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• Tue, 01 Apr 2025 22:21:01 +0000: Comment on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25 by InMD - Comments for Ordinary Times
  In reply to <a href="https://ordinary-times.com/2025/03/31/open-mic-for-the-week-of-3-31-25/#comment-4080304">Jaybird</a>. 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, and I guess a little more self interested in our understanding of 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.
• Tue, 01 Apr 2025 22:18:50 +0000: Comment on A Grudging Concession About Something Trump Did by Dark Matter - Comments for Ordinary Times
  In reply to <a href="https://ordinary-times.com/2025/04/01/grudging-concession-about-trump/#comment-4080295">Chris</a>. The Good: 1) Tariffs on China. 2) What he's done with Israel. 3) Dismantling DEI and understanding it's like opposing someone's religion. The Neutral (or with holding judgement): 1) I'm not going to put paper straw in there because it's a nothing burger. 2) I'm also not going to include cozying up to Russia as a bad thing because it looks like that's going to blow up. 3) I'm also going to withhold judgement on damage to rule of law because that's yet to come to a head... but lots of potential on this one. The Bad: 1) Various tariffs for the sake of tariffs. 2) Mistreating our various allies (this would be a long list btw) 3) Hiring anti-vac people to head up Health. 4) General lawlessness and basically being at war with the judicial system. 5) Hiring people who are incompetent and firing the competent people below them who are needed to carry out policy. 6) General chaos and unwillingness to use governmental tools in appropriate ways. Rather than Musk's group we should have a copy of what Gore did as VP. 7) Getting rid of large amounts of gov competency without any effort to do a cost/value eval on it first (note I would have included bureaucracy reform as a good thing last time) 8) Apparently taking Russian info war stuff as legit information. 9) Going serious Tax-Cut and Spend. 10) General lack of stability. I think he's suffering from some age related dementia. Some of this is chaos of administration transfer, having very new people in their jobs, and a negative relationship with the press. However the overall summation is really bad. He's ripping up decades of international good will, and doing a lot of damage to the gov, and the economy. Whether that also includes rule of law is a work in progress. At the moment I'd say he's probably going to end up the 2nd worst President we've ever seen and he's got an outside shot at #1.
• Tue, 01 Apr 2025 22:06:10 +0000: Comment on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25 by Jaybird - Comments for Ordinary Times
  In reply to <a href="https://ordinary-times.com/2025/03/31/open-mic-for-the-week-of-3-31-25/#comment-4080303">InMD</a>. This isn't exactly the Grey Tribe (though Musk has overlap with them and Thiel is Grey to the bone). Gold Tribe?
• Tue, 01 Apr 2025 22:00:46 +0000: Comment on Open Mic for the week of 3/31/25 by InMD - Comments for Ordinary Times
  In reply to <a href="https://ordinary-times.com/2025/03/31/open-mic-for-the-week-of-3-31-25/#comment-4080298">Marchmaine</a>. 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.
• Tue, 01 Apr 2025 18:33:16 +0000: Comment on Trump’s Most Insidious Scheme (So Far) by David TC - Comments for Ordinary Times
  In reply to <a href="https://ordinary-times.com/2025/03/31/trumps-most-insidious-scheme-so-far/#comment-4080292">Dark Matter</a>. That's a law enforcement agency arresting, for <strong>months or years</strong>, people who not only have not committed a crime, but no crime actually existed at all. They just _mysteriously_ looked at the person and decided they were here illegally. You don't think that's meaningful?