#gendpol

This is why it's acceptable for women and children (non-men) to publicly break down and cry and attract a man to help them out, but a man who breaks down and cries is contemptible. Non-men get to demand help from men, but men are supposed to be providing help, not demanding it.

This isn't "patriarchy", it's far wider than that. Feminists routinely demand that men, as a whole gender, must do something to solve the problems of a few worried women. Progressives set up "women and femmes" spaces for non-men, that allow adult dickhavers if they aren't men, and children of any sort. John Hopkins University put out a LGBTQ glossary defining "lesbian" as a non-man attracted to non-men.

Man, both of these men are so old and tired, though Biden is the older and tireder of the two. ... This guy's like a cat with 6 months to live.

It isn't that Biden "lost" the debate, as in he morally failed to engage in enough preparation. The man is simply too old; no amount of preparation would have worked.

-★-

With the abortion argument, we get a good example of Trump's pattern of exaggeration: "Everybody wanted to get it back to the states. Every legal scholar, all over the world. The most respected."

There was a substantive debate about this, and in fact there were a number of legal scholars that believed that the issue was, on a legal basis, on shaky ground. This was a common argument over the past two decades. There was not a complete, unanimous consensus.

People talk about Trump lying a lot. For a lot of that, I think they have this sort of thing in mind, but I don't take it all that seriously. This is salesman lying. He is trying to sell you a Trump steak.

Each message has a [social] component and a [content] component. Trump is weighting the [content] component lower, making it less accurate, but the [social] component lacks tactical depth.

I think this gets into some sort of personality conflict.

All politicians lie. They put on a nice suit, tell you some flowery speech, and then go bomb some country in the middle east. Obama was a genius at public speaking, like Hollywood President tier, but the drone war continued.

So, to make up an example (that's less controversial), a regular politician will start talking about "the human dignity" of guys that break into cars, or something, and the initial language will be quite empathetic. But rather than going where this is supposed to go, and improving the quality and safety of the prisons, they'll get you to agree to this nice-sounding language as part of a multi-step maneuver, and then they won't fix the prisons, and they won't properly rehabilitate the guys that break into the cars, and they'll just... release them, to break into your car.

So if someone starts talking about "human dignity," I start looking for where they hid the knife. (I also consider their personal record; I'm willing to entertain that they're serious, but I have to see the evidence of pragmatism first.)

Trump comes in and he starts talking about how, "All the legal scholars agree with me, all over the world. The most prestigious." This translates to, "I'm popular. I make great decisions. Vote for me."

It's so crass that it has a tactical depth of like, one. It's not part of some long and complicated chain. There is no sophisticated ideological permission structure being setup. He's not trying to redefine the language. There is no second maneuver.

So to me, this feels safe.

I'm not expecting to be attacked from some high-level social plane or whatever, so I can relax. This man is a salesman. A lot of what he says is bullshit, but he just wants to sell me something.

I know it's bullshit. He knows it's bullshit. He knows I know it's bullshit. But this deception is so unsophisticated that it loops back around to being somewhat honest, or even friendly. (It's like if you had a mandatory prison gang fight, and technically, they have to "fight" you, but they're not really trying.) Obviously it results in a lower rate of information transmission, though. (What will he actually do? It can be hard to say.)

This is not the same as "lock her up," from Trump's 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton. That was concerning, and in fact in the 2016 election I voted for Clinton. But then, he didn't follow through on that.

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Thinking from the other direction, why would someone find the general, "we have the best cows," approach to be disconcerting rather than just annoying? (The Wall was kinda also like that. It's just a big, dumb object.)

Well, if you're used to everything having three layers of social misdirection in order to protect everyone's reputations and social position, and using this to demonstrate loyalty to others, maybe the crass rhetoric makes it sound like anything could be up for sale, with enough votes.

So you're supposed to say the stuff that your network socially agree sounds nice, and if you aren't saying the stuff, that might mean you're planning to coordinate to do something bad. (Why aren't you following the network? Do you think you're better than other people? Sounds like you might be planning to subordinate others.)

But the actual content of the messages doesn't get properly evaluated.

To quote some swing voters from the famous Reddit "sanewashing" post:

Only one participant here agrees we should "defund the police." One woman says "That is crazier than anything Trump has ever said." 50% of people here say they think Biden was privately sympathetic to the position. We are explaining the actual policies behind defund the police. One woman interrupts "that is not what defund the police means, I'm sorry. It means they want to defund the police." "I didn't like being lied to about this over and over again" says another woman. "Don't try and tell word don't mean what they say" she continues. Rest of group nodding heads.

During the early part of the 2014-2022 era, when we had the feminist push, there was a term called "mansplaining," intended to mean roughly "a men condescendingly explaining things to a woman."

In discussion with each other, men may try to assess who is the most knowledgeable or sharpest (in order to lead the discussion), so they may throw a piece of information out there like it's a tennis ball, and they expect you to hit it back. So a man might tell a woman about a book that she wrote, and then expect her to respond with some insight about the passage he was discussing.

From what I've seen, among men this is social statusy, but it's not like, hardcore. From some women, we got tweets along the lines of, "How dare he lecture me about my own book! Does he think he knows better than me about the book I wrote myself?!" It's basically mismatched systems of etiquette. (An autistic woman might have powered through and info dumped about the book to the man anyway until he got tired of the topic, and perceived no insult.)

This was a triple failure.

First, the men did not realize that the women (this kind of woman) have different discursive norms from men, and adapt in a way that makes them feel more comfortable in mixed spaces.

Second, the women did not realize that this was not a male plot to subordinate women. Feminists connected this etiquette mismatch to a larger ideological construct ("patriarchy"). Some of them are probably still angry to this day.

Third, the two groups largely did not reach a mutual understanding on this issue, except for a few honest people (and people less prone to viewing the opposite sex adversarially) in small spaces, coming into maturity.

Which is to say, in this clash of norms, the view based on multiple layers of social indirection as a form of politeness may be socially astute within its own culture, but may be socially maladapted outside of that culture.

Because these social norms are social, they are a product of a local social equilibrium rather than a more universalist analysis, which in practice makes them more particular. Compare economic or scientific ideas, which, while they exist in a social context, have a non-social framework for discovery and resolution.

I don't find it that difficult to understand the median voter wanting first trimester abortion to be legal and third trimester abortion to be illegal.

In the same way, to the median voter and not just conservatives, a slogan like "defund the police" means "defund the police." A lot of the more confrontational slogans produced by this process sound positively unhinged to outsiders - in a way that makes Donald Trump seem normal by comparison.

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There are a good number of right-wing grifters who are out there regularly lying. I don't post much about them, because they just aren't that interesting. The field of politics is constantly shifting, anyway.

But I think it's worth considering how Democrats got into this situation.

To pick another Trump example, some readers may have seen this 2018 video of Trump telling Germany they're too dependent on imported Russian natural gas, and the German delegation smiling at him.

I vaguely recall that this was part of a Trump push to sell more liquefied natural gas from the US to the Europeans.

Of course, Russia did expand their war with Ukraine in 2022. At the time, Germany was importing 55% of their natural gas from Russia.

Brookings interviewed some economists about how the results went down. Russia cut down on gas supplies into Europe in 2021, reducing the amount of stored gas in Germany by the expansion of the war in early 2022. They raised and lowered the amount of gas coming in to Germany until the explosion of the Nord Stream pipeline in mid 2022.

So it's likely that Putin's Russia were, in fact, trying to gain leverage over Germany. Estimates from industry CEOs predicted a major recession.

The economists predicted that the situation would be expensive, but manageable, and the damage to Germany's economy was less than expected. Why?

First, the demand for gas was not perfectly inelastic. The dire predictions were based on gas as a bottleneck causing a cascade of missing production inputs ("for want of a bolt, the bulldozer is lost; for want of a bulldozer, the factory is lost; for want of a factory..." one might say). It turned out that it was possible to substitute at multiple points in the production process, so more gas-intensive components could be imported if needed. (As the war was in Ukraine, Germany was not blockaded.)

Second, gas was imported from other sources, including Norway... and liquefied natural gas from the US. (A second source claims that 5-6% of the gas is still coming from Russia.)

Third, the disruption was already on the horizon from 2021, so it was easier to coordinate actors.

So was Trump right? Was he wrong?

Germany was getting about 26% of its energy from natural gas in 2021. If 55% of that is from Russia, that makes for about 14% of Germany's energy supply, not including imported Russian oil. As of 2014, Russian troops were already occupying Crimea.

What I want to argue is that, less than right or wrong, "Getting ≥14% of your energy from a powerful geopolitical rival, particularly one currently engaged in a military occupation just two countries away, gives them potential leverage, and this makes it risky," is obvious.

Going, "Haha, look at this ignorant buffoon who thinks that Putin might exploit providing us with 1/8th of our energy for leverage," is just... It's cringe.

Germany had to reactivate their coal power plants to deal with the energy crisis, but they still had coal power plants to reactivate. The long-term storage problem for renewables hasn't been resolved yet. If they had an energy economy that was 60% natural gas, 40% renewables, and 0% nuclear, they'd be in an even worse spot.

(Lately it looks like people are making a stab at sucking CO2 out of the air and converting it to fuel. Will that be online as a replacement in 2030? That's harder to say. It would be fortunate, because combustible fuels don't have the same security concerns as fission power.)

-★-

Anyhow, that was all background.

How did Democrats get into this mess?

Well, obviously Democrats and left-leaning people in the media made a huge deal of Trump as the exception, Trump as the risk, Trump as would-be dictator, Trump as the erosion of norms, and so on. And of course, the Covid-19 pandemic landed on Trump's term and was very abnormal.

The point of running Joe Biden, from the perspective of the median voter, was a "return to normalcy." This is what voters were telling them by picking the pre-Trump Vice President from Obama's term.

After Trump got in and stopped caring about pursuing Hillary Clinton, I found it hard to buy the idea of Trump as an emergency.

Democrats always seemed to use "Trump is an emergency" as an excuse to behave in worse ways. For example, Democrats argued that protests against lockdowns of community centers like churches were too dangerous to be allowed due to the risk of spreading the virus, but then argued that nation-wide race riots needed to be allowed and that this was the position of 'science' as an institution.

Did the race riots accomplish anything of value? No. The opportunity for normal police reform was squandered on braindead slogans like "Defund the Police," which swing voters think are insane. There was a significant increase in homicide, and this is before accounting for significantly-improved trauma surgery since 1990. If LA is any indication, most of the victims of the increase in homicide were black and hispanic.

They complained constantly about Trump eroding institutional norms... and then eroded institutional norms. By 2022, trust in mass media among independents and Republicans collapsed to 27% and 14% respectively.

This is going to be a long-term problem; conspiracy theories are proliferating due to a lack of trust in sense-making institutions, and sense-making institutions have had their reputations shredded by wasteful partisan behavior that barely moved the needle electorally.

One way to assess how much someone values something is to ask what they're willing to give up to get it. Ask any Democrat on Twitter - what concessions are they willing to make to the rest of America to ensure Trump doesn't get back into office? The answer is none.

A "return to normalcy" would mean using the racial identitarians as expendable shock troops and then dropping them after the election, not getting shut down by the courts for doing "race conscious" policy.

The administration would quietly make changes to shore up the practical (not mere messaging) legitimacy of the institutions in order to cover for the spent legitimacy from the Trump era and run a boring administration focused on policies with supermajority support.

So now Democrats are the weird theater kids, and Trump is the normal guy. (And he's already been President, so publishing a magazine cover calling him Hitler just comes off as hysterics.)

-★-

Why did this happen?

First, as the guy that won the election, Joe Biden is the primary guy with the political capital to reshape the Democratic coalition's priorities. In 2020, Joe Biden had the same problem he has in 2024: he's too old.

There is no Democrat strategic command to impose discipline on the coalition members. There are lots of factions all fighting each other to pursue policy that's aligned with their own interests rather than the national interest, and it's resulting in what I call a coalitional interest deadlock. (For a relatively uncontroversial example, Left-NIMBYs and boneheaded environmentalists oppose housing construction, while pro-immigrationists bring in millions of people... who, when they get here, would need housing. One of these two factions needs to lose.)

Nasty identitarian rhetoric requires no immediate material concessions from these factions, nor does it require any discipline, so we get nasty identitarian rhetoric that does not benefit the country in any way, and is not connected to positive programs (that would require actual work and limiting claims to what's realistic, which defeats the point).

Some of you are probably familiar with the idea of a "leveraged buyout." This is when a private equity firm buys a company with debt, and then typically put it on the balance sheet of the company they just bought out. A firm with too much debt is said to be "overleveraged."

The second problem is that Democrats are epistemically overleveraged. They are making too many bets based on incomplete information, and a lot of the assumptions they're making in the process are not accurate.

Some tech-related online right-wingers believed that mass schooling was having almost no effect on learning or performance, and that it was almost entirely just selecting for conscientiousness and intelligence.

Learning losses from online schooling during the pandemic showed that mass schooling was having an effect - by removing it.

However, in researching the literature on education shortly before the pandemic, I found that getting educational results beyond what schools were achieving was very difficult, and that many educational interventions would fade out. Charter schools only produced modestly better results (for about the same price), in a way I couldn't differentiate from selection effects on parents. (I did find that online charters performed horribly. Well, I guess that's one finding verified by a larger-scale experiment.)

It isn't a matter of funding. Baltimore schools are highly funded and get terrible results.

We lack means to convert funding into results.

(Roland Fryer reportedly managed to beat the average for one class, but as a sign of things to come, he got politically sidelined in 2019. Naturally, he's an economist.)

Line voter Democrats are likely to claim that sub-par US school results are due to underfunding. The condition of scientific institutions is not as bad as right-wingers think it is; researchers know that just blindly slapping more funding on to education won't work. However, the guys in between, the 'officers' of the Democratic coalition, are quite happy to leave the line voters in the dark.

They're probably patting themselves on the back, thinking, "I should leave out the most damaging information in order to protect the weak and marginalized," and then not accounting for the possibility that everyone else in their information chain is doing the same thing.

Because of this, we don't get a more serious conversation that would establish a better method to convert funding into results. (This applies to other domains as well. Public transit in the US is ruinously expensive to construct, particularly in CA and NYC. A "car tax" without the ability to practically construct public transit is just a hateful punishment.)

When a Democrat is talking about "beating Trump at his own game," for example, by pretending that Biden did OK at the debate, this is generally of the form, "we should be more aggressive, deceptive, and selfish."

The Democrats are already too deceptive. It's inhibiting their ability to govern effectively. The Democrats are already too aggressive. A number of the online right being read by Chris Rufo and Elon Musk were once self-identified liberals [1] who were driven away and radicalized by the hostile messaging (which was not connected to practical benefits for society, so this isn't "mere selfishness"). Democrats are already selfish enough; forgiving student debt without fixing the system to reduce the origin of that debt polls 30-40 approve-disapprove.

And for the debate itself...

Bro why do we have 70+ year old[s] running for office? Shouldn't we have someone at least young and more modern? This is like watching a retirement home cafeteria fight 😭

Do you think telling someone like that, "Biden didn't lose the debate," sounds, you know, hinged? At the very least, it certainly doesn't inspire trust or confidence.

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A little while ago, collapsedsquid posted:

Seeing a lot of the "This Trump thing is because everyone was so unfair to Romney in 2012 and he lost" out there again and this is fucking abuser logic man, "Why did you make me hit you? If you'd only put away the dishes like I'd asked then this wouldn't have had to happen" shut the fuck up man.

I had been writing a draft response to this.

Basically, seriousness is both a substantive position and a rhetorical stance. The Bush administration undermined the rhetorical stance on the Republican side due to the Iraq War, which was mismanaged, and in which no nuclear weapons were found. (Some old chemical weapons were found, but not an actual development program.)

Throwing the line "binders full of women" at Mitt Romney didn't help, of course, but it's more like that faction of the Republican party failed to regain its footing.

During the Bush administration, there were comparisons of George Bush to Hitler (it showed up on protest signs, for instance).

In practice, the Bush administration were libcons. Looking at Afghanistan, a mountainous, dry, landlocked country that has a GDP per capita of around $500, they were neither 'anti-racist' enough to decide not to invade and respect the local rule of the Taliban (and their local cultural traditions), nor conventionally racist (or culturalist) enough to conclude that national development would be a tremendous challenge requiring a radical reorganization of Afghan society.

Utilitarianism is generally about maximizing "utility," or subjective positive experience, and assumes that this can be summed across individuals. For example, there is a utilitarian thought experiment in which a surgeon has one healthy patient and five sick patients. If he kills the healthy patient, then he can harvest the man's organs in order to save the five sick patients. (Yes, like in Rimworld.)

There are many problems with a naive utilitarian approach.

However, if we rotate the concept of utilitarianism, we get the idea of moral prices, and morality as something that can be traded off against other factors of production, such as land, labor, energy, capital, and so on. Morality is not like these other resources; immorality can incentivize more immorality. However, this provides us with a potential frame with which to view a more violent and exploitative past.

One way to view the situation is that a radical reorganization of Afghanistan would be morally intensive, not just financially draining.

For example, Afghanistan has a high rate of cousin marriage, which is not common in developed countries. Overriding that would mean prioritizing foreign marriage norms as superior, taking on epistemic debt as the relationship between marriage norms and democracy or economy is more correlative than rock-solid causative, and to the degree that Afghan people resist this change, enforcing it at gunpoint.

While Democratic voters of the era would joke about Republican-voting "rednecks" being cousin-married, the appetite for such a program likely did not exist.

Another way to view the situation is that, from the outside, the Bush administration believed that democracy, rule of law, economic productivity, and women's liberation, were simply what happens in the absence of dictatorship. This view legitimized American power and influence as simply the natural order asserting itself, and argued that asserting American influence was morally cheap.

If democracy, rule of law, economic productivity, and women's liberation are non-trivially the product of particular cultural norms and values, then American interventionism is much more morally expensive.

In either case, Trump represents a "correction" in reaction to the failed project of the Bush administration: conflict and oppression are still undesirable; bombs are morally expensive; borders are cheap.

-★-

As we know, the United States lost the war in Afghanistan to the Taliban. A joke emerged at the time:

"Now the Taliban have to govern Afghanistan."

Discussion in right-wing circles claims that the Taliban won by doing a better job of maintaining basic property rights and resolving disputes than the US-aligned forces did, despite being in a state of war with the US:

The short answer is that they auditioned to replace the state across the spectrum of control — including punitive violence, but also the pedestrian tasks of recordkeeping and adjudication and governance. They wove their legitimacy into ordinary people’s water rights, their inheritances, their personal disputes — so that even people who were indifferent to the Taliban’s ideological program became invested in the Taliban’s stability and growth.

There were, reportedly, complaints from members of the Taliban after their victory, but it would seem that the Taliban were already governing Afghanistan.

Richard Hanania may be a troll, but he went through some Afghan War documents posted by the Washington Post, and I don't think he's making it up. It would seem that while the Taliban were governing Afghanistan, the US forces, well, weren't:

Six months after he was appointed, Bush didn't know who his top general in Afghanistan was, and didn't care. General McNeill had no guidance about what he should be doing in the country.

He has a whole long thread of this sort of thing. It reminds me of reading through the Wikipedia page on the Vietnam War many years after high school history, which made it sound like the US was quite adept with high-technology weapons, but failed to properly identify and manage the political source for the conflict.

Let's return to the student loan debt forgiveness issue.

A typical firm only has a profit margin of about 7-10%. A firm can keep going as long as it's breaking even, so even a low profit margin can still pay wages. However, if a firm is losing money, it will have to sell off assets or lay off employees, reducing its production capacity.

There is investment, in which we spend current production in order to increase or maintain future production, such as by building a factory. If we make a good investment, we'll get the production value back later. There is insurance, which involves moving risk around. For example, you are unlikely to be in a car accident most of the time, but if you have car insurance and you do get in an accident, the insurance company will pay for repair or replacement of your car. [2] This may make you more likely to buy a car in the first place, or more likely to structure your life around the assumption that you will have a car.

Governments can (in theory) spend a great deal on investment or insurance, but they can only spend a more limited amount on consumption spending.

For a college degree that pays for itself, government can loan money at a low interest rate, and the value will be paid back by the person who took the loan later.

For a college degree that doesn't pay for itself, someone has to supply the production that builds the buildings on the campus, fixes the water pipes, reloads the toilet paper in the bathrooms, and so on, and if that's not "the person taking the degree, but in the future," then it has to be someone else.

Someone like collapsedsquid might have the view, "I want the state to subsidize college education. Why should I pre-compromise and reduce my negotiating position?"

To expand on this, "Guarding the state treasury is the work of the right and of capital (business); why should I do their work for them?"

From this perspective, the role of the Democratic presidential candidate is to be the leader of America's left-leaning coalition, the blue team.

But the median voter or swing voter does not necessarily have this perspective. The median or swing voter is choosing between two candidates to lead the American enterprise.

The actual job is President of the United States.

If you win the War in Afghanistan, you have to govern Afghanistan. If you win the US presidential election, you have to govern the United States of America.

That's the prize. If you don't like it, don't run for office.

-★-

Nonetheless, this causes a tension. In order to become President as a Democrat, you first have to win the Democratic primary, which makes you effectively the leader of the Democratic party.

How do you deal with this?

That's "simple": split the issues.

A political coalition has a lot of people and those people have diverse interests. Representing them all at once is too difficult. Talking about them all at once is too difficult. Generalization of coalitional interests into a smaller, more manageable set of principles yields ideology.

Take the issues, and order them by how important they are to the functioning of the country, and how important they are for mainstream voters.

For the issues most important to mainstream voters, aim for a very broad coalition using very general principles. Pass legislation that has supermajority support in the polls, and be loud about it so that voters know what you've done for them lately.

For more niche issues that mainstream voters care less about, aim for a narrower coalition with narrower principles, to reward your base.

The second is the reward for the first. The median voter should be able to trust you on the things that he cares about, and where he doesn't trust you, it's on things he doesn't care about.

Core issues for the functioning of the country will seep into more generic voter dissatisfaction with things like inflation, so it's better to keep on top of those. Whether to be loud about it depends on whether the individual policy that's actually needed has good optics or not.

-★-

If you want to "beat Trump at his own game," you don't do so by talking about how America has the best steaks.

You identify his most important issues, and then you work out how to best steal them from him.

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[1] "They were elves, once." Extradeadjcb is probably the most prominent example, but it comes up for a number of them. I've written about this before, but ethnic conflict theory by one player creates an equilibrium more favorable to ethnic conflict theory by other players. Lefty Twitter users asked Razib Khan why he attended Extradeadjcb's natalism conference; he replied by asking where the left-wing natalism conference was. That's probably still 20 years out.