This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I often think how cozy it must be to live with the child's view of politics. They disagree with me, those idiots!
What is stupidity, what is intelligence? What is their value? With intelligence as a descriptor we attempt to measure and describe something else. It's IQ and g, the thing itself, "it." What is it? It's building skyscrapers plural with your name on them and being elected POTUS twice with the most powerful media machine in the world standing against you. Trump has it, so when someone says he lacks intelligence, maybe! But he doesn't lack it, so if he lacks intelligence its value is far less than we think, if it has any at all.
It's the most complicated game and just because Trump has it doesn't mean he always or even often makes the right decisions. He made plenty of bad decisions in his first term, but here I must observe in those areas firmly under the executive's direct purview, where he didn't have to delegate it into an adversarial bureaucracy or broker with an ambivalent-at-best congress or wait and hope for the court's approval, he delivered two unequivocal aces. No further adventurism in the Middle East, and his strong attempt to normalize relations with North Korea. Had it been Obama with Un on the DMZ the picture would have won a Pulitzer and Obama would have won a second Nobel Prize. Instead, like so many truly historic pictures of Trump-as-President, it's just another icon ghettoed to where few beyond his supporters both know and appreciate. When Trump can play the game without an arm or both tied behind his back, he wins, and this is indicative of it.
As for his cabinet and advisors, I'll only talk about one: Stephen Miran. The last few weeks has seen a lot of discussion on the tariffs, including one particular user who opened his brief fluff of criticism by repeatedly calling Trump a retard. Is Miran? Because it's his work, his exploration of the potential hazards of holding the reserve currency and holding trade deficits and how tariffs might correct these hazards, that is influencing the Oval Office (after Trump's old affinity for tariffs). When your adversary does something incomprehensible, it's the vapid feel-good shortcut to say it's because they're stupid. They can be wrong, and the sum of everything that makes them wrong may be an indict of their reasoning, but that conclusion isn't useful. It doesn't help your own decision-making. It's a belief, or it may be true outright, but either way it doesn't pay rent. What does is knowing that everything: what do they read, or what do the people they listen to read? What do they believe, what ideas do they hold, what's their ethos? Assuming necessarily they reached their conclusions through reason, what were those reasons? I've lately been arguing here very strongly in favor of absolute sovereign authority to expel foreigners with the minimum possible due process. I know the people disagreeing with me aren't stupid and I don't think they're evil. I'll be the first to say if they were right, their fears would be justified entirely, and I don't fault them for those fears either, it's eminently rational, their conclusions logically follow from their premises. We differ in premises, and I would be doing myself a disservice let alone everyone else if I just said "Of course you believe that, you're stupid." They're not, and Trump isn't either. The establishment left certainly isn't, yeah I'm here on record calling Biden demented behind the wheel, but the people who were actually making the decisions behind him are competent, are intelligent, and did a damn good job, though thankfully not enough, at the end.
The world is as it has always been because powerful, competent and intelligent people disagree with each other. There are moral judgments to be made sure but oh, does all history stand as the final testament on evil not being synonymous with stupid--nor good with intelligent.
That's not terrible prose but how do you square the idea that Trump isn't stupid with the fact that he apparently doesn't know how his beloved tariffs work?
I talked about the int-econ101 theory of tax incidence last week, if you don't trust the sophisticate version https://www.themotte.org/post/1827/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/316188?context=8#context
More options
Context Copy link
Miran covers this is in his paper, presenting his argument of China as having effectively paid for the 2018-2019 tariffs.
If tariffs cause the average consumer to pay +$1800/year when they don't make +$1800/year, or simpler, if tariffs are causing people to spend money in excess of increased wages, what would they care of a stronger dollar? Miran also covers this:
The game of tariffs appears far more complex than "cost passed to consumers" but I'm just copy-pasting Miran, I don't know economics.
His argument is that in essence China can opt to weaken Yuan proportionally to the tariff, and simply decrease the costs of exports to the extent that their new prices in USD + tariff overhead ≈ old prices in USD; alternatively, Chinese suppliers themselves can secretly be operating with a massive margin and drop the prices directly. Well, I don't know if this will fly this time, especially if the dollar itself weakens. In any case, China can simply not do any of that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There’s enough ambiguity in the chain of causality that anyone can be said to ultimately pay for something. Trump also said mexico will pay for the wall. The people love to hear the tale of the paying foreigner, it really gets them going.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ah yes, the enlightened one. Please grace us with your superior wisdom and reasoning, that we may not err in our ways.
I genuinely don't believe that Trump is stupid, and I'll even extend that to say that I don't believe that Vance is stupid. I would say that even cabinet members like RFK Jr. and Linda McMahon aren't strictly stupid, but rather wildly out-of-touch to the point that anything they say is completely unrelatable and easily interpreted as "stupid".
My whole point is that my concern isn't stupidity, and that "stupid" is a useless epithet that doesn't further the conversation at all. You would seem to be in passionate agreement.
Graciously, I'll ask if you're extending the concept of "stupidity" to "incompetence" - because our disagreement would simply be that you're straw-manning my entire argument: "How juvenile it is to think that powerful people are stupid." I personally think those are two separate concepts, where "incompetence" has the additional dimension of context, but "stupid" is wide-ranging. I'll even argue that Trump is not universally incompetent - and has shown great competence in certain facets both in Trump I and Trump II and during his 10-year electoral campaign. Your examples of a diplomatic visit with NK and a drawdown of some activities in the Middle East are great (although I struggle to see what fruits they've bared in the past 8 years).
I appreciate your counter-example of Stephen Miran. Navarro does not inspire confidence that Trump has a good eye for economic advisors (as signs pretty much indicate Navarro lost his mind somewhere around 2015), but I'll give Miran the benefit of the doubt that he has not yet lost his mind. He seems to be hand-picked to support the conclusions that Trump has already reached, so I'm already skeptical, but again, that is not in-and-of-itself proof of his incompetence. All of that is bailey anyway, where the motte is that actually Trump's economic policy is highly calculated and we're aiming for is maintaining our very high average standard of living (at least, for certain classes of people) while also convincing the rest of the world to drop USD as a reserve currency as it presents an existential risk that no one but Trump is bold enough to face head-on. I don't disagree that the world holding USD as a reserve currency is an existential risk, but my main question is: why does it have to be 5D chess? Does the success of the strategy rely on none of the world (including his own constituents) being privy to exactly why certain economic policies are being executed? Is that the secret sauce? It has to be 5D chess or we won't be able to both maintain our standard of living while also convincing the world that they shouldn't hold USD? This is my issue broadly with many Trump strategies - I'm told I just don't get it and it's all part of a bigger plan. Well, it would be great if we were told that plan. To put it simply, when someone says "trust me bro", I instantly do not trust them, bro.
Back to the topic of the OP, the thrust of my point is that I've observed a certain type of arrogance over my lifetime that has been tightly paired with the rejection of expertise, and that I'm seeing the same pattern daily coming out of the executive. That's my signal through the noise. I tie that arrogance (and apathy) back to something that I thought everyone here might be able to relate to, the "pit in your stomach" when you realize you've fucked up because you're out-of-depth. I also tied it to the worst amphetamine-fueled mistake that an authoritarian made during WW2. Your critisicm is basically that my interpretation of the situation is juvenile?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link