This however coincides with the much older ideas of the technocracy movement, which was championed by Musk's grandfather Haldeman:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement#The_Techn...
So it is not necessarily Russia driven, but surely RT has recently published an article that defends the Technate (RT is blocked, so here is a copy):
https://thepressunited.com/updates/heres-why-trump-really-wa...
Europe is a bit slow in picking up on all this: Russia, the US and China are carving up the world and Macron calls a summit to determine how to make Russia and China eternal enemies. The EU (and Ukraine!) have been played since 2008/2014.
It sounds like he’s less concerned about the west, but knows that there needs to be political chaos in order to prevent the US from interfering with Russia’s political goals.
I guess that seems obvious at this point, but worrisome that the US government is now actively supporting of those goals.
If you take an objective view that these are geopolitical conditions that would be beneficial to Russian objectives, and pair it with the concurrency of these things playing out, then it’s hard to see it as coincidence.
I think it is safe to say that the west is experiencing Duginism.
Dugin's influence on Putin/Russia is a total fake news. Aleksandr "Putin's favorite political/historical/cultural icon/advisor according to Western media" Dugin, has NEVER even met with Putin, as in not a single time.
Don't spread fake news.
Your argument is super goofy.
David Foster Wallace is my favorite author, and I've never even met the guy!
Are you a powerful dictator? Is Wallace living under your rule? Is Wallace's writing influencing your policy? Is Wallace proclaiming everywhere that he is close to you, that he is your advisor (you can't advise without the connection), that you are worshiping him?
Don't be goofy and intentionally misunderstand my arguments.
It's driven by Trump and Musk egos. It's Nero watching Rome burn, to bring about his new greatness.
Missing dossiers of Russian Intel from Mar-a-Lago...which of course we never got to hear the full story of thanks to Judge Cannon and SCOTUS.
This is so on the nose it would be rejected if someone wrote it as a novel or film.
Lenin had a newspaper called “the spark” the concept was that a spark would light the flame to revolution. Trump was the spark in the US, but the tinder had been laid out over many years amongst political weirdos who are now prominent.
Putin isn’t a communist, but he’s a former KGB guy who wants the USSR back. They want the outcome, the ideas are a means to an end.
Dugin's thought is being used as a rosetta stone in Kremlinology, but I believe that _Foundations of Geopolitics_ has been coöpted as an intellectual veil for a bare Russian imperialism. There is not a lot of evidence that Russia is trying to enact actual Duginist political thinking (which is a specific kind of ethnocentrism highly influenced by Heidegger; he outlines it in _The Fourth Political Theory_). It's being used in a way not dissimilar to Marx being co-opted as a means to domination in Leninism.
We are looking for a more complex answer to a simple problem, which is that an authoritarian leader obsessed with dominance wants to expand that sphere of power where he feels wronged. It doesn't have to be intellectual.
Yes, Russia has nuclear weapons but no one would commit suicide by using them.
Russia is dying, so are Italy, Japan and China etc.
As the parent of a kid who got put in a “BIPOC” affinity group, I’m thrilled about the cuts to DOEd and the hammer coming down on teaching race consciousness (https://www.ed.gov/media/document/dear-colleague-letter-sffa...).
My dad spent his career in public health. He did things like convince villagers in Bangladesh to trust hospitals instead of midwives. So I’m thrilled to see cuts at NHS and CDC, which torched public trust by making exceptions to Covid lockdowns for protests. Those people are just bad at their jobs—everyone in public health knows you don’t do shit like that.
I can’t wait to see what Tulsi does to the intelligence services that lied us into the Iraq War, and what Kash does to the FBI that investigated conservative parents as domestic terrorists. These agencies are full of disloyal people who think they know better than the public, and few people are going to lament them getting canned.
As a train nerd who took Amtrak every day to work for two years I hope we fire every manager at Amtrak.
I hope the social security checks keep coming. The FAA and FCC generally seems to do a pretty good job. That’s about it.
And by conservative parents as domestic terrorists, I assume you mean the people convicted of crime due to their actual criminal actions on Jan. 6?
People talking about all this Russia shit sound like Reagan/Bush republicans.
I think he means parents who made threats of violence against school boards.
https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/1f1vdz8/trumps_rec...
But yeah, it's worse this time around.
that’s what I would conclude from “it exists but wasn’t taken seriously”
Here is an article that sampled various expert opinions:
“ This event will unleash the kind of uncertainty that Keynes had in mind when he said “we simply do not know” when referring to the likely effect of war. Such uncertainty can only be disruptive for financial markets. We will enter a new era of volatility that is likely to last until these difficult negotiations are completed.”
“it is more likely than not that we will witness political instability.”
“ Such market reactions could sharply contract economic activity, further depressing asset prices in a self-reinforcing cycle”
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/brexit-potential-financial-ca...
So I agree, the more extreme must have been amplified voices from the fringe, on places like Reddit.
We have had 5 Prime Ministers since 2019.
Some of the problems we are seeing are due to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. But Brexit is the biggest factor by far. And 100% self-inflicted. It is the elephant in the room that the politicians can't even talk about it, as it's electoral poison.
What is significantly worse, is the governing clases continuing the same pre-Brexit policies and deals post-Brexit, to nullify it.
- UK - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDGBR
- FR - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDFRA
- IT - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDITA
It would be somewhat unusual if they didn't all look similarish given the level of trade between them.
The UK government predicted a 2% reduction in growth over 15 years with a soft brexit compared to what it would have been otherwise, but seeing it on a graph may be difficult given those countries were also hurt by Brexit.
- all the major corporations would leave and there would be no jobs - collapse of the pound - start of wars within the UK and potentially with EU
>...concerns that the U.S. will abandon Europe and align with President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
Nothing to worry about with Musk doing nazi salutes and Trump looking at hanging with the nearest we have to a modern reich.
And Vance explicitly said that Russia can't be expected to go back to the pre-war borders. In other words, Russia gets what they want (Donbas).
Why would he make concessions for nothing in return? I thought he was meant to be a great negotiator and businessman.
If he has to spend the rest of his term negotiating back and forth over which flag flies over a particular outhouse in Western Crimea, he may not see that as being a successful deal-maker.
Being able to say "we got buy-in for our first proposal, took me four days to end the conflict" fits his image.
It already had very low respect (except by paid hacks and client states) and declining world-wide dominance for decades. And the churn rate for those very dissaponting results, reflected in public debt, was huge.
And that's assuming a nation having "world-wide dominance" is a good thing to begin with.
Why should Americans care what foreigners think of them? Most people in the world aren’t Americans and have values alien to Americans. We’re in the middle of sorting out a disloyal administrative state that needs to be brought to heel. Eggs will get broken to make the omelet. But outside the Acela class (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/politics-podcast-are-th...) nobody wants to be governed from DC. Many want more funding for their local schools or bigger social security checks, and they’ll caucus with the Acela class because they must. But they’re not going to worry about personnel changes in government bureaucracies. And their opinion is the only thing that matters.
Those who stay will be doing so with the full understanding of the vindictive nature of the current administration. What makes you think these employees will stand up to illegal requests? What makes you think they'll go the extra mile? It's a bad situation all around, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.
And nobody has has seen America as the “good guy” in my lifetime. We’re the country that destabilizes Latin American and Asian countries, bombs the Middle East, etc. I used to think there was at least a logic to all that, but it turns out our elites were just ideologues and morons.
I'm no economist but a trade deficit in the hundreds of billions[0] suggests otherwise.
[0] Wikipedia says 773B for 2023.
Again, I'm not an economist, bear with me and explain what that's got to do with the trade deficit being a deficit? You could have a GDP of a quintillion dollars a year but if you're consistently running a trade deficit (which the US has for decades), that strongly implies you cannot close your borders with impunity.
If you could supply the goods cheaper than importing them, people would, no? Simple capitalism!
There are boycott’s afoot and I wouldn’t be surprised if canada and Europe will choose more Chinese and domestic in the future.
Basically, the US closing its borders will lead to a Chinese world leadership which is not good for the US either.
When it comes to isolation I think of this:
The word invasion itself is a good example of this.
A French ironmaster says: "We must protect ourselves from the invasion of English iron!" An English landlord cries: "We must repel the invasion of French wheat!" And they urge the erection of barriers between the two nations. Barriers result in isolation; isolation gives rise to hatred; hatred, to war; war, to invasion. "What difference does it make?" say the two sophists. "Is it not better to risk the possibility of invasion than to accept the certainty of invasion?" And the people believe them, and the barriers remain standing.
And yet, what analogy is there between an exchange and an invasion? What possible similarity can there be between a warship that comes to vomit missiles, fire, and devastation on our cities, and a merchant vessel that comes to offer us a voluntary exchange of goods for goods?The US isn't far less dependent, China is at 37% GDP from trade to the US's 27% but doesn't have the structural dependency on trade from having the reserve currency.
But after having spent years living in China, and being very familiar with the political situation there and their global ambitions, I'm afraid that the alternative to the US is even worse.
Have a democratic system has somewhat of a moderating effect on the worst impulses of the US elite. China has no such guardrails.
At least China’s unelected bureaucrats are competent and actually focused on what’s good for the public: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-sur...
There's a lot you don't know about how things actually work in China. The levels of autocracy, corruption and lack of true legal framework, make the US look like a democratic haven.
It might hard to unscramble that omelet if we want the rule of law back later.
But if not then it must at least be democratically responsive. When republicans win the presidency—or a progressive or populist democrat—the 90% of the administrative state that’s comprised of Acela liberals should be asking how high to jump. Otherwise you have a system that’s not worth saving.
That's bibliolatry, directed to a long-obsolete interpretation of the Constitution and the role of the federal government. FDR was analogous to Copernicus and Kepler, rescuing the country from Ptolemaic interpretations of the Constitution that were based on outdated data sets. He pushed successfully for a pragmatic reinterpretation — not inconsistent with the text — that allowed effective federal government action to deal with a global crisis.
No, FDR's New Deal didn't end the Great Depression (that was done by World War II). But the New Deal did help hold off what could easily have turned into authoritarianism of the Huey Long variety.
Says who? The Constitution is in essence the basic operating manual for American national government. Conditions on the ground have changed — and we've learned more about the world — since 1787. It'd be unpragmatic (read: insane) to insist that the original modus operandi MUST stay the same forever and ever, just because that's how they did things in 1787, as long as the new M.O. can fairly be said not to be inconsistent with the constitutional text.
It doesn't help your case that Article V provides an amendment process: Nothing in the Constitution prohibits reinterpreting the existing language to accommodate new evidence and new insights, at least not as long as the reinterpretation doesn't do violence to the text.
"The executive power" in Article II is just as open to interpretation as anything. Interpreting that power as being subject to Congress's Article I authority is clearly well within the hash marks, to say nothing of the playing field as a whole.
Article I can fairly be read as allowing Congress to expand, and/or to cabin, presidential authority. That includes creating, and delegating power to, administrative agencies under general presidential supervision; that could include delegating expansive powers to agencies and perhaps limiting the president's ability to hire and fire agency personnel.
The "unitary executive" interpretation — with a president asserting the right to unilaterally disregard or revoke congressionally-enacted arrangements — is dangerous in the extreme. We've seen that in other countries, and we could well see the same thing happen here.
Decades ago, the head of the Reactor Department on my ship [the USS Enterprise] had a list on the office wall of Great Naval Quotes that we were forbidden to use. The #1 prohibited quote on that list was, "But we've always done it that way!" followed by #2, "But we've never done it that way!" Both of those are violated by using a bibliolatry-based approach to the Constitution as a purported justification for unilaterally up-ending longstanding practices — especially when, on the whole, those practices have worked passably well.
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> that just makes it more exigent to "pragmatically reinterpret" the law to ensure effective presidential control over the administrative state
That's clearly one of your ideological priors, but it wasn't handed down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets.
But the “living constitution” is nothing more than imposing one’s ideological priors onto the document. I happen to think the crisis of a permanent bureaucracy that is ideologically divergent from the population is far more “dangerous” than anything else the country faces. If we are going to “pragmatically reinterpret” the constitution, that’s the challenge that such interpretation needs to meet.
That overlooks a key distinction: An "ideological prior" that's proved to be supported by real-world evidence (i.e., experience) is no longer an ideological prior.
Analogously: Special- and general relativity were just theories in 1905 and 1915 (their respective publication dates). Over decades, real-world evidence proved that they were, in the main, correct — but we still don't treat either as a sacred, immutable text.
The unitary-executive view is an untested theory, an ideological prior. In contrast, our existing administrative state is supported by close to a century of real-world experience.
That's not to say that modifications aren't needed in the modern state. We don't want to make a golden calf of the granular details of FDR's or the Warren Court's approaches, any more than we want to enshrine the unitary-executive model or the Alito-Thomas perspective.
But in a country with some 340 million people that's been the source of the reasonably-successful Pax Americana, it's incredibly risky to go unilaterally f*cking around — it's the equivalent of a teenaged driver insisting that he can refuel his car and change the oil while driving 75 mph on a crowded freeway.
Regardless, we find ourselves in a new time. If the Old Republic could be overthrown by “emanations from penumbras” we can just as easily wave away the current imperial interregnum in which we find ourselves.
"Far from perfect, but reasonably serviceable" ≠ "total shit"
The “Acela class” is a term used, often pejoratively, to refer to the elite political, business, and media class concentrated along the Northeast Corridor of the United States, particularly in cities like Washington, D.C., New York, and Boston. The term comes from the Acela Express, Amtrak’s high-speed train that runs between these cities, symbolizing the connectedness of this group.
Critics use it to describe a political and economic elite perceived as out of touch with the rest of the country, especially with working-class and rural Americans. It’s often associated with establishment politics, bureaucratic power, and coastal liberalism.
Professionals might have a housekeeper or get their lawns done, but they're not employing a kitchen or construction site full of people.
The government is not a corporation and the president is not a unilateral dictator. You're right about other cultures having values alien to Americans, and perhaps you need to do some introspection there before making political arguments.
But sanctioning riots because their ideology tells them “racism is a public health problem?”
That's one way to put it.
https://bsky.app/profile/twlldun.bsky.social/post/3lic2x56dv...
Trump announced the rule of law is dead and there has been basically no pushback. I mean, sure, it may have just been bluster, but the Republicans used to put the idea of the Constitution on a pedestal. Now the president is saying, loudly and prominently, that laws don't apply to him (or anyone who is "saving" the country), and it's crickets.
There is no way the US comes back from this in my opinion. I'm not saying something like "collapse" is imminent, but I think the decline is irreversible once the rule of law has been declared null and void.
Also, while I obviously have my opinions, I honestly would be genuinely interested in someone who has a different take (i.e. who thinks Trump's statement isn't as catastrophic as I think it is) to explain their rationale.
Practically speaking, common law is the judicial branch using moonlogic upon moonlogic to create pseudo-laws (Roe v. Wade, Citizens United v. FEC) that may be good or bad but should be made by Congress. If the Constitution is unclear, it should be modified through a democratic process that can actually pass, not be continually reinterpreted in absurd ways by a 9-person court that can be corrupted and has no term limits. Congress is unable to fix itself; the unlimited filibuster in the Senate proves that, and the "pro-forma" session is simply embarrassing. Clear systemic change is excruciatingly difficult, so actions must be taken through fuzzy emergent messes without guardrails like executive orders.
"Is outrageous thing X from this EO illegal? Idk, let's wait months to check with the courts."
The popular comment I see is that institutions are people at the end of the day, so "strong institutions" is just a buzzword, and the current crisis comes from cowardice and inaction. But if the mechanisms aren't there to stop a bad actor in the executive, the best they can do is make some noise (which they should). If they truly bend the rules, the executive can always just write a more unhinged EO, so it all reduces to who has control over actual enforcement.
The problem is widespread; for example, the election system is simply dysfunctional, like Flint water tier. From the basics of gerrymandering, to the electoral college creating absurd things like "swing states" (if you want to give more power to some states, just weight the votes), no real universal national ID, voter suppression, voting by mail is a horrible idea that invites conspiracy theories and is a crutch for the lack of accessibility, voting machines are bad and a crutch (see the French). Not even the schizophrenic rules-set is actually followed; the 2000 election was decided by Supreme Court fuckery. Trump would've been stupid not to try to interfere in 2020; an election was successfully stopped 20 years ago and nothing happened. The most basic democratic institution failed and the priority wasn't "let's fix this immediately, oh my fucking god." So yeah, rule of law has constantly been chipped away for some time, good luck with the midterms.
To be fair to the average American, the idea that "gradually, then suddenly" also applies to the state is something people learn firsthand and hopefully teach their descendants. The history of outsiders only goes so far.
No, imagining them continuing to do what they have been doing in the open is not fantasy.
Imagining them somehow "snapping back" to supporting constitutional order is much more fantastical. Especially in the face of the anti-judiciary salvos of JD Vance -- a leading candidate for the next nominee.
I'm not that concerned that Trump said what he said. I'm concerned that he said that and there was no pushback from Republicans or probably about half the country (and I'm guessing that at least a third of the country vehemently, enthusiastically supported the idea).
I saw a good post recently that described what is happening as essentially a "'cold' civil war". That is, in normal times, there may be strong disagreements about policy, the role of government, etc., but there is general agreement on the framework of democracy, the role of institutions, etc. But it feels to me now that we're past that point, where each side essentially sees the other in "existential threat" terms.
For me personally, I don't want to be there, but if you believe that it's fine for the President of the US to declare the rule of law null and void, then there is no middle ground, primarily because if you're declaring the rule of law null, then the only option for both sides is non-legal conflict. I can't think of a statement that is more "anti-American" to me than that. Which is again why I'm open to the idea (TBH actually I'm really hoping) that I'm either misinterpreting the statement or there is some other reason to think it's not as catastrophic as I view it.
Adolfo Franco (interesting name for a right-wing strategist..) said it best on Al Jazeera. "How can he be a spokesperson for a man like Donald Trump?" He was asked. his answer was that he's a spokesperson for the REPUBLICAN PARTY, and in 4 years, there will be a new nominee. Simple as that. Time will tell what happens.
Polarization has reached "existential threat levels." It will eventually go back. Vance may find that moderation is in his party's interest after all the chaos of Trump. They are very different personalities.
the problem with people like you (I sincerely do not mean this in ANY derogatory way, just generalising people that make these arguments) is that you are using “American forefathers” as you see fit. American forefathers would be ROLLING IN THEIR GRAVES seeing and hearing what Trump and Elon are doing. They literally fought against people like the two of them.
If I have too choose between bloated federal government and having a President who thinks he is above the law and his Supreme Court cronies saying so in so many words and having a fucking african immigrant with god access to government computer systems I choose bloated government any day of the week and twice on sunday
From a position of world-wide dominance and respect, it is being destroyed at a rate that is too quick for most to even start to comprehend what the outcome of these actions will be. I suspect the consequences of these actions will be carried for the rest of our lives, as they are not so easy to turn back.
Lots of other countries are standing by watching while the USA has seemingly found enough rope to hang itself.