domain:open.substack.com
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
5hr ago
No one here mentioned rationing.
What could "If you're just one of the guys talking how you're going to divvy it up" possibly mean except rationing?
You quite literally are talking about some person divvying out ressources. That's what that is. You can call it something else if you want, that doesn't change the economics of the situation: that person has to make the ressource allocation, so they have to make an economic calculation, so they have to have some accurate metric of desire and feedback mechanism. Someone needs to decide what we're building here and how much of it people will want.
The ECP is not at all about efficiency. It's about the ability to have a functional industrial economy at all.
You're treating abundance as some magical font of wealth. This is demonstrably not how industrial economies work. There are many countries with abundant ressources that are poor today, because as Adam Smith demonstrated wealth does not come from having large ressources but from the economic activity that exploits them.
Why doesn't Sweden, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia or some other oil rich country have a booming car industry? Because there are far more inputs than fuel that go into the equation to make a complex good like a car. You need steel and labor, which means that you need energy for your steel mills and training for your workers, and so on.
All these activities are competing for the same pools of ressources, which means that you need some method to decide where those ressources go. Even if you had infinite quantities of steel, you wouldn't have infinite labor or infinite time. And if you don't solve the ECP in some way, you'll end up with no car because everyone wants to be a car salesman or CEO instead of a assembly line worker.
Abundance does not conjure wealth out of thin air. You need correct ressource allocation. Which Mises demonstrated is impossible at industrial scales without price signals.
Lizzardspawn
5hr ago
I think that we are in the phase of chatgpt in which calligraphs and stenographs don't see the point of typewriters. I would definitely say that chatgpt has saved me a lot of time and made me more productive.
Ioper
5hr ago
Just because i haven't seen it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Maybe it's a American thing related to regulations or something.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
5hr ago
So, why are you asking me?
Because you're not providing any alternatives. People will resist the abolition of private property by force of arms. This is a given.
If you don't have a way of dealing with that your politics are worse than deathly, they're inconsequential.
People will not "only just".
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
5hr ago
To presume that my thinking/ideas can be reduced to "nothing new" that hasn't "already been tried" is silly at this stage
I've heard this song too many times to believe it without some solid hard hitting evidence. I've met so many people that think they could have made it work because they are better intentionned than Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin. It's never true. You and I are not better people than the Bolsheviks in any meaningful sense. And I have to be skeptical of any doctrine that doesn't take this into account.
Being incapable of the same level/degree/intensity of love and mutualism they participate in on small scales does not ipso facto mean they're completely incapable of any degree of love and mutualism at larger scales. It's not an on/off switch, it's a spectrum.
But that's just not true. And I speak from experience. There is a very specific moment you can pinpoint in any commune style community where the general intuitive understanding of each other's needs can no longer maintain the commons and it stops feeling like a tribe/family and becomes impersonal enough administrative enforcement becomes a requirement. And then you just made the State again.
I have seen Dunbar's number with my own eyes. I choose to trust them rather than conjecture. It's not a spectrum.
The tacit implication is that we have crucial needs that can't be met at small levels;
Look if you want to do the primitivist thing and destroy industrial society, be my guest. I even have some sympathy for it. But let us not pretend that this is a desirable or realistic proposition for most humans.
It's amazing to see that so many people are certain it means exactly that. Weird.
I don't think it's weird at all. It's impossible to prove non trivial impossibility empirically. So the best way of reacting to negative feedback is to lower the expected possibility of something until it eventually rounds down to zero.
It was very understandable and perhaps even necessary to be a socialist in the 19th century. The awesome power of the industrial revolution changed the world to such a degree that anything seemed possible.
We have since had dozens of very serious attempts at realizing this vision, in a large variety of starting conditions, with a large continuum of tools and ideological specifics. And all that it has ultimately managed is a lot of death and a bunch of state capitalism.
A rational actor would adjust their priors based on this information.
ThenElection
5hr ago
the tariffs have not in fact collapsed the economy, while the institutions' commitment to being paranoid ninnies about covid did
I still find it shocking that everyone important just agreed to never talk about COVID and our response to it again. I don't know how anyone can discuss bad policies that wreck the economy without at least bringing it up to refute it being an example. It's like remembering the COVID shutdowns happened is icky and uncouth.
Lizzardspawn
5hr ago
The problem with Venus is the initial cooling of it. Any kind of shade generating device will be blown away from the solar wind.
Lizzardspawn
6hr ago
put solar on top of everything outside, bolted, dig big climate controlled caverns inside, massive production facilities to launch what is needed to other planets from the moon instead of the earth.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6hr ago
At what point of his ideological history would you have expected him to go "actually, tariffs are great and Trump is great for trying to do tariffs"?
SnapDragon
6hr ago
Here. I picked a random easyish task I could test. It's the only prompt I tried, and ChatGPT succeeded zero-shot. (Amusingly, though I used o3, you can see from the thought process that it considered this task too simple to even need to execute the script itself, and it was right.) The code's clear, well-commented, avoids duplication, and handles multiple error cases I didn't mention. A lot of interviewees I've encountered wouldn't do nearly this well - alas, a lot of coders are not good at coding.
Ball's in your court. Tell me what is wrong with my example, or that you can do this yourself in 8 seconds. When you say "like a few lines", is that some nonstandard usage of "few" that goes up to 100?
Even better, show us a (non-proprietary, ofc) example of a task where it just "makes shit up" and provides "syntactically invalid code". With LLMs, you can show your receipts! I'm actually genuinely curious, since I haven't caught ChatGPT hallucinating code since before 4o. I'd love to know under what circumstances it still does.
Lizzardspawn
6hr ago
We don't need magnetospheres. Living under the surface is totally fine. The idea is to have massive energy producing and material harvesting operations ready on the surface and underneath it, so we can synthesize the organics humans need. We will never have green Mars - too little sunlight there. So no need bothering.
ThenElection
6hr ago
Republicans have a failure mode of cult of personality; Democrats have a failure mode of cult of not personality or ideology but of whatever bureaucrats and various cultural elites organically land on as the Important Signifier of the day. It's distinctly less personalistic. People learned that the message of the day was that Biden is the greatest person in the whole world, and they knew questioning it made you a Bad Person who must be punished. But the Democratic blob recognized a weakness in the candidate that they couldn't paper over and, in the span of a few weeks, shivved him, memory holed him, and made Harris the greatest person in the whole world. That dynamic does not and could not exist with Republicans and Trump. In Presidential politics, Democrats perform a kind of pseudo-personalism: the point of acting as if you believe X is the Great Person of History is not to indicate any true belief but to indicate tribal membership. Biden dead-enders were heavily marginalized everywhere a day after Harris became the heir apparent, if Biden dead-enders even ever existed.
It's not as clear to me as it is to Scott, though, that one cult is clearly less damaging than the other. The reaction to COVID did far more damage to our economy and wellbeing than the tariffs will (and I believe the tariffs are ridiculous and incredibly damaging), and that can be squarely laid at the feet of the neoliberal bureaucrats.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6hr ago
I don't understand how anyone can in good faith believe that even with an arbitrary amount of effort and funding, AGI, let alone ASI, is coming in the next few years. Any projection out decades is almost definitionally in the realm of speculative science-fiction here. Even mundane tech can't be predicted decades out, and AI has higher ceilings/variance than most things.
I put in a few thousand lines of code into an AI, ask it to change it to fix this issue... and it can do it. Sometimes it can't and it gives me a broken fix, other times I have to try several times or go through various stages of brainstorming, log-analysis, trial and error, workarounds.
If you're doing intellectual labour (this is intellectual labour, it's producing code that earns revenue) then you must be intelligent not in the 'answers toy questions' sense but the 'does useful work' sense. If it is intelligent, then AGI shouldn't be far away. It's only a matter of investment and incremental development.
AI is a question of fundamental possibility: by contrast, with AI, there is no good reason to think we can create AI sufficient to replace OpenAI-grade researchers with forseeable timelines/tech. Junior SWEs, maybe, but it's not even clear they're on average positive-value beyond the investment in their future
Fundamental possibility is deader than disco. There is no reason for doubt at this point. You think there's an insurmountable gap between Junior SWE and senior SWE? That's ridiculously silly. There was no insurmountable gap between 'can't walk except on perfectly straight floor at 3 kph' and 'diving through hills, scrabbling around obstacles, getting up after being knocked over'.
There wasn't an insurmountable gap between 'the most deranged and hilariously stupid pretend harry potter writing imaginable' https://youtube.com/watch?v=6rEkKWXCcR4 and 'any story imaginable written in perfect, fully meaningful English albeit usually (but not always) lacking in literary merit but at a very reasonable price'.
There wasn't an insurmountable gap between 'can't identify a cat' and 'short videos of catgirls'.
There wasn't an insurmountable gap between 'literally no code at all' and 'Stackexchange withering away'.
There's no reason for doubt, you can't even give a reason except these elaborate statements of surety. I don't understand how what you're saying even resembles a valid argument. Forget about whether the premises are true or if the argument follows, there are no premises in what you're saying!
mrvanillasky
6hr ago
I'm skeptical because elite tfr here is dropping hard and the people aren't as smart as they once were. The only fields medalist who are Hindu were both born to Upper caste families in the west, which means that the iq shredding here has been worse than anticipated.
30 years ago if you did really well in the nation wide entrance test for engineering where the top 10-100 guys are usually smart enough to be in the olympiad teams, you'd get. PhD spot at a pretty good uni in the US. Not the case anymore. People from my high school who did actually do this went for cash cow degrees.
Most upper castes are poor and upper caste elites are completely oblivious to all this. They sold out our future long back and got nothing in return. I do appreciate you for having had a good view of what some operations look like but in most cases, these people are already rich. I was nearly a a thousand of a million people in the above mentioned exam and people in my uni will never make it beyond soydev roles in bangalore.
The centralised nation state is not ideal because it wants to spread its tyranny to every place. Lawless Federal semi feudal failed states at least you get away with things, here the moment one of the oligarchs wish to compete with you, you're out of luck unless you have serious technological edge.
My failed startup was registered in the US and I worked out of Thailand as these two were cheaper and more convenient than doing it in here. Maybe I'm too skeptical but if you are a poor upper caste, you're fucked because rich ones actively hate you. Indians cannot cooperate very well, beyond some exceedingly small pockets, even the elites behave like the underclass which is sad.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
6hr ago
Atmosphere does actually absorb a lot of radiation.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
6hr ago
America thrived on a whale fall after WWII, but the bones are picked dry and the Baby Boomers were the ecosystem which thrived upon it. That’s my new metaphor.
KennethAlmquist
6hr ago
I talked about two different surveys. The “DEI discriminated against white people” question was from a poll of the general public. The one on about whether workplace DEI trainings and/or meeting were helpful comes from a survey of workers. If you didn’t find DEI training/meetings helpful, that would place you in a minority. That could be a reflection of the DEI training you received; perhaps most people would rate that particular training as unhelpful.
If you wouldn’t have guessed that large numbers of people find DEI training/meetings helpful, that’s the point of conducting surveys: to learn what people are actually thinking, rather than generalizing from you own experience or the experience of a few people who happen to be in the same bubble as you.
Jiro
6hr ago
The graph wasn't predicting that cars would go faster than light. It was combining different transports from horses to cars to rockets--the graph was for all human transportation put together. That is, it basically was looking at cars and predicting maglev trains--not by name, of course, but predicting that there would be newer modes of transportation that would be faster than the existing ones. At some point one of these future transports would be faster than light.
Except, at some point, we just stopped getting faster transport. If you look at cars and predict maglev trains, and you look at maglev trains and predict moon rockets, and you look at moon rockets and predict FTL... well, no.
It's like how Moore's Law broke down. Processing power doubled every 1.5 years for decades... until it didn't.
aiislove
7hr ago
I. On Self Esteem, or How Do You Compare with Your Same Sex Parent?
A year or two ago, I watched a video that I found interesting. It said that one of the main factors of self esteem was how we compare ourselves to our same sex parent. (Which is to say, how a man compares himself to his father, or how a woman compares herself to her mother.) If someone is doing much better than their same sex parent, they are much more likely to have positive self esteem than if they are doing worse than their parent. I have thought about this a lot and I found it really insightful when looking at my own self esteem and that of other people I know in my life.
My father passed away at the end of 2021. He was kind, patient, funny, charming, and the sort of person who others are drawn to and liked to talk with. But he had some demons as well. He always hated his parents to a degree that I could never understand. My grandparents were always kind to me. As a child I once accidentally broke a door to one of their cabinets and I was terrified that my grandpa was going to hurt me because I knew my father hated him so much. But my grandfather simply fixed the cabinet door and forgave me. Why did my father hate his father so much? Well, I don’t think I’ll ever really know entirely since they’re both gone, and you can never really know everything about the people closest to you. But I imagine that my father resented the success of my grandfather compared to his own failings. Crucially, my father was the fifth and the last in his line of 5 generations in our family business. My grandfather sold the family business to a corporation in the 1980s. My father, in his anger, left the business at the time, resentful of my grandfather. I think this seriously affected the self esteem of my father and he spent several years not speaking with my grandparents- I did not see my grandparents for probably 6 or 7 years of my life, until my senior year of high school when they reached out to my mom (my parents divorced when I was young) who took me to see them. My father had other problems as well which affected me negatively.
When he died, I had to come to terms with the reality of who he was. I no longer had to lie to myself about the sort of person who he was, I became free to remember fondly the good parts of him and negatively about the bad. Early in the grieving process, when I finally let myself realize the bad parts of him, I was really annoyed with him, irritated that he couldn’t have been a better person and father to me and my brother. But since then I’ve grown to accept him for who he was and really see it as a blessing in disguise: I can always compare myself to him and see that I’m doing better than he was able to do.
II. France
France is the most beautiful place in the world. I have visited France more than any other country outside of my own (The US.) It is easily the most photogenic place: every time I see pictures I have taken of Mt. St. Michel or the chateaus of the Loire Valley I am shocked at how beautiful they are and that I have been there and that they’re still over there, just being gorgeous, as life marches on around them.
But France is also a strange place. All that beauty, but it’s all in the past. Stray a few streets outside any well preserved medieval village, or stunning baroque or rococo era neighborhood or city center, and suddenly you’re surrounded by some of the ugliest architecture in the world. One of the ugliest places I’ve ever been is a roadside hotel in Brittany. The new build exterior is a series of white and gray and fluorescent yellow rectangles with tiny square windows that barely open. The way this architecture stands in stark relief to the class, elegance, and beauty of the past is glaring.
So what went wrong in France? I put the height of French beauty and elegance around the time of Louis XIV, the Sun King. Versailles is an incredible monument to the capability of humans. How could Louis XV and Louis XVI compare to this? These were clearly men standing in the shadows of giants. The 19th century was tumultuous for the French, but they still managed to produce beaux-arts (itself mostly reproductions of baroque and Rococo style, but beautiful nonetheless.) The belle époque, and the art nouveau, of the late 1800s up until World War I was the last gasp of greatness of the French civilization. It would be so convenient for me to place the end of French greatness at the end of the Ancient Régime but really, the decline began decades before, and the French people managed some greatness after that.
But post WWI? There were some moments of glamour in the 1980s, but besides that, France today is living in the shadow of itself.
An aside. I briefly dated a very cute French guy in France. We were looking at the city from afar, and he said he wished he could tear down all the new buildings and just leave the old ones. This is probably a bourgeois and classist sort of opinion to have in France, but really I agree with him. Contrast this with someone I dated in Vienna. He was from Dresden, a city I’ve never visited but suffered greatly from WW2 and apparently is filled with rather utilitarian buildings now. We were visiting some beautiful baroque palace in Vienna, walking the gardens and enjoying all the splendor you’d expect from a baroque palace. Then he points at some medieval support wall, and tells me that he prefers the medieval support structure to the elegance of the palace. Uncharitably, this is the sort of opinion you adopt when you are looking for points for intellect. I preferred the French guy.
III. Japan
Growing up, Japan was the land of the future. Sci fi vistas of skyscrapers and neon lights, hyperfast bullet trains, they were already on Playstation 7 when America just got Playstation 2. It’s still like that today, right?
Sadly, no. Japan’s economy and culture exploded during the early 20th century, culminating finally in the bubble economy of the 1980s. The rapid wealth the Japanese amassed in such a short time is unparalleled to this day. For nearly a century, every Japanese generation greatly improved their standard of living from the one before it. Then the bubble burst and the country has faced stagnation since the 90s. The population is extremely old, and you feel it in the streets. Showa era cafes without a single change since the 60s are strangely common. These are charming, in a very surreal way. Crustless egg salad sandwiches eaten with melon soda floats are delicious but go against every food trend and nutritional guideline of the past 30 years at least. Really I’m glad they exist, and it’s very comforting to know that there’s a place in the world where tradition can be kept alive with such thoughtfulness and attention to detail. But there is also something that feels very wrong about these places.
Being in Japan today feels like witnessing the end of a civilization. It feels like it’s going through what France must have been going through a hundred years ago. Tokyo, only a few decades ago the center of East Asian youth culture, feels like a creaking behemoth. Shinjuku Station, one of the scariest places I’ve ever been, is an exercise in absurdity. Five separate train companies run trains through 53 platforms in the heart of a city of over 14 million people. You can imagine how this gets built in the chaos of the 20th century but it’s patently ridiculous with the technology and capabilities of the 21st century. Everything in the country feels like it was an exciting idea in the 20th century. The youthful energy of the Showa era is gone.
IV. Thailand and South Korea
Chiang Mai, a city of 1.2 million in northern Thailand, feels more vibrant and exciting than Tokyo today. They have 4 modern shopping malls with extremely good, extremely affordable food and shopping options, and countless day and night markets with even cheaper food and shopping. People are optimistic about the future and seem proud of their work and way of life. They still have some catching up to do in terms of health and building standards compared to the rich countries of the old world, but it feels like they’ll get there sooner rather than later. It seems like there’s more opportunity and willingness to hustle among the Thai people than the Japanese. And the highly functional economy of Thailand seems to spur innovation at a much higher degree than today’s Japan, Europe, or the US for that matter.
I am not nearly as well read about Korean history as I am about Japanese history. I have spent about 2 months in Seoul. The main difference that strikes me about South Korea compared with Japan is that South Korea seems to have modernized much more recently than Japan has. In Seoul, you will notice that older people above 50 or so are significantly shorter than younger people. It’s apparent that famine and food insecurity is within living memory for the South Koreans. But South Korea feels like the only country that is truly living in the 21st century. The food is plentiful and nutritious. Young people are healthy and attractive. Technology is cutting edge. Spaces are clean and well designed. People speak really good English. Shopping in Tokyo, you feel suffocated by outdated trends and ancient traditions. In Seoul, shopping feels like you’re touching the future. Apparently the population decline is bad and they have North Korea looming as a constant threat but if anything it gives the culture a fighting spirit that other rich countries have lacked since WWII.
V. The USA
France has already experienced decline. Japan is rapidly declining today. Thailand and South Korea are on their way up. Where does that leave the US? To put it shortly, I don’t know.
As an American it’s difficult to pinpoint where exactly the US is at. I am from a rust belt town in the US. The town I am from peaked with oil money in the Victorian era. There are still glamorous mansions and downtown buildings built around the turn of the century, some of them in great shape, others not so much. Different cities in the rust belt have fared differently since the Victorian era- some of them boomed during the 60s, some of them have just declined, and others have recently been having a bit of a resurgence (especially from people leaving bigger neighboring cities. I suspect there’s been a white flight 2.0 since 2020 but I haven’t been able to find stats backing this up.)
But outside of the rust belt, how is America doing? Let’s look from West to East. Hawaii is beautiful. How sustainable is American power projection in Hawaii? I have been there only for a few weeks, but in that short time I gathered that native Hawaiians are broadly hostile to the American government. Downtown Honolulu was surprisingly sketchy to me (especially Chinatown.) I was there in 2022- huge swaths of tourist industries seem to have shut down around the time of Covid. (I suspect a lot of this was also a victim of the identity politics of the late 2010s- white tourists buying native Hawaiian culture isn’t very woke etc.) Besides that, Hawaii is a very expensive place- the cost disease of the American economy can’t be overlooked. I have broadly the same impression of California from my short time in LA as I do of Hawaii- both are beautiful places with great weather but with a possibly unsustainable culture whose most vital energy is in the past.
I spent a lot of time in New York from around 2010 to 2019. It was the closest megacity to where I grew up so it attracted me as a young and ambitious person. But the city begins to wear on you. It’s really degrading to witness so much filth and extremes of human behavior. It is such an outlier that I hesitate to draw any conclusions about the state of America from the city of New York, but I think the rot is broadly the same across all the major Northeastern cities of the US, from Cleveland and Erie to Baltimore and DC. If I had to put a pin on it, I would say that the Northeast is in decline, but seems to attract enough talent, money and innovation to keep things current.
The South is much more pleasant than the North. If you grew up in the North, you are raised to hate southerners and their culture, but basically this is because the north are haughty and arrogant. People in the south are polite and respectful in a way that the north has not been in decades, if ever.
Speaking of respect, this is the central issue of American culture that I am going to try to tease out. Respect has completely been lost in the realm of public life in the northern, eastern and midwestern US. People constantly interrupt each other. We do not listen to each other. People in the north act confused when I respond to the things they are saying rather than giving a short and flippant response. Being in France taught me the value of listening to others and having patience. There were times when I was in France, when I would go from having a strained but polite interaction, to suddenly having the interaction turn very rude. I didn’t understand what I was doing, but I eventually realized that I was cutting them off, talking over them, which is very rude in French society. In turn I realized that this is very rude in every society, we just get used to it in some cultures. The Northeast is the absolute worst in terms of disrespecting other people and once you have been away from it it is shocking and demoralizing to witness again. Extreme displays of behavior from "Karens" may go viral but they're just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the ambient level of rude interactions all the time in American culture today.
Circling back to the self esteem point I opened with. There are trends on civilizational scales that we can look at. Fortunes go up, people are excited, they create great things. Fortunes go down, people feel worse about themselves, they create fewer great things. Where does the US fall in this? The vibes are telling me we’re in the decline stage. The boomers in my life are poorer and less married and successful than my grandparents’ generation. My grandparents and great aunts and uncles all drove clean elegant cars and kept tidy homes. The generation of my parents and their siblings are still working well into their 60s, dress slovenly or like people much younger than they actually are, and seem to lack the confidence in themselves to rightfully command the respect that they imagine they deserve from those around them. The baby boom generation seems to be the first generation since the 1930s to be doing worse than their parents. Gen X and Millennials seem to be continuing the trend broadly. I anticipate decades of decline based on this trend alone.
KennethAlmquist
7hr ago
Thanks. I'll keep these in mind for the next time I post.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7hr ago
I just don't think it's right to suggest that e.g. a protective tariff will generate zero revenue.
It won't generate literally zero revenue in an accounting sense, though it might damage overall tax revenue, on account of depressing economic activity while not raising much money. Tariffs are highly distortionary.
Maybe this is what the administration is doing, but do you not buy into the concern about outsourcing our industrial base to China at all? (I don't think that situation is quite as dire as is often suggested, but that doesn't mean we should ignore the problem, does it?)
I'm really not that worried about it. The demise of US manufacturing has been tremendously exaggerated, and the panic about it has less to do with pure manufacturing capability than with
a) anxiety over the rise of China and the loss of US manufacturing supremacy. Autarkic economic policy will make this worse, not better. The proper remedy for this would be heavy investments in industrial automation (the US is embarrassingly under-roboticized considering it's the world's most advanced economy) and closer trade ties with allied countries (e.g. Mexico). The problem here is that there's very little appetite for this sort of thing - US labor politics is adamantly anti-automation, domestic producers are more interested in squeezing rents out of a captive market, and industrial policy is largely treated as a jobs program. Even so, there is a limit to what the US can do about this. China has 4x as many people, a state with far fewer fetters on its power, and a policy commitment to industrial overcapacity.
b) the social consequences of industrial consolidation, which also have less to do with China alone (seeing as they predate Chinese industrialization) and more to do with broader shifts in global economic circumstances (e.g. Japan eating into the US' international market share in the 80s) and technological improvements that made manufacturing less labor intensive and encouraged physical consolidation. This was very bad for a lot of rural industry and the communities that depended on them, but creating zombie industries to prop them up is absolutely the wrong move.
The US has the second largest industrial base in the world, by quite a margin. We don't produce a lot of cheap consumer goods, but I don't see a reason to care that we're buying t-shirts from Vietnam instead of Mississippi.
Did you read them?
I did. I was not impressed, especially since they're not exactly delivering on defeating the Houthis (and probably will fail for the same reason the Biden admin failed, which is that it's really hard to bomb a determined adversary into submission).
More importantly, the crude transactionalism doesn't speak highly of the current admin's thought processes. Which shouldn't surprise us, since this is a bunch of amateurs trying to do foreign policy.
There are a number of good moves his administration made in their first term, I think. Whether or not that counts as "4D chess" is up to you, I guess.
I guess you're going to have to clarify what you mean by "secret sauce", because I think this is grading Trump on an outrageous curve. Most of this stuff either doesn't matter or would've happened under any semi-competent president, and without the myriad own-goals that Trump inflicts upon the country foreign policy-wise in the meantime. Trump has a pattern of doing very impulsive things, occasionally punctuated by something reasonable (usually because someone else talked him into it or because the machinery of the USG more or less made the decision for him). I don't see much reason to extend him charity on this, especially when it's been a personal fixation of his for a long time. Trump just thinks tariffs are neat, and he doesn't know enough about trade or economics to understand why this is a bad idea.
communism is dead as a political force
Nazism has been dead as a political force for much longer. And was active as a political force for much shorter period. And "the handful of self-identified Nazis" most definitely are "LARPers with no aspirations to power" (if by "aspirations" one means serious possibility and not wet dreams under the influence of drugs) - while communists are plentiful in our academic institutions, can easily find themselves at positions of power in smaller local governments, and that is without even peeling the veil under which DSA is hiding. Short of violent overthrowing of the government, if a politician supports virtually any part of Communist program, she may be considered a bit of a radical but not completely out of the acceptable in the polite society. If you can shut up about the glorious revolution for a bit, there's no barrier for a communist to participate in modern politics. You may not win the presidency (though watch AOC, who knows?) but you won't also be kicked out. Is it really dead or just temporarily laying in wait?
whereas fascist sympathizers keep surfacing in positions of influence inside right-wing populist movements
Here we have not one rhetoric tricks but several:
- "Sympathizers" - we move from self-identified Nazis to nebulous "fascist" (on the left, anybody to the right of Bernie is damn "fascist", including one's own landlord who demands paying rent with the delay of no more than three months!) and then from that to even more nebulous "sympathizer" - which is pure mind-reading.
- What is "position of influence"? A blog on instagram is a "position of influence". A soapbox in the middle of the street is a "position of influence". Is professor in the university a "position of influence"? We have a ton of communist professors, find me one self-identified Nazi professor. We have school teachers parading in shirts with the portrait of Gevara (notorious communist mass murderer) - can you point any teachers parading in a shirt with a portrait of Hitler? Or even Eichmann? What would happen if a prominent movie star declares herself a communist and what would happen if she declares herself a Nazi? Where are "positions of influence" here?
- Which "movements"? Are "groypers" a movement? Are 4chan trolls a "movement"? Are Andrew Tate followers a "movement"? Who knows, maybe. None of those has serious participation in national politics. Which "populist movements" under the serious ideological influence of Nazis can you name? Can they take over and burn down a whole city, and repeat it for months? Because I know movements on the left that can, and did.
but there just isn't the kind of symmetry they're looking for.
True, there isn't. "Neo-nazi problem" exists almost exclusively as a thing to accuse everybody on the right in, not as stand-alone political movement that is capable of anything more than moving the stale tiki torch inventory in the local hardware store. Violent leftist movement are capable of much, much more. And their political wing controls a lot of society's cultural and educational institutions. It's not even close to symmetry. That's why a former communist terrorist can be a respected professor and a mentor to the US President, and a former Nazi never could. Former KKK member probably could (did Byrd mentor anyone? don't remember) but he would end up in the same party as the Communist one.
The closest you get are pro-palestinian activists, who rather famously don't get along with mainstream left-wing politicians
The not getting along is rather one sided though. The militant left doesn't like the polite left, because they consider the latters to be wusses, hipocrites and pretenders (in which they might even be correct, even if for the wrong reasons) but the polite left would always cover for, enable and defend the militant left. And the antisemitism is just the "current thing" in fashion today (though antisemitism is never truly out of fashion on the left) but there's always some cause where violence, especially deniable violence, would be very useful to the Party. Be it protecting the Gaia, enforcing DEI, suppressing enemy speech or impeding enforcement of the laws the left doesn't like, there's always enough reason for political violence. And those who deploy this violence look very much like those whose existence you deny.
There's no equivalent neo-stalinist movement
Why it has to be Uncle Joe? Neo-Nazis have no choice, they had only one prominent figure. Communism has so many bloodthirsty tyrants or wannabe tyrants on record, one could choose freely among them, or proclaim all of those weren't true Communism, which has never been tried, and thus it all doesn't count.
KennethAlmquist
7hr ago
In case it isn’t clear to anyone following along, we are talking about the 2023 poll of workers. About 10% of the workers were self employed or owned their own business. Another 8% worked for organizations with fewer than ten employees. 52% of the remainder, or about 43% of the total sample, said their company or organization had DEI training or meetings.
My impression is that DEI training is very common in the corporate world and pretty close to universal in government, so the numbers don’t seem implausible to me.
Tariffs used to be a pretty standard left-liberal policy position, Paul Krugman literally got the (not)Nobel Prize for arguing for them. The only coherent objection to what Trump is doing from that perspective is "his goals are good, but he's doing it wrong", which a few principled left-wingers are doing.
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