domain:academic.oup.com
Tariffs are fairly standard policy when it comes to import-substitution industrial development. If they're so bad, then why does the rest of the world have them? Are they stupid?
Without going into a Putin-esque diatribe about the history of the United States, free trade was the bribe that Americans gave to the defeated Axis and their European partners to be anti-Soviet and anti-Communist. Now that Americans no longer benefit from this arrangement, they are free to end it as they please. Economically? Not very good. As a scheme to destroy the liberal, atlanticist order? Very good.
And there's the root of the problem, of which the OP doesn't get. You can't paper over ideological differences like that. What if I see destroying the old order as a good thing? What if we don't agree on the role of American hegemony? Can the Americans back away from their own empire if they want to?
If my ends are the fundamental destruction of your world order, we can't chalk it up to democratic plurality. There really are positions of which are irreconcilable to the liberal worldview. What are you going to do about it? Honorably lose to me? Have many moral victories to your name as I take power?
I'd like that very much, actually. That sounds great.
Every flight so far was suborbital. There was one where people were saying they could have gone to orbit with it, by chose not to.
Edit:
100 tons to LEO is aggressive
Wait, which one was that? My interpretation of all the bets is achieving orbit during a test flight, no cargo. Self_made_human's predictions include a safe landing.
Glassnoser
19hr ago
I guess what I'm confused by is why people have emergency funds. Why not just spend your regular savings or use a line of credit and slowly pay it off, spreading the cost out over a longer period of time? Or if you need a new car, why not finance it?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
19hr ago
I keep saying I've reached the point in my Motte career where I've discussed every topic under the sun. That's true for this one.
In this specific case, assuming it's the incident from a year or two back, the child was almost guaranteed to die regardless of where they were taken. The main objection of the doctors and the government against them being taken was both that transfer would be highly expensive, and that it wouldn't make a single jot of difference other than prolonging the anguish. If you know any paediatricians, you'll know that they're the kind of people who love kids and will move heaven and earth to help them. If they're saying it's a write off, I am highly inclined to believe them.
From my own, liberatarianish position, I would have preferred the family got to try nonetheless. But there is no clear cut answer, and it was a decision made in good faith.
Glassnoser
19hr ago
What do you mean by "losing your car"? Are you saying everyone you know has totalled their car multiple times to an uninsured hooligan? I don't think I know very many people who have totalled their car for any reason. Personally, I have never been in an accident that did more than damage a bumper.
Even if this is your situation, it doesn't make sense to buy insurance for something you expect to happen a few times in your life. Savings and loans are tools that already exist to even out the expense over your lifetime. Insurance adds an unnecessary cost to this.
Now, if you are unusually prone to getting into accidents and your insurer doesn't know that, then it makes sense, but this averse selection is exactly why it wouldn't make sense for most people.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
19hr ago
Your mistake is that you assume there is a platform of universally agreed upon policies that are agreed to be universally beneficial. There are not. If you disagree with this, name a policy, and I'll show you its partisan sides. You can't technocrat your way out of politics. What is your good and effective policy is my bad and harmful policy. The bad and inefficient parts of policy that I support are called tradeoffs that I can live with.
Ok, sure. Please show how the tariffs, as implemented, will achieve their stated goals, or any other goal that could not have been better achieved some other way.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
19hr ago
Do you feel like you are more or less protected in the long term from the democrats than you did 6 months ago?
Good and effective politics necessitates revenge. Total revenge in fact.
This can be easily demonstrated as long as one is willing to admit that politics, as a phenomenon, has instrumentally nothing to do with the enactment of some transcendental moral ordering, and everything to do with the accrual and maintenance of power.
Principled agents are bad politicians: they will sacrifice what is necessary on the altar of their principle, and thus be outmaneuvered by less scrupulous agents. Their principles will be subverted by their enemies and become the instrument of their demise.
This is most famously evidenced by Machiavelli in The Prince, from whom we can draw on the necessity of revenge:
So it should be noted that when he seizes a state the new ruler must determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He must inflict them once for all, and not have to renew then every day, and in that way he will be able to set men's minds at rest and win them over to him when he confreres benefits. Whoever acts otherwise, either through timidity or bad advice, is always forced to have a knife ready to his hand and he can never depend on his subject because they, suffering fresh and continuous violence, can never feel secure with regard to him.
It is timidity you advocate here, a timidity which only causes more bloodshed.
Machiavelli of course had his share of historical examples of this, such as the successful pacification of Romagna which was enabled by Cesare Borgia's cruelty. But we may draw very large numbers of examples from both ancient and contemporary history.
Roosevelt, Mustapha Kemal, Lee Kwan Yew, Peron, Stalin, Abraham Lincoln, Mao Zedong, Charles de Gaulle, Margaret Thatcher, Konrad Adenauer, every successful politician follows a similar trajectory that has them reward their friends and punish their enemies, with what you call "principle" and "policy" being an instrumental concern or a long term vision to rally around rather than the grunt work.
It's the inflexible will to power and the dirty hands that result from it that makes one successful in politics, which is why so many of the people I just listed have "Iron" associated nicknames and quotes.
So if you are genuinely asking yourself what is effective, ideological inflexibility is essentially the first thing to ditch.
Liberals used to understand this, which is why they were very much ready to break their own rules so long as it would enable a larger victory. But you've grown in a world where these people won so long ago that their principles are the background radiation of your morality, much like Christianity was to the people Machiavelli was trying to instruct.
You can either accept that politics is a dirty game and all your fanciful conceptions of rights and liberties and fairness will be muddied if you are to secure anything; or you can lose.
Of course accepting this isn't incompatible with a desire and ability to enact good government that manifests those principles at least somewhat, but none of it will ever be pure, and you have to make peace with that.
Power always corrupts, but that also means the innocent is powerless.
JarJarJedi
20hr ago
Whereas Strateg says Putin is intentionally disarming Russia for a NATO invasion.
This is hilarious. But I hope whoever that fine specimen of humanity is, he's not in Russia, or hides well, because Putin's oprichniks does not care which place you criticize it from, be it from the right, from the left or from the depths of derangement only accessible to a devoted Lovecraftian. The mere fact of criticizing the Boss is enough. Girkin got how much, 4 years I think? I am not sure I will be sad when that specimen is declared Foreign Agent and shut down too, but I would probably prefer it to continue to exist - somewhere far, far away from me - as a proof that the Universe is capable of producing more wonders that I would ever be able to comprehend.
All in all, if the war is fake theatrics
Anything can be derived from a false premise.
ulyssessword
20hr ago
They are so much worse in combination.
- Leaving your passed out friend behind is terrible.
- Making baseless accusations that someone's a groping pervert is terrible.
- Leaving your passed-out friend behind with a pervert who was groping her???? No shit she cut ties.
magicalkittycat
20hr ago
Bernie Sanders isn't a liberal.
You're right, he's a socialist.
Neither am I. That is not a novel observation. I am telling that I am not a liberal.
Correct, you're not a liberal. You're a person agreeing with a socialist about whether or not government should assume control of private enterprise.
I am not an American.
Oh ok then. Perfectly understandable you wouldn't care as much if the US implements good or bad policy if you aren't an American.
A free-market capitalist economic zone is mutually exclusive with the vision of America as a Christian nation.
America has pretty much always been capitalist. Many of our amazing presidents have been both capitalist free traders and Christian. Maybe you haven't heard of him since you're not an American, but we've had plenty of greats like Ronald Reagan (one of the most widely respected and liked conservatives in our history) who fit that bill perfectly.
I have to wonder are you a socialist? You seem to agree with the socialists on policy ideas around government involvement in private enterprise, and think capitalism goes against Christianity.
JarJarJedi
20hr ago
Orwell was a communist. He wrote about what he knew and observed directly. This lends him the ability to describe the bleakness more realistically. Though he was a Western communist, so he hadn't experienced the full measure of what totalitarianism could do to a person and a society.
They say that ice is incompressible, but it's only 1/20th as incompressible as steel (9 GPa vs. 200 GPa elastic modulus). I'm not sure how well it would work given that difference.
(The "elastic modulus" of air isn't really a meaningful concept, but if you ignore that then the right number would be 0.0001 GPa, or 100000x as compressible as ice.)
magicalkittycat
20hr ago
You're right. Revenge is bad and unprincipled. I stand ready to applaud your valiant and arduous efforts to convince the Democrats to not seek retaliation or revenge after what gets done to them over the next 3.5-12 years, and to lash them with scathing criticisms for every hypocritical turn.
Just point us to where you're doing that. I'm eager to start applauding.
Thank you Seer for predicting what I will and won't be doing. But sure, I'll do with them what I am doing right now. Posting about it online.
The Dems should not abandon any policy decisions they claim to support as good policy in order to pursue a quest of emotional vengeance. We should focus on the good of our nation and the future, not tribalism.
If you want to argue for disarmament and cooperation, you have to already have a plausible commitment from your own side.
What's "my side"? Also this doesn't address the point whatsoever! If someone truly believed that small government involvement in business was good for the nation and our economy, then what gain is there in doing big government involvement? If you see the left stabbing the country with bad policy decisions, why pick up a knife and join in?
Can you draft up a letter to Gavin Newsome, explaining that he's being a hypocritical, unprincipled fool?
Wait why would I have to draft up a letter to Newsom? I'm not drafting a letter to republican politicians here. I'm posting on the internet.
Because in the real world of Iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas between actual factions that have their own beliefs and minds and aren't just going to be Jedi Mind Tricked into suicide, tit-for-tat is a generally optimal policy. Revenge is a fully sufficient justification when you don't want people to hurt you again, and you don't have a trustworthy arbiter to seek justice on your behalf.
But again, entirely missing the point here! The idea that free trade, government involvement, etc are just questions of morality. That the only reason conservatives shouldn't press the "government owns companies" button is just because of tradition instead of an actual belief that government involvement in private enterprise is bad. If conservatives believe that government ownership is harmful to the nation, then embracing it is like throwing molotovs at your own house and calling it vengeance.
Cirrus
20hr ago
are there any major, visionary projects happening at the moment that have a plausible chance of success?
You could argue that doubling the population of Africans by 2050 to over 2.5 billion people is a visionary project. Bill Gates’ malaria nets and Mr. Beast’s wells may help add a hundred million more Nigerians and Congolese to the global population. That way they can occupy Seoul, Tokyo, Stockholm, and Minneapolis when the native populations there die out due to unaffordable housing and cultural nihilism. That’s a level of human engineering never before attempted, quite visionary.
alsfhwe
20hr ago
The Line in Saudi Arabia
It's under review and construction has scaled back, due to financial issues.
Saudi Arabia is reassessing the scope and timeline of its $500-billion NEOM initiative, according to Bloomberg and CNBC, with officials reportedly reviewing key components of The Line in response to deepening financial strain across the kingdom’s Vision 2030 infrastructure program. The move comes amid mounting vendor arrears and a liquidity crunch that has prompted an urgent reallocation of energy-sector capital and personnel.
According to sources cited by CNBC, planners have frozen development on large portions of The Line, NEOM’s flagship linear city concept, and slashed active construction manpower by 35% since April. The labor cutback reflects a broader slowdown as fiscal priorities shift away from breakneck expansion and toward cash preservation.
magicalkittycat
20hr ago
Principles are easy until you've lost a few elections. Once you realize no one else has them, it becomes difficult to maintain an interest in such a filthy game without playing it.
That doesn't address anything!
Let's say there's a small government conservative who truly believes that growth, national wealth and general national prosperity are benefited through free trade and a hands off government. They want what is best for the country, so they support a small government.
They observe that other people in the world are hypocrites. Being a person who truly believes that free trade and hands off government is beneficial to the nation (and assuming they still care about the nation), they would not change on policy with this observation and would still support free trade and hands off government.
Tenaz
20hr ago
Would he be a god? In the same way Loki in Marvel is a god.
That wasn't my question. I asked if he was God, not if he was a god. I'm asking whether, if the being from the Old Testament showed up and told you irrefutably that he was God, but that the nature of God is somewhat different from Catholic philosophy (only in very esoteric ways--not in any tangible way whose difference you'd ever experience), if you would believe him.
The reason I think this question is important is because on some level the philosophy needs to come after the reality. I, and most others, simply don't find the cosmological argument, the ontological argument, etc. to be convincing in the slightest. The reason I believe in God is due to firsthand experience. That's not to say that I've met him, but I've felt his Spirit and experienced miracles that are difficult to explain otherwise.
Those experiences inform my understanding of God. I don't consider myself, or anyone who has ever lived save Christ himself, nearly smart enough to actually "prove" God from first principles, nor should such a thing even be necessary. He simply exists and manifests his love in real life frequently. Just as I see no need to say something like "I am human, and humans have parents, therefore I have parents," since I have met my parents personally, so too do I see no need to logically prove God's existence, nor do I think that such logical proofs can or should define him.
I'm not convinced it's even theoretically possible to prove this kind of thing from first principles--because even if you could, where's your proof that the first principles you chose were correct? We gesture to analogies like the hand-raising one, but those just don't feel true to me or most others, and absent the analogy one only has the bare assertion that the underlying axiom is correct.
Of course there are things I hold to be crucial to the concept of God, but they're much more fundamental than anything you've mentioned. If God were not Good then he would not be deserving of worship. If he is all "good", but his definition of "good" is fundamentally incompatible with mine, then likewise. Otherwise, I'll believe whatever he tells me about the underlying philosophy, which is sure to be greater than anything we can currently understand.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
20hr ago
The best people at giving advice in my experience are sports coaches because most of the job is giving advice, so I'd look at coaches who were successful at building programs into contenders to see if there is anything they share as possible ways to make advise work better.
magicalkittycat
20hr ago
Political conflicts arise because of clashes between incommensurate value systems, misalignment of tribal interests, the competing demands of heterogeneous subjectivities, emotional biases both conscious and unconscious... if political conflicts could be settled through rational argumentation then people would have done so already.
Well yeah that's the point. Changing stances on policy at the drop of a dime doesn't reflect people wanting things they actually believe are good for the country and our future, but tribalist emotional based thinking around personal moral disputes rather than national health.
magicalkittycat
20hr ago
Of course, I would say they are wrong and I am right- I notice that democrats are very hostile to my tribe. Presumably, you disagree, but I think the government should protect my tribe from people who hate us. I don’t think you disagree with me(although you might on the premise). I also want protection from democrats more than I want any particular good policy.
And what part of protecting yourself from Democrats involves things like state ownership of private enterprise?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21hr ago
Australia numbers 28 million, thanks to a ridiculous amount of recent immigration.
Also, the continent is mostly worthless. There's plenty of minerals but much of it is basically uninhabitable due to the heat and dryness.
Furthermore, the Antarctic claims are perfectly reasonable, Australia is actually close to the Antarctic and there are a few hundred people in stations down there. What the Russians, Norwegians and Chinese are doing down there is unreasonable, Russia and Norway have plenty of Arctic territory and shouldn't be double-dipping.
pigeonburger
21hr ago
An optometrist helped diagnose me with an autoimmune disease. I had been having eye pain for a week or so, went to see a generalist who half-assedly assumed it was a bacterial conjunctivitis, prescribed me antibiotics which only made my eye feel worse. I looked for an emergency optometrist, the one that had appointments on shorter notice was in a small but fancy glasses store downtown. Went there, the optometrist checked my eye and she diagnosed it as a uveitis instead. Started me on steroid drops that helped, but then she asked me questions about stuff that seemed unrelated, like do I often get back pain. Is it at rest or from exercise that I get back pain. Indeed, I had been having back pain for years, that physiotherapist have been trying unsuccessfully to help me with.
Turns out having a uveitis was atypical at my age and in my condition, so she suspected there must have been more. She had me check with an ophtalmologist that specialises in uveitis, who then referred me to a rheumatologist and ayuup, I have ankylosing spondilitis.
Sure, the optometrist helped me by "merely" doing her job well, but to be honest she could have just treated the uveitis and I would never have thought that she had been negligent.
It seems to me that people who have adopted what you label "revenge narratives" generally no longer believe that there is such a thing as "our country" or "our citizens". Certainly I do not.
Forming, equipping, and paying a police force is "stupid, inefficient, counter-productive, and prone to corruption" in a number of ways. It's just that it's less stupid, inefficient, counter-productive, and prone to corruption than not having police, given the situation we find ourselves in. If the situation were different, police might not be worth it. But it isn't, so they are.
Leaving aside the questionable existence or identity of "the country", sure, everyone wants "good and effective policy". What are their goals, though? What's the situation? What's the problem that needs solving? Different answers to those questions lead to very different answers to which policies are "good and effective".
Let's take a concrete example. I used to be very concerned about government spending and the national debt. I thought that it was very important that we get this spending under control, and bring the debt down. This was part of the basis for my voting for George W Bush in 2000. But Bush then blew the budget out funding the war on terror, and then Obama (who I also voted for) blew the budget out even worse (to my recollection, corrections welcome) with his various domestic and foreign policies. Voting for fiscal responsibility did not actually secure fiscal responsibility.
Moreover, it's concretely evident that government spending domestically has positive first-order, short term effects for the places and people receiving the money, and thus purchases votes/political power. Even if the long-term effects are postulated to be net-harmful, there is no mechanism available to prove it sufficiently persuasively to offset the votes/political power gain it offers. Partisans are therefore incentivized to spend public money when they are in power, receiving concrete benefits for themselves and their allies in exchange for costs that are diffuse, delayed, and socialized to everyone. And in fact, the entire history of government spending shows exactly what one would expect if one formed their priors off this model. Given that this history is varied and quite long, there is no reason to expect it to change to any significant degree without heroic sacrifice or terrible disaster.
Now, you might say "but if you believe this, then Heroic Sacrifice is the right thing to do!" ...And if such a sacrifice would actually fix the problem, that would be a solid argument. But if party A commits this great sacrifice, they will be less popular, because people won't be getting paid government money any more, and will be mad about it. Then party B is free to promise to resume or even increase spending, win the election, do so, and then win the next election too, and now the problem is the same or even worse. Nor would it matter how many times A repeated the heroic sacrifice; B is strongly incentivized to defect. And if this is even an approximately accurate model of our situation, then it is obvious that there is no benefit to being the "party of fiscal responsibility", when your opposition can simply squander whatever you have saved when it's their turn in power.
I observe that previous governments, Democrat and Republican, have chronically failed to exercise fiscal responsibility. I observe that attempting fiscal responsibility now will cost significant votes and political power, which will naturally flow to the fiscally-irresponsible. Therefore, I conclude that while I would strongly prefer fiscal responsibility, there is no way to get there from here, and so I abandon this as a political goal because it does not appear to be practically achievable. Therefore, I no longer care about fiscal responsibility or the debt, and I apportion my political priorities and values to areas where victory seems more probable.
Now, my guess is that the above doesn't make sense to you. But you're free to give it a think and tell me where you think I've gone wrong, specifically.
As you may be aware, prior to the outbreak of World War II, politicians from a number of countries mutually recognized that arms races between the various political powers were a stupid waste of everyone's resources, and attempted to prevent such contests through diplomacy. The Washington Naval Treaty was a product of this thinking. And yet, war broke out anyway, and once war broke out, all sides abandoned the limitations of the treaty and began building warships as big and as quickly as they possibly could, accelerating the arms race as never before.
Now, hadn't we all agreed that naval arms races were stupid and counter-productive, and what we actually wanted was not to build warships, but to give our citizens medicine and education and good roads and electricity? Obviously so! We (as you say) wrote a treaty and signed it! Weren't the Americans and the British upset that Germany and Japan were building bigger ships than the treaty allowed? Absolutely! They were extremely upset about this, and said so very loudly and at considerable length!
And yet, America and England turned right around and began building their own warships, also bigger than the treaty allowed! Didn't they understand that Germany and Japan were wasting money on these stupid ships, and the best thing to do would be to hold to their principles and not waste their own money on stupid ships the same way? Why do you suppose that America and England fell for this "revenge narrative", reversed course, and did exactly the thing they'd previously promised in writing not to do? Is this as confusing to you as the questions you pose above? If not, why not?
"the best policy" is drastically underspecified.
The best policy if I were the immortal God King, whose very word is law?
The best policy that I can get the nation to vote for on the election next Tuesday?
The best policy I can convince one of the two major parties to support?
The best policy, even if it has modulo-zero chance of being implemented or succeeding?
The best policy, even if it harms you and helps your enemies?
These are all different policies.
Others have asked you why the ACLU failed, and it seems to me that your replies have been flippant. You claim that over a century, any organization will change as people come and go. But the ACLU did not change over a century. It had a very solid reputation for a specific set of principles as recently as 2010, and by 2016 that reputation was utterly demolished. If you believe that principled groups can stay principled easily, you need to explain how the ACLU maintained its principles for many decades in a row, and then lost them completely in less than one.
And yet, the evidence has shown that they cannot prevent endemic free speech violations, nor even significantly impede them. When it mattered, they could not protect my speech in any meaningful sense, nor will they be able to do so in the future. Their impact is, to a first approximation, theoretical. The model they operate off, where only government speech controls impinge on the first amendment, is a suicide pact that I respectfully decline to involve myself in.
I value free speech because I wish to be able to speak as freely as possible. FIRE has not and very likely will not made any appreciable progress toward securing that goal. Supporting Trump has done far, far more, so I will continue to support Trump.
Perhaps you are correct, and this is how the narrative really does sound to a thoughtful, well-informed neutral party. Alternatively, perhaps it only sounds this way to people like those you present yourself as: young, naïve and lacking both crucial historical perspective and formative life experience, dismissive of both contrary evidence and contrary perspectives, certain that they alone hold the answers to all life's questions. Many of us were that way, once, but I find that persuading such people is both difficult and generally unproductive. If you are as you claim to be, you'll understand in time.
More options
Context Copy link