I like "the dumb right" much more than "the woke right," although I don't know what's "right" about weird erratic management, economic protectionism, and faith in some strong man instead of faith in consistent values. I wish we could drop the right/left paradigm, it is less and less useful for communicating any actual information about the subject you're talking about.
I think Arnold Kling's "Three Languages of Politics" is useful here. Progressives view the world through the lens of oppressors vs the oppressed, conservatives through the lens of civilization vs barbarism, and libertarians through the lens of freedom vs coercion.
If the strong man claims to be using erratic management and economic protectionism to defend (in this case Western) civilization from barbarism, then by this definition it's conservative.
During the Cold War there was alignment between libertarians and conservatives because the barbarians were communists, hence the right-wing support for small-l liberal economic policies. Now that the barbarians are the Chinese, immigrants, and the woke left, that alignment is gone.
Edit: Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory is also useful here, and more finely grained than Kling's framing (though they aren't mutually exclusive).
Kling has been on several times to talk about different topics and in all honesty I don’t find him to be a particularly interesting thinker. But I do think this framing is concise and useful.
I second Randolph Carter’s recommendation of Moral Foundations Theory.
Or the Jonathan Haidt moral foundations, there are so many better ways to categorize a set of political beliefs than the name set we inherited from the insane French
Great title for the 500th episode that isn't the 500th episode because of several mistakes in the challenging task of *adding 1 to the previous episode number*.
Anyway, thanks for all the laughs and here's to 500ish more.
I live in Omaha. Trump's beautiful tariffs and the uncertainty he's created, the man who Scott Bessent repeatedly said is the greatest deal maker in American history on CNN, has completely fucked nebraska's agriculture and meat packing industries. Both industries account for Nebraska's largest exports and primarily go to Mexico and China. Exporting to China is out, and exports to Mexico are full of uncertainty, which is bad for fucking farmers. Nebraska's Farm Bureau President said,
“As we get ready to plant our crops here in the next couple of weeks, we are literally putting seeds in the ground that we're probably going to lose money on every acre,”.
Now, I understand there are government subsidies for farmers in the Midwest, I'm not sure what Nebraska farmers get, and those subsidies need to stop imo. But it doesn't really matter if the farmers can't sell their crops.
Trump tariffs are a lot like tornados. We know a severe thunderstorm is coming and has the potential to produce tornados and there's a lot of uncertainty. But when a tornado does hit, it's sudden and doesn't last very long, but anything in it's path gets fucking destroyed.
I'm very much in "what was it all for" territory right now and desperate to get a real answer out of the dumb right for the following questions:
- if tariffs were supposed to unlock wealth and prosperity, why is DJT pulling back?
- what is the endgame now, especially considering that we're still being slapped with retaliatory tariffs by our friends who are also making deals with China on the side?
- If Trump is pulling back on his key economic agenda, what other crises will he get cold feet on in this administration and how will that show strength?
- how's your stock portfolio / 401k looking these days?
- why are there 500,000 manufacturing jobs perennially unfilled in the United States and why does it make sense to reshore more jobs people don't want?
- how's DJT & friends' stock portfolios looking these days, if you had to guess?
- if the answer is "probably pretty great" do you think it was worth it to gamble with the world economy to make elites even richer and you even poorer?
I appreciate that Matt asked what the guys would consider a success, and I wish he would have got a straight answer from Michael and Kmele. But since he didn’t, I’ll answer.
If 18 months from now the US has entered into (or is well on the way to entering into) new, mutually beneficial (I.e. not extorted) trade agreements with Canada, Mexico, the EU (and non-EU states in Europe), the UK, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India, and any of our other top-25 trading partners, while securing supply chains for goods that are vital to national security vis a vis China, and generally strengthening our strategic position with respect to China, while managing to smooth over damaged relations with our allies, I’ll consider it a success. I’ll leave it to citizens of other countries to decide what is beneficial for them, but for me, I want to see economic growth that especially benefits the people who feel like they’ve been left behind by globalism. Because right or wrong, if they continue to feel like they are losing out, it’s going to corrode our politics and our society.
Bowie released Blackstar days before he died, and it is a masterpiece. One last swerve. One last transformation. And it is one of his very best. If you've never heard it, get the hell off of Substack, onto Spotify, and rectify that now.
Again it's the Matt Welch Reason Roundtable show, which means no serious engagement with the merits on the other side. Just libertarian talking points. I'm waiting for reading assignments for Ayn Rand books. That was fun when I was 19, not so much now.
The new approach on TFC is to pick out the craziest lunatics on the other side and bravely position yourself counter to them. Very brave. Very rigorous. When you bring a tariff expert on, make sure it's the absolute most ardent opponent of all tariffs (Lincicome). When you decry a new immigration policy, like registering after 30 days, don't mention all the problems we are having with people overstaying visas and doing crimes (Chilean break in gangs eg). It's all just blue-sky open-borders anti-immigration-enforcement libertarian porn. And I'm pretty open to lots of these ideas but there's a reason I'm not a libertarian like Matt and it's that I see tradeoffs, especially with immigration and trade with China. It's embarrassing to see smart people so emotional they can't engage intelligently. Even Moynihan, who said the stock market reaction was like the worst in 100 years? What the actual? Oh and you drove across the country and didn't see shanties so everything is actually fine. Get out of Brooklyn, it's killing you intellectually.
Bahaha the copium is hilarious here. Wall of bad faith text.
You don’t need to the crazy lunatics on the other side. You literally just need this current admin’s retard policy.
Tariffs - disastrous so far.
Immigration - effectively stopping asylum seeking (no shit anyone can do this), deporting rando exec determined gang members w/out due process, etc
Trade war with China 2.0 - again anyone can do this with obvious net negative effects on the prices of electronics primarily.
Stock market reaction: We don’t know where this ends but you can’t even argue that this was not on pace to be on par with Covid, GFC, Dotcom and Black Monday. Different due to its unique nature but legit if Trump hadn’t done the 90 day pause (as forced to by the bond market yield upsplosian) we were 100% on the path to a 40-50% decline on par with those other drawn out scenarios and highly condensed at the “mere” ~23% decline. Whether it reaches those other events is purely in the hands of a mad man, a Congress that refuses to impeach him for clear abuse of power (nothing but evidence that this has nothing to do with a national emergency vs simple trade policy however retarded) and a slow moving court system that ends with a SC that could go their equally retarded route of presidential power deference/near infinite immunity).
Be honest, you’re a non Kamala voter who’s coping. Let the trigger begin.
God just read through this a 2nd time and it’s more regarded than I realized the 1st.
Matt - little CRS bro can’t actually spell out his points so ducks to retarded Ayn Rand was cool when I was 19 pablum. Address Matt’s fucking points dipshit. Fucking cowardly ass shit.
They’re not picking out the craziest lunatics on the other side unless you mean the current fucking President of the US who is the legit craziest… the boys are engaging directly with his policy. Not some rando loon on twitter. The actual president. That’s what’s happening but you’re too fucking retarded/entrenched to acknowledge it.
The rest of your sub points on tariffs, immigration is pure reactionary populist porn. Tariffs you don’t even attempt to make a point other than “Lincicome mean on tariffs” (yes tariffs of Trumps form are retarded; cope harder dipshit).
And then retarded deep MAGA Chilean gang talking points are next level retard shit bent on NOT addressing the downsides to Canadian and other 1st world tourism that was the actual point made. But you’re too much of a dumbfuck to try to address directly.
In the end… your retarded comment is an order of magnitude more fucking stupid than anything you list in your malformed claims against the boys’ points.
In short… you’re a fucking maga RETARD. So glad we brought the word back in time for a group of people who actually deserve the term. Go fuck yourself dumb fuck. Retard level 1000 reached. Well done moron.
Cynical take: there is no philosophical underpinnings behind Democrats or Republicans. It’s not two competing sets of ideas, centered around the desire to see all Americans better off.
It’s just two flavors of authoritarian tribalistic mobs fighting over who gets to use the government gun on their enemies.
Don’t even know what you mean. Republicans don’t exist. It’s the maga party with a bunch of Republicans who are pretending they can somehow steer snags towards the light. Hilarious.
Dems may have lost their way. MAGA has not… they’re doing exactly as their retarded ideology portends. Like they’re literally instituting mass tariffs against every country to bring manufacturing jobs back. One of their many far right pillars. You can’t pretend Trump doesn’t have an ideology anymore. He’s literally enacting his ideology by executive order by demonstrably false reasoning of national security. It’s pure ideology that includes disregarding the other two branches. Far right fascist shit of an American variety (as all fascist ideology is specific to its nation and time).
To Michael’s point that people aren’t really getting poorer, that may be true based on raw numbers but it’s also true that education and home prices are way more expensive now than they were 50 years ago. It doesn’t matter if wages are beating inflation (if they even are) or GDP is skyrocketing. If people can’t afford the basics then we are doing worse than before
If that's household income, the median in 2022 was 77000, so the delineations seem quite skewed. I wouldn't call 35000 a middle income household. I know people making 70,000 who are scraping by. It seems a little like a message is being forced through the data.
Globalism is the scapegoat for this, however. Yes, there are prominent examples of offshoring manufacturing and parts of the country that remain economically depressed as a result of this but specific to the issue you bring up, the main cause is inflation, debt and money printing.
Maybe the guy bagging groceries subscribes to Racket. Matt Taibbi has covered the "war gaming" (not Matt's term, I don't think, but maybe) extensively. Here's a NY Post article referring back to Matt:
Maybe I missed your point, but it looks to me like you chose a bad example.
I enjoy the podcast -- including this one -- but, please, keep some perspective. If Trump is going after people who had no limits when it came to "stopping Hitler," can you fault him? I'd argue it is critical to do so. The idea of temporarily waiving the statute of limitation... well, you can't do that and still claim the statute of limitations exists as a viable concept.
As far as the sycophants, yeah, I see it, too. But it's not going to trouble me until they say something as high on the Suckup Meter as "Lia Thomas is a woman in every sense of the word."
Then cheer when a male-swimmer-last-year wins the NCAA women's 500-meter freestyle swimming national championship.
I mean no disrespect, but I just do not understand this perspective. College sports and the economic wellbeing of billions of people are, from my perspective, on fundamentally different levels of importance, and it’s not even close.
And can I blame Trump for going on a revenge tour? Yes, absolutely. We aren’t going to get to a better place if each side keeps doubling down on the bad stuff the other side did.
I take no offense whatsoever. My comparison is not of college sports to potential economic collapse. My comparison is of the ludicrousness of the things the sycophants mouthed. A person saying "A man who identifies as a woman is a woman in every sense of the word" is completely lost. A person defending tariffs and deferring to his boss is standard political spin.
I think they gave two examples of "Trump revenge." One was fairly legit they seemed to feel, but the other struck them as revenge. I don't know about either case, but if their take is accurate, I certainly would never support a baseless case done for revenge. More generally speaking, though, turning the other cheek (in the political world) can't be a one-way street -- not for long, anyway. The gusto in prosecuting the J6 protesters set a new standard. (As did the temporary suspension of the statute of limitations I mentioned before.)
I would argue that the response to the tariff pause from Trump's supporters goes beyond standard political spin, but I take your point.
But this brings up an interesting question -- Is there a meaningful difference between sycophancy towards an idea vs towards an individual?
I think there is but it can cut both ways. Individual influence usually dies with the individual. But ideas, good or bad, can last several life times. Of course, sometimes an individual takes on mythological status and transforms into an idea, but I don't think that's all that common. The Kims in North Korea might be one example, but they rule at least as much through brute force as they do through ideological loyalty. I think that, more often, the successor to the individual inherits the reins of power but can't wield them as effectively because they lack the skill and charisma. But also, even though ideas *can* last several lifetimes, they can also lose popular support quickly. People are fickle and fads come and go all the time. Not sure where I come down on this aspect of it.
On the other hand, ideas percolate from the ground up and aren't usually centrally controlled (at least, the ideas that are sincerely held). It also means that an idea can't really exercise control in an agentic, goal-oriented way. The idea is always filtered through the minds and directed towards the goals of the individuals that hold it. Individuals, on the other hand, exercise top-down control. They act as a single point of failure, and the sycophants have to kowtow to their whims. I'd argue that when the individual is mercurial, sycophants have to be capable of at least as many mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance as adhering to an idea which, regardless of its relationship to the truth, is at least internally consistent.
I don't really have a point here, just rambling. I'll just close by saying that I instinctively favor bottom-up vs top-down systems, so I find individual sycophancy more revolting. But YMMV.
"Is there a meaningful difference between sycophancy towards an idea vs towards an individual?"
That went through my head, too, as I was thinking this through. I'm not sure how I would rank the two. However, I do think there's a distinction to made made between "Our policy in West Blogonia has been perfect" (when it obviously hasn't) and "The Mississippi River runs south to north."
Totally agree the rhetoric surrounding the on-again-off-again tariffs and the market drops and rallies has been beyond silly.
Anyway, I found your comments interesting, and if you were rambling, I was there for the full ride.
unrelated: new JRE episode dropped with "comedian" Dave Smith and Douglas Murray. 40 min in, Murray is pushing back hard in a way rare for JRE guests who kiss Joe's ass. I've always liked Murray but my respect is growing exponentially. He has been on the JRE a handful of times previously but this will probably be his last invite.
I like "the dumb right" much more than "the woke right," although I don't know what's "right" about weird erratic management, economic protectionism, and faith in some strong man instead of faith in consistent values. I wish we could drop the right/left paradigm, it is less and less useful for communicating any actual information about the subject you're talking about.
I think Arnold Kling's "Three Languages of Politics" is useful here. Progressives view the world through the lens of oppressors vs the oppressed, conservatives through the lens of civilization vs barbarism, and libertarians through the lens of freedom vs coercion.
If the strong man claims to be using erratic management and economic protectionism to defend (in this case Western) civilization from barbarism, then by this definition it's conservative.
During the Cold War there was alignment between libertarians and conservatives because the barbarians were communists, hence the right-wing support for small-l liberal economic policies. Now that the barbarians are the Chinese, immigrants, and the woke left, that alignment is gone.
Edit: Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory is also useful here, and more finely grained than Kling's framing (though they aren't mutually exclusive).
I found this super interesting, thank you.
Here’s the first EconTalk episode where Kling talks about this (they’ve revisited it a couple times since).
https://www.econtalk.org/kling-on-the-three-languages-of-politics/
Kling has been on several times to talk about different topics and in all honesty I don’t find him to be a particularly interesting thinker. But I do think this framing is concise and useful.
I second Randolph Carter’s recommendation of Moral Foundations Theory.
https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777
It’s interesting, and I think there’s a chance it might even be somewhat true! For a social science theory, that’s high praise coming from me. ;-)
Or the Jonathan Haidt moral foundations, there are so many better ways to categorize a set of political beliefs than the name set we inherited from the insane French
Ha, yep. I edited my message to include this as you were posting this response. We're on the same page here.
This is really interesting. Thanks for introducing us to, and explaining this concept!
And I would hear 500 'sodes,
And I would hear 500 more,
Just to be the man who heard a thousand 'sodes to cope with it all.
Great title for the 500th episode that isn't the 500th episode because of several mistakes in the challenging task of *adding 1 to the previous episode number*.
Anyway, thanks for all the laughs and here's to 500ish more.
You may be overselling the fingerprint requirement by DHS and underselling the 51st state talk and calling Trudeau governor.
Don't get me wrong, we have to get our shit together up here and Trudeau was at the front of a lost decade on that matter.
But that shit is deeply insulting to your supposed and assumed best friend. The best relationship on planet earth by many accounts. People are pissed.
It’s a barely veiled threat and so fucking rude. I can’t stand that he treats Canada like that (I was born in Detroit- Michiganders love our cousins!)
Forward looking flights for summer tourism season from Canada to US April to September are down over 70% YoY btw. That's astonishing!
I live in Omaha. Trump's beautiful tariffs and the uncertainty he's created, the man who Scott Bessent repeatedly said is the greatest deal maker in American history on CNN, has completely fucked nebraska's agriculture and meat packing industries. Both industries account for Nebraska's largest exports and primarily go to Mexico and China. Exporting to China is out, and exports to Mexico are full of uncertainty, which is bad for fucking farmers. Nebraska's Farm Bureau President said,
“As we get ready to plant our crops here in the next couple of weeks, we are literally putting seeds in the ground that we're probably going to lose money on every acre,”.
Now, I understand there are government subsidies for farmers in the Midwest, I'm not sure what Nebraska farmers get, and those subsidies need to stop imo. But it doesn't really matter if the farmers can't sell their crops.
Trump tariffs are a lot like tornados. We know a severe thunderstorm is coming and has the potential to produce tornados and there's a lot of uncertainty. But when a tornado does hit, it's sudden and doesn't last very long, but anything in it's path gets fucking destroyed.
More like a TRUMP-NADO eh? Ok I'll stop.
That's what I was aiming for. ha
I'm very much in "what was it all for" territory right now and desperate to get a real answer out of the dumb right for the following questions:
- if tariffs were supposed to unlock wealth and prosperity, why is DJT pulling back?
- what is the endgame now, especially considering that we're still being slapped with retaliatory tariffs by our friends who are also making deals with China on the side?
- If Trump is pulling back on his key economic agenda, what other crises will he get cold feet on in this administration and how will that show strength?
- how's your stock portfolio / 401k looking these days?
- why are there 500,000 manufacturing jobs perennially unfilled in the United States and why does it make sense to reshore more jobs people don't want?
- how's DJT & friends' stock portfolios looking these days, if you had to guess?
- if the answer is "probably pretty great" do you think it was worth it to gamble with the world economy to make elites even richer and you even poorer?
I'll take my answers off the air.
BTW, Matt, the word is "humbiliciousness"
I appreciate that Matt asked what the guys would consider a success, and I wish he would have got a straight answer from Michael and Kmele. But since he didn’t, I’ll answer.
If 18 months from now the US has entered into (or is well on the way to entering into) new, mutually beneficial (I.e. not extorted) trade agreements with Canada, Mexico, the EU (and non-EU states in Europe), the UK, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India, and any of our other top-25 trading partners, while securing supply chains for goods that are vital to national security vis a vis China, and generally strengthening our strategic position with respect to China, while managing to smooth over damaged relations with our allies, I’ll consider it a success. I’ll leave it to citizens of other countries to decide what is beneficial for them, but for me, I want to see economic growth that especially benefits the people who feel like they’ve been left behind by globalism. Because right or wrong, if they continue to feel like they are losing out, it’s going to corrode our politics and our society.
But I’m not holding my breath.
Bowie released Blackstar days before he died, and it is a masterpiece. One last swerve. One last transformation. And it is one of his very best. If you've never heard it, get the hell off of Substack, onto Spotify, and rectify that now.
Again it's the Matt Welch Reason Roundtable show, which means no serious engagement with the merits on the other side. Just libertarian talking points. I'm waiting for reading assignments for Ayn Rand books. That was fun when I was 19, not so much now.
The new approach on TFC is to pick out the craziest lunatics on the other side and bravely position yourself counter to them. Very brave. Very rigorous. When you bring a tariff expert on, make sure it's the absolute most ardent opponent of all tariffs (Lincicome). When you decry a new immigration policy, like registering after 30 days, don't mention all the problems we are having with people overstaying visas and doing crimes (Chilean break in gangs eg). It's all just blue-sky open-borders anti-immigration-enforcement libertarian porn. And I'm pretty open to lots of these ideas but there's a reason I'm not a libertarian like Matt and it's that I see tradeoffs, especially with immigration and trade with China. It's embarrassing to see smart people so emotional they can't engage intelligently. Even Moynihan, who said the stock market reaction was like the worst in 100 years? What the actual? Oh and you drove across the country and didn't see shanties so everything is actually fine. Get out of Brooklyn, it's killing you intellectually.
Why don't you bring your best argument against their positions?
But what if the craziest lunatics are in the top echelons of the administration and making policy? That ain’t cherry picking.
Bahaha the copium is hilarious here. Wall of bad faith text.
You don’t need to the crazy lunatics on the other side. You literally just need this current admin’s retard policy.
Tariffs - disastrous so far.
Immigration - effectively stopping asylum seeking (no shit anyone can do this), deporting rando exec determined gang members w/out due process, etc
Trade war with China 2.0 - again anyone can do this with obvious net negative effects on the prices of electronics primarily.
Stock market reaction: We don’t know where this ends but you can’t even argue that this was not on pace to be on par with Covid, GFC, Dotcom and Black Monday. Different due to its unique nature but legit if Trump hadn’t done the 90 day pause (as forced to by the bond market yield upsplosian) we were 100% on the path to a 40-50% decline on par with those other drawn out scenarios and highly condensed at the “mere” ~23% decline. Whether it reaches those other events is purely in the hands of a mad man, a Congress that refuses to impeach him for clear abuse of power (nothing but evidence that this has nothing to do with a national emergency vs simple trade policy however retarded) and a slow moving court system that ends with a SC that could go their equally retarded route of presidential power deference/near infinite immunity).
Be honest, you’re a non Kamala voter who’s coping. Let the trigger begin.
God just read through this a 2nd time and it’s more regarded than I realized the 1st.
Matt - little CRS bro can’t actually spell out his points so ducks to retarded Ayn Rand was cool when I was 19 pablum. Address Matt’s fucking points dipshit. Fucking cowardly ass shit.
They’re not picking out the craziest lunatics on the other side unless you mean the current fucking President of the US who is the legit craziest… the boys are engaging directly with his policy. Not some rando loon on twitter. The actual president. That’s what’s happening but you’re too fucking retarded/entrenched to acknowledge it.
The rest of your sub points on tariffs, immigration is pure reactionary populist porn. Tariffs you don’t even attempt to make a point other than “Lincicome mean on tariffs” (yes tariffs of Trumps form are retarded; cope harder dipshit).
And then retarded deep MAGA Chilean gang talking points are next level retard shit bent on NOT addressing the downsides to Canadian and other 1st world tourism that was the actual point made. But you’re too much of a dumbfuck to try to address directly.
In the end… your retarded comment is an order of magnitude more fucking stupid than anything you list in your malformed claims against the boys’ points.
In short… you’re a fucking maga RETARD. So glad we brought the word back in time for a group of people who actually deserve the term. Go fuck yourself dumb fuck. Retard level 1000 reached. Well done moron.
Cynical take: there is no philosophical underpinnings behind Democrats or Republicans. It’s not two competing sets of ideas, centered around the desire to see all Americans better off.
It’s just two flavors of authoritarian tribalistic mobs fighting over who gets to use the government gun on their enemies.
Don’t even know what you mean. Republicans don’t exist. It’s the maga party with a bunch of Republicans who are pretending they can somehow steer snags towards the light. Hilarious.
Dems may have lost their way. MAGA has not… they’re doing exactly as their retarded ideology portends. Like they’re literally instituting mass tariffs against every country to bring manufacturing jobs back. One of their many far right pillars. You can’t pretend Trump doesn’t have an ideology anymore. He’s literally enacting his ideology by executive order by demonstrably false reasoning of national security. It’s pure ideology that includes disregarding the other two branches. Far right fascist shit of an American variety (as all fascist ideology is specific to its nation and time).
To Michael’s point that people aren’t really getting poorer, that may be true based on raw numbers but it’s also true that education and home prices are way more expensive now than they were 50 years ago. It doesn’t matter if wages are beating inflation (if they even are) or GDP is skyrocketing. If people can’t afford the basics then we are doing worse than before
Education and home prices have been fucked by government.
https://x.com/emmma_camp_/status/1909999578025255391
If that's household income, the median in 2022 was 77000, so the delineations seem quite skewed. I wouldn't call 35000 a middle income household. I know people making 70,000 who are scraping by. It seems a little like a message is being forced through the data.
Globalism is the scapegoat for this, however. Yes, there are prominent examples of offshoring manufacturing and parts of the country that remain economically depressed as a result of this but specific to the issue you bring up, the main cause is inflation, debt and money printing.
https://x.com/jmhorp/status/1911224957029253401
Wages are out pacing inflation. Workers today earn about 45% more than in 1992 (inflation adjusted with PCEPI).
Housing and education are policy caused problems.
Cartoons Hate Her had the great title "The Rachel Dolezals of Blue Collar Work"
Maybe the guy bagging groceries subscribes to Racket. Matt Taibbi has covered the "war gaming" (not Matt's term, I don't think, but maybe) extensively. Here's a NY Post article referring back to Matt:
https://nypost.com/2023/05/05/medias-long-con-to-bury-hunter-bidens-laptop-scandal/
Maybe I missed your point, but it looks to me like you chose a bad example.
I enjoy the podcast -- including this one -- but, please, keep some perspective. If Trump is going after people who had no limits when it came to "stopping Hitler," can you fault him? I'd argue it is critical to do so. The idea of temporarily waiving the statute of limitation... well, you can't do that and still claim the statute of limitations exists as a viable concept.
As far as the sycophants, yeah, I see it, too. But it's not going to trouble me until they say something as high on the Suckup Meter as "Lia Thomas is a woman in every sense of the word."
Then cheer when a male-swimmer-last-year wins the NCAA women's 500-meter freestyle swimming national championship.
I mean no disrespect, but I just do not understand this perspective. College sports and the economic wellbeing of billions of people are, from my perspective, on fundamentally different levels of importance, and it’s not even close.
And can I blame Trump for going on a revenge tour? Yes, absolutely. We aren’t going to get to a better place if each side keeps doubling down on the bad stuff the other side did.
I take no offense whatsoever. My comparison is not of college sports to potential economic collapse. My comparison is of the ludicrousness of the things the sycophants mouthed. A person saying "A man who identifies as a woman is a woman in every sense of the word" is completely lost. A person defending tariffs and deferring to his boss is standard political spin.
I think they gave two examples of "Trump revenge." One was fairly legit they seemed to feel, but the other struck them as revenge. I don't know about either case, but if their take is accurate, I certainly would never support a baseless case done for revenge. More generally speaking, though, turning the other cheek (in the political world) can't be a one-way street -- not for long, anyway. The gusto in prosecuting the J6 protesters set a new standard. (As did the temporary suspension of the statute of limitations I mentioned before.)
I would argue that the response to the tariff pause from Trump's supporters goes beyond standard political spin, but I take your point.
But this brings up an interesting question -- Is there a meaningful difference between sycophancy towards an idea vs towards an individual?
I think there is but it can cut both ways. Individual influence usually dies with the individual. But ideas, good or bad, can last several life times. Of course, sometimes an individual takes on mythological status and transforms into an idea, but I don't think that's all that common. The Kims in North Korea might be one example, but they rule at least as much through brute force as they do through ideological loyalty. I think that, more often, the successor to the individual inherits the reins of power but can't wield them as effectively because they lack the skill and charisma. But also, even though ideas *can* last several lifetimes, they can also lose popular support quickly. People are fickle and fads come and go all the time. Not sure where I come down on this aspect of it.
On the other hand, ideas percolate from the ground up and aren't usually centrally controlled (at least, the ideas that are sincerely held). It also means that an idea can't really exercise control in an agentic, goal-oriented way. The idea is always filtered through the minds and directed towards the goals of the individuals that hold it. Individuals, on the other hand, exercise top-down control. They act as a single point of failure, and the sycophants have to kowtow to their whims. I'd argue that when the individual is mercurial, sycophants have to be capable of at least as many mental gymnastics and cognitive dissonance as adhering to an idea which, regardless of its relationship to the truth, is at least internally consistent.
I don't really have a point here, just rambling. I'll just close by saying that I instinctively favor bottom-up vs top-down systems, so I find individual sycophancy more revolting. But YMMV.
"Is there a meaningful difference between sycophancy towards an idea vs towards an individual?"
That went through my head, too, as I was thinking this through. I'm not sure how I would rank the two. However, I do think there's a distinction to made made between "Our policy in West Blogonia has been perfect" (when it obviously hasn't) and "The Mississippi River runs south to north."
Totally agree the rhetoric surrounding the on-again-off-again tariffs and the market drops and rallies has been beyond silly.
Anyway, I found your comments interesting, and if you were rambling, I was there for the full ride.
What is this retarded statement. Fucking state a single fucking pint and your disagreement with it. Jesus fucking Christ.
hola bicholas.
unrelated: new JRE episode dropped with "comedian" Dave Smith and Douglas Murray. 40 min in, Murray is pushing back hard in a way rare for JRE guests who kiss Joe's ass. I've always liked Murray but my respect is growing exponentially. He has been on the JRE a handful of times previously but this will probably be his last invite.
Tariffs are gay.
I grew up in trailers and am totally fine with "them" taking all the dreary brown mobile homes. May they never return.