Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
No bio...
User ID: 1226
Sci-Fi a weird genre to have effectively adopted neo-Luddite tendencies.
And yet SF has always had a notable technophobic element. It's less weird when you consider that a 'cautionary tale' is necessarily going to be SF even if the author thinks everything after the typewriter was a mistake.
I think there's a conceptual muddle (everywhere, not just here) between LARPing (silly, low-grade imitation, connoting unseriousness or outright insincerity) and Cargo Cult behavior (imitating superficial elements of something while not understanding what actual produces the results).
When someone talks about the homeschool prom being a LARP, what I think they're really getting at is that the organizers are trying to copy the structure of an adolescent courtship ritual without having all of the actual machinery that powers it. You try to set up a dance, but it doesn't work because not only do these teenagers not have pre-existing romantic relationships, they don't even know each other.
The reason given for this strategy is that it rarely stays fake forever. Maintaining a performative pretense, saying and doing one thing all while constantly going "this is silly, this is stupid, this is fake, this isn't me, I don't believe any of this" in your head is hard
Many of my peers can cite concrete negative experiences as their reason for leaving the church, but for myself and quite a few others in my cohort, the reason 14 years of private religious education failed to stick was precisely that it was abundantly clear to me past the age of about ten how silly and fake the whole thing was. Being made to participate in the rituals negatively impacted my religious identification compared to if I'd done the truly traditional thing and gone to church for Christmas, Easter, weddings, and funerals.
And the thing is: my teachers were not LARPers. By and large they were true believers trying to share their genuine belief. If they had been faking it, it would have been even more ridiculous, though I do think their authentic belief actively blinded them to the absurdity of doing things like asking a bunch of upper middle class white 15 year olds to share their personal testimony of being born again.
Which is to say: it's not that hard to think something is stupid and fake while going through the motions, and that's when the people insisting are themselves fully committed to the idea. I struggle to imagine what it would have been like if the schools had been run by present day tradcon LARPers whose interest in evangelical Christianity was purely instrumental.
It's why governments have made citizens recite propaganda slogans over and over
Yes, because while many people are persuadable, the most important benefit is isolation. The point of making you participate in these rituals is not to convince you that the underlying ideas are correct (though that may be an added benefit), it's to create the impression that everyone thinks these ideas are correct. Many people are pretty milquetoast and will go along with whatever the prevailing opinion is. The Pledge of Allegiance doesn't make you love America; it encourages you to think everyone around you loves America and you'd best get with the program if you don't want to be ostracized. Likewise with widespread church attendance. It's not about faking it 'til you make it; it's about making your preferred belief system the path of least resistance.
Unless you can actually introduce a general preference cascade towards, e.g., religious fundamentalism or at least get your community to voluntarily segregate from broader society, performative piety isn't going to do much. Substantive indoctrination is going to require something more all encompassing and building parallel institutions requires actually building competitive parallel institutions (which is the real sticking point).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
I think there's a politically-aligned difference here in what "validate" really means.
In the context of the original post and its respondents, the salient distinction seems to be between old school personal conservatism and more modern social anti-liberalism (I don't really have a punchy term for this phenomenon). The former prescribes manning up. The main problem is boys refusing to step up and take risks. The latter focuses primarily on anti-feminism and identifies girls' attitudes as the primary problem.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
I don't feel the US being in a declining era. I don't feel it around where I live or when I go home, or when I visit other parts of the country. The US is in something of a fragile position and I think it could easily go the way of Argentina if politics stays stupid, but this would be a wholly self-inflicted wound, not the product of generational decay. The vast majority of people I encounter who think America is washed are people with either chronic depression or severe racism.
The US has the premier scientific establishment, the most powerful economy in the world, a network of alliances that sprawls over the globe, and a culture that attracts immigrants without number. The question is not "has America lost its mojo?" It is "will America shoot itself in the head?"
But post WWI? There were some moments of glamour in the 1980s, but besides that, France today is living in the shadow of itself.
Writing off Art Deco immediately causes me to question your taste. Of course, I find many elements of pre-modern fashion and architecture unbearably gaudy, so your mileage may vary.
Let me offer a perhaps controversial thesis (which I'll admit I don't really believe myself, at least as an explanatory factor): monumentalism is at odds with the interest of the common citizen. Louis XIV may been Great, but he did not exactly leave France in great shape for the French. The increasingly liberalized societies of developed countries have little patience for pouring vast sums to satisfy the vanity of kings (though they have their own pathologies). Ultimately, cities are for people to live in, not architectural museums to be admired by later generations. Forgetting this seems to be an egregious problem across most of western Europe.
The South is much more pleasant than the North. If you grew up in the North, you are raised to hate southerners and their culture, but basically this is because the north are haughty and arrogant. People in the south are polite and respectful in a way that the north has not been in decades, if ever.
Some of us grew up in the Midwest and learned to hate them from experience :V
I find it funny you say this, because this has been pretty much the opposite of my experience. Southerners are polite, but - especially for men - it is an extremely brittle courtesy that falls apart the moment you step outside their fairly rigid expectations. Being easily offended is not an admirable trait, and I have always been baffled by the characterization of Southerners as nice. Maybe Texans, but my experiences in Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina did not leave me with a favorable impression of the locals. There's an undercurrent of meanness I don't encounter anywhere else in the US, including the rudest parts of the Northeast.
The South is an odd place in that the core South is largely a decaying husk. Georgia is propped up by the growth of Atlanta (housing theory of everything wins again!), but no one thinks Alabama or Mississippi or Tennessee are going anywhere. The parts of the South that are doing well are on the periphery - Texas, Florida (though Florida has its own pile of ticking time bombs), and North Carolina - and are in many ways divergent from traditional southern culture.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5d ago
One of the hallmarks of the American populist right is, on the one hand, an almost gleeful cruelty, and, on the other, a fragility and hypersensitivity that is remarkably at odds with their self-image as tough and emotionally resilient (unlike the snowflake libs). Obama in particular evokes paroxysms of rage (for, uh, reasons) and "you didn't build that" rather bluntly punctures one of their core myths and their hypersensitivity means they can't let it go.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7d ago
No, but I can imagine them claiming an equivalence, being debunked, and then claiming they were directionally correct so it doesn't matter, then repeating the same talking points next week.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
I just don't think it's right to suggest that e.g. a protective tariff will generate zero revenue.
It won't generate literally zero revenue in an accounting sense, though it might damage overall tax revenue, on account of depressing economic activity while not raising much money. Tariffs are highly distortionary.
Maybe this is what the administration is doing, but do you not buy into the concern about outsourcing our industrial base to China at all? (I don't think that situation is quite as dire as is often suggested, but that doesn't mean we should ignore the problem, does it?)
I'm really not that worried about it. The demise of US manufacturing has been tremendously exaggerated, and the panic about it has less to do with pure manufacturing capability than with
a) anxiety over the rise of China and the loss of US manufacturing supremacy. Autarkic economic policy will make this worse, not better. The proper remedy for this would be heavy investments in industrial automation (the US is embarrassingly under-roboticized considering it's the world's most advanced economy) and closer trade ties with allied countries (e.g. Mexico). The problem here is that there's very little appetite for this sort of thing - US labor politics is adamantly anti-automation, domestic producers are more interested in squeezing rents out of a captive market, and industrial policy is largely treated as a jobs program. Even so, there is a limit to what the US can do about this. China has 4x as many people, a state with far fewer fetters on its power, and a policy commitment to industrial overcapacity.
b) the social consequences of industrial consolidation, which also have less to do with China alone (seeing as they predate Chinese industrialization) and more to do with broader shifts in global economic circumstances (e.g. Japan eating into the US' international market share in the 80s) and technological improvements that made manufacturing less labor intensive and encouraged physical consolidation. This was very bad for a lot of rural industry and the communities that depended on them, but creating zombie industries to prop them up is absolutely the wrong move.
The US has the second largest industrial base in the world, by quite a margin. We don't produce a lot of cheap consumer goods, but I don't see a reason to care that we're buying t-shirts from Vietnam instead of Mississippi.
Did you read them?
I did. I was not impressed, especially since they're not exactly delivering on defeating the Houthis (and probably will fail for the same reason the Biden admin failed, which is that it's really hard to bomb a determined adversary into submission).
More importantly, the crude transactionalism doesn't speak highly of the current admin's thought processes. Which shouldn't surprise us, since this is a bunch of amateurs trying to do foreign policy.
There are a number of good moves his administration made in their first term, I think. Whether or not that counts as "4D chess" is up to you, I guess.
I guess you're going to have to clarify what you mean by "secret sauce", because I think this is grading Trump on an outrageous curve. Most of this stuff either doesn't matter or would've happened under any semi-competent president, and without the myriad own-goals that Trump inflicts upon the country foreign policy-wise in the meantime. Trump has a pattern of doing very impulsive things, occasionally punctuated by something reasonable (usually because someone else talked him into it or because the machinery of the USG more or less made the decision for him). I don't see much reason to extend him charity on this, especially when it's been a personal fixation of his for a long time. Trump just thinks tariffs are neat, and he doesn't know enough about trade or economics to understand why this is a bad idea.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
the tariffs have not in fact collapsed the economy, while the institutions' commitment to being paranoid ninnies about covid did.
Putting a pin in this.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
Yes.
The trouble with the comparison is that communism is dead as a political force. The handful of self-identified communists are sanctimonious LARPers with no aspirations to power, whereas fascist sympathizers keep surfacing in positions of influence inside right-wing populist movements. The right-populists wants to engage in whataboutism so they don't have to talk about their neo-nazi problem, but there just isn't the kind of symmetry they're looking for. There's no equivalent neo-stalinist movement. The closest you get are pro-palestinian activists, who rather famously don't get along with mainstream left-wing politicians.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
it really does seem like ardent lefties have to discard a lot of fundamental fairly obvious facts about baseline reality to maintain their ideological commitments.
Interesting.
Its definitely the one place where the average response doesn't drastically misinterpret a person's post and respond to the persons' hallucinated point rather than the plain words they said.
Your mileage may vary. I am routinely imputed views I don't hold. This forum is roughly equivalent to an above average political subreddit, just with the ideological inflection reversed.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
That, uh, doesn't address any of the points. The existence of ownership doesn't preclude cooperation. Coining a new term doesn't do anything about basic physical realities like "if I eat that apple, you can't."
And how are you going to try alternatives when a guy can't even get you to explore them?
Please, put something forward. I'm not going to think your thoughts for you, especially since they're apparently inscrutable. All you've said so far said "property is a mental disorder" on repeat.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
I...don't think this is true. It probably is true that you can't maximize the benefits from all of them.
To the extent that you pursue any one of those goals, you sacrifice the other two. And that's being charitable and assuming there are actual benefits and these policies don't just make America poorer and weaker. Raising enough revenue to replace income taxes requires extraordinarily high tariffs without a decrease in imports (good luck). Trading partners are not going to accept radically asymmetric tariff arrangements, so if you're conceding tariffs as part of trade negotiations, you're effectively dropping the tariffs and any attendant hypothetical benefits (i.e. returning to something approximating the status quo after torching a bunch of good will).
I suppose one could reconcile tariffs-as-industrial-policy with tariffs-as-tax-policy if one supposes that the economic boom from ISI policy will be so massive that even with massive hikes in taxes on imports, people will still consume enough imports to generate a substantial amount of revenue. This is a) not credible b) under Trumpian trade theory, a bad thing.
Frankly, the most honest pitch would be that this is just right-wing degrowth policy - arguing that poverty is an acceptable tradeoff for certain intangible benefits (for left-wingers, it's environmental protection and anti-capitalism; for Trumpists it is the reestablishment/reaffirmation of certain social hierarchies). The Trump administration seems to willing to make this case, though I don't know that they realize that's the case they're making.
And so the US can't just threaten to tank your economy (which they absolutely can do) they can threaten to cripple your national security structure as well.
The problem is that this is an iterated game, which the Trump administration seems to forget. After decades of acquiescing to US preferences on a range of subjects, suddenly the US comes to you and says "You've been taking advantage of us. Give us more." Worse, their demands are irrational or incoherent - their primary grievance seems to be that their consumers buy more stuff from your producers than your consumers do from their producers. The 'deal' they're offering is that you should give American good privileged status in your domestic markets while they tariff your products at home and that you should cut off your biggest trading partner.
Not only is this a shit deal, you're also going to ask yourself "what about next time?" (and, if you're someone depending on US security guarantees, "do I believe they'll actually show up if the shit hits the fan?") The US is a valuable market, but it's not so valuable that you can't live without it. Especially if they plan to shake you down on the regular and you're starting to doubt they can be counted on in a pinch.
The leaked Signal chats were very instructive in this regard.
Were they?
That seems very obvious to me, which is part of why I can't shake the suspicious feeling Secret Sauce Stuff might be involved.
Has Trump ever done anything to make you think 4D chess theories are plausible and not cope? Trump had an anti-China trade deal on his desk during his first term. He vetoed it.
Ownership exists because many (most?) things are rivalrous - if I have it, you can't, and vice versa - and finite. Even things which are not rivalrous or finite are generally produced with such things (e.g. software may be functionally free to reproduce, but producing it in the first place took real labor effort and material resources). Different ownership schemes are different ways of determining who gets to decide to use/have/dispose of various rivalrous things.
You can't escape from this. A communal ownership arrangement is still an ownership arrangement. If the question is "why private property?" the short answer is that private property with regulation has so far proven to be preferable to alternatives in most cases.
Here's something from years back, before I'd zeroed in on the perverse nature of ownership: ...Capitalism is psychopathy with a makeover.
This is a word game, intent on framing things as negatively as possible by drawing a dubious analogy. There's a fair point about how original title is often rooted in a claim asserted by violence, but there's an equally fair counterpoint of "so what are we going to do about it?" Someone is getting final say over the disposition of stuff. That's not a distinctive feature of capitalism - the State (or Community or whatever entity you imagine) asserting their right to dispose of resources is no less arbitrary - so the real question is what gets us the best outcomes (or at least better outcomes)?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
The reason why you'd want to rehabilitate Hitler (aside from the straightforward reason that you think Hitler had some pretty interesting ideas and gets a bad rap) is that Hitler and the Nazis are by their mere existence are uniquely delegitimizing for the authoritarian right in a way virtually no other part of the ideological spectrum has to contend with.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11d ago
I dunno. I would have a stronger opinion of this if I considered myself more economically literate. But the basic strategy that seems to be shaping up, as reported, of essentially forcing countries to choose between the US and China does make sense.
The Trump administration advances multiple mutually exclusive theories justifying high tariffs:
- Tariffs are industrial policy - basically, ISI
- Tariffs are a revenue substitute - tariffs provide a rationale for further income tax cuts by replacing them with consumption taxes
- Tariffs are a negotiating strategy - we're going to use tariffs as leverage to force concessions
The problem is that you can't have all three. If tariffs are a negotiating strategy, you're agreeing to drop them in exchange for whatever concessions you're angling for, negating their use as industrial or tax policy. If they're revenue raisers, you're counting on Americans continuing to prefer imports over domestic consumption, so there goes industrial policy. If they're industrial policy, you're betting on Americans switching to domestic production and thus not replacing revenue.
There are other problems, as well. For example, the Trump admin not having any coherent idea of what they're looking for in a trade deal (in no small part because Trumpian trade theory makes no sense), so trade talks are floundering. Anti-Chinese coalition building is not consistent with trying to shake down your trade partners. ISI has a terrible record (I mean, who doesn't look at Argentina and think it's something to aspire to). Not to mention, the entire endeavor seems to be rooted in either a delusional belief that the US can reclaim post-war era style manufacturing supremacy despite radically different global economic conditions or just straight autarky.
Even being maximally charitable and assuming there's a serious plan behind all this, the Trump admin being so high-handed and transactional towards allies is absolutely the wrong way to go about negotiating the creation of an anti-China trading bloc, especially when they're also badly overestimating the strength of the US' position. The US already benefits substantially from the present global economic arrangement, so going to your trading partners and saying "give me more, also cut off your biggest trading partner who produces a bunch of difficult to replace inputs for your domestic industry" is a tough sell. Doing it in an aggressive and insulting matter further undermines the goal by invoking national pride.
If you wanted to build an anti-China trading bloc, you would probably try to carefully negotiate a multi-lateral trade partnership with other critical trade partners in a way that encourages trade to shift away from China rather try trying clumsy threats and hoping for the best with bilateral negotiations.
We'll see if he's able to pull it off.
I feel like I've been hearing this line more and more lately :V
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
People have regularly been pointing out that Trump routinely devolves into gibberish since 2016 at least. This is a guy whose re-entry into the political sphere was in the form of spearheading the most trivially disprovable conspiracy theory I've ever seen. His mental fitness is not a new topic. His supporters just don't care, because they have never cared about any aspect of Trump's fitness.
It's always helpful to remember that Donald Trump a) will never intentionally admit he did anything wrong b) is a fully post-truth individual. I don't think Trump has been all there in a while, but he's also a narcissist and a pathological liar.
On a different note, this interview helpfully provides an illustration of how Trump likes to pretend to be retarded but is also just an idiot. They're quite easy to tell apart. Compare:
TIME: The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that you have to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia. You haven't done so. Aren’t you disobeying the Supreme Court?
Trump: Well, that’s not what my people told me—they didn’t say it was, they said it was—the nine to nothing was something entirely different.
TIME: Let me quote from the ruling. “The order properly requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador.” Are you facilitating a release?
Trump: I leave that to my lawyers. I give them no instructions. They feel that the order said something very much different from what you're saying. But I leave that to my lawyers. If they want—and that would be the Attorney General of the United States and the people that represent the country. I don't make that decision.
to
TIME: Well, I mean, the question is, how can CEOs make long-term plans and investments if our tariff policy can change from day to day and still remains so uncertain?
Trump: How can they make long-term investments? I'll turn it around. How can they make long-term investments if our country is losing $2 trillion a year on trade?
TIME: Will you consider giving exemptions—
Trump: No wait, just so you understand. How can we sustain and how is it sustainable that our country lost almost $2 trillion on trade in Biden years, in this last year. That's not—when you talk about a company. I had the head of Walmart yesterday, right in that seat. I had the head of Walmart. I had the head of Home Depot and the head of Target in my office. And I'll tell you what they think, they think what I'm doing is exactly right.
"Golly shucks, I'm just the president of the United States, what do I know about one of my banner policies?" vs defensive gibberish.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
It certainly does! Most complaints about how the left always gets its way and the right never does are simply selective perception or "not-winning-hard-enough"/"everything-I-want-is-the-bare-mininum" style complaints. The US political system is incredibly status quo biased. Sometimes this helps the right, sometimes it helps the left.
I'm reminded of this comment from a few years ago on the old place:
It's strange, isn't it, how no one feels like they're in charge.
If your goal is to radically change the legal status quo, US governing systems are generally arranged in such a way where you have to win everything by large margins. The right is generally in favor of this whenever the left wants to do things.
including the entire judiciary at every level and every non-political hire in the bureaucracy (which means they have to be willing to, after winning, use the political capital necessary to fire everyone and replace them with their own)
Given the strong propensity of American conservatives to treat these groups as hated enemies regardless of their behavior, the long-run trend will always be that these groups end up aligned against them. Until such a time as the right can overcome both its ideological hatred of civil servants and its human capital problem, it's not going to produce any solution more sophisticated than either serial arson or bringing back the spoilers system.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
15d ago
Cooper is not merely angling towards anti-communism (where, as you note, there'd be a number of more successful and less odious icons you could hitch your wagon to). He, as far as I can tell, genuinely favors something fascism-adjacent* and is trying to rehabilitate far-right authoritarianism.
Even extending him the charity of assuming he's merely interested in the hard core right-wing authoritarianism and not the genocide, this is awkward for him in several respects. The first is simply that most of his co-partisans are howling bigots, which is embarrassing when you're trying to come across as serious and respectable. Even if you yourself are immaculately well-behaved, you're going to be tarnished by association. The second is that if you're trying to pitch respectable fascism, the historical record of the Nazis is a big problem. Even people who might be on board for the strict top-down social regulation are liable to balk at the aggressive expansionist wars and industrialized mass murder.
So on the one side, you have him here rebuking other parts of the far-right for being indecorous. On the other side, you have him downplaying Nazi atrocities as a combination of tragic misadventure and "the commies made me do it". The end goal is to move fascism closer to the Overton Window and people like the groypers are an impediment to that goal.
*he seems to be somewhat cagey about his actual preferred political arrangement, but his anti-liberalism combined with some of his other statements plus that very caginess makes me strongly suspect that his actual views are well beyond the pale and he's hiding his power level.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
20d ago
Really? What major were you?
Math for undergrad, stats for grad school. Had a Chinese professor who was pretty terrible, but I also had several other Chinese and Korean professors who were totally fine and a number of American professors who were also pretty bad.
The TAs were always fine, even the ones who weren't native English speakers.
The number of Chinese students we retain is awful (under 50%, sources are all wildly different)
Probably because we don't try very hard.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
21d ago
At least from personal experience, I suspect it's unaddressed because it's an incredibly minor problem.
It is alienating and subconsciously hostile to one’s innate sense of community when the prevalence of myriad exotic accents reaches a certain level.
Speak for yourself. I truly do not get the visceral disgust people experience from hearing other accents or languages.
Also, the Chinese nationals are totally spies for the PRC.
Really? All of them?
See, I am a China Hawk, and I think it is absolutely braindead not to siphon off every bit of human capital from them we can. The risk of the occasional PRC spy pales in comparison. You don't have to give them jobs designing ICBMs.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
21d ago
The defense of forcing ideological diversity, per your own words, is that it directly influences someone's ability to contribute to the organization.
The defense of forcing background diversity is that it directly influences someone's ability to contribute to the organization.
it's categorically different from adding diversity of demographic characteristics under the belief that adding such diversity would increase diversity of thought.
Why? What is the categorical difference between "You need more conservatives because it will add perspectives you haven't considered" and "you need more [women/blacks/etc] because it will add perspectives you haven't considered". You don't actually articulate what makes it different.
The primary distinction I see is that while both are ideological arguments, the latter is not arguing for ideological representation while the former is. Other than that, either way you're dealing with an argument to use an imperfect proxy for some nominally desired underlying quality (and in both cases the nominally desired quality is a figleaf for ideological goals).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
21d ago
(honestly a completely reasonable opinion if you’ve ever spent a significant amount of time on a major university campus)
...why?
The fact that the US attracts a ton of foreign talent is a feature, as is the fact that many of these students bring money into the country. The national security pretext is largely irrelevant (we're mostly talking about undergrads and it's not especially difficult to vet or just exclude foreign nationals when dealing with genuinely sensitive research).
Francis' critics and fans outside the Church both seem to have a wildly exaggerated idea of how progressive he was. He was more tolerant (and I use the word advisedly) on certain social issues and was a vocal proponent of the religious humanitarianism* that is pretty standard for the Catholic Church, but he was still fairly socially conservative. He might have be liberal for the pope, but that isn't saying much.
*which, granted, puts him at odds with the... lifeboat capitalism of the contemporary American conservative movement
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