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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4918 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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Someone's wrong on the Radio: Internal contradictions in the narratives on USAID

I was listening to NPR today. The main story seemed to be that Elon Musk's DOGE is seeking to shut down (or severely pare down) USAID, the US Agency for International Development. This would probably not be very interesting to me, except that the NPR narrative made two seemingly conflicting statements within a ten-minute time frame.

  1. "Later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was now the acting administrator of USAID — which has long been an independent body — and that a "review" is underway aimed at the agency's "potential reorganization."

  2. "You know, over the weekend, there were reports of two security officials at USAID who were put on administrative leave for refusing DOGE access to certain systems. Democrats have accused DOGE of inappropriately accessing, you know, classified materials, which the lawmakers are saying they're going to investigate.".

(This is being stated much more unequivocally by other outlets: "The Trump administration has placed two top security chiefs at the U.S. Agency for International Development on leave after they refused to turn over classified material in restricted areas to ...".)

So on the one hand, USAID is described as an independent nonpolitical agency and should not be subsumed into Rubio's State Department. On the other hand, they have troves of classified materials that should not be accessed by staff of another agency. ... Why would an independent body for economic development have classified material? I recognize that I am confused...

So I looked at the Foreign Aid Act of 1961, as amended up to 2024. It looks like amendments are added several times per year, so this is not necessarily up to date, but such is the version of the law which is easy to read, "with amendments." It is 276 pages, so I didn't read more than the first five. Searching for "indep" turns of several uses of the term "independent," but they are for functions of USAID like "support for independent media" and "independent states of the former Soviet Union" (with four hits for "independent audit[or]). So the department isn't "independent" under the law, at least not in those terms.

Surprise surprise, on page 2 or 3 USAID is defined as "Under the policy guidance of the Secretary of State, the agency primarily responsible for administering this part should have the responsibility for coordinating all United States development-related activities," and is headed by an "Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development." There is no mention of whether this is a cabinet-level position. So Rubio taking over as the director of the agency and delegating actual responsibility to someone else appears totally legal, quotes from guests on NPR to the contrary notwithstanding.

Also, USAID is tasked with funding the International Atomic Energy Agency, for "civilian nuclear reactor safety" in former Soviet states, for limiting aid to countries engaged in nuclear weapons development, and for "nonproliferation and export control assistance." So that seems to explain why classified information may be found in its headquarters.

The claims of Elon Musk and NPR actually align on the topic of aid for LGBT causes, with NPR guests stating that the loss of USAID will be a disaster for gender nonbinary people. The MAGA narrative is also supported by the Act when compared to archives of the agency's website: there are only 12 mentions of "gender" in the law, and they are exclusively for "gender-responsive interventions" for HIV/AIDS, for "gender parity in basic education", "performance goals, on a gender disaggregated basis" and for statistics about who has received how much aid, again "disaggregated" by gender. In contrast, USAID's website used to contain pages with text like "USAID proudly joins this government-wide effort with its own commitment to advance the human rights of LGBTQI+ people around the world, including members of its own workforce, and supports efforts to protect them from violence, stigma, discrimination, and criminalization.". There is a Trans angle, with text like "In Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Malawi, Namibia, and Nigeria, transgender-led CSOs delivered health services (including transgender-specific health and HIV services), emergency housing, and economic empowerment programs. In Burma and South Africa, the first transgender health center was organized, drawing upon best practice from Thailand." (ibid)

Then there is the pandemic angle, of which I am skeptical, but Musk did retweet that USAID provided $38M in funding to Ben Hu for "bat coronavirus emergence" research from 2014 to September, 2019, from a document which appears to have been obtained under FOIA by the White Coat Waste Project. Ben Hu was a PI with EcoHealth alliance and was previously alleged to be one of the first three Covid patients according to "sources within the government," although an intelligence community report mandated by Congress later denied that any Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists were known to have been among early Covid patients.

If the FOIA document about funding is true, that funding appears to have been outside of its mandate and potentially a misuse of public funds: the only mentions of "pandemic," "epidemic," or "virus" in the Foreign Aid Act concern HIV/AIDS.

I'm left with the impression that Musk and MAGA are being more truthful than NPR, and maybe the Agency does deserve to go into receivership.

i doubt there has been a legal misuse of funds. i suspect whatever words are used to control funding are broad enough that they let the wordcels do anything with the funding.

Right now I'm feeling kinda smug because Musk's takeover of various federal agencies looks a lot like I imagined it to be: https://www.themotte.org/post/1233/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/266617?context=8#context

I didn't actually expect him to take over IT servers with his merry men, but I'm glad to be right for once.

I don't understand the claimed contradiction.

So Rubio taking over as the director of the agency and delegating actual responsibility to someone else appears totally legal, quotes from guests on NPR to the contrary notwithstanding.

I do not see any claims that Rubio being director is illegal. Sen Andy Kim claims "This is an entity that was created through federal statute, codified through federal statute, and something that cannot be changed, cannot be removed except through actions of Congress.", and I agree that significantly changing or removing it might be illegal, but not Rubio taking over.

Why would an independent body for economic development have classified material?

A lot of very unimportant things are 'classified'. A very small percent of 'classified material' are things that'd be genuinely bad if they got out. I don't think this is significant. The DOGE people accessing classified USAID information thing is probably similarly insignificant.

On the other hand, they have troves of classified materials that should not be accessed by staff of another agency. ... Why would an independent body for economic development have classified material? I recognize that I am confused...

You know, I accept just about all the rest of the post. But this is silly. A US agency needing to distribute food in the Ivory Coast needs to understand the actual (unvarnished truth of) the situation on the ground there, at the very least so they don't hire a boat to go dock in a harbor right before the rebels grab it or try to truck it through some area where the government has (in fact, but not avowedly) lost control.

That kind of up-to-date intelligence is rightly classified. Probably the most rightly-classified as compared to the median bullshit that gets the stamp.

Anyway, this is not the thing to be confused about.

AP News also describes USAID as "an independent agency":

What is USAID?

[...]

Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act and Kennedy set up USAID as an independent agency in 1961.

[...]

Given that are now at least two Reliable Sources calling it "independent", you can expect wikipedia article to also do so. That primary sources, in this case Foreign Aid Act of 1961, do not will not change anything.

It's independent in the sense that it's not part of the Executive Branch. Similar to how FDIC is always described as an independent agency because it isn't part of the Treasury Department (or any other department), or how the US Forest Service is described as part of the Department of Agriculture. Being under "guidance" of the SoS isn't the same as being part of the State Department. Rubio is acting administrator, but there's usually a separate administrator who doesn't take orders from the State Department, just advice.

You're missing some important context.

It is a long running conspiracy theoery open secret that the Democrats and the CIA have been (are?) in the tank with Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS, the Taliban Et Al. actively working against US/Western interests in the name of "decolonization" and that the primary role of USAID was to "launder" food, fuel, arms, and other forms of material support allocated to these groups while also as serving as a slush fund for various woke causes and NGOs. Ever wonder who was funding all thos migrant caravans? The reason the current administrator presumably doesn't want to turn over the books to Rubio is that is that they don't want the opposition (Ie the MAGA crowd) to know where the proverbial bodies are buried or who to subpoena.

I really wish to ask when the vetting process failed such that the vetters were these ideologues to begin with. Is it just that everyone with capability and independent thought left the US civil service because it is a bloated swamp that neither rewards financially or emotionally unless one has the specific temperament? Like I've dealt with other civil services before, and petty power politics and paper pushing bureaucratics protecting their iron rice bowls are common, but never have I encountered a bureaucrat whose mission is to destroy the nation they say they serve. Every functionary will claim that they are True American Patriots, but only the barest gust of wind is necessary to uncover the reality that they wish to create a New America that is in their preferred image instead of preserving an old or existing version of America. At least the corrupt bureaucrats here in Southeast Asia don't pretend to have the interests of the state at heart when they suggestively indicate which midget bar has the most discrete hostesses.

Why would an independent body for economic development have classified material?

USAid has been advancing US political interests along with the CIA operations branch overseas for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_International_Development#Political_operations_abroad

William Blum has said that in the 1960s and early 1970s USAID has maintained "a close working relationship with the CIA, and Agency officers often operated abroad under USAID cover."[195] The 1960s-era Office of Public Safety, a now-disbanded division of USAID, has been mentioned as an example of this, having served as a front for training foreign police in counterinsurgency methods (including torture techniques).

https://kyivindependent.com/how-us-foreign-aid-transformed-ukraine-through-the-years/

The USAID’s technical assistance program which provides expert advice, support, and resources to help countries implement reforms and achieve development goals, played a big role in transforming Ukraine after the EuroMaidan Revolution that ended the rule of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014.

In other nations:

From 2003, NED-family Ingos got into the act of securing regime change at the next parliamentary elections, turning against Akayev who had initially allowed them access to the country during the heyday of IMF and Usaid conditional lending. Even more than in Ukraine, American dominance of the local NGO sector is complete in Kyrgyzstan. P Escobar describes the monopolisation of local civil society thus: "Practically everything that passes for civil society in Kyrgyzstan is financed by US foundations, or by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). At least 170 non-governmental organizations charged with development or promotion of democracy have been created or sponsored by the Americans."

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/colour_revolutions_3196jsp/

There are several biased sources but also some pro neoliberal sources.

They have been also advancing leftist causes abroad, whether that benefits US is pretty dubiuos.

P Escobar describes the monopolisation of local civil society thus

Not sure I would trust the King of Cocaine on this, but then again I imagine he has significant experience in dealing with various arms of the US federal government

I'm left with the impression that Musk and MAGA are being more truthful than NPR, and maybe the Agency does deserve to go into receivership.

I suspect that "The Agency" is an...apt term to describe USAID.

People are thinking a lot about

  1. The message shutting down US foreign aid sends to US citizens, and
  2. The message shutting down US foreign aid sends to foreign governments who want to receive US aid funding,

Missed in this is the question of 3): What message is being sent to foreign governments by shutting down a branch of the US intelligence apparatus*?

*Yes, I think this is an overstatement, but think about it from the perspective of a foreign government: once USAID serves as cover for a hostile covert op aimed at overthrowing a government, you have to assume the entire agency is serving as a CIA arm. And this is without getting into even the "soft power" or perhaps "propaganda" aspects of what USAID does.

If the CIA was competent enough it'd set up its own network of shell companies or charities to just continue the work of infiltrating nations and cultivating domestic assets. Funneling everything through USAID or some other US centric organization just seems like a forced sharing of the feeding trough with other pigs that exist just to be the first up for slaughter when the butchering season begins. Actually once I say it that way it makes sense that the CIA would have a vast number of friendly organizations embedded in the bureaucracy that would be first on the chopping block. Being the biggest baddest hog in the swamp is a survival strategy, but so is being one step faster than the clueless pigs feasting next ro you.

When the US funds regime change abroad, it doesn't go into a budget line item as such. "$100,000 for anti-Orban parties in Hungary." It's just called something else. In this case unimpeachable-sounding charity at USAID is the cover for vast amounts of patronage and graft. It's an extremely partisan organization, it's inherently secretive, it's an arm of the CIA, and it's anti-democratic. A lot of bodies are buried at USAID and the thing is probably unsalvageable. Incredible whitepill to know that Trump is gutting the whole thing.

"$3 million for Pakistani development funds" (actually this is going to fund Cuban Government Overthrow Twitter)

Does Believing in Big Conspiracies Cause Small Conspiracy Theories, or Do Small Conspiracy Theories Cause People to Believe in Big Conspiracies?

Or: Why the Fuck is Luka a Laker?

I’ve always thought that one of the primary philosophical values of athletics is that it is a direct connection to capital R reality, in a way that is otherwise possible to avoid for many people. When I was in law school was when I got really serious about weightlifting, for the same reason that a lot of my friends got very into drinking: 1L year is a hell of feeling unmoored from any evidence of how you are doing. Traditionally, as my school did things, you have no feedback until finals. You are working all day every day studying, but you only really ever get tested on it in a cold call, which more depends on your professor’s mood and style for how it goes than it does on how good you actually are. And you might only get cold called ten times a semester anyway across all your classes. You’re working constantly and you have no real idea how you’re doing. But, as Henry Rollins put it, The Iron Doesn’t Lie to You. You can lift the weight, or you can’t. So I got really into the Olympic lifts. The Snatch, the Clean and Jerk, the Clean and Press (I’m old school). The numbers went up, or they didn’t, every day in my notebook. And if they went up I could feel good about myself, regardless of the fact that I was sure I was going to fail CivPro (I didn’t). Lifting weights, or running, or biking, gives you instant feedback on where you stand. You have a number you can pin your ego to, a baseline reality. You can lie about it, you can cheat, but you’re only cheating yourself: you know you’re a fake. In law school I needed that anchor to reality to keep me sane, to keep me from getting lost in my anxieties about things that I could not have knowledge of or control over.

Competition of course, is the ultimate reality check. I’ll confess to having become a bit of a hermit in my workout habits over the years. I have a very extensive home gym setup, the only time I worked out socially was the occasional climbing trip. Switching to BJJ has gotten me obsessed with fitness in a way I haven’t been in years, in that every time I go to the gym I’m getting my ego crushed. I’m getting dominated, submitted, and that’s reality: there was nothing I could have done to stop it. But, the victories are as real as the defeats. I can feel myself improving, and when I get a minor win, it means nothing it’s just a casual roll in a suburban strip mall in Eastern Pennsylvania, no one gives a shit. But it’s real, it happened.

And I think that athletics are necessary for that reason: they provide a tie to reality. There’s a reason that the study of decision making in economics has come to be known as Game Theory: you create a circumscribed ruleset for competition and use it to model greater decision making. This has value both in personal practice of athletics, and in the greater world of spectator sports and athletics. Moneyball taught more people about statistical analysis and strategy than any textbook. Sports are the one real thing on TV, you watch it and something happens, or it doesn’t. Your team wins, your team loses. This is important in that it keeps people grounded, it tells people things about reality. It teaches kids growing up to accept defeat, that sometimes the breaks beat the boys, that sometimes bad things happen. Sport was so important to national and ethnic pride, to civil rights movements, over the years, because sporting success is an inevitable fact. Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson and Jack Johnson were, and remain, so important because he went on the field and did it. When they went in against whites and won, the lie that no black man could do that was untenable. There was no denying that reality. Trans competitors in girls' sports has been such a controversy, not because anyone gives a damn about the purity of high school girl's track, it's because it is undeniable. Contact with reality. Black and white.

Unless, of course, the product on the field is fake. The ultimate crime against the public, as Fitzgerald put it:

"Fixed the World Series?” [] The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as something that merely happened, the end of an inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people--with the singlemindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

Then sport becomes just another case of one’s emotions being manipulated by some power on high.

I bring all this up in reference to the recent blockbuster NBA trade that came out of nowhere over the weekend. In the middle of the night on Saturday, the Dallas Mavericks chose to trade Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis and a 2029 First Round Pick, plus some spare change going around. This trade is so off the wall that many people assumed that the reporter who first put it out had been hacked. It simply makes no sense by standard NBA strategy: normally a team will never part with a top-5 player in their prime like Luka under any circumstances. If they did choose to trade a guy like that, then the team would accept that their current project was torpedoed and sell everything for future value, young players and draft picks to build the next great team. The Mavericks did neither: they got older and worse switching from Luka to AD, without acquiring any high end draft capital to help them build in the future. They lost a potential all-time talent, a face of the franchise and the NBA, a player who had just lead them to the NBA Finals as a number one option last year; and in exchange they got a slightly worse player several years older. It makes no sense. Writers call it The Dumbest Move I’ve Ever Seen. The Lakers have a player who virtually guarantees them a competitive team for the next ten years, and for it they gave up an aging star who was a key piece on a championship team five years ago, but didn’t look likely to win one this year.

And inexplicably, Mav’s GM Nico Harrison didn’t try to shop his player around at all. The players involved heard at the same time everyone else did, from a twitter account they thought had been hacked. Luka bought a house in Dallas less than a month ago. Players around the league reacted with shock. Fans are apoplectic. Had Luka been shopped, it is likely that Dallas could have stocked their team with bright young players and future picks to build a juggernaut years from now. A package vastly better than AD and change. They chose this very specifically. Leading many fans to ask why?

Conspiracy theories popped up immediately. From the mundane, Luka is injured or Luka is about to be MeToo’d or Luka fucked the owner/GM’s wife. To the more baroque: the Mavs chose to make this trade at the behest of TPTB within the NBA, who wanted their marquee franchise in LA to get a fresh star with the LeBron era winding down. Send the best young player in the league, and certainly the best looking most photogenic and charismatic player in the top ten, to the traditional top franchise in the league. The Mavs perfidious new owners, the (((Adelsons))) went along with this because they want to move the team from Dallas (a small market I guess?) to Las Vegas, and they needed to destroy the franchise and its fanbase Major League style in order to do it.

And that made me wander: do conspiracy theories filter up or trickle down? Does one start with a conspiratorial worldview and paranoid style and jaded cynicism because Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself and then decide the NBA is probably fixed too; or does one start with thinking the NBA is fixed and it shakes your faith in everything else? I’ve noticed the conspiracy theorists I know tend to be into personal conspiracy theories too. The same guy that’s telling me the Marines just raided a FEMA data center in Iceland to get the files about the 2020 election will tell me that the mechanic slit the rubber on his CV boot so that the mechanic could charge him to fix it. I wander, if one polled /r/nba fans, what would the correlation be between believing that the Luka trade was fixed and believing in RussiaGate?

Now we reach another question where Sports is a low-stakes microcosm of life: assume that the uproar was so severe that it actually threatened the legitimacy of the league. That so many fans were so convinced that the Luka trade was fixed by the NBA, that it threatened to ruin the NBA’s ratings and destroy the fanbase. Assume also, that it isn’t true, that Nico Harrison really just thought he was that much smarter than everyone. You are the NBA commissioner. Do you exercise your power to rescind the trade, in order to preserve the appearance of fairness, or do you allow it to go through, knowing that it will create the appearance of unfairness?

I've been loosely keeping an eye on this, as there's something inherently hilarious about grown men malding and melting down over a stranger wearing different laundry to put an inflated orange ball through a metal rim, impotently posting screenshots of canceled season tickets, and/or declaring that they will now switch to be a fan of team [X] instead of the Mavericks like a twelve-year-old girl. /r/Mavericks is/was looking like /r/GuyCry.

Another theory is that Luka is a raging alcoholic, hence the increased bloating and fatness over the years despite the calorie-burning of a professional athlete, and the Mavericks have had enough. Supposedly there's a video floating around of former-Mav Michael Finley snatching a beer out of Luka's hand, but there are also counterclaims that The Snatch was for NBA sponsorship reasons and the beer was later returned to Luka in an unlabeled cup.

I saw a funny comment in a sports subreddit to the paraphrased tune of "Alcoholic? I don't care if Luka is a heroin addict. You let him find a vein at halftime, keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn't die, and wait for the offseason to try and get him clean."

And I suppose in any case, even if Luka is a raging alcoholic, heroin and Overwatch addict, and Diddy and Drake party enjoyer, you can get a better haul for him than Anthony Davis, a first round pick, and some random NBA redshirt. Or at least try to, instead of adding to the Laker plot armor with what appears to be, at least for now, a generational gift.

This trade doesn't help the conspiracy theory angle in a sports league that's seen the Knicks alleged frozen envelope, Jordan's first retirement, that Lakers-Kings Game 6, Durant's "Save" (which may have been the worst no-call in NBA history if Harden hadn't deviated from the script). The whole Tim Donaghy thing certainly doesn't help either.

I really appreciate the first part of the post re: sports. I have a number of close friends who don't care about sports at all, and, although I bear them no animosity, I can't help but feel like they've missed this entire part of life that, if they engaged with it, would make every other part of their life better. My very best friends not only played and enjoy sports, they each have an attitude bordering on obsession with one or more professional or college teams. It means something. It means ... everything?

On conspiracy theories, I think people get tripped up in defining them. As @FirmWeird post indicates, sometimes what people call a "conspiracy theory" is really just the truth that one or more parties have attempted to conceal. If we don't get more specific, than a personal conspiracy can be as commonplace as telling your significant other a white lie about their appearance to preserve domestic bliss.

Therefore, my model of what makes something a conspiracy has more to do with the epistemic rubric people apply to any causal series of events. To be more direct about it, a "conspiracy theory" is a method of processing evidence wherein any counter-evidence is treated as, inversely, additional evidence that further proves the initial point.

"The Earth is flat"

"Here's a picture from space. It's a globe."

"OBVIOUSLY THAT'S A FAKED PHOTO THEY PRE-PRODUCED AS A PSYOP, WAKE UP, SHEEPLE"

In dealing with this epistemic rubric, there's simply no evidence, no matter how compelling, you can ever produce to change the other person's opinion. Note how this is actually distinct from confirmation bias in which confirming evidence is amplified 10x, and counter-evidence (sorry for that goofy phrase) is diminished 10x.

All the theories about the Luka trade, therefore, are NOT conspiracy theories until someone says something like "Lakers doc did Luka's physical and says he's fine" and the original conspirators respond with "Well, duh, the Lakers would never tell you the truth if he was injured."

A lot of the more enduring "conspiracy theories" (JFK comes to mind most easily) are fun because you can judge the available evidence pretty evenly and still find a lot of holes. Not believing in the Warren Commission report is nowhere near "lol tin foil hat alert!" I'd call it a kind of popular narrative agnosticism.

More recently, this is exactly how I felt about the lab leak theory. I couldn't give you a full, evidence laden dossier on why I felt unsure about the wet market hypothesis, or why I gave some credibility to the lab leak theory. I just kind of felt that way. What's more, nobody could offer me any sort of counter-evidence totally falsifying the lab leak theory. Instead, it was just an endless, yet vague, appeal to authority. "Jeepers! No serious SCIENTIST believes the lab leak theory. Get over it, man! A pangolin fucked a bat and now we can't hug grandma. That's just how life is sometimes!"

At the same time, you had John Stewart (of all people!), putting the regime on notice in real time. Wild.

In terms of conspiracy theory filter up / trick down, I think the key variable is mostly how an individual views information as a commodity. Meaning, when I encounter a new piece of information on anything, what's my initial reaction to it before I even process it. Is it "well, here's some data, I ought to consider it vis-a-vis my existing model." Is it "Someone obviously put this here for me to find. Let met try to discern this unknown person's motivations." Is it "I will begin with the assumption that, whatever this new piece of data is, it's wrong until proven right (or vice versa).

A smarter person than I might have some sort of snappy label for this (metabias? omni-priors?). The point remains the same; people are going to have attitudes about information even before they have enough information to justify having an attitude.

I really appreciate the first part of the post re: sports. I have a number of close friends who don't care about sports at all, and, although I bear them no animosity, I can't help but feel like they've missed this entire part of life that, if they engaged with it, would make every other part of their life better. My very best friends not only played and enjoy sports, they each have an attitude bordering on obsession with one or more professional or college teams. It means something. It means ... everything?

I just went from "don't care sports at all" to "care about soccer a great deal" last summer, and it really was just like a switch flip in brain moment. Like having children (obviously not like having children at all expect in this one sense), just can't explain it fully to those who don't have it.

I will note that the most talked about NBA conspiracy theory prior to this one was that there was a frozen envelope that guaranteed Patrick Ewing would go to New York.

From my POV that is several orders of magnitude less viable than ANY conspiracy theory regarding this trade. How can you be the GM of Dallas and not know you have the best asset in the league (minimum top 3) when you just made the freaking finals? Is he some sort of mafia boss sex slave trader? If so how does LA not know they are giving up assets for a super felon?

Luka Doncic being traded in this fashion should spur accusations of conspiracy, they are deserved.

I apply the same structure to "conspiracy theory" evaluation as a prosecutor would to a criminal case: means, motive, and opportunity. The NBA is a multi-billion dollar global enterprise, the value of which rests on delivering a compelling product to as wide an audience as possible. It's a cartel of privately-held organizations operating in lockstep under a commissioner whose job is to maximize the value of the league as a whole. It wouldn't be terribly difficult for a small handful of high-level NBA executives (whether they be corporate office or individual team owners) to work together in the interest of profit maximization at the expense of competitive fairness. Things like this trade, the Lakers-Kings '03 match fixing, Donaghy, etc., all point to what appears to be obvious collusion.

And that made me wander: do conspiracy theories filter up or trickle down? Does one start with a conspiratorial worldview and paranoid style and jaded cynicism because Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself and then decide the NBA is probably fixed too; or does one start with thinking the NBA is fixed and it shakes your faith in everything else? I’ve noticed the conspiracy theorists I know tend to be into personal conspiracy theories too. The same guy that’s telling me the Marines just raided a FEMA data center in Iceland to get the files about the 2020 election will tell me that the mechanic slit the rubber on his CV boot so that the mechanic could charge him to fix it.

I proudly claim to be a conspiracy theorist on this site and have done so for years but I don't really see any "small conspiracies" like the kind you're suggesting. For the record, I started believing in conspiracy theories as a child in the leadup to the Iraq war - I thought that Iraq didn't actually have any weapons of mass destruction, and that those reports were lies to allow the rich Americans in charge of the MIC to steal the oil from another Middle Eastern country. I believed that the government was monitoring all domestic communications - and then Mark Klein reported on it, which was also considered a conspiracy theory until Edward Snowden just released the details. I thought the lab-leak explanation for COVID was more likely despite being told it was a baseless conspiracy theory, and now it seems to be generally accepted knowledge that it was actually a lab leak. I went into the weeds on the Russiagate story (and I have a lot of posts on that particular conspiracy theory on here) and took the conspiracy theory angle again... and it was totally, completely correct. I'm on record stating on the old site that Joe Biden was mentally checked out and could only temporarily be made to perform for special events years before the news about his actual mental state broke.

It just seems nakedly obvious to me that conspiracy theories are a more accurate and truthful depiction of reality than mainstream media reporting and societal consensus. This doesn't really bleed out into my daily life in any noxious or odious way, either - the one time I thought that somebody was conspiring against me, I had another person they tried to conspire with directly tell me that they were doing so. If anything, I think having an accurate understanding of how people work and act, built up over experience interacting with them in the real world, directly leads to conspiracy theories because conspiracies are real and a natural outcome of human psychology. People start seeing conspiracies not because they're just having their brains get filled up with microplastics, but because we live in a world where conspiracies very obviously happen and have a lot of influence on the world.

I went into the weeds on the Russiagate story (and I have a lot of posts on that particular conspiracy theory on here) and took the conspiracy theory angle again... and it was totally, completely correct.

I'd be interested to read them, would you mind sharing the links?

It seems to me that what Trump is doing has worked; both Panama and Canada have, for now, capitulated to his demands. In spite of all the smoke and confusion, I'm optimistic. If leftists hate Musk and Trump as much as Reddit indicates, then it's a safe bet that the Left is in for a bad time.

Please, someone check my apparent ignorance of the nuances of trade wars, and of economics more broadly. Suppose that Trump 'is successful in annexing Canada and Panama. What material benefit does this provide to the U.S.? I'm optimistic because young and smart people are eager to build the new world which has been promised. And what more American an expression of hope and opportunity than in the conquering of new land?

What material benefit does this provide to the U.S.?

Let me ask you this: what material benefits do you expect the US to obtain from having ~45m disenfranchised imperial subjects that we couldn't already obtain through normal trade and treaty arrangements?

This doesn't meet the effort standard for a toplevel post imo. No links, no analysis.

As far as I can tell nothing Canada or Mexico have agreed to is particularly meaningful. Mexico seems to have already had 10k troops on the border. And Canada's fentanyl czar isn't a win because we don't have a Canadian fentanyl problem. I thought the fentanyl stuff was supposed to be a pretext to renegotiate the trade agreements Canada and Mexico are supposedly screwing us on. That hasn't happened yet.

It's not meaningful because it's a demonstration intended to convey capability, with that capability to be used in a future round. It's no difference than a gorilla demonstrating its strength by jumping up and down and beating its chest or an impala leaping up in the air -- what does it meaningfully accomplish?

So what happened is that Trump proven that he has the domestic support to impose tariffs on a flimsy pretext and that no one in Congress will/can talk him out of it. He's proven that he that capability.

I think if anything it conveys he'll back down in exchange for small concessions to avoid hurting markets? Like he could have just said 'hey, commit to doing this trade deal or tariffs go on in a month'. Instead we got this.

There was never going to be a tariff. Trump just needed Mexico and Canada to cooperate on migration and drugs. They’ve done so and will be more willing partners on other issues going forward as well.

Same for Colombia. Same for Panama.

And, sorry, but there won’t be any conquering of new lands either.

Canada didn't capitulate. They reannounced the same $1.3 billion border security package they already announced in December, allowing Trump to declare victory.

Trump got the same deal by going full psycho that he already got by speaking quietly and carrying a big stick, except that some of the backchat from the noise he was making cost his pal Elon a $100 million Ontario government contract.

On a scale of kayfabe where SpaceX is 0 and WWE is 100, the Canada/Mexico tariff rows have been about 80, and the Colombia row north of 90.

I mean, going off Trudeau

I just had a good call with President Trump. Canada is implementing our $1.3 billion border plan — reinforcing the border with new choppers, technology and personnel, enhanced coordination with our American partners, and increased resources to stop the flow of fentanyl. Nearly 10,000 frontline personnel are and will be working on protecting the border.

In addition, Canada is making new commitments to appoint a Fentanyl Czar, we will list cartels as terrorists, ensure 24/7 eyes on the border, launch a Canada- U.S. Joint Strike Force to combat organized crime, fentanyl and money laundering. I have also signed a new intelligence directive on organized crime and fentanyl and we will be backing it with $200 million.

Proposed tariffs will be paused for at least 30 days while we work together.

Emphasis mine. Yes, the $1.3B border plan is old(ish) news. There are additional commitments.

It's a cold and dreary Monday afternoon in Ottawa. The nation is awash in a newfound wave of pride and determination, yet there is an unmistakable fear in the eyes of every citizen. Lame duck prime minister Justin Trudeau enters the situation room with his closest aides and allies. The prime minister takes a deep breath as he awaits the call. The prosperity of his people hangs in the balance. Tens, if not hundreds of thousands of jobs could vanish by the end of the week. The phone rings. The unmistakable voice of the orange man in the White House booms out of the speaker. Will he demand an anschluss?

"Mr. President, these tariffs will lead to needless suffering and destruction. Is there any way we can set this aside for the moment?"

"Fentanyl is a big problem Justin. Hire someone to work on that and you've got a deal."

Listing cartels as terrorist organizations is actually a big deal. It enables the government to aggressively track money.

It's widely suspected that payments from the cartels to Chinese chemical companies are being laundered through Canadian real estate.

I don't think Canadian government policy towards drug cartels depends on whether it calls them terrorists or not. The way you deal with a sophisticated, wealthy, armed criminal organisation that you actually care about stopping is the same way you deal with a sophisticated, wealthy terrorist organisation that you actually care about stopping.

In concert with the other top-level discussions of betting, how about a topic which will definitely be uncontroversial:

Will Trump survive his full term?

No, I’m not talking about assassination. Curve-fitting the 4/45 former Presidents killed in office, the 4/59 terms ended by assassins, or the 4/236 years with assassinations? That’s a fool’s errand. It’s time for actuarial tables.

The President is 78 years and 7 months old. This gives a baseline 5-6% chance of death for the year, climbing towards 8% when he leaves office. He’d have a cumulative chance of death, during that period, of about 24%.

But Trump is not in the same position as the average American. He’s overweight or slightly obese, giving him a higher share of the risk for heart disease and stroke. He’s not a smoker, reducing various cardiovascular and cancer risk factors. He doesn’t drink, which further reduces his cancer and stroke risk but somehow raises his overall risk. Some of these factors, like cancer, are going to be mitigated by the planet’s best medical care. (You’d better believe that Trump is getting the best colonoscopy. The biggest.) Others are harder to screen or treat. I have no idea how to assess them holistically, and further data are welcome.

Still. 24% chance that this Presidency ends with conspiracy theories about stroke guns.

Fred Trump (Donald's father) live to 93 and Mary Trump (Donald's mother) lived to 88. Going back through the Trump family tree, many of his ancestors had higher than average lifespans. Considering Donald doesn't drink or smoke and that he walks and moves around very regularly, I find it highly doubtful that he kicks the bucket before his term is up.

Watch this video of Trump powering through a round of Golf (and I do mean POWERING) and tell me you think this is a guy with failing health for his age:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6Rb9b8rYhII?si=rFfmT-27t6uw2Mk1

Okay, don't watch the whole thing, it is an hour long, but skip to any random segment and see if it looks like he's having any physical difficulties.

I'd take the other side of any bet of Trump dying of natural causes in four years.

Yes he might experience a sharp decline, but the medical care on tap should stave off almost any plausible cause of death past his term.

The main thing missing here is that a significant number of 78 year olds are in nursing homes or hospitals or in wheelchairs or use walkers or are demented. Trump's energy is a lot lower than 8 years ago, but he vigorously walks and talks. So that means his risk of death is significantly below the overall average. Not sure by how much though. I'm pretty sure the associations between alcohol/coke and risk of death are measuring confounding or something. Another thing to consider is the risk he declines like Biden did! They were both too old to be president, do you really trust either of them to make good decisions if woken up right at 2AM after a sudden nuclear or conventional attack...

But Trump is not in the same position as the average American. He’s overweight or slightly obese, giving him a higher share of the risk for heart disease and stroke.

Sounds like the average American to me. Not actually joking - life expectancy already factors in the fact that most Americans are overweight/obese.

conspiracy theories about stroke guns

Conspiracy facts.

Real talk, I seriously doubt that you could fire frozen shellfish toxin out of a gun and actually hit and penetrate the target. I suspect this thing is bullshit or a "goat ESP" tier CIA project Which is not to say that they didn't have another heart attack gun that actually worked...

Supposedly there were other microtoxin assassination tools developed by the Soviets and British. An umbrella that shoots out very tiny spheres covered in deadly toxins. Shove the umbrella tip into someone to activate it and they are doomed.

This thing must have had a very short range and the scope is unnecessary. But in principle a close range toxin-laden sprayer is feasible.

The ricin-injector umbrella was very much real (one of the scientists involved in the investigation taught me at Cambridge) and used by the Bulgarians to assassinate Georgi Markov in London. A KGB defector later told us the unsurprising fact that the Soviets built it for the Bulgarians.

I picked "stroke" for this exact reason.

The chemicals are making the frogs gay, too.

Back in college I read an article in the student paper about research from the school showing that agricultural runoff is feminizing male fish. It's a real problem.

Years later I hear Alex Jones clips about the chemicals turning the frogs "bisexual". I get he is right in a larger sense, but he means "intersexed".

Trans, really.

Trump also drinks lots of coke, which interviews with centenarians indicate has life extending properties.

This is true, and @j0nahfun on Twitter explained the virility-enhancing properties as well:

Soak your dick in (semi-erect) in warm Coke for 10-15 each day when you wake up. The phosphoric acid is supposed to expand the blood vessels in your penis which makes it look thicker and slightly longer.

The question that falls out of this is 'What would an inherited JD Vance presidency look like?'

I think JD would roughly follow the mandate of Trump, but I don't think he would be as bombastic and aggressive in his negotiations. This would effectively lower the amount of change in America as a result of the presidency.

I think we’d see more technocratic social conservatism but probably also more immigration.

(You’d better believe that Trump is getting the best colonoscopy. The biggest.)

The deepest. Yuge.

Income has a large (and shockingly linear) correlation to life expectancy. I checked that data vs other sources, but the linked graph is pretty and seems accurate. Not sure how it effects the yearly mortality other than decreasing it in Trumps case.

I'm still waiting for the mea culpas for all the people on this very forum who said that Trump was old and demented like Biden. (If you were one of those people, it might be worth considering how you arrived at that conclusion.)

In any case, I wouldn't rely on actuarial calculators. People who are near death often look and act like it. Obviously the odds of Trump kicking over from a coronary event are non-zero, but the calculators are a crude estimate and crucially include people who are already dying of diabetes, cancer, etc.. The 6% of 78 year olds who die every year include a lot of people who are already on their death bed or have terminal cancer, etc... The death rate for a healthy individual is much, much lower. Plus, Trump is almost certainly on statins.

So 24% is a naive and bad estimate. My guess is that we could train an AI to do a much better job than antique calculators just by watching a video of someone speaking for a couple minutes.

I'd give equal odds to him being assassinated as to dying from natural causes, say roughly 8% each.

Those seem like pretty plausible numbers. I agree that he’s definitely not in the bottom 6% of health. He’s not even close on weight; he’s like 60th, 70th percentile. So not the highest risk for cardiovascular. And I expect screening to rule out all sorts of possible stealth risks.

I wonder what the actuarial tables look like for sudden death. I don’t know how I’d search for that.

Assassination risk is a whole different ball game. He’s probably more hated that any president since…Nixon? But that’s only loosely coupled with actual assasssination attempts. It’s also not a good predictor of defensive measures. Makes me a little curious if the government cuts involve cleaning house for the Secret Service…

Makes me a little curious if the government cuts involve cleaning house for the Secret Service…

I would sincerely hope so. It keeps getting glossed over in these discussions, but I still haven't seen anything remotely like an adequate explanation of the events surrounding the Butler assassination attempt, and barring some extremely rigorous explanations or an ironclad paper trail detailing how the Secret Service has been an elaborate bluff all along, "the secret service intentionally attempted to allow an assassination of a presidential candidate" seems to me the the most likely explanation.

I’d put money against it being intentional. You’d need 1) a conspiracy in the SS which 2) acts once and only once and 3) gets lots of people fired but not charged with treason.

No, I think they probably hit a common failure mode in project management. It’s easy to skimp on testing scenarios which are rare, even if they’re really critical. Presidential assassins are rare, and FPOTUS assassins even more so. I would bet they got complacent and didn’t do the kind of training or testing they’d need to actually secure the site.

I’ve seen some pictures of Trump’s detail lately and they definitely look like real secret service agents, unlike the motley crew from last summer.

Humans make errors. Occam's razor is our friend here--no need to go the conspiratorial route when evidence doesn't exist for it.

citing occams razor in the domain of politics is foolish when being pretending to be retarded is the ultimate way to get plausible deniability.

According to some video and media reports, the Secret Service counter-sniper on a nearby rooftop was aiming at the shooter, perhaps before he took some or all of his shots.

“The counter sniper appears to be looking through his scope as if he's scanning for something. … And then, when the shots are fired, takes out the shooter from his position almost immediately,” said Miller, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of Intelligence & Counterterrorism until 2022. “So we have to fill in those gaps. What happened during those seconds? What were the communications? What did he see through the scope, and did he act at his first opportunity? And we'll learn that later.”

I'm still waiting. The evidence as I understand it is that the Secret Service sniper had the assassin in his sights and not only allowed him to fire multiple shots, but only fired after a non-sniper engaged the assassin and disabled his rifle.

He thought the guy could very well be a local cop -- how stupid would he feel if the headline was "trigger happy SS agent brains local cop during Trump speech". Career ending.

That is because that building was supposed to be under the care of the local police, it was actually their headquarters.

It was not clear who that person was until shots were fired. And communications were sorted out.

Don't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity/ineptitude.

Don't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity/ineptitude.

That's terrible advice when there's lots of malice around (like now).

Huh. I thought the rifle was destroyed by one of the sniper’s shots.

This is one of those things which SHOULD have continued to get public attention, but has been swept under the rug since November, if not earlier.

This is kinda what I think, too - although of course the actuarial tables are interesting, Trump seems very active and I think he's unlikely to just tip over. Plus, he seemed to handle the first term fairly well.

I will say that I did get the impression that he was older during the debates. But I wouldn't be surprised if he makes it to 90.

Looking at his family members might be interesting:

  • Father, Fred Trump: 93
  • Mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump: 88
  • Brother, Robert Trump, 71: (seems he died of complications related to a fall, but had perhaps been in poor health)
  • Brother, Fred Trump Jr., 42: heart attack (alcoholic)
  • Uncle, John Trump, 77
  • Grandmother, Elizabeth Trump, 85
  • Grandfather, Frederick Trump, 49 (died in the 1919 flu pandemic)

Now, the internet assures me that lifestyle, not DNA, is the most important part of longevity, so this is a dodgy guide at best. But it seems to me that Trump already survived his version of the bird flue and isn't likely to die of alcoholism. He inherited his father's spot at the top of the Trump empire - if he takes after his mother and father (and grandmother) he'll be golden.

Yeah, there's a very decent change he simply drops dead of natural causes at some point in the next 4 years. Given that many of his most ardent supporters are conspiracy-mongers, there's a good chance they'll say his death was "organized by the deep state" or something like that, actuarial tables be damned. A lot of it will depend on the optics: if he just randomly dies in his sleep with minimal warning like Scalia did, conspiracies will fly. If instead his illness is known beforehand, then there will be less of that.

The problem is that as a strongman, he'll want to avoid mentioning any illnesses if possible. He couldn't get away without mentioning he had COVID, but he could plausibly sweep other chronic issues under the rug if they don't impact his physical appearance. Thankfully, Trump is a buffoon who hires people who gladly leak things as a matter of palace intrigue, so there's a decent chance that any long-term illnesses will be known, I hope.

This gives a baseline 5-6% chance of death for the year, climbing towards 8% when he leaves office. He’d have a cumulative chance of death, during that period, of about 24%.

Based on the SSN actuarial tables, it's a cumulative chance of death of 22.42%.

Sure, but that’s including the morbidly obese(trump is fat, but not morbidly obese), those with serious preexisting conditions, heavy smokers, etc. A basically healthy 78 year old has a much lower chance of death.

I dunno: it may include the morbidly obese, but also the senior citizen health nuts. Presumably the unhealthier you are the more likely you are to die early, which would imply that the older you get the fewer people are left your age who made bad lifestyle decisions Healthwise. I have no idea how that shakes out in practice though, maybe you don't see that effect happening until you get into the 80s or 90s.

I dunno: it may include the morbidly obese, but also the senior citizen health nuts

The point is that a lot of people who die each year already look like they are about to die and Trump doesn't.

That’s what I was looking at. Number of lives at 83 over number at 79 should be percent surviving.

How’d you figure?

I was not as clever as you and simply took the probability of surviving each year from ages 78-81 and multiplied them. That gave me a combined probability of survival to age 82 of 77.58%.

I guess the entire difference is down to if you should index by 78 or 79 then. The table is on "Exact age," so I guess @netstack was right to use 79. He even rounded down from there to "about 24%" from 24.6%, so it probably is about right interpolating. As the comments above point out, additional factors probably are more important at that level of accuracy already though.

I actually have to deal with these tables for work, and you'd calculate by 78 or their stated age. At least that's how the professional economists do it for expert reports. If you graph it it's easy to see why — the probability doesn't follow a set function but wanders based on extrinsic factors and random variation. For example, a newborn's chances of dying in the next year are the equivalent of a 50 year old man's. But it drops sharply after one year and continues dropping until age 8, when it starts permanently rising. There's then a jump around age 16, probably due to driving (and poorly at that), etc. In other words, it's derived from actual data. And the actual data can't be granular down to the day because it would be a nightmare to calculate and would probably end up wonky because of limited sample size (how many people aged 17 and 301 days die in a given year?) So they base the data on anyone who is a given age, even if they may be nearly a year apart. So if you're 78 and 240 days then your probability is what it is for 78, full stop, no rounding up. On your 79th birthday you use the higher number.

I was also surprised the number was that large, but also got 24.6% both taking the ratio of "Number of lives" and the complement of the product of the complement "Death probabilities."

Interestingly, in the notes they include cause-specific ultimate rates of reduction, so you could exclude the violence category if you are only considering health related causes.

Species of Tyranny and their Hallmarks (Part I: The Theory)

(c) Feb 3, 2025, by J. Nelson Rushton

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.
[Matthew 7: 15-16, KJV]

Webster's dictionary defines "woke" as being aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social justice. Notice that this definition doesn't mention identity politics, or censorship, or cancel culture, or radical progressivism. Indeed, it does not mention anything that is associated with wokeness in the commonsense understanding of the word. That is because today, even the dictionary is woke.

To be woke in the Webster's sense is a noble thing indeed; it is to be a defender of the oppressed and downtrodden. This is the defining characteristic of a storybook hero -- like Superman, or Prince Charming, or the valiant huntsman who vanquishes the Big Bad Wolf and rescues Little Red Riding Hood and her sick, old, grandma. Not coincidentally, and probably because it is sine qua non of a storybook hero, "defending the oppressed" has also been the stated agenda of some of the most murderous demagogues in modern history. Practically every murderer is also a shameless liar; thus, not being constrained by the facts, they naturally toward the loftiest possible story about their motives.

A tyrant's rise to power is often paved with woke-sounding platitudes. For example,

  • [Our] aim has been to grant equal rights to those social strata that hitherto were denied such rights.
  • Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others.
  • There must be a revolutionary party because the world contains enemies who oppress the people.

These are the words of Hiter, Stalin, and Mao Zedong-- who, between them, murdered tens of millions of their own people, and caused the deaths of tens of millions more through ideology-driven malfeasance, all in the name of "social justice". When you see a political leader rising to power on a fanatical message of standing up for the little guy, it's best to keep your rifle clean.

And how do such wolves rise to power? In many cases they are propelled by the will of the people. It is often believed that tyranny and democracy are opposites -- but the fact is that some of the most brutal dictators have risen to power on waves of broad popular support, in some cases through legal democratic processes, as was the case with Adolf Hitler. For this to happen, the tyrant must be shiny and slick enough to fool many people into complicity, and far more into complacency -- and they must keep their predatory intent in the realm of plausible deniability until it is too late for them to be stopped. It might be hard to believe this could happen, if it hadn't happened so many times.

So, how do we avoid being fooled, by leaders of our own party or those of another party? Are there signs that can be used to spot a rising tyranny in its formative stages, while it is still in its sheep's clothing? If so, those signs must be subtle -- or else it would not have been possible for so many intelligent, well-meaning people to be taken in by tyrannical movements through history.

Nonetheless, while they may be subtle, I believe there are certain hallmarks, or "tells", that tyrannical movements tend to exhibit even early in their stages, before they have gathered power, risen up, and bared their fangs. I hold that these hallmarks include, for example, the following:

  • identity politics: as a caste system based on moral double-standards, often founded on a narrative of historical class exploitation
  • authoritarianism: a sense of being entitled to control other people -- which engenders censorship, lawlessness, militancy, and arbitrary, intrusive governance
  • extremism: policies and moral positions that flagrantly defy reason and common sense

The thesis of this essay will be that

  1. these hallmarks of tyranny were evident in the early stages of the most murderous tyrannical movements of the 20th century -- Soviet communism, Chinese communism, and Nazism), even before their true nature became obvious to their victims and to the world, and that
  2. they are also manifest in the "woke" movement in the West today.

Species of Tyranny

Tyranny can be defined as oppressive government rule. As I have discussed in a previously post, Plato wrote about the forms of tyranny that he and his forebears had observed in Classical Greece, but today we have more history to look back on. From our perspective, we can see that while many of Plato's observations are timeless, not all forms of oppressive government conform to the same model. It seems, author James Lindsay has put it, that there is more than one species of tyranny.

The tyrannical movement described by Plato is populist in nature. That is, in its rise to power, the tyrannical regime of The Republic derives its strength from broad public support. Generally speaking, this support need not come from an absolute majority of the population -- but it must come from a vocal and militant minority, that is large enough, and has enough allies, in the presence of enough passive bystanders, to seize power on the impulse of a "people's movement". Thus, Plato's tyrant is a demagogue: one who rises to power by stirring up and appealing to rash, angry sentiments that are festering among the population.

A demagogue can take office through a legal election or appointment (as with Hitler), through a revolution (as with Mao Zedong), or through a popular coup d'etat (as with Lenin). But not all tyrants are demagogues. A hereditary monarch, such as Mary I ("Bloody Mary") of England or Ivan IV ("Ivan the Terrible") of Russia, might indeed lead a cruel and oppressive regime, but their ascension to power does not rest chiefly on popular support, either of themselves or of their agenda. So, typically, a monarch's path to power does not resemble that of Plato's archetypal tyrant, even if they are, in fact, a tyrant.

On the other hand, despotic hereditary monarchs are not the sort of tyrant we need to worry about much in the West these days. From this point forward I will focus on populist forms of tyranny: those in which the tyrants take office on the strength of their public support, whether by legal means, illegal means, or a combination of the two as in Plato's Republic.

Even after restricting focus to populist forms of tyranny, not all of these have the same character. On top of being populist in nature, the tyranny described in The Republic is marked by radical progressivism, defined as extreme disregard for traditional norms and values. But not all populist tyrannies are radically progressive, or even progressive at all. For example, the path from democracy to tyranny in The Republic begins with weakening household patriarchy, and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia took steps in the same direction -- but the Ayatollahs have not weakened the patriarchy in Iran (au contraire!). For another example, Plato’s tyrannical regime advocates open borders and a liberal immigration policy, much as the woke left has in recent times -- but such a program would not characterize the Nazis, to say the least.

On the other hand, while not all populist tyrannies are left-leaning in nature, it does seem that practically all, if not all, left-leaning tyrannies are populist in nature. This is empirically observable as well as naturally logical: if a tyrant, as such, has the power to impose his will upon the people without their consent, one doctrine he is not likely to impose is that of egalitarianism. He is more likely to impose a pitiless, top-down pecking order, with himself at the apex.

In light of all this, I submit the following:

  • Tyranny is defined as oppressive government rule.
  • Populist tyranny -- or what might be called "grass roots" tyranny -- is a form of tyranny that draws its power from broad-based popular support, at least in its formative stages.
  • Leftist tyranny, of roughly the character described in Plato's Republic, is one form of populist tyranny -- though there are other forms of populist tyranny that are not leftist in character.

In summary, populist tyranny is a species of tyranny, and leftist tyranny is a sub-species of populist tyranny. What follows from that?


Populist Tyranny

The first consequence of the claim that populist tyranny is a species of tyranny is something that is obvious to any student of history, but evidently not obvious to many people: that populist tyranny is a thing in the first place. It seems to be widely believed that democracy and tyranny are opposites, and that tyranny can only take hold by being ruthlessly imposed from the top down. In fact, Webster's (now woke) dictionary lists democracy and tyranny as antonyms. But on the view I propose here, de facto democracy is not the opposite of tyranny at all. On the contrary, it is an essential prerequisite for the very kinds of tyranny we need fear most, viz., tyranny of a populist variety.

At a minimum, there is nothing logically contradictory about democracy and tyranny. The will of the people as a whole, at least in principle, could be to welcome over them a cruel and oppressive dictator -- so long as he is cruel and oppressive chiefly to a well-defined minority. So a democratic tyranny is possible in theory; the question is whether it could happen in real life. Philosopher Jean Jaques Rousseau -- a key figure of the Enlightenment -- seemed to think not. Rousseau wrote that democracy is practically infallible, so long as it truly reflects the will of the people:

*As long as several men assembled together consider themselves as a single body, they have only one will which is directed towards their common preservation and general well-being. Then, all the animating forces of the state are vigorous and simple, and its principles are clear and luminous; it has no incompatible or conflicting interests; the common good makes itself so manifestly evident that only common sense is needed to discern it.

However, when the social tie begins to slacken and the state to weaken, when particular interests begin to make themselves felt and sectional societies begin to exert an influence over the greater society, the common interest then becomes corrupted and meets opposition, voting is no longer unanimous; the general will is no longer the will of all; contradictions and disputes arise.*
[Rousseau: Of the Social Contract, Book IV]

I wonder what Socrates would have to say about that.

The plain fact of history is that the population as a whole often supports leaders who cruelly oppress certain individuals or demographic groups -- and, in many cases, supports those leaders because they promise to oppress those people or groups. It might be difficult to know what the majority silently felt about, say, Lenin, or Hitler, or Ayatollah Khomeini -- but what the majority silently feels is not worth spit. In the real world, it is what a majority of active and vocal citizens feel that makes the will of the people -- in proportion to how active and vocal they are, and regardless of whether they assert their will by counting heads or by cracking heads. Formal democracy can soften the effect of this law of realpolitik, but democracy just-on-paper cannot soften anything much when the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity [cf. Yeats: "The Second Coming"]. Germany was a formal democracy as Hitler was rising to power, as was Russia during the rise of Lenin. Yet, in the practical sense of rule by the people, Germany welcomed Hitler over them, as Russia welcomed Lenin -- in substantially the same way that Iran welcomed in the Ayatollahs, even though Iran was not a formal democracy at the time. Each of these leaders rose to power by winning a contest for popular support, one way or another, Rousseau's pipe dream bedamned.


Hallmarks of Tyranny

So, how do we recognize rising tyrannical movements before they reach full bloom?

To draw an analogy in zoological terms, consider, for example, how usually know a mammal when we see one. A mammal is defined as an animal that nurses its young with milk. But when you see a mammal in the wild, even of a species you have never seen before, you usually don't have to wait until you see it reproduce and feed its young to recognize it as a mammal. This is because mammals have a certain cluster of diagnostic traits -- that is, features that co-occur together in most mammals, and co-occur for the most part only in mammals. The diagnostic traits of mammals include having hair rather than scales or feathers, and being warm blooded -- as well as certain hidden anatomical features such as having three middle ear bones, a diaphragm for breathing, and a neocortex brain structure.

Each category of tyranny -- if we have chosen our categories in a way that reflects nature (or in this case human nature) -- should also have certain collections of diagnostic traits. I will refer to the diagnostic traits of each species of tyranny as its hallmarks. Below I will list what I believe are some hallmarks of tyranny, followed by additional hallmarks of populist tyranny, and the further hallmarks left-leaning populist tyranny. For readers familiar with the history of Communism and Nazism in the 20th century, these hallmarks may strike a chord of familiarity. The same goes for readers who have seen wokeness unfolding in the West in recent years.


The hallmarks of tyrannical government of all sorts include authoritarianism, extremism, and identity politics, defined and illustrated as follows:

  • Authoritarianism is a sense of being entitled to control other people. It manifests as highly centralized government authority, lawlessness, suppression of dissenting voices, and arbitrary, intrusive governance -- particularly including widespread and vicious use of government authority against political rivals.
  • Identity politics is the stance of advocating moral double-standards, in which people are viewed as having different moral status, eventually leading to differing rights or obligations, based on demographic characteristics such as race, class, sex, religion, and ethnicity.
  • Extremism is the embrace of policies and principles that flagrantly defy reason and common sense. In particular, it tends to include utopian "final solutions" to problems that are endemic to the human condition.

Populist tyrannical ideologies -- from that of Plato's Republic, to Soviet and Chinese communism, to Nazism -- exhibit the hallmarks of tyranny in general, with two modifications. First, the identity politics of populist forms of tyranny tend to be based on a narrative of historical class exploitation (e.g., by the Jews, the "bourgeoisie", or straight white males). Second, in populist tyrannical movements, the characteristics of authoritarianism, identity politics, and extremism emerge in a decentralized form, imposed by partisans of the ideology in any spaces, institutions, and jurisdictions where they hold sway. This process begins long before the movement consolidates central power, as we have seen happen with the woke movement in recent years.

Leftist tyrannical movements -- including all of the above except Nazism -- share all of the hallmarks as populist tyranny, with the stipulation that their extremism takes the form of radical progressivism, defined as extreme disregard for traditional norms and longstanding laws. Elements of radical progressivism (common to the Communist movements in the Soviet Union and China, to Plato's archetypal tyrant, and to the woke movement) include things such as negating gender differences, rejection of traditional religion, aggressive wealth redistribution, disarming private citizens, gutting the pre-existing legal system (e.g. legacy police departments), negating meritocracy, and denigrating traditional culture and cultural icons.


My next few posts will illustrate how these hallmarks were visible in the early stages of the three most murderous regimes of the twentieth century -- Russian and Chinese Communism, and German Nazism -- and how they are also visible in the woke movement today, in case you haven't noticed.

You need to reference more past work here. Since the 1940s, countless thinkers have drawn parallels between Communism and Fascism, trying to identify a common element that causes societies to descend into tyrannies, usually with the idea that it might pre-emptively prevent such an outcome. Here are some examples:

Karl Popper and "The Open Society and Its Enemies", where Popper traces tyranny back to Plato, Hegel and Marx. He identifies historicism, a belief in a predetermined historic destiny, as one similarity. Fascism has the inevitability of racial struggle, while Communism had stages of history where society was destined to progress through capitalism, socialism, and then to communism.

Hannah Arendt and "The Origins of Totalitarianism". More or less the foundational text of the entire idea of "totalitarian studies". Blames mass society, pan-nationalism, racism, and the collapse of traditional sources of authority in the Kaiser and Tsar as the key similarities that enabled the rise of Fascism and Communism.

Even Ayn Rand, who identifies "altruism" as the cause, can fit here. Specifically, her criticism that Auguste Comte's version of Altrusim, which demands that individuals should live not for themselves, but for others, leads to tyrany. Whether that other be the proletariat, the state, the nation, or the race.

As for the idea that you need to look for the precursors of Nazism/Communism, and that by drawing parallels between this and Woke, you can also identify Woke as being tyrannical, is nonsense. Because you don't even need to look there. Whatever you want to call the current ideology, it already has totalitarian outcomes. To beat my usual drum, it was the lockdowns. No need to fret about what they might do in the future when the past already has an example.

I hate that every long form essay now comes under suspicion of being generated by AI. But this looks very much like you used AI to generate much of it, with perhaps some edits. The amount of effort to write multipage screeds like this, just to farm AAQCs from fellow woke-haters on the Motte, is characteristic of either a monomaniacal obsession not displayed by even our most dedicated and prolific polemicists, or someone who's testing his prompt engineering skills.

So, really man, did you write all this?

I hate that every long form essay now comes under suspicion of being generated by AI.

I don't see this as such a bad thing. Maybe it'll make people to actually get to the point faster instead of doing a Scott and spending pages and pages of pointlessly waffling around the periphery.

For what it is worth, the diction and grammar makes this seem less likely to be AI to me.

Haha. Yes I really wrote it.

My goal is not to farm AAQC's. I am writing a book and serializing it on TheMotte to get feedback. The AAQC's are nice, but the feedback is invaluable. The working title of the book is They See Not [cf. Proverbs 135:16].

But this looks very much like you used AI to generate much of it, with perhaps some edits.

I do not believe it looks like it was written by AI. But, if you know of an LLM that will generate sourced evidence for the malignancy of the woke mind virus without being hacked, please do let me know.

On the power of the purse and control of the Treasury.

I’ve seen a few articles and videos going around, referencing and linking or exerpting the various left-wing people (mostly women) on “short video” social media filming themselves crying about how they can’t sleep because they’re up all night with the thoughts of how their children are about to starve because Trump is taking their EBT and Social Security away; followed by a debunking of this — complete with links to/excerpts of the press conference addressing this mistaken view, and how these sorts of domestic benefits are unaffected by any funding halts President Trump has ordered so far — and how these people have worked themselves up due to believing scaremongering from voices on the left. But I’ve come to wonder whether this is just about riling up these sort of easily-misled people… or if it’s about laying groundwork for a fight over the Treasury Department.

I’ve repeatedly held (here and elsewhere), whenever someone has talked about “defunding the left,” that it would actually be very hard to do, because for all that the constitution gives Congress “the power of the purse,” in reality all the checks are actually written and issued by the unelected bureaucrats at Treasury, as seen in every “government shutdown.” So what if Congress orders some left-wing institution defunded… and Treasury just keeps writing the checks anyway? I’ve argued that they can, and maybe even will, just defy Congress, because who can stop them?

Well, on the one hand, we’re seeing that permanent bureaucrats are less “unfireable” than I thought. On the other, we have this tweet from Musk on how independent people at the Treasury act:

The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups.

They literally never denied a payment in their entire career.

Not even once.

So, again, what if Treasury officers keep issuing checks after being told to stop? Or, in an alternate scenario that brings things back around to my first paragraph, they start engaging in the sort of malicious compliance we’ve already seen elsewhere (like the “No DEI? Guess we have to stop teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen!” bit)? If they talk about how, since they can’t tell who’s been really fired by Trump and who hasn’t, and thus who they should or shouldn’t issue paychecks to, they’re going to err on the side of caution and halt all federal employees’ paychecks (are ICE agents going to be deporting people for free?). Or how if Trump’s talking about abolishing the IRS, that means they need to put an immediate stop to issuing anyone’s income tax refunds. Or how they’re so confused trying to figure out what is and isn’t funded by Trump’s rushed, poorly-written executive orders, they’re just going to halt all Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, EBT, etc. until things get “straightened out.”

Because what are Trump, Musk, and company going to do, fire them all? Because this is where Scott’s “Bureaucracy Isn't Measured In Bureaucrats” really comes into play. The more people at Treasury you fire, the fewer are left to process and issue all the funds that need issued, the more everyone’s paychecks and Social Security and Medicare and EBT and tax refunds get delayed.

So, will the Treasury #Resist? Can they be reined in, or does their control over the cash spigot so many depend upon give them too much power?

Vaguely relevant:

https://x.com/jneeley78/status/1886394836195922200

Another of the DOGE Six, Gavin Kliger, has a substack and in response to the Wired article wrote a paywalled post titled “Why DOGE” with a $1k a month subscription price ($10k annual). The post is blank.

People online have been getting really upset at how young people are in charge of the treasury as opposed to boomers under Elon's New Order. I have no real opinion but think it's spectacularly based to set up a troll substack like this. Apparently some of them are super talented, one was decrypting the Herculaneum scrolls with AI.

The basic problem Trump/Musk have is that trying to defund government agencies you dislike isn't new. Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act to prevent Nixon from doing it, and the Supreme Court upheld it. If Treasury stops sending the checks, which they will imo, they'll just get enjoined and then resume sending them. More details: https://adamunikowsky.substack.com/p/simulating-doge, he thinks SCOTUS will uphold the Impoundment Control Act if it comes to them and that seems reasonable to me.

Sure, but Congress will find it easier to act to "resolve" the conflict.

Much of it is a three piece gambit -- they have to throw the agency into chaos & dysfunction, the Congress has to see that the agency being dysfunctional isn't hurting anything so it is safe to actually reform.

Congress controls the purse, just like you control your own budget. The treasury cannot block payments unilaterally, just like banks cannot do that to you for the same reasons.

If Musk has rooted the Fiscal Service, then he has the operational ability to block payments unilaterally, regardless of whether or not that is legal.

I don't know if he is planning to do this (the benign story where Musk only wants read access is also plausible), but I have no doubt that the administration has wargamed at least some scenarios which involve breaking the law and daring anyone to stop them, and refusing to make legally-required payments as a negotiating tactic is something both the Trump organisation and Musk's Twitter used as something close to SOP.

I think it is pretty common for any large entity (not just government) to have separate departments for authorizing payments and making payments. I am pretty sure in my own employer this is exactly how it works. If department or individual X with authority to authorize payments has done so it's not clear why department or individual Y should be second guessing them about whether the payment is permitted. Especially for large and complex operations it's not clear to me how the "department of writing checks" can also be expert in the subject matter of every other department and what they are and aren't authorized to spend money on. The accountability is (properly) located in the entity that authorized the payment, not the department that wrote the check. Blaming the department of check writing would be like blaming my bank for letting me send a bunch of money to gambling platforms.

I posted this in last week's thread about a nearly identical topic that is prescient here:

In constitutional law, it is very clear--the executive branch does not have the authority to stop payments. A entity like DOGE isn't even a part of the government and does not have a right to view classified material. Regardless, this is considered impoundment. There are 3 reasons for this:

  1. Article I, Section 9, Clause 7: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” President's do not create law, congress does. Withholding funding is considered "Impoundment" by

  2. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 which was upheld via judicial review by

  3. The SCOTUS ruling in Train v. City of New York (1975).

So these actions would go against all 3. The Constitution has not been amended, the law has not been repealed and the supreme court has not seen a case to change that precedent, at least not yet.

This is doubly so for Musk, who isn't even an official part of the government. If Trump wants to change this, he can ask congress to pass a law--republicans are a majority in both houses, or they can try to amend the constitution.

But this is unlawful just like the OMB executive order and for the same reasons. Congress has the power of the purse, not the president.

I think you may be wrong in certain areas. First, DOGE is part of government (read the EO). Second, the president can give info to whoever he wants. Third, the President can certainly stop payments where the authorizing legislation is broad and open ended (eg 50m to foster goodwill in LATAM is not a command to spend xx dollars on a specific project in LATAM)

First, DOGE is part of government (read the EO)

The DOGE created by the executive order is a beefed-up Government digital service, which sits in the EOP, and is headed by a United States DOGE Service Administrator who is an EOP employee reporting directly to the White House Chief of Staff. The job of this DOGE is to co-ordinate the activity of the DOGE teams set up in individual agencies (consisting of agency employees who formally report to the agency head, but have a dotted line to DOGE), with a particular focus on software interoperability. The executive order explicitly doesn't transfer any of the authority of the Office of Management and Budget to DOGE, so as far as I can see DOGE has no authority to block spending.

Even from my mostly Trump-sceptic point of view, DOGE is a good idea, and making Elon Musk the public face of it and giving him some suitable advisory role will make it more effective, as well as making it easier to pull in someone first-class from a private-sector tech company for the crucial full-time role of DOGE Service Administrator.

Elon Musk is not an employee of the EOP reporting to the White House Chief of Staff (and couldn't be while continuing to hold his private-sector jobs), and if the post of United States DOGE Service Administrator has been filled by someone else, this fact has not been publicised. The media is reporting that the people working with Musk on @DOGE are not government employees either, and are mostly still being paid by Musk-owned companies. So the @DOGE that is shutting down USAID and rooting the Fiscal Service is not the DOGE of the EO.

I can't comment on what @DOGE is doing because they aren't saying, but given that USAID and the Fiscal Service were set up by Congress it is probably illegal and definitely irregular.

You are wrong on #1 and #2: Congressional action is required in order to create new executive branch offices. Presidents cannot do that through executive order per the constitution Article II, Section 2, Clause 2. DOGE was not created by congress and Musk has not been approved by congress. #3 depends, as most funding is earmarked to what organization it goes to.

Specifics matter. If Trump wants to have a new office in the executive branch, he will have to ask congress to create it for him. If he wants Musk to lead it, he will have to get him confirmed, the latter will never happen.

He won't do either one, so it looks like we are headed toward a constitutional crisis.

Congressional action isn't needed to create roles in the Executive Office of the President that are not "Officers of the United States". Musk could do most of what DOGE is doing legally as a Special Assistant to the President, but he isn't one, he is just a private citizen who Trump has told his top political appointees to share information with.

Well, you still haven't actually read the EO.

DOGE is established as a renaming of the US digital service to US DOGE service, with a temporary suborganization called US DOGE Service Temporary Organization with teams of Special Government Employees.

And USDS's new mandate is a Software Modernization Initiative, not technically a budget directive, so the mission of USDS has not changed.

Finally, the president does have authority to share classified info with anyone at any time. The President and only the President is the ultimate classificarion authority (because classification is justified under constitutional provisions for foreign policy, I guess).

Whether this EO gives Elon the right to dismantle USAID is probably subject to controversy, but on the points you are pushing the Trump Admin has already thought of and dismissed your objections.

What the Trump administration is trying to do with this executive order is unlikely to hold up in court. Wether anything is actually paused at that point is another story.

Lets say your interpretation of the EO is correct. It is still illegal for him to be making financial decisions, firing people and unilaterally canceling spending explicitly earmarked by congress.

The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups.

They literally never denied a payment in their entire career.

Not even once.

The main job of the US Fiscal Service (the agency of the US Treasury that Musk and his staff have rooted) is to make payments which have been authorised by other parts of the government. Given Musk is tweeting first and asking questions later, what he almost certainly means here is that (for example) when the SSA tells the Fiscal Service who to pay Social Security benefits to retirees, the Fiscal Service doesn't run any additional checks beyond the ones already run by the SSA. In the case of Social Security, this is obviously the right thing to do - the government should be paying Social Security to otherwise-eligible retirees who are suspected terrorists. It's not just a good idea, it's the law. Whether the Fiscal Service should be acting as a second line of defence to deny payment if e.g. the Department of Defence contracts with a local ally who might be a terrorist is a legitimate question about how to organise the government, with "no" being a perfectly reasonable answer.

There are two plausible stories for what is going on here:

  • The benign one is that Musk got read-only access to the database, which he wanted because downloading the entire database of US government disbursements (including payee, date, amount, and source of authorisation) is the easiest way to do what he wants to do with @DOGE (as opposed to the DOGE established by Trump's executive order, which is something else) and the Fiscal Service was the easiest way to get the data.

  • The malign one is that Musk wants to control the Fiscal Service because Musk and/or Trump are planning to cut spending at the bill is paid, not the point where the expense is incurred. (This is consistent with the way Trump ran the Trump organisation until he tanked his credit rating, and is also something Musk did at Twitter). A world where (even if an invoice is approved for payment by the government department who bought the thing) @DOGE is arbitrarily blocking payments because they don't like the politics of the payee is a world where nobody competent will want to contract with the government. And if the same stunt is pulled with Social Security payments, federal payroll, or heaven forfend bond interest, the results are catastrophic. Trump and Musk are reckless enough, and Trump has joked about defaulting on the debt, so I can't rule out the possibility that the plan is to default on the federal debt, and that taking control of the Fiscal Service is the way to forestall a legal challenge.

I can understand that there's arguments that can be made as to why payments would be automatically approved, sure, but then it begs the question: why is the government paying "payment approval officers"? Couldn't the process just assume these are automatically approved? Why is someone in the loop if their job is to pass along paper?

Why is someone in the loop if their job is to pass along paper?

Why indeed. I highly recommend that people on this forum read Musk's biography by Walter Isaacson. I see a lot of people who are confused by what Musk does and it would help them to not be confused.

Musk's whole method of improving systems is to break into the parts of the system that others gloss over.

For example, at Tesla, they bought a machine to do something. The machine is really slow. So Musk asks the guy running the machine why it is so slow. Guy doesn't know. Musk asks for it to be speed up. The guy doesn't know how. So he finds someone who does know. They open up the machine and speed it up +300%. It doesn't work. They dial it down to +200%. Now it works and the throughput is 3x what it was before.

99.9% of people would have treated the machine like a black box. And that's what people are doing here with the government. No one really knows how the government works, even our resident lawyers. It's far too complicated. So they treat it like a black box. Congress appropriates money. The Treasury spends it.

Okay, but like, who, actually spends it? Who signs the checks? Who is the actual person who processes the payment?

I am virtually certain that Musk's process here will uncover a bunch of fraud and waste. And that's why some people are so desperate to stop it.

A world where (even if an invoice is approved for payment by the government department who bought the thing) @DOGE is arbitrarily blocking payments because they don't like the politics of the payee is a world where nobody competent will want to contract with the government.

This very much seems like a win-win for right-wing populists, Trump, and Musk. They all broadly hate the government, so trashing its credibility provides fodder for them to say "Look! See how bad it is!" antics. People will state the obvious that it's particularly bad now because they're trashing it, but they'll just say "Legacy Media lies!" and ignore it.

The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups.

Did he give any examples of these fraudulent and terrorist transactions? Is the Treasury even in a position to stop payments from being made? My understanding is that those issues need to be resolved at the agency level:

The Treasury payment system already runs through several computerized filters, including the “Do Not Pay” system that stops money from going to ineligible recipients such as dead people and known terrorists. There is also a debt-offset system that can prevent payments from going to people who owe child support or back taxes, said Don Hammond, who ran Treasury’s payment system in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Hammond said that federal agencies are responsible for determining who is eligible to receive money. Those agencies then send the payment information to the Treasury Department, which makes bank deposits and wire transfers.

Did he give any examples of these fraudulent and terrorist transactions?

Musk falsely identified payments made before 20th Jan 2025 to Lutheran Family Services for their work on legal Biden administration refugee resettlement programmes as "these illegal payments", but otherwise no.

As most are aware, Trump has announced 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and 10% tariffs on China. It seems to me that it presents a number of opportunities.

Being a Rationalist-descended forum, many here believe in listening to experts, following the data, and trusting science to guide our policies. On the other hand, many others here have observed numerous cases where expertise and data collapse when confronted with unexpected real-world events, and have grown far more skeptical of expertise. I have stated previously that I have little faith in Economics as a discipline; I've seen a lot of failed mainstream predictions and what at least have appeared to be failed policies. These new tariffs are the largest and most consequential policy departure from consensus economics in living memory, and as such they present a profoundly valuable natural experiment. For my entire lifetime, the consensus of economists has been that tariffs are a rotten economic policy, that they stunt economic growth and induce stagnation. These tariffs are very large, are aimed directly at our three largest trading partners, and arrived with very little warning; while Trump had stated his intentions clearly, Trump says a lot of things and no one actually expected this to happen. As such, it seems to me that we have an unusually-good natural experiment here, and we should be exploiting it for maximum value.

Simply put, what happens next?

The proof of a theoretical model is the ability to make accurate predictions. Predictions of large-magnitude changes are more valuable than predictions of small changes. Naïvely, it seems obvious to me that large policy changes should have large effects, and this is very clearly a large policy change. If consensus economics is valid, it seems to me that they should be able to predict with reasonable accuracy the consequences of these new policies, and that those consequences should be unequivocally negative. What negative outcomes should we expect, specifically? There was some discussion last week about whether or not our last attempt at tariffs caused the Great Depression; is that the expected outcome here?

One of the old Rationalist traditions is betting, and it's been a somewhat contentious topic as our community has drifted further from the mother country of Scott's comment section. Some people, myself among them, really don't like betting. Happily, this experiment comes with its own betting baked in: what should we expect the stock market to do as the consequences of this policy change roll out? If the economic consensus is valid, what better bear signal could there be than an unexpected, dramatic departure from sound economic policy by the world's dominant superpower? A quick googling tells me that the markets are down generally this morning; should we expect this trend to continue? How do people here intend to manage their investments, given these events?

For reference, previous discussion of the tariffs from last week.

The whole thing was fake.

https://x.com/Claudiashein/status/1886434747238514776

https://x.com/JustinTrudeau/status/1886529228193022429

Trump likes tariffs, but there is one thing he likes more than tariffs: pushing around world leaders.

I expect short term negative economic outcomes on the Canadian side as Trudeau and the Liberals fight a losing trade war until the next federal election, which they will delay as long as possible but lose. Standing up to Trump plays well with the Liberal base, and allows them to blame the bad economy on him, but it won't be enough to salvage the election. The incoming Conservative government will make some concessions, flatter Trump, ramp up the war on Fentanyl, spend more on the military (the last two things they want to do anyways), thus allowing Trump to declare victory and claim he got Trudeau booted from office. Trudeau manages to salvage some shred of his legacy as the guy who stood up for Canada, and the Liberals will claim that their efforts paved the way for the resolution.

End result: minor increase of Canadian/American economic integration with advantage going to USA, and the Liberal party gets an excuse for why they lost the election. If Canadians are lucky the whole thing allows the Conservatives build infrastructure to sell more oil (and other natural resources) to someone other then the USA and/or increase free trade between the provinces.

Edit: Already wrong. Another W for the nothing ever happens crowd. A domestic win for Trudeau certainly.

This seems like you're setting up a situation where "if I don't see utter economic catastrophe as predicted by the most histrionic leftists as a result of these tariffs, it'll prove once again that economists, the establishment, and anyone else who disagrees with me is wrong, and my vibes are always right".

The tariffs aren't actually that big by historical standards. Compare them with the Smoot-Hawley tariffs that exacerbated the Great Depression. These tariffs are starting from a low historical baseline, are only hitting the top 3 trade partners instead of everyone, have carveouts (like Canadian energy), will probably be subject to delays (e.g. Trump delaying with Mexico due to their symbolic concessions), etc. Further, the US economy is relatively autarkic with its trade as a percent of GDP being surprisingly low compared to almost any other nation. Then there's the factor of the long-run growth rate being almost monotonically positive in the US, which would offset any decline due to trade wars and would mean that any losses would probably have to be observed from "less growth" rather than "negative growth". Moreover, the hits from tariffs, while some are immediate, largely come from long-term effects of certain industries being less profitable.

I don't think tariffs are always bad, and this isn't a particularly heterodox position in Economics especially with obvious modern examples like China. But I would prefer them to have a clear purpose -- the Chinese and maybe Mexican tariffs make sense to some extent, but the tariff against Canada seems like a pointless own-goal.

This seems like you're setting up a situation where "if I don't see utter economic catastrophe as predicted by the most histrionic leftists as a result of these tariffs, it'll prove once again that economists, the establishment, and anyone else who disagrees with me is wrong, and my vibes are always right".

In the first place, I'm not perceiving the predictions of doom to come from "the most histrionic leftists", but rather "the most histrionic economists". Secondly, it seems straightforwardly useful to positively identify who the "most histrionic" people are so that we can stop listening to them. I learned that Paul Krugman was one of these people based on his predictions in 2016, and I'll never take anything he says seriously again. How is this not the straightforwardly correct thing to do?

It seems very clear to me that this policy is far, far outside anything the Economics consensus considers reasonable. If you disagree, the obvious next step would be for me to look for prominent economists predicting doom; I have not looked yet, but I'm confident they won't be hard to find. Do you think I'm wrong? "Less growth" doesn't cut it; we have "less growth" at home. Your list of mitigating factors seems entirely reasonable, but all of them apply just as easily to "this is a good idea, actually". Bad policies are bad because they have bad results, right? So what are the bad results we should expect?

I may be completely misinterpreting your post but it seems to me that the tariffs are clearly intended to be temporary bargaining chips. Long-term consequences are not expected.

That's not clear to me, but then, my sense with Trump generally is that we're flying blind. If this is a bargaining position, what result is he trying to extract from Canada?

One possible option might be to help accelerate the decline of the Liberal party and make the Conservatives commit as allies to Trump personally. That might make sense; I think the general international consensus has derived a very large part of its power from being the party of "normality", so ending normality might work directly against them if it can be done without excessive cost.

Mainly, I'm interested in people nailing down what they actually see happening and what they expect the results to be. I personally have been at least loosely thinking of these as permanent measures, with the goal being eventual re-industrialization of the US, but will happily admit that I might be wildly off-base with that.

One possible option might be to help accelerate the decline of the Liberal party and make the Conservatives commit as allies to Trump personally

If this was someone else doing it, maybe, but Trump doesn’t play 5D chess.

I'm not perceiving the predictions of doom to come from "the most histrionic leftists", but rather "the most histrionic economists

Please post some examples. There are plenty of bad economists out there writing for progressive think tanks or leftist op-ed sections, but they're already widely reviled by the Right, so they don't serve as good examples.

I want to see economists who are regarded as at least somewhat neutral who are clearly saying that this will be an economic catastrophe, and not just "bad" to some degree. Preferably in an article of some sort, not just Twitter shitposts.

E.g. Noah Smith is probably most left-leaning econ guy I follow, and his article states unequivocally that the tariffs will be bad, but in terms of how bad exactly, he posts an image where the long-run effects are all in the single digits, mostly in the low single digits. This is bad obviously, but hardly cataclysmic.

So what are the bad results we should expect?

Price increases on goods most exposed to the tariffs + less economic growth than we'd have in an alternative reality where the tariffs don't happen. As far as I know, this is the consensus of most economists.

Tariffs on EU were also promised to come soon. Allegedly, EU doesn't import enough american agrocultural produce and cars.

Nobody is more weak to flattery than Donald Trump. I have argued here before that if Barack Obama called Donald tomorrow and told him he fully agreed with his policies, he was doing what Barry hadn’t been powerful enough to do, and he was undoubtedly one of the best presidents of his lifetime (other than himself), he could parlay that into regular golfing and a weekly phone call to ‘discuss’ the big issues with minimal real effort. People forget that the biggest reason Trump never went after Hillary in office is that he actually kind of likes her, Bill and her always made nice small talk at Manhattan parties after all, and he can only really be tough forever (rather than for brief moments) against people he actually doesn’t like. He certainly doesn’t like Trudeau. But who can forget how his view on Macron went 180 degrees after he got invited as guest of honor to the French Bastille day military parade, had all the soldiers salute him, etc.

Why is Trump not going apeshit on the UK despite the fact that the trade relationship is still a deficit AND Musk’s recent spergout over Rotherham? Because the Labour government smartly decided that they would deploy Prince William to all diplomatic meetings with Trump, and William being a man of very modest intelligence nevertheless trained from birth to always flatter his foreign contemporaries is well liked by The Donald. Nations are people in the Trumpian world view, personal flattery determines everything. He soured on Kim not when it became clear that he wasn’t going to change his nuclear policy, but when it became clear that he didn’t really seem to like Trump very much. His relationship with Putin is similarly ambivalent, I don’t think he likes the guy because on some level he realizes that Putin doesn’t take him seriously.

I also think this is what frustrates Elon about Trump’s embrace of Altman, Bezos and so on. It’s like spending years building up a business relationship only to have your competitor win a deal after a single dinner and some Grade A bullshit game, it’s seethe-worthy. But Trump has few eternal enemies and even fewer eternal friends. His greatest weakness (and, in some ways, a great strength) is that his primary criteria for loyalty are strictly temporal, rather than historic.

Regarding Kim, one of the most fascinating things about Trump is that no matter how much he rants about communists and Marxists on a general level when it comes to his domestic opposition, this doesn't seem to translate at all to foreign policy, which is ruled by non-ideological "you like me, I like you" considerations as his other interpersonal relations, as shown by the recent U-turn on Maduro. (Sure, there are arguments to be made regarding the actual levels of Marxism within both Kim and Maduro administrations, but that's at least how they are generally seen.)

one of the most fascinating things about Trump is that no matter how much he rants about communists and Marxists on a general level when it comes to his domestic opposition, this doesn't seem to translate at all to foreign policy, which is ruled by non-ideological "you like me, I like you" considerations

Sounds pretty based to me. I really don't like people who try to spread their worldview globally.

Strong agree with all of this. Trump is a vibesmaxxer-in-chief, being far more concerned with how he appears on cable news than any objective measurement of the impact of his presidency. There's a very good chance that some symbolic concessions could delay, reduce, or even cancel the tariffs altogether. None of that is guaranteed, but there's a good chance.

There's a very good chance that some symbolic concessions could delay, reduce, or even cancel the tariffs altogether.

Damn, good call: https://x.com/JustinTrudeau/status/1886529228193022429

Would this be a prediction that the tariffs don't actually happen, then?

Why? Other people have pride, too. As far as the tariffs, Trump likes the market to do well, and that ultimately places an upper bound on tariff policy.

Man, these next few years are going to finally be a referendum on Keynesian versus Austrian economics. Or maybe referendum is the wrong word, but a test. On the one hand, you have the notion that deficits can pile up forever, inflation is required to prevent a deflationary great depression, government spending doesn't cause inflation, etc. On the other hand, you have the ideas that if we balance the federal budget, pay down our debt, reduce regulations, and tax foreign goods, we can keep wage growth above inflation and everyone will be better off. If this plan gets bungled, or is executed perfectly and just plain doesn't work, that's it, Keynesian economics until the end of time.

Personally, I'm rooting for the later case. Trumps first term saw corporate taxes slashed, regulations slashed, minimal inflation, historic wage growth (though that was a low bar), and that included the beginnings of waging a trade war with China. And this was despite "all the economist" saying it would ruin the US economy. So on the face of it, I'm not terrified of what happens with more of a trade war, especially given the aggressive spending cuts Trump's admin has been performing, and the regulation cuts, and hopefully even tax cuts I'm anticipating. I'd say if Trump 45 was a preview of things to come, there is a decent chance Trump 47 will be even better.

Your first paragraph is an egregious strawman of mainstream (Keynesian) economics. It's also not a particularly accurate view of Austrian economics either. Are you saying Austrians would be in favor of tariffs? It's not really clear from what you wrote, but that would be a very strange Austrian indeed.

Tariffs aren't Austrian economics, that's accursed mercantilism.

I expect once Trudeau is gone, Canada bends the knee... but Trump also becomes somewhat less demanding.

I'm not changing my investments, which are broad-market. If the tariffs turn out badly, I don't see any clear winners as a result, and making money off losers (with options or short plays) is too risky for my blood.

Tariffs on Mexico delayed for a month- Mexico making concessions.

If Wikipedia is correct about the scale and scope of the Mexican Drug War, sending 10,000 extra troops to the border (which is the only concession announced) is a pretty meaningless concession - there are already 300,000 plus Mexican troops involved in fighting the drug cartels, and Mexico's interest in defeating them is stronger than America's. (If the Mexicans are deliberately tanking said fight because the cartels have bought Sheinbaum, then sending 10,000 extra troops to the border won't change this).

Two obvious possibilities for what went on on the call:

  1. Sheinbaum turned on the flattery, and Trump agreed to delay tariffs for a month with the expectation that he can have another phonecall in a month's time where she announces another trivial concession, he tells his supporters that his tough policy achieved a massive concession, and the process can continue indefinitely to mutual benefit in domestic political terms. (cf the kayfabe row with Colombia)
  2. Sheinbaum successfully pointed out that a total breakdown in relationships between the US and Mexico would hurt his political position fairly directly because the US relies on Mexican co-operation to police the border, and a short term bounce in immigration would make Trump look bad.

Given the size of the market rallies (and in particular the MXN rally) on the announcement, financial markets do not expect tariffs on Mexico to come back in a month's time, and almost certainly don't expect any kind of voluntary arrangement that would materially curtail Mexican exports to the US.

Also possible that the concessions bought enough goodwill for Trump to believe Rubio will obtain more substantial concessions in a months time.

Kanye West pulled an insane stunt at the Grammys where he had his wife strip naked in front of where they take the pictures. Clearly a publicity stunt (since he wasn’t invited anyway), and he quickly got kicked out.

What’s shocking to me is how freely so many media outlets and people on social media are sharing it completely uncensored. For some reason X doesn’t seem to be marking it as pornography either. It’s quite disturbing to me how widely and casually it’s being shared. I’m not going to link because I don’t think it’s good to share this type of thing but I’m sure a quick search will find the video in question.

The worst part is that his wife looks clearly disturbed, sad, and afraid as he stands there looking around in a sort of combative way. It’s truly awful.

A lot of people on the right saw Kanye as a sort of martyr who stood up for his beliefs enough to get completely cancelled. Hopefully this stunt shows that he is not truly aligned with most conservative’s values, and is just a billionaire who loves attention. We’ll see how it goes.

The worst part is that his wife looks clearly disturbed, sad, and afraid as he stands there looking around in a sort of combative way. It’s truly awful.

Maybe. I'm sure a hypothetical therapist would ask her, a model, "so, what are you getting out of posing nude at the Grammy's?" and her response wouldn't be "absolutely nothing, I'm just a prisoner here in my world famous musician husband's $35 million Beverly Hills mega-mansion".

Just seems like performance art to me.

I agree. It might even fail to rise to the low bar of "performance art." This is a publicity stunt and one that a Kanye affiliated lady has done already!.

When women don't have clothes on, people take notice. It isn't just attractive or famous women. All over the world, every single day, men pay out inordinate amounts of cash simply to see women with less or no clothing on. Sexual interaction need not be present. I'm talking about topless bars / strip clubs / what have you. Let's also remember that men continue to do this when endless explicit sexual content is freely instantly available in digital form. In 2025, more people have access to endless free porn than clean drinking water - and men are still literally throwing cash at IRL women on the daily.

So, Kanye, a person who has made his money in the pop culture entertainment industry, knows that "tits = eyeballs" and that this will be the same today, tomorrow, and forever.

There is nothing more and nothing less to the story.

Always a little bit amused when people not only take the most surface level read of a particular person's behavior, but aggressively impose their own biases on it, reading deep into 'body language' tics that may not even be there.

Its trivial to 'fake' a particular emotional state, especially to cameras. They're literally entertainers its part of their job description. The weird public behavior is about the weakest evidence of the true situation you could find.

So no, I have my beliefs about Kanye, but not much reason to believe he is actually going to lock a woman up without her consent and abuse her until she can't think of leaving.

Its absurdly hard for me to believe that this woman is 'trapped' in a marriage with Kanye in any real sense. My current most likely hypothesis is they both have some kind of exhibitionism kink that Kanye is rich enough to indulge on the largest platforms around, which is gross in that including the public into that is really violating everyone elses' interest in maintaining certain standards of decency.

And in those cases, acting embarrassed or humiliated is oftentimes literally part of the kink.

Also vaguely reminded of Bezos' new wife and her outfit at the Inauguration.

Its absurdly hard for me to believe that this woman is 'trapped' in a marriage with Kanye in any real sense. My current most likely hypothesis is they both have some kind of exhibitionism kink that Kanye is rich enough to indulge on the largest platforms around, which is gross in that including the public into that is really violating everyone elses' interest in maintaining certain standards of decency.

And in those cases, acting embarrassed or humiliated is oftentimes literally part of the kink.

Yeah, this is my take too. It's a way clearer explanation than both people risking their reputations for basically nothing.

Kanye could had been a sort of martyr who stood up for his beliefs enough to get completely cancelled in a previous episode. Just don't cancel people who say that Jews cancel people if you don't want them to be martyrs. That and the threats from his personal "doctor"/handler can't be just dismissed because the dude is acting foolishly. He certainly is not some kind of consistent conservative icon though.

His antics definitely have reduced some of the bite of his past complaining about Jewish producers pushing degeneracy in the black community through what art they support, and what they encourage people to be doing. But he could have been partly right then and part of the problem now. Partly, because art isn't only the result of producers desires without artists themselves having influence. Even though producers and agents can be influential not only through dictating to artists but also by what kind of people they choose to promote.

Regarding his wife's extremely slutty outfits. Kanye West seems to approve and so does she. It doesn't make sense to make her a victim in this. It isn't the first time she is almost naked in outfits that circulate online. I highly doubt she is constantly forced into it.

On a side note (deliberately avoiding the morality-side discussion):

It is interesting to watch the back-and-forth between "everything social you do is potentially publicly visible forever" and various attempts to allow social contact without said permanency.

In this case, you can view this as an attempt at "you can't share this publicly without running afoul of explicit content laws". Not a particularly successful one.

Other attempts I can think of offhand (not from Kanye West in particular, just in general):

  • Always wearing the same outfit. (Daniel Radcliffe did this a fair bit IIRC.)
  • Loudly playing copyrighted music so recordings get copyright-striked. (copyright-struck?)
  • Sending voice calls instead of text to make it more difficult to search through after-the-fact. (This one is rapidly becoming dated.)
  • Sending videos of text instead of text; ditto.
  • Copyrighting your name or likeness and then suing if someone uses it to refer to you in a negative light. (Doesn't tend to work, but the act of suing even if it doesn't win is often a deterrent.)
  • Deliberately including PI in communications and then using GDPR if necessary.

I do not think that this was the intend. I mean, it would be trivial to put black bars over the naughty bits and then you can share the photo on prime time TV.

Personally, I think that different settings have different expectations of privacy. A bedroom is different from a private party, which in turn is different from the streets, which is then different from big entertainment spectacles. If you run naked across the field in the middle of a big soccer game, you can hardly argue that your privacy has been violated when people take pictures.

A lot of people on the right saw Kanye as

How people see him as anything other than mentally ill is beyond me. He constantly expresses delusions of grandeur, and he's freaking Kanye West! His beliefs and values are tied to reality by gossamer threads. I don't mean to dismiss or demean him. I think he is very talented. He thrives in the spotlight, and seems to enjoy it. But he behaves like a lot of people with bipolar disorder. Who knows why he does what he does sometimes.

I don't think it's necessarily against conservative values? I can easily imagine there's some type of point they're trying to make about celebrity culture being a form of prostitution and selling their bodies. It came out about as lucid and legible as you would imagine it would when someone with mental issues is in a situation where no one is able to stop him.

Umm, no, public nudity isn’t really a right wing thing.

For its own sake no, but I can see it as a way of denouncing sinful celebrity worship, once warped through the mind of someone with a bad understanding of how his actions are percieved by others?

No, a right winger denouncing celebrity worship will just say so, and not only not do that but not resort to up to interpretation performance art of any kind.

That kind of shock value performance art is more of a leftwing thing.

Because the culture's approval was coming from left wing institutions, so it was less fruitful to do shock performance art as a right winger. Maybe we'll see more of it from the right if the culture does shift the way it seems it might be, though Kanye's an attention junkie and is jumping the gun by a lot.

I think it’s best the US stops the way it oddly thinks about sex and the naked body. Granted, I was born abroad but I’ve lived here for decades and probably have the same sensibilities as everyone else.

Europes nakedness probably won’t work here due to many reasons, but I think showing an uncensored news story where the main point is ‘ woman gets nude as stunt at celebrity outing ‘ should be fine.

Kanye I don’t believe was ever seen as someone who was standing up for conservatives or someone with a conservative bent, it always seemed like finger pointing at a crazy guy who was fucked by the liberal establishment and might be clawing his way out in a rightward direction. Plus his gospel album was a banger.

Europes nakedness probably won’t work here due to many reasons

What is "Europe's nakedness" anyway?

I live in Finland and the way people approach nudity is absolutely very different from even Germany, nevermind something farther away like Italy.

It's also highly context dependent. Yes, you go to sauna naked (it might even be coed if you're in your 20s and at the summer cottage with friends). You might also see a bunch of students running naked around the block as a dare if you lived close to the student housing in a university town. If someone pulled a stunt like Kanye, people would think they're crazy and either pulling a shitty and inappropriate performance art stunt or really need to see a psychiatrist and get back on their meds.

Europes nakedness probably won’t work here due to many reasons,

For all that people bring up the supposed different attitudes to nudity between the US and the EU I don't really get it. I live in a European country famous for its supposed sexual liberty and you would absolutely not see something like this stunt in public.

Do you really think Kanye chose her outfit? Seems to me the woman is an exhibitionist. She always dresses semi-nude.

But yeah, the 'dress' giving the news outlets a veneer of plausible deniability that she's naked is pretty funny.

The pre undress pics in my feed are maybe the first I’ve seen that lady fully clothed.

Kanye is definitely a weird guy, but that doesn't mean he's wrong about everything.

That seems to imply that there was something to be right or wrong about. I don't really see it. What even is the point of contention here?

I mean in the controversies he got in before, like, whether George Bush cares about black people or not, for example.

Man, nudity. Not necessarily something you want to see from everyone, but surely some billionaire's wife is easy enough on the eyes. And even if she isn't, we just return to the default case of "well that's just what people look like under their clothes". I don't understand the American War On Nudity, though I shall tolerate your prudish culture.

American culture is far more tolerant of nudity now than it ever has been. When else would television shows like The Boys and Game of Thrones get away with showing so much of the human anatomy as within the last three decades?

Boy’s nude swimming was a mandatory subject in American public schools until the seventies.

Right after penis inspection day, right?

No, Americans just used to have a very different attitude towards (male)semi public nudity.

They are cable shows, not TV ones, aren't they? Theoretically, you can only watch them if you paid for HBO/Amazon, you can't stumble upon them while browsing the channels for cartoons after school.

Seems to me they're actively trying to be transgressive, and nudity is a means towards that end precisely because it's still so very taboo.

Or maybe nudity just tickles people in the lizard brain and showmakers can finally get away with it because the taboo really has weakened.

Hell, I don't know. I just find it weird that something as extremely basic as being naked remains a big deal at all. But I realize of course that this is not a mainstream opinion.

More tolerant than before, but still quite puritanical relative to Europe. As I understand it, nudity in Europe is much more divorced from sexuality than in America. The shocked reaction demonstrated here seems exaggerated for a dress (well, "dress") that's 15 square inches of fabric away from a bikini.

Recent examples of nudity in American media reinforce the contrast. Even now, anything including nudity/involving sexuality is Adult and Mature and even the mere acknowledgment of genitalia is risqué. Meanwhile, the Netherlands has a children's show about a man's prehensile penis.

More tolerant than before, but still quite puritanical relative to Europe. As I understand it, nudity in Europe is much more divorced from sexuality than in America.

There is some truth to this, but it also sounds like a teenager's excuse how he came to possess a VHS tape of Emmanuelle. It is a variation of "the grass is less prude on the other side of border" effect, and not very good one. I don't think a pretty lady in skimpy outfit is divorced from sexuality anywhere in Europe. There is only a local difference in where the lines in previous battles for standards of public mores have been fought and lost. In general, Paris, London, Berlin and other big city urban cultures have had a different mores than more conservative small town - rural cultures. In some countries the urban mores have gained more ground than in others.

Concerning Dillermand show, I think Danish religious conservatism decidedly lost during springtime of people's and definitely by around WW1, something to do with industrial pork agriculture urbanizing the rural areas and parliament's iron grip of church providing no ground for a Christian revivalist movement. (Church of Denmark has no archibishop, they are ruled in name only by king and directly by parliament, resulting in a church ruled by concerns of secular non-believers.)

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