Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
That would explain grudging support, whereas Trump's supporters are anything but grudging despite his negative VORP on substantive issues.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
Presidential candidates being thoroughly mediocre is pretty normal. There just aren't that many brilliant leaders out there, and in the US presidential system you're praying for the trifecta of: able to win a partisan primary, able to win a nationwide general election, and actually a competent executive. There is some overlap between the first two with respect to charisma, but they're mostly three distinct skill/capability sets.
However, it must be noted that 2024 didn't fit the pattern of people grudgingly voting for their party's nominee. Trump voters did not regard him as the best option amongst a subpar selection. They were (and for the most part still are) rapturously enthusiastic about him.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
Trump is a narcissist with a god complex.
This is undeniable. He's been slapping his name and face on any national icon he can and is presently in the process of trying to make the nation's 250th anniversary a massive ego trip.
A better question is what is it about Trump that makes so many of his supporters abandon their supposed values (Christian morality, patriotism, etc...) to not only excuse but effusively support him in a way that utterly surpasses normal partisan affiliation.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
I've never had a foreign agent try to seduce me, so I can't speak directly to what inducements they might offer, but I imagine even quite successful men are not so inundated with sexual attention from women that they would pass on a moderately attractive woman who actively wants to sleep with them, especially if they're not especially faithful or scrupulous (as appears to be the case with Swalwell).
I would also hazard a guess that genuinely gorgeous women who are willing to trade on their appearance have better career prospects than espionage honeypot.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
If this were anyone other than Trump, no one would be talking about it.
If Trump weren't president of the United States no one would be talking about it.
It is certainly no patch on on dijonghazi or tan suitgate, but you expect a certain amount of decorum from your senior leaders that you don't demand from other people. Especially when it comes to mocking your own supporters by substituting yourself for Jesus.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9d ago
Which of these called a crusade against the Khwarazmian Empire?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9d ago
At least based on OP's article, this seems less like Israeli/Jewish manipulation and more like a straightforward pitch from Netanyahu that Trump bit on despite warnings from most of his foreign policy advisors. It might be another matter if pro-Israeli people in USG were whispering in his ear that this was a great idea, but the Secretary of State, CIA director, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs all told him the Israelis were full of shit.
I have a hard time believing that the USG will actually accept any of the stated points. Every one but the first seems like a non-starter, and taken together seems beyond disastrous for US interests (as well as unbelievably humiliating).
Leaving aside regional interests in the Gulf, conceding the traditional US position on freedom of navigation would be a huge deal. Trump is probably too stupid/parochial to grasp that, though, so I doubt it will move him.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
Fair. I'd forgotten about that.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
I make no commendation of it, but it is very common to find paradigms of masculinity which hold that a man must be tough and serious at all times. Dealing with children is for women.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
I note that at least going back to the Bush administration (and probably back into the mists of time, but I haven't checked) that there is a significant subset of people who simultaneously want to claim moral superiority and seethe at being held to any kind of standard.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
The intermittancy of certain kinds of green energy isn't quite a fake problem, but it is close. Solar especially has consistently made fools of skeptics, and the technical obstacles that were supposed to render it impractical have proven extremely surmountable.
And on the other side of things, Nuclear has a whole raft of its own problems. It is theoretically a "proven" technology, but it is extremely expensive and slow to deploy, with a break-even time measured in decades. The waste problem, while not technically difficult, is politically radioactive (hah) and imposes security problems that Solar and Wind do not have. It is not a coincidence the genuinely successful nuclear-dominated power systems that we (e.g. France, Eastern Bloc) see came from top-down political systems that had the power to tell objectors to suck it and which were only marginally sensitive to economic concerns. There is also the stated preferences vs outcomes issue I alluded to in my first post - Nuclear is deployed more as a rhetorical deflection from other green energy sources than as a serious alternative, and given conservatives' affinity for the fossil fuel industry I think it is very likely that if decarbonization advocates were pushing Nuclear they'd be against it.
I'm really not sure what you're going for here bro.
I could ask the same question. I am attempting to make myself understood. My position - that threats of genocide are more concerning you have the ability to carry them out - is not complicated or ambiguous, so what is the point of asking "So is it ok to threaten genocidal destruction so long as you don't have the capacity to actually carry it out?" Do you actually think I believe that? I suspect not.
I have some uncharitable speculation, but it would be merely speculative.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
I'm just replying to the argument you made.
No, you're not.
- BigObjectPermanceShill raised objections to genocidal threats from Trump.
- Jiro responded with whataboutism about Iranian rhetoric.
- I respond to Jiro saying that the comparison is off based because the circumstances are radically different.
- You imply that I think threatening genocide is okay as long as you can't do it.
The problem is that nowhere in my post do I say or even imply that Iran's rhetoric is acceptable.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
I don't know how you inferred that from what I wrote, but I want to raise two points.
Firstly, and this is unbelievably important: evil behavior from others does not excuse your own evil behavior. There's a kind of self-conscious human orc who feels the need to justify their own brutal impulses by pointing to the depravity of others, but they don't actually seek to resolve anything.
Secondly, power implies responsibility. The fact that one party can act on their threat and the other cannot is absolutely a reason to care more about the one than the other. You should not be threatening genocide, period, but you definitely shouldn't be doing it when you are currently in the process bombing the shit out of the people you're threatening to exterminate.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
A major difference is that right now the US bombing Iranian cities and has the capacity to inflict catastrophic damage on civilian infrastructure while Iran is not bombing American cities and on their best day could inflict minor damage.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
I kind of have the sense that Trump is actually going insane, or at least his emotional control over himself is slipping.
When I read comments like this, I feel like I'm going insane. Trump has been openly bonkers for at least ten years, and the real TDS has always been people insisting that he's not. He has always been emotionally incontinent and narcissistic. He's always been a blustering bully with cruel instincts. He re-entered the political arena as the champion of the most laughable conspiracy theory in history. Hell, 75% of his appeal is that he's an uninhibited, incurious asshole. "He says it like it is" which is, as always, code for "repeats my bigotries aloud." (It's certainly not a statement on his commitment to epistemic courage).
Insofar as there has been downward spiral from his first administration, it is down to his advisors going from relatively normal Republicans who sought to moderate his impulses to weird, evil sycophants who seek to amplify and exploit them. Compare Hegseth to Mattis or even Esper. Esper wasn't much of anything, but he at least wasn't a gleeful psychopath like Hegseth.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11d ago
Worth noting that the failure of Operation Eagle Claw wasn't the lost equipment (losing the helicopters was already priced in), but the failure to rescue the hostages.
Here it appears at least possible that they contemplated the possibility that they'd have to ditch the planes.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11d ago
Pretty much everyone is smugly wrong all the time, so it's not a strong explanation for anything in particular. Right-wing anti-environmentalism predates any sort of SE-related retraining push. Environmentalism is lib-coded in the US because libs are generally the ones worried about the commons and proposing trading off economic growth for QoL improvements, while red states are more likely to have a direct interest in the fossil fuel industry.
--
Separately from that, the problem with "learn to code" was not that it was it was wrong, but that, like every other kind of bootstrap rhetoric, it wasn't actionable. It's one step up from "git good" in terms of life advice. If they were capable of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, they wouldn't be rotting in a central PA town. However, the underlying concept was correct: "The mine/paper mill/meat packing facility/whatever isn't coming back and you/your community is going to have to reinvent itself or (more realistically) die. Anyone telling you otherwise is scamming you."
Of course, telling a bunch of middle-aged rural conservatives "change or die" didn't go over great, no matter what positive gloss was put on it. But no one was quite willing to bite the bullet and tell them their options were to get pensioned off while their kids moved away and their way of life slowly died or to get none of that and have their way of life still slowly die off. Not that it would have made much difference. Nobody gracefully accepts extinction, so it was pretty much a given that they'd fall for any conman willing to promise to turn back the clock.
Coal miners can't be that large of a constituency, surely, so what's driving this obsession in particular?
Coal miners are a symbolically massive constituency. There aren't that many coal miners, but there are quite a lot of people who view coal miners as representative of a particular vision of America (sort of like how there aren't that many cowboys or farmers). Specifically, a mid-century vision oriented around stereotypically "manly" industries like manufacturing and resource extraction. Conversely, opponents of clean energy will raise practical objections, but there's a heavy undercurrent of aesthetic distaste for green energy. Like caring about the environment more broadly, it's hippy and lib-coded. It's not a coincidence that the non-fossil fuel most attractive to anti-environmentalists is nuclear power, with its massive engineering requirements and historic status as bete noire to environmentalists. There is, of course, also the broad self-interest question. Red states are heavily intertwined with the oil and gas industry, so there's interest in portraying renewable energy sources as inefficient or outright pointless while downplaying the costs associated with fossil fuels.
Of course, there's a tension between peoples' personal views and the legal environment in which these systems exist. Thus, e.g. Texas installing more solar than California despite Texans thinking that solar power is gay.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
12d ago
While I am a great believer in the theory that Trump has been absolutely cooked for years, this post is stylistically weird (for Trump) in a way that makes me think he didn't write it. Has he ever used profanity in a public communication before?
(Sidenote: has Trump received the light of Islam? On Easter, of all days?)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
Prediction markets are a casino in a top hat and a monocle, but with added opportunities for insider trading. Once they grew beyond an niche thing for eccentric techies, it was always going to turn out this way.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
14d ago
Tbf I could also go back and say that the US is Don Draper, engaging in showy posturing to hide feelings of inferiority.
Not really. There are some marginal voters who voted for Trump but don't like him, but the vast bulk of Trump's ~~77.5m votes in 2024 came from Republicans. Amongst Republicans he is still incredibly popular, both in terms of raw approval and in terms of the fervency with which he is supported. The MAGA base has essentially devoured the rest of the Republican Party.
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