quiet_NaN
19hr ago
The point I was trying to make, unsuccessfully, was that in my world model, an economic superpower trying to fix their trade deficit by applying tariffs proportional to that deficit would be considered a terrible idea by a broad majority -- basically everyone except for "destroy all corporations" radical leftists, and lizardman's constant worth of outliers (some de-growthers, some sourvereign citizens, some fringe isolationists who want to see America 100% autark, even if that means giving up on oil and coffee, et cetera).
Naturally, here at the motte we have a proud tradition of taking fringe ideas far out of the overton window serious, and I am fine with that. I just feel that "starting a global trade war will actually go great" was plenty discussed here already, and I would much rather discuss the next fringe idea, perhaps "legalize marital rape" or "build a sub-aquatic habitat in the Mediterranean Sea for the Gazans". In my mind, the fact that someone has just announced a fringe idea as the national policy of the US should not make it less fringe than if a random poster had posted it here. I am not a fan of the forced neutrality displayed by the original poster. If party A wants the living room thermostat set to 280K, and party B wants it to be set to 680K, setting one's preference to 480 Kelvin is not neutral, but just about as insane as 680K.
I grew up vaguely left-wing and peace-y. Then Putin happened, and suddenly I found myself having to defend the North Atlantic Treaty and mutually assured destruction. Now Trump has taken a turn towards economic authoritarianism, and I find myself holding up the torch for libertarianism -- not because I think taxation is theft, but because I recognize that capitalism leads broadly to better outcomes than all the alternatives which have been tried.
quiet_NaN
20hr ago
Oh, it was generated by a squishy neural network, but in retrospect I might have had the chatGPT bullet point format in my subconsciousness.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Wait what? The chambers of Congress can change procedure with a simple majority? And presumably, the procedural changes survive elections?
This seems ripe for abuse. Say party A currently has a majority in the House, but knows that it will lose its majority after the elections. They can simply make a procedural rule saying that the speaker has to be elected with a 2/3rd majority, and until he is elected, the House can do nothing else but try to elect a speaker. (Or they might simply change the rules so that the guy with the longest beard is the speaker, if they have the guy with the longest beard.) This would prevent the newly elected majority from passing any laws until SCOTUS intervenes. I think it is good practice to require a 2/3 majority for changing how a legislature operates.
As I understand it, under the current rules the House will have to vote on some proposal X. Now people who do not want to vote on matter X introduce a proposal Y which says "we will not vote on matter X".
What I don't understand is how this would change the substantial outcome. Either a majority would support X, in which case they will surely not vote for proposal Y. Or a majority is opposed to X, in which case they presumably might support Y -- but that does not matter for the outcome because X is lacking support anyhow.
The only way this matters is if the vote itself is the problem, not the outcome -- if their base would be enraged if they voted against X, for example. However, the optics of "we specifically changed the rules so that we did not have to vote on the Stop Puppy Torture Act" does not feel substantially different from "we voted against the SPTA" -- you might keep the support of your most stupid puppy-loving constituents, but in turn you lose support from anyone who likes clean, efficient legislature instead of messy spaghetti code.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Ideological benefits to tariffs:
- Exemptions. With the tariffs being as high as announced, a lot of companies reliant on imports will no longer be feasible in the US. This means that the leaders of these industries will petition Trump for exemptions, which gives Trump a lot of power. Musk wants to import cheap lithium for Tesla -- sure, he is on team Trump, after all. But if he was not, denying them exemption would be a no-brainer for Trump: electric vehicles are very much a thing for urbanites who care about climate change (and, by correlation, are woke), and breaking the EV industry is denying his political enemies a power base. Bankrupt companies do not payroll Democrats, after all. For more neutral industries, Trump might ask "I don't know, what have you been doing for me lately?" -- thereby gaining political leverage: campaign contributions, building a factory in the state of a Republican senator, whatever.
Of course, this is is the case with every regulation which has exceptions. If the Democrats had passed an environmental regulation which forbade the emission of carbon dioxide, and then crafted exemptions for all the industries aligned with them, that would be just as bad.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Okay, let me try too.
Dangers and downsides to having the US air force firebomb Kansas City:
- A lot of people will die in agony.
- A lot of housing and means of production will be destroyed.
- Refugees will increasing the housing crisis in other cities.
Economic benefits of the USAF firebombing Kansas City:
- Housing prices in KC will be much lower while it is an uninhabited wasteland
- It will incentivize other US cities to prefer non-burning building materials and invest in air defense, which will both increase disaster preparedness and be a boon to the some industries.
- It will open up avenues to redevelop the city.
Ideological benefits (for various ideologies):
- It will drastically lower the amount of immigrant crime at ground zero.
- Over a period of a decade, it will likely lead to lower GHG emissions.
In general, firebombing is much more acceptable than nuking because of (a) the lack of nuclear fallout and (b) it does not contribute to the normalization of nuclear weapon use.
In conclusion, there are good economic and ideological arguments both for and against firebombing random cities, and experts in law, strategy and economy disagree if it is net beneficial or not. The fact that every administration before president Harris has refrained from burning down KC does not mean that she is wrong to do so.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
There is a vast gulf between "it is the end of the world" and "it is no big deal".
For example, if I were to lose the use of my legs tomorrow, that would not be the end of the world. Wheelchairs exist, and my job does not strictly require me to be able to walk. However, it would be a big deal, on roughly the same order as if an economy is forced to rely on salvaging landfills for working computers.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I used Prussia because Bavarian natives have a tendency to use the word Preiß (Prussian) for Germans from the northern half of Germany, often in the term Saupreiß (pig Prussian).
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, [...]
Sure. Let us crash the economy so that the PMC will have to work in the fields instead of designing iPhones or being a DEI compliance officer or living from day trading. The basis for a prosperous nation is honest, back-breaking work, not fancy technology.
A nation, a culture, a race that does not provide for itself, should go without. This, I imagine, is one of the core ethical commitments that separates MAGA from its opponents.
Sure. If cocoa beans do not grow in a country, its citizens should go without chocolate. If they don't have oil, they shall go forgo petrochemicals and combustion engines. If they can not support a semiconductor production chain, they shall not have computers. The population shall acquire disease resistance the hard way until they can develop a vaccine, just as God intended.
After all, this is kind of the program which turned Cambodia into a superpower when it was implemented by the Khmer Rouge, so it will surely Make America Great Again as well.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
So, it appears that Germany is following Trump's footsteps with regard to selectively removing foreigners for political speech:
The orders — issued by the state of Berlin, whose Senate administration oversees immigration enforcement — are set to take effect in less than a month. None of the four has been convicted of any crimes.
Some notes:
- The four people to be deported are citizens of the US, Ireland and Poland. The latter two countries are part of the EU, as is Germany. One of the cornerstones of the EU single market is the free movement of people. It appears to be more of a privilege than a right, actually. For contrast, imagine if Bavaria decided to refuse entry to people from Prussia, or California decided to deport any people born in Texas -- both would be blatantly unconstitutional.
- This decision was made by the city of Berlin, which is ruled by a coalition of CDU/SPD (convervative/labor) -- the same constellation which will rule Germany in the future. The CDU is basically trying to rebrand itself as AfD light -- adopting policies suggested by the far right. (The AfD is of course very opposed to anything which could be considered pro-Muslim antisemitism. Not that they are overly fond of holocaust memorials, though.) The SPD is notorious for lacking any organ resembling a spine, so it is unsurprising that they went along with it.
- The targeted people were accused of participating in a pro-Gaza demonstration. Some where accused of shouting "From the river to the sea", which is illegal in Germany (and I am ok with it being illegal). However, none of them have been convicted so far.
Now, I am not per-se against deporting foreigners if they have been convicted of a serious offense, say if their prison sentences exceed 10% (or 20%) of the time they have spent in the host country so far. From what I can tell, most of the accusations here are very minor, though. Using immigration laws to sidestep due process is wrong, though.
Also, for EU citizens, expelling them should additionally be contingent on a separate court case in front of some EU court and subject to criminal standard of evidence. If Berlin wants to get rid of these people, let them argue why they are a hazard to their security in front of a judge.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I don’t buy the idea that tariffs are a net negative for everyone in an economy.
This is an exceedingly low bar to clear. 9/11 was not a net negative for everyone in the US economy. The spread of the automobile devastated the horse industry. Lumina might put half the dentists out of work. I am sure that there are a few people who fare better under North Korea's economic regime than they would in a more capitalist society.
Blue collar labor might have a niche in the future, but "unskilled American laborers" will not make a comeback. Even if Trump manages to bring back manufacturing by putting his hands on the scale in favor of more expensive, worse, US-produced products, modern manufacturing relies heavily on automation, and outlawing automation will just turn the US into some third-rate country when everyone does it (instead of just the fucking longshoremen's union).
The good news is that plausibly, AI will threaten the livelihood of the PMC too -- perhaps even more, a lawyer is easier to replace with an LLM than a plumber. So at some point, we might get some kind of UBI. But the days where factories were hiring tons of people to shovel coal into furnaces are not coming back, and good riddance -- these were never jobs which enabled humans to thrive.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I want to revisit my point 6. A boy is at least one order of magnitude more likely to be murdered by his mother than a girl by an incel (though both happen extraordinarily rarely). Should we make a TV show about it? Hold hearings in government about it? Order that all expectant mothers need to attend a mandatory class on how they need to purge themselves of misandry and not murder their sons?
The truth is that incels are not hated because they are very murderous. Their crimes are much more serious than that:
- They are icky
- They made the mistake of being born straight cis-male, which marks them as oppressors in the woke mindset
- They might follow manosphere influencers with pretty antique views
- They presumably might not compete for money and status to attract a mate, thereby calling the natural order of society into question
- Presumably, they might not even treat every hot woman with the devotion which is her birthright
Women will put up with hot men who are not feminists, but if your sexual market value is small and you are also on the bottom of to woke oppressedness totem pole, then you are expected to be an Ally to your betters. See the Scott Aaronson saga for illustration.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
While I am sure that economists are just as biased as the practitioners of any soft "science", I do think that quite a number of them actually lean libertarian, not woke. Historically, economies which broadly embraced free trade fared better than countries which mostly rejected it.
But sure, just try to make the US build their own supply chains for everything. It will also hurt the rest of the world, but it will hurt you a lot worse.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Last time that happened, we got FDR and then leftist politics for 2 generations.
Note that for Europe, the outcome of the great depression was even worse by many metrics.
There is a reason why some worship the economy as a malevolent Outer Deity. When angered, its destructiveness can be on par with Adonai.
I am vaguely in favor of carefully testing the limits of what is offending the economy when there are good humanitarian reasons for it (e.g. in healthcare), but the US -- which historically was the biggest proponent of free trade -- becoming protectionist feels more like directly defiling the its altars and expecting it will continue to grant its blessings.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Illegally entering the US is not a crime which warrants a lifetime of imprisonment, or what might be an adequate monetary equivalent to that.
If someone is trespassing on your property, and steps on a landmine you placed and gets his legs blown off, you can not simply tell the judge that since the trespasser was in the wrong, he does not have any cause for a complaint.
I see no reason why people who shouldn’t be here in the first place are getting benefits denied to US citizens given there’s no federal right to compensation for government mistakes/ errors / negligence.
While the US government claims sovereign immunity over a lot of things, there is still the FTCA.
WP gives an example:
In 2022, a navy sailor successfully sued under the act after being hit by a vehicle driven by an active-duty military member, and received a $493,000 settlement.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
This clearly does not meet the standards of a criminal trial in any civilized country, including the US. He did not get to face and cross-examine his accuser.
Given that what is at stake here is El Salvador locking him up long-term, I feel it is reasonable to require similar standards of evidence to a criminal trial.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Okay, what is an adequate compensation for likely having to spend the rest of your life in some Latin America prison? At what monetary sum would you be indifferent between getting locked up and getting the compensation and being free and getting nothing?
Presumably, a million US$ will not buy you freedom, but 100M$ -- if invested wisely in campaign donations -- might see you getting freed within a year and living in a mansion for the rest of your life.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Most of the stuff you mention is entirely orthogonal to ignoring the court system. Police getting deployed is a political decision, and the safeguard against politicians failing to stop violent protests is to vote them out of office. Law fare -- while problematic -- is explicitly using the court system.
If you have a story about someone who was imprisoned for a gun regulations charge, and the courts ordered their release and then the democrats said "haha" and kept them imprisoned indefinitely, please share it.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
In most civilized countries, "if you deport me I will face a lengthy prison sentence without a court trial which would vaguely meet Western standards" would be reason enough to grant asylum.
From my understanding, El Salvador is not planning on making the people Trump sends them into upstanding citizens of their society. Instead, they will simply lock them up indefinitely.
Given the harmfulness of being locked up indefinitely in a country with a spotty human rights record, I would argue that this demands due process on the scale of a capital crime trial. In consequence, it is closer to executing someone than to deporting a Canadian whose work visa expired back to Canada.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
In quality adjusted life years, this pales in comparison to the Iraq war.
Most civilians the US killed in Iraq were killed within the rules of engagement. While scholars of international law might have various ideas about the legality of invading Iraq, but from my recollection there was never a US court injunction against using bombs in Iraq.
The crimes which really enraged the public were not the median civilian killed by a bomb, but outliers like Abu Guraib. This is just a consequence of humans being scope insensitive, but also, you are who you are on your very worst day -- "but have you considered all the days of my life when I did not kill anyone" is not a very successful defense.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
The problem with this approach is that it establishes terrible incentives. If the argument "that was a mistake, but it is a done deal, and no court order in the world can change this" was sufficient, then there would not be wrongful death civil suits.
If individuals or governments fuck up in a way which is beyond repair, we don't shrug and say "well, luckily for you, the antique you recklessly destroyed was beyond price, so there is nothing you can do to make it right, off you go". We use money to approximate the damage. Sometimes we award punitive damages.
Of course, the prison in El Salvador is as likely to follow the whims of the US government as gitmo is. If Trump makes it a priority to right the wrong his administration did, that guy could be back on US soil in 24 hours. It only takes a court to set the correct incentive.
Perhaps award to him or his family 1000$ in federal funds for the first day he spends in El Salvador because Trump's goons ignored a court order, and double that every day afterwards, up to 1% of the defense budget per year. I am sure that the administration would rather get him back then pay him a billion in taxpayer money.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I happen to recognize the legitimacy of Abrahamism as the moral doctrine of at least three distinct human civilizations, so I don't find any difficulty there, both sodomy and dressing provocatively are "sins" in those places for reasons that are both practical and internally consistent.
This sounds like moral relativism to me: dress according to your religious community standards (whether it is a burka or just non-provocative western clothing), follow your community's sexual norms (whether you have three wives or one, and how old they have to be when you marry them), follow your religious communities dietary restrictions (especially regarding pigs, cows, humans, shellfish) and so on.
And you must recognize this because that is indeed why we deny children autonomy. Why then not do it for the mentally ill?
[...] insofar as one recognizes that delusions are a thing, you need to confront the fact that consent is an ill suited tool to attack this moral issue.
The fact of the matter is that humans did not evolve to be perfectly rational agents. As the sequences teach us, we are all loaded with our own biases. We treat the median adult as sane not because they are a rational actor whose map matches the territory who try to maximize some utility function, but merely because all the systems which did not engage in the polite fiction that people are sane have had much worse outcomes as the people who would take paternalistic charge of mankind are not sane themselves.
That being said, while I might deny that there are sane people, I will concede that some are way more insane than others. A demented person starving while wandering through the woods is likely lacking the coherence that we can apply the fiction of sanity, and we should institutionalize or MAID them per their living will.
Young people have two handicaps: first, their map is often even less accurate than that of adults simply because they lack experience, and second they are probably even more impulsive. As a crutch, societies have decided to lock certain autonomy behind age limits. This is manifestly unjust -- a tenth percentile 20 yo is likely less sane than a 80th percentile 10 yo, and yet the former can vote, consent to sex, enlist in the military, take on debt, immigrate to Saudi Arabia and so on. But until we find something better, age is a Chesterton's fence we should keep.
Still, I think that recognizing that our system is somewhat arbitrary and unfair, we should try to respect the choices of those whom we deny autonomy whenever their choices seem sane.
- An 8 yo who wants to wear a red t-shirt instead of a blue one should get their wish, all things being equal.
- A 10 yo who wants to get a facial tattoo should be denied -- presumably, there is a broad consensus among adults that they would have regretted getting such a tattoo at that age.
- A 14 yo who wants to enter a relationship with a sugar daddy should likewise be denied, as there is a broad consensus that this will be harmful to their development.
- A 14 yo who wants to quit school and live in the woods should be denied, but if they want to quit school to start a trade apprenticeship that is a different matter.
As a moral toy model, give the minor a minority of votes over their life and distribute the rest to adult society. At a very young age, they have little voting power, and only get autonomy to do stuff which a majority of society supports. At age 18 (or 21 or whatever), they gain majority, and have 51% of the votes, which means that they can do whatever they want, no matter how ill advised. Morally if not legally, it would make sense to have a continuous increase of their voting power in between these two points. Perhaps at age 17, they have 40% of the votes, so they get to do whatever at least 1/6th of the adults considers age-appropriate. Just because we don't give them full autonomy, we should not disregard their opinion entirely.
Likewise, mentally ill adults. Generally, I am against involuntary commitment of anyone who has not run afoul of the law (otherwise, sentence them normally, then give them the option to serve their time in a ward instead) unless it is very likely that they will die on the outside within a year. Plenty of people locked up in psych wards object to being locked up for entirely rational reasons orthogonal to any mental illness they might have.
I could understand being afraid of people using "sluggish schizophrenia" and the like against political opponents
I think there was recently some MAGA legislation trying to make Trump Derangement Syndrome and official medical diagnosis.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I would not count medicine as STEM. Also, there are plenty of subfields of medicine which are not very subject to ideology.
I would expect a Nazi obstetrician who wants to help Aryan women to give birth to new soldiers and soldier-makers for the Fuehrer and a minority ethnic radical feminist obstetrician to show a high degree of instrumental convergence in the long run.
The subfields ob medicine which are controversial -- like gender stuff, or perhaps psychiatry -- are generally few and far between. In most stuff which is tangentially related to medicine and controversial, the controversy is orthogonal to the science part: abortion, death penalty, MAID, embryo selection, germline editing, organ donation debates are all not about what is the case, but what we should do. Sure, sometimes activists smuggle in arguments masquerading as science, but mostly there are no open questions of fact there.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
You can find red paleontology enthusiasts they’re called creation scientists.
That parses a bit like "you can find spiritual astronomy enthusiasts, they are called astrologers".
YEC goes with paleontology about as well as geocentrism goes with astronomy. I mean sure, there are likely people with a mainstream degree in paleontology who found work giving YEC's a veneer of respectability, but I am doubtful if in their heart of hearts, they actually believe in YEC. It would be like someone studying electrical engineering and then denying that electrical currents exist -- sure it might happen, but I would call that person either deceitful or insane.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I think this line of thinking misses where the wound actually is - it isn't that conservatives are absent from the academy, it is that the academy can't function in their absence.
I apologize for my STEM arrogance, but I would claim that if a discipline can not function without having followers of any particular ideological bent, it is probably bullshit.
I would like to add that the way trade works is not that the US magically pays China more than China pays the US. In trade, participants generally pay cash to receive goods of some kind -- resources like oil, consumer products like tamagotchis, ransomware keys to that data which you did not properly back up. If the seller and the buyer can not agree on a price, the trade does not happen.
Now, just because someone in country A and someone in country B agreed on a trade, that does not mean that both countries are happy with it -- if Mexican cartels are buying US weapons, Mexico will probably object.
Of course, if you are a normal country, you can not keep running a trade deficit forever -- you need hard cash to buy stuff from other countries, and that cash has to be earned somehow. The US is special in that it is a global superpower which controls the primary currency of international trade, and China is happy to sell them electronics for freshly printed US dollars.
Tariffs are useful in some situations: perhaps you want to protect your nascent car industry until it gets internationally competitive, perhaps you want to play Defect in response to another party playing Defect to discourage others from instituting tariffs, or perhaps you know that the other country is selling some goods at a loss in order to achieve strategic dominance and want to level the playing field.
But these are all surgical interventions, while Trump's tariffs are like operating the patient in twenty random places in the hope that this will magically increase their well-being.
More options
Context Copy link