I think that the US actually has an incredibly low level of political violence if you consider how easy it is to buy a gun here. Far from being a country rife with political violence, the US actually is a country where the vast, vast majority of people either don't care enough about politics to use violence, are not politically polarized enough to do political violence, are morally or ideologically against political violence, and/or simply don't want to get killed or spend decades in jail as a consequence of using political violence. I don't know what the relative significance of these different factors compared to each other is.
Surveillance and policing seem to have gotten to a point where it's very difficult to attempt an assassination and get away with it. Low-level unsolved murders of random ordinary people happen all the time, but the system takes political violence pretty seriously. See Mangione for example. And it turns out that very, very few Americans, no matter how politically outraged they are, are willing to throw their lives away for the sake of political violence. This goes for both the left and the right. It would be completely trivial for a leftist to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a young Republicans meeting, or for a right-winger to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a leftist protest. It requires no special planning, no careful strategy. Yet it almost never happens, even though there are hundreds of millions of guns in civilian hands in the US, and even if you don't have one it's usually pretty easy to get one.
Let's do a quick back-of-the-envelope estimate. Let's say that 1% of the adult US population would love to commit an assassination or several if they knew they would get away with it. That's already over 2 million people. Yet there are only a handful of political assassination attempts in the US every year. This shows that far from the US being rife with political violence (I know you're not arguing that it is, but just saying), the US actually has an almost shockingly, surprisingly low level of political violence, given how easy it is to attempt an assassination here against the average politician or corporate executive (successfully killing a President is very hard, but that isn't the case for the vast majority of politicians and corporate executives) and given how polarized the political discourse has become.
I do think that the "you'll almost certainly get caught if you try" factor is a very important one. It is part of the explanation for why actual political violence seems to so often be committed by mentally disturbed people instead of by fervent but largely mentally stable ideologues. The vast, vast majority of fervent ideologues in the US are not committed enough to their causes to throw their lives away for those causes' sake.
All that said, it does seem to me to be the case that the frequency of assassination attempts has been slowly increasing the last few years. Very very slowly and nowhere comparable to how polarized and frothing the political discourse has become in the last 20 years (the left and right regularly accusing each other of being fascists, pedophiles, and so on)... but still, very very slowly, increasing.
Goodguy
22d ago
I feel like your statement kind of might just boil down to "things I like are freedom, things I don't like are not freedom".
From an objective point of view, we absolutely have more sexual freedom right now than people in the West did 150 years ago.
Israel would have almost exactly the same national security interests and likely strategic patterns of behavior even if it had no element of racial-supremacist Abrahamic cult-myths, though. Its strategic behavior is much more driven by its status as a small country that is populated by an ethnic group with a recent history of being genocided and that has a powerful superpower friend than it is by Jewish ethno-supremacist sentiments or Abrahamic cult myths.
A similar train of thought, by the way, is also why I don't think Israel or the US have anything much to worry about if Iran develops nuclear weapons. Iran might be a theocratic state with a lot of political influence from true believers in Islam, but I think that the chance that, if it developed nuclear weapons, its leaders would launch a nuclear strike that would get themselves annihilated... is close to zero. Hence the idea that Israel must prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons no matter what strikes me as pretty silly if evaluated from a cold objective perspective (of course in practice, it's not surprising that emotions run high if another country rhetorically calls for your country's destruction and is trying to build nukes). Realistically speaking, if Iran develops nukes relations between the two countries will probably just follow the India-Pakistan model.
Goodguy
8d ago
Women are more hostile to COVID vaccination, perhaps reflecting a female urge to make politics revolve around their bodies.
I don't understand the supposed logic here. Wanting politics to revolve around one's body is orthogonal to one's opinion about COVID vaccination. If you want politics to revolve around your body, that could equally easily make you a fervent COVID vaccination supporter or a fervent COVID vaccination skeptic.
I think one can argue that the modal man of 1875 was some farmer who spent his life at the mercy of his father and his local community, or some city factory worker who was at the mercy of his local political machine's boss. Also, they had actual conscription back then, the government could force you to join the army against your will (technically that's still true but in practice it's extremely extremely unlikely to actually happen). More freedom back then? I doubt it.
Goodguy
24d ago
The US participated in a massive campaign to lull Iran into thinking an attack was not going to happen immediately
I think that the campaign can't have been that massive, given that the US telegraphed the likelihood of something like this happening by starting to withdraw non-essential personnel from its Middle East embassies a few days ago.
Goodguy
21d ago
No, I'm just using the normal, everyday meaning of the word "freedom", the one that can be stated as "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action". In that sense, we are undoubtedly sexually more free than people were 150 years ago. If you prefer a different definition of "freedom" that's fine, this is just a semantic argument after all. My point, though, is that I did not say what I said because I have some kind of progressive ideology. I said it because it's objectively true if you use the normal, most common, everyday "man in the street" kind of definition of the word "freedom".
Goodguy
24d ago
I don't see any reason to think that the India-Pakistan war earlier this year came anywhere close to a nuclear war.
Goodguy
21d ago
When one uses the word "freedom" in its most common, everyday meaning of "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action", that's not twisting language, that's just using the most common, everyday meaning of the word. I would argue that it's actually more of a twisting of language to use the word "freedom" to mean something more philosophical, like you are doing. But in any case, this is just a semantic argument.
Goodguy
1mo ago
No, if it was a staged fight there is no reason for Musk to use what in our society is the rhetoric equivalent of nuclear weapons, which is implying that Trump had sex with underage girls on Epstein's island. It would be easy to effectively stage a fight without going that far.
Also, there's Occam's razor. It seems more likely to me that these two guys, both of whom have a track record of being emotionally volatile, abrasive, and vindictive, actually did just get into a real spat, than that it is staged.
Goodguy
21d ago
When OR decriminalized drug use were the addicts freer?
Yes. Some of them just used this extra freedom to make decisions that made them less free. But the decriminalization itself made them freer. They just didn't necessarily make good choices with that freedom. Part of what freedom is, is that it sometimes allows people to make decisions that make them less free in the long run. That does not mean that it is not freedom, though.
Musk also routinely drives traffic to various random X posts by posting one-liners like "Interesting" or "100%" in response to them. Which, while not any sort of heinous deceptiveness, nonetheless is clearly just a way to put his finger on the scales of what gets amplified without having to literally manipulate the algorithms. It's not the kind of action that a pure guileless engineering-minded person would take, I would think.
I also find it a bit hard to believe that Musk would get $300 billion without having some understanding of Machiavellians. In our society, pure brilliant engineer-types tend to max out at a net worth of a few tens of millions, don't they? To get more than that people generally need to have a lot of business acumen, and it's a bit hard for me to imagine having that level of business acumen without understanding how to deal with Machiavellians.
I do think that the overall notion of Musk as being more of an autist type and Trump more of a Machiavellian type seems correct to me, but I quibble with some of the details of Davon Eriksen's purported explanation.
At this point, the main reason why I write about politics online isn't to change other people's minds necessarily, although I do enjoy that when it happens. I have too many more directly pressing personal concerns around money, personal relationships, and so on to dedicate any substantial amount of energy to attempting political change. I think at this point the main reason why I write about politics online is to get feedback that makes me feel less like an outlier. I equally dislike the left and the right, so it is affirming for me to discuss politics in places where not everyone is totally a fervent supporter of one political side or another. Places like Reddit and X generally disgust me, I dislike both the "everyone to the right of Bernie Sanders is an evil fascist and it is our duty to punch them" vibe and the "I am a based trad-wife-seeking Aryan and we should literally kill the libs" vibe. I wish I could find more places online with more of a detached, looking-at-politics-objectively vibe that avoids ideological dogmatism and that kind of simple "my political opponents are evil and we should kill them" moralism that is so common online. /r/moderatepolitics can be good sometimes. TheMotte is definitely more right-leaning than I am, but you can have decent interesting discussion here so I appreciate it. rdrama.net has a few sociopathic ghouls on it, but the politics discussion generally mocks both the fanatic left and the fanatic right so I appreciate that places as well. I can't really think of any other places, which really surprises me. One would think that, with hundreds of millions of people online, it should be easy to find many forums that avoid virtue/vice signaling, empty moralizing that treats the opponent as ontologicaly evil while saying nothing interesting about politics, or just general chimpanzee-like shit-flinging at others. But I haven't been able to find many.
I think that getting away with assassination doesn't just require smarts (and it requires plenty of that in our heavily surveilled world where there are cameras all over the place), it also requires a lot of coolness of nerve so that you don't make simple, stupid mistakes in the middle of the act, in the throes of overwhelming fear, adrenaline and other kinds of emotions. I think that there are very very few people in the world who not only have the smarts to get away with an assassination of a high-value target, but also have the sort of emotional coolness where they can actually apply their intelligence to the situation while they are doing it, instead of having 90% of their smarts wiped away in the moment by raw adrenaline while trying to pull off the act, and/or just stumbling into the sort of friction that always happens when trying to implement a plan in real life as opposed to in theory or daydreams ("no plan survives contact with the enemy"). Dostoevsky wrote a great description of how this works in Crime and Punishment.
I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of The Motte posters are well aware of the enormous variation in men's attractiveness to women. It's not like it's some secret knowledge that is only available in obscure corners of the dark web.
The current state of online politics discourse seems pretty dire to me. Here are forums I'm aware of:
TheMotte - often a bit too "assume that social conservatism is correct" and wordily show-offy for my taste, but it's a good forum, you can speak your mind without being banned.
X.com - engagement bait grifters, engagement bait grifters, engagement bait grifters... and the occasional rare actual worthwhile discussion.
/r/moderatepolitics - good, very surprisingly good for average Reddit censorship norms, but a bit slow.
/r/politicaldiscussion - used to be decent like 5 years ago but now has been overrun by typical Reddit TDS ("Drumpf will end all elections", etc...)
4chan /pol/ - basically useless, 95% literally mentally ill people, trolls, and maybe bots. Might as well engage with flat Earthers about astrophysics as engage with these people about politics.
Astral Codex Ten comments - can be interesting sometimes, but isn't mainly politics focused and the politics discussion seems to be be dominated by the same few people.
rDrama.net - is usually directionally right about politics, in my view, by the simple expedient of assuming that anyone who is very demonstratively committed to a given political ideology is likely worthy of ridicule, but of course not a forum for discussing policy in any depth, most of the time, and also unsurprisingly given the origin of the site, is as focused on trolling as on political analysis, lol.
/r/politics - TDS central, orange man bad 24/7.
/r/centrist - seems ok, but pretty TDS leaning.
/r/stupidpol, /r/redscarepod, etc... Dirtbag left, good for criticizing the establishment but also they tend to be Hamas apologists etc... basically mostly people who are still at the I hate America so anyone who fights America must be awesome stage.
debatepolitics.com - people yelling at each other, very slight step up from 4chan /pol/.
Like, there have to be some good forums I've missed, right? Billions of people are online, including hundreds of millions of Anglophones (I largely have no idea what the state of non-Anglophone political discussion is like). Is it really possible that only like 0.00001% of them are capable of having relatively moderate and rational (not that I've always been) political discussion?
I've been searching for good politics discussion forums for years. You'd think there would be more. What the fuck is going on?
I wonder if there might actually still be, even in our modern world, some major intellectual insights that future generations, once those insights have appeared, will think of as relatively low-hanging fruit and wonder why it took so long for their ancestors to come up with them, and wonder why their ancestors did not come up with them given that they already had every necessary bit of knowledge to come up with them, and maybe only lacked some spark of genius.
Some examples from history:
- Calculus - You can teach this to any decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, but, while there were some remarkably close predecessors to it in ancient Greece (the method of exhaustion), it was not formalized as a rigorous concept and method until about the 18th-19th centuries.
- Antibiotics - As far as I know, there is nothing about penicillin as an antibiotic agent that could not have hypothetically been developed and systematized 2000 years ago - this would not have required any modern technology. To be fair, there may have been ancient cultures that had an intricate knowledge of plant-derived drugs and so on that are at least relatively comparable... but to my knowledge, none of them developed something like modern antibiotics, which revolutionized the world and basically immediately did away with the whole literary genre of "lonesome poet dies at 30 from tuberculosis".
- Free markets - It seems at least plausible these days to many decently intelligent people that free-ish markets (too much freedom in markets has its own problems but...) serve as a good communicator of economic information, and that this can help relatively free market economic systems at least in some cases to outcompete central planning (there are many other factors involved of course, but this is one of them...). I'm not aware of anyone having had this kind of hypothesis until a few hundred years ago. But it's the kind of idea you can explain to a decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, it's not something that requires mountains of highly specific knowledge to grasp.
- Natural selection - The idea that the combination of survival pressure and reproduction will over time cause better-adapted entities to out-reproduce worse-adapted entities is so logical that one can demonstrate the truth of it through pure mathematics. But as far as I know, it did not become a popular explanation for the evolution of living beings until about 170 years ago, even though people 2000 years ago were both familiar with so-called artificial selection (breeding of livestock and so on) and probably had the intellectual background to understand the concept of natural selection mathematically (people who were advanced enough mathematics thinkers to create something like Euclid's Elements certainly had the raw brain-power to model natural selection mathematically, if a certain spark of genius had struck them).
It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.
Why has the tech sector revolutionized work without dramatical increases in productivity
Is this true? Granted, it's hard to measure productivity. But US GDP per capita, adjusted for inflation, has increased by about 40% since the tech boom began in the mid-1990s.
I wonder what are some good metrics of productivity.
If someone makes more money than someone else, or one group is healthier than another, or people from one neighborhood go to jail more often than people from the next neighborhood over, the only explanation is systemic injustice. Someone must have done something evil to exploit someone else -- there's no other way people could end up in such different positions.
To be fair, there is a relatively small but quite loud subset of right-wingers who believe exactly this about Jews. And there are quite many right-wingers who really overestimate the degree to which leftists make their decisions out of deliberate maliciousness and really underestimate the degree to which leftists make those decisions out of a combination of ignorance and pathological empathy. Some right-wingers have even adopted a Rousseauian "man is innocent in the state of nature" attitude, except their idealized pre-modern utopia from which humanity has fallen is some kind of amalgam of ancient martial cultures, 19th century farmsteads, and the 1950s.
Politeness is nice. However, people sometimes make life-and-death decisions based on their political beliefs. If you deliberately teach people to ignore reality for the sake of politeness, some of them will literally die as a result. Having beliefs such as, "that run-down neighborhood which seems to be full of surly loiterers is actually made up of misunderstood people who have hearts of gold", or "the police are extremely dangerous, so it is safer to take your chances with street criminals", or "society would actually be safer if we drastically reduced the size of the police force", or "when this violent paramilitary group says that they are fighting for the benefit of humanity, they are being honest - so I should go join them" is not just an abstract thing. These are all examples where holding inaccurate views of reality can literally cause you or others to die. Teaching someone polite but inaccurate political and social views can be like teaching someone inaccurate things about chainsaw or firearm safety.
Honest dating advice coaches aren't like "just improve yourself and then supermodels will jump on your cock every day", they're more like "improve yourself and you will be able to maximize whatever you're starting out with". It's not like the Internet dating advice space is just entirely made up of the sort of "bro just improve yourself and you'll start having to fend off supermodels all the time" material. There's plenty of that, but there is also more realistic stuff out there. Sure, there are many grifters out who promise unrealistic abilities, but there is also plenty of dating advice out there that actually works to maximize whatever basic gifts you started out with.
I don't know what serious actions could be taken about the issue on a wide-spread level other than sexual communism. But I myself do not desire sexual communism. Partly for a moral reason... I do not wish women to be coerced to have sex with people they would not otherwise want to have sex with. But also for non-moral reasons. I prefer to compete openly in the sexual marketplace and thus know from an ego perspective that whatever I am getting, I am getting due to my own qualities rather than because of some outside pressures. This is also why I have never had any interest in visiting prostitutes. Which is a funny two-sided thing. Because on the one hand it shows that I value sex for more than just sex, but then if I really dig down into it one of the main reasons why I don't want to visit prostitutes is just because it would be an ego decreaser. I just don't have a sex drive so high that I want to fuck no matter what... for me the satisfaction of having the other person want me is a key part of it, and while that might sound good abstractly, it actually might say more about my ego than about my morality.
In any case, I can't think of any political answer to the issue that wouldn't restrict women's liberties, and I'm not into restricting women's liberties. Most of why I'm not into it is because my morality, the rest is because of a sense that wanting to restrict women's sexual liberties as a man is loser-coded and the proper masculine thing to do is to let women do whatever they want and attract them anyway, not to try to restrict their sexual decisions.
There is something about the human psyche that makes it very difficult for many of us to actually emotionally come to terms with unfairness. We might understand the unfair nature of life perfectly well intellectually, yet not come to grips with it emotionally. We live in a world where some people are just born with vastly more wealth, and/or sex appeal, and/or intelligence, and/or health than others... there are things we can do to improve on our starting position, but there are no guarantees of success.
There is a tendency to develop compensatory psychological narratives, defense mechanisms... ideas like "in the afterlife god will judge us and I will be compensated for all of this unfairness", or "if I am a good boy I will be reincarnated in a higher caste", or "I swear in just two more weeks I'll launch the great people's revolution that overthrows the rich", or "women aren't attracted to me but they're a bunch of degenerate sluts anyway and I'm the real based sigma male, I don't really want those evil whores anyway".
Another common way of dealing with it is to give up on any hope of actually remedying the unfairness while emotionally latching on to more powerful groups through psychological identification mechanisms. One example of this is the depressed housewife who spends eight hours a day watching the lives of celebrities on TV so that she can emotionally exist in a virtual world in which she feels like she has some stake in their lives. Another is the nationalistic soldier who is willing to go fight and die for the interests of his country's elite class because he has become emotionally identified with the entire nation as if it was his family - even though, even if he wins the war and survives, he will become no richer for it.
Goodguy
1mo ago
Your native community's sexual ethics do not surprise me, in the sense of me being surprised that they exist. When I say that I don't understand, I mean that, while I abstractly intellectually can mentally model the inner experience of men who are different from me in this way, I do not share their feelings. It is similar to how, I like broccoli and some people hate broccoli. I can mentally model not liking broccoli, but I don't really understand it from the perspective of my own tastes, all I can say is "oh well those people's tastes are different from mine".
I wouldn't trust anything I read from an account on X, especially a high-profile account on X, to be real. Most high-profile X accounts who were not already famous before joining X are engagement bait grifters, and some of these grifters are precisely in the business of crafting scissor statements to get maximum engagement. Even if the genesis of this particular story is a real-life situation, I wouldn't trust a high-profile X account to convey it accurately instead of conveying it in order to mine maximum engagement. The entire nature of the medium, with its short clippy posts (yeah you can pay to write long ones, but this comes off as geeky so is not used as much as one might think) and its monetization, makes it a melting pot of scammers, grifters, and con artists. I have tried many times to start genuine political/cultural discussion on X, and 95% of the time it doesn't work. X rewards cheap engagement bait vastly more than it rewards serious conversation. It is a brutal Darwinian power struggle in which masters of scissor statements, controversy bait, and so on rise to the top.
He says "Pornography causes nothing but harm. Crystal meth causes nothing but harm." This is not true, but for the sake of argument let's say that it is actually true. What he does not say is that letting the government have the power to prevent people from watching pornography or doing crystal meth also, in the real world, causes harm. In practice, one cannot allow government to have the power to prevent private individuals from watching porn or consuming recreational drugs without also having downsides, such as: 1) you must then give extra tax money to government agents so that they can enforce these laws, and 2) it will probably encourage the growth of government power in ways that even you yourself might not agree with - once you empower government to snoop and to reach into people's lives to that extent, it is unlikely that government will stop at just banning porn and crystal meth.
Now, we can argue about what causes more harm, pornography/crystal meth or the government preventing people from using those things. My point is more that Smith does not even engage with this argument, even though it is a common and fairly obvious one.
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