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Comment by energy123 | Hacker News Reader

To the populist right, everything is zero-sum, all effects are first order, all effects are immediate, and all effects only impact the parties to a transaction.

Soft power doesn't exist. Iterated games don't exist. Long-term consequences don't exist. Externalities don't exist. Positive sum utility gains don't exist. Systemic effects don't exist. It's all too abstract and cognitively difficult, it's the business of the arrogant intelligentsia.

The problem for them is that reality isn't going to adjust to fit their worldview. The decline will eventually reach people's purchasing power. The laws of reality will catch up to them.

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> all effects are first order

Basically they are mostly below average intelligence. The ability to think about second, third, N order effects is a sign of intelligence which is clearly lacking here. Those in power are leveraging that lack of intelligence in the populist right to execute their larger plan of dismantling the government for the benefit of the super rich.

The scary part is that when the consequences come, these people tend to look for a new scape goat rather than learn anything...

And that scapegoat will be the other party.

It's the previous party, it's a multi-decade grievance. It was the "woke mind virus that ruined us", before that, the economy was going great.

You put this really well. It's been incredibly frustrating to try to understand the mentality of these people, but that's just the problem—there is barely any "mentality" at all, it's easier understood by what they don't consider or understand.

It's worse. They see bad things happen, then ask the question "how do I keep my faith in Donald through this"? (Not rhetorically)

> The problem for them is that reality isn't going to adjust to fit their worldview.

The perpetual problem is that it will in the short term!

It’s just like the MBAs juicing profits by cutting R&D spending — this works every time!

It works, and it works long enough for a few to reap the benefits at the expense of the many.

This will play out over and over until we somehow magically achieve the Star Trek future utopia.

> Soft power doesn't exist

I just realised that per their own stories we’ve got a government headed by folks with extreme daddy issues. I’m not turning this into a Vox article. But perhaps there is overlap between leaders who can’t empathise and whose who admit to having had a trash upbringing.

Yeah folks tend to make fun of it, but from my experience missing or simply broken dysfunctional father figure a massive thing for both women and men that they will struggle to cope with (and mostly fail) during their whole lives.

Well, good thing nobody in a position of power and influence is having 14 kids with different women and neglecting all of them with no backlash whatsoever then.

I've said it before, it's like these guys turned up to study economics, learnt about free markets on day 1, then just went home.

In a free market, Doge would fire Elon.

Agree, voting for the dummy was the soft revolution, the hard revolution will happen...once the damage has been severe or irreparable.

You have put into words exactly my thoughts on this topic.

Most have the same zero-sum first-order attitude to free speech, and couldn't see what's happening now was always going to be net worse for free speech than any controls that could have been put in place to reduce the chance of getting to this point.

MAGA can escape the "laws of reality" as long as Trump's charisma can can paper over the gap between what is promised and lived reality. There will always be another scapegoat, another enemy preventing MAGA from reaching its societal Utopia which is just over the horizon. Trump and his administration are already explaining the economic downturn that the start of his administration caused to actually be a good thing for America. And MAGA is fully onboard with the idea that an economic recession/depression is necessary to clean out all of the alleged fraud, waste, and abuse in the system. And only afterwards can a stronger American economy be built.

I don't know about that, conservatives (well, free marketeers anyway) favour second-order effects in economics, and win-win and all that stuff when it comes to free markets. The trouble is that the populist right is now moving away from free markets.

(It's almost a return to the old setup, back in the days of the Corn Laws etc - free markets used to be a left-wing position while the right was into mercantilism / protectionism)

We don't have conservatives these days, we have right-wing reactionaries.

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