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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28942 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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There's a bunch of handwringing downthread about how the real problem with low TFR is dysgenics and not shrinking populations. I've got some data to push back on that: https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-money-more-babies-whats-the-relationship-between-income-fertility

The US is a meritocracy, which means that income and IQ are correlated- and we see a dysgenic fertility for native blacks(but they're shrinking as a percent of population and not that high of one to begin with) and a eugenic fertility for native whites. The latter statistic is interesting because we know that the conservative white fertility rate is higher than the liberal white fertility rate, while incomes run in reverse- which indicates either east asia tier fertility for lower middle income blue tribers or african tier fertility for wealthy red tribers(and no, from 10,000 feet red tribe and conservative/blue tribe and liberal are not different things, even if they might be in individual cases. At least not post-Trump). Hispanics look like they have a dysgenic fertility pattern, but anecdotally they do lots of tax fraud so the income statistics might be off, and also I'm guessing recency of arrival leads to a looser income/IQ correlation. Still, it might be dysgenic. Asian fertility is low but broadly eugenic.

That gives an overall picture which is actually relatively encouraging- the largest group has a eugenic fertility pattern, people that are hard to categorize have a eugenic fertility pattern, and two poor minority groups have dysgenic looking patterns, but one of them might not actually be dysgenic.

Realistically concern about dysgenics is concern about either a) the browning of America or b) the likelihood of a majority black world. And I'm not claiming either to be unconcerning, but upwards mobility still exists in Latin America. Latin America manages to filter its higher IQ individuals into roles that are necessary to the functioning of society. There is an industrial society south of the border. It's poorer, produces less innovation, and has higher crime rates, but life is OK by global standards. It sucks a lot worse for an untalented individual to live in Brazil than in the US, that's true. But it is very much not a third world country with third world problems. The browning of America is manageable, and the effect is overstated anyways because blacks(who have the lowest IQ) aren't growing as a percentage of the population.

A majority black world, on the other hand, is likely, but immigration enforcement is getting harsher and Africa is hard to get out of. This is, in other words, likely a mostly African problem- and Africa's fertility is still declining. Particularly if the breeder hypothesis(and Lyman Stone's simulation suggests it tops out at 33% of population- still enough to strongly influence societal direction) turns out to be true, the concern in 2100 will be less about enormous numbers of black migrants reaching Europe and more about the Dutch Calvinists getting enough votes to institute a theocracy. It's true that random African peasants don't contribute much to civilization but keeping them in Africa is eminently doable.

Dysgenics is an overhyped problem, just like overpopulation was in the seventies. The real problem? Pensions, tax receipts, instability in central and west african shitholes that have a surplus of young males and no ability to manage agricultural production, general population contraction.

breeder hypothesis

What is that?

The idea that as low TFR drags on, natural selection will push for people who are going to have more kids under any circumstances.

In the west, this is not actually a selection for wanting kids- it's a selection mostly for traits correlated with religiosity and ruralness. I'm not sure about East Asia, but it's probably selection for ruralness. I don't think that Japan's high-for-the-region TFR is due to the breeding hypothesis starting to kick in- I think it's relative social conservatism, same as Italy.

It sucks a lot worse for an untalented individual to live in Brazil than in the US, that's true. But it is very much not a third world country with third world problems.

They've got more murders there than in the entire rich world + China, Russia, Indonesia and North Africa: https://old.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fp1vrd7wr6dy81.jpg

Mostly these are low-lives killing eachother. But I don't want to live in a country full of murders. Even the US murder rate is too high. We should be aiming for perfection, not a bare-minimum. What about Japan or pre-2010s Sweden or Iceland?

and Africa's fertility is still declining

This is the big question, how quickly is this happening.

The MICS-2021 survey in Nigeria showed TFR falling from 5.8 to 4.6 in only five years. The 2021 USAID survey showed a drop from 6.1 to 4.8 in ten years. If the MICS trend holds, Nigeria could be below replacement fertility in only ten years.

Combine this with a hypothesised fertility rebound due to Darwinian selection, and the fertilty map 20 years from now could look very different indeed (although obviously massive amounts of fertility will already be baked in, with young populations in Africa and extremely old populations in countries like Korea).

I think you are massively over-interpreting the data.

  • There is some correlation between income and IQ (which is in turn correlated with genetics). Likely, there are different effects at play here: Rich caretakers will invest more in educating which will lead both to higher IQ and better paying jobs, but of course a lot of high-paying jobs (STEM, law, medicine, etc) also have some implicit IQ requirements.

  • There is at least some correlation to number of children between generations, parts of it purely cultural. Kids who grew up in large families are more likely to have many children themselves. On the other hand, a significant part of incomes are from inheritance. Most people living in cities spend a huge fraction of their income on rent, and most landlords did not earn their properties through the work of their hands but through inheritance. It stands to reason that a single child whose mother was 40 when she gave birth will on average inherit more money than one born to a five-kids family whose mother gave births between 20 and 35, even if either ones parents owned exactly the same amount.

  • You look at the income to fertility curve of blacks in the US and conclude that they true for blacks in Africa. If the relationship between IQ and fertility in each ethnicity was constant, then 10k years (perhaps 400 generations) ago blacks should have been very smart and whites really dumb given that today their intelligence is roughly similar. This is nonsense.

  • The source in the plot is cited as "American Community Survey". I am not sure if they are affiliated with the IRS and telling them their income is a bad idea if you are cheating on taxes. Just dismissing Hispanics because "anecdotally they do lots of tax fraud" feels epistemically bad, if you believe that tax fraud is significantly affecting the data, then your data is useless, unless you have statistics showing that 99% of the Hispanics cheat on taxes and only 1% of the non-Hispanics.

  • I disagree with your value-loaded adjectives 'dysgenic' and 'eugenic'. All things being equal, a person with a higher IQ is probably more beneficial to society than one with lower IQ in most scenarios. But what you are actually measuring is parental income, which is somewhat correlated to IQ, which then has a strong genetic component. As you use these adjectives, the implications are that a successful drug dealer reproducing is good while a person working an unglamorous job (such as a truck driver) is bad.

As this is the CW thread, we should also discuss how Dobbs will affect this curve. My prediction is that it will mainly increase the fertility of the lower income population. We are selecting not only for parents who were not able to use birth control successfully, but also for people who lack the resources or executive function to travel to another state to terminate their pregnancy. If the IQ 135 math student gets pregnant by accident (not terribly likely, imho), her professor parents will pay for a trip to another state. If the IQ 90 high school dropout raised by a single mom with a substance problem, who discovered sex and booze when she was 14 finally gets pregnant (a more likely scenario), she might not have the financial and executive resources to go on a trip to a blue state.

Tangentially related, but I have helped Asian immigrants with their businesses and there was definitely tax fraud. Chinese women dividing stacks of cash and accounting software that tracks credit card purchases.

Once I went to a newly opened Chinese restraunt (a real Chinese restaurant meant for Chinese people, not that gross American "Chinese" food.). They gave a nearly 10% discount for paying cash. They wrote down two numbers on the bill. Saving on credit card fees and illegally undereporting income.

Not directly responding to your point, but it really feels like 2024 is the year that concern about birth rates and pronatalism broke into the mainstream. Looking at Google trends, it looks like news searches for 'birth rate' have increased pretty massively in the past ten years. Web searches for pronatalism have also increased a lot in the last two years.

Is it simply that birth rates have finally dropped so much that more governments are taking notice (outside of Eastern Europe and East Asia)? Is it that future-thinking intellectuals picked it up and the rest of the world is following? Did these guys make it happen?

Maybe fertility doomerism will become the right-wing version of left-wing climate doomerism?

I think this is a case of a very niche interest becoming slightly less niche, but still staying very niche. The vast majority of people do not care in the least bit about the fertility rates of societies.

These surveys suggest that this is changing. I think you're right that it's still pretty low, but the Google Trends links I posted do suggest that awareness is growing, and we can only expect that to increase as birth rates continue to decline and governments become even more panicked.

I think it's pretty simple, back somewhere in the 70-00s we profited from a short-term demographic dividend as we could forego spending on children, which we could invest in other things (in practice mostly hedonistic endeavours). Now we're starting to see the long-term effects, which is a never-before seen crunch on retirement. As somebody else put it, "now that it's time to reap, I wish I had sown more".

How much of that is reproduction rates and how much of that is the combination of the elderly living longer than ever before + costing significantly more than ever before.

Have life expectancies really improved much, if at all, since 2000? I see headlines suggesting that they've actually regressed in the US fairly often, largely due to obesity more than countering anti-smoking efforts and such.

Medical expenditure on squeezing out those last few years far greater than the cost of just being elderly, though. Not only is the person not being productive, suddenly they've got a raft of major intervention surgeries and therapies.

Have life expectancies really improved much, if at all, since 2000?

A little, not much. From 2000–2019 there was a slight increase from 76.7 to 79.1. (Note: more recent data is still screwed up because of bad Covid-19 assumptions).

https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

I think that lower smoking rates have played a big part in the increase. If so, health care costs would have increased as well, since lung cancer kills people relatively cheaply compared to, say, Alzheimers.

Prediction: Life expectancy will increase considerably in the next 10 years due to GLP-1 drugs.

To your basic question of "why specifically this year", the answer is probably "Elon Musk bought Twitter and this is one of the fruits". Prior to that, this was a banned opinion in mainstream venues, so of course the mainstream didn't hear it much.

The concern over dysgenic spiral isn't the within-group correlation between income and TFR, it's the two things you mentioned: replacement migration and higher TFR of foreign groups in Europe and the United States, and the African population bomb.

Realistically concern about dysgenics is concern about either a) the browning of America or b) the likelihood of a majority black world. And I'm not claiming either to be unconcerning, but upwards mobility still exists in Latin America. Latin America manages to filter its higher IQ individuals into roles that are necessary to the functioning of society.

The problem isn't having a lack of people with an IQ to fill the seat of a middling bureaucrat, or having a high-enough pool of IQ to keep the lights on, it's recognition that the tail ends are sensitive to small shifts in the mean. The high quality leaders, innovators, geniuses, and heroes who have directed Civilization will simply not exist any longer with modest changes in the population-average of these traits. And we will see large growth of the problematic elements on the lowest end of the distribution which, causes decay as well.

Dysgenics is an overhyped problem, just like overpopulation was in the seventies. The real problem? Pensions, tax receipts, instability in central and west african shitholes that have a surplus of young males and no ability to manage agricultural production, general population contraction.

It is exactly the reverse. Dysgenics is an underhyped problem because recognition of HBD is a dependency for assessing the threat. The vast majority of scholars, politicians, and policy-makers don't accept HBD so they have nothing to fear, inherently, from demographic change. Let's say, hypothetically, 100% European admixture no longer exists, and everyone on the continent has a minimum 25% ME and 25% African admixture. You can't recover from that. It's gone forever, and human history is full of many many such cases. You can recover from a tax shortfall.

You might say "that will never happen." But look at how fast demographic change happened in the US, and how you are actually a political pariah if you oppose it! You can't take for granted that Europe will have the resolve to resist migration from the African population bomb, or to even slow down present demographic change of Arab Muslims throughout Europe.

The problem isn't having a lack of people with an IQ to fill the seat of a middling bureaucrat, or having a high-enough pool of IQ to keep the lights on, it's recognition that the tail ends are sensitive to small shifts in the mean. The high quality leaders, innovators, geniuses, and heroes who have directed Civilization will simply not exist any longer with modest changes in the population-average of these traits. And we will see large growth of the problematic elements on the lowest end of the distribution which, causes decay as well.

Replying a second time because it's a totally separate topic.

Assortive mating solves this. Or, more specifically, the US has a repository of high IQ Jews with an ultra high fertility rate. It's likely there are more IQ 160 people in Kiryas Joel than in most African countries.

Assuming that some percentage of these Hassidim secularize each generation, we'll have a reliable supply of new Einsteins.

Of course, this has its own peculiarities. But I have a feeling that other high IQ clusters exist in a less dramatic fashion.

99.9% of the population is a nearly identical mixture of African, European, Middle Eastern, and Hispanic and you have 0.001% population of 100% Hassidim that forms the ruling elite. Sounds like hell on earth.

Cool. What should we do about it? You seem to have lots of complaints but few solutions.

Prevent demographic change, promote eugenic mate selection. Deportations, endogamy... There are levers. Those things are going to require some non-conservative ideology that motivates people deeply. That's what Religion does.

What is that ideology/Religion? I don't know, it doesn't exist yet, but it needs to inspire people to do those things. It's not Christianity. It's not Conservatism.

Completely uninvited, I will offer my theory of everything.

What is good: Direct relationships between people

What is bad: Relationships between people and the state, or mediated by the state

With stronger family and community relations, eugenic mate selection will happen on its own. In terms of a direct policy prescription.. school vouchers seem like a good start. And since we can't cut spending, we need to "starve the beast" via tax cuts whenever possible.

That would be the ultimate plot twist, if the thing that ended up saving the white race was.... small gubment and tax cuts. But like I said, conservatives do not have the solution.

Ashkenazi high IQ genetic stock will continue to exist thanks to ultra-orthodoxy, but the ultra orthodox ain’t gonna be keeping the lights on. They don’t teach their children how to speak English, let alone algebra or any of the million things needed to be competitive in the us economy.

Oh definitely. But what percent of them leak out to the normal community eventually? I don't know that answer, but I think it matters.

An ultra-orthodox apostate is not ready for college, he’s probably not ready for a trade either. He lacks the skills needed to take care of himself in a modern economy and will probably be a charity case until he dies alone.

Haven't you seen Tarzan? You can learn that other stuff quickly as long as you have the genetic substrate.

Really, the more important point is that IQ is not the only cognitive trait that matters. Civilizational achievement of various empires: Rome, Greece, Persia, the British Empire, the American Empire, and so on was a function of much more than the IQ of the ruling elite, but on other qualities which are equally or more important when all taken together. The common ancestry of the Founders of all those Empires points towards a civilizational-bearing cognitive composition that goes beyond IQ alone. In practice, think something like the innate desire of many Europeans to leave their modern, metropolitan cities to settle the American frontier. That quality is not driven by IQ alone.

It also raises the stakes of dysgenic spiral when you accept that IQ is not the only cognitive trait that matters here.

The ultra-orthodox may have the IQ, but do they have the other qualities which would lead towards the thriving of civilization if they were in charge? I certainly don't think so, with Israel being absolute proof of that.

The ultra orthodox are just stuck in a failure mode for civilization. It’s a rare (although I’m not sure if it’s unique) failure mode relative to the usual kind, but it is a failure nonetheless. I’m reminded of our discussion a few months ago on how awful South Korean society seems from the inside, an endless awful, grinding rat race where children are forced to study into the night for endless tests, parents pour all their resources into a single child etc even though all of this is completely unnecessary for the functioning of a country of smart, relatively wealthy people. But they can’t get out of it, seemingly, by themselves.

Similarly, the deep and enduring ugliness and squalor of Chareidi society is impossible to ignore. The ugly, colorless clothes. The lack of concern for architecture, for style, and for art. The adherence to the (secular) styles of dress and music that just happened to exist in Poland 150 years ago for no real reason other than inertia and a lack of care to change. The rejection of material comfort and prosperity, of science. The refusal to fight for their own people and homeland. The parasitic tendency to do whatever it takes to minimize the amount of productive labor done so that they can maximize the amount of pointless, regurgitated religious commentary produced while they wait endlessly for the messiah to come.

The Amish, at least, have a certain (sometimes overstated) folksy, pastoral charm. Squint and - divorced from the fact that they ultimately rely on the world’s most powerful and advanced nation to defend them - they live well, or at least fine. The Chareidim do not. Whatever happens in the current conflict, Israel will either forcibly secularize them or it is doomed, likely the latter. Fecundity aside, they have dug themselves into an aesthetic pit they can’t get out of. If Jewish civilization has any hope of further greatness, and I hope that it does, it must deal with them in the harshest way.

it must deal with them in the harshest way.

Israel is going to be country #110 isn't it.

Expulsion wouldn’t work (they have nowhere to go) and would be unnecessary. The ultra-orthodox just need to be forcibly secularized, which is likely possible (mandating IDF service for all young men and women at gunpoint, closing all kollels, ending all welfare, banning Yiddish in schools, forcibly enrolling them in secular education, killing or imprisoning their leaders if and when they try to rebel, banning their style of dress). It would be spicy, but it’s technically possible, not that it will happen (sadly).

The Amish do fine when the government doesn’t protect them- there are flourishing Amish communities in cartel controlled Mexico. They have to pay taxes to the cartels, sure, but it turns out the things they produce are easy to sell and very fungible, and the cartels literally recruit Mexican soldiers by promising better rations so they can use agricultural products to begin with.

‘Farmer’ is a job that’s literally never going away. Subsistence farming communities aren’t dependent on an industrial civilization having an inexplicable soft spot for them- everyone needs food, and very few people particularly want to grow it themselves because it’s a lot of hard work. They can trade for outside inputs in any conceivable threat environment pretty easily because, again, there is no one on earth who doesn’t need what they produce.

Their society can’t make microchips, but the things they do make are infinitely fungible so it doesn’t matter. If they for whatever reason need microchips the people who do make them need what the Amish have to sell.

‘Farmer’ is a job that’s literally never going away. Subsistence farming communities aren’t dependent on an industrial civilization having an inexplicable soft spot for them

It's already reduced by about 50x, and I'd claim that subsistence farming isn't really feasible in much of North America, or won't be soon, because of high land taxes on all the good farmland.

there is no one on earth who doesn’t need what they produce.

If I were a cartel, I'd rather have at least semi-industrialized farmers on my land than subsistence farmers. "Subsistence" means you don't produce much more than you need to subsist, which means you can't produce much taxes for the local cartel / government.

I don't know why you think this is an either/or, though - there are other insular Amish-like groups with high fertility that are also fully modern when it comes to production, e.g. the Hutterites and Mennonites.

I don’t think you know a lot about Kiryas Joel. First, they are not actual members of your country. They are their own nation. They barely pay taxes. They do not share their wealth with outsiders. Nothing positive that happens to them translates into something positive to you. Kiryas Joel was nominally the poorest town in America because of their tax schemes, they were given a state funded fertility clinic, but had the highest fertility. In cities in the US they don’t even use the state emergency* services but have their own. When they gain power in your town they cut all education spending and take over councils with block votes. You will never be able to join them if you are not Jewish. You are essentially writing, “I feel safe about America because of a totally alien and sovereign nation within its borders whose numbers are increasing at an extreme rate”. You might as well request China to conquer you as that would be better for your interests.

But you’re also confusing Haredi with Europe’s pedigreed assimilated Jewish families. Haredi IQ in America has never been studied. The Haredi do not have a fertility rate that highly favors their rabbis like the historically high class rabbinical families of Europe where a Rabbi may be selected based off meritocracy and have the highest fertility. Instead, all Haredi have a lot of children, including the dysgenic ones.

“I am going to sell out my entire people for an alien group 100% against my interests because of a non-evidenced belief that they may make Einsteins” is not persuasive. We have India and China for recruiting new Einsteins anyway, and they will actually assimilate instead of literally 2000 years of hating assimilation.

But you’re also confusing Haredi with Europe’s pedigreed assimilated Jewish families. Haredi IQ in America has never been studied. The Haredi do not have a fertility rate that highly favors their rabbis like the historically high class rabbinical families of Europe where a Rabbi may be selected based off meritocracy and have the highest fertility. Instead, all Haredi have a lot of children, including the dysgenic ones.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the people living in KJ have the same genetic stock as a typical Ashkenazi Jew and would (it stands to reason) have a similarly high IQ. The selection process which led to this result was in the past.

I never claimed that places like KJ are continuing to select for high IQ people. But neither are they selecting for low IQ people. The overall genetic potential within the community stays constant.

"I am going to sell out my entire people for an alien group 100% against my interests because of a non-evidenced belief that they may make Einsteins” is not persuasive.

This is extra low charity. I mentioned KJ as a counter to the idea that the whole population will become so genetically mixed that high IQ outliers can't exist. Clearly this isn't true. Even ignoring isolated religious communities, smart people marry other smart people and have smart children.

I’m pretty sure Hasidim began as a folk religion among the poorer rural Eastern European Jews. It was detested by the leading educated Rabbis. I don’t think it is correct to say that they are the same genetic stock of a typical Ashkenazi Jew. Assimilated Ashkenazi Jews came from intelligent rabbinical-finance families, whereas many of the starting Hasidic families were the poorest and least educated Jews.

smart people marry other smart people and have smart children

Maybe 80% of the time, which means every generation they will be 20% worse off

Maybe 80% of the time, which means every generation they will be 20% worse off

I don't think so. Sometimes, by random chance people are smarter than both parents. These people will tend to marry other outliers and concentrate that intelligence. The forces of assortive mating are much stronger than in the past, given that so many highly intelligent people move from all over the world to work at US universities and tech companies.

Over time, I'd expect the number of extremely high IQ people to increase even as the overall IQ decreases.

I’m pretty sure Hasidim began as a folk religion among the poorer rural Eastern European Jews. It was detested by the leading educated Rabbis. I don’t think it is correct to say that they are the same genetic stock of a typical Ashkenazi Jew.

That depends on the founding stock. Many of the smartest and most successful American secularized Jews of the early-late 20th century were of poor shtetl stock rather than bourgeois Western (eg German) Ashkenazi stock. The insane IQ stats found amongst Jewish kids in Brooklyn schools a century ago were likewise largely capturing Ostjuden rather than more-established Yekkes.

In addition, the founding population of modern Chareidim weren’t necessarily rural peasants, they were often communities that surrounded the few yeshivot whose members survived the war, including the extended families of the leading rabbis, many in the Baltics. They weren’t representative of the most common rural Jewish inhabitants of the pale of settlement.

More testing is needed, I agree, to be sure about the quality of Chareidim. But I’d say the evidence suggests their modern founding population (especially given it was highly selected for the few smart enough to escape the war in time) was probably on par with Ashkenazim in general at that time. Even if the extreme selection that produced the high IQ average then stopped (because as you say they all have 8 kids now), that would not necessarily lead to a strong decline in intellectual performance in the medium term, only maintenance.

In commodities, particularly the wackier side of mining, there are quite a few interesting ultra-orthodox businessmen (perhaps due to longstanding involvement with gemstones etc). Some of their stories are insane, essentially uneducated (formally, at least in the secular sense) men raising a small sums of money from within the community and making some very smart bets that pan out very well, bets hedge funds staffed by great traders and PMs with smart analysts with PhDs in mining engineering or whatever for speculative analysis of exploratory sites would love to make.

I therefore suspect they are indeed very smart, especially when considering that these guys are typically the failed students who get told to spend less time on Talmudic commentary because their analysis isn’t as good as the next guy’s. That they choose to waste their best resources on what is essentially Bible study is, of course, a grander tragedy.

Does anyone have a link to something explaining how communities like Kiryas Joel and various Amish / Mennonite towns exist in a legal sense?

It seems to me that they would be in constant violation of eveything from the mundane - say, fire code in buildings - to the serious - unreported child abuse etc.

They control the towns they’re in, local government has a lot of power in the US, and statehouses are extremely easily corrupted given most politicians are small-time local people who are never subject to much scrutiny.

If I call a county Sheriff to a home in Kryas Joel, do they have the same authorities they would elsewhere? Can they arrest people, can they enter premises with probably cause / warrant etc?

If the answer is, "Yes", then my assumption would be this doesn't happen much because of the immense social pressure in these communities to not call the police. Would that be accurate?

For sure, I think it’s a perennial feature of all highly insular religious communities that they’re suspicious of police and that they tell children from an extremely young age never to involve secular authorities. Even if they knew how, doing so would destroy their entire lives; they don’t even speak English as a first language, they would find it hard to exist in the secular world.

The FLDS is definitely subject to secular jurisdiction and has had specific laws passed in states they live in to make it easier for law enforcement to obtain probable cause on them. Still doesn’t work because of internal cohesion to not involve the police.

If I call a county Sheriff to a home in Kryas Joel, do they have the same authorities they would elsewhere? Can they arrest people, can they enter premises with probably cause / warrant etc?

Yes, Kryas Joel is not literally an autonomous state immune to US law. Just like the FLDS and Amish communities are not exempt from US laws. In practice, local law enforcement prefers to leave them alone and avoid political shitstorms unless they absolutely have to step in.

They are in violation of these things and you could write several pages of all their infractions. Everything from declaring a personal dwelling a religious building (a Chabad rabbi does this in my own town and probably your town if you live in NJ, check the property records), to violating agreements on utilities, to simply not teaching English in schools. In Kiryas Joel (“low income”) they have their own private security that will illegally attempt to stop you if you walk through their town as a woman without the proper attire… welfare schemes involving Haredi usually result in sweetheart deals with no jail time…

there’s not really an explanation beyond “Haredi block vote and block-lobby and use all of their money to ensure the illegal flourishing of their group”

A google search on the FLDS would inform you that doing this is a more general habit of cults, and getting away with it is more a matter of general internal cohesion than block voting.

Of course, I don’t disagree. But FLDS is 6k unsophisticated people in the middle of nowhere, and the Hasidic community in Jersey/NY is perhaps ~250k quite sophisticated people who have ties of advocacy to a larger community of fellow travelers. I just looked it up and I see I have been misusing the term “block vote” (I wonder if it morphed into a different colloquial meaning around here) but the Hasidic leaders effectively tell their members who to vote for.

The FLDS basically gets away with it- with even other Mormon polygamist groups advocating against them. Geographic distance is probably part of it but it’s also just hard to police groups that don’t want to be.

but the Hasidic leaders effectively tell their members who to vote for.

This Is Not Uncommon

The Amish are actually exempted from quite a few laws in the parts of Pennsylvania they're in. The Haredi generally take over the government of the towns they dominate; it's good to be the king mayor.

Being exempted from laws because of an adherence to a particular faith seems to be exactly what the constitution wanted to prevent.

I'm not trying to be combative here. I just think it's wild that the US essentially tolerates a few mini-cults within our own borders because ... quilts?

Being exempted from laws because of an adherence to a particular faith seems to be exactly what the constitution wanted to prevent.

You agree with Justice Scalia circa 1990 on this, but it's a nuanced issue that has been going the other way in recent years.

Yes, actually? The First Amendment is often seen to cut both ways: it prevents the establishment of religion, but also prohibits enforcing secularism on the public.

It was broadly seen to include religious exemptions to generally applicable laws until Employment Division v. Smith in 1990, at which point Congress passed the RFRA near-unanimously, saying "actually, we meant to apply strict scrutiny to laws burdening the practice of religion". At its core, allowing Native Americans to use peyote for their religion, or the Amish to opt out of Social Security (some groups even object to the assignment of SSNs to people!), or Sikh soldiers to grow beards.

In practice, some of the Internet atheism crowd chafe at Christians taking advantage of the RFRA, but I'd say it's general use cases are fairly popular. But it also swings close to self-contradiction in legal arguments, like Trinity Lutheran: the state can't prevent churches from applying to generally available playground improvement funding.

Basically there's tension between the Free Exercise clause, the Establishment clause, and the all-encompassing state. When a general law steps all over a religious practice, it's hard to decide whether exempting the religion violates Establishment, or not exempting them violates Free Exercise.

The concern over dysgenic spiral isn't the within-group correlation between income and TFR, it's the two things you mentioned: replacement migration and higher TFR of foreign groups in Europe and the United States, and the African population bomb.

Yep. Even if the evolution within each group is eugenic, the overall effect is dysgenic. This is Simpson's Paradox in a nutshell.

At the risk of gatekeeping, this should be table stakes in this forum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

Your graph shows that non-Hispanic whites don’t have replacement level fertility until the 99th percentile. Meanwhile we are bringing into the country millions of random immigrants, illegal and illegal. This is an apocalyptic case of dysgenics. The dysgenics Black / immigrants will also affect the whites over generations into the future through interbreeding.

The browning of America is manageable

What is manageable? Your grand grandchild will have a very high chance of marrying a “dysgenic” Central American due to the numbers. It is manageable in the sense that you will still be alive but in a less competitive country irrelevant on the world stage?

immigration enforcement is getting harsher

Not sufficiently so, and neither is white racism sufficiently high that you can rest assured that your future ancestors will not be dysgenic. Who did Jeb Bush marry? Your future great grandsons will have the Faustian dilemma of thick latinas or high IQs, to be sure.

Your graph shows that non-Hispanic whites don’t have replacement level fertility until the 99th percentile.

which might be still dysgenic, as difference between 99th income percentile and 98th percentile might be luck and not IQ (or whatever we are concerned about).

Even assuming that today's inhabitants of the Global South are "dysgenic", how certain are we that, a hundred years hence, their descendants will be?

If the poor outcomes among certain ethnic groups are caused by genetic factors, we will soon be able to identify, repair, and possibly improve them beyond what has appeared naturally.

Concerns about "dysgenics" could be regarded by the people of the 26th century as we now look at the predictions of Malthus, or the horse-manure crisis!

You think Jeb Bush's marriage is dysgenic?

Jeb is the son of an elite American political dynasty. His wife is the daughter of a rural Mexican migrant worker he met doing charity work at 17. This is dysgenic if you care about intelligence and eugenic if you favor cute latinas.

She might be an exception to the averages. It makes no sense to be convinced that the marriage is dysgenic from an intelligence point of view unless you know something about what her individual intelligence is actually like.

Don't bring a knife facts to a gunfight race war! I'm joking about that @coffee_enjoyer, but I see no evidence of JEB! being particularly bright. I'm reading his bio here and it seems like a life of tryhard failing up. The man almost got expelled at the finishing school Andover (repeating 9th grade!) due to bad grades. I did summer soccer camps and stayed in the dorms with Andover kids, not a hard school to stay in... parents tend to send their less exceptional kids there to polish them up a bit, or to get better at a sport with a super senior year and not waste their eligibility years.

Meanwhile Columba Bush managed to marry into one of the most powerful families in the world while coming from basically nothing, has managed to avoid the pitfalls that can come with that, and now has three children that seem smarter than JEB! Who is the dysgenic one here?

Not only that, but she managed to do it without the aid of being really good-looking. She wasn't some kind of gorgeous beauty when younger, she was a completely unremarkable-looking woman.

It’s possible that the rural Mexican woman that Jeb met as a 17yo is actually a genius. It’s incredibly unlikely, given the information we know about her and the fact that Jeb selected her from a low number of women in the exact town he was performing charity work in. We can make reasonable assumptions here. As /u/AhhhTheFrench fails to point out, Jeb was honor roll at a prestigious high school, magna cum laude at Yale, then became enormously wealthy as partner of a top real estate firm. His wife’s bio details are just the basic “wife of politician” charity stuff.

Is Mitch McConnell's marriage eugenic because he married an east Asian? Assuming they had chosen to have children.

Is the ultimate hypothetical eugenic melange a mix of the smarter sort of whites, east Asians and Jews?

Ultimate eugenic 'melange' is finding the very best genomes and mating these together. It'd probably be a mix of all these, yes.

McConnell did not find his wife in the backwaters of rural China. They met when she was working a high-level government position. Her father founded a shipping company and she received a degree from Harvard. If anything their relationship might be dysgenic for her. It is not simply that Jeb’s wife is Mexican that makes it dysgenic (after all, plenty of top tier Mexicans), but where in Mexico he located her and how. There was zero selection going on for intelligence and so we can reasonably assume a dysgenic effect (like, if these pairings occurred 100 times, for sure it would be dysgenic on the whole, though there could be a few times where it is non-dysgenic out of chance). The implicit point is that we receive millions upon millions of latin Americans just like Jeb’s wife who will be marrying higher quality Americans and eventually alter the gene pool. You need to be extremely racist and/or track family trees to prevent a deleterious IQ effect as an American, and a lot of Americans will simply select for perceived attractiveness over IQ.

Is the ultimate hypothetical eugenic melange a mix of the smarter sort of whites, east Asians and Jews?

Unquestionably, yes.

Why only factor in IQ? Given that things like moral preferences, health, and a good portion of culture come from genetics as well, doesn’t an IQ-maxing breeding strategy destroy those other three things?

Who said I’m only optimizing for IQ? I think that a genetic intermingling of gentile Europeans, Ashkenazi Jews, and East Asians would maximize the good qualities of all three groups, while dulling some of the problematic extremes of each.

I believe that all three groups have something obvious to be gained by combination with one or more of the other groups. You get Ashkenazi verbal dexterity and high factor of personality, and lose the neuroticism and the propensity for balding and vision problems. You get European creativity and earnestness, and lose the extreme individualism and pig-headedness. You get Asian diligence and orderliness, and lose the extreme conformity and dishonesty.

White red tribe TFR is roughly stable at replacement; that’s a 98 IQ population not going anywhere. Conversely the Hispanic population tends to see declining fertility with time in country.

Whites will decline as a percentage of population, but not by that much.

Very true, but to counter the black pill I will point out it is absolutely possible for even a small minority to retain and improve itself and be relevant on the world stage. But it requires an actual ideology or religion to orchestrate the behavior. Maybe 90% of whites go down the Jeb Bush genetic route over the next several generations. But if 10% don't, because their behavior is coordinated by a unifying ideology or identity, then that is all that would be needed to avoid the Bad Ending.

That's to say- the situation is dire but we are still at an extremely high altitude before impact. There is plenty of time to figure things out but they have to be figured out ASAP.

illegal and illegal

I don't know why but that typo cracks me up. I'm imagining a buddy comedy about a Mexican who gets caught up in the weird intricacies of the American immigration system and his childhood friend who just walked in without a care in the world.

Was the situation markedly better during the military dictatorship?

What's the pecking order among subfields of (pure) mathematics? Is algebraic geometry more prestigious than geometric algebra? What about geometric topology vis-a-vis topological geometry? Do group theorists look down upon ring theorists? Are number theorists generally considered the smartest? What about combinatorists? Is set theory and/or foundations of mathematics low status?

I guess this isn't "culture war" per se but more "sociology of mathematics", but it seems to belong here.

Algebraic geometry and most of number theory on top. Graph theory and most of combinatorics toward the bottom (I am here). The basis is largely the minimum difficulty of producing independent, original work.

Getting spoonfed or rubber-stamped in a high status area, like Piper Harron, does not confer high status.

Every Sunday there's a Small Questions thread that serves as an ideal home for these types of posts. But the range of topics allowed in the Culture War thread is very broad, and there are some interesting culture war implications in how academia treats "pure" and "applied" fields, so the post is fine here.

Generally I'd say that more abstract sub-fields are held in higher esteem (especially "abstract" in the sense of "fundamental", as in the results have wide-reaching implications in multiple areas of mathematics), in accordance with the general esteem that pure math itself is given over applied math. But this has its limits. Even some pure mathematicians balk at things like category theory, or the study of large cardinals, as "abstract nonsense". I think you're right that there is a certain mistrust of the foundations of mathematics - anything that carries the stench of philosophy is ipso facto suspicious. So it really depends on who you ask.

Even some pure mathematicians balk at things like category theory

The fact that it has more practical uses than a lot of other abstract mathematics is one of the endless ironies of the discipline.

It always seems to be that more applied mathematics generates new methods that advance abstract problems whilst abstract mathematics generates new frameworks that can solve new classes of practical problems.

There is also the funny phenomenon that plenty of academics don't have to interact with each other at all, so they can all independently look down down on all other fields and hold their own up as superior.

One observes this in a number of more practical fields, too.

I don’t know what the imaginary industrial engineers say about the rest of us!

Netanyahu not doing enough to free Gaza hostages, says Biden

Joe Biden has said Benjamin Netanyahu is not doing enough to secure a hostage deal and ceasefire with Hamas, amid reports suggesting a new proposal would be sent to the Israeli prime minister as "final".

The US president and Kamala Harris, his vice-president, met negotiators in the Situation Room to hammer out a proposal, as protests engulfed Israel on Monday over the weekend deaths of six hostages in Gaza. Asked whether Mr Netanyahu was doing enough, Mr Biden replied "no". He added that the US would not give up, and would "push as hard as we can" for a deal. US officials have categorised this latest proposal as a "take it or leave it deal", the Washington Post reported.

Meanwhile there's a massive strike in Israel today which the PM has called a disgraceful show of support for Hamas. This is all in response to the recovery of six dead hostages which were shot, presumably before they could be rescued. Although this is indicative of Hamas's weakness in some sense, it has greatly exacerbated criticism of Netanyahu that he is prioritizing political survival over the lives of hostages. Although the US has generally pointed the finger at Hamas for the failure of previous ceasefire talks, it is clear that frustration with Israeli intransigence is beginning to boil over, with the US threatening to just go home and let Israel continue miring itself in a war that is creating further political division (is it okay to rape prisoners?), damaging their economy, and causing Western countries to rethink their support.

I think that the hostages are basically a distraction, geopolitically.

I am willing to cut the IDF some slack for hostage saving operations, if 50 civilian Palestinians and 30 Hamas die in an operation that ends up rescuing a few hostages, I will not cry foul at them for valuing the lives of their own citizens higher than that of the civilians of a territory whose government are murderous bandits. Much more slack than for accepting collateral damage for other goals such as offing yet another Hamas lieutenant. Other than that, the hostages should not make a difference.

In the meta-game, the winning response to hostage-taking is to ignore the kidnappers demands. If you roll over whenever someone takes your citizens hostage, expect to be doing a lot of rolling over.

The problem with Nethanyahu's war is that is is not actually winning. Defeating Hamas would (at least) require occupying Gaza, and the IDF seems unable to do that. Just striking here and there until all of Gaza is living in some refugee camps will not get rid of Hamas (killing half of their bandits will not accomplish anything on a decade scale), and seems like a waste of human lives.

I think Biden (or his minders) does not care too much about lives of the remaining hostages either, and mostly uses this as political leverage on Bibi.

Gaza really deserves the Germany-45 treatment (occupation and the stamping out of their government), but if nobody is willing and able to do that and if we have to suffer Hamas to live either way, then it seems strictly better to cut a deal with them where both sides refrain from bombing each other rather than fighting a war whose objective will never be fulfilled. Bringing the hostages home would make it seem less like the defeat it actually is.

better to cut a deal with them where both sides refrain from bombing each other rather than fighting a war whose objective will never be fulfilled

That was pretty much the situation before the war. Israel was starting to let Gazans cross the border to work, there were a few rocket attacks which engendered similarly small responses from Israel, but mostly things were peaceful...

Then Hamas stormed across the border, taking hostages and killing everyone they didn't take. With the woefully optimistic plan that this attack would set off a country wide pogrom and rid the Holy Land of Jews forever.

Why would Hamas agree to return to the status quo that they chose to violate? Because Gazan civilians are dying? Hamas wants Gazan civilians to die, because it legitimises their position and delegitimises Israel.

Gaza is essentially a giant open air prison that is banned form exporting and has severely limited imports. It isn't sustainable for them to have the pre October 7 arrangement. Long term the only future for Gaza is to get a much better deal. Forcing Israel to fight a permanent insurgency is a viable strategy because Israel is going to be stuck in an unsustainable situation. Israel can't be in a constant state of crisis and war.

Gaza is essentially a giant open air prison that is banned form exporting and has severely limited imports.

Quality of life in the Palestinian territories in general pre-war was not substantially below that of other (non-petrostate) Arab nations and communities.

Quality of life in the Palestinian territories in general pre-war was not substantially below that of other (non-petrostate) Arab nations and communities.

In Egypt people aren't stuck in a tiny area that is under blockade. They didn't have hundreds of their country men killed by an enemy government in the past year and they didn't have thousands being held hostage by Israel.

POWs or terrorist being held captive is not the same thing as “held hostage.” Also wonder why IDF killed hundreds of Palestinians but not Egyptians

Daily reminder that Israel unilaterally pulled out of Gaza twenty years ago and were rewarded with redoubled attacks, after which they instituted the blockade.

Wasn't there a pretty big Gaza/west bank difference there, or am I misremembering?

You have it fundamentally backwards. Israel not only already substantially opened up shortly before Oct 7, but they also hoped to open up further and Hamas put an end to it since it was against their interest. Palestinians working in Israel and normalising relationships is in Israel's interest, since it makes Hamas' obsolete and removes their biggest thorn in the side. Or at the very least they would like to just leave the Gaza strip alone, but that was unsustainable since it gave Hamas' easier access to weapons. Endless death and war on the other hand is in the Hamas' interest, since it lets them generate western and arab support and keeps them in power.

You have it fundamentally backwards. Israel not only already substantially opened up shortly before Oct 7,

Israel was expanding the occupied terrirories on the west bank, had killed hundreds of Palestinians during 2023 and had thousands of Palestinian hostages. They were conducting a blockade against Gaza.

Endless death and war on the other hand is in the Hamas' interest, since it lets them generate western and arab support and keeps them in power.

It isn't endless. Algeria was French for a century, now it isn't. Rhodesia was British for a century, now it isn't. They are turning Israel into the next Vietnam and making Israel fundamentally unsustainable. The US left most of Iraq and all of Afghanistan because it simply wasn't going to end. Israel minus Palestinians and ultra orthodox is about 1/60th of the US but trying to occupy a quarter as many people as the US tried to occupy with the help of Britain and several other countries in 2003.

You see how calling convicted terrorists "hostages" makes people suspicious of your point of view right? Why are we conflating the West Bank and Gaza? They will never be one nation again unless they ethnically cleanse Israel off the map. Of course there were trade controls in Gaza, it is, I don't know how many times it must be stated, run by a terrorist organization whos interest is killing Jews and using its own citizens as human shields to try and get American and European Leftists sad.

You see how calling convicted terrorists "hostages" makes people suspicious of your point of view right?

Palestinians have every right to engage in armed resistance. Israel is taking more than combatants prisoner and not providing trials.

Why aren't there trade controls on Israel then? They are bombing and occupying Israel? Fundamentally what the region needs is a situation in which Palestinians are in control of the situation and have a stable arrangement that they are satisfied with. The needs of the Israelis can't take higher priority than those that represent the bigger population. Security in the arab world is needed both for them but also since it benefits Europe. The interests of an insignificant tiny state with no natural resources has to be way down the priority list.

Palestinians have every right to engage in armed resistance. Israel is taking more than combatants prisoner and not providing trials.

Well if its an armed resistance then they are POWs and not hostages. You are trying to have it both ways. In one part of your frame this is a legitimate war, so the Gazans are entitled to violence. Yet, in the other part of your frame Israel is not entitled to carry out its war in an effective manner, which, given normal rules of engagement + Hamas's tactics would ordinarily entitle Israel to a genocide. Which you would, obviously, again object to.

Fundamentally what the region needs is a situation in which Palestinians are in control of the situation and have a stable arrangement that they are satisfied with.

So a genocide of Israel is necessary? The people of Gaza have spoken and they prefer death to coexistence.

Those comparisons would be more meaningful if Israelis could just take the suitcase or death deal. Even if we wrote off the ones of European origin, the Mizrahi Jews certainly can't/won't go back "home".

It bodes ill that the Palestinian cause seems to depend on a very narrow equilibrium where Western nations are both decadent and secure enough to just eat a loss or two, given the disanalogies.

It's not worth wondering about for Westerners but I often wonder if Palestinians actually think the Algerian deal is viable. Or if they're just lying for their audience and know deep down that, when it comes to it, Madagascar really isn't an option but they'll burn that bridge when they get to it.

I’m not 100 percent sure what Hamas expected. In my mind I boil it down to three scenarios.

  1. The one you outlined in your post, where Hamas expected an immediate uprising in the West Bank and an immediate response by Hezbollah and Iran.
  2. Hamas expected to get massive Israeli resistance and be stopped a few hundred meters out from the wall. In this scenario, Hamas was expecting a large battle where three or four hundred IDF soldiers were killed, which would justify some air strikes but not necessarily a full invasion. The current situation is the result of Hamas being victims of their own success.
  3. Hamas expected the exact scenario they have now, and are willing to burn themselves and Gaza just to scotch the Abraham accords and get the Palestinian question back on the table.

I suspect different participants may have had different scenarios in mind. The guys who were actually going in were probably pumped up with scenario one, while the leadership actually had in mind scenarios two or three.

This is all in response to the recovery of six dead hostages which were shot, presumably before they could be rescued.

Based on some other hostages' testimony it seems likely that these 6 hostages were shot because the IDF was about to rescue them.

It's an unsourced reddit post, but this person claims the names of the hostages were being circulated a couple days before the bodies were found. There were rumors of a rescue mission: https://old.reddit.com/r/2ndYomKippurWar/comments/1f660pm/the_6_hostages_bodies_found_in_gaza_have_been/lkyth9t/

The moment the Israelis exchanged one hostage for a thousand Palestinians created a terrible precedent of which Hamas seeks to repeat.

I am not sure why the Israelis, knowing that their enemies were digging tunnels, did not dig tunnels of their own. Surely with modern equipment and a lack of a need for secrecy they could dig beneath to undermine them. Why hasn't this happened?

My question to Biden is “or what?” What exactly is the USA going to do if Netanyahu decides to say “no”. There’s not really even a threat to not sell bombs, let alone set out economic sanctions or bomb them or something. This, for that reason feels less like a statement to Netanyahu and much more about trying to shore up support for Kamala among the Pro Palestine crowd. There’s just no credible threat here for the Jews in Israel to fear. There’s not even a hinted at consequence. It’s just “stop the war in Gaza or I’ll huff and puff some more.”

A lot of Biden's decisions seem to treat this as an issue of balancing domestic messaging, without considering if parties other than US citizens are seeing and/or being emboldened by the ambivalence.

Edit: "America's" to "Biden's"

without considering if parties other than US citizens are seeing and/or being emboldened by the ambivalence.

I think there a lot of mid-wits in think-tanks who view the US managerial class as the only people in the world capable of exercising agency.

Meanwhile a cynic might suggest that emboldening certain parties is the intent.

I’m absolutely convinced they are. The entire thing sounds like a parent desperately trying to get a kid to behave by making threats that they’ll punish them in some vaguely unspecified way. “Behave or else” only really works when there’s an actual “or else” and the other party has reason to believe that you have the will and power to actually do that. Biden has neither, and I don’t think anyone actually believes he does. He doesn’t have control of congress and would thus have a lot of trouble getting any policy changes to happen. Congress isn’t going to agree to withhold weapons. They’re going to Scream bloody murder if he even suggests sanctions. Even supporting the ICC thing is a non starter. We know this, Biden knows this, Netanyahu knows this. And so not only is there no reason to stop, but if he wants to prove he’s not beholden to American dictates, he’d be wise to double down and do more of what he’s been doing. Why would he agree to stop?

Odd reports coming out of the west. I always feel strange reading these, the way they’re framed, the kind of background assumptions (or ignorance?) required to take these reports at face value.

To clarify: Hamas wants Israeli forces out of Gaza, including Philadelphi (the Gaza-Egypt border) so that they can take a long breather and resume fighting on better terms. To be blunt, Israelis would have to be retarded to take this kind of deal on these conditions alone.

Additionally, some of the Arabs released in the last hostage deal already went back to being terrorist scum and killed Israelis (and are now dead), making a deal with the 30:1, 50:1, 500:1 ratios Hamas is demanding an even worse deal. Trading a hostage for more dead Israelis is, again, retarded.

Frankly I can’t understand why any westerner thinks this is a good deal - unless they don’t actually know the details of the deal and just assume it’s some form of reasonable. The Biden admin is continually proving itself to be a terrible ally, and I just wish we could get off the American tit and make our own ordinance again.

Frankly I can’t understand why any westerner thinks this is a good deal - unless they don’t actually know the details of the deal and just assume it’s some form of reasonable. The Biden admin is continually proving itself to be a terrible ally, and I just wish we could get off the American tit and make our own ordinance again.

I was reminded of some of the discourse surrounding @BurdensomeCount's post here reading this recent Maureen Dowd peice on Palantir.

Long story short there is a strong class-based bifurcation here where a lot of if not a majority of the West's so called "elite" are like EC in that they deeply resent western values. They want to dissolve the people. They want to see Isreal as a western ally weakened just as they want to see Iran/HAMAS and Russia as western opponents strengthened.

“If you go into any elite circle, pushing back against Russia is obvious, and Israel is complicated. If you go outside elite circles, it’s exactly the opposite.”

...because it really is that simple. Democrats in the US and Labor in the UK are all about a woman's right to choose right until it comes to a Isreali woman's right to choose not to be raped or taken hostage which point we're supposed to pretend that there is some sort of nuanced position to be had. I say "screw that".

in that they deeply resent western values.

The ones who resent western values are Israel. AIPAC and ADL are some of the biggest threats to western values. Israel is a state fundamentally opposed to western values that causes constant headache for the west.

They want to see Isreal as a western ally weakened

Israel isn't a western ally, it is nothing but a giant burden on the west causing constant problems in the middle east, engaging in massive foreign interference and receiving a tonne of aid.

as they want to see Iran

Iran is an indoeuropean nation that is stable and exports oil. They are socially conservative while still having a modern and industrial economy. They have done an excellent job at resisting the catastrophic neo-con policies that have swamped Europe with refugees and let jihadists run amok in the middle east. We should be thankful that Iran helped liberate large parts of Iraq and are fighting jihadists in Syria.

to a Isreali woman's right to choose not to be raped

What about European women's right not to be raped by the migrants IsraAID is bringing into Europe? What about the christians in the middle east that are being destroyed by the hostile nation of Israel?

Israel is a state fundamentally opposed to western values that causes constant headache for the west.

I mean, yeah; a state organized around blood-and-soil nationalism premised on a mythic past and present-day military conquest is pretty opposed to the modern deracinated, pacifistic, cosmopolitan western ideal. A bit surprised that you're in favor of the latter over the former, but wonders never cease!

What about European women's right not to be raped by the migrants IsraAID is bringing into Europe?

Clearly the gentile governments of European nations don't care about protecting that right. Sounds like a problem with the Gentiles.

What about the christians in the middle east that are being destroyed by the hostile nation of Israel?

Sounds like another failing of world christendom. You should probably get on that.

I mean, yeah; a state organized around blood-and-soil nationalism premised on a mythic past and present-day military conquest is pretty opposed to the modern deracinated, pacifistic, cosmopolitan western ideal.

Funny how the ADL and AIPAC have been pushing hard for the polar opposite of nationalism for us. Mass migration and open borders to Europe, an ethnostate for Israel.

Clearly the gentile governments of European nations don't care about protecting that right. Sounds like a problem with the Gentiles.

Yes, we need to get rid of the AIPAC and ADL influence.

Funny how the ADL and AIPAC have been pushing hard for the polar opposite of nationalism for us. Mass migration and open borders to Europe, an ethnostate for Israel.

Why, it's almost like diaspora populations have strange relationships with the host nation and the metropole. Of course, if you actually look at the people who are doing the on-the-ground work of the mass-migration you get a lot of Catholic groups, not Jews.

Yes, we need to get rid of the AIPAC and ADL influence

Ah yes, the gentiles who actually hold office are just helpless little mice before the terrifying might of...completely ordinary lobbying groups. And it just so happens to aaaaaaallllll be the Jews...couldn't be the Turkish lobby, or the UAE, or the Saudis, or the Iranians.

The US has a policy of ensuring that Israel has a qualitative military advantage over any plausible combination of Middle East powers. This includes billions annually in military aid to Israel and refusing to export advanced weapons to other regional powers. The US even gives aid to Israel's neighbours for maintaining good relations with Israel.

Then there are the loan guarantees, the US's tactical ignorance of Israeli non-NPT nukes and the incredibly slavish rhetoric from US leaders: Donald Trump repeatedly expounded his dismay at how Israel no longer controls the US House of Representatives like it used to.

Or we could look at the Biden administration cabinet: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jews-in-the-biden-administration

Homeland Security, Secretary of State, Director of National Intelligence, Secretary of Treasury and Attorney General are Jewish along with many more.

It's laughable to think that Turks or Iranians have anywhere near the level of influence in Washington that Jews do.

The US has a policy of ensuring that Israel has a qualitative military advantage over any plausible combination of Middle East powers.

Since 2008. Extremely GWoT-pilled. What harm, exactly, is this doing to our policy in the region other than generating more $120,000/yr. paperwork compliance jobs for folks living in Falls Church? Were we on the cusp of selling F-35s to the Iranians? Is Egypt making a better case to advance our interests in the region?

This includes billions annually in military aid to Israel and refusing to export advanced weapons to other regional powers.

The sum-total of all U.S. aid to Israel since its founding 75 years ago is about 0.5% [Edit: /u/Randomranger is correct, this should be 5%; I make sloppy math mistakes] of the 2023 US budget spend. Also, that includes money for highly-productive joint research and development projects, and billions upon billions in laundered subsidies for U.S. military-industrial conglomerates (i.e. grants which can only be used to purchase equipment/services from U.S. firms), both of which we would want done anyway even if Israel wasn't the one doing it.

The US even gives aid to Israel's neighbours for maintaining good relations with Israel.

You're right, there couldn't possibly be any other rationale for paying regimes on top of major trade and international supply routes to not blow each other's major infrastructure up. Has to be the nefarious influence of da Joos.

More comments

Israel isn't a western ally, it is nothing but a giant burden...

Israel is only "a burden" and "causing headaches" in so far as our current so-called "elites" are more aligned with the interests of Iran and HAMAS than they are those of thier own nations.

Iran is an indoeuropean nation that is stable and exports oil.

There is nothing "European" or "Western" about Iran and "stable" is releative. Thier current tegime relies far more heavily on foreign support to maintain thier grip on power than the current Isreali government does.

What about European women's right not to be raped by the migrants

Our so-called elites argue for "nuance" there to. Hence thier support for anti-western and anti-enlightenment policies like a two-tiered justice system for migrants vs non-migrants under the guise of "decolonization", "social justice", and various other flavors of socialist nonsense.

What about the christians in the middle east that are being destroyed by the hostile nation of Israel?

Christians aren't getting discriminated against or killed by the state of Isreal, they're getting killed by the people the state of Isreal are currently waging a war against.

Israel is only "a burden" and "causing headaches" in so far as our current so-called "elites" are more aligned with the interests of Iran and HAMAS than they are those of thier own nations.

The elites are completely bought by Israel and are far more zionist that the populations.

We have zero interests in wasting trillions destroying middle eastern countries and we have no interest in causing massive refugee crisis on the border of Europe. We absolutely share an interest with iran, we want a stable Iran that isn't causing a migrant crisis, we want jihadists defeated in Syria and an end to the forever war.

There is nothing "European" or "Western" about Iran

Far more than there is with Saudis. Iranians tend to be the easiest middle easterners to integrate. They even speak an indoeuropean language.

Thier current tegime relies far more heavily on foreign support to maintain thier grip on power than the current Isreali government does.

Yes, they sell oil and cashews to us. I hope they continue and don't have their oil industry go the way of Libya's.

Hence thier support for anti-western and anti-enlightenment policies like a two-tiered justice system for migrants vs non-migrants under the guise of "decolonization", "social justice", and various other flavors of socialist nonsense.

The same woke politicians want to bring the migrants here from the wars they created. I oppose the wars that brought them here and the mass surveillance state migration requires. One of the advantages of the middle east rejecting the globalists is that they don't get infected with wokeness.

Christians aren't getting discriminated against or killed by the state of Isreal

Israel has driven a large portion of the christians out of the country, killed thousands, bombed churches and orthodox jews spit on christians. The Christian community in Syria has been wrecked during the war in which Israel sponsored the Al Nusra front. Jerusalem should be a christian city and jews are the one religion in the area that completely rejects christ.

The elites are completely bought by Israel and are far more zionist that the populations.

If our elites are bought and paid for by isreal why is the US government spending so much money and materiel to keep HAMAS in the fight, while pleading with the IDF to pull thier punches? Why are the most vocal supporters of HAMAS the staff and student bodies of Yale, Columbia, Et Al?

Israel has driven a large portion of the christians out of the country

I dont think you have any idea what you're talking about. The state of Isreal has been accepting Christian refugees from across the middle east for decades now, that many of these Christians do not stay in Isreal and instead use it as a stepping-off point to Europe and elsewhere is not the same as Christians being "driven out" of Isreal.

If our elites are bought and paid for by isreal why is the US government spending so much money and materiel to keep HAMAS in the fight, while pleading with the IDF to pull thier punches?

Israel is the greatest welfare queen of them all. Trying to stop Israel from taking their genocide too far makes sense as there is a limit to how blood thirsty they can get and still win elections. Brutal wars in the middle east aren't popular.

Why are the most vocal supporters of HAMAS the staff and student bodies of Yale, Columbia, Et Al?

Why are these schools cancelling people who don't think Israel has a right to genocide Christians while they cancel people say it is ok to be white?

The state of Isreal has been accepting Christian refugees from across the middle east for decades now,

Israel is terrorizing christians: https://international.la-croix.com/world/israel-unprecedented-report-lists-anti-christian-acts

To be clear, you are complaining about spitting and anti-Christian graffiti in Isreal while ignoring the priests getting imprisoned in Iran, assasinated in Pakistan, and the lynching of non-muslims in Syria and Lebanon.

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They have done an excellent job at resisting the catastrophic neo-con policies that have swamped Europe with refugees and let jihadists run amok in the middle east.

Iran has colossal numbers of Afghan refugees and has the same issues with them that European countries do. You spout DR memes without even understanding the countries you discuss.

let jihadists run amok in the middle east

What about funding Houthi Islamists whose flag says ‘Death to America’ serves Western foreign policy aims in Yemen? Since MBS’ ascension Saudi funding to Wahhabi Islamist mosques abroad has been in any case dramatically curtailed, this isn’t 2014.

Iran has colossal numbers of Afghan refugees

Whose fault is that? They didn't create the Taliban and then fight the Taliban for 20 years.

says ‘Death to America’ serves Western foreign policy aims in Yemen?

What do they mean by death to America? I don't think they mean death to ordinary Americans. They mean death to neoliberal imperialists.

I have no issue with them delivering death to people who are trying to infect the Middle East with gender studies and push millions of migrants into Europe. I consider the people who participated in the wars in the middle east absolute traitors well deserving of the Houthis are delivering.

It serves an important foreign policy goal, kicking the globalists out of the middle east.

There is no such thing as ‘globalists’, only competing factions seeking to expand their own (global) influence. Why are one side globalists but the other not? Islam is an inherently ‘globalist’ ideology, how could it not be?

What do they mean by death to America? I don't think they mean death to ordinary Americans. They mean death to neoliberal imperialists.

This made me chuckle IRL

"The leopards eating faces party surely don't want to eat my face, just the faces of my outgroup!"

Again why are they not saying death to Brazil? Death to China or death to Iceland? Why specifically the US?

Of course, if you're determined to be charitable you will interpret any "death to [country]" chant as a desire to merely rid it of the bad elites in a manner surgical enough to not kill the entire country, or at least large amounts of countrymen. However, it does not appear to work out that way often.

For the record, I think that when someone says "death to America", they are not aiming to be very discriminate about it if given the chance.

I'm also curious if you'd extend the same charity to the domestic extremists who say "death to AmeriKKKa".

Of course, if you're determined to be charitable you will interpret any "death to [country]" chant as a desire to merely rid it of the bad elites in a manner surgical enough to not kill the entire country, or at least large amounts of countrymen. However, it does not appear to work out that way often.

Why are they chanting death to America and not death to Iceland, Zimbabwe or Uruguay? It is clear that they are motivated by the absolutely abhorrent policies that american impoerialists have imposed on them. They are fighting the same military industrial complex that is a cancer on western societies.

I'm also curious if you'd extend the same charity to the domestic extremists who say "death to AmeriKKKa".

A lot of that crowd seem to be actively pushing the same wokeness as the people trying to impose gender studies on Afghans. If they strictly meant the NSA, black rock and Lockheed Martin I would support it. If they want to impose all sorts of wokeness then I don't support it.

It is clear that they are motivated by the absolutely abhorrent policies that american impoerialists have imposed on them.

I'd be more concerned by what they'll do, not what they're motivated by. Generally, fighting a country's military-industrial complex in any meaningful manner is not good for that country. Unless, of course, you're losing badly and are just feeding your soldiers to the enemy's weapon industry.

I think you're displaying the same naivete here that the Russian progressives do when they assume that the West, if it crushes Russia, will only kill Putin and let the planet heal.

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Why are they chanting death to America and not death to Iceland, Zimbabwe or Uruguay? It is clear that they are motivated by the absolutely abhorrent policies that american impoerialists have imposed on them. They are fighting the same military industrial complex that is a cancer on western societies.

This is extremely naive. The same people will happily make terror attacks in arbitrary non-majority muslim countries they can get into, in fact even in majority muslim countries against non-muslim minorities.

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What do they mean by death to America? I don't think they mean death to ordinary Americans. They mean death to neoliberal imperialists.

I am sure you would not apply this level of charity to Israelis chanting anti-Palestinian or anti-Muslim slogans.

When people are burning flags and chanting death to a country, they are not making a distinction between "neoliberal elites" and ordinary citizens of that country. It would not even be completely unreasonable to point out that if you think the "neoliberal elites" deserve death, then the people who vote for them and pay taxes to their regime are complicit. This was the justification for 9/11 and basically every other terrorist attack on American soil or against American civilians and military personnel.

When people say "Death to ____," they mean Death to ____, not some abstract and nuanced political objection to ____'s current political leadership.

I have no issue with them delivering death to people who are trying to infect the Middle East with gender studies

Which universities in the Middle East are pushing Western gender studies courses? Would love to know how those are going.

In mild, mild fairness, I could imagine that, like with North Koreans, the modal Iranian might carry much less hatred towards an ordinary American in isolation compared to the totality, but that probably doesn't scale well.

What about the christians in the middle east that are being destroyed by the hostile nation of Israel?

While Israel was on the opposite side of the civil war from the majority of Syria's Christians, they have no real beef with the Christian population elsewhere in the middle east; indeed, the one that they deal with directly, the Maronites, Israel would rather be more powerful as a counterbalance to Hezbollah. Of course the Maronites don't particularly want to be an Israeli puppet either.

While I'm sure some Christians have gotten hit as collateral damage in Israeli strikes and Arab Christians by and large are not huge fans of Israel, Israel doesn't seem any worse for surrounding Christian populations than the Muslim governments of those countries are.

Western elites are pro-Russian? In what world?

I’d make a more substantive comment, but frankly, this assertion seems so obviously false that I’m not sure the rest of your analysis is worth engaging with.

Edit: Reading the quote from that article in context, I think you completely misunderstood what he meant with regard to Russia. He was contrasting the positive response to his pro-Ukrainian activities with the mixed-to-negative response to his pro-Israeli activities.

Western elites are split/ukraine is complicated but i do think that the Clinton/Kerry/Obama wing of the Democratic party in particular are much much more concerned with keeping both the Ukrainians and the Russians in the game than they are the security of the US.

See the hilarious half measures like arming the Ukes with aircraft and artillary but then prohibiting thier use against russian military targets in russian held territory. Its obvious that our so called elites dont want either side to win. Given that, whats the real objective if not to deplete western stockpiles?

The restrictions forbid using US-provided missiles against Russian forces on Russian soil, not on Russian-held territory. This seems to me like a sensible precaution aimed at minimizing the risk that Russia claims this as a NATO attack against Russia and retaliates with nuclear weapons.

Which Russian soil? The soil that was Russian in Jan 2022, or the soil that was always historic Russian territories yesterday?

The former; the soil within the internationally recognized borders of Russia.

prohibiting thier use against russian military targets in russian held territory

Last time I checked the prohibitions were on striking pre-2022 Russian territory. Were they updated since then?

https://www.timesofisrael.com/philadelphi-is-becoming-rafah-negotiators-lament-politicization-of-ceasefire-term/

The Israeli security establishment has appeared flexible on the issue, an Arab official from a mediating country said. The Mossad, Shin Bet and IDF representatives who make up Israel’s negotiating team have stressed the importance of implementing new mechanisms to prevent smuggling. However, they also believe that the IDF can swiftly return to the corridor if need be, so it can afford to withdraw in the meantime to save the lives of the hostages, the Arab official explained.

https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/article-817291

There are some points where the Mossad’s position is tougher than the US position, but generally, since May, Barnea has been closer to the US, IDF, and Gallant’s view that it is time to cut a deal, even temporarily sacrificing control of the corridor, than he has been to Netanyahu’s staunch opposition to concessions in that area.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/gallant-said-to-call-philadelphi-demand-a-disgrace-drawing-fury-from-pm-ministers/

In the meeting Sunday evening, Gallant reportedly called the demand that Israel maintain control of the so-called Philadelphi Corridor separating Egypt and Gaza “an unnecessary constraint that we’ve placed on ourselves.” As a result, the government “will not live up to the war goals we set for ourselves,” he warned, according to comments carried widely in Hebrew-language media.

Reading those articles, they're pretty neutral - or ambivalent - towards those claims.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/philadelphi-is-becoming-rafah-negotiators-lament-politicization-of-ceasefire-term/

His office has issued repeated statements in recent weeks and days stressing the importance of maintaining control over the Philadelphi Corridor. “The need for sustained control of the Philadelphi Corridor is a security one… If Israel withdraws, the pressure to prevent its recapture will be enormous, putting our ability to return in significant doubt,” read the most recent one issued on Tuesday.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/gallant-said-to-call-philadelphi-demand-a-disgrace-drawing-fury-from-pm-ministers/

The remarks drew hostile responses from other ministers, as well as from Netanyahu, according to reports.

“If we give in to Hamas’s demands, like Gallant wants, we’ve lost the war,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was quoted saying.

However, the outlet claimed that Netanyahu also said he was willing to compromise in other areas aside from the Philadelphi Corridor, maintaining that a hostage deal with Hamas was still possible.

Both Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Foreign Minister Israel Katz reportedly accused Gallant of creating a dynamic in which Hamas would receive concessions from Israel as a result of murdering hostages.

These all seem like reasonable concerns that aren't really answered in the article.

Yes, I’m well aware. The experts don’t impress me. These are the same people who got us to this point, and they should all go home as far as I’m concerned.

What's the general strike about? Like granted labor unions probably get caught up in a general factor of left wing politics everywhere in the world, including Israel, but is there any specific trigger?

Yes, on Saturday night the IDF found 6 dead hostages in Gaza (in the Rafah area, btw) - apparently they were killed by their captors shortly before the IDF arrived. This lead to more protests in favour of a hostage deal, and a strike announced by the country’s largest labour organization.

Edit: I should note that in Israel, labour unions aren’t necessarily left wing. Israel in general has socialist roots so organized labour is basically baked in in many industries. A lot of unions today are actually Likud power centers, after some realignment when Labour (the party) basically became irrelevant. The head of this union, HaHistadrut is purported to be a friend of the Netanyahu family actually. Conspiracy theories abound about him being a controlled opposition of sorts, giving Bibi an excuse to act in ways that his coalition disapproves of.

I understand why Biden wants a ceasefire: to make it all temporarily go away before the election. And I understand why some Americans want a ceasefire: because they have a very dim understanding about anything that happens outside of America. What I can’t get my head around is why a huge number of Israelis seem to want a ceasefire.

Perhaps the Iron Dome has insulated them from the consequences of living in rocket range of Hamas all too well?

They want the hostages back. Everyone I know is at most 2 degrees of separation from a hostage or more. It hits very close to home. Many don’t know the details of the deal, or suspect that PM Netanyahu is working from bad motives and don’t believe the reported details.

Frankly I can’t understand why any westerner thinks this is a good deal - unless they don’t actually know the details of the deal and just assume it’s some form of reasonable.

Lots of Westerners are:

  1. Convinced Israel is in the wrong overall so all the onus is on them when it comes to ending the conflict.
  2. Suffering from some GWOT-hangup where insurgents can't be beaten and fighting them makes everything worse.
  3. Bad at game theory. You know those "they're just stealing baby formula for their kids", criminal justice reform types? Now imagine they've been seeing videos of dead children forever.

Well, let me amend that to “reasonable westerner” then. Those all seem like terrible reasons. Especially 2, which I keep hearing also repeated from the Israeli left, seems to not understand that Arabs are a finite resource.

We’re at about 2% of Gazans dead, and 4.5% wounded to incapacitation. At some point they’re going to run out of able-bodied men. Might take a few years, but that’s still preferable to another October 7th.

This would work if there were 7 million Israelis and maybe 4 million Arabs. But there are about 450 million in the Arab world. Many of them do not particularly like Israel. The 7 million Israelis are not even internally united.

How many people do you have the ability to kill before the flow of Western weapons and support runs out?

There are less than 2 million Arabs in Gaza. I don’t imagine we could take on the entire Arab world, and happy that we don’t have to.

How many people do you have the ability to kill before the flow of Western weapons and support runs out?

Good question. The alternatives are cruder bombs with more collateral damage though, which I don’t imagine is a more palatable option for limp hearted westerners.

Machiavelli would tell you that you'll need to eliminate all the male children as well or else they'll grow up and seek vengeance.

That’s one benefit of stretching the war, then - they’ll grow up to a killable age!

More seriously though, if their society collapsed they’d likely have to move somewhere else anyway. In my fever dreams I hope Trump is elected and disbands UNRWA somehow, and then those refugees might even integrate in their host countries. That being unlikely, I’ll accept them just being further away and thus less likely to cause damage.

Which Israel can't do. So the reluctance there at least makes sense.

The fatal problem with the radicalization thesis imo is that it's all well and good for America, but not everyone can go home and stop radicalizing people.

It's the generic (and often unconscious) response to people being uncivilized on the left:

  • We ought to empathize with them, and take seriously whatever motivated them to such actions.

  • We can't put expect anything of them, because they're uncivilized.

  • We can't expect to influence them, because they're uncivilized. (And is it even right to try to sway them from it, given the justifications that they have for it?)

  • Instead, responsibility should be loaded upon those who react too harshly, because they should have known better. And we should feel bad for the victims of the response.

This is precisely the same path that leads people to adopt soft-on-crime prosecutors, and generally punish those who retaliate against the lawless. It happens often when it's easier or involves less unpleasantness for the state to punish those who are otherwise productive, than those who are wild.

This is the default thought pattern that happens when sympathy and responsibility get loaded onto different parties in some conflict. It clearly correlates with seeing things as oppressor (responsible) and oppressed (sympathetic), which is tied to why it's more common on the left, I think.

See Daniel Penny, see the UK riots (and speech arrests), see opinions on cops (when unjustified), etc.

I imagine things will get a lot better for you, if the 2024 election goes to Trump, and worse if it goes to Harris.

Some notes on John Forester and Vehicular Cycling

After the discussion on last week's cycling CW post had waned a bit, it occurred to me that the name of John Forester had never come up. Indeed, in the context of the two broadly defined "sides" in the discussion we had then, Forester stands out in a manner analogous to the early 20th century eugenicists and imperialists who essentially founded the US National Park system and comservation movement. Some of their ideas pop up uncredited in our discourse to this day, but they dramatically fail to be on either side of the current CW and probably as a result are not widely remembered by name. I am a lifelong cyclist and reasonably knowledgeable about bicycle history and had never heard of Forester until a recent troll thread on 4chan, though some of the advice my dad (also a lifelong cyclist) gave me when I first started riding for transport is pretty clearly Forester in the intellectual water supply--don't be scared of the streets, claiming the lane, staying out of thendoor zone, setting up for left turns, and so on.

John Forester was an engineer by trade and lifelong avid cyclist. The main thrust of his cycling-related advocacy was that "bicycles should be operated like any other vehicle — ridden in the same lanes and manner as cars and trucks rather than in bike lanes or separated infrastructure", a philosophical position which he called Vehicular Cycling. So far, so recognizable, you may well think. However, Forester made himself notorious for actively arguing against the construction of separated bike lanes and bike paths, often in fairly acrimonious terms. His general argument was that the very existence of a designated bikeway, even a hilariously inadequate one (in the door zone, frequently blocked, full of debris, disappearing, located in the right-turn lane but intended for through traffic, etc), would be used to force cyclists into more dangerous and less effective riding strategies, and even a bikeway that avoids these obvious pitfalls exposes cyclists to significant collision risk when it inevitably intersects with a road. Indeed, it sounds like there were a few legal battles along these lines in Forester's area of operations in the 70s. If this all sounds rather baffling to you, it may help to consider the question of whether it's safer to drive on interstates or surface streets. Kinetic energies are much higher on the interstate and it's much harder to just pull over and stop than it is on most surface streets, but interstates are well known to be safer than surface streets (see e.g. https://www.thewisedrive.com/side-streets-vs-interstate-which-is-safer/). Now imagine that, in order to make life easier for commercial trucks and keep passenger cars safe from vehicles much larger than them, it was proposed to legally limit passenger traffic to surface streets. You might, of course, dispute the analogy to cycling on roads vs bikeways, but perhaps it helps clarify the point.

As far as I can tell, nobody in the conversation uses scientific research in what those of us who are familiar with old SSC review articles would consider a convincing and intellectually honest manner, so I'm not going to bother engaging either Forester's studies (he likes to cite Kenneth Cross) or the Marshall paper from the Chi Streets link below. This being the Motte, I'll note that nobody in the conversation seems to have considered the likely impacts of 13/50 on either motorist or cyclist behavior.

Forester claims pretty plainly in his book Effective Cycling that an actually existing credible threat of severe punishment effectively deters truly negligent and malicious driving, which I dunno about. Every so often a motorist kills a cyclist and gets off remarkably easy. (I have been in online conversations about this where someone pipes up to say, well, what about cyclists who kill pedestrians? Sure, them too.). Forester actually cites a number of these cases in his book, but seems to regard them as an advocacy issue more than anything. "Other people should behave differently" would be nice in a lot of cases but is generally not a viable solution to your problem.

On the other hand, in Forester's favor, a lot of actually-existing bikeways in the US do in fact suck in one or another of the ways I've described and my experiences riding in them versus acting like a car generally agree with his. Forester himself was by all accounts an outstandingly disagreeable nerd and a pretty strong recreational cyclist; a good deal of his book is concerned with going faster, though I don't believe that part has been updated since the widespread adoption of the power meter so it's a bit of a 70s endurance broscience time capsule. His interlocutors (e.g. in my links below) seemingly all say things like "don't you know the population that's scared to ride in traffic is more Diverse?", a point which he essentially ignores when the interviewer brings it up. I suppose I take these as indicators of which side I should be on. From a more substantive standpoint, the problem of people who are too slow to ride effectively in traffic is at least somewhat mitigated by e-bikes, though I guess that's a whole different Culture War battle of its own.

Some further reading

Long interview with Forester: https://archive.is/5GwSs

FAQ from the training and advocacy organization that succeeded Forester's Effective Cycling courses: https://cyclingsavvy.org/road-cycling/

Unsympathetic from Strong Towns: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/28/why-john-forester-was-wrong-design-streets-for-the-humans-you-have-not-the-humans-you-wish-you-had

And from Chi Streets: https://chi.streetsblog.org/2020/04/24/r-i-p-john-forester-a-worthy-adversary-in-the-battle-for-safe-biking

Vehicular cycling is a local optimum. Dutch-style dedicated cycling infrastructure is better, but you have to survive a decade or two of painted-on lanes, disconnected infrastructure, endless complaints from the drivers and other trials and tribulations until a sufficient part of the city is rebuilt to have protected lanes, protected crossings and ample parking for bikes.

I think he's right that, at least some of the time, bike lanes are not really for the benefit of bikers- they're used to force bikers out of the way so that cars can go faster. It seems like we've basically accepted, as a society, that you have a right to drive at whatever is the speed limit on your current street. And anyone who interferes with that is blocking traffic and needs to get out of the way. Which is a little odd, when you think about it- in normal life there's no "right to run" where you can sprint at top speed and just expect people to get out of your way. It might make sense on a freeway dedicated to motor vehicles, but even then, you'll encounter stuff like trucks going at a slower speed and you just have to wait until you can pass them safely.

I've been wondering if this will come up more in the future, as EVs have given a lot more people access to speeds that in the past you'd only see from ultra-expensive supercars. If I pay for 200MPH "plaid speed" from Tesla, why should I be stuck behind some granny going 60 in her 1980s honda civic? Make a "slow car lane" and force her to drive exclusively in that lane so that the rest of us can drive as fast as we want! Oh, and if she accidentally drifts into the "regular" lane, make her pay for the damage to my car. Or at least, that's how it feels like from the perspective of someone who got used to cycling on rural roads and is suddenly told he's not supposed to do that anymore.

Make a "slow car lane" and force her to drive exclusively in that lane so that the rest of us can drive as fast as we want!

We sort of already have this. Many states reserve the far left lane for passing only, and cops will absolutely pull you over and ticket you for driving too slowly in it. Speeders get a pass; those following the speed limit get a fine.

This is true, but enforcement in the US is quite a bit more notional than real, ime. I wonder what the equilibrium effects of a stricter norm around this would be--maybe slower traffic would be less disruptive if the left lane was consistently open for passing.

Sure, but that's different because it's temporary. You wait for a safe chance to pass, gun it, then move back to the normal lane and speed once you're clear. You're not supposed to just continuously barrel along the left lane at twice the speed of the right lane, which is the equivalent of cars vs a bike lane. Of course, people do that anyway...

It seems like we've basically accepted, as a society, that you have a right to drive at whatever is the speed limit on your current street

Yes, because speed limits are one of the most abused tools of legislation in the modern world (over the cross-section of people affected by them).

Legislators/certain factions of society impose them for reasons that have nothing to do with safety, but forget that respect for their laws is a two-way street; drivers then treat the laws (and by extension those who insist they be followed religiously, or those who aren't capable of breaking the lowest-common-denominator speed limits due to some infirmity) with the zero respect the law affords them.

they're used to force bikers out of the way so that cars can go faster

They're also a way to put the bikers in a place where drivers are expecting, or can learn to expect, them to be. Though really, it's just a hack around not having the space to put in a grade-separated lane because drivers stupid enough to be on their phones (or the aformentioned granny who can barely even see) can't lanekeep (as in, not intrude on the bike lane) to save their lives.

It still gets people killed when the bike lane empties onto the road for that reason, too; the "everything needs to be high up because people who are bad enough drivers to get into rollovers deserve to die less than the pedestrians" safety standards don't help (you can't see out of modern cars unless you make the effort; that and modern hyper-bright eye-level [if you're in a normal car] headlights are why everyone loves tall SUVs simply because tallness gives you [the illusion of] better visibility, and I'd argue that if you screw up so bad you end up on the roof you deserve to die more than the people someone else is going to run over because they can't even see them when pulling out of the drive-thru or making a right turn across the bike lane).

This is why the meta is "put things in between the cars and the bikes at the expense of road usability", because it takes away the road's ability to support reasonable speeds by putting things in the way while at the same time functionally getting a grade separation between cars and bikes. Even those fucking texters still have self-preservation instincts and you can trigger them by making the lanes so narrow that they're more scared of the F-350s and the collapsible-yet-still-capable-of-damaging-the-front-end separation pipes/rails boxing them in than they are missing the latest Facebook post for 5 more minutes.

They're also a way to put the bikers in a place where drivers are expecting, or can learn to expect, them to be.

Wouldn't you normally expect them to be in the road, like right in front of you in the easiest possible place to see? Not shunted off to the side, into their perepheral vision, in a place where you can 99% ignore them until it's time to make a turn and then "oops, I never saw him." But ok, maybe you're right that drivers are just so phone-addled these days that the periphery is the only place they can actually see. Too bad modern car designs (like you mentioned) make it exceedingly difficult to see the blind spots.

Wouldn't you normally expect them to be in the road, like right in front of you in the easiest possible place to see?

Yeah, this is a fairly significant component of practical vehicular cycling advice.

The main thrust of his cycling-related advocacy was that "bicycles should be operated like any other vehicle — ridden in the same lanes and manner as cars and trucks rather than in bike lanes or separated infrastructure"

Sure, and the special needs kids should be in the same classes as any other student, not segregated into their own classes, but free to completely shit up ordinary high school math by eating the exercise papers and wailing at maximum volume.

Holding everyone else back to accommodate the slowest is morally monstrous and more importantly, just wasting a ton of people's time for no good reason.

Holding everyone else back to accommodate the slowest is morally monstrous and more importantly, just wasting a ton of people's time for no good reason.

This may be different elsewhere, but the number of pants-on-head idiotic drivers who waste my time is... at least 1, but more probably 2 orders of magnitude greater than the number of cyclists I encounter on a day-to-day basis.

We tolerate cars that are falling apart, weaving between lanes, stopping abruptly, and just fucking around far under the speed limit whenever they want.

As a driver first and foremost I'm sympathetic to your point that slowing others down is a moral problem. Do you contend that cyclists, as a group, are more responsible for this than drivers?

If so (and I'd love to know where in the world this could be the case), is the moral problem caused by cyclists worthy of the murder and maiming visited upon them by vehicles when they use the roads?

Do you contend that cyclists, as a group, are more responsible for this than drivers?

Yes, probably. One hundred percent of encounters I have with cyclists result in me having to slow down. Single digit percent of encounters with other drivers.

If so (and I'd love to know where in the world this could be the case), is the moral problem caused by cyclists worthy of the murder and maiming visited upon them by vehicles when they use the roads?

No, and as such, they should get off the roads.

I understand on a per-capita basis that cyclists are going to slow you down more, but that's not the point I'm making. To inconvenience you, a traveler needs to be:

  • Biking (Already exceedingly rare)
  • On a road with no infrastructure (Common)
  • On a busy road that blocks passing (Uncommon - anyone cycling already gravitates towards less busy roads)
  • On a fast enough road to slow you down (Probably average - an urban cyclist is going to be faster than fellow cars)

I can count on one hand the number of times I've been slown down by a cyclist in like, 2 years. The places I drive aren't particularly cycling friendly which is part of it, but I just don't see this as a problem to eliminate in any meaningful way.

It happens to me roughly half the time I drive. Just some lone cyclist holding up a queue of 5 or 6 cars. This is an old town, and the roads here aren't very wide, so even when they aren't being deliberately annoying by sitting in the middle of the lane, it's hard to pass them. They will happily skip up onto the pavement to avoid stopping at a crossing or a red light at a junction, but not to show any consideration to the line of people they're holding up by choosing to ride a child's toy on a real grown-up road.

choosing to ride a child's toy on a real grown-up road

I can't take this barb very seriously. Using your body and a simple machine to travel self-sufficiently is "childish", but cocooning yourself in a 4,000 pound air-conditioned couch for even the most trivial trip is "adulting"? It doesn't line up, and it's pretty lowbrow discourse.

Yes. Adults have better ways of doing things than children. You might as well be pogo-ing or roller blading to work.

Forester's intransigence was, in my opinion, largely an effect of his own political experience. He had been riding for 25+ years at the time the '70s bike boom started, and prior to that period there were so few cyclists on the streets that no one really gave them a second thought. He'd been doing it for so long that he was comfortable and developed his own set of best practices. When the bike boom cause the number of cyclists to swell, motorists started getting irritated, and their superior numbers led to local governments installing bike lanes and forcing cyclists to use them when available. Forester didn't view this as an accommodation but as a statement by government that he was a second-class citizen. I don't know what these '70s bike lanes were like, but I'll give Forester the benefit of the doubt here and assume there were safety problems with them that don't apply to contemporary designs. He fought back against this and got enough grassroots political power to convince local governments that vehicular cycling was better than dedicated infrastructure.

His advice is generally good for when it come to how to behave when riding on urban streets. But it really only works for the kind of person who isn't intimidated by riding on urban streets, i.e., an experienced rider who has both the equipment and fitness to maintain 20 mph and isn't intimidated by aggressive drivers. But it isn't going to convince casual riders to bike rather than drive. Luckily no one pays attention to him anymore because most cyclists weren't around for the California Bike Wars, don't know or care about the politics behind them, and instinctively feel safer when protected from traffic.

Yeah, this is a solid summary. Always interesting how these things shift over time.

I think he’s fundamentally wrong. Like many things, it’s not about equality (which has increasingly been used to deny outcomes people don’t like) but about the physics of bicycles. Very few cyclists could hope to maintain a constant speed much above 25 mph, and to do that you’d need to be in pretty good shape. That’s about the minimum speed a car can possibly do without constantly braking. Add in the visibility issue (a small bicycle is pretty hard to spot, especially if the rider isn’t wearing hi-visibility clothing — which rarely happens) and the extreme vulnerability of the cyclist (F=MA, you’re in for a serious injury if a car hits you), and anyone looking at this from a pure safety perspective would absolutely not want cyclists “sharing the road” because it’s not possible for a small human-powered vehicle and a 2000 pound vehicle doing 45mph to “share” safely.

Coming from the perspective of someone who learned vehicular cycling techniques in order to use my bike as a practical form of transport in a place (Cambridge UK) where this made sense, there is an underlying assumption that you are cycling on city streets (reasonable - rural distances are too far to cycle) with a design speed of 30mph or less (true almost everywhere where the street plan was laid out pre-WW2). This is consistent with speed limits in towns which are 30mph in the UK and 50km/h in the EU and Canada. (The US has a 25mph speed limit in neighbourhoods in most states, but critically the street plan is designed to force through traffic onto arterial roads with higher speed limits).

From an urbanist perspective, if the traffic is moving faster than 30mph then either you are in a rural area (in which case biking is a slightly weird recreational activity, not a form of transport), on a freeway (where biking should be banned anyway and alternatives exist), or the cars are dangerously too fast.

Vehicular cycling makes a lot of sense for sober, competent, adult cyclists who are trying to get somewhere in a hurry cycling on city streets where the actual speed of traffic is 30mph or lower. In my experience, this is the only use case where cycling makes sense anyway, but I am aware that my views on urban transport (best articulated by this guy) are considered weird by both sides of the culture war.

F=MA, you’re in for a serious injury if a car hits you

I hate to be pedantic about what is kind of a minor point, but F=MA is almost totally irrelevant here. What matters in a collision is (to a first approximation) the kinetic energy of the two participants, which is given by 1/2mv^2.

That’s about the minimum speed a car can possibly do without constantly braking.

In addition to what everyone else has said, this is clearly not so. Idling in D is under 5mph in everything I've ever driven, same with giving it just enough gas to not stall in 1st in a manual (I can actually idle in 1st in my truck, which has a torquey diesel and a low first gear, but generally not in passenger cars).

2000 pound vehicle

The jacked-up station wagons everyone drives and EV sedans are 4000 pounds, not 2000. Larger SUVs and smaller trucks get to 5000, larger trucks are 6000, and the Hummer EV is over 9000.

Compact cars from 20 years ago were pushing 3000, and even a Miata from 30 years ago was still slightly more than a ton.

And yet I bicycle on roads often and have for years, certainly cannot maintain 25mph, and the only serious injuries I have suffered involved no cars but rather a 0 mph hole in the ground.

Of course, if you're looking at it from a "pure safety perspective" you shouldn't be bicycling. Nor driving. You should probably just stay home .

if you're looking at it from a "pure safety perspective" you ... should probably just stay home.

I thought an alarmingly large percentage of accidents happen in or near the home....

And if everyone just stays home that will rise to 100%!!!

Forester claims pretty plainly in his book Effective Cycling that an actually existing credible threat of severe punishment effectively deters truly negligent and malicious driving, which I dunno about. Every so often a motorist kills a cyclist and gets off remarkably easy.

The threat does deter malicious driving, and negligent driving to some extent, but it deters it only, it does not eliminate it. And as I said in the previous thread, motorists who kill anyone (not just cyclists) and aren't drunk or on drugs and don't leave the scene usually get off without any criminal consequences. This is likely an effect of nearly everyone driving; no matter how often someone whips up a moral panic and gets consequences increased, the fact that people who drive all the time (including judges, jurors, legislators, and prosecutors) don't want "one mistake and I get raped in prison" hanging over their heads every time they get in the car tends to keep it from taking full effect.

Another thing about vehicular biking is, outside of fairly small areas of cities, is the choice is between that and no biking at all. There's no reasonable way to build up an entire separated bicycle infrastructure covering even a metro area, let along a large country; the cost per user would be enormous. Some bicycle advocates are indeed arrogant enough to demand this, but aside from a few token "share the road" signs, it ain't going to happen.

"one mistake and I get raped in prison"

Quoted from Effective Cycling, not necessarily endorsed:

Americans have been raised to believe that the greatest danger to cyclists is same-direction motor traffic. Therefore, the motorist who sees a cyclist on the road ahead of him believes that this is a moment of great peril. The motorist thinks that some strange event is likely to occur that will cause him to hit the cyclist. Because whatever it is that is likely to occur, it won’t be my fault. The typical person sees himself as driving along, minding his own business, when there is a loud crash and—“Oh my God, I’ve hit a bicycle!” That is how they have been taught that these accidents happen: an act of God or an evil magic at work. Therefore, in this type of event the cyclist is seen to be more at fault than the motorist.

Forester would dispute the factual truth of the bold based mostly on the Kenneth Cross study. Of course, equilibrium effects and so on....

It seems that the main difference between bikes and motorized vehicles is speed, and that's also the main difference between different types of roadways- highways go faster than main roads go faster than side streets go faster than residential streets. It's perfectly reasonable for a typical cyclist to ride on residential or side streets but not main roads, and only the most elite cyclists ever have any business going on the highway.

speed, and that's also the main difference between different types of roadways

I'm not at all sure about this (lots of main roads move pretty damn slow through town, lots of country two-lanes with driveways entering them where everyone does 70 in good weather, classification by density of access points or something like that seems a good deal more rigorous), and I don't think your conclusion makes sense either. How well slower vehicles mesh with everything else is going to depend much more on how much of everything else there is, how many lanes there are, what the shoulder looks like, and infrastructure for overtaking (passing lanes, sight lines, etc) than it will on speed alone.

Well yes, bike lanes, wide shoulders, etc, make slower bike traffic mesh better with main roads- this is probably why the main road in my neighborhood has such wide shoulders(many of the boarders cannot afford cars). But those dirt-poor boarders who need their bikes to commute to wherever they work don't go on the highway and stay out of the left lane, because they will never go fast enough and they're smart enough to take some responsibility for not getting run over.

only the most elite cyclists ever have any business going on the highway.

Honestly, highways are much safer for cycling than a lot of main roads. They tend to have wide shoulders and long sightlines, making it easier to stay out of traffic and maintain visibility. Main roads often have limited room on the side and blind curves that can send motorists a little over the edge; add in traffic and it can be pretty nerve wracking. Even country roads can be bad, because people fly on them without regard for other traffic, let alone bicycles.

Even country roads can be bad, because people fly on them without regard for other traffic, let alone bicycles.

i'd endorse most of this post, but ime the rural roads around me are actually pretty friendly because it's easy to pass in the oncoming lane and people are used to passing tractors going from field to field, and honestly if you're in a hurry there are state highways and interstates to take instead. obviously not universal.

It seems that the main difference between bikes and motorized vehicles is speed,

I am a novice to this debate, but why wouldn't two other relevant differences be stability (cars don't fall over or spill their driver/occupants onto the pavement nearly as easily as two-wheeled vehicles) and occupant safety features (seat belts, air bags, crumple zones, etc.)?

and occupant safety features (seat belts, air bags, crumple zones, etc.)?

Besides thicker clothing and a better helmet wouldn't motorbikes be the same as bikes under this standard?

Sure.

Hence why I said motorized vehicles, not cars. Motorcycles use the highway uncontroversially.

Another difference is the amount and types of data to be processed by the driver/rider.

As a person with high-functioning autism, I’ve been blessed with a computer mind and very few sensory issues. I’m a car driver with no blemishes on my record and a good feel for safety.

However, I didn’t learn how to ride a bike until the age of 21 due to severe autism-related clumsiness. The person who taught me was surprised when I wasn’t able to do with my left side what I could do on my right. He said it was the first time he truly knew I had a disability.

I wouldn’t survive a week on the bike lanes and intersections of Albuquerque.

There's another rather major difference between main roads and side streets, and that's that the main roads go through. I live between two ridges; all the roads (except the highway) which cross the summits are "main streets", so is the road along the eastern summit and so is the road that goes along the valley. The side streets are mostly just little networks that either lead to the main roads or dead end without going far. The one partial exception which parallels a large section of the valley road is rather unpleasant to bike on because it's covered in speed bumps to keep people from taking it as an alternative to the valley road.

So, if you want to actually go anywhere, you will be on the main roads.


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