Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
2d ago
Why does this indicate Trump will be different this time? Musk and Ramaswamy signal boosted a shorter bill, which proves they have influence, which means DOGE could be more than a publicity stunt, maybe? I'm not really getting the connection.
The number of pages of legislation seems like a very poor barometer of government judiciousness.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
8d ago
-Okay, but how are physician salaries trending, are you making more than you used to?
Doctors have been getting year after year real wage cuts for 20-30 years. Everyone else’s (in healthcare) salaries have been going up. Percentage of healthcare spending on physician salaries is going down. So, if you really want us to get paid less just wait. Our salary shrinks every year and the portion of the pie we are taking shrinks too.
Alex Tabarrok wrote an article in 2019 that showed this is simply incorrect. Real physician wages tripled over the past several decades, and are doing far better in terms of wage growth than many other professions. Maybe he's doing something weird with the numbers here, but you didn't post any numbers, just an assertion.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11d ago
The debate over what terminology to call the woke right reminds me a lot of the controversy around what to call the woke left. This article, if you reverse all the partisan valences from left to right, would be highly pertinent.
But any stable term the woke right would accept would almost immediately become tainted with negative connotations, and would thereby become "uncool". Thus, members of the group have collectively decided that they'll allow no words at all to describe their movement, so you have tons of individual definitions like were used to describe the left (progressive, woke, wokist, SJW, social justice leftist, etc etc).
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11d ago
Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things if they still have illiberal understandings of a common good that can supersede any single individual's will.
Again, you're playing games with definitions here. It's like saying "capitalism is fine as long as people still have a Maoist-Communist understanding of common good that can supersede the free market".
Which might be true if capitalism is implicitly defined as "crazy anarcho capitalism", and Maoism is "anything that's not that". But those are silly definitions.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
12d ago
In terms of "liberalism", this post is a big old strawman akin to e.g. an orthodox Maoist claiming any slight movement towards free markets is functionally indistinguishable from anarcho-capitalism.
Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things if it thinks the externalities are too hard to control, e.g. hard drugs. There's no reason it couldn't do the same to sports betting.
Children move thousands of miles from their parents to pursue economic opportunity, leaving behind free family babysitting for the kids they'll never have.
This is a consequence of the Internet making it easier to apply for distant jobs, not of liberalism. It's happening in China too.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
16d ago
The word didn't change vis-a-vis monarchism so much as the underlying conditions did. Monarchism became functionally irrelevant.
It's like how "living animals" once included dodos, until dodos went extinct, and then it didn't. The definition of "living animal" didn't change, yet one morning dodos were no longer included.
I don't disagree that words can change, but change usually happens gradually and organically.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
16d ago
I've seen Cthulhu mentioned in reference to Trans topics, which haven't been relevant for very long, certainly less long than multiple decades.
Someone will post a headline of the woke left winning some minor flavor-of-the-month battle, then someone will chime in with "Cthulhu always swims left" as a stand-in for "[things] always get [worse]" and "the left always wins".
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
16d ago
Philosophy can be done well enough by using existing words as they currently are. If that's unfashionable, pompous philosophers usually invent new words rather than redefine old ones. Hijacking existing words is almost always a bad idea if the point is clear communication. It's outright deceitful in many cases by seeking to harness the pre-existing emotional valence of words for different ends, e.g. "racism = power + privilege". Alternatively, it's used to wobble between the real definition and the made-up definition at will to confuse people and claim "you just don't get it". I'm not sure if MM himself does this, but people who quote his work certainly do!
In any case, "left" and "right" are such diluted words and he's open enough about his definitions
You could say the same thing about leftists redefining "racism". They were quite open about their definitions, often giving them to you unprompted!
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
16d ago
If you use the common definition of "left", as most people implicitly do when using the phrase "Cthulhu always swims left", then the phrase is simply wrong for the reasons I described in the original post.
On the other hand if you accept MM's vague redefinition of "left", then "Cthulhu always swims left" is basically tautological as you say, but you're smuggling in the ideology with the silly definition.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
16d ago
You galactically overestimate the effect the CIA, or any spy agency for that matter, can ever have. Spy agencies can only nudge, or, at most, provide a spark when there's a highly flammable situation.
Saying the US overthrew the president of Ukraine is like saying the Russian FSB elected Trump in 2016.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
16d ago
First of all, this is all a question of timescale. When Moldbug brings up the phrase, he is talking about modern history, of everything since the French Revolution.
First, this isn't how people often use the phrase on this site or others. When they speak of Cthulhu, they're often referring to things happening on the scale of decades or years, and sometimes even less.
And second, while MM may want to relitigate enlightenment ideas broadly, in this case he uses examples that are a few decades apart:
But no. Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left. Isn’t that interesting?
In the history of American democracy, if you take the mainstream political position (Overton Window, if you care) at time T1, and place it on the map at a later time T2, T1 is always way to the right, near the fringe or outside it. So, for instance, if you take the average segregationist voter of 1963 and let him vote in the 2008 election, he will be way out on the wacky right wing. Cthulhu has passed him by.
which is that understanding Moldbug to say "the left" in the common sense of the word is a mistake.
On this part I agree. MM does that obnoxious thing SJW's did by redefining commonly used words to suit his political purposes. Like the left redefining "racism", MM redefines "left" to be basically "everything bad":
First, we need to define left and right. In my opinion, obviously a controversial one, the explanation for this mysterious asymmetric dimension is easy: it is political entropy. Right represents peace, order and security; left represents war, anarchy and crime. Because values are inherently subjective, it is possible to argue that left can be good and right can be bad. For example, you can say that the Civil War was good — the North needed to conquer the South and free the slaves. On the other hand, it is also quite easy to construct a very clean value system in which order is simply good, and chaos is simply evil. I have chosen this path. It leaves quite a capacious cavity in the back of my skull, and allows me to call myself a reactionary. To you, perhaps, it is the dark side. But this is only because the treatment is not yet complete.
It's a big sneer at the outgroup. MM dislikes where society has headed, so he puts everything he hates in a big bucket, calls it the "left" and says it always wins. It's pure gerrymandering.
Cthulhu always swims right.
A common argument that pops up from time to time is that history generally moves in one direction. One prominent example of this historically has been Whig history, which has a narrative of human society generally moving from a barbaric past to an enlightened present. People like MLK Jr. have implicitly endorsed this view with the quote "the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice". It's a nice idea... but it's clearly wrong when you bother to think about it. People believe their current values are where true justice lies, and their current values are highly predicated on their environment whenever they grew up. Nobody can look into the future, so we look to the past instead, and it's a story of people gradually becoming closer and closer to our present selves. But if we had the capability to look into the future, there's a good chance that we'd be shocked or horrified about where we eventually end up. People in 2000 BCE would probably think our present world in 2024 CE is terrible in a number of ways. Neither side is correct or incorrect, it's just a difference in the baseline.
Given the negativity bias of the internet, more recent takes on "history generally moves in one direction" can mostly be summarized as "[thing] generally gets [worse]". One example is conservatives telling you how progressives always eventually win on basically everything. One popularization of this idea is "Cthulhu always swims left", which people have claimed on this site many times, example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, etc. If you’ve been on this site for long, then you’ve almost certainly encountered this idea at least once. This rebuttal is a better critique than I could ever give. The gist is that things only look like this if you gerrymander history in a pessimistically partisan way. Yes, progressives always win if you only include their wins and exclude all of their losses… duh? But that’s a goofy way to cut history. Conservatives might then try to come up with reasons to handwave away any progressive losses, either as trivial (“they lose the small things but win where it counts”) or as simply delayed (“they haven’t won… yet!”). But these are never particularly convincing to an unbiased observer. History really doesn’t move consistently in any direction but the most vague and basic ones, and trying to force it into this box or that serves as little more than a glimpse into that person’s pessimism.
Freddie deBoer posted an article today that espoused that idea that “Cthulhu always swims left”, but flipped so that, effectively, “Cthulhu always swims right”. He doesn’t say those exact words, but that’s his general conclusion. In the aftermath of Harris’ defeat, many in the Democratic party are claiming that the party needs to move to the center after being too far left for many years. Americans mostly agree with this idea, but the remaining leftists like FdB are horrified at that conclusion. To people like them, Harris basically ran as a Republican, and so saying that the party needs to go even further right is anathema. If this all sounds utterly ridiculous… I wouldn’t disagree with you. Saying the country always moves right shares all the flaws as those saying it always moves left. I explicitly disagree with this piece, but I still think it serves as a useful example of what it’s like when the sides are reversed.
There is one and only one political dynamic that matters in modern American politics, and it is the same dynamic that was in place when I was born in 1981: the Republican party is a right-wing party that works relentlessly to advance right-wing ends; the Democratic party is a centrist party that only sometimes tries to mildly slow the country’s drift to the right; the result is a country that moves right regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats win. People like to dismiss this with references to meaningless cultural politics, elite liberal language games and Pride flags flying outside of Raytheon and the like, but such symbols are just that, meaningless. In terms of policy we have two right-wing parties of varying extremity and so even modest center-left policy wins become impossible. And neither Matt Yglesias nor Jon Chait nor Kevin Drum nor Ezra Klein nor Josh Marshall nor Joan Walsh nor any of the rest of them have ever been able to articulate a remotely convincing explanation of how this scenario can result in anything but a right-wing drift.
…
It’s worth saying that the Republicans are a more effective political party because this whole dynamic would simply never happen within the GOP. Ezra Klein would not have a big national interview with (say) Lincoln Chafee, treating him as a person of influence within the Republican party, because moderate guys like Chafee can’t become people of influence in the Republican party. If he did, that interview would not be treated as a big deal among conservatives in politics and media, and whoever the lefty analog of Bret Stephens might be would not then write a column extolling Chafee’s push to move the Republican party to the left. That column would not then spark tons of discussion within the Republican party about whether it’s time to head hard left. That wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen; the conservative movement have inoculated themselves against that. And the inevitable result of a Republican party that rigidly adheres to a right-wing ideology and a Democratic party that constantly shuns left-wing ideology is a profoundly right-wing country. This is, again, not complicated.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
17d ago
So break the doctors' cartel. What do insurance companies have to do with this?
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
17d ago
Your anger at health insurance companies is misplaced. If the profit motive is the problem, a public option is a solution, but American voters (especially right-leaning ones) have been pretty emphatic about refusing it.
Companies have to deny some claims or else premiums would have to rise for everyone. UHC's profit margins are actually far lower than e.g. Apple's.
It refers to a deal Hunter tried to enmesh his dad in, but his dad emphatically said no.
Alternatively it was just Hunter throwing his dad's name around.
There's a lot of evidence that Biden's family is corrupt and that Biden himself is involved
Still waiting on someone to give that evidence that Joe himself broke the law. I've only ever seen is arguably unethical actions, innuendo, and guilt-by-association. It's quite symmetrical to Trump's Russia problems, where the people under him were breaking the law, and there was a lot of smoke wafting in the general direction of the president, but there actually was no fire despite a thorough search.
to the point that his own side forcibly un-nominated him for the presidential race. And yet, somehow, he's not quite senile enough to actually remove from office.
There's a big difference between being capable enough to do the job of being president now, and being capable enough to also simultaneously do the job of running for president, and then also actually being president for another 4 years.
Alongside that, I agree with the people below who say the president arguably isn't that important as long as they have good enough deputies. They can be powerful depending on the person, but that isn't always the case. Trump is a great example, as he was effectively little more than the vibesmaxxer-in-chief, spending long hours watching cable news and generally getting distracted by petty squabbling and being unduly influenced by whoever spoke to him last on a topic. Kushner, McConnell, and other lower-level employees effectively ran the country in his absence. That's why he seemed so powerless in the months leading up to and following J6: those people largely abandoned him.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
26d ago
The relevant line from Noah is here:
In the 2010s, immigration went from a technocratic consensus to a progressive cause célèbre. This happened for two reasons. The primary reason was that Donald Trump and his reactionary movement were against immigration, probably on racial grounds (though they never explicitly admit this). For many progressives, that made fighting for immigration a way of fighting against racism. A more minor reason was that many progressives either implicitly or explicitly bought into the idea that immigration would create a permanent Democratic majority.
This all seems broadly correct to me. The Gallup chart he posts indicates the left really did become much more pro-immigration during Trump's presidency, likely due to thermostatic equilibrium. They're WAY more pro-immigration than, for instance, the 90s as you say. And while not all people who oppose immigration (like me) oppose it on racial grounds, there are many (including on this very site!) who do.
While some schools may still be quite woke, the first derivative on DEI efforts overall is negative. The NYT published a very long hit piece on UMichigan's DEI efforts, for instance. There will still be some schools that are holdouts, but that's to be expected given academia is where wokeness was born and where its staunchest advocates came from.
I think of wokeness today like I think of evangelical Christians in the late '00s or early '10s. They still have some residual power, but they're losing on every front. Your perspective from academia is like someone from a megachurch telling me nothing has changed to evangelicals.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
26d ago
I haven't seen any evidence that puberty blocker hormone prescriptions are down or anything of the sort.
Is there any data on this anywhere? The way you're wording this is a bit sus, making a claim without evidence, but implicitly demanding evidence of a specific kind for any rebuttal.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
26d ago
While there are still serious concerns about how wishy-washy Trump is on Russia, that's a separate issue from "Russiagate" which was related to specific coordination possibly through blackmail. It might seem like any criticism of Trump's position on Russia is synonymous with "Russiagate", but when properly disambiguated I'd say not many Dems really believe in the crazier takes (e.g. Trump is a KGB plant).
I also think you're not really understanding what I (or the writers I linked) mean by "crank". A crank isn't just anyone who believes in stuff that isn't supported by science or evidence, it's specifically conspiratorial views like QAnon or "Bill Gates is microchipping us through vaccines" or "global elites want open borders to genocide white people". It's distrust of amorphous undefined "elites", who are perceived to have a secret evil agenda. Someone who believes in religion or astrology is wrong, obviously, but I wouldn't call them a crank.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
26d ago
Do you have any evidence that wokeness is still peaking, or has not yet peaked in the short to moderate term? I've gotten a lot of pushback from people on this site claiming how ridiculous it is to think wokeness has peaked... yet they kind of just handwave that as an assumption. By contrast, people like Noah have pretty good evidence in articles like this (non paywalled version available here)
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
27d ago
People have at least discussed this, although I don't know how much it's been internalized yet. Matt Yglesias had an article about the crank realignment, Hanania had an article about voters who see conspiracies everywhere, and Meskhout had this article.
In short, both sides have become dominated by delusional partisans screaming in echo chambers. The left have become experts in infiltrating institutions and corrupting them to woke ends, while the right have become eternal dissidents who are great at critiquing the left but terrible at actually building better replacement institutions. The left was a bit ahead of the right when it came to radicalizing, but it's also deradicalizing now in a way that will likely happen to the right in a few years. Around 2020 was "peak woke" after which things slowly calmed down. Now we're approaching the summit of "peak crank" on the right, which will also hopefully calm down.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
27d ago
From an economic perspective, low doctor productivity is a huge issue. The Baumol effect means an ever growing amount of money needs to be devoted to medicine to make up for the shortfall. It really doesn't have to be like this, but nobody in the field wants to disrupt the gravy train, and/or regulations make it too difficult to change anyways.
I feel like a lot of what doctors do could be done algorithmically by chatbots. From what I've seen, most doctors just respond to simple cues as to what the problem is. Testing could be done at outpatient facilities, then the meatspace doctors would only need to come in as a last resort.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
29d ago
Last week there was a discussion on the motte about Trump’s cabinet picks, in particular about Rubio who is something of a hawk. This goes against what many of Trump’s isolationist supporters want. It’s almost certain that Trump is making these picks extremely haphazardly, deciding on names after a bare modicum of thought and prioritizing vibes, “loyalty”, and Fox news appearances over any other concerns. The NYT has documented this extensively, and it’s entirely in keeping with the chaotic nature of his first term.
One of the goofier explanations given by those on the right was that nominating Rubio was actually a 5D chess move to get Rubio out of the Senate, which is apparently extremely necessary for some unexplained reason…? As opposed to Trumpian loyalists like Murkowski. It was just a silly idea altogether.
Why do I bring it up again? Well, because it might have actually worked! Just… on the wrong person. Trump nominated Gaetz for Attorney General, and Gaetz almost immediately resigned from the House when the news broke. This is a bit unusual, as most people stay in their seats until their confirmation is done. There was the looming release of an ethics report on Gaetz which will likely damage his reputation somewhat, so there’s a chance that Gaetz was always planning to resign, although I somewhat doubt it. In any case, Trump yanked the nomination when it was clear that there was bad press coming from it, and now Gaetz has said he won’t come back to Congress even though he probably technically could.
One might ask why Trump would want to get rid of Gaetz from the House. Well, Gaetz was instrumental in paralyzing Congress over the last term, so perhaps Trump wanted to avoid that. The issue with that explanation is that Gaetz is a fiercely pro-Trump, so it seems weird that Trump would promise something to an ally, and then leave them high and dry. The word “backfired” might be a more accurate description in such a case.
My guess is that Gaetz will probably come back to the Trump White House in some form that doesn’t require a Senate confirmation, after the news dies down.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1mo ago
The economic opportunity per capita in the West is higher than it is in the East,
What do you mean by this? South Korea is above average in terms of GDP per capita (PPP) compared to Europe, or even just Western Europe according to IMF estimates.
If by "economic opportunity", you instead mean something like "competition for jobs is much more fierce", then that mostly just goes back to zero-sum status competitions being particularly bad in conformist countries in East Asia.
Color me skeptical. Sounds like just another marginal improvement at most. The problem with these metrics is that model makers increasingly seem to be "teaching to the test".
The vibes haven't really shifted since chatGPT 4.0 nearly 2 years ago now.
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