site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

9
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This is incorrect.

Trump picked Peter Thiel as his VP.

J.D. Vance is the in-game skin downloadable content.

This is partly sarcasm, but I don't know how much.


The trouble with Vance is that we don't know who he is. Hillbilly Elegy is a good character origin story. But what follows? After serving with distinction as a Marine Corps ... Public Affairs ... yeah, nevermind ... he went Yale Law School and time at Thiel backed venture capital firm where he invested in ... an agribusiness?. Vance lived mostly in San Francisco before running for Senate in Ohio. He's a Catholic Convert married to a non-practicing-anything. His children are Ewan (not Evan), Mirable, and Vivek.

In 2016 he's a Never Trumper. When he runs for Senate, DJT helps get him over the finish line (along with Mitch McConnell but, hey, the real one's always operate from the shadows). In the Senate, he's staunchly pro-Israel, questions support for Ukraine, and says Lina Khan has done a good job.

As a VP pick, the move is to try to lock down Pennsylvania's electoral votes. Anointed as Trump's successor? Dyed in the wool MAGA? I think not. Another commenter mentioned Palin. I think that's a good comparison.

Trump has been moving to the middle on everything this cycle besides immigration and tariffs. The true believers are already losing their primaries (Bob Good in Virginia). OG MAGA (which was Tea Party 2.0) is on the way out. MAGA 2.0 is really riding a lot of the currents that popped off with COVID and BLM riots. Throw in a bunch of Grey Tribe Tech Bros and Vance makes a ton of sense.

The real question is when Trump finalized the decision - before or after the assassination attempt?

His children are Ewan (not Evan)

Really leaning into that borderer thing, eh?

This is low effort and antagonistic enough that I considered reporting it for a moment. I am, however, generally opposed to reporting (there have been some exceptions).

Can I invite you to explain what you mean here in more detail?

I'm not sure why it's antagonistic. Vance is of Scots-Irish (i.e. "Borderer") descent and the name "Ewan" is derived from Scottish Gaelic; him having a kid named Ewan fits pretty perfectly with his origins (and with Hillbilly Elegy; Albion's Seed claims many Borderers migrated to the Appalachians)

The scots-Irish are not in any way Gaelic. Ewan probably comes off as Irish-Catholic to most Americans, an actual borderer name might be something like billy-bob or Ray.

Ewan probably comes off as Irish-Catholic

The first "Ewan" I think of is Ewan McGregor, who is straight Scottish from Perth, Scotland. Also "Billy-Bob" is more redneck than hillbilly.

I mean I would assume a native born American named ewan to be Eoin but badly spelled.

I know a kid named Eoin, pronounced "Owen". Is "Ewan" pronounced the same way?

No, "Ewan" is pronounced You-an.

And in fact that probably explains Vivek. The first boy got the ethnic gaelic name, so the second boy gets the ethnic indian name.

Maybe if his first kid is Evan, the second is Victor. Maybe not.

Ohio

Always has been huh, at this point they should start putting Ohio's flag on rockets and space ships instead.

His children are Ewan (not Evan), Mirable, and Vivek.

Not to leap to this one politician's defense too much, but: marry a foreign woman, have enormous understanding for and accommodation of her ways. Of course he has a kid named Vivek. His wife is from India. And if she wants a bunch of other Indian stuff in their household, he'd better smile and say "yes, dear". That's what marrying a woman is buying into.

I do notice his thoughtful writings on modern American Christianity that sort of forget about his non-American (to the best of my knowledge)-non-Christian wife.

His wife is from India.

No, she's from San Diego.

Oops. I thought she was Indian Indian.

Anyways, his ethnically Indian wife gets to have a son with an Indian name.

Nothing at all wrong with marrying a foreign man or woman. Nothing at all wrong with naming your progeny using his/her cultures names. All very well and good and points to a healthy marriage.

But your median to less-than-median Appalachian white trash (I get to use that word. It's our word) is going to, at the least, point and laugh at your goofy kids' names. And that's fine - fuck those morons, right?! J.D. Vance went to Yale Law School and did big tech things with venture capitalists in California and now he's the Vice President!

Except, wait, no, he gets those Appalachian / Rust Belt people because he is so totally still one of them. Oh, there are problems with the culture, but he is one of you!

And he totally also gets law and the economy because he went to Yale (did I mention that already?) and then helped Peter Thiel build crypto-mars or something.

The point I'm trying to make is that you have to know who you are and be it. If Vance wants to tell the simple (and good!) story of "Hey, I almost fucked up my life when I was a kid, but then joined the Marines etc....I now realize a lot of my cultural upbringing led to some bad perspective and habits and I don't think it's a good thing" then more power to him. I have forever been waiting for the Black candidate who will publicly state a similar repudiation of what was once called "inner city" culture. (Fun fact: both of these groups adhere to highly male versions of an honor culture.) People get to change and you aren't defined by the zip code within which you came of age. It's helpful if you clearly state this.

If he wants to tell the story of "I represent the lost Appalachia / Rust Belt. Those swamp creatures and Washington have killed us!" that's fine too. But mixing them gets really dangerous because it leads to a lot of just so stories and cherry picked emotive reasoning. I don't think Vance has ever published anything that's factually inaccurate, but I think he weaves a narrative that gives some interesting (and highly varying) emotional perspectives on things.

But does it even matter, isn't it all about policy anyway? Yes. That's the point precisely. Policy is inherently tricky and if you can't commit to your own personal story, how will you commit to a policy (or, hopefully, a cohesive political-economic philosophy) and not say "Fuck it" and follow whichever way the weather vane of your base is pointing? If Trump is serious about tariffs on steel, then Vance will be part of the final nail in the coffin to whatever remains of the Rust Belt. But listen to his story about memaw!

Except, wait, no, he gets those Appalachian / Rust Belt people because he is so totally still one of them. Oh, there are problems with the culture, but he is one of you!

And he totally also gets law and the economy because he went to Yale (did I mention that already?) and then helped Peter Thiel build crypto-mars or something.

Yes, he gets to sit on both these chairs.

The simple issue is that elite is different from non-elite, and a culture that heartily rejects all things elite as alien to it is a dead culture, a beheaded culture, a discarded trash culture, a District 9 prawn culture, that will have no champions and must die in irrelevance. "Hillbillies" have no viable notion of political elite – I posit that being a rich son of a bitch who has inherited some franchise isn't it. You are seeing this class being defined, and it proves to be very similar to the template of general modern American aristocracy. Multiracial, well-connected, well-educated, socially aggressive. Just with some borderer flavor.

This is - incredibly sadly - perfectly accurate.

I hate to see HBD in everything but the reason you see - rust belt town kid - repudiates culture and joins blue/grey tribe is because there are a lot of them. It’s a very common path.

I think these towns may be starting to run out of high IQ stock as they are filtered out but they are relatively young in the filtering process. Like a generation back. These are coal mine or steel mill immigrant communities 70-100 years ago. The mills closed in roughly the ~’80s.

Baltimore just doesn’t have the stock to have these people emerge in large numbers.

It's been happening far longer.

The opening line of "One Piece at a Time" by Johnny Cash is;

"I left Kentucky in '49 / went to De-troit working on the assembly line".

The rust belt / Appalachian natives of today (and certainly of Vance's childhood) are either directly involved in or one step removed from aggressively anti-social patterns of behavior. Mostly substance abuse related. It's compounded my multiple generations of degeneracy. The Johnny Knoxville documentary The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia does a good job of showing this in detail. It papers over some more thoughtful commentary with goofy fun (hey, it is a Johnny Knoxville movie).

But this is why it's so important for people who "make it out" to turn around and point out that what passes for normal and expected in these communities is anything but that. When everyone from memaw to your parents, brothers, sisters, and cousins are actively participating in government benefits fraud, small time drug dealing and abuse, and constant alcoholism, you can't expect a child to look around and go, "oh, I should really focus on that linear algebra course [that isn't offered] at High School."

Correct. In the dying rural area where I'm from (in north Alabama, not southern Ohio), the Silent generation was the last really "normal" generation that mostly stuck around even though they mostly transitioned from farming to working in factories (I had several relatives who ran vestigial hobby farms in their spare time/retirements.). Boomers and onwards tended to move to suburbs closer to where the jobs/amenities were (and even Huntsville starting to get expensive hasn't revitalized the area where I'm from yet; it seems to be sprawling northward and I grew up on the other side of the river) such that my neck of the woods started dying in the 70s and was a sitting duck in the 2000s for the meth epidemic to take over and turn what was left into a white trashville as the retired Silents sat in their houses and wondered what the Hell went wrong.

With that, my other side of the family wound up in a crappy part of the rust belt thanks to the Great Migration (My grandparents also took part, but returned home and eventually George Wallace brought a GM factory to us for my grandfather to work at. My parents met each other in the Marines because the military was how Gen X got out of dodge.) and it's striking A. how much worse off my Millennial cousins are up there than mine from Alabama and B. how low the standards are up there. Like, I'm a fuckup by the standards of being college educated but I have a full time job, pay my own bills, have never had a problem with illegal drugs, and haven't been to jail so to them I'm a success. Maybe they were just worse to start with and my dad was the outlier success story on their side and my mom one of the worst on her side (Her sister was very much like J.D. Vance's mom from Hillbilly Elegy. Mom was...a cartoon villain tier psycho who put on an epic of domestic violence and dead pets.) but it's depressing nevertheless.

As for aggressively anti-social behavior, I did find it amusing that once Mom moved to a city with actual police it didn't take her long to start winding up in jail for her bullshit (Twice in a year, once for domestic violence and once for stealing from her job.). Luckily she finally succeeded in her decade-long quest to draw disability and now gets something like 90% disability from the VA, so she's not really my problem anymore and can go around making a mockery of "disabled veteran" (Lol the local diversion program for disabled veterans did spare her quite a bit of jail time for that DV charge. Apparently that wasn't her first offense for that, to which I can only reply "no shit".) with all the plate and stickers on her car.

Khan. I can’t figure her out. She’s blocking a mid-tier luxury hand bag merger but Microsoft got to buy Activision for $68 billion. Google just announce they are buying Wiz for $23 billion. I’m actually concerned about big tech getting bigger but some mid tier consumer garbage she targets? Perhaps google just thinks the deal doesn’t close till she’s out of a job.

I’d like to know more on Vance’s thoughts here.

I'm fairly certain they did fight hard on Microsoft-Activision, they just did it poorly

Maybe. I don’t have the inside baseball on these things. Michael Kors getting bought the stock is trading like it won’t be approved.

Is this just a case of the luck of the draw on the judge draw? Both judges though were appointed by Biden.

Honestly, the U.S. just needs to approve a merger tax and then stop regulating this shit.

Start at 10% for buying a $1 billion company, then add another 10% for every additional order of magnitude. Problem solved. Google wants to buy Wiz for $23 billion? Cool. No problem. Pay the U.S. government $3.13 billion and you're all good.

If the EU wants to add its own tax then we let them but then also increase the wine and handbag tarriff accordingly.

All of the airlines would merge within a week under that regime, and then we'd all be paying monopoly rents to Amalgamated Airlines for the rest of our lives whenever we wanted to travel more than a hundred miles. And all of the other industries too. A 10% tax on deal consideration wouldn't even rate.

Couldn't competitors still come along?

Not if they can't get slots at the airports they need.

Fuck it, just make them pay ME personally a % of that sweet sweet profit. Make it a good amount.

The airline industry is the one industry that sort of has the go ahead to break antitrust law. The combination of high fixed costs, no moat, and marginal revenue maximizing pricing of $0 makes them go bankrupt too much. Their CEO’s already get to answer questions talking about anti competitive behavior with only a thin plausible deniability.

It's funny to think that airlines don't have a moat, since it's a ridiculously expensive business to run. But I suppose if you define moat that way then they don't.

Correct, their actual moat is airport slots and routes which are now meticulously tabulated when DOJ considers airline merger agreements after US Airways / American Arlines merger empirically resulted in higher fares.

It’s less of a moat in many cases than people think; the experience of euro budget airlines like Ryanair and EasyJet shows that consumers are happy to go to airports 100 miles out of town for fares 1/4 of the legacy airlines. Startup costs are extremely low with the leasing business the way it is. I’m skeptical that looser competition laws would dramatically worsen the situation for consumers.

It’s less of a moat in many cases than people think; the experience of euro budget airlines like Ryanair and EasyJet shows that consumers are happy to go to airports 100 miles out of town for fares 1/4 of the legacy airlines. Startup costs are extremely low with the leasing business the way it is. I’m skeptical that looser competition laws would dramatically worsen the situation for consumers.

Then why did USAir/AA raise fares?

I take your point on Euro airlines, but suspect that the Euro airport/airline system is different in some fundamental way.

Great point. We should also add a market cap tax along the same lines. Perhaps 1% per trillion per year, adjusted along the same lines. (So 0.001% per billion, etc...)

This would prevent excessive consolidation.

The point is that the government, being so very bad it, should not intervene in the free market but should simply extract a simple and fair tax from excessive profits. The simpler the better.

from excessive profits.

There is no such thing.

You can sustain your profit margins through a fantastic product, a moat, whatever else. Or, they gradually erode to competition. Sure, software margins look eye-popping but the deeper financials bring the back to earth. Also, remember that, because of bad tax policy developer salaries were able to be categorized as R&D expenses for years instead of COGS, which artificially boosted margins.

Much more likely, your margins come back down due to competition. That's how the market works and it works well.


In the Government Contracting world, so much of pricing a project comes down to a "fair and reasonable" standard that is (a) loosely defined and (b) ultimately, subject to the whims of a mid level bureaucrat. How do they determine "fair and reasonable?" largely through vibes based "Gee! that seems like a lot!" reasoning. Bear in mind, too, that the GS pay scale tops out at maybe $160k (even in places like LA, NY, DC) and these gov't employees know that the VPs on the other side of the table from them are north of $400-$500k, and it does come down to pretty Kafka-esque jealousy sometimes.

The result?

Government Contracting, especially for weapons platforms and airplanes, is THE poster child for cost diseases, budget overruns, and takes-forever delivery. The government gets to feel smug for its penny-pinching at the unit margin level, meanwhile there's an ocean of cash they light on fire over 20+ years.

This is staggeringly ignorant on many dimensions. To pick one at random, Mark Zuckerberg would happily manage his market cap down to $20MM and compensate his employees with cash if it meant he could rely on his sole shareholder vote to retain control and consolidate the entire tech industry into a behemoth that bestrides the world. Your proposal is a road to Soviet style serfdom, and not even a long road.

Trump picked Peter Thiel as his VP.

J.D. Vance is the in-game skin downloadable content.

I don't think I believe this. Sure, Thiel will have a lot more of a voice than otherwise. But I don't think he'll have much actual power over Vance, and Vance is intelligent enough to want to decide things for himself.

Apparently Vance got Don Jr in his corner (whose advice is weighted highly) and deliberately appeared on TV defending Trump a lot (which he knew Trump would love), and I’m pretty sure Burgum was #2 but Jr convinced Trump that Burgum was too establishment. One article mentioned showing Trump media reports that he was backed by Karl Rove which Trump did not like at all. Rubio was tanked by the residency constitutional issue.

Does Don Jr have any personal ideology whatsoever? Did he before his father ran for President?

He likes guns, so I think he's at least been pro-2A for a long time.