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Walterodim

Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t

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User ID: 551

Walterodim

Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 12:47:06 UTC

					

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User ID: 551

Health, Fitness, Obesity, and Politics

Something that’s been bouncing around in my head for quite some time is how people relate their politics to their personal health. This story from The Daily Beast on Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde has resurfaced this for me by providing a clear illustration of what I perceive as a current difference between the American left and right on this issue:

“Look, we have an explosion of Type 2 diabetes right now. Explosion. Obesity is off the charts. You know, we’re removing people from being responsible for their own health,” Hovde said.

“If they all of a sudden started to realize that they’re going to pay more for their health care by consuming, you know, by consuming massive amounts of soda every day or fatty foods and not exercising, maybe they would change their behavioral patterns.”

Hovde then claimed obesity was a “personal choice.”

“It’s a personal choice,” he said, “but there should be consequences to those personal choices. Fine, you want to do that, you become obese, your health care is going to cost more. Or, the quality—or not the quality, but the amount of health care may go down, because you may not have the money to afford it.

“You have to force personal responsibility back to people, and also make them smart consumers.”

The Daily Beast helpfully loops in a putative expert on the matter, a professor at NYU:

Jay said that Hovde’s comments singling out obesity as something that should raise people’s insurance rates reveals that “either you’re not understanding or you’re really discriminating against people who have a chronic disease.”

“It’s assuming that obesity is some sort of moral failing that people need to be punished for,” she said. “That’s not true.

She added: “It’s a pretty awful and dangerous thing to say.”

This is the latest spat about these sorts of things and probably lays the dichotomous beliefs out about as clearly as possible. There is a policy angle (some people think insurance should be risk-based, some don’t), but that is comparatively dry relative to the beliefs in personal responsibility and how those views extend into political beliefs. There was an old throwaway post from the dissident right blog Dividuals that stuck with me a decade later because of how clearly it captured something that I felt when I read the left-leaning positions:

One realistic way to parodize liberals / lefties / Progressives / feminists / SJWs etc. would be to present them as narcissistic, solipsistic, self-absorbed people with huge and fragile egos who demand that everything should revolve around themselves.

The simple fact that feminists tend to be fat would only make, in itself, a weak joke. But when you find they run around parading their fatness, and make it a political goal to make men somehow adore it – imagine it, human beings making it a political goal that other should have a positive opinion of their own personal fsckups! “I have crap for character, now praise me for it, oppressor!” Imagine programmers making it a political goal to convince people that bugs are actually good!

At the time, I wasn’t particularly right-aligned, so this wasn’t really an ingroup-outgroup thing, but an articulation of a growing frustration I had with people on the left, this absolute refusal to ever tell people to own up to their situations, take responsibility for where they are in life, and fix it. Everything, always, forever is just contingent on circumstances, completely outside of their control. While I could understand the arguments about this sort of thing when it comes to wealth accumulation or crime, to be so extreme as to not grant that people have agency over what they eat was the kind of thing that was just steadily pushing me away from having any inclination to share goals with the economic left.

Since then, there has been a steady (if not particularly large) genre of articles characterizing fitness as a right-wing phenomenon. Some of these are really silly things about how gyms are gateways to far-right extremism, but let’s look at one example that’s a little more self-serious and not obviously ridiculous:

The study found a significant correlation between those men who were heavier and stronger and the belief that some social groups should dominate others. These men were also less likely to support the redistribution of wealth, a typically left wing principle.

Specifically, the researchers found a specific correlation between the number of hours spent in the gym and having less egalitarian socioeconomic beliefs.

Dr Michael Price, a senior lecturer in psychology at the university and the lead author of the study, suggested the findings could come down to three things: The result of the men “calibrating their egalitarianism to their own formidability”, that less egalitarian men strive to become more muscular or there could be a third variable at play.

“Our results suggest that wealthier men who are more formidable physically are more likely to oppose redistribution of wealth,” he said. “Essentially, they seem more motivated to defend their resources. But less wealthy men who are still physically formidable don’t seem more inclined to support redistribution either. They’re not demanding a share of the wealth.

Vice covers the same thing, but with an oddly smug glee:

To all you gym-bro haters amongst us, come, be seated. This one's for you. Science—objective, empirically tested science, the science that tells us that the ice caps are melting—has confirmed what many of us have long suspected: Gym bros are right-wing jerks.

Price's findings? That rich muscle dudes are the worst! Under those rock-hard abs lie the rock-hard souls of men who doesn't believe in spreading their riches around. "It's basically your tolerance to the idea that wealth shouldn't be redistributed," Dr. Price explains. "Some people thought it was horrible; some people thought it was fine."

If there was ever a line that called for a YesChad.jpg response, it’s that one. While I am not a particularly big guy, I will self-report that I do believe my work as an endurance athlete has substantially shifted my views against egalitarian perspectives and more towards personal responsibility. Rather than modeling that as being about domination and aggression, I would propose that the mechanism is the personal sense of accomplishment and mastery coupled with knowing how much of it is a direct product of your internal locus of control. I’m not decently fast because of some random freak accident of nature - I wasn’t fast when I started running, I’m much faster now, and I keep getting faster in almost perfect concert with how much work I put into the sport. Others will fare better with less work, such is life, but we all have a great deal of control over our outcomes. So, yeah, I am inclined to believe that pursuing fitness as a hobby will tend to lead one to the right of their current positions.

The belief that fitness is a right-wing thing doesn’t stop with this sort of relatively modest claim about egalitarian tendencies though. The Society for Cultural Anthropology has a weird writeup on Gym Fascism. To go nutpicking a bit, the Manitoba University newspaper has Fitness culture and fatphobia are fascistic - Our obsession with looking the same is culling joy and body diversity:

Prof. Brian Pronger points out that almost everything that we stress about physical education centres around maximizing the body’s performance. It’s the way that we are all expected to structure our lives around our fitness regimens, and those five days a week when we’re supposed to work out must be in service to making ourselves as strong as possible.

Fitness fanaticism constipates our personal growth. Think about what it means to “work on yourself.” It often means to work out, as if your character is tied to your physical strength and muscle tone.

OK, too much nutpicking. Back to a serious journalistic outlet, Time magazine. Just before the New Year, Time published a story that might dissuade people from making an ill-advised resolutions for 2023 titled The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness:

It was super interesting reading the reflections of fitness enthusiasts in the early 20th century. They said we should get rid of corsets, corsets are an assault on women’s form, and that women should be lifting weights and gaining strength. At first, you feel like this is so progressive.

Then you keep reading, and they’re saying white women should start building up their strength because we need more white babies. They’re writing during an incredible amount of immigration, soon after enslaved people have been emancipated. This is totally part of a white supremacy project. So that was a real “holy crap” moment as a historian, where deep archival research really reveals the contradictions of this moment.

Oh dear.

Anyway, to return to that Hovde story that kicked things off, I find it pretty interesting to think about how these things play with different crowds. Something that’s kind of obvious is that Red Tribe America is not actually very fit at all, while Blue Tribe power centers consistently have quite a few fitness-minded individuals. Nonetheless, when Hovde says that fat people are responsible for their own bodies, it seems to me that most Red Tribers basically agree and accept that they’re fat because they like burgers and beer a little too much, while the Blue Tribers recoil at the suggestion that people are responsible for eating themselves into Type 2 diabetes. This reminds me of how discussions of marriage and morality play out as well - educated elites, regardless of political persuasion, stay married at very high rates and seem to be well aware that this is the correct way to live, but are hesitant to say this about the underclass. They hold standards for themselves that they believe don’t apply to others. As far as electoral politics goes, I doubt this little newscycle item means much of anything, but it does provide a fun case study and litmus test for perspectives on the topic.

Gender Identity and Sports - Once More Around The Track

There has been ample discussion regarding whether trans women should be able to compete in women’s sports, ranging situations as unpopular as Fallon Fox celebrating the bliss of fracturing women’s skulls in cage fights to the silliness of the Boston Marathon extending women’s qualifying times to anyone that says they’re non-binary. For better or worse, some of this is starting to wash out to actual policies at the highest levels of sports, with World Athletics banning trans women from competing as women in the Olympics. Personally, I would regard this as an obvious and easy decision, with no reasonable debate to be had. For the other side, here’s trans sprinter Halba Diouf’s feelings on not being allowed to compete as a woman and here is Science insisting arguing that the null hypothesis should that be trans women don’t necessarily have an advantage.

This is sufficiently well-worn territory that I don’t really expect anything fresh to be said at this point. Instead, I want to focus on something that I’ve always personally thought was quite a lot more difficult to judge correctly, which is athletes that were assigned female at birth, but have conditions that cause them to have abnormally high testosterone, such as XY chromosomes. In recent years, this seems to be coming up more often, possibly because of awareness of it being a thing that happens, possibly because the increased money and visibility of women’s sports has begun to select for increasing levels of biologically unusual people, or possibly because of something that’s not occurring to me. The first one I was aware of was Castor Semenya, who I’ve always had a soft spot for because it seems like a really tough break to have been born labeled as a girl, lived your life as a woman, competed and won at the highest levels, then get told, “nope, sorry, your chromosomes don’t match, so you’re banned in the future”. I hope that regardless of my positions on these issues to always extend that basic level of empathy to someone who truly was not at fault in the creation of a difficult situation.

I recently bumped into an article tying the plight of Diouf to a Senagalese sprinter who turned out to have XY chromosomes and high T, resulting in a ban from the Olympics and this is what gets to the heart of the matter:

LGBTQI advocacy groups say excluding trans athletes amounts to discrimination but WA President Sebastian Coe has said: "Decisions are always difficult when they involve conflicting needs and rights between different groups, but we continue to take the view that we must maintain fairness for female athletes above all other considerations.

First, I’d like to note that this objectively is discrimination and that takes us right to the heart of the point - having a women’s category in sports is inherently discriminatory. That’s the whole point, to discriminate men from women and create a category that is feasible for the best women to win, hence we must determine what a woman is for the purposes of that competition. That a policy is discriminatory simply cannot suffice as an argument against it, particularly when the whole point of the category is to implement a form of discrimination!

Second, I think Coe’s answer is correct and neatly covers all of these scenarios. I used to have a tough time with them, precisely because of the desire to be fair to women like Semenya, but the reality is that Caster Semenya simply isn’t a female and the whole point of women’s sports is to allow women to compete on equal footing against other women. That this will feel unfair and exclusionary to some tiny percentage of the population that has either a gender identity disorder or chromosomal abnormality is barely an argument at all - elite athletics isn’t actually an inclusive activity, it is exclusive and filters for the absolute best in the world for a given ruleset. Within track, use of performance-enhancing drugs is strictly monitored, with spikes in biological passports used to ban athletes even if what they used cannot be identified. With such tight constraints and rules on what physical specifications athletes are allowed to have, I no longer favor something so inclusive as to allow XY or other gender-abnormal athletes to compete - the women have to be actual women competing against other actual women. If nothing else, Lia Thomas has helped provide me some clarity on the absurdity of muscle-bound, testosterone-fueled males in women’s sports.

Confession - I am a NIMBY (Part 1/2)

There, I said it. In the circles that I reside in, calling someone a “nimby” comes with a clearly negative connotation, such a strong negative connotation that it stands alone as an argument in favor of any given development or policy change. To make sure that I’m thinking clearly and not just embracing the term because I’m a contrarian (although I am admittedly a contrarian), I turned to Wikipedia to make sure I had a sound working definition:

NIMBY (or nimby),[1] an acronym for the phrase "not in my back yard",[2][3] is a characterization of opposition by residents to proposed developments in their local area, as well as support for strict land use regulations. It carries the connotation that such residents are only opposing the development because it is close to them and that they would tolerate or support it if it were built farther away. The residents are often called nimbys, and their viewpoint is called nimbyism. The opposite movement is known as YIMBY for "yes in my back yard".[4]

Well, now that I’ve got a clear definition, yes, that’s exactly me. I support good things in my neighborhood and I’m against bad things in my neighborhood. I even embrace the implied hypocrisy of saying that I don’t care if other people want to have bad things in their neighborhoods, it’s really up to them whether they accept or refuse those things. In the event that such a thing is truly necessary for both neighborhoods to succeed and that one of us must accept the bad thing, I embrace Coaseian negotiated handling of the externalities.

Let’s move on to some concrete examples of my nimbyism. The first one that pops to mind are the frequent local proposals for homeless shelters, family shelters, and similar structures and aid organizations. One of my best friends used to live in a condo that was seated next door to one of these, which gave them a rather first-hand and literal application of what it means to say, “yes in my backyard” to this sort of project, and it was about as unpleasant as you’d expect. The frequency of parking lot fights, ambulances in the middle of the night, and police presence were, again, about you might expect. Without regard to whether such organizations are actually helpful or not, should I want to accept such a similar proposed structure in my backyard? The answer that I give is a fervent no, that inviting the indigent to my neighborhood will make it a worse place to live in just about every conceivable way. I want indigent populations removed from my neighborhood as soon as practicable and legal for the police to do so, for the incredibly obvious reason that this makes my neighborhood a better place to live. Some people feel quite differently from me on this - perfect! Since I don’t want drug addicts and crazy people in the park across the street and others say they don’t mind, we have a Pareto optimal solution. If they actually do feel that there is a cost, we’ll have to come to some sort of Coaseian handling of externalities, but I’ll at least have extracted the concession that it actually does suck to have hobos in your park.

Moving on to one that’s a little less plain to see and that is even more galling to those that think the nimbies must be stopped, let’s talk a bit about housing density. Madison currently faces a housing crunch, caused by economic opportunity and geographic constraints. The city has an unusual abundance of high-skill job prospects as the state’s capitol, home to a large and prestigious university, and large software and biotechnology sectors that have spun off of that university. Geographically, the heart of the city is the largest American city situated on an isthmus, just about one mile wide, running between a picturesque pair of lakes. The city has an ordinance protecting the prominence of the state capitol building, keeping the overall aesthetic of the skyline as it has been. It is also famously tedious to deal with when it comes to historical preservation; if you’d like to enjoy some ridiculousness, check out this recent argument about a bar that Al Capone apparently went to. As a result of these factors, that slice of land is a surprisingly expensive place to live for the Midwest.

Despite the prices, I elected to settle here anyway and I really do love this city. I love the beauty of the city, the historic skyline, the lakes, the biking, the fitness culture, the breweries, the cheese, the parks, the huge farmer’s market, and much more. I even love that it’s the kind of place that a fake Indian nonbinary lunatic would set up shop for fun and profit.Others in my city share that love, but think it should be a cheaper place to live, that we should increase housing density, and this is basically a human right. One recent opinion piece on this has a decent enough piece on a rather villainous and peculiar bit of law here:

An ordinance the Madison Common Council adopted in 1966 defines a “family” as “an individual, or two (2) or more persons related by blood, marriage, domestic partnership, or legal adoption, living together as a single housekeeping unit, in a dwelling unit, including foster children,” though city ordinance does carve out some exceptions for roomers, children, group homes of people with disabilities, and so on. The implication for renters is that, depending on the zoning of an area, it might be technically illegal for more than two unrelated people to live in an apartment together. Restrictions are also tougher for renters than for people who own homes. In our scenario, if one of us had been able to buy a home, it would have been legal for us to live together, but as renters, it would be illegal in most residential districts to share a home.

The neighborhoods with the greatest opposition to this change are already some of the most expensive in the city. Homes currently for sale in Dudgeon Monroe, Vilas, Greenbush, and Wingra Park range between $625,000 and $1.3 million for a 4 bedroom home. They’re not your typical target neighborhoods for student housing. UW-Madison undergrads are a smart bunch, but likely very few of them have the time, money, and energy to hollow out your neighborhood of expensive homes. Most of them are perfectly decent neighbors, too, by the way.

The fact that the current ordinance doesn’t relate to use, but is more about who, is an indicator that it is designed to be discriminatory. While more explicit restrictions against poor people, young people, unmarried people, or students living in certain homes would certainly violate fair housing laws, these thinly-veiled discriminatory ordinances seem to fly under the legal radar. Still, one could argue it does violate city protections based on marital status, income, as well as student status. It actually could be cause for a lawsuit. Some municipalities’ family definitions have been struck down by courts in various locations around the US, and the Attorney General of Wisconsin in 1974 wrote an opinion that these ordinances “are of questionable constitutionality” under the Fourteenth Amendment. It’s discriminatory enough that housing is so gosh-darned expensive—do we really need unjust zoning ordinances on top of the price tag?

Here’s where I bite the bullet and go full nimby - yes! I am in favor of exactly that in my neighborhood. I want to live next to married couples with decent careers. My experiences with poor people and the transiently coupled have shown me that they’re lower quality neighbors. Even aside from trustworthiness, transience, investment in the property, and quality of friends and relatives, we simply don’t share the same cultural norms and preferences. I would rather be around the petit bourgeois. Back to the distinction between being a nimby and having a broader policy recommendation though - I don’t care if someone else in some other neighborhood would like to get rid of this sort of restriction, it’s not like I have some moral prohibition on there being poor people with roommates, I would just rather that my neighbors be a nice married couple that is going to stick around a while. I’ll even cop to the even more villainous take that I rather like the high property values here in part because they serve as an effective barrier against living around the kind of people I don’t want to live around.

The new House Speaker, Mike Johnson, is an Evangelical Christian that has positions and stances on homosexuality that I do not share (I confess, I remain a Millennial lib that has no problem with gay people doing gay things). Nonetheless, this CNN video where they discuss his positions on homosexuality and conversion therapy just seems so bizarre to me. In it, they refer to the idea of someone going from gay to straight as "debunked", quote Johnson saying, "there's freedom to change if you want to", and "homosexual behavior is something you do, not who you are".

Despite my own inclination to completely accept gay people qua gay people, I find nothing objectionable about Johnson's statements and see them as a much more accurate model of reality than what the CNN crew is expressing. I have zero doubt that sexual preferences and predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition. I'm agnostic on whether this could allow someone who has a natural inclination towards homosexuality (or heterosexuality) to groom attraction for the sex that they didn't initially prefer, but it's not obvious to me, and I don't think there's good reason to say that it's deboonked as though this is just a common stylized fact. Likewise, even if it proves impossible to change one's underlying preference, it certainly remains true that one can elect to follow a different pattern of behavior than their natural tendency. I might have a natural tendency to hook up with a flirtatious woman at the bar while I'm on a work trip, but Mrs. O'Dim wouldn't appreciate this and I value her so much more than some stupid hookup. Were I a religious man, I might be inclined to view my religious obligations through the same sort of lens.

But really, the thing that keeps hitting me with dissonance isn't even the above points, which I can at least countenance reasonable counterarguments to, but the incongruity with the belief that gender itself is a mere social construct that is fully malleable to an individual's stated preference. A man attracted to other men cannot become a straight man, but he can become a straight woman. Do the people articulating this view not notice that this is at least a difficult pair of propositions to adhere to? Do they see no conflict? Do they understand the conflict, but believe that it's a question that's been solved by The Science, so better to just trust The Science and move on? Cynically, I think it's mostly that expressing the opposite view will get you bullied and fired.

crutch to mitigate the downsides of modernity, except instead of social anxiety

Of course, the drugs seem to work like shit compared to be an authentically mentally healthy human being. I expect that Wegovy and similar drugs will wind up similar on a number of dimensions. I genuinely cannot imagine preferring a lifetime of pill popping to just riding a bike.

New Frontiers in Algorithmic Racism - Tax Edition

The New York Times has an article out on the IRS algorithmically targeting black Americans at higher rates than other racial groups. The claim is that there's something in the algorithm that inappropriately biases it against black Americans. Summarized in the opening paragraphs:

Black taxpayers are at least three times as likely to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service as other taxpayers, even after accounting for the differences in the types of returns each group is most likely to file, a team of economists has concluded in one of the most detailed studies yet on race and the nation’s tax system.

The findings do not suggest bias from individual tax enforcement agents, who do not know the race of the people they are auditing. They also do not suggest any valid reason for the I.R.S. to target Black Americans at such high rates; there is no evidence that group engages in more tax evasion than others.

OK, so what exactly is causing them to get audited more if it's not individual bias, the machines are blinded to the race of the individual, and the rules are the same for everyone? Apparently some of it comes down to targeting EITC filings:

Black Americans are disproportionately concentrated in low-wage jobs. They are more likely than whites to claim the E.I.T.C. The authors wondered if that prevalence in claiming the credit might explain why Black taxpayers face more audits, because I.R.S. data show the agency audits people who claim the E.I.T.C. at higher rates than other taxpayers.

But as the research progressed, the authors found the share of Black Americans claiming the E.I.T.C. only explained a small part of the audit differences. Instead, more than three-quarters of the disparity stems from how much more often Black taxpayers who claim the credit are audited, compared with E.I.T.C. claimants who are not Black.

Unless I'm missing something, the article does not explicitly state what the relevant factors are that result in this targeting are. In what I see as typical NYT style, it does leave a breadcrumb that might be suggestive if you're ignoring the narrative quotes embedded in the article:

Black taxpayers appear to disproportionately file returns with the sort of potential errors that are easy for I.R.S. systems to identify, like underreporting certain income or claiming tax credits that the taxpayer does not qualify for, the authors find.

To me, this reads like the most likely explanation for black taxpayers being audited more frequently is that they report their income incorrectly in easy-to-detect ways. Since the IRS already has W-2 data for filers, it's probably not very hard for them to notice when someone reports their income wrong. There isn't really any elaboration that I find after this, so I'm unclear on how much this accounts for auditing disparities. The implication of the article and the quotes from "equity" advocates imply to me that we should figure out a way to make sure that white Americans are audited at least as much as black Americans, regardless of who is misreporting their income more frequently.

As cynical as it sounds, I'm beginning to hear the term "algorithmic bias" as nothing more than a form of projection - algorithm systems frequently detect something real about the world, people with racially motivated politics don't like that outcome, and they seek to shift the algorithm towards a bias in favor of their preferred group. If a program that is optimized for detecting incorrect tax filings works as intended to detect them, but turns up more black Americans than white Americans, the suggestion appears to be to change the weighting until it evens out the races, regardless of the impact on the efficiency of detecting lost revenue. The "algorithmic bias", from my reading of this would be injecting a deliberate racial preference to counter the program noticing actual disparities. I am reminded of the racial resentment scale, in which people who say that "blacks have gotten less than they deserve" are not racially resentful, while those who think things like "Irish, Italian, and Jewish ethnicities overcame prejudice and worked their way up, Blacks should do the same without any special favors" are racially resentful.

Anyway, I'll be curious to see if the study is released more publicly and details what exactly is causing the disparity.

Is Dylan Mulvaney the Trans Andy Kaufmann?

Watching the Dylan Mulvaney spectacle play out has left me with an odd feeling that I’ve struggled to quite put a finger on, with Mulvaney causing me to have something like an uncanny valley reaction to his transition and demeanor. I don’t mean this to say that Mulvaney looks almost female, but not quite, I mean that Mulvaney gives me the impression of someone that isn’t sincere about transitioning, but has put enough effort into it that I’m not exactly sure what’s going on and what to make of this person. In light of the recent Bud Light debacle I’ve finally settled on an explanation that makes more sense to me - Mulvaney is a modern Andy Kaufman, playing the part of a trans person well enough to convince some people, while others are in on the joke, and all of them contribute to Mulvaney’s accrual of fame and cash.

Who was Andy Kaufman? I think the Wiki summary is better than anything I’ll write up:

During this time, he continued to tour comedy clubs and theaters in a series of unique performance art/comedy shows, sometimes appearing as himself and sometimes as obnoxiously rude lounge singer Tony Clifton. He was also a frequent guest on sketch comedy and late-night talk shows, particularly Late Night with David Letterman.[6] In 1982, Kaufman brought his professional wrestling villain act to Letterman's show by way of a staged encounter with Jerry "The King" Lawler of the Continental Wrestling Association. The fact that the altercation was planned was not publicly disclosed for over a decade.

Kaufman died of lung cancer on May 16, 1984, at the age of 35.[7] As pranks and elaborate ruses were major elements of his career, persistent rumors have circulated that Kaufman faked his own death as a grand hoax.[6][8] He continues to be respected for the variety of his characters, his uniquely counterintuitive approach to comedy, and his willingness to provoke negative and confused reactions from audiences.[6][9]

Comedian Richard Lewis in A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman said of him: "No one has ever done what Andy did, and did it as well, and no one will ever. Because he did it first. So did Buster Keaton, so did Andy."[96] Carl Reiner recalled his distinction in the comedy world:

Did Andy influence comedy? No. Because nobody's doing what he did. Jim Carrey was influenced—not to do what Andy did, but to follow his own drummer. I think Andy did that for a lot of people. Follow your own drumbeat. You didn't have to go up there and say 'take my wife, please.'[97] You could do anything that struck you as entertaining. It gave people freedom to be themselves.[98]

Reiner also said of Kaufman: "Nobody can see past the edges, where the character begins and he ends."[99]

Kaufman made people laugh, get angry with him, and even physically attack him by playacting at different roles so successfully than people couldn’t tell where the sincere Kaufman stopped and the characters began. When I watch Dylan Mulvaney advertise native-scented deodorant, I don’t see someone that’s genuinely trying to be a woman. I see someone that’s clowning the concept, mocking women, mocking trans people, and exploiting the clicks for fun and profit.

I wasn’t around for Kaufman, so this comparison is likely imperfect. Nonetheless, watching people react to what sure looks to me like a running joke as though it’s perfectly sincere has been entirely surreal. I see people on the pro-trans side treating Mulvaney as sincere. If I’m right and this is a running joke, Joe Biden sure didn’t get the word. My inclination has been to chalk this up to people becoming sufficiently accustomed to never question claims from trans people that playing along with Dylan Mulvaney is no different than the rest of it, and even if they have doubts, they’re surely not going to look at Dylan and saying, “oh, come the fuck on”. So even though this was weird, it wasn’t until the Bud Light thing that it began to really seem hyperreal to me.

Here, watch this 35 second reaction video from Kid Rock. What’s going on here? Is Kid Rock sincerely pissed off at Bud Light, so pissed off that the only way to express it is with a burst of automatic weapons fire supplemented by some covering fire from a shotgun-wielding buddy? Is he basically sincere in his reaction, but strongly exaggerating the reaction because it’s funny? Is he ambivalent, but doing it for the clicks and lols? Is he part of the Bud Light advertising campaign, just driving the product into people’s mindspace? Does he agree with me that the whole thing is a big joke and he’s just rolling with his own improv? I don’t know and I don’t even know how I would know.

Vox reports that people have reacted in real life:

Don, a liquor store owner in Arkansas who requested to remain anonymous so he “doesn’t get caught up in the wokeness,” told me he’s seen a 20-25 percent dip in Bud Light sales since the controversy hit, with his admittedly small sample size of shoppers seemingly opting for Miller Lite and Coors Light instead. However, he doesn’t expect the backlash to stick. “A lot of people are talking about it, fired up about it, they’re never drinking Bud Light again, yada yada yada, but they’ll be drinking them in a month, as soon as the news cycle quits,” he said.

Well, what are those people thinking? Are they genuinely pissed, but not so pissed as to permanently give up a product that seems completely fungible with other light beers? How about Ben Shapiro:

The post started to pick up steam in conservative circles relatively quickly. Right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro decried the collaboration on his show, saying, “Well, folks, our culture has now decided men are women and women are men and you must be forced to consume products that say so.” Shapiro appears not to be much of a Bud Light fan himself, so he probably doesn’t have much to boycott. “I understand Bud Light is piss water masquerading as beer,” he said, “so I guess that, you know, it’s sort of trans beer.”

Well, I’m glad he at least kept the on-brand smugness. In fact, no one seems to be missing out on their normal branding, which lends itself to the hyperreal experience. In keeping with that, I will smugly note that I don’t drink that shit anyway and I’ll be cracking an IPA from a real industry underdog - Lagunitas(tm), a tiny subsidiary of a little-known international parent company. Thank God that I’m not getting taken in by all this hyperreal marketing.

I’ve previously written about how much I dislike student loan forgiveness policies and framing college education as a public good. Now that the Biden administration is attempting to implement the policy, the discourse has shifted away from whether it’s a good idea to whether it’s a legally valid policy, with two challenges currently going to the Supreme Court. For a defense of the policy that extends all the way to declaring that the challenges are completely illegitimate, we can look to a Voxsplainer from Ian Millheiser:

The legal issues are straightforward: A federal law known as the Heroes Act explicitly authorizes the program that Biden announced in the summer of 2022, as the Covid-19 pandemic persisted. Under that program, most borrowers who earned less than $125,000 a year during the pandemic will receive $10,000 in student loan forgiveness. Borrowers who received Pell Grants, a program that serves low-income students, may have up to $20,000 in debt forgiven.

And yet, while this program is clearly authorized by a federal law permitting the secretary of education to “waive or modify” many student loan obligations “as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency,” it is unlikely to survive contact with a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees.>

I suggest a full readthrough, but that does get to the heart of the matter. The full text of the Heros Act is here and is about as clear as Milheiser suggest above. After some initial throatclearing, the act says:

SEC. 2. WAIVER AUTHORITY FOR RESPONSE TO MILITARY CONTINGENCIES AND NATIONAL EMERGENCIES. (a) WAIVERS AND MODIFICATIONS.— (1) IN GENERAL.—Notwithstanding any other provision of law, unless enacted with specific reference to this section, the Secretary of Education (referred to in this Act as the ‘‘Secretary’’) may waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs under title IV of the Act as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency to provide the waivers or modifications authorized by paragraph (2).

I don’t see anything in the ensuing paragraphs that would narrow this meaningfully, although I welcome input from anyone with a sharper legal eye than I have. Nonetheless, I find myself looking at this as an utterly dishonest exploitation of a law that was written with a clear purpose in mind. The Heros Act was created to handle soldiers being sent abroad to fight the War on Terror; whether this was good or bad policy, it had a clear purpose and a somewhat defined cost cap based on how many people are actually affiliated with the military or meaningfully economically impacted. The Biden student debt cancellation takes advantage of the “or national emergency” provision by declaring that everyone was impacted by the declared Covid emergency and therefore all student debt was subject to cancellation per this bill.

This, I suppose, is where I rediscover that whatever judicial philosophy I adhere to looks more like originalism than textualism, but really looks even more like I adhere to my own You Must Be Kidding Doctrine. I don’t buy for a moment that the people that drafted this legislation intended to empower the executive branch to declare an emergency that affects all Americans and that this would grant the power to cancel as much student debt for as large of a group of people as they like. Had they intended to do so, they probably would have just done that explicitly rather than spending a page clearing their throats about the importance of the United States military.

I see many speculating that the ostensibly conservative Supreme Court will use the Major Questions Doctrine to overturn the policy:

In the last few decades, the Supreme Court has placed another limitation on the Chevron Doctrine’s scope. The “major questions doctrine” holds that courts should not defer to agency statutory interpretations that concern questions of “vast economic or political significance.” The Supreme Court justifies this limitation with the non-delegation doctrine. According to the Supreme Court, courts are supposed to interpret “major” legal questions, not administrative bureaucrats.

I have to confess that I personally despise student loan “forgiveness” so much that I would be enthusiastic about nearly any convoluted reasoning that the Supreme Court comes up with to reject it as a legitimate policy. I am further bolstered in that attitude by what I perceive as decades of utterly ridiculous, lawless rulings that build on the time honored principle of deciding what I want and figuring out why the law agrees with me later. In this particular case, I think it’s actually fairly reasonable to say that this $400 billion policy and license for trillions more is not a legitimate use of executive authority delegated by Heros act, but I don’t think I can actually prove that through looking at the language in the text.

What say you?

Confession - I am a NIMBY (Part 2/2)

Zooming out to a somewhat ridiculous degree, I find that I extend my position on this all the way up and down the ladder of my preferences and politics. When I consider immigration, for example, it’s not that I’m against all immigration to my country or that I think other countries should necessarily restrict free flow of movement, it’s that I want my nation’s policy to reflect what will be good for our (rather large) neighborhood. We should identify what is good for our neighborhood and choose to do that. In the event that cooperation with other neighborhoods is required, we should sort this out by negotiations to price externalities. There are going to be some pretty obvious agreements about what’s good for the neighborhood and these disagreements can occur between reasonable and well-meaning people, but we’re going to have a tough time getting the terms of debate to even begin to make sense if we can’t agree on whether the improvement of our neighborhood is the priority.

In all of these cases, the counterargument, as I understand it, is that while these things might be good for the current residents of my neighborhood, they’re not good for the potential future residents of my neighborhood. This is where I find it difficult to rebut the argument on its own terms, as it is evidently coming from a perspective of utilitarianism with little or no discount as one moves out the concentric ring of association. I don’t share that perspective and feel little or no responsibility to make my neighborhood more accessible to those that aren’t presently members.

In pondering this a bit yesterday, the part that I find most interesting in the efficacy of “nimby” as a sneer word against an opposing position. How did it come to be that even people that hold fundamentally nimby positions mostly recoil from being called nimbies? I think I found something like an answer in a recent Reddit thread on the putative housing shortage in Madison:

NIMBYs won’t let anything be built and this is what happens. There is not enough housing in the area but Madison-area NIMBYs are fake progressives who don’t actually care about the working class. Their number 1 priority is preventing multi family units from being built near their unremarkable mid century homes.

I think that’s it - progressivism demands the sort of egalitarianism that precludes one from saying that their backyard holds any particular value to them relative to other backyards. If something is good, then it must be good everywhere, which means that you must accept it in your backyard. Opposition to development is (correctly, I think) identified as anti-egalitarian, hierarchical, and classist.

In any case, I expect that people will continue to want good things in their neighborhood and not want bad things in their neighborhood. I hope that they regain the inclination to reply simply, “not in my backyard”.

California has a likely new Senator, and her background is a doozy if you're someone as cynical as I am about political figures. With Diane Feinstein having died, Gavin Newsome can now select anyone he'd like, and had promised that the position would be selected from a strict affirmative action pool of black women. He apparently failed to find anyone that actually lives in California that fits the bill, so he has instead selected Maryland resident Laphonza Butler for the position. What, you might ask, are her exquisite qualifications that would make her the top candidate for such an important position? Wiki's summary suffices:

Butler began her career as a union organizer for nurses in Baltimore and Milwaukee, janitors in Philadelphia, and hospital workers in New Haven, Connecticut. In 2009, she moved to California, organizing in-home caregivers and nurses, and served as president of SEIU United Long Term Care Workers, SEIU Local 2015.[4][5][6]

Butler was elected president of the California SEIU State Council in 2013. She undertook efforts to boost California's minimum wage and raise income taxes on the wealthiest Californians.[4] As president of SEIU Local 2015, Butler endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.[7]

In 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown appointed Butler to a 12-year term as a regent of the University of California.[6] She resigned from her role as regent in 2021.[8]

Butler joined SCRB Strategies as a partner in 2018. At SCRB, she played a central role in Kamala Harris's 2020 presidential campaign. Butler also advised Uber in its dealings with organized labor while at SCRB.[9] She was known as a political ally of Harris since her first run for California Attorney General in 2010, when she helped Harris negotiate a shared SEIU endorsement in the race.[4][10]

Butler left SCRB in 2020 to join Airbnb as director of public policy and campaigns in North America.[11][5]

Butler was named the third president of EMILY's List in 2021. She was the first Black woman and mother to lead the organization.[12][4]

What exactly is EMILY's List?

EMILY's List is an American political action committee (PAC) that aims to help elect Democratic female candidates in favor of abortion rights to office. It was founded by Ellen Malcolm in 1985.[4] The group's name is an acronym for "Early Money Is Like Yeast". Malcolm commented that "it makes the dough rise".[4] The saying refers to a convention of political fundraising: receiving many donations early in a race helps attract subsequent donors. EMILY's List bundles contributions to the campaigns of Democratic women in favor of abortion rights running in targeted races.[5][6]

From 1985 through 2008, EMILY's List raised $240 million for political candidates.[1] EMILY's List spent $27.4 million in 2010, $34 million in 2012, and $44.9 million in 2014.[3] The organization was on track to raise $60 million for the 2016 election cycle, much of it earmarked for Hillary Clinton, whose presidential bid EMILY's List had endorsed.[7]

Chalk up a win for patronage models of politics! This is someone whose entire career is built on raising money for politicians, culminating in heading a powerful PAC that is more explicitly built around money, money, money even in their very naming than any other PAC I've seen. Obviously, anyone paying attention knows that PACs are always about raising money and that's their express purpose, but I don't think I've seen one literally just make their name an acronym for the patronage enthusiasm. Big donors give money to politicians and get what they want and the organizer for acquiring that wealth is awarded with a seat in the Senate. In all, I see three things of note that are often the subtext of various choices and decisions, but I rarely see so blatantly:

  • The appointment will be explicitly about race and gender. If you're anything other than a Black Woman, you need not apply.

  • The Democrat party apparatus does not care in the slightest whether this person represents California, states are a stupid anachronism anyway.

  • The appointment will go to someone that has demonstrated loyalty and usefulness in assisting with the funneling of hundreds of millions of dollars to preferred sources.

On the one hand, it's all rather offensive, but on the other hand, I can think of no better Senator from California than a transient grifter that makes her living off of identity politics.

The best example of this, to me, is found in the term "fat shaming". The first time I heard it, I genuinely couldn't make sense of it, I was sincerely puzzled by what was meant. To me, being fat is plainly a bad thing to be, is a thing that people become due to their own actions, and therefore it is shameful to be fat. If someone engaged in self-control or exercise, they wouldn't be fat, but they are fat, so that is shameful. What an unsophisticated fool I was! If we can't even apply shame to something so straightforwardly negative, I don't see much hope for shaming behavior that's more equivocal.

I want to talk about how we talk about elections and what’s acceptable for whom to say. Over the weekend, when I was discussing Trump and the reaction to him from the broadly construed left, I told someone that I just genuinely don’t understand the perspective that he’s a “threat to democracy”. Since my interlocutor is on the same page as me with regard to January 6, they didn’t go down that easy and well-trod road, but instead brought up something from before the 2016 election that really rubbed them the wrong way, that they thought from an otherwise neutral perspective was unacceptable behavior, and that’s the way Trump speaks about his acceptance of electoral results. We have a shared recollection of him saying that he would only accept the results if they were fair, but now that I’m sitting down, I want to make sure I know exactly he said:

WALLACE: Mr. Trump, I want to ask you about one last question in this topic. You have been warning at rallies recently that this election is rigged and that Hillary Clinton is in the process of trying to steal it from you.

Your running mate, Governor Pence, pledged on Sunday that he and you—his words—”will absolutely accept the result of this election.” Today your daughter, Ivanka, said the same thing. I want to ask you here on the stage tonight: Do you make the same commitment that you will absolutely—sir, that you will absolutely accept the result of this election?

TRUMP: I will look at it at the time. I’m not looking at anything now. I’ll look at it at the time.

What I’ve seen—what I’ve seen is so bad. First of all, the media is so dishonest and so corrupt, and the pile-on is so amazing. The New York Times actually wrote an article about it, but they don’t even care. It’s so dishonest. And they’ve poisoned the mind of the voters. But unfortunately for them, I think the voters are seeing through it. I think they’re going to see through it. We’ll find out on November 8th. But I think they’re going to see through it.

WALLACE: But, sir, there’s… TRUMP: If you look—excuse me, Chris—if you look at your voter rolls, you will see millions of people that are registered to vote—millions, this isn’t coming from me—this is coming from Pew Report and other places—millions of people that are registered to vote that shouldn’t be registered to vote.

So let me just give you one other thing. So I talk about the corrupt media. I talk about the millions of people—tell you one other thing. She shouldn’t be allowed to run. It’s crooked—she’s—she’s guilty of a very, very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run.

And just in that respect, I say it’s rigged, because she should never…

TRUMP: Chris, she should never have been allowed to run for the presidency based on what she did with e-mails and so many other things.

WALLACE: But, sir, there is a tradition in this country—in fact, one of the prides of this country—is the peaceful transition of power and that no matter how hard-fought a campaign is, that at the end of the campaign that the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying that you’re necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and that the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?

TRUMP: What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense. OK?

I don’t think this is a cherrypicked example either, instead being a clear articulation of a position that I think Trump has consistently espoused with regard to both the 2016 and 2020 elections, that he will only accept the results of the election if he thinks they were legitimately free and fair (which may well require his victory for him to agree things were on the up and up). The person I was discussing this with thinks this is a terrible way to speak about elections because of the damage caused to trust in institutions by having your highest political officers saying that they really don’t know whether it’s a fair election or not.

I have previously articulated at some length why I think the 2020 election was an absolute mess and why I think the de facto elimination of secret ballots calls all American elections into question. Nonetheless, I have to admit that having a Presidential candidate express the same sentiment is destabilizing. The question I bump into is whether it’s incumbent on the speaker to be the one trying to stabilize things if they truly believe that the election is going to have highly questionable results. As a general matter, I think it would be best for candidates to not deliberately increase the level of uncertainty about a result; if you basically agreed to the rules and security procedures and thought they were fine, you should assure the public that their votes will determine who wins and you’ll win or lose on the merits. But what if you don’t think the election is even close to fair? What should you say? Let’s try a few examples to think about:

  • As I describe in the link above, the 2020 election was a mess, with large numbers of ballots cast illegally and laws changed at the last minute. If I were running and believed that, what should I say about it? I don't actually know if it materially impacted the results, but I would be pretty pissed off if my opponents pulled these kinds of stunts in my election.

  • If I were running in an Illinois state-wide election in 1982 and there turned out to be over 100,000 fraudulent votes just in Chicago, do I still have to just play along with the crooked machine?

  • Should all Russians agree that Putin was fairly elected this Spring? While his margin might be implausible, he probably is popular, so why stir up pointless turbulence?

  • Paul Kagame is making Rwanda great again and won 99% of the vote in 2017. His opponent offered him the high praise of saying, “but so far in this election no one in our party has been killed or imprisoned or harassed and that means at least some progress” which was presumably both stabilizing and good for his personal health. Can’t beat that!

Aside from the specific considerations, where at some point an election moves from sincere disagreement about the quality to obviously crooked, there seems to me to be a game theoretical problem with unqualified agreement that there are no concerns about the election. If I repeatedly state that the election is free and fair, am I not limiting my ability to challenge the results if it turns out I was wrong and it’s crooked? Is the game theoretically optimal choice not saying that you’ll see how it goes and assess accordingly? Setting aside problems with Trump’s honesty and bombast, I have trouble with the idea that one should offer such a concession to an opponent that they don’t think is actually a good-faith actor.

But really, I do get the point. Most American politicians don’t talk about issues with the electoral process, favoring stability over personal gain, with the added element of it being likely that they’ll be punished electorally if they attempt to defect from that equilibrium. How should politicians talk about their confidence in elections that haven’t happened yet?

“It is inescapable not to observe the racial dynamics here,” said Crump. “If the roles were reversed,” he continued, “how much outraged would there be in America?”

Approximately none. Black on white violence isn't uncommon and doesn't generate much in the way of outrage at all.

Protesters marched as they chanted, “justice for Ralph” and “Black lives matter,” and carried signs reading, “Ringing a doorbell is not a crime” and “The shooter should do the time,” footage from CNN affiliate KMBC shows.

I will register a prediction that the full story will not be very similar to a kid rang a doorbell and was then racistly shot for no reason at all. I don't know what happened, I don't have a specific hypothesis, and I am not jumping to blame the injured teen, I just bet that this is not what happened.

In a Monday interview with CNN, Crump said the shooting “hearkens back to Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery and so many of these other tragedies where you had citizens profile and shoot our Black children and the police then let them go home and sleep in their beds at night. Unacceptable.”

Agreed, it harkens back to Martin and Arbery, which is exactly why my inclination is to not believe that he was just an innocent jogger, armed only with Skittles, ringing a doorbell and being shot by an evil old racist for no particular reason.

Scott has a piece up on SBF's drug use. Unsurprisingly, the writing is clear and informative. It's Scott doing Scott things - go read it!

That said, I can barely get through it. This latest bout of examining SBF and his crew just fills me with a sense of absolute disgust and contempt. I rarely feel what people are talking about when they see some public figure do something they don't like and refer to it as "gross", but this has to be what that sensation is. We're talking about a guy that essentially committed fraud to collect billions of dollars, funneled tons of money to preferred political causes, played dress-up as being highly altruistic, and still might well get away with the whole thing. But none of that really triggered the disgust reaction, all of that just seems like the sort of thing that I predict the scions of Harvard finance law professors get up to - scamming money in maybe-legal fashion just seems incredibly on brand for such families, even if the specifics of effective altruism spice the story up.

Against the odds of anything that I would have thought years ago, the part I'm disgusted by is the drug use and treating it as just a bit of biochemical calculus to work out whether it's a good idea. I cannot even begin to relate to the idea of thinking about things like this:

Milky Eggs reports a claim by an employee that Sam was on “a patch for designer stimulants that mainlined them into his blood to give him a constant buzz at all times”. This is a hyperbolic description of Emsam, a patch form of the antidepressant/antiparkinsonian agent selegiline.

...

Everyone wants “magic bullets” - drugs that can increase dopamine in one of these ways, but not any of the others. Treat attention problems without causing hallucinations. Cure tremors without causing hypersexuality. But it’s tough. There are dozens of dopamine-based drugs, and all of them succeed in some ways and fail in others. Adderall mostly helps attention but sometimes causes a little paranoia on the side. Antipsychotics mostly prevent hallucinations and delusions, but also cause anhedonia. If a good doctor carefully chooses the right drug and dose, you’ll mostly get what you want. Otherwise, choose 2d4 random side effects from the appropriate side of the table.

Using things like this when you don't actually have anything wrong with you, when you just wish your mind worked differently viscerally disgusts me. I'm not exactly a Mormon over here - I start the day with coffee and often finish it with whiskey. I don't care if people smoke weed or even have the occasional bump of cocaine. Something about this though, medicalizing your very existence and taking psychoactive drugs all day, every day. Of course, Scott gets more into the pros and cons of the drug, whether it induces compulsive gambling, and so on, but I keep returning to the simple prescription to just not pump yourself full of psychoactive drugs in your quest to embezzle more money to send it to "good" causes.

I'd drifted away from rationalism, effective altruism, utilitarianism, and other ideas in the same constellation over the years, but nothing really quite put a bow on it like this SBF story in its full ridiculous caricature of how utterly bankrupt of basic morality and humanity the whole suite is. Scott closes with:

If I were one of the psychiatrists who will one day buy second houses from the money they make as expert witnesses on this case (DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT ASKING ME TO DO THIS9), I would focus on what doses were involved. Adderall 10 mg will help treat ADHD and give you a nice motivational boost. Adderall 200 mg will cause paranoia and sometimes hallucinations. There are similar considerations for modafinil and Emsam. All of these drugs are compatible with “probably didn’t matter” or “probably the main cause of everything” depending on what doses we’re talking about.

(and of course there could be other drugs I don’t know about)

The other free advice I would give these witnesses is to think about sleep. The most common way stimulants cause psychosis (this is my personal opinion, I haven’t checked if the literature agrees with me) isn’t by some kind of direct dopaminergic agonism. It’s by making it feel possible to operate on two hours of sleep a night. This is not actually possible and will land you into some kind of very exotic and maladaptive mental state. Someone who takes lots of stimulants during the day and then manages to sleep fine at night might do better than someone who takes the same amount of stimulants in order to work 130 hour weeks.

As someone that's not a credentialed psychiatrist, I have free advice that has served me and people close to me well - just don't do any of this. If you're ever having to consider whether you had a psychotic break because of meth or the lack of sleep caused by the meth, and the putative reason was so that you could work really long hours moving financial chips around while creating absolutely nothing of any value, you're doing everything wrong. These shouldn't be critiques on the margins, they should be wholesale repudiation of such a lifestyle. If I were part of the EA community, I'd be getting out in front of this and rejecting everything about how these people behaved, not saying that maybe they should have just used lower doses of their drugs.

To put it bluntly, most of my White neighbors and coworkers basically resembled hobbits. They had no ambition to them, nor any aspirations of greatness. Nor did they think about the world in a dynamic way—the more educated among them certainly stayed informed about the wider world, but they largely took it for granted that their immediate universe was a static place where nothing would ever happen.

And the horrifying thing is that’s how they liked it.

I quickly discovered that Midwesterners had no sense of imperial destiny and “right to rule” like you see in New Yorkers, Texans, or Californians. They had nothing like the feisty Faustian individualism of Floridians or “fuck you” pride of Appalachians. They didn’t even have the air of faded glory and gothic tragedy you see in the Deep South. It was nothing but aggressively bland conformity everywhere you looked.

As someone that has adopted the Midwest as home, I'm glad that it's so bad for this guy that it twisted his political views and forced him to leave. Yes, we are basically hobbits, content to live in nice towns with little in the way of crime and no real desire to seek power over others. Yes, the "elites" in the small-city Midwest are less Machiavellian lunatics seeking power at all costs and more boring bureaucrats that just want the buses to run on time. No, this sort of community building doesn't manifest any sort of whites-only ethnic unity; Hmong, Indian, and other populations that would have been exotic here a century ago show up, adopt the culture, and basically wind up seeming about the same as other Midwesterners in a couple generations. That this part of the country remains relatively naturally egalitarian, welcoming, and so godawful boring for a status-seeking, power-hungry lunatic is exactly why I am much happier here than in a genuine power center of the empire.

There's also something that's just genuinely funny to see this guy finding out that Whiteopia isn't actually what he dreamed of and having that curdle into animosity towards the Whiteopian residents that don't even engage in serious racial introspection like residents of Diversitopias.

We often ask what we're reading, but as a person of drunkenness, might I ask, what are you drinking?

My most recent whiskey acquisition is a bottle of Four Roses single barrel, barrel-proof bourbon that turned out to be delightful. I'm not sure that these are quite up to the their newly raised, over $100 MSRP, but it is a very good bottle.

On the beer front, I've shifted to keeping my barrel-aged stouts as weekend treats to get a couple pounds of weight off. Nonetheless, we are approaching the weekend, and I'm likely to pop a bottle of 3 Sheeps Barrel Select Wolf. Alternatively, I have a bunch of Central Waters anniversary stouts still, with both the Elijah Craig-barreled and Pappy-barreled variants on the shelf.

Hell, people treat Peter Singer as a perfectly legitimate, welcome-in-polite-society utilitarian and here's what he thinks about infanticide:

I did write that, in the 1979 edition of Practical Ethics. Today the term “defective infant” is considered offensive, and I no longer use it, but it was standard usage then. The quote is misleading if read without an understanding of what I mean by the term “person” (which is discussed in Practical Ethics). I use the term "person" to refer to a being who is capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future. As I have said in answer to the previous question, I think that it is generally a greater wrong to kill such a being than it is to kill a being that has no sense of existing over time. Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living. That doesn’t mean that it is not almost always a terrible thing to do. It is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to her or his parents.

Murdering babies - mostly bad because it's upsetting for the parents. From this perspective, the only real problem was that she wasn't getting her joy from murdering sick orphans. In fact, if her level of satisfaction was high enough, if enough utils could be produced from the murder of sick orphans, she'd really be doing quite the disservice by not strangling them in the crib.

Somewhat tangentially, I don't really understand how "eat the rich" isn't read as a really, really extreme position. Yes, I know that literally eating people is tongue in cheek and it isn't earnest advocacy of cannibalism, but the underlying sentiment really is that people that have too much money should have their wealth expropriated by force. This seems at least as ideologically extreme as the sentiments implied by 14 words styling, but one is read as being a literal Nazi and the other one is just a cute hippy slogan. It's really quite remarkable how communist-adjacent positions are inside the Overton Window.

During my run yesterday, I gave a listen to the oral arguments from Murthy v. Missouri that had happened earlier in the day. Before getting into what they covered in the argument, let's have a quick rundown of the basics of the case from Wikipedia:

Murthy v. Missouri (originally filed as Missouri v. Biden) is a case pending in the Supreme Court of the United States involving the First Amendment, the federal government, and social media. The states of Missouri and Louisiana, led by Missouri's then Attorney General Eric Schmitt, filed suit against the U.S. government in the Western District of Louisiana. They claimed that the federal government pressured social media companies to censor conservative views and criticism of the Biden administration in violation of the right to freedom of expression. The government said it had only made requests, not demands, that social media operators remove misinformation.

On July 4, 2023, Judge Terry A. Doughty issued a preliminary injunction against several agencies and members of the Biden administration from contacting social media services to request the blocking of material, with exceptions for material involving illegal activity. On appeal, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found that there had been some coercion in the government's contact with social media companies in violation of the First Amendment, but narrowed the extent of Doughty's injunction to block any attempts by the government to threaten or coerce moderation on social media. The United States Supreme Court initially stayed the Fifth Circuit's order, then granted review of the case by writ of certiorari.

Hearings for the case were held in May 2023. Judge Doughty issued his ruling on July 4, 2023, issuing a preliminary injunction against several Biden administration officials from contacting social media services for "the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech."[14] In his 155-page ruling, Doughty wrote: "The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition. Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden’s policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature. This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech. American citizens have the right to engage in free debate about the significant issues affecting the country."[15] He continued: "If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history. The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the government has used its power to silence the opposition."[14]

To no one's surprise, federal agencies have been continually reaching out to social media companies, "encouraging" them to implement moderation policies that are in keeping with the federal government's preferences. On some of these, I can certainly see honest motivations for federal actors to prefer that things be moderated, on others it seems entirely self-serving, but the question before the court on whether the speech rights of posters are being infringed doesn't seem to hinge upon what the government's motivation is (although there is an argument that restrictions that would meet a strict scrutiny standard could be legitimate). The oral arguments were moderately interesting and I thought the first half, argued by Brian Fletcher on behalf of the government, raised some points that I hadn't fully considered. As ever, I am not a lawyer. If you want to peruse the transcript, you can find it here. The most salient piece for me is when Sam Alito is exchanging with Fletcher:

JUSTICE ALITO: Mr. Fletcher, when I read all of the emails exchanged between the White House and other federal officials on Facebook in particular but also some of the other platforms, and I see that the White House and federal officials are repeatedly saying that Facebook and the federal government should be partners, we're on the same team, officials are demanding answers, I want an answer, I want it right away, when they're unhappy, they -- they curse them out. There are regular meetings. There is constant pestering of -- of Facebook and some of the other platforms and they want to have regular meetings, and they suggest why don't you -- they suggest rules that should be applied and why don't you tell us everything that you're going to do so we can help you and we can look it over. And I thought: Wow, I cannot imagine federal officials taking that approach to the --the -- the print media, our representatives over there. If you -- if you did that to -- to them, what do you think the reaction would be? And so I thought: You know, the only reason why this is taking place is because the federal government has got Section 230 and antitrust in its pocket and it's -- to mix my metaphors, and it's got these big clubs available -- available to it, and so it's treating Facebook and these other platforms like they're subordinates. Would you do that to The -- to The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or the Associated Press or any other big newspaper or wire service?

MR. FLETCHER: So there's a lot packed in there. I want to give you one very specific answer first and then step back out to the proper context. So specifically you mentioned demanding an answer right away and cursing them out. The only time that happens is in an email that's about the President's own Instagram account. It's not about moderating other people's content.

JUSTICE ALITO: Okay. We'll put that aside. There's all the rest.

MR. FLETCHER: So --

JUSTICE ALITO: Constant meetings, constant emails, we want answers.

MR. FLETCHER: Right.

JUSTICE ALITO: We're partners, we're on the same team. Do you think that the print media regards themselves as being on the same team as the federal government, partners with the federal government?

MR. FLETCHER: So potentially in the context of an effort to get Americans vaccinated during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. And I really think that piece of context, it doesn't change the First Amendment principles, but it's relevant to how they apply here. And I think it's important to understand that at this time, this was a time when thousands of Americans were still dying every week and there was a hope that getting everyone vaccinated could stop the pandemic. And there was a concern that Americans were getting their news about the vaccine from these platforms, and the platforms were promoting, not just posting --

JUSTICE ALITO: Well, I -- I --

MR. FLETCHER: -- but promoting, bad information.

JUSTICE ALITO: I understand all that. And I know the objectives were good, but -- but, once again, they were also getting their news from the print media and the broadcast media and cable media, and I just can't imagine the federal government doing that to them. But maybe I'm naive. Maybe that goes on behind the scenes. I don't know. But I -- I -- it struck me as wow, this is not what I understand the relationship to be. That's all.

While there is quite a bit more substance, I think Fletcher's argument relies heavily on the bolded above. While he doesn't admit that there is coercion on the part of the federal government (it would be pretty damning if he did), he seems to be suggesting that if there was coercion, it was for a very good reason, so it's OK. In contrast, when the oral argument shifts to the individual arguing against the government, his core position doesn't really rely on whether the speech being restricted is good or bad, whether the government had a strong motivation to encourage restriction of speech, he simply claims that it is illegal for the government to use a third-party to restrict speech:

MR. AGUINAGA: Good morning, Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court: Government censorship has no place in our democracy. That is why this 20,000-page record is stunning. As the Fifth Circuit put it, the record reveals unrelenting pressure by the government to coerce social media platforms to suppress the speech of millions of Americans. The district court, which analyzed this record for a year, described it as arguably the most massive attack against free speech in American history, including the censorship of renowned scientists opining in their areas of expertise. And the government's levers of pressure are anathema to the First Amendment. Behind closed doors, the government badgers the platforms 24/7, it abuses them with profanity, it warns that the highest levels of the White House are concerned, it ominously says that the White House is considering its options, and it accuses platforms both of playing total Calvinball and of hiding the ball, all to get the platforms to sensor more speech. Under this onslaught, the platforms routinely cave. Now, last month, in the NetChoice cases, the platforms told you that it's incredibly important that they create their own content moderation policies. But this record shows that they continually depart from those policies because of unrelenting government pressure. Indeed, as Facebook recently disclosed in an internal email to former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, the reason Facebook did that was "because we were under pressure by the administration. We shouldn't have done it." Now my friend says all this is constitutional because the government has the right to persuade using the bully pulpit. But the government has no right to persuade platforms to violate Americans' constitutional rights, and pressuring platforms in back rooms shielded from public view is not using the bully pulpit at all. That's just being a bully.

JUSTICE THOMAS: Counsel, the -- I know your argument is basically a Bantam Books argument, but do you need coercion in order to -- do you think that's the only way you could make your case, or could coordination accomplish the same thing; that is, the government is censoring by joint actions with the platforms as opposed to coercing the platforms?

MR. AGUINAGA: Your Honor, we don't need coercion as a theory. That's why we led with encouragement in our red brief. And I would point the Court to what it said in Norwood, which is the Court -- or the government cannot induce, encourage, and promote private actors to do directly what the government can't itself do directly. And that's, I think, the principle that's guiding here, which is regardless of the means that the government tries to use to pressure -- to pressure the platforms to commit censorship against third parties, the Constitution really doesn't care about that. It's the fact that what the government is trying to accomplish is the suppression of speech.  Aguinaga's argument is that the principle and the literal text of the First Amendment are quite clear, that there isn't some exemption for the government just really, really not liking what someone is saying. The Court doesn't seem to be buying this at all, for three reasons:

[1] Issues of traceability and redressability. The standard is that for the Court to intervene, one must be able to demonstrate that the origin of the restriction speech comes from the government and that relief can be provided by the court. The reason that some of the justices seem to think this isn't traceable is because of how dispersed the government's actions - you can't prove that you were targeted when the government reaches out to Twitter and says, "someone remove this troublesome speech from your platform". Why, Twitter might have decided to do it without the government. Not only that, they didn't say to take down your speech, they just suggested that it would be good if the company took it down. Apparently, the legal theory here is that banning a whole class of speech wouldn't be traceable because the effects are dispersed. One example of this back and forth:

JUSTICE KAGAN: Yeah, but even on that one, I guess I just didn't understand, in what you were saying, how you drew the link to the government. I mean, we know that there's a lot of government encouragement around here. We also know that there's -- the platforms are actively content moderating, and they're doing that, irrespective of what the government wants. So how do you decide that it's government action as opposed to platform action?

MR. AGUINAGA: Your Honor, I think the clearest way -- and if I understand -- so let me answer your question directly, Your Honor. The way -- the link that I was drawing there was a temporal one. If you look at JA 715 to 717, that's a May 2021 e-mail. Two months later after that e-mail, calls were targeting health groups just like Jill Hines's group. She experiences the first example of that kind of group being -

JUSTICE KAGAN: Yeah, so in two months, I mean, a lot of things can happen in two months. So that decision two months later could have been caused by the government's e-mail, or that government e-mail might have been long since forgotten, because, you know, there are a thousand other communications that platform employees have had with each other,   that -- a thousand other things that platform employees have read in the newspaper. I mean, why would we point to one e-mail two months earlier and say it was that e-mail that made all the difference?

MR. AGUINAGA: Your Honor -- and I would say a thousand other e-mails between the White House and Facebook in those two months. I mean, that's the volume of this interaction, this back and forth, between the platform and the government. And it's all -

JUSTICE KAGAN: But if it's encouragement -- I mean, let's even take that this was something that the -- that the government was continually pressing the --encouraging the platforms to do. I mean, until you can show that there's something about --overbearing the platform's will, which, you know, seems sort of hard to overbear Facebook's work -- will from what I can gather from the world, but, you know, how do you say it's the government rather than Facebook? This doubles as a great example of what I mean when I say that many legal arguments are fundamentally dishonest.

Come on - does anyone really believe that federal agencies sending thousands of emails to Facebook doesn't impact their moderation policies? If those thousands of emails didn't have an impact, one might wonder why the White House staffers wasted so much time sending them.

[2] A strong emphasis on coercion. There are tons of laps done around this, attempting to distinguish between coercion, strong encouragement, and weak encouragement. Arguinaga takes a very libertarian view that even weak encouragement to remove someone's posts would be an illegitimate government action, but emphasizes that this isn't necessary to rule in their favor. These exchanges get more frustrating to listen to later, but here's one that clarifies the point:

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: And one thing that I think I want to square up with you is if someone calls and -- or contacts the social media company and says what you have there, this post, has factually erroneous information, so not a viewpoint that we disagree with, factually erroneous information, and the social media company says, we'll take a look at that and --and you still think that's significant encouragement that qualifies as coercion, if they take it down in response to concluding that it, in fact, is factually erroneous?

MR. AGUINAGA: No, Your Honor. If there's no ask from the government, if the government's just saying here's our view of the statement --  JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: Okay. And we think it should be -- it should be taken down, it's up to you, but we think it should be taken down.

MR. AGUINAGA: I think that's a harder case for me. I guess, you know, if you think it is a close case decide it under the First Amendment.

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: I don't know if --that's the question here. You can't -- you can't just claim the mantle. Yeah. What -- what do you think the -- when you say it's a "harder case," why do you think it's a harder case?

MR. AGUINAGA: Because I understand the instinct, Your Honor, that just asking very, very politely or saying very, very politely we think you should take it down, that that shouldn't be a First Amendment problem but the reality is that when somebody like the FBI or somebody lying a deputy assistant to the president makes a statement like that, that statement carries force. That's just the reality. My dear mother is a saint and if she makes a statement -- same statement to Twitter their -- they don't know anything about her, they don't care, but they do care if it is the government.

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: Why is that? Is it your assumption that anyone in those circumstances is always implicitly threatening adverse consequences?

Aguinaga is actually more conciliant in response than what I believe - yes, when the FBI reaches out to you and says, "we think it would be good if you did X", it is always coercive. The nature of the FBI is that it does not have the ability to merely encourage - every single thing that comes as a "suggestion" from the FBI is inherently coercive to a private party. Thinking otherwise seems like an example of someone that is so lawbrained that they're unable to relate to the experience of a private individual interacting with a powerful federal agency.

[3] Sometimes the government just really, really wants to take down your posts. This theory was pushed most heavily by my least favorite Justice, Kentanji Brown-Jackson:

JUSTICE JACKSON: So my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods. I mean, what would -- what would you have the government do? I've heard you say a couple times that the government can post its own speech, but in my hypothetical, you know, kids, this is not safe, don't do it, is not going to get it done. And so I guess some might say that the government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country, and you seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information. So can you help me? Because I'm really -- I'm really worried about that because you've got the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances from the government's perspective, and you're saying that the government can't interact with the source of those problems.

Quite the counter. Sure, you may believe that you're guaranteed speech rights, but the government actually has a duty to silence you if your speech is, like, bad. It takes a very sophisticated legal mind to contextualize Brown-Jackson's perspective on the First Amendment, that's for sure.

Anyway, the tenor of the argument made me pretty confident that the Court is going to rule in favor of the government. What grounds they'll have for doing so will be at least mildly interesting. I'm hoping that it will be a narrow ruling, with Roberts spearheading a tailoring doctrine that focuses on the putative lack of traceability and distinguishes between coercion as unacceptable, but strong encouragement being fine. In the worst of all worlds, something like KBJ's principle that the government should censor you if it just thinks you're really bad will be the law of the land. Alito and Thomas will likely offer a short, blunt dissent, probably penned by Alito, emphasizing that the First Amendment actually does say what it says and that implementing censorship via a third-party is fundamentally the same as just doing it yourself.

Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids. Conservatives had to give up on oppressing gay people, but managed to bring them largely into the tent of traditional marriage and neoliberal economics and so forth.

Is this how you remember the sequencing? As someone that was vigorously in favor of legalizing gay marriage, I recall the path being inverted from this, where the respectability politics had already happened and the big selling point was that our gay and lesbian friends are not degenerate weirdos, they're totally normal and just want the same thing that straight couples have. This was a pretty good selling point! It convinced me handily, and I certainly see couples that live exactly like that now. The problem is that the aftermath of that win was not declaring victory and slapping a Mission Accomplished sticker on the Pride flag, it was moving onto trans politics, leading up to the modern day "trans kids", trans "women" in women's sports, and so on. At this point, I've basically been convinced that I was wrong, the slippery slope people were completely right, and that simply winning on the one cause and then moving on with normalcy was never an option.

I figured that the high water mark before the tide receded would be somewhere in the vicinity of HAAS Fat Activism

The fat activists have been pretty successful. The fact that "fat shaming" is regarded as something that shouldn't be done is really quite remarkable.

Just how far does agreeing to respect someone's identity go? Let me introduce you to a strange case that I read about over the weekend, of a Jewish woman named Daryln Madden. Darlyn is much more violent than the typical woman, having murdered at least three people, with the most recently discovered one being the horrifying cold case of Bill Newton:

Newton was murdered shortly after completing what would be his last film, The Grip of Passion. He was last seen alive at Rage Nightclub in West Hollywood, the gay epicenter of Los Angeles. Newton's dismembered body was discovered by a transient in a dumpster near Santa Monica Boulevard the following morning.[2] Only Newton's head and feet were discovered in plastic bags, said his father, Richard Harriman of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. At the time of his murder, LAPD detective Ron Veneman told the Leader-Telegram in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, "We have several leads we're working on but nothing that is solid yet. We have other information we're not at liberty to give out."

Now, if dismembering gay porn stars doesn't really sound like the sort of thing that you typically expect Jewish ladies in Southern California to get up to, there's certainly a good reason for that, and you've probably already guessed the explanation - Daralyn was Darrell at the time that "she" was gruesomely butchering men for fun and profit. Here's where things get weirder though:

Williams discovered that Madden had previously claimed to have killed a man in LA when she was a self-proclaimed white supremacist and skinhead who led a second-life as a male pornstar named Billy Houston.

...

“We’re talking to a person who has swastikas tattooed and is also wearing a knitted pink yarmulke,” Lamberti said. “The person we’re talking to is a gay porn actor, transgender skinhead, Nazi orthodox Jew. You write that down in a sentence, and it’s like, ‘What?’”

Indeed.

So, which of Ms. Madden's identities are to be respected? Is "she" truly an Orthodox Jew, entitled to the superior kosher diet instead of standard prison slop? Well, if a man can become a woman, surely a Nazi can become a Jew, I suppose. Still, even by the standards of trans-in-prison debates, the level of cynicism or true belief (there can't be any in between, right?) to acknowledge Ms. Madden as an authentic Jewish woman boggles the mind. Point deer, make horse.

I have mixed feelings. I want a border that is fully hardened against incursions and to turn away every single person with a bogus asylum claim from south of the border, which in my view is every single person with an asylum claim from south of the border. Nonetheless, framing it as being about the spread of Covid has always seemed like a dirty trick, a way to get around the preference for open borders that many in the bureaucracy seem to hold. On one hand, this trick is fine because it's in response to the trick of using "asylum" to create de facto open borders, on the other hand, I just don't like lying.

I was baffled, then I got to this exchange and I think I understand now:

Roko - I don't understand why anyone would vote blue in this poll. Can someone who voted blue please give their logic?

Damita - I don't want anyone to die?

Roko - It is only possible to die in this scenario if you pick blue. Red is always safe.

Clinton Coker - The logic for me was, why would anyone vote red?

Roko - Because there's no possible downside to it. Read the question carefully.

Clinton Coker - There is a possible downside. It's right there in the poll.

In this weirdo version of a prisoner's dilemma, everyone can cooperate by hitting Red and all is well, or everyone can cooperate by hitting Blue and all is well. If you have normal coordination and everyone chooses Red, they're all good, but if someone "defects" to Blue, they get killed. You or I apparently don't worry about the defector - just don't be an idiot and you're fine. Other people want to save the idiot contingent so much that they're willing to risk their own lives for it (at least in a Twitter poll). In a scenario where the only person punished by defection is the defector, the threat of that person suiciding is enough to make people change course.

What's wild is that I think this does actually have some explanatory power. When I say that I don't really care about bad outcomes for people that can't do something as basic as show up to work in a country where it's as easy as the United States, this poll makes it obvious that the Blue-pressers are willing to risk their own wellbeing for people that are too stupid to just push the correct button. This also seems like it helps explain the efficacy of hunger strikes, which I've never viscerally grasped - if someone elects to starve themselves in response to something, I am morally blameless when they starve, and their argument completely fails to persuade me. I see their actions working on others via media exposure, but I've never understood how the threat of killing yourself is supposed to move others to your position. Apparently, "give me what I want, or I'll kill myself" works even what the person wants is just the ability to smash Blue. To be fair, their impulse probably is pro-social, but it's also completely foreign to me.

Jason Aldean’s Try That In a Small Town has gotten substantial media discussion and has been covered here as well, with one of the themes I see being country, conservative, and small-town defenders noting that the song isn’t actually particularly violent compared to rap. While I think this is obviously true, there’s been something about it that has rubbed me wrong, and I finally put my finger on it while I was running with some country music in my ear from Spotify recommendations. The song that got me thinking for the first verse in Bryan Martin’s Wolves Cry:

Well, I was born on the banks of the Sabine River

Not far from the Texas line

I ain't got much but I'm damn proud of this Double wide up in the pines

I'll do whatever it takes, I'll go to my grave

Protecting me and mine

So you better understand if you step on my land

I'll leave you where you lie

Much like the Aldean kerfuffle, one distinguishing feature from rap violence is that there is implied instigation on the part of whoever’s going to be left to lie, but the verse above leaves much less ambiguity about what happens if you cross Martin on his land. Martin’s music has a decent bit of this sort of edge, with Everyone’s an Outlaw clarifying that this isn’t exactly a Back The Blue situation:

Well, I was raised up by a simple man

I grew up with a gun in my hand

Taught me how to love and how to fight

Taught me what's wrong, taught me what's right

Yeah, this life gonna be real damn tough

You take them scars and you call that bluff

Don't let me catch you fittin' in

'Cause everyone's an outlaw

'Til it's time to do outlaw shit

This clearly articulates honor culture values, that you’re morally obligated to do what’s right, including stepping up and killing someone if necessary. These themes aren’t at all uncommon in country music, although they’re usually not as aggressive in the most popular music.

Returning to my point, what I’ve realized bothered me about resorting to comparisons to rap is how whiny, pussified, and self-pitying it sounds to me. While some people did just just reply that honor culture is good, that men should be willing to commit violence against outsiders that wrong them, there was this appeal to how the black people can get away with being tough and cool and they’re way tougher and cooler than country white people, which played into the hands of people that write things like this Rolling Stone article:

These talking heads go after hip-hop because it’s a convenient punching bag. It’s much easier to appeal to Americans’ latent fear of Black expression than it is to defend something like Jason Aldean’s video. Never mind that this is the same ideological movement that’s always talking about free speech — the hypocrisy is nothing new. Neither is the failure to consider hip-hop as a serious artform that deals with all aspects of human life, including the negative ones. In a follow-up tweet, Walsh took an ugly pot-shot at the late rapper King Von, who was killed just as his career was getting off to a promising start in 2020. Has he ever listened closely to King Von’s music, or thought about what it might mean for an artist to give voice to the people he grew up alongside in Chicago? It’s doubtful.

For me, this is another example of the woke are more correct than the mainstream. Don’t whine about black music! Respond to this criticism by saying that it’s much easier to appeal to PMC fears of chud expression, that liberals said they favored free speech, and that this is a serious art form that deals with all aspects of human life, including the negatives. Have they ever listened closely to country singers and thought about what it might mean for an artist to give voice to the people that they grew up alongside in the trailer park? It’s doubtful.

I grew up in a rural, heavily white area, and the men I knew from that area really do represent the sort of rugged individualism and willingness to engage in violence embodied in some country music. Some of this spills over into behavior that I’m not personally a fan of, maybe even “toxic masculinity”, but I think it’s a culture that’s worth articulating and defending, not one that can only be defended by way of saying that black culture is worse. Jason Aldean is the light, poppy version of this, but country music really does have a fair bit of violence, and it’s good, actually.