Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
People have regularly been pointing out that Trump routinely devolves into gibberish since 2016 at least. This is a guy whose re-entry into the political sphere was in the form of spearheading the most trivially disprovable conspiracy theory I've ever seen. His mental fitness is not a new topic. His supporters just don't care, because they have never cared about any aspect of Trump's fitness.
It's always helpful to remember that Donald Trump a) will never intentionally admit he did anything wrong b) is a fully post-truth individual. I don't think Trump has been all there in a while, but he's also a narcissist and a pathological liar.
On a different note, this interview helpfully provides an illustration of how Trump likes to pretend to be retarded but is also just an idiot. They're quite easy to tell apart. Compare:
TIME: The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that you have to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia. You haven't done so. Aren’t you disobeying the Supreme Court?
Trump: Well, that’s not what my people told me—they didn’t say it was, they said it was—the nine to nothing was something entirely different.
TIME: Let me quote from the ruling. “The order properly requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador.” Are you facilitating a release?
Trump: I leave that to my lawyers. I give them no instructions. They feel that the order said something very much different from what you're saying. But I leave that to my lawyers. If they want—and that would be the Attorney General of the United States and the people that represent the country. I don't make that decision.
to
TIME: Well, I mean, the question is, how can CEOs make long-term plans and investments if our tariff policy can change from day to day and still remains so uncertain?
Trump: How can they make long-term investments? I'll turn it around. How can they make long-term investments if our country is losing $2 trillion a year on trade?
TIME: Will you consider giving exemptions—
Trump: No wait, just so you understand. How can we sustain and how is it sustainable that our country lost almost $2 trillion on trade in Biden years, in this last year. That's not—when you talk about a company. I had the head of Walmart yesterday, right in that seat. I had the head of Walmart. I had the head of Home Depot and the head of Target in my office. And I'll tell you what they think, they think what I'm doing is exactly right.
"Golly shucks, I'm just the president of the United States, what do I know about one of my banner policies?" vs defensive gibberish.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
It certainly does! Most complaints about how the left always gets its way and the right never does are simply selective perception or "not-winning-hard-enough"/"everything-I-want-is-the-bare-mininum" style complaints. The US political system is incredibly status quo biased. Sometimes this helps the right, sometimes it helps the left.
I'm reminded of this comment from a few years ago on the old place:
It's strange, isn't it, how no one feels like they're in charge.
If your goal is to radically change the legal status quo, US governing systems are generally arranged in such a way where you have to win everything by large margins. The right is generally in favor of this whenever the left wants to do things.
including the entire judiciary at every level and every non-political hire in the bureaucracy (which means they have to be willing to, after winning, use the political capital necessary to fire everyone and replace them with their own)
Given the strong propensity of American conservatives to treat these groups as hated enemies regardless of their behavior, the long-run trend will always be that these groups end up aligned against them. Until such a time as the right can overcome both its ideological hatred of civil servants and its human capital problem, it's not going to produce any solution more sophisticated than either serial arson or bringing back the spoilers system.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5d ago
Cooper is not merely angling towards anti-communism (where, as you note, there'd be a number of more successful and less odious icons you could hitch your wagon to). He, as far as I can tell, genuinely favors something fascism-adjacent* and is trying to rehabilitate far-right authoritarianism.
Even extending him the charity of assuming he's merely interested in the hard core right-wing authoritarianism and not the genocide, this is awkward for him in several respects. The first is simply that most of his co-partisans are howling bigots, which is embarrassing when you're trying to come across as serious and respectable. Even if you yourself are immaculately well-behaved, you're going to be tarnished by association. The second is that if you're trying to pitch respectable fascism, the historical record of the Nazis is a big problem. Even people who might be on board for the strict top-down social regulation are liable to balk at the aggressive expansionist wars and industrialized mass murder.
So on the one side, you have him here rebuking other parts of the far-right for being indecorous. On the other side, you have him downplaying Nazi atrocities as a combination of tragic misadventure and "the commies made me do it". The end goal is to move fascism closer to the Overton Window and people like the groypers are an impediment to that goal.
*he seems to be somewhat cagey about his actual preferred political arrangement, but his anti-liberalism combined with some of his other statements plus that very caginess makes me strongly suspect that his actual views are well beyond the pale and he's hiding his power level.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
9d ago
Really? What major were you?
Math for undergrad, stats for grad school. Had a Chinese professor who was pretty terrible, but I also had several other Chinese and Korean professors who were totally fine and a number of American professors who were also pretty bad.
The TAs were always fine, even the ones who weren't native English speakers.
The number of Chinese students we retain is awful (under 50%, sources are all wildly different)
Probably because we don't try very hard.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
At least from personal experience, I suspect it's unaddressed because it's an incredibly minor problem.
It is alienating and subconsciously hostile to one’s innate sense of community when the prevalence of myriad exotic accents reaches a certain level.
Speak for yourself. I truly do not get the visceral disgust people experience from hearing other accents or languages.
Also, the Chinese nationals are totally spies for the PRC.
Really? All of them?
See, I am a China Hawk, and I think it is absolutely braindead not to siphon off every bit of human capital from them we can. The risk of the occasional PRC spy pales in comparison. You don't have to give them jobs designing ICBMs.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
10d ago
The defense of forcing ideological diversity, per your own words, is that it directly influences someone's ability to contribute to the organization.
The defense of forcing background diversity is that it directly influences someone's ability to contribute to the organization.
it's categorically different from adding diversity of demographic characteristics under the belief that adding such diversity would increase diversity of thought.
Why? What is the categorical difference between "You need more conservatives because it will add perspectives you haven't considered" and "you need more [women/blacks/etc] because it will add perspectives you haven't considered". You don't actually articulate what makes it different.
The primary distinction I see is that while both are ideological arguments, the latter is not arguing for ideological representation while the former is. Other than that, either way you're dealing with an argument to use an imperfect proxy for some nominally desired underlying quality (and in both cases the nominally desired quality is a figleaf for ideological goals).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11d ago
(honestly a completely reasonable opinion if you’ve ever spent a significant amount of time on a major university campus)
...why?
The fact that the US attracts a ton of foreign talent is a feature, as is the fact that many of these students bring money into the country. The national security pretext is largely irrelevant (we're mostly talking about undergrads and it's not especially difficult to vet or just exclude foreign nationals when dealing with genuinely sensitive research).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11d ago
Giving conservatives preferential treatment or using a conservative "Czar" to oversee such things is categorically different from that, because ideology - and specifically a diversity of ideology - does directly influence someone's ability to contribute to the organization
This is identical to DEI arguments. As I'm sure you're aware, there has been a great deal of effort invested in the idea that diversity is not an ideological goal, it is a pragmatic benefit. The right-wing argument is that this is not true for, say, women, but is true for conservatives (and only conservatives, not other views with poor representation in academia).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
11d ago
Indeed, when the media discuss economic issues they are more likely to interview a businessman than an economist.
As an aside, I think it has generally been to capitalism's detriment that people tend to conflate business, finance, and economics when these are three different fields. Businessmen make terrible ambassadors for capitalism.
I don't even understand how exactly viewpoint diversity is supposed to be done?
You're overthinking it. It's affirmative action for right-wingers. You do it by hiring right-wingers into faculty positions until the Viewpoint Diversity Czar is satisfied. The specifics of their viewpoints are largely irrelevant, because the actual point is to try and install a bunch of Trumpist faculty.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
University endowments are not general purpose slush funds for the University administration. They can't just allocate money from the endowment to replace research funding.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
The Trump admin has the power to crush Harvard. They have HUGE reasons to play ball, the things that the administration can do to them are existentially threatening.
The Trump administration has made it abundantly clear that showing your belly is the wrong move, because it won't earn you the tiniest shred of leniency. When the barbarians tell you to throw open your gates and surrender or be destroyed while you can see the smoke rising from the last city to surrender, you're not going to comply. You're going to hunker down and put out calls for aid.
Harvard has a lot of wealthy and influential alumni, and they may reasonably believe that making themselves a beacon of opposition will allow them to weather the storm more or less intact.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
Columbia caved and didn't get their funding back, so there's not much reason for Harvard to accommodate the Trump administration's demands that they install right-wing commissars to monitor the university for wrongthink.
The Fed's letter included contradictory demands. One can't require merit-based admissions and hiring while also requiring viewpoint-diversity admissions and hiring:
Woke Right theory wins again?
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
C is highly defensible, but it's far more common for D to masquerade as C. Not even necessarily intentionally/in bad faith - people have their personal hobby horses they fixate on and most of the systems they're complaining about are very complex.
There is substantial overlap between criminal justice reformers who take issue with the US' policy of extreme leniency towards police misconduct and people who take issue with sending people to Salvadoran gulags. Conversely, there is a generalized skepticism towards due process common amongst both hardline deportation advocates and tough-on-crime/back-the-blue types.
That aside, that's not how things worked. If the police violate your rights, you can usually at least get a court order telling them to stop doing that (and potentially scuttling any case against you), even if they can't return the lost time/reputation/emotional well-being. You can often obtain damages as well.
Ever heard of qualified immunity?
Qualified immunity is not what people seem to think it is. QI protects government staff from personal liability in carrying out their duties (shifting the burden onto taxpayers), even when they egregiously fuck up; it doesn't indemnify them from criminal charges. The bigger issue there is simply that the criminal justice system bends over backwards to give law enforcement officers accused of misconduct the benefit of the doubt. If a cop murders you, it's still murder, but it's exceeding rare for cops to get charged and even rarer for them to get convicted.
(For example, the notorious Daniel Shaver case, the city ended up paying about $10m in damages to Shaver's relatives even though the officer was acquitted)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
14d ago
The police and whiteness remain conspicuously intact.
"For a change." - this being a deviation from Trumpism's usual scrupulous honesty.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
15d ago
Probably because during the campaign (and now, for that matter) it was routine for Trump defenders to pretend that he wasn't going to do it, that it was just big talk, take him seriously not literally, etc... Encouraging people not to believe Trump was (and is) standard practice.
"Of course he's not going to do it, that's ridiculous" -> "He said he was going to do it, what are you complaining about?"
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
15d ago
Short answer: they do change the rules, frequently. HEMA has no unified ruleset. The trouble is that it's very hard to create a ruleset that can't be gamed - introduce a solution to one kind of tactical double and you likely create another (or incentivize some other kind of bad behavior). Insofar as you can they tend to have other problems.
People do occasionally do "first blood" tournaments with mutual loss rules precisely to try and circumvent this situation, but they have a number of practical issues. They tend to exacerbate the problem of low quality judging in HEMA, since a single poor call isn't just disadvantageous, it's decisive. There's also the more prosaic issue that if people are going spend hundreds of dollars traveling to your tournament, they are generally going to demand more than a half-dozen exchanges. The result is that first blood tournaments are usually sideshows.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
15d ago
Trump acts all tough and doesn't back down publicly, but China actually doesn't back down.
Something that was always apparent if you paid attention but has become increasingly hard to ignore: Trump is not a master negotiator. He plays one on TV.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
15d ago
You're still talking about the object level impact of the tariffs. I'm talking about the ability of the state to translate will into action when the action involves short term pain.
Willingness to endure pain is not an independent quality - people are more willing to endure pain for an achievable goal they believe in and less willing to endure pain merely to prove that they can.
The tariff proposal elicited a sharp, widespread negative response because it was incredibly stupid and self-destructive. There's never going to be much of a constituency for chopping off your own foot to look tough, and the Trump administration has done a terrible job selling the idea that these tariffs would be a positive force for American manufacturing (probably because they're actually terrible for it).
The motte would be stronger if the bailey wasn't full of people actively dismantling it. US "industrial policy" has been overwhelmingly aimed at protecting jobs and incumbent firms from competition, not preserving or building capability.
The Trump administration advances multiple mutually exclusive theories justifying high tariffs:
The problem is that you can't have all three. If tariffs are a negotiating strategy, you're agreeing to drop them in exchange for whatever concessions you're angling for, negating their use as industrial or tax policy. If they're revenue raisers, you're counting on Americans continuing to prefer imports over domestic consumption, so there goes industrial policy. If they're industrial policy, you're betting on Americans switching to domestic production and thus not replacing revenue.
There are other problems, as well. For example, the Trump admin not having any coherent idea of what they're looking for in a trade deal (in no small part because Trumpian trade theory makes no sense), so trade talks are floundering. Anti-Chinese coalition building is not consistent with trying to shake down your trade partners. ISI has a terrible record (I mean, who doesn't look at Argentina and think it's something to aspire to). Not to mention, the entire endeavor seems to be rooted in either a delusional belief that the US can reclaim post-war era style manufacturing supremacy despite radically different global economic conditions or just straight autarky.
Even being maximally charitable and assuming there's a serious plan behind all this, the Trump admin being so high-handed and transactional towards allies is absolutely the wrong way to go about negotiating the creation of an anti-China trading bloc, especially when they're also badly overestimating the strength of the US' position. The US already benefits substantially from the present global economic arrangement, so going to your trading partners and saying "give me more, also cut off your biggest trading partner who produces a bunch of difficult to replace inputs for your domestic industry" is a tough sell. Doing it in an aggressive and insulting matter further undermines the goal by invoking national pride.
If you wanted to build an anti-China trading bloc, you would probably try to carefully negotiate a multi-lateral trade partnership with other critical trade partners in a way that encourages trade to shift away from China rather try trying clumsy threats and hoping for the best with bilateral negotiations.
I feel like I've been hearing this line more and more lately :V
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