Jesweez
2yr ago
I read something today which I have long thought deep down, but hadn’t really seen spelled out elsewhere.
Namely, the censoring done by the liberal left, while there, is rather mild in the scheme of things and is probably much less than the same left would be censored by the people it currently censors if that group was in power.
The quote that brought it to my mind was from here, on Richard Hannania’s substack. After a post discussing being banned by Twitter, he drops this at the end of the article.
The right-wing whining in particular gets to me, and another motivation here is I don’t want to end up like my friends… I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/saying-goodbye-to-twitter
The attitude of censoring opponents seemed to have crystallized for the left around 2016, where I distinctly remember the conversation centering around the limits of tolerating intolerant ideologies. (Which seems to have become fully settled by now, interesting to observe an ideological movement update in real time in that way).
Does Hannania have a point here? Is the issue that the right takes offense with censorship itself, or would the right if it actually gained back power censor in a much more strict and comprehensive way?
Was it Scott Alexander who back in the day wrote an essay about how liberal values are optimized for times of peace and abundance and conservative values are optimized for a zombie apocalypse scenario?
I’ve pretty much incorporated that into a lot of my perception of politics.
The role of conservatives is often to point at something and say that it is dangerous and should be given more due attention.
As a normie lib I often have the reaction of the poster you quote, but also I have to say there have been times that over time I came around to the conservative position that “X represents a danger that we should be more wary of”.
My best example is how I used to be pro-decriminalization of hard drugs in the early 2010s when much of the rhetoric was based around the failure of the war on drugs. I was also pretty liberal about homelessness. But now I’ve come around to the conservative position that we should crack down on those things to preserve the public space for normal people.
Other fronts of the culture war are for example conservatives telling me I should be more afraid of immigration.
But it doesn’t always line up. I think conservatives should be more afraid of climate change, for example. Particularly if you don’t want lots of immigrants coming.
But this does line up with the original essay, being concerned about preserving the environment is something from a peace and abundance mindset, not a survival among dangers mindset. If you’re in a total war for example, the effects your bombs have on the environment don’t fucking matter!
Another one I’m trying to square is COVID. I think the fault line there was through the axis of societal cooperation vs individualism but it’s still interesting to me… for example my very conservative grandfather who had lung cancer refused to take any preventative measures and subsequently died from COVID. Here was a case where as a liberal I was predisposed to point out dangers and recommend caution but as a conservative this was anathema to my grandfathers nature.
Jesweez
4mo ago
I’ve come to realize this about this movement, yes.
Essentially, the US can’t be my home anymore if things go on like this for much longer.
The attitude that causes someone to shout at Zelenskyy, “why don’t you wear a suit? Do you even own a suit?”.. that’s what’s in charge and their ire extends to me.
The best historical analogy I know of is the cultural revolution in China where the intellectual class was persecuted.
They’re not that violent, of course, but I also don’t want to give them the chance to be.
Jesweez
5mo ago
Sure is fun being a grad student in STEM and pouring every waking moment into a grant proposal due in the next few weeks to see this news today!
We’ll see if the United States decides to continue being a scientific powerhouse or if we’ll all get chased away to other countries..
Jesweez
4mo ago
I’ve semi doxxed myself on this platform by saying what I work on before, so I don’t really mind doing it again.
I work on developing models that estimate the water content of vegetation from satellite imagery. This has direct relevance for fire risk forecasting, and I use it to study where droughts affect forests most.
You can judge for yourself the usefulness of this, but also, I think the thinking generally reflects a wrong perspective about where benefit in science comes from.
Some systems are weak link chains, and others are strong link chains. The quality of a weak link system depends on the strength of the weakest link, and the strongest is somewhat irrelevant. An example of this is food safety inspection. One key mistake and the mission is a failure.
However, science is more of a strong link system. There can be a lot of low quality papers, sure. But really the benefit we gain from science arises from top quality research that gets done. You can have 100 people doing low impact research, but if you get out of that investment even one big breakthrough, it can be very worth it.
The problem here is that science is sort of a blind search as well, we don’t know where big breakthroughs might exist. Who would have been crazy enough to say that studying Gila monster venom would lead to one of the most important drug class discoveries in the 21st century. You might say, ah ozempic type drugs, who cares, I’m not fat. But maybe the next unexpected discovery reverses Alzheimer’s, who knows. Maybe you are destined to get Alzheimer’s, at that point, would have been nice to have some strange new drug class that combats it.
Saying, “hey, random PhD student, I don’t think your work is that important in the end and thus I’m fine with weakening science in the United States across the board”.. it’s certainly a position one may take, but I’d say it is not at all a smart one regarding human or national advancement.
I want more immigration for selfish reasons. Because in the modern times, countries which import people will have more robust economies than those who just peter out and invert their demographic pyramids.
And as opposed to the increasingly common right wing concerns, I don't care about living in a diverse place, I actually enjoy it. I like to eat different foods and I'm a big language learning nerd, so its cool to practice people's languages with them. I believe in importing highly skilled people from all over the planet as the way to build a powerful country. (Although I'm fine with mid level immigrants too, small business owners, chefs, whatever!).
America has benefitted enormously from stealing the top percentile of almost every other country on the planet and these fools in government currently want to do everything to end that system and turn us into a declining backwater former power like the UK. Cutting funding for science, ceding our position in the world we built, and tearing up the good will that we have from other countries is the icing on the cake.
I'm going to steal right wingers framing here but I seriously think this is the case. What right wingers want to do is profoundly dysgenic, they want us to stop siphoning talent from the world and instead close ourselves off. So instead of being, idk, a bubbling cauldron of human potential like a New York City or a Cambridge Massachusetts, they want us to become more like Appalachia. Closed off, greying, clinging to dying industries, old modes of life, lacking in dynamism in a competitive world, and with a bad reputation everywhere else.
It's not really in my interests, that one!
Hopefully more liberals learn to talk like me instead of only the bleeding heart thing, that would also be in our interest.
As opposed to the blood-soaked results of the fetishization of open immigration?
Why just one case?
You should use a statistic when making an argument like this.
(Hopefully one that doesn’t fall into the base rate fallacy..)
Jesweez
4mo ago
A working class revolt against the educated class, yes
I can see why maybe you felt that previous years were like the cultural revolution, you probably felt censored and I can get that.
I never really had opinions I felt I had to censor that much under wokeness, but I am fresh off of scrubbing all mentions of “climate” from my research proposal and changing every instance of “diversity”, even though I was talking about the diversity of water availability among forests
Jesweez
9mo ago
Pretty bad response. In any group of millions you can find examples of anything you want.
As we all know, cardiologists are horrible, horrible people.
Imagine an alternate world where any time a kid expressed suicidal ideation, government employees would firmly nudge them towards euthanasia, and would jail you as a parent for protesting
I don’t know if it’s naïve, but I’ve always sort of assumed that transition is something which gets recommended after years of therapy where someone is consistently exhibiting being gender dysphoric.
I’m curious because I think this is a key point where left assumptions and right assumptions tend to diverge. Left assumption: you talk about gender dysphoria with a therapist and they evaluate you for a long time to make sure it’s actually there and is affecting your life in a severe way before recommending any life altering treatments. Right assumption: any old kid reads something online about gender fluidity, experiments with the idea for a short phase, the doctor algorithm says, dysphoric, boom here’s some hormones to take.
Idk which one it looks more like in reality.
Like, I think it’s fine that people transition, but I also know it’s easy to basically trick psychologists until I get prescribed Adderal. Right? So ideally transition would be there but you’d have to spend a huge amount of time and commitment to get anybody to open up the door where it’s locked up at.
That feels to me like a place where some common ground can be found? But maybe I’m also naïve there too, lol.
This is part of a bigger suspicion that all of our problems are solvable by understanding that there are fractions of truth claims in what both sides tend to offer, but it’s very unpopular to say so because we immediately perceive the other side as the worst consequences of their way of thinking rather than looking for where there is a bit of truth in what they say.
Jesweez
6mo ago
That’s literally the entire concept of America, we’re a country of people who had the resolve to cross oceans to seek a better life. Every single one of us apart from the Native Americans and those descended from slaves meets that description.
Now we’re suddenly going to rewrite it?
Jesweez
4mo ago
Sometimes my prefrontal cortex doesn’t make the best decisions, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to sabotage it out of revenge.
Essentially you’re arguing that this is for revenge and implicitly acknowledging that it will be bad for the United States even so.
Jesweez
4mo ago
Large portions of Trump votes are likely based on illegal immigration or concerns about inflation, his election isn’t itself evidence that any majority of the US is deeply against having an Indian doctor move here.
Jesweez
4mo ago
I don't think the US would be in a position to have that many muslims, the world is a big place and most of the people in it aren't muslim.
I do dislike abrahamic religions that try to dominate politics so I see the rationale for being concerned about becoming eventually dominated by followers of one. However, that doesn't mean I want to close all immigration. Immigration policies can be tailored to who you do want to let in. It's not all or nothing.
And I think Europe has different problems regarding immigration than the US does, being right next to the middle east and in former colonial relationships with other muslim countries.
Jesweez
2yr ago
How many regular people do you think are walking around with an internal plot to “displace white America”?
Jesweez
2yr ago
Tyler Cowen published an analysis of the “new right” today.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/classical-liberalism-vs-the-new-right.html
He illustrates the new right as a reaction against two factors: the pretty crazy level of what we’ve come to call wokeness on the left, and the capture of most of the main cultural institutions by the same left.
At the same time, there are signals that the woke left is declining in power and relevance (not quite a sure thing yet, but he lists a few signs that we’re trending this way).
Tyler does a good job in my opinion of fairly representing the views of the new right, while also laying out his own disagreements with the philosophy. These center around the idea that the new right is unlikely to be able to create a high trust society. Indeed, since 2016 we have had a precipitous decline in trust in our society, and while almost no one would disagree with this, the different sides would place the blame on different factors.
He finishes the piece:
The polarizing nature of much of New Right thought means it is often derided rather than taken seriously. That is a mistake, as the New Right has been at least partially correct about many of the failings of the modern world. But it is an even bigger mistake to think New Right ideology is ready to step into the space long occupied by classical liberal ideals.
Overall I think it’s an important piece and potentially a lot of the more thoughtful members of the new right might get a lot out of reading it.
Political movements often do a good job at identifying problems in society, but it’s usually their own internal quirks and flaws that end up being magnified if and when they do come to power. Politics tends to progress as these flaws become exposed, as one side reacts against the excesses of the other, and vice versa.
Whatever the case may be, it leads one to wonder whether the woke left and the new right are short term aberrations, specific to what will be looked back upon as a short period of time, or whether these are indeed the feedstock of long lasting ideologies that we’ll be stuck with.
I think one key fact is that the central example of a human-extincted species is some bug living only on one type of tree in the rain forest
We’ve got a bunch of more impactful recent extinctions than that.
A few that come to mind:
The passenger pigeon, whose flocks were so large they used to black out the sun for days on end as the billions of birds passed.
Stellars sea cow, the largest sirenian ever known to exist and the only which existed outside of warm tropical waters.
The dodo, one of the dozens of quite unique Australian animal species which went extinct in the past couple centuries, and which has become synonymous with extinction.
The thylacine, another Australian example. The largest marsupial carnivore on the planet. Not only its species but the entire family it represented is now extinct.
The carolina parakeet. The only parrot species native to the USA.
Of course there are a lot more which are not fully extinct but have been reduced so drastically it’s sort of similar.
The American buffalo. The right whale. Much of the range of the wolf, of bears, the general abundance and size of life in the ocean which has decreased over time, etc. etc.
Fascism is a word that has an actual meaning.
It has a meaning which does at times resonate quite a bit with Trump though, I’d argue that although he doesn’t fully meet the definition there is a reason it keeps getting applied to him specifically. For example,
Fascists often:
Dismantle the systems of democracy. Trump didn’t do this, I don’t think you can call him a full fascist at this point, but he has tendencies on this point. For many people, including his former vice president, he’s the first US president to try to break the system of transfer of power. Whatever you believe about that situation, he said from the beginning that he’ll consider the electoral process rigged if he loses. And once he did, he loudly and consistently employed a whole host of means to try break the system, trying to get governors to “find votes”, to put up alternative electors, to halt the system of certification, etc. He got his followers so riled up about this that they formed a mob and broke into the US capitol building. These are all definitely tendencies toward the dismantle democracy aspect of fascism, and if you were in a country where someone did try these things, you might pre-emptively call that person a fascist.
Promote ethnonationalism and typically delineate a group of people as an enemy. Trump often takes steps in this directions and then pulls back. Actual ethnonationalists often have a love hate relationship with the guy because he’ll use promising rhetoric and then say something else which is pro x or y ethnicity and which pisses those guys off. But in the end he was elected on the central promise to conduct the greatest mass deportations in American history, and those vibes certainly match what would be expected for historical fascists to say as well.
Use authoritarian state force on internal minority groups. I don’t think he’s done this, kudos. Other people often think he has, “children in cages”, etc. But fascism tends to be crueler than this and less within previously established norms. There are obviously fears around this happening during the mass deportations, but that remains to be seen.
Crush dissent violently. This is often part of the dismantle democracy thing. I don’t think Trump has done this and this would be the biggest American norm to violate in order for a fascist to emerge. I do believe that Trump the man himself has these tendencies that could have emerged in a different context (consider his rhetoric in quotes such as his praise of China’s strength during the Tiananmen massacre, and lamenting that were not strong like that). There are many similar quotes that could be mined to paint a case that he sometimes has somewhat of a fixation on this type of “strength”.
Idealize the military and often use military force in expansionist ways. Trump has sometimes idealized the military in ways that previous American norms have not, e.g. calling for the US to begin doing military parades in the style of China or N Korea. But up until this point he has not shown much tendency to launch any sort of military adventure, much to his credit. (And of course to your point about previous presidents, much to their demerit). Recently he’s been making people edgy on this point, yesterday saying that he would use economic and perhaps military force to annex various territories around the world. Knowing Trump, this is likely his typical “start with the most extreme statement” bluster. But I think it can be pretty clear to understand why for people who think he does have certain fascist tendencies to become concerned when he suddenly starts talking about expansion or annexing territories. We’ll see if he actually is serious about using economic force to try and annex other territories. If so he fits the point about territorial expansionism. If he broke with norms so extremely to threaten Panama with the military in order to take territory from them that would obviously be extremely fascist coded behavior. The whole thing, in the end, shows hints of him breaking with norms that liberal democracies have had in the postwar era. Like in the Helsinki accords, to which the US is signatory; they respect each others sovereignty, they respect territorial boundaries, they do not threaten one another for territory, etc. Breaking these norms is definitely fascist coded, and we’ll see if he continues down that path or if it’s just another passing Trumpism to sit back and enjoy.
Jesweez
9mo ago
Migrants ARE committing crimes at elevated rates relative to their demographic, violent crimes at that
Source?
I’ve never seen this shown, despite all the times it’s claimed.
Jesweez
9mo ago
Not at all isolated.
“Group X coming here has been a blood soaked affair!”
Um… source?
Does group X kill people at a higher rate than group Y, Z, A, B, or C?
Or are we just engaging in hysterics because it’s an out group?
Jesweez
9mo ago
It’s just a garden variety situation where you’re asked to pitch in so as to avert larger scale hardship.
Was that so alien to you beforehand?
For example, during the world wars people had to ration their goods so that everyone can eat and so that the soldiers could be supplied.
Would you have pushed back and eaten a second sandwich at lunch because you’re not going to sacrifice your personal enjoyment for some “system”?
Say you’re in a house with 3 other people. You all want a hot shower because you just got back from a long trek. You get the shower first. Are you really going to use ALL the hot water just because you like long hot showers? Or do the preferences of others enter into the mind at some point? Because if so, well it’s just the same logical process.
I know where I was at during COVID, the hospitals weren’t at capacity, but there was a time when it stayed right at the edge of capacity for a few weeks, and they had to roll up a few mobile morgues during that time (air conditioned shipping containers) to process the extra bodies.
I did personally see it as valuable for me and the community I was in to take at least some small sacrifices to make sure that those morgues didn’t fill up too quickly during those few weeks.
Jesweez
9mo ago
Visually, Trump looked flustered and irritated the whole night. Importantly, he barely even looked at Harris, just started straight ahead for almost the whole night.
Meanwhile Harris had dominant nonverbals. From walking straight up to him on his side of the stage and catching him off guard, to staring at him while he spoke.
On content, Trump got baited several times and also made some unprovoked errors. Harris stuck to the points she wanted to make, seemed to effectively get across the message she intended to get out, and landed a few memorable lines. I don’t recall anything that could be considered a mistake from her.
She wins the debate and comes out of it seeming more competent than I think a lot of people had penned her.
A quick report from the world of science and academia.
Strange times indeed. Grant proposals my lab has been working on for months have disappeared. I’m seeing and hearing of several nodes in my network which are in federal positions just disappearing.
I also advise students who are building software products for clients, and of both clients that are government agencies, NASA and US Forest Service, today I have learned that one has essentially cancelled the project at its end stages and the other has been MIA for weeks (Ironically, the cancelled product was a system that would significantly improve the efficiency of a key NASA analysis workflow).
Today I see news that the NSF research experiences for undergraduates, which trains undergraduates to conduct real research and which I personally credit with making me into a scientist, is being shuttered across much of the country.
The grant I’m relying on to complete my PhD is on shaky ground according to people close to the problem, and I fear that funding cuts could affect the only backup plan I have, which is continuing working as a teaching assistant. (A luxurious $15k per year + tuition remission). The key expert on my committee in the tech I’m using is at NASA and I fear for the longevity of his position.
Feels like the government is just dismantling the world I’ve spent my life working to become a part of, and I can’t say that I quite understand why.
I’m in a hard science field with direct applications to societal benefits. I believe that what I’m working on is something many would recognize as important. And I also think there’s a pretty clear link between training people who do this sort of thing (STEM generally) and national wellbeing and competitiveness.
I could understand this all better if it was just Trump doing it alone. Sort of a lower class rebellion against the educated class. But what really has me confused is the fact that it’s being spearheaded by Musk and “tech” people.
When DOGE was first announced I thought, great! I deeply dislike Trump but maybe this will make it actually be quite worth it in the end if we can fix the behemoth of government and make it more efficient. Maybe the country will be able to start to build things again, like the tech guys say, it’s time to build! But what we got was quite different from that hopeful version of me had in mind. SV types spearheading the dismantling of the US institution of science. That was not on my bingo card! Why was this the first move of DOGE? Noah Smith argues that it’s an ideological purge rather than an attempt at efficiency, and I guess that makes sense. Ultimately science funding is quite small potatoes in the federal budget. So why is it among the first major target of the administration and DOGE?
I don’t want to catastrophize here. Science in the US is being weakened and downsized, and somewhat purged for touchy topics, but it’s not being destroyed. I’ll probably be able to pull through and finish my program, at least that’s my current hope.
Yet it seems quite obvious to me that these moves are going to significantly weaken the US against competitors such as China. Science has its flaws, but it’s still the secret sauce of western societies’ success and a key part of the economic engine. I’ve always thought of Elon Musk as a big picture, long term thinker who understands the role of science and technology in human advancement. So I’m at a loss for why he would direct focus onto weakening science in the US as among his first moves if his interest really is with the medium to long term success of the US.
More options
Context Copy link