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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28970 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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European tech, American tech, and regulation

tl;dr: what do you think about 1) European alternatives to American tech, and 2) European and American tech regulations?

Background

  1. Europeans (citizens, businesses, and governments) heavily rely on American tech. Europe has alternatives in most categories (e.g. phone, CDN) but most have less adoption.
  2. The US has regulations. The EU and its nations have different regulations, notably the Digital Serivces Act and Digital Markets Act. Occasionally a big company gets fined and told to change; they usually appeal, then sometimes still don't pay or change anything. The EU and its nations are widely regarded as having way more, stricter regulations and fines.

Recent events

Online ideas and my opinions

More radical

  • "The EU should ban and block US tech companies": on (pro tech freedom) Hacker News of all sites, which suprised me. Effectively a Great Firewall for the EU. I strongly disagree. More broadly, I believe people should have the freedom to stream propaganda from any nation they want: Russia, China, even Iran. I have no issue with governments directing citizens to their own propaganda and discouraging other sources, even preventing people who are so dumb they may actually believe whatever e.g. the Iran regime says. But this leads to the proposal's more significant, practical issue: way too many Europeans use American tech, and they aren't switching despite seemingly having some national pride and US dislike. European governments internally use Office and other American tools. It's near-term infeasible.
  • "Europe should stop protecting US Intellectual Property, from Cory Doctorow: while I'd love to see the end of IP, like I'd love to see the end of labor, this is also near-term infeasible, so I also strongly disagree. If a European nation "just stops" enforcing the DMCA, tech companies can "just stop" operating there, and remember that practically all of Europe still relies on them. Cory Doctorow has lots of interesting arguments, and I really admire and support his crusade against IP and enshittification, but his views are very extreme and some of his ideas go too far.
    • What I think European nations should do in the near term is provide leniencey for and encourage companies to not over-enforce IP laws; for example, by supporting companies who get sued for not taking down content from a flawed DMCA claim (DMCA takedowns are heavily abused). Likewise, they should defend companies who are wrongly sued for copyright/patent infringement, and ensure, however strictly IP is enforced, it's equally strict on small and big companies.
    • I'd still like to see the end of IP, but it must be done reasonably and with an alternative for deserving IP owners (particularly artists who need to make a living, and not platform owners who restrict users' content). For example, LLMs sidestep existing IP: they can scrape any website, build any app from a description, and generate copyrighted characters for personal use. Maybe European (and American) nations can accept AI companies training on copyrighted data in exchange for keeping this.

Less radical

  • "European nations and/or the EU should encourage and fund European alternatives": strongly agree. In general, I want to see more variety and innovation. In particular, I think everyone using locked-down platforms (social medias, phones, mail, etc.) is really bad, and the way out is not regulation (though some is important/useful) but competition, so companies are pressured to open their platforms or at least stop degrading them.
    • Notably, I don't actually care whether the alternative platforms are European.
    • Unfortunately, I'm not optimistic that governments will help here. And I myself avoid mainstream social media, but still use an iPhone and Mac because they're better.
    • On Mistral. AI is particularly important, so Europe will be at a big disadvantage if they don't get competitive AI and America restricts its own. Mistral makes local models (as opposed to locked-down cloud ones), so I want them to succeed. However, even with full EU backing, they'd be outcompeted by OpenAI and Anthropic, who can release local models themselves, making all their effort and work seem wasted. Except I don't think it would actually be a waste, like how acquiring weapons isn't a waste, when the deterrence from their existense makes them unnecessary.
  • "European nations should relax (tech and general employee) regulations to encourage innovation": agree, there are way too many. But I don't think they should relax them as far as the US. I don't know where to draw the line, and I don't have the motivation or discipline to understand existing regulations (not even getting into how they're applied in practice).

Vaguely, I believe American tech companies should be regulated more, since they seem to be damaging society and have effective monopolies due to network effects. And more importantly I want to see more tech innovation, which I think is hurt by less competition. But I don't exactly know how.

I generally think America and Europe should work together, but here, I think different regulatory frameworks and competing tech services is good.

The four ideas are not mutually exclusive, in theory, the EU can do all 4. In fact, there is an existing successful example of doing all these ideas: China. It is in the greater interest of both America AND EU, geopolitically at least, to not get to that point, because individually they won't be able to compete with China if they also have to spare energy to compete with each other.

US subpoenas tech companies for private messages of European officials enforcing the DSA: the Trump admin is criticing European governments for censoring speech, which is...true, and not just "hate speech" but sometimes just criticing politicians.

Oh, snap. I was sitting on an effortpost on the subject, but never got around to finishing it. Since you're bringing it up, I'll just dump the draft I had stored:

Freedom of expression is a fundamental right in Europe and a shared core value with the United States across the democratic world.

Some of you might scoff at these words if you've been keeping tabs at what's going on in Europe. Some might scoff even harder upon realizing they come from a statement from the European Comission responding to Trump's travel sanctions against Commissioner Thierry Breton, who sent a letter to Elon Musk, threatening him with regulatory retaliation, ahead of his interview with Trump. But even if you were familiar with that situation, when you find out how deep this rabbit hole goes, it might turn out all that scoffing is nowhere near enough

Recently the House Judiciary Committee released a report on EU laws' impact on American political speech. They subpoena'd the major platforms for documentation on the measures they took to comply with EU regulations, and the results were quite illuminating. One of the responses to the Twitter Files story was that it's a nothingburger. Private companies came up with private terms for using their private platform, and the government was essentially just pushing the "report" button. We've had plenty of conversations about whether that is an accurate portrayal of the situation, but aside from that, it now looks like the core premise of that response is wrong. The platforms' terms of service weren't established on their own accord, but rather under pressure from the European Commission. From the report:

starting in 2015 and 2016, the European Commission began creating various forums in which European regulators could meet directly with technology platforms to discuss how and what content should be moderated. Though ostensibly meant to combat "misinformation" and "hate speech," nonpublic documents produced to the Committee show that for the last ten years, the European Commission has directly pressured platforms to censor lawful, political speech in the European Union and abroad.

The EU Internet Forum (EUIF), founded in 2015 by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Migration and Home Affairs (DG-Home), was among the first of these initiatives. By 2023, EUIF published a "handbook ... for use by tech companies when moderating" lawful, non-violative speech such as:

  • "Populist rhetoric";
  • "Anti-government/anti-EU" content;
  • "Anti-elite" content;
  • "Political satire";
  • "Anti-migrants and Islamophobic content";
  • "Anti-refugee/immigrant sentiment";
  • "Anti-LGBTIQ . . . content"; and
  • "Meme subculture."

Now, some might say that just because an official government body invited some companies to have a friendly conversation about moderating their platforms, doesn't mean any pressure is actually being put on them, but the problem with that theory is that the companies themselves weren't under that impression. The report contains examples of emails such as this one from Google:

...co-chairs set the agenda under (strong) impetus from the EU Commission; decision is taken by "consensus" -- but consensus can be heavily pressed by the EC, if they disagree where it's going.

or:

The EC is opening the GAI subgroup under the Code of Practice. I assume we want to join (we don't really have a choice), but do we also want to co-chair it?

or one from TikTok about adding rules against "marginalizing speech and behaviour", and various forms of "misinformation":

This update, which was advised by the legal team, is mainly related to compliance with the Digital Services Act

Now, maybe this is just a case of overzealous bureaucrats throwing their weight around to push their private agenda? Despite the letter of support for Breton after Trump's sanctions, the official line was that was acting without authorization, so maybe this is was also the case here? Well, maybe, but said bureaucrats really wanted to make it seem like this is all done with the blessing of the top brass. For example an email from an EC official representatives at Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Bytedance signed off with:

Given the urgency, I take the liberty to use this informal channel but I want to assure you that I am addressing you with the agreement of the Vice-President (who is cooperating on this with [redacted] and [redacted]) and the knowledge of the President.

Personally, I think this casts doubt on the claims about Breton as well.

The executive summary of the report isn't a long read, and has receipts for a few other dramas like the Romanian elections.

Has there ever in history been a government that implemented any speech restrictions that didn't spread to broad criticism of the ruling party?

The US? say what you will about America, the first amendment is amazing. I suppose it depends on what you mean by "the ruling party".

Edit1: There has been certain attempts, like the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, but overall the first amendment has been a strong stalwart against government overreach.

I feel Americans are far too quick to congratulate themselves on the topic of freedoms and rights. Not only has the US government worked to censor in recent years using big tech as a proxy, it has also done so historically, such as with the case of Schenck v. United States, Charles Coughlin, McCarthyism or COINTELPRO and similar.

If the government was the owner of all major communications platforms, then yeah, the first amendment would technically be super relevant. But when American law is willing to leverage the right of a single company owner to censor speech as being equal to the right of millions of people to express themselves on that companies platform, you have a state of affairs that is effectively no different from not having any free speech rights at all. Which is exactly the case for anyone wanting to color outside the lines of American powers that be. Maybe not by putting you in jail, as is the case in Europe. But via indirect means, such as with the examples given earlier or suddenly not having a bank account or not being able to freely choose an airline or host a website by any normal means.

I think a secondary part is that what a lot of Americans believe doesn't seem to matter a whole lot. And even if that wasn't the case, American media has had such a stranglehold on the public that it's not as if there was ever going to be a risk of anyone believing anything truly heterodox to begin with. And if that were ever a likely case, the American government can and has stepped in to get ahead of those movements. The sheer mass of the American media and political system has been too great for any popular grass roots movement to budge it until, arguably, 2016 Trump arrived.

But even after Trump, TPTB have learned their lesson, are course correcting and we are now only celebrating 'free speech' in America because a South African bought twitter.

I feel Americans are far too quick to congratulate themselves on the topic of freedoms and rights.

Not at all. Our track record is far from perfect, but we still somehow manage to completely eclipse every other country on earth when it comes to speech rights, in spite of our failures and shortcomings. We can call our politicians idiots without getting arrested [1], and in the rare cases when cops have overreached for that sort of thing the courts have shut it down.

1: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-over-online-insult/a-70793557

That's a comparison revolving around being the cleanest pig in the sty. If the culmination of the freedom loving spirit of Americans can't reach beyond comparing themselves to the Germans then the point, that Americans are far too quick to congratulate themselves on the topic of freedom and rights, is very much made.

The Germans, thé UK, the Canadians, in fact most of Europe…

There being a lot of pigs in the sty doesn't change the point.

  1. As pointed out by @ChickenOverlord, Americans and their speech is so so so much free-er than other countries that sometimes I feel Americans don't get congratulated enough for it
  2. Yes, that's right, the question was about government overreach. Being able to does not mean it has to be easy. And yeah, the difficulty with getting your ideas and thoughts across to others is part of the friction of communication. I'm not sure what is being asked here, are you asking that political belief is to be a protected class and private companies should not use that as an excuse to offer/not-offer products and services? Either way, if people want their speech heard, nothing prevents them from taking over or recreate what they need.
  3. What Americans believe matters a whole lot. Trump's 2.0 victory is complete vindication of how what the median American thinks matters and led the country to what they want. Feels like every other presidency can be easily characterized as "newcomer with grassroots momentum that trounced the elite favorite".
  4. So the freedom of the people worked. An American, with the means and opportunities to make a change, made a change! He certainly didn't stay in South Africa to do that. He did what he did with Twitter because he had ideological and philosophical values, very American ones if I might add, that drove his actions.

1 I responded to that comment below.

2 If your free speech comes with the caveat that any sufficiently powerful person or group can effectively own the public square in part or whole and dictate what can and can't be said then I can only consider my original point, that Americans are far too quick to congratulate themselves on the topic of freedoms and rights, proven and demonstrated.

3 I'm not terribly interested in getting in the weeds on this nor do I see the relevance, but:

I don't see how Trump 2.0 can be considered to have given his voters what they wanted when there is an active middle east war and more foreign workers in the country now than before his second term began. But the MAGA base will cheer on literally anything as long as Trump does it so there's that.

If your free speech rights hinge on you becoming a billionaire to functionally buy the public square then, again, I feel I can't overstate my original point.

4 Isn't that a great refutation of your own point? He didn't compare himself to Europe and make that the barometer. He had ideological and philosophical values! He looked beyond just what's in the world and dared to dream of what was possible. Or something...

But how American are those values? The vast majority of the American elite is in favor of speech restrictions and controls. Illustrated by every other American platform having very clear speech and content restrictions that go beyond any law of the land. That's why Musk had to buy Twitter. Before that people had been getting banned for misgendering people or making political jokes that offended the ownership elite or the special interest groups that constantly drive for more censorship like the ADL. Musk's X is in a very clear minority among the elite and his platform still engages in censorship and backroom algorithmic manipulation.

How about we have our own ideologies and values and judge what's happening in the world of free speech by those? Rather than basing our barometer on what some billionaire came up with or what they are doing in Germany or wherever else.

I came from a country where people are afraid of writing too much in private chat and would rather call you up to talk. The plurality of opinions here in America is frikin amazing in comparison. People can go to whatever public square they like here. Twitter, bluesky, mastodon, reddit, random forums, random forums that had to migrate and move to their own sites. Good luck making another social media site in my country without getting a visit from the police. We obviously have very different viewpoints on this. "I didn't see the light until I was already a man". You are very vigilant of any erosion of rights, or maybe disappointed at the gap between theory and reality. Just because the American people (the elites or the masses) fail to live up to American values does not twist American values nor detract from the striving to have and keep those values. What I see is that an American can go into the streets holding a sign, or tweet it out, or make a website, or rambling posts on Facebook, on most things and won't get beaten or put away in unmarked vans, and that is the kind of freedoms I would congratulate America for.

an American can go into the streets holding a sign, or tweet it out, or make a website, or rambling posts on Facebook, on most things and won't get beaten or put away in unmarked vans

Unfortunately, this happened to Rümeysa Öztürk. That she was a (legal) immigrant Muslim who wrote an op-ed accusing Israel of genociding Palestinians - I think is just a poor excuse.

Thankfully, she's free now.

I do believe, today, the United States has overall more free speech than any other nation. I think the EU nations have significantly more free speech than Russia, China, Iran, etc. Importantly, both America and Europe allow mocking public figures (my example is one of only a couple exceptions) and anonymous web usage (I'm sure the FBI etc. track you, but seem to only act on classified information and CSAM).

Still, I think every nation should have more.

More comments

I think the first amendment reinforces my point: it has no speech restrictions. Narrow exceptions only exist outside, yet even they've been twisted (e.g. prosecuting Communists for "planning to overthrow the government" in Dennis v. United States).

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I suspect that speech hasn't been prosecuted more in the US because children are taught this first, then exceptions later, so they're generally biased against exceptions.

In 1969, Dennis was de facto overruled by Brandenburg v. Ohio.

Took 18 years, but that's a short time compared to the long history of a country.

I suspect that speech hasn't been prosecuted more in the US because children are taught this first, then exceptions later, so they're generally biased against exceptions.

Yes, makes sense, the freedom is broad, so the exceptions are "the exceptions that prove the rule".

Arguably Singapore? It’s legal to criticize the people’s action party despite not being super-pro-free speech in general.

They might not honor it perfectly in the breech, I suppose.

IANAS, but my impression of Singapore was that criticism of the party (ideally constructive criticism) was accepted, but that criticism of prominent individuals faced very harsh and sometimes politicized libel laws. Not bad as they go.

My general impression is that Europe doesn’t respect free speech the way we do in the United States. For example, in England, one RooshV was banned from entering England (even for getting on a connecting flight) because he expressed views the leaders of England disagreed with.

I think a strong case that a lot of the online censorship (e.g. not allowing people to have frank discussions about Trans rights—and, yes it’s Reddit’s trans rights discussion censorship which drove The Motte to have their own website instead of remaining on Reddit) we saw in the late 2010s and early 2020s was partly a result of EU overreach. Indeed, Twitter/X doesn’t censor the way most other major social media platforms do, and they were hit with a huge fine from the EU late last year, and I feel the EU unfairly targeted Twitter/X because that platform allows people to express views which get people banned on other platforms.

For one, I’m glad this site is here to allow frank discussions. Yeah, it can be right-learning, but considering a lot of mainstream right-wing views are straight up suppressed and silenced on other platforms, it’s no surprise right wing people flock to the relatively few platforms which allow frank open discussion.

I’m saying all this as a classic liberal.

I think a strong case that a lot of the online censorship (e.g. not allowing people to have frank discussions about Trans rights—and, yes it’s Reddit’s trans rights discussion censorship which drove The Motte to have their own website instead of remaining on Reddit) we saw in the late 2010s and early 2020s was partly a result of EU overreach.

That the worst online censorship was around trans rights is strong evidence that it was not driven by pressure from the EU authorities - the offline push for censorship of sane views on trans issues was much stronger in the US than the EU. Given the weakness of free speech laws in Europe, the EU (and member states) could have openly censored unapproved views on trans issues the way they openly censored complaints about Muslim immigration, but they chose not to. The pattern of what got censored how hard on Reddit is most consistent with a bottom-up push for censorship by the powermods, and more consistent with top-down censorship directed by American lefties than European lefties.

Given the weakness of free speech laws in Europe, the EU (and member states) could have openly censored unapproved views on trans issues the way they openly censored complaints about Muslim immigration, but they chose not to.

A quote from the executive summary that I saved in my draft, but didn't get around to commenting on before posting:

Since the DSA came into force in 2023, the European Commission has pressured platforms to censor content ahead of national elections in Slovakia, the Netherlands, France, Moldova, Romania, and Ireland, in addition to the EU elections in June 2024.50 Nonpublic documents produced to the Committee pursuant to subpoena demonstrate how the European Commission regularly pressured platforms ahead of EU Member State national elections in order to disadvantage conservative or populist political parties.

(...)

The 2023 Slovak election is one key example. TikTok’s internal content moderation guides show that TikTok censored the following "hate speech" while facing European censorship pressure:

  • "There are only two genders";
  • "Children cannot be trans";
  • "We need to stop the sexualization of young people/children";
  • "I think that LGBTI ideology, gender ideology, transgender ideology are a big threat to Slovakia, just like corruption"; and
  • "Targeted misgendering."

Other than that, you have national laws like the Selbstbestimmungsgesetz or Ley Trans.

If you want to paint the EU as more sane than the US on the trans issue, you'd have to point to the medical establishment. The legal establishment might as well have been directly transferred from the libbiest gender-studies departament in the US.

Now, some might say that just because an official government body invited some companies to have a friendly conversation about moderating their platforms, doesn't mean any pressure is actually being put on them, but the problem with that theory is that the companies themselves weren't under that impression.

One reason tech companies might form that impression is because regulatory bodies seem to be developing a habit of giving off that impression even when without exercising formal power. Recently, in eSafety Commissioner v Baumgarten, the Australian eSafety Commissioner had been revealed to be sending "informal requests" to X using X's legal requests portal, and then turning around and claiming to the Administrative Review Tribunal that the decisions were not reviewable because they weren't exercising formal powers granted to the Commissioner.

https://www.auspublaw.org/home/2026/3/the-government-is-not-the-same-as-us-esafety-commissioner-v-baumgarten-2026-fcafc-12-gwdak

The Baumgarten case reveals that the Commission has gone beyond its statutory mandate by working to limit online speech that it considers harmful or otherwise problematic, but that falls below the thresholds set in the statute. Ms Baumgarten posted a video on X which was critical of a Melbourne primary school teacher for organising a ‘Queer Club’ for students. The post named the teacher, but did not identify any children. The eSafety Commission received a complaint about the post. The complaint was considered by Samantha Caruana, an official within the eSafety Commission, who had no delegated authority to compel social media services to remove posts. Ms Caruana concluded that the post probably did not amount to ‘cyber-abuse material’ for the purposes of s 7 of the Online Safety Act. Despite her conclusion, Ms Caruana filled in a form on X’s ‘Legal Requests Portal’ asking that the post be taken down. The eSafety Commission’s request referred to s 7 of the Online Safety Act as authority for the request.

Ms Baumgarten sought review of the eSafety Commission’s ‘decision’ to order the removal of her post in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (which was replaced by the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART) during the course of her case). Section 220 of the Online Safety Act provides for a right to seek merits review of the Commissioner’s decisions to issue removal notices. But the Commission argued that Ms Baumgarten had no right to challenge the decision in the Tribunal, because it had not made a removal decision under s 88. Rather, the Commission argued, it had simply made a request of X that it remove the post. Thus, the Commission argued, that there was no ‘decision’ for the Tribunal to review and it had no jurisdiction.

The Commissioner's argument was rejected by the ART and the appeal rejected by the Federal Court of Australia.

Cory Doctorow has lots of interesting arguments, and I really admire and support his crusade against IP and enshittification, but his views are very extreme and some of his ideas go too far.

I'd give a different issue: regardless of how good or bad his ideas are, they're clearly unrelated to the actual goals he's claiming to champion. Twitter and YouTube and Discord and almost every company of relevance here are not market leaders due to the strength of their intellectual property; it's trivial to implement one-off examples of their functionality, and building a decent many-to-many implementation is a small business, not a large one. Their strengths come from their scaling capabilities and, to a far greater extent, the absolutely massive network advantages. The division from LibreOffice or GIMP to MSOffice and Photoshop isn't a massive, deep moat of algorithmic design or CPU optimizations, but a shallow one of user interface and user training. Individual people can build cell phones. It's just only a rounding error of people wants that done, to fund it, or to use it once manufactured.

It might be more relevant for specialized software (operating systems, CAD work, simulation software), but notably none of these spaces are things Doctorow focuses on. He talks about iOS in the sense of jailbreaking iPhones, a matter where legal constraints have never been the primary limit. He never mentions Linux, and only mentions Microsoft to say they "bricked" the International Criminal Court's outlook server due to sanctions (real world: cut access to Karim Khan's e-mail account). The ICC's moving to openDesk (also not mentioned, wouldn't have been my first choice)... and having it run by B1 Systems GmbH, a contractor in Germany. A quick google estimates <150 IT staff; having tried OpenDesk, I'd expect <20 full-time staff equivalent for the ICC, mostly tech support.

That is not a moonshot. It's definitely not the moonshot Doctorow's theory would need.

The only place they might be relevant is AI models (hmmm), and then only to the point where there are closed-source, high-capability models that could be cloned and run from EU services. That's not coherent to Doctorow's whole view - "Because even though the AI can't do the 's job, an AI salesman can convince the 's boss to fire them and replace them with an AI that can't do their job", that's the text - but he's not pretending to be coherent so much as tell his readers what he needs to get his goals, so whatever.

((Presumably they only ignore the copyright requests Doctorow dislikes, not artist and writer intellectual property, but to be fair, it's not like anyone without a hundred million dollar business can get an inter_state_ copyright lawsuit, nevermind an international one.))

How's that supposed to work? Okay, the model leaks, quickly. That I can buy, I've been a proponent of the theory that 'the leak always gets through' even if it hasn't always applied in practice. The EU companies are able to clone the graphics cards or ASICs, probably. Can they make them? The current best fab is 18nm, and while they're planning to build a 2nm-ish plant, the current timeline is 2030 and also kinda a joke. Okay, well, over long enough the hardware and training costs get amortized, it's the landscape and inference cost. Is EU power going to be cheap? Regulatory compliance? Legal overhead?

What's the business plan, here? Be annoying?

Mistral makes local models (as opposed to locked-down cloud ones), so I want them to succeed. However, even with full EU backing, they'd be outcompeted by OpenAI and Anthropic, who can release local models themselves, making all their effort and work seem wasted

Mistral's been suffering for a while. It had some sizable influence in low-parameter models a year ago - and to an extent, still has: Cydonia is a Mistral-3.1-24B-derived model that's popular for roleplay, even if it introduces a lot of world consistency issues as context scale - but it's ranged from middling to actively bad since.

One complication here is that there are clear spaces that OpenAI and Anthropic are unlikely to want to explore, that would leave a niche for not-quite-frontier models that don't excel at things like coding but do focus well on other career spaces ... but that is likely to be more regulated in the EU, in ways that impact the ability of providers to provide decent models. And that's particularly overt for Mistral: one of the suspected causes for (some of the many) problems in Mistral 4 was the repeated 'safety' failures in Mistral3 variants. Ideally, they'd be able to avoid regulatory failures without harming core capabilities, but so far the degree models seem to suffer from overcorrection correlates pretty heavily with regulatory exposure.

(Caveat: they could have also just found some local minima. Things are moving so fast in these spaces that they could well turn around quick.)

I happen to have experience in this space, and my tl;dr take is very simple: EU tech regulation is, historically, productive when and only when it focuses on creating a general standard which big tech companies are required to meet, then leaves the technical details up to the companies. DMA-mandated interoperability for messaging apps is a good example. Anything more granular you can trust them to be too out-of-touch and slow-moving to get right, and that's how you end up with cookie popups everywhere.

On your opinion survey:

  • Agree bans, fines intended to crush companies, etc. on US tech companies are stupid, and the US should treat them as a geopolitically hostile act (a real act, not like shitposting about Greenland). But European commentators and even policymakers these days are not as rational as they used to be; there's a lot of feelings of fear and inferiority that manifest as aggression.
  • What would happen if the US, in return, decided to stop protecting European IP? Oh no, how horrible, guess we gotta escalate further, maybe we can get Japan in somewhere on the escalation ladder? Seriously, not realistic but I agree we can move towards more lenient IP enforcement.
  • On European innovation, there's really nothing stopping French dirigisme from building an AI juggernaut like they built Airbus - except choking regulation, capital draining off into foreign markets and the welfare state, and a decline in high-capacity population. I have no doubt De Gaulle would be building a European hyperscaler right now if he were still in charge. Sadly...
  • EU labour laws are part of the picture but more relevant to the non-tech sectors. General compliance burden and access to capital (partially downstream from regulation) are bigger problems. But like the IP point it's a one-step-at-a-time thing even if the EU could fundamentally change its governing culture in a deregulatory direction.

Here's what will happen in Europe.

A) A study will be commissioned for ten million dollars, providing a steady sinecure for several credentialed experts, that will produce a tidy report four years too late to be timely, that has the right decisions, however...

B) Several start-ups blossom like mushrooms around the recommendations, but lacking the capital to grow and burdened by EU employment law, decamp to the United States.

C) Lacking any viable local company, it is given to a national champion alongside several billion dollars to produce a result ten years too late and too small to be of any significance.

D) The French and the Germans fight over workshare and capital of said pointless endeavor, turning it into a boondoogle as every politically connected company turns up for a feed at the trough, and it dies a miserable, pointless death.

Repeat, ad nauseam.

Chat Control 2.0 failed: "Chat Control" was a controversial bill that allowed scanning private data of EU citizens to catch child predators and CSAM distributors. Chat Control 2.0 would've been more invasive than the existing one (requiring client-side scanning), but was rejected while the old one expired.

Good riddance.

My heuristic is that any time the state whines about CSAM, or generally one of the horsemen of the infocalypse, treat it as a power grab by the police wanting more rights to snoop on citizens. Once you let them snoop, they will find other areas of concern which are also very terrible and before you know it, you have been frog-boiled into letting them search your phones for copyright violations.

The largest problem with CSAM is people paying for it, because it creates an incentive to produce more, which involves the sexual abuse of kids. The good news (at least when this product is concerned) here is that most people are not skilled enough to hide financial transactions. "So you just create a bunch of wallets and then use mixers to move funds from a wallet linked to you to a wallet not linked to you" is not something most people will understand.

The second, IMHO much smaller problem is people making CSAM available for members of the public. It is obviously bad for the victims, and arguably it may create customers willing to pay or more speculatively drives consumers to sexual abuse. But even here you do not need to scan people's private messages. After all, definitionally any such group has an inlet, which means that you can just have cops infiltrate it. And once you are in their chat groups, you can trivially track down the people behind it through their phone numbers. Well, at least for mainstream chat apps which the chat control would target, but anyone tech savvy enough to use tor will also be tech savvy enough to thwart client side scanning.

What remains would be closed groups, who personally know and trust each other, and use encrypted chat apps to exchange CSAM. This seems a pretty minor problem, to be honest. If you institute client side scanning, they can just switch to trading boxes full of VHS tapes. Any car on the Autobahn could have such a box in it! Does this mean we should install xray scanners to search through all the cars?

Obviously not. There are always tradeoffs between effectively enforcing laws and the costs of doing so, both monetarily and to civil liberty. CSAM as a whole, and the cases which could only be detected with client side scanning in particular does not seem like a big deal, e.g. compared to sexual abuse of children more generally. I mean, it is good that it is illegal and we will punish you if we catch you, but the average kid getting sexually abused is not getting abused because their guardian wants to make a quick buck selling CSAM.

But the political reality is that there are no quick fixes for actual sexual abuse. It is just not politically feasible to put any child under 24-7 video surveillance (and in fact that would probably mess up kids too). The relevant tradeoff is how much you want to treat any father, teacher or sports coach as a possible child molester. But you can't win any votes by moving that tradeoff.

So instead you focus on the creeps watching CSAM, and the technology they use. 80% of the voters don't understand tech, and everyone hates CSAM, so that is a winning strategy.

End-to-end encryption is a technical fix which was widely rolled out when it became apparent to the tech community that the state will snoop on traffic to the maximum extend technically feasible. Similar to how the US founders wanted the population armed so there was a failsafe if the government turned bad, really. Obviously there is some push against E2E, and this is just part of that.

As a side notice, I find it especially ironic that the so-called Christian parties (e.g. CDU in Germany) are always championing these anti-tech measures. Half of them are in a church which a mere generation ago was systematically enabling priests to sexually abuse kids. You know, actual children, most of whom were likely traumatized. And now they want to tell us that if there is some creep who is jerking off to nude pictures of five-year-olds, that is a civilizational emergency and we need to bug everyone's phones to stop it.

The largest problem with CSAM is people paying for it, because it creates an incentive to produce more, which involves the sexual abuse of kids. The good news (at least when this product is concerned) here is that most people are not skilled enough to hide financial transactions. "So you just create a bunch of wallets and then use mixers to move funds from a wallet linked to you to a wallet not linked to you" is not something most people will understand.

As of 1999, most people who downloaded paid kiddieporn online knew perfectly how to hide financial transactions - they used stolen credit cards. Operation Avalanche in the US found 35,000 credit card numbers and only made 100 arrests and various foreign offshoots including Operation Ore in the UK became fiascos because they arrested the legitimate owners of the stolen credit cards.

People who knowingly download paid kiddieporn know that they are committing a crime that society (rightly or wrongly) takes more seriously than small-time financial crime and that the material they are looking for is on a darker part of the dark web than advice on how to obfuscate financial transactions.

As a side notice, I find it especially ironic that the so-called Christian parties (e.g. CDU in Germany) are always championing these anti-tech measures. Half of them are in a church which a mere generation ago was systematically enabling priests to sexually abuse kids.

A quibble, but the Christian element of the German CDU is predominantly Protestant, and I am not aware of a large child abuse scandal in the German Lutheran Church. Catholic Bavaria has a different Christian Democratic party (the CSU) which is in near-permanent coalition with the CSU at the federal level, and obviously is guilty-by-association in the way you suggest.

And now they want to tell us that if there is some creep who is jerking off to nude pictures of five-year-olds, that is a civilizational emergency and we need to bug everyone's phones to stop it.

This is just general man-hating; the women who vote for those parties want the power to ban all men jerking off to nude pictures of women (so that men can be maximally exploited by women) and 5 year olds are just the motte of that argument. Traditionalists (or more loosely, 'Christian conservatives') and progressives are in agreement that this is a thing that should happen and the language differences between the two groups are just bikeshedding.

Half of them are in a church which a mere generation ago was systematically enabling priests to sexually abuse kids.

And their opponents are progressives, who are... also systematically enabling priests to sexually abuse kids, but it's totally different this time because instead of men in churches with an abusive hand it's women in schools with an abusive mouth.

Also there's lots of sexual abuse of children by teachers. Supposedly far more than the total amount of abuse by religious figures. But more kids go to school than church.

far more than the total amount of abuse by religious figures.

Teachers are religious figures. The Christian Right was correct when they made this observation back when they were a relevant political force, but they also believed that was in large part a good thing and were as such unwilling to actually do anything about it.

Which is in part why they got away with it even when the gender balance was closer to 50/50 than it is today, and now that it's shifted further into a majority-female profession, that gender's sexual abuse is harder to prosecute because [for the 50% of the population that doesn't benefit from being able to do it], a significant portion of men don't believe it's a coherent concept, and even if they do, they think that the only way it happens is not actually destructive (re: South_Park_Nice.jpg).

Yet, if you believe the statistics that show this population 'abuses' students in the male mode at a far higher rate than men did at their peak, it's likely that the female mode of sexual abuse occurs at an even higher rate than that.

Monero is easy to use and does not require mixing funds. On the other hand, crypto in general has a lot of friction (even getting Kiwi Farmers to donate crypto is like pulling teeth). On the gripping hand, a determined enough pedophile will probably bypass all the friction he possibly can.

I think the biggest point here is that cops can (and should) take down CSAM groups the old-fashioned way: By doing intelligence work to infiltrate, investigate, identify, and then arrest the pedophiles. It's a far better approach than invading everybody's privacy. The only problem is that law enforcement now have to do actual police work rather than sit on their asses and get everybody's data handed to them for free.

Doctorow's use of CC-BY-SA-NC licenses for his novels as opposed to the more widespread CC-BY-SA that e.g., Wikipedia uses doesn't sit right with me. The NC (non-commercial) in general strikes me as being like the Trotskyist provision of the creative-common/open-source world. "It's not enough that people can share my contents for free. They must also not be allowed to profit off it!"

Or maybe I'm the Trotskyist for thinking CC-BY-SA-NC isn't open enough. (But really, NC doesn't really have an analogue in the code-licensing world, and for good reason: way too ambiguous.)

Alright, AI bros, follow-up from last week. I was able to secure access to Claude Opus 4.6 at my job, and I gave it the same prompt that I had given to Sonnet. It overlooked the authentication part of the HTTP client library completely this time in what it generated. In a follow-up I asked it to extract out the common logic for the authentication portions specifically. It didn't do that, instead it generated a class with two helper methods.

The first helper method was just a thin wrapper around System.Text.Json for deserializing the response. There's an optional flag to pass in for when case insensitive deserialization is needed, and nothing else.

The second helper method was something for actually making the HTTP calls. The strangest part with this one is that it has two delegates as parameters, one for deserializing successful responses, the other for handling (but not deserializing) error responses. It didn't do anything to split out handling of the 2 different ways to authenticate at all.

The issues with what was generated (for both the API client as a whole, and for the authentication part of the code specifically) are numerous, here are a small handful that I identified:

  1. It assumes that an HTTP 200 code is the only successful response code, even though some endpoints return 202, 207, and more.

  2. It assumes that all endpoints return plaintext or JSON content, even though several return binary data, CSV data, etc.

  3. It didn't do null checking in several places. I assume it was mostly trained on C# code that either didn't do null checks correctly, and/or on code that doesn't use the nullable reference type feature that was added in C# 8 (back in 2019). Regardless, the null checks are missing/wrong regardless of whether nullable reference types are enabled or disabled. Also it always checks nulls with == or != null. This works 99% of the time, but best practice is to use "is null" and "is not null" for the rare cases where the equality operator is overloaded. Once again, I assume this is because most of the training data uses == and !=.

  4. It doesn't handle url query parameters (nor path parameters), it assumes everything is going to use a JSON body for the request.

  5. It uses the wrong logging templates for several of the logging calls. For example, the logs for an error response use the log template for logging the requests that are sent. Even more troubling is that it removed all the logic for stripping user secrets out of these logs.

There are quite a few more issues, but overall my experience with Opus was even worse than my experience with Sonnet, if anything. AI bros still in shambles. I definitely have zero fears that AI will replace me, though I'm still definitely fearful that retarded C-suite execs will think it can replace me.

My post from last week about using Claude Sonnet: https://www.themotte.org/post/3654/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/426666?context=8#context

Edit: Just saw a very relevant post over on Orange Reddit about this very topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660925

I listened to the recent Odd Lots episode with Gina Raimondo (Biden's Secretary of Commerce) and I would echo the sentiment here:

Most Americans when they hear AI, they get afraid, right? The vast, vast majority of Americans, "AI = anxiety", "I am going to lose my job". I get that, you know, people are scared. I think it would be a huge mistake to like retard our AI progress with overregulation. [We] just talked about China. I want to win the AI race, I want America to lead the AI world. And I think when we get to the fifth or sixth inning of this AI revolution, whatever you want to call it, I firmly believe there will be more jobs. I do. I think that there will be new industries, new companies, new products and services. I'm an optimist. [That being said,] I am pretty worried about getting from the first inning to that inning.

I am not dismissive of AI because it made me more productive but I also believe that software engineers will be around.

I'm surprised (as a mostly non-user for now) at the complaints that engineering performance has degraded over months. Is this rapidly-improving expectations? Honeymoon phase wearing off? AI vendors cranking the screws to reduce costs and looking for pennies? I thought the models were difficult to train and largely static, so I didn't think that sort of scaling was trivially on the table.

Mostly vendors cranking the screw to squeeze more cash out of us. Worst thing is when providers silently update or change the quantization of the model without making it known. Local Models don't have this problem people (I say this as someone who's managed to get Qwen 3.5 397b-a17b running locally on a server I rented).

Somewhere here is a good reaction meme joke about AI doomers having to cope with AGI dumbing itself down to maximize token usage ($$$), not paperclips.

Not saying it's happening, but it'd be ironic.

I think it's largely AI vendors cranking the screws.

On the other hand, Anthropic can't even manage two nines of uptime, so it may just be outright incompetence on their part. Being a PhD in machine learning does not make you and expert at SRE, and the models aren't quite there yet either.

Is this rapidly-improving expectations?

Yes

Honeymoon phase wearing off?

Yes + its fun building the first part of slop-software (slopware?). The last 20% of finalization/polish is much less fun. I have gone from "holy shit AI software development is so neat" to "AI software development is neat but I'm getting really sick of making X specific and complicated thing I have no business building work" (I'm so close though).

AI vendors cranking the screws to reduce costs and looking for pennies?

Yes, this is getting worse too.

I thought the models were difficult to train and largely static, so I didn't think that sort of scaling was trivially on the table.

That's why they're all spending Billions

Yeah, personally, I've never bought into the AI hype at all. Everything I've ever tried to use it for, it promptly shits the bed on, so I just dismiss it as worthless.

But even in an alternate universe where I'm the crazy one and everyone else is sane, there are severe problems with trusting this stuff: first, you're de facto ceding control over your technical infrastructure to a third party (run by exactly the sort of people who say stuff like "idk, they trust me. dumb fucks"). Yes, yes, you're supposed to religiously check the output before committing, not let it execute unsafe commands in a privileged environment, yada yada. I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell ya. Second, there is existing precedent for tech services being intentionally made worse to increase usage: for example, Google intentionally made Google search worse by doing things like disabling spell check so that users would have to search multiple times to find the result they were looking for, thus "increasing usage" (yes, this is from an actual court document lol). As OP and plenty of other smart people have noted, there is is a trivially obvious incentive and mechanism for this to be done with LLM coding agents. Just make the agent worse so people have to use more tokens!

If they're going to enshittify the AIs, it'll have to happen after one company gets sufficient market dominance that swapping to a different one isn't trivial.

And we're not at that point yet. If anything, the competition is at its fiercest right now. People seem to be willing to drop one product for another if they notice any tiny loss of performance.

I've mostly stuck it out with GPT so far, but I can't see any way they could lock me in hard enough that I wouldn't leave if it was obvious their model was consistently 10% 'stupider' than the alternatives.

If they're going to enshittify the AIs, it'll have to happen after one company gets sufficient market dominance that swapping to a different one isn't trivial.

Microsoft already had Copilot start inserting ads into pull requests without consent a week or two ago, I think that counts as enshittification.

This AI bro vs (idk what to call the opposition) schism on this site is very funny

I feel like both sides are talking passed each other in many ways, and also have no interest in bridging the epistemic gaps.

About me

I'm firmly in the "AI bro" camp I guess. I do not code, nor do I know how to do code aside from simple programming 101 type stuff, which is all I need(ed) to make VBA scripts work in excel. I will never copy/paste another line of Stack Overflow VBA to jank together a macro again, and that makes me very happy.

Adoption is slow, but it's gradually happening at my employer $MULTI_NATIONAL_FINANCE_CO. It is very clear to me that I will see (and already have seen) large productivity gains, especially as agent scaffolds are made for things other than coding.

LLMs are both extremely powerful and very jagged. I think a huge amount of their "jaggedness" is due to their nature as LLMs, and are very unlikely to get to ASI/some versions of AGI*. My best guess is they'll be as disruptive as the ~computer (i.e. the information age) was from 19XX-now, perhaps slightly smaller given "AI impact on human civilization" is kind of a subset of "computer impact on human civilization".

*Notwithstanding some kind of paradigm change in algorithm/AI approach. Which is always possible, but we're pretty clearly on the LLM-tech tree path for the next bit.

Vague Predictions

I am sure many white collar jobs will disappear entirely, many will be insulated for any number of reasons (ranging from genuine limits to retarded bureaucracy and everything in between) and will remain unchanged for a while, and some, like mine, will keep their core identity but day to day tasks will shift a lot and who knows what happens to employment (too many factors to guess per job).

Coding

It is clearly revolutionizing coding. This cannot be denied. GitHub commits are now going parabolic, so people are "building things". Much of which is slop. I am one of those people, I now have a small but growing fleet of personal tools. I'm sure they are coded awfully, I've never looked and wouldn't understand if I did. I don't care, they work for me.

There are much more accomplished coders on twitter, etc, who are also reporting massive changes to their lives. Many of them are incentivized to say such things and over exaggerate, but I doubt it's a massive coordinated lie or mass delusion. So there is truth there.

The more sensible ones will even agree that AI code is on average mediocre to bad, and AI can't do high precision high quality specialized code like a cracked human can. AI will even take your amazing high precision high quality specialized code and slop it if you're not careful. Many of them, like Karpathy, have just given up and accepted the slop as a price of doing business. Because they're accomplishing what they want with the code too. It works.

It's assumed that AI performance will improve massively from where it is today. It has so far, it's a pretty safe assumption right now. It's rumored that the new Claude model beat expectations on performance vs scaling laws. AI model hype is always a large % bullshit, but we'll find out the real capabilities soon, and no matter what they will be better than they are now.

I don't think LLMs are going to bring us the ASI digital god of Sam's wet dreams/nightmares. I think they are going to profoundly change our service economies regardless.

Your situation

I don't know your codebase or the thing you're getting it to do. I don't know anything about HTTP.

I seriously doubt you're trying to set the AI up for success at all. I can't code and I'm probably using more AI coding best practices than you are, and all my git commits are titled "lol".

It's also very possible that it's not worth the time to set up AI "properly" to fix this. There's a very real possibility it's much faster, if more tedious, to just do it yourself. But this is one task. N=1. There are things AI can do for you today, that's a guarantee.

The bubble

The usual retort of "skill issue" is "well if I have to set it up and use best practices then AI is a bubble". I think that's a strawman, because I am not stuck in a reflexive yes/no binary where if you like AI you can't also think it's a bubble. It could be a bubble, I don't know (or care). It's incredibly easy for an asset to be over-financed and you never know if you've done enough capex until you do too much (at any scale). What I care about is the AI tools I can access which are excellent and also flawed.

Maybe AI needs to be that good out of the box to justify the trillions in capex. It probably does. But does that matter here? Neither you nor I control capex spend or can predict how long the scaling laws will hold for.

I don't care if AI is a bubble - we'll all find out and predictions of this scale/magnitude are essentially worthless. If you have alpha and guess right, all power to you, but the bubble conversational branch strikes me as a fool's errand. And it's irrelevant to "can LLMs do things for you?".

Closing thoughts

We have LLMs here right now that are massively changing basically any digital task you point them at. It's not easy, and it doesn't work everywhere, but it's insane when it does.

It's cognitively exhausting. It's a new way of thinking + every time new models/tools come out you change many things you were previously doing. So many assumptions and bottlenecks change. It's genuinely not easy or obvious always how to implement it. We are learning this in real time as a culture.

It's so exciting, and I hope to soon quit my job at $MULTI_NATIONAL_FINANCE_CO to capture more of the value of my labor, which is about to increase a lot (probably lmao, could also go to 0).

If you want to refuse or deny the power of these tools you can. You can set about finding examples of them sucking to point and laugh. But you're letting your bias blind you, and leaving a lot of value on the table. You can tell your computer to do stuff and it can now, it's awesome.

Also noting that in your HN link the inventor of Claude Code is asking ppl for feedback/providing explanations live as I type this.

I've never looked and wouldn't understand if I did. I don't care, they work for me.

This might be a huge part of the divide between doubters and believers.

The code coming back might be ugly, buggy, insecure, and probably completely impossible to scale.

But if it works, how much does the 'average' user care?

Yet those who care for the quality of the code or product it might grate when they look and see the inelegance of the solutions and the lack of foresight.

Apply this to the AI art debate, too. Sure a trained eye will notice deficiencies and shortfalls. But the average user notices that they can produce a logo or a cute cartoon portrait in 15 seconds for pennies.

Me, I'm now basically using the LLMs to do final review on any work I don't feel 100% competent on, since its attention to detail is now impeccable and of course it never gets tired or complains.

Sometimes it hits some nitpicks I genuinely find stupid because in actual practice its an irrelevant detail for the actual outcome of the matter. But it catches things, so it almost feels like it'd be malpractice to not use the tool.

Anyway, its broke through to normies, AI agents are going to be huge among small busineses, I see people who are otherwise technologically inept with Grok AND ChatGPT on their phones lock screens. They are already relying on this tech to a degree that might startle you. Genie ain't going back in the bottle.

Get psychologically (and financially) prepared to adapt, that's the only advice that I can truly offer right now.

It's so exciting, and I hope to soon quit my job at $MULTI_NATIONAL_FINANCE_CO to capture more of the value of my labor, which is about to increase a lot (probably lmao, could also go to 0).

Love this uncertainty. On the one hand, I could 10x my productivity and cut my rates by half and still be making crazy money for myself. Seriously, the number of basic and intermediate tasks that GPT can do for me is freeing up time to engage with the higher leverage tasks that I enjoy and get paid the most for.

But if it gets just a little better then my role as an expert intermediary becomes redundant. I myself become a wrapper for the LLM, I'm just giving the stamp of approval to outputs that are already 99% perfect, and getting paid to eat the blame if something does go wrong 1% of the time. And competition with other humans in this role will drive my marginal profit down to pennies.

I hate this uncertainty.

The code coming back might be ugly, buggy, insecure, and probably completely impossible to scale.

But if it works, how much does the 'average' user care?

In my experience the average user starts to care right around the same time that heir credit card number and mother's maiden name end up for sale to the highest bidder.

I don't think the normies are THAT far along that they'd trust it with their financial information.

But not too far out, either.

They might trust a Vibe-coded website, though.

As I understand it any website taking customers' financial information will usually use a third party's software rather than roll their own.

If Paypal et al. are vibe coding without regard to security we are in for some pain.

Block is vibe coding now

No one is going to vibe code their own SAAS to replace Salesforce et al

Salesforce and other huge boys with giant moats will enjoy higher labor efficiency. May experience serious pain due to higher competition > margin pressure but hard to predict.

Mid-cap software will knife fight each other over margins as competitors grow like weeds.

Small-cap/VC/PE idek lol, really excited to watch this space.

I'm super curious to see what happens when a given VC can invest in 5x as many startups per unit of $capital. I assume startups will scale faster. Do VCs stretch themselves thin with more companies in a portfolio? Do funds get bigger or smaller? Are there more or less actual VCs? Is it easier or harder to get a VC fund going?

That last bit is the most interesting part to me.

Right now, my understanding is that VC is extremely hard to get because a handful of AI darlings have sucked all the air out of the room. If they IPO soon, VCs should theoretically have freed up capital to deploy as the OpenAIs/Anthropics of the world start to show a return.

If I believe the argument, then it should result in a much larger number of smaller investments, since labor is ostensibly the biggest cost of software startups and that cost should plummet.

One of my favorite parts of this forum is moments like this, when someone puts my thoughts into words better than I could. I agree with every word.

I have the exact same view on AI art. I have quite low skills in "artistic taste", it's never I skill I've been good at or sought to develop much (low reward per n time vs things I like more). But now I can get to make funny images and concept art and express ideas in mediums that were previously locked to me. What fun! Yet there's people crying and screaming on the internet because like game developers are using AI agents to help them make games faster+better. I'm just excited for the golden age of AI gameslop. Good dev studios are going to be absolutely cooking.

I myself become a wrapper for the LLM, I'm just giving the stamp of approval to outputs that are already 99% perfect, and getting paid to eat the blame if something does go a wrong 1% of the time. And competition with other humans in this role will drive my marginal profit down to pennies.

I'm hoping this window of time lasts a while. I'm adjacent to the legal world and they're going to use every institution they wield (many!) to keep themselves in this state for as long as they can.

I mean, there's no way that the legal profession doesn't outlaw AI use in law the moment it becomes a threat to their jobs, right? Lots of law makers are lawyers, and I don't think they are above using the levers of power to make sure their profession can't be replaced.

I'm not sure how they'll catch attorneys who are careful about the end products they're filing.

You might see attorneys staying suspiciously effective despite juggling large caseloads, making surprisingly adept legal arguments in their briefs while their performance at a live hearing is lacklustre.

But yeah it'll be banned from any client or public-facing roles to large extents.

AI use by attorneys will get lots of attention for job market and ethics reasons, but the courts are 100% unprepared for the day when pro se litigants start filing piles of plausible-sounding briefs in their traffic ticket/misdemeanor/family court cases.

They're already doing it in low-stakes Civil cases.

Ask me how I know.

The UK NIMBY community was one of the first groups to take up legal AI with Objector. Every significant planning application now receives multiple lengthy AI-generated objections stating every plausible legally valid reason for rejecting it.

More comments

Like @faceh, I too have had the displeasure of witnessing a pro se litigant attempt to argue an AI slop motion in front of a judge. A 300+ paragraph AI slop motion. It was a post-trial motion. And I heard quite a bit of it because all the litigant could do was read it verbatim. After 20 minutes, I still had no idea what the case was even about, because he evidently didn't know that lawyers have to argue the facts of the case. After it became unbearable, I realized that since a TV show was filming in one of the courtrooms a friend of mine from high school who works in the industry might be there (I run into the guy once every few years), and even if he wasn't it would give me something to do while I waited for my case to be called. Sure enough, I saw him as soon as I left the courtroom and caught up with him for about a half hour. When I came back, the guy was still reading from his brief, and the judge told him he wasn't going to listen to the whole thing and cut the guy off while he gave the defense a chance to argue. It was only then that I was able to glean that he had apparently sued Hertz rental truck for being injured on their property, and that AI evidently didn't tell him that his mother was not qualified to act as a medical witness, or prepare a proper defense to their motion in limine that would allow her to testify as a damage witness. When the judge went back to the guy for his response he just continued reading from his brief.

Honestly, I think AI actually makes things worse for pro se litigants because at least before, judges were willing to cut them some slack and argue the facts of their case in a more informal way. Their deficit was that they didn't understand the law well enough to argue the facts effectively. Now they can generate pages upon pages of legalese they don't understand but think is the magic bullet that separates them from the lawyers and that they'll be able to wow the judge with their mad legal skillz. All the judge is going to do is smile politely during their argument and rule against them, because they haven't said anything.

Yeah, the 'deference' judges give to pro se litigants (if they are clearly unable to afford attorneys, that is) is going to backfire as it becomes more common for them to use AI for drafting basic stuff, and thus the volume of filings increases but the work of actually parsing and applying it still falls on the Judge and opposing counsel. Who will, 'ironically,' probably start using AI assistance to keep up.

The case I'm dealing with, thankfully, is a straightforward land use/partition action and the pro se party is otherwise very cooperative, but you can tell that the stuff they're filing is AI-assisted because the few times I've talked to them directly they have been unable to do anything but re-articulate their general position, and don't quite understand the processes they've chosen to invoke.

I'd hope the AIs would advise AGAINST 300 paragraph briefs, that's for sure.

Here's what I think about: I've seen a pro se defendant reduce a 30-year prosecutor to tears of rage with non-stop well-written motions because the prosecutor had to respond to every single one. The defendant had been through the system a number of times and had learned enough from his trips to be able to write decent motions. He ended up getting a plea on a felony case that the prosecutor had previously swore would never happen (guy had a ton of priors, so still prison, but 1/10th of his risk after trial).

The number of defendants like that is vanishingly small. He was writing those motions from in-custody, which made it all the more impressive. The skill required to do that is very rare.

Once the AI motions get good enough, every out of custody defendant can be that guy. Perhaps the in-custody ones once they figure out a way (probably via family or friends or whatever) to access an AI outside the jail. The system is not prepared for every traffic case, misdemeanor, and felony to turn into a barrage of plausible-sounding motions.

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That's interesting.

I have tolerable art skills, but low intrinsic motivation. Sometimes I get over the hurdle of deciding what to paint, and then I do actually paint it, but more often I get stuck at "what could I possibly do with another painting of a flower? Where will I store it? I already have too many photos even, and I don't have to physically store them" and don't paint it.

I spend a lot of time talking to software developers and adjacent people, and am entirely unable to imagine what kind of thing I would program, if I had a program creating ginn. There are some apps (ugh, terrible word, so tired of it) that I have that want fewer of. Why did I have to download an app to get a concert ticket? I don't think it's just because I'm old, I'm not all that old. My millennial friends are often talking about how much they dislike screens, and want less of them, and less things on them, and how there's quite too much digital product already, even for free.

Yeah.

I pretty much want an 'everything app' that gets me through my daily life without having to constantly stay logged in, updated, and, god help me, subscribed to dozens of different services to interact with businesses.

The AI agents are sort of promising to become that.

The idea that every single person can deploy a bespoke app which other people can then download and use for [minor convenience] terrifies me in a certain sense.

Especially when these apps start to feel like they're just there to do rent-seeking by standing between you and the things you want, demanding payment to even get to see the options. Yes, why do I need an app to buy concert tickets? This deal was supposed to be between me and the venue and artist. Why do I need to download an app to pay for a parking space? Why do I need an app to to track calories and a DIFFERENT app to track workouts? Why do I need 6 different communications apps to stay in touch with friends? WHY DOES MY BLENDER NEED AN APP?

And yeah, in some cases I get why there are issues solved by having the app in place. I'm just saying the sum total is that I end up with 100 apps on my phone and I have to use 10-20 of them on the daily and my monkey brain isn't designed for this shit.

I hate this uncertainty.

I've always been an anxious person, worried for the future, etc. I've basically given up with AI, the world has gotten so ridiculous it's just funny.

I have no control, everything is going to change. Everything has changed a lot already in my lifetime. I'm just gonna ride it out, I had my friends over for a BBQ last night. Trying to do more of that this year.

hell yeah brother.

The thing about singularity-like situations, reliable prediction becomes impossible. Although technically I don't have to predict with real accuracy, just better than 90+% of the population. Beat the masses to do alright, provided we aren't all killed. You can fret about this, or you can let go and focus in on the tiny parcel of territory in the vastness of probability-space that you have any influence over.

In my most primal moments, I sometimes think I should literally just locate the most physically enticing female I can attract (and compromise on everything else because what else matters if AGI hits?), liquidate most of my assets except like $100k kept in the S&P, and shack up in my house to have gratuitous amounts of sex, get all my groceries delivered, and just fuck around with AI art generators and see if I can make a bit of money off them before whatever comes next washes over us.

But man, it turns out somebody still has to do the hard work of keeping civilization turning so we can keep the lights on until we can finish the silicon god (or the false idol). Those data centers and nuclear plants won't build themselves. Yet.

I despise people who do that stupid "permanent underclass" posting, specifically to drive anxiety without any actionable outlet.

I had my friends over for a BBQ last night. Trying to do more of that this year.

Strong recommend. I've focused on keeping the friendships I have as strong as possible. Say "yes" to more social invites than you used to. As long as the activities don't kill you before we reach utopia, why spend this exciting time hunched over a desk or lying in bed doomscrolling?

But man, it turns out somebody still has to do the hard work of keeping civilization turning so we can keep the lights on until we can finish the silicon god (or the false idol). Those data centers and nuclear plants won't build themselves. Yet.

I have to admit, I have no idea how society is still supporting itself right now. Almost everyone I know is intentionally not working, including myself (got burned out and retired 6 months ago). When I can make crazy amounts of money in tech, then sit back for the rest of my life and have people deliver DoorDash meals to me ... well, who's doing the actual work holding everything up? Some dedicated cadre of 10x engineers?

Sure wish I had the social skills to implement your gratuitous-sex suggestion, though. Not that I think we're in a true singularity - I expect the world to look pretty different in 10 years, but not an unrecognizable ASI dys/utopia. So maybe put the heroin away for now...

Almost everyone I know is intentionally not working, including myself (got burned out and retired 6 months ago).

Its hard to tell for sure, but everyone I know is now working harder than before to keep things at baseline. Like, longer hours, or multiple jobs, and still falling behind.

And I'm talking almost all industries. Actuary buddy, senior pharmacist buddy, construction foreman buddy, IT buddies, and all my friends who are even tangentially connected to the medical field.

People in my circle seem to have less free time. It fits with the apparent stats that show more people dropping out of the labor force, the increase in people drawing on welfare/disability programs, and, of course, the silver wave of boomer retirees. They still consume services, demand products, but aren't on the productive side of the equation any longer.

Oh, and its possible deportations are causing issues too.

Most sit-down restaurants seem understaffed. Hospitals are teeming with patients. Any services you need to set appointments for are pushed out for weeks. Municipal governments seem to be struggling to perform their core functions in a timely manner. One symptom I've noticed is that most 24 hour Wal-Marts (and fast food places) went away after Covid and haven't come back. Every service I have availed myself of seems to be more expensive and less flexible/available due to sheer demand.

Just more work to be done, everywhere, than there are people available to do it, and yet tons and tons of people also consuming services, many of whom don't seem to be working, themselves?

who's doing the actual work holding everything up? Some dedicated cadre of 10x engineers?

The forbidden question.

I can't say for sure, I assume there's a group of people who just quietly and diligently do their work (competently) and collect their paycheck and go home and do whatever they do or raise their families without posting about it online and they are generally content.

The thing I do notice is that businesses that do keep things flowing and keep their prices reasonable often have some form of "slave labor" they draw on. Maybe its their kids, maybe its some barely-sober recovering druggie, or illegal immigrant, or a dude with clear mental deficiency who is nonetheless very functional once trained.

That is, people who are able to do basic labor day in and day out and aren't prone to demanding better pay, and may have some specific incapacity (maybe physical, maybe social) that makes them unlikely to quit.

That's not universal, I've seen the flip side, where an employer treats his people so well and compensates them generously enough that they're extraordinarily loyal and productive.

I have to admit, I have no idea how society is still supporting itself right now.

Something I wonder about almost daily.

Almost everyone I know is intentionally not working, including myself (got burned out and retired 6 months ago).... well, who's doing the actual work holding everything up?

Like a chump, I still have to go to work and accomplish things.

From "On Living in an Atomic Age" by C. S. Lewis:

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors — anaesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

Love Lewis' writing but this is a bit like "just stop being anxious lol."

It'd still be nice to know that somebody, in a position of authority, somewhere, had a plan to clip the risks.

Faith in God is a great salve for this purpose, but for many they are just raw-dogging cold reality and need something tangible to pin their hope to.

I don't have a dog in this fight, we are unfortunately being Strongly Encouraged to use AI at work.

The thing is, I think a lot of SMEs and domain experts don't realize just how bad things are even without AI. Software has been eating the world for ages and despite all efforts appears to be getting creakier, worse, and less secure either intentionally or otherwise. People can complain about AI art until the cows come home but let's not pretend 90-99.999% of art in the internet age isn't terrible either.

All the things AI can or can't do - I think, given the capabilities of current models, the best way to approach it is that it is a force or dakka multiplier for everything we produce. Quantity has a quality all its own; whether this means we make 1000x the software fuckups or not. Companies were already making incredibly poor and short-sighted decisions without AI, what they do with it will be a thing of terrible glory, with wailing and gnashing of teeth.

The thing is, I think a lot of SMEs and domain experts don't realize just how bad things are even without AI.

I do, I've written about it here (and elsewhere) even before AI became a big thing. My grand unifying theory of modern software development is roughly:

  1. There is greater demand for software than there are competent developers/engineers capable of delivering it

  2. There are "enough" incompetent software developers to meet the demand

  3. Companies hire more incompetent devs than competent because there are far more competent than incompetent

  4. Companies create retarded processes and systems like scrum and agile because carefully managing and babying your incompetent devs is the only way to eke out something functional

  5. The competent devs get sucked into these shitty processes (because they want/need jobs, and companies are terrible at identifying talent so they get lumped in with theretards), so even they generally aren't making quality software because of the bullshit processes etc. they have to deal with

Yeah, I was initially worried about the quality impact on software from AI, but then I thought about it for a little longer and realised most software is already awful so it probably won't get much worse.

I have no idea why Claude Code is working so badly for you. I work at a FAANG-level company, and a huge amount of our code is written by Claude. Garry Tan is in AI psychosis, but Claude Code is easily the biggest productivity unlock in CS since I started my career.

Few recommendations:

  • What thinking mode are you using ? Use at least high or max.
  • For the purpose of this test, give it all permissions and link it to an mcp like context7
    • This allows it to independently read documentation on your local and from remote sources
  • Basic, but update the app. This lapse happened to a very smart coworker of mine.
  • Use plan mode. It allows the model to build an intuition for the problem before it goes off on its own
  • If you want specific behaviors, then ask for that. Something like:
    • State and scrutinize your assumptions explicitly
    • Consider and invalidate counter factuals.
    • Utilize coding patterns that have already been established in the repo.
    • Ideally, ask it to go write readme.md files for core utility dirs in your repo, so it doesn't cold start
  • Pair it with a type checker / linter and add it as a post-model hook
    • In python land, ruff & based-pyright are the tools of choice.
    • I have used pre-defined open source linting rules, which allows the model to implement best-practice behaviors (eg: opinionated null checks) without human intervention.

I've noticed that the quality of the codebase plays a huge role in the model's ability to write effective code.

For ex:

It assumes that all endpoints return plaintext or JSON content, even though several return binary data, CSV data, etc.

Ideally, all endpoints will already be typed. The model should not have to guess the request-response types.

Unless there is a specific regression in Claude Code, I don't know why claude failed at your task. It should have worked.

Also, if you're looking for a model that prioritizes meticulousness, then I'd use codex. Codex has a tendency to autistically cover all of your bases, that benefits the sort of problem you're work with (again, Use in high or xhigh mode).

I have no idea why Claude Code is working so badly for you.

I'm not @ChickenOverlord, but I'm also seeing unimpressive results. Maybe we can get to the bottom of it.

I've tried Claude (via Claude Code), Gemini (via Gemini CLI), and GPT (via codex).

In all of them, I've used their equivalent of Claude.md/Agents.md to lay ground rules of how we expect the agent to behave. Multiple people have taken multiple shots at this.

We always use plan mode first.

Our documentation is markdown in the same repository, so that should be useful and accessible.

We're using Java, which is strongly typed and all our endpoints are annotated with additional openapi annotations that should provide even more metadata.

We're using a pretty basic bitch tech stack, but it's not spring boot. All three models regularly fight us on that fact.

We have a four levels of validation, each with their own entry point in the build scripts. These are described in a readme.md in the root of the project. The first is a linter. The second is unit tests and code coverage. The third is a single end to end test. The fourth is all end to end tests. We have instructed the models to use these validation targets to check their work.

Despite all this, we see common failure modes across all models we've tested.

  1. Bad assumptions about the tech stack. No, we do not use spring boot.
  2. A tendency to add more code, rather than fix code.
  3. An urge to "fix" "bad tests" that exist for very specific reasons. These specific reasons are usually covered with inline developer documentation as well.
  4. Confusion about what capabilities our version of java has available. Yeah, the pattern matching preview was cool. Stop trying to turn it on with experimental feature flags.
  5. Writing tests that don't actually test the thing it's changing.

I'm sure there are more, but these immediately come to mind. There are four of us trying to make these things work, and we all keep running into the same problems again and again. It's not just me - even people with dramatically different writing styles and thought processes are seeing the same thing. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, because a lot of people I know in real life are experiencing the same pain, but on the Internet it seems like I'm a huge outlier.

What's the disconnect here?

I'm sure there are more, but these immediately come to mind. There are four of us trying to make these things work, and we all keep running into the same problems again and again. It's not just me - even people with dramatically different writing styles and thought processes are seeing the same thing. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, because a lot of people I know in real life are experiencing the same pain, but on the Internet it seems like I'm a huge outlier.

My most competent co-worker, a Russian guy who got his start writing assembly back in the 80's, was the most enthusiastic about/interested in AI person that I knew. He was always trying out the latest models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. He was also running his own local LLMs and diffusion models locally. He even dropped $4-5k on a DGX Spark late last year. And even he seems to be getting disillusioned/losing interest in AI, he doesn't seem to think it's going to be able to achieve anything remotely close to the promises and hype. Though I will note that the push from our upper management to use AI hasn't pleased him much either, especially since the project we've been working on for the past year (modernizing a giant mess created by our Indian coworkers. They weren't using package management at all, they were literally emailing around zip files full of DLLs for years, I got pulled into 4 hour long calls to fix dependency conflict issues in prod once every 2 or 3 months) was very much not aided by AI, but management insisted we find a way to use AI on the project regardless.

What's the disconnect here?

It works a lot better if you bend to the AI and use a stack it likes. Why this specific Java stack?

Legacy concerns. The amount of custom code that has built up over the last 15 years is too big of a shift to deal with right now. It's on the backlog, but not anywhere near the top priority.

I hope that isn't a serious suggestion. A programming tool which only works if you use a particular framework is a shitty tool.

An imperfect tool, but not shitty. I know there might be an AI bubble right now in the market but the true value is still in the hundreds of millions of dollars at least. A lot can be done with the frameworks AI is good at. A shitty tool is something like Lisp or Haskell that you can hardly give away.

No dude. If a supposedly general-purpose tool is only capable of working with a specific framework, it is a bad tool. It might still be useful for someone who uses that framework, but it's a bad tool nonetheless.

If the true value of AI is only in the hundreds of millions, the industry is even more fucked than an AI skeptic like me could imagine.

This reduces the amount of prompting you need to do since more of its assumptions will automatically be correct, but is by no means required. I use AI quite successfully on very janky 30 year old SQR code -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQR if you don't know what SQR is, because neither did I before I got this current job.

I agree. When I try to one-shot or purely vibe code, I get junk, but my speed up is massive with no quality decline when I hand-hold it just a little bit. For example, I just added some names to a drop down list in a client somewhere. It formatted the names in the wrong order compared to the other ones. But because I am still testing everything it does, I caught it and it fixed it instantly. My speedup is still massive compared to the same task with no AI. I'm suspecting people who complain are just bad at managing an AI or a person and want to nitpick.

When I try to one-shot or purely vibe code, I get junk

That's fascinating. It's been my experience that the more I iterate, the worse it gets. It usually only works well when I one shot it.

Going from a one-shot to something more robust can be problematic because AI will often default to simple dirty solutions, which subsequent prompts double down on. If you plan on building something robust from the ground-up, however, it's very doable with AI over many prompts.

Probably the context window filling up?

and a huge amount of our code is written by Claude. Garry Tan is in AI psychosis, but Claude Code is easily the biggest productivity unlock in CS since I started my career.

That's weird because in my experience, Codex 5.4 is way better than the most recent Sonnet. Haven't tried Opus though.

These tools don't generate 1-shot perfection - you need to create a feedback loop that will iterate until it reaches the goal. That can be either test coverage or using tool calling to hit a live service with a test API key or something. Even just prompting it to use a linter or a compiler to catch syntax errors makes a huge difference. Claude would fix most of the issues you flagged in a few loops of trying to test the library, failing and getting an error message, adding the error to its context, editing the code, and repeating. Then at the end once you have something that works, instruct it to write some regression tests, clean up the code, and make sure everything still works as intended.

You're doing the equivalent of handing an intern a sheet of paper, telling them to write down their program based on a vague problem description, and then calling them an idiot when it doesn't work on the first try.

I don't understand the people who don't understand how much of a big difference AI is making to software development. Speaking of Software development, this video is great and captures my frustration with a lot of the software developers who I have to work with and yeah for people like that I'd understand completely why AI is bad, all it does is it 10x the amount of slop they produce which then others have to review.

That's one of the things that has caused the org I work for to re-think their internal AI push. The blast radius of bad developers is no longer limited by their own incompetence.

this video is great and captures my frustration with a lot of the software developers who I have to work with

Sadly the parody developer in that video would be more competent than most of my Indian coworkers, so I wouldn't be surprised if AI could replace them. But instead it will be one of the slightly more competent Indians generating mountains of barely functional AI slop (instead of the small hills of slop my coworkers currently generate).

I don't really know how to answer your posts because you seem to live in a different universe than me when it comes to AI efficacy. It's like someone checkmating "grass is green" bros by saying they checked and their lawn is brown.

Perhaps there are some unstated assumptions that lead to our differing views on it. Have you read this article about a guy accomplishing a highly nontrivial project with significant AI assistance? It matches my experience pretty well, from the pitfalls you can fall into to the genuinely new possibilities it opens up.

I don’t think anyone is saying it doesn’t have its use cases. It’s a problem of expectations both on the technical as well as the business side. If you’re using it to replace workers, you’re making an objectively bad business decision. If you’re using it to automate and assist workflows, then it’s probably good.

I mean, yeah, he's failing (badly) at using a tool that the rest of us are successfully using. And he thinks that this is some sort of flex. It's not worth engaging with him. We're going to keep getting better at using AI, and the serious programmers who aren't just trying to pwn "AI bros" will figure out its advantages and disadvantages, and successfully integrate it with their work. (Or get replaced, if line keeps going up, but the jury's still out on that.)

It's interesting that you mention C# and null checks.

I also work C# here and there, as well as a language that is a relatively verbose, garbage collected, class based, statically typed, single dispatch, object oriented language with single implementation inheritance and multiple interface inheritance. Like you, I'm seeing unimpressive results that do not justify the spend necessary for agentic coding.

Every time I've mentioned it here, I'm told the following:

  1. I'm using the wrong model. It does not matter what model I'm using - I'm using the wrong one. If it's not the absolute latest model as of three days ago, I'm speaking in bad faith because I'm using an outdated model (and I should ignore the fact that people were saying the same damned thing about the last version that they're now denigrating). If I am using the latest model, I should be using a different model from a different vendor. At this point I've tried Gemini 3.1 Pro/Thinking/Flash, Opus 4.5/4.6, and GPT 5.4. I'm running out of frontier models.
  2. Next, I'll be told I'm not using plan mode. I can read the manuals. I assure you that I am using plan mode. The fact that the agents frequently do not follow their own plan is apparently a moral failing on my part.
  3. Next, I'll be told I'm using writing a bad spec and providing bad prompts. I'm an experienced developer. I'm a published author. I have an English minor from college. I worked as a technical writer for a while. If I can't write a solid prompt, I have to wonder who the ideal candidate is - especially when these things are supposedly so frighteningly powerful that the vendors claim to be half-afraid to release them.
  4. After that, I'll get barraged with vague claims about how the tech is so rapidly improving that my personal tribulations don't matter. Depending on the person, they'll either refer to radiology as a benchmark (ignoring the fact that the models return results even without a film ) or something about how the models are only improving, and inference is only getting cheaper.

Nobody seems to want to offer the sane take, which seems to be that there can be real efficiency gains for small, well-specified projects, provided you are already an expert in the domain and are willing spend a considerable amount of time beating it into submission whenever it so much as coughs.

If you're working on a small (or perhaps exquisitely modularized) codebase, and it's chock full of documentation written in a way that the LLM can comfortably consume it without getting confused, and it's using only the happy path architecture and library set for your language, and it's in one of the "favored" languages (like python), and you have a robust set of preexisting end to end tests that can help keep the LLM on the rails, then this technology is probably pretty great.

Outside of FAANG and a few startups, however, I'm not sure how often that's the case. Legacy code is real. Enterprise customers can have upgrade cycles that are measured in years. Backwards compatibility is worth more than features. Regulatory compliance issues might end up a court summons instead of a JIRA ticket. That's not a world that does well with disposable code. Unless startups can outcompete every established player in every industry with those characteristics, I'm not sure how that changes. I can't rule out that such a future might happen, but given the moats around those industries, it'll be a tough row to hoe.

In our internal pilots, AI-generated PRs from frontier models make it through our test suite on the first try about 15% of the time. Another 30% never pass at all because they spiral out into schizophrenic fantasy lands, trying to call libraries that don't exist or attempting to rewrite a two million line codebase in "modern python". Of the ones that do make it through, about three quarters of them end up failing code review, even as we update and refine our agent instructions. At this point, dependabot has a better track record, and it doesn't even have Dario Amodei crying at night about how terrifyingly capable it is.

It pisses me off. The technology clearly has some uses, but fuck me if it doesn't feel like it's been wildly oversold. We still use it internally, but the mania is starting to die down. Management thinks it's the best thing ever because it can automatically spam LinkedIn for them. Development uses it as a more accessible StackOverflow. But we've given up on agentic coding for the time being. We'll probably look at it again in six months, assuming nothing bizarre happens between now and then.

I'm not a programmer, so what you just said is all Greek to me, but I'll take your word for it that what you described represents a significant departure from the expectations that the AI horny would lead one to have concerning the capabilities of the product. But they can always respond that these are problems that are solvable, and with the technology in a constant state of flux we can expect that in the coming years things will only continue to improve, since it was only very recently that even that level of functionality wasn't possible. My concerns with AI go beyond that, though, to problems that don't seem to be solvable in the short term and that have only gotten worse in recent years. These are more business-related than technology-related (though the limitations of the technology do factor in), and threaten the entire viability of AI as an industry.

I use Photoshop quite a bit. During the pandemic, though, my graphics card crapped out, and since they were in short supply, I replaced it with an old one from 2014 I had lying around. Since I don't play games or anything this was a perfectly acceptable solution, except that at some point newer versions of Photoshop started offloading some of the workload to the graphics card, for which mine was hilariously out of date. While the newer versions technically worked, there was a certain wonkiness that prevented me from adopting them full-time, and I continued using an install of Photoshop 2018, which was more than adequate for my purposes. In the meantime, I noticed that a newer version I had installed had incorporated "neural filters" aka AI into the program, which of course it did, and I fooled around with this a bit. Some functions were fun, if limited, while others, like upscaling and automatic scratch removal, didn't seem to do anything useful. But whatever. A few weeks ago I finally got a new graphics card after the old one gave up the ghost, and I looked into Photoshop 2026 to see what had changed since 2025. The answer was that the updates were basically all AI-driven, and not in a good way.

Adobe has been a convenient punching bag for the enshittification trend as of late, and the purpose of this post isn't to pile on, but to illustrate how it's representative of a greater rot in the software business and how AI only seems to accelerate that rot. Like previous iterations, some of these AI features are impressive, and some or stupid, but all of them cost extra. The way it works is that you get a certain amount of credits depending on your subscription (and as a long-time customer of the Photoshop-only plan I get a generous number of credits), and each time you use one of these features it costs a certain number of credits. And if you run out you can't just buy more, but you have to upgrade your subscription, and I already get the most credits you can with an out -of-the-box subscription that doesn't involve going through their sales department. To make matters worse, determining how many credits a given action will cost isn't based on a set rate but depends on 900 different factors, and is so complicated that the software can't even tell you how much an action will cost before it's run. And as a final blow, they don't even provide a way of telling you how many credits you have remaining; you eventually just get a message that you've run out.

The latter problem is obviously part of Adobe's slimy sales tactics where they want users to be unable to plan ahead so that they unexpectedly run out of credits in the middle of a time-sensitive project and are forced to upgrade, so I can choke that up to normal corporate bullshit. The former problem is due to the fact that there is simply no way of predicting how much compute an AI system is going to use until it's already used it. The real kicker is that, due to the inherently unpredictable nature of generative AI, you don't even know if the command is going to achieve the desired result, or how many attempts and tweaks it will take to get the desired result, and it may take multiple, expensive generations just to get something usable. The result is that the function is inherently self-defeating. There are lots of Photoshop functions that may require tweaking or not work at all, but they're integral parts of the software and aren't costing the user anything but time if they don't get things right on the first try, and the individual user will get more proficient with experience. The AI features are simply a black box that requires you to throw an unknown amount of money at it and hope it does what you want it to. I, as a user, thus am disincentivized to bother learning how to use these features because my access to them is liable to be cut off at any moment, whereas my existing workflow works fine as it is.

This is basically the problem with the whole "AI as a service" model these companies all seem to be banking on. If the response to Photoshop 2026 is any indication, customers want cost predictability and function predictability. If Microsoft Word cut you off after 1 million words per month it would seem less like you were buying software and more like a free trial. It would be even worse if the number of words you were allowed to type depended on font, font size, formatting, etc., and you didn't know how many credits each action you would take and were liable to be cut off while in the middle of writing something important. Luckily, I can use Word to my heart's content without it costing Microsoft any extra, so they have no reason to impose such a restriction. With generative AI, on the other hand, every action costs the company money, whether it benefits the customer or not, and the company can't predict in advance how much money that's going to be. So there's no way an AI company can realistically charge based on use without pissing off their customer base, who will cancel after getting that first $75,000 bill in the mail that no, they aren't paying.

Charging a flat monthly fee for unlimited usage doesn't solve this problem so much as stick the provider with the bill instead of the customer, so most of the AI services have resorted to a deceptive hybrid model where it looks like you're getting unlimited usage but has asterisks stating that it's subject to a cap, which caps are never explicitly defined. Some charge a monthly fee for access to a certain number of credits, which don't roll over at the end of the month. I'd find a lot to criticize about these models, which wouldn't fly in any normal business sales situation and would be relegated to the scummy end of the consumer pool in any other context, except that they still manage to lose money for the big players. Third-party agent developers may be profitable, but it's only because they're already buying their compute at a discount.

The only conclusion I can draw from all this is that software as a service, while loathed by customers, isn't really beneficial to companies either, other than as a cheap way of temporarily boosting numbers. And that's indicative of a deeper problem in the tech industry as a whole, a problem of their own making. From the 1980s through the 2000s, the computer industry grew exponentially. In the 1970s computers were things that large corporations and government agencies had to manage large databases. In the 1980s they became productivity tools that every employee had on his desk. By the mid-90s, home adoption had started in earnest, and by the end of the decade practically everyone had one. In ten years the internet went from being a hyped curiosity to an essential utility. The technology was also changing quickly, and the improvements were massive. In 1994, a typical home PC had a 486 processor clocked at 66 MHz, 8 MB of RAM, and a 500 MB hard drive. It would run Windows 3.1, which would be replaced a year later with Windows 95, a huge upgrade. Five years later that computer would be hopelessly obsolete; in 1999 a comparable build would have a 450MHz Pentium II, 128 MB of RAM, and a 13 GB hard drive. It would run Windows 98, which would be replaced 2 years later with Windows XP, and even bigger upgrade that eliminated the finickiness of DOS once and for all.

By 2010 CPUs would be clocked in the gigahertz and run multiple cores, RAM would be measured in gigabytes, and external hard drives of more than 1 TB would be affordable. Windows 7 was released the year prior to great acclaim. To put all that in perspective, I'm currently writing this on a Lenovo Thinkpad from 2024 that has the same amount of RAM as the currently-avalable model, which has the same amount of RAM as my home PC build from 2019. Or 2018; I can't remember the year I last did a major upgrade, but I haven't done any since before the pandemic, aside from the aforementioned graphics card. I haven't needed to upgrade it either, as there hasn't been any decline in performance in the tasks I actually use it for. And even that upgrade didn't appreciably improve performance from the 2014 gear I was running before that. Windows 7 was the last Windows release that was universally loved; every one since then has been met with varying degrees of derision. There had been flops before, but Vista was too far ahead of its time to be usable, and ME was a half-assed stopgap that never should have been released. The only mistake in this vein since then was 8, which completely misread the future of computing. Every new Windows since then has been an unexciting incremental upgrade that would probably have worked just as well as a security patch for 7.

I don't want to overstate my case here and suggest that computers haven't improved in the last 15 years; I'm sure my 2014 build would be woefully inadequate by today's standards. The point is that the advances aren't coming as fast as they did in years previous, and when they do come the improvements are more subtle. It feels like 2010 was the year that computer technology reached a mature phase where all adults, even your grandparents, knew how to use it, and good technology was as cheap as it was going to get. This wasn't clear at the time, but in a few years it was apparent that things had stagnated. In the early 2010s I listened to TWIT semi-regularly, and it didn't seem like there was much to get excited about. The two big things that the industry was pushing as the next frontier at the time were wearables and IOT devices. The former flopped spectacularly. The latter had better market penetration, though some of the implementations were ridiculous, and the whole concept has since become a metaphor of how technology has gone too far, trading simplicity and security for dubious functionality. As hardware stagnated, software quickly followed suit. Improvements in software follow improvements in hardware, and with hardware capability virtually unlimited, there was nowhere left to go. Sure, there would always be new features, support for new devices, and better security, but the game-changing upgrades seemed like a thing of the past.

So take a program like Photoshop that was first released in 1990 and had improved leaps and bounds by the time CS6 was released in 2012. A lot of users contend that this was peak Photoshop and that everything since then has been unnecessary bloat. I am not one of those people; the current software is significantly better. But CS6 was also the last version to be sold as a standalone product. Adobe had good reasons for doing this at the time—Photoshop was an incredibly expensive professional grade product that also had broad-based appeal. This meant that it was particularly susceptible to piracy, and lost more money to piracy than more modestly-priced products. They had tried to combat this in the past by releasing less expensive consumer-grade versions like Elements, but these never really took off, as consumers felt like they were missing something (most notably, Elements did not provide access to curves, which every photography book agreed was an essential tool). The decision to go subscription would give consumers access to an always-up-to-date full version of the product for less than it would cost to upgrade every other release.

The crowd who insists that CS6 is better is dwindling now, but even in its heyday it was mostly composed of people who had never actually paid for Photoshop and were mad that it was more difficult to pirate. But when Creative Cloud was first released in 2013, much of the criticism came from professionals and actual customers who were concerned about the new model. Sure, it was cheap now, but what was stopping them from jacking up the price in the future? Creative professionals aren't exactly the most highly paid. In the past one could upgrade whenever he could afford to and, if necessary, stick with a legacy version until things improved. But making one's continued access to software they needed for their job dependent on paying a ransom that they might not be able to afford was a different story. The reaction may have been better if CC offered a significant upgrade over CS6, but rather than wait a few years and offer a significantly improved version, CC came out earlier than one would expect and didn't offer much of an upgrade. Accordingly, the new subscription model was the only noteworthy thing about it. To Adobe's credit, the subscription price didn't change at all for over a decade, but in hindsight, there weren't any game-changing upgrades, only incremental improvements. If the company had simply relied on customers paying full price to upgrade whenever they felt it was worth it, they may have been waiting a long time.

As SaaS has matured from those early days, it has become less about preventing piracy and more about anxiety that newer products won't differentiate themselves enough from the old to merit the user to upgrade. Better instead to lock in that revenue stream with a user subscription that's impossible to cancel short of telling the bank to stop paying. Unfortunately, as a business move it's a one-time thing; make the number go up as all the old customers switch to subscriptions, but once they're aboard, the line flattens out again. In normal industries, this isn't a problem. In the computer industry, 30 years of exponential growth being not only welcomed but expected meant that the situation was unacceptable. Since there was nowhere left to go technologically, the industry had to resort to cheap gimmicks to keep the numbers up. SaaS was one. The aforementioned IoT was another; nothing better than announcing huge deals with appliance manufacturers who will be integrating your products. The problem with gimmicks like this is that, while they can increase revenue, they have a shelf life. A deal with Whirlpool to make a smart fridge may make both of your numbers go up, but once you have computers in every fridge sold, exponential growth is no longer possible. By the 2020s, the tech industry was running out of gimmicks. I think the reason Apple became the top dog during this period is because they were the only tech company that didn't seem to be peddling bullshit. I had a friend who was in and out of tech startups during this period (I even interviewed at one of his companies), and every idea was based on a free service that was really just scaffolding for advertising or data harvesting. A company like Apple that still sold products and services they expected customers to pay for was an outlier indeed.

So AI came to save the day. I'm not denying the fact that the technology is impressive and potentially useful, but it is just about the biggest gimmick one could imagine. Because simply being impressive and useful puts it in about the same league as, well, Photoshop, which, even in its first iteration, was a revolution to anyone who had ever worked in a darkroom. Unlike Photoshop, though AI promises to solve not one particular problem, but all of the problems, including ones that haven't been identified yet. This latter point is particularly salient, because exponential growth in the tech sector was never based on the present, but on the future. If the tech industry in the 2010s looked like it was in danger of stagnating and becoming a normal industry, in the 2020s the sky was the limit. It was now worth it for capital to invest all of the money in AI companies, because if they were successful, then money wouldn't matter anyway.

And if they weren't successful? Well, they never considered that possibility, because the line only moves in one direction. The equation is pretty simple: If AI companies are successful, then your support was worth it and will be repaid. If they aren't successful, then you need to give them more money. But what happens when the money isn't there? How good Photoshop's AI features are is ultimately secondary to how much they cost. Someone has to pay for them, be it the customer or Adobe. Some companies may be willing to subsidize AI, but if Adobe is willing to give product away for free, they'd do better by dumping CC and charging $500 for CS7, but we know that ain't going to happen. Instead, they've raised subscription prices by 50% in an attempt to get customers to pay for the privilege of having access to functionality they have to pay extra for if they actually want to use. I doubt it's a coincidence that the first substantial price hike in the history of CC coincides with the introduction of the expensive AI upgrades. I doubt Adobe will suffer much for it, because their business (like Apple's) is actually sound, and their products indispensable, but it's indicative of the perversion that's at the center of the tech world. Eventually, somebody is going to expect to get paid, and the party will be over. And as I write this, I don't see any scenario where the money is going to be there.

…but once you have computers in every fridge sold, exponential growth is no longer possible.

A couple weeks ago, someone made analogy to the tractor bubble. Turns out that once you have a rugged, cheap machine on every farm, you can’t keep up the initial growth. But this should apply to every durable good. Why are some slow to reach the flat part of their S-curve?

  1. Continuous improvement. This describes lots of mid-century consumer goods like televisions where the underlying tech just kept getting revolutionized.
  2. Untapped markets. Once every American has a tractor, proceed to every NATO member, then to every third-worlder. Companies can keep up this classic capitalist snowball until they outrun their logistics and lose out to a local producer.
  3. Resource sinks. Postwar Europe had much higher demand for industrial materials, courtesy of a few thousand Allied bombers. Probably not a controllable strategy.
  4. Synergy. Tractors needed fuel; PCs needed software. Demand grows as other technologies climb their own curves.
  5. Moat. Lock down tractor repairs, sell subscriptions, etc. and extract what you can. I’m not sure this is extending the curve so much as slowing others so that you can safely slow your own ascent.

Tech companies benefit the most when they’re climbing the curve. If reasons 1-4 aren’t applicable, they’re going to end up trying for 5. Right now, we’re seeing massive buildouts of data centers because AI serves as a synergy for cloud computing. Apple Intelligence and its ilk will remain a gimmick until such a synergy applies to personal computers.

A lot of the software business has gone from selling software to renting software. Likewise, IoT is (in practice) not based on the idea of people buying products but them renting cloud services to use the products.

I mean, I can understand the drive, being a rentier (or neofeudal tech lord) is a sweet gig if you can get it.

If you sell software, you have to compete against the versions which you sold five years ago. This is not a problem if you are substantially improving your product, few people would stick to Windows 95 to save a few bucks for XP. But if your software is mature, that will not work. The classical Adobe software (Photoshop, Illustrator) has had the features the users want for decades. Sure, someone who spends 20 hours a week in Photoshop might benefit from running the latest and greatest version, but most users will be fine with the features of the 2010 version, so they have little incentive to upgrade.

So of course web-based SaaS became popular with software companies: it destroys the 2nd hand market you are otherwise competing against. If the customer wants to use the feature for the next ten years, he will need a subscription all the time, so you collect rents without having to innovate very hard.

Obviously for the user this is a terrible deal. Not only do you pay for a feature continuously, but the software vendor can also use it to push unwanted updates on you in an attempt to extract even more money, a process generally known as 'enshittification'.

Personally, I think that Knuth has the right idea with TeX (current version 3.141592653, released 2021) -- most software should converge rather than diverge in features and version number.

Of course, for some kinds of software this is not feasible -- operating systems will want to add drivers for newly developed hardware indefinitely, and security patches are another thing which is never done with most software. But I maintain that having an UI team which needs to produce something new, exciting and different for every new version of Windows or Android is actively harmful. (Yes, this makes me an old person.)

My solution is to mostly use F/OSS. For example, my window manager is Window Maker, which can be depended upon not annoying me with new features when I upgrade my Debian. Luckily for me, all of the essential software for software development is open source. (I do run proprietary video games, but not with subscription services, and I use proprietary toolchains for FPGA work, but I am very hard to rely as little as possible on them.)

So of course web-based SaaS became popular with software companies: it destroys the 2nd hand market you are otherwise competing against. If the customer wants to use the feature for the next ten years, he will need a subscription all the time, so you collect rents without having to innovate very hard.

Obviously for the user this is a terrible deal.

On the contrary, the move toward SaaS has been a mutual one between both software vendors and the customers (at least, where the customers are businesses). SaaS converts a capital expense into an operational one, one that can easily and predictably be calculated by accounting, and can scale up and down with business needs. This is actually a great deal for a huge number of businesses, especially ones that tend to be low on capital but reliably operate on cash flow. It means you can grow a business with ~0 IT investment, and it means that you aren't stuck with a depreciating asset in the case the business contracts or goes defunct. The best feature for businesses is that it's predictable - prices don't change much over time, and you can much more easily financially model a set monthly cost of business than you can major purchases and implementation costs of hardware and software that often have independent life cycles.

Yes - SaaS raises prices for consumers because the total amount you can extract from a consumer over a multi-year subscription is significantly more than the highest price you can stick on a shrinkwrapped product with a straight face. But at constant EV of price paid, SaaS is better because you pay more for the successful purchases and cancel the stuff that doesn't work out for you, so trying a new product is a lower risk proposition.

If you're willing to iterate one more time can you try giving it this series of prompts?

  1. @agent "Please create a standard set of agents, skills and prompt files for this project. I want specifically for there to be an orchestrator that I can give a complex query to that will walk through a planning stage, asking me relevant questions, create a plan md file and then manage subagents to execute on that plan. Two agent definitions that I definitely want are a security specialist that will audit changes for best practice and a reviewer agents that will audit to make sure updates do not break previous functionality. The orchestrator should know to invoke these agents for these tasks"

  2. @orchestrator "Please scan through and document this project using standard claude.md files to aid agents in navigating and understanding the project. Update agent definitions with relevant information."

  3. @orchestrator "[Insert your prompt]"

You can tinker to make this much better but doing this should greatly improve your results alone.

Edit: I should have said that you need to execute each step in a new context window. This is very important.

I'll try that later this week when I get a chance. Maybe next time I'm stuck in an awful meeting for two hours

One thing I'll pre-register ahead of time. I'm sure if this doesn't get satisfactory results you'll declare the whole process pointless, but in the case that the harness fails I have had very good results of explaining to the agent why what it did was wrong and having it update the documentation to avoid that failure mode, over time the harness improves and stops making the same mistakes. Our harness has progressed to the point that I can pretty reliably directly drop a user's feature request email into a jira ticket, give the orchestrator the jira ticket number, maybe answer two of three questions and have a working feature branch building on out CI pipeline in under an hour, any failure is an opportunity for improvement.

Yeah I've been having some issues with Opus too recently as compared to Sonnet, probably they downgraded everyone since a new model is coming out soonish and they want more compute for that.

But I'm still getting good work done with it, working on a 100K LOC strategy game, which is not exactly boilerplate webdev slop. It is eminently possible to do pretty complex things with AI coding.

AI bros still in shambles. I definitely have zero fears that AI will replace me

Why don't you tell it what exactly you've been finding that's wrong, update the memory file, have a correction pass go over it or do something a little more sophisticated in your orchestration instead of bitching about it online?

This 'I was able to secure access to Claude Opus 4.6 at my job, and I gave it the same prompt that I had given to Sonnet' sounds like you're just trying to one-shot it. You try, review, adjust, try again, have it go in from another angle and then it works.

You don't see me complaining about bugs it gives me, units chasing eachother such that they exit the map. I see a bug, I note it down, I fix it and try and work on a way to avoid similar things happening again.

There's a cavernous gulf between 'lived experiences' here, ironically this is what the motte is kind of for. It's self-evident to me that AI coding is great and effective, whereas it's self-evident to you that it isn't.

As a ln enjoyer of strategy games, what do you mean by 100k LOC? Is that a financial term, I haven't heard it before.

Edit: you probably mean line of credit? Whats the game about?

Lines of code.

LOC = Lines Of Code.

You try, review, adjust, try again, have it go in from another angle and then it works.

That sounds like more work than just writing the code yourself. It sounds like training an intern.

With the big difference that an intern will learn (at least ideally) and will need less handholding over time. The LLM does not learn, at least not directly from you showing it things.

Except the intern is always at your disposal and is extremely fast at outputting code.

That doesn't improve things at all. Helping an intern write code is more work than writing it yourself without the intern involved. You need to check everything carefully and give detailed explanations on how to fix any problems.

Adding more intern-level code would make most development teams slower.

Well I can't actually write code, so this way is a lot easier for me! I can also give high level observations and hypotheses, tell it to investigate further and get it to handle the nitty gritty stuff autonomously. Here is what I mean by 'adjust, try again, review':

Ah, one distinction is that the AI can attack and raid in the same turn, it could attack a weak fleet and then return to the place it was raiding. Right now it just focuses on raiding with zen-like determination. Also, I'd like to ensure the AI fleets don't have full vision, they should have to use the visibility system and scout to find trade routes to raid.

OK, I think something has broken here. I'm not observing the AI actually buying warships at all. It certainly used to buy warships. It (nebbardy in this instance) doesn't react to its trade routes being raided at all, despite having 150K or so in the bank. It could easily buy enough warships to defend itself but isn't.

The AI does actually learn, it has a memory file for the project that it autonomously made. Whether that actually helps much is open to debate. But I'm pretty satisfied with its performance. Occasionally it just fails and I say 'try again, think outside the box' and after a couple of times that usually works.

Also it's just a lot of code to manage. 3 MB of code is a fair bit I think, that's a lot for anyone to write.

Well I can't actually write code, so this way is a lot easier for me!

Fair enough. I've had AI do things for me that I don't know how to do. I wouldn't stand behind the results, especially if I can't even judge them, but then again, that differs per use case. E.g., I'll use it for translating something from a foreign language if I want to read it, but I wouldn't use it to translate something I'd send out under my own name if I can't at least check it.

I note that people (and I've caught myself doing this too) tend to be bullish on AI when it comes to fields they don't know well, but bearish when it comes to fields they do.

3 MB of code is a fair bit I think, that's a lot for anyone to write.

That's only a little less than my employer's entire biggish, legacy enterprisey SAAS product with 20 years of history, if you're counting just the code. (Edit: at least the back-end. Probably about double if you count the front-end as well, but still.)

Are you counting assets such as graphics or really just the code itself? Perhaps the AI has simply generated really inefficient code. But hey, if it works.

I wouldn't stand behind the results, especially if I can't even judge them, but then again, that differs per use case

Yeah, absolutely there are errors when it comes one-shotting things. It'll oneshot the bulk of what I want but there will be these little niggling flaws in integration or how it interacts with other features. I rely a lot on judging the outcome, trying and improving and AI troubleshooting.

That's only a little less than my employer's entire biggish, legacy enterprisey SAAS product

There aren't really any graphics, just placeholders at this point. There's one fancy Rocaille-style procedural domain warping effect to create an FTL warp bubble animation but I count that as code since it's just maths.

I added one actual image icon for steel and that's in the assets folder, not the src folder that I count as the game.

It really is just 3 MB of code at heart, counting backend and frontend (a bunch of tabs and panels). There's a lot of stuff that it has to do, the ingame AI factions have to do their own war planning, province management, research, colonization and trade... I don't claim that they do these things particularly well, or that my game is bugfree. It absolutely isn't, I'm still making it. So perhaps your SAAS is more precise code. Nevertheless my game does work, it's totally possible to do large projects just via AI, without any coding skills. This used to be impossible, I tried back in the GPT-4 era and it was just a joke. But today it works out.

I've also been doing my own more boring SAAS projects for business use and they work too.

I work for <large software company> that provides me access to Claude Opus 4.6. My work is primarily in a several-million-line-of-code legacy service written in C#. I use Claude itself generally via the GHCP CLI. I broadly agree with the analogy that it is comparable to having a junior dev or intern to hand to actually write changes you need done. My best results at one-shotting a change are when I give Claude a change that's probably in the few dozen up to 100 line of code scope. Beyond that, it can be hit or miss as to whether Claude itself will successfully break up a change into smaller chunks or whether I need to do that preemptively. Probably the biggest benefit Claude enables is improving parallelism. I spend much less time actually typing code and more time getting other things done. If all I did was sit and stare at Claude doing changes I could otherwise be doing, I would probably be less productive by using it but I largely don't have to be. I can tell Claude to make a change and then go do something else, come back and iterate, rinse and repeat.

For now, it seems like a very useful tool but I am not particularly worried about it taking my job. I also have not used it in a context where I am exposed to how much it costs so it's unclear to me if the ROI is there either. I will say that I often have better results when I do things like give it more context, especially specific in-repo examples, and the different harnesses I've used (VSCode integration, Cline, CLI) do seem to make a substantial difference to its output.

Since nobody seems to be bringing it up, I will:

"Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"

It really is Poetry.

Over time, I've lost faith in religion. I no longer believe in deontology. I doubt objectivism. I don't think consequentialism produces meaningfully outcomes. I find modernism passe. The rationalists seem kinda irrational. I've done the calculations: utilitarianism doesn't math out.

I think I'll have to RTVRN to tradition: I think Plato might have had it. Maybe Aesthetics as Virtue was the true path all along.

It seems that the aesthetics someone chooses to project and their aesthetic sense (taste? values?) are better predictors of what they will do and who they really are than anything else. It seems that half of my political values boil down to aesthetics in any case: I find trump-hegseth-vance-desantis et al to be disgusting and contemptible; I have more respect for Rubio, but the last Republican I could really get down with was Mccain, purely off of his aesthetics, even if choosing someone as gauche as Palin disqualified him from my vote (Romney was too morman for me to handle, I'm sad to say).

Likewise with the D's: Their candidates have been universally superior to the republicans these past 8 years because they would rather be eaten by wild dogs than put "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" up in lights and then line up behind it, but I have the most good vibes off of Bernie, Buttegieg, and Mamdani; also probably for purely aesthetic reasons.

I think this might actually be rational: just by observing the aesthetics an individual chooses to portray, you can make a judgment vis. how they intend to act in a way that is much harder to fake than "Saying shit". Kamala was a social climber totally absent of virtue, and campaigned like it. Bernie is a crusty old marcher, and acts like it. Buttigieg is a bloodless technocrat, and looks like it. Trump is a neuvo rich venal tasteless rich guy, and governes like it.

All this to say: I think I'm just going to be unapologetically ruled by my aesthetic sense from now on, and say that we can allow some grace. Maybe Duublya had a stutter, you can get an aphorism wrong and it's fine. It's ok. That being the case, if any politician in the future sits down and types out something as fucking sauceless and cringe and gross as "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" and thinks "This is great, fucking SEND IT"; they should probably go back to screaming at the cocain ghosts in an alleyway stop blighting our eyes with their garbage.

I kind of have the sense that Trump is actually going insane, or at least his emotional control over himself is slipping. It's not that he is bombing Iran - that isn't very different from normal US foreign policy. And it's not that he is being bombastic - he has always been bombastic. But his pronouncements lately have had a very deranged and openly sadistic frothing-at-the-mouth quality that is noticeably different from his usual previous posting style.

I don't think that he is just talking like this for strategic purposes. His base likes the bombast but would probably prefer a kind of bombast that seemed more composed and less emotional. They like the idea of "Trump the strong man", not "Trump the ranting lunatic". As for Iran, after having experienced assassinations and bombings for weeks, there is no reason why they would not believe a threat that was worded more calmly. If anything, I think a calm-worded threat would probably seem more plausible to them. I can't think of any way in which frothing at the mouth would help manipulate the stock market any more than a calmer tone would, either.

As for Iran, there is no reason why they would not believe a threat that was worded more calmly. If anything, I think a calm-worded threat would probably seem more plausible to them.

Honestly, the 4d chess argument I can come up with for this is that Trump is actively trying to make sure the war does not come to a diplomatic conclusion, and as such is utilizing a mix of insults and obvious bluffs to convince the Iranians to stay in it.

Related to my conspiracy theory that this entire adventure is designed to let some air out of the stock market bubble, on the theory that the AI investment process needs to continue in order to achieve AGI, but that a catastrophic sudden bubble pop would torpedo the whole industry, so they needed to do something to bring down the stock market slightly prior to the bubble.

Honestly, the 4d chess argument I can come up with for this is that Trump is actively trying to make sure the war does not come to a diplomatic conclusion, and as such is utilizing a mix of insults and obvious bluffs to convince the Iranians to stay in it.

Agreed, but I don't think it's really 4d chess; it's not a really sophisticated strategy. He doesn't want them to make an offer that sounds reasonable.

I think this communication strategy makes sense in the context of the Middle East and Iran in particular. The region is pretty well known for its bombast. The videos of political rhetoric I’ve seen from that region sound pretty bombastic as they chant for the deaths of their enemies. There are videos of toddlers chanting for the death of Assad, feel good news stories about a kid healing from the death of his father by playing video games (in which he pretends the enemies he’s killing are Jews). You can’t convince those people you’re serious if you’re not over the top bombastic and ready to kill them and destroy their country. This isn’t Sweden, and you can’t talk to an Iranian Shia Muslim like he’s a Swedish Lutheran.

This isn’t Sweden, and you can’t talk to an Iranian Shia Muslim like he’s a Swedish Lutheran.

I can't disagree more. The Iranian leaders have all got philosophy degrees, study Kant, etc - and their messages are substantially more cultured than the hot air coming out of Trump and Hegseth. I can understand a lot of the chants for the death of their enemies, too - if America blew up a primary school in my country I'd start chanting Death to the Great Satan as well.

if America blew up a primary school in my country I'd start chanting Death to the Great Satan as well

They've been chanting that particular line for decades now though

But the hit of the primary school retroactively justifies and explains all the bad things the Iranian regime has ever said or done to the US.

I'm sure that Primary School missile struck got a bunch of new ones to start chanting it - after all, the Official Story was that the Iranians hate their government and were just waiting to rise up against it, which very much has not happened. But even beyond that, do you think that they just started chanting Death to America for no reason, completely unprovoked? There's a long history of nasty US behavior in the region that does stretch back decades.

I can understand a lot of the chants for the death of their enemies, too - if America blew up a primary school in my country I'd start chanting Death to the Great Satan as well.

Timeline is kind of backwards there, no? Unless you're talking about America blowing up a school several decades ago...

I'm referring to how the American strikes on that primary school for girls shored up support for the regime and helped destroy the enthusiasm that the earlier efforts to spur an uprising created. That said, those death to America chants started happening for a reason back then too.

My ex-girlfriend who was a convert to Islam years ago, used to take me to a local mosque in the area that was a well known Shia mosque. I used to have dialogues and debate with the Imam who would lead these massive groups in prayer and they knew I was a Catholic, but were very welcoming and always looking to talk to me when I went, but I was a very irregular attendee. They gave me English-Arabic supplication and prayer books and all kinds of other stuff. Was very interesting to read. He was from Iran and at least some of the regulars of the mosque had family back in the Middle East.

On the other hand, I've had lifelong friends who are more or less secular but culturally Muslim/Assyrian, and would go back and visit their families in Amman Jordan and elsewhere. They'd always tell me, "... you ain't shit in the Muslim world until you've threatened death to Israel and had at least half a dozen of your cousins killed..." One of them in particular who is half Arab half Italian and was from al-Sajariyah in Anbar Province in Iraq originally, has relatives who were active ISIS fighters who fought in the siege of Deir ez-Zor and battle of Kobane. Some of them were killed in American airstrikes. You never bring up the American military in conversation with them here when talking to them; it’s a very sore thumb that raises the anger levels.

For what it's worth, "death to Israel" is about as uncontroversial a sentiment in the Arab world as "chocolate is nice" is in the Western world. There is room for discussion about how literally it should be taken, because most of the time what "death to Israel" means is "Israel is bad" without any specific policy action attached to it, but it is completely universal that Israel is a bad thing that we hate. Even when Arab countries try to normalise relations with Israel, that usually provokes significant popular outcry.

So I wouldn't read that much into any specific person saying that. If you're with a group of Arab Muslims and people say "death to Israel" and you disagree, you are the one being anti-social. It's the equivalent of, say, being a Westerner who is vocally pro-North-Korea. If I were having a conversation with a bunch of Westerners, someone casually said that such-and-such is a horror show like North Korea, and I interrupted to say that actually North Korea is a victim of Western propaganda and it's actually a workers' paradise, everyone would stare at me like I'm a crazy person. That is what would happen if you were hanging out with a bunch of Arab Muslims, they said death to Israel, and you interrupted to disagree.

Anecdotally, all my experiences with Muslims in the West have been positive - Egyptian, Afghan, Syrian, Indonesian, Turkish, they've all been lovely. They have in my experience been patient, polite, and happy to respectfully talk about the differences and the common ground between our traditions. I just carefully steer away from anything involving Israel or Palestine. The ones living in Western countries do not say "death to Israel", but they are all passionately pro-Palestinian. Compare how pretty much all my experiences with religious Jews in the West have been positive, and they also have been lovely, polite, generous, and willing to have wonderful conversations; but they are all passionately pro-Israel (even the super-liberal ones), and it is not worth trying to engage on that. At this point my position is just that I like the Muslims, I like the Jews, and I never talk about Israel/Palestine with them because that makes brains switch off and people get angry.

I never talk about Israel/Palestine with them because that makes brains switch off and people get angry.

The same approach works with pro-Israel American normies and pro-Palestine British lefties.

If there was a law against talking about the Israel-Palestine conflict unless you had lived in Israel or Palestine for at least ten years, the world would be a better place.

Personally, this image of "Iranian Shia Muslims" being insane brown terrorists has been one of the casualties of the war for me. Was it always just Israeli-American propaganda, MemriTV cherry-picking, or merely a product of general American ignorance about the broader world, "everyone in the ME is Arab, except Jews who are white"? They don't really look the part. They don't do suicide bombings like Sunnis, they don't deal in over-the-top theatrics, they state conditions and try to execute on those. Throughout the war, Iranians have communicated much more similarly to how I'd expect a European nation – say, Sweden, or Denmark (we've just had a dry run with Denmark, come to think of it) – under attack to communicate, compared to the coalition of Moral Clarity. "This is the Middle East" is a bad excuse for the American side, so bad in fact that it vindicates their desire to have nuclear deterrent. Same logic as Israel uses. You can't expect to be left alone by such people without WMDs on the table.

They don't seem as religiously unhinged, too. Very little talk of Apocalypse.

They don't do suicide bombings like Sunnis

No, they get others (including Hezbollah) to do them for them.

they don't deal in over-the-top theatrics

Like Death to America Day

Not to mention their Israel Doomsday Clock.

No, they get others (including Hezbollah)

I presume you mean Beirut in the 1980s. Wow, you sure have been around for a long time.

That one was the first, but it's not the only suicide bombing by Iranian proxies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Buenos_Aires_Israeli_embassy_bombing

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

Depends what you watch. It'd be easy for visiting aliens to see the Iranians as the more composed and understated party in this war. Their latest statement was to call for a ceasefire, arguing that it would "give the US and Israel a short pause to regroup and commit new crimes", which is straight up funny vs Trump's unhinged anger.

If anything, I think a calm-worded threat would probably seem more plausible to them.

"There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man." -- Patrick Rothfuss

A lot of his base has always said that they don't like his more extreme rhetoric. 'I like what he does but why does he have to talk that way?'. They're kidding themselves of course. They enjoy having a dog that they've let off the leash, and they enjoy pitting his aggression against people who've committed themselves to some level of public decorum.

I don't know if the escalation in frothiness is just insanity, or more of Trump's gut instinct and bone-deep understanding of madman theory. I don't think he's necessarily wrong in his approach, given he is now in this mess. By doubling down on incoherence and anger, he makes himself somewhat invulnerable to critique for e.g. not actually following through on his deadlines and ultimatums. If the guy is a divinely appointed gut, he can do exactly as his gut chooses at any given moment, making Trump(now) much freer to ignore things that Trump(then) said. If he went about his threats in a calm way, his failure to follow through on a given occasion would be informational for his enemies. As it stands it is easy enough to believe he really meant each and every ultimatum in the moment he said it, whether or not he did.

Nonetheless a certain amount of rhetorical escalation is necessary to maintain this effect, hence his decision to use the f word.

I kind of have the sense that Trump is actually going insane, or at least his emotional control over himself is slipping.

When I read comments like this, I feel like I'm going insane. Trump has been openly bonkers for at least ten years, and the real TDS has always been people insisting that he's not. He has always been emotionally incontinent and narcissistic. He's always been a blustering bully with cruel instincts. He re-entered the political arena as the champion of the most laughable conspiracy theory in history. Hell, 75% of his appeal is that he's an uninhibited, incurious asshole. "He says it like it is" which is, as always, code for "repeats my bigotries aloud." (It's certainly not a statement on his commitment to epistemic courage).

Insofar as there has been downward spiral from his first administration, it is down to his advisors going from relatively normal Republicans who sought to moderate his impulses to weird, evil sycophants who seek to amplify and exploit them. Compare Hegseth to Mattis or even Esper. Esper wasn't much of anything, but he at least wasn't a gleeful psychopath like Hegseth.

To me Trump definitely seems more unhinged and less grounded now than he did during his first term or even the start of this term, and I've never particularly been a fan of him.

It is a quintessentially tasteless tweet

  • Posting a message about your enemy living in hell on Easter, the joyful day celebrating Christ rescuing sinners living in hell

  • Posting it on TruthSocial, which I imagine is only populated by evangelicals who care a lot about the holiday

  • Threatening to destroy civilian infrastructure, which again, is on Easter morning, and presenting it in the language of an easter basket

  • Concluding with Praise be to Allah (???????)

  • Posting no other Easter message the rest of the day

  • Coming off as desperate, not at all in control

My running hypothesis is that the rescue operation went poorly and handicapped his judgment.

Praise be to Allah

I think this should be read as a threat. Which it is.

Isn’t the rescue operation being claimed as a victory? What's your theory?

It seems more parsimonious to assume the negotiations are going poorly. That also strikes me as more in-character for Trump (seems himself as a big negotiator, probably doesn't really care about the lost C-130s.)

But we did get a couple of birds stuck over there and had to blow them up, which I imagine being frustrated by in theory (particularly for the people who were really hoping we could avoid anything that remotely resembled Eagle Claw this time lol).

Worth noting that the failure of Operation Eagle Claw wasn't the lost equipment (losing the helicopters was already priced in), but the failure to rescue the hostages.

Here it appears at least possible that they contemplated the possibility that they'd have to ditch the planes.

Yeah I think this is a total, complete W for the US of A and probably demoralizing for the IRGC.

But I do find it kinda funny that we still had a C-130 snafu due to Iranian dirt.

The funnier part is the cope, either by the regime claiming they totally shot down those planes, no for reals, or by the shills claiming that this means that it was at best a pyhrric victory for the US, and wow look at all the equipment they lost what a bunch of losers losing two planes and a bunch of helicopters for one guy!

It's kind of funny, a few days ago @VoxelVexillologist made a comment about smug Europeans being a core part of JD Vance's origin story, and I replied to them via DM that if Scott Alexander hadn't purged the discussion threads from his blog when he felt the Eye of Sauron Upon Him, I was pretty sure I could've pointed to the specific discussion.

The discussion I had in mind was a review of "the Top Ten War Movies" that turned into a sub-discussion about the movie Blackhawk Down directed by Ridley Scott. The general consensus was that it was a bad movie that perpetuated "unrealistic expectations" and "anti-utilitarian ideals" by suggesting the US military was right to "waste" 94 lives trying rescue a handful of men. Our future VP came back with the argument that this alleged flaw was exactly why it should be regarded as peak cinema and one of the greatest war movies of all time, only for some of the regular Euros to shout him down and demand that Scott ban him.

I'm getting a similar vibe off of recent discussions about the F-15E Weapons Officer's rescue. The Fact that we we'll go to absurd and irrational lengths to retrieve our guys is being painted by some as a flaw when I (and others) see it as a virtue.

Hold on, are you saying JD Vance personally commented on one of Scott's articles?

More comments

I'm getting a similar vibe off of recent discussions about the F-15E Weapons Officer's rescue.

I outright reject the possibility of anyone taking the other side of that debate. No, I don't care how many links and examples you have.

Going through great lengths to rescue soldiers is essentially a form of insurance. Nobody outside the lizardman constant says that if someone has employer-provided insurance and it pays $X to deal with a medical condition, but $X is more than the person is worth to his employer, the money is "wasted". This is exactly the same except the expensive medical condition is "stuck in enemy territory" instead of "needs a costly operation and medication".

Now, in this case it cost lives, and costing 94 lives is bad. But I wouldn't expect that rescuing a soldier costs 94 lives on the average--claiming that this is bad because of the cost in lives is treating a worst case cost as though it's an average cost.

I think we probably lost lives. There’s the video of a helicopter crashing down; it makes no sense that all the aircraft were somehow stuck in mud when there was no mud in the area; the propellers in one photo are bent as if they crashed while in use; Iranian news showed a skull in the wreckage. Downplaying fatalities is important here for morale reasons: because of the Easter holiday, because Trump fired all those generals who opposed his plans, because Trump-Hegseth have a particular eye for PR, and because Trump wants to make a ground invasion seem easy. We will see, eventually, but perhaps not for some years.

There’s the video of a helicopter crashing down

The only video I have seen shows a helicopter trailing smoke. Please link to a video of a helicopter crashing.

the propellers in one photo are bent as if they crashed while in use

My understanding is that the propellers in question are composite blades, which would have snapped in a crash. They melted due to fire.

Iranian news showed a skull in the wreckage

This was likely the wreckage of a car and Fars pulled the image and said they were going to investigate its authenticity.

The US government can certainly cover things up (although it's hard to cover up the deaths of servicemembers) but your post is not a good reason to believe they are doing so in this case.

We're hearing increasingly unbelievable things coming out of the DoW about each Iranian operation. I can't say with any confidence which things are untrue, or what the truth is, but the credibility given to the official story is dropping rapidly.

Increasingly, I can't offer any alternative theory, because I don't know anything other than what is being said by two (or three) untrustworthy participants in the war. But it's like reading an /r/relationships post, at some point you decide the whole thing is bullshit.

The alternative theory is that the WSO was rescued at the same time as the pilot but his rescue is covered up to provide cover for an operation to liberate the uranium at Ispahan.

Trump fires generals opposed to obviously doomed plan. Special forces go in amd take over an airstrip bringing C130s to get the goods out. At some point the whole thing goes south and the plan is abandoned.

Trump tweets in anger at having lost one of the few cards that would let him exit claiming victory.

but the last Republican I could really get down with was Mccain, purely off of his aesthetics

The guy who chanted "Bomb Iran" to the tune of "Barbara Ann"?

Buttigieg is a bloodless technocrat, and looks like it.

And allegedly purchased a child via surrogacy. Probably not the kind of aesthetics I'd support, but I suppose that's the problem with trying to judge someone by aesthetics. I don't care for Trump's, but I'd be hard pressed to name a politician from either party who has aesthetics that make me think I should support them.

The guy who chanted "Bomb Iran" to the tune of "Barbara Ann"?

To be fair, just about everyone of a certain age has to be tempted to do that when the subject of Iran comes up. If the regime falls, the new regime would be well-advised to ask the country be called "Persia" again just to break that association.

I never knew it was any different. I was singing that song in my head a couple weeks ago.

In Pete’s case, the aesthetics has already gone south. Aretaics couldn’t be all that salvific if it produced the same mediocre outcomes. It’s the case with all moral systems. Moral systems fail as people ‘depart’ from their values unless the content itself is the object of your critique (e.g. Nietzsche).

In the absence of artificial uteruses, how is a gay male couple supposed to have a biological kid for one of the fathers except throug surrogacy? I don't see what the aesthetic opposition could be here unless it is to such a degree that gay males are not able to "aesthetically" have biological children at all.

Gay couples having kids really is a bad thing. It’s obvious girls are just different. I see it every time my gf does little baby talk with her cat. Men just don’t have that silliness where they can actually have fun doing dumb kid stuff for hours every day. Mothers are different.

We actually did have a technology that let gay guys have kids. They just picked a wife and had sex. Then occasionally went out with the boys and did gay stuff. It worked fine for gay guys who wanted kids.

Instead modern society places sexual identity at the top of a hierarchy of needs. But not having a mother (by design) seems far worse to me than having to hide some sexual attraction.

It’s obvious girls are just different.

I broadly agree that men and women have different psychology around kids and nurturing, but has there been much research into ways gay men are psychologically more similar to women?

Like, aside from the obvious thing of being attracted to men, it seems like gay culture in several different times and places tends to adopt a lot of the trappings of the female gender role. Is this just because it is a slightly better way to seduce "straight guys", or does it reflect actual biological differences in gay men? Do gay men tend to have more thing-orientation, or person-orientation?

Is it possibly the case that gay men are better nurturers, on average, than straight men? (Though, if this turned out to be true, it would just shift to the idea that two lesbians raising kids would probably be a bad idea. Unless it is an averaging effect of some sort with other biological factors balancing out, then maybe the best nurturing parents might be: straight woman > lesbian woman ~= gay man > straight man.)

I guess there are tops and bottoms. Of my gay friends I would assume two are tops and the third not sure on. The tops definitely act more masculine and why I find it easier to be friends.

Bottoms probably are a little bit more of a nurturer personality but I would still doubt they come close to the average female nurturing personality trait.

I would be curious what % of gay men would find my comment offensive. It’s sort of taking away a right many think they should have today. But they also don’t find females attractive and I am confirming that men and women are different. And confirming their masculinity. You can be my bro and drink beers together but obviously because we are men neither of us should design a life to be primary care givers to a child.

From the gay (and bi) men I know there’s not really a strict separation between tops and bottoms, most are vers and many will change their preferences over time, and I’ve rarely met stereotypically feminine gay men the way I’ve met stereotypically masculine lesbians.

Maybe it’s because most of the fems end up as trans women these days, so the gay male population ends up consisting of guys who are at least mildly comfortable with their masculinity (even if it’s limited to working out and growing a beard).

I see it every time my gf does little baby talk with her cat. Men just don’t have that silliness where they can actually have fun doing dumb kid stuff for hours every day.

Jfc your life must be boring.

  • -10

What value does this comment have? What's it's point other than to be randomly nasty, unprovoked? Don't do this.

What kind of heartless man wouldn’t want to spend as much time as possible doing “dumb kid stuff” with their own child? Or calls it “dumb kid stuff” in the first place?

Having just spent the Easter weekend with my brother’s small kids, there was a lot of kid stuff but remarkably little of it was anything I’d call ”dumb”. Occasional silly (and TBH fun) stuff as you’d expect but mostly helping them get toys / puzzles, dressing for outdoors, pushing them in the swing and making sure they didn’t run into the water without rubber boots on.

5/5, will do again.

I make no commendation of it, but it is very common to find paradigms of masculinity which hold that a man must be tough and serious at all times. Dealing with children is for women.

Gay couples having kids really is a bad thing. It’s obvious girls are just different. I see it every time my gf does little baby talk with her cat. Men just don’t have that silliness where they can actually have fun doing dumb kid stuff for hours every day. Mothers are different.

You need to broaden your horizons.

Neither I nor Mrs. FiveHour have the baby talk skill. This is concerning for our offspring, but we'll figure it out.

Human experience is broader than you and your girlfriend.

That’s one example. Every girl in my family I can think of has that skill set. For the vast majority it’s instinctual. And for most men it’s not instinctual. My mom had the skill set. My father did not. My sisters have the skill set. My aunts have the skill set. I don’t know your gf or if you have kids but I would still with a great probability assume if you put her child in her hands the instincts come out.

how is a gay male couple supposed to have a biological kid for one of the fathers except throug surrogacy?

They're not. That's what they sacrifice as gay men. It's a helluva dilemma to be put on the horns of, but that's the hand they've been dealt.

Surely it hasn't been that long since "kids need a mother and a father" was a mainstream, common-sense point of view on the right?

Obviously the conservative position is that gay couples, whether male or female, cannot have children. It is physically impossible for such a couple to have biological children, obviously. One partner might be the biological parent, but there must necessarily be a mother or father who is being excluded somewhere, and this exclusion is firstly an injustice, and secondly itself a mere pretense, an attempt to ignore the biological fact of parentage while fantasising a similar role for the same-sex partner. And sociologically, sure, the same-sex couple can adopt a child, but it is normatively bad for a child to be raised by a same-sex couple. Children need both their parents, and if for some reason that is not possible (there are divorces, separations, maybe a biological parent dies, etc.), they still need parental figures of both sexes.

It's barely been a decade since Obergefell. Has everyone forgotten the gay marriage debate so quickly? Gay adoption? It is very common for conservatives to just bite the bullet here and say, "Gay couples can't have a biological child, and shouldn't parent children at all. That's the whole point."

firstly an injustice, and secondly itself a mere pretense, an attempt to ignore the biological fact of parentage while fantasising a similar role for the same-sex partner

This would be a salient argument if the only children not raised by their biological parents were either orphans or adopted by gay people.

But reality is different. Gay marriage did not destroy marriage, instead marriage was destroyed long before that. People marry, have kids, then divorce. Or just get pregnant outside of committed relationships. Parents have their kids taken away because they are terrible parents.

Now, you could institute a regime where these cases were avoided. Perhaps you make abortion mandatory for any pregnancy where the parents are unable to prove that they will stay together with a probability higher than 0.95. Or you just extract gametes from everyone after puberty and then sterilize them, and rely on IVF for couples after they convince an expert panel that they will make great parents. Or you just make people require such an expert panel for marriage and make PIV sex outside marriage illegal.

So far, I have not seen any conservatives arguing for any of that. Your 'injustice' lives in every single parent family, and your 'pretense' in any patchwork family. In fact, the pro-lifers are actively creating more of that -- nobody believes that a crack addicted prostitute who got pregnant will become clean and form a happy fairy tale family with her former client just because you force here to have the child.

For what it's worth, I was describing a position, not advocating one myself.

Personally I agree entirely with the conclusion that marriage was destroyed or degraded long before this particular issue emerged. I am not therefore sympathetic to same-sex marriage, though I note in that linked post that it's probably 'good policy', but I do think that the argument about SSM specifically is missing the deeper point.

From the comments of "The Argument from Cultural Evolution":

People objected to no-fault divorce, and were dismissed as religious fundamentalists who wanted to chain people in loveless marriages. People objected to contraception, and were dismissed as sex-hating Puritans and papists who wanted to suppress healthy, loving sexuality. Slippery slopes were invoked in both cases, but no one paid attention.

It doesn’t matter which hill you choose to die on, you still get called a bigot, and you still die.

And from "Beware Systemic Change":

The strongest conservative case against gay marriage is that it reinforces a centuries-long redefinition of marriage from a strategic partnership focused on child-rearing to a ceremonial acknowledgment of romantic infatuation, potentially leading to a deep shift in the way people think about issues like who to marry, when to have kids, when to get divorced, and how to treat their family. That argument hasn’t been rigorously evaluated by statisticians and found wanting. It’s been found annoying and left untouched.

The imperfect is not the opposite of the good. It’s the imperfect of good. You do not choose evil (which children like Buttigieg is evil) because the world is imperfect.

And it’s the same thing with gay marriage. Because you can find bad marriages does not mean you just get rid of marriage which gay marriage essentially did. You work to improve marriage.

I feel like your arguments boil down to some people starve therefore all people should starve.

Has everyone forgotten the gay marriage debate so quickly?

I mean, you'll find people forgetting that Western society literally went full Nazi 6 years ago and destroyed ~20% of planetary wealth (mostly through inflation) in an ill-fated attempt to cure a particularly nasty variant of the common cold.

So not only is 20 years ago ancient history, but the loudest contingent opposing it has shrunk by half due to a dynamic best described by actuarial tables. People who were 60 and driving the opposition to gayness in 2008 are 78 now, so half of them are dead and the other half have been brainrotted by social media, usually into TDS (these are the kinds of people you see at No Kings protests).

Children need both their parents

Yeah, that's not what the people who came of age during the '70s (and so are 65-70 right now) think (remember, divorce was [simplification] legalized at that time), which is why it's not a big deal for them to have family units with 2 'parents' of the same sex. Which is why once the last generation grew too old to combat it, that "need" was done away with.

conservatives

Conservatives have conserved nothing.

And progressives haven't progressed anything, what's your point? :P

More seriously, I think it depends on the time-scale you look at and who you think counts as a 'conservative', and I'm also inclined to think that it's unfair to judge a movement for not necessarily succeeding overall. Movements tend to name themselves for their goals - we understand that it's not really that fair to criticise American libertarians or communists for not having restored liberty or brought communism, because those are small parties. How small is 'conservatism' as a movement? Over the last decade or so there's been plenty of writing trying to distinguish 'conservatives' from 'the right', with the understanding that actual conservatives might be a significantly smaller tribe than was realised.

Anyway, if I look at the last two hundred years so, I think that conservatives, in a broad sense, have achieved plenty of things. Not everything they wanted, certainly, but I wouldn't say their efforts were wasted. Eugenics and communism stand out as probably the two biggest issues that conservatives were on the winning side of.

I don't see what the aesthetic opposition could be here

Tearing away a child from it's mother's arms is not aesthetically displeasing to you?

unless it is to such a degree that gay males are not able to "aesthetically" have biological children at all.

They can do it the same way everyone else does.

Gay men impregnating women is unironically very lindy.

Since the mother has signed up to be paid for surrogacy, I am not particularly inclined to view the child as being torn away from the mother's possession. Possibly, I am not open enough to the infant's perspective that it is being torn away from its mother, but divorce, mothers dying, infant adoption, etc., seem to me like they are common enough that this is not a huge problem. I am open to the idea that allowing surrogacy should be completely illegal on the grounds that it is too much like selling organs, but a) this would also ban surrogacy for high-risk mothers and b) is better than organ sales in that faking the supply chain is totally impossible. If surrogacy exists at all, it seems like it has to be an option for gay males.

Since the mother has signed up to be paid for surrogacy, I am not particularly inclined to view the child as being torn away from the mother's possession. Possibly, I am not open enough to the infant's perspective

Yeah, there's that, but also, it's rather naive to think that it's all fine because the mother signed on the dotted line, before a major transformative experience. And that's without looking into the gory details, like how a lot of them do it out of desperation, how the contracts penalize them for backing out, etc.

but divorce, mothers dying, infant adoption, etc., seem to me like they are common enough that this is not a huge problem

All of these things are massive tragedies, and we don't go out of our way to deliberately create them. Divorce, given it's scale, is a huge problem.

If surrogacy exists at all, it seems like it has to be an option for gay males.

Correct. Surrogacy should not exist at all, it is a moral horror. I don't understand how the thought that this is about gay men, enters into people's heads.

Although it is not my own, I find the position of no surrogacy for anyone perfectly coherent. Normally, I would just upvote and move on, but I find myself wondering how you feel about wet nurses. Breastfeeding is a fairly intimate bonding experience, so a wet nurse arguably also has a strong claim to motherhood, or at least it seems aesthetically displeasing on the same grounds as surrogacy.

Depends on the reasons for it. Sometimes a mother can't produce milk, so if it's either wet nursing or the baby starves, it seems fine. If it's because of some aristocratic lady's notions that breastfeeding is beneath her, someone should slap her around and tell her that maybe motherhood is beneath her (though the issue with that is she'd have your hands chopped off for it).

or at least it seems aesthetically displeasing on the same grounds as surrogacy.

Yeah, sounds about right, though it feels less severe to me, as it doesn't involve literally selling a child. From the child's perspective, it's pretty messed up, though.

it doesn't involve literally selling a child.

I think of surrogacy as probably involving the implantation of a fertilized egg that does not originate with the surrogate. This way, a mother without a functional womb would still get to pass on her genetic material, and it would also make it so that surrogate-purchasers would not be forced to use the surrogate's genetics, which is potentially very desirable for both sides of the transaction. The financial transaction here is selling the use of the womb, which seems sufficiently icky for someone to reasonably find it unacceptably unaesthetic, but it does not really seem like selling a child unless the birthmother's egg is being used.

Maybe a way to think about this is to ask if an eggless woman somehow steals a couple's last and only viable fertilized egg from a fertility clinic and implants herself, to whom should the child belong once birthed? My view is that the child clearly belongs to the woman who provided the egg.

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This... gets complicated.

The standard process, right now, is that the surrogate gives birth, the baby and mother are immediately separated, and the surrogate spends the next 24-72 hours recovering in a separate room. Sometimes surrogates are willing to work with the fathers for some time afterward, but for commercial surrogates that's usually a (possibly virtual) meetup a couple times a year at best, and among compassionate surrogates the optimistic case is more often 'stranger who did daddies a favor' than getting six weeks with the kid and two dads to help during recovery before becoming an aunt.

((And then there's the coercive power of large amounts of money, the often-invasive genetic screening, the difficult hormonal supplements and common-place use of a separate donor egg.))

It's at least imaginable that there could be better processes. If I were writing things a utopia, a world where surrogacy and donors are appreciated and common, where they can become pillars of the community as connection points across varied families, and where they're seeing their kids on a monthly or weekly basis during childhood, would all be nice. You don't have to be Ursula Le Guin or a pregnancy fetishist prefer the aesthetics of it. Very rarely, it does happen.

But it's not clear that it could scale. It's not a coup-positive solution, it's a 'rebuild human psychology' solution.

The insistence that the surrogate have little contact with the child after birth is sometimes about greedy parents wanting to maximize bonding, but it's also a clear defense mechanism that surrogates very much want. (This can go to extremes that are a little surprising to me; many surrogates apparently won't pump milk even for significant compensation, and it's pretty common for gay parents to want more contact between the kid and the mother.) Compassionate surrogates often find themselves having to make hard decisions when their career, or a father's career, moves five hundred miles away. People just change, and in a world where 50% of marriages end in divorce, it's hard to complain that surrogates and fathers don't want face legal issues nearly as complicated as a divorce just because they were too close to the mom.

It's not a fun problem!

how is a gay male couple supposed to have a biological kid for one of the fathers except throug surrogacy?

I found the photo uncomfortable to view, it was much too like "new mom in hospital bed after birthing the baby" when it's two guys and someone else's babies, that someone else being written out of the fairytale completely:

Then, in early September, they shared a black-and-white photo of themselves smiling with their newborns.

"Their" newborns? Yes, well. The children are adopted and - is the term mixed-race or multiracial? They're black, anyway. Which is another entire kettle of fish with some controversy around transracial adoptions.

Aesthetically, I like all the ex-soldier glass-cutting-jaw congressmen. Even better if they bear some physical wound from service. They fit my citizen-soldier, Cincinnatus vision of what a leader should look like. And by and large, that breed of politician kind of sucks. They've always kind of sucked. Largely (appropriately enough) because they tend to be overly concerned with aesthetics at the expense of the actual nitty gritty of politics and governance.

If all we cared about was aesthetics, Dan Crenshaw would be president. Does anyone want that?

....have you read Starship Troopers by any chance?

I have not, but I'm familar with the basic ideas and story beats.

May be worth reading based off of the comment haha.

Yes, you do understand this goes both ways? You understand democrats come off as Halloween villains to much of the country?

Trump is an aesthetician. He governs on a platform of, essentially, ‘I’m the tsar and I’m gonna look like it’. Yeah, aesthetics. And he baits democrats into the vanguard party damn-fool aesthetics.

Yes, you do understand this goes both ways? You understand democrats come off as Halloween villains to much of the country?

I'd go with actual living demons over Halloween villains, but to each their own.

In light of the over the top evil of the opposition, I'm fine with my chosen champion acting like a Crusader King.

The over the top Cruella de Ville laugh seems more like something from a commercial or B-movie than real witches, at least.

I don't think Trump acts remotely like a crusader king.

Granted, my model of an idealised crusader king is probably Louis IX of France, or the other obvious candidates are Richard I of England, Philip II of France, or Frederick Barbarossa. I do not imagine any of them acting like Trump. I'm curious where you see the similarity?

Unless your capitalisation is meant to imply that you think Trump acts like a Crusader Kings (the video game) character, in which case... um, sure, but those are video games that are substantially treachery-and-murder-and-adultery-and-corruption simulators, so, okay, that sure sounds like Trump, but that's not exactly a defence of him.

>names four crusaders

>all their crusades were failures

>no Bohemond of Taranto

>no Baldwin of Edessa

>no Frederick II Stupor Mundi Hohenstaufen

You're not beating the beautiful loser allegations there, I'm afraid.

The criterion was 'Crusader Kings'.

Of your three, Bohemond was not a king of any sort, Baldwin became a king only after the crusade's success, and I think Frederick II is not particularly known for being a crusader. Frederick II's 'crusade' was mostly a diplomatic coup, and I think pretty far from most people's mental picture of a crusader.

I would comfortably assert that the most famous 'Crusader Kings', by which I mean kings (or European monarchs of similar standing) who set out on a crusade, i.e. a military expedition to secure the Holy Land, are Richard the Lionheart and St. Louis.

Nor was Godfrey of Bouillon, by that standard. In fact, none of the figures of the First Crusade, by far the most successful and glorious, count. Incidentally, good call to drop Philip II from your list - he was one of the all-time-great sneaky bastards of the Middle Ages, and left the Crusade partly so he could break his Crusader oath and attack Richard's territory before he returned. Also the most successful king of the three monarchs you mention, though St. Louis had a good run of it. Barbarossa, I'd say, is probably the most Trumpian - or, more accurately, closest to Trump's enemies' depiction of him as a would-be tyrant trampling over "norms" - of your list, and the only Crusade he actually made it to was the perfidious shambles of the Siege of Damascus.

At this point, I think we've left whatever WhiningCoil's point was far behind and are engaging in mutually sperging out over medieval history which, as much as I enjoy it, probably isn't particularly productive.

Well, no, that's why I didn't mention Godfrey originally.

I give Philip II pretty good marks as King of France, I think. I just don't think he's synonymous with crusading the same way that Richard is. He went on a crusade to the Holy Land when it was politically convenient, abandoned it opportunistically when it was advantageous to him, and also dragged his feet and avoided participating in the Albigensian Crusade. I consider him a successful king overall, probably more so than Richard, but certainly his commitment to crusading was, at best, tactical.

Though now I'm wondering who I would consider the most Trumpian figures of the Middle Ages... it's an interesting question. Richard II sprang to my mind, but I may just be unduly influenced by Shakespeare there, in the portrayal of an erratic, absolutist king who struggles against his own government and advisors.

Frederick Barbarossa

Fought protracted wars against the towns of North Italy to keep them in quasi-vassalage, by the end of which he almost ruined them and himself and everyone was worse off. I kinda see parallels to the Trumpian tariffs, but it's admittedly vague.

One possibility: Trump lost his edge after being banned from Twitter. He used to be legitimately great at writing funny tweets, even if you don't agree with him. But Twitter is an ecosystem, and a skill, TruthSocial just isn't the same (I don't think I've ever seen anyone share a post from there that wasn't Trump). He's basically just talking to himself there, so his Tweeting skills are getting rusty.

His live standup insult comedy act is still top form, though. Did you see his meeting with the Japanese PM and journalists? Hilarious. He told an extremely crass joke with no hesitation or shame, off the cuff, and made it work.

Let's hope he delivers on this. But I am doubtful. But yeah - he is going insane. Which is much more entertaining than Biden's senility.

Which is much more entertaining than Biden's senility.

Say what you will about Trump, he is an S-tier showman

I rememeber when he was first running for office, the amount of analysis that the proper way to think of him was as a pro wrestling commentator.

Try watching Indian news coverage of the Iran-Israel war. I shit you not, when it first broke out, they were amping up the participants and playing this almost headbanger type music, you'd have thought it was a WWE event and the anchor was the announcer. First thing I did was scroll to the comment section and I was not disappointed.

Given that even the French Navy has been putting out MLG-360-noscope-style videos of drone tests and ship interdictions... which then get posted to Naval News and Maritime Executive, some of the drier news sites in existence... we certainly live in a unique era of history.

If you spend a lot of time with men entering dementia, it's pretty clear they're two sides of the same coin. Some old men shuffle quietly around, mumble unclear platitudes, and try to be unobtrusive and confusing enough that no one can figure out that they have no idea what is going on. Others get angry, yell, insist that they know what is going on; this works as a coping mechanism because eventually the rest of the family or the people at the nursing home realize that there's no point arguing it'll just upset grandpa more so let's just agree and then we'll figure it out once he's out of earshot.

Both are extremely problematic behaviors in the white house.

I know we sniped back and forth on the topic of the war so I am trying to think of a way to broach this topic in a somewhat non-confrontational way and I'm struggling.

Thinking Trump is in any way immersed in dementia is just tremendously non-credible.

As contrast consider Biden - he was basically hidden from the American people with an aggressive support by all levels of institutions and the press corp to minimize his symptoms. His last primary care note was also extremely concerning. He also barely worked.

Trump has everyone breathing down his neck, is constantly making himself publicly available in a variety of ways, is working a tremendously grueling schedule, and has had leaks of him going about his social life in his usual way.

He may not be the man he was ten years ago, but he's working harder and functioning better than a lot of men half his age. The stress may or may not be getting to him, where it may or may not have been before, but he ain't demented.

The vast majority of 80 year olds suffer from significant memory impairment. This isn't ground breaking news.

Simple way to keep this polite:

If Trump, as Commander in Chief with apparently sole authority to start a war and draft the strategy thereof, starts a war of choice against Iran and Iran ends up controlling better than a tenth of world oil transit in the peace deal, can we consider that simple evidence of cognitive impairment?

It's not obvious to me that this would be a worse outcome than them deploying nuclear ballistic missiles.

Doing things you don't like isn't evidence of cognitive impairment.

Running an incredibly demanding schedule is evidence of no cognitive impairment.

Either way - age related decline in cognition is not dementia.

So we're in agreement that there's age related cognitive decline, but you're correcting my use of the technical medical term in a casual way?

And to be clear, how do we judge a President's mental abilities if not by their fruits?

Major neuro-cognitive disorders (of which "dementia" is an example) are true pathology. They are generally irreversible, progressive, and ultimately life limiting (if something else doesn't get there first).

When someone says "dementia" it evokes the imagery of a dying grandma who can't remember who her kids are, or as you note other ways in which most people have seen family in their life decline.

Trump has probably lost a step and experienced a decline from his functioning ten years ago in a very normal way. It may be tempting to label this as "fine it is an exaggeration" but these are severely different categories. Your uncle Phillip who used to be razor sharp and stumbles over his words sometimes is not the dying grandma.

This is especially important because of what happened with Biden, who by all accounts is actually for real demented and wasn't fit to hold the job, vs. someone who is fit to hold the job in the sense that some people are unhappy with what he is doing and other people are happy. The dementia accusations are a lying TDS slur.

You can hate Trump and his plans without biting on the misinformation and idiocy.

All this to say: I think I'm just going to be unapologetically ruled by my aesthetic sense from now on, and say that we can allow some grace

It's like coming full circle. The pre-politically interested child who makes superficial comments about a politician's appearance had it right all along. "He blinks too much!" or "he's fat like Santa" was all the political philosophy you need, turns out.

Just so we're clear on the timeline here:

Saturday March 21, 2026, 7:44 PM (ultamatum expiring 7:44 PM Monday March 23, 2026) -

If Iran doesn’t FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS from this exact point in time, the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

Monday March 23, 2026, 7:23 AM (ultamatum exteded to Saturday March 28) -

I AM PLEASED TO REPORT THAT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE COUNTRY OF IRAN, HAVE HAD, OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS, VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST. BASED ON THE TENOR AND TONE OF THESE IN DEPTH, DETAILED, AND CONSTRUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS, WHICH WILL CONTINUE THROUGHOUT THE WEEK, I HAVE INSTRUCTED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD, SUBJECT TO THE SUCCESS OF THE ONGOING MEETINGS AND DISCUSSIONS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP

Thursday March 26, 2026, 4:11 PM (ultamatum extended to Monday April 6, 8:00 PM)

As per Iranian Government request, please let this statement serve to represent that I am pausing the period of Energy Plant destruction by 10 Days to Monday, April 6, 2026, at 8 P.M., Eastern Time. Talks are ongoing and, despite erroneous statements to the contrary by the Fake News Media, and others, they are going very well. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Sunday April 5, 2026, 12:38 PM (Ultamatum extended to Tuesday April 7, 8:00 PM)

Tuesday, 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time!

The other bit of context is that Iran has denied being in negotiations with the US wrt the tweet from the 23.

This does not mean that there were no negotiations (they lie just as much as Trump does), but seems to rule out negotiations which were going great.

Empirically, polities are willing to publicly state that they are in negotiations with an adversary long before they reach terms. Ukraine and Russia had negotiations. Israel and Hamas had negotiations.

If you can't even admit that you are negotiating, the chances that you are able to sell your country on a peace deal are basically nil.

also probably for purely aesthetic reasons

Aesthetics are a terrible way to judge a candidate.

It's true that Trump is behaving in a stupid and reckless way and this is causing considerable damage to America. Honest, capable, sober people can also cause considerable damage to America, perhaps even more damage. Even Mamdani can do a lot of damage to America. They just have bad values and so all their good qualities are worthless or even negative.

Would you prefer pointless wars for Israel but with a nicer facade? That's a Rubio presidency for you.

What about a serious, sober, effective campaign to wreck the criminal justice system, have DAs and prosecutors just put offenders out onto the streets to victimize normal people? That's boring, 'sensible' politics, that's what Soros has been doing, what Mamdani would probably do.

Consider Judge Russell Clark. In 1985 he decreed that since bussing (another sensible but torturous and massively harmful social experiment with predictably bad results) couldn't be mandated to desegregate Kansas inner-city schools, he would make city schools so attractive that white kids would voluntarily come back. He told the schools to buy everything they wanted without regard for cost. So they lowered student per teacher ratio, they built robotics clubs, swimming pools with underwater viewing rooms, a model UN with simultaneous translation capacity. Naturally this was paid for by doubling property taxes in the district. Somehow a judge had power to do that in the retarded American system where anything must be done to prevent segregation.

The results: an ocean of corruption, ballooning of administrative workers, administrative dysfunction, test scores no higher, somehow the inner city schools got even blacker than before. Dismal failure in all respects at the price of a few billion dollars.

I bet this judge is very sensible, very normal, a fine dinner guest. He's also a massive wrecker of society, squandering billions of dollars pointlessly. There are many similar stories in the US and around the world.

Just because something looks lawful and officially correct, it doesn't mean it's good. Trump can definitely be bad! But you should not assume that people who appear good actually are good.

Consider Europe. Run by very boring, sensible moderates. Run into the ground, fallen well behind the US, despite all the dumb wars and Trump and assorted incompetence. Real wreckers wear pantsuits.

I bet this judge is very sensible, very normal, a fine dinner guest. He's also a massive wrecker of society, squandering billions of dollars pointlessly. There are many similar stories in the US and around the world.

I'm reminded of a few lines from Boswell's Life of Johnson, emphasis mine because it's a fantastic line:

The genteelest characters are often the most immoral. Does not Lord Chesterfield give precepts for uniting wickedness and the graces? A man, indeed, is not genteel when he gets drunk; but most vices may be committed very genteelly: a man may debauch his friend's wife genteely: he may cheat at cards genteelly. [...] it may not be like a gentleman, but it may be genteel.

One means exteriour grace; the other honour. It is certain that a man may be very immoral with exteriour grace. Lovelace, in Clarissa, is a very genteel and a very wicked character. Tom Hervey, who died t'other day, though a vicious man, was one of the genteelest men that ever lived.

I always preferred Saint Augustine's rendition in City of God, "A man serves as many masters as he has vices,” if Dogmatic Theology is your thing. Or if you prefer Nihilism, there's always Tyler Durden, "The things you own, end up owning you." Or the Bodhidharma if Zen Buddhism is your thing, “All phenomenon are empty. They contain nothing worth valuing.” Or Charles Bukowski if Amerian literature is your thing, “Find what you love and let it kill you.” These are all logically identical statements when you run the full gamut of logical consequences under them.

Honest, capable, sober people can also cause considerable damage to America, perhaps even more damage. [...] They just have bad values and so all their good qualities are worthless or even negative.

This is part of why Trumpism and similar movements elsewhere came about; the Very Serious People responded to the financial crises of 2008, and subsequent public ire, by putting a seemingly-respectable façade on an ideology that effectively amounted to 'compassion and equality for groups that can be proportionally represented in the C-suites; ruthless social Darwinism for individuals, especially those who are not Members Of An Oppressed Group'.

Re Judge Clark, I'm going to invoke Chesterton's Fence on the American taboo against segregation.

After the end of Reconstruction, many Southern plantationists resented that they could no longer coerce unpaid labour from Black people at whip-point without a fig-leaf of a criminal conviction. Having racially-separated schools allowed them to subject black people to worse conditions than their white counterparts, and 'separate but equal' rarely if ever stayed equal for long. (There was one school district, I think in Texas, that gave the schools in Black areas names at the end of the alphabet, and then implemented improvements such as air-conditioning in alphabetical order!)

That does not mean that any particular method of desegregation is necessarily advisable, and I would be interested to hear any alternative you might have in mind.

That does not mean that any particular method of desegregation is necessarily advisable, and I would be interested to hear any alternative you might have in mind.

Literally anything but that one. Strictly speaking thé schools weren’t even segregated, thé neighborhoods were(and there was no way to fix that easily).

I wonder where the lib outcry about separation of powers was for that particular judge- like there was almost certainly a statutory mechanism for setting school budgets and taxes that he trampled all over.

Strictly speaking the schools weren’t even segregated, the neighborhoods were(and there was no way to fix that easily).

Gerrymander the school districts?

That was functionally what bussing was, and it was not only incredibly unpopular, it also didn't work.

Regarding desegregation, I'm really more thinking of all these books like 'White Girl Bleed a Lot' or 'Race War in High School' where the black kids go around beating and viciously bullying the white kids, setting teachers on fire. The knockout game where blacks randomly sucker-punch other races. Blacks stabbing white girls (recall Iryna), or shoving them onto train lines as in NY.

It strikes me as unfathomably unjust that the US system bends over backwards for even the biggest lowlifes if they're black. They give this hoodlum an extremely valuable heart transplant, (he was coming to hospital with an ankle monitor on!) they gave him a second life and he still managed to get himself killed by the age of 18.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/anthony-stokes-teen-who-got-heart-transplant-dies-car-chase-n334001

They gave Kansas city an enormous amount of money for the sake of trying to get blacks and whites to be together harmoniously and it failed. How many lifetimes does a couple billion dollars represent, how many millions of hours of labour does that represent?

And yet the narrative is clearly that whites are in the wrong here, it's projected so loudly that it's international. It was compulsory for me in Australia to be taught about Rosa Parks not wanting to sit on the back of the bus despite it being on the other side of the world.

Well here are some of the things I read, letters that Flaherty publishes in his books:

I am a white teacher working in an almost exclusively black middle school. In May of 2012, I left my classroom in an ambulance after two fighting students ran around the room at full speed and plowed into me, knocking me to the ground.

I sustained permanent back injuries and had a knee operation.  This year, instead of remedial reading classes (I am a reading teacher), I was assigned full classes. From mid-September, I have been subjected to almost daily race baiting, racial and sexual taunts, threats, and attacks.

Students chase me and each other around the room with table legs, threaten to kill my “three ugly little niggers”, follow me to my car in groups shouting racial epithets and “get in a white school, bitch”.  Requests to sit in a seat are met with, “Oh, it’s cause I’m black” or “Why you hate black people?”  I often hear, “Imma gonna slap this white bitch”, etc.

On Oct 30, a 7th grade girl with a history of incidents against me had just returned from suspension (she had sprayed me in the face with perfume after telling me that I “smell like old white pussy”) and got angry when I changed her seat.

She said, “Oh, this damn bitch is all up in my face startin’ her shit. Imma gonna kick her fuckin’ white ass”. She then got up and gave a long racially charged diatribe about how she “can do whatever I want to the white bitch and the school can’t do nothin’. It’s just a damn school and I’m about to kick this bitch’s white ass ‘cuz I am DONE with the damn bitch”.

She ended her rant by shoving past me and shoving me to the floor.

Incidents such as these are written off as “poor instruction” or “poor planning”. When I discussed this situation with my (Black) principal, she said, “I doubt they even know you are white.” She also said, “I have to wonder if you are able to really to engage the young people – do they LIKE the work you give?”

I know other teachers who are in similar situations who are also fed up.

There's quite clearly bad blood between blacks and whites in the US and I think they should be kept well away from eachother. Ironically enough I say that segregation was the Chesterton's fence that was broken. And then all these people get stabbed and killed and raped and beaten up, get gaslighted about their racism and have to pay all this money to government programs that fight racism.

Interesting set of anecdotes. If you are not in favour of desegregation, what alternative would you propose for ensuring that the Black schools are not systematically neglected as they were prior to Brown?

Ironically enough I say that segregation was the Chesterton's fence that was broken.

But in that case, the people tearing down the fence do know why it was put up; that's why they want to tear it down!

Why would it matter if black schools were neglected, what's the worst that could happen? Are blacks going to complain more about racism? They already do that a lot.

Is all this top black engineering and technical talent going to be lost? That would be surprising. I don't recall seeing many black names writing AI papers or earning STEM Nobels.

That's exactly what I brought up originally, spending all this money making the most amazingly well-equipped inner-city black schools in Kansas didn't help raise test scores or promote racial harmony. So why bother?

So why bother?

Because it's the right thing to do.

Because while some Black people will grow up to be criminals even with well-run schools, and some Black people will educate themselves even if they attend poorly-run schools, there are almost certainly a large number who could go either way.

Because if Black people are systematically denied the tools necessary to support themselves, and they thus turn to crime, the Blue Tribe will be more sympathetic to their sob stories and be that much harder to convince that anything ought to be done about crime committed by Black people.

Because somewhere in the U. S., there are future versions of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, and they deserve a proper education just as much as white children do.

Because a society which stomps on its ethnic minorities risks seeing karma hand it its own arse.

Because if Black people are systematically denied the tools necessary to support themselves, and they thus turn to crime

What tools are these, exactly? Are you saying they turn to crime because their 1950s schools didn't get aircon quickly enough? Or that the student-teacher ratio isn't good enough? If you're upset about my use of anecdote earlier, why not use some statistics? We could compare the crime rates of blacks in the top 10% of income to whites in the bottom 10%, see if the 'tools necessary to support themselves' argument holds up.

In fact, blacks get worshipped in the US, they're treated like gods. Mere mortals aren't allowed to say their magic words, only they can call eachother 'niggers'. The press invent new rules for capitalizing black while refusing the same for whites.

The media goes out of their way to decry anything bad that happens to them. There are movies and laws and constant updates on the Emmett Hill case. And likewise, extraordinary effort goes into valorizing anything they do well, well beyond the point of historical distortion. Some blacks in menial roles in the Apollo program are not a big deal. It was German rocket scientists and white men making electronics or rocket boosters that were the overwhelming contributors to the moon landing. I can only imagine the comical scenes of these writers looking for some black women to valorize, going through the records: 'Werner von Braun, director of the space centre, no (far too white and Nazi), Arthur Rudolph who oversaw the rocket development process, no (another Nazi), George Mueller who managed the development process and introduced all-up testing, well he is at least not a German but he's still white... Dr Jack Crenshaw, hmm well he actually did what we want to ascribe to black women regarding circumlunar trajectories with a computer and not a slide-rule - still too white and male, OK let's pretend that some black women who just worked in double-checking actually were important figures"

Some white kid gets executed by a black and odds are nobody ever hears about it. Blacks do something bad and they're 'teens', 'youths', 'crazed maniacs' or just forgotten by history. Blacks get given cushy DEI jobs and can scarcely be fired without legally ruinous accusations of discrimination. There are constant inquisitions into industries that don't have enough blacks.

They get perhaps the cushiest treatment of any minority group in history despite their terrible behaviour and incompetence. They're not getting stomped on at all. 'Not getting white people's money to support their school districts' is not the same as being stomped on. Certainly not when spending more money fails to have any noticeable effect.

I see acceptable aesthetics as a necessary but not sufficient criterion.

Suppose you are interviewing for a job, and I come in in clothes which I have been wearing for a week which have tomato sauce on them. For most positions, this would instantly disqualify me, and rightly so.

If instead I come in dressed acceptably that does not mean I am actually qualified to do the job, and it would be very foolish to simply hire the best-dressed person (unless you are hiring a fashion designer, perhaps).

Trump tweets like a deranged lunatic. Of course someone who instead wrote masterful sonnets could have policies which were just as bad, but this does not mean that we should just ignore that fact.

Suppose you are interviewing for a job, and I come in in clothes which I have been wearing for a week which have tomato sauce on them. For most positions, this would instantly disqualify me, and rightly so.

If I'm hiring someone to reverse engineer the firmware of a competitor's product, I'm hiring whoever is the most competent for the job, even if it means hiring the sexually deranged catboy wearing programming socks. And for something like reverse engineering firmware, I'd venture a guess that somewhere in the range of 50 to 75 percent of the qualified candidates are catboys (or aesthetically similar).

The same goes for fixing the rot in Western Civilization. The overwhelming majority of candidates capable of fixing it are going to share a lot of Trump's bull in a china shop aesthetics, it's just kind of the nature of the sorts of people capable of what is needed. Sure, some candidate with will and ability to get things done and with the aesthetics of JFK might exist out there, but I'm not going to vote for Democrats that will keep deepening the rot in the meantime while I wait.

And for something like reverse engineering firmware, I'd venture a guess that somewhere in the range of 50 to 75 percent of the qualified candidates are catboys (or aesthetically similar).

Doubt it; I've known quite a few people good at that kind of thing (including myself) and none of them have been catboys or anything similar. Even SREs, who seem to have more than their share, don't reach 50% catboy. Maybe if you include bronies, but you can't tell all of them by looking.

I come in in clothes which I have been wearing for a week which have tomato sauce on them

the sexually deranged catboy wearing programming socks

One of these things is not like the other....

If I'm hiring someone to reverse engineer the firmware of a competitor's product, I'm hiring whoever is the most competent for the job, even if it means hiring the sexually deranged catboy wearing programming socks. And for something like reverse engineering firmware, I'd venture a guess that somewhere in the range of 50 to 75 percent of the qualified candidates are catboys (or aesthetically similar).

The same goes for fixing the rot in Western Civilization.

Sure, when you're hiring a guy who will never leave his basement or some other coding lair, you'd hire whoever. But when you hire the face of the PR juggernaut to promote your new rip-off of your competitor's product, you're more likely to hire someone based on their aesthetic appeal to your target market. This isn't likely to be a deranged catboy.

Part of the job of being a civic leader is instilling/perpatuating/reinforcing faith in the civic model, because without civics we have tribalism. Our leaders should not only promote positive policies, but they should create a sense of faith in the system and appear level-headed while doing difficult things.

Even if Trump doesn't trigger some kind of global apocalypse, his corrosive approach to his civic responsibilities is, IMO, absolutely cancerous and likely to poison our system for a generation or more.

As a conservo-libertarian, I assume that any politician is going to be somewhat corrupt given the size of our current government. While we shouldn't accept corruption, it is far better to have Dick Cheney-like corruption -- quiet, background corruption by adults who are otherwise concerned with oiling an effective civic machine -- than the loud, fuck you, baby-ish corrution of Trump, who clearly cares about nothing and no one other than what serves him in the moment.

I disagree, I think the big problem with the Trump administration is not the corruption but the policies. The US is a pretty rich country, there's lots of room for corruption, sophisticated or babyish. California corruption makes Trump look like a mewling infant dipping a single toe in the water. In fact I think Trump's deregulatory stances probably will do much more to help the US economy than his corruption will harm it.

Going on about anexxing Greenland, trade war with the world, war with Iran. That's where the problems arise.

And all of those things are driven by Trump or his advisor's ideological stances, not their greed. Trump wanting a legacy as a man who expanded the US territorially, Lutnick's/Trump's skepticism of trade and the Israeli/neocon faction yammering about regime change in Iran - that's where the problems emerge. Sure there's insider trading and these policies are pursued in a corrupt way. But corruption is not even 0.1% of the damage. The policies are the damage.

If Trump truly cared about nothing besides what served him in the moment he'd be 10 times the president he is now.

Maybe Duublya had a stutter, you can get an aphorism wrong and it's fine. It's ok. That being the case, if any politician in the future sits down and types out something as fucking sauceless and cringe and gross as "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP" and thinks "This is great, fucking SEND IT"; they should probably go back to screaming at the cocain ghosts in an alleyway stop blighting our eyes with their garbage.

Yes, and people had the same "ew low social status!" intuition when Dubya pronounced it "noo-KYOO-lahr" instead of "NOO-clee-uhr," talked in a texas twang, dared to have big funny poke-out ears, and gave people nicknames like "Turd Blossom". You're just finding the most recent instantiation of it, and it will forever be a dysphemism treadmill where the current departure from the zeitgeist is the WORST THING EVER while the previous instances are actually not so bad in retrospect (because no longer the focus of the social eye of sauron), or even maybe garner a "strange new respect." It's all so tiresome.

It seems that the aesthetics someone chooses to project and their aesthetic sense (taste? values?) are better predictors of what they will do and who they really are than anything else.

Ah yes, that's why Lucky Strike cigarettes are just empirically better than Virginia Slims. Don't you know, they choose to project the most modern and sleek aesthetics, and, haven't you heard, They're Toasted!

You say that, but if people had payed attention to their low social status intuition during the election, we would be in a much better timeline. We wouldn't have had a country fried moron declaring "MIssion Accomplished" Before immediately spending an ocean of money and and blood to accomplish nothing and then deregulating so hard that the invisible hand shit itself and died in 2008.

Maybe Gore would have fucked up, maybe not; but bush did! He fucked up at every turn! The only reasons the devil didn't pull him straight to hell loony toons style was PEPFAR balancing his karma so hard!

You are bringing up a case where the elitists were correct!

The alternative to the actual blunders of history isn't necessarily "everything working out perfectly"; it's likely "things still go completely pearshaped, but in different ways or to different degrees." In particular, if you looked at the candidates' foreign policy proposals in 2000 without foreknowledge, you wouldn't have assumed that Bush would be the one to go hog wild with occupying Iraq and Afghanistan for a generation. Gore, and the Clinton administration of which he was fundamentally a continuation, were the ones who got us involved in Kosovo, and had a foreign policy team full of "R-2-P" Liberal Interventionist types like Samantha Power.

And worse, Gore was (and remains) a climate lunatic. I'm still waiting for the Arctic ice-free summers Gore predicted would likely happen 15 years ago. Insofar as anything has been propping up the U.S. economy recently, it's been the US energy renaissance driven by shale oil and natural gas. With Gore as president, that likely never happens and indeed the U.S. might have gone the same route as the Germans recently and completely slit our own throats in a wild chase after renewables which, whatever you may think of them in the abstract, have not proved to be the panacea they were alleged to be.

Very funny to see people trying to normalize Trump's behavior by comparing him to Dubya, or doing the usual "but the libs", or "TDS". We're not in Kansas any more, this isn't about stutters or being uncouth, Dubya had nothing on this guy, irrespective of bad faith criticism and outright slander by his opponents. Trump 2.0 is a sui generis in American history, whether in his ineptitude, corruption, or malice (or, yes, aesthetics). And the only TDS I see at this point is unquestioning, defensive loyalty to Trump that has become completely untethered from his faithfulness to any policy line – except, perhaps, owning said libs, making them seethe. But perhaps that's all there was to it from the start? Conservatives felt bullied, mocked. Conservatives were fed Romney-style polite retreat or, if they grew intellectually curious, Moldbuggian defeatism about Cthulhu swimming left inexorably, like a law of nature, about the Elite Human Capital destined to convert their kids into hating their bloodline. Conservatives wanted to know how it feels to be on the other side of the boot – just once. And so long as Trump grants them this wish, so long as the moment of ecstasy continues uninterrupted, he can do no wrong.
This is pretty much how Palestinians saw Oct 7. When you're convinced, rightly or wrongly, that you're a desperate underdog, no manner of retaliation feels unjust or unwise – punching up, as libs like to put it. Of course, Israeli politics are the same, perfected, elevated to the core of religious doctrine – eternal righteous lashing-out of a cornered rat, since the Holocaust, since Titus, since the Pharaoh. Iranians are lashing out against the Satan Duo and the entire global economy now. Russians imagined themselves boxed in by NATO, post-colonial third worldists chafe under the White Man's revealed superiority and asserted colonial sins, the Chinese are fantasizing about revenge for the Century of Humiliation… Perhaps the root of evil is plebeian resentment as such. Elites that can feel it themselves are an unacceptable hazard, and political systems that reward fanning and exploiting this loser sentiment are powder kegs. What can stop this? Fukuyamists hoped it'll be the sheer sedating comfort of the unfathomably rich liberal democratic order. Didn't work. Christianity offered some lofty words about forgiveness, but Christianity is now a garish Easter Bunny mascot that ushers in gleeful war crimes on Passover. Praise be to Allah, I guess.

Trump 2.0 is a sui generis in American history, whether in his ineptitude, corruption, or malice (or, yes, aesthetics).

I mean, there are definitely comparisons you can make to past historical eras. Andrew Jackson's presidency has a lot of Trump parallels: non-politician elected to the presidency, political scandals that became loyalty tests for supporters, non-normative uses of presidential powers, firing large amounts of federal employees and putting in their own guys instead, disagreement with the central bank of the US, etc., etc.

And surely some of the presidents we had at the height of the machine politics era of US history were at least as corrupt as Trump is? Perhaps they had more decorum about it, but corruption is corruption.

I think Trump has been uniquely bad in terms of foreign policy by a pretty massive degree, and this is absolutely the worst time for the US to have bad foreign policy. And it's not even that he's got a strategy that he's competently carrying out but it's a bad policy, it's that he seems to not have a policy and yet is doing so many erratic things that damage US foreign relations that he might as well be taking a wrecking ball to the country. Jackson was pretty bad on domestic policy, but Trump is worse on foreign policy. At least Jackson actually had a military record behind him.

If you have to go all the way to Jackson…

But America was a bit player back then. I am not sure even Jackson would have been such a jackass in charge of the global hegemon.

Does the ‘flavor’ of jackass really matter in this sense?

We're not in Kansas any more, this isn't about stutters or being uncouth

Yeah, that's the kind of thing people said when Dubya was compared to his father, whether it be the vomiting incident or the broccoli one. Yes, each Republican will be worse than the last, I understand.

Trump 2.0 is a sui generis in American history, whether in his ineptitude, corruption, or malice (or, yes, aesthetics).

He's not inept at all, but if he were, there's always Herbert Hoover to compare. Corrupt? Warren G. Harding, Nixon, Clinton. Malice? Gonna have to go with Obama and Biden for domestic malice, and FDR for foreign.

And until MAGA people start raping (eww) and killing the libs, I believe Palestinian comparisons are extreme hyperbole.

Yeah, that's the kind of thing people said when Dubya was compared to his father, whether it be the vomiting incident or the broccoli one. Yes, each Republican will be worse than the last, I understand.

Just so I understand, too:

While attending a banquet hosted by Japanese prime minister Kiichi Miyazawa on January 8, 1992, U.S. president George H. W. Bush fainted after vomiting onto Miyazawa's lap at around 20:20 JST. The incident took place at the Naikaku Sōri Daijin Kōtei in Tokyo, the Prime Minister's personal residential quarters. Doctors later attributed the incident to a case of acute gastroenteritis.

"During his tenure as the 41st president of the United States, George H. W. Bush frequently mentioned his distaste for broccoli, famously saying: "I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid. And my mother made me eat it."

And now:

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP […] A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.

Is that it? Is your reaction to a claim that the latter is qualitatively worse than the former just an eyeroll about those pearl-clutching libs with TDS who nitpick at gaffes and bully awkward Republican presidents?

Have you considered that it is in fact possible for your side to be getting considerably worse over time, or rather, that specifically Trump is worse than Dubya?

Do you have any absolute frame of reference, or is it just anchored to the current intensity of lib chatter?

It seems to be common knowledge that the Left had in some ways gotten worse over time. Do you say it's a priori implausible the same has happened on your team?

Trump is uncouth. He's more uncouth than any president since Lyndon Baines Johnson. But that is all that it is.

What future observations would change your mind?

No, if you want to change my mind it's your job to convince me, not my job to hand you levers with which do to so.

Ideally, I don't do anything to convince you. Ideally, you will have a mental model of what the actual physical world will look like, and then you will notice what that model predicts about the physical world, and then you will look at the world and at those predictions and see whether they align with each other. The world in which Trump is crashing out and likely to lash out in counterproductive ways looks different from the one in which he's playing six dimensional chess. I am asking you to determine, in advance, what you think each one looks like. What will Trump definitely not do?

You don't even have to write it down. But if you find yourself resistant to making those advance predictions, even in the privacy of your own head, I think you should interrogate that resistance.

Ideally, perhaps. But in practice if I give out a lever -- for example, suppose I say I'd change my mind if Trump used nuclear weapons -- that lever will be used to abuse me. For what should be a silly example but is actually similar a discussion I've been part of, someone will say I SHOULD change my mind or be foresworn because depleted uranium penetrators were used.

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It was a different time, with fewer cameras around, but to quote Robert Caro's Master of the Senate:

Even at college, where sexual boastfulness is a staple of campus existence, Lyndon Johnson's boastfulness -- and exhibitionism about his sexual prowess -- had been striking to his fellows. Exhibiting his penis to his roommates, Johnson called it "Jumbo"; returning to his room after a date, he would say "Jumbo had a real workout tonight" ... If he was urinating in a bathroom of the House Office Building and a colleague came in, Johnson, finishing, would sometimes turn to him with his penis in his hand. Without putting it back in his pants, he would begin a conversation, still holding it, "and shaking it, as if he was showing off," said one man with whom he did this. He asked another man, "Have you ever seen anything as big as this?"

There are some further LBJ anecdotes in that book and others. IMO that's at least a bit more uncouth than Trump's behavior in public office. But only a bit.

I don't doubt that Trump is uncouth, nor do I have strong opinions about whether Trump is the most uncouth president. The thing I doubt is that being uncouth is all that's going on with Trump.

the only TDS I see at this point is unquestioning, defensive loyalty to Trump that has become completely untethered from his faithfulness to any policy line – except, perhaps, owning said libs, making them seethe.

This really feels like it. There were some people who were genuinely interested in MAGA from a policy perspective, but they've been slowly boiled away by Trump's capriciousness, while others may have started out with principles only to slowly jettison them over time while still remaining on board Trump's coalition out of either misplaced loyalty or revealed preferences. Now it really is just 90% Catturd-esque "he makes my outgroup seethe and I LOVE it!!!" like you say with a small thin slice of policies here and there that he still holds to. He still has immigration somewhat, but it's in a "he's better than Democrats" sense rather than "he's actually doing the policies I want" sense.

But the really blackpilling fact is that despite all this, Trump's coalition remains sizeable. Nearly half of Americans are fine with Trump's foolishness, and while Dems can't get away with quite as much as Trump they have their own sizeable base of ultra-loyal followers.

The persistant MAGA followers that I know personally think that the U.S./Global Elite are so far past the point of redemption (see: elite Satantic pedophile cults) that they theoretically welcome the Trumpian apocalypse while also failing to comprehend how terrible it could get. I suppose most airmchair revolutionaries suffer the common delusion that they will somehow emerge unscathed, or assume that they will be painlessly transported to their righteous place in heaven if things go shitward. So, yes, they love to see the liberals seethe and that feeds them, but they also feel like nothing is worth saving so why not back the bull in the china shop?

I don’t think it’s untethered. It’s more complicated because the big reason that no conservative wants to criticize Trump is sort of that the Libs have been screeching about Trump hating democratic values since … he first ran for office. They’ve done everything they can think of to call the man evil and stupid at the same time. And the feeling seems less that “MAGA Republicans are in a cult” and more “Why should they do the enemies’s work for him?” Jews feel the same about criticizing Israel. They know the rest of the world doesn’t like them much and wishes that state would just go away, so they know any negative statements made will be used to paint Israel and by extension Jews as evil and manipulative and secretly running the world etc. so why should a Jew feed antisemitism? No people want to make their tribe an easy target.

Trump 2.0 is a sui generis in American history, whether in his ineptitude, corruption, or malice (or, yes, aesthetics).

Hah, no. This is what historical, actual American democracy looks like. The post-FDR bureaucratic-imperial interlude was just a momentary blip.

A couple of months ago I argued here that the reevaluation and demythologization of Reagan's legacy is something the Republicans have not yet faced up to. Assuming this will ever be done at some point, I think the same assessment of Dubya will also need to happen.

All this to say: I think I'm just going to be unapologetically ruled by my aesthetic sense from now on, and say that we can allow some grace.

Your terms are acceptable.

What's wrong with Admiral Levine's aesthetic? The impression I get from her is of an outwardly-stern but decent grandmother.

Yeah, that's not an appropriate aesthetic for a man in a position of power.

Is it appropriate for a woman in power?

Yeah, but how is that relevant to what we're discussing?

Because that just brings us back to the question of whether the Admiral is a man or a woman, and whether it is appropriate to consider the biological factors correlated with that question.

If he chose to come to work in blackface, would I have to answer the question of whether he's black or white, and whether it is appropriate to consider biological factors correlated with that question?

The impression I get from him is that he's a corrupt bureaucrat who leaned on a medical organisation to manipulate their recommendations of best practices for political reasons, not to conform with the best medical evidence available.

The impression I get from him is that he's a shameless hypocrite who wants to prevent young children from ever having children of their own while freely admitting he can't imagine life without his own children.

The impression I get from him is that he's an autogynephile whose wife predictably divorced him shortly after his "coming out", as she had no interest in playing along with his delusions/roleplay/whatever.

That's substance, though, not just aesthetics.

Well, I think the third point is aesthetics, but I see your point.

...whose wife predictably divorced [her] shortly after [her] "coming out", as she had no interest in playing along....

Or she is very much not a lesbian....

Lesbians aren't sexually or romantically interested in male people, regardless of how they "identify".

Funny how so recently you were speaking so dismissively of the "cotton ceiling" people and how they don't represent all trans people/all trans activists. Now you've just outed yourself as one of them.

In the specific case of Mrs Levine, the possibility to which I was alluding was that, not being a lesbian (or bisexual, which I probably should have included), she is only interested in a male partner, and defines that not to include transwomen.

In the general case, some lesbians, and some straight men, are attracted to natal-anatomy!women, some to current-anatomy!women, some to appearance/'presentation'!women, and some to identity!women; mutatis mutandis for gay men and straight women and various definitions of men.

The 'cotton-ceilingers' are objecting not to the non-existence of the latter categories but to the existence of the former, and my response to them is the same as to those who object to the existence of people who don't pursue intimate relationships across racial boundaries.

my response to them

Your response to whom?

my response to them is the same

... which is?

Your response to whom?

Someone who objects to someone else being willing to date a cis-woman but not a trans-woman.

This is isomorphic to someone objecting to someone else being willing to date a white person but not a black person; both 'a lesbian (or a straight man) not being intimate with trans-women (or a gay man or straight woman not being intimate with trans men)' and 'a white person not dating black people' are personal decisions, and neither, in itself, is an act of wrongdoing.

Thus, my response to both "Lesbian!Alice won't date trans women" and "White!Bob won't date Black women" is the Minnesota Golden Rule.

I suppose that Levine is getting praise as "first female" and being transgender that accolade is a little sketchy, if one feels that trans female is not the same as cis female:

On 19 October 2021, Levine was commissioned as a four-star admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, becoming the first openly transgender four-star officer in any of the United States uniformed services as well as the first female four-star admiral in the Commissioned Corps.

Though at least in uniform their appearance is not quite as baldly "guy in a dress", due to late transition.

All this to say: I think I'm just going to be unapologetically ruled by my aesthetic sense from now on, and say that we can allow some grace.

Oh, welcome then! I have some great picks for you. Real aesthetes, if you can only overlook some minor issues. Have some d'Annunzio, some Mussolini, some [insert 1930s Japanese leader]!

No! Those are all gross pencil necked chickenhawk NERDS playing at being big strong men, they're so strong guys, you don't understand, I can bench 450, you don't get it. Fuck those guys!

Give me an FDR or a TR or a lincoln or a Eisenhower or a Degaulle, if you want suggest a muscular authoritarian type!

FDR

Beautiful shitposting there.

NO! Well, yes, but also no.

FDR qualifies because dude was dropping banger lines all the time AND he was your kindly uncle who had his shit together and wanted the best for you, but also knew better than you and WAS better than you, and you better never fukin forget it. His vibes were immaculate.

I mean, don't get me wrong, he had some great points, but I don't think he was benching 450 as a "muscular authoritarian type". At least not the image most people have of him...

We know that NOW, but at the time they were doing movie magic to imply he wasn't President hotwheels and besides that: only fools and weaklings believe that muscularity exists in the body. You are muscular in your SOUL, you emanate muscle vibrations into the world. that's why so many ripped gym dudes come off as little bitches. they failed to train the most important muscle: the indomitable spirit.

Well you're not wrong, I'll give you Degaulle and Theodor Roosevelt, easily. But I thought the point was valuing aesthetics over performance?

It's hard to say, because Lincoln and FDR are kinda baked in as aesthetic icons of strength, given the situation. Same with Churchill and Stalin.

The aesthetics are how you perform your character for others to see. That's why I give the nod to FDR and lincoln, although it's impossible to say if that is post-facto given how baked in they are as pillars of american aesthetic virtue

Over time, I've lost faith in religion. I no longer believe in deontology.

I am not sure what is this about. If one evaluates Christianity, it is at worst a mix of deontology and virtue ethics.

I doubt objectivism. I don't think consequentialism produces meaningfully outcomes. I find modernism passe. The rationalists seem kinda irrational. I've done the calculations: utilitarianism doesn't math out.

I wholeheartedly agree

I think I'll have to RTVRN to tradition: I think Plato might have had it. Maybe Aesthetics as Virtue was the true path all along.

Again, it seems that you discovered virtue ethics. Christianity - or at least Catholicism - specifically talks about transcendentals of Good, Truth and Beauty. This is basic Thomas Aquinas, he talks about concepts related to beauty such as Claritas, Integritas, Consonantia, Honestas and their relation to the other transcendentals and also toward deontological concepts such as duty. For example if you act in accordance to your duty (of let's say POTUS) you radiate Claritas. It is often cited concept where duty formed by reason forms something beautiful when in action - e.g. when a worker honestly and dutifully pursues his craft, he creates beauty. One can also say the same about politics as a craft.

There is also great deal of wisdom in Catholic teaching when it comes to aesthetic morality. While sin is ugly, it can also lead to a dangerous sin of pride. Sometimes seeing ugly things all around you means something lacking on your part, inability of you as an observer to honestly judge correct aesthetics. In a sense it is lack of your inner beauty, replacing it with ugly sin of pride, which prevents you to see the harmony even in supposedly ugly things.

The final resting place of TDS: acceptance that it was just aesthetic snobbery all along. The greatest political actor in the US since FDR, vanquished both parties, slew the Bush and the Clinton dynasties, co-opted the Kennedies, rewrote the political playbook and realigned the party system, the international treaty system and US policies more generally. One day they'll probably teach this little banger in 300-level poly-sci classes, in the same chapter as the Fireside Chats.

So gauche!

It so happens that if you are too stupid and malicious to consider consequences, you can do a hell of a lot as the president of the United States of America. You can do great things indeed. The greatest. It's a tremendous force, this office.

For example, you can kill a whole civilization.

You can realign everything into a crooked parody of itself. You can throw a temper tantrum and wreck international treaties, replacing them with your preferred club of third world kleptocrats. Easy-peasy. The hard part is getting into that office, but thankfully even the smart Americans have grown tired of treating things seriously, and so happily elected a random moron.

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again

This is genocidal rhetoric. What do you even say at this point? We are clearly in the wrong. Trump has disgraced America more than anyone before him. The Republican Party may be over for the next decade. Perhaps endless immigration will simply be our punishment from God for allowing the bloodthirsty to occupy the government.

Yes more than actual genocidal presidents.

Netanyahu is not an American president.

I know you hate the joos but I was referencing the the trail of tears

Supposing that Jackson’s actions did constitute genocide, there are 200 years of moral progress separating our era from his, which I think does make Trump’s threat of eternal civilizational destruction more shameful.

I think that's exactly what he's talking about:

... I was referencing the the trail of tears

That's "at the expense" and tail end of things that sits on a pile of injustices and atrocities where the flag of "progress" gets planted.

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Will need some kind of truth and reconciliation process after this. Can't have another weak Democrat administration pretending it never happened.

I don't agree with you must of the time but the GOP won't be over for the next decade. I know it feels that way in the present but it isn't true. You're looking at him through the prism of seeing a sitting American president. The people that elected him elected a wrecking ball, not a suit that focus group's every third sentence. That isn't what they wanted. When people say "... but Kamala's platform was better than Trump's...," that presumes there's political will and integrity behind the candidate and their administration. People need to touch and feel tangible results in their own life to believe that the political system is working for them. Saying "fiscal spending is going to increase $200 billion for clean energy initiatives," is empty when compared to a $1,200 COVID stimulus check that shows up in people's bank accounts.

The Republican Party may be over for the next decade.

Press X to doubt. 2 reasons:

  1. Any foolishness from the side of Republicans will be seized on by the Dems to be more foolish themselves. It'll allow them greater leeway to hang themselves politically by supporting nonsense like defacto open borders or wokeness 2.0 or whatever else they can cook up with. Then that'll alienate more people, and we'll be back to equilibrium.

  2. MAGA voters could choose to end this war at any time by aggressively protesting what Trump is doing, threatening to withhold support, etc. Trump listens to them in broad strokes, and becomes much more TACO-y when he senses the ground shifting beneath him. So far though, MAGA has not done this. It's going along with the Iran war despite the massive hypocrisy of many MAGAs of previously being isolationist. There's a few tiny cracks and some softening support here and there, but Trump's base remains relatively united behind Trump.

A lot of major conservative names have actually defected here. Here's Candace Owens calling for the 25th amendment over his comments. Tucker Carlson is calling on troops to disobey these types of orders. Theo Von has been extremely against the war in Iran (I havent yet seen any comments on this recent but specifically)

They're the 3rd, 7th and 11th most listened to podcast on Spotify in the US.

It's not just the traditional podcasters either, for example here's Alex Jones. You can find plenty of major conservatives, many who have been conservative way before Trump even was, who oppose this war.

It is true that Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones have large audiences, and that most of these audiences are Red Tribe.

It is also true that they are opposed to the war with Iran, and yet we are having a war with Iran, and at least to date that war is overwhelmingly popular with Red Tribe.

I do not see how it is possible to claim that Red Tribe is both taking Owens, Carlson, and Jones' arguments as authoritative, and also overwhelmingly supporting a way they vehemently oppose.

So let us speak plainly here: is it your argument that Red Tribe should be taking Owens, Carlson, and Jones' arguments as authoritative? If so, why do you, yourself, personally, think that would be a good idea?

Bonus Question: One of your more notable posts, in my opinion, was your extensive arguments that Red Tribe is increasingly converging on anti-semitism of the Fuentes/groyper variety. I believe I've previously noted that I consider this one of the worst arguments I've seen on this forum in quite some time, but have not yet had the time for engaging with the substance of your arguments in detail (or indeed with most other arguments, sadly.) Still, pursuant to such engagement, could you elaborate on your personal understanding of the nexus between Israeli government influence and Trump's decision to go to war with Iran?

It is also true that they are opposed to the war with Iran, and yet we are having a war with Iran

Opposition to the war doesn't really matter that much, especially when there's a disconnect between the average politician and the voters anyway. It's the politician who decides until their time is up and they might get replaced, and as we're seeing with the midterms Trump is increasingly losing influence in that area.

at least to date that war is overwhelmingly popular with Red Tribe.

Confidence and support are still falling and that's despite the selection bias that people who change their minds don't always show up as mind changers, because they retcon it to begin with. The increased dissatisfaction among independents isn't just independents turning sour, but also sour republicans who turn more independent. And independent registration is at the highest ever because of dissatisfaction by otherwise Dem and GOP leaning voters. People who are upset leave, the tribe shrinks and election chances get worse even if the inner tribe circle jerking gets stronger.

Bonus Question: One of your more notable posts, in my opinion, was your extensive arguments that Red Tribe is increasingly converging on anti-semitism of the Fuentes/groyper variety

It's simple, Israel is not the average Jew, especially the average American Jew. I believe in personal responsibility and some random Joe Stein who works in accounting or whatever holds absolutely zero responsibility whatsoever for the Israeli government's influence on US politics. Antisemitism, like all bigotries, is mostly based around blaming groups instead of individuals.

Like imagine a world where Nazi theories were correct and powerful secret elites did control Germany and were corrupting it, and those elites were all Jews. Even if that were true, it would not suddenly make it ok to round up a bunch of random Jewish people, including many children, and just kill them. There is no world where literal babies and newborns could have done anything wrong, and yet they died too.

Confidence and support are still falling and that's despite the selection bias that people who change their minds don't always show up as mind changers, because they retcon it to begin with.

I voted for Trump because he promised no foreign interventionism and I thought Trump 1 was better than Biden, and have regretted it immensely. Unfortunately, there aren't many people who are willing to listen to this; strong Trump supporters hold this to be traitorous, and Democrats don't provide much of a runway for people who had reasons to support Trump but feel betrayed, because they were already on the bandwagon of anyone who voted for Trump is evil. Retconning your vote is basically the only pathway to being respected, so it's not surprising people are doing it. Trump is a phenomenon that has to be survived, because he has a stranglehold on his base. Hopefully the country survives.

That said, unfortunately the anti-war movement on the right has coalesced around antisemites and undesirables like Carlson and Owens, who oppose this war, like the local antisemites, because they believe Iran is a necessary counterweight to Israel which is the country they actually care about. I'm anti-war for reasons that rhyme with leftist views; I hate the American foreign policy apparatus, I believe it is a force for evil in the US, and I believe it does damage to the world while not aiding actual American interests. So it's frustrating to see that the right's anti-war impulses are being redirected into a shape that blames the problems of American foreign policy on THE JEWS!!! and not, for instance, the military-industrial complex, the blob, and the deep state.

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You're correct that there have been some defections, but even Tucker Carlson has been pulling his punches, going more for the "bad boyars" critiques rather than directly criticizing Trump. And polling has shown that most of the rank-and-file support the war, at least as of a few weeks ago. Self-reported MAGAs were 92% in favor of continuing the war.

If Trump called for the slaughter of the first-born, self-reported MAGAs would poll 92% in favour of it. I'm not sure if this is because 92% of Trump's supporters are sufficiently keen to give the loyal answer to pollsters that they would claim to support the slaughter of the first-born, or whether it is because former Trump supporters who can't bring themselves to claim to support the slaughter of the first-born stop self-reporting as MAGA.

I'm surprised that no one brings up the option "MAGA are Trump supporters by definition, so you're more likely to see the group itself shrink, than to see the percentage of positive responses drop".

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MAGA didn't always mean "cult of personality around Donald Trump". It's a relatively new phenomenon in the wake of Trump's re-election. MAGAs theoretically had some principles like low immigration and being anti-war. And when a group has principles, it's theoretically possible for an individual to break them.

Chronologically speaking, it's more like allowing the openly bloodthirsty (previous Presidents probably weren't saints in that regard, but generally kept their mouths shut) to occupy the government is the punishment for allowing endless immigration.

Do you think this is actually calling for genocide, or is it just strategically useful for you to call it genocidal?

When Trump refers to the "civilization" dying, do you sincerely think he's referring to mass-murdering the civilians in the region, rather than the obvious reading that he's referring to the society and regime?

If so, why didn't he just say that?

Deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in (substantial) part is an act of genocide, and I don’t see another means by which Trump can cause “a whole civilization” to “die” “never to be brought back again” without inflicting such destruction. You can’t bring an entire nation to “the Stone Age” because “they’re animals” without consciously inflicting such destruction on the members of the group.

rather than the obvious reading that he's referring to the society

If Iranian “society” is defined as a national or ethnic group, or, in its Shia adherence, a religious group, then you can’t aim to destroy the “society” either. If Trump’s actions are designed to destroy a substantial part of the Iranian population according to nationality, ethnicity, or religious identification, through (say) targetting enough civilian infrastructure that it necessarily destroys a substantial part of the population, then that’s an act of genocide. We also don’t have to use words with a specific connotation; we can just say that it’s not in the interests of the human race to do such things because it’s an act that is unnecessary and really bad for wellbeing, and thus those who do it should face a Nuremberg-style tribunal as deterrence for future defectors of the norm.

If so, why didn't he just say that?

Why didn’t he just say “regime” or “political party”? Why did he choose the word civilization, which has never been used to refer to a regime before? I’m having a hard time imagining how you can destroy a civilization forever, without intentionally destroying a significant portion of the members of the civilization.

Google gives me this for the definition of "genocide":

the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of a large number of people from a particular national or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.

This comports with a couple of dictionary definitions I checked.

The key part, and the part you're trying to emotionally invoke, is the killing of people. That's the central concept of genocide, and it's what people who say "genocide" are trying to lean on. When people hear "genocide", they're supposed to think "murdering an ethnic or national group"; they're supposed to think "sending people to the gas chambers".

Is that what you think Trump is threatening? If so, where does he say anything remotely like that?

If, instead, you think Trump is threatening something that's still bad -- such as regime change that will inherently come with collateral damage, or the destruction of civilian infrastructure -- then say that. It will still be bad! But calling those things "genocide" is co-opting a stronger word purely because it's a stronger word. I don't believe you actually believe Trump intends to murder "a significant portion of the members of the civilisation" (please tell me if I'm wrong), so I don't take that as a sincere defence of using the word "genocide".

https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition

The problem with trying to use a non-robust definition of genocide is that it allows someone like Hitler to cause the same destruction simply by thinking cleverly for twenty minutes. This is why you need to work with robust definitions of terms of art here. Imagine, for the sake of argument, an Egyptian Hitler in the year 2040ad. This hypothetical Führer may declare that he will “destroy Jewish civilization forever” because they are “animals”. What would we intuitively understand is being referred to by these remarks? And if our Pharaonic Führer proceeded to target with his air superiority the civilian infrastructure, medical institutions, technical instititions, scientists, and so forth, all while threatening water desalination plants and the electric grid, I don’t think anyone would doubt his genocidal intent. It’s pretty clear he would be intent on destroying in substantial part the population of his victims.

I don't believe you actually believe Trump intends to murder "a significant portion of the members of the civilisation" (please tell me if I'm wrong)

He threw his support behind a plausible genocide just last year. Why would you doubt that he would do it this year? Causing starvation and preventing infant formula from entering the Gaza Strip is, also, a textbook act of genocide, as it is “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”. Trump supported this. Why would he not support it against Iranians, whom he has already dehumanized?

The Republican Party may be over for the next decade.

Democrats are currently polling worse than anyone except Iran itself.

Going to log the prediction that the polls in 2 months are substantially identical to the ones from February.

Remember when Trump ended everything with that horrible tweet about Robert Deniro?

Did it take everyone a minute to dredge up the memory and substitute the correct actor?

Have we forgotten that polls are inaccurate when it comes to predicting actual voters?

Democrats are currently polling worse than anyone except Iran itself.

Well, either the pollsters are delusional or the Democrats are, because they're already counting the money from the wealth tax and all the other taxes they're going to put in after their landslide.

Also, Iran seems to be winning if you read the NYT, Economist, Free Press, etc.

Oh, for sure. "The Democrats" poll insanely poorly because their positions are mostly insane troll nonsense, but "John Normalson [D], who spends the campaign talking about nice, moderate things and never taking tough questions before getting elected and voting like Mao" will poll and perform pretty well in the general.

He actually can't kill the civilization. Islam did that already.

So I guess all of these domestically manufactured missiles and drones that are currently raining down on the Middle East are the product of some other civilization that happens to inhabit the same geographical location?

Yes.

Can't argue with gigachad responses.

Islamic Persia has produced a huge amount of architecture, art, poetry and literature. They were the intellectual elite of the Caliphate. And have existed in that form since before England was a country.

For example, you can kill a whole civilization.

Have you made similar objections towards "death to America" or "death to Israel" coming from Middle Easterners, including Iran? Or is this one of those "America isn't civilized, so it's fine to destroy America, but Iran, whew, that's civilized" ideas? Or is the reasoning perhaps that it's hyperbole when Iran says it but serious when Trump says it?

A major difference is that right now the US bombing Iranian cities and has the capacity to inflict catastrophic damage on civilian infrastructure while Iran is not bombing American cities and on their best day could inflict minor damage.

So is it ok to threaten genocidal destruction so long as you don't have the capacity to actually carry it out?

It's not okay, but it's self-evidently better. With great power comes great responsibility etc.

I don't know how you inferred that from what I wrote, but I want to raise two points.

Firstly, and this is unbelievably important: evil behavior from others does not excuse your own evil behavior. There's a kind of self-conscious human orc who feels the need to justify their own brutal impulses by pointing to the depravity of others, but they don't actually seek to resolve anything.

Secondly, power implies responsibility. The fact that one party can act on their threat and the other cannot is absolutely a reason to care more about the one than the other. You should not be threatening genocide, period, but you definitely shouldn't be doing it when you are currently in the process bombing the shit out of the people you're threatening to exterminate.

I don't know how you inferred that from what I wrote

You were replying to someone who asked if you raised similar complaints over Iran calling for death to America for decades with the argument that a big difference between the two is that the US is currently bombing Iran and has the capacity to inflict significant damage while Iran currently isn't and cannot. I'm not saying anything excuses anything else here, I'm just replying to the argument you made.

Firstly, and this is unbelievably important: evil behavior from others does not excuse your own evil behavior.

I say it does (or rather, that that prevents it from being evil to begin with.)

Shooting someone out of the blue is wrong. Shooting someone in self-defense is not wrong. What's the difference? The difference that makes it okay is precisely that the other guy did it first.

If Trump just picked a random country out of a map and said it needs to be destroyed, that would be bad. But that's not what he did. He picked a country that used similar threats against us first. It's the equivalent of self-defense, only with words instead of shooting people.

You are also ignoring that in the very next sentence, Trump said that he didn't want it to happen, and who knows, maybe it won't happen. When BigObjectPermanenceShill only quoted the first sentence and hoped that nobody would follow the link to see what Trump actually said, the effect was to mislead.

There's also the question of exactly what he meant. He didn't say "kill all the people". I'm sure he wants the regime to fall.

The fact that one party can act on their threat and the other cannot

Come on. Iran has also said "death to Israel". And they absolutely could genocide Israel (through bankrolling Hamas and Hezbollah or through nuclear weapons) if they aren't stopped.

From a Banksian perspective, aspirational Fully Automated Gay Space Communism says "yes", but still has to manage "real threats" (ideally non-kinetically, but not always). I don't think we're there (yet?), so I wouldn't call that a fair expectation in 2026.

Ali Khamenei made those objections already, stating that it means opposition to U.S. government policies, not the American people. Hard to imagine a greater authority on the matter.

Besides that, rhetoric coming from a protest or some mass gathering is slightly different than rhetoric coming from world leaders. 'Glassing the place' became a common term for what many Americans said should be done to the middle east, I don't suppose you think that's the same as an official statement from a national leader? Though Trump has now narrowed that gap.

Ali Khamenei made those objections already, stating that it means opposition to U.S. government policies, not the American people.

If that counts, it should exonerate Trump too; Trump said in the same statement that he didn't want the civilization to die. It's even above in the link!

I'm not sure if claiming to oppose a regime and expressing intent to bomb a civilization into oblivion are the same thing. That was kind of the game the US was playing with 'Regime Change'. Or the US claiming to stand for global order, instead of Hegseth going out there claiming no quarter would be given, which is just a random declaration of wanting to commit war crimes.

That being said, I'd accept the terms, if only to not ever have to listen to someone claim that Iranians shouting 'Death to America' represents an existential threat, rather than just being the same kind of empty bluster US officials are now want to put out on social media, assuming it's empty, of course.

  1. yes, it is hyperbole in the case of Iran. This has been covered enough. Iranians have, in fact, never had the genocide of Americans or even collapse of the American state to be their policy.
  2. Iran cannot credibly threaten death to America, or even Israel, for it has no means to inflict such death. On the other hand, the US can credibly send Iran to the Stone Age, or whatever, with near-complete impunity.
  3. I do have double standards. An ostensible vanguard of the Western Civilization cannot conduct itself like an insular theocracy it says is ruled by "crazy mullahs".
  4. This victim posturing is exactly what I've been talking about, it's unbecoming of a superpower.

Iran cannot credibly threaten death to America, or even Israel, for it has no means to inflict such death.

Which is why it was working on nuclear weapons.

...or because they don't want to be regime changed.

Their nuclear program was completely obliterated less than a year ago.

Obviously not, since they still have the enriched uranium, a nuclear reactor, and other parts of said program.

Iranians have, in fact, never had the genocide of Americans ... to be their policy

Where has America had the genocide of Iranians to be its policy?

Well, I had higher expectations of the USA than Iran personally. Makes sense to me people would find such rhetoric coming from the POTUS more notable than similar rhetoric coming from a mob in a third world country or from a notorious extremist theocracy.

I note that at least going back to the Bush administration (and probably back into the mists of time, but I haven't checked) that there is a significant subset of people who simultaneously want to claim moral superiority and seethe at being held to any kind of standard.

What insightful commentary. Do go on.

Trump killed a civilization with a tweet. Hysterical. Chuck Norris jokes as political analysis.

Chuck Norris jokes as policy announcements.

Does it not tire you to maintain this disaffected persona chuckling at "lib" overreaction? Do you really believe that the proper treatment of POTUS's words is "unhinged and obviously non-credible bullshitting", but also that this kind of person deserves to be POTUS?

The person who deserves to be POTUS is the person who gets enough votes to be POTUS. This is the horrible truth, the thing from which you desperately struggle to avert your gaze. The United States is a democracy and Donald Trump is its democratically elected president. His legitimacy derives from the people.

Donald Trump did not trick his way into office and then surprise everyone by acting in a manner unbecoming of a president. The people of the United States of America decided to elect someone who breaks all the rules of what a president is 'supposed' to do. They don't care what the president is 'supposed' to do, they care whether the president is doing what they want him to do. For quite a long time, through many administrations, the president has not been doing what the people want him to do.

Donald Trump did not trick his way into office and then surprise everyone by acting in a manner unbecoming of a president

He apparently surprised Catturd and other major boosters who were celebrating NO MORE FOREIGN WARS upon his election. That said, they've quickly pivoted, now foreign wars are Based.

The people of the United States of America decided to elect someone who breaks all the rules of what a president is 'supposed' to do. They don't care what the president is 'supposed' to do, they care whether the president is doing what they want him to do.

This is mostly sophistry, but I suppose you are making a sharp point: the problem is not Trump, it's the American people.

Does it not tire you to engage in this constant catastrophizing? It's been ten years. How are people still driving themselves into madness like this?

Four years of ineffectual flailing due to political sabotage, 4 years out of power, and now a bit over a year of uninterrupted and unprecedented shitshow. The list of his follies is very long, but an American consumer is very rich, so can ignore it for a time. Still, it hasn't been a long time. What did you mean by ten years?

uninterrupted and unprecedented shitshow.

No, everything has been between "basically fine" and "awesome, actually". This is what I mean by catastrophizing.

What did you mean by ten years?

That's how long Trump has been dominating our political conversation. That's how long lefties and NeverTrump types have been having crashout meltdowns EVERY. SINGLE. WEEK. about whatever new calamity is making the rounds on TikTok or BlueSky. How many times has Trump DESTROYED THE ECONOMY?!!/1 How many times has Trump STARTED WORLD WAR THREE!!!!1? How many times have we seen THE END OF DEMOCRACY!!1?

(They screamed, on their national television shows where they will definitely never suffer consequences for open, deranged antipathy for the purported fascist king of America. Unlike Europe, where complaints about being raped by migrants or criticizing politicians gets people jailed for longer than the migrant rapists.)

And no one ever stops and recalibrates. No one ever pauses to take a sanity check. They just lose issue after issue, fact pattern after fact pattern, and dive straight into the next hype cycle.

Remember the other day when all those idiots thought he was dead?

LMAO.

It's certainly flailing and I want to call it ineffectual, but at this point the sheer staying power of the moral panic / doomsday cult mentality is honestly impressive. Terribly unhealthy, but impressive.

Trump has caused hundreds of billions in damage with Liberation Day tariffs, attacked Denmark and forced EU allies to orient towards China, basically wrecked NATO by this point, foolishly escalated against the same China and got humiliated in Busan, exposing American industrial ineptitude (particularly to Korea), is about to lose Taiwan, and is in the process of shaving off 1% or so off the global GDP growth. That's just the big foreign policy stuff I care about, domestic policy is discussed daily here.

That loyalists conveniently forget such issues or reframe them into WINS is unsurprising.

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I mean just to pick something that has had a very personal impact to people I know, the NSF and related science cuts have basically been Covid-level fallout for higher education and related research. The fact this was done on purpose and even lauded is nauseating. For every person like my friend’s wife whose half-bullshit psych masters degree got derailed by a year or two, there’s two people like my aunt who got laid off from her incredibly important job at a primate research lab that does a ton of stuff on both infectious disease and cancer research, where the whole lab is probably going to close. For all the whining Republicans did about Covid pummeling K12 education with knock on effects for another decade or more, it’s extra astonishing none of them seem too concerned at all that the same thing is happening in slow motion at higher levels.

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The US President making a thinly veiled threat to commit genocide is, in fact, a bad thing. Even if he's practically guaranteed to TACO and just do some airstrikes on civilian infrastructure at worst. The fact that Trump does it through Twitter does not reduce its badness since Twitter is basically an official communication channel these days.

It wasn't Twitter, it was Truth Social. Which is where Trump rants.

... that does not make it better.

Sure, but Truth Social is just a reskin built to be Trump's personal Twitter. The fact it has a different name doesn't really matter since people will still see his posts if they're controversial enough.

They are two entirely different entities.

None of that is true; is the thing. He is a gross capering clown who leads a populist interregnum; he does things that are stupid and counterproductive to his own goals while still doing normal neocon things. He is Bush 3: Bush harder, just worse in every way.

The things you attribute to him are just end process that began with regan and thatcher, the rotting away of the state and of society into atomized citizens and neoliberal incentives.

I think the idea of TDS is a kind of prion some people ate that is stopping them from looking at the fat, senile lunatic they have decided is a master manipulator and realizing: Holy shit, our guy is a silver spoon moron!

He is a gross capering clown who leads a populist interregnum

LOL. Nice choice of words for someone who has been protested by a group called "No Kings".

His opposition including some stupid people who can't get their narrative straight is not a particularly strong point in his favour.

Sure it is; in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is... err, there's that word again.

Does the one-eyed man get to be king of the properly sighted just by presenting some blind people he would be comparatively fit to lead, though?

I don't think the metaphor you chose works here. In the end, you are just trying to force the parent poster to answer for some incompatible view espoused by unrelated people who happen to agree with him on the "Trump bad" part, which we can maybe consider to not be completely invalid if you also take responsibility for the "support Israel to position the set-pieces for the Rapture" camp on your side.

For anyone else like me who needed to look up the root, interregnum, as in, regal, rex, king. Inter, between, so if Trump is the leader of the populist interregnum, we are definitionally between the reign of two kings (Obama in this case being one king).

I like words.

To be unnecessarily nitpicky, it's inter regnum, and regnum means 'kingdom', 'reign', or 'authority'. As Etymonline notes, the term was used in the Roman republic, to mean a time between consuls. As such, though it is etymologically related to rex, 'king', I think both the Romans and ourselves validly use the term to mean any interruption in political authority.

Constitutionally, the American system is designed to never have an interregnum. If the president dies, the next person in the line of succession instantly becomes president - the office is never vacant. Western monarchies often work the same way - "the king is dead, long live the king". The throne is never empty. The presidency is the monarchal element of the American constitution (America being a Polybian mixed constitution), and it too is never empty.

That said asdasdasdasd is clearly using the term more informally, to just mean something like 'interruption'.

My problem with TDS is that it conflates three different things. The original meaning was hating something purely because it was done by Trump (and the assumption that people would have approved of a policy if it was enacted by their tribe). This is the true aesthetic snobbery, which probably happens more than we would like to admit. There are two other factors at play though.

1 - Genuine dislike of Trump's goals. This is certainly the case with true believers on the left. They like the bureaucracy that is getting axed. They like the world order that is being dismantled. They like the identity politics and moral panics, etc. I wouldn't say they have TDS. I'd say they don't like change.

2 - Approval of Trump's goals but dislike of his methods. I'd say the vast majority of objectors fall into this category (myself included). I do support a bunch of what Trump wants to do (at least from a very high level). But his ways of doing those things are some combination of a) incompetent or b) designed primarily for the aesthetic appeal. This makes sense from an electoral perspective, but it's not a long term strategy. Eventually the underlying reality of the world (ex: oil and gas economics) catches up. And at that point, you end up causing a crisis and delivering the government back to the very people you wanted to remove from power. You put on a flashy show, but just end up as a small detour in Cthulhu's leftward swim.

I'd say they don't like change

In other words, they're "conservatives". They don't like that name because in their worldview (informed by a memeplex that began in the '60s that they applied despite its ideas being objectively too advanced for them) it means they're the bad guys.

I think the term TDS is perfectly appropriate for both dislike of the man and dislike of the change, because the former is how conservatives launder the latter.

The problem with (2) is that I would not say the vast majority of objectors fall into that category, because if it was you'd find quite a bit more measured discourse rather than, y'know, what we see right now. And half of these also tend to fall back into TDS by going "Trump stupid, reeeeee", which you can see in every thread that talks about the guy on this forum, to say nothing of what happens in the wider world.

And at that point, you end up causing a crisis and delivering the government back to the very people you wanted to remove from power. You put on a flashy show, but just end up as a small detour in Cthulhu's leftward swim.

That's just kind of the nature of government, though. However, I would mention that Cthulhu swims rightward- towards the conservative and the local maxima of corruption (International SJWery, at present)- not leftward, which is more just general chaos.

The problem with (2) is that I would not say the vast majority of objectors fall into that category, because if it was you'd find quite a bit more measured discourse rather than, y'know, what we see right now.

It's an issue of granularity. If you take the 10k foot view "I want to improve boarder security / decrease illegal immigration", the vast majority of people are okay with that. Only like 20% of the population truly wants open boarders. It's only an issue because a bunch of political thinkers buy into the whole "people are fungible and we need as many as possible in an era of negative population growth" ideology. So 80% should in theory agree with Trump. But each time you get more specific, you lose people. Do you want ICE roaming around picking up criminals? A decent size chunk of people are okay with that. How about just general illegals? Eh...probably less. Do you want them doing performative raids with face coverings and tactical gear in quiet suburban neighborhoods and occasionally detaining or killing a citizen? Your average person is probably not happy anymore. It started hitting way too close to home.

Basically any Trump policy has this shortcoming. Because when you come to the fork in the road where you can choose pragmatism/results on one path and showmanship on the other, Trump always chooses showmanship. In the end, it is just aesthetics. It's what Trump lives for, what he derives his support from, and what keeps him from actually getting anything done.

Yeah. This has long been my position about the Trump rhetoric and phraseology. It’s brilliant politics, and honestly fair game, but transitions very poorly to governing where people actually do expect government officials to utter things with a stronger relationship to truth. Take Trump’s recent threat about ending civilization in Iran. Facially, that’s a nuclear bomb threat. The fact we cannot tell if that’s what he means or if it’s pure vibes is dangerous. Even if we assume it’s pure politics, it degrades the future ability to rationally assess the official positions of the government and facts on the ground. What particularly grinds my gears is some of the most ardent defenders of Trump around here have taken the simultaneous and cognitively dissonant position that Western civilization is in trouble because it is losing high trust social dynamics. But no, it’s the darn immigrants and their trust-caustic culture that is at fault, or maybe the darn liberals and their moral purity crusades, it can’t possibly be something as simple as the loss of trust from a direct attack on institutions or a President who lies and exaggerated as easily as he breathes.

One incredible thing about Trump's continued insanity is how much of a natural loyalty test it creates. If you take his words seriously, he's now threatening genocide (and implying nukes) against Iran over a war we won weeks ago about a strait that has been open for transit and is safe to cross against a regime that has already fallen and been changed to be favorable to us.

It pushes out anyone who can't, or isn't willing to, commit themselves to the double think and devout followers are making a constant fool of themselves because they aren't all able to update fast enough. There's a reason why the Democrats now hold the edge on the Senate, a thing that in any ordinary year should not be happening (just look at how low the predictions were until somewhat recently). But the mad king is even crazier than people expected and the Trumpist group grows more and more insular because most people surprisingly enough, are not willing to pretend the emperor is or isn't wearing clothes depending on his whims.

Almost half of all voters are independent now and that should be eye opening to these partisans.

If you're a Democrat you should be worried that the Dems are so politically toxic that people won't associate with you, even though the alternative is those "crazy Republicans". If you're a Republican you should be worried that the GOP is so politically toxic that people won't associate with you, even though the alternative is those "crazy Democrats". Just imagine how despicable the average citizen must be viewing you now that they're willing to consider you just as insane and awful. Outrunning the other person instead of the lion brings you only temporary victories, the 2020 Biden mandate turned into a 2024 Trump surge, and the 2024 Trump surge is turning into a 2026 Dem landslide.

Why would I be tired of winning with Trump. America wants Europe to spend more on defense. Twitter is telling me today France now spending more on defense. Prior UniParty - Europe please spend more on defense. Trump - I will end NATO.

Sure he makes sausage a little strange. But it gets us W’s.

Leftist have claimed for years that Trump miscalculated and now he will go to jail or something. Then he wins again.

I am mixed on Iran right now. Hopefully he finds his W again.

I don’t quite want to say Trump is smarter than me. Like his hardware is probably slower, but he has different software with better instincts than me.

Europe spending more on defense isn't really a good thing if Europe and the US are at odds. It also wouldn't be good if Europe couldn't use those defense dollars productively if they're politically paralyzed due to e.g. Hungarian intransigence.

Europe started ramping up defense spending in 2022 already (for obvious reason) and hiked it more from 2023 to 2024 than from 2024 to 2025.

Although it is a very healthy sign from Europe in general, i am reminded of how when the US announces something it'll say "100 billion spent on EV charging stations" and China will say something like "10 million EV charging stations have been made"

German spending in particular seems prone to this. So much money spent, so little actual product made.

Sure, but that's ephemeral if the question is whether Trump is making Europe spend more on defense through bully-boy tactics or whether Europe would be spending more on defense anyway - and, indeed, an important point is that it's after Europe has done what Trump ostensibly wants it to do that Trump has decided to start provoking and undercutting Europe in various and sundry ways.

that is a very good distinction

One incredible thing about Trump's continued insanity is how much of a natural loyalty test it creates.

It will come as no surprise to you that I think there are many progressive beliefs which serve a similar function as loyalty litmus tests.

The most notable progressive belief that serves the same function (feigned confusion toward or rejection of male/female definitions) is mostly harmless, though; worst case scenario, it wrecks women's sports, which no one actually cares about anyway. The Trumpist version has given us the highly escalated Iranian situation, which is much more costly.

The belief that American police officers are gunning down unarmed black men willy-nilly led to the 2020 riots (causing something like a billion dollars in property damage), and the subsequent police pullback (resulting in an additional ~10,000 murders, mostly young black men).

If a life is worth $10M, that's $100B in damages over a couple years. Not small, but by the end will likely be dwarfed by the Iran War.

Though, your example does bring to mind another that probably will be comparable: COVID and the response to it. I'm not sure what proportion of the blame to place on progressive litmus tests for that, but it's certainly substantial.

Well, given that the Iran war's direct costs are already estimated to be in excess of 20 billion, a couple hundreds more in funding are being requested and this does not even include figures for random damage like US embassies and bases in the region let alone indirect costs due to more expensive fuel and what-not, I think we are some orders of magnitude past that. (We'll see about the deaths depending on whether they actually proceed with a ground invasion.)

(And no, the "military budget is just money reinvested in US companies" argument won't do much here; it's still money that means part of the economy is retargeted towards making things that explode rather than twinkies. You could make absolutely the same argument about BLM damages since presumably the damaged storefronts were also rebuilt by US companies, too. What's the qualitative difference between "fire a missile and pay for a replacement" and "shatter a window and pay for a replacement"?)

If you are going to balance costs you have to also balance benefits, though it is too soon to do so.

The Iran war is likely not going to have anywhere near the same amount of benefits as its direct costs. At the very least it's unlikely free Hormuz transit is ever coming back.

It's going to be "too soon to do so" in the anecdotal Zhou Enlai sense for a very long time, and on top of that hopelessly subjective (is "US police are now scared of casual violence towards black do-no-gooders" a benefit or not? Would "Israel occupies part of Lebanon" be? Would "US Evangelicals ecstatic because they think the Rapture has drawn closer" a benefit or not?).

worst case scenario, it wrecks women's sports

This is probably the least worst case scenario for progressive beliefs like this: it looks the other way while thousands of little girls are raped (Rotherham et al), spends hundreds of billions on public infrastructure that still doesn't go anywhere (CA HSR), lets loose violent criminals on their own recognizance to murder people on the train (sometimes Ukrainian asylum seekers), openly constructs race and gender-based spoils systems, and often-as-not in other countries (Venezuela, Cuba) refuses to even consider public opinion and starts ignoring elections.

Not going to say there aren't a similar number of equivalent failure modes on the right, either: civilization has always been a delicate dance to align incentives to avoid violence.

I think the most costly progressive belief is something like "we should not punish antisocial behavior if we can tell a story where that antisocial behavior is downstream of prejudice around race, gender, or class". While Trump has obviously been acting like a petulant toddler lately, it's not like handing uncontested power back to the progressive "adults in the room" is likely to go particularly well. Probably less badly but that's not a very high bar to clear.

it's not like handing uncontested power back to the progressive "adults in the room" is likely to go particularly well. Probably less badly but that's not a very high bar to clear.

We are in agreement. I might gesture at "let's hand power to people who would do better than either," but unfortunately I don't see a way from here to there.

The most notable progressive belief that serves the same function (feigned confusion toward or rejection of male/female definitions) is mostly harmless

I think you can find it anywhere that a progressive who is smugly "pro-science" will completely ignore inconvenient science when it gets in their way of supporting abortion, trans essentialism, or racial handouts.

It also wrecks the crime rates, which people do care about.

The problem is where does this progressivism work outside of the big cities and already blue democratic strongholds? It works essentially nowhere else which is why the party line stays closer to the establishment because the left can’t win the nation on progressive ideology.

I'm not sure if I understand your question.

I think I'm just going to be unapologetically ruled by my aesthetic sense from now on

It sounds like "aesthetics" is mostly just "vibes" here. Vibes are how most of the electorate choose who to vote for. If your vibes are well-calibrated, then it's probably not a bad way to choose overall, though I still think having specific rules or looking for specific things is better.

Vibes are how most people do anything. Anyone who’s ever made an impulse purchase has done so directly on that basis. Only for the most critical decisions do people tally the evidence and weigh the counter objections and even then, they don’t spend that much time doing any real thought.

I'm not that old but I think aside from the tan suit controversy Obama had the best aesthetics in living memory? Europe was so gosh darn proud of us.

I never understood that one, because the only coverage I ever saw of it was "Republicans pounce on tan suit". Despite having what I think is a fairly centrist media diet, I never saw any of the actual condemnation of the suit, but I saw tons of reactions to it. Even looking at the Wikipedia page, I can only find two clear examples of actual comments on the suit by the Republican-aligned (Lou Dobbs on Fox Business, representative Peter King) and a couple of neutral "weird choice" but not particularly condemnatory fashion commentators, amid dozens of links deriding the "controversy".

It always felt very manufactured to me. Honestly, the tan suit never bothered me, but it did feel like everyone focusing on it was distracting from what should have been real controversies of the time (mismanaging the Arab Spring and ISIS, ATF gunrunning, constructing a domestic panopticon). Although in that vein, it does feel like Trump frequently intentionally causes outrage at minor things to distract from major ones.

I get the impression this was something that played out more on Twitter than in meatspace. I’d have thought people had built an immunity by 2014, but apparently not.

It is interesting that even the “republicans pounce” commentary is subdued by post-2016 standards. Outlets are using this to mock Republicans for having nothing better to do; I could barely find anyone calling it racist.

Until he had that Presidential Center built. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_Presidential_Center


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