site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30348 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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

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

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

  • Shaming.

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

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5
Top Bottom New Old Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

This Is Not Uncommon

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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?

...

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Was the situation markedly better during the military dictatorship?

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.

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.

More comments

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?

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.

More comments

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.

More comments

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 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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/

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?

Let’s talk about Matrix/Element.

With the Telegram CEO getting gotten and Twitter being banned, you may have heard Matrix/Element shilled as a potential alternative platform for communication. There’s also talk of interoperable messaging in Europe, and the pipedream of Matrix being involved. Unfortunately, Matrix/Element is a dead end, but it’s worth talking about. Information gathered from lurking Matrix discussions as well as private DMs.

I

In 2016, the folks at New Vector ltd. decided to make an end-to-end encrypted and federated instant messaging service. They created Riot.im (now known as Element), which communicated over a new protocol they called Matrix. Under the Matrix protocol, users on independent homeservers could communicate with each other, similar to Mastodon/ActivityPub. Also similarly, independent implementations of the protocol are able to communicate in the network. Like Misskey can communicate with Mastodon, apps such as FluffyChat can use Matrix to communicate with Element.

New Vector struggled to get Element off the ground, first positioning it as a Slack alternative. They even snapped up the declining Github-centric im service Gitter and subsequently did nothing as the entire userbase fled to Discord and Slack. When that failed, Vector pivoted to providing bespoke encrypted services to government spooks including shipping white-labeled walled gardens and trying to make Element a Zoom competitor. With a steady source of Cash, the Vector team lost interest in the rest of us. From the CEO himself:

... [Y]ou need to understand that Element has ended up making payroll by selling messaging apps to people like the UN, NATO and the French and German governments. And they value other things (reliable encryption; performant apps; UX which outperforms WhatsApp) more than building a Discord killer.

II

So where does Matrix come in? The Matrix protocol was supposed to be federated and Vector felt that adoption of the protocol with Element as the flagship client would be good PR. Vector set up the Matrix foundation with the goal of promoting federation in an ecosystem by offering the promise of an open protocol. The foundation was also put in charge of the “matrix.org” homeserver - ostensibly a peer to many homeservers but the de-facto hub for reasons that will be explained below. What the Matrix Foundation wasn’t given was the power or directive to implement features actually needed for growth. Something as basic as sharing an invite with someone off Matrix is something that’s impossible to this day. And even with Vector recently abandoning any interest in Element as a social platform, the Matrix Foundation has categorically refused to endorse an alternative (non-Element) app run by a team that cares more about growth.

They had a little bit of success in getting a few open source communities to dip their toes in, but it was fleeting. Unfortunately with a lagging featureset and inscrutable onboarding process, Matrix floundered while Discord, Telegram, and WhatsApp launched to the moon. Only the deplorables kicked off of Discord flocked to Matrix, most notably sharers of CSAM content. With a complete lack of algorithmic ranking and constant churn of discussions that fizzle out because they can’t onboard new members, the server has become a graveyard filled with unpleasant and illegal land mines.

Is there any hope for the Matrix protocol? Can any other servers step in where the Matrix Foundation failed?

The problem is the Matrix federation protocol doesn’t actually work! It can’t even ensure two servers think the same members are in a particular room, which has obvious consequences. As a result there isn't a single large community on Matrix with substantial participation over federation. While other homeservers exist, they effectively act as independent islands with communication happening between server members and little to no productive traffic transiting to other servers.

The Matrix Foundation is now a zombie, created to evangelize a protocol (that doesn’t work!) that is de-facto controlled by a company no longer interested in federation. It dutifully works on “trust and safety” to hide the CSAM so they can keep their matrix.org server running, a server which is a graveyard of dead discussions devoid of any meaningful discussion not about Matrix itself.

III - CW topics for discussion

  • With the biggest tech platforms becoming explicitly left-wing, the space for the grey and red tribes online has shrunk. Federated solutions such as Matrix and Mastodon seem like a tempting way to escape censorship, but are plagued with organizational and technical problems. Witches may find respite in these places, but only because the admins are too incompetent to successfully carry out a witch hunt. Twitter orienting itself as a free-speech platform may be the only whitepill for the current generation of deplorables.

  • Does the restriction of compliance tools such as photodna to major players act as regulatory capture against smaller players? Posting known CSAM on Discord or any other major platform will result in an instant permaban. Upstarts and deplorables don’t have the privilege of accessing these tools.

  • What is the future picture of interoperable messaging? Is it an email-like level of federation? EU has mandated interoperability but will it promote free speech or stamp it out? (anyone want an unhinged rant about "RCS"?)

  • The willful refusal to implement table stakes features in order to pursue differentiation at all costs. (invites, emojis/stickers, user statuses, cosmetics) The Slack competitors Chime by Amazon and Hangouts Chat by Google both fell victim to this, actively refusing (I have inside knowledge of this) to pursue feature parity with slack despite having blank-check level resources. I think this says something about human nature.

  • The baggage of the broken protocol has been a deadweight on the team, but momentum has the team papering over the problem with additional layers and proxies. Vector's cash cow, bespoke white-label encrypted apps for government agents, benefits literally nothing from federation. Yet these apps carry the vestigial protocol like an albatross around their necks.

Edit:

You might think "I've used Element casually and it pretty much mostly works, so it's fine" but that's missing the point. A messaging service needs to work on the first try, every time. And even if Matrix can send 99% of your messages fine, and let 99% of people join your channel, that 1% sends it directly to the garbage heap. And Matrix can't work every time.

Telegram only went down once in its entire 10+ year history, and besides that outage, not one single message for anyone in the world was shown as delivered that wasn't delivered and viewable by every member of the group.

I can't really agree with this post. I use Matrix (even host my own homeserver) and it works just fine. I don't think it'll take off among normies, but I also don't think any federated service will ever take off among normies. But for any user who is moderately tech savvy, Matrix works and works well.

A number of people in every room over federation don't see your messages. In fact they don't even know you're there. You don't even know they're there either.

Considering I personally know the people I'm in rooms with, and I know for a fact they are seeing my messages... that isn't true. Maybe in some cases, but not in my case.

If you want secure - threema or signal (they both have weaknesses, but are top tier)

If you want less secure with dubious E2E - whatsapp and viber

If you want only Putin to read your messages - Telegram

If you don't care at all - instagram/facebook

If you want to have no one to talk to - everything else

The Slack competitors Chime by Amazon and Hangouts Chat by Google both fell victim to this, actively refusing (I have inside knowledge of this) to pursue feature parity with slack

I think you are mistaken about Chat. Several of the more hated changes (the recent threading change) were done explicitly to make the app more slack-like. The puzzle that the app is still shit is left as an exercise for the reader.

I was there for the early days of Chat early access in 2016 when they first invented their cursed way of doing threads. It was pretty unanimous that the Slack way of doing threads was better, and it only took Google 5+ years to wrap their heads around that. https://blog.google/products/g-suite/meet-the-new-enterprise-focused-hangouts/

Meanwhile they still don't have partyparrot and never will.

The original chat threading was far superior because it actually allowed you to keep track of active conversations in a particular space. Now they've removed it against tons of feedback to mindlessly imitate slack.

Meanwhile they still don't have partyparrot and never will.

Corp users can upload custom emoji, but you're right that it's not going to happen for personal users.

Corp users can upload custom emoji,

Oh nice I stand corrected. They didn't have this feature for so long I just assumed they never would

The original chat threading was far superior because it actually allowed you to keep track of active conversations in a particular space.

I can certainly see that some people might prefer the old Google way, but where I worked the reception was so bad that the developer revolt was able to convince the executives to switch to slack fairly rapidly

As a daily user of Matrix (but not via Element, usually via alternative clients such as SchildiChat, FluffyChat, Cinny, and Gomuks) to participate in various communities that happen to be there and talk to some people I've met on there, I have no idea why it needed this dramatic effortpost. It's just a chat protocol that works semi-well. What's the big idea? I don't see how it's a "dead end" (mostly because you seem to have a lot of your information wrong).

The willful refusal to implement table stakes features in order to pursue differentiation at all costs. (invites, emojis/stickers, user statuses, cosmetics)

Wrong. It has invites, emojis, stickers, and user avatars (which is a form of cosmetic).

Source: Literal screenshots from SchildiChat (which is a fork of the official Element client) that I have open right now:

https://pomf2.lain.la/f/kd2ff7b8.png

https://pomf2.lain.la/f/lhwijza7.png

It dutifully works on “trust and safety” to hide the CSAM so they can keep their matrix.org server running, a server which is a graveyard of dead discussions devoid of any meaningful discussion not about Matrix itself.

Wrong. I'm in multiple Matrix chatrooms that have nothing to do with Matrix itself, on the official matrix.org server and other servers.

As a result there isn't a single large community on Matrix with substantial participation over federation.

It depends on how you define "substantial", but there is cross-server activity in the rooms I use. Sometimes it causes problems, but not that often and increasingly less often. Protocol stability is increasing, albeit gradually. Most people do sign up for the default matrix.org server, but that's just because most people do the default in almost all cases.

Honest question: Have you actually used Matrix? How much? The post reads like the classic breathless "informational" YouTuber "explainer" about something they have no firsthand experience with. Like the idea that Matrix has no emoji support... It's had them for as long as I've used it, and that's been years. Where did you get these ideas?

No, it's not as braindead "easy" as Discord. (And I'm defining "braindead 'easy'" by a standard of someone I once talked to who claimed the Element interface seemed "too complicated" because... when she went to register, it asked her to enter in all of her info (desired username, desired password, attached e-mail, etc.) all at once in 3 separate form boxes presented in rows, instead of doing it like most modern apps where they have you enter in the first desired item in the only box on the screen and then send you to a new screen that says "Good job! You did it! And now we need [next thing].", repeating for all desired info.)

That's a good thing, because Discord, like New Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, etc. is designed according to the standards of Idiocracy. (The horror! In Matrix clients I can see actual dates and timestamps for things instead of "A day ago", "A few minutes ago", "A long time ago", etc. (But no I haven't used Discord in a long time so I don't know if it has those too.))

Why does it either have to be a "Discord killer" or a "dead end"? And why do you think that having stickers and invites (which again it does have anyway) is the difference between the two? It's all the network effect. People use Discord because everyone uses Discord because everyone uses Discord. That the primary users of Matrix are those who are banned from Discord is an expected feature, not a bug.

Most people are NPCs who simply use the most popular thing. That's all it is. Matrix does have flaws, and some pretty severe ones ("Cannot decrypt message") but those flaws are almost entirely irrelevant to this fact. It could be a 5x better or 5x worse Discord clone and it probably wouldn't be much more or less popular. You mostly haven't had dramatic vanquishings of incumbent services online since the days of Myspace and Digg. That's a fact that applies to even the best attempts. The network effect is a behemoth that basically only TikTok has been able to conquer in recent memory, and even then that's mostly only because Vine's shutdown left a hole. They also still didn't kill anyone.

Honest question: Have you actually used Matrix? How much? The post reads like the classic breathless "informational" YouTuber "explainer" about something they have no firsthand experience with.

I know alot more about Matrix than you do. I've actually read the protocol docs in depth and personally talked to the devs about it.

Protocol stability is increasing, albeit gradually.

It might get better, but it can't get good, because the protocol is fundamentally broken.

Wrong. It has invites, emojis, stickers, and user avatars (which is a form of cosmetic).

You know what I mean. Emoji in the sense that Slack has them. Stickers in the sense that Telegram has them. Invites in the sense that Discord has them.

Why does it either have to be a "Discord killer" or a "dead end"?

There's an in-between but this isn't it. Matrix is a dead end because its protocol is fundamentally broken and can't be fixed.

And why do you think that having stickers and invites (which again it does have anyway) is the difference between the two? It's all the network effect.

Wrong. Nobody uses Matrix because it's impossible to ask someone to sign up for Matrix.

I know alot more about Matrix than you do. I've actually read the protocol docs in depth and personally talked to the devs about it.

Great. Then hopefully sometime you can impart that actual knowledge upon us instead of dropping "knowledge" that is transparently wrong.

It might get better, but it can't get good, because the protocol is fundamentally broken.

Care to proactively provide some evidence for this inflammatory claim?

You know what I mean. Emoji in the sense that Slack has them. Stickers in the sense that Telegram has them. Invites in the sense that Discord has them.

No I don't, because I don't use any of those. Maybe write like everyone is reading and explain next time?

Wrong. Nobody uses Matrix because it's impossible to ask someone to sign up for Matrix.

That's funny, because I've done just that, they did, and we talk sometimes, even cross-server.

the protocol is fundamentally broken.

The only Matrices im familiar with are the mathematical constructs and that Keanu Reeves movie, but i am pretty familiar with communication protocols so i would like to know what you mean by "broken" in this context.

Details of specific technical issues with the spec, for those interested (this isn't CW but since you asked). @SubstantialFrivolity @sarker @confuciuscorndog @TequilaMockingbird Unfortunately it's difficult to explain the shortcomings of the protocol in layman's terms because the protocol itself is hard to understand in layman's terms.

What matrix is supposed to be: Fundamentally, matrix advertises itself as an “eventually consistent” datastore, but in essence can be described as a distributed state machine.  When operating correctly, events are sent to the distributed machine which mutates the state. In other words, matrix is a distributed computer/virtual machine that calculates who is in a room, what their permissions are, and which messages should be displayed in the room. What it's supposed to do is akin to the operating model described in “practical byzantine fault tolerance”. Auth events are particularly important mutations, because they change which mutations are valid in the future

What matrix is in practice:

Matrix is not eventually consistent: Matrix has no method to guarantee that servers will eventually reach a consistent state.  In practice, servers do not reach consistency but instead diverge increasingly over time.  There is no mechanism for servers to tell if they are missing events.  Prev events is a weak measure, because with larger rooms where most members are lurking at any given time, the missed even is much less likely to be referenced.  In the “ideal” world of open federation, each homeserver will only be represented by a handful or even a single user in a given room.  If events are dropped in transit, or a homeserver spends some time offline, the homeservers will likely never recover those lost events.

Room membership breaks spaces, profiles-as-rooms, etc. In practice many spaces are used simply as a readonly way to distribute a list of public rooms.  With auth rules and past state snapshots, spaces with a large membership become a terrible drain on homeserver resources despite the actual information being transmitted being next to nothing. Profiles as rooms would face an even tougher challenge because the people who need to view a user’s profile are the superset of all other users in any room that the user is in. Peeking over federation to achieve one-to-many communication is a horrendous hack, and likely would never get implemented.

Availability during partitions is a bug, not a feature: Matrix is designed to attempt to function even if some homeservers are partitioned from all of the rest of the homeservers.  Fundamentally, this means that each side of the partition will have events that contradict events on the other side of the partition.  If this results in a permanent split brain, this is worse than a temporary loss of availability, because the room is now broken forever.

State resolution implies time travel/retroactive changes: The very idea of state resolution is to address contradictory events, and attempt to come up with a consistent set of events that multiple servers agree on (though as shown in the above item, this doesn’t work in practice).  This means the erasure of some contradictory events, and a revision of history for the server that believed in those erased events.

Matrix does not guard against time travel by hostile homeservers with power level: Users who currently and in the past have the power level to do so and control a hostile homeserver can rewrite history by sending events timestamped in the past and with appropriate DAG pointers.  This will also blow up the resource consumption on all other homeservers in the room, depending on how far back the rewrite happened

Calculating retroactive state with nonlinear history is intractable and ambiguous

State resolution complexity is a consequence of a lack of consensus, not a way to achieve consensus

/sync transmits a diff of the entire snapshot of the state to the client, when the client never even needs the full state. In every other messaging app model the client queries for a view of exactly what the user needs to see on-the-fly. Computing the state diff for sync is computationally intensive for no productive purpose.

Seem to me that you need to clarify what your requirements are.

So matrix advertises itself as "eventually consistent" but is that an actual design goal or is it just words words words courtesy of some MBA? "Consistant" is a very different requirement from "secure" or "fault tolerant" with very different trade-offs. From your description it sounds like the designers have priorized fault tolerance and portability over other concerns, that doesn't necessarily mean it's "broken".

It is a design goal and it's laid out as a claim in their technical specifications (which don't look like mba marketing materials to me)

https://spec.matrix.org/latest/

Eventually-consistent cryptographically secure synchronisation of room state across a global open network of federated servers and services

https://matrix.org/docs/older/faq/

at its core Matrix can be thought of as an eventually consistent global JSON database

Nevertheless, I see no world where having agreement who is and isn't in a room isn't a very basic requirement.

I'll caveat first of all that I'm not sure federation is a solution (and, thus, that Matrix's bad implementation is the problem). A clever and correct federation protocol might be technically interesting (though I'm not entirely convinced it's even possible without trimming off a lot of the core criteria, but like a lot of structural efforts to solve governance problems, there's no guarantee that it's the right fix.

In the modern sphere, federation pushes to one of three local maxima:

  • Sites disagree about moderation remove each other from federation, leading to one large group of servers that have such a wide 'shared set of values' that the different servers mean little more than having rediscovered sharding badly, and a broader set of subgroups disconnected servers that are basically invisible to anyone not on them. At best, you might Zif yourself into a half-dozen clusters. See Mastodon's various blocklists for one example.
  • Sites agree about a moderation in all meaningful ways, which means that they've rediscovered sharding badly.
  • Sites disagree about moderation, but semi-federate, such as setting a distrusted server's users to whitelist only, or add varying opt-in requirements, running into the more general problem of 'mediated group hallucinated reality': some people in your sphere seem to be talking about things you can't see or touch.

Does the restriction of compliance tools such as photodna to major players act as regulatory capture against smaller players?

While PhotoDNA restricts its use to 'qualified customers', at least in theory relatively small outfits can apply and be recognized; RocketChat has a plugin based on the assumption that your individual outfit will enable it. The on-premise version does seem more restricted, though.

There are also a few other tools with at least different availability requirements, such as Cloudflare's implementation.

But I'm also not sure that on-server images (or video) is really that critical.

What is the future picture of interoperable messaging? Is it an email-like level of federation? EU has mandated interoperability but will it promote free speech or stamp it out? (anyone want an unhinged rant about "RCS"?)

I'm not sure I understand the advantages of a lot of the more complex proposed technologies, compared to something like an IRCv2 or even a much-more-rapid self-hosted or mail-list like RSS seem much more valuable -- improve the ability to read old messages or set some messages to specific channels, implement some sort of direct client-to-client file transfer capability a la wormhole, let the server operator optionally set some up-to-server capability, give 'rooms' a better interface and discoverability, give some basic protections for account creation, done.

But even if that were The Ideal Chat Form, a large part of the problem today is that Everything's Good Enough now. Discord, Matrix, RocketChat, and even a lot of lesser-known competitors are workable for communities currently using them, the costs of transition are vast, and new Western-culture communities aren't forming anywhere near the rate they were in the USENET, Eternal September, or early Smartphone era. If you build a better mousetrap, they will not beat a path to your door. They may not even hear about you.

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.

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!

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.

With the recent news of X being banned in Brazil, it seems we're entering a new stage of the ongoing battle between major, multinational corporations and governments.

A common talking point on the left is that Musk is making a hissy fit out of Brazil, but has been happy in the past to censor for 'outgroup' countries like Turkey, China, et cetera. While I haven't looked into the truth of these claims, I think it's interesting to take them at face value, and ask why that's a problem exactly?

We have clear evidence that Facebook, Insta, Twitter, etc all heavily and not even secretly censored anti-right wing information (and even just true information) during the Covid pandemic especially, but also around other, more political topics.

So in this case, I suppose the question comes down to - if most people on the left think that censoring information during covid and around the 2020 election was fair game, why is it not fair game when someone on the 'other side' does it back to them?

Now personally I think that the censorship around covid was far more egregious, but again I'm hoping to pose a general question about freedom of speech, especially for these incredibly powerful media tech companies. Are we entering an era where elections are mostly decided based on corporate censorship? Are governments going to just cede power to the technarchs gently, or will there be more and more lawfare against them?

I don't think e.g. Brazil can really pressure someone like Musk much, but the battle between him and the EU, as well as the left side of the U.S. government, is certainly worth keeping an eye on.

Normies don't care about being anti-censorship on principle, they only care when it impacts a political opinion they personally agree with. And even then, they only raise a stink about it when their trusted political influencers tell them it's a problem. The "I just want to grill" conservatives might grumble a bit about covid censorship, but they really don't go to bat against it. Instead, half the Republican party is obsessed with trying to commit electoral suicide by loudly forcing women to have their rapist's child.

Are we entering an era where elections are mostly decided based on corporate censorship?

We've never been in the situation where elections are "mostly" decided by corporate censorship, nor will we ever be. However, it could push things lightly at the margins. But this is really no different than what the media was always capable of doing.

We've never been in the situation where elections are "mostly" decided by corporate censorship, nor will we ever be. However, it could push things lightly at the margins. But this is really no different than what the media was always capable of doing.

Right on the leadup of the 2020 election the New York Post's twitter account got suspended for publishing a story about the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop. The rationale at the time was 'misinformation' but pretty much every aspect of the story and the contents of the laptop has been verified as true and accurate.

The story was clearly newsworthy. And yet it was censored, at what we know now was likely the request of state actors.

Was the media always capable of crushing the spread of a story that a different media outlet published?

Could the marginal effects of this story spreading have impacted the outcome of the 2020 election?

Could the marginal effects of this story spreading have impacted the outcome of the 2020 election?

There's a possibility it could have, but mostly because recent elections have been decided by razor-thin margins in a handful of swing states. Almost anything can impact the outcome of elections in such a scenario, like how the Comey letter plausibly cost Clinton the election in 2016.

in your view, was the Comey letter more or less harmful than indicting Clinton on multiple felonies would have been?

The Comey letter was an example of an FBI effort to protect Clinton breaking down, due to absurd malfeasance on the part of Clinton herself and other Clinton-related individuals. The FBI did their best, but there were literally too many crimes to cover up. That is to say, subsequent crimes broke the coverup on previous crimes.

In pure polling terms, the Comey letter made Clinton go from +5ish over Trump, to ~+1ish. It'd revert a bit when he posted the "lol jk" retraction 3 days from the election, but most of the damage had already been done. By contrast, Trump being convicted of felonies did almost nothing since he's judged on an extremely generous curve. So in terms of polling, the Comey letter was far worse.

If the left was anywhere close to being as conspiratorially minded as the right is, it could have easily claimed that Comey made a conscious effort to throw the election to Trump with his October Surprise, and that the 2016 election was therefore functionally "stolen". But of course, they didn't do that.

Or many people believe the charges for Trump are trumped up kangaroo charges—not that he is graded on a generous curve.

Republicans will think any charges against Trump for any reason are politically motivated. Most don't think he's a saint or something, it's just pure culture warring -- circle the wagons and defend the leader from the outgroup no matter what.

Sure. But the NY charges were bullshit. The Florida charges may have been politically motivated but they aren’t bullshit.

Can you point to a case where the FBI offered Trump or his underlings blanket immunity in exchange for testimony that implicated only themselves, thereby forestalling any possability of prosecution?

Can you point to a case where the Logan act has been used to prosecute the underlings of politicians other than Trump?

If there is a clear disparity in how the law interacts with Trump versus other politicians, why should Trump's supporters not take this disparity into account, and object to selective application of the rules against their candidate?

More comments

Almost anything can impact the outcome of elections in such a scenario

Which certainly would explain why the sitting government would want to tip the scales so that the odds are generally more in favor of news that helps them coming out whilst stories that hurt them are more likely to be suppressed.

Literally, you're suggesting that even a tiny bit of thumb on the scales would be all it takes to, tip most otherwise stochastic elections towards the party with power to influence the media.

Well yes, it can be a factor. But then, lots of things can be factors. The original question asked:

Are we entering an era where elections are mostly decided based on corporate censorship?

Which is still a resounding "not really", same as it's always been. It's like asking if the media alone can start wars. If you squint, you can sort of see it, but you'd have to ignore a lot of other factors first if you wanted to declare it was "mostly decided" by the media (or censorship thereof).

Furthermore, how is Brazil banning X different from the US banning TikTok?

I suppose the US followed a lot more legal process around it (it was an act of Congress signed by the President) and isn't so much banning it as demanding that its principals fall under US jurisdiction, and at least the cover story is not over suppressing speech but around guaranteeing that the CCP isn't conducting surveillance on every American.

In broad strokes it feels the same though?

Tiktok is a national security threat in a way that X is not.

With Tiktok, Chinese intelligence gains a great deal of data about the U.S. military and intelligence, including the location of many or all of our secret bases and personal details about the people who work in them.

From a security standpoint, X isn't a threat because they are the least likely to share data with foreign governments. It's only a threat to those who wish to censor alternative viewpoints.

you claim to care about free speech but isn't sending information about secret bases and military personnel to the CCP a form of speech? :thinking:

jk jk

isn't the Brazil judge making a similar national security argument though? not around secrets but around public order? X is fostering hate speech and supporting the return of the deplorable Bolsanaro elements, or whatever?

It seems to me there's a non-trivial distinction between shutting down a network to try to prevent influence and data gathering by a semi-hostile foreign government, and shutting down a network to try to silence domestic political speech.

I don't think you could openly do the latter in the US. Though if Harris is elected, I won't be shocked if Musk is indicted on some tenuous securities charge to try to force him out of his companies in favor of more accommodating leadership.

All the big social media companies almost certainly employ spies that are exfiltrating data.

If I were running Chinese intelligence I'd think it smart to Br'er Rabbit the Americans about banning Tik Tok. If they actually do it then maybe they'll rest on their laurels a bit thinking they've actually accomplished something. It also provides a blow to their supposed principled stance on free speech, and the debate itself is a good distraction from my lesser known methods of collecting data.

It seems to me there's a non-trivial distinction between shutting down a network to try to prevent influence and data gathering by a semi-hostile foreign government, and shutting down a network to try to silence domestic political speech.

I'm pro free speech, but the distinction seems pretty blurry. Twitter is also gathering data, for sure, and I'm pretty sure you could also portray what they're doing as "influence". I guess it all depends on your relationship to the United States.

I justify my anti-TokTok stance by it being an ADHD-inducing brainrot machine, not by any political influence it has.

But of course, any domestic political speech you don't like can always be easily painted as influence of a (semi-)hostile foreign government. What's more, any hostile foreign government worth their chops will try to influence your domestic political speech.

But of course, any domestic political speech you don't like can always be easily painted as influence of a (semi-)hostile foreign government.

Under US law, I think this would also be fairly distinct from the TikTok ban. Allegations of foreign influence don't get you past prohibitions on viewpoint discrimination here. The TikTok ban is (probably) legal only because it hinges on a structural fact about TikTok (foreign ownership) rather than targeting any particular viewpoint.

With Tiktok, Chinese intelligence gains a great deal of data about the U.S. military and intelligence, including the location of many or all of our secret bases and personal details about the people who work in them.

This seems like a fig leaf reason.

  • US personnel are a tiny minority of the population, banning it for everyone would be disproportionate. Just tell the soldiers that they can't bring their private phones to their bases and have to use phones which vetted software instead.
  • Most info you get from phone tracking in non-restricted spaces is actually not that valuable. You could probably get the same by using classical spy work, like just observing people or putting trackers on their cars. I mean, if it was the seventies, you could try to find a serviceman who frequents the local gay night club and try to blackmail him over that, but today he would just laugh at you. You would require something heinous to entice treason (perhaps being a serial killer or child abuser), which is highly non-trivial to figure out from location data.
  • Most of all, Tiktok is hardly the only avenue for getting location data. People have a shit-ton of apps installed, facebook, whatsup, tinder, candy crush, pokemon go, etc. Probably even some other apps controlled by the PRC either directly or through letterbox companies. As a general rule, all of these apps will gather all the data they can get their grubby little hands on, and store it somewhere in the cloud. If you think that the PRC can not get access to the location records of half the US smart phones, I would call you very optimistic.

The Tiktok ban is purely about controlling the flow of information between users on the platform, and what the algorithm could push.

You could probably get the same by using classical spy work

At some point, which they've long passed, making spying easier in effect grants the spies new capabilities, even though they "already could do that". (This applies to domestic spying too. The NSA could send out an agent to surveil any target that is caught up in Echelon, but surveilling everyone makes things so much easier that there's no comparison.)

Rather than goverment vs corporations it is more about governments and companies who align agenda wise, although granted part of this process includes the goverment requesting censoring, or puttings its own people in charge.

I see it as a broader network/faction.

We are entering an increasing phase of authoritarianism. The Democrats certainly and probably several republicans, possibly even a larger share of republicans than in general, on the issue of speech critical of Jews, are after European style decimation of freedom of speech.

Moreover, the existence of centralized platforms, including platforms like this very forum where someone can decide to censor or ban people at will, it self represents a power grab against freedom of speech in a way. There is also the other side, where it also allows more communication. But meat space did have some less constraints.

I believe there is a direct relationship with moderators banning people and this being celebrated and with governments imprisoning people for hate speech.

So I see it as a struggle between figures like Musk, Durov, Torba, and a totalitarian far left faction. With someone like Musk possibly somewhat compromising with them in some areas and opposing them in others.

Another facet of this is technology which helps enable centralization of power, as also seen with A.I. models being different variations of super woke which makes it easier to take peoples freedom's away. Although if the technology was utilized differently, it could have had different effects. But the possibility of technology being used to centralize and create a totalitarian system is there and it is taken advantage of. It means we are facing a techno-totalitarian threat that is unprecedented.

Like the faction against dissent includes people in goverment and in corporations, those in favor of existence of dissenting platforms should include people both outside the goverment, but also people who ought to take influence within governance, as either legislature or executives. That way, if Brazil wants to get rid of X, but Z other country and politicians like Musk, then that raises the pressure against Brazil.

More charitably... there's one coherent position where the complaint isn't about compliance with complainer's principles, but that X-era Twitter is claiming a set of principles and not following it. You don't have to believe in free speech yourself to notice if someone wearing a Free Speech T-Shirt is also ignoring it. And in Musk's case, the economic incentives to drop principles when China or the Saudis ask are pretty overt.

((Though in practice, it's based on a strawman. For better or worse, Musk has never been a free speech absolutist so much as a formalist, and much of the high profile bad behaviors by X-era Twitter have reflected jurisdictions with weak or no formal right of free speech. And the 'higher' compliance-with-takedown numbers are Goodhart'd to hell and back: we know that the Official Requests have always been swamped by the unofficial ones.))

Less charitably, "who whom".

Too much charity. X was initially willing to censor in Brazil, though they complained about it. Then something happened, a bunch of secret orders, and Musk got his back up. Some of those orders have since been released (by a member of the US House, I believe, since X wasn't allowed to release them); they included global censorship. That is, censoring X outside of Brazil based on Brazilian court orders. That's something X has refused before, notably from Australia. So no, it isn't a matter of outgroup country vs ingroup country.

The balkanization of the internet will continue, and has been since before the arab spring when it became clear social media censorship / influence was a security threat to autocrats, an influence vector for the west, and a basis for competition between the Americans and Europeans when the Europeans identified legislative / regulatory influence over American media companies as both an economic interest (see the attempts by national regulators to charge google news linking to country media groups) and a political influence interest (see the attempts to suppress the right / require political commentary in the name of counter-misinformation). Ever since the Chinese government enforced its own geographic regulatory zone over western internet providers during the early 2000s in the buildup of the great firewall, the ability and interest to construct similar regulator sub-divisions of the internet has been a growing interest across the world.

That said, I think X will 'win' this one, in so much that I don't expect Brazil to effectively cut off access to VPNs or Satellite internet needed to actually block Twitter from the Brazilian information sphere. In addition to Musk being able to write off the loss, Musk is both providing an internet service (X) but is also an internet service provider via Starlink, and even if the current US administration doesn't like Musk politically, it really, really likes the premise of Starlink, which allows access to X, and nothing Brazil will do will outweigh the Americans' interest in bypassing the regulatory firewalls via space network capacity.

Starlink (and the military extension starshield) have direct national security implications for the US government. You can see the direct military application implications in Ukraine, where it has given the Ukrainian substantial network access and military advantages the Russians struggle to degrade, and these are generalizable anywhere the US either wants to operate or wants partners or allies to be able to operate. These capabilities have non-kinetic implications either, such as natural disaster functions when land-based networks may be knocked down, critical infrastructure integration if a cyber-attack takes down land-based network connections, and so on. Starlink's resiliency and ability to survive / mitigate common disruption vectors is much of the point.

But Starlink also counters that balkanization of the internet, as a space-based, US-based, internet provider counters many of those balkanization efforts of regulatory enforcement in a way that the US government wants to happen to other internet-balkanization countries.

Regional internet regulation largely worked against internet service providers when the companies had to be working within infrastructure in the countries doing the regulating. When the company and the country disagreed, it was the company that bore the cost of enforcement, since it could be fined / have its critical infrastructure seized if it was found to violate laws. This is central to, say, the regulatory demands to keep personal data in-country (as opposed to the US)- where the infrastructure is matters. And regional internet regulation makes the companies pay the cost for stepping out of line, either in fees or losing access to the infrastructure.

But Starlink reverses the enforcement cost. Beyond freezing Starlink assets in a country itself, Starlink satellites are literally in outer space. Unless Brazil intends to literally launch a satellite to take down a starlink satellite, it's going to stay in space... and if Brazil were to try that, SpaceX- again owned by Musk- could throw up many more satellites for a fraction of the cost.

That leaves a general country two main avenues.

One is to try and take Starlink to court in the US and have the US enforce a shut-off to the country. This would almost certainly fail because this is the exact sort of scenario of maintaining access to the US internet that the US government wants anti-US countries to be unable to stop. While there are opportunities for the knives to come out for Musk, the ability of anyone in the world to access the US internet regardless of what their own national government wants is something the US has very, very strong incentives to maintain for strategic interest and ideological reasons. The same regulatory logic that allowed other countries to pressure US companies to regulate speech in their own countries is what protects US regulatory pre-eminence in its own market, which just so happens to happens to include it's satellites.

The other option is to go after Starlink / X-VPN users in the country itself. Which is where the enforcement cost starts to add up. Far more intrusive, suppressive, and aggressive governments than Brazil have tried to block satellite dishes and access to global comms, and the costs of doing so are non-trivial both economically and in social-political costs, especially when Starlink offers a service that is exceptionally useful the further away from government-infrastructure you are.

And this is without the internal politics of Brazil coming into play. The Supreme Court judge can ban X and demand fines on people who use VPNs on it, but that's a separate matter from an electorally-sensitive administration actually enforcing such things. It turns out that voters in relatively free democracies tend not to like governments who have huge poverty and crime issues instead sending the police in to check what sort of satellite dish you have. The Brazilian government's electoral margins aren't that strong, and the laxer enforcement is, the more effective X remains at functionally skirting the ban.

How long before authoritarian or neutral countries have their own version of Starlink? The advantages they give, if they're truly as big as you say, seem like they would attract the interest of other state actors to co-opt them. At that point, limiting Starlink is just a matter of banning its terrestrial assets in the country, which is easy enough. Normies can then switch to Chinalink or Indialink or whatever and not be that bothered.

Granted, this might not apply to the current situation, but Musk is playing a dangerous game here by directly incentivizing the creation of competitors.

You can't use frequencies in a country without that country's permission.

How exactly does this apply to what I said? This is a genuine question of clarification, not an accusation.

It seems like that should make Star Link trivial to block if the Brazilians really wanted to then.

Sure, yeah, hypothetically. But if Starlink operated in Brazil without permission, how exactly is the Brazilian government going to stop them?

Let's say I have a Starlink terminal in a house in Brazil. What now does the Brazilian government do to stop me from using it? They certainty don't have a panopticon or security state so thorough that they'll be in my home checking my electronics for frequency allocation violations.

At that point, limiting Starlink is just a matter of banning its terrestrial assets in the country, which is easy enough.

That's the very hard part. The terrestrial asset of starlink is basically a satellite dish that goes for a few hundred USD, and will generally be indistinguishable from other generic satellite dishes. From the consumer end, the biggest difficulty is to establish a payment link, and there are long established market methods to enable that in ways that avoid general financial system monitoring, such as buying pre-pay cards with cash. And that's if anything is charged at all. There's nothing preventing, say, a government from broadcasting for free.

For a frame of reference, Iran in 1994 banned satelite dishes in general, and actively jams attempts to broadcast into the country. In 2011, BBC Persia was reportedly having around 7.2 million weekly Iranian viewers, which was about 10% of the population. As of 2023, that number is reportedly around 18 million 'in Iran and around the world'.

In short, even in an authoritarian theocracy with extremely intrusive and abusive human rights conditions and active jamming, you're still looking at significant information penetration. Countries with less resourcing of the suppression-aparatus and less will to suppress will do even worse.

How long before authoritarian or neutral countries have their own version of Starlink?

You don't satellite-based internet to access the partions of the internet- you can legally access the Great Firewall of China from across the world already. Even North Koreans can access the internet, if they use the proper protocols / minder programs / etc. Regulatory internet barriers are for keeping people in, and it's the information they want to keep out.

Which brings the question of 'what is the point?' / 'why would you bring a lot of outsiders in?'

A Sino-link that exists to keep law-abiding Chinese in the Sino-web is unnecessary for anyone except the most remote / unconnected people. A Sino-link that brings in any Mandarin-typing outsider is an ideological contamination hazard.

Granted, this might not apply to the current situation, but Musk is playing a dangerous game here by directly incentivizing the creation of competitors.

The creation of competitors is a boon, not a malus, for stopping / rolling back internet partition. If everyone has access to all the different internet broadcasters, and if everyone defends their right to ignore the regulatory pressures of other countries, then no one can enact a regulatory monopoly even as everyone has enhanced access to non-approved media.

First off, thanks for replying. I always find your comments to be well thought out and high-quality.

My follow up would be to question if the situation with Iran is really analogous. The Great Firewall of China is fairly easily bypassed for anyone who wants to break containment, but most normies in China simply don't care enough to do so. Most people just want to browse whatever sites they're used to, and as long as they can do that then the other details are immaterial. So say a neutral (e.g. Indian or Russian) competitor to Starlink is born which promises to fulfill the wishes of whatever censorship regime a country may have. The government could then mandate that satellite dishes have to be of whatever visually-distinct partner brand is cooperating with them. Of course they'll never get 100% compliance, as people could disguise their dishes or whatever, but most people simply won't care about that enough to bother.

A complete banning of satellite dishes like Iran did would be costly as there are presumably a bunch of reasons why people would have them. But if the state tells people to switch from one brand to another, that's an entirely different story.

Thank you. The compliment is returned, and I appreciate reading your posts even when I disagree.

To the topic-

The point on Iran is that even when enforcement is done by a regime willing to brutalize the public, it's not feasible to keep satellite dishes out. Brazil is much able to do that, and that's before you hit the point that the more authorized satellite dish variants you have on the market, the easier it is to just hide your dish within the mess (or just out of easily inspectable sight). If someone is using the same technology base, this would be like trying to regulate cars by demanding distinctive tailpipes.

It takes a huge, system-defining prioritization to do a Chinese-style surveilance state to do such a thing... and as you note, even that is not enough to keep information out.

Which then comes back to 'what are you spending so much money and political costs for, exactly?'

Which applies to both the Starlink-suppression, and the Starlink-'competitor'.

The value of starlink as a commercial service is the internet access without having to build/have infrastructure on that part of the planet. If you are on that part of the planet, it is in many respects more profitable / sensible to just... build the infrastructure on that part of the planet. Which is what China already does through companies like Huawei and 5G networks, which produce separate geopolitical benefits that come from having your fingers on all the data. Brazil paying China to build a Sino-link to provide Brazilian internet is directly competing with money to just, well, paying China less per network capacity to build better Brazilian internet that can be physically overseen by Brazil. Corruption on such a scale isn't impossible, but it is stupid.

(Especially since the only cost-competitive space agency able to launch the satellites in the foreseeable future is... SpaceX.)

It also doesn't address the issue of ideological interest of the Americans to back Starlink on this. Starlink won't go out of business if there's business competition, because part of Starlink's value to the American government is expanding the information sphere, and it (or things like it) can practically be guaranteed funding regardless of competiting power states. You may even see the US subsidize Starlink (or equivalent) satellite-internet at a global scale in the future, just to undercut the businness of others. Providing American-media-sphere access across the globe is an interest in and of itself, no matter how many strategic competitors set up their own, and especially if they do.

The Chinese Thousand Sails/G60 project just got its first batch of satellites launched earlier this month, though I don’t know the target timeline for operational use.

Starlink is not a trivial undertaking. It's entirely possible that chinalink is outside the realm of possibility.

"Brazil-link" is certainly a stretch...

At that point, limiting Starlink is just a matter of banning its terrestrial assets in the country, which is easy enough.

The newer versions of starlink have laser cross communication capabilities, so no terrestrial assets in the country are required. So you really would have to hunt down the end user dishes one by one.

The balkanization of the internet will continue, and has been since before the arab spring when it became clear social media censorship / influence was a security threat to autocrats, an influence vector for the west

The Arab Spring was irrelevant, and if that's all that happened, western goverents would be more than happy to preserve the Internet in it's old form. What signed the death warrant on the Old Internet was Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. The establishment thought that their foreign and domestic enemies will forever remain behind the curve in the "marketplace of ideas", when that assumption was disproven, they opted to take the autocratic route themselves.

A few disparate thoughts.

I suspect that the arrest of the Telegram guy in France was a trial balloon/shot across the bow to show that Western Countries can use a, for lack of a better term, "Chinese-Style" authority to physically detain extremely wealthy oligarchs and celebrities to try to reign in their open resistance to government edicts. Compare the "Russian-style" authority where they just chuck you out a window or crash your plane.

My model of how centralized governments think holds that NO such government will tolerate a serious power base outside of its own control, which includes any 'platform' or organization that, if activated, could attempt to seize political control of said government from the current holders (organizing to vote for particular candidates counts too!). The instant such an alternative power base seems to arise, the existing government will seek to either seize it, destroy it, or disrupt it.

They will do so with even more urgency in times of war or serious unrest, and we're sliding into such times.

It was all fun and games when tech companies were helping produce more wealth and providing said government with neat tools to e.g. surveil the public and detect crimes, or analyze economic data, or better weapons to fight their enemies. But the balance of power in the relationship is becoming untenable... from the government's point of view.

I believe the U.S. and European governments strongly feel like the tech industry represents such a power base, or at least that they provide the platforms that dissidents and political opponents can use to organize their supporters into effective movements that can then undermine existing power bases. And said governments can pay lip service to classical liberal ideals while plotting to disrupt those opponents and bring those platforms to heel all the same. End of the day this will mean threatening the people in charge of and operating those platforms with serious consequences. Which is hard to do if those people are extremely wealthy and generally popular, and your country has laws that inhibit the government from arresting citizens and taking their stuff on a whim.

The one thing I know for certain is that they will NOT simply stand by and allow power to accrue outside their hands until it actually destabilizes their authority.

Finally, I have literally never felt quite this much shivering terror at the realization that the group who believes in something like unrestricted free speech even and ESPECIALLY against the efforts of government to 'protect' us... is a tiny school of fish in a sea of indifference, patrolled by many censorious sharks.

I was aware that globally the concept or ideal of free speech was vastly a minority preference, but I didn't have much concern about what a Cameroonian or Indonesian thought was okay to say or not say. But even in the West, even in the United States itself it feels like I've got maybe 20% of the population that would honestly vote for a provision protecting free speech if one didn't already exist.

The left was never in favor of it but now they've gained enough institutional control to silence enemies on various platforms, the liberals have abandoned it in the name of stopping or getting Trump, the moderates just want to grill, and the conservatives/MAGA are generally shaky allies on this particular point.

With all the tools for censorship that are now turnkey ready to implement across the board, starts to feel like it is just a question of whom will be in charge when the governments of the world lock down speech entirely.

Why are you surprised? It seems obvious to me that "unrestricted free speech should be legal" is no different from "you can't defend yourself from my swing until and unless it connects".

Because the west is still marketing itself as supporting free speech, and claiming it's different from / better than the autocrats in other parts of the world.

Though I suppose I agree that by now one shouldn't be surprised.

What were your beliefs about freedom of speech and the importance of government power to crush dissent in 2007?

"unrestricted free speech should be legal" is no different from "you can't defend yourself from my swing until and unless it connects".

I would characterize it more as "It should be legal for any given person to speak to any given willing audience without interference." Trebly so on the internet, where generally an audience seeks out a speaker and the speech doesn't interfere with anyone who hasn't actively sought it out.

The right to free speech has as a necessary corollary the right to hear. As in, a speaker and a listener/the audience both have an interest in the right to free speech, and both are 'infringed' when a speaker is censored.

That's less the case when someone starts throwing punches, there is no consent, implied or otherwise, to receive a punch, vs. the consent to hear a given speaker. Unless it is in an agreed upon boxing match, of course.

I'm sure you could find a listener who's interested in hearing the nuclear codes, or, as another user put it more saliently, the coordinates of a military unit at the frontline that you're entrusted with. The listener's right and interest to hear things is not exactly under question.

What's under question is why any society would want to have free season on coordinating violence/malfeasance. Classify all communication as "speech" and thus "free", and you get bizarre anarchy where no opsec can be enforced and no threat can be reacted to until it is made true on. Make exceptions, and you get to argue over the extent of the exceptions.

I approach you in a dark alley from behind and tell you to empty your pockets with my hand half a second away from retrieving my open carry gun and shooting at you. That should be legal, shouldn't it? All I did was speak to you. If you felt threatened, that's entirely on you. And besides, don't you have the right to hear what I have to say?

I'm sure you could find a listener who's interested in hearing the nuclear codes, or, as another user put it more saliently, the coordinates of a military unit at the frontline that you're entrusted with. The listener's right and interest to hear things is not exactly under question.

I mean, I still support contractual rights to restrict the spread of information, such as nondisclosure agreements and even certain forms of copyrigght.

The constant tension between the "INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE!" philosophy and "Some information can cause harm" is everpresent.

I approach you in a dark alley from behind and tell you to empty your pockets with my hand half a second away from retrieving my open carry gun and shooting at you. That should be legal, shouldn't it? All I did was speak to you. If you felt threatened, that's entirely on you. And besides, don't you have the right to hear what I have to say?

Ahh, this takes me back to arguing this stuff on 4chan and reddit back in the day.

What is your specific intent in uttering these words? Is it to give me some useful information that I desire to hear or that I requested to hear? If not, then surely I am entitled to take that into account when I judge how to respond to your speech.

"It should be legal for you to utter those words" and "it should also be legal for me to shoot you on the spot if you utter those words" are not in fact in tension.

In this case, the restriction on speech is more practical than anything. You wouldn't utter those words for fear of being shot. No third party needs to 'interfere.'

Is it to give me some useful information that I desire to hear or that I requested to hear?

You would probably welcome an opportunity to hand over your valuables without a fight, rather than get shot/stabbed wordlessly and have no choice in the matter.

You wouldn't utter those words for fear of being shot.

I'm sure you're very badass, but I do believe the advantage is on the robber's side here. I specified that the gun is holstered because I expected a gotcha about brandishing, but really, brandishing is a fake crime as well.

More generally, I do support shooting people who called you a slur on Twitter. Perhaps if more progressives did that, people wouldn't give them such information that they didn't desire to hear.

I'm sure you're very badass, but I do believe the advantage is on the robber's side here.

Ironically you've presented a scenario that I can claim expertise in, since one of my jobs is in fact self defense instructor. This precise scenario is one I have thought about and trained on literal hundreds of times.

The calculation I have to make is based on whether I think your gun is real, whether it is loaded, whether you have the wherewithal to pull the trigger, and, ultimately, if I'm faster than you. Which I probably am because, as stated above, I train for this.

And in the vast majority of hypothetical cases I would... hand over my stuff without a protest and let you go on your way. Simply the easiest resolution once you've pressed the matter. But you have acted in such a way that I will consider ALL options on the table. And my calculation will adjust based on whether I have loved ones with me and whether I have reason to believe you would kill anyway.

Simply put, YOU have to make a calculation too, and if your calculation has already included the possibility of being shot yourself and you STILL take this action, I can't speak well of your judgment.

And once YOU have made a statement that shows you are willing to kill me (or someone else) to obtain mere possessions, by my perfectly, coldly rational logic you have forfeited any argument for why you shouldn't be killed in return, so the only question is whether I think that is necessary to protect myself.

Similarly, if you claim that you want to suppress the speech of others, I would HAPPILY support restricting your speech because you can't really complain about being treated the way you already agreed its fair to treat others.

Symmetry is nice, like that.

I do support shooting people who called you a slur on Twitter. Perhaps if more progressives did that, people wouldn't give them such information that they didn't desire to hear.

It sure would. But you've already stated that its on twitter, so the means to do so would certainly not be present unless you go to the effort of locating and hunting that person down, which seems like a LOT OF FUCKING EFFORT when you could just walk away from the screen. Or you could just use twitter's own tools to mute the words you don't want to hear/read and block the people you don't want to interact with.

So there's a certain level of implied consent if you consider a particular set of words offensive enough to kill over... and yet you don't avail yourself of readily available tools that will prevent you from seeing those words at all if you don't wish.

I now recall that we've disagreed before on the meaning of the word "fairness". Yet again, you seem to have your own definition for "symmetry" as well.

It is not "symmetrical" to kill in the process of robbery and to kill in self-defense. The latter is a more "fair" act, even in a situation that is not evenly matched. I doubt even your training would provide you with the means to quickly and accurately evaluate any attacker in order to make your self-defense perfectly, rationally "symmetrical" (the classic home invasion scenario - few on this forum would say they'd hold themselves back from shooting the invader, even if he's not obviously armed and threatening). This does not matter in a sane legal code because as one who has not initiated the aggression, you are in the right.

Similarly, if you claim that you want to suppress the speech of others, I would HAPPILY support restricting your speech because you can't really complain about being treated the way you already agreed its fair to treat others.

Am I correct to assume that if I want to suppress others expressing a certain set of ideas A, you would support restricting my speech entirely? That's hardly symmetrical, and not very fair either. What would be symmetrical and fair is to support restricting my speech around the set of ideas A. You'll find that many people readily agree to such proposals. In my view, that supports my interpretation of fairness. People tend to agree to fair counterproposals and reject unfair ones.

Or you could just use twitter's own tools to mute the words you don't want to hear/read and block the people you don't want to interact with.

I don't think this can be done before encountering the random person who'd say the words to me. Similarly, you can't shoot a robber before they appear and try to rob you. Instead, you rely on implicit intimidation to deter robbers. Instead of putting the onus on every possible robbery victim to "block" them, many would-be robbers decide not to rob in the first place.

More comments

What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats