site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34551 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

13
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Consider this a response to @naraburns' AAQC on classified documents.

U.S. classified materials are handled, for the most part, procedurally. There's a process to open the SCIF and one to close it. A separate, but similar, process for the safe. Creating a document means portion marking and filing, and if you ever want to generate something that leaves the room, by God, there's a process for that too. Even if it's a deliverable going to another room with the same level. Don't get me started on the security overhead to set up a facility, an information system, or an individual badge access point.

At a personal level, compliance is very easy. Do your work in the SCIF. Do not take anything with memory in or out. If you aren't sure, ask a specialist, because your employer quite is quite certainly paying one to handle that, specifically. Fill out all the paperwork. When you run into a roadblock, err on the side of doing nothing until the appropriate authorities cover your ass provide explicit instructions. If this causes challenges or delays in your project, welcome to government contracting.

This does not appear to be how Congress or the White House operate. How could it be? The President doesn't turn in deliverables, he receives them. Everyone involved has staffers; this includes said staffers. Running into uncharted waters with security can't mean a stop-work order, not when the "customer" is the President. As one moves up the hierarchy one runs out of authorities to cite. This moves from the realm of legible rules--and legible consequences--to a more nebulous situation. Responsibility is diluted, and it gets harder to point to any one scapegoat.

Clinton was always going to get away with it. She most likely never crossed whatever bright-line rules were created for the rest of us. She had people for that. At some point they looked for permission to set up such-and-such IT and found there was no obvious point of contact. And as is the standard human response, they shrugged and went forward with whatever they wanted anyway.

I'm going to bet that most Congressmen and Cabinet members run such risks. Biden and Pence and Trump seem to have done so with their filing cabinets and moving boxes. Who was going to sign their AFT form? Who was going to demand to see paperwork before packing up an office for the President or VP? The whole apparatus built around normal security operations sort of....grows sparse as the participants start to overlap with the authorities. Trump has pushed up against these category boundaries with remarkable consistency.

What we're seeing with NARA is not the deep state continuing its politics by other means. It's the visceral panic of a bureaucracy realizing it has a blind spot. My God, it thinks, we just trusted people? Relied on their buy-in, rather than something we can measure and legislate? Their natural reflex is to patch this immediately, preferably with a new regulatory body or two.

The instinct of the media, on the other hand, is that a blind spot is boring. But a Bad Actor exploiting a blind spot--now that's newsworthy. It follows that most news coverage starts from the assumption that Biden, Pence, or especially Trump is a villain trying to abuse the system for personal gain. This is why the different response from Trump is important. It is ammunition for anti-Trump narratives, which are in no short supply. Playing along is boring. It's also anathema to Trump's campaign and to his personal brand.

I still don't think Trump will see meaningful consequences for his 45 Office. The difference in perception is happening almost entirely at the media level, not within NARA or the DoJ. They don't need a scapegoat to revise their policies, and they'll have a hard time finding one due to the spreading of responsibility. I am much more sure that Pence and Biden, as boring cooperators, see no consequences whatsoever.

It's the visceral panic of a bureaucracy realizing it has a blind spot. My God, it thinks, we just trusted people? Relied on their buy-in, rather than something we can measure and legislate?

Being cynical, I think it's "We claimed Trump was a traitor and a threat to the security of the United States because of taking classified documents away with him, and now it turns out every damn congressman has a box of 'classified' documents in his spare room, what the hell do we do now, we can't throw them all in jail - can we?"

I know I'm not exactly unbiased when it comes to this topic but I'm quibble with your characterization of the Clinton situation a bit.

The incident that kicked the whole mess off was that TSC/SCI material from outside the State Department was found in possession of a Clinton staffers' spouse. The material being marked for compartmentalization and having come from outside the state department is important because it means that Clinton was not the classifying authority and thus there was no way for it to end up where it did without multiple clear-cut violations of USC 18-1924. The fact that the tracking numbers had been whited out, further suggested knowledge and intent.

Granted, this was bad but likely would have been ignored if hadn't happened within the wider context of the Bengahzi hearings, and Clinton's response had been anything other than trying dismiss any and all criticism of her performance as sexism.

TSC/SCI material from outside the State Department was found in possession of a Clinton staffers' spouse

Let me be clear, this is the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal (one of), right? Where the FBI investigating him for allegedly sexting a 15 year old seized his laptop and found emails on it from/to his wife Huma Abedin, Hillary's aide and close friend and staffer, and they weren't just about 'where will we go for lunch on Wednesday?'

I can't even count up the regulations and/or laws being broken there in all sorts of ways and that's before getting into 'were these classified material?'

Well, I find the Clinton case to be particularly egregious because it was done with intent to evade oversight. There were perfectly good State Department servers that had at least decent security. Instead of using those, she set up a parallel system, without any meaningful security. Then dozens/hundreds of times she knowingly did nefarious things, because instead of simply emailing to her private server from State servers, she had aids, print, then scan documents so as to get them onto the private server without "any trace".

Overall I agree with you, and this is why I feel that the wider context of the Bengahzi hearings is relevant.

@netstack's invocation of a hypothetical gray-area/blind spot where the participants start to overlap with the authorities, simply does not apply to Clinton because she (through her position as SecState) was not the classifying authority. As such her printing and scanning the documents so as to get them onto her private server "without a trace" was about as clear cut a case of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material as it is possible to ask for. Compartmentalized material was removed from the SecState's SCIF, copies were made, and those copies were transmitted to third parties and stored without proper precautions or authorization.

What we're seeing with NARA is not the deep state continuing its politics by other means. It's the visceral panic of a bureaucracy realizing it has a blind spot. My God, it thinks, we just trusted people? Relied on their buy-in, rather than something we can measure and legislate? Their natural reflex is to patch this immediately, preferably with a new regulatory body or two.

Exactly so. Complicated by the fact that the President can give classified access to anyone he wants, because classification authority is defined by Executive Order, not by legislation. And politicians with Constitutional oversight authority are required to undergo neither the background checks nor the training that civil servants require in order to handle classified documents.

I'd be willing to bet that every president since Eisenhower has taken classified documents home and kept things they weren't supposed to after they left office.

I'd be willing to bet that every president since Eisenhower has taken classified documents home and kept things they weren't supposed to after they left office

And I'm not even sure this is a problem worth solving. The altetnative to elected politicians just sort of winging it on the honor system is unelected bureaucrats being able to unilaterally gatekeep vital information from our democratic representatives, which seems immeasurably worse to me.

What we're seeing with NARA is not the deep state continuing its politics by other means. It's the visceral panic of a bureaucracy realizing it has a blind spot.

I find this entirely plausible. Nonetheless, I still conclude that I would not like officious bureaucrats to have meaningful leverage over Presidents on the matter of classified documents (even if they tell me that they're actually DOCUMENTS rather than any mere documents). Additionally, I will see little or no legible difference between officious bureaucrats panicking and asserting such authority over Presidents and bad actors in the bureaucracy asserting such authority for the sole purpose of power.

What we're seeing with NARA is not the deep state continuing its politics by other means. It's the visceral panic of a bureaucracy realizing it has a blind spot.

What we're seeing is the deep state continuing its politics by other means, but then finding that it can't put the genie back in the bottle and make sure that only the desired target got punished. Some bureaucrats didn't get the memo that an everyone-is-guilty rule was supposed to be used for selective prosecution. Instead they applied the rule fairly, which made everyone guilty.

The fact that they went after Biden doesn't mean it's not the deep state, it means that the deep state screwed up.

The fact that they went after Biden doesn't mean it's not the deep state, it means that the deep state screwed up.

I think it means there's a few people within the bureaucracy who weren't on board with the overall goals, and had enough power to stir up some shit. Not enough to take Biden down of course, but enough to ruin the chance of anything happening to Trump.

Isn't it possible that some people in the deep state think Biden is getting old, and want to see him replaced by a younger Democrat? That's what voters in general want, if I recall correctly, and it seems reasonable to take voter sentiment as a prior for government employee sentiment. (Actually I think govt employees lean Dem heavily but that pretty much reinforces my point)

No, I don't buy it.

By "deep state" I mean an undercover interest in harming Trump specifically and outsiders more generally. That's not what we're seeing here. I'm arguing that the Congressional and Executive handling of classified information is slapdash as hell, always has been, and the current dose of headlines are a bureaucratic attempt at course correction.

The "everyone-is-guilty" rule doesn't exist. There's no DoJ memo saying alright, comrades, this year we're enforcing classification documents. We have had a classification system, bureaucracy, etc. built up over years, and it's very clear on how normal usage is supposed to go. The DoJ/DoD is consistent about training it, about enforcing it, about making examples of the Snowdens and Bergers who actively worked around those protocols.

Except as you move up, into this particular environment, that falls apart. The rules were designed for a certain kind of work product, a specific set of users. SCIFs don't meet the realistic needs of untrained senators getting intel briefings over their morning coffee. So what happens instead? There's no incentive for the elite to make their own hardline rules, and there's little to no scrutiny coming from above.

So they wing it. There's an understanding that one evaluates documents with discretion and without publicizing anything too sensitive. It's mostly common sense; Congressmen don't spend too much time speaking off the cuff. Any press release is going to be filtered through the consensus of dozens of other level-headed, similar-minded bureaucrats. In short, the public face of your average Congressman is as restrained as you might expect from a class of wealthy, educated, self-interested professionals.

But this says nothing about their personal handling of information. As long as it doesn't end up public, who is going to complain when a document doesn't make it back into the safe? This works until it doesn't, until someone builds up enough pressure to overcome all the institutional inertia. Behind every rule is a story. This time, Trump's front and center, but it's not actually about him. It's about breaking kayfabe.

All of this can be true, but with the conclusion reversed. Nearly every time a "scandal" came up during the Trump administration, I chuckled and said, "...so today is the day that people are going to learn how X works, eh?" And when my left-leaning buddies would get into why it was a scandal, we'd discuss how X actually works, with the clinching question being, "So, what are you willing to do about the problem of X? The only constraint on your answer is that you need to be willing to apply the same standard to politicians you like as you do for politicians that you don't like." That's when it became clear that they didn't have any "solution" to the "blind spot" that they could embrace. Their initial reaction was not, "Oh my, this is a blind spot that is a problem with the system in general, and it would be nice if we could fix the system." It was always, from the first moment, motivated by and embraced specifically for its ability to get Trump, because he's obviously crooked and only someone so crooked could do such a thing.

We can check this in hindsight, too. If and when this mostly blows over, because people realize they can't take Trump's scalp on it without taking too many other scalps, how much energy do you think there will be to 'fix the blind spot'? What's an example policy fix that you expect is likely to be adopted in order to bring about changes to the system and then applied evenly to politicians on both sides?

Are these people involved in what Jiro was calling the deep state?

I don't doubt that the media and the average Democrat are more interested in taking Trump to task than in high-minded procedural reform. The issue is boring/niche enough that only the most partisan framing will make it into headlines. And in this court of public opinion, it'll be reduced to extremes: do we Lock Him Up, or is it a Nothingburger?

This is a far cry from the bipartisan outrage at Nixon, so both public options are nonstarters. A solution, if any, will have to be internal. I would not be surprised to see the Executive branch issue some boring policy changes. But this is kind of a copout, as far as predictions go, since I don't really expect them to be public. My more legible predictions are negative.

  • The DoJ will not charge Trump with mishandling classified documents.

  • The DoJ probably won't bring obstruction-of-justice or similar charges (barring new situations).

  • Neither Biden nor Pence nor anyone in Congress will see an actual charge or penalty for their boring, procedural mishandling.

  • Mainstream media will keep reporting anything Trump related as a mortal sin anyway.

I could buy that, but then I think we're sort of contradicting the original premise:

What we're seeing with NARA is not the deep state continuing its politics by other means. It's the visceral panic of a bureaucracy realizing it has a blind spot.

The way you're describing the response now does not seem like "visceral panic". If there is an actual visceral panic upon discovering a blind spot, wouldn't that be oriented toward at least some real, meaningful policy changes? Why wasn't that visceral panic triggered back when it was discovered that there was a blind spot in, "My God, we just trusted people like the Secretary of State?" I've read the culmination of the bureaucracy's response upon learning about such a blind spot - it's the IG's report (IGs are basically always supposed to take scalps; they are the sine qua non of the bureacracy's "visceral panic"). It's incredibly difficult for me to characterize it as "visceral panic".

The rules were designed for a certain kind of work product, a specific set of users. SCIFs don't meet the realistic needs of untrained senators getting intel briefings over their morning coffee.

How is that not "in practice, everyone in high positions is guilty"?

Wasn't there a Senator recently who spoke about having to use a SCIF in the basement of the Capitol to interact with classified documents?

I think it's entirely possible this is a problem limited to the upper-reaches of the Executive branch. I don't think Congress gets to be flippant with its handled of classified material (except to the extent the Speech and Debate clause allows them to verbally release it from the floor of their chambers).

I think it's entirely possible this is a problem limited to the upper-reaches of the Executive branch.

Except we know Biden has stuff from his days as a Senator.

Yeah, and I've seen commentary that that is significantly worse precisely because it's more difficult for Senators to just take stuff home.

You have no evidence for this. You're just assuming everyone is a bad-faith conflict theorist because you are unable to envision how anyone else could be otherwise.

When your model of your enemies is such that if they do what you expect, it affirms your beliefs, and when they don't do what you expect, you assume they made a mistake and thus it affirms your beliefs, consider the possibility that your model is wrong.

I expect my enemies to have double standards against Trump. They have acted accordingly.

Just because they didn't completely ignore Biden doesn't mean they are using fair standards.

And just because they acted against Trump doesn't mean they have double-standards.

Sure, it's hard to come up with a mistake-theorist justification for his theory. It's possible to make a more charitable conflict-theory one, though. If one assumes that the deep state really, really hates Trump, then one might expect them to overplay their hand. Naturally this would be a more impressive prediction if made in September.

I agree that theories of the deep state tend to be sloppy and/or unfalsifiable. This is plausibly an example of such. I think it's still bad practice to put words in his mouth.

Some bureaucrats didn't get the memo that an everyone-is-guilty rule was supposed to be used for selective prosecution. Instead they applied the rule fairly, which made everyone guilty.

Wouldn't that imply that the deep state is at least slightly less deep? or perhaps that it's targets are not purely politically partisan. For example as an ex civil servant, I can tell you there is a class of people which all civil servants I knew really disliked - politicians, regardless of allegiance.

"Slightly less deep" isn't nonexistent or powerless though.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats