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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25446 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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It is more that one man can not be an administration, even if the appeal of Trumpism is the fantasy of change.

For all the promise of Trump changing things, at the end of the day his administration will have plenty of typical republicans. But Trump at least represents a promise. And there is some difference.

You also ought to give Trump credit for being an obstacle to a much more neocon, interventionist, deep state aligned republican administration. And you would be getting a different administration if people more like Pompeo, Mike Pense, etc, were the president.

I do agree with another poster that people should put more pressure on politicians like Trump who they think are supposedly on their side, when pushing counter establishment moves. But also towards other politicians of course.

While some criticism can be warranted, and Greenwald manages to usually be fair about this issue, blaming everything on Trump and doubly so focusing the blame on Trump fans is unwise, even if one isn't doing so from a lefty perspective. It lets off the hook more powerful, numerous factions like the neocons. Especially the permanent bureaucrats who don't change, or lobbyists, or the media and those that run it. It is better to focus on them, than Trump fans who are at least hopeful of a bigger change than what Trumpism probably can bring.

Trump himself isn't any sort of libertarian's dream when it comes to people like Assange and Snowden. From what I recall, he made some vague murmurs about possibly pardoning Assange at one point, but that went nowhere. Meanwhile, when he was on the campaign trail in 2016, he strongly hinted that Snowden should be executed as a traitor. Which also went nowhere, of course. But my point is that on this issue, Trump has made as many pronouncements which are more authoritarian than the typical establishment politician as he has made pronouncements that are less authoritarian than the typical establishment politician.

However, I agree that Trump has acted like slightly less of a neocon than the typical US president, although that is a low bar to clear.

Trump's own thoughts are immaterial. The behavior of institutions is moved by organized minorities, not the inner monologues of figureheads. After his surprise election, his administration was quickly captured by typical spook mouthpieces and behaved as such. No surprises.

If he is to win this time, it will be on the legs of a persecution by those same institutions and the support of Project 2025 people who, from my estimation, are absolutely woke on the spook question. I've seen some quietly repeat Moldbuggian slogans about retiring everyone from the CIA and they're specifically drawing a plan to purge the deep state instead of Trump's original total lack of steps to drain the swamp.

I don't know if that means he does anything about Assange and Snowden. I don't know if those people survive his election. I don't even know if he'll be elected. But it seems fair to say he gets a mulligan on this particular question given the situation and his staff.

You also ought to give Trump credit for being an obstacle to a much more neocon, interventionist, deep state aligned republican administration.

Neocon and interventionist like assassinating Iran's most important and revered military leader in a foreign capital by drone strike?

I think the neocon interventionist move was "war with Iran." They built the Littoral Combat Ship for a reason, and it wasn't fighting China.

LCS was horrendously bad, was it even suitable for Iran?

In April 2012, Chief of Naval Operations Greenert said, "You won't send it into an anti-access area"; rather, groups of two or three ships are intended to be sent into areas where access is jeopardized to perform missions like minesweeping while under the cover of a destroyer. The LCS's main purpose is to take up operations such as patrolling, port visits, anti-piracy, and partnership-building exercises to free up high-end surface combatants for increased combat availability.

Sounds like it was supposed to be handling Yemen...

By May 2022, the Navy shifted its plans to decommission nine LCS warships in Fiscal Year 2023, citing their ineffective anti-submarine warfare system, their inability to perform any of the Navy's missions, constant breakdowns, and structural failures in high-stress areas of the ships.

Or not.

I think the idea was that it was supposed to help handle the swarms of Iranian speedboats.

My vague sense of Iranian capabilities is that once we fielded the LCS in numbers their capabilities had evolved beyond merely "100 speedboats with warheads" anyway, although we know from Ukraine that the threat from speedboat swarms is real.

The key is the comparison. Would a typical republican be just as interventionist as Trump was, or much more? The reality is that there is in fact a much more gung ho republican faction and there has been backlash against Trump for not going along with the neocon agenda, as much as they wanted.

Both in regards to Ukraine, Syria, and general American involvement and intervention with other countries.

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