Luke Ford | No sacred cows.

Donald Trump – The President Of Vice (12-4-24)

Posted on December 4, 2024 by Luke Ford

01:00 Vice is bad, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/04/opinion/donald-trump-vice-voters.html
03:00 Commentary mag: There Are Nations in Crisis—Just Not Ours, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqSB6OeDxow
08:20 Among Transition hiccups, Trump survives stuff that no political mortal could survive, says Mark Halperin, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/among-transition-hiccups-trump-survives-stuff-that/id1573813504?i=1000679240142
12:00 Humor & Morality, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=158042
19:00 Variations in Moral Concerns across Political Ideology: Moral Foundations, Hidden Tribes, and Righteous Division, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=158050
24:20 Does Hunter Biden need a pardon to save himself from triggers? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sme1_gt4GJM
29:00 Covid & Epistemic Coercion, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=158056
55:10 Kip joins to talk about the horror of editing one’s own thoughts
1:00:00 The SS St Louis ship is denied entry to the USA in 1939, but was it welcomed by anyone?, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis
1:26:00 Asabiyyah, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asabiyyah
1:30:40 Israel’s elite is quite different from the Israel majority, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkKsENN0S2M
1:34:14 The primacy of military power
1:36:30 What’s going on in Syria?

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Epistemic Coercion

Posted on December 4, 2024 by Luke Ford

Stephen Turner writes in Epistemology & Philosophy of Science, 2024, vol. 61, no. 3:

“Words such as state, republic, society, class, as well as sovereignty, constitutional state, absolutism, dictatorship, economic planning, neutral or total state, and so on are incomprehensible if one does not exactly who is to be affected, combatted, refuted, or negated by such a term. Above all the polemical character determines the use of the word political regardless of whether the adversary is designated as non-political (in the sense of harmless), or vice versa if one wants to disqualify or denounce him as political in order to portray oneself as non-political (in the sense of the purely scientific, purely moral, purely aesthetic, purely economic, or on the basis of similar purities) and therefore superior.”
[Carl Schmitt, (1932) 1996, pp. 31–32].
* …the regimes of science and expertise are ineradicably political and coercive. But if regimes of science and expertise are ineradicably political and coercive, what remains
is the problem of our choice of regimes, and how to accommodate them in a democratic order. We must come to a reckoning with the disillusion from the idea of the purity of science and the neutrality of expertise. We cannot simultaneously valorize “the science” as a real institutional fact and insist on “following the science,” and ignore the practical meaning of the imperfect institutional processes that make it up, and the value choices that are made within science, which may diverge from the values that derive from democratic processes.
* …The Covid pandemic saw the development and widespread use of actual means of knowledge suppression and epistemic engineering, both within science and with respect to expert claims, within nominally free societies….The rationale for the use of these means was that malinformation, misinformation, and disinformation were sufficiently pervasive in the digital world that they produced harms that justified not merely correction or disagreement but intervention to alter the cognitive climate. The reasoning produced a novel concept, “cognitive security,” as well as a plethora of new jargon terms, many of which were designed to conceal the partisan nature of the technical interventions under such bland terms as “curation” and treating interventions as forms of cybersecurity.
* New revelations about the role of governments and drug companies in these interventions, and their extent, occur almost daily. And in each case they show that the interventions cross whatever line still exists between partisanship and scholarship, fact and value, and claims warranted by sufficient evidence as distinct from plausible assumptions that might warrant policy preferences, and any line between coercion and persuasion. And under Covid, in medicine, we have seen unambiguously direct coercion: taking the licenses of doctors for failing to abide by problematic guidelines, or censorship based on definitions of misinformation which were themselves based on policy agendas with little evidence behind them. What is especially important in the presence of novel technologies of persuasion is the question of whether these are novel instruments of epistemic control or coercion, and whether they require new forms of control, and new forms of resistance, in order to serve the purposes we expect discourse, either in science or the public sphere, to achieve.
* Power also comes in two basic forms: commands which are enforceable and hegemonic power which takes the form of pervasive conditions of constraint that are unconsciously internalized as normal and then serve as self-imposed limits on thought and behavior that are not even recognized as such.
* we can find examples of explicitly coerced personal experiences that generate largely inarticulable knowledge: a paradigm case would be Eisenhower’s decision at the end of the Second World War to force Germans to watch films of the concentration camps by making it a condition of getting stamps to obtain food.
* Most of our explicit knowledge comes from others. We judge what we are told by a combination of two variables: our assessment of their trustworthiness (and motives) and our assessment of their competence to speak and their access to the subject.
* The mechanisms of power in science are familiar: they include exclusion, article rejection, failure to endorse, to fund, to employ, to allocate scarce resources to, failure to attend to, and so forth. There are also many rewards for cognitive conformity and conforming to standards of achievement. All of these are forms of censorship, in the sense that they are, like overt censorship, means of controlling and manipulating the cognitive environment.
* Changing minds is difficult. Silencing and excluding is not. The easiest point of coercive entry into the epistemic environment is at the moment of transmission. Preventing publication, delegitimating the sources, threatening the speakers, are all common means of exercising this kind of coercion. They were lavishly employed during the Covid pandemic.

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Variations in Moral Concerns across Political Ideology: Moral Foundations, Hidden Tribes, and Righteous Division

Posted on December 4, 2024 by Luke Ford

From The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology (2022):

* Traditional Conservatives (19 per cent). This group is patriotic, religious, moralistic, and tends to lament what it perceives as the gradual erosion of a bygone and glorified American way of life. They tend to believe that America is a fair society, and that people’s success is the result of hard work and effort rather than luck and circumstance. They strongly approve of Donald Trump’s job performance, and tend to agree in traditional notions of American identity, such as having two American parents, speaking English, and being Christian. They tend to get their news from Fox News and from talk radio, and are suspicious of traditional media, believing that it is biased in favour of liberal causes and tends to be anti – religious. Traditional Conservatives’ more important concerns are foreign tensions, jobs, and terrorism.
Devoted Conservatives (6 per cent). This group is highly active, highly engaged, uncompromising, and nationalistic in its views. Members of this group have a higher income than any other group, and feel significantly happier and more secure than the average American. They are staunchly supportive of Donald Trump and his ‘America First’ policies, including a ban on travel from Muslim – majority countries and a wall on the US — Mexico border. They tend to oppose compromise, and are the most likely to believe there is a need to ‘defeat the evil’ within our country. They feel the most pride in the American flag, and are deeply loyal to the ideals for which it stands. Their most important issues are immigration, terrorism, jobs, and the economy.
Overall, the results revealed a number of interesting insights regarding the psychological roots of political polarization in the United States:
Tribal membership predicts political views better than self – identified political labels…. For example, support for building a wall on the US – Mexico border was predicted better by tribal membership than by self – identified ideology (as measured by the question asking people to indicate their political on a scale ranging from ‘very liberal’ to ‘very conservative’). The same was true for overall approval of Donald Trump, and beliefs that racism and sexual harassment remain serious problems in the United States. In addition, when predicting concern for each of the moral foundations, tribal membership does a significantly better job at predicting four out of the five moral foundations (purity, authority, loyalty, and fairness) than self – identified ideology. (The one exception is harm, in which there is no significant difference between the models.) Overall, this helps confirm the notion that tribal membership (obtained directly from measurements of core beliefs) is a powerful predictor of explicit political attitudes. Moreover, it helps explain the seemingly unlikely election of Donald Trump by revealing the ‘hidden tribes’ in America that would be most susceptible to his message of threat and his expressed desire to return to the putative ‘golden years’ of American greatness.
* endorsement of the care foundation is most closely correlated with the view that hate speech is a real problem in America and that sexism is pervasive. Endorsement of fairness is associated with the views, for instance, that women are paid less solely because of their gender and that the world is a dangerous place. Endorsement of the loyalty foundation is associated with pride in seeing the American flag and feeling as though being American is central to one’s identity. The authority foundation is associated with support for the Muslim travel ban and the view that the police should be more protected than Black Lives Matter activists. Endorsement of the purity foundation is associated with opposition to gay marriage and the view that changing attitudes towards sex are causing American to lose its moral foundation. Overall, these results show a strong and intuitive relationship between people’s endorsements of various moral foundations and their professed views regarding a variety of current political issues. More broadly, the results show that moral foundations have important power in predicting not just people’s underlying ideology but also their political opinions.
* perceived threat subsequently correlated with such attitudes as support for the Muslim ban, and support for the US – Mexico border wall. Another important predictor of political attitudes was parenting style. Devoted Conservatives were a full three times more likely to endorse authoritative as opposed to permissive parenting values (for instance, preferring preferring ‘good manners’ to ‘curiosity’, and ‘respect for elders’ to ‘independence’) In turn, endorsement of authoritative parenting principles positively predicted a slew of political opinions, including opposition to gay marriage, being ‘pro – life’ in the abortion debate, and believing that people’s gender is fixed at birth.
A final important difference between the tribes was in views about personal responsibility. Corroborating the observations of past research, 86 per cent of Progressive Activists believed that people’s lives are determined by forces outside their control, while 98 per cent of Devoted Conservatives believe that people are largely responsible for their own outcomes in life. These viewpoints are subsequently correlated with a variety of policy decisions. For example, those who endorse the former perspective (vs those endorsing the second) are more than twice as likely to support expanding the government safety net, 25 per cent more likely to say that refugees are America’s moral responsibility, and 35 per cent more likely to believe that women are discriminated against in the workplace.
Conservatives tend to believe that it is only through disciplined and effortful adherence to a certain set of pre – established obligations — including one’s family, one’s country, one’s religion, and existing laws and traditions — that the individual may become a good and moral person. To the liberals, by contrast, true personal success is achieved not by taming the inner spirit, but by cultivating and freeing it. Progress, therefore, is achieved by releasing people from pre – existing moral obligations, and instead allowing them to pursue their own authentic path of self – expression.

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Humor & Morality

Posted on December 4, 2024 by Luke Ford

From The Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology (2022):

* when one is engaged humorously one adopts a certain static ‘state of mind, a way of seeing and being, a special mental ‘set’ towards the world and one’s actions in it’ that calls for nothing. …a paratelic state precisely to distinguish it from the telic states that underwrite more serious, goal – directed forms of activity. … in laughter we often lose control of our normal abilities to act voluntarily in goal – directed ways. In laughter, muscle tone decreases and, in extreme cases, it is accompanied by the non – voluntary production of tears, and even by incontinence…
* developed comic sensibilities are, like developed moral and linguistic sensibilities, highly culturally situated.
* Richard Wiseman’s ‘Laugh Lab’ 4 reports that people from Ireland, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand prefer jokes implicating word – play, such as:
patient : ‘Doctor, I’ve got a strawberry stuck up my bum.’
doctor : ‘I’ve got some cream for that.
Americans and Canadians, in contrast, prefer jokes that seem to turn on a sense of superiority, for instance:
texan : ‘Where are you from?’
harvard grad : ‘I come from a place where we do not end our sentences with prepositions.’
texan : ‘Okay — where are you from, jackass?’
Wiseman’s data also suggests that Europeans display a preference for ‘surreal’ jokes, and for jokes about subject matter that makes many Americans uncomfortable — jokes about death, and marriage, for example. And Germans, apparently, don’t display preferences for particular kinds of jokes, but like them all equally.
* people who dislike complexity, novelty, or symmetry display a relative preference for incongruity – resolution humour: those possessed of strong preferences for incongruity – resolution relative to nonsense forms of humour also tend to prefer simple art forms, and simple patterns of dots on a card, relative to ‘fantastic’ art forms and more complex dot patterns…
* Affiliative forms of humour tend to be more popular in collectivist cultures, which emphasize the interdependence among the members of social groups, while aggressive forms of humour are more highly appreciated in societies where the needs of individuals take precedence over the needs of the group or community…
* Laughing together often is consistently cited by successful couples as something that promotes the strength of their relationships…
* In an early but well – known evolutionary theory of humour, Gruner hypothesized that laughter originated in the ‘sexy’ vocalizations that signalled victory in aggressive conflicts among our male ancestors ( Gruner 1978 ; cf. Eibl – Eibesfeldt 1973 ). Laughter, Gruner reasoned, still functions as a dominance signal that’s been updated to reflect the ways that more complex linguistic capabilities have made it possible to ‘defeat’ others in conversation.
* There is some evidence supporting a sexual selection model of humour. Women tend to laugh more than men do, and to seek out men who make them laugh; men tend to tell more jokes, and to seek out women who will laugh at their jokes ( Provine 2000 ; Lundy, Tan, and Cunningham 1998 ). Greengross and Miller (2011) found that intelligence predicts humour ability, that humour ability predicts mating success, and that males, relative to females, have more humour ability.
* comedians tend to be more suspicious than average, more intelligent, angrier, and more depressed. The early lives of the professional comedians interviewed were, moreover, typically characterized by intense feelings of isolation and deprivation. Subsequent research also suggests that many of the same familial conditions that predispose to the development of gelotophobia characterize the early lives of professional humourists: in general, comedians tend to describe their mothers very negatively, and in fact it appears that the mothers of children that go on to become professional humourists are selfish, controlling, less kind, and less likely to be intimately involved in the lives of their children than the average… the comedic skills of professional humourists are developed as a tool to cope with uncongenial family environments — in particular, as a way dealing with feeling of anxiety and rejection, and of gaining the attention and approval of otherwise dismissive parents. Following Ruch and Proyer (2009), it has been suggested that those who professionally seek out the laughter of others might be called gelotophilic. Gelotophiles more generally seek out or cultivate situations in which they can elicit the laughter of others, which is experienced as a source of joy and validation.
* self – disparaging forms of humour can facilitate depressive etiologies, and professional humourists score unusually highly on measures of psychotic traits, even relative to other creative artists and performers…
* Comic sensibilities may, then, be developed in different ways as tools to cope. But it remains unclear whether having a good sense of humour provides a good strategy for coping across the board. Abilities to produce comic materials are associated with premature mortality, and that link — like that between comedy and tragedy — may have deep roots. In a seminal study of young children, it was found that high ratings of a child’s sense of humour, from both parents and teachers, predicted a greater likelihood of dying over seven decades ( Friedman et al. 1993 ). A much more recent study found an inverse relationship between comedic talent and longevity, in a cohort of professional male comedians from Britain and Ireland ( Stewart et al. 2016 ). And it’s not just that the lifestyles of professional humourists from the UK are riskier than the average; it looks as though their level of comedic talent also matters: the funnier the comedian, the more likely they were to die prematurely. In the case of comic duos, the funnier of the two comedians was three and a half times more likely to die prematurely, relative to their partner, even after adjusting for differences in age ( Stewart et al. 2016 ).

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The rise of the “substackademic”

Posted on December 4, 2024 by Luke Ford

Chris Bickerton writes:

A successful academic entrepreneur must make themselves their primary focus. In an odd way, the academic entrepreneur is the realisation of Foucault’s call for a “cultivation of the self”. The constant curation of one’s status as a source of insights is the route to success…
To whom do academic entrepreneurs address themselves exactly? Instead of creating a new public through the elaboration of a distinctive body of thought, academic entrepreneurs more often than not address each other and a small quasi-public drawn from a narrow social elite, such as those who will pay for the insights the academic entrepreneur provides. The “substackademic” will struggle to go beyond a relatively closed conversation with like-minded individuals, one where the conversation itself is driven by the search for Likes and Up-votes.
The final and perhaps greatest danger is that by breaking free from the academy, the academic entrepreneur is exposed to all the vagaries of corporate and political power. Political and social elites are the core audience for the academic entrepreneur, making them dependent upon their interest and goodwill. Speaking truth to power when one is entirely dependent upon its munificence is a perilous enterprise.
…research in the social sciences is dominated by lots of little dots; what is missing are the threads to bring these dots together. Many of today’s thinkers are not from within the academy at all. They are professional writers, or occasionally journalists who have risen above the cut and thrust of chasing news to devote themselves to writing.

News and intellectual labor rarely pay for themselves.

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Decoding the Trump Transition (12-3-24)

Posted on December 3, 2024 by Luke Ford

04:00 Hunter Pardon, Day 2, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sme1_gt4GJM
11:00 The “If You Like Your Doctor, You Can Keep Your Doctor” Pardon and Kash Patel,
https://ewerickson.substack.com/p/the-if-you-like-your-doctor-you-can
17:30 Say Nothing tv show, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say_Nothing_(TV_series)
19:30 Americans used to be known for their plain speech, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0arXVZ72hvI
24:20 Inflation was the result of Biden’s failed attempt to buy off voters, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0arXVZ72hvI
27:00 Joe Biden’s Ukraine catastrophe
31:20 Donald Trump & Gaza, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViqsVFGazLs
34:20 Jesse Waters
43:00 Are Democrats too nice? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViqsVFGazLs
47:20 If you’ve met one Irishman, one Aussie, one Brit, one Frenchman, one Jap, you’ve met them all, but not with Americans, https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/supplementary-material-19-critic-o-rama-with-extra-trans-dimensional-alien-demons
51:20 Jordan Petersen’s lazy Christian apologetics
59:00 Are there are any proud Biden Democrats?
1:08:00 Kip joins to discuss morality in America
1:17:30 Mike Benz does not optimize for truth
1:21:00 What is the nature of truth?
1:28:00 My different experiences with God, Christianity & Judaism
1:40:00 Why We Don’t Change (and what you can do about it) | Dr. Ross Ellenhorn, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTzA15BQzHo
1:42:00 The buffered identity, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=149512
1:43:00 The Embodied Expression Of The Elite Attitude, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=157628
1:48:00 Smart people ‘especially prone to tribalism, virtue signaling and self-deception’, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=158031
1:52:00 ‘Trump Is De-Stereotyping Republican Foreign Policy’, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=158024

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Smart people ‘especially prone to tribalism, virtue signaling and self-deception’

Posted on December 3, 2024 by Luke Ford

Musa Al-Gharbi writes:

We pay attention to, easily recall, and feel positive emotions towards things we deem interesting or useful. We dismiss, downplay, dump, and have negative emotional reactions to information that is threatening to our objectives or our self-image, or that conflicts with our expectations or pre-existing beliefs. Things that don’t seem particularly significant in either direction, we largely ignore (even though these neglected details often prove to be quite important in retrospect).
…When good things happen that could be plausibly laid at our feet, we attribute those positive outcomes to stable and internal factors that are within our control – i.e. positive characteristics we possess and wise actions we took. When bad things happen, we tell the opposite story. Adverse outcomes are attributed to contingent and fleeting circumstances – things external to us and outside of our control.
…Most business fail within six years. An overwhelming majority of romantic relationships end in less than a year. Most employment relationships end up not working out for one or more parties eventually (relative to the alternatives) – typically leading to resignations or termination within five years. Social movements rarely achieve their stated ends. Most innovations are maladaptive. The modal result of publication submissions is rejection. An overwhelming majority of published scientific findings are wrong, trivial, and/or non-impactful. If we allowed these types of probabilities to govern our attitudes and behaviors, we’d rarely invest ourselves in anything.
In reality, however, people defy the odds all the time. Ostensibly irrational levels of confidence, conviction, resilience and optimism often play an important role in these outcomes. Our biases and blindspots are, therefore, not just a product of our cognitive limitations – they empower us to accomplish things we otherwise may not.
…people who are highly educated, intelligent, or rhetorically skilled are significantly less likely than most others to revise their beliefs or adjust their behaviors when confronted with evidence or arguments that contradict their preferred narratives or preexisting beliefs. Precisely in virtue of knowing more about the world or being better at arguing, we are better equipped to punch holes in data or narratives that undermine our priors, come up with excuses to “stick to our guns” irrespective of the facts, or else interpret threatening information in a way that flatters our existing worldview. And we typically do just that.
In a decades-long set of ambitious experiments and forecasting tournaments, psychologist Philip Tetlock has demonstrated that—as a result of their inclinations toward epistemic arrogance and ideological rigidity—experts are often worse than laymen at anticipating how events are likely to play out . . . especially with respect to their areas of expertise. What’s worse, cognitively sophisticated people tend not to be very self-aware about our error rates either, because we excel at telling stories about how we were “basically right” even when we were, in fact, clearly wrong – inhibiting our ability to learn from mistakes and miscalculations.
In a similar vein, experts have been shown to perform a bit worse than laymen at predicting the likely effects of behavioral science interventions. Political practitioners have been found to be no better than laypeople at predicting which political messages are persuasive. Comparative and longitudinal studies have found that highly educated political leaders perform no better than less educated ones, and may even be a bit worse in some respects.
Rather than becoming more likely to converge on the same position, people tend to grow more politically polarized on contentious topics as their knowledge, numeracy, reflectiveness increases, or when they try to think in actively openminded ways.
These empirical patterns would be shocking and difficult to explain while operating under the assumption that humans’ cognitive and perceptual systems are primarily oriented towards objective truth. However, these tendencies are exactly what one might expect if we instead work from the premise that our cognitive capacities are fundamentally geared toward group building and coalitional struggles, and that we typically reason in ways that help us achieve our goals with and through other people.
On this understanding of how our brains work, we might likewise expect that the kinds of people the symbolic professions select for (cognitively sophisticated, academically high-performing, highly educated) may be especially prone to tribalism, virtue signaling and self-deception.

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‘Trump Is De-Stereotyping Republican Foreign Policy’

Posted on December 3, 2024 by Luke Ford

Stereotypes are useful when they correlate with reality (such as different groups have different gifts). Stereotypes are not useful when you insist that different groups have inherent qualities that explain all of their actions. Regarding an out-group as inherently evil, be it communist, Iranian, Islamic, ethno-nationalist, is stupid. All groups respond to incentives and the essential qualities of a group usually vary depending on context.

There’s nothing inherently evil and untrustworthy, for example, about China, Russia, Iran and Palestinians. You can make deals with them. You are usually better off by not going to war with them.

Glenn writes:

No matter how much evidence can be produced that countries like China and Iran, for example, are defensive realist powers primarily concerned with their own security — that accept many institutions of the international order while rejecting others — the Republican hawks are utterly convinced that they’re hell-bent on world domination. Congressman Mike Waltz, Trump’s incoming national security advisor, warns that the Chinese “seek to dominate the world [and establish] a new world order with America subservient to China.” Senator Marco Rubio, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, believes the United States and China are hopelessly locked in a New Cold War — something that would likely come as a surprise to Chinese leadership.
Waltz, Rubio, and virtually all the rest of the Republican establishment also contend that Iran is compelled by an irrational hatred of the United States and Israel to relentlessly pursue nuclear weapons. This is despite U.S. intelligence having known since at least 2007 that Iran has not had an active nuclear weapons program since 2003, and Iran having vowed in 2015 that “under no circumstances will [it] ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons,” while severely curtailing its civilian nuclear program. In fact, even though the 2015 nuclear deal had more than quadrupled the time it would have taken Iran to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon, while international authorities repeatedly verified Iran’s compliance, Rubio declared in 2018 that the deal had “pave[d] the Iranian terror regime’s path to nuclear weapons.”
Trump is surprisingly not a stereotypical foreign policy thinker. Stereotyping requires having strong, inflexible beliefs about the inherent characteristics of others. Trump’s beliefs, to the contrary, are subject to change based on how useful he assesses someone to be for advancing his personal interests at any particular moment.
This is why Trump’s apparent beliefs and actions toward many foreign states and leaders have changed rapidly in a relatively short period of time.
…when aggression against Iran has carried a significant political cost, Trump has pulled back from military action, even as more orthodox Republicans have continued to agitate for it. This occurred at least four times during Trump’s first administration, including during repeated near-miss scenarios in which the United States and Iran teetered on the brink of war…
On each occasion save the last, Republican hawks agitated for war with Iran because they believed Iran was evil, irrational, duplicitous, or could be dealt with only by using force. Meanwhile Trump, after initially following his advisors, became increasingly hesitant to attack Iran as he realized they behaved rationally in response to incentives and could impose unacceptable costs on the United States that would hurt his chances of winning re-election. Once he lost the 2020 election and he no longer had anything to lose but potentially much to gain by attacking Iran, however, he changed his position again and supported military action.
This is not a pattern of behavior you would expect from a policymaker engaged in stereotyping. Stereotypes are fixed. They don’t change based on extraneous factors or things that are true and false about the world. Yet, Trump changes his assessment of other actors all the time based on how useful he thinks they are for helping him fulfill his goals and how nice he thinks they’re being to him. Basically his entire governing philosophy is organized around inducing and coercing others to bolster his own status, while leeching as much money as possible through extortion and petty corruption. When your interests are so simplistic and dependent on being able to manipulate others, you don’t really have the latitude to cling to false images about others’ interests and character.
The conceit of Trump’s foreign policy is that, even though it’s mostly instrumentally rational, it’s also driven by Trump’s own provincial self-interest. Sometimes this coincides with the national interest, as when he avoided escalating with Iran for fear that it would lose him the election. Much of the time, however, Trump’s interests are tangential or directly opposed to the national interest.
The first time around, Trump was constrained by public opinion. The second time around, he’ll likely be much less preoccupied with such things as poll numbers because he won’t be running in any future elections. His interests will lie primarily in settling personal scores: that is, exacting revenge on his enemies and returning favors to the elites of the Republican Party who accommodated his hostile takeover of its institutions, who now do the grunt work of making his administration function, who cling to fanciful notions about Chinese and Iranian designs on world domination, and whose true-blue, red-blooded American hearts swell with jingoistic fervor at the prospect of burning flesh on the other side of the world. Many of these elites also believe, as it was put by neocon godfather Michael Ledeen — whose daughter was the Pentagon’s point woman for the Middle East during the last year of Trump’s first administration — that: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
….As for the Iranians, Trump likely won’t ever forgive them for being the problem child of his first administration. In another universe, Trump could have done with Iran what he did with North Korea and declared himself the Dealmaker of All Dealmakers. But the Iranians — who, like the Americans, engage in stereotyping — foolishly turned down Trump’s offer to meet without preconditions and got on his bad side instead. It’s probably fair to assume that he holds a grudge against them due to their alleged attempts on his life, for example. Whether this means Trump would opt for military action is hard to tell, but to paraphrase Michael Tracey, if Trump does indeed live out the decades-long Republican fantasy of bombing Iran, we can rest assured that the bombs will have been dropped by a non-stereotyper.

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The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism

Posted on December 2, 2024 by Luke Ford

Matthew Continetti writes in this 2022 book:

* Isolationists paid no price for opposing intervention before Pearl Harbor. One scholar identified 115 isolationist candidates headed into the 1942 midterm elections; only 5 lost. By the last year of the war, Republicans had won a net twenty – one seats in the House and fifteen in the Senate. And the Right had new heroes: Generals Douglas MacArthur, who commanded US forces in the Southwest Pacific; George S. Patton, who led troops in the Mediterranean and European campaigns; and Curtis LeMay, who organized the strategic bombing of Japan.
* In 1944 a pair of America Firsters, Frank Hanighen and Felix Morley, founded Human Events, a free market, antiwar weekly newsletter inspired by Albert Jay Nock’s Freeman. Human Events carried on the anti – Roosevelt tradition of denying any difference between American liberalism and European totalitarianism. The next year the duo became a trio when an Illinois businessman named Henry Regnery joined the enterprise.
* In March 1945 [Friedrich] Hayek arrived in New York to begin his book tour. His publishers told him that his speaking engagements would send him as far west as Oklahoma City. His first appearance, however, was scheduled for the next morning at town hall in Manhattan. Hayek was mortified. He had never lectured in public. The audience had been told he would speak for an hour on law and international affairs. It was a subject to which he had given little thought. “And then I discovered that American audiences are extremely grateful audiences,” Hayek recollected. “You can watch on their faces their interest — completely different from, say, an English audience; and gradually I worked them up into great excitement, and I got through this lecture with great success.” When he returned to England in May, Hayek was an academic celebrity.
* On April 10 the [Mont Pelerin] conference adopted a “Statement of Aims.” It left no doubt that these beleaguered liberals felt themselves engaged on the losing side in a battle of ideas that had been raging for more than a century. “Over large stretches of the earth’s surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared,” the statement began. “The position of the individual and the voluntary group are progressively undermined by extensions of arbitrary power.” Together the participants resolved to study, among other things, “the problem of the creation of an international order conducive to the safeguarding of peace and liberty and permitting the establishment of harmonious international economic relations.”
[LF: “Freedom” has no meaning without reference to a particular hero system.]
* Taft was a lone voice in opposition to Truman. NATO, for example, was exactly the sort of permanent entanglement in European affairs that Taft had dreaded ever since his experiences with Hoover after World War I. He argued that NATO would make American foreign policy not less but more venturesome. “It is easy to slip into an attitude of imperialism,” he said, “where war becomes an instrument of public policy rather than its last resort.” He was among thirteen senators to oppose NATO when the treaty came to a vote in 1949.

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Decoding Trump 2.0: The Shock & Awe Version (12-1-24)

Posted on December 1, 2024 by Luke Ford

01:00 I was ahead of the game until I took that supplement to get my chi moving
04:00 Trump’s Next Move: The Legal Battle That Could Change EVERYTHING, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewE5SEkFnTM
07:00 Conservative Host WALKS OFF Show After CoHost Calls Her A NAZI,
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5012229-trump-dei-merit/
24:15 Maladaptive Daydreaming: Avoiding Pain by Fantasizing, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqXbZtQ11SM
28:40 Behind the Curtain: Trump’s shock and awe, https://www.axios.com/2024/12/01/trump-cabinet-kash-patel-fbi
35:15 Putin abandons ‘weak’ Assad as rebels head for Syrian capital | Stefanie Glinski, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWdB984gz08
40:20 Putin’s armies too stretched to aid Assad’s ‘catastrophically bad’ military | Mark Galeotti, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pxr6tAfCxs
48:00 Trump tariffs
1:14:00 Glenn Greenwald: Dangerous New Escalation in Russia, & Our Blackmailed Politicians, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKh4txSD0eQ
1:20:00 Christopher Caldwell: Speaking Trumpian: Persuasion in a post-oratorical age, https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/speaking-trumpian/
1:34:20 Post-Thanksgiving Extravaganza, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if04NMat9_4
1:43:30 Biden’s Parting Gifts, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXQDOSzglW4
1:47:00 Claremont: All the President’s Mental Lapses: Democracy dies in deception, https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/all-the-presidents-mental-lapses/
2:05:50 Who moved my chi?
2:29:45 Velvet Prisons: Russell Jacoby on American Academia, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qlBJpJZE0I
2:38:00 Character Trouble: Undisciplined Essays on Moral Agency and Personality, https://www.amazon.com/Character-Trouble-Undisciplined-Essays-Personality-ebook/dp/B09KM7MPG4
2:47:20 Kip joins to talk about how we affect other people
3:26:00 Milgram experiment, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
3:30:00 Stanford prison experiment, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
3:37:30 John Doris: Rewriting the history of psychology, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIhp_zxoc2k
3:39:00 The replication bros vs Amy Cuddy, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/magazine/when-the-revolution-came-for-amy-cuddy.html
3:45:00 I find redheads disturbing

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