site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   13512 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 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.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I've been reading up more on Tulsi Gabbard. Honestly, she has an incredible and distinguished track record- from being a medic in Iraq, to her Hawaiian heritage.

If she really does get the DNI position in the Trump cabinet, there is strong chance that she will attempt a bid for President immediately after.

This could cause competition for the Thelians hoping for more JD Vance after Trump leaves office. But I'm not here to wargame 2028 campaign hypotheticals when Trump isn't even sworn in yet.

It seems she and her husband converted to hinduism.

My immediate take is that her presence and native pacific islander background means you know she ascended, and worked for the positions she had. Her brief stint as a Democrat is a bit odd, but otherwise she looks like she has a pretty pristine track record that's really hard to shit on.

Her being anti-lgbt, with a track record of policies that would otherwise be fairly progressive, she seems like a standard, good pick for almost any position in ... any president's cabinet?

From reading the wiki page, I'm having a hard time figuring out why anyone would mouth-froth over the idea of her having any position of power.

Dear Mottizens, what is your view on her? Any information I've missed?

It seems she and her husband converted to Hinduism.

She was raised Hindu. You can't convert to Hinduism. No Indian would be able to explain what that even means. Pagans are flexible. The Indian "far-right" (RSS) routinely suggest that Indian minorities are religious chimeras, calling them Muslim-Hindus or Christian-Hindus. The data backs their claims. A majority of Indian Christians & Muslims believe in karma & a plurality believe in reincarnation. For Hindus, the lines between lines between culture & religion are blurry, with very few consensus beliefs.

Push comes to shove, I'd say Hinduism is about:

  • Karma (Actions have consequences)
  • Dharma (Sanctity of the duties you've signed up for + abiding by a personal moral code)
  • Rebirth till Moksha (Less worldly desires is better. Ends up as a general tree-hugger syndrome)
  • General neutrality of the divine. (The system exists for all. No special cut out for devout believers.)

Contrary to popular belief, vegetarianism & non-violence are relatively modern (20th century) ideas and part of Nehru/Gandhi's 20th century Vishwa-guru (teacher to the world) propaganda. Other than a small subsection of Brahmins & Jains (over-represented in the US diaspora), the rest don't put either idea on a pedestal.

All this to say, I'd caution against imposing Abrahamic models onto Pagan religions. American Hinduism is closer to ACX-Rationalism than the sort of conservative thought that is ascribed to India's rural Hindi heartland.

That aside, what's her reason for opposing gay marriage? I know Christians and Muslims have a scriptural disgust for it. I'd like to know where young Tulsi's strong opposition to it comes from.

I found some commentary on /r/moderatepolitics where she's criticised for being pro-Russian (so of course a Russian agent) and pro-Assad (because apparently she visited Syria and had an opportunistic meeting with Assad; after which she was a 'skeptic' of Assad using chemical weapons on his own people). There was some speculation on reddit that the senate wouldn't confirm her DNI appointment for the above reasons. She apparently also backed conversion therapy when she was younger. I haven't fact checked or done a deep dive on any of this. I'm just providing a hook for people to start their own research.

I'm actually a big fan of Tulsi after seeing her several times on Rogan (Transcript). She is against the MIC, the deep state (unelected bureaucrats) and forever wars. I was disappointed that she didn't get SecDef and worried that she would be sidelined, but my confidence was restored with the DNI selection. She's unironically what I would like to see as a female president.

I don't know how 2028 primaries will turn out, but I'd expect Rubio, Vance and Gabbard to compete. Vance and Gabbard seemed to get along very well on the campaign trail (Vance being an (ex)marine and Gabbard being Reserve Army).

Edit: Adding some links. Atlantic article doing some character assassination here.

Most of the opposition is going to point at her record on Syria -- she was ponderously slow to realize Assad was an asshole, and remained skeptical that he used chemical weapons after . She cites the Iraq War as cause, and that's fair to an extent, but it's an odd thing to bring to the DNI. I dunno whether to read it as a (figurative) bomb-thrower that'll root through some of the various agencies' more corrupt bits or at least throw some chaos into the various whisper campaigns, or just something she really wanted and Trump was willing to give her.

Some of that's just a tendency for conservative hawks to treat anyone remotely skeptical of their institutions as deadly poison, but even in the self-described neocon circles that wouldn't have cared about other spheres are really concerned on this one -- there was a minor news cycle when she mentioned demanding a ceasefire around Ukrainian that was mostly noteworthy for Romney calling it treason. Same from the places Democrats have been hawks. Which... may or may not be persuasive to you.

She shares a bit of crystal healer woo with RFK, though that probably matters less at here than any other cabinet position. She's also separately a social conservative on a lot of stuff (gays, trans people, abortion, DEI), though that's mostly a separate deal.

From the Blue Tribe-specific stuff, it's a little more boring: she pushed against Clinton getting the 2016 nomination, and hasn't treated Trump or January 6th as The Worst Thing Ever, and is not pro-LGBT.

she was ponderously slow to realize Assad was an asshole, and remained skeptical that he used chemical weapons after.

Assad is an asshole, but my understanding is that the evidence he used chemical weapons is actually quite weak and possibly false intelligence. And it's not like the US and her allies and the international community more broadly have never lied about Middle Eastern dictatorships doing bad things for propaganda.

But it has been a long while since I've looked into this all.

I'd be an asshole too if I had to defend my country from ISIS, Turkey, The United States, and Israel all at the same time.

Her brief stint as a Democrat is a bit odd

She was 20 years a Dem? She was 21 when she was voted into the Hawaii House of Representatives as a Democrat.

Sorry, that was a joke!

I phrased it in such a way that I expected most to recognize.

Seems a bit of a moot point as there is surely no way she gets through the Senate.

She's a crank with similar vibes to RFK Jr. or Ron Paul, although they have very different voting records. The fact this group has ascended now is thanks to the Republicans being dominated by the Dale Gribble voters.

While I see and understand the throughline of her appeal to the Gribbler faction, I don't see or understand what earns her crank-hood.

She is a crank whereas your opinions are perfect and normal. Oh but wait — weren’t you the one defending the Selzter poll and calling other people (like me) partisans hacks despite us clearly stating the facts for our doubts? And yet who was right? Maybe that should cause you to have just a minuscule amount of introspection instead of just criticizing your out group. That is, maybe you get a lot of things wrong.

You and the other so-called 'partisan hacks' don't get to say you're right because a coin came up heads despite a poll saying it had a 60% chance to come up tails. The fact that you 'correctly predicted' an event has little inherent bearing on whether your reasoning was correct.

I'm incredibly tired of hearing this talking point. Did you correctly predict the election map in 2020? in 2016? Do you have a better record overall than the pollsters you critiscize? What reason do I have to believe that you are not a broken clock that is right twice a day?

On the other hand, you're fine to critiscize OP calling someone a crank with no substantive reasoning.

I owned up to the Selzer poll being wrong, specifically about thinking it would be off by less than 10 points. The arguments against it were pretty uniformly medicore, along the lines of "nah, it just feels wrong" or crosstab diving or "unskewing", against a pollster who had a track record of proving her critics wrong over and over (e.g. in 2020, when she was far more pro-Trump than most of the competition, and ended up being right). Obviously it ended up being incorrect, and now Selzer has a lot of egg on her face.

Also, I'm not a fan of ad hominem attacks so this will probably be my last response to you.

"nah, it just feels wrong"

Perfectly justifiable. If you prefer: "My priors of this being true are so enormously low and a single extreme outlier poll is such a small unit of evidence, so I refuse to significantly update my belief regarding this. The likelihood that a single poll is wrong is far greater than the likelihood that my entire understanding of the electorate is this far off. By far greatest likelihood is a one-off polling error. Miniscule likelihood it is correct and I am demented and detached from reality in my understanding of Trump's support."

Luckily our brains have excellent heuristics that approximate all this. So at a glance you can easily say "Smollett is a liar, no way that happened" or "Nah, that poll is just wrong". And you sound jivey talking about priors and weights of evidence if you simply state the obvious likelihood delivered to you by the sophisticated mechanisms in your brain.

Dude. This isn’t an ad hominem. You made nothing but an ad hominem in the OP and then I called out that maybe you should show more humility.

As for the Selzer poll, I pointed out that the Selzer poll would require believing there were massive shifts in multiple populations over a short time that wasn’t captured by anyone (indeed her prior poll showed Trump +18 — a 21 point move wasn’t explained by Biden to Harris). That should’ve given you pause. Calling those bad arguments ignores the fact that those arguments actually reflected reality whereas yours did not.

Tbf cricitizing (even unfairly) a 3rd party is not really ad hominem.

It is functionally the same. Ad hominem in the classic sense is “your argument is bad because you are a bad person.”

There was zero intent to engage with the concept that Tulsi is good or bad pick Instead, the poster just said “she is a crank.” It is functionally the same—not addressing the issue and instead basically name calling.

Funny enough the poster claimed I was engaging in ad hominem. Instead, I was pointing out that the poster’s judgement isn’t great—especially when it comes to political topics. So read most charitably his comments re Tulsi amounted to “trust my judgement.” So bringing up his bad judgement is directly addressing his argument. He couldn’t handle it and decided to throw a fit and block me.

Uh, how exactly is she a crank? She’s a Hare Krishna who doesn’t hide her ‘member of a very conservative religion’ views on social issues while having some progressive ideas and being opposed to US intervention.

She's followed quite a similar arc that RFK Jr. has, initially being a Democrat but being very out of step with any major faction. She also has a big thing for conspiracies, like claiming the Syrian gas attack was a false-flag by the British, or being very worried about "biolabs" in Ukraine that Putin was using as fodder for innuendo that the US was creating a supervirus to mass-murder Slavs. The Gribble faction loves stuff like this.

r/neoliberal on suicide watch rn.

I know, reddit. But they are so confident that she’s a Russian agent. What’s the deal with that? Is it just normal radlib demoralized Russia hysteria? It seems deeper than that.

On a related note; I’ve been on Reddit a lot in the last week, mostly out of morbid curiosity. I had stayed away for probably 12-18 months, and it’s terrible. A much worse echo chamber than I remember, and it was incredibly bad before. Good god.

Geeze. You weren't kidding about neoliberal being hysterical today. They're in rare form. I expect this from /r/politics and their ilk. I thought neoliberal thought they were high brow.

I think the Democrats unleashed the most massive wave of bot and shill astroturfing that they ever have before onto Reddit in the last year or so. I have heard a theory that seems very plausible to me, which is that one of their main astroturf focuses has been to put political posts up on relatively obscure subreddits and then massively upvote them using automated or semi-automated means to drive them to the front page. https://old.reddit.com/r/houstonwade/ is often presented as an example of this theory, and if you take a look at it it seems to check out.

The astroturfing combined with years of censorship having driven out most political dissent means that a large fraction of the political discourse on Reddit in the last few months has consisted of waves of bot and shill astroturfing slamming into the minds of people who are already mentally prepared to believe in wild pro-Democrat political theories.

Reddit is almost done as a political discussion space. Even /r/politicaldiscussion, which was maybe like 70% pro-Democrat a few years ago, is now more like 90% pro-Democrat. /r/moderatepolitics is still holding out but I don't know for how much longer. The dirtbag and socialist left on places like /r/stupidpol and /r/redscarepod is still being tolerated but again, I do not know for how much longer given that they criticize mainstream Democrats almost as much as Republicans do.

I don't know if trying to turn Reddit from 95% pro-Democrat to 99% pro-Democrat was worth what the Democrats invested in it, but it might be. Such astoturfing campaigns are not necessarily very expensive, and in a close election they well might swing it.

X has also been full of astroturfing, and still is for that matter. But in the case of X, the astroturfing is coming through from both sides, rather than almost entirely from the Democrats like on Reddit. I don't know if Republicans didn't bother to invest much into astroturfing Reddit or if it's just that their attempts got foiled by censorship, but on X their astroturfing attempts seem to have decent penetration.

It's not just political subs. Reddit is a web of lies, misrepresentation, shills, fraud, and trolling. Believe me I wish it weren't the case. I mean I have a long train commute.

Vivek Ramaswamy gave an interesting talk at Yale's Buckley institute a few days after the election. What I specifically want to focus on is the part starting at 34:35, where he describes what he thinks is a divide in the Republican party between two different notions of American national identity. The first is that being American is about following a common set of values---meritocracy, free speech, self-governance, etc. The second (starting 39:12) is that being American is about having deep, ancestral ties to a particular piece of land---"blood and soil". He sees the coming years as an almost factional fight within the Republican party between these two notions of identity.

This topic is very close to my heart---I think the majority of my interaction with this forum has been very unsuccessfully arguing in favor of the ideals-based notion of identity. Ramaswamy fervently supports the same and I hope hearing his much better-argued case (from a much more authoritative source) is far more compelling than anything I've tried to say.

However, what I'm actually interested in is what people here think the outcome of the factional fight is going to be. What do you see in Trump's choices of appointees? Is Ramaswamy going to be pushed out or is he going to be an influential figure moving forward? Which side do you think various major figures in the Republican party land on?

Just to put my cards on the table, I personally think Ramaswamy is delusional that it's even a fight and that the Republican party is fully dominated by the blood-and-soil side. This is in fact the main reason I vote Democrat and if I believed the ideals side was going to win, I would immediately become a die-hard Trump supporter. I believe that if you actually hold the ideals-based notion of identity, then the Matt Yglesias/Noah Smith-wing of the Democratic party is the right political home for you. As for why I believe this, I always thought that support for legal, skilled immigration was the best litmus test for this divide---if you are on the ideals side, then it is a no-brainer win-win and if you're on the blood-and-soil side, then it is very dangerous. Both what happened in the last Trump administration and experience talking to right-wingers here seemed to very strongly demonstrate that US Republicans are very against skilled immigration.

WASHINGTON - President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz as the next U.S. Attorney General.

Trump announced his latest cabinet appointment Wednesday afternoon. Gaetz has been a long-time Trump supporter and is a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus in the House.

"Matt is a deeply gifted and tenacious attorney, trained at the William & Mary College of Law, who has distinguished himself in Congress through his focus on achieving desperately needed reform at the Department of Justice. Few issues in America are more important than ending the partisan Weaponization of our Justice System. Matt will end Weaponized Government, protect our Borders, dismantle Criminal Organizations and restore Americans’ badly-shattered Faith and Confidence in the Justice Department," Trump said in a statement.

Gaetz represents Florida's District 1.

Trump has announced a flurry of nominations in the week since his election. Earlier on Wednesday, he selected Sen. Marco Rubio to serve as his Secretary of State.

He should be just trolling I think ...

Gaetz is funny enough to be trolling, but more likely Trump just wants someone willing to be enough of a hatchetman. Be interesting to see how much of the confirmation fight circles around his actual philosophy, rather than around how oily he is (spoiler: yes) or the reputed and increasingly dubious allegations of the most sexual impropriety.

More effort than this, please.

We are a discussion site, not a link aggregator. Or, uh, a quote aggregator.

Tulsi Gabbard got Director of National Intelligence. Rubio is still twisting in the wind waiting for his position to become official. I wonder if Trump is just doing his ritual humiliation ceremony, same as he did with Chris Christy.

Gaetz immediately resigned from his house seat...maybe this is a bureaucratic poisoned chalice for the senate, which has the choice of either confirming Gaetz as AG or facing a potential appointment of Gaetz to Rubio's vacant seat?

I do think that we need some bulls in china shop in washington if the western civilization is to be ok in the next century. So Tulsi is a good pick. But gaetz is not qualified I think and probably couldn't pick up to speed fast enough.

Surely these picks are a smokescreen. I bet JD Vance is huddling with Yarvin, Musk, and Thiel in a smoke-filled room right now discussing which anon Twitter accounts and Mottizens will get the call to serve in the shadow cabinet. They must be cross-referencing the Gray Mirror Substack subscriber list to make sure they don’t accidentally double-count any alts.

No, they’re not, there are upper and upper mid level officials in the Texas and Florida governments who will get drafted instead.

You laugh, but Yarvin himself has been very strongly opining that Nothing Ever Happens and any Trumpian hopes were likely to crash on the shores of redtape.

I'm willing to bet that Musk and Thiel will get what they wanted out of the admin (i.e.: the feds stop putting roadblocks in front of them), but twitter anon dreams of power because they are mutuals with Vance were delusional.

feds stop putting roadblocks in front of them

If/When the Dems regain power, especially if MAGA dies fully with Trump, what do you think is going to happen to them long term? My guess is imprisonment or just thrown off a building depending on the fallout of a Trump administration.

I wouldn't recommend throwing Musk off a building; he'd probably shoot flames out of his ass and land safely.

I would imagine they think by the time the Dems regain power, the impossible-to-work-with faction will have been soundly defeated and whoever takes over will only be a drag on their businesses, not anything worse. I don't believe that, but Musk, at least, is an optimist.

They'll do what filthy rich billionaires did before them : Donate = Bribe = Lobby.

Now that Elon & Thiel are Texans, the state should offer them plenty of protection even after Trump goes away.

Does anyone have any ideas about what is going on with Marco Rubio as SecState?

Rubio's substantive political views are those of a swamp neocon on foreign policy and a conventional GOPe conservative on domestic policy. He isn't noted for his personal loyalty to Trump (to put things lightly). So what is Trump's motivation for appointing him? Rubio is a Ukraine war sceptic, but there are lots of Ukraine war sceptics with foreign policy experience who are closer to Trump. This looks like the same mistake Trump made appointing Tillerson in his first term.

This is sufficiently hard to explain that I am finding the left-wing conspiracy theory plausible (that the point isn't to get Rubio into the Cabinet, it's to get him out of the Senate, and Trump has already agreed with DeSantis on who will be appointed to the vacant Senate seat, probably a Trump family member).

I wouldn’t be quite so bold about it as @Ben___Garrison, but, uh, I don’t understand why people keep expecting coherent plans out of Trump. He was the vibes-based President.

If Rubio’s shown the right kind of enthusiasm, Trump isn’t going to have a problem folding him into the enterprise. When he inevitably butts heads, Trump will throw him out. Whether Rubio accomplishes anything in the meantime is more about his level of ass-kissing than his stated politics.

Personally, I give this dynamic a lot of credit for the legal hurdles faced by the Trump admin. But I doubt that’ll convince anyone who prefers the Deep State explanation.

Most of his confirmed appointments seem to be Rubio tier or worse. Complained about the Cheney's during his campaign and literally appointed a Cheney loyalist and ex-advisor as his national security advisor. Trump's criteria for a cabinet member is how loudly nice they are too him, not their political policy.

Really the big question surrounding Trump's second term was, "Has he learned from his first term?" and the answer is clearly no. X seems to be in near open revolt after all the appointments and Thune getting voted Majority lead. He's gonna lose all the libertarian support, all the weird center-left? populist RFK support and so on. It'll be funny if he loses the house because he appoints to many people from it and republicans all lose the follow up special elections.

He's gonna lose all the libertarian support, all the weird center-left? populist RFK support and so on.

He's going to lose maybe 1/3 of those, if that. The rest will get into the Trump cult mindset where Trump is always right and will either change their own ideologies to match wholesale, explain away Trump's actions (5-dimensional chess!) or just ignore the cognitive dissonance. I mean, that's been the general pattern with so many others Trump converts previously, why would it change?

I mean, that's been the general pattern with so many others Trump converts previously, why would it change?

That's just people, every day we negatively polarize just a little bit more into being a complete magatard or a woke zealot.

Libertarians tend to be contrarians who are comfortable with preaching their message from the sidelines while the mainstream ignores them. It is my impression that a smaller but still significant percentage of the other eclectic groups that flocked to Trump this time around are made up of those with a similar mindset. If I’m right about that, they’re probably more likely to jump ship when they don’t get their way than Trump’s other supporters are.

Trump needs establishment allies. Marco Rubio in an Uber prestigious spot fits the bill nicely.

As some smarter people have said, Trump is not an entirely unserious person, but has only one earnestly held political belief, which is a fondness for tariffs and an obsession with the balance of trade. This is his one issue, not immigration or gun rights or taxation or the size of the federal government or free speech or anything else. He has cared about it for fifty years and it is as sincere an ideological stance as that of any other ‘conviction-based’ politician.

Anything that isn’t tariffs is something Trump is malleable on. He may have feelings or be drawn in one direction or another but it’s more vague and he can be (often easily) persuaded. As for why he picked Rubio, Trump is easily flattered, and while the warm embrace of a loyal ally is nice, the pledging of an erstwhile enemy to one’s banner is a much better feeling. In this, Trump is a smarter leader than he lets on; nobody is truly loyal, but someone who can convert an enemy to a friend and make him feel truly accepted is rarer than it seems.

5D chess move would be he removes him from his Senate seat, which gives Desantis the pick to replace him.

And Desantis will pick someone closer to Trump's ideal so the Senate will be a bit more favorable to the Trump agenda.

And Rubio gets fired as SecState inside 2 years, probably.

Oh goodness.

Yes, Trump's grand move is to empower Desantis, the man who tried to kill the king less than a year ago, with whom there's still bad blood privately, and who has only begrudgingly fallen into line. To replace Rubio... a senator who hasn't really made an anti-Trump stink since 2016.

Why not do this against Murkowski instead, a senator who voted to impeach Trump?

Alternatively, why not do this to a House seat, given that chamber is likely to be far closer.

And Rubio gets fired as SecState inside 2 years, probably.

Unironically plausible, given Trump is so utterly capricious with his nominees. Rubio could be setting himself up to get the same fate that befell Jeff Sessions.

Desantis was the one who was quickest to see where the winds were blowing and endorse the guy without reservation.

By comparison, I still remember when Trump's nickname for Rubio was "Little Marco."

And it is also obvious that replacing a Senator is a much higher-leverage move than replacing a house member, in general.

Why not do this against Murkowski instead, a senator who voted to impeach Trump?

Would she accept?

By comparison, I still remember when Trump's nickname for Rubio was "Little Marco."

Yeah, that one's going to stick around to the end of his career.

Desantis was the one who was quickest to see where the winds were blowing and endorse the guy without reservation.

He only endorsed when it was very clear that Trump was going to trounce him in the primaries. Haley was the only semi-major candidate left in after Iowa. And his endorsement was more like a detente at the time.

By comparison, I still remember when Trump's nickname for Rubio was "Little Marco."

What does this have to do with anything? Ron's nickname was "desanctimonious".

And it is also obvious that replacing a Senator is a much higher-leverage move than replacing a house member, in general.

Not when Trump will likely have a 53-47 majority in the Senate, vs a very narrow majority in the House that's known for being chaotic and unpredictable.

Yes, Trump's grand move is to empower Desantis, the man who tried to kill the king less than a year ago

...Could you elaborate on your model here? Like, it seems you're positing that Trump and Desantis are enemies, and further that his supporters should consider them enemies and prefer conflict between them rather than cooperation. Would that be accurate?

They're not bitter ideological enemies, but they are political rivals in the same vein as Sanders vs Warren.

But you understand that we, the base they both depend on for their continued careers, want them to work together, right?

Sure, but voters are bad at punishing politicians for specific transgressions in the best of times. If Desantis really wanted to snub Trump he could likely get away with it if he staged it correctly, and didn't go too far like nominating a Democrat. That's not to say that that's likely to happen, just that it's a possibility, which is part of why it's implausible that Trump has some 4D plan in his head. It's far more likely that one of Trump's advisors put Rubio's name forward, Trump went "oh yeah, that guy, he's alright, he didn't vote to impeach me" and that was it.

It's simple: People falsely attribute policies they personally prefer to politicians they like the vibes of. This denial of reality isn't infinite, but it is very strong. Right-leaning isolationists tired of "forever wars" thus falsely think Trump shares their view, or is even an outright pacifist. They use ridiculously overfit evidence like "no new wars happened under Trump", and aggressively ignore everything else like Trump nearly sparking a war with Iran, entangling us further in Israel, not withdrawing from Afghanistan, sending weapons to Ukraine, wafflemaxxing on China, employing hawks like Bolton or Pompeo, etc.

Trump doesn't like war in and of itself, but he hates being seen as "weak" far, far, FAR more. Avoiding situations that "make us look weak" is the amorphous basis of his entire foreign policy.

Although I must say it's entertaining to watch people try to come up with ever more elaborate justifications to resolve their cognitive dissonance. The "4D chess" hypotheses are always worth a laugh.

not withdrawing from Afghanistan

He did begin the process, it just only finished under the Biden administration. I agree with everything else.

He delayed endlessly, and if he were re-elected there was a good chance he would have delayed even longer past the date he had previously set.

During the campaign he said US shouldn't have left Bagram, Bagram is in Afghanistan, by transitive property that means remaining in Afghanistan.

This has far more to do with Trump monday-morning quarterbacking than anything else.

I think the whole idea, and I’m sort of on the fence about how true this is, was that you didn’t have to give Bagram back and we could just have kept it as essentially imperial property, like Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Apparently it would have been extremely easy to defend basically indefinitely with minimal manpower. Bagram is (was) absolutely a huge airbase and was a massive strategic asset to the US & Allies in the region.

This isn’t as strange as it might first appear, this was a live issue in the whole “counterinsurgency vs counterterrorism” debate on the fate of Afghanistan. The counterterrorism camp basically said sod the afghans internal politics, they were unimportant and not worth any nation building effort, and that they should just use Bagram as an operational base to hunt Al Qaeda.

They do see kind of right in retrospect.

He also got outmaneuvered on Ukraine and with all the MIC Russian collusion agitprop had limited options when it came to Ukraine without giving their propaganda more credence and further tanking his reelection prospects. The Soleimani thing was pointless though and did nothing to better America's position in the ME and that's entirely on him. He's also definitely in Israel's pocket, but so is most of the US government, there's a reason we'll never get the full info on Epstein. Only politicians I can think of not owned by them without doing research would be the ones owned by Islamic interests and Thomas Massie.

Trump doesn't like war in and of itself, but he hates being seen as "weak" far, far, FAR more. Avoiding situations that "make us look weak" is the amorphous basis of his entire foreign policy.

Aren't these almost the same thing? The way you avoid wars is by being seen as strong and, crucially, as willing to fight if necessary. Countries that appear weak, or appear strong but unwilling to fight, are the ones that end up being attacked.

We’re not actually worried about being attacked. Not like Russia rolling over the border to Ukraine. It’s the rest of our interests that are at risk. Erosion of our hegemony over the ocean, space, finance, etc. A long series of bad trades just under the margin of what we’re willing to fight. Securing that is more complicated than just looking dangerous.

No. He was willing to stay in dumb wars far longer than we should have (e.g. his endless delays on withdrawing from Afghanistan) because actually exiting would lock in the losses that had been practically inevitable for a long time, which "would look weak". One could say that being in the Middle East at all is a serious misallocation of American resources.

I don't deny the logic of not being seen as a pushover on the international stage, but Trump's fear of "looking weak" was far more driven by Fox News pundits than by actual geopolitical perceptions.

Nah it's 2024, you don't need to beat your chest and throw your spear threateningly in the direction of the rival tribe's line of warriors. We have enough nukes to destroy the world multiple times over. Speak softly and carry a big stick and what not. Trump's bravado stems more from insecurity and narcissism, which makes him easy to manipulate by the deep state.

Maybe we're talking about different things. I'm thinking of Obama talking about red lines in Syria, then not doing anything about it. Or Putin hinting about using nukes over foreign involvement in Ukraine and then not. I agree one can also go too far and be easily baited.

I don't see how Syria made the US look weak and vulnerable. It just made it apparent that leadership was out of touch since he had no popular support for involvement in Syria and had to backtrack.

If anything Iraq and Afghanistan have done the most to make the US look vulnerable. They showed that a strong enough opposition can actually defeat the US military and this was a case of the US overextending. Too much chest beating.

Russia is harder to say since the information environment has gone fully 1984 and there is almost no factual information circulating in western media at this point about the conflict. Equal odds we are deluding ourselves about Putin's red lines.

Tanner Greer suggests that it is because Rubio shares Trump's economic vision, and Trump's economic vision is intended to become the centerpiece of his foreign policy strategy.

Interesting.

So yes, Rubio is the senate's most important China hawk. He also has a hawkish record on both Iran and Russia. ...But he also has given speeches on the failures of globalization, and the need for a new international economic order. If I had to wager which of those things Trump cares most about.... I would choose the last item.

Well Nixon's opening to China solved the cold war, Trump may try to engineer it's own opening to Russia - so you need someone that is dove-ish on Ukraine but hawkish on China. Rubio seems to fit the bill.

China needs to be managed. They want 2 things - the nine dash line and Taiwan. Both are negotiable I think, but there needs to be sticks and carrots.

The nine dash line is much less important that Taiwan. Control over Taiwan lets China into the Philippines sea, which cannot be completely isolated from the world ocean like the South China sea can.

Secretary of State is one position that really does benefit from having career politician in it. The politics of diplomacy is wild. Some say Rubio is a foreign policy wonk, so maybe simply that was it?

The right-wing conspiracy theory is that it will allow DeSantis to appoint a lightweight and run himself for Senate. He is term limited. And it Rubio could run for Florida Governor.

Rubio hasn't been formally confirmed yet, has he? It's "sources say" but sources have said all sorts of stuff that hasn't happened. One theory is that Trump team is leaking fake info to various sources to see who passes it on and thus reveals unreliability.

Assuming this is true, though...

This looks like the same mistake Trump made appointing Tillerson in his first term.

Tillerson was sacked for lack of personal loyalty and was replaced with even more hawkish and neoconnish Pompeo. If Rubio gets in then it's just proof that it's not a mistake, it's what Trump intends to do.

If the image that Trump supporters (and opponents) have constructed in their heads of Trump that goes majorly against the grain of the general thrust of postwar American foreign policy differs from reality... well, that can't be helped. In general, foreign policy tends to the be one thing where political changes don't usually lead to large differences in course.

Nobody gets confirmed until Trump takes office…

If the image that Trump supporters (and opponents) have constructed in their heads of Trump that presents some sort of a major different to the general thrust of postwar American foreign policy differs from reality... well, that can't be helped. In general, foreign policy tends to the be one thing where political changes don't usually lead to large differences in course.

This, mostly. Don't forget that John Bolton was Trump's National Security Advisor for a time, which is a position of significant influence (but, critically, not determinative).

Trump isn't an isolationist, nor is he a neocon. He's more than willing to have hardliners on the staff, but he will ignore them as much as he ignores that anti-hardliners, which is to say he'll pick whoever's proposal he likes most in the context. Trump isn't ideological enough to be consistent, and while he's willing to go with things that are thought of as 'hardline' (such as the Soleimani killing), he's also been willing to go along with things considered 'weak' (such as the meeting with North Korea's Kim).

Part of Trump's style / implicit offer to his cabinet and significant appointments last time is that he's willing to appoint people whose ambitions / desires are outside the Overton window of the department they oversee, as long as they stand by him / don't start to try and spat with him / his priorities. Trump's appointments, however, are not themselves an endorsement / indication of top-level support for their preferences (i.e. Trump isn't going to fight their bureaucratic battles for them).

What that means is that Rubio and Trump probably have some identified overlapping interests that Rubio wants to do but the current state department momentum isn't. Rubio being a hawk doesn't disqualify him to Trump, because Trump isn't going to defer to Rubio as much as let Rubio do his own thing until Rubio gets involved in a fight with Trump.

He's not that serious. And he especially doesn't want to do things that will create personal risk for him or his family. He'll happily make friends with neocons that now he has the top status job; so long as they stay loyal to his image. He'll go for the easy wins. The hard wins will be ignored. Constitutionally, I don't think he cares at all about the hard wins. He just sees them as a bad investment.

Trump just announced his plans to go forward with a Milei-style AFUERA campaign radically cutting government spending and jobs. And because nothing in government ever gets done without increasing the government first, the plethora of American Departments to do Stuff is joined by one newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency. Apart from proving once again that we are living in the dankest timeline, the DOGE will also give Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy something to do.

Musk has quite the track record when it comes to trimming fat but it remains to be seen whether those skills are transferrable.

Culture War angles are plenty. It would be trivial to craft a narrative either of a hostile, "fascist" takeover of Our Sacred Democracy or of a laptop class that siphons resources from everybody else via the instrument of an ever-expanding bureaucracy consisting of bullshit sinecures for the credentialed.

But the more interesting angle is that this is a fight between the executive and the entrenched bureaucracy. Were I a betting man, I am not sure where I would put my money. Others have tried and failed to cut the bureaucracy to size. But maybe it takes a chainsaw-wielding maniac to get the job done. How is Milei doing, by the way?

Relevant: Dominic Cummings complaints about the UK government and its clownish bureaucracy

For the first year of Gove’s time in the DfE (May 2010 – spring 2011), ministers were up until the early hours proofreading officials’ drafts of letters and rejecting about nine out of ten because of errors with basic facts, spelling, or grammar. When I got embroiled in rows about this in Q1 2011, some MPs had been sent no reply for six months. Despite several complaints to senior officials, nothing happened, shoulders were shrugged – ‘cuts, we need more resource, lack of core skills, all very difficult’ and so on.

https://dominiccummings.com/2014/10/30/the-hollow-men-ii-some-reflections-on-westminster-and-whitehall-dysfunction/

The problem with Western governments isn't that they literally can't find people who know how to spell, or fix lifts, or avoid idiotic wars.

There are plenty of smart people in government and even more who are theoretically available. The whole institutional structure doesn't prioritize doing things correctly. As a collective, they pursue vibes of what they think might be popular amongst their peers (see Team Kamala's decision of why not to go on Rogan). They try to strengthen the power and control of their class and subdue any threats (this is their highest shared priority). They try to deflect all bad outcomes away from themselves. And they like to plot and play politics, diverting national resources for their own internal factional interests. That's how they rise up the ranks.

The key thing isn't scrapping programs or reducing spending but changing the whole incentive structure and culture so that stupid programs aren't initiated and wasteful spending doesn't emerge in the first place. Politicians and officials must not feel safe going 'let's invade this country for made-up reasons' and creating a mess. They must not feel safe wrecking national industries. In the private sector, if you wreck and blunder you end up sinking your company and getting removed from the leadership pool. Ideally you're sifted out through competition before you get into any high-ranking positions. You can't really wriggle out of that (though some manage it).

In the public sector, it's very difficult for even the most effective wreckers to completely destroy a country. Competition between states is quite limited in most places. Responsibility is so diffuse they can lay blame elsewhere. The culture gets more corrupt under the lesser competitive pressure.

To take a less contemporary example, consider Admiral Yi of Korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yi_Sun-sin

He was an incredible leader on the battlefield but he was constantly getting imprisoned, tortured and demoted by his jealous rivals and nervous superiors. The Korean governance culture was inferior, it squandered enormous amounts of talent. We can see a similar kind of suppression (albeit much less severe) on Musk under the old regime, who is clearly an incredible strength for America. Presumably his European equivalent got suffocated before he even got started.

That's what needs to be changed, the entire mindset. This is very hard to do, creating good institutions in the first place needed hundreds and hundreds of years of bloody wars in Europe. Maybe we could try introducing fearsome anti-corruption commissions and merit-based promotions like they have in China. But even then, there are problems with people gaming the rules: 'if the mayor is fired when a disaster kills 36 people, then all disasters will be reported as killing 35'.

Only a clear and inescapable need for true performance can really get it done.

As much as the whole doge thing warms my millennial heart, DOGE just seems like a clone of Inspector General offices, no? And the main reason those have no balls is they're staffed by people who go to the same house parties as everybody else, right? (I am just assuming, here, this seems like a likely Schelling point over time)

So the most effective DOGE will be the Musk one since he's a true outsider, then they will be less effective over time until DOGE exists just to get paid to rubber stamp things.

More and more I think this stuff is really about the people and not the positions. You can create a "Department of Screw the ATF" whose whole job is to obstruct the ATF but if you populate it with people who are drinking buddies with the ATF people they'll coordinate on one or two "hard hitting" investigations (maybe to get rid of somebody the ATF wanted to fire anyway) to make the public happy and otherwise will be in lockstep.

Checks and balances are a cool idea but it's rare to get people who are true enemies. When that happened in the beginning it was such a crisis that we got the 12th Amendment. Not to mention a literal gunfight. Later we got Brooks/Sumner. It's ugly.

Speaking personally (and as somebody who has had libertarian leanings since the age of 16) I wish Musk the best and I think there is a unique window of opportunity here but I kinda hope DOGE just dissolves itself after he's done, there is no real need for a redundant Inspector General, in fact it would be the sort of redundant bloat that DOGE exists to remove.

On further thought I take that back, a good college try at devising a "system" that prevents (reads: delays as long as possible) the inevitable corruption is a noble endeavor and I'm sorry for discouraging it.

I do wonder if the DOGE organization is just a way to offer a cudgel to the private sector that they can wield against the bureaucracy.

Right now it is mostly one way power. A regulator can come in and say "hey we don't like this" and a private company is faced with a costly and lengthy legal battle to overturn that.

Now musk can say "oh you don't like that thing, maybe you are being inefficient and need a reduced headcount".

If your goal is to reduce overall regulation it will mostly fail. If the goal is to reduce regulation for the people that have connections to DOGE then it will probably succeed.

Main problem is this is bureaucratic end-state problems. When the main reward you can hand out to political allies is an exemption from the worst regulations and taxes that everyone else must face.

Musk's been vocal about transparency and even mentioned having a public "leaderboard" for biggest wastes of government money they find; I think this is where the true potential lies. If all they do is maintain that leaderboard publicly, like a Most Wanted List for fiscal conservatives, I think it will help. Even if they have no legal power to cut funding, they can still act as a giant spotlight on some of the more egregious examples, and in turn get some organized public opinion churning on specific cases, which would be plenty useful IMO. Every little bit counts.

I’m pretty sure that describes the Tea Party era of Fox News. A giant spotlight on whatever government spending was most visible. All it got us were a few government shutdowns and a stage set for Trump.

If it set the stage for Trump, then it sure does make sense for Trumpians to support a continuous long-term version of it.

My heart is bullish on DOGE but my mind is bearish. Much of government inefficiency is not that too many people have been hired, like at X, but that its own regulatory requirements are too dense and too strict. Time and effort is sucked up by compliance, procurement, and legal. Firing people might not help, it might simply lower the resources the government has to comply with its own regulations, slowing everything down. If DOGE isn't given the power to reform procurement and cut red tape, I'm afraid it will crash and burn.

Trump promised not to cut entitlements and isn't going to cut defense, that's the vast majority of the budget not being cut right there. The rest is tinkering around the edges.

Medicare and Medicaid can be made more efficient and are the largest part of the budget.

Defense can be made more efficient without "cutting" it. Spending != capabilities.

How does this work when the budget is set by Congress and many of these jobs are required by regulations that Congress would have to repeal? Is there just going to be a massive surplus and a government that doesn't enforce the law? What happens when things like permits that are required by law to do certain things aren't issued because the remaining staff can't keep up with the demand?

It seems to me that the first step should be changing the law so that the government isn't needed to do most of the things it currently does.

Prediction- this will be a federal equivalent of those state subset commissions within 5 years. Sometimes they do good around the margins, sometimes(Colorado) they don’t, either way they’re generally uncontroversially and boring.

My prediction is that early on Musk will run into the incredibly thick red tape that normally prevents massive cuts in government, try to cut through it anyway because that's what he's used to in the private sector, and it results in some sort of lawsuit or other scandal.

I’m not discounting Musk himself doing something big. I just don’t think this will be a durable legacy.

Yeah, I'll further guess that he escalates more than anyone expects, then finds some surprising lever to accomplish something remarkable.

Betting against Musk seems like the most negative alpha strategy imaginable, yet people keep lining up to do it.

I highly doubt Musk will be able to make much progress. He might be able to bag a few high profile wins in a few places at best, but he's not going to get anywhere near the $2 trillion mark he set for himself. There's not nearly that much fat to be trimmed before he'd inadvertently start chopping off bones that people care about and would complain about loudly, and Trump isn't going to let Musk cause too many bad Fox news cycles before he snaps and it becomes a battle of the egos.

If there's anywhere to improve government that could simultaneously reduce costs and improve outcomes, it would be paring back the army of contractors the government has leveraged as a bandaid when people want to get something done, but R's slashed budgets so much that nobody in the government has the competency to do them. But undoing that would mean hiring more government employees and probably paying them more as well, which strongly goes against R vibes and is thus unlikely to be considered.

There's not nearly that much fat to be trimmed

The fat to be trimmed all comes from stuff like unions and other special interests, and you'd have to break those before you can actually cut the fat. When unions have rules like "Only janitor union members can clean floors, and only food sector union members can peel fruit", at small locations you can easily end up with multiple employees where you only need one. But you can't actually fire either employee until you get rid of the union rules, because those jobs do actually need doing.

Unions could be a source of savings, but only like 1/3rd of federal employees are in unions, and part of what makes federal employment bearable is the benefits and job security that such unions have been able provide. If Elon thinks he can get a workforce that has private sector benefits + job security, but with the paylevel of the federal government, I have a bridge to sell him. The notion that there exists huge swathes of the government where employees sit around doing nothing simply because "they can't be fired" is illusory.

R's slashed budgets so much

Wut

Ahem

I'm talking about money to government employees, not all federal outlays (which are dominated by boomer entitlements like Medicare and Social Security).

That's not a problem of budgets, though. That's just a head count. Of course, it's also highly confounded by general employment in the denominator; surely, you wouldn't say that looking at the spike in that plot in 2008 is because they suddenly decided to hire a bunch more government workers. And oh wait. Ahem, I think they say.

I can't find it right away, but Tyler Cowen recently shared an image showing the extremely different composition of the federal workforce over the years when binned by location on the general schedule; far more folks on the higher end of the schedule. This is likely much more directly in the control of the bureaucracy. Additionally, if your complaint is that entitlements are getting in the way, I'm not sure who's to blame for that.

These are both complains about how the budget is spent, not that the budget has, itself, been slashed. The latter just simply isn't true.

If you only take the raw number of employees across time then it's confounded by population growth and labor force participation. It's like not adjusting a monetary metric for inflation. So sure, the total headcount has only dropped slightly from the 90s, but if that's put into context then it's clear that the federal bureaucracy has been quite constrained as a percent of the overall labor force.

In terms of of whether using the term "budget" is correct here, you're slightly more correct but I'd say you're being pedantic. It should have been clear that I was talking about personnel budgets specifically, given the context of the sentence. Also, for the record "slashed" probably is less true than "constrained, especially in regards to inflation", but I digress.

Where is your evidence that the personnel budgets have been constrained, specifically, especially given that I mentioned a significant shift in the composition of the workforce by pay scale?

Here

The total percent of government spending that's going to its employees has dropped precipitously, from about 35% in the 60s to ~18% today.

That again suffers a denominator problem. That other sorts of spending have exploded doesn't tell us much about what you're making claims about. Perhaps something like this would show the precipitous decline that very neatly corresponds to some notable R actions taken? (Click max x-axis, I don't remember how to embed that into the link.)

More comments

Francis Fukuyama publishes a letter to Musk with regards to DOGE. He tells Musk that the number of Federal employees have remained about the same for 50 years. Young people don't go into the Federal government jobs, so they're filled with older people and about a bagillion contractors.

Under these conditions, you cannot fire your way to excellence. Government work needs to be made attractive to younger, tech-savvy people; they need the flexibility to go in and out of federal employment and not be subject to a Government Service pay scale for job categories created 70 years ago, when most bureaucrats were clerks and typists.

This probably won't happen. I thought this was interesting though:

Many conservatives believe that government bureaucrats have too much discretionary authority and use it to enact a liberal agenda, thereby eluding democratic control. This does occur in some instances. But the real truth is rather the opposite: bureaucrats spend way too much of their time complying with hundreds of rules mandated by Congress, rather than using their independent judgment to make decisions that lead to good results for citizens

We need to cut back government regulation of many parts of the private sector. But we also need to deregulate the government itself, and allow those who work for it to actually do their jobs.

I agree that bureaucrats spend too much time in byzantine labyrinths and upending many of those could be good. However, if faceless bureaucrats act upon me as a lowly private citizen I have little to no legal recourse.

Fukuyama -- and Musk probably -- want a younger, more efficient bureaucracy with less red tape and nonsense. I would also like the boot to not be wasteful and do good things. Still, I hope Musk, et. al. keep in mind what he means to destroy, rebuild, and design. He means to resole the boot that can and will stamp on my face. It's not exactly a great boot in its current form, but let's not go making it more monstrous than it needs to be.

Francis Fukuyama publishes a letter to Musk with regards to DOGE. He tells Musk that the number of Federal employees have remained about the same for 50 years. Young people don't go into the Federal government jobs, so they're filled with older people and about a bagillion contractors.

This is a very stupid take and anyone who has worked as, with, or around the federal government will tell you so. Maybe it is true of very low GS level positions who are essentially secretaries and janitors, but it isn't true of anyone writing and promulgating regulations or enforcing them. Those positions attract very qualified people. Unfortunately, those qualified people take the jobs because they exactly want POWER and the forces surrounding them prevent them from doing anything innovative or good with said power. But those positions are filled with people who have resumes that would make the average hiring manager go "oooo".

Thus the issue of the revolving door and capture of agencies by Goldman and other such firms. But the reason is that those people are Goldman level qualified. The problem isn't quality. It is agenda and structures.

Why listen to a person that has been consistently wrong? The guy is the epitome of the Intellectual Yet Idiot.

Much of Fukuyama’s work laid the foundations for ideological analysis performed by the “alt” left and right today. His most famous work (which is pretty much the famous “nothing ever happens” meme) was prescient in countless ways. He’s a smart guy, and he hasn’t been more wrong than most people, here or elsewhere.

Fukuyama's work exists in the world of ideas, not of reality.

Fukuyama wins if his ideas sound convincing to other academics. But that doesn't mean his ideas work. Experience gained through trial and error will always trump academic theory in the real world. I don't think his voice adds much value here honestly.

A while ago I came to the conclusion that any intellectual (or ”intellectual”) commonly being discussed here is a sign that their main skill is filling pages and pages with nonsense and that I should simply completely ignore anything that intellectual says. It works remarkably well.

In the private sphere Musk also has the advatnage that he can attract top talent on prestige. Government workers enjoy the opposite of that. The most common response to someone pontificating on government work is "the job security must be nice." In other words, you're only going to be fired for terrible malfeasance, not for run-of-the-mill incompetence. And as a result there's not a whole lot of competence on display among the federal government workforce.

To make the government leaner and more effective, I'd couple cuts with an increase to prestige. Make government jobs highly sought after. Make the pay something like 95th percentile for comparable industry jobs. Make expectations high, with a target on attrition at well above zero. Grant benefits that are simply unavailable outside of the federal workforce. They could have immediate access to Tier I support at other federal agencies. Access to exclusive spaces at national parks. Franking privileges. The rights of an FFL without the paperwork. There are many possible privileges that would cost very little.

The goal should be for people to react to someone saying they work for the feds with the same respect and fascination as say, a rocket engineer for SpaceX.

Government jobs (at least the ones with policymaking discretion) are highly sought after.

Making federal employees a higher tier of citizen is a horrible idea that would contribute to the Sovietization of society and is directly contrary to the American ideal. The government being generally low quality is fine (though the floor should be higher than it currently is) it just needs its scope massively reduced. If it had the scope reduced to match capabilities, then you don’t have to increase capability

Furthermore, one way to lower the temperature in politics is to reduce the size of government.

When the government controls everything, the question of who controls the government is paramount.

And as a result there's not a whole lot of competence on display among the federal government workforce.

While there are certainly plenty of examples of this, I don't think it's as universal as is often claimed. I've known government technical folks that are incredibly competent and focused, especially in leadership roles. Sometimes you get folks in over their heads, but I don't know that the general low-level public-facing employees (social security office staff?) should be taken as typical examples. And honestly I've had pretty good experiences even with my local mail carriers and park service rangers. I've seen general-level officers speak a few times and always been impressed -- memorably, one gave an hour long technical keynote with slides without ever glancing at anything but the audience.

There is a lot of pride and patriotism, and to be honest not even that bad of pay, in the federal service in at least some areas. On the other hand, they are hamstrung by a very risk-averse culture -- nobody ever got fired for adding an extra protracted approval process or required training -- and by complicated rulebooks cooked up in response to the last few thousand times someone defrauded the government. There is certainly room for substantial improvement.

Government workers enjoy the opposite of that.

Depends on which part of the government, and which part of the country.

Looking at PMC-tier jobs, the military officer corps is more prestigious than comparably competitive private-sector careers in the red tribe, and comparably prestigious in the pro-establishment bits of the blue tribe. The career foreign policy bureaucracy is the other way round, of course. Teaching is almost always government work, and carries more social prestige than you would expect given the average SAT score of Ed school entrants. In my area (finance) government jobs are prestigious because quite junior people at a regulator or in the Treasury can make quite senior people at banks jump.

At the blue-collar level, law enforcement and various types of public safety work analogous to firefighting are pretty prestigious, as is the NCO corps (at least within the red tribe).

The point is that there are a lot of jobs that are "cool jobs" to a subset of the population that mostly can't be done outside the government, and very few of them come with the "government job" stigma. The "government job" stigma as I perceive it mostly relates to people doing and supervising routine office work (DMV staff being the paradigmatic example), who are assumed to be lazier and dumber than their private-sector counterparts.

There is also a set of jobs where the prestige doesn't change when you move between the private and public sectors because the job doesn't. A professor at a State university enjoys the same prestige as a professor at a comparably elite private university. A doctor or nurse doesn't gain or lose prestige if they take a job at a VA or municipally-owned hospital. If anything, a USPS (or Royal Mail in the UK) postman enjoys more prestige than a UPS/DHL/Amazon deliveryman.

The goal should be for people to react to someone saying they work for the feds with the same respect and fascination as say, a rocket engineer for SpaceX.

SpaceX is a small, elite firm, so the fair comparison is a small, elite part of the government. But I think in most bars in most of America, a Navy Seal is less likely to be buying his own drinks than a SpaceX rocket engineer.

In any case, the question isn't "How do you make a senior policy-making role in the Commerce department prestigious?" because those types of roles are already ultra-prestigious. The question is "How do you make the IT guy at the SSA who makes sure pensions are paid on time as prestigious as the IT guy at Google who keeps the site up?" - because those are comparably responsible jobs.

Grant benefits that are simply unavailable outside of the federal workforce.

The pay yes, but this I'm not sure that would be a very popular move. From my understanding of them, Americans hate privilege. Even if money obviously changes everything in practice, they love the idea that they are all technically equals in the eyes of the law, of bureaucracy, etc...

Frankly even the pay might be a tough sell: if we’re looking to slash wasteful spending, why would we pay bureaucrats even more?

(Yes, yes, I’m aware that the goal is to hire talented bureaucrats who will use their prodigious skills to bring government closer to private-sector levels of efficiency and productivity and thus more than make up for their higher salaries. But it’s hard to get buy-in from the public, especially the Red Tribe, on such second-order concerns)

The issue is that pay increases for government employees just means poaching talent from the private sector. You’ll increase government efficiency at the cost of lower private sector efficiency. There’s only so many competent people. Raising pay doesn’t make more of them.

Great point, and one which I didn’t consider. The model I was going off of was Singapore, which famously compensates its bureaucrats quite well both in terms of money and prestige. The government even pays for top students to attend elite universities in the US/UK, but with the requirement that those students come back and work in the civil service for a period of time, or else be on the hook for the tuition bill.

The opportunity cost of such elite human capital going to work for the government is probably not that huge, as measured by the impact on Singaporean gross domestic product: the cream of the crop can certainly generate much more value in the private sector, but in almost all cases, making boatloads of cash requires employment abroad and hence not contributing to Singapore’s GDP. Indeed, it’s not unheard of for FAANG to buy top-notch Singaporean Stanford/Harvard/MIT CS grads out of their tuition bonds with the government, so that they can stay and work in the US (and while it’s true that some tech giants have a presence in Singapore, it’s almost invariably an Asia sales office without any serious product/engineering work going on).

By contrast, the US has a much deeper pool of high-paying, high-prestige jobs within the country that our hypothetical elite government employment scheme would compete with/crowd out.

I think the pay might work because it can be presented in multiple ways. Much is made in tech of the 10x engineer. Instead of saying you're going to increase salaries, say you are reducing the salary mass by replacing 10 checked-out, unmotivated, aging, inflexible paper-pushers with 1 young well-paid bureaucrat, 1 part-time tech consultant and an OpenAI enterprise account.

But maybe it takes a chainsaw-wielding maniac to get the job done. How is Milei doing, by the way?

Reasonably well, but for reasons that are generally non-transferable to Trump. Milei's success / continued political survival was in large part because the economic issue of government bloat / inflation were central to his election. He was able to win election and maintain support despite warning upfront that things would get worse before they get better because he was very clear there would be pain, and the voting public accepted the legitimacy of that in order to address a broadly recognized problem that had decades of buildup.

The Trump context is considerably different. Trump beat Biden, and the electoral college makes it more decisive than the vote difference otherwise would, but Trump ran on a generalized vibe rather than an explicit and widely accepted problem. Particularly since US problems aren't the same sort of 'within the Executive sphere' as Milei faced. Milei had to deal with executive patronage networks / make jobs / inflationary policies, but the US challenge on the budgeting sense is the automatic entitlement spending, not the bureaucracy administering it. The sort of cuts to be needed would need to be legislative, and the sort of sphere that Trump has tended not to challenge.

This will be interesting, in the sense of interesting times, but the chainsaw will probably go after the wrong institutions to meet it's stated goals (but which probably will meet less-stated goals).

the US challenge on the budgeting sense is the automatic entitlement spending, not the bureaucracy administering it.

I’m not sure how true this is. Most times people complain about government spending it seems to relate to corruption, cost disease, and regulatory costs: Broadband programs that provide access to ~0 people for billions of dollars, bridges that cost 100X what they should, hospitals needing 10 administrators for every doctor etc. All of these are executive issues. The complaints about the actual literal entitlements ordered by Congress usually come up as complaints of vote buying, and regardless aren’t the core of the problem.

Those could literally all be true without caveat, and it wouldn't matter in the budgeting sense since those may seem like big numbers in absolute terms but are proportionally very small compared to entitlement spending. It doesn't matter of bridges 100x or even 1000x more than they 'should' if the budget is spending thousands times more on entitlement spending than on bridges.

To wit- according to the Biden administration earlier this year, the US has $40 billion allocated to spend over 5 years on bridges. By contrast, the combined Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare spending in 2024 is $1.67 trillion, and expected to rise to 3.1 trillion by 2033.

Put another way- 5 years of all bridge spending is less than 3% of one year's medical spending, and shrinking. You could make that $40 billion 10x, 100x, or even 1000x more efficient, but no matter how efficient you spend 40 billion it's a drop in the entitlement spending. Sure, you could argue that there are savings to be made there... but then you're not going into the discretionary budget administration, you're going to the automatic entitlement spending, which goes to the laws rather than the executive administration thereof.

Part of that's just baked into demographic politics.

When the Americans legislated Social Security in 1935, FDR signed a law that authorized payments for those 65 or older when the average American lifespan in 1935 was... 61 for men and 65 for women, according to a quick google search.

Today, social security can begin between ages 62 and 70 depending on your preference of payout amount... when the average American lifespan is about 75 for men, and 80 for women.

It fundamentally doesn't matter in a budgeting sense how efficient you are at executing the discretionary programs if the entitlements previous created on the assumption that less than half of people would live long enough to see them are instead expecting to pay for more than a decade. When you start adding in medical spending, which costs increasing with age, you're adding more. This is an issue of law and what the legislators deem is the appropriate entitlement, not administration of that amount. No matter how much you save on the executive side- and it can be very good to have more efficiency there!- it's not the central or determinative issue.

Is the average lifespan in 1935 one of those situations where its mostly just a higher rate of infant mortality?

Two arguments here:

1.) Government spending: consider that the massive efficiency issue applies not just to bridges, but to nearly all government spending of any kind. While bridges alone are a small cut, it’s significantly more expensive to spend 10X or 100X for many different things.

2.) The issue goes beyond government spending to include government cost. Cost includes the expenses that are offloaded to the private sector, many of which are executive in nature. Rolling back a wide swath of administrative regulations could massively increase private wealth and save the public fisc indirectly. This also applies to the healthcare spending that makes Medicaid so expensive. That 10X multiplier is there as well (more than in most industries really.) Cut medical regs, increase doctor supply, etc etc.

The administration will have trouble with this politically though, since the second type of cost saving doesn’t show up in a straight “spending in 2022 vs spending in 2026” analysis

I'm hopeful, but I can't stop laughing at putting two executives in charge of the new department in charge of reducing redundancy. Given that both are presumably running other actual businesses, there will probably also be an acting leader or chief of staff who runs DOGE on the day to day.

This is going to be an adventure.

As someone who has had two bosses before, I know it can be a complete disaster, especially when they have very different personalities and priorities.

but I can't stop laughing at putting two executives in charge of the new department in charge of reducing redundancy.

This is a great, hilarious point actually!

How is Milei doing, by the way?

It's progressing slowly, but it is happening. The problem is that a lot of the waste is in the other branches of government (Legislative and Judicial), or directly in the provinces (kind of, but not quite, like states), both of which the executive has a harder cutting.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that in fiscal year 2019, the federal government spent about $300 billion on civilian personnel, including wages, salaries, and benefits.

80% of that number is $240 billion dollars. Posting this in case anyone other than myself was curious.

I have never seen an efficiency or anti-bureaucracy agency having much influence. They are politically sidelined and no one cares too much about waste of a few millions here and there, when the government budget is trillions.

Firing hundred thousands of government workers are also a no go, because of its effect on the economy and midterms and the media reporting extra hard on any adverse effects it will cause.

My bet is DOGE won’t closing the budget deficit and after a few month Elon Musk will get bored/frustrated and leave.

With the economy running at full employment, I think the effect on the economy would actually be positive.

The big class war of our era is between the people who live off the system and thsoe who pay into it. The welfare class and the sociologists are on the same side while a plumber is on the other side. The welfare class and the sociologist both want a big public sector while a plumber has little need for the welfare state. The women voting left trope isn't entirely true. Single women who get paid through the government are solidly left while women who don't fall into this category are far less radical. Women aren't really swinging the the left as much as they are increasingly single and employed in the public sector.

Much of the radicalism among the left probably stems from many in the left investing 6 years into getting a master's in something with a strong ideological bent, being entirely reliant on the government for the job and their social status. They are terrified of ending up as someone in East Germany with a masters in Leninism.

The most important thing the right can do in order to secure a long term future for itself is to reduce the size of the left's client classes.

Pop quiz: which of the following jobs contribute more to Democrats than Republicans?

  • Flight Attendant
  • Bartender
  • Librarian
  • Taxi Driver
  • Pediatrician
  • Architect
  • Carpenter
  • Park Ranger
  • Gardener
  • Chef
  • Union Organizer

Answers. I think your category completely fails to capture our red/blue divide. Is that because you borrowed it from Ayn Rand?

Any proper system has to explain the machinist vs sheet-metal-worker divide (around a 30-point difference) and I have yet to see one that does.

Small business (possibly owner or part-owner) vs union shop, I suspect.

Isn’t “welder” likely to be a union shop, too? And I’m not even sure what qualifies one as a “machine operator.”

Machine operator is a pretty basic role. If you’ve ever used a 3d printer and had to deal with leveling the bad, clearing stuck plastic, verifying that prints are proceeding correctly etc. it’s basically that but with bigger machines.

Unironically the most interesting thing about this dataset is it sorts "Web Developer" into "IT" and not "Engineering." I have no doubt many flame wars could be fought over that one.

And the second most interesting thing is that the most Republican professions work with fossil fuels, and the most Democratic professions work against fossil fuels. Forget about Black Lives Matter, the divide between the left and the right seems to be about Black Gold.

Umm, yes. The GOP is most accurately described as a pro-fossil fuels Party which supports the interests of social conservatives(not necessarily socially conservative interests) and tax cuts.

I would add a lot of other “female” coded jobs (eg HR) are largely (though not entirely) created by the government but paid by private sector directly.

This is good for dogecoin.

The DOGE combined with the pending executive order to review military officials for "requisite leadership qualities" make me think he might actually make good on the Project 2025 promise to do some housecleaning in the bureaucracy. I'm not holding my breath, but, we'll see.

The speed at which the transition team is moving gives at least the superficial appearance that they learned something from Trump's first term. They know how they were stymied the first time, and they're making efforts to prevent that from happening again.

review military officials for "requisite leadership qualities"

Man, this article is the perfect example of how dishonest the media have become. Sure, they can fabulate that he wants to purge the brass to have loyalists for a coup, but the brass fucking lied, kept crucial information from him and undermined him the first time around. He would be stupid NOT to purge them. Biden should have purged them after he got hit by the trap they left for Trump with the Afghanistan widthdrawal.

How were they stymied last time and what are they doing now to prevent that?

I dunno, it just seemed like the right thing to say.

EDIT: Permanent unelected bureaucrats were instrumental in blocking the implementation of certain Trump policies during his first term. The fact that the transition team has already floated multiple proposals for trimming the bureaucracy seems to show that they’re aware of this fact and have a strategy for dealing with it.

My impression is that GOPe political appointees were responsible for more obstruction and sabotage than the Deep State.

Conspiracy theories, startups and skepticism

tl;dr read some stuff , i am kinda skpetical of outlier startup founders being totally honest, but still will pursue this path lol

For the longest time, I have simply laughed at people like Alex Jones or David Icke because the Lizard and male supplements are obvious telltales of something being off. Something changed recently thanks to Twitter.

Ryan Breslow was one of the youngest billionaires. Stanford dropout started bolt, on the surface he sounds like the ideal YC candidate because no matter what Paul Graham may tell you, they absolutely care about your uni, especially Stanford, a cs undergrad dropout from there is about as blue chip a prospect you can be. Yet he never got in. Bolt was worth billions in 2022 and Ryan was doing well, one day he probably took more drugs than usual and went on a tirade against VCs. Pointing out how YC and Paul Graham (PG) wronged him as Bolt would go against Stripe run by Pauls golden boys. He also pointed out the Instacart incident where the VC firm Sequioa got Instacarts CFO as a partner so that he could make a report nitpicking the firms issue which would help them oust their founder and CEO as sequioa wanted them to IPO but the CEO did not. Well the dude got replaced and instacart IPOd.

Here is the interesting part, Ryan later nuked all of this. His allegations about VCs and the startup world being cliques came true because not only did he "leave" bolt but he got lawsuits and is worth way less than a billion now. The strange thing is, there are zero articles, videos, discussions, HN comments or even tweets about this. At first, I was fairly convinced that this is because Ryan is not important but Bolt is worth more than Mistral or every single LLM wrapper put together. PG does have favorites who are objectively bad people. Austen Allred of Sigma Bloom formerly known as Lambda School lied about everything until his firm blew up and PG still defends him.

Here is where the conspiracies start, I read some stuff on chuckstack.com which prompted this thread. Charles C. Johnson is not a very good source of news which should not discourage us from throwing out everything he says. He gets a lot wrong but he clearly gets stuff right too. His posts on Thiel having worked for the FBI and how he stopped donating money the moment one of his boyfriends died under mysterious circumstances raise good points. He is also the first to mention the ties Andreesen Horowitz have to Saudis for raising money.

Edit - i could not find his post so posting the source he cited here

Now I am a middling or below middling wannabe tech startup guy in case you guys did not follow my previous accounts (u/practical_romantic being the latest before this one). My reason for pointing this out is to not be that one guy who blames everyone else for not succeeding, plenty of people do make a fuck ton of money despite zero help of any kind. I simply wish to put these as an example of the fact that there is a good possibility of there being far more happening at the very top of the VC/ founder space that we are totally in the dark about.

Human beings innately desire heroes in some capacity, Achilles in the Iliad is seen as a martyr however Aidan Maclear has a different reading where he points out that in the Odyssey, Achilles tells Odysseus that he regretted dying in the war for the higher good, thus him being a martyr is an incomplete reading as martyrs see their sacrifice as an honourable thing. My people have for the longest time considered Martyrdom or Veergati (our word for it) as the highest deed one can do besides ofc winning the war. Similarly, I used to see Peter Thiel as someone who embodied values I admire but the information about him from Charles completely breaks that for me.

My relatives who work in politics and intelligence agencies share a similar nihilistic view towards the world and how most of what we see, believe and hear about is in fact mostly fabricated. The impression people have of Indian politics is that BJP is some hyper-casteist political party that wants to impose Hindu and caste supremacy on the world whereas the BJP is hyper-leftist, the first people or party to actively promote BR Ambedkar as a pan-national icon and pay people of lower castes to marry into higher castes. No publication that is popular or any public intellectual pieces this together. Nearly 100 percent of all Indians cannot see reality this way but it is pretty obvious when you take an objective look at things from a detached perspective.

Same goes for electoral politics. The average election has had enough booth capturing and suspect things happening that it would be considered rigged by Western standards yet you cannot prove it empirically. The west is not third world so me being skeptical may only make sense here but the underlying skepticism makes me not take anything at face value. Its not that you cant rig elections because of values but its always a question of how much you can get away with. How much of what is true, I am not sure, I just wanted to ask you guys for an honest opinion.

most of what we see, believe and hear about is in fact mostly fabricated

Yes, but I'm not sure what the conspiracy theory is. It seems like a paragraph or two was lost before the edit.

Not really, I mostly meant to state that I do not believe fully that all the super mega corps that are being run are completely clean entities that represent everything good about the world. Charles Johnson is a nutcase in many cases, the cases he makes for most of VC stuff being for show, where you do have mostly legit companies but the super mega corps most likely have fishy connections, motives and backstories is more believable than I was previously led to believe.

Nuclear technology did get stolen, most of what intelligence agencies do is classified and not reported on much universally in most nations. My theory is that a lot of what we are told about how the absolute outliers came about obfuscates a lot of things and there is a good chance that they are complicit in doing things with either domestic or foreign regimes for their own gain, where the incentives are far higher than what we can think.

Hollywood has casting couches, we know this, most of us know that if you are an actress, you very likely did have to sleep with some sleazy guy. Harvey Weinstein was caught but he was one of likely hundreds of thousands alive who did it. It still is happening and no one talks about it. In many cases, the people who later get hired by the actresses or their friends and families are unaware too. In such a scenario can it not be possible that there is quite a bit that happens inside Silicon Valley that we don't know about because none of us are founders of firms that are extreme outliers?

Your conspiracy theory is… big business probably has some skeletons in its closet?

Yep, a whole cemetery I guess and most new big businesses as opposed to old ones.

Hell, Wells Fargo Bank got caught knowingly laundering money for the cartel, and they only got a slap on the wrist. I would not be surprised if all manner of shady business is occurring in lots of other industries and companies.

My impression is Johnson's brain got eaten by the sorta connection-stitching that normally gets thrown up on Pepe Silvia walls. Might not make everything false, but you might as well read chicken entrails if you want something specific enough to actually say.

Austen Allred of Sigma Bloom formerly known as Lambda School lied about everything until his firm blew up and PG still defends him.

There's probably a steelman of that Allred piece -- heaven knows Lambda's collapse has a lot to be embarrassed about -- but it has such a scattered grab-bag of every disagreement possible that it's a little hard to take at face value. The clear illegality of operating as an unregistered school is damning, and then it's undercut by the 'oh and the legislature had to update the law later to make clear it was really-illegal not just I-want-it-to-be illegal'. Allred's homelessness was a lie, because he could have gone back to his parent's spare bedroom, as evidenced by this example of a guy who... was homeless until he made calls and went to a friend's spare bedroom. He did that incredibly dumb Sample Size of One Gimmick, but he also considers a court holding an arbitration clause intact as winning (spoiler: yes) and ran a pretty stupid 500 USD hustle to try to promote a YouTube channel (congrats, you've found an influencer). He's made three references to Elon Musk, which is tots a sign of delusion, and not just having different political aspirations, which is near-certainly what really set Sandusky off. There's some serious criticisms of Lamda excluding 'no-longer-searching' students that weren't searching because Lambda left them with no change or dropouts that Lamda went after for pennies, and also here's a claim of 27% job placement that's behind a paywall, which, once you roll the rock aside depends on interpretations of a leaked slide deck that, afaict, isn't anywhere online and allegedly is disputed by third-party auditors.

Which is probably is big difference. Graham's definitely got some serious faults here, and that he's not more critical where Lamda has fucked up says a lot about whether he's on the outside pissing in or the inside pissing out. But his sort of people have an answer about an indefensible fellow insider: they never mention them again. That's what you're seeing with Breslow -- Bolt faltered like most companies trying to upscale too fast in a highly competitive field (albeit with some hilarity when the pivot to profit collapsed, which isn't especially interesting, but that he dissed them and no one cares enough to accuse Breslow of eating faces means you couldn't get Graham et all to mention his name without a set of pliers.

Graham doesn't damnae memoria Allred not because of some complex conspiracy, but because he thinks there's some defensible variant of Lamda's goal that the school simply missed (and to be fair, I could be persuaded!), and at a more importantly, because so many criticisms of Allred were and are somewhere between exaggerated and junk.

My impression is Johnson's brain got eaten by the sorta connection-stitching that normally gets thrown up on Pepe Silvia walls. Might not make everything false, but you might as well read chicken entrails if you want something specific enough to actually say.

That is fair but having a little more skepticism about the consensus on topics that you see in the startup sphere would serve all of us well. Johnson is incorrect about a lot but he is right about some stuff too, enough to warrant one to read and judge for themselves, I can point out for instance that his stuff about Yarvin and anything related to Indonesia is totally wrong but he is correct in pointing out that you have quite a lot of charlatans here.

He wrote pieces on lex friedman and eric weinstein where he at least did point out that both these people were immediately thrust into the limelight, how manufactured it all was and the ways they used credentials to later justify them being astroturfed. Lex went on JRE for the first time when he did not even have a podcast, even the views he got on his obviously incorrect tesla videos were very less. At that time, if you looked his name up (which I did) the first result was his BJJ match against Garry tonon. He would talk about MIT despite only being a post doc who spent little time there and had academic output that was about as good as Amy Chuas which zero.

Eric somehow got a job at Thiel Capital doing god knows what, claiming that his wife and he were noble science-winning minds or close to it and would throw fights whenever he was asked about his time spent in Jerusalem after his PhD and how somehow he has no output from that duration. For someone who worked as a managing director at Thiel Capital, I have never once heard him say anything about startups or investing at all that would indicate much interest or experience.

Chuck is the wrong to point this stuff out as he is not trustworthy and has a personal axe to grind.

Graham doesn't damnae memoria Allred not because of some complex conspiracy, but because he thinks there's some defensible variant of Lamda's goal that the school simply missed

Perfectly reasonable take. I guess I reacted fairly harshly to knowing this stuff and finding out that people who LARP as the bastions of everything good with the modern day world are well LARPers. In PGs case, he absolutely has favorites, no matter what bolt did later, them not selecting them seems fairly unreasonable. Adam Neumann of wework also somehow managaed to get another firm started post wework issues and still could raise money so people certainly have some form of strong preferences here.

The post I made here was somewaht difficult to write for me, I wish to be as good as one can be at what I want to do despite having been a total failure till now due to well just bieng lazy. In the case where I make an argument for favoritisim and other issues whihc for sure have to exist if you have money on the line, I kinda feel that I am making exuses but at the same time we all know that we are lied to on the regular about important things.

You cannot read the New York Times every day and not be a liberal

in my case here it would be

You cannot follow tech stuff every day and not believe that PG et all are heroes

And that is hard to swallow. I have a hard time fathoming that Elon can work 4 jobs on his own and still be more onlline than me because time is limited, even if yu have all other attributes working for you, or how somehow the most important man in AI is sam altman even though he did not write down the code for the LLMs they use which use a combination of Transformers (Google) and Transfer learning stuff Jeremy Howard talked about in ULMFiT. Eric Schmiddts mistress, Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman Fried were mytholgical figures. I remember very clearly how much literally everyone, even the people over at ssc liked Sam becuase he would comment there occasionaly. If you told people that the same guy would end up in jail because of being incompetent and hiring an even more incompetent Stanford grad, no onew would have belieaved it. I personally would not have. I thought CZ was clean till he himself got sent to jail.

I hope I make sense. i dont want to end up on the same path as conspiracy theorists or make myself believe that you can onlly do well if you are a crook wokring for something or in the cabal but I just want to know what reality is. Obviously I know I will do well if I do things right but the mythos around it shaky at best.

My impression is Johnson's brain got eaten by the sorta connection-stitching that normally gets thrown up on Pepe Silvia walls.

I think my grandparent's called that paranoid schizophrenia. Everything is connected, if you are mentally ill enough.

This is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence :)

I think he would call themotte a cia psyop if he got to hear about it.

The strange thing is, there are zero articles, videos, discussions, HN comments or even tweets about this.

I think the real question you need to be asking yourself is why do you find this "strange".

Or more pointedly what specific facet of your current worldview/model is it that this particular fact seems to invalidate or contradict?

My previous understanding was that people who build large firms do so entirely on their own fighting impossible odds and are helped by fellow founders, that unlike academia, there is zero corruption here, no scope for dishonest people to survive, those at the very edge are people who are not only competent but just better people.

Reading this breaks that, how can you trust anything? Thiel was a legit FBI guy for a year and there is zero mention of it by anyone anywhere and this is not because of Palantir being related to him either. Similarly, Marc Andreessen is seen as this American patriot, /ourguy/ but a VC whereas his firm has taken money from Saudi Arabia and likely China too, how can you not have a conflict of interest then?

I used to take everything at face value before, I think I will probably lean towards believing things that I have seen as true instead of taking everyone else word for it.

Tbh that does sound incredibly naive. The start-up scene, or more generally capitalism, isn't good bc everyone involved is a perfect angel. It's because the competitiveness forces you to develop a good product that people actually want to buy, and to cut the slack and produce it reasonably cheaply. That's it. Worse yet, there are many tricks how people try to get around the competition with backhanded, negative-sum strategies, and you have to account for them & stop it. The problem with everything else, such as bureaucratic institutions, is that they often don't even attempt to account for these strategies so they run even wilder. Or worse yet they naturally incorporate the opposite.

It's douchebag who needs to please you vs douchebag you need to please. Nothing more, nothing less.

Kind of which is why I did thnk chuck was being too tin foily

there is zero corruption here, no scope for dishonest people to survive, those at the very edge are people who are not only competent but just better people

This is the most shocking thing I've read in months. No wonder I didn't understand what the conspiracy was. Surely you did school projects and saw people do little getting a lot of credit, surely you've heard of Enron, Theranos and thousands of other companies...? How could you suspend such a thought for so long? How did this Bolt guy of all things break the glass?

All I hear is how every founder who made it is an angel who is just better than everyone else, how all of them did it because you can too. Even here, I cannot fully say that I suspect that there is some chance that a lot of new-age tech firms likely cut deals with governments that we have zero clue about and how many of them can be astroturfed.

I did not want to believe it because I started reading PGs essays and thought that startups were the only fair thing in the world, how you cannot get ahead here without being super honest about everything, how everyone else is that way, how these are the saviours of humanity. Saying that Musk or Gates or Jobs may have actually done a whole bunch of shady shit that we conveniently wish to pretend could not have happened was my frame. I will get downvoted and get called a frustrated negative loser here, even though I hope Charles is incorrect. The idea that a lot of them happen to have fairly rich families that somehow did have connections with various agencies or services adjacent to them does seem fishy. Alexey Guzey made a post about Nobel prize winners and all their parents mostly worked white collar jobs like academics, engineers and maybe business owners but very few were active in politics.

Even in the case of Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos ran for years with VCs head of national agencies in the board and somehow never asked for a working white paper or patent, or how Adam Neumann raised money from a16z despite causing a lot of loss to people with his wework stuff. PG lies to people about how uni does not matter yet YC favors your undergrad and past experiences a lot more than most jobs do. Adam Neumann fucked innocent people over who lost money and jobs because of weworkm somehow he is still a better person than everyone else.

Last week on a thread before the elections got over I joked about voter fraud at which point I got a reply from a guy asking for substantial proof. This is the same thing as casting couches, if you actually investigate this stuff, it is very hard to prove as defection means punishment, with the P Diddy stuff, many who got raped by him will likely never come and accept it. How is it that most large crypto projects (exchanges) somehow have extensive money laundering issues to the point where if you run one, you likely fail jail sentences because you implictly either helped or rugpulled people

I don't want to be a conspiracy nut who thinks CIA or aliens or "the jews" run the world and do everything good or bad. The idea that there is still far more corruption in everything, especially startups, where the extent of the rot is sealed pretty well behind the personalities of founders and VCs who LARP as thought leaders whilst writing blogs that would make my incoherent ramblings look sane should make you suspcious.

In the case of Elizabeth Holmes, I think people were desperate for a female Steve Jobs. Don’t forget she never got significant amounts of VC money; she got the funds from blinding politicians and supermarket CEOs with science.

Great point, andreessen did support her but never invested money. Regardless, it's strange to raise 100s of millions without a working prototype for a single valuable feature for a firm that existed for close to a decade.

Wework, broadcast.com, ftx are some high profile blow ups but mostly VCs don't invest like dumbasses. Even if I were to believe that openai or something has obvious shady ties and origins and or founders of their backstories etc, they still made a ton of money. Not alleging that but I mean to say that even in such conditions, most people make money at least via valuations or exits and that most founders aren't scheming people, just that the probability of top top dogs doing this stuff seems high to me.

I think it's worth pointing out that the companies you named aren't exactly comparable. Taking them one by one:

  • Theranos was a fraudulent company that made an ineffective product, lied about its effectiveness, faked demonstrations and test results, and not only parlayed that into a ton of VC funding. The weird thing about it is that they nonetheless plowed forward by entering into contracts with large retailers that they couldn't possibly deliver on, and the whole operation was soon revealed as a sham.

  • FTX was a legitimate investment firm that fraudulently mishandled client funds. Years ago, my grandparents were victims of a similar fraud when their investment manager was telling them he was investing their money in the market but was really using it to make loans to his son's woodworking business. When the woodworking business couldn't cover the loans, he didn't have the money for investors withdrawing funds, eventually someone called the DA's office, and the guy was convicted and died in prison. This guy was a legitimate locally trusted investment manager that normal people used, not some obvious fraudster. When rumors started circulating that he was crooked, a lot of people, including my parents, pulled their money out, but my grandparents had been investing with him for years and said they trusted the guy.

  • WeWork was a legitimate company that was able to hype itself into a valuation so high it defied common sense. It was effectively a commercial real estate company that marketed itself as a tech company. The estimated valuation was so high leading up to the IPO that investors realized there was no real room for growth, not to mention that they were losing more money than could be reasonably explained. There were some questionable valuation processes (e.g. counting every desk job in a city where they were operating as a potential customer rather than a more reasoned analysis of the market for ad hoc office space), but none of this was exactly secret.

  • Broadcast.com was a successful company that Yahoo ran into the ground after acquiring it for a lot of money. I don't even know why it's included here because it was well past the VC stage at the time of purchase and it's just another failed acquisition.

So of the four companies, Theranos was the only one that engaged in fraud to attract VC money. FTX engaged in fraud to prop up another business. WeWork used non-fruadulent puffery to attract investment, and Broadcast was badly managed by a corporate giant.

The VC scene has been shady and two-faced forever. Graham is bad, so are the rest of them. Johnson has an extreme axe to grind and is a fabulist of hilarious proportions, but like you say he’s never entirely wrong. He’s basically an extremely autistic compulsive liar with a huge axe to grind.

The impression people have of Indian politics is that BJP is some hyper-casteist political party that wants to impose Hindu and caste supremacy on the world

I think it’s more that there’s a clear delineation between caste supremacy and Hindu nationalism. The latter can’t be too casteist because most Hindus are of either middling caste or casteless. For the same reason a British nativist might be hard-pressed making the argument that the aristocracy should be put back in charge of everything after the revolution.

I used to see Peter Thiel as someone who embodied values I admire but the information about him from Charles completely breaks that for me.

The boyfriend died shortly after he showed up unannounced at Thiel and his husband’s Christmas party and apparently made a big scene. (Classic case of a mistress with unwarranted confidence). Was he killed? Hard to say, but probably not. Thiel stayed out of this election to hedge his bet, he still needed all those contracts for Palantir etc if Harris won, and Vance is his guy so he doesn’t need to suck up to the Trump campaign.

The boyfriend died shortly after he showed up unannounced at Thiel and his husband’s Christmas party and apparently made a big scene. (Classic case of a mistress with unwarranted confidence).

Do you know anything about the personality this guy had? Stories like this almost always pattern match to certain kinds of mental illness (in this case maybe Borderline Personality Disorder).

Unstable relationships, attractive and likely to get in a superficial relationship, aggressive and maybe suicidal when spurned, possibly paranoid...

Likely someone who knows the people involved would be like "oh yeah that checks out he was crazy."

But outside looking in it isn't as obvious and these other explanations pop up.

The VC scene has been shady and two-faced forever. Graham is bad, so are the rest of them. Johnson has an extreme axe to grind and is a fabulist of hilarious proportions, but like you say he’s never entirely wrong. He’s basically an extremely autistic compulsive liar with a huge axe to grind.

I do wish to know more about this, there are barely any accounts on any of this at all but people on the inside are extremely tight. For instance, I do not know how Elon Musk can tweet at all hours of the day, play video games and still be involved in various firms, even part-time involvement in 4 different firms is enough to chew you out completely even if you work more than the hard-working Investment Banking guy. He probably is passive in what he does because I don't know how else you can do all that and still spend so much time online. These are not agencies that outsource Web Jobs to Indians, they are hard-tech firms, even if you spend 25 hours a week on one, you still get 48 hours for the rest of your week where you have to eat 21 times, meet your dozen kids, play your video game, tweet at all hours, go on podcasts and now work with the government.

I bring this up because I am certain that a lot of what we are told has pr spin on it combined with our innate desire to have heroes. You would rather want to believe that he does this and more than be told that a lot of what we are told is given charitable spins for preserivng ones image. He is certainly fairly capable, beyond what most people can comprehend but I doubt he is newton, far from it.

The boyfriend died shortly after he showed up unannounced at Thiel and his husband’s Christmas party and apparently made a big scene. (Classic case of a mistress with unwarranted confidence). Was he killed? Hard to say, but probably not. Thiel stayed out of this election to hedge his bet, he still needed all those contracts for Palantir etc if Harris won, and Vance is his guy so he doesn’t need to suck up to the Trump campaign.

Apparently, he has quite a few more of them with him, his mistress (feel weird using it for a guy) did tell people that he was under threat a few days before his demise. Thiel got contracts even after 2020, donatng this time around would most certainly been helpful.

I think it’s more that there’s a clear delineation between caste supremacy and Hindu nationalism. The latter can’t be too casteist because most Hindus are of either middling caste or casteless. For the same reason a British nativist might be hard-pressed making the argument that the aristocracy should be put back in charge of everything after the revolution.

Most of modern-day urban India is mostly leaning towards the casteless future BJP imagines or Congress did before it. There is no caste supremacy, arranged marriages exist a relic, and people who are living in urban centres and not poor don't really care as much about who they marry. BJP is not and never reactionary even when it first started out. They follow Arya Samaj which makes corrections to the Vedas to justify annihilating castes. Savarkar in his texts very directly talked about this. BJP has to appeal to upper castes because they vote for BJP in unison.

You cannot discuss any of this here publicly nor point out the HBD implications of castes, how brahmins in various parts Sanskritized people for money or how every single scripture is explicitly in favor of having castes and varnas. Indus Valley civilisation had a concept of caste despite not being aryan and the Aryans who came from the Eurasian steppes had Varnas, two are different but nearly identical in most cases now. I am not some caste obsessed lunatic, I have to mention all of this since it gives a complete model for understanding religion, denying birth-based varnas is not far from denying the divinity of Christ. Anyone who does that is calling scriptures wrong, and not the fake new ones but the Vedas which are the equivalent of the bible in Hinduism. Again I am not asking for people to follow it, its just that you cannot believe in the Vedas, call them divine and then go against things they explicitly tell you to not do.

The reality of being poor plus having stark contrast with people who live beside you who not only inherit everything good but also were responsible for everything bad done to you and have slightly different ancestry is a recipe for disaster. Also why they push against Aryan Invasion Theory as it makes things even worse. On the flip side, most upper castes are people who got Sanskritised in that fold, their y haplogroups don't match those of others so there are no good outcomes.

Indus Valley civilisation had a concept of caste despite not being aryan and the Aryans who came from the Eurasian steppes had Varnas, two are different but nearly identical in most cases now.

Eh? I'm not aware of any reason to think the IVC had a caste system, and I couldn't find a reputable source that says so. We know fuck all about them really, their language is undeciphered, and their cities show only the same kind of social stratification that most civilizations do, in other words the elite living in the nicer places.

There is no caste supremacy, arranged marriages exist a relic, and people who are living in urban centres and not poor don't really care as much about who they marry.

I don't know about you, but arranged marriages are very much a thing and far from deprecated. The BBC says that in 2018, 93% of all marriages in the country were arranged. That hasn't changed noticeably in the last 6 years.

The BBC says that in 2018, 93% of all marriages in the country were arranged.

Wow. I knew arranged marriages were a thing, but I didn't know they were that ubiquitous. With that many marriages being arranged, are the handful of people who don't go that route looked down upon as weirdos or anything?

Not really. For the middle class and above, nobody would really bat an eye unless the proposed spouse was otherwise socially undesirable.

If we're talking the lower class, it's still largely acceptance, albeit the picture becomes more murky when you consider the variation inevitable in such a large country.

The biggest issue is avoiding falling in love with the wrong person, defined as probably being poorer, in a bad job, wrong caste (which matters far less than it used to) and so on.

Even then, arranged marriages are nowhere near the popular misconception where the bride and groom only get to see each other before marriage (in most of the country). It's far closer to family-mediated speed dating, as opposed to having friends introduce prospective singles as is more common in the West (until dating apps steamrolled everything else).

Ever since you reach a Certain Age, your family, including bored aunts-twice-removed, begin putting out feelers or become more receptive to the same. Or they make a profile on a matrimonial site I guess. Then comes the carousel of cups of tea in living rooms, families and prospects vetting each other. Assuming both sides like what they see, the couple is encouraged to become familiar with each other, often unsupervised (or at least nobody in the living room) and them genuinely falling for each other, while not strictly necessary, is a welcome outcome. I'd be so bold as to claim the would be partners have veto rights throughout the process.

When everyone is happy and no skeletons or jilted lovers have turned up, then it's time for a big fat Indian wedding.

This isn't particularly different from a modal love marriage either! You take your partner home one day, introduce them, and then both families nigh inevitably begin giving each other a closer look. Objections may or may not be raised, but there's still a lot of reconciliation to do. You marry not just a person but their family, after all.

It's a pretty reasonable system, and God knows that there would be fewer NEETs and incels if more families in the West took hints from Indian mothers exasperated that their kids took their advice to ignore relationships and study for the NEET a little too seriously and need coaxing to produce grandkids eventually.

Uh, westerners trying to do the rough equivalent has mostly not worked very well, although the neuroses of fundamentalist Christianity may be a major explanatory factor there.

It's a civilizational issue. Westerners have this combination of individualism and guilt based moralism that prevents this sort of rigged-for-your-own-good type of institution from lasting in the face of principle.

If you want to make this idiotic romanticism manifest, try to argue openly that Romeo and Juliet are evil for engaging in a wholly destructive act of lust that shirks all their duties, and see people jump to defend vehemently characters whose ostensible fate is death.

This particular mode of being is not without its virtues, but we can plainly see the limitations of it now that it's been pushed to its logical conclusion.

IVC did have jatis, jati or castes and varnas are different things, I heard Razib speak on this on clubhouse, but will need time to find some sources

It is not very common among the urban white-collar crowd to marry people of other castes. People still have caste based identity because of religion, poverty and the general state of bioleninism here.

My point about religion and caste still stands, hardcoding it in the vedas means that people intially will be against this, it would have worked to dissolve castes before but doing it now does not favor the OBC or below population as they get free things from castes existing.

What do you make of the old anthropologist’s argument that the varnas are sublimated remnants of an ancient, long forgotten cow/bull sacrificial cult, with the Brahmins and accordant ritual purity taking the role of the bovine? (Sam Kriss is awful, but he has a brief summary here)

Incorrect, varnas are from Aryans, jati or caste from IVC, other Aryans and their descendants also had it, Scythians, Germanics etc. There is very little out there is honest about it though Razib Khab is pretty good.

Ancient germanics had a distinction between Noblemen and commoners, with nobles having priestly privileges, just like Ancient Rome. There’s no evidence for some kind of hardcoded up and down social hierarchy like the Indian caste system.

Survive the Jive (Tom Rowsell) would disagree. Germanics and Scythians especially had some kinds of castes not too far from the normal aryan way. He unlisted a few videos recently Aryans and their descendants absolutely had castes which did inspire even the Japanese later on.

Dan Bilzerian, former playboy went on (Piers Morgan)[https://youtube.com/watch?v=KICYv4O03CA] did his anti jeiwhs bit and I could not dp anything but laugh because of how absurd it was. Him saying the things he said and Nick Fuentes acting like a diva on his stream and twitter is poisonous for anything good.

You never want to play the villain, Moldbugs insights back in 2008 still stand. Anyone sane would look at both these things and be turned off unless its thier first time seeing these people whilst also being in on the jokes. Even then, playing a caricature is a good way to repel everyone. Nick who talked about optics back in 2018 to the point where he called Richard Spencer a wignat who was bad for the "movement". Nick is ofc most likely working with the FBI as he was a key member on ground on Jan 6 where he did get people to storm the capitol, many of whom got arrested whereas his primary issues were being on a no fly list.

Similarly, Dan going out there and denying holocaust numbers does not sit well with anyone. You can criticise Jewish people or israel in a sane way. Claiming that they are responsible for everything bad is either dishonest or low iq since progressivism did mutate from Christianity. Simply pointing out how you are against the treatment of gazans and the impact israel has on public policies being linked to out and out holocaust revisionism is a terrible look. His argument about the numbers of the holocaust by the end came off more as a nutcase bitchute tier video than an earnest analysis. Jared Taylor does not get invited due to his calmness during interviews. Many on the right disagree with him, including (spandrell)[https://x.com/spandrell4/status/1854433166561554534] though his conduct is alright.

My ethnicity has little to no problems with either euros or Ashkenazis, I just find the stuff being done by both Nick and Dan as something that would make you laugh for 30 seconds and stay as a disgrace for a few decades. Playing the villain is always bad.

There's a simpler problem here: who cares what a himbo like Dan Bilzerian thinks? He got big playing Hugh Hefner without the articles. This is the guy we're going to for geopolitics or a discussion of the mechanics of cremating millions of people?

I tried to listen to it and realized that I was just tired. Israel-Palestine is tiring enough when it's someone whose opinion we're supposed to take seriously. How many people that were previously reachable by Dan Bilzerian care now that he's flirting with Islam and Holocaust denial (I think the Muslim fanbase is an underrated explanation for the derangement of certain figures)?

There's a sort of weird overlap between "manosphere" figures and antisemites like Fuentes but I don't see how anything will come of it given they don't have that much in common, any sort of stable ideological core and inevitably fly too close to the sun with some bullshit and end up getting burned a la Fresh and Fit.

There's a sort of weird overlap between "manosphere" figures and antisemites like Fuentes

I don't think there's anything weird about it. The ideas in the manosphere (men and women are different and those differences reach the level of psychology and not just anatomy) are in the same category of unmentionable/cancellable beliefs that holocaust denial and regular old racism are in. If you're someone in the manosphere who wants to talk about those ideas seriously, the only places you'll be able to actually have that conversation is in the same places that let other unmentionable beliefs be discussed. I personally think that this is actually one of the reasons behind the rise in antisemitism and racism - if a young guy wants to learn how to actually have sex with women, he's getting a full course of banned and disreputable ideas.

I honestly regret any time I spent knowing all of these people, they're fringe and Dan is past it now that he isn't Instagram hugh hef, still this is a bad look because people will bunch people together.

I tell people that there are fairly many ethnic groups in my nation, doesn't mean it's the same genetic distance as that of a sub saharan and a nord in terms of ancestry but there still are some differences, even if they might not be explicitly physical but the average person will only listen to the word Indian and bunch 2 billion people together.

Fuentes is a fed so his motives are muddy. The Muslim fanbase indeed is the reason lol, since you can't criticise Muslims because of bioleninism. Same happened with Islam is right about women, feminists knew the posters were offensive but couldn't word it out because they knew that would be heretic lol.

The relationship between optics and efficacy isn’t clear for the “alt right”. Nick Fuentes’ extremist rant led him to collaborate with Adin Ross and debate Destiny; Adin Ross was mentioned by name during Trump’s victory speech, and Trump was interviewed by Ross under the influence of Barron. Andrew Tate gained influence solely due to his outrageous takes. Trump’s early outrageous remarks are what led 4chan to back him deadly in his first election.

The alt right is increasingly influential and popular; if optics are so important then how did that happen? Maybe it comes down to a “great man theory” of political persuasion, with Elon and Tucker responsible for the big cultural change, I don’t know.

His movement was technically groypers, so alt right but more religious and slightly less woke on racial issues. Whereas Spencer who coined the term or co opted (maybe both) alt right dreamt of a pan European empire with US as it's beacon.

Spencer was a relatively decently educated guy who'd do neo kazi things in a sophisticated fashion, rile up people and ultimately had to become a fed like milo due to the issues he faced. His audience was way worse than him whereas nick from the outset aimed for a young college audience that was like Richard. Both fought over this as Nick didn't like Spencer's direction but would eventually fucking say the same things.

Spencer never saw the effects of live streaming, nick has been streaming since 2018 maybe, YouTube, dlive, cozy (his own service) etc. Now I'm certain he too is a fed as he did rule up people for Jan 6th, both are suspected of being homosexual with nick being caught having Trans porn on his computer and famously having never touched a girl.

So in essence you have a fast talking 120 iq volcel who can't keep his low brow racial views down fighting with a richer, more educated 125 iq man who was not that different.

I mention this because the only guy who actually didn't act out with similar views but a higher iq is Jared Taylor, lo and behold he's still banned despite never crashing college campuses or raising nazi salutes even as a joke.

The great man theory would be represented by someone like Yarvin or his NRx buddies far more because they give a good model of the world and what's wrong. You can send a well meaning progressive an open letter to an open minded progressive and he'd not think you're off the rocker. Nick famously disses Moldbug and every other reactionary because he can't read much and thinks anyone doing well in life is a CIA op, whilst being a fed.

4chan was instrumental, I'm certain nick or Spencer or tate aren't people who fulfill the great man prophecy. You have to know what reality is, why it's the way it is and a path forward that's different from what we had bbfore and what we have now. Then acting upon that, this is a huge ordeal as then you have to convince others who represent the best of humanity around you to follow suit, not all but far more than what we have right now.

Ultimately Trump isn't this reactionary God emperor, his people are certainly not either of those things and the rot in the US or other places isn't easy to thwart. Calling women fat isn't the same as making nazi jokes.

I say this because another youtube guy tired this and failed, Sargon of Akkad, but in the flipside, nick isn't going for elections, so if he acts as a gateway to reactionary or neoreactionary people then it isn't that bad, though these optics are certainly terrible. I should writ a short history in this guy lol, too long of a comment, others may like it.

Mobile sports gambling is like, really, really bad, mmm'kay

Color me in the not surprised category. The article, and the additional one's it links at the bottom, do a good job of toe-ing the line between "people should be given the freedom to make choices" and "holy shit this is sentencing those with addictive personalities to lives of poverty."

I'm not super interested in talking about sports gambling itself, although I welcome any good anecdotes, and would instead like to invite comments on the concept of "digital addiction."

There's enough literature out there now that there's a strong enough case to be made that digital technology - very specifically smartphones - can cause behavior patterns that can accurately be described as addictive. However, there is still a delineation between digital addiction and physical/neurological addiction of alcohol and drugs. As a society, we acknowledge the basic danger of these substances by age-limiting some and outright prohibiting others.

My general question would be; what are the major culture war angles on digital addiction? For kids? For all of society?

Restricting minor’s access to digital media- especially social media- is very much a culture war of the future. In the USA this is a thing we’ll increasingly associate with republicans.

At least in Australia currently there's an attempt to ban social media for your under 16. Not super up to date on Australian politics but this effort appears to be coming from Labor which is supposedly the center left party

Well yeah, I didn’t say ‘globally this will be a right wing crusade’. I said ‘in the US restricting minor’s social media will be increasingly associated with republicans’. Other countries might code it differently; I’d expect Japan, Germany, Hungary to make it a center right policy, and most of the rest of the Anglosphere+France to make it a center left thing.

I've run sportsbooks both legal and frontier and I'm a pretty big gambling prohibitionist in my day-to-day life. If you're a wise guy, you're toeing a very fine line (yaddayadda promo arbitrage, soft books etc bit more leeway but even then) where even if you've got an edge you're likely going to run into issues in the medium/long-term if you get accustomed to high stakes gambling. If you're on the fish side, it's far too accessible and risk of ruin is very high especially in this current economic moment where most people feel a near-obligation to gamble in order to advance their socioeconomic situation.

I think this is a textbook case of the wisdom of keeping things that will be addictive as hard to ge5 as possible. Sports gambling in a casino might not be so terrible. The steps necessary to get to a casino for any sort of gambling serve as an important brake on the behavior. The fact that such gambling can now but done using stored credit card information on a device that is carried in the pocket makes it almost impossible for anyone with the proclivity to addiction to ever have control. And this is true of other potentially addictive behaviors— if you have your addiction always available, you can’t easily say no to it.

I'm not sure this reasoning makes sense. People still blow their life savings in casinos, le famous twitter video. If 5x fewer people go to physical casinos, and as a result 5x fewer people blow their savings, does that actually make in-person gambling worth keeping legal? There could be a relative effect, but I'm not sure there is - I could easily imagine the opposite argument, where online gambling, relatively, makes it easier for casual to spend a little, because the friction of going to the place is relatively a higher cost if you only want to spend $20 vs being addicted. Probably better to just have the state assume the job of blocking compulsive gamblers from all gambling platforms (physical or not)

Imo experience with all sorts of addiction has taught us that almost nothing works once people are already addicted, and getting addicted can happen quite easily once you get in contact. If legal platforms block access, the addict will find another way. The key is to generate less addicts in the first place.

Low friction = more addicts = more problems. This is extra true for gambling, since it doesn't get you near-instantly chemically addicted the way some drugs do, it needs some time to be cultivated and re-enforced. If you need to repeatedly, physically go to a casino, people around you will notice, you might have to explain yourself to your partner or parents or close friends, and for yourself it's easier to notice when you start losing significant money. And noticing it early is important to get people to stop before it's too late. If you play on the phone, you yourself might only notice much, much later how much you have played and how much you really lost, and others notice even later, if at all. Not that this is impossible to happen with casinos, it's about the ease it happens with. There's related approaches, such as requiring casinos to change a fixed sum into a number of chips that you play with (which makes it obvious how much lost every time you go) vs just directly playing with cash (easier to lose more than you wanted to play with) or just pay by card (extremely easy to blow a lots of money), or to require limits on how much someone can lose in a specific time frame, and so on. All of these have the purpose to a) give a legal outlet to avoid the proliferation of a black market b) reduce the generation of addicts by increasing friction c) reduce the negative impact of being an addict by making sure you can only lose x money per hour or so spend.

For similar reasons, nowadays I feel like the old approach of having a small amount of a drug being mostly legal or at least not super punished, but if you were caught trading significant amounts you were fucked, was a certain sweet spot. The friction to even start drugs was quite significant. There is an argument to institute a similar ban on gambling, where small-scale private gambling is explicitly legal, but once you do it large-scale it becomes illegal full-stop. You can then still meet with friends and play a round of poker with real money but still mostly low stakes, but you don't get this industrialised pipeline of addict generation we have now.

Well, the more friction you can place between you and your addiction the better. Yes, people can and do blow their life savings at casinos. But that’s worlds harder than blowing through your savings when the casino is on an always online phone you carry in your pocket. When you have to go to a casino to gamble, you need to get dressed, get your wallet, drive for 10-15 minutes to the casino, walk across the parking lot, into the casino, find a machine and put in the credit card. Those actions probably mean about 20-30 minutes of being able to talk yourself out of it.

This kind of thing in reverse is true of exercising. The more friction between you and exercise, the less likely you are to actually do it. So they advise keeping your gym clothes and shoes on your dresser, having any needed equipment at home, etc. because at every step you can talk yourself out of it. Do I really feel like fighting traffic to get to the gym? And if the answer is anything other than a very firm yes, chances are you’ll be on the couch Motte-posting instead of exercising. Or maybe you want to eat healthier. The standard advice is stop buying junk food and instead buy the healthy stuff. The reason is that inertia will work in your favor here. You’ll be hungry and all the food in your home is healthy, you don’t necessarily want carrot sticks, but getting potato chips means getting in the car, driving in traffic to the store, walking to the chip aisle, buying the chips, paying, driving through traffic back home before you can finally eat them. The extra effort isn’t worth it most of the time, so carrot sticks it is.

I think the argument is that people who have an edge and are thus gambling rationally are much less likely to be dissuaded than gambling addicts.

Probably better to just have the state assume the job of blocking compulsive gamblers from all gambling platforms (physical or not)

Zvi says that the online platforms would be unprofitable without preying on compulsive gamblers, so I'm not sure that this cashes out to a difference in worldstate.

Yep. Physical barriers to harmful behaviors are a pretty decent brake to keep them from proliferating throughout a society. Low agency people are more susceptible to those behaviors, but also probably less likely to go to the trouble of accessing them if its difficult enough.

In Florida, most gambling was relegated to Seminole Tribe casinos, so they necessarily couldn't proliferate beyond the boundaries of the reservations. Florida has a deal with them where they pay up a chunk of the revenue and the state bans gambling elsewhere in its territory. It in theory keeps gambling minimized in the rest of the state and makes it easier to supervise and regulate the places where it does occur.

Now, the Seminoles have worked to make it maximally enticing to come out to the Casinos, and maximally difficult to leave once you're there, but at least it required you to physically drive there, and at some point you'd have to go home. So in a sense it beat, and still beats having a mini-casino on every street corner, which is harder to regulate and will probably ruin more people.

Las Vegas does this on a much grander scale, of course.

Digitizing the casinos... man. Its the rough equivalent of hooking up a pipeline to everyone's house that could dispense heroin, meth, and/or crack cocaine on demand. If you don't have to venture into the seedier parts of town and risk getting mugged to get your fix, I'm sure more people will partake.

I think the most palatable change would be something akin to banning those under age 16 from having social media accounts. Maybe a step further, banning them from possessing smartphones altogether (yes, enforcement would be a bear. No arguments there). Give them a basically functional blackberry-esque device that can send and receive messages and has GPS functionality and bluetooth, and no app store.

I think there has been vastly insufficient discussion of superstimuli and policies that address the proliferation of ways one can completely wreck their life in short order. Just like drugs are more potent than they were 50 years ago, marketing companies are much, much better at their jobs and barely-legal scams are more efficiently predatory than ever before. And meanwhile, humans are, if anything, a little dumber on average.

Like, I am libertarian as fuck when it comes to social issues, but I've experienced the rush that gambling brings and my sincere belief is that we HAVE to provide some 'friction' in place to prevent people from slipping into deep, DEEP holes from which there is no escape, or at least they'll be stuck climbing out for years.

Consider if you owned a property with an extremely deep sinkhole on it, that was surrounded by smooth, polished rock with low friction coefficient on a 20 degree slope, so that anyone who wants to approach the edge of the pit would find it very difficult to climb back out without special equipment, and some % of people are going to slip and fall into the pit. If you're charging admission to view the pit, I argue we can reasonably say you're being extremely negligent (and therefore at least partially responsible) if you didn't provide people with adequate warnings, safety equipment, and AT LEAST a guardrail around the edge to keep people from sliding in.

ESPECIALLY if you were enticing people to come view the pit with the promise that some small number of guests would get fabulously wealthy, and the closer they get to the edge of the pit, the more they could possibly win.

Even my deepest belief in personal freedom doesn't require that the pit must be tolerated as-is, in its maximally dangerous state.

But metaphorically speaking, we're apparently allowing thousands of these sorts of pits to dot the psychological landscape, with bright flashing advertisements drawing in patrons and no mechanisms in place to 'rescue' those who fall in.

It is bad enough for adults who get sucked in, kids whose entire development was awash in these stimuli might not even develop basic defenses, since this is what they would consider 'normal.' The kids these days have gambling mechanics in ALL their video games, they've already made and lost minor fortunes in Crypto, they can gamble on literally any sports event they want, and they grew up watching influencers shilling them on the most harebrained of get-rich-quick schemes.

And meanwhile, financial literacy is barely ever taught.

Also, it is patently absurd that the rules as they exist allow anyone over 18 or 21 to throw money away gambling, but if they want to invest in early-stage startups they have to have a certain amount of wealth built up already.

The 'problem' such as it is, if we start investigating and making rules for those who have addictive personalities, or are easily manipulated, or simply don't understand odds/statistics and restrict their ability to use their own money in ways they wish. Maybe they have restricted bank accounts that limit them to, say $500/day withdrawals. Maybe they're not allowed to take on long-term debt, or we legally cap the amount of debt they can take to some specific % of their net worth. Or require them to pass an annual financial audit to exercise certain rights...

Because if we don't, there's a certainty that many of them will blow up the entirety of their savings and becomes a burden on the rest of us later on. And thus we can only do our best to mitigate this externality.

Well, we're essentially carving out a different class of citizens with reduced individual rights due to their vulnerabilities. What's the justification for letting such people vote? Or have a bank account at all? Or have kids?

Imagine being a very smart and disagreeable 15 year old stuck in a small town somewhere. You want to be on the internet, learning to code, arguing about politics, and making friends similar to you ... except social media is banned, lmao. The internet is where the future is, and where power is, keeping kids off it isn't advantageous to them.

My guess is in most cases he would be better off learning to deal with his disagreeability in a way that does not prevent him from forming meaningful relationships with his local community, as opposed to fleeing into an online bubble of like minded people and becoming atomized and terminally online and building an identity about being very smart. If anything your example makes me more convinced kids should not be on social media, not less.

Also, the fact that in some very specific circumstances social media might have a positive effect on children, does not necessarily mean it is a good idea to have children on social media. I have not looked into it too deeply so I am open to having my mind changed about it, but I have the impression Jonathan Haidt shows pretty convincingly that social media have had a catastrophic effect on teenage mental health, so if that is true it might still be a good idea to ban or at least disincentivize social media for children.

Finally, banning social media is not the same as banning the internet. In a world where social media is banned, your hypothetical very smart child can still get on the internet and look up information of coding and such, without having to be on tiktok or anything like that. This would raise questions about the definition of social media. Maybe it would be feasible to treat platforms that have some sort of addictive recommendation algorithm differently from places where you look up your own content, so kids could look up stuff about coding or politics or find an online community that they like, while not being allowed on tiktok or youtube or whatever and be exposed to algorithms that are basically trying to get you addicted to the platform's content. Or this type of algorithmic feed could become a separate 16+ feature of these platforms or whatever where everyone can use these platforms and look up stuff whereas you have to validate your account and prove you are 16+ before you get access to the addictive features. I am just fantasizing on the spot about specific policies, but trying to get kids off of addictive social media platforms does not have to mean a blanket ban on everything fun and useful on the internet.

Do you think the modal teen fits thar description?

Of course not, but someone here's more likely to have been like that in the past

Yes, but the policy debate is going to have to consider that the damages being caused to a majority of the teens out there might outweigh the loss to the comparative handful of teens who benefited from unrestricted internet access.

might outweigh the loss to the comparative handful of teens who benefited from unrestricted internet access

Which is just another way of saying that they don't have the right to benefit from that ability, and that ability should be redistributed to everyone who doesn't. (It's ironic that the types of people who complain about more rules being "communism" are directionally and trivially correct, yet most of them aren't smart enough to explain why.)

I think a social media ban for this subgroup is likely to pass in some way, shape, or form, but that's mainly because we don't think anyone under 18 (21? 25? 120?) is actually a human being (more like 3/5ths of one). And because it's going to be the Boomers doing it, it's going to be something stupid and ham-fisted that includes stuff like 4chan and StackOverflow (i.e. the places high-value teenagers are more likely to visit) but excludes YouTube Shorts-type content factories (which is what everyone over 30 thinks 'social media' is, and is more about dealing with the Evil New Media that they can't get their kids off of because there's basically nothing else for them to do).

At least there's a playbook for defeating tech-illiterate Boomers that more or less just needs to be dusted off. I think there's a real future in distributed social media among people smart enough to insert an SD card into a Raspberry Pi and edit a few configuration files.

but that's mainly because we don't think anyone under 18 (21? 25? 120?) is actually a human being

I mean, it shouldn't be controversial to say that youth is a form of 'mental disability' that most people overcome through age and experience.

I'd be in favor of there being some kind of basic test that someone can past to 'remove' that disability in a legal sense, rather than having a blanket age of consent.

that most people overcome through age and experience

The sheer size of my political outgroup is clear evidence to the contrary. Most of them are over 18, too.

I'd be in favor of there being some kind of basic test that someone can past to 'remove' that disability in a legal sense

Oi, where's your freedom license?

I am too, but the problem is that society won't tolerate it being an actual, legible test (mainly because muh disproportionate impact, but also because there's a lot of ego/conscience-approval involved in the assumption of righteous disenfranchisement by default, much like there is with all the -isms).

This is currently fulfilled by "having enough common sense to lie to the website about his or her date of birth, and intelligent enough not to contradict that lie after the fact". Fake IDs serve a similar purpose, or at least they did back when they were easier to make; half the problem I have with this scheme is that it makes this much harder (they are/were natural escape valves), as in the face of -ism-driven lawmaking the question of who it actually applies to and what they'll be doing instead won't be seriously considered.

I think the most palatable change would be something akin to banning those under age 16 from having social media accounts.

They're trying to legislate this in Australia right now.

Does everyone need to show their ID to get a social media account up? Do I need to show ID for this website? Who is storing my information and where is it going? What about VPNs (every second youtuber is shilling them, kids could easily set one up) to bypass the ban and log in from a more permissive jurisdiction - ban them? What about 4chan or its derivatives - they can't be bothered to do age-verification (and don't have the resources) - ban them? Xbox and Playstation have online chat, thousands and thousands of games have online chat. Are they all social media? In a stroke online privacy is greatly diminished, along with all small web forums.

At least in crypto you have marginally higher chances of making money and it's not inherently rigged against you. Down with sports betting, up with Shiba and Doge.

Societies' restrictive energies should remain focused on drugs, they cause much more harm than gambling does.

Thanks, hadn't picked up on small sites not being excepted. I think some of the smaller players could say "bite me" due to lacking assets in Oz, but that's not the ideal solution.

I find that I agree with you across the board, but one footnote on my annoyance with the current state of affairs:

I argue we can reasonably say you're being extremely negligent (and therefore at least partially responsible) if you didn't provide people with adequate warnings, safety equipment, and AT LEAST a guardrail around the edge to keep people from sliding in.

I feel like these online services already do this. They advertise, but they close with a line about gambling addiction. Everyone is simultaneously bombarded with advertisements for gambling and admonishments about how you need to be really careful. To me, this feels like the worst of both worlds, where we legalized something that's apparently quite destructive for quite a few people, but with the caveat that everyone has to be antagonized about how dangerous it is. I bet $2 on Josh Allen to score a rushing touchdown because I think it's fun. Leave me alone. Stop telling me over and over and over that I'd better watch out about how addictive it is. Either let people ruin their lives or don't, but don't do this stupid in between thing where we all acknowledge that it's ruining lives and therefore everyone needs to hear about that.

Overall, I guess I just increasingly believe that the typical person should pretty much not be extended credit on much of anything. They just don't seem to be able to conceptualize how credit lines work, what interest is, and so on.

For me, it is fine. I can gamble once a week a couple of dollars and it is fun without causing me any harm.

But I can’t help but note the business doesn’t really run on people like me. I don’t make the house enough money. It is dependent on the whales. Those guys lose a ton of money. I the business is unseemly.

Yep. I have a reflexive dislike for ANY business model that is entirely reliant on a small number of customers spending 10-100x of the average to stay profitable.

Has at least something to do with me being EXTREMELY sensitive to attempts to hack my psyche, which is the hallmark of such places. Oh, your game is "free to play?" Pardon me if I don't want to spend mental effort resisting the 1001 ways your game is constantly trying to convince me that spending in-game money is more important than food.

On the other hand, when I play such games I do not feel having to expend any particular mental effort to resist shelling out cash, any more than I feel compelled to take any Nigerian princes up on their offers. If you're not in the susceptible target audience, those games really are free.

But it kind of feels like free riding off of people who are destroying themselves.

'Zactly. On the one hand I don't mind free-riding by, say, using ad-blocker on sites where I was never going to click the ads anyway.

On the other, I really don't like to think that I am getting something for free because somebody else is vastly overpaying relative to the value they're getting. It is easy to imagine they're some rich loner who has endless spare cash, but it is still a predatory model. Also, in game settings, the 'free' players are arguably there just to be easy opponents for the overpowered paid whales. Not really a fan of playing the role of disposable mook so some other guy can live out his power fantasy.

I think those disclaimers are a fig leaf in this case. At best.

Its like having people sign a waiver that they understand "Gravity is a powerful force that pulls you downward" before you enter the pit zone. I don't think psychological "nudges" are actually a real thing, honestly.

To me, a 'guardrail' is something that physically prevents you from falling in. Unless you climb over it. In this case that may be something like a restriction on your bank account that prevents you from depositing money into an app or withdrawing cash at a Casino after a certain period of time or above a certain amount.

There's a (strong) case that banks shouldn't be peeking over their clients' shoulders and judging what they use money on, so I'm really trying to think of ways to put something TANGIBLE in place that might allow someone to slide right up to the point of absolute ruin, but stop at the edge and have a chance to retreat, or at least think over the implications before jumping in.

And of course, degenerate gamblers will just borrow money from 'friends' or loan sharks if their bank cuts them off, so there are no 'foolproof' solutions.

There's a (strong) case that banks shouldn't be peeking over their clients' shoulders and judging what they use money on, so I'm really trying to think of ways to put something TANGIBLE in place that might allow someone to slide right up to the point of absolute ruin, but stop at the edge and have a chance to retreat, or at least think over the implications before jumping in.

Here's an example: if an elderly customer suddenly tries to withdraw a large sum of money, the system pauses the transaction and directs the teller to arrange an interview with a security officer that ensures the customer is not being scammed by someone impersonating their grandchild in sudden financial trouble.

Is this kind of meddling permissible?

Another example: if a customer suddenly tries to transfer a large amount to an account that doesn't belong to them, the system pauses the transaction and directs the customer to upload a document that explains the purpose of the transaction.

Is this kind of meddling permissible?

Finally, if a customer tries to transfer more than X to online gambling companies this month, the system pauses the transaction and suggests the customer sets up a monthly gambling limit.

I don't think this kind of meddling is more bothersome than the previous ones.

I personally would like to get rid of the two examples you mentioned as well. The kind of big brother monitoring banks do is obnoxious as hell and I'm not convinced it is an overall value-add for society.

That's because your parents haven't yet deposited their life savings into a "secure account" because a helpful "FBI agent" told them to.

It turns out that I do not hold opinions on policy based on whether or not the negative consequences of said policies personally impact me or those I love.

But why?

More comments

Here's an example: if an elderly customer suddenly tries to withdraw a large sum of money, the system pauses the transaction and directs the teller to arrange an interview with a security officer that ensures the customer is not being scammed by someone impersonating their grandchild in sudden financial trouble.

Is this kind of meddling permissible?

No, and making it so is likely to result in a wave of exit from banks and into cash-stuffed mattresses.

Another example: if a customer suddenly tries to transfer a large amount to an account that doesn't belong to them, the system pauses the transaction and directs the customer to upload a document that explains the purpose of the transaction.

Is this kind of meddling permissible?

Depends on what you mean. Such transfers may be interrupted by fraud detection and the customer might have to prove his bona fides (which is annoying enough) but having to write an essay explaining to one's bank why you're spending your own money isn't really acceptable.

No, and making it so is likely to result in a wave of exit from banks and into cash-stuffed mattresses.

It’s pretty common and most people don’t keep Benjamins under their mattress.

No, and making it so is likely to result in a wave of exit from banks and into cash-stuffed mattresses.

It's standard procedure in Europe. It actually saved me money when someone managed to clone my wife's card.

I question whether there’s a difference between addiction to drugs and addiction to gambling. If gambling induces an endogenous release of dopamine at a level commensurate to the release of dopamine from cocaine, then there is literally no reason to treat cocaine as “more addictive” than gambling. It’s the same addictiveness. One involves cognition, but that doesn’t alter the addictiveness.

what are the major culture war angles on digital addiction? For kids

Every child allowed to play a modern video game is being trained for a life of gambling by way of lootbox mechanics. It’s really the ultimate disproof of liberalism. We shouldn’t give people free choice where (1) they lack wisdom to discern the complicated costs and benefits, (2) their instincts overrides rationality. That’s because the choice is not actually free. It’s either coerced by an illusion or coerced by an animalistic instinct.

My first instinct was that drugs categorically different because they cause physical dependence and withdrawal symptoms. A quick google search tells me that gambling withdrawal is a thing, but all the sources are treatment centers, and all the symptoms are psychological. Withdrawing from amphetamine left me pretty much non-functional for weeks. I doubt gambling can cause that sort of nervous system damage.

One involves cognition, but that doesn’t alter the addictiveness.

The argument perhaps goes that you can mentally train yourself to resist the effects of a given stimuli when the source of the neurological effect is entirely local to your own brain. End of the day, you can make a 'choice' to stop pushing the button.

But there's no training yourself to resist the introduction of exogenous drugs.

That’s because the choice is not actually free. It’s either coerced by an illusion or coerced by an animalistic instinct.

I'd object to the use of the term 'coerced' here, but otherwise mostly agree. I think its mostly based on the idea that they are not psychologically or philosophically prepared to give 'informed consent' to behaviors that have complex long-term implications. They literally cannot comprehend the effects, so while they can 'agree' to the terms, the consent lacks the actual 'comprehension' which is necessary for someone to truly consent to and accept the risks of a given transaction.

And the world has only gotten more complex, not less, so normal legal standards around 'age of consent' are, arguably, entirely outmoded for addressing this issue.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats