gorge
2yr ago
Back in September a commenter here on the TheMotte posted an argument about fertility trends claiming that among rich countries fertility actually increases with feminism. I did not have time to respond at the time, but this is something that I have heard many times, so I wanted to make an effort post explaining why I don't believe the claim. Here are some examples of prestige outlets making the same claim, from a New York Times op-ed:
The culture of misogyny and gender inequality [in South Korea] may be affecting family life, in a country facing predictions of population collapse. Research shows that a low fertility rate in developed countries reflects backward attitudes over female gender roles. source
And here is the United Nations Population Fund:
Want to increase birth rates? Try gender equality. Many countries in Eastern Europe face what is often perceived as a population crisis....There is broad consensus on what needs to be part of such a policy package: Quality, affordable childcare starting from an early age. Flexible and generously paid parental leave for both parents (with incentives for men to take what they are entitled to). Flexible work arrangements, and providing equal pay for women. Programmes to encourage men and women to equally share care and household work. And affordable housing as well as financial support for low-income families. source
The original TheMotte commenter wrote:
However, what I have noticed is that rich female friendly nations do far better in terms of birth rate than rich conservative strict gender role societies. For example - France has a fertility rate around 1.8. 1.7 for the US. Germany 1.4. In the east with more strict gender norms the rich societies however have far more abysmal fertility rates - Japan 1.3, South Korea 0.8, Taiwan 1.1, Singapore 1.2.
I will address three big problems with the argument, and then I want to talk about the elephant in the room.
The first problem is that this is cherry-picking examples. We could just as easily cherry-pick other countries that show a reversed trend: Spain has a parliament that is 50% women but a fertility rate of merely 1.3. Finland ranks number one on female empowerment, sharing many of the same policies as Sweden, but has a a very low fertility rate of 1.3. In Ireland, where men only do 43% of the housework (which is low for Europe), women have a fertility rate of 1.6.
You might think we could get around the problem of cherry-picking by running regressions against a broader dataset. But turns out there are still too many researcher degrees of freedom. In playing with the data myself, and in reading about others who have played with the data, I could get anything from a massively negative impact of female empowerment on fertility, to no impact, to modestly positive. Here are some charts I made:
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Gender Inequality Index versus Fertility for all countries in the world -- massive correlation between less gender inequality and less fertility -- https://i.postimg.cc/8PngCpQM/gender-inequality-index-versus-fertility-all-countries.png
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Gender Inequality Index versus Fertility for rich countries (>$15k GDP, as rich as Poland or Uruguay) -- small correlation of less gender inequality, lower fertility. No correlation after removing the petro-states. Big range restriction problem (more on this later) -- https://i.postimg.cc/JnWLWpwF/paid-leave-versus-fertility-oecd.png
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Weeks of Paid Parental Leave versus Fertility, OECD countries (neglibile negative correlation, more paid leave, less fertility) -- https://i.postimg.cc/JnWLWpwF/paid-leave-versus-fertility-oecd.png
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Net childcare costs (after government subsidies) versus Fertility, OECD countries (no correlation) -- https://i.postimg.cc/nV4LMQ07/net-childcare-costs-versus-fertility.png
That parental leave or subsized childcare has no correlation with fertility rates should dispense with any notion that these are the magic policies that will fix fertility while reconciling child bearing with women pursuing careerist paths.
The second problem is that fertility rate itself is confounded by sub-cultures within a country. The poster children for feminist family polices with high birth rates are Sweden and France. However, their fertility stats are hopelessly confounded by the fertility of more patriarchal subcultures -- that of non-European immigrants. Unfortunately, it is fiendishly hard to find accurate statistics on how much this impacts the numbers.
France, for instance, bans collecting statistics by race. But this report showed 38% of new births in the cities were considered high-risk for sickle cell anemia -- meaning the parents are of Arab or African origin. That's a huge number.
In the United States, fertility is boosted by less feminist groups, such as recent immigrants, Amish, Mormons, and evangelical Christians. Israel's fertility is boosted by ultra-Orthodox Jews who have a fertility rate three times that of secular Israelis.
(continued in the replies due to excess word count)
gorge
1yr ago
- Large conspiracies like faking the moon landing would require so many people to be in on it as to be impossible to maintain. So concepts like “The Cathedral”
The whole point of "The Cathedral" is that it is not a conspiracy. It is a phenomenon of distributed, public coordination -- there is no inner-party doing the coordination.. It is a herd. A very powerful, important herd, and one that continually defies any attempt to be named. There are microconspiracies within the Cathedral (journolist, Climategate, etc.) There are super-influencers who to some extent can move the herd. But the overall phenomena is a herd phenomena that is not generally based on secret coordination, but rather everyone looking to their left and to their right to stay in line. "The Cathedral" has a very enviable ability in that every time someone tries to coin a term for it "The System" "The Establishment" "The Uniparty" they manage to make associate usage of the term with being a kook or "conspiracy theorist."
gorge
2yr ago
(cont, part 3)
The elephant in the room
Now that we muddled the situation by discussing all the confounders, unknowables, and conflicting evidence, we should adress the the elephant in the room: Every low-fertility country in the world today -- from South Korea to Sweden to Poland -- is wildly feminist by the standards of history, and by the standards of countries that have had high-fertility.
When we compare basic measures of modern feminism versus traditional partriachy -- % of women enrolling in college educated, % of legislatures women, divorce rate -- we see that contemporary South Korea and Japan are far closer to the modern United States and Sweden than it is to 1950s America.
Fertility Rate | Gross college enrollment rate for women | % national legistlators women | Divorce Rate |
|
America 1820 | 6.42 | 0% | 0.0% | 3% |
America 1890 | 4.39 | 0% | 0.0% | 6% |
Japan 1925 | 5.18 | 0% | 0.0% | 10% |
America 1950 | 3.31 | 5% | 0.1% | 25% |
Saudi Arabia 2020 | 2.28 | 74% | 20.0% | 48% |
Iran 2020 | 2.15 | 57% | 6.0% | 33% |
America 2020 | 1.8 | 102% | 24.0% | 39% |
South Korea 2020 | 0.84 | 88% | 17.0% | 42% |
Japan 2020 | 1.34 | 62% | 10.0% | 35% |
Poland 2020 | 1.38 | 84% | 29.0% | 33% |
Sweden 2020 | 1.8 | 96% | 47.0% | 50% |
Spain 2020 | 1.24 | 102% | 47.0% | 54% |
Finland 2020 | 1.35 | 101% | 45.0% | 56% |
Russia 2020 | 1.5 | 93% | 17.0% | 70% |
Most Americans would probably be surprised by how feminist contemporary Iran and Saudi Arabia are. When these countries entered public consciousness we saw them as ultra-patriarchal, "medieval" and "theocratic" kingdoms. But by 2022, Saudi Arabia now sends 76% of women to college, has a 47% divorce rate, and allows a modest amount of women rpresentation in parliament. Most laws against women living alone or owning property have now been rescinded. Correspondingly, its fertility rate has plummetted from 7.1 in 1980 to 2.2 today.
When we want to determine if low fertility is an inherent part of wealthy modernity or of feminism we have a problem in that we have no control group. Every country in the world post-1945 either came under the dominance of the American hegemony, the Soviet hegemony, or the Chinese hegemony. All three of these empires were explicitly feminist. Feminism has been a core part of the United Nation's declarations and intiatives. America has pushed feminism in every country that matters, whether that be via the hard power of conquering Japan and rewriting their constitution, or the soft power of requiring certain governance and "human rights" intiatives in order to gain aid and favored trade relations.
This does raise a big question of whether wealthy modernity, feminism, and low fertility are all inherently linked together -- maybe it is not just historical accident that there is no control group. Perhaps we will address that in a future post.
(cont, part 2)
The third problem is that many assertions about such-and-such country having a "traditional patriarchy" are completely wrong -- these claims are either exaggerations made by agenda-driven activists, or misconceptions of Westerners who only ever hear exceptional stories, and never the stories about how 99% time they are similar to us.
Starting the case of South Korea, we see that the New York Times has signal-boosted a few writers who have called South Korea "patriarchal":
Many men would rather not acknowledge that South Korea is an entrenched patriarchy and that toxic gender relations are taking a toll on society. source
And:
Other trends in South Korea strongly discourage births. They include rising opposition among women to child-rearing expectations by men in what remains a patriarchal society. More women in South Korea, rebelling against the country’s deeply embedded sexism, are foregoing marriage and motherhood in pursuit of education and professional careers.
But is this the true story of South Korea?
I went on a binge of reading articles and forum posts by actual South Koreans. By cherry-picking alternative evidence I can tell an entirely different story:
South Korea in the past decade has gone off the extreme feminist deep-end. Popular online communities for young women, such as WOMAD or Megalia,have been the hosts of campaigns of vitriolic attacks and physical assaults against men -- such as calling men vermin, posting secret nude pics of men up for mockery, wishing for North Korea to invade and kill Korean males. Nor is this not a fringe movement -- the online communities these views thrive on can reach up to a million young female users. While of course the majority of the content on these forums is mundane, when the topic of men comes up, only the radical feminist position is allowed. The Western media, not understanding the nature of South Korean feminism, denounces even a modest backlash against this extreme feminism as being mysoginistic.
At the government level, South Korea is more feminist than the U.S.A. in a number of ways: South Korea elected a woman president in 2013, followed by a male president who campaigned on promises to be a "feminist president." Ministry for Women claims that men are 'potential criminals' and have a 'social responsibility' to prove women that he is 'different from the others.' South korea ranks 10th in the UN's equality index, while America is 46th.
Korean media culture has villainized the domineering mother-in-law of old. The newer generation of mother-in-laws positions themselves as friends and equals of young wives. The rights of Korean women have enormously improved, and women are standing against gender discrimination and injustice. The patriarchy system has disappeared a lot, and daughter-in-law is no longer subordinate to their mother-in-law.
Korean feminism is more selfish than the Western version -- the new trend is to expect guys to be sweet k-drama fantasy men that enthusiastically cook as a hobby. Princess culture cherry picking feminist privilege, not empowerment, has really become an abomination. Korean government is pushing a female quota for police, despite women being held to lower standards and not actually doing anything at the scene of the crime.
Women are now a key part of the work force -- and held to the same standards of long hours as men are held to. Despite stories fed to western news organizations by activists about how South Korea is stuck in the 1950s, that is not true at all. Companies aren't firing women in droves as soon as they get pregnant, instead, they are often asking them how quickly they can come back to work because they cannot afford to lose them for long. There is no baby-making strike, despite what lying activists trick the gullible BBC into saying, all the professoinal working women in Korea are able to go back to work after having children and 50% of homes with children are now dual income. Korean women report that sexual harrassment is actually far greater in Europe and the USA than in in South Korea.
Which portrait of South Korea is more accurate? My own sense based on reading all the original posts and viewing the statistics is that South Korea is more feminist than the U.S. on some dimensions, and less on others. Choosing and weighting the categories in order to add up a total feminist score is an entirely arbitrary exercise. There is a general trend of extreme low-fertility among urbanites in modern cities with high real estate costs, little room for kids to play, and intense job markets. I suspect that South Korea's and Singapore's extra low fertility rates are probably more related to their population being more competitive urbanite than America's. I would guess that South Koreans in Seoul probably have a similar fertility rate to white college educated people living in New York City.
Neither are the Eastern Bloc countries some last hold-outs of patriarchy. Remember that Soviet communism was ultra-feminist for its time-period. The Bolshevik party in the 1920s set up women's departments . Divorce and abortion were available on demand (unlike in the United States at the same time):
In 1923 women's departments existed in most provinces; 35,539 women attended delegate assemblies in cities and towns, and 55,688 more in rural areas....The official message to women was that following the victory of the socialist revolution, women were equal. The Bolsheviks implemented concrete policies designed to equalize the status of women with men, improve their educational level, and involve them in society. ... The main thrust of the rural women's departments was to encourage women to participate in village soviet elections, attend women's assemblies, and promote Komsomol membership. The Bolshevik mission was to enlighten the "backward female masses," overcome their "religious superstition," undermine male domination, and draw them closer to the party. Russia After Lenin: Politics, Culture and Society, 1921 -- 1929.
Now, later on the West experienced second wave feminism while the situation in the Soviet Union was more stagnant. That is probably how the reputation arises for the Eastern Bloc being less feminist. But since the opening up the ex-Soviet bloc to western style TV, these countries are anti-traditional in their own way. Russia for instance, has American inspired reality TV shows glamorizing the "gold diggers" who leave their local towns for wealthy boyfriends in the city. Divorce rates in Russia are insane. Pick-up artists have reported on Poland being especially prime place to pick up women who cheat on their husbands.
As one prominent Russian nationalist recently wrote:
I have to admit that for many years I've been pissed off at our official Duginist rhetoric about the holy war of Russia as the center of world good, tradition and shit, with the bad West and the Euroatlantic civilization. There are two problems with these ideas.
First, it's all a lie. There is no “tradition” in Russia - not in the sense of an historical tradition and canon, but in the sense of a “living” tradition here and now. Russia is the country of total divorce, low birth rates, abandoned old age, an absence of elder men (and thus zero patriarchy), general cynicism, individualism, cult of consumption, extremely weak religiosity (unless we count DIY paganism and DIY esotericism as such), mass (not only elite) aping of any foreign fashions, torn historical and familial memory, indifference to everything national, concrete high-rise construction with no feel of the earth or a feeling of being masters on the land, and most importantly an extreme lack of trust in all social and collective institutions.
USA is an infinitely more “traditional” country than Russia. In USA, almost every other man has read the Bible - and will quote from it. But whatever, the second thing is worse.
In fairness, this is rant likely exaggerates the difference between the USA and Russia in other direction. My general sense is that in the Eastern Bloc both the men and the women are defecting harder than in the West. Outsiders with an agenda look and at this and see how poorly men are behaving and associate that with "toxic masculinity" which codes to them as "traditional patriarchy." In reality there is excessive bad behavior with both sexes and the bad male behavior has little to do with traditional patriarchy.
...on to part 3...
I haven't followed the FEMA stuff, but there has been a libertarian claim "the purpose of police is to prevent private citizens from enforcing the law." For a long time I scoffed at it, but I've slowly come around. When I watched the BLM protests there were a lot of police out on the street, but a lot of people were engaging in looting, disorderly conduct, street blocking, etc, with total impunity. But of course, if a group of concerned citizens had come out with clubs to beat up the vandals and looters, the police would have come down hard on them. In some cases there are videos of police arresting citizens who are trying to pull protestors away from blocking the street.
What it comes down to is that it is simply easier for the police to arrest Joe taxpayer-with-something-to-lose for vigilantism, than it is to stop a mob of BLM protestors. Furthermore, it may be more of an embarrassment, a challenge to their manhood, if a private citizen is enforcing the law. The elite don't like the private citizen enforcing the law either, a BLM protest they can contain, private citizens enforcing the law would be far more unpredictable. This model also predicts why despite blatant disorderly crime being so common and unpunished, and gangland violence being common, actual murdering of white children is very rare in a city. The police do take this seriously, because they know threat of arrest won't be enough to stop parents from engaging in vigilantism. So the police still have to do enough actual law enforcement to keep crime to a barely tolerable level.
There is probably some iron law of bureaucracy that states that the bureaucracies primary mission de facto will end up being preventing competition.
Getting back to FEMA, I don't think this is a case of FEMA consciously having orders to punish rural Trump voters. But, as a bureaucracy, they probably have some mandate that says, "our job is to establish chain of command and authority over the disaster area, so we don't have chaos and anarchy, and decision making comes through us." Sounds sensible to people in Washington sitting in the office coming up with the plans. But on the ground, in the middle of the disaster, it turns out it is far easier to stop people from helping, to stop people from flying helicopters in, than it is for FEMA itself to actually analyze and approve all incoming resources, or for FEMA itself to do the providing of resources. So the plan initially is:
- Establish authority over the disaster area. Prevent movement of resources without approval to ensure scarce resources are not misallocated, that there are no airspace collisions, etc.
- Approve allocation of resources, approve flights as requested based on our analysis
- Bring in resources from outside for people.
But then in the fog of war it becomes:
- Establish authority over the disaster area. Prevent movement of resources without approval.
- (too hard, falls through cracks)
- (too hard, falls through cracks)
So the actual result of the organization is that it is an anti-disaster relief bureaucracy. Conquest's third law strikes again.
tired: standardized testing is on the chopping block because it has disparate impact against blacks and hispanics
wired: standardized testing is unpopular because the white upper class is losing out to Asians, but they can't say this so they use discrimination against blacks as an excuse.
inspired: standardized testing is unpopular because the head girl types who now control our politics are still mad about the class male nerd who blew off all his homework but still beat her on the tests.
expired: the majority being jealous of smart people is just the world historical normal that we are reverting back to, the era of promoting people based on objective academic achievement is the anomaly
gorge
5mo ago
I read And the Band Played On.. a few years ago. The author was a mainstream journalist at the SF Chronicle, was gay, and eventually died of AIDS himself, so he has no reason to be biased against the gay community. What I took from the book is that for the first few years nobody wanted to talk about AIDS. The conservatives thought it was a gay disease that did not affect them, the liberals, the NY Times journalists, did not want to highlight the fact that there was a disease that mostly seemed to arise from men having sex with each other. Gay activists also fought screening men-who-have-sex-with-men from blood donations because they didn't want gays stigmatized.
If you read carefully, it seems like Reagan's main "culpability" was that his priority was to get control of the budget, and his people already thought NIH had a huge budget, and they should just use that budget to research AIDS rather than allocate new money. So really the most you can say about Reagan's guilt is: "Reagan's culpability was that he didn't know that a bureaucracy spontaneously reallocating money within itself to address the highest need disease is not something that actually happens, so either Congress and the President dedicate new money for the disease, or no research gets funded for it." It's funny how no one ever criticizes the NIH for not just immediately reorganizing their funding priorities to address AIDS ...
it's also a massive L for many reactionary theory of politics which have proven so popular in what can broadly be called the "dissident right."
As a long-time Moldbug/Yarvin reader, this is a surreal take.
What Moldbug wrote back from 2008 to 2012 was that the Republican party was fake opposition, that Republican presidents were basically pretending to be a CEO while in fact all hiring and firing is done by civil service laws, broader ideology is set by the Cathedral, and the Republican president impact is minimal. The steering wheel was not connected to the rudder.
Moldbug's proposed solution was to use the internet to route traditional mainstream media power, and hold a "true election" where a majority elects a president who promises to exercise the full executive authority of the Presidency, as FDR and Lincoln did, and to cut through or ignore the strata of civil service rules, administrative state rules, to re-attach the steering wheel to the rudder, etc. etc. in order to break the oligarchical Cathedral/administrative state.
A lot of men on the right read Moldbug, did route around the Cathedral, did do a hostile takeover of the Republican party, and are now at least starting to attempt what he proposed. I'm still worried that they are going to declare victory way too soon and it will all go off half-cocked. But it is a promising start. The Trump administration has yet to go full-Yarvin, and to the extent they hold back I think they are more likely to ultimately fail.
In 1972, the Cathedral could slander and smear a president and the normal Republican would believe the Cathedral over the president. In 2024, this is not the case. In part this is because of the Internet, in part because the Cathedral itself has hemorrhaged talent and dropped kayfabe -- but also in part because Yarvin himself exposed the Cathedral for what it was.
It's like Yarvin said, "Ah, I diagnosed your problem, it is far more fatal than people think, and the cures other people are selling will not work on it. However, I think I may have a treatment that just might work ..." And the person then tries the treatment and starts feeling better, and someone else says, "Ah, Yarvin said you would die of this disease, but you are feeling better, he is discredited!"
In fairness to your view, though, Moldbug and the neoreactionaries have written a lot of stuff and have gone back and forth on what might actually work, what will be allowed, etc, as is to be expected in any longrun and wide-ranging conversation. Yarvin has waffled and said that maybe the medicine won't work, maybe you need a different medicine, etc. With regards to the 2024 election, there was a lot of disagreement in the dissident right about whether the Cathedral would be strong and unified enough to find or manufacture enough votes to overcome its deep unpopularity. Yarvin himself said he did not know. Yarvin also just emailed an apology for underestimating Trump 47 and over-estimating the strength of the Cathedral in 2024.
But overall, to see this as a massive L for reactionaries is ridiculous. What we are seeing is actually the fruition of 17 years of intellectual trench-work and public persuasion.
ADDENDUM:
Moldbug's diagnosis was that we don't live in a two-party system, we live in a system where the Republicans or the "right" are basically fake opposition. They are allowed to win small victories every now, in part to make their opposition look real, and in part to fix obvious problems of too much leftism, but they are never allowed to win on existential questions and in general the country moves to thee steps to the left for every step to the right. It's unclear if Trumps actions will amount to a full regime change and rightward shift on existential questions -- or if it will actually be a re-invorgation of the two-party system just as people were catching on to the fact that the Republicans were fake opposition. IN this scenario, there will be some right-ward shift on the craziest of the left-wing stuff from the past ten years, but the Cathedral will remain in-tact and the country will continue to move to the left after Trump leaves, and very little about our system will have fundamentally been altered or fixed by Trump.
Thus, Moldbug's analysis was and is correct, and as long as the Trumpist-right follows is prescribed treatment plan, they can defeat the Cathedral and cure the country. But if they go off the treatment plan and don't actually bother to follow through in enforcing these executive orders and in firing workers and taking control of the budget and defunding the NGO/academia/non-profit complex, etc, then all Trump will have done is to reboot the fake two-party system with a more exciting season of TV.
gorge
1yr ago
I think a lot of book-smart millennials were socialized into a culture that pattern-matches anything Republican/Fox News/"homophobic" as morally bad and scientifically wrong. The big battle they witnessed was that of gay rights, where the people who not on board with gay rights in the early 2000s were, in the eyes of the culture, proven to be morally in the wrong. So the instinct is that the LGBQT/NPR team is the good guys, and the trad Christian conservatives the anti-science bad guys. This generation was also raised in a culture (epitomized Jon Stewart) where you didn't carefully examine both sides of the debate, one side was good, and the other side only deserves mocking and derision.
I have a lot of sympathy (or maybe pity) for SBF. "Stole client funds" appears to have solidified as a meme much the same way "crossed state lines" had in the Rittenhouse case.
The FTX terms of service were very clear in saying that client digital assets belonged to the client, were the property of the client, were under the control of the client and were not to be loaned or traded out. "Title to your Digital Assets shall at all times remain with you and shall not transfer to FTX Trading. None of the Digital Assets in your Account are the property of, or shall or may be loaned to, FTX Trading;"
Caroline admitted that in fact they intentionally transferred/loaned these customer deposits to Alameda. That is straight up embezzlement, go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
This is like a bank drilling into a customer's safe deposit box to take their gold, lending out the gold and then losing it. It's theft, not merely a trading mistake.
gorge
2yr ago
Here is a citation that of thinking from Scientific America in 2009 "How Women Can Save the Planet: [Empowering young women through education will help reduce overpopulation in areas that cannot support it and avoid extremism in the children they raise"
Or United Nations University in 2019: "Female Education: a Solution for a Crowded Planet"
Time Magazine in 2013: "Why Empowering Poor Women Is Good for the Planet Overpopulation isn't the great environmental fear that it once was, but there are still parts of the planet where large family sizes are a problem. Female education can help change that"
The most charitable explanation is that they honestly believe that empowering women will lead to a more optimal level of child-bearing -- thus more children in countries who are rich and encountering problems of low fertility and less children in countries that are poor and already overcrowded.
A less charitable explanation is that these arguments aren't made by the same people, but since "feminism good" is the only acceptable opinion if over-population is presented as a problem Cathedral editors signal-boost writers who believe that feminism can prevent over-population and if population decline is presented as a problem then they signal boost writers who can take some subset of the data to show how feminism can help with under-population.
gorge
2yr ago
To go along with the others that say this is not new and this is not a mistake, I recently learned that back in 2002 the National Organization for Women -- one of the top feminist organizations -- actually pressured city bus networks to drop ads that educated women about risks to ferility:
The series of advertisements -- developed for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the nation's largest medical association devoted to fertility and reproduction -- uses provocative baby bottle images to highlight four major causes of infertility: cigarette smoking, unhealthy body weight, sexually transmitted diseases and advancing age.
When the ads appeared on buses in several U.S. cities last year, they drew the ire of the National Organization for Women. Accusing the doctors group of using "scare tactics," NOW argued that the ads sent a negative message to women who might want to delay or skip childbearing in favor of career pursuits.
Meanwhile we have a generation of women who are woefully under-informed about how early fertility drops-off and how limited the power of science is to actually extend this. Even women doctors are grossly ignorant of this, often resulting in terrible heartbreak as IVF treatments fail.
As a reproductive endocrinologist, I have seen countless 40-something-year-old female physicians seeking fertility treatment, only to be genuinely shocked that their peak egg number and quality -- that is, their peak fertility -- has long since passed.
Often the only reliable treatment in the setting of substantial reproductive aging is using donor eggs from a much younger woman, which is infrequently a desired solution.
Despite decades of medical education, most physicians and other medical professionals have never had sufficient training in basic human reproduction.
Family planning, to the limited extent is taught in our schools, focuses entirely on the prevention of undesired pregnancy. Ironically, no attention is given to the limits of human fertility and the question of how to conceive when a pregnancy is desired. There is no reliable time in any American's life -- including our physicians' -- when they are taught even the basic reality and limitations of how to become pregnant.
That NOW and feminists in general are actively trying to downplay the risks of infertility due to age says everything about whether they really are working for what is best for women.
Preliminary:
- Right now I prefer the term "gender & race communism" to "wokeness." And as such "wokeness" did not start in the 2010s or in the 19080s as Paul Graham posits, but was a growing trend the entire last two hundred years.
- In the Anglo-American sphere, it has tended to grow, not in a straight line, but in a saw-tooth pattern -- three steps to the left, one to the right. During the 1960s and early 70s we went three steps to the left on race communism, then there was a bit of a movement rightward during the 1990s. We went another three steps to the left from 2012 to 2021, and now there is a bit of a movement back to the right. However, we are still a long way to returning to the status quo of 2010.
it didn't really lead to any concrete changes beyond hand-wavey gestures that in hindsight look more to have been done for purposes of public perception than to make any real changes.
Nuts.
- The curriculum of the school system in the major US city where I live is a near total wreck. Up through eighth grade, they basically don't teach a single classic American text, they don't teach anything that would inspire a white American boy (and frankly the curriculum probably isn't that inspiring to the people of color it is supposed to represent). Even the unit on space exploration -- uses Hidden Figures as the main text -- the school is flat-out teaching "misinformation." The magnet schools that were previously a great option for the better students have been greatly harmed by the post-2020 equity craze that lead to a change in admission rules. The administrators talking about these changes explicitly said that these changes were a result of making equity and anti-racism a central focus of their mission.
- The police were told to stand-down, a huge crime wave ensued, and urban public safety in the major cities has not come close to returning to 2000s levels, far less 1950s levels (Don't talk to me about crime rates -- due to police capacity and risk homeostasis, crime rates don't actually measure changes in public safety in the medium-term -- you have to look at how people's behaviors have changed).
And if you say, "this is mainly a problem of the blue cities" -- well, I don't accept "just move to the reservation the suburb bro" as a cost-less mitigation. "Just give up on your ability to hold on to the central nodes and your ability to coordinate easily." The cities becoming less habitable for white, family-oriented, traditional families is a huge defeat.
- The demographics of our elite colleges were greatly changed as a result of equity focused changes in admissions. This matters a lot for the future leadership of our country.
- The nature of campus social life and dating has fundamentally changed, partly because of Title IX investigations and metoo, but of course, also for many other reasons.
- The demographics of the entire country changed because it became racist and xenophobic to do any border control which produced bad optics or "violated human rights"
- The replacement of merit-based hiring with DEI hiring has not been rolled back, our institutions are continuing to crumble as a result. We do have people claiming they saw explicit anti-white-male discrimination in hiring at companies like Google and Intel and I think it has something to do with the stagnation and decline of those companies.
- Cross-dressers went from being a joke, to something that will get you fired and ostracized if you don't play along with their false beliefs. School systems now teach multiple genders and you are a bad person if you don't acknowledge someone's chosen gender. Code-of-conducts across an enormous number of projects, conferences, and other institutions, now ban "misgendering" someone. Mandatory denial of reality across many institutions of society is an enormous concrete change.
gorge
2yr ago
Peak woke would be when people who push woke too far actually get punished. It's not enough for people leading cancellation mobs to sometimes fail. The leaders themselves need to be punished for harassment. It's not enough for some college administrator pushing a crazy new DEI initiative to fail at it. They need to get punished for being stupid or for being racist against white people. When people who wish to push woke more to the left are afraid of getting punished for overreach as those those who want to push back things to the right are afraid of getting punished, then we will be at equilibrium.
That woke movement sometimes fails is meaningless. Lot's of cancellation attempts have failed and will fail, lot's of trial balloons will get popped (like that latest outrage from Stanford over inclusive language). But as long as there is no consequence for the attempt, there will be more attempts, some will succeed, and we will continue to ratchet leftward.
gorge
2yr ago
A few weeks ago I wrote about a post about the link between feminism and declining fertility rates, I used Saudi Arabia as an example. Since 1980 Saudi Arabia has gradually loosened many of its old restrictions on women, women have become more "empowered", and correspondingly fertility rates have dropped from a sky-high 7+ to just over 2 (replacement level).
User /u/2rafa objected to my claim, saying:
The collapse in Saudi tfr happened well before recent liberalization, and in fact the largest collapse occurred during the most severe period of post-Siege of Mecca religious reactionary conservatism, when Saudi society became much less feminist, the Niqab was mandated, the modern guardianship system was mandated, middle and upper-middle class women were largely removed from the professions, Saudi society became more markedly segregated even among urban elites and so on. If anything, Saudi declines in TFR match much more cleanly the rapid enrichment of much of the population with oil money.
I decided to go down a rabbit-hole tracing the history of patriarchy and liberalization in Saudi Arabia.
The first thing I found is that there is a lot of lying going on. For instance the current young prince of Saudi Arabia says:
In an interview in March 2018, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, said that before 1979, "We were living a normal life like the rest of the Gulf countries, women were driving cars, there were movie theatres in Saudi Arabia."
This is apparently just false. Religious police patrolling the streets for vice was a practice going back centuries. Saudi Arabia Women were banned from driving in 1957.
An Jamal Khashoggi (later assassinated, allegedly by Prince Salman) wrote in the Washington Post in response to the Prince:
I was a teenager in the 1970s and grew up in Medina, Saudi Arabia. My memories of those years before the twin disasters of 1979 — the siege of the Grand Mosque of Mecca and the Iranian Revolution — are quite different from the narrative that the 32-year old crown prince (known as MBS for short) advances to Western audiences. Women weren’t driving cars. I didn’t see a woman drive until I visited my sister and brother-in-law in Tempe, Ariz., in 1976. The movie theaters we had were makeshift, like American drive-ins except much more informal. The movie was beamed on a big wall. You would pay 5 or 10 riyals (then approximately $1.50-$2) to the organizer, who would then give a warning when the religious police approached. To avoid being arrested, a friend of mine broke his leg jumping off a wall. In the 1970s, the only places on the Arabian Peninsula where women were working outside the home or school were Kuwait and Bahrain.
The first rule that affected Saudi women’s rights was not the result of a campaign by Wahhabi religious authorities or a fatwa. Many Saudis remember the sad story of a 19-year-old Saudi princess who tried to flee the country with her lover. They were both executed in 1977; the episode was the subject of a 1980 British documentary drama “Death of a Princess.” The reaction of the government to the princess’s elopement was swift: The segregation of women became more severe, and no woman could travel without the consent of a male relative.
We can also corroborate this from articles at the time. Here is a NY Times article from 1975:
Princess Hussa, a slim, attractive woman of 26, is married to a senior Government official. They have one child. Like many other young women of Kuwait, she insists on a life of her own. The Princess, who speaks several languages, studies English literature at the University of Kuwait and, when she so chooses, goes out unescorted to tour the art galleries, shop for her designer clothes or visit her friends.
Such freedom for women is unknown in Saudi Arabia where women are forbidden to drive cars or hold office jobs. They may work only as teachers in girls’ schools, aides to social workers or as doctors. Women may not mingle with men other than their husbands or relatives in any public place. Even the zoo is open on separate days for men and women.
On the street and in the market places of the cities and villages, women pass by as dark shadows, veiled in black from head to foot. The veil may not be lowered even for a passport photo and photographers are forbidden to take pictures of Saudi women on the street.
In Saudi Arabia, if a Saudi woman dares to venture out without the traditional garb, the matow'ah, who are the religious police, are empowered to spray her legs with black paint. Not many years ago women could be whipped for what the matow'ah considered excessive exposure and those charged with adultery might be stoned to death.
Such attitudes toward women are colliding, however, with the efforts of the Saudi Government to modernize swiftly and, with its billions of dollars in oil revenues, to develop the structure of the society. The Government is under pressure to enlarge the role of women simply because many of its ambitious programs are being frustrated by a critical shortage of manpower.
For Saudi women, this has meant seclusion, no political rights, and, until King Faisal intervened, no schooling.
King Faisal, who mounted the throne in 1964, is a Moslem fundamentalist and the chief protector of the Islam faith in the Arab world. When he sought to introduce education for women, he was bitterly opposed by religious conservatives. He finally declared there was no law in the Koran barring such education and opened schools for girls. In some areas, he had to back up his decree with a show of military force. Today, there are as many schools for girls as for boys —but coed.
At the University of Riyadh in the capital of Saudi Arabia, Dr. S. A. Melibaky, the secretary general, said in an interview that about 20 per cent of the enrolment of 5,200 are women. They are registered as extension students in the departments of arts and commerce.
Women are accepted as full‐time students in the College of Medicine, but there are no coed classes. Women receive instruction in special ectures, some through closedircuit television, and they ake separate examinations. Drily in the final years of heir graduate studies are vomen medical students pernitted to work alongside of men in the hospitals.
It's unclear what the "conservative backlash" after the 1979 uprising amounted to. The only clear policy change I can find is banning women from roles on TV. However, this may have been more of bone thrown to the conservatives, while as a whole society continued to slowly march leftward and more feminist. Overall, seems the country gradually became more feminist as the birth rates gradually declined:
| Year | Fertility Rate | Gross female college enrollment rate |
|---|---|---|
| 1970 | 7.3 | 0% |
| 1980 | 7.2 | 4% |
| 1990 | 5.9 | 11% |
| 2000 | 4 | 25% |
| 2010 | 3 | 39% |
| 2020 | 2.2 | 74% |
(I use college attendance as a key metric of feminist advancement because it is one of the only metrics that is easy to quanitify and it is one of the most important institutions for tipping the scales from patriarchy to "women's liberation": 1) it takes women away from the oversight and tutelage of her father and family 2) it represents a big investment in skills unrelated to being a wife or mother 3) it immerses her in messaging from the universe that these job and academic skills are super important 4) university and the years preparing for university are extremely central to life.
(...part 2, in which we travel through time via newspaper articles, to be continued as a reply...)
gorge
2yr ago
Every DINK with a pet are two votes that should been a pro-child vote balancing out the other forces in politics, but instead they are absent from the fray. When you have so many adults in their prime ages of energy raising pets instead of children, it changes as a whole what the culture values.
The points about unions don’t even fit either circle unless I’ve missed recent developments in the Library Cults.
In my city, libraries have been basically non-functional since the pandemic. The official hours are ridiculously limited, but every time I actually go during those hours, it has been closed. They have rules requiring at least 4 staff members be on site all the time, so if one staff member calls in sick, and they are below the number, the entire thing closes. This is despite staffers admit they spend most of their time doing nothing. They are having trouble hiring, but despite shelving books being a task many people could do, only people with the official sheepskin are allowed to be hired, which is generally a union thing to create barriers of entry and higher pay. Of course, the library workers job can itself suck, because they are lower priority than the rule "always accommodate vagrants lest we get publicized doing something that creates bad optics."
gorge
4mo ago
The "media ignore it entirely" is such a claim: CNN, CBS, ABC, and my favorite, an ominous report from the Washington Post. This story is obviously being covered - maybe more than it deserves to be - so why type something out you know to be a lie or something that 5 seconds of research would falsify?
Yeah "media ignores" it is wrong. Media spins the vandalism using what Cofeve Anon calls "progressive passive voice" is the correct critique. Notice these headlines:
"Tesla vehicles in Chicago vandalized in protest of Elon Musk's role in White House"
"Tesla vehicles destroyed, vandalized since Musk began role at White House, authorities say"
"Anger at Elon Musk turns violent with molotov cocktails and gunfire at Tesla lots"
"Tesla faces vandalism and protests amid backlash against Elon Musk"
Every single one of these is in the passive voice. There is no person or persons with agency that are doing these criminal acts. They simply ... happen... they are simply a logical consequence of "anger" and "backlash" at what Elon Musk is doing.
Whereas if the sides were reversed, the headlines would read:
"Republican temper-tantrum over Musk policies results in vandalism to Tesla vehicles"
"Far-right protest turns violent with molotov cocktails and gunfire at Tesla lots"
"Right-wing mobs unleash terror and destruction in response to Elon Musk's new policies"
Two more gems from the NY Times archives:
Feburary 8, 1979 -- MAPUTO, Mozambique — What kind of man is Robert Mugabe, leader of the main guerrilla army now operating in Rhodesia? What kind of country would it be if he and his movement came to power?
The strongest impression, during an interview, was of an internal confidence approaching serenity. Mr. Mugabe speaks in a low voice, without the bombast of some other Rhodesian African nationalists. But he leaves no doubt that be believes his side is winning.
Americans would probably find him personally attractive despite his Marxist politics. He is a trim 50, the best‐educated of Rhodesia's leaders, articulate, rational, a practicing Catholic. He was a teacher and has several degrees — including a London University law degree earned by correspondence while he was a political prisoner of Ian Smith for ten years.
He was uncompromising in his opposition to Mr. Smith and the black figures in the “internal settlement.” They were continuing white dominance in disguise, he said, and he would not even negotiate with them — except perhaps “to bring about the necessary surrender.”
...But when he was asked about the future, when the war finally ends and Rhodesia becomes Zimbabwe, he did not sound doctrinaire. He emphasized that he was a socialist and was committed to redistributing wealth to “the dispossessed African,” but he spoke in pragmatic and gradualist terms.
His repeated talk of “realities” and what was “feasible” matched what some Westerners who know him well say of Robert Mugabe. That is that, having lived in Mozambique these last years, he does not like the ideological rigidity and economic troubles he has seen here- and does not want to make the same mistakes.
Could whites remain in a Zimbabwe ruled by Robert Mugabe? In terms of physical safety, their chances would probably be better than with any other African figure on the horizon. Even persons antagonistic to his politics concede that he is not corrupt, and the signs are that he has imposed discipline on a guerrilla army.
Four white prisoners of Mugabe's guerrillas, released here last week, spoke very favorably of the soldiers and repeated the compliments when they returned to Salisbury, to the embarrassment of the Smith Government. One of the captives was a seasoned British Army major, Thomas Wigglesworth, who said: “I was impressed with the guerrilla efficiency in the field, their discipline and particularly their high morale.”
For the American Government, Mr. Mugabe is a prickly problem. Conservatives denounce him as a “Marxist terrorist.” But he is doing well militarily and politically, and his mind does not seem closed. A Western diplomat said:
“He is the toughest but also the straightest. He doesn't say things to please people. Frankly, I think we can work with him.”
December 9, 1979 SALISBURY, Zimbabwe Rhodesia — If there was a betting line on the candidates to be this country's first internationally recognized black ruler, the shortest odds could well settle on Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, the odd‐couple guerrilla leaders who accepted the basics of a British peace plan for the territory in London last week.
...Although the tide of the war is running in their favor, the guerrilla leaders evidently have accepted the British peace terms in the expectation that power will come to them more swiftly through the ballot box than by the barrels of their Soviet and Chinese supplied guns. Zimbabwe Rhodesia has yet to see scientifically conducted public opinion poll, but straws in the wind suggest that their confidence may not be misplaced....
...Another villager interjected: “All we want is for the war to end. It looks like the people who can do that are Nkomo and Mugabe.”
...Bishop Muzorewa, with strong support among urban blacks, cannot be counted out. The peace agreement bars him from forming a coalition with former Prime Minister Ian D. Smith's 20‐seat parliamentary bloc but the prelate will have the certainty of white support if he needs it. He also probably can count on backing from some of the other splinter groups, though not all. Others may disappear as the electioneering develops, taking shelter inside one or other of the main contending parties.
So the "international community" refused to recognize the black President (Muzorewa) of a black-white coalition government, they refused to lift any sanctions, meanwhile Soviet and China was arming Mugabe to fight against the Rhodesian government. And the American government and NY Times viewed Mugabe's rule as the best option for Rhodesia. Yeah, pretty clear to me that the NY Times/American Government/British government/"International Community" was midwifing Mugabe's takeover of the country.
gorge
1yr ago
I have the impression of NPR as their spin being similar to NYT: representing the most milquetoast "centrist" corporate Dem position possible,
This was true, but even then, NPR would be "too far to the left" since it is selling itself as a politically neutral, government funded non-profit and so ostensibly would be taking a position at the American political center, not the Democratic party center.
But even to the extent your critique was true, it is a stale critique.
The entire 'corporate Dem' position has moved sharply to the left in the past ten years (that is, it has moved left of where the American center was in 2010), and these political positions have enormous real world impacts. It's not just cheap signaling. For instance, the massive inflow of migrants we see are all downstream of NPR et al spending years denouncing necessary border enforcement as being inhumane in some way. We also see stats like how percent of white men among TV writers has declined from around 60% to 35% in the past 10 years. That is a major change with major impact for the media environment we all live in. There were many policy changes around police stops and bail reform and public order enforcement, etc, all downstream of NPR/NY Times media coverage on police shootings, and those policy changes have had massive real world impact. I could go on and on.
In 2000, as part of opening up Saudi Arabia to new capital markets, the government signed conventions on human rights. Presumably, these conventions had stipulations about women's rights:
The government has said it intends to set up a capital market, which would require new standards of openness for Saudi companies. It has also started work on reforming its legal system and trade regulations, all in pursuit of membership in the World Trade Organization. And it has signed international treaties and conventions on human rights.
...Saudi Arabia has ratified four conventions on human rights and discrimination against women, though it submitted formal reservations. And prompted by its acceptance of international treaties and trade rules, the government is considering creation of an appellate court and a codification of defendants' rights.
in 2001, Saudi Arabia ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), although they did so with reservations that it would only do so when not in violation of Islamic law.
In 2002, Saudi women talk about how discrimination against women still exists, but "progress" is being made:
Maha Muneef, a female pediatrician, emphasized that Saudi Arabia is progressing, albeit more slowly than many women would like. ''My mother didn't go to any school at all, because then there were no girls' schools at all,'' she said. ''My older sister, who is 20 years older than me, she went up to the sixth grade and then quit, because the feeling was that a girl only needs to learn to read and write. Then I went to college and medical school on scholarship to the States. My daughter, maybe she'll be president, or an astronaut.''
Another doctor, Hanan Balkhy, seemed ambivalent. ''I don't think women here have equal opportunities,'' she acknowledged. ''There are meetings I can't go to. There are buildings I can't go into. But you have to look at the context of development. Discrimination will take time to overcome.''
In 2005, the Saudi King started creating cities "free from the influence of Wahabi clerics":
Within the first months of ‘Abdullah’s term as King, the Saudi government pursued a number of policies to improve the Kingdom’s economic profile.... finding jobs for young Saudis, and opening up foreign investment. But they had another function too, one that was more transparent in a centerpiece of the early period of ‘Abdullah’s reign: the establishment of “economic cities” where, freed from the influence of the Wahhabi clerics, Saudis would live, work, and study as productive members of a modern economy.
....The lead project was the King ‘Abdullah Economic City, which was announced in December 2005. Three more have followed for Jizan, Hail, and Medina.
...With images of men and women in beach wear, its developer Emaar Economic City, a subsidiary of Dubai’s Emaar, proclaimed in 2005 “the dawn of a kingdom in a new colour.” Officials let it be known in foreign media that women would be allowed to drive cars, schools and universities would be co-educational, the gender restrictions in public places would be relaxed, and Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal’s entertainment firm Rotana could operate cinema houses. Housing two million people by its completion around 2020, the city was to be a model of urban renewal and modern education, as well as a zone where the rules of society were put in abeyance. Though no one has said so publicly, the city was intended to be a liberal enclave in Saudi Arabia’s sea of religious conservatism.
The economic city/liberal enclave innovation was part of a wider shift engendered by the hijacking of civilian airliners in the United States by an al-Qa‘ida cell on September 11, 2001....‘Abdullah’s calculation was that Saudi Arabia needed to offer a better image to the world if it wanted to challenge the idea fashionable among some circles close to the Bush Administration of toppling the regime, as was of course planned for Iraq. That meant smoothing the rougher edges of al-Wahhabiyya, though nothing as drastic as breaking the historical alliance with its ‘ulama’.
...The Saudi-Wahhabi state contains other liberal zones where Wahhabi social control is relaxed. They include parts of the city of Jeddah where some restaurants play music and allow unrelated men and women to sit together, on the assumption that the religious police will not drop by. Jeddah’s summer festival has included a cinema section since 2006, and concerts have featured rappers, reflecting the more liberal social attitudes of the Hejaz region compared to the Najd. The religious police generally avoid the diplomatic district in Riyadh and the town of Dhahran on the Gulf coast that houses state oil firm, Aramco. They maintain a light presence in neighboring Khobar, but a strong presence in the more conservative Dammam in the same Eastern Province vicinity.
...King ‘Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) has been fêted in Western media as one of the final gambles of an octogenarian monarch in his twilight years to outflank the repressive clerics.[2] KAUST breaks with tradition on many fronts. It is run by Saudi Aramco, widely seen as the country’s most efficient and modern corporate institution. It has a foreigner, from Singapore, as its President, and faculty hired from around the world at immense expense. It opens with a huge $10 billion endowment said to be from the King’s own pocket. Its curricula are designed by Western consultants rather than the Education Ministry where, despite the hype, Wahhabism still reigns. There is no question of marauding religious police seeking to impose gender segregation on the premises.
...Domestic media has never presented the economic city concept in the way it was described to foreigners. When foreign media used the phrase “liberal enclave” in 2008, there was a visceral reaction from conservatives.[3] The government has not even hinted that the subsequent economic cities announced for Hail, Jizan, and Medina would be similarly segregated from Wahhabi power
In 2005, Saudi Arabia banned forced marriages.
In 2009, first women minister became member of the cabinet.
In 2012, government ministries are actively helping women to seek work:
Now the Saudi Ministry of Labor has asked him to help encourage women to find work. The government turned to the start-up because many of those seeking jobs in the kingdom are women.
The government has even announced plans to form a “woman friendly” city in the eastern province of Hofuf next year, aiming to bolster employment opportunities for women without transgressing religious boundaries.
In 2012, domestic abuse is now criminalized. Male guardian consent is no longer required for women to seek work.
Women voted for the first time in 2015.
2017 women allowed to drive.
2018, the King restricted the powers of the religious police, women no longer forced to wear the hijab in public.
2019, guardianship system is mostly rolled back. Women are allowed to travel abroad without male relative permission. "Women will now receive standard employment discrimination protections. They now also have the right to register the births of their children, live apart from their husbands, and obtain family records. And along with her husband, a woman can also now register as a co-head of household."
2019 -- marriages under age 18 banned.
2021 -- women can marry and divorce without permission. Single women now can live independently without a male guardian.
Saudi Arabia is now more feminist/liberal than 1950s United States -- and accordingly, its birth-rates are significantly lower than 1950s United States.
We can still debate a few things: 1) to what extent did "women's lib" happen as a result of government support and policy, and to what extent it was the result of sattelite TV and the prestige of American culture? 2) Could the government have stopped "women's lib" if it wanted to, or is it an inevitable result of being wealthy and having modern technology? However, whatever the role of government policy, it does seem clear to me that over the last 40 years there was a gradual process whereby patriarchy eroded and women did become more liberated/empowered.
(end of posts)
gorge
5mo ago
The January 6th rioters should be treated the same as the summer of 2020 race rioters were treated by the Democrats. For the 2020 rioters, virtually no rioters were prosecuted or punished for merely being there, in fact, they got rewarded with civil lawsuit settlements! Rioters who committed property crimes generally got diversion, and the rioters who actually committed assault against the cops appear to have gotten about a year in prison. AFAICT, no one got in trouble for organizing any of the riots or egging them on from afar.
Ideally, the 2020 rioters should have been more harshly treated. But they weren't, so there is no reason for Republicans to accept harsher treatment of their own team.
Pardoning the non-violent offenders for January 6th and commuting the most violent ones to time-served basically just matches how the Democrat rioters were treated. Actually not quite -- the January 6th people need to sue the DoJ and then the DoJ can settle with them in court for millions of dollars. That will match how the Democrat rioters were treated.
gorge
4mo ago
The whole thing made me nauseous , treating an ally like that is disgusting , unpresidential and certainly geopolitcally inept.
Ukraine is not an ally. I get that the U.S. foreign policy blob sometimes talks like that, but they are not part of NATO, there has never been a treaty of alliance, the American people were never sold on Ukraine being an ally. Personally, I just want the war to end as soon as possible and I really don't care about territorial concessions or military concessions Ukraine might need to make.
gorge
11mo ago
What are some actionable ideas, things that might actually help, whether it is some sort of viable plan for forming a vigilante militia or a plan for influencing local elections?
- Organize with your local neighborhood association to raise money to hire private security. I have seen this done moderately successfully.
- Less effective: Attend community meetings with police, community meetings with politicians and make your voice heard.
- Potentially most effective, but very high effort, haven't seen it done: Start a political advocacy group that creates a scorecard for all politicians on how well they are doing on public safety issues. Publicize your scorecard, publish endorsements, so all the citizens in your city know who to vote for if they care about public safety. Once you have enough of a following, you will be able to command meetings with politicians to get your greivences heard.
What stops me is that I quite simply disagree with the laws against recreational drugs on a very fundamental level. I am sure that I am not the only one. I cannot in good conscience side with the cops who enforce such fundamentally illiberal laws.
If someone was stinking up a park with marijuana, and a woman with children asked you to get them to stop, would you have a bad conscience about that? If a street had become notorious for open air dealing and people shooting up and leaving needles around and the police chief told you to make arrests and clean up the street, would you feel bad about that?
AFAICT, urban police in the 2020's are not in the business of arresting people for private use of marijuana in their homes. Their not in the business of jailing people for personal use amounts of marijuana. They police drug problems only when it becomes a major public nuisance.
My problem with the drug war is not just rooted in my libertarian-esque attitudes about the proper bounds of government. It is also rooted in me seeing that the war on drugs turns the banned drugs into a highly valuable and easily produced form of underground currency and thus directly leads to the growth of drug gangs and cartels that are, clearly, responsible for a good share of the street crime that I am seeking to curb.
I think this was always motivated reasoning on the part of left-liberals. They wanted the cause of crime to be something that they opposed anyways, and so such arguments got signal boosted. But in you look at it, Singapore and China don't have a crime problem because of drug prohibition. Loosening up on drug prohibition hasn't reduced crime in the United States. And frankly, the strictness of drug prohibition was always overblown. I recommend this old blog post ( https://devinhelton.com/drug-crimes ) and specifically this excerpt from a news article about policing drug dealing:
That’s just talk to officers, who say the revolving-door punishment makes for an unwinnable game. They know the dealers and users they arrest today probably will be back tomorrow, selling the same drugs and prompting the same neighborhood complaints.
“The dopers know it, too,’’ says Sgt. Rick Lehman, a 26-year veteran who supervises the District 4 Violent Crime Squad. ”They’ll say, `I’ll be back out in a couple hours.’ "
The real drug war was never tried. Those dealers should have been getting a half-dozen whacks with a cane then put in a workhouse until they were able to move to gainful employment.
"Racism" is an anti-concept. It is a word of activist power. It groups a whole bunch of unlike phenomena together, and then the people who can use the word can equivocate on the definition in order to target the people they want to target for shaming and cancellation.
An example of the game plan is:
- Create an association in the public between the word "racist" and images of white people throwing stones at black children and calling them horrible names.
- Include in the definition of a racist "a person who believes in the superiority of one racial group, such as a group being more intelligent"
- Then using that definition, call people like Charles Murray or Steve Sailer "racists" since he arguably fits definition 2) even though they are the farthest thing from definition 1).
- Cancel Charles Murray and Steve Sailer, since their ideas are a huge threat to the $2 trillion dolllar education-industrial complex.
Another way of saying this is that "racism" is any idea that opposes the current left/center-left establishment ethnogensis or ethno-preservation projects. So if you are against busing ethnic Polish and Irish white kids to black neighborhood schools, you are against a certain ethnogensis project, and therefore racist. If you are against historically black universities, or against a law making certain hair styles a protected characteristic, you are against a certain ethnology-preservation project and therefore racist. If an asian-American mom wants her daughter to marry an Asian guy, that is irrelevant to any establishment plans, so the establishment does not care and does not consider the mom a racist.
No the obvious difference is that they never went to war with the establishment the way Trump did. Also, admittedly Trump is publicly a liar and sleazeball so that makes a lot of people think that he must be a criminal too, which creates a favorable environment for pursuing a prosecution.
No he did not commit a crime.
So to get a felony conviction here, the prosecutor, judge and jury had to introduce multiple unprecedented or ridiculous leaps:
Here is an establishment liberal explaining why this prosecution was so unprecedented: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-but-prosecutors-contorted-the-law.html
Yes, of course.
The thing about Trump is that he is a sleazy guy who lies a lot, but he is ultimately a show-man Boomer business man who listens to his lawyers and doesn't do obviously criminal things. He is not mobbed up. His faults are those of a carnival barker, not of a Bernie Madoff. There has been an enormous media campaign to portray Trump has some kind of obvious fraudster criminal but that is not actually who he is.
I'm in the tiny sliver of people who thought Comey got it right. He was right to have the press conference explaining what she did wrong to the American people, but also right not to prosecute. Her violation wasn't serious enough to try warrant overriding the electoral process with a judicial process.
When it comes to prosecuting the highest-level politicians, I would use this rule of thumb: If you explained the crime in a few sentences to George Washington, would he say, "what? I don't even understand why that is a crime in your era." Or would he say, "Of course that is a crime." Actually taking bribes, deliberately leaking secrets to enemy powers, executing opponents, etc, are all real crimes and should be prosecuted regardless of the person. But prosecuting high-level officials for technical crimes and gray-area crimes and crimes invented in the last 80 years gives far too much power to the bureaucracy.
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