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Trumpian policy as cultural policy - Marginal REVOLUTION
Trumpian Policy as Cultural Policy Analysis: Trump's administrative actions and policy decisions are primarily driven by a strategy to reshape American culture rather than achieve specific policy outcomes, using controversial decisions to dominate public discourse and shift cultural narratives.
- The article analyzes Trump's policy approach as primarily a cultural strategy rather than traditional policy-making
Key aspects of this cultural policy approach:
- Focuses on highly visible, controversial decisions that generate widespread discussion
- Prioritizes cultural messaging over policy effectiveness or implementation
- Aims to control ideological agenda through rapid, multiple policy announcements
- Doesn't require policies to be legal, practical, or even implemented to achieve cultural impact
Specific examples:
- Executive orders against DEI and affirmative action as first actions
- Proposed renaming of Dulles Airport
- Bill to add Trump to Mount Rushmore
- Tariff threats against Canada and Mexico
- Changes to federal employment structure
- Elimination of Black History Month at Department of Defense
- Targeting of US AID
- Nomination of RFK Jr.
Strategic elements:
- Uses polarization to guarantee at least one-third public support
- Deliberately chooses well-known targets (like Canada/Mexico) for maximum cultural impact
- Creates debates that delegitimize existing institutions
- "Floods the zone" with multiple controversies to maintain constant cultural dialogue
Author's analysis:
- Strategy doesn't require coordinated planning
- Works through spontaneous order of competing interests
- Relies on three factors:
- Conflicting interest groups
- Competition for Trump's attention
- Trump's belief in cultural issues' importance
Effectiveness factors:
- Leverages internet-intensive, attention-based media environment
- Creates disorganization among opponents
- Uses negative contagion to reinforce cultural shifts
- Prioritizes cultural impact over policy success
A quote by Rainer Maria Rilke
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
On Nonviolent Communication
if you say “my boss makes me crazy”, you will indeed think your boss is “making” you crazy. If you instead say “I am frustrated because I am wanting stability and consistency in this relationship” you may then think you can control your level of frustration and clearly address what it is you want. If someone else is making you crazy, there’s nothing you can do. If you control your feelings, you can take actions to change how you respond to causes.
Words can be windows or they can be walls — they can open doors for compassion or they can do the opposite. NVC uses words as windows. Our language today uses them as walls. More on this later.
If I ask you to meet me at 6:00 and you pick me up at 6:30, how do I feel? It depends. I could be frustrated that you are late because I want to spend my time productively, or scared that you may not know where to find me, or hurt because I need reassurance that you care about me — or, conversely, happy that I get more time to myself.
It’s not enough to blame the feeling on the person whose actions triggered the feeling. That very same action might have inspired completely different feelings in someone else — or even in me, under different circumstances!
Incidents like the friend coming late may stimulate or set the stage for feelings, but they do not *cause* the feelings.
There is a gap between stimulus and cause — and our power lies in how we use that gap.
If we truly understood this — the separation between stimulus and cause — and the idea that we are responsible for our own emotions, we would speak very differently.
We wouldn’t say things like “It bugs me when …” or “It makes me angry when”. These phrases imply or actually state that responsibility for your feelings lie outside of yourself. A better statement would be “When I saw you come late, I started to feel scared”. Here, one may at least be taking some responsibility for the feeling of anger, and not simply blaming the latecomer for causing such feelings.
the more we use our language to cede responsibility to others, the less agency we have over our circumstances, and the more we victimize ourselves.
NVC believes that, as human beings, there are only two things that we are basically saying: Please and Thank You. Judgments are distorted attempts to say “Please.”
NVC requires learning how to say what your needs are, what needs are alive in you at a given moment, which ones are getting fulfilled, and which ones are not.
You sacrifice your needs to provide for and take care of your family. Needs are not important. What’s important is obedience to authority. That’s what’s important.
With that background and history we’ve been taught a language that doesn’t teach us how to say how we are. It teaches us to worry about what we are in the eyes of authority.
When our minds have been pre-occupied that way we have trouble answering what seems to be a simple question, which is asked in all cultures throughout the world, “How are you?” It is a way of asking what’s alive in you. It’s a critical question. Even though it’s asked in many cultures, people don’t know how to answer it because they haven’t been educated in a culture that cares about how you are.
The shift necessary requires being able to say, how do you feel at this moment, and what are the needs behind your feelings? And when we ask those question to highly educated people, they cannot answer it. Ask them how they feel, and they say “I feel that that’s wrong”. Wrong isn’t a feeling. Wrong is a thought.
When your mind has been shaped to worry about what people think about you, you lose connection with what’s alive in you.
The underlying philosophy of punishment and reward is that if people are basically evil or selfish, then the correctional process if they are behaving in a way you don’t like is to make them hate themselves for what they have done.
If a parent, for example, doesn’t like what the child is doing, the parent says something like ”Say you’re sorry!! The child says, “I’m sorry.” The parent says “No! You’re not really sorry!” Then the child starts to cry “I’m sorry. . .” The parent says “Okay, I forgive you.”
Note, I think NVC is productive is for friendships and relationships, or anything where connection is the main goal, not for any work or organizations that primarily serve another mission.
NVC involves the following:
1) how we express ourselves to other people,
2) how we interpret what people say to us, and most importantly,
3) how we communicate with ourselves.
Some have suggested alternatives such as Compassionate Communication, Authentic Communication, Connected Communication.
35 bits of advice - Erik Torenberg
This doesn’t mean that everything that has happened to you is a result of your actions. It means that you develop an ability to respond to whatever happens to you, even if you don’t control the consequences of your actions.
It means exerting maximal agency towards the things you can directly change (your behavior), and maximum acceptance towards things you can influence but not control (external circumstances, other people’s behavior).
Our responses typically come from patterns and scripts handed down from our parents and our pasts. We are not hostage to those patterns, we can update them. A pattern that's run through your family for generations can stop with you. Vision is bigger than baggage.
A pattern like anxiety may have been helpful in a previous unsafe environment but is maladaptive for our current safe environment.
Cognitive behavior therapy or Byron Katie’s work helps us get new training data by asking questions like: “are you absolutely sure that’s true? How do you react when you believe that thought? Who would you be without that thought?“ This is great for updating limiting beliefs, of which we have many that are often mostly incorrect and holding us back.
loving people and wanting other people to flourish on their own terms, independent of what’s in it for you—even when it’s at your expense.
Write down a list of what you want in your relationships and the types of people you want personal and professional relationships with and then make sure you are bringing those attributes to the table too. e.g. If you want loyal friends, *be* a loyal friend. Focus on “being” rather than “having”, because you can only control the former, and by doing so you can influence the latter.
We want to get that job because we want respect, autonomy, recognition, connection. But there are thousands of ways to meet that need. Acknowledging this makes you more flexible to what life throws at you, and makes it more likely you’ll get what you actually want deep down. A lot of stress in my life came from being set on certain strategies when if I appreciated what need I was trying to meet, I could have been more flexible in switching strategies.
“I’ll be happy once I hit X goal” may be motivating, but it won’t be true—you’ll just move the goalposts. If this is how you’re motivated now, it’s unlikely to last because at some point you’ll figure out that your pattern is unfulfilling and you’ll stop following it. Then you’ll need to find a new way to motivate yourself. A more durable motivation comes from genuinely enjoying the process and the contributions and the relationships that stem from it.
You can’t be in your body and be stuck in your brain at the same time. The way out of the brain loop is through the body. If you feel feel the feelings it might take a few minutes or hours to pass them, whereas if you repress it it might take months or years.
Keep in touch with old friends more broadly. Call them randomly, even if it’s been years. Keep track of what they care about.
Be able to acknowledge when you are not in a secure place, and be able to reset by working out, taking a walk, listening to music, talking with a friend, etc. Wait until the anger or trigger passes before acting. And never fight over text. And if you ever find yourself in a fight, realize you’re in one and calm down and ask yourself why you’re fighting.
Deposits into your own bank account look like being proud of yourself — contributing to others, gaining competence at something that matters, doing the right thing, keeping promises to yourself and others, and taking good care of yourself.
Track what people and activities and habits make you feel better and which drain you. Track when you get triggered or or when you trigger others and see if you can identify patterns.
Do a weekly audit where you can look backwards and reflect on what brings you closer to yourself or and vice versa and readjust how you spend time accordingly.
Although rewiring is worth doing, it's easier to change your environment than to change your insides. Change your environment & then let the new cues do the work.
If you’re going to offend someone, do it on something you care about. Not on an off hand remark or action that didn’t mean anting to you. If you’re unsure, wait a couple days to see if you still mean it. Usually you don’t.
Grudges are ankle weights on your soul.
If you have extended anger with someone, even if they’re in the wrong, you’re both losing.
Empathize with what needs they were trying to meet through their actions and then either reconcile with them or move on with the levity of being grudge-free.
Try other tactics to get curious about other people instead of righteous. If you look at their childhood photos it’s hard to be mad at them. If you have your hands on your heart it’s hard to be angry at them. If you’re hugging your partner it’s harder to fight with them.
One self-connection exercise when triggered is:
How do you feel? (vent)
How does that feel on the inside? (connect with deeper feeling)
What do you want? (suggest strategy, get action oriented)
What would that give you? (connect with deeper need)
Use language that emphasizes the fact that people can change: Use verbs over adjectives and observations instead of judgments. For example, instead of saying, “X is always late”, say “X has been late the last three times.”
Don’t bring work mode to relationships and vice versa. For work, you want to be efficient, outcome oriented, and prioritize winning above all. With people, you want to be effective, process oriented, and prioritize connection above all. For work you want to be right (accurate), for relationships you want to be happy (connected).
Don’t keep score, your patience will run out. And equality doesn’t matter. On your death bed you won’t wish things were more fair, but you’ll regret that your insistence on fairness prevented you from connecting with an open heart.
everyone has a micro impact on their families, friends, and local communities and we don’t pay enough attention to making it great.
Use things like politics, sports, social media etc as ways to meet or get closer to other people, but don’t use it as something to make you angry or further from others.
Cultivate what makes you unique. The more distinct your path is, the less competition you’ll have, and the less you’ll compare yourself to others because you’re running your own race.
Envision the highest version of your own success and strive to get as close to it as possible while also being happy with wherever you land.
Your past was what you needed to get here (no regrets), and fretting about what will happen in the future bond what you need to prep for it won’t help either
Most ambitious people on their death beds wish they were less hard on themselves. The happiest people are best at focusing on what they can control and not letting past drama or future worries get in their way.
Asymmetric upside opportunities could lead to new relationships or forms of growth. Asymmetric downside opportunities could lead to sacrificing your health or your relationship or your reputation.
Anthropic's Economic Index Findings
you owe it to all versions of yourself
- Multiple selves exist simultaneously across three dimensions:
- Temporal (past/present/future)
- Contextual (work/family/friends)
- Developmental (child/teen/adult)
- Each self deserves moral consideration and ethical treatment
The Season 1 finale of Severance may be one of the best episodes of television of all time.
Fortnite Is the Future, but Probably Not for the Reasons You Think — MatthewBall.co
AI Based Tagging And Collecting | Voters | Raindrop.io
Ladies & Gentlemen... 50 Years of SNL Music | Official Preview
in defense of pretension.
Cozy video games can quell stress and anxiety.
The Real Lie About Online Video Runs Deeper Than Facebook’s False Metrics
I Think People Are Perverts
I hate the embarrassment that people in this country have around art. I hate the word “pretentious”, especially. I am not against skepticism, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. It’s one thing to criticise pretension when it serves to hide a lack of substance, but we have long since lost the plot about what the word “pretentious” even means. It has become a cudgel, a pernicious rejection of the idea that art should “mean” anything at all beyond entertainment. This kneejerk anti-intellectualism that manifests most often among the “let people enjoy things” crowd, who take gleeful pride in their ignorance and condescension towards any art that aims to broaden horizons or break rules. People who treat art like customer service, like an artist is a DJ you’ve hired for a wedding to only take requests.
lookcaitlin
interesting. / esoteric retro images photos and illustrations
PersonalityMap | Explore 1 million human correlations spanning personality, demographics, behaviors, psychology, and beliefs | Generally speaking, do you think that the churches (or religious authorities) in your country are giving adequate answers to people's spiritual needs?
Tool for finding psychology correlations across public studies
Niche Internet#psychology#social#social-impact#surveys#writing/characterization#search#data#stats#research#culture#public-life#biasData Viz Project
A comprehensive collection of data visualization techniques
Video Game History Foundation Library | Video Game History Foundation Library
TI-84 Online Calculator | Graphing Calculator & TI-84 Plus Features
DeepSeek isn't a victory for the AI sceptics
we now know that as the price of computing equipment fell, new use cases emerged to fill the gap – which is why today my lightbulbs have semiconductors inside them, and I occasionally have to install firmware updates my doorbell.
surely the compute freed up by more efficient models will be used to train models even harder, and apply even more “brain power” to coming up with responses? Even if DeepSeek is dramatically more efficient, the logical thing to do will be to use the excess capacity to ensure the answers are even smarter.
ure, if DeepSeek heralds a new era of much leaner LLMs, it’s not great news in the short term if you’re a shareholder in Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta or Google.6 But if DeepSeek is the enormous breakthrough it appears, it just became even cheaper to train and use the most sophisticated models humans have so far built, by one or more orders of magnitude. Which is amazing news for big tech, because it means that AI usage is going to be even more ubiquitous.
DeepSeek FAQ
future competition may be more about cost structure than model capabilities
On Product-Market Fit
You should be selling.
I don’t mean running drip campaigns. I don’t mean running ads. I don’t mean pitching. I mean authentic, meaningful, organic selling. You should talk to the people you want to be your customers and go deep. Find their objections. Find the thing that sparks excitement. Don’t settle for “that sounds useful” - that’s a bullshit phrase that means your idea is garbage. Find a new customer or find a new idea. Find the customer where it clicks, the partnership and excitement is there, and they represent your early TAM. That is selling.
The recognition was we were relying too much on “data” - analytics - and enterprise conversations. They were the easy solutions. Both are easy access. Both are wrong in our case.
I didn’t actually connect that what I was doing early days at Sentry was sales. I was hanging out at conferences, sharing my opinions, sharing beers with my peers. I was giving presentations talking about how we approached Open Source or how I glued some of our database infrastructure together. I didn’t connect it to sales because I wasn’t shilling bullshit. I was selling my values, my beliefs, my expertise. At the same time I was validating and improving Sentry in these organic conversations.
sales and marketing are not the solution to your problem - just the same way as abstract analytics aren’t going to tell you why a feature doesn’t have engagement.
It’s up to the product team - PMs, engineers, designers - to do the selling, to go deep, to be critical, and to sell the product until it sells itself. Your account reps will assist when you get there, but they’re not going to get you to PmF.
tl;dr
Product-market fit isn’t about revenue or analytics
It’s about customers selling your product for you
You can’t outsource finding it to sales or marketing
Focus on your true ICP, even if it means building something that won’t scale initially
SPECIAL EDITION: Catching up on everything we've missed.
Trump is undeniably flooding the zone, but I'm not sure yet how different this is than Trump 1.0. His administration is still beset by widespread leaking, disorganization, some missteps, and signs of chaos. He’s also breaking or testing the boundaries of many laws, which is not a sound recipe for long-term or sustainable change. Signs of disorganization — like the OMB funding freeze fiasco, the tariffs that Trump backed off of after spending days getting Republicans to rally around them, or the IRS inadvertently removing words like “inequity” (of holding tax payer money) and “inclusion” (of a taxpayer ID on a form) from important financial directives — are everywhere. Even more targeted approaches, like the dismantling of USAID, seem to go through fits and spurts (first the organization was going to be shut down, then it was just getting a new director, now 10,000 employees are being told to pack their bags without a plan or much of an organization to get them home, and the attempt to shut it down without Congress might be illegal). Another sign that Trump’s strategy won't be effective: Congressional Republicans are struggling to get anything done so far. It’s unclear what important legislation they’re going to prioritize or how they’re going to advance it, and Trump’s rapid-fire approach seems to be overwhelming even his own party.
Alt-CDC BlueSky account warns of impending data removal and/or loss. Replies note the DataHoarder community anticipated this eventuality.
HIV, transgender care, climate change and other federal websites go dark