| ▲ | scarecrowbob 5 hours ago |
| Damn I wish the waning of US soft power felt like a positive thing to me; the CIA, along with the DEA, has been one of the more powerful criminal networks on the planet since its inception in the mid 20th C. It doesn't feel like the US gov is moving away from the soft-power/understated action stuff because the US gov is somehow committed to being less evil. It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power. That feels a little horrifying to me. |
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| ▲ | idle_zealot 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power. They do feel that way, but I think they're wrong. Pervasive soft power is a lot better for building stable systems of oppression than more overt shows of force. They're either really bad at, or not interested in (probably both) building anything. I don't think this period of brutal oppression they're gearing up for is going to last very long. People in the US react very poorly to roving bands of State goons. |
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| ▲ | red-iron-pine 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | this isn't 1820 -- most people's perception is via social media, and failing that, legacy media. which is why the big tech bros and the openAI execs donated money to Trump; "kiss the ring". it's why Larry Ellison desperately wants to buy CBS. recent posts show that 1/3 of the US electorate will still, in all likelihood, vote Republican, again, even after everything that has happened. | | |
| ▲ | idle_zealot 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You're talking about that effective soft power, yes. There are some smarter authoritarians still maintaining it, but when things get overt it loses a lot of efficacy. We've swung from 1/2 to 1/3 support for Republicans, despite most people going about their lives more-or-less normally outside of one small city. So that swing is attributed to a failure of soft power. Check out opinions in Minneapolis to see what application of hard power looks like. | |
| ▲ | alpha_squared an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > it's why Larry Ellison desperately wants to buy CBS. I think this specific take is wrong. For example, Netflix doesn't want CNN/cable in the WB deal, so that's still up for grabs if Netflix acquires WB but Ellison still wants the whole thing (studio and cable). Extrapolating to CBS, it was Paramount the studio that Ellison was after, the network piece is just a dying artifact of a bygone era with a handy mouthpiece that has the veneer of credibility. |
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| ▲ | supjeff 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How much do we believe the current administration values "intelligence"? For the most part, the truth is trump's enemy. as far as he can control it, it's better for his to be the only authoritative voice. If he says Australia is full of muslims and bad hombres, he doesn't need the CIA contradicting him. |
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| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > How much do we believe the current administration values "intelligence"? Broadly? A lot. Donald Trump is wickedly smart. So is Stephen Miller. Susie Wiles. Hegseth is an idiot, but he's Chip 'n' Dale to Marco Rubio. (Our planes aren't falling off our carriers any more. And the raid on Caracas was executed flawlessly. That isn't something numpties can pull off.) | | |
| ▲ | AngryData 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What makes you think h is smart instead of a blubbering idiot that Mr Magoo his way through life? All the reports from people who knew him personally had very low regard for his intellegence, and that is even before taking into account his repeated public blunders. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > What makes you think h is smart instead of a blubbering idiot that Mr Magoo his way through life? The fact that he's President. Twice. He maneouvred himself into the most powerful seat in the world. Twice. I'm tremendously sceptical that someone stupid can wind up there like that. (Again, not necessarily intelligent. You don't need to be intelligent to clear the Republican field in 2016. You do need to be crafty.) | |
| ▲ | scarecrowbob 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's certainly closer to my understanding of the guy. He really doesn't feel "smart" in any of the usual sense of the term. It's entirely possible that you can be on the stupid side of Chesterton's fence (to abuse the metaphor) and take it down, causing all the expected havok, and then claim you're excelling at your goals because you just have a sociopathic approach to the world. Sure, picking up Maduro was well executed... and then he has been replaced with (checks notes... ) "the Maduro Regime". Yeah, that -screams- competence. |
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| ▲ | tokyobreakfast an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | People—especially the squares in this business—tend to mistake his unfamiliar blue-collar New Yorker manner of speech at face value and don't bother to look deeper. | | |
| ▲ | notahacker 27 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Or they look deeper and note that the folksy bragging about pretty basic and irrelevant misunderstandings continues into the minutes of meetings his base that laps that stuff up doesn't bother paying attention to, where there isn't any strategic value to dissembling or being mildly irritating to the apolitical CEOs he's supposed to be giving bland assurances to, and conclude the emperor actually doesn't have any clothes. There are, of course, smart and well connected people that want someone whose extraordinary talent is being the centre of attention occupying the centre of attention. |
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| ▲ | protocolture 20 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Donald Trump is cunning, but you wouldn't make a Fox president either, it would just screech and shit all over the oval office too. | |
| ▲ | mynameisash 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Donald Trump is wickedly smart. I'll grant that he has achieved success via some amount of cunning (often via threats), but "smart" is decidedly not a term I would ever apply to him, and I'm not sure how anyone could reasonably think this given the myriad facts otherwise. | |
| ▲ | red-iron-pine 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Donald Trump is wickedly smart. wut. this is a joke, right? Stephen Miller... maybe. He's mostly evil and shiftless, and willing to utilize any and all tools. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > wut. this is a joke, right? No, it's not. He's smart. His political instincts are well honed. And he's good at surrounding himself with strategists. I'm not sure he's wickedly intelligent. And he's getting old, which cuts into his cleverness and memory. But his wit is quick (recall the Republican debates), retention used to be spectacular and has achieved things which you simply cannot do by being the bumbling dope he's sometimes characterised as. | | |
| ▲ | adventured 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The bumbling dope is the default go-to characterization by the left, they always target intelligence first no matter what. Bush 1 was a dope. Dan Quayle was a dope. Bush 2 was a dope (until they decided they liked him). Sarah Palin was a dope. Trump is a dope. Vance is a dope. The left views intelligence as a top tier prize, so they start by first trying to dismantle someone's standing on that. How likely is it that all of those people are actually stupid compared to the typical voter? Zero chance. They're more likely to be considerably smarter than the typical voter, above average intelligence across the board. Are Bill Clinton and Obama smarter than Trump? Yes imo. But you can't play at nuance in the propaganda game though, so the left always settles on: my opponent is stupid; and they push hard in that direction. | | |
| ▲ | frumplestlatz a minute ago | parent | next [-] | | I’m firmly on the right, but W Bush and Sarah Palin were absolutely bumbling dopes. Dan Quayle hitching his wagon to the moral majority and inadvertently setting the stage for the neocon right? Maybe not a bumbling dope, but absolutely a dope. | |
| ▲ | amalcon an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don't remember people thinking HW Bush was dumb. Or McCain, or Romney, or Ryan, or McConnell, or even someone like Gingrich. Quayle, Palin, W Bush (very incorrectly, dude was wrong and/or lying about a lot of stuff but he wasn't dumb), and Trump, sure. The thing those people have in common is that they have unorthodox public speaking styles. Especially Trump. It's kind of a pro wrestling adjacent style -- lots of performative bombast, specific tropes referencing cultural touchstones, I'm not trying to change anyone's mind on any substantive issue. I'm just trying to put myself into a particular box in the viewer's mind. It can be effective, but when it's not, it comes off as buffoonish. | |
| ▲ | gardenhedge an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Bill Clinton who got caught in a sex scandal... smart? | | |
| ▲ | 9x39 31 minutes ago | parent [-] | | And Noam Chomsky was deeply connected to JE and his island, which is a significantly larger scandal. The point is that intelligence is orthogonal to, say, lust or many other trappings of power. |
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| ▲ | scarecrowbob an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | A willingness to break norms could be genius, or it could be a sign that the person doing that simply doesn't understand why those norms are in place. I think you're both correct to note that attacking the intelligence of a person is both meaningless and a pretty normal liberal tactic. At the same time, one way of understanding the shift from hard to soft power is the same as understanding Trumps "intelligence": he's funny and knows how to work a crowd, but it doesn't functionally matter how smart he is because he has so much organized power and thus resources that he doesn't -have- to be smart. Being rich and sociopathic is probably way more effective than worrying about the long games, and everything in sir hoss's life probably makes that fact obvious. In that same way, my horrors about this shift in power could also be stated as a worry that the folks running the US gov don't feel like they need to have any subtlety or mask on their power because they are more comfortable using dumb, brute force. And they might be correct in that assessment- they might not need to be intelligent if they can be brutal enough. Good luck to them and "game on" I guess; 3k troops versus 150k activated but as yet non-violent folks in Minneapolis will be an interesting bit of data for sure. |
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| ▲ | stonogo 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | ah yes, a wickedly smart man who appoints an idiot as secretary of defense. completely consistent analysis here | |
| ▲ | esseph 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Donald Trump is wickedly smart This is the exact opposite of what has been said about Trump by his "friends" in the Epstein files. |
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| ▲ | exe34 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It gives me hope that Trump will replace the top generals and a few layers down with yes-men who will spend the military budget on coke and then the US will be less of a threat to the rest of the world. Another Russia is not a good thing, but it's better than a mad man at the top of the most powerful military in history. | | |
| ▲ | simonh 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What were getting is another Russia with the full military and economic might of the US. | | | |
| ▲ | georgemcbay 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > It gives me hope that Trump will replace the top generals and a few layers down with yes-men who will spend the military budget on coke and then the US will be less of a threat to the rest of the world. I realize this is kind of a joke, but... The US will continue to be the most powerful military in history for a very long time even with a highly incompetent top-layer. It will just have less people with the wisdom and power to push back on the president's worst impulses. Unfortunately(?) there's not enough coke in the world to put much of a dent in our current military spending (which they hope to increase even further to 1.5 trillion dollars in 2027). And if the price of coke ever did become a problem, well the US now believes it reserves the right to the entire western hemisphere which includes Columbia... On a more serious note there is also likely to be a rapid burst of nuclear proliferation across the globe as everyone else adjusts to this new reality sans the traditional post-WW II world order. On the current Trump path the world is going to get far more dangerous and chaotic, not less. |
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| ▲ | epsilonic 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| We're definitely going in the direction of "might is right". The "palantirization" of data stores (not just those for surveillance) is going to be an enabler of the "hard power" you're alluding to. This whole platform is probably a dragnet for identifying intelligent people with dissident views. Expect things to get uglier and stranger as well. |
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| ▲ | scarecrowbob an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I mean, my hope is that the kids at the CIA read all my dumb postings here, report them to their old-men quattos, and try and flip me :D But I'd think that the folks with their hands on the big levers probably care less and less about that kind of thing; I'd imagine it's harder and harder to find the Foucault readers who might even care to collect and monitor dissident views because the newer folks figure all us stupid nerds will show up on flock and get nabbed once they've run out of brown folks to kidnap. | | |
| ▲ | epsilonic 5 minutes ago | parent [-] | | They will have machines do that for them, curating collections of dissident files that are categorized by various propensities, then proposing among a range of soft to hard interventions. This is why we're seeing an uptick in the construction of AI data centers (e.g. STARGATE); it's going to get ugly very soon. And before you know it, your social mobility will be dictated by how well you adapt to the narratives they endorse. The fact that they (i.e., the elites) have gotten away with so much depravity, and are now revealing it publicly, emboldens them further to commit the type of oppression that I foresee happening. What we're experiencing now is ritual humiliation at scale. |
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| ▲ | exe34 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Project Insight. Hydra was growing inside S.H.I.E.L.D the entire time! | |
| ▲ | Revolution1120 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Power also needs to be justified. Hitler is an example of "unjustifiable might." And all fools who want to promote Darwinism need to know that causing one's own extinction is far easier than causing one's own evolution. Evolution is merely a survivor bias, and Darwin's On the Origin of Species didn't analyze the patterns of extinction.The evolutionary pattern should be that only when you yourself are perfectly rational can you eliminate the irrational enemy. Some people are inherently irrational, yet they try to use Darwinian "survival of the fittest" as their belief to eliminate rational beings, ultimately leading only to their own extinction. This is what happened, is happening, and will happen.Might makes right is not an Rights; Rights are Rights. Might is might, and Right is Right. The statement "might makes right" is rife with literary folly. | | |
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| ▲ | gunapologist99 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| But in some ways publishing your opinions on other countries might be the equivalent of sharing your hand at the poker table, right? So this arguably strengthens the soft-power method as well. (OTOH, to your point: how you describe other countries is itself an exercise in soft power, so your point is well taken in that respect.) |
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| ▲ | goda90 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power. Soft power is a hard power amplifier though. I don't think it's incompetence and ignorance about how to maintain and use power, I think it's intentional deconstruction of power so that others can fill the vacuum. |
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| ▲ | learingsci 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| One can view the defensive realist perspective as another application of the 80/20 rule. It’s all economics. Debt determines many outcomes. |
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| ▲ | Revolution1120 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Shouldn't the DEA be the weakest agency? Now that the drug problem requires the involvement of the Department of Homeland Security, the War Department, and the U.S. military, shouldn't the DEA be shut down? |
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| ▲ | mrexcess 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [flagged] |
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| ▲ | iwontberude 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It’s the incompetence and low-intelligence of our leaders that scares me most. We need actual clever people in office coming up with decentralized systems that work rather than the mentally deficient demagogues and liars coasting along collecting rent. Californian independence is the best way forward for us. |
