I don't think the poster was saying that Orban wasn't bad, just that Cato saying something about it isn't particularly signifying.
Also... neoliberalism is basically what you think of when you think "right-wing billionaire word salad" from like 6 years ago. Neoliberalism is the the idea of elevating "the market" to the absolute primacy of... everything. Neoliberalism is coined relative to the traditional "liberalism", specifically the part of traditional liberalism that supported free trade and marketization.
The Cato Institute was literally founded by one of the Koch brothers, and has been staunchly neoliberal/libertarian. It stands in opposition to many of the policies of the current far-right/ex-right movement, because those policies call for a fusion of market and government that actually is fundamentally incompatible with neoliberalism. Furthermore, we should be aware that the populist surge that is at least partly powering this surge is itself a reaction to the conditions that neoliberalism (and institutional capture) has created.
Yes, and the Overton Window has moved so far to the far-right, that my largely progressive ass is agreeing with Cato in this case. Yet, here we are, due to the content of TFA being based on fact.
he's chickened out of getting regime change primarily.
in terms of shifting war goals, he's chickened out on getting back to the status quo from before the war.
rather than chickened out, the US is the sound loser of this war. the best outcome the US can negotiate for now is worse than what they could get before the war
Meanwhile Iran continues to blow up oil prices which is devastating for the entire world's economy, to say nothing of the USA's economy and especially Trump's popularity.
How is it backing down when his threat was we’d do it if they didn’t agree to open up the strait, which is now open?
I don’t like the way he does things but we’ve seen Trump’s playbook enough to see what he does. Big threat, followed by the US getting some sort of capitulation from it. He then doesn’t follow through with the threat.
That’s not chickening out. That’s just negotiating with a big stick.
The strait is not open, Trump is pretending it is, to save face. Iran is charging $2M per ship, which will net them $90B and that is significantly higher than their oil revenue ($60B). Plus they get to keep their enriched uranium. Yes they lost some buildings and bridges but the strait fee is enough to rebuild. Iran is in a stronger position now than when the war started. TACO Trump lost the war.
Iran wants to charge $2M per ship as part of it's ceasefire conditions - which will almost certainly be rejected since that would impact every ship/nation traversing these waters. Waters that are not owned by Iran.
> Plus they get to keep their enriched uranium.
There's 0% chance of that happening.
> Iran is in a stronger position now than when the war started.
All of Iran's senior leadership are dead. Most or all of the "second-string" leadership is dead. All but their ground-force military is destroyed.
It's stunning to me, that people still do not understand Trump's one-and-only playbook. He literally published a book about his one-and-only strategy all the way back in 1987 - yet people still freak out when he makes big demands then settles for more realistic options. The guy literally has used the same strategy over and over, and everyone acts like it's the first time every time.
It's also stunning to me the very same people that were losing their minds about threatened events immediately switch into "TACO" mode when those events don't happen.
In this situation, Trump made wild threats and demands if Iran didn't agree to a ceasefire. Iran initially rejected but then some 6 hours later accepted. The one-and-only playbook strikes again.
What is stunning here is that some people think Trump has a reasonable strategy. What works in the business world is not the appropriate approach when working with other nations. When you threaten to kill an entire civilization, that damages US's reputation, regardless of what that threat accomplishes. Today the Pope is admonishing us and our closest partners such as UK is shunning us. US is now seen as a shit country on the level of North Korea. TACO Trump needs to be removed from office ASAP.
Even as Trump was threatening to wipe out Iran’s civilization unless Tehran agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, he was actively looking for a way out of the crisis. Trump then got Pakistan to post a fake plea to himself on X [1]. A few hours later Trump accepted the fake plea.
I mean, neither one did what they said they would do, if they had both done what they said they'd do, I guess we'd have nuclear war, so. (To the extent that you can't get anything consistent out of what Trump says he will do it's literally not possible, because he constantly contradicts himself.)
If the madman act had worked there would've been some significant changes before the bombings last year. Or, ok, maybe you gotta show them you're serious. But the madman act would at least then prevent needing to attack for weeks this year. Oh, nevermind. But... third time's the charm, right! He's definitely gonna get what he wants this time?
The people running the country, killing protestors, etc, aren't trying to "win" in the same way Trump is. It's easier to avoid regime change than it is to cause it from air strikes.
We must have a completely different definition of 'it worked'. The only thing that worked here is that he managed to get Epstein off the front pages, but that will only work for so long. Oh, then there is Cuba of course.
Why do you still believe there's any crime at all that could somehow turn around the people who support Trump?
Do you really think, after over a decade of buying into a cult, they will suddenly give up after seeing slightly better proof of things that are already widely known?
It's delusion to think this has to do with Epstein. Israel committed to this war Oct 7th, and the Trump admin jumped in for worse reasons: They thought they were special and could win. They thought they would be seen as strong.
Why do Trump friends own so much news and media if Trump believes he has to make up a war to distract from Epstein?
No amount of preachers raping kids has stopped fundamentalists christians from supporting their institutions that enable such activity. They are some of the same people who support Trump. They don't care if he personally raped a kid. "The ends justify the means". 2A folks support him even though he has directly said he wants to take guns from people without due process and even though he said Pretti should not have brought a gun to a protest, something that Kyle Rittenhouse supporters probably should have a problem with.
They don't care. The ends justify the means. They've never cared about the actual person involved. Everything they say in defense of him is post-hoc rationalization and entirely a front. They do not care.
The 12 D chess explanation, people still believe this?
This whole thing is a debacle. Trump was manipulated by his betters into engaging a war he doesn't understand at all [0], and while flailing he just reached for the most insane threat he could imagine.
The madman theory ironically actually requires a sane and competent person to perform the bluff, [1] which is not the case here.
That is certainly a favorable interpretation of events. I don't buy it. I think there's more evidence that he's actually an erratic, compulsive liar than some master strategist. What great deals has he secured for the US?
it really seems like the US is just ceding to iranian terms. the US cant solve the hormuz strait problem militarily, and so it has to come to the table
"I will end your civilization" is not credible. He'd lose a war powers vote and likely be removed if he even started down that path. To say nothing for the logistical impossibility.
He's not doing some Scott Adams master persuader nonsense. He spent a month being ignored by his counterparty so he just kept amping up the rhetoric until he was threating actual genocide. With human shields placed around the infrastructure he promised to attack, the president desperately begged Pakistan to broker a ceasefire with two sets of terms.
The absolute cost isn't the problem, it's the value that we're getting from it. SLS and Artemis are both incredibly expensive and ramshackle programs, and regardless of how bad the rest of the USG might be in terms of their cost, or value, if you are a true space fan and a true American space fan, you should want this little corner of humanity to hold itself to a higher standard.
Acceptance of over costing and under delivering is exactly why the US is stuck with SpaceX as its prime space launch provider. It's only through the miracle of the vanity of billionaires that there's even a realistic second choice (Blue Origin) that might develop.
It's also this type of attitude that let's us be in a situation where we honestly don't know how well the heat shield will work on reentry (SLS launches are so expensive, and so slow to build and prep to launch, that we cannot fit in a uncrewed mission between 1 and 2 to test or validate fixes or models).
If Artemis as a program succeeds, it will be despite the incredible graft, pork, and ass covering, not because of it. I want Artemis to succeed because the achievement will be beautiful and amazing, and I want everyone to be safe and sound. I want Artemis to fail, to force a reckoning. I still believe that America has great things to offer to the world, but it's not going to be able to do that by muddling it's way through and cobbling together random pork filled programs into a vaguely inspiring shape.
The goals it to fly often - adding a SLS launch to 2027 and a second launch to 2028. This drops the cost-per-launch, which is mostly fixed. It redoes SLS to make it less expensive and more capable. It moves the lunar space station down to the surface of the moon.
And it's budgeted at $10B/3 years, which fits into NASA's budget.
Isaacman took the Artemis program and fixed it. The reckoning came, and it's looking good.
There's a lot of potential in the announced changes and what SLS/Artemis might be able to become. This shouldn't prevent us from being critical of what SLS/Artemis most definitely has been for the previous 10-15 years.
And don't be fooled about the SLS launch cadence. As recently as summer 2025, Artemis III was still a nominally a 2027 manned lunar landing (https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2025/08/18/nasa-begins-p...). It got moved to a 2028 manned lunar landing in early 2026, before being converted back to a 2027 manned test flight.
The plan for SLS also does nothing to make it more capable (though hopefully less expensive). The cancelled exploration upper stage is being replaced by Centaur V, which is a less powerful stage. Isaacman refuses (I think rightfully) to really pin down on if there a future for SLS past Artemis V. If Isaacman chooses to cancel SLS after Artemis V (which I think is a defensible course of action), then SLS would represent a ~17 year long program that cost at least 41 billion dollars that netted 5 mission launches.
And characterizing it as "moving the lunar space station down to the surface of the moon" is... kinda falling into the trap. Lunar Gateway was supposed to launch ~2028 (along with Artemis IV - from the era where Artemis III was the first lunar landing). Gateway was a gongshow, and was delayed, and now cancelled. And now the new plan says the habs (the part that people think as an actual base...) happens in Phase 3 starting in 2033. The sort term elements they are trying to reuse from gateway into near term (think ~4 years) base projects are very "ancillary".
It remains unclear if NASA will infact be able to up the launch cadence of SLS to meet the double 2028 launch requirement. While it was clear that Gateway made... very limited sense for great expense, and the new plan is certainly ambitious with what I think is a stronger value proposition, it's also basically exactly as pie in the sky as gateway back in 2019.
The fact that I am doubting NASA's ability to execute now, is the very cost of SLS (and friends).
> then SLS would represent a ~17 year long program that cost at least 41 billion dollars that netted 5 mission launches
SLS will never be worth it. But I'd discount from that price tag the continuity benefits of keeping the Shuttle folks around, and aerospace engineers employed, across the chasm years of the 2010s.
Yeah, it’d be really nice if we could somehow express the strategic capabilities maintained in these discussions. Because on the face of it, SLS looks terrible, but paying that much to maintain the national capability to make something like the shuttle and SRBs feels reasonable.
Kind of similar to farm subsidies and the strategic implications there.
> paying that much to maintain the national capability to make something like the shuttle and SRBs feels reasonable
It’s reasonable to pay something. I’m unconvinced $41bn is the correct amount.
> Kind of similar to farm subsidies and the strategic implications there
There aren’t many. Countries in which farmers aren’t swing voters don’t have farm subsidies. I’ve been looking into buying some farmland and just collecting CRP on it, for example.
> SLS launches are so expensive, and so slow to build and prep to launch, that we cannot fit in a uncrewed mission between 1 and 2 to test or validate fixes or models
If they’d wanted to they could have launched an empty Orion crew module into LEO on another, cheaper, rocket and tested re-entry. The crew module by itself is less than ten tonnes.
How would they get it up to the required reentry speed for it to be a valid test? They already know the heat shield works for reentry at LEO speeds. That's not where the problems occur.
For the last 20 years NASA has intentionally run their Commercial Crew Program, which has the stated goal of developing/fostering/funding the development of commercial providers for launch vehicles.
They, by plan they explicitly laid out and implemented, decided to rely on American commercial providers. And that's what they got. And in doing so, the program ended up producing the most prolific/successful launch vehicle in history.
>> It's only through the miracle of the vanity of billionaires that there's even a realistic second choice (Blue Origin) that might develop
Yes, this is another company which the NASA commercial program explicitly funded in order to get them to develop another launch vehicle.
SpaceX is an amazing success story, both as a commercial story, and as a story of government-industry cooperation. NASA should be proud and commended for fostering SpaceX.
The question is why does SpaceX stand alone? Why did ULA stagnate? Why can't NG make SRBs that don't have nozzles that fall off? Why can't Betchel build a launch tower on time? What is it about government contracts in these other areas that led to all of this under performance?
The US benefits by having SpaceX around. It would benefit even better by having many SpaceXs around.
Oh, and also I believe it's generally understood that NASA provided very little funding for New Glenn. They gave BO a lot of money for HLS, but that's relatively recent (2023). New Glenn has been in the works since 2013 and was mostly bankrolled by Bezos, with some USAF/DoD money kicked in.
100%, and something that is underappreciated and often taken for granted nowadays, especially on our little forum here.
>>> It would benefit even better by having many SpaceXs around.
That made me chuckle, sounded to me a bit like "our house would benefit from having a few cats around". Perhaps the reason why there aren't too many SpaceX-like companies around is that it's truly among the hardest companies to ever create.
If we're going to do public/private cooperation, we still need the whole competition thing.
If we don't have it, either we're subject to monopoly, or just a State owned company, at which point, why not just cut out the middlemen and go full Nationalized?
ULA is the old guard made from Lockheed and Boeing. SpaceX is the snappy upstart moving fast and breaking things. Having the freedom to fail with experiments is a totally different methodology from any failure seen as very bad. SpaceX has never been involved in loss of life. If they ever have that happen, I'd imagine they'd be forced to stop moving as fast and quit breaking things.
Big space stagnated because they could. Their friends in Congress directed them lots of money and lots of political cover, and they both profited handsomely. Why would they change? They never had so, and I might argue that they still don't. Cost-plus contracts, years spent in expensive consulting and planning, all these mean they make money whether they go to space or not. Every five or six years, they trot out a "new" plan that purports to solve all the problems of the old plan, with exciting presentations and hired speakers, and the then-current administration sees a way to drum up political support, and the lobbyists and Congress see a way to make even more money and political favors.
And now it's over 50 years since we last landed on the Moon.
No no no no, I can't let that go. Sending astronauts around the moon has nothing to do with "knowing more about the moon". We don't need people up there to observe the moon. In fact, it's a lot easier and better to have sensors go there and automatically make measurements (e.g. pictures).
Now thinking about Mars, sending astronauts there is actually a net negative for science because it risks contaminating Mars.
We send astronauts there because it's cool, period. Science has nothing to do with it.
This FAQ from the NASA website seemed particularly intellectually dishonest:
>Why do we need astronauts to view the Moon when we have robotic observers? Human eyes and brains are highly sensitive to subtle changes in color, texture, and other surface characteristics. Having astronaut eyes observe the lunar surface directly, in combination with the context of all the advances that scientists have made about the Moon over the last several decades, may uncover new discoveries and a more nuanced appreciation for the features on the surface of the Moon.
I don't think its meaningful to talk about commercial/diplomat as such clear categories at this level.
Bypassing dollar clearing is only really a commercial concern because it is a political/diplomatic concern.
Diplomacy is the act of non-violent interactions between countries. Commerce is (generally...) a non-violent form of interaction between countries. High level diplomatic actions enable commerce (of various forms and levels), while commerce creates incentives for diplomacy, and creates the strength for a party to perform diplomacy.
Western reflexes towards isolationism comes from two factors:
1. Long-term backlash against unchecked globalization. Every western country has to come to grips with the long-term impacts of the deindustrialization that globalization has enabled - this impacts their domestic societal stability, their long-term economic growth, and their ability to act internationally and independently.
2. One particular western leader (who happened to come to power, at least partly riding the wave of the backlash above) has accelerated this trend by taking the possibility of trans-Atlantic (+plus a few Pacific trends) tradebloc to form "globalization lite" as a middle ground solution (honestly, I have no idea how viable this would have actually been), and took it behind the shed and shot it, and then burned the corpse.
Globalization was bearable in part because America did infact run the game, and tended to run the game reasonably well. US aligned nations could all see China growing in strength, but they all figured that as long as they played their role and played nice, that when the time came, they could join the US in whatever new game it wanted to play, or join the US in helping push back. What they perhaps did not count on was just has careless America could be, or that America would want to stop playing with them at all.
Towards your point on confidence and trust. As others have pointed out, Trump has also violated trust in all sorts of ways. Trump delights in norm and trust breaking, as a form of dominance display - both as meat for the base, but also to satisfy his own impulses. But perhaps worse, I think a lot of people are now also calculating that Trump could easily misuse or violate trust without really knowing it. Iran should have clarified to everyone that the Trump administration is willing the act on deeply flawed (or perhaps absent) second order (or even move-countermove) planning.
The Iranian's regime's minimal goal is regime security. To that end, it aims to apply maximum pressure/cost on Israel/US, and hope that they will relent at some point. Iran has no other means to actually cause the Israel/US to stop (as in, it lacks the ability militarily deter or defeat).
Iran recognizes that it is not just the actual damage, but the credible threat of damage that incurs pressure/cost. For example, there are piles of ships holed up in the Gulf - Iran has the capability to strike at them, but they don't need to. Publicity is part of magnifying the threat.
Iran likely lacks the capability to actually assuredly destroy any single target of its choosing. Iran instead likely has the capability of destroying maybe 1-10% of targets that it actually chooses to engage. However, it can hold hundreds of targets at threat to try to ratchet up the pressure. In addition, by casting an ever wider net of claimed targets, when it does get around to attacking, it's more likely to be able to construct a narrative of "calling their shot".
a) Rise of alternate forms of organizing trust. People distrust government or other organizations, and turn to alternative forms of organization and trust.
b) Rise of digital wallet/transfer systems that are fundamentally about charging for throughput/withdrawals. The article mentions that banks are restricting withdraws - presumably because banks need deposits to stay liquid. Whish on the other hand doesn't care - it makes money as a % of each transaction.
The events of the last year certainly have a role to play, but the overall effect is just the result of trendlines that have been in play for quite a while.
I think the initial catalyst for this was when the US/Biden arbitrarily removed Russia from SWIFT post Ukraine invasion. Whether people agreed or disagreed with that decision isn't really material to the discussion, the fact remained that the west decided to remove Russia and they basically had no recourse. And given the, well, unpredictable nature of the current US executive I think it's kinda kicked other countries into overdrive.
> Gold has always been stable, because it is physically limited.
Incorrect. Physical scarcity matters, but it’s not the main driver. Gold’s price is far more sensitive to interest rates, dollar strength, sentiment and fear, speculative flows.
The stability it’s historically shown was mostly the result of fixed monetary systems, and those are long gone.
its because you are measuring stable Gold in volatile fiat which is being printed every day depending on the factors you mentioned (interest rates, expectations of future growth, sentiment etc).
because you are getting paycheck in fiat, you are psychologically programmed to think of fiat as something stable, and Gold as volatile.
> its because you are measuring stable Gold in volatile fiat
You're defining gold to be stable, and fiat to be volatile. Well, fiat is volatile, but that doesn't make gold stable.
Gold (measured in dollars) nearly doubled over the last year. Does that mean that the dollar is worth only half what it was a year ago? No, it doesn't. (There's been some inflation, but not nearly 100%.)
Gold is down 10% since January 28th. Does that mean that the dollar is worth 10% more than it was on January 28th? No, it doesn't.
You're wrong; the prices of precious metals have never been stable, which is why bimetallic systems have always had a lot of problems papering over the notionally fixed exchange rate between coins of different metals.
That said, I agree that e.g. gold under a regime where most things for sale are priced in gold is more stable than gold as a novelty investment under a fiat currency regime.
When things are priced in gold, most of the demand for gold comes from the fact that it's useful as currency. All of the phenomena we have now still exist, and they disturb the price, but they're small effects compared to the demand for currency.
In the fiat regime, that source of demand is gone. All of the same random effects still push the price of gold around, but because the price is so much lower (due to much lower demand), the price swings are wilder.
I find this to be quite an interesting perspective change!
If I may try for a metaphor, then it's like our default perspective from the Earth is that we are the center of the universe, the other planets, Sun, and stars move around us, and we are stationary.
But, to zoom out, you can take a more objective view that everything is moving independently (ie, volatile). The baseline stability is a subjective perspective.
The only "stability" gold has is an emergent property of an interconnected system of hairless apes somehow making each other believe they need it. Same with fiat, bitcoin, or whatever we come up with tomorrow. None of these things have any real utility outside of an expectation that the peer ape also finds them valuable.
>Incorrect. Physical scarcity matters, but it’s not the main driver. Gold’s price is far more sensitive to interest rates, dollar strength, sentiment and fear, speculative flows.
Those are only relevant on a shorter timescale; on a long timescale gold's held its value extremely well. The price of a loaf of bread in gold now is still similar to what it was in the Roman Empire 2000 years ago.
That comparison actually sounds horrible for gold... By all accounts we should be extremely more efficient in manufacturing loafs of bread. So a same amount of gold should buy lot more bread now than 2000 years ago.
So if you really think about it. If you held gold for 2000 years. You would only reach same standard of living as 2000 years ago...
All value is subjective and thus at the whims of wild animal spirits.
Gold seems stable largely because the price must rise to make mining significantly more of it economically viable. Yet, were it truly stable, prices measured in terms of gold should have seen price deflation from the Roman era to now. That this is not the case proves that gold has zero intrinsic value. It may have some inherent utility, but that is not the same thing. As people want more gold for use as a conductor, or in alloys for dental prostheses, or for adornment the price will go up. Speculative demand can make the price go up. Demand for trade without USD can make the price go up.
Gold and USD prices are independent of one another. That they can be used to measure one another is also a human invention and an accident of history.
For certain periods of time, not losing to inflation is a major win. The more people think that we're headed into such a period, the more they reach for gold.
The real price of gold has been deflated by paper gold/futures trading, which has the effect of multiplying the perceived amount of gold in circulation without a necessary counterpart in physical gold. Financial institutions can within limits manipulate the price of gold so that it remains lower than it should be if the physical material had to be delivered.
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