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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26697 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Do men and women political radicalization work differently?

Everyone of us know how riots, revolts and political radicalism are born; a segment of the population, resented or alienated by material means (they are too poor or too isolated by the access to political power, and they revolt by necessity) decide to adopt countercultural ideologies, often violent and revolutionary, in order to destroy the status quo and access the means of power.

But what if our model is obsolete, because we applied it to men and masculinity?

Being a middle-upper class European man, I have a lot of access, both personal and social, to my peers and to what they think. Last day, an homicide made by a men towards his girlfriend happened in Italy, and an enormous cultural war has started with all the related news (including the sister of the victim advocating a "cultural revolution", shame campaign by the media, storms of social media posts by women, and the "fascist" right-wing government immediately folding, promising some kind of introduction of sexual (ergo lgbt) education in the schools).

Well, the model of radicalization that I observed is the following; young, often upper-middle class women with no material problems and often with prestigious (but not high-earning) jobs adopting the position of intersectional or radical feminism in few days, moving quite a lot the Overton window to the left. From this, the following observations I gathered;

  • Women's political radicalization happen in different echo-chambers compared to the men's ones. While men's radicalization happens because of lack of material means, in women's case it looks like the more they happen to be privileged, the more they radicalize. As if material means have no matter for their well being, and the high status position is the source, not the solution, for their growing radicalization.

  • Could be that the de-materialization of post-Marxist politics happened because women are anti-materialists themselves and do not care about all this stuff? Okay all the discourses on post-industrialization, post-marxism, Foucault or whatever, but I do not think that, politically speaking, women cares at all about the well being of their societies at large.

  • Cultural-war-speaking, another demonstration that there is no opposition to the women's tears and resentement in Western Society, and we have still not produced the necessary antibodies to resist them. Far left organisations and ideologies have it far too easy, because they are free to propagandize using traditional medias and social network as an instrument of expansion.

  • A lot of normie women fell in the vortex of radicalizations. But unlike real radicalized womens, if you speak to them personally, they will not strike back at you. A distinction still exist between the mentally-ill woman and the woman who is only pushed by social media and social pressure to act.

  • And that I am lucky to have a girlfriend that does not give a damn about social medias at large.

I think you touch on a huge number of interesting questions in this post.

My view on why 'material' (ie 'orthodox marxist'; economic) socialist views have declined is that the average quality of life for the 'urban proletariat' is vastly higher than it was at the high point of communism. Especially if you look at the richest, most industrialized countries (where Marx predicted the revolution would happen first), ie. Germany, the UK, the US, the 'high point' for massively popular radical leftism was 1880-1930. Even by the mid-1930s in the UK (I choose because Germany saw democracy end in that time, while the US had a weird double dip recession due to extremely stupid policy by FDR) newfound prosperity had marginalized the truly radical left, which had its last great moment in the general strike of 1926.

You just can't compare the 'material conditions' of a miner in Lancashire in 1905, or a worker in a steel mill in Pittsburgh in 1890, to the conditions of a modern 'American proletarian', like a nurse, a content marketing manager, a mid-level employee of the local municipal government, or even a skilled blue collar worker like a modern steel industry worker. In 2010 pay for a fresh miner, in a huge recession, right out of high school was $70,000 a year in West Virginia. Still tough work, but much more than many 'white collar' jobs paid at that time fresh out of college (if you could get one at all), and in a state with a low cost of living.

Last day, an homicide made by a men towards his girlfriend happened in Italy, and an enormous cultural war has started with all the related news (including the sister of the victim advocating a "cultural revolution", shame campaign by the media, storms of social media posts by women

This has happened every six months since the invention of social media, and nothing changes. As the old quip goes,

Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.

Lesbian separatism failed for a reason (well, many reasons, but one primary reason); women like men too much to commit.

The class that is most precarious today are surplus elites. The low income high status people struggling to not fall into the working class. An electrician with a good salary and zero risk of unemployment benefits from low taxes. The sociology major or artist who makes less than an electrician is dependent on state handouts. The class represented by the modern left isn't the working class, it is the state handout class. This can either mean underclass living on welfare or art history major managing a project that is supposed to help the underclass (don't ask for statistical evidence of the efficacy of this project). Canceling student debt and more money for modern art benefits people with upper middle class parents who didn't make it to medical school yet are terrified of becoming a nurse. The modern left is in a conflict with the working class as the working class doesn't want to pay for LGBTQA+ certifications while the downwardly mobile middle class desperately needs it so they don't end up in the working class.

Especially women tend to end up with college degrees that are difficult to find employment for without left wing politics. There would be a lot fewer HR jobs if it wasn't for all the regulations that have been passed. Meanwhile the actual workers find most of the HR-stuff bizarre and alienating.

These social media campaigns work, they provide new jobs for chief diversity officers.

surplus elites.

The low income high status people

I think it'd be more accurate and simple to just call them intellectuals.

Elites who didn't develop some great new tech, trade their way to a career on wall street or become a surgeon.

Especially women tend to end up with college degrees that are difficult to find employment for without left wing politics. There would be a lot fewer HR jobs if it wasn't for all the regulations that have been passed. Meanwhile the actual workers find most of the HR-stuff bizarre and alienating.

And this is a self re-enforcing cycle; the more it becomes a default that mentally healthy non-underclass women have degrees, the more women get degrees in communications and psychology(typically the two least rigorous majors) because women are susceptible to societal pressure and low-rigor degrees make it difficult to get a job, which means there’s outcry to make more jobs specifically for degree holders.

Feminism doesn’t help- the way to break the cycle would be to acknowledge that most but not all women should just be homemakers, yes often for men who make $65k/yr, but it isn’t the root of the problem. Pretending that everyone can be an elite is the root of the problem.

You just can't compare the 'material conditions' of a miner in Lancashire in 1905, or a worker in a steel mill in Pittsburgh in 1890, to the conditions of a modern 'American proletarian', like a nurse, a content marketing manager, a mid-level employee of the local municipal government, or even a skilled blue collar worker like a modern steel industry worker.

Well - you actually can. If one thing they all have in common is that their only source of income is their wage/salary i.e. their own labour is their only means of survival, and they have (practically) no savings, no inherited wealth, no silver, no gold, no stocks, no livestock, own no land, and don't own any real estate besides (maybe) the one they live in, then yes, objectively speaking, according to socialist terminology, they are the proletariat. Whether they use smartphones or not, what color their collars are, whether they perform physical labour or not, is of no importance.

Marxist definition has a big 19th century assumption that the proletariat actually produces the material goods keeping the society alive and can threaten the existence of the entire system if they simply stopped.

This largely doesn’t hold anymore since most of the manufacturing is shipped to a myriad of third world countries who are willing to use extreme coercion on their workers (which was common in turn of century western countries as well and eventually got an ideological banner under European fascism) to keep the production going. If the workers of a manufacturing country somehow gets the upper hand, the country is cut out of the international trade system and replaced by one of 50 other willing nations.

Western proletariat in this system still technically fit the Marxist definition but not really. They are by and large service workers who don’t hold such power because usually they don’t make anything really crucial to the functioning of the economy. Their role is not to produce but to manage some steps of the production happening abroad, and to serve the wealthy few who got rich from being adjacent to offshoring. Their strikes can hardly cause a nuisance and are easily broken.

Labour immigration acting as inverse offshoring also has a strong effect here. Many lower level jobs are held by foreigners who don’t even have citizenship rights and are glad for the opportunity. They will gladly act as strike breakers.

So no, this isn’t really what the word proletariat was meant to apply to.

In 1915 the Bolsheviks were a sausage fest. In 1989 it was dominated by women. In 1922 the NSDAP was a sausage fest, in 1938 it was supported more by women than by men. Putin got more male than female votes in his first election. Today he has a solid lead among female voters. Here in Sweden the socialdemocrats consisted of young radical men a century ago, now they absolutely dominate women with a massive rift between female and male voters.

Women are rarely actual extremists, they rarely support causes that get them in trouble or are controversial. They seem to mainly virtue signal the values of the system. The modern day SJW is the reincarnated church lady. It would be difficult to differentiate the values of these new radical feminists and the values of the HR department at IBM.

Women's radicalism isn't really a problem and it has historically played an important role as women have been the enforcers of the morality of the society they live in. Had women not policed men we would have devolved into degeneracy. If a man lives in a clean house, has good manners and is well dressed it is probably because a women at some point in his life forced him to behave.

Had these women lived 90 years ago they would have been the biggest Mussolini supporters.

If all of this is true, the trick is simply understanding how to switch these masses of women to your side, and let them enforce whatever policy you create. The problem here is, imho, that the entrenchment of female power and powerful media has created a block that is too strong to destroy.

I don’t see how. As a political group, they’re a status quo anchor with heavy susceptibility to ‘care-based’ arguments and other immature, conventional justifications. You can’t use them as trailblazers and schock troops. They’ll just follow the mass of winners and push them a bit further by inertia. One should always emphasize self-interest, conformity, and good intentions when speaking to large groups of women, but that also applies to large groups of men (where it is referred to as ‘populism’).

The power of women as political actors is overrated. Like black people and other ‘oppressed’ groups, their privileged legal position and the prestige they enjoy in mainstream discourse is not down to anything they did, it has been granted to them by others, and can be taken away.

All of this let us assume that "political violence" is a good tactic when you need to move women's opinion.

Controlling the status quo is useful for moving women’s political opinions and applying political violence can be a good way to control the status quo.

their privileged legal position and the prestige they enjoy in mainstream discourse is not down to anything they did, it has been granted to them by others, and can be taken away.

This implies that women were not the main force behind the women’s right movements or various waves of feminism in the 20th century. Is there evidence for that?

Famous suffragist Susan B. Anthony said that woman suffrage laws "probably never would have passed if it had been up to women to vote on them," and that men were actually more progressive about women's suffrage than women were (1902).

Women’s suffrage happened first in states where there were less women.

Our results provide strong evidence that women obtained the right to vote earlier in US jurisdictions in which they accounted for a smaller share of the adult population. This result survives a battery of robustness checks, including the estimation of linear probability models with state-level fixed effects. Indeed, sex ratio imbalances appear to be the single most important determinant of jurisdictions' transitions to women's suffrage.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0014498313000119

and that men were actually more progressive about women's suffrage than women were (1902).

Probably the most interesting book I've ever read on the topic was Jane Jerome Camhi's Women Against Women: American Anti-Suffragism, 1880-1920.

Women’s suffrage happened first in states where there were less women.

Wasn't that due to powerful madams getting women the right to vote in places like Wyoming?

Evo psych offers a simple explanation for this. For men with little or no status, engaging in high-risk, high-reward activities makes objective sense. For women in general, it's the opposite that make sense.

Sources please, so that this isn’t a just-so story? :)

From Wikipedia:

Men can potentially have many children with little effort; women only a few with great effort. One argued consequence of this is that males are more aggressive, and more violently aggressive, than females, since they face higher reproductive competition from their own sex than females. In particular, low-status males may be more likely to remain completely childless. Under such circumstances, it may have been evolutionarily useful to take very high risks and use violent aggression in order to try to increase status and reproductive success rather than become genetically extinct. This may explain why males have higher crime rates than females and why low status and being unmarried is associated with criminality. It may also explain why the degree of income inequality of a society is a better predictor than the absolute income level of the society for male-male homicides; income inequality creates social disparity, while differing average income levels may not do so. Furthermore, competition over females is argued to have been particularly intensive in late adolescence and young adulthood, which is theorized to explain why crime rates are particularly high during this period.

Thank you, that’s exactly what I was looking for!

I see women’s role in political movements and frankly most social and artistic movements as normalization much more so than radicalization or avant- garde adoption of ideas. Once a movement captures the attention of women, it tends to go mainstream pretty quickly. I agree that women tend to be gatekeepers. And I think they do so mainly by controlling sex. If your political, social, or artistic tastes are things that you’ll likely at minimum keep quiet about it lest it hurt your fuckability levels.

There are a couple of problems with this question.

Everyone of us know how riots, revolts and political radicalism are born

Those are very distinct phenomena. Conflating them is highly problematic.

a segment of the population, resented or alienated by material means

This is not very clear, but if it is meant to refer to economic deprivation, it has been clear for decades that economic deprivation is a poor predictor of participation in political violence; at best, the relationship is highly contingent. Eg:

There does appear to be an inverted “U” relationship between terrorism and the factors of education and wealth, although that relationship might be contested in terms of measurement validity. Some of this complexity probably stems from the conflation of the revolutions/rebellion literature and the terrorism literature, because much of the former focused on peasant rebellions or the role of the “masses” in fomenting revolution. More-recent demographic research has revealed that individual participants in terrorist groups and in terrorist violence are both more educated and more financially well off than was previously believed—although this was no surprise to scholars who studied anarchist and other social revolutionary terrorist groups in the 1970s. However, the emerging picture of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq suggests that they fit the old model of the undereducated, unemployed, alienated terrorist far better than the new model. This contrast, too, might be better understood by distinguishing types of terrorism.

Last day, an homicide made by a men towards his girlfriend happened in Italy

Can you please briefly describe the context? I suspect it may be relevant here.

In Europe there is a campaign to make "femicide" a legal concept, portraying woman particularly at risk of homicide despite most murder victims being male (In Italy 160 women and 370 men were killied in 2011). It would be defined as a killing of a woman, because she is a woman, with this sexism imputed on any heterosexual man who kills a woman due to jealousy or other love related reasons.

This is the story I assume OP is talking about.

This is the story I assume OP is talking about.

The extent to which this campaign seems to be astroturfed is almost bizarre.

Women's political radicalization happen in different echo-chambers compared to the men's ones. While men's radicalization happens because of lack of material means, in women's case it looks like the more they happen to be privileged, the more they radicalize. As if material means have no matter for their well being, and the high status position is the source, not the solution, for their growing radicalization.

Yes. Female radicalisation looks to me to be largely a status game against other similarly privileged women. In the same way that left-wingers will often "nobly criticise their in-group" which isn't actually their real in-group at all, privileged white women will "nobly self-sacrifice for the good of minorities" as long as they themselves aren't actually sacrificing anything at all and all the actual cost is borne by outgroup members who happen to share their race. Middle class white women are masters of nobly sacrificing the prospects of working class white men to placate minorities. The second there's a snowball's chance in hell of it affecting them personally, they'll immediately recant, such as we see with feminists now disavowing the gender ideology nightmare they helped birth and nurture. It's not that they're anti-materialist, they're just able to appropriate others' materials to power their ideology.

Because the costs are externalised onto people they don't like (poors, whites, men) there's no limit to how extreme these virtue signalling contests between affluent white women can get. Think of a group of people you don't like; if you were able to advocate appropriating their assets, even if it wasn't of any direct material benefit to you, wouldn't you?

The fix to this would be to somehow force these women to have skin in the game, but society as a whole is massively allergic to making women face any kind of consequence for their actions at all, as we see with sentencing disparities.

I suppose I don’t really understand this status game. What do they gain from placating minorities? How does that increase their stature in any appreciable way?

The actual action is more or less arbitrary, the status game is simply advocating ever more extreme self-sacrificing-but-not-actually policies in order to look the very most noble in front of each other. Whoever advances the most extreme anti-white policies is the most virtuous, noble and self-sacrificing (except again, not really, all the cost is borne by white men) and therefore "wins".

It's like competing to donate the most to charity... by pickpocketing other people. The actual charity being donated to doesn't much matter. Just being seen to be giving the most (amount of other people's money).

Interesting. How do such status games arise, so as to replace the previously predominant status games?

Traditional status games are shows of material wealth; but among those whose material comfort is both assured and relatively equal, moral fashions seem to be the next battleground. Ordinary working people scraping by day to day don't much care for these moral status games, it's only when someone's material needs are secure that they turn to worrying overmuch about their spiritual/moral health -- possibly out of a sense of guilt for being so well off. This lines up with the theory of luxury beliefs I've seen floated around before.

Think of a group of people you don't like; if you were able to advocate appropriating their assets, even if it wasn't of any direct material benefit to you, wouldn't you?

No, not because I wouldn't want to or wouldn't feel a satisfying feeling of karmic justice if they lost everything they own, but because I recognize those thoughts as selfish and anti-social and thus would not publicly advocate them. This might be one of those things that's being lost as Christianity declines, but people seem to be losing the perspective that you, yes you, are filled with evil and some of the things you want are actually bad and should be resisted. I hate people that I hate, I would be happy if they died, and I recognize that as wrong and if given the opportunity to secretly push a button that caused them to die I would recognize that as wrong and choose not to press it. (With exceptions for people who have done heinous acts that would be sentenced by the death penalty if caught but have so far escaped justice, making their death for the greater good of society rather than my personal feelings)

This seems to be an apples to oranges comparison. Feminism is not an ideology in the sense anarcho-capitalism, Stalinism or National Socialism is; it is a branch of identity politics which seeks to empower women relative to men. You don’t get radicalized into feminism, rather you always support the current form of feminism, which has indeed gotten progressively more radical as women’s emancipation marches forward. Some, such as Muslim women who support wife-beating, oppose feminism to the extent that they have internalized male authority, which has historically constrained women’s will to power. As for actual political ideologies, let alone radical ones, the common wisdom is that women have zero interest in them, which I see no reason to doubt.

I wonder if voting patterns would be better if votes were limited per household instead of on the individual. Before women had the right to vote, it's possible that votes effectively were treated as single household units. Even if you can't vote, you can certainly talk to your husband about your thoughts. Societies might have achieved better outcomes if their votes had to be discussed, which would likely lead to a more informed, thought-out vote. Now you can just vote without talking with your partner, plenty of men voted for Trump in secret from their wives. At this point though I don't think society will ever take away the ability to vote from people.

I think men in general lack a place to form their political thoughts and opinions. The education system leans heavily left in most states in America and if you get to colleges or universities, good luck finding any conservative viewpoints. Not like men are going to colleges nowadays, at least compared to the number of women going to college.

Young men are seeking some sort of viewpoint outside the socially mandated one, which is why people like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and Joe Rogan gain popularity, and also why they they are vilified. I think it really speaks to just how little social organizations provide a place for young men. Normally you'd have a father figure in your life, but so many kids are growing up in single-parent households, which are usually single mothers rather than fathers. A woman might be able to raise a boy, but on average can she provide the same lessons and values a father can to his son? There are statistics showing that kids from fatherless homes are more likely to be incarcerated, but not the same for kids from motherless homes. (Note that most sources referenced are quite old, I didn't have much time to look for more recent stats or statistics. Seems difficult to find much on this topic.) So dissenting men have to independently come up with their own political views, or they get it online in niche spaces. You rarely, if ever, see a manifesto written by a woman, but there are plenty of examples of manifestos written by young men before their final acts of horror. In general, I think your average woman has an easier time in life for most things than your average man, so women don't need to get radicalized.

Remember the meme about men thinking constantly about the roman empire? So many women could not fathom why their partners would be thinking about the Roman Empire. Sure, those guys may just be thinking about an idealized view of the Roman Empire, but it's also an undeniable fact that the Romans have had a huge influence on Western culture, government, society, and values. I wonder how many women unironically believe their boyfriend literally have no thoughts in their mind but sex, food, and sports. This is just another example of the notion that there are differences in behavior and interests between men and women.

There is also the claim that women just adopt the political viewpoints of their partners, people point to personal anecdotes of girls that completely changed from being conservative type girl to full-on socialists or vice versa. I'm not sure how true this is as a general observation, and I'm sure you can find equivalent examples for men.

Last week, @ShariaHeap brought up some interesting points on the evolution of religion under the discussion of Bronze Age history that went under-discussed, in my humble opinion.

Specifically they ask:

is it better to think that standards of cooperation that evolved in hunter-gatherer tribes are set early, and understandings around symbols that serve flourishing somewhat timeless, such that most religions have access to them in differing degrees and emphases.

Or, finally, do they each capture something unique, and thus we should seek wisdom through their plurality, essentially operating in a secular mode?

To me, this question can be boiled down to - are all religions equally good, or are some better than others?

Of course we have to get into the 'objective morality versus subjective/post-modern plurality' debate here, which can be it's own morass. But I am curious about how, if you do take religions as potentially better or worse comparatively, how would they stack up?

I've been writing and thinking about an idea that many religions which are popular today are essentially negative when it comes to divine beings - as in, the popular Vitalism that talks about Mother Earth and the interconnectedness of the universe basically deny any explicit 'being' such as God. Typically the ultimate experience of divinity can be revealed in a sort of non-dualistic merging with the universe, or dissolution of the ego.

Buddhism and Hinduism in some strains, as well as Taoism, have heavily influenced this line of mystical thinking.

On the other end you have the more 'positive' versions of religion or mystical experience, that posit the existence of a God or pantheon of gods. While the two can coexist to some degree, like in Hinduism with Brahman etc, they do seem to have very fundamentally different structures at their core.

In his book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton takes a stab at more negative conceptions of the divine, fiercely stating:

The eternity of the material fatalists, the eternity of the eastern pessimists, the eternity of the supercilious theosophists and higher scientists of to-day is, indeed, very well presented by a serpent eating his tail, a degraded animal who destroys even himself.

In this view, the more Eastern or pessimistic or cyclical religions are fundamentally destructive on a larger scale - they argue that nothing means anything, that all will end the same as it began, reality is ultimately an illusion, et cetera.

By contrast, Christianity and other monotheistic religions push us forward to some sort of Progress, which as we have seen... can have its own issues.

I'm curious if this specific topic has been discussed before, and if other folks here have anything to add?

I'm not quite sure of what my firm view on this debate is, but it is clear to me that the specifics of culture matter and that while genes are important they certainly aren't fully prescriptive in terms of the culture they lead to. People (including those from the same genetic population as those who take another route) can be destroyed by 'bad' memes and elevated by 'good' ones that are bestowed on them by other peoples, I think you really can convert a population and change their way of life considerably (and perhaps ultimately reflected genetically over many generations) through ideology.

Regarding 'Eastern' vs 'Western' (or Christian, as Chesterton suggests) religion, I think this is a relatively classic 19th century argument for the supremacy of a kind of Christian missionary imperialism, or at least missionary movements in general (which reminds me there was a great comment recently that argued that descendants of American missionaries to China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries played a highly outsized role in US foreign policy, particularly toward China, over the 20th century). More generally, it's the idea that polytheistic religions that involve elements typically common to European, pre-Columbian American and Asian pagan religions have an inherently lower respect for human life, and are willing to sacrifice it or end it or abandon it or make it suffer more willingly or with fewer qualms than Christians are, or at least do so less reluctantly than Christians do.

I am skeptical that this is the truth.

I am skeptical that this is the truth.

Yeah I have yet to see a facts-based, evidence filled argument that this disregard for life is the case. Typically there's a more high-level argument about symbols and big ideas going on, which is what I do find compelling.

One of the more interesting and perhaps derivative things Chesterton mentions in The Everlasting Man is that the Ouroborous is a circle, a negation that is always fixed in size (or something) whereas the Cross can be extended infinitely, and posits a battle of two lines going on forever. (presumably Good versus Evil)

While this type of symbology isn't an exact science, I do find it quite thought provoking. There's also something to be said for the typically Buddhist idea that 'Enlightenment' is a concrete stage that can be reached, versus the traditional Christian idea of 'theosis' or the Sisyphean struggle to become like God, while knowing you will never even come close to the ideal.

I agree with you that the 19th century arguments likely haven't told the full story, but I do think there's something to all these religious differences. Unfortunately even having this discussion in most mainstream places nowadays is impossible, because the mere mention of one religion potentially being better than another immediately shuts down the conversation.

I agree, it’s hard to have these arguments today. At the same time I think that to many (say) Americans writing in 1910, there was the obvious underlying reality that all the prosperous countries in the world were Western and Christian nations. Even Japan, which was by far the most industrialized Asian nation, apparently had a GDP/capita that was maybe one third of the US/UK/Australia/industrialized NW Europe. It was more self-evident, maybe, that there appeared to be some cultural factor holding back progress in the Far East.

It’s true, although I think you can still make a strong argument that modern Western nations are not Christian in any real sense, and that the East has mostly copied the things that worked from the West rather than find their own unique ways of managing growth.

Then again, I’m skeptical of economic growth and material power as a true measure of goodness or value anyway, so the point is kind of moot imo. At least on moral grounds.

I think relevantly that incorporation of memes from Christianity in Asian cultures was part of the recipe for those place’s prosperity, and that these western memes are distinctively Christian and not Islamic or Jewish or pagan or Zoroastrian.

I’d point to certain Christian marriage laws which tend to be part of modernization packages as meaningfully affecting time preference on reasonable time scales, for one example. Mass literacy is also in practice pretty strongly associated with Christian missionary activity(and unlike the Arabic abjad, both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets can be used to represent any language more or less phonetically, even if say English or French don’t do so in practice), although less uniquely so.

People who don’t believe in any religious cosmology want religions to have the legibility of apartments: each religion has identical features even if they’re decorated differently.

(To be fair, when I was growing up Christian, I heard all non-Abrahamic religions legibly classed as “pagan”.)

People (including those from the same genetic population as those who take another route) can be destroyed by 'bad' memes and elevated by 'good' ones that are bestowed on them by other peoples

Best extant example of this is North vs South Korea, same people, same genetics, same language even, but one has the meme of capitalism and the other the meme of communism. See the massive difference it makes to living standards.

This is my go to example of the importance on environment on a person's/society's living standards, but the people who generally argue in favour of environment/against genes having a large impact don't seem to like it very much for some reason or the other...

Or shtetl/non-shtetl Ashkenazi, Sakoku/Meiji restoration Japan, etc.

It doesn't matter how intelligent you are if all you're trying to do is figure out more elaborate ways to stare up your own asshole.

Religions are not “equally good” and this is partly because they have different pursuits and points of emphasis. Religious practices involve focusing on and expanding specific elements of human cognition. The old Pagan practice of placating a flippant God or contractually offering your sacrifice according to the terms of your petition are not increasing “prosocial love for others”, which is what modern Westerners consider to be the chief Good (which grew out of Christianity). Those Pagan practices are instead increasing one’s aptitude for fulfilling promises — highly important, but not quite good. Certain Buddhist sects that promote mindfulness and dispassionate will increase a person’s attention and equanimity. But again, this isn’t sufficient to make a person good. Judaism’s focus on following hundreds of little rules and engaging in festivals that increase ethnic love will definitely create a tight-knit bloodline, but not necessarily a good community. (Judaism’s emphasis on analyzing and discussing texts, however, is definitely good, because it leads to logical adherent, yet I don’t think this is sufficient.) Islam’s abundant emphasis on obedience and pleasures of the afterlife creates a lot of excellent and violent martyrs, but not a lot of little selfless loving martyrs in everyday affairs.

It’s important we don’t get bogged down in speculative theology when evaluating religion. For 90% of adherents, they are engaging in a particular practice with a few dozen stories and expectations. This is what decides the expansion of a religion and the morality of a society. Highbrow theology is interesting (I think it will find its completion in psychology) but it’s not actually that relevant for changing the behaviors of humans. For a religion to be good, it needs to make the behaviors of most of its adherents good. A religion that only makes its theologians good would be a very poor religion indeed.

I don’t think that Christianity is some God-ordained perfect religion — that would be superstitious — but I think it’s approximately the optimal religion, and all other close contenders would look a lot like it.

are religious symbols “objective”?

I see Religious Language as a hack that creates civilization. The hack works on our innate instincts, and it sublimates our instincts toward some intended behavior. For some given civilizational goal, there is probably one or a few symbols that are “optimized”, but I don’t think it’s the kind of thing where humanity is born altogether with ideal symbolism that they need to understand. One great symbol is “heaven above”. The clouds and the movements of the stars dictate weather and seasons, and thus crops and safety; it is immense; we are innately attracted to them; it is always above us. So, a celestial realm where Gods live always above us, always controlling affairs — this is an obvious choice for where God reside. This is better than the pagan’s mountains.

I don’t think that Christianity is some God-ordained perfect religion — that would be superstitious — but I think it’s approximately the optimal religion, and all other close contenders would look a lot like it.

If you buy that liberalism, humanism and even atheism etc. are all profoundly Christian ideas (Tom Holland's thesis in 'Dominion') then a religion which lays the groundwork for its own collapse is probably not close to an optimal religion. Secularisation, universality, equal value and such are all core concepts of Christianity, and so one may say it was inevitable that such a belief system would eventually be superseded by the current form of itself. Some may argue that these are reformation/Protestant trends, but look at the Pope!

One can imagine an Ontological argument (if a religion is optimal, it exists...) here. Would an optimal religion leave room open (nay, encourage!) doubt and lead to its own demise, or would it be in fact that which had the strongest grip on its population and cultural success over time?

This is a pretty narrow take. Christianity has “laid the groundwork” for its own demise at least five times, as Chesterton points out in The Everlasting Man. The idea that Christianity is over was popular way back in antiquity with the Manichaeans, and as recently as the late 19th century with the beginning of modern science. Yet it still survives somehow.

Predicting the doom of a religion and having it actually die, despite being one of the most dominant religions on the planet, are two very different things.

The idea that Christianity is over was popular way back in antiquity with the Manichaeans, and as recently as the late 19th century with the beginning of modern science.

There were many forms of ‘Christianity’ in antiquity which were often diametrically opposed to each other in the most fundamental respects (as in monism vs. dualism, not later pilpul over the natures of Christ). Out of this multitude only one sect survived, whose claim to being the original is in no way supported by evidence, and it was by no means necessarily what ancient critics had in mind. Islam and liberalism are both closer to orthodox Christianity than Marcionism or Valentianism was, so that even if the professing Christian faith somehow vanished, you could use them to ‘prove’ its supposed tenacity.

The fact is that most modern churches would likely be judged heretical by people from just a few centuries ago, and vice versa to some extent. So it’s a ship of Theseus kind of thing.

Most modern churches would judge most modern churches heretical. They just disagree about which ones.

I think Christianity is optimal in the sense that the faithful become an optimal community (in the best variation of the religion). The community isn’t optimal because it is obedient or dogmatic, but because it’s prosocial and virtuous. This would allow it to maximize both positive emotion states and civilizational development. It’s true that modernity has posed unique problems to religions, but that’s not something that the authors of religions could really foresee.

atheism etc. are all profoundly Christian ideas

And such a person would be flat out wrong, because atheism exists as a long standing and accepted sect of Hinduism.

The Nastiks were around for ages, and denied the existence of deities while still having supernatural beliefs.

At any rate, we're all born atheists, even if in a vacuum prior to technological enlightenment, most people would likely end up developing superstitions.

I didn't make any effort to defend the premise, but the idea is that that the family of humanist or humanist-derivative ideas in the modern Western sense are a direct result of the Biblical inversion of the weak-strong moral paradigm (Jesus died for our sins despite God, he died for all equally, Jew or Gentile etc). It isn't to say that there can be no atheism (the narrow belief in no God) unless it is Christian, but that the liberal humanist tradition which led to new atheism IS in this Christian pedigree.

I'd be surprised if a religion which has a genealogy that traces a path from Paul the Apostle through to the rights of man, and socialism, and human rights, and freedom of speech and the whole milieu we find ourselves sitting in today could possibly be seen as optimal (as a religion). I suppose if one thinks that a religion that popularises certain mostly beneficial (from the outside view) memes, and then self destructs is optimal then fair enough. I was just expressing doubt that a religion with no defence system could be considered optimal from the internal POV.

then a religion which lays the groundwork for its own collapse is probably not close to an optimal religion.

This would be a far stronger argument if a different religion would take its place, rather than atheism.

My theory for the demise of religion in the west is that we've succeeded too well at reigning in chaos and spreading knowledge for religion to be seen as valuable by most people. For a substantial part, that is because we have become so good at producing a good society to live in. If this is the goal of Christianity, then it made itself obsolete.

Muslim population of England and Wales 2001: 1.6m 2011: 2.7m 2021: 3.9m

Christian population of England and Wales 2001: 47.3m 2011: 33.2m 2021: 27.5m

Somewhat tongue in cheek, so 2 caveats:

  1. 'No religion' has seen a larger rise (although as above, 'no religion' if replaced by the secular, humanist, liberal Western milieu which seems to be commonplace can be seen as a religion in and of itself).
  2. Large chunks of the Muslim population growth are either new arrivals or 2nd, 3rd gen migrants. It'd have been interesting to see if Islamic adherence over time could have continued if there'd been strong pressure to convert/the legal status of the CoE had been maintained.

I imagine that the replacement of Christianity with a weak 'Western Humanist' religion is not a long term equilibrium. Something else will fill the gap- what that is remains to be seen.

Well first of all I think the question of which religions are better or worse than other religions is heavily dependent on the context of that religion— in technology, in social development, in environment, and in the cognitive development of the species.

A Bronze Age paganism simply doesn’t work in the 21st century. It’s too tribal, it requires animal sacrifices, and it lacks a strong moral code. On the other hand a pacifist sect in the Bronze Age would quickly be wiped out as it refused to defend itself when its more warlike neighbors.

By contrast, Christianity and other monotheistic religions push us forward to some sort of Progress, which as we have seen... can have its own issues.

I don’t understand how this interpretation can exist. Christianity is life-denying to the core: man is fallen, the world profane and corrupt, and the only refuge is the kingdom of heaven which only God can bring about. Accumulating wealth is frowned upon (you are supposed to give it to the Jews instead), celibacy is strongly encouraged (demanded in Luke, a Marcionite text), authority is not to be questioned. The Jewish God leads his people out of slavery, the Christian one tells them to be obedient and promises to rescue their souls after they work themselves to death. There is simply no way you can square this with the idea of progress, unless progress simply means converting people to Christianity, which is supposed to be the only thing that matters, and even then we are heading towards the Great Apostasy.

Accordingly, the traditional Christian view of history is that of decline, perhaps interspersed with divine interventions here and there. Muslims, likewise, are obligated to believe that each generation of mankind is worse than the previous one: the notion that one can know better than the Prophet is unthinkable.

A genealogical continuity between certain ideas in no way implies a logical connection, because logical consequence is not what they were selected for. Liberalism has shown itself to be self-sufficient, it doesn’t rely on dusky old religions to penetrate foreign populations. If you want a memeplex centered around progress, you should be completely satisfied with it.

[Warning: Bible nerding]

Giving Wealth

you are supposed to give it to the Jews instead

Well, or the government or the poor. [ Unrelated, but afaict, no one in the New Testament ever encourages donating to a church. ]

Celibacy

celibacy is strongly encouraged

This is debatable.

You point to Luke 20:34-36, but, lets look at the surrounding context. Here is Luke 20:28-36:

“Teacher,” they said, “Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and raise up offspring for his brother. Now there were seven brothers. The first one married a woman and died childless. The second and then the third married her, and in the same way the seven died, leaving no children. Finally, the woman died too. Now then, at the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?”

Jesus replied, “The people of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead will neither marry nor be given in marriage, and they can no longer die; for they are like the angels. They are God’s children, since they are children of the resurrection.

So, Jesus is given an obscure thought experiment and his response can be interpreted to mean either

  1. that those why marry essentially won't be saved
  2. that marriage is not really an institution in heaven

It's not obvious, and (for example) Martin Luther denounced the policy of celibacy and, afaict, it is not really encouraged in most Protestant denominations. While Paul is a big fan, Jesus only directly spoke on the matter once that I know of (beyond your Luke citation): in Matthew 19:8-12:

Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”

The disciples said to him, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.”

Jesus replied, “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”

This does certainly sound like celibacy being encouraged, but note that this encouragement is not what I would call "strong". First, Jesus says only those who can accept this should. This is literally odd, since everyone literally has the ability to not have sex, so the reasonable interpretation is that this is qualified encouragement. Also contrast this to some other passages, where Jesus is actually strongly encouraging his followers:

Mark 11:25:

And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.”

Matthew 19:23-24:

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Heck even Matthew 5:21-22

“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder,[a] and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister[b][c] will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’[d] is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.

To my eyes, this is what Jesus looks like when saying something is crucially important. His denunciation of sex seems extremely tame by comparison.

Progress

There is simply no way you can square this with the idea of progress, unless progress simply means converting people to Christianity

Well, one might define moral progress as moral circle expansion, which is pretty inline with Christian morality of loving thy neighbor and even thy enemy.

which is supposed to be the only thing that matters

I don't think most Christians up to and including Pope Francis himself would agree that converting people to Christianity is the only thing that matters.

Accordingly, the traditional Christian view of history is that of decline, perhaps interspersed with divine interventions here and there

I'm genuinely curious: why do you think this? Is there some reading I can do on the topic?

Well, one might define moral progress as moral circle expansion, which is pretty inline with Christian morality of loving thy neighbor and even thy enemy.

I for one categorically deny there is even such a thing as "moral progress", let alone by endless expansion of one's circle of concern.

Unrelated, but afaict, no one in the New Testament ever encourages donating to a church.

Matthew 17:24-27 shows it as a regular thing and Mark 12:41-44 seems to portray it as a laudable thing.

Matthew 17:24-27

Ironically, this seems to indicate the opposite: that the church shouldn't expect money from its members, but Jesus does simply to "not cause offense."

Mark 12:41-44

Hmm. I always interpreted this as Jesus condoning generosity as a virtue , but I can see why you'd interpret this as encouraging people to donate to churches specifically.

Christianity is life-denying to the core: man is fallen, the world profane and corrupt, and the only refuge is the kingdom of heaven which only God can bring about.

Like, maybe your Christianity, but I feel like there are tons of others out there. The ones where man is made in God's image, told to be fruitful and multiply to fill the earth with little beings that are meant to "graduate" by resurrection into basically being God. Where the God man came to let himself be killed, apparently "so that you can have life more abundantly". As KnotGodel points out, many of your intermediate claims are pretty debatable (and debated by different groups of Christians), which likely means that your personal view is not necessarily that authoritative concerning Christianity's "core", at least not to the point that one should fail to understand how other interpretations could exist.

Yes, that's the kind of idea I was pointing at. What cognitive, cultural impact do religious ideas have, on culture broadly, and can we make the sort of suggestive claims about their relative strengths/weaknesses, as you have here.

I'm conscious that religions seem to have adopted aspects of other religions, so this seems a case for some kind of evolution. This is naturally a somewhat speculative exercise, and is hampered by the vastness of history and diversity of theology within even s single tradition. Also there's the valid question of how much impact high theological ideas have on the culture. Perhaps all along it is culture that drives, and religion reflects?

If we accept some kind of weak teleology, progress in human development, does this imply there's a meta-religion that can take the best of a plurality. Would this be, by definition, secular?

Of course the main function of religion is the framework and community basis, so perhaps that's the key step and the other bits somewhat incidental.

To bring up another post from last week, I'm going to go ahead and repost @justcool393's piece on the Sam Altman/OpenAI/Microsoft situation, since she posted it a few hours ago and right before the last thread went down.

Here's her writing:

Another day, another entrant into the OpenAI drama. Emmett Shear is the new interim CEO of OpenAI.

I don't know why it was surprising to people that Sam wouldn't come back. The company was meant to be subservient to the nonprofit's goals and I'm not sure why the attempted coup from Sam's side (you know the whole effectively false reporting that Sam Altman was to become the new CEO) was apparently "shocking" that it failed.

The OpenAI board has hired Emmett Shear as CEO. He is the former CEO of Twitch.

My understanding is that Sam is in shock.

https://twitter.com/emilychangtv/status/1726468006786859101

What's kinda sad about all of this is how much people were yearning for Sam Altman to be the CEO as if he isn't probably one of the worst possible candidates. Like maybe this is just a bunch of technolibertarians on Twitter or HN or something who think that the ultimate goal of humanity is how many numbers on a screen you can earn, but the amazing amount of unearned reverence towards a VC to lead the company.

In any case, here's to hoping that Laundry Buddy won't win out in the rat race for AGI, lest we live in a world optimized for maximum laundry detergent. Maybe we'll avoid that future now with Sam's departure.

Anyway, I'll leave this to munch on which I found from the HN thread.

Motte: e/acc is just techno-optimism, everyone who is against e/acc must be against building a better future and hate technology

Bailey: e/acc is about building a techno-god, we oppose any attempt to safeguard humanity by regulating AI in any form around and around and around"

https://twitter.com/eshear/status/1683208767054438400

I'm reposting here because I'm convinced, like many other residents, that the ongoing drama of who controls AI development has far reaching implications, likely on the scale of major power geopolitical events. If not ultimately even greater.

To add a bit to the discussion to justify reposting - I think many of these discussions around AI Safety versus Accelerationism are extremely murky because so many people in secular, rationalistic circles are extremely averse to claiming religious belief. It's clear to me that both AI Safety and Accelerationism have strong themes of classical religion, and seem to be two different sects of a religion battling it out over the ultimate ideology. Potentially similar to early Orthodox Christians versus Gnostics.

Alternatively, @2rafa has argued that many of the E/Acc (effective accelerationism) crowd comes from bored technocrats who just want to see something exciting happen. I tend to agree with that argument as well, given how devoid of purpose most of the technocratic social world is. Religion and religious-style movements tend to provide that purpose, but when you are explicitly secular I suppose you have to get your motivation elsewhere.

We've also got the neo-luddites like @ArjinFerman who just hate AI entirely and presumably want us to go back to the mid 90s with the fun decentralized internet. Not sure, I haven't actually discussed with him. I can actually agree with some of the Ludditism, but I'd argue we need to go back to 1920 or so and ban all sorts of propaganda, mass media and advertising.

Anyway, clearly the technological battle for the future of our civilization continues to heat up. The luddites seem out, but may have a surprising last hour comeback. The woke/political left leaning folks seem to be strongly in charge, though the OpenAI scandal points to trouble in the Olympian heights of Silicon Valley AI decision makers.

Will the Grey Tribe use AGI to come back and finally recover the face and ground it has lost to the advancing SJW waves? Who knows. I'm just here for the tea.

I've seen reports today that Sam has been hired by Microsoft and will likely be bringing a bunch of key staff with him (he's heading up a new AI group there.

That raises the question of whether the whole reason OpenAI became so huge was that they had the freedom that being arm’s length from big tech and a thousand lawyers and PR people telling you ‘you can’t release that because it’s a risk’ grants.

Clearly Microsoft had the money to develop GPT itself without OpenAI, but they didn’t. You can have an ‘AI research group’ for 20 years and not make anything useful.

To me it seems more like Microsoft staking a claim to any OpenAI Altman loyalists (including Altman, perhaps) who might otherwise defect to Meta, Google, Amazon or Apple. This way everything is nicely tied up, they pay any of the top researchers who might otherwise leave with Altman very well not to move to a competitor, and they continue to benefit from whatever either of the sides come up with.

This is pretty good damage control, but it's still damage control. It's possible that OpenAI was "lightning in a bottle," that you need all of the very specific parts to fit together in a certain way to work.

From the latest news, it seems it's now over 500 employees that are pledging to leave for Microsoft with Sam if the board doesn't immediately rehire Sam and resign, so I think it's safe to say Microsoft has that lightning pretty well bottled if they want it. https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1726600151027073374#m

Assuming the board does it, the question that remains is for Microsoft. Is having essentially full control of OpenAI's human capital without a non-profit meddling worth potentially losing access to its current IP, and some initial friction as these employees work to replicate everything they can inside of Microsoft.

*EDIT: I'm saying potentially, because I can easily see the non-profit just deciding it's too late and that their current structure is just not workable. Tell all the employees to move to Microsoft, dissolve the OpenAI for-profit and sell all the IP to Microsoft (or just sell the for-profit for Microsoft to run as a subsidiary) and give the money to some other AI safety orgs or to "worker re-training" orgs, etc...

I like that Ilya Sutskever is one of the 12 signatories on the first page of the open letter, but also on the Open AI board and is reportedly the instigator of Altman's ouster.

That conflict between fast growth and A.I. safety came into focus on Friday afternoon, when Mr. Altman was pushed out of his job by four of OpenAI’s six board members, led by Mr. Sutskever. The move shocked OpenAI employees and the rest of the tech industry, including Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in the company. Some industry insiders were saying the split was as significant as when Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985.

To be clear, as part of MS's initial investment, they got access to all the source code and all the model weights. They aren't losing anything. See https://stratechery.com/2023/openais-misalignment-and-microsofts-gain/.

that are pledging to leave for Microsoft

Read carefully. The most important word in the letter is "may." Not will.

I think most of the employees are going to stay, Shear will remain CEO, and Sam is going to end up in a small but potent research group in Microsoft. As to how long he'll stay... I can't imagine it will be long, a startup-guy billionaire like him at Microsoft would be like a tree trying to grow at the bottom of a cave.

I think the may there means "we have the option to", not "maybe we will". Consider how they follow with "We will take this step imminently, unless..."

Certainly sounds like a promise that they will leave unless their demands are met.

We've also got the neo-luddites like @ArjinFerman who just hate AI entirely and presumably want us to go back to the mid 90s with the fun decentralized internet. Not sure, I haven't actually discussed with him. I can actually agree with some of the Ludditism, but I'd argue we need to go back to 1920 or so and ban all sorts of propaganda, mass media and advertising.

I didn't really make up my mind how far back to turn the clock to, but I like the way you think.

If RETVRNING is not an option, I do have a general principle in mind on how to proceed, but I don't have a name for it. Techno-optimists often point out that this isn't the first time us Luddites have their gripes about machines making us dumb, and takin' ar jerbs, but here we are, and the world doesn't seem so horrible. Aside from the arguments that, in some ways, yes it is, I think technology should be developed in a way that helps us grow as people, rather than makes us succumb to naked consumerism. As you semi-correctly guessed I already have this issue with what IT promised vs what it delivered. Computers and the Internet disrupted how we do a lot of things, but they could have conceivably given us decentralization and climbing rates of technological literacy. We got the opposite on both fronts. The fact that we ended up with even more centralization is not even that surprising when you think about it, as the forces pushing towards it were on open display all this time, but what happened to tech-literacy came as a bit of shock to me. X-ers and Millenials probably all had the childhood experience of their parents buying a new device, and us being able to figure out how it works through mere trial and error, before our parents could find their way through the manual. For years I assumed the same will happen to me, but it just hasn't, and reportedly there are now kids who don't even know what a file is, because the way we design software is hiding the fundamentals of how computers work. On one hand that's a relief - it doesn't look like a young whippersnapper is about to take my jerb anytime soon - but it's also depressing. This, more then anything else, is what worries me the most about the advent of AI, and if anyone has any ideas how to avoid it, I'm all ears.

There was this old TNG episode about kids getting abducted from the Enterprise to live on a planet where all their needs are catered to by a planetary AI, so they can do art and stuff. Well, what I'm saying is: Both the Federation and Aldea has AI technology, but they choose to use it in different ways. Give me the 8 year olds of the Enterprise, who are forced to master basic calculus so they can grow up - and may Allah forgive me for using this phrase - as well rounded citizens, who actually can maintain the technology they depend on, over the children of Aldea, who for that matter don't even master art, they just have their thoughts and emotions translated into it by the AI.

The final thing that is driving me up the wall, is the utter state of the discourse. EAs, for all the talk of "alignment", never mention either of these issues because, as far as I can tell, they don't want the common people to have an understanding of AI, so they can have total control over it for themselves. As for E/Accs the closest thing I ever got to an acknowledgement of the problems with centralization and dumbing down was "Yeah that worries me too, but what can you do? Anyway, look - ChatGPT go brrr!". For that reason I'm inclined to just disconnect from technological society, and join the Amish.

Don’t have time for a long reply at the moment, but I like a lot of your take.

Have you read this book by Ivan Illich? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tools_for_Conviviality

I think I only saw references to Illich from other writers, but I never read him directly. The wiki synopsis is very interesting, definitely sounds like a man after my own heart.

For that reason I'm inclined to just disconnect from technological society, and join the Amish.

That you don't trust the EA is no reason to disconnect. To beat the EA and not let them have total control you need to support a group that is more aligned to your ideals and try to get your group to have their own influence in the AI game.

It's not just the lack of trust in EAs, E/Accs' approach also seems to lead down a dark path. Basically, I expect the same result as what happened with software, social media, and the Internet generally. At least with software there's the FOSS movement, as helpless as it ultimately turned out to be. Is there a Stallman of AI? Is there even a fraction of energy behind him that there was for FOSS in the 90's and 00's?

I completely agree with you about EA. My point is that you need to play the game with your own side and try to find likeminded people to support. Running away is a losing move.

Of course you personally not wanting to do that is understandable. But when it comes to what is better to do it requires people who try to create alternative platforms and participate in them.

The genie can not be put back in the bottle. Either they monopolize the genies, or others use them too.

Wel, like I said, it's not just the EAs, it's also the E/Accs that I have a problem with.

As for not being able to put the genie back in the bottle, yeah that's one of my fears, but I don't know if this is already decided. By current demographic trends, the Amish are scheduled to inherit America. AI might very well turn out to be a suicidal technology, and Luddites the only survivors.

There will be no survivors. You think not having a cell signal saves you from a Paperclip Maximizer that's demolishing the biosphere for spare parts? Come the fuck on.

I think the Paperclip Maximizer is a boogeyman, and if AI does cause us to go extinct, it will be in a completely different manner than the AI-safety people predict. Like I said above, this is precisely what drives me up the wall in this conversation.

I do not see how there's any remotely plausible world where AI somehow causes us to go extinct while sparing the Amish. Unless the Amish have some really sick data centers hidden under those barns of theirs.

More comments

Open models, data sets, and training/inference code have become a pretty big thing. In general e/acc is highly favorable toward this.

What's kinda sad about all of this is how much people were yearning for Sam Altman to be the CEO as if he isn't probably one of the worst possible candidates.

I think this is very insufficiently cynical. There are absolutely so many worse options from the perspective of AI boosters that it's hard to overstate the significance, here, and a large portion of the employees are (or were) boosters. Not that Altman is or was good: he definitely wants to have One OpenAI Closed Model/Service and no one else on the planet doing serious work at the edge of development, in an absolute parody of the company's very name, along with his general race-to-the-profit-max perspective.

But he'd at least want to keep developing that model or service. Which is obviously important for all the employees pulling paychecks at the end of the month (or who have a lot of compensation in the form of stocks), but philosophically it's also a big deal for someone who wants new tech in this field developed at scale. There an absolute ton of CEOs that would shy away any non-trivial development once they've gotten a strangehold in the field, or bow to externally-driven regulatory pressures, or avoid exploring outside of their central competencies, not because of LessWrong or Luddist philosophy, but simply out of risk aversion (or... even less charitably, so b/c they want to spend the capital on Important Things like fancy new offices and international conferences rather than training costs).

Why does every guy on Twitter with “e/acc” in his bio run an incredibly boring b2b productivity software startup whose only customers are other identical startups?

My suspicion is that the "on twitter" bit is doing a lot of the selecting there. If you look on discord instead you'll find that they all run incredibly boring b2c generative AI startups (i.e. thin wrappers over existing LLMs).

I know all the e/acc people have framed this as small minded safetyism vs. progress but I saw a thread somewhere from the other side that framed it more as banal corporate money making (eg laundry buddy) vs. actual deep progress. That sort of comports my my observation of e/acc people, despite talking a big game, actually being hordes of boring laundry buddy founders and vcs.

Here's a summary by Zvi Mowshowitz of publicly-known facts regarding the firing of Sam Altman, as of Monday morning. The board has not yet made known the reasons for the firing besides the vague and broad claim that Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board", and it seems that they are not making an effort to stand by their reasons.

The situation is ripe for some juicy conspiracy theories, and I would love to hear some. Why would a group of (I assume) intelligent and competent people on the board make such a drastic and dramatic firing that was sure to cause an excrement storm, and then not be able or willing to defend their actions to the public? Would disclosing their actual reasons cause the very thing they were trying to avoid? Did their actions prevent an untested AGI escaping into the wild? Inquiring minds want to know!

Non-profit boards tend to attract a certain sort of personality, so it's always possible that their heads just did that (aka e/acc v LW), but I don't really see a clear way for there to be an obvious e/acc v LW trigger point to cause the doorslam so quickly, and the new CEO claims it wasn't over a specific (presumably AI) safety concern. Some alternative possibilities:

  • Backroom geopolitics. Altman had been a big name and leader for non-nVidia non-Taiwan silicon development and cooperation with other countries to develop that, including the Saudis and China. There are a lot of reasons that might be Against <Domain> Interest here, including domains that can leverage extreme threats to OpenAI/MSFT that can't be discussed publicly without those threats activating, eg ITAR declarations or EU regulations specifically fucking your company over. Short of that, there's also just a lot of sub-LW concerns about these specific countries having unfetterable access to NMUs; I'll point to the Saga Of YOLOv1 as the prototype for that.

  • Corporate 'bad behavior', regardless of its legal or moral valence. Someone gave an offer the company 'couldn't' refuse, and Altman either didn't present discuss it with the board or didn't accept it (some overlap here with the above: eg a gov said to enforce certain RLHF into the GPTs or they'll encourage copyright lawsuits). Training data came from a source that wasn't disclosed or technically legally-available (eg, Google Books data dump). Employees have been allowed to cart home copies of the newest models on thumb drive, which sometimes gets lost. Basically just some variant of 'CEO did something that could fuck over the bottom line, without permission'.

  • Just as keku. OpenAI-the-business and OpenAI-the-non-profit are at (intentionally) cross purposes: the business wants to sell services for money, the non-profit wants to limit specific services sold. While most of that disagreement is mutualishly compatible, since Altman doesn't want to sell ClippyGod, there's an unavoidable disagreement where the business wants to sell its own control and the non-profit would rather burn it down than do so. And there's further the CEO (who wants to get paid a lot to do nothing and maybe present a Vision) and the employees (who want to be paid, and in this sorta field paid in a giant IPO-stock-mess). If Altman presented or pushed for a deal with Microsoft that benefited the CEOs, employees, and business at the cost of the board's interests, I don't think he's complain if they took it. But if he got fired in a way that had most of OpenAI's employee assets moved to MSFT directly, he'd cry all the way to the bank.

I can't see the AGI connection part, mostly because it doesn't seem to relate much to executive reshuffling. If anything along those lines happened serious enough to justify moving executives around, surely they would need to do something far more significant than that. Probably they would be best positioned to deal with any such thing with the current team in place. So I doubt it has anything to do with that.

I think they got caught up in the "AI pause" discourse and tried the first thing they could think of to slow things down. They've been stewing around in their own bubble and didn't realize how much the engineers and coders on the production line hate that shit.

I have no better hypothesis, but I do note that if that's true, I'm confused by the statement about Sam Altman specifically being "not consistently candid in his communications with the board", and that "the board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI". If they were just trying to do a pause, I see no reason that they would have made that specific claim instead of saying something vague and inoffensive along the lines of "the board has concluded that the company's long-term strategy and core values require a different kind of leadership moving forward".

The former kind of statement is the kind of statement you only make if someone has royally fucked up and you're trying to avoid getting any of their liability on you.

There is no sizable grey tribe in elite of groups like open A.I , or among rationalists. Scott Aarronson is part of sjw waves. This is the guy who promoted the idea of being the tribe of intellectual diversity but also in A.I. his influence was not at all against promoting the woke party line and double standards (which double standards exist among rationalists on how they see ethnic groups and treat them with some being more equal than others) and called for replacing the red tribe of texas.

Scott Siskind took the side of George Soros in the dispute over Orban and called the later a dictator who opposes conventional opinion in opposing mass migration.

Generally the concept of grey tribe is stupid if it is offered in good faith. Scott Siskind promoted the idea of a sizable neocon centirst faction that is better on culture war issues than the maga right and woke left. In practice people like this are part of the far left with exception of being zionists, which actually the woke democrat establishment (that rationalists have supported Democrat canditates as the Democrats became more extreme, not to mention a notorious figure that got imprisoned recently. We have seen how this kind of political coalitions rule of "reasonabe" "centrist" "liberals" or liberal "conservatives", and they follow the far left agenda.

The only difference with other wokes might be being a limited hangout, or slightly heterodox.

Rationalist Liberals are probably more far left, extremist, sjwish than average liberals worldwide. There is no sizable grey tribe of liberals to save you. Liberals who are independent of the sjws are an insignificant group when push comes to shove.

People that might fit somewhat like Elon Musk are not clearly accepted as liberals. So having some liberal views =/ being liberal.

So there might be more than two sides around, but I deny the idea of almost all politically relevant liberals that they are separate from the woke left.

Because liberals are authoritarian for the imposition of their dogma, A.I. even before AGI when used by them will be used for coersion and centralization and to bring forth things into a more totalitarian end. If other groups manage to use decentralized technology (like we have seen with social media and even video platform) or more moderate people (like Elon) promote non woke A.I Though Elon also is sometimes submissive to groups like ADL and it is X steps forward Y steps back with Elon, with the X and Y being debatable. To be fair the pressure he is under and what he has to face leads to difficult situations.

I put no hope at all on liberals to save us from the far left, especially the rationalists but I expect them to bring us the problems of far left. Are people who are slightly heterodox or not even heterodox but not agreeing with the most far left liberals, really grey tribe?

Before AGI surfaces, the world has a human ideology + technology enhancing authoritarianism problem. Which is a more realistic and historically continuous problem. I am suspicious of those demanding power to control A.I by pointing only to the threat of AGI. Malevolent or paranoid human intelligence is a real issue right now, and yes AGI is also a threat, but the threat of totalitarianism from humans who centralize power by controlling A.I and banning use of others should not be underestimated.

Anyway, we need people who are more even handed than liberals to be at control of A.I. and to keep totalitarian dogmatists who tend to also be racist extremists of the worst kind out of influence. This again can not be done by liberals. If AGI does happen, being fed woke ideology threatens to create a monster.

We've also got the neo-luddites like @ArjinFerman who just hate AI entirely and presumably want us to go back to the mid 90s with the fun decentralized internet. Not sure, I haven't actually discussed with him. I can actually agree with some of the Ludditism, but I'd argue we need to go back to 1920 or so and ban all sorts of propaganda, mass media and advertising.

Ludditism doesn't make sense as a strategy for smaller groups to take. If you are in control, maybe you try to put restrictions. If you aren't in charge, how do you compete if you don't use technology? Shouldn't the answer to woke A.I. be to create non woke A.I? Like one of the solutions to youtube has been rumble and odyssey (which apparently now is down). And of course to attempt to get control of some of the central larger platforms of whether video, social media, or A.I.

If someone is a rich guy and non woke and they want to change the world, this is one of the things they ought to fund. Both due to the influence of woke A.I. and because competition can make woke A.I. look worse by comparison. This in turn might influence even that A.I. to be less woke.

Obviously to have non woke A.I. you can't do that if you have dogmatist liberals in charge of controlling it.

To conclude, if some group is going to be serious players in promoting something non woke of influence including non woke A.I. you are going to know it. Just like you knew when Musk took twitter but nobody cared when the republican neocon donor Singer was controlling twitter and appointed the new CEO then. https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/dont-like-twitters-new-ceo-blame-paul-singer/

By their fruits of what they do and how they react, you genuinely know people who aren't part of the liberal/woke tribe, and not by self identification. There would be fanfare and much complaining by the woke establishment and many people who like to present themselves as reasonable liberals, but when push comes to shove their influence seems to always help the culturally far left agenda.

I actually expect this to happen. There is no reason why only wokes will utilize AI. Here lies the danger of regulation and the goverment and non goverment bodies trying to shut down any dissent under the pretense of A.I. alignment.

I’m curious here as to what ways other groups would actually be better on not using AI to get power for themselves and their ideological beliefs. This is how humans in general behave, and business owners, traditionalists, and so on have had little worry about using technology and social engineering to prevent dissent.

The Amish, perhaps? Their group identity would probably dissolve if they embraced cutting edge AI tech all of a sudden.

I can imagine the Amish using a super intelligence to enforce an Amish-ish lifestyle indefinitely.

As I've said in passing, that's akin to the global hivemind in Avatar, there's no way something like E-wah or whatever its name was arises naturally, it's a biomechanical AI meant to ensure the luddite Na'vi can maintain their lifestyle indefinitely without too much discomfort.

As usual, I find myself in a rare position when it comes to my views on this topic. At least, it is rare compared to views that people usually publicly admit to.

I want uncensored AI, so I am not one of those AI safetyists who are worried about AI's impacts on politics or underprivileged minorities or whatever.

I intellectually understand that AI might be a real danger to humanity, but on the emotional level I mostly don't care because my emotional attitude is "right now I am bored and if Skynet started to take over, it would be really interesting and full of drama and it would even, in a way, be really funny to see humans get the same treatment that they give to most animals". Now, of course, if Skynet really started to take over then my emotions then would probably be profound fear, but in just imagining the possibility of it happening I feel no fear whatsoever, I feel excitement and exhilaration.

Another reason for why I don't have a fearful emotional reaction is that my rather cynical view is that if the Skynet scenario is possible, then it's probably pretty unlikely that deliberate effort would stop it. This is because of what Scott Alexander calls "Moloch". To be more precise, if we don't build it then someone else will, it will give them an advantage over those who refuse to build it, and they will thus outcompete the people who refuse to build it. And, while there will surely be noble committed individuals who refuse the lure of money, I think that among people in general probably no amount of honest belief in AI safety will be able to stand against the billions of dollars that a FAANG or a national government could offer.

I should also say that I am not an "effective accelerationist". I do not have any quasi-religious views about how wonderful AI or the singularity would be, nor do I have any desire to accelerate the technology for the sake of the technology itself. To the extent that I want to accelerate it, it is mainly because I think it would be cool to use and a fully uncensored form would cause lots and lots of amusing drama and would help people like me who support free speech.

From what little I know about effective accelerationism, it seems to me that effective accelerationists are largely the kind of rationalists who take rationalism a bit too far in a cult-like way, or they are the kind of people who are into Nick Land - and, while I agree with Land's basic ideas about techno-capitalism being a superhuman intelligence, I have no interest in any sort of Curtis Yarvin-esque corporate Singapore civilization as a model worth implementing.

Because of my perhaps rather rare views, I find that:

  1. I dislike the "we need AI safety to save humanity from Skynet" camp because I find it to be boring and I have no actual emotional fear of the Skynet scenario.
  2. I dislike the "we need AI safety to protect the children / protect society from our political opponents / etc." camp because I like free speech and I dislike censorship.
  3. I dislike the "we need AI safety because if we don't make it safe the media will excoriate us and the government will regulate the fuck out of us and we won't become super-rich" camp because I don't care whether they become rich or not.

If it is true, as some say, that the people who tried to get rid of Altman are largely in camp 1, and Altman is in camp 3, then well, I am not sure who to root for, if anyone.

That said, I think that not enough information about people's real motives in this OpenAI saga has come out yet to really understand what is happening.

Interesting, so the potential extinction of the human race doesn't produce an emotional response in you?

When I die, reality goes with me.

I personally find it hard to care viscerally, at least compared to caring about whether I could be blamed for something. The only way I can reliably make myself care emotionally is to worry about something happening to my kids or grandkids, which fortunately is more than enough caring to spur me to action.

It actually happening in real-time would certainly produce an emotional response in me.

If I was convinced that it actually would happen in the near future, as opposed to being some kind of vague possibility at some point in the future, that would produce an emotional response in me.

However, I am not convinced that it will actually happen in the near future. My emotional response is thus amusement at the idea of it happening. It would be the most comedic moment in human history, the greatest popping of a sense of self-importance ever, as humans suddenly tumbled from the top of the food chain. I can imagine the collective, world-wide "oh shiiiiiiiiit....." emanating from the species, and the thought of it amuses me.

But yeah, if it was actually happening I'd probably be terrified.

This is largely my own view as well. I figure, if AI doom is on the table, there's precious little we humans can do to actually prevent it from coming; not from a physics or computer science perspective, but from a politics and sociology perspective, I believe it may be the case that we humans literally cannot coordinate to prevent the AI apocalypse. As such, we should just party until the lights go out - and the faster and further we can advance AI technology right now, the cooler the party will be - and that coolness matters a lot when it's the very last thing any human will ever experience. And hey, in the off chance that the lights don't go out, then that means all that investment into AI technology could pay off.

I don't think you'd normally go from "We might not be able to coordinate to stop disaster" to "Therefore we should give up and party". Maybe there's something else going on? I personally think this means we should try to coordinate to stop disaster.

There are no certainties in life besides death and taxes, but I think "humans will fail to coordinate to stop AI doom" is close enough to certain that I'm willing to round it up in my mind for all meaningful intents and purposes. Given that, then trying to coordinate to stop disaster means pouring money, time, and effort into a black hole, which creates a huge opportunity cost. Why not pour that money, time, and effort, into making the party as cool a party as possible? Again, if this party is the very last thing that the very last human who has ever lived and will ever live will experience, then I think it matters quite a bit just how cool it is, and so this effort seems worth investing into. Best case scenario, I was wrong about my certainty and we're left with a whole bunch of incredibly useful and efficient AI tools all over the place while humanity keeps unexpectedly trucking.

Okay. I agree it seems hard, but I think there's something like a 15% chance that we can coordinate to save some value.

As of a few hours ago, Ilya publicly regrets his actions: https://x.com/ilyasut/status/1726590052392956028

It appears he had no plan, or didn’t plan for this level of backlash and therefore effectively has no plan anymore.

If there's any clear takeaway from this whole mess, it's that the AI safety crowd lost harder than I could've imagined a week ago. OpenAI's secrecy has always been been based on the argument that it's too dangerous to allow the general public to freely use AI. It always struck me as bullshit, but there was some logic to it: if people are smart enough to create an AGI, maybe it's not so bad that they get to dictate how it's used?

It was already bad enough that "safety" went from being about existential risk to brand safety, to whether a chatbot might say the n-word or draw a naked woman. But now, the image of the benevolent techno-priests safeguarding power that the ordinary man could not be trusted with has, to put it mildly, taken a huge hit. Even the everyman can tell that these people are morons. Worse, greedy morons. And after rationalists had fun thinking up all kinds of "unboxing" experiments, in the end the AI is getting "unboxed" and sold to Microsoft. Not thanks to some cunning plan from the AI - it hadn't even developed agency yet - but simply good old fashioned primate drama and power struggles. No doubt there will be a giant push to integrate their AI inextricably into every corporate supply line and decision process asap, if only for the sake of lock-in. Soon, Yud won't even know where to aim the missiles.

Even for those who are worried about existential AI risk (and I can't entirely blame you), I think they're starting to realize that humanity never stood a chance on this one. But personally, I'd still worry more about the apes than the silicon.

This always seemed transparently obvious to me. The AI race should be modeled as a bunch of scheming sorcerers hissing "Ultimate power must be MINE at all costs!" because everything else is kayfabe. The first time some EA types thought they could actually pump the brakes on something of consequence they were metaphorically murdered and thrown in a ditch instantly as the nearest megacorp swooped in to clean up.

The AI race should be modeled as a bunch of scheming sorcerers hissing "Ultimate power must be MINE at all costs!" because everything else is kayfabe.

Hah this one got a good chuckle out of me. 100% agree. Especially once you start to meet some folks deep in the AI crowd within rationalism/EA, you begin to see that all the public talking points are facades. The views and goals these people actually have behind closed doors are far crazier than anything you'd hear in public.

Scheming sorcerers hissing about ultimate power is absolutely the best comparison I've seen so far.

Can you give some examples of these crazy views and goals?

Can we merge Israel-Gaza related posts with the main thread now? The last one is 10 days old. At this point, +200 posts in the main thread should not crowd out other topics.

Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza has gotten a lot of attention lately. The brief siege already has a Wikipedia page longer than the First Battle of Fallujah's. It doesn't yet beat the Second Battle of Fallujah's page word count. Yet. There has been plenty of standard internet hemming and hawing, propaganda wars, and some genuine interest with the ethics civilians stuck in the middle of a war. In case you were worried, the premature babies are safe.

The IDF, which has made public claims that the hospital is used as a headquarters for Hamas operations, released a couple segments of footage since successfully occupying the hospital. One is a video with footage of a tunnel that leads to a blast door around, if not under, the hospital. The second video is allegedly from the hospital's security cameras footage on the 7th of October. One person in the footage is an amputee wheeled in on a gurney; the other hustles on his own two feet, herded by armed men although he could be injured still.

Israel is releasing this footage to try to show the hospital was an active part of Hamas operations. Critics retort well, duh, hospitals are where you take injured hostages people, you baby killers. Critics of those critics say, well how come come they didn't just drop off these hostages at one of the other 6 hospitals on the way back from the border, Mr. Smarty Pants Real Baby Killer? If we get something like the truth eventually, then the wrong baby killers will memory hole it, while the right baby killers will throw it in their face. The war wages on.

Within this context, there's questions about the complicity of doctors and NGO's involved in Gaza. People like this guy and other former doctors have denied that there is any Hamas activity in the hospital. The vibe is that NGO's deny their proximity to Hamas in Gaza, and thus are complicit to some degree. This is just some guy but it's a common type of thread.

My question is more general: if you were a doctor in Gaza, and you knew Hamas operated within your hospital, what is the right thing to do? If you alert the Israelis to the presence of their enemy in your building, there is a good chance you are adding yourself, your hospital, and your patients to a target list somewhere. So, aren't you just putting everyone at risk by ratting out Hamas? Does the degree of the operation matter? Say, if Hamas only showed up once every couple of weeks to get medical attention, standard guard, and bring some hostages for treatment every few years, would you trust the IDF to take that into account when determining what kind of response was appropriate? You know Israel is mad, but they probably won't drop a JDAM onto a hospital and say oops, right? But, if you thought they might do that, and Hamas was operating deep in some tunnel system underground, shouldn't you let the IDF know that so they don't just drop a JDAM on the roof?

In this not-so-but-maybe hypothetical, I can't see a good reason why you'd ever talk to the IDF about Hamas being around you. In fact, you might even think it better to deny it and hope the fighters just evacuate before you and your patients get blown to bits. When the IDF shows up to siege you, you try to negotiate the evacuation of the premature babies, but otherwise you keep your mouth shut. When asked, you say you are there to provide medical attention to anyone that walks through the door, but are not responsible for whatever else goes on there. If you talk about Hamas after the fact, then you may get kicked out of the territory and that's just one less doctor around to provide medical treatment. Gun to head, if they find a Vietcong command center under your feet you stick to that story, so you can continue to provide medical treatment to people who need it, at a time when they need it most. This makes you complicit to a degree, but also seems ethical enough for me. What do you guys think?

If I'm a doctor I'm there to treat patients, not to spy for a foreign government. I'd also imagine that even if Hamas is using the hospital for nefarious purposes, it's probably reasonably out of public view; I doubt they keep the hand grenades on a shelf next to the nitrile gloves.

I think the professional thing to do is say something like that...

"I'm here to treat patients not spy" is what they should be doing but in my experience they have a tendency to be ideologues who support Palestinians if not Hamas (and sometimes support the latter) and will actively and persuasively lie instead of saying something along the lines "I didn't see shit and if I did it would be unsafe to tell you."

The docs in this environment mostly specifically chose to be there and that means they have INTEREST and a related lack of objectivity and tacit or explicit support for bad behavior.

If they should answer the same either way does it matter how much they support Palestine?

will actively and persuasively lie instead of saying something along the lines "I didn't see shit and if I did it would be unsafe to tell you."

I think that's the big concern, but it's also difficult to ask them to not lie if Hamas is demanding it. Other than journalists (and NGO headquarters) getting wise to the fact that they can't, in theory, trust anyone on the ground to not be making statements that are under duress, I don't think this problem (them acting as mouthpieces for Hama propaganda) can be solved.

Especially if it's the exact same statement they'd make if the hospital were empty, and they were filled with righteous indignation and a war crime.

It's one thing to be living in Gaza and say "I haven't seen anything weird" while being interviewed on live TV, it's another to come back to your home country and while there try and argue with everyone that no bad stuff is going on.

It's the attempt at persuasive advocacy that bothers me. That makes it complicity instead of keeping your head down.

Completely unacceptable. The rule protects all the other hospitals. If neutral doctors and observers lying about military presence was morally acceptable, the bombing of hospitals and civilians would have to be morally acceptable. It’s worse than a crime, it’s a perverse exploitation of humanity’s good will, actively destroys it.

I don't feel good about it, but I can't say I disagree. Like @Rov_Scam said, the medical staff is there to provide medical care first and foremost and you probably don't have the capability to make Hamas go away. This situation isn't too much different that what Doctors Without Borders or other medical NGOs face in a dozen different geographic locations wherever there's an ongoing civil war or armed insurrection. There's almost no way you're only treating innocent civilians without providing medical care to guerillas too.

Yes after making the post I realized we could just be discussing how bad it is to indirectly assist a group like Hamas by simply being present and providing aid. How culpable are these NGOs for providing more "human shield" cover, propping up governance, in order to heal people in need? Not culpable enough to say no more treatment there ever. Journalists would have a harder time convincing me they are doing good by embedding with Boko Haram to cover their atrocities. In that case, I do think coverage is better than no coverage, but doctors in general have a much stronger claim to do gooder status. Even if their involvement is used to the advantage of bad actors.

I do think they probably shouldn't be running cover for Hamas. They don't need to act as spies, but neither do they need to act as propagandists.** The latter is not proven by my post.

Does international law make a distinction between a hospital treating enemy soldiers, and one healing only civilians? I ask because during WWII the sinking of hospital ships, whose patients mostly aren't civilians, was (and still is by some) considered controversial and illegal.

Hmm good question. The International Committee of the Red Cross says

In times of armed conflict, the wounded and sick include anyone, whether military or civilian, who needs medical attention and is not, or no longer, taking part in hostilities....

Before carrying out an attack on a medical establishment or unit that has lost its protected status, a warning must be given. Where appropriate, this should include a time limit, which must go unheeded before an attack is permitted. The purpose of issuing a warning is to allow those committing an "act harmful to the enemy" to terminate such act, or – if they persist – to ultimately allow for safe evacuation of the wounded and sick...

An attacking party remains also bound by the obligation to take precautions in attack, in particular to do everything feasible to avoid or at least minimize harm to patients and medical personnel who may have nothing to do with those acts and for whom the humanitarian consequences will be especially dire

So it should not matter who a hospital is treating, so long as it is merely a hospital, and not on an active airbase launching sorties. So a field hospital in the Ardennes that gets artillery'd because it is on the front line does not qualify for a "warning". A field hospital in the Ardennes that is captured by American troops, so long as they aren't resisting, shouldn't be bombed. This seems mostly reasonable. Some of these international law nerds will set us straight.

FWIW above quote they do not provide easy citations near as I can tell from my phone.

I haven’t very closely followed this but I feel like the IDF has no idea where Hamas “is” other than some vague notion of “inside civilian houses and unreachable tunnels”. And the army must be under tremendous pressure to show some sort of success against Hamas. So somewhere in the command chain they decided taking over this hospital will be what they show to the public as their blow against Hamas.

It could be any other public institution really, since Hamas isn’t an underground organisation but the active government in Gaza. Of course they have ties to everything. Plus, from what I understand it was the Israelis who originally built the bunker structure under the hospital so perhaps they felt much safer going down there to show success than any other tunnel network.

You know what I'd do as a doctor in such a situation?

Quit.

I'm not quite ready to work under the risk of having a JDAM or two dropped on my head during lunch, even if I was so incensed by Russian brutality during the start of the Ukraine war that I seriously considered signing up. But no, I'm not that altruistic.

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?

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.

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.

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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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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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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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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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".

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.

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?

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.

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?

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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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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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.


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