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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34893 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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I just want technocrats who will build a thousand nuclear reactors, regulate industrial contaminants and unhealthy food, craft policy for cheaper industrial inputs, rationalize local (city, county, state) regulations and bureaucracy (e.g. a unified online tax or building permit system) and encourage our people and culture to prosper, like Lew Kuan Yew. I've seen nothing like this in the West. Should I build it?

So what the GOP claims to be doing? The way to get that is to convince competent and sane people to join the republicans en masse.

Your request is impossible. Just as we do not have angels in the form of kings, we do not have angels in the form of technocrats. There was one Lee Kuan Yew... but only one.

The problem is lack of trust. Is that vaccine real or is it just a way to sell a product at taxpayer expense? Are those people regulating industrial waste actually engaging in a good-faith effort to keep the commons clean, or are they just regulating competitors of their lobbyists’ sponsors off the board?

You cannot have nice things without trust, and "trust" isn’t some value that mystically vanished: the disappearance of trust has been warranted. The governing strata of society are infested with liars and grifters.

You cannot have nice things without trust, and "trust" isn’t some value that mystically vanished: the disappearance of trust has been warranted. The governing strata of society are infested with liars and grifters.

I don't think this is consistent with the patterns we observe in contemporary politics. General institutional distrust is wildly asymmetric and the populist moment certainly hasn't cut down on the number of liars and grifters involved in government. People overwhelmingly think the other team is untrustworthy, but are, if anything, even more blindly loyal to their own political elites than they have been in the past.

It's perfectly consistent. If Republicans blindly trusted their own elites, Trump would never get the nomination, let alone the presediency. The fact that this did not result in a decrease of grifters might be a flaw of the tactic they picked to address the issue, but it's not a result of blind trust.

When the elites will not lead the people in the direction they want to go, they will find other leaders, who will be mostly grifters, because that's who is left.

"Social trust" isn't just between a population and its rulers, but also between the members of the polity themselves. Perception of crime, "thickness" of social bonds, community engagement, etc. That also has been going down thanks partially to increasing diversity but also thanks to the internet which has everyone staring at a screen instead of each other and staying in instead of going out.

I don’t deny that the things you mention may be factors, but I think by far the most prominent driver of trust decline is people giving compelling evidence that they are, in fact, untrustworthy.

Thanks to most people, especially those with authority, being utterly untrustworthy and the shared agreement to pretend they aren't failing.

  • pet issue
  • policy changes
  • really big policy change
  • vague vibe

The current system can actually accommodate this kind of thing, and I mean it completely sincerely when I say it is possible, but it requires some form of organization, ideally in the form of a movement. So, unironically yes, you should build it. Think Tea Party or something - it took a few years, but we see now the fruits of what they planted on a wide range of issues, and it all started from a strong local groundswell of sorts. But first you'd have to find some way to package at least some of it together in a sensible way. Right now these things don't neatly fit into the packages offered by the status quo. I could theoretically see it sliding in either on the left (housing, green energy, people-centric) or the right (healthy living, lower regulations, cultural prosperity) just as well, though starting on a particular 'side' isn't mandatory.

I'd call it something along the lines of Human Basics, just have a heavy emphasis on health and housing, I could see that blending into a "package", with a reasonable vibe. I think something is brewing at least on the housing front, so your best bet other than starting from scratch would be to try and push the packaged mini-ideology onto an existing and on-the-ups housing advocacy group. Or, if you want to be institutional, if you could find a powerful state government to run a housing-regulation overhaul, that could be a good trial balloon if you can convince some powerful people directly. That's probably the only way to actually sidestep the movement requirement.

I'm not so sure about that branding: seems already taken. At least, "basic" and "human" make up two-thirds of the endonym for "woke" ("basic human decency.")

Unfortunately our technocrats can't deliver that, but as a compromise, how about a trans-inclusive code of conduct for your favorite FOSS project?

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