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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   25134 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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I think "someone says something with is laughably wrong and also outrageous on the motte" does not warrant a top-level post.

We have our share of trolls and Nazis. Every once in a while we get an holocaust denier. I am sure that I could make a civil argument about why we should kill and eat all the people with the letter x in their legal names as a matter of national policy without getting banned for it.

I think it is important to establish that a lack of refutation is not the same as silent approval. Trolls can make outrageous statements a lot quicker than anyone can refute them. See xkcd.

I mean, mods could use the "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be." rule to shut down such comments, by ruling "denying humanity to a significant portion of extant h. sapiens is a claim which is so inflammatory that you should require ten recent articles in top-notch scientific journals making that claim as evidence" (and then relying on the fact that this level of evidence can not be met).

But this would also put us on a slippery slope to tone policing. As the late Niemoeller observed (paraphrased): "First they came for the holocaust deniers, and I said nothing because fuck Nazis. Then they came for the blacks-arent-humans people and I said nothing, because fuck racists. Then they came for the genetic-IQ-difference crowd, and I said nothing because it was not a topic which interested me. Then they came for me for using a generic masculine form and nobody was left to speak out for me." So I am kind of fine with the odd Nazi comment as a price to pay for having a forum where any opinion can be expressed, because some other controversial opinions are at least interesting.

a slippery slope to tone policing

You mean "content policing", right?

But this would also put us on a slippery slope to tone policing.

Er, we do tone police. Explicitly.

And @TitaniumButterfly was in fact modded for asserting that "blacks are animals." Not because you can't say inflammatory things here (yes, we allow Holocaust deniers and segregationists and fascists and even that one "Abolish the age of consent and make females sex slaves, yes, including your six-year-old daughter" guy), but because you have to do it, well, civilly. Which admittedly can be a hard needle to thread when the argument you want to civilly make is that Group X should be eradicated/enslaved, but that's intentional.

The I have a black friend argument.

I do too. I’ve had a few. One went to Northwestern, they all pretty much have corporate jobs doing normal blue tribe stuff.

The thing in the whole debate is nobody doing the debate had George Floyd type black friends. It does go too far too call black people in general animals. We all know many who function quite well in western civilization. However, there is an underclass that seems to need a huge amount of intervention in terms of policy and financial aid to develop communities looking anything like the rest of western civilization. They are not self-sustaining without aid from other parts of society.

The thing in the whole debate is nobody doing the debate had George Floyd type black friends.

I spent a year and a half working an entry-level factory job. more than half my coworkers were black. They weren't graduates from prestigeous institutions. They were still obviously human. Meanwhile, it turns out that all the arguments for black inhumanity apply to white junkies as well.

However, there is an underclass that seems to need a huge amount of intervention in terms of policy and financial aid to develop communities looking anything like the rest of western civilization. They are not self-sustaining without aid from other parts of society.

They need tight-knit communities who deliver immediate punishment to defectors, with those continuing to defect written off. "aid from other parts of society" is how this underclass is maintained in its longstanding condition.

"aid from other parts of society" is how this underclass is maintained in its longstanding condition.

You know, I just got through a book about the Irish potato famine and the parallels between the 'Democrats run modern welfare plantations' narrative and Trevelyan are pretty interesting. You say welfare is how the underclass is maintained in it's current condition; Trevelyan says:

In his book The Irish Crisis, published in 1848, Trevelyan later described the famine as "a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence", one which laid bare "the deep and inveterate root of social evil", that evil being Ireland's rural economic system of exploitative landlords and peasants overly dependent on the potato. The famine, he declared, was "the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected... God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part and we may not relax our efforts until Ireland fully participates in the social health and physical prosperity of Great Britain." This mentality of Trevelyan's was influential in persuading the government to do nothing to restrain mass evictions.

In the summer of 1846, Trevelyan ordered the Peelite Relief Programmes, which had been operating since the early years of the famine, to be shut down. This was done on 21 July 1846 by Sir Charles Wood.[13] Trevelyan believed that if the relief continued while a new food crisis was unfolding, the poor would become permanently conditioned to having the state take care of them.[13]

I'm too lazy/short on time to pull actual quotes, so I hope you'll forgive me for copying wikipedia wholesale. It was the heyday of Adam Smith and laissez-faire economics, along with widespread acceptance of Malthusian philosophy (interesting for entirely different reasons in the debates around TFR), both of which influenced Trevelyan's thinking significantly. Trevelyan may have been correct that the situation in Ireland was untenable (TFR >4, increasingly small plots of land that necessitated subsistence potato farming, rampant poverty and illiteracy), but his actions directly led to the preventable deaths of 750,000-1,500,000 Irish and the emigration of a million more. I'm not convinced that his actions had any impact whatsoever on education, self-sufficiency or any meaningful improvement of the lot of the Irish. They also didn't noticeably move the needle on eliminating Catholicism, which he cared for about as much as he cared for their welfare.

There's a certain delicious irony that modern Ireland has double the GDP per capita of Britain, although my rudimentary understanding of economics is that this is largely due to finance and tax havenry rather than a truly productive economy. Regardless, given that it took Ireland more than century after the famine to turn things around, are you confident that Trevelyan's choice to let millions of people starve was correct? I'm working on a second book detailing the path from the potato famine to modern prosperity, but I have a hard time believing that you could draw any kind of causal connection between the two. Perhaps more germanely, are you confident that slashing welfare programs in the US would lead to the outcomes you (we?) want, and do you have any examples of underclasses being cut off from welfare and becoming prosperous within a generation or two?

You know, I just got through a book about the Irish potato famine and the parallels between the 'Democrats run modern welfare plantations' narrative and Trevelyan are pretty interesting.

In the most general terms, I have to ask: do you believe that the Resource Curse exists?

More specifically, you believe that responses to an acute problem over seven years and a chronic problem lasting since somewhere between 1964 and 1866, depending on where one starts the counting, generate parallels because they both can be summarized as "giving poor people handouts doesn't solve poverty"? The crisis has an obvious, acute source in the one case, which is a crop disease killing all the crops. Is the analogue to the potato blight racism? I'm gonna bet it's racism. But the fact remains that giving poor people handouts has not, in fact, solved poverty, and there is, in fact, a large and by all evidence permanent underclass utterly dependent on the handouts, a problem those proposing the handouts did not predict and those defending them have no idea how to solve. Especially given that black people were not in fact generally suffering a famine when we instituted handouts for them, is your argument that a famine would have resulted anyway if they had not been instituted?

Trevelyan may have been correct that the situation in Ireland was untenable (TFR >4, increasingly small plots of land that necessitated subsistence potato farming, rampant poverty and illiteracy), but his actions directly led to the preventable deaths of 750,000-1,500,000 Irish and the emigration of a million more.

Indeed, which is an excellent argument for why Trevelyan was dead wrong in his case. What does this tell us about our case?

Perhaps more germanely, are you confident that slashing welfare programs in the US would lead to the outcomes you (we?) want, and do you have any examples of underclasses being cut off from welfare and becoming prosperous within a generation or two?

...And this is a good point to ask whether you actually read my comment.

They need tight-knit communities who deliver immediate punishment to defectors, with those continuing to defect written off. "aid from other parts of society" is how this underclass is maintained in its longstanding condition.

Which part of the first sentence do you disagree with? Because this was not, in fact, an argument for cutting welfare subsidies, or even a comment about welfare subsidies specifically. Underclass blacks are born, raised, and die in a system they neither have created nor can effectively control. It's not just the welfare checks, it's the schools, the police, the laws, the economy, every aspect of social structure beyond personal interaction. We made a society for them, and when that society delivers miserable results some of us invite them to place the blame on others of us. Notably, the people targeting the blame are those most involved in implementing those actual social structures, and those of us getting the blame are involved chiefly in paying for it all with our taxes.

You understand that my critique isn't the wastage of money, right? Perpetuating a permanent underclass is a monstrous thing to do! Actual accountability for the results is the only solution I can imagine having any chance of working, and I want a solution because the situation is monstrous!

I have previously proposed Reverse-Segregation: give blacks an area that they control completely, where every public official and government position must be held 100% by black people, by law. Grant this area leave to write its own laws as it sees fit, irrespective of the American constitution, and grant it leave to enforce and adjudicate those laws as it sees fit, completely outside the jurisdiction of the rest of American jurisprudence. Fund it with a per-capita percentage of all outlays legitimately payable to black Americans equivalent to the percentage of black Americans who actually live within it. People, white or black, can move there if they want, and leave if they want; no one can be kept there against their will, and no law-abiding citizen be prevented from going there by the rest of America if they choose to go. Then declare that outside this zone, racism has been solved. Blacks get the exact same legal status as everyone else. No AA, no hate crime laws, no special privileges, we implement pure colorblind enforcement of the letter of the law. Race-based discrimination is equally illegal no matter which race it's applied to. If certain words are evidence of bias, they're evidence regardless of who speaks them. Claims of bias will no longer be entertained unless they come with ironclad evidence. And if anyone doesn't like this, there's a place they can move. Welfare can even continue outside the zone as well, we just use cellphone data to track who's inside and who's outside and apportion the money appropriately. Anyone not-black who wants to can move inside the zone, they just can't hold office or vote for anyone who isn't black, presuming the zone decides to keep voting. Maybe even through in something about the zone expanding if its population rises too high.

Far-fetched, I admit, but I think something along those lines would probably improve our situation immensely. Given the current trajectory of Blue Tribe, it's entirely possible one of their cities would even be willing to implement such a zone in-situ rather than trying to build one from scratch. Chicago, maybe? Detroit? Maybe give it two years' lead time so people can move in or out according to preference. Whaddya think?

...In closing, I'm left with a surprisingly similar impression as by some of @2rafa's comments in the recent thread about the immigration bill, and again when that alt-right article got posted that proved Hlynka was right all along. People keep talking as though it's Reds versus blacks or browns, but I can live with blacks and browns happily enough. It's Blues that are an actual problem.

In the most general terms, I have to ask: do you believe that the Resource Curse exists?

No idea. Not my area of expertise.

More specifically, you believe that responses to an acute problem over seven years and a chronic problem lasting since somewhere between 1964 and 1866, depending on where one starts the counting, generate parallels because they both can be summarized as "giving poor people handouts doesn't solve poverty"? The crisis has an obvious, acute source in the one case, which is a crop disease killing all the crops. Is the analogue to the potato blight racism?

No, you're trying to be too granular with the parallels I'm drawing. The Irish lived in crushing poverty for many decades before the Famine, and lived in crushing poverty for many decades afterwards. British rule seemed largely focused on pushing Protestantism, at least some (much earlier on, I think) advocating for pushing the Irish out entirely and settling the land with British and extracting wealth. The problem was orders of magnitude larger than the Famine, but the years of the Famine are well documented and Trevelyan makes an interesting character study.

But the fact remains that giving poor people handouts has not, in fact, solved poverty, and there is, in fact, a large and by all evidence permanent underclass utterly dependent on the handouts, a problem those proposing the handouts did not predict and those defending them have no idea how to solve.

Indeed, although as many here love to point out, poverty is relative. I am often mocked for the quaint idea of 'eliminating poverty.' Nevertheless:

Yes, coming up on a century of welfare in the US has failed to eliminate poverty (interestingly, enacted in response to another Nucular Racism-level cataclysmic event). Depending how you measure it, it has decreased, but whatever, I expect welfare and a social safety net to be permanent and not necessarily undesirable features of our society. Either it's a temporary solution to get people back on their feet, or I don't expect people to be productive regardless and I don't want them to starve. But let's put that aside and jump forward a moment:

You understand that my critique isn't the wastage of money, right? Perpetuating a permanent underclass is a monstrous thing to do! Actual accountability for the results is the only solution I can imagine having any chance of working, and I want a solution because the situation is monstrous!

Okay, so make your case then! Do you have any evidence that could possibly convince me that your way is better? I was responding to a single throwaway line in your OP:

"aid from other parts of society" is how this underclass is maintained in its longstanding condition.

Is there some analogous case you can imagine where welfare was cut off, and the underclass pulled itself up by it's bootstraps? Really any case at all where some underclass managed that? Most modern examples I can think of involve overthrowing communism, cozying up to multinationals or finding underwater lakes of oil in your hinterlands. China, Ireland/Singapore, various Middle Eastern countries. I can't think of any community-level trailer-trash to riches stories in the West, can you? Are there any relevant experiments you can cite? Do anti-welfare Republican governors have more functional societies with less poverty than the rest of the country?

The crisis has an obvious, acute source in the one case, which is a crop disease killing all the crops.

But it didn't though! Why do you think the Irish were living in mud huts on tiny plots of land, and entirely dependent on potato cultivation? Two centuries earlier their society was completely different with warring tribes/clans largely focused on where they could steal their next cow from (apologies to the ghost of FarNearEverywhere). Ireland wasn't some Atlantis laid low by a potato blight, it was an overpopulated clusterfuck dependent on potato monoculture, setting the scene for disaster.

Especially given that black people were not in fact generally suffering a famine when we instituted handouts for them, is your argument that a famine would have resulted anyway if they had not been instituted?

No, again, overindexing on famine. I'm told all the time to notice the piles of Communist skulls; don't you think you should notice the piles of skulls from people advocating for cutting welfare with the goal of making the underclass self-sufficient and productive? I don't expect poor white/black/elderly Americans to starve en masse if we cut all welfare programs tomorrow (at least in part because I expect large amounts of private capital to try and plug the hole), but I do expect it to be a giant clusterfuck with shantytowns, hovels and economic prospects becoming even worse than they were.

And this is a good point to ask whether you actually read my comment.

Read and re-read.

Which part of the first sentence do you disagree with? Because this was not, in fact, an argument for cutting welfare subsidies, or even a comment about welfare subsidies specifically.

I don't necessarily find it disagreeable, although I'd need to better understand what you mean by defectors (criminals? baby mommas/daddies? Drug addicts?) and how exactly you expect the problem to resolve itself. Unless you're just saying a variant of the underclass just needs to stop having a culture of doing underclass things, and their lives would be better, in which case - sure - although I'm not entirely sure how to put that into policy. Normally I hear some variant of:

"aid from other parts of society" is how this underclass is maintained in its longstanding condition.

i.e. welfare lets single moms raise kids without their baby daddies, kids are fucked up without strong father figure, perpetuating the cycle. The implication being that cutting off welfare would force baby momma and baby daddy to marry, get a job and provide a stable household/example for their children. This is what I find objectionable (because I find it unlikely, to be clear, obviously not because I'm against a stable household), and why I started discussing welfare. Tell me how to parse 'aid from other parts of society' then, since it seems like I misunderstand you.

Underclass blacks are born, raised, and die in a system they neither have created nor can effectively control. It's not just the welfare checks, it's the schools, the police, the laws, the economy, every aspect of social structure beyond personal interaction. We made a society for them, and when that society delivers miserable results some of us invite them to place the blame on others of us. Notably, the people targeting the blame are those most involved in implementing those actual social structures, and those of us getting the blame are involved chiefly in paying for it all with our taxes.

I am also born, raised and will die in a system I have neither created nor effectively control, no? I fail to see the argument you're trying to make, although I'll note that it sounds remarkably similar to the 'we live in a society' strain of thought on the left.

Perpetuating a permanent underclass is a monstrous thing to do! Actual accountability for the results is the only solution I can imagine having any chance of working, and I want a solution because the situation is monstrous!

Again, if you can convince me that your way is meaningfully better, I would change my mind. The existence of 'monstrous things' is not evidence that our current policy is even wrong, it could just as easily be the least bad of two options or evidence that there isn't enough welfare.

Far-fetched, I admit, but I think something along those lines would probably improve our situation immensely...Whaddya think?

I can...100% guarantee that it won't. Disparate outcomes outside of your SEZ will still be used as evidence of racism, rampant poverty inside will mean most people would want to leave. Black leaders in the SEZ wouldn't be some magical panacea with policies that we can't imagine out here; black representation (imo) is important so people feel they have a say in the democratic process, so they imagine they could be a representative someday if they chose to, and possibly because on the margin they may better know what their constituents need.

I'm left with a surprisingly similar impression as by some of @2rafa's comments in the recent thread about the immigration bill

Must have missed those.

again when that alt-right article got posted that proved Hlynka was right all along.

Not entirely sure what you mean. My best approximation of a Hlynkian argument is that the Actual Racist Republicans online are blue tribe anti-progs, while the actual red triber is a noble, endangered beast roaming the American heartland in pickup trucks. I could draw all kinds of creative lines around the categories to make my ingroups look good and my outgroups look bad, but at the end of the day, those Actual Racists want and believe things so far removed from me that we're just playing word games.

People keep talking as though it's Reds versus blacks or browns, but I can live with blacks and browns happily enough. It's Blues that are an actual problem.

That's funny; I feel like I can live with just about anyone happily enough, regardless of politics. I'm highly skeptical of the idea that Blue tribe has a monopoly on assholes, or that Blue policies are uniformly harmful or inferior to what the Red tribe would implement. What happened to that period of time where you realized you carried hatred in your heart (sorry if my paraphrasing is off), and you wanted to focus on family and church? Are we just full scorched earth now?

But it didn't though! Why do you think the Irish were living in mud huts on tiny plots of land, and entirely dependent on potato cultivation? Two centuries earlier their society was completely different with warring tribes/clans largely focused on where they could steal their next cow from (apologies to the ghost of FarNearEverywhere). Ireland wasn't some Atlantis laid low by a potato blight, it was an overpopulated clusterfuck dependent on potato monoculture, setting the scene for disaster.

Wait, what? The cattle raid of Cooley was set in pre-Christian history, 1st century AD according to Wikipedia. The famine started in 1845, but the Normans/English/British/whoever had been messing with the island since 1169.

My understanding was the proximate cause of the problem was the sheer poverty of most of the Irish, and the lack of work, or more broadly the lack of an economy, that could lift them out of poverty. The poor tended to rent a small farm where they grew potatoes to eat, and worked odd jobs for money which mostly went to rent. Without the potatoes, they were simply too poor to survive on their own, and the British work-fare programs came late and had problems. It was a horrible situation, and mostly I blame the British, but the basic dynamic was that there were a lot of working people who were so poor that the only food they could afford was potatoes that they grew themselves. When the potatoes went away, everything collapsed. It's not like they were buying most of their food with money, but then there wasn't enough food. They just didn't have enough money to buy food in the first place.

In contrast, America is absurdly wealthy, with a diverse economy, and has huge amounts of absurdly cheap food. Even without the subsidies, we'd have cheap food. I've personally been part of an organized group that cooks food and gives it to anyone who shows up (100-150 a day, mostly homeless). (Maybe I'm part of FCfromSSC's problem?) There's no way that people kicked off of welfare would starve, as long as they can find work, and assuming they didn't also have crippling mental illness, physical disability, or drug addiction. (Not to get into other big problems.)

That said, I agree that cutting off all welfare and similar services, cold turkey, would be a disaster. Any such reduction would have to be done slowly, making sure that there were sufficient jobs and cheap enough housing to handle everyone. (We do have plenty of housing, it's just not where people want to live, or it costs too much.) But I doubt that America has the political will or attention span to pull this off, and so we may be stuck with the current system or a disaster.

(I'm not personally against the existence of a safety net, and the optimal amount of exploitation is probably not zero. But I worry that it's gotten so complex that we don't know what's going on, or what the effect is. And the people who run it seem to be ideologically committed to expanding it forever, and that worries me most of all.)

Wait, what? The cattle raid of Cooley was set in pre-Christian history, 1st century AD according to Wikipedia. The famine started in 1845, but the Normans/English/British/whoever had been messing with the island since 1169.

Yes. It's just amusing to me that their one of their main epics revolved around a cattle raid, and from what I read this was still a large part of their lives in the 17th century.

(I'm not personally against the existence of a safety net, and the optimal amount of exploitation is probably not zero. But I worry that it's gotten so complex that we don't know what's going on, or what the effect is. And the people who run it seem to be ideologically committed to expanding it forever, and that worries me most of all.)

That seems reasonable, although I think there's a steelman to 'expanding welfare forever.' We don't yet have fully automated luxury gay space communism, but we've moved the needle somewhere along the spectrum from hunter-gatherers to subsistence farming to modern civilization. What's the point of it all if we're just going to be forced to grind away at jobs we hate regardless? Maybe a sane society would celebrate the automation of a job rather than panic and try to find bullshit work for the displaced employee. Maybe the dream we should aim for is a society where work is for those who want it (I tell people if I won the lottery tomorrow, my life would probably continue more or less unaffected - I don't work for the money) and welfare isn't stigmatized, even if we aren't quite ready yet.

I think there's a steelman to 'expanding welfare forever.'

I agree, my ideal would be a slow transition of welfare to a cash transfer system (plus Medicaid for all), and then that can expand into a UBI if that's how the economy of the future goes.

What's the point of it all if we're just going to be forced to grind away at jobs we hate regardless?

What's the point of it all if the productive among us are going to be forced to grind away at jobs to support the non-productive and anti-productive in a lifestyle of low-class luxury? The thought of AIs asking that question is one of the things driving AI fears, but somehow it's become anathema for humans to ask.

More comments

A dark possibility is that the HBD dysfunction of the Irish was indeed very much a thing, but events like the famines exerted a strong selective pressure that over time raised Irish performance significantly, to the point that it now equals other NW Europeans.

Not sure why the famine would be more selective than all the wars and rebellions. Don’t think the evidence is good that they were ever stupid. Like the Armenians, they have a weirdly extensive and developed literature compared to their population size (probably around 750,000 at the time of the conquest IIRC). I think it’s more important that they had no indigenous tradition of living in cities (which were Norse and then English), which is where high civilization things tend to occur. After the conquest [edit: Norman, not Tudor], most of the best economic territory was in the hands of the major English lords, who were culturally oriented toward France and England.

There was some historic oral and literary tradition. More recently though much famous ‘Irish’ literature in the revival was not written by ethnic Irish but by the Anglo-Irish. Even Joyce claimed to be of Norman and Scandinavian descent and that his ancestors came over during Cromwell’s settlement, although that’s a topic of some historic debate. If you were asking for evidence of a great historic African literary tradition and I cited a bunch of Boer writers I presume that would be similarly invalid.

One theory (discussed elsewhere in this thread I think) is that the Irish were probably on the level of other peer populations in the dark ages but deteriorated considerably from the 16th to 19th centuries with the potato monoculture, ever smaller plots of land, worse nutrition, overpopulation and so on. Perhaps it begun even earlier in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries. It then took emigration, selection of the smartest and improved nutrition to successively drive huge performance improvements over time.

I don’t think it’s as easy to dismiss poor estimates of Irish performance from the Victorian/Edwardian era as some people suggest. It’s entirely possible they were correct but that outsized gains have led to the current equivalence. We know poor nutrition can have a deleterious effect on IQ and the diet of the Irish in 1850 was probably substantially worse than their ancestors’.

The early literature in the Irish language always struck me as precocious by northern European standards, particularly in prose, and the Irish also developed the Ogham script within a few centuries of the Nordic runes, so I think they have a literary tradition to be proud of even discounting the Anglo-Irish contribution.

Uh, what selective pressure do you think the potato famine exerted? As far as I can tell it just killed random poor people, with those wealthy enough to be exempt being mostly non-Irish.

Well, in that case the HBD doom and gloom is overblown. If things get bad, it'll just take a few disasters to knock off the rust and return a given race to fighting trim.

What did you find objectionable about my comment in the immigration bill thread?

As many on the right acknowledge, immigration is the only thing that matters.

Why does it matter?

It is the central issue upon which every other issue ultimately depends.

Why does every other issue depend on it?

Even a minor shift in the right direction, even something that delays demographic destiny by a few more years buys the right more time.

Buys the Right more time... for what?

There is no ‘national conservative’ movement. There is no ‘Trumpist’ party with a coherent, European-style nationalist policy platform. There’s a Trump personality cult with very little genuine infrastructure behind it, sitting on top of the carcass of the post-Tea Party GOP, which itself is a hollowed-out shell of what it once was even ten years ago.

What does a "European-style nationalist policy platform" look like, and why should I want one? IIRC, you were pretty bullish on the UK Tories. How's that working out these days?

Is the problem Immigration, or is the problem Blue power? If you had to choose between immigration and no Blue power, or no Blue power but lots of immigration, which would you pick?

Immigration isn't the only thing that matters, Blue power is. Immigration matters because it's a Blue Tribe win condition under the old system, but that win condition has already effectively been executed. Having been executed, its further importance is only going to diminish over time. Controlling the border was a means to an end, which was keeping Blues from engineering unilateral control by importing voters; having failed, the priority transfers to other methods of denying, constraining and deconstructing that control.

What is the goal? The OP in that thread seemed to think that passing favorable laws should be presumed to be useful, and you appeared to agree. I'd guess that you're comparing our current situation without the law to a hypothetical with the law, and the latter seems obviously better to you, because we would have the law, and then it would be enforced. So the choice is between getting things we want, versus not getting things we want. But passing the law grants legitimacy to the existing system, and there is zero reason to believe that actual enforcement would happen. This is the fundamental problem with that thread's OP, which spends a ton of words describing the bill, and then throws this in towards the end:

In the world of Republican vibes, there’s the idea that conservatives are always the suckers when it comes to immigration. The idea is that Reagan’s bill was supposed to fix the issue, but the Democrats skillfully reneged on their promise. There’s also the idea of the ratchet, that Republicans will compromise with Democrats, and Democrats will get a bunch of concessions but won’t actually fulfill their end of of the bargain, either because the Republicans are RINOs who don’t actually care about limiting immigration, or because the true-believer Republicans are simply outmaneuvered. Then in the next round of dealmaking, more concessions will be given, and on and on it goes until America is overrun with illegals. For example, in the first deal, “illegal aliens” are reclassified as “illegal immigrants”, and amnesty is provided for, say, 3M of them in return for enforcement of the border laws. Then the enforcement doesn’t happen, ten years go by, and another round of negotiations happens. This time “illegal immigrants” is changed to “undocumented persons” and now we need to give amnesty to the first 3M AND the 5M that arrived since then, but in exchange now we’ll totally have enforcement… pinky promise! And then it doesn’t happen again and… you get the picture.

There’s a kernel of truth to that idea, although it’s obviously extremely oversimplified and lacking in nuance. That said, those vibes are powerful enough that compromise is thoroughly delegitimized for the Republican rank-and-file...

...There's more than a "kernel" of truth in that idea, and if it's "extremely oversimplified" or "lacking in nuance", I'd be fascinated to hear how. @gattsuru has written a lot of quite excellent posts detailing evidence for the problem, and I've tried to contribute where I could. We had all the laws we needed to prevent mass immigration. They didn't work, because Blues actively subverted them, as they subvert every law, rule or decision intended to serve Red Tribe interests. What is the point of passing additional laws in "cooperation" with Blues when we already know any part of the law that serves our interests will not be enforced, and any part of the law that serves Blue interests will be expanded light-years beyond the scope provided by the text?

Why is this law more valuable than the defiance against Blues coordinated and the legitimacy for Blues denied by refusing it? If we can break Blue control, it doesn't seem to me that immigration actually matters much any more, and passing that law doesn't seem like it helps break Blue control. Again, "more time" for what?

And all this applies to Trump as well. It is questionable whether good governance is even possible under current conditions. Failing that, stripping the system of its legitimacy is the best alternative, to open up more space for state-level leaders like Abbott and De Santis, and possibly to accelerate Blue states like California and New York further down their current ideological trajectories. Trump continues to accomplish this, which is, I think, why his support remains so strong: he coordinates defiance, whether he means to or not, whether he even understands the situation or not. No matter what happens, the system will have significantly less legitimacy next year than it does now; given that the immigration has already mostly happened, that seems like a good thing to me.

There's a pretty strong case that the welfare state broke black families apart, leading to the current state of social dysfunction.

There is a counterargument to this which is that there are many white people who are also the dregs of society. Objectively there isn't much difference between a George Floyd and a Kensington zombie. That the problem is more acute in the black community is obviously true; that it is something inherent to being black is something HBDers assume to be true.

"I have a black friend" is of course a trite cliche, but it's also something I cannot overlook every time people bring up HBD and argue, essentially, that we should just accept that blacks are lesser, or even go further and argue for full segregation (the premise being that the only alternative is race war). I do have black friends. Educated, professional black friends. Now of course in an actual race war, everything can go sideways and your black friends won't count for much, but it seems like a lot of people arguing, essentially, that blacks are animals are either making some kind of "But I don't mean you" exception for their black friends, or they really believe that black people who are intelligent and socialized are like unicorns.

For some of us it's more like we just give up. As far as I can tell, virtually every single place on earth where they make up the majority of the population is some kind of dysfunctional shithole and it doesn't seem to matter what continent it's on, what country it's in, or how many generations of effort well-meaning white liberals have squandered trying to fix it. It never gets better, and it doesn't look like it's ever going to.

It's not that we're all ideologically dedicated to the idea of HBD, necessarily, so much as it's the fact that the alternative is a hodgepodge of unfalsifiable just-so excuses that in aggregate strain credulity beyond the breaking point. I just don't really buy that they're equally capable but have coincidentally been kneecapped by one historical mishap or another, everywhere, a hundred percent of the time, forever.

I don't really buy that we just need to eradicate the latest iteration of structural systemic invisible racism and suddenly their homicide rate will plummet by 90%, etc. etc. I just don't buy it. It looks exactly like an ethnic group with lower IQ ending up exactly where you would expect it to while people make up other reasons for it. The idea that they're collectively capable of advanced civilization on their own is, let's say, unevidenced, and it doesn't look like that evidence is ever going to come.

Most advanced civilization was invented by the British and Americans, some by a few other Western Europeans. That didn’t stop plenty of other countries borrowing the technology to start their own industrial and technological revolutions. China didn’t need to invent the car, or the computer, or laundry detergent to use those things. “On their own” isn’t a standard we apply to other modern civilizations.

Sure, African countries are less functional and developed than the West, but many are developing rapidly, living standards are improving, education is increasing, infrastructure is being built, many more are seeing nonviolent leadership transitions - and most of that isn’t the result of charity but of ordinary economic activity. It seems ridiculous pessimistic to think things will never improve. Most African countries are far from being Haiti.

developing rapidly, living standards are improving, education is increasing, infrastructure is being built,

1.1% real growth per year is anemic: https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/reimagining-economic-growth-in-africa-turning-diversity-into-opportunity

Yes because some countries have extremely high birth rates and highly dysfunctional societies with no real economy to speak of, and that hugely distorts per capita growth figures. If you look on a per country level (as the very article you link says) there are many success stories.

TFR is falling in Africa, this means share of working age people increases. If two societies, one where share of working age people increases and another where share of working age people decreases (due to TFR at flat bottom) have same % of GDP per capita growth, what does that tell you?

many are developing rapidly, living standards are improving, education is increasing, infrastructure is being built, many more are seeing nonviolent leadership transitions - and most of that isn’t the result of charity but of ordinary economic activity.

Man I want to believe this but I just don't. It happens every once in a while but as far as I can tell it's only ever cyclical. The country getting out of a low-trust hole can only do it for 10-15 years before the next coup based on tribal lines.

You can't even read the Africa section of the economist regularly without losing your mind. There's such a constant background simmering of rape, mass murder, and corruption going on at some level on that continent it's just impossible to fathom.

I'm not convinced that that has anything to do with HBD, actually. First of all, Africa has ethnic boundaries that often don't match borders very well, and not much tradition of nationalism outside ethnic boundaries. Second, it's just hard to get out of dictatorship once you're in it. One group can't suddenly decide to be noncorrupt all on hts own, and the power needed to stop corruption by fiat enables corruption by the group with the power. There's also the familiar poverty trap where you have to help your family members rather than save for yourself, which also leads to "you have to be corrupt because your family members will require that you use your position to their benefit".

Africa has ethnic boundaries that often don't match borders very well

You could have said this about Europe as well. What did the Welsh have to do with the Scottish or English? People in Provence, Brittany, and Isle-de-France didn't even speak the same languages. Italian only coalesced as a basically-uniform and mutually-intelligible language in the last couple hundred years, and at the time of the discovery of the New World there was no "Spain", but instead "the Spains" because they were a bunch of fiercely-independent kingdoms with their own privileges and rivalries, bound together through fragile personal unions. Prussians, Brunswickers, Saxons, Badeners, and Bavarians didn't have much in common. Russia is a giant, multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic empire, and even today eastern/south-eastern europe don't match ethnic and national borders well - they certainly didn't back in the bad old days of the great Habsburg empires.

Second, it's just hard to get out of dictatorship once you're in it. One group can't suddenly decide to be noncorrupt all on hts own, and the power needed to stop corruption by fiat enables corruption by the group with the power.

Up until the late 19th century, just about every significant country in Europe was some type of monarchy (i.e. dictatorship), mediated by local elites (as is the case in Africa as well). How did they escape this seemingly-impossible corruption trap?

Dictatorship and corruption aren't synonymous. There's some trivial sense in which a dictatorship is "corrupt" because the dictator can violate laws for his own benefit, but it isn't necessarily corruption in the sense of there being whole classes of corrupt people and cultural expectations that push the government towards being corrupt.

Even more recently there's been a bunch of ex-dictatorships emerging into strong market economies without much outside influence. Most of the Asian Tigers would be closer to facist than anything else. Spain, etc.

Writing was independently invented in three or four places. None of them were in sub-Saharan Africa. After contact with the Westerners, Japan got its act together, modernized, and repulsed their attempts at colonization. It took China longer but they managed too. Africa is older than those places and has had Western contact as long, and is not doing as well. Not even close.

Writing was independently invented in three or four places. None of them were in sub-Saharan Africa.

None of them were in Western Europe either.

Western Europeans are largely descended from people in one or two of those places, however.

Europeans spread literacy quickly, Africa didn't. Also Europeans didn't invent writing, but getting separate characters for vowels and consonants, written in sequential fashion, is almost as large step as getting writing at all. E.g. Aztec phonetic writing was so bad that they preferred pictography to it.

The alphabet was invented by Phoenicians though, not by Europeans. Africans also seem to be creating plenty of new writing systems these days, at least a few of which are spreading rapidly online, so maybe whatever was holding them back on this front has been at least partially resolved.

As far as I can tell, virtually every single place on earth where they make up the majority of the population is some kind of dysfunctional shithole and it doesn't seem to matter what continent it's on, what country it's in, or how many generations of effort well-meaning white liberals have squandered trying to fix it.

What about Bahamas or Mauritius? They both have an Human Development Index comparable to Western Europe (I don't consider HDI to be the ultimate measure of quality of life, but it's a pretty good approximation nonetheless).

For historical examples, what about the Mali Empire?

Western civilization is, in the words of Gandhi, "a good idea". Even if I were to concede that Sub-Saharan Africans are little more than pitiful savages (and that's one big if!), they're still capable of copying valuable institutions created by another ethnicity and apply them to their own countries. Didn't the Western world itself took more than just notes from Arab math?

What about Bahamas or Mauritius?

I enjoy how, even for two supposed counter examples of Sub-Saharan African self-sufficient capability, the former is a tourist-dollar-rich series of islands whose “natives” have substantial European admixture (especially those who are running the show) and the latter is an African country predominantly composed of Indians, with ample whites and Southeast/East Asians having chimed in.

But maybe that’s the joke and I got semi-whooshed.

Even if I were to concede that Sub-Saharan Africans are little more than pitiful savages (and that's one big if!), they're still capable of copying valuable institutions created by another ethnicity and apply them to their own countries.

Well, no, they're not. Or they weren't, anyway; colonial infrastructure collapsed there after the colonists left.

I will refrain from creating mod drama but the comment was clearly against the spirit of the rules, which are opposed to needlessly inflammatory or grossly offensive language in the interests of civility. This was enforced even during the emotion around the BLM protests, so I think it can be enforced now.

As regards the sentiment itself it has always seemed to me to be a very poor hill for white supremacists to die on. If chihuahuas and pit bulls and border collies are the same species, surely the different phenotypes of humans are too. Commonly held animals made up of several species (like Elephants) have major physical differences, separated many millions of years ago, and cannot breed successfully (only one Asian/African elephant hybrid was ever born despite them being held together in zoos for centuries, and it died after a couple of days). Human populations can all have children together.

In any case, it has some amusing implications. If a 100 IQ population can call an 85 IQ population animals, why should a 115 IQ population consider a 100 IQ population anything but? The line being drawn just below the median for Europeans is no more or less arbitrary than the line being drawn below Asians or Jews.

This forum is much better without arguments that belong on message boards with swastikas in the sidebar next to links to buy siege from the e-commerce shop.

If chihuahuas and pit bulls and border collies are the same species, surely the different phenotypes of humans are too. Commonly held animals made up of several species (like Elephants) have major physical differences, separated many millions of years ago, and cannot breed successfully (only one Asian/African elephant hybrid was ever born despite them being held together in zoos for centuries, and it died after a couple of days). Human populations can all have children together.

This is what always bugged me about Star Trek, I understand they have this complicated lore that is basically Raelism before it was cool, but still. By the common definition, the frequency of inter-alien reproduction made it clear that all the humanoid species in the galaxy were one species. Vulcans are humans are Klingons are Romulans. Ignoring the fact that they're all just humans in various kinds of prosthetics, of course.

One thing I would like to see explored in science fiction(maybe as a collaborative project somewhere) is a hard sci-fi future where early human colonization efforts led to speciation and the different species interacting with each other in the distant future after some kind of sea change in frequency of interactions.

The GURPS Transhuman Space series may qualify. In this setting, set in year 2100, many different groups of space colonists have engaged in extensive genetic modification. There is no FTL, and the setting is limited to the Solar System.

You might enjoy All Tomorrows

This is such a thing that there is TVTropes article about it.

In any case, it has some amusing implications. If a 100 IQ population can call an 85 IQ population animals, why should a 115 IQ population consider a 100 IQ population anything but? The line being drawn just below the median for Europeans is no more or less arbitrary than the line being drawn below Asians or Jews.

I know this is meant to show how absurd the position of race supremacists is but I don't think this a good rebuttal because the ability gap to do most things in life between a 100 IQ person and 85 IQ person is much greater than between a 100 IQ person and 115 IQ person. If you were to extend the gap by 30 to 70 vs 100 vs 130 IQ it becomes even more clear. 70 IQ people essentially cannot follow directions, to the point the US military deems them a liability. A 130 IQ person might be much more brilliant than a 100 IQ person but both would be able to navigate in society just fine.

I do agree with your conclusion that the line being drawn is arbitrary for the reasons you state in the previous paragraph. It's common to take a word with meaning and implications associated with it already and then redefine it. It feels like the far-right version of changing the definition of words like racism.

A 130 IQ person might be much more brilliant than a 100 IQ person but both would be able to navigate in society just fine.

A society of 100 IQ individuals, perhaps. I see no reason why an IQ 70 individual would struggle more in a society of 100 IQ individuals than a 100 IQ individual would struggle in a society where the median IQ was 130. Of course no such societies exist, but we can imagine that the average 100 IQ individual dropped into Jane Street or the Princeton physics faculty might find it rather difficult to intellectually keep up. In neither case would it make the less intelligent party an 'animal', though, except in the sense that we all are.

The world doesn't need everyone to have a job where everyone needs a 130 IQ to function. Well, maybe the rapid onset of technology will change that but we're still not there. There's basically no job for 70 IQ people today. A 100 IQ person can still communicate information and do less intellectually rigorous tasks like documenting information, running and maintaining processes, and being able to actually follow instructions and directions. 130 IQ people can benefit from the work of 100 IQ people. 100 IQ people will not benefit from the work of 70 IQ people. 70 IQ is the literal level of mental retardation.

The world doesn't need everyone to have a job where everyone needs a 130 IQ to function.

No, because the current world is built around a 100 IQ. In a world where 130 IQ was average, systems would be built in such a way that 100 IQ people would struggle and be mostly useless/a net negative. This doesn’t necessarily mean we need to rebuild our systems around 70 IQ individuals, but it does call into question if building it around 100 is optimal. There are many ways that 70 IQs could be put to use with enough structure, though the increased structure would likely mean the 130s would be even more needlessly constrained than they already are.

I gave examples of how 130 IQ people can benefit from 100 IQ people because 100 IQ people have utility. 70IQ people have almost no economic utility.

Why don't you give some examples of these supposed systems that would exist if that median IQ matched that to current day 130 IQ people, and how 100 IQ people would be a net negative in such a system?

@2rafa at least gave an example of a 100iq person navigating Princeton or Jane Street. But in this case, the 100 IQ person can serve many functions in those places. Cooking, cleaning, plumbing, maintenance, research assistance, etc are all tasks a 100 IQ person can easily do and excel in. Yes, the 100 IQ person would never be at the top of their class, but a 100 IQ person can still learn and specialize in tasks that don't require a genius-level IQ.

The fact is the gap in the ability and capability to do tasks is not equal in both directions. You could consider IQ as a barrier of entry to be able to accomplish certain tasks. A 130 IQ can easily find a use for a 100 IQ person. A 100 IQ person working with a 70iq person sees the 70 IQ person as a liability because the 70IQ person is incapable of following directions. You can't trust a 70 IQ person to do something like run a dishwasher.

You can't seriously be saying a 130 IQ person looking at a 100 IQ person will see them just as incapable as a 100 IQ person looking at a 70 IQ person will.

@2rafa at least gave an example of a 100iq person navigating Princeton or Jane Street. But in this case, the 100 IQ person can serve many functions in those places.

in part, because almost everyone 130 IQ has good knowledge what 100 IQ can do and can not, even if they live in a high-IQ bubble they have some average IQ relatives or exposure from media. If norm is 130, then 100 become scarce and weird.

Also, maybe a poor example, do you expect any modern use of smartphone with 64 megabytes of RAM?

If everyone gets 30 IQ bump, society would change barely recognizable. There would be quickly more robots doing many tasks. Rewind a few centuries to natural economy (how do we factor in Flynn effect?), most 70 IQ people worked in agriculture.

According to Lynn, the Ivory Coast had an average of 70. I have been there several times and think that if I were to employ or have control over the employment of, say, a dozen average (not particularly elite/smart/etc) Ivorian workers I should easily be able to find jobs for them in the US.

So just a couple of thoughts I have.

There are many different methods of measuring IQ and intelligence, and IQ tests can break intelligence between crystallized and fluid. Are the people of the Ivory Coast averaging 70 IQ due to a lack of nutrition and education, or because they are genetically inferior and the 70 IQ is their genetically average potential? Or to put it another way, if we take a baby born to the average person in the Ivory Coast and raise them in a Western nation with Western nutrition and education, would they on average have 70 IQ?

Based on observations of the Flynn effect and the increase in average IQ over time for all populations, I'd say that they would likely have a much average IQ than 70 if they were raised in better conditions. In other words, I'm arguing that IQ scores between countries are not exactly the same and that a 70 IQ person from the Ivory Coast is not equivalent to a 70 IQ person in the USA. To Flynn's credit, I believe he does try to account for multi-country analysis by using the progressive Raven Matrixes version of the IQ test, which doesn't require reading, writing, or speaking, but it also means the range of intelligence being tested is limited. As highly correlated intelligence is across different types, it's not equivalent. Also, from what I recall from Flynn's work the data in Africa is quite limited and had to be extrapolated across various countries, Ivory Coast included. (Note that I am not arguing there aren't any genetical differences in average IQ, just that all the races have not had a chance to reach say their 90% potential in IQ distribution.).

IQ has much stronger predictive powers of income in the lower brackets than in the higher brackets. I find this to be strong evidence in support of my notion that IQ is a barrier to entry for being able to perform specific tasks. One Swedish study on intelligence and income finds that above 60,000 the predictive ability of intelligence drops and that the top 1% of earners score worse in cognitive ability than the bracket right below them. Once you reach an adequate amount of IQ, other factors about a person matter more.

I will concede that you could likely find a job for a 70-IQ person, but would they be able to keep that job, and would they be offered that job in lieu of a higher-IQ person? I argue most jobs have an "optimal" IQ where after a certain point having additional points of IQ would offer very little benefit. I will even go as far as to say that having a higher IQ could actually be a detriment since the job would be too simple for an extremely intelligent person and they would likely quit out of boredom and find a better job. I don't think there is a single job where 70 IQ is the optimal amount of intelligence for that job.

Hauser's Meritocracy, Cognitive Ability, and the Sources of Occupational Success" found that iq distribution of various jobs finds that only that "janitors and sextons", "construction laborers", "unpaid family workers", and "farmers and farm laborers" had at least someone with a less than 70iq in the 90th iq percentile distribution in people that work in those job categories between 1975-1977. The data from 1992-1994 shows there is not a single person in the 90th distribution of IQ that falls below 70 IQ. Most of this is explained by the Flynn effect, but as tools have become more complex it's more and more difficult for a low IQ person to be able to even do the lowest paying jobs. As I said, a 70 IQ person can not be trusted with something like a dishwasher because operating a dishwasher is actually quite a complex task compared to a task such as hammering an object in the same spot over and over. The economic output of workers in a modern nation must surpass the minimum wage, otherwise no business will hire such people except out of charity.

Gottfredson has a description of the ability of people at various IQ ranges in her paper Social Consequences of Group Differences in Cognitive Ability. There are descriptions for 2 cut off points of IQ I want to highlight - 75 IQ and 85 IQ:

IQ 75 signals the ability level below which individuals are not likely to master the elementary school curriculum or function independently in adulthood in modern societies. They are likely to be eligible for special educational services in school and for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) from the U.S. government, which is financial support provided to mentally and physically disabled adults. Of course, many do marry, hold a job, raise children, and otherwise function adequately as adults. However, their independence is precarious because they have difficulty getting and keeping jobs that pay a living wage. They are difficult to train except for the simplest tasks, so they are fortunate in industrialized nations to get any paying job at all. While only 1 out of 50 Asian-Americans faces such risk, Figure 3 shows that 1 out of 6 black-Americans does.

IQ 85 is a second important minimum threshold because the U.S. military sets its minimum enlistment standards at about this level. Although the military is often viewed as the employer of last resort, this minimum standard rules out almost half of blacks (44%) and a third of Hispanics (34%), but far fewer whites (13%) and Asians (8%). The U.S. military has twice experimented with recruiting men of IQ 80-85 (the first time on purpose and the second time by accident), but both times it found that such men could not master soldiering well enough to justify their costs. Individuals in this IQ range are not considered mentally retarded and they therefore receive no special educational or social services, but their poor learning and reasoning Social Consequences of Group Differences 29 abilities mean that they are not competitive for many jobs, if any, in the civilian economy. They live at the edge of unemployability in modern nations, and the jobs they do get are typically the least prestigious and lowest paying: for example, janitor, food service worker, hospital orderly, or parts assembler in a factory.

IQ 85 is also close to the upper boundary for Level 1 functional literacy, the lowest of five levels in the U.S. government’s 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). Adults at this literacy level are typically able to carry out only very simple tasks, such as locating the expiration date on a driver’s license or totaling a bank deposit slip, but they typically cannot perform more difficult tasks, such as locating two particular pieces of information in a sports article (Level 2), writing a brief letter explaining an error in a credit card bill (Level 3), determining correct change using information in a menu (Level 4), or determining shipping and total costs on an order form for items in a catalog (Level 5). Most routine communications with businesses and social service agencies, including job applications, are thus beyond the capabilities of persons with only Level 1 literacy. Their problem is not that they cannot read the words, but that they are not able to understand or use the ideas that the words convey.

The intellectual capability of the 70 IQ, or even 85 IQ population is made clear in these descriptions. These are significant ability barriers to entry to most jobs or functions and have a greater impact on a person than the additional gain in ability at the higher IQ tiers. To go back to my original point, a 100 iq racist arguing that an 85 iq population are 'animals' can construct a stronger argument than a 115 iq racist arguing that a 100 iq population are animals Both would be incorrect for reasons you already stated previously, but if they were trying to refine the definition of animal you get better arguments the lower the IQ goes.

We have seen IQ rise to match the jobs available, but I say that we are nearing our natural genetic potential in IQ for well-developed nations. Actually, we are seeing IQ points drop in developed nations due to the implementation of ludicrous and inane policies. Unless something like eugenics or gene editing becomes a reality I doubt the average level of intelligence will rise more than 5-10 IQ points for the developed nations.

We have no idea what a hypothetical society of a world where the average person's IQ is 130 will look like, but I still argue a 70 IQ person would struggle more in a society of 100 IQ individuals than a 100 IQ person in a world of people with 130 median IQ. There are almost no jobs for a 70 IQ person in a modern nation. Even if the hypothetical 130 iq society is able to automate away many existing job categories with robots and AI as @aardvark2 suggests, I doubt it would actually remove all all jobs where the barrier to be able to do the work requires a minimum level of IQ above 100. It's likely such a society could easily provide a luxurious peaceful life to the 100 IQ person and they wouldn't need to even work and could spend a life pursuing the arts or leisure.

Based on historical trends a lot of people would argue job availability will keep up but we actually don't know that! Historical trends don't always predict the future. @aardvark2 uses an example of a smartphone, and I'd like to point out Moore's law is no longer being met (the pace of development has slowed down). You can't assume past trends continue infinitely and there are good reasons to believe that there won't be enough new industries and jobs that are created where human labor is preferable to robot/AI labor, especially if robots and AI reach the point where it makes most current jobs obsolete.

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Look, I completely understand that you're unhappy with what @TitaniumButterfly said, and understandably so. He's been warned by @Amadan, and presuming he doesn't clean up his act, or at least say such things in a less maximally inflammatory manner, he's probably going to end up banned.

However, your own response, especially submitted as a top level comment in this thread, doesn't fly either. I'm not going to put anything on your mod record, since you're new and justifiably incensed, but at the very least, you need to put more effort into a rebuttal. Yes, I'm aware of how weird that sounds.

If you'd just stated this as a reply, I probably wouldn't have bothered to respond or put on the mod hat, but once someone has been modded for their actions, you should leave it at that and not performatively call them out to make a rhetorical point. After all, to make a very lukewarm defense of them, they went into a great deal of explaining as to why they hold the view that they do.

I'm not going to put anything on your mod record

Off-topic question. How does the "mod record" work? Do you use spreadsheets? Or does the software for this site have an admin UI for adding/browsing those things on per-user basis?

It's a drop down panel that has a list of every notable mod action, both good and bad. Warnings, bans, AAQCs, they all go in there. Per user, as you'd expect. We can add additional commentary in the free form text entry section.

Far superior to Reddit's implementation of mod tools. I suppose that's inevitable when the primary dev also owns and runs the site, and has a vested interest in his jannies not committing sudoku with our occasionally contentious userbase.

While I get official warnings on my permanent record (even though the mods didn't even say the word warning) for slightly edgy posts deep in the replies, this guy gets off scot free for this top level post. And I'm still salty about that time on the old place where I wrote a comment expecting to eat a ban, but instead the mods deleted my post.

Have you tried being newer and having your incense being on the more correct side of history?

and the lovestory of the mod team with the idea of "increasing the participation of more Darwins in the subreddit/site" continues.

Is the software general enough to be used for other communities? I'd actually like to self-host it! Is there a link to the source?

Actually, yes. It's a fork of the rdrama code base, with our own bespoke additions. Open the side panel to view the source code on git, though I don't recall the license used right now.

The code is linked in the menu at the top of the page.

The code was forked from rdrama.net iirc.

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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!


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