Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
16d ago
I actually have a different issue to raise than my earlier remark: very little of this is new. American business elites have been trying to roll back regulatory oversight, labor laws, and the welfare state since the minute they were created. Certainly the proposition that Musk et al are reacting to being 'ruined' is laughable. Even before he managed to make himself un-elected shadow president, he was one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. Sorry bud, libs hating billionaires isn't new either. All you have to do to get away from them is uninstall twitter.
The only thing new is that the conservative movement has become more reactionary and overtly illiberal.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
16d ago
I don’t think conservatives have been in the cultural drivers seat since at least the 1970s.
I disagree. The fact that American conservatives don't make very much art isn't especially material*, both because popular art still tended to defer to conservative sensibilities and, more importantly, because I am not just talking about art. Piecemeal challenges to conservative cultural hegemony didn't change the underlying fact that you had to convince conservatives to let you succeed and conservatives were still ultimately setting the baseline. ∃ liberals who have substantial breaks from conservative orthodoxy is not the same thing as liberals driving culture. It took 45 years to go from Stonewall to Obergfell, and that issue still isn't exactly settled. Hell, you had Prop 8 in California in 2008. The 80s were full of conservative backlash to the cultural turmoil of the 70s and the 90s were marked by Clinton's 'triangulation' strategy (i.e. pivoting right on a lot of issues) and a general sense that everything was fine, don't rock the boat.
*Although perhaps a better metaphor then would be that conservatives were in the back of the cultural limousine, being chauffeured around by liberals.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
17d ago
DOGE is arguably being fairly effective in its core goal of providing propaganda to justify tax cuts while convincing the base forward rather than backward progress is being made on government spending.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
17d ago
The left, via their march through institutions as well as their early control over new media, gained access to a super weapon; the ability to point the whole of society against any individual.
This isn't really true*, but it gestures towards something true: the fairly novel experience for social conservatives of not being in the normative driver's seat. For a very long time, social conservatives defined collective norms while social liberals rebelled against them. Every so often the liberals would win a fight and move consensus, but the center of gravity remained with conservatives. Even institutions that tended to be dominated by liberals in composition (e.g. Hollywood) still had to submit to a broader conservative consensus.
In the Obama era, this was upended and for the first time conservatives were in the uncomfortable and bewildering position of being censured for failing to adhere to liberal values rather than vice versa. The cultural center of gravity shifted away from conservatives. Liberals were defining standards of public behavior, and generally not in ways conservatives found agreeable. The entertainment industry shrugged off the aforementioned conservative consensus and started pushing overtly progressive themes (e.g. LGBT/minority representation) in a way that challenged conservatives' sense of rightful cultural hegemony.
This is part of why we get the peculiar phenomenon where conservatives seem to care far more about what liberals say about them than vice versa. The former were accustomed to being able to demand respect and unaccustomed to finding themselves on the outside;the latter were already acculturated to a certain amount of social opprobrium and often took pride in it.
*social media cancellation overwhelmingly affected people in liberal-dominated spaced and was an emergent behavior rather than a directed one. Rupert Murdoch was in no danger of being canceled even though left-wingers absolutely despised him; we can argue about why Musk shifted right
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
20d ago
"Trump is trolling" is just a lowbrow gloss on "Trump is playing 4D Chess". It's never 4D Chess. Not with anyone, but especially not with Trump. It's just cope for the reality that Trump is an impulsive idiot.
Canadians may be better off simply laughing about the 51st state rhetoric instead of claiming they are being annexed.
That was more or less the response back in December when Trump first brought it up. Trump's subsequent behavior points more towards trolling in the classic form.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
21d ago
I mean, this happened with the Right during Obama's second term. We've been undeniably living with it since 2016.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
21d ago
Instead we expect the state to pick up the slack and look after all these unfortunate groups, which only results in a multitude of horror stories about police departments, child protective services etc. being a useless bunch of uncaring buffoons
The history of religious charities is not exactly immaculate either. The reality is that if you give people power over the desperate, some of them will abuse it.
However, it's also not really correct to say that responsibility transferred from church to state. In some places (especially Catholic countries) the church and state provision of aid were heavily enmeshed. However, you also had things like the English poor laws, which were secular, state-provided relief (of a sort) for the desperately poor. More commonly than either, people in the described categories simply went without aid if they weren't situated within a community they had strong ties to. The social support systems of the past were quite narrowly applicable (almshouses were for people who nowadays we'd consider 'homeless'), don't generalize to modern contexts very well (relatively few people live in small agrarian communities, and even those have been radically transformed from pre-industrial forms), and in some cases have no modern analogs.
I wonder what the rationalist point of view on all of this is.
I am not exactly a rationalist, but I am generally unimpressed by romanticization of the past. I am likewise skeptical of the desire to reserve a privileged spot for religion in the functioning of society. It is true than in some cases religious organizations did provide certain social services, but I don't seem much reason to think they were uniquely capable in that respect.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
21d ago
I think the modal shoddy government decision looks more like spending absurd amounts on high speed rail that never materializes.
I'm not sure this is true. People tend not to fuck around with critical systems unless they absolutely have to, so visible high impact decisions tend to be rare. But I think the typical bad government decision looks more like an act of over/under/misregulation with wide-reaching consequences. Things like overly restrictive drug approval processes, inadequate clean air standards, bad land use laws, etc... And there's also more tail risk with government policy. Corporations mostly aren't tasked with public health or maintaining critical transit infrastructure or public order. The last time I'm aware of that a corporation caused a famine was when the East India Company was acting as the de facto government of Bengal, etc...
I picked on PEPFAR in particular because it is an existing program. It's true that the US could save more lives if it were willing to spend more money, but with PEPFAR you can point to specific people who depend on the program. You can point more broadly to any medical/healthcare program - breaking Medicare/Medicaid would lead to a lot of people losing healthcare access.
On the corporate side, you could look at Thomas Midgley, who was instrumental in popularizing leaded gasoline and freon, with drastic effects on probably tens of millions of lives.
I guess we're dealing a different intuition around blame, because I see these as fundamentally regulatory failures. Same with motor vehicle fatalities - private companies may build the cars and private citizens may drive them, but traffic laws and vehicle standards are set by the government.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
21d ago
Hey, thanks to Trump you might finally get a customs union within Canada.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
22d ago
The justice system does not exist to spite criminals. It exists to maintain public order and occasionally dispense justice.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
22d ago
Something as simple as humanitarian aid suspension for a few weeks will kill more people than every act of shoddy automotive and aerospace engineering in the last twenty years put together.
I feel like people have difficulty grasping the difference in scale of even very large corporations versus government operations, and hence what is at stake. "Move fast and break things" is an ethos that works fine in tech where you're designing new commercial products and the worst that happens is you waste some money or cause a minor accident or invent digital heroin. It's not an ethos that works well for critical systems.
Can we? State and local government often makes the Feds look efficient and honest. Some of the most high-impact bad policy is attributable to decisions made at the state and local level. It's rent seeking all the way down, and half the time "local autonomy" just local elites stamping the boot on the necks of local out group members.
Obviously not 100% of people will be convinced but this does a lot to discredit the legitimacy and even constitutionality of our current government
Again, this makes no sense. Accelerationism rarely plays out the way you expect. If you start corruption and abuse-maxing, the most likely reaction is tightening accountability and proceduralism such that officials have less discretion to abuse. It also raises the risk of authoritarianism as the power abusers you enthroned to destroy state legitimacy abuse their power to hang onto to power. Bad faith participation may make sense of your goal is to literally wreck the country, but that's just a different form of shooting yourself in the dick.
Like, how do you see this playing out? Trump abuses executive discretion, therefore we're going to abolish social security?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
23d ago
So yes, Musk, Trump et al. acting brash, irrational, and abusing power might be a great thing, if it reduces the government loving progressive caucus’ trust in the whole apparatus.
Why on Earth would it do that? When the opposition party makes it clear their plan is overt sabotage, you're not going to think "the system is broken, better hand even more power to people like Musk." You're going to think "we have a problem with saboteurs."
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
23d ago
Other possibility is that it is not a new personality trait, only its magnitude has increased lately: Musk has had a documented habit of pushing not exactly reality based visions when he has been able to get away with it
I think this is correct. Musk can simultaneously be a narcissistic bullshitter and a highly capable manufacturing CEO. Delusional overconfidence can be a benefit in certain endeavors because even if you fall short of unrealistic expectations you may still exceed what was conventionally thought possible and you may stick with projects when less demented determined people would have called it quits. On the other hand, it can also lead you to throw away time, money, and effort on unrealistic projects that go nowhere because no amount of force of will can overcome the technical problems.
It can also lead you to repeatedly fall for obvious nonsense because you think you're too smart to be wrong, and none of your retinue dares correct you.
I am once again obliged to note that despite direct, unambiguous textual pacifism, Christianity was the faith of choice for a continent full of warrior-aristocrats who, in between constantly fighting each other, would make an effort to prove their faith by going halfway around the world to fight other people. These Christian warriors routinely behaved appallingly, not only to heathens but to their fellow Christians (and this is before we touch on a number of incredibly savage sectarian wars). On more than one occasion they would literally make war on the Pope.
So yeah, I don't have a problem saying that it is entirely within a reasonable understanding of Christianity that a gangster who murders a priest can still be a Christian. It is not the only face of Christianity by a long shot, but it is certainly one of them, and one with a long history.
is there any doubt that millions of Christian’s are currently being persecuted?
I think the claim that Christianity is uniquely persecuted and demands special attention above and beyond other religions is questionable at best. The argument is not helped when there seems to be substantial misrepresentation going on - namely that the vast majority of 'persecuted' are Christians living in Christian-dominated countries that happen to be shitty places live.
To be perfectly ungenerous, my experience with people bringing up the claim is that they are usually not actually interested in intrareligious humanitarianism*; they are simply grievance-mongering and reinforcing a siege mentality amongst American Christians. How does Darryl Cooper feel about admitting tens of millions of Christian refugees from the Middle East/Africa or Latin America or China into the United States? Or, alternatively, vast amounts of humanitarian aid to those same regions? I have a weird feeling I'm significantly more in favor either of those than he is.
*to be fair to Open Doors, I don't think they are doing this, but they also have the receipts that people like Carlson or Cooper or Walsh do not.
I did click through. I was underwhelmed. 'Persecution' implies some sort of specific targeting on account of religion. Christian gangsters going after Christian community leaders for reasons orthogonal to religious identity sounds more like Mexico has a crime problem than a religious persecution problem. Mexico is an overwhelmingly Christian society with relatively high rates of religious involvement in communities
I confess to being skeptical of the claims about indigenous communities. Most of these indigenous communities are already Christian (albeit a form of Christianity that would look pretty weird to American Protestants), and looking at their own report it looks mostly like sectarian friction in rural communities.
--
The point of all this being that I think they are being sufficiently smudgy with their representation of facts in areas I have some knowledge of to make me question their reliability elsewhere.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
24d ago
Listing Mexico and Colombia as places where Christians are persecuted seems like they're using a tendentious definition of 'persecution'.
I think I've solved the mystery of why the right never makes much headway with Jewish voters.
Christian countries actively ignore it and really couldn’t care less
I hazard the 'Christian' countries he is talking about are actually secular nations that merely happen to have large populations of nominally Christian residents.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
26d ago
You cannot have nice things without trust, and "trust" isn’t some value that mystically vanished: the disappearance of trust has been warranted. The governing strata of society are infested with liars and grifters.
I don't think this is consistent with the patterns we observe in contemporary politics. General institutional distrust is wildly asymmetric and the populist moment certainly hasn't cut down on the number of liars and grifters involved in government. People overwhelmingly think the other team is untrustworthy, but are, if anything, even more blindly loyal to their own political elites than they have been in the past.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
26d ago
That's because the frog's motives are significantly less relevant than its desperate circumstances.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
27d ago
If the US invades your country and you fight alongside the invaders, the least you could be rewarded with is protection.
A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog is willing to help because the scorpion is fighting the frog-nazis. But it hesitates, afraid that it'll be punished if the frog-nazis see it helping a scorpion. The scorpion offers to let the frog move in with it afterwards. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. After crossing the river, the scorpion hops on a helicopter and flies away. As the chopper takes off, the frog asks the scorpion why it changed its mind, to which the scorpion shouts back: "I just remembered I'm super racist. And besides, you're not a scorpion, so any promise I make to you doesn't really count." "But I'll die." "Damn, that shit sucks."
Then the frog goes to read a history book and learns that scorpions do this all the time.
--
When you're dealing with desperate people, there's really no cost to screwing them over except the moral injury of going back on your word. They don't have any ability to get you back and the concern that they won't work with you in the future is mostly obviated because desperate people don't have a choice but to queue up to get screwed over again and again. And the moral injury is heavily defrayed if you don't consider the people you're betraying to have moral worth.
Many Trumpists have more or less openly embraced the idea that the only people with moral value are a nebulous subset of Americans. For everyone else, it's transactional at best, if not outright malicious.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
27d ago
Sold by who? Trump is president of the US - if someone is going to take lead on forming an anti-China trading bloc it's going to be him (both because the US is the country with the most vested interest in the idea and because it seems incredibly unlikely that Trump would accept the leadership of anyone else).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
27d ago
That's certainly the traditional critique, but I'm not sure it holds up. And by not sure I mean I'm sure it doesn't. The US' finances are unusually messy for a wealthy developed country. The US has a debt-to-GDP ratio of approximately 120%. Pretty bad, though our northern adversary and former overlord both hover around 100%, so maybe it's just an Anglosphere thing. Or maybe not, since Australia's is ~50%.
Conversely, the 'give-away' heavy democracies of Europe (e.g. the Scandinavian countries, Germany, Belgium) broadly have better public finances than the US in terms of both debt and deficit (some actually run a modest surplus from time to time). This despite generally weaker economies and lower per capita income. American conservatives like to attribute this to (lack of) military spending, but they're mostly wrong. The primary driver of the difference is taxation - the US spends like a high-tax country, but has relatively low taxes. This is not a general failing of democracy, it is an peculiarity of American politics.
I don't have any theories as to the deep rooted cause of this, but in a proximate sense, I think this is fairly straightforwardly explained by the fact that the US doesn't actually have any fiscal conservatives. The Democrats are, broadly, fiscally liberal. They want to raise taxes and redistribute the money or spend it on public services (but will happily settle for the latter without the former). The Republicans, however, are not fiscally conservative. They are merely anti-taxation. They might like to cut welfare spending and public services, but when push comes to shove they always prioritize cutting taxes over balancing the budget or paying down the deficit.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
27d ago
Well, I'm not a leftist and have been pro-free trade forever, so I can't speak to people like that. Conservative tax-phobia is most salient to their stated preference to reduce the deficit versus their revealed preference of increasing it via uncovered tax cuts.
What I can say is that not all taxes are created equal - in terms of revenue raised, distortionary impact, etc... Tariffs are extremely distortionary, which means they cost a lot more than the revenue they raise, and that's before how you'll start getting retaliatory tariffs. A broad-based VAT or sales tax wouldn't be especially popular, but it would probably be defensible. But, importantly, that is not what Trump wants to do. He (says he) wants to cut income taxes and replace them with tariffs.
Trump Derangement Syndrome Utterly Vindicated, Season 10, Episode 19.
Trump promised to act in a lawless, corrupt, and abusive manner. Lo and behold. I don't know if the cruelty is the point, but it certainly seems like a KPI.
The trouble is, of course, that admitting the TDSers were right either requires openly admitting that you're evil
Even assuming this is true, crime does not become legal because you do it really fast. The Alien Enemies Act doesn't apply, and the administration claiming they can nullify due process is textbook tyranny.
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