State of the Discussion

I always think of the UK as more civilized than us, but they are human too. I'm burning my way through the Slough House series and there's a definite political subtext throughout about politics as cynical, stupid, and dominated by sociopaths. The author also takes frequent swipes at Trump.

President Trump has urged the new Japanese prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, not to provoke China 

The idea that Trump, Trump of all people, urging anyone not to be provocative? It simply boggles the mind. Next he'll be adminishing Americans to eat healthy, no doubt.

I had been aware that Witkoff got rich in real estate. What I had not known was how he got rich.

Basically, while Trump was making money by helping Russian oligarchs and mobsters launder money via New York apartment buildings, Witkoff was doing the same with commercial property there.

Suddenly, what we're seeing from the two of them becomes expliciable. Unsurprising even.

On the meta subject of "what a fucking bunch of clowns", I'm pasting what David Frum has to say about the end of DOGE, and what it has done. I understand that not many here are that receptive to conservative voices, but I like to keep my hand in and see what sane conservatives are saying (I've said before that I still find it incredible to regard the author of "axis of evil" in that light, but times change), so here goes:

I want to open with a few preliminary thoughts about the expiry of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. DOGE was never really a department of government. It had a kind of extralegal existence. It was a creature of the president. But in the opening months of the Trump presidency, it dominated the agenda. It created havoc across the U.S. government and across the lives of many, many government employees and many people who depend on the U.S. government for services. I think, as it expires now, almost at the end of the year 2025, I think it’s fair to render the verdict that DOGE was an almost total fiasco. It failed to achieve its own stated goals of making any impact in government spending. The fiscal situation at the end of President [Donald] Trump’s first year is much, much worse than it was under President [Joe] Biden. Total debt—not that these numbers mean anything anymore, they’re so big—the total debt of the United States is now approaching $40 trillion and will continue to climb through the Trump presidency and beyond.

The root of the problem was that President Trump maintains very high levels of spending, is raising spending on defense, has made permanent the tax cuts that were supposed to be temporary when they were passed in 2025—sorry, 2017. They were now renewed in 2025, and they will last indefinitely. And DOGE and Trump’s big plan to offset the impact of his spending and his tax cuts is his tariff regime, which, first, doesn’t raise all that much money. Second, he’s already spent the money multiple times over: He’s promised to give the money to the farmers. He’s promised to rebate the money to the American consumer. He’s promised to rebate much more than the tariffs are collecting to the American consumer. And anyway, the tariffs are probably illegal and may well shrink or disappear very, very soon. So the DOGE failed entirely in its object. But I think it is worth thinking about why it failed and what legacy it leaves behind.

DOGE failed for three main reasons. The first was it was run by arrogant people who did not take the trouble to understand what they were doing. Elon Musk approached the problem of reducing government spending as a kind of coding error, a problem of computer engineering. You didn’t need any subject-matter expertise. You didn’t need to understand how health-care programs worked or how the Department of Defense worked. Just as a website is a website is a website, so he figured that solving the problems of overspending was solving the problems of overspending. You didn’t need to know anything in particular—=; you just fired people and saw what happened later. So in their arrogance and in their high-handedness, they didn’t bother to learn anything. And so they began cutting wires, metaphorically, and discovered that they were connected—those wires ran important machines.

But second, because they didn’t understand how government worked, or understand their subject matter, what they were doing, they completely misdiagnosed the problem. Government does have fraud, of course, and it has inefficiency, of course. A lot of the inefficiency is there to prevent fraud; that’s why there’s so much paperwork, is to make it difficult for people to steal. But even with the certain undeniable amounts of fraud and inefficiency that there are in government, they’re just not big drivers of the way the U.S. government spends. Most money flows out in direct payments to people, Social Security; or it flows out in direct payment to hospitals, Medicare and Medicaid; or it flows out to pay for the national defense. You have to wrestle with those problems, and the idea that you’re going to find cases of obvious [duplication] of spending or spending that achieves nothing, especially when you don’t know how anything works, that’s just—because they were arrogant, they didn’t study the problem. Because they didn’t study the problem, they addressed the wrong problem. And because they addressed the wrong problem—looking for inefficiency and fraud—instead of actually having to reduce services to people and products, they failed.

But the last thing that they did, and this is maybe the most important, was they broke the law. Under the law of the United States, once the House approves an appropriation, once the Senate confirms the appropriation, once Congress agrees on a budget—or any kind of spending mechanism—and once the president signs it, the president’s people cannot rescind that spending. What Trump was doing was claiming, through DOGE, a power to revoke government spending that Congress had passed and the president had signed. And that’s just illegal. Now, there are some states that give the governor a line-item veto, where, when a budget is presented to him, he can strike this item or that item. And maybe that’s a good idea, and maybe that’s not a good idea. But the president doesn’t have that power, and he certainly does not have the power to rescind the spending after he or his predecessor have signed the spending. So DOGE collapsed in the end because, again, they were too conceited to find out what they were doing; therefore, they did the wrong thing.

But DOGE does leave a legacy, and that is something we need to address. When you think about What did DOGE do?, the DOGE people were, on the nicest reading of what happened, were careless, or maybe something more sinister than careless, so that’s one legacy.
The second is that DOGE did enduring harm to scientific and biomedical and climate research. The cuts made to the National Institutes of Health, the agencies that study the oceans and the air, those are difficult to undo. The people who worked in those jobs are very valuable people. Now, they’ve chosen public service either because that’s what they wanted or because they liked the benefits or because it suited their family life. But once you dispense them from public service, they will find other work to do. And you can’t simply blow a whistle and say, Okay, everybody come back. They have not been idling and collecting unemployment insurance; they’ve gone on to often more-lucrative jobs in the private sector. And it’s going to be difficult to call them back. Or they’ll be redirected from researching the kinds of things that National Institutes of Health do to the kinds of things that universities and other people do, and they’re different. So there has been a deep and enduring damage to the scientific-research capabilities of the United States government.

A third enduring change has been damage to the voice and standing of the United States. Rebuilding the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and other stations, rebuilding the public-diplomacy aspects of the State Department, again, that’s going to be a big job. Many of the important people who had very specific language skills have been lost. The integrity of the service has been compromised. The relationship with listeners in unfree countries who turn to the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, or other stations for information, that has been strained. And most important of all the public-information and public-appearance things that the United States does has been the attack on foreign aid.

The United States doesn’t spend money abroad out of random charity or being a sucker or a dupe; it does so to advance the interests of the United States. And even when it acts in the most purely humanitarian way—when food arrives in a famine zone or flood relief after a disaster—it’s building relationships with people whose governments may defame the United States, but who will remember, When I was in trouble, it was an agency of the United States government that helped me. And that may have some political impact. Tremendous damage has been done to that. Some have tried to estimate lives lost because of the interruption of the flow of aid. That may be trying to quantify something that can’t be quantified. But there’s no doubt that people have been hurt, people have been harmed, the reputation of the United States has been lowered, and this will be enduring.

The last thing, though, and one of the hardest to fix and one of the most immediately felt, has been what DOGE did do was dismantle a lot of the financial-enforcement apparatus of the United States. The Internal Revenue Service that collects revenue for the government, the Securities and Exchange Commission, those agencies were really ravaged. And maybe it wasn’t a total coincidence that the head of DOGE had contentions and disagreements with the IRS and the SEC, and they’re now much less able to enforce, that DOGE’s damage to those agencies has been ratified by the recent government shutdown in the deal to end it. President Biden put about $40 billion over a decade into modernizing the IRS, both so that they would be more responsive to consumers, but also to improve the efficiency of their tax collections. A lot of the fraud in the United States is concentrated where the money is, on the high end. It’s been estimated that a dollar put into IRS collections brings back maybe 10 times, maybe more, in revenue to the government. And all of that has been dismantled. It is much easier to cheat on your taxes. It’s much easier to defraud your investors, if you’re a publicly traded company, post-DOGE than it was before. And again, reclaiming that expertise—getting the IRS people back, getting the SEC people back, rebuilding those agencies from the ground—that’s going to be the work of many, many years, and a lot will flow by in the interim. So DOGE did permanent damage in making it easier for the very wealthy to escape paying their taxes and, therefore, putting more of the onus of funding the government on people at the middle and the bottom.

You could think of DOGE, it seems to me, as a kind of decapitation strike against the executive functions of the United States government, that a lot of the government that runs on autopilot—as the Social Security system does—it continues to function in the way that, after a decapitation strike, the different branches of a military may continue, the cafeteria service may continue to work. But the brain’s nerve that [operates] the system, those were really damaged in a profound way, and in a way that is felt immediately and will last a long time. It’s an example of how the Trump administration, in its claim to make America great, is actually making America weak and little and pitiful. The reputation of the country is less. His ability to collect revenue is less. His ability to enforce its financial laws is less. Its ability to do research, to understand the universe, to protect Americans from diseases, all of that is less—less, less, less. But the deficit, the debt, the spending—more, more, more.

What a fiasco. After all the self-congratulation of the early months of this administration, it ends in, as so much of this administration does, in failure and disgrace.

I'm not sure that Rubio (or his people) is the source of the leak. Given the leak of the second call between Ditriev and Ushakov, I wonder if this hasn't been leaked to Bloomberg from one or more of the European intelligence services. I'm sure that they would rather be dealing with Rubio than with Witkoff and Vance, and they have been a lot more public in their profile since The Ancient Orange One threatened to withhold US intelligence from other NATO members.

I'd trust the Euro's competence over Rubio's.

At first, I thought the conversation was a joke, but here it is (from Cheryl Rofer at LGM)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-25/witkoff-discusses-ukraine-plans-with-key-putin-aide-transcript?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc2NDEwMTcyMiwiZXhwIjoxNzY0NzA2NTIyLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUNkFGR1dLSkg2VkwwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJGMUM1Mzc1OEY5Qjg0MDZCOUJCNzMyODRDN0RBMEY3QyJ9.R55A7wfpKrimqSTKzT8ij6J3HqjPMIFE84iKN_Bp9Q0&leadSource=uverify%20wall

Rofer points out that one question is who leaked it, and it seems obvious that it is from Rubio's camp, because Rubio wouldn't pee on Witkoff if he were on fire. Other is how it was recorded, which gets into questions of spooks and surveillance. State has their own intelligence service, but the current head of the CIA was in Congress when Rubio was a senator. Maybe I should shout vive le petit Marco!

Well, well, so Bloomberg has the following tape:

[phone rings]
Steve Witkoff: Hi Yuri.
Yuri Ushakov: Yeah Steve hi, how are you?
SW: Good Yuri. How you doing?
YU: I am ok. Congratulations my friend.
SW: Thank you.
YU: You made a great job. Just a great job. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you.
SW: Thank you Yuri and thanks for your support. I know your country supported it and I thank you.
YU: Yes, yes, yes. Yes. You know that’s why we suspend the organization of first Russian-Arabic summit.
SW: Yes.
YU: Yeah, because we think that you are making the real job there in the region.
SW: Well listen. I am going to tell you something. I think, I think if we can get the Russia-Ukraine thing solved, everybody’ll be jumping for joy.
YU: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you need to solve only one problem. [laughs]
SW: What?
YU: Russian-Ukrainian war.
SW: I know! How do we get that solved?
YU: My friend, I just want your advice. Do you think that it will be useful if our bosses will talk on the phone?
SW: Yes, I do.
YU: You do. And when you think it could be possible?
SW: I think as soon as you suggest, my guy is ready to do it.
YU: Ok, ok.
SW: Yuri, Yuri, here’s what I would do. My recommendation.
YU: Yes, please.
SW: I would make the call and just reiterate that you congratulate the president on this achievement, that you supported it, you supported it, that you respect that he is a man of peace and you’re just, you’re really glad to have seen it happen. So I would say that. I think from that it’s going to be a really good call.
Because — let me tell you what I told the President. I told the president that you - that the Russian Federation has always wanted a peace deal. That’s my belief. I told the president I believe that. And I believe the question is — the issue is is that we have two nations that are having a hard time coming to a compromise and when we do, we’re going to have a peace deal. I’m even thinking that maybe we set out like a 20-point peace proposal, just like we did in Gaza. We put a 20-point Trump plan together that was 20 points for peace and I’m thinking maybe we do the same thing with you. My point is this...

YU: Ok, ok my friend. I think that very point our leaders could discuss. Hey Steve, I agree with you that he will congratulate, he will say that Mr. Trump is a real peace man and so and so. That he will say.
SW: But here’s what I think would be amazing.
YU: Ok, ok.
SW: What if, what if... hear me out...
YU: I will discuss that with my boss and then I come back to you. Ok?
SW: Yeah because listen to what I’m saying. I just want you to say, maybe just to say this to President Putin, because you know I have the deepest respect for President Putin.
SW: Maybe he says to President Trump: you know, Steve and Yuri discussed a very similar 20-point plan to peace and that could be something that we think might move the needle a little bit, we’re open to those sorts of things — to explore what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done. Now, me to you, I know what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done: Donetsk and maybe a land swap somewhere. But I’m saying instead of talking like that, let’s talk more hopefully because I think we’re going to get to a deal here. And I think Yuri, the president will give me a lot of space and discretion to get to the deal.
YU: I see...
SW: ...so if we can create that opportunity that after this I talked to Yuri and we had a conversation I think that could lead to big stuff.

YU: Ok, that sounds good. Sounds good.
SW: And here’s one more thing: Zelenskiy is coming to the White House on Friday.
YU: I know that. [chuckles]
SW: I will go to that meeting because they want me there, but I think if possible we have the call with your boss before that Friday meeting.
YU: Before, before — yeah?
SW: Correct.
YU: Ok, ok. I got your advice. So I discuss that with my boss and then I come back to you, ok?
SW: Ok Yuri, I’ll speak to you soon.
YU: Great, great. Thank you so much. Thanks you.
SW: Bye, bye.
YU: Bye.
[Call Ends]

So what happens to nationalism if many more people are either moving from place to place or or at least relocating from where they were raised? Does it become stronger among the relatively few who stay put? How do they handle being outnumbered by “the others”? Do the movers become citizens of the world?

Well, you might have the Dubai model with a small number of citizens (roughly 5% in the case of Dubai) and the rest viewing it transactionally. One could scoff at that, because the numbers are so extreme in the case of Dubai, but the whole discourse of "diversity is what makes us strong" is being discarded like yesterday's trash. While moving from one state to another doesn't trigger dystopian images, you start to get a larger and larger group of people who move further afield.

"Openish" thread, so:

I very much enjoyed (on hilzoy's bluesky feed) the comparison of RFK Jnr's "poetry" about Olivia Nuzzi to Vogon poetry

Further to which, Marina Hyde is fun today on the difference between American and English journalists' self assessment.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/25/rfk-erotic-poetry-scandal-america-olivia-nuzzi

lj, since you are keen on Stewart Lee, in case you don't know he is a regular contributor to Carole Cadwalladr's and the other Observer refuseniks' new online publication The Nerve.

In terms of internal climate migration, I think it is important to realize that the US does not have one form of nationalism. My guess is that we have at least three competing forms of nationalism, and the White Christian Nationalist side of things is going to find itself on the move moreso than the others. For reference, we have the maps here at the Public Religion Research Institute: https://prri.org/research/support-for-christian-nationalism-in-all-50-states/

Note that support for Christian Nationalism is strongest in the Southeast, Northern Plains, and the Great Plains states that connect those regions.

Compare this with the map of climate winners and losers at Pro Publica: https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/

My guess is that we will see some migration along the diagonal between these areas as people leave the Southeast and look for something like the "American Redoubt" for their idea of a nationalist utopia, and we are going to start seeing some stark regional divides between WA/ID and MN/SD. Think Ruby Ridge. There's more of that on tap, but the right is now much more aligned with their fringe, so that's going to be more difficult to deal with.

It's one of the things that would make me think harder about settling in places like Spokane, Eugene, or Fargo. Those could become the epicenters for violence fueled by dueling nationalisms in the region.

So what happens to nationalism if many more people are either moving from place to place or or at least relocating from where they were raised?

It depends...

If people are relocating across national boundaries, that could reduce nationalism, because they are not rooted anywhere. Say if they relocate because their job moves.

Or increase it, because they have moved on the basis of "I want to go to this particular place" (vs "I need to leave where I am.") See the immigrants to the US who embrace America to the point that they, or their children, volunteer for the US military.

On the other hand, there are those who relocate within a single country. It seems like they might embrace nationalism, simply because that is the level of group they still belong to. If you relocate from Alabama to Texas, you may not have strong ties to either. But you still have strong ties to the country overall.

But I would point out that, while you feel your new roots are shallow, you are hardly someone who is perpetually moving. (I’d put the threshold for “perpetually moving”/rootless at relocating every couple of years or less.)

We seem to be reaching a point where everyone will be more like me: perhaps not perpetually moving, but moving enough that the idea of being rooted in a place no longer holds. I feel like that inflection point is coming in the next few decades, helped along by the fact that climate will make the places we live so different from what they were. People may not be perpetually moving, but the place they are living will change with enough speed and strength as to make everyone strangers in their own towns.

That is one of the current double standards on the US right at the moment. Russian expansionism is less alarming to many because Russia is a white Christian nation, and the far right in America is smitten with the Orthodox church, its muscular Christianity and patriarchy, and its staunch opposition to LGBTQ+ rights.

China, in the eyes of the US right, are godless asian communists, and thus enemies of Western Civilization.

Meanwhile, it is being reported, Xi has been telling Trump how Taiwan is an inalienable part of China and must be reunited with the motherland. A meeting is being proposed. The Putin playbook is clearly an inspiration...

Those other debts weren’t being enforced by the Russian Mafia.

Doesn'tneed to involve the Russiab mafia. The Russian government has demonstrated its ability to conduct its own enforcement operations around the globe.

"Trump will go with whatever end game in Ukraine allows his family to continue to service Trump Organization debts that are held by Russian entities"

You seem to think that Trump wouldn't just walk away from his debts, in spite of all past evidence.

Trump will go with whatever end game in Ukraine allows his family to continue to service Trump Organization debts that are held by Russian entities. Without that, the family fortunes all go to shit.

The same is probably true for Saudi Arabia and Trump at this point.

It's not just about making money, it's also about whose money is actually backing all of those big splashy projects that they put the family name on.

russell:

How would that embolden Putin? My assumption would be the opposite.

Sorry, that was not clear. I meant if the US stepped back and Europe and UK stepped up, it would nonetheless embolden him. I suppose if PURL were still on the table, it would work for a while, especially if the US continued to supply intelligence. But Putin knows Europe and the UK cannot sustain the delivery of materials by themselves, at least not at this point. IMO, a US pull back in any form will embolden Putin, regardless of how the EU/UK respond.

but at the rate those data centers will swallow up water and warm the planet

doubling compute capacity every 6 months is a hell of a rate.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/google-tells-employees-it-must-double-capacity-every-6-months-to-meet-ai-demand/