site banner
PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   31512 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Inferential Distance Part 3 of ?. On being a not-so-special agent.

It's 2012 or maybe 13 I'm honestly not sure, but the 15 year-old border guard keeps his AK on safe as he inspects our paper-work and negotiates the customary 'service charge'. In reciprocity I keep the revolver concealed in my jacket pocket pointed at the dirt instead of the kid's groin and quietly pray neither of us will get shot today.

This post is an installment of an ongoing series.

I've started writing this post at least a dozen times now and each time I have hit a wall and stopped. There's an idea/feeling I want to convey but I don't have the words it for in part because it is the water I swim in. At the same time the a number of recent posts/threads have left me thinking I really need to just say fuck the wall and kool-aid-man my way through it. I freely concede that the rest may come across as nonsense but I swear there is is point to be had.

Anyway, as we pulled away from the impromptu border checkpoint on the A3 outside Liboi I notice that the young med-students volunteering for [International NGO] and the Mormon Missionary that I'd been charged with chauffeuring are giving me odd looks. As I re-stow the Brazilian-made Smith & Wesson clone in the center console the missionary begins to hammer me with questions "have you had that gun the whole time?" "yes". "Were those real cops?" "Real enough". "What do you mean 'real enough'?" "Just that". "Did you bribe them?" "No, I paid a service charge". "Were you really going to shoot them" "Not if i didn't have to". "Who sets the service charge" "the guys running the checkpoint". "Are you sure it's not a bribe" :Now Faintly exasperated: "Yes, if it were 'a bribe' it would not have been included as a line item in your travel budget because that would be illegal"

10 years later I'm in the back yard talking to my elderly neighbor who lives in the other half of the duplex. She's angry that her purebread indoor cat that she spends a fortune on premium cat-food for has gotten out out of the house yet again and has been running around the back yard, getting dirty, eating table scraps, and having sex with the local stray. She makes some vague insinuation that my kids are somehow to blame. I calmly point out that she had left her kitchen door wide-open and that's probably how the cat got out. "But that was to get some fresh air in the house not to let the cat out" she explains. I nod and pretend to understand, but I don't. Instead I am reminded that missionary on a dusty African highway a decade ago.

Can you see the common thread? If not, perhaps a third example will help clarify...

If you have to dry the dishes

(Such an awful boring chore)

If you have to dry the dishes

('Stead of going to the store)

If you have to dry the dishes

And you drop one on the floor

Maybe they won't let you

Dry the dishes anymore

  • Shel Silverstien

I don't know if you're seeing what I see here, but in my mind all three of these examples, the missionary's questions, the my neighbor complaining while the cat does as she pleases, and the Silverstein poem all seem to trip the same breaker in my hindbrain and gesture towards the same underlying feeling. They are simultaneously nothing alike, and the exact same picture.

If I had to distill it down to a single sentence it would be "the sensation of agency" but that doesn't quite cover it because a major component is also the awareness of the pressence of other agents in the environment and like water for a fish (or air for a human) most people never consider it's presence unless confronted with it's absence.

On a related note, I think one of the more valuable lessons another person ever taught me was "Never give an order that will not be followed". It was part of an NCO leadership course that I attended prior to my second deployment. The course itself is something I've been meaning to write about at somepoint because the material was almost the polar opposite of what you might expect from an official military curriculum or formal "leadership" course and yet I can say with confidence that it made me a better leader, a better folower, and 15 - 20 odd years later arguably a better parent and boss. The dude who taught the course was a crusty old fuck in his late 50s who'd served from the end of the Vietnam War through the fall of the Berlin Wall and then continued to work for the DoD as a civillian employee through the 90s and into the early 2000s which when our paths crossed.

Those of you who've been around for a while may be aware of my claim that despite endless protestations to the contrary the US military is oddly democratic in the sense that that much of the actual power and decision-making is concentrated in "the Demos" IE the enlisted rank and file. Much like my neighbor's cat, Marines are gonna do Marine shit regardless of what you want them to do and it's on you to adapt to them rather than vice versa. The point Mr. Young was trying to impress upon us as future Platoon, Company, and Detachment leaders was essentially the same one that Tywin Lannister/Charles Dance is trying to impress upon his grandson in this scene from Game of Thrones back when it was still good. As rigid as the military hierarchy may be portrayed, it is far more flexible in practice. It is important to remember that those under your command are agents in thier own right. They have thier own objectives, their own opinions, thier own desires, and they are fully capable of making thier own decisions about who what to do, and who to listen to. The key to being obeyed is understanding what orders to give. The best orders are those that your subordinates will understand and want to follow in their own right. Any officer or NCO who finds himself appealing to authority is effectively inviting mutiny. Hence the admonishment to "Never give an order that will not be followed" and the observation that a man who needs to keep reminding people that he is in charge is not truly "in charge".

Which brings us to the flip side of the course and what I have in mind when I describe the course as "the opposite of what you might expect from an official military curriculum". That being formal training in the esoteric arts of "Malingering" and "Malicious Compliance". As a senior NCO your job is two-fold, to keep the enlisted men on task and to punish the stupidity of officers. Simply put, the ability to recognize and implement such techniques is a core competency for both jobs. The word "No" is one that should be used sparingly precisely because it is powerful. "No" is not a teaching word. However following an order to the letter even especially when doing so will get your superiors in trouble is a teaching moment because it teaches your superiors to think carefully about the orders they give.

I've heard through the grape-vine that the old Navy/USMC NCO curriculum developed during the Vietnam War was superseded by something "more contemporary" not long after I completed the course. I can't imagine that this is a good thing because I feel like this intrinsic conceptualization of "the contested environment" not just between ostensible opponents, but those who are in theory at least on the same side is something that is sorely missing from modern commentary.

As I've said before I feel like the left's dominance of academia and traditional media has effectively left a Hobbes-and-Burke-shaped hole in the discourse. We have users here saying things like "the only wardrobe that allows CCW in New York is a police uniform" because the possibility of a human being choosing to disobey the law is just not something that exists within their philosophy even as they complain about rampant criminality. Would it have been legal for me to shoot that teenage border guard? No of course not. Was anyone at anytime under the impression that this legality or lack there of played any role in my ultimate decision not to shoot him? No of course not.

Yet another one of those core points of inferential difference between woke urban progressives/rationalists and the mainstream right is this distinction between law and social hierarchis as a means vs as an end. The difference between "we follow this man because he is the king" and "this man is the king because we follow him".

The common thread is some people thinking that laws are self-acting. People deep inside the first world bubble look around and see a surface appearance that fits nicely with laws being self-acting. One can explain this away, but the explanation must never-the-less explain why it looks that way, even though it isn't. Here is my attempt, focusing on incentive compatibility and Magic Special People, the MSP's.

Utopia, version one. There is an excellent rule book. Its excellence lies in how nice the world would be if people followed the rules. Its downfall is the lack of enforcement mechanisms. People break the rules and the utopia fails.

Utopia version two. A mostly free-market system. Most rules are incentive compatible. People obey those rules because it is in their interests to do so. But most isn't enough. Some necessary rules get broken and the utopia fails.

Utopia version three. Further compromise with Moloch. All the rules are incentive compatible. People fleeing the society say "Those were not compromises, they were surrenders." Version three turns out to be Hobbes' war of all against all. Works as planned, but is a dystopia.

Utopia version four. Built on version two. Yes, some rules are not naturally incentive compatible, but there is a police force. Break the rule and your punishment is worse than your gain from breaking the rule. So the rules are artificially incentive compatible. I'll use police as a synecdoche for police, courts, prisons, etc. There not just a rule book for the ordinary citizen. There is a rule book for the police. Some of it is incentive compatible. Some of the policemen believe in the utopia and follow all of the rule book for the police, even though it is an uphill struggle. But there are not enough of them, and there is no police-police enforcing the rule book that the police are supposed to follow. Too many doughnuts are eaten. Too few laws are enforced. The utopia fails.

Utopia version five. An Ourobos built on version four. The police-inspectors supervise the police, making sure that the police follow the rules. The common people watch the police-inpsectors and can vote them out of office. This is the basic idea of representative democracy. The record is mixed. The USSR had a constitution very like the American one, but with much less success. There is an extra, unrecognised ingredient. Most version five utopias fail quickly. Some last as long as supplies of the missing ingredient hold up.

Utopia version six. Ourobos + Magic Special People. Turn aside from contemplating the Ourobos and recall that utopia version four didn't fail as quickly as expected. Some of the policemen believe in it and went against their incentives out of religious conviction. There really are Magic Special People like that, just not enough off them. Notice the hierarchical structure of version five. Ordinary folk, police, police-inspectors. All but the top level face artificial incentives. The pyramid narrows towards the top. If society has 2 or 3 % MSPs, they could occupy the top level and make it work. If we sprinkle some fairy dust on society to get the MSPs to the top we would have a viable utopia.

How long would utopia version six last? People get old and die. Where is the new crop of Magic Special People to come from?

Perhaps from cultural transmission. Some MSP are teachers, encouraging children to cultivate and grow their inner MSP. So long as this is respected there is hope for continuity. But if the culture asks "If you are so smart, how come you aren't rich?" and mocks the self-sacrifice required to make cultural transmission happen, the supply of new, young MSP's will dwindle and the utopia fall.

Perhaps there is a genetic element. Some women seems to have a rather paleo-lithic taste in men, preferring those who win fights and grab an unfair share of resources for their own children. MSP's with their obsessions with justice, rules, fairness, and self-sacrifice, are not sexy and Magic Specialness is slowly bred out of the population, causing a type six utopia to fail.

Perhaps I'm understating the issue with magic fairly dust. Maybe MSP's are elbowed aside by grifters, and the top of the social heirarchy gets filled will muggles, who follow their incentives and the utopia fails.

Before answering my question about why it looks like the law is self-acting, I want to fill in some of the details of what life in a type six utopia is like.

There are ladies and gentleman. Some people are capable of understanding how society works and the need for rules, and are able to make and keep gentlemen's agreements about following the necessary rules. They lack the ruthlessness and self-sacrifice to count as Magic Special People, but provided the MSPs maintain order in society as a whole, the gentle folk have no need of MSPs within their bubble. Within their bubble, law is effectively self-acting.

There are rough folk. They push boundaries and break rules. They are sometimes caught and punished. Too seldom and things escalate and utopia fails. Too much? Is there a too much? It is a more subtle issue of the expensive of policing, and the corruption that results if police are granted too much latitude. There is also an issue that the more laws society has, the more police society needs, and the more MSPs society needs to supervise the police. MSPs are a scare resource; expand the need until society runs out of them and watch the utopia fail.

In between gentle and rough are ordinary folk, by far the most numerous. They have aspirations to be genteel. They want to be ladies and gentlemen, but when it comes to keeping gentlemen's agreements they find themselves hard pressed by tempation. They want to be street smart, not a mug or a mark. Not the one still trying to be a gentleman when every-thing has gone to shit and it is time to play for rough, to play for keeps.

The ordinary folk have rich inner lives, filled with psychological drama, which leads to the key distinction between the ordinary folk and the rough folk. Managing the rough folk requires that the police are efficient enough to keep the expected value of criminal activity negative. Managing the ordinary folk only requires the police to do their job occasionally. There is an inner struggle. Will the aspiration to be genteel win? Will the aspiration to be street smart win? It is enough that the gentle side can point to one or two middle class criminals caught and shamed. The street smart side might start figuring the odds but the gentle side scolds that as shameful in its self.

In the good times, the ordinary folk are kind of, somewhat in the same bubble as the ladies and gentlemen who honour their agreements and can see law as self-acting. Come the bad times and ordinary folk will flip to being street smart and things will go down hill fast and hard.

And that is my story of how society works, and how it comes to appear to nice middle class people that the law is self-acting, even though it really isn't.

The USSR had a constitution very like the American one, but with much less success.

You know except for the freedom of political organization outside the one party rule of the Communist party it was exactly the same.

The common thread is some people thinking that laws are self-acting. People deep inside the first world bubble look around and see a surface appearance that fits nicely with laws being self-acting. One can explain this away, but the explanation must never-the-less explain why it looks that way, even though it isn't.

That is an astute way to put it and not one that would have occured to me on my own. Well done.

You could get MSP by giving them a stake in the system. I think that’s why the PMC is full of people who don’t understand rules don’t work magically is because they’re raised to understand that following the rules and doing what they’re told pays off, not just legally but in most situations. They got into good schools by ticking boxes, they were allowed special privileges for being teachers pet, they get kudos at work for doing what the boss wants. Obedience has worked well for them, and contrary wise breaking the rules has generally been punished.

I think I get where you're going, but the civilians won't and can't. And it's a bit meandering. There's a core of truth here, but the presentation obscures rather than illuminates, at least for those whose minds don't run on this software.

Not that I could do better, I've been working on the philosophy of violence and the limits of rules for some time, and I can't make it sound anything but crazy to normies. This is what films like The Matrix and Fight Club (or American Beauty) are all about, and why they were such hits. They spoke to the underlying and terrifying reality that it really just is all sex and violence at the bottom, with ten thousand years of social, economic and political structures sitting wobbly on the narrow balance point of mass public opinion.

Civilization isn't even skin deep. It can vanish in an instant, and does, for millions of people every day.

There are those who know this, and those who desperately need to keep convincing themselves that it isn't true, because that would mean it was their responsibility to take care of themselves, rather than their parents/teachers/professors/police/government. This is what Dostoyevsky is talking about with "everything is permitted". "God" is the symbol of social control superseding human agency. But there is no god, and we can do anything. Only by careful consideration and long experimentation can we constrain this basic reality into a productive human civilization.

I can't make it sound anything but crazy to normies

Normies have a fundamentally broken view. They think that when violence occurs it's completely unacceptable unless the state is doing it, but that some of the worst people can be excused for it because they cannot do any better. It's the same view, writ large, behind the idea that if someone rudely pre-empts you, the only polite thing to do is graciously allow them to. As I said it's fundamentally broken, and it would fall apart utterly if we didn't have an insanely powerful state freezing everything in place, bad ideas and all.

Calling it the normie view pretty much implies that it is the view of the majority, but from what I can tell only a small fraction of the population of the US has such a view.

The vast majority of Americans have never been in a fight, ergo have no recourse to violence, ergo rely on the state to do their violence for them. Everyone's had a reason to fight, sometime or another.

Everyone's had a reason to fight, sometime or another.

But for most people it almost never makes sense to do so. If you lose you go to the hospital, if you win you go to jail. If you go to jail and you're one of the "rough men" you might not suffer much as a result. If you're not you may not just lose your freedom but your job, your future, your friends, even your spouse, because now you're a barbaric criminal.

Solzhenitsyn quote you probably already know, but will come in handy if you don't:

“Your punishment for having a knife when they searched you would be very different from the thief’s. For him to have a knife was mere misbehavior, tradition, he didn’t know any better. But for you to have one was ‘terrorism.’”

For a simple assault charge plead down to disturbing the peace or some shit? The fact that you think so shows my point more clearly than I could have. I've been in many fights, in jail a dozen times, caught charges twice, and my record is underage drinking and "recieving stolen goods" for having an old sign for a months-old hockey game in my dorm room. And that's only because it was campus police, rather than real cops.

You don't generally get done for fighting. The other guy has to press charges, they have to find him, you'd have to tell them etc. Your paranoia of being a "barbaric criminal" and your whole life collapsing for scrapping is simply perfect. That, that is the mentality I'm talking about.

We're likely not similarly situated. My sister got busted for minor in possession of alcohol, lost a college internship (teaching) as a result, and was unable to get another until she managed to get the record sealed. And that's as pissant a charge as you can get beyond traffic tickets. Of my co-workers in my past few jobs, judging from the reactions if I tell the story I'm probably the only one who has been arrested for anything serious as an adult (I was not convicted, or I'd likely be long dead by my own hand). I know of people who weren't hired because it turned out they had a criminal record, though for what I don't know.

The other guy doesn't have to press charges. If you get in a barfight, you can get busted for drunk-and-disorderly if not assault, for instance. Or if the cops break up the fight they can and sometimes do charge all concerned.

One can always find a reason why a course of action is too risky.

More comments

Exactly. Unless it's an immediate mortal peril, it's generally best to be physical conflict avoidant in modern society due to the consequences of civilization being potentially levied on you.

Just because a man decides to rely on state violence instead of doing violence himself does not mean that the man thinks that violence is unacceptable unless the state is doing it. More often, it means that the man thinks that it makes more sense from a benefit/risk perspective to rely on the state than to do it himself. It's not about personal violence being acceptable or unacceptable to him.

No, it doesn't. But it is a revealed preference that others do violence in one's stead.

It's the difference between eating meat and hunting. Between cheering for your team and being on the team. Between supporting a war and fighting it.

Normies have surrendered to logic, but it is precisely the illogical, violent and insane passions of humanity that militate against any long-term oppression. You have to be willing to suffer wildly disproportionate consequences for the sake of internal principle to ever fight a structural issue. Hence religion.

Of course, this basic urge also produces many societal problems. Like beer, violence is the cause of and solution to many of our problems. This is a fundamental tension of humanity, that our most heroic impulses are also our most evil and destructive.

Normies have surrendered to logic,

I think this is wishful thinking.

I suspect that the truth is that the median plumber electrician or individual working an hourly min-wage service job understands all of this implicitly and that it's the rationalists and the grad students who haven't made the connection yet.

Those at the lower end of the economic scale can see into the void below, it's why they're working. They're also the secondary victim pool of the underclass, so a much larger percentage of them have experience with violence. But even then, it's a minority in the US. Some localities (like mine) are high enough crime and conflict that probably the majority of males making less than 50k a year have experience with violence, but it is one of the most violent places in the country, and has been for thirty years.

Long-term oppression is the story of history.

I think that one of the ideas you are trying to get at is the difference between 'reality + imperfect methods for dealing with that reality' vs. 'the world as pure social construct'. Thus the distinction between 'you can't do this because the law says so' vs. 'you won't do this because you don't want to defy the law right now'.

To me it makes sense to see this on a spectrum. For example, as you move from rural to urban, the amount of your experience that is 'raw' reality unmediated by human systems decreases compared to the amount that is determined by social systems. The same is true for (most) startups, where you are very close to bankruptcy at any given time and exposed very closely to the needs of your client, vs. a large entrenched bureaucracy like the civil service or the (peacetime) army.

I've long had a theory that as America becomes fuller and more urbanised, the population whose day-to-day experience is very highly socially mediated will continually increase and that American society will consequently become more European, with a more entrenched class system and more complicated systems of deference. So far that theory seems to be holding up quite well.

the possibility of a human being choosing to disobey the law is just not something that exists within their philosophy even as they complain about rampant criminality.

As others have pointed out aspects of, neither half of this seems even remotely true of the woke progressives I know or the ones I see online (two groups that are quite different in some other ways). Plenty of both break laws all the time or cheer on others' doing so, and they don't seem nearly as likely to complain about rampant criminality as deny or downplay it at best, and not infrequently cheer it on.

Most woke urban progressives, and probably even most rationalists, are willing and often eager to break laws. For example, there are plenty of members of both groups who break drug laws all the time. And the reason why no woke urban progressive has shot Trump is not that it would have been illegal.

The number of people who are so over-socialized that the notion of disobeying a law does not exist within their philosophy is actually very small, I am sure.

What rationalists and also a large subset of woke urban progressives (especially the affluent ones) tend to be is hyper-cautious, probably cautious to the point that it interferes with quality of life rather than enhances it. Or, to be less charitable, they are cowardly.

They imagine the possible very negative outcomes of breaking the sorts of laws that carry large penalties and think to themselves, "even if me getting caught is very unlikely, when I multiply the possibility of getting caught by the penalty that I would receive, the result is still too large for it to be acceptable to me".

This may well be much more of a "middle class or higher" attitude than a blue tribe attitude.

Based on the 2020 protests/riots/etc. and the distribution of who, back then, most often threatened or actually used violence to achieve their goals, one could argue that it is actually the red tribe that is more overly law-abiding and hyper-cautious than the blue tribe. Think of all the red tribers who both own guns and believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Almost not a single one has done anything about it. This was true even before the heavy legal outcomes of the January 6 protest/riot/etc. became clear.

An entire nation of them exists. The Germans are real people.

Reoccurring anecdotes about them refusing to disobey even the most obviously miswritten law or mislabeled item, and acting agast or hurt if you suggest they could just ignore it are very common amongst anyone who interacts with them.

Hmm, well I was mainly thinking about Americans. I do not have much experience with Germans. I have heard similar things about the Japanese.

@Southkraut what do you think about this?

tl;dr: More true of Germans than of any other nation I know.

Germans aren't 100% law-abiding, many of them will ignore minor laws when it suits them and they feel they have the moral high ground and they know their social network wouldn't condemn them for it.

Some Germans, get this, are actual honest-to-god criminals. We have them! They break laws and often they get caught and fined or imprisoned for it.

And many are indeed exemplars of the stereotype. It is not without some basis in reality. There are many who will indeed do their utmost to obey every law and regulation, no matter how inane, counterproductive or obviously insane. They are genuinely afraid of going against the letter of the law, not out of fear of punishment, but because it would be against the cosmic order of things.

Some people will even invent new laws on the spot as an excuse to not do something they do not wish to do - it often sounds plausible enough.

We also have tens of millions of foreigners and "Germans" who aren't nearly as lawful, but probably behave more lawfully than they would prefer so as to not stand out too much.

But overall yeah, we make lots of rules and expect them to be obeyed and most of us obey most of the rules and it's serious business all the way down.

Its really dramatic in German descended parts of rural America and Canada... as the laws are increasingly written with the assumption that no one will obey them and German descended small business people try desperately to comply with impossible contradictory laws.

I wonder what the Germans do about GDPR. That law seems particularly difficult to comply with.

Assiduously fill out a form every time you go to a public event, to the doctor, to a mechanic, to town hall, or generally have any interaction with anyone whatsoever that isn't bedroom-private or plain retail.

I wonder what the Germans do about GDPR.

They (and Europe in general) get around it by not having any meaningful tech industry.

My opinion of the European tech industry is also pretty low. Here's an anecdote about Italy. While I was there, I couldn't access ChatGPT without a VPN because it didn't comply with Italian privacy laws.

Meanwhile, because of Italian law, every hotel required that I enter my passport photo, city of birth, and other very personal details into their extremely shittily-designed web portal which I am sure is being hacked regularly. (I did lie when possible)

That's not the fault of the Italian tech industry, that's the fault of Italian regulations.

Do people drive the speed limit there?

Rather famously, Germany has no speed limit on most of the Autobahn. German law-abidingness is a result of three linked phenomena - people believe the law simply codifies expected pro-social behaviour, people generally choose to behave pro-socially, and the legislators making laws (like speed limits on uncongested freeways) which would undermine the other two.

and the legislators making laws (like speed limits on uncongested freeways) which would undermine the other two

There's an underrated concept that I heard once about this concept generalized as having to make laws there be "beneath the dignity of the State".

Contrast the law in the neighboring countries and most of the English-speaking world where everyone recognizes that speed limits are not one of those laws that codifies pro-social behavior (because, quite simply, they're set far below the maximum safe speed of the road) and everyone drives 10 over as a consequence. It's almost like respect for the State is a two-way street or something.

the missionary is acting as though there is a law to be followed, when there obviously is not. The checkpoint guard is a potential threat, the "service charge" is not optional, and these realities must be engaged with. The missionary is thinking there's some system in place such that these realities are Someone Else's Problem, that the proper response is to file a complaint form and let the system handle it. He's blind to the fact that there is no system, that this is the way things are.

The cat lady is doing the same thing. She acts as though there's a system to enforce her will over and above her immediate actions. She apparently thinks there's a system that prevents the cat from walking out an open door, ignoring that no such system exists. She wants such a system to exist, ignores the fact that it does not, and so suffers the consequences.

The "dishes" poem (one of my favorites, by the way) illustrates the disconnect between cooperative systems of the type the people in these two examples are imagining exist, and the reality of individual choice. Washing the dishes is supposed to preclude breaking them, but there's nothing innate to the task to actually prevent this. What prevents breaking dishes is something entirely different, a whole other complex of assumptions and interactions with no actual connection to the act of dish-washing itself, and the existence of those assumptions cannot simply be assumed when it's time for dish-washing.

Assuming the above is correct, let's see if I can extend the pattern.

This scene from The Wire is all about the divide between the power of a hypothetical system and the power of material reality. The guard wants it to be one way: his whole job is in fact to be that system, that's the whole reason he's there, the reason he draws a paycheck, he has a uniform and everything! And yet, it's the other way: the system doesn't actually exist, even though he wants it to, even though he's paid to implement it, because at the end of the day, cooperation has to either be consented to or enforced, nd mechanisms of enforcement are both very expensive and quite limited in what they can achieve. Stanfield refuses to consent, and the guard, and the people the guard represents, aren't actually prepared for enforcement. They're bluffing, and Stanfield calls it. The guard's response is to try to guilt-trip him over his defection, as though Stanfield doesn't understand what he's doing, as though he's just making a mistake, and once this is pointed out he'll fall in line with the system. This doesn't work because Stanfield is not making a mistake, has no intention of cooperating, and knows that neither the guard nor the people behind him have any way of enforcing the system they're claiming exists. In reality, he has all the cards, and recognizes no reason to pretend otherwise. He is able to inflict emotional whiplash on the guard at will, by allowing the guard to pretend the system exists, and then demonstrating that it does not.

Applying it to the Culture War, there's the argument I've made for a long time here that the Constitution is dead, or that it is ink and paper, or that it is whatever five justices say it is. The point of all these statements is to highlight different ways that this system vs reality disconnect applies to the system of the Constitution: the document itself is not the power, the justices aren't even the power. The paper and ink and the justices interpreting it are just coordination mechanisms. The power comes from the social consensus that they exist to coordinate, and that power can be manipulated in a whole variety of ways that have nothing to do with a fancy piece of parchment or five people in silly black robes. A foolish person might imagine that their ignition key is what powers their car: they turn the key and the car starts! But of course, the ignition key is only indirectly connected to the car's engine, and if there's something wrong with the engine the key certainly isn't going to help.

This is one of the serious issues our society is trying to deal with. Our established systems are failing en masse, and there's a blatant disconnect between the way things are hypothetically supposed to work, and the way they actually work. Some people fail or refuse to understand this reality, and so keep appealing to systems that used to exist, or that we pretended exist. They do this because they want it to be one way, but it's the other way.

I agree with your overall characterization. To be clear my objection "the constitution is dead" rhetoric has always been that something must have actually been alive at some point in order to be "dead". As for "the constitution is whatever five justices say it is." I feel that this is aptly covered by my closing observations on laws and kings.

Now carry your extension of the pattern even farther...

I've previously likened many of the anti-woke posters here on theMotte to people who are still in the Matrix. They may have taken the red-pill but they haven't freed their minds. They're still trying to model the world in terms of systems of inductive logic, they're still trying frame things in terms of where they sit in the intersectional stack, they still have not grasped the true implications of the "replication crisis" and apparent fact that the bulk of academic inputs are garbage, they still buy into obvious nonsense like "elite theory" and "external loci of control". In short, they still think that's air they're breathing.

I agree with your overall characterization. To be clear my objection "the constitution is dead" rhetoric has always been that something must have actually been alive at some point in order to be "dead".

A fair point. There was a big post I've tried to write a couple times about exactly this, how the partisan politics of my youth deeply ingrained an idea that the system actually ran things, that the key powered the car. And this is in fact how I grew up thinking about the constitution, as though the paper and ink had a life of their own, as though the social system that emerged from them was as dependable as gravity. I think a lot of people still think of it that way.

Thinking about it, though, wasn't that the point? Weren't the Constitution's authors attempting to create an instinctive, unquestioned norm, something where compliance didn't have to be enforced on a case-by-case basis, but could simply be assumed? My church seems "alive" to me, because we don't argue about whether God exists, whether Jesus died for us, or whether our goal is to serve him. If those were live issues within my church, if the preacher and the elders considered them live issues of debate, I'd be looking for a new church, because I would consider my current one to be "dead". Ideally, wouldn't it be the same for the constitution?

They're still trying to model the world in terms of systems of inductive logic, they're still trying frame things in terms of where they sit in the intersectional stack, they still have not grasped the true implications of the "replication crisis" and apparent fact that the bulk of academic inputs are garbage, they still buy into obvious nonsense like "elite theory" and "external loci of control".

This was me, for a long, long time, as you no doubt noticed, and the temptation is still there.

There's a deeper thread I wish I had more time to follow; briefly, the systems, when they work, make things a lot easier for everyone involved. Certainly that's how it was for me. I didn't want to accept that there wasn't a systemic answer available, because non-systemic answers seem riskier and scarier than systemic ones. Probably it's no more complicated than the difficulty of distinguishing prudence from cowardice; the latter will always frame itself as the former, one can always say that that any risk is too great.

A scene from one of my favorite films:

Turkish : Tommy, why is your skin leaking?

Tommy : I'm a little worried actually, Turkish.

Turkish : Worried about what?

Tommy : What happens if the gypsy knocks the other man out? I mean, he's done it before ain't he?

Turkish : We get murdered before we leave the building, and I imagine we get fed to the pigs.

Tommy : Well I'm glad to see you're climbing the walls in fucking anxiety. Pardon my cynicism, but I don't exactly trust the pikey.

Turkish : Don't think I haven't thunk about that one, Tommy. It's his mum's funeral tonight. God bless her. You know those gypsies like a drink at a wake. I'm not worried about whether Mickey knocks the other man out. I'm worried about whether Mickey makes it to the fourth fucking round.

Tommy : What if he doesn't make it to the fourth round?

Turkish : We get murdered before we leave the building, and I imagine we get fed to the pigs.

Tommy : So why are you so calm? ...I said...

Turkish : I heard what you said, Tommy! It's not as though we've got a choice, now, is it? You show me how to control a wild fucking gypsy, and I'll show you how to control an unhinged, pig-feeding gangster.

Tommy wants a plan. He wants a systemic answer that assures him everything is going to be fine, that risk is minimal. He wants lines to color inside and the assurance that as long as he does his part, everything will work out. A lot of people are like Tommy. I certainly was, and still am to at least some extent. Freedom is scary. You changed my mind pretty significantly by having a similar conversation once upon a time, but for this reality to sink in one has to be willing to accept the possibility of considerable losses. There's another effort-post I've been considering, looking at rationalist and proto-rationalist fiction, stuff like HPMOR and Ender's Game, and the way certain Enlightenment assumptions bleed through every part of the narrative: there's a right answer, there's a winning move to find if you're clever enough, there's always a way out, a way to fix things, a way to get what you want. The same idea comes through in a lot of Scott's and Yudkowski's writings. They look at the world and imagine there's a system to manipulate, a right answer to parrot back, a solution. Hence Utilitarianism's attempts to "solve" morality like a math problem, and all the absurdities and atrocities that result. My experience is that this idea is very attractive, and it dies very hard.

And this is in fact how I grew up thinking about the constitution, as though the paper and ink had a life of their own

This is the sort of magical thinking that we almost inevitably engage in because our minds are a tiny subset of the enormous universe that they are trying to model, so our minds inevitably have to simplify almost everything about reality.

Another such simplification, for example, is the idea that there is such a thing as "the left" and "the right".

Another is viewing the economy through abstractions like "the market" or "socialist planning" rather than viewing it as an immensely complicated system of land, physical materials, people who all have their own motives, computers, communications flying every which way, and so on.

as though the social system that emerged from them was as dependable as gravity.

It often is for a long time until it isn't.

Lenin: "there are decades in which nothing happens and weeks in which decades happen".

But it is difficult to function without the belief in this dependability, even though to be convinced of the dependability would again be magical thinking. So again, our minds simplify in order to face reality.

The problem with shrugging off all of academic ideas and modern thought is you get to a point where you don’t have anything to trust. No man is an island, and even if we know for a fact most of the knowledge around us is BS, one person simply isn’t capable of navigating the world solely on their own intellect. Especially not in a modern world, where due to increasing complexity we must take hundreds of things for granted a day.

What is your solution to living life completely blackpilled, trusting in no one and nothing but yourself? How do you interact with others, teach your children, seek advice or role models?

The problem with shrugging off all of academic ideas and modern thought is you get to a point where you don’t have anything to trust

You describe this as though it were a bug rather than a feature. What's the old line from Michel Du Montaigne? all I know for certain is just how little I know.

The problem with shrugging off all of academic ideas and modern thought is you get to a point where you don’t have anything to trust.

Thought from before the modern era? Thought from the modern era which does not seem to have been significantly influenced by modernity?

How does thought from before the modern era grapple with massive shocks like climate change, modern economic swings, dealing with technological addiction?

How do you teach your kids to avoid modern thought if their peers are exposing them constantly?

How do you determine which modern thought isnt “significantly influenced by modernity?”

God. Morality. Reason.

I that scene it's not as if they're not prepared to enforce compliance and totally bluffing, they're just not prepared to enforce compliance on Marlo Stanfield. If Bubbles tried to steal something the security guard would have stopped him without a second thought.

Marlo takes two Lollipops he could easily pay for while looking the guard in the eyes. He's signalling his power and his ability to flaunt the rules and personally disrespecting the security guard. The security guard knows Marlo can have him killed on a whim, he's scared to look him in the eyes and says 'he's not stepping to" Marlo, but him having pride as a man means he can't let the slight to unanswered. He's not asking Marlo not to defect, he's not trying to get the lollipop's back, he just wants to be recognized as a working man outside "the game" who isn't going to interfere with the gangs but shouldn't have to tolerate such clear disrespect either. And Marlo of course says no, it's the other way.

One of the running themes in The Wire is that the code of honor that allows drug dealers to exist alongside the community is in decay. Omar takes pride in never robbing a citizen, he's gunned down by a child. They shoot at his mother on her way to church. Avon's generation might have stolen, but they wouldn't have personally humiliated the security guard in doing so. Marlo is the next generation, he's more ruthless and has people killed constantly for vague suspicions or minor slights. The system that no longer exists isn't state and federal law, it's the norm that people outside "the game", especially "citizens" are to be left alone and not really interfered with.

In that scene it's not as if they're not prepared to enforce compliance and totally bluffing, they're just not prepared to enforce compliance on Marlo Stanfield. If Bubbles tried to steal something the security guard would have stopped him without a second thought.

I guess it comes down to what it means to be a "bluff". You say that if Bubbles tried to steal something the guard would stop him, but would Bubbles actually try to steal something? Bubbles isn't Marlo, and he doesn't have the power or the understanding of that power that Marlo has.

The guard has no gun, only a radio, and no one he radios is going to do anything worth mentioning about Marlo's theft of two lollipops. Marlo would not do this in front of an actual cop, because the actual cop has an actual gun and an actual police force behind him. An actual cop can prosecute a fight, his organization will back him, and Marlo will definately lose. The guard is not a cop, only pretending to be one, hoping the actual power of the cops rubs off on him vicariously through a bit of social mimicry. He's hoping he has authority because he looks like authority, without actually backing it up. He's bluffing.

The system that no longer exists isn't state and federal law, it's the norm that people outside "the game", especially "citizens" are to be left alone and not really interfered with.

Yes, exactly, and it's the same with real-world issues as well. State and federal law, like the Constitution, are coordination mechanisms. Their goal is to create a norm of cooperation between all the members of society. That norm is where all the benefits come from, and it can be weakened or destroyed without those mechanisms changing in the slightest way. Breakdown of norms is a social problem, and systemic solutions might be necessary to solve them, they are by no means sufficient. If your counterparties aren't actually looking to cooperate, cooperation isn't on the table.

Applying it to the Culture War, there's the argument I've made for a long time here that the Constitution is dead, or that it is ink and paper, or that it is whatever five justices say it is.

The reasoning is true, but the problem with accepting it is it removes all legitimacy from government. If e.g. the constitution and the justices say I can carry a gun, and the real power says I can't, then for what reason should I not violate every single one of the state's edicts provided I can get away with it? Where does the state's legitimacy derive? Lysander Spooner's answer (it doesn't) seems to be the only one which makes sense.

Where does the state's legitimacy derive?

Raw force.

Be nice until you can coordinate meanness.

Democracies end in military dictatorships, because eventually the best way to get to the top is simply to co-opt the raw force. As countries become more successful and peaceful, the more impact control of their shrinking military has.

I think the question of legitimacy and power are separated here. Power rests with whoever can bring force to bear on the population. If you’re in a weak enough state, power might well rest with gangs. They wouldn’t be legitimate, obviously, but they’d have power. Legitimacy comes from whatever legal theory gives the rulers the right to rule. David could rule because God chose him as head of a theocratic state. Charles III rules because he’s the eldest son of the former Queen. Biden rules as President because he won the election and therefore has the right to the office.

Law is almost always an idealist thing. It gives rules but rules are merely the map and assume that everybody is doing exactly what they’re supposed to do and further that the enforcement and judicial branches are not compromised. This rarely happens perfectly simply because laws generally forbid things that people very much want to do. Businesses want to skirt labor laws (paid breaks and lunches are expensive. OSHA laws can be expensive to follow as well). Dumping stuff in the river is much cheaper than recapture. So there’s always an incentive to try to negate any laws that you don’t want to follow. As such a lot of laws simply aren’t enforced or if the cops bother judges overturn them.

Where does the state's legitimacy derive? Lysander Spooner's answer (it doesn't) seems to be the only one which makes sense.

And again this is the sort of thing that I'm talking about when I say that there is a giant Hobbes-shaped whole in the discourse. The obvious response that almost every red-triber learns as a child is "from the consent of the governed" and yet this concept seems to be completely alien to progressives and the wider left. A cynical man might even theorize that the absence of this concept is why the philosophical left seems to be so much more prone to devolving into totalitarianism and mass-murder that the ostensibly more authoritarian right.

You are acting as if there is a category of the "the governed" that can "consent" collectively somehow.

The nation is an imagined tribe... not a one of these social intuitions actually worked in theory or practice once the modern nation state came about and actively started hacking people's communal instincts to start regulating people, not at the level of the village or town of the hundreds or thousands, but at the tens of millions strong nation... this is why the birth of modern bureaucracy was so horrific and killed so many tens of millions of people, people kept behaving and acting as if they were part of a social organ capable of sane joint decision making when they weren't.

Every cultural group and nation went insane in its own unique ways in the socio-cultural drift, and the only reason civilization didn't break down entirely in SOME places is because they had a unified culture that just so happened to ape the mad vision they imagined they were enacting.

There is no 300 million strong category of "the governed" that is somehow capable of making decisions and "consenting"... Your brain is simply hacked by tribal instincts that worked and produced effective social morality when your ancestors were navigating social relations of a few thousand.

"The system" and "the Governed" and "the consent of the governed" can go haywire and murder 10s of millions of people at a moment's notice for no reason at all outside of pure cultural inertia and no sane intuition or person would at all be capable of stopping it.

You are adrift on black seas of infinity, lost in a unstoppable collective dream that could turn to a nightmare at a second's notice for reasons barely intelligible to the dream itself, with figures and institutions appearing before you in the poorly stitched skinsuits of your friends and loved ones saying "Come give grandmother a hug" or "If it isn't my old comrade. Let me shake your hand" and for the moment they hug back or shake the hand, and encourage you to follow them further up the road, and you say "Of course I'll follow they're my dear friends and family" whilst everyone who's noticed the nightmarish miasma. and that the ground is not wet with mist but blood, is screaming "FOR GOD'S SAKE LOOK AT THEIR TEETH!"

You are acting as if there is a category of the "the governed" that can "consent"

...and you are acting as though it would matter if they didn't exist. Why? What makes you think that this the case? or that if it were that it would be remotely valid as a rebuttal if it were?

All tribes are "imagined" in much the same way that all words are "made up". They only exist in so far they are agreed to exist and while you are free to believe that things like a shared religion, shared philosophy, shared culture, or even shared personal affinity are no basis for social coordination. The people of history are under no obligation to abide by what you might consider "reasonable" "rational" or "real". When push comes to shove the definition of "tribe" is simply the Venn Diagram of those you're willing to bleed for and those who are willing to bleed for you. Appeals to constructs like "race" and "economic class" are the purview of the socially atomized urban narcissists who being unwilling to bleed for anyone but themselves and thus have no tribe of their own.

You say that I am "adrift on black seas of infinity" but you're wrong. I am not "adrift" I am sailing, and If were feeling uncharitable I might suggest that you are only able to hold the beliefs that you do because you've never ventured beyond the shallows of your safe first-world middle-class existence. @FCfromSSC speaks the truth, true freedom, the kind that comes from clear-headed understanding of what "freedom" actually entails, is fucking terrifying and not for the faint of heart.

As for the implied accusation that it is people like me who pave the road to oblivion and concentration camps, I would point out that between the two of us, I am not the one who has recently been writing apologetics for the actions of men like Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, and Mao.

I've never written one apologetic for a single one of them.

I compared them to Lincoln and the great leaders of history... You applied the Modus Ponens that I was therefore saying they weren't as bad, when I claim the modus tollens "They're all fucking horrifying beyond comprehension"

You believe in a Christian world where good and evil exist, and even if not in balance, the good is not wholly outweighed by the bad, whereas I believe in a Lovecraftian world where we are adrift on the nightmarish black seas of infinity.

Sorry is I have to be insufficiently condemnatory of our cultures collective boogeymen to beat it into peoples fucking head that the worst human beings who ever lived, and the people they think of as great leader, statesmen, and heroes,, or even just mediocre politicians are VASTLY closer in both degree and kind than ANY are to ANYONE that any person should consider remotely praiseworthy.

I've never written one apologetic for a single one of them.

What do you call this then?

As other users in that thread have pointed out, it's a pretty massive leap to go from "the Nazis were not uniquely evil" to "aKshUallY the Nazis were heroes of western civilization"

Not a quote.

My claim was for the majority of western civilization Hilter would be considered a "National Hero" such as Napoleon for the French, Alexander for the Greeks, Ceasar for the Romans (and later italians) Vlad Tepest for the Romanians, and Ghengis Kahn for the Mongols, or Lincoln for the Americans.

All war criminals who killed 100s of thousands if not millions and pursued explicit genocides in most cases (ask the Native Americans about Lincoln), but who are praised as heroes of their people by said people.

The fact people use a juvenile definition of the word "hero" thanks to Hollywood divorced from both its classical and early modern usage does not mean I am going to stop using that valuable and specific technical word. Not least because its positive affect accurately captures the socio-cultural esteem it describes.

I'm watching the japanese series right now Legend of the Galactic Heroes its an incredible military series with tons of classical allusion and political insight.

Do you think its title would be better translated as "Legend of the Galactic really swell guys" or "Legend of the Galactic Esteemed Military Conquerors"

More comments

"progressives and the wider left" argue all the time that the government must follow the consent of the governed. They just disagree with you, and for that matter with me as well, about what sort of things the governed are allegedly consenting to.

America has plenty of authoritarians, but it has no large political block that is openly authoritarian or even particularly self-aware about being authoritarian. Both the blue tribe and the red tribe view themselves in much the same way: "we are the real democrats, the heroic and plucky underdogs, the other side are authoritarians who are oppressing and victimizing us".

Which is not surprising, both sides grew up watching the same movies about heroic and plucky underdogs who overcome oppression and victimization.

The obvious response that almost every red-triber learns as a child is "from the consent of the governed" and yet this concept seems to be completely alien to progressives and the wider left.

I'm neither progressive nor part of the wider left, and your insistence that everyone who doesn't agree with you is has become quite tiresome. As for "from the consent of the governed", yes, I learned this in school as well. It appears among other places in the Declaration of Independence: "That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed". But it's a fiction. Nobody "consented" except through tortured versions of consent ("if you don't move to an ungoverned place you've consented the government you're living under). And this "consent" cannot be withdrawn without punishment (as Jefferson, of course, knew). Government's powers are by and large not "just" at all.

Hobbes doesn't help, he just provides another tortured version of consent. Either the sovereign keeps you out of a state of nature in which case you should, by all means, consent because a state of nature is worse than anything the sovereign would do to you. Or if you don't consent, you're in a state of nature, in which case whatever the sovereign does to you is fine because that's what a state of nature is. So Hobbes's conception boils down to "might makes right", with some apologia about how it is right to bow down to might because only that might can keep you from the state of nature.

your insistence that everyone who doesn't agree with you is has become quite tiresome.

And for the umpteenth time it's not "everyone who doesn't agree with [me]", it's the specific set of "red-pilled" blue tribe academic types from progressive backgrounds that seem to generate the bulk of the anti-woke content here on theMotte. IE the sort of people I described above.

I would suggest that you find Hobbes' conception of consent (or willing submission as he would put it) to be "tortured" because it violates some closely held belief of yours. I am urging you to examine that belief.

All the social contract theorists are the same in several respects. One of which is that all of them are trying to find a justification for the authority of the state -- a reason (other than naked force) that one should obey. Note that means they are all starting from the conception that you must indeed obey. You talked earlier about reciprocal obligations; those do not exist at the individual level in social contract theory (and certainly not Hobbes); they exist in feudalism. And feudalism worked only in a different world, where the sovereign's power wasn't all that great compared to his vassals, and even a gang of bandits could aspire to cut themselves out a small fiefdom. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, there's none of that. The sovereign (or its representative, government, in Locke and Rousseau's version) speaks and you must obey. Hobbes says this crappy agreement is better than the alternative. Locke says if you don't like it, tough, move to some ungoverned land, and Rousseau allows for legitimate rebellion but not disobedience.

None of the social contract theorists would agree that it is OK to unlawfully carry a weapon in New York City, and all would agree that if caught the government is perfectly justified in acting against the weapon carrier. Regardless of whatever obligations the government was not fulfilling.

I think the lady doth protest too much.

I've clearly hit a nerve by suggesting that who, what, and where you are is a product of your own choices, and that "the system" only has what powers you grant it. I suspect that reason that the concept of an external loci of control and appeals to "systemic issues" are so compelling to a certain sort of personality is that they allow one to shift responsibility/blame for one's state away from oneself. In other words, they are what the kids these days would call "a cope".

I don't think that being "a man of action" makes me special because there's nothing special about it, it's the default state of human affairs as anyone who has ever had to wrangle a recalcitrant 4 year-old or a forum full of reflexive contrarians will attest. I hope you have enjoyed your literal shitpost and that this brief moment of tearing another person down has made you feel marginally better about your own state of affairs.

Edit to add: I wrote this reply from the notifications board and didn't see that @Amadan had already banned you. I've always felt that it was bad form to call someone out while they are unable to respond so apologies. My bad.

After your last warning, posting this appears to be a particularly obnoxious way to flounce.

Banned, permanent unless the other mods dissent.

His post may have been shitty, but the literary critique of Hlynka taking too long to make a simple point is not entirely off the mark.

Yeah I voted this was warning worthy because it was exceptionally rude but I 100% agreed with the basic point. We're forum posters and not professional writers and so most literary stuff is going to be not great but people should be allowed to experiment with writing style without extremely rude criticism.

Given the popularity of GPT posts on this forum I don't think this is your true objection.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Please explain.

GPT posts are kind of known for their combined verbosity and lack of point.

Yes. GPT posts are cancer. It's the kids pulling out their phones mid-conversation to show me the latest tripe on TikTok.

Now what is my true objection?

TBH, that has always applied to a significant portion of posts here, on /r/themotte and way back on /r/slatestarcodex.

Maybe you're more finely attuned? Please call out the next GPT-created post you see. Because I have only seen a couple - and they were instantly noticed by others as well.

for my part, a lot of top level posts made by a user named Questionmark (or something like that) in the old site were very likely GPT made, at least to my eyes.

Okay? Feel free to say that. But not the way he said it.

The course itself is something I've been meaning to write about at somepoint because the material was almost the polar opposite of what you might expect from an official military curriculum or formal "leadership" course and yet I can say with confidence that it made me a better leader, a better folower, and 15 - 20 odd years later arguably a better parent and boss.

I was planning on berating you for not doing a trailer post first, so I appreciate this.

That aside, this is kinda cheap -

We have users here saying things like "the only wardrobe that allows CCW in New York is a police uniform" because the possibility of a human being choosing to disobey the law is just not something that exists within their philosophy even as they complain about rampant criminality.

I mean, you could be right - you aren't about nybbler as he mentions below, but stripping away the hyperbole I have met people who seemed to think illegal = flat out impossible before. I don't think they're hanging out on the motte though. We pretty much have to talk in legalities about legal issues because the law is a shared baseline we might not all agree to, but we all agree exists. Arguments like "New York doesn't allow private citizens to concealed carry!" "Heh u still can 😎" don't really go anywhere.

Arguments like "New York doesn't allow private citizens to concealed carry!" "Heh u still can 😎" don't really go anywhere.

Perhaps they should though.

As @crushedoranges observes down thread there seems to be this paradoxical complete confidence in the power of the state while simultaneously existing in a world where public defecation and getting attacked on the street are just things the public are expected to tolerate. The only reasonable conclusion from my perspective is that the citizens of New York want to live in filth, that they want to live in Hobbes' state of nature, and this is what I mean when i say that there seems to be a massive Hobbes/Burke shaped hole in the discourse.

Edit to add.

I think the "illegal = flat out impossible" conceit is much more common here than you give it credit for. At the very least it seems to be a reasonably common failure mode of the "systematizing" personality type in general, and rationalists in particular. I actually think it's a large part of the whole "rationalists as quokka" meme. There seems to be this endemic belief in the fundamental correctness of "systems" and "inductive reason" that is simply not supported by observed reality because any scenario involving multiple actors/agents is by its nature going to be anti-inductive and actively resist systematization.

All "laws" must ultimately reduce to the consent of those governed by them.

Ah, I actually think that kind of "you will eat the bugs bigot" doomposting follows the recognition of that truth, but also the next step - that consent can be manufactured and 90% (charitably) of the populace are incapable of seeing through it.

After living through Australian covid I know that it doesn't matter if you sit someone down and walk them through it - 'yes Anastasia Palecek said masks and lockdowns and vaccine mandate, but she can't actually stop you from going to the shops, let alone force you to get drugs injected - and the only reason she is getting away with it currently is because you let her, if everyone walked outside right now and set their masks on fire she would have to accept that Queensland no longer tolerates masks.' they might agree with you in principle, but they will turn around two minutes later and tell you you need a mask if you are going driving.

Did I consent to any of that shit? No, the closest I got was malicious compliance when absolutely necessary. Did it change anything? Yes, dozens of people I once considered friends now refuse to talk to me on the grounds that I am The Joker. Anything in the nature of covid management? Not a thing. None of the people in charge will ever be held responsible.

And if it happens again - maybe this time China weaponises eczema and we all have to handcuff ourselves behind our backs so the infected don't scratch themselves to death - everyone will do as they are told and give me disappointed looks when I tear my hair out wondering why they play along. What else can I do but doompost?

I think the "illegal = flat out impossible" conceit is much more common here than you give it credit for. At the very least it seems to be a reasonably common failure mode of the "systematizing" personality type in general, and rationalists in particular. I actually think it's a large part of the whole "rationalists as quokka" meme. There seems to be this endemic belief in the fundamental correctness of "systems" and "inductive reason" that is simply not supported by observed reality because any scenario involving multiple actors/agents is by its nature going to be anti-inductive and actively resist systematization.

Yeah that's fair. I always assume they are getting carried away with their arguments and forgetting is/ought, because I do that a lot, but that's the other thing I do too much - typical minding.

Yeah that's fair. I always assume they are getting carried away with their arguments and forgetting is/ought, because I do that a lot, but that's the other thing I do too much - typical minding.

I sympathize.

I think a lot of people end up cowed because they at least perceive they have something to lose by defecting. If you’re PMC especially, the prospect of jail is much more scary because it’s not just jail, but a complete economic and social death sentence. You’ll lose most of that comfortable lifestyle, the good job as an apperachnik, the nice house, the nice car, respect and social standing. Rebellion takes that, if you’re arrested. Felons have very few options— most of them terrible— for work. Respectable places don’t want you. The wages (n.b. The felon generally must take an hourly wage) is generally barely a survival wage. Most respectable people don’t hang around with felons either.

With that much to lose, most of those raised PMC are raised with a very strong dose of “obey the law and be a good boy.” Other classes don’t. Someone who’s in the working class thumbs their nose at authorities all the time. They aren’t really the worse for it. If you worked for a survival wage at QuikTrip before you got arrested, you aren’t that much worse to work at QT afterwards. Your shitty house and car aren’t going to get worse. As such the hold the system has on you is much lighter. And at least in America, the bulk of the COVID rebellion came from such stock — people with nothing much to lose.

If you’re PMC especially, the prospect of jail is much more scary because it’s not just jail, but a complete economic and social death sentence.

And quite possibly a literal one, depending on which facility they decide to put you in. Defend yourself too vigorously during the trial and you might find yourself becoming the newest bitch at Five Points.

It is possible both to be above the law, and below it.

All "laws" must ultimately reduce to the consent of those governed by them.

They do not. To think that there is some "must" there is to make the same mistake as the lady with her cat.

Laws can and often do just reduce to whoever has the most power, consent has nothing inherently to do with it.

You've got that backwards It is those who appeal to silly abstractions like "power" and "legitimacy" who are making the same mistake as the lady with her cat, because a cat is always going to do as the cat pleases. You're appealing something that does not exist.

The only way to prevent a cat from walking through an open door is ensure that the cat does not want to leave the house in the first place. IE to attain the cat's consent.

Legitimacy is an abstraction but power is not. Power is very real. A man who holds a gun to another man's head has power over that man. If cats understood language and understood what guns do, you could also prevent the cat from walking through the open door by telling it that you would shoot it if it did.

Legitimacy is an abstraction but power is not. Power is very real. A man who holds a gun to another man's head has power over that man.

No he doesn't, or at the very least only in so far as the man being threatened chooses to allow it. That's kind of what I'm trying to get at. You're imagining that "the system" (or whatever you want to call it) is self-acting when it manifestly is not.

The man with the gun does have power over the other man. In some very unusual sense -- the sense in which "your money or your life" is a free choice -- he does not have the power to force the other man to act as he wishes. But he does have the power to force the other man to choose between acting as he wishes and dying.

I know what I'm about to say is a cliche, but it's a cliche for a reason.

We are all dying. we are all going to die.

Even the retarded Yudkowskite who achieves his dream functional immortality by of uploading his consciousness to a block of computronium is doing to die when the last embers of the universe burn out, assuming the molecular structure of his processor didn't get melted down and repurposed long before that.

Death is not the end of things.

More comments

The only reasonable conclusion from my perspective is that the citizens of New York want to live in filth, that they want to live in Hobbes' state of nature, and this is what I mean when i say that there seems to be a massive Hobbes/Burke shaped hole in the discourse.

Well, the vagrants have nothing to lose. They have no property that can be confiscated if they commit a crime. Being behind bars might even be an upgrade.

A taxpayer on the other hand is leading a life and owns property and actually stands to lose from state punishment. Even though you can just eat the fine or jail time, the state reaching in to screw you doesn't really seem like a state of nature to me.

Well, the vagrants have nothing to lose.

Sort of. They have nothing to lose that society is willing to take from them. They have their lives and their freedom (for some definition of those things). They can absolutely lose those things, we're just not willing to take them.

We can solve vagrancy tomorrow, it's just an "atrocity". If it becomes a big enough problem, people will start to look for real solutions, and most of them are pretty bad.

They have their lives but their freedom is worth almost nothing to them, I suspect. Prison is probably better than living on the street.

No, they do value their freedom at least in the moment; if you confine them they will attempt to escape.

Even though you can just eat the fine or jail time, the state reaching in to screw you doesn't really seem like a state of nature to me.

Of course it is; the state of nature is all versus all. If you proclaim yourself free of the state, at the same level of actor of the state, then you have opened yourself up to be legitimately screwed by the full might of the state, because a state of nature has no rules but "the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must". And the state is strong and you are weak.

The ordinary citizens of New York don't have that much say. Every few years they get a vote between people all of whom will either not solve the problem, or cause other problems even worse, or both; that's all the say they have (besides exit). The government has decided it's OK for homeless people to live and shit on the street and terrorize subway passengers; it has decided it's not OK to harm these homeless people (even when they're acting threatening) nor to carry a gun. And it has easily enough power to achieve these ends. It is true that the government COULD decide otherwise; it certainly has the capacity to do it (except in as much as it is constrained by higher-level governments, which is in fact a great deal). But it does not want to.

Sounds like in your anecdotes the rationalist casually DESTROYED stupid people with FACTS and LOGIC, but felt it was beneath him to elucidate and impart his wisdom to his lessers. The mormon missionary and friend are clearly uncomfortable with the ambiguity and grey moral area of bribes and use of force. The neighbour doesn’t understand that her intent has no causal influence on events. And it’s true, common people do not understand the finer points of why they should follow the king, his officers, the law or the ten commandments, it’s the cliff’s notes of morality, of course they haven’t read the book like you, oh enlightened one.

This is too antagonistic, you've had two warnings in the past for this same thing. 3 day ban.

Who is the rationalist?

We have users here saying things like "the only wardrobe that allows CCW in New York is a police uniform" because the possibility of a human being choosing to disobey the law is just not something that exists within their philosophy even as they complain about rampant criminality.

That is not why I said that. I said that because if you CCW in New York (City) without a police uniform, either you are a habitual criminal and will stick to carrying in your own bad neighborhood, or you will be caught, probably sooner than later, end up in jail for a long time, and perhaps come out at the end with the choice of living a straight, narrow, and meager existence or retraining as a habitual criminal. State capacity is great enough nowadays that for those laws the state cares about (and weapons laws are included in NYC), it is not an option for a person to disobey without throwing away everything for the life of a habitual criminal.

From all I've heard I don't think the military is different; the Demos are no match for the Woke.

The woke live in the paradoxical confluence of complete confidence in the state's power to bring about their wishes while living in constant culture struggle against its enforcers. It's like being a sovereign citizen, but sometimes saying the right gibberish does make things happen. Just because in the West authority has become completely abstracted from force doesn't mean that the authority's power no longer requires it. The demos has great power that yet sleeps, yet.

If laws are passed that make people criminal, perhaps more people should be criminals: if you're the kind of person who wants to possess a gun you're already an enemy of the state: the bureaucracy just hasn't caught up with you yet.

If laws are passed that make people criminal, perhaps more people should be criminals: if you're the kind of person who wants to possess a gun you're already an enemy of the state: the bureaucracy just hasn't caught up with you yet.

As the old Hienlien line goes, where the law is tolerable i obey it, where the law is intolerable i ignore it.

If the law isn't stopping the crooks/gang-bangers from carrying weapons, why should it stop you?

If the law isn't stopping the crooks/gang-bangers from carrying weapons, why should it stop you?

There's a pretty obvious answer, and I think it rounds a lot of the conversation. Trivially, the crooks and gang-bangers are a good deal more willing to shoot at the cops than I am; before that point, they've built a lot of their infrastructure and systems around evading or delaying police. Those are not things that only crooks and gang-bangers can do.

Do you want the broader conservative movement to start thinking in that framework? Because there's no particular reason to stop at merely ignoring the law when it's set against you: the logic very quickly leaps from un'lawful' concealed carry or fucking with their taxes to going full Goetz to infrastructure attacks that I'm pointedly not going to describe in detail here.

I likely don't have your capacity for red team considerations... but I'm not a Blue Triber; I have enough. But I also have seen what and how badly that goes for everyone involved, and it's a pin you can't put back in the grenade once it's an option for enough people.

I would like to find another solution, if one is available.

The law makes carrying a weapon unappealing to rational actors, which criminals mostly are not?

Why work a 9-to-5 when you could be peddling dope?

Crooks and gangbangers aren't trying to build stable, productive lives. They aren't aiming for the same win condition, so they aren't playing by the same rules. If one does not share their goals, some of their tactics are useless or actively counterproductive.

I think a more productive framing would be to examine what level of disobedience people are willing and able to enact. "Always cooperate", always work within the system, is clearly a bad strategy in an adverse environment. The question is how to strike a balance between defending oneself against adverse action, and compromising actual goals. Currently, it's clear that people generally lean way too hard toward compliance at all costs, with avoiding all risk, and that their risk-aversion makes them easy to manipulate. Unfortunately, figuring out what level of risk is acceptable is actually very difficult to do well, and the consequences are significant. It's not obvious to me that individual action is a solution here, since a lot of the threats are actively being coordinated at the level of overall society. Taking drug-dealer risks for CCW-benefits is a pretty questionable idea. On the other hand, the capacity to resist must be cultivated, and that means accepting some non-zero level of risk.

It's not obvious to me that individual action is a solution here, since a lot of the threats are actively being coordinated at the level of overall society.

Concurrently it seems obvious to me that individual action is the only viable solution, because it's the only thing anyone can actually control. See this bit from Micheal Collins. "Irish democracy" (IE feigning deference to those "in charge" only to go and do whatever you were gonna do anyway) is the ultimate democracy.

The linked scene is Michael Collins arguing to a crowd that they need to take collective action. They do, fighting back against the Constables who attack Collins and the crowd. Collins himself fights, before being hustled to safety by two others.

They are each acting individually, and Collins' argument is a specific appeal to individual action: "if they shoot me, which specific one of you will step up to take my place?" But that individual action is welded into a common purpose, a common cause, collective action, collective identity. And this process, by which individuals individually choose to act in concert, is the entire basis for his plan. What makes his victory possible is the fact that not only one person will step up to replace him, but many and more.

Coordination defeats individual action. People are stronger together than they are apart. "Irish Democracy" required the Irish, and wasn't going to happen without them. Individuals can attempt something similar, but the potential payoffs are much different. That doesn't make pure individualism a bad idea, but it does make coordination much stronger for a variety of reasons.

In the same way, POWs attempt to form organization with their fellow prisoners, and their captors often make every effort to keep them isolated from each other. the captors would much rather coordinate against individuals than against a group; the prisoners would rather compete group vs group than individual vs group.

I'm not claiming collective action is a general solution, only that individual action isn't either. There are no general solutions. It's a hard problem all the way around.

This is why speed limits are so well respected.

Well said

And the point I'm trying to get at is, what is collective action if not a collection of individual actions?

It's coordinated individual action, the sort of coordination which leads to convictions for seditious conspiracy. If three people attempt such co-ordination, at least two of them are Feds.

More comments

coordination and cooperation and a recognition of common identity, a "you and I together", I think? Or is this what makes them a "collection"? One can act as an individual without these, and should, but they make one's individual action a lot more effective. I'll freely admit that people, myself unfortunately included, tend to treat these things as though they are necessary for individual action, when they absolutely are not, or that they replace individual action, which they absolutely do not.

Currently, it's clear that people generally lean way too hard toward compliance at all costs, with avoiding all risk, and that their risk-aversion makes them easy to manipulate.

I don't think that is clear. The consequences for a non-habitual-criminal being non-compliant in ways the state cares about are very high, and the state capacity to find and punish them is also very high. Unless the chance of being carried by 6 is nearly 100%, it's best not to risk being judged by 12 -- because being judged by 12 is almost as bad as being dead. Maybe worse, depending on how bad the prison you end up in is.

The consequences for a non-habitual-criminal being non-compliant in ways the state cares about are very high, and the state capacity to find and punish them is also very high.

It's not clear to me that this is actually true. It is very clear that Blue Tribe and the authorities do everything in their power to make it appear to be true, but actual prosecutions seem quite rare.

If the law isn't stopping the crooks/gang-bangers from carrying weapons, why should it stop you?

"Should" is not the question. It does. (also gang bangers aren't that big a problem for non-gang-members in New York). But the state has arranged this situation. Much of it is because a crook or violent nutcase and me are not similarly situated; if a violent nutcase carries an unlawful knife, he might spend a little time in jail for it and get a longer record, and when he gets out he's in the same shape he once was.

If I carry an unlawful weapon and I'm caught for it (which will happen if I do it regularly, or if I ever am in a situation where it would otherwise make sense to use it), not only do I get sent to prison, but if even I survive prison without permanent damage (unlikely, IMO; prisons are full of violent people with a culture I would not be able to adapt to), then when I get out I have no job, and no prospects of getting one that doesn't suck (because I'm now an official criminal), I'm probably broke and homeless as well.

Basically if I'm convicted of a major crime I've lost the game of life and am just running out the clock until I die. Which is all the homeless schizos are doing too, but they have nowhere to fall.

"Should" is not the question. It does.

And I am saying that you really need to examine the assumptions behind that. What systems do you believe that are in place but may not actually be so?

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats