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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   33707 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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Of all of Trump's cabinet picks, RFK Jr is the most unserious.

The credentials of the others at least seem fit for the positions.

It is a bit odd how worried people are about credentials. Look at the last number of HHS secretaries. Do they really have better credentials?

It is a bit odd how worried people are about credentials.

"Remember, a lone amateur built the Ark. A whole team of professionals built the Titanic."

This is insightful. Xavier Becera is a completely empty suit, devoid of any substantive (object level) merit. And somehow we're willing to chalk that up to normal politics.

In truth, I think it might actually be directionally correct. An actual idiot that does nothing and thinks nothing of substance may actually be preferable to someone that knows enough to confidently fuck up.

Call it the Sorcerer's Apprentice Curve -- the utility function is concave in intelligence.

what substance he had was quite partisan - he argued against Little Sisters of the Poor, for instance

Of course he did -- any D appointee would have. That wasn't some personal view he brought with him to HHS.

In this case, being anti-vaccine and alt-health should be considered actively malicious.

The problem of the US are the high prices of finding and getting good care, and the byzantine system. The frustration of that has been successfully redirected into whole-system skepticism.

Which, fair enough. But outbreaks of preventable disease are bad. In the end, it will be interesting to see if RFK and the gribblers end up biting off more than they can chew by going after the immovable corn lobby.

The current HHS head is a HerbaLife fan.

I’d love to have better options, and I’m disappointed that the Trump one is this, but I think people badly underestimate how bad our institutions are.

Gaetz seems like a POS. RFK is a philanderer who fried his brain, but did some good and doesn’t seem particularly malevolent.

Are you a measles virus or something? From a human perspective, RFK is visibly malevolent in a very obvious way.

Before he got on the Trump train, RFK devoted a significant part of his activism to discouraging parents from vaccinating their children against measles based on false claims that vaccines cause autism. His activism caused a measles outbreak in Samoa with 83 deaths.

If we measure malevolence by the degree by which the harm-to-victim exceeds the benefit-to-wrongdoer, killing kids for social media klout is the worst.

His activism caused a measles outbreak in Samoa with 83 deaths.

No, it didn't. The outbreak was ultimately caused by two nurses who diluted two measles doses with muscle relaxants instead of water. Two children died as a result, and the government paused MMR immunization for several months. When they restarted, they didn't immediately release the reason for the children dying, which probably limited uptake after that. The outbreak started in this environment, the government imported a lot of measles vaccine from India, the outbreak continued. It is at this point Kennedy comes in. He does claim the measles vaccine from India was probably defective and caused the outbreak to continue, but HE certainly was not the cause of it.

There's more to political legitimacy than skill.

my guess is that RFK Jr won't last very long. Remember Scaramucci? Trump likes to reward people for loyalty, and HHS is a decent prize, but RFK Jr has too big an ego to play subserviant to Trump for long.

The high number of people claiming that the trump picks won't last long seem to be hoping against hope. Trump does have a core number of people who do and are able to work with him over years and years.

RFK Jr is clearly a different personality than the establishment that wasn't able to last, so claiming that rfk will not last long seems premature.

Bannon was also idiosyncratic and he didn’t last long. So was Scaramucci.

I'm not against Trump, I consider myself neutral. But it's just an objective fact that he churns through people around him quite quickly. I've never before heard of a president where his own vice president publicly came out against him, for example.

Steve Sailer once said that this kind of constant churn is common in a certain type of hard-charging, 80s, NYC business guy. I think that's a fair description for Trump.

I think some non-trivial portion of his starting picks won't remain in their positions until the end of his term. I'd say 25%. Either because Trump removes them or they remove themselves.

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