This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Seventy years pro-life activists have called their opponents baby-killers and it did not swerve their opposition's resolve by one inch.
Conservatives, particularly MAGA conservatives, must harden their hearts as such. In the coming months and years, there will be no end to the wailing. They will beg you in the name that all that is decent and humane to give them the one exception and save many lives. The rationalist crowd will come to you with spreadsheets and lives per dollar and give logical arguments to save lives. You will be constantly bombarded with propaganda designed to psyop you to support the return of the old status quo.
Put on your biggest smile and say no. That's your cross to bear. Resist the temptation to give in, and to be seen as 'one of the good ones'. Mercy and compassion are the luxuries of the victor, and you have not won yet. This is but the first of many battles in a long war. If your opponents say that your proposals will cost millions of lives, say to them: "Billions." And do what you intended to do, and do it so throughly and completely that it does not have to be done again. Embrace the virtue of Lycurgus and destroy what you must to save what you can.
This kind of posturing is very hard to take seriously absent a compelling case that USAID funding is a meaningful obstacle to conservative victory as such. Your pro-life vs pro-choice analogy doesn't work because the pro-choicers' victory necessarily depends on pro-lifers' defeat.
I think it’s a good strategy because the left has long since weaponized empathy to the point where any cut to government anywhere is going to hurt the empathy puppy. Which effectively means that if you start acknowledging the “do no harm” principle, you effectively cannot ever cut spending. So heartlessness is the only defense against the weaponized empathy. It doesn’t work on people who state openly that they don’t care about the empathy puppy.
And at this point, we have no choice. We cannot sustainably be the world’s sugar daddy, protector, doctor, infrastructure manager and nature conservator. We probably have many more domestic programs than we can actually afford to sustainably support. If we keep that up, we’re going to end up in a mess when we can no longer produce enough value to support this. We might already be there.
How exactly did not eliminating something like PEPFAR prevent any further cuts to spending? The State Department did exactly that weeks before your comment and Rubio still managed to fire the majority of USAID's workforce.
No one, as a matter of the practical reality, has ever had to commit to some totalizing "do no harm" principle, you can simply (to the extent "you" have discretion over the matter) weight the cost of aid cuts against the benefits of doing so. Those benefits certainly include the strictly political and strategic value that defunding partisan enemies involve, but if those are being alleged they need to be specified in concrete terms. "The left will use any morsel of moral thinking against you in some unspecified and indeterminate way" is a useless thing to say without information about what this amounts to in concrete legal or organizational terms, and nobody insisting that we desperately need to halt every last cent of aid has given such an account here.
More options
Context Copy link
Are you really suggesting that the <1% of GDP the US currently spends on foreign aid is some kind of unsustainable luxury? It's a rounding error as far the deficit is concerned.
More options
Context Copy link
Also we have seen decades of it all going one way and understand momentum is easy to arrest. We understand time is short and the iron must be struck while it is hot.
America is not responsible for saving the world and even if cutting some funding causes some harm we never had a duty to mitigate that harm in the first place. I would even be open to redressing some of those harms after we get our own house in order; not before.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I believe that the entire US federal government and civil service is an obstacle to conservative victory. There's only so many times you can play kayfabe and watch your politicians be devoured by DC and come out as creatures of the American imperium. It was a mistake to believe that the institutions would abide by the popular will and not act in their own self-interest. At some point Elrond has to push Isildur into the volcano instead of hoping he won't be tempted.
Except Tolkien's point is that no-one had the strength of will to do that. Not even Elrond, not even Gandalf. The ring could only be destroyed by someone not trying to destroy it but to possess it and destroy it by accident (or by divine intervention).
"Tolkien wrote that no one could have willingly destroyed the Ring, no matter how good their intentions were. He also wrote that the Ring was "beyond the strength of any will to injure it, cast it away, or neglect it"
Elrond would have rationalized why he should not push Isildur because he would not have the will to destroy it. Indeed, that might exactly be why he didn't! (well in the book they don't even enter Mount Doom so even more effort would have been required). Note that Isildur in the book is in fact on his way to destroy the ring when it betrays him and falls off his finger so he can be killed. But Tolkien is clear when it came down to it, no-one on Middle Earth had the will to destroy the ring.
Everyone will be tempted. Everyone will succumb at the end. Even the wise, even the pure. If you think the federal government is like that, then logically your prediction should be that Trump/Elon will not destroy it, but instead take it for their own. Or that Isildonald, heir of Fred and Elond of Tesla will turn against each other and in fighting over it, one will fall into the volcano and be lost with the government.
Hopefully in this analogy the volcano is not one of nuclear fire!
To continue the analogy, what we have here is a case where the ring betrays Isildur... but he survives! Then the ring tries even harder to finish Isildur off, lest Isildur ever get it back again and finish what he was talked out of the first time. And somehow, someway, Isildur just doesn't stop, and just keeps winning. Now he has the ring, and he's hammering away at it with every tool and faculty, because a judge told him he can't just cast it into Mt Doom without a 4 year comment period.
Will a wiser, more battle hardened, once betrayed Isildur let the ring go undestroyed a second time, after all that?
I mean, sure, Tolkien would say "Yes" because that's the mythology he wrote and it's his world and he defined the metaphysical parameters of it to be exactly that way. Analogizing to Trump's current destruction of the deep state, hopefully they have not been created to have such absolute authority regarding the nature of reality.
Although Mike Benz has been going off about how USAID has basically created an entirely false Truman Show-esque reality we've all been living in. So I guess there might be that.
I guess the analogy falls apart a bit here, I don't think they are actually trying to destroy the federal government, just size it down.
So I suppose the better analogy is the ring is at the jewellers getting resized. Which isn't really as dramatic. Unless the jewellers is Sauron's Discount Rings and Gems of course.
A reveal that Musk was part of the deep state all along would be a shocking twist worthy of Sauron deceiving Celebrimbor.
One DOGE to rule them all, one DOGE to find them, one DOGE to bring them all and in the Deep State bind them. In the Land of D.C. where the bureaucrats lie.
I wonder. Maybe it's performative, but Trump seems to angrily blurt out things from time to time indicating he believes the deep state tried to murder him. The axe he's been taking to various departments seems to be driven by vengeance. And the array of ideologically heterodox misfits he's arrayed around him have one thing in common, the destruction of various tentacles of the deep state they've spent their lives combatting.
I don't think he's resizing the ring. I think this is more deeply personal than we appreciate. This is Caesar returning to the pirates who ransomed him and crucifying them to the man.
But the ring in the OP's post is the entire federal government not just the deep state. I simply don't see Trump trying to destroy what lets him govern. Downsize it sure, target the bits that have been problematic for him, absolutely. Take a chainsaw to agencies and NGO's? Yes.
But taking the whole thing down? Shuttering every three letter agency? Getting rid of the military, national parks, ICE?
I really do not see Trump as wanting to be the President who essentially ended the United States of America by delegating every single power to the states, including his own, somehow. Does he really want New York or Portland having control of immigration in their state?
Draining the swamp still leaves you with the land under the swamp. If you didn't want that, you wouldn't have to drain the swamp at all, just blow the whole thing up. And I don't see evidence despite much outrage, that he wants to do that.
Parsing the EOs is impossible but the latest could be read to say that active duty military and ICE is fine but national parks and nearly every single DoD civilian is fired. All the guys who just want to make gun shoot further or missile go faster or armor not break quite so badly and don't particularly care what you do with it.
If people in the deep state tried to murder him how many do you think were involved? Maybe Trump will find out what that sort of thing looks like when he reads all the JFK documents. If it was like ten blowhards then it doesn't make a lot of sense to put strays into hundreds of thousands of people who are otherwise just enhancing your power for no reason other than that you think you can't figure out who the ten blowhards are.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I see this somewhat regularly and I really dislike this style of comment, written like a Roman general giving a speech to the senate.
On a surface level, get a grip! You aren’t fighting a war. Most anybody here engages with politics to is to squabble on the internet and maybe vote.
On a deeper level, I think it really reflects a polarized view. The battle-lines are drawn, and you’re rallying for a cause. But in reality these issues are often not as polarized in the public as you might think. There is room between ‘change nothing’ and ‘blow it all up’.
There is a number of people on this forum who clearly would like to see it as a place for smart right-wingers to organise and rally, rather than a carefully tended neutral ground. Unfortunately, the mods don't seem terribly interested in acting against it unless directly called out for inaction, so the only way to reduce it would probably be to persuade the majority on a grassroots level that it is not in their interest either.
Indeed, it's quite disappointing what this place has become. Good posters like TracingWoodgrains have been banned or moved on. Shitposters from CultureWarRoundup have moved back in, telling us constantly how we have to hate the outgroup with every fiber of our being, and any notion that we should try understanding them is akin to betrayal. The mods are apparently asleep at the wheel. Zorba, the original creator of the site, hasn't posted in 3 months, and hasn't really participated that much in nearly a year.
The shitposters from the CWR never left, although I suppose they used to be better behaved.
Yeah and I don't do it constantly.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Do you think you made a good attempt at understanding the outgroup you described in your post?
Yes, they're fully in the tank for conflict theory. Look at a post like this and try to disagree.
Aside from FC's point, how does conflict theory see any notion that people should try understanding their opponents as akin to betrayal?
Did you read Kulak's post? His general idea is that allowing for discussion just legitimizes evil people who think things like that it's OK for people to rape white girls.
Did you read mine? I'm asking about conflict theory not Kulak, FC already gave you a response why he's not a great example for you.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
...Kulak is your example of a typical poster? With a post about how he doesn't post here any more?
Kulak is a particularly blatant example but plenty of people here are working off the same template.
I am a reasonably prolific poster who has argued for some time that Conflict Theory offers clearly superior predictive power. The difference between kulak and myself, I believe, is that I am capable of communicating on the spectrum this forum is designed for, and he is not. If you need an example of posters being "all in" on conflict theory, I think I'm probably one of the better picks. There are others, but most of the ones more extreme than me tend to get argued against and modded fairly frequently.
I think using my posts would work less-well, though, because I generally don't write unhinged rants arguing for ceaseless war of all against all, and I generally try to back up my arguments with solid evidence. Likewise, people who appeal to all the great old posters who used to represent Blue Tribe here tend to not remember how some of these pivotal conversations actually went on the Blue end. People don't remember the chronic advocacy for lawless violence, the defenses of the indefensible, the absurd behavior, and the blatant trolling campaigns when it's their side doing it. I miss the old days, and I'm dedicated to trying to keep the conversation running as long as possible, but if you think the breakdown is the fault of nasty right-wingers, I think you are mistaken.
More options
Context Copy link
This is a bit like our conversation on "classical liberals". You're operating on broad categories that possibly include me, but pick extreme off-the-wall examples that are a poor fit to the category.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I agree with this sentiment. I broadly align with the right wing but don't like the turn this place has taken since the move off of Reddit. I think we would all be much better served by actually looking more for heat than light, and having less right wing applause lights.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
On the contrary, they are fighting the culture war, and what's a war without some war crimes?
More options
Context Copy link
You flatter me. I have a sophist's love of rhetoric: but if politics is serious - if it is about human life - then it should be taken seriously. I find it less moral to equivocate, to pretend that there is a difference between 'save some lives' and 'save all'. Removing the room for argument is the only way to reduce the size of government otherwise you are merely a ratchet on Leviathan's appetite.
‘Removing the room for argument’
That’s already been done. I don’t know all the details, but Trump seems to have direct authority over USAID. In theory, he/DOGE could take even a cursory look at what programs they fund and make some decisions from a rational basis. But it doesn’t seem like they have a real methodology, it’s just ‘XYZ is corrupted by the woke left, burn it all down’.
I’m fine with making things more efficient, when it comes to aid programs, grants, and regulations, I want people to be arguing over the merits. What I don’t want is for it to be all-or-nothing situation. It doesn’t have to be that way, it would be better if it wasn’t, and I simply don’t agree with your framing.
The other side of that is that leaving room for arguments just leads to the deed never actually getting done.
Imagine a situation where a patient is morbidly obese. He weighs 500 lbs. if he doesn’t lose weight, he dies. Do you start by “negotiating” about how many cheat days he gets? How many sugary drinks he’s allowed to have? How many times he gets to eat dessert? Or do you hand him a strict diet plan that tells him that if he wants to see 2035, he needs to drink only water, not eat more than 2200 calories a day, and he can’t go over. When you start from the position that the cure is negotiable, you end up coming up with excuses to continue the behaviors or in this case the spending habits because if there are loopholes, then you’ll tend to find ways to squeeze more and more programs into the loopholes and not end up doing any actual cutting. If things that are national defense are okay, everything becomes national defense. Just like if you start allowing people to declare cheat days, every day will eventually meet the criteria for a cheat day.
This is why metaphors are overrated outside of poetry. They tend to obscure at least as much as they illustrate. If you want to stick with the fat guy metaphor, DOGE's "economy" drive is hectoring the patient for eating a salad for lunch while ignoring that he eats two pounds of bacon for breakfast and a box of Krispy Kreme donuts for dinner. You would discuss dieting plans where you step down food consumption and coming up with a plan the patient could actually follow and doesn't harm them. You wouldn't just say "you're going on a starvation diet now, figure it out."
But in actual fact the USG is not a fat guy. Spending is not food. It's not going to drop dead of a heart attack if it has irresponsible fiscal policy. The worst case scenarios involve a lot of economic turmoil, but the US isn't going to collapse because social security becomes insolvent.
Moreover, the US has a lot of tools with which to solve its fiscal problems, but no one wants to use them. Conservative elites are primarily focused on cutting taxes for conservative elites and weakening consumer/labor protections; electoral success dictates protecting transfers to elderly and rural voters. So the obvious solution of trimming entitlements and raising taxes is a nonstarter and instead we get a pantomime of cost savings* as a cover for re-legalizing banking scams.
*high confidence prediction: these will not result in meaningful government savings over the long run and will incur higher social costs
*intermediate confidence: they will actually increase government costs over the long run as even more Federal staff are replaced with more expensive, less efficient contractors
If we can break the katascopocracy and stop funding foreign coups and dictators that's good enough for me.
More options
Context Copy link
The worst case scenarios involve a lot of economic turmoil, in a social context where the taboo on political violence has been trampled to nonexistence. Many millions of people are openly cheering for political assassins at this present moment. Many millions more have already demonstrated their willingness to shred the basic constitutional, legal and social protections of those fellow Americans they consider their outgroup, without apparent limit.
If you think "a lot of economic turmoil" is survivable under these conditions, it seems to me that you are stretching optimism beyond the bounds of credibility.
More options
Context Copy link
I would contend that we are headed for an economic collapse simply because we are spending so much more than we produce in GDP, often by simply printing more dollars. To an extent, we can get away with it for now, simply because we’re the World Reserve Currency and oil is traded in Petrodollars. I don’t believe that’s going to last as long as we think it will, and large amounts of liabilities are going to make the process much harder because we’ll be dealing with several crises at once.
First, Theres the inflation from trillions of dollars that will be eventually dumped when the world switches to Petroleum-Yuan or whatever currency we eventually trade oil in. Then you have people and even entire countries suddenly not getting the expected benefits as they’ve long since become dependent on them. You also have millions of people who have been doing essentially make-work jobs and have few marketable skills.
The combination is going to be a poly crisis that will probably crater the US economy and possibly the world economy as well. Add in people used to the government tit no longer getting their benefits, government workers looking for work with no skills that mean anything outside of the government/NGO environment, now needing help or working minimum jobs, needed services no longer happening because the costs are too high to justify showing up. Teachers get low wages now, but if we have 20% inflation and no teacher can afford to be a teacher.
"Economic collapse" covers a range of outcomes from Mad Max to austerity. If this economic apocalypse described really is looming, then DOGE is in chair of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. A project to streamline federal bureaucracy - even if successful - is not going to cover budgetary shortfalls, reverse the rise of China, or bring back
the 60sUS manufacturing dominance. It's not even going to cushion the fall. Neither is cutting foreign aid to zero.Which bring me back to my point: the US has the tools to manage its fiscal issues, but there is no good faith fiscal conservatism in the US when it comes to Federal politics. There are serious conservative proposals for bringing spending under control, but they have no traction with actual politicians. If you think harsh fiscal discipline is the only way to save America from economic disaster, you should be yelling at your leaders to stop grandstanding over trivial savings and a) raise taxes b) cut entitlements. The 'every little bit helps' excuse is, in fact, wrong.
To illustrate what I mean, we have the current House GOP's budget proposal. Now, it's just a proposal and it probably undergo major changes, but it does demonstrate what I am talking about. Johnson has floated cuts to Medicaid (hey, something substantial!) among other things, but not in aid of deficit reduction. No, the plan is to cash in all of the savings (and likely then some) on tax cuts that will increase the deficit.
So let's not pretend DOGE is about radical measures to save money.
If this analysis is correct, it is a huge argument in favor of US foreign involvement. It suggests we are getting absolutely staggering returns for our role as global hegemon and the fact that it isn't coming in the form of annual tribute is immaterial. Pretty much the last thing you'd want to be doing is running around alienating people by abruptly cutting off trade and aid.
More options
Context Copy link
Teachers get paid fine and they’re always going to to be first in line for government backed pay increases. They’re just a big and sympathetic constituency that thinks they should be paid like doctors and lawyers.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sorry, what banking scams are being legalized? (asking for a friend)
The story I'm seeing, is that with the CFPB getting destroyed, banks have free reign to do whatever they want. The fact that banks can't reorder your transactions to extract the most fees from you is attributed to the CFPB. They've also been the ones up Silicon Valley's ass about their crypto projects. The accusation is that the CFPB debanked SV startups trying to get some sort of blockchain based crypto banking off the ground.
The fear is that SV will reinvent banks, but on a computer and with crypto (and hookers and blackjack), but without all the "protections" that normal banks have to provide. Like FDIC insurance, or making sure their mortgage backed securities aren't fraudulent... anyways. They'll all run FTX style scams with their customer's money because they can, and then everyone is worse off, the economy is wrecked, and everyone loses all their money.
I'm sympathetic to the argument, but I also just don't trust the people making it they've so bankrupted their credibility with me, and the things they are willing to spend their political capital on are straight out of a Slaaneshi cultist meeting. So even if they are right, it's just the bad I've accepted I'll have to take with the good.
Yes, that particular reg is in fact the CFPBs. It's their thalidomide, though the prospect of banks screwing you on fees is a lot less convincing than the prospect of babies with no arms. Getting rid of them would bring us back to the Wild West days of... 2009.
More options
Context Copy link
I see -- I struggle to ascribe enough competence to something like the CFPB to think that they'd actually be doing anything useful, but... maybe I guess.
Anyways, can't concerned parties just, like -- not put their money in the SV/hookers/blow banks, and prefer the normal stodgy banks (that steal your money less directly, by being TBTF and F'ing every so often) -- if they are concerned?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I take this point, and it’s certainly true that this kind of decisive action can be gummed up, but I’m not sure it applies here. It seems like the administration has free rein on program approval, they don’t have to negotiate with anybody.
To extend your metaphor, it’s like if the doctor, instead of establishing a strict calorie limit and diet plan, simply said ‘Stop eating!’. You don’t have to be that harsh, you can take a second to come up with a plan that makes sense to you, and enforce it with an iron hand.
Except that “doing it on a rational basis” means getting information about the programs, having public criteria, and sitting down with the heads of the various programs. Word of mouth will quickly out what kinds of programs (say defense) that Trump won’t cut. Then suddenly for no reason at all, everything in USAID is defense related. If you cut than later perhaps restore, there’s a good chance of most of the cuts sticking because you didn’t start out negotiating, you started by laying down the law.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
From Tucker Carlson’s interview with former State Dept. guy Mike Benz, it sounds like USAID was some unholy combo of CIA and the State Department, doing state-destabilization work neither of those relatively above-board organizations wanted to do.
DOGE is basically a Scooby Doo episode where four hackers pull a lever and fall through a trap door into the secret basement of a charity, where they discover the Illuminati are running The Matrix.
“Well gang, let’s pull the mask off this monster and see who it really is…”
“Gasp! It was old Man Kristol all along!”
All sardonic takes aside, it looks like State is bringing all the non-woke USAID charities under its purview.
More options
Context Copy link
After living through the first Trump presidency, this falls on deaf ears. The standard arguments as soldiers rebuttal to anything Trump did, no matter how reasonable, no matter how within the norms of his predecessors, no matter how legally justified was "He's opening himself up to a lot more attacks by doing things this way." But that's just how it looks with you have a media ecosystem that is basically an extension of the DNC, Judges in the middle of nowhere who feel they can exceed their authority issuing national injunctions on spurious grounds, and a bureaucracy hostile to the President as a person, much less his agenda, and a security state that spreads misinformation about it's own commander in chief.
Trump 47 is basically doing things completely different than Trump 45, and still that tired old soldier of an argument "He's opening himself up to attacks by doing it this way" gets trotted out.
There is no counterfactual where Trump is not "opening himself up to attack", except perhaps if he didn't walk away from Butler PA. But it turns out, the best defense is a strong offense.
More options
Context Copy link
How was it supposed to be a slam-dunk? You know that USAID refused to cooperate with an audit, and the only reason we know any of this, is from who started complaining when they lost their funding.
There are some psy-ops to this effect, but I'm yet to see anyone express this sentiment organically.
Aren’t USAID programs and their funding all a part of the public record? The websites not working, but I believe you could previously just search stuff up.
There's a lot of information that gets messy when you try to get more than surface-deep into it. There was a big deal about a USAID grant for 45m to Burma/Myanmar scholarships after DOGE tweeted about it, and these are things you can look up!...
But while there's some funny punchlines involved, it doesn't really tell you that much. IIE got the grant -- which is better than some cases, since domestic grantees in some categories can receive anonymity -- but outside of some joking-not-joking CIA links, that doesn't actually mean much. They're 'just' a cutout, and while they've got a lot of staff, their day staff aren't the ones doing most of the actual spending and day-to-day education stuff.
You can kinda piece together a rough outline by seeing who publicly announces that they've gotten onto a grant with similar numbers around the same time, but even a lot of that falls off the internet pretty quick. It's really easy to go full Pepe Silvia, too.
More options
Context Copy link
So, Mike Benz has been doing a victory lap over USAID. He did this Joe Rogan episode like a year ago before it was in the spotlight, and he's been slowly plodding along over the last who knows how long with his own dinky little podcast or substack or whatever.
To say his profile has exploded is an understatement.
But the thing listening to Mike Benz makes clear, is none of this is as simple as reading the public records. I might only be able to summarize the shenanigans with lots of they, like we know who they are. Mike Benz dives into memos, NGOs, executives, revolving doors between organizations, etc, etc. And somehow, when you stop summarizing everything with they like you are talking about a secret cult, and start naming names and citing specific policy directives, it sounds even more schizophrenic.
Because none of this shit has "Destabilize Hungary" in the memo field of the check. It has nice sounding things like funding the arts, or health, or "training". But then it turns out absolutely all of it actually goes towards people critical of Victor Orban, and attempting to change the culture out from under him such that his positions are unthinkably evil.
"Politics is downstream of culture" often gets attributed to Andrew Breitbart. But it turns out the CIA and USAID have been playing that game longer than Andrew was even alive, including in our own country.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It is interesting how self-unaware this comment is. You are doing what you incorrectly accuse the OP of - only worse.
My point was that you should have a sense of perspective, and not frame things like you're leading the frontline into battle. I don't see how I'm guilty of that.
I don't think you wrote it in that spirit but I can see how georgioz would interpret the tone of "get a grip!" as an officer dressing down his men.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The crux of the abortion debate is the moral status of the fetus, and the moral permissibility of ending life support to the fetus. It's not that activism did not swerve the opposition's resolve - the opposition has a fundamental disagreement of fact with the pro-life activists.
The situation is more similar to animal rights activism (in that it is a debate over the moral status of a living being not everyone considers morally important/relevant) rather than the foreign aid debate (where almost nobody assigns literally zero moral value to foreigners, even if they assign less moral value to them than their fellow countrymen.)
It's fine on the object level if an election result means a federal program is gutted, even one that a lot of people like and which does a lot of good in the world. Even so, I think it would be better to advance the principled reasons for stopping such a program, instead of reveling in how much you're owning the libs or whatever.
All I am asking is for conservatives to put the same level of value on the lives of foreigners as their domestic opponents do on fertilized human embryros. That is the level of commitment that they will need to win. If they can endure that level of opprobrium then the battle is already won. Do you believe that pro-choicers support abortions to 'own the cons'..? On some level, maybe. But they have a genuine belief in the liberty of women, unshackling them from the tyranny of biology. We must similarly have cruel principles that put our own well being over the needs of others.
Is that really all you're asking for?
The conservative position on fertilized human embryos is "Don't kill them." I would assume this position also applies re: the lives of foreigners. The conservative position on fertilized human embryos is NOT "The government must provide all the food/medicine/trans operas/LGBTQIA++ comic books required to get that embryo through life."
This sounds like the old canard that by not providing a womb-to-tomb welfare state, you are in effect murdering the weak.
What am I missing?
I was speaking circuitously: what I meant is that 'conservatives should act as if the value foreign lives at zero'.
This serves a tactical purpose, as to defang reflexive knee-jerk appeals to sympathy.
But also strategically, in shining a spotlight on the revealed preference of their enemies as to the value of foreign life. If foreign lives are valued at one to one, and conservatives are through inaction killing them, then liberals are put in a moral dilemna to overthrow the government or reduce their valuation in contrast to their rhetoric. More likely, however, there will be a downward correction: and then the true work of negotiation begins.
But I don't think basically anyone is claiming they value foreign lives at a 1-to-1 ratio to domestic lives.
Given that the programs were 0.2% of the federal budget, I'd be okay with saying that I value America lives the ~450 times more than foreign lives that that implies, at least as far as US federal foreign policy goes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link