Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
No bio...
User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
19hr ago
Fair. I'd forgotten about that.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
19hr 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
19hr 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
19hr 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
21hr 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
21hr 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
22hr 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
23hr 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
1d 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
1d 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
2d 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
3d 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
4d ago
Tbf I could also go back and say that the US is Don Draper, engaging in showy posturing to hide feelings of inferiority.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
But other members of the Cabinet and administration have expressed frustration that Bondi’s apparent lack of involvement in the details of managing the Justice Department resulted in basic mistakes. “They are sending in idiots” to defend the Trump administration in court without sufficient experience, one official from another agency told us.
It hardly seems fair of them to blame her for the fact that the Trump administration repels competence.
The problem with making a personal loyalty pledge the sole qualification is you inevitably end up with a staff dominated by bootlickers and conmen. Competent people generally expect to be treated with a measure of dignity and even the ones with a weak sense of ethics have some regard for their professional reputation.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
If you had two stickers, one labeled US and one UK/EU, which sticker would you put on the first man, and which on the second?
The actual answer is that the meme is not applicable. People in the US and EU think about the other plenty. If you put a gun to my head and made me choose, I'd say the US gets to be Don Draper in this scenario, if only because a lot of Americans seem only tenuously aware that people in other countries exist and have lives (Tanner Greer dubbed this type of thinking 'big country autism'). But the reality is that it's extremely easy to elicit thoughts on Europe from Americans, whether that is praise or contempt or seething.
The pattern emerges that people in the US are more likely to think that the people of Europe are both capable and share our interests and values, while the people of Europe disagree.
The reason I don't think the Mad Men Meme applies is that I think this difference in attitude is not due to an asymmetry in concern (i.e. Americans caring more about Europe than vice versa) but due to the power asymmetry. As it stands now, while the US is allied with most of Europe, European nations are very much junior partners. That means getting jerked around by the interests and the whims of the US. I am fairly confident that if circumstances were reversed - if the military and economic security of the US turned on the impulses of European voters, or we were staring down the barrel of an economic crisis because European leaders did something retarded - Americans would be at least as cool on Europe as Europeans appear to be on us right now. Similarly, I think the greater American optimism about the EU's power is explained by this power asymmetry. What Americans perceive is that the US doesn't always get what it wants from the EU. What EUers perceive is that whenever there's an international crisis, they're stuck monitoring the situation while the US does whatever it wants.
Actually, the EU is Don Draper, feigning aloof superiority while privately riddled by anxiety.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5d ago
It's very hard to keep the lights off to that degree. Also unclear how bombing a public health institute is going to help.
These types of campaigns have been ineffective against governments less willing to inflict hardship on their own citizens, and yet there remains an irrepressible constituency for the idea that the core issue with American foreign policy is not lack of public trust or coherent strategy, but that we're too squeamish.
I have to wonder why the Trump administration's foreign policy leadership thinks they can compel a regime that just killed 20-30k of their own citizens by hitting civilian infrastructure.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5d ago
If by 'retreat' you mean 'responding to a different claim', then sure.
You said (emphasis mine): "That's wrong for any definition of 'intellectually respectable' or 'how government ought to operate' that doesn't mean 'liked by progressives'"
My point is that Actually Existing Trumpism isn't defensible even by the principles Trumpists claim to support, and they usually don't try. This is not simply a matter of only using progressive yardsticks. Trumpists don't generally, for example, publicly support corruption. They don't even say "I'm willing to tolerate corruption as long Trump puts the boot into the immigrants and trans people." They dismiss critics as some combination of hysterical and dishonest. They do this even when critics are mounting arguments that, if they were intellectually consistent, Trumpists ought to at least entertain.
So, yes, I feel very comfortable with the "TDS is an intellectual escape hatch" theory.
Jtarrou posted -- literally days before you nailed this jello 'thesis' to the wall -- that Trump could well be in the wrong here.
This is literally a demonstration of my point. JTarrou isn't seriously entertaining the idea that Trump could be wrong; he's saying that if Devereaux's analysis is right, it would be pure chance. Not through any direct response to his arguments, but because "Devereaux is a long time Trump doomer"
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
It is never 4D chess.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7d ago
The chart at the top shows 70% very unfavorable and 20% somewhat unfavorable (90% total). The 79% is the average across the countries surveyed.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
7d ago
The neocon dream was a quick, decisive war to topple the IRI and replace it with a pro-American democracy. The specifics of how that was going to happen were probably pretty hazy and involved both underestimating Iran and overestimating the US, but I really doubt they envisioned an intense-yet-noncommittal air war with no meaningful ground element. As I will never shut up about: this war looks like a failed attempt at gunboat diplomacy with seemingly no plan if Iran didn't immediately cave.
The bombardment of Tehran, Isfahan, and IRGC infrastructure looks a lot like 2003 "Shock and Awe" in Iraq.
Not really. The point of "Shock and Awe"-style tactics is to disrupt enemy command and control so your ground forces can overwhelm theirs with limited organized resistance. There was no ground component to Operation Epic Fury.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8d ago
I think this gender abolitionist framing is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
The problem with the gender abolitionist framing is that when push comes to shove virtually no one actually believes it. There are a lot of culturally contingent ideas about femininity and masculinity and associated gender roles and there's some heated disagreement over how much the behavioral differences between men and women are rooted in biology(/natural order) vs indoctrination, but the number of people who think we should actually get rid of gender distinctions is close to zero. What is passed off as gender abolitionism tends to merely be a rebellion against perceived male supremacism and heteronormativity. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of women like being women. When they chafe against the strictures of womanhood, they're not (generally) saying "I wish I could be a man," they are saying "I wish I didn't have to put up with all this bullshit."
All of which is to say, I don't think hostility to the development of any sort of masculinist/male-specific movement descents from a serious belief in gender abolitionism. Rather, there are two main motives:
a) a zero-sum view of gender relations, under which any sort of men's movement is a problem because men's gain is women's loss and vice versa.
b) the (usually correct) fear that any men's movement or space will rapidly become anti-woman.
However, you can't just come out and say "men shouldn't be allowed to advocate for their interests because they'll inevitably become a threat to women." That sort of gives the game away. Instead the issue is dressed up in gender abolitionist rhetoric wherein men's interest in masculinity is held to be illegitimate/mistaken in and of itself (as illustrated in the quoted excerpt). However, this doesn't get great traction with men because it's transparently one-sided (and also bullshit). You can't make a big deal about the importance of representation for women and then turn around and say it's not important for men.
(There is also the separate reality that modern liberalism is very hands off on the question of what it means to live well, which makes it averse to highly prescriptive social norms. This includes strongly defined gender roles.)
Women don't grow up thinking about how to be woman, because much of what defines femininity is there by default.
I can't speak from firsthand experience due to not being a woman, but from what I can observe and have been told, this is very much not true. Girls have their behavior policed from a young age, and while the framing (and content) may be different across social contexts, the basic idea of needing to learn feminine ('ladylike') behavior and skills is omnipresent. Even in the purely physical domain, feminine beauty is, while helped along to a great degree by genetics, heavily artificial. Often in ways men are hilariously blind to (e.g. many men are comically bad at noticing when women are wearing makeup)
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).
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