Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man. No one yet has guessed multiple people, or a scholar. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
In most civilized countries, "if you deport me I will face a lengthy prison sentence without a court trial which would vaguely meet Western standards" would be reason enough to grant asylum.
Which is why the European continent of civilized nations have largely transitioned to a pre-arrival detention model, so that those who would make asylum claims receive lengthy prison sentences without a court trial before they can make an asylum claim.
The Europeans pay extensive sums of money to countries with spotty human rights records precisely for this service, as do many other countries that would rather not deal with economic migrants who have been coached to claim asylum.
It has largely been a win-win-win for the three main groups of states involved. Migrant-destination states don't have to deal with increasingly delegitimized asylum practices that have been used as a tool for illegal migration facilitations, Migrant-holding states get significant foreign aid and reprieve from state sanctions from the migrant-destination states, and bystander states that aren't facing socially-destabilizing numbers of migrants get to claim moral high ground posturing relative to the rest.
The Great Le Pen Conviction Saga
Yesterday, Marine Le Pen, a French politician sometimes called a (female) French Trump and once called the Devil's daughter, was convicted in France of embezzling EU funds in the early 2000s. She is to be sentenced to house arrest for two years, and barred from politics for five.
The significance? That takes her out of the next presidential election, in 2027, where she is the current front runner.
The other problem?
When the original sentencing judge says Le Pen and other co-defendants didn't enrich themselves personally, 'embezzling' may have the wrong connotations. The judge who made the ruling preferred a 'democratic bypass that deceived parliament and voters.'
How does this lead to a leading political candidate getting imprisoned and disqualified in a leading western democracy?
Oh boy. This is a long one.
TL;DR: Banal political corruption insinuations ahead. And more. And more. Bless your innocent hearts if you have high trust in government, and don't be surprised if what follows starts to echo in your culture war interpretations in the months and years to come.
Disclaimer: What follows is a mix of plentiful citations, and some things that can only be noted with an eyebrow. Which is to say- some pretty hefty suspicion of impropriety, in ways that aren't exactly public record. However, if you want to believe that all governments are innocent unless proven guilty, by all means. Be ye warned.
What is this scandal?
It's more of a funding-code issue that results when you deliberately overlap organizational interests but establish conditionals that can be used as gotchas depending on whether the anti-fraud office wants to pursue.
EU funding for european political parties is normal. The overlap between national parties and EU political parties (Members of European Parliament, or MEP) is normal. The transition between national parties and nominally distinct EU parties is normal. Money is fungible. Even political aids are fungible- an aid who helps in one respect of a politician's work load enables the politician to work on others.
What Le Pen is charged / guilty of is that EU MEP party-member funds were used for someone who was working for Le Pen, the National Party leader, rather than Le Pen, the MEP party leader. Part of the basis of this claim is where there aid worked from- MEP assistants getting EU funds are supposed to work from / near the EU parliament, but around 20 of Le Pen's aides worked from France. As a result, they did not qualify for the funds they drew for being an aid to MEP-Le Pen, since Le Pen's MEP-aids are supposed to be geographically bounded.
Hence, embezzlement. Did the aids help with MEP work from France? Not actually relevant. Did the aids enable Le Pen to better focus on her MEP duties, as was the purpose of the money-for-aides? Also not particularly relevant.
What gives the saga more backstory, and scandal potential for those who think it's a gotcha, is that it's part of a much, much longer multi-decade saga.
Who is Le Pen?
Marine Le Pen is the daughter of Jean Le Pen, her father who founded the party. In short, he was the political outsider / far rightist / probable fascist sympathizer / possible nazi sympathizer, or at least dismisser, who was absolutely hated by the French political establishment. He's the guy who's synonymous with the National Front, unrepentant French far-right of the post-WW2 variety .
One of the key notes of Le Pen is that he ran the National Front like a family business... not successfully. Whether by purely coincidental mismanagement, personal bilateral animosity with French industry, or possibly indirect state pressures after the National Front's surprise and embarrassing showing in the 2002 presidential election, the National Front had some troubled finances.
And by troubled finances, I mean that by 2010 the French Government was progressively revoking the government's political party stipend that made up a plurality of its funding, even as Jean Le Pen was unable to get bank loans from French banks and unable to find a buyer for the 10-to-15 million Paris HQ to raise funds in 2008.
Where does the money come in?
The financial situation is where Marine Le Pen really enters in earnest. Marine Le Pen was given control of the party by her father in 2010. This was notably after she had already entered the European Parliament for over a half decade. Marine Le Pen was a MEP from 2004 to 2017, which is to say she inherited the National Front- and its financial issues- when she was already a MEP with no particular issue.
Marine's political priorities in the early 2010s was the rehabilitation of the National Front as a party. In 2013, she was still being called the Devil's Daughter by publications by the Atlantic. In 2018, this was when the National Front became the National Rally.
But the other part of Le Pen's job was to right the fiscal ship to keep the party viable. This is why across the 2010s Marine Le Pen was seeking foreign bank loans from abroad, including from US banks. This was where the Russia bank loan line of attack starts, since it was a Russian bank in 2014 that ultimately ended the credit embargo, but also saw Le Pen adopt a more pro-Russia rhetorical position. (This challenge / options for loans has endured, and is why Le Pen more recently got a loan from Hungary in 2022.)(https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/frances-le-pen-got-loan-hungarian-bank-close-orban-filing-2022-03-10/)
So, to restate- Marine Le Pen was a reasonably-long-standing MEP in the 2000s with no major alleged issues at the time. In 2010, she took control over the national front. At this time, the NF was in financial distress.
This is the context where the misuse of European funds arose.
The Start of the Scandal
The Marine Le Pen allegations arose in Feb 2015, when European Parliament President Martin Shulz, a German MEP, raised complaints against her. Le Pen's party promptly counter-accused one of Shulz's own aids of a similar not-in-the-right-location violation. This didn't exactly get anywhere, because as noted at the time-
Machmer explained that one of Schulz’s assistants organizes study trips for a local branch of the SPD, but said this was “in his spare time, for free, because it is his hobby.”
Remember: it's embezzlement if you take EU money and work for the party. It's not embezzlement if you voluntarily do national party work for free as a hobby.
Who was Martin Schulz?
Well, in 2014, the year before he initiated the Le Pen allegations were made, Schulz was generally considered a bit... lacking in ethical enforcement. He was one of the European leaders who may / may not have turned a bit of a blind eye to notorious Malta corruption. After his time in the EU parliament, he made a brief but ambitious play in german power politics as the actual head of the German SDP in the 2017 German election. He lost to Merkel, of course, but so do they all. But he had the ambition to try, and had a history of building favors and friends.
But back to the earlier 2010s for a moment. Besides being President of the European Parliament at the time, he was a member of the Party of European Socialists in the European Parliament. He was also a (clearly important) member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Germany, i.e. part of the key governing coalition which itself is part of the Franco-German alliance that is the heart of the EU. Schulz was in the running for being the German foreign minister following the 2017 German election,, which might have some relevance to foreign relation implications with France.
Why does Martin Schulz matter?
Why does this party orientation possibly matter?
Because in 2015, the President of France, Francoise Hollande, was a French Socialist. Unsurprisingly, French Socialists tend to caucus well with the European socialists in the European parliament, though party politics being what it is I'll just ask you believe me on that.
Did they get alone? It's hard to say. But in May 2015, just a few months after the le Pen allegations were leveraged, Hollande was among the heads of state awarding Schulz the Charlemagne prize 2015. The Charlemagne prize is bestowed to those who have advanced european unification, which means as much or as little as you think it means. Typically it's an insider's appreciation award for strengthening European Union politics, which is to say strengthening the Frano-German influence on the continent because that is, in most practical respects, what EU centralization entails.
More relevant was that Schulz's very diplomatic interest in working with French rose above partisan politics, such as his notably high-profile willingness in 2017 to work with Macron, the current (but currently troubled) French president whose political fortunes have gotten a bit better with Le Pen's disqualification.
Would a German politician- -with a spotty ethical record -who stood to personally benefit -from a political favor -to the ideologically-aligned current French president -or the subsequent french president -who they might closely work with in their post-EU policial career
-ever leverage a politically motivated ethics complaint against a MEP with a decade of non-complaints, over an issue that they themselves might be guilty of?
Heavens no, that's absurd.
Ahem. Sorry. Back to 2017 for a minute?
2017: Enter Macron
2017 is when Macron enters the Le Pen tale, since the 2017 election is what established them as rivals.
The 2017 French elections were notable for that they benefited both Macron and Le Pen as anti-establishment candidates. The election saw the collapse of the French establish right and left, and while that left a vacuum for Macron, it also benefited Le Pen. Macron ultimately won by the French firewall when the French socialist-left voted for him and against Le Pen, but it was historically remarkably close.
What was also remarkable is that Macron's party position has gotten worse over time. His party did very poorly in the 2020 municiple elections, though this was more a collapse of his left than a rise to Le Pen on the right. Macron pulled out another win in the 2022 election, where Le Pen, again, made it to the final round after a stronger-than-most showing.
This creates a certain... shall we say complication for the 2027 election, because Macron can't run for re-election in 2027, and he's known to not like that. Macron managed to beat Le Pen twice- was arguably the only person who could have- but the 2027 election would see him leave the stage and Le Pen be... well, a clear leading candidate, if by no means a guarantee.
Unless, of course, the judicial block-out is coincidentally underway even before the 2022 election is over.
And starting in a way that is- coincidentally- convenient for Macron's re-election.
2022: The Year the Scandal Returns In A Most Convenient Way
Five years after Macron takes the presidency, and nearly 7 after the Le Pen EU funding scandal starts, it returns in ways whose implications to the surrounding context become a bit clearer if you lay out relative dates of events. (Most of these dates are in the above al jazeera link.)
11 March 2022: The European Anti-Fraud Office provides the French prosecutor's office it's report on Le Pen.
Clearly the French government was taken by total surprise, and had no hand or insight into this EU process delivering this package.
12 March - 9 April 2022: No mention of or publicity is given to this report in most media. As such, no voters are aware of the duplicitious deception of French voters by a former MEP for whom this is an old scandal, forgotten scandal from over half a decade prior.
Which might have been slightly topical, given that...
10 April 2022: The first round of the French Presidential Election occurs.
After the French government sits on the report for a month, Le Pen places strong but somewhat distant second place, out-performing some expectations and underperforming others. 28% Macron, 23% Le Pen. The third-place runner up, and thus the potential second-round candidate party is a leftist party that garnered... 22%.
Which is to say, the French Prosectors really did Le Pen a favor by keeping that potentially embarrassing and undemocratic revelation a secret! Why, if she hadn't made it to the second round, Macron would have faced a broadly united left against him rather than for him in the name of the anti-le pen firewall!
It's a good thing that this virtuous adherence to principle applied for the rest of the campa-
17 April 2022: French prosecutors announce the new (actually old) Le Pen fund appropriation report
Coincidentally, 17 April 2022 was a Sunday, meaning this would be one of the opening media report for the next week's media cycle.
24 April 2022: The second round of the French Presidential Election occurs. Macron wins, 58% to 42%.
Fortunately, Macron's presidential margins are great! Any effects from the timing of the report probably had no result on a 16% gap.
June 2022: Unfortunately, Macron's parliamentary margins in the June 2022 elections are dismal, as his party loses control of the parliament and Le Pen's party gains 81 seats to become a key power player in government (in)stability for the next year and a half.
July 2022-February 2023: No particular action or movement is made on the Le Pen case. Nominally this is when the French prosecutors are developing their case, but given the substantial prior awareness in practice the case remains where it was since between rounds 1 of the election: available as a basis of future prosecution if and when desired.
The key point of 2022 is that the Le Pen scandal resurfaced coincidentally in time to shape the 2022 Presidential Election, where it was sat on when it might have hindered Le Pen's ability to get to the second round, but publicized right at a time to maximize Macron's electoral margins. Afterwards, it was further sat on until future timeliness.
2023 - 2024: A series of Correlating Progressions
March 2023: After Macron does the eternally popular thing of cutting welfare in the name of reform, the Macron government (in the legislature) comes less than a dozen votes from falling in a no confidence vote after Le Pen's party largely votes for no confidence.
June 2023: After about a year of political paralysis and parliamentary instability, a Macron ally who totally likes him for real guys raises the prospect of amending French constitution to give Macron third term. This totally-not-a-trial-balloon proposal flops like something that has no life.
October 2023: Just kidding about before, Macron makes a personal call for constitutional amendment for a third term.
8 December 2023: The French government announces Le Pen's trial will start in March 2024.](https://www.france24.com/en/france/20231208-french-prosecutores-order-le-pen-to-stand-trial-in-eu-funding-scandal)
20 December 2023: Le Pen does the unforgivable, and gives Macron a 'kiss of death' by forcing him to compromise on immigration legislation in return for support. This actually triggers an internal party rebellion for Macron. Unrelated, establishment French media wonder how Macron will manage Le Pen's ever-rising rise.
The 20 December events aren't particularly causal in the process, but are amusing context.
The more relevant point of 2023 is that Macron's decision to prosecute Le Pen, an act which would bring favor from the French establishment, comes amidst his very unpopular bid to extend his time in office, which would require support from the French establishment. At this time, the Macron administration adopts a Tough-on-Le Pen position of 10 years- a period of time that would easily take her out of two elections- that will later be taken down to two years out of [insert choice here].
Also notable in the August 2023 initiation of prosecution of that it is both a starting block for the timer, and all future events. Whether there needed to be a 7-month gap between the announced intent to prosecute and the trial or not, had the prosecution train been started seven months earlier- during the large gap after the 2022 elections- then the future 2-year house arrest would have by consequence ended before, rather than probably after, the 2027 election. An 18-month bar, for other cases, would have been even less likely have a presidential election impact... had that been desirable.
2024: The Trial of Political Opponents with Absolutely No Political Parallels Or Impacts Elsewhere
March 2024: The Trial of Le Pen starts, about 24 months after the French government received an EU report of the 2015 report nearly 108 months prior. Truly the gears of French justice turned as fast as they could.
These are completely unrelated. Just because three major democracies of mutually-sympathetic ruling parties had parallel legal cases against leading opposition parties that threatened incumbent interests, and just because they did so on similar narrative themes/justification sof protecting democracy and rule of law themes, does not mean there was any sort of wink or nod or feeling emboldened by the example of others. Every case was independently moved forward on its own merits, with monetary judgements appropriate to the severity, and the mutual commentary by the states on the other's prosecutions was exactly what you would expect.
Also also coincidentally, this happened to be timed to roughly the same time that a UK court not only rejected a Trump lawsuit over the Steele dossier that was the root of the Russiagate hoax, but ordered Trump to pay 6-figures in legal fees, which was helpfully noted as adding to the half-billion in legal fees Trump had accrued so far that year and not at all contributing to pressures or efforts to drive Trump into bankruptcy analogous to the Le Pen experience earlier in the experience. Note that was before the historically unprecedented further half-billion fine from the New York judgement.
Now, admittedly, the Trump fiscal correlation must be a total distraction. Reputable democracies do not try to bankrupt their oppositions out of politics, and France failed to force Le Pen into fiscal insolvency years ago. The French government would only seek a 300,000 euro fine against Le Pen. And a 2 million euro fine against her party. And opened up a new case in September 2024 alleging illegal financing of the 2022 election.
This, clearly, is utterly unrelated to any other aspect of handling the Le Pen case, and not the initiation for a future basis to further fine and disqualify Le Pen from politics in the future after the current judgement runs its course.
And returning to the only relevant case itself, Le Pen trial that began in March in turn would certainly have no impact on...
June 2024: Surprise! Macron triggers snap elections in effort to overturn political gridlock and break his dependence on Le Pen. Perhaps the ongoing Le Pen trial will at last get rid of this troublesome opposition party?
July 2024: It, uh, doesn't work. Le Pen's party gets about 1/3 of all votes, and about 13% more than Macron's party.
The snap elections are generally considered a strategic mistake for Macron, doubling-down on his issues.
They also, coincidentally, totally kill any talk of Macron's constitutional reform for a third term candidacy.
A candidacy that- remembering previous elections- would have been substantially improved with a Le Pen in the field to rally a resentful Left to his side.
But now that Macron's political hopes for a third election are dead and buried...
November 2024: The French Government announces it seeks 5 years in jail, on top of the political bar, for Le Pen. However, conflicting reports say 2 years., with judgement expected in march 2025
Notably- even a 2 year sentence from vaguely April 2025 to April 2027 would release Le Pen right on / after the 2027 election, and thus totally unable to compete. And, depending on the terms of the house arrest, unable to speak or influence.
31 March 2025 (Yesterday): Le Pen is sentenced to 4-but-2-if-she-behaves years of prison, 2 of them under house arrest and 2 suspended, and a five year bar from political office. She is allowed to appeal but...
Even if she does appeal the ban on public office, only an appellate ruling could overturn it and restore her hopes of running, although time is running out for that to happen before the election as appeals in France can take several years to conclude.
Gallic shrug
I am sure the French government that took a decade to bring this conviction about will speedily process the appeal of the Le Pen who recent French polling suggested was somewhere in the 40% voting range for the first round. (Usual French first round poling disclaimers abound.)
Functionally, this ruling conveniently clears the deck for France's nominal establishment left and rights to make a return, without Le Pen in the way.
Call it Macron's farewell gift to French democracy. It's not like he disqualified his own presidential election opponent...
...though that's more because he failed to get the constitutional change he wanted that would have allowed him to run again...
...in which case, perhaps prosecutorial discretion might have leaned another way.
Summing It All Up
Le Pen (Senior) was an all-around tosser and more or less enemy of the French establishment, if not the French State per see
- Le Pen (Senior) embarrassed the French Establishment in the early 2002 election where he made the second round of the presidential election
- Le Pen (Senior) thereafter suffered years of unfortunate financial prospects that would have driven the Le Pen party out of politics
- Misfortune including perfectly neutral reductions in state stipends for political parties, a bank blockade, and an inability to sell a multi-million dollar property in Paris
- Le Pen (Senior) is politically toxic, and fiscally insolvent, before his daughter takes over the party
Le Pen (Marine) is Le Pen's daughter who inherited his mess, and his enemies
- Le Pen was an unexceptional MEP for over a decade with no notable scandals or accusations of fraud of this sort at the time
- In 2011, Le Pen inherits the party, and its finances, from her father. Money is tight.
- During this time, and probably before, Le Pen deals in the technically-illegal-but-totally-not-widely-practiced practice of paying national party members with EU funds.
- No one cares.
- Le Pen spends the next years working to rebuild fiscal solvency, including taking foreign loans to break the Parisian bank blockade
- The foreign loan most in question is Russian, marking a turn towards a more Russian-friendly narrative line, and increased institutional and international suspicion
President of European Parliament Shulz was a totally-not-corrupt German politician who totally didn't do a political hit job on the rival of an ally in furtherance of his own political ambitions
- Schulz had a notable, internationally-reported reputation for corruption, including on a similar issue
- The issue that will be the basis of the scandal is, uh, not unknown in his circles
- Schulz takes a particular stab at the political rival of a major political partner
- and potential future diplomatic partner who could help Schulz's ambitions come true
- Schulz definitely doesn't get awarded for services rendered for French-appreciated interests
- Or eagerly try to sustain the relationship with surprise arrival Macron
- But Schulz is not the villain
- Merely the tool providing the French establishment their means to prosecute Le Pen when desired
President Macron was totally not letting Le Pen stay in politics as a foil to bolster his personal electoral prospects against the French left
- It's not like Le Pen automatically invoked the support of the French left in every second round election
- Or bolstered his parliamentary prospects against the left that would, absent her, happily no-confidence him
- Or that his administration hid scandalous information that might have let her fail to be the foil when his left flank was weak
- It just takes an additional half-decade to complete investigations to find prosecutable evidence of something that was recorded and reported on more than half a decade prior
- You know, to develop the case until the time is right
Macron was totally not prolonging the case management by months or years in parallel to anticipation of extending his own political career
- Extending his jupiter-style presidency to a third term would have been more unpopular than he was
- In which case a free Le Pen sure would have been useful for those second-round elections
- But keep her and her party in a slow boil post-2022 with unclear intentions or scope
- As insurance policy, or leverage on the parliamentary politics
But Macron's efforts to garner support for a constitutional amendment failed
- And Macron's his snap election gambit to regain control of government failed
- And when it failed, so did his prospects at constitutional change
- And if he's not running again, there's no electoral advantage in Le Pen to run again
Which makes it naturally the best time to announce the intent to jail and disqualify the clear frontrunner
- A merciful 'mere' 2 years house arrest just coincidentally scheduled to time to the next election cycle
- It certainly could not have occurred earlier, and thus mitigated the perception of intentional procedural manipulation
- This is justified because embezzlement of EU funds is a critical subversion of democracy the voters should know about
- Just not when it might have harmed Macron's electoral prospects
- Or by letting voters vote accordingly against Le Pen with the knowledge
In Conclusion
Is there a 'benign' explanation for all this? Sure, if you want.
Is this a sketchy-but-will-be-claimed-above-reapproach series of events? Also yes.
The Le Pen saga doesn't actually require some all-encompassing conspiracy. La Pen (Senior) can have his own political feuds with the French establishment separate from La Pen (Marine). Schulz was a means, but hardly the start or the end of the Le Pen family feud with the French establishment. Macron was (probably) never involved in the early phases of whatever French state pressures may or may not have been used to try to bankrupt the Le Pen party.
But unless you believe the French prosecutor's office is completely independent of Macron and only coincidentally schedules things to align with electoral milestones and key dates to Macron's benefit, the Macron-era Le Pen saga has plenty of its own implications of, shall we say, politically considerate handling.
And those Macron handlings were built on a history of the Marine Le Pen handlings. And the Marine Le Pen handlings were built on the Le Pen (Senior) handlings. This has been a political fight for longer than some of the posters on this forum have been alive.
None of this means that Le Pen didn't actually 'defraud' the EU of however many manhours of political aid hours she charged the EU. If that's all you care about, this can be 'just,' sure. Let justice be done though the heavens fall, and all that.
But the other part of 'just' is if this is handled the same as other cases. And to an extent this is impossible, because no one else in France gets handled like Le Pen, because no one else represents what the Le Pen family represents, or threatens, to the French establishment.
What Next?
Don't be surprised if this becomes a significant reoccurring propaganda / european culture war theme for the anti-establishment skeptics, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Establishment European media are already signaling an expectation of further political chaos in France, and trying to coax/signal Le Pen to 'help her party' over 'seek revenge.' (Politico) The National Rally remains in position to topple the government by contributing to a no-confidence vote if the other parties oppose Macron.
The New York Times, which is broadly sympathetic to the French government effort and hostile towards Le Pen with the NYT's characteristic framing devices, concedes that-
Ms. Le Pen, like it or not, may now become another element in the Vance-Musk case for European democratic failure.
This is surrounded by all the appropriate signals that this is bad thought, of course, but it is unlikely to be solely an American critique. Various right-of-center politicians across Europe were quick to condemn, and the culture war lines will write themselves.
Not all are unhappy or afraid, though.
In Paris’ Republic Plaza, where public demonstrations often unfold, Le Pen detractors punched the air in celebration.
“We were here in this square to celebrate the death of her father,” said Jean Dupont, 45, a schoolteacher. “And this is now the death of Le Pen’s presidential ambitions.”
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front and a figure long associated with racism and Holocaust denial, died earlier this year at age 96.
Sophie Martin, 34, a graphic designer, was among those in a celebratory mood. “I had to check the date — I thought it was April Fool’s Day,” she said. “But it’s not. She’s finally been knocked down. We’ve lived with her poison in our politics for too long.”
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Taxonomical Ranking of Ideologies... I like that metaphor. Thank ye.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
The default assumption was and still kind of has to be that the other person making judgements off of you is also rational.
Nuclear deterrence modeling fundamentally does not work if either party is irrational. It's a common failure mode both of the madman theory and the precautionary-compromise-to-alleviate-fear paradigms. Neither actually works if the external observer is genuinely irrational, both are selective choies of 'but if we do this thing, then they will become rational actors.'
I remembered that post fondly, but had forgotten the key-words or who it was from! Thank ye.
Separately / concurrently- given that the American Founding Fathers didn't predict the rise of political parties, and had to amend the constitution pretty early for the vice president kerfuffle, I think the 'did not necessarily understand the procedural implication of their own rules' is a fair critique.
In some respects they did- slowing the progress of government change in some respects- but that itself just locked in various self-catalyzing changes, like the New Deal coalition leading to the rise of the imperial presidency and administrative state that would compete with the chief executive.
Am I misreading anything with the MAD situation?
Yes. Quite a bit, but it starts with forgetting that nukes are controlled by people, and the people in half of this context are elected leaders of democracies, and the other half are leaders of polities as well, not the polity itself.
Democratically-elected politicians and parties like to be re-elected. They also like the idea of having a successful historical legacy even if they can't be re-elected. They also like being popular with their supporter base. They also like not dying in second-strike scenarios, but more relevant is that people who enjoy being popular, and the political prestige/esteem that comes with being popular, take being popular seriously. Even a 'successful' genocide tends to put a scupper in their support base opinion polls amongst people who don't like genocide but do put a lot of value in thinking of themselves as good people. Even if the elected leader is neither good nor shares that genocidal objection, their interest is being shaped by the third party reactions.
Similarly, no one 'thinks like' a multi-hundred year polity. This is because individual people don't live hundreds of years old. There are no ethnic gestalt consciousnesses that dominate decision-making. Even ideologues act according to their specific ideas as they understand them. This divide between the appeal to the mass consideration to the actual decisionmaker gets wider the more the political power differential is between elites and masses. Peasants don't dictate how aristocrats decide their own future- that's why one is a peasant and the other is an aristocrat in the first place.
As a result, the actor characterization stumbles over the rather basic question of- 'why?'
Nukes don't fire themselves. They are fired by people. People have motives. 'If I fire first, I could wipe the other side out with little to no response!' is not a motive. It is a literal statement, but not a serious statement. To be serious, it would have to deal with the consequences that actually shape decisionmaker- specific humans- behavior. It has to address 'why' that makes sense, not why it is mechanically possible.
Your misreading is also taking MAD elements literally, but not seriously. And this includes MAD itself.
The Mutual in MAD has never necessarily been mutually-received damage in scale or proportion. A for Assurance is not an assurance of any particular level of retaliatory destruction, and hasn't for as long as second-strike capability entered nuclear triads. The D of Destruction has likewise been 'too much of my own destroyed to be worth it,' rather than literal destruction of everyone and everything in internationally recognized borders of the aggressor.
None of these extreme measures are actually required for nuclear deterrence. All deterrence requires from the defender is enough of a cost to the attacker for the cost to outweigh the benefit to the attacker. This is true regardless of the outcome to the defender if the conflict actually occurs, because attackers choose to attack over their own prospects of success, not the defender's prospects of defeat. The two are not the same, and total target destruction does not make for total victory.
This matters to leaders because Republican President Name-not-Trumps-Alot is deterred even if retaliatory nuclear missiles 'only' wipe out a half-dozen Democratic-party cities. This is because the costs to President NNTA is greater than the political gain. In serious consideration, 'genocider of the Russian nation' or 'razed the swamp with nuclear weapons' aren't exactly Republican base applause lines when the nuclear weapons are kind of hurting them too, even if not as much directly. This cost is even greater for a Democratic President NNTA. They'd kind of like to keep winning, and it's kind of hard if your political machines and voter base are nuclear ash. The decision and incentive structure for rewarding such a decision to be serious rather than literal considerations have to be so extreme the scenario is no longer some ad-hoc out-of-the-blue alpha-strike scenario.
This literally versus seriously division continues with your decision on adopting certain positions.
Taking Russian claims on any sort of security, let alone nuclear, issue at face value is, uh, a way. But it's a take of taking them literally over seriously, given their historical rhetorical shifts on the subject. Similarly, it may be literally true that the Americans are capable of unspeakable hypocrisy and cruelty. However, it's not a particularly serious belief system that any given unspeakable act of cruelty and hypocrisy is a reasonable fear. Sincere if the holder is irrationally considering reality, perhaps, but not serious.
If you want to be serious about avoiding nuclear war, then you want to prioritize mitigating nuclear use risk, not mutually assured destruction. MAD is the distraction. Nuclear use is where it matters, because pre-emptive nuclear genocide is less relevant than someone thinking that tactical nuclear weapons won't have nuclear responses that could escalate.
Nuclear risk, in turn, is not minimized if you minimize nuclear fears at all costs.
This is because minimizing nuclear fears at all costs leads to directly incentivizing nuclear bluffs. Nuclear bluffs work by raising nuclear fears and inviting the other side to provide concessions in return for lowering the rhetoric/actions used to generate nuclear flear. Successful nuclear bluffs encourage incentivize further nuclear bluffs. Eventually, bluffs get called, which creates credibility tensions that incentivize actually using nuclear weapons. Nuclear use is what leads to nuclear retaliation.
You certainly don't want to work from an invented assumption that the nuclear opposites are desperate and failing as the starting status quo... especially if you have to simultaneously introduce irrationality to accept that starting premise.
Edit: And apparently this is the post dr_analog blocks me for?
Okay. And weird.
Dean
Flairless
4d ago
LOGH is GOAT but there's really nothing else like it.
Amen.
Not internet-themed in the least. But great.
I’m not even sure that’s what they demonstrate. I’d argue that they’re more a result of lack of state capacity, and of a lack of alternate methods of adjudicating international disputes.
If I concede you this point in its totality, that yours is the interpretation they would take from common knowledge, would you then still say the American experiment would have been conducted in the same way?
I am going to skip forward a moment here-
Sure, we now know that states ostensibly influenced by the Enlightenment are still capable of waging massively destructive wars, at least under certain circumstances. If that’s supposed to discredit the entire philosophical undertaking, then I’m not sure what it would take to rehabilitate it in your eyes.
-and remind / prod you to remember the context of whose lack of current common knowledge is supposed to shape their decision. The people who would have to make the same decisions even with the advantage of the ahistorical common knowledge are the American founding fathers, not me. That would be 18th century merchant-class elites who identified with their home states more than a common american nationality that wouldn't exist for another hundred years or so.
If the common knowledge of the 20th century totalitarianism was as a descendent of the enlightenment was that 'this can be avoided if we give the state more capacity to centralize power and adjudicate inter-state disputes', do you think the then-independent states of the proto-United States would nod and agree to give up their sovereignty even harder, or do you think their delegations would have run from the negotiating chambers screaming? And then formed their own defense pacts against what was left of the early United States lest it impose such graciousness on them in the name of the common good?
Many of the compromises in the early American government were done to prevent a strong central government dominated by their political/economic rivals. This is why the Senate exists, to equalize power between weak and large states. This is why the 3/5ths compromise on the electoral power from slaves exists, to moderate the ability to dictate influence over interstate commerce rules development. This is why the bill of rights adds several more restrictions to boot, even though an argument against them is that they were so common-sense they shouldn't be needed.
Even then the formation of the American state as we know it was a near-run thing for already being too strong. The founders were fully cognizant of the benefits of centralized power. They were also highly distrustful of others having it over them. Half of the early government formation negotiations entailed some variation of 'that will never happen, that's crazy!'
Why, specifically, should such a group of power-sensitive, self-interested, and future-minded elites who had to be convinced this new government wouldn't one day overtake them give it more power, rather than less, in the name of avoiding... the consequences of too much state capacity and potential for abuse unless given?
Why would they not just re-look the Articles of Confederation, and go 'maybe we should just stick with that and tweak it instead'?
An awareness of the common knowledge of the Enlightenment's failure doesn't mean that the self-interested power-concerned slave-holders suddenly become 21st century progressives, anymore than knowledge of WW1 would mean George Washington would reverse his 'nah, don't get involved when the Europeans are killing themselves' stance.
Edit Cutting off later responses because they didn't really add much.
So, do all the pre-Enlightenment famines and mountains of skulls just… not count for anything?
Oh, they certain count... as support for Enlightenment paradigm when you lack an anchronistic (future-history) basis of comparison.
Pre-Enlightenment famines and mountains of skulls were demonstrative of a lack of Enlightenment. Failures in the early Enlightenment were proof of insufficient enlightenment. These are common knowledge that make Enlightenment paradigms look good- after all, no Enlightenment movement had ever done such a thing!
If you're hearing the echo of 'real Enlightenment governance has never been tried,' that's not a coincidence.
Only a common knowledge of the historically unprecedented size of the mountains of skulls that Enlightenment-states could reason themselves into would credibly counter-balance a belief that Enlightened people wouldn't create mountains of skulls like those un-Enlightened barbarians. That is the relevance of the WW1 and WW2 common knowledge. It was a forced entry of common knowledge that, yes, civilized enlightened Europeans absolutely would create mountains of skulls. Enlightened despots would make skull piles on par with or greater than the un-enlightened savages of history, and use Enlightenment themes and principles to lead the publics to slaughter.
But that common knowledge was impossible in the late 1700s when the Americans were forming a state. Because the downsides of the enlightenment, first demonstrated at scale in the French Revolution, hadn't occurred yet.
It would be common knowledge now, however. Which is why @FCfromSSC says
More or less. More precisely, it should not and probably cannot be repeated, and its problems were identified early on. The ideological amalgamation of the American Revolution was a one-shot thing; it worked as well as it did the first time around due to ignorance in the form of an absence of specific elements of common knowledge. Now that those specific elements of common knowledge exist, large portions of the project no longer work and cannot be made to work again.
The common knowledge is how the Enlightenment can go off the rails. Had that been known at the time, the American experiment would have proceeded differently on the basis of that (impossible) knowledge.
You have reasons to oppose Enlightenment rationalism which are independent from any objective measure of famine prevalence, relative likelihood of starting massive wars and killing civilians, etc., and you’re pointing at the failures and shortcomings of certain ostensibly Enlightenment-derived regimes without actually proving that said regimes did worse on those metrics than the ones which came before them.
The Enlightenment regimes don't have to be worse. Equivalence can be just as damning. Equivalence brings into question the value of adopting an explicitly enlightenment model/approach to government as an unproven experiment. The point of the experiment is to lead to different, not equivalent, results / acts of despotism.
If pre-Constitution common knowledge had included things like 'the Enlightenment-camp can rationalize class-based persecution as a necessity and morally justified means of social reform,' the merchant-class that was heavily involved in American government formation would probably not have agreed to as much Enlightenment influence at their own potential expense.
WWI and WWII were utter catastrophes, of course, but their high levels of devastation were largely a result of technological developments, not the fact that they were wars prosecuted by rationalist regimes. (Imperial Japan, for example, was nothing like a rationalist Enlightened state.) Communism killed a lot of people, yes, but it’s not the rationalist or “top-down” elements which are primarily responsible for this result.
These may have been the dark side derivatives of the enlightenment, but there are pretty direct arguments for how each and every one of these historical arguments can tie into various themes and expectations of enlightenment thinkers. It may be in 'that's not what we meant / wanted' forms, but that's a matter of uncontrolled / unpredicted ideological evolution, not a dispute of descent.
The uncontrolled / unintended / unpredicted failure-mode evolutions of the Enlightenment are what are common knowledge today, but not in the past.
Dean
Flairless
4d ago
Can you explain what the Hobbesian premise is that's being rejected/forgotten?
Sure. You not mentioning Hobbes at all, let alone Hlynka's position on Hobbes, is the Hobbesian premise that is being rejected / forgotten.
How I would characterize Hobbes doesn't matter. My position is that you can't properly characterize Hlynka's position if you don't address such a significant part of the position. Which is rather hard to do without mentioning them, which is generally a precondition to accurately characterizing. If you aren't accurately characterizing Hlynka's arguments, there's reason to doubt the validity of your argument.
The lack of mention in your rebuttal-argument is itself the hole.
Dean
Flairless
4d ago
What do you think the missing "common knowledge" in question is?
The various mountains of skulls and famines in the name of technocratic progress and rationality.
At its most common denominator, the Enlightenment presumed that good thinking would lead to good results. The Hlynka-claimed divide is that this different upon whether changes mattered most from internal changes or external environmental changes, but they both shared a belief that if you thought through things better, progress would deliver better results as a matter of course, both in a moral and a practical sense.
WW1 was a major culture shock to this mentality, and discredited democracy-enlightenment-rationalists enough that 20th century totalitarianism became an intellectually viable alternative, precisely because the enlightened European states and cultures did incredibly stupid, senseless, and wasteful things to their own delegitimization... twice. And after WW2, the technocratic elements of the Enlightenment that took power in the form of the communist-socialists social engineers proceeded to build mountains of skulls and engineer famines as a result of, disputably, well-meant social reforms. On the other hand, the more individualist-leaning enlightenment descendants of the West otherwise discredited themselves in various Cold War abuses, ranging from the Imperial Presidency of the Americans, the imperial/post-imperial conflicts for influence over the third world, and so on. Plus, you know, that whole MAD thing of deliberate and purposeful preparation to destroy the world.
Had the American founding fathers had the 20th century as common knowledge of how badly enlightenment value evolution could mesh with state powers, it probably would have triggered some substantial shifts in not only the revolution, but the post-revolution American consolidation.
It is simply another expression of rejecting alternative but existing and relevant frameworks of analysis as invalid basis of discussing politics.
There was indeed some (a lot of) garbling. I posted before giving it the reread it needed, and made changes.
All the more reason he should be brought back to defend himself!
And yet, he isn't, which you knew when you began to lambast it. I maintain it was in poor taste, as well as inaccurate.
But it did seem to be one of his most critical recurring positions, it's the position that I've encountered most frequently in other conversations with posters here who claim to be carrying his mantle, and, crucially, it's the position that was outlined in the post I quoted from hydroacetylene. So that's what I wanted to respond to in my post. My post was only intended to respond to that position and not any of Hlynka's other positions.
This would be part of the fundamental flaw in your critique, and further bolstering the validity of Hlynka's critique. Hlynka's positions were relatively closely interconnected, much as the various influences of the Enlightenment were interconnected, and attempting to take and argue over one element in isolation of the underlying substructure leaves a substantial hole in the discourse.
The more you talk around the premise of the hole or substructure argument, the more relevant that premises becomes. An argument of substructure doesn't get disproven by surface-level variances when the substructure argument already predicts and allows for surface-level variations.
But this isn't actually a good way of dividing up different ideologies. It's essentially a non sequitur. It's just something Hlynka latched onto because it seemed like a good way of putting all his enemies onto one side, while he got to stay on the other side.
You are continuing to demonstrate the point of Hobbes-shaped hole in political discourse. The hole exists because the avoiders of the hole reject the underlying premise even when they are aware of it, if they are aware of it in the first place. It is simply another expression of rejecting alternative but existing and relevant frameworks of analysis as an invalid basis of discussing/analyzing politics.
It really doesn't matter if you feel that underlying framework analysis is a bad way of dividing up different ideologies, any more than the narcissism of small differences discredits outside analysis noting relative commonalities. A characterization of you does not need your consent to be accurate or insightful. The same also applies to groups at scale. The premise that it does- that self-identification of most relevant attributes is what matters most- is simply another element of the common-cluster.
It is also a part of the cluster that creates the hole in social understanding when it fails to acknowledge / recognize the relevance of the hole-clusters, or their basis of analysis.
Put another way- you are demonstrating an analytic failure mode equivalent to those who criticized islamic extremists like ISIS of not knowing their own religion and being irrational. This was quite often false. ISIS did have an Islamic cluster-structure which informed their world view. It may have been different from what observerses believed an Islamic cluster-structure should be, but it was quite real, and quite relevant. It was real and relevant regardless of how little someone from another perspective disagreed or dismissed it, because enough people did share in the cluster that ISIS was able to be a major threat rather than an irrelevant marginal movement.
Hlynka's point on the hole in Enlightenment discourse is that various modern political elements that can be traced back to / self-identify with Enlightenment discourse have a similar cluster dismissal / divide. They do not recognize / acknowledge that their cluster-commonalities are not actually the scope of Enlightenment clusters. In turn, they make assumptions that divisions within their subcluster are major divisions in Enlightenment premise, rather than subdivisions of a sub-section.
It also just misrepresents the basic facts about what different groups believe, particularly in the DR. As HBD advocates, they believe in a relatively static human nature that cannot be reshaped by social institutions. Nor can their position be reduced to "white people inherently good, everyone else inherently bad"; they acknowledge that whites have a higher genetic disposition to violent crime than East Asians, for example, and that this would persist regardless of social arrangements.
You are continuing to conflate what Hlynka's regular arguments on the commonality between groups was. It was not an argument of shared surface-level beliefs and conclusions. It was an argument of shared underlying paradigm-assumptions, the common clusters, that undergird and shape the political discourse that reach diverging surface-level beliefs and conclusions but share underlying logic.
There appears to have been a mild resurgence of Hlynkaism on the forum. This is concerning, because I believe that the core tenets of Hlynkaism are deeply confused.
Is there any particularly reason that your belief of the core tenets of Hlynkaism accurately reflect the core tenets of Hlynkaism?
I'm not exactly a fan of top-level posting denouncing the beliefs of someone who isn't permitted to clarify their position, but this is specifically an accuracy question. Hlynka wasn't exactly adverse to elaborating his position at length, even going so far as to do so in multiple top-level posts in his Inferential Distance series, and you've linked to none of them to allow a cross-reference of your claim of the position and the position as provided by the man whose views you raise to denounce.
Which itself wouldn't be a failure by any means if you accurately characterized his position. But Hlynka's narrative had some pretty clear and specific keywords that you've not even raised. Some of Hlynka's tropes included raising the divided nature of the Enlightenment, early Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes, the concept of the loci of control and agency against different paradigms, and so on. These are relatively distinct keywords of Hlynkaism, the sort that are easy to CTRL-F to search for to see if one is even referencing related texts. You are not, which is indicative that you are not speaking from the same sheet, or even referring to the same base of reference, as the Hlynkaists.
Which, itself, is emblematic of one of Hlynka's major claims- that there is a major hole in the discourse of current politics from a spectrum of Enlightenment-derived groups that do not acknowledge / recognize / are unaware of the relevance and salience of certain major Enlightenment influences, i.e. the Hobbes-and-Burke shaped hole that he regularly referred to.
This was central Hlynka's reoccurring thesis because Hlynka claimed that this was a commonality amongst people who internalized the other spectrum/side of the enlightenment, a group which rejected the Hobbes-and-Burke premise. Call it whatever you want- left or right, whether humans are naturally good or evil, the nature of the locus of control as internal (individualist/person-centric) or external (you can change people and the world by taking and changing the institutions), but this was a cluster of concepts that served as a dividing premise in Hlynkaism.
These Englightenment-traced premise clusters were the grounds of what Hlynka viewed as bringing people who nominally despised each other on 'fundamental' or 'tactical' differences into an animosity of close-differences. The paradigm of comparison was the cluster of enlightenment principles they derived from. The adoption of those sorts of clusters vis-a-vis the Hobbes-and-Burke shaped hole that wasn't even considered a meaningful alternative was the grounds of claiming commonality. You raising reformation and revolutionary marxists tactical differences is demonstrating a fundamental confusion of the paradigm in question. Hlynkaism is far more interested in their enlightenment cluster paradigms they share (class-based analysis of society, external loci of control prioritizing institutional control) than the tactics.
This may be wrong by some internal contradiction, it may not be a correct reading of history, but an effective counter-argument to the a central tenet that there is a Hobbes-and-Burke hole in the discourse should probably not avoid mentioning Hobbes and Burke entirely. Nor is it countered by rejecting Hlynka's structure and imposing your own that rejects the former's categorical premise. That sort of rejection / non-recognition of the alternative enlightenment paradigms was / is one of the core tenets of Hlynkaism.
A critique of Hlynkaism that doesn't even mention the "Enlightenment" or "hole" even once is probably not a critique of Hlynkaism's core tenets. It may, however, lend credence to some of his arguments on the relevance of not recognizing or addressing very significant background contexts.
Dean
Flairless
4d ago
Summer Wars, a 2009 movie, is an interesting short-ish experience. It was sort of a... not spiritual sequel, but a 'this is the story we wanted to tell' of one of the digimon movies. Basically an internet-of-things-meets-rogue-AI experience. A nice family story that also balances tradition and progress in a family story context. Only a few hours long.
I sincerely do think the third digimon series in particular, Digimon Tamers, is a well put together series and not-exactly-accidental AI allegory. On top of a bildungsroman for the children, it basically is an 'alignment and conflict between humans and AI' narrative. Once you accept that the digital monsters are AI, you can recognize AI metaphors that would be more coherent decades later, upto and including the limits of government capacity to keep control. This includes an AI developer not recognizing the implications of his invention and having to grow with it as much as guide it (kid makes magical monster who is fundamentally childlike), various AI-growth-risk metaphors, and even rogue AI.
Ghost in the Shell is an older and more adult-focused classic. It's far more in the cyberpunk field of things, but it's a gem for reasons, though reasons include some pretty abstract stuff.
I find this whole conversation and the intensity of your passion bizarre, but okay.
And I find your attempts to play coy in Kulak's defense silly.
There is no schrodenger's anarchist. Either Kulak can be credited with living up to his standard, or he is not credited.
Setting aside the indisputable fact that you have no idea whether he 'conducted' 'positive action',
I have multiple reasons to believe he did not, including but not limited to previous admissions of absence and his testy defense of absence on grounds of surgery. He deleted that reddit post soon after, but the surrounding claim of surgery is echoed by others including yourself.
it remains the case that even you don't claim he's ever said that someone should intentionally broadcast the matter afterward.
I have, however, claimed that people do not get to claim credit for actions neither they nor anyone else claim they have been a part of.
That would obviously be crazy.
Bravery often is. However, Kulak's call to action was not to be something other than crazy, but to not be a coward. Note the different goalposts. Being non-crazy is perfectly consistent with being a coward.
You know what would also be crazy, though? Being a substacker who makes calls to violence on associated social media accounts while secretly moonlighting as an actual anarchist engaging in political violence. Clearly Kulak is not above being crazy at least some of the time. We are merely in dispute as to how much and when.
After reading your post multiple times it's still not clear to me what inconsistency you're trying to catch him in. What is clear to me is that there's some kind of unseemly antipathy here. At any rate I'm checking out of the conversation and will not be responding further.
I am moved by your attempt to leave with the last word and a final zing, and your confessed confusion on the position that Kulak is a consistent coward by his own standard.
By way of reply, if I knew the answer, and that answer were yes, do you think I'd talk about it?
By way of reply, does your willingness to acknowledge whether someone else is a coward or not change any factor of them being a coward?
In his old reddit posts on the trucker protests, Kulak made cowardness conditional on whether one conducted political violence regardless of being caught and identified. This was a demand for a positive action, and failure to meet that action was a categorical proof of personal failure deserving social contempt. He established no exceptions- inaction itself was proof of failure.
Kulak has also made no claim of having conducted political violence at the time he claimed it was necessary to prove one was not a coward. Nor have any of his sympathizers. In fact, sympathizers have provided claims that he did not meet the non-coward criteria for reasons that did not meet his pre-established exceptions. Further, no claim of compensatory action has been claimed- nothing that might provide absolution for the initial failure if her were physically incapable of prioritizing getting into a protest over his personal health. Which itself is a claim no one has made, least of all his defenders.
The principle of positive claims requiring positive evidence to warrant belief does not get reversed for reasons of OPSEC by people who dismissed fear of discovery or arrest as grounds for non-involvement. 'Oh, Kulak can't admit to conducting political violence- he'd be caught!' is not a basis to believe Kulak lived up to his claimed requirements for not being a coward. Kulak would not admit to have conducting political violence if he had not met the standard. The absence of the claim is not proof of a claim.
None of this would seem to have any relation to whether you would admit to any knowledge or lack of knowledge.
Kulak can be accused of many things but I haven't yet caught him in moral inconsistency.
Kulak being a moral coward would be morally consistent. It might be morally contemptable, but it would be consistent.
Kulak can be condemned on plenty of grounds. As a historian, a literary analyst, even a rhetorician. However, the condemnation of cowardness can be justified by his own standard presented that he presented as a demand for action lest one be dismissed as a coward.
He did not act. Hence, he can be dismissed as a coward. That he makes no claim to having acted in other cases are additional, but redundant, cases for being a consistent coward.
Dean
Flairless
5d ago
Early 2000s anime had some interesting takes on internet implications. It's something of a time capsule- plenty of acknowledgement of danger / risk / threat (viruses as monsters, etc.), but also mystery / ambiguous potential.
Sword Art really ruined the genre by turning it pure isekai MMO power fantasy.
That's who I'm blaming, anyway.
Why is that fair to him? He set the standard he judged others by, and he can be judged by it in turn. 'Fair' is not 'nice,' it is impartiality.
Did he meet his own standard of sincerity and moral courage that he accused other of lacking if they did not join a violent resistance despite risk of bodily harm as a consequence?
Or did he abstain on grounds of the consequence of bodily harm?
When someone makes moral judgements and accusations of cowardness for others not risking life or limb, the fair response to claims of personal abstainment on grounds of risk of limb if they went forth is not 'oh, you could get hurt? That's understandable.' It is 'so what, coward?'
Particularly since there have many been many other contexts, before and after, for him to have proven his bravery, if he wanted to tie bravery to political defiance and violence.
Your confusion is probably because you are strawmanning an argument I did not make, while conflating different lines of argument, while trying to cite an article as evidence I should reconsider my position even though the article consists of insinuating a charge that the text acknowledges has not happened.
Which is to say, it cries wolf.
I am sure if you continue to push more information of Donald Trump not deporting american citizens without due process you will continue to accomplish more cries of wolf.
Dean
Flairless
5d ago
My response to the 'missing the old system' is 'the grass on the other side is always greener.' That substack has its own authorial restraints doesn't mean it doesn't successfully establish independence from traditional media constraints. It just means that it's a change of constraints, rather than an absence of constraints.
Which, frankly, is not going to change. In the same way that the abolishment of private markets under communism didn't mean that people didn't have to work for a living, there is always going to be a tension between 'what the writer wants to do' and 'what the paymaster is willing to pay for.' And as long as there is a need to justify receiving limited resources- and there will always be limited resources- there will always be a paymaster in some form.
That doesn't mean that it isn't a net gain. The fact that Tracingwoodgrains and Kulak are equally eligible to make a living giving their opinions is still better than a world where only one or even none of them could because established opinion-generators ran the system like a cartel.
As they say, anything that you do for a living rather than passion, you'll eventually end up economizing to minimize costs- including time and effort- relative to expected income.
When people make their opinions the basis of their livelihood, their future intellectual freedom is shaped by the nature of their payment structure. If you draw a salary, you're not exactly going to be criticizing the hand that feeds you for long. If you make commissions, you're going to optimize for iterations to earn more commissions.
But when you go substack-style subscriber model, you're going to be pressured to keep providing people what they pay money for. The information you have is that they paid money for [x], and your brand grew from your reputation, and thus recommendations, for saying [x]. And if you don't, the subscribers go away. You live or starve by your brand.
In some respects this is more ideological constraining than a salary structure, since a salary-payer may have special interest in your input if you change an opinion. If you live on [organization Y]'s salary-dole, and you raise issue that [organization Y] may not like, that could be really valuable to know. Your reputation for supporting X makes warnings against X all the more credible. It's like if the Catholic Church criticizes papal conduct. If your job is providing advice / recommendations, this is the most important sort of advice you're liable to offer, and thus justify continue paying for. (Up to a point- if you get a reputation to anti-X instead, it may turn differently.)
In a subscriber model, however, going against the audience grain is a recipe for losing buy-in, but without gaining equivalent opposite payments. At which point, a variation of 'the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent' kicks in. Your audience base can remain unhappy and unwilling to fund you longer than you can get by without an audience base, and you can go under sooner than it takes to build a new audience base.
At which point, your incentive structure is that if you want a comfortable existence, don't fail to deliver what keeps you in a comfortable existence.
Can I convince you to try old children's cartoon series, like the original Digimon Adventure anime?
Digimon was a 1999 children's monster anime from Japan centered around a group of children who meet at a summer camp and find themselves in another world. There they are met by monsters both friendly and not as they try to survive and understand the new world they find themselves in, even as their goal is to find their way back home and return to their families. The story follows the children's efforts to survive, which depends on their personal growth, their relationships with each other, and their partnership with the monster-partners who met them on arrival claiming to have been waiting for them from the start. The later is part of the mystery of the plot that unfolds over 54 episodes, each less than half and hour.
This was isekai before isekai became a power fantasy cliche, more Swiss Family Robinson than Sword Art Online. While the format of the show is a literal monster-of-the-week setup, at nearly every stage of the adventure the children are the underdogs running from a far, far more powerful adversary. Rather than an escapist fantasy from Japanese life, it is fundamentally a story of lost-and-seeking-to-return to home and family.
While the production quality is terribly dated by modern standards- late-90s era animation, pre-modern adaptation practices, etc.- it also had strong character writing. 'Came for the monsters, stayed for the children' is how I fondly remember it. Now, that is on the admittedly biased recollections of a children's show from literal decades ago, but japanese anime has (had?) that trait of sometimes smuggling better writing into anime than American children's media of the time.
(There are various sequel series- some direct sequels, some in other settings. The third series, Digimon Tamers, starts as more of an urban fantasy genre, but arguably is better polished due to a smaller character caste and thus more focus on individual character arcs over time.)
What makes me think this might be appropriate to your ask is that the series (or at least the earlier iterations) is that the series is fundamentally a bildungsroman- a narrative focusing on the protagonists' formative years and spiritual education.
The series is fundamentally a collection of character development stories, in which the monsters and the adventure are the framing device for the children to grow, with that maturation being the narrative payoff as much as the ultimate outcome of the adventure. This isn't a mere 'the power of friendship means we win' spiel either- the series takes an Aristotelian approach to character traits, in which a virtue can become a flaw both by its absence and its excess. And this struggle is the basis of character arcs that track the entire series, even as this process is central to the world-building system.
So I thought of this when I read your criteria.
By line...
I am looking for story where group of characters (family or friends) form together a group that is NOT dysfunctional.
I think this qualifies. The groups that form have internal conflicts, but they are conflicts that are worked through. When there is an enduring conflict, it is character-appropriate and often plot-significant.
As a bildungsroman, the story is characters forming into better people. This does mean they start as worse people, but this is generally in terms of 'good-faith kids who are out of their depth and not yet mature' rather than malicious / incompetent / immoral. There is a generally consistent sense of progression, as the character development of the episode is generally permanent going forward rather than something forgotten in the next episodes.
Them dealing with problematic/oppressive/bureaucratic/evil world is fine, in fact I want to have some conflict. On the other hand I do not want them to win effortlessly or get some insanely OP powers that invalidate any opposition. I do not want tragic/bad ending, I also do not want obvious 100% perfect absurd success thanks to blatant plot armor.
Digimon Adventure starts as a survival story in which the world is dangerous, but with heavy distinctions between evil, morally flawed, and dangerous. Most of the series entails the children on the run or otherwise hiding from the Big Bad.
I also want story to not feature blatantly stupid setting or characters that make no sense whatsoever. Initially I phrased it as "no unrealistic stuff" but I am in fact fine with dragon-flying slave traders as antagonists, as long as suspension of disbelief is achievable.
The series is an isekai. The nature of the isekai isn't exactly a meta-mystery (digimon = digital monsters), but is one to the character cast.
If you can adopt the lie of the isekai premise, it is consistent enough in that context. It reflects a now-archaic 'the internet as a wild new frontier, both dangerous and amazing' mentality rather than any current political concept like disinformation or some such.
I strongly prefer avoidance of current politics in either direction, I have seen remarkably few cases where it was done well. I also do not want books that would be recommended only due to current politics, quality of that is even worse.
The series is a Japanese series that predates the post-2000 culture war. It also predates the Japanese moe-phase or isekai-escapist trends of the late 2000s/2010s.
Story may be small scale.
As an episodic series, there are many smaller-scale stories within the larger plot. While there is a constant the-stakes-are-survival context from the start, many individual stories are fundamentally smaller-stakes, like imposter syndrome, overcoming personal failures and guilt, or familial challenges born of love and complication. There is even a story about trying to help a friend who is being scammed and feeling like you are being dragged down with them.
The series does grow in scale and stakes as the internal mysteries are developed, but they fundamentally start at much, much lower scale in their initial premise. The first series starts with a survive-and-return-home premise, and keeps that for most of the series.
(The urban-fantasy series 3 starts as 'how do I keep my baby dinosaur a secret and out of trouble' child's-secret-pet tale, before the real adventure is about trying to find a lost friend. Again, everything else is framing for small-at-heart struggles.)
...so, have I gotten you to consider watching a 25-year-old children's cartoon with terrible-by-modern-standards production levels for your serious fiction fix?
Requesting clemency for patricide on grounds of being an orphan is certainly a strategy.
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