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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25650 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025

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Two screens, more literally than usual

There was a thread a few weeks back about Hasan Piker supposedly using a shock collar on his dog. I didn't think too much of it at the time, not knowing who Hasan Piker even was (I had heard the name, but couldn't tell you anything else). But a little later I ran across Taylor Lorenz's podcast episode on it "Hasan Piker and the Future No One Is Ready For" (link to YouTube and therefore auto-transcript, since I follow via podcast, I have not seen the video).

In the episode, she describes the shock collar claim as obvious nonsense that anyone watching the video can see for themselves, in addition to her having met Hasan and the dog in person and therefore she is sure the claim is false.

In comparison, in the Culture War thread post I linked above, /u/crushedoranages says

It is obviously a shock collar that is being used. No amount of denial or snarky comments can get anyone to believe that their lying eyes can see any differently. And if you think that's an overstatement - I invite you to see the footage for yourself.

I have not gone down the rabbit hole of analysis of the video, so I'm not going to try to defend Taylor's interpretation. But I was struck by seeing a case where both sides are telling me to watch the exact same video clip since in it is plain to see the events transpired as they claim. The "two screens" concept comes up here a lot, but it's usually about seeing different subsets of a population, often whatever your social media algorithm surfaces, or different interpretations of the same utterance (see: taking Trump literally vs. seriously or, more recently, the Young Republicans group chat). This seems like a whole new level of disagreement about reality.

Taylor's thesis is mainly one of anti-surveillance (a major theme of her work), which is pretty well covered by this quote from the YouTube auto-transcript:

Just last month, billionaire soon to be Tik Tok owner Larry Ellison said that a vast AIfueled video surveillance system would ensure quote citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on. This comment is a perfect encapsulation of the delusional fantasy pushed by so many in Silicon Valley. That the surveillance state will be used for good. The narrative is seductive. If we could just see everything in 4K, disputes over what really happened would collapse, the thinking goes. If everything in life is videotaped and archived, then the real truth of these messy situations would be indisputable. But Hassan Piker's dog collar incident shows that this theory is catastrophically wrong.

I have not gone down the rabbit hole of analysis of the video, so I'm going to try to defend Taylor's interpretation.

Is there a "not" missing there, or are you literally saying you'll defend something you want to plead ignorance about later?

Anyway, I think the concept of "two screens" has to stop short of covering scenarios where someone is outright lying, or it will lose any meaning and usefulness.

Is there a "not" missing there

Yes. Thank you, edited to fix typo.

It's not complicated. Taylor Lorenz is just a shameless liar who knows that her followers never actually check source material. How many of them still think Rittenhouse opened fire on a peaceful crowd and killed three harmless black people? Piker is probably the biggest leftist streamer with serious support from Twitch, which refuses to ban him no matter what he does. Getting him canceled (or arrested, using a shock collar to force an animal to perform is apparently a crime in California) would be a blow to the cause of champagne socialism. Just so, Lorenz would tell you the sky was water if it helped her political faction.

Just so, Lorenz would tell you the sky was water if it helped her political faction.

The Lorenz transformation, if you will

They’re personal friends too…

That the surveillance state will be used for good. The narrative is seductive. If we could just see everything in 4K, disputes over what really happened would collapse, the thinking goes. If everything in life is videotaped and archived, then the real truth of these messy situations would be indisputable. But Hassan Piker's dog collar incident shows that this theory is catastrophically wrong.

Weird take.

Seeing everything in 4k isn't bad because it makes us realize that our delusions of truth and stability fade into so much airy nothingness when exposed to the might of the simulacrum panopticon. Seeing everything in 4k is bad because it truthfully shows people the actual truth of what you did (e.g. shouting racial slurs while you were having a really bad trip at that frat party that one time), which then causes them to actually harm you, in a truthy way.

There is no post-truth, there is no collapse of values and morality, there's none of that. It's clear that the discourse on "post-truth" is a product of wishful thinking. It sure would be nice if the truth would stop smashing its boots into our faces for just a little while. But that's not the reality we live in unfortunately. For people whose physical survival depends on the truth, it's actually shockingly rare for the truth to come into serious question (regarding issues that actually matter, anyway).

You know how when you were a kid on the playground, people could make up anything about the new Pokemon game and you would believe them, or at least you would hold open the possibility that the rumors could be true, because you were a dumb kid and you didn't know anything, and the internet was in its infancy so you didn't just have a source of infinite authoritative knowledge that you could verify everything against? All of reality used to be like that. "Lightning is just what Zeus does when he gets mad", "Well zamn, I don't know whether that's really plausible or not, but I'm illiterate and I only know about the existence of one or two city-states besides my own and the rest of the world is shrouded in mystery, so for all I know, it certainly could be true". That was post-truth. Or pre-truth, rather. Now we're living in the age of truth, and it sucks. (It would suck too if we actually did enter the post-truth reign-of-nihilism age, but for different reasons.)

There's nothing "seductive" about truth; the truth is real, it's dangerous, and most of the time I would very much like it to stay over there, away from me. Alternative perspectives on the matter are typically coming from, as the kids like to say, a place of "privilege".

Forgive me if I misunderstood, but I don't think that's what people are referring to when they refer to a post-truth world. My understanding is that 'post-truth' means:

  1. Continued belief in something that has been proven false due to not wanting to engage with the source material (I believe the "Hands up don't shoot" or "Very Fine People" fall under this category).
  2. Using the fact it has been disproven in order to claim it is believable ("I believed my outgroup was eating babies, and even though this particular person was not, it should say something that I believed it plausible")
  3. Official sources deciding to claim that "we've always been at war with Eurasia" and people deciding to update their programming respectively (Masks don't work, until they're mandatory. The Trump vaccine is poison, until it's required. If you take the vaccine, you won't get COVID.)

(Apologies that my examples are all left-wing; I am certain right-wing examples exist, but I am loosely right-wing, so they do not stick out in my mind in the same way left-wing ones do).

The problem isn't the Truth smashing its boot into our faces; the problem is that tribal warfare has become more important than truth, to the degree that we can't do anything anymore (like, we can't say "more immigration may boost our GDP numbers, but it is causing the quality of life for the lower and middle classes to plummet, so we need to reduce it significantly." Instead, we have to claim its all bad, while the other side needs to claim its all good, and nothing gets done about it ever).

I figured 2. was referring to the Haitian dog thing.

None of these are really new phenomena. There was no shortage of tribalism in the last two centuries. What makes it “post-truth” is how deep you can go. In 1898, your ability to fact-check basically bottomed out at the newspapers. Today, you can research your way into whatever corner you want. There’ll already be a newly created Substack arguing your exact theory with links to compelling video evidence. You can do this for wildly contradictory positions and still see what looks like high-quality evidence. Hence: post-truth.

As usual, surplus breeds specialization. When building credibility is easier, contrarianism naturally gets more popular. We’ve reached a point where a fundamentally contrarian movement dominates one of the main political parties. I don’t think that happens without cheap and easy access to alternative facts.

Wasn't it Lorenz who secretly surveiled a Clubhouse gathering only to falsely accuse Marc Andreesen of being retarded?

Of saying "retard" but yeah.

She's also zero-covid.

Unlike the rest of us who are "raw dogging the air" in her words.

I know about this controversy much more than I should have, mostly by following Asmongold on this. At the end of it I think Hasan really used shock collar on his dog. I do not have "evidence" at this point as I really did not assemble all the clips, but I will throw it here:

  • There is much more than just one video here. In true 4Chan manner, a host of clips surfaced where Hasan moved the remote around, where his dog reacted strangely when she left the designed place while the stream was muted etc.

  • The dog really serves as a prop on his streams standing for hours in the same place.

  • Hasan changed his story many times to the point of it being completely incomprehensive. It produced memes on its own

  • He apparently had some bull breed in the past that he did not treat kindly. He used some sort of barbed collar and generally was not nice to it, e.g. pulling it by the tail etc.

At this point I do think that he used the shock collar and in general is probably not the most responsible dog owner. On its own it seems like a simple story, one I would not even comment on. But it has life of its own now, and is a stand-in for general information environment. Even with controversial Taylor Lorenz now being part of it. Of course it generated great number of memes and other content, including AI generated song and more.

There is much more than just one video here.

Are all those videos from the same stream? It's easy to cherry-pick suspicious-looking things from thousands of videos.

Yes, I did not investigate it thoroughly. I just googled another instance where Piker moved remote from the shock collar on some other occasion. It is not the same stream, but his dog is in the background all the time for hours on end. She is almost like another decoration and permanent fixture. Also he changed his story. First, he said that when he reaches outside of camera it is for his Zyn. Then he changed the story that yes, there is a remote for collar but it is only for vibration function etc.

In a sense he fed the whole controversy by himself as he just dug deeper and deeper hole for himself. Adding Taylor Lorenz into this whole mess only expands it further. It is actually quite funny - as I said, a simple story now has life of its own way beyond the original thing as it spawned other substories like "why Hasan changed his explanation" etc.

The weight of evidence for 'child abusers' is the single instance of them hitting a child, with repeated proof furthering the original case. Followup apology vids of 'its just context bro' while the child actually has bruises visible don't help. When the case looks bad enough it requires the aggrieved party to outright state that there was no harm performed, and that is why children and pets - not animals as a whole specifically pets present within an asymmetric power dynamic - are given a level of public sympathy not available to other interaction scenarios.

It is necessary to highlight that this is a giant TOUCH GRASS RETARDS HOLY SHIT moment, but for the fact that Hasan occupies a hilariously stupid intersection of IRL to Internet thoughtspace: a terminally online retard agitating for real life changes. Asmongold wants his vidya to keep having big titty white girls and awesome dudes doing awesome stuff, and any IRL activism such as it exists is expeditionary raiding to push back invaders. Hasan wants to stream while talking about the necessity of the revolution, and never actually do anything in dirty meatspace where people can actually disagree with him. The digital world Hasan cocooned himself in is emblematic of leftist echo chamber circlejerking, but, unlike political podcasters that clone their IRL bubbles into online islands, Hasan operates in a visible manner that allows a surprising amount of bleedthrough not just from IRL falsifiability but also from adjacent digital cocoons like le epic redditor pupper protection brigades. He evades from all sides when he can, calling himself an online streamer irrelevant to real life influence but also a socialist whose voice must be raised as a totem for the youth to follow. Turns out animal abuse is something his slicked broccolihair can't deflect though.

I agree with this.

After seeing just the initial video, I was probably around 51-60% sure that he used a shock collar.

After his attempt at explaining away the collar the next day, it shot up to 95-99%. Without taking into account the fact that all analysis of the video shows that the collar he showed is consistent with a shock collar with its removable prongs removed and then taped over and is not known to be consistent with any vibrating-but-not-shocking collar as he claimed, the simple fact that he presented the collar the way he did, briefly showing in his hand, with huge chunks of it covered by his fingers, barely holding it still for more than 0.3 seconds before taking it away from camera view, was enough. Someone who's been on camera as much as Piker knows how things look on screen, and if he were genuinely motivated to reveal the honest truth that he truly was not using a shock collar, he would have shown the collar in a different manner, by holding it by part of the strap and slowly rotating it around in front of the camera after verifying its focus, while making sure there was minimal movement besides the rotation, so that every part of the collar could be seen clearly. And he would have done this during the stream in which he was accused, not on the next stream (the fact that a multimillionaire like him didn't find a decoy non-shock collar in that time that looked similar to the shock collar when worn by a dog in that time is curious - either hubris or just the limits of physical reality).

And, of course, this was also after he and/or his followers claimed that the yelp was caused by the dog clipping its nail on the bed - something quite possible, but also something quite non-evident in the video. This claim was memory-holed basically within a day, replaced with the "it's a vibration collar, not shock collar" claim.

This sort of behavior is consistent with someone who believes he was caught shocking his dog and highly inconsistent with someone who believes he was falsely accused of shocking his dog. If Piker believes that he was caught shocking his dog, then I believe it too.

I'll also add that, given how easy it is to look up and see the primary sources for oneself, anyone who's defaulting to ignorance and just listening to what people on various "sides" are telling them to think is someone I believe is motivated to remain ignorant for fear of finding out the truth (or just someone who's not interested in it).

I don’t care if Hasan used a shock collar on his dog- this beast is likely still doing better than the alternative, which is security for a scrap metal dealer. But Taylor Lorenz saying something blatantly at odds with reality isn’t evidence of two screens. She’s a weird delusional lizard person on blue sky. This is just evidence that one mentally ill person is delusional.

I don’t care if Hasan used a shock collar on his dog- this beast is likely still doing better than the alternative, which is security for a scrap metal dealer.

Dog needs to go get a drink of water after hours in that bed? Dog needs to relieve itself and not make a mess on the bed (which probably would mean punishment)? Dog needs to stretch because no, it is not normal to be in one position for hours on end? Still gets shocked because its owner is an idiot?

By the same logic, if I (hypothetically, in Minecraft) put a bag over your head and chained you to a bed, you would still be doing better than, say, a migrant labourer in the UAE who is worked to death in the blazing sun. That may be true, but we are talking "lesser of two evils" and not "this is fine, this is okay, what is everyone making a fuss about?"

I suggest someone put a shock collar on Hasan and zap him every time he gets up from his chair to go get a drink or use the bathroom. After all, that's still way better than the alternative, right?

In principle - I have no good answer to the whole animal rights conundrum, namely:

A: They are living beings, even if they are not as smart as humans. It is not okay to kill them - would you be okay with a human cattle ranch of mentally retarded people?

B: This is indeed an ugly thing: I don't want to live in a world where the weak and stupid have no right even to their life if their death would cause some positive utility to one of their biological superiors (especially when "weak" and "stupid" are relative terms...)

B: But sadly, there is no good resolution to this. If we really wish to avoid this ugly notion of biological inferiority/superiority, "a great chain of being", etc - then we are forced to extend our compassion forever downwards, below the cattle and dogs, below the rats, below even the ants, bees and wasps - down to the level of unicellular organisms: on just your fingertip lies millions of bacteria, each time you wash your hands is a genocide. The only way to avoid actively harming innocent beings is the death of the entire human race, each breathe we take to prolong our murderous lives is an atrocity.

B: So, if we wish to continue living, and wish to retain some coherent notion of morality - we must accept the drawing of a line somewhere. So we must be able to say X is so low on the "chain" it is acceptable to take its life. And yes, this unfortunately puts the question of whether I deserve my own life onto the table.

This is a self-consistent rebuttal (and is the argument I personally believe in), but it's also exactly what an evil person trying to justify their evil would say in order to continue being evil ("Look, maybe being a cartel hitman is actually not a nice thing to do. But also, it's the only life I know, and I'd probably be killed myself if I stopped, and also coincidentally I have this neat philosophy that actually makes it kosher!"), so I often have doubts about this.

I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on this (I have seen similar things written elsewhere, but never exactly this)

But - to go back to the original point: wider (meat-eating) society accepts the fact that animal lives are lesser than a human's. In particular, we kill and eat animals (okay, more realistically - we sponsor their killing by buying their meat in a supermarket), and not even for survival reasons. It seems that if we value a "life" so little, making said life have to stay still for a while and get shocked whilst being housed and fed and not slaughtered is pretty marginal in comparison ("it was one thing to kill and eat all those people, but when you trespassed into that lady's house to hide in her shower, you crossed the line")

I don't think it makes sense to oppose mild animal abuse unless you are a vegetarian (and even then there are other issues, but being vegetarian seems the bare minimum for holding this sort of position)

By the same logic, if I (hypothetically, in Minecraft) put a bag over your head and chained you to a bed, you would still be doing better than, say, a migrant labourer in the UAE who is worked to death in the blazing sun. That may be true, but we are talking "lesser of two evils" and not "this is fine, this is okay, what is everyone making a fuss about?"

If I (hypothetically, in Minecraft) kidnapped you from your home (and also a bunch of other humans), put you on a farm, eugenically bred you with other humans with the goal of making succulent offspring, and eventually slaughtered you, butchered you, and sold your flesh for a profit... you'd actually be worse off than even the migrant labourer. Actually this is the plot for an especially disturbing horror movie - so if we're comparing animals to humans this way, you (and I, and everyone else who eats meat) are at an off-the-charts level of bad.

It seems that if we value a "life" so little, making said life have to stay still for a while and get shocked whilst being housed and fed and not slaughtered is pretty marginal in comparison

I think moral intuitions on this point differ pretty widely. A lot of people would say that they find suffering to be more terrible than death, and thus, torture to be more wicked than murder. The idea that even if you intend to kill an animal, you should at least put it out of its misery quickly rather than let it suffer, is old and widespread; we typically recognize that a kid pulling the wings off flies is doing something wrong and perhaps concerning, whereas we would think nothing of that kid swatting the fly altogether. And this applies to humans, too. At an instinctive level I would be much more creeped out to learn that a guy I was about to shake hands with had once been a torturer, than to learn he'd shot someone dead. A good man might kill for a variety of contextual reasons, but outside of specific thought experiments about hidden bombs, torture's just wrong, and someone who practices it probably has something wrong with them.

So I don't think it's incoherent or even surprising for someone to object to the mistreatment of dogs while still eating meat. (Now, if they're morally consistent, such a person should also care about battery farming and other 'inhumane' practices. But I think a lot of people do insofar as they can bear to think about those things; if they don't act on this belief, it's out of moral cowardice, not a lack of theoretical opposition.) And actually, I think the "a torturer probably has something wrong with them" bit is important too, particularly here. Even if we think of animals as flesh automatons who don't suffer in a morally relevant sense - even then, it would lower my opinion of someone to learn they'd torture a dog, for much the same reason that it would lower my opinion of someone to learn that they have a hobby of ripping teddy bears apart with their teeth. It makes me instinctively suspect that something about their capacity to experience empathy is broken, in a way that makes them untrustworthy in terms of how they'll treat actual sentient humans.

A lot of people would say that they find suffering to be more terrible than death, and thus, torture to be more wicked than murder

In general, I am also unequivocally opposed to "torturing" animals.

But "suffering" is a spectrum, ranging from getting wet in the rain to the kind of stuff drug cartels do.

My actual practical resolution for this is to say torture is any situation where you make the victim want to die and then do not allow them to die. With an exception if you sincerely love and care for them (to avoid classifying extremely painful things that eventually lead to something good for the "victim" as torture)

And this situation does not seem to be torture. If it were really on the level of torture, I think the dog would just wig out and attack Hasan. A dog that sits still in discomfort for a long time is just suffering a "reasonable" amount. I think it still prefers living, and does not wish to die to escape the shock collar.

And actually, I think the "a torturer probably has something wrong with them" bit is important too, particularly here

As I said, I don't think this particular thing amounts to torture. But I agree that it is causing suffering to the dog, and it should make us worried about a person if they wantonly cause suffering to living things because of what it says about their ability to empathise, but:

  • This doesn't mean the person is actually doing anything morally wrong. It's just that they are actively doing something that makes the people around them (who cannot access their true state of mind) update their priors to think they will later do a separate thing, that is morally wrong.
  • In this case, I don't even think we should be worried* He wasn't shocking the dog for fun, he was trying to make his property stay in the right place for his livestream. In your teddy analogy: your guy is not ripping teddy bears apart with his teeth, but decided to use one of the button eye as a spare for his jacket. No need to worry about a missing empathy response - he probably did feel a little uncomfortable but understood the discomfort was irrational.

[*] Well, at least not worried he's a Ted Bundy. It is antisocial behaviour for him to break a rule and then hide his rule-breaking behaviour (even if the rule itself is bogus)

My actual practical resolution for this is to say torture is any situation where you make the victim want to die and then do not allow them to die. (…) I think it still prefers living, and does not wish to die to escape the shock collar.

I don't think that's a very good definition, especially if we're trying to apply it to non-sapient creatures. In the first place, I'm not convinced it is actually cognitively possible for non-sapient animals to conceive of suicide, certainly not in the rational, goal-oriented way of a suffering human opting for assisted dying. Is it possible for human babies, even? I don't think "torturing an infant" is an oxymoron, but it would seem to fail your criterion.

And in the second place, it would mean that the exact same mistreatment could be torture or not-torture depending on the victim's will to live. Without tipping all the way over into suicidal, this is clearly something that varies from individual to individual. Some might have a very strong will to live; others might put one foot in front of the other mostly as the path of least resistance and wouldn't fight very hard if their life was in jeopardy. If people from those two groups are put through the exact same torments, and experience the exact same amount of pain, but the first remains steadfast in wanting to get through this while the other starts shouting "oh for God's sake just kill me now", is it reasonable to say that only the second guy is being tortured? Seems weird and contrived to me.

This isn't to say I necessarily want to die on the hill that Piker's treatment of his dog qualifies as torture. But "would the dog rather be dead than experience this treatment" seems far too high a bar assuming it's even applicable to a canine mind. (I will clarify that to the extent I think it might be in the realm of torture, I am very much talking about the compounding effect of "being forced to sit still for hours on end under threat of painful shocks", where the constant stress and enrichment-starvation are part of it as much as the shocks themselves. I certainly wouldn't argue that shocking a dog to house-train it would qualify as torture.)

In this case, I don't even think we should be worried* He wasn't shocking the dog for fun, he was trying to make his property stay in the right place for his livestream

Well, that's rather the problem. It suggests that he views the dog as property, as a living prop for his livestream, rather than a living being he loves and enjoys the company of. I don't think there's much of a leap from that to suspecting that he also thinks of the humans in his life as tools to be used for personal advancement, rather than people with inherent value and dignity.

(It is of course possible to straight-up believe that animals lack qualia and/or moral standing without being a psychopath in one's relationship to other humans - hence the teddy bear - but I don't think a Piker who was simply a principled Cartesian of that kind would have any reason to own a pet dog in the first place. Having a pet dog visible in his livestreams at all is a signal of "I'm the kind of person who enjoys the company of our four-legged furry friends", and if that's not actually how he thinks of dogs then the signal is deceitful and his whole moral character becomes suspect, never mind that he tried to cover up the shocking.)

I'm not convinced it is actually cognitively possible for non-sapient animals to conceive of suicide, certainly not in the rational, goal-oriented way of a suffering human opting for assisted dying. Is it possible for human babies, even? I don't think "torturing an infant" is an oxymoron, but it would seem to fail your criterion.

So I did consider animals when I wrote the definition, which I why I carefully worded the condition as: "want[ing] to die" instead of the more sophisticated "wishing to commit suicide", etc. For animals, I am working on the assumption that they will express a death wish as going crazy and just thrashing about / attacking people / etc.

It's not a perfect solution, but unfortunately once an entity is unable to communicate verbally, it's hard to definitively rule out that it is not in some kind of terrible agony (see also: "The anesthesia only partially worked. The patient is unable to control their body, but feels everything"), so I think this is the best we can do.

I didn't really consider babies. I don't think it is an oxymoron either. But I think my definition still works, because we can try and reasonably infer if it is in agony, primarily by asking if the thing we are doing to it is painful (and, as I mentioned, there is the caveat of if you love the entity and are trying to help it, so medical procedures on newborns is not torture) - this is even less cut-and-dry than the animal case, but again I think it's just a hard problem to evaluate suffering on a living thing that cannot communicate its thoughts (and in fact probably doesn't even have "thoughts" in the way normal humans do)

If people from those two groups are put through the exact same torments, and experience the exact same amount of pain, but the first remains steadfast in wanting to get through this while the other starts shouting "oh for God's sake just kill me now", is it reasonable to say that only the second guy is being tortured? Seems weird and contrived to me

Actually this is an intended aspect of my definition. The primary goal of my definition is that I find it disturbing that intelligent beings are able to inflict extreme "unnatural" levels of pain on living things, and sometimes it is in their benefit to do so.

In general, it feels "unnatural" to ban a state from inflicting any kind of suffering on someone, because a "baseline" level of suffering just exists without states (people/animals starve to death, creatures get eaten by stronger ones, etc), so why just disallow inflicting suffering in just this particular kind of circumstance.

But for torture, this is a thing that only happens if you have civilisation (lions don't torture gazelles or other lions, they can't because they are too stupid) - so I think it should be considered always immoral to torture.

As you yourself have mentioned, sometimes there are good and necessary reasons to kill someone (a criminal just starts attacking people and refuses to surrender), so we can't go so far as to ban killing for any reason (plus what about killing animals, etc)

So my definition comes out as the best coherent imperative that can actually be adhered to in any circumstance, but also rules out a particularly egregious class of suffering: i.e. a fate worse than death (if whatever is happening to someone is truly a fate worse than death, under this rule, they have the right to choose death instead)

In your particular comparison - the strong willed person is personally experiencing whatever is happening to them as a fate not as bad as death. As long as they are always given the option of choosing death (consent can always be taken away at any point, etc, etc) - I don't think I can do any better without my axiom becoming non-universal.

Well, that's rather the problem. It suggests that he views the dog as property, as a living prop for his livestream, rather than a living being he loves and enjoys the company of.

I think you're right, I went too far with my previous statement. What I do believe is that this is less worrying than wanton suffering, but still, being able to actually act on the philosophy I propose for animals with a real animal, even for a useful purpose, is still worrying because he was able to ignore its suffering / lacked the empathy to realise its suffering.

but I don't think a Piker who was simply a principled Cartesian of that kind would have any reason to own a pet dog in the first place. Having a pet dog visible in his livestreams at all is a signal of "I'm the kind of person who enjoys the company of our four-legged furry friends", and if that's not actually how he thinks of dogs then the signal is deceitful and his whole moral character becomes suspect, never mind that he tried to cover up the shocking

I agree, it is quite slimy he lied that way. I already mentioned it was bad he covered up his rule breaking, but you're right he also went out of his way to mislead people into thinking he was pro animal rights by having a pet.

Though I think misleading people into thinking you hold a particular ideological stance is less egregious than actually breaking a rule (thought crimes vs physical crimes)... but I guess I'm biased, since (like many others on this forum, I imagine) I personally mislead the people around me to believe I am on-board with progressive ideology (but in my defence, I will say I have tried to keep this deception implicit, I don't go around with dyed hair and pronoun pins)

There are animals that we let trained people butcher for meat and do not think much of it, or otherwise subject to harsh conditions for our utility, and there are animals that we cherish and pamper, or at least respect. Some societies do not have that clear demarcation between cattle and pets, but the society Hasan purports to be a part of does (which is why he doesn't go "even if I did shock her, big deal, she's my property and she's better off than etc etc.").

As mentioned elsewhere here, a person who knows the acceptable way to treat pets (enough to cover the mistreatment up) but doesn't is morally suspect.

There are animals that we let trained people butcher for meat and do not think much of it, or otherwise subject to harsh conditions for our utility, and there are animals that we cherish and pamper, or at least respect.

I find the whole ranking of animal species business pretty suspect morally.

But fine, that is a self-consistent framework that justfies meat eating but not pet abuse (assuming you would be okay with someone abusing a pet from a "meat" species)

(assuming you would be okay with someone abusing a pet from a "meat" species)

It's not about the species for me but about the adoption of the pet. So torturing your pet piglet is not ok. And vice versa, I don't care if people shoot stray dogs or, as is the rumored custom in some countries, farm them for food.

Well, my view is that animals and humans are not equal moral agents.

However, animals are beings of their own. They have their own needs. Forcing an animal to act outside its nature is cruel, just as (say) beating a toddler for crying when they are hungry would be cruel. A dog is not meant to sit in one position or lie on a bed for hours. I don't know why the dog got up - hungry? needed to relieve itself? stiff from sitting? bored? - but shocking it for that is cruel.

And we don't have to introduce farmed humans, we just have to treat animals as creatures that, if we assume the authority over them of ownership, should be responsible ownership. I hate the modern notion of treating pets like quasi-humans, or living plushies, whose existence is to provide the owner with unconditional love on the owner's demand, and if this means locking a dog up for hours every day in an apartment while the owner goes to work, then so be it. Keeping cats indoors and never letting them out? So be it. The function of the animal is not to be a being in its own right, but an extension of the owner's needs. I hate that because, even if I don't think animals are the equivalent of a human as moral agents, a dog is a dog, not a living toy.

Piker's shocking his dog was obviously cruel and neglectful, but spoiling your pet is another, if less obvious, way of being cruel. C. S. Lewis from "The Four Loves":

This terrible need to be needed often finds its outlet in pampering an animal. To learn that someone is "fond of animals" tells us very little until we know in what way. For there are two ways. On the one hand the higher and domesticated animal is, so to speak, a "bridge" between us and the rest of nature. We all at times feel somewhat painfully our human isolation from the sub-human world--the atrophy of instinct which our intelligence entails, our excessive self-consciousness, the innumerable complexities of our situation, our inability to live in the present. If only we could shuffle it all off! We must not--and incidentally we can't--become beasts. But we can be with a beast. It is personal enough to give the word with a real meaning; yet it remains very largely an unconscious little bundle of biological impulses. It has three legs in nature's world and one in ours. It is a link, an ambassador. Who would not wish, as Bosanquet put it, "to have a representative at the court of Pan"? Man with dog closes a gap in the universe. But of course animals are often used in a worse fashion. If you need to be needed and if your family, very properly, decline to need you, a pet is the obvious substitute. You can keep it all its life in need of you. You can keep it permanently infantile, reduce it to permanent invalidism, cut it off from all genuine animal well-being, and compensate for this by creating needs for countless little indulgences which only you can grant. The unfortunate creature thus becomes very useful to the rest of the household; it acts as a sump or drain--you are too busy spoiling a dog's life to spoil theirs. Dogs are better for this purpose than cats: a monkey, I am told, is best of all. Also it is more like the real thing. To be sure, it's all very bad luck for the animal. But probably it cannot fully realise the wrong you have done it. Better still, you would never know if it did. The most down-trodden human, driven too far, may one day turn and blurt out a terrible truth. Animals can't speak.

Those who say "The more I see of men the better I like dogs"--those who find in animals a relief from the demands of human companionship--will be well advised to examine their real reasons.

She’s a weird delusional lizard person on blue sky.

A lizard person who goes to incredible lengths to hide her age (she's 40 as of earlier this month).

Am I the only one who thinks its facially insane that she purports to be so driven by pursuit of truth and LARPs a brave, crusading ace reporter meanwhile actively hiding/dodging basic information about herself that has no relevance aside from her own denial of reality?

After the whole story of how she got fired from The Washington Post, I could only conclude that she is deeply unwell.

Every little bit I've learned about her has led me to conclude that she could tell me it was raining in Seattle and I'd feel the need to check myself.

... but how do you know the video is real and not an AI deepfake? Isn't it possible now, for instance, to gin up a video of Charlie Kirk robbing a liquor store?

Nobody is even bothering to claim it is AFAIK.

I've noticed this as well. There was another of those quite recently - the ICE-shooting-pastor (David Black, if you want to check it out) video. To the left, the priest is not doing anything dangerous, so shooting him is obviously overkill. To the right, the priest is blatantly ignoring orders and blocking the entrance, so what did he expect? Both sides have imo increasingly trapped priors, to use bayesian parlance, so in short videos it's easy to fill in the details with what you already are predisposed to believe.

The reddit front page seemed quite certain that it was a shock collar, so the "sides" here are at least not the typical ones. As per the comments below... are you sure this isnt just Lorenz in paticular making shit up?

Its worse than just that, since the "he's clearly an animal abuser" crowd then pored over every single hour of footage involving Hasan and any dogs (there's gotta be thousands) to find other bits of evidence scattered about that sort of support the thesis that he is constantly shocking his dog.

People aren't just watching two different screens, they're able to custom-build their post-hoc interpretation of everything from scratch, if they want.

Straight up confirmation bias, rather than trying to find something that was convincingly exonerating/falsify their hypothesis. We know from the "WE DID IT, REDDIT!" days how well this usually goes.

Of course, the guy has gone about defending himself as sketchily as possible.

Applying some epistemic hygiene, I don't think the original video is strong proof of him actually shocking the dog. That said, the specific set of events that the camera did capture requires a more complex coincidence to explain than the pretty dead simple "the dog left its spot, he reached over to hit a button to correct the dog, the dog reacted to the correction" one.

Given what I know of Hasan, given the fact that the dog did have that particular style of collar on, given the aforementioned set of events, given the fact that the dog does seem trained to stay on that little bed for hours on end, I think it is more likely than not (call it 55%) that he shocked the dog on stream. How much weight you give that conclusion probably hinges on how much you care about streamer drama in general.

And I am willing to believe that Hasan is 'abusive' to the animal in that he cares way more for his own image than said dog's comfort and happiness. And I would judge him pretty harshly for that... but it doesn't budge my opinion much, given how low said opinion already is.

Everything about the situation is pretty well explained by the apparent motives of the people involved. There's nothing 'interesting' here its all just precisely what you'd expect from every single person who has touched it.

The Livestreamer world has been in utter shambles lately, if you ask me. If you are paying too much attention to it you're participating in a circus of self-harm, in my absolute honest opinion. There are some 'decent' people in there that you can give attention to but obviously its the nature of the whole platform to elevate some of the worst, most narcissistic, poorly-adjusted personalities to the fore and inflict their behavior on the viewers. And then rewards them for generating outrage, sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars, so of course they will follow the incentive gradient.

We're a LONG way from the wholesome days of "Twitch Plays Pokemon." The current state of it reads more as "Gen Z Jerry Springer Show." Not that I want to exonerate Millenials.

The 'good' people who make it big either get pulled into the mire of degeneracy or make their bag and escape. Likewise, you can usually tell the 'good' people as the ones who had their lives in order, solid relationships, and a tendency to avoid drama before they came in, and maintained those while they were active.

Hey, remember that time Ninja caught flack for stating his general refusal to co-stream with females other than his wife?

Given what just came to light with Mizkif (and he's far from the first) this just seemed like a smart move.

If you don't recognize any of these names, congratulations, you are winning at life, please avoid contaminating your brain by gaining awareness of their existence.

I think I said it before, probably YEARS ago, but if Twitch had made a serious effort to stick to its core model of "person records and broadcasts themselves as they play a video game on their computer" they'd be having an easier time avoiding scandal. That would also mean nuking gambling, prostitution ads (I'd literally say the policy should be "if you have any presence on an e-prostitution site where you appear to engage in any sex acts we ban you instantly"), political commentary, most 'real life' type streams, or active drama farming. When in doubt, make the rules more strict rather than less.

Of course, that would have risked them losing out to a competitor, such as Kick, with a more 'anything goes' ethos.

Sorry for the tangent. I really just despise that most of these people exist while having any kind of mainstream sway.

I think I said it before, probably YEARS ago, but if Twitch had made a serious effort to stick to its core model of "person records and broadcasts themselves as they play a video game on their computer" they'd be having an easier time avoiding scandal.

Seems to be a core problem of the internet. Reddit also had an opportunity to become the default discussion forum / comment section for everything on the internet. But they instead wanted to chase instagram and tiktok and came out with a UI that both destroyed their old model and failed to bring anything new to the doomscroll model. They've chased every internet fad and failed every time. Now a gaming chat service (discord) is stuck being one of the default discussion and comment sections for the internet. Which its bad at, but at least it isn't fighting that role like reddit has been since its inception.

The fact that almost every site tends to converge towards the exact same general use modes has soured me on the idea of internet as innovation engine. i.e. "forced" competition with other sites for users would in theory lead to differentiation in features and, one would expect, aiming for different audiences and cultivating that niche.

But no, instead they all try to appeal as broadly as possible, discard the factors that made them unique and appealing, and constantly copy each other when they see anything that looks like it 'works' to draw and retain viewership.

Innovation seems to be driven by some other force somewhat external to the web, and the internet just enables rapid copying of a new, winning formula. Something something Zero to One is way harder than One to One Thousand.

Elon bought Twitter and made some quick, semi-drastic changes to how things work and lo-and-behold virtually every site made very similar changes in short order. They could have done this stuff all along but something made them reluctant to step out in that direction.

Same thing happened with dating apps. Anything that might set one apart and drive people to it disappears, they all converge on the doomswiping model.

Similar trend seems to be arising with LLMs, honestly.

Now a gaming chat service (discord) is stuck being one of the default discussion and comment sections for the internet. Which its bad at, but at least it isn't fighting that role like reddit has been since its inception.

I admit I expected Discord to pass by the wayside for something new by now. I've been around for Ventrilo, teamspeak, Mumble, AIM, Skype, others. Discord is kind of bad at its function insofar as its a bloated piece of poorly-optimized software that has features 90% of users won't need or use. I just want an app that gives me voice and text support, a friends list, and a decently attractive and intuitive UI. Livestreaming/screen-sharing is neat too, I guess.

I wouldn't have called Discord as the one people land on and stay with, but as you say its now the default "forum" software too.

There are of course like 50 different messaging apps that people use.

Wake me up when (Eternal) September ends.

I'm somewhat tempted to blame venture capital.

Many of these web companies grew into what they are while catering to the whims of VC funds. Which usually meant massive and rapid growth to get as many users as possible. Which is not a bad strategy when you have less than millions of users. But at some point in the millions of users you need to convert to monetization of those user's. But that is typically when the firm goes public and loses all guidance from the VC. Or worst of all is stuck with founding leadership that was optimized for the "acquire users at all costs" schtick.

I'm now wondering if it's a software investment problem in general. AAA games seem to follow a similar dumb logic. Endless cloning and copying of the hatest hit, barely any differentiation among the top products.

Oh man I could do a rant on the current state of VC too, although it'd be from a position of ignorance as to the on-the-ground-realities.

I remember Juicero.

I think that your point rings true, though. Founders these days apparently want to exit as big as possible as quickly as possible. Your initial product, your initial audience is really just there to springboard you to mainstream attention, where you grab as many new users as you can, crow about your growth metrics to you can bring in more investors, at which point you're either going to make it to an IPO or blow up b/c the stats were straight up faked or simply not maintainable.

Or get bought by one of the big players who sees you as potential competition, which still gives you a major payday.

Its weird that I've grown some grudging respect for Mark Zuckerberg. Despite hating what FB has become compared to what it was... he sticks around and owns his decisions, remains the face of the company, and makes BIG plays like paying a BILLION FACKING DOLLARS to poach top AI researchers. Also he seems to really love his wife and has stuck with her, no whiff of scandal, for over a decade now.

Indie games seem to be a counterargument to my point, the internet allows them to find and cultivate audiences and while some of them elevate to smash hits, they all thrive on being unique and playing to their specific strengths, and while you still see tons of copycatting, most of the time the ones that 'win' are truly imaginative.

Someone want to give the expected IRR hurdle for high usage low conversion platform aggregators? The optimistic discount rates given to investors at pitch rarely map onto actual as use statistics or patterns, and oftentimes the VCs are number crunchers looking at TAM conversions instead of understanding how ginned up stats are disguising other more usable metrics. Oftentimes platforms have to find a defensible USP to slather on top of the blitzscaling machine they've built and hope the narrative of the USP holds when the blitzscaling is creaking under fake incentives, and that just becomes a bagholder escape exercise.

Tumblr, Reddit, Twitter, Discord are famous examples of high use platforms unable to convert their userbases into monetizable assets without significant curation and often full on self destruction once the USP got exposed to scrutiny. A more quantifiable example of platform aggregation failure is the facebook pivot-to-video where autoplay vids got counted as full engagement and caused many platforms to both invest in video architecture as well as creation, when in reality no one was actually watching that much video (that came later on with tiktok and COVID doomscrolling cemented that operational modus). Facebooks shift to video specifically meant plenty of VCs were investing in esports specifically, which had to be written off in later years and which clearly showed changes in term sheets post 2020 after the charade was exposed.

Its also true that we are likely still in the overhang of ZIRP, with an irrational exuberance in market strength due to Trump and rapid capital shifting during this economic chaos. We still are in the window for a lagged interest rate stressor, and mortgages are peaking above 07 rates though that means nothing in this differentiated environment. In any case this ZIRP overhang still sees capital sloshing around looking for someplace, ANYPLACE to put money into to get alpha, and the demand for a story outweighs the demand for a technically sound assessment. No ones going to listen to the sysadmin saying the usage stats for AI wrapper chatbots don't make sense and will collapse when regex parsers are shown to be as useless as BPO outsourcing consultancies, VC Principals listen to the confident guy that promises he will change how humans work thanks to their Scarlett Johanssen sexvoice AI assistant reminding grandma to take her meds.

I kinda wish we had a tipping function on this site (no, that's not actually a feature request) because this encapsulated the rant I would have made about VC much more concisely and with even sharper barbs than I would have used.

I'd just add on the "the demand for a story outweighs the demand for a technically sound assessment" point.

I hate how most modern Founders take the position that they're solving some pressing and very difficult problem facing the world. But if you point out that their proposed solution has some bad second order effects and might make things even worse you get a justification that boils down to "Well a real solution is to too hard to produce all at once so we expect to iterate towards that over time, meanwhile if we don't do this thing someone else will."

And I'm thinking "that sounds like the actual problem that needs solving, how to coordinate enough to mitigate second order effects while working towards a long term solution. Why aren't you working on THAT?"

Specifically thinking of Cluely right now. "We'll let you cheat your way through ANYTHING!"

"Okay, neat GPT wrapper. Can you see how this might cause some serious trust problems for both your customers and the people they interact with if you're encouraging them to be dishonest and hide their use of your product?"

"Not our issue."

"...Okay. I will immediately invest in any company which persuasively promises to render your company nonviable. That's the problem I want solved."

Like, the story is "VCs and Founders work together to coordinate capital towards creating a better world."

It really seems in practice "VCs throw money at any Founders who seem smart enough to turn that money into a viable product and capture a 10-100X ROI even if it makes the world worse in some less-tangible way." Any benefits to the consumer/society are a byproduct of this process. (Which may be enough of a justification, mind).

This is true of all free apps and sites, because the only way to monetize them is ad revenue, meaning doom-scrolling is always optimal. Incentives will out.

There are still variety and innovation to be found in paid services, as well as some that are funded by donations or the like. Whether that's subscription-model newsletters/sites that provide unique analysis, paid dating services that provide 'expert' matchmaking, or hell just look at video games - every free game has the same garbage time sink model, meanwhile indies that cost $5 can still be fantastic.

"If you didn't pay for a product, you are the product" applies universally. If something is important to you and provides value, go pay for the real thing. The 'internet' only sucks because it's free.

This is true of all free apps and sites, because the only way to monetize them is ad revenue, meaning doom-scrolling is always optimal. Incentives will out.

Yeah. And despite the fact that this is very clearly not making users happier, and is corrosive to attention spans. Then add in a gambling mechanic and you've got your user in a perfect little skinner box.

For me, it makes the choice easy. The only winning move is not to play. I will not install the gamified narcissism slop app. Any of them.

Anyone looking to be a tech innovator should try and invent a monetization method that provably enriches the users' life, or at least doesn't grind their attention span to dust for no gain.

But oh no, they don't want to solve actual hard problems when the easy solution of building a better Skinner Box to siphon money to yourself is right there. They want the status of being a hard-problem solver, though.

If something is important to you and provides value, go pay for the real thing. The 'internet' only sucks because it's free.

I only push back insofar as there's a common 'predatory' model that starts out making the thing free or reduced cost and very carefully implying that this will remain the case, but retain the right to alter the deal at any time. Then alter the deal once you sense that they've gotten invested enough that it'll be too painful to leave vs. shelling out money.

And even if you pay for the thing, they can and will shove ads into it anyway. Netflix did it.

This feels to me like a distinctly unfair practice, only maintained because its usually not worth complaining that a thing you were getting for free went away, since its not like it cost you much. But it kind of did. It cost all the time I could have put into another outlet, and it relied on one's general good faith belief that the free option would stick around unless the entire site/app went kaput.

Like, I've put a whole hell of a lot of time and thought into my Motte posts. I don't believe that I "own" the words on the site, but I would be pretty cheesed off if they started restricting my access to my own content and then stuck a paywall up if I wanted to access comments from longer than a month ago.

AND THEN said "hey its fine if you don't want to pay, we'll just start injecting ads into your comments and slapping a gambling mechanic on the Friday Fun thread unless you pony up.

I would immediately drop the site and never look back. But I WOULD put up some money to keep the site functional at the current level simply because I actually do value the community here at significantly greater than $0, which is something I can't say about many other forums.

First, nice summary I would sign under it if I could.

If you don't recognize any of these names, congratulations, you are winning at life, please avoid contaminating your brain by gaining awareness of their existence.

The issue is that these worlds collide from time to time. Hasan himself was touted as a response by Democrats to Gen Z male voter issue. Hasan or Destiny were for some Democrats an answer to their quest of finding their very own Joe Rogan or at least Charlie Kirk or some such. So unfortunately people will not be spared in the foreseeable future.

i'm actually wondering whether if a lot of these drama events are actually real or if they have are wholly faked or pre-planned to generate content. one hot tub streamer Amouranth appears to have generated a fake abuse story with the co-operation of her husband.

I'd bet a lot of the time it's just a matter of individuals following their incentives. Get into some scandal or high profile beef with someone, create a large sink of free attention, and then that sink of attention gets divvied out to the participants, using whatever eldritch rules determine such things.

How consciously faked it is is almost besides the point--it's 100% fake parasocial engagement through and through, and probably the best adapted parasites are the ones that're able to convince even themselves that it's real.

I'd bet a lot of the time it's just a matter of individuals following their incentives.

Safest bet imaginable. Identify the incentives, I'll explain and predict the behavior.

Amouranth is an apex predator in this environment, its more likely that most of her drama is planned out in advance, since I've yet to see her make any moves that would be very likely to result in legal consequences if they were faked. I.e. there's no 'cost' to faking this stuff, so they probably do fake it.

But I also would be willing to believe that she is instinctively willing to convert ANY source of drama, authentic or no, into further attention, and thus the dysfunction of her and those around her is actually adaptive?

Amouranth is an apex predator

Was curious as to why, Googled it, saw her images, and closed out the tab as my question was answered.

I giggled. Yes, that's about the only impression you need.

Okay, maybe this one, too. (Very SFW, but will induce extreme cringe).

...

It's not just a video. When you livestream your life, it's impossible to hide what you do and who you are. Is the outrage fueled by partisans who hated him to begin with? Yes. But that doesn't diminish the fact that it happened. Lorenz is not speaking truth to power, but is a proxy defending her master in the LA streaming scene after he changed his story too often to be credible.

If you don't recognize any of these names, congratulations, you are winning at life, please avoid contaminating your brain by gaining awareness of their existence.

I only know of Hasan due to Sam Hyde's threat to kill him (in the ring?). The rest are all just gibberish names.

Bless you.

Incidentally, I think the only appropriate outcome here is that Sam fights Hasan (in the ring) and winner gets the dog.

It's more that he got caught lying in real time.

And don't take my word for it, look at the chronology... He makes a claim that's obviously false (it's a different vibe collar, the prongs can't be removed, etc). Watch the orbiters repeat the line. And watched people get attacked for exposing the obvious lie (he totally removed the prongs).

Whether or not he shocks the dog is kind of a different issue at this point. You either accept the lie or you're an 'ist. It's kind of interesting to watch.

Yeah, I would agree that at this point the coverup is bigger than the 'crime.'

Its very interesting to me that Hasan immediately clocks that it will hurt his status if people realize he's shocking his dog as a training tool, but for some reason it never occurred to him not to use a dog as a prop in the first place.

He generally just comes across as a control freak (part and parcel with Narcissism) both for wanting his dog to be so strictly trained as to sit quietly in the backdrop of his stream, and for wanting everybody to believe he's NOT a control freak who would strictly train his dog to sit quietly in the backdrop. To the point where he's clearly pressuring/threatening others to bolster his position.

Noticing that this is the Orwellian sort of tactics that most leftist governments implement when they have power well, that's an exercise for the reader.

I daresay Mr. Piker is behaving Stalin-esque. He'd probably be having anyone who disagreed with his lie purged if he could.

The sloppiness of the whole this is what blows my mind. If you're going to lie, at least be smart about it. Or is it one of those things where; they were so used to controlling the narrative that they got lazy?

And to burn so much social capital for something so silly.

He generally just comes across as a control freak (part and parcel with Narcissism)

I think you hit it on the head.

”If we could just see everything in 4K, disputes over what really happened would collapse, the thinking goes. If everything in life is videotaped and archived, then the real truth of these messy situations would be indisputable. But Hassan Piker's dog collar incident shows that this theory is catastrophically wrong.”

Does Taylor Lorenz think that it is impossible to archive financial transaction data? If we had Hasan’s credit card ledger, and cross-referenced his purchase history with the internal transaction records of every entity on the list that sells dog collars, we would be able to see exactly which model of dog collar he bought for his dog.

This seems like an odd place to make a “reality is fundamentally unknowable” argument.

Being FAIR, we don't now how he acquired the collar in question, whether it was purchased by him on a card associated with him directly or not, or whether he was even the guy who made the decision to buy it.

Maybe it was a cash transaction inside a brick-and-mortar store.

Hence I put a little more weight on evidence that he is actively using it like a shock collar, and thus knows exactly what it in fact is. His 'winning' move would have been to pull the collar off the dog, on-camera, RIGHT after the incident, to show that it isn't a shock collar. Beyond that, proving a 'negative' is always fraught.

I'm quite sure I can find a shock collar on eBay or FB marketplace.

Not that I think people are scheming to conceal these purchases, but the principle is bonkers.

Taylor Lorenz is personal friends with Hasan - they hang out all the time in LA. (My gf has met both of them at parties multiple times.)

Someone covering for their personal friend is a less interesting hypothesis… but one more likely to be correct.

Larry Ellison said that a vast AIfueled video surveillance system would ensure quote citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on. This comment is a perfect encapsulation of the delusional fantasy pushed by so many in Silicon Valley. That the surveillance state will be used for good. The narrative is seductive. If we could just see everything in 4K, disputes over what really happened would collapse, the thinking goes.

This is likely a hostile summary. I think that there is a steelman to be made on how video evidence can help establish a consensus. Think stuff like killings by the police. There will always be scissor cases, but if there is video evidence of a suspect pulling a gun or raising his hands in the air, then both sides of the culture war are somewhat more likely to agree on what really happened compared to when they just have to rely on eyewitness testimony.

Of course, video evidence will not always show the full context of an interaction, but it is generally better than nothing to find out what happened. And with gen-AI, video evidence will probably become less trustworthy. AI-generated videos can already fool members of the public (such as me), in the future they might also fool a forensic expert. At that point, you need to rely on a chain of custody, and in CW contexts, you generally can not trust the other side not to tamper with the evidence. Half the police departments would probably happily edit body cam footage if it lets them avoid a few weeks of BLM riots, and half the SJ people would happily use AI to "improve" their videos to drive home the point of racial injustice.

Or it could be that Ellison was really voicing a pro-panopticon sentiment, where video analysis AI will punish every tiny infraction anyone commits a la Demolition Man. I think such a society will slide into totalitarianism, because dissent begins in private.

There will always be scissor cases, but if there is video evidence of a suspect pulling a gun or raising his hands in the air, then both sides of the culture war are somewhat more likely to agree on what really happened compared to when they just have to rely on eyewitness testimony.

Rittenhouse is the disproof of this claim. "somewhat more likely" offers some wiggle room, but we can see that it just isn't enough in practice.

Not just Rittenhouse, but Ma'Khia Bryant. And Rayshard Brooks.

...

So have you noticed how Police Body Camera footage in controversial cases generally gets released within hours when the footage exonerates the cop, and when it looks bad for the cop it take days or weeks to see it?

Universal surveillance doesn't give "the public" access to the truth. It gives the people who control the panopticon access to the truth, and the power to present it to the public however they choose to present it. A group in which Larry Ellison imagines himself, controlling surveillance tech, not the subject of it. Ellison wants to be the man in the control room full of screens, not the man being surveilled.

When infinite evidence exists, the presentation of the evidence becomes the game. And there are always going to be differences in access to that evidence. We're doing the "don't invent the torture matrix" game here, Palantir is directly named for this concept! The Palantir drives Denethor mad, not by showing him falsehoods, but by showing him truths presented by Sauron, edited by the enemy. The Palantir is dangerous not because it doesn't work, but because unless you have tremendous Power, it will overtake your will by presenting things to you in a persuasive way. And that's the position of power that the tech lords want to be in: able to present evidence to us to prove whatever position they please.

Instant replay in sports has been a mixed blessing. For every obviously wrong call, we get truly ridiculous rules and arcane formulas for what constitutes "possession" of the football. True Crime podcasters with vocal fry, and their more respectable cousins in various Innocence Projects, have shown us why Finality is a fundamental value of the justice system, that when you throw infinite effort into researching a case or event you will always find stuff that looks weird. Infinite angles of truth are fundamentally indistinguishable from falsehood without guidance.

When you base truth on Rule of Law you empower lawyers to tell you what the truth is. When you base it on religion you empower priests. If we base truth on surveillance technology, we empower the owners and operators of the surveillance tech. Coincidentally, Larry Ellison has a close relationship with Palantir and similar companies.

No, there is one screen: Hasan's defenders telling us to not trust our lying eyes. There is some merit to the post-truth era but this one is not it. How can you claim it to be two screens if you've never seen it for yourself?

I ran across Taylor Lorenz's podcast episode on it "Hasan Piker and the Future No One Is Ready For" (link to YouTube and therefore auto-transcript, since I follow via podcast, I have not seen the video).

It is important context that Talor Lorenz is a Hasan fangirl and general whacky person who has several blocked and reported episodes dedicated to her shenanigans.

I was reading Does the social contract even exist any more?. It starts out with some typical stuff about questionable business models, some people being inconsiderate, some (left-leaning) politics. It mostly seems like a replacement-level post, until we get to the example of Daniel Naroditskys suicide.

Starting in late 2024, Naroditsky received repeated accusations from former world champion Vladimir Kramnik that he cheated in online chess tournaments. There is basically no evidence that this was true - Kramnik threw some slapdash statistics together that were roundly rejected by other experts - but Kramnik kept loudly repeating the accusations in interviews, on social media, and generally to anyone who would listen. As a former world champion, he had a large audience, and he specifically used it to harass Naroditsky without any real basis other than his own paranoia.

This mostly fits the theme (not that paranoid-delusional chess grandmasters are particularly new), and then comes:

Spurred by Naroditsky’s death, the chess community is demanding action. Some are calling for Kramnik to be investigated for ethics violations, stripped of his grandmaster title and kicked from FIDE, the sport’s governing body.

Holy shit, thats the normality youre missing? This is the only thing in the post that was actually unthinkable for me, though in retrospect with the amount streamers in the game, maybe it shouldnt have been. Still, in a post about how things used to work, presenting this as the obvious thing to do would still cause some whiplash, even if I thought to anticipate some people calling for it. The author here is an /r/neoliberal alumnus who frequently bangs the "You can just be center left, wokeness is a distraction" drum, and this feels like Ive just seen the manchurian punditate activate accidentally.

I'm not sure what should happen to Kramnik. The FIDE handbook has a section on false accusations:

https://handbook.fide.com/files/handbook/ACCRegulations.pdf

Reckless or manifestly unfounded accusation of chess cheating is a serious violation of the requirement of fair play. False accusation in chess is an abuse of freedom of expression that is prohibited by the FIDE Ethics and Disciplinary Code.

FIDE did investigate Magnus Carlsen over a similar complaint in relation to his activity with Hans Nieman. But found him not guilty except for a charge relating to his withdrawal from a tournament which I believe is not allowed without good reason. I think Magnus was able to avoid sanction because it didn't make a direct accusation but I suspect Kramnik has walked closer to this line even though he will claim that he is just asking questions or looking at statistics if he is ever challenged.

The other problem I see is this starting to normalize suicidal threats. David Navara made a blog post that can be uncharitably summarized as 'do something about Kramnik or I'll kill myself'. However, I do urge you to read the whole blog because I think the situation is much complicated than that and I think its very difficult for someone in his situation to express how he feels without it coming across as a suicidal threat or emotional manipulation (https://lichess.org/@/RealDavidNavara/blog/because-we-care/fauAwr9r). He even has this to say:

I want to stress that I firmly believe that a suicide is a wrong decision in a vast majority of situations, including mine one. I do not write this to criticize people who were desperate and saw no other solution, I just stress this to discourage depressed people from damaging themselves in an irrevocable way. The human life has a great value. It is a gift and gifts should not be given back.

To my point, its not particularly important what the FIDE policy is currently, its about what Johnson considers reasonable. Unranking someone over... basically anything other than cheating himself, theres no practical reason for this besides "well, we could use this as a stick". Imagine making a list of the 10 fastest marathons ever and omitting someone because he got into a fight with the federation. In line with the point of the post, this sort of thing used to be sacred, now "something must be done".

omitting someone because he got into a fight with the federation.

Joey Chestnut has entered the chat. Although he was allowed back into the championship (and won) this year.

Mostly a funny anecdote: I don't follow the competition generally.

I guess if FIDE has provision for doing something like that, then that a risk a player undertakes when they violate the rules. But I do agree that it is a bit weird to strip people of results like World Champion that have legitimately earned for unrelated unsportsmanlike conduct that occurred at a different time. Stripping people of titles like Grandmaster seems more reasonable because it sounds more like an honorific even though it is purely based on an objective criteria. It does actually look like a strict reading of the code would allow FIDE to strip Kramnik of his World Championship result (https://handbook.fide.com/files/handbook/EthicsAndDisciplinaryCode2022.pdf). They basically have a bunch of sanctions, and a bunch of offences and there doesn't seem to be any guidance from the FIDE code on which sanctions are appropriate for which offences.

FIDE even has the damnatio memoriae option:

Removal of a player’s historical data from the FIDE database: The deletion, from the FIDE official database, of all data about participation and past results for a player and ratings progress during his/her chess career (in the event of a lifetime ban).

This doesn’t go far enough. We need to remove his games from Chessbase. Books on opening theory should contain the line, “and then one day in late 2000, for no reason at all, people started playing the Berlin defense.”

Kramnik has been making cheating allegations for well over a year now, and i doubt he has been giving evidence. He has already received some kinds of punishment, kinda: I think Chess.com muted his ability to use it as a blog, since he was being annoying or something.

If he gets punished further, it won't actually be because of cheating allegations, it will be because The People Demand Something Be Done because of Naroditsky. (I think its ironic that we take it for granted that he killed himself. You'd think with this topic in particular, we would wait until we have evidence before saying things!)

This sounds like the debate over if wokeness is just a list of object-level political opinions, or if wokeness is also a set of social conformism techniques.

Maybe the author agrees with Cancelling People, but just haggles over the price. Woke rebuttals to "wokeness is a set of social conformism techniques" include that Hollywood blacklisting communists was also cancel culture, and that we have always lived in a cancel culture. From here, we should see wokeness as just a list of object-level political opinions, including novel high speeds of vibe shifts.

The comparison to pervious conformism isnt relevant here, because this is not about Who Started It or is violating political norms or such. The vast majority of things wokeness has canceled people for, "normal" leftists agree that it would have been better not to do that thing, at least by a little. They disagree what to do about it, and object-level opinions about surrounding facts certainly play a role in that, but just increasing the willingness to demand conformity gets them to play along with whatever the wokes do (whether or not that makes them woke themselves is, again, not relevant here).

Theres also a difference in which things you enforce conformism on, and what you enforce it with. Removing the title here seems to me like something that used to be out of bounds. And I doubt anyone was removed from chess over communism - there literally where competitions with the USSR at the time.

feels like Ive just seen the manchurian punditate activate accidentally.

Maybe this is a specific reference I didn't get. I understood you as saying: "This author prides himself with being center-left and not a woke psycho, but he still demands a formal cancellation by an institution for personal moral shortcomings." Was I misinterpreting? All I was saying was this author could think Kramnik's offences rise to Cancellable but (say) the Young Republicans don't.

So it's really hard for me to find examples of FIDE revoking titles for moral failings! Andrejs Strebkovs appears to be the only example I could find, and that is recent.

Still, in a post about how things used to work

This might be the issue! Johnson is barely talking about the past, and indeed he says returning wouldn't fix everything; he also explicitly says some norms are bad and should be changed. He is just venting about things, and all this 'social contract' stuff is just to give his opinions some sense of legitimacy.

I do appreciate you bringing this up. I do not like people's willingness to Mean Girl their way into what ought to just be objective accomplishment-tracking. I wonder if it is more generally related to the Great Feminization.

I understood you as saying: "This author prides himself with being center-left and not a woke psycho, but he still demands a formal cancellation by an institution for personal moral shortcomings." Was I misinterpreting?

Yesnt. I think a lot of left-leaning people arent "actively woke", but will go along with it, for various reasons - no enemies to the left, "but come on all the people agruing against this are bad", etc. They say they dont have the woke beliefs, and they dont, because those decisions arent made based on those. They would/could not, themselves, start it, but they will be one the woke side, when it starts. And that case seems to me like that programming triggering somewhere non-political.

The manchurian candidate is not a secret agent hiding his true beliefs, he is sincere but can be mind-controlled with a passphrase.

The problem with "cancel" as a strategy was always that it was an argument in favor of bringing back blacklisting communists. Which I thought we all agreed was a bad thing, but apparently not, so here we go...

The problem with "cancel" as a strategy was always that it was an argument in favor of bringing back blacklisting communists.

Only if you treat tactics as inherently good or bad. "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." "Good guy with a gun" and "bad guy with a gun" are very different things, morally.

Which I thought we all agreed was a bad thing

No bad tactics, only bad targets. HUAC and the Hollywood blacklists were bad not because the tactic was inherently wrong, but because it was Evil Right Wingers wrongfully persecuting poor, innocent, well-intentioned Communists; the same tactic is good when used by Good Left Wingers to rightfully drive out the deplorable bigots.

It's simple: there are Good Guys, and there are Bad Guys. Anything the Good Guys do is good, anything the Bad Guys do is bad… even when those are the exact same actions, because the morality of deeds is determined by who is doing unto whom.

Only if you treat tactics as inherently good or bad.

I believe the traditional phrase is "once you pop, you can't stop." You can socially normalize a direction but not a concrete set of standards.

Nobody's ever in complete control of how trends develop. And only a fool would concern himself with the philosophy of a mob.

once you pop, you can't stop.

Yes the notorious Epstein quote.

I don’t understand the complaint here. Unranking him for ethical violations is a normal thing sports have done for a long time. Pete Rose was one of the greatest baseball players ever and permanently* banned from the Hall of Fame in the 80s for betting on games. Whether you agree or disagree, I think the idea of having ethical standards in competitions that aren’t directly related to cheating is nothing new.

The bit in the article about the Twitch streamer is ridiculous to me. She is a form of prostitute and was kissed by one of her simps. This in turn did nothing but boost her career. I promise she is overjoyed by this and maybe even arranged it herself, she isn’t some vestal virgin.

Im not familiar with baseball, but from what I can tell the Hall of Fame is entirely done by voting. I think thats obviously different from something recording an objective achievement.

Reminiscent of this discussion on whether to list Lance Armstrong's objective achievements on wikipedia; https://www.themotte.org/post/3311/friday-fun-thread-for-october-10/375101

Although this thread is more about ethics outside the game (steroids are in the game) and chess. So maybe Bobby Fischer is a better comparison? His achievements aren't hidden but there's often an asterisk

Pete Rose wasn't just banned from the Hall of Fame, he was banned from baseball, he couldn't coach and he couldn't work for a team and he was very rarely featured as one of the greats of the game along other legends of similar stature. This stance softened over the course of my life, and you started to see him acknowledged more as he got older and his sins faded into memory. But it wasn't that the voters never voted for him, like they have refused to with steroid users, but that he was never eligible on the ballot at all.

The social contract never existed, or at least was never really a contract. The terms can be varied at will and are enforceable only by one side; if the other side complains, mere toleration of their existence in society is considered both agreement and sufficient compensation.

I might be a bad reader here and misunderstanding, but I see that article as 3 distinct pieces:

  • Does the social contract even exist any more?
  • Did Cheating Accusations Kill This Grandmaster?
  • Twitch Can’t Protect Streamers

I don't read the latter two sections as in any way related to the former.

Social contracts broken, bad behavior leads to more attention, keep doubling down, never apologize, etc - it’s the same playbook in every case. FIDE has been slow to act,

In the Chess part

It’s yet another way in which social contracts are crumbling in front of us, and I honestly have no idea what I’d do about it if I was a woman who had to be on camera in front of the internet for my job.

In the Twitch part

Okay, you're correct and I am a bad reader. To my credit (and as you said), those examples are so bad that they short circuited my brain and I could not relate them to the opening thesis.

So, the Ontario Reagan ad thing.

As the governor of Ontario, Doug Ford (Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario) produced a 1-minute ad in favor of free trade ad targeted at US residents, with some high-profile airings during some sports events. The ad consists of spliced together sentences of a 1987 Reagan address.

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation claims that "the ad misrepresented Reagans address". The reaction of Trump was to suspend trade negotiations with the Carney (Liberal Party) government of Canada:

The Ronald Reagan Foundation has just announced that Canada has fraudulently used an advertisement, which is FAKE, featuring Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about Tariffs. The ad was for $75,000,000. They only did this to interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, and other courts. TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A. Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT

I watched the original they linked, and I honestly can not see what their problem is. In the original 5 minute version, there was also a message of "we have introduced duties on semiconductors from Japan because their companies were not competing fairly, but we do not want a general trade war". But having watched both the ad and the address, I agree with the fact-checkers that Reagan was not quoted out of context. The ad agency basically took a five minute speech, of which at least three minutes were a spirited defense of free trade as the foundation of prosperity and condensed it into a one minute defense of free trade.

I understand how the ad would annoy Trump. Reagan is a time-honored hero of his party, and his voiced ideals are in stark contrast to Trump's policies. The message "this man is stepping way out of line of the tradition of his political ancestors" certainly seems a good way to persuade traditional conservative demographics to reconsider Trump.

But for all his annoyance, I think Ontario is basically well within it's rights to use ads to affect US trade policy. Even without Citizens United, the US would be the last country in the Americas to have any standing to object to foreigners interfering, especially if the interference is only attack ads and not coups.

And as far as attack ads go, it is incredibly tame. A clear policy message without any ad hominem jabs or name-calling.

This makes Trump's reaction utterly bizarre to me. Diplomacy sometimes means negotiating with people who would love to murder you and dance on your grave, never mind seeing you voted out of office. Then there is the fact that Canada is not an absolute monarchy, and their federal government does not control its provinces. Assuming that PM Carney has control over Ford would be like assuming that Trump has control over Newsom. If you are willing to walk away from negotiations because of that, then either you were not seriously negotiating before or you emotions are making you irrational.

Even if the ad was paid for by Carney, Trump's reaction would not be appropriate for an adult. It seems that he is mentally sorting people into two buckets, the ones who support him and are loyal to him, and the ones who are opposed to him. This is basically the world view of a toddler. Reality is more complex. Of course Canada would love nothing more than the US electing Democrat majorities in the mid-term and them killing Trump's tariffs. Presumably, Trump in turn would love for Canadians to elect a MAGA fan who is willing to bend over backwards and give Trump all the concessions instead of retaliating. But in the likely event that neither side get what they want, it still makes sense to negotiate.

To me, it seems pretty clear that a mass media campaign like this is directed at the electorate. In Trump's mind, it is meant to influence the SCOTUS. This makes me question his world model even more. What is the proposed mechanism of action? A SC justice is watching a sports event on TV, sees the Reagan free trade ad, gets the message 'tariffs bad' into his head, then decides a case which hinges on what powers Congress can delegate to the president purely based on if he likes how the president has used these disputed powers. It seems that Trump is a victim of the typical mind fallacy here -- just because he could persuaded by a TV ad to make unprincipled changes to his policy to get some desired object-level outcome, he assumes that the minds of justices work the same way. At the risk of likewise typical-minding, I think that he is wrong. Perhaps, some judges are partisan hacks who will rule for or against Trump on general principle. But my model of the median SC judge is someone who cares about the long term policy outcomes and making consistent rulings, rather than someone starting by writing "therefore, Trump's tariffs are legal/illegal" at the bottom of the page according to their leanings and then filling the space above with some legal argument. (Which is kinda what Roe v Wade did.)

In short, if Ontario wanted to influence the SCOTUS, TV ads seem like the worst way to go about it. I would recommend they pay high profile legal scholars to publish in academic journals. Or more cynically, invite some justices to an all-expenses-paid retreat.

Trump's behavior is kinda lame here, I tend to be of the "just fucking own in" school, but I suppose that's why I'm not a politician.

But for all his annoyance, I think Ontario is basically well within it's rights to use ads to affect US trade policy.

This on the other hand is more debatable. Wasn't there an entire drama about some pittance that Russia spent on Facebook ads during Trump's first run?

It was the motte for a bailey of election interference and (sigh) cybercrime claims, yes.

I think Ontario is basically well within its rights to use ads to affect US trade policy.

And the US is well within its rights to set trade policy however it likes. The government of Ontario clearly has the money to spend on foreign propaganda so clearly they're not suffering too badly.

Even if the ad was paid for by Carney

It probably wasn't (considering the incentives at play, I think the corresponding denouncement was genuine), and that's actually kind of a big deal. Individual provinces have been more effective at influencing foreign trade policy than the Federal government is, for better (Smith) or for worse (Ford). What good's the Federal government if it won't do this, and has revealed to instead be too weak to enforce message discipline on its constituents?

it still makes sense to negotiate.

This is a negotiation- the corporate arm of the people of Ontario being one of the interested parties. The fact that those people still see fit to go out of its way to shitpost is actually relevant; I wouldn't want to do business with them either.

And sure, maybe the Supreme Court rules it all illegal and everything goes back to normal, in which case Ford can take a win back to his most elderly, jingoistic supporters and not spend much goodwill on the people who had to pay for them. That's the gamble he's taking here; perhaps it'll pay off, perhaps it won't.

Assuming that PM Carney has control over Ford would be like assuming that Trump has control over Newsom.

You're assuming the average American knows or cares about Canadian political structure? Canada is a monolith to Americans, especially those living in the East (that's why the meme is '51st' and not '51 to 55'). But then again, I think this makes more sense if understood as an intra-Canadian political slapfight that more tangentially happens to involve the US.

This is a negotiation- the corporate arm of the people of Ontario being one of the interested parties. The fact that those people still see fit to go out of its way to shitpost is actually relevant; I wouldn't want to do business with them either.

I would not characterize the ad as 'shitposting'. Also, the relative strength of both parties will likely be reflected in how the gains from a deal are distributed among them. If the US is in a stronger position, it also has more to lose on not making a deal.

Of course, it could be that a trade deal is so insignificant that it is simply not worth the president's time. If it was a negotiation between the US and Madagascar, saying "screw you, try again in a year" at the slightest offense might be acceptable. But with Canada, not having a trade deal is leaving quite a bit of money on the table, I imagine.

I would not characterize the ad as 'shitposting'.

Shitposting, saber-rattling, attempting to propagandize a foreign nation/people your economic future depends on for ego reasons...

not having a trade deal is leaving quite a bit of money on the table

For the Canadians, yes, which is the point of Trump loudly turning 360 degrees and walking away. Not really as much for the Americans.

It's actually kind of a paradox, where American foreign policy is designed to encourage a more pro-business/pro-reality elite in other countries, which then results in a stronger country that's then more able to tell the Americans 'no'.

Naturally, the hyper-conservative elite [this can also be voter blocs if political representation is sufficiently slanted in their favor, and the Canadian political system is this way by design] hates that idea, especially because the last few administrations were happy to both let them free trade their way to prosperity so long as they threw Pride parades and DEId. Thanks in great part to the US having kept this up for so long, these ideas are now the baseline conservative position, which is part of why conservative elites like them (the other reason is because it's a way to pretend they're on the side of the young).

Now that a liberal has taken power the elite in those countries feel empowered to keep on keeping on. They aren't as capable of rapid change as the Americans are, mainly because the people who were capable of that emigrated to the US a long time ago (or who never reproduced due to the deaths of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers in the Great European Mass Suicides of the 1910s and 1940s).

This makes Trump's reaction utterly bizarre to me.

As a three-time Trump voter, I just have to say - the man needs to be put out to pasture. By all accounts you are correct when you posit that his emotions are making him irrational. I personally believe that he was originally quite an impressive and intuitive leader, but the stress and partisanship of the last ten years appear to have degraded any nuance in his personality and thinking. We are swiftly approaching Joe Biden territory. I just wish he were being stage-managed as well as Joe was.

I personally believe that he was originally quite an impressive and intuitive leader, but the stress and partisanship of the last ten years appear to have degraded any nuance in his personality and thinking.

Can you give some examples of Trump not being a petty little bitch protecting his own ego and emotions?

I'll grant you "impressive and intuitive" politician, based on his commandeering of the Republican party, but leader is a bit of a stretch.

... I don't like the man, but you may have missed a picture.

Are you saying the "assassination attempt" was staged?

In seriousness, I didn't say he's a pussy (not that letting the Secret Service move you however they think best would make anyone a pussy, of course), I said he's a petty little bitch who protects his ego and emotions. The photo is consistent with putting ego and emotions first.

The photo is consistent with putting ego and emotions first.

Hm....

his own ego and emotions?

Reagan is a time-honored hero of his party

On an unrelated note, I'm guessing the Republican reevaluation and demythologization of his legacy is something that is bound to happen at some point.

What actually is the opinion of Republican voters toward Reagan nowadays? Do they even care? AFAICT among Democrats his name is still mud--HIV, the homeless, the decline of unions, and rise of inequality are all his fault--to the extent that even Bush Jr. seems to have a better reputation nowadays. But I don't see Republicans on the Internet referencing him much, for good or ill.

You may have recently heard of a certain slogan of his, though -- 'Make American Great Again'.

Democrats always hated him, as much as they hated anyone up until Trump.

even Bush Jr. seems to have a better reputation nowadays

It has been my experience that Bush II has a better reputation among the "respectability" wing of the GOP, who seem to sincerely believe that if only Trump had been more like Romney in 2020, the loss would have been closer, and they could have lost again in 2024, instead of being saddled with a GOP president in the current year.

Among the rank and file of "occasional voters" that form a lot of Trump's base, Reagan is a remote, vague, yet positive figure who hearkens back to a time when America Still Had Balls.

That's a good question. His final approval poll was 63-29, at the higher end of a presidency that went up and down around an average of 53. His retroactive approval went as high as 73-22 in 2002, and as of a couple years ago it was still 69-28, 2nd only to JFK among the 9 recent presidents Gallup asked about. The left-wing opinion still seems to be "Reagan screwed up the AIDS epidemic" so I'd have to assume that his support still leans right and he's at 70+ among Republican voters.

But this might be just one of those things that's uselessly sensitive to poll wording (YouGov says 44-29! Is that just because they emphasize their "neutral" option more?) or to poll methodology (Gallup says 90-8 for JFK!? Is it just getting harder and harder to correct for "only boomers answer the phone for pollsters" effects?).

I think it's worth considering that our current Vice President is not old enough to remember Reagan being in office.

That said, this Millennial Republican voter's opinion is that Reagan is both overrated and over-hated. Why? Because he was mostly a continuation of Carter's neoliberal agenda with a more optimistic presentation. Good or bad, neoliberalism should be understood not as something imposed by the GOP (who, let us remember, never controlled Congress during Reagan or H.W. Bush's Presidencies) but also as a change in elite consensus within the Democratic Party. Pick something that Reagan is blamed or credited for and odds are that Carter really started it. Union busting? Carter appointed Volker whose interest rate hikes wrecked the sort of private sector jobs that were heavily unionized. That big military buildup? Also started under Carter, and for all his peacenik vibes post-Presidency he took a more confrontational tone toward the USSR (compare Carter's Zbigniew Brzezinski to Nixon's Henry Kissinger) than Nixon. Maybe we buy the idea that Reagan didn't care much about AIDS but I've yet to see a convincing argument that the US handled it radically worse than the rest of the developed world. Most Democrats voted for Reagan's tax cuts. As Governor of California Reagan was hardly a conservative firebrand. He signed off on tax increases while legalizing abortion (and he'd go on to screw over the pro-lifers again by nominating Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court) and no-fault divorce. Free trade and immigration? The Democrats have been free traders more or less continuously for the party's entire existence, and Congressional Democrats were more likely to vote for Reagan's amnesty than members of his own party.

IMO his legacy is outsized for both sides because it allows a certain brand of Republicans to act as if they had more to do with the good things that happened than is arguably the case and a certain brand of Democrats to avoid facing the fact that they'd largely been betrayed by their own party's politicians. Amusingly, certain right-wing ideologues figured it out first, which is why both Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan ran campaigns against Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush.

AFAICT among Democrats his name is still mud

I don't think this is true, except in the sense that he is a conservative Republican and therefore the enemy. He tends to score well in polls of academic historians, for example, who are 80-90% Democrats. It is (and was at the time) mud among leftists, who resent the fact that he successfully deprived their beloved USSR of the moral high ground. Most Democrats are not leftists, although for most of the last decade this hasn't been obvious because the non-leftist Democrats were afraid of the leftists calling them racist.

AFAICT among Democrats his name is still mud--HIV

What exactly should he have done? Closed down gay bathhouses, interned and tested every patron and resettled the HIV-infected ones on Angel Island?

Vietnam has low taxes, social conservatism and super business friendly policies while having hammer and sickle flags along the streets and a political system that celebrates Lenin. The republicans are going to talk about how great Reagan was while under no circumstances wanting to talk about his policies since Reagan's agenda are pretty much the opposite of MAGA. Republicans will like the aesthetic while refusing to even acknowledge the ideas.

Reagan's big thing -- building up the military in opposition to the USSR -- is no longer relevant.

Reagan was big on the War On Drugs. So is Trump.

Reagan liked lower taxes. So does Trump.

Reagan made a deal for immigration amnesty. Trump saw the results of this deal and won't. So not really a conflict.

Reagan talked big about free trade, which Trump doesn't. But despite that he did engage in trade warring, including YUGE tariffs on agricultural goods.

They aren't the same, but they aren't "the opposite" either.

Reagan was a neocon globalist. A strong focus on military interventionism, free trade and shipping jobs abroad. He didn't really focus on America but a globalized American empire.

Military interventionism during his presidency was rather limited in scope though.

Reagan liked lower taxes. So does Trump.

Reagan liked cutting rates (and in particular top rates which were far too high at the time) while closing loopholes and simplifying the tax code. Trump likes opening new loopholes and making the tax code more complex.

Arguably, the huge increase in the standard deduction is the biggest simplification of the tax code since Reagan. After the 2018 (Trump administration) changes there, the number of filings taking the standard deduction went up from 70 to 90 percent.

For over a decade at least I've seen the right blame Reagan's amnesty for turning California from deep red to deep blue. And also the reason to never believe in another amnesty deal every again.

I think for the longest time the GOP loved Reagan almost just because he won 49/50 states. He won the cold war, and there are still a terrifying number of unreformed cold warriors in and around Washington dictating increasingly deranged policy.

But it's also easy to forget that Reagan was a Hollywood liberal until he reinvented himself as a conservative. Liberals flocked to the GOP under his banner, and this weird combination of pro-interventionist, pro big spending liberals with pro free trade conservatives birthed the Neoconservative movement, which has been hated my entire life. Neocon was a meaningless smear word the entirety of my childhood and early adulthood.

But the lived experience of the Reagan years were amazing. My father until the day he died talked about what a relief it was to just survive in America under Reagan. The way he remembered it, taxes and cost of living was destroying everyone in America until Reagan came along and finally fixed everything. Reagan was elected in 80, my dad got married, bought a house and had a kid (me) shortly after. I can't speak to the accuracy of how he remembered things, but his actions certainly speak to some faith that it felt that way to him at the time at least.

Actually kind of reminds me of the trajectory of my own life with respect to Trump getting elected. The tax cuts were among the best raises I ever got, and my investments went through the roof. Made me feel good enough about my life after too long feeling like I was barely treading water, unable to keep up with a constantly shifting goalpost, that I got married, bought a house and had a kid.

I did the math about a year ago and guess what? At least if we're talking about amnesty creating eventual citizens who eventually vote and vote Democratic at disproportionate rates, the numbers simply don't work and would have had only a minor impact at best in turning California blue. So, I'm sorry if that's a long held belief of yours but it doesn't seem true.

It's probably more a mix of tech boom + urbanization + marginal changes in demographic makeup + a few more local concerns + national trends. It's worth noting how fast this was, though, and that makes me suspect the last two especially: +16 R for Reagan in the 1984 wave, to +3.5 R for Bush Sr 1988, to a total collapse to -13.5 (Ross Perot shenanigans though) as Clinton took the state for good in 1992 with about the same margin again in 1996. A bungled post-Reagan, post-amnesty GOP push for a 1994 anti-immigrant bill is often cited... but that post-dates the first massive swing against Bush and Republicans. So unless you mean that somehow that amnesty almost singlehandedly turned pre-existing Reagan fans against Bush Sr, I don't see it. California only went about 2 to 3 points more Democratic than expected (the 4-year swing as compared to national trends) in 1988, the closest election after the 1986 amnesty. Even if you think that "unique" delta is purely the result of amnesty, it's still only a drop in the pond compared the overall swing and certainly wasn't the sole difference even remotely. An easier holistic explanation is right there: Bush was an East Coast insider. And you probably had some early stirrings of social liberalism gaining ground. Looking again at the numbers, it seems to me that a mix of Bush Sr's weaknesses plus the Clinton era is more responsible than anything else (in 1996, actually, since Clinton did better than 1992 generally, you could actually characterize it as a small amount of backsliding, but 2000 seemed to cement the vote differential as noticeably Democratic).

I'm sure you could do more analysis with more local knowledge and county data, not just presidential numbers, but I'm pretty sure the explanatory power of the lazy equation above is pretty high, and doesn't leave much room for a uniquely amnesty blame-game.

I've mentioned this before, but I return to it because it remains true.

Circa 2016, when we were starting to realize that Trump was a real candidate, I attended a lunch talk with the Yale constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar. Amar is a brilliant scholar, whatever you think of his political opinions. One of his core arguments that day in 2016 was that Barack Obama was about to become what he labeled at the time a "Turning Point President." His basic thesis was that when you look at American political history, when a President wins 1) Two consecutive terms and then 2) gets his chosen successor elected after him, then that sets the paradigm (a Turning Point) that the country operates under until another Turning Point when a new paradigm is established. So if Clinton had won in 2016, Obama would have been a bona-fide turning point, and we would be operating under the Obama paradigm today. It's a Hegelian triad, Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis, kind of system; a turning point president represents a new Synthesis that becomes the next Thesis.

But the upshot of this logic is that we are currently operating under the Reagan paradigm. Developed and attenuated, altered with each passing presidency, but we're still within that paradigm. When Reagan came into office, the last president to achieve this feat was FDR, and between FDR and Reagan we were operating within FDR's New Deal paradigm. The Democrats during that time tried to expand the New Deal, the Great Society and whatnot. Even Republican presidents during that period, Eisenhower and Nixon, were operating within the New Deal. Eisenhower adjusted the New Deal to make it more conservative, and Nixon signed a lot of liberal legislation but otherwise tried to reign in the New Deal and not to overturn it.

Reagan overturned the New Deal paradigm. He struck a fresh synthesis, of social conservatism that would manage change, pushing family values while mostly surrendering on race issues and the sexual revolution. Free market capitalism, free trade, race neutral corporate meritocratic success, these were the core values of the Reagan Revolution. An assertive foreign policy that brushed off post-Vietnam malaise with short and sharp foreign interventions that did the job and left town.

And we've operated under that ever since. Clinton's third way Dems were an adaptation to that paradigm, an effort to soften it and move it left. Dubya operated within that paradigm, dominated by the overseas interventions of his term. Obama said forthrightly that Republicans had been the party of ideas since the 1980s*, and sought to change that, but he still operated within a corporatist, capitalist, free trade, Washington-Consensus paradigm, with a foreign policy built around assertive American exceptionalism and short sharp interventions. Perhaps Obama thought he could establish a new paradigm, but he didn't, and I debated with Amar at the time if he even could claim one regardless of HRC's results.

If you hate the status quo, you have to hate Reagan as he actually existed. You can, of course, revise Reagan to make a myth of something you do support, but you can't love Reagan and hate the world we live in today. It's his world, it's his America.

*"I think it's fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10-15 years in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom," Obama said in an interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal.

The right wing critique of Reagan would be that he was a Judas goat who created the strong appearance of rolling back Johnson’s Great Society program while actually solidifying and entrenching it. Another thing to keep in mind is that one of Reagan’s main conservative bonafides was winning the Cold War, and it is starting to feel more and more lately like America didn’t actually win the Cold War. China won the Cold War, while the USA and USSR both lost.

Exactly. If you don't like the America we live in today, you can't love Ronald Reagan. He compromised with the New Deal, he made Social Security and Medicare understood as permanent entitlements for "hard working" old people, even as he tried to roll back welfare benefits for working age young people. Reagan brought on The End of History, but maybe that wasn't such a good thing after all for conservatives.

Another thing to keep in mind is that one of Reagan’s main conservative bonafides was winning the Cold War, and it is starting to feel more and more lately like America didn’t actually win the Cold War. China won the Cold War, while the USA and USSR both lost.

I don't know where the saying originates, but I've heard many times that Athens recovered from its defeat in the Peloponnesian War very quickly, while Sparta never recovered from its victory. America may never recover from what it did to win the Cold War.

The Christian Right also supported him in the belief that he'll help them advance their goals. In fact, the opposite happened. At the same time, the Left largely completed the Long March through the institutions with most distracted Reagan supporters not even noticing.

Oh come on. China ended 1988 with a GDP of $325B as compared to the US $5.XT

Almost all of China's growth and power has accrued after 2000.

The timing doesn't line up. In 1991, China was still sorting itself out while the US had emerged from the Cold War wealthier, more powerful, and more unchallenged than ever. It wasn't like the US exhausted itself crushing the USSR. You could compellingly argue that the US fumbled its post-Cold War international supremacy through a combination of complacency, arrogance, and sheer stupidity, but that's a matter quite separate from China winning the Cold War.

That won't necessarily stop people from re-imagining Reagan as the guy who sold the world to China, but they'll be wrong.

@anon_ I’m not saying Reagan personally whiffed it. That’s mostly on the people that came after him. I mean that with hindsight it starts to seem less and less like a grand achievement, which is going to tarnish his reputation even if that part of it wasn’t his fault. Ozymandias built a pretty amazing temple and monument complex, but all I’m seeing at the moment is a disembodied stone foot sticking out of the trackless desert and it’s hard to be impressed.

Ozymandias built a pretty amazing temple and monument complex, but all I’m seeing at the moment is a disembodied stone foot sticking out of the trackless desert and it’s hard to be impressed.

One of my favorite random facts is that after Shelley wrote the poem, the mummy of Ramses II (in Greek, Ozymandias) was discovered and is currently in a museum in Cairo.

The Soviet Bloc was a spent force by the time he assumed office. Their best available future option was ongoing stagnation followed by limited market reforms that end up preserving the political system while abandoning the Cold War, as in the case of Cuba and Vietnam.

"Clinton and Gingrich actually did more to roll back the welfare state and control spending in general" is very much a valid criticism of Reagan. Empirically, the US is only fiscally responsible when there is a Democratic President and a Republican deficit hawk leads at least one house of Congress.

"Starve the beast" is a failed Reagan policy - it turns out that if you cut taxes while promising to protect popular spending, you don't force your political opponents to cut spending when they get in, you just blow out the deficit. The reason why Reagan still has a good reputation on tax is that most of what he did to the tax code was fiscally neutral simplification (lower rates, fewer loopholes).

That doesn’t seem right.

Short, sharp interventions have been out of vogue since some time around Iraq. Neoliberal economics survived the dotcom bubble only to become a permanent wedge after 2008. Obama hollowed out the Democrat apparatus; now Trump’s completed his own skin suit. The Tea Party was completely suborned. Identity politics got a second, third and fourth wind. American exceptionalism shares space with a multipolar model.

Whatever we’re in, it’s not the same paradigm as Reagan.

Short, sharp interventions have been out of vogue since some time around Iraq.

No, we just argue about making them shorter and sharper, but we still haven't moved into another paradigm. Obama's foreign policy operated within the same system as Dubya's, the Reagan paradigm, but trying to keep it to drones and special forces instead of heavy ground troops. Obama's interventions in Libya, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen were all built around the same foreign interventionist playbook. Trump made lots of noise about being an isolationist, and at times I've applauded him for it, but he kept up drone and special forces campaigns begun by Obama in his first term, including the strike against Abu Bakr and Suleimani, and in his even-more-schizo second term he's bombed Iran in the shortest and sharpest way he could. Trump is trying to break the paradigm, but he hasn't yet constructed a cohesive edifice that shows what he actually wants to do: he talks America First then acts Israel-only. Arguably Biden's pull out from Afghanistan was a move against that paradigm...and it was roundly panned by everyone, sometimes on dishonest technical ground, but really for spiritual reasons.

Neoliberal economics survived the dotcom bubble only to become a permanent wedge after 2008

People are dissatisfied with neoliberal economics on both sides of the aisle, neither side has constructed an alternative. Our economy still functions as a neoliberal Washington consensus corporate financial system. The big banks are still big and still bailed out by the government, the big insurance companies are still causing the same problems as before the ACA, outsourcing and deindustrialization continued apace. Have corporations been pushed from power in any way since 2008, have admins since 2008 been any less in bed with corporations? Sure we've swapped General Motors and General Electric and IBM for Nvidia and Oracle and Meta, but the economy is still built around corporate profits and the stock market. The way it has been since Reagan.

Obama and Trump both talked about moving past the current paradigm into new territory, nobody has done it yet. Trump has yet to build a cohesive economic model or foreign policy. He gestures in new directions, he has not yet completed the change. Maybe President Vance will.

Arguably Biden's pull out from Afghanistan was a move against that paradigm...and it was roundly panned by everyone, sometimes on dishonest technical ground, but really for spiritual reasons.

Your general point is correct, but every time this comes up I feel compelled to point out that it's the one thing I have and will always unequivocally praise Biden for. I've had some interesting debates with @Dean on the subject.

I'm kind of excluding you and me from the category "everyone" here. I guess "everyone relevant on the political spectrum" would be more accurate, but less felicitous.

I dont recall if you have addressed this point in the past, but given what appear to be tactical blunders on just about every level, how do you defend Biden's failure to fire multiple Generals and other high level commanding officers that participated in the withdrawal?

The same way I defend Trump's failure to fire the generals who admitted to lying to him to prevent his lawful orders from being carried out. My assessment is that the Bureaucratic layer is out of control, and I'm much more worried about getting it back under control than I am about ensuring that the Executive is giving maximally-good orders. Given the choice between assigning blame to the bureaucratic layer and assigning it to the executive for failing to punish the bureaucratic layer... If we punish the executive, how does this translate to the bureaucratic layer receiving accountability for their fuckups?

Perhaps more firings?

Biden's pullout was also executing a deal made by the 1st Trump administration which the Deep State were trying to manipulate Biden into ratting out of.

I tease "Trump makes us stronk" MAGA supporters about the fact that Trump surrendered to the Taliban, but under the circumstances it was clearly the right call for Trump to surrender and clearly the right call for Biden to implement the surrender agreement. The war had ceased to be winnable long ago.

Obama did... not run a noninterventionist foreign policy. Nor was there a major move away from neoliberal economics until very recently.

I didn’t say noninterventionist. More… disillusioned with the pretense of shortness and sharpness.

Maybe I’m applying too much hindsight. We did get out of Libya pretty fast, and the we didn’t know at the time that it would slump back into civil war. But the Afghanistan slog continued. We waffled on Syria. It’s not entirely pur fault, but it’s just not what I’d call short and sharp.

Were there any short, sharp and successful interventions besides Grenada and Panama?

Kuwait in 1991? Arguably Operations Praying Mantis and El Dorado Canyon, too.

Some might consider Kosovo / bombing Yugoslavia to have been successful, too.

The obvious problem with the Kuwaiti, Iranian and Libyan examples, as opposed to the interventions in Panama and Grenada, is that the military operation, no matter how splendid, did not result in the long-term political settlement of the crisis that prompted the invasion in the first place. It’s difficult to imagine a scenario after all where the 1991 Gulf War is not followed by another Gulf War eventually. Also, the Libyan regime stayed in power and kept supporting terrorist groups after 1986 as well (I suppose). In the case of Kosovo I think the long-term negative repercussions are too palpable. The ‘rule-based international order’ might have worked in another scenario but surely was never going to work after Kosovo.

It’s difficult to imagine a scenario after all where the 1991 Gulf War is not followed by another Gulf War eventually.

It's very easy. If the US doesn't start the 2nd Gulf War, there isn't a 2nd Gulf War. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours in 2003 and his WMD programme was kayfabe to deter an Iranian invasion. The only terrorism he was sponsoring was Palestinian terrorism against Israel, which the West was and is comfortable tolerating in countries they don't have any other beefs against. Israel and Saudi Arabia both wanted Saddam gone, but by 2003 both saw Iran as the real threat, which means that the most likely outcome of a 2nd Gulf War (a Shia-dominated government inclined not to oppose Iran) is net negative for them.

There are good reasons for thinking that the world would have been better off without Saddam if he could have been removed by someone competent, but nobody had to remove him. There is no credible scenario where Saddam starts a 2nd Gulf War from his side.

Those are all good points, but I was referring to US domestic politics.

More comments

at some point

... after the demythologization of FDR, by the Democrats. Reagan was mythologized, to begin with, because the last good Republican president was Eisenhower. Trumpists obviously don't parrot the party line about Reagan, but I'm guessing the median and modal Republican's image of Reagan is about what it was in 2015.

My completely arbitrary vibe as just another post-liberal shitlord floating around the internet is that boomers and dorks love Reagan but based chuds think he was a cuck on guns and immigration, if they think of him at all.

Apples and oranges. The demythologization of FDR would necessarily entail the demythologization of the American role in WW2, and I wonder if Democrat-aligned normies are ready for that. In Reagan’s case there’s no such taboo present.

But will Democrats become double-negative-polarized in his favor then?

I can see it, especially with the Abundance bros.

Dankest timeline, etc...

Probably yes.

Abundance bros.

Is it really even worth giving that brainfart a capital letter? That ironically named "movement" is already dead and has no popular appeal at all on the left.

I'm not sure why would you be antipathetic towards the only part of the Dem apparatus that produces something least resembling nonsense? What purpose could that possibly serve? To elevate the AOC weirdos?

Have you seen the polling results? The "abundance" doctrine has no purchase in the left-wing base at all. Even without going into the issues with their actual ideas, there's simply no viable path to victory for them. If you think the abundance platform is good, you should go work with the party that actually supports them - which is the Republican party.

As for AOC, I don't actually like her either - and I think she's done enough damage to her reputation with the left that she's going to have a very hard time getting the top job even when the current crop of ghouls in the DNC gracelessly expire.

Oh I agree, I'm not particularly partisan anyway. But Republicans (or conservatives generally) should probably root for the wing of the Democrats (or liberals generally) that are somewhat less than completely insane.

Even if they are rooting for them quietly.

On an unrelated note, I'm guessing the Republican reevaluation and demythologization of his legacy is something that is bound to happen at some point.

Its been a long running trend among younger generation Republicans that Reagan was tricked by Democrats on numerous issues, particularly immigration and balancing the budget.

Also: abortion, the Long March through the institutions.

Also general amnesty in return for securing the border.

I think if you consider the Canadian politics angle, some pieces fall into place:

  • Doug Ford has a shot at future CPC leadership, and could be a future PM candidate against Carney
  • Assume this reaction from Trump was expected. This hurts Carney's ability to make a productive trade deal with the US, weakens his minority government
  • Who is going to see this ad? 1. a lot of baseball watching Americans. This ad really does correctly portray Reagan's views on free trade. The people know it. This hurts Trump. Weakens Canada short term, possibly strengthens Canada medium-long term if Democrats do well in the next elections. But also 2. a lot of baseball watching Canadians will see it. Canadians love to bandwagon the Blue Jays whenever they do well. It stokes a lot of patriotic pride. They also love to hate Donald Trump. This associates Conservative values (Reagan) with getting a savage dig in on Trump with Canadian sportsball pride competing at the highest level in America's game.

I'm not saying this is a perfect explanation. I have doubts about whether Ford or whoever was thinking about this stuff, but it would make a certain kind of sense.

Doug Ford has a shot at future CPC leadership, and could be a future PM candidate against Carney

Given the way Canadian politics works, this is extremely unlikely. National and provincial political parties are separate institutions and National and provincial politics are effectively separate career tracks.

That Ford has no brief to help Carney is nevertheless a valid point.

The ultimate problem is, Reagan and the free traders were just wrong. Free trade destroyed our ability to manufacture physical goods, offshoring is forcing American workers to compete with every person in the world and making software far more attractive since software companies can hire thousands of Indians to work for pennies.

Ultimately I think Trump should just accept that fact and say hey Reagan was wrong. But then again I'm not a politician.

Free trade destroyed our ability to manufacture physical goods

No, environmental law, labor law, product liability law, and other regulations did that. Free trade just saved us from some of the consequences of all that. With consequences which mainly fell on the "beneficiaries" of some of that law.

and making software far more attractive since software companies can hire thousands of Indians to work for pennies

Software engineers are still paid an enormous amount of money, probably the best you can do without being a politician, an MBA, or having an advanced professional degree. It's true Indian labor has knocked the lower end out of the market for Americans, though that's mostly H-1bs rather than offshoring (offshore Indian programmers are so terrible even compared to bottom-tier H-1Bs I wouldn't be surprised if they're worse than useless), but the software market has expanded so much it's really hard to call this a net negative.

Fair points I do agree that over regulation was another part of the death knell of local manufacturing. Offshoring was part of it as well though.

Indian programmers are really not that terrible. I work at a bigcorp and our whole team is Indian. The bad ones get fired and over time the remaining team is decent.

Helps that our manager over here is Indian too though, I suppose.

Indian programmers are really not that terrible. I work at a bigcorp and our whole team is Indian. The bad ones get fired and over time the remaining team is decent.

Most people are familiar with body-shop Indian programmers. All body shops use the same tricks: staff the teams with people that are tolerably underqualified and rotate them out as soon as they show promise. Indian body shops are simply big enough, cheap enough and remote enough that they can do this brazenly.

If a local body shop tried to rotate one of the devs that I actually liked, I would just have a coffee with the guy to confirm it wasn't a personal reason and bully the account manager into keeping him on my team. Worst case scenario, he tries to fire the dev for cooperating with me and I get to poach him with clear conscience.

Indian programmers (or other tech employees) aren't necessarily worse than their counterparts here. It's just that they, like skilled workers anywhere else, cost more money than their peers. And since most companies outsourcing to India are cheap bastards, they pay peanuts and so they get bottom of the barrel employees.

In addition to the normal race-to-the-bottom and lemon problems, there's also uniquely severe incentives toward fraud. Once you tell a lie, the truth will forever be your enemy, and there's a lot of reasons for low-tier immigrant-focused employers to have to lie. And since a few particularly scammy businesses make up the majority of H1-B applications in a few fields, there's a lot of potential to run into hilariously-incompetent people even where the median option would have been meh or even good.

I strongly urge you to read this article by Hanania. It's a stock narrative in American populism that neoliberal policies in general (and NAFTA in particular) resulted in all of the manufacturing jobs being offshored and the demise of the Midwest, but Hanania quite rightly points out that, as a consequence of more efficient technologies, the proportion of the US population employed in manufacturing had been in steady decline for decades prior to Reagan's election. The graph illustrating this is really striking (Ctrl-F "continuation of a long run process"): there are literally no shocks, spikes or sudden drops visible from about 1977 onwards, it's a smooth, continuous decline.

offshoring is forcing American workers to compete with every person in the world and making software far more attractive since software companies can hire thousands of Indians to work for pennies.

If an Indian can do the same job as an American for half the price, it would be foolish not to hire the Indian. This is also known as "economic efficiency".

If you want a job as a cashier that will pay €75k a year, no one would hire you. If you whined that you can't get a job because of all the scab workers/immigrants who'll work for peanuts (i.e. €25k a year), everyone would laugh at you. I truthfully do not understand why this complaint is illegitimate for an unemployed cashier with delusions of grandeur, but why I'm supposed to take it seriously when an unemployed software dev makes it. Because software dev is "skilled labour"? Too bad: your salary is in part a reflection of your skillset's scarcity in the jobs market. If lots of people invested in learning the same skillset as you, and some of them want to live within their means, you will be outcompeted. Better luck next time.

I truthfully do not understand why this complaint is illegitimate for an unemployed cashier with delusions of grandeur, but why I'm supposed to take it seriously when an unemployed software dev makes it

Purchasing power is the missing link here. Stuff in India is cheaper. It's not that the American software dev demands a higher living standard than the Indian ones settle for, it's that rent, taxes, etc. are more expensive for the American one than the Indian one, so if he settled for the same gross wages he'd wind up much worse off. The only way for him to compete would be to move to India as well.

I'm not talking about Indians working remotely from India, but Indians moving to the US for work (e.g. the ongoing debate about H1B visas).

I'm marginally more sympathetic to an American coder who complains about being undercut by an Indian in Mumbai who can live like a king on US minimum wage. An American coder who lives in SF who complains about being undercut by an Indian coder who also lives in SF? Sorry, don't care. Either git gud or adjust your salary expectations.

I'm not talking about Indians working remotely from India, but Indians moving to the US for work

Ah. In that case I don't entirely disagree (though you could still gesture at citizens having to pay taxes etc. that non-naturalized immigrants don't have to deal with), but I hope you understand the confusion given that you were making this argument seemingly in reply to a sentence which began with "offshoring is forcing American workers to compete with every person in the world".

Yeah, that's a fair point.

The indian coder in SF sends back remittances to his family to live like kings and has the full possibility of returning with whatever savings they have which will go far further in India than the US. It's not a different situation at all. Yes, I too would be willing to work for less if I knew it was purchasing my family a mansion back in my hometown that I can return to as a conquering hero.

Also, yeah, before you even bring it up - people are also willing to work for less in worse conditions when they have a deportation hanging over their head. For that matter, they'd probably be willing to work for even less if we pointed a gun at their head and told em to get cracking or else. I don't want to compete with slaves for wages either - guess I need to adjust my salary expectations.

When you allow people with massively different and negative externalities driving their wage acceptance criteria down to compete with people who don't have the same externalities hanging over their head, you are transferring the consequences of those horsehair swords onto others. Surely the people who didn't previously have to compete with the sword of damocles can at least ask you to stop doing that?

Stop, please.

How many coders in the US have lost their jobs to people in the US illegally, a fact which was known to their employers, and which their employers used as leverage with which to pay them subsistence wages? I'd be amazed if it was triple digits. How many coders in the US have lost their jobs to literal slaves or indentured servants? I mean, has it ever happened?

Arguing about trees when the forest is burning down, or are you seriously contending that immigration - legal and otherwise - as well as offshoring, has not seriously depressed US labor wages in nearly every sector?

And yes, the fact is that US companies using offshored sweatshop slavery destroyed much of the US factory labor class. This is terrible in its own right -I shouldn't need to connect it to coders for you to care - but yes, this depresses coding wages too. The economy is interconnected and the general state of labor prices affects wages everywhere.

are you seriously contending that immigration - legal and otherwise - as well as offshoring, has not seriously depressed US labor wages in nearly every sector?

You will have to disambiguate this. I think I presented a convincing case that, if you look at the decline in total inflation-adjusted wages in the manufacturing sector in the US over time (as opposed to wages per employee), most of that decline is attributable to automation and mechanisation. This is also true of agriculture, for much the same reasons. If you look at all American employees who don't work in agriculture, in 1945, 37% of them worked in manufacturing: by 1977, this figure had fallen to 22%. This is before any of Reagan's neoliberal policies and nearly twenty years before NAFTA. Perhaps if there had been no offshoring and less immigration in the decades to come, the decline over the following fifty years wouldn't have been quite as steep, but I still find it hard to envision a scenario in which more than 10% of the American non-farm workforce works in manufacturing.

If an Indian can do the same job as an American for half the price, it would be foolish not to hire the Indian. This is also known as "economic efficiency".

Unless you actually care about the American people and giving Americans jobs? Protectionism in economics is not "foolish" it's a strategic decision to promote your own people's economic interests over others.

I don't believe in the economic vision of "comparative advantage," it seems to be obviously riddled with holes at this point. Like, for instance, lacking strategic manufacture of key military tech and medicines. Not to mention hundreds of other issues.

Unless you actually care about the American people and giving Americans jobs?

But by your own admission, you don't care about giving Americans jobs. You want to give Americans jobs at vastly inflated salaries relative to their market worth without their creating any additional value i.e. rent-seeking. If you just wanted to give American software devs jobs, you would tell them to either:

  • make a compelling case that they have more to offer employers than their Indian equivalents, which would justify a higher salary; or
  • revise their salary expectations down so as to be competitive with their Indian equivalents.

Option 1 is not a facile or rhetorical suggestion: it might well be the case that the modal American software dev is more productive than the modal Indian. Maybe a native English speaker will have an easier time understanding and being understood than someone speaking English as a second language with a heavy accent, which will be more efficient (hence cheaper) in the long run. Maybe the modal Indian coder is more prone than his American equivalent to writing sloppy code which works in the short-term but creates technical debt over time. (These are toy examples: I don't believe that the latter is the case.)

But an American software dev who acknowledges that he is no better than his Indian equivalent but demands to be paid double his salary anyway (because he's an aMurrican, dammit!) inspires no emotions in me other than disgust and contempt. This sort of whiny entitlement actually strikes me as profoundly un-American, in the McCarthyist sense of the term.

I would even be open to being persuaded on the grounds that, while hiring a talented Indian programmer on a H1B at $70k/year is cheaper and more efficient in the short-term, in the long-term high levels of migration from overseas might impose negative externalities (in the form of community cohesion etc.) on society as a whole. But when I hear someone moaning "it's not fair — I'm just as good at my job as he is, but he'll work for cheaper!", all I can think is "oh, well then he deserves the job more than you."

But when I hear someone moaning "it's not fair — I'm just as good at my job as he is, but he'll work for cheaper!", all I can think is "oh, well then he deserves the job more than you."

I'm not saying this is always wrong, but it is the incantation that summons Moloch.

Suppose you are one of the first rats introduced onto a pristine island. It is full of yummy plants and you live an idyllic life lounging about, eating, and composing great works of art (you’re one of those rats from The Rats of NIMH).

You live a long life, mate, and have a dozen children. All of them have a dozen children, and so on. In a couple generations, the island has ten thousand rats and has reached its carrying capacity. Now there’s not enough food and space to go around, and a certain percent of each new generation dies in order to keep the population steady at ten thousand.

A certain sect of rats abandons art in order to devote more of their time to scrounging for survival. Each generation, a bit less of this sect dies than members of the mainstream, until after a while, no rat composes any art at all, and any sect of rats who try to bring it back will go extinct within a few generations.

In fact, it’s not just art. Any sect at all that is leaner, meaner, and more survivalist than the mainstream will eventually take over. If one sect of rats altruistically decides to limit its offspring to two per couple in order to decrease overpopulation, that sect will die out, swarmed out of existence by its more numerous enemies. If one sect of rats starts practicing cannibalism, and finds it gives them an advantage over their fellows, it will eventually take over and reach fixation.

If some rat scientists predict that depletion of the island’s nut stores is accelerating at a dangerous rate and they will soon be exhausted completely, a few sects of rats might try to limit their nut consumption to a sustainable level. Those rats will be outcompeted by their more selfish cousins. Eventually the nuts will be exhausted, most of the rats will die off, and the cycle will begin again. Any sect of rats advocating some action to stop the cycle will be outcompeted by their cousins for whom advocating anything is a waste of time that could be used to compete and consume.

For a bunch of reasons evolution is not quite as Malthusian as the ideal case, but it provides the prototype example we can apply to other things to see the underlying mechanism. From a god’s-eye-view, it’s easy to say the rats should maintain a comfortably low population. From within the system, each individual rat will follow its genetic imperative and the island will end up in an endless boom-bust cycle.

Imagine a capitalist in a cutthroat industry. He employs workers in a sweatshop to sew garments, which he sells at minimal profit. Maybe he would like to pay his workers more, or give them nicer working conditions. But he can’t, because that would raise the price of his products and he would be outcompeted by his cheaper rivals and go bankrupt. Maybe many of his rivals are nice people who would like to pay their workers more, but unless they have some kind of ironclad guarantee that none of them are going to defect by undercutting their prices they can’t do it.

Like the rats, who gradually lose all values except sheer competition, so companies in an economic environment of sufficiently intense competition are forced to abandon all values except optimizing-for-profit or else be outcompeted by companies that optimized for profit better and so can sell the same service at a lower price.

Elsewhere on this site, we have @faceh lamenting that every tech product eventually enshittifies and tech innovators build Skinner boxes rather than finding a way to monetize that doesn't wreck user experience. And one of the primary reasons this happens is that people expect a reasonably complete product with a certain amount of polish these days, and the moment you start looking for funding to do so you meet a VC who say, "well, I could fund you, or I could fund one of the 10,000 startups who aren't pre-committing to leave money on the floor". (There are other reasons, including the fact that every founder believes they should be a multi-millionaire if their startup is successful).

And this attitude is slowly poisoning the entire tech market. Customers are skeptical about trying new products, expecting the rug to be pulled from under them. Entrepreneurs are pressured to only start buzzworld-laden unicorns (because that's all that gets funded) and pass over serious attempts to build useful things. There is no slack to take risks, and quality slowly declines as more and more individually-ok but collectively-damning savings are made. It's not just that outsourcing leads to cultural externalities, or even that these devs are necessarily worse. But the attitude of "I can find someone cheaper than you" undermines the spirit that is needed to produce genuinely high-quality products.

There is also the more hard-edged point that paying American salaries is (or should be) the price of having access to the rich American market to sell your product, which is sustained by American workers living in America paying American prices. If you want to situate your company in Vietnam, hire only Vietnamese workers and sell only in Vietnam for Vietnamese prices, nobody will stop you.

Bro if I paid indian prices for housing and every other good and indian tax rates I could afford to work for indian wages too.

You seem to fail to understand that american companies make america-sized profits by selling in america at american prices - prices that are only affordable to americans because of america-sized wages. If no company pays american wages anymore the whole edifice collapses. It's literally textbook tragedy of the commons here. An individual company thinks they're super smart offshoring, but if every company does it congrats we've achieved total parity with the indian standard of living.

See my reply here. I'm not talking about Indian coders working remotely from India.

But by your own admission, you don't care about giving Americans jobs. You want to give Americans jobs at vastly inflated salaries relative to their market worth without their creating any additional value i.e. rent-seeking. If you just wanted to give American software devs jobs, you would tell them to either:

Yes, I want Americans to enjoy the wealth our ancestors created and be exclusionary and rent seeking to the rest of the world. I have no problem with that, to a certain degree.

I'm sorry you have contempt for the country that built the modern internet, and much of the modern world, wanting to have a higher status than other countries that are mostly along for the ride.

Patriotic nitpick: the modern internet (hypertext, URLs, HTTP) was built by a Brit in Geneva: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee. Although I'm pretty sure America gets the credit for Usenet.

Otherwise agreed.

Ok I regret my previous response, I wrote it in anger.

I do think you can make an extremely compelling and true case that overseas employees are often much less productive than American employees, even if only because of a shared culture. However, unfortunately much of our economy is geared towards short term juicing of numbers, instead of long term genuine value creation. This means offshoring is naturally incentivized.

I'd also say that I don't think there is anything wrong with protectionism, and I don't think it's unamerican. Early Americans were extremely patriotic and judgmental of others countries. I highly doubt the founding fathers would've been in favor of the massive globalist free trade economies we have today, in large part because they considered their nation morally superior to the rest of the world.

Ok I regret my previous response, I wrote it in anger.

No hard feelings. I understand where you're coming from, and I agree that protectionism may have some extremely limited use cases (mainly that outlined by Scott here).

For me, the destruction of rural America's prosperity and selling out these people for globalism hit very close to home. My father died when I was young, in large part because he was committing to keeping a rural family business alive that his grandfather built, and he had to compete with overseas manufacturers. There are real costs to these economic plans, and I genuinely don't give a shit about the economic efficiency of competing with people in other countries if it's at the cost of my fellow Americans livelihoods.

Unless you actually care about the American people and giving Americans jobs?

American people have jobs. Prime age LFPR is as high as its ever been

Protectionism is about allowed favored groups to exploit the rest of the population. If the USG wants specific domestic capabilities, it should pay for them directly rather than grant some firms a license for rent-seeking and hoping they do what we want.

I think you should be careful just using the 25-54 age range, as that excludes any trends for early retirement and delayed starts. It would show the same rate for a society where people work from 25-54 exactly the same as one where people work from 18-65, despite the latter having 18 more years of productivity (47 vs 29).

The trends across different demographics and age groups all tell different angles of the story, enough that I do not think it is simple to say labor participation doing just fine. I would not go so far as to say it is dire, but there are troubling signs when you look across the whole age range. Going from a high of 67% participation to 62% drops the ratio of participants to non-participants from just over 2 to 1.63. Unlike earlier decades, there is a smaller ratio of children to adults to explain the lower rate. Perhaps it will level out as the boomer generation starts to pass away, but I can understand why people are troubled looking at these numbers.

I think you should be careful just using the 25-54 age range, as that excludes any trends for early retirement and delayed starts.

That's why the prime age LFPR is used. Americans getting so rich they can retire early is a good thing. The low end is more of a mixed bag as it mixes people staying in education voluntarily longer with lack of opportunity at entry level.

Agreed, although we would need some way to sort between voluntary vs involuntary retirements vs "voluntary" retirements. Although it is probably another spectrum, so we're looking at marginal changes that could be pushing people to retire early, some positive and some negative: High 401K returns & buy-out deals vs poorly timed layoffs & onerous regulations.

I think you should be careful just using the 25-54 age range, as that excludes any trends for early retirement and delayed starts.

That's the point of the prime age rate. A society where people live longer in retirement and stay in school longer is not without tradeoffs, but it is not indicative of a society dealing with large scale unemployment due to outsourcing.

Unlike earlier decades, there is a smaller ratio of children to adults to explain the lower rate.

Overall LFPR excludes people younger than 16. The proportion of 16-17 year olds working has declined. This is generally seen as a positive, and regardless of where you stand on its moral valence, it is indicative of a society that doesn't feel a lot of pressure to push older minors into the workforce, not a society struggling to find employment opportunities for its people.

it is indicative of a society that doesn't feel a lot of pressure to push older minors into the workforce, not a society struggling to find employment opportunities for its people.

I'm not as sure; I think it's both. That's why the warehousing exists the way it does; it adds pressure to keep the under-18 set (and under-25 set with respect to college for the white-collar professions) out of the workforce.

There's not enough economic opportunity to employ them sustainably. There used to be, which is why their workforce participation was higher in days when there was more economic opportunity for that (and is part of why society tolerates the credentialism spiral that normally consumes the objectively best days of one's life, that being your early twenties).

I agree that living longer will definitely skew the LFPR, but I think it definitely introduces blindspots into the data to set the cutoffs at 25 and 54. A 55 year-old, more than anytime in the past, still has many productive years ahead of them. If those people are retiring earlier because of strong entitlement programs, real estate bubbles in their favor, credentialism/ageism pushing them out of the work-force, etc. I would think we'd want those numbers to be involved in the conversation.

Living longer to enjoy retirement, taking it earlier, and spending more time in school learning are good things, so long as the cost of those benefits are accounted for. One of those costs includes having fewer people creating resources while still consuming resources.

I puts a finger on the scale to set the age range to 25-54 when talking about gainful employment of the overall populace. It masks some of the problems of credentialism hitting the young and hides the effects of detrimental policies pushing out the old. Having said that, increasing the age range to, say, 18-65 would not be the end-all-be-all of labor statistics either, but another hand to feel for the shape of the metaphorical elephant.

Here's 20-54. Was higher in the late 1980s-90s, but still quite high.

One thing that always interests me with these takes is why the other countries engage in counter tariffs. If tariff-free trade relations are such an amazing boon, why even engage in such a retaliation? If US wants to produce cheap aluminum and cars and timber and brandy then why did let's say Canada impose tariffs as some part of trade war? Are they not foolish for not taking nicely subsidized goods for cheap from USA and just produce something else?

Cooperate-cooperate is better for everyone, but if one party defects, the other party must punish them by defecting in turn. Tit-for-tat outcompetes DefectBot and CooperateBot.

Cooperate-cooperate is better for everyone

That is not the claim of anti-tariff people. Their claim is that tariffs damage local economy. Unless they have some savior complex where they enact tariffs in order to save poor people of country they are in trade war with? It does not make sense.

Also where is the limit, what is the end game? Free trade is not truly free and effective unless literally every single country on planet Earth including Iran, Russia and North Korea "cooperates" - and until such a time we need harsh regime of aggressive trade wars to the last man? There is a list of countries by tariff rate here - USA with 3.3% is among the best - better than Canada or Switzerland or Norway and much better than almost any African countries. Why focus on USA and not some other much more "unfree" country?

Cooperate-cooperate is better for everyone

That is not the claim of anti-tariff people

Certainly it is. No tariff/no tariff is the best, followed by tariff/no-tariff -- which is worse for both sides, but more worse for the tariffing side, followed by tariff/tariff, which is worse than tariff/no-tariff for both sides. This is not a prisoner's dilemma payoff, and the per-round rational strategy is clearly "no tariff" in all cases. But that's not the end of it, because a rational party will also want to get the other party to not tariff, and if the other party erroneously thinks it's in a prisoners dilemma, some tariffing makes sense to do this.

This game doesn't seem to have a name at least on Wikipedia. The payoffs are like Chicken except the mixed case is reversed (that is, going straight is lower-payoff than chickening out when only one player chickens). It's not a very interesting game because the best move is obvious; it only comes up because the players think they're playing something different, or because of the payoffs being uneven within the countries as I mentioned above.

Oh, so tariffs are bad for target of tariffs. And maybe some nations with large economies that are not as exposed to international trade are to large extent immunized to impact of counter tariffs. It almost seems as if tariffs are quite a nice tool to threaten or even enact in order to bring the other side to the table and make some diplomatic concessions and maybe sometimes it is actually good to experience some pain in order to gain even more good. I'd say Trump would wholeheartedly agree.

I agree with Trump that it could sometimes be good to impose tariffs to get the other guy to back down on their trade barriers. I disagree that this is all that he has been doing. Trump seems to think that overall having some tariffs is better than having no tariffs (hence the 10% global tariff); free trade is not his goal.

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So given that America’s average tariff rate is 1.49%, and Canada’s is 2.35%, isn’t Canada being the defect-bot here?

I don't think you can determine who is a "defect bot" based on tariff rates. Probably neither is a defect-bot; it's just that both are sometimes tariffing (and Canada for more and/or larger, if those figures are accurate and current).

This is something free-traders often point out, and it's true to an extent. The payoffs aren't like prisoners dilemma for the nation -- "co-operate" (no tariffs) while the other side defects is better for both sides than defect-defect, unlike Prisoners Dilemma where co-operate/defect is worse for the co-operator.

However, there are two other issues. One is that co-operate/co-operate is better for both, so engaging in a little spite (harming yourself in order to harm the other guy) to push the irrational counterparty back to that position may make sense. And the other is the nation has subdivisions, and some are hurt by the tariffs more than others. Canada may not want to allow the US to hurt its maple syrup producers with impunity even if that helps other Canadians.

Canada may not want to allow the US to hurt its maple syrup producers with impunity even if that helps other Canadians.

And USA may not want to allow Canada to hurt its lumber producers or car producers with impunity, even if it helps other Americans. It's the same logic, the only thing remaining is chicken-egg issue of who has the original blame, which in the end is not really that interesting.

That argument shouldn't apply unless the US has full control over the other country's government. Otherwise the other country's government can mismanage it in such ways that people there are willing to work for very low wages, and then those people will work for low wages in our country and drive our salaries down. On the level of each individual laborer the laborer is working for peanuts in the US voluntarily, but on a level of incentives, most of them would not have done so if the other country's government had not made their country so poor.

And the other country's government, of course, is a government and as such not subject to market forces or economic efficiency.

Also, this assumes some sort of weird EA-variant. If it's economic efficiency to not hire Americans, I don't want economic efficiency. Why would I hold economic efficiency as an end in itself without regard of who gets to benefit from it? I don't treat all humans alike.

Why would I hold economic efficiency as an end in itself without regard of who gets to benefit from it? I don't treat all humans alike.

Is your claim then that you would rather American firms hire mediocre American programmers over talented Indian ones?

It depends on the value of "mediocre". "Mediocre" could, for instance, mean "does equally good work, but demands an American salary", in which case yes. It could also mean "is slightly less efficient and the amount by which he is less efficient doesn't matter", in which case, also yes.

Who would you rather an American firm hire: a talented Indian programmer, or an American programmer who is less efficient to the degree that it matters?

The answer is tautologically the Indian programmer because of the phrase "to the degree that it matters". It is possible to think the Indian programmer should never be hired and still agree with that (the degree that it matters would then be zero).

I don't know if that answer is tautologically true: I think there are quite a number of nativists who think the number of Indian programmers getting hired by American companies on H1B visas ought to be zero, regardless of how talented they are.

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I for one don't want to get into a race to the bottom against the poorest people on Earth. They'll win and I'll be dragged most the way down to their economic level.

I would argue that free trade made the US the economic superpower it is today. Of course, there is such a thing as being a victim of your own success. To bring back low-margin manufacturing, one would need to crash the US dollar. If the dollar is low, US products will be cheap on the world market, while Americans will have a hard time paying for international alternatives. However, this would not be in the best interests of the US.

While some people care about the US manufacturing physical goods, very few want to work in manufacturing. The fraction of Americans who are envious of the job and life quality of an Indian working in plastics manufacturing is basically zero.

I think protectionism makes sense for supply chains which are of strategic importance. But that only covers a small fraction of products. Raising tariffs on USB cables until people will start to manufacture them domestically will not help your economy.

However, this would not be in the best interests of the US.

Certainly of a lot of voters. But some countries run on intentionally-devalued currencies --- China has been accused of this before. It doesn't drastically change the balance of internal trade, but makes your products more competitive globally for export, presumably allowing investment at scale for a longer-term payoff. The pluses of a valuable currency only show up if you're buying global commodities (oil prices), imported luxury goods, or taking international vacations (which is favorable only to the monied fraction that is going on those vacations). It need not directly hit anything valued in terms of "hours of domestic labor", like construction.

ETA: you're probably right about USB cables, but I'm not convinced about phones and computers, which are mostly automated production lines.

I would argue that free trade made the US the economic superpower it is today.

The US was already an economic powerhouse by the start of WWII, before free trade. After WWII, it was absolutely dominant. Free trade was good, but it wasn't the making of the superpower status.

USB cables contain microprocessors and are a security risk, I would absolutely prefer not to use ones manufactured by a hostile state.

I admit that I was thinking of USB-A to USB-B cables, which are supposed to be completely passive.

Also, I think that that level of paranoia is going to be prohibitively expensive if you want to protect the US public at large from supply chain attacks.

The compromise would be to have a process to manufacture USB cables in the US using vetted companies which employ vetted citizens for 100$ apiece to supply the needs of the NSA and the Pentagon (where BYOD is presumably forbidden), and let the rest of the US buy 5$ cables from China and risk supply chain attacks which spy on their printer communication.

Free trade destroyed our ability to manufacture physical goods

It didn't. For one: the US still manufactures physical goods. The value of the US manufacturing sector is second only to China. It outstrips the combined output of the European Union.

What happened was that the US went from a position of absolute dominance in manufacturing in the late 70s to having a wide range of competitors today (most prominently China). Short of bombing China, however, this was pretty much unavoidable. It hasn't helped that the US pursued soft deindustrialization policies domestically while the tech sector hoovered up human and financial capital, but US manufacturing supremacy was unlikely to last even with a more favorable legal/financial environment.

Unavoidable long-term yes, but short and medium term?: Quite preventable. The US rolled over to China and allowed IP theft on industrial scale, strategic acquisitions of US and global companies in key industries, ignored blatant limitations on foreign companies within China, ignored massive targeted state subsidies, and failed to support manufacturing in other more friendly and allied low-labor-cost countries, all because US companies were convinced that they could double their profits by getting access to the Chinese market - which, and the real kicker of it all, obviously did not work in any way, shape, or form for anyone in the West, at least beyond a decade or two. Sadly nothing too new; I still regularly curse Nixon's name to this day over leaving us with the Taiwan shitstorm because he was too busy trying to reap short-term political benefit at home - sound familiar?

There's an alternate world where Taiwan, Vietnam, Mexico, Thailand, etc. (possibly India but that's a different can of worms) all picked up significant amounts of manufacturing slack which we could play off of each other, and China's technological acceleration was delayed by a full additional decade (and thus also their military, political, and economic clout). China really backstabbed us when it came to the "promises" made on joining the WTO in the leadup to 2001, Bush should have taken action by the mid-2000s to give them a warning, and Obama shouldn't have taken so long to bring about the TPP (2016!) which ended up both shitty and even worse, sailing without us. Even worse, especially under Obama's watch, the forced technology transfer, ownership restrictions, and outright theft reached critical proportions with essentially zero real response. I personally think that will go down in history as one of the worst economic blunders of all time.

What hath this wrought? There's a strong chance we're war with China over Taiwan within two years after Trump leaves office, and if so we will lose. Badly. It won't even be all that close.

Also the context of that Reagan radio address was his justification for applying tariffs against Japan. "Of course we all know tariffs are bad, but..."

This codes to me as very similar to the atheist quoting the bible meme. Does anyone really think Doug Ford is a huge Reagan fan?

What else should the atheist quote when arguing that some Christian is a hypocrite?

That is a good question, but in my experience such disingenuous motivated reasonings are always discounted with an eye roll. Intuitively I would say only another ingroup-member (who also wants the ingroup to succeeed) can credibly criticize the ingroup.

If trying to point out they are a hypocrite, perhaps. But that is not what is happening here, or Trump is not Reagan and isn't being a hypocrite.

In addition, the average use of bible quotes against Christians usually just shows a misunderstanding of that text, but that isn't really worth getting into at this time.

"Of course this argument wouldn't work on me. But just maybe it will make you do what I want."

Accusations of hypocrisy tend to be failures in recognizing nuance, different factions or different situations and context. I would put very little stock in accusations of hypocrisy from someone hostile to my views.

"Of course this argument wouldn't work on me. But just maybe it will make you do what I want."

There is nothing in the Christian faith, to my knowledge, stating that you are allowed to not follow it just because your atheist interlocutor isn't. It is all good and well to be a conflict theorist and to refuse to submit to your enemies, but doing that and still claiming to follow a faith that might require you to submit to your enemies sometimes will be rightfully called hypocrisy.

The religion claims it's true. If I make an argument from what is, from your perspective, truth, then either my argument is faulty, you agree with me despite me not accepting your axioms, or your axioms aren't as axiomatic as you claim and are closer to "never do what my enemies want".

If we were competing mathematicians, where you believed 1+1=2, and I believed something else, then suppose I ask you to make some sort of a tangible bet based on your belief that 1+1=2. Will you go "but you don't even believe that 1+1=2"?

I've always taken the point of that pithy line in that comic to be making the point that someone who lacks the faith in the religion and uses the belief as a tool to manipulate others into doing what they want is someone who likely doesn't understand the thinking of someone of the faith, to such an extent that their arguments based on the religion are faulty. In a Dunning-Krueger way, someone who believes he knows enough about a religion he has no faith in to manipulate believers into doing things based on their faith in the religion is someone who doesn't understand what he doesn't understand.

"You simply don't understand how it works until you actually start believing it yourself" is also the go-to line of many obviously malicious cult leaders. (Some cynically assume the major church leadership counts, too.)

Indeed, it is. And by many people's lights, including mine, basically every major religion is isomorphic to a malicious cult. That's a completely irrelevant point to the one that's being made in that comic, though.

What is the actual comic you're talking about, by the way?

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All good points.

My issue is the common trend of people asserting what the views of their opponents should be and declaring them hypocrites based on a simplistic understanding of their views. Attempting to assign ideological positions to someone and then hold them accountable, rather than asking and listening to their actual views.

There are of course actual hypocrites and valid accusations of hypocrisy. But culture war accusations of hypocrisy tend not to be that. They are instead extreme extrapolations from vague sentiments.

Does anyone really think Doug Ford is a huge Reagan fan?

Of course not, but Ford might well concede that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Doug Ford is a conservative who leads the main right-wing party in the Ontario provincial Parliament, so I would very surprised if he wasn't a Reagan fan.

Well, from browsing through his WP page, it seems that he is sorta libertarian-conservative. As he is not the at the head of a nation state, it is hard to judge how committed to free trade he is. I think that it is very possible that he really believes that free trade is a good Schelling point to strive for, even if he does not have a picture of Reagan in his bedroom.

Different intentions.

The main purpose of quoting the Bible to religious conservatives is to needle them over their hypocrisy. This is not especially productive, but it is satisfying for the people doing it. Watching them get huffy is the point. Only the most naive people expect it to actually change minds.

This ad is pretty clear aimed at persuasion, or at least raising the salience of the issue. It doesn't directly attack anyone, it appeals to a well-liked American leader, etc... The question of whether or not Ford personally likes Reagan is immaterial. If I'm trying to persuade someone, I'm going to try to appeal to their values and preferences, not mine.

But for all his annoyance, I think Ontario is basically well within it's rights to use ads to affect US trade policy.

That is true. And Trump is well within his right to say fuck you and stop negotiating with a party that finances attacks on him. I think it is absolutely within bounds to require some restrain when it comes to hostile actions and posturing during negotiations. This is negotiation 101 be it nations, companies or individuals - especially if you hold all the cards.

Trump did the same with Zelensky in the past where he also misread the situation. Zelensky was in weak position and came literally to beg for money - but he could not help himself and overplayed his hand. So he got fucked and in turn he fucked his nation - he apparently did not realize that he needs to change his behavior under new administration. Last time Zelensky behaved much better, he even brought his suit.

Now one can still criticize Trump for his style, but it seems to be working. He was able to negotiate peace between India and Pakistan, he managed peace between Israel and Hamas, he managed peace between Armenia–Azerbaijan, he presides over cooling of tensions between Cambodia and Thailand and he even turned Modi and Xi Jinping against Putin with his latest oil embargo. It is not as if he is just a buffoon without results.

Last time Zelensky behaved much better, he even brought suit.

What exactly is the US national interest in a foreign leader's dress sense? To people who don't have Trump Hagiography Syndrome, there seems to be a pattern where Trump deploys tough negotiation tactics most successfully where the goal is to get people to flatter him personally, not to advance US national interests.

He was able to negotiate peace between India and Pakistan,

Lolwut

he managed peace between Israel and Hamas,

A ceasefire, not peace. There have been lots of those. Trump's one lasted less time than most.

he managed peace between Armenia–Azerbaijan,

The complete military defeat of Armenia by Azerbaijan (backed by Turkey) predates Trump's second inauguration. He turned up to take credit for the surrender negotiations.

he even turned Modi and Xi Jinping against Putin with his latest oil embargo.

Has he? The oil markets haven't moved.

there seems to be a pattern where Trump deploys tough negotiation tactics most successfully where the goal is to get people to flatter him personally, not to advance US national interests.

And that those tactics aren't actually workable in the most intractable cases and thus only really fall hard on US allies.

Those tactics don't work on Putin and Kim Jong Un, but neither did anything else. Whether they help with Xi is still in question, but if they don't, the same thing applies.

It's obviously a problem because his theory of the case is that he can solve disputes with Xi and Putin by doing this...to US allies.

His strategy with Ukraine appeared to be to soften the USs pro-Ukraine position enough that the US could reasonably act as a third party to the negotiation. This naturally involved becoming harsher towards Ukraine. It didn't work, because Putin was intransigent and possibly took this (as many of Trump's opponents seem to have) as Trump being a pushover. But it's certainly a strategy that had a chance for success. It even seemed to have worked in Gaza, where the ceasefire came right after the Trump administration got publicly pissy at Israel over attacking in Qatar.

This naturally involved becoming harsher towards Ukraine. It didn't work, because Putin was intransigent and possibly took this (as many of Trump's opponents seem to have) as Trump being a pushover.

A risk raised by his domestic opponents when he suggested his solutions.

It even seemed to have worked in Gaza, where the ceasefire came right after the Trump administration got publicly pissy at Israel over attacking in Qatar.

Well Israel, the stronger party here, is closer to Ukraine than to Russia so it isn't really the exact same problem (putting aside whether Trump's vocal support emboldened Israel into that blunder or if the later apology was all theater)

A risk raised by his domestic opponents when he suggested his solutions.

No, his domestic opponents didn't stop with saying that Putin would think he was a pushover. They said he WAS a pushover and was going to give Ukraine away. He did not. The negotiation failed, but so had all previous attempts.

Trump did the same with Zelensky in the past where he also misread the situation. Zelensky was in weak position and came literally to beg for money - but he could not help himself and overplayed his hand. So he got fucked and in turn he fucked his nation - he apparently did not realize that he needs to change his behavior under new administration. Last time Zelensky behaved much better, he even brought suit.

I think that the US has sound strategic reasons to supply Ukraine, and that these are orthogonal to how much Zelenskyy is willing to grovel before Trump's throne. I do not think Zelenskyy disrespected Trump in a way that would have harmed him. I can not imagine an opinion piece by the (very pro-Ukraine) liberal media about how Trump was letting Zelenskyy walk all over him by tolerating him wearing his trademark army fatigues.

A typical rational actor does not like to grovel. Making the other party grovel will lower their utility function, so in turn their more tangible demands will be higher. If one buys a house only if the seller is willing to give a blowjob as part of the deal, it seems very likely that one will severely overpay for the house.

Again, there is an optimal amount of aid the US should be willing to give to Ukraine for strategic reasons, and likely other amounts will be less effective.

Now one can still criticize Trump for his style, but it seems to be working. He was able to negotiate peace between India and Pakistan, he managed peace between Israel and Hamas, he managed peace between Armenia–Azerbaijan, he presides over cooling of tensions between Cambodia and Thailand and he even turned Modi and Xi Jinping against Putin with his latest oil embargo. It is not as if he is just a buffoon without results.

I do not think India and Pakistan were that keen on a big nuclear war. The US (which is kinda allied to both) probably helped, but I think this is something which the Biden administration would have done just as well.

Regarding Hamas, his strategy was basically to give Nethanyahu the card blanche. This (questionable) victory is Bibi's, not his.

I remain skeptical if Trump really manages to get China and India to forgo cheap Russian fossil fuels. In general, with Trump, the winning move seems to tell him "yes", and continue as you did. Chances are he will either have another good phone call with Putin or a bad phone call with Zelenskyy and go back to not caring about Russian oil exports.

typical rational actor does not like to grovel. Making the other party grovel will lower their utility function, so in turn their more tangible demands will be higher. If one buys a house only if the seller is willing to give a blowjob as part of the deal, it seems very likely that one will severely overpay for the house.

I don't think it is about groveling. In the past countries like Germany or Canada took USA for granted and even outright mocked Trump when he gave his speech as in this example. I am not even US citizen but I do think that other NATO members really held their noses too high, it was as if they were entitled to everything that USA provides either trade or security wise in exchange of mockery and disrespect. I think demanding respect was absolutely in order.

Paradoxically Euros or other western countries do not have problem groveling before Xi Jinping or Saudis or even before Iranian dictators. But suddenly they are too good to show some respect to USA just because they think they can farm internal US political dispute.

I kind of hate to use this example, but EY nailed this dynamic in MoR with the clerk who was happy to enforce petty tyranny on the heroes, because they were heroic and would not retaliate, but careful to show respect and deference to the villains because they would retaliate viciously to disrespect. Frankly, I don't feel like Europe and Canada have acted like allies for a long time. They rather act like freeloading "friends" who hate us specifically because we do most of the work and pick up the tab all the time and they can't forgive us for it.

Many such cases!

Yep, many people view kindness and benevolence as stupidity and weakness bordering on entitlement to it. It reminds me an old joke about a businessman and a beggar:

Businessman sees a beggar and takes pity on him as he reminds him of his own turbulent past. So he gives him $100. The beggar is happy and thanks profusely. Next day the situation repeats and beggar is absolutely besides himself. This goes on for several days but then the businessman does not come anymore. After a month the businessman suddenly appears again with $100 bill in his hand and the beggar asks: Where were you last month? The businessman answers - Oh, I was on a vacation with my wife and my kids. The beggar then mutters: I guess it had to be a very nice vacation given all my money you spent.

In the past countries like Germany or Canada took USA for granted and even outright mocked Trump when he gave his speech as in this example.

The same Canada that got into a diplomatic mess with China because the US wanted to cause an issue Huawei? The lumping is doing a lot of work here.

This seems like a microcosm of a lot of Trumpian foreign policy: it's all a blend of vibes. What all of these groups have in common is uppity vibes, not actions.

Trudeau comes across as an Obama-wannabe -> this naturally means he comes across as the sort of person who would look down on Trump -> when Trump does something totally arbitrary against Canada it's then read through the lens of legitimate vengeance for ?? because the class of people who look like Trudeau/Obama include people who have ignored US strategic interests at some point or been mean to Trump.

Ultimately it just seems like the general grievances of red tribe have just metastasized to the international realm (because Americans are somewhat insulated from global affairs and so can turn foreign policy into a narcissistic affair).

It’s just DeCarlos Brown muttering to himself that the tiny white woman called him a nigger. It isn’t anything unexpected: he was already angry, as many loners are, and was desperately hoping to hurt someone. When he didn’t receive a justification, he manufactured one so he could stab someone anyway.

I actually think the reasons were more prosaic. Trump wanted secure borders and more favorable trade relations with some additional things like increased defense spending as part of NATO pledge etc. Canada dug their heels and decided to go for trade war and insults back. It of course does not help that both sides were let's say ideologically opposed to certain extent, but the dispute is a real one. Also let's not pretend that the same does not work the other way around as when EU representatives strongarm other countries like Hungary or post Brexit UK or Italy, when elections do not go the way powers that be like.

But in the end it is all besides the point. Canadians may learn the ancient truth of the strong do as they will and weak suffer what they must. USA is not Hungary or some random African nation. Good luck to Canada for next 3 years and potentially number of more years, if some MAGA candidate wins next elections.

When Trump wanted to renegotiate NAFTA and slap his name on it, that happened. The idea that Canada's response is to just never do anything when it comes to US demands doesn't stand up to scrutiny. USMCA also has a mandated renegotiation period coming up so all parties agreed in principle that negotiations are part of the deal, Trump decided to jump the gun and impose tariffs outside of regular order (which is why he had to claim an emergency).

The idea that Canada is the party that "dug their heels in" and threw insults is...Like, I'm legitimately wracking my brain here because it's just so far from my experience of what happened. Trump started the conflict, Trump insisted on the idea of annexing a neighbor in a trade dispute, Trump then said a few times that there was nothing to be done to remove tariffs and Canada should just accept being annexed.

It of course does not help that both sides were let's say ideologically opposed to certain extent

It would be vibes-based idiocy to base trade policy on that in the first place

But this isn't even really consistently true. Starmer is probably worse than Trudeau on all of the major woke indices and he somehow gets along with Trump.

But in the end it is all besides the point.

If it is besides the point why bring it up? Why lump it in with legitimate strategic concerns like NS2? Why not just say from the start that the US is just thrashing about for advantage any way it can?

This is another hallmark of this sort of vibes-based, personality-driven "policy": frog-boiling and essentially apathy once it's done (for reasons no one could have predicted beforehand or hell, even articulate consistently today).

It's not a debate that Canada is weaker than the US (in fact, that's my argument against the idea that some meaningful defiance was going on), or that it has behaved in an indolent fashion that makes its dependency worse.

I am not even US citizen but I do think that other NATO members really held their noses too high, it was as if they were entitled to everything that USA provides either trade or security wise in exchange of mockery and disrespect. I think demanding respect was absolutely in order.

I think the actual motivation was that the European leaders understood that Trump doesn't have any actual, real power over the military industrial complex which decides these things. Trump doesn't have the ability to stop the MIC (hell, they don't even tell him the truth about military operations) so who cares what he thinks? Zelensky knew that no matter what he did the flow of materiel was completely outside Trump's control.

Except of course when he did in fact shut off the flow of materiel and intelligence for a week and a half to demonstrate his power over Zelensky, and the next time Zelensky visited the US he wore a suit in deference?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine%E2%80%93United_States_relations#Second_Trump_presidency_(2025%E2%80%93present)

This is conspiracy level thinking. When you say Trump doesn't have "power over" the MIC, what do you mean?

Budgets, which pretty much everything is down stream of, are firmly the responsibility of congress.

Military operations, short of a declaration of war, are 100% an executive branch function with WIDE latitude. Remember, the President is the commander in Chief.

But I feel like what you're trying to hint at is a shady world of lobbyists and backroom deals and executives at Lockheed etc. If this is what you mean a) say it and b) provide some evidence. Because the very, very sad truth of the matter is that most of the companies within the "military industrial complex" are welfare-parasite companies that are reflections of growth (or decline) in Congressional Budgets. The most recent CEO of Raytheon was literally trained as an accountant. These people aren't out there moving and shaking, they're inside (indoor kids) who can stomach the tedium of working budgetary processes and Pentagon PPBE processes over decades. In terms of FMS (Foreign Military Sales), that process is mostly about convincing the State Department that you aren't exporting anything particularly advantageous (the US doesn't let the really good stuff go overseas), and doing all of the paperwork that says your sales team wasn't trying to bribe the foreign government*.

On the Ukraine specific issue, it's hilarious to think that the big players in the MIC really care about arms deals there. Ukraine is dead fucking broke. The US assistance to them, although not insignificant, is not the prize pie for MIC. They're after the multi-decade long domestic deals. The F-35 program, over its entire lifetime, will bring in revenue for Lockheed in excess of $1 trillion. The ground based updates to the Nuclear Triad will get Northrop half a trillion. According to the State Department from this March total US assistance to Ukraine has been about $70bn all in from the start of the war. But wait! that's mostly direct transfers of equipment - i.e. things that the US already purchased (in budgets!) years prior. It's not like that was a $70bn check to Ukraine or even $70bn of new military purchases.

That number is less than $5bn (same link). That's the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) number. That is the "help Ukraine pay for stuff" budget. $5bn isn't anything to sneeze at but you have to think - like the MIC does - in terms of ROI and opportunity cost. Do I, Lockheed / Northrop / Raytheon / General Dynamics et al., really care want to do all of the extra and politically fraught work of supplying to Ukraine for a share of $5bn when I can just make more patriot missiles for the Army at home and collect $2.7 bn dollars.

There are several good reasons to not support supporting Ukraine. There's a bunch of threads here on that topic. I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing this idea that the MIC "loves war" because it means sales go up and that, furthermore, they're so gifted as to be able to manipulate a whole host of world leaders.

That's not the case. The MIC's wet dream are a bunch of hyper expensive programs, run mostly domestically, that go nowhere. Government IT, for instance, is, annually, on the order of $100 bn. Government IT is also were money goes to commit suicide because it's all horrific mismanagement of dated computer systems that provide no value to the taxpayer but are mandated by Congressional budgets. See where we end back up at? Budgets. American, Congressionally approved budgets. That's where the MIC spends most of its energy. Budgets. And it isn't sexy hollywood lobbying. There are no steak dinners, cigars, and cognac with Senators who give you a wink and a nod so long as you donate to their campaign. No, it's a lot of repetitive zoom calls and in person meetings with the Budgeteers at the Pentagon and staff on Capitol Hill and then hoping that the paperwork shuffle ends up with a single number next to your Program Element Number going up.

On FMS bribery, I should do an effort post but it would be too specific to not be doxx bait. The long and short of it is that every American arms company knows that for close to all foreign governments, bribery is required for a deal to go through. For the Europeans its a lot of soft bribery - fancy dinners, sales meetings at resorts, whatever. All of this can actually get written off totally legally. For those countries with less of a Western sensibility, however, bags of cash, coke, and hookers are often part of the deal. With the State Department going over everything with a fine toothed comb, however, no American firm is going to take a chance. What exists, then, is an actual shadowy network of lawyers and "consultants" based out of places like Switzerland, Barbados, and the like who provide "advisory" services to the American firms, for a fee, and then act as a liaison to the foreign government.

You might think "oh, so it's just pass through bribery!" But, no. There's actually a tremendous amount of risk here. The American firm can't simply say to a foreign government "Hey, here's a bunch of money to help us get the contract. But, it's going to come from Shady-Uncle-Hans over here." That's transparent. The American firms have to have real not just plausible deniability of knowledge of any illegal activities. So, they hire these "consultants" and the consultants go, of their own accord, to the foreign government parties and do whatever they think needs to be done. Then, they send a bill for their service fee to the American firms.

In effect, the American firms are pushing money into a black box and hoping that the magic bribery fairies are on their side. This is often not the case. Anecdotes are crazy - literally comic book levels of fraud. There's a lot of middle manning and skimming off the top. Over promising and then disappearing late in deals etc. Ultimately, the American firms who do FMS hate these people and see them only as a necessary overhead expense. They prefer to work directly with a non "bribe me" government to work out actually good security deals.

But, again, what the MIC firms really want is domestic program dollars. The largest arms deal in history was with the Saudis at $142 bn. That's big money, for sure. But there's no guarantee that it all gets paid out, that there aren't weird changes to the contract, or that it could grow to, I don't know, $1 trillion. In the domestic market, the government always pays (unless you really fuck up), if the contract does change it will do so slowly and, most of the time, it's an opportunity for the contract to charge more and, finally, if it's a big enough program in enough congressional districts it can literally turn into $1 trillion over the course of several decades.

First of all, I'd just like to say that I agree with the vast majority of what you wrote. That's a great takedown of MIC corruption and how the sausage actually gets made in certain sectors.

This is conspiracy level thinking. When you say Trump doesn't have "power over" the MIC, what do you mean?

First of all, I don't think "conspiracy level thinking" is much of an insult. When I look at the Iraq war and try to understand it, I have no problem believing the conspiracy theory that they didn't actually have any WMDs. Similarly, I believed in the conspiracy theory that the NSA was spying on domestic communications even when James Clapper went and said that they weren't doing it to congress. All of the conspiracy theories about Trump being surveilled by the intelligence agencies on false pretexts were completely true as well - and the mainstream, non-conspiratorial theories on these topics are just transparently false. This line of attack probably would have worked in the 90s, but that dog just won't hunt in a world where I can go and read the PRISM documentation or the full story of the Carter Page FISA warrant.

But as for what I mean, I mean exactly what I said - the military-industrial complex has more power over the actions of the US military than Trump himself does. The military directly lied to his face about circumstances on the ground and encouraged him to take actions which he explicitly said he did not want. Trump famously said that to attack Iran would be the mark of an incompetent president with poor negotiation skills, and he relentlessly promised in his campaign that there'd be an end to the pointless foreign wars. Once he got into office, the pointless foreign wars kept on going and nothing changed.

I understand that this may seem a bit trite (of course politicians aren't going to keep all of their campaign promises) but it reflects a serious problem in the mechanism of democracy. A candidate ran promising an end to wasteful foreign wars and military adventurism - only to get the US involved in more wars, bomb additional countries and start getting ready to invade another country for oil (Venezuela). A politician wanted to do something, received a democratic mandate for it... and then absolutely nothing happened. I'm not going to claim to know precisely where the actual decisions are being made, nor do I think there's some shadowy figure behind the throne or learned council of elders deciding everything (my belief is that the US state has multiple competing power groups with divergent interests, and the actual actions taken by the US government emerge from that competition).

What I am claiming is that the actions of the US military/empire are very clearly resistant to the desires and will of the voting public. Maybe Trump is corrupt, maybe the generals are lying to him again, maybe he's being blackmailed by someone with access to the Epstein tapes, maybe the military has gone rogue and explicitly does not answer to civilian leadership - I can't tell, and until the dust settles I don't think anyone will be able to tell. But the fact that I can't explain precisely why the actions of the US war machine grind on regardless of the expressed wishes of the populace doesn't change that reality.

It's more about bargaining position and how much respect is due to Zelensky. He's a debtor here to beg after his nation's corrupt bullshit caused us (Trump) internal problems; letting him show up in the outfit of a heroic frontline operator sets a very different tone for the discussion.

And Trump well within his right to say fuck you and stop negotiating with a party that finances attacks on him.

The President isn't supposed to arbitrarily tariff countries actually. If that were the case, Trump needn't have ever provided the fentanyl pretext for tariffing Canada.

Paradoxically president does have right to impose tariffs specifically for National Security reasons. Foreign power meddling in election campaigns counts as such a case as Russia gate showed us before.

Paradoxically president does have right to impose tariffs specifically for National Security reasons.

All three courts to consider this question and about 2/3 of the individual judges have said the opposite. SCOTUS is considering it.

That is true. And Trump well within his right to say fuck you and stop negotiating with a party that finances attacks on him.

Also, Trump stops negotiating all the time. It's just a negotiation tactic to keep the other party off balance. Carney will probably have to disparage Ford, and then things will be back on.

I watched the original they linked, and I honestly can not see what their problem is.

The Republican Party is the Trump Party now. Using past Republican luminaries to criticize Trump is therefore out of bounds. It's not just an attack against the tribe, it is an attack against the tribe's mythology.

It seems that he is mentally sorting people into two buckets, the ones who support him and are loyal to him, and the ones who are opposed to him. This is basically the world view of a toddler.

This is the worldview that got him elected. Trump has always been the electorate's id manifest, and in particular plays to a particular kind of impulsive, thin-skinned voter who thinks this is what strong, tough leadership looks like. To ask what his thought process is here is to suppose a kind of analytical mindset Trump very obviously does not have.


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