Lostwingman

By that standard the world has been laughing at us for some time before Trump became president.

I think Trump weakening US soft power institutions is a temporary phenomenon.  The reason he's doing it isn't because he necessarily has some ideological opposition to soft power.  For instance, the video that was shown to the North Korean leadership during the Singapore talks dangled the carrot of integrating North Korea into the world economy so they could enjoy the same legitimacy and prosperity that their neighbors do.

The reason that Trump is at odds with US soft power institutions right now is that they are filled with people who hate his guts and want him gone.  There's a reason I've joked about Trump opening gulags; the US government is full of people openly scheming to get rid of Trump.  Their competence is doubtful, but not their intentions.  Trump will do everything in his power to increase the importance of institutions that are loyal to him at the expense of institutions that try to undermine him.  But this state of affairs cannot last forever.  Either Trump will go away, and things like the State Department and various NGOs will resume some of their former importance, or Trump will prevail and large parts of the US government will be effectively restructured.  Either way, things will change.

Yes!  What's so hard to believe about this?  Ever since 1883 the President can only fire the Secretary of State, the rest of the employees of that department are practically untouchable to him.  In fact, it's very difficult for government employees to be fired even by their own departments.  The end result of that is State employees are free to ignore the President.  The only thing keeping this from being obvious is a certain desire to present a veneer of professional normalcy.  The President and the State Department will attempt to make it look like they agree and that they're part of a team even when that isn't true.  Usually this involves the newly-elected President conceding most of their campaign promises.  Remember how G.W. Bush promised a "more humble" foreign policy?  Remember how Obama was going to close Guantanamo Bay?
 
Trump is different because he is willing to feud with the State Department.  And he does.  This is particularly well-documented.

Trump has been trying to get control over the State Department ever since he had Tillerson in charge.  Note the panic and over-reaction.  It's a bloodbath!  Oh the humanity!  Wait, how many employees did Tillerson actually fire?
 
 
...

More recently, State Department officials got caught planning to host an event that would have undermined Trump's Cuba policy.  The result?  The event was "postponed."
 
These sorts of reprisals by Trump and his goons seem utterly inconsequential to State, which employs something like 70K people.  And, in an absolute sense, they are.  But what makes Trump different is that he is willing to push back at all.  This is not business as usual.

What?  No, that's a ridiculous oversimplification.  Real power structures are filled with ambiguity, intrigue, and realities that don't line up with paper org structures.

So, sure, on paper the President is in charge of the Executive Branch and therefore everyone in the US Department of State should click their heels and do exactly what he says all the time because that's what the org chart says.  

Meanwhile, in the real world, it hasn't worked that way since 1883.  Or maybe even 1867.

Ask yourself this; if the President has absolute power over all Executive departments, then why hasn't Trump fired absolutely everyone and replaced them all with his toadies?  The US government did work that way at one point.  It was a terrible way for the government to work because every election cycle that a new party took power, every government employee was replaced with some toady of the new president.  So the Republican Party changed it in 1883 to make the vast majority of Executive departmental workers untouchable by politicians with the conspicuous exception of the cabinet-level heads of the departments, who are a vestigial remnant of the old spoils system.

Today on the internet I learned:
 
Some old British buildings have separate faucets for hot and cold water Some British people cannot comprehend hot and cold water coming from the same faucet;

Go fucking die already McCain. 

It doesn't involve putting people in jail for tweets or denouncing sexual violence victims as racist so it's outside their expertise.

Anybody want to throw up odds that if the Democrats win in 2020 they'll try to increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court?

Abraham Maslow's later work was really weird.
 
 
We briefly discussed this interview on the Discord server before, and I think I did a poor job1 of explaining why this interview reveals so much.  So I will try again.

What makes this piece interesting is not the interviewer.  In fact, the interviewer is so bad at their job that I want to reach through time and space and (attempt to) beat the stupid out of them.  I mean, look at some of this shit:
 

What possible point is there to asking these questions?  Either Brad Parscale was part of a massive criminal conspiracy with the Russians to undermine the American electoral system, in which case he would say exactly what he said above, or he wasn't, in which case he would say exactly what he said above.  What possible purpose could this serve?  I want to know what is wrong with this person.  Brian Blessed wants to know too.
 
Ignore all the parts of the interview that are about this shit.  It's obviously pointless.

Fortunately, the fact that the interviewer was too unprofessional to avoid wasting everyone's time with idiocy did not prevent Brad Parscale from stating what he came to the interview to say:
 

OK, you got that?  Facebook was the centerpiece of Trump's campaign and eventual victory.  It's all about Facebook.  That's what the Brad-man is here to say.  You understand that message?

OK, now ignore that part too.  This is obviously misdirection by the Trump campaign.  Social media services come and go.  By their nature, they tend towards natural monopoly, so only one is really dominant in a given region of the world at any particular time.  But Facebook sits atop a throne made of the bones of Myspace, Friendster, and a bunch of other dead services.  In time, some new upstart will add Facebook's place and add its bones to their regal seat.  There is nothing particularly magical about Facebook.  They have risen and they will eventually fall.
 
Furthermore, there are signs that their inevitable decline will occur sooner rather than later.  The fact that their founder got dragged before the US congress and forced to explain technology to a bunch of senile muppets is one such sign.  Getting the Democrats to commit hard to a theater of war that is already losing relevance would be a very Trump move.

Alternatively, the interview reveals just how incompetent Hillary Clinton's Facebook team was:
 
 
It's entirely possible that the Trump campaign is baiting the Democrats into committing more resources to a theater of war where his side is so effortlessly superior that they would just be wasting their money.  But honestly telling people what his strategy was is so obviously bait that it can't be wise to take the idea that Trump won mainly as a result of Facebook literally.
 
No, what's really interesting about this interview is that it shows how technology will change politics:
 
 
The Trump campaign used, and is using (Trump never stopped campaigning) the power of the eldritch outer god of Evolution.  If you know anything about Evolution and all its manifold horrors, this should scare you.  But it did not scare the interviewer, as they possess that singular trait that keeps mind-shattering cosmic horror at bay: fucking ignorance.
 
 
This interviewer thinks that Brad Parscale might have used black magic mind control, and this prospect is clearly disturbing to her because she is worried that evil men might connive to mind-rape people into voting for Trump.  This is about the worst possible crime that this interviewer can imagine anyone committing.  In fact, what Brad Parscale admitted to is far worse and the interviewer is too fucking inbred to notice.

If psychographics, theoretically speaking, weren't a pile of horseshit and it were possible to mind-rape Facebook users into doing the bidding of an evil overlord, then at least the depravity Facebook users would be subjected to would be limited by the imagination of the evil overlord.  Evolution is, by definition, not teleological.  There is no design behind it.  It just oozes by trial and error into every nook and cranny of the possible.  The possible is a much larger set of unspeakable cosmic horror than the merely imaginable.  The human mind came up with the works of the Marquis de Sade.  Evolution came up with parasitoid wasps.
 
Unchained, self-modifying optimization routines will do awful things that their human minders would never think of.  Read this account of a coder who accidentally created a racist AI that affirmed local bigotry in a language the coder wasn't even fully literate in.  That is the horror of adaptation.  Evolution isn't malicious.  It's much, much worse.
 
This is just the start.  In the long term, the human race is doomed to being manipulated by smart ad-bots into doing nonsensical, debasing things.  Not even cynicism will protect us, no more than the potent insecticide nicotine protects the tobacco plant against tobacco hornworms.  Evolution is going to torture us all for no reason forever and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.  I don't blame Brad Parscale, just so we're clear, but I would like the record to state that Trump was one of the first to enlist the aid of the outer gods in order to secure a political victory.  Self-refining ads will be much, much worse than psychographics, because eventually trial and error will evolve something like psychographics that actually works.  Human attention is up for grabs, and inevitably it will be captured by self-refining artificial intelligence.  AI will figure out how to make ads that are more attention-grabbing and more addictive than gambling and pornography.  If you want a vision of the future, imagine a small orange robot hand grabbing a human pussy - forever.
 
Of course, everyone knew that robots would kill humanity, or worse, eventually.  But a direct revelation on the exact methods they will use is a rare treat.
 
But I realize that not everyone is a connoisseur of robo-eschatology.  So I have saved my explanation of the most exciting disclosure from this interview for last:
 
 
The part bolded above is why it doesn't matter if Facebook explodes tomorrow.  Facebook, Google, the Kroger family of supermarkets; all of them work the same way.  If a service is free, the user is the product.  Services that have created mass databases of personal information have been around for years.  A combination of social networking services and automation are making it possible for political campaigns to take advantage of these databases in ways that they could not previously.  It is now possible for a political campaign to efficiently attack weaknesses in an opponent's coalition that were too obscure and diffuse to attack before.  The traditional political coalitions will not survive this development.

The ability to make targeted campaigns to small, dispersed swing demographics puts long-tail candidates on a much more even playing field with more traditional candidates.  It has already been pointed out several times here that Trump's campaign in 2016-present wasn't so different from Ross Perot's in 1992.  But Trump had, among other advantages, the technologically-assisted ability to get his small hands into crevices that others could not take advantage of.  He has enjoyed several other advantages, like the ability to just shrug off manufactured outrage, to electrify crowds with postmodern Charlie Sheen mantras, and twenty four years for Bill Clinton to lose his edge.  However, this technologically-enabled micro-targeting should be more interesting than these other advantages because it's an advantage that someone who isn't Trump could use.

In short, it's a fulfillment of the prophecy laid out in this surprisingly good Newsweek article from ten years ago.  I have no idea what happened to that author, by the way.  They seem to have been able to write coherent articles, and yet they still worked for Newsweek.  Presumably the management had them executed.
 
 
 
 
 
1. i.e. everyone else made a subpar effort at comprehending my brilliance

Nice.
 
 

And the Supreme Court upholds Trump’s travel ban on countries identified as threats during the Obama administration.

I agree that the majority of the US population won't rise up in anger against this latest outrage, and that in a surprisingly short span it will be only vaguely remembered.  I disagree that this is due to American politics being filled with latter-day Julio-Claudians, although if you are correct I eagerly anticipate full political representation for horses.
 
Here's the deal; the US/Mexico border is fucked up.  It's not just fucked up, it's completely fucked up.  Trump is offering a solution, albeit a... somewhat harsh one.  His opponents are offering... nothing.  The Democrats haven't even cynically put forward an alternative bill that they don't really plan to pass.  They learned their lesson when Trump ended DACA.  Trump likes to highlight issues that are divisive for the Democrats.  If they say anything substantive they will be beaten black and bloody by their own base.  If they say nothing at all, they will be beaten by their own base, but less severely.
 
The emptiness, the lack of long-term memory that you identify is part and parcel of being an anti-Trump politician today.  Those poor bastards sure do talk a lot, but they don't really do anything.  Trump has successfully traumatized all politicians who are not part of his agenda into metaphorically assuming the fetal position and drinking the pain away.  Or perhaps they do that literally.  They do complain a lot, but nobody cares about the complaints of politicians because politicians aren't people and when their feelings get hurt it's funny.  Seriously, supposed anti-Trump leaders are really that feckless.  Their latest master plan is to harass Trump Administration employees in restaurants.  That'll teach 'em!  Trump is surely finished this time!

On the order of tens of millions of migrants cross the US/Mexico border every year.  I say "on the order of" because the thing about undocumented immigration is that it's undocumented, so the error bars here are pretty big and nobody has a crystal-clear view of what's going on.  Remember when your country was having all those refugees from Zimbabwe, who largely ended up stuck in camps because there wasn't much else to do with them?  Now, imagine that half of the population of Zimbabwe crosses your border every year.  Some of them stay, some of them go back.  Some come in seasonally.  The situation is largely driven by economics.

As you might imagine, a completely unregulated, mass-scale enterprise like this leads to a free-market, Libertarian paradise.  It includes all the traditional paradisaical elements of gangsters who prey on immigrants, mysterious mass graves, child prostitution, and weapons smuggling networks that somehow extend to Islamist groups in Europe.  I'm not usually one to say that a situation is so morally outrageous that something must be done, but holy shit, they should probably do something about all this.

Note that the article on the mysterious graves also notes that children were put in detention camps.  Trump is sorta-kinda telling the truth when he says that putting children in cages was the previous administration's policy.  It's just that whenever there was a large pulse of migrants, previous administrations would blink because they feared the bad optics of putting children in cages.  Trump doesn't give a fuck, and ordered full steam ahead.  Or, more likely, immigration hardliner Stephen Miller told them to go full steam ahead.  You may wish to imagine that he swirled a twelve year old Grand Vin de Chateau Latour around a gilt human skull while he did this, but like I said before, I think the Trump Administration folks largely see themselves as men of the people, so it was more likely a mid-grade California prosecco.

Trump's gamble has largely paid off.  Americans are angry about children being separated from their families at the border, but more of them blame the parents than blame the Federal government.  Again, we see that Trump's divide and conquer strategy succeeding generally.

I just... Hahahaha, wow, I have no idea how you can type that with a straight face, man.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5902565/Magistrate-Nigel-Stringer-defended-Morningthorpe-Norwich-burglary-private-justice.html

That pretty much says everything right there. "Government you deserve" and all that.

Yeah, I bet the FBI thinks it would have been for his own good to lose the election, too.

This is a real headline.
 

The New York Times published an article yesterday confirming the United States’ intelligence apparatus was used to spy on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. Here are a few quick takeaways.

If there is one issue that the Repubs and Dems have walked together in lock step over the years, it's genuflecting to Isreal and AIPAC.

No, I am speaking about Libya. There were leaked messages about their plans in Libya. She deserved a jail for being part of destruction of functioning state and rise of human scum (open slave trading and so on) and she should receive death penalty for doing her job and plans totally incompetently.
 
She also was photographed with al-Qaeda PR "reporter", which I posted in Syrian war thread in 2017 IIRC, which is complete fucking disgrace for Americans died in fight against them and people died from their hands in last decade or more. 
 
In short - she is fucking POS of a human and there is sadly no labour camps in America where Trump could put her to compensate with a tree chopping all that damage done with her help.