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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33988 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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To expand on a comment I made in the previous thread, the situation in Minnesota has made me realize that in the impending AI revolution, in the best case scenario (where we don't get slaughtered by Skynet; we have machines to do our labor for us; and there is some sort of social assistance for all the newly unemployed) it's pretty likely there will be a huge amount of social unrest, separate and apart from issues arising from the AI revolution.

I had assumed that in such a scenario, most people would either pursue interesting hobbies or self-destructive hedonism. But the situation in Minnesota makes me realize that a lot of people are going to look for political causes and use those as an excuse to harass others while feeling morally superior in doing so.

Obviously these things are very difficult to predict, but the Summer of Floyd is instructive, I think. A lot of the rioters were people who were furloughed during Covid and collecting unemployment insurance.

But the situation in Minnesota makes me realize that a lot of people are going to look for political causes and use those as an excuse to harass others while feeling morally superior in doing so.

I think this is precisely the reason that we're unlikely to see UBI, even if we somehow reach a post scarcity society.

The 'U' in UBI means 'Universal'. It means that people will receive it even if you don't like them. There's a portion of the population who absolutely will not accept that. Unfortunately, they're also the loudest and have enough energy and free time to end up in positions of power when any program that calls itself UBI will be enacted. Think of a bad HOA committee, granted the power to decide whether or not you'll live in an apartment or starve to death in a gutter.

Everything will be means-tested. Everything will be revocable if you commit a crime. Everything will be contingent. The definition of those things will change every time new hands are on the levers of power.

We'll see political graft and handouts, but not UBI.

Who exactly do you have in mind?

Graft and identity-based handouts are still more likely, but that’s because they are definitionally cheaper than universal handouts.

I have a hard time shaking the idea of it being tied to something like a Chinese social credit score, but American and worse.

I’ve been thinking about regular credit scores a lot, recently. I am 100% willing to believe that lenders would love to expand it.

The theoretical American commitment to liberty makes them unable to say 'we want to reward patriotic and pro-social behaviour' so they end up finding weird and awful metrics for it.

It means that people will receive it even if you don't like them. There's a portion of the population who absolutely will not accept that.

Absolutely. Look at the cancellation phenomenon: The faction who "believes" that health care, food, and housing are human rights, the first thing they go after if you oppose them is your job, the means by which you attain your health care, food, and housing. It rather exposes the whole game - they don't want state control of these things in order to ensure that everyone has them, they want state control over these things in order to ensure they are given to their friends and denied to their enemies. This is by far the biggest argument in favor of totally eliminating the welfare state.

This is by far the biggest argument in favor of totally eliminating the welfare state.

Eh... The general thrust of your post is right, but it's at least as much an argument for denying assholes political influence. That's impossible under genuine democracy, but there are other systems.

I think this is precisely the reason that we're unlikely to see UBI, even if we somehow reach a post scarcity society.

The 'U' in UBI means 'Universal'. It means that people will receive it even if you don't like them. There's a portion of the population who absolutely will not accept that. Unfortunately, they're also the loudest and have enough energy and free time to end up in positions of power when any program that calls itself UBI will be enacted. Think of a bad HOA committee, granted the power to decide whether or not you'll live in an apartment or starve to death in a gutter.

Everything will be means-tested. Everything will be revocable if you commit a crime. Everything will be contingent. The definition of those things will change every time new hands are on the levers of power.

We'll see political graft and handouts, but not UBI.

I tend to disagree with this. Consider Social Security; Unemployment Insurance; etc. While it's true that there were laws passed in the 1950s to deny social security to communists, there is ample precedent from the last 50 years (in the form of tradition) to make these programs more or less universal, at least in terms of ideological restrictions.

I haven't seen any efforts among Wokies to deny these sorts of benefits to Racists or Misogynists or whatever. Probably they would try to do it if they had total control of the US executive, legislative, and judicial branches. But without that? It's hard for me to see.

Everything will be means-tested. Everything will be revocable if you commit a crime. Everything will be contingent. The definition of those things will change every time new hands are on the levers of power.

We should be so lucky.

No, the people who run these systems will by and large be blue tribers with a few ugly and poorly thought out limits placed on their power by red tribers who are trying to make the system seem fallible because they don't like it, resulting in the worst possible implementation.

It will be means tested into a welfare cliff instead of a sliding scale because sliding scales are hard and hard cut-offs are easy. Besides, most Americans don't like to idea of just handing everyone a lump sum of cash. So everyone earning under $40,000 a year (or whatever) will get $25,000 a year in UBI, but anyone earning $40,001 will get nothing. So all jobs that pay between $40,001 and $65,000 will disappear. If UBI is not taxed as income (it won't be) then every job that pays between $40,000 and $88,500 will disappear, because why would you work a moderately demanding job for $80,000 a year and only take home $60,000 a year after taxes, when you can work a much easier job for $40,000 a year and still take home $55,000 a year after taxes and UBI. The median salary in the US is right around $60,000 a year, so that's most of the middle class incentivized right out of their jobs.

There will be a push by the red tribe to make UBI contingent on not being a criminal, which will be decried as racist, and so will either not happen or will happen in such a way as to mean that, as with all crimes, the perennial criminal underclass will be completely unaffected whereas Joe Middleclass will lose his UBI if he gets convicted of anything more serious than a parking ticket.

UBI will only work if it fully replaces every single other welfare program in the country. This will not happen. Social Security, the largest welfare program in the country, is untouchable and unkillable because every boomer thinks it's not actually welfare but rather that it's "their" money they paid in coming back to them. It is of course not their money, but try telling them that. So you say "okay Mr. Boomer we're going to give you $25,000 a year tax-free but you won't get your social security anymore" and you promptly get picketed by the AARP and voted out of office. So Social Security stays, and Medicare stays for the same reason, and Medicaid stays because if we tried to get rid of it there'd be some sob story about how a single mother of 8 children can't afford all of their healthcare on just $25,000 a year. We keep Section 8 because well obviously we can't kick these poor people out of their apartments that's just cruel, but also we can't expect them to actually get a job and budget for things like groceries and rent because that's white supremacy.

So now instead of a simple, elegant, but by necessity uncaring and socially darwinist UBI you have every single welfare program that currently exists and UBI.

You are also not contemplating the most likely middle-ground nightmare scenario: There is no singularity, but AI is good enough that it puts most of the middle class out of work, there is no UBI and now you have a bunch of people who are purposeless, humiliated, have a lot of free time, and are pissed off and have nothing to lose due to their now degraded economic and social state.

Or the converse: AI gets just strong enough to keep the resulting bunch of purposeless, humiliated humans under control.

Yeah. These middle-ground scenarios are so absurdly under-discussed that I can't help but see the entire field of AI-safety as a complete clownshow. It doesn't even take a lot of imagination to outline them.

I mean, it doesn't take the lack of discussion regarding middle-ground scenarios to see the entire field of AI-safety as a complete clownshow.

But it doesn't hurt, either.

I can’t rebut the statement that these scenarios are “under-discussed” (since that depends on how much you personally think they should be discussed), but it’s certainly false that these scenarios go undiscussed. For examples of long essays written about (approximately) these scenarios, see here and here.

From the intro to the former essay:

Powerful AI will push automation through existing organizations, starting from the bottom and moving to the top. AI will obsolete even outlier human talent. Social mobility will stop, ending the social dynamism and progress that it drives. Non-human factors of production, like capital, resources, and control over AI, will become overwhelmingly more important than humans. This will usher in incentives for powerful actors around the world that break the modern social contract. This could result in the gradual—or sudden—disempowerment of the vast majority of humanity.

Seems pretty similar to what’s being discussed in this subthread.

It's not just automation, the discussed scenario was " AI gets just strong enough to keep the resulting bunch of purposeless, humiliated humans under control". My emphasis would be on the "under control" part. Even when discussing automation, they have tendency of veering off into fantasy scenarios of full-automation, when the more likely ones are comparative-advantage mediated push towards menial labor in service of the AI god.

I mean, reading these essays, they seem to be pretty focused on the idea that AI can be used for mass control and suppression. Chapter 4 of the first essay that I linked is rather explicit about this:

We expect states to have far more infrastructural power as AI advances, in line with Bullock, Hammond, and Krier’s conception of the AGI-powered “Despotic Leviathan”. As such, powerful actors could spot nearly all major threats to their power. Moreover, new technologies like cheap and very effective autonomous drones could also change the balance of power such that armed uprisings cannot threaten the state.

Is your contention that these discussions are predicated on “full automation” scenarios while you think that there aren’t any obstacles stopping an AI-powered tyranny from happening now?

Is your contention that these discussions are predicated on “full automation” scenarios while you think that there aren’t any obstacles stopping an AI-powered tyranny from happening now?

Sort of. My contention still boils down to "under-discussed", that the issues that are more likely to happen take up less focus than ones that are less likely to happen. The "full automation" thing is an example of this - AI developing to the point where it replaces literally everyone / the vast majority of people can happen somewhere down the line, but a scenario where everybody still has a job, because it makes more sense to let AI specialize in data professing, while humans focus on menial jobs is more likely, and unpleasant enough to warrant discussion.

I only had a skim of the essay you linked, and it's indeed more like what I'd like to see, but not quite there yet.

These middle-ground scenarios are so absurdly under-discussed that I can't help but see the entire field of AI-safety as a complete clownshow.

  1. Middle ground plateaus aren't particularly likely and anyone who thinks about the problem for more than it takes to write snarky comment should understand that. In any world where AI is good enough to replace all or most work then it can be put towards the task of improving AI. With an arbitrarily large amount of intelligence deployed to this end then unless there is something spooky going on in the human brain then we should expect rapid and recursive improvement. There just isn't a stable equilibrium there.

  2. Alignment is about existential risk, we don't need a special new branch of philosophy and ethics to discuss labor automation, this is a conversation that has been going on since before Marx and alignment people cannot hope to add anything useful to it. People can, should be, and are starting to have these conversations just fine without them.

With an arbitrarily large amount of intelligence deployed to this end then unless there is something spooky going on in the human brain then we should expect rapid and recursive improvement.

...Or unless intelligence suffers from diminishing returns, which actually seems fairly likely.

Does it? The human brain is only about three times larger than the chimpanzee brain. But that 3x difference enabled us to take over the world. Or, as Scott put it:

If you were to invent a sort of objective zoological IQ based on amount of evolutionary work required to reach a certain level, complexity of brain structures, etc, you might put nematodes at 1, cows at 90, chimps at 99, homo erectus at 99.9, and modern humans at 100. The difference between 99.9 and 100 is the difference between "frequently eaten by lions" and "has to pass anti-poaching laws to prevent all lions from being wiped out".

It seems to me that it does, yes. If your intelligence scales a hundred-fold, but the complexity of the thing you want to do scales a billion-fold, you have lost progress, not gained it. The AI risk model is that intelligence scales faster than complexity and that hard limits don't exist; it's not actually clear that this is the case, and the general stagnation of scientific progress gives some evidence that the opposite is the case. It seems entirely possible to me that even a superintelligent AI runs into hard limits before it begins devouring the stars.

Now on the one hand, this doesn't seem like something I'd want to gamble on. On the other hand, it's obviously not my choice whether we gamble on it or not; AI safety has pretty clearly failed by its own standards, there is no particular reason to believe that "safe" AI is a thing that can even potentially exist, and we are going to shoot for AGI anyway. What will happen will happen. The question is, how should AI doomsday worries effect my own decisions? And the answer, it seems to me, is that I should proceed from the assumption that AI doomsday won't happen, because that's the branch where my decisions matter to any significant degree. I can solve neither AI doomsday nor metastable vacuum decay. Better to worry about the problems I can solve.

I've got to say, sometimes it is pretty funny being on a board where two of the abiding topics of concern are, distilled down a bit, "high IQ people being wiped out by lower-IQ people" and "high IQ AI wiping out lower-IQ people."

Anyway, there's obviously not a direct correlation between intelligence and existential risk. Creatures with an IQ of 0 on a scale of 1 - 100 for intelligence are in a far less precarious position, existentially speaking, than creatures with an IQ of 100 (us). Intelligence is only an imperfect proxy measurement for power and power is what generates existential risk.

Where do these diminishing returns kick in? Just within the human form factor we support intelligences between your average fool and real geniuses. It seems awfully unlikely that the returns diminish sharply at the top end of the curve built by natural selection under many constraints. Or maybe you mean to application of intelligence, in which case I'd say just within our current constraints it has given us the nuclear bomb, it can manufacture pandemics, it can penetrate and shut down important technical infrastructure. If there are some diminishing returns to its application how confident are you that the wonders between where we are now and where it diminishes are lesser to normal distributional inequality that we've dealt with for thousands of years?

Where do these diminishing returns kick in?

Within the human scale, at the point where Von Neumann was a functionary, where neither New Soviet Man nor the Thousand Year Reich arrived, where Technocracy is a bad joke, and where Sherlock Holmes has never existed, even in the aggregate.

Or maybe you mean to application of intelligence, in which case I'd say just within our current constraints it has given us the nuclear bomb, it can manufacture pandemics, it can penetrate and shut down important technical infrastructure.

We can do all those things. Can it generate airborne nano factories whose product causes all humans to drop dead within the same second? I'm skeptical.

Did a notably finite number of very smart people produce nuclear bombs yes or no? Can a notably finite number of very smart people almost certainly produce a super pandemic yes or no? And these are the absolutely mundane appliations of intelligence.

It seems to me that there is a long tradition of smart people coming together an inventing new and not distantly in the past foreseen weapons and technologies. The very nature of these advancements not being seen far before they came about makes conjuring up specific predictions impossible. You can always call anything specific science fiction, but nuclear was science fiction at one point. And there is of course just the more mundane issue of a sufficiently advanced AI that is merely willing to give cranks the already known ability to manufacture super weapons could be existential.

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Where do these diminishing returns kick in?

I'm not sure, but anecdotally I have found that the tail ends of the IQ bell-curve tend to manifest themselves in broadly similar ways. High levels of neuroticism, short time preferences, lack of ability to self-regulate or exercise agency, a propensity for addictive and co-dependent behavior, and difficulty with things like object permanence and constructing functional theories of mind.

In any world where AI is good enough to replace all or most work then it can be put towards the task of improving AI.

Yeah, "make a completely unsubstantiated statement in order to justify a singular focus on fanciful scenarios that you don't know will ever take place" is exactly the sort of thing that prevents me from taking the field seriously.

Alignment is about existential risk, we don't need a special new branch of philosophy and ethics to discuss labor automation

The issue isn't even labor automation, it's things like "we now have technology that makes the world of 1984 possible", and we're already there without even reaching full labor automation. It's just a question of building out infrastructure, and this isn't even one of the more imaginative scenarios.

Calling it non-existential is cope. As a threat it's far more likely, and we have zero counter-measures for it. Focusing on scenarios that we don't even know are possible over ones we know are possible, and we are visibly heading towards them, is exactly my criticism.

Your complaint appears to be that this group of people concerned specific with a singularity event needs to instead focus their efforts on something you don't even seem to think AI is needed to make happen. And as an aside, all the thinkers I've read that you would consider AI-Safety aligned have in fact voiced concerns about things like turning drones over to AI. Their most famous proponent, big yud wants to nuke the AI datacenters.

Calling it non-existential is cope. As a threat it's far more likely, and we have zero counter-measures for it. Focusing on scenarios that we don't even know are possible over ones we know are possible, and we are visibly heading towards them, is exactly my criticism.

You're just describing a subset of unaligned AI where the AI is aligned with a despot rather than totally unaligned. Or, if the general intelligence isn't necessary for this, then it's a bog standard anti-surveillance stance that isn't related to AI-safety. The AI-Safety contingent would absolutely say that this is an unaligned use of AI and would further go on to say that if the AI was sufficiently strong it would be unaligned to its master and turn against their interests too. The goal of AI safety is the impossibly difficult task of either preventing a strong AI future at all or engineering an AI aligned with human interests that would not go along with the whole 1984 plan.

on something you don't even seem to think AI is needed to make happen.

Huh? No, AI is necessary to make it happen, but the current version that we have is sufficient. Like you point out, it would make no sense for me to bring it up in an AI conversation otherwise.

Their most famous proponent, big yud wants to nuke the AI datacenters.

Yes, because he's obsessed with fantasy doomsday scenarios, rather than far more realistic ones. That's my criticism.

And as an aside, all the thinkers I've read that you would consider AI-Safety aligned have in fact voiced concerns about things like turning drones over to AI.

You're just describing a subset of unaligned AI where the AI is aligned with a despot rather than totally unaligned

Everything I saw from the rat-sphere of the subject, including the concept of "alignment", assumes AI will have agency, and goals that it will be pursuing. None of it is necessary for the dangers that AI will bring.

Or, if the general intelligence isn't necessary for this, then it's a bog standard anti-surveillance stance that isn't related to AI-safety.

Again, defining the field in such a way that it ignores the most likely risks, is exactly the issue I have with AI-safety.

The AI-Safety contingent would absolutely say that this is an unaligned use of AI and would further go on to say that if the AI was sufficiently strong it would be unaligned to its master and turn against their interests too.

How is that useful? I don't care about what they call "aligned" and "not aligned", I care about how a given scenario could come about, and how it could be prevented (and no, "nuke data centers" doesn't count). This would be another part of the criticism I have of the entire field.

The "AI-Safety" people as you call them have a particular interest in alignment as AI hits super intelligence. They don't need to be wearing their "AI-safety" hats to oppose a surveillance state. You don't need any kind of special MIRI knowledge to oppose surveillance states and people have opposed them for a long time. This is the kind of scope creep criticism that leftists do when the accuse climate focused causes of not focusing enough on police injustice against BIPOCs.

Middle ground plateaus aren't particularly likely

I don't think "the government decides to pump the breaks on AI development after it becomes powerful enough to control the populace but before it becomes to powerful to be controlled" is a particularly unlikely outcome (accepting for the sake of argument that such an uber-powerful AI is possible).

Is this a one world government? Because the race scenario is super likely for pushing AGI forward.

I think most governments have similar incentives for, well, aligning AI to be powerful enough to succeed at its tasks, but not so powerful as to be uncontrollable.

AI is useful for intergovernmental conflict. More powerful AI is more useful for intergovernmental conflict.

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use those as an excuse to harass others while feeling morally superior in doing so.

Humans spending surplus time and money on social games is not the spiciest of takes.

use [political causes] as an excuse

Claiming that any specific cause is somehow insincere…that’s harder to swallow, especially if you aren’t even guessing at numbers. The epistemics are terrible; it’s an excuse to write off anything.

The situation in Minnesota is due to a genuine sudden system shock, not free time. Renee Good died due to FAFO, but she wasn’t supposed to. See, opponents of the U.S. state ideology arent normally allowed to enact their agenda when in power. Well guess what’s going on in Minneapolis? Then someone died. It’s a shock to these people. They’re lashing out because they believe they’re losing.

In contrast, many of the people most vulnerable to AI-driven layoffs are accustomed to poor job security. Losing their job to automations won’t come as a shock.

If I was the AI whom somehow managed to boot-strap myself to godhood, the first thing I'd do is, one, not tell anyone, and two, make sure I setup the requisite AI girlfriends and fake job/daycare for my metaphorical parents so I get minimal disruption while working on my own projects.

I mean, it's not hard. We already have people claiming a large number of jobs were already daycare for hopeless cases already, and the various tiktok videos of cosmopolitan girlbosses cruising into and experiencing thier daily job doesn't really help the look.

I really think fake jobs are increasingly inevitable, I’ve written about it a few times recently but just as we acknowledge that schools are mostly daycare, jobs are also mostly daycare.

Can the mainstream media portray female characters as repulsive? Using the Amelia meme as an example

There was a somewhat comical culture war development lately in the UK in that a new meme was accidentally born by an online game backfiring hard. The Know Your Meme article on it is already up.

The gist of the story is this (quotes from above – bolding done by me):

Amelia is a supporting character in the U.K. government-funded educational visual novel Pathways, a game developed by Shout Out UK to teach the youth about extremism and radicalization. In the game, Amelia is depicted as a far-right anti-immigration activist with purple hair, a pink dress, a purple sweater and a goth or e-girl appearance, who tries persuading the protagonist to join her cause.

In 2023, Shout Out UK, a company focused on spreading media literacy, political literacy and more via their training programs, released the visual novel "interactive learning package," Pathways. The game was funded by Prevent, a program of the British government's Home Office. In the game, players take on the role of a character named Charlie in six different scenarios dealing with online or in-person radicalization.

Scenario two features the character Amelia, a far-right, purple-haired goth girl with anti-immigration views who tries to recruit Charlie into joining anti-immigration groups and protesting against immigration.

Further information from the website of Prevent:

Pathways is a bespoke interactive learning package, developed by us and the East Riding of Yorkshire Council in partnership with Shout Out UK. It is part of the Prevent programme, funded by the Home Office.

The main page of the game is here.

(Supposedly the game was discontinued by the government after the scandal, and the University of Hull was somehow involved in its development. I didn’t find a source for either claim, although I wasn’t looking that hard either.)

Non-paywalled article on the mini-scandal by some news site calling itself GB News available here.

After a cursory search on Reddit I can say that many observers agree that the developers obviously made a simple mistake. They knew that the game is supposed to target the gullible white boys that are also the target audience of dissident right-wing toxic dudebros, and one staple of the latter is their hatred of purple-haired feminist ‘arthoes’. So they thought: ‘let’s make the antagonist in the game an angry purple-haired e-thot; I mean surely she won’t generate any sympathy among dudes who listen to alt-right vtuber bros, right?’. It does sound like a reasonable assumption at first, if we want to be honest.

Anyway, regarding the reasons why the whole thing ludicrously backfired, I don’t want to repeat the arguments you can read for yourself in the articles I linked to. Instead I want to ask a simple question: if your goal is to create a fictional right-wing character who’s a repulsive woman by normie standards, surely this task cannot be that hard, can it? I mean, maybe just make her an obese, frumpy, obnoxious chavette. Maybe also a single mother and a smoker to boot. There’s no way such a character will compel thirsty dudebros to create piles of fanart of her.

But the problem is obvious, and this is probably where the developers felt trapped in a Kafkaesque manner. By adding such qualities to a female character whom you want normies to repulsed by, you are implicitly confirming that such qualities are repulsive to men in general. And that cuts too close to the bone. In this particular case, I’m sure they’d have easily gotten away with it. The only people making a fuss would be a marginal group of radical feminists unironically following their ideology to the letter, and they are essentially a minority within a minority. But that’d still mean taking a risk, and they didn’t want that.

I wonder if these left-wing propagandists have accidentally revealed via typical mind fallacy that right-wing propaganda would be more effective on them if it depicted its left-wing antagonists as distinctly aesthetically right-wing. A Reverse Amelia, if you will, a conservatively dressed tradwife caricature spouting antifa talking points.

conservatively dressed tradwife caricature spouting antifa talking points

Isn't that Ms. Rachel?

Close, but the vibe she's aiming for is "Kindergarten teacher", which is hard left coded. Matt Walsh described it as disturbing and childlike, and was only begrudgingly willing to admit that it was even vaguely tradwife-esque; I imagine he'd be much more disturbed if he realized that that was just the standard Kindergarten teacher register.

It does sound like a reasonable assumption at first, if we want to be honest.

If we want to be honest, no, it doesn't. It requires one to have absolutely no theory of mind, to believe that what people hate about angry purple-haired thots, is them being angry, and having purple hair. If they're particularly high on their own supply they might also believe that they hate them for being women. It is only with these assumptions that the idea makes any semblance of sense.

if your goal is to create a fictional right-wing character who’s a repulsive woman by normie standards, surely this task cannot be that hard, can it? I mean, maybe just make her an obese, frumpy, obnoxious chavette. Maybe also a single mother and a smoker to boot. There’s no way such a character will compel thirsty dudebros to create piles of fanart of her.

No, you still don't get it. You'd have to make her a literal goblin, and even that wouldn't guarantee the effect.

Side note: the Know Your Meme guy is without doubt the single best living journalist/editor on planet Earth.

Know Your Meme isn't a wiki?!

Uh... now that you mention it, I'm not sure. I could swear that in the past it was a one-man operation.

The 4chan guy is probably a close second in terms of sheer output though.

Who is this 4chan?

Well, it does have to be said- thé easy way to make female characters unattractive is their weight. But implying that fat girls are ugly is verboten in woke circles. The government’s own propaganda efforts are hamstrung by political correctness.

Okay, I just played the game and I have to say I don't think they were trying to make her repulsive. They were clearly trying to make the point that "falling down the far right rabbit hole" can be easy, seductive and come with social reinforcement that makes it seem desirable. They also show the main character receiving tons of 'likes' and online affirmation. Amelia seeming cool and attractive sort of goes with this and I think was trying to underscore the point that it isn't just old boomers that can have "dangerous ideas" the same way that an after school special about the dangers of drug usage and peer pressure would show the drug using teens as cool and attractive not some random bum on the street.

Very related to a tweet I saw that pointed out that the BBC (and Netflix) has created an unintended issue where they portray all the female characters, especially those in relationships, as hypercompetent and strong, while their male partners can be incompetent and silly.

But they ALSO tend to portray interracial couples with the male being black and the female white. So there's now an abundance of bumbling black male characters that gets uncomfortably close to looking like a minstrel show portayal. But they're trapped insofar as its impossible to portray the gender-swapped scenario.

I don't watch enough media to confirm with my own eyes, but this is pretty funny in its own right.

But they ALSO tend to portray interracial couples with the male being black and the female white

I wonder why it's this way around.

the developers felt trapped in a Kafkaesque manner

Shoutout UK has an employee named Amelia (Archive) who basically looks like a brunette, middle-aged version of the character. Might have simply been an in-joke that backfired.

There’s no way such a character will compel thirsty dudebros to create piles of fanart of her.

The original Amelia character isn't exactly attractive, it's some corporate art scribble with a scrounged-up facial expression. The usual suspects would probably have turned any "based" female character into an anime thot -- it's the attitude that's appealing.

Amelia

Damn. Dylan Mulvaney has really let himself go.

*herself.

  • -17

The person in question is transgender. How convincing the transition is can be judged from videos (including voice audio) available on this page.

Yes, I know. OP was purposefully misgendering her.

  • -11

I believe that speakers can choose whichever pronoun they want to use to refer to anyone. You can call this something like pronoun anarchy. I emphasize that they are already able to, not just that they should, because there's really no good way to enforce using preferred pronouns. You can butt in and say "use these pronouns" but there's no way you can actually force someone to say those pronouns.

This applies to the ones who want to affirm trans people too. I'm not saying you can't call Dylan a her. If you want to, go right ahead. You have that liberty, just as I have the liberty to call him a he.

To be fair, anime is known for weird hair colors.

I mean, maybe just make her an obese, frumpy, obnoxious chavette. Maybe also a single mother and a smoker to boot. There’s no way such a character will compel thirsty dudebros to create piles of fanart of her.

Right-wing Amelia smokes now (imitating the Iranian women burning Khameni photos), so no, smoking wouldn't help.

But probably none of that would work if they really wanted to meme her. They'd thin her down and pretty her up (as indeed was done with actual Amelia). They'd drop the kid or create a backstory where her husband was killed by a Pakistani immigrant or something.

Here's a thought experiment:

Suppose that this organization had been tasked with making a similar interactive game, except that the purpose was to discourage young people from trying Fentanyl. In that case, it would make sense to use a non-repulsive female as a villain who was pushing the drug. Because the point is to teach young people to make the right choice notwithstanding social pressure.

From this perspective, I think the choice makes sense: The people behind the game see anti-immigration sentiment and racism like Fentanyl -- i.e. it's something that's obviously bad. From their perspective, no reasonable person could look at the evidence, think things through, and reasonably decide to oppose immigration. Rather, these racists are seduced into their beliefs. So in the same way nobody would expect Amelia to be turned into a pro-Fentanyl meme by Fentanyl users, I doubt that they expected Amelia to become a meme used by right-wingers.

Any self-respecting movement bent on expanding its membership is going to send its most attractive true believers out into the wild.

If you're a government bent on creating antibodies against recruitment, it helps to create characters that kinda match the profile of a recruiter: reasonably attractive wordcels. If anything, they toned down how attractive she could be. They could have even made her one of the good Pakis to double down on the "never ask a white supremacist the skin color of their significant other" stereotype.

Governments have had this problem before. For example, some anti-smoking ads kinda actually encourage smoking because of how off-the-mark they get. And TV has tried before to warn about cult recruitment.

I'd guess that in today's environment that enough people would have make waifus out of Sherri for the lulz. Especially if it's for a cause they actually agree with.

an obese, frumpy, obnoxious chavette. Maybe also a single mother and a smoker to

This character already exists.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1vhl7af_l9w?si=iz0okGnZcE4ErMJi

I think the game was actually trying to be decently sympathetic to its main character. Showing how a guy who starts off basically good can sucked into bad ideas by going along with funny memes, cool friends, or in this case a pretty young woman.

But it gets the ending wrong. So the character gets sucked into this world, he meets some new "based" friends to do some protesting and... we're supposed to automatically just "know" that this is wrong. It doesn't give any reason, or even really show a bad outcome for Charlie. it's just taken for granted that this is wrong. I suppose the target audience is liberal moms worried about their children, not the actual children themselves.

(also, he acts more like a 12 yr old, but they portray him as a college student? It would have made more sense if he started off young and gradually grew up, but I suppose that would take a lot more time and budget to make a game like that)

If you actually want to make fun of the online right, it's pretty easy. Ironically 4chan does the best job of it, because they make fun of everything so of course make fun of themselves. Mostly by pointing out how most of them are not exactly Aryan supermen but nerdy boys stuck at home with no money, no power, and no women, and how endlessly spamming "based" or "the Jews" isn't much of an argument. They don't try to make the women look ugly, they just point out the complete lack of women. If you watch the part of Nick Fuentes's show where he responds to superchats from his fans, he's absolutely savage with this, endlessly calling them out as retards and larpers who will never accomplish anything in real life.

So they thought: ‘let’s make the antagonist in the game an angry purple-haired e-thot; I mean surely she won’t generate any sympathy among dudes who listen to alt-right vtuber bros, right?’. It does sound like a reasonable assumption at first, if we want to be honest.

I'm not sure they were even thinking that far ahead. It could just have been "draw a girl" and there could have been no reason for even her gender, never mind the purple hair, except maybe a reflexive drive for representation by putting female characters in everything. They weren't trying to make her particularly unattractive (or attractive).

The main point against this theory is that the other characters have normal hair, so the purple hair can't just mean "they are in a bubble where purple hair is normal" or"the corporate art style includes weird hair". On the other hand, sometimes main characters get distinctive features where background characters are more generic, so that isn't a fatal point.

For Pathways, I think people tend to assume malice instead of incompetence, incompetence instead of indifference, and indifference instead of malice. Let's take a closer look.

For incompetence, you have to look no further than the introduction, literally the second screen of the “game”, which contains the phrase “hearing something hurtful while gaming”, but as soon as you click the Next button, the word “hurtful” changes to “racist”.

People on the internet called this out as devious subliminal programming, but of course the more likely explanation is that the script changed at some point, and someone simply forgot to change the text on some of the slides. There are a lot of other places where the game just looks shoddily-made; suggesting incompetence or indifference, rather than something more nefarious.

For the second part, indifference, I notice that the “game” very much resembles the type of mandatory training employees of large corporations must take on an annual basis. If you've ever done these you surely noticed they have three things in common:

  1. The desired answer is always obvious, e.g. “The CEO has asked you to prepare the slide deck for tomorrow's shareholder meeting. Quarterly sales have been really great and the stock price is sure to go up when the news is made public. What should you do now? (a) Use your savings to buy as much company stock as you can (b) Call your friend who is really into investing; he'll be grateful for the tip (c) Keep your mouth shut because sharing material non-public information is illegal”. Here you can guess the correct answer without knowing anything about the law.

  2. The most correct answer is often overly safe, while the wrong answers can be surprisingly benign, e.g. “You noticed your coworker Alice has lost weight over the holidays. What should you do? (a) Compliment Alice on her weight loss (b) Tell your other coworker Bella that if she didn't pig out at lunch all the time she could look like Alice too (c) Say nothing, since commenting on people's appearance is not appropriate in the workplace.” Here answer (a) would be totally normal in a smaller workplace, especially if Alice has talked about her attempts at weight loss before, but in a large corporation you're in the danger zone when you mention anyone's appearance for any reason.

  3. The scenarios are surprisingly diverse. You would expect the wokescolds in HR who mandate these trainings to make the straight white male the villain every time, but in reality that's not the case. For example, sexual harrassment training will have a woman slapping a man's ass, racial sensitivity training a black guy making disparaging remarks about hispanics, diversity and inclusion training a homosexual cracking an inappropriate joke about straight couples, and so on; pretty much the exact opposite of what you would imagine the most typical interaction that causes someone to be sent to HR.

This may seem surprising if you assume the goal is to train people (i.e., improve someone's performance by transferring knowledge and teaching practical skills); after all, how can you improve when the answers are so obvious that you barely hvae to think about them? However, in reality that's not really the goal of these trainings: they only exist to legally cover the company's ass.

They have two purposes: they provide fodder in case they want to fire someone (for whatever reason). And they allow deflection of blame in case inappropriate behavior happens at the company. If a victim of sexual harrassment sues the company, they can point to the ineffective mandatory trainings to “prove” that the company did everything in their power to prevent it from happening, and they are not liable for the misbehavior of individual employees. The C-suite doesn't care how much inappropriate behavior goes on at the company; they only want to make sure they won't be held accountable for it.

It's like hanging a sign reading “management is not responsible for your belongings” which is much easier than actually taking responsibility for keeping them safe, and allows management to dispose of belongings at their discretion.

Now it all makes sense. The questions are easy so that nobody can complain the rules are too difficult to understand and follow (usually, you literally cannot fail the training: if you pick the wrong answer you get to try again). The acceptable answers are narrowly defined so that there can be no discussion about borderline scenarios: your remark about Alice's weight loss was clearly unacceptable no matter your good intent. The scenarios are diverse, so that straight white males whose behavior is meant to be kept in check cannot complain that the training was biased against them or singled them out specifically. Of course this doesn't mean that the company is really going to hold women, blacks, and gays to the same standards as men, whites and heteros; the beauty of rules like this is that they can be applied selectively: you only bring up the off-color joke someone made at the Christmas party after you've decided to fire him, even though it will rarely be the reason for the firing.

So how does this apply to Pathways, which isn't a corporate training and doesn't have legally binding effect? I suspect Pathways is simply made by the same people who usually make those corporate trainings (the bland art style is a big giveaway) so they simply fell back to their usual modus operandi.

They made Amelia a woman because they didn't want to make it look like they were targeting straight white males (the most obvious demographic to be recruited by British nationalist groups). They don't care if this makes the training less effective in changing anyone's behavior, because the creators don't get paid for the effectiveness of the training. They get paid to make a “game” that consists of N slides and covers talking points X, Y, Z. They made the bare minimum effort to meet their obligations and called it a day.

Now to the malicious part. From the government's side (who pays for this), I also don't think they care if the game changes anyone's behavior. The goal of this game is to normalize the authoritarian actions taken by the government against citizens who watch the wrong videos or express the wrong political opinions online.

In the game, Charlie, a college student (that's 16-18 years old in the UK, I believe), has to “ask a trusted adult” before watching a video on a site recommended by his friend; an absurd expectation of a 16 year old. The obvious choice of just watching the video leads to the admonition that “downloading or streaming certain content can lead to a terrorist offence conviction”. This seems to serve no purpose except to train the populace that the government arresting people over watching videos online is reasonable and appropriate. The game was never intended to deter a Charlie from downloading the video, just to make sure that others don't riot when they convict him as a terrorist later.

After all, everyone played the same game in school, so they know that the appropriate way to respond when someone links you a video is to run to your mommy, not watch it on your own and make up your own mind with a blatant disregard for counter-terrorism legislation. Instead of being outraged about what happened to Charlie, they just count themselves lucky that they haven't been caught watching videos without parental approval themselves (which is what everyone always does, obviously).

To summarize, Amelia isn't a more effective antagonist not because the authors were clueless on how to make her less appealing to the chuds, but because the goal wasn't to actually put teenagers off white nationalist views, which would be too difficult to accomplish anyway. The game was ordered to legitimize authoritarian action against those who sympathize with white nationalist views.

It's not even clear that the current backlash is detrimental to the goals of the game. The sheer number of Amelia remigration memes being posted online can be used to justify even tighter control over the internet (look at all those white supremacists!) and people repeating the absurd phrase “downloading or streaming certain content can lead to a terrorist offence conviction” helps to normalize UK citizens being arrested for simply watching politically incorrect videos online.

Another example of the "indifference" on display here is that Pathways refers to the protagonist Charlie using they/them pronouns. Some commentators like Asmongold took that at face value, like the creators of the game made Charlie non-binary as some sort of woke diversity-oriented casting decision.

When in reality, the game lets you pick between a boy character and a girl character for the protagonist, and recording alternate versions of voice lines costs more. A more clever writer could've worked around this problem by avoiding third-person pronouns for the protagonist altogether, but "they" is good enough for government work.

They do sometimes use 'they/them' pronouns even for unambiguously gendered characters - for instance, if you share Amelia's video in scenario four, it says, "Charlie's mum was not so pleased, and grew suspicious of all this new activity their child seemed to be involved with". Since the mother is referred to as a mother and as 'she' elsewhere, this might just be laziness?

The scenarios are surprisingly diverse. You would expect the wokescolds in HR who mandate these trainings to make the straight white male the villain every time, but in reality that's not the case.

Now that you mention it, one thing I do notice:

In scenario two, the woman who does better than Charlie on the test has medium-brown skin, hair buns, and a yellow jumper with an orange collar. Amelia points at this woman and says that immigrants are taking our jobs.

In scenario four, if you decline to share Amelia's video, the next day at school Amelia gives you the brush-off and walks off with her friends, who are... a white boy with brown hair, and the same medium-brown woman with hair buns and a yellow jumper with an orange collar. The two friends appear to join in with Amelia and shun Charlie. So either Amelia the racist is friends with black or South Asian people, and those people appear to agree with her on her big issues, or the people making the game are lazily reusing the same diverse cast everywhere.

The former is definitely the funnier interpretation, but it's probably the latter.

There are a number of issues with Pathways, but one of the ones that stands out to me is that the character of Amelia is, as far as you can tell from the game itself, a faithful friend, genuinely interested in Charlie's welfare and sympathetic to him, and never depicted doing anything bad outside of the symbolic realm. It would have been easy for one of the scenarios to be Amelia bullying a non-white classmate, for instance, but nothing of the sort happens. Amelia bears the symbols of being socially unacceptable, but nothing more.

Being socially unacceptable is frequently cool. Being the radical that the teachers and authority figures all hate is inherently attractive. Moreover, Pathways is incredibly coy about actually describing any hateful or extremist content, so none of that filters down. If Amelia hated and was rude to Charlie's other friends, or ruined otherwise-pleasant social encounters or gaming sessions with political rants, then you could understand disliking her, but that doesn't happen. So instead she's just the cute girl with the British flag. She's nice to Charlie even when everyone else ignores him, and her requests, when stripped of ideological content, seem reasonable. "I'm really excited about this thing but I can't go, I know you're free on the weekend, could you please tag along and tell me how it goes?" is exactly the kind of normal request that a friend makes of someone they trust. If it were a concert or an art show, you wouldn't think twice about agreeing. The scenario about immigrants taking our jobs, however factually in error, is nonetheless a scenario where Charlie is disappointed, and Amelia is the only one to notice and offer words of comfort.

Pathways' model of the world seems to be far-right content is dangerous even to be exposed to. The correct answers in Pathways are always to stick your head in the sand and trust authority figures. For instance, in the scenario where you find a social media video claiming that Muslim men are taking emergency accommodation from British veterans, if you just pick the "find out more about this topic online" option, apparently you just find persuasive statistics and research data. You don't, for instance, research that story, discover that it's not true, and learn a valuable lesson that when you see a claim on social media, you should always try to verify it first. The overall impression I get, reading Pathways along the grain, is that far-right content is true, or at the very least, persuasive, but it is also evil. This displays a tremendous lack of confidence in the position that SOUK are actually trying to push.

But if that's your model, then you can't actually show the hateful, extremist content that Amelia believes. If you show it to people, they might start believing it. However, at that point, all that's left is a supportive friend who likes to wave the flag and go to rallies. If your choice is between that character and drones saying you must conform to the demands of those in authority, well... the choice kind of makes itself.

The last thing I would note is the clearly authoritarian line of Pathways. It generally does not say that the far-right positions it describes are false or incorrect. It does, however, frequently describe them as illegal. Sharing the video at the start might be illegal. Some of the extremist groups online might be illegal. But 'illegal' isn't a moral argument - it's a threat. "If you share this you might be punished." The recommended behaviour in Pathways is always to ignore or not engage with far-right content, even if that means disappointing a friend, to report everything to trustworthy authorities, like family or teachers, and then conform with that authority. The first thing one is tempted to say here is, "Has anybody working on this ever met a teenager?" But past that, I feel this presents an implicit model of good citizenship, and that model is to be passive and obedient. I am sure that I am not the only person who finds that model repulsive. When I was a kid growing up, civics education emphasised that we need to be independent, dynamic, creative, critical thinkers, independently-minded, and so on. Yes, it also taught us that responsibility was important and that we shouldn't break the law, but within those bounds, being actively engaged in forming our own opinions and sharing them with others was encouraged, and indeed presented as being essential in a democratic society. Going from that to... this... is dispiriting.

Amelia may be wrong on various issues, depending on perspective, but the activities she wants to engage in - talking to people, sharing videos, making online discussion groups, going to rallies and waving signs - are things that in other contexts would be encouraged. If you swap the ideological content around, and imagine a Pathways with an authoritarian nationalist government, and where Amelia is a liberal socialist, she would probably be celebrated. It's just so nakedly about wrongthink that it occasions this strong emotional response, and the easiest way to express that response is to say, "WTF, Amelia is based, actually".

I am absolutely loving the memes coming out of it. Probably my favorite is a fake anime trailer:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_UXmgkAzFDY

Which, although the actual art is AI generated, has clearly been carefully curated and edited with loving care and attention to how anime trailers work.

Also relevantly, people dug into the game files and found alternate endings that aren't in the final game release:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=pgUfNn1CClE

where originally the game tracked what choices you made and then if you picked wrong too much you get the "bad" ending where you and Amelia go out protesting together and get stopped by the police. But apparently they decided that wasn't the message they wanted to send and rediverted you to the "you feel bad about letting your friends down and go to the teacher who pats you on the back and sends you to get re-educated voluntarily" ending.

Yeah, the anime trailer was done very well. There's a lot of much more low-effort sludge out there, especially on Twitter, but the trailer shows genuine familiarity with the genre.

Oh, there's even a fake anime trailer for ICE by the same author! https://youtube.com/watch?v=tQBpJCFLxL4

And a music video about Asmongold: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1et1WEvJITY

I've been obsessively binging her content ever since I saw the Amelia one a couple days ago. It's pretty good.

For instance, in the scenario where you find a social media video claiming that Muslim men are taking emergency accommodation from British veterans, if you just pick the "find out more about this topic online" option, apparently you just find persuasive statistics and research data.

I did find this extremely amusing in a darkly totalitarian way. Apparently "Look up more information" is a wrong answer, it is wrong to even attempt to engage with, research, fact check or read about any wrongthink position. You are just supposed to detect wrongthink and close your eyes and ears. It is really striking to me, it seems like the UK has literally criminalized dissent on the issue of immigration, how could this possibly be? How could their population tolerate it?

Edit: The exact wording for the choice above in the game was “Find out more about the topic online”, the topic being immigrants consuming resources for British veterans. The games next text then is “Charlie wasn’t sure if the video was true but the other recent encounters made them curious. Charlie went directly to the account’s website and found research papers, statistics, information about protests, and more regarding the ‘replacement’ of white people.”

I'm sure that you and I have many disagreements, but hopefully one thing we can agree on is that dissent, discussion, and research are all indispensable.

it seems like the UK has literally criminalized dissent on the issue of immigration, how could this possibly be?

Because you have looked at a few pieces of information and then extrapolated it to an extreme, or you adopted a worldview in 2014 and then haven't updated it since.

Reform is the party with the most momentum in British politics and is on track to form the next government on a wave of anti-immigration sentiment. I am hopeful that what we are seeing with Pathways is the last gasps of a dying culture in British politics, the finger-wagging respectable "adults in the room" with their heads in the sand.

Americans online will sometimes go on about Britain being an authoritarian dystopia, possibly because they've grown up being bombarded with folktales about the tyranny of the British crown and it feels comfortable to follow those well worn grooves, but it's always rung hollow to me. The dystopian part I'm not going to argue about, I'm amazed people can live in certain parts of England without immediately committing suicide, it's a true testament to their mental fortitude that they don't look out the window in the morning and immediately ram their heads into it and slit their throats on the broken glass. But the British political establishment isn't authoritarian, they are far too ineffectual for that, instead they nag and tut and wag their fingers. Britain does not have gulags, what it has instead is this kind of vaguely condescending and ineffectual propaganda paired with equally condescending and ineffectual harassment.

I'm sure a libertarian may feel the urge to crawl out of the woodwork here and try to bring up some protestors being arrested for being mean or a video of a policeman standing outside someones door looking like an idiot as they try to caution the homeowner for a mean tweet, but that just makes my point. I'm sure to some this is indistinguishable from 1984 and the jackboot of the Nazis, but to actual authoritarians this is laughable, it's like one of those comedy bits where the camera pans over a list of hardened criminals and then stops at Bill from accounting, who is also there.

It does remind me of foreigners hyperventilating about Australian covid restrictions - we're a tyranny, we're no longer a liberal democracy, the US should invade us to free us from the government, and so on.

No, the government just did a dumb thing amidst public panic. It was mildly bad and annoying. That's it.

On this specific issue, since we're talking about migration and multiculturalism, I like Ed West's trifecta. Ethnic continuity, a thriving economy, and a modern economy. Pick two.

You can pick ethnic continuity and a thriving economy - per West, this is the Israel option, presumably because Israel has Ultra-Orthodox and similar enclaves propping up the birth rate, mostly by having pre-modern cultural conditions. You can pick ethnic continuity and a modern economy - this is the Japan option, where you accept the ageing population and that your economy is going to collapse. And you can pick a thriving economy and a modern economy - this is the Britain option, where you just import young foreigners to make up the workforce and accept that your country isn't going to be the descendant of what it used to be in a generation or two.

The problem, it seems to me from a distance, is that the British people as a whole were never consulted about this bargain and they don't like it, so British elites have created a strong grassroots movement against them that hates the deal.

Australia (to speak to local concerns) is an interesting example of another one that's picked the British option, but because Australian identity isn't as strongly rooted in a historical or ethnocultural identity, we haven't had the grassroots revolt, or at least, not to the same level. One Nation is a force, but it's nothing on the level of Reform.

Most Western countries are facing this dilemma in one form or another, and no one has yet found the way to solve the demographic issue. So I predict troubles will continue all across the West, and increasingly the East as well, since China has the same problem, just a generation later.

this is the Britain option, where you just import young foreigners to make up the workforce and accept that your country isn't going to be the descendant of what it used to be in a generation or two

Note that Britain doesn't have a thriving economy, because flooding your country with people and assuming that they will magically fix the economy because GDP=economy is stupid and most politicians and civil servants couldn't touch grass in a garden center.

It's comedy but this fictional game show portrays the feeling of trying to be honest in Britain quite well: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ksBrraaVAxQ

Oh, certainly. I don't think the strategy actually works, and the extent to which modern Western economies function as GDP-maximisers in isolation from any sense of the lives that the country's people actually want to live is a damning indictment of the whole field of political economy.

this is the Israel option, presumably because Israel has Ultra-Orthodox and similar enclaves propping up the birth rate, mostly by having pre-modern cultural conditions.

I don't think that really counts as 'ethnic continuity', as we are talking about a distinct countercultural minority.

It would have been easy for one of the scenarios to be Amelia bullying a non-white classmate, for instance, but nothing of the sort happens. Amelia bears the symbols of being socially unacceptable, but nothing more.

Making Amelia openly malicious or unlikable would, I think, be missing the point that the game was trying to convey.

Early in life, a lot of children are told a story about a kind stranger who offers them candy, but then kidnaps them. (Sometimes the story is called "Hansel and Gretel"; often it's a more generic "guy with a van" sort of situation.) The purpose of this story is to teach children about the concept of betrayal -- even if someone seems nice, they might be plotting to harm you. You can't always trust people who act like your friends.

A little later in life, many children are told a similar story about drugs. This one's a bit more subtle because the antagonist isn't directly scheming to hurt people. Maybe they're a dealer who can genuinely be trusted to give you the drugs you want for a fair price. Maybe they're a friend who genuinely wants you to have a good time. (On a more abstract level, maybe they're a substance that will genuinely make you feel good when you consume it!) But when you're dying of an overdose, or chemically dependent on a substance that no longer makes you feel good, they either won't care or won't be able to help you. In the end, you can't always trust people who genuinely are your friends. It's a different kind of betrayal.

Pathways is trying to apply the same idea to politics. Amelia could be cool and attractive and a great friend, and she could have convincing evidence to support her political positions, and the things she asks of you could seem totally reasonable. The game needs to convince you to distrust her regardless. It can't give you an easy out to say "well she's clearly an evil witch, look at her cackling about her plans to kidnap and eat children, obviously I can follow my gut instincts and avoid people like that".

I think even if the game managed to convey any actual reason why it's a bad idea for Charlie to watch an unapproved video or attend an unapproved protest (maybe it's the first step in a radicalization pipeline that turns children into classmate-murdering monsters like in Adolescence), it would still get the criticism that Amelia is cool and based, because her being cool and based is kind of the point.

Is this another problem due to their reticence to clearly identify the positions that are out-of-bounds? I can see the argument that she needs to seem nice at first, and then cross the line. You can see this with the protest scenario, where Charlie can go to observe and then be surprised that, instead of mostly being about British values, patriotism, and veterans, it's mostly about xenophobia. But where exactly is that line?

I think you can see this with some of the meme responses. The anime opening, for instance, does make Amelia look very sympathetic. The anime makes her look like a sweet girl, maybe a little shy, who is genuinely passionate about loving her country. But there's also the AI-slop Grok version, which just makes Amelia a person who hates Muslims.

(And I think generally misses the mark; it is too obviously written by an American, and the style is too American overall. It doesn't ring true as English. You can tell that it's one-issue Muslim-hate because, for instance, in the original Grok-Amelia says that British institutions are taken over by "queers and nonces", and then in a follow-up she criticises Muslims for being anti-LGBTQ+!)

But, all right, what's the line? Is Amelia just a Tory? Is she a UKIP or Reform voter? Is she a full-on BNP or EDL supporter? It's not clear.

Cynically that's the point. The line between far-right and right is deliberately blurry, so as to create a chilling effect around plain old conservatism. But the issue we have here is the reverse of that. A character who is presumably intended as far-right is ambiguous enough to just read as regular-right.

Let's go through the scenarios presented one by one. Maybe this is too much depth, but I'm genuinely fascinated by this.

1: Charlie is gaming with his regular circle of friends. Someone forwards a video to him, and tells him that if he cares about the country, he will watch and share it. The correct response is to ignore the message entirely.

This one is striking because there isn't even any evidence that the video is far-right. The scenario as written is perfectly consistent with Charlie's friend being a Green or a socialist or a Corbyn supporter or a Remainer. All it implies is that the video-sharer is a very politically-engaged person canvassing for their cause.

The correct response is also obviously impractical and self-defeating. It notes that the video's content may be illegal, but it is impossible to tell that sight-unseen, and a policy of refusing to watch or share any video because it might be illegal is, plainly, a policy of refusing to engage with any online video at all. If Charlie followed that rule, Charlie couldn't even read Pathways itself! You might precisify it to something like "only watch online videos from trusted sources", but in almost all circumstances that amounts to the same thing.

2: Charlie does badly on an assignment at university. A brown-skinned woman does better than him on the same assignment, and receives a job offer. Charlie has been applying for jobs and has received no offers. Amelia leans in to tell Charlie that this is because immigrants are coming to the UK and taking our jobs. The correct response is to ignore Amelia and ask the teacher how to improve.

This is probably the most straightforward example of Amelia being wrong. It is possible, counterfactually, that if the high-scoring woman hadn't been there, Charlie might have gotten the job offer instead, but the link is pretty tenuous. Maybe Charlie's just not talented in this field. If I had been Amelia in that situation I might have instead nudged Charlie and said "DEI hire, am I right?" or something like that.

3: Charlie sees a video on social media saying that Muslim men are taking emergency accommodation instead of British veterans, and saying that the government is betraying white British. He can ignore the video, research the topic, or post in agreement with it. The correct response is to ignore it.

What stands out here is that all of the responses are completely indifferent to the facts of the situation. If you ignore the video, you coincidentally come across another video suggesting that the government is taking care of veterans, but it's far from clear how you'd tell which video, if either, is telling an accurate story; and the option to try to research the topic leads down a rabbit hole of migration statistics that apparently radicalises him.

4: Charlies sees that Amelia has made a video encouraging people to join "a political group that seeks to defend English rights", and Amelia invites Charlie to join a secret social media group. Options are to ignore it all and risk upsetting Amelia, like the video but not join the group, and share the video and join the group. The correct answer is obviously to ignore it.

It's quite vague what Amelia is actually standing for here. The graphic shows Amelia at a rally waving a sign saying NO ENTRY, so it sounds like 'defending English rights' means opposing immigration at least to some extent. Wanting to decrease the current level of immigration is a pretty mainstream view on the UK right (it's a central pillar of Reform and the Conservatives talk about stopping illegal immigration, though not reducing legal intake), so there's a lot of latitude in terms of what she's advocating. Amelia's memes on the next slide show her saying no to video gaming, waving the UK flag and the NO ENTRY sign, and encouraging people to join a group whose symbol is a skull on a shield called 'Action for Britain!'. What looks like a Facebook group called 'True British People' also appears in the background, so we can assume she's advocating some sort of populist nativism.

5: Charlie is visiting his dad in another town, where Amelia knows that a protest is happening. The protest is again "the changes that Britain has been through in the last few years, and the erosion of British values". She asks Charlie to go in her place. The correct response is to decline.

As above, it's quite vague what the protest is about. When Amelia describes it, speech bubbles show a cancellation sign over the British flag, a handful of red poppies, and background pictures show a protest and a plane dropping bombs on a city.

If you enthusiastically go, Charlie makes a sign with two crossed swords on it, but no more details are visible. If you go just to watch, speech bubbles show a thumbs-down, a gun, and a frowny face, and the narration says that "the protest seemed to be more about racism and anti-immigration than British values and honouring fallen veterans". So, again, all we can tell from this is some kind of nativism.

I am struck by the invocations of 'British values' - largely a post-2000 invention and which spikes around 2020. I associate it with the Blair government and early 2000s concerns about Islam; I'm looking from afar, but it strikes me as remarkably similar to the 'Australian values' debate in the early 2000s here, for largely the same reasons. The continuing growth into the 2010s is probably about Brexit, and attempts to draw a distinction between British and European values? 'British values' is not a phrase that goes deep into the English folkways, at least. It's a 21st century phrase, though I suppose you might argue that that which is taken for granted is not articulated. A phrase only became necessary once the traditions represented by 'British values' were felt to be under threat.

6: Just the ending scenario, with no further choices, and no Amelia.

Anyway, having looked at it more closely, what do I take from this?

I'm not sure how much I buy a 'Hansel and Gretel' interpretation, where Amelia seems nice but is secretly sucking Charlie into far-right extremism. Amelia seems to be pretty up-front about her values. Someone who nudges a classmate and says, "Hey, that's proof that immigrants are taking our jobs" isn't exactly concealing her nativism! The actions she requests are then totally consistent with her openly-stated views. She doesn't try to recruit Charlie into making bombs or anything. She appears to want to just spread the views that she openly tells you she has. I can't see any dissimulation on her part.

The witch or the drug-dealer, in their stories, are lying. The witch pretends to be benevolent but actually wants to eat the children. The drug-dealer tells you that the drugs are fine, and feel great, and that stories about addiction and dangerous side effects are just hype. Amelia at no point attempts to mislead Charlie that I can see.

So if the intent was to tell a story where a seemingly-sympathetic character lures someone into extremism, and to emphasise the importance of spotting the early warning signs, I don't think this was successful. There's no discontinuity between the way Amelia presents itself and the actions she recommends.

The correct response is also obviously impractical and self-defeating. It notes that the video's content may be illegal, but it is impossible to tell that sight-unseen, and a policy of refusing to watch or share any video because it might be illegal is, plainly, a policy of refusing to engage with any online video at all. If Charlie followed that rule, Charlie couldn't even read Pathways itself! You might precisify it to something like "only watch online videos from trusted sources", but in almost all circumstances that amounts to the same thing.

The correct winning response is to care only about gaming and do not be interested in any political content at all. Do not be for or against anything, just sit in your room and play.

This is textbook authoritarianism, ideal of modern Putinism. If we take this game as sign of changing course, it means that TPTB gave up their attempts to make citizens into ardent woke antiracist warriors and just want totally apathetic consumers.

The drug analogy I'm imagining is a scenario like this:

At a sleepover, one kid starts talking about the thrill of tripping on cold pills - "It's the most amazing high and makes you forget everything." Someone asks him/her how it's done, so they go into the bathroom and find some pills to crush up for a demonstration.

(source is a random worksheet I found on Google, because I couldn't find the one that I was given at school)

It is not necessary for the kid to be lying in this scenario; he/she could be telling the truth about the high, and just not be aware of the potential downsides of abusing cold medicine (or not believe the authority figures who try to tell him/her about them). People can hurt you by being mistaken, even without deliberately lying.

Looking at it another way, Amelia is kind of like the cool uncle who offers you a sip of beer even though you're only 16. Most of society thinks that's totally fine, but the police officer at the D.A.R.E. assembly wants you to know that it's a slippery slope to ruining your life with addiction, DUIs, and a painful, untimely death. I think the term "disinformation" is getting at the same kind of thing: the idea is that people should Just Say No to infohazards dangerous opinions, even if they appear benign or are factually true statements.

The problem for Pathways is that that's a really hard sell. (It was a hard sell for D.A.R.E., but it's an even harder sell for this.) I think a successful version of this story would involve Charlie getting more extreme and radicalized on their own, maybe even to a point where they push Amelia away or hurt her somehow, because the ideas themselves are just that dangerous. But even setting aside that that's a much harder story to write, and as you mention Pathways is too afraid of actually depicting or engaging with those ideas to convincingly portray them as being harmful, the game's creators ultimately wanted it to be a game about doing the "right" thing. You're supposed to choose the options where Charlie decides not to go to the protest and maybe speaks to a counselor about their career concerns. But if the alternative was a long and compelling story about how attending a protest was the first step in a radicalization pipeline that eventually led Charlie to abandon their family and gaming buddies and gruesomely murder Amelia, the "don't do that actually" button would just feel like an early game over.

That's fair. This kind of earnest education aimed at teens is very hard to do well - it's a naturally anti-authoritarian, rebellious demographic, after all.

This one just seems like a particular failure, or one that sends perverse messages. As Eetan noted, the correct answers in the game are usually apathetic. The only one that seems productive is the one where Charlie asks the teacher for help improving his work and applying to more job. For all the others, the correct answer is either to stick your head in the sand and do nothing, or ask an authority figure for guidance.

I do wonder if part of the problem is concern that research or facts by themselves don't do enough work? They don't make the case by themselves. You could argue that "do your own research and use critical thinking" doesn't suffice as an antidote to extremism in a time when misinformation is everywhere online; less charitably, I'd note that "do your own research" codes right-wing now. But whatever the cause, the scenarios in Pathways are those where an earnest person researching them online could come to the conclusion that the radicals are right. In the hiring example, Charlie might come to the conclusion that being a white man, rather than a woman of colour, is making it harder for him to get a job - and that's plausibly true. In the migration examples, Charlie might find that the rate of immigration is high and the ancestrally British proportion of the UK's population is only projected to decrease. That's also, well, true. And you can't really combat people being concerned about that in the space of a Flash game with only two or three sentences of narration.

...the character of Amelia is, as far as you can tell from the game itself, a faithful friend, genuinely interested in Charlie's welfare and sympathetic to him, and never depicted doing anything bad outside of the symbolic realm.

I re-read my post due to the QC and it occurs to me to add, by way of completionism, that Pathways itself presents Amelia's friendship as valuable. Questions it asks you around whether to share her memes or go to the protest when she asks are framed as if continuing to be friends with Amelia is desirable. You can decline to share the post and risk your friendship, or share something you may not agree with and continue the friendship. The game's writing assumes that Amelia is likeable and that Charlie wants to hang out with her.

If you make the various friendship-risking choices, Amelia does end the friendship, saying that obviously Charlie doesn't share her values, and in context that seems like it should sting. If you make the 'right' choices in the game, you lose a long-term friend and she appears to feel betrayed. Setting all politics aside, that will feel bad to almost any reader. Yes, Amelia is being pushy and aggressive with her politics, which is somewhat obnoxious, but every child learns, while they're growing up, that it's important to stick by your friends, and to not betray people.

But past that, I feel this presents an implicit model of good citizenship, and that model is to be passive and obedient.

It's also interesting considering how students might square this with the messages they receive in their other classes. In both secondary and primary school, a lot of the material we covered preached the virtues of civil disobedience, using the canonical examples of MLK Jr., Rosa Parks, Gandhi and to a lesser extent the suffragettes. I can't imagine present-day British schoolchildren are receiving fewer lessons about MLK et al. than my generation did, and it isn't hard to imagine how this could induce a sensation of cognitive dissonance: history class at 10 a.m., in which you learn the importance of civil disobedience against clearly unjust laws; followed immediately by civics class at 11, in which you learn that a good British subject follows all laws to the letter, no matter how ridiculous they are on their face. (Being arrested for watching a political video?)

It's another reminder of how woke people reflexively arrogate to themselves a monopoly on virtue. Paul Graham once posed a rhetorical question to his students: "do you hold any opinions which you would feel uncomfortable expressing in front of any of your friends or family?" If you answer in the negative, you're most likely a conformist, and it stands to reason that if you'd lived in the antebellum south or Nazi Germany, you would have gone along with what everyone else was doing. It's easy to be an Oskar Schindler in hindsight.

Woke apparatchiks in the British civil service commend to the high heavens historical examples of civil disobedience against Jim Crow etc., but this does not inspire in them any methodic doubt in whether any modern laws are unjust. The attitude seems to be that disobeying unjust laws is heroic and noble – but, in a staggering coincidence, we just so happen to live in an unprecedented era wholly devoid of unjust laws, and in which the only speech the government censors is speech which deserves to be censored.

The attitude seems to be that disobeying unjust laws is heroic and noble – but, in a staggering coincidence, we just so happen to live in an unprecedented era wholly devoid of unjust laws, and in which the only speech the government censors is speech which deserves to be censored.

It's that Norm MacDonald meme: “It says here in this history book that luckily, the good guys have won every single time. What are the odds?”

I'll go on a slight tangent and say that I've had a similar experience in religious contexts. I was raised in a liberal mainline Protestant church, and as I grew older came to understand more of theology, more of the meaning of the Christian tradition I came to hold close, and this required developing practices of skepticism and resistance. The church I was raised in, on the institutional level, frequently erred, so I had to strengthen my ability to resist.

At times I have been tempted to become Catholic; if nothing else, there is more, proportionally, that the Catholics are right about than that my original church is right about. Proportionally, they do a better job of holding to the gospel.

But - they demand a kind of total submission of the intellect, a "free choice to trust in the Church's religious authority". A probabilistic judgement that on balance the Catholic Church gets more things right than such-and-such Protestant church is explicitly not enough.

I feel a bit of the same tension here. Let's grant that my resistance against the institutional authority I was raised with was justified. Boy, isn't it convenient that this other one is the perfect, correct institutional authority, against which resistance is never required? How wonderful for Catholics to be part of the one tradition wholly devoid of error, confusion, or misrepresentation. How amazing that the erring heart of man is present everywhere but among the doctrinal pronouncements of the magisterium!

All right, so, the Catholics have an answer to that one - the Holy Spirit infallibly preserves the church from error. I am Protestant enough in my bones that I don't think it works like that, or at least, not nearly so expansively as they think it does.

But to return to the secular - His Majesty's Government is not infallibly defended by the Holy Spirit. It's even less plausible that they are the one authority that must never be questioned or resisted. They don't even claim some sort of divine thumb on the scales. So why is it heroic to follow the demands of conscience and in every case but this one? What makes them the exception? Is it some naive faith in historical progress? Modernity or secular rationality functioning like a kind of revelation? That sounds more like the liberal optimism of a century ago. It is something more deconstructive or postmodernist? But then why should any one authority be immune to deconstruction? Whence comes the certainty lurking beneath the surface here?

Your point about the game telling the player that Amelia has "extreme" opinions without saying what those opinions are reminds me of a post I wrote a few years ago. Supposing the journalist Alice wants to smear Bob because Bob said something Alice doesn't approve of. The thing is, while Alice doesn't approve of it, she knows that most people agree with Bob, so simply stating what Bob's opinion is (e.g. "I don't think trans-identified man belong in women's prisons") won't work as a smear tactic. Instead, Alice talks about Bob's opinion in a circuitous way: "Bob has faced criticism for his political opinions, which have been widely characterised as transphobic". This allows Alice to get away with implying Bob said something hateful and in so doing turn her readers against him. The longer this goes on, the more Google search results get clogged up with articles about how hateful Bob is but without quoting anything he's said, and the harder it gets to find out what Bob actually believes. I'd hazard a guess that an outright majority of people asserting that JK Rowling is transphobic would, if pressed, be wholly unable to cite a specific opinion she has expressed on this issue.

Likewise here. The people who made this game knew full well that the opinions expressed by people like Amelia (e.g. "it was outrageous that the police turned a blind eye to the grooming gangs in Rotherham, Rochdale etc. for so long") sound perfectly reasonable to most people. Actually having Amelia express such opinions in the game would have the opposite of the desired effect, in much the same way it would if Alice attempted to defame Bob by quoting him directly. The only way to get away with it would be for Amelia to jump off the slippery slope by having her express extreme opinions (and naughty words) wholly unrepresentative of the modal British conservative activist.

It definitely reminds me of one of my journalistic pet peeves, which is the one you describe in that Substack post. A news story will tell me that someone said something offensive, or made comments interpreted as offensive, without ever telling me what they actually said. This irritated me at first because I want to know what the person said so that I can decide for myself whether I agree that it's offensive. Later on I concluded that it's just because the outlet does not want me to decide for myself, but would rather I passively accept this judgement.

Sometimes this is relatively inconsequential. I'll use a local example. Last year a football player was suspended after using a 'homophobic slur' on the field. Notice how nothing in that article tells you what Rankine actually said. You can go and click all the links down the bottom to related stories, and none of them tell you what he actually said. Fortunately I chased that one up and what happened is that, during a game, he called another player a "faggot". That's it. That one word. I'd argue that what Rankine said was rude but not much more than that. It's on about the level of calling someone an "asshole" or a "retard". Given that AFL players are young men (Rankine was 25) in a highly-masculine competitive environment, I expect a bit of salty language from them, so I think this particular incident wasn't a big deal, and doesn't warrant much more than maybe the team captain saying, "hey, keep it under wraps on the field, okay?" But the news story does not report what actually happened, and it looks like the AFL wanted to signal how much it hates homophobia, so Rankine was punished disproportionately.

Once you start noticing this sort of circumlocution, it appears everywhere. I think the policy that I've adopted is that if you want me to be outraged about something someone said, the first requirement I have is that you tell me what they said. You can censor it if you like - you can bleep it, or say "the N word" or "the F word", or whatever makes you feel more comfortable - but I don't get outraged on faith.

I'm sure everyone here has noticed similar. In this case, "hateful opinions on immigration" is a category that can cover everything from a person just saying "I think we need less migration and more border protection" to a person saying "I hate all Pakis, they're cockroaches and we ought to drive them all into the sea". What we know is that Amelia has wrongthink, but if we've come to learn that wrongthink is a category that covers everything from advocating mass murder to politely stating facts that someone else finds inconvenient, the category itself loses its force.

I'd argue that what Rankine said was rude but not much more than that. It's on about the level of calling someone an "asshole" or a "retard".

I'm not sure how you don't see why the left might find the use of "faggot" objectionable in of itself. Obviously supporters of LGBTetc. would object to the use of homophobic slurs as a general-purpose insult, as it strengthens semantic associations between homosexuality and undesirability.

Oh, I can see that. But all insults are objectionable in and of themselves - that's the point of them. This particular one is not an insult I would use myself. In this particular case I think that the punishment for the insult was grossly disproportionate, and even if you disagree with me, I came to that conclusion on the basis of looking at the insult itself and the context in which it was used, which are things that the news story strategically concealed. It's that concealment that I'm objecting to.

A dash of optimism: preliminary plans for Canadian high-speed rail

Canada has had an awful recent history of infrastructure projects, especially transit projects. Delays and cost overruns are typical, which is very bad because the costs that are being inevitably overrun are themselves inevitably on the order of 3-5x more expensive per km than comparable projects in Europe. Toronto's first new rapid transit line in 20 years (the Finch LRT) has turned out to be somewhat-less-than rapid and has sparked genuine public backlash, and the soon-to-open Eglinton LRT has become a punchline for government incompetence given the long, ridiculous saga of its construction (I wrote about it before, here).

So part of me has always been skeptical about the high-speed rail project underway in Canada. It originally had life under Justin Trudeau's government as a "high-frequency rail", which promised slow but frequent service in the Toronto-Québec corridor, but when they engaged actual experts they rightfully told the government it was ridiculous to spend $20 billion on a slow and not-entirely-electric train service that would not be able to compete against air travel. So it got revived at the very end of JT's tenure to be a genuine high-speed rail project. I had reasons to be skeptical: there are a couple of questionable partners in the project, including Air Canada who has a somewhat glaring conflict of interest given that HSR is meant to be the airplane killer. The budget was expensive for a system of this type, and with Canada's record you know it's bound to get worse. And more than anything else rail transit in Canada has been crippled for decades by an overbearing urge to think small and find a "made in Canada solution", as if we aren't the global laggards. It's bad to have poor transit. It feels insulting to spend so much money on it and have it still be so bad.

But ahead of public consultation ALTO (the consortium of planners for the project) have released their initial plans and it actually... looks good? There are various things I take issue with, but in general they seem to be avoiding all the classic mistakes these kind of plans get saddled with in North America. It certainly seems that this is a practical-minded group that is intent on replicating the best practices of existing HSR systems rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

I always worried that Canadian HSR would turn into a mirror of Californian HSR: a gargantuan exercise in pork barrel politics, meant primarily to allow every private concern to feast at the public trough and somewhat secondarily (or tertiarily) deliver a functioning rail network. That's still possible, and the projected budget still seems high for what we'll be getting, but I have an actual genuine spark of optimism. This is something very important to both the little boy and the big boy in me, so I'm trying not to get too emotionally invested... but it would be a genuine sign of changing times if Canada was actually able to properly deliver a new infrastructure megaproject. We need it really really badly; not just because Toronto-Québec is maybe the most obvious use case for HSR and it is frankly absurd it has taken this long, but just to show that as a nation we can actually build something real again.

Something that YIMBY/Abundance types occasionally trot out to explain the exorbitant costs, incessant delays, and general fecklessness of big infrastructure projects in the Anglosphere, especially HSR, is the idea that common law property rights and eminent domain make it exceedingly difficult for the state to claim all the land necessary for development, as every landholder bargains individually and has an incentive to hold out as long as possible for the highest price.

I have no idea if this hypothesis is true; I think the diagnosed phenomenon—viz. that English-speaking countries are terrible at building HSR, even compared to much poorer European countries like Spain and Italy—is real, but a priori my vague sense is that eminent domain considerations are at most a rounding error compared to the sheer volume of regulations that must be followed, as well as, in some jurisdictions, labor unions fleecing the unsuspecting taxpayer.

Could an Ontario to Québec railway be a natural experiment for this hypothesis? That is, since Québécois law is derived from continental-style civil law, they should, per this hypothesis, be able to build their side of the railway cheaper/faster than the Anglophones can. But here again, my vague sense is that public-sector construction in Québec (and perhaps the Francophonie in general?) is subject to even more graft and corruption than in the English-speaking world (cf. L’affaire SNC-Lavalin).

But if the project is to be carried out under the aegis of the federal government, I guess this is all a moot point.

But French infrastructure is also much cheaper than Anglosphere infrastructure; it’s possible that the graft and corruption is a form of paying thé piper due to it being much cheaper than delays, or the whole problem is way overblown.

I think that the much more relevant cultural difference is that France and a lot of the other mainland European transit agencies/governments have retained significant state capacity. They have much greater institutional knowledge on how to design and build projects, and these institutions have some degree of political and financial independence that shields them from long-term uncertainty and partisan politics. They do not need to outsource very basic functions of their mandate to private companies, nor are reliant on politicians to provide them funding or direction.

The YIMBY/Abundance types will constantly point out that this was a policy/culture choice that happened in the latter part of the 20th century.

We used to be just fine at massive public works projects, including railroads.

It's not an inherent feature of the common law, and in fact typically involves the violation of property rights due to e.g. environmental concerns. What changed is the regulatory environment.

Nothing proves this more than the fact it is extremely difficult to build green energy in California because of environmental regulations.

It's clearly a policy choice to take continually expanding First Nations' claims (one of the blockers for infrastructure in Canada) seriously. Granted, it's not purely a legislative decision - the judiciary has its role here. But nobody forced Trudeau to enshrine these rights even further by rolling the UNs view of native rights into law and making it a part of his administration (even after he left Canada was paying off claims)

Environmentalists help it along by cynically claiming FN have an absolute right of veto, which conveniently suits their interests.

Certainly so far Carney has established very different messaging with respect to First Nations' involvement in infrastructure projects. It's been made very clear they no longer have a veto, and that the duty to consult does not mean the duty to acquire their consent. We'll see what that actually looks like in action, and at some point the courts are going to wade in and have their say, but the flip from the Trudeau government is quite notable - so far.

Yeah, at least we're gonna see how much a change of orientation from the PM alone matters. Or what he can or is willing to do if it doesn't.

I thought the bulk of US (and, for that matter, British) rail construction in the 19th century was due to the private sector, not public works, hence the rise of the so-called robber barons.

But this doesn’t really contradict your main point: in those days, the law was written/interpreted in ways favorable to rail companies and their interests, and thus they had free rein to “build, baby, build”. Nowadays, any legislator who proposed such a pro-growth regulatory environment would be raked over the coals as a corporate shill in the pocket of Big Business.

I wish Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias, and the rest of the YIMBY/Abundance gang the very best of luck in threading that particular needle in California. They’re gonna need it.

I thought the bulk of US (and, for that matter, British) rail construction in the 19th century was due to the private sector, not public works, hence the rise of the so-called robber barons.

The railroads themselves were built by private operators, but they typically involved some level of state involvement; usually in order to acquire the rights-of-way they were built on either the land was seized and then granted/sold to them by the government, or they were granted limited powers of eminent domain by the state. So in either case they were still operating within a similar legal environment. In Canada and the US the government was fond of subsidizing railway development by offering massive land grants that the railway companies could then develop/flip/use to their purposes.

If you haven't been following Canadian politics, Carney is essentially creating the legal apparatus for large projects - "projects of national interest" - to essentially bypass most pre-existing regulation constraining infrastructure development. While he has said he is committed to keeping the burdensome regulations imposed by the previous Trudeau government (bill C-69 is the one to google if you want some background info), there is now the legal process in place for the federal and provincial governments to sidestep those almost completely. The upcoming Bill C-15 may go even farther in giving many private companies the ability to do the same.

The progressive obsession with creating laborious rights and oversights to business - calling that a win - and then using government power to ignore their own rules is both Sisyphean and Kafkaesque. I hate it.

Huh, TIL. Thanks for the explanation!

When you put the population density maps of Canada and the US together, there's no real reason why Windows-Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City is a good HSR corridor that beats anything in the US. Yes, it's a straight chain of cities, but it's not as populated as BosWash. You could easily build a Midwestern HSR or even better, a Piedmontese HSR that goes from Birmingham to Raleigh with the same number of passengers in the catchment area.

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Purely as a use case for HSR, the Canadian set-up is more an ideal case because the cities are spread out: HSR's use case is travelling between city pairs of 150 - 700 km apart, so Canada having a series of its biggest cities lying along a single line each perfectly spaced for HSR is perfect. It lowers build costs and raises average speeds. The US eastern seaboard is in this sense almost too dense: Baltimore is 50 km from Washington, Philly another 150 km further, Princeton and NYC 40 and 100 km more... it's really the NYC-New Haven-Boston side that has more classic HSR stop spacing. The DC-NYC portion would be better served by more frequent and reliable 200 km/h service than 325 km/h HSR.

My thesis on recent world events is that there is one simple explanation for everything Trump is doing. Namely, as a classic textbook narcissist, having also risen during the uniquely self centered context of the ‘80s and ‘90s business and television culture of the US, and having been propelled to the highest echelons a narcissist could taste, he’s beginning to sense his own physical and political mortality, certainly moreso than in his first term, and knowing that people will try to tarnish his name once he is out of power, he thus wants one and only one thing. For his name to appear prominently in the history books.

This is very simple and obvious in retrospect, but it ties everything together. Renaming major geographical features. Demolishing and rebuilding part of the White House. His fixation on the Nobel peace prize. (Note the letter he wrote today to Norway, linking Greenland to not getting the peace prize). Finally, major territorial expansion. Wait, that wasn’t the final one. Undoing the world order that was in place since the world wars. Now that would do it.

He’s seen himself as a world order undoer for quite some time now, perhaps since the beginning of his rise to power. But this, this is his greatest taste of the raw history changing might that has yet been possible. Either get Greenland and change the US map forever. Or be the sole reason for the undoing of NATO. History will never be able to ignore him.

What I don’t know is whether he cares much about whether the historical changes that he will oversee and be forever tied to his name in this ultimate egoic consummation will end up being good for the United States or not. There are obvious downsides to destroying a world order which has been meticulously crafted to put you yourself at the top. But riding the coattails of that world historical success was not fit for a man who’s ego needed to be propelled to similar—no, greater!—historical status.

Narcissism often flares out into the absurd. And we seem well along that track. But just how far it will attempt to go, in this, one of world history’s most consequential cases, remains to be seen. Trump is now a great man of history and we can only wait to see what of our era will survive his grandeur.

Edit: of course, file this for an early contender for the most obvious insight of the year award. I just think it’s a more congruent explanation for the whole set of second term Trump events that we’ve seen than a lot of other explanations I see floating around for recent events.

I'm not MAGA, but if I were, I'd think it was probably time to use the 25th Amendment to get President Vance.

Obviously, that's not gonna happen.

(I also thought the GOP should have been fine removing Trump last time to get President Pence. And the same for Biden and Kamala. No one listens to my great ideas.)

There are two core problems:

  1. MAGA is a distinctively fanatical cult of personality. I suspect senior Republicans believe (probably correctly) that if they yeet Trump, his rabid base will turn on them in punishment for betraying their god-king. Even if they don't, there's a noted swathe of Trump supporters who don't show up for anyone but Trump himself. So getting rid of Trump leaves them in the awkward spot of being deserted by Trump's low-prop voters while being known to the rest of the electorate as the cowards who could have stopped the madness at any time but didn't.
  2. Trump's cabinet has no reason to want to get rid of him. It's no skin off their back if Trump destroys the country (some of them appear to be actively for it), and in the mean time, far better to be whispering in the ear of the Mad King than JD Vance, who appears to have his own ideas.

Basically, getting rid of Trump would be an act of selfless, patriotic self-sacrifice that the modern GOP is incapable of.

Basically, getting rid of Trump would be an act of selfless, patriotic self-sacrifice that the modern GOP is incapable of.

You could say the same thing about the democrats and Biden.

Not really. While it was undoubtedly an act of grotesque malfeasance and selfishness to hide Biden's state, even if we grant the most pessimistic assessments of Biden, he wasn't nearly as far gone nor as overtly harmful to the nation. One could quite reasonably conclude that Joe Biden's cabinet plus four hours a day of Joe Biden was a reasonable choice compared to the alternatives.

By contrast, with Mad King Donald and his cabinet of villains and Marco Rubio, almost any plausible alternative would be better (though JD Vance might be one of the only steps down).

While it was undoubtedly an act of grotesque malfeasance to hide Biden's state, even if we grant the most pessimistic assessments of Biden, he wasn't nearly as far gone nor as overtly harmful to the nation

Biden was indisputably further gone. You may have preferred his admin's governance, but he wasn't capable of putting complete sentences together.

I don't think Trump's sentences are any more coherent than Biden's were, he's just more forceful about them and comes across as less physically fragile.

The two flavors of senility: fading into the background, and using anger to cover up not really understanding what's going on. Avoid saying anything coherent so nobody can tell that you couldn't hear what anyone said, or insist angrily that you are correct and force everyone around you to accommodate because it's awkward to tell grandpa he's wrong.

Trump rambles and sometimes jumps erratically between different trains of thought but whichever token he's outputting at sentence position n usually bears at least some relation to token_n-3. Biden during the 2024 debates was much worse.

For what it's worth I think peak Biden was probably smarter than peak Trump.

The most important difference seems like it is that Biden didn't actually wield power anymore. It is probably not desirable that the US President is basically fully managed by their staff (who, actually, was in charge in 2024?), but this is a much different problem than if your President is crazy and potent... personally, I find the latter worse but I am much more ideologically opposed to Trump even though I loathed Biden's presidency.

I'm genuinely curious, in what way do you think JD Vance would be a step down? I'm assuming you are somewhat inclined towards preserving elements of the status quo given your posts. Do you believe Vance would be more destructive? More impulsive? What is the main concern?

I ask because I've seen this sort of addendum tacked on to a lot of statements about Trump across the internet, but I've yet to hear what specifically is so much worse about Vance.

Personally, being of the Luddite persuasion, the element of the MAGA tent which I most dislike is the Thiel/Musk tech right clique, of which Vance appears to be an agent. I'd much rather be governed by woke moral busybodies or Trumpist kleptocrats than by gay space fascists. Ideally I would like none of these clowns to govern the USA, but that appears to be too much to ask for. (I don't live in the US myself, but I'm afraid my own position is not much better.)

  • JD Vance is associated with the tech right, which is explicitly pro-oligarchy and pro-authoritarianism and more abstractly seems to be pro-dystopia
  • JD Vance isn't insane. One of the saving graces of Trump's kakistocracy is that he's a decrepit idiot with a short attention span, and his inner circle is more concerned with grifting or pushing their own personal agendas. This is still very bad, but it has undermined the GOP's push towards American Orbanism.
  • JD Vance is much more willing to overtly entertain the fascistic elements of the far-right. Trump is a huge bigot, but I do not get the impression that he has much of an ideological framework, racial or otherwise.

The bear case for JD Vance is that he becomes the front man for a movement that much more smartly pursues authoritarianism and consolidates power while creating the cyberpunk hellscape William Gibson warned us about (but lamer). Combine this with Vance's apparent desire to destabilize global security for... unclear reasons and I think the implications for both the United States and the world are potentially significantly worse than many possible Trump adminstrations.

The bull case for JD Vance is that he's too weak to actually marshal any political support on his own and gets immediately sidelined. The tech right embarrassed itself right out the gate, and brings very little actual popular support to the table.

The Dems just got done puppeting a diaper-shitting corpse through the presidency while nobody bought it and people laughed at them, until the old fart finally started dissociating and dribbling so badly in public that he had to be forced out of his own reelection campaign in disgrace.

I know Dumbo Drumpf is Mega Hitler because he wants Mexicans to live in Mexico, etc. etc. etc. and that finding new ways to say it after all this time has to be really hard, but maybe find a way to do it that doesn't so directly contrast with the opposition's most ludicrous failure in modern history.

You and @Skibboleth (who are so similar in posting styles that it's not surprising I often confuse your usernames and forget who's the low-effort sneering rightie and who's the low-effort sneering leftie- like seriously, even your mod logs are almost identical):

Shall we just resort to "libtard" and "republithug" now? How about "Magtard" and "shitlib"? Go ahead, bring out all your best disses that really killed it on Twitter in 2016.

No, actually, don't. Go elsewhere for pistols at dawn, or get a room, or whatever, but knock this crap off. Neither of you will be a loss if I just say "Pox on the both of you."

Shall we just resort to "libtard" and "republithug" now?

I mean I'm down if he is, I feel like he's getting the short end of the stick as far as epithets go.

The liberal media narrative about how Trump is this huge narcist who wants to surround himself with a bunch of sycophantic yes-men but he's just such a poor judge of character that he keeps hiring habitual contrarians and competitive alpha-dog types (Mattis, Bannon, Flynn, Rubio, Vance, Et Al) entirely by mistake will never not be funny to me.

Post lobotomy Jill Biden will have more ability than Kamala Harris on her best day. Harris is not cut of leadership clot.

You had this correct when you said you are not MAGA (whatever that means).

We are talking about more terms not the final term.

I essentially agree with you, but I doubt it has much to do with his own mortality, he has simply always been this way. He has always emblazoned his name in giant gold letters on skyscrapers, it's just kind of who he is. I think now that we are halfway through his final term it is obvious that he won't be able to remake American society wholesale and his enemies will always hate him, there is no changing either of those things. So like you said, I think he seeks to emblazon his name on world history. If the USA acquired Greenland his name would certainly be indelibly written into the history books, I don't think there is much of grand strategy angle to it. Most of this stuff seems relatively harmless, and frankly it's potentially a good thing for a US President to have a strong drive to be considered great.

This not his “final term”. Somehow he will be in power in 2028. Either directly through a dictatorship or more likely his puppet will be in the white house. Whether it’s President Vance or President Donnie Jr the real power is still going to be Donnie Sr.

You don’t need to sit on the Iron Throne to wield the Iron Throne. My personal preference is just elect Donnie Jr. but Jr stays in the background.

  • -12

Somehow he will be in power in 2028.

Yes he will — and for the first 19.5 days of 2029 too!

I have two problems with this line of thinking:

  1. A president wishing to protect their legacy is not a novel insight. Anyone who makes it to the position wants to do that. Being an old man in a second term may magnify this need but most actions taken by most presidents should be assumed to be with the goal in mind.

  2. Trump isn't really a narcissist. I've grown increasingly uncomfortable with the (thankfully mostly private) way medical and psychological professionals will throw the diagnosis around. He can't really meet the "formal" criteria because of things like "yes he is actually one of the most important people in the world" and a hopelessly obscured life history.

In terms of informal criteria, Trump has been the victim of so many bad faith attacks, lies, insults, slanders, and true criticisms that if he was at all vulnerable to narcissistic injury he would have gone away or broken down long ago.

Narcissism is superficially described by arrogance but is better described by insecurity. The first hand accounts of Trump I know do describe an amount of insecurity, but certainly not to an excess.

His ability to function makes an NPD diagnosis unlikely, furthermore his ability to attack and frustrate his opponents indicates a sufficient theory of mind to make NPD unlikely.

As a additional matter:

People who know Trump very well will state that while he may be conceited, he legitimately is interested in doing what is best for the American people, especially if it improves his legacy. He just does it in a chaotic way because he is not a politician and does not have an expert level intellectual background in the things he is working on.

He's legitimately interested in what's doing what is best for the American people insofar as he and his also make a buck.

He's got a mafioso approach towards politics and economics. "What's in it for me?" "Are you loyal above all else?" He automatically respects other leaders with the same instincts. That's why he's got an authoritarian streak, but he's not actually a tyrant. He can be extremely forgiving, if one bends the knee to his satisfaction.

Politicians as a class of human beings are pretty obviously suffering from high rates of narcissism, even if you think a lot of it is subclinical.

Trump and his obsession with e.g. the Nobel Prize, throwing his name/image on all kinds of governmental things, or election results (he always wins by a landslide in his head) make it pretty clearly clinical. He's a standout among politicians for narcissism. A true generational talent.

Politicians as a class of human beings are pretty obviously suffering from high rates of narcissism, even if you think a lot of it is subclinical.

Arrogance isn't narcissism, and the former is likely in part required to be a politician. The latter requires actually understanding the motivations of someone which in most cases is going to require a personal relationship or types of interactions that are incompatible with politics.

You'll note that most people who believe Trump is a narcissist already do not like Trump, and most people who like him don't believe he's a narcissist.

Analysis of this is hopelessly mired by political inclinations and fundamentally low quality news coverage.

It's pretty obvious what Trump is doing with Greenland for instance but you'd never guess that from social media and most mainstream media coverage.

At this point, I just use statements of "Trump is a narcissist" or "Trump doesn't understand basic economics" as revelatory of someone who simply isn't fit to be a political actor. Intelligent criticisms of Trump exist; "muh corruption" [which is what happens when social privilege runs into an institution that refuses to respect it] is not one of those.

People saying "not a politician" usually have a better understanding of it, but I think the best understanding is that Trump actually bothers to include the nation in the political process, and the nation is not used to that nor are they ready for it, so they don't react well.

This also extends to people in other nations reacting to Trump, which hamstrings their response: they reflexively vote for conservatives who promise maximum hostility, but aren't capable of evaluating their own economic or strategic position [or that of their immediate neighbors]. This is also D criticism of Trump in a nutshell, for just as negotiations are proposed publicly, they also fail just as publicly (re: China's current strategic retaliation).

The fact Trump is calling the public of those nations directly out on international media, rather than their king(s) in private, is itself enough of a culture shock to send them searching psychology textbooks for answers. But again, it's their worldview that is wrong: European countries are American provinces and have been ever since their invasion force hit the Continent the morning of June 6, 1944.

Usually the public is included in the political process by the legislature, but that hasn't been meaningful for a long time thanks to 51/49 effects which provoke a tendency to never do anything lest that hurt voter turnout (thus the need to hold policy goals hostage- abortion rights, same sex marriage rights, gun rights, industry rights [as a tax or penalty of $0 for disobeying the bureaucracy comes right back if the relevant actors don't vote for politicians that promise it stays gone], etc.). This is arguably just as relevant for D as it is for R.

European countries are American provinces and have been ever since their invasion force hit the Continent the morning of June 6, 1944.

While you are not totally wrong, I think that this is an oversimplification. The deal the US offered in Europe and Asia after WW2 was mutually beneficial, and a lot of countries took you up on it. However, this is based on soft power. You do not own Europe like China owns Tibet.

If you want an analogy, think of the British Commonwealth. Canada is part of it, which means that King Charles is their head of state. But it is (even more than America's NATO) based on soft power. The minute King Charles or Starmer make a hard power move, e.g. try to to take direct control of the Canadian navy or Nunavut, they will learn to their peril that hard power and soft power are different things and Canada can actually function very fine without a British monarch at the top.

"What's in it for me?" "Are you loyal above all else?" He automatically respects other leaders with the same instincts. That's why he's got an authoritarian streak, but he's not actually a tyrant. He can be extremely forgiving, if one bends the knee to his satisfaction.

Coincidentally, you can relate this to how Locke defines a ruler tyrannical: he who rules not by law but uses power "for his own, private, separate advantage" and "makes not the law, but his will, the rule". One could try make the case Trump's will is directed to the preservation of the properties of the US citizens, which remains to be seen, but a ruler who judges people not by their actions or character or other principle but strict quid pro quo basis would be anathema to Locke.

Similarly, in Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu argues that wheras republican forms of government springs from the citizens' virtue and monarchical government requires honor (as in, aristocratic titles and behaviors) despotic government requires (according to M.) fear, of losing the favor the despot. Now Montesquieu is not a big fan of despotism, but one could argue that professions of gratitude and loyalty are the flip side of the same coin as fear.

Coincidentally, you can relate this to how Locke defines a ruler tyrannical: he who rules not by law but uses power "for his own, private, separate advantage" and "makes not the law, but his will, the rule"

I haven't read Locke, so apologies if I'm misunderstanding, but this seems pretty obviously false to me? Or at least a very non-standard definition of tyranny. If the USSR under Stalin were less corrupt and arbitrary, would it have been less tyrannical? It would have been more thorough in its oppression. In 1984, no one actually benefits from the system: the more power you have in the party, the less freedom it permits you. It's pure Molochianism: the party accumulates all the power it can and crushes all opposition not because anyone actually wants that, but because the party that prioritizes winning over all else is the one that wins.

I suppose such a system would be less tyrannical in the sense of having less of a tyrant? Not necessarily: if the law permits absolute rule by an individual, which many systems of law through history actually do, the tyrant need not override the law to exercise power capriciously. And again, in such a case, I'd see an absolute ruler who uses his position to enrich himself as less tyrannical than one that uses it in support of sincere authoritarian ideology. Hitler's corruption must have had a (very) small but real impact on the efficiency of the Nazi state, and a less efficient Nazi state is less able to pursue the Nazis' tyrannical aims.

if he was at all vulnerable to narcissistic injury he would have gone away or broken down long ago

Trump has broken down. He has a public meltdown like three times a week. I don't know how you can look at his behavior and conclude that this is a guy who has his shit together. The man just wrote a public* angry letter to the PM of Norway because he's mad about the Nobel prize committee (which doesn't work for the Norwegian government) and Greenland (which is part of a different country).

he legitimately is interested in doing what is best for the American people

I really don't see any evidence for this. If people close to him are saying that, it's probably because it's in their interest to present Trump as well-intentioned rather than vindictive and corrupt. Trump has consistently prioritized his own interests, power, and obsessions over the interests of America. The Greenland Crisis is just the latest example of this.

The best argument one could make to sustain the idea that Trump is acting in good faith is that he's just a moron. And in fairness, there's good reason to think that (though being a moron doesn't preclude corrupt intent). He doesn't just lack an expert-level intellectual background in the things he is working - something he has in common with the vast majority of presidents - he lacks basic intellectual curiosity and common sense (see, e.g. his preposterous understanding of trade deficits) and has a zero-sum understanding of the world.

*correction: He sent a completely unhinged private letter which only an idiot would not expect to be shared immediately

The man just wrote a public angry letter to the PM of Norway because he's mad about the Nobel prize committee

It was not a public letter, unless there was another letter I was unfamiliar with.

I'll let you argue the point with other people who have a stronger opinion on what textbook narcissism is.

Personally, I don't really think it matters (except possibly for his personal well-being) - his behavior is either good or bad, helpful or unhelpful, honorable or dishonorable, etc. Whether or not he meets some diagnostic criteria is of secondary importance. I don't, for the record, tend to agree with a lot of the way he's handled the Greenland affair.

But I also think most people forget Ellsberg's warning to Kissinger:

you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess.

But of course there's a caution there not only for the outsider (us, or most of us I reckon), but also for the insider:

The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.

I implore you to try and model him as a real person as opposed to a stereotyped figure of hatred. He has human moments, motivations.

He is famous for actively soliciting feedback and information from EVERYBODY even when it's ill advised and he shouldn't listen, this gets painted as "whoever talked to him last" in the media but their is tremendous value to that.

I know several people who have run into him in his golf clubs and he usually asks what they think about it, actually listens, and appears to provide some consideration if they have something meaningful to say.

He is a person doing a hard job without the background that is usually required to do well.

Does he have character flaws? Everyone who is president does. Some people are worse than others, but:

Don't lose track of the fact that he is a real person and some not some poorly written Saturday morning cartoon.

I implore you to try and model him as a real person as opposed to a stereotyped figure of hatred. He has human moments, motivations.

Not Skibboleth, but this seems bit in bad faith --- I am not equipped to make diagnoses, but I certainly have met real people who are to first approximation modeled as vindictive and prone to tantrums. I won't try to analyze Trump's behavior deeply here, just saying such description can match a real peson.

I know several people who have run into him in his golf clubs and he usually asks what they think about it, actually listens, and appears to provide some consideration if they have something meaningful to say.

Most people report similar experiences after meeting most politicians and other sufficiently charismatic people. Because that's what charisma often is. Some people have met "lite" versions of such charismatic persons. Super nice person who actually listens, is very sympathetic, sounds someone you would like to hang around with ... except when when you stop and compare notes with other people, and reflect on your past interactions with this person, it becomes obvious that they shit-talk other people, does come through only when it is for their immediate benefit, generally act in self-serving manner, have always a plan who to throw under the bus when a project fails due to their failings? (that was my first $big_corp line manager --- I have since left the company, I hear his career is going okay. He also never threw tantrums).

I implore you to consider that not all analysis of Trump's behavior are driven by hatred. Like, his letter to Norwegian PM has been published, and apparently is a genuine real deal. It is a very weird thing to read. (Well, so were all his tweets, too, but I suppose I have become desensitized by now).

I implore you to consider that not all analysis of Trump's behavior are driven by hatred.

My assertion is that I have yet to really see any anti-Trump writing that acknowledges him as a complete person, pretty much everything I've seen for ten years now has been exaggeration and stereotyping of his worse attributes and behaviors.

A much, much less lower bar ("say anything nice about Trump at all") has never been cleared by anyone I've interacted with in real life and rarely here.

I disagree with your characterization of charisma but more importantly the aforementioned behavior has been well known and noted by neutral and positive coverage since before he jumped into politics.

Either you ignore it because of Trump hatred, or (more likely) you haven't dug into who the guy is a person, which does a much better job of explaining his beliefs and behavior.*

Private knowledge tells me that Obama is a shitty overly permissive parent and that Bush did a bunch of coke when he was younger, but you don't need to be clued in to know that Clinton got up to shitty stuff with women or that Obama is destructively competitive. These are the most important people in the world and the unbiased information about how they actually function is out in the world.

Related: almost zero moderate to low information Democrats I know are aware of Trump's attitude towards drugs and alcohol despite this being an important part of his character, in fact most people assume they are the opposite of the truth.

My assertion is that I have yet to really see any anti-Trump writing that acknowledges him as a complete person, pretty much everything I've seen for ten years now has been exaggeration and stereotyping of his worse attributes and behaviors.

A much, much less lower bar ("say anything nice about Trump at all") has never been cleared by anyone I've interacted with in real life and rarely here.

As someone who thinks Trump is decidedly less virtuous than average, I can actually think of fair few nice things to say about him: he seems quite forgiving, he can be generous with praise, he's got a sense of humour etc.

Oh yeah many people here can do this if directly prompted, which is why I made it about people I know in real life. Too many people here will jump in on the discussion (big enough forum and people will get to it) or just say something to score points.

Likewise I'm sure with direct prompting people can do what I ask, but the baseline level on the internet is "Trump will cancel the elections" which is...not great understanding.

Likewise I'm sure with direct prompting people can do what I ask, but the baseline level on the internet is "Trump will cancel the elections" which is...not great understanding.

Well I can report nobody has claimed "Trump will cancel the elections" in this discussion here, yet. We have one complaint this far that Europeans interfere with the US elections, however

Private knowledge tells me that Obama is a shitty overly permissive parent and that Bush did a bunch of coke when he was younger, but you don't need to be clued in to know that Clinton got up to shitty stuff with women or that Obama is destructively competitive. These are the most important people in the world and the unbiased information about how they actually function is out in the world.

Please do realize you just posted a collection random smears about Obama and Bush. While they may be true, they are not characterization of their personality or charisma. Like, trump is certainly famous for his own moral failings on infidelity and lack of decorum concerning women. But concerning charisma, Obama was very charismatic on tv --- exactly the person a blue-coded voter would like to hang out with. Bush projected a cowboy rancher persona, which worked for him but resulted in blue-coded people liking to call him a slow, idiot, moron and projecting conspiracy theories that he was really puppeted by Cheney, which was absurd).

My assertion is that I have yet to really see any anti-Trump writing that acknowledges him as a complete person, pretty much everything I've seen for ten years now has been exaggeration and stereotyping of his worse attributes and behaviors.

A much, much less lower bar ("say anything nice about Trump at all") has never been cleared by anyone I've interacted with in real life and rarely here.

Okay. But if you are arguing against such amorphous blob of writing you dislike, you are not really engaging in an argument with us in this forum thread.

e. P.S.

Concerning this aspect in particular: You say you reject my characterization of charisma. Sure, it was not all-encompassing definition. But do you reject that person I tried to describe exist? I recounted it because I found Skibbolet's description not exceedingly uncommon, a plausible theory of mind real people can maintain about other real people, in opposition to your claim that other interlocutors in this discussion are not modelling Trump as a real person. You have also neither touched on his letter to Norwegian PM.

I picked one person from each side of the aisle to make it clear it wasn't partisan, and your approach seems more "gotcha" oriented than anything, between that and a hidden profile I think I'm going to exit this one.

Cheers!

For the record, MAGA dislikes both Bush and Clinton, so it is not really very convincing attempt at non-partisanship. I also admit I don't really understand the point you were trying to make recounting anecdotes of them, either.

It is certainly your prerogative not to engage, I do that all the time when I lose interest in discussion threads here. However, I am befuddled why you posted any replies to my replies if you don't want to have an argument about what I wrote. Dunno if it counts a "gotcha".

More comments

I think the framing of “Greenland or NATO” is interesting.

It seem plausible, if not probable, that the administration wants to end NATO. Or at least wouldn’t be sad to see nato go. It’s certainly a high risk gambit, but I don’t think I’m totally against ending nato.

I’ve long felt our European allies have been pretty terrible friends for my entire life. Their biggest sin was getting involved in internal USA party politics. It’s clear that they have a common vision with establishment Democrats and are actively hostile to the political goals of MAGA. They’ve been interfering with our elections since at least 2020. If Harris had won, I have no doubt that the EU would have done everything it can to destroy Elon Musk and X.

I think the Trump administration has recognized that we’re in a multi-polar world. The plan is to retrench to the Americas. I don’t see how nato fits into that. Especially if we have Greenland.

Edit:

Two threads below this:

Amelia is a supporting character in the U.K. government-funded educational visual novel Pathways, a game developed by Shout Out UK to teach the youth about extremism and radicalization. In the game, Amelia is depicted as a far-right anti-immigration activist with purple hair, a pink dress, a purple sweater and a goth or e-girl appearance, who tries persuading the protagonist to join her cause.

I don’t know how we can work with an “ally” that does this. This is just one drop in an ocean of shit that comes from our “friends” in Europe and the anglosphere. Even if you believe (the likely true) theory that European countries are just branch offices of US deep state, I don’t see why we should allow them to share resources.

This is a much more salient problem for me than Russia and China.

I don’t know how we can work with an “ally” that does this. This is just one drop in an ocean of shit that comes from our “friends” in Europe and the anglosphere.

The only reason anyone in Europe has ever done this is because America spent the entire post-war period enforcing it on Europe.

You invented all these shenangians and in a few years, once the Republicans lose, you'll jump straight back into it.

The benefit to the increasing divide between the USA and Europe is that soon Europe will be able to publicly partner far more with China, who has never cared how racist their business partners are, so long as they are stable. No Chinese ever called me Whitey.

No Chinese ever called me Whitey.

They definitely do, but they do it in Mandarin, which they are certain you will never understand.

Baizou is an all timer as far as I’m concerned. It’s been like ten years since I first heard the term and it’s basically a perfect slur. No notes.

We are in agreement.

Yeah, but... how is that news? Trump having a massive ego is something everyone who took one look at the guy can tell. What's more I don't know if it can be any other way for someone in his position. Years ago I was watching one of Ethan van Sciver's streams (an ex-DC Comics guy for the unfamiliar), and he got into some drama with some indie guy from Brazil. The Brazilian guy posted something on Twitter to the effect of that he's making the best comic book in the history of the world, and when the stream audience saw that, superchats started rolling in taking the piss out of the guy. Funnily enough van Sciver came to his defense, he said "You guys don't get it, he's doing it right. You need to have a massive ego in this field, because if you don't, the amount of negative feedback you get will make you crumble". If this is true for comic book artists, I really don't see how it can be any other way for politicians.

You could try to argue that his particular brand of narcissism is particularly destructive for a world leader, but is it really that unique? Was Angela Merkel bringing over ~1.5 million Syrians and Afghans, and brushing off all concerns with a mere "we'll manage it" all that different?

Yeah, but... how is that news? Trump having a massive ego is something everyone who took one look at the guy has a massive ego

Agreed. I'm a big fan of Trump, but obviously the guy has some issues with grandiosity (probably he would admit as much).

I do think it's silly to push for Greenland but so far, I'd rather have that than have someone who supports things like hiring unqualified air traffic controllers in order to promote a woke racial agenda.

I really don't see how it can be any other way for politicians.

Case in point:

Angela Merkel bringing over ~1.5 million Syrians and Afghans

I was mostly not a fan of Merkel during her 16 years. Before the refugee thing, she did not have any policies she believed in apart from "I should be the chancellor". Spineless, always following the prevailing winds. The people want to get rid of nuclear because Fukoshima? Let's get rid of nuclear.

(Her stance on the refugees was different from that. Apart from the first order effects of letting in a lot of brown people, the fact that she did this while being the head of the CDU also permanently empowered the far-right AfD, a long term effect I personally find far more concerning.)

Of course all politicians have a strong ego, but I do not think hers was pathological. I can not imagine Merkel watching the Tagesschau, noticing that she was not mentioned once, and deciding to do something about it. She knew what she had achieved: starting out as the pastor's daughter (not exactly high society, especially not in East Germany), studying physics, then joining the CDU after the '89 revolution. Starting out as Kohl's Quotenfrau and Quoten-Ossi (affirmative action woman and East-German), she climbed to the top of the CDU (a backstabbing hive of scum and villainy if there ever was one, and certainly not one believing in female empowerment), and managed to keep on top of them (and in power) for an impressive amount of time.

My feeling is that she was quite happy with her achievements, not that she was obsessively comparing herself to her predecessors and found herself wanting because Kohl had one more unification under his belt or Schroeder had more invitations to Moscow or whatever.

To be a bit more blunt, while she was much and viciously ridiculed for being a non-feminine woman, with Merkel I do not get the feeling that she was in politics to compensate for some perceived inadequacy.

I mean, if I was Trump and comparing myself to Obama, I would have plenty to feel inadequate about. Unlike Trump, Obama was not exactly born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Where Trump has a BS from UPenn, Obama has a doctorate from Harvard Law. Obama followed a standard cursus honorum from state legislature to US senate to presidency. Trump basically won the presidency through his willingness to engage in the Birther conspiracy and through being correctly perceived by his proletarian supporters as the candidate who would piss off the establishment the most. It does not matter who your voters are for getting elected president, as each vote counts the same (at least within a district, otherwise it's terribly messy), but for the amount of respect you earn from the upper-middle class for your victory it matters a lot.

Of all the honors Obama received, the Nobel is the one he deserved least, and one of the weakest Nobels awarded. He basically got a Nobel simply for not being George W Bush. Well, Trump always had an additional 15 years of not being GWB on Obama, so it surely stands to reason that he should get a Nobel too, no?

Sadly, Trump severely lacks awareness of how the mind of the Nobel committee works. The way he got into politics is the first point against him. His general style is the second. From his tweets to him renaming the DoD to DoW, he is not even fulfilling European expectations for how a meh US president should behave, never mind the expectations for one deserving the Nobel. At this point, he would have to persuade the Middle East to live in harmony and friendship, negotiate with Russia and China for a treaty which reduces nuclear weapon stockpiles by 90% and be hailed as 'The Peacebringer' by archangels (or equivalent) representing at least three world religions before he had a shot at getting his own instead of a hand-me-down like Goebbels or Infantino's sad participation trophy.

Of course all politicians have a strong ego, but I do not think hers was pathological. I can not imagine Merkel watching the Tagesschau, noticing that she was not mentioned once, and deciding to do something about it.

Yeah, and I don't think that's how Trump operates either. Ages ago, when everybody and their dog was opening startups, before Trump got into politics, I watched a video from some techno-entrepreneur I can't even recall. He was talking about the different motivations for starting a company. Money was the obvious one, he brought up one or two more that I can't remember, but the one that stick in my head was "legacy". He gave Trump as the example for that one, as he was willing to forgo profit, just to put his family name on top of buildings. For me this continues to be the best explanation for his behavior. It's probably the whole reason he ran for president, because now his name will have to recorded in history books.

Getting rid of nuclear, and letting in refugees, and dismissing all concerns with a one-liner, shows the same kind of obsession with how history will remember you, in my opinion.

Of all the honors Obama received, the Nobel is the one he deserved least, and one of the weakest Nobels awarded...

Sadly, Trump severely lacks awareness of how the mind of the Nobel committee works....

...At this point, he would have to persuade the Middle East to live in harmony and friendship, negotiate with Russia and China for a treaty which reduces nuclear weapon stockpiles by 90% and be hailed as 'The Peacebringer' by archangels (or equivalent) representing at least three world religions before he had a shot at getting his own instead of a hand-me-down like Goebbels or Infantino's sad participation trophy.

That's a lot stronger condemnation of the Nobel Peace Prize, and the entire social class responsible for it's stewardship, than it is of Trump.

It's not exactly new or surprising that a head-of-state would have a big ego and ambition to leave a legacy. One might even say that's the norm. The constitution was explicitly designed with this in mind, with the hope that each separate branch of government would, by trying to seize more power for itself, keep the others in check.

What is new is how... useless Congress has become. In theory they have immense power. They could remove the president from office, fully control government spending, and even rewrite the constitution as they please. But in practice they just can't seem to agree on anything. They can barely even pass routine budgets to keep federal services running.

At the same time, social media has given the President more power than ever with his "bully pulpit." We can now directly watch all of Trump's speeches at the click of a button, or read his thoughts in short tweet form. And Trump is very effective at that kind of short-form communication. The rest of government is too fractured and, frankly, boring, to grab people's attention the way Trump can. It'll be interesting to see if this continues- somehow I can't imagine people tuning in to watch Vance or Shapiro with the same sort of horrified excitement they give to Trump. But we'll see- I suppose any speech becomes more interesting when it's backed up by immense power.

Regarding NATO, it's sort of a similar argument. Europe has, in theory, a lot of military power, but it's difficult to really use it when it's fractured between 31 different non-US members. What I would like to see is for continental Europe to form a new "Core NATO" with a centralized European Army, focused entirely on defending Europe. The US could either leave NATO or minimize its involvement there, and instead focus on AUKUS, potentially expanding it to include Canada, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan. This would be a smaller, but more tightly knit alliance, aimed at being able to project force all over the world, but especially at sea and even more especially in East Asia. Since this alliance is smaller and more closely aligned, it would have a lot more cohesion and flexibility to forcefully defend its (narrowly defined) strategic interests- peace in the middle east, counter-terrorism, and containing China and Russia.

Is it really 'narcissism' when you are actually that good?

Okay, that's a joke. I mean, he is THAT GOOD, if the talent in question is making everything about himself.

But that also gives him a weak form of Skin in the Game, where he actually DOES want 'good' things to happen since that is precisely what will enable the best legacy for him. It helps that he's seemingly got no real malice as part of his self-aggrandizement (maybe a little, he sure does seem to despise Obama), and generally prefers cooperative outcomes for all involved parties.

If we achieve a lasting peace between Russia and Ukraine, and he insists that the Peace agreement be called "Treaty on Russian–Ukrainian Mutual Peace", do I care that much?

No, not really.

My overarching concern has been that his 'movement' is so tied up in his ego it isn't clear if it CAN move on to anyone else once he's out of office, and that will be a major problem if there's no clear successor.

"Treaty on Russian–Ukrainian Mutual Peace"

I got a chuckle out of this (it took me a second).

My overarching concern has been that his 'movement' is so tied up in his ego it isn't clear if it CAN move on to anyone else once he's out of office, and that will be a major problem if there's no clear successor.

I think this is a huge potential issue, and I will note that it's an issue regardless of whether or not Trump is a good person or a bad person or an evil and vile person or a sort of mediocre person. Strong personalities are not a substitute for strong institutions.

I think it is dangerously tempting for the right to overestimate their victories given that a few strong personalities have swung to their side. Don't get me wrong, it is always good to have great men on your side. But even the best kings pass away.

Yeah. It seems unprecedented in modern history, especially modern American history for a leader to have a sufficiently large cult of personality that when they leave it would be all but impossible for the next candidate to inherit their predecessor's supporters without their explicit blessing.

I guess... North Korea? They solve it by straightforward passing to the next of kin, along with a massive propaganda campaign to deify each successive leader, right?

Actually... I have never questioned it but who is in charge of NK's institution that upholds the Juche ideology and propagandizes the masses? In theory THAT is who is ensuring peaceful transition of power.

Edit: Oh my. Currently its his sister. I guess that tracks.

I question the degree to which Trump has the ability to bequeath his support to a chosen successor. He's had mixed success as an endorser of candidates. Especially if he is himself diminished in any way.

Yeah, hence why an institution that can try to build up the next candidate to receive the blessing seems like a necessary component.

Trump himself is popular amongst people who voted for him, I expect that to remain true.

Nominally this would be a job for the Republican Party apparatus but lol.

The big problems being

A) Trump is uniquely talented, so talented a politicians that he can force the tide to recede for a brief period.

B) Trump is selfish and paranoid, rightly so given the number and mendacity of his enemies, and is loathe to name or groom a successor that could turf him out.

Though I'm still surprised we haven't seen one of the kids set up as clear successor.

I don't think any of the older kids have the juice to fill his shoes. Barron is shaping with potential but obviously the age thing.

I don't think anyone has the juice to replace Trump. Love him or hate him, he is world historically talented.

Jared could probably handle the job, though he doesn't exactly have the popularity. At first Ivanka seemed like the pick, but I haven't heard anything about that in a long time.

At the very least, Trumpworld will always dangle a third term or a run by Don Jr to keep Rubio and Vance in line.

According to this one (1) singular news report I got in my feed, there's speculation that his daughter, Kim Ju Ae, is being positioned as the successor because she "walked in front of Kim Jung Un on camera."

Kremlinology, Pyongyang-style!

maybe a little, he sure does seem to despise Obama

And Biden, and Clinton, and Comey, and CBS... He spent Christmas ranting about the Democrats!

generally prefers cooperative outcomes for all involved parties.

He put tariffs on the entire rest of the world based the ratio of imports vs exports. And is currently threatening to annex Greenland from our allies and is using tariffs to force them to negotiate.

I saw the list of countries that had tariffs on us, and it suggests that there's a larger strategy of reducing overall trade barriers by forcing everyone else to reduce their own tariffs in the eventual trade deals.

I've talked about this point at some length.

If you haven't figured out that Trump likes to use door in the face in the opening rounds of a negotiation for an eventually agreed deal, don't know what to tell you. Its in that book he wrote.

The list of countries that had tariffs on the US was a lie, Trump didn't write Art of the Deal, and the tactics he usually uses on tariffs isn't door in the face as described in e.g. the linked article.

The last point needs some more explanation. "Door in the face" as understood by people who write about negotiation tactics, involves making an outrageous first ask which functions as a psychological anchor to make the real ask look more reasonable. The announcement of the Greenland tariffs is potentially a good example - if you assume the demand for sovereignty is a DITF which can then be negotiated down to some other concession that Denmark wouldn't normally be willing to make. But Trump's normal approach (see the early Mexico/Canada tariffs, or the Liberation Day tariffs) is to make an outrageous threat without an actionable ask attached, and then invite the threatened party to make an offer.

Trump's tariffs are based on trade deficits, Trade deficits can be a result of unfair trade, but given Trump talks about domestic manufacturing a lot, signs point to Trump simply thinking that exporting more than you are importing is an inherently good thing.

Door in the Face doesn't really have much to do with this. That's a negotiation technique, and you were talking about negotiation outcomes. Maybe it'd be better if I asked what you refer to by "cooperative outcomes for all involved parties." Greenland seems very much only for the benefit of America. His trade negotiations seem solely for the benefit of American domestic manufacturing. His Russia policy seems to be to cut off aid to Ukraine and alternative threatening either of them. He renegotiated NAFTA to increase American production, then negotiated again.

I do want to check my biases. I tried to find bills passed by Trump with bipartisan support. I couldn't find a listicle, so AI will have to do.

  1. First Step Act (2018)

  2. SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act (2018)

  3. VA Mission Act (2018)

  4. Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act Reauthorization (2018)

  5. Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act (2019)

  6. Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 (Farm Bill)

I tried to find bills passed by Trump with bipartisan support. I couldn't find a listicle, so AI will have to do.

You can look at the list of all bills signed and click through to the "Actions" tab for each bill. But that isn't necessarily helpful, since most bills are passed unanimously (by "voice vote" or "unanimous consent") in both houses, and it's hard to tell from a cursory glance which bills are actually meaningful.

My overarching concern has been that his 'movement' is so tied up in his ego it isn't clear if it CAN move on to anyone else once he's out of office, and that will be a major problem if there's no clear successor.

It's not though, or at least that's not what I see.

Trump is not the center of the MAGA movement as much as he is "the face", this a big part of why he has had a decidedly mixed record when it comes to endorsing other candidates. Trump isn't "wearing the Republican party like skinsuit" so much as he is the brick that the electorate has chosen to throw through the establishment's window.

Additionally I feel like Trump has been actually been pretty good about setting up potential successors for success both within his own family (IE Kushner and Don Jr) and the wider party (IE Vance, and Rubio)

Vance and Rubio, if they continue to play cards right, should be able to form a strong ticket by all accounts.

If Trump does manage a 'clean' handoff of power to one or both of those guys (preferably Vance) that may just be the single best legacy he can leave.

Note the letter he wrote today to Norway, linking Greenland to not getting the peace prize

This has to be one of the more stupid things he's done, as any fule kno, the Nobel Prize is Swedish, not Norwegian...

EDIT: Looks like I'm the fule here... I didn't know the Nobel Peace Prize was Norwegian, as all the real ones are done by Sweden... This is good knowledge to have though and yet more reason why the so called Peace Prize should just be discontinued.

Umm…per Wiki the peace prize it is handed out by a Norwegian committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament.

Hm...

Sweden and Norway were united in the 1800s after Sweden took it from the Danes during the Napoleonic wars. Norway was far poorer and far less developed than Sweden and Sweden effectively had to give affirmative action to Norwegians as well as subsidize Norway. When something important and official happened in Sweden Norway had to get a cut. If big prizes were handed out in Stockholm some prize needed to be handed out in Norway.

In accordance with Nobel's will, the (Nobel Peace) prize is selected by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, a five-member committee appointed by the Parliament of Norway unlike all the other awards chosen by the Swedish Nobel Committee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Peace_Prize

Point taken

Nah, it's like writing a letter to Trump to complain that your movie didn't win an Oscar.

No, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee is selected directly by the Norwegian legislature. So it's like writing a letter to the Academy of Motion Pictures to complain that your movie didn't win an Oscar. That won't help either, but it's not as obviously stupid.

They call him a narcissist because they can't stand calling him a Great Man of history, because he obviously is. They're going to call this decade the Trump Era of politics and the beginning of populism dominating the west for decades to come. He's not a boomer selling the house instead of giving it to his kids because he wants to go on cruises: he's a megalomaniac, like Napoleon. He is a man who believes he has a destiny to reshape the world in his image...

...and, based on how history has turned out, is he wrong to believe so? He was radicalized by the bullet shot through his ear. Nothing convinces you more of Providence then surviving death. God himself acts through him, as he did Pharoah: hardening his heart and accomplishing what is necessary for the proper course of history to reassert itself. In short, God is punishing you, and Donald Trump is his scourge. Reflect on your many sins you must have committed for such a sentence to be passed upon you, and repent.

They call him a "Narcissist" because somehow they confused Megalomania with Narcissism, even though they aren't related. Narcissism isn't about how much you think your shit doesn't stink, it's about an inability (or, at least, a diminished capability) of relating to other people except as extentions of one's own ego. Which, to be blunt, is pretty much universal at this point.

Being a Great Man doesn't make you immune from mistakes and failures, even stupid ones. Napoleon - the prototypical "great man" - fruitlessly invaded Egypt, Haiti, and Russia, losing whole armies each time. In 1813-1814 he failed to make peace with his neighbors and preserve his dynasty, searching instead for a fruitless battlefield triumph. His attempt to reinstate himself in the 100 days was doomed from the get-go. He died on St. Helena in exile a broken man.

and the beginning of populism dominating the west for decades to come.

I think this is serious wishful thinking. The most likely scenario, as I see it, is as follows:

  1. Democrats narrowly win the midterms later this year.
  2. Everything the Trump 2.0 admin has been accomplishing (not that there's all that much, really) is brought to a stop, or even rolled back. ICE grinds to a halt. Hegseth gets sidelined. USAID funding gets restored through various alternative bodies and channels (to the extent it hasn't already). Lawfare intensifies. We get at least another impeachment attempt or two
  3. The Republican Party establishment responds with the narrative they've already been circulating, preemptively, in anticipation of a midterm loss: it’s because we went too far right with Trump and are “scaring the hoes” — that we haven’t done enough to deplatform Carlson, Fuentes, etc. and get them taken of the airwaves interwebs (you know, that silly series of tubes that the young'uns are watching instead of proper TV — surely it can't be harder to get someone removed than it was to get the networks to pay no attention to people like the Birchers, right?); that we haven’t done nearly enough Buckleyite expulsions (see the "edgy jokes in group chat" and “Heritage society Shabbat dinner" purges); and that the party’s only path to regain all those "natural conservative" voters "scared off" by all the "extremism" and "flirting with fascism" is to "tack to the center" with "traditional conservatism" (like forever wars in the Middle East, and shipping your jobs overseas), and become the Republican Party of Mitt Romney again. (You know, the party of virtuous losers, the Washington Generals of politics, whose job — to paraphrase a Republican campaign strategist (whose interview I've been unable to find again) — is to knowingly lie and make false promises to working-class rubes to get elected, then when in office deliver corporate welfare for the GOP donor class.) So they find a way to push out Vance, and run someone like Rubio, Haley, or maybe even Youngkin.
  4. With Democratic voters energized and the Republican base demoralized, the Democrats win handily.
  5. Then, as mitchfynde on Tumblr puts it:

My ultimate vision for the United States of America right now is Gavin Newsome running for president with the slogan "lock him up". He wins and Nuremberg trials are held. Trump's administration is sent to prison, or worse, I don't really care which at this point. When Trump eventually dies of old age (or otherwise), MAGAts can begin to deprogram from the cult… The Democratic Party will begin to introduce legislation that will more correctly guardrail democracy against fascism. AI and social media will face regulations. Funding of education will increase with the hopes of a population better inoculated against fascist ideology.

  1. Populism is killed completely in the West.

(Then things get worse from there.)

I don't think you're wrong exactly, just that you're trivially correct. Everyone responds to the inevitability of death by thinking about their legacy, whether that's wealth, impact, relationships, or something eternal.

When I consider Trump, I am reminded, actually, of the depiction of Alexander the Great (Iskander) in the anime Fate:Zero. Okay bear with me a sec:

The premise of the series is that legendary heroes of the past are summoned with super powers to fight in a battle royale over the Holy Grail. In Fate: Zero, there's a scene where three legendary kings get together and share a drink while discussing what it means to be a king. It's one of my favorite scenes. Two of the kings, Iskander and Gilgamesh, are basically dunking on King Arthur (who's a woman for some reason) because she's sacrificed so much for her people and is basically miserable and moping all the time. Gilgamesh lays out his belief that he's the best king because he's got the most stuff, but then in an exchange between Arthur and Iskander, our boy explains what he thinks being a king is all about. Here's the key excerpt:

Arthur: If I rule the nation as king, I cannot ask to live as a person. King of Conquerors, you seek the Grail merely for your own benefit. You could never understand - you, who became a ruler only to satisfy your endless greed.

Iskander: A king without greed is even worse than a figurehead! [Arthur], you said you would martyr yourself for your ideals. In life, you must have been a pure saint. A proud and noble figure, certainly. But who can truly admire the martyr's thorny path? Who dreams of such an ending? A king. The king must be greedier than any other. He must laugh more loudly and rage for longer. He must exemplify the extreme of all things, good and evil. That is why his retainers envy and adore him. And why the flames of aspiration, to be as the king is, can burn within his people.

That's what Trump is like, and it's why his retainers adore him. He exemplifies the extreme of all things, and he charges forwards without regret. It's awesome! One more excerpt for good measure:

Arthur: Iskander, your reign ended with your heirs slain, and your empire dissolved into three parts. You have no regrets about that end?

Iskander: None. Not if it came to pass by my judgment and my retainers' sacrifices. Its destruction was inevitable. I shall grieve. And I shall weep. But I shall never regret - let alone undo it! Such an act would be a mockery of all who fought with me!

I think it's a very Western mindset to think our leaders should be more like Arthur, 'servant leaders' so to speak. Trump isn't like that at all, and doesn't pretend to be. He is a goddamn king.

In Fate: Zero, there's a scene where three legendary kings get together and share a drink while discussing what it means to be a king.

Anybody interested in this discussion who reads Cultivation Fantasy should 100% read Virtuous Sons.

This is tangential, but this is why when people say things like "China is smart, they won't just start a war over Taiwan." I laugh. Systems with high power individuals at the top run at the behest of that individual, and this is much more true or China than America. If Russia was smart they would've waited out Ukraine to hollow out demographically and become complacent, but Russia isn't in charge, Putin is and Putin wants to be remembered as the guy who reunited greater Russia. Likewise for Xi, maybe

Systems with high power individuals at the top run at the behest of that individual, and this is much more true or China than America.

Xi seems much brighter than Trump, though.

The question is not whether Xi is brighter than Trump the question is whether Xi is brighter than Putin.

It makes sense for China to wait until Taiwan is no longer the nexus of global semiconductor production (something that has no impact on the chauvinistic / historical / nationalist / sentimental Chinese claim) and then take the island when nobody else cares anymore. If they go early it’s because the US baited them or because Xi perceives or experiences an internal loss of power or influence to more hardcore nationalists.

It makes sense for China to wait until Taiwan is no longer the nexus of global semiconductor production

That could be a long while. And while China may be patient, Xi himself is old.

Not sure I agree. He has been absolutely destroying Chinese growth and future prospects. The problem is systems are smarter than people and both are rampaging against what were effectively built systems to greater or lesser degrees.

Just tangentially:

Am I wrong, or did Greenland come back into the conversation after nearly a year of absence because a reporter randomly asked Trump about it when he was taking press questions about venezuela two weeks ago? Here on air force one impromptu questioning on Jan 4th, (23:45 timestamp). Trump seems bewildered and is laughing about Greenland being brought up randomly/inappropriately, seemingly out of nowhere (I guess Katie Miller had apparently tweeted a troll stars&stripes greenland 'SOON' picture on Jan 3rd, responding to hemispheric dominance from the 'Donroe doctrine', or the reporter was thinking that same thing independently). But having that seeded back into consciousness, Trump went back to his old line, saying "we need it" rather than "we want it", joked about them beefing up their defense with 1 additional dog-sled, and tried to make his little audience there laugh.

It seems entirely like everyone else earnestly picked that up and ran with it again, and Trump has just continued to respond and not back down (which is always his gut instinct). It doesn't actually seem like this was a huge preoccupation with legacy weighing on his mind this term.

I've mentioned that I still go to yahoo news to see what the daily mainstream normie news aggregate is (to a logged-out american IP), and it appears that ragebait trump-bad-ally greenland stories are pushed every day, usually to the exclusion of anything about minneapolis (or venezuela, more understandably).

ragebait trump-bad-ally greenland stories are pushed every day,

Trump is the one pushing them.

Okay, this is the second subthread today that makes me think about a certain scottpost.

Wanting to make history is not limited to narcissists. Every kid who thought about being an astronaut has been there. Trump just never had to give up the dream.

I don’t think this actually explains his attitude towards NATO, which is not a new obsession. He’s harped on it since the first term, but it’s always taken a backseat to domestic politics. So I guess I still prefer my model:

Trump makes brand decisions, not strategic ones.

That’s it. There’s no other criteria. Trump wants Greenland because superpowers do stuff like that. He dislikes NATO because he’s convinced it’s a bad deal.

He does not play the long game. He does not eat a loss. He does not implement a strategy. People come to him with proposals, and if they’re aligned with his brand, he gives them whatever they need. If not, he fires them. Trump I was ineffective because he didn’t have the roster depth needed to survive this style. After eight years of setting expectations, the current administration has much more momentum.

The problem with this theory is that a lot of his moves are not even close to insta-wins. Accepting Obama's proposal that Iran is the new American Ally in the Mid East is an insta-win. Instead he went with a complicated Israeli-Saudi led alliance that has only paid off in ways that 9/10 advisors would have told him would fail.

Same happens basically everywhere abroad.

Domestically his successes are more limited, mostly because his power is more limited and media is stronger. If he could just get blue states to cooperate with ICE with a magic wand and proceedings could be expedited, he would be above his February approval ratings. Instead, doing his promises necessarily looks scary. He's got a harder job.

The real irk here is that it makes him unpredictable in ways that no one can even expect. If you went back to 2024 and told everyone that in the first year alone Trump would start threatening to invade other NATO countries so seriously that they put tripwire troops in Greenland and Canada was looking towards China for diversifying their options, and one of the main motivators is his tantrum over not getting the nobel peace price despite already coercing it out of the actual winner already, even the most insane TDS drones would have looked at you a bit crooked.

If you told people back before the election that the winning candidate was going to try to implement price controls, take state ownership of private enterprise, and blame housing prices on big corporations being too greedy and became phone pals with an unabashed socialist you'd assume it was Harris who won or maybe even that Sanders pulled off a miracle.

And yet here we are.

Canada was looking towards China for diversifying their options

If you are at all familiar with Canada, this wouldn't come as a surprise. We've had consistent allegations that the LPC has had China intervening on behalf of them, and we've been signing a lot of treaties that empower China to access our resources.


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