It took me a long time to realize that most people don’t make any effort to understand politics beyond surface level headlines.

A lot of people treat politics like they behave in the HN comment section: They see the headline, arrive at a conclusion based on previous assumptions, and head straight to the comment section to argue their side without ever even making an effort to read the article. With politics, politicians are experts at crafting headlines and sound bites that feed these people their confirmation bias and tickle the part of the brain that says this person is on your side.

I’ve had some success discussing issues with these people calmly and openly, adding facts one at a time until they realize the situation isn’t what they thought. There are a lot of “That can’t be right” lightbulbs going off as the facts start to conflict with their idea of how the world works. This goes for both extremes of the political spectrum, BTW.

A generous interpretation of this is that most of the time, people pay little attention to politics as they are busy with their daily lives : earning money, shopping for food, looking after their families, etc. Most people have neither the time or the inclination to even follow politics beyond the headlines, or think through the problems and their position.

This can be a problem when the political 'class' (politicians of course, but also media commentators, journalists, podcasters, whatever) do not realise this issue. Brexit is a classic example, where the UK prime minister called for a referendum possibly confident that 'no one' would actually vote yes.

The problem is that politics, particularly in the US, tends to push people into binary thinking.

I certainly do not love the Trump admin and think Kamala would easily do better. However, that does not mean the Trump admin has done nothing I agree with. There are nice parts to the OBBB that directly benefit me. Further, I think the approach to H1Bs, removing the lottery and instead basing it on salary, is the right move.

I say this because regardless of admin, there's going to be things you like and dislike. What seems to happen is people get completely sucked in a media bubble which only reports the good or bad of their political opponents.

Even the worst and most evil world leaders in history did good or had some good policies. There's never been a pure evil or good leader. Unfortunately, people want to flatten the world and remove the nuance "if so and so did it, it must be good/bad".

a more appropriate way of looking at this would be incentives. Who, in the government, stands to benefit from revising the H1B system? Even if you agree with the action, you may not not agree with the motivation.

Your line of thinking is like saying that the British Raj was terrible for India, but the British built railways, which was a good thing. Good and bad do not exist in isolation. The British built railways in india so they could more effectively extract wealth, not out of the benevolence of their hearts. It is much the same with the US government.

I disagree, outcome matters more than incentives IMO. Every policy and regulation will create winners and losers. The incentives for doing so matter in they drive which policies get written, but you can't use those incentives to determine if a policy is ultimately good or not.

Back to the british railway example. You are correct that it was there to more efficiently extract wealth (bad). But that does not mean that rails aren't hugely beneficial to the population in general. Roads in the US exist primarily to aid in rapid shipping, that doesn't mean roads are a bad thing because a company like Amazon gets the majority of the benefit.

It's a basically non-existent politician that does something purely out of the goodness of their own hearts. In a democracy, it's the role of the electorate to try and remove politicians from power who refuse to provide benefits to the citizens as a whole.

Why should we expect otherwise, what land on hn is already crafted title as well after all, and once human are accustomized to some habits, they will have generally a hard time going out of routine.

The online space (Reddit, HN, others) is so deeply embedded with groupthink that people have lost the ability to see other points of view or debate topics of interest.

To me it's very clear why the government is leaving UNESCO (and over time the UN at large). The UN is dysfunctional and does not work. It used to be a source of soft power for the States, but hasn't been so for the better part of this century. Meanwhile, the US continues to fund it even though it is currently running a massive deficit. It doesn't make sense to continue throwing good money after bad, especially when funds are scarce. Let other nations pick up the funding slack. Likely they will not and the UN will collapse, as it should. Something new can be built from its ashes. Many people agree with this rather pragmatic view.

If you want to have a discussion, debate the points I made above instead of hurling insults and ad hominem attacks.

> when funds are scarce

The US budget is ~$7T annually. There is $50B to spend deporting critical parts of our workforce. There is $1T in defense spending to ensure that we spend more than the next 9(!) militaries combined*. Et cetera.

The US spends ~$18B supporting UN programs. This is ~0.003% of the federal budget.

The point here is funds are not scarce, and in any case to the extent that one is concerned about spending, the UN spend is not the driver. The rest of your point is consistent, there's no need to use the red herring about lack of money.

* I'm old enough to remember the end of the Cold War. Americans were told that as the Soviet threat withdrew, we could expect a "peace dividend" now that we didn't need to spend so much on defense. Inflation-adjusted, we spend more now than at the peak of the Cold War.

Given the threat matrix today that includes fantasies such as "US land war against its third-largest trading partner" and the absurd "protracted war against a developing nation currently being fought to stalemate by a country smaller than California," I am not sure this increased spend makes sense. Seems like the only scenario that justifies our military spend is when a President decides to blow a wad of lives & cash in some utterly wasteful conflict.

The U.S. is $35 TRILLION in DEBT. It's on a fast path to very high inflation which will be bad for everyone.

U.S. can't afford $18 billion of non-essential spending. It can't afford $1 billion of non-essential spending. In fact, it can't afford $1 of non-essential spending.

The argument "we're $35 trillion in debt so it's not a big deal to add 0.01% to it" is just incomprehensible to me.

And it's not just UN. It's $47 billion to USAID, $9 billion to NPR, $10 billion to California's "never gonna happen" rail, $1.3 billion to Harvard and that's just a small part of spending.

US government still needs to go on a serious spending diet. But every cut gets people to catastrophize how the world will end if US doesn't fund UN or Harvard.

As here, is often ignored are two levers available to resolve our debt.

> The argument "we're $35 trillion in debt so it's not a big deal to add 0.01% to it"

This is not the argument. The argument is more along the lines that our leadership just weeks ago rallied around a sharp increase in the rate of our debt accretion, so obviously erasing the debt is not a political priority at this time.

Given that erasing the debt is not a political priority, good stewardship demands that deficit spending should align with uses that will generate positive long-term financial returns to Americans (e.g. cancer research) instead of negative returns (deporting agricultural and construction workforces).

Making cuts that will have the effect of slowing the long-run growth rate of the US economy and its overall competitiveness will also make it harder to erase the debt should that ever become a political priority.

What’s the counter to the standard “nation-states do not run like family budgets, especially when the nation-state is the global hegemon”? Or “Owe your banker £1,000 and you are at his mercy; owe him £1 million and the position is reversed.”?

That at every point in the past and almost certainly in the future, global hegemons don't stay that way once their currency is sufficiently devalued and no longer held as the reserves of other nations.

This is true and correct, but none of it will matter if we keep letting the olds bleed the last drops from our country and continue pissing away the majority of our budget on social security and medicare. Until those are gone and the majority of the federal budget thereby removed, this remains an intractable problem.

The US ran a $1.8T deficit in 2024. That's objectively scarce funds. Even if the UN doesn't drive a significant portion of the spending, they do not serve the people that are going into debt to fund it.

The US just signed a new law that will expand the deficit further. (I'll leave as an exercise to determine whether the increase from the law is > or < than the UN spend.) Your argument would have more purchase had not the administration committed to many years of larger deficits only a few weeks ago.

A government that does not collect sufficient taxes to fund its priorities can somehow always claim that funds are scarce. But that's a) a choice and b) can be rectified any time by shifting priorities (see: military budget, for ex.) or collecting more revenue.

It's fine to say "I don't care that there is a body where nations can defuse conflict without war," but it's disingenuous to pretend there simply is not money for it.

I still intellectually can't parse the argument: yeah, we're in debt therefore it's fine to spend on stuff we don't need.

If you're ok with increasing debt to fund UN (and thousand other things) then come out and say so.

BTW: I would love to hear which wars did UN stop?

It seems to me that recently US, not UN, stopped Houthis from bombing ships, stopped India-Pakistan conflict, derailed Iran's nuclear plans and is making progress on Israel-Palestine conflict.

All I hear from UN is pro-palestine, anti-israel virtue signaling and zero action or even a realistic plan to help end those conflicts.

> If you're ok with increasing debt to fund UN (and thousand other things) then come out and say so.

Yes. I am okay with increasing debt (currently costing 2% after inflation) to increase long-term US stability and competitiveness. I am not okay with increasing debt to decrease long-term US stability and competitiveness, as we are doing now.

- nobody was endorsing the OBBBA or saying that it’s good.

- some spending is objectively more necessary than other spending. Funding UNESCO is not that important. I detailed why we shouldn’t do so even were we running a $1T budget in another comment.

- UNESCO is not responsible for “defus[ing] conflict without war.” The vast majority of the UN is not.

OBBA is important context because it was just enacted this month and it demonstrates clearly that the deficit and debt are not political priorities. Any argument put forth by the administration that enacted the OBBBA concerning debt is transparently facile given its demonstrated actions of increasing the rate of increase of the debt.

It's fine to say we should not participate in the UN/UNESCO for ideological reasons, but we don't have to take leave of our faculties and engage with the silly notion that this administration cares about the debt or deficit.

No, they obviously aren’t. I don’t think we’ve had an administration or congress that cares one bit in my living memory.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to quit supporting removal of pointless spending any more than it means I’ll support the OBBBA. I’m not going to adopt a sunk-cost fallacy that “well, they just pissed away even more money, so throwing the UN a few billion to further chicom propaganda and political narratives I oppose is fine.” That’s not a facile position.

I agree it’s not going to make a huge difference in the debt but we don’t have the money to burn. The fact that congress and the president ignored that doesn’t make it less true or compel me to do so for this case. There isn’t this bargaining thing happening where trump’s OBBBA pisses away trillions more therefore now it’s acceptable to piss away billions on anti-american global organizations.

I think the parent post was saying the money is not well spent, not that the US can't afford it. We could clearly throw a lot more at the UN, but that would just be doubling down on a bad investment. At least thats how I read it - better to just pull the plug.

You say “the UN doesn’t work” apparently because “working” means it being a source of soft power for the US.

It had several remits, but its most important is probably the one to prevent a world war. It’s designed specifically as a talking shop to help countries find other ways of resolving disputes than kill people - and promote international understanding . It’s far from perfect, but in general it does a pretty good job.

American dollars shouldn’t go to things that aren’t sources of soft or hard power for us, and they should be clawed back from things that are sources of soft power for china.

> American dollars shouldn’t go to things that aren’t sources of soft or hard power for us, and they should be clawed back from things that are sources of soft power for china.

Fair enough. It's worth noting though, that China benefits when the US withdraws from stuff like this.

China has already thoroughly captured most of the whole UN. They would benefit if this weren’t already the case, which means stuff like closing VoA is still dumb. But UNESCO is among those they’ve captured. All removing funding does is reduce the power of a chinese agent.

If they managed to capture it, how did they manage to capture it? And what will be the impact of the US surrendering?

And that’s fine, if that’s what you believe. But that has nothing to do with whether the UN has worked or not.

“ This pick-up truck is dreadful as a tool for peeling bananas “

The UN didn't prevent another world war. If you'd want to include an organization, it'd be the UN security council, but not anything else of the UN. And realistically, it's nukes that prevented WW3. It's not a coincidence that the permanent members of the security council, the veto powers, all have nuclear weapons.

> It’s far from perfect, but in general it does a pretty good job.

The current state of the world would definitely beg to differ

Prior to the creation of the UN we had 2 world wars in 25 years.

And post the creation of the UN we have still had hundreds of wars (conveniently termed "armed conflicts") resulting in uncountable deaths.

It really wouldn’t

The UN was founded in the shadow of WWII to prevent further global conflicts. It also established a global standard for human rights and to provide a forum to uphold international law. It has also taken on roles to provide development and humanitarian assistance.

Whether the UN works or not is largely dependent upon whether the five powers that granted themselves veto power (the P5: the US, the UK, France, China, and Russia) allow it to work. They are largely the source of its funding.

With that context in mind, it's difficult to understand your perspective. You've only thrown out your opinion instead of facts, and then - in a preemptive defensive posture - claim any criticism will be insults or ad hominem attacks.

You seem to believe the UN's job is to advance the US's agenda. (No, it isn't. It's there to allow a forum for diplomacy for all nations.) You also seem to believe that the UN is a bad investment. (That's a highly subjective perspective: what are your stated metrics for such a judgement on ROI?)

If you believe that the world is a better place with regional hegemons ruling their parts of the world with power as the only metric that matters, I'd suggest building yourself a time machine and going back to the end of the 19th century.

> Whether the UN works or not is largely dependent upon whether the five powers that granted themselves veto power (the P5: the US, the UK, France, China, and Russia) allow it to work. They are largely the source of its funding.

The US is responsible for more than 25% of the UN's funding and is ~5-6x more than other members of the Security Council [1]. This is disproportionate to its obligations or its population.

> You seem to believe the UN's job is to advance the US's agenda. (No, it isn't. It's there to allow a forum for diplomacy for all nations.) You also seem to believe that the UN is a bad investment. (That's a highly subjective perspective: what are your stated metrics for such a judgement on ROI?)

Countries are not friends. They are allies with shared interests. That means each country has to derive value from the alliances it participates in. These alliances are strategic. If the alliance does not bring value, the country could and should divest from them. These are foundational principles of statecraft.

> If you believe that the world is a better place with regional hegemons ruling their parts of the world with power as the only metric that matters, I'd suggest building yourself a time machine and going back to the end of the 19th century.

If you believe the world is anything other than that then either you have been fooled by the super comfortable existence insulating you from most shocks that the US has provided, or you wish the world was like this. Truth is it never changed. It is still very much regional hegemons governing their parts of the world. The only difference being that the hegemonic boundaries are not defined by homogeneous geographic regions. If you read the world news carefully, you will realize that all conflicts are tied to the boundaries between two or more hegemons.

[1] https://unsceb.org/fs-revenue-government-donor

> The US is responsible for more than 25% of the UN's funding and is ~5-6x more than other members of the Security Council [1]. This is disproportionate to its obligations or its population.

Fact. Another fact: this is a rounding error for the US government's budget. The total spend is under $15b. Government spending has been $5t to $7.5t in the last decade. Why is this particular spending line item of such interest to you? Do you truly see zero value derived from investment in the UN? Is that perhaps because you require some benefit to Americans from the investment? About 2/3rds of UN spending is on development and humanitarian assistance. Is helping the rest of the world raise the standard of living a laudable goal for the richest country in the world to contribute to or not, in your eyes?

> Countries are not friends. They are allies with shared interests. That means each country has to derive value from the alliances it participates in. These alliances are strategic. If the alliance does not bring value, the country could and should divest from them. These are foundational principles of statecraft.

Perhaps one root difference in belief is that I don't believe the UN is an alliance, and you do. It is a forum for countries that belong to different alliances to have a forum to talk to each other. It also is a forum to build temporary alliances for military intervention (e.g., Iraq War I) across such boundaries. The US failed miserably at building such a consenus for Iraq War II and has been

> If you believe the world is anything other than that then either you have been fooled by the super comfortable existence insulating you from most shocks that the US has provided, or you wish the world was like this.

Thank you. I understand your zero-sum argument and realpolitik in general, both from an academic and personal perspective. I grew up in a third-world country, so - perhaps, unlike you - I'm intimately familiar with the impact of Great Power games in the post-Cold War era. You are unfortunately correct; I wish that the US (my home for several decades now) tried harder to move away from such thinking and utilized the UN for more win-win scenarios, but we're moving away from such liberal thinking, and so my wish will probably remain unfulfilled.

You took out the comment about people howling about change. Why? That seemed the central thesis of your statement.

I would argue that it's not practical to burn the current system down without a plan at all for the next system (like the ACA a few years ago. . .)

My concern isn't change. My concern is the complete lack of concern for consequences. Like it or not, the US is and has been on the decline in terms of world authority. Leaving a power vacuum, like dismantling the UN, will just open the door for places like China to step in. You think that country has any amount of give a crap about humanity as a whole? Not even a little, I would argue.

So, again, for many people, it's not that the UN is perfect (or even functional in my opinion). It's that there is, has been, and seems like there will never be an actual plan. Am I wrong?

> Leaving a power vacuum, like dismantling the UN, will just open the door for places like China to step in. You think that country has any amount of give a crap about humanity as a whole? Not even a little, I would argue.

If China wants to foot the bill, let them. As I pointed out, the US hasn't been getting anything in return for the last 25 years of footing the bill, basically since 9/11. China cares about its people. They are currently fighting back against privilege and conspicuous consumption by the elites [1]. The CCP knows that an open revolt would destabilize their grip. After all, they themselves rode a populist wave into power.

I think of it like the Tour de France. Sometimes to win the race you need to move into second place, conserve your resources, and let someone else face the headwinds.

The comment about change felt like an ad hominem attack.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg7827pwlro

Would you really liken the recent US approach to international relations to a peloton? Seems rather more like the race leader stopping his bike, chucking it off a cliff whilst hurling insults at all the contestants a lap or two behind, including the teammates offering him an alternative bike

Thoughtful, conservative isolationists don't mix up their questions about how important soft power is really with threats to annexe Canada or attempts to get the Brazilian Supreme Court to drop a case through tariff policy. Or indeed rant incessantly about how much of a threat China is whilst doing everything possible to drive the rest of the world into their arms.

Throughout much of its history, the US has been conservative and isolationist. The post-WW2 era was an aberration, not the status quo. I see these actions as the US returning to its roots. Whether the US annexes Canada is up to the US and Canada. Other parties only get an opinion when either of those two decides to involve them.

And the Tour de France is not a Peleton. You are being disingenuous.

> Throughout much of its history, the US has been conservative and isolationist

Even if this were true - and Commodore Perry, Manifest Destiny, and our zealous pursuit of trade among other skeletons of history fly in the face of this - why would we want to return to a status quo when we are so far removed from it now? The global landscape has changed, and we were the primary motivator of that change. After decades of assassinations of political leaders abroad and shock doctrine economic policies, we are to pack up our bloody toys and go home? The moral objections aside, this is a foolish and shortsighted policy that leaves only chaos. We will not preserve anything about our way of life, because it's been spliced with the genes of a globalized, post ww2 administrative world we created.

> And the Tour de France is not a Peleton. You are being disingenuous

A peloton is a line of cyclists with riders taking it turns to voluntarily relinquishing the lead to conserve energy. Happens a lot in Tour De France. Pretty much exactly the situation your analogy attempted to describe. (If you're only aware of the branded exercise equipment, maybe don't use cycling race analogies and definitely don't confuse people possessing knowledge you lack with disingenuousness)

Got to enjoy the irony of someone accusing me of being disingenuous for knowing slightly more than zero about cycle races, whilst simultaneous arguing that a mad child shouting about annexing Canada is either isolationism or the "US returning to its roots" though.

I mean, I guess the US did have a mad king once and, separately, an attempt to annex Canada. Neither of those had anything even slightly to do with the principle of isolationism either, and I don't think either of them were successful enough for any sane Americans to want to return to them :D

> As I pointed out, the US hasn't been getting anything in return for the last 25 years of footing the bill, basically since 9/11

You pointed this out but provided no evidence.

"I'm paying for these traffic lights with these taxes but all they do is slow me down"

China especially cares about its Uyghur people, providing them with paternal supervision, excellent vocational camps, and even providing guests to live with families.

That's called whataboutism. China's internal problems are for China to solve. If you have an opinion, why not go over and advise them on what to do?

Sure, and it’s usually more conducive to do so under the aegis of an international body that can claim some measure of neutrality, rather than as a private individual from a rival nation-state.

> Leaving a power vacuum, like dismantling the UN, will just open the door for places like China to step in.

The UN has no power, so dismantling it cannot leave a power vacuum. The US abandoning its overseas policies, that'd leave a power vacuum, because the US has power and projects it. But the UN has no power - it's some UN member states that have power.

Case in point: the general assembly demanded Russia withdraw all military forces from Ukraine. But what are they going to do about Russia ignoring that demand? Nothing, they're powerless.

I used to say that HN was a place where very controversial opinions were respectfully discussed. Granted with some bias, but still a lot of tolerance for unpopular views. Even climate change skepticism or 2020 election skepticism. What got voted down was unwanted tone, essentially.

Now it seems that the current administration is too much for people here to handle. I wonder if the mods have noticed the same thing, or maybe they support it at this point.

While UN is not optimal and needs a revamp, it is an organization that has almost all countries of the world as members. There is no guarantee that a new organization is going to be any better. Once US leaves UN, why would any other country believe in US to build a better organization, especially seeing that the existing administration in US itself is chaotic.

^ This is the primary meta argument against Trump foreign policy.

If you screw your counterparty over in every negotiation, you erode trust and end up without allies.

That’s fine in a business setting, if you’re self-capitalized (although Trump famously ran into issues after burning bridges with most banks), because you can do without them.

It works less effectively in a forum of sovereign nations, where you’re going to need to deal with CountryX tomorrow and ten years from now.

The US is ceding the soft power and web of alliances that are the basis of its economic and hard power.

The US, without allies, loses to China strictly on the basis of population.

“America first” is “America alone” with an orange spray tan.

I am not sure it was ever very functional. I am not an expert on it at all but it seems like it had two purposes for the US. 1) prevent Nazis (i.e. another world war which metaphysically it seems people believe Right wing views are responsible for war which leads to very specific outcomes we see today) and 2) prevent countries from becoming communist by opening discussions with them.

This article makes the case that the 1965 Immigration Act happened not because anyone in the US wanted it but because the State Dept. pressured Congress to pass it in order to make more allies with Third World countries https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/geopolitical-origins.... Basically the UN was used as a forum by countries to trash the US which it still is. The USSR propagandized against the US in the Third World.

So honestly the whole UN experiment seems like it was kind of a foreign policy wonk experiment that didn't really serve the interests of US citizens especially now that the USSR fell. But I think the philosophical ideas behind it run very strong in elitist thought in the US. These are that 1) Nationalism is an ever present threat to global peace 2) social engineering should be used to prevent Nationalism/Nazis/etc. 3) Immigration is a tool for statecraft and limiting Nationalism in certain countries. 4) an enlightened class of smarter, educated people should be used to counter Nationalism.

If any of these goals or assumptions are false the whole thing becomes useless.

> The UN is dysfunctional and does not work.

Says the person using an international communication network orchestrated by the UN...

The surface arguments for abandoning these kinds of programs (also USAID, recalling diplomats, bunch of research funding) seem straightforward: "there is a deficit, why pay all this money for ostensibly wasteful work, etc."

Where I get frustrated is when the admin turns around and massively expands the deficit by throwing cargo ships full of money at other wasteful, in my opinon, programs. That tells me the fiscal responsibility talk was just a pretense to do another kind of money grab and "own the libs" at the same time. And at the end of the day the argument reduces to opinions on what is wasteful and what is not.

Example: you claim UN hasn't been a source of soft power "for the better part of this century." Well, says you - I think it has done a great job. Now what?

Yes, they are spending funds on things that matter to those that voted for them, and removing funds from things that don't. Sounds like a standard thing that happens in a democracy. When someone you vote for is in power, they will spend on things you prefer to fund instead.

> Example: you claim UN hasn't been a source of soft power "for the better part of this century." Well, says you - I think it has done a great job. Now what?

Okay, what has it done that has aligned with US interests?

Why is the US the only country in the world denying Israeli crimes in Gaza?

That's how I know the UN no longer matters.

And the Syrian Druze? Christian Syrians. Anyone in the UN speaking up for them. Why just Gaza and not the other civilian casualty events.

Because the rest of the world denies Palestinian crimes in Israel.

Resistance of occupation, including violent resistance, is not a crime under international law.

War crimes conducted for the "violent resistance" does come under international law. There are rules of engagement all parties need to adhere to.

The State of Israel spent so long fighting monsters that it became one.

The State of Israel literally created the main “monster” it claims to be fighting (Hamas), abd did so for the specific purpose of splitting Palestinian opposition and having a less sympathetic enemy to weaken international criticism of its campaign to cleanse Palestine of Palestinians, which has been fairly overt policy since the occupation began.

That's a rather bold claim.

For instance: Both Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich have been sanctioned by the UK, Norway, Canada, New Zealand and Australia for “repeated incitements of violence against Palestinian civilians."

And yet all of these countries also condemn Hamas and their atrocities....

They... don’t. The ICC sought warrants for both Israeli and Palestinian leaders (at least one of the Palestinian leaders was subsequently killed by Israel, rendering any charges moot, but the ICC wasn't ignoring the alleged crimes.)

Similarly, many countries have sanctioned both Hamas (and/or other groups like PIJ, etc.) and/or individual Palestinians for acts against Israeli civilians as well as Israel and/or Israeli politicians for acts against Palestinian civilians.

Can you define “dysfunctional and does not work”

What has the UN achieved in the last 25 years?

You don’t think China, the Gulf states, hell, oil-rich Azerbaijan won’t pick up the slack for international legitimacy or national glory? And you think U.S. isolation from the League of Nations was the right move, too?

Let's see. We'll know soon won't we?

Probably not, as even this administration is unlikely to leave the U.N. altogether. Withdrawing from UNESCO feels like “slashing the NPR/PBS budget” virtue-signaling.

They should put that UN money where it belongs, the MIC and more bombs for Israel, and why not add more the deficit. This isn't even a joke, its just what they're doing.

The UN is for the leftist children of the well-connected to make theatrical speeches condemning the West. And also wasting tax money on conferences

It is also the place where world opinion is shaped. West has majority of veto powers which it used to its advantage. West had also condemned other nations in the same forums in the past.

These arguments of the form “the US should not do X because of the deficit “ are either ill informed or disingenuous.

Go look at where the money goes. This is not it.

The UN is dysfunctional because the US blocks every good thing it tries to do like the abomination of the security council vetoing resolutions to stop the US backed genocide in Gaza.

It’s a bit incomplete to bring up Security Council vetoing without mentioning Russia (currently at war with a sovereign nation) and China (intent on war with a sovereign nation).

The UNSC isn’t an arbitrator of good, but an alignment of hard UN outcomes with the first countries to have nukes (and therefore the ability to force the issue militarily if they disagreed with the UN).

> China (intent on war with a sovereign nation).

This is not proven. Why would China want to wreck Taiwan? Official US, Taiwanese, and Mainland China policy is that there is one China. Taiwan is like Texas being a breakaway republic run by confederates in the USA, though the culture has evolved in a more progressive direction (more progressive than USA) since the original breakup.

> It’s a bit incomplete to bring up Security Council vetoing without mentioning Russia (currently at war with a sovereign nation)

I'll give you that's bad, but at least it's a fight between nations and not a genocide. I believe the U.S. instigated this fight by advancing NATO territory eastward and my position is there should be peace negotiations immediately.

> Why would China want to wreck Taiwan?

For the same reasons most wars have been fought: belief (primacy of CCP), resources (uncontested access to the Pacific), and the economy (don’t worry about that, ra ra flag).

> [Russia and Ukraine] not a genocide

One of the definitions of genocide is forced relocation of children and eradication of culture, both of which Russia is doing in the Ukrainian territories it occupies.

Here's a list of vetoes at the UN Security Council: https://research.un.org/en/docs/sc/quick

All parties seem to be exercising their right, the US does not have a monopoly on it.

I clicked on one of the ones where Russia and China vetoed.

Among other things, it called for Yemen to stop attacking Israeli shipping, which is one of the few acts by a country that is fulfilling its international obligation to intervene to stop genocide. Yemen has repeatedly stated that it will stop when Israel stops its genocide in Gaza and proved it when it stopped during the ceasefire.

Intelligence does not imply that folks also care about humanity or long term consequences. There are plenty of smart folks who make their life all about personal material wealth.

It's different perspectives, I've come to learn.

The people I know who support this regime do so because they feel completely left out (they're low income so I'm not sure that applies to software developers).

When there's nothing for you why wouldn't you want to just burn it all down? Then you can build a more "fair" system.

Please note that I do not agree with literally anything current admin does, this is just the perspective I hear often.

> When there's nothing for you why wouldn't you want to just burn it all down? Then you can build a more "fair" system.

Notably, the people who lived under legal oppression for centuries in this country did not take this approach. Instead, they worked inside the system and were able to affect change. The "burn it down" side ended up having its cities literally burned down.

I think most oppression got ended by burning down. I am not aware of too many movements that successfully changed things from the inside.

My comment, like OP, was specifically about the US. Burn it down has a worse track record here than working in the system.

People think things can be better, but don't realize things can be easily worst. They'll be the last to feel the impact

I got to think there's more to it than how it is voiced.

They probably also feel left out by their current regime, and "just burn it all down" would be done more efficiently by other ways, or with other choices.

There's still a part that resonates enough that they're willing to support a specific message.

Left out by what? Left out by whom? Are these people actually satisfied that what the administration is doing will improve their lives, or did the administration just tap into their anger and prejudice for votes?

You'll have to forgive me for being suspicious, but I hear these arguments, too, and the people I see who feel "left out" are largely left out because they hold fringe beliefs or because they are told they are left out despite actually being part of highly influential groups.

Left out by society in general, and the modern world specifically.

Rural Middle- to low-income folks are who I interact with mostly.

No fringe beliefs, just the unfortunate circumstance of being born in places that peaked 60 years ago, but with family roots deep enough to keep them planted. Not who I would call influential. Mostly just working class Joe's trying to make it and struggling, even though their parents were FAR more successful with FAR less education, training, and pressure.

But why would low-income people hitch their cart to a spoiled, whiny NY rich bitch who made a career out of stealing from blue-collar people and has never put in an honest day's work?

That's the truly infuriating part.

Because he talks like them, and they know he's a scumbag, but he's their scumbag, which they sic on the people they hate most: the vermin liberals, the immigrants poisoning the blood of the country, the parasitic federal workers whose lives they want to make miserable, the trans people they deem as all predatory groomers, the academics and scientists they're defunding because it's all woke. It's about taking their lump of flesh. They excuse the open corruption as at least being open corruption, since they assume everyone else is ten times as corrupt behind closed doors. That's why they were fine withholding disaster relief from blue states in 2020.

It makes me angry as hell. They hate us and you can't say anything about it because if you're not nice enough to them, they act like you're being mean to them and the personal reason they'll continue to vote for people that demonize and hate you.

And of course they flag my post because this entire site is an echo chamber of pompous, crybaby cunts. Run by pompous crybaby hypocrite cunts who think nothing of stealing from users... who serve as unpaid shills for their cunty behavior.

What the "burn it down" crowd fail to realize is Trump and those like him will always put guardrails in place to ensure they come out in top in the new world. Unless they're willing to be part of an actual revolution, they're still just voting for "new king, same as the old king"

Intelligence also shouldn't be assumed to cross between disciplines either.

Being able to code isn't the end-all-be-all skillset the industry likes to pretend it is.

Intelligent people also have come to realize that our government is essentially one performative instance after another and see a "uniparty" of legislatures (Congress) who have optimized for local maxima (getting reelected) and not global maxima (constituents well being). Some of them see this administration as a way (and perhaps the only way) of disrupting that inertia, just like they agree with how startup's disrupt existing markets (see Paul Graham's "you should be a little mischievous"). So, to me, it's not a huge surprise many of them voted for this admin.

For the record - I think those same intelligent people overlook the externalities (a personal military for the executive branch) of such a disruptive administration, or irrationality disbelieved it would ever happen.

Thus failing the Game of life at the very core, with corresponding last moments full of regrets if available. Yes we all have met those folks, only fools (or similar but less successful folks) wish they would be those people.

> corresponding last moments full of regrets

That’s why they’re burning money on life extension moonshots.

Which will in foreseeable future end up as we all expect... there is still some form of justice in this world, and no money can really hack around it. trump will eventually die, so will putin and similar folks. The only hope for common people.

And what will happen in 22nd century and onwards is no great concerns for us here.

Even then it's still dumb since they're unlikely to be rich enough to benefit. Nor did they figure out that the main economic policy Trump campaigned on was idiotic and would make things worse for everyone.

> And they could be completely correct.

Given the consistency of the source material, this seems unlikely to be true.

Prosperity gospel.

And religious people like to point to charitable giving.

But studies performed by religious organizations themselves (who, if anything, are likely to skew the numbers more positively) show that across the board, "Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget," and an additional 5% goes to "church-run programs" (be it after-school care, social, or group activities).

If a secular charity - and let's go to Charity Navigator here - Top Ten Inefficient Fundraisers (https://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=topten), we see some of the worst charities spending 15% of their donations on "program expenses" (i.e., doing what they are being given money to do).

I'm not familiar with the monitoring of 501(c)3 groups, but I suspect if charities regularly spent only one percent of their givings on what they were entitled to enjoy tax exemption for, they'd likely have such a status revoked.

And, if you factor in this average percentage (even the six per cent combined, which is generous, as as much fun as social and youth activities are, they're not necessarily serving a critical need), and start to question 'how much money is being spent on 'spreading the word', patting themselves on the back, competitions in Texas to see who can built the world's biggest cross just down the road from where the world's previously biggest cross was built at costs of millions, there comes more and more skepticism of just how highly you can value "giving to your church" on the scale of charitable contributions.

A study by ECCU (http://web.archive.org/web/20141019033209/https://www.eccu.o...) stated that churches use 3 percent of their budget for children’s and youth programs, and 2 percent for adult programs. Local and national benevolence receives 1 percent of the typical church budget.

So.

Your link is broken. Please fix as I'm very curious to review the evidence here.

Too late to edit, but: http://web.archive.org/web/20141019033209/https://www.eccu.o...

What? Plenty of religious people chase wealth and power. "Prosperity gospel" is a thing. The Catholic Church is one of the largest landowners in the world. Etc.

> Atheism isn't known for the consistency of its source material either.

Atheism isn't organized so there's no way to quantify your bullshit.

What? If something, I'd talk about spirituality instead. There can be a spirituality without religion, but also a religion without spirituality. Beware!

I pursue material wealth because it provides for my family, my lifestyle, and allows me to support causes I like. But even if I was poor I would be content because family and friends are truly what matter.

Surprisingly many people who claim to care about "family" don’t seem to have any qualms about leaving their children and grandchildren a considerably worse world.

From my perspective the world is getting better every single day. I wouldn’t want to live in the past

Sad and short-sighted view. Which is of course what got us into this mess, and is actively working to make things worse in any timescale longer than quarterly.

It’s sad to me you are miserable

I've been toying with the following attempt to explain all this:

- Information bubbles (this is the top issue, and it's really incredibly persuasive)

- Geographic location and social environment

- Lack of time to deeply evaluate truth vs noise and consider multiple sides of an issue

- Conviction of values - how much does a person believe their values are tied to the political view (leads to subtly drawing emotional conclusions and implicitly trusting a political party)

- Belief that due to one's own intelligence, one is not subject to propaganda (a clearly false belief that many smart people fall into)

Deep emotional awareness is not as strongly related to intelligence as people think.

They have a worldview that is so different it is effectively an alternate reality. This mostly comes from seeing different information streams or being in different social circles.

The same could be said of any worldview. So tell me—what part of UNESCO’s decision to admit the “State of Palestine” as a Member State strikes you as objectively righteous?

I didn't say I thought it was objectively righteous. I didn't say anything about my worldview.

It seems objective that many civilians have been killed and a lot of land stolen.

But my point is that things that seem objective to one group of people might be objectively false to another group.

Which isn't to say that there is no real truth. Just that the premises people hold are so different that the worlds are not compatible.

"...a lot of land stolen" let me just say that your limited understanding is painful.

Can you explain? I'm going to ignore your arrogant decision because I am genuinely curious. What is it about Israeli "settlements" that makes it different from stealing land?

Only in a morally inverted world is a nation blamed for keeping land it took while fending off an attack.

> These are seemingly smart people.

They _are_ smart people. There's more to the differences in perspective than "lib smart, maga stupid".

If your intelligent in your work, but completely retarded when it comes to society , information gathering and independent thinking rather than regurgiate whatever your oranged tanned cheeto says, then no, your not smart. You just have been able to condition your brain to do something over and over again. Intelligence and smartness isnt about doing one thing well.

There is more to life but I do have to question the intelligence of anyone who believed that Trump was going to somehow lower grocery prices by implementing tariffs.

It almost doesn’t even make grammatical sense to say “raising prices will lower prices”, let alone any kind of rational sense.

At this point there really isn't. The only political philosophy that meshes with Trumpism is anarcho-capitalism. If Trumpists were generally espousing anarcho-capitalism, I could respect that they were coming from a different fleshed-out perspective and we could debate the merits of it. But they are not! Rather Trumpists appeal to widely varying political ideals, but then when you try to apply a specific one to different actions of the regime it's either just crickets or a Gish gallop. So the straightforward conclusion is there is a glaring lack of any sort of coherent analysis.

Most people are idiots. No party has a monopoly on being stupid.

I think there's also more to it than that.

There are so many wide ranging forms of intelligence. Being an exceptional engineer or a high functioning executive/CEO you may have a very narrow slice of intelligence or capability. It does not in any way mean you have an understanding of how the world works or general knowledge.

I agree -- it is surprising how many high achieving people have such poor understanding of how the world/society/countries work. It's almost like our education system's specificity hasn't done a good job on civics broadly.

It’s prioritizing material wealth above other pursuits.

Not only in their own lives, but as the primary measure of success.

One side effect of this is that they stop investing effort in things that don’t generate material wealth.

Personally, I think that tends to turn people into dicks (non-transaction friendships are valuable to me), but they do them.

Maybe take a few minutes to talk to the other side to better understand their thoughts and why they have such thoughts. Sadly I’ve noticed understanding and tolerance of diverse perspectives went out the window lately.

To be clear, sadly, “lately” covers a longer time than the current administration.

I do and did. In my youth one of my best friends slowly became a neo nazi, with lines like: "foreigners should be herded together and exterminated".

After one particular discussion he conceeded: "I know you're factually correct, but I don't care, because this is what I want". And this is the point were further discussion was useless.

Elon Musk did a Nazi salute on stage at the presidential inauguration. I really don't care about understanding those thoughts or the thoughts of those who willingly excuse that behavior.

I'm not going to be another Nazi at the table.

Do they support some policies or everything that this administration proposes?

In my experience I have seldom seen people who believe 100% in whatever party/government does. Most of the time it's a few topics that matter - be it immigration, or less taxes, or whatever. However, they are not gonna protest for leaving UNESCO. They might find it stupid, but probably they find topic XYZ more important. So they suck it up and move on.

Then there are the believers - everything the administration does is great. But I like to believe and think they are a minority.

> But I like to believe and think they are a minority.

There's a lot of MAGA hats out there man. Historically, has it ever been a good thing when so many people believe everything one man says is pure truth? I mean, even if I agreed with every policy, the extent and dedication of this cultish behaviour would give me pause.

The nice thing about democracy and politics in general is that everyone can have an opinion and a way to see something.

Many MAGA hats don't all mean the same. I doubt all of his supporters like the tariffs, or how he is dealing with Russia, or Israel, or, or or...

However, I believe that some of the core policies (hard on immigration, etc) somehow find a common agreement. And even in those core policies, some might like different approaches. And yet in total they do feel they support this administration.

The issue is when people let all happen because one of the core problems must be solved at all costs. Meaning the administration solves that one core problem you really wanted fixed, but the price to pay is equally bad, and yet you just look down and let it all happen, because it's convenient and doesn't affect you in the short term.

In my opinion, this has become more and more common with whichever party we elect, except some are more vocal about it than others.

My only point, without discussing policy at all, is that it's a cult of personality, with all that entails (not good). I think a failure to recognize this as either naive or intentional.

The CCP has been lobbying the World Heritage Evaluation Committee for a long time now to increase its number of sites. This directly promote’s china’s false narrative of “5,000 years continuous civilization” with attached mythos (despite much of the early evidence coming from the mythical Shiji, china simply blackmails academics into silence with source access and mainland collaboration to maintain a monopoly on her historical narrative) and this idea of a “glorious past”, which is also critical for maintaining her “reunification” narrative and justifying current or future control of Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan, Macau, Hong Kong… this extends to baseless and historical claims like state propaganda claiming the Yuan founded beijing to support this totalizing metanarrative “grand arc” type story the chicoms attempt to construct.

Meanwhile 28 of the 196 state parties to the world heritage convention have no sites listed at all. Of course, Taiwan has no sites at all.

It’s well known that many of the UN bodies and similar international orgs have been wholly captured by china or her new axis of evil. Ghebreyesus, for example, has been china’s man from the get-go. American dollars should not go to support a grand red chinese narrative.

UNESCO has, in recent years:

- published an “anti-racism toolkit”

- campaigned to “#ChangeMENtalities”, to “reshape masculinities for gender equality”

- published “comprehensive sexuality education” that is strongly at odds with many Americans views on how such things ought to be taught

- published ai ethics recommendations that focus on issues like “gender” and “climate”

- run partnerships to “get every learner climate-ready”

In other words, it’s operating out of its original scope, doing things that are clearly and massively one-sided. I recognize the NGO-industrial complex, along with much of mass media and culture, has been so wholly captured by the left for long enough that y’all can see a change back to the status quo as disruptive or odd. But the other half of the Overton window does still exist. A lot of what the current administration has done is stupid or wrong, but my tax dollars being sent to this organization would also be stupid and wrong.

These are literally within its remit. It's the "Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation". All of these issues are educational, scientific or cultural. And even so comparing research around gender with the indisputable fact of climate change is a rather twisted way of reasoning.

I didn't say out of its remit, I said outside its original scope. The plain fact is these programs are newer and I don't believe in funding them.

UNESCO was previously a body that did some social justice stuff and a bunch of heritage work. Now it's a body that does a lot of social justice stuff and heritage work hijacked by chinese agitprop. The case for withdrawing previously was decent but these days it's pretty clear.

Intelligence sometimes manifests as doing the wrong thing in the most convoluted way.

Intelligence also gives people the power to reconcile morality or economic theory with almost any desire.

The worst ideas come from the smart people who can persuade themselves and others of inevitable success.

I think(lol) that assuming the other side stupid is one of the big failures of current political environment. Honestly, I'm baffled that is "ok" to say something like "the other side is stupid" without being called out harshly for it. Using weasel words expressions like "seemingly smart people" doesn't make it better, it makes it worse.

Do you mean it's a political failure as in it leads to electoral losses or it's a moral failure as in it shouldn't be "ok"?

In theory I'd love to agree with you. In practice we are way past that.

I'm totally fine debating whether the sky is blue with someone claiming it's gray because it is usually overcast. I'm happy to entertain the motion that the sky could be bronze - with a reference to ancient Greece and pretty sunsets. At the end of the day we can just agree to disagree and move on.

But I'm not going to debate whether the sky is blue with someone yelling that the sky MUST be green because obviously clouds are green. They have moved so far from the truth that they are either arguing in bad faith or just plain delusional. Neither case is worth even the slightest snippet of my time: I'd have a better chance of success trying to explain my viewpoint to a tree. It isn't politics anymore, it has turned into religion or sports.

Sure, but you forget something. It's impossible to have a discussion with someone you consider inferior to you and they know it(eg. "Trump supporters are morons"). This makes them vote with the person who is willing to have that discussion. That lost the democrats the previous election and has all the chances to happen again in 3 years. I'm not American, and while I do follow US politics, I see the signs closer to home in Europe, where all the "idiots" are voting with worrying candidates for the same reason - the "nice" parties are ignoring them and calling them idiots, subhumans, TikTok drones, etc.

There is just a shocking lack of empathy in the world today. Selfishness is off the scale.

I personally blame social media and the financialization of everything for this. A person's entire self-worth can be reduced to the size of their 401K and their instagram reels (brunch, dog, destination wedding, hike, repeat).

Depressing.

> These are seemingly smart people. The past 10 years or so made me realize I don’t know anything about human nature or intellect.

just remember, there is nothing more easy to manipulate than an insecure male.

Smart people in a bubble will confidently apply their intellect to things they have no first-hand experience with

> These are seemingly smart people.

If someone who seems smart disagrees with me then there's only 1 explanation

If you are searching for some insight into human nature and intellect, you may find the history of the Roman Republic (and it's transition to an empire) to have shocking parallels to modern-day events. Trump is remarkably similar to Sulla, who showed the next generation of leaders how to break the rules to gain power. Caesar is coming...

I'm a black developer and have never had another developer tell me about their support for Trump. The past 10 years have made it plainly obvious why.

It has also made me realize how difficult life was for my parents and grandparents, who were all born before the civil rights act.

The civil rights act passed when Trump was in college so he and the other elderly members of the other branches also saw the lead up to it. Every action I see is to prevent anything like that again. Or to personally enrich themselves.

My father passed in 2019, in cleaning up the house I came across a walnut display case with 10 or so real $2 bills with Trumps picture on them, sealed in plastic.

I had no idea my Dad had gone down that path, or why...

I've been on this earth a long time, and I too realize I don’t know anything about human nature or intellect.

> These are seemingly smart people.

Engs all think they and their peers are very logical and super smart. They must be because of all the world changing apps/services/monies they make...? I've fallen in to this trap.

Clarity of words will help:

  * Intelligence is the computational power one is born with
  * Stupid/smart is the effective utilization of that intelligence

Lots of intelligent people do lots of stupid things (mea culpa)

What is wild to me is that all the replies I read are written as if everyone on this forum obviously agreed and those who don't are "others" not worth thinking about.

I'm not a US citizen and did not have to make a choice, but I could see plenty of reasons not to vote for the Democratic candidate: the establishment had tried to run a candidate that was obviously unfit for office and parachuted a replacement at the last minute; the Democratic response to covid was atrocious (yes, the irony of Trump capturing that slice of the vote does not escape me); the issue of males (transwomen) in female sports and prisons...

Whether those reasons outweighed the obvious (to me) negatives is everyone's choice to make when casting their vote... but the inability to understand the other side (and brag about it) seems odd for all the smart people here.

Being good at math or engineering doesn't make you good at empathy, sociology, politics or any number of other functions.

And of course this applies to comments in the discussion as well…

Agreed, however, people with a good education _usually_ learn think intelligently about a variety of problems. By which I mean, they understand how to fact check sources, how to think critically about information presented to them, and how to validate their own assumptions.

Edit: removing a sentence that came across as offensive.

> Agreed, however, people with a good education _usually_ learn think intelligently about a variety of problems.

Depends on the problem you're trying to solve.

Perhaps it's "how can I get more for myself?" versus "how I improve the lives of humanity?".

First part yes, second hell no, why the heck the need to do such baseless attacks. We have plenty of sociopathic a-holes in Europe as well, I'd say more than plenty on all levels of society in all countries.

I didn’t think it was an “attack”, but merely an observation and a question.

But I can see how it can read as an “attack”, I’ll update the comment. Thanks for calling it out!

Steelman their position. Try finding reasons good people would vote for Trump, or at least sincere mistakes of reasoning that a good person could make.

I'll give them a steelman: They thought Trump would reduce their taxes (he hasn't, by and large). They thought Trump would cut government waste (he did the opposite). They thought Trump's tough-guy persona would convince foreign countries to fall in line (it hasn't, they have shunned the USA).

They were steelmanned for years and that is how theu got powerful. Maybe we should stop to do it and start to interpret their words accurately.

Sometime, cruelty is the point and there is only delusion in trying to project "good reasons". It is loosing strategy.

To get Trump supporters to vote for you it's important to beat Trump at addressing their concerns. Even a small swing of 5-10% of them could win an election.

Addressing their concerns will do nothing, just as it did nothing in the past. They will hate you for addressing their concerns and blame you for things Trump caused. Each time they were given something, they just got more aggressive and harmful

Yes small swings could change election results, but none of them will come from Trump voters. This argument just serves to more politics further to the right.

Those people wanted harm, wanted to cause pain and addressing their concerns does not provide any of that.

And you'll find that almost all of those people are deeply religious, and that's not a coincidence. There's a surrender of thought to authoritative power in both cases.

I share the same horrible experience of having these last 10 years open my eyes wide to the reality of humanity.

This is reactionary, elitist, and false.

I know many of “those people” and not a single one of them religious.

American leftist insults always go like this - X is bad, but only if it originated from us. The self loathing is amazing.

* Religion is bad, but only if it’s Christianity. * Men are bad, unless they’re trans * Gender is a social construct, but race is real * culture is important, unless it’s associated with whites, because they don’t have culture

Right wing is a semi balancing act * religion is good, unless Muslim * men aren’t necessarily good or bad. They can be heros or villains * boys naturally fight with sticks, it’s not taught * American culture is just as valid as any other

Not exactly a mirror image, but enough team loyalty and justification goes on so people can pat themselves on the back as smart while the other team is delusional

"False" I can entertain, but reactionary? Elitist? Huh?

Your list of grievances is like a Fox News handout for viewers to remember what they hate about DemonRats.

Your "assumptions":

  * Religion is bad, but only if it’s Christianity. 
  * Men are bad, unless they’re trans 
  * Gender is a social construct, but race is real
  * culture is important, unless it’s associated with whites, because they don’t have culture

Can be "fixed":

  * Your Religion is yours, don't make it mine (regardless of which flavored cult)
  * Men no longer get to be the boss just because they're men 
  * Gender is a personal "choice"
  * Culture is important (and "white culture" is tempting to make light of in that it's "punching up", and it's kind of Wonder Bread bland).

LOL IRL on the right wing balancing act, but I'll agree with the statements except for the blanket "religion is good" (it's conditional), and the Islamophobia (which I love as much as I love christianity).

I'm happy for you that you have people to pat you on the back and tell you you're smart -- we all could use a little emotional support.

Edit: I only have two Trump supporters in my friend list -- they are both intelligent, kind, and devoutly religious. Obviously I have n=2 personally, but it's a thing to very Christian and very Trumpy. It's an observation, not a judgement.

There are several reasons. First, developers are threatened by foreign competition and that third feels that Trump would protect them. Second, this presidency represents a change from previous DEI policies and that third may benefit from it. Third, they feel previous administrations were too soft on crime around their neighborhoods, and their tolerance for permissiveness ran out. They want action done to benefit them at any cost.

I've seen the same thing. What I've seen is most of those folks that supported them during the campaign are now pretty quiet. During the campaign it was "cool" to support Trump and the republicans but now that the dude's in office, most are seeing that campaigns are very different from the administrations.

Looking back I blame the Democrats for running horrible candidates and the gaslighting that their candidates were actually great and were as "cool" as the Trump team. It just felt so disingenuous when you heard Democrats saying that Biden was still very with it and even more disingenuous when they said that Harris/Walz were a great pick. And now the folks that said it was disingenuous were not wrong, cause after the campaign ended and Trump was in office seemingly everyone that praised Biden and then Harris then flipped the script and started saying what everyone was thinking all along (that Biden was not fit to serve and Harris wasn't a great candidate).

I talked to alot of guys that flipped from D to R this past election and just about every one of them said a version of: "do they think we are stupid??".

The Democrats have a hubris problem, they think that just because they run someone and tell folks that the person is great, everyone will just automatically buy into that. That's just not how it works and you have to make a genuinely convincing argument and that argument can't be "the other guys is worse"

The Democrats have a structural problem.

The party is defined as being composed of the people who are already elected. So the priority of the Democratic Party ends up reflecting the priorities of those who are already in office, which is to make sure the incumbents get reelected.

This means there's very little incentive to expand the electorate (which would mean younger voters, who are likely to vote younger candidates, so that threatens the aging incumbents), or spend resources in expanding the map (because by definition there are no incumbents there whose interests are represented in the party).

For as advanced as the US political system is, it's incredibly backwards when it comes to professionalization of the political parties. A good comparison is the BJP in India. Setting aside policy, ideological issues for a moment, what they're really good at is being professional. The head of the party is not elected, and constantly rotates the party representative in each election, keeping their bench deep. They also have a soft age limit.

In a way, Donald Trump's greatest contribution to the Republican Party was destroying the incumbency advantage for Republicans. As a result the Republican slate was completely refreshed with younger (although generally worse) candidates, but while it may have made the party significantly worse from a policy/ideology perspective, it has made it politically stronger.

Intelligence is not general. It can be. But rarely is. Most people contextualize their knowledge and skills, they divide to conquer, as generalizing is hard. Especially hard in a fragmented, divided world.

Those seemingly smart people are likely all smart. But they have no idea how to take their skills from one area and apply them to another. So they fall for really stupid BS outside their area of specialization.

A couple of things I've realized as I've gotten older:

1. Intelligence does not transfer across domains. E.g. being good at making money doesn't necessarily make you qualified in other areas. And vice versa, as Isaac Newton is famously quoted as saying "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of men" after losing a ton of money in the South Sea Bubble.

2. Many (most) people view their identity as a membership in some group, however that is defined. Most people like to pretend to argue about policy, but they're really arguing about their group membership.

3. Admitting you were wrong and changing your opinion is incredibly difficult for most people, perhaps even moreso for people who are nominally smart in other domains. Doubly so if it goes against your group membership as pointed out in #2.

Regarding "And it’s wild to think that more than 1/3 of the devs I’ve met in my life support this admin" specifically, at least in my experience, many of the devs don't support Trump as much as they chaffed against some of the cultural changes Democrats led (woefully unsuccessfully in my opinion) and so they hooked their wagon to Trump. E.g. this is my personal opinion, but I think "the left" really did go overboard with language policing, recognizing racial group membership above all else when it comes to diversity, labeling any valid discussion of the pros and cons of biological men in women's sports as "transphobic", the utter dishonesty in pretending Biden would be capable for another term and thus denying a real primary, etc. etc. And, to be blunt about it, for a very long time the Democratic party had almost nothing to offer for white men - indeed, in many aspects "old white men" became an acceptable derogatory term amongst the left. How they expected that would win them elections in the US is beyond me.

So don't get me wrong, I think Trump is worse in nearly every way, but I think a lot of the dev supporters I've seen of Trump are less full-on MAGA folks than libertarian types who thought Trump would challenge the excesses of the left (and are now having a hard time admitting his full-on fascist behavior).

Intelligence is just computing power.

If you have false beliefs as the basis for your computation you just get wrong results faster.

What people mean by intelligent person is often someone who: - has more computing power - spends their time using that computing power - checks their assumptions and biases regularly - over time accumulates more correct beliefs than others

If you get lots of computing power but don't do the other things - you get a dumber person than average. Because they accumulate more wrong results than everybody else.

This is how you get tech bros - great at math and programming, dumb as a shoe about everything else.

Ignoring that most of those example are just false dichotomies, what they claim to prioritize is contradictory. It's more like "If you are Christian, not killing children in the womb and also taking away school lunches from children if their parents can't afford to pay for them"

Life is a right; free lunch by definition is not. One is not up for debate; the other is.

Edit to reply: Even if that were true (which it is not, religious people give more to charity every year than atheists statistically); two wrongs do not make a right.

Sorry, what do you think happens to people who are not given food?

By definition of what? You're just saying words and claiming them to be true and undebatable. Regardless, these people are claiming to act upon the word of the Bible while ignoring the parts of taking care of the hungry and the poor.

Odd to mention Islam when the drive for the first two causes in the US is overwhelmingly from Christians.

Islam is strong opposition in both cases; with the recent "LGBTQ books in school" lawsuit at SCOTUS having Islamic parents in the plaintiffs. Let's not stereotype this as a purely Christian issue.

Islamic people also don't want to bake cakes for the LGBTQ crowd. They're with the Christian baker there.

This is may be true of many Muslims, though they should probably factor the possibility the current administration despises them as a demographic much more than it despises LGBT people into their decision making. In any case, views on Christian bakers don't seem to be a particularly good reason to endorse the behaviour of Trump or believe that international trade is a pissing contest, or mass incarceration without due process or many other things the current administration is far more interested in than SCOTUS lawsuits, and I don't think many of Trump's voters backed him out of adherence to Islam...

> Islamic people also don't want to bake cakes for the LGBTQ crowd. They're with the Christian baker there.

Please don't make generalizations based on religion or culture. Please also make an effort to follow the guidelines, in particular these ones:

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you replace Islamic and "immigrant from Cuba" with Republican this also holds true

Not all supporters of a given political party agree on everything. They may simply align with the party on the topics that are most important to them, even if they disagree with other topics that are lower on their priority list.

It is disingenuous to suggest that any group of people unilaterally agree on a diverse collection of topics.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44647688 and marked it off topic.

Please don't introduce religion-based flamebait like this.

An entire set of countries actually - no division between intelligence. It was a global cultural phenomenon.

to be fair, there was lots of resistance within those countries, but not enough to overcome the Guys With Guns(tm).

The point is it has nothing to do with being smart or dumb. if you can’t explain why smart people in good faith participated, you just don’t understand it,

And the leadership was supposedly smart too.

Intelligence and morality don't necessarily go together.

The amount of Argumentum ad Nazium / Reductio ad Hitlerum going around at the moment is getting really tiresome.

Can we stick to the actual issues instead of invoking Nazis? It’s not helping the discussion.

The Trump regime is the modern equivalent to the Nazi regime. Just because we don't get to see through the perspective of history doesn't mean it doesn't share all the same characteristics. The only difference with Nazi Germany is that the current democratic institutions in the United States are somewhat stronger than the ones in Germany in the 1930s, which prevent the Trump regime to gain full power. But they have been systematically eroded in the last few years (and especially in the last 6 months), and eventually they will fail too.

That’s a very naive reading, pretending all that is happening is because of Twitter flame wars.

It may appear so, because that’s how the actors involved use social media, but it’s not caused by it.

What caused it are the journalists that moved their work from on the ground reporting to on the twittersphere reporting. Rather than go out and see what people feel, they decided they could just sit at home and browse twitter as a stand-in replacement for public sentiment.

This gave an enormously disproportionate voice to the fringe groups that had long been deeply entrenched in the online space.

The Democratic Party lost to Trump, not "the left" and they lost based on either: not opposing the genocide in Gaza or because even ostensibly progressive voters won't vote for a black woman; there's only two data driven possibilities and neither of them is "culture war/identity politics has just gone nauseatingly overboard"

and of course the idea that the Republican Party hasn't been running on "identity politics" would require a wilful ignorance and complete lack of thought about any of their campaigning in the last few decades.

Most people didn't actually care about the culture war and wanted to focus on the economy. Unfortunately those people also failed to absorb the fact that the fast-talking grifter was in fact grifting them into supporting him by lying that he is a master of the economy.

The democrats losing support of hispanics, blacks, and men under 50 in the 2024 election is directly a function of the culture war.

If you insist on using the term "Latinx" and every Latino tells you that you are a self righteous idiot, listen to them. If you run the slogan "defund the police" despite inner city populations being the most in favor of police funding, listen to them. If you push the phrase "toxic masculinity" while young men move to the right in droves, listen to them.

And if your response to this is "That's not what those terms mean!", taking a marketing 101 class.

Having met several of them, the people who use terms like latinx, toxic masculinity, and defund the police aren't even democrats and hold almost as much antipathy towards them as they do towards republicans.

The polls speak for themselves. Why would hispanics suddenly be turning on Trump? Is he now pushing latinx himself or is he actually not good at the things he claimed he was gonna be good at?

Polling on the issues: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/09/09/issues-and-t... https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-...

Recently support polling: Latinos - https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/03/somos-votanes-poll-...

>Having met several of them, the people who use terms like latinx, toxic masculinity, and defund the police aren't even democrats and hold almost as much antipathy towards them as they do towards republicans.

Yes, and the Democrats throw away elections trying to cater to these people because the media dramatically overstates their relevance.

I don't think you realize that the Culture War is originating from the Right, and that it's a tar trap for those on the Left.

More so, that the whole point of this War is to foster anger and division, so that we squabble amongst ourselves rather than the elite who own us all.

I don't think that's quite right. I think over the last 10 years a lot of the anti-corporate energy of Occupy Wall Street has been funnelled - by means of the culture war - into "identity" issues that have little potential to harm corporate power or profits. I would argue that this did not originate on the right or left but was the result of a political class that's beholden to endless donations.

To me, one really clear example of this is immigration. As recently as 2016, Bernie Sanders was saying that mass immigration is a Koch Brothers strategy for keeping wages low[1]. I think he was right. But the left has been cajoled away from this position over time because it had the potential to harm their corporate donors.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0

> I don't think that's quite right. I think over the last 10 years a lot of the anti-corporate energy of Occupy Wall Street has been funnelled - by means of the culture war - into "identity" issues that have little potential to harm corporate power or profits. I would argue that this did not originate on the right or left but was the result of a political class that's beholden to endless donations.

No disrespect, but that makes no sense.

This version of the Culture Wars have been with us for decades. Before the Trans Panic™ there was the Gay Panic. Abortion was a non-issue (even for Republicans) until they realized they could rally the troops around dead babies. And racism? That's been part of the very fabric of the US since the beginning.

Immigration has been well-documented in how waves of newcomers have been despised until a generation later when they're settled in and they can turn around and hate on the new crop (Irish, German, Italian, etc). Hating newcomers is a veritable tradition.

As to the donor class etc, yes, the Democratic Elites are looking after the elites and not the people (shocking!), but it doesn't mean rank and file Democrats are that way (note: I am not a party member).

The "both sides are the same" bit has traditionally had a fair amount of truth in that (the elites thing), but now that the GOP is the Party of Trump that can longer be said.

I don't buy this. Both parties have flaws. The Republicans under Trump don't understand economics, are willing to cut our benefits while still increasing the deficit, are willing to fire disproportionately veterans (who are disproportionately in federal jobs), are willing to let corrupt people walk free and avoid trial, are willing to crypto scam their own supporters, and are willing to make us a pariah state so we can keep supporting Israel.

And Democrats are nauseating about identity politics.

Voters get what they vote for, and they voted for this and now they are suffering. The mental calculus here has to change or it will just get worse

You’ve bought into a completely wrong take here. This is not at all what happened. The media kowtows to Trump and the GOP at every opportunity, and has helped create this nonsense CW you are parroting. Twitter is overrun with bots and full-on racism and Nazism and you’re saying Dems bowed to that? You have been fooled.

He meant the "formerly twitter crowd". In my interpretation, he means the outspoken social justice crowd that was trying to institute a McCarthy-esque purge of all that is racially/socially offensive.

Both your point and his can be correct

This is a deep topic but let me try and summarize.

The key concept here is "transhumanism" [1]. This is a very popular belief among Silicon Valley CEOs. Followers have deluded themselves into thinking their genes are special and they think about what they can do to ensure this transhuman future. It usually means having as many children as possible a la Elon Musk.

Thing is, transhumanism is simply eugenics [2]. It's tech-flavored white supremacy [3].

[1]: https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/silicon-valley-art...

[2]: https://www.seenandunseen.com/transhumanism-eugenics-digital...

[3]: https://biopoliticalphilosophy.com/2023/01/19/transhumanism-...

To be fair, a lot of people were fooled by the first term.

In the first term Trump hired a lot of retired or retiring generals. They may not have been subject matter experts, but that's fine, since they had subject matter experts within their departments, and they had the ability to organize, lead and execute.

But most importantly, most of them had a pretty strong sense of ethics and loyalty to the country and constitution.

The generals, and the people they hired, and even the Trump lackeys who were nonetheless being watched by the generals, helped keep Trump's worst impulses in check.

In Term 2, on the other hand, Trump has explicitly picked people who are completely unqualified (this is a mafia tactic to ensure the individual's loyalty is entirely to you since they know they would never have got the job they did on merit) and their primary skills lie in right wing TV and Podcasts. So these people prioritize effect and show for their followers, and are loyal to no one but Trump. And they've been selected primarily because they're incapable of doing the jobs they've been hired for well, so it's a stark 180 from the first term.

They're probably smart, but also assholes. Being kind to others and being smart aren't mutually exclusive.

Being an asshole is one thing. But thinking you can be an asshole by proxy by becoming an asshole's victim, is something else entirely.

They're not assholes by proxy, they're also assholes. They were before, and they will continue to be after.

They're seeking maximum asshole alignment and some recognize that while supporting the primary asshole may be causing them pain, it's lesser than the pain of the people they've always wanted to hurt.

Well, we disagree on our asshole classification. To me a true experienced asshole notices when another asshole is about to swindle them. There is some inexplicable tendency for swindlers to get swindled, but that's probably more at the periphery. Not sure if those qualify as assholes. I'll have to think about it.

I'm just talking about people who are angry and mean to the point that it's harmful to themselves

I see the general phenomenon of those people as an outlet for a set of social defects we have. Keep in mind that "immigrants bad" and so on cultural wars repertoire is always the go-to of populists when they want to point to an easy enemy to rile up the population.

It works because it's like short-circuiting. You have the easy to identify superficial traits, and so the current goes straight through, and shorts the system. Except it's social electricity in this case. My point is while we can blame the individual assholes in this, their generation itself is an inevitability in the right toxic environment. These populist explanations seek to address real concerns of people like bad work conditions, inflation and so on, but it invents an easy to digest (and entirely wrong) premise about why their lives are bad.

I wish I could say hating the assholes works, but that's just another short-circuiting of social electricity. Polarization, hate, enemies. It all just serves to divide and conquer us. Unity is strength, division is weaknesss.

And it’s wild to think that less than 2/3 of the devs I’ve met in my life don't support this admin. These are seemingly smart people.

I think it’s a symptom of how bad the democrats are. They can’t create a compelling message that people really care about. “I am a little better” just doesn’t cut it anymore

Nothing is ever fault of conservatives and libertarians. No matter what, someone else has to be blamed.

Complaining about them isn’t going to win elections for the democrats.

Conservatives won the election by complaining about Democrats, often lying about them. By being as insulting and offensive as possible. Elections in republican land are not won by being constructive and letting republicans lie and insult. That is how they were lost.

There should be a lot more and a lot louder complaining about conservatives.

It is a common categorical error to assume that people good at math or complex electromechanical systems must also be good at ethics, morality, or philosophy.

We see a bodybuilder good at lifting things, or a bricklayer good at building houses, and we don't assume they also have an opinion on nicomachean ethics that should be entertained. Similar, usually, with entertainers. But we sometimes assume that someone really good at structuring database queries for optimal retrieval efficiency must respect the separation of labor from capital value or the challenges of providing for the needs of eight billion people because they are people.

I have to assume it's because we think that if you're good at one "labor of the mind" you must be good at the others (and, probably, because too few of us also have nearly enough respect for how much thought goes into making a wall that won't fall down).