Links, May 2025

Plus, House of the Dragon, Season 1 review

I’ll be giving a talk in Berkeley at Manifest on June 7, at 4PM, on my lessons from nearly ten years of forecasting Trump. Sign up here to attend!

1. This is excellent on the “Lost Cause” narrative emerging surrounding DOGE. No, it’s not that they had good intentions that were thwarted. It’s that most of what they said was lies, their theories and beliefs about government were false, and they made no effort to even seek out the knowledge that would have helped them achieve their goals.

This was clear from the very beginning. Federal spending wasn’t going to be significantly cut based on DOGE’s activities, and they couldn’t hope to even create momentum towards substantive change because they weren’t dealing in reality.

Don’t let them get away with the Swamp narrative. I’ve seen on the right that events that we all observed often get stupider and more ideologically self-serving as time goes on. This happened with the 2020 election. A new Lost Cause narrative surrounding DOGE will only ensure that budgetary issues never get solved. We’re not at a point where we have a conservative movement that can be reasoned with in a debate over priorities or ideological disagreements. It’s a movement that just believes false things and therefore can’t hope to ever make rational decisions.

2. Loved this Works in Progress piece on cruise ships. They just keep getting larger, better, more affordable and more efficient because they’re not subject to the same laws and regulations as things like buildings. I can’t imagine going on a cruise because it’s dense living but you’re around people who I imagine are uninteresting. But I can appreciate the accomplishment. Articles like this are a good reminder of how much is possible in a world where decisions are made through market rather than political mechanisms.

Look at these contrasts.

3. History Extra podcast on the unification of Italy, called the Risorgimento. There’s a remarkable artificiality to the whole thing. Major events were the result of French or Prussian rather than Italian victories. Italy remains the most unnatural large European state to this day.

4. Douthat interviews Vance. Painful to listen to. Most Trump cultists are just hacks who don't pretend to be intellectuals; they're playing to an audience of one. Vance of course plays to the same lunatic but also needs to feel like he is taken seriously intellectually. Good for Douthat for pushing him on a few things, particularly immigrant crime, a completely made up narrative that the right is committed to. My favorite part was when Vance claimed that Trump wanted to send American criminals to El Salvador because he was worried about conditions in our jails and thought they would be better if we deported the worst people. I'm sure that conversation really happened.

5. Aella on her childhood, during which her parents followed a program called Growing Kids God's Way. The basic idea is to teach obedience. You hit children, break their will, and make sure that no matter what happens they obey their parents. You make rebellion literally unthinkable, by not allowing kids to consume media where children are disrespectful towards adults and preventing contact with non-GKGW children.

At first I thought that this seems adaptive because it makes parents' lives easier. Then I saw how much work it took to break a child's will and I thought I wasn't so sure. It seems like a lot of work, relative to just letting your kids do what they want and giving in to their whims. I asked Aella though, and she said parenting is actually easier for people like this.

As for the kids, I think that as a social science experiment, it shows the importance of role models and social connections in determining behavior. Things like teenage rebellion and toddler tantrums are by no means natural, but a societal choice we made. Who made the choice? No one really. I think that most of us are just too nice to want to keep hitting kids even when they're crying and that became the new norm.