site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   36523 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

☁ INAUGURATION THREAD ☁

I was going to post this to encourage Americans to participate in our show of civic unity. Let the messages of unity and American exceptionalism wash over you. Pay no mind to the commentators muttering about President Biden's last-minute preemptive pardons, or to the persistence of each Democrat speaker in reminding everyone that the Constitution exists and definitely binds the hands of the executive, too.

Kavanaugh has sworn in VP Vance. Now for the President.

Here's to four uneventful years. May the new administration succeed in delivering on their promises.

Edit: some of these promises kind of suck. I sure hope we don't do anything stupid over the Panama Canal.

Trump:

I am fine with legal immigration, I like it. We need people and I'm absolutely fine with it. We need it because we're going to have a lot companies coming in to avoid tariffs. You know, if you don't want tariffs all you have to do is build a plant in US, so we're going to have a lot of workers coming in, but we have to have legal.

So, instead of, for example, importing cars assembled in Mexico, US is going to import Mexicans to assemble them inside the US. Sounds like the opposite of what nativists would want, but what do I know.

I am particularly curious about how this fits into the campaign against inflation. The neoliberals have been trying it for decades!

Among the MAGA base, the mood is jubilant. The legitimate king has returned, speaking of the greatness to come; the usurper put out to pasture, the corrupt officials who oppress the people dismissed. Every peasant understands this story, and everyone knows what happens when a illegitimate king sits on the throne, and what do you know, the weather is literally improving as we speak.

Perhaps we'll grow disillusioned with our great MAGA king. Perhaps in a thousand years, the ruler who unites the colonies on Mars will take the title of Trump- like the emperors of Russia and Germany titling themselves Caesar. But either way, this remains the first president put in place because of the mandate of heaven. Obama and Bush and Biden exercised imperium, Trump personifies it.

I sure hope we don't do anything stupid over the Panama Canal.

Carter already did something stupid over the panama canal - this would be just correcting his mistake.

Carter finds more success in the arena of foreign policy, where instead of dealing with mercurial politicians from his own country, he can deal with mercurial politicians from other countries. He starts by tackling the third rail of the Panama Canal. The United States built the Canal by essentially colonizing the part of Panama it runs through, and obviously, the Panamanians aren’t super cool with that. The U.S. government has been kicking the can down the road since the LBJ era by continually promising to return sovereignty over the canal to Panama eventually, and after over a decade of “eventually,” the Panamanians are getting impatient.

The politically easy move for Carter would be to drag out the negotiations until the canal becomes the next president’s problem, just as Johnson, Nixon, and Ford all did before him. But for better or for worse, Carter almost never does the politically easy thing. “It’s obvious we cheated the Panamanians out of their canal,” he says, and he negotiates a treaty in which ownership of the canal is turned over to Panama, in exchange for the U.S.’s right to militarily ensure its “neutral operation.” It’s a clever diplomatic solution—Panama gets nominal ownership while we retain all the benefits ownership provides—but the American public hates it. To the average voter, it feels like we’re just giving some random country “our” canal.

To get the treaty approved by the Senate, Carter plays the congressional negotiating game well for the first and maybe only time in his presidency. He lobbies heavily for his treaty with every senator, cutting individual deals with each of them as needed. One even goes so far as to say that in exchange for his vote, Carter has to… wait for it… read an entire semantics textbook the senator wrote back when he was a professor. Oh, and Carter also has to tell him what he thinks of it, in detail, to prove he actually read it. Carter is appalled, but he grits his teeth and reads the book. It’s a good thing he does, because the Senate ratifies the treaty by a single vote. Although it remains unpopular with the general public (five senators later lose their seats over their yes votes), those in the know understand that Carter cut a great deal for America. Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos knows it too. Ashamed of his poor negotiating skills, he gets visibly drunk at the signing ceremony and falls out of his chair. He also confesses that if the negotiations had broken down, he would have just had the military destroy the entire canal out of spite.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-outlier

(emphasis mine)

So he executed a stupidity brilliantly. US literally created Panama so they could build the canal.

Water under the bridge. By 1977, Panama was a country with her own history and a population with certain political inclinations. Reaching a compromise on the canal without violence was a good move.

Particularly since the Cold War and Cuban-sponsored regional insurgencies were still a thing.

As long as the Panama Canal was an American imperialist asset, it was a target of anti-American / pro-latin-american groups across the region. When it became a Panamanian sovereign asset, the later half of that interest-coalition disengaged, and became far more supportive, particularly in Panama where national self-interest aligned with keeping the canal running smoothly. Come the 1990 Just Cause invasion, a vast majority of the Panamanians supported the US intervention

Moreover, the turnover of the canal was a significant element on the United States transition from the early cold war period- where the conflicts were often remnants of imperial system breakdowns of managing post-imperial transitions amidst Soviet-backed peasant uprising- to the later cold war, where increasingly established / self-coherent governments gradually garnered more legitimacy. The Panama Canal turnover decreased perception of sovereignty-threat from the US, since if the US was willing to give up a strategic asset like the panama canal then there was almost certainly no asset / port / resource of your own that would be more appetizing to strategic greed.

Particularly since the Cold War and Cuban-sponsored regional insurgencies were still a thing.

And were, in fact, about to become a much bigger thing in Central America.

Thanks for the link, read the whole thing. Very entertaining.

What surprised me is that Carter was an outsider at the time. A lot of recent politics made me think Trump was one of the first true outsiders. Apparently not the case.

Carter was exactly the sort of politician normies say they want to see as a leader. It's rather sobering to observe how that all worked out for his legacy.

Between him and Reagan, the Democrats basically lost all access to a huge chunk of Boomers. They voted for him, he failed to deliver, and then Reagan promised something completely different.

I do think his legacy turned out okay. Even my grandfather, who is a pretty central example of one of those Boomers, doesn’t really seem to hold it against him personally.

I think he actually has a pretty solid legacy, no? I've never heard too many people complain that much about Carter. His main thing is his peanut farm.

The legacy of Carter the man is generally very positive. The legacy of Carter the President is generally quite negative - he's always considered the worst of any modern-day (ie post-1900) Democrat. He got demolished in his reelection bid, easily the worst performance by an incumbent in American history.

No? I can’t think of anyone I know who actually likes him except the most partisan democrats imaginable, who would vote for a Hitler/Satan ticket if it had a D afterwards.

Jimmy Carter's legacy as president is the Iranian hostage crisis, stagflation and malaise, and the energy crisis/rationing. Even nuking the snail darter and deregulating airlines can't make up for all that.

I guess not too many people complained about him in the sense that he was mostly seen as a sweet, thoughtful and caring old man. But I imagine he was scarcely seen as a successful and effective head of state, and more like somewhat of an idealistic, out-of-touch loser.

The actual policy legacy of the Carter administration (as opposed to Carter's personal reputation) held up pretty well given that we are now 45 years out.

The unambiguous successes include:

  • Volcker as Fed Chair, inflation tamed primarily through monetary policy
  • Deregulation of interstate trucking, airlines, etc.
  • The Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt
  • Transferring primary responsibility for defending South Korea from North Korea to South Korea, where it properly belongs
  • An unusually clean White House

Things Carter changed with impacts decades later even if conservatives don't like the result:

  • The Chrysler bailout
  • Setting up the Education Department
  • Government recognition for Asian-Americans as an identity group
  • Head Start
  • Modest tightening of environmental laws
  • A deal with Panama which allowed US shipping access to the Canal while avoiding the expense of maintaining a garrison in the Canal Zone.

Things which still looked like a success after 10+ years where we probably shouldn't blame Carter for his policy continued beyond the point of usefulness:

  • Supporting the muhajadeen to quagmire the Soviets in Afghanistan
  • Normalising relations with Red China (including the continued-to-this-day policy of informal recognition of Taiwan).
  • The Superfund law for dealing with the worst cases of land contaminated by industrial pollution.

Good ideas which Carter couldn't get past Congress, but is right with hindsight:

  • Spending discipline, and in particular the idea that the Executive should identify specific wasteful spending and ask Congress to cut it.
  • Natural gas deregulation (Congress took so long to pass the legislation that the benefits were felt after Carter left office, but with hindsight this is Carter's greatest achievement)

Deregulation of interstate trucking, airlines, etc.

Setting up the Education Department

Government recognition for Asian-Americans as an identity group

Can you explain why you see those as good decisions?

The last 2 are changes which have had long-lasting effects that Carter would presumably have wanted given that he was a Democrat. Whether they are good decisions is a fairly straightforwardly partisan issue, then and now. But from the point of view of Presidential legacy, successfully changing policy in your preferred direction in a way that sticks is an achievement.

The Carter transport deregulations are all good because they significantly reduced costs to individuals and businesses.

The US trucking industry has a serious problem of truckers ageing out of business and scarcely getting replaced, which is supposedly the long-term consequence of Carter's and Reagan's deregulations turning it into an unappealing career choice, as I've read on the interwebz.

More comments

Yeah, was going to say the U.S. already fought a war in Panama in the modern era. It was over in a few weeks.

Obviously there are some other parties who might object to the U.S. controlling it this time. But I think there's probably a solution that falls far short of warfare here.

I think it bears mentioning that the reason that war was rather short was that it had no other goal than the capture of one rogue general usurping de facto rule over the state.

A few weeks is probably long enough for the Panamanian military(such as it is) to destroy the canal, or at least inflict enough damage to render it unusable for several years.

The US could almost certainly secure the canal faster than that. But it doesn't matter. The Panama Canal is Panama's raison d'etre. If they destroy it, the only thing they accomplish is to impoverish themselves if the US decides "LOL never mind". I don't believe they could repair or rebuild a substantially damaged canal themselves, and the US would certainly prevent any other power from doing so, so their only move at that point would be to allow the US to rebuild on its terms.

I suspect Trump is just bloviating and will eventually accept some token concession so he can say he got a "deal" -- the bit about "refusing to rule out military force" is meaningless of course the US will refuse to rule it out.

Probably?

From an engineering perspective, the Panama Canal is a system of 12 locks. If you want to destroy it, you need a handful of green recruits and a small amount of demolition charges. It's over before morning.

If you want the repairs to take years, you additionally need a few demolition crews experienced in concrete embankments. Drills, more charges, and every hour the marines don't take the locks adds a several months to the repair time.

The real question is ‘can panama repurpose construction workers before the marines land’. This is a very strong maybe.

Oh yeah, you've got to plan this, no way around it. But that's exactly what the military's there for, and they neither need a large chain of command to achieve that goal nor does it require a lot of resources. And totally surprising them will be very difficult, so first getting the charges and then the machines into position will be part of the posturing long before the marines even get into their helicopters.

But seriously, first blowing holes into the lock gates, then blowing the destroyed gates of their hinges and then blowing the drive units will be bad enough, especially if there's ships in or between the locks. There's a lot of force behind an 80' waterfall. And lead time on bespoke stuff like those huge gates is often measured in years...

Pretty much, and even this doesn't get into the issues of the cyber-vulnerabilities of someone who already controls the computer networks and what that can mean, or the ability to scuttle a ship already within the canal, or the fact that Panama is within drone attack range of various low-governance/hostile-to-the-US regional actors...

...and that none of those really go away if you capture the canal intact, since cyber-vulnerabilities are always there to be found, the whole point of the canal is to bring ships through, and, of course, regional reaction.

Anyone who thinks the Americans seizing the panama canal by force would be quick and easy and good is about as high on their own supply as the pro-Russians going into Ukraine.

My basic search is showing that panama lacks any Combat capable aircraft.

So IF it were actually going to be a fight, I dunno that they'd be able to pop their head out long enough to do much sabotage.

But more to the point, that's about the only piece of leverage they have to avoid a fight, so I suspect they might sign a deal rather than play that card.

The US could offer Panama statehood. We'd get the canal and a quarter of global shipping.

Wouldn't that make the problem of illegal immigration about 10 times worse?

How are they going to vote? Nothing is worth more D senators and electoral votes.

There'd need to be a 'Panama Compromise' that in addition to admitting Panama also allowed for Greater Idaho or Eastern Oregon and / or admitting the conservative areas of California to offset the adverse impact of Panama.

I imagine it’d be something like statehood for Puerto Rico and panama in exchange for the states of upstate New York and eastern Oregon. But if it goes sufficiently anti Republican Texas can split in two(or more, technically) without congressional approval- just sending the panhandle off on its own is two party-line Republican senators.

Just expel the locals and resettle Panama with Trump-voting loyalists. Maybe purge Puerto Rico and Connecticut at the same time.

Here's to hoping that the next four years do indeed make America great again, again. And we manage to dredge some unity and goodwill out of our desiccated corpse.

For all that we complain, I always ask people: if not the United States, where would you go? And where would you invest? Whatever my family and friends say, they're still investing in American securities. They're mostly still working in the USA. The opportunity here in most fields is unrivaled.

And to paraphrase Curtis Yarvin, I'll bet you 50$ that if you look around your neighborhood, you'll notice 0 changes over the next 4 years attributable to Donald Trump.

Here's to hoping that the next four years do indeed make America great again, again.

Hope springs eternal!

if not the United States, where would you go?

Ulaanbataar. The steppe nomads will rise again!

And we manage to dredge some unity and goodwill out of our desiccated corpse.

I wouldn't hold my breath. Trump is a superlative divider.

if not the United States, where would you go

The traditional answer is Canada, but that's looking less safe of late :v

One of the (many) reasons I despise Trumpism is that it embraces everything sordid and distasteful about the United States and rejects much of what makes it genuinely exceptional. It looks backwards to a worse time for its idea of "greatness" and praises thuggishness.

Simply put, Trump makes it very hard to be patriotic. (It doesn't help that his supporters have spent much of the last eight years saying I and people like me are not merely opponents but enemies).

I'll bet you 50$ that if you look around your neighborhood, you'll notice 0 changes over the next 4 years attributable to Donald Trump.

Unfortunately, my circle of concern is broader than just the physical confines of my neighborhood. I have a number of friends and relatives who (quite rationally) expect Trump to make their lives worse over the next four years. I personally expect that if Trump follows through with the economic and taxation policies he has touted, I will be materially worse off than the alternative.

it embraces everything sordid and distasteful about the United States and rejects much of what makes it genuinely exceptional.

And what would those things be exactly?

Insecurity, uncritical jingoism, contempt for the poor and the weak, proud ignorance, prioritizing the privileges of the elite over the well-being and rights of ordinary people, the South, brutality against the least members of society masquerading as "law and order", Christian nationalism...

jingoism i can see. But contempt for the poor? Prioritizing the privileges of the elite? Are we watching the same movie?

To me it seems that much of the wailing and gnashing of teeth surrounding Trump is coming from the complete opposite direction. People being pissed about him paying far too much attention to "the poor" and "the ordinary" when he ought to be defering to the "experts" and the "elite" as a good politician ought to.

The prevailing attitude seems to be one of; get a load of this at this buffoon, doing the things he said he was going to do.
...

I also note that you only listed the things you considered "sorid" and did not include anything you considered "exceptional". That is unless it was your intention to suggest that the US is exceptional in its soridness.

Only good thing I've been hearing from Trump's mouth are his continued support of legal immigration. That and his culture war salvos against DEI etc.

Looking at just the effects of the executive orders Trump has made so far:

  1. Direction to State Department to not recognize trans gender identities. Unclear exactly what this means in practice, but this will likely make it difficult or impossible for many trans people to get/renew passports. I know many trans people renewed their passports early expecting this (and the Biden State Department literally worked overtime to fulfill those requests before January 20th).

  2. Less serious, but Return to In-Person Work at best inconveniences many government workers. The intention is almost certainly to encourage federal workers to quit (just like tech company RTO policies are interpreted as stealth layoffs).

Those are the only two that I see that have immediate impact on the lives of people I know, but many of the others will likely lead to noticeable effects.

I'm honestly surprised that Republican platform isn't 100% telework for government employees (with the caveat that they cannot be within 15 miles of Washington DC and must accept lower locality pay) it would be a much more politically palatable way to decentralize the government and shift it into more red states and reduce power within a very blue stronghold.

Platforms are not, generally, perfectly rational technocracy.

Return to In-Person Work at best inconveniences many government workers. The intention is almost certainly to encourage federal workers to quit (just like tech company RTO policies are interpreted as stealth layoffs).

It will be quite the inconvenience to some and drive separations. There are multiple different types of situations. There are the folks who live right around the corner from the office, but they only go in one day a week or are even on full remote for whatever reason. Those folks will be inconvenienced, but they'll just do it; only a very few will actually leave. Other folks live halfway across the country from their agency's official locations. Perhaps the agency has other interests in that area, but hasn't set up an official office building, because they only want a small number of folks there. I've heard of some people whose remote work was literally a retention deal - their spouse got a job elsewhere, and they could do their job perfectly fine remotely, so they moved halfway across the country. This could basically force them to decide who is going to have to quit which job and whether they want to pick up and move again. Perhaps still an 'inconvenience', but a pretty significant one. The people who are likely to actually leave are these folks, and it's unclear to me which strata that's going to primarily affect.

One friend of ours doesn't work for the gov't, and she's not remote; she's hybrid. She was telling us about her situation, and it's actually dumb for her to have to go in to work, because she's in a global role, and the vast vast majority of the people she works with on a regular basis aren't local anyway. She commutes in to work, time that, let's be honest, she would normally spend working on the days that she stays home, just to sit in her closed office at work and be on Teams meetings with people from different countries all day. Some of her coworkers are remote, and yeah, they'd probably just drive those folks off to different companies if they said, "Sure, we told you that you could be remote, so you bought a house and set up roots and stuff, but now we're going to demand that you move halfway across the country so that you can sit in Teams meetings all day from here instead of there."

It will be quite the inconvenience to some and drive separations.

If you happen to by trying to drastically reduce the size of an organization, voluntary separations are actually pretty great...

Correct, if that is your only terminal value, a la Vance's "fire everyone with an odd/even SSN" approach. Any selection/self-selection process will have its own mix of results. For example, the odd/even SSNs will be totally random, up and down the chain. Versus, for the classic example, if you lower everyone's salary, then you're selecting out the people who have better alternatives and could perhaps be more productive elsewhere, leaving yourself with probably the lower-quality folks. Versus the Schedule F approach, which targeted higher-level, policy-making positions. Versus the Musk-at-Twitter approach, where he just personally made decisions based on code commits, likely selecting on some combination of gross code output and a subjective quality/value of code assessment. Versus, say, firing people based on recent performance ratings, which mostly just lets management get rid of the people they already didn't like. Every method has its own results.

Going after remote work is going to merely inconvenience the folks who live nearby but drive disproportionate separations from those who live far away for various reasons. As @atelier points out, one might have a competing terminal value that would drive someone to want almost the opposite of this policy, but a lot depends on what your terminal values look like. My guess is that, unlike the Schedule F approach or atelier's idea, this is likely to mostly impact lower-level folks who weren't "in the club" of the top-level policy-making folks. Those folks are mostly all located pretty close, because 1) until COVID, they had to be, and 2) they're likely older and further in their career (thus higher level management) and had already established roots there and likely had less incentive to move in the last few years. This is likely to chip away at the raw numbers, but have very little impact on the power bases of the deep state.

This is likely to chip away at the raw numbers, but have very little impact on the power bases of the deep state.

Probably true -- I think the DS almost definitionally lives in & around DC.

Draining the swamp will need to be approached more directly -- but everyone who quits over RTO will be someone you don't need to pay anymore (nor severance probably, tho it depends on the contract I guess), which is a step in the right direction budget-wise.

My limited understanding of gov't budgeting is that they don't have money earmarked for personnel. I.e., there is not some pot that you can 'pull back' if they have fewer salaries to pay. (I've heard about separate head count caps, but I think those operate independently of the budget figures.) Congress attaches money to funding purposes (i.e., "Do this thing"). So unless Congress is making changes to their appropriations, they'll still get that same pot of money, and they'll still spend it... on, I guess, who knows what? Contractors, consulting, other contracts/grants, hell, they'll spend it on DEI programs if there is any gap in the language trying to shut that down. One thing I've heard from economists who analyze gov't spending is that the number one priority of those folks is spending their money, so they always have a pile of things backburnered and ready to go if they run into a surprise surplus of funds. I'm pretty skeptical that edging out a few remote workers is likely to have a remotely sizable effect on expenditures. Probably would only matter to the extent that those remote workers are actually some sort of bottleneck on funds getting out to whatever they're being spent on (and this is highly unlikely for the real big ticket items like, e.g., entitlements). In fact, to the extent that one thinks they'll be more "productive" if they're in the office in-person, the thing they're probably going to be more "productive" at is spending all their money.

So, my guess is that when we retrospectively look back on the budgetary impacts, it'll have a very small impact on salaries paid, approximately no impact on total federal expenditures, and the difference will be thrown at more and more marginal things. The long play here is convincing Congress that "look at all these marginal things that we're spending money on" and convincing them to draw back on subsequent appropriations.

One thing I've heard from economists who analyze gov't spending is that the number one priority of those folks is spending their money

That is definitely true; I've been one of those contractors. But in the context of Elon and his DOGE the (optimistic) assumption would be that those stable budgets are out the window next fiscal, whether they are spent or not.

Involving Congress would certainly be the "conventional" play (to the extent that reducing federal expenditures can ever be called "conventional"), but who knows what these guys will dream up.

Unclear exactly what this means in practice, but this will likely make it difficult or impossible for many trans people to get/renew passports.

How? I don't see how it prevents you from getting a passport that states your biological sex.

As for other things that it means in practice, a few things that are mentioned in summaries (though I haven't looked at the EO itself so I'm not sure if it's listed there), are no males in female prisons, and not allowing to use anti-discrimination-against-women laws and regs to be construed as anti-discrimination-against-trans. Will probably also have impact on sports, though I haven't seen it mentioned explicitly.

How? I don't see how it prevents you from getting a passport that states your biological sex.

Trans (or intersex) people may not have or be able to acquire identity documents that state their "biological sex". And if they do, photo IDs showing a mismatch between the sex marker on the ID and the gender presentation in the photo (or in person) are at risk of being rejected as valid ID.

The other effects you list also have some pretty awful consequences, but I don't know anyone directly affected by them, while I do know people who failed to renew their passport in time and will be left without one, and therefore be unable to leave the country, at some point in the next 4 years.

I do know people who failed to renew their passport in time and will be left without one, and therefore be unable to leave the country, at some point in the next 4 years.

When you apply for a passport, you submit a current picture, which will match their current appearance. I don't think I've ever had a border guard read down to the M/F line on my passport -- they look at the picture; sometimes check the stamps.

If one does, the person in question will just need to say "I had a sex change operation" in the local language -- similar to what I would do if I dyed my hair or something. There is no practical problem; it is ideological.

Trans (or intersex) people may not have or be able to acquire identity documents that state their "biological sex".

I suppose if you already have an altered birth certificate, that poses an interesting question as to what will happen, but I don't know how you default that to "won't be able to get a passport".

Also why the quote marks? You have some novel theory on human biology? And why would intersex people have trouble with their documents?

The other effects you list also have some pretty awful consequences

How are they more awful than the consequences of keeping the old policies?

I always ask people: if not the United States, where would you go?

I've long been answering that question for people, in two different senses.

In one sense, my answer would be ideally that Alaska becomes it's own independent country — I seriously pissed off my 4th grade teacher for writing a "social studies" report in support of the Alaska Independence Party — and failing that, that Russia takes us back.

In the other sense, I've given my list before, starting, in order of preference, with Liechtenstein, then Monaco, and ending with Eswatini. And as always, for why I haven't already moved to one of those places, it's because none of them will take be; as a schizophrenic welfare parasite, no country on Earth will let me legally immigrate, and so I'm stuck here in the US whether I like it or not.

Isn’t Alaskan independence relatively mainstream and normal?

Isn’t Alaskan independence relatively mainstream and normal?

Depends on what you mean by "relatively mainstream." In that the AIP exists, has about 2% of the state's population as memebers, and is one of the few third parties to have ever (briefly) controlled a state governor's seat, sure (though it hasn't really been the same since Vogler was murdered).

But there's still quite a lot of opposition; Mrs. Johnson's was on the basis that "secession is secession," that any and all attempts to leave the US are, morally speaking, the same thing, and thus support for Alaskan Independence is also necessarily equal support for the Confederacy, and thus slavery, and therefore an unacceptable opinion for anyone to hold in her classroom.

"oh lordy we need goodwill and unity!" I cry, before returning to making snippy comments about my outgroup. How Democratic.

The context of the Yarvin quote is that democracies are weak and feckless so we convert to a dictatorship, not that Trump is a particularly ineffectual president. My point was that presidential elections probably won't affect any of us all that much. I would, and have, made the same point about democratic administrations. Is that what you were referring to?

Did you mean to post this in reply to someone else? I didn't say anything about Yarvin or Trump, I was talking about the way you bemoaned our lack of unity in the midst of your sniping at Trump and his supporters. It seems very gauche to me, but I am used to it courtesy of the former administration.

The post you are responding to is a line of argument @Chrisprattalpharaptr has been advancing, consistently, for some years now: the culture war is not and should not be an existential conflict, and keeping this in mind is to everyone's benefit. Further, his comment seems mostly aimed at progressive catastrophizing. It seems to me that he is modelling a willingness to accept a loss, shrug, and move on with one's life.

I disagree with CPAR on a great many things. I even somewhat disagree with this particular idea that the Culture War can be shrugged off, though the argument seems a reasonable one to me. I can say that of the people making snippy comments about their outgroup, he certainly would not make my personal top twenty.

Is this level of hostility really warranted?

No, it's for you. I'm confused what you see as sniping at Trump supporters. Make America great again, again?

Yeah chum, exactly that. Please don't pretend you sincerely believed Trump made America great in 2016 or that he is going to do so this time. It was bantz.

I love the United States! We're the fucking best. Almost everywhere else sucks by comparison and even the places that are pretty good are on such a small scale that they're more akin to nice states than major nations. Nonetheless, being the best doesn't ensure that there isn't just a secular decline in quality of life across the world, which is what I think would happen if the Pax Americana recedes. To that end, I hope we do reassert our authority with a Monroe Doctrine style of foreign policy.

And to paraphrase Curtis Yarvin, I'll bet you 50$ that if you look around your neighborhood, you'll notice 0 changes over the next 4 years attributable to Donald Trump.

We could talk about deportations, but on a small scale, I do credit Trump for appointing Supreme Court justices that sided with Grants Pass. Cities not being able to stop bums from camping in parks really would be a pretty terrible outcome that would be immediately obvious to everyone involved. They may or may not realize what the cause of that effect is, but pretty much everyone would notice bums camping in parks freely.

I suppose Australia counts as a 'nice state' from this perspective? I certainly like living here, more than I did in parts of the US.

Australia is probably just about the only one that cracks into "true nation" range that I would put on par with the United States for quality of life. Being a gigantic island certainly helps it feel more like a real nation than a place like The Netherlands (which I adore, for what it's worth), even if the population is still in the range of being a large state.

We're about Texas sized, I think. The way I think of it is less that we're the size of a state and more that the biggest US states are the size of small countries.

Even then I'm sometimes shocked at the size of some countries. I once roomed with a Czech and was shocked to realise that his entire country was smaller than an Australian state capital.

Yeah, that's fair.

In any case, I only have a couple weeks in Australia, but I had a great time. It's the only country I've been to that had the visually obvious size and wealth that I associate with the United States. Really such an interesting thing of its own that it's hard to really group with other countries meaningfully. I suppose Canada has a bunch of similar traits, but sharing the continent still makes it feel less singular. Americans also tend to underestimate just how far it is to get to Australia - people know it's far, but a 16-hour flight from LA still shocks the senses. To be honest, I didn't even think about it in the post above - the places I had in mind were European countries, Japan, Korea, and South America.

I always ask people: if not the United States, where would you go? And where would you invest?

Unless you tethered by your job, live elsewhere where it's cheap but always invest in 'Big Tech'. Nothing beats tech as far as returns are concerned or Bay Area real estate. But otherwise, America is too expensive and you can save tons of money living aboard and than using the saved $ to invest in FAAMNG.

Unless you tethered by your job

What about friends? Family? Your bond to the land?

I can never understand this mindset of just being freely floating without any ties besides where you work...

You might even call such people "rootless cosmopolitans" or something similar

consider the possibility that an opinion doesn't have to apply to everyone or all circumstances

Never!!!! I am a true Kantian.

Sure but why would a U.S. company hire you to telecommute from Europe for U.S. wages? Why not just hire a European for European wages?

The U.S. is downright cheap compared to other countries when you factor in the wage gap.

To put things in perspective, if you earn 68,877 euros, you are 95th percentile in France. 99th percentile is 115,313 euros. You will also pay half of it in taxes. Europe is much poorer than Americans think.

consider that someone may not be working, such as retired, and wants to save money by moving somewhere cheap. expat communities are a thing

yeah, if you making solid 6 figures in Bay Area tech, then it's worth it to stay put.

consider that someone may not be working, such as retired, and wants to save money by moving somewhere cheap.

Why? Why is this something that the employer should consider?

i said retired. I thought there was no ambiguity

I'll bet you 50$ that if you look around your neighborhood, you'll notice 0 changes over the next 4 years attributable to Donald Trump.

I'll take that bet, but only if "Vance/Desantis 2028" yard signs and flags count as a change, since I think that would easily be 'attributable' to Donald Trump. As far as material changes, go, I have a few Hispanic neighbors, its entirely possible some of the are here illegally, so if they get removed and housing prices in the neighborhood go down due to fewer migrants in the South Florida area generally that can probably be attributed to Trump as well.

Note: I like my neighbors so I'm not going to be the one calling ICE.

I'm not sure how many people were watching compared to the Inauguration proper, but right after the end of the Inauguration ceremony, Trump went downstairs to the 'Emancipation Hall' inside the Capitol to give a second speech to his supporters -- it was 33 minutes, vs. 29 minutes for his official Inaugural, and it was basically a mash-up of his stump speech with improvised riffing on the news of the day (Biden's last-minute 11th-and-a-half hour pardons of his family and political supporters). More importantly, Trump said that his staff & advisors told him he couldn't say certain things in his official Inaugural, so now he gets a chance to say all of them, which makes this a kind of Inaugural 2.0. I honestly don't know what to make of it, and I expect that this speech might actually overshadow the Inaugural Address itself (especially since Trump said he thought that the 2.0 speech was a better speech than the official speech upstairs!)

I genuinely have no idea what to make of this.

Will he give hit bitcoin and 'tech people' what they want?

The official speech was a teleprompter speech, was pre-written, and as usual Trump hated every second of giving it.

The 2.0 speech was largely impromptu, involved Trump talking from his head, and had his actual energy.

Trump is an engaging off-the-cuff speaker, and a terrible, terrible speech reader. And he knows this, which is why he hates pre-written speeches.

Watching Biden during the innaguration, I felt bad for him. He looks terrible.

There's no way this man has been running the country. I'm just glad he's out -- for his sake -- so his wife and his son and his handlers can no longer pour piss on his reputation in his name. Watching him leave the ceremony, I just wanted to give him a hug. May God have mercy on him, and may his sickness and his humiliation in public life be unto him a participation in cross of Christ, a call to repentance that leads to eternal life.

Oddly, I had a dream last night: that in his final speech Biden closed by saying something like I "resign myself," or I "recuse myself" or I "deny myself" or something like that. The man was a senator forever, and the VP to a president popular with his party and a large segment of the country; now his reputation will forever be that of a sick old man pushed out by his own party and his own president.

He could have retired after Obama, and just coasted on the reputation his association with Obama gave him. But politicians are like TV shows: they run until they're cancelled, not until they're finished. He who lives by the sword will die by the sword, and he who lives seeking power will be destroyed by power.

But politicians are like TV shows: they run until they're cancelled, not until they're finished.

Only in the United States. British and Japanese shows are more likely to stop when they should. But to an American producer, the idea of not creating another season of a TV show that is still making money just because the story has reached a logical and satisfying narrative conclusion is incomprehensible. It's literally leaving money on the table.

Well, admittedly, Hollywood has gotten better at this since the second golden age of television.

Can non-Americans engage in civic divisiveness?

By the power invested in me by the ghost of George Washington that came to me in a dream last night, I proclaim you an American for one (1) day. Enjoy the complimentary American flag cake and bald eagle. Don't forget to leave all civic divisiveness at the door.

Don't forget the AR-15 and ticket to Dollywood.

Jeez at least give him some fireworks.

and one (1) gallon of genuine iowa high-fructose corn syrup.

Give us your trolls, your bots, your huddled masses yearning to post freely, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Found the Russian bot.

No, that's netstack.

Days like this I kinda wish I was still on Reddit because I couldn't resist telling them how badly they screwed up for things to get this far and reminding them how utterly powerless they are to stop what is coming (whatever that is, I can't even say for sure), and if they had an ounce of self-awareness and the ability to reflect, this might cause them to change some of their beliefs about the world but no, they will be stuck in a cycle of learned helplessness because they can't even exit the echo chamber that has rendered them completely incapable of interfacing with the reality on the ground, and the beliefs 'normal' people hold anymore.

And also Sotomayor has a decent chance of dying or retiring in the next 3 years so lol enjoy having that shoe waiting to drop the entire time.

I'm not really sadistic, but that site has really become a pustulent sore on the Internet's face. I want to keep poking it until it pops. At least 4chan has the decency to stay hidden on the internet's ass.

One of the great internet disappointments for me, Reddit. It was so good in its day. Perverted in parts, poisonous, like a loaded gun ready to go off--though even loaded guns are harmless if you know how to handle them. But also brilliant, funny, expansive, daring, poetic, a real scope into the lives of others, worse and better, and of course of our own familiars far off.

Now it's like an IV where you push for more stupidity and lies, push the button, push, until it euthanizes you.

There are still rare flashes of the old (dot) Reddit. Floating among the river of bravery posts on /bestof recently was this post where an industrial press mechanic answers a question about the shapes on the lids of tin cans.

It feels like that sort of thing used to happen frequently on Reddit. A small insight into some overlooked aspect of modern culture brought to the fore and given a human voice. Of course given the medium much of that was tech adjacent, like a '90s games dev popping up to explain how they exploited the hardware in a console to pull off a novel graphics effect, but also these more unexpected interactions that only happened because Reddit's userbase was so big and broad.

It's a shame that AMAs which began with people like that mechanic (or a pathologically upvote addicted biologist) inadvertently hijacking a thread to spontaneously answer people's questions on a slow work day were formalised and turned into cynical PR appearances for attention starved celebrities.

Now it's like an IV where you push for more stupidity and lies, push the button, push, until it euthanizes you.

Hilariously accurate. Used to be useful at least for keeping a thumb to the pulse of 'the internet,' but they went and alienated the actual fun parts of the internet so now its just a thumb on the slowly fading pulse of the particular brand of 2010's atheist/SJW leftist brigade who still think that their ironclad hold on the site makes them relevant.

The button pushing also helps euthanize the rest of the patients too.

"When does the Narwhal Bacon" indeed.

Indeed, it's technical brillance compared to its contemporaries in the early and mid 2010s was so great, that even now 10 years later (an eternity in internet time) spinoff/dissident platforms like this one haven't found a better format. And when such a great tool was left to a representative slice of the western population (or at least, of the technophile western population), it really felt magical.

To ruin it, all it took was the admins coming down a couple of times on the same side of culture wars tussles (and it's not a matter of being the right or wrong side, just coming down on the same side a few times in a row is gonna do it), and the left noticing (as it often does) before the right the large amount of narrative-shaping power that was being left on the counter in the form of modship over ostensibly neutral subs.

It was inevitable. The years where it worked were great, but it was not a stable arrangement.

I have checked https://old.reddit.com/r/somethingiswrong2024/ every day for weeks now. It's too good.

They think Trump will usher in a fascist dystopia and are horrified at Democrats smiling and nodding leading up to the inauguration.

They also think Elon Musk personally stole the election by changing votes using Starlink satellites with help from Russia. And it gets dumber from there.

Here's a nice little thread where they suggest that Elon Musk is... The Most Dangerous Man in the World.

And hey, he's probably in the top 1000, if we talk about potential to cause maximum chaos. In theory he could make millions of Teslas wrap themselves around telephone poles at 120 mph... But I don't understand how you can look at or listen to this dude and think he'd be the one who would order millions of men to their deaths or intentionally cause mass destruction.

There's a level of derangement that seems to arise when people notice a guy can shrug off social influence and utterly ignore bribe money and is, further, able to implement long term plans that happen to thwart your 'team's' goals.

But this is an extreme distortion of reality that only an internet-powered filter bubble/echo chamber can achieve.

In theory he could make millions of Teslas wrap themselves around telephone poles at 120 mph

Wow, I had not thought about how much of a security risk that was, I was just impressed by the self-driving capabilities.

The knowledge that has soured me on self-driving cars as a concept is learning more about cybersecurity.

If every Tesla is running identical software with approximately identical behavior, then there are predictable vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious actors.

One threat model is that teenage deliquents figure out (hypothetically) that Teslas will swerve to avoid any human-shaped obstacles in the road, so they start jumping in front of Teslas for fun, knowing that they won't get hit.

Another is, of course, malicious code gets injected which, under specific conditions triggers the car to accelerate at maximum and turn into the nearest cylindrical object once it reaches 100mph.

Think of how granular the STUXNET virus was.

The one benefit that human drivers have over robots is we don't have any way to hack humans to become suicidal at scale.

I've been saying for years that "youths" casually carjacking automated cars will be a thing because of this.
And now it's illegal for the company to have cars avoid streets where everyone keeps getting carjacked, so it will just keep happening forever and you'll lose your Wae2.go® Driving Privileges™ Account if you talk about it. Better hope you can afford a fire and urine-proof suit for the bus ride.

So be rabidly against mandated automatic driving.

A) there's absolutely no way to fight the economic pressure to adopt such a useful technology.
B) it's an incredibly useful technology that should be adopted.
C) you also can't fight the reddit "that's not happening and it's awesome that it is" tactic. Which is being used both about the mandates and the terrorizing. (I don't have my bluesky screenshots on this phone, but they're already doing the "haha look how scared those tech bros are, what if we burned them alive in Minecraft tee hee hee" thing with vids of mobs surrounding driverless taxis)

As always the only thing worth fighting is the one struggle against leftism, so that at least some exec will be able to tell the engineers it's ok for the taxis to avoid the intersection of MLK boulevard and Angela Davis Ave after the 20th carload of people are murdered.

More comments

Yep. The irony is that there is simply NO WAY that any car company would program their vehicles to affirmatively use deadly force in defense of a passenger.

There might be a market for jailbreaks that allow your Waymo or Tesla to run down attackers if you shout a code word or something.

I actually think I'd want my self-driving car to be offline (i.e. not internet connected) at ALL TIMES, and if firmware updates are needed it should only support a physical internet connection then.

And that's already too much of a vector for mischief than I'd like.

And that's already too much of a vector for mischief than I'd like.

"Air-gapped? Don't make me laugh. Show me an Iranian air-gapped defense system and I'll show you a ready victim awaiting our four zero day vulnerabilities."

More comments

At the same time, it being online is extremely useful for navigation, so there'll always be demand for that.

The continued existence of tech-optimists has been a huge mystery for me for quite a while. How can you observe what happened to all the other cool tech, and not immediately think of everything that can go wrong with it? I don't even think driving people into telephone poles is that much of a threat - such dramatic displays of power are sure to be met with retaliation, and thus are unlikely to happen to begin with. Try Canadian musings about how ridiculous it was that the truckers had the capability to drive into the capital, without the ruling class' approval.

The same derangement that makes them so against JK Rowling. She disagrees, they apply pressure on social media in their typical way, she doubles and triples down. They can't bend her. Rather than have a "you can't win them all" attitude they turn a bit hysterical.

That's a Bingo.

I was pretty nervous but everyone remained civil. I hope that we can keep that civility for the years to come.

I was hoping he'd announce an executive order putting the whole country back onto year-round Standard Time.

Paging @DuplexFields. As previously discussed, you owe me a mea culpa.

The predictions I made:

  1. Court case - they tried, but realized any sentence for “feloniously committing a misdemeanor” would be a bridge too far.
  2. rent a mob - there are demonstrations in D.C. but the inauguration was moved indoors.
  3. assassination attempt number three - the inauguration was moved indoors.

Thanks for reminding me that the blackpill mentality is extremely online and conspiracy-focused; mea culpa.

Posts like this are why I keep coming back to The Motte. Very sporting, respect.

I don't think you were wrong to make the predictions, but try to give a confidence estimate next time for sanity checking purposes.

And props for taking the outcome with good humor.

It was the morning after the election. There had been so much doomering I hadn’t really had the chance to see it as victory. Even now I’m expecting something monumental to happen (5%), while hoping Nothing Ever Happens (75%).

This is a man who doesn't forget his debts... noted!

I loved Trump listing Americas accomplishments. Bring back patriotism! We have so much to be proud of as a nation.

We're going to dig deeper into this speech, but first, I think we want to hear Carrie Underwood...

Thanks, CBS. You have captured the American ethos.

One thing that stands out: President Trump is a much better speaker than either of the Congressmen or even the commentators. He hasn't been filling space with an "um" or an "ah." Since we can't see the original text, I don't know if he's sticking to the script, but I'd be willing to bet it's improvisation.

Oh yeah he's an incredible orator. I am so happy to have some good pomp back. Most Congressmen and Senators and even the priests (ugh) were terrible at speaking.

he's a professional public speaker and rehearsed it

I naively expected that to apply to sitting Senators.

Sitting senators have generally not run a competitive race in quite a while.

It's beautiful hearing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, seeing soldiers march to it. Same with Glory, Glory Hallelujah. I can't imagine how incredible these songs would've been when they were written, back when most people believed deeply in the Republic, and in God.

Definitely moved me.

Didn't catch that, but the (impromptu?!) a capella America the Beautiful by Carrie Underwood was delightful. Hearing the crowd sing along like a proper church hymn gave me a little thrill.

impromptu

Hah yeah, whoever was in charge of the music is (hopefully) getting fired. Super embarrassing for a mistake like that to happen at such an important event.

They mentioned that the program had been adjusted last-minute to sync up with the traditional 12:00 swearing-in.

I did find the whole presentation kind of slapdash, even though every individual part was well-executed.

Fun fact, here it's been turned into a Christmas song (trigger warning: sung by a 13 year old Céline Dion).

Also a Japanese nursery rhyme (TW: exactly what you would expect, dead_dove.gif)

And the jingle for a Japanese camera shop chain.

A Finnish nursery rhyme, too.

I wanted to add another song with that music to the list, but Johnny Rebel apparently has an exclusive contract with Apple music.

It's beautiful hearing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, seeing soldiers march to it. Same with Glory, Glory Hallelujah.

Uh, isn’t the latter just (part of) the chorus of the former?

oh maybe idk

Couldn't agree more. High point of the ceremony, probably because no one was speaking.

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