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Last week there was a discussion on the motte about Trump’s cabinet picks, in particular about Rubio who is something of a hawk. This goes against what many of Trump’s isolationist supporters want. It’s almost certain that Trump is making these picks extremely haphazardly, deciding on names after a bare modicum of thought and prioritizing vibes, “loyalty”, and Fox news appearances over any other concerns. The NYT has documented this extensively, and it’s entirely in keeping with the chaotic nature of his first term.
One of the goofier explanations given by those on the right was that nominating Rubio was actually a 5D chess move to get Rubio out of the Senate, which is apparently extremely necessary for some unexplained reason…? As opposed to Trumpian loyalists like Murkowski. It was just a silly idea altogether.
Why do I bring it up again? Well, because it might have actually worked! Just… on the wrong person. Trump nominated Gaetz for Attorney General, and Gaetz almost immediately resigned from the House when the news broke. This is a bit unusual, as most people stay in their seats until their confirmation is done. There was the looming release of an ethics report on Gaetz which will likely damage his reputation somewhat, so there’s a chance that Gaetz was always planning to resign, although I somewhat doubt it. In any case, Trump yanked the nomination when it was clear that there was bad press coming from it, and now Gaetz has said he won’t come back to Congress even though he probably technically could.
One might ask why Trump would want to get rid of Gaetz from the House. Well, Gaetz was instrumental in paralyzing Congress over the last term, so perhaps Trump wanted to avoid that. The issue with that explanation is that Gaetz is a fiercely pro-Trump, so it seems weird that Trump would promise something to an ally, and then leave them high and dry. The word “backfired” might be a more accurate description in such a case.
My guess is that Gaetz will probably come back to the Trump White House in some form that doesn’t require a Senate confirmation, after the news dies down.
For added hilarity: Gaetz is now on cameo
His family here in Florida have tens of millions of dollars. This grift would seem...unnecessary.
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The Gaetz drama did take the heat off of Hegseth, though, who is now having his own sex allegations circulate.
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From the ‘ vibes ‘ I gathered about a day after the Gaetz nomination, most Trump supporters thought he was being set up to be a lightning rod of controversy and tossed aside.
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I looked up the scandal on Wikipedia. He allegedly had sex with a 17 year old (who he claims he thought was 19)? That's what's made him radioactive? Is there anything else I'm missing? The wiki section for this says "UNDERAGE SEX TRAFFICKING" so I was expecting he was ordering 9-year Ukrainian war orphans to his house or something, but this really underwhelming. Technically a crime, yes, blah blah blah, but reminds me of the pearl clutching over Lewinsky.
It gets more interesting: it's likely these 17 year olds were recruited off sugar baby websites by the former Seminole County Tax Collector by the name of Joel Greenberg who gave them fraudulent real Florida driver's licenses which listed their ages as over 18. Joel Greenberg was arrested for a scheme of sending letters claiming to be young teenagers in order to accuse his middle school teacher primary opponent of sexually assaulting them, and they found treasure trove of crimes on his cell phone and computers. Greenberg then attempted to get a deal from the feds by floating to the Barr DOJ that he had evidence a sitting member of Congress had sex with women under the age of 18. Despite the DOJ being filled with frothing-at-the-mouth partisans, they opened a secret investigation into Matt Gaetz (and likely a grand jury), and then former DOJ officials likely attempted to blackmail Matt Gaetz's father for $25m in exchange for a Biden admin presidential pardon for Gaetz's "looming" sex trafficking charges (which spurred one of the most bizarre, and true, interviews of a sitting Congressmen on National TV), but after the blackmail thing was burned the sex trafficking investigation was leaked to the NYT, Joel Greenberg plead guilty was finally sentenced to 11 years in prison (only 1 year more than the mandatory minimum for his specific sex trafficking conviction), and the DOJ dropped the investigation over a year later.
It's unverified if it's specifically true the women Greenberg admitted to giving fraudulent real Florida IDs were the 17 year olds Gaetz is rumored to have sex with, but given the behavior of the DOJ, I think that's a good guess as to why no charges were brought.
I think it’s likely Gaetz knew about the fake IDs rather than it being a deliberate attempt to gain kompromat by Greenberg, who was a consummate failson in many ways. Him and Gaetz were both from rich families and became friends over a mutual interest in crypto and guns, apparently. Gaetz also hasn’t really thrown Greenberg under the bus (even though coming out publicly and saying “the woman had an ID saying she was 19, I later found out my friend had set this up as part of a blackmail scheme”) would indeed be a fair defense not only legally as you say but also, at least to a major extent, in the court of public opinion.
It's hard to know since all of this stuff is leaked/rumored as we don't have the full report. My understanding is the rumor is Gaetz was with Greenberg when he was making some fraudulent IDs with the implication being Gaetz knew what was going on, but the specific period we're talking about is in 2017 when the girl was still 17 and I believe this rumored instance was after that. I believe I've heard Gaetz refer to someone going to prison for 11 years (which would refer to Greenberg), but I don't think he's ever said a name.
Given the frothing-at-the-mouth behavior of the DOJ going after anyone connected to Trump, I suspect Gaetz has pretty iron-clad defenses in the court of public opinion and real court, especially when the case would have to be brought in Florida instead of Washington DC or the SDNY.
As a former client told me: if you're going to do shady shit, never in writing and always in cash.
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The daily podcast yesterday laid out what they expected would have happened. Senate democrats would have asked Gaetz if he had ever paid women for sex (illegal in Florida and most of the US), whereupon he could have:
Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but I'm surprised democrats wouldn't hold onto this until Gaetz had been confirmed so they could use it as a cudgel against the Trump administration. Maybe they genuinely think he'll wreck the DoJ in a way that his substitute may not.
Sitting on kompromat against Trump to use when it's needed didn't work the last ten times they tried it, and it may well have cost them the election (Trump was able to stall his criminal cases for 18 months, but I doubt he would have been able to stall them for 40 months, especially if he couldn't point to ongoing elections as political cover).
I got the sense from some Democrat lawmakers that they were personally afraid of a Gaetz DOJ. This interview is a masterclass. People in the comments say it's sarcasm, but it's deeper than that. Everything the congressman says is literally true. Even the subtext is straightforward. It is only the emotional valence assigned to the facts laid out that differs between Republicans and Democrats.
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I get that mores change and republicans have abandoned even the pretense of moral majority, but like 17 year old prostitution is not suprisingly scandalous. It’s not some made up woke shit. It’s what the whole Epstein island implication was… yesterday.
If one personally doesn’t find this scandalous, ok. But the performative surprise that others might is disingenuous
Uncharitable and frankly surprising since your posts are usually pretty high quality. I'm not performing anything. "Performative " describes people who act outraged when a 42 year old bangs a 17 year old but don't care when a 43 year old bangs an 18 year old.
Conservatives were performatively butthurt about this stuff way before the Woke. "Won't someone think of the children!" is an ancient meme. I never said it was "made up woke shit." Conservatives have a way longer history of disingenuous pearl clutching, that's why I brought up Lewinsky. I'm saying that I think both wokies and self-righteous moral majority types who express offense at this are inconsistent and ridiculous.
No see this is the issue. If conservatives have been ‘pearl clutching’ about sexual morality for this long maybe it’s not performative… and further why are you surprised?
Your entire reaction (if not performative) thus rests on the conclusion that conservatives don’t earnestly find anything wrong with soliciting teenage prostitutes.
If you don’t find anything wrong with it, again- ok. But to assume anyone who does is pearl clutching is an extremely warped worldview
Because the majority of pearl clutchers get divorces, use contraception, get abortions, let their sons and daughters fornicate in high school and college, consume internet porn, watch gratuitously violent and sexual movies/tv series, etc etc.
I don't doubt that principled conservative exist when it comes to sexual mores -- I think I (and you?) would probably count, but we're now a very small minority. My conservative religious family members are all okay with gays now, 20 years ago they absolutely were not.
So my point (perhaps poorly expressed) was that the media is engaging in a sort of cargo-cult appeal to Christian morality ("Can you BELIEVE he cheated on his wife/had sex with a student/posted raunchy comments on a forum/etc.??") to the ever-dwindling number of people who can muster anything more than lukewarm outrage to that stuff. There's a "smoke and mirrors" effect of the same type as a woke Twitter outrage mob. Some outlets repeat the story, Twitter addicts tweet incessantly and spam memes and shit up the victim's Twitter threads, and risk averse corporate/political consultants label the victim "high risk" and endorsements get withdrawn. The Kamala campaign astroturfed the heck out of the internet for weeks, we just saw a very pure example of this phenomenon.
More to the original point, they tried the same stuff with Trump. He's a philanderer, he has sex with expensive prostitutes, grab em by the pussy, pee tapes, etc. I'm pretty sure that (most) conservatives in the 90s would have been genuinely affronted by Trump's behavior, but (most) conservatives in the 2010s, while unhappy with his antics, apparently didn't find them disqualifying.
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In case you were wondering what the difference between wokies and
temporally-embarrassed wokiesself-righteous moral majority types is:Traditionalists (popularly, "conservatives") are butthurt that a 42 year old man fucked a 17 year old woman, without having to pay with his life for the sex.
Progressives (popularly, "wokes") are butthurt that a 17 year old woman fucked a 42 year old man, without demanding he first pay with his life for the sex.
By contrast, liberals are the men and women who don't think sex is worth that much.
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That's not really comparable. 17 is well past the sexual majority in most countries. The Epstein scheme recruited girls as young as 11.
Not to mention there's a world of difference between paying for sex and setting up an underage brothel.
There is a difference in both nature and degree between these moral transgressions.
All the famous Epstein victims were 16/17. There was some dark hinting about younger ones but the evidence is extremely thin on the ground.
I seem to remember testimony from 14 year olds (at the time). The evidence in general in this case isn't particularly forthcoming, for obvious reasons.
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I think the criteria is that if it’s not bad enough for your own side to care (I mean a large number of people genuinely caring, en masse, rather than just some senators thinking “I’m gonna have to burn some political credit to confirm this guy”), then it’s not a genuine moral infraction, and it can be assumed that the alleged outrage on the opposing side is largely performative.
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Epstein involved girls younger than that, in greater quantity, with elements of coercion, going unpunished, and potentially for the purpose of blackmail on behalf of a foreign nation. These are not comparable events.
an upcoming guy from a rich family gets elected as Seminole County Tax Collector who then gets women off of Sugar Baby websites paying them >$70,000, prints them fraudulent Florida driver's licenses listing them as >18, and then pays them to have sex with him and others, including perhaps a sitting Congressmen
looks like this could potentially be a blackmail operation also (although perhaps not on behalf of a foreign nation), but the guy doing it also engaged in a bunch of other ridiculous criminal behavior which landed with him being arrested for something else which is when the above was uncovered
I think there was a blackmail element no?
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/leaked-texts-from-israeli-consular-official-show-more-details-in-gaetz-levinson-funding-scheme/
https://archive.is/5jZtH
Admittedly I never looked into this deeply. I also distinctly recall some other politician coming forward when the Gaetz drama dropped, saying that something similar happened to him: he met someone, they had girls in the back of the car who were overly friendly, and he left because of the strange vibe. But I don’t remember who that was.
As far as I know, there was no blackmail element from Joel Greenberg himself.
There was other nonconnected blackmailers, though: a former prosecutor for the northern district of Florida by the name of David McGee and a former Intelligence officer for the military named Bob Kent got together and likely attempted to blackmail Gaetz's father. The scheme was Don Gaetz would give $25,000,000 to McGee and who would allegedly use this money to attempt a rescue operation on a long-lost CIA contractor named Bob Levinson and in exchange the two would use their contacts in the Biden admin to get a presidential pardon for Matt Gaetz's "looming" federal sex trafficking charges (which up to that point were secret). Don Gaetz immediately went to the local FBI and they got him to wear a wire to meet with David McGee. Luckily for the Gaetz family, Don refused to do anything without a written letter from the FBI detailing the purpose of the meeting, their agreement, and their cooperation.
Once the Gaetz family had that letter and went to the meeting with David McGee, shortly afterwards someone leaked the entire sex trafficking investigation to the NYT which led to Matt Gaetz giving one of the most bizarre television interviews ever. I also remember this causing a bit of a fallout with other politicians commenting, but I also don't remember who that was.
It looks like your links don't list Bob Levinson as a CIA contractor, but I believe his ties to the CIA (and maybe others) were leaked to the press in ~2013 in an attempt to pressure the Obama admin to get him back.
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The main Epstein scandal involved girls who were 16-17, most famously Giuffre. Maxwell was recruiting high school girls. There were allegations about girls who were younger than 15 but much less evidence behind them, which is not, of course, to say it didn’t happen.
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I think it was the paying for sex part.
I'm still amazed that someone would be not only so stupid as to not use cash for an illegal transaction, but would actively document it using transparent innuendo.
If anything, being this sloppy should be disqualifying. If you can't even get consorting with whores right as a politician, how are you going to do anything more sophisticated with the whole bureaucracy against you?
Who cares? This is up there with stealing a balloon on free balloon day. Sloppy? It doesn't matter how careful you are, they will make scandals up. See Kavanaugh
I like my political operators to understand basic operational security because I want them to succeed in enacting the goals of my coalition.
That the enemy uses diverse tactics that make this only relevant sometimes doesn't invalidate that preference.
This translates to something like: "I like my political operators to not get lied about. If they were smart their enemies wouldn't be lying about them." E Carrol Jean. Tulsi Gabbard. Kavanaugh.
But this isn't a lie -- Gaetz really did pay for sex on Venmo & PayPal. There are receipts.
"My opponent is going to lie so therefore the black-letter truth doesn't matter" is a take.
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Where did Kavanaugh leave written receipts of any wrongdoing exactly? Afaik there is no evidence for him doing anything untoward, only hearsay.
Our man would still be AG in waiting if all there was was hearsay.
I understand closing the ranks is a sound tactic, but if you can't recognize picking competent leaders is too I can't do anything for you.
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Nah it’s cringe to hire 17 year old prostitutes as a 40 year old man, people are entirely within their rights to consider that sleazy behavior.
I can only hope to be so cringe but free at 40.
You planning a move to Thailand?
Excuse me, I'm racist, not gay.
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What does age gap discourse have to do with hiring a prostitute?
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I think it's much less cringe than hiring 37-year-old prostitutes. And at 400-500 dollars per session she was a real bargain, to boot.
In your view, what are the most and least cringe age of prostitutes to hire, and for what prices?
It's not just age. It's the answer to "how likely would the person be able to have the same experience by asking his wife/GF or hooking up" that determines the cringeworthiness. So it can be age, kink, difference in attractiveness, etc.
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the girl was allegedly 17 years old in 2017 when Gaetz was 35 and the girl likely had a fraudulent real Florida driver's license saying she was 19
middle-aged women are "within their rights" to think any opinion and it's certainly not surprising they disapprove of rich congressmen their age sleeping with 17 year olds, paying them or otherwise
I'm not middle aged or a woman and I think carrying on a purely sexual relationship with a high schooler while a man in his thirties is pretty cringe.
why?
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What’s the threshold for ‘middle aged’ in your opinion?
over 30-35
for the record, this wasn't meant to be a personal dig at you because I didn't know you fit this description (or even if you do, but given the mod response I suspect it's at least close); it was meant to be a dig at the middle-aged+ women commentariat who regularly make such comments on the internet
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Make your point without the snide personal digs.
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This is like a self-confession: You have no theory of mind for Trump or Trump-supporters. If you really think Trump is totally arbitrary foppsical and whim: I don't know what to tell you. I think you have a unique theory of how Trump operates. Even the most liberal publications I consume have picked the theme: Trump is nominating people with grudges against the bureaucracies they will lead, or who plan to destroy those institutions. If you genuinely think Trump has no purpose or motive I guess I'd like an explanation for how Trump succeeded at anything. It would be extremely interesting.
How else does one account for nominating someone with a known scandal, then pulling the plug when people inevitably started talking about said scandal. How did he not see that coming?
How does this square with Rubio, Burgum, Turner, Chavez-DeRemer and any number of other picks which seem basically ordinary Republican picks - Chavez-DeRemer even has decent/sympathetic relations with trade unions, especially by Republican standards!
Gaetz withdrew himself.
Trump continues to act as if in victory people will come together to enjoy the spoils. It's loser establishment Republicans who continue to defect!
Hegseth, Gaetz, RFK, Tulsi. There's an obvious pattern here, I can hear it discussed on NPR. Yeah, it's a big cabinet, there are lots of things going on, coalitions need to be managed. But OP's analysis is that Trump is essentially a random actor and nothing he does make sense and this is all totally stupid: that's nonsense, that's TDS, that is an anti-explanation.
They aren't 'defecting', they simply consider the 'outsider' picks like Tulsi and Gaetz fundamentally unfit to hold office, and it would be a dereliction of duty to not oppose them if they believe so.
Literally any combination of picks could be rationalised in this way. Tulsi especially seems like a ludicrously ill-thought through choice. She won't pass the Senate, her position on Ukraine is way off the reservation even by Trump/isolationist Republican standards, she's proven herself to be politically unreliable and unpredictable etc. etc. If the response to this is that, as you say, she has a 'grudge' against the institutions and will disrupt/destroy (parts of) them, she doesn't have the political chops for that. Her only political experience is as a backbencher and later twitter poster - not really the sort of person to 'take on' any deeply embedded institution.
These same Republicans voted for Merrick Garland, who proceeded to try to throw Trump in jail. They have completely different standards from what constitutes "unfit" from the mainstream Republican voter. It's a two-party system, you vote for your guy and against the other. Talking about vetting candidates for being "fundamentally unfit" is missing the point: that's why Republicans continue to lose! Trump wins specifically because he's not the party of Murkowski, McConnell, Collins, et al. Republicans would have lost without Trump, and instead of going along with what Trump wants to do, they sabotage his cabinet. That's "defecting".
Describing cabinet appointments as managing factions is basically a truism. Calling cabinet appointments fundamentally random, as OP did, is an anti-explanation.
Tulsi served in Hawaii and was the heir to a minor Hawaiian political throne. She served in the military and was at one point No. 2 at the DNC. She's not some grizzled veteran, but come on: She has more experience in politics than Obama or Trump did when they assumed office.
They should have different standards. They owe the voter their judgement, not their obedience. Also, Murkowski and Collins are not 'defecting' from anything because they were never part of the Trump coalition. 'Republicans' might have lost the presidency without Trump, but for Collins particularly he is a liability who will probably sink her in 2026. Tulsi is not 'their guy' for moderate or hawkish Republicans, they hold her views in total contempt - why would they ever vote for someone who is very nearly the last person they would ever choose to fill that role? Politics exists outside of the eternal horse race. They think she would be a disastrous DNI, so they won't vote for her. Simple as.
They are obviously not random in the most literal sense, what he likely meant is that appointments are being made without any cohesive overall strategy, on an ad-hoc basis. Individual picks have their rationales, but out-of-range disruptive picks like Tulsi and Gaetz destroy any chance of it being some sort of compromise, unity cabinet. I don't think this is an unreasonable perspective to take on Trump of all people, someone who managed to drift fairly in a fairly directionless manner through a whole four year Presidency. Perhaps if he did have strategies he might have achieved something other than tax cuts.
She does, but roles like DNI require more experience than President, and I mean that very seriously. Since a President can by definition not be an expert on all of his briefs, it doesn't really matter if he's expert in none of them. Advisors and officials like the DNI however are there precisely to provide expert and experienced guidance from a like-minded political perspective. Even Trump's longest serving DNI last time round had been in politics since 1976, had a strong interest in foreign affairs throughout his time in Congress and was a former ambassador to Germany.
You are very obtusely missing the point. Voters elected Trump. Republicans elected Trump. Collins, Murkowski et al. can either work with Trump or not. They choose to defect, over and over again. They don't do this with Democrats -- they voted to confirm Merrick Garland who immediately went about trying to put Trump in jail. Which goes back to my original point: in victory, Trump has not retaliated against his enemies. He didn't try to lock anybody up in his first term. He rewarded regular mainstream Republicans with appointed positions. (He gave McConnell's wife a cabinet position in his first term.) And these same Republicans over and over again continue to defect, voting against Trump, criticizing him in public, undermining his administration. They always come back to this same defense: they're just doing their jobs, their judgment, they don't owe the voters anything. Ok! That is why voters are rejecting them.
It might be true that, for Collins specifically, her interests lie in being a centrist moderate vote. Ok, that's fine as far as that goes, politics is a realistic game. But she also wants to call herself a Republican! She wants seniority so she can chair committees and exercise political power and direct money back to her state. These politicians aren't actually independent, they need alliances and seniority and the Republican Party to have any power at all. And then they try to have the best of both worlds: they'll take the Senate committee chairs they won because Trump won, but they won't vote to give Trump anything he wants! This is exactly what I wrote to begin with: Trump continues to act as if in victory people will come together to enjoy the spoils. It's loser establishment Republicans who continue to defect!
Which gets to the other point: Trump clearly has a vision in how he is making cabinet appointments. He is selecting for smart competent people who are loyal to him, have specific axes to grind in administrating their bureaucracies, and who represent the various parts of his coalition. This is extremely obvious, even liberal outfits like MSNBC and NPR are talking about it. But for some reason on this forum a few posters like OP want to deny this, out of some sort of TDS anti-explanation. They don't like Trump, or don't want to understand him, or don't want to admit that they have been wrong about anything. So very explicable political processes somehow become totally inexplicable: Trump is just making picks at random, haphazardly, the guy who staged the greatest political comeback in American history just isn't all that smart. (People who are smart: posters on The Motte who propose that events are fundamentally random and no explanations can be deduced for anything Trump does.)
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Why must a successful person have explicit strategies? I can think of a lot of works of literature with very coherent meaning that the author does not seem to have explicitly intended. Rather, the author seems to be so in tune with the fictional characters and world that the result cannot help but have depth. Why not also a gifted politician? To me, it seems more likely that the superficially haphazard approach to appointments is driven by Trump's talent for identifying and tapping into the zeitgeist, not a detailed dive into the specifics, though I don't doubt that some of the people close to Trump (eg Musk) do seem to have some sort of master plan.
If you want to argue that Trump is in the flow zone, sure, I could see it. OP is arguing that Trump is just incompetent and acting totally at random. This isn't understanding, this is anti-understanding, because it requires ignoring actual patterns and insights that are very plainly apparent. It comes off as TDS.
I think rationalists in particular are prone to simply not understanding his type of skill as skill at all. It’s an unfortunate side effect of the credentialism that absolutely plagues the blue tribe, including the renegade blue tribe “dark elves” that are common here.
Trump has an instinctual, intuitive quality to him that eludes certain types of rational analysis, which doesn’t mean there isn’t an underlying logic to it. Increasingly the people around him have the same type of energy and will.
It’s really deeper than TDS it’s a civilization wide blind spot of the type of leaders and personalities which used to be more commonly revered before managerialism became cancerous and infected our collective brain.
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At first I thought the Gaetz nomination was some kind of play to take the heat off some of the more controversial nominees he actually wanted to get in. GOP senators only have so much political capital to expend on blocking Trump picks, and if all of that capital and attention goes toward Gaetz then it can't be spent on other nominees. That requires him to actually stand for nomination, though. No one's going to waste a vote to keep Pam Bondi out of the cabinet, so the attention will now focus on Pete Hesgeth and Tulsi Gabbard. Gaetz's personal scandals have gotten more press in the past week than they did when they were current news, and it would only get worse when all the salacious details were revealed during confirmation hearings. Gaetz may be loyal, but asking him to endure that kind of humiliation with no shot of being confirmed is more than even Trump can ask. That's one possible explanation. The more likely explanation is that Trump has no political sense and just picks people he likes, regardless of their experience or policy positions.
As a further point, can we just leave it at 3D Chess? That was the original expression, and it's become cliche to try to put a further exclamation point on it by increasing the number or specifying that it's underwater or changing the game from chess to something else. There's no legitimate difference between 3D Chess and 7D Underwater Backgammon insofar as the point that's trying to be made. I always thought it was a dumb expression to begin with but it has its uses. Modifying it only serves to draw more attention to the expression than to what you're actually trying to describe. It's like people who think that adding the number of sheets to the wind signifies an additional degree of drunkenness. The only (and I repeat only) time this ever worked was in the title of the Tom Waits song Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen).
I don’t care about Matt Gaetz but you leave 5d chess alone! It’s a legitimate increase of complexity, and a perfectly good phrase.
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This is entirely possible, and furthermore, Gaetz may well have been the driving force to remove himself from consideration, rather than doing so at the behest of Trump.
My understanding is that Gaetz discussed his nomination with the offices of four Senators—Collins, Murkowski, McConnell, and new Utah Senator John Curtis—and was basically told that there was absolutely no way any could be persuaded to vote for his confirmation. After discussing the matter with Trump, he was told to get out now, as Trump doesn't like losing.
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