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What's going to be the big apocalyptic struggle this election?
I wrote a piece over at my blog about how at this time in 2020 we were already in "2 Weeks to slow the spread", were about 1 month out from the first anti-lockdown protests, and 2 months out from the Summer of Floyd.
It seems obvious to me that all the chaos in the wider American empire concentrates around election years and seems to have the oxygen sucked out of it on off years.. 2020 is obvious, 2016 was only slightly less history changing, and even the 2008 financial crisis was an election year event.
There's a lot of really obvious candidates: Ukraine could go south really catastrophically really quick; the middle-east is speculated to kick-off with a potential Israeli invasion of Lebanon; and going shearly off the numbers the US southern border is one of the largest population transfers in human history with few precedents since WW2 or the even the 4th and 5th century.
But I don't know, maybe it's my mind trying to fit things too neatly to the 2020 framework... it feels like the election hasn't started yet, it feels like there's some shoe to drop or issue I'm missing, something as far from public consciousness as Immunology in Jan 2020, or racial politics in March 2020...
I can feel this massive issue just behind my peripheral vision that's about to draw all my attention and require its own Motte containment thread, and that will devour the media and twitter, for months on end.
I feel like there's this huge world shattering issue that's about to explode and within the next few months I'll be lamenting that I only have 24 hours in the day to read enough about it, convinced that it DEMANDS every second of my attention.... And I have no idea what it is?
-Is Trump going to die?
-Will a Nuke Launch?
-Is China about to take Taiwan?
-Are all those Chinese and foreign nationals on the southern border about to start targeting power infrastructure?
-Is there about to be a financial crisis?
-An "Internet Lockdown"?
-Hot ethnic cleansing in Europe?
-Global food chain collapse? .
Give me your best guess.
What will be the major containment thread at the Motte between now and election day?
This feels like one of the most boring presidential elections of my lifetime. So far it's mostly about Trump's personal scandals and Biden's age, both things that we've known and discussed already for what feels like forever. And it's frustrating, because like you said there are lot of big dramatic issues that we could be talking about. But neither of the parties seems to really want to talk about them in a clear way. There's been zero discussion of things like:
But this is not discussed. Both candidates seem pretty similar, honestly- they both want to more or less leave things as they are, with just minor disagreements over taxes and trade policy. Fair enough, maybe it'll be good to have a boring election for once. This reminds of Clinton vs Dole in 96, which was a match between an incumbent vs a very old senator, with most of the debate being around Clinton's personal scandals.
CCP controls TikToc. For all their many sins Facebook and X are not similarly run by the CCP.
Yes I know that's the official explanation, plus potential security holes. But then why not ban alibaba, wechat, weibo, etc? Or for that matter the billions of electronic devices manufactured in China? Is this the beginning of a general trade war on China, or is it just this one specific app? I want to see a real debate between Trump and Biden on this, instead it just sorta got rushed through Congress.
To be fair, it isn't just TikToc being targetted. More and more Chinese ownership or supply of communications infrastructure or devices have been banned in the past few years.
HTC Android devices are banned in the US. The import or sale of Chinese telecom equipment is banned. Previously installed Chinese-made cellular equipment was removed and replaced with non-Chinese equivalents at a cost of billions of dollars. The export of American made telecom components to China is banned by the US government. Etc, etc. This is a general trend picking up steam these past 4ish years.
I have and use Wechat on my phone. I only use it to communicate with Chinese immigrants in America or to video call Chinese people in China. I'm sure it is Chinese spyware and probably should be banned. But if few non-Chinese people use it then it isn't a major problem. Not exactly mass dataharvesting our youth.
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Alibaba has potential trade consequences that go beyond social media apps, and would be a much harder sell. It could also significantly impact the viability of Amazon, Walmart, and other large businesses that mostly derive inventories from China.
WeChat and Weibo are, outside of a handful of Chinese nationals with friends and family in the mainland, effectively already banned from the west - by China itself. These apps are crippled and uncompetitive in their neutered western forms. The Chinese experience on both platforms is widely understood to be dramatically different.
In all of the cases above, no one is targeting the median American teenager with pro-CCP messaging and anti-western memes. TikTok is.
To your point about electronics in China: if it were feasible, we'd consider it. But I think you underestimate the sheer size and cost competitiveness of Chinese manufacturing. Between their massive volumes, government subsidies, decades of manufacturing expertise built up on other people's goods, and the utterly anemic and perpetually consolidating western semiconductor market, you're talking about a trillion dollar decades-long pivot that would plunge the US supply chain into prolonged chaos.
And frankly, I already know what Trump and Biden would say in any such debate. Trump has been making his case for decades, and you'd have to be sleeping under a rock for the last eight years to know exactly what he wants to do with respect to China. And Biden doesn't really have anything to say about China - his administration can and does take reasonable steps to protect government and military supply chains from foreign powers, but clearly they aren't too concerned about the nature of our remaining trade relationships. I don't know what we'd gain from this or frankly any debate between the two sides - I think people made up their minds on Trump v Biden years ago.
Sure, that's a good answer, as is @TIRM's . I just want to hear Biden make that case explicitly, with Trump getting a chance to respond. Instead we just have to guess at the motives, while the candidates talk in vague campaign slogans.
I get it now, and sorry for missing your point initially - my big lesson from interacting on this forum is that I tend to respond to the thing I know how to talk about, instead of the thing actually under discussion. Working on it.
Maybe the political parties could have a more productive dialogue with different candidates - I don't think any campaign with Trump in the mix can host meaningful debates, especially after the disastrous 2016 Republican primaries; and I'm less than confident that Biden is still firing on all cylinders. There's surely still some debate left in the downballot races, but between gerrymandering and party infighting, this year is less about debating issues and more about who should even get to speak.
I've worried for a while that the private sector has been absorbing competence on both sides of the aisle, ever since tech took off in the late 80s and early 90s. I think the kind of people you'd want to see in political contests, who'd be willing and able to actively engage in debates about relevant current issues, are pursuing more lucrative and less risky careers making targeted advertising platforms or whatever. So even if we had different candidates today, I'm doubtful we'd get quality debates.
Do you think there's an opportunity for productive debate with the state of US politics in 2024? With Trump v Biden? Someone else (who?)? Any downballot races you could point to as examples of what you want?
a productive debate, probably not. FWIW I thought Biden's state of the Union address was pretty good. He got a big block of time to speak, uninterrupted, with lots of eyes on him. He seemed very articulate and well-prepared. He just didn't really say anything of substance.
I thought the recent election in Argentina was interesting. I don't speak Spanish so I don't exactly know what was said, but it seemed like the new president, Javier Milei, was able to speak very frankly about how their country was facing serious problems and needed a massive change in their economic system in order to fix it. And it's not just lip service, he's pushed austerity and deregulation in a big way.
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