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Notes -
War, Genes, History, Capital, Data
Opening
I’m making a top-level response to the Quality Contribution (QC) of RandomRanger for the week of September 8, 2025: "But let's put sports to one side, what about the subject that sport emulates and trains for: war?". This will be blunt, but I’m open to being moved.
My stance: It shouldn’t have been a QC. The Motte defines QC as: "interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered." and the comment is certainly polished. But the bar that made me join here was higher: QC is a comment/post that explains something counter-intuitive, or something that changes my mind, or at the very least makes my view of the world more nuanced (and yes I know that I just repeated the same thing three times). This QC does the opposite: it uses an eloquent voice to sell a very strong claim about “racial war ability” that its own evidence doesn’t actually support.
The comment argues, and I quote, that: "there's no evidence that blacks are anywhere near as capable at warfare as whites and much to the contrary. Ye olde racist might be wrong 9/10 times but is right where it matters, regarding key civilizational abilities of which warfare is the most important".
Before I push back, I want to note what I think the QC gets right. It’s absolutely true that warfare is a brutally demanding composite of logistics, industry, organization, and abstract thinking, and that it tells more about a society’s real capabilities than feel-good representation in sports or prestige slots. I also think it’s fair to say that colonial wars were often “easy” given the power and capital disparities involved. My disagreement is not with those premises, but with the jump from those facts to a story about fixed racial essence.
In this comment I’m doing two things: (1) arguing that the specific racial thesis is not supported by the evidence presented, and (2) arguing that holding this up as Quality Contribution lowers the epistemic bar precisely where it most needs to be high.
Let's get into it. I have three rebuttals, and then some various thoughts that I put in an appendix.
1. "Too early to tell" isn't a dodge, it's history
Stephen Kotkin's "too early to tell" should be the first test for any broad assertions. Imagine The Motte in 1904, before the Battle of Tsushima, and the confident essays about how East Asians “just don’t have civilizational war in them.” Or The Motte in Tang-era China, self-secured about southerners who’d been ruled on and off for a millennium, then asks Vietnam about how permanent that looked. Hell, look at the Jews and how long did it take before they got to really rule themselves?
History routinely punishes premature essentialism. The fact that we can point to an era where one region dominates does not conclude a law of peoples for all time. And even within Africa, we’re barely a few post-colonial generations into modern state formation, compared to the half-millennium runway European and some East Asian states had to iterate on fiscal-military institutions.
On the timescales we are talking about, modern African states are a brand-new experiment. Their “industrial-era warfare record” consists of a small number of highly skewed trials, many of them fought under extreme external constraints. Declaring a permanent “war ability gap” on the basis of this very particular, very lopsided historical window is not caution, it’s overfitting.
2. "GDP not HBD” and that compound interest fights wars
War isn't about race, it's logistics, industry, and fiscal state capacity. If it can be pointed out how genetic components lead to the development of the bond market, increasing financial capacity to feed armies and wage wars, now that would be a much more compelling argument.
Right now, the examples in the QC are consistent with at least two stories:
The data cited in the comment simply doesn’t distinguish between (A) and (B). If we line up a low-capital polity in 1885 against a peak-industrial empire, we didn’t measure “innate war-ability”; we measured who got to compound capital for 400 years and who got repeatedly reset or never even started.
Take a more personal compound-interest analogy. Start two players at $100k and $1M: the 8% guy with a head start beats the 8% guy without it, every time. It should be obvious to everyone here that the player without the head start has to be more hardworking, more brilliant, more cunning, more successful, and do that repeatedly over a sustained amount of time to have a chance. If one side got centuries of relatively (I acknowledge "relative" is a load-bearing word) unmolested compounding (trade routes, gunpowder iteration, fiscal states, etc.) and the other got geographical isolation, depopulation, extraction, arms restrictions, and arbitrary boundary-drawing, then you don’t need chromosomes to explain outcomes.
This is what I mean by path-dependence (see Appendix point 7): outcomes depend on the sequence of early moves, not just the static “inputs” we see today. Once one cluster of polities industrializes early and builds fiscal-military states, and another cluster is repeatedly raided, partitioned, and ruled through extractive institutions, you should expect a persistent gap even if the “human material” were identical.
If you want to argue for (A) over (B), you’d need cases where institutions and capital are roughly comparable but ancestry varies, and then show a robust systematic gap. You’d also need to say what sort of controlled datasets or natural experiments might actually distinguish “genes → institutions → capital” from “history/geography/path-dependence → institutions → capital”. The QC never even sketches what such a dataset would look like, let alone shows it. Before we invoke genes, we should at least exhaust the far more direct account in terms of path-dependent sabotage, disinvestment, and the inertia of early advantages.
3. Mutilating a dataset and how successes are flukes, failures are inherent
Methodologically, there’s a clear pattern in the comment. When an African/Black polity wins, it’s “disease,” “terrain,” “numbers,” "politics," or “European rifles.” When whites lose strategically, it’s “just politics.” When blacks lose, it’s taken as evidence about their essence. That’s not a neutral reading of history, it’s a one-way explanatory filter that can only ever point in one direction.
On top of that, the metric itself is baked to produce the conclusion. “Only once did a black army inflict a major campaign-ending defeat on a white army” sounds impressive until you notice how narrow and hand-picked that category is: “black” vs “white” armies, in “major campaign-ending defeats”, under modern conditions defined by European great-power wars. If you define your dataset so that African victories mostly don’t count, then treat what’s left as a natural experiment in “racial war ability”, the result isn’t surprising—you built the maze.
Apply the same moves to European history and it becomes obviously silly. Napoleon’s march on Moscow? “Oh, that was just winter and supply lines, doesn’t tell us anything about French military competence.” Stalingrad? “Just weather and Hitler’s politics.” If you treat all your side’s failures as contingent and all the other side’s failures as intrinsic, you can prove anything you like about “innate capacity” without ever admitting you changed the rules midstream.
Now, to some of the specific cases.
Yes, the 1896 Battle of Adwa shows that forces with almost equivalent technologies (French vs Italian rifles/artilleries) but one side has the superior numerical advantage would lead to ... predictable results. That's not surprising nor evidence for some proof-of-contradiction for inherent racial ability. But notice what happens rhetorically: when Africans win at long odds against a European power, it gets filed under “numbers and technology, nothing to see here.” When Africans lose to an industrial power, it’s suddenly racial essence again. Heads I win, tails you lose.
And the 1935 Italian comeback was because of airplanes and ... chemical warfare. That's industry and international impunity, not racial revelation. The only tenuous argument that I think can be made here is why there wasn't industrialization of Ethiopia between the two wars, and well, industrialization is hard.
Haiti isn’t an asterisk, either. Attrition by yellow fever was probably the strategy as much as winter is Russia’s. I think a general who was also "well known as an 'herb doctor'" would be aware of the health advantages between his people and the colonizers. If Napoleon freezing outside Moscow counts as “Russian generalship plus winter,” it’s odd that disease in Haiti gets counted as “just disease.” Subtracting an adversary’s environmental advantages but keeping your own is a one-way filter, not an empirical method.
“Portuguese defeat were primarily political defeats, not military ones.” That’s a category error if you’re using those defeats as evidence of “innate capacity.” A great general once said: "war is a mere continuation of [politics] by other means", or in other words, to impose your will on the enemy at an acceptable cost. If your battlefield kill ratios are fine but you cannot hold territory, sustain the war, keep your coalition intact, or secure the population’s compliance, you have lost at the thing war is for. You don’t get to call tactical performance “essence” and strategic failure “mere politics” if your thesis is about civilizational war capacity. That’s not an exception, that’s just defeat.
Finally, let's jump to modern day and examine the vignette of "a fairly small Wagner force can go on safari and take a whole African country, they can go in on the Central African Republic and take their gold mines, take the country's foreign policy." Right, old-superpower-backed paramilitary group vs capital-starved country fractured by decades of external meddling. Again, not attributing industry and capital and international impunity, but assigning ancestry as the reason. If this scenario happened in Europe — say, between Russia and Georgia — we don’t suddenly say “there must be something deficient about Georgian ancestry.” We correctly treat it as a story about power, capital, and position, not chromosomes. The fact that the same kind of mismatch in Africa gets read as “racial war ability” is exactly the asymmetry I’m criticizing.
Closing
The QC claims that "there's no evidence that blacks are anywhere near as capable at warfare as whites and much to the contrary." On its own terms, it never actually establishes this. It interprets a highly skewed historical record under one favored story about essence, filters counterexamples until they don’t count, and then declares victory.
I’m not denying differences exist between peoples. I’m denying that the QC, as presented, can tell us where those differences come from, or cleanly separate history, capital, contingency, path-dependence, and politics from “innate ability.” It treats a lopsided, distorted record as if it were a clean experiment in racial war-ability, and then summarizes the result into "essence".
At best, the evidence on offer is compatible with multiple causal stories: one where genes sit at the root of everything, and one where geography, timing, conquest, and accumulated institutional and capital advantages do most of the work. Nothing in the QC even tries to tease these apart. It just assumes the genetic story, then reinterprets every data point in its light.
To me, that shouldn’t qualify as a Quality Contribution. QC should make it harder, not easier, to confuse the complicated truth from the stories we tell ourselves. If we’re going to invoke genes and civilizational fitness, the standard of care should go up, not down. Holding this up as exemplary lowers the epistemic bar precisely where it most needs to be high.
What would satisfy me? At minimum, an attempt to say what sort of controlled datasets or natural experiments might actually distinguish “genes → institutions → capital” from “history/geography/path-dependence → institutions → capital”, and some acknowledgement of how far our current evidence is from that ideal. And even then, I’d still want an answer to a simpler question: even if Europe and East Asia did get lucky in some deep way, why must that luck be retrofitted into a story about racial essence, instead of leaving it as just that, simply luck?
Appendix of unconnected thoughts
I like this post, I've read all of it, and there were a few nits I wanted to pick.
First, with your point 1:
The problem with this kind of thinking is that it ignores the pace of change we have experienced. If barely a few generations counts as a brand-new experiment, then demographic replacement of 30-40% of the dominant population within the same timescale counts as a catastrophe. We're currently two generations in to the accelerating racial replacement of Europeans in Europe and their colonies. Whites, in other words, in white countries built by whites for whites, as any Mottezin of 1904 would happily tell you.
If race doesn't matter, then we can afford to wait around for historical time scales before passing judgement. If race matters, then the time to act is decades ago, and yesterday, and today.
Which brings us to 2.
There's no starting, stopping, fair, or equal to be considered here. We're millennia, eons, removed from the starting point, and restarting to make everything fair is functionally the same as playing to win. This also reflects on the prior point: whites went from winning bigly to being replaced. What gives? Someone else is playing, and winning, the game. All I need to take A over B is to acknowledge race as an axiom of self interest*, and the rest follows. It makes no sense to discard genes when considering path if the gene is acknowledged.
Or, race doesn't matter and none of this matters. There's that sticky thorn again.
Along to 3.
What happens rhetorically is that the side that made all of the guns used by both armies gets bonus points, and the side that used borrowed technology gets dinged. The losing side learned better, stopped selling out, and came back with bigger, better stuff to assert its comparative advantages.*
Yellow fever has been beaten, Winter is undefeated. Yellow fever was beaten in the same way as all of the other advantages were defeated: through ingenuity and innovation exhibited infrequently outside of Europe.
The reason to give attribution to racial war ability is because there is first a difference in race, and a significant one. Two groups of slavs conquering each other doesn't leave much room for race. Second there is the matter of examples. Is there an African country that you think could stand up to Wagner? Probably Ethiopia at least. I won't count Egypt as I'm talking about people and not geography. South Africa used to have nukes, but "South Africa used to" could have been my whole post in four words.
I wanted to bring this part to the fore. This story is true, genes do sit at the root of everything, given you define everything as "life on planet earth." Yeah, genes really do sit at the root of everything. They're what differentiates between kelp and kangaroos, between horses and men. That's the point, that's the sore spot, that's your ultimate contention with the original post.
For the extras.
This is true, and the response is to ask why whites are choosing not to use the tactic they're best at, the ultimate tactic that offers no recourse: war. Why fight with one hand tied behind your back when you're losing, and why leave it there until it's too late?
I was very unimpressed with the AskHistorians links, because they actively prune any arguments that are racial in nature. That's the water we swim in, but I notice the water. I'm not sure you do. Most of this is a long disagreement that race matters, which I guess is the point. That has never made any sense to me. Of course race matters, how could it not? We don't have to understand it for it to matter, after all, and we'd see it in the outcomes if it did (we do). So between saying it's not a problem, and starting with wait and see, there's not much here to sway me.
Overall, good OP that you disliked, good reply from you, and that's what the QCs are supposed to be for. This has taken up plenty of my time, so I don't think I'll reach this length of post again in the replies, but I understand the struggle. I don't keep working on posts for more than a day, or two at most. The best you get from me is something like this, where I start writing in the morning and then reply in the evening. It's tough to make it worthwhile, and while there's always a place for quality, often what we want is timely.
*The parallels to modern day China are illuminating.
Thank you for taking the time to reply, totally understand the cost-benefit dilemma of "should I participate?" you're talking about. Since I did make a top-level comment, I will try to reply to all that replied to me.
That's definitely a dilemma, on one side is the possibility of inflicting injustice and persecution for who knows how long, the other side is making a civilizational-level mistake. I think I remember an AAQC that talks about how even if HBD is proven, they're not sure what would be the next steps and that some proponents of HBD does seem to be true "follow the science" types while some seems more interested in the societal engineering.
I suppose one can say that on a long enough timeline, everything will work out anyway so why worry about whether to act or not. At an individual level, migrate to majorly white societies and enact strict immigration assimilation laws. If race does matter, then over time, where suffering is stretched so thin it's minuscule, the "correct race" will win.
True, and I also still don't see how the disparity has to be explained by race.
I agree with you that right now I can't think of many countries in Africa that can stand up to Wagner. I've only recently gotten interested in African development so maybe I'll have a better opinion to share with all once I have more intuition on this.
Why does it have to be gene? Why couldn't it be something like: god exists, who is white, and doesn't like black people? Or they were cursed ala "Midichlorians isn't the Force, it's only an indication of the Force powerscale of a person" kind of situation?
I thought of this as well, but it was hard to find scholarship that was digestible and that I myself feel sufficiently authoritative. I've lurked for a while but it's not necessary that I know what sources would people accept. And even then, I don't necessarily want to deny myself a source that I would often trust. TheMotte for me is the same, another water where I dip my toe in and try to synthesize "the truth" from other waters I take from.
I do believe Argument 1, though the most abstract, is the most likely to instill some pause. Argument 2 and 3 aren't really attacking HBD itself but more the epistemology of the OG comment. From the vibes, I know that there's "not much here to sway" you, but maybe there was a slight flutter of the wings of a fly at least.
War does sharpen us, and so does culture war. I know that these are well-trodden grounds for you and others, it is probably tiring to debate and communicate over and over, so I really appreciate that you engaged with my comment.
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Off-topic, but what does The Motte in 1904 actually look like (let alone Tang-era China)? A republic of letters made up of philosophes writing comments to each other across Europe? A group of renegade thinkers meeting in a coffee house in Paris or Vienna to discuss the culture war? A resistance movement distributing pamphlets with top-level posts at the university of Munich? Dissident intellectuals spreading self-published copies of blog posts all over Russia? Come on, give me ideas; it'd make for a pretty cool cameo in an alternate history novel.
Ah yes, The motte as samizdat printed on shitty paper. Would read.
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There was a late Victorian right wing heterodox intellectual movement- the oxford revival. High church Anglicanism is mostly downstream from it today, including the parts that eventually became Catholic(this latter part was not, contrary to the criticisms in 1900, inevitable, but rather historically contingent on the Anglican communion deciding to have gay bishops).
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This is simply where I disagree with you on where the burden of proof lies, at this point in time particularly.
Genes > Institutions is simply and Occams Razor solution compared to the Diamondian History + Geography + Path Dependence > Institutions solution.
Diamondism has had the full support of the establishment and academy for over half a century at this point, and produced nothing persuasive. Instead, often entire points that are being asserted as fact are simply rebutted by looking at, for instance, the geography that actually exists or existed, or a list of animals that exist or existed in a place. When the same set of easily rebuttable set of ideas that all resemble each other are always easily wack-a-moled one by one, its not a good sign for the overarching theory or set of theories that is outputting those theories. And that is a fundamental problem for environmental and historical theories at this point.
I do agree with some of your observations, GDP is the war machine, of course. But that is limited. Everyone knows if you gave the Congo's most elite squad American equipment and drones and satellite, they couldn't protect their own President from an equal sized group of Marines if he was holed up in some cabin in the woods. Maybe if it was something overwhelmingly strategically advantageous like a mountain cabin they could do it, but Italians throwing rocks were able to deter many landings in WWI. No one thinks the Italian tech and GDP were superior to the British at the time.
Thanks for your response. If I am the God Emperor of Mankind 40K style, I would be tempted to try planet-scale experiments but you and others like @gorge has definitely pointed out the lack of evidence on my side "at this point in time particularly."
You could have just cloned a few dozen people for each population and test them 20 year later.
I think in my head, when I was thinking planet-scale, I actually want to simulate/create populations that goes to war with each other. So maybe seed un-colonized planets with different "mixes", wait a few centuries, and then evaluate the ensuing history. The initial setup will be quite important, probably babies raised by robots. A varying amount of planets, a varying amount of possible "mixes" per planet. All kinds of variations on starting points. It's a very Civilization kind of perspective based on CivBattleRoyale.
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These books are also often mum on the next most likely success story, whereas Genes>Institutions/Lynnian takes have a clear answer we can at least consider (Lynn was bullish on former socialist states with high IQ like China and Poland but by 2000 that might not have really been inhuman foresight)
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Not to turn this into a pile-on but:
The default premise of your post is that there exists somewhere an essence of parity between whites and blacks. And that this parity is obfuscated by external factors that give the appearance of an essential difference.
Which is in turn why you chastise RandomRanger for presuming an essence of racial difference.
Which is irksome, since most of the gist behind your post had already been responded to by RandomRanger to your "not very well thought out" response.
It's alright, thank you for your response and sympathy. I knew that I was coming in with a point of view that would come under attack AND that I am under equipped for the battle. But I do want to be the one who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again. I did look at RandomRanger response to mine at the time but I think it's a continuation of Argument 3. For example, I can examine this sentence:
Well conveniently for me there is W. Arthur Lewis who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. I can already imagine the counters, "Economics isn't a hard science", "It's not even a real Nobel prize", etc.. However, taking the sentence at its face value, for me it's a lapse in data.
I was more alluding to the premises you both afford yourselves. RR makes the point that there is already a substantial amount of evidence supporting his premise. To that end his historical just so stories at least serve a supporting role and fit a broader narrative.
I'm going to copy-paste some stuff so maybe you've already seen it.
My bailey is: "I'm not denying that civilizational differences in war exists, I'm denying that the QC comment as presented made a compelling argument that the reason for the differences is ancestry" My motte is: "I'm not denying that civilizational differences in ware exists, I'm denying that the reason for the differences is ancestry"
My 3 mostly expresses my bailey, Argument 1 and 2 mostly expresses my motte. I made a mess of the comment because I didn't clearly point out the two. But thanks for sharpening my thinking.
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I consider it extremely unlikely that all prior history will turn out to be a fluke, and a continent with an average IQ of like 70 will suddenly get really good at warfare now that it's more complicated than ever. Pointing out the handful of times in the last ten-thousand years that anyone from there defeated an army that wasn't barefoot doesn't really change the equation. Africa sucks at everything and the reasons aren't actually mysterious.
If you're talking about the entire continent, I think it's worth observing that Cannae is generally considered to be one of the most tactically successful battles in recorded history.
Africa almost always means Subsaharan Africa. Carthage was a Phonecian (Lebanese) settlement. The more meaningful division between Europe and Africa isn't the Mediterranean, it's the Sahara.
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Yeah, the Arabs/Berbers did manage to conquer the Spanish, the Tunisians did manage to go around slave-raiding and raping the Mediterranean (they even got to Iceland at one point IIRC), the Moroccans managed to beat Portugal badly at one point... but really he means sub-Saharan Africa not North Africa or Phoenicians in Africa. It's tedious to constantly add sub-Saharan though.
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Yes but as pointed out in Argument 1, there have been long periods of history where particular groups of people also had bad track records in warfare then at some point turn things around, it seems to me that it would have been just as easy to point to "ancestry" then too. It seems easy then that the same mistake is being made now. I will always remember this comment on /r/WarCollege that argues Paul Kagame is one of the most notable military leader alive and I always wonder how a person of that skill and intellect would have fared in a non-African conflict.
Listen, you claim not to be an HBD coper and I guess I believe you, but that just leaves me wondering exactly what you're coping so hard for. There's no amount of re-litigating the military historical record that's going to turn Sub-Saharan Africa into anything but a collection of primitive tribal civilizations that mostly get stepped on by everyone who comes along.
Like deadass, how much am I supposed to believe better geography or something would really do for a population missing two SD worth of average IQ?
You mean you wonder what this one outlier smart guy might have done if he had existed among a population capable of maintaining an advanced civilization. Yeah that's kind of the whole point.
After this thread, I think what I will do is wait 1 year and re-visit this topic. Personally, I have an ideological attachment to "all men are created equal" and an emotional attachment to the underdog story. And yes, that's coping, but I don't think it's yet "copium".
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GDP (or rather, what GDP is actually trying to measure, economically valuable output), doesn't compound. Countries hit points of diminishing returns, hit points where they are up against the edge of technology and the pace slows down, hit points of bad government, and other countries catch up because they don't have to invent anything new, they just rapidly adopt other inventions. Hence, how Japan caught up with the West in about 70 years, or how China is now blowing past the USA. If a country has good government, economic output converges toward what smart fraction theory would predict.
Consider this simple fact though: out of a billion plus people in countries all around the world, in countries of all different economic situations, in countries that were never colonized, or threw off colonial oppressors long ago, or had gentle transitions from colonialism, all different circumstances, there is not a single black owned and operated company that can produce an engine block (nor anything more technologically sophisticated than an engine block, like a jet turbine or a CPU). It's going to be pretty hard to be good at war without engine blocks and jet turbines.
Being good at modern war requires intelligence, and the lower average intelligence of subsaharan Africans is hardly tenuous, but this is well-trodden ground for people on this forum. You can start with Chapter 13 and 14 of the Bell Curve, a book that was "argued against" but never "debunked" (after spending a very long time evaluating the arguments from both sides, many years ago, I came to the conclusion The Bell Curve actually understates the case).
The last thing this forum needs are long AI assisted gish-gallop posts based on stuff the poster did not even read, think about, verify, and synthesize.
Thank you for your response, here's what I think of it
I'm really confused and maybe I need you to explain further but I am firmly of the belief that GDP compounds. It's also easy from my perspective that early wins/advantages leads to "snowballing" or sustained comparative advantage. And extension from that is others can close the gap if they don't have to go through the slower innovation/invention process and can achieve "faster compounding". I would attribute to China blowing past the USA in terms of manufacturing and certain technologies is because clearly they put way more focus and intentionally built the foundation for it in the past and now the future. Also we have to account that currently China has more people than the USA, that is undoubtedly an advantage.
Ok, I would like to invoke my Argument 1 and say I will wait for an African polity that "has good goverment". I actually think that time isn't too far away, optimistically it will happen soon (so 1 or 2 decades), at worst I do think it will happen before I die (which should be about 40-60 years away). The invading part though I'm not sure would ever actually happen.
Unfortunately I don't know mechanic skills, but I do believe a "powertrain" is more complex than an "engine block". I found Piston Automotive which is black-owned and "supplies powertrain systems, front-end cooling systems, chassis systems, BEV and PHEV battery packs, and interior systems for the automotive industry." and is a pretty big company. I'm sure I can find more. We can also find multiple car manufacturers in Africa that are black-owned (the first one I picked had a white-ish looking founder actually but the second and third one are very black-looking). You are right that there are currently no black-owned aircraft manufacturer that I can find. I do find lots of black-owned companies in the tech world. I think my Argument 2 is strong here, automotive industry is known to be capital-intensive, requires high vertical integration, if we just talk Africa, that's a lot of demand for a continent where 40% still living below the poverty wage.
Let me attempt at a rewording of my conclusion:
My Argument 2 and 3 mostly expresses my bailey, Argument 1 mostly expresses my motte. Unfortunately, HBD is not well-trodden ground for me so thanks for the linked book. I've only occasionally read HBD stuff because of the usual QCs around it, but I didn't focus or really think about them. I suppose as of the last year I have been focusing on great powers competition (in the current world) so the QC comment crossed my bailey.
Let me expand.
Well after World War II, northeast asian countries were maybe 60/40 for good government? China and North Korea bad, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan decent. And then a generation later, China got a decent government. How come African countries have flipped tails 50 or 100 times in a row? That said, I think there have been African countries with decent enough government.
I said owned and operated. Are the engineers black? Are the technicians black? That they are have a black front-man and are bragging about being "minority owned business" (a designation which potentially gives them all sorts of bonus points in getting various contracts) does not mean anything. It's pretty telling there are no photos of anyone but the owner... Maybe Linkedin, can help us out, yep, here is the VP of Engineering: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-miller-48350a12 The actual workforce looks very white: https://www.linkedin.com/company/piston-automotive/people/
What I mean is that there is no company with blacks at every important position in the engineering and production of some complex technological product.
China, India, South Korea, were all very poor, and then they figured out how to build more and more technologically complex products and sell them and then they got richer.
Touche. So I'll examine a few Sub-saharan car manufacturers and taking out the South African ones.
Scrolling through the Linkedin people listing, I see plenty of engineers, product designer, technician, etc. Are they small? Yes, but the question was are there any black owned and operated. Are they at very real risk of just being bought out by the bigger international players? Yes, but that just comes back to my Argument 2. I think these are good enough examples to satisfy your criteria.
You are right, and I don't have a good answer for this other than Argument 1. My instincts tells me that maybe there is an argument to be made of good governance appropriate for the timeframe or something about culture, there are plenty of other Asian countries that wasn't as successful. Bad for me but it seems like African countries might not be able to use the same playbook those countries used to pul themselves out of poverty](https://youtube.com/watch?v=tqZGsnUgCPA). Sorry for the chain of thought here but it's also something I'm grasping at. Time will tell whether I'm right or yall are right anyway.
PS: I agree Piston Automotive wasn't a good choice (I didn't do a deep enough dive), but to me they're clearly shows that they're black-owned but full of white workers
I said "owned and operated that can produce an engine block." Every time I learn about some breakthrough African company that is now making automobiles, it turns out that they are just doing final assembly with the engines being imported.
Innoson vehicles -- assembles cars from parts, engine blocks are imported source and source: "Car seats, steering wheels and engine blocks still had their fresh wrappings from shipping containers."
Kiira Motors -- uses engines from Cummins, an American company.
Katanka Group "The Living Apostle Who Sold The Media On The Myth Of 'Ghana's First Car' To the extent that the cars are produced in Ghana, it appears to be matter of final local assembly of components that have been stamped out and largely prebuilt in China. It would seem Kantanka's unique contributions amount to little more than the badges and trim, a fact that has escaped news coverage to date." Read More: https://www.jalopnik.com/the-living-apostle-who-sold-the-media-on-the-myth-of-g-1784458558/
Katanka Motors is defunct. It appears it was a partnership with Western companies so who knows how much they actually made themselves when they were in business.
Thank you for the research. I absolutely stand corrected.
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Honestly, one of my niggling doubts when I didn't take a stance on HBD was how the hell North Korea - despite appearing like an Africa-level basket case - was able to get nukes and survive being an incredible pain in the ass. It fit uncomfortably well with general East Asian competence, just for evil. Then again, of all cases listed, that's probably the one you can blame on geography the most.
If they didn't have Seoul in their sights and China at their backs they would likely have gotten stomped by the US regardless. But it always raised uncomfortable questions.
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But the East Asians were clearly pretty good at war even before 1904? Attila the Hun and the Mongols both managed to beat Europeans in their day. Notably China also developed the compass and gunpowder weapons. China was a big source of porcelain, silk and other manufactured goods.
OK and what's the root cause of that compounding then? Sub-saharan Africa had plenty of gold, ivory, arable land, they certainly had things that people wanted. But they consistently failed to produce powerful states and institutions (you need to be highly organized and orderly for that), they failed to take control of trade routes (you need advanced financial abilities, strong laws, shipbuilding and seamanship), they failed to develop advanced metallurgy/textiles for industry and weapons (you need to be smart for this). Even today, the sub-Saharan African countries still can't make any advanced technology domestically, only apartheid South Africa could make their own jet fighters, nuclear weapons or pioneer heart transplants.
They had a shield of disease that prevented more capable foreigners from conquering them, that's how they retained independence (and how they expanded to the Caribbean tbh). But the moment that quinine pierced the shield, the Scramble for Africa.
Meanwhile Poland got carved up, plundered, colonized, genocided, communismed for a few centuries and they're now highly developed, producing infrared photonics, AAA video games, high-precision plasma generators. The Ottomans were slave-raiding, plundering, raping Eastern Europe for centuries. Eastern Europe is now highly developed. They make tanks, steel, nuclear reactors, aircraft carriers, hypersonic missiles... China got wrecked for a century, then hit with a particularly bad strain of communism but they're a superpower today.
Historical compounding and catch-up growth is a consequence of innate ability. Yes, there are historical and geographical factors that matter. But they matter less than innate ability. Even under Maoism, China was a major world power that could fight the US to a draw in Korea, develop ICBMs and H-bombs. Innate ability is the key. That's the best way to explain this trend.
This scenario didn't happen in Europe. The Russians (a full army and air force) went in on Georgia and walloped them, imposing a limited defeat. It was not a small band of adventurers like Wagner that took over a whole country and exploited their natural resources.
The strongest African powers occasionally hold off the weakest European powers but almost always lose. That's the key trend. Numbers and technology are of course very important. Mobilizing that is the whole aim of the game. Any win is still a win. But it's a very different kind of win to Russia fighting a very strong European power's full offensive power (making their own weapons) and marching their troops into Paris! The Russians did not merely fend off the French, they all but conquered France. The Ethiopians never conquered Italy.
What I mean by political vs military victory is kind of the difference between Saigon becoming Ho Chi Minh city and New York becoming Vo Nguyen Giap City. That's a wholly different kind of victory, a total success at arms when all political resources were fully committed to the struggle. Some black countries achieved the former, never the latter.
Well if we introduced Africans to a very high human-capital civilization like America we'd assume the institutions would rub off on them right, they'd suddenly realize (like the East Asians did) how to do things effectively? Right? There'd be no chronic dysfunction, massively high crime rate, no poverty issues, no massive crime rate? They'd start getting STEM Nobels?
Or a US-supported black colony in Africa, with a constitution directly copied from America, shielded from any external threat by US power, that'd do well right?
Or all these black refugees/economic migrants heading to Europe, they'd be doctors and lawyers, not rapey welfare-abusers right?
But no, Liberia is a shithole, it's just the same as other West African countries. US blacks are violent, unproductive money-sinks. Europe is getting very sick of these refugees. I don't understand why centuries of poverty and brutal oppression immediately washes off Poles, Irish, Russians, Chinese, Koreans and they can immediately go out and do great things once free but blacks are somehow uniquely vulnerable to slavery and mistreatment that they'd be permanently degraded by this (in Ethiopia's case it was only a few years of Italian rule). The simplest scenario is that they're innately less capable.
I think it's much more dangerous to think that one's strength is in institutions or ideology rather than race. Racists like Stoddard (he wrote 'the rising tide of color') were extremely farsighted in predicting the power of China by observing the ability of the Chinese people. Whereas institution/culture people still deny Chinese potential, recall all the cope about how 'communists can't innovate.' We don't hear that much any more.
It's only dangerous if I'm wrong. But the predictions of racists have been proven more accurate than the anti-racists. The integrationists of the 50s and 60s thought that US blacks would be performing as if they were white, the investment would've paid off by now. But it hasn't. This is the arrogance that has cost trillions in fruitless, unjust DEI, tens of thousands of raped or murdered whites who 'didn't want to be racist', whole books like 'White girl bleed a lot' or 'Don't make the black kids angry' which are nothing but compilations of the tragicomedic failure of the antiracist worldview and the endless media/education work that's needed to prop it up.
Thank you for the response. Obviously, your OG comment, followups, and this thread has given me a lot to think about. My personal belief (so I guess a bad bet that I'm willing to commit to) is that within 10 to 30 years, we'll see major upheavals in Africa as it "comes online" so to speak. If there aren't any, obviously I would be wrong and you all are ahead of idealists like me. Even the biggest of "copers" or ideological believers would struggle after a century of evidence.
I know that we can go line by line on claims made by both side and do an "Adversarial Collaboration" like @gorge so helpfully did for me briefly downthread, but unfortunately I am not that focused on this topic. I think at the essence of it, I like my premise more than yours and I find your and others arguments unconvincing still. So howabout this, I will touch base on this topic in a year? I do need to digest and research more on the many things people pointed out. By then, either my viewpoint has changed or I would have come up with some other arguments for us all to examine together (yet again).
As for the problems of slave-descendants in America, I don't have a concrete viewpoint about it at the moment, it's probably pure vibes for me but I do think generational trauma is real, that the external (culture and institutions and ideology) are way more powerful and can overtime erase the innate.
Yeah, it's of course open to observation and review. I just get the sense that sub-Saharan Africa tends to be structurally vulnerable. HIV was bad, Africa hit hardest. Leninism was bad, Africa hit hardest (at least the communist bloc could develop industrialized societies and largely escape subsistence agriculture).
Whenever anything bad shows up, Africa is usually hit hardest. Whenever anything good happens in Africa, it's usually squandered somehow (Nigerian oil revenues, Equatorial Guinea's oil revenues, black South Africa and Zimbabwe's inheritance of infrastructure and capital). Botswana's diamonds are the major exception but even so, the country is still HIV-ridden and mired in subsistence agriculture. Whenever anything good happens in the rest of the world, it struggles to reach Africa except for European enclaves like South Africa, despite a great deal of investment.
An earthquake in Haiti will be catastrophic, merely damaging in the Dominican Republic... that's the trend I see.
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People said this kind of shit about South Africa thirty years ago and look how that worked out. Just like the large heavily-black American crime shithole city I live near, ten years away from a big comeback for the last fifty years.
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Please elaborate
My anecdata consists of two things that happened within the last month or so:
Maybe it's all bullshit just trying to tie a pattern to small data points, but I am inferring a positive upward trend with regards to Africa.
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Modernity and the welfare state and its consequences have been a disaster for the black community. With a highly ordered religiously enforced nuclear families they were alright. When the state actively disincentivizes having a second parent in the household you get ratchet hood shit and women with several baby daddies. A memeplex can shore up the natural deficits in a community up to a point. When you don't even have that you get what we now see. Parentless behavior.
I agree that this is an empirically valid effect. But even in the late '50s it was the same old story - 10% of the population, 60% of the crime.
https://x.com/1776General_/status/1965505815366004743
Probably it's one of those multicausal clusterfucks so common in the social sciences. Parentless households, soft-on-crime policing raise crime. Forensics, modern surveillance, wealth increases and aging population reduce crime. Nevertheless, there remains this vast gulf for as long as statistics can show us. State disincentivizes having a second parent in the household, blacks hit far harder than whites. Soft on crime policing? Black crime rate rises higher than white. Drugs emerge? You know the drill... The big story is that base-level difference.
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No comment on the rest of your post, but I will comment on this.
First, complaining that a post you didn't like or think was deserving received a QC is one of the most tedious of complaints. QCs are necessarily subjective. Not everything that gets nominated is selected for a QC, I assure you. There are people who automatically AAQC any post that expresses a view they agree with. Even the shittiest boo outgroup hot take will get some AAQCs from certain people, just because it validates their feelings and they love seeing their outgroup get shat on. @naraburns is the one responsible for choosing which nominated posts actually get listed. Obviously that means the list leans towards what he deems to be worthy, but I know he does not just choose posts he likes or agrees with.
You thought a particular QC wasn't interesting enough or didn't really support its argument? Okay. Whatever. That's just, like, your opinion, man.
But more importantly, it inspired you to write this long post in response, which is very much the raison d'etre of the Motte. To get people to test their ideas and receive effortful responses. Now, we've seen the argument before "If a terrible, low effort post provokes a lot of discussion, doesn't that make it a good post?" Well, no, but on the other hand, you complaining that a QC didn't measure up and then writing a long rebuttal to explain why... sort of does make that argument.
I also want to add that your mention of using AI made me raise my eyebrow, because a lot of this text looks kind of like AI generation. I don't think you wrote it entirely with AI, but if you are using AI to "fill out" the volume of your post, then you don't really have any standing to be complaining about the quality of someone else's post.
Thanks for the feedback and also letting me expand more on my points.
Well, FWIW, I unfortunately have now flagged you as "that guy who uses AI" and I will skip over your posts without reading them from now on, unless I am required to skim them because you've been reported.
It's one thing to use AI to do grammar checking or even bounce ideas off of. But it's pretty clear you used AI to do large chunks of your writing for you.
Right now our rules about AI usage are sort of fuzzy; someone obviously posting an AI-generated post is going to have that post removed, but it's hard to prove something is AI-generated, and we don't really have a rule about how much AI is too much. You deserve credit for owning it, but you need to know most people don't want to read what an AI thinks, or what an AI writes after you typed what you think into a prompt.
Sounds good. It's harsh to hear but it's good to know one's own audience (whether they're receptive to AI usage and how much). I'll keep it in mind for next time. I could share all my conversations with AI so others can see for themselves how much I use it but I'll be better about that the next time I participate.
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Is this not a prime example of such a post?
Debatable. It looks like he wrote or edited some of it himself, and like I told him, we don't really have a rule about how much of your post can be written with AI assistance. Also, since I've already talked to him about it, it seems kind of unfair to go back and delete the post now.
If he keeps doing this, the mods will discuss it and we will likely remove such posts in the future.
Just because smh rationalizes his AI usage with "well I wrote some of it myself" doesn't mean we need to take that excuse from just anyone -- this post is the very definition of AI slop; if you're going to let that slide there might as well be no rule at all. Enjoy your 10k word back-and-forth posts as people point their AIs at each other, I guess.
Monsieur's dissatisfied snapping of fingers is duly noted.
Tres drole -- what actually is the exact rule about AI posting? I forget, but I thought it was theoretically not allowed on grounds of low effort. (other than the "but I was just using it to help me edit" excuse/loophole, which is clearly not true with this guy -- have you been reading his replies?)
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You Gotta Serve Somebody
TLDR: The most important choice you make in life is who you will choose to follow. Obedience is agency.
Earlier this week, there was a long conversation about agency and its apparent reduction, leading to my reply on the topic of how we build agency in kids. Particularly this example passage from Herodotus sparked a lot of discussion from the crowd:
I offered it mainly as a fun little example of boys being boys throughout human history, whether it is ten year old Persian boys playing palace, or 12 year old boomer boys playing sandlot baseball, or 14 year olds in 2002 playing D&D late into the night at scout camp; how the best and brightest rise naturally to be leaders in any of those endeavors, and this teaches boys to find their role in the group and seek to raise their status by getting better at things according to their ability. But some of our friends saw something a little darker in it:
@Bombadi said:
@Corvos among other things said:
And my reply to first one, then both of them spiraled outward until it became entirely too large to be a reply to one small comment, so I’m branching it out.
You gotta serve somebody. Obedience and submission is the ultimate act of human agency and will. Who you choose to obey and what you choose to submit to is what decides who you are and how you live your life, for good and for ill. An effort to avoid serving anyone, to be totally free of obligation or obedience, is a life thwarted, stunted, never to grow to its possible power.
Cyrus was not the only one displaying agency here, all the boys were displaying their agency, except the son of Artembares who was displaying cowardice and weakness. The boys got together, decided on a set of rules, elected a leader, and followed the orders of their chosen leader. They all used their will collectively to imbue their chosen leader with power, to make their chosen rules the rules, and make that will a reality. That is the essence of agency: organizing amongst themselves to work together, and choosing a leader who will work most effectively towards those goals.
And they could not have chosen better. We hear nothing of these boys in the future, to my recollection. But if they maintained their relationship with Cyrus after he became Great King, if he remembered their loyal service in their youth, then they were set for life. The spoils of Cyrus’ empire would have flowed into their coffers, they would have been Satraps and Generals, lords over peoples and estates. They would have pillaged Babylon, Lydia, Egypt, Ionia, Phoenicia. They would have had rich and beautiful wives of noble family, their sons would have been great princes and nobles.
Those who were cruel to the young Cyrus were luckier if he forgot them. The son of Artembares, he displayed not agency but weakness. He chose the game to start, he chose Cyrus, then he hesitated, he lacked the courage to commit, he tried to change horses midstream and wound up all wet. Rather than abide by the rules that he and his peers had organized together, rather than live in the world conjured by their own collective will, he tried to run to his daddy and get bailed out. He’s lucky if he was simply forgotten when Cyrus was Great King.
The choice of who to follow determine our lives. Man is at core a political animal, “apes together strong,” how we choose to organize ourselves determines our power and our ability, and who we choose to align ourselves with determines how far we rise. Whether we are ancient Persians choosing to follow a king, Romans choosing a Consul, Israelites choosing a Rabbi who claims to be the Messiah, soldiers choosing how to follow orders from an officer, citizens choosing sides in a civil war, students choosing which professor to try to seek mentorship from*, choosing a boss to follow or a business partner to work with or a company to dedicate our efforts to building, a young athlete determining to listen to everything the coach or the team captain says, a woman choosing a husband, an investor choosing a startup to go all-in with, a man picking a religion or a political party. We all gotta serve somebody.
Agrippa was the childhood friend of Augustus, he chose to follow Augustus at a time when it was not an easy choice to remain loyal and his loyalty made him a great man whose name and story I remember off the dome. The Apostles of Jesus and the Companions of the Prophet and the Sravakas of the early Sangha all became great men, great religious leaders, saints, because they saw a man worthy of loyalty and remained loyal. Lafayette and Hamilton submitted themselves to Washington when they joined the Continental Army. Ringo and George became gods following John and Paul around.
Every Billionaire makes many millionaires, some make other billionaires! Wozniak would never have been a household name if he had refused to follow Jobs. Ballmer would never have bought the Clippers (and gotten into trouble for breaking the salary cap rules) without the money he earned working with Bill Gates. Musk, Thiel, Bezos, and Huang have all made many of their friends and compatriots and early employees rich. The great coaches across sports spawn sprawling family trees: Bellichek and Saban famously demanded total dedication and loyalty from their assistants and players, but dozens of their assistants and former players have become great head coaches in their own right today. You’re much more likely to get rich by choosing the right guy to partner with or to work for than you are to get rich by founding the company yourself.
And you can choose wrong, with dire consequences. Think of those who chose to follow Benedict Arnold instead of George Washington. Think of those who backed Pompei over Caesar. Think of those zealots who aligned with Judas Iscariot over Jesus Christ. Think of those who backed and dedicated their lives to the vision at WeWork or at Theranos, instead of Tesla or OpenAI. You gotta serve somebody.
For most people, most of the time, agency is in choosing who to follow, who to take orders from, what orders to take. Choosing who to submit to in marriage is the most important decision most people make in their personal lives, and choosing to punt the decision and never marry is an equally important and life-deciding choice. Whose treatises and manifestos do you read? What political party do you sign up for? What candidate do you vote for? Who do you work for? Who do you give your money to? This is what agency looks like.
Coming off @Thoroughlygruntled ’s reply from the prior thread bringing up the Boy Scouts as a vehicle for boys to “go into the woods and throw rocks at each other” and thus build agency, and returning to kids for a moment. What I see as the truly great aspect of Boy Scouts is that if an average boy remains in the scouts from 11 to 17, he will go through every phase of the troop. He will join as an 11 year old, working to make Tenderfoot, and he will be in the bottom group of 11-12 year olds who are basically useless to the troop, who need to be shown how to do anything, who can’t keep up on hikes and their backpacks are taken up by the stronger older boys, who need to be protected from others and from themselves, who will need to be closely supervised when doing any task. The 11-12 year old looks to the older boys for help and guidance with everything, for leadership and mentorship, and they learn to listen to the older boys. Then they’ll grow up, get their First Class badges, and they’ll be in the middle group of kids, 13-15, who are basically self-sufficient and competent, who can be trusted with basic tasks like building a fire or pitching the kitchen tarp. They’ll become responsible members of the troop, trusted to handle themselves and expected to do what the 16-17 year olds tell them, and to instruct the 11-12 year olds. Then they’ll grow a few years older, and the older boys they grew up with will graduate and leave the troop, and they will become the older boys, the troop leaders, the 16-17 year olds. They’ll become the Senior Patrol Leaders and ASPLs and Quartermasters that the younger boys rely on for guidance and support. They’ll become the older kids guiding the younger boys. Boy Scouts is one of the few remaining organizations that delivers that kind of clear life advancement over time for kids.
Or at least it was. I had this argument many times with people about admitting girls to the Boy Scouts. It’s not that I think girls can’t enjoy or benefit from mostly the same program and activities that Boy Scouts runs, it’s that the moment you insert 12-17 year old girls into the group, it can no longer be self governing. Nobody wants to see a 17 year old senior patrol leader “guiding” a 13 year old girl without close adult supervision, and once you add close adult supervision the entire vision is destroyed. Who knows if my sons will be able to benefit from scouting, if they’ll ever get Eagle or get voted into the Order of the Arrow like their old man.
But I hope, whether it is in scouting or elsewhere, that they’re able to learn to obey and to lead. One cannot truly be capable of one without the other. Someone who cannot listen cannot give orders, someone who cannot give orders can’t really listen. We all give orders or take them in greater or lesser degrees as our talents provide in the Great Chain of Being, but we all gotta serve somebody.
*One of the reasons “Mentor” and “Mentorship” have become degenerate buzzwords rather than live concepts is that we do such a bad job of teaching young people how to be proteges. Mentorship isn’t a one way street, wherein your mentor altruistically imparts knowledge and favors onto a young subordinate in exchange for nothing. Rather, the protege must demonstrate his value. This can be that the protege demonstrates his simple talent: one day he will be important, and that will reflect well upon his mentor as well as put him in a position to dispense favors to his mentor in his turn. It may be doing favors or tasks for his mentor. It may be willingness to take the fall, take the blame, take the bullet for his mentor when necessary. But it will certainly involve loyalty and obedience. Choosing a person within an organization to be loyal to is a key part of advancing in any hierarchy, whether it’s a sports team or the Boy Scouts or a corporation or a police department or a courthouse or a military. However meritocratic a bureaucracy may purport to be, who you know is always important. Without the loyalty of the protege, the mentorship is meaningless, just an endless series of networking lunches.
We followed the man because he embodied the virtues of office that effect the manifestations of success within ourselves, and we replaced the man with tbe office hoping that virtue can be embedded within the wall and text like words of power. Modern failure is due to the office being sacrosanct and the selection of men to enter such offices is done by chicanery crookery or chance. The corner office is degraded by the incompetent holding it as his own, but the failure is to let the incompetent drape himself in the trappings of virtues rewards without the work. The gatekeeper to the doors of office are what maintain or degrade the virtues desired, and when the office is hollowed then other offices are made to do what is necessary without the gatekeeper being present.
The great man and great leader works fantastically for small group organization where personal affect can be sustained, but it fails to scale horizontally or linearlly past death. Old boy networks held the line when mass labour mobilization and consolidation let in incompetents, but those networks had to be hidden, impossible in modern digital communication.
Right now the gatekeepers are the masters of the offices and the great men are replaced by what the gatekeepers deem relevant. With the rewards still accruable to the islands of competence, what incentive is there for greatness to subject themselves to the struggle session of gatekeeping proles or bureaucratized academica? The obvious problem is that the system as a whole rots, but thats the fault of the system for ennobling asskissers and tokens.
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Our modern childish individualism sees people as complete and perfect, needing no training or education at all. We are taught to resist and subvert legitimate authority, and submit to the opinions of strangers on the internet.
How much of our educational idiocy is downstream of the inability of teachers to command the respect and attention of their students?
How much of our criminal idiocy is downstream of the resistance of large sections of the public to basic enforcement of the laws?
How much of our political idiocy is downstream of the unwillingness of our ruling class to support the government they control?
Ultimately, we all spend our lives on what we find important. We follow the rules we must to get where we want to go. We all serve, we are all limited. Freedom is not the lack of restriction, it is the choice of restriction.
One might note that "legitimate authority" hasn't exactly covered itself with glory recently.
If it's "legitimate" then we wouldn't be taught to resist it, now would we?
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Why? How great would Cyrus have been if he operated simply on lizard brain tit for tat?
The difference between a great king and your common Crip is that the great king understands that there's more to life than getting even.
Not to mention that choosing to rebel is also a choice. Better to reign in hell, etc etc.
The most agentic angel in Milton isn't Satan, it is Abdiel, the one angel who is present when Satan incites rebellion in heaven but chooses to be loyal.
Have we wrapped around to "agency is doing as you're told"? Running and telling Father about the rebellion is worse than what Artembares' son did.
Agency is as much having the ability to do what you're told as having the ability to not do what you're told. An individual who can't follow instructions, who can't cooperate with others, who chafes under any guidance, who rebels against any authority, lacks any agency just as much as someone who can never act against the crowd.
So what you're saying is, if Satan didn't rebel you'd think he was high agency?
Whose instructions did Cyrus, your high agency wunderkind, follow? Or is the top dog the only one in the chain with no agency, and all the goons high agency?
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Good post.
This is explored in the ending of Xenophon's Education of Cyrus, and forms the core of Xenophon's argument against monarchy, actually. Xenophon argues that what Cyrus did was take the best men of his people, lead them in glorious asabiyyah to ruling a great empire- and then what? What Cyrus has to do, once becoming Great King, is to make his friends worse men. He has to play them off against each other, he has to reduce their formidable wills, he has to effectively castrate the excellence and will to power that made these men worthy friends. Even the greatest king cannot be truly good to his friends, no matter how many satrapies he gives them, because he has to stay on top.
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I believe most scout troops (age 12-17) are still single-sex. There are some pairs of boy and girl troops that meet at the same time, but where I've seen this the young girls seem to be much better at taking charge of things (girlboss memes?) and there doesn't seem to be any pressure on the boys to step up and actually lead, which despite cultural memes doesn't actually seem to be something little boys want to do without a leadership vacuum or adult prompting. Most troops seem to still be single-sex in practice, but this may somewhat depend on your area.
I believe the Boy Scouts require their troops to be single sex, for obvious reasons relating to liability and chaperoning policies.
Troops, yes. They already have had other types of co-ed units: Venturing (age 14-21) and Cub Scouts (elementary school), for example. The chaperoning policies include a semi-annual multi-hour training course for adults.
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It's a little more complicated than that. There are single sex troops, but that also alters a lot of events where both male and female troops will be necessary. The troop level is only relevant for the weekly meeting and for troop-only events. If scout summer camp or high adventure camps admit both male and female troops, then that event is co-ed. If the local church has a boys and a girls troop and they hold camping trips together, if the local council jamboree or civil war reenactment event has both boys and girls, local Order of the Arrow, etc. Then each of those events becomes co-ed, and advanced adult supervision becomes necessary, and kid independence becomes lessened.
Venture scouts have existed for a long time, but there's a reason they start at 14 instead of 11.
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Taking this apocryphal story at face value, Artembares clearly displayed agency by refusing to obey. The argument that he agreed to the rules and helped elect the "king" and then refused to go along seems a little suspicious and convenient; one would suspect something else happened that made him say "Nah," but to call refusing to go along with the crowd a lack of agency is quite a weird argument. Yes, you gotta serve someone (in some sense), but refusing to serve a particular person is a choice.
Arguably running to daddy to complain is cowardly and weak. But if instead he'd knocked Cyrus in the dirt, I don't think you'd be saying he lacked agency.
I define Agency, inasmuch as we are describing a virtue, as something a little nobler than a deadbeat dad. Agency isn't just lack of discipline, it isn't just doing what you want when you want to, it isn't just "if it feels good, do it." A person who starts something but can't finish it is clearly lower agency than someone who finishes what they start. Giving in to the temptation to quit easily over every unpleasantness is a lack of agency.
Two kids join a baseball team. One does the bare minimum of showing up to practices, goes through the motions of the drills, then refuses to play the outfield and tells the coach that he refuses to play any position except shortstop or pitcher. The other shows up early to practice and stays late because he wants to do his best in every drill, practices as hard as he can, and goes wherever the coach tells him whether it is second base or right field or shortstop because he just loves baseball and wants to get into the game.
Which, in your view, is a higher agency kid?
That's an easy setup with an obvious answer. But "Obey the little shit who got elected as our sandlot 'king' no matter how tired you get of this game" is not showing agency, persistence, or drilling and practice. It's just being a submissive bootlicker.
I think the connection between the two setups is that the lazy and annoying kid who refuses to play right field or be in the band if he isn't lead singer or play DnD if he isn't DM, he will always insult the other kids by saying that they are
This is the universal cry of the burnout too lazy to study calculus, the kid who doesn't want to be on the football team if he has to do two-a-days, the guy who never makes progress in the gym because he doesn't want to stick to a program, the unemployed loser insulting his brother who just made VP at the bank. There's a balance between the two, Agency as a virtue means a moderation of willfulness and submission, having the strength to endure unpleasant things to get what you want, and the strength to choose what it is you want.
I guess we're both projecting our own version of what the setup and rules for ancient Persian and Mede kids playing "Palace" would be, and determining the outcome based on our vision.
But surely you can see my point here, that refusing to play isn't inherently more agentic than choosing to play, and that in many cases the individual who "takes his ball and goes home" is in fact less agentic than one who endures discomfort or a less than ideal situation to keep up with something they want to do?
Nor is choosing to play inherently more agentic than refusing to play. You can choose not to play. And if that means breaking commitments or you choose not to play because it was too hard, perhaps that speaks poorly of your character. But--
Agreeing to make some other kid "king" is not a commitment as binding and serious as joining a sports team or signing up for calculus or agreeing to start a workout program. The scenario you (Herodotus) present is that some kids made Cyrus king for a day, one kid got sick of it, and you argue that he was wrong to get tired of the game. He should have continued bowing and scraping until Cyrus said the game was over, dammit! Again, I think "running to daddy" was the weak part, not when he got tired of calling Cyrus king. But Cyrus responded to some kid not respecting his "authority" by getting the other kids to gang up on him and beat him, and you (Herodotus) praise him for this!
You are presenting one principle ("You should choose your commitments and stick to them") but supporting it with an entirely different argument ("You must be obedient and you may not change your mind").
I honestly find your entire argument rather baffling. "You gotta serve somebody" is a truism that sounds profound on the surface, but essentially you're saying "Choose your master and obey him." Herodotus presents this as an anecdote about how awesome and naturally kingly young Cyrus was. Not being enamored of kings, or the concept of any man being "born to rule" (and others born to bend the knee), I don't know what to make of your ode to submission except that I reject the premise. We all serve someone, willingly or not. We don't have to make a virtue of it.
Let's take a closer to home example of self-organized play then: is the poster on theMotte who lashes out at the moderators and refuses to play by the rules more or less agentic than the poster who abides by the rules and advocates for their position?
TheMotte is actually a pretty good example of what I'm talking about, when I think about it. We respect those who demonstrate their worth, their skill and charisma, often if they are interested they end up as mods, they're in a position to change some of the rules if they want to enough. Those who lash out and can't handle the rules, they flame out, they don't have any impact.
The Motte equivalent of Artembares is someone who decides we suck and leaves (and then goes to whine about us on reddit). We can't actually keep people here who decide they don't want to play anymore.
Or if you want to compare Artembares to the guy who lashes out and gets banned - yes, he is being agentic and he's quite entitled to decide he doesn't want to follow the rules. And we're entitled to ban him.
That's where I disagree, I don't think the people who come here and then lash out are agentic. I think they are slaves to their own passions, incapable of agency because they can't operate within the rules. What amazes me about this place is the people who get banned and come back and get banned again. They clearly want to be here, but the moment a rule offends their delicate sensibilities they lash out and ruin it for themselves. Over and over.
I don't look at such a person and see a wild stallion who can't be tamed, an electric centaur with the true spirit of freedom in their breast. To me such a person is a slave, lacking in agency, they can't do the things they want to do because they are too chained to their own feelings.
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Is there an obvious answer to to that setup? One of the kids loves baseball and seems to enjoy every part of the practice, the other kid's maybe only there because the authority figures in his life are forcing him and does the bare minimum to not get in trouble. We don't get any insight whatsoever into the first kid's agency, and the lack of more open defiance from the second could show a lack of agency, but then that would be counter to FHMs larger point. (Which I think is nonsense, tbf. His entire post seems to be "agency=good, therefore the action that lead to the best outcome must have been the highest agency".)
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There is something to your broader point, but...
Choose is doing a lot of work there. In the anecdote you give:
Did this boy choose Cyrus? Actively, willfully? Or did he 'choose' in the sense that I 'choose' to pay my taxes because something something Social Contract means that a big man will hit me with a stick if I don't? 'Collective will' so often imitates that Fuentes line: 'your body, my choice'. Cyrus was a tyrant who didn't give a single shit about your 'choices', and we can tell because when that boy does make an active, willfull choice, Cyrus has him beaten.
How many choices does one need to be offered before it is a choice, in your opinion?
Meta, but I also just wanted to thank you for responding to criticism with a proper well-written top-level post. I'm dubious on a decent chunk of the actual argument but good-faith, constructive responses to disagreement are not so common.
Cheers. What I enjoy about this place is when criticism causes me to learn more about my own hot-takes, I knew Teddy's history in my head but talking to you caused me to look up the passage in his autobiography, and it turned out the story was far more on-point than I realized. My opinion on the topic is deeper as a result.
Happy to be of service. Note that Teddy's original turn towards the strenuous life and deliberate weightlifting was prompted by his father though (at least as relayed in The Rise of Roosevelt by Edmund Morris, strong recommend). His father basically told him flat out that he had a brilliant mind, but that it would do him no good unless he built bodily strength to match, which Teddy assented to.
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At least 2, of which one cannot be 'I punish you harshly for not choosing the other'.
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I like your post overall but this jumped out at me:
And Jobs would've been nothing without Wozniak. It was a partnership, not one man following another. They needed each other equally - without Wozniak, Jobs is a sales guy without an interesting product, and without Jobs, Wozniak is a tech guy with a killer product but without the ability to convince people of its utility.
It was one sentence in a comment, so obviously I'm condensing the complexities of a relationship that was told in movies and books so long and boring that people gave them to me as gifts because they know I love long boring books.
But I do think there is some truth to it. Wozniak is arguably more responsible for the existence of Apple than Jobs in terms of technical innovation, in the same way that Agrippa is arguably more responsible than Augustus for winning the wars that put Augustus into power. Woz was the brains, but Jobs was always the public leader and visionary out of the two, even back to the days when they were selling Blue Boxes to scam telephone companies. Woz' decision to follow Jobs in his vision is the difference between Woz' likely outcome of a modestly wealthy tech worker bee in California, and being worth hundreds of millions of dollars and having a name I know. Agrippa would have been a talented Roman general regardless of who he chose to follow, but I wouldn't know his name if he hadn't followed Augustus.
A partnership naturally involves some degree of submission of one's own will to the partner, whether in a marriage or a corporation. But forming a partnership is a greater act of agency than going it alone and never making anything great.
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Trump is calling for the arrest and trial of six Democrat lawmakers who posted a video telling the intelligence community not to follow unlawful orders,. The video claims that the current administration is threatening democracy and the constitution, and that the military "must refuse illegal orders."
Trump also apparently had another post that just said, "SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH."
This is the first time I have genuinely increased the probability of a real civil war breaking out, this is an absolutely terrifying escalation by both sides. While the Democrats were hinting extremely obviously that the military / intelligence community should basically pull off a coup, I also think that Trump hinting back that they should be executed is way beyond the pale.
Hopefully we're still in nothing ever happens land? I for one do not want to live through a civil war.
I'm just gonna post a transcript here because the reaction to this seems insane to me.
Characterizing the speech above as a call for a coup or sedition seems crazy. Like, courts have held that some of the orders Trump has given the military on American soil are unlawful! That is literally a thing that is happening! Trump is, as literally as possible, giving the military illegal orders as determined by a court of law. This is not even getting into the boat strikes that I think are straightforwardly murder. "If the president tells you to do something illegal, as he has already done, you must not do it." "THIS IS TREASON!"
All of this is happening in the context of a serious battle for authority on a grand scale. Whether the troops should (that's a moral should, not a legal should) be listening to their elected president Donald Trump or U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb is precisely the issue in question. To a big chunk of the country, the legal wing of the government has vastly overstepped its remit and is engaged in constant tendentious legal warfare to undermine the elected leader of the country. They are misusing the authority that they have been given and have no moral right to use the tools that they are attempting to wield.
If you see the world in that way, what is this video saying? Firstly, this video wouldn't be made if the makers didn't think that Trump was giving illegal orders, or was about to do so. So they're not just speaking about a hypothetical, they're standing up and saying, "Either the orders you're being given now, or the orders you're going to get soon, are illegal and you should ignore them". They are not only attacking the president and by extension those who voted for him, they are deliberately attempting to usurp his power of command.
So it's more like,
"Don't listen to the president, listen to me instead." "THIS IS TREASON".
which, yes, it is.
Obviously, this depends on a particular interpretation of events and of the role of law which you don't hold, but that's the reasoning IMO.
EDIT: Not to mention that of course
is going to raise the temperature considerably because it firmly casts Trump's voters and those who approve of his actions as being criminal, unconstitutional and unAmerican. Which is the problem that #Resist has had from the start, because this is a very dangerous place to be if you don't in fact hold majority support. It's more or less how the Right lost control twenty years ago - by framing anyone who wasn't in favour of Christian social teachings and maximally liberal economics as being unAmerican, they made a generation of voters and politicians who didn't care at all about being American on those terms.
To ask this question is to answer it: Jia Cobb, until some court above her says otherwise. The President is not above and superior to the judiciary. You want to know why people say Trump wants to be king? Shit like this. Apparently Donald J. Trump is to be the sole arbiter of what the law is and what is legal and illegal and no one may gainsay him!
The constitution does not give the President, or any official, the power to give orders contrary to itself or to law. To the extent the President's orders are unlawful, he has no authority to give them.
Yes, that is the answer of one faction. The answer of the other faction is that they do not trust Jia Cobb and her ilk to determine what is and is not lawful and correct (and they do not always believe that those are the same thing). You can hate that people think that way, but they do in fact think that way.
If I may engage in slightly more naked culture warring, I think that the last ten years can be best modelled as a huge extended temper tantrum by the Anointed, in response to having the basis of their power and their right to wield it challenged. (By Trump in the US, by Brexit in the UK).
Taking over the legal system and the pipeline of legal trainees doesn't actually mean you get to wield the power of the law as you please in perpetuity, but instead means that people will stop taking lawyers and the law seriously. Likewise for the academy, the metropolitan police, the bastions of culture. Ultimately, the power of those things do not come from anything that's written down, they come from the coordinated agreement of many people to take them seriously. That's why England gets along fine with no written constitution. And it's also why no written constitution can survive if it sets itself too firmly against the needs and desires of the populace.
I have no doubt that people think that way. I think that way about a great many decisions of our current Supreme Court. But I think the government should obey them anyway. I thought the Supreme Court judgement striking down Biden's student loan forgiveness was not a well reason decision, but it still would have been wrong of him to say to hell with the court and do it anyway.
If you think we should only have a judiciary if the judiciary makes decisions you agree with and produces outcomes you like and when that doesn't happen we should instead have a single executive take the law and its determinations into their own hands then I think you are anti-American. You are clearly opposed to the fundamentals of the American experiment and what it means to be an American.
Most of the time, most people think this way. But there is a window - broader than the Overton window - that you have to stay inside, or you lose the Mandate of Heaven.
I argue that:
The judiciary must, most of the time, make decisions that people broadly agree with and produce outcomes that they broadly like. This is a fundamental and underappreciated requirement of the Rule of Law.
As America or any country grows more diverse (on many axes) it gets harder and harder to stay inside this window for the majority of people for the majority of the time, with the resulting slow-motion breakdown that we see. FWIW I genuinely don't get the impression that most Trump supporters want a single executive king: instead they want Trump or someone like him to drag the Republic back within their window and then leave it to continue ticking along as before.
FYI I'm not American if you mean that as a personal 'you'. I'm just observing what I see in Anglo countries more generally. But of course many Americans have their own ideas of what it means to be an American! I find this essay very revealing on the topic. It mentions at one point an interview with Captain Preston, a minuteman who had fought against the British.
Excerpt below:
I did intend that more in royal-you kind of way, not necessarily you specifically. I appreciate the clarification.
Perhaps I should take a different tact. My impression, based on polling, is that Trump's deployment of the National Guard to DC is not just unlawful, it is also unpopular. Here is a Quinnipiac poll from August finding voters disapprove 56-41. Here is an NPR-Ipsos poll from late September showing a disapproval of 47-37 for DC that rises to 52-34 when the question is about National Guard deployment to "your local area." To the extent Trump's resistance to the judiciary is premised on having popular support over them, I do not think that is the case with this issue.
Thanks for the article! I'm enjoying it so far.
It's unpopular in the sense of the majority not liking it - but these numbers show that there is a fairly solid base who wants it too. I don't know if we can necessarily say it's unpopular when 1/3 of the population is saying "yes please". Like, yes, it's not a democratic majority, but when has that stopped a government before?
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Allowing the informal/singular you (thou) to die was unironically a huge mistake. If wonder if the French have the same problem with polite 'vous' and plural 'vous'...
Interesting and worthy of thought, thanks.
Good! He's one of the only really good bloggers I'm aware of, without any particular crankish tendencies.
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You are being overly literal to hide what's being said.
Suddenly announcing that illegal orders from the President shouldn't be followed may literally be a hypothetical claiming that to the extent the orders are unlawful they don't need to be followed. But what it actually means is "the President is giving out illegal orders now and they should be disobeyed now," even if the speech doesn't literally include the word "now".
Gillitrut has not tried to claim that the video was hypothetical, but rather, pointed out that a judge has in fact ruled some of Trump's orders illegal. Therefore the Democrats in the video are not casting baseless aspersions, explicitly or otherwise, but reacting to already-established legal fact.
That's a big part of the problem, though, right? It's not a legal fact, it's a legal assertion. When the Pope speaks ex cathedra then by the rules of the Catholic church (AFAIK) what he says is true for all time, but that doesn't make it a fact. And indeed, many will completely ignore it because they don't think the Pope is valid (schismatics) or they don't care what Catholic rules say (all non-Catholics).
EDIT:
For the avoidance of doubt, what I mean is that it's not an actual literal fact like 'the boiling point of water is 100C'. Instead it's an assertion that under the rules of the legal system is treated like a fact, but that doesn't make it literally so.
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The quoted section is just a factual description of what is occurring, according to the branch of government charged with making that kind of determination.
The same issue applies to "it's about these specific things ruled illegal by a court" as to "it's about hypothetical illegal things": that's not how people talk. The way you'd have it, it's as if these congresspeople suddenly gave a speech where they said that there are infinitely many prime numbers. Why did they say that? Who knows, we just wanted to inform you about that. Isn't that a weird thing to suddenly speak about? Naah, they just decided to say it. And it's true, after all. Maybe tomorrow they'll explain to you how it's against the law to rob banks.
Making a statement about not having to obey illegal orders from Trump implies that Trump is giving illegal orders, that they should not be obeyed, and that you have some reason to warn people about them. Nobody thinks there's a need to warn anyone about orders that have already been ruled illegal by a court.
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Prior to the determination by a single circuit court judge that the deployment was illegal, would it have been the role of the individual members of the national guard to evaluate the constitutional authority of the deployment and decide whether to obey orders based on their own individual evaluation? Given the overturn rate of the DC circuit courts on appeal in this administration, how confident should we be that the deployment will remain “illegal” after appeal?
If soldiers are not empowered to push back on illegal orders before carrying them out then the prohibition on doing so is toothless.
I think it's pretty good. Just about every court to consider the question has come to the same conclusion. In Oregon and California and DC and Chicago. None of them, to my knowledge, overturned by either the relevant circuit or SCOTUS.
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Whatever sort of dogwhistle this is supposed to be, I don't hear it. Are you saying that their assertion (that under US law, as a soldier or whatever you are allowed to or even obliged to ignore illegal orders) is false? Because if it isn't, then this is as much of a coup as it would be for a random civilian to fail to bend his schlong straight into the rectum if the Donald were to say "go fuck yourself" to his face. Presumably written and customary law already circumscribes what commands from the president anyone actually has to obey; the video merely asserts that this is not "all of them" for soldiers or the intelligence community either. Any expectations that those who made it may have about the specific kinds of unlawful commands that they expect to be given in the near future are irrelevant, and surely this is for the individual soldier/intelligence community member to determine (under risk of standing court martial or whatever if they determine badly).
No, it's not. But that's not what they're arguing. They're arguing "whatever orders you are getting are illegal because the administration is illicit/Not My President/it's mean if you do these things against our favoured groups/do what we tell you not what they tell you".
Where in the video does it say that? To begin with, I assume the context is what Wikipedia glosses here as "Experts, human rights groups and international bodies said the killings were illegal under US and international law", so even if they are wrong or confused, the form of the belief clearly is that the military may be given orders that are illegal in the standard sense of the word rather than some sort of tribal brainrot Calvinball of the type you are evoking.
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“The mods should ban you for conduct that breaks the rules. … What? I’m not calling for you to be banned! I’m just stating the hypothetical that if you were to break the rules, then the mods should ban you. You wouldn’t disagree with that right?”
I think we all understand that this hypothetical would be disingenuous.
I think we all understand that hypotheticals often carry literal meaning. Out of the infinite hypotheticals you could be speaking, you chose this one. You’re singling something out. There’s a specific implication. The hypothetical voice is saying something.
In this case, Democratic senators are saying they want the military to violate Trump’s unlawful orders. They’re singling out Trump. They’re singling out the military. They’re singling out Trump’s orders to the military. We all understand what they’re implying. They want the military to disobey Trump.
Now, I’m sure they believe he is committing unlawful acts, in which case disobedience would be righteous. But it’s a pretty thin figleaf to suppose that, well, they’re just speaking hypothetically, they’re not saying anything really. Then why speak at all? Why that emphasis? Why now? If we pretend the hypothetical voice doesn’t convey literal meaning, we have to pretend they’re saying nothing at all.
That is, as long as someone says the magic word, “hypothetically,” they’re absolved for all responsibility. If Tanks roll up to the White House tomorrow, why, these Democrats didn’t call for that at all, unless Trump were breaking the law, in which case the thing they said had nothing to do with it.
“If Trump were breaking the law then…” If my grandmother had wheels she would be a bicycle!
I really don't think that an assertion to the effect of "we believe Trump's orders are illegal, and want to remind you that you have an obligation to not obey illegal orders" is in any sense similar to a coup - even if some soldiers actually followed up on it, insubordination is still not a coup but just a disciplinary matter. To begin with, I'd be surprised if under the present US military code, the actual action they are calling for even obliquely (refusing an order to participate in some attack) would carry the death penalty, so in what world does it make sense to suggest that the instigators deserve it? (In toxoplasma terms, it would seem eminently less escalatory to me to call for giving Trump the Saddam treatment in response to this, given that he is apparently calling for killing his political opponents.)
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We very often talk about the future in such terms. I told my son "if you bang your spoon on the table, it gets taken away". It's not hypothetical, it's saying that if a possible thing comes to pass, this is what may come of it.
So yeah, the Dem Senators are indeed highlighting this as a thing that might happen in the future. Perhaps they singled it out because they fear it.
What is the 'it' they fear? A military that disobeys unlawful orders without any legal process, which curtails Democrats own ability to issue orders of dubious legality like Obama drone striking a US citizen? Or the orders being executed that actually are lawful but unpopular for Democrats?
If I threaten to take my childs spoon from him after I issue the warning, I am the one exercising the threat. The democrats are saying the orders may be unlawful and the military itself should exercise judgment on the unlawfulness to remove trump. The responsibility is borne solely by others and never by the democrats for affirming an active course of action. It is yet another example of cowardice in action and intent, cloaking desired outcomes behind someone elses actions and preparing oneself to take credit later on.
If you're going to trot this tired canard out, you should consider invoking it at Ulysses Grant who ordered ~100K US citizens killed by canon and bayonet.
If they had made themselves judge of the lawfulness, you'd consider that arrogation of authority they don't have.
I do think the a soldier should consult with a JAG if there is a questionable order, even given the presumption of legality.
I do consider this an arrogation of authority! I also consider the JAQing off about "if the military is given illegal orders shouldn't they disobey hint hint hint" an arrogation of authority as well, compounded with cowardly evasiveness.
Grant was ordered to kill 100k US citizens, and that should have triggered a supreme court crisis right from the outset even with the generals who were first mobilized. That no such challenge was sustained proves only that the durability of legalistic restrictions is a choice, one that Trump has clearly shown can be steamrolled over de facto by just simply fucking doing it. To be bound by the laws is a choice if unbacked by kinetic measures, and the chief wielders of kinetic force (army and police) get a say in whether they want to follow the rules. Right now the US security establishment has leaders prefer to resign with dignity intact rather than stage coups to enforce or resist "unlawful" orders. For democrats to hope for a noble cincinnatus to overthrow Trump and restore the republic to the exiled senatorial class is Sorkinian fantasy. Sucks but it is what it is. If the leaders don't want to actively resist orders, what chance some E4 giving a single shit about the legality of his actions.
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There is a huge gap between the "refuse to obey illegal orders" talk I saw and this. Could you link (and ideally transcribe) what you're paraphrasing here?
I'm reflecting line of argument upthread. I don't actually believe it, but the democrats are signalling that they expect the military to oppose trump to ends beneficial to democrat political objectives, the bare minimum being preventing the military being a + point for trump.
The democrats statements are cowardly weaselling: we expect the military to disobey illegal orders proactively but we are not actually saying trumps orders are illegal, we expect the military to make that judgment for themselves to achieve a political objective benefitting democrats. Oh and the reverse implication is that the military is conducting illegal orders under trump by executing the missions.
If the orders are illegal state it openly as such. Why make a statement decrying the consequences of illegal orders if there are no illegal orders. Democrats clearly hope to gain political capital out of this but are too cowardly to actually openly declare their affirmative stance.
Thing is, even if they stated the orders, they wouldn't get any significant chunk of the military to refuse them. Pretty much all of the "immigration horror" videos I've seen involve not the military but Customs and Border Protection. If you went into that agency (which is civilian anyway), you're not going to have any problem with the orders to arrest illegals. The National Guard has been used against rioters, and also to basically show the flag by standing around and looking tough, and (aside from the deployment itself, which will play out in the courts, not in refusals by individual soldiers) doesn't involve any facially illegal orders.
So if they specified anything, not only would they be treading closer to actionable sedition, but they'd get nothing for it.
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Well I guess Trump isn’t threatening anyone but merely highlighting the death penalty for treason as a thing that might happen in the future.
I think he asserted that it already happened and they "SHOULD BE ARRESTED" (capitalization original).
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I’m not sure they believe the orders are illegal. They think they are getting political currency out of #resisting and this is another way to show they are #resisting.
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The video heavily implies that illegal orders have already happened. "This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against citizens... Right now, the threats to our constitution are not just coming from abroad, but from right here at home."
It heavily implies that soldiers should refuse their current orders. However, those orders are presumed legal until proved otherwise by the judicial system. They at the very least are guilty of providing atrocious legal advice.
That's true, but it's hardly anything near sedition.
Soldiers unsure about the legality of orders should go talk to a JAG. That's what it's for.
If the atrocious legal advice is, "disobey your commanding officers," then yeah that sounds seditious and it is illegal to advise.
Add up the following:
While service members have the right to refuse illegal orders, all orders are presumed lawful, and the burden falls on the service member to prove an order is manifestly unlawful.
The video implies without evidence that unlawful orders have already happened.
The video therefore implies that current orders which have the presumption of being lawful should be disobeyed.
UCMJ 94 says: " (1) with intent to usurp or override lawful military authority, refuses, in concert with any other person, to obey orders or otherwise do his duty or creates any violence or disturbance is guilty of mutiny; (2) with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of lawful civil authority, creates, in concert with any other person, revolt, violence, or other disturbance against that authority is guilty of sedition;"
So I guess the lingering question is if a coordinated video advising that currently presumed lawful orders should be treated as if they were unlawful counts as a disturbance. But if so, yes, sedition is the word used in the military code.
I can't say that I buy the second bullet about implying that unlawful orders already happened. YMMV, but I think if you look at a claim and conclude it's "without evidence" then you should probably conclude that the speaker(s) did not actually intent that claim.
How else do you interpret this sentence?
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This is stupid. I hate that a stitched-together video is what passes for an official statement. I hate that Twitter is the de facto source for partisan drama. And Libs of fucking TikTok, no less! I don’t want to watch this slop.
I wonder if elected officials could be banned from social media. Let them appear on TV or release a boring document if they want to puff up their feathers. It’d greatly improve faith in the political process. Make it take more work to bait outrage.
You’d probably just end up with a secondary industry of ghouls like LoTT laundering those official appearances into an allegedly unofficial party line. But I genuinely think our politics would be improved if seated politicians had to put a little more effort into public appearances.
There are a few court cases now suggesting that elected officials don't have (on their bon-personal accounts?) the right to block people on social media. I think you'd need to go fishing for a precedent that this encompasses chosing platforms that "block people" in the same ways. Which doesn't sound completely crazy: Trump blocking people on Twitter and getting Truth Social as a platform to ban people (also blocking them from sending DMs) both limit contact with public officials.
On the other hand, if you go too far in that precedent you'll block politicians from email spam filtering (I was trying to petition my elected leadership to help me save this member of Nigerian royalty!) or attending events in any access-controlled spaces.
No, I want the opposite! Everyone else should automatically block politicians. No POTUS Twitter account, no Senators chasing TikTok trends. Think of how much cringe we could avoid.
Holding office should constrain you to official channels, which should be both boring and delayed. If the leader of the free world needs to address the population, he can damn well set up a press conference.
If Congressmen weren’t allowed to broadcast their reelection propaganda like this, nothing of value would be lost.
The problem with this is that it allows politicians to be held hostage by the official communications apparatus. Have you ever watched Yes Minister? Politicians become actors whose only job is to say the lines they're given in the right order, and to take the blame when the Civil Service wishes to assign it to them.
Like it or not, Congressmen need to get reelected and are therefore dependent on comms. The only question IMO is whether you want the propaganda to at least be written (sometimes) and signed off on by the politicians themselves, or whether you want your representatives to be unable to speak except when the bureaucrats arrange and opportunity for them to do so.
To be perfectly honest, I do not think that truly boring politics is compatible with democracy. Japan tends to have boring politics but a) there's a certain amount of grassroots turmoil these days and b) Japan somewhat resembles China in that almost all important debate takes place within a single ruling party.
Presumably they could do that by going on television, releasing statements to the press, writing books, and all the other things that serious people did before social media. If you're concerned about the asymmetry with what bureaucrats get to release on the politicians-deserted social media, we can simply ban bureaucrats from using social media either - make social media a completely government-official-free zone - forbid the dissemination of official information of any kind through such platforms. An end to Bluechecks once and for all.
In theory yes, in practice I think most people do agree that there was a phase change where social media enabled populists and more fringe movements to gain the spotlight and communicate better.
I don't know the mechanism for this. Plausibly, filming a statement that won't go down well with the bureaucrats in front of all your advisors has a chilling effect compared to writing a social media post where thousands of your followers jump in to defend and support you. Also plausibly, gatekeeping is much harder to do on social media compared to official channels.
Broadly I think that both the following are consistent positions:
But I don't think it's true that going back to 90s era communications will still allow 2020s political populism. And I am broadly skeptical of people arguing that it will, because as far as I can tell most of them are arguing for switching back to the old system precisely because they don't like modern populist politics!
The question, I think, is whether social media merely removed bureaucratic gatekeepers so that a preexisting silent majority of extremists (as it were) was suddenly allowed to speak out; or whether the presence of politicians on social media contributed to a self-sustaining feedback cycle that made everyone's positions genuinely more extreme than they were before.
Under the latter theory, the outcome would indeed be "politics becomes more centrist and less populist/fringe", but that would not be because nefarious advisors are preventing the politicians from giving the base what it wants; it would be because, in the absence of the toxic social media clout-chasing incentives, the politicians and to an extent the people will genuinely come to hold more measured views because they aren't getting into stupid dick-measuring contests everyday.
Putting it into practical terms: in a world where he is forbidden to communicate in any way on Twitter or Truth Social or any similar platform, Trump is going to rant a lot less about CROOKED Democrats who are TRAITORS who should be SHOT to DEATH for TREASON. Is this because his advisors would stop him from saying what he wants to say? I don't think so. I think it simply wouldn't occur to him to tell the world half the shit he types, if he wasn't invested in chasing the algorithm like a common vlogger. Would he be betraying the wishes of the voters who put him in the White House? Again, I don't think so - at least, not in a counterfactual world where he was never the Poster President at all. I think his base would not want him to say this stuff if he hadn't gotten them hooked on their daily Two Minutes of Hate in the first place. It's a hyperstimulus like any other, and you've got to cut off the vicious cycle.
Okay, that's a consistent viewpoint. I half-agree with it, too. E.g. my opinions of Scotland became sharply more negative after being exposed to the writings of Cybernats (Scottish Nationalists online).
The flipside is that at least in the UK I think we have been building up serious problems that, prior to social media, it was simply impossible to discuss or publicise. I remember Covid, when social media was maximally locked down - the effect of that freezing wasn't that people or politicians became less extremist, it was that it was impossible to publicise any facts or opinions that ran contrary to what was convenient to the administration. That's a big blow in my mind for the 'more controlled communication leads to better and saner politics' hypothesis.
I would say I started getting worried/upset about immigration in 2013-2016 which did coincide with rhetoric ticking up but also with various life changes and pretty high levels of immigration. Likewise my opinions of feminism were worsened by extremely negative feminist rhetoric online (White Male Tears) but also by the behaviour of my actual acquintances. And so on and so on. I think it's both tbh.
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Hm. Maybe we shouldn’t try to drift towards the UK.
And Japan has had its fair share of unhinged opposition.
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How does a civil war actually manifest in the current environment? Terrorism sure. Although civilian Marxists have been pushing to arm themselves since Trump’s 2016 campaign, they’re still a few decades behind the right. The MAGA right is probably even better armed than normie Republicans.
The intelligence community and the brass may have a fair amount of anti-Trump sentiment, but I don’t think they command the loyalty of the grunts. In a coup attempt, I suspect the Marines would gladly clear out Langley and Fort Meade. The big, mostly red county map comes into play. Democratic strongholds, while densely populated, are essentially islands. Then there’s the constant refrain directed at 2A activists: “What are you going to do against a drone?” That argument collapses even faster than the standard rebuttal when the right controls the executive branch and the grunts. At that point it’s no longer armed civilians sabotaging your planes and drones on the ground - it’s Marines attacking the base itself. The left has almost no ability to project power outside the areas it already control
The civil war would surely not manifest itself as a coup attempt, but as something like CHAZ on a much larger scale. Do you think the Marines would actually gladly clear out Seattle or Chicago if they decided to set up armed checkpoints to prevent federal government representatives from entering? Do you not think some units would mutiny if the order were given, given that the rank and file is hardly uniformly Red?
The federal government's internal troops are not marines, though. The federal government has law enforcement paramilitaries(under the DHS and DOJ), and if they aren't good enough there's the national guard. 'Federal paramilitaries and national guard units willing to follow questionably legal orders if they're backed by the republican party' are surely a thing- as Greg Abbott demonstrated in his border standoffs with the Biden admin.
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Semantics but if the military isn't involved I don't consider it a Civil War.
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I don't know about that. The MAGA right almost by definition are a different group from core ideological conservatives, who do indeed have lots of guns. MAGA is probably better armed than average, and the most heavily-armed groups are indeed pro-MAGA, but Trump>republican challengers is not their ideology. YMMV, but my most heavily armed cousins supported Cruz in the 2016 primary and Desantis in 2024.
That being said, I do think you're mostly correct that the red tribe would win a civil war, although it would be a lot uglier than you're counting on. I also think the actually competent groups on the left know this, so they won't try anything.
My point isn't so much that it would be easy. More that with the current dynamic it's extremely unlikely to even happen in what I would define as "civil war".
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Similar to how it happens in latin american countries. Mexico is in a state of civil war and the Mexican government doesn't have total control over the country. The coming civil war looks like a failed state with groups fighting each other. There probably will be fewer explicit political groups fighting and more low level violence and gang violence.
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The marxists have much better force multiplication.
Even tens of millions of conservatives with rifles in their safes, but who only take them out to go to the range (alone) or hunting, can't match the capability of even a few tens of thousands of Marxists with institutional support, networks, and a proven doctrine for organizing and carrying out insurrectionist violence while minimizing legal consequences. Conservatives don't even have a consistent capability to organize simple protests, much less the sorts of shows of force that are routine on the left.
Yes, and thank you for pointing this out. Given how obvious this is, I don't know why it's so hard to get people on the right (as well as a few on the moderate left) to understand it.
I think that folks on both sides understand the principle at some level, just not enough to actually take the principle to its logical conclusion.
One of the more common anti-2A refrains is along the lines of "you and your AR-15 can't take on the government!", which is true. The counterpoint is "the government is outnumbered and an armed populace doing guerilla warfare wins pretty much every time", which is also true. Both sides of this argument basically understand that the actual important part is being able to arrange for a bunch of people to act in concert toward their shared political goal. The left is way better at this.
No, it's not true. In Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present, Max Boot calculates that, of all the insurgencies since 1775, about 78% of them failed. Of the 22% who did win, one of the necessary (though not sufficient) preconditions is substantial material support from one or more foreign states. (Also, AIUI, practically every case of successful guerrilla warfare has been against a de facto foreign occupation.)
Yes, and the right seems unwilling to try to remedy that.
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American Civil War II: The Troubles Goes Hawaiian
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The problem is if that gets bad enough, state governments and the feds eventually have to take sides. People including myself will often point out how the first American Civil War was militarily not much like a traditional civil war, and more like a war between two nations. But the political breakdown leading to that actually does look a lot like a civil war and you can see the progression:
Weirdos like us began to see the risks of future political breakdown over the slavery question as early as 1820, look at Jefferson’s “fire bell in the night” letter.
This political breakdown actually begins happening in 1832. The Nullification Crisis wasn’t over slavery, it was over taxes, but everyone could see it could apply to other things too. Like slavery.
Actual incidents of bloodshed start to happen periodically. Nat Turner’s revolt happens in 1832. Elijah Lovejoy is murdered in 1837. It’s 20 years out from the beginning of major hostilities, but already everyone is on edge.
Mass scale lawfare begins in the 1840s. There are highly contentious compromises over admitting various slave and free states.
Large scale paramilitaries begin to form in the early 1850s. By 1854, there is actual low-intensity guerrilla warfare breaking out in Kansas.
The scale of the violence gets high enough that state actors and influential people are beginning to take sides. By the mid 1850s Pro-slavery and Pro-freesoil militias are getting lots of funding from somewhere to buy sophisticated military hardware including artillery.
Things boil over in the late 1850s with the twin shocks of the Dredd Scott decision and John Brown’s raid. The Dredd Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Act mean that major institutions of the federal government are now openly taking sides in the conflict. John Brown’s raid shows that large scale business entities in the north are now willing to directly fund paramilitary attacks against the South with the aim of overthrowing their social order by force.
Lincoln is elected in 1860. The South begins to panic. The federal government they had weaponized is now going to be turned against them.
Most southern states still have no interest in secession. One particularly radicalized state, South Carolina, secedes from the union in 1860.
The first shots between South Carolina and the federal government are fired in early 1861. The lines are now drawn, and state governments now have to actually take sides. The political order rapidly crumbles as state after state begins to secede.
America today seems to be in the 4-5 range, with worrying indicators that it’s about to go to stage 6.
What’s your model for a “traditional” civil war? I’d like to see this analysis applied to the Romans, the English, the Bolsheviks, whichever you think is most typical. I suspect the extreme asymmetry of various third-world conflicts is a modern phenomenon more than a traditional one.
Also, I don’t think Jefferson was slumming it with weirdos like us.
I’d say it applies fairly well to all three of those.
The lawfare and sporadic outbreaks of violence started a lot earlier with Rome (about 40-80 years before formal military activity). The formal state apparatuses got dragged in a lot faster. But otherwise this mostly holds.
It applies less well to the English Civil War, since that originated as jostling between two branches of the government. But you do see lawfare (arrest warrants and royal prosecutions) before the outbreak of formal hostilities.
There was an increasingly intense pattern of SR terrorist activity and labor strike actions beginning in the 1880s, that then eventually dragged in the people and the military against the Tsar.
Sh-sh-shut up! * sobs *
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Vance on the other hand...
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From the context, I do not think that follows. There are plenty of situations where the correct response is just to say "No sir, I will not do that", without trying to dispose whoever gave the unlawful order.
Personally, I think the winning strategy for the Democrats is to wait Trump out. Time works for them. Few economists think that his tariffs will lead to economic success, the mid-terms are coming up, and without a majority in Congress MAGA will be much more limited in what they can do.
Sure, he will blow up more boats in the meanwhile, but blowing brown people up without a declaration of war has been a hobby of all presidents in this century so far, nobody really cares. And while sending his troops into cities which voted for Harris and deporting school students is not good, in the great scheme of things it is also not sufficient reason to end the American experiment with democracy. Established, traditional politicians are doing okay under the present system, and are hopefully reluctant to overthrow everything. I sincerely hope that most Democrats are smart enough to understand that a one-time surgical breaking of the constitution to get rid of Trump followed by business as usual will not work.
I am a bit more worried about the MAGA crowd, though. They are not your traditional Republicans who have thrived under the status quo for generations. Trump is certainly spending a lot more effort on placing loyal officers in charge than he was in his first term. One man's coup-proofing is another man's coup preparation. Frankly speaking, the Trump crowd has no regard for mos maiorum, for how things are done in politics, and while the chances that GWB would pull a Gracchi and run for a third term were basically nil, with Trump all things are possible.
Eh. It's not that I'd put it past him if he were even just ten years younger - but that's just it, he isn't. Guy's old. By no means senile or at death's door, but you just don't pull this sort of shit at 82.
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I think the legitimacy principle of two terms only is far too strong- we're more likely to get a king than a president for life, and we're more likely to get a libertarian president than either.
An annointed Trump successor, on the other hand, is very plausible.
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This is just a somewhat skillfully deployed call for sedition by the people in question. Obviously it would be impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt in court, but the implication is clear to anyone who is activated by the statements.
Its basically the Jan 6 case against Trump on steroids and I dont like it from either side, but here we are.
Maybe if they were making this appeal to the security detail outside a Trump rally. “I know that everyone here will be marching into that rally to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
There’s no route where this stupid video causes the “intelligence community” to plot a coup. At worst, you’re going to get a couple partisans refusing to do their jobs. That’s categorically not as bad as gatecrashing a session of Congress. If you don’t think Trump was culpable for that, you shouldn’t think these chucklefucks are somehow worse.
Large swathes of the intelligence community already plotted a coup. Generals have already bragged about defying lawful orders and concealing that fact. Any escalation of what we've already seen would indeed be quite crippling to our Republic. Otoh, giving a speech in DC happens all the time, and J6's outcome was a 99% outlier that can hardly even be attributed fully to Trump, as he didn't control any of the security apparatus involved in the security failures.
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It's a bit worse than that. but to Slotkin's credit, the appeal has been artfully constructed to be maximally provocative to the target audience (military members, and to a lesser extant Trump voters) while appearing innocuous to anyone who is unfamiliar with the context of that specific phrase and it's place in early US history.
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You are correct! it launders legitimacy for the intelligence community and the coup they've been working hard on the last 10 years.
The crimes of the intelligence community against the Trump administration are becoming undeniable. But most liberals are completely ignorant of them. Since they experience time not according to when things actually happened, but when they hear about them. So having these senators bless the deep state with executing a coup against Trump will make everything fine and dandy in the mind of the average liberal when the crimes of the deep state finally penetrate their information bubble. The actual order of events doesn't matter, only the perceived order.
Does that mean you agree this isn’t a crime?
Surely a cause-and-effect enjoyer like yourself can recognize that this could not be incitement.
I agree, it isn't a crime.
But in a just world they would hang all the same.
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Employees of the United States government conspiring to suppress accurate press reports by pressuring private companies to do so, and quite likely successfully changing the result of an election, is far worse than some rioters gatecrashing a session of Congress.
As tempting as it is to haggle over price, I suspect we’d just be shouting “nuh uh!” at each other.
So—sure, whatever, fuck those guys. What’s that got to do with the price of semiconductors in China? Do you think Trump’s Jan 6 speech was incitement or not?
Because if you don’t, there’s no way this video rises to that level. It shows motive but not means or opportunity. That makes it shameless posturing.
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They didn't even successfully suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story - the failed cover-up attracted far more attention than the story would have done organically. Nor would honest reporting of the laptop have changed the result of the election - if it had been reported honestly the story would have broken in the summer, and it would have become clear that it was basically a nothingburger ("Hunter Biden is a corrupt failson" was already priced in after the Burisma story and the first Trump impeachment) well before polling day.
"We might have won if an October surprise based on a strategically timed leak of an ongoing criminal investigation had gone off perfectly" doesn't constitute a claim of a stolen election.
How do you figure that? It was also algorithmically supressed from what I remember. I doubt it broke out to the normies.
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Maybe I’ve been watching too much Vaush, but this is a pretty weak-sauce video from the Democrats. Why are they still appealing to people’s consciences? It’s pretty clear that isn’t a viable strategy for stopping this stuff. The baseline UCMJ statute of limitations is 5 years. Why not come out and say, “if you obey an unlawful order, we will remember and we will prosecute you.” Show that you take it seriously. Put your own liberty on the line before asking someone else to do it for you.
An entire party of massive pussies. Maybe they’re losing because it feels emasculating to vote for them.
They aren't trying to stop this stuff, they're campaigning for the midterms.
Yeah, that's what is so tiresome about it. It's not really about appealing to the military, whom they probably think are a bunch of ignorant white rednecks, but to signal to their own side that they are La Résistance, vote for us in the upcoming elections, we take all your concerns seriously because look, we're repeating your talking points.
I was somewhat amused that in that glowfic quoted in a different post on here because of course, naturellement, ICE are Le Ebil. Le big grand monstrous eeeeevuuuulll. Not a bunch of guys doing their jobs in a government department, nope, Big Evil. That is the attitude amongst the Bay Area Rationalist glowfic writers who are going to vote straight Democrat in the midterms, and that's the constituency this kind of video is appealing to: the military are being forced to follow illegal orders by the evil moustache-twirlers in power, and if they don't raise their consciousness enough to realise this is what is going on, well you and your views about the boots on the ground grunts have been proven to be justified.
From that I may be as bold in my beliefs:
But I'm surprised you got that far; last time you bounced off the exact same fic.
I followed through that part of the link to see what was going on. Again, laughing my sides off at the social worker and foster parent all ready to get up in arms over EVIL FUNDIE PARENTS when it's the girl herself who insisted on heading off to serve God (and pretty clearly is from another world/dimension, not our own).
Sure. Conservatives bad, we get it 😁
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Possibly relevant: today is the 80th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials.
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I haven't watched the video because I get enough propaganda per day, but did they happen to specify which orders are the illegal ones that should be refused?
Nope! Just said "Right the ship."
The video posted by Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) did not say "Right the ship", it said "Don't give up the ship!". The latter is a very specific phrase with a very specific context and connotations within the cultural mythos of the United States Military.
That connotation is that this is the war of 1812 and the enemy is not at the gate, the enemy is already inside the walls and they need to be killed or democracy will die.
Imagine a French politician making allusions to Madame' Guillotine and "the final argument of kings" during an inter-party squabble. That is essentially what this is here.
Elissa Slotkin is a "former" CIA operative, right?
I do not know. I am only familiar with her as the junior senator from Michigan.
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Former CIA employee, yes.
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If it's the video I'm thinking of, no, they did not. It's rapid-fire cuts between them identifying themselves and their credentials and telling the military to refuse illegal orders, as though they all read the same script and then each recording was cut into 3s or less chunks and quilted together. It's kinda disorienting.
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Technically the Democrats in that video are right that soldiers do not have to obey unlawful orders. But in practice, orders are presumed lawful unless a military judge rules otherwise. From the Uniform Code of Military Justice: "Inference of lawfulness. An order requiring the performance of a military duty or act may be inferred to be lawful, and it is disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate. This inference does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime. The lawfulness of an order is a question of law to be determined by the military judge."
It seems obvious to me that the implication of what these Democrat legislators are saying is "The stuff Trump is having you do in Portland, D.C., and Chicago is illegal and you should disobey those orders." If that's what they had actually said I think there would be a strong case against them, but with the mere "implied" meaning I think there's enough plausible deniability to avoid any actual consequences.
Well, where does it explain the bounds of "patently illegal?" All illegal orders direct the commission of a crime, inasmuch as carrying out an illegal order is itself a crime.
There is history on what manifestly illegal means.
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Do you mean this in a legal sense? Because I very much doubt that is true. Saying, “I think what these government agents are doing is bad and illegal,” is quite squarely within the core area of first-amendment protections for speech on matters of public concern. I’m not even sure what statute would plausibly cover this. Treason is defined in the literal constitution in a way which doesn’t seem to apply here (who are the enemies of the United States being given aid and comfort to?).
If your point is that, “Elissa Slotkin told me to do it,” wouldn’t be a valid defense in a court-martial, I would have to agree with that.
I agree, but saying that plus "and I urge members of the military and federal agencies to disobey these orders" would likely fall under incitement.
Okay, I think I found the law that is supposed to deal with that, 18 U.S. Code § 2387
I don't think they're asking them to refuse to obey orders. I think its more of the counseling and urging to cause disloyalty or impair loyalty within the military and intelligence communities.
Free speech protections are pretty high though and they would have run this past the lawyers before running the ad.
One would hope, but if someone has a Bright Idea and can persuade other squirrels that this is a great notion to win votes and position themselves so as to survive any intra-party purges once the fighting over who will steer the ship, the moderates or the progressive wing, is done - then they're likely to have leaped at the chance before asking advice of sober heads.
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This is downstream of the orders actually being legal. Saying that X is illegal and therefore troops should refuse to do X depends a lot ob X.
With this touching the 1A, I also suppose that courts might allow you to say so if "X is illegal" is a defendable legal position. For example, one might have voiced the opinion that waterboarding is torture and US troops are required to refuse to engage in it, and even as the courts decided that nah, gitmo was just fine, they might presumably still refuse to convict you under that title. (I dunno, there is probably case law here.)
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Hmm interesting. It seems that it can be read to say that even if the orders are actually illegal, if you say it in the wrong way as to cause loyalty or morale issues, that can still be punished.
I think you can say "In my view, X is illegal" and that's free speech. What this video seems to be doing is stating (by implication?) "X is illegal and moreover you should disobey orders to do X" which I think is going beyond their authority when it's addressed to members of the military specifically and not the general public at large.
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Treason and sedition are two different things. However, U.S. code does not authorize death as a punishment for sedition.
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I can't even tell who is baiting whom anymore.
This one reads like Trump rising to some sort of obvious bait, yet the Dems are getting further and further out over their skis with this whole "threatening Democracy" thing.
As far as I can tell, we just had an election held that produced winners that were not favorable to Trump, and there was not a single attempt to overturn those outcomes or halt the election or otherwise interfere in it.
Adding on the pleas to get the military to act in some very under-specified way and its genuinely annoying at this point to have to deal with the constant superposition of "Trump is literally inches away from becoming supreme leader of a fascist state unless we act NOW" and "by 'act now', we really just mean 'vote for Dems in the next election like a good citizen.'"
I dunno, Trump has actual reasons to be concerned about seditious behavior given how much as been revealed in just the past month about Dems (up to and including Barack Obama?) worked to hamstring him.
He's gone after Comey and Brennan using the standard, established criminal justice process, he didn't have them assassinated in their beds in the middle of the night.
But its also kinda incoherent to call for someone's arrest for Sedition while being the guy who is in charge of the agencies that would be arresting them.
Shit or get off the pot guys. All this sound and fury signifying nothing is just tedious.
Seems more like they're trying to urge the military not to act in a particular way.
And that way being to not follow lawful orders, which the urgers would like to insinuate are unlawful but are neither inclined to specify nor are they culpable for the consequences of a wrong judgement (though they will, of course, make much political propaganda about it).
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Sure, because he's not actually going to order their arrests. He's just bloviating in response to obvious bait. Truth Social seems to be his preferred outlet for doing so.
As mentioned, though, he HAS taken action against political enemies now, with Comey's indictment being an opening salvo.
But obviously arresting sitting congresspeople who haven't done a blatant crime is a much harder lift.
If my understanding is correct, Comey basically signed off on a witch hunt that he knew was baseless. And it wasted two to three years of the first Trump presidency.
If that is true or someone believes it to be true then he definitely should be prosecuted for that shit.
The other political opponent is that New York prosecutor (Letitia James?) that went after him for real estate fraud. It was a bogus case that lots of people are semi guilty of. He went after her for the exact same thing. It's the most tit-for-tat political retaliation ever.
Yep.
Completely irrespective of ideal political norms or even the optics of it, I have to respect how precisely targeted and proportional it is.
Given that issue, and the irregularities around the 2020 election, I'd almost just shrug it off if Trump wanted a third term.
He shouldn't get one, and not just because of the rules. But the bureaucracy effectively vetoing a President's agenda for years (with congress' tacit approval, granted) is a worse problem than a President winning an election for a third time.
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Oh, the Letitia James case. The 34 FELONIES!!! case. I've always disliked Trump, but the way his political rivals and enemies have gone after him is just ludicrous.
The solemn, po-faced repetition (which I have encountered elsewhere just recently) that he committed 34 FELONIES!!! is risible. "Okay, what did he do?" "Mortgage fraud!" "Okay, that's one crime, and the other 33?" "Mortgage fraud!"
34 charges for one offence are not at all the same as 34 different and separate crimes. Murdering one person is wrong, but it's not the same as murdering thirty-four people, but this is the equivalence they are trying to make. I'm not even sure that it is a crime as such, since Wikipedia calls it the "New York business fraud lawsuit" which sounds more like a civil than criminal case, and this bit confuses me:
So they charged him with... lying about being richer than he was in fact? And that turned into 34 FELONIES!!!!?
Or am I completely wrong and the 34 FELONIES!!! is the "paying hush money to the porn star" campaign finance case? Even so, the same applies: 34 charges for one offence not the same as 34 different offences in different crimes.
As a moderate opponent¹ of Mr Trump, I did get a 'nabbing al-Capone for tax evasion' impression from the matter....
¹Capable of understanding that not every possible criticism of him is necessarily true², and of recognising his stopped-clock moments³.
²Compare the cancellation of Bill Maher post-9/11 for pointing out that the hijackers, while irrational⁴ anti-freedom murderers, were not, in the usual sense⁵ of the term, cowards.
³Such as the Executive Order on architectural styles.
⁴For those not familiar with Mr Maher's oeuvre, he has a very dim view of organised religion.
⁵As opposed to the vague 'bad person' sense, which far too many terms for specific character flaws erode into....
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Correct. The THIRTY FOUR FELONIES was purportedly because he mislabeled the expenses in his own accounting book and thereby defrauded himself to retroactively cheat in the election that had already happened.
The mortgage fraud one was where his claimed value of a property used as collateral was different from what a partisan hack Democrat judge was willing to claim it was, and that this constituted fraud against the bank that was testifying on Trump's behalf, and therefor the state of NY was entitled to damages in the amount of the highest possible theoretical value that Trump could have benefited, multiplied by the highest theoretically possible return on investment he could have made with that difference in the intervening years (which would have been far outside the statute of limitations, but I believe they got around that changing the law for the express and exclusive purpose of Getting Trump).
Thanks for the clarification, there have been so many cases and accusations I get muddled.
I do think the 34 FELONIES thing is disingenuous because it refers to one over-arching crime. The impression it is intended to leave is that Trump has committed all these BIG SERIOUS CRIMES in a series of BIG SERIOUS CRIMES, but it's really THIS ONE CASE.
I think most people laugh at it, though.
I think the 34 FELONIES thing is disingenuous simply because the same people who insist that Donald Trump's victimless paperwork crime makes him a horrible person because the word "felony" is attached to it, routinely start massive riots on behalf of, advocate the minimum possible legal consequences for, and grant patronage to, people who commit actual acts of violence that also have the word "felony" attached to them.
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I had this thought too, but there seems to be a general pattern in the Trump administration of government via social media. Tweeting this stuff out may be the most effective way Trump has of directly communicating with US Attorney for DC Jeanine Pirro.
It seems to me that you and @faceh are framing this as though law and public sentiment are two distinct things, and are wondering why Trump is making appeals to public sentiment when he could simply use the law. But it is evident that the law is much weaker than legible public sentiment, even disregarding the legal mechanisms by which law emerges from public sentiment in the first place.
The current era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. Coordinating public sentiment is the most effective method possible for reducing the amount of trouble one gets in when hurting the outgroup. The law is a whore, and public sentiment is the coin she trades in; if public sentiment is on-side, paper rules are no impediment at all.
Still? You can keep saying it, but that doesn't make it true. The current era is best understood as social media-induced brainrot afflicting each generation in it's own way, with zoomers doing whatever it is they do on tiktok, boomers/gen Xers schizo posting incoherently in news comments sections and millennials straddling the line. Then some idiots on the margin actually Do Something, and the rest of us are dragged through the ensuing shitstorm.
If you still believe your model has so much explanatory power, make some predictions:
Riots and political violence failed to manifest after a brainrotted zoomer killed Kirk two months ago, elections ran smoothly and the political momentum seems to be swinging away from 'Your Side.' I'll give you and @ThomasdelVasto ten to one odds that there's no civil war before the completion of the next presidential election, and I'd give you much better odds if I sat down to think about it more and actually had the money to bet on it. I'd wager that if we had some indices of political violence and economic prosperity, the former would be below 1960s/1970s level, the latter would be close to some ATH and the only way the current era is remarkable is how efficiently the internet has divided us.
But please, make your own predictions.
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Yeah very much agree here. I'm tired of Trump communicating and signaling as if he is going to take serious action, then... not doing it?! It's kind of the worst of both worlds in that it gets the opposition riled up while winning no victories for his base. I don't understand it.
I understand it as Trump doing his version of constant A/B testing to see if there's any appetite for following through.
I don't know what his negotiating stance is in this case. Dems feel comfortable speaking out against him. Boohoo. Staff the agencies with as many friendly people as possible and fire as many of the rest as possible (which means fighting the Courts, granted) so there's minimal concern about mutiny.
Just keep doing things and if the best the Dems can muster is veiled non-threats then its safe to ignore that rather than give them new sound bites.
And if its time to kick things off by actually arresting them, then cowabunga it is, I've been ready for that for years now.
I think this is basically right. In addition Trump isn’t just A/B testing the base but the Republican leadership in Washington. I would guess it’s about 50/50 or 40/60 in his favor, with a little over half of Republicans still hoping we can go back to the days of “decency” and tax cuts.
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