voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
No bio...
User ID: 3622
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
1d ago
Well, I'd say it's pretty obvious. If you can't tell the difference between your dog and your chair, you might sit on your dog, and take your chair out for a walk, which is exactly what we're seeing with things like male rapists being sent to women's prisons.
See that's the line I'm interested in. How do we go from "gender and sex are different concepts, and woman is attached to gender, not sex" to "Whoops I sat on my dog because I can't tell the difference between a chair and a dog?" That's the bailey and:
is exactly what we're seeing with things like male rapists being sent to women's prisons.
this is the motte. It's a real problem that I can't argue against. Why can't we update our institutions to be sensitive to the rights of inmates in general? Why does it take a "male rapist" being sent to a "women's prison" for us to give a shit?
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
1d ago
I find your analysis lacking as even a starting premise. Your claim that the people who do this were purged in favor of loyalists is more characteristic of a partisan narrative-level understanding than familiarity with what's happened in the US government over the last few months.
This is a competence-of-evaluation issue. Call it a 'vibes-based analysis' if you will. It is consistent with your vibes-based understanding of history, both contemporary-american and broader leader issues. It is not consistent with accurate model-building of people or efforts outside your vibe, which so far you have not demonstrated.
Genuinely: do you have a recommendation of who to read in order to gain a non-partisan narrative-level understanding of what has happened with the US government over the last few months? I'd like to get away from some of my regular sources of information and into ones that provide a higher signal-to-noise ratio.
For example, analyses of the actions of the executive branch here on the Motte contradict each-other on a week-to-week basis as more information comes out. I come here to find takes that would temper a "partisan narrative-level understanding", but often find most posts that analyze the actions of the executive branch as highly speculative ("5d chess")[1]. Should I just read Project 2025 and take it as gospel, despite the counter-hysteria during the campaign season? Is the executive executing reactionary revolution? What is the bar for competence-of-evaluation for an average citizen to judge the worthiness of their executive branch? Should no one protest the actions of their government because they're not qualified to evaluate the competence of those who took those actions?
However, the nature of being a vibes-based analyst is that contempt / condemnation of other people for being vibes-based decision-makers rings more than a little hollow. This is particularly true if you cannot model what other people outside your vibe are trying to achieve, or why they believe certain actions will advance that goal, without building in a back-handed basis of dismissal.
Yes, but to an outside observer I'm just a shitposter[2] on a political forum, and they're the supposed leaders of the free world. Different standards, no? I do have models for the actions of those in the executive branch. I think they're mostly of disreputable character, as are many politicians and people in positions of power, but they're not irrational or stupid. It's their failure to disclose the honest motivations behind their actions that limits the effectiveness of my model for their behaviors.
- [1] I agree with posts beyond the obvious leftwing posters, for the record. Some of the things I agree with may even surprise you if you have a simplified model of the political opinions I represent. It's that specifically any analysis of the actions of the current executive branch that I find lacking.
- [2] Caveat for the moderators, I don't actually view myself as a shitposter. Make the Motte a better place and all that.
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
1d ago
I was hoping a response would be more about the threat of epistemic collapse, rather than the certain evidence of it. But I'll bite.
The whole "what is a woman" thing is just a "gotcha" that abuses the fact that words have different meanings in different contexts. Very few words evoke a singular meaning in our minds. It's like asking "what is water"? Well, are you asking about the thing I can drink? The thing I can swim in? The chemical composition? My take is that if you asked people before the concept was politicized, very few people would spit out the answer "someone with a vagina". They would probably describe quite a few gender-coded concepts, thinking that you were asking something that had more philosophical depth than the most obvious answer. Just like when you ask me "what is water" I don't immediately go "H20, dumbass." Matt Walsh is a hack and this paragraph sums up his entire strategy.
More importantly, within our legal documents the word "water" takes many different meanings as well! Why not "woman"?
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
1d ago
Stick around, new kid. Time in this community will thoroughly disabuse you of that notion, presuming you can avoid the traditional leftwinger meltdown and flounce-out when you realize that other people are going to continue to be allowed to argue back.
Thanks, bro. Genuinely, I'd like to. It would be far too easy to comment somewhere that I receive no push-back, but then I wouldn't be sharpening my mind at all, would I? Unless you're not interested in also sharpening your mind, I would imagine you wouldn't want this to devolve into a reactionary circlejerk?
Prospiracy with significant conspiracy elements.
I'd buy it. But I'd also push-back that it was a one-way street and that conservatives had no agency in the matter. It's almost as if it would be convenient that academic institutions were one day able to be simply "deleted" for wrong-think.
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
1d ago
Genuinely, I am here to get into the weeds so I would love to hear the line drawn between "cannot define what a woman is" and "epistemic collapse", and the threat that "epistemic collapse" poses, especially since throughout scientific history we've updated words to better match the scientific consensus of the model of our universe and our existence within it. I do assume you have more evidence for epistemic collapse beyond the "definition of a woman"?
I, too, have deep antipathy towards the perverse incentives within current academic institutions, and the actors who exploit those perverse incentives. Maybe you and I actually have some common ground there?
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
1d ago
This is just a rephrasing of "reality has a liberal bias", the veracity of which is being tested now.
It was specifically sidestepping the nearly-20-year-old Colbert meme, but I guess you caught me. Maybe I am inclined to believe that those who seek truth for the sake of truth do tend to come out with a "liberal" bias. But more importantly, I feel more strongly that the painting of universities as institutions of liberal indoctrination deny entire cohorts of students their own agency in developing political beliefs, and equal-and-opposite mirror of the claim that FoxNews has indoctrinated an entire generation of cable news subscribers. Like you, I look forward to the results of this "test".
I would say The Long March Through Institutions qualifies as a strategy.
I would say it also qualifies as a conspiracy theory. I am curious, though, is your theory that the Long March Through Institutions was a concerted effort, with agents who collaborated and took specific actions? Or one that happened more "naturally" due to the perverse incentives of a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_education](liberal education)?
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
1d ago
I'll try to break the back-and-forth of condescending snark from cherry-picked lines, but you've at least matched my level so kudos.
My main issue with your interpretation of my post is that you're reducing my use of the word "wargaming" to a very literal activity that happens behind closed doors with a couple military brass at most. I could have chosen a better term that would not have evoked such a specific image in your mind, so mea culpa. What I mean by "wargaming" is broadly any strategic, adversarial simulations with starting conditions based on scenarios that are executed in order to relatively evaluate the outcomes of different actions.
Anyone claiming to know precisely what "wargaming"[1] is within the context of the USG either oversaw it, took part in it, or is talking out of their ass. Civilians are probably equally aware of how the USG executes "wargaming" as much as they are aware of the USG's intelligence on "UFOs": any knowledge is highly speculative at best. My personal definition of competent "wargaming" would bring in unconventional expertise, like experts from something like the Department of the Interior, to get accurate fact sheets on e.g. the likelihood that Yellowstone erupts and what the domestic and military response would have to be. My fear is that such information would be overlooked in the current administration, due to the arrogance and apathy referenced in my OP. It is not evidence-based decision making, it's vibes-based decision making.
But maybe that's at the core of our disagreement. You, and others who feel as passionately as you do, are done with "evidence-based decision making", at least since we've had since we elected a black man president. To continue with "evidence-based decision making" would be an existential error. The solution for you isn't necessarily the rejection of evidence, as that's irrational. Your solution is still rational, it's just that you will not actively seek that evidence as you fear that what you may find contradicts your conclusions.[2] Your cause is righteous and therefore correct.
- [1] "wargaming" here being my broad definition, not your narrow definition
- [2] I'll throw you a bone here: it's also likely that you view contrary evidence (either correct or incorrect) as too deeply entrenched in our institutions themselves and to deny the evidence would be to deny the institutions
Obama spent 8 years conducting a massive political purge of the general staff and replaced them all with idiotic loyalists. You just didn’t notice because the media never bothered to mention it.
Whataboutism is cringe, but I'll steelman this and interpret it as "this is just how things work". You're stretching the word "loyalist" pretty thin here. When I say Trump "loyalist", I mean someone like Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz who were metaphorically cucked on live television by Trump only to then bend the knee to suck from the teat. "Idiotic" is a useless epithet, the entire point of the first half of my post, so I'll just ignore it.
I don’t know, but at least he has the mental capacity to not start one and then cover up that he started it.
Based. To meme you right back I'll that I don't think he has the mental capacity to even begin to understand what it would take to start one.
And I’m sure Xi was quaking in his boots over the last President, who could only remember he was President for four hours a day
No argument there, but again, whataboutism is cringe. Thank God we have a strong president who can look Xi eye-to-eye and say 245% tariffs! We know that's the best number because we have formulas! The simplest explanation here Trump is aping foreign policy with tariffs.
Edit: link format
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
1d ago
Yes, I agree, at least early on in Trump II we at least seem to have some sort of tempering going on (we even saw some in Signalgate). We'll see how long it lasts as it is currently only April 2025, and unless Trump has completely changed character, he has a pattern of executing massive turnover on his teams.
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
1d ago
I often think how cozy it must be to live with the child's view of politics.
Ah yes, the enlightened one. Please grace us with your superior wisdom and reasoning, that we may not err in our ways.
The world is as it has always been because powerful, competent and intelligent people disagree with each other. There are moral judgments to be made sure but oh, does all history stand as the final testament on evil not being synonymous with stupid--nor good with intelligent.
I genuinely don't believe that Trump is stupid, and I'll even extend that to say that I don't believe that Vance is stupid. I would say that even cabinet members like RFK Jr. and Linda McMahon aren't strictly stupid, but rather wildly out-of-touch to the point that anything they say is completely unrelatable and easily interpreted as "stupid".
My whole point is that my concern isn't stupidity, and that "stupid" is a useless epithet that doesn't further the conversation at all. You would seem to be in passionate agreement.
Graciously, I'll ask if you're extending the concept of "stupidity" to "incompetence" - because our disagreement would simply be that you're straw-manning my entire argument: "How juvenile it is to think that powerful people are stupid." I personally think those are two separate concepts, where "incompetence" has the additional dimension of context, but "stupid" is wide-ranging. I'll even argue that Trump is not universally incompetent - and has shown great competence in certain facets both in Trump I and Trump II and during his 10-year electoral campaign. Your examples of a diplomatic visit with NK and a drawdown of some activities in the Middle East are great (although I struggle to see what fruits they've bared in the past 8 years).
I appreciate your counter-example of Stephen Miran. Navarro does not inspire confidence that Trump has a good eye for economic advisors (as signs pretty much indicate Navarro lost his mind somewhere around 2015), but I'll give Miran the benefit of the doubt that he has not yet lost his mind. He seems to be hand-picked to support the conclusions that Trump has already reached, so I'm already skeptical, but again, that is not in-and-of-itself proof of his incompetence. All of that is bailey anyway, where the motte is that actually Trump's economic policy is highly calculated and we're aiming for is maintaining our very high average standard of living (at least, for certain classes of people) while also convincing the rest of the world to drop USD as a reserve currency as it presents an existential risk that no one but Trump is bold enough to face head-on. I don't disagree that the world holding USD as a reserve currency is an existential risk, but my main question is: why does it have to be 5D chess? Does the success of the strategy rely on none of the world (including his own constituents) being privy to exactly why certain economic policies are being executed? Is that the secret sauce? It has to be 5D chess or we won't be able to both maintain our standard of living while also convincing the world that they shouldn't hold USD? This is my issue broadly with many Trump strategies - I'm told I just don't get it and it's all part of a bigger plan. Well, it would be great if we were told that plan. To put it simply, when someone says "trust me bro", I instantly do not trust them, bro.
Back to the topic of the OP, the thrust of my point is that I've observed a certain type of arrogance over my lifetime that has been tightly paired with the rejection of expertise, and that I'm seeing the same pattern daily coming out of the executive. That's my signal through the noise. I tie that arrogance (and apathy) back to something that I thought everyone here might be able to relate to, the "pit in your stomach" when you realize you've fucked up because you're out-of-depth. I also tied it to the worst amphetamine-fueled mistake that an authoritarian made during WW2. Your critisicm is basically that my interpretation of the situation is juvenile?
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
1d ago
Yeah that was kind of my whole point. Is there a way to argue the blue tribe's concern without resorting to "they're stupid". I did not make the argument coherently enough because the main rebuttal I've received is basically ~ "why are you calling them stupid".
My argument is that they're arrogant and out-of-depth, and my evidence is their wide-ranging rejection of expertise. The argument against would be that they do truly know better than the experts they're purging and alienating and there's nothing worth worrying about.
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
2d ago
Thank you for what appears to at least be a sincere response. I recognize your username as one of the ones that I disagree with the most on the Motte (I don't always find the need to respond), so I'm not shocked that it provoked this type of response, but hey, at least my post did provoke a response instead of slowly sinking into irrelevance. I made the comment here because I wanted harsh and honest feedback, rather than on other platforms that skew hard liberal where it would just disappear into the circle-jerk.
Okay. How about this- are you competent enough to judge competence?
Are any of us? I don't think we should blindly trust those at the heads of our institutions, and I think we should be even more critical when they represent an extreme shift in the status quo. So here's my attempt at being critical of their competence. I'll ask you genuinely, do you have strong evidence of their competence (especially with regards to my main point, that they are weak on what I'm calling "wargaming")?
You start off early with a claim that the mid-2010s the Republican party was on its death throes. This, uh, is a way of describing a party that was the House Majority for 6 of the 8 years of the Obama Administration, and swept out 10 state governors (a 20 state swing) in 2010.
I'm surprised this isn't consensus? I did not think that me saying Trump rejuvenated a party that was having an identity crisis leading up to the 2016 election would be controversial, but I'll adjust my priors on that. I had thought that both left and right-wing thought leaders saw Trump as an opportunist that took advantage of the Republican Party's situation, and remolded it in his own image. But if it was a strong party, that doesn't really contradict my main point that Trump isn't stupid, because it makes it even more impressive that he overtook a strong party than a weak party.
In the space of three words you make a pejorative equivalence to... Mussolini, Pincohet, and Stalin.
Yes, "the space of three words", also known as a "list".
Not exactly Bad People known for having the same sort of flaws, beyond historical category of Bad People.
As I said in the sentence prior, they were all known as authoritarians, used authoritarian rhetoric, and surrounded themselves with sycophants who echoed the same authoritarian rhetoric. I chose three names out of a hat, but I suppose I could have chosen more carefully and provided specific examples of Trump's sycophants sounding like historical sycophants.
You raise wargaming... but cite as proof of failure a leadership level that wouldn't actually be involved in running wargames.
I didn't intend to simply raise it, I intended it as my main point: that ideological purity testing and loyalty testing are purging the competence we had built up leaving us vulnerable against adversaries who haven't recently purged their most experienced ranks. You seem to be implying that you think Trump's appointments / retentions at the levels relevant to what I'm calling "wargaming" must be more competent than the people whose positions are more visible? I would say that's a pretty generous assumption.
without addressing how the most recent pandemic squandered public trust and credibility in the experts that RFK is known to be at odds with.
The fun part about a pandemic is that any time a governmental response is sufficient (i.e. saves lives), the response can be deemed a failure by overreaction because clearly not enough people died to warrant a response. That's a digression, though, because replacing leadership with someone lacking not only any expertise, but any credentials at all, seems like a juvenile retribution, no? But I guess that's reactionary revolution in a nutshell. That's actually at the core of the "out-of-depth" that I was describing in the OP that leaves you with two tires hanging off the edge of a cliff.
If all you want to do is 'Trump is dumb, lol,' you certainly put effort into that post. Consider catharsis achieved. If you want to make sense of the Trump administration, 'they are all idiots and I'll use the political language of their political opponents accusing them of all being idiots' is probably not a good place to spend time.
My point was to bring something new to the table, and extend a bit of a fig leaf to Trump supports by saying that Trump is not stupid. But, he is making the same mistakes that many arrogant leaders have made before him. And I think the root of the reason why he's doing that is because he lacks the humility to realize that he is not special.
I will throw your critique in the trash with all of the other opinions from people who hate me and want me broke and dead.
I don't even know you? I don't even have hate for any type of person, though I do feel frustration when I think of various stereotypes of people (who I can also consciously acknowledge are just stereotypes and don't exist). If I were to make a shot in the dark about you: I actually empathize for the plight of a lot of Americans (especially rural) who feel left behind / under-served, and think the neoliberal status quo was untenable for them. But I don't think a reactionary "burn it down" federal government is going to be a win for those Americans in the end. Look how Putin sends the peasants of the hinterlands to the meatgrinder in Ukraine for a sneak-peek of how authoritarians treat forgotten classes of people.
I doubt that when liberals subjected our institutions to decades of rot that you ever wrote a screed about how and why they were doing so, and why we must stop them.
What have those decades of rot delivered? The most advanced technological society in history, with the deepest understanding of the physical universe to-date? I almost think the exploitation of those institutions (e.g. Google, Facebook, etc. and other brainrotting social media and advertising companies capturing a generation of our greatest engineering minds) are more sinister than the institutions themselves.
I am genuinely coming from a place of interest: this my best effort of putting my thoughts and coinciding fears down. What have I missed? Is the criticism you provide literally just "Your threat model is wrong, my threat model is better"?
Edit:
when liberals subjected our institutions to decades of rot
Also, I'm not sure why it's always presented as a given that "liberals" are guilty of any decline in the value of our societal institutions, as if it was part of an orchestrated agenda? Why do we never talk about perverse incentives? Is it because people in those institutions, or that those institutions produce, are generally liberal? Why is that so often presumed that this is due to indoctrination? I'm not going to rehash the entire sides of both arguments here, but it's such an entrenched assumption whenever it comes up...
Double-edit: Regret responding to this low-effort response because it's spawned a bunch of subthreads that have nothing to do with my main point in the original post: that the rejection of experts on ideological grounds inhibits our ability to effectively wargame against our adversaries, and we will make mistakes as a country.
Forgive me in advance for what is mostly supposed to be a cathartic post, but also a request for criticism because it's how I'm making sense of the my observations right now, as well as the conclusion that I think is most likely.
Trump is not stupid
Or, at least, calling Trump stupid is not supported by enough evidence for it to be productive for anyone to claim that he is stupid.
The evidence against stupid
No matter your political leanings, one must admit that Trump ran one of the most impressive political campaigns, perhaps, of all time. For ten years, from 2015 to 2025, Trump was campaigning strategically without pause across the United States, building a big-tent party full of nearly every type of conservative. The Republican party was in its death throes. The Tea Party was not enough to invigorate the base. Trump performed the most impressive resurrection in over two thousand years. It was intellectually exhausting and demotivating for all of his opponents, to the point where any opposition within his own party simply quickly folded and pretended they never opposed him at all.
There's plenty of snark that Trump was born with a silver spoon and that none of his financial success is noteworthy because if had simply invested his gifts and inheritance he would have a higher net worth.[1] But if he were truly stupid, he would have simply lost all of that money with nothing to show for it.[2] Trump at least retained his wealth, which is much better than many lottery winners, drug dealers, sex workers, professional athletes, and "influencers" have to show.
It is also undeniable that Trump has a gift for delegating effectively, especially with regards to his campaign and consensus-building strategies. There is very little chance that Trump himself was in charge of choosing where to have his next campaign event, who to coordinate with locally, how to scam that podunk town out of its money, etc. The meme is that he doesn't know how to read, but if he's delegating effectively, he doesn't need to read in order to accomplish his goals. He has people for that, and they have served him especially well on the campaign trail for the past 10 years. He's also somehow able to get everyone to leave his cabinet meetings with a singular mission and idea, and the commitment is unfailing.
Trump has also trained his tongue to be sharp and clever. Like the Platonic ideal of the schoolyard bully, there has not yet been someone capable of rising to the occasion to out-Trump the Trump. Trump is completely immune to any type of attack that he himself has already mastered. Even crazier still is that Trump single-handedly killed left-wing satire and exposed it as snark. One of the most powerful tool liberals had against figures like Bush Jr., Romney, and McCain was completely neutralized by Trump. This is not something that happens accidentally: it is cold, concentrated talent, combined with years of practice. Trump is quick-witted, and that's anything except stupid.
Stupid, as a rhetorical device
The word stupid, fundamentally, is not terribly descriptive. Out of the people I know, spanning family, friends, coworkers, friends-of-friends, and significant others thereof, I can only count two individuals who I could never begin to defend against the epithet "stupid". I suspect both of these individuals have pretty significant learning disabilities. I have confirmed that they are the type that could not understand what an interest rate is, and how it affects their personal finances, no matter how long or how carefully the concept is explained to them. Their contribution to meaningful conversation caps out at, "Wow bro, that's crazy."[3]
Why even call a political figure stupid? Well, it is useful for forming in-groups and out-groups based on whether one agrees or not, or even feels compelled to agree or disagree. But that doesn't have much utility, especially because there are plenty of other methods for forming in-groups and out-groups. Let's be generous and give the benefit of the doubt that the protestor holding the "Trump is stupid" sign[4] is doing so because they seek to persuade others to change their mind regarding their support for Trump, as if those supporters will have some sudden epiphany that yes, Trump is stupid!
The fun thing about cults of personality is that any insult against the head of the cult is taken as a direct insult of members of that cult. Members of the cult aspire to be strong, smart, virtuous, and bold just like their dear leader. Their leader represents a more perfect version of themselves, so their leader must also be smarter than them. But if their leader is stupid, that makes those cult members even more stupid! Well, they know they're not stupid, so their leader must not be stupid. The members of that cult of personality will have to be "deprogrammed", as it's commonly referred to in the context of cults, in order to even begin to accept a reality where their leader is not strong, smart, virtuous, and bold.[5]
So, every time I catch someone calling Trump stupid, or anything remotely similar, I cringe. It's not supported by evidence. It's not a useful rhetorical device. That being said...
That pit in your stomach
I'd like to think that everyone has had that prototypical humbling experience, especially in your youth, of being woefully underprepared or completely out-of-depth. Maybe you forgot to study for an important exam, or to begin working on that rather important diorama. Maybe even later in life, you've made a mistake that you realized could have cost you your life. I once realized that the bushes that I had parked next to completely obscured the nearly-vertical cliff on the side of the road, and now two out of my four wheels were basically teetering over the edge. I was overconfident and unfamiliar with the terrain, and when I realized I was inches from certain death, my stomach fucking dropped.
I'd like to think that one of the most iconic photos of George W Bush captured that moment of visceral humility when he realized his presidency wasn't going to be spent reading stories about pet goats to elementary students.
Professional sports fans love to overestimate their abilities versus their sports idols: how many yards could you get on a designed run play against an NFL defensive line? There's the meme about a vast majority of American men claiming to believe the could land an airplane if they needed to. Rarely does anyone get to live the experience of testing their arrogance, although if you're a fan of some Olympic events you could go try to run a sub-4 minute mile and revel in the humility. I'll give E-Sports some credit here, because their transparent MMR system does typically convince the player base that compared to the top-level players, most players are complete trash.[6] It seems that humility is a learned trait that doesn't come naturally, and rarely do humans come face-to-face with their own mortality because of a lack of humility.
Humility, in general, brings to mind some people from grade school, middle school, and even high school who seemed to never have that "oh shit" moment during childhood. They either immunized themselves with apathy ("This grade doesn't matter.") or arrogance ("I don't need to prove anything."). Most of them were not wealthy, and therefore, continue to live relatively unremarkable lives based on their Facebook postings. I don't say this judgmentally, rather as an observation that success in school, either through good grades or learning how to work hard and take things seriously, is one of the only ways to be socially mobile in the United States. But what if they were wealthy?
My working theory is that Trump and everyone he has surrounded himself with are wildly out of their depth, in a completely unsubtle way. Do I even need to mention autism, A1 sauce, and 245% tariffs? It's not subtle, right? A major part of this is that I think they're precisely the type of people who have immunized themselves to this type of valuable introspection through apathy and arrogance. When I look at the people leading the executive branch, I see Kyle. But...is that the point?
A new model of "expertise"
When your cause is righteous, you cannot be wrong. He who saves his country, breaks no laws. Now, feelings don't care about your facts. We're operating off of vibes only from here on out.
The old model of "expertise" is out the door: it was ideologically captured by liberals. A new model of "expertise" must be created, one that by design serves not just conservative, but reactionary interests. Much like "Christian Science" is held to the constraint that any conclusion must be consistent with an American-Evangelical interpretation of the bible, this new model of "expertise" must be held to the constraint that any conclusion is consistent with reactionary ethos. And that ethos is driven by vibes, brother.
If you're a biologist that doesn't support HBD? Good bye bucko. Climate scientist that doesn't support a "things will work out, trust me bro" view on energy production? Have fun flipping patties. Economist that would dare suggest that tariffs won't even work out in the long run? Hah.
But this is surface-level snark here, and aside from disrupting careers and potentially accelerating some climate doomsday, I don't think it's worth focusing on. No, what I care about is national security, especially as we slide into authoritarianism.
Wargaming
Trump has selected heavily for loyalty, and now he's surrounded by sycophant grifters and real-life ghouls that would fit right in to any authoritarian administration you could think of: Mussolini, Pinochet, Stalin, etc. I'm not even sure if some of these people are reading history books and simply ad-libbing the speeches of these despots, or if they genuinely think they're clever and this time it will be different because of that learned apathy and arrogance. Reactionary rhetoric is like pop music, it's always the same four chords. How many pop artists succeed on vibes, and how many pop artists study the greats and emulate their formulas?
It's debatable whether the war could have had any other outcome, but Hitler didn't come face to face with true failure until Stalingrad.[7] He had drunk the Kool-Aid and genuinely believed that the German army was more righteous and mighty than any other force on Earth, combined. Despite intelligence warning him otherwise, he pushed for an offensive that overextended his army and left him on the back foot until he finally held the pistol up to his temple. He was wrong before, but it never cost him like it did that time. His mistakes never cost his country as much as they did in Stalingrad.
Hitler's mistake brings us to Wargaming: simulations that ensure that, when facing adversaries of roughly equal might and intelligence, one has the greatest chance of success. In the context of the USG, Wargaming is not limited to the Department of Defense. Wargaming is not limited to wartime activities. Wargaming is not limited to simulations that happen behind closed doors. Wargaming requires a deep trust in experts who have spent their entire careers studying mundane things like seasonal global crop yields on the 40th parallel. Wargaming is an activity that explicitly selects against loyal and uncontradicting parties.
Everything that I see from the executive branch these days indicates to me that they have lost the capacity to meaningfully wargame, and it threatens a catastrophic downfall of the United States. The military brass that have been selected for loyalty, rather than expertise, were the worst losses, but it doesn't stop there. Do you believe that RFK has the mental capacity to handle a human pandemic, let alone a livestock one? Do you believe that whoever Trump replaces Powell with will have experience running simulations on various levers the Fed can pull? I can't help but think Xi Jinping is laughing behind closed doors at the moment that he's up against such an arrogant and out-of-depth adversary.[8] Say what you will about the "Deep State", but those entrenched bureaucrats won us the cold war, and kept us on top of the world since the 1990s. And right now we're trading it for reactionary vibes.
Edit: I forgot that at one point I had meant to integrate the concept of "aping" or "cargo-cult" into this post. I thought the leaked Signal chat was an incredible example of a surface-level understanding of how a properly-executed military operation should be spoken about at the cabinet level. The cabinet is aping experience and expertise, and it won't cut it in the year 2025.
- [1] Probably not anymore, or for much longer, now that criminal bribery has a much higher bar for proving quid pro quo.
- [2] Here's a clickbait article about "idiots" who lose all their money: https://www.businessinsider.com/lottery-winners-lost-everything-2017-8
- [3] As a digression, they are both Trump supporters, but I realize that's a tired dunk and hesitate to even bring it up.
- [4] Would love to have a peek at what everyone reading this line imagined when I brought up this "protestor".
- [5] Not every Trump supporter is a member of his cult of personality, but that cult is debatably the vanguard of his electoral success.
- [6] I say that, and yet there are robust markets for MMR boosting just so people can lose against the best.
- [7] Maybe it was Kursk, maybe it was El Alamein - I'm just using Stalingrad rhetorically.
- [8] https://www.newsweek.com/china-responds-us-tariffs-245-percent-trump-trade-war-2060875
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
4d ago
Shouldn't? Or doesn't?
The factoid I'm familiar with comes from Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers", in which he dubs the concept "accumulative advantage": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)
Allegedly, elite Canadian hockey players tend to have birthdays earlier in the year.
Edit: this medium post shows the results of a very rudimentary data gathering exercise relevant to the topic: https://medium.com/market-failures/birth-months-and-hockey-players-further-validating-gladwells-observation-1187f4deb63b
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
4d ago
Operation Wetback
Thanks for the link and jogging my memory, because I am loosely familiar with this and very familiar with Harlon Carter (amazing how history rhymes so much: parallels to be drawn between modern figures and historical figures).
My takeaway from (admittedly, briefly) reading about this operation is that the "success" wasn't strictly that the executive was able to act with impunity absent judicial oversight, but also that the Mexican government was equally enthusiastic about stemming the tide of migrants.
I still hold the position that the legislature is where the solutions to immigration should lie, and that any interaction between the executive and judicial is fundamentally suspect. I appreciate your comment, but I'm not certain that I can be convinced otherwise.
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
4d ago
I just want throw you a kudos for introducing me to the concept of a "deepity", I think it has a lot of utility for me in all aspects of my life: professional, personal, political, etc. I thought actually writing this "kudos" out would be more meaningful / bring more visibility than simply upvoting you as I'd like to specifically encourage this type of introduction of novel concepts that people may not be familiar with.
A rhetorical device I've been using with coworkers is a solution simply stated is not a problem simply solved, basically just to draw attention to the fact that if you're a middle manager and you can describe a solution in a few words it doesn't mean your underlings can quickly implement it and solve the problem. Unsure if that passes the threshold for "deepity", but I may be more careful with what I say in the future as to not use "deepities" as a crutch.
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
4d ago
if that variation is true, why don't we see it in life expectancy and althetic records?
I'm reminded of the factoid that most professional hockey players have birthdays towards the beginning of the year, because the peewee leagues have cutoffs on New Year's Day. So you get more attention because you're statistically larger / have 11 months more growing time as a January peewee player than a December peewee player. It didn't require a proper scientific study, but someone just looking up professional hockey player birthdays and going, "huh".
I would be surprised, but maybe no one has done significant birthday analyses with regards to life expectancy and athletic records because it would feel like silly astrology. That's kind of why even analyses that can be painted as "silly" in a soundbyte, say, during a Presidential Address to Congress, might have a legitimately interesting motivation: are you doing this analysis because of "astrology" or because of epigenetic effects based on seasonal variations during gestation?
Either way, I think you're striking at the heart of the issue: we probably don't need to hook people up to devices that measure vitals in order to determine if there are measurable differences based on the calendar dates of their gestation. If the difference is meaningful, we should be able to see downstream effects in, as you said, life expectancy and athletic records, and other examples as well.
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
8d ago
The most fundamental authority of a sovereign entity is determining who is permitted within its borders.
I don't necessarily disagree with this. I was literally just mocking ("tongue-in-cheek") the hyperbole of the OP that was brought forth without much forethought: reactionary doomposting.
When the federal bureaucracy had its small departments with narrow scopes, soon enough they became massive departments with broad scopes.
The world has changed significantly. People used to show up on our shores with nothing more than a name on a ship manifest. Now passports with electronic components are ubiquitous and traveling without one is unimaginable. Bureaucracy must exist to manage this, no? Or do we simply turn away all foreigners based on a "vibe check" from the current executive? Bureaucracy shouldn't be judged by its size, but by its outcomes (I'll touch on that later in this comment).
Racism, sexism, religious bigotry. If we were so racist, so sexist, so bigoted, if we were so tyrannical for so many, then how were we ever liberated?
This feels like a non-sequitur so I'm just going to ignore it after quoting it...
But there was a point when we could deport foreigners with minimal hurdle, and now we can't.
What days are you hearkening back to? I struggle to think of any notable mass deportations in the modern era. Japanese Internment Camps with FDR? Trail of Tears with Andrew Jackson? Or even further, when you were simply accepted into or rejected from based on skin tone and accent?
who checks the judge?
The legislature, which originally ceded its power for short-term political gains (thanks Newt Gingrich), but has now ceded its power for reactionary political revolution (thanks Mike Johnson).
I'm not defending the current asylum system, as the impression that it can be abused has brought us to a less-than-optimal political "middle-ground" where a few hundred judges are assigned to hundreds of thousands of cases to determine whether someone's asylum claim is authentic or not. Conservatives are on record opposing legislative immigration reform for more than a decade. Progressives do not have political power at the federal level, even if you can find soundbytes on YouTube of them getting "owned". The neoliberal Democrat centrists have never been opposed to immigration reform, and have brought forth multiple bills delivering exactly what their conservative counterparts have asked for (thanks again Newt Gingrich, who needs bipartisan legislation when we can just swing a massive pendulum between 2 shitty alternatives every couple of years).
To go even further: I do think there are going to be really difficult pills to swallow in the coming decades regarding mass migration, not even outside of borders, but within our borders as well. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that there is some potential future where we will be watching masses of people starve through binoculars across the Rio Grande. It'd be great to figure out how we can, as a nation, navigate those turbulent waters without regressing to animalistic authoritarianism, but over the past 10 years I have lost faith more and more that that's even possible.
All of this is just a play for more executive power. I don't trust that executive power won't be abused, especially given that the current executive seems to get off (sexually?) on flaunting abuses of power. But maybe there's where you and I differ in concerns about real dangers to our freedom in the coming years.
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
9d ago
Not to blackpill too much, but the country is basically doomed. When judges can override issues of national sovereignty - literally there is NOTHING more important than a country deciding for itself who to let in and who to expel - the illegal immigration issue in the US will never be solved. It's over, there's just no way to solve it. The millions who came in will never leave.
Every time I read something hysterical on this forum I always flip what is being talked about in my head:
Not to blackpill too much, but this country is basically doomed. When cabinet appointees can override issues of human rights violations - literally there is NOTHING more important than a government being forced to respect the rights of its citizens and residents - the social justice issue in the US will never be solved. It's over, there's just no way to solve it. There will always be a subjugated class of people in the US.
Less tongue-in-cheek, it seems like the firebrands on the topic of immigration on the US are pretty much cheering for the suspension of habeus corpus: deport by any means necessary, due process be damned. It's unfortunate that it's gotten to this point. But I also dread the unintended consequences / friendly-fire. I guess at least if you're on the conservative side of the political spectrum you don't have any fears of political persecution under this administration.
voters-eliot-azure
metapolitical analyst
9d ago
Original comment:
Because the US government is the only hegemon in history willing to expend resources for a rules based system.
Your response to me bringing up Rome:
Rome did not protect trade for foreign nations (even trade Rome wasn't a participant in) without a demand for absorption into the Roman state.
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".
Building infrastructure within your own borders and pushing back on the barbarians on the periphery are simply standard expectations for all states not free trade policy.
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.
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
9d 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
9d 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".
I'd also say it's likely that the people who enshrined jus soli for the United States could never imagine a world where a (common) pregnant women could not only travel, but also give safely give birth in a foreign land that they were not intent on living in for the rest of their lives, or that they would even want to!
I'm curious how opposition to jus soli has evolved over time to match the world that we live in due to technological advances (e.g. maternal mortality rates).
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