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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28218 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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…but it is 100% worth discussing.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-10-14/la-me-no-assassination-trump-coachella

On one hand, the perpetrator is an outspoken Trump supporter, running an advocacy org to expose the Deep State.

On the other, he runs an advocacy org to expose the Deep State. I don’t think that selects for the most stable individuals.

On the gripping hand, the guy is taking fake IDs and fake weapons into a restricted area with his fake license plate. He’s lucky to be alive.

“You can't keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbors. You know, eventually those snakes are going to turn on whoever has them in the backyard.” ― Hillary Dawg Clinton to Pakistan

Trump and his lackeys have fed conspiracy theories for a full decade, which are now coming back to bite them in the ass.

It's a familiar story. The radicalization of Bangladesh and the Maldives are examples from the last two years. You can't give ammunition to the crazies and then be surprised when the crazies start shooting (figuratively and literally).

The deep state isn't some nefarious ingroup. It's a useful umbrella term to capture the emergent ideology of DC's upper-middle-class bureaucracy. But that’s it. It personifies the incompetence inherent in all bureaucracy. It is as faceless as it is boring. However, Trump's rendition of the deep state is akin to a singular eldritch horror that seeks to destroy all that we hold dear. In this narrative, the deep state is held responsible for all of America's problems, and Trump is heralded as the savior.

Of course the crazies ate it up. And given Trump's recent behavior, of course they're turning against him.

It's a uniquely American problem. High trust is usually synonymous with the first world. High trust and civic sense drive efficiencies that help the first world stay ahead. First-world Europeans and East Asians do not have this deep-rooted suspicion towards authority. Even functioning third-world nations have sweeping rations and welfare (low quality as it may be) to help with survival. So, the citizenry retains a base level of goodwill towards institutions.

America, since its inception, may be the only first-world country that's remained low-trust. The Second Amendment and the union-of-states structure start things off with suspicion between smaller organizations and national organizations. As time went on, you got the Wild West, stranger danger, dilapidated inner cities, and more recently, drug addiction-driven homelessness. Can't trust anyone. Usually, this would be unstable. But America has so much money that it brute forces its inefficiencies away. The entire American debt and insurance industry is propped up as a band-aid solution for all the missing trust.

In such a zeitgeist, violent conspiracy nuts become a unique failure mode for American society. Somewhere along the way, these kinds of conspiracy nuts are beaten down into compliant citizens. But not here. The country feeds this distrust, through its scriptures and decentralization. Now the nuts are crazier than ever, they have guns, and they're pointing to the source of their distrust: national leaders. With the disempowerment of pacifying institutions such as mainstream media and traditional churches, the nuts continue spiraling. America is dry tinder, and Trump is a whole-ass blowtorch. For the sake of this nation, I hope he loses and quietly fucks off to Mar-a-Lago for good.

America has not been high trust in the modern era. We’re a Latin American country which is so wealthy it can brute force its way past most of the usual Latin American social ills, or at least mitigate them. We’re not a bigger wealthier first world country. This isn’t England or Japan in the new world. It’s Brazil with seven times the GDP per capita.

I think that's a direct restatement of what DirtyWaterHotDog said. Was that your intention, or were you trying to argue with him?

The deep state isn't some nefarious ingroup. It's a useful umbrella term to capture the emergent ideology of DC's upper-middle-class bureaucracy. But that’s it.

The concept of "Deep State" is one of the only exports of Turkish political discourse to the wider Western world (you are welcome).

While some Americans such as you came up with explanations as to how it "actually" denotes something else more inline with your own worldview, no the actual concept of Deep State very much describes an inner polity that actually runs the country while staying embedded deep inside the visible state.

This makes a lot of sense in the local context of Turkey and similar shakier Western-aligned countries (Greece, Egypt etc but even for example Italy). These countries often had a core of NATO aligned bureaucrats and military/intelligence officers who coordinated with each other to manipulate or bypass the wider political process for important decisions. These structures were on hyperdrive during the Cold War but they did not disappear overnight afterwards and usually morphed into different shapes.

As the world nears a new era where there is genuine competition and danger for the US Empire, and the politicians and regular bureaucrats cannot be trusted with certain decisions, it is not a coincidence that some of these groups are reactivating and flexing their muscles.

The deep state isn't some nefarious ingroup. It's a useful umbrella term to capture the emergent ideology of DC's upper-middle-class bureaucracy. But that’s it. It personifies the incompetence inherent in all bureaucracy. It is as faceless as it is boring.

I feel like "Yes, Minister" should be required watching in Civics classes.

This doesn't make any sense... if this were true you'd expect to see the opposite. You're going to blame Trump for stirring up the crazies with wild conspiracy theories, then say that HE is the one to blame for it when he gets attempted assassinations?

If this were attempts against Joe or Kamala, I could maybe see this. In fact I'd probably agree to some extent. But the idea that Trump is the one who is going to get assassination attempts when he has been 'stirring up the crazies' against the other party, yet the other party has 0, is farcical.

Most violence happens within the ingroup. 54.3 percent or people murdered were killed by someone they knew. The same doesn't exactly hold for assassinations, but there's a trend of assassins having more in common with their targets than their targets' political enemies. Charles J. Guiteau was definitely on Garfield's "side." Lee Harvey Oswald was closer politically to Kennedy than Nixon. John Hinckley Jr was nonpolitical, but at the same time had been attempting to become an entertainer.

And given how the US presidency works-- with the designated survivor being the vice president-- this really makes perfect sense. If you hate the president, replacing him with a vice president you also hate that meanwhile becomes much more radically against you is a terrible idea. But showing "your side" that they shouldn't risk betraying your cause/better go even further in your direction makes more sense.

With all that being said, I wouldn't blame specifically trump for the assassination attempts since it's not like his rhetoric exists in a vacuum. But it's not like we're not seeing equivalent forms of radicalism in the democratic base. See: BLM, pro-palestine protestors sabotaging their own side. Trump's base just happens to be more male, more armed, and therefore more violent.

The Maldives have been trending more Islamist for 30 years, but I wouldn’t call the events of the last couple of years further or more rapid radicalization. In fact the middle class youth seem less radical, fewer hijabs, less modesty in general than they did ten years ago, tempted more by new money consumerist Dubai culture than anything else. They’re watching Dubai Bling on Netflix (though who isn’t?).

What’s changed is that anti-India animus has grown, but that was always inevitable under a Hindu nationalist government. Most of the anti-Indian insults on Maldivian Twitter also weren’t / aren’t Islamist in character, they’re more the same stuff you find on /pol/.

America has remained low trust? There are a multitude of economic counter arguments one can make. The simplest is that few people would invest in a low-trust society, and yet the American economy remains the envy of the world. The US dollar is the world’s reserve currency. The US routinely runs current account deficits, as foreigners just seem to love holding US-denominated assets. The legal system has its foundations in common law, which requires a great deal more trust than civil law. American industries operate quite profitably based on trust such as banking, and anything that relies on brands.

What I think you’ve identified, quite appropriately, is the mistrust that reasonable Americans now have toward the people and institutions who have betrayed them. Technology has made it harder for politicians and journalists to lie. Television showed Americans what was going on during e.g. the Vietnam War. The Internet gave Americans more perspectives that were censored or ignored by the mainstream press. Social media allowed Americans to communicate with each other without needing a propagandist to soft chew their ideas for them. And it turns out that many conspiracy theories turned out to be conspiracy facts, and Americans realized that the faceless bureaucracy supposed to represent the better angels of our nature actually had its own self-serving motives. So maybe the ‘conspiracy nuts’ were previously the ‘compliant citizens’ who woke up to a nation that—somewhere along the line—stopped being theirs. Is it any wonder, then, why some of those people might resort to taking their nation back by force?

The deep state isn't some nefarious ingroup. It's a useful umbrella term to capture the emergent ideology of DC's upper-middle-class bureaucracy. But that’s it. It personifies the incompetence inherent in all bureaucracy. It is as faceless as it is boring. However, Trump's rendition of the deep state is akin to a singular eldritch horror that seeks to destroy all that we hold dear. In this narrative, the deep state is held responsible for all of America's problems, and Trump is heralded as the savior.

It’s not nefarious no, but it’s also completely absurd that people aren’t allowed to distrust the organs of state that rarely serve their purposes, and quite often serve to stymie peasant attempts to better themselves economically. The organs of the deep state are finely tuned to follow procedures that protect themselves from scrutiny, and provide deniability to anyone that might be blamed if something goes wrong. It is not geared to serving its purpose and regulating without being destructive.

OSHA is supposed to protect workers, but quite often the opposite happens as rules that do little to prevent serious injury often make it difficult to impossible to run a business. Which makes it a much cheaper and often better idea to have things made in China or India so they aren’t fined because of some cosmetic problems that have nothing to do with safety.

FEMA is so regulation heavy that it’s more a hinderance than a help in a disaster. Much of the aid in Helene is getting through despite FEMA, not because of it. And because of this the people no longer want FEMA around. I can’t blame them when a bunch of construction workers with heavy equipment can rescue more people in a couple of hours than FEMA and those they contract with can manage in a week.

It’s poor customer service. The people are not getting better transportation from the department of transportation, better education from the department of education, and so on.

Of course the crazies ate it up. And given Trump's recent behavior, of course they're turning against him.

They’re not necessarily “crazy”. I think they’re wrong in the sense that these groups don’t wish them to suffer. But at the same time the deep state serves the deep state and is mostly a jobs program for elites who are otherwise unemployable who have no idea how to get things done. They follow procedures off cliffs because they are not skilled enough to know how things actually work so they can’t or won’t bend the rules to get things moving in the right direction.

It’s not nefarious no, but it’s also completely absurd that people aren’t allowed to distrust the organs of state that rarely serve their purposes, and quite often serve to stymie peasant attempts to better themselves economically. The organs of the deep state are finely tuned to follow procedures that protect themselves from scrutiny, and provide deniability to anyone that might be blamed if something goes wrong. It is not geared to serving its purpose and regulating without being destructive.

Whether you admit that, people do believe it is nefarious, or at least speak as if they genuinely believe it. And that it is organized.

Agencies are built to be standardized, both due to logistics of coordinating between agencies and at scale, and to try to prevent both actual and perceived bribery or kickbacks.

They’re not necessarily “crazy”.

I would apply that term to a Trump supporter that tries to assassinate Trump. Unless it was some 4D chess move to pretend to try to assassinate Trump to give Trump a polling boost.

I've found myself in a lower managerial position of a large corporation. I've had my share of processes that are meant to add traceability to both the tasks themselves and my workload, and the incremental increase in the number of steps added. I hate it, but I'm not throwing away my job over it.

I’m not going to deny that at least some people think it’s nefarious. It’s just that it’s much more likely that FEMA is bean counting supplies gathered by other charities before letting them through to satisfy a process that’s in their handbook. Standardizing is generally okay. But then again this is a situation where time loss means dead bodies and everybody knows it. It’s not exactly the same as managing accounts in an office. The time spent adding traceability to a process in an office job and even using that to trace that information isn’t going to cause much of a problem because you have the luxury of as much time as you need to do that. If the cost of traceability is death, then I think honestly it’s a bit more critical to push back and say “why is it important to have a complete inventory of what First Baptist Church of Asheville is distributing when that will delay aid by a whole day and people will die without food?” Sure, there are some bits that you need to hold the line on, but trying to follow a checklist to the letter in a disaster zone just adds delay where none was needed.

The American people and American institutions are distinct. I agree that the world's institutions trust American institutions. The modern world order has been sculpted by post-WW2 America. It is less so trust, than the world being a vassal state to America.

To be clear, I don't say this with resentment. I consider US to be history's most benevolent global superpower. I'll take Pax Americana 100 times over the superpowers it replaced.

For my previous comment, I meant interpersonal trust and citizen-domestic institution trust.

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