Ha! I miss Norm.

Well here comes the big f- you to working families everywhere. I predict hard lessons are about to be learned when everything gets way more expensive and any new investment in the US in return is minimal.

Heh it's true, I am a dog person.

I know this is irrelevant and probably inappropriate but I find Kristi Noem's Instagram face deeply unnerving.

I think this is the most persuasive hypothesis and among the most direct causes is just how Extremely Online this administration is, and it's even worse than it was in 2017. For all the talk about social media giving politicians a direct line to their supporters without any gatekeepers one wonders if the way the internet distorts reality won't ultimately cause this approach to he self defeating. Twitter gazes back at you, or something like that.

I think it'll eventually revert to a master and apprentice kind of model where the senior person gets an heir and a spare rather than a department or firm or whatever getting a chunk of a big graduating class. Family businesses may live on. The big boys do too but they shrink drastically.

Yes, my prediction is that the pipeline will also constrict. Clients will still want a guy or gal with a little grey in his or her hair and the bedside manner breaking down the brass tacks but the path to becoming that person will be narrower.

I think we have to be more constructive. The female coded thing is something I feel good telling people to get over. I fully expect that by the time I can retire (if I ever can, God willing) that law will be female coded in a way it was not when I started out. That's what the pipeline looks like and there's no harm in it.

The question becomes what you can do to create mass work at a time when technology is slowly but surely eliminating the demand. Maybe it's FDR style paying people to go out and clear scrub brush. Maybe it's, I dunno, paying people to coach little league. Of course you then have to deal with every dollar being spent on that not being spent on the latest ship killer drone that blows up amphibious landing vessels while they're still out at sea.

Just to add you look at that situation with the longshoreman and port automation. On the one hand those people have good jobs and you hate to see them go. On the other, is it really in the strategic interest of the US to refuse to automate its ports, while China speeds ahead with the technology? It isn't easy stuff.

Yea, on the one hand financialization and globalization have wreaked havoc on low skill manufacturing. On the other times and technology really have changed in important ways.

Over on Yglesias' substack someone shared a rather glib tweet (xeet?) about the lack of upside to bringing back the sock factories from Cambodia. It's harsh but MY isn't totally wrong about that.

While we need to on-shore or friend-shore any number of strategic industries those are probably mostly of the high tech manufacturing variety, and importantly not the type that leads to mass low skill employment with unions and good benefits, etc. like in the days of yore. They're jobs for smaller numbers of people who may still need degrees and/or significant training to operate the mostly automated tools.

So what do you do for those guys? They probably don't make enough for tax cuts to mean anything. Resistance to subsidy is bolstered not just by pointy headed economists but by senses of worth and dignity. It's still not clear to me what you can do for them that doesn't work against creating and holding the other forms of strategic advantage.

Voters can get comfortable with evil, but incompetence? That's a real problem.

Yea it's all good food for thought. Parts 1 and 2 seem like the kind of thing that could even have bipartisan legs. Part 3 I think may he fundamentally in tension with Parts 1 and 2. Constraints on trade for the greater good of our way of life may well be necessary (I agree that they probably are) but the result of that is going to make us poorer in the aggregate, as is re-arming. Not a lot left over to put your fingers on the scale for working families in that environment.

I take it as people may be dumb but it's a bad idea to insult their intelligence. And a guy like Musk just can't help insulting peoples' intelligence. Constantly. And with extreme prejudice.

My read of Cass is he's trying to grope towards a new synthesis of the right of center. From the essay and other pieces I've read by him I think he'd tell the Romneys and McCains that the old world is dead and they had better get used to it. However he still has a sophisticated enough view of geopolitics that he understands that a US that operates totally out of self interest (to say nothing of being totally irresponsibly governed) is a less powerful country. The question I'd ask him is what separates his views from those of, I don't know, George H.W. Bush and if the answer is nothing then are you sure you're actually a conservative, as that term is coming to be understood?

Maybe I need to read him more to get that. I read the substack post on the 3 demands that seemed to me to be premised on the idea that there is an audience for this within the Trump administration. I have not been able to watch the interview with Jon Stewart and (mistakenly it sounds like) assumed it covered the same ground.

Eh maybe...?

I mean admittedly I am not the closest Musk follower but my take on him is that his two big political priorities, construed most charitably, are about institutional and/or economic efficiency and a pseudo libertarian set of social values. These things are both in direct conflict with at least 2 of Cass' 3 big ideas, those being balancing trade with friendlies and coordinated anti-Chinese protectionism across the democratic world.

If you really wanted to give Cass a kind of push you'd say congratulations, you've re-invented the US led liberal world order, just with our allies paying their own freight on defense and being a little less touchy feely on certain questions of values. Maybe also a little more nakedly self interested in our approach to global capitalism. But that's also not really what Trump is doing, by haphazardly threatening tariffs against friend and foe alike and calling into question our ability to lead the kind of alliance Cass says we should. It also doesn't seem to be what motivates Musk.

The ideas are worth taking seriously but the conceit that Trump (or Vance, or Musk) understand or are motivated by them is.. a tough sell. I mean maybe if Rubio was president you could see there being challenges selling some of this in the face of institutional inertia and a fickle public raised on a Steven Spielberg version of World War 2 and the years immediately after but does anyone else in the administration have this kind of vision? I'm unconvinced.

Eh a more witty version of something like:

-The movement now MAGA conservatives have never been principled on any of this, as we are seeing now. It was all a kind of confidence or 'sh*t' test in the handful of places the left totally dominates like academia

-The left has failed the tests in epic fashion in large part by not appreciating that the audience isn't just the person canceled, hecklers vetoed, etc., it's the normies who see it happen, which now includes a multiracial working class

-Being a constructive force for a better tomorrow requires avoiding the same mistake, which probably includes some laying off of the piling on or recounting already thoroughly discussed hypocrisy. Ward Churchill may have been an ass and an incompetent academic but there was a difficult truth to what he said and punishing him for it was wrong.

-You've made the observation that the grey tribe is likely to get a reminder soon of all the things it hates about the red tribe.

I had a long reply that seems to have been eaten. Not sure if it can be salvaged.

I agree with your assessment, and that experience contributes to my politics today.

I think you're failing the sh*t test with this line of reasoning, same as they have been. We either live in a world where people can deal with these kinds of questions, including when they're asked in ways many may deem offensive, or we can't.

I think you give the game away when you ask if I know what 'important rights' are, so much so that everything in your comment before and after is best interpreted as a kind of nihilism, not a real attempt to grapple with the rights or principles in play, on the merits. Even if for the sake of argument we concede that at the end of the day nothing profoundly bad happened as a result of name your incident (and to be clear, I'm not doing that), all it would mean is that left wing or progressive illiberalism is the weaker prong of a pincer movement. Which is something I'd have agreed with well before we started putting the theory to the test.

That was part of it but I think it may have also been an early indicator of otherwise highly obscure academic silliness becoming widely disseminated to non academic audiences via the internet. People like him and numerous pro-Palestinian/Israel skeptical types were in many ways the OG victims of 21st century cancelation campaigns. It's among the reasons that trying to treat everything from FedSoc judges or jurists to conservative provacateurs to just normal liberals who don't toe the line on some issue or another as safety threats was so self evidently a mistake from the outset. Anyone with a memory longer than a nat could see where this was going. People at these places are reaping what they spent 15 or so years sowing.

The irony about the Niemoller quote that's the subject of this piece is itself head spinning. When was the last time someone worked up about the current environment prominently stood up for the rights of someone they disagreed with, just on the principle of the thing? It just doesn't really happen anymore.

Speaking of Arnold one liners this brings to mind 'You're a f*cking choir boy compared to me!'

Still a good one even though it was a 'darker' 90s effort.

One full of and run by f*cking idiots.