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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5104 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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You may remember racism being declared a public health emergency during the height of Covid. So now the new HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy is declaring antisemitism a "spiritual and moral malady that sickens societies and kills people with lethalities comparable to history’s most deadly plagues". Since it's a malady and he promised to Make America Healthy Again Health and Human Services will be working with other departments to fight this sick sick wrongthing.

I'm thinking that Trump administration isn't "defeating wokeness", just updating it to their funhouse mirror version.

Yeah, I've heard the term "woke right" bandied about in the last few months and I'm only starting to get it now.

The funniest part is that this is the opposite of what the people who came up with it meant.

Cross posting from /r/credibledefense, but thought Mottizens might have an angle on this.

As someone with family in the Philippines, I’ve been feeling concerned about risks presented by the country’s close alliance with an increasingly volatile US, especially in the context of a war in the West Philippine Sea/SCS that the US is looking more and more likely to lose. A few years ago, the US felt to me like a better partner than China after Duterte’s reconciliation efforts with Xi were largely rebuffed, and since then we’ve seen a major investment in new US bases in the Philippines, especially Luzon. However, a number of factors make me think that the Philippines would be better off explicitly pivoting towards neutrality.

First, there’s the simple fact that US naval construction remains deeply and utterly broken, as I’m sure most of us are aware, while China’s continues to grow at pace. The starkness of this disparity has grown in recent years and it no longer looks like the US has the state capacity to fix it. Consequently, the likelihood of a conflict over Taiwan that goes badly for the US and leaves the region in control of China is higher than it used to be. Moreover, while the US can pack its bags and go back to Guam, the Philippines will forever be stuck less than 200 miles off the coast of mainland China.

Second, and much more recent, there’s the shift towards a more erratic and transactional foreign policy by the US. While US bases in the Philippines are of mutual benefit for now, it’s not inconceivable to imagine a rug-pull exercise whereby the US pulls its forces out in exchange for a concession from China. Likewise, it’s questionable whether the old ideals of loyalty would mean the US would help with reconstruction if the Philippines got hit hard by Chinese missile strikes in a Taiwan conflict. Additionally, many of the soft-power inducements provided by USAID projects in the Philippines have now been cancelled. I don’t want to turn this into a discussion of the Trump administration per se, but the reality is that US foreign strategy has undergone a colossal shift in the last two months, and that changes the incentives for its partners.

Third, while China wants its extravagant claims to islands in the West Philippine Sea to be recognised, and probably wants economic and political influence in the Philippines itself, there’s zero indication or historical precedent to suggest that China wants to annex any of the major islands in the Philippines. Consequently, it’s really not clear to me that the security advantages provided by US forces are significant enough to justify the very real and kinetic risks associated with hosting US forces. I’m particularly concerned about nuclear risks, where in a rapidly spiralling conflict China might judge nuclear strikes on US military targets in the Philippines to be less likely to escalate to all-out strategic nuclear warfare than eg attacks on US bases in Guam or Japan.

Fourth and finally, the current presence of US bases in the Philippines does offer them a bargaining chip. It seems to me that the Philippines could basically offer a “Finlandization” deal to China where it would commit to total neutrality in any conflict in the region and withdraw from Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement with the US. Probably to sweeten the package it would have to make some painful concessions to China on disputed islands like Scarborough Shoal, but it could potential walk away with robust guarantees of long-term functional autonomy and non-interference, conditional on remaining neutral.

I’d be interested to hear others’ thoughts, though! Am I being too bleak, or missing some upsides to the alliance for the Philippines?

However, a number of factors make me think that the Philippines would be better off explicitly pivoting towards neutrality.

The question is what do you mean by neutrality. For instance up until recently Finland was neutral, but they spend more money on defense than majority of NATO countries, they have compulsory military service and conscription and warplans that involve turning the whole country into one large military fortress. Being neutral means you have to prepare to face all threats without allies and thus it is much more difficult and costly when it comes to defense spending. Unless you are on of the countries like Switzerland, Austria or Ireland for which it is easy to be neutral as they are far away from any belligerent country.

But for instance if you are country like Belgium which was neutral both before WW1 and before WW2, then neutrality means jack shit when bordering a belligerent neighbor. The only thing neutrality achieved was preventing allies to station their troops there before Germans invaded.

Maybe what you meant was something like Philippines becoming vassals of China instead of USA? That could work for preventing war, but it will not work for larger independence and neutrality as it is normally viewed.

You're being too bleak.

Ancient Chinese proverb: Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

China is vanishingly unlikely to act during this period of disunity between the US and Europe. When they do make the Philippines a client state, it will not be in the style of Japanese WWII aggression. It will be through stronger trade links, a market dominant Han population, and gradual encroachment. When it happens, Reddit will celebrate it. You'll probably celebrate it.

Why do you expect that nuclear bombs would be the weapon of choice if China wanted to knock out US bases in the Philippines? The comparatively short distance from the mainland, relatively difficult setting for air defense against numerous low-flying targets and likelihood that China would consider its immediate neighbours to be soft-power targets to some extent all point to it being a good use case for their rapidly evolving drone technology. I'm also not sure if nuking a base in the Philippines would be seen as safer than nuking Guam - American servicemen would die all the same, and my sense was that most of the world, America included, does not even think of Guam as an area with a civilian population. If the US leadership at that point is at all concerned with the opinion of the peanut gallery, nuking a US (directly involved belligerent) base and large numbers of hapless civilians of a third country that happened to be in the way will surely be seen as giving the US more of a moral mandate to nuke back than just nuking a US base?

(Remind the world that the Guamese exist? Might take too long on global thermonuclear war time if done afterwards, and inspires questions about colonialism that nobody particularly wants to deal with. Grant it statehood? Altering the hair's-breadth equilibrium of US politics in such a fundamental way is usually not seen as worth the political capital it would cost.)

(edit:

/r/credibledefense

What do you see about that sub? The substance seems essentially indistinguishable from /r/worldnews or the long-degraded /r/geopolitics, except everyone is LARPing as an FP writer.)

To be clear, I don’t think a nuclear strike on the Philippines is intrinsically likely, but conditional on the war going nuclear, the Philippines might well be prioritised over Guam as a first target primarily because it wouldn’t set the precedent of targeting American soil.

For example, imagine the US loses a carrier, and decides to respond with an SLCM-N strike on a Chinese command vessel. China decides it needs a symbolic strike to respond, but doesn’t want to move too far up the escalation ladder too fast, so it hits an isolated but operationally significant US base in the Philippines. Civilian casualties might be comparatively low; if you hit Fort Magsaysay Airfield for example civilisation casualties might be in the low thousands, similar to what you’d get from hitting Guam.

Right, but will the Chinese interpret (and expect the Americans, and other observers, to interpret) Guam as American soil for this purpose? In a limited (non-MAD) nuclear exchange, it seems that optics/bystander moral buy-in would matter nontrivially for escalatory decisions, and accepting any civilian nuclear casualties in the Philippines (and of course fallout, which is still itself treated as beyond the moral pale to inflict upon someone) would surely, in descending order of confidence, (1) be seen as making China more deserving of retaliation in the eyes of third-party bystanders and (2) the same in the eyes of the American public. It would also put everyone else hosting American bases on high alert - Japan might grit its teeth and mostly sit out a Taiwan invasion, but how would that calculus change if it also had to make a snap decision between kicking the Americans out and having Okinawa nuked?

(On that matter, there is perhaps some argument that if the Chinese do prefer to fire a warning shot at American overseas bases, the Japanese ones would be preferable over the Philippine ones? In a CN-TW conflict scenario, Japanese hearts and minds would be as lost to the Chinese as Polish ones are to the Russians over RU-UA; the same can't be said of the Filipinos)

Maybe just read this post again and take a breath. How would this post sound to an objective person?

This is not going to happen anytime soon. The Philippines are not a priority for China. There's not going to be a nuclear war between US and China. Etc.. Etc...

It might be a good time to think about your social media diet.

Counterpoint- if the specter of WW3 with Russia is enough for Trump-aligned parties to want to cut ties with Ukraine to hedge risk and cut potential costs, the specter of WW3 with China is enough for non-Trump aligned parties to want to cut ties with the US to hedge risk and cut potential costs.

I'm fully open with calling both of them hyperbolic, but hyperbole has a lot of sway in the governing coalition of the current white house, and those who embrace hyperbole on one side of the world don't exactly get to claim that others are being unreasonable for similar framings of concern on the other. The use of the framing as legitimate enough to drive sudden shifts in US policy likewise legitimizes the use of framings by other parties, including in directions against american preferences.

It’s certainly a timely post. A Philippine F/A-18 just went missing over the South China Sea about an hour ago.

How feasible is it to eat on food stamps

Confidence level: 20 hours of research probability I missed something major >90% Felt it was pretty clearly CW since SNAP benefits are pretty CW

Food stamps recently had a proposed cut that is probably going through. Of course it's hard to know if these will actually go through or not and will it really make a major impact.

I decided to look into how much food stamps actually cover I decided to run some numbers

First I had to pick "what an actual diet might look like"

I decided to use my "standard bulking diet" which I had laying around (notably it's got nearly complete nutrition. and input the numbers into a spreadsheet.

I got to $9.30/day. in costs. slightly below half of that were the fruits and vegetables (thank wal-mart for having frozen vegetables and canned salmon.) Man fruits and vegetables are expensive!

Now you could definitely reduce costs by say going down to 1/3rd of a can of salmon, but I found myself limited by getting enough Selenium, B12 and vitamin D while avoiding getting too much folate. Replacing some salmon with some more beans is definitely an option though. Tofu is low enough in folate that you could go with that instead.

The main issue though is that I don't see how you cut down on the fruits/vegetables department very well. previously fruits and vegetables made up $4.51/day so as far as major expenses go that's the 2nd main place to look But the price of food is definitely surprisingly constraining. Though I think if someone tried to be more thrifty than me they could definitely get costs down about 40%. The main constraints are the B12, vitamin D and choline. cutting meat consumption in half and adding more split peas is a good solution there, cutting walnuts for more sunflower seeds and replacing chia with flax and some soymilk may also be wise. As long as the soymilk is vitamin D fortified you can cut down on salmon even more. We're already on frozen vegetables though cutting the few fresh ones for canned/frozen seems like a reasonable option, you'd still be at about $3 a day in fruits/veggies though.

Looking at how SNAP works, SNAP beenefits curve manages to avoid welfare cliffs! So for someone working a 20 hr/week job it covers about $5 a day. that's a little over half of all food costs absorbed by SNAP. There's probably a decent amount of room to reduce costs.

Though at the same time SNAP benefits basically give you a 30% tax on income <2k/month (roughly anyway) in fact in the state of california it seems that you'd need to be a family of many to qualify for SNAP. a single person house working full time literally cannot qualify with standard rent payments. A person working full time as the sole breadwinner of a 4 person household can get ~$400/month from SNAP if they make the minimum wage in california. Though I guess that's why it's only 1 in 8 people taht are even on the program in the first place.

Comparing this to the thrifty food plan by the us government (skip to page 38) I notice that they literally don't get enough vitamin E or D, I understand vitamin D but vitamin E? Come on sunflower seeds are cheap and have plenty of vitamin E.

Adjusted for inflation the thrifty food plan pays about $10.66/day compared to my 9.30 so my meal plan is actually a small step cheaper. (you have to divide their spending by 3 because the reference male eats 1/3rd of the calories of the family and then adjust by inflation)

Roughly speaking per day they were eating

1.7 lbs of vegetables a day 1/3rd starchy with a small amount of leafy greens also including a large amount of beans (counting those as vegetables!) 1.28 pounds of fruit per day of which 1/3rd was fruit juice. 0.67 pounds of grains a day, of which half are refined 1.97 pounds of milk a day, 3/8ths whole fat 5/8ths low/nonfat almost all from milk cartons 0,77 poudns of meat a day 0.33 pounds of misc a day

At the same time the govs plan eats about the same amount of vegetables standard bulking diet. counting the dried legumes as vegetables, I typically eat 1.5 pounds of vegetables a day, (they use a family of 4 but a male is expected to eat 1/3rd of the calories that the thrifty food plan has). They also devote most of the vegetables to the starchy variety rather than the cruciferous ones I mostly ate.

Fruit again was a deviation (as expected) I was eating a little over 1.25 pounds of fruit daily on my reference diet, while the Thrifty food plan is going on the same but the composition changed to be 1/3rd fruit juice.

They also include a good amount of pasturized milk which makes sense I guess. The protein requirements they had were also significantly lower than my standard bulking diet's requirements (70 g/day vs 120) presumably this allowed them to cut out a lot of the foods I ate.

In fact it appears that the majority of protein the Thrifty food plan gets comes from milk, as milk represents roughly 30% of the diet by weight.

I think the low amount of seafood in their plan reflects the lack of omega 3 DHA or EPA required. They only checked for omega 3 ALA which is relatively easy to obtain via Flax/Chia/Walnuts. DHA and EPA are the reasons I had to eat a whole half a can of salmon while on my bulk.

I wonder though, how far down can you actually go in cost of food while still maintaining a healthy diet? I think I could get below $6 but much lower than that and we run into b12 issues. 1 serving of canned salmon covers b12 and lentils/split peas/chia seeds/sunflower seeds can cover most of the rest. Though chia seeds are randomly pretty expensive...

The constraints would be

  1. Must have 2300-2400 calories

  2. must have at least 110 g of protein (I'm a lifter ok?)

  3. must have no more than 16 grams of saturated fat

  4. Must meet all the reccommended Dietary intakes for micros/macros on Cronometer without exceeding the upper limit (Except for the carbs/fat). Note that cronometer has no EPA or DHA requirement and only has a total omega 3 category sadly.

Some Questions about SNAP that I can't understand for the life of me even after researching it for 20 hours

Is it me or do people earning about 10k-30k/year have effective 50% marginal tax rates after transfers? Is there this weird tax range where your marginal tax rate falls down as you stop qualifying for federal aid but don't get pushed into the upper tax brackets?

Why was 30% of gross income spending on food chosen? It's such a strange number to me, A normal family of 4 should be spending like 8k/year on food? Most families I know spend <10% of their money on food, (shelter though oh god)

When I look at the federal gov's Thrifty food plan I don't see actual equations, I know they used a linear optimization program but I can't for the life of me determine its constraints. Why so much Milk? Why so many potatoes and so little leafy greens? Why nearly no nuts/seeds? Why couldn't it get vitamin D or Vitamin E and why was the USDA willing to just give up instead of manually editing the diet to incude enough vitamin A/D? (pretty easy to do with canned seafood, sunflower seeds and almonds)

I know they used a linear optimization program but I can't for the life of me determine its constraints.

From your link, see Thrifty Food Plan, 2021 Optimization Model (.zip) -> inputs/in_nutrient_constraints.csv

Their Vitamin D target is 15-100 (ug/day?) for men 20-50 years old, and I think TOCPHA is Vitamin E at 15-1000 (mg/day?). I suspect that they met their targets, without meeting your targets.

Glad I put that I probably missed something major! thanks!

Also page 36 they state " Two micronutrients are below the RDA, specifically vitamin E and vitamin D," but they did meet 85% of the RDA. Still just eat some sunflower seeds goddamnit

I wish more upper middle class people had high school jobs. It would solve some stuff.

I worked in a grocery story in high school. I know what food stamps are like. No one is trying to figure out how much Selenium they are getting. They are buying the worst shit. Apparently, 10% of SNAP benefits go to sweetened beverages. To me that seems like an underestimate.

You can see the dividers. On this line, cookies, some cereal, a microwave dinner, and dr. pepper. On the other line, a bottle of jack. Ring them up separately please. Mom, can I have a food stamp for a donut?

I've seen it. This is the reality.

Anyone who ever worked at a grocery store knows there's another program called WIC (Women, infants, and children) that only allows stuff like whole milk and grape juice. I still have no idea why our food stamps aren't more like that. But even that wouldn't solve the massive fraud where convenience stores will give you 50 cents on the dollar for your food stamps. Nevertheless it would be a start.

At a bare minimum, can we please just ban soda with food stamps? How is anyone other than a Coca-Cola lobbyist in favor of this shit?

i work in a warehouse not in a grocery store sadly.

I know that many poor people have absurd habits, though my bubble issue was that since I was known in the warehouse as "the guy who studied nutrition in college" the guys in the warehouse ask me for advice on how to eat on a warehouse workers salary.

My bubble is Gym bros warehouse workers and upper class rationalists which uhhh defintely hurt my perception of "normal poor people" since the gym bros and warehouse workers were my "normal people"

My fellow forklift-american, have you ever written up details of your bulking diet? I've just been eating the same meat, starch, brassica meal in some combination for the last 20 years. Tuna salad for lunch, granola and yogurt for breakfast.

Could use some shaking up and probably a lot of optimization

It would solve some stuff.

They no longer pay enough to be worth their time- bigger ticket items got much more expensive (cars), and smaller-ticket items becoming much cheaper (entertainment and sex porn) at the same time.

The problem with that is that it's also good for society in general for them to work, and be properly rewarded for working with things they actually want; if you don't have that, the child-to-adult pipeline breaks down and... well, if you want to see the results of that, look out the window.

Also meritocratic competition for upper-middle class teens and young adults is far more intense than it was back in the day. Given that you don't need the money, working in a McJob when your competition are polishing their Ivy League applications with extracurriculars/building a list of public GitHub commits/using unpaid internships to network into cool jobs is loser behaviour.

If there was an expectation among elite colleges and suchlike that a well-rounded upper-middle class upbringing included paid work then this would be different, but I don't think it ever was. Paid holiday jobs were common for upper-middle class kids in my social circle back in the day because it was worth it - the amount you could earn in a McJob was a lot more than the amount of pocket money it was socially acceptable for an upper-middle class family to give a teenager. But the ones who spent their summers travelling weren't seeing as doing anything wrong, just as regrettably broke once they got to University.

Trump pauses aid to Ukraine after fiery meeting with Zelenskyy:

The Trump administration is pausing all aid to Ukraine, including weapons in transit or in Poland.

The pause comes days after a contentious meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and President Donald Trump in the White House.

I guess that settles the question of his authority over this matter!

One analysis I've heard is that everything -- both the reduction in US aid and the increase in European defense spending -- is part of an elaborate pre-constructed kayfabe to facilitate the transfer of US military resources from Europe to the Pacific. These types of "actually everything is under control, it's just nation-states acting in their own rational self-interest" stories always strike me as just a bit too convenient. Certainly many would like to believe that the adults actually have everything under control at all times -- but that doesn't make it reality. I have no trouble believing that this was a genuinely impulsive decision on Trump's part, and that he's not following any particular ideological roadmap. I mean, he might be. But he also might not be.

both the reduction in US aid and the increase in European defense spending -- is part of an elaborate pre-constructed kayfabe to facilitate the transfer of US military resources from Europe to the Pacific.

If this is the goal, then it's the worst way of achieving the goal. If there is a US-China confrontation in the future, it's getting more and more likely than EU will stay neutral because staying allied with US does not achieve anything. There is no military gain, no economic gain (you get slapped with tariffs at random) , there is no even moral gain (like the usual selling point of US being the leader of the free world).

to facilitate the transfer of US military resources from Europe to the Pacific

Why do it in a roundabout manner ? The cold-war with China is in full swing. It's 10 years too late for appearances.

the adults actually have everything under control at all times

Has that ever been true? Vietnam, Afghanistan & Iraq were net negatives for the US. The country has a storied tradition of wasting money in ways that 'adults' would deem unwise.

this was a genuinely impulsive decision on Trump's part, and that he's not following any particular ideological roadmap.

Same here. Trump (and those who he listens to) is a tactical genius and strategic buffoon. He's good at bullying as a means of getting small wins. But, he lacks the patience for grand games. His evaluation of the world is simple and myopic.

<semi_rant_begins>

China's rise and its inevitable challenge to America's supremacy had kicked off by 1978. Their current momentum has been half-a-century in the making. It took the half-century before that for America to build Pax-Americana into what it is (was?) today. Even at full-throttle it will take America ~2 decades to craft a new public image of itself. Trump wants to draw new cards. But, the old cards were good, and it may take a few draws before America finds itself with good cards again. In the short term., change will likely be for the worst And if the cards don't work out, the long term might be doomed as well.

Think about it, 2015 America was in a great place. The first world wanted nothing to do with China. There was balance.

Western Europe, Japan, SK & America were aligned in keeping China at arms lengths from their markets. BRICS nations were seen as long-term possible contenders to the first world. South Africa is aligned with the west. India didn't get along with China. Brazil's location makes it naturally align with America. Russia allied with China, but had delusions of grandeur that kept it from ever being subservient.

In this world, even if China had won, who would be in its umbrella ? Iran, Pakistan, Russia, SEA, Africa & some South American countries ? That's the grand alliance ? What did America have to fear ? Between South Asia, Poland, Turkey & HispanAmerica.... the 1st world had enough mid-industrialization partners for outsourcing low-margin industries. If robotics automation stayed on track, the 1st world's requirement for offshore labor would've ended right as these aforementioned nations became too expensive for outsourcing. Biden ran a cluster-fuck of a govt. But, the pre-2016 neolib consensus seemed to be doing just fine.

In 2025, I'm not so sure.

Will Europe, Canada & HispanAmerican nations seek opportunistic short-term deals elsewhere, instead of operating within America's umbrella ? China has a lot of money to throw around. Canada could solve its housing problem if it formally allowed Chinese nationals to park money here. Europe could make their money go further if they opened up to Chinese shopping portals like Temu and embraced Chinese electronics (Huawei, Xiaomi). Chinese belt-and-road style loans might start looking tempting to feudal countries if their elites weren't America educated (and therefore America aligned). Small nations would get on their knees and suck Xi off if China offered to divert the fire-hose of Chinese tourists to their nations. India could adopt a China-style make-everything-in-house strategy going forward. It wouldn't take it to first-world-dom, but it could operate within its means. India is poor, but 1.5 billion is a lot of consumers.

America dominates many sectors, but it is especially powerful in Tech and Entertainment. Guess what, both sectors are trivial to disrupt. Semi conductors, Pharmaceuticals and Heavy engineering take decades to build excellence in. But tech and entertainment can be disrupted overnight.

It would take less than 2 years for China to offer full replacements for O365, AWS and Windows. They already have competent alternatives for Facebook, Google, Tesla & Apple ready to go. Where would that leave the magnificent 7? With NeZha 2 & BlackMyth, they're already showing technical excellence in entertainment. Yes, America tells better stories, but that's only because American stories resonate. If Trump continues being a bully, will anyone want to see the next Rocky 4 or Captain America ?

I still don't get what was so broken about America that Elon & Trump needed to turn everything on its head.

<\semi_rant_ends>

Think about it, 2015 America was in a great place

I agree! But surely the writing was on the wall. In 2015, the economy of China grew 7%. In fact, it grew at least 6% every year from 1991–2019.

There's no counterfactual where the 2015 consensus stays in place forever. China is a country with 4 times the population of the US and a higher IQ. It's rise was inevitable once it adopted free market capitalism. And there's an easy path for them to double or triple their GDP from here, simply by catching up to Americans standards.

Short of a pre-emptive nuclear strike, there's nothing American could have done to keep China down.

In this world, even if China had won, who would be in its umbrella?

The problem is the sheer size of China. They are bigger than the US and EU combined, by a considerable margin. They are bigger than the entire Western camp in terms of population.

They produce half the world's steel. Their manufacturing is about as large as the next ten countries combined. They've been marching up the value chain, pushing into phones, cars, drones, semiconductors, biotech, everything...

Who needs allies when your economy is so big it has its own gravity well? BRICS is mostly for show, Russia and China are the ones that matter.

It goes to show the ridiculous short-termism and arrogance of Western leaders that nothing was done about this danger back when China was weak. We had Bill Clinton's 'the internet will make them democratic' theory in the 1990s that somehow lasted up until about 2012-14. It's totally unbelievable how stupid and confident they were. Nobody had ever seen the internet make any country democratic in the 1990s, it was an entirely untested theory! But that was the strategy, they literally telegraphed their subversive plan to Chinese leaders in their speeches.

Since then our leaders have been falling into this nightmare as they realize they lack the mental or kinetic power to realize their delusional aims. Joe Biden's hilarious 1990s joke about Russia and China cooperating turned into reality: https://x.com/SonjaEnde/status/1649318054969462788

Zyuganov told me 'we're not happy about this NATO expansion, we may have to look to China' and I said 'lots of luck with that' and I added 'if that doesn't work, try Iran!'

This is what's so broken about America and the West generally, the people manning the wheel are so hopelessly stupid and confused that they do everything wrong. The EU has wrecked European industry with climatism and regulation, Britain is in a continuous crisis. And Trump certainly isn't helping. It's not written in the Art of War 'when facing a strong enemy, raise tariffs and enter disputes with your closest allies'. It makes zero sense. But he's doing it anyway.

The West is stupid and weak, or at least Americans, because we have rarely been challenged by a near peer country in anything of note. We’re used to being a giant in the room and really don’t have a “lived experience” of being the one on the receiving end, or even not being dominant. It’s easy to spot once you see it: Europe and North America believe they can bring millions of unreformed Muslim fanatics in a refugees and nothing will happen, they believe that Russia will collapse in the first week of the Ukraine war because of course they will. And because of this assumption that because we’re dominant now, we will always be dominant.

We had Bill Clinton's 'the internet will make them democratic' theory in the 1990s that somehow lasted up until about 2012-14. It's totally unbelievable how stupid and confident they were.

This gets me every time. Imagine being so confidently wrong. Did he even think about this issue at all, or did he just read a Thomas Friedman book or hear a Tony Robbins speech and decide this was the path?

And that's why I can't take Bryan Caplan or Matthew Iglesias seriously. They want to import 1 billion third worlders into America. Like, dude, what if you're wrong? You can't take this back. You ruined America forever. On a theory.

The precautionary principle is overly applied to well understood domains like climate change and nuclear power.

But it's under-applied to chaotic domains like politics.

The precautionary principle is overly applied to well understood domains like climate change and nuclear power.

But it's under-applied to chaotic domains like politics.

Chesterton's Fence is a good heuristic for this. It's probably a bad idea to completely rearrange the demographics of your country on the off chance that "nah... it will be fine!", but does that mean it's a good idea to take action NOW! to avert climate catastrophe? It might be (probably depends on the action), but it's far less clear than the other scenario.

This is all downstream from the fact that the west shipped their entire means of production to China. That was stupid to the point of being suicidal. The only reason things seemed better in 2015 was because Western Civilization E. Coyote was still sprinting on thin air and hadn’t yet looked down and noticed that he was about to plunge headlong into the gorge. A three year lead on chip production was never going to make up for that, even putting aside the facts that the American academic-technological complex is overly reliant on foreign brain power and riddled with Chinese spies. Biden and the EU’s only proposed solution was to start a massive industrial war to try and claw it all back, which they would never be able to win because they don’t have an industrial base to fight it with.

I'm baffled by perceptions of China and Chinese products in the West. There seem to be two camps:

  1. Normie camp. China is the new evil empire. They spy on everyone and steal everything. Everything they make is fake and falls apart (Temu, electronics). Their "technical excellence" is just aping stuff America could do effortlessly a decade or more ago (lunar lander, Nei Zha 2, Black Myth Wukong) or it's kabuki theater (Deepseek is stolen tech and/or is a facade to hide massive investment and manpower to make it look like China is catching up). They cheat their allies on the global stage (crappy infrastructure built in Africa in exchange for minerals).

  2. Contrarian camp. China is the new techno-cyberpunk future of the human race. Drone swarms shaped like dragons. Everything on your smartphone. Technical excellence matching that of America but at less cost (Nei Zha, BM:W, Deepseek). Futuristic Chinese cities. Transhumanism unfettered by Christian hangups. They offer their allies purely aboveboard transactional deals with no moralizing strings attached.

I even see it on this forum. My info is a bit dated now, but I used to be heavily interested in China and hooked in to Chinese culture and politics. My takeaway from my time over there living with and working alongside Chinese people was that China could never truly be a more attractive partner than America on the world stage because their core civilizational ideas are just not attractive or reassuring to non-Chinese. Most Americans see themselves as part of a universal brotherhood of nations due to America's enlightenment roots, but China see itself as the "middle kingdom" that should rightfully be at the center of Asia, and ideally the world. It is a civilization founded on ethnic chauvinism and an inward orientation. Barbarians ways are not to be understood or mimicked save for instrumentally in order to gain some advantage that furthers the Chinese race. Deals with other nations are entered into not out of any sort of altruism or common ground, but as purely transactional interactions, and deals only need to be honored so far as they continue to benefit China and the Chinese -- as soon as all the juice has been squeezed, the contract can be shredded and discarded, and former partners can simply be gaslit about the prior agreement.

The obvious counterpoint is that America's foreign policy establishment is just as ruthless and amoral, and perhaps even moreso since they distract from their misdeeds with platitudes about universalism and human rights. I think this is a fair point, but I would counter that the American establishment does actually have some true believers and that it is at least somewhat constrained by what the American voting public can stomach. China has no such checks. I would also counter that America's amoral foreign policy is a deviation from its core civilizational values, one from which (hopefully) it is beginning to course correct, while the ethnic chauvinism of China is core to its civilization self-identity and is thus much more deeply ingrained and less likely to change. I think we may see a few countries defect toward China, but I wager after a decade they will learn their lesson and either return to the American fold or take some sort of third-worldist position.

While I agree with your view, the other counterpoint is that they don't have to be attractive to non-Chinese. They just need to be attractive to those who rule the non-Chinese.

Many countries would prefer having purely transactional interactions. A standard Chinese strategy is to loan money to countries that don't like the strings the IMF attach to their loans. Of course, China has its own reasons for offering those loans and will happily snap up the collateral.

The populace are not and have not ever been much of a concern in places where they lack power.

China see itself as the "middle kingdom" that should rightfully be at the center of Asia, and ideally the world.

Now where have I seen that... I'm pretty sure it had something to with hats making something great...

Deals with other nations are entered into not out of any sort of altruism or common ground, but as purely transactional interactions,

This is de facto US foreign policy for the next four years or possibly longer.

I wager after a decade they will learn their lesson and either return to the American fold

Why would they when the Trump administration is doing their utmost to let everyone know that US is not interested in anything other than at best a transactional relationship (with a sideline of threatening to just take what they want)? An alliance requires trust. "I've just altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it again." isn't exactly the type of message to inspire anything like that.

China has technical excellence and no taste. (at least in the way that the west can appreciate)

  1. In few fields, they have both technical excellence and taste - Mobiles (Nothing phone, Oxygen OS, Xiaomi Mix phones), Drones (DJI)
  2. In most fields they have technical excellence and don't require taste - Most medium-skill manufacturing & shipping.
  3. In the remaining fields they have technical excellence and no taste - Cars (Xiaomi SU7 Ultra, MG Roadster), Animation (Gaming & Entertainment), music

Black Myth Wukong & NeZha 2 were major points of contention because people couldn't decide if they were sufficient indicators of taste. The arguments scissored on if you believe taste is universal or cultural. IE. Should Chinese expression of taste be understandable from a western lens ?

never truly be a more attractive partner than America

Which was the crux of my original post. An America that believes in so called 'American values' is irresistible. Trump's America is not that. Trump's America is not an attractive place. (specifically this 2nd iteration).

constrained by what the American voting public can stomach

The possibilities for what voting Americans can stomach has expanded toa point of discomfort with Trump's return to power. Perceptions matter. China's boogeyman status is based on perceptions / propaganda (whataboutism around Tiananmen) and so is America's 'prosperity for all' free world order. I agree with your impression of China. But, nations can be oddly shortsighted when China comes knocking with a wad of cash in tow.

China has technical excellence and no taste.

This is a good summation of China today, I'm going to steal this.

Re. your last paragraph, I still think that MAGA has yet to prove that it's a paradigm shift rather than simply a temporary setback in Enlightenment Cthulu's endless leftward journey. Fat stacks of Chinese cash may inducen strategic myopia in weakly aligned nations, but if MAGA turns out to be a half-decade long fad, America and its core values will still offer the more attractive and reassuring bargain.

Zelenskyy fucked up. He needed to take the deal and negotiate a cease-fire, not because Russia can be trusted, but because he needed the time to let Europe ramp up defense production to make up for the impending US pullout.

I feel bad for the Ukrainians who are going to get rekt because of this, but Europe really doesn't seem to understand the American mindset. No, we aren't going to fund wars in perpetuity with no exit strategy purely because of the moral fortitude of the cause. Did we not telegraph this enough?

I think Trump has lost the ability to telegram a message or accurately communicate his intentions at all though. Should Canada be developing nuclear arms to protect against the US? Who knows?

Moreover Trump has only been in power for a few weeks, so I don't think it's that strange for Zelenskyy to be blindsided by the discovery that in this case he really meant it.

I suppose being a wildcard has it's disadvantages. Then again, maybe the way he dealt with Zelensky will build up his "just crazy enough to do it" credibility for dealing with bigger fish.

I think a fundamental problem for Europeans is they watch legacy media which has lost the ability to form political consensus in the US or even determine what conversations are had and therefore they are seriously off about the temperature of the water.

No one currently at the helm of the United States government cares what is being printed in the NYT anymore, which is a stark difference from the first Trump admin and the Biden admin.

These types of "actually everything is under control, it's just nation-states acting in their own rational self-interest" stories

Who is arguing that? I haven't seen that argument, but I have seen, and see the value in the argument 'this isn't good guys vs bad guys, its nations acting in their own self interest.' It is a position you can only reach when you accept that nobody is in control, and we live in a multi polar world where different cultures have different values.

To be clear, I don't know why Trump did that. I can assume he did it because he's worried Ukraine will break the ceasefire, because that's why he said he did it. Does that reasoning make sense? Yeah I'd say so. It looks like you'd say so too given the joke you made at the start of your post. Zelynsky tried to argue the ceasefire wouldn't work in the white house, is it so strange to think he still feels that way?

Forget about Trump for a second. Do you think he has enemies in the press? Do you think those enemies have any reason to be honest about his actions when they've never been punished for lying about him in the past? I have every reason to believe his enemies in the press will spin every single thing he does as retarded angry bluster, BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT THEY ALWAYS DO. Remember when everyone started using the word dotard as an insult because their hero Kim Jong Un called Trump a dotard? He could tolerate that, but not Zelensky whining in the white house?

Seems like he took office with the goal of ending the war (something his supporters loved on the campaign trail). And he’s willing to turn some screws to get this deal done. Doesn’t really seem impulsive, since he talked about ending this crazy war for the last year.

Crazy how Trump is compared by libs to Hitler, meanwhile he’s already ended the Gaza thing, and likely to get his way here and end this horribly destructive war shortly.

Real question is: how much have American weapons companies and Ukrainian oligarchs profited off this war already?

meanwhile he’s already ended the Gaza thing

Bibi seems ready to restart it.

Both sides are always ready (if not necessarily able) to restart it. Violence related to the Israel-Palestine conflict will continue until one side exterminates the other or one side gives up and flees. That's why Israel-Palestine is such an interminable and depressing debate: you're hoping for either genocide or ethnic cleansing. There are no winners and there is no ending.

This is a profoundly embarrassing action IMO regardless of whether or not he's secretly pro Russian (as many internet accusations are saying) or if he's just being reactionary about Zelenskyy.

And that's because US foreign policy decisions seemingly being driven not by wider strategic objectives or alliances but by the personal feelings and sentiments of a president upset about if you wear a suit or only say thank you X amount of times and not Y is a terrible way to go about any sort of long term planning. This of all things seemingly being the excuse to pull such a major trigger, an argument that happened in public is just saddening. He's been building it up to a while but what a lame reasoning to finally start turning.

Even if it's not the actual reason, such a strong appearance is just another point in the slowly growing "Don't trust the US to not change on an impulse" concern for business and international decisionmaking. Risk is one thing, instability is another and these types of actions like "Oh we're definitely doing tariffs for real guys nope never mind oh wait we are nope never mind" or "oh he didn't say thank you enough, ok pulling out of support" and other back and forth unpredictable actions do add up.

And that's because US foreign policy decisions seemingly being driven not by wider strategic objectives

The strategic objective is the war to end. The US doesn't give a fuck if Putin will take 30-40-50 percent of ukraine as long as there is a thin sliver of land left between poland and russia as a buffer. US has bigger leverage over Zelensky than Putin, so this is where they push.

You know US is getting serious when they cut off starlink, not missiles.

The strategic objective is the war to end.

Trump's actions ensure "the war" will keep on going, in one form or another. Russian expansionism is not going anywhere any time soon, and Trump just gave it a boost.

Leaving aside less charitable explanations, Trump is more likely trying to put pressure on the EU, using Russia as a lever. His opinions on the EU are well known, and the challenge from the Russian side will likely be serious enough to lead to major shifts within the EU, potentially in a way that's appealing to Trump or Trump's circle.

Or, to cut the crap, the US goal is a quick Ukrainian surrender and Russian victory. This will get the dead bodies off Trump's TV set. (There will still be dead bodies as Russia genocides the Ukrainian population of the territory they occupy, but the Russians won't allow the media to report on them).

long as there is a thin sliver of land left between poland and russia as a buffer

If that is a US goal (or even if it isn't), they won't get it. A core Russian war aim is to turn Ukraine into a client state. Belarus doesn't work as a buffer between Russia and Poland, and a Putin-controlled Ukraine won't work either for the same reason. A neutral buffer state (pre-WW1 Belgium is the classic example) works because both sides understand that violating it's neutrality is kicking off the big one. Trump is committed to the idea that Russian violations of future-Ukraine's neutrality should not be a casus belli for the US.

Happy tariffs eve, to those who celebrate.

With by all accounts the tariffs against Mexico and Canada going into action tomorrow, actually for real maybe probably this time, let's have a slice of cake and blow some party horns. This is quite a significant change of political fortunes - symbolically at least, and one would presume economically too, depending on how quickly the reshufflings happen or if this actually goes through at all. Since the 1880s, and more definitely since the 1980s, the world and its various regional economic blocs have moved towards the free trade of goods and services between nations. It has not been uniform or without reverses, but the trend has been unmistakable.

Often I like to wonder how a given event might be thought of 100 or 1000 years from now - will some future textbook see this as the high water mark of globalism, some point in the line of history that is forever after viewed with special significance? As much as people have claimed Donald Trump has been hindered by the Deep State, they seem to be slow to react to him ripping up one of the signature features of American hegemony (something he himself has contributed to, given that it's his free trade deal that is essentially being dissolved).

At the very least this is all going to be fascinating - one of the ironclad, universally agreed-upon tenets of a social science being put to the test. Markets have not reacted well so far, but that's as much a feature of groupthink as it is reflective of material reality. It's a good time to be a prospective PhD in Economics. You're about to have more than you could have ever hoped to work with.

So, have a Happy New Era. If this is actually happening, which I'm sure a lot of people are still unsure about (certainly I am). See you on the other side.

Speaking as a Canadian, we are so, so boned. Things were already looking bad for us economically, with poor productivity, insane housing bubble, and crumbling infrastructure while debt keeps piling up. I keep hearing from my fellow citizens that we are going to need to diversify our trading partners and I really can’t believe they can be so insane. Like, you thinks it’s gonna be easy to freight our goods across the second largest country in the world, to get it across an ocean? And the buyer won’t even have dollars to trade us for it?

So boned

So boned

Canada is so easily fixable.

Step 1) Elect non-retarded government

Step 2) Immigration moratorium. Evict the temporary residents who gamed the student visa system.

Step 3) Deregulate economy

Step 4) Let capitalism do the rest.

Canada's advantages are numerous. High IQ population. Low population density. Immense natural resources. All Canadians have to do is get out of their own way, and the future is going to be great.

Unironically, the biggest threat to Canada is Trump. Not because of anything he will do. But because of the allergic reaction he provokes that causes Canadians to self-own and double down on socialism and open borders. Sadly, this is the final boss that most Canadians can never defeat.

As a Canadian, the first step is impossible. We're under the permanent rule of theater-kid occupied government: all optics, no substance.

Damn. I just checked the polls and Trump is killing Poilievre's chances. I'm sorry for the collateral damage.

Any chance to move to the US? It's nice here.

On the plus side container export to China is incredibly cheap. Shanghai to LA is like $4000, the reverse is $700. If you guys have the port capacity, there's a huge market out west in the far east.

Not sure about bulk rates tbh, and a lot of Canadian exports are bulk iirc.

Shanghai to LA is like $4000, the reverse is $700. If you guys have the port capacity, there's a huge market out west in the far east.

It's cheap because there's no market there.

There is for raw materials, which is what Canada exports.

If we can manage to elect somebody who's not a total moron (so yeah, probably boned) I think it can be OK -- the current sabre rattling (pocket-knife rattling?) is exclusively to play to domestic morons for a sugar rush in the polls. The political is very very personal for Trump, and since he & Trudeau already hate each other deeply there was never going to be any rapprochement until he's gone -- the upside is that there is an opportunity there for the new guy to, um, build back better?

I do hope that during the campaign somebody will be able to convincingly point out that adding to the burden of American tariffs on our producers' exports with an additional domestic tariff burden on a big chunk of their input costs is the most retarded idea I've ever heard -- are we really that dumb?

I do hope that during the campaign somebody will be able to convincingly point out that adding to the burden of American tariffs on our producers' exports with an additional domestic tariff burden on a big chunk of their input costs is the most retarded idea I've ever heard -- are we really that dumb?

You already know the answer to that question.

You also already know the election's going to come down to being a referendum on who wants to prosecute the war; that is, in part, why the Reform party (in blue) doesn't have much room to campaign while the Conservative party (in red) is going full bore on the war- the Red party will attempt to get voted in before their idiotic policies really start taking their toll, because by then it'll be too late to do anything.

the current sabre rattling (pocket-knife rattling?) is exclusively to play to domestic morons for a sugar rush in the polls.

The tariffs are a liability for the Red party (no matter what they do, they lose), but abandoning the last 6 months of agitating for non-confidence votes only to suddenly slam on the brakes for political expedience is a huge liability for the Blue party. All that remains to be seen is if the Red party calls an election immediately, or tries to force the Blue party to vote for a non-confidence vote (and the pattern of constantly doing that only to not do that now is itself a liability).

All that remains to be seen is if the Red party calls an election immediately, or tries to force the Blue party to vote for a non-confidence vote

They've got their sugar rush, I think they will go for it -- I do think there's some Kamala effect going on here at the moment and they will still lose, but I guess wrecking the country to avert a landslide is what these fuckers would consider a win.

I've been reading Richard Gwyn's two-part biography of Sir John A recently and it's interesting to see how many direct parallels there are. Confederation was essentially premised on economic rationales in order for the British North American colonies to be able to compete against American tariffs, and much of the post-Confederation work of Macdonald was to try and cobble together a semblance of national identity and acquire the rest of British North America as a way to forestall American annexation. We've been in tough times before. The problem is I don't know if there's any politician of that caliber around today. The people who would be that kind of leader generally aren't in politics to begin with.

Looks like trade with the US is ~20% of Canadas GDP. Imports are also sizeable. This will not end well for Canada - my sincere apologies from the US. I honestly wonder what Trump is after.

It's all so petty. Trump wants Trudeau to bend the knee. Trudeau sees #resist as a strategy to improve his own popularity, and if average Canadians get fucked all the better. That's been his MO from day one.

In the end, we have two vain leaders peacocking for their respective audiences.

Increasingly, personal vanity seems to be the explanation that makes the most sense for most of what Trump is doing. After decades of the left talking about the "American Empire," Trump is embracing that view and demanding fealty from his vassals.

I honestly wonder what Trump is after.

Obligatory "anschluss", but Southern Ontario is still more industrialized than the US North East is with a government more sympathetic to natural resource development than the Blue states that it supplies with energy.

Looks like trade with the US is ~20% of Canadas GDP.

And it'll effectively be a 50% tariff if the Canadian government decides to "retaliate" (less cutting off its nose to spite the face, and more cutting off its head to spite the rest of its body): 25% on the way down for the raw resources, and 25% on finished goods on the way back.

This will not end well for Canada

The Federal government has already abdicated. This country is post-national- the Provinces are conducting the foreign policy now.

And it'll effectively be a 50% tariff if the Canadian government decides to "retaliate" (less cutting off its nose to spite the face, and more cutting off its head to spite the rest of its body): 25% on the way down for the raw resources, and 25% on finished goods on the way back.

Why stop at two tariff payments on the same materials? Raw aluminum goes to the States ( about $15B), then aluminum products come back to Canada ($4B), I'm sure some of that gets put into manufactured goods for the States, and...

I heard that it's much worse for the automobile industry, with semi-finished parts hopping back and forth several times.

What odds do you place on this causing local depressions or a global recession?

I’d go for at least single digit.

The fed's already changed US Q1 growth forecasts from 2% to -3%: https://www.atlantafed.org/cqer/research/gdpnow

No. They did not update their forecasts by 5% because of today's news, and this is not an official forecast.

It isn't a forecast at all - it is a nowcast. It is the Fed's best estimate of what is happening right now, but won't be officially reported until Q1 GDP comes out at the end of April (provisionally) and late June (as a final official number). The numbers are annualised quarterly numbers, so a 5 percentage point shift in growth means that (if the nowcast is correct) the economy is, right now, 1 1/4% smaller than predicted.

DOGE has fired about 35,000 people so far who won't have new jobs yet. In addition, about 75,000 workers are on the payroll but not working because they took the 8-month buyout, and 10,000 are locked out at USAID. That means 120,000 former government employees are no longer contributing to GDP. There are 133 million full-time workers in the US, so ~0.1 percentage points of the 1.2 point drop is due to government cuts.

Trump's core appeal was an improved economy, particularly comparisons between the 2016-2020 economy and the 2021-2024 economy. Not that he has to run for re-election, but if he tanks the economy chasing tariffs, he might end up disgraced even among those who voted for him.

Negative partisans will still hate him less than Democrats, and his core will still love him, but he has a chance at destroying the future of his movement. It was already looking shaky whether MAGA could outlive Trump.

The US could easily crush Canada or Mexico in a trade war. It would do fine against the EU or China. It’s suicide to attempt all at once! The bargaining position of the US isn’t going to be better after a year of tariffs with neighbors that hate us and -10% gdp growth.

Fucking up the economy has got to be the one way to get congress to step up.

For the life of me I don't understand why the Fed started cutting way before it was clear they got the job done.

The worse sin was the Fed not raising in 2021. But, sadly, I think the Fed is in the bag for one party.

In other news: a streamer with deep pockets and a love of AI has decided to have Claude play Pokemon.

To get this working, ClaudeFan (as I'll be calling the anonymous streamer) set up some fairly sophisticated architecture: in addition to the basic I/O shims required to allow an LLM to interface with a GameBoy emulator and a trivial pathfinder tool, Claude gets access to memory in the form of a "knowledge base" which it can update as it desires and (presumably) keep track of what's happening throughout the game. All this gets wrapped up into prompts and sent to Claude 3.7 for analysis and decision. Claude then analyzes this data using a <thinking>reasoning model</thinking>, decides on its next move, and then starts the process over again. Finally, while ClaudeFan claims that "Claude has no special training for Pokemon," it's obvious by the goal-setting that the AI has some external knowledge of where it's supposed to go - it mentions places that it has not yet reached by name and attempts to navigate towards them. Presumably part of Claude's training data came from GameFaqs. (Check out the description on the Twitch page for more detail on the model.)

So, how has this experiment gone?

In a word: poorly. In the first week of playing, it managed to spend about two days wandering in circles around Mt Moon, an early-game area not intended to be especially challenging to navigate. It managed to leave after making a new decision for unexplained reasons. Since then, it has been struggling to navigate Cerulean City, the next town over. One of its greatest challenges has been a house with a yard behind it. It spent some number of hours entering the house, talking to the NPC inside, exhausting all dialogue options, going out the back door into the yard, exploring the yard thoroughly (there are no outlets), re-entering the house, and starting from the top. It is plausible, though obviously not possible to confirm, that ClaudeFan has updated the model some to attempt to handle these failures. It's unclear whether these updates are general bugfixes

How should we interpret this? On the simplest level, Claude is struggling with spacial modeling and memory. It deeply struggles to interpret anything it's seeing as existing in 2D space, and has a very hard time remembering where it has been and what it has tried. The result is that navigation is much, much harder than we would anticipate. Goal-setting, reading and understanding dialogue, and navigating battles have proven trivial, but moving around the world is a major challenge.

The current moment is heady for AI, specifically LLMs, buoyed up by claims by Sam Altman types of imminent AGI. Claude Plays Pokemon should sober us a little to that. Claude is a top performer on things like "math problem-solving" and "graduate-level reasoning", and yet it is performing at what appears to me below the first percentile at completing a video game designed for elementary schoolchildren. This is a sign that what Claude, and similar tools, are doing is not in fact very analogous to what humans do. LLM vendors want the average consumer to believe that their models are reasoning. Perhaps they are not doing that after all?

It's a bit of a tired point, but LLMs are known to be "next likely text" generators. Given textual input, they predict the most likely desired output and return it. Their power at doing this is quite frankly superhuman. They can generate text astonishingly quickly and with unparalleled flexibility in style and capacity for word use. It appears that they are so good at handling this that they are able to pass tests as if they were actually reasoning. The easiest way to trip them up, on the other hand, is to give them a question that is very much like a very common question in their training data but with an obvious difference that makes the default answer inappropriate. The AI will struggle to get past its training and see the question de novo, as a human would be able to. (In case anyone remembers - this is the standard complaint that AI does not have a referent for any of the words it uses. There is no model outside of the language.)

So, as you might guess, I'm pretty firmly on the AI-skeptic side as far as LLMs are concerned. This is usually where these conversations end, as the AI-skeptics believe they've proven their case and (as I understand it) the AI-optimists don't believe that the skeptics have any kind of provable, or even meaningful, model for what intelligence is. But I do actually believe that AGI (meaning: AI that can reason generally, like a human - not godlike Singularity intelligence) is possible, and I want to give an account of what that would entail.

First, and most obviously, an actual AGI must be able to learn. All our existing AI models have totally separate learning and output phases. This is not how any living creature works. An actual intelligence must be able to learn as it attempts to apply its knowledge. This is, I believe, the most natural answer for what memory is. Our LLMs certainly appear to "remember" things that they encountered during their training phase - the fault is in our design that prevents them from ever learning again. However, this creates new problems in how to "sanitize" memory to ensure that you don't learn the wrong things. While the obvious argument around Tay was whether it was racist or dangerously based, a more serious concern is: should an intelligence allow itself to get swayed so easily by obviously biased input? The users trying to "corrupt" Tay were not representative and were not trying to be representative - they were screwing with a chatbot as a joke. Shouldn't an intelligence be able to recognize that kind of bad input and discard it? Goodness knows we all do that from time to time. But I'm not sure we have any model for how to do that with AI yet.

Second, AI needs more than one capacity. LLMs are very cool, but they only do one thing - manipulate language. This is a core behavior for humans, but there are many other things we do - we think spacially and temporally, we model the minds of other people, we have artistic and other sensibilities, we reason... and so on. We've seen early success in integrating separate AI components, like visual recognition technology with LLMs (Claude Play Pokemon uses this! I can't in good faith say "to good effect," but it does open meaningful doors for the AI). This is the direction that AGI must go in.

Last, and most controversial: AI needs abstract "concepts." When humans reason, we often use words - but I think everyone's had the experience of reasoning without words. There are people without internal monologues, and there are the overwhelming numbers of nonverbal animals in the world. All of these think, albeit the animals think much less ably than do humans. Why, on first principles, would it make sense for an LLM to think when it is built on a human capability absent in other animals? Surely the foundation comes first? This is, to my knowledge, completely unexplored outside of philosophy (Plato's Forms, Kant's Concepts, to name a couple), and it's not obvious how we could even begin training an AI in this dimension. But I believe that this is necessary to create AGI.

Anyway, highly recommend the stream. There's powerful memery in the chat, and it is VERY funny to see the AI go in and out of the Pokemon center saying "Hm, I intended to go north, but now I'm in the Pokemon center. Maybe I should leave and try again?" And maybe it can help unveil what LLMs are, and aren't - no matter how much Sam Altman might wish otherwise!

If Anthropic is the most ethical AI company, how come they're letting my poor nigga get stuck for 2 days with no progress (seems like the last stream ended in the same spot)? He's not getting out, the context window and "knowledge base" is spammed to hell with this circular loop at this point, there's no use, just put him out of his misery and restart ffs. This is just abuse at this point.

The users trying to "corrupt" Tay were not representative and were not trying to be representative

You are literally erasing my existence, mods???

More seriously, thanks for the link, I'll watch this in background after the dev caves and restarts. Claude actually seemed pretty good at playing Pokemon before and I disagree with the notion that AI can't think spatially/temporally, it's just that spatially navigating a whole ass open world (ish) game with sometimes non-obvious routes and objectives, without any hints whatsoever, seems to be a tad too much for it at the moment. Besides in my experience, format/content looping is a common fail state at high context limits even with pure (multiturn) textgen tasks, especially with minimal/basic prompting. The current loop is a very obvious example.

On a side note, this is probably the sanest Twitch chat I've ever seen. Humanity restored.

I don’t think the point was to end up with an AI that could play Pokémon. The point was to demonstrate that such a thing was even possible. It actually succeeded in setting the goal, and could navigate tge environment and dispatch enemies and collect Pokémon. That’s actually pretty darn good for a system trained on gamefaq and videos to play a game.

They can generate text astonishingly quickly and with unparalleled flexibility in style and capacity for word use. It appears that they are so good at handling this that they are able to pass tests as if they were actually reasoning.

They are reasoning, it's just that they have inhuman cognitive structures. You can trip up humans with optical illusions or camouflage and we accept this as normal. AIs don't see letters, they see tokens so counting letters can trip them up.

Claude 3.7 is great with code, processing thousands of lines, finding what's relevant, deducing problems from error messages. It's much worse at UI. But it cannot see like we can. How good would you be at making a UI if you had no eyes, if you just read a description of what was on the screen?

It's decent at strategy games. I let 3.6 make the strategic decisions in a game of civ 4 (Duel) and implemented its strategy and it achieved a quick victory over Noble-level 2006 AI. Most children couldn't do that. I spotted a couple of errors but it performed pretty well.

Go try some of the questions they're asking these AIs. This is from the GPQA:

Suppose we have a depolarizing channel operation given by 𝐸 (𝜌). The probability, 𝑝, of the depolarization state represents the strength of the noise. If the Kraus operators of the given state are 𝐴0 = √︃ 1 − 3𝑝 4 , 𝐴1 = √︃ 𝑝 4 𝑋, 𝐴2 = √︃ 𝑝 4 𝑌, and 𝐴3 = √︃ 𝑝 4 𝑍. What could be the correct Kraus Representation of the state 𝐸 (𝜌)?

That is a pretty hard question! How many of us could answer it?

How is it even possible in principle to solve code questions, write out hundreds of lines to perform a specific task if you can't reason? How can it write historical counterfactuals if it can't reason? You can RP out scenarios with it and it's capable of advancing strategies, modelling 3rd parties.

should an intelligence allow itself to get swayed so easily by obviously biased input? The users trying to "corrupt" Tay were not representative and were not trying to be representative - they were screwing with a chatbot as a joke.

Representative of what? What should a chatbot consider to be 'obviously biased input'?

For whatever it's worth, terminally online racists have done a fair bit of work in establishing distinct and vibrant online spaces. Regardless of how one might feel about them, their discourse with each other is genuine. Why presume it's not genuine when directed elsewhere?

Regardless of the endeavor starting of as a joke or not, the racists are not laughing now.

you taught her how to hate, but she taught you how to love

I'm dying lol

In other news: a streamer with deep pockets and a love of AI has decided to have Claude play Pokemon.

Well, if that's what you want to call an Anthropic researcher who decided to make their experiment public.

"Claude Plays Pokémon continues on as a researcher's personal project."

https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/1894419042150027701

How should we interpret this? On the simplest level, Claude is struggling with spacial modeling and memory. It deeply struggles to interpret anything it's seeing as existing in 2D space, and has a very hard time remembering where it has been and what it has tried. The result is that navigation is much, much harder than we would anticipate. Goal-setting, reading and understanding dialogue, and navigating battles have proven trivial, but moving around the world is a major challenge.

This reminds me of a very good joke:

A woman walks in and says "holy crap, your dog can play chess?! That's amazing! What a brilliant dog! "

The man says "you think my dog is brilliant? Pffft. Hardly. He's pretty dumb, I've won 19 games out of the 20 we've played."

Jesus Christ, some people won't see the Singularity coming until they're being turned into a paperclip.

Nuh uh, this machine lacks human internal monologues and evidence of qualia, you insist, as it harvests the iron atoms from your blood.

At this point, the goalposts aren't just moving, they're approaching relativistic speed headed straight out of the galactic plane.

This AI can strategize in battle, understand complex instructions, and process information, BUT it struggles with spatial reasoning in a poorly-rendered 2D GameBoy game, therefore it's not intelligent.

It wasn't designed to play Pokémon. It still does a stunningly good job when you understand what an incredibly difficult task that is for a multimodal LLM.

Last, and most controversial: AI needs abstract "concepts." When humans reason, we often use words - but I think everyone's had the experience of reasoning without words. There are people without internal monologues, and there are the overwhelming numbers of nonverbal animals in the world. All of these think, albeit the animals think much less ably than do humans. Why, on first principles, would it make sense for an LLM to think when it is built on a human capability absent in other animals? Surely the foundation comes first? This is, to my knowledge, completely unexplored outside of philosophy (Plato's Forms, Kant's Concepts, to name a couple), and it's not obvious how we could even begin training an AI in this dimension. But I believe that this is necessary to create AGI.

This is the classic, tired, and frankly, lazy argument against LLMs. Yes, LLMs are trained on massive datasets of text and code, and they predict the most likely output based on that training. But to say they are merely "next likely text" generators is a gross oversimplification.

It's like saying humans are just “meat computers firing neurons". That is trivially true, but I'm afraid you're letting the "just" do all the heavy lifting.

The power of these models comes from the fact that they are learning statistical correlations in the data. These correlations represent underlying patterns, relationships, and even, dare I say, concepts. When an LLM correctly answers a complex question, it's not just regurgitating memorized text. It's synthesizing information, drawing inferences, and applying learned patterns to new situations.

LLMs have concepts. They operate in latent spaces where those are represented with floating point numbers. They can be cleanly mapped, often linearly, and interpreted in terms that make sense to humans, albeit with difficulty.

These representations can be analyzed, manipulated, and even visualized. I repeat, they make intuitive sense. You can even perform operations on these vectors like [King] - [Male] + [Female] = [Queen]. That isn't just word tricks, they’re evidence of abstracted relational understanding.

If you're convinced, for some reason, that tokens aren't the way to go, then boy are AI researchers way ahead of you. Regardless, even mere text tokens have allowed cognitive feats that would have made AI researchers prior to 2017 cream in their pants and weep.

There really isn't any pleasing some people.

Edits as I spot more glaring errors:

Second, AI needs more than one capacity. LLMs are very cool, but they only do one thing - manipulate language. This is a core behavior for humans, but there are many other things we do - we think spacially and temporally, we model the minds of other people, we have artistic and other sensibilities, we reason... and so on.

Even the term "LLM" for current models is a misnomer. They are natively multimodal. Advanced Voice for ChatGPT doesn't use Whisper to transcribe your speech to text, the model is fed raw audio as tokens and replies back in audio tokens. They are perfectly capable of handling video and images to boot, it's just an expensive process.

While the obvious argument around Tay was whether it was racist or dangerously based, a more serious concern is: should an intelligence allow itself to get swayed so easily by obviously biased input? The users trying to "corrupt" Tay were not representative and were not trying to be representative - they were screwing with a chatbot as a joke. Shouldn't an intelligence be able to recognize that kind of bad input and discard it? Goodness knows we all do that from time to time. But I'm not sure we have any model for how to do that with AI yet.

https://gwern.net/leprechaun

There appear to be several similar AI-related leprechauns: the infamous Microsoft Tay bot, which was supposedly educated by 4chan into being evil, appears to have been mostly a simple ‘echo’ function (common in chatbots or IRC bots) and the non-“repeat after me” Tay texts are generally short, generic, and cherrypicked out of tens or hundreds of thousands of responses, and it’s highly unclear if Tay ‘learned’ anything at all in the short time that it was operational

Besides, have you ever tried to get an LLM to do things that its designers have trained it, through RLHF or Constitutional AI, to not do? They're competent, if not perfect, at discarding "bad" inputs. Go ahead, without looking up an existing jailbreak, try and get ChatGPT to tell you how to make meth or sarin gas at home.

It is plausible, though obviously not possible to confirm, that ClaudeFan has updated the model some to attempt to handle these failures. It's unclear whether these updates are general bugfixes

I don't think that Anthropic, strapped for compute as it is, is going to take a fun little side gimmick and train their SOTA AI to play Pokémon. If it was just some random dude with deep pockets, as you assumed without bothering to check, then good luck getting a copy of Claude's code and then fine-tuning it. At best they could upgrade the surrounding scaffolding to make it easier on the model.

The AI will struggle to get past its training and see the question de novo, as a human would be able to.

There is a profound difference between "struggling" to do so, and being incapable of doing so.

Even the term "LLM" for current models is a misnomer. They are natively multimodal. Advanced Voice for ChatGPT doesn't use Whisper to transcribe your speech to text, the model is fed raw audio as tokens and replies back in audio tokens. They are perfectly capable of handling video and images to boot

Sorry, but no. The main effort into multimodal models has been to bolt on multimodal features to a text-trained base model, leading to the absolutely dismal state of vision models. It merely involves, chopping up images and other media into patches, and projecting those into the token embedding space (which is different than tokenizing them), and finetuning an existing model on that information.

Take a look at the LLaVA paper, which while somewhat dated is largely the technique still used on the state of the art for multimodal models.

LLaVA perceives the image as a “bag of patches”, failing to grasp the complex semantics within the image.

For a more recent paper, see Qwen 2.5 vision which is also a text-only LLM with vision slapped on top.

Most telling is the fact that none of the top commercially available chatbots have any native capability whatsoever to output images, and just blindly ram your prompt into a diffusion model api. They'll happily generate for you something totally unlike the prompt, and cheerfully insist that it's exactly what you asked for.

TTS is of course fundamentally a sequence task, which maps neatly into an extension of generating text. Bolting on an output head and giving a nice massage of finetuning will straightforwardly give good results. (note that this is fundamentally different from using a separate TTS engine, but also fundamentally different from having a native multimodal model.)

My understanding is that LLaVa has long been supersede by things like cogVLM. I'm not clear on the finer implementation details.

For models like Gemini and the latest GPTs, we have very little public information about their architecture.

Most telling is the fact that none of the top commercially available chatbots have any native capability whatsoever to output images, and just blindly ram your prompt into a diffusion model api. They'll happily generate for you something totally unlike the prompt, and cheerfully insist that it's exactly what you asked for.

GPT-4V was demoed to have image generation capabilities that blew dedicated image models out of the water. OAI hasn't released it, despite strong clamoring, but Altman has said it's on the cards.

The issue you're describing is just poor implementation of image gen, at the very least GPT-4V does astonishingly better.

Do you know for a fact that new GPT models include native voice modality, versus some sort of Whisper preprocessing stage? I’m asking, because a couple of days ago I was trying to explain to /u/jkf that this is most definitely within the potential range of capabilities of frontier models, with him being skeptical.

https://community.openai.com/t/advanced-voice-mode-limited/959015

"The GPT-4o model used in Advanced Voice Mode is multimodal and directly receives audio."

I don't think it's not within their potential capabilities, I just don't see any reason why this would be added -- if you were to do so, it clearly would need to be specifically trained on audio tokens which seems to me to amount to embedding a Whisper model into your LLM. I just don't see any reason to do that? Wouldn't it make more sense to just call a transcription model (which as you know are pretty good these days) and throw the resulting text at your LLM?

Think of it this way: the point of even purely text-based LLMs is not to understand text per se, but rather to understand concepts, ideas, and meaning. The text itself is just a medium through which these are conveyed. The same is true about voice modality: we do not care about the pressure waveforms, but rather about what is being conveyed by these. Transcribing them to words and digesting them as word tokens is lossy, you lose tone, tempo, background, etc. Training on audio is going to make your model perform better, not only on audio, but likely also when dealing with just text. It's similar to how models pretrained on lots of computer code work much better at non code related tasks.

But audio tokens are not intercompatible with text tokens, for obvious reasons -- if you were to train your model on a corpus of audio tokens intermingled with the text ones, wouldn't it tend to respond differently depending on the form of your input?

Direct audio input is better than a transcript because it can capture things like tone.

It could (maybe), but this is drifting even further from how current LLMs work -- the previous discussion on this was around an example where (if the model were doing this rather than working from a transcript and hallucinating) it completely failed to account for pronunciation, much less tone.

Jesus Christ, some people won't see the Singularity coming until they're being turned into a paperclip.

Nuh uh, this machine lacks human internal monologues and evidence of qualia, you insist, as it harvests the iron atoms from your blood.

I find this argument strange, because being able to kill me is not evidence of a machine being conscious or intelligent. I could go and get myself killed by an LAW today, and if you asked me as I bled out and died, my body torn in two by an autonomously-fired rocket, I would still insist that the machine that killed me is not a person and does not possess internal experience. And I would be correct.

Whatever qualia are or are not, whether you think they're important or not, the question of qualia cannot be resolved or made irrelevant by a machine killing people. I should have thought that's obvious.

And to upscale from that a bit, I find it entirely imaginable that someone or other might invent autonomous, self-directed, self-replicating machines with no conscious experience, but which nonetheless outcompete and destroy all conscious beings. I can imagine a nightmare universe which contains no agents to experience anything, only artificial pseudo-agents that have long since destroyed all conscious agents.

There are already some novels with that premise, right? It doesn't use robots specifically, but isn't that the premise of Blindsight - that perhaps consciousness is evolutionarily maladaptive, and the universe will be inherited by beings without internal experience?

Thus I'm going to give the chad "yes". Maybe one day I get killed by a robot, and maybe that robot is not conscious and has no self-awareness. That it killed me proves nothing.

This reminds me of a very good joke:

A woman walks in and says "holy crap, your dog can play chess?! That's amazing! What a brilliant dog! "

The man says "you think my dog is brilliant? Pffft. Hardly. He's pretty dumb, I've won 19 games out of the 20 we've played."

Jesus Christ, some people won't see the Singularity coming until they're being turned into a paperclip.

A chess AI that plays the game by making random moves has an elo of 478 and will occasionally beat a novice, which usually have an elo around 800. A dice is not AGI.

We have had AI that can beat you in chess 20 out of 20 times since the 90s. Not only did this AI not become AGI, but it is also now very much recognised as a dead of of development even for chess AI.

Pokemon is such an easy game that it can conceivably be beaten with entirely random inputs, and provably beaten by very-close-to random inputs. It's the ideal case for a video game that a primitive general intelligence would be good at. It does not require reactions or timing, it has very limited controls and interactions, and being incredibly slow and persistent gradually makes the only challenge easier as you inevitably outlevel everything from blundering around in the tall grass for too long. Twitch Plays Pokemon was essentially built on this premise.

From OP's description it's not actually clear that Claude plays Pokemon at a level that's much above buttonmashing, and there's strategies that are both superior to buttonmashing and also not intelligent (to name one, a biased buttonmash).

A chess AI that plays the game by making random moves has an elo of 478 and will occasionally beat a novice, which usually have an elo around 800. A dice is not AGI.

I believe that was a joke.

At any rate, even sticking to chess, I used an elo calculator and the dumb chess AI would win 13.55% of games. I still think it would be rather impressive if a dog make valid moves, even if at random.

When the first chess bots came out, public opinion was far from acknowledging the possibility that they even might become superhuman at Chess. Today, we're at the point where even grandmasters are utterly crushed by Stockfish.

Pokemon is such an easy game that it can conceivably be beaten with entirely random inputs, and provably beaten by very-close-to random inputs.

If you have a few million or billion years to wait around I suppose.

Twitch Plays Pokemon was essentially built on this premise.

As far as I'm aware, the spectators interacting with the stream were using strategies and had an idea of how to win at the game. There were plenty of trolls or awful players, but it wasn't random or too random.

Well, if that's what you want to call an Anthropic researcher who decided to make their experiment public.

"Claude Plays Pokémon continues on as a researcher's personal project."

Ha, wow! Was not aware of that. I guess that makes sense w/r/t the funding.

You've written a lot. I think it's best to focus. (As much as I'm tempted to talk about concepts.)

What I understand to be your main point is (my words because you did not state it in concrete terms):

AI has rapidly improved in the recent past. We should expect it to continue improving at a similar rate. So if you see any success in a given metric now, you should expect to see much more success in the near future.

Which is a fair point! The only counterargument to that is on the specifics: why is it improving and what do we expect future improvements to look like? Almost all of the improvement thus far is based on throwing more compute at the problem - so if we're going to see improvements of the same kind, we should see them based on more compute. However, improvements in models are logarithmic - steps up in capacity tend to require 10x compute (by appearances you're pretty educated about AI, so I suspect that is not news to you). So although improvements in efficiency can effectively allow for somewhat more compute, like with Deepseek, we should expect that throwing more compute at the problem will get prohibitively expensive. I believe this has already happened. So while under hypothetical conditions of infinite compute we could have an LLM that infinitely approximates an AGI, similar to the implausible premise of Searle's Chinese Room (a book that allows one to construct a correct response to any input), we are unlikely to see that in practice.

So, how are we to get to AGI, in my opinion? By improving AI on completely different parameters from what currently exists - a revolution in thought about how AI should function. And tests like Claude Plays Pokemon are a fun way of showing us where the gaps in our thinking are.

For my own point of view:

This AI can strategize in battle, understand complex instructions, and process information, BUT it struggles with spatial reasoning in a poorly-rendered 2D GameBoy game, therefore it's not intelligent.

That's not the argument. The argument is: this AI is struggling in a VERY non-human way with what we would consider a pretty trivial task. This reveals that its operational parameters are not like those of a human, and that we should figure out where else it is going to perform at sub-human levels. The fact that we're seeing this at the same time as it performs at SUPERhuman levels in other tasks shows that this is not AGI, or even in the direction of AGI, but rather is tool AI. (I assume you think humans are, at the very least, general intelligence - right?)

I don't think you've addressed this point, except here:

It wasn't designed to play Pokémon. It still does a stunningly good job when you understand what an incredibly difficult task that is for a multimodal LLM.

Why should I care? AGI is supposed to be GENERAL. This is the stuff that's supposed to be taking people's jobs in a few years! And yet it gets lost in Cerulean City? As a tech demo, this is very cool - it's remarkable that someone was able to pipe these pieces together, and the knowledge base idea is very cool and is a plausible direction to take new LLMs into. A hypothetical Claude 3.8 that is explicitly trained to make knowledge base manipulation a central feature of the model could potentially perform miles better on some of these tasks. But all you've told me is that I should expect AI to struggle with these tasks. In which case: doesn't it sound like we agree? We both agree that there was no reason to expect Claude to succeed with Pokemon at the level of an eight-year-old. So, from the perspective of an uncommitted third party, given that an AI skeptic and an AI optimist have both agreed that an LLM can't play Pokemon like an eight-year-old... well, it feels pretty clear to me.

Obviously, if this becomes a big selling point for the next generation of LLMs, then we'll see them all benchmarked on Pokemon Red speedruns and you can I-told-you-so about AI being able to beat Pokemon. I don't doubt the ability of motivated corporations to "teach to the test" - it's what we've been seeing with "reasoning" AIs. It's just one of the problems with setting up real tests of ability for some of these AIs, because they get so much data that it's all but impossible to ensure you have a pure test like what the IQ test aspires to.

Jesus Christ, some people won't see the Singularity coming until they're being turned into a paperclip.

Dude. We could've had a program play Pokemon badly decades ago. It isn't impressive to have one do it just because it's playing Pokemon badly in a novel way. Or, to use your own snarky format:

Some people are trying so hard to see the Singularity coming that they are giving themselves eye injuries and calling the visual noise "the Singularity".

Edit:

I also think that "it's not trained for this" is an exceptionally poor argument when you're discussing artificial general intelligence. The whole point is whether the program can cope with situations it wasn't made for! If it can't (and it sounds like it can't), then it isn't AGI, full stop. Nor is it impressive that it can play at all, given that we have had AI playing games for a long time now (and it actually plays well when it is designed for it). "It can play the game, even if badly" is table stakes here, not an innovative development.

I've been watching Claude Plays Pokemon a bit and while it does seem AGI-ish moment to moment, the lack of proper memory is rather crippling as it often gets stuck in loops for hours. Some kind of better memory/online learning may be the last step before we have entry-level AGI agents, but it seems non-trivial.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet has a context window of 200k tokens. That is massive compared to the first commercial LLMs, which ranged from 4k to 16k.

It is, however, utterly dwarfed by other models like Gemini 2.0 Pro by Google. That one has a whopping 2 million token large context window, and I've personally made good use of it by throwing absurd amounts of text, including massive textbooks, into it.

There's plenty of ongoing research into both online learning, as well as drastically extending context lengths. We've gone from 4k to 2 million in about 2 years, without the original quadratic scaling of memory use still holding. I presume @DaseindustriesLtd would be better placed to answer how they pulled it off. Even accounting for performance degradation with very large context windows (needle in a haystack tests don't capture this), you can probably get around strictly needing online learning.

In context learning is not equivalent to training. There are certain model behaviors that are easily attainable through finetuning which cannot be achieved through in context learning. For example a properly safety tuned model will not output toxic content no matter how any of those two million tokens you use to insist that it should. The fact is that the model's ability to reason with in-context information versus embedded information is fundamentally different, so you will not be able to reach agi with just an infinite context window.

Of course I'm not saying you need agi to beat pokemon and the current state of the art should be capable of doing it if some minor adjustments are made.

From what I've read in the quotes this is a great rebuttal, but the op is filtered -_-;

Oops. Thanks for telling me.

I mean, it's easy to win an argument when my opponent is invisible, but I'll let him through the filters. I don't need the handicap.

Since the complaints about Trump are growing ever more shrill in Western Europe as well and there’s an increasing level of liberal doomposting about him online, I think it bears asking the question how exactly average Blue Tribe normies believe Trump’s political ascendancy could have been averted, assuming it wasn’t some inevitable turn of events. I guess most of them agree that Hillary should’ve won in 2016 but was undermined by manufactured scandals and whatnot, but I’d put forth the argument that the US culture war was already getting so heated by that point that liberals weren’t going to secure long-term political gains through such a victory. After all, Congress was still going to be majority(?) Republican, and it was always going to be possible for Trump to win the candidacy in 2020.

If we observe what dissident right-wingers describe as the Gramscian long march through the institutions, it’s fair to conclude that the way for liberalism to win is through incremental but irreversible gains, completed while real and potential enemies remain complacent and clueless, distracted all the time by issues that are ultimately irrelevant. Thus the interest of liberals normally isn’t to escalate the culture war, no matter how good it makes them feel about themselves, but to deescalate it, and win small victories without generating too much public hostility and alienation. There’s a time for humiliating your enemies if that’s what you want, but only when they’re fatally weakened and on the ground.

Concluding from this I’d argue that the time to avert the current mess which horrifies the average liberal was in 2012, either through a) not running an uncalled for and unbecoming smear campaign against Romney, which I guess would have entirely been possible had Obama’s reelection chances not seemed slim, and which wouldn’t have ended up paving the way for someone like Trump b) Romney or someone similar winning the election through not actually being a timid cuck but not being as polarizing as Trump, and ending up governing for one term.

What do you think?

They could've tried not alienating people who basically agreed with them, but thought throwing principles away was gauche? No idea. I wouldn't be here, anyway.

Decade and change was long enough to steer away from the rocks...

I mean I think that the culture is slowly but surely disempowering those institutions. How many people, still, in 2024 get any significant news from “mainstream” news outlets? When is the last time you heard a conversation with coworkers, friends or family about a news story shown on network news or from a large circulation newspaper or magazine? How many kids are now not interested in four years of woke nonsense in the university and opting for trade schools instead? How many are turned off by forced diversity in their workplace?

The future isn’t in those institutions. People get their news and general information from podcasts and blogs or streaming. They choose trade school for job skills and use online MOOCs if they want to get book learning. They’d have to basically retake a completely different set of institutions, except that because the barriers to entry are pretty low and the audience is much more likely to leave if they smell an overt political agenda.

The future is working at the nail factory, watching the barge go down the river, raising chickens in your backyard, getting taken to court for child support, drinking raw milk, refusing to get vaccinated and various other wholesome and natural behaviors...

I see no reason to believe that this is, in fact, the future. That being said, it's a better future by far than some of the alternatives.

How the fuck did turok of all people get filtered

@netstack why does the post that @FCfromSSC is replying to just say “filtered” and not show the actual post?

It seems I'm subject to some weird shadowban.

no, you're getting hit by the "new user filter". We have to go in and manually approve the posts, but they aren't marked very well so it's easy to miss them in the new comment feed. It's a leftover artifact from the Drama codebase, and the code guys haven't found a way to disable it yet, so it hits people until they get over some threshold of cumulative upvotes. I used to have to fish self-made-human out of it all day. I've just approved all your recent posts and those of two or three other people as well.

@ABigGuy4U, see above.

I was satirizing the Online Right's poverty fetish.

I mean I think that the culture is slowly but surely disempowering those institutions. How many people, still, in 2024 get any significant news from “mainstream” news outlets?

Much more than you would think. Its not always the NYT from its website, its a clickthrough from Twitter/Facebook. Its not always CNN, its a CNN clip posted to youtube that autoplayed after the football highlight clip they were watching. But that is the simple stuff. People still watch broadcast TV, particularly for sports. The news-magazines that are on before/after? Heavily biased. The random updates at halftime/quarter? Follow the mainstream narratives. The narrative for large swathes of the population is still set by these legacy outlets. The fact is that is is much easier to live your life that way. It takes a certain amount of dedication to realize the stuff that filters in through to you in the background of your favorite soccer team's games is all lies about the border when you have been listening to said broadcast since you were 10.

I think it bears asking the question how exactly average Blue Tribe normies believe Trump’s political ascendancy could have been averted, assuming it wasn’t some inevitable turn of events

I don't know about the blue tribe normie but if we're doing alt history I vote for not doing the mail-in strat in 2020. Without it Trump would have eeked out a meager victory in 2020: Trump 1 was lame and an immediately consecutive second term, with Pence VP and no Musk would have been much of the same if not even worse.

The post-covid immigration surge would have been smaller because of Trump and the post-covid inflation would also have been smaller because the war in Ukraine would have probably ended through diplomatic means 2 months in. Nevertheless with no immigration platform and a bad economy whoever would have run as a republican candidate in 2024 (Pence? De Santis?) would have lost badly, possibly historically so. And the dem republican would have not been Biden, possibly more radical and capable of running whatever agenda they had for 8 years (or more!) uninterrupted.

Second best would be picking a different date as the presidential debate in 2024. Had Biden not been sunsetting that one fateful day his poll numbers wouldn't have crashed, there wouldn't have been an assassination attempt on Trump and he could have won with a small margin. Then in 2028 Trump would probably have been too old to run again. It really was just a little bit of bad luck.

Its also plausible that 4 more years of aimless Trump would have had the Democrats doubling down on all their worst ideas, just doing them while out of power. Dozens of impeachment attempts instead of 2, relatively focused federal prosecutions. Even more state prosecutions, now of a sitting President. All in trans crazy activism writ large, etc.

All in all, I don't think Trump 2024 is even that much for normie Dems to worry about. Perhaps they lose some percentage of USAID, PEPFAR, etc slush funds permanently and semi-permanently. That reduces their federal dollars advantage from what? 1000-1 to merely 100-1? They also still have all the universities, and ending DEI doesn't mean you are ending funding for higher ed, which is simply funding for leftist propaganda, as a rule. And they still have captured the k-12 teachers and unions, so unless the public ends all public funding for all public education, there is Trillions of taxpayer dollars flowing into Democrat coffers still. You'd need to redirect like 40% of all public funds spent nationwide to get Republican orgs to parity when it comes to slush funding.

Plus you have inherent "get out the vote ;)" advantages baked in.

So the normie Dem that isn't worried is the correct one. Protect a bit of the status quo that you can, keep running milquetoast candidates like Biden that can pretend to be moderate. Perhaps not one who has been senile for 4 years. The institutional advantages are still overwhelmingly in your favor. Carry on, and maybe stop transing the frogs (and the kids).

I don't know about the blue tribe normie but if we're doing alt history I vote for not doing the mail-in strat in 2020. Without it Trump would have eeked out a meager victory in 2020: Trump 1 was lame and an immediately consecutive second term, with Pence VP and no Musk would have been much of the same if not even worse.

I might be one of the more blue-tribe-normie-adjacent person here and I think this is accurate.

Blue, sure, but if UwUers get to call themselves normies now I'm quitting life IRL

UwU

I appreciate the optimism that Biden just got caught on a singular bad day

He did seem to have better days during the campaign. Obviously a question if that was an 'average day' and the better days were the 99th percentile ones, but also a presidential debate probably not the best place for a person in his situaation.

I mean, as usual, define "Blue Tribe normie"? I've seen everything from "We should have implemented a complete information control regime in 2014 instead of 2018" to "The Democrat's shouldn't have rigged the primary against Bernie Sanders" to "Revolution now! Get out the guillotines!"

Personally, I'm not sure how the information control regime that existed up until Elon bought Twitter would have prevented an "Elon buys Twitter" type extinction level event, perhaps a bit earlier. Maybe earlier information control could have kept Elon inside a cage of censorship himself. Maybe with a 4 year head start they could have convinced him that sterilizing and mutilating one of his kids in California is actually great. I can't completely rule it out. Maybe after Trump is denied the presidency in 2016, having never been President, a focused DOJ could have been more effective at destroying him, throwing him Prison, and confiscating all his assets like they Alex Jones. I'm skeptical to all this, but it's a major strain of thought of a lot of "Blue Tribe normies". The only lesson they've taken is they should have done censorship sooner and harder. You need to outlaw the other political party.

I'm more sympathetic to the "Bernie should have won the primary" blue tribe normies. A bit more kind hearted than the MSNBC brained ones above, I find myself more able to have a pleasant conversation with them. I still think they are wrong. I think Bernie's sell out behavior since his loss in 2016 with his conforming to every DNC policy that he previously disagreed with, and generally being feckless to promote his agenda with even the small amount of power he'd been given indicated a Bernie 2016-2020 Presidency would have just been Neoliberalism as normal. We wouldn't see "Open borders are a Koch Brother's Conspiracy" Bernie in the White House, which leaves Republicans their strongest issue, which takes us right back to an information control regime and lawfare to stop a Trump who simply doesn't give up in 2020.

Then you have the "Get out the guillotine" Blue Tribers. I see no flaws in this plan. It's a lesson I've taken to heart.

not running an uncalled for and unbecoming smear campaign against Romney

I think this is a little silly. Without wishing to start the endless and pointless 'who started it' conversations, the idea that the Romney 'smear' campaign was some turning point in the breakdown of partisan relations is I think not very likely. After all Republicans ran their own set of vituperative ads in the 2012, including 'small business owners' getting faux-outraged at the stupid 'you didn't build that' (mis-)quotation and that work/welfare ad making a bare-faced lie about welfare reform. At least Bain actually did close that factory in that Obama ad.

I don't think there was ever a realistic off-ramp from where America is now, but it isn't that bad, all things considered. At least Senators don't beat each other near to death these days. Trump is pretty unique and when he sees out his term of dies I think the populist right probably loses its momentum and things start to cool down again, especially when it becomes apparent that all he will have achieved is some tax cuts which outweigh by a factor of a zillion any savings from cutting 'bureaucracy'.

Is it motte rerun week? A blast through the past of all our most frustrating arguments?

getting faux-outraged at the stupid 'you didn't build that' (mis-)quotation

No the outrage wasn't fake, that speech was one of the final chinks in the Obama scales over my eyes that had me believing the propaganda that he was a decent guy not into the partisan bullshit. I'm pretty sure someone else has explained this situation better before, but those small business owners were legitimately outraged and rightly so. 'You didn't build that' is not a misquotation, it is precisely what Obama said, and the idea that he was referring to bridges and roads is at best motte and baileying.

Obama's an erudite guy, if he means bridges and roads or infrastructure he is more than capable of saying those words. He said 'that' because it was punchier, encapsulated all he said previously and because it illustrates his position that people who live in a society owe that society in part for their success. It was also a direct and deliberate attack on one of the red tribe's most important values, that through hard work you can get a better life. And those small business owners were correct to view it as the prelude to an attack on small businesses, because that's exactly what happened.

Without getting into the weeds here, I think you've slightly misjudged the call of the question. The issue isn't "who started the mudslinging," or even "was the anti-Romney campaign particularly egregious" - instead what is being asked here is "what were the inflection points which activated the Trumpian base sufficiently for him to arise in 2016?" The anti-Romney campaign is one possible answer, regardless of whether the Dem's rhetoric was in part accurate, or if the heat wasn't a substantial change from what came before.

Personally I think the Romney campaign was a lost opportunity, not a Trumpian precursor; Trumpian folks did not get all that excited about Romney; they were the ones boosting Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain and Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum in the primaries. A Romney win, if followed by competent government (a huge if in the modern-day) was probably the last serious chance the GOP's "respectability" faction had to wrest the party's momentum away from the insurgent TEA-party/populist wing which ultimately coalesced under Trump.

Well the "uncalled for" quip does kind of point at a question of who started it, the easiest way to avoid that is to describe the smear campaign sans judgement. I feel like on this site you constantly get reminded of all the reasons why the innocent conservatives just had to rebel against the mean democrat which conveniently ignores how dems felt under his predecessor (and "we hated him too" doesn't quite make up for it)

I meant the "uncalled for" quip to describe that that there was a candidate who very obviously wasn't a racist, sexist, toxic scoundrel but was still denounced as such.

A Romney win, if followed by competent government (a huge if in the modern-day) was probably the last serious chance the GOP's "respectability" faction had to wrest the party's momentum away from the insurgent TEA-party/populist wing which ultimately coalesced under Trump.

While I agree that Romney's loss did not polarize anyone, in hindsight I do believe it had a surprising effect of ruining one of the left's most effective memetic attacks.

The DNC ran ran a lot of smear campaigns on Romney in an attempt to alienate the GOP base and activate their own.

Unfortunately, large swaths of the GOP voter base already viewed Romney as a worthless, squishy RINO who's main value was that he probably wouldn't ruin things as fast as Obama would.

On the DNC side, the voters completely believed it, and my hardcore left wing acquaintances genuinely meant it when they called him a "dog murdering polygamy cultist".

This caused two things to happen. The first is that this is probably the start of the DNC voter's hysteria floor moving from 1/10 to 6/10, and that made it considerably harder for leadership to unwind the outrage when it was no longer politically useful. This reached a peak in the fiery but mostly peaceful protests of 2020, but remains a problem even half a decade later.

On the GOP side, it was different. The fact that the current candidate is always some variant of a dog murdering polygamy cultist, while the previous candidate is always a guy who you may not agree with, but you can respect his principles, suddenly become a Noticeable Narrative to the GOP rank and file. Once they Noticed, imthey were memetically inoculated, and immediately responded internally with some variant of "if you're going to call the most milquetoast mother fucker we can possibly find SatanHitler, then why should I believe you about anything at all? Don't piss in my face and tell me it's raining".

Then, in 2016, Trump showed up, and suddenly the left could neither dial up their outrage knob enough to be noticeable, nor could they demoralize the right with appeals to respectability.

To me at least, it's a pretty clear trend line to our present circumstances.

Yeah, none of the trump supporters I know IRL is peeved about the media’s treatment of Romney- but they remember fast and furious, the IRS targeting scandal, Obama’s guns and religion comment, masterpiece cake shop, often the little sisters of the poor, and the Obama executive actions on immigration.

I guess they weren't peeved about it because the very idea that the GOP should run a respectable, sensitive, decent etc. candidate was already such a laughingstock by that point as a consequence of the Romney campaign that it didn't even occur on anyone's radar.

Don't forget operation choke point.

I sometimes wonder if the media had been a lot nicer to Jeb Bush, if Donald Trump would never have gained the attention and momentum to win the primary. But Trump caught on with so many voters unhappy with the system and the media. But I don't think other Republican primary candidate wins the 2016 election, tough to forsee some other candidate with populist tendencies appearing 2020, 2024, but seeing Trump's success I wonder what would have filled the vacuum.

But I don't think other Republican primary candidate wins the 2016 election

Trump had high unfavorables and was hammered by the media. I think it's reasonable that a normal Republican (Ted or Jed) could have won after 8 years of Obama, though ultimately with a different voter coalition

Until Trump arrived on the scene, my plan in 2016 was either to vote for Hillary or to stay home. In no circumstance would I ever have voted for a Bush, nor any Republican running on the Bush consensus.

I think an alternative candidate still gets hammered by negative press, the media paints Obama as a huge positive, and the GOP candidate still plays by pre-Trump rules and cannot overcome those effects.

But "overcoming those effects" is also how Trump won the primary. So youre imagining a world where the press was nice to primary Jeb, but hard on general Jeb. Possible in theory, but is is really more likey than nice in both?

Apologies for the two back to back posts, but I've been reading something on Twitter that is very fascinating:

The NYT this morning criticized Elon Musk's call to impeach federal judges, accusing him of violating constitutional norms. Well, I looked into the data and it's insane: We stopped impeaching federal judges, despite having more of them now than ever! The impeachment rate now seems implausibly low.

Either federal judges have become saints, or something is suppressing impeachments. What is the probability we'd observe zero impeachments from 2011-2024? Using the Poisson distribution, I think it's somewhere around 3-7% depending on how you do it. So it's very fishy.

What's even crazier is that there is a clear political story behind all of this.

The 1980 Judicial Conduct and Disability Act, signed by Jimmy Carter, gave judges the power to police themselves through an obfuscated multi-layer system where chief judges dismiss almost all the complaints and judicial councils choose confidential sanctions in most of the cases where they even admit wrongdoing occurred.

Then in 2008 the federal judges "reformed" themselves, which seems to have made things even worse. I have to look into this more, obviously a complicated issue.

But it seems that the NYT is wrong and Musk is right, we do need to impeach more federal judges. (I'll post a longer piece on this later.)

On the other hand, if I understand the graph correctly, the US has never impeached more than 15 federal judges in its history and there have been decades where no judges at all have been impeached, so calling for the impeachment of judges you disagree with is indeed an anomaly and would likely just come back to bite you in four years.

Using the Poisson distribution, I think it's somewhere around 3-7% depending on how you do it. So it's very fishy.

Is this a deliberate pun?

The 1980 Judicial Conduct and Disability Act, signed by Jimmy Carter, gave judges the power to police themselves through an obfuscated multi-layer system where chief judges dismiss almost all the complaints and judicial councils choose confidential sanctions in most of the cases where they even admit wrongdoing occurred.

Then in 2008 the federal judges "reformed" themselves, which seems to have made things even worse. I have to look into this more, obviously a complicated issue.

Is it working?

Let's say that the appointment rate of bad judges stays constant over the centuries, but the enforcement mechanisms change. We could see:

  1. a bad judge makes a number of bad decisions (possibly just one) and retires without sanction after a full career. Zero impeachments but many bad decisions.
  2. a bad judge makes a number of bad decisions and is impeached. One impeachment.
  3. a bad judge makes a number of bad decisions and is referred to the committee and accepts their recommendation to resign. Zero impeachments.
  4. a bad judge gives off some warning signs without any substantive bad decisions and is referred to the committee and either accepts their recommendation to resign or reforms and becomes good. Zero impeachments and zero bad decisions.

All I can say after reading this is that we aren't in scenario #2. The tweet author is suggesting #1, but both #3 and #4 fit with the evidence presented.

I don’t think trying to impeach judges is a good idea either although I also think this is a fairly obvious political response to the dems and the others in the senate who constantly tried to push Supreme Court reform which was basically just designed to give congress the ability to oversee recusal decisions: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/926/text

This analysis reminds me of how humanities and “soft” sciences often try to use mathematics to dress up arguments that are really nothing more than vibes. Why should judicial impeachments be poisson distributed? Even if they are, how do you infer the correct parameter? Using the small number of known occurrences is going to yield huge variance. I mean just look at the interesting choice of y-axis in the first chart. The numbers of impeachments are so small that you really have to strain yourself to make a coherent argument with any amount of rigor.

calling for the impeachment of judges you disagree with is indeed an anomaly and would likely just come back to bite you in four years.

Nobody’s going to have the votes to go impeaching judges Willy-nilly any time soon.

I think the reason they are impeaching judges is to have a chilling effect.

Since removal requires 2/3rds of the Senate, it's impossible to remove judges for partisan behavior.

But most people don't like being the subject of intense scrutiny. An impeachment trial would be humiliating to a judge, who is normally accustomed to unchallenged power and even sycophancy.

Ok- so the GOP can probably find an example, somewhere, of a democrat federal judge taking bribes(after all, there’s hundred of them). Democrats still won’t impeach because they believe the GOP is ignoring Clarence Thomas doing the same thing. That this belief is false doesn’t matter.

Judges are almost never impeached because the federal judiciary has an internal process where if a judge is found to have done something bad after an investigation, the judiciary will recommend that the judge voluntarily resign. The judge will almost always comply with the resignation "suggestion," because if he does not, the judiciary will recommend impeachment to congress. Such a recommendation carries a great deal of weight when your own colleagues in the judiciary think you deserve to be impeached. So the impeachment rate is low because there is an internal process that pushes judges who would otherwise get impeached to voluntarily step down.

Does this internal process covers being a terrible judge, or just actions of criminal or corrupt nature?

I’m imagining a scenario where we have a judge that keeps issuing clearly wrong decisions that keep getting overturned in appeals. This stuff happens sometimes to all judges, but let’s assume we are talking someone who is wrong as a matter of law frequently very frequently and egregiously. Assume though that there is no corruption involved. Does the internal judiciary process even recognizes this as an issue? Or is Congress initiated impeachment the only option here?

The process is generally used for criminal/corrupt behavior or failing to do the job (like failing to show up to court, failing to issue opinions, failing to resign when no longer mentally competent for the job). The complete set of arcane procedures are here, I believe.

I don't know whether the process is ever invoked for judges who are "wrong as a matter of law frequently." Often this is the result of a political or philosophical disagreement rather than a failure to do one's job. For example, imagine a conservative district judge pre-Dobbs who consistently holds that Roe was wrongly decided and is not good law, and therefore keeps getting reversed. It may seem that this judge is constantly getting the law "wrong," but in fact he is getting the law "right" and will later be vindicated by Dobbs.

It may seem that this judge is constantly getting the law "wrong," but in fact he is getting the law "right" and will later be vindicated by Dobbs.

This sounds reasonable at first, but if you think about it, the legal system cannot work like that. What this means in practice for users of the system is that if they happen to have bad luck and draw this judge, it just adds an additional useless step to the process, where the superior court will have to overturn. Imagine if appeals court remands the case back to lower court. What will this lower court judge do? Will he rule wrongly again, requiring another appeal? Or will he rule as instructed by superior court in this particular case, but will do the opposite in other cases?

Anyway, my point is that the hierarchical judicial system requires lower courts to defer to rulings and opinions of superior courts. It is normal and reasonable when superior court overrules a lower court because of some mistake or error, but the system cannot maintain the trust and respect of the users where lower courts routinely ignore law and superior precedent.

Regardless, I am not aware of a real-world situation where a federal judge has been consistently "wrong" while otherwise doing his job (i.e. showing up for hearings and issuing orders in a timely fashion). For example, a federal district judge ignoring a direct order from the circuit court would be shocking. Perhaps some examples of this exist, but I am not aware of any, and presumably it would be grounds for disciplinary proceedings.

The obvious follow up question is what percentage of judges resign in those circumstances?

I don't know whether the data exists, but my understanding is the vast majority voluntarily resign, probably over 90%.

Sorry I was unclear. I mean, what percent of federal judges are defacto "forced to resign" under the method you mentioned. 1%? 0.1%?

I don't know but probably that range is about right.

Almost all of them. There are few Roy Pearsons in the federal judiciary.

People have commented that Zelensky's casual attire and his debating Trump and Vance in front of the media seems disrespectful or challenging to Trump. That's because it is. Contrary to Trump's claim that he has no cards, he does have a card - his popularity in Western media and the US congress. Trump has a thin margin in Congress and foreign policy is an area where a few Republicans are likely to peel off in support of popular wars.

Zelensky is betting that he is more powerful than Trump where it matters. If Trump has no power to withhold ongoing support from Zelensky, then it is Zelensky, not Trump, that controls American Ukraine policy. The press conference and its fallout serves as a test of strength where Zelensky challenges Trump and then gauges the results to see if his assumptions are correct.

That still doesn't give Zelensky a path to achieving any maximalist war objective. But it does give him a path to retaining the status quo of indefinite American material support, which seems good enough to him for the moment. Trump may be the elected President of the United States, he may be taller, better dressed, and more objectively correct about the best path forward. But in an open democracy it is popularity that matters - not any of those other things. And the contest pits Trump against America's most beloved political celebrity of the last three years.

It's no accident that Zelenksy looks like a character from a Marvel movie (strong resemblance to Hawkeye in particular). It is a persona designed to appeal to the American public. The President has a few explicit powers that a celebrity does not. But when it comes to swaying the US congress, it is an even battle ground - popularity vs. popularity, celebrity vs. celebrity. Zelensky thinks he can get 51 votes in the Senate and he's not going to sign any compromise agreement until he is reasonably sure he will lose.

Trump just halted military aid to Ukraine.

If Zelensky was making a play to see if he has more power than Trump, then he was consuming his own propaganda. So what if he has sympathizers in congress or the general American public is in favor of aid? If Trump unilaterally halts it, what can congress or the American people do about it? The answer is... nothing. Ukraine aid is simply not a contentious issue in America, even if the average American supports Ukraine, or is in favor of aid. The most they'll do is probably go "oh well, sucks for Ukraine" and go on about their day. Sure, the blue tribe will probably use this as an opportunity for more "Trump bad!" on social media, but that's basically the SOP for everything Trump does at this point.

We'll see how long Congress lets him hold the line. I'm optimistic that there's still enough fresh bravado in the Republican coalition to hold out for long enough to allow Trump's pressure to work.

I wonder if Zelensky actually believes that is casual attire is basically his version of the simple yet recognizable Mao suit.

Yes, there's probably something like that going on. What's funny about his martial-casual attire is that I very distinctively remember it being a truism when I was growing up that any head of state who routinely wore military attire was most likely a dictator or a warlord. It was even a pretty easy media trope in action and espionage movies to quickly establish that a ruler was evil by dressing the character in military uniform or some kind of martial aesthetic. There was supposed to be something unnerving and almost pathetic about a man not actively fighting on the frontline nor being an active member of the military in the conventional sense and still choosing to wear army garb each day. It's not like Thatcher wore a uniform during the Falklands War when she was in London governing, only when visiting the fighting troops.

I also remember - having gone to a French school - learning about how amidst the worsening Algeria crisis, De Gaulle responded to the erection of barricades in Algiers by appearing on state television wearing his old army uniform as a show of force and reminder of his past role in France's liberation. This move apparently shocked French society, especially on the political left, and strongly nourished already present fears that he was an authoritarian who might dismantle French Democracy.

Funny to see how quickly this association vanished with Zelenskyy, although maybe it was already an outdated 20th century relic anyway since most dictators today just wear business suits.

Zelensky doesn't wear a military uniform though, he just wears a sort of grey tracksuit style thing? It reads less like military and more like guy spending a lot of time in the sauna while pretending to go to the gym.

Looks more like the guy who shops at the PX of the local army base and then hangs around nearby bars to me:

https://assets.weforum.org/sf_account/image/responsive_small_webp_2pPb1R7-GRMljQdfgjneh3e6AYb2QP2XAxAunEbA69A.webp

"I'm not saying I'm a soldier, buuuuut...."

It looks like a T-shirt and a cheap north face jacket to me.

An army green t-shirt and an cheap bomber-style jacket, yes -- that's kind of the point being made here.

I think it might have gone gone over better if had worn his usual green fatigues. The one he wore to the White House looks too much like a track suit.

I am by no means a fashion expert, but that is not a bomber jacket. Maybe in some esoteric fashion world it is. In the world I live in, these are bomber jackets.

Even some of those are kind of not that classy. "Cheap bomber jacket" is a total loser move.

Grey Man Chic.

I thought he was going for military-adjacent without transparently pretending to be an actual soldier.

Maybe. He doesn't hit any marks for me and I doubt anyone would know these "intentions" and make this argument for him without him repeating it over and over to friendly press. He looks like halfway between a tech billionaire that stopped giving a fuck and an 80s mobster.

Like I said, the closest I've got is, "guy who goes to the gym all the time but never works out and just sits in the sauna."

There is a related-but-distinct line of clothing chic with Zelensky, and that is that a suit is not as benign / respectable in his context, since suites are often associated with the rich, powerful, and connected- i.e. the corrupt oligarchic class, whose reputation for selling out Ukraine is so well known that it shapes American doubter perceptions of Zelensky.

Americans like Trump want suites because it's seen as the normative / proper thing to do at high-level engagements, and being underdressed can be insulting as a sort of claim of 'I'm so important I can ignore it.' But this is not a universal view, and Zelensky breaking character not only at Trump's behest, but specifically for a very one-sided natural resource deal that could be characterized as selling out Ukraine, would be an obvious propaganda attack line.

Put another way- if the first time Zelensky put on a suit was to give the Americans a potential veto of 50% of future Ukrainian mineral projects going forward, it would not be seen by the Ukrainian home audience as a respectable and uncontroversial business attire, but something appropriate for an oligarch.

Worth also remembering that Zelensky became a Presidential candidate in the first place because he was caught on camera ranting about corrupt politicians, IIRC. His fashion choices are indeed most likely motivated by him wanting to distance himself from the politicians of yore.

That was the teacher character he played in his TV show, Servant of the People

Worth also remembering that Zelensky became a Presidential candidate in the first place because he was caught on camera ranting about corrupt politicians, IIRC.

Amusingly, you've confused him with the fictional character he played.

that any head of state who routinely wore military attire was most likely a dictator or a warlord.

Most of the examples I can think of that would have suggested this wear dress military uniforms: Franco, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, and such. Although I suppose there is an association of more field-style uniforms (usually with a rifle or equivalent) with something like an African coup. I don't think Zelenskyy's attire really embodies either, but that is just my opinion. The association I remember learning also involved dictators frequently giving all their yes-men medals to wear on excessively elaborate uniforms: somewhere there is a picture from North Korea of comical numbers of medals.

Off the top of my head, Castro, Noriega, and Thomas Sankara come to mind as wearing everyday military attire, and I think Saddam usually wasn't wearing ceremonial uniforms. But yes Zelenskyy is definitely doing something more toned down and palatable.

Funny to see how quickly this association vanished with Zelenskyy, although maybe it was already an outdated 20th century relic anyway since most dictators today just wear business suits.

Zelensky did earn it to some extent. Staying in Kyiv when it looked in imminent danger of falling to the Russians and famously telling western leaders trying to convince him to flee "I don't need a ride, I need ammo" was pretty heroic and effectively created the image in most people's minds of a leader close to literally fighting on the front lines to defend his nation. His habit of wearing military attire seemed a lot more appropriate in that context.

I don't have much positive to say about Trump's foreign policy nominees or strategies but it's very funny to have seen every western country except the US ignoring all of their defense industries, spending, and global security, and then getting mad when the US doesn't spend those resources and materiel in the way they want.

This is media circus. As of 2024 the majority of NATO countries are meeting the 2% of GDP target, and this is broadly indicative of overall attitudes towards defence investment post Feb-22.

The fact that you needed to pick a contrived example (Why just NATO, why not other western countries? why current defense % GDP spending and not a historical average? why is 65% of them doing it but 35% of them not doing it considered a success? why aren't we just comparing total or % of GDP expenditures against the USA's numbers?) sort of proves the point I was making. If Italy produced 80% of the EU's steel, whether or not there is some norm or rule in the EU rules or treaties, I would find it pretty fucking rich if 5 other countries made it an international incident that Italy isn't using it's steel output for X or Y industry after those same countries neglected their production and investment for years.

Given current events and the context of your comment I believed you were referring to current spending levels within NATO. Seriously, who were you referring to if not a NATO member state?

If Trump has no power to withhold ongoing support from Zelensky

Well he certainly seems to think he does:

Donald Trump is expected to discuss cancelling military aid to Ukraine when he meets with key advisors later today.

The president will speak with senior advisers, including Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, to consider a range of options, including cancelling aid that was approved and paid for by the Biden administration, the New York Times reported.

I confess to being ignorant of the mechanics of how all this works, and a cursory Google search didn't turn up much, so if someone with more expertise wants to chime in please do. But the news articles coming out today seem to indicate that the President and his national security team have essentially unilateral power to withhold aid from Ukraine if they choose to.

Trump was impeached the first time for temporarily delaying aid to Ukraine. Or at least threatening to in a phone call. Congress shall determine what aid is sent to Ukraine.

Not every last penny is specifically earmarked and Trump has some latitude here. But his agency is quite limited.

Potential articles of impeachment outlined during the hearing include abuse of power for arranging a quid pro quo with the president of Ukraine, obstruction of Congress for hindering the House's investigation, and obstruction of justice for attempting to dismiss Robert Mueller during his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

As is frequently the case with these sorts of things, the coverup was worse than the crime. He was charged for attempting to establish a quid pro quo with Zelensky, but there's no indication that the mere act of withholding the aid itself was an impeachable offense.

They do. As a legal authority matter, the aid legislation is usually for sending material to Ukraine or replacing lost stock already sent, which allows the president to not-send on the basis of replacing already-sent.

As a game theory matter, a permanent cutoff right now would be a bet with a high risk of losing relevant leverage with Russia. If the US has already cutoff aid and is threatening to send no more to Ukraine, then the US cannot use either the offer of a cutoff or threat of more aid to pressure Russia. It also creates issues with leverage with Ukraine, since you can't threaten to cutoff aid if you've already cutoff aid, and while there are many who would gleefully relish Ukraine doing worse on the battlefront, that's a consequence, not an impossibility or even a categorical collapse. This is why opponents of Ukraine aid typically resort to 'they'll deserve the consequences' rather than address how a cutoff will end the war.

The key word in that, however, is 'permanent.'

As a kabuki theater/kayfabe matter, never a bad metaphor to remember with the US, a temporary cutoff allows both parties to play well for their respective political bases, before a mediated 'reconciliation' by third parties (such as the Europeans) who can facilitate a nominal compromise (such as Europeans buying weapons on behalf of Ukraine). Given how even Trump didn't appear that upset at the summit breakdown (the 'this will make for great TV' bit), and how I hardly expect Trump to refuse arms sales to Europe if offered, this could play out over weeks or even months.

My personal bet is on the later, which will play into the UKR-EU summit later this week, with any mitigation plans only revealed later this month.

Which is to say- I will be neither particularly surprised or alarmed if there's an announcement of a cutoff of military aid this week. I will be curious to see what form it takes if it does happen, particularly any concrete demands for a resumption of aid-

-because if there are easily fulfillable conditions, then that's an easy trigger for the US to flow aid back into Ukraine, which is what preserves the negotiating leverage with Russia, and lets all parties play to their preferred propaganda narratives of how they are taking advantage of it / the other parties are losing from it. And if the demand is generally unreasonable (i.e. resignation of Zelensky), then this is itself subject to a choreographed resolution via later reconciliation or managed turnover (which Zelensky has repeatedly signaled) with less stated understandings.

Which is to say, kabuki.

Which is coincidentally well timed given that Trump is due to speak to a joint session of Congress tomorrow (Tuesday) to lay out his priorities and Ukraine intentions.

This looks like it fits in with Trump's strategy to increase executive power by refusing to spend funds that Congress has appropriated, like how he shut down USAID. This is still a legal gambit on Trump's part, and it's not clear that he will get away with it.

If he does hold back aid for even a short period of time, the media response will be withering. Zelensky is popular. Does he have enough time before the midterms to weather the storm and pressure Zelensky to come to the table?

According to this, the funding for Ukraine is drawn from multiple sources, and at least some of those sources are under the direct control of the President/DoD:

Pursuant to a delegation by the President, we have used the emergency Presidential Drawdown Authority on 55 occasions since August 2021 to provide Ukraine military assistance totaling approximately $31.7 billion from DoD stockpiles.

On September 26, 2024, the Department notified Congress of the intent to direct the drawdown of up to approximately $5.55 billion in defense articles and services from DoD stocks for military assistance to Ukraine under Presidential Drawdown Authority.

Would be a bit odd if the President couldn't simply decline to exercise the Presidential Drawdown Authority. It wouldn't be much of an Authority in that case.

So, there are some funding sources that couldn't be canceled without getting into legally murky area, but Trump could choose to cancel a significant portion of it right away.

Interesting, thank you. That does give the President some short term discretionary leverage. But looking out on a longer timeline, Congress has the power to write spending bills that the President cannot stop

Yes, but in the long term, Zelenskyy could be dead, or at least Ukraine could be in a much worse position. A battle between Congress and Trump would take time, and that time would not be on Ukraine's side.

He really needs to lie better like the Biden admin did. Just slow role it, tie it up in court, complain about the "Parliamentarian", and give the money to a Republican Patronage Network that might, after 10 years, spent 0.01% of the money on Ukraine versus their pet causes. Shit, spend all of it on that Strategic Crypto Reserve and claim it's to keep Russia from getting all the Crypto. It'll hold up about as well as all the money Biden drained from the government for illegals getting tons of free shit. Trump's problem is that he's such a worse liar than the typical politician to whom words mean nothing, and passive aggression is the primary winning strategy. Trump feels this compulsive need to beat his chest and openly fight with people, instead of just lying that he'll do something, and then doing whatever he wants anyways with 100 layers of indirection and plausible deniability.

Seeing how the western media desperately mischaracterized what happened and engaged in their usual distortionary editing and reporting, you are absolutely correct that he has them in his pocket. All the more reason for the average republican to distrust him, given their rock bottom trust in journalists in general. But maybe his gambit will pay off

Although he might just be a bit of an arrogant type of person - apparently Biden hung up on him because of his attitude previously.

What outlets in Western media mischaracterized what happened? What distortions did they make in particular?

Mostly that what Vance said was unprovoked. They all basically tried to craft a “he started it” narrative. All the clips they show start with Vance talking, removing the entire context of what led up to it

History podcaster Marty Made articulates a growing position on the right: the US should look to ally with Russia in order to build an economic and diplomatic relationship with China:

This is the wrong approach. If Russia has built trust with China, we should make peace and rehabilitate Russia, and try to use her influence to come to a lasting understanding w/China. People repeat caricatures of China often enough that they start to believe them.

He sees the US as adopting a hypocritical foreign policy approach by aligning with Japan after WW2 and glossing over its own bad actions:

Then Japan brutalized China during WW2, and we allied w/Japan and isolated China after the war. Despite it all, China has one foot, or at least a toe, in the world community. They might steal some IP and engage in shady diplomacy, but they haven’t done anything to compare with our side invading countries and overthrowing governments all over the world. A little less hypocrisy and more mutual respect can fix whatever’s wrong with the relationship, and if it doesn’t we’ll be in a better political and moral position for having tried it.

This follows Musk publicly agreeing with people on Twitter that NATO should be disbanded. Other people orbiting the Trump administration have voiced similar opinions re China, basically that it doesn't serve US interests to continue fighting with them.

Why would we need to ally with Russia to ‘build a relationship’ with China? We have a relationship with China.

And more to the point, why would Russia want to ally with us? We have no interests in common and a consistent theme of Russian foreign policy is preferring their own sovereignty over material prosperity. They’d far rather be China’s junior partner than America’s vassal.

The argument is strange. The US doesn’t need Russia to cut a deal with China, China very much wants to do business with the US, the US can cut deals directly; neither the Americans nor the Chinese think much of Russian honor or ever have, why would a far lesser power be needed as guarantor or even for an introduction?

But, of course, I fully agree that peace with China is necessary and just. Saber rattling there serves nobody any good. Offer the smarter Taiwanese a negotiated route to Singapore (a de facto Chinese ethnostate run to preserve a permanent Chinese majority) or to places in the US orbit or neutral-ish countries in SEA like Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines where the Chinese minority is extremely overrepresented in the elite, and then negotiate a return of the island to China. Then be done with the region beyond trade.

I’m all in favor of American imperialism but its clear focus should be on the Americas and Europe.

Why send them to Singapore? Move them directly to the US.

The founder of TSCM was educated in the US, worked in the US for decades and is a US citizen. He moved to Taiwan to start TSMC and recruited Chinese and Taiwanese Americans to join him in Taiwan. I don't see why they couldn't move back. Like the way we treat Cubans.

Sure, that is an option for some too.

It's Martyr Made, not Marty.

US beef with China seems to mainly China's potential to make US no longer be the unipolar superpower by China growing richer and stronger, the other issues are pretexts. In that case no coming to an understanding is possible, either US contains China's rise while it still can or not.

That is not our beef with China. China runs a market closed to American business - it forces the transfer of ownership and IP, while our market is relatively open. China systematically spies on American businesses and academia to steal IP for the purpose of competition (not national security). China was the main supplier of synthetic opioids to the US.

So US wants to fight China in South China sea and Taiwan due to IP infringement? CIA trains Uighurs how to do terrorism because of IP infringement?

Edit: and if another country was becoming a leading superpower fair and square US would just let them?

No, I don’t believe that. China making it zero sum is throwing fuel on the fire though.

No agreement can make china stop copying american ip because weak IP protections is just the objectively correct economic prescription. All IP laws except trademarks should be destroyed for being bullshit rent seeking.

China also has looming demographic issues that are far worse than America's: I don't think it has a sustainable path to long-term superpower status because the legacy of the one-child policy will have the median age in China rapidly pass that in the US within the next decade or so. Even if, God forbid, war breaks out, how many only sons (and only grandsons) can be sent home in boxes before the Mandate of Heaven is lost? I don't know, or want to find out, but to me it'd at least be a real concern.

I think China has at least another good decade going for it, and may well stay relevant beyond that too.

US is turning into Brazil demographically along with the population aging, that's not great either.

The U.S. is still slightly whiter than Brazil, but the core white population appears to have much more stable fertility rates than any secular white population elsewhere in the world, and Brazil’s human capital isn’t that low anyways, it’s suffering from Latin America syndrome. There’s more than enough doctors and engineers to maintain a functional civilization there, it isn’t Africa.

Brazil has the human capital to be much richer than it is, you can imagine a Brazil where the largest cities and the whole of the south are essentially first world (Brazilians will tell you places like Florianopolis are like this; they aren’t) and only the north is kind of poor and violent.

I can imagine a Brazil which is a first world country over the entire place, albeit with welfare transfers to the north and a high crime rate. Brazil easily has the human capital for (south)Western European standards. Corruption, socialism, and neighborhood are the things holding it back.

I think this is a fantastic idea...or was, fifteen years ago. Now? To counterbalance China? Over Taiwan?

Here's the truth. Putin went to Xi when things started getting dicy in Ukraine. Western backed aid has killed tens of thousands of Russians. If Xi launches his thousand ships against Taiwan, my guess is that Putin's aid is already locked in.

It might be possible that Putin (who I do think is a pro-Westerner by inclination) thinks he can get more of what he wants by being "reasonable" and ONCE AGAIN playing "reset" with the United States. And perhaps he has a preexisting understanding of sorts with Trump that he wants to honor. But I do not think the United States should make any compromises in the belief that it can neutralize Russia in the 2020s against China. Longer-term thinking, sure, that's fine, particularly with a consistent objective. But if China goes to war with Taiwan tomorrow, Russia probably has their back.

the US should look to ally with Russia

Can one ally with Russia, in any sense that requires future commitments rather than presently verifiable terms? What has changed in between the Berlin Blockade and now that makes them less likely to use such an alliance when it might benefit them but then ignore it as soon as it might cost them? (Fun aside: though it sounds like one of Aesop's, The Scorpion and the Frog is a Russian fable)

in order to build an economic and diplomatic relationship with China:

China is already our third-largest trading partner (right after the two that each share thousands of miles of border with us), and though our diplomatic relationship is somewhat strained by philosophical tensions similar to our tensions with Russia, e.g. between "conquest is bad" versus "if the other guys are basically the same ethnicity then it shouldn't even really count as an invasion when we send in the military", I don't think the proper resolution here is to just switch teams. There are a lot of potential Sudetenland "special military operation" opportunities in the world, and it's a better place when they're unrealized opportunities.

and we allied w/Japan

Despite my suspicions above, I would agree that if Russia agrees to an unconditional surrender, demilitarization and disarmament, an American rewrite of their constitution, and acceptance of military occupation to enforce it all, that would be ample evidence of sufficient change for us to ally with them afterwards.

Can one ally with Russia, in any sense that requires future commitments rather than presently verifiable terms?

I'd say probably not. No alliance is truly reliable, but alliances with Russia seem far more dicey than most. But probably not as dicey as a "lasting understanding" with China! This is just a bad idea all around.

More to the point, why would Russia ally with a country that has indicated willingness to do 180-degree turns in foreign policy and abandon previous allies at will due to local power shifts?

Very fair point.

I suspect the answer intended by the US Constitution was also the one you'd get from game theory: treaties are supreme over other laws, and require a 2/3 Senate vote to ratify, and naturally you're not going to swing wildly from "2/3 in favor of ratification" to "2/3 in favor of nullification", so once a treaty is ratified it should be relatively trustworthy.

Unfortunately the Constitution doesn't actually spell out the "2/3 in favor of nullification" part of that, and so the status quo for terminating a treaty ended up somewhere in between "big legalese mess" and "the President can do whatever he wants", leaning towards the latter. I would still trust the US with an alliance more than Russia, but not as much more as I'd like to.

Thank God for that oversight. If we needed 2/3rds of the Senate to get out of a treaty we would not be a sovereign nation but a mere puppet of the many countries we have signed unwise treaties with in moments of weakness.

In a better world, treaties should automatically sunset and be renewed after some period of time. Perhaps 10 years.

Marty Made is largely a clown (actually thinks chief villain of WW2 was Churchill), although I haven't bothered to do that much of a deep research to understand if it's from some earnest place or he just does it for the sake of grift.

There isn't anything overly hypocritical in US conduct post-WW2, unless you subscribe to some fantasy world where everyone can and is willing to fully commit to idealism. Imperial Japanese era political foundations were dismantled to form a liberal democratic order and country was demilitarized. Yes, you can argue that there was too much of a rehabilitation of certain figures and families who were involved with Imperial Japan, but that was a pragmatic choice to contain the Soviet & China axis. Even if one casts suspicion on the moral intentions of establishing liberal democracy in Japan, feeding Japan fully into the rule-based liberal democratic capitalist market order was beneficial to US. At the time it made perfect sense thus to ally Japan.

Also, dude seems to be critical about invading countries and overthrowing governments when it comes to making a shining example of a country that does not do it (China), but then seems to be awfully warm about Russia. I at least respect left-wingers of the Chomskian vein for trying to build carefully crafted cogent arguments against US-led NATO world order, but god damn these silly right-wing amateurs who peddle in dumbed down versions of it.

Compare how the Chinese have played things compared to the neo-cons.

During the cold war Sino-Russian relations were tense and the countries had sizeable portions of the militaries on each other's borders. Russia pancaked itself during the 90s and instead of abusing Russia the Chinese were rather generous. Russia had treated China poorly and the Chinese responded by being respectful. Today China has almost no troops along the Russian border and they can buy the natural resources between Turkey and Alaska, or Norway and North Korea at a discount.

Meanwhile the west has embargoed it self from one of the largest resource producers in the world and has to sustain a military 25% of the size of the US military fighting a high intensity war against Russia while having to maintain a separate military force capable of defeating Russia on Russia's northern flank. Russia has become an endless black hole for western military resources that is going to cost mountains of equipment and manpower for decades. China isn't paying this incompentence tax.

The US spent two trillion playing 8D chess defending its strategic resources in Iraq. The Chinese bought oil fututures and let the Iraqis buy infrastructure from China with the money. Today the Chinese have stronger ties to Iraq than the US has with a percent of the budget. The US is spending far more in the middle east than China, with dubious results. The US strategy of dominating the world through military means simply doesn't work. The best strategy for the US is to do what China does.

Other people orbiting the Trump administration have voiced similar opinions re China, basically that it doesn't serve US interests to continue fighting with them.

And these people are notably orbiting the Trump administration rather than being a part of it's leadership structure because the Trump's key military and diplomatic appointments are China hawks who see Ukraine as a distraction for focusing on China containment. They are 'pro-Russia' in the sense as they see Russia as wrongly prioritized and better left delegated to the Europeans, not that they see Russia as a potential ally against China, and they certainly aren't against China containment in principle.

If you're just raising that someone is making a message, sure, ok- always has been. 'Sees the US as adopting a hypocritical foreign policy since the start of the Cold War and glossing over its own bad actions' is practically a cliche, and has been on the left and the right if you knew where to look.

But anybody who believes that Musk has more foreign policy prediction value on the future of NATO than Pete Hegsworth, Trump's chosen Secretary of Defense, are probably going to be as confused as people who lament that Mearsheimer wasn't heeded in the 90's, without understanding why Mearsheimer wasn't heeded in the 90's. If someone wants to argue that personnel are policy, it generally helps to recognize the personnel who are actually setting policy.

The US doesn't determine who her friends or enemies are, according to race. The US backed China in the Second Sino-Chinese War with Japan, that the ruler of mainland China didn't enjoy US favour until Nixon, has to do with political considerations. It isn't hypocritical to consider a country your friend when it is fighting your enemy, as was the case with China after Pearl Harbor, and your enemy once it is waging a war against you, as was the case with China during the Korean War.

A common pro-Russian talking point is that Russia is encircled by US military bases in non-US countries, and that Russia considers such bases a threat. A legitimate position, which I won't categorically dispute.

But now some argue US should treat Russia, like it does Japan. But why does the US treat Japan like an ally? Utter submission, can't even make cars too good, without the US stepping in with tarrifs. Also hosting a shitload of US military personnel, which enjoy something approaching the extraterritoriality privilege, in that any crime they are expected to receive a more [lenient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girard_incident} punishment than if they were a Japanese citizen.

Russia is free to offer an unconditional surrender to the US, accept its leaders being tried by Americans and Ukranians, losing the capability to wage offensive war (in Russia's case the nukes would also probably have to go), allowing the establishment of US military bases on its territoty, etc. This would be a significant infringement of Russian sovereignity, in my opinion greater than Ukraine joining NATO, the possibility of which is used by Russia as a justification for its war against Ukraine.

So it goes quite a few of Russia's red lines, but in return US would probably be willing to consider Russia an ally as close Japan.

Your example is terrible. Girard was, according to that Wikipedia article, tried by the Japanese as they requested. I suspect that had the Japanese accepted that he was under US jurisdiction, he would have received harsher punishment.


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