voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
No bio...
User ID: 3622
I have read hundreds of different pet theories on the "strategy" behind what has happened with the tariffs, and the vast majority of the time, I've come to the conclusion that the theory is basically a reflection of the writer's own bias.
I think in all likelihood this is simply a result of everyone agreeing (even his supporters) that you simply can't trust anything that Trump says as a reflection of his own motivation. I'll add a caveat, though, that there are some people who insist that his actions are entirely consistent with his rhetoric, but I have not yet been convinced.
So it's not so much "no theory of mind", as much as "no mind worth theorizing about". It's intellectual terrorism. People are bending over backwards spending precious thought cycles that could be spent on work or with their family trying to rationalize what can only be reasonably described as irrational.
I'll even add my own pet theory to the end here: Trump wants to push buttons and feel powerful. House Republicans have blessed him with the "tariff" button. Trump pushes it. Trump feels powerful. The end.
(Edit: this sort of dovetails with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory, first associated with Nixon. Maybe great for foreign policy, but when practiced on your own electorate, I think "intellectual terrorism" is a fair descriptor.)
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
7hr ago
There's as much to learn by what isn't being voted on.
Just want to highlight how good of an observation this is - no matter who is in power.
One could even measure how duplicitous legislators are based on how much they campaign on something vs. how much they legislate on it. Would sure be a disappointment if the golden goose that serves as a war drum for your supporters was a problem that was suddenly solved by coherent legislation.
Tinfoil hat: there's little incentive for American conservatives to create any legislation around immigration. Action through executive enforcement, while not as effective as legislation and reform, will keep the base energized and conservatives in power. What's the equivalent for the progressives? Taxes on the rich?
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
7hr ago
Because the US government is the only hegemon in history willing to expend resources for a rules based system.
Rome built roads and pushed back on the barbarians in the north.
But also, is it really that controversial to suggest that the USG has been engaging in various forms of pillaging throughout its entire history?
Seems to me that there's always been a balance between expending resources for establishing rules, and then also pillaging. I don't think world powers establish rules out of benevolence, but because it allows lower-risk extraction of resources outside of its own borders - sometimes best-described as "fair trade" and sometimes best-described as "pillaging".
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
7d ago
I think you've assumed that I think that critical theory is the only type of academic history? It's part of this "overcorrection" that I see that whenever a historical figure is pointed out as being not worthy of our praise, it must be "woke".
The difference is, "woke" history is "whig" history - trying to read back present day moral notions and fashions back into the past as if they were objective (they're not).
This is pretty much explicitly what I did not mean when I said "academic history". Academic history is digging up primary texts, learning obscure languages and scripts, and doing a lot of the dirty work that others may consider unimportant because it represents a fraction of a fraction of the story of human history.
Actual good history doesn't sugarcoat the past; it immerses you in it so you can understand the actual norms and mores of the time and thus figure out for yourself who was being a giant piece of shit given the society they were in.
I find actual "good" history to be incredibly boring. It's basically translating and regurgitating primary texts (as previously mentioned). There's very little immersion. Primary texts are awful - humans were not particularly great at forming narratives before Gutenberg. Some of my shopping lists have more narrative complexity than some of the primary texts I've been exposed to.
I think Columbus would be my pet example of anti-woke overcorrection. His contemporaries found him to be a giant piece of shit. Lots of people around him were saying, "Damn, Columbus, slow the fuck down with the atrocities." But he did something notable - he dug up the funding for a moonshot project for which many sponsors doubted the ROI. So his name got slapped on everything. Pop history (grade school-level history) gave a very uncritical treatment of him for decades. But his shittiness, even for his times, is pretty obvious in the primary texts - one does not need to use critical theory or employ "whig" history to figure that out.
(Tangential hot take: give Italian Americans their own holiday worthy of their community's cultural spirit, and Columbus will disappear.)
trying to read back present day moral notions and fashions back into the past as if they were objective (they're not)
I appreciate your comment though, because this line did really make me give pause while writing my reply. Personally, I do think there are some universal morals that do transcend time, but at times throughout history it was simply not feasible to act in accordance with those universal morals: there's only enough food for 3 families to survive the winter but there are 4 families in the village. Should we judge people who were otherwise great, except for "universal moral" failings that were simply a product of their time?
I'm totally fine with future generations being appalled at me for continuing to consume factory-farmed meat even though I know the immense suffering that it causes near-human-level intelligence animals, so I guess I will continue judging people of the past because I have a feeling that deep down, they knew better.
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
7d ago
Like... literally brawling? I would say sports would have to take the cake, with the city of Philadelphia holding the crown for most unhinged sports fans.
Heated verbal arguments? I would say politics, but you disqualified it. Even local (city) and hyper-local (neighborhood / HOA) disagreements fall under politics imo... So that leaves anything to do with work or family: coworker or boss mistreating you, or cheating and dishonesty.
Good-natured disagreements? Definitely food, or other regional cultural rituals. It's almost like regional culture is advanced during the small wins and losses during those disagreements, "No, we're going to do things this way." Then suddenly 200 years later your county is known worldwide for having high quality whiskey.
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
7d ago
What changed? Is politics today just much harder to succeed in without being a cutthroat monster?
It all started when Kennedy put on some make-up for his televised debate with Nixon (/s, sort of).
I think you might be falling prey to some sort of rose-tinted lens bias when looking into the past. Americans love to deify the founding fathers and other notable people in our national mythology, but there's not really too much evidence that they were not (and I don't say this lightly) giant pieces of shit - horrible, awful people. Especially for the most charismatic ones you can find accounts of them being duplicitous, deceitful, and all-around lacking in personal morals that betray their virtuous musings in various publications.
I've noticed a tendency in pop history to equate "doing something notable" with "being someone good", whereas within academic history, historians are much better about maintaining an objective distance from the figure being studied. I think it's pretty telling that this objective distancing is often labeled "wokeness", but that's a digression.
Coming back to the present, there's plenty of people who are now "doing something notable", but you're realizing that you have plenty of access to the information that they are not "being someone good". So something must have changed? No, my hypothesis is that notable people have always been giant pieces of shit: back to 1700AD Louis XIV, back to 750AD Charlemagne, back to 30BC Cleopatra, back to 1300BC Ramses I, etc.
I'm not sure how many people I speak for, but I've always dabbled with the thought of personally unseating my local congressperson. But there's nothing really remarkable about me as a person that people would want to rally around. I write well, I speak well, and I rise pretty quickly in whatever companies I happen to jump between. Because of that competence, I guess I would be an ideal bureaucrat in a world where bureaucracy would have to exist.
I want to improve my community, but running for office seems to be even more performative than making sure to pick up litter at rush hour, rather than picking up litter for the sake of picking up litter.
You can't run moonshot companies like as is literally the case for SpaceX, or Tesla, if you don't make sure you've done your best to account for all relevant factors.
As someone in the tech industry, I actually have the exact opposite take, to say the least.
The quiet "Mittelstand" of tech is based on domain expertise, driven by B2B sales, and moves slowly but is actively transforming industries as the largest corporations don't want to be "left behind" with new innovations. This, for me, is calculated and matches your pattern of doing the "best to account for all relevant factors".
Moonshot companies and big tech are strategically opposite: operate on hype-cycles and vibes driven by marketing and build enormous moats that will plug the holes of the flaws of the Version 2 of your product (see: enshittification). This is not only "move fast and break things", but also "fuck you got mine".
Edit: This is also my experience as someone who has worked for both types of companies, one which was sold for $3XXm as a portfolio subsidiary, only to later be shuttered as a $3XXm loss once a hike in interest rates exposed it as smoke and mirrors.
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
7d ago
At some point I'm going to have to start assuming people just don't listen to him.
I actually don't think they do, aside from little quips that are (accidentally?) designed to be repeated memetically.
I would imagine most people form their opinions of Trump following marching orders from their news outlet of choice. If Trump has a truly nuanced take, I'm not sure if it will ever make it past the initial polarization filter of Fox News, Reddit, etc.
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
9d ago
Huh, I always thought the void ray change was because it was overpowered, not because it was awkward within the context of the lore.
Worth noting that SC2 still has the viper (caster type unit) which converts health (of other units / buildings) to energy, and you'll often see Zerg hatcheries on nearly 0 health in end game scenarios because it's used as a battery for the vipers, especially in PvZ.
In true culture war fashion, it seems like there's a dilemma that is "obvious" from either side of the lens.
The strategy from the left is well-documented here: any opposition can simply be hamstrung with "lawfare". This is especially effective since within recent history the left's opposition in the "West" is led by strongmen populists of personality - there's no depth in terms of charismatic leadership within the movement at large, so if you cut off the head the beast is dead. Unfortunately for the left, that's also the case in places like Russia and Turkey, where it seems like it takes a cult of personality to "grassroots" a movement capable of opposing the entrenched right - so the whataboutism is baked in (as seen in your write-up).
But the strategy from the right can't be ignored either: snowball small crimes and cry lawfare on your way up to the larger (antidemocratic) crimes. White collar crimes are hilariously underpunished (unless you've already climbed the "lawfare" ladder), so the risk is extremely low: move a few decimal points here or there on some tax returns, make the SEC slap you on the wrist for misreporting on financial statements, etc. Then, when you're punished for something meaningful, simply appeal to your followers that you're only being punished because of your politics, and bring up all the other cases where white collar crimes were hilariously underpunished as a double-standard.
In fact, to "climb the lawfare ladder", you don't even have to have personally performed the smaller crimes first, like some perverse inversion of "guilt by association". It appears to be possible to utilize the (just) prosecutions of others as evidence that you yourself are being unjustly persecuted. Maybe one could even pardon those individuals, some of them on the left, to cast even more doubt!
Unfortunately for us plebeians of the non-accelerationist variety, I don't see this deescalating any time soon. Reactionary strategists have surely caught on to the pattern, and are probably quite pleased how much the term lawfare has spread like wildfire amongst the even the most moderate conservatives, thanks especially to news outlets that act like a memetic megaphone.
Likewise, the left seems to view a stronger judiciary as one of the only ways of stalling a full-on reactionary revolution - something that some on the right seems to acknowledge as well judging by comments from the Speaker of the House and the once-leader-cum-ex-leader-cum-leader of DOGE. Just browse Reddit for a bit to see how much the left sees the judiciary as the last bastion of hope against a unitary executive and a doormat legislature.
Edit: spelling, formatting
Original comment:
Your response to me bringing up Rome:
This is a bit of moving the goalposts, no? They were a hegemon, and they expended resources to establish a rules-based system.
I'm just positing a more complete theory of world powers throughout history that neatly explains everyone's behavior, rather than trying to put one more notch on the bedpost for American exceptionalism ("the only hegemon"!). World powers establish rules, and then use those rules for profit - somewhere on the spectrum between "fair trade" and "pillaging".
I mean, it does count as "within your own borders" once you conquer those peoples and expand your borders I guess. People frown upon that these days but I'm sure without our modern views on sovereignty, the US would have "expanded" its borders a few more times in the past couple of decades. (But sovereignty seems to be a concept that some world leaders seem to want to leave in the 20th century, so who knows.)
Likewise, I'm sure if Rome had the capability to remotely ensure stable trade outside of its borders in the early AD centuries, it would have. A more stable silk road / spice trade? Easy to agree to. It wasn't for lack of desire ("willing"), but lack of technology.
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