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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2364 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 9, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Are there any Trump voters here who have been disappointed in the direction the Trump administration is heading in, particularly with respect to the economy? The stock market took a beating today.

I really don't intend to be snarky here because even in hindsight, it's still very reasonable to argue that Trump was a preferable vote to Harris. It's just that there must have been a better way to go about things, and not torpedoing the economy is a good place to start.

I was going to ask a related question:

How much of the market drop and the apparent crisis(es) are the result of negative media coverage? Anything and everything the administration does is seen as a violation of something or other.

"News Today: Fascist still in White House doing things, when will the carnage end? Breaking Update: during a vital meeting, trump used the bathroom and delayed lifesaving aid to [minority]>."

I'm still convinced that this happened during COVID. With any other administration, the media wouldn't have been motivated to keep hammering on the fear, the vaccines would have been an excuse to end the lockdowns, and you wouldn't see masked-up leftists to this day. Being deathly afraid of COVID was bound up with being a good little resistance member.

That said, I didn't even vote in this election and don't personally like Trump; he melted my dad's brain, among other wrongs. I'm disappointed at the Musk lying and tomfoolery; this isn't even good trolling. It feels like someone somewhere made a monkey-paw wish to defeat wokeness and this is what they got. I worry it might have been me.

I really just wanted the crypto market to go up, thanks to fair/reasonable/clear regulation and institutional buy-in. A Bitcoin reserve is fundamentally a good idea. I want a future where putting 5-10% of your assets/investments in crypto is boring safe, conventional wisdom that it'd be irresponsible not to follow, like bonds or whatever. Trumpcoin doesn't further that goal.

I can't say this was my "eye opening" moment since my eyes were already opened by then but that was the headline I'll never forget from the Coronavirus era, because it showed me the rot goes all the way down, there's no bottom: https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnn-trump-peddles-unsubstantiated-hope-coronavirus

How much of the market drop and the apparent crisis(es) are the result of negative media coverage?

I'd say we've been due for a crash for quite a while, and I'm surprised we've been able to keep it up for this long.

First of all, this hour's stock ticker is not "the economy". If you failed to notice for the last 200 or so years, the stock market is volatile. What happens to "the economy" remains to be seen in much longer timeframes than a couple of days. And that's btw why it is wrong for most people to engage in active trading - they trade with their feelings and not their brains (as they do most of the other things too, including - unfortunately - voting) and unless they happen to be exceptionally gifted or exceptionally lucky, they get taken to the cleaners.

I personally am not 100% happy with how Trump is handling foreign policy. The whole Ukraine thing remains very far from both "peace in 24 hours", which obviously nobody believed in, and any peace deal at all, and his actions do not seem so far to yield any results there. I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and judge by the results, but unless any positive result happens soon, I must conclude the whole thing was a big failure for him. In general, he seems to have an idea of himself being this yuge peacemaker, but there are places which are not ready for peace, and trying to make peace by force there only makes things worse. It's pretty much a tradition for this to happen to Israel, and Trump doesn't seem to help there too by conducting parallel negotiations with Hamas. Same with Iran, which doesn't seem to be open to peace, so why bother? The whole Canada thing seems to be totally unnecessary - while I understand why one would want to rough up Mexico a bit with regard to what is happening on the south border, I don't see the northern border as a big priority and I don't see any use in a public fight with Canada - moreover, it could help the Left to stay in power there, which is a stupid strategic blunder, there's not many non-leftist governments in the West.

I am not disappointed with his approach on dismantling the taxes-to-GONGOs pipeline but the real battles are ahead. The budget is stuffed with all kinds of pork and spending targeted at enriching special interests, and Republicans' hands are as much in this cookie jar as Democrats are. It's one thing to cut off a woke NGO and another thing to cut off a subsidy that a Republican district benefits from. If the latter is not done, than there's no hope for any real change in budget deficits. I would still see disrupting the flow of grift money as the positive, but whether or not it will fix a real fundamental problems and whether Trump administration ends up to fundamentally reverse the course or just be a flash in a pan and the next Democrat president would just reverse everything he has done in a week - that remains to be seen. I also am happy he's taking serious steps to dismantle the DEI system, hopefully he does enough damage to it to make it hard to recover in the future. It will likely try to resurrect and reassert itself after Trump is gone, but hopefully not in a comprehensive envelope that is has been up to now, when every major company or organization must have a big DEI department and every scientific work has to have at least one section describing how it helps a preferred DEI cause. I am very interested in his efforts of reasserting the power of the executive over the unknown (this is literally true, nobody knows how many of them even exist) number of government offices that so far have been pretty much living their own lives controlled by nobody and doing whatever the hell they want. The major battles in this campaign are in the future, and likely to be fought in SCOTUS, and I hope he manages to get some good lawyers on his side, because the other side will fight him very hard on that. But at least he's trying.

I am also not sure what he is doing with tariffs makes sense. He has some bold ideas, but I am not sure they are thought through enough to actually produce results that he expects, or the ones I'd like. In some places - like established grift pipelines - the disruption itself is a good thing, but in other places just shaking things up is not enough.

As a libertarian, Trump is very far from being my ideal candidate, and I always knew that. But domestically, so far he's doing better than I expected, though it is very tentative given how little time has passed. I'd wait at least a year to make some conclusions. In the foreign policy, so far it has been rather disappointing (I don't count border control etc. as foreign policy) - while kicking Europe's asses enough to make them finally wake up and smell the Russian bear at their doorstep is encouraging, it's not enough. Unless he delivers some results - and that would require making a turn from disrupting to dealmaking - I don't see him as winning there. I am not regretting my vote, but I am certainly regretting his choices there so far.

I am very interested in his efforts of reasserting the power of the executive over the unknown (this is literally true, nobody knows how many of them even exist) number of government offices that so far have been pretty much living their own lives controlled by nobody and doing whatever the hell they want.

What offices are these?

All kinds of things like CFPB which has recently been in the headlines, but there are a ton of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_agencies_of_the_United_States_federal_government and at least some of them seem to be under impression that they are not responsible to anyone. While there may make some sense for agencies like the Fed for which independence from the fleeting passions of day-to-day executive operations may be a very important feature, for most of the agencies I think being isolated from control by executive also means being isolated from control by pretty much anything. That was especially bad combined with Chevron deference, which means basically the agency, at least within its own domain, is the supreme sovereign without any check on their power. Even with that gone, having a myriad of agencies inside the government that basically conduct their own policy without any input from anywhere does not feel right.

Assuming the current administrations statements on them were accurate, wasn't USAID literally that?

Not exactly. USAID was somewhat unique as it was created by an executive order, not by an act of Congress, and thus can be also destroyed by another executive order. However, many of the independent agencies are created by the Congress, and some like CFPB are even provided with financing schemes that makes them immune from future Congresses defunding them. Thus, the agency created this way is basically immune from either legislative or executive control (and until recently also from judicial control due to Chevron deference). The premise that Congress can create agencies which are further uncontrollable and self-perpetuating is highly questionable, just as the premise - that a lot of people on the left are advancing - that the President can only execute a very remote and hands-off control at best over those, like removing clearly criminal officers, but can not participate substantially in political control over them (somehow they never object about Democratic presidents controlling them, go figure). In a Republican (not as party, but as system of government) system in the US, this just doesn't make sense, and I am glad that Trump is pushing back on that.

Elimination of USAID however, while welcome, is unrelated to that because USAID was always on a very weak foundation compared to many other agencies which have been established on much stronger legal grounds. IMHO sometimes too strong.

I, personally, am regretting my vote. Taking a chainsaw to the government was something I thought was just rhetoric, not something he'd actually do. I also didn't expect Elon to be doing so much direct chainsaw-ing, since he was just supposed to be an advisory role. In addition, I have never liked the executive overreach that often comes with abusing executive orders, and there has been a lot of that. How am I supposed to view his birthright citizenship executive order any differently from the New Mexican governor's executive order declaring gun violence a state of emergency, or Biden's executive order canceling student loan debt? How am I supposed to take a White House statement written like this seriously? Why did they cede sounding professional to the Democrats? ETA: The decision on national parks is also incredibly baffling. It doesn't cost that much. If he also axes federal lands, people who like to hunt in flyover territory are going to be affected the most by not having federal land to hunt on.

But the foreign policy has been the worst of it. Even if Zelensky was overstepping his bounds on a deal already agreed upon, surely there were better ways of handling it than getting into a shouting match over whether he's appreciative enough or not. The tariff baiting is another thing; shit or get off the pot. I'm not even entirely opposed to tariffs, though obviously they are going to hurt; this is just getting the worst of both worlds, though. And then the stuff about annexing or buying these other countries, like you said. Pointlessly antagonistic. And then aligning himself so closely to Elon Musk, who is a powder keg with questionable mental stability and intelligence, judging from how he handled the Nazi salute, the AfD endorsement, the time when Community Notes disagreed with him, and more. And the leaving NATO and the UN thing, and pulling troops out of Germany, and more. I'm pretty sick of all of it.

I never would have voted for Kamala Harris, ever. But the next candidate from the Republicans will have to disavow at least some of this stuff for me to vote for them again. I will just go back to pointlessly voting Libertarian again.

I also don't know how much complaining I would have if I was nearly this politically active during his first term. Maybe he was always this bad?

Okay, I keep thinking of things to add, and the mods probably don't appreciate over-editing of comments. The Zelensky thing wasn't as bad as withholding arms shipments to Ukraine that were already approved by Congress. And the withholding of military intelligence to the Ukrainians. Seems like these both led to the Russians pushing and taking Kursk. Trump responded by threatening even more sanctions against Russia, which is even stupider decision making -- how much are more sanctions going to do, and weren't you just talking about lifting sanctions? Better yet, you could have just not halted things unconstitutionally just to give red meat for your base that apparently wants you to be aggressive on Ukraine?

The Congress does not approve arms shipments though. They authorize the President to use allocated money - or, rather, usually the existing stock within the limits of allocated money - to send the shipments, but the actual shipments are entirely within the discretion of the President and Secretary of State. It is entirely constitutional and within President's authority to stop those shipments temporarily or even permanently - there's no demand for the President to spend all the money or any part of it. See for example: https://www.state.gov/bureau-of-political-military-affairs/use-of-presidential-drawdown-authority-for-military-assistance-for-ukraine for reference. If you enjoy this kind of thing, check out the actual text of the FAA, it specifically spells out that the President is the one who makes the determination.

People have taken a habit lately to use "unconstitutional" as a replacement for "anything that anybody does and I don't like" but that word actually has a meaning, and that's not what it means. You may hate what Trump does, and it's completely within your rights to do so, but there's absolutely nothing "unconstitutional" (the Constitution doesn't say much about it in any case) or illegal in his actions. If you're going to criticize him, at least bother to get some facts correct.

In this case, I just defaulted to assuming it was Congressional authority because, you know, “power of the purse.” I’m glad it’s explicitly delegated.

I see. I was not aware of this. My apologies. Yes, still a shockingly bad decision, but not unconstitutional (in this case).

I support:

  • Reorientation of Russia/Ukraine policy

  • Offering asylum to white South Africans (assuming he actually follows through on that)

  • Strengthened border enforcement and ICE raids

  • DOGE and the general plan of reshaping the civil service / deep state to be more right-leaning

I oppose:

  • The bizarre threats towards Canada and Greenland
  • The crackdown on pro-Palestine protesters

I'm neutral/unsure about:

  • Threats to withdraw from NATO
  • Tariffs

So overall I'm still happy with my vote. No regrets. Honestly nothing earth-shattering has really happened yet, we're largely still in "nothing ever happens" territory despite what the breathless 24 hour news cycle would have you believe about the "abdication of American soft power".

A lot of the stock market is probably fake and gay anyway and as others have pointed out a correction could be healthy in the long run.

What exactly about the civil services offered by the government are "left leaning"? And more importantly, what actions are "right leaning"?

Giving workers training in various forms of Critical Theory (from race to gender) sounds pretty left wing to me, and stopping that would be right-leaning by comparison, off the top of my head. One could also imagine a "equal but opposite reaction" where right-wing values are taught at workshops instead.

What are "right-wing values"?

I might expect a modern administration to push “race-blindness” or “American exceptionalism.” The latter was, I think, developed specifically to oppose a self-effacing history curriculum. Full-on revisionist history of the “Lost Cause” variety is probably beyond the pale, but I keep getting disappointed when I make predictions.

Twenty years ago we might have seen initiatives for traditional households or intelligent design. Those would be watered-down attempts at cultural Christianity. Thankfully, I don’t think either has traction today.

Order, cohesion, justice, tradition... there's a whole bunch, "right-wing" is a broad category so which values are held by whom, and to what degree, is going to vary. You could also write an entire essay on what exactly is meant by each one, so I don't know what sort of answer you're expecting here.

Well, I agree it's all down to subjective opinion, so I just wanted to know what yours are.

DOGE and the general plan of reshaping the civil service / deep state to be more right-leaning

Is that what's happening though? From my perspective, I've observed the following:

  • First, all of the people tasked with carrying out this administration's agenda are political appointees. This means that all of these people can easily be replaced in four or even eight years.

  • Second, and relatedly, I don't think there is a plan to make the civil service more right-leaning, and even if there is such a plan, it would be ineffective because nearly all of the people being fired are either not performing tasks that could be described as either left or right or the tasks they perform change with agency policy, which again, is a product of political appointment. Further, if the goal is to create a more right-leaning civil service, why are the most right-leaning government agencies (Veterans Affairs and Defense) facing the deepest cuts? Instead, I think the plan is to create the appearance that you've significantly shrunk the size of the government by firing tens of thousands of people (maybe in the low hundreds of thousands when all is said and done) and cutting "waste" and "fraud". However, neither of things actually affect the national debt in any significant way or drastically change the political orientation of the country in the long-term.

  • Lastly, and most importantly, there does not appear to be a deep state, or at least the deep state is nothing like what its proponents claimed it was. Consider the deepest of the alleged deep state operations: foreign policy. Trump has been able to upend the global order unilaterally and with virtually no resistance. Decades of carefully crafted alliances and policy are being thrown out the window and there are not secret operatives in the shadows stopping this. In a way, this is a massive blackpill for some Trump supporters because it demonstrates that everything done so far can just be reversed under a Democratic administration.

Lastly, and most importantly, there does not appear to be a deep state, or at least the deep state is nothing like what its proponents claimed it was. Consider the deepest of the alleged deep state operations: foreign policy. Trump has been able to upend the global order unilaterally and with virtually no resistance.

Last time he was in the White House, Army generals were bragging to the press about giving false information to their commander-in-chief. If there was no deep state, such a thing would be unthinkable, or immediately, and he would be free to do all what he's doing now 8 years ago. The fact that he's able to pull it off now, after 4 years of consolidating a coalition within the US government proves the opposite of what you're claiming.

And US defense officials bypassed Obama when they shared intelligence with allies who then shared it with Assad. There were multiple instances during the Obama administration where generals publicly disagreed with him and were accused of undermining him (especially with re to Afghanistan and Syria), including when McChrystal and his staff made comments to Rolling Stone against senior White House officials. If your definition of the deep state is the military undermining the President, that was a phenomenon well before Trump's first term. That's just politics.

I think the fact that Trump has been able completely redefine the parameters of American foreign policy is evidence against the type of deep state pushed by right wingers.

And US defense officials bypassed Obama when they shared intelligence with allies who then shared it with Assad.

Correct, Obama was also frustrated by the deep state on several occasions.

I think the fact that Trump has been able completely redefine the parameters of American foreign policy is evidence against the type of deep state pushed by right wingers.

Do you think you can restate the idea of the deep state pushed by the right-wingers, in a way that the right-wingers will recognize as their own?

The extraordinary US asset pricing bubble has had its long-overdue correction postponed for five years now. We are long past due, and while the market can stay irrational for a very long time, there has never been a permanently high plateau, to borrow a fateful phrase.

It was therefore likely that whoever won in 2024 was going to be president during a big repricing and associated severe recession (which may well be postponed further, but which I’m confident will happen before 2029 - though I have been wrong before). The question is whether Trump might be worth it.

What kind of Democratic Party will win in 2028? Gavin himself is a blank vessel with no real beliefs. But it is possible - in my view, likely - that Trump might cause the Democratic Party to profoundly rethink policy on a number of fronts in a way that makes a future Dem administration more amenable than a hypothetical Hillary / Harris / Biden II admin, especially on social policy.

I…wouldn’t bet on it.

I’ve written about how my 2012 self thought the GOP would handle Obama’s reelection. Could he have caused the Republicans to rethink policy? Maybe sideline the social conservatives in favor of the Tea Partiers?

When stressed, establishment Republicans lost ground to their upstart populist wing. What would that look like for Democrats? The blue-collar base is either hollowed out or firmly aboard the Trump Train. White-collar workers want the kind of safety net that makes free college look like a bargain. I don’t know what left-populists could do other than throw helicopter money.

There is a pretty straight line between the tariffs and the markets' reassessment of near term, and long term, growth prospects. The AI stuff feels like a bubble to me, but the reason things keep going down is that it keepa looking like the Trump administration is actually going to follow through on the tariff thing. I don't know what delusion they are operating under that they think it will work out long term; this is spectacularly ill-conceived and badly executed policy.

I knew that he would be pro-Israel but it’s a little too much for me. Cutting 500mil funds to a university because their students protest against Israel, not releasing the Epstein files, and now trying to primary Thomas Massie is too much. At this point I’m willing to become a loyal Democrat if they come out strongly against Israel.

Pro-DEI, high taxes, mass immigration, affirmative action but anti-Israel, or the inverse? (If you say ‘we’re getting both anyway’, that wasn’t the question).

My first priority is “White population doesn’t go down + they aren’t discriminated against”. My second priority is that Israel doesn’t exert undue influence on us, and instead we exert it on them. But if Trump continues to be so comically submissive to them I will temporarily flip my priorities around. Also, new information I’ve learned on the Mennonite birth rates in South America make me care a little less about White TFR (eg in this century they will make up most births in Bolivia).

My first priority is “White population doesn’t go down + they aren’t discriminated against”.

Can you expand on this?

What is there to expand that you haven’t already read on the forum? The White share in the countries they founded is trending downward rapidly. I don’t want it to, which is justified by personal taste, the science of evolution, and the evidence that countries are better with more of these people in it. Also, I don’t want people of White ancestry discriminated against in institutions or in the origin stories foisted upon them in education. This means that a middle class white person will never have a position taken by a wealthier minority person of similar ability due to diversity, and it means that there is nothing negative taught about White people in school which isn’t counterbalanced by negative stories about minorities. When these primary things are met, which are upstream of most of the things I care about, then I have the luxury to care about the more trivial matters of the economy and geopolitical reach.

Mennonite birth rates in South America make me care a little less about White TFR (eg in this century they will make up most births in Bolivia).

Too early to tell. It might be that the modern malady is simply taking a little longer to catch up to them. Of course I hope it doesn't.

Not sure if it’s too early to tell, really — it’s consistently high, provided there’s available farmland. What definitely is too early to tell, however, is whether the Amish or Mennonite who leave agriculture will continue to have a high birth rate. Or maybe there’s already a study on that which I need to read.

The not-particularly-strict Mennonites that I know seem to maintain the same sort of lifestyle when they start construction or other businesses -- I'm pretty sure it's mostly the church and community support. Whether they can maintain this is another story -- I don't really know any "urban Mennonites", or if that's even a thing.

I'm disappointed with the way he's treated US allies. Or maybe I should say "ex-allies".

Tariffs are a good idea but aimed at the wrong countries. Better to fight financial wars than the kind that leave young men in wheelchairs or in the ground. But why Canada of all things?

On the topic of economy, numbers tend to randomly go up or down. Neither economists nor governments seem to know what they're doing or have much control so I think it's best to not look at the stock market much.

Doge and anti-DEI efforts seem to be going pretty well.

Overall, I still think he's overwhelmingly a better candidate than Harris, even if he makes embarrassing and bizarre mistakes like antagonizing Zelensky.

Yes. Trump has accomplished my top priorities, but I'm disappointed in his economic policies.

If The Donald wrecks the economy enough to ensure blue landslide, then nothing of this would matter.

Trump voter and generally disappointed, especially with tariffs. It's not that any of his bad economic policies are a surprise. Its a bit of a toss up of whether he is worse than the alternative. The Democrats tend to have lots of dumb but relatively small impact bad economic policies. Trump just has the one big policy of tariffs that is very dumb.

Trump just has the one big policy of tariffs that is very dumb.

Not a surprise. He campaigned on this.

I'm in the "economy is coming down either way" camp and when I expected Harris to win my thought was that at least she'll take the blame, but here we are.

Re: Trump's direction, it's complicated. On the one hand it's amazing to see what it looks like for an administration to go all-out. On the other hand so much is happening so fast that it's dizzying in a way that's closer to scary than fun. Have they made a ton of missteps? You bet. I'm chalking that up to cost of actually doing something.

Yes, but I more or less expected this. I still think he has been better than a potential Harris administration, so I don't really regret my vote.

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