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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25648 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025

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Political discourse as small talk

People approach political discourse the same way people approach small talk. They don't really put a lot of higher order thought into it. And that tends to frustrate both them and the people trying to have a higher level discussion with them. Most people engaging in water-cooler discourse do not have any intention to operate on any deep, thoughtfully-developed principles, but on vibes. That's just how human beings are.

Notably, vibes are not always directionally wrong, and analytical thought is not necessarily correct (else I'd agree with CRT and inequality of opportunity - common sense carveouts justified by added complexity). But the point is, most people don't really apply themselves in unraveling political discourse.

What got me to think about it was this excellent post downthread.

Summary: when our hypothetical character Lauren says, "Oh, I had so much traffic on the way here. I hate it. Man, what are all these idiot drivers doing out there?" There's a couple ways you can respond to that. The general way you would do it is to just go, "Yeah, I hear you. Traffic, man." There is not any kind of intellectual discourse that's being had here. However, when you answer that way, you're basically signaling a level of empathy for that person as an individual, a willingness to hear them, even if you're not that interested in what they have to say.

The second thing you can do is kind of signal disinterest. Maybe you just do not want to hear it, so you give a single-syllable response.

The third way is that you can be autistic about it, and you can say: "Um, actually, you know, nobody likes traffic. Why is that even worth saying? You're part of traffic too, right? You know, you're adding to the problem." Or, you know, you can be the Redditor autist: "If everyone took public transit..."

People don't go into small talk expecting you to start arguing about the intellectual valence of traffic-related frustration.When I was a little 12 year old autistic kid, if I heard another kid complain about rain, I'd be like: "If there was no rain, everyone would die." And that was a mistranslation of my father's attempt at making me a less cynical individual, where his response to my complaints over rain would be to say: "Oh, you should appreciate the good side of things, because rain gives us plants and stuff."

You might technically be right, but that's really just not the kind of conversation that's supposed to be happening here. When people open that kind of small talk line of discussion, they're not asking for a debate full of intellectual rigor. They're just expressing a basic observation, maybe in this case minor frustration. And they want that to be appreciated. They want other people to understand their current emotional state and what's driving them to it and offer sympathy. They're not really looking for any kind of discourse.

When you answer politely, you're signaling a baseline empathy for Lauren, even if you don't actually care about what's being discussed at all, and she probably won't even care if you really are. But what the Laurens of this world do care about is that you care about their feelings. And that's what you're demonstrating when you show interest in small talk. Your true investment is the individual. So the theory goes, that small talk fulfills a basic social function, kind of greasing the wheels, reducing friction between individuals. And that can actually start as a jumping off point for a deeper conversation. They might be less willing to just assume you're "one of those people," regardless of who has what beliefs. People are more willing to assume good faith if you have demonstrated that sort of general niceness, and you can both get a better sense of the vibe before things get too hot.

Back to the main thesis: Small talk is how a lot of people discuss political talking points. When a left-leaning person at work brings up Kyle Rittenhouse, they're not looking for philosophical debate on the merits of self defense. They're not looking for a proper legal assessment to uncover whether he was acting in accordance with the law. They're mad that those people got a murderer off the hook, and they want their fellow coworkers to appreciate how upset they are over such a ridiculous ruling. Obviously, this has the feature, not a bug, of acting as a soft social enforcement mechanism. Being impolite to Lauren would be weird. How about LeftyLauren? To her, hearing your rigorous undertaking in response would come off exactly the same way as me being a smartass to my fellow students about how rain is actually really good. She will not be impressed, maybe bewildered or angry.

Why is LeftyLauren like this? Well, from what I saw with Kyle Rittenhouse but also politics in general, most people who felt inclined to yap about it didn't really feel inclined to look into it. And when people raise any talking points to object to their pithy slogans, they just want to say, "I guess it's legal to murder progressives now." Someone with that mentality is not really looking at the actual facts of the case or anything like that. They're just vibing, and they're making small talk about a minor frustration. That's not to say they don't actually care—quite the contrary, they do. They are genuinely upset when they say these types of things.

And that's a big part of what frustrates people in political debates, because some people will approach these discussions with the mentality of getting to the bottom of it, of digging into the facts, of assessing the truth, acting on moral principles. And other people who have possibly never really given their baseline principles as they relate to such an issue any consideration will be caught unblinking. They will see that person being the weirdo autist, like the redditor ranting about slavery after you said Happy 4th. "Bro, you're hashing the vibe!" These people are generally going to be on completely different wavelengths.

I remember when the Kyle Rittenhouse thing was going down, I was getting in arguments with people about it, and a lot of them sure seemed to have strong opinions on it while also refusing to even watch the video. And I was just completely dumbfounded. I asked: "How can you have an opinion on something like this if you're not even going to do your due diligence as a professional opinion-haver and look at the freaking video and see what actually happened with your own eyeballs?" But, while I definitely think I was right in a technical sense — and this, in no way, excuses their lack of rigor — I had absolutely no awareness that these people were venting and looking for validation. They were being Laurens about it, just hoping for somebody to say, "Man, yeah, it's crazy what you can get away with in America, bro!" And hearing me respond with emphatic, sincere disagreement came off as hostile. They had no interest in an actual discussion.

I, by no means, mean to imply that you are either in Camp Rigor or Camp Vibe at all times. It depends on the individual interest in the topic, I suppose. One person may be the most technically-rigorous autist in a discussion about gun control but an entirely vibes-driven normie on foreign policy. Perhaps vibes vs rigor pretexts is an explanation for Gell-Mann amnesia; consider if you had an astrophysicist rain on your parade by interjecting about how your super cool sci fi concept you brought up in an idle office conversation was just totally off-base. He would then go home and write a post about how dumb office talk is, and you'd write about how much of a dick he was to just not even try to have fun. You get the picture. You're vibing, he's not.

And I'm not going to just bash progressives here. I think I was probably in the vibe camp after the death of Charlie Kirk. I do not know if rigor was on my side - I like to think it was, overall, but it wasn't my primary operating principle. I vented my frustration privately to many progressive friends, was met with abject dismissal, and felt absolutely aghast about it. Then I came here and got "Facts don't care about your feelings" and other such expressions thrown in my face. Do you know how alarming that feels? It's very, very disconcerting to have your vibes spat upon that way, especially when they feel so normal, so unobjectionable. And that is probably not too different from how those poor normies felt about my confrontations over Rittenhouse.

But I do think this vibing is a valuable tool. Whining about traffic is as low-stakes as it gets. But this method of communication, this basic human tendency — I think its exploitation can be one of the ideal end states of propagandistic efforts. Uncritical small talk is, for reasons I discussed at length, kind of unassailable! You look like a lunatic for contesting it. This makes it the perfect tool for spreading an agenda, provided that it's normal enough that invoking doesn't make you weird. This is the perfect weapon for LeftyLauren to enforce norms, and to be honest, I have some doubt that it's intentional in all cases. I think this is a weapon that is often issued to clueless footsoldiers who probably don't even realize they're fighting a war.

I suspect this very detail was the reason "the personal is political" caught on, but I may be giving this too much credit. Either way, if someone says something flagrantly political, about, say, how awful it is that 10,000 unarmed Black men a year are killed by cops... I might be inclined to dispute that fact. But what am I gonna do about it, hash the vibe? All I'd accomplish is to rock the boat and look like a weirdo, at best, ignoring any disciplinary potential.

"What? You think getting rained on is fun?" and "You think it's okay to just shoot protestors?" come from the same fountain of normie autism-repellent. Neither of those are really accurate assessments of the contrary point of view, but you're never going to get an honest autist discussion from these two starting points. And from a propaganda spreading angle, that's actually really beneficial! It's not just about how you look to onlookers, either. You are as likely to convince Lauren to reconsider her vocal disapproval of some political happening, as you are to convince Lauren that her complaints about TRAFFIC are farcical, and that she should know better. It's completely orthogonal. At best, you're missing the point of her discussion.

And LeftyLauren can and will tune that exact same human mentality towards complaining about capitalism uncritically, which I bet is more likely to be a genuine expression of frustration than a deliberate attempt at manipulation. The intent doesn't matter though, either way, this has a profound normalizing effect, drawing people to a cause, making an idea more openly expressable, and forcing anybody who disagrees to adopt a socially weak standing. The Lauren making a flagrantly political argument in the first place will thus make an autist out of her weird political interloper.

You will be about as successful as my 12 year old autistic stuff harping about how rain is good, actually.

When a left-leaning person at work brings up Kyle Rittenhouse, they're not looking for philosophical debate on the merits of self defense. They're not looking for a proper legal assessment to uncover whether he was acting in accordance with the law. They're mad that those people got a murderer off the hook, and they want their fellow coworkers to appreciate how upset they are over such a ridiculous ruling.

Sorry, but you still need to work on your autism a bit, because there's a lot you're missing in that hypothetical conversation.

There's a reason small talk is called small talk - it's not supposed to touch on "big" subjects that people are invested in. There were even sayings like "never talk about religion or politics at work" that were attempting to crystalize that wisdom in people's heads.

When Lauren brings the Rittenhouse affair to the water cooler she is at best saying that she can't possibly imagine any moral and reasonable person disagreeing with her, or, at worst, is an utter sociopath that is perfecrly aware such people work in her office, and she's daring them to show themselves so she can ratfuck them later.

When people push back against her talking points, they're not being autistic, they're saying "be careful how you talk about 'those people' some of them might be here with you right now", hoping Lauren is just a tad egocentric, but well meaning. What many people did not take into account in the last decade or so, was how many Laurens are sociopaths.

There were even sayings like "never talk about religion or politics at work" that were attempting to crystalize that wisdom in people's heads.

When Laurens defect from this unwritten norm, it means they are convinced that their side won the culture war.

Or alternatively, they're staking out a territorial claim. "In This Office We Believe..."

When people push back against her talking points, they're not being autistic, they're saying "be careful how you talk about 'those people' some of them might be here with you right now"

Correct. In fact, the whole "you're an autistic jerk if you push back against woke talking points" idea is and was a tactic used to prevent pushback so the small talk could be used to enforce consensus.

was how many Laurens are sociopaths.

Or alternatively, how many of them really believe their talking points are so obvious to reasonable people that they just can't be disagreed with if explicitly stated. HVAC techs will do the same thing in the opposite direction.

Or alternatively, how many of them really believe their talking points are so obvious to reasonable people that they just can't be disagreed with if explicitly stated.

How is that an alternative?

HVAC techs will do the same thing in the opposite direction.

Please, shower me with stories of people getting fired from their dream HVAC technician job for being insufficiently chud. Note: quitting because you don't like the chuds or they don't like you, doesn't count.

The organizational structure of a pro-chud HVAC contractor is different enough from corpo HR nonsense that the enforcement of social norms is way different.

What i mean, if you are working in a labor intensive trade and the team you are working with really doesn't like you, they will try to convince the boss that you suck at the job (if you are new on the team this will be easy). If that doesn't work the most roided guys will threaten to beat your ass while the rats plot against you.

The chuds can make quitting because you don't like eachother a very appealing option on their home turf, in the event that they decide someone really doesn't fit in.

I've heard of this type of thing happening a few times, and surprisingly none of the aspiring electricians and house framers had much of a twitter presence to complain about it to.

If the dude that got knocked for cracking his knuckles while driving a van somehow managed to become known, discriminated upon HVAC technicians should manage to bubble up as well. "It's totally happening in a completely symmetrical way, it's just that one side's cancellations are somehow cmpletely invisible" is not very compelling.

I can actually confirm this is the case, and I hope I've established my "not an establishment liberal running-dog" bona fides on this forum. My roommate had an HVAC job and the other guys talked his boss into firing him in less than a month because he awkwardly dodged or didn't join in the raunchy chud humor. I get it, I'd have a siege mentality too, these days.

There's no twitter mob to go after random HVAC techs and electricians for being liberal. Outside of the union or commercial refrigeration specialist HVAC techs get labeled 'not team players' for being open democrats(and even in those two it's still probably Trump+80). This is a 97% male field where most people work independently- we don't do the teenaged girl cancellation thing- open democrats/liberals get badmouthed, are more likely to have random drug tests, get worse performance reviews from all the complaining about them, but there's no ganging up to get them fired.

open democrats/liberals

What counts as "open democrat / liberal"? Having a "vote for Biden" baseball cap? Or is it simply enough to mention that you voted for a democrat in the state elections?

Of course it isn't symmetrical, why would it be. Imagining that rednecks don't have their own ways to socially police rhetoric they disapprove of is just as foolish as attempting to be the squeaky wheel in any other workplace where there is a clear politically correct position to have.

And fwiw, if a guy takes naps in his truck he should and will get fired. I'm thinking more along the lines of "yeah that new guys a flaming faggot, i dont want that mf around me all day". I've had jobs where that could be a pretty persuasive argument to the crew in general. I kindof imagine being strongly conservative as a college professor is similar. The old guard can smell that you are different, they don't like it, they concoct some bullshit offense for you to have unknowingly committed.

HVAC techs generally work alone, being woke on an install crew will probably result in not making it into a career- and that is exactly how it happens.

Please, shower me with stories of people getting fired from their dream HVAC technician job for being insufficiently chud. Note: quitting because you don't like the chuds or they don't like you, doesn't count.

HVAC techs do not get fired for things like political statements, use of racial slurs, or workplace sexual harassment.

"What? You think getting rained on is fun?" and "You think it's okay to just shoot protestors?" come from the same fountain of normie autism-repellent

And this is why the yeschad.jpg is so powerful, or at least variations on it. "Damn, it's legal to shoot protestors now? That's crazy. Do I need a tag, or a permit, or what? Can I get started this weekend? What's the bag limit?"

Granted, it works best if following rules 1 and 2, but putting them on the back foot of having to be the humorless scold who says "umm actually that's not funny" is way better than going turbo autist on the topic.

Uh, you might or might not win that round of banter, but you would for sure win an immediate meeting with HR, "RoyGBivensAction was joking about shooting me/my whole family/half of our office" and what-not.

When you're a star handsome, they let you do it.

Y'all too paranoid about HR. They're bored functionaries who think 'allahu akhbar!' is a hilarious answer to mass shooting concerns and need to get their paperwork in a row.

Can we please stop the endless repetition of "it's just a couple of crazy kids on the internet" meme? What would have to happen at this point for you to admit you're wrong?

It varies wildly depending on where you are and what the company does. I would never claim it's a couple crazy kids on the internet or that HR fears are overblown. After some time at an employer, though, it's possible to read the temperature and see how HR truly reacts to things.

They're bored functionaries

Oh, you mean like this woman?

“I’m a recruiter, and it’s a small, small, small industry. Smaller than you think. Same with HR. So, if you’re looking for a job, or maybe trying to keep a job, maybe, just maybe, think about what you’re putting on social media.

“…but what I can tell you, what is a fact, is that recruiters talk.…”

“…Do you know what that means? Do you have any guesses? Any guesses what that means? What that means, is that if you need a job, you might not get one. If you want to keep a job, you might not get to do that.…"

“…Then what do we do? We terminate you. With cause, if we’re so lucky. If not, we give you the minimum allowed by law. Either way, best of luck to you. Recruiters are watching; HR is watching. Everywhere. And we hate you. We hate you so much. And you think we can’t do anything. But we can. We. Have. The. Power. Always. Remember that. Doesn’t matter if there’s a man at the top of your fucking HR department, it’s run by women. And it’s run by angry women just. Like. Me.…”

Seriously, go watch that video, (look at those crazy eyes), and listen to an "HR professional" go totally mask off about how she and her coworkers throughout the field actively collude to fire, and “blacklist” from any employment anywhere, anybody with the “wrong” political views.

They're all like this. No matter where in the country you work, no matter what company you work for, if it has an HR department, the people there are all exactly the same as this woman. Every. Single. Last. One. Of. Them.

There's a word for people on the right who believe this. That word is "fired".

Had a bit of fun at work asking people where I go to sign up for a Handmaid after the election. The DMV people looked at me like I was crazy!

I agree with the broad Manosphere / Red Pill interpretation of the feminist slogan "the personal is political", namely that it’s the expression of the simple concept that women, as opposed to men, have an interest in pursuing political solutions to remedy or alleviate their personal problems. These include: no-fault divorce, rape shield laws, punitive child support and alimony laws, affirmative action, the Duluth Model etc. For men, the reverse is true: the political is personal. Namely: political developments have a potential effect on their personal lives, and their only resort are personal options, not political countermeasures. I know this is completely off-topic, my bad.

A big part of it is ignoring structural incentives created by political changes. "I can get divorced if I want to get divorced" souds great. But it also creates the incentive structures that causes men to pump and dump women on tinder. "I can sue my ex for tonnes of child support"- sounds great, but my boyfriend of seven years doesn't want to get engaged, doesn't. The thinking is only in one step, government gives me stuff, I want stuff. Not what are the actual consequences of this.

Women can dress however they like sounds lovely. Women are dressing in hyper sexualized ways and compete by having translucent leggings as pants and thong bikinis doesn't sound great. You can't have women competing, no rules regarding dress and not expect women to outbid the competition by showing skin.

One tenet that was getting repeated on those sites is that women don't understand cause and effect well because it's unnecessary for childrearing.

because it's unnecessary for childrearing

Isn't it? Surely punishing a child is just reinforcement learning.

The punishing was normally done by the father though, wasn't it?

On a farm, yes. By the mid-20th century, no - Dad didn't reliably get home before bedtime, and in any case Mum knew that immediate punishment was dramatically more effective than delayed punishment.

No? My grandfather recalls his cousins that were still subsistence farmers at the time(Acadiana in the early 20th century was not a developed country) living in terror of their mothers, who would immediately beat them with whatever was at hand at the slightest sign of wrongdoing. The chancla is female coded even today.

I suppose there's a gender norm of serious corporal punishment being administered by men, but the average spanking was probably done by a woman.

Golly these people are sexist. Women do do better with male supervision but only if those men don't hate them for being women.

Well, yes, it's sexist. Then again, society is also sexist, as are most women.

Let’s be honest though. Most men don’t faire very well either in their youth when the hormones first kick in and all they can think about is love and sex. It’s all consuming on a level that is maddening to get ahold of and they shouldn’t be entrusted with too much independent decision making either. It’s practically as intoxicating as trying to rear every young man off cocaine because those changes are essentially are a cocktail of drugs. When the testosterone first hit my body and mind were brimming with a level of energy that was uncontrollable and I felt like I could conquer the world. I was a raging hell storm for others to deal with at times. And while I perform quite well in all spheres today, 16-18 year old me could absolutely run circles around me in 2025; I would be no match for myself then.

No, sixteen year old boys shouldn't be emancipated either.

Patriarchy is elders the managung incompetent and emotive youngins and the greatest trick of women was to have men take the label when mothers are the ones who exert control over their daughters and other inferiors far more viciously than men do.

Well, I guess they'd say that they hate women not for being women per se, but for being irrational, cowardly, idiotic, etc etc you get it. The chuddiest among them might draw parallels to 13/52 and whatnot.

Honestly, they have a point. The moral inferiority of womankind is an obvious conclusion of most redpill/traditionalist thought, but proponents of such always either handwave it away or dutifully ignore the implications.

But hating them for these things does not help to lead them. The bible's first instruction for husbands is 'love your wives' presented as being as important as wives submitting to their husbands.

Well, just like when a wife stops submitting when a husband demonstrates over the long term that he doesn’t love her, when women as a class have demonstrated over the long term that they are not interested in anything that even smells like submitting, they shouldn’t anticipate much love from men as a class.

The Bible also has plenty of examples of God allowing his loved children to get the fruits of their bad decisions good and hard while saying some extremely harsh things about them/us, and that’s sometimes part of actually loving someone.

Gender Marxism, man, it’s toxic in every respect. Individual women are not part of a class, I mean, obviously they have interests as a class, but they prefer their interests as part of a family. Corporatism, you know, not Marxism. Women aren’t defective men and men arent defective women, either.

Red pill bullshit makes me worry for my daughters more than feminism does. Granted lots of that is just exposure bias. But there are still good women out there. They don’t deserve to be treated like radical feminists. Women respond to love and care and consideration, even if they’re in a defensive mode.

I don’t know which sex, on average, defected first. The whole question seems entirely irrelevant. What matters is what an individual should do, how to build virtue, and treating people in accordance with their god given gender roles. No, that’s not exactly the same, but it’s also not in revenge for what some other person who happens to have the same chromosomal configuration did. Listen to the Bible instead of coming up with excuses, I’d tell the same thing to the gays, drug users, etc. Don’t come at me about anarcho-tyranny or whatever the latest ‘Christian moral rules are for cucks’ framing is. Women should submit to their husbands and men should love their wives, but neither of these things is preconditioned. It’s a requirement, not a contractual arrangement. That’s for Mohammedans.

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Well, just like when a wife stops submitting when a husband demonstrates over the long term that he doesn’t love her, when women as a class have demonstrated over the long term that they are not interested in anything that even smells like submitting, they shouldn’t anticipate much love from men as a class.

I don't think this works as a parallel. It seems to me that submissiveness is not desirable in of itself, but as a proxy for a cooperative demeanor. Trivially, a wife who is capable of exercising sound judgement within her domain and contributing effectively to collective decisions seems superior to a more "submissive" wife who never exercises her agency to the benefit of the couple. I suppose that most men would prefer to be the generally senior partner in the relationship, but that's a much looser paradigm than 1 Timothy 2:12 would have it. If I may also get a little Freudian, surveys consistently find that men prefer to be the dominant partner only by a relatively small margin. By contrast, women are much more insistent that they be the submissive party and are far more averse to dominating than men are to submitting.

Now, insofar as one believes that women are intrinsically poor agents, then female submission is approximately equivalent to effective cooperation. I know @hydroacetylene is insistent on women's lesser capacity for agency, and I presume you are too. However, this view would naturally seem to lead to a recognition that women are lower creatures than men, in accordance with the pre-Christian understanding; a donkey may not be a defective horse, but it is still an ass. Maybe I'm just not familiar enough with Christian philosophy and there's some galaxy-brained epicycle around this implication, but everything else within the redpill/traditionalist consensus on women seems to implicitly corroborate this outlook. This, fundamentally, is the core concern of feminism, or at least the most defensible steelman of feminism, and so long as the Right neither has a satisfying answer for them nor reinstates complete patriarchal control, its spectre shall continue to haunt them.

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I don’t actually know how I feel surrounding this. When I was growing up it felt like there was much greater decentralization and separation between culture and politics in the strict sense of the word. Politics and religion were the 2 standard notions that families rarely brought up apart from church attendance, and you certainly didn’t bring them up with your friends and neighbors either. Not because you were afraid to. It just wasn’t important to why we associated with each other. Unless things naturally turned in that direction it was just considered in poor taste to broach the topic. We liked one another on a closer and personal level.

I couldn’t tell you who my parents voted for and they voted at every state, federal and local election. But that’s not because I’m apprehensive about telling others. It’s because nobody in our family knew who voted for who and we didn’t discuss it. Politics never got in the way of our family importance.

Thomas Sowell once said “if you have a lot of social control you don’t need a whole lot of government control.” I see that as the counterpoint to the intermix of the personal and the political. We resolved issues on our own. I don’t remember seeing a single instance of teenage pregnancy until gangs swept through our neighborhood and it didn’t impact us personally. Child support and alimony existed politically but weren’t a thing in our community. Marriages were mostly stable and of those that weren’t the husband and wife generally separated but never divorced.

The simple fact is you can’t substitute politics for community and there is no substitute for good judgment. Politics comes in to address these wherever there’s a disintegration and tear in the cultural fabric.

decentralization between culture and politics

I wonder to what extent this is simply because cultures were more effectively separated at the time. It's easy for culture and politics to be separated when everyone that you're talking politics with is either the same culture or a known, geographically adjacent culture. A huge problem with the internet is that there's no easy way to discern the culture of the person you're talking to. Talking gun control with a backwoods Alabaman man is a fundamentally different exercise than with a Canadian woman from Ontario. On the internet, you don't get to know which one you're talking with. More importantly, even if you do, you're likely to experience culturally-mediated political opinions that are fundamentally contrary to your way of life, which is much less likely in person.

If I live in Xtopia, a city where the only mode of travel is bicycles, and I see some tax supportive discussion about taxing and registering bicycles online, I might look at the discussion as anti-Xtopian. They hate bicycles! They hate the way I live! They care nothing for me, my family or my friends! This may or may not be true (it often is, such is the nature of cultural differences) but either way it's very different than talking to my Xtopian neighbor. If he supports the tax, surely there must be a more rational reason for him doing so. He likely enjoys bikes, or he wouldn't live here. I can at least hear him out, maybe learn something. It's just a totally different activity, and frankly it's a shame the same English words are used for both. If I hear someone from Y-ville (city where bicycles are banned) talk about the bike tax, I can be certain that they hate bikes and probably my bike-centric existence, but it really doesn't matter that much. I already knew that, it was priced in. If I'm talking to them in the first place I've already decided they have enough other qualities that outweigh their opinion on bikes.

I wonder to what extent this is simply because cultures were more effectively separated at the time.

When I was growing up you couldn’t really help it. Culture moved slower then than it does today and even slower the further in time you go back. I’m younger than the typical cohort here and grew up at the intersection of new changes that were rapidly developing but I was still very beholden to my upbringing of the previous generation fortunately, so trendy new influences never pushed me around in the storm of things very much. I was always a very strong willed kid who was proud to have remained stable in a sea of chaos. People tend to look down on others who haven’t changed throughout in their lives. I haven’t changed one bit since I was 16 years old. Very few people would be able to distinguish the me of then and the me of 2025, but for me, refusing to change has been one of the proudest achievements of my life. A handful of good people I knew growing up and today all the worse because they left their good sense behind them to go down roads they shouldn’t have travelled. My foundational roots had already been solidified for good.

The experience of the world back then was also far more local and felt much smaller than it does today. When I was extremely young, if we went 2-3 hours out of our way for a family event, it felt like I was living at the edge of the known world without much to explore beyond it. Today the whole world can be knocking on your doorstep, demanding and competing for your attention which leaves a lot of people feeling burnt out on life. I can play the whole social media game if I want but it has no appeal to me and I have little desire for it. I have an enormous love for technology, just none of its popular uses. What’s popular is almost guaranteed to be wrong, per Heinlein’s maxim:

“Does history record any case in which the majority was right?”

Or if you like, the quote often misattributed to Henry Ford:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

People carry around a lot of standard knowledge for the time in which they live but very few have any truly useful insight to impart with others. Coupled with Sturgeon’s Law, nobody has me convinced that I’m missing out on anything here. Not being a narcissist driving everywhere with a selfie stick in the back of my car is more than enough of a win for me. I hope future anthropologists one day can cite that item as the defining characteristic that marked the downfall of American civilization. It’s pathological.

The Internet in its infancy was a kind of refuge for misfits who could connect and talk to each other and do funny things over BBS boards, among other stuff. Cyberspace then was a form of digital dumpster diving for the curious. Nowadays it’s just another form of crass commercialism. Another marked out district for the display of wealth without culture. Just mindless consumerism.

Virtually all political structures seem like an attempt to engage group dynamics and/or abstract logic to remedy personal grievances. What does gender have to do with it, or what are the male-coded political structures that you see as somehow pure of personal considerations?

Are you sure it's not just that areas of greater practical concern for women (family, children, sexual morality, domestic violence, etc.) seem inappropriately "personal" to you because you don't share the concern, whereas you naturally perceive male-coded personal issues as just objectively Important?

Edit: for instance, there's a discussion lower down about Stand Your Ground laws, which seem clearly like an attempt (on both sides) to use the law to work out a set of very personal, very male-coded feelings about physical aggression and dominance, regulating a set of interactions that are overwhelmingly between men. One might argue "oh no, that's actually a question of objective safety/ public welfare/ individual rights," or "plenty of people of the opposite gender also take sides in this debate," but after all the exact same thing could be said about family law or rape legislation, right?

What are the personal problems that no-fault divorce is a political solution to? In the absence of such laws it is the state compelling you to stay in a relationship you'd rather end. Is thinking a legal arrangement is unjust a "personal" problem? Same for rape shield laws, which concern the admissibility of evidence in criminal proceedings.

If you consider your husband icky and feel stuck in a marriage, and would prefer to simply get divorced on "grounds" you just don't want to be married anymore, but you can't legally do so because no-fault divorce isn't on the books and your husband has technically not done anything that is grounds for divorce, than yes, I suppose it does feel like a personal problem. It violates your feelings, just like the lack of rape shield laws do. You feel wronged.

If you consider your husband icky and feel stuck in a marriage, and would prefer to simply get divorced on "grounds" you just don't want to be married anymore, but you can't legally do so because no-fault divorce isn't on the books and your husband has technically not done anything that is grounds for divorce, than yes, I suppose it does feel like a personal problem. It violates your feelings, just like the lack of rape shield laws do. You feel wronged.

This is exactly what’s wrong with today’s social landscape. People I knew just fundamentally had a much more realistic sense of people than those who pass for “adults” in the year 2025.

If you described yourself as being “stuck” in a marriage 25-30 years ago, we ‘all’ knew what that meant. It meant you were in a physically abusive marriage and you needed a way out. Today being “stuck” in a marriage means your husband wanted to have sex with you last week and you don’t feel as attracted to him as you once were. One of these 2 things doesn’t belong.

Adults have this attitude today that life doesn’t involve hardship and making sacrifices. Anything that represents even the slightest inconvenience to you is at liberty to be disregarded because you should just “do what makes you happy.” Well I’m sorry, but that’s ‘life’. Life is about doing 100 things every single day that you don’t want to do. And while your personal happiness is important, it’s far from the highest value to aspire to and is the least enduring and meaningful when you’re on your deathbed and wondering what you’ve left behind.

Maybe I'm confused. In your comment you referred to no-fault divorce as a political solution to a personal problem. My contention is that it is a political solution to a political problem. The circumstances under which one can exit marriage, and the details of marriage as a matter of law, being themselves political creations. Similarly rape shield laws. The rules of evidence for courts being political creations.

I'd argue that marriage was a religious creation.

@ArjinFerman has the right idea: if Lauren uses political small talk to feel validated, she is either totally oblivious herself or is deliberately doing this as a form of consensus building. What you have to do it to push back not on the topic itself, but on the use of this topic so close to the water cooler.

"I don't know, Lauren, I trust the jury and their final decision. You and I haven't seen all the evidence they have seen." Now it's Lauren who's guilty of "doing her own research".

"I don't know, Lauren, I don't feel comfortable discussing the circumstances of other people's personal tragedies, especially people I don't know personally."

And then you immediately pivot to a FORD topic to show Lauren that you enjoy talking to her in principle.

I love this way of framing it. It's like typical mind fallacy, right? You assume your coworker at the water cooler has the same intentions as you for engaging in conversation, but really you could be miles apart. It's one reason it took me so long to get small talk. Why are we saying a thing that's obvious to both of us?

I have a coworker who drives me up the wall sometimes. She's pretty low information and if you tried to tell her about media bubbles, she'd just look at you blankly. But boy does she have opinions based on whatever her media feeds have shown her that day. She once started going on about something that happened three years ago, and for some reason it was trending in her media feeds and I guess it appeared to be a new story. Luckily I do find that she's open to correction and changing her mind if you go about it carefully.

I find it's best not to correct everything she says, because that just paints me as argumentative. So I let 90% of it go. But when there's something that's really egregious, something that's really easy to falsify, something that's one of my pet issues, I'll just gently say something like, "but have you considered that" or "I see it differently because" or "did you know that-". I like that last one a lot because I find people like this do enjoy those listicles of "interesting facts" because it makes them feel smart.

I like what the other commenter said too about gentle pushback and taking political out of the realm of small talk a bit. People use small talk to make what they think are uncontroversial remarks, accepted by everyone. A gentle "I don't see it that way" just lets them know hey, other people have opinions too, and maybe think next time before you assume I will just blandly agree with you.

But going back to the typical mind thing, as others have noted, it is deeply weird that we have this community. Astonishingly rare. But when I see people like my coworker, I understand why. And like I said, she's open to changing her views. What dismays me is around here with people who have spent time deeply considering and analyzing a topic and have come to a different conclusion than I have, and they're sticking to their guns. Just a reminder that we are all in information bubbles too, all of us. We all start with our own priors, our own sacred cows, and the conclusions we're hoping to reach.

Trying to find the political common ground that’s appropriate for discussion often leaves people uninterested. Suppose you’re a person that has what would pass for radical opinions in the current climate. Would you really want to risk discussing that with someone you aren’t sure you’re on that level with, at work?

There’s a great level of comfort and ease I still have with my childhood friends that I just don’t have with professional colleagues. Even among those who’d I’d describe as friends. With the former we can discuss very morbid topics or perhaps even share unpleasant opinions without forgetting that we confidently know that’s not who the other person is because we’ve known them all their lives and have seen every dimension of their personality growing up.

There’s more than just the axes of personal/professional and small/serious. There’s also boring and interesting and that varies widely with people. You can often tell by the level of engagement and whether they’re more reactive or proactive in the discussion as to whether they have an active interest in the topic or it’s just because it’s a “you” thing. General topics are more accessible at the water cooler or lunch table at break but they’re far less interesting than the ones that would get you the side eye from the booth or table next to you that causes that group to get up from the table and relocate elsewhere because you brought up the Khmer Rogue and Cambodian genocide and how it compares to what’s happening in Gaza.

Isn't this just status games? In the workplace continued status communication by polite engagement is necessary for subsequent cooperative potential. Its just not worth it to change an existing dynamic. Ideal solution is to flag oneself as unimportantly heterodox in advance. You know Im not the same as you but I dont care enough to change your mind so dont bother trying to change mine, so lets talk normie shit like baseball or weather where fundamental value flash isn't axiomatic to our functional dynamic.

Let it rip for nonrepeated games though. At house parties I have great fun openly stating my maximalist positions when interrogated because I don't care about my reputation among oneoffs. They can bitch to the host later about the evil nazi that somehow entered the party but thats the hosts fault for inviting me in the first place if he knew I'd accept leaving my cave for a meatspace rando sorting hat ceremony.

This sounds a lot like what Scott described as 'phatic' speech.

I mentioned recently that I work in a caring profession and spend most of my time talking to people. One of my lessons from that work is that while occasionally you meet someone who wants to have an in-depth, substantive conversation of a particular issue, by far the majority of all social encounters are phatic. The goal of the conversation is not to arrive at insight, but rather to make a person feel heard, appreciated, and validated. Even if I am going to forget everything we talked about by lunchtime - and I confess that I usually am - my purpose in the space is not to learn or assimilate facts, or engage in some kind of analysis, but rather to convey to the person I am caring for, "You are important, and I care about you".

This goes especially for when people want to talk about politics. Smile, nod, show sympathy, but don't get into an argument or even an analysis. Sometimes people will say things I disagree with strongly and I'll just file away that disagreement and ask an open question. If someone rants about this or that politician, there are a lot of ways to politely engage in and redirect that conversation without either lying or making it a contest. Gaza is one that comes up sometimes, and I have gotten pretty good at noncommittal ways to move that one along.

People are usually not trying to share facts, and if you treat every conversation as an exercise in collaborative truth-seeking, you are the creepy weirdo, not them. Sometimes the correct response is to just nod, smile, say "yeah, I know where you're coming from", and then say something else. If someone says to me, "ugh, my job was awful today, I hate capitalism", I don't jump in with facts and arguments about how 'capitalism' however defined is not the reason why work is tedious and boring. I say, "oh gosh, sounds like you had a hard day, can I get you a cup of tea?", and then we move on.

Now you are correct that this kind of conversation is politically productive, and the kinds of complaints you can make are reflective of overall shifts. To use the above example, I pretty much never hear "ugh, I hate capitalism" from older people, but younger generations are much more likely to use that phrase as a generic statement of unhappiness. That does reflect a shift in values and political priorities. This goes for politicians as well - whether, in a particular local context, someone uses "ugh, Trump sucks" or "thanks Obama" or "let's go Brandon" as a casual complaint is genuinely reflective of something, and your phatic response to that serves to normalise that complaint. The same goes for praise as well; I have noncommittally nodded along to a lot of praise of Jacinda Ardern. But I tend to think these conversational changes are downstream of larger changes, and that the direction of the stream cannot be reversed by arguing or quibbling on this casual level. From an activist perspective, the way you should respond to or change the view of the "I hate capitalism" girl is not to argue with her on the spot, but to change the affect she associates with the word or concept of capitalism. You can't change the direction of the ocean currents by pushing the froth on the surface in the opposite direction; and we're mostly talking about conversational froth here.

I think this is remarkably wrong. A big part of the reason these yutes complaining about capitalism, or sexism/racism, or the ‚destruction of the planet‘ are unhappy, is because those are deeply incorrect, anxiety-and-depression inducing beliefs! You could actually solve most of their long-term problems by convincing them they are false (which isn‘t easy, I grant), instead of patronizing them every day by making them feel good for 5 minutes. They could have talked about the weather if they wanted to wallow in their misery, but no, they‘re practically begging you to save them, and you say „no thanks you‘re just being phatic kiddo“, tap them on the head and go on your way.

I think I'd be more sympathetic to that if, well, I hadn't tried that. It usually goes badly.

Yes, there is probably a useful conversation to be had around capitalism and climate and hope for the future somewhere down the line, and I've had those as well, but it is almost never helpful to respond to a person expressing irritation or exhaustion with, "actually, you're wrong, here's why".

I think it's worth it. If an expert debater and religious authority with a knack for youth online culture like yourself isn't going to dispel their harmful illusions, who is?

Clearly you rate me higher than I myself do.

My quick thought: I don’t think it’s appropriate to have polarizing political views in a work setting, unless the work environment is one with an obvious political agenda. The person who brings up falsehoods about Kyle Rittenhouse was the one who was bringing up an inappropriate topic of conversation here. Saying stuff like that at work is asking for a fight.

Keep in mind that a lot of people, particularly on the right, supported Rittenhouse’s actions, and reading his Wikipedia entry I tend to agree that Rittenhouse was not starting trouble, and was only defending himself.

I agree. I think it should be basically a faux pas to bring up politics and for that matter religion in the workplace simply because it introduces friction into that workplace to no benefit.

I mean I wouldn’t mind so much if the vibes based people weren’t absolutely involved in politics and weren’t absolutely convinced that they are the serious ones. The vibes based political discourse that most people mistake for politics is destroying the country. We’re possibly the first civilization that will blow itself up simply because we’re bored. And it’s happening. We’re seeing political violence that usually only comes to civilizations in actual crisis— high inflation, high unemployment, mass arrests, etc. We have none of that. We have bored people yelling about politics, marching in the streets, and shooting people in an economy that’s probably no worse than the 1980s.

I wish that people would find politics boring so that policy could be made by wanks who actually know what is going on without having to worry about idiots on social media who see sad images on Facebook and decide that the other side is evil. I want it to be safe to disagree without having to think about whether it threatens my job, my family, or will end a relationship. But here we are, trying to turn an artificial cold civil war into an actual hot civil war. I wish the common response to politics was “boring”. And TBH real politics (reading the text of the bills, looking up statistics, reading FRED reports, and so on) is boring.

And TBH real politics (reading the text of the bills, looking up statistics, reading FRED reports, and so on) is boring.

That's not politics, that's clerkship. Politics is fighting for benefits for your ingroup, which is evidently far from boring for most people. Back in the day, the politics people engaged in was local, family-level squabbling. Now we're atomized and online, so our involvement in politics is mostly in the global context.

It’s also issue and fact based, which 99% of political discourse is not. Arguing about the optics of a political issue and about issues you have no control over not only doesn’t make actual governing better, but prevents it.

Arguing about the budget and the size of government makes sense if you understand tge budget on the table and what it changes as compared to last year’s budget. Arguing the Marist of a program makes sense if you know what the program is, what it’s supposed to do, and if it’s meeting its targets. Just yelling into Twitter isn’t politics.

Weirdly I essentially never encounter even the most mildly political comments at work. I work in tech, mostly with asians, and for the most part they seem apolitical. Occasionally there will be a tentative “topical” Trump joke, but I don’t sense any seething anger behind it. Generally asians seem to value seeming composed and professional. I encounter political comments most from white boomers I know through my hobby. The typical tech companies I’ve worked at seem to be good at upholding an unspoken “no politics” norm, even based in SF with a 90% anti-Trump workforce. I haven’t socialized with a person under 40 outside of work in many years though

You definitely mean east asians (culturally) when you state the above as asians. The personal is gauche and embarrassing to asians, and consequently the personal is simply unimportant to others. Me communicating the unimportance of my life to you is an expectation that you'll reciprocate and not try to impose the supposed importance of your life onto me. Sinic small talk of any import will be on topics of casual depth, like food or gaming strat or makeup tips or workout tips. No sinic ever wants to hear anything about your dating mishaps or family drama.

To a lesser extent this means that emotionally in-tune East Asians are inevitably westernized to some degree and are insufferably narcissistic to normie sinic eyes. Saying you have trauma doesn't make you more sympathetic to me, it makes you an uncomfortable oversharer trying to get mental expenditure from me that I simply cannot provide.

This changes when doors are closed and alcohol is involved. What happens in the ktv stays in the ktv.

Did you know that Karine Jean-Pierre was a Black LGBTQ Woman? Of course you didn't.

The above link is to KJP's "interview" with the New Yorker. It's exceptionally horrible. I don't usually get too wrapped up in "bad interviews" because journalists routinely use them to get the other party tied up in knots with impossible to answer questions.

The thing about this interview is that Isaac Chotiner isn't even really asking questions. He's mostly politely asking KJP "what do you mean?" and she keeps answering it worse and worse. I'm having a hard time thinking of a worse written interview.

The culture war angles are too obvious. DEI, rejection of reality, identity politics. They're all here. What stuck me those most was the word salad. Trump is always ridiculed for his own word salad but the left, yet, this is the White House press secretary struggling to build cohesive thoughts.

I've held an unprovable theory for many years now that people who routinely hold demonstrably untrue ideas in their head do some sort of literal brain damage to themselves. A sort cognitive self-harm wherein an emotional appeal is so strong that it dulls the synapses. Again, unprovable, but this interview makes me hold that faith just a little more.

Reading the interview, the interviewer was on a warpath. KJP seems to have stepped outside the party line with her book and now she needs to be brought to heel or pushed aside. Lines like this from the interviewer:

You’re talking about Biden like loyalty was owed to him. Isn’t loyalty owed to the country?

Wow, what a shitball of a question.

This comes after KJP maintains that the Democrats had no idea if they had a better candidate than Biden. Which has to be considered at least somewhat true. So points to her for that.

Outside of that, it's rather obvious KJP is carrying water for Biden. But to what end? Is he not out of politics? The earnest defense of his honor, whilst admirable, is a political dead end. Suicide, even. She's a fish out of water and the interviewer is hammering on that fact again and again. To a point where it obvious, which KJP picks up on at the end of the interview:

KJP: When I talk about the broken White House in the subtitle, I’m talking about the Trump White House. So what are the Democratic leadership actually doing to beat back and fight back? What are they doing?

IW: I’m not here to answer for the Democratic leadership. I would—

KJP: You’ve been answering for the Democratic leadership. [Laughs.] You were giving me their answers.

I think these final lines sum up the interview quite well. A politically daft operator and a democrat establishment shill embarrassing one another. Sure, KJP was floundering throughout the interview, and I'm sure the book seemed incoherent to those who feel which way the winds blowing politically, but getting caught off guard by a political hitman in a hostile interview can happen to anyone.

To steelman KJP: Running with Biden through the election and then benching him and getting Kamala in as VP was probably the best choice given they did not have a better candidate than Kamala. My guess is that the people behind the scenes got greedy, pushed Biden aside and went with Kamala to their detriment. To that extent, KJP defending the honor of Biden is just as much a political dead end as the interviewers defense of the current democrat establishment. Two political losers fighting over lost scraps.

You’re talking about Biden like loyalty was owed to him. Isn’t loyalty owed to the country?

Wow, what a shitball of a question.

Here is the thing. I can imagine a world where Jen Psaki, much as I disliked her and everything she stood for, takes that question and makes the interviewer deeply regret asking it. I deeply loath her, but I can admit she was good at her job, if you take her job being to make reporters look more stupid than the administration.

Likewise, look at JD Vance, being the current administration's attack dog, going into hostile media environments and generally having pretty good message discipline, as well as being verbally nimble enough to not appear that he's pointing to a deer and calling it a horse. He generally does a pretty solid job making reporters regret asking him questions by making them look stupid.

KJP was, and is, a preposterously stupid individual who was terrible at her job. Her elevation to the position, and the fact that she somehow rode it until the wheels fell off, was probably one of the most obvious signs that nobody was in charge in the Biden administration.

I'm glad you posted this. I hate KJP but it was an obviously hostile interview.

If the Democratic establishment is capable of selling vastly incompetent black lesbians down the river again, congratulations to them.

Outside of that, it's rather obvious KJP is carrying water for Biden. But to what end? Is he not out of politics?

The Biden political machine exists post Biden. Biden was in politics for 54 years. Generations of people have worked for him.

Many of those people are continuing to work post Biden, and I'm sure some of them appreciate her loyalty.

Outside of that, it's rather obvious KJP is carrying water for Biden. But to what end? Is he not out of politics?

I wondered about that, too. Turns out (when I looked it up) that she served as "as the chief of staff for U.S. vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris during the 2020 presidential campaign."

Kamala Harris is making noises about running in 2028 (after a lot of people thought she was dropping out of politics altogether) so I wonder if this is less about Biden and more about positioning herself for Harris maybe hoping to get another job with the second campaign (if it happens)? And part of Harris pitch is loyalty to Biden so anyone hoping to be onside with her has to repeat the message (as much a signal that she can sell the same message Harris is selling as anything).

From Harris' book:

Many people want to spin up a narrative of some big conspiracy at the White House to hide Joe Biden’s infirmity. Here is the truth as I lived it. Joe Biden was a smart guy with long experience and deep conviction, able to discharge the duties of president. On his worst day, he was more deeply knowledgeable, more capable of exercising judgment, and far more compassionate than Donald Trump on his best.

But at eighty-one, Joe got tired. That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles. I don’t think it’s any surprise that the debate debacle happened right after two back-to-back trips to Europe and a flight to the West Coast for a Hollywood fundraiser.

I don’t believe it was incapacity. If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.

So the line is Joe was great, but yeah he had to step down, but yeah he was great and while he was president he was fine and that is what matters. It's threading the needle of "was he incapacitated while in office and if so, why didn't anyone speak up about it?" 'No he was fine so I/we didn't have to speak up but later on yeah he got tired and overwhelmed and that's ancient history now'.

It seems worth noting that, while this woman will never be in the limelight again, she clearly wants to stay in dem politics. And absolute, unconditional loyalty to the boss, even retroactively, is... something politicians value.

Except Biden isn't the boss anymore, and she's questioning the judgment of the people who are in charge now. If she had just kept her mouth shut then she might have had a future. Then again, maybe she knew she had no future, and figured her only chance was to criticize D leadership for the election loss.

Except Biden isn't the boss anymore, and she's questioning the judgment of the people who are in charge now.

I wonder. There does seem to be a power struggle going on between the faction of the party that is, let's take Platner as an example: "we need to ditch the more extreme progressive/idpol/lefty stuff and move towards the centre to appeal to a broader set of voters" versus the "hell no we need fifty Stalins" faction right now, in the wake of Harris' defeat.

Look at what Jean-Pierre was saying in that New Yorker interview about black women being the backbone of the party. I think she's pinning her hopes that the progressivists will come out on top, and she's staking her claim: you guys need the black vote, particularly since the Hispanics/Latinos are ditching you for the other lot. You need the blacks and the LGBT+ set, and if you want to make history by having the First Female President, you need Harris instead of (let's say) Newsom.

So she's signalling her loyalty to the party line about "we did nothing wrong, Biden was great, it was sexism and racism that lost the race for Harris not any flaw on her part, and giving in on any of this is throwing the black and queer vote under the bus and appealing to the Nazi fascist element in the party".

I wonder how much influence Biden (or his inner circle) still have. He had a long career in politics, he made a lot of alliances and presumably has a lot of favours still banked. Crossing him or his faction could be a real mistake, while signalling loyalty may be more of a help than we think. Who exactly is in charge of the Democratic party right now? The old guard are hanging on, even while others are attempting to shove them off the stage, and some of the ones wanting to do the shoving are the progressive elements. "I am a queer black woman and if you try to shove me out of the way I will cry racism sexism homophobia" is still a credible threat.

Biden has very little influence. He has cancer, he's bitter at people, he's blamed by almost everyone in turn, his presidential library (a useful barometer) has been receiving hardly any donations, and he never extended much trust to people outside the inner circle in the first place so it's no surprise as there weren't many true-believers to begin with. And he even managed to dumpster his own reputation in record time with stuff like breaking his promise and pardoning his family (handing an invitation to Trump on a golden fucking platter to abuse the pardon power himself). I'm a moderate, I liked Biden as a person, I even liked some of the stuff about his governance, but that last bit alone was more damning that anything else he ever did, in my eyes.

She's trying to sell books likely because she heard (somewhat incorrectly) that it's a good way to earn money. I mean, who is going to hire her? Maybe some kind of lazy progressive nonprofit, but that seems it.

I mean we can write that off as ‘she’s stupid and bad at her job’.

To his credit, the interviewer specifically picked up on this:

One could conceivably think that he could do the job through January, 2025, but that it was not wise to think he could do the job through January, 2029, right?

It’s not my place to say.

What do you mean it’s not your place to say?

No, no, no. Wait, I’m answering the question. I did not see anything that would cause me concern. That is my answer.

Except the debate, and the other things that everyone saw?

What I’m saying to you is the debate for me was one time. I had never seen him like that before.

So basically refusing to even answer the (real, 2029) question. Sadly, not new - that was the whole initial bit, was how the Biden campaign would insist "he's fine now" and then go silent when asked if his trajectory was stable enough to last through 2029. The debate wasn't just a shocker because it was at odds with "he's fine now", but also because it established a clear downward trajectory, you didn't even need to extrapolate that much; you could simply look at the 2020 debates and the difference was obvious.

Kamala, by the way, is deliberately cultivating the "I'm going to drop out of politics" angle, it wasn't accidental. She knows that only after losing she can drop the "our politics is broken" line, and thus attempt to curry favor with the disenfranchised "fellow kids". You're probably right about the Harris angle, and furthermore since Kamala obviously doesn't have a good grasp on what kinds of things are actually persuasive, she might even blithely bring KJP back.

Outside of that, it's rather obvious KJP is carrying water for Biden. But to what end? Is he not out of politics? The earnest defense of his honor, whilst admirable, is a political dead end. Suicide, even.

Biden is clearly relitigating his legacy. Which is why Hunter came out not too long ago or we get comments when Jake Tapper releases a book.

But it is interesting that the two people who seem most willing to public go down with the Biden ship are black women.

It makes some sense with KJP since she'll never get another major role in the party.

But Kamala seems to be making noises like she'll run for something again and she's still providing cover for his health issues. She was also a late addition that wasn't particularly loved in Bidenworld apparently so one wonders what she gains.

To steelman KJP: Running with Biden through the election and then benching him and getting Kamala in as VP was probably the best choice given they did not have a better candidate than Kamala. My guess is that the people behind the scenes got greedy, pushed Biden aside and went with Kamala to their detriment. To that extent, KJP defending the honor of Biden is just as much a political dead end as the interviewers defense of the current democrat establishment. Two political losers fighting over lost scraps.

This is not actually a defense of KJP and her ilk.

What most likely happened was that Kamala was already on the ticket and so could use the money raised. The other issue is that many of the other Democratic candidates that did seem viable saw the situation was a mess and knew they could run in four years (when Trump might have nuked his popularity again) with a full campaign. Once Biden spitefully endorsed Kamala it was especially not worth it.

But that's not the reason it's not a defense of KJP. Another factor was people like Jean Pierre who deliberately tried to poison the well on any sort of contested primary by making it about the denial of a black woman her legitimate role. That was another reason candidates couldn't jump on.

If that had happened, KJP would be complaining again as a black, queer woman.

She was also a late addition that wasn't particularly loved in Bidenworld apparently so one wonders what she gains.

The Biden element in the party, if there is one, may still have some influence. Or more that if Jill et al. feel spiteful about what happened, they can make sure she crashes and burns. So trying to placate the Biden partisans is worth it.

Especially if there is the hint that maybe Obama wasn't as enthused about Kamala as she might have liked, which even as early in her book as I am, I am getting. And she definitely has it in for Gavin Newsom, so once again, building alliances to counter her rivals is important:

It became a boiler room, a site for the rolling calls we needed to make right away to secure support from Democratic delegates gathering for our convention in Chicago in less than a month, as well as from the former presidents, elected officials, and labor leaders who would be attending.

...In my notes of the calls:

...Barack Obama: Saddle up! Joe did what I hoped he would do. But you have to earn it. Michelle and I are supportive but not going to put a finger on the scale right now. Let Joe have his moment. Think through timing.

...Gavin Newsom: Hiking. Will call back. (He never did.)

Gavin Newsom: Hiking. Will call back. (He never did.)

Incredible gigachad move. Makes me move him up a notch (to notch 1).

No, move him back down. Newsom did put out an endorsement that same day, and was in fact one of the first to do so, so I wouldn't give him too much credit there. So the inclusion of this text in the book is actually a smear against a potential rival and a mischaracterization. Not that I'm going to cry any rivers about it

Yeah, if he did endorse her, then this is Kamala getting her retaliation in first. She really is planning to run herself, or at least queer the pitch for Newsom. I am now fascinated to know what behind-the-scenes dust-up in California Democratic politics is behind this rivalry. Maybe she was thinking of running for governor herself previously but Newsom out-manoeuvred her there (he did manage to get Biden to throw support behind him during the recall election, which might have been when Kamala got squished, if indeed she was thinking that was her chance; it looks pretty clear they were only willing to let no-hopers* go forward so Newsom would not be seriously challenged).

*E.g. "Kevin Paffrath, YouTuber Real estate broker UFOlogist Opioid Vendor Landlord". UFOlogist? Well, it is California!

Okay, that was 2021, she was VP. Can a sitting VP resign and run for a different office, or is that a no-no? Was she maybe bummed out that, if she had known there would be a recall in 2021, she would have waited for that instead?

State level politics regularly has utter clowns get into surprisingly important backbencher positions that get to jump into the limelight for stuff like that(Texas had an ancient aliens theorist as a criminal justice committee head a couple of congresses ago, because the coalition politics required a democrat and he was the seniormost one without serious delusional higher ambitions. These kinds of stories just happen all the time in state level politics everywhere).

I'm also not sure that Kamala's ego can be discounted from political factors. She's made some poor political decisions in the past and 'it's my turn now' is a known failure mode for prominent democrats.

I'm also not sure that Kamala's ego can be discounted from political factors. She's made some poor political decisions in the past and 'it's my turn now' is a known failure mode for prominent democrats.

I was wondering why the heck she was making remarks about possibly running again. Someone with sense would realise that VP was as high as she is going to get, and that the only reason she got the job is Jim Clyburn and the black caucus demanding quid pro quo for supporting Biden, that it was owed to them to give a black woman the job.

But she may be vain enough to believe all the cope about "greatest candidate ever, sexism and racism and MAGA to blame" and think that the party and the nation are breathlessly waiting for her to announce she'll run again. Hence the dig at Newsom.

What the heck she thinks she's doing re: Buttigieg I honestly have no idea. This far into her book, she's all "oh my great pal Pete" but then she gives an interview about "couldn't possibly pick him for anything, way too gay". That's just begging him to refuse to take her calls in future: "Sorry, Kamala, wouldn't want to get my gay cooties all over your shiny campaign". If she's trying to distance herself, however clumsily, from the LGBT2SQIA+ stuff now that wokeness is on the wane, then okay "Pete too gay" but it's a terrible way to go about it.

It's on a ten-point scale, so notch 1 isn't high praise.

Oh, I think that for California power politics, Newsom has her taped and she knows she can't beat him. That's why I was surprised that she didn't decide to run for governor while he runs for president, but then again maybe the inside baseball there is that his machine is too entrenched to let her have an easy victory there. I am surprised she is willing to take him on, but I guess she's hoping to invoke the power of the narrative around "Which do you, the party of representation and inclusion, want to pick as your public face: a Black and Asian woman or yet another (moderately) rich white guy?"

Interestingly enough, it recently came out that Obama had agreed with Pelosi not to endorse Kamala too soon, as they were hoping for a mini primary. But Pelosi broke her promise early due to peer pressure. Especially since several other would-be opponents took themselves out of contention pretty quickly - I think that fact gets lost a little bit in the narrative, but that was a big deal. Day 1 consisted of Biden and the Clintons endorsing Kamala, Obama publicly urging something more deliberate (but vague), and a few governors including Newsom endorsing. Day 2 was Whitmer and Pritzker and Shapiro and Pelosi. Also, Dean Phillips endorsed but wanted a straw poll or something, but this was ignored. Day 3 was Schumer and Jeffries, and by then it's over. In other words, by the second day there wasn't any frontrunner even considering not backing Kamala, so it's kind of doubtful a primary would even have made sense.

Part of that was not so much about money, but a few filing deadlines that were only a few days away. I'm not completely sure how influential/accurate that point was, though. Ultimately, if a primary was going to happen, Biden would have had to push for it right away.

Interestingly enough, it recently came out that Obama had agreed with Pelosi not to endorse Kamala too soon, as they were hoping for a mini primary.

I'm still only on chapter/day three of Kamala's book (too busy at the moment plus it's not riveting prose) and it's amazing how even this early in the book, it's clear she wanted the job - who the hell lets their brother-in-law make plans for if suppose just say maybe somehow someday you need to replace the boss? and forget all her coy 'oh I didn't want to dwell on it', she never said 'drop it, Tony, this is not how things are done' - and how she didn't need or want no stinkin' primary; it was gonna be her or nobody (there's also the slightest of hints that Obama, as you say, wasn't 300% on board the Coconut Queen Express):

[My brother-in-law Tony West] is also an astute political thinker, working on campaigns since he was a teenager, first for Representative Norm Mineta, then for Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, and Barack Obama. A year earlier, he had started what he called the “Red File.” With a president in his eighties, he suggested, it would be malpractice on my part to be unprepared if, God forbid, something should happen. In such a traumatic moment, it would be prudent to have a plan for the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours, so people don’t have to make a lot of decisions in the pressure of a crisis. He had thought through the first twenty-five calls I would need to make to world leaders, the first twenty-five to political colleagues, when to make my first statement, and what the rules of transition are. I didn’t want to dwell on such an eventuality: I left it in his hands.

As the pressure for Joe to drop out had mounted, he’d pulled out the Red File and started adding to it. I did not want to be a part of any such discussions, so while Tony was in town for the family weekend, he’d gathered four members of my core team, without me, for a meeting in the pool house*. Tony had opened the meeting saying, “Let’s assume he’s dropping out tomorrow.”

...I knew I had everything I needed to do this. With Joe’s endorsement and more name recognition than anyone else who might challenge, I had the strongest case. I’d also proven in the midterms that I could help flip seats. I had appeal for moderates and independents.

I also had a powerful personal contact list. On the road for the past four years, touring college campuses to build youth support and, more recently, on my tour for reproductive rights, I’d made a point of inviting local elected leaders to my events. Later, I’d have a moment with them, take a picture, have a brief chat. I would meet fifty to a hundred people a day in this way, and I had made it a point to follow up and keep those connections alive. During the delegate selection process, I’d pressed to include people who were my enthusiastic supporters, not just Joe’s—people I’d known for years. I don’t think too many people grasped the strength of the relationships I’d forged. This was not going to be a coronation. It would be the result of years of work.

...I went from call to call with the clarity that comes when stakes are high, stress is through the roof, and there’s zero ambiguity. Some people I called would offer me support and then ask, “What do you think the process should be?”

If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them. How much more time would it have taken to pull that off? I could imagine the chaos of even trying to decide how to do it, much less actually doing it, as precious days slipped away.

“This is the process. If anyone wants to challenge me, they’re welcome to jump in. But I intend to earn the support of the majority of the delegates and I’m doing it right now.”

I have to laugh about her brother-in-law working for Dukakis, Kerry and Obama campaigns; two out of three that went nowhere is not a great omen for her campaign!

*Given the allegations of how she ran her staff as VP, no way four 'core team members' are gonna have any meetings behind her back if they don't want to be ex-team members. They knew that tacitly, if not explicitly, she's just fine with succession planning and having her brother-in-law draw up a road map for when she is coronated. This is some deniability bullshit in action: "no way I had anything to do with it, I knew nothing, it was all my family members and then suddenly out of nowhere it all became relevant due to circumstances beyond our control". Simultaneously "I was loyal and not scheming behind Joe's back" and "nevertheless, I too was sadly aware of his decline and preparing for the stepping down" so she can appease all sides.

Reading the interview, the interviewer was on a warpath. KJP seems to have stepped outside the party line with her book and now she needs to be brought to heel or pushed aside.

I think that some claims are more difficult to defend than others. If you write a book without controversial claims, perhaps a work of fiction or a textbook on a well established field, then an interviewer would likely not feel the need to cross-examine you.

But if you published a book about how Trump is secretly a lizardman, I would hate to see an interviewer who just goes "interesting opinion, man".

Claiming that Biden was forced out of the race for some nefarious reasons while he was mentally fine to be president is trying to claim an 'alternative truth'. I hate it when Trump does these things (starting from the size of his inauguration crowd), because I feel that people should strive to agree on facts. I do not like it any better when some lefty makes claims which seem factually wrong, and I applaud efforts to probe if she has extraordinary evidence for her extraordinary claims.

I do not think that "Biden had dementia which made him an unappealing candidate" was a particularly Democratic party line. It was basically the consensus reality. Anyone who pushes back against people trying to make our collective map of reality worse is doing god's work.

To steelman KJP: Running with Biden through the election and then benching him and getting Kamala in as VP was probably the best choice given they did not have a better candidate than Kamala.

I think that by the time of the TV debate, the Democrats had already maneuvered themselves in an unwinnable position. Running with Harris as a candidate was not great, but running with someone who had been seen on TV as suffering from dementia would not have gone better.

I do not think that "Biden had dementia which made him an unappealing candidate" was a particularly Democratic party line. It was basically the consensus reality. Anyone who pushes back against people trying to make our collective map of reality worse is doing god's work.

I think this is overly charitable. The Democratic Party Line up until halfway through the debate was "This is the best Biden has ever been and any suggestions or "video evidence" otherwise are cheap fakes from that liar Trump."

Then the debate happened, and the extent of Biden's decline was at last laid bare before the voting populace, and the movers and shakers in the party acknowledged his dementia just long enough to force him out of the race and replace with Kamala in a Hail Mary effort to not get destroyed down-ballot.

After which the party line flipped to something like "OMG, why are you even talking about this? Who care who was running the country, or how many people told how many lies about it? Trump is old, too!"

The real problem with KJP is that she is still talking about it, and she's not even remotely smart enough to thread the needle of lies there. Quite possibly no one is. Biden's overall situation is bad enough that it ought to be a crippling scandal for the party, and the Democrat Party Line is to simply brazen through on sheer shamelessness, an important part of which is simply pretending it never happened. Writing a book and putting it back into the news cycle because KJP is a sub-midwit who is just blindly following the formula without reading the room, is counter productive to this tactic.

Compare that to Jake Tapper's book on the topic (As an aside, I'm going to need either him or James Clapper to drop out of relevance forever. I'm sick of getting them mixed up because their names rhyme.) Tapper's book was utterly, shamelessly retarded and disingenuous. But it served the purpose of providing a fig leaf for the "Democrat operative with a chyron" media and the Democrat party to pretend they had no role in the scandal and sweep it all under a rug. It let them pull the "We've been over this, it's old news, MoveOn.org" rhetorical trick.

I'd say no one with a brain believed it, but there are plenty of people even here who get very upset about Trump's cheating fuckboy relationship with the truth who seem to mostly not care who was actually running the country for the Biden years, and certainly haven't updated on the degree of known dishonesty that was clearly involved among functionally all high ranking Democrats.

Which brings us back to the real problem with KJP. She gave me a platform and excuse to hammer all that home again, really rub everyone noses in the reminder that Biden's dementia was a scandal a thousand times worse than Watergate, and that anyone who doesn't write off most of the DNC doesn't get to pretend to care about truth and norms ever again. And she did this not just while failing to provide any useful rhetorical chaff, but while making the situation actively worse and also reminding everyone about the consequences of DEI hires.

I saw that interview, and I saw her with Colbert, and also with some other journalist whose name escapes me now, and man oh man this lady does not want to acknowledge that anyone could have any legitimate concerns about Biden. It's like watching the Monty Python sketch about the dead parrot - Biden's just resting, see, he's pining for the fjords!

Who? A quick search indicates she was Biden's White House Press Secretary, and is definitely black, though not African American -- she was born in Martinique. The New Yorker seems to think she's relevant (she never was), but amusingly even Politico isn't impressed. Their headline and subhead is

Karine Jean-Pierre's book tour is non-stop cringe. Her former colleagues can't look away.
Democrats, who'd like to close the book on Biden, are horrified at the former press secretary's struggles to explain herself.

Chotiner is the New Yorker’s resident assassin. Merely being asked to sit down with him is a sign that someone wants to see you politically gutted.

I’m not sure the New Yorker really does view her as especially relevant, so much as they just need to toss a goat into the T-rex paddock every so often.

Chotiner is the New Yorker’s resident assassin. Merely being asked to sit down with him is a sign that someone wants to see you politically gutted.

Which honestly was predictable. Right now, for Democrats associated with the Biden administration, the smart move is laying low, not launching books. The party is still looking for excuses for its 2024 performance and its moribundity going into the 2026 midterm season. Peeking your head out, like Harris and now Jean-Pierre did, is just asking to be thrown under the bus.

Chotiner is the New Yorker’s resident assassin.

Is he? I'm not familiar with the New Yorker. I didn't find his questions all that hard; he mostly came across as someone trying to make sense of the word salad (maybe that counts as particularly hard in political interviews).

I didn't find his questions all that hard; he mostly came across as someone trying to make sense of the word salad (maybe that counts as particularly hard in political interviews).

Some people just can’t stop themselves from stepping on rakes. It seems like that’s an awful lot of people in politics. Presumably because they:

A: Like to hear themselves talk

B: Only respond to questions by deploying their talking points

C: Default to word salad when the first-level defense of talking points is penetrated

Chotiner is a massive liberal but he’s had some interviews where the interviewee just Yes Chad’d their way through, and they always come out looking better than the typical politician.

This is a good example with neo-con Eliot Cohen. https://archive.is/R8IZX

Another Chotiner classic, of him interviewing the President of the SFUSD school board:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250215094922/https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-san-francisco-renamed-its-schools

Chotiner: So none of the errors that I read to you about previous entries made you worried that maybe this was done in a slightly haphazard way?

Gabriela Lopez: No, because I’ve already shared with you that the people who have contributed to this process are also part of a community that is taking it as seriously as we would want them to. And they’re contributing through diverse perspectives and experiences that are often not included, and that we need to acknowledge.

Chotiner: I’m not quite sure what that means when we are talking about things that did or didn’t happen.

Lopez: I think what you’re pointing to and what I keep hearing is you’re trying to undermine the work that has been done through this process. And I’m moving away from the idea that it was haphazard.

This is about as hostile as he ever gets. His specialty is asking a question, getting nonsense back, asking what do you mean, and leading the interviewee to a total trainwreck.

I think theres a self selection mechanism going on where people who are aware that they have rope to hang around themselves know better than to be Chotinered. Those who are too stupid to realize they are entrappable don't show up. It is entirely possible that these people being interviewed aren't aware of their reputational flameout during the interview with ostensibly friendly New Yorker and then are blindsided that people think they're coming across as retarded once the piece is published. No how can you think I'm wrong can't you see the strength of my conviction?

I'm proposing hydro's law: the bigger a deal an individual woke black makes of being black, the more likely to be Caribbean.

I have one friend from the DR, and he always strenuously objects to being called black (or anything on the treadmill). He's Dominican.

So the meme is true...

same with britsish blacks, no? Its not nigerians claiming the mantle of BLM.

She fried her brain by too much time as Press Secretary, so her habits of deny, deflect, redirect, pretend to be "clear" are too strong when talking to journalists. Kind of fascinating from a psych perspective. I've said this before but most people don't appreciate how much politicians often end up ideologically captured by their own roles. Lots of people have this idea that every politician is a spineless weasel who will say anything to win if it matches their lane, but this is just wrong. Politicians often have silver tongues, but that's because it's an adaptive benefit on average. It doesn't have much to do with their core beliefs. Many, many politicians end up playing a role so long they come to believe it.

Part of me wonders if this is another puzzle piece behind why the Senate and Congress has been having so much trouble recently. Too much time talking to the media, and not nearly enough time locked in a room with each other. Older more historical Congresses, where you literally do need to sit your butt in a seat and listen to the speeches, had some kind of built in incentive to talk with each other, if not compromise. But nowadays, it seems like even if you do meet across the aisle, half the time it has to be in secret. Which is why that blowup a few years back about policing who could show up at certain DC restaurants was actually a big deal.

(Also, Chotiner definitely knew what he was doing posting this, as you can tell by the technically-accurate but definitely-throwing-shade summary line "Karine Jean-Pierre feels that Democrats were so mean to Biden that she is becoming an Independent.")

(Jean-Pierre, who served for more than two years in her role, which consisted of defending the Administration to the press and explaining its policies, also blames the Democratic Party because it “couldn’t articulate the achievements of the Biden/Harris administration well enough.”)

A stinging line. I assume that's about as harsh as the New Yorker gets when they have to criticize a Dem, but even so, it has some bite.

Amazing interview. This is probably an unpopular opinion here but.... I love the New Yorker. There really aren't a lot of other publications that are liberal-friendly enough to get this kind of access, but also smart enough to hold them accountable to their bullshit, and subtle enough to jiust let it speak for itself intead of trying to hammer the point into the readers' heads.

Her answers seem like actual double-think straight out of 1984. She's forccing herself to hold two contradictory opinions at the same time (that Biden was an amazing president who did nothing wrong, but Harris was also an amazing candidate who did nothing wrong even though she lost badly). Her loyalty is being proven by how strongly she's able to endorse contradictory postitions with no shame.

I couldn't help knowing because they trotted it out every single time she was ever mentioned. The fact that she was terrible at her job? Not mentioned so much (I did watch one announcement she made as press secretary and it was bad).

So there's another black woman of an immigrant background from the Biden administration who has a book out about how she was right and everyone else was wrong? Well, well, what a surprise!

Did you know that Karine Jean-Pierre was a Black LGBTQ Woman

Yes of course. After seeing her unbearably hideous mug on countless Twitter and fake news articles, the accompanying text undoubtedly contained that information. And of course I'm sure that's literally the only reason she of all people was chosen instead of literally anyone else on the planet.

I need to acid wash my eyes again after clicking on your link unfortunately.

hideous mug

??? She's fairly attractive as political bit-players go. Not Hollywood-actress attractive, but come on now. (Certainly she has the kind of pleasant, genuine-seeming smile that Kamala Harris could only dream of.)

As a card-carrying nigger (of Caribbean descent), after perusing Google Images, I will rate both Harris and Jean-Pierre at 3 out of 5. Jean-Pierre may get an extra −0.5 for having a fat face, but it's a close call. She definitely gets an extra −0.5 when she uses a weird asymmetrical straightened hairstyle.

More proof why the 5-point or 10-point scale fails. There is 1 or 0.

I thought the scale was inversely related to how many drinks it took to flip the 0 to a 1.

I can think of 8s who would be 0s for me and 3s who would be 1s. There's a correlation but not 1-1

It's 1 or 0, and you must live with the criticism/mockery from your bros about your picks.

Also angles of photos. I was looking at two different photos taken on the same set and at the same interview, and in one she looks bad and in another she looks okay.

I think her current hairstyle isn't doing her any favours and that particular outfit is awful, but she's older and she does have a plump face so it's going to be tough to look good all the time.

3/10. Hideous is strong but unattractive is appropriate.

Honestly I think the exact opposite. Even Joe Biden [can't keep his eyes open at the sight of KJP]. If I had to choose, I'd rather have portraits of Kamala everywhere than KJP. Of course KJP never had the opportunity to smile while getting railed on every single briefing because Joe Biden was doing his usual.

I guess attractive is a multifaceted term, but on a scale of "looks good fitting into a room full of suits and influential people (as a peer not as an Epstein guest)" I would put Kamala as a definite winner. I'm not a fan of her policies or fake black accent, but Kamala looks completely acceptable. KJP though... eww.

This sounds like a point against the aesthetics of suits and influential people.

Mostly leaving aside the race factor, two possibilities:

A) she has high chipmunky cheeks, and I suspect that's an unfortunately polarizing feature that she can't do much about. Some people find it cute, some find it off-putting, maybe fewer opinions in the middle.

B) she seems to have decided against adapting her makeup to the podium lighting, and it gives her an almost plastic look. Every picture on Google Photos she's just so shiny. I wouldn't say hideous but a somewhat 'uncanny' feeling.

I agree her smile does her many favors, and in the photos where she doesn't have that shiny-plastic look, yeah, above the political average and the prettiest of the last several press secretaries. Surprises me a bit to skip over the redhead.

You have an exceedingly warped perception of attractive.

At this point I just have to assume that some people's brain really just deducts 5 points or more for being black, judging by the periodic reactions here to some women's photos.

Friday Fun Thread project: Assemble a few dozen photos of celebrities (or just stock-photo models) of various races, solicit ratings from users of various races, and determine correlation.

Can't wait to have another "is Hillary Swank Zendaya hot?" discussion when Dune 3 drops!

I mean, this women was never going to become a sex symbol. Absolutely nobody wants to see her selling fitness routines. But she's not buttugly and unpleasant the way so many female politicians- especially democrats- commit themselves to firmly.

She is not the most ugly person I have ever seen. You don't need to think she's a beauty queen, but she could look worse.

Undoubtedly, there is a black lesbian who can speak clearly and who is connected enough to democratic politics to be on a list for the role. KJP may have been dumb enough not to realize she was signing onto a sinking ship; AFAIK, Biden's senility was an open secret. Ultimately, though, this is one of a number of bafflingly terrible decisions with no logic behind them whatsoever made by the Biden admin.

If Karine Jean-Pierre is unbearably hideous, then Lori Lightfoot is the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Lori Lightfoot is the Creature from the Black Lagoon a Fungi from Yuggoth.

Yes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

I can see it, especially with the Abundance bros.

Dankest timeline, etc...

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.

Probably yes.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?).

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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).

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 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.

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.

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.

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..."

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.

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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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?

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.

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.

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).

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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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