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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26696 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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I find myself increasingly perplexed by the people who think a second Trump term would be any kind of a big deal; that there’s anything he’d be able to do in a second term he wasn’t able to do in the first. It’s primarily in fellow right-wingers that I find this attitude most vexing, but it also holds to a lesser degree for the people on the left who hyperbolically opine in outlets like Newsweek and The Economist about how a second Trump term would “end democracy” and “poses the biggest danger to the world.”

Really, it’s not even about Trump for me, either. I don’t really see how a DeSantis or a Ramaswamy presidency would amount to anything either. What can they possibly accomplish, except four years of utterly futile attempts at action that are completely #Resisted by the permanent bureaucracy? Giving “orders” to “subordinates” that prove as efficacious as Knut the Great’s famous command to the tides?

I hear about how the president can do this or that, according to some words on paper, and I ask “but can he, really?” Mere words on paper have no power themselves, and near as I can tell, the people in DC haven’t really cared about them for most of a century now, nor is there any real mechanism for enforcing them.

If I, a random nobody, come into your workplace and announce that you’re fired, of course you still have your job. Security will still let you in when you show up each day, you can still log in and out of whatever, your coworkers will treat you the same, and you’ll still keep getting paid. Now, suppose your boss announces that you’re fired… but everyone else there treats that the same as the first case? You still show up, you still do the work, you still get paid. Are you really fired, then?

I think you're completely overestimating the extent to which the President would be openly defied. Trump succeeded in firing a lot of people. If he goes and fires the head of the FBI again there might be another investigation, but the head of the FBI is still fired.

Presidents are not all-powerful, but they are very powerful. Trump was an unusually incompetent one, but even so there's plenty he would be able to do. If he had made the decision to nuke North Korea, North Korea would have gotten nuked.

but the head of the FBI is still fired.

Not if the entire FBI says "no he's not" and keeps taking orders from him, while ignoring any "replacement," and whoever at Treasury or wherever prints government paychecks keeps paying him on schedule.

There are over two million civilian Federal employees. If all of those two million plus collectively decide that they are not going to obey, enforce, or even acknowledge any orders or appointments from Trump, what can he do himself, as one mere mortal, to compel them to obey?

So at that point you’re talking about a coup?

In practice, perhaps, but far enough from the traditional picture that too many people probably wouldn't see it as such. (And even if they did, there wouldn't be anything they could do about it.)

And then the question becomes “what does the military do.”

The U.S. military is, historically, committedly apolitical and stays out of civilian political matters. A "a very long 240-year tradition of an apolitical military that does not get involved in domestic politics," even.

Where there is an in your face coup? What if the president calls up the national guard?

Where there is an in your face coup?

No, a heroic resistance by dedicated civil service to defend Our Democracy against Trump's authoritarian auto-coup via his illegitimate and undemocratic attempt to replace functional government with corrupt, incompetent lickspittles so he can turn America into a Christo-fascist hellscape.

What if the president calls up the national guard?

And then they take a page from Gen. Milley and refuse to assist Orange Man in his attempt to become dictator-for-life of Gilead.

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And if they do that, do you think the military will simply

Yes.

Right but that's not going to happen. You're actually crazy if you think that's going to happen.

If all of those two million plus collectively decide that they are not going to obey, enforce, or even acknowledge any orders or appointments from Trump, what can he do himself, as one mere mortal, to compel them to obey?

If the FBI refuses to take orders from him, he declares the entire FBI fired for insubordination.

If they refuse to leave their physical buildings, he declares them to be trespassing on government property and calls up the DC Police to evict them.

If the DC Police refuse to comply and/or are unable to defeat the FBI (which I admit is quite likely), he declares martial law and sends in the troops to retake the rebel-controlled buildings.

All of this is TTBOMK perfectly within his legal authority as President.

I'm not saying Trump would have an easy time of things, but open defiance won't work (at least not without military buy-in, at which point, well, yes, a coup can override "ink on a page"). It's the cases where things just mysteriously don't happen and there's no clear culprit that are the really-hard ones.

I'm not saying Trump would have an easy time of things, but open defiance won't work

On one hand, I agree that it would take other forms than "nah, we're not doing it", on the other even the first response you list would trigger a wave of international hysteria about the rise of fascism.

Also, you do know that US generals were outright lying to Trump about the number of troops deployed to Syria? Does that count as open defiance?

Also, you do know that US generals were outright lying to Trump about the number of troops deployed to Syria? Does that count as open defiance?

I presume they didn't tell Trump/the public that they were lying to him - at least, not at the time - so that's not "open" defiance. That's more like the sort of thing that I called "really-hard".

If North Korea nuked the US first then yes, no doubt. If there was strong-seeming evidence that North Korea was about to nuke the US, then probably. But an unprovoked US first strike against North Korea out of the blue? I am not even sure that the military high command would obey an ordinary president who gave such an order, much less Trump.

Ostensibly POTUS has sole discretion in ordering a nuclear strike, but obviously that's not necessarily how things would go in a real situation. I don't know if the nuclear football relays an order directly to a silo or whatever or to the joint chiefs, but in any case someone who isn't trump needs to decide to push the button.

POTUS lacks the legal discretion to start a war outside the structure of a previously congressionally approved war. Self defense side steps this, as does defense of Senate approved treaty allies. But he can't just order a nuke lobbed at any country at any time.

I don't think there's any reason to think that the president can't order a strike at any moment.

The War Powers Act and every war since Korea (if not even sooner) suggest otherwise. This is separate from the constitutionality of this

It goes right to the silos, and the people in the silos have been trained and selected specifically so that if they get the order to launch, they'll obey.

There's been several occasions in history where the guy in the silo did not push the button.

I don't believe that's accurate. There have been cases where officers on the ground have identified what they saw as false alarms, and chosen not to act in response. And there are cases where orders to ready nuclear weapons were issued in error and later retracted or aborted. My understanding is that in the latter case, the men in silos almost always obeyed their orders when they believed they were genuine.

The words on paper have a certain power in the sense that if they are disobeyed too blatantly, we cross into this interesting circumstance that people call "constitutional crisis", and then anything can happen.

Had he a supportive enough congress to not overturn his orders and pass laws to codify the details that are needed, a President that would want to purge the executive totally could. Hawaiian judges can only stall you for so long. The anti-FDR could totally roll over the current administration with a more competent and organized minority.

The problem is that for anything meaningful to hurt the deep state, you'd have to gut entire agencies and retire large swaths of people, which is bound to fail if congress and the supreme court are not 100% in with you. Not to mention how everyone in those agencies would want you dead.

Trump is all the right has, so of course they go "maybe something nice will happen". But "why the fuck would anything nice ever happen?"

The words on paper have a certain power in the sense that if they are disobeyed too blatantly, we cross into this interesting circumstance that people call "constitutional crisis", and then anything can happen.

I don't see how it could have any outcome other than the 2 million plus executive bureaucrats finally making their reduction of merely-elected officials to entirely-powerless figureheads?

Had he a supportive enough congress to not overturn his orders and pass laws to codify the details that are needed, a President that would want to purge the executive totally could

How so? If the executive bureaucracy is ignoring Trump, why wouldn't they ignore a Trump-aligned Congress too?

Because Congress decides who gets the money and because these organizations exist because Congress makes them exist through laws. You can't ignore your way out of a shutdown.

Of course if they decide they don't have to abide by laws anymore for their internal processes and the CIA just forces the treasury to print money at gunpoint we just default back to constitutional crisis mode.

I think you underestimate how much the administration is tied into the legal system. They make leeway for themselves but they need the rules to exist to some degree.

Because Congress decides who gets the money and because these organizations exist because Congress makes them exist through laws. You can't ignore your way out of a shutdown.

Every time their was a so-called "shutdown," I still got my SSI checks direct-deposit from the Federal government despite said "shutdown" and the unconstitutionality — again, mere words on a musty old parchment by dead slave-owning white men — of spending without House authorization.

Congress does not themselves write the checks, people in the executive do — like, as you note, the Treasury. So when Congress declares something "defunded," and the Treasury just ignores them and keeps sending the checks out anyway, no CIA gunmen needed, what then?

"Constitutional crisis" and so on, but so what? Nobody in DC really cares about that dead letter, nor have they for probably a century now, so what if this is made (more) explicit? The FBI, ATF, and other ordinary law enforcement will be enough to crush any — inevitably disorganized, sporadic, and aimless — "resistance" or "rebellion" from the citizenry.

https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/fleo20st.pdf

Most federal law enforcement is either fairly reddish or has jobs that do not include "chasing domestic extremists" which they can be expected to protest being pulled off(because being a security guard at NASA is both cooler and less likely to involve getting shot at than staking out some compound in Idaho that's drilling 1/8 inch holes in lower receivers, plus you get to go home every night) and/or simply can't be pulled off. The ATF, FBI, and US marshals combined simply do not have the personnel to carry out a meaningful crackdown.

Most federal law enforcement is either fairly reddish

Not according to the people I talk to IRL.

The ATF, FBI, and US marshals combined simply do not have the personnel to carry out a meaningful crackdown.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Consider the German Peasants' War. 300,000 pissed off peasants, who at least sometimes "were well-armed. They had cannons with powder and shot…" against 6,000–8,500 nobles, knights, and assorted mercenaries. A 35:1-50:1 numbers advantage…

…except it wasn't. Because it was several thousand organized and experienced knights and mercenaries against a thousand peasants here, then several thousand knights and mercenaries against twelve hundred peasants there, then several thousand knights and mercenaries against four thousand peasants over there, then…

And in the end, the peasants were crushed, over a third of them killed, and the losses on the other side? To quote Wikipedia's "Casualties and losses" box: Minimal.

It wouldn't take that large a SWAT force to take out your "compound in Idaho" with small odds of any losses. Any one out of "the ATF, FBI, and US marshals" could easily put that together. And after they take out the first such compound, then they take out the second, and then the third, and then the fourth., and then…. In each individual engagement, they'll have the superior forces. Because for the "rebels" to actually have superior numbers, all the little groups of five, or six, or a dozen guys would have to actually come together and coordinate. And as I noted, they are fundamentally incapable of ever doing so, and openly proud of it.

It wouldn't take that large a SWAT force to take out your "compound in Idaho" with small odds of any losses.

In the 90s, they did this with an isolated guy and his family, living in their cabin, and then they did it to a bunch of weirdo Christian types. It worked real well both times, and then a federal building blew up.

Because for the "rebels" to actually have superior numbers, all the little groups of five, or six, or a dozen guys would have to actually come together and coordinate.

There is zero need for massed formations or mustered armies in such a scenario. You are basing your assessment off the idea of a campaign of pitched battles and clearly-defined fronts. There is pretty much zero chance that's what a future American civil war would look like. It's pretty unlikely that such a war would even be fought with AR15s, much less tanks and planes.

It's pretty unlikely that such a war would even be fought with AR15s, much less tanks and planes.

No, a future American civil war would inevitably involve significant state-to-state territorial disputes because the breakdown in federal authority necessitates big states establishing their regional hegemony to safeguard their own stability and non-isolation from both resources and markets. This process involves lots of conventional armies moving around because that’s what governments do.

For probably the most obvious example, California needs to engage in some level of adventurism against significantly smaller neighbors to ensure its water supply(no, it will not improve its water management, nor do citizens of wealthy and powerful regions accept rationing for the sake of the hinterlands) when the federal government can’t impose an acceptable solution from above.

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It worked real well both times, and then a federal building blew up.

Which accomplished nothing, except getting our government to make their suppression of such groups quieter and less of a big media show.

There is zero need for massed formations or mustered armies in such a scenario.

Explain how "20+ man SWAT team takes out 4-5 'domestic terrorists' with no losses, then another 4-5 'domestic terrorists' with no losses, then another, then another…" ends in victory for the folks on the losing end of every single engagement, rather than being picked off, tiny packet by tiny packet, until none are left?

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All you're really talking about here is military dictatorship, which is a likely outcome of that crisis.

What you're missing is that political regimes aren't mere power relationships, they're the story people tell about those relationships. The US is a democracy because people believe congress has the magical power to bend the bureaucracy to its will through ritual. Maybe it's not true and it would lose if the bureaucracy really didn't want to submit. But the constitutional order is maintained by such a belief.

The day the confrontation happens and Congress loses is the day that particular belief dies, it will have to be something else. But it can't be nothing. People need to believe in a magic ritual of some kind for laws and order to exist. Because law is literally a magic spell, as the Romans knew.

And the problem a bureaucratic system has is that its processes rely on the existence of the nominal democracy. Moldbug's point was right in a way, Congress is like the King of England. Even though he has no power, you can't remove the king and expect England to remain. And that's some power yet.

If the President and Congress force the administration to ignore them, they force America to become something else. And that something else might not end up on top of a shootout.

The day the confrontation happens and Congress loses is the day that particular belief dies

As well it should.

But it can't be nothing.

Why isn't raw power enough? "Obey, or the cops will arrest/shoot you" should be quite sufficient.

People need to believe in a magic ritual of some kind for laws and order to exist

No, all you need for laws and order to exist is for armed men to be paid enough to enforce them. And you don't need to be able to shoot every rulebreaker to get people to fall in line (look at the US's solve and conviction rates on homicide, and yet laws against murder still exist and shape people's behavior). What fraction of speeders do the police catch? The Chinese have an ancient four-character saying on this point (because of course they do): "kill the chicken to scare the monkey." Voltaire's "pour encourager les autres" (and I've read a work arguing that Byng's execution did indeed influence British admirals to be much more risk-taking, and that this in turn contributed greatly to the Royal Navy's success rates).

Oderunt tum metuant. You don't need people's belief, all you need is their compliance. "Understanding is not required, only obedience," as Babylon 5's Minbari would say.

Plus, I remember once reading — though I've been unable to find it again — a long essay, drawing mostly upon Rousseau and his "general will," to argue that not only are elections not a sufficient condition for democracy, they're not a necessary one either, and laying out a case that real democracy is single-party rule by an elite vanguard of technocratic experts who do what they believe is in society's best interest whether the voters like it or not, and who treat the rarely-held elections as purely advisory and non-binding. I keep being reminded of it more and more at various times, like when reading N.S. Lyons's "The China Convergence," or most times I hear people on the left talk about "Our Democracy," or Hungary and Orban's "authoritarianism." From the former:

Despite a rhetorical commitment to egalitarianism and “democracy,” the elite class deeply distrusts and fears the people over whom it rules. These elites have concentrated themselves into a separate oligarchic political body focused on prioritizing and preserving their rule and their own overlapping set of shared interests. Wracked by anxiety, they strive constantly to maximize their control over the masses, rationalizing a need to forcefully maintain stability in the face of dangerous threats, foreign and domestic. Everything is treated as an emergency. “Safety” and “security” have become be the watchwords of the state, and of society generally.

This elite obsession with control is accelerated by a belief in “scientific management,” or the ability to understand, organize, and run all the complex systems of society like a machine, through scientific principles and technologies. The expert knowledge of how to do so is considered the unique and proprietary possession of the elite vanguard. Ideologically, this elite is deeply materialist, and openly hostile to organized religion, which inhibits and resists state control. They view human beings themselves as machines to be programmed, and, believing the common man to be an unpredictable creature too stupid, irrational, and violent to rule himself, they endeavor to steadily condition and replace him with a better model through engineering, whether social or biological. Complex systems of surveillance, propaganda, and coercion are implemented to help firmly nudge (or shove) the common man into line. Communities and cultural traditions that resist this project are dismantled. Harmfully contrary ideas are systematically censored, lest they lead to dangerous exposure. Governing power has been steadily elevated, centralized, and distributed to a technocratic bureaucracy unconstrained by any accountability to the public.

All of this is justified by a utopian ideological dialectic of historical progress and inevitability. Those more in tune with the tide of history (i.e. elite interests) are held to be morally and intellectually superior, as a class, to backwards reactionary elements. Only certain views are stamped “scientific” and “correct,” although these may change on a political whim. An economism that values only the easily quantifiable reigns as the only moral lodestar, and frictionless efficiency is held up as highest common good; the individual is encouraged to fulfill his assigned role as a docile consumer and cog in the regime’s machine, not that of a self-governing citizen. The state regularly acts to stimulate and manage consumer demand, and to strategically regulate and guide industrial production, and the corporate sector has largely fused itself with the state. Cronyism is rampant.

The relentless political messaging and ideological narrative has come to suffuse every sphere of life, and dissent is policed. Culture is largely stagnant. Uprooted, corralled, and hounded, the people are atomized, and social trust is very low. Reality itself often feels obscured and uncertain. Demoralized, some gratefully accept any security offered by the state as a blessing. At the same time, many citizens automatically assume everything the regime says is a lie. Officialdom in general is a Kafkaesque tragi-comedy of the absurd, something only to be stoically endured by normal people. Yet year by year the pressure to conform only continues to be ratcheted higher…

Which country does this describe? If you can’t quite tell, well, that’s the point. For many citizens of the West, the systems of governance under which we live increasingly feel uncomfortably similar to what appears on offer in the People’s Republic of China.

…

Finally, the managerial intelligentsia functions as the vanguard of the whole managerial system, providing the unifying ideological framework that serves as the system’s intellectual foundation, rationale, and source of moral legitimacy.[3] The ideological pronouncements of the intelligentsia, transmitted to the public as revealed truth (e.g. “the Science”) by the managerial mass media, serve to normalize and justify the schemes of the state, which in turn gratefully supports the intelligentsia with public money and programs of mass public education, which funnel demand into the intelligentsia’s institutions and also help to fund the research and development of new technologies and organizational techniques that can further expand managerial control. The intelligentsia of course also provides a critical service to every other managerial sector by meeting the need for the formation of more professional managerial class members through mass education – which also helps to advance societal homogenization and further elite cultural hegemony. The managerial intelligentsia therefore functions as the keystone of the managerial elite’s broad-based and resilient unity and dominance (which is what defines them as the elite).

This hegemonic, self-reinforcing system of overlapping managerial elite interests – public and private, economic, cultural, social, and governmental – can together be described as the managerial regime. To identify or describe this regime as simply “the state” would be entirely insufficient. As we will see, the evolution of this broader regime is today the central factor of the China Convergence.

…

“In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong.” So declared neoconservative lawyer and former Bush administration Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith in a high-profile 2020 essay on democracy and the future of free speech for The Atlantic magazine. “Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values,” he explained. “The private sector’s collaboration with the government in these efforts, are a historic and very public experiment about how our constitutional culture will adjust to our digital future.”

…

Across the West, the managerial elite therefore immediately went into a frenzy over the danger allegedly presented by “populism” and launched their own revolt, declaring a Schmittian state of exception in which all the standard rules and norms of democratic politics could be suspended in order to respond to this existential “crisis.” In fact, some began to question whether democracy itself might have to be suspended in order to save it.

“It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses,” New York Time Magazine journalist James Traub thundered with an iconic 2016 piece in Foreign Policy magazine. This quickly became a view openly and proudly embraced among the managerial elite, who no longer hesitated to express their frustration with democracy and its voters. (“Did I say ‘ignorant’? Yes, I did. It is necessary to say that people are deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-delude them,” Traub declared.) “Too Much Democracy is Killing Democracy,” is how a 2019 article published by neocon rag The Bulwark put it, arguing for Western nations to take their “bitter technocratic medicine” and establish “a political, social, and cultural compact that makes participation by many unnecessary.”

This elite revolt against democracy cannot be fully understood as a reaction only to proximate events, however – no matter how outrageously orange and crude their apparition. Rather, the populist revolts that emerged in 2016 sparked such an intense, openly anti-democratic reaction because they played directly into a much deeper complex of managerial anxieties, dreams, and obsessions that has roots stretching back more than a century.

…

But what did Wilson mean by “administration” anyway? “Administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics,” he wrote. “Administrative questions are not political questions.” By this he meant that all the affairs of the modern state, all the “new things the state ought to do,” should be placed above any vulgar interference from the political – that is, above any democratic debate, choice, or accountability – and instead turned over to an elevated class of educated men whose full-time “profession” would be governing the rabble. What Wilson explicitly proposed was rule by the “universal class” described by Hegel: an all-knowing, all-beneficent class of expert “civil servants,” who, using their big brains and operating on universal principles derived from Reason, could uniquely determine and act in the universal interest of society with far more accuracy than the ignorant, unrefined masses.

In Wilson’s view the opinion of the actual public was nothing but “a clumsy nuisance, a rustic handling delicate machinery.” Overall, administration indeed meant running government as a machine, and the public could not be allowed to gum up the gears. Moreover, machines need engineers, which meant that, “It will be necessary to organize democracy by sending up to… the civil service men definitely prepared for standing liberal tests as to technical knowledge.” Soon enough, “A technically schooled civil service will presently have become indispensable,” he suggested, describing the entrenchment of rule by a managerial class.

…

But Wilson’s most important legacy was to begin the process to “organize democracy” in America just as he’d dreamed of doing as an academic: a “universal class” of managers would henceforth determine and govern on behalf of the people’s true will; democracy would no longer to be messy, but made steadily more managed, predictable, and scientific. From this point forward the definition of democracy itself would begin to change: “democracy” no longer meant self-government by the demos – the people – exercised through voting and elections; instead it would come to mean the institutions, processes, and progressive objectives of the managerial civil service itself. In turn, actual democracy became “populism.” Protecting the sanctity of “democracy” now required protecting the managerial state from the demos by making governance less democratic.

…

The People’s Republic of China has already taken this logic to its fullest conclusion. Popular voting may have been done away with all-together in China, but it too is still a democracy (it says so right in its constitution!). Instead of elections, the Party (which exists solely to represent the people, forever), rigorously assesses the will and interests of the masses through a process of internal consultation and deliberation it calls “people’s whole-process democracy” – also known as “consultative democracy,” for short.

Consultative democracy has serious advantages over the traditional kind in terms of maximizing managerial efficiency, which is why it has long been so admired by Western elites. “There is a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say we need to go green,” Canada’s Justin Trudeau has for instance explained (though typically stumbling over his words and forgetting to label China a democracy instead of a dictatorship). Or as The New York Times’ elite-whisperer Thomas Friedman once put it, if we could even just be “China for a day” then the state could, “you know, authorize the right solutions… on everything from the economy to environment.” Overall, being more like China for at least a while would be super convenient because, as Friedman obligingly elaborated in his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, “once the directions are given from above, we would be overcoming the worst part of our democracy (the inability to make big decisions in peacetime), and the very next day we would be able to enjoy the best part of our democracy (the power of our civic society to make government rules stick and the power of our markets to take advantage of them).”

…

Nonetheless, the managerial regime is capable of only one response to the emergence of such instability, which is to double down: more top-down control; more layers of management; more insistent claims to expert knowledge; more efforts to spare the people “all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living”; more clearing away of any perceived resistance to utopia. This may be labeled as progressive and modernizing reform. Genuine effective reform – paring back centralization and management, easing off universalism, releasing and devolving control to allow for local differentiation and adaptation to reality, as well as generally adopting at least a little humility – is of course an impossibility, as that would mean going “backwards,” admitting fallibility, and accepting the limits of managerialism.

This is absolutely not to say, however, that managerial regimes are incapable of sophisticated adaptations to effectively (if temporarily) suppress instability, or that they are necessarily short-lived. To assume that any given regime is weak or on the verge of collapse would be a mistake; the mass-scale managerial regime is mostly a modern phenomenon, and so far only one (the USSR) has collapsed absent military intervention. So we do not really know how long an especially clever managerial system can endure, even if we know it won’t be forever. What we can assume is that any regime will act automatically to defend itself and its interests against proliferating threats. It will likely not hesitate to evolve and adopt new methods in order to do so, just as it has evolved repeatedly in the past. New means of everyday repression, or what the CCP regime likes to call “stability maintenance,” will quickly be found and trialed.

Today this imperative of stability maintenance is driving a rapid and mutually productive convergence between the world’s hard and soft managerial regimes, with the hard becoming softer (that is to say, more subtle and clever, not less cruel) and the soft becoming harder (more forceful, coercive, and unabashed).

…

In other words a new, firmer order is produced through the chaos of disorder; you break things so you can replace them with new things of your choosing. Or as Mao put it in a letter to his wife in 1966 when he decided to kick off China’s hugely destructive Cultural Revolution (mainly so as to consolidate his own waning personal power) the method was to stir up “great disorder under heaven” for the purpose of creating “great order under heaven.” Only through the emergency of chaos and mass disruption could he find the latitude to take bold action, make sweeping changes, eliminate rivals, reorder allegiances, and seize control of new power centers in ways that would previously have been impossible. (Hence why he is reputed to have remarked during the height of the bloody madness that, “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.”)

This dialectic can work at any level. As a simple hypothetical example, let’s say you’re a political bureaucrat and you want to seize factional control over a department of police so as to wield them as your personal jackbooted thugs. That might ordinarily be pretty difficult, since the public would complain, the department itself is an established institution with rules, and it is already filled with seasoned men loyal to an existing hierarchy who are united in not liking or trusting you, you little psychopath. But there’s a way: you find a reason to have the department defunded, forcing most of those disagreeable people to leave and find other work during this difficult fiscal crisis; now the streets are overrun with crime and all is chaos under heaven, so the public angrily demands you re-fund the police and enforce some law and order; you graciously acquiesce and fund the department – in fact, you, a champion of the people, double its budget, hiring all your chosen thugs, and at generous salaries. Presto! The department is back bigger than ever, but now loyal to your patronage. Through disunity has emerged a new unity.

…

Then there are the Black Categories, the reactionary bourgeoisie, the fascists of the working and middle class, who can now also be branded as white supremacists and all other manner of ‘phobes, and then be righteously beaten down and tormented and isolated and surveilled and dispossessed anew for their deplorable bigotry and hatred. Oh, how the tired old class struggle has been reinvigorated to provide such delicious new moral delights!

…

The center, having thus transformed politics into a psychodrama of its civilized struggle against surrounding barbarians, becomes willing to take radical action to maintain the stability of its control, no matter how much it disrupts and destroys in the process. This includes actively anti-democratic, extra-constitutional, or otherwise norm-breaking actions that are justified as necessary to defend norms (read: the norm of establishment control). Like a body with an autoimmune disorder, over time the center becomes extreme in its self-protective behavior, potentially undermining its own legitimacy and societal stability in the process. This of course only makes it more paranoid about the need to maintain strict control of power.[17]

This paranoia engenders a sense of being under siege, along with a feedback loop that produces a steady slide into more and more suspicion and perceived need for greater security (this dovetails perfectly with the processes of bureaucratization and safetyism discussed earlier). Soon everything has become a matter of security. And once something becomes a matter of security, it becomes a matter of existential necessity, and therefore suitable for exception from the established processes and rules of collective decision-making and accountability (democratic or otherwise), given that in an emergency it is justifiable to suspend normal procedures for the sake of expediency. But of course once everything is a matter of security everything becomes an emergency, and so anything is justified – permanent emergency becomes a procedural basis for governance.[18]

…

Most importantly, the securitization of everything by the extreme center has eased America’s ongoing transition to a rule by law system. Not to be confused with rule of law, rule by law is another useful CCP concept. On one level, rule by law is simply a recognition that in order to maintain stability and a “harmonious” (compliant) society, there need to be laws on the books, and people generally need to be made to follow them. This is called “law-based governance,” and Xi Jinping has made strengthening it through greater professionalization of the legal-administrative system a key priority for China’s development. At the same time, however, the rule by law concept explicitly rejects the “erroneous Western thought” encapsulated by the phrase “no one is above the law.” How can anything be above the rule of the CCP? There can be no rule of law over the Party Center, because the law is only a set of procedures, a tool of governance. “To fully govern the country by law,” Xi has explained, means “to strengthen and improve the Party’s leadership” and to “ensure the effective implementation of the Party’s line, principles, and policies through rule by law.” The whole point of law is to facilitate the rule of the Party, so of course the Party’s leadership is above the law.

This is only logical: if the law is a tool of human management, how can it restrict and rule over the managers who create it? Laws exist to rule the ruled; if rulers choose to exempt themselves from rules that’s not “hypocrisy,” just power. After all, sovereign is he who decides the exception. An appeal to the supremacy of “the law” (or that “no one is above the law”) is, when you think about it, a rather weird idea: it is only conceivable if even the highest of earthly powers accepts that there is some even higher power (whether a God or some other transcendent, unchanging, and just order which the law itself reflects) that can and will hold them accountable, in this life or the next, for defiling the spirit of the law (justice). Absent such a power the rule of law is nonsensical and only rule by law remains. Managerialism of course cannot permit or even conceive of any power higher than itself; its entire raison d'être is to reorder and control all of existence, and to accept that anything is beyond its reach would undermine its whole basis. Therefore managerialism and rule of law cannot coexist.

So, in a rule by law America, laws (a great jungle of them) would still be on the books, but their interpretation and application would inevitably vary extensively in order to best suit the managerial regime in any given situation. Since, just like in China, their purpose would be to “ensure the effective implementation of the Party’s line, principles, and policies through rule by law,” when and to whom laws are applied would be largely determined on the same inside vs. outside basis that defines the extreme center. Subjective interpretation of the law – as meaning one thing one day, another the next – would be not only acceptable but absolutely necessary so long as the purpose of the law (to protect the center and progress its managerial project) were to remain fixed as the guiding principle. Building vague and expansive language into the law to facilitate this would become the norm, much as the Chinese regime regularly makes use of laws against such ill-defined crimes as “spreading rumors” or “stirring up trouble” to flexibly do away with problematic people as needed. And selective use of the law as a factional weapon (aka “lawfare”) to undermine or destroy outsider political and class enemies, while sheltering insider allies, would become not only ethically permissible, but practically the civic responsibility of the center’s ruling elite.

Thus the law would become merely an arm of the managerial regime’s revolutionary dialectic. This, perhaps more than any other symptom, would confirm and solidify the transition from a representative multi-party democracy to a one-party state.

…

So, does the United States, or the broader West, have its own united front? Inquiring minds doubtless want to know. At this point it is impossible not to notice the strong tendency of Western elite media, in particular, to move in near absolute synchronicity. It is no longer unusual for a dozen different articles from different outlets to appear touting exactly the same narrative on the same topic in the same week, or even the same day. In fact this is now the norm. For the glassy-eyed talking heads on television to all repeat, with identical phraseology, exactly the same talking points in unison hundreds of times within days is now the industry standard. The sudden adoption of the same linguistic taboos, redefinitions, and fads. The same claims to absolute truth, along with the moral necessity of “debunking” the “misinformation” of any alternative views, followed by the sudden, simultaneous, and wholly unacknowledged and unexplained shift to some different version of absolute truth. The simultaneous identification of the same enemies and pressing threats to the public. The same individual targets singled out for simultaneous hit pieces. The same niche objects of obsessive, swooning coverage. And the same topics of great public interest mysteriously left entirely uncovered by every outlet, as if an official blackout on even the acknowledgement of their existence had been suddenly enforced from above. This is all now standard for the media.

But of course it’s not only the media. The experience of having politicians, academics, major corporations, internet platforms, advertisers, entertainment companies, and all the neighbors you run into at Wholefoods all suddenly pivot to adopt the same weekly conception of facts, echo the same shibboleths, and hang the same flags of allegiance is now simply a normal, if bewildering, part of everyday life in the West. This mass, synchronistic adherence to the constantly shifting “current thing” naturally gives rise to suspicion that there must be some top-down coordination occurring. Is this the work of a united front?

Formally, no. Functionally, yes. There may not be anything like China’s official, centrally administered united front organization, but there is a network and it is united and coordinated – or rather, it is self-coordinating. This united front network is of course the managerial regime itself. The regime is the amalgamation of all the different arms of the managerial system, and can be usefully thought of as if they were all a single institution (which has alternatively been called “the cathedral”). The many institutions of each arm demonstrably behave as if they were part of a single organizational structure, the whole structure moving arm-in-arm together.

Why is that? Who controls this unified network of institutions? No one really controls the network; the network controls everyone. What controls the network? A narrative does. All the institutions in the cathedral seem like they’re singing from the same hymn sheet because they are. The essential unifying and coordinating mechanism of the managerial system is that all its constituent parts share a single doctrinal perspective, an adherence to the same motivational memetic narrative. It speaks with one voice as an emergent property of this fact.

…

A managerial regime is a system of systems. Each has a local narrative validating its own particular existence and importance, but these narratives are nested in higher narratives. A teachers union has a narrative about itself, but that is nested in a higher narrative about the importance of managerial mass education. At the top is an ur-narrative, justifying and uniting the whole edifice. In our case that is managerialism itself: the need for managers to manage all things. All those within the system of systems (the managerial regime) seeking prestige and advancement must therefore effectively subscribe to all these narratives, including the same ur-narrative. Echoing the values and stories of the dominant narrative then serves as an indicator of belonging to system, class, and shared righteous identity.

Hence anyone in the professional managerial class who wants to become or remain a member of the managerial elite will almost inevitably conform to and parrot the same broad narrative belief structure, even if they are in completely different institutions and professions. Frank the FBI agent and Joanna the journalist are programmed to each react the same way to the same narrative stimulus, repeat the same slogans, and engage in the same required “not noticings” of reality, simply because each wants to avoid being shunned and to advance in status within the prestige hierarchy of their respective organizations. There is no direct coordination needed to get them to do this.

…

As Jacob Siegel astutely notes in his deep dive into the development of the Censorship-Industrial Complex, “countering disinformation” (the Western euphemism for “political security”) has since 2016 been regularly described as requiring the development of a “whole of society” strategy. “Only a whole-of-society approach – one that engages government, private companies and civil society alike – can effectively combat and build resilience to disinformation,” is how FBI Director Christopher Wray put it in 2020. Such an approach has, he said, become “central to how we work with both the public and private sectors, from other government agencies, to companies of all sizes, to universities, to NGOs.” Indeed the “whole of society” framing can now be found in use just about everywhere you look across the Western world, serving as an excuse for directly fusing state power with a single extensive and unified international network of managerial technocrats, effectively circumventing and shielding it from any democratic control whatsoever.

It sure seems, in fact, like the revolt of the elites has produced not just a more self-conscious and defensive oligarchic network, but has prompted its hardening into something that’s beginning to look an awful lot like the singular party of a party-state. As a result, narrative coordination mechanism seems to have begun to evolve and crystalize into something more: an actively enforced party line.

…

Xi Jinping and his officials like to muse wistfully about the pleasures of the “Fengqiao experience” (枫桥经验) and sharing them with all of China. Fengqiao (“Maple Bridge”) is, or was, a picturesque little township in Zhejiang province, but I’m afraid the Fengqiao experience is not a tourism package. Rather, back in the 1960s Fengqiao distinguished itself as a model town in the eyes of Mao. While usually Party thugs had to go around identifying and rounding up “reactionary elements,” in Fengqiao the people handled it themselves: “not one person [had to be] rounded up, and still the vast majority of enemies were dealt with.” Brilliant!

Fengqiao so impressed Mao because, by constantly monitoring and snitching on each other, and engaging in “on-site rectification” (mob struggle sessions) and “rehabilitation” (thought reform) to collectively enforce conformity, the people there successfully policed themselves without being told. Here at last was a true example of the “dictatorship of the masses” that Mao hoped to establish. With sufficient mobilization by the Party’s leadership, the “mass line” of the public could successfully exert immense social control over itself on the Party’s behalf. Mao encouraged the party to learn from the experience of Fengqiao, and in doing so planted a seed that would take root and grow in the hard soil of the CCP imagination: a dream of a population so thoroughly conditioned by Chinese socialism that someday it would practically manage itself.

Today Xi has revitalized and modernized this idea by marrying it to newly available tools: those of the digital revolution. With exhortations of “mass prevention and mass governance,” “digital justice for the masses,” and “grid-style management,” traditional methods of Fengqiao-style social mass monitoring and control (such as organized teams of informants, tip lines, public “call outs” and social shaming) have been combined with internet-wide mobilization and a vast digital surveillance apparatus.[20] That now includes big data analytics integrating universal real time biometric, location, and financial purchase tracking (including through the ubiquitous “everything app” WeChat), along with internet and social media history and interpersonal relationship mapping.

…

Why is this happening? Why would private banks and other businesses force out paying customers like this and risk courting public backlash? Because it is in their interest to do so if they want to survive and thrive, and indeed they have little choice. These banks are not really fully “private actors,” as they are part of the managerial economy in a budding managerial party-state. The business of a managerial business is not business; it’s managerialism. And once more: there can be no neutral institutions in a party-state. The party-state’s enemies are the institution’s enemies, or the institution is an enemy of the party-state (which is not a profitable position to be in). This is what “reputational risk” means: the risk of appearing to be on the wrong side of the party line. Hence why we find Coutts, a bank founded in 1692 and so quintessentially posh establishment that it banks the British Royal Family, decking out its entire headquarters in the rainbow regalia of loyalty and operating like it too is, like the AIIB, controlled by “an internal secret police.”

So, at the present moment, when the managerial system is defending itself against challenges from its anti-managerial “populist” enemies, the banks will automatically find themselves participating in the war effort. And the banks are on the frontlines of that war, because financial control is the obvious next evolution for a hardening soft managerial system seeking new methods of stability maintenance beyond the usual practice of narrative control. In a digitized society, financial control is now, like narrative manipulation, entirely a matter of controlling virtual information. That makes it a natural and familiar feeling tool for foxes who prefer suppressing dissent from a laptop. No need to get the hands dirty when your weapon is a keyboard.

…

How far might this all go? While the powerful realm of financial flows is today’s focus, there is no reason to think that, on the current trajectory, the same dynamics won’t be applied, in a united front, to every other sector of our economy and society. If someday soon people find themselves evicted from their insurance policies for speaking out of turn online (or associating with too many people who do), apartment leases come with ideological morality clauses, and airlines unite to ban customers with the wrong beliefs from traveling, we shouldn’t be surprised – this will simply be the behavior of a hardening managerialism seeking stability through mechanistic control over all the details of life.

New technologies, like AI and, especially, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) will only continue to make this kind of granular control more and more possible.[22] And all that which can possibly be used will be used. A few months ago, a man found himself completely shut out of his digitally controlled “smart home” by Amazon after a delivery driver accused his doorbell of saying something racist.[23] Why would Amazon bother to do this? Because they can do this; and so, in the end, under a managerial regime, they must do this. As our managers find that every day it feels easier and easier to “solve” problematic people with the click of a button, they will not be able to resist hitting that button, hard and often.

…

Today the great super-states struggle for possession of the earth. But for all past speculation that the 21st century would be defined by a “clash of civilizations,” today there is only one, smothering form of modern civilization that has stretched itself across the face of the globe, its multiple personalities vying amongst themselves for imperial supremacy. In the West, progressive managerialism softly strangled democracy to death over a century of manipulation, hollowed it out, and now wears its skin. In the East, the imported virus of communist managerialism wiped out a once-great civilization in a river of blood, then crystalized into the cold, hard machine that now rules the lands of China. Fascist managerialism, killed off by its fratricidal siblings, lives on in their genes.

Managerialism has today conquered the world so thoroughly that to most of us it may seem like the only possible universe, the very water in which we swim. With our history rewritten and our minds conditioned, just as Orwell (and other prophets) predicted, we now struggle even to perceive its existence, yet alone to break through the iron paradigm of managerial thinking and recognize that, as both a form of government and a way of being, it is in the human experience something wholly new, abnormal, tyrannical, and absurd.

So, does that illustrate some idea of what might emerge to be that "something else"? That the old order has been suspended in it's failure to defend Our Democracy — now (re)defined as managerial elites enacting the Rousseauan "General Will" with their technocratic expertise — against its greatest threat, populism — meaning a demagogue taking power by promising to do what the poor, misinformation- (and "malinformation") addled masses think they want (and, in its worst manifestation, actually meaning it) — thus requiring a Schmittian state of exception (though they won't call it that) until the "Fascist threat" has been dealt with — and, as someone recently argued to me IRL, the average white GOP voter "wants Fascism."

Most people will be brought to obedience by ever-improving narrative management. Much of the rest will be terrorized into compliance by the fear of consequences brought through showy examples of force. And the last group will be those examples.

Oderunt tum metuant. You don't need people's belief, all you need is their compliance. "Understanding is not required, only obedience," as Babylon 5's Minbari would say.

As fictional character in fictional world would say.

You can do anything you like with bayonets, except sit on them.

As one of most skilled and accomplished politicians in the real history of the real world would say.

Gaetano Mosca explains well the need for the magic story in The Ruling Class. He calls this the "political formula".

All regimes forever and always are, in the practice of power, oligarchies of an organized minority. But to organize, which is a prerequisite of maintaining power, the minority needs an ideological substrate. It can be a lot of things, it can even be farcical and insane, but it has to be coherent and at least somewhat grounded in the reality they occupy, otherwise people stop believing in it and you start producing counter elites.

This is what happened in the Soviet Union if you remember, the elites themselves lost faith in socialism and reformers collapsed the Union, as nobody in power had the will to maintain it by force.

Overt dictatorship of the managerial class ("hard managerial regime" as the DR calls it) is perfectly viable in the short term as a replacement for the soft variant that thinks it's a democracy. But it requires might and it exhausts itself fairly quickly even when backed by it as we saw in the XXth century.

The fact is, regimes usually fall when they start having to employ hard power to maintain themselves but can't actually bring themselves to do it. And a less convincing political formula combined with a need to use violence is the recipe to become Louis XVI.

If we want to believe that the managers will keep the ship together, we therefore must find who among them has a fanatical enough devotion to managerialism to send troops to gun down people in the streets in its name.

I can find this force of will in the bourgeoisie of the revolution. I do not see it in the managerial class of today. I think the only reason they are still in power is that no serious counter elite has what it takes to challenge them as of yet. And I see challengers growing their strength yet.

First, there are reports that certain Republican orgs have been doing the work to assemble a large list of mid level staffers to install in the federal government for the next president. See NYT article. https://archive.ph/0uVQq

This should have existed in 2016, but clearly that was not the case.

Second, trump has an EO ready to go to reclass a huge percentage of federal enployees as contractors, making them much easier to fire. https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2022/07/trump-reelected-aides-plan-purge-civil-service/374842/

Third, a trump term would distract my political enemies and forestall whatever terrible agenda they are planning to implement. The dystopian liberal democratic order is coming for all of us in the west no matter what at this point. I’ll take four more years of wailing and grinding of teeth from the establishment as a nice sideshow in the meantime.

First, there are reports that certain Republican orgs have been doing the work to assemble a large list of mid level staffers to install in the federal government for the next president.

And my point is that it will be impossible to actually install any of them.

Second, trump has an EO ready to go to reclass a huge percentage of federal enployees as contractors, making them much easier to fire.

And when the civil service collectively declare this EO illegitimate and ignore it completely?

The dystopian liberal democratic order is coming for all of us in the west no matter what at this point. I’ll take four more years of wailing and grinding of teeth from the establishment as a nice sideshow in the meantime.

Exactly my point — nothing getting done is the best we can possibly hope for.

And when the civil service collectively declare this EO illegitimate and ignore it completely?

I think this is too far in the other direction. They'd have to come up with some statutory basis that can be argued to, uh, trump it. I think this can be forced down their throats, especially if it's dropped again on Day One of Term Two, rather than in October 2020. The administration will have four years to force out the resisters and a serious mechanism by which to simply fire them and deal with the lawsuit rather than have them playing intransigence for years.

They'd have to come up with some statutory basis that can be argued to, uh, trump it.

Why? What if they don't?

I think this can be forced down their throats

By whom? Who are going to actually enforce things, against those who disobey?

a serious mechanism by which to simply fire them

And again, just who is going to enforce this, and how?

Why? What if they don't?

He can pretty easily fire them in that case.

You're very strangely continuing to prod many folks to go all the way toward declaring some form of civil war in some limit, but that's silly and it won't get there. It's the same type of hysteria that led the Blues to imagining scenarios about, "WHAT IF TRUMP JUST IGNORES THE SUPREME COURT AND JUST DEPORTS THE MUSLIMS AND EXECUTES TEH GAYS AND REFUSES TO LEAVE OFFICE AND AND AND AND".... uh, and then we had a reasonably normal presidency with some low-level variance.

Trump fired people before. They went home. Sure, they also went on TV and were lauded with social approval for hating Trump on TV, but they went home from their government job and someone else took their government job. Like, what do you think happens right now if someone just refuses to go home from government property after they get fired from their government job?

Like, what do you think happens right now if someone just refuses to go home from government property after they get fired from their government job?

Eventually, security evicts them (and the police probably arrest for trespassing), while their former coworkers do nothing to stop it.

But the point is that security won't do this, nor their coworkers. When security keeps letting them in because "they still work here," their coworkers keep cooperating because "they still work here," and payroll keeps paying them because "they still work here," how do they not still work there?

The #Resisters suffer from a coordination game. This is especially difficult, because the firings will likely be one-by-one and entirely focused on the upper/mid-upper level of the bureaucracy. People whose names you don't know. "The most heavily Democratic departments are the EPA, Department of Education, and the State Department, where about 70% of employees are registered to the party." So, Trump sees that, say, the EPA is #Resisting in implementing the EO and slow-walking the naming of new Schedule F positions. EPA has 15 upper management presidential appointees with Senate confirmation. I can't easily find a simple number, but they have a bunch more that are just straight political appointees without Senate confirmation. No one has even remotely suggested #Resistance on the level of, "When Trump fires the old political appointees at this level and appoints new ones, we're going to #Resist, lock the new guys out of the building, and physically fight against security to keep the other guys coming in. Oh, plus, BTW, we need to infiltrate whatever organization manages their pay system to keep the paychecks going (even though that's likely housed in some other agency that just does it for a variety of them)."

So, what does Trump do? First, he goes to his 15 Senate-confirmed appointees and says, "Yo dawgs, you need to file your TPS reports or I'm going to fire you." Do those Senate-confirmed appointees file their TPS reports? If so, problem solved. If not, he starts firing them. Maybe one of the nine sections controlled by an Assistant Administrator is the only one who doesn't file their TPS report. Trump fires him/her or asks him/her if the problem is another political appointee within their section. Fires whoever the problem is. Each of these people almost certainly can carry out the duty of listing the new Schedule F slots pretty much on their own, if they have to.

But okay, you say, the #Resistance will come when Trump fires the Assistant Administrator for Environmental Information. Everybody in the Environmental Information department is up in a tizzy and is using every tool in their toolbox to prevent the Assistant Administrator from filing his/her TPS report. Two things to note. First, the Assistant Administrator for Environmental Information is already a bloody Trump appointee! It was already someone that Trump picked to do that job! How many #Resisters are going to fight security to protect a Trump appointee?! This is a position that has been a political appointment for essentially forever; this is a position where no one across the upper management of the entire civil service would claim can not be simply fired and replaced by a new appointee. Second, #Resisters in other agencies or outside government have no bloody clue who this person is. They have a horrid coordination game to play. They have to somehow coordinate enough people inside and outside the agency to all simultaneously put their necks out in open defiance of the way things have always been done, they way that they're claiming to argue is the way it should still be done, but that they're all going to simultaneously literally be willing to fight security to keep one nameless Trump appointee over some other nameless Trump appointee. Gimme a freaking break. Ain't no chance. You'll see some ridiculous article in the Times about "trouble in the EPA", as Trump is "endangering the future of the climate" by futzing with some no-name at the EPA, but there is zero chance that you're going to coordinate that many people to physically #Resist to protect one upper/mid-level Trump appointee that everyone acknowledges he can just fire and replace.

If they don't do that, problem solved. We have a new Assistant Administrator for Environmental Information, and that new guy files his friggin' TPS report. If they do it, he can just bring in security from one of the other agencies, take his pick from the most loyal, and either the current security guys (probably literally nobodies who were hired on contract from the private sector at the "lowest cost", drawn from a very different portion of the population than EPA upper/middle management) will physically fight them to prevent them from taking over security for the building or, again, problem solved.

The only reason why there was ever the chance of having as much hullabaloo as the FBI director had was because (a) for better or worse, everyone knew who Jim Comey was, so they could reasonably coordinate around an individual they trusted, (b) they had at least a fig leaf of the idea of independence in the position from the statute, and (c) they had the rhetoric of an independent investigation into Trump, himself. They won't have any of that here. They would have to simultaneously show up to violate the law, risking prison for themselves, in a huge coordination game, to protect some nobody upper/mid-level Trump appointee. Ain't no bloody chance. The TPS report will get filed, even if the head Administrator (also hand-picked by Trump) just has to write the names of positions on the damn TPS report himself. If anything, it gives the top Trump appointee the chance to target anyone in the organization who gives him even a whiff of #Resistance. Then, when that lower-level guy gets fired and replaced by a new Schedule F guy, the #Resisters will have to play an even worse coordination game for an even lower-level nobody, all putting their own cushy jobs (and possibly their freedom) on the line.

and physically fight against security

Why would they need to? Security will be the ones helping them "lock the new guys out of the building" and "keep[ing] the other guys coming in."

Oh, plus, BTW, we need to infiltrate whatever organization manages their pay system to keep the paychecks going

No they won't, because, in a sense, they already have. Even if it's "some other agency," it's still fully-captured, still staffed by the same sort of people, in full agreement. The managers of their pay system will side with them automatically. It's all one big, totally-captured Permanent Bureaucracy, the "separate parts" in lock-step with one another.

Do those Senate-confirmed appointees file their TPS reports? If so, problem solved.

How does that solve the problem?

Each of these people almost certainly can carry out the duty of listing the new Schedule F slots pretty much on their own, if they have to.

Again, how do they enforce this duty?

So Trump fires a political appointee whose nominal subordinates refuse to obey, and replaces them. What prevents the agency from continuing to #Resist the new Trump appointee?

If they do it, he can just bring in security from one of the other agencies

Who are just as captured and will side with them against a Republican president. The whole point is that nobody is going to obey. Every group with the power to enforce any firings outside the direct appointment level is already part of the #Resistance, and are going to side with their fellow Defenders of Our Democracy against Cheeto Hitler's ordering them to help make him Führer.

risking prison for themselves

How so? Who's going to arrest them?

More comments

Eventually, the national guard. But it won’t proceed that far because blue tribe bureaucrats in NoVa are not Islamic fundamentalists. They are risk averse and very wealthy people with opposite political leans to trump who won’t take their chances on national guardsmen hauling them out of the office on their ass and prosecuting them for trespassing on government property.

trump has an EO ready to go to reclass a huge percentage of federal enployees as contractors, making them much easier to fire

ROFL at "huge percentage". The article says like 50k positions. There's close to 2M federal employees. And they wouldn't become "contractors"; they'd just be more politically-controlled. There's something like 4k political appointees currently. Going to 50k would be a significant step toward making civil service leadership more politically-accountable when someone actually wins an election, rather than it just being de facto Democrat-controlled, but who knows how deep the rot is. In any event, it's definitely not putting a huge percentage of federal employees on the political chopping block.

50k more than were there in 2016.

I’m not sure what your point is. Is it hopeless? Maybe. Likely. But what have we got to lose?

I trust trump more than desantis. And Nikki Haley might as well be a democrat in my opinion.

I don’t get this view. What has DeSantis done that makes your trust Trump more? Trump turned most of the country over to Fauci.

My point is that it's not a "huge percentage". Like, that's my point. A very very simple point. It's not a matter of complicated argumentation. That point is just a dead simple comparison of two numbers. I'm definitely definitely not saying that it's hopeless. I said:

Going to 50k would be a significant step toward making civil service leadership more politically-accountable when someone actually wins an election, rather than it just being de facto Democrat-controlled

Meaning it does have hope/potential in being effective. A full analysis of the factors for how effective it will be for various agencies is significantly more complicated. But no matter where people come down on that question, it's an extremely simple matter of pointing at two numbers to see that it's not a "huge percentage".

Agreed that it's not a huge percentage, but how many of that two million have titles like "Mail Carrier" or "VA Hospital Nurse"? Most of them aren't going to be able to do much to stop anyone's agenda. If they're carefully chosen then 50k could make a big difference. If nothing else it gives you a lot of people in senior positions that can start firing troublemakers pour encourager les autres.

Agreed that they're totally targeting upper management, and this won't affect the vast majority of individual mail carriers/nurses/etc. Could potentially be a significant change in how much an incoming executive can control the Executive branch against #Resistance. The language they're using in their targeting is “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making or policy-advocating” positions. My point is that it won't be the vast majority of individual mail carriers/nurses/etc; it won't be a large percentage of overall employees. That's not to say it has no chance of being effective. I have longer and more complicated thoughts on whether/how/where it will be effective or not.

50k potential federal employees turning over every time a president changes would be a pretty massive change in how the government runs. It would make for excellent fireworks.

You will be surprised how little summary executions are needed especially if you signal that you will keep them for as long as needed.

We're at the point where reporting in the msm assumes that Trump will just suspend elections somehow. This report from PBS Newshour is about Trump using the word 'vermin' in a recent speech. In this report the words 'Dangerous Rhetoric' were overlaid over an image of Trump, and the meat of the report was an interview with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor from NYU. Right off the bat her comparison was with You Know Who, and she then argues that rhetoric is symptomatic of sections of the Republican party wanting to move to authoritarianism and suspending elections. The mechanism for this happening is up to the viewer's speculation.

Is there a mechanism for him to suspend elections and stay President forever? No.

Will he try anyway and cause a shitload of drama? Probably.

Trump AG prosecute Obama, Biden,Hilary, Fauci etc.. Also people who criticize him. People get violent. Atmosphere of fear, people are afraid that one wrong move will fracture the republic (or try to make that move because it feels virtuous given that your side is right).

Replace generals with Trump loyalists? That doesn't get you all the way there, but it helps. Then you have a choice between an internal military coup to get rid of the Trump loyalists at the top, and maybe they say that it's better to have another term of Trump than to destroy the Republic; they might be right.

You could see how they would think it's reasonable. The first term didn't count because the deep state interfered, and this makes some kind of internal sense, so this would be his first real full term, or maybe the next one, because he will need to use this one to eradicate the deep state.

Ya, I have a hard time seeing any of this happening.

The thing is, for the first term, we were told all this was going to happen anyway. People were online asking about how they could flee to Canada ahead of the jackboots marching in the street to drag gays and minorities off to be tortured in the camps.

What happened, in reality? Pretty much business as usual, apart from Covid. And getting conservative judges on the Supreme Court, which I really never imagined he'd either try or even get done. Congratulations there on a real achievement.

We didn't get the Third World War, the nukes flying, the end of days, crashed economy, torture conversion camp for gays, the Christofascist theocratic regime. So why think that even if he somehow manages to win a second term, this would happen? Too much "wolf! wolf! look there's a wolf!" cried the first time for me to believe all the "no really a wolf this time!" this time round.

We didn't get the Third World War, the nukes flying, the end of days, crashed economy, torture conversion camp for gays, the Christofascist theocratic regime

We did get the attempt to overthrow democracy. So there's that.

I'm hardly informed about goings-on over the pond, but isn't that a bit of an exaggeration? Not that democracy is flawless or working overly well, but I'm having a hard time seeing attempts to overthrow it outright in the recent past.

No, I don't think it's an exaggeration. He lost an election and tried very hard to stay in power regardless. That is a central example of an attempt to overthrow democracy in my book.

From the Trump side, we did see an attempt to overthrow democracy, and it was successful: the Biden coup.

  • Tallies were reached in a variety of ways which one side found alarmingly suspicious, but court cases alleging fraud were not adjudicated with “discovery”.
  • Believing that an attempt to overthrow democracy was under way, that side gathered in the nation’s Capitol to protest.
  • Hundreds of thousands of Trump fans gathered peacefully, hundreds of militiamen joined the protests without firearms. All of them could have abided by a clean loss, but not a dirty theft.
  • Events happened which cannot be agreed upon for tribal reasons, and the media took one side’s descriptions as the absolute historic truth while prosecutions took the the other side to jail.

If 2020’s election season and J6 were indeed a Biden coup, it was portrayed to those in the know as a way to pre-empt a seemingly inevitable Trump coup, complete with Nancy Pelosi’s daughter capturing events for a documentary intended to portray events as a 9/11-style attack.

If it was a Trump attempt at seizing power, it was the most ridiculously convoluted and ineffective plot in political history, with an impromptu army of hundreds of thousands just giving up without firing a shot.

If it was all just a series of bad game theory moves which gave each side's actions the illusion of malfeasance through tribal lenses, it is a tragedy of democracy all around.

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Hm. Alright. Hearing "overthrow", I expected something more effectual, but I suppose I can see where you're coming from.

Oh, you mean the setting up of CHOP and CHAZ and people forming little militias that killed the very people they were supposed to be protecting?

Not that, huh?

I was more talking about Trump's actions, but sure, there was that too.

There are legal mechanisms for him to remain POTUS until his death assuming he can win the vote. He has loyal children of age. He can just run one of his children for decades. And that would not violate the constitution.

He might even be more effective that way as people would feel more comfortable that he’s not sitting on the nuclear button.

China and Russia have both been in a similar situation. Putin and Deng were both considered the ultimate power when they had no official position.

There are legal mechanisms for him to remain POTUS until his death assuming he can win the vote.

By "legal mechanisms", do you mean holding a Amendment Convention to repeal the 22nd Amendment? How on earth would he secure 3/4 of state legislatures and/or state conventions? Seems like an unserious concern to me.

His children can run with him the power behind the scenes.

He can just run one of his children for decades. And that would not violate the constitution.

Remember the "ha ha only joking" T-shirts when it was assumed Hillary would It's Her Turn Now? All about how it would be 2 terms for Hillary, then run Chelsea for 2 terms, then Michelle Obama, then Sasha and Malia... perpetual female one-party rule for decades was a great idea when it was Our Guys doing it.

Is there a mechanism for him to suspend elections and stay President forever? No.

I mean, get enough loyalty from the army, declare it, kill anyone who objects?

That's how it typically goes, right?

Sure, the US has historically been pretty resistant to this, and probably will continue to be, but it's not like there's no mechanism by which this could imaginably happen. History has plenty of examples.

God forgive me, but the amount of screaming hysteria in the media (and that's not even touching what is on social media) is entertaining.

Also extremely worrying, because it really is building Trump up to be a potential candidate for the Republican nomination. He doesn't even have to turn up to the official debates, he's getting so much free publicity. It's going to be "okay, whoever does end up as the sole runner after the debates will then have to go up against Trump".

If he gets selected, it'll be on the 'opposition' stirring people up into a tizzy about him. Who even knows if he could win a second term? The way talk is going, you would think it was all over bar the shouting and once he gets back, this is what is going to happen, noooooo!

I think the intended difference is that there’s lists of appointees for a second trump admin who are competent and effective and who will have the ability to sideline resistance libs in the civil service.

To what extent that’s true I don’t know; my impression is that at least some of trumps issues with getting stuff done were just his tendency to ask for the impossible and fire high level officials for not doing it.

there’s lists of appointees for a second trump admin who are competent and effective

Except, isn't the whole argument of things like Michael Lewis's "Fifth Risk," and all the talk of "Trump-proofing" Federal hiring and firing that any right-wing appointee, by disagreeing with the existing left-wing "expert consensus," thereby proves himself "not an expert," thereby not "competent and effective," but a "partisan hack" who "has no idea how our government works," and thus whose appointment would constitute "a government under attack by its own leaders," to be resisted by any means necessary?

who will have the ability to sideline resistance libs in the civil service.

And how does anyone "sideline" over two million people?

There are two million people in the civil service, but how many of those actually need to be sidelined?

To start with, there’s lots of janitors, low level auditors, air traffic controllers, secretaries, etc. employed by the federal government. Obviously these people don’t generate policy, and they don’t really enforce it either.

Then on the enforcement wing, you’ve got lots of cops who are mostly not resistance libs. Yes, there’s EPA permitting officers and DOJ lawyers, but you can tell a lot of them to sit in a corner by the simple expedient of not assigning them any work. Ken Paxton as attorney general brings with him an inner circle which can take over most of the DOJ lawyers’ jobs at the cost of some mild corruption- and the rest of it can be assigned to the compliant dozen or so. It’s a very small portion of people which need to be moved to rubber rooms, and there are already people listed to replace them.

There are two million people in the civil service, but how many of those actually need to be sidelined?

Pretty much all of them, given that AIUI they are > 95% solidly left-wing.

you’ve got lots of cops who are mostly not resistance libs.

Disagree, at least at the Federal level — and even if they aren't all resistance libs, most of the rest are the sort who will follow whatever orders given because they've got bills to pay and can't lose their precious, precious pension.

but you can tell a lot of them to sit in a corner

And when they refuse to do so? Or even refuse to acknowledge the one doing the assigning or lack thereof?

Ken Paxton as attorney general brings with him an inner circle which can take over most of the DOJ lawyers’ jobs at the cost of some mild corruption

And when the DOJ collectively refuse to recognize Paxton's appointment or authority, have him and his "inner circle" locked out of the building, and proceed on without them?

Pretty much all of them, given that AIUI they are > 95% solidly left-wing.

Did you read my comment? Lots of these people are irrelevant. TSA agents, janitors, receptionists, the payroll lady, air traffic controllers- their political leans don’t matter very much at all. Most federal employees are doing perfectly standard average jobs that don’t involve making policy.

most of the rest are the sort who will follow whatever orders given because they've got bills to pay and can't lose their precious, precious pension.

When the people giving the orders are trump appointees, this works in favor of trump.

And when the DOJ collectively refuse to recognize Paxton's appointment or authority, have him and his "inner circle" locked out of the building, and proceed on without them?

The national guard breaks the building down and they’re all fired like Reagan did air traffic controllers in the eighties, plus lots of them are arrested for wildcat striking. Trump raises millions off of calling it a ‘socialist coup’.

I know, you’re going to say ‘but what if the national guard refuses’ at that point you’re talking about an actual civil war in which the US probably Balkanizes and believe me, the successor states are probably not paragons of shittlibery, nor does the Virginia federal civil servant class retain the ability to pay their mortgages in this scenario.

at that point you’re talking about an actual civil war

No, it won't be a war, because one side has pretty much all the power. The Trump side will just be a bunch of disorganized randos engaging in uncoordinated, aimless attempts at lone-wolf terrorism, and so ordinary civilian law enforcement, the FBI and the ATF and so on, will be quite sufficient to win this "civil war" and put down any and all "rebellion," no F-15s or nuclear weapons needed.

Ordinary civilian law enforcement is incapable of handling the serious militia groups(and let’s remember that the vast majority of the federal law enforcement apparatus is actually red DHS and not blue DOJ) and the realistic outcome of military backing in such an endeavor is that the chain of command collapses. Plus the bigger red states actually stand to benefit from a federal government with no state capacity to speak of, and have resources on par with average European countries.

I’ll believe that if the situation is out of control enough, the DC national guard mutinies and refuses to obey trump’s orders. Do you think a red state national guard won’t just take their place? If trump faces an actual mutiny do you expect the troops deployed to operation lone star to remain there when he needs them? You realize that the marine corps is pretty red, and trump would literally be their legal commander, right? ‘Team red’s resources during the American version of the auspicious incident’ are not zero.

Ordinary civilian law enforcement is incapable of handling the serious militia groups

You mean the "militia groups" created, run, and staffed by undercover FBI as a sting/entrapment/false flag operation (to meet the unrealized demand for a "domestic terror threat" to justify their budgets)? Or the club of a handful of forty-somethings with beer guts and too much tacti-cool gear who shoot guns together some weekends? Because they're all one or the other.

Plus, I'm old enough to remember Waco. People will occasionally point out the lack of similar incidents more recently as evidence that the government is less capable of such suppression, but they've got it backwards. AIUI, there were several prior points where local law enforcement could have arrested Koresh and various other members of the Branch Davidians on outstanding warrants or local charges — and wanted to — but the Feds kept holding them back. Because Reno et al wanted to round up the whole group in one fell swoop as a big show for the media. And what they learned from the resulting incident was not to do that part. The reason you don't see Waco standoffs is because our government successfully nips such groups in the bud long before they get to the "build a compound" stage.

The average American, thanks to pop culture and lousy history classes, totally misunderstands how revolts work. As I once saw it put, a revolution is not going from one government to zero governments to one, but from one government to two governments to one. Every successful rebellion is a set of parallel governing institutions. And see the likes of the German Peasants' Rebellion for when angry civilians, no matter how numerous, fail to organize sufficiently.

My parents, for example, are firmly convinced that the American Revolution consisted in its entirety of random disorganized colonial civilians each, on their own, grabbing their hunting rifles and running willy-nilly to pick off Redcoats, who did absolutely nothing in response but stand there in their nice ranks in open fields waiting to die while impotently protesting about how "this just isn't cricket" until there were none left. Notwithstanding that the Continental Army was indeed a real, organized army — particularly after von Steuben got done whipping them into shape — and the local militias, even as part-time citizen-soldiers, were not just disorganized "lone wolves" running off and doing their own thing.

Then try reading what gets written at places like Sarah Hoyt's blog comments section. They'll talk about how Biden stole the election, "the Marxists" want to gulag us all, and the need for the Second Amendment… and about how "we're the people that when someone orders us to breathe, we suffocate to death" and "that's our superpower" How when SHTF, everyone just needs to independently hunker down in their own homesteads waiting to shoot the "jack-booted Commies" when they come to pick us off one-by-one, "because that's how we win." When one person pointed out the eventual need in such a scenario to eventually begin organizing, everyone pounced, one responding about how it didn't matter how much they might be in agreement, 'if anyone shows up at my door talking about "joining up," it doesn't matter how close of a friend they are, I'll shoot them dead on the spot, because anyone who says something like that is The Enemy.' "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately" and "Join, or die"? That's pinko glowie talk! Red-blooded Real Americans will never organize, never join together, never obey any sort of chain of command, never recognize any superior officer or commander but Christ Himself.

Plus the bigger red states actually stand to benefit from a federal government with no state capacity to speak of,

Except, again, why would the 2 million plus lose any "state capacity" from ditching the 535 ever-rotating, merely-temporary warm bodies in Congress and the handful of similar at 1600 Pennsylvania?

You realize that the marine corps is pretty red

At which ranks, though? I've seen people talk about why coups are usually carried out by colonels, with respect to why it's not anyone of higher rank (namely, generals are political creatures), but there are also reasons why it's not anyone lower in rank.

And who is more important to obey, a distant boss all the way up the chain and hundreds or thousands of miles away… or your immediate superior who is right there face-to-face (with MPs and a sidearm)?

Disobeying an order you think is unlawful is the right thing to do… if the inevitable court-martial agrees with you. If they don't, then have fun at Leavenworth. If you're a tip-of-the-spear "grunt," and you and the rest of your unit all disobey your immediate superior so as to obey a distant Commander-in-Chief, that's one thing with regards to your chances. But if it's just you and a couple of other guys while the rest of the base refuses to join your "mutiny in support of a would-be dictator's auto-coup against Our Democracy," well, then it's either Leavenworth or a coffin. So you better be sure that you've got enough of your fellows on your side before you risk it… but you can't be sure, because this isn't the sort of thing you can talk about. And soldiers are not immune to propaganda, either. If every media report is that only a few malcontent traitors have joined the Trumpist coup while the bulk of our brave men, women, and non-binary people in uniform hold true to their sacred oaths to defend Our Democracy from this domestic enemy…

I've read plenty of online discussions about "Civil War II" and coup/counter-coup scenarios. And many a time, an active or former serviceman has chimed in to talk about how, while this sort of thing might happen in other countries in this hemisphere, It Can Never Happen Here, because the American soldier is a different breed, a nobler class of warrior who will always put his duty ahead of his personal political allegiances and opinions, and for whom the military's absolute non-intervention in domestic politics is eternally sacrosanct. And on talk of state/local allegiances, with comparisons to the past civil war, you'll get more responses about how things are different now, how the Army learned from that war and made immediate changes to ensure that nothing like General Lee will ever happen again.

‘Team red’s resources during the American version of the auspicious incident’ are not zero.

But "Team blue's" resources are so much more vast that they might as well be.

As for the perennial Afghanistan comparisons, it's one thing to fight halfassedly for ambitious-but-vague non-military goals, with your troops restrained by unworkable RoEs put in place by lawyers and by a State Department for whom the real enemy is the Pentagon, when you're halfway around the world, and can safely call it quits and go back home at any time without anybody near the top suffering even the tiniest of career consequences. It's another when "home" is where you're fighting. The consequences for losing a civil war/revolution are generally a lot more severe and lethal ("you win or you die" and all that).

While trying to turn clannish medieval Muslim goat-herders into modern, WEIRD liberal democrats isn't exactly a task soldiers are well-equipped to carry out (or anybody, for that matter), "suppressing domestic revolt" has been a core competency of standing armies for as long as there's been standing armies. It's like the main reason the Founding Fathers didn't want one.

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Pretty much all of them, given that AIUI they are > 95% solidly left-wing.

You are grossly overestimating how politically motivated and left-wing the average fed is. Federal employees organizations are overwhelming Democratic (unsurprisingly, given the GOP's traditional hostility to organized labor and the Democrats' favorability); actual federal employees are nowhere near as unanimous. Here is a Gallup poll surveying the partisan alignment of Federal employees (among other things). It's older than I'd like, but it illustrates the point. If anti-Trump civil servants tried to coordinate a strike against his administration they'd just fail.

I have worked in a federal government agency for about ten years which employs over 5,000 people. It is possible to strongarm policymakers with enough political will. But it’s not easy. This is how you might do it within one presidential administration:

  1. Identify those individuals in charge of policymaking within the agency. At my agency it’s a small department within a small division, constituting about 25 people. Fire them all. Also, fire every high-ranking attorney in each of the major offices as well as headquarters. This would be another 50-100 people. Don’t fire the executive leadership—they got there because they follow orders well. All you need to do is rewrite the orders and they might grumble but they know well how to fall in line.

  2. Immediately abolish the public sector union associated with the agency. Do not negotiate, strip employees of all collective bargaining rights and grievance processes. Every single federal government agency’s union is captured by the PMC Left. The only exception is perhaps for those representing law enforcement and border patrol, because those are Red Tribe heavy. (I suspect this is why some people want to reclassify agency employees as contractors.) The unions have long been captured, they must be destroyed.

  3. Loosen hiring procedures to de-emphasize college degrees as a requirement to apply for federal government jobs. These are just credentials designed to benefit academia, which is also hopelessly captured by the PMC Left. Do this on day one. After four years the effects on employee hiring and attrition will be evident.

  4. Identify all agency employees who have ever donated to establishment Democratic or Republican political campaigns. Fire them all. Thankfully it’s easy to do this courtesy of the FEC and ActBlue and other PACs that publish donor information no matter how small.

I can attest that more federal government employees than you think are Republicans, perhaps even conservative/MAGA types. Problem is they don’t hold the power. A lot of it depends on where the agency offices are located. People who work in DC are much more likely to be Blue Tribe than people who work in Texas. That’s why the Trump administration briefly floated the idea of relocating headquarter offices outside the DC beltway. The power centers of these agencies—the headquarters—are in DC, and it takes a certain kind of slug bureaucrat to live in DC or choose to work there. Move the headquarters to Billings or Pensacola or Nashville and you’ll get a different crop of loyalists for sure.

Thank you, AACQ’d. The main thing I want to add is that from connections to Texas state politics, I’m pretty sure that at least the border patrol union is solidly pro-red tribe. IIRC local/state level law enforcement unions frequently are as well, it would stand to reason that at least some other federal law enforcement unions are red tribe/Republican.

That’s why the Trump administration briefly floated the idea of relocating headquarter offices outside the DC beltway.

This has long been one of my favorite reform proposal, but it's hard to make it stick. Every agency out there feels like their highest imperative is to ensure that their overlords "understand" what they're trying to do, finds value in their organization, and keeps the resource train flowing. So it is not uncommon that even when the bulk of an agency is actually located elsewhere, their leadership either all have offices in DC or spend significant amounts of time "traveling" there. So, one likely immediate consequence is that this "travel" to DC will ramp up even more, such that agency leadership essentially all have "temporary offices" there that become less and less temporary. They'll delegate more internal power down the chain as their jobs become more "externally-focused". The result may be a bit of a rift between agency upper/lower-upper management. In the balance, how does this actually affect the day-to-day operation of the agency? It probably depends a lot on agency specifics and how much their upper/upper-middle layers cohere through the process.

In sum, I sort of thing that just firing and turning management into political appointees accomplishes a certain amount, while relocation sort of severs upper management from agency operations, which may actually reduce the effectiveness of turning those folks into political appointees. The permanent bureaucracy already does a lot to isolate political appointees to make sure they can't "stir up too much trouble", and that may actually be a bit easier to do if they can just ship them all off to DC all the time, while they take the real reins of power over day-to-day agency operations.

Identify those individuals in charge of policymaking within the agency. At my agency it’s a small department within a small division, constituting about 25 people. Fire them all. Also, fire every high-ranking attorney in each of the major offices as well as headquarters. This would be another 50-100 people. Don’t fire the executive leadership—they got there because they follow orders well. All you need to do is rewrite the orders and they might grumble but they know well how to fall in line.

And critically, we know that Trump's people are actually preparing to do this - Schedule F removes civil service protection from policy-making civil servants across the Government, and during the last 3 months of the Trump administration the system appeared to be co-operating with the process of drawing up a list of affected posts. And Project 2025 is drawing up a list of reliable MAGA Republicans to replace anyone who needs firing.

What can they possibly accomplish, except four years of utterly futile attempts at action that are completely #Resisted by the permanent bureaucracy?

I think Project 2025 is actually promising. The sentiment that you couldn't do anything meaningful on the right because it would just get knocked down by liberal SCOTUS justices used to be common and the right remedied that via its own version of the long march through the institutions. Persistent vetting and advocacy has resulted in a SCOTUS and justice system overall that is notably to the right and notably more originalist than in the past. With a major drive to acknowledge that personnel is policy and thus the personnel must be replaced, it's possible to actually make a much bigger difference this time around. In 2017, I think Trump was under the impression that the bureaucracy would behave as though he was the CEO of the country, but it seems to me that he has learned that it doesn't work this way and could plausibly replace large amounts of that bureaucracy.

When you see people in the media handwringing that he's going to replace "professionals" with his "cronies" or similar language, this is exactly what they mean, that it seems as though the Republican plan for 2025 really does include a rapid shift in personnel. Whether you find that invigorating or horrifying will depend where you sit, but there is actually a plan.

The problem for Trump, though, is that he doesn't really have any cronies other than the kind of people for whom ass-kissing is their only skill. Trump's most notable battles weren't with faceless lifetime bureaucrats who refused to follow his orders, they were with people he chose himself. The constitutionally-mandated role of the Cabinet is to advise the President. If he's not willing to take advice when it goes against his own preconceived notions then the Cabinet is basically useless. If he's unable to select well-qualified people whom he's willing to listen to and who broadly agree with him on policy without getting into public spats whenever they give him advice he doesn't like, it says more about his own ability as a policymaker than it does about "The Swamp" or whatever.

The problem for Trump, though, is that he doesn't really have any cronies other than the kind of people for whom ass-kissing is their only skill. Trump's most notable battles weren't with faceless lifetime bureaucrats who refused to follow his orders, they were with people he chose himself.

You're not necessarily wrong here but I think it is worth pointing out that the inability to hire good people was actually a direct result of said faceless bureaucrats. Anybody who signed up for a prominent job in Trumpland also signed up for an immediate bad-faith prosecution and investigation (this was one of the reasons the Mueller special counsel was spun up). This is also a case of the process being the punishment - even defending yourself against one of these investigations would be extremely expensive, and they'd be going back over your entire historical record. Finding competent people is hard enough when you aren't also asking them to subject their entire life to the baleful gaze of a motivated deep state.

Really? The only people in the Trump Administration I can think of who were prosecuted were Steve Bannon, who briefly held a position that was created specially for him, Michael Flynn, and Mark Meadows. So two people in important positions he actually had to appoint. There were a few minor aides indicted in Georgia but nobody of any consequence. Kellyanne Conway was accused of Hatch Act violations but nothing ever came of it. The wave of Trump associate indictments is mostly people outside of government — personal lawyers, campaign advisors, Trump organization employees, etc. Other than those I mentioned above, I am unaware of any high-ranking Trump Administration officials who have been blackballed from polite society because of their associations with him. There are plenty of conservative think tanks and consulting firms out there who are willing to put people from any administration on the gravy train. It certainly beats working for a living.

This gets exceedingly difficult to untangle, because several of the people involved in the Trump administration, including Trump appointees, were working against him for the entire time. Take Rod Rosenstein for example - he was a Trump-appointee, and took over managing the Mueller investigation after Sessions recused himself... but he was one of the people who signed off on the Carter Page warrant, and he authorised the raid on Michael Cohen's offices to boot. Several of the people in Trumpland were actively working against him for the entire time he was in office, and that doesn't include the people who were simply passively resisting. Nobody's going to blackball Rod Rosenstein for being a Trump hire, because he was never actually working for Trump and did everything he could to bring him down.

Other than those I mentioned above, I am unaware of any high-ranking Trump Administration officials who have been blackballed from polite society because of their associations with him.

I include those mentioned above as people who were subject to this kind of politically motivated prosecution, and the other problem is that the strategy worked. Trump had an exceedingly difficult time finding people who he could trust to staff various positions, and in many cases he didn't. The Mueller investigation was a massive sword hanging over Trump's head, and it had a big impact on what he could do and the people who would have been willing to work for him.

Trump had an exceedingly difficult time finding people who he could trust to staff various positions, and in many cases he didn't.

Why do you think he inspires so little loyalty in those closest to him?

I don't think that's the right lens to view this with - it doesn't matter how good you are at inspiring loyalty when you're being forced to recruit from a pool of people that are diametrically opposed to both you and your base of support. The main problem that I was talking about was that the recruiting pool for a lot of these positions is not that deep - how many people do you think would have been viable contenders for Comey's job? Picking ones who actually supported Trump's goals from that extremely small list would have been extremely challenging and I'm not at all surprised that he ended up with a bunch of people in his orbit that were actively working against him.

you're being forced to recruit from a pool of people that are diametrically opposed to both you and your base of support.

...such as John Kelly, Mike Pence, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, etc, etc, etc.

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Because they're not suicidal. Even if you agree with him, always having the rest of the political establishment as your enemy will be bad for you.

Yup. If he's elected he'll appoint Ken Paxton as AG or something, then 11 months later Paxton will be out on his ear for some dumb petty reason and writing books about what a shithead Trump is.

I agree - that's why I'm optimistic about Heritage just doing the lower-level staffing for him. Trump isn't going to give a shit about who the Senior Advisor and Interagency Coordinator for Artificial Intelligence Information Technology Policy is, but the thousands of people in those sorts of roles will set policies for four years if Heritage gets their way. Having a roster of actually competent people signed up to take those roles in the first 6 months of the administration would be huge.

In 2017, I think Trump was under the impression that the bureaucracy would behave as though he was the CEO of the country, but it seems to me that he has learned that it doesn't work this way and could plausibly replace large amounts of that bureaucracy.

What bothers me about this point is - why didn't he figure this out 3 months after he took office, if not sooner? If he didn't figure it out and take effective counter-action against it then, why should we believe he is properly prepared to do it now?

A really effective conservative President at this point should come into office like Elon Musk went into the CEO position at Twitter. Everyone who might be opposed to him is out on their asses in 5 seconds. Cut every office that is obviously useless and like 50% of the company too, just so everyone knows you're dead serious. Adopt policies that are a little wacky at lightning speed just to be really sure everybody is going along with it whether they like it or not. Etcetra.

Hell, maybe we should do Musk for President. I may not love every bit of his politics, but he has demonstrated the ability to rapidly and decisively break a large bureaucratic machine to his will.

That's the first coherent 5D chess explanation for what's going on at Twitter.

The sentiment that you couldn't do anything meaningful on the right because it would just get knocked down by liberal SCOTUS justices used to be common and the right remedied that via its own version of the long march through the institutions.

Except, AIUI, the permanent bureaucracy is >95% Leftist, and the only people "qualified" (meaning "credentialed by left-captured institutions") to be hired into it are even more solidly Leftist. Instead of Right-wing "action" from Congress or the President being "knocked down by liberal SCOTUS justices," it will simply be ignored by the 2-million-plus permanent Federal bureaucrats.

In 2017, I think Trump was under the impression that the bureaucracy would behave as though he was the CEO of the country

Indeed, I remember many articles from his term about that, including quotes from government officials about how this meant he was "acting like a king" and "didn't know how things work," and a lot of other statements implying that whatever your civic textbooks might say, the "experts" of the civil service are the ones who actually make policy, and the President's job is to merely put a face on it.

and could plausibly replace large amounts of that bureaucracy.

And that's where I disagree: I don't see any plausible way to replace any of the bureaucracy if it doesn't want to be replaced.

it seems as though the Republican plan for 2025 really does include a rapid shift in personnel

And my point is that that plan will necessarily fail, because, as things are currently constituted, such a personnel shift is in practice impossible.

In general I would agree that I would not expect much from a second Trump term. However, he would have some significant benefits this time.

  1. The opposition left I believe will become less engaged. How do you motivate the troops if you spend 8 years calling him the Antichrist and then the American people reject that and vote him in anyway. They would be a defeated people.

  2. He seems to be growing somewhat as a politician.

  3. He’s going to be more popular during the second term and it seems like a lot of former Dem voters are moving to Trump voters because they now believe he’s better. I remember Chamath flipping a few months ago publicly.

  4. The GOP has a better policy framework in the legal sense to deal with the left now. Guys like Hannania have been thinking about the legislative stuff that has provided the woke with protection. You have two types of corporations on woke stuff (1) the true believers (Disney) (2) those afraid of lawsuits and keep their mouth shut. Maybe nothing gets done but policy frameworks will exists in 2024 that did not exists in 2016. Ideas will exists to start to close the lefts institutional power. They will still dominate the institutions in terms of personel but their legal rights have a chance of being defanged.

Ideas will exists to start to close the lefts institutional power.

See, I don't see how that will work

their legal rights have a chance of being defanged.

Again, I disagree. Because laws are but words — and words are wind — unless you can get them enforced. And I don't see how the right can meaningfully do that.

They may not accomplish the mission but Hannania has written a lot about how changes in the law (civil rights etc) have given the left a lot of lawsuit power on things like disparate impact. I believe Musks is being sued on something like that. If they can change the laws (a tough asks) then they can change the facts on the ground.

If they can change the laws (a tough asks) then they can change the facts on the ground.

And if they change the laws — again, mere words on paper — and the 2 million plus just ignore and refuse to obey or enforce the new laws? The only real laws are whatever it is that men with guns choose to enforce.

Okay, but we're talking about a future GOP govt repealing these laws. I get you're a big doomer, but surely the idea of a liberal DOJ apparachnik charging a Trump appointee with a law that isn't on the books anymore and threatening the Republican judge that if he doesn't pretend like the law is still real, the two-million-strong army of Democrat-voting mailmen and receptionists will hold him accountable must sound farcical even to you.

Okay, but we're talking about a future GOP govt repealing these laws.

Is a law really repealed if the people who actually enforce the laws keep enforcing it?

but surely the idea of a liberal DOJ apparachnik charging a Trump appointee with a law that isn't on the books anymore and threatening the Republican judge that if he doesn't pretend like the law is still real, the two-million-strong army of Democrat-voting mailmen and receptionists will hold him accountable

Perhaps a slightly uncharitable framing, but, yes, that is the sort of thing I expect in that scenario.

In that scenario, even with a deeply hostile media, the Republicans would have a field day excoriating the managers over this. The judicial system is not partisan enough to go along with this, and judges tend to deeply resent being threatened in their own courtrooms. Look at the Governor of New Mexico, who was informed by her also-Democratic Attorney General that he was simply not going to enforce her gun-grabbing executive order due to its blatant unconstitutionality for a very recent example where establishment liberals will stop each other when their actions become indefensible to the public.

The judicial system is not partisan enough to go along with this, and judges tend to deeply resent being threatened in their own courtrooms.

“John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

AFAIK, DC still hasn't given Dick Heller his carry permit. As others have noted here, the people targeting Masterpiece Cakeshop looked at his court win, shrugged, and just kept on without the slightest change in behavior. They already ignore unfavorable court rulings, so why not more so?

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The opposition left I believe will become less engaged. How do you motivate the troops if you spend 8 years calling him the Antichrist and then the American people reject that and vote him in anyway. They would be a defeated people.

Wow, you're a lot more optimistic than I am! I anticipate that we will revert right back to everyone calling him (and actually thinking) he's the Antichrist, and the left will simply use the fact that he was reelected as proof that we're a white supremecist nation, that Trump has corrupted various institutions through dirty dealing, that Russia is still meddling in our elections, and what else.

I think that obviously MSNBC will still say that, and I think sliders probably isn’t disputing this. But it’s entirely possible it simply has less bite this time around; I wouldn’t count on it, but it also wouldn’t be shocking if TDS generated its own fatigue and parts of the dem coalition which never found Trump qua Trump particularly deranging but were being team players about it stopped playing along with that stuff.

That stuff will exists but I don’t think it will get to peak 2019-2020.

I also forgot another reason - Musks owns twitter. It may not be the dominant information provider to most Americans but it is the dominant information provider for the top 10-20% which is key to getting outrage movements going.

Since Musks took over twitter right-wing boycotts began to succeed. Twitter in terms of power is well-worth the 40 billion paid for it.

except four years of utterly futile attempts at action that are completely #Resisted by the permanent bureaucracy?

The problem is, Trumpism and MAGA have now had 8 years to take over the Republican party, and have efficiently marginalized all other factions of the party.

Much more of the permanent bureaucracy is now on Trump's side and comfortable with his tactics and ambitions, than were 3 years ago. The same is true for his Republican colleagues in Congress, the Judiciary, and various state and local governments.

There's every reason to think he will get much more cooperation from the rest of the government than he did during his last term. Bureaucratic turnover is slow for sure, but it does happen, especially when an insurgent movement in one of the parties is chasing out non-believers. This has absolutely been happening to Republican offices for the last 8 years.

Whether the process has proceeded far enough for him to accomplish any of the horror scenarios Dems are predicting is probably impossible to tell. But the odds are definitely much higher than they were 3 years ago, people are not wrong to notice that and point it out.

Status quo bias is ussually correct, and probably will be again; but it's still just a heuristic, you can actually notice things about your environment and reason about whether they undermine it this time.

Whether the process has proceeded far enough for him to accomplish any of the horror scenarios Dems are predicting is probably impossible to tell.

What, we're not going to get the concentration camps? But I am assured that there will be concentration camps!

I honestly don't understand why the strategy has been to build Trump up as this massive threat with power, influence, and a horde of fanatically devoted followers who will vote for him no matter what. Wouldn't it have been better to insist that he was a has-been, washed-up, useless and incapable? Couldn't do anything while in power, so why vote for him again? Instead, everyone is leaping up on chairs drawing their skirts about their knees shrieking that he's going to be Literally Hitler when he gets back into power in 2024.

I honestly don't understand why the strategy has been to build Trump up as this massive threat with power, influence, and a horde of fanatically devoted followers who will vote for him no matter what. Wouldn't it have been better to insist that he was a has-been, washed-up, useless and incapable? Couldn't do anything while in power, so why vote for him again?

Partisanship is at very high levels historically, convincing people not to vote for their party's candidate is a losing battle (and correctly so, the most consequential thing Trump did was appoint Supreme Court justices and that was an astronomically huge win for his base even though literally anyone in his chair with a R by their name would have done the same thing).

The way you win is by driving up turnout for your own base. Which is what the scare tactics are for.

Yeah, but the scare tactics also energise the opposition base. If potential voters are seeing "Out of all our possible nominees, Trump is the one that scares the other bunch and they're afraid he's going to do all the policies when he gets into power", then if I am broadly in tune with what Trump is saying, or at the very least I feel that I'm not going to do well if Gavin Newsom becomes president, I'm going to go for Trump instead of Nikki or Vivek or whatever other 'let's pick a nice moderate centrist to cool down partisanship' person is put up.

If you really think Trump is going to End Democracy, then do the tar baby strategy (side note: is that acceptable reference or not, I have no idea what particular bee may be in any Anti-Evil bonnet about outdated references): go "Trump is all washed-up and useless, who we really don't want to see getting the nod is [Billy-Bob]". That throws support behind Billy-Bob and with any luck splits the opposition vote on polling day. At the very least, Billy-Bob should be the lesser of two evils.

Again, I agree this is a sensible type of strategy in general, I just think Trump has had too much of a lead for it to actually change the outcome of the Republican primary.

And if you try it and fail then you've potentially hurt your chances in the General by not activating your own base.

It's a strategic calculation with trade-offs. I think the strategic choice their making has better chances than the one you're proposing, but of course I could be wrong.

If your base has to be activated by a belief that this time for realsies the sky is falling, then you should instead invest in a bunch of cattle-prods to drive them to the voting booth. Cheaper and less wearing on the nerves for the rest of us who have to listen to the hyperventilating.

Agree and disagree. I don’t think the right needed huge turnout for Desantis to win. Enough median voters would be turned off by Biden and be fine with Desantis as more of an institutionalist GOP who also bashes a bunch of the left but I don’t think the average voter super cares about trans rights and many are fine with just interpreting them as mentally ill males. But those voters would turn up to vote against Trump.

Trump campaign big turning point was all the charges; before that Desantis was making ground. The charges did two things - 1. Got trump in the news cycle after he was in blackout and 2. Trigger a protect your flank movement with conservatives like myself who rightfully know you can’t abandon a third of your vote.

In the end the left locked in the nomination for Trump who for many seems more unstable than Desantis.

I can see the sense in that narrative, but I don't think it quite lines up with the reality of the modern Republican party.

Trump's popularity among Republicans has been hovering steadily in the 75%-85% range for years, Desantis never got above 65%.

Maybe Democrats could have socially engineered Republican's loyalties by continuing to ignore Trump and acting really scared of Desnatis, but that's giving them a lot of credit to be able to control their opponent's actions. I doubt it would have worked.

Wouldn't it have been better to insist that he was a has-been, washed-up, useless and incapable?

During Trump's first election campaign he was artificially boosted by media companies on the order of the Clinton campaign, because they believed that his extreme politics would make people run away from the Republican party. I don't see any reason to believe that they will have changed their approach or learned from their mistakes in 2016.

And see how that backfired on Hillary and her campaign. If the Democratic Party is the party of the reality community and smart people and the educated and the rest of the virtuous things they are never tired telling us about, then surely they should be able to learn from "well that didn't work at all last time"?

‘If’

Much more of the permanent bureaucracy is now on Trump's side

Citation needed, because everything I read and hear points to the opposite. That the last tiny remnants of the Red Tribe in the civilian portion of the executive are being purged and the institutions and processes "Trump-proofed" to ensure their likes can never be brought in, and that similar trends are at work in the military side.

There's every reason to think he will get much more cooperation from the rest of the government than he did during his last term.

No, there's every reason to think he will get much less cooperation, as they've learned from the last time and continue to take measures to ensure that not only Trump, but no future Republican president can ever exert any power at all over DC.

Bureaucratic turnover is slow for sure, but it does happen,

And the new people coming in, being products of our fully left-captured academia, are even more solidly left-wing than the people they're replacing, because no one on the right is "qualified" (credentialed) to be hired in our "neutral, meritocratic" civil service.

Does the polling suggesting he might win also suggest a full GOP trifecta is likely? If he can’t get that (with enough headroom not to be held hostage by one or two congressmen), there’s very little use speculating about what he can do.

Yeah, I don't see Trump winning without also having control of the House and Senate, although possibly by very small margins. And the past few years both parties have been filing down the filibuster, so it's possible a Republican trifecta would eliminate it in 2025 even though they were unwilling to do so in 2017, and therefore be able to push through more legislation. Unclear a narrow majority (of either party) could actually agree on much legislation.

The most plausible 2024 senate result, full stop, is ‘narrow Republican majority’, and that means people like Collins and Murkowski have substantial negotiating power. Paths to a large Republican senate majority seem mostly implausible to me; paths to a dem majority at all seem wildly implausible.

Biden has a disqualifying senior moment, Dems are unable to replace him with a non-senile candidate, Trump landslide with coattails picking up multiple senate seats seems to me to be within the bounds of plausibility. But even with a landslide, I don't see how the Rs get to 60, which is de facto what you need for a large majority.

The reverse scenario where Trump has a disqualifying senior moment and Biden wins in a landslide probably still isn't enough for the Dems to hold the senate given how bad the map is for them.

Biden shit his pants in the process of mistaking the pope for a black man and it didn’t affect the polls, I think this election will be decided off of economic vibes.

Wait, really? When did Biden shit his pants?

I will send a laxative to anyone, anywhere in the world, who can convince me this happened.

I have proof he shit his pants! The problem is he might have been about 2 years old, but the base rate is pretty high at that age ;)

I'll be taking a macrogol laxative, you can ship it to any hospital of your choice in India, it'll save some poor doctor the headache of writing yet another prescription haha.

DM me copy of the proof toddler-Joe had diapers and everything, and I'll put your name on the shipment I send to Lions General Hospital in Chittogram, Bangladesh--otherwise, I'll put down that it's from @cjet79.

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Yes, if a Republican wins the white house they will very likely also win full control of the legislature.

The GOP already holds the reps of course. Not by a big margin, but you wouldn't expect to lose it while winning the presidency. Meanwhile they need to pick up 2 seats in the Senate. One is near-guaranteed in West Virginia, with a bunch of other vulnerable seats available in places like Ohio, Montana, Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and maybe even New Jersey at a stretch if the Bob Menendez issue plays out in a helpful way. On the flip side the most vulnerable seats the Republicans are defending are... Texas and Florida.

What do you wish Trump et al could accomplish between 2024 and 2028? Is it mainly restricting low-skill immigration?

What do you wish Trump et al could accomplish between 2024 and 2028? Is it mainly restricting low-skill immigration?

I'm a monarchist, awaiting an Augustus Caesar — while almost certain we'll never get one.

Why a (presumably hereditary) monarch versus a regular ole dictator?

These two words represent the same thing, the “dictator” one just carries negative connotation.

Doesn't monarch imply blood-line succession?

No. A monarchy has a defined succession principle; not only have there been historical monarchies where that wasn’t blood, there are monarchies right now where is isn’t(Malaysia and the Vatican).

The succession problem. I once recall someone pointing out that the broad strokes of Henry VII Tudor's life are a match for any number of Latin American dictators… and someone else pointed out the clear counterpoint of "except when it ended." Where most modern dictatorships fail is at the transition of power following the dictator's death, but when Henry VII died, then here comes Henry VIII.

As others have pointed out, not all monarchies are hereditary. I recall de Maistre, in his discussion of Aristotle's classification of systems of government, pointing out that both Roman monarchies — the pre-Republic Kingdom and the post-Republic Empire — were non-hereditary. He then went on to describe hereditary government as a later innovation, created to address the associated issues that Rome repeatedly encountered. Yes, succession crises do happen in hereditary monarchies (though a number of the historical factors are less likely to be relevant in the modern world), but not nearly anything as often as modern dictatorships collapse over transitions of power. And the primary example in the present day of one that hasn't, and has shown some of the most longevity, looks pretty hereditary in practice.

Hm, in that case aren’t stable democracies even better for avoiding civil wars over succession crises? What historical factors are less relevant now?

And are dictatorships worse in that regards? Of the ones that immediately come to mind — Stalin, Franco, Pinochet, Mao — their countries didn’t descend into civil war at the end of their reigns.

I don’t really see how a DeSantis or a Ramaswamy presidency would amount to anything either.

Desantis would be bringing over a seasoned and loyal team from his Tenure as Florida governor, and a knowledge of how to use the powers of an executive office in a precise manner intended to bring about specific results in short order.

A huge part of Trump's issue was finding people both willing to serve on his staff and would be loyal enough to carry out his wishes in a competent manner. I expect this would hurt him in a second term.

Part of Desantis mythos is based on the fact that prior to taking office he did a long read into the entire 'rulebook' of what authority he actually possesses as Florida Governor and then, day one, flexing certain powers that had been long unused by the Governor to immediately establish himself as the new boss, and get doubters in line. Then he proceeded to strategically use those same powers in a judicious manner whenever it was needed.

Presumably he'd bring the same tactics to the Presidency.

Now, in Florida he had the benefit of full GOP control of the legislative branch to back up any decision he made. So unless that also applies to the 2024 election then those same assumptions might not carry over. And of course the Federal Congress is a different animal altogether.

Suffice it to say, Desantis at least recognizes the nature of the threat and the size of the task and is capable of both creating and carrying out a plan to deal with it with the assistance of other competent staff who aren't going to turn on him the very instant they leave the administration.

I'd just like to take a moment here to plug the most important part of my view on Trump, which comes from Andrew Sullivan's interview of the author Michael Wolff. I won't drop too many spoilers, but Wolff, for all his factual errors, seems very correct to me when he talks about the language most journalists use being inadequate to describe Donald J. Trump.

Here is the interview: https://open.substack.com/pub/andrewsullivan/p/michael-wolff-on-the-trump-threat

also Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/michael-wolff-on-the-trump-threat/id1536984072?i=1000534947059

and PodBay: https://podbay.fm/p/the-dishcast/e/1631290292

and how do I format links using markdown? Also, I'm just starting the book it's based on and I'll write it up a little as a top-level post when I'm done.

Desantis would be bringing over a seasoned and loyal team from his Tenure as Florida governor, and a knowledge of how to use the powers of an executive office

Except my point is that, whatever it says on paper, the U.S. Presidency doesn't actually have such powers. That the 2-million-plus Executive bureaucracy can defy any supposed authority a GOP president would attempt to assert, and there's nothing he could do about it.

Presumably he'd bring the same tactics to the Presidency.

And again, my point is that they won't work.

with the assistance of other competent staff who aren't going to turn on him

Except, what happens when the agencies refuse to let that "competent staff" in, refuse to accept their authority, refuse to follow their orders, and so on?

There is simply no way to force the vast permanent bureaucracy to obey anything it doesn't want to obey… because all the mechanisms for enforcement are part of that very same bureaucracy.

people on the left who hyperbolically opine in outlets like Newsweek and The Economist about how a second Trump term would “end democracy” and “poses the biggest danger to the world.”

These people are correct from their own limited perspective. Remember that "democracy" to them just translates to "rule by the managerial class" - this is why Donald Trump being democratically elected by a majority of the voting population would be a defeat for democracy (FBI agents arresting the winner of the election and announcing the Hillary Clinton caretaker government would be a victory for democracy in their view). At the same time, he would pose an incredibly big danger, but to their world rather than the world as a whole. Term 2 Trump would absolutely represent an end to the world that these people live in and know (as has been pointed out by some other commenters) - when your entire worldview is based upon being part of the elect, the class of managers who optimise society and tell people what to do, what happens when the people you consider your workers/underlings tell you in no uncertain terms that you're worse than useless and they want to listen to a person diametrically opposed to you and everything you stand for?

what happens when the people you consider your workers/underlings tell you in no uncertain terms that you're worse than useless and they want to listen to a person diametrically opposed to you and everything you stand for?

You crack down on misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, and find ways to re-educate your misguided underlings how ever much is necessary until they are properly enlightened as to the correctness of your expert views.

Great point, and it kind of speaks to a future where the PMC has this paroxysm of anguish while, for most Americans, nothing changes, leaving ‘both sides’ disappointed.

I think Biden's and Trump's domestic policy will look basically identical.

Biden did the painful but necessary task of getting us out of Afghanistan. I guess Trump didn't start any wars but he didn't end any either.

I think Biden has done a great job building international coalitions, particularly as a counter to China, and I don't think that foreign leaders trust Trump to do that (and I also think he's too erratic and untrustworthy).

Trump was quite literally ten minutes away from potentially starting a war larger than Iraq and I’m not even joking. I’m referring to Trump (this info is from him directly) deciding to rescind his already-given order to strike the Iranian military directly and killing about 150 in response to downing a drone of ours. He says he changed his mind at that last minute because it (obviously) wasn’t proportionate. But to me, the fact it was considered at all and initially approved by Trump is a textbook example of going way too close to the edge.

Im a little drunk on thanksgiving. Can someone tell me the pope having lunch with transgenders is false.

https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1727444933207056730?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

This was low effort. I think a 7-day ban is too much. But this is still something where as a Catholic you would be like what I’m seeing has to be wrong. I will eat it. This isn’t an unworthy culture war post if it fact checks which from Hannania I assumed he did.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Christianity is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as transgender ideology. Believing that a certain man 2000 years ago was the son of god and rose from the dead is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as believing that a man can become a woman by calling himself a woman and doing surgeries. But many people here on The Motte give Christianity a pass because it's really old and really popular and so it seems "normal", because they like its cultural/political connotations, and probably in some cases because they were raised Christian.

But I don't give Christianity a pass. When people tell me that they are Christian, I have pretty much the same reaction as I have when people try to convince me that a trans woman is a real woman. In both cases, I think that their beliefs are ludicrous and deeply irrational.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Christianity is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as transgender ideology.

It has much more of a track record of encouraging adaptive behavior and institutions though.

If Christianity is not true then I don't care about what kind of record it has at encouraging adaptive behavior and institutions. I don't want to build society on a bedrock of delusions.

If Christianity is not true then I don't care about what kind of record it has at encouraging adaptive behavior and institutions.

That is a value judgment (arguably a very Christian one) you're entitled to make. It's not just a fact.

I don't want to build society on a bedrock of delusions.

I'd prefer a non-deluded, rational secular humanism where we dispense with all superstitions and life is improved in every way by it, as was promised to me by Dawkins and Harris (PBUT) at a formative point in my teens.

But I'm no longer certain that truth and value are the same (especially when it comes to an individual life). And I'm not sure that option is available. What I see in that clip are dueling "delusions", except one has a longer track record of encouraging kids and pro-social behavior.

What I see in that clip are dueling "delusions", except one has a longer track record of encouraging kids and pro-social behavior.

Humanity is not stuck in the ridiculous position of having to choose between the rock of trans-ideology and the hard place of Christianity. Choosing these two specific species of insanity is eliding the fact there are plenty of less insane alternatives.

Name a less insane society organizing religion then.

We know what the cult of reason begets, we tried that one pretty thoroughly since 1789. Positivism turned out a lot more insane than Abrahamism.

You're not going to get out of the need for a metaphysics. Better men than you have tried and they all failed. Religion is, for better or worse, not optional. The very rise of the Woke is proof of it.

Name a less insane society organizing religion then.

I deny the need for religion in the first place. Or if there's a "need" for it in the psyche of the average human, poor thing, it needs to be excised, not fed.

Religion is, for better or worse, not optional. The very rise of the Woke is proof of it.

I obviously disagree, even if Wokism has plenty of traits of religion.

I simply can't think of any society throughout the history of man that has lacked a religion, in the sense of a shared metaphysics.

It seems to me you're arguing for something that's categorically impossible, so please explain.

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If you’re looking for alternatives, I’d point to Buddhism, Confucianism, and possibly Zarathustrianism. They all have decent track records of producing high civilizations.

Your use of that metaphor is telling, we need hard objects to cling to, we need something to serve as an epistemological bedrock. Something is going to be unquestionable in whatever worldview we eventually settle on, and so far us/the secularists haven’t done a good job building something on top of the bedrock of rational observation.

Who's "we", white man? Jokes aside, I am personally entirely content with having my subjective goals and desires be the bedrock on which I build my existence. I don't aspire for more because it's not possible to have an "objective" morality or foundation in the first place.

What policy preferences or cultural peccadilos a society has doesn't particularly matter to me, as long as the central tenets don't violate our best understanding of the laws of physics, as Christianity does, or biology, as Wokism is guilty of.

I am personally entirely content with having my subjective goals and desires be the bedrock on which I build my existence

The problems crop up when someone else wants their subjective goals and desires to be fulfilled, and you are standing in their way. How does society's institutions satisfy you both? If they can't, who wins? That's where we get the Progressive Stack. On what do we base 'this is how we run things so that as a whole we can muddle along'? Great, we've settled the law of gravitational attraction, but how does that apply to deciding if Sparklina-formerly-Bob can now take your stuff because xe is the mostest oppressed and you owe xer, cis scum?

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No, it's going to be some flavor of insanity because it's purity spirals all the way down. The so-called less insane alternatives are just stepping stones between there and here.

It's true that there are lots of society-wide ideologies to choose from with staying power, but none of them are liberal rationalism.

I don't want to build society on a bedrock of delusions.

Neither do I, yet I note that much that replaced Christianity as social bedrock has been quite explicitly delusional. Secular Materialism talked a good game, and then when people actually committed to it, they went utterly mad. Meanwhile, us Christians continue to chug along, succeeding by the Materialists' standards as well as our own.

Some variants of secular materialism went utterly mad. Stalinism, for example, or the Khmer Rouge. But Western society as a whole is not mad, at least not by the standards of the typical society throughout history, and it is chugging along just fine for the most part.

Okay, I was inclined to be snarky, but if this is your basic problem with it, then I have to respect that. I too much prefer "is it true or not?" than "is it prosocial or not, even if it's a heap of bullshit?"

An honest atheist is a more worthy opponent than all the patronising "of course it's dumb as a description of reality but if you look as it as early sociology..." rationalisations.

Did Christianity have a better record after ~40 years of existence?

Pretty sure even at the beginning it was encouraging people to get married, and start families, and avoid various forms of hedonism, so yes?

I thought it was very explicitly 'leave your families and follow me' at that point?

After ~40 years of existence?

I think that was supposed to be in his mid 30s, so, pretty close? A biblical scholar might have more info.

I wasn't aware he proselytized right out of the cradle.

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That's highly dependent on how people interpreted it. A fair few people castrated themselves, and more went into the desert to pursue lives of extreme asceticism. Remember that early Christians were like, a millenarian cult that believed that Jesus would be back in a few decades... Then a few centuries...

The weird apocalyptic stuff coexisted with more prosocial messages (Paul allows for marriage for those who can't be celibate, attacks the use of prostitutes).

There is a legitimate question of when they fully got it out of their systems. 40 years is...tight. The Gospels fit around that time and they have prosocial messages and hints of anti-family stuff.

By the standards of the age, it's not really prosocial at all, which is why the Romans hated it so much and tried to suppress it. I think it ended up being more prosocial and Christian Europe was in some ways morally better than the Roman Empire, but someone walking around in 100AD probably would have looked at these weirdos celebrating a guy that got horribly tortured to death, living lives of asceticism in the desert, rejecting all of the dozens of sects and cults that existed mostly harmoniously in the Roman Empire, rejecting the entirely proper worship of military power and violence in favour of humility and peace, and they probably would have reached a fairly similar conclusion to a modern conservative looking at trans people - 'these people are freaks and a threat to our society'. Tell me, when the time comes for war against the Parthians, who's going to get the job done? A bunch of flaccid cheek-turning monks, or our red-blooded Jupiter-worshippers? If we don't make our ritual sacrifices, who's going to guarantee us victory in war and calm seas in travel? If this God of Jesus is so powerful, why didn't he protect him? I'll put my faith in whoever the Senate declared a God last week, thanks.

If this God of Jesus is so powerful, why didn't he protect him? I'll put my faith in whoever the Senate declared a God last week, thanks.

The Senate deified Julius Caesar. Rome's track record of having gods powerful enough to protect themselves from their eventual killers (who would then go on to declare them gods) isn't exactly stellar.

If you just take the Pauline letters as the orthodoxy in the early Church, which it was and still is, there's virtually nothing disagreeable (modern progressivism notwithstanding)

Even contemporary pagans remarked on the exemplary sexual ethics of the early Christians.

I wonder what a dozen intelligent AGPs would have been able to make out of trans ideology if bound by a common Church and actual vigorous oppression. Even stuff like this is fairly compelling, in a demonic sense. And I probably know a dozen online characters who could do better…

Well they’d probably just do what smart AGP who want to push the cause among skeptical people already do (as you’ve noted) which is to claim it explicitly as transhumanism rather than a sexual fetish. And from transhumanism, presumably, one can fashion some kind of quality millenarian religious ideology.

In 70 AD Christianity was certainly led by people trying to encourage adaptive behavior, that's basically the plot of the Pauline letters.

Honestly, does this matter? If it takes 1000 years for a belief system to mature enough to perform well, then that's even more reason to stick to established systems.

I mean yeah old things have more track record than new things?

That said, trans ideology has gotten me a lot of good youtube content and podcasts in only about 15 years, at that age Christianity hadn't produced much more than a single carpenter in Galilee.

I'd say trans ideology has a lead in the Time Trial rules. Of course it has a long way to go.

(and, more seriously, lots of non-Christian places have had adaptive behaviors and institutions, so attributing those things to Christianity just because they happened in Christian nations is a nontrivial claim)

It’s actually extremely plausible that Christianity is the main reason western Europe and not other high-IQ regions took off. Christian ‘lifestyle rules’- monogamous, free choice exogamy in particular, but also monasticism- contribute meaningfully to modernizing behavior and you will note that East Asian societies attempting to modernize by force imposed monogamous exogamy.

How much of that came from Christianity itself and how much came from the Roman Imperial substrate it grew in? Rome is uniquely the source of a lot of Western legal traditions, democracy itself is Greek and republics are Roman. I don’t know but I doubt a place as cosmopolitan as the Roman Empire was inbred. Even after Christianity came to dominate Greek and Roman Philosophy were taught in schools. I think Christian apologists tend to overestimate the influence Christian ideas had on making society what it eventually became mostly by portraying the Romans as idiotic barbarians who were completely backwards.

Having read a lot of the philosophy they produced, the Romans were a sophisticated civilization that believed in virtue and reason and that ideally laws would serve the public good. The Stoics are halfway to being Buddhists and there was a strong sense of duty and helping your fellow man. They were nearly modern in their thinking, and very pragmatic.

The one thing Christianity brought that didn’t exist before was Missionaries. They’re the first religion that had as a major tenet to convert the world and that if you weren’t specifically a Christian (and an orthodox one at that) you were damned to eternal hellfire. The Judaism that Christianity grew from wasn’t missionary, and still isn’t. They believe that their religion is for them and that others are not expected to become Jews. Buddhism sees itself as one choice among many. Only Christianity and Islam really push the idea that if you don’t become part of the religion, you’re damned to hellfire. This gives a lot of push to recruit, and conversion of the Indians was a driver to get people to the new world. And since the west developed the mindset of “our way is correct, and everyone should adopt it” you can create more westerners by conversion to our ideas.

Sure, lots of scholasticism is based in greco-roman intellectualism. That part's true. But universities specifically grew out of church-run schools of the sort that Greece and Rome didn't have. Stoicism in particular had a few proto-enlightenment ideas but was actually suppressed by Christianity; Christian metaphysics and philosophy is mostly Aristotelian.

Now as far as marriage customs, Roman marriages(monogamous, limitations on domestic violence, exogamous) do look recognizably more Christian than other ancient marriage laws- including Ancient Greek marriages- especially in manu marriages. But there's some striking differences; the Roman concept of marriage takes for granted that divorce for a better deal was a common occurrence used by both parties, remarriage was mandatory, the bride didn't have to consent and was often betrothed years ahead of the actual marriage for physical reasons, and a married couple was part of and under the legal control of the groom's father's household rather than being legally independent. Now in some ways Christian marriages might have looked notably morally strict/reactionary with a few eccentricities to educated Romans- the harsh restriction on divorce and short betrothals, for example- a bit like how Mormons are seen today, but classical Rome was simply not a society which practiced those things even as a relic, any more than calling cards are part of courtship today.

I don't think this is a fair comparison.

One is an empirical claim about the actual literal nature of reality, the other is a normative semantic claim about how we should draw category boundaries on a word (and cultural/legal/etc category boundaries as a society).

Even if they were both equally silly, one is a mistake about the actual physical nature of reality, the other is just a request to do language and culture differently.

The latter can be dumb but it can't be wrong in the same way.

Trans people make an impossible empirical claim as well. The claim that undergirds their requests are that they are actually able to tell that they are the opposite sex. That is to say they are claiming to be able to distinguish between the experience of "being a male who correctly thinks they have the internal experience of a female" and "being a male who mistakenly thinks they have the internal experience of being female". This is epistemically impossible as we each only have one experience and cannot triangulate reality.

Hmm? I disagree that self-assessment is the be-all and end-all in gender, you have to pass as the opposite sex, but your analogy doesn't make sense to me.

Consider someone with phantom limb syndrome, say it's present since birth despite them lacking an arm (I know that's not how it works, bear with me). Are they allowed to claim that they are correct in having the sensation of a missing limb? They never had one in the first place. Or more prosaically, someone left-handed and raised right-handed who always felt that something was off, until they learned about dexterity or learned that in many places, it's a benign quirk that is easily accommodated instead of squashed.

I have also heard accounts of children who were raised as the opposite of their phenotypical/genetic sex, be it by an insane mother who wanted a daughter and made one out of her son, or a child with ambiguous genitalia or who had their penis botched around birth and were reshuffled off as female. Quite a few of such cases had the kids rebel against the perceived gender roles they were made to follow, even if that's how they'd been raised.

That's not to say that trans people are all like that, I think autogynephilia and a delusional memetic contagion account for most of it, so I'm arguing with the given reason for your conclusion even if I agree with the conclusion itself, mostly.

If I reduced transness to desire to undertake hormone therapy with no justification needed or given with no further implications what percentage of the trans activist community(or trans community writ large) do you think would sign onto it? What percent do you think would call me a transphobe?

... if you actually intended to allow that and grant legal recognition and full rights and no persecution or mockery? I think most would be fine about it.

The reason for all the more complicated narratives is to try to come up with something that will convince conservatives to give them rights and leave them alone. The gay rights movement went through the same thing with Ellen and 'born that way' and etc., it's all politics.

Legal recognition of what? Which rights are people missing? To go with the gay rights metaphor I was in favor of taking the state out of marriage and building out civil unions to be the state equivalent with no reference to gender. I'm deeply suspicious that what you're implying is you want to use the state to enforce some views you have on gender and sexuality and not just as a meditating body for letting people live peacefully with those who disagree with them.

Which rights are people missing?

I'm not talking the modern real world, I'm responding to the hypothetical you're proposing.

Yes, trans people do have most relevant rights today in real-world USA, the world in which they used the tactics I'm outlining (and which I think you're objecting to? Kind of hard to parse) to get them.

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That's entirely orthogonal to my point, I'm saying that the standard you're using invalidates far more than just claims of gender dysphoria. I don't deny that what you describe wouldn't be palatable to most trans activists.

One can attempt use of both the left and right hand. One has other limbs to compare the feeling of missing a limb to, or if a quadraplegic at least a plausible biological explanation for the sensation. The Reimer story you reference is packed with alternative explanations besides internally felt 'gender' being real.

I was trying to avoid getting bogged down in the weeds of examples because I think your understanding of this, while I also think is wrong, is not representative of the trans movement at all. It's the rickety motte inhabited by you and two other people surrounded by a kerosene soaked Bailey filled with people who make claims like "we can tell a 2 year old is trans if they don't like wearing a certain type of dress."

Attempting to use one's right hand isn't the same as being right-handed! A person who is left handed can very well claim that they're so, without anyone asking how they're quite so confident in that fact, since they've never experienced the internal qualia of being right handed so they can claim that they somehow know that's not what they're feeling in the first place.

It's not news to me that this isn't the stance or primary concern of trans ideologues, I oppose them myself after all, it's my specific objection to your use of the fundamental inability for us to inhabit many counterfactual mental states as the primary criterion for denying the existence of innate senses of gender, regardless of whether that's a real thing. It has far too much collateral damage at the very least, as I've attempted to show.

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Why do you think that there's such a thing as a unitary 'internal experience of a female', or that trans women think they have it?

Obviously every human has a different experience, I'm not really sure what your claim would mean.

Anyway, it sounds to me like you are adding circumlocutions to the whole thing. The claim is just 'trans women are women, trans men are men.' I'm not familiar with the specific extended claim you're making here being a common one, aside from in the again semantic sense of 'my experiences are a woman's experiences because I'm a woman'.

There being such as thing as being a woman separate from biology is foundational to trans people being a coherent concept. If there is no such "woman" qualia how can you actually explain dysphoria? A miss match implies a correct match which implies some category.

'Money' is a thing separate from the pieces of green paper and yet it's not a unique qualia.

This is what a 'social construct' is. Social constructs are very real and important, they basically make up the majority of our thoughts about and interactions with society, culture, language, and each other.

There's a social construct of 'woman', it is applied to some people and not others, trans women would like it applied to them. They experience dysphoria when their own self-image or self-understanding is not reflected either in their own form and appearance or in how society treats and interacts with them.

Unique qualia are not needed for any of this. The experience can be and is built from a complex structure of normal qualia, just like most experiences.

We didn't socially construct the female sex. Females do not have higher estrogen, wombs, larger breasts ect because society decided they should. The gender "woman" is built up around the reality of a sexually dimorphic species which must deal with the reality that half of the population has meaningfully different abilities and reproductive role. The qualia of womanness is the internal female experience.

There is a claim that tran women have this qualia and not the compliment male internal experience. The mismatch in these qualia is what causes dysphoria.

Maybe you have some other justification for the existence of trans people but it is tiresome to have the same behavior explained by dozens of different just so stories that all seem to fall apart immediately upon examination.

The gender "woman" is built up around the reality of a sexually dimorphic species which must deal with the reality that half of the population has meaningfully different abilities and reproductive role.

Yup, and many many people who do not meet some or many of those criteria would be called women by you.

And by me.

There is a claim that tran women have this qualia and not the compliment male internal experience.

I think maybe you are just using the words 'qualia' and 'experience' interchangeably, which they very much are not.

But if you just mean 'experience', sure, the vast and imprecise and fuzzy-bordered and non-exclusionary category of 'woman' includes some things about thoughts and experiences. No two women will have the exact same woman-related thoughts and experiences, and woman who don't have central ones aren't excluded from being women, and etc etc. But whatever, sure, lets stipulate something like that vaguely exists.

You seem to be saying that we can't know what experiences other people have (and therefore can't meaningfully claim to have similar experiences to another person) because we're not psychic.

But we are psychic.

I'm taking thoughts in my head, and using an external signal to put those thoughts into your head. Right now.

Our modern forms of telepathy do not have infinite bandwidth or fidelity, sure. But we use them to share information about what we are thinking and feeling and experiencing all the goddamn time, that's like a huge part of what art and culture and just talking to people is. And in other categories we do not question or reject claims like 'yeah I've felt that way before' or 'I agree with you' or 'oh yeah I recognize that feeling' or etc.

These are normal kinds of conclusions to draw about similarities in experience between people based on them just describing their experiences, and rejecting that method only here is an isolated demand for rigor.

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Trans people make an impossible empirical claim as well. The claim that undergirds their requests are that they are actually able to tell that they are the opposite sex.

To use an analogy: Richard Hanania has written about how civil rights law is the origins of what is called "wokeness." I've seen others talk about how American colleges and universities only started valuing "diversity" after the Supreme Court struck down one form of affirmative action, while signposting other forms of affirmative action that would be acceptable.

All of that to say, is it possible that the "empirical claim" that trans people make are more motivated by "what actually works" legally and culturally in our society? That they're falsifying their preferences, in an attempt to justify the way they want to live their lives to the gatekeepers and the masses?

Obviously, their efforts don't work for you and other trans skeptical posters on this forum, but imagine you found yourself in the following life situation:

You are a man, and you want to be a woman. It doesn't matter if that desire is caused by an intersex brain, or a paraphilia or is a whimsy you picked up as a result of your life experiences. You have this desire, and it is strong enough to make you want to do something about it. Maybe it has become what Scott Alexander calls a trapped prior - a nearly unchangable belief that doesn't respond to new evidence, like a phobia or an OCD obsession. You know that you can't become exactly like a typical woman, but you believe that with hormones, surgery and vocal training you can get close enough for your own purposes, at least physically. Heck, maybe you'll even get lucky and pass so well that for the vast majority of the people you interact with, you will be indistinguishable from a typical woman and you'll be able to live your life.

Either way, you need to convince society that they should allow you to get the hormones and surgeries, and that they should treat you in all ways like a woman, despite whatever doubts members of society might otherwise have about your claim.

I put forward that the "typical trans narrative" is like water filling the shape of the society it is arising from. All of the philosophical and metaphysical arguments are a smoke screen. They don't exist to get cis people closer to the truth of understanding what it is like to be trans - they exist to get enough important gate keepers in society to let the trans person live the life they want to live. Maybe parts of the "typical trans narrative" are close enough to being true for many trans people. Maybe they were gender non-conforming as a kid, or didn't fit in with other kids of their natal sex, or they couldn't cut it as an adult of their natal sex, but it is also the end-point of a long process of memetic evolution, where trans people collectively discovered the set of secret words and shibboleths they had to say to get what they wanted.

I think the modal trans person wants to look like, live as and be treated socially and legally as a member of the opposite sex. Whether that is a result of nature or nurture, or whether we realistically have any way of talking a person out of this once it has become a trapped prior for them, all other aspects of the "typical trans narrative" grow out of this simple truth. Because they want to live as and be treated as the opposite sex in all ways, it behooves them in the current cultural environment to make certain impossible-to-verify empirical claims about their internal experiences, about "feeling like a woman" or "knowing they were a woman."

That's how they get doctors and lawmakers on board with their desires, and after that it is a matter of keeping their heads down (if they pass), or cultivating cultural norms that minimize the friction of the way they're living their lives (if they don't pass.)

Long story short, while I'm sure many trans people actually do believe empirically unverifiable things about themselves, I think that in most cases those things matter much less than the simple pragmatism of saying whatever reduces the friction between them and the things they want out of life.

Sure, I think and have long thought this is the truth. But the commons they burn with the lies they live doom children. They are trapping the priors of others.

I agree to some extent with this. Yes, they are two different kinds of claims. But I find them to both be irrational, just in different ways. When I say that transgender activist claims are unbacked by evidence, what I mean by this is that I think a neutral and unbiased observer (like an alien visiting earth, for example) when looking at a trans woman, even a post-transition one, would find more physiological similarity with the the male side of the gender spectrum than the female side. Perhaps also when looking at the behavioral similarity, although I am not sure about that one.

My understanding of the typical trans activist position is that to them, it is not that trans women are women by a new definition of "women", it is that they are actually women by the old definition. I could be wrong about this, though.

Re: aliens, I guess it would depend on whether they're dissecting people and judging internal organ structures, or looking at them as they interact with society and judging based on that.

An alien that only looked at physical traits and no social interactions would think that money is just meaningless scraps of fabric and that it must not be very important to human society. Such an alien doesn't actually have much insight to offer on human society and culture and isn't really a useful arbiter of anything in a thought experiment on those things.

And yeah I think an alien looking at social interactions would classify most post-transition trans people as their chosen gender, there's a lot more signifiers in agreement with that conclusion than against it.

Unfortunately, your atheism is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as either. You are personally as irrational as the trans ideologues, but you give yourself a pass out of pure self-serving smugness. From whence comes equality between methodological constraints of science and metaphysical theory of ontology? It's nothing but really old and really popular and so it seems "normal". You probably like the cultural/political connotations, and you may have been raised to believe such irrational things. If you're going to act like anyone is "given a pass", it is you, and every time you pull this schick, it eats away at the detente that the mods claim to believe in/enforce. The result of you continuing to break down the detente is that, unless the mods continue to protect you, your irrationality will no longer be given a pass. It'll be made clear that you're no different than trans ideologues.

Unfortunately, your atheism is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as either.

That's a relatively new one in these parts eh? Leave aside arguing why my ideology is superior, let me claim that yours is just as bad. I can see this is an immensely convincing argument.

There is an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that the universe operates according to a mechanistic evolution of relatively simple laws of physics, with no external intervention at all.

To people like Goodguy, the only point is to hear himself call his ideological opponents irrational. That is the ground where the battle has been declared.

There is an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that the universe operates according to a mechanistic evolution of relatively simple laws of physics, with no external intervention at all.

What experiment have you conducted which demonstrates equality between methodological constraints of science and metaphysical theory of ontology?

EDIT:

That's a relatively new one in these parts eh? Leave aside arguing why my ideology is superior, let me claim that yours is just as bad. I can see this is an immensely convincing argument.

Also, it's telling that you didn't come to say that... to Goodguy, who, after all, did nearly nothing but say that someone's ideology is just as bad as another one. Big oof by you, but telling of the fact that you're far more critical of things you're predisposed to disagree with than things you're predisposed to agree with.

What experiment have you conducted which demonstrates equality between methodological constraints of science and metaphysical theory of ontology?

Metaphysics is not physics, hence it's not amenable to exploration by such means. But religions are not exclusively metaphysics, almost all of them, and certainly Christianity, claim tangible effects in the real world that is tantamount to a divergence from mere mechanistic evolution of physical processes. They certainly have apologetics by the bucketload for why such interventions are beyond the ability of scientific empirism to evaluate in terms of plausibility.

A religion stripped of physical implications or supernatural influences on reality is simply a philosophy, and those can only be adopted or denied, not proved or disproved.

Phenomenal, pun intended. Where in this nomenclature does atheism fall?

The null hypothesis. To recycle a very appropriate quip, atheism is no more a religion than a TV's screen being off is a television channel.

It is inherently an aspect of any metaphysical system that doesn't have explicitly claim the existence of supernatural elements, at the very least those that imply any interference, past, present or future, with the evolution of the world.

It is inherently an aspect of any metaphysical system

So, you're saying that it's a metaphysical system? Or that it's a component of a metaphysical system? Something like that?

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it eats away at the detente that the mods claim to believe in/enforce. The result of you continuing to break down the detente is that, unless the mods continue to protect you, your irrationality will no longer be given a pass

"Christianity is wrong and irrational" is not a moddable offense. Neither is "No it isn't." What is this "detente" that you claim is being broken and which we are not enforcing? (ETA: Okay, this one. Yes, that still pertains. You can criticize beliefs, but do it without sneering or personalizing it or trying to evangelize/recruit for a cause.) People are allowed to argue for/against religion and for/against atheism, no matter how tiresome and repetitive such arguments become (but in fairness, so is most well-trodden ground here).

@Goodguy hasn't been "protected" from anything. He can say your beliefs are irrational, and you can say his beliefs are irrational. What we would prefer is that people offer serious arguments rather than "Uh huh!" "Nuh uh!" back and forth. And what we would definitely prefer is that you refrain from trying to personalize it in the antagonistic manner you're doing here.

Any stick'll do.

I've said it before and I'll say it again...

But I don't give Christianity a pass. When people tell me that they are Christian, I have pretty much the same reaction as I have when people try to convince me that a trans woman is a real woman. In both cases, I think that their beliefs are ludicrous and deeply irrational.

What point do you think you are making? I repeat: you are allowed to say Christianity is wrong and irrational. You are allowed to say atheism is wrong and irrational. This is consistent with everything I have said in the past.

Mod hat is as mod hat does. Praise be to mod hat!

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Also, it's telling that you didn't come to say that... to Goodguy, who, after all, did nearly nothing but say that someone's ideology is just as bad as another one. Big oof by you, but telling of the fact that you're far more critical of things you're predisposed to disagree with than things you're predisposed to agree with.

What exactly is it telling of? If you wish to call it hypocrisy, feel free, but I can wholeheartedly assure you that people will leap to the defense of things they care about/prefer more than those they don't.

I am on record defending particular ideologies/movements I strongly dislike from false accusations.

For a recent example, when another atheist reclaimed religion as innately irrational, I strong disagreed, there's nothing wrong with the concept of religion from the standpoint of rationality, it's the belief in it in the face of the monumental amount of evidence against the supernatural elements seen in believers that makes them irrational. Belief in the supernatural ceases to be irrational when there's net positive evidence of supernatural events.

I see nothing wrong with claiming that religion/Catholicism is as bad/unfounded as trans-ideology and Wokism, or at least comparable in terms of harm, certainly in terms of the basis of their claims where it pertains to empirical reality.

My objection to you is that you didn't submit anything more than post-modernist nonsense about how, since atheism makes metaphysical claims, it's just as unfounded as religion. That is not the stance of anyone who has more convincing examples to show me, and believe me plenty of religious people try to do that, I and many others are atheists because such evidence is utterly inadequate for the magnitude of the claims

What exactly is it telling of? If you wish to call it hypocrisy, feel free, but I can wholeheartedly assure you that people will leap to the defense of things they care about/prefer more than those they don't.

People will obviously engage more with topics that they care about than topics they don't care about. But you specifically raised a concern with what you perceived as the form of an argument. We can go back to antiquity to find good reason to think that one should consider the form of an argument apart from its particulars.

My objection to you is that you didn't submit anything more than post-modernist nonsense about how, since atheism makes metaphysical claims, it's just as unfounded as religion.

Huge ROFL. I've never said that. Just not even. Double ROFL in thinking that it's anything post-modernist. Instead, it's like, core classical philosophy. I've seen some kind of ridiculous misunderstandings/misaccusations about post-modernist philosophy, but this is a new one. Just comically off the mark.

For reference I said:

That's a relatively new one in these parts eh? Leave aside arguing why my ideology is superior, let me claim that yours is just as bad. I can see this is an immensely convincing argument.

Quoting you saying:

Unfortunately, your atheism is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as either. You are personally as irrational as the trans ideologues, but you give yourself a pass out of pure self-serving smugness.

Hmm.. Did you happen to notice that @Goodguy was claiming that trans ideo was comparably awful to Catholicism, while condemning both? And not being an adherent of either?

And that my gripe with you is that you are presumably a Christian or at least religious, and your sole argument in that specific comment was claiming atheism is just as unfounded as religion, while being religious?

In other words, "both of you suck" versus "you suck just as much as I do". The former is, well, a just a value judgement, whereas the latter is what I expect someone to jump to when they've got nothing else worth saying.

You do you, but I'm leaving, my time to pointlessly quibble here is limited since I have no expectation of an eternal afterlife, or at least one not of our own making, and it's not here yet.

I see. You seem to have just imagined me saying something about my personal beliefs. Moreover, you have some weird post-modernist idea that your perception of my beliefs/identity has some bearing on the validity of the form of my argument. Also, you struggle with "greater than or equal to".

Okay, I’ll bite the bullet here. There’s plenty of evidence to support that Jesus Christ is the son of God and that he rose from the dead. For the benefit of others here who might read this…

  1. Jesus Christ was (to my knowledge) the only founder of a major world religion who claimed to be the son of God. He was put to death not because he performed miracles but because he made this claim. Why would someone make such an outrageous lie if it meant their death? Jesus Christ was not merely a good moral teacher, he claimed to be the son of God so those who admire his virtuosity (but not his divinity) will have to answer to why they admire a liar.

  2. Jesus Christ fulfilled many prophesies written by people hundreds of years before he lived. Many of these prophesies, as well as the account of Jesus’ acts, are verifiable by eyewitness accounts (reproduced in thousands of manuscript segments carefully copied and preserved over thousands of years). There is more scripture authenticated and verified from the New Testament than texts of many Ancient Greek philosophers whose authenticity is never questioned as rigorously. The letters of the New Testament have been subjected to lexical analysis and found to be internally consistent by author and authentic. There are no contradictions in the Bible, unlike the contradictions inherent in other belief systems such as transgenderism.

  3. Jesus Christ rose from the dead—he was observed by over 500 people over a 40 day period after his resurrection. His empty tomb was first discovered by women—not the most credible source in ancient times if you wanted to fabricate a story. We know that he died because the Roman soldiers punctured his side and drew blood after the crucifixion, a mortal wound that the soldiers had believed was conclusive.

I could go into more detail, but belief in Jesus Christ as the son of God, who died and rose again has a lot of rational merit. There is ample evidence to support this belief, but it isn’t proof so ultimately you must choose whether to believe it or not.

I do love an opportunity to relive my atheist debater glory days.

He was put to death not because he performed miracles but because he made this claim.

Jesus was put to death as an insurrectionist against Rome. This is why the sign over his head said "King of the Jews" and not "son of God."

Jesus Christ fulfilled many prophesies written by people hundreds of years before he lived.

According to the books written by his followers, yes. In a lot of places you can see how the Gospel authors are working overtime to fit prophecy to reality, like Matthew's story of Jesus entering Jerusalem on both a colt and a donkey, to fit the prophecy of Zechariah. Or the two very different nativity stories in Matthew and Luke. And a lot of the supposed prophecies fulfilled by Jesus aren't even prophecies, like Psalm 22.

are verifiable by eyewitness accounts

Even by Christian tradition, neither Luke nor Mark was an eyewitness to the ministry, death, or resurrection of Jesus. Matthew was very clearly not written by the Apostle Matthew, since it plagiarizes about 90% of its content from the Gospel of Mark (a non-eyewitness), including and most inexplicably, the story of Matthew's own call to be Jesus' disciple.

Jesus Christ rose from the dead—he was observed by over 500 people over a 40 day period after his resurrection.

Paul refers, in an offhanded comment in 1 Corinthians, to an episode which is elaborated upon nowhere else in Paul's writings, nor elsewhere in the early Christian canon, in which the risen Christ was supposedly seen by 500 people at once. No details are presented, nor does any account of this appearance exist. It's no more convincing than that video from like 2010 where a crowd in Alabama believed they'd seen a leprechaun. Actually less so, because there's video evidence of the leprechaun crowd. The resurrection narratives in the gospels contradict with other on a number of points which makes their historicity doubtful at best.

His empty tomb was first discovered by women—not the most credible source in ancient times if you wanted to fabricate a story.

IMO the empty tomb story is probably a later fiction. "Translation fables" in which bodies went missing from tombs were extremely common in the Mediterranean literature of the time. It was a literary shorthand to indicate that a righteous person had been assumed to heaven and been deified. It would be special pleading to assert these other contemporary stories are false but the story in the gospels is true.

We know that he died because the Roman soldiers punctured his side and drew blood after the crucifixion

I feel like I'm back in 2012 just typing out the words, "you can't use the Bible to prove the Bible," but...it's true. Yes, this is what happened according to a story in the gospel of John, and the reliability of the gospels is the issue in question.

For a lot of these you are misrepresenting @Cirrus's points in order to rebut a weaker and less evidence-based claim than the one he actually made.

Jesus was put to death as an insurrectionist against Rome. This is why the sign over his head said "King of the Jews" and not "son of God."

Notice you said "as" rather than focusing on the actual "why", because the "why" (which was the claim in question) is a much softer and more difficult point to rebut. There were many insurrectionists; few were put to death. Jesus was betrayed by the Jewish leaders because he claimed to be the son of God, and this is why he was executed. The legal pretext is a separate matter.

Even by Christian tradition, neither Luke nor Mark was an eyewitness to the ministry, death, or resurrection of Jesus. Matthew was very clearly not written by the Apostle Matthew, since it plagiarizes about 90% of its content from the Gospel of Mark (a non-eyewitness), including and most inexplicably, the story of Matthew's own call to be Jesus' disciple.

I wouldn't say this is "very clear" at all--it seems to have been written decades after the actual events, with an eye to maintaining consistency. Also, "a few people were not eyewitnesses" is not exactly a very strong counterargument for "there were eyewitness accounts."

I find it funny that you focused on this rather than "There are no contradictions in the Bible" which is so much easier to counter.

Paul refers, in an offhanded comment in 1 Corinthians, to an episode which is elaborated upon nowhere else in Paul's writings, nor elsewhere in the early Christian canon, in which the risen Christ was supposedly seen by 500 people at once. No details are presented, nor does any account of this appearance exist. It's no more convincing than that video from like 2010 where a crowd in Alabama believed they'd seen a leprechaun.

I agree here, the only reason to trust a one-off mention like this is if you have strong prior reason to trust the author's original account, and trust that nothing has been warped/miscopied/mistranslated/deliberately altered from the original account.

There were many insurrectionists; few were put to death.

That’s not true. The Romans crucified rebels all the time. They crucified two right next to Jesus. Jesus would not have been crucified if the Romans didn’t want him dead, because the Romans were the power in Judea. The Sanhedrin were handpicked puppets.

I wouldn't say this is "very clear" at all

Huge swathes of Matthew are copied word for word from Mark.

Also, "a few people were not eyewitnesses" is not exactly a very strong counterargument for "there were eyewitness accounts."

If the gospel authors weren’t eyewitnesses, then we have no eyewitness accounts.

I find it funny that you focused on this rather than "There are no contradictions in the Bible" which is so much easier to counter.

I didn’t address this precisely because I didn’t think it was with addressing. Yes there are a lot of contradictions in the Bible, but arguing about them is usually fruitless.

That’s not true. The Romans crucified rebels all the time. They crucified two right next to Jesus. Jesus would not have been crucified if the Romans didn’t want him dead, because the Romans were the power in Judea. The Sanhedrin were handpicked puppets.

What I said was that there were many insurrectionists and few were crucified; this is compatible with the claim that they were crucified all the time. The point is that only a small proportion were crucified.

The two crucified next to Jesus were thieves according to the Bible; do you have some other source of information on that?

The Romans can obviously want him dead for many reasons, one of which being that their handpicked puppets were whining about him. It's not like those puppets are literal puppets--they were still Jews, chosen for (among other things) their ability to lead other Jews.

Huge swathes of Matthew are copied word for word from Mark.

I thought it was clear I was aware of this based on my response. You are vastly overstating scholarly consensus on this. Many think Matthew was written before Mark and Mark copied Matthew; others think they both copied some other Gospel. Given how long ago this happened, our strongest evidence either way is still pretty weak. Even if Matthew did copy Mark though, as I mentioned, it's really not too strange to just imagine Matthew, the apostle, copying Mark's account to maintain consistency about events he may not now remember in quite as much detail decades after the fact.

If the gospel authors weren’t eyewitnesses, then we have no eyewitness accounts.

John appears to be an eyewitness account, Mark and Luke are based on eyewitness accounts, and Matthew appears to be an eyewitness account.

What I said was that there were many insurrectionists and few were crucified; this is compatible with the claim that they were crucified all the time. The point is that only a small proportion were crucified.

First century Palestine is not especially well-recorded, but even so a number of rebel leaders are known (Judas the Galilean and his sons, Simon son of Giora, Theudas, “The Egyptian,”). All of them were killed by the Romans, though they weren’t all crucified.

The two crucified next to Jesus were thieves according to the Bible; do you have some other source of information on that?

I don’t read Koine Greek but my understanding is that the word usually translated as “thief” is more like “bandit,” and it has a political connotation. Crucifixion was not normally a punishment meted out for run of the mill robbery or even murder, but generally for sedition or treason. Barabbas, who is part of the same ‘batch’ of prisoners slated for crucifixion before his pardon, is explicitly identified as being one of a group of rebels arrested for having participated in “the uprising”

The Romans can obviously want him dead for many reasons, one of which being that their handpicked puppets were whining about him. It's not like those puppets are literal puppets--they were still Jews, chosen for (among other things) their ability to lead other Jews.

If Jesus’ Jewish enemies had wanted him dead for breaking some Jewish law, they could have disposed of him on their own terms, whether through stoning or just whipping up a lynch mob. There would have been no need to get the Romans involved. The fact that he was crucified at all suggests the primary instigators of his execution were the Romans, regardless of whether or not a lot of Jews also wanted him dead (I’m sure they did) and that the main reason for his death was that he was perceived as having committed some anti-Roman act. Claiming to be the son of some obscure regional deity, or even the deity himself, was not, but claiming to be a king would have been.

Many think Matthew was written before Mark and Mark copied Matthew; others think they both copied some other Gospel.

Markan priority is about as established as anything in the field. I can’t call to mind any currently active scholar, even in the most conservative institutions, who hold that Mark is dependent on Matthew. There may be two or three. I do know there are a lot of Bible-believing, Nicene affirming, “Jesus-is-the-only-way,” even inerrantist, conservative scholars who still won’t defend Matthean priority, which IMO says something in itself.

In almost every instance of a deliberate difference between Mark and Matthew, the change is one that would make a lot of sense for Matthew to add to Mark, but none the other way around. For example, it makes a lot of sense that Matthew would add birth and resurrection narratives to Mark, which lacks them, but it’s hard to see why Mark world cut them out of Matthew.

It doesn’t make any sense that Matthew, an eyewitness, would copy most of his gospel from a second-hand source (including, again, the story of Matthew’s call, surely the most important moment of his life). Cross-checking a thing or two, sure. Copying most of it wholesale? Highly unlikely.

The internal anonymity of the gospel of Matthew is also a problem. Ancient authors rarely failed to cite firsthand knowledge of the events at hand if they had it (why would you?), but nowhere in the gospel does the author even claim eyewitness status.

John appears to be an eyewitness account,

John is the only gospel for which I think one could, in principle make an argument for eyewitness testimony.

Mark and Luke are based on eyewitness accounts

I doubt it, primarily for the reason that neither bothers to cite the eyewitnesses they consulted by name, which there would be little reason not to do. There are also significant and (in my view) irreconcilable differences in the narratives, particularly in the resurrection narratives, the most important part of the story, which precludes them from being accurate and mostly reliable accounts of historical events.

Matthew appears to be an eyewitness account.

I doubt it, for the reasons above.

First century Palestine is not especially well-recorded, but even so a number of rebel leaders are known (Judas the Galilean and his sons, Simon son of Giora, Theudas, “The Egyptian,”). All of them were killed by the Romans, though they weren’t all crucified.

We know Jesus was executed for insurrection due to the Bible, which is also what tells us that this was just a legal pretext. Guessing at what you think the most likely alternate hypothesis is--it's common knowledge that Jesus was executed for insurrection, but the authors of the Bible constructed an alternate story where that was just a legal pretext? I find this highly unlikely--the Bible basically says nothing at all about independence from the Romans. I think anyone likely to know Jesus was executed for insurrection, and need an explanation for that, would also have some inkling that he actually was a rebel if that was what he was.

Also, all of those people actually ran rebellions, complete with military action. I really don't think they're in the same reference class as Jesus, barring totally baseless conjecture.

If Jesus’ Jewish enemies had wanted him dead for breaking some Jewish law, they could have disposed of him on their own terms, whether through stoning or just whipping up a lynch mob. There would have been no need to get the Romans involved. The fact that he was crucified at all suggests the primary instigators of his execution were the Romans, regardless of whether or not a lot of Jews also wanted him dead (I’m sure they did) and that the main reason for his death was that he was perceived as having committed some anti-Roman act. Claiming to be the son of some obscure regional deity, or even the deity himself, was not, but claiming to be a king would have been.

The Bible says they were worried about the response from the people. They did have to maintain power after all, which means maintaining popular support.

It also does mention a few lynch mobs which Jesus manages to escape from, such as in Luke 4:28-30. Since this actually did happen, by your logic, Jesus' Jewish enemies did want him dead.

They couldn't stone him--capital punishment was restricted to the Romans.

I doubt it, primarily for the reason that neither bothers to cite the eyewitnesses they consulted by name, which there would be little reason not to do. There are also significant and (in my view) irreconcilable differences in the narratives, particularly in the resurrection narratives, the most important part of the story, which precludes them from being accurate and mostly reliable accounts of historical events.

This is early Christianity, citing someone by name would mean threatening their life. I don't think irreconcilable differences are incompatible with eyewitness accounts--these were written possibly decades after the fact and people may simply misremember the details. Eyewitness accounts are not infallible of course, especially back when mass hysteria was more of a thing.

I strongly disagree that irreconcilable differences between the accounts "[preclude] them from being accurate and mostly reliable accounts of historical events." At worst this means they cannot both be accurate accounts.

As far as the rest, what you say sounds perfectly logical. I can't trust it though, because when you talk about stuff I know anything about it seems obviously wrong to me. Clearly I have a lot to learn though.

More comments

The two crucified next to Jesus were thieves according to the Bible; do you have some other source of information on that?

Metatron did a video about the arrest of Christ, looking at the 'original' Greek text of the bible. Very interesting look on the matter, and going by the various gospels, it's heavily implied if not out-right stated that Jesus was crucified as an insurrectionist/rebel, alongside the other two.

The Romans can obviously want him dead for many reasons, one of which being that their handpicked puppets were whining about him.

This I would disagree on. My interpretation of the trial of Jesus by Pontius Pilate is very much a case where Pilate is having to deal with politically charged Pharisees hell-bent on seeing Jesus killed due to his teachings. Going by the Gospel, Jesus literally argued his case with Pilate so well that Pilate was begging the Pharisees to allow Pilate to declare Jesus guilty, so much so that he offered them up the choice between Jesus and a man accused of murder.

And we know who they picked.

Metatron did a video about the arrest of Christ, looking at the 'original' Greek text of the bible. Very interesting look on the matter, and going by the various gospels, it's heavily implied if not out-right stated that Jesus was crucified as an insurrectionist/rebel, alongside the other two.

Right I was already aware of this, that's the legal pretext I was talking about. If you're talking about WHY he was executed, I think it makes the most sense to talk about the proximate cause, i.e. the reason he was executed when others in the same reference class were not. Many others who were about equally anti-Roman were not executed. He was executed, not for insurrectionist beliefs, but for claiming to be the Son of God, which earned him the enmity of the Jewish leaders, who created the legal pretext of insurrection in order to execute him.

Interesting that the other two were also possibly executed as insurrectionists. Honestly not the sort of thing that is very significant to me, so I won't be looking into it too much, but I wish that kind of info was easier to find.

This I would disagree on. My interpretation of the trial of Jesus by Pontius Pilate is very much a case where Pilate is having to deal with politically charged Pharisees hell-bent on seeing Jesus killed due to his teachings.

I think I'm missing something here; this sounds like you're agreeing with me. The Pharisees can exert some pressure on the Romans to execute specific people.

Going by the Gospel, Jesus literally argued his case with Pilate so well that Pilate was begging the Pharisees to allow Pilate to declare Jesus guilty, so much so that he offered them up the choice between Jesus and a man accused of murder.

And we know who they picked.

Did you miss a word? Pilate wanted to declare Jesus innocent.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Christianity is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as transgender ideology. Believing that a certain man 2000 years ago was the son of god and rose from the dead is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as believing that a man can become a woman by calling himself a woman and doing surgeries.

In theory yes, in practice no. Your parents dragging you as child to church for dunking in cold water or to gender clinic for gender affirming treatment is one big difference.

But many people here on The Motte give Christianity a pass because it's really old and really popular and so it seems "normal", because they like its cultural/political connotations, and probably in some cases because they were raised Christian.

Because Christianity is no big issue here, because only arguments for Christianity usually presented here are: "it is ancient" "it is our tradition" "churches are beautiful" "church music is inspiring" "if you are lonely, you will find friends in church" "you must believe in something, why not Jesus" etc...

If poster, or group of posters tried to preach, evangelize and missionize here in noughties hardcore style, if they came and argued for literal existence of God, literal truth of the Bible and literal bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, they would not be given any "pass", they would face strong opposition and generated lots of interesting discussions full of heat and light. Anyone who does not remember the great Atheist-Christian war of the noughties, missed internet at its best.

There were those who made themselves eunuchs for Christ. Not really that popular any more, for some reason.

Okay, the context for that quote is Jesus saying "Divorce is a no-no"; Matthew 19:

10 The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” 11 But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. 12 For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

Now, who or what were the "eunuchs who have made themselves so for the sake of the kingdom"? Because this is during the ministry of Christ when He is still alive, and before Christianity became differentiated from Judaism. So does He mean literal 'guys who chopped off their balls' or 'guys who are living celibate lives without marriage or sex so they won't be distracted from the mission'?

I don't think I've ever seen exegesis of this passage, and I should go look it up. Off the top of my head, the only case of an early Christian doing literal castration was Origen, and he's considered A Bit Odd.

Though seemingly there were pro- and anti- sides on this!

Justin Martyr, First Apology, AD 155-157:

Chapter 29. Continence of Christians And again [we fear to expose children], lest some of them be not picked up, but die, and we become murderers. But whether we marry, it is only that we may bring up children; or whether we decline marriage, we live continently. And that you may understand that promiscuous intercourse is not one of our mysteries, one of our number a short time ago presented to Felix the governor in Alexandria a petition, craving that permission might be given to a surgeon to make him an eunuch. For the surgeons there said that they were forbidden to do this without the permission of the governor. And when Felix absolutely refused to sign such a permission, the youth remained single, and was satisfied with his own approving conscience, and the approval of those who thought as he did. And it is not out of place, we think, to mention here Antinous, who was alive but lately, and whom all were prompt, through fear, to worship as a god, though they knew both who he was and what was his origin.

But by the fourth century, there was a problem; seemingly an ascetical cult which practiced castration had grown up and become influential:

Two centuries later Basil of Ancyra devoted several sections of his treatise On the True Integrity of Virginity (ca. 336-58) to the same practice. Unlike Justin, however, Basil hardly considers this evidence of a man's continence: on the contrary, those who "perversely" castrate themselves "by this very deed make a declaration of their own licentiousness".

So does He mean literal 'guys who chopped off their balls' or 'guys who are living celibate lives without marriage or sex so they won't be distracted from the mission'?

My understanding is that he meant the former, since the language they were speaking definitely distinguished between the two. Indeed, in context it makes no sense. Why would he say 'eunuchs made by men' (clearly meaning castrated men) only to immediately say 'eunuchs by choice', only this time using the word metaphorically and not literally?

Well, I find the distinction interesting because if you're volunteering to have your balls chopped off, you are still being made a eunuch by men. Now, there is indeed the difference between "castrated as a child/taken as a prisoner or slave and castrated", and "volunteered to be castrated", I recognise that, but there is also some possibility of "voluntarily abstaining from sex, by choice, as if one is a eunuch".

The entire discussion is in the context of marriage, and how it's hard to abstain from sex, which is why those who do so by choice do it "for the sake of the kingdom".

they came and argued for literal existence of God, literal truth of the Bible and literal bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ

It might surprise you that (as far as I know, at least) there are several regular users who do believe this, largely or entirely, and discuss it regularly. They are generally pretty welcome.

Have any of us ever argued for the literal truth of the first 11 chapters of Genesis? I believe I have made posts about the theory of mind of literalist YEC's, and that we have a few posters who will point out that it doesn't hurt anyone in practice to have a large percentage of the population believe it, and that that is more or less the closest this forum has seen.

Posters do come and argue for literal existence of God.

Old = worked for 2k years as civilization exploded.

Worked is not merely debatable, it is debated even among Christians to this day. It isn't very hard at all to point at times when it did not in fact work, and caused much grief to both its adherents and victims.

Astrology worked at least two millenia more, and all modern problems began when arrogant modern "science" rejected ancient wisdom of the stars. Good that modern people are RETVRNING to tradition.

Ancient Greece and Rome did fine without Christianity and were recognizably Western and civilized to modern observers, compared with Early Modern Europe. Trade extremely violent gladiatorial games for extremely violent religious wars, slavery for serfdom...

You might consider that you don't have a very solid grasp on what Christianity is, if that's your definition.

What is your definition? The one I am using is part of the Nicene Creed.

a certain man 2000 years ago was the son of god and rose from the dead

This is also my understanding of Christianity. What do you understand it to be?

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Christianity is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as transgender ideology.

As @Cirrus explains below, there is plenty of evidence. Thousands and thousands of eyewitness accounts, prophecy, et cetera.

Not to mention the very cultural/political connotations, history and tradition are themselves evidence compared to transgenderism. Just evidence that points to a conclusion you really don't like or can believe is true.

I'm not trying to be antagonistic here, but your strong claims against Christianity show a clear bias and lack of clear eyed, Bayesian priors. I think you need to reassess your own 'objectivity' before you start claiming a high horse.

That's an interesting comparison. While the historicity of Jesus is debated downthread, the Gospel accounts IMO have a very valid purpose: they can teach the reader how to be a charismatic psychopath who motivates his followers! devout leader of a church: (1) Gather some small number of people who worship the predecessor religion, which contains some prophesies. (2) Find an interpretation of the predecessor religion or religious text in which the prophesies refer to things that happened to you and your group. (3) Act and teach as Jesus did in the Gospels, with a focus on the corruption of and persecution by The World (4) Die according to your prophesies and (5) be rememebered forever!

Experimentally, we have evidence this works for many groups. Most of them don't make it to (5) because they don't make new prophesies of their own, but some do.

So the natural place to go here from gender ideology is to ask whether gender ideology provides a sufficient set of social tools to build a movement, or whether the ideology sources those externally.

We live in a society that has figured out, long ago, that we should have religious pluralism where Christians can worship as they please, but can't enforce their religion on society. So I don't care how irrational they are.

We have not figured this out for trans people.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Christianity is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as transgender ideology. Believing that a certain man 2000 years ago was the son of god and rose from the dead is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as believing that a man can become a woman by calling himself a woman and doing surgeries. But many people here on The Motte give Christianity a pass because it's really old and really popular and so it seems "normal", because they like its cultural/political connotations, and probably in some cases because they were raised Christian.

I'm always baffled when this accusation comes up. We understand that there are Christians among us and we don't poke that sore spot unprovoked. But it's absolutely not the case that we let reasoning from religious conviction go without critique. There are trans people here, when they argue topics that aren't about transness I don't, or at least attempt not to, let the fact that I have some disagreements on one topic come up in the other unless it's invoked.

Can you actually point to instances where someone used their belief that Jesus was the literal son of god when arguing for some policy without brooking opposition?

Don't do low effort top level posts.

7 day ban for making me deal with this on Thanksgiving

I'm having a hard time deciding what a reasonable ban duration for drunkposting on a holiday should be. I keep defaulting to 1 day, but that only functions like throwing someone in the drunktank until they're sober, and that only works if you catch them in time. OTOH, more than 3d feels excessive, unless there's an existing pattern. But in this case, 4d would keep them in the drunktank until the next thread... Ugh, it's good I'm not a mod.

A 7 day ban for this is incredibly excessive. This user is clearly a good contributor, despite drunkpoasting one thing on a holiday. Banning people like this also deprives other users of good discussions. One day would be both appropriate and also funny, and not punish everyone else.

Unless this person has some history of this and bans: this is a ridiculous response.

Apparently the mods don't believe that low effort, low quality posts can prompt high effort, high quality responses despite ample evidence to the contrary.

I've been banned repeatedly, and while I surely earned some of them, the majority have been what I consider tickey tack and unreasonable curtailing of reasonable discussion. This is right according to profile from my perspective.

Apparently the mods don't believe that low effort, low quality posts can prompt high effort, high quality responses despite ample evidence to the contrary.

I think it's a reasonable case of being concerned about moral hazard. If you let low quality posts because they can lead to high quality posts then you may find yourself with a flood of low quality posts so unworthy wading through that you scare away the high quality posts. There is an experiment on this, CWR.

Yes, but the repeated requests for the bare link repository indicate that there is demand and interest in discussing more than what gets brought up, but the purposefully high barriers to entry prevent those topics from even being raised at all, and thus no responses can be prompted, regardless of quality.

I'm not convinced the repeated requests for the bare link repo aren't just the same three or so people repeatedly bringing up the same request. I'm indifferent to it's return.

I am in deep, passionate, unrelenting agreement with your indifference.

They are not a great contributor. They have a history of low effort posting.

An improvement to these things (which seem heavy handed) would be to include this history when you take these sorts of drastic actions.

Because from the outside it seriously just looks like power tripping/petty.

Normally that is something that I would include. I'm away from my computer, right now because it's Thanksgiving, and busy hanging out with family. It is more time intensive to construct those lists on mobile.

The user had twelve warnings and temp bans in their mod history. I didn't even add my most recent one.

This is not a stellar user that drunk posted once on holidays. It's a crap user that also posted drunk on holidays.

My willingness to compile a list of bad posts during a holiday is low.

You probably did not notice, but there is potential schism brewing inside the Catholic Church. The theological debates are interesting, they revolve around ecumenism post Second Vatican council and it seems that current Pope takes them very far with messages like

Some theologians say it is part of God's "permissive will," allowing "this reality of many religions. Some emerge from the culture, but they always look toward heaven and God," the pope said.

As a former Catholic myself just briefly investigating this over last few months I am convinced that the pope is probably either an apostate or a heretic. The church also has to deal with day-to-day subversion from the left as with the rebellious bishops from German Catholic church that decided to bless LGBT unions. And on top of that there is some strange relationship between Pope and Davos types around wide variety of topics such as climate change or strange messages like this openly mentioning return of catholic integralism, which may be the way how some of the critics of Vatican II were placated.

It really is strange and pope Francis himself seems to have interesting enough background to generate controversies ranging with his embrace of socialist version of catholic teachings endemic to Latin America called liberation theology with openly communist figures like Hélder Câmara whom Pope calls as that holy bishop. Add in a very strange way of how Francis got elected - while previous much more conservative pope still lived and you have anther leg of the controversy.

So yes, Catholic Church is not safe from culture wars, if anything they are waged even on larger scale given that Catholic Church is a vulnerable institution. Now it is not as if there was not a problem with Catholic Church before, there were antipopes and murderous popes like Stephen VI and so forth, this time may not be different.

there is potential schism brewing inside the Catholic Church

Not again! You mean like 1054? or this entire list of breakaways before, during and after the Reformation?

I think this is just more rumblings on of the Spirit of Vatican II. A heavier hand should have been taken with the likes of the German bishops, but that's just my opinion. The main problem is the increasingly secular society of today, and the shockwaves of the abuse scandals - Ireland has become unrecognisable in social liberalisation during my lifetime, and that's something I've observed over a period of forty years since my late teens to today. Even those still going to Mass have a very vague notion of what the religion is about. There's a ton of cultural Catholicism, but even expressions of that like processions etc. got washed away very fast in the 90s onward.

So as far as doctrinal issues goes, there is the perennial problem of "how much accommodation to the Spirit of the Age do you do?" Benedict was my pope in a way Francis will never be, and I admired his attempts to go back to more reverent and more traditional liturgy and displays, but there is too much inertia and too much ignorance built up over the decades. We can't go back. Francis is very much imbued with the notion of pastoralism - that you go out and search for the lost sheep without worrying too much over the jots and tittles of what the rules precisely say. And he's having to deal with "how do you prevent the Church from being hollowed-out, from losing any young people continuing to remain Catholics, from becoming a museum piece where churches are just tourist attractions and not houses of worship?"

You can't go back, so how far do you go with the ways of today?

The other vision for the future of the church, that the Trads like to point out, is radical downsizing and refocusing around the core of conservative believers with a positive birthrate, instead of chasing wishy-washy modernists leaving the church for the religious experience of protesting anyway. While this would ensure slow-but-steady positive growth, it would also entail becoming a peripheral pseudo-ethnicity minority religion in many lands, like the Copts or Mormons. The only difference is their leader would still technically have an itty-bitty country to run.

This would also make the Pope less of an Important World Leader all the presidents shake hands with, and that the Church would have to sell a lot of its very nice things, a terrible fate in the minds of reformists (and many conservatives too, which is why they don't talk about those parts being necessary as much).

Relatedly: https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2023/11/pope-francis-as-public-heretic-evidence.html?m=1

It should be noted that rorate Caeli is very influential among right wing clergy and that the author is not simply a rando, but also that it’s unclear what his call would actually look like and that pope Francis is an 87 year old man with cancer and at least two previous heart attacks, while the opposition are likely very cautious because high ranking clerics in the RCC are almost definitionally old and high-IQ.

Charitably: the pope is trying to engage with sinners and help them return to the light.

Christ didn’t hang out with prostitutes because he thought being a prostitute was a good thing.

Mark Chapter 2:

16 When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

17 On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Some people want their Mark 2:17 without Mark 2:16. Even more people want their Mark 2:16 without Mark 2:17. They need to be taken together, but they almost never are.

Things you’ll never hear Pope Francis say: “These people are sick and should stop sinning in these specifics ways.”

Islam is in dire straits and has been for a while now. So people often wish for a singular Caliph to show up and just wave a wand and bring it to some reconciliation with modernity.

On the other hand...

What is fake? What is real? Are we living in a simulation? Or just the AI version of what is passed around as news?

As far as I know, yes, it's real. Jesuits, eh?


What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


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