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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29972 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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(I posted this in last week's thread this morning having forgotten that today was Monday. Reposting in this week's thread.)

Nowadays, whenever I meet a woman or gay man who's millennial or younger, I'm counting the seconds until they ask me "so, what's your sign?" Among young Western women, belief in astrology seems to be right up there with an interest in true crime podcasts and Taylor Swift.

I have the impression that this is a fairly recent development, like in the last decade or so. When I was in secondary school I don't remember any of my female classmates expressing any interest in astrology, and I sort of remember the general opinion was that reading your horoscope in a tabloid was seen as a low-status spinster thing to do.

Three questions:

  1. Has there actually been a recent resurgence in interest in astrology? Or is my gut feeling actually mistaken, and interest in astrology has actually been constant over the past twenty years?

  2. If "yes" to the previous question, what are the underlying causes? If astrology underwent a resurgence in popularity over the last decade, why so? Is it a "god-shaped hole" effect (when people give up organised religion, they immediately start looking for something else to take its place)? I've heard that there was a lot of VC money floating around for astrology apps a few years ago, could that be behind it? Or is that an effect rather than a cause?

  3. Why is it such a gendered phenomenon? I literally don't think I've ever been sincerely asked what my sign is by a straight man - 100% of people who've asked me have been female (or far more rarely, gay/bi men). Is this true everywhere, or am I in a bubble and it's a less gendered phenomenon in other regions? I wonder how it ties into a tendency among women that they seem to enjoy the act of classifying people into "types": a few years ago when I was single, something like half of the dating app profiles I saw had their Myers-Briggs listed somewhere.

  1. It's definitely been increasing. I noticed the trend start somewhere during the COVID lockdowns, and it seems to have spread at an accelerated rate since then.
  2. I blame the Tik tok. It seems concentrated in younger women. These same women all got tattoos at the same time as each other, and started carrying metal cups at the same time as each other, started shoving bull rings up their noses at the same time as each other, and claiming they were neurodivergent at the same time as each other.
  3. In my experience women consume a lot more algorithmically driven short form video based social media than men.

neurodivergent

This one really, really bugs me, I see it as stolen valor. Also, they're still unforgiving of the neurodivergence of others.

"My neurodiversity makes me exciting, quirky and unable to be held accountable for any of my moral shortcomings; your neurodiversity makes you nerdy and lame; his neurodiversity makes him a creepy rapist."

I recently had a pretty negative experience with a woman who genuinely WAS neurodivergent, moreso than my awkward ass. I found it incredibly disheartening to find out that she didn't have the same "resents normies but desperately wants to be accepted by them" complex as me, almost as if despite her awkwardness the world had still welcomed and cherished her.

Me and neurodivergent women:

"Oh, what I thought was eye-fucking this whole time was just you being slightly autistic."

Reminds me of that tweet like

Short women: Tee hee, I can't get things off the top shelf ha tee hee!

Short men: The streets will run red with their BLOOD for how they treated me.

False symmetry. Height is a masculine trait, and its absence is a feminine trait. The counterpart to short men isn't short women, it's tall women - short men and tall women are both wrongly-heighted. The counterpart to short women isn't short men, it's tall men - short women and tall men are both superbly-heighted.

The point I was making is that women can be afflicted with a particular trait which presents no obstacle to their socially flourishing (autism, being short) but the same trait can often be ruinous if a man is afflicted with it. Maybe tall women have a rough time of it, who knows - the parts of the internet I frequent seem to actively fetishise them in an only half-joking way, many unusually tall models and other female celebrities are widely considered sex symbols (e.g. Taylor Swift, Claudia Schiffer, Famke Janssen, Elle MacPherson, Brooke Shields, Sigourney Weaver, Uma Thurman, Nicole Kidman, Gisele Bündchen, Rebecca Romijn), and I'm not aware of any equivalent to complimentary adjectives like "Amazonian" or "statuesque" for short men.

Oh, to be clear, I didn't mean to imply that tall women are precisely equivalent to short men, or that tall men are precisely equivalent to short women - different sexes are different. It's just closer than the other way around.

Do women mock other women for being tall? That could be the source of any reported rough time.

I've heard tall women essentially complain that it narrows their dating options. It's a reasonable desire for her partner to be taller than her. Luckily, most men are taller than most women. Short men can date slightly short-er women.

A 5'2" woman expecting any partner she has to be 6'6" is an unreasonable desire. She's allowed to have that preference, but her having difficulty finding a partner isn't some grand injustice, it's self-inflicted.

I'm not aware of any equivalent to complimentary adjectives like "Amazonian" or "statuesque" for short men.

I believe they've started calling them "short kings," but I'm not convinced it's complimentary.

I found it incredibly disheartening to find out that she didn't have the same "resents normies but desperately wants to be accepted by them" complex as me

Why?

This complex doesn't seem particularly helpful or conducive to positive outcomes, and I'd say that her lack of it seems more psychologically healthy. It seems like you're aware that this is a maladaptive pattern - is it something you're working on resolving?

Well, instead she just resents normies and lives in a leftist hugbox.

This is an adult woman who complains that straight men always assume she's not an aromantic demi-asexual, who hasn't yet learned that most straight men interpret her eye-fucking, sharing intimate details, and saying the other person is pretty as flirting.

Emotionally and descriptionally true from the female first person perspective.

The usual Women’s Wonderfulness and infantilization vs. the male burden of performance and accountability. The same behaviors that would get men mocked and ostracized can be forgiven, overlooked, neutral, or even moderately positive for women.

I can confirm both being asked by women (at work!) and being shocked because I thought it was low status.

My theory is that it’s not so much a “god-shaped hole” as an “identity-shaped hole.”

The other day, I forget where, I saw an ad to find out my “work personality type.” Astrology, Myers-Briggs, various personality quizzes do a couple things I think

  • they let you out yourself and others in a box
  • they seemingly outsource introspection—why “know thyself” when you can read it in a book?
  • they give you a narrative for yourself

It’s not completely unrelated to god I think, but more about missing meaning, purpose, and something to tell you who you are.

It's not really low status from my experience. Most of the young women I know that talk about it are liberals in the PMC.

Notably though most of them aren't really committed to it; I get the impression it's more of a fun topic and that if I said I don't believe that I wouldn't get much pushback on it.

Same group is definitely into all of the personality tests though, and they take those more seriously.

I feel like I encounter it less since I got out of the dating game. I don't really meet many young women anymore, and they were the main source of astrologists in my life. The comedians I've heard joke about it also tend to be young and single guys.

Are you suddenly more exposed to young women for some reason?

I'm pretty sure it's a phenomenon for most women, not just young ones. Its just that the young ones haven't picked up on how men think it is silly. My mother was really into astrology stuff, but the level of eye roll my dad gave off when she brought it up meant she preferred to talk to her children about it. My mom is also religious, and a microbiologist PhD. I've asked her about conflicting internal beliefs before, they don't seem to bother her.

Not a god-shaped hole. There is a witch-shaped hole. Its filled with astrology, seance, ghosts, crystals, etc. Its a common quirk among women, if you are straight I'd suggest making your peace with it and trying to ignore it.

Are you suddenly more exposed to young women for some reason?

I recently changed jobs, but in my previous job most of the colleagues I was friendly with were women in their mid-twenties.

My MIL and SIL honestly believe that a person could commit with their dogs on a spirit level. They sent a picture to the “dog psychic” who texted back basic cold reading techniques. My MIL and SIL feel for it hook, line, and sinker.

My MIL told my mother about it while at a family dinner. My mother became deeply concerned — she was concerned they were speaking with demons!

I was the only one who said it was an obvious fake!

Yeah I almost added "cats" to my list of witch shaped hole things, but I think the more accurate one would just be "familiars" aka deep spiritual connections to household pets.

aka deep spiritual connections to household pets.

This one seems to be a pretty common one, historically. I don't think of myself as very witchy, but I admit getting touched when I read ancient epitaphs for pets: "I am in tears, while carrying you to your last resting place as much as I rejoiced when bringing you home in my own hands fifteen years ago." Or reading about one of Muhammad's companions who was so devoted to his cats that he got nicknamed "father of kittens."

Not a god-shaped hole. There is a witch-shaped hole.

This. The common people are absolutely obsessed with superstitio and always have been, and it’s gendered a bit female. Essential oils woo moms are the same thing. But, uh, bodybuilder bro lore is also the same thing.

Men tend to have a lot of superstition around gambling and sports teams. The cryptozoology and xenology "researchers" also tend to skew male.

I do wonder if there is a similar effect with women where enough social approbation will make people hide their magical beliefs. But people are much more ready and willing to make fun of men, so the magic beliefs get repressed harder.

I think it's tied in a bit with the neuroticism trait, which does skew more towards women.

Essential oils woo moms are the same thing. But, uh, bodybuilder bro lore is also the same thing.

I've been waiting for the perfect prompt for my erotica-trained LLM. Thank you, sir.

Just to even the scales a little, there is a conservative female coded astrology stand in: Lord of The Rings.

I was never a fan of either the books or the movies, but it's comes up all over the place (there are now like 5 different VC backed companies named after minor elements / characters --- Anduril, Palantir, etc.) As I understand it, Tolkien did intend for it to be a Christian allegory, but didn't want to make it as thinly veiled as things like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.

That extent to which that is true or not doesn't matter. Conservative women get their fill of woo-woo, but in the context of being a princess / queen in a holy war against Satanic forces. They might join you in rolling their eyes at astrology, but will have strong thoughts about Galadriel.

I mean to what extent is being fans of a fictional world whose themes appeal to them comparable to astrology? LotR doesn't come with some woo-woo belief system attached.

The woo-woo belief system of astrology isn't a genuinely held belief system by 90% of astrology "practitioners." Elsewhere in the thread someone pointed out that the women who have astrology apps or know all of their moon signs don't truly believe that random musing on the constellations have causal validity. It's sort of a fun pastime paired with a "good vibes" aesthetic.

I'd say that's what LoTR is to many of its fans. It's not a cohesive belief system beyond being a re-telling of a Christian narrative. Nobody actually thinks they're fighting that bad guy spooky ghosts thingies (wraiths? Nazgul?). But it's fun to dig into the guts of the aesthetic.

Tolkien vehemently denied that he was writing any sort of allegory in the preface of LOTR, though I guess stating things plainly is the best way to be interpreted to have meant the opposite.

I offer no argument here. Like I said, I was never really a fan.

Let's say Tolkien didn't want to be an allegory. I surrender. My point was wrong. Please forgive my fundamental stupidity.

But people still treat it as a Christian Allegory. And some of those people woo it up.

I apologize if my counter came off as needlessly pedantic.I do enjoy both books and most of the films and feel a certain misplaced responsibility. Your wider point is of course evident.

As a data point, there's a giant astrology / witchy section of books very close to the register at my local Barnes and Noble (I live in a 65% Biden voting area in a purple metro in a purple state, for what that's worth... very Karen territory). So at the very least, there are marketers who believe that there is an audience there, and it's the trendy kind of audience that you try to extract money from to keep your ailing business afloat.

That entire store at this point gives off serious anti-straight-male vibes, because of the books they stock and foreground, really. Which I suspect is more a reflection on the current publishing industry and the audience that still goes into book stores like that to buy books than anything particular about B&N. But as someone who reads a huge amount and loves books and bookstores (but, well, libgen, so hey, I concede my role as part of the problem), it is seriously depressing to be there.

a reflection on the current publishing industry and the audience that still goes into book stores like that

In my neck of the woods, that's best described as "people who want overpriced coffee and will suffer being near books to get it".

my local Barnes and Noble (I live in a 65% Biden voting area in a purple metro in a purple state, for what that's worth... very Karen territory)... That entire store at this point gives off serious anti-straight-male vibes

My local B&N is also in a ~65% Biden area, blueish-purple metro in a purple state, at a declining suburban mall with a majority-minority attendance and I tend to be a little surprised at how... normal it is? Like exceedingly well-balanced, here's the rack of Biden books and here's the rack of Trump books, here's the Christian section and here's the astrology section, etc. The staff pick notes lean more Internet Progressive or Karen-y, but less so than some of the libraries. Also the manga section keeps growing. I'm not surprised that American comics seem less popular than ever, but I am a little surprised at the manga growth.

The indie bookstores in the wildly more expensive and whiter neighborhoods, those are the ones that exude "you do not belong here."

Also the manga section keeps growing. I'm not surprised that American comics seem less popular than ever, but I am a little surprised at the manga growth.

If the staff are very woke, this doesn't surprise me. How can you be pro-trans without also being pro-anime?

How can you be pro-trans without also being pro-anime?

What exactly do you think is the connection? And what are your thoughts on the converse of this statement?

All I know is that my friend was doing a rotation in child psychology and whenever one of her patients was a teenage boy who was having gender issues, she would think "so he's autistic and spends all his time playing Minecraft and watching anime". And she was always right.

I don't know why watching anime seems to set so many people on the trans pipeline, I just know that it does. I know that being trans and watching anime both have very large overlaps with autism (in both boys and girls). I also know that there is an awful lot of hentai which depicts extremely feminine and sexualised women who also have very large penises, which perhaps instils in teenaged boys unrealistic expectations for how their own transition will go.

I think it's correlation rather than causation. i.e. I think both are caused by some underlying independent cognitive/personality trait. I was having sexual fantasies about being a woman years before I started watching anime or interacting with the online anime community (and certainly long before I knew what futa was!).

I can certainly agree though that both autistic and trans people are overrepresented among anime fans and in other adjacent socially reclusive hobbies.

A futa for those not aware, is short for futanari referring to a character with male and female physical characteristics, usually female anatomy and male genitalia.

Futa is futatsu or two. Nari seems to be derived from naru or 成る "to become". Futanari is therefore "dual form" or similar. It is not the accepted term for "hermaphrodite" but has a similar meaning. It's mostly an anime term.

Like most Japanese terms futanari gets shortened by the Japanese. I guess those extra two mora are just too much.

Seeing a clarification like this in the comments feed makes me dread scrolling down to see the context of why it was necessary. Good job.

is short for futanari referring to a character with male and female physical characteristics, usually female anatomy and male genitalia

And more specifically/notably, hyper-exaggerated female physical characteristics (and also hyper-exaggerated dicks). Futa without these things is rare (though more generally that is what traps are, and why "draw a girl call it a boy" is a standard criticism of that subject matter).

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My sons used to play Minecraft (and Fortnite, and currently Mariocart or some soccer game) and also watch anime. They're like most boys their age in Japan. If there were something in these that were correlated to being trans, I'd have expected it to have manifested more clearly by now. Your friend doing child psychology rotations may have noticed a trend with "western" kids, but that, as has been said, is probably correlation rather than any kind of causal mechanism. Even within anime there are many, many styles and genre, and just as many in manga if not more. (Manga = print or otherwise cel-based drawn 2D comics, and Anime cartoons, in other words moving, as the term animation suggests.)

I'm assuming neither of your sons is autistic or on the spectrum?

Not that I've noticed.

I don't think there are any good stats on this, but most estimates of trans people in the population put it at around 0.5% or less. If anime increased the likelihood of identifying as trans to just 0.75%, that would represent a gigantic increase in likelihood while still making it vanishingly unlikely that any given anime fan is trans or even seems trans.

I do buy into the theory that whatever correlation exists is due to them being both downstream of autism, though.

It isn't just futa hentai, there's also a disturbing trend with non-sexual yuri (lesbian) stuff.
It attracts boys and failsons who are struggling to be men, feeds them "cute girls doing cute things with other cute girls", barrages them with anti-male propaganda, and sorts them into toxic groomer communities.

Do you remember that famous Tumblr post that went "for all my lovely trans-girls who need to hear this: you do not have the Male Gaze, you cannot Sexually Objectify women, your love is Pure, you are not Gross for looking at women because you are not a man"? Millions of poor boys who fell into the manga/anime tumblr-sphere grew blasted by a firehose of that shit, usually backed up by groomer teachers.
Tumbler's long past its peak now, but the scene has mostly moved to discord, where kid-games-for-autist servers have softcore porn and roleplay channels, and being "queer" gives predators total immunity to rules.

Those communities were actually a lot worse than the porn ones, because A) they didn't exclude minors, B) they enabled predators who pulled the "heckin wholesome trans-girl egg-hatcher uwu" act, and C) got a ton of institutional support from e.g. school librarians trying to bait kids into reading "queer affirming comics' (you can see endless examples of this on librarian reddit)

Source: I knew people in Yuri manga translation, and saw the browser history of a few boys who were getting their first porn from /r/egg_irl reddit predators they met on minecraft discords.
And I know far less about it, but I'm confident there's an equivalent "boys love" pipeline for girls. They're all the same types of awkward weeb girls who read that stuff back when I was in school, but now with support from teachers who groom them into "oh you must be a boy if you like reading about boys so much. Let's get you a haircut and some jeans but don't tell your parents tee hee"

TL;DR if you have a kid who spends too much time on the PC and has started reading weird tranny-adjacent stuff, literally just check his discord account. It's an invasion of privacy, I know, but a potentially lifesaving one. And of course if you see anything furry, it's too late.

barrages them with anti-male propaganda

You'll get that if you interact with the fandom. But as for the works themselves, a lot of yuri anime/manga will strenuously avoid depicting or even mentioning men as much as possible. The recent Mahou Shoujo ni Akogarete for example appeared to take place in a world entirely without men. This was never an explicit plot point and no one in the show ever pointed it out. There were simply... no men, anywhere in the world, as though it were taking place in a parallel universe that had just always been that way. Is it anti-male propaganda if you simply ignore men entirely?

Yeah, it's not the works themselves but the surrounding culture which the works are an escape from.

Is it anti-male propaganda if you simply ignore men entirely?

Is it racist if there are no people of race X in the work?

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I didn't particularly like the show (made it 4eps before dropping), but the English "community" around it is the perfect example of everything in that post.

Just looked the series up on reddit, check out /r/yuri_memes and users like /u/CuteNervousLesbian for what I mean. Literally has the "umm yikes men have the gross male gaze, unlike wholesome me wanting to fuck them with my heckin girlcock" thing. Just impossibly creepy 30+ year old men grooming kids on reddit.

English "nerd" communities have poisoned a lot of media for me. Thank God most of my actual hobbies gatekeep creeps like that.

Is the show itself to blame? Not sure where I fall on that. Depends on the intent of the authors I suppose, which I don't have much insight into.

Do you remember that famous Tumblr post that went "don't listen to anything women-as-class say; you shouldn't assume they have any privileges over you, because you're not in the category they are designed to repress"?

Yeah, I have no idea why men would ever latch onto a movement that tells them that. Maybe I was wrong about the trans-feeders: you take any alt-right figure and make him incapable of directly saying women are at fault for this, and I think "just claim you're a woman, then you'll be allowed to act fucking normal" is what comes out.

Maybe the trans-feeders were directionally correct about men needing to be less accommodating. Shame they can't use any of it if they go all the way into eunuchry.

Who doesn't play Minecraft and watch anime? These were the default hobbies of the older zoomers.

Is anime that popular among older zoomers? I would've thought the default form of non-interactive entertainment among older zoomers would be American TV shows or streaming.

I don't know why watching anime seems to set so many people on the trans pipeline, I just know that it does. I know that being trans and watching anime both have very large overlaps with autism (in both boys and girls).

Autism causes watching anime because the sensory interpretive circuits in the brain don't work the same way.

I suspect it's being autistic, not the anime-watching, that causes the susceptibility to transsexualism; I saw anime as a kid, of course, but I hadn't gotten into hentai, or started downloading anime, when I went GID.

Surely the type of anime plays some effect? I don't think that standard shonen battle animes like Dragonball, Demon Slayer, Naruto, etc. are making people trans, or encouraging them at all. But there's a particular subset of anime that really plays up the "girls are so cute!" schtick. And another, smaller niche that really delves into genderbending stuff in a way that most western media avoids.

I don't think we even know there's a correlation between anime-watching and transsexualism after controlling for the obvious confounder of autism (if you have evidence there is, I'm all ears). No point reaching for hypotheses to explain something until you know whether there's something to explain - especially not when you're thinking of reaching for a notorious false friend like the Jack Thompson argument.

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How can you be pro-trans without also being pro-anime?

Be a feminist who is convinced that anime objectifies and sexualizes women. Eg, see UN Women's regular attempts to crack down on anime and manga.

I don't see any conflict between the claims that anime objectifies women and that it's a major contributing factor to trans identification. I'm not aware of UN Women being a TERF/gender-critical organisation but I'm open to correction.

They are quite pro-trans and also quite anti-anime. Even if they acknowledge that anime is a major contributing factor to trans identification, they are still extremely hostile to it and regularly push governments to censor it.

I think you have a completely inverted view of the culture of modern comics. Western comics are substantially "woker" than anime and manga, and the people making them go out of their way to advertise that fact.

I'm well aware that modern Western comics are aggressively woke and go out of their way to be inclusive towards LGBTQ people in an extremely ham-fisted and unsubtle way. That's not what I'm referring to. As I explained in my other comments, I'm referring to the phenomenon in which teenagers or recent adults consume anime/manga obsessively, and (for whatever reason) it starts them on the trans pipeline.

I didn't see those comments and hence didn't reply to them, but now that I go looking... I don't think anime/manga start people on the trans pipeline at all - it's just that you don't know what younger people actually do these days and hence are unaware of the ubiquity of anime/manga, i.e. "Most murderers drink soft drinks ergo soft drinks contribute to murder". The far more likely contributing factors I can see (among men, women are facing something different) are in-born rates of autogynephilia and social contagion (relentless demonisation of male sexuality followed by "and you can become one of the elect by becoming trans, which sanctifies those terrible urges").

Also the manga section keeps growing. I'm not surprised that American comics seem less popular than ever, but I am a little surprised at the manga growth.

What makes you surprised?

Guess I'm still in that 90s mindset where watching anime other than Dragonball Z or Sailor Moon marks you as weird, and reading manga marks you as unacceptably weird and probably not very hygienic. My perception of youth culture has not kept up enough with just how mainstream manga is.

IMHO, nearly every question that begins "Why do women....?" can be answered by "They are standard deviations more neurotic and agreeable than you."

Why do women gravitate towards woo-woo bullshit like astrology? Because it can never be wrong, and the wound of being wrong is far worse for women (due to neuroticism) than men. Of course they gravitate towards "knowledge" that is completely unfalsifiable. It's safe, it's cozy, and they can indulge in it as much as they please without ever risking the pain of being wrong about anything.

I mean I'm a pretty neurotic person and I don't have any time for astrology or other forms of woo.

Don't ask questions about group differences if you're going to just turn around and go "but I don't do thing".

Either we understand that we are making generalizations that aren't going to apply to everyone, or we don't.

I'm just not sure if "neuroticism" is a sufficient explanation, especially when there are millions of neurotic men in the world but their neuroticism seems to express itself in systematically different ways to the female variety.

Assume that only neurotic people are drawn to astrology. Why so? And why only neurotic women, but not neurotic straight men?

I'm just not sure if "neuroticism" is a sufficient explanation, especially when there are millions of neurotic men in the world but their neuroticism seems to express itself in systematically different ways to the female variety.

You see what you did here, right?

"Men and women can both be neurotic. I just think they're neurotic in different ways"

Yes. Yes that's exactly what's being said. Specifically when you pair higher than average neuroticism with nigher than average agreeableness.

Who, as a group, scores higher in neuroticism+agreeableness? Women.

Okay. So is your hypothesis that men who are both neurotic and agreeable will display the same interest in astrology as neurotic and agreeable women?

Maybe, but probably not.

I'm not sure what you're after here? There are some men who are definitely into astrology, but there are far more women and there appears to be some recent cultural impetus at play that's made more women get into astrology than before. That's what the thread is about.

I know what the thread's about - I started it because I wanted an answer to my question. I guess I'm just not persuaded that being agreeable and neurotic makes one disproportionately likely to be interested in astrology.

Edit: Nevermind

Did yah call ya mothar? She gets so worried sick about you, and you nevaaaah call!

Did ya turn off the stove before you left the house?

Did yah call ya mothar?

A question which genuinely haunts me at night.

Did ya turn off the stove before you left the house?

Joke's on you, I haven't cooked all weekend.

Has there actually been a recent resurgence in interest in astrology? Or is my gut feeling actually mistaken, and interest in astrology has actually been constant over the past twenty years?

Google Trends to the rescue!

Looks like it's been more or less flat since 2016. There was also a massive decline from 2004 to 2008, followed by a smaller decline between 2008 and 2016.

Although this survey suggests that (in America) it's more popular among young people, and that older men are particularly likely to reject it (maybe they think it's girly?). So I guess that does support your suggestion that it's having a moment among young women.

My guess is that what with all the 70s fashion (moustaches, flares, long skirts) this was only a matter of time.

I first ran into it among low-IQ co-workers at a terrible job I once had, male and female. They couldn't wrap their minds around my disinterest in discussing it; I dug in my heels and refused to give them my birth date. I was affronted.

A male friend of a female friend at a dinner party brought it up, and between me slightly disliking him based on secondhand info I got from my friend, and off-the-cuff surprise, I was not kind when he casually brought up astrology as a conversational topic. My default assumption was it was a tactic to appeal to women, and the only thing I dislike more than people who actually believe in astrology is people who pretend to like things for social brownie points.

I did Kung Fu for a long while, and while the school was fairly no nonsense, you got a lot of people there into woo-woo bullshit. Once at a dinner, some guy was talking about some "Kung Fu Master" he knew when he was a younger man and he was travelling. The master claimed he could turn invisible and nobody could see him. To demonstrate this to guy at the table, master said he'd walk through a subway turnstile without paying, right in front of a cop, and the cop wouldn't stop him. Well, he did, and the cop didn't, and guy at the table was remarking how amazing it was that "Kung Fu Master" could turn invisible.

Without missing a beat I said "But you saw him."

Poor bastard's brain segfaulted right then and there. Just sputtered, every attempt to speak was just sentence fragments, with some broken syllables mixed in, and then he eventually went quiet.

Probably the singular time I ever called someone out on a woo-woo bullshit story and actually broke them. Normally the flow of bullshit just absorbs and works around any rock thrown into it's currents.

Obviously the kung-fu master's power was psionic, not physical. He was only using it on the cop, erasing him from the cop's perception. I'm disappointed in his creativity.

Maybe he was using a SEP field?

I would 100% pretend to believe in astrology to annoy you.

Which could be a fun game for years with you thinking I’m just pretending to enjoy it while I attempt to convince you that no no I’m a believer.

Divination, coursing and astrology have been of vital importance to the thinking of ordinary people and elites throughout history, providing external stimuli and hypotheses about what the future may be that people can react to and think about. They provide an aspect of randomness that ensures we consider many eventualities and possibilities, and don't get into ruts of thought. They also provide an anchor (albeit a random one) for narrowing down thinking about the future when we would otherwise spiral and feel overwhelmed by its possibilities.

Maybe the male/female divide is to do with astrology providing test scenarios for thinking about and imagining that tend to be to do with love, social and family life and psychology. Women are often more interested in and better at thinking about these things and they want to keep this ability sharp.

I would also venture that the internet's algorithms are spewing all kinds of scenarios and perspectives at us these days that largely meets our needs for divination, which is why astrology and its ilk are in fact really quite unpopular by historical standards.

90%+ of women who’ve brought up astrology will admit they believe it’s mostly or entirely bullshit after five minutes. They might not do this to a man who they think is judging them for it, but that’s standoffishness / defensiveness more than stupidity.

It’s like the homeopathy thing. Most homeopathy believers aren’t Steve Jobs; they believe in ‘western medicine’ very quickly when they need it. Similarly, an astrology girly who meets a perfect man who happens to be the wrong incompatible star sign isn’t going to break up with him unless she’s a 99th percentile crazy.

Is it a "god-shaped hole" effect (when people give up organised religion, they immediately start looking for something else to take its place)?

Tradcath women are obsessed with medieval-style galenist temperaments, so it’s not a God-shaped hole.

This is like staring into tear through the fabric of space and time and catching a glimpse of an alternate reality for me.

Can you elaborate a little?

Traditional western medicine held that there are four humors- or essential bodily fluids- which determine by their quality and relative quantity the properties of human health, including the expressions of personality/mental health. A person with a preponderance of blood is said to be sanguine(a people person personality), of phlegm phlegmatic(a go with the flow type), of 'black bile' melancholic(introverted, serious, artistic), and of 'yellow bile' choleric(a type A personality). Galen, a roman doctor, codified the interactions of these humors with bodily functions and Hildegard of Bingen(a medieval German Abbess) codified how they could be influenced herbally and through the diet. I think IIRC that this is kind of a steelman of the theory behind essential oils affecting your health.

What this theory gets right is health being different for each person and more or less about the whole person/body being in overall health rather than about treating the symptoms of disease- I'm sure our resident doctors can relate with frustration patients who just refuse to address their obesity/hypertension/whatever and want meds for the symptoms. What it gets wrong is that eating spicy food will not help you get more done at work.

Somehow these temperaments seem less violently offensive to rational thought than astrology.

Astrology has an "in-your-face" stupid effect, whereas the temperaments at least attempt to explain some causal mechanism.

It's strange that people feel this way given that galenic temperaments and astrology were inextricably linked for centuries. They have the same origin (Aristotle making shit up, misunderstood by Galen which is misunderstood by arabs which are misunderstood by medieval translators) and the main purpose of astrology, for pretty much all its history save for the last 100 years, was to inform galenic physicians in how to fix humors.

My Greek Orthodox godmother, who was at church multiple times a week enjoyed astrology and reading fortunes in cups of Greek coffee turned upside-down. She was generally not a stupid woman.

I love Camille Paglia, can listen to her talk for hours, and agree with much of what she says. But she's also hugely into astrology.

Tradcath women are obsessed with medieval-style galenist temperaments, so it’s not a God-shaped hole.

What's wrong with temperaments? As long as they aren't explaining the difference in people's behaviour by the imbalance of humours, of course, they are a useful shorthand for putting people in boxes based on their default mood.

Not really anything in particular; there's nothing inherently wrong with noting a choleric personality type or whatever. But it's quite clearly the same impulse as astrology, even if a less illogical and ridiculous expression.

My point was that it's not a God shaped hole. Very religious women do the same thing in a different way.

It seems like most of the posters here couldn't imagine themselves being into astrology or anything adjacent. I on the other hand went through a brief period in college where I was obsessed with MBTI, so I have a bit of an insider's perspective. But it's admittedly very difficult to articulate why I find MBTI (and perhaps even astrology, to some extent) appealing. I simply know that I do.

It's easy to think of a lot of explanations that have negative connotations. It provides (illusory) order in a fundamentally chaotic world, it appeals to self-centered people with the promise of unveiling hidden truths about oneself, it's a form of Sartrean bad faith that keeps us from having to confront the yawning abyss of our freedom. But I don't feel like any of these explanations actually strike at the core of what's going on. I don't think an affinity for astrology/MBTI/whatever is a bad thing - merely a different style of cognition, one might say. The most positive gloss I think I can put on it is that it's correlated with being the type of person who structures their experience in terms of narratives. You have a story that has a place for not only yourself, but other people as well. You evaluate things in terms of their narrative weight; you see people as more than arbitrary collections of traits and properties. People don't have a birth date and a death date - they have an origin and a telos. This sort of cognitive profile doesn't necessarily have to lead one to being interested in astrology specifically, of course. But I think that's the personality type (heh) we're dealing with.

And this sort of narratological personality is certainly not exclusive to women. Carl Jung, of course - his work was the inspiration for MBTI for a reason (even though the actual content of MBTI bears little resemblance to anything he wrote). Nietzsche's work too is replete with this kind of typological thinking.

In Japan people might be vaguely interested if you mention star signs, but they'll really bite if you start talking about blood type.

I've brought up the blood type thing several times in the last couple of years. Everyone, without fail, scoffs at how ridiculous it is (as well they should), including self-identified true believers in astrology who take it extremely seriously and buy all the books and read the charts and so on.

I mean, obviously the idea that your personality is determined by your blood type is preposterous, but it's not obviously more preposterous than the idea that it's determined by the time of day at which you were born (not even conceived).

The blood type stuff doesn’t actually strike me as absurd at all. Blood type is hereditary, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if blood type had some sort of non-zero correlation with personality. Now, I’m aware that no correlation has been established with any rigor. I’m just saying it’s not at all absurd to believe that there would be such a correlation, given that there’s at least a material/genetic factor that could be identified as causative.

Surely this would imply that about half the population of the earth had essentially the same personality.

No; just a shared tendency toward certain traits, however minor in the face of other factors.

Only if it were the sole determiner of personality, which I don't think is what @Hoffmeister25 is suggesting.

Reminds me of a funny personal story:

When I was prepping for a factory visit in Japan, my Japanese colleague who was doing the paperwork asked for everyone's blood type. I was surprised that BigName Corp were so superstitious, and said so.

She gave me a look and said, "They need to know what blood to give you if you have an industrial accident."

One can over-egg the cultural differences.

Sorry, I'm going out of order.

I literally don't think I've ever been sincerely asked what my sign is by a straight man - 100% of people who've asked me have been female

I saw a tweet a while back saying something like: if you meet a straight guy that knows his Moon Sign, he's been ran through.

I've heard that there was a lot of VC money floating around for astrology apps a few years ago, could that be behind it?

A personal low-stakes conspiracy theory: "The Pattern" and similar apps got very popular around 2020, and a lot of my female friends got super into it. I don't think any of them really believe in it, but they would all read it, every day, and at one point I downloaded so my wife could see what it told me.

I joked, at the time, that Bloomberg was going to secretly take over The Pattern as part of his primary campaign, so that on primary day every girlie would get a message pointing them towards voting for Bloomberg. "Your month looks risky, it's important that you pick a leader you can trust, like Mike Bloomberg."

Even if the users don't take it too seriously, it's an app that literally tells one how to think, feel, act. Think of the advertising and influence opportunities! The potential to Nudge! Especially when combined with, what I'm sure are, generous permissions that allow the app to track where you are, and what you're doing across other apps, and use it to form a clear customer profile. Tinder wants to close the sale for premium? "We see romance in your future this week, take the plunge and take a chance!" Fanduel wants you to up your weekly bets on NBA games? "Jupiter is in the shadow of Mars this week, fortune favors the bold, you can't lose!" Financial adviser wants to sign you up? "The skies are looking stormy ahead, seek safe harbors and kind advice." This kind of vague, fortune cookie advice, is typical of astrology charts, but could maybe "nudge" someone towards a desired action. And it's totally unaccountable! The customers don't even really expect you to be right! Most won't even admit they think about it!

If astrology underwent a resurgence in popularity over the last decade, why so? Is it a "god-shaped hole" effect (when people give up organized religion, they immediately start looking for something else to take its place)?

My wife enjoys astrology as a little game she takes half seriously, and in my opinion what superstitions like that provide is "seasonality." By which I mean, a degree of randomization that allows you to vary your actions in ways that are useful or pleasing. Optimal strategies for many games require a degree of randomization, and human happiness tends to respond well to variation. Variety is the spice of life that gives it all its flavor. But the nature of modernity is that we've eliminated a lot of the required randomness from our lives, a lot of the seasonality. We can eat any food we want at any time of year. We watch any movie we want, regardless of whether it is in theaters or on TV or if the VHS is in stock at Blockbuster. If I want to buy something, say a new Burberry trench coat, I don't have to plan my annual trip to the Good mall a couple hours away, I can do it on my phone and have it shipped to my house. If I want to read a new book, and my library doesn't have it, I'm not hunting around for it, I'm just buying it off Amazon or downloading it off LibGen.

In that world, it's easy to settle into a rut, into a Baridan's Ass equilibrium that's not ideal but that you have no reason to depart from. Literally just changing some things for the sake of changing them (the Coolidge Effect?) would improve your life, but why will you choose to do it?

Astrology provides something of an answer to that question. If you follow it, it gives you reasons to randomize your actions, in ways that will often improve your life, if not substantively at least experientially.

Consider how Sign-Compatibility can help you choose a mate. Imagine yourself as a young woman in SF, with a job somewhere on the soft side of tech in PR or HR or XR or whatever. You have many suitors, but they are all more or less replacements for each other, none of them are so much better than the others that you feel the need to commit. You know, at some level, you'll be happier if you commit to any of them, but it's tough to choose without a reason. You break out of your equidistant bails of hay by a randomized process, what does The Pattern tell you on the day of the date, or how does their time of birth indicate compatibility with your time of birth?

Or consider the old trope of a person being totally conflicted on a yes/no decision, can't choose between two women or whatever. Another character enters the room and, hearing their indecision, takes a coin out of their pocket and says "fine, I'll flip the coin, heads you go with Jessica tails you go with Sarah." He flips the coin, the first character jumps up and says no don't do that, the second character, rather than revealing what the coin landed on, asks him "Which are you hoping it landed on?" And in that moment, the first character knows which choice to make. Interpretations of signs can help us interpret our own desires and beliefs intuitively, cutting through the noise. A simple horoscope like "Trust the right people today." is inherently useless on a rational level: who are the right people? How will I know what to trust them with? But on an intuitive level, a vague instruction like that gives you room to realize what you wanted to do all along, to interpret your own desires. LLMs serve much the same purpose, as do consultants at the corporate level.

As a last personal note, I will say that I have never followed astrology but I have two major superstitions.

One, I always considered it good luck to see a hawk, because I liked them when I was a kid. Significant conservation efforts at the Federal and State levels, along with changing demographics and development that have made habitats for Hawks friendlier, have brought Hawk populations back towards health in my area. Where in the past I might only see one once a month and it was a major "sign" of something. Now I see them most days. Maybe the magic is gone, or maybe I am mystically tied to seeing hawks and my life is just that much better now, which might be accurate.

The other is that Wawa receipts for MTO items come in with three digit numbers, and my wife and I consider it a major sign when we get a single digit Wawa receipt, and to a lesser extent the other "special" numbers like 333 or 999 or 420 etc. The first time I got a 001 receipt, my wife went in for a life changing job interview. We also had a terrible day the day we got 000. These are important.

Your theory about The Pattern is some top-tier schizoposting, we need more of this.

Are we at the point, now, where Wawa hoagies can become an official Motte meme?

I'll throw in an effortpost on the Sheetz/Wawa dichotomy later this week.

  • Over 20 years, a high school classmate presented me with a star chart. I used to remember what my rising sign was. I never remembered the squares, trines, or other angled relationships with other signs. We haven't spoken aince graduation.

  • A year before COVID, I danced with a woman at an independent art show. She asked me my sign. I asked her to guess. She smiled & said what her favorite signs were. I was not in that list. The next morning, she thanked me for the cup of tea I prepared. I sent a couple text messages, but she seemed uninterested. I moved on.

  • Another coder I know posts about star signs roughly one a month. He has a lot more women in his social circles than I do, and they engage with him fairly well. I have noticed this, as well as his interest in the well-being of his toddler daughter.

Astrology is a tool. You can use it as a game, or you can get autistic with it and try to make grand statements about people's character. Lots of people like games; not a lot of people like to be defined.

Keep in mind that when someone is tasked with a decision and is suffering from analysis paralysis, even an irrational & arbitrary distinction such as birth month can narrow the field down to a reasonable set of choices.

Russia's different, as the 90's were a free-for-all for religions and esoteric practices. This means there's a gap in my understanding of what "being into astrology" is in the US

  • knowing your Zodiac sign? (pretty normal here, my son's a Pisces)
  • knowing your Oriental Zodiac sign? (again, pretty normal, my son's a Rat)
  • carefully reading newspaper horoscopes for your sign? (common among left-slope women here)
  • worrying about other people's Occidental/Oriental Zodiac signs? (weird)
  • knowing your astrological birth chart or sixty-year cycle Oriental Zodiac sign? (this is starting to get weird, and this is where most midwit women that are "into astrology" sit)
  • worrying about other people's astrological birth charts or sixty-year cycle Oriental Zodiac signs? ("disturbingly into astrology")

In a headline that say a lot more about modern society than I would like: Public-Health Officials Should Have Been Talking About Their Sex Parties the Whole Time

In conversations caught on hidden camera, New York City’s former COVID czar said that he’d organized a pair of sex parties in the second half of 2020, as New Yorkers coped with peak pandemic social isolation. “The only way I could do this job for the city was if I had some way to blow off steam every now and then,” Jay Varma told an undercover reporter with whom he thought he was on a date.

The article itself is quite fascinating, as is the original recording. Once again, we have a right wing partisan recording footage of a public health official saying things that should ostensibly be remarkably damning to both the speaker and the political bloc that installed him. Instead, the reaction seems to be quite muted.

Is this COVID fatigue? Narrative control in a friendly media? Is it really a nothing burger? What do you personally think is going on here?

Is this...?

To my friends, everything; to my enemies, the law.

One can complicate this however much they want, the naked truth is that those officials have power and you do not, which is why they can burden you with obligations and you have no ability to do the same to them.

Note how Boris Johnson was not capable of escaping responsibility in this way. This should inform you as to his power relative to those of the officials who, de jure, work for him.

If Boris Johnson was not capable of escaping responsibility for his actions during 2020 and 2021, he'd be rotting in a damp concrete box for ~200,000,000 counts of false imprisonment, not just merely no longer be PM.

To be sure, but that's because he wasn't without power. He's just not in charge of things is all.

Is this COVID fatigue? Narrative control in a friendly media? Is it really a nothing burger?

The first one, most likely. Covid is done and unless you're highly ideologically for or against the lockdowns, some dude admitting that he violated the rules 3 years ago just doesn't do much. The nation's attention has moved on to the 2024 election. Moreover, it's hardly a new thing or unheard of, Gavin Newsom was criticized for this exact thing in 2020.

Gavin Newsom was criticized for this exact thing in 2020.

Newsom was involved in Molly-fueled orgies? I missed that one in all the other noise.

No, he broke the lockdown and social distancing rules.

He attended a private party at an exclusive restaurant while his state prohibited such get-togethers: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/25/opinion/gavin-newsom-french-laundry-california.html

Remove the sensationalism of the orgy, and it's violation of the same principle.

Under Lockdownism, the benevolence of COVID restrictions is treated as an axiom, not a conclusion. Everything else will get redefined and rearranged to conform to that axiom, rather than the conclusions being changed as new facts emerge. Therefore those responsible for creating, implementing and enforcing those restrictions are always good people regardless of their personal failings. If that means suddenly discovering that technically his restrictions didn't criminalize his actions, then so be it. The alternative, acknowledging that the hypocrisy of those imposing the restrictions is evidence they didn't really believe in them, opens the way for ulterior motives, and once you think those responsible for restrictions have ulterior motives, you're already half-way to being one of us evil conspiracy theorist granny murderering freedumb-loving fascists.

I don't know the specifics of the regulations across every little subdivision of the US at every point in time. So I don't know if he technically broke the law. In the UK, we de facto criminalized all casual sex, because we criminalized the act of meeting up with members of another household indoors (prostitution might have fallen under a work-related exception loophole, and dogging is technically illegal but generally treated as less illegal than violating lockdowns). The thing is, I don't particularly care about that. If anything, flagrantly violating COVID restrictions elevates my view of your moral character, and the more trivial the motive for violation, the better. Breaking the law because you were kept from visiting a dying relative? Meh, doesn't indicate any particular attachment to human liberty, just a willingness to bend the rules in extreme circumstances. Violating lockdowns just to get your dick wet? Hell yes, we need more people who think like you in charge. But that's a +1 to Jay Varma's score of -100 for being responsible for the restrictions. There's little difference between wanting to see Varma fired into the sun, and me wanting to see Varma fired into the sun but I'll put him a few people further back in the queue for the sun cannon.

Violating lockdowns just to get your dick wet? Hell yes, we need more people who think like you in charge.

Good to know I can count on your vote.

If anything, flagrantly violating COVID restrictions elevates my view of your moral character, and the more trivial the motive for violation, the better.

I don't think that holds when you're the one imposing them in the first place.

It doesn't hold because imposing them in the first place is, in my view, so bad that minor good deeds can't undo it. Not specifically because of hypocrisy.

Tophattingson is a single issue anti-lockdowner.

Nobody really cares. Normies are past Covid, regardless of their positions on the matter. The people who still wear n-95s everywhere have long ago gotten over public health officials ‘being irresponsible’ and the hardcore anti-lockdown crowd believes they already have enough evidence that the health officials knew Covid wasn’t that dangerous and were lying.

Is this COVID fatigue? Narrative control in a friendly media? Is it really a nothing burger? What do you personally think is going on here?

Whatever it is, it is US-specific. In the UK, officials who broke their own lockdown rules and got caught consistently suffered career-ending consequences. Partygate broke after COVID was "over" for us, but was still the multi-month-long all-consuming scandal that brought down a Prime Minister.

The full list of notorious fired lockdown-breakers includes:

  • Boris Johnson (Prime Minister)
  • Dominic Cummings (de facto Chief of Staff to Johnson)
  • Neil Ferguson (leading pandemic modeller at Imperial College and SAGE member)
  • Catherine Calderwood (Scottish chief medical officer)
  • Margaret Ferrier (SNP MP)
  • Matt Hancock (Health Secretary)

I don't know why US figures survived this kind of stuff. I think the British approach to elites breaking their own lockdowns was a lot healthier, and is part of the reason that we don't have a substantial libertarian movement trying to relitigate COVID.

That's an interesting comparison. Did any US politician or public servant face meaningful repercussions for flouting their own policies? Newsom is listed below as another example, and is being feted as a future president.

and is part of the reason that we don't have a substantial libertarian movement trying to relitigate COVID.

Reform UK wants to relitigate COVID and just won 14.3% of the vote. If anything the movement would be stronger if the state did not violently suppress it.

Reform UK Party Ltd is a private limited company with a single controlling shareholder, not a substantial movement. By the time Reform was polling above 5%, Farage had resigned as leader and it had gone back to running a standard-issue right populist campaign based around dubiously-funded tax cuts and reduced immigration. COVID wasn't mentioned in Reform's 2024 election campaign, at least as far as a random voter who was paying attention could see.

Right populism in the UK is fundamentally about Islamic immigration. The attempt to make US-style public health skepticism part of the movement failed.

is a private limited company

Most small political parties are organised as companies because there's no other coherent legal structure for managing the finances of a political party. What else would they be? State owned? Not in a democracy. Charities? By law, they can't be tied to a political party. This talking point about Reform is intended to misinform someone with (admittedly typical) ignorance about what companies are. It's not a serious argument.

I know exactly what a company is - my day job involves managing a regulated Group with separately licensed legal entities.

I also know why the entities registered with the Electoral Commission for the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats are unincorporated associations, with the company set up to hold the asset being a company limited by guarantee whose members are certain elected officers of the unincorporated association.

The fact that Reform is set up as a company limited by shares is linked to something important about the internal democratic processes of Reform, namely that there are none, and that Nigel Farage retained (literal and figurative) ownership even during the period where Richard Tice was leader and Farage held no party office. There is a reason why non-profit companies (whether or not they are charities) are usually limited by guarantee - the Koch-Crane feud at Cato being an example that was briefly famous in US right-wing circles of what can go wrong if they are shareholder-owned. Reform (and Cato back in 1977) chose to do the weird thing for a reason.

If a normal political party with Reform's level of support decided through its internal democratic processes to campaign on COVID lockdown blame, that would be a sign that a substantial movement was doing so. If Reform's owner decides that Reform should campaign on COVID lockdown blame, it is a sign that one man is doing so. Given that one man's primary source of income is his appearances on foreign media, it is more likely than not that the "substantial movement" he is representing is the one paying him - he certainly didn't find himself leading a substantial movement of still-salty-about-lockdown libertarians in the UK given Reform's anemic poll performance at the time.

The fact that Reform is set up as a company limited by shares is linked to something important about the internal democratic processes of Reform, namely that there are none

If this is what you were going for, your first comment was an extremely confusing way of going about it, and this is literally the last thing that would come to my mind from the way you phrased it.

If the lack of internal democratic processes bother you so much, you can just not vote for them.

If a normal political party with Reform's level of support decided through its internal democratic processes to campaign on COVID lockdown blame, that would be a sign that a substantial movement was doing so.

It's still a sign of a substantial movement doing so, unless you're saying he has the power of forcing people to work for him, and to vote for him.

If your problem with Reform is that it lacks a coherent internal structure and meaningless membership, then sure, that's an actual criticism. One that I'd also levy at the Labour and Conservative party, which have internal democratic processes in theory but not in practice. But you should just say that, instead of complaining that reform is a company.

Reform lacks much internal structure as it was a very small party, re-founded during a time when the organisation of something akin to Conservative Associations or Constituency Labour Parties would have been mostly illegal. and only recently growing to a point where such an internal structure would be necessary. So already it's committed to changing structure to a company limited by guarantee.

Given that one man's primary source of income is his appearances on foreign media

GB News is not foreign media.

he certainly didn't find himself leading a substantial movement of still-salty-about-lockdown libertarians in the UK given Reform's anemic poll performance at the time.

Political organisation against lockdowns was de facto illegal during lockdowns. This is about as surprising as finding out there were no pro-Capitalist parties successfully participating in Soviet Elections in the 1930s.

If your problem with Reform is that it lacks a coherent internal structure

I don't have a problem with Reform - I support proportional representation because I think the way that excluding 20% of the population from meaningful political participation (whether that is the populist right in the UK with the globalists in control of the Conservative party, or the centre-right in the US with MAGA in control of the Republican party, or various left-wing equivalents) is bad for democracy, and that Reform should have more MPs than they do. I profoundly disagree with Reform and I am proud of the fact that my country is more resistant than most to their kind of politics, but getting along with your political opponents is part of living in a civilisation.

I think that Nigel Farage's decision to take up anti-lockdownism in 2020 was not the result of a social movement. You implied that it was. The presence or absence of an internal democratic structure in Reform is relevant to this question.

re-founded during a time when the organisation of something akin to Conservative Associations or Constituency Labour Parties would have been mostly illegal.

This is incorrect. Reform was founded (as the Brexit Party) in November 2018 long before the pandemic. The name was changed during the lockdown, but if Farage had wanted to stand up a normal party organisation he had had over a year to do so. In any case, Alba (founded February 2021) was able to stand up a more normal political party organisation during a COVID lockdown (although, I agree, not a full set of local associations).

GB News is not foreign media.

GB News hit the air in June 2021, after Farage's attempts to run a US-style anti-lockdown campaign had failed. In 2020 his most lucrative gig appears to have been Fox News.

I don't know why US figures survived this kind of stuff.

Many American politicians have figured out that you can just ignore this stuff and people will probably forget about it. If you're sufficiently shameless you're basically scandal-proof. Also, the structure of US politics makes it harder to get rid of someone. A minister can be sacked, a PM can suffer a leadership challenge, an MP can be kicked off the party list. In the US, an elected official is only really accountable to their voters, and that goes double for state officials. Re: Covid specifically, it helped that basically everyone was ignoring the substance of Covid restrictions anyway.

The ruling class in America wants to put COVID behind them because they got to "work" from home, control others, their investments and homes appreciated wildly in value, and they still got to flaunt the rules when it suited them.

Other people missed weddings, funerals, their children fell behind in school, their mental health suffered and they lost businesses. But they aren't the ruling class, so their concerns are entirely ignored.

But don't mistake the ruling class being "over" COVID with the people who's lives they ruined being over it.

Flout, not flaunt.

To be fair, they did both in this case.

Off-topic slightly, but are the women at these parties presumed to be prostitutes? Or is it more like a "two couples who know each other met and had a crazy night" story which got blown out of proportion for sensationalist reasons?

I would think that “swingers party” would be the closest model.

He says it was his wife and their friends, so presumably a swinging thing.

Only partially related, but I'm still so mad at the covid collective insanity that took place. Can you believe there was a time when the Canadian CDC actually recommended that people use gloryholes to avoid spreading covid? And I've actually argued with pro-lockdown people who defend that recommendation as legit instead of denouncing it as insanity and bandwagon jumping. Multiple people I've argued with have said something like "well, just because you're sucking dick through a hole doesn't mean it's unsafe sex with anonymous partners". And this flabbergasts me.

In what world would people use a gloryholes that's safe and not anonymous? Gloryholes exist in adult bookstores. Did any people go modifying their houses, drilling holes into their walls saying "gee, I sure would like to have sex with girls I'm seeing, but I don't want to violate lockdown and be in the same room as them"? Did any guy tell the new girl he's dating (the one that he is not yet seeing steadily enough such that he would just include her in his covid bubble) that he wants to meet her at the adult bookstore so she could suck his dick through the filthy hole there without him looking at her face-to-face, so they don't share the same airspace? Women love being asked for non face-to-face sexual favors, while being in a separate room, being done through disgusting holes where random guys stick their dicks regularly, that never get cleaned, right?

To me this is up there with "racism is a bigger public threat than the pandemic" and promoting mask wearing when getting up from your restaurant table to go to the bathroom as terrible apologism to justify their own side's horrible behavior.

To be fair, there actually are some gay guys who kink on gloryholes-qua-non, where it's about the informality and casual nature rather than either the anonymity or grossness/degradation. (Though the resulting kink is still very casual-sex-with-longer-term-acquaintances). Braeburned's probably one of the better-known artists in the furry fandom really focusing on it, but there's a decent amount both inside and outside of the fandom.

But it still wouldn't be especially effective at reducing COVID transmission even in that 'ideal' case, for pretty obvious reasons, and it still has other issues re: both COVID and STD transmission.

I share your frustration, anger, outrage that the craziness of those 2+ years were just allowed to pass and be forgotten. In Ireland (where I am) stories were legion of different rules for those in charge than the rest of the people. Old people were allowed to suffer, die and be buried alone, with no family contact, because of isolation regulations. People who refused to take a vaccine that was (let’s face it) experimental having been rushed through foreshortened clinical trials, were outcasts, prevented from entering any space where the vaccinated were. Apps and QR codes to separate the noble majority from the degenerate minority. It’s an enduring disgrace and it nauseates me that we’ve become too fatigued by it and too sedated 360-degree 24-hour screens to remember what went on. Therefore we’re destined to repeat it, and worse, at some indeterminate point in the future. It makes me sick.

[Edit: There’s so much crap about DEI but so much of what went on was its opposite. It was the preferential treatment of the old and the wealthy at the expense of the young and the healthy. That split has continued with further wealth transfers taking place since then via pensions and taxation. Spoke to a guy recently who, at 65, got his free medical care and discounted entry to the swimming pool and sauna while the hardworking and broke generation can’t afford either.]

Is there interest in a group summary project of Project 2025, similar to the Inflation Reduction Act project from the Old Place?

It seems likely that the boring non-headlining aspects will quietly inform the agendas of a Trump administration, or that independent-ish administrators will align with it without explicit direction from above, as we've already seen in leadership styles that rely on prospiracy to deniably communicate leadership priorities, eg Putin and Trump, so a good amount of benefit could come from a small investment of labor.

Edit: Project 2025 full text is available here.

I'm more curious whether there is actually desire to implement it etc. Trump has disavowed it multiple times and many contributors were kicked out of his past administration. On the other hand, Trump is insincere and the base generally likes it.

I would expect many trump underlings in a 2nd Trump administration to generally act in accordance with the overall thrust of the recommendations there, though the more radical the proposal and the more it diverges from the interests of major interest groups the less likely there are to be serious attempts to implement it. I also expect Trump to loudly denounce any effort which gets sufficient media attention to make him look/feel bad, and possibly fire any bureaucrat responsible for the attempt.

I would expect many trump underlings in a 2nd Trump administration to generally act ...

Based upon what?

It seems uncharitable to tells someone what they believe (or what they will do) after they denounce it.

Doesn't this lead to believing whatever you want about your political opponents?

I don't think charity makes any sense when it comes to what you think about politicians. They're not your equals; they never have to even consider your beliefs much less give them charity. Why should you?

Based upon what?

Based upon the fact that the majority of the rank and file GOP activists, lawyers, think-tank fellows, and other people likely to fill the thousands upon thousands of presidential appointment slots in a second Trump term come from institutions that are fairly sympatico with many of the assertions in Project 2025.

It seems uncharitable to tells someone what they believe (or what they will do) after they denounce it.

Yes, and neither candidate this cycle has earned much charity from me. However, I do take Trump at his word that he really does not like being bound by Project 2025, and he certainly wasn't part of dreaming it up (though many people who worked in his first administration and who remain his supporters were). Thus my conclusion that his appointees are likely to be friendly to many of the goals in Project 2025, but that Trump is likely to throw overboard any aspect of it which he believes has become a political liability.

Doesn't this lead to believing whatever you want about your political opponents?

I am trying to draw educated guesses about the most likely outcomes, based upon what I understand the facts to be. I would be happy to be corrected if anything I've said is factually incorrect, or if I'm missing something. My posting history should clearly indicate that I am open and transparent about owning up to error.

Pennsylvania mail-in ballots with flawed dates on envelopes can be thrown out, court rules

The state’s high court ruled on procedural grounds, saying a lower court that found the mandate unenforceable should not have taken up the case because it did not draw in the election boards in all 67 counties. Counties administer the nuts and bolts of elections in Pennsylvania, but the left-leaning groups that filed the case only sued two of them, Philadelphia and Allegheny counties.

This came up when the lower court issued their opinion a few weeks ago. I remember several commentators asking if the fact that it was only filed in two counties was going to have a material impact in the outcome. It looks like it did.

For those of you who leaned one way or the other, how does this impact your future predictions?

On a more specific note - @Rov_Scam, you had some fairly extensive commentary on this case that was interesting and insightful due to your profession. If you have time, would you mind chiming in with an update?

Although state law requires envelope dates, election officials do not use them to ensure ballots arrive on time. Mail-in ballots are logged in and time-stamped when received, and must arrive at county elections offices before polls close on Election Day.

This is on the legislature for mandating a feature of the ballot that's not actually useful/used.

I'm a "Stop the Steal" agnostic. The 2020 election looked fishy, but most of the "proof" of election fraud has been merely suggestions with no follow-through. I'm not a Trump voter, but I have no faith in the integrity of his opponents -- especially if you take them at their word that he is an existential threat.

The Democrats do themselves no favors by trying to stop all of these election reform measures in swing states, like PA and GA. Their insistence that we should not clean the voter rolls, enforce ballot integrity or deadlines, or be able to produce records that verify vote counts or reconcile ballot and voter numbers is bewildering in the absence of fraud. Can anyone of the "Most Secure Election in History" persuasion steelman the argument against increasing election integrity? Isn't it in everyone's best interest to increase confidence in the electoral process, even if you think 2020 election deniers are kooks, as it will improve the legitimacy of whoever wins and diminish avenues of sympathy for the deniers?

Can anyone of the "Most Secure Election in History" persuasion steelman the argument against increasing election integrity? Isn't it in everyone's best interest to increase confidence in the electoral process, even if you think 2020 election deniers are kooks, as it will improve the legitimacy of whoever wins and diminish avenues of sympathy for the deniers?

The argument is that the actions Republicans take do not increase election integrity, and are instead aimed at adding hoops to jump through that may reduce voter turnout among groups that typically vote Democrat. For example, North Carolina in 2016 had a law overturned combating voter fraud. For important context, the legislature had requested an received demographic information about how voters vote, by race. That is, whether they use provisional voting, early voting, mail-in ballots, etc. The day after the Supreme Court rolled back provisions of the Voting Rights Act the legislature moved forward with a bill over "election security." Said law:

  • Reduced early voting.

  • Disallowed SOME but not all forms of alternate photo ID

  • Removed same-day registration

  • Removed provisional voting if a voter showed up at the wrong polling place within the same county

  • Removed pre-registration which allowed teenagers who were below voting age to register, provided they would be eligible to vote on election day

  • Did NOT require mail-in voters to show ID.

Based on the above bullet points, can you guess which forms of registering/voting were most used by blacks, and which were most used by whites? Hint - the ones which were used primarily by whites were untouched.

Democrats believe that Republican leaders are borrowing a similar playbook in Republican controlled areas, and that "election security" is simply plausible deniability. I agree with that, but I'd add that as a project manager, my philosophy is that a process should be only as complex and restrictive as it needs to be to perform its function, and no more. In other words, something like photo ID is a burden on the process of voting, and justifiable only if it stops a fraudulent vote. If it does not, then the time spent is a waste and should be cut with prejudice. Likewise, if a form of ID is enough to reasonably establish someone's identity, include it.

Democrats should get ahead of the game and propose their own voter integrity initiatives. It would be an easy slam dunk to say, "Republicanss don't make elections more secure, but Democrats do." Maybe this trickles out in press releases about unmasking Russian ad campaigns, but it never manifests in having the kind of election procedures that are universal in Europe and Asia.

While it would be funny I would prefer not to intentionally move faster towards the world where both sides try to mash the defect button as often and as hard as they can.

The election security procedure that is universal in Europe and Asia but not the United States is public or semi-public hand counting of paper ballots. This would be prohibitively expensive in the US because of the large number of races in an American election - it is very unusual for a European election to include more than two or three races, whereas a typical US election includes dozens of state and local races as well as up to three (President, House, Senate) federal ones.

Countries which have complete, accurate and up-to-date lists of resident citizens (i.e. not the Anglosphere) have meaningful citizenship checks to register to vote, and generally require a national ID card (which proves citizenship as well as identity) to be shown when voting. Countries which don't do Papieren, Bitte culture generally have weak voter ID cards which could be defeated with a $10 fake ID if anyone actually wanted to commit retail in-person voter fraud, which empirically they don't. (Postal vote fraud is much easier.) Apart from a few red states in the US, no country without a citizen register requires proof of citizenship to register or vote. (In general, in countries without a citizen register, the only strong documentary proof of citizenship would be a passport)

My browser ate an effortpost on this point, but the fate of ERIC demonstrates that the MAGA activist base is not acting in good faith on election integrity issues, so there is no point in the Democrats trying to co-operate with them or appease them. The median voter (quite correctly) doesn't care enough about election integrity for it to be a winning issue for either side in the general - the noise about election integrity is there because it is a winning issue in Republican primaries full of Dale Gribble voters.

I'm embarrassed, since I claim to care about transparent election integrity but haven't heard of ERIC beyond this. Can you whip up a precis? I've only found https://www.npr.org/2023/10/20/1207142433 and https://www.npr.org/2023/06/04/1171159008 casually.

Your objections are pretty implausible, and then you conclude it's the other party acting in bad faith!

public or semi-public hand counting of paper ballots. This would be prohibitively expensive in the US

This is what we did before vote-counting machines existed. It's what they still do in larger countries like India.

The median voter (quite correctly) doesn't care enough about election integrity

There are dozens of issues decided in an election at the same time. The median voter doesn't care about the Afghanistan pullout, so it's not important. It's fine if we do it again, because it's not a big deal.

the noise about election integrity is there because

It's there because political machines in the cities magic up tens of thousands of votes in the dead of night, counting ballots implausibly takes days, no other country accepts these processes, and any criticism of the above gets you labeled a conspiracy theorist. Then, if you try to recount the election, the chains of custody for these ballots are are illegally destroyed, and there's no proof, and then I get to hear from people like you how there's no proof of fraud.

This is what we did before vote-counting machines existed. It's what they still do in larger countries like India.

India only have one race per election (rarely two), and they don't try to count overnight - they allow a full day for counting after several days to allow ballot boxes from remote rural precincts to be taken to the counting centre.

In the UK, we don't try to count more than one race overnight. If there are multiple races (e.g. Westminster and local elections on the same day) we count the Westminster election overnight and count the local elections the following day. Three races is about the practical limit for a full-day count - I have attended local counts with three open seats per ward, and London mayoral elections also involve three races (Mayor, constituency assembly member, and PR list assembly member) and in both cases the results come out late in the afternoon. London count the mayoral election on Saturday (polling day is Thursday) to given electoral staff and party observers time to recover from polling day - having done a day's GOTV followed by observing a three-race count the next day I understand why they do this.

Taking the largest state as an example, California had 4 major races in 2020 (POTUS, US House, both houses of the State legislature) and 12 propositions. In 2022 there were 13 major races (scheduled US senate, special US senate, US House, both houses of the State legislature, 7 statewide offices, Board of Equalization), 7 propositions, and 4 judicial elections. Add 2-3 county-level races, 1-2 city level races and 1-2 other races (e.g. school board) and you are looking at an average of about 25 races. Hand-counting that at British levels of efficiency (which are above the global average, and well above anything California could manage) would take about two weeks even if there were no contentious recounts. Americans expect the first count to be complete by the early hours of Wednesday morning, and MAGA are already claiming that delayed counts are evidence of fraud.

To hand-count all races in a typical US election in a one-day daylight count, let alone overnight, would be a bigger commitment of resources to vote-counting than any other country has ever made. There is a reason why the US adopted voting machines long before voting machines that actually worked were available - remember the Florida 2000 "chad" debacle. I'm not sure, but it looks like the US starts using voting machines around the same time that the media starts to expect next-day results. Would it be a good idea? Probably. Is it technically feasible? I don't know. The number of races you can count in parallel is limited by the size of the available count venue and the bandwidth of key senior people who need to review every result before it is announced. You also run out of sufficiently distinct colours of ballot paper. I remember the time the city council election was on blue paper and the county council election was on lilac paper - it caused several hours of delay and the administrator responsible was transferred.

Would convincing the media that they could wait two weeks for the state and local results to allow for a hand count to happen at reasonable speed be a good idea? It depends if it would actually increase confidence in elections. My gut feeling is that in today's America it would not.

Would reducing the number of directly elected positions so that there are fewer races to count be a good idea? Almost certainly in my view, but the argument about whether or not to elect the dog catcher is not primarily about ease of election administration.

They apparently do!

It's very bare minimum and the numbers are small, but I was surprised to see this pop up.

The mistake occurred in part because Oregon has allowed noncitizens to obtain driver’s licenses since 2019, and the state’s DMV automatically registers most people to vote when they obtain a license or ID.

Conservatives have been saying this for years, and it was treated as a conspiracy. (The article concludes by noting that it's a state and federal crime to do this, after noting that at least nine people in Oregon have done exactly this. Have they announced charges?)

The argument is that the actions Republicans take do not increase election integrity, and are instead aimed at adding hoops to jump through that may reduce voter turnout among groups that typically vote Democrat.

Those all sound like eminently reasonable election safeguards (possibly except for the in-county restriction, maybe because I live near the intersection of 4 counties; in-state should suffice), and would be easy to comply with for anyone of any race or background, and it seems racist to suggest otherwise. If some communities need to be better educated on election procedures, that does not seem like an insurmountable obstacle, and I'm sure there are organizations dedicated to voter awareness that would be happy to help them.

I don't agree with that.

Early voting would give more time to count votes, thus increasing election security.

Photo ID = either it's the person or it's not. There's no reason to be any more restrictive than is necessary to establish identity. Creating a fake ID to cast 1 extra vote out of 100 million would already be a large waste of time. Also, when I said they only disallowed SOME forms of ID, I mean only the forms of ID democrats would use, like student IDs.

Same day registration I don't see as a problem to verify.

Provisional voting I could see being used for fraud, but that also make it trivially easy to check provisional votes for double votes.

Pre-registration I see literally no way to use for fraud.

If anything, mail-in votes would be the most likely way to commit fraud, and they were untouched by North Carolina after they found whites used them.

I don't agree with that.

Is your agreement required for something to be reasonable?

Early voting would give more time to count votes, thus increasing election security.

This is incorrect, and the reasons why are precisely why international election standards focus on consolidating votes received early with strong chain-of-custody measures, but only opening and counting concurrent to election day.

Counting votes in advanced of election day provides increased opportunity and incentive to compromise election security by informing the people who could/would commit fraud that it is either unnecessary (in which case they don't expose themselves to risk), or likely to be needed (in which case they have more time and ability to prepare to act without being noticed, and scale their intervention more carefully). Without the foreknowledge, rigging becomes more prone to obvious abuse, as after-the-fact interventions after delayed revelation are easier to notice and expose due to increased scrutiny on election night and increased reliance on heavy-handed measures (such as freezing counts to insert more ballots before resuming, seizing the records of the talley counts and later releasing unverifiable numbers, and so on).

If you are a party that would conduct election fraud- a position that requires you to have both the interest and the ability to act on the interest with reason to believe you can pull it off (which generally requires already being established and domiannt)- early voting increases your interest (by letting you know you're at risk of losing your positional advantage if you don't cheat) and your ability (by letting you have more time to prepare / act without notice / scale your means of intervention) to cheat.

This is also the reason why long vote-counting periods are bad for election security. Instead of 'taking time to be careful,' it instead allows parties more time to intervene while dragging out public attention and creating more opportunities to act than a shorter time period would.

Photo ID = either it's the person or it's not. There's no reason to be any more restrictive than is necessary to establish identity.

This smuggles in the assumption that a photo ID is sufficient to establish a valid identity. This is incorrect.

A photo ID is simply a photo tied to a set of credentials, not a guarantee that the credentials are valid for all purposes. Particularly when photo IDs are issued across valid and invalid criteria without distinction- such as a driver's license that doesn't actually address citizenship or registration- various forms of ID, photo or otherwise, have no categorical compliance with voting criteria. If you can use a particular ID to vote, but don't need to be able to vote to get a particular ID, the ID itself has no validating function in whether you should be permitted to vote, even if it is actually you.

And this in turn doesn't approach database correlation. A form of ID may not be registered or applicable to a relevant authentication database in a way that provides appropriate tracking and authentication. For example, a driver's license number can only validate against a database of driver's license numbers. Unless that database is actively set up to also note which elections the person tied to the driver's license is actually enrolled in, it provides no indication that the person is a valid registered voter in the state, because all the database can provide is 'this is a driver's license.' Most voting systems are not setup to provide this, which is why ID is used to verify that someone is an individual, but then the individual is checked against a local roster rather than an ID database.

Creating a fake ID to cast 1 extra vote out of 100 million would already be a large waste of time.

This assumes the only reason to create a fake ID production or dissemination process is to cast 1 extra vote, or that 1 fake ID only enables 1 extra vote, or that a fake ID is required for a fraudulent vote, or that 1 extra vote is in a context of 100 million. This would be incorrect, on all ends.

To pick just one example- if you automatically enroll people with driver's licenses to vote, but also issue driver's licenses to non-eligible persons (as Oregon did), then a real ID of a real person would flag as a valid voter no matter how many fraudulent voter IDs were issued.

Also, when I said they only disallowed SOME forms of ID, I mean only the forms of ID democrats would use, like student IDs.

This is not an argument of disenfranchisement, this is an argument that non-standardized partisan-correlated voting IDs like student IDs should be used in the first place.

This is absolutely contestable.

Provisional voting I could see being used for fraud, but that also make it trivially easy to check provisional votes for double votes.

This is incorrect, as many systems do not have means or methods to actually check for double voting across jurisdictions, and this is separate from the desire to on the part of those who would need to.

If your voting station marks down that you voted via a tally mark on a piece of paper, it does nothing to check for double voting unless there's someone else, sometime later, who actually puts it into a system to check against other databases. And if that database does not touch the correct other database that could identify an issue, it still does nothing.

If anything, mail-in votes would be the most likely way to commit fraud, and they were untouched by North Carolina after they found whites used them.

I am always happy to find a new mind reader in the American populace, unless you happened to have some other evidence that the distinction was driven by racism rather than something else.

Like how South Carolina is a ballot harvesting state and thus has a different entrenched political interest setup than non-ballot harvesting states. Or that there might be different legal considerations involved in terms of surviving legal challenges. Or that South Carolina has a significant military recruitment demographic, and so there is a higher than normal socially-accepted basis for significant out-of-state voting.

Is your agreement required for something to be reasonable?

No? It was an introductory statement which I laid out my reasons for.

Counting votes in advanced of election day provides increased opportunity and incentive to compromise election security [...]

That all assumes that voter fraud is reasonably achievable and the only issue is needing more time to adequately prepare. That premise has yet to be established and even if it were, the reaction to that knowledge should be change the process such that they cannot achieve that regardless of having an extra few days.

This smuggles in the assumption that a photo ID is sufficient to establish a valid identity. [...]

This is a neat trick of dismissing an opposing argument while missing that it detracts from your own argument. Your argument is that you need to do 2 things in order to vote:

  1. Establish an identity

  2. Establish that the identity is able to vote

Your argument following that is that doing 1 does not do 2. Okay, but the fact that you still need to do 2 has nothing to do with whether or not you've done step 1. They already do check that your name and credentials is registered, so 2 is covered. And even if it weren't, changing which IDs can be used to establish 1 does not change how step 2 is performed according to you. If your argument is that step 2 is insecure, then if the N.C. legislature were truly trying to increase security and not disenfranchise voters it seems like they should have focused on that, no?

This assumes the only reason to create a fake ID production or dissemination process is to cast 1 extra vote [1], or that 1 fake ID only enables 1 extra vote [2], or that a fake ID is required for a fraudulent vote [3], or that 1 extra vote is in a context of 100 million [4]. This would be incorrect, on all ends.

To pick just one example- if you automatically enroll people with driver's licenses to vote, but also issue driver's licenses to non-eligible persons (as Oregon did), then a real ID of a real person would flag as a valid voter no matter how many fraudulent voter IDs were issued.

You do a bit of a gish-gallop here. I put numbers above to show the 4 arguments, but you only respond to 1.

  1. Doesn't sound like North Carolina is enrolling all drivers to vote, so probably not relevant. And even if it were, automatically registering people when they get a driver's license != registering everyone just because they got a license and not checking eligibility.

  2. Why would it not? And even if not, then the problem isn't with checking the ID.

  3. As with 2, if they aren't even using an ID, then messing with the requirements to use an ID won't fix this.

  4. I threw a semi-random number out there because most people talk about election fraud in the context of Presidential elections. While election fraud should still be caught, election fraud only really has consequences if it changes who/what wins, which it takes way, way more than a single vote to do. You have to commit it at scale for it to achieve anything at all.

This is not an argument of disenfranchisement, this is an argument that non-standardized partisan-correlated voting IDs like student IDs should be used in the first place.

What? If the reason it was disallowed was because it was most used by one party, then it absolutely was an attempt at disenfranchisement. That's tautological. Either you can vote or you cannot, and the ID proves your identity or it does not. If a form of ID previously was good enough to prove a person's identity, then I would say the onus is on the people removing it to argue that it's not secure.

If your voting station marks down that you voted via a tally mark on a piece of paper, it does nothing to check for double voting unless there's someone else, sometime later, who actually puts it into a system to check against other databases.

Then you'll be happy to know that they literally do go back and check. And they sometimes prosecute people for it if they believe it was intentional.

I am always happy to find a new mind reader in the American populace, unless you happened to have some other evidence that the distinction was driven by racism rather than something else.

It was North Carolina BTW. And what you sardonically refer to as mind-reading was the N.C. court of appeals looking at all the actions performed and all the actions NOT performed at the same time, and taking into consideration that the legislature had the data they could use to disenfranchise. They came to the conclusion that their actions lined up too strongly with what a biased actor would do to reasonably assume a coincidence.

Their insistence that we should not clean the voter rolls, enforce ballot integrity or deadlines

The deadlines are enforced by the country by stamping the actual time of arrival of the ballots. And they stop taking them on Election Day.

Writing the date on the front is entirely superfluous -- no one reads and no one ought to because.

I'm all for cleaning the rolls, enforcing integrity or whatever, but jeez, find an actually meaningful hill to fight for! Throwing out ballots because a date that otherwise wouldn't matter is wrong doesn't actually advance any of those causes.

I don’t think you should be agnostic here. Absence of evidence is, in fact, evidence of absence.

I also don’t think Democrats are categorically against security measures. They are generally opposed for the same reasons Republicans generally oppose gun control. It’s costly, it’s been abused before, and above all, it’s an attack on Our Team.

When I last looked at Texas election policy, I concluded it was pretty reasonable. But the Texas Republican Party has to push harder. They’ve made it a wedge and a sign of party allegiance; anyone who dissents is doing himself no favors. So the party platform (§221) has to be more extreme.

  • “bit by bit forensic imaging” on request
  • consolidating power under the Texas AG’s office, except when it encourages civil lawsuits
  • cutting the early voting window to 3 days instead of 2 weeks
  • precinct only voting
  • categorically banning preferential/ranked voting

Implementing these will make voting slower, more difficult, and more likely to generate lawsuits. They encourage a heckler’s veto, where anyone with the time and money has more levers to slow down and cast doubt on the outcome. Is that likely to improve legitimacy?

No, these are designed more like the post-2020 Trump playbook. Spawn enough lawsuits, raise enough red flags, and people will start to doubt the outcome regardless of the facts. If you’re looking for ulterior motives, this is the one.

Also, preferential or ranked voting is literally my single issue. I would vote for Paxton, Trump, anybody if he came out in favor, but no, the party has decided that it’s a threat to democracy. Give me a break. But I understand that most people don’t really care.

Absence of evidence is, in fact, evidence of absence.

Absence of evidence is evidence of absence when qualified, competent people make good-faith efforts and are met with good-faith assistance. It may be too cynical but I think any investigation into the 2020 election fails every qualifier: the investigators were not competent nor good-faith, and they would be met with resistance at every possible step anyways.

To be slightly conspiratorial, I'll throat-clear saying the 2020 election was not stolen (though whatever propagandist came up with "most secure election ever" should've been fired and sent to Siberia), but I think there is an awareness that it is not really in anyone's best interest to find that evidence even if it exists (which it almost certainly doesn't). As much as Trace has come to be a disappointment, he's not wrong that right-wing media is even more disappointing and doesn't really care to find evidence (that in this case doesn't exist) so much as grift from the idea of it.

I also don’t think Democrats are categorically against security measures.

Is there any good reason ballot harvesting shouldn't be banned and treated as a grave offense against the private ballot and the democratic process?

For a few additional comments, a now-deleted account that reported (positively) on performing ballot harvesting in California back at the old abode, a few of my reasons why ballot harvesting is so open to abuse yet wouldn't get reported, and some other guy you might recognize makes offers on what to trade for banning ballot harvesting.

Absence of evidence is, in fact, evidence of absence.

...he said, standing in front a stack of burning papers...

Ok, Im being facetious, but what sort of evidence to you expect to see, in a system that doesn't to integrity checks, and preemptive steps, that the rest of the world consider basic?

I think we do most of those checks, and that we observe very little fraud anyway.

If there was widespread undetected fraud, I would have expected surprise audits like the Mariposa County report to turn up more of it. I’d have expected more of the Kraken lawsuits to win or at least make it to court. It’s not like they were lacking in motivation!

While I can’t run the statistics on my phone, I get the impression that most of these examples are caught by routine processes. That suggests there’s not much low-hanging fruit.

What specific integrity check would you have in mind?

Partisan scrutineers being allowed to meaningfully inspect the counting process is kind of a big one.

That’s definitely already a thing, no? Pennsylvania, Georgia.

They won't be able to make a repeat of it, but 'because covid', observers were made to keep a 3m distance from the actual counters, and accused of 'making the workers feel unsafe' if they tried to ask about anything in PA for sure. (there was a court case about it, which the RNC or whoever won and got an order to let the scrutineers scrutinize -- once the counting was more or less done)

GA I don't want to relitigate, but "we're stopping counting because of <definitely not a water main break>, you may as well go home" coupled with restarting the count a couple hours later seems well outside the spirit of that reg.

Implementing these will make voting slower, more difficult, and more likely to generate lawsuits. They encourage a heckler’s veto, where anyone with the time and money has more levers to slow down and cast doubt on the outcome. Is that likely to improve legitimacy?

I don't see "slower or more difficult" as valid objections to improving vote security. Maybe it should be slower or more difficult? Maybe not, but I would need more information to judge those trade-offs. And it already seems to have gotten slower despite the improvements in technology. Lawsuits aren't always bad. Maybe some are worthwhile? I don't know, I'm just saying that when someone says, "Your system is flawed" and your reply is, "It's the most perfect ever," without probing the suggested issues, is shitty public relations whether or not there are actual problems. And worrying about whose ox gets gored by investigating potential hazards is never going to result in effective systems regardless of who is in charge. That's a Soviet-response to Chernobyl environment in the making. Get it the fuck out of American voting systems, please.

Every election ought to be able to withstand an audit and defend its results, and not just met with a shrug when hundreds of thousands of ballots can't be accounted for or memory cards get wiped or voter rolls don't match or someone just accidentally let thousands of late ballots get counted or all of the vote totals changed in the dead of night after all of the observers were told to go home. The best reply to false or incorrect accusations of vote fraud is to present the accuser with impeccable records that support the result. If your election systems are such a mess due to laziness or complacency that you can't really support the result, it doesn't matter who is accusing you of what -- get your shit in order, or it makes it look like they might be correct when they accuse you of corruption. That is corruption, even if it's a less malicious sort of corruption.

I'm not familiar with the rules in PA but my assumption is the plaintiffs just re-file/amend adding the appropriate parties (all 67 counties). Unless there are some rules I don't understand this is not an insurmountable procedural hurdle. I appreciate wanting to hear a case in the proper procedural posture but this does seem like it's going to come back to them, much closer to the election.

I think it's likely to miss the election entirely if the plaintiffs aren't quick about it.

Previous thread here.

Given the extent that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is political and has made political decisions, this is a pretty surprising result to me, if for more cynical causes. Binding parties that were not part of a court procedure is bad, but courts have been pretty willing to put a procedural thumb on the scale toward more votes being counted above all. Whether this ends up the last word, or we have a process change a couple days before the election when all the is are cross and ts dotted, though...

It's especially surprising because there was just an election last year where the Democratic judge was elected on pretty much straightforward partisan electoral lines: Abortion. And he's in the majority on this one.

Looks like there is an ounce of integrity left in that body.

Easy procedural decisions are the ones where a political court is least likely to make a political decision on the underlying merits - the cost of making the legally correct decision is usually low (because the litigant who goofed can often refile, and in any case it doesn't set a bad precedent on the merits) and the cost of making the politically correct decision is high (because it messes up the body of precedent on what should be an easy procedural question, which generates extra work for every judge in the jurisdiction). There is also the possibility that the procedural issue itself has partisan political implications - in fact it almost always does, with left-wing judges favouring civil plaintiffs and criminal defendants. And an appeals court deciding a procedural issue knows that the procedural precedent usually has more impact than the substance of the case at bar.

A good example from the other side is the mifepristone case - SCOTUS decided 9-0 on standing with Thomas' concurrence saying that the plaintiffs lost even harder on standing than the majority - even though Thomas and Alito at least would probably have sided with the plaintiffs on the merits.

This is also why Media Matters stand a better change than you might think of winning on appeal in the 5th circuit if Musk wins the "ads on Nazi posts" lawsuit at trial - the procedural precedent created by allowing an anti-free-speech lawsuit to go ahead in a forum-shopped jurisdiction is on balance a pro-left one and the Fedsoc judges who dominate the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals know this.

While all true, the other three Democratic judges in dissent prove that it's still very easy to just spike the procedural issue and vote your interest, anyway.

Judges often say things in dissent that they wouldn't dream of saying in a majority opinnion. You only have the freedom to throw bombs when there's no risk of actually making a mess of things.

Kind of like how Democrats never pushed for enshrining Roe until it was gone.

NYT has released an article about unmarked graves in Canada.

They quote Tom Flanagan about lack of concrete evidence for child graves:

“There’s, so far, no evidence of any remains of children buried around residential schools,” Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary and an author of “Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools),” said in an interview.

“Nobody disputes,” he added, “that children died and that the conditions were sometimes chaotic. But that’s quite different from clandestine burials.”

The arguments by Mr. Flanagan and other skeptics have been roundly denounced by elected officials across the political spectrum who say evidence clearly suggests that there are many sites of unmarked burials.

Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation, who made the announcement about the Kamloops site, said: “The denialists, they’re hurtful. They are basically saying that didn’t happen.”

Why are the denialists hurtful, Chief Rosanne? Wouldn't it be great news if there are no unmarked graves?

“We’ve had many conversations about whether to exhume or not to exhume,” Chief Casimir said. “It is very difficult and it is definitely very complex. We know that it’ll take time. And we also know that we have many steps yet to go.”

“We have to know for sure,” she added, “that we did everything that we can to determine: yes or no, anomaly or grave?”

So, the current course of action is to continue not knowing for sure.

“Will every one of those anomalies turn out to be an unmarked grave? Obviously not,” Mr. Lametti, a former law professor now practicing law in Montreal, said. “But there’s enough preponderant evidence already that is compelling.”

The article conveniently omits which evidence is compelling.

The comments seem like a breath of fresh air:

So having read this article, I’ve learned that native children were in the past treated horribly by the government, and that today there is a vigorous debate about how to remember that. But the article doesn’t tell us whether there is actual evidence for mass graves.

The ground penetrating radar results showed disturbances that could be bodies, or tree roots, or something else. There's simply no way to tell unless there are excavations.

When these results were announced in 2021, the country was led to believe these were likely children's graves. Flags were lowered for months. It was reported as a deeply shameful fact, and it really undermined people's pride in their country.

Shockingly, no one in authority has tried to actually get to the bottom of what actually lies underground. If these were clandestine graves there should be criminal investigations. If these are tree roots, then this should be a very cautionary tale against preliminary investigation results being taken as fact and then used for political purposes.

All of the above is totally separate from the real and well documented suffering of Indigenous children wrongly taken from their parents and placed in those awful schools. But it does their memory no credit to make unproven claims in their name.

And now we come to the comment, due to which I started writing all this:

It is sad this is the most recommended comment, which is simply refuted in the second sentence of the article.

Racism abound.

Quote from the article:

While there is a broad consensus in Canada that children were taken from their families and died in these schools, as the discussions and searches have dragged on, a small universe of conservative Catholic and right-wing activists have become increasingly vocal in questioning the existence of unmarked graves. They are also skeptical of the entire national reconsideration of how Canada treated Indigenous people.

Another comment:

Same old rightwing playbook. Deny, obfuscate and rely on sophistry to prove that nothing is real unless they agree with it.

There are so many known and proven ways, in which First Nations were harmed. I can't imagine my child being taken away from me to be reeducated in some way in general, let alone experimented on. Taking away children from their parents causes a visceral reaction in me. I can't imagine the pain and which downstream effects this would cause to a community.

Setting all of the compassion I feel on the personal level aside, why do we need to invent new ways for the indigenous people to be oppressed? Is it acceptable to just lie for victimhood points at this point? Why do liberals seem to be content with this state of affairs?

It all comes down to this, and it's a very cynical and bitter conclusion: it's profitable to lie. Would, for example, this documentary* be made? Would the feds give $27 million to National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation? Would provinces pledge more money for searches? (god knows which unreliable methods would this money be spent on in the future. Divination? Remote viewing? Not out of the question apparently).

And the same tired tactics are used to browbeat the skeptics into "believing science", again. Who cares that for now ground scanning radar found exactly 0 buried kids? It doesn't matter, Catholics killed kids. It's plain and simple, champ. Just be more centered. Do better. Be less racist. Catholic churches on fire be damned. What's one church against maybe existing child remains?

Chief Nepinak from the CBC article above:

“I think the vocal majority in the room, in the community engagements, wanted certainty. They wanted to find the truth. They wanted people held accountable,” Nepinak said. “And to that end, you know, we prioritized that, that voice.”

Apparently, it's easy to exhume, even if the act of doing so violates religious beliefs. And now Pine Creek First Nation knows for certain: no unmarked graves where the ground scanning radar found the anomalies. Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation, on the other hand, would prefer to not know.

* This documentary is stunningly scare on content. Julian Brave NoiseCat shows us a lot of tears over the dead children, lying in those unmarked graves. A lot of interpersonal trauma. People hurting other people - there's a scene where he confronts his absentee father about spending the childhood without him. They find a survivor of residential schools who recounts a story about putting a newborn baby, who was the result of an indigenous girl being raped by a priest, in an incinerator. Of course there's no evidence outside of this single account. The whole RAPE BABY INCINERATION is mentioned in passing. One of the main characters is an activist woman, who's trying to uncover the whole truth about the residential schools for 50 years and the only thing that she now clings to is... unmarked graves. Widespread evidence of abuse is so widespread, one person can apparently dig for 50 years and come up with nothing.

I remember Nassim Taleb trying to push back against the "Black Roman" discourse on the grounds that it was erasing proto-Arabs from history. (The question of to what extent modern-day Arabic-speaking North Africans are descended from historical Berbers vs the Arab colonizers is hoary, but "African" i.e. North African Romans were plausibly related to modern-day Arabs in a way that they are not to sub-Saharan blacks). It didn't work - even in the UK blacks are comfortably further up the progressive stack than other ethnic minorities.

Hello, and welcome to the Motte!

Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with our rules, particularly on posting about specific groups. Who are these “experts?” Can you show examples of their chud-owning antics? @MadMonzer’s response is a good approach.

Is it acceptable to just lie for victimhood points at this point?

Yes. An example of this has stuck in my mind the past couple months. I was listening to this Bari Weiss podcast on a run. It focuses on the story of Matthew Shepard which was "the most notorious anti-gay hate crime in American history." A national tragedy and outrage of the 90's, so city liberals had so more evidence to deride the experience of small town bigotry. They wrote a play and made a movie about it.

Matthew Shepard was a young gay man living in a college town in Wyoming. He was found murdered and tortured to death in 1998. The narrative of "gay man butchered to death for gaying too gayly" galvanized gay rights advocates for the follow decade. Contemporary reporting very quickly turned to gay hate crime. This podcast is an hour long conversation with author Ben Kwaller who did first-hand reporting in Laramie, Wyoming and research on the murder for a book with a different conclusion.

Turns out that there is a fair bit of evidence and testimony that Matthew Shepard probably wasn't murdered for being gay. Because Matt used and sold meth. He was murdered by a guy he sometimes had meth dealings with, and probably had sex with according to other testimony. The gruesome nature of his murder was possibly not the product of virulent gay bashing, but a meth fueled macabre butchery. Done by a desperate, indebted addict whose life was falling apart. His murderer had not slept or consumed anything except drugs for several days.

In the Honestly episode Ben Kwaller shares recordings of one of his visits to Laramie. Ben (who is gay) goes to some college LGBTQ+ group and interviews them. He asks what the town thinks of the countervailing narrative. He wants to know if they at all consider the implications that their narrative was wrong. One of students says that Ben, the guest and author, should stop asking these questions, because they make him uncomfortable. I won't find the time stamp unless asked, but I can hear his voice say the words "read the room."

The student meant that this is our rallying cry. Think of all the good that has come out of this noble lie. Imagine a world where gays across America didn't believe Matthew Shepard, their avatar, was brutally murdered for being gay. We might not even have gay marriage! We might not have all these vigils and community and influence. Stop asking questions. Let us have it.

"Read the room." I'm not particularly black pilled, but conflict theorists do be winning sometimes.

Now I expended all my typing on a semi-related event. I do appreciate the write up. It's good. But, frankly, I am tired of the mass graves story. I can't draw the energy to care that the NYT finally reported on a story with marginally more integrity than the CBC has ever had. This specific article was written just over a year ago. It has the mainstream framing of the topic in August 2023, which is years after journalists had plenty of reasons to ask meaningful questions about the narrative. I'm sure we have had dozens of top-level mass graves threads in the Culture War Roundup's various forms. It keeps on chugging along.

The mass graves story, and how deep its roots grew into Canadian society, was an eye opener at the time. First, it demonstrated that Canadians had ended any and all resistance to the American culture war waged at their doorstep. Not only did Canada capitulate, but Canada picked up the banner and dedicated itself wholeheartedly to the cause. Progress. Truth seeking doesn't always scratch an itch. People want to prostrate themselves before a greater power. Canada's elite, advocacy groups, certain tribal leaders, and media saw they could leverage that desire for gain. Why not? A new national past time is born.

Canada doesn't really have the same sort of adversarial media presence that the US does, does it? If a few Native American leaders enrich themselves, a few politicians win elections, and some money gets embezzled because we're telling a noble lie, so what? Think of all the good that has come out of this. Read the room.

The student meant that this is our rallying cry. Think of all the good that has come out of this noble lie. Imagine a world where gays across America didn't believe Matthew Shepard, their avatar, was brutally murdered for being gay. We might not even have gay marriage! We might not have all these vigils and community and influence. Stop asking questions. Let us have it.

I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir here, but one problem with this approach is that it requires ever more sordid lies to be concocted in order to generate the same level of activist outrage…nominative determinism strikes again?

I will caveat that while the Shepard murder is definitely murkier than the mainstream sanitized version of events, the Jimenez version has its own limitations.

Is it acceptable to just lie for victimhood points at this point?

Earlier today I started doing a writeup on these events after seeing headlines to the effect of, "box knife used to carve racial slur into flesh of college student." My first thought was "if it's not a straight up hoax, then it may be the most unambiguously racist crime I've ever heard of." But I ended up abandoning the post because I couldn't figure out what to say beyond "I'd like to say 'wait and see' but I kind of doubt we'll ever see."

Reading between the lines, it seems like the actual events were: two college kids who were friends got up to some shenanigans with a sharp object, including writing "the N-word" on the chest of the black friend. The writing is variously described as "scratching," "cutting," and "carving," depending on who is talking about it, and the implement is variously described as plastic, ceramic, a box cutter, a box knife... no pictures of the implement or actual slur appear in evidence. Some upperclassmen reported these shenanigans to their coaches, who kicked both the perpetrator and the "victim" off the team.

To carve a legible word into someone's flesh requires either dramatically overpowering strength, a gang of lackeys holding the victim down, or the cooperation of the victim. The victim also was apparently not the one to report the events, though the victim's family is quite upset about the whole thing. So my best guess is that the two friends decided to do something edgy together, or maybe the victim is easily suggestible for some reason. But of course the whole story now is about racism instead of about the general foolishness one gets when young athletic males are gathered together with no purpose but to "have some fun." And not just any racism, but "carving the N-word into the flesh" of the victim! Now that's a headline to sell some papers! Nuanced discussion of how racial slurs have become one of very few kinds of language young people can use to genuinely shock and disturb, such that most utterances of racial slurs are probably disconnected from actual racism (of the "race X is inherently superior to race Y" variety), is right out.

Now, for all I know the perpetrator is 6'7" and can bench press a horse, while the victim is 5'5" and 100lbs. soaking wet, and the perpetrator is a Good Old Boy who always wanted his own scarified slave or something, and this was every bit as horrific as the headlines imply. But I don't know, and I doubt I ever will, and as long as no one really knows, we can all just tell ourselves whatever story we want to tell ourselves about how these events totally reinforce all our existing beliefs and biases.

Hopefully you can see how that's not a tangent at all, despite me not commenting on the exhausting superposition of "gravesites" which are probably mostly not gravesites. But so long as they might be, well, then there is money to be made and power to be grabbed by peddling a narrative. The story is more useful--arguably to both proponents and opponents--as long as it remains uncertain.

Truth is the only casualty, and who (but the occasional Internet autist) cares about that?

What’s especially galling is that the indigenous kids dying is being framed as murder because communicable diseases that everyone died from back then killed those kids, because the schools lacked proper ventilation. Yes, that’s how Catholics planned to genocide the Indian children. Improper ventilation. How devious! How cunning!

Ironic also that it’s only Catholics bearing the blame, when the Unitarians and other churches also joined in.

From what I can gather, the idea of residential schools at the time was a rather progressive idea: "we can make these kids lives better by bringing them up assimilated with Western education and values." And several prominent Native Americans were at least loosely supportive of the idea (Charles Curtis, Vice President of the US during the Hoover administration comes to mind).

It strikes me as very similar to the far-left/communist meme about who gets to educate your children. And I think even now there would be support for it among progressives as long as you make sure it's for children of the right "undesirables."

the idea of residential schools at the time was a rather progressive idea

Nothing has changed. The Catholics get it worse simply because they're the easiest target for Progressives to engage (for various reasons). They also tend more often to be actually located on the reserves.

there would be support for it among progressives

Progressives already act like this, with force of law.

What do you think "we'll send Indian Affairs CPS to take your kids away if you use their birth name at home" is?
What do you think "if you complain about the teacher's pet raping your kid, you'll be arrested" is?
What do you think "if you engage in your native customs, like letting your kid outside to play unsupervised, you'll be harassed by the State" is?

They'll beat the Indian out of colonize you eventually.
Remember, land acknowledgements are about forcing you to admit that these colonizers own the land.

Ironic also that it’s only Catholics bearing the blame, when the Unitarians and other churches also joined in.

Do you think this is independent of present day politics? The project 2025 scaremongering rabbit hole blames Catholics too. It’s just a progressive meme.

'just' a progressive meme undersells it a little I think -- there's a very real attempt to whip up anti-Catholic sentiment for social engineering reasons, and going after some Unitarians in bumfuck SK wouldn't advance this goal.

In reality the parameters of the project were determined by the (largely Liberal) government of the day -- so if anyone should be getting the hate it's like Robert Borden or something. This does not serve the agenda either, which is why old John A gets so much demonization despite being removed from power around the time the residential school system got really fired up.

Louis Riel did nothing wrong.

just' a progressive meme undersells it a little I think -- there's a very real attempt to whip up anti-Catholic sentiment for social engineering reasons, and going after some Unitarians in bumfuck SK wouldn't advance this goal.

I won't disagree with that, but at the same time there's a limit to how far the cathedral is willing to go there. Hit pieces on St Mary's Kansas seem ambivalent and conspiracy theories about the knights of Malta involvement in project 2025 are not being pushed by DNC attack ads.

I think the lawfare and literal conquest by fire of the churches are doing the job well enough.

Some observations:

  1. As multiple other commenters note, residential schools were a very progressive idea for their time. The kind of person running it was clearly the same kind of person now criticising it, even with largely similar values. Given that progressives are considered the side of empathy - most conservatives main complaint is their excess of empathy - this makes me weep for the project of empathy as a whole. If people fail to empathize with themselves, projected into the past, how can they possibly empathise with other people?

  2. The contrarian in me obviously wants to just exhume everything and see whether there is anything at all; But to some degree that still buys into a framing that imo is entirely unfounded. To our knowledge, we know that conditions in foster institutions were generally quite bad independent of the skin color of the child for a long time, not to mention that many kids already were mistreated even before they entered them. We know some of them died due to this. Even if they were being buried locally, that is still no proof whatsoever for the wild claims of murderous racism.

  3. It strikes me again just how little connection there seems to be between people getting into positions of power in native american councils and actually being, you know, native american. "Chief Rosanne Casimir", who argues against exhumations, looks much less native than "Rancher Garry Gottfriedson", who argues in favor! And sure enough, Garry is an actual former residential school student.

There were schools and orphanages in Ireland within living memory that were worse, and nobody outside that country cares, because the victims weren't part of a "marginalized group."

How I learned about this.

I think that exhuming any suspected graves on residential school grounds where name and date + cause of death are uncertain is obviously the correct thing to do.

Many forms of murder would be still visible on the skeleton. Some signs of severe abuse might also be preserved.

Given what I know about Catholics, I think it is highly unlikely they ran death camps. They almost certainly employed violence against their wardens, probably of a severity for which today's society would feel that you should never have power over any kids ever again. I would not be shocked if an investigation discovered poorly healed fractures linked to child abuse. Very likely there was also some sexual abuse going on (a common outcome when men have a lot of power without oversight, even when not specifically selecting for men who decided to forswear church-sanctioned sex), but that will rarely be provable from the forensic record.

I also presume that the white staff had a higher caloric intake than the indigenous kids, and that the latter were much more devastated by infectious diseases. All in all, it was a terrible human rights abuse and might technically qualify as genocide.

The way I model Catholics, the kids were probably baptized before they had their first warm meal. And putting the bodies of your fellow Christians (even if they are of a 'lesser race') into anonymous, unmarked mass graves is not usually done. Of course, they likely would not have paid for tombstones either, so what was a marked grave in 1940 could very well be an unmarked grave in 2020 because wooden crosses don't last that long.

I have no sympathy for people who embellish atrocities. Typically, the historical consensus is damning enough. Adding "did we mention that the perpetrators lived on a diet of murdered babies?" is strictly counter-productive (unless true, of course) -- instead of just having the people against you who like to deny or diminish the atrocity for political reasons, you are suddenly opposed by all the people who care about the truth.

The way I model Catholics, the kids were probably baptized before they had their first warm meal.

My understanding is that indigenous parents got to generally choose which residential schools their kids went to- so we can probably assume these kids were Catholic before they arrived.

If people fail to empathize with themselves, projected into the past, how can they possibly empathise with other people?

The left's "empathy" project has never been unlimited and all-encompassing. Only the good people (read the correct newspapers to learn who those are today) deserve empathy, and the bad people deserve nothing but hate. The left can be - and often is - horrendously vicious to those that are considered bad people. And that matters absolutely nothing that they may have held the same ideas or were members of the same movement in the past. Once they are declared the bad people, they are outside the empathy circle, and it is very, very dark on the left outside that circle. Is not the "excess" of empathy, it is very carefully directed allocation of it, deployed along very ideological guidelines.

The left's "empathy" project has never been unlimited and all-encompassing.

This isn't true; the original hippies did actually buy into this (LSD and MDMA likely had something to do with this). Less so in the 90s-00s, but the window of "you're okay" was much wider than it has been since SJ congealed. And even SJers very rarely intend massacre as an end*, though that's a very low bar to clear.

*As in, given a sufficient stranglehold on power, the vast, vast majority of SJers do not want to massacre their enemies. Most are willing to fight a civil war (and many are willing to commit terrorism) if that's the only way to get that stranglehold, but that's a means, not an end in itself. Disenfranchisement, re-education, and institutionalised kidnapping to prevent enemy culture transmission all have significant (though in the latter two cases I'm not sure about majority) support as means to ensure permanent victory, but not massacre.

OK, I can't really talk about the hippy times, I wasn't even born yet then. But given by how many leftists terrorists (Weather Underground, RAF, etc.) existed at that time or immediately after, hippies probably weren't exclusively dominating the leftist mainstream. But those times are long gone, and the hippies are nowhere to be seen, and probably already have been denounced as a racist, cisheteropatriarchal movement (I don't know but it sounds so on brand I am pretty sure somebody already wrote a paper on that).

even SJers very rarely intend massacre as an end

I don't know if they want to massacre their opponents personally, but they are surely A-OK with somebody else doing the job. They are willing to support pretty much any organization that would deploy violence against Western traditional targets or anybody they consider "bad people".

“Will every one of those anomalies turn out to be an unmarked grave? Obviously not,” Mr. Lametti, a former law professor now practicing law in Montreal, said. “But there’s enough preponderant evidence already that is compelling.”

And then the obvious response of "come back to us when one of these ground penetrating radar discovered mass graves turns out to be real, when the success rate exceeds 0%".


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