burkeboi
1mo ago
I originally learned about this story from my wife. For her, it infuriates her for two reasons:
- We are taking care of an infant, so she’s emotionally protective of small kids. She’s also logistically spending more time on the phone.
- She has multiple BPD female relatives who often try and pull the card “I’m sick, so I get to treat you badly.” This case seems to be an almost perfect scissor statement for her. She’s quite anti-Clancey, so this is of anthropological interest for me.
burkeboi
1mo ago
Thanks for the write up. The strong argument makes sense to me. I can get how someone may or may not agree with it and don’t know enough about the case to judge it. If she’s insane or not is a factual question which, as shown by both sides having doctors testify for them, isn’t super clear cut.
The weak man argument to me seems to just be grasping for straws/motivated reasoning to avoid saying “this woman did a very evil act.” This does seem to be a time where the uncharitable explanation does indeed describe a lot of the supporters of one side.
burkeboi
1mo ago
Can someone give me a steelman of the popular pro-Lindsay Clancey argument? I’m not really talking about the defense, whose argument is a complex justification for why she medically and legally qualifies for the insanity defense. I’m more asking about the people online arguing that she is a victim and her being prosecuted/this situation is an example of sexism. My wife told me about the case and is very anti Clancey. ChatGPT also gave what I felt is an unsatisfactory steelman. I don’t have a theory of mind for her supporters, and wish to rectify that.
burkeboi
1mo ago
Im a believer in compatibilism, so I don’t think there is a contradiction between determinism and free will. My personal headcanon is that any wish from the one-wish-willow either directly causes something bad, like Nikki’s possession, or indirectly causes something bad like the above sequence Friend gets money -> Friend goes to brag about it -> Friend gets shot by Nikki.
We are getting into death of the author territory at this point, so this is just a personal rationalization of the mechanics of the movie.
burkeboi
1mo ago
I may be misremembering the movie, but didn’t Bear’s friend go to Bear’s house to brag about the money then immediately get shot by Nikki? That sequence of events was caused by the money, and would be a monkey’s paw.
burkeboi
1mo ago
Or are we totally in a post-moral political hellscape where might makes right and morals are dead?(And more topically - do you agree that emergencyism is a thing on the left, and do you think it’s a thing on the right two, or that’s the wrong lens to use to make sense of the Trumpist blob?)
I agree with your above point that emergencyism is a big thing on the left. I think it’s also a pretty big thing on the right. It being a pretty big thing on both sides can be seen very clearly in both the words and actions of actors on both sides.
Where I want to push back though is on the idea that it’s just “might makes right” though. While naked self interest colors the ideology and actions of all men, I can imagine very few “emergencyists” so defined solely or even mainly justifying their actions with it. I think energencyism typically is justified in two flavors, often simultaneously:
- Extreme actions need to be taken to protect the agreed upon order.
- The agreed upon order is not actually promoting my terminal values, so I don’t want to follow it.
Sulla is a great example of #1: the populares were legitimately breaking the law and literally murdering large numbers of people. It was an emergency. At the same time, many Optimates were willing to break the law to support senatorial power, so they were sneakily an example of #2. Marius and the populares generally argued, and acted in accordance with, both #1 and #2.
One thing I notice rhetorically, both now and back in Sulla’s time, is that when using rhetoric people who often believe #2 cite #1 since it’s the more popular position. You’ll notice this with most revolutions too: typically the first wave cites legality and says “we recognize the general structure of society, but there is an emergency that breaks the social contract so we have to act outside the social contract to” and only later on, and especially if things radicalize like in the French and Russian cases, do you have leaders only saying 2.
In the modern US case you do have enough people who believe #2 to make a difference, and even more who believe #1 and/or a combo of the two. Once you have enough #2 and #1 actors, the rules are in whole or in part no longer in force so emergencyism is a self fulfilling prophecy.
burkeboi
1mo ago
I wonder how much of the sting of perceiving being viewed as “inferior” comes from a feeling of powerlessness. To give an example where the shoe was on the other foot: in Haiti, first after the abolition of slavery then after the defeat of the LeClerc expedition the Blacks and mixed race people ruled their half of the island. These are by and large the same people who were either slaves or (in the case of the mixed race) lived under basically French Jim Crow in 1788. In 1788, there was a large internalization of the view that the French were just better and they were powerless. By 1804, and even by 1794, that view was nonexistent. They had achieved self rule and clearly were not inevitable charges of the French.
It seems to me the issue isn’t this or that physical statistic, but more about the fear that “my community in perpetuity will be dominated by the outgroup.” As Haiti showed, albeit with every race massacring every other race, that feeling of agency is less about the base physical facts of the different groups and more about social position.
burkeboi
1mo ago
I don't think "the Civil rights era was full of threatened political violence and America getting through with as little bloodshed as they did was a great achievement" should be controversial.
When I read about The Troubles in Northern Ireland, it’s interesting to do a compare/contrast of that with the US Civil Rights movement. If it was handled poorly, the US could’ve had a continent sized Troubles in the 60s and 70s. The US already had the days of rage in the late 60s and early 70s.
burkeboi
1mo ago
You can’t enslave, discriminate, oppress, and demean a people based on the assumption that they’re inferior and then…turn out to be right.
The basis of human moral equality isn’t based on equal abilities or any physical trait or set of physical traits being equal; it’s based on the inherent dignity of humans. This can be justified by either secular ethics or religious ethics.
Most of the adherents of the Western Abolitionist Movement were literal White Supremacists; they thought the African Diaspora was incapable of civilization on an equal level to Europeans. Their argument against slavery was that it violated the natural rights of Africans. The capabilities of Africans wasn’t a question for them.
The same was true of the US civil rights movement: tons of US leaders, Nixon is a good example, believed in many claims that today are classified as HBD and that Jim Crow violated the rights of blacks. The population level IQ scores of whites and blacks just wasn’t relevant to why they found Jim Crow wrong.
In the end, HBD isn’t really how 99% of people organize their ingroup or outgroup anyways. “Never become so racist that you forget White Liberals are the worst people in the world.” is a meme for a reason.
burkeboi
1mo ago
If you wish to stop cases like Arday, I don’t think you really need HBD. You just need the following two principles:
- If you hire people focusing on anything but merit, you will get people to a greater ir lesser degree unqualified for the job. We keep testing whether affirmative action or nepotism or whatever won’t reduce the qualifications of the org, and empirically it always does.
- Human groups are unequal for a million different reasons. Expecting outcome equality between two groups should not intellectually be expected. Even without HBD, Thomas Sowell made a great argument for this with tons of examples. There are also cases of merchant minorities, like Jews and Armenians, who are often simultaneously richer than average and discriminated against.
Ultimately, if you look at the system the real dividing line is “Is your group and client of the identitarian left and if so how much.” This all boils down to institutionally breaking the identitarian left; arguing only works insofar as it convinces non-identitarians to join the cause.
burkeboi
1mo ago
What is the meaning of life in at most 3 sentences?
My (provisional) answer: Do right by your family and friends. Enjoy your life. Leave the world better as a result of your existence.
burkeboi
1mo ago
Your conception of US "civic nationalism" isn't very historical given that it practiced what you describe as "White Nationalism" for 150 years. In practice, people from different communities were expected to assimilate and intermarry and that's exactly why non-whites were not allowed to immigrate - read the decision in US vs Bhagat Singh Thind:
That case is more evidence of 'the US is a civic nation that Indians can't assimilate into' than 'the US is a nation of white people or a subset thereof.' By then, you had the 14th Amendment giving blacks citizenship, the 1917 granting of Puerto Ricans citizenship, and the 1920s granting of Amerindians citizenship. I agree with you that the US of the time was White Supremacist and that it was part of the US legal architecture at the time. You also did have a minority of Americans, such as the Know Nothings, arguing for an explicitly ethnic conception of the US.
What I'm arguing is kind of a finer point; the bulk of Americans did not say "We are a nation of a specific ethnicity/ethnos that people assimilate into.". The bulk of Americans then said instead "We are a nation of different peoples tied together by common civic rules and a common civic culture. Non-whites are to a greater or lesser extent incapable of fulfilling the duties of citizenship." While in practice those identities are quite similar in many aspects, they are conceptually different and those differences do have practical effects.
Most white nationalists argue for the first identity, which is ahistorical. For white nationalists who argue for the second identity, they are arguing for a historic identity. The argument there is a factual question of if x/y/z group is unable/unwilling to assimilate.
I was just arguing with people who advocated for a constructed nation of "Reds" which would presumably exclude one's liberal family members. How is that any less impracticable?
I can't speak for their arguments, but I have my own viewpoint on this. I think a sort of "Red Tribe" nationalism is not workable. Red Tribe is a pretty heterogenous coalition of people. There are various groups of Christians, rural groups, working class groups, and other groups. There are also groups like Conservative Blue Tribers and Hispanic Evangelicals who are non-central cases. They are bound together in agreement on certain baseline values, but it is neither desirable or practical to try and separate those groups from other groups in the US at the moment. At the same time, the Right should practice patronage for the groups that support and ignore the groups that don't; not act as stewards of the entire nation.
One thing I think may elucidate my viewpoint is to contrast what I'm saying above with the mid/late 20th century US right. From the Civil War to the Great Depression, a reasonable oversimplification of US politics would be that Republicans were the party of Yankees who wanted to turn all of the US into Yankee-stan, economic policies included, and the Democrats where the party of all the different groups who did not want that. There was a national identity and patriotism, but the Republicans never got the unified and uniform national culture they wanted. With the New Deal, WW2, the Television, and national economic and cultural integration you really had a strong, semi-uniform national identity for the first time in the mid 20th century.
As a result of the semi-uniform national identity and preexisting trends, the Republicans in the mid to late 20th century changed their self image to desiring to be the party of the American mainstream/middle class. They considered themselves stewards of the nation in general. Patronage still existed, but the Republicans even as they became the explicitly right wing party in the 80s still viewed themselves as the party of the whole country. The cultural consensus, if it ever existed in reality, that Republicans viewed themselves as the representatives of no longer exists. As a result, they should simply be an interest party of their constituents and cooperate only on mutually beneficial policies.
Doesn't this argue against including Asians as "on the team" with white people considering its advocates were happy to spread slander about white Americans but draw the line at black Americans? Clearly they are more aware of their racial position in American society than you are.
The reason I mentioned this is that it is a case of Asians putting the interests/cultural values of Blue Tribe over their own 'racial interests'. If Asians were maximally ethnocentric, they would not have stopped pushing Stop Asian Hate once the focus got on black criminals. That they stopped shows that blue-tribe Asians value blue-tribe norms over personal ethnocentrism. If you look at how they vote and act, red-tribe Hispanics either value red-tribe norms over being Hispanic or view it as no conflict.
People in Latin America don't seem to think the way that I do and probably agree with you about civic nationalism but it's pretty clear that the more ethnically European parts of Latin America are more agreeable to people of European descent and this is generally more important than the partisan orientation of the government. This is basically what I'm arguing. No matter how nice your Asian coworkers are (and they generally are), at scale they reproduce an Asian culture in the places they live. This is true of Asians, American whites, Russians, Indians, Mexicans, and so on, and that is what binds whites in America together whether they like it or not.
You listed American whites and Russians as peoples that create separate cultures when they congregate. What do you consider to be the descent that people should rally around? How much of that inheritance is genetic vs. cultural? Since you separated the above two, it seems we are talking in terms more granular than the big three races. My particular issue is that I don't think European descent is a good dividing line for 'makes a good neighbor' and 'want to share a body politic' with.
burkeboi
1mo ago
Sure, in practice I think very few people are going to make that kind of distinction in their personal lives based purely on race. I certainly don't.
Agreed.
But the societies and neighborhoods we live in express of the character of the people who live in them, and that does depend on race and ethnicity.
I think this statement is true, but the dispute is over what heritage matters and how much. I think the way the US classifies race, which from my understanding is similar to the rest of the Anglosphere, in particular is not really that determinative of neighborhood character in most cases. To give an example: a fully Charedim neighborhood is more different than a normie white suburb than a normie white suburb is from a normie Texas suburb, which is often only plurality non-hispanic white.
East Asian and Hispanic neighborhoods are worse to live in and other white people agree with me whether or not they will admit it because they move away from them to live around other whites!
In the US that's not necessarily the case. Gentrification generally is mostly white upper middle class and middle class people moving into Hispanic neighborhoods. Same with historic East Asian neighborhoods. In the US it's really only black neighborhoods that tend to be dysfunctional enough to preclude gentrification. Many neighborhoods, especially in California, have actually gone through the process of blacks -> illegal immigrants (hispanics) move in -> the neighborhood becomes mostly hispanic -> the neighborhood is now nice enough for middle class people to move into.
This alone should be reason enough to care about the ancestry of the people in your society.
I agree with this, but your argument is more particular than this general statement: your argument is that different groups of western whites are fundamentally bound to each other due to shared heritage and that both normatively and positively binds them more closely to each other than to any other group. That is the part I, and it seems many others here, are disputing.
The reason why I mentioned the Hispanic church goer and the Asian coworker is that in terms of daily lives, those two have far more in common with their white counterparts than their white counterparts have with each other. In many cases, they are literally family to each other and often have offspring with each other. They all are part of shared communities, and typically follow their communities norms even when it conflicts with their 'racial interest'. Witness how 'Stop Asian Hate' hit a brick wall once people started noticing most of the assailants were black. I think these communities are the real fundamental bedrock of most people's identities and morals rather than their race.
(The following is for the US case. Different nations have different histories and situations, so it may not apply to other nations.)
Probably the biggest reason why White Nationalism is not viable, at least in the short to medium term, is that it asks whites to basically jettison their lived experience and say that their in-group is not the people who they actually live with and form a real community with, but instead people who they share a census category with. This is a romantic nationalist project, and like all of those projects people are going to ask 'Why should I practically identify with this constructed nation?" This is especially the case when that constructed nation excludes members of a person's community and often own family too.
'White Nationalism' is a newly constructed 'nation' as well; historically the US combined civic nationalism with the belief that certain races and ethnicities were incapable/unwilling of fulfilling the duties of citizenship. Americans viewed themselves as a confederation of different states, ethnicities, sections, and religions bound together by a common civic state and culture; they never viewed themselves as a singular and uniform, or made to be uniform, people. You can contrast this with many European national states, who did envision and enforce a uniform culture on their nations. The viewpoint that America is a civic nationalist state where not all cultures can fulfill the duties of citizenship is still alive today. It's currently the dominant view, at least in terms of popular vote, on the right. There are disputes over which cultures don't/can't integrate, but that viewpoint is within the Overton Window of the US right wing. Similarly, most of the other moderate demands a white nationalist would have, like strong policing and/or an end to anti-white racial discrimination, are already within the Overton Window of the US right wing. There is no real policy incentive for someone to adopt white nationalism vs. a conservative US civic nationalism.
Summing it up:
- White Nationalism is a new ideology and not the historic US form of nationalism. Adopting it is adopting a new ideology. It's not conservative.
- Much like historic European nationalisms, it requires the lived in communities that people live in to be split up for the sake of an abstraction.
- That abstraction doesn't really promise any policy benefits over conservative forms of US Civic Nationalism, and has a lot of downsides.
- In practice, White Nationalism makes enemies right wingers don't need to make to achieve policy goals right wingers already advocate for by advocating right wingers ally with people who don't like them and want no part in this project.
burkeboi
1mo ago
he suffers autistic burnout during the coronavirus pandemic
My culture is not a costume, Dr. Arday.
burkeboi
1mo ago
He has an older sister named Mandi Gosling. That’s the closest you get to a pure gender swap.
burkeboi
1mo ago
What you are describing above was Bolivar’s “War to the Death”. That was a policy of the failed second Venezuelan republic, which principally failed since they were unable to get the mixed race Venezuelans on their side and winded up getting overrun by murder cowboys. The mestizos and pardos figured criollo rule would be more intrusive that distant peninsular rule.
The third republic, the one that succeeded in securing independence from Spain, avoided earlier atrocities and intentionally tried to get all the inhabitants of Venezuela, including peninsulares, on their side. They intentionally flipped the support of pardos and mestizos and made racial equality a part of their platform.
Ultimately, the lesson of Venezuela, and you have similar stories in the rest of LATAM, is that your friends are those who act as your friends and your enemies are those who act as your enemies. Alliances shift even if immutable characteristics don’t.
I think the core issue with White Nationalism is that it doesn’t map on the lived experience friend/enemy distinction of most people. For a white red triber, the Latino who goes to his church and is his coworker is practically far more his brother than a white blue triber sneering at him. The same is true vice versa for the white blue triber and his East colleague. While immigrant groups differ, Somalis are not Mexicans, it seems one should determine friend/enemy based on the actions of the person, not the race.
burkeboi
1mo ago
Originally in the US, chain migration was seen as a backdoor way to privilege the relatives of already existing Americans and minimize ethnic change. More right wing Americans backed it while more left wing ones preferred a more skills based system. The hope was that you would have a few, high quality, people come in from the third world but most immigrants would be relatives of then Americans. That was the theory behind Hart Cellar.
That didn’t happen. It turns out once a country gets rich enough, and it doesn’t have to be equally rich, it just stops sending many immigrants. Few immigrants have come from Europe, but tons of people come from the third world.
burkeboi
1mo ago
Is “White” really an important social division in Britain? It was useful in the colonization of the Americas since it was contrasted against Native Americans and Africans, but once the legal and practical realities of the colonization era ended racial identities tend to collapse with it. In almost all of modern Latin America you have a mestizaje identity that includes whites and your various mixed race people integrated with the national culture contrasted with small native and occasionally African diaspora subcultures as recognized minorities. You are even seeing this delayed process happening in the US right now.
If the right populists get their way, I can see Western European nations potentially going the way of a titular “mestizaje” ethnicity plus a few minority subcultures.
burkeboi
2mo ago
Two things to note:
- Most of the real terrible African nations often haven’t had censuses in decades. We can guess but don’t know too much about their populations.
- to make the situation grimmer, the high human capital Nigerians, either in the country or outside, have close to or below replacement fertility rates. It’s the ones without an economic place in the modern economy that reproduce like crazy. This pattern is common in Africa, and was the case in LatAm in the later half of the 20th century. My Nigerian associates, who are upper class, are staunch supporters of already existing contraceptive NGOs as a result.
Would AGI, or ASI, affect the morality of human slavery? A common objection to slavery is that while there are many humans fit to be slaves/unfit to be free, see gent zombies, no humans are fit to be masters since basically all humans inevitably abuse such authority.
A sufficiently aligned AGI or ASI solves that problem. It’s aligned, so it follows the morals given to it. Assuming we can align AGI or ASI, would slavery to it be moral for certain subclasses of humans?
EDIT: Fent Zombies, not gent zombies.
burkeboi
2mo ago
It was a well made, patriotic film that didn’t race swap or hide Fr*nch savagery.
burkeboi
2mo ago
The last Spanish election was a nail biter. This seems to be a pretty bold move by a government that is not that secure necessarily.
Another thing to point out is that Spain has an East Asian TFR now. On the flip side, they can get practically infinity immigrants from Latin America dependent solely on how many they want to let in. Letting in MENA immigrants just seems like a terrible idea given they haven’t gone through their source of more culturally compatible immigrants yet.
burkeboi
2mo ago
The notion that the bloodline-denominated collective is an end in itself and the individual is a means to that end.
I agree that putting the Volk as the only thing worthy of moral consideration, with all other rights subordinate to it, is a core ideological feature that made Nazism, and fascism in general, so harmful.
At the same time, I think the issue is when you decide a group, or concept, is the only thing that matters morally and no other rights are important rather than whatever group or concept in particular you elevate. The communists killed millions for the revolution and utopia. In pre-modern eras, millions were butchered for king and/or faith. The crime is in discarding individual rights, not in the object you decide is the only important thing in the world.
The notion that whether or how much a Life Matters is dependant on bloodlines. (When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?)
Is there a limit to this principle? Can families morally have ingroup preference? What about a community the size of dunbar’s number? Is the limit more about how much preference you can give someone vs the reason for the preference?
While equality of people is a good, it is a good that has to be balanced against the fact that any individual human has people they care about and people they don’t and our social lives, and really civilization as a whole, are built on this distinction.
The notion that the property rights of rich people are more important than the personal rights of the smallfolk.
I think this is more the crime of the Confederates and isn’t really the core objection to Nazi Germany. I think the principle of equality under the law naturally leads to people saying rich and poor deserve the same rights. All societies have had both positive and negative rights, and you can’t clearly separate the two in practice. Which rights different people have is a constant negotiation. While I think slavery is a clear violation of equality under the law, and the civil war is an example of the problems it caused, I don’t think you can just from the specific case of slavery to a modern rich vs poor issue.
I think you made a very strong argument for, assuming she is insane, her deserving a degree of sympathy. While there are complex arguments for how insanity and culpability interact, her coming to after her disordered thinking becomes ordered must have been the worst moments of her life.
I’m less asking about the defense and more about the culture war that has grown up around the case on both sides. To me, this just seems like a really horrific case that doesn’t really have culture war relevance. From what I grok, the original culture war argument regarding this case seems to take the shape of some feminists arguing that she was unwell and her failure to receive proper treatment was due to anti-woman bias and that the state prosecuting an obviously sick woman is also evidence of anti-woman bias. The rest of the culture war are feminists and anti-feminists reacting to each other.
I haven’t really been able to find a steelman of the argument that her lack of treatment and/or the state prosecuting her is misogynistic. Hence my question.
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