Obsidian Wings

Your dumpster fire du jour (this time, it's classified!)

by liberal japonicus

I thought that this deserved a separate thread. I'm sure everyone knows, but just to put it out there, a circus sideshow where National Security Advisor, Michael Waltz convened a Signal chat consisting of the three main Cabinet secretaries (in the UK, they refer to the Great Offices of State but for the US, the three main dipshits would probably suffice), Stephen Miller, Tulsi Gabbard and invited the editor of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to follow along. There are too many takes, so here's a thread for your best ones. First,here's the Goldberg piece, which is a gift link from an LGM post by Robert Farley, so I don't know if it still works. He also posted this link to John Ganz' article, which I found enlightening, particularly this:

Anybody who has worked in any organization can recognize that Hegseth is not taken particularly seriously. He responds eagerly and enthusiastically, but a little too eagerly and enthusiastically. He’s trying to seem to be a part of the team, in the middle of a process that has essentially taken place without him: “Agree.” Well, that’s all you can do Pete. He’s clearly the least respected member of the chat. Hegseth is a “central casting” hire: he’s a cheerleader meant to go on TV, he’s not a policy guy.

To me, this explains a lot. Petey wants to play with the big boys, so he makes sure he sends all the deets to everyone, and he doesn't just kiss Vance's ass, he swoons over that. 'yuk, yuk, you tell em, JD!'

Another observation that popped up was concerning the source, Jeffrey Goldberg. This Current Affairs article deems the Atlantic 'the worst magazine in America' and links to this piece about Goldberg that is really stomach turning. He's popped up in a bunch of interviews, and you can see he is struggling to strike the right notes, but after emphasizing how sensitive the information is, he ends up posting the info. I don't really know what he should do, but it is a bit of karma to see someone who has waved the flag at every opportunity be the one who has to figure out what to do with this information. It would be high-larious if he gets prosecuted for revealing classified info.

Anyway, feel free to post your links to other takes.

Why is this a problem?

by liberal japonicus

I had been trying to write an email concerning this Ezra Klein podcast, with Matt Yglesias and Dara Lind, dealing with their discussion of birthright citizenship. I've not been able to pull it together, so I'm just posting my draft here.

Klein and Lind (Yglesias didn't have much to say about it) spent a bit of time wondering about how such a practice could be allowed to take place, with Lind suggesting that there were 'resorts' where people have their children. Here is a chatgpt cleaned up transcript, with some parts emphasized (it's important to note that these aren't the actual quotes, but I think they convey the meaning)

Lind: The birthright citizenship order declares that anyone born after February 19th of this year is not a U.S. citizen by birth if their mother does not have legal status or is on a temporary visa, and their father is neither a U.S. citizen nor a green card holder. The executive order defends a novel legal theory that attempts to change the 14th Amendment's interpretation via executive action.

Klein: The birthright citizenship debate has two parts. One is about children born to people without legal status, which was expected. But they also included children born to people on legal visas like student or H-1B visas, which is surprising. This has been called a "Harris provision," and while it hasn’t been controversial before, it was added here. Matt, what’s your take?

Yglesias: Part of this is about redefining certain groups, like those with Temporary Protected Status or asylum applicants, as "illegal immigrants." While these individuals aren't legally classified as such, the intent seems to be to expand the definition. The order even includes people on routine, non-controversial visas. Trump previously expressed support for the H-1B program, so this broad inclusion is surprising. It signals a deeper hostility toward immigrants from some policymakers.

Klein: Are they including this extreme position so it can be removed later, leaving only the focus on unauthorized immigrants?

Lind: I don’t think so. While there hasn’t been much controversy about student visa holders having children, there has been concern about "birth tourism" — where people travel to the U.S. on a tourist visa to give birth. The practice of getting a tourist visa spending that time at a resort for the purpose having a child during the time has been targeted by the more extreme anti-immigration wing for years.

Klein: Doesn’t birth tourism reveal an overly broad interpretation of birthright citizenship? Even as a pro-immigrant person, I see that as an abuse of the rules.

Lind: It’s surprising this hasn’t been addressed more aggressively. The State Department has the discretion to deny visas and could enforce stricter policies to curb birth tourism without changing the law. This seems more like a policy problem than a constitutional one.

Klein: True, but they aren’t pushing for a narrow fix; they want a broader debate about citizenship itself. This taps into a long-standing shift in Democratic rhetoric. In the past, illegal immigration was treated as a problem to solve, but now unauthorized immigrants are more often seen as a group to protect. This order forces Democrats to clarify their stance on this issue.

Yglesias: Trump has largely won that argument, though Greg Abbott has been key in shifting the debate. Even Biden has acknowledged concerns about unchecked immigration. While this executive order is overly broad, it lets Republicans frame the debate while Democrats push back on the extreme parts. In the end, I think this will lose in court because the constitutional argument is weak.

Klein: Normally, I’d expect cynicism about the courts, but you seem confident here.

Yglesias: This topic has been litigated repeatedly, and the argument that these individuals aren’t "subject to U.S. laws" is legally untenable. Illegal immigrants are subject to U.S. jurisdiction, and the idea that they have some sort of immunity is simply false.

Back when Michele Malkin was a thing, she and her ilk were complaining about Mexican/Central/South Americans pregnant women coming, virtually as they were in labor, to deliver their children in the US and was tied up in the construct of 'anchor babies'. Here is the Politifact discussion when it came up.

Now, three commenters on the liberal side seem to accept the framing that was off in the weeds of right wing fever dreams a few years ago. What happened?

It seems to me that the first thing is that this is intersecting with the first of medical tourism. Wealthy familes want access to the medical technology available in the US. If their kid happens to get a passport out of it, that's great, it gave them more options in a future where you didn't have Trump considering a three front war of Canada, Greenland and Panama.

The second thing is tied to that, which is that parents want to give their kids an advantage. As the polifact discussion notes: "Most of the benefits of citizenship accrue over the much longer term. The child will be able to work here legally once he or she is old enough, said Roberto Suro, a communications and journalism professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in Hispanic issues, and when they're ready for college, they'll qualify for in-state tuition at most public colleges. "It is a hell of a lot of deferred gratification at best," he said."

The last thing is that people tend to create relationships and given that the US has housed such a large, and durable, population of undocumented immigrants, all the better to do the scut jobs that need to be done, it is totally unsurprising that some of them choose to have a family.

It baffles me that the liberals here and apparently a lot of others fail to understand a parent's desire to give their children opportunities. And how they have come to thing that urge, rather than being something that is laudable and made the US an envied society, is something that needs to be squashed. God help us. 

Is malicious compliance what pushback looks like?

by liberal japonicus

in facebook comments (which is the only place, for the most part, I see any political discussions in the wild), I've seen something interesting crop up. Obviously my facebook feed is pretty heavily weighted towards liberal opinions, though I do have some friends from high school who are MAGA types, but more often than not, I'll just snooze them if they go off. So I get a lot of liberal posts that discuss the latest Ubu roi dumpster fire and a fair number of them are about the latest military DEI bullshit. And in those, every so often, a opposite voice pops up and says 'oh, this is just malicious compliance' and that made me wonder a bit.

Wikipedia has this about malicious compliance (emphasis mine)

Malicious compliance (also known as malicious obedience) is the behavior of strictly following the orders of a superior despite knowing that compliance with the orders will have an unintended or negative result. It usually implies following an order in such a way that ignores or otherwise undermines the order's intent, but follows it to the letter.^[1][2] It can also describe a willful act of regulatory interference, for example when a corporation releases a compliant but inferior version of a product in response to new legislation. A form of passive-aggressive behavior,^[3] it is often associated with poor management-labor relationships, micromanagement, a generalized lack of confidence in leadership, and resistance to changes perceived as pointless, duplicative, dangerous, or otherwise undesirable. It is common in organizations with top-down management structures lacking morale, leadership or mutual trust. In U.S. law, this practice has been theorized as a form of uncivil obedience.

I may be overthinking this, but when someone says 'oh, that's just malicious compliance', I assume that they are accepting that things like deleting black medal of honor recipients, the 442d Regimental Combat Team and Navaho code talkers are mistakes and these malicious compliers are liberals in military clothes. An excuse that doesn't get offered is that this is an auto purge, which may be why these folks didn't pop up when the Enola Gay photos and information was deleted.

If this is the case, it reveals some interesting contours. People offering up this excuse are admitting the things listed above are wrong, but it is somehow the fault of people following orders rather than the people giving the orders. And what does it say if there is this kind of subterrrean effort in the military to sabotage these anti DEI efforts?

The last line of the wikipedia excerpt has me wondering. Has it been set out that malicious compliance is illegal? If so, it would be the perfect looking glass outcome: prosecuting people for taking down information when they were ordered to.

homo puniens

by liberal japonicus

I don't really have much time for the genre of 'let's explain why Trump is doing X',  however, I might make an exception for this Ezra Klein discussion with Gillian Tett, which hits a lot of very interesting notes because Tett was trained as an anthropologist, so her take on the mess we are in is very enlightening rather than the ahistoric, personality driven explanations that are so common. So much so that I'll give you links to the two books she recommends at the end.

She suggests the first third of Keynes' The Economic Consequences of Peace because she draws a connection between the Trump vision of foreign relations and the punitive nature of the post WW1 and she suggests Albert Hirschman's 1945 National Power and the structure of foreign trade, which is available through JSTOR if you are at an institution like I am, but because it is an old book, there seem to be a bunch of pdf aggregator sites that have illegal copies.

A couple of points that I pull out from this

-The bond market should be watched. If China stops or slows its purchase of US government debt, it will really signal some deep shit. Japan also holds a lot of US debt (this piece quotes a figure of $1.06 trillion for Japan, and China has $759 billion and has this)

In 1997, after all, then-Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto admitted to a New York audience that “several times in the past, we’ve been tempted to sell large lots of U.S. Treasuries” to make a point. One such episode was the heated auto negotiations a few years earlier.

-Despite the pull quote on the video, "We're back to the beginning of the 1930's", the talk doesn't lean into Trump in terms of progress and reversion, so when she suggests that we are moving to a 'tribute-based hierarchy' that pushes us back to a pre-industrial age and says

It certainly engenders a sense that morality is entirely relative or to be more accurate we live now in an honor-based system not a shame based system and that essentially we're back to something that looks more like tribal leadership in Afghanistan

 

it's pretty telling.

 

-they have some good words for Tyler Cowen's theory that for Trump it is all about cultural power. I guess this blog post is the best distillation of that, though I personally don't hold much of a brief for Cowen, I feel like he is part of a coterie of right-wing observers who flit from topic to topic, always alighting on culture. It's like the old saw about lawyers, saying if you are If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table. Or in this case, pound on culture. 

I know that listening to these videos is not everyone's cup of tea, so here is the edited transcript.

Thinking about systems

I found this article quite interesting, it's about Vision Zero, an initiative which began in Sweden and is being taken up in other countries.

What I find most interesting is that this is a great example of what happens if you change your perspective. I read that New York is trying to adopt it, but it is probably going to remain an outlier. The NYT had an interesting program about one aspect of this:

For years and years throughout the 80s the '90s the early 2000s roads in America were becoming safer and safer for

pedestrians and then something changes around 2009 all of a sudden roads start to become more dangerous year after year to the point where more than 3,000 additional pedestrians died in 2021 compared to 2009 and it's this incredible mystery for a number of reasons one of them is that we don't see anything like this in other industrialized countries.

 

We're number one!

Force de frappe

by liberal japonicus

Russell suggested a new thread around Macron's speech (here and here). The title is the old name for the French nuclear capability, it is now called Force de dissuasion. Whether it will live up to the new name and this pdf from 1965, which details Soviet reaction to this nuclear capability, is an interesting read.

Not sure exactly what Russell was thinking, but I was thinking how things could play out. I imagine there are three possibilities, bad, worse, and worst. Have at it.

A transcript

by liberal japonicus

A thread about that dump Trump and Vance took on the Oval Office rug. To be honest, I've not looked at the video, I think it would make me physically ill. But below the break, I've put in the transcript, which I got from AP here. Probably like everyone else, I've seen tons of stuff on line, and I imagine folks have the same reaction that I had, but I didn't want to pretend that it didn't happen. Anyway, have at it.