Rosencrantz2

Rosencrantz2 3d ago

Sometimes you can even buy essentially the same thing but made in the US, with a big 'made in the US label' and it costs more, as with New Balance trainers. There's a 'Made in the UK' version as well. Both the US/UK versions are actually better quality than the made in Vietnam ones, I would say – but also twice the cost (in the UK, £199 vs £99).

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Rosencrantz2 3d ago

But neither of these deals actually change the trade deficit, which is about goods flow not investment. My point is that the new tariffs should be based on something countries can correct rather than something orthogonal to what the US's problem with them is.

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Rosencrantz2 3d ago

But what is it countries are supposed to do? It doesn't seem to be about tariffs themselves but trade deficits. Simply buying large amounts of American goods could be an option for them to get these numbers down but it's not in the power of most of the worst affected countries.

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Rosencrantz2 3d ago

It's because they're liars trying to poison the well of public discourse and make as many people as possible think that the chart showed other countries' tariffs.

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Rosencrantz2 3d ago

That's quite interesting, but this line of thinking feels close to Cartesianism. If we can't appeal to authority at all, we have to discount almost all information about the wider world – we don't know what any countries' GDP is, what the tax rate is, whether there's really a war in Ukraine etc, unless we trust in certain authorities whose information we have no reason to strongly doubt. We wouldn't be able to discuss the world economy at all.

I would have thought a more pragmatic version of this philosophy would have us interrogate and challenge the data and views of experts, and hold them lightly, always seeking to check that the experts are abiding by similar evidentiary standards as we would aspire to ourselves, but realising that it is impractical to check everything and therefore being good Bayesians about what we can't be sure of.

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Rosencrantz2 3d ago

I don't think I follow your meaning here, do you mind spelling it out slightly more?

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Rosencrantz2 3d ago

Which experts would you look to if not ones in the western world? Are you saying there is no expertise, no right and wrong, only power? If so, you do you, but in a nominally rationalist setting that has rules of debate, why are you here? You should prefer a forum where posters do not use words but just pipe bellowing noises into other people's homes at a volume set by their net worth.

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Rosencrantz2 3d ago

He totally did in the past but I think that a combination of success and the company he keeps has lately morphed a Silicon Valley bias towards optimistic action into a bias against thinking or delay of any kind. Also I think he would genuinely care about potential damage to his companies whereas he is not likely to weight e.g. other countries getting mad, or his enemies spluttering, or federal workers losing their jobs, as damage at all, quite the opposite.

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Rosencrantz2 3d ago

The lack of rigour is perhaps the most fundamental tenet of Trumpism. If these rates were based on actual facts or informed by expertise, then the policy could be argued with and modified based on reasons and data. This way, each other country has to negotiate its rate based on bargaining, flattery or retaliation.

The defence I hear of Trump/Musk's approach most often is that they just do things without looking too closely at data or potential harms, and that this is good because some action is better than none. Even further, this attitude seems to have become reified into something like 'if you aspire to rigour, you are a cuck and not suitable to be near power'.

I gotta assume that someone seeking to challenge the accuracy of Trump's tariff chart would be thrown out of the White House and not asked to come back, and that this preference for anti-rigour is more deeply ingrained in his circle than any particular policy.

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Rosencrantz2 9d ago

I don't know if you're describing an actual or hypothetical sculpture, but yes, it does sound workmanlike from your description (although, if we're evaluating comparative newness alone, we can note that it is at least in a relatively new genre compared to a representational religious painting, and potentially expresses emotion about a breaking situation rather than depicting the motifs of an ancient faith).

I also think a lot of the artworld would agree that abstract political sculptures genuinely were a lot more exciting back when there was something innovative about them as a form. In other words I suspect artworld people often really are interested in newness and I am not convinced by your suggestion that it's a pretense. (Of course within that story, loads of art is totally boring and not innovative and exists only for reasons of business, personal ambition and to rally political causes.)

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Rosencrantz2 9d ago · Edited 9d ago

I think a Christian artist might get artworld support if their art was about their complex feelings toward Christianity or had some kind of critical lens, or maybe if it was by a Christian outsider or even mentally ill person and mixed in another culture or influences in novel ways. If it was primarily proselytising art, it wouldn't stand much of a chance though, especially if it was iconographic in the sense of emulating previous artists in already existing styles. Today's art world insists on newness above all. Not to say most 'tastemakers' of the 21st century aren't incredibly judgemental, they are, but they don't generally deny the incredible artistic output of christianity in centuries past, just today.

If you have got some good example of contemporary conservative Christian art that is uncelebrated, would you be willing to share? I'm genuinely interested.

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Rosencrantz2 11d ago

I also often favour movies where all the 'differences from reality' appear to flow from the concept of the movie itself. The more additional arbitrary tropes the movie includes the worse it can be. A schlocky Marvel movie has rules in addition to 'superheroes exist' such as 'there is no such thing as sex' and 'people banter a lot in dangerous situations' and indeed 'all women (and men) can fight really well'. There are reasons for these rules but they're mainly to do with appealing to a mass audience rather than artmaking. And genre movies basically are clusters of rules that are imposed in addition to a movie's guiding concept. (At least in good genre movies the makers understand the reason the rules have evolved, and use them for an overarching purpose however).

But all that said, this is about good art vs bad art, and if you try to do your learning about the world just based on bad art, it might not be too surprising if you don't learn too much.

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Rosencrantz2 11d ago

It may be normal but if you are a truth-seeking type of person, taking fiction to reflect reality in this way feels like accepting that it should do. But should fiction accurately reflect the world? I would tentatively say no, though art is perhaps best if it's authentic to an earned worldview or moral sensibility of some kind.

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Rosencrantz2 11d ago

I'm sure we all believe false things but tbh, to have reached this conclusion, this guy must be quite underdeveloped in certain aspects of intelligence, curiosity, and yes, even rationality. I think he comes across as blaming the world for giving him a false impression and thinks the world should change to fit his neurotype, whereas he might consider holding all his beliefs more lightly and questioning his assumptions a lot more. His argument might go a bit better if he gave examples of 'experts lying to his face'; rather, all his examples are Marvel-type movies and video games, which he should never have expected to map the real world in the first place.

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Rosencrantz2 13d ago

Are we damaging our international relations or putting a stop to low-life's trying to come here take 'Murican (comic book) Jerbs. Are we just busting foreign activist-artists but no one is saying that part out loud?

Speaking as a somewhat lefty, artist-adjacent type, who could not be described as an activist but has lots of Trump-critical words published under my real name, I am much more reluctant to come to the states under a Trump administration and probably won't visit my extended family members there during this administration (I normally come every year, and normally turn up for remote work duties at least a bit while visiting). Whether most Motte readers would see that as constituting evidence of damage to international relations, or a welcome impact of the new anti-foreigner vibes, I don't know.

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Rosencrantz2 24d ago

The question already excluded that.

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Rosencrantz2 25d ago

The effect is similar to trolling because it's not going to happen and hasn't got a warm reaction even among Trump voters.

I don't think it is true trolling though.

If it somehow became a popular policy, would Trump drop it, as if it had all just been a joke to him all along? I somewhat doubt that.

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Rosencrantz2 26d ago

Now you're talking about articles about polling, not polling. That is a different thing and I don't dispute at all that it is seeking to 'shape the conversation'.

I am not trying to insinuate you're a schizo conspiracy theorist (though now I am wondering if your anger is causing you to lump multiple things together as your enemy, when not all of them are the same).

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Rosencrantz2 26d ago

I struggle to understand what their motives are here. Are you implying the pollsters are trying to help the democrats based on the theory that people turn out for a winner? I don't know what the basis for that theory is. It seems equally or more likely that over-estimating a candidate's popularity will lull them and their voters into a false sense of security. Based on this theory of polls, it would seem more likely the pollsters over-estimating Harris's polling were trying to favour the republicans.

I don't really see evidence to think either of these is the case though. Maybe they are just incompetent or too afraid of being outliers.

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