site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38136 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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

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

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

  • Shaming.

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

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6
Top Bottom New Old Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Vivek Ramaswamy gave an interesting talk at Yale's Buckley institute a few days after the election. What I specifically want to focus on is the part starting at 34:35, where he describes what he thinks is a divide in the Republican party between two different notions of American national identity. The first is that being American is about following a common set of values---meritocracy, free speech, self-governance, etc. The second (starting 39:12) is that being American is about having deep, ancestral ties to a particular piece of land---"blood and soil". He sees the coming years as an almost factional fight within the Republican party between these two notions of identity.

This topic is very close to my heart---I think the majority of my interaction with this forum has been very unsuccessfully arguing in favor of the ideals-based notion of identity. Ramaswamy fervently supports the same and I hope hearing his much better-argued case (from a much more authoritative source) is far more compelling than anything I've tried to say.

However, what I'm actually interested in is what people here think the outcome of the factional fight is going to be. What do you see in Trump's choices of appointees? Is Ramaswamy going to be pushed out or is he going to be an influential figure moving forward? Which side do you think various major figures in the Republican party land on?

Just to put my cards on the table, I personally think Ramaswamy is delusional that it's even a fight and that the Republican party is fully dominated by the blood-and-soil side. This is in fact the main reason I vote Democrat and if I believed the ideals side was going to win, I would immediately become a die-hard Trump supporter. I believe that if you actually hold the ideals-based notion of identity, then the Matt Yglesias/Noah Smith-wing of the Democratic party is the right political home for you. As for why I believe this, I always thought that support for legal, skilled immigration was the best litmus test for this divide---if you are on the ideals side, then it is a no-brainer win-win and if you're on the blood-and-soil side, then it is very dangerous. Both what happened in the last Trump administration and experience talking to right-wingers here seemed to very strongly demonstrate that US Republicans are very against skilled immigration.

At the end of the day, the number of Americans with deep (white) nationalist convictions is much smaller than the number that will gravitate towards arguments couched in blood and soil because they are angry about something else, usually crime, and can be placated by increased policing and a reduction in public disorder, regardless of the actual demographics of their community. Even if Trump succeeds at deporting 15 million illegal immigrants and ending birthright citizenship, which is unlikely to say the least, that still leaves tens of millions of legal immigrants, many of whom have just started voting for Republican candidates because of the Democrats' mishandling of identity politics and will be key to winning future elections.

Demographics is destiny to a degree so it's been over for the racists for a long time. They can join the tent and extract some concessions, but not at the expense of the rest of the coalition.

I always thought that support for legal, skilled immigration was the best litmus test for this divide

Why? Importing high gdp people will make number go up, but it won't provide any support for your values of "meritocracy, free speech, self-governance, etc." If you import a million high iq gay race communists, that will actually destroy your American values faster than importing a million freeloaders will.

I think there's also the question of which set of ideals were talking about. Are they the ideals of the Founding Fathers, which presupposed a European/Christian worldview and a virtuous populace? Or are they the ideals of the Civil Rights Neoconstitution that is IMO essentially a pro-globalist anti-identity? If it's the former, I might be okay with supporting the civnats, but it's the latter, I'm going to reluctantly support the blood-and-soil people.

For what it's worth, I was raised by Republican parents who listened to Conservative Talk Radio and watched Fox News. Growing up I listened to Michael Medved, Glen Beck, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Rush Limbaugh, and Micheal Savage in the car. I still follow some of these personalities on X. I feel like I am tuned into normie conservative sentiment. And the Normie Conservative Sentiment is that America is a values-based society. Immigration is great if someone is willing to work hard, not take handouts, assimilate, and parent their kids to do the same.

I only see the "Blood and Soil" types in fringe online groups. The vast majority of American conservatives are not like that, and if you think that the "Values-Based" Americanism is losing I don't know what to say. I don't even know where the fight is taking place - YouTube comment sections?

I say this as someone who thinks it will be very sad if France is not majority French people, Italy not majority Italians, etc. In my heart I almost see Europe as a museum and I will be sad to see that go away. But America is multi-racial and I see that as a good thing.

That being said, seeing America as a Values-Based Society requires limited immigration. To explain, let's say that we brought in 300 million immigrants next year from all over the globe. 50% of Americans would be immigrants, 50% would be born in the USA. Let's ignore the economic pressure that would create, housing and job crises, and just focus on culture. If the population of foreign-born Americans was 50%, would we be able to pass along American values and culture?

I asked my siblings this question once and they said, "Of course, why not?" I think they were pretty stupid for thinking so. If American norms and values were so easily acquired and distributed throughout the globe, why would people need to move to America? They could just turn their existing countries into America themselves.

Instead, we find in immigration-heavy states like California that new structures that resemble the bribery, nepotism, and corruption of immigrant's home countries.

Obviously 50% of foreign-born people residing in the United States would be too big a shift for us to properly integrate them into our culture. But what is the correct percentage? Immigrants today account for 14.3% of the U.S. population. I think this is an under-count, because they list only 11 million "unauthorized" immigrants, when other independent studies have found closer to 20 million..

Is 14.3% of foriegn-born people the sweet spot? I don't think so. At times of greatest stability in America, that number was between 5-10%.

If america were to raid India or China or Israel, will people of the respective ethnicities not have a very high chance of siding with nations they come from?

This has been a concern throughout American history and there have been some level of sabatuar and unrest during wars from time to time. But most Americans, especially immigrants who choose to assimilate, side with America. People who drop everything with the dream of Being American, a sovereign in themselves, with unalienable rights and infinite opportunity, don't defect so easily. At least not when selected carefully.

What benefits does the average heritage amerikaner get from having Indians or Chinese becoming a permanent resident?

In our current environment with a low TFR, we get people. We avoid a steep population crunch, if only for a little while longer until we can sort it out.

Most people migrating or getting refugee status are completely incapable of being productive money wise.

You seem to misunderstand me here. I don't want "Most people." I would prefer for our foreign born population to decrease by 2/3rds. I think a reasonable amount of newcomers is good, as long as they come in at a rate where they can intermarry and assimilate. I don't want enough of any given foreign population to create an enclave.

This is largely the sentiment I see from normie cons, with the caveat that many believe some groups- they’re always cautious about which ones but if pressed would probably name heavily Muslim groups to start with- are essentially unassimilable, and that only their children, or more probably mixed race grandchildren, can be expected to buy into American values enough to be ‘real Americans’.

If you are in favor of ideals then Republican immigration policy sounds like it would be a better fit for you. In order for American Ideals to continue to be American Ideals we need to assimilate immigrants into them, and that means taking in a manageable flow, and preferably from all sorts of places. Too large a flow and the existing culture and ideals get diluted too quickly. Too much from a single source means they form enclaves which makes assimilation harder (I am especially thinking of the majority muslim areas of Michigan here). Republican policy preferences are the ones that will meet this goal the best.

The thing is, you assume that 'ideals-based identity' and 'ancestral identity' are separate and orthogonal to one another. But even if we put aside tribal allegiance, it's pretty clear that emotional predispositions (openness, authoritarianism, neuroticism, etc.) are at least partially genetic. And this is going to correlate somewhat with race, because most places have had fairly stable demographics for hundreds or thousands of years.

The ideal of "free speech" is going to look very different in a country of high-openness, high-extroversion people vs high-neuroticism, low-openness. Likewise "self-governance". Moved from one country that considers itself meritocratic, self-governing and devoted to free speech to a very ethnically-different country with the same ideals really drove that home for me.

American notions of what their founding ideals mean has already shifted pretty clearly since the country was founded, and I doubt that's independent of the demographic changes that America has been through since the founding. Anyone who wants to preserve modern American values has to consider the demographics of the population upholding those values and passing them down to their children.

(Look at how much work it took for Roosevelt et al to get federal jobs allocated by exam scores not patronage. Both factions considered themselves thoroughly American, but one defined 'merit' as 'decades of loyal service' and the other as 'intelligence and diligence").

it's pretty clear that emotional predispositions (openness, authoritarianism, neuroticism, etc.) are at least partially genetic

There's a standard counterargument here: even accepting this, ancestry is at most weak proxy for values---the distributions always have significant overlap. Using the weak proxy instead of more direct measures of values is silly. I bet even English proficiency and being able to pass a civics test gives more information on acceptance of the current American values than ancestry. I'm not going to complain if this picks out different proportions of different ancestry groups---just don't prejudge anyone based on very weak correlates when there's a better way!

Sounds nice but in practice it doesn’t produce good results:

  1. Reversion to the mean - just as geniuses tend not to produce genius children, the disposition of your cohort is a better predictor of your lineage’s behaviour than your personal values. Especially when that cohort forms ethnic enclaves on arrival.
  2. Passing a civics test != sharing your values. Trying to prevent an ethical project from being infiltrated by people who make the right mouth noises is an ancient problem faced by religions, charities, and NGOs, and it’s almost unsolvable. The two most reliable ways are requiring personal recommendations for membership, or limiting it to a specific ancestral group like the Hasidics or the Amish. I assume that neither appeal to you.

Seriously, I’m not trying to gotcha you with clever arguments. One of the reasons I moved towards an ancestral-based understanding of Britishness was watching all the immigrants who’d taken the mandatory civics test on ‘British values’ turn around and condemn those values the moment they got their visa. We wanted skilled immigrants who would uphold our values too, who doesn’t? But in general that’s not what we got, and the children are worse.

if I believed the ideals side was going to win, I would immediately become a die-hard Trump supporter.

That's interesting. So what are the things you love about Trump so much that would make you a die-hard supporter, if his (or the Republicans') stance on immigration wasn't an issue?

I believe that if you actually hold the ideals-based notion of identity, then the Matt Yglesias/Noah Smith-wing of the Democratic party is the right political home for you.

A single tweet / substack in the wake of a lost election doesn't make for a good argument that an ideals-based identity person belongs in that wing. Particularly when one of these is written by mr. "I want wrong right-wing ideas to be discredited, while wrong left-wing ideas gain power".

I also don't understand why Trump(ist)'s stance on immigration is enough to turn you off from otherwise die-hard support, but you are apparently able to tolerate the Democrat's constant abuse of the very notion of meritocracy.

I always thought that support for legal, skilled immigration was the best litmus test for this divide---if you are on the ideals side, then it is a no-brainer win-win and if you're on the blood-and-soil side, then it is very dangerous.

I don't think it's dangerous (let alone very), I even agree it's a clear win, given the benefits and the small schale of that particular form of immigration, but if you can't think of literally any risk or downside, I'd say you lack imagination.

That aside, I'd say most people are skeptical of skilled immigration, because they see it as a foot-in-the door for mass immigration (no one said how high the skills have to be to count as "skilled").

So what are the things you love about Trump so much that would make you a die-hard supporter, if his (or the Republicans') stance on immigration wasn't an issue?

It's more that I agree with you that the Democrat's stance on American identity isn't ideal. I would become a die hard supporter despite everything else I don't like because then the Republican party and Trump would be the best instruments to make the stance on identity I like dominant---I'm basically a single-issue voter on this issue of identity.

Democrat's constant abuse of the very notion of meritocracy.

Despite also being bad on this issue, the Democrats at least have a wing that supports meritocracy. This wing can actually win primaries/elections in very left-leaning areas; for example, they are going to be running San Francisco as of the recent election. On the other hand, the anti-hereditarian meritocrats on the Republican party, like Ramaswamy, seem to get slaughtered in primaries. Whatever Trump actually believes, meritocracy is something he's very willing to sacrifice when it comes to actual policy decisions. Stephen Miller is still going to be the most influential immigration policy advisor!

no one said how high the skills have to be to count as "skilled"

I'll give a line: better for the country than the median citizen in some measure combining ability to assimilate and ability to contribute. Given how dominant US culture and values are globally, it shouldn't be very hard to find a huge number of people making this cut.

I'm basically a single-issue voter on this issue of identity.

Fair enough, there are issues that move me this way too. But I think it's important to recognize there are valid reasons why either side won't drop everything to get your support. It's a very limited set of circumstances where a one-issue voter gets to exercise influence.

This wing can actually win primaries/elections in very left-leaning areas; for example, they are going to be running San Francisco as of the recent election

I don't think I heard of this. Who won, and what are they planning to do for meritocracy?

On the other hand, the anti-hereditarian meritocrats on the Republican party, like Ramaswamy, seem to get slaughtered in primaries.

And then they get appointed to high positions by people who win them... what's the problem?

I'll give a line: better for the country than the median citizen in some measure combining ability to assimilate and ability to contribute.

I don't think it's the ability to assimilate that's the problem, because that's actually pretty high for most people. The problem is that there is next to no pressure to assimilate anymore, the very idea of putting such pressure is seen as deplorable, and higher immigration will necessarily lower that pressure even more.

Given how dominant US culture and values are globally, it shouldn't be very hard to find a huge number of people making this cut.

It would still imply mass deportations, wouldn't it?

The problem with the values side is the values aren't really verifiable. The homeland of a people side feels under threat in large part because many of the people coming in aren't expected to believe in meritocracy, free speech, or any of that.

Take the example of Judge Chutkan. Her parents left Jamaica and brought her to the US because they were too hardline communist for the communists of Jamaica.

The Dems appointed her to be a DC judge precisely because she has weak cultural ties to the US and can't be shamed into following traditional American legal norms. Appeals to democratic traditions and rights just fall flat on her, she just hates her political enemies.

Republican voters see her in charge of the DC Trump trial and loose all faith in values based immigration.

Oh and it's a big lie that H1-Bs go to "highly educated foreign professionals". Sure decent chunk do. But they are randomly selected from the pool of applicants that have the correct paperwork, so there are significant abuses.

For instance here are H1Bs granted to a hog farming company: https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=murphy-brown+llc&job=&city=&year= Median Salary is $40768.

For H1Bs you need to match the prevailing local wage, so a lot of shops set up in a poor city, and pay their employees well below the normal national wages.

https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=wipro+limited&job=&city=&year=all+years

Sort by salary low to high.

As a fix for H1Bs I've long argued that they should award them based on base salary instead of the current random. It'd fix problems.

The problem with the values side is the values aren't really verifiable.

This, but there's also another problem: changes in values can go either way. If anyone can become American by adopting "American values"… what if they change their mind about said values? What about natural-born citizens who stop believing in those American values? Do they lose their citizenship?

Of course not, for several reasons, one of which is the difficulty of verification you note. But notice that this creates a ratchet — there are multiple ways to become an American, but far narrower paths to cease being one. (AIUI, renouncing American citizenship is actually very difficult.)

(One might draw a comparison here to how an atheist (ethnic) Jew and a gentile convert to Judaism are still both Jewish.)

meritocracy

Oh god, please don't bring up this word with OP, we're about to get a lecture about how meritocracy necessarily means open borders to high-talent immigrants, even if it means economic ruin for existing residents...

WASHINGTON - President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz as the next U.S. Attorney General.

Trump announced his latest cabinet appointment Wednesday afternoon. Gaetz has been a long-time Trump supporter and is a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus in the House.

"Matt is a deeply gifted and tenacious attorney, trained at the William & Mary College of Law, who has distinguished himself in Congress through his focus on achieving desperately needed reform at the Department of Justice. Few issues in America are more important than ending the partisan Weaponization of our Justice System. Matt will end Weaponized Government, protect our Borders, dismantle Criminal Organizations and restore Americans’ badly-shattered Faith and Confidence in the Justice Department," Trump said in a statement.

Gaetz represents Florida's District 1.

Trump has announced a flurry of nominations in the week since his election. Earlier on Wednesday, he selected Sen. Marco Rubio to serve as his Secretary of State.

He should be just trolling I think ...

More effort than this, please.

We are a discussion site, not a link aggregator. Or, uh, a quote aggregator.

Surely these picks are a smokescreen. I bet JD Vance is huddling with Yarvin, Musk, and Thiel in a smoke-filled room right now discussing which anon Twitter accounts and Mottizens will get the call to serve in the shadow cabinet. They must be cross-referencing the Gray Mirror Substack subscriber list to make sure they don’t accidentally double-count any alts.

No, they’re not, there are upper and upper mid level officials in the Texas and Florida governments who will get drafted instead.

You laugh, but Yarvin himself has been very strongly opining that Nothing Ever Happens and any Trumpian hopes were likely to crash on the shores of redtape.

I'm willing to bet that Musk and Thiel will get what they wanted out of the admin (i.e.: the feds stop putting roadblocks in front of them), but twitter anon dreams of power because they are mutuals with Vance were delusional.

feds stop putting roadblocks in front of them

If/When the Dems regain power, especially if MAGA dies fully with Trump, what do you think is going to happen to them long term? My guess is imprisonment or just thrown off a building depending on the fallout of a Trump administration.

I'm quite certain this is why they've been angling to purge all the people who won't leave them alone.

There are large parts of the deep state that understand that their work is needed for America to keep its military edge. It's not clear to me that the people who want to fuck with that are the most senior or the most powerful.

They'll do what filthy rich billionaires did before them : Donate = Bribe = Lobby.

Now that Elon & Thiel are Texans, the state should offer them plenty of protection even after Trump goes away.

Musk joked that either Trump would win or Musk would be imprisoned. It's a joke. But novel legal theories worked once to secure dozens of felony convictions. Why not a second pass?

That was in no way a joke. He was already facing down a prosecution for not employing enough illegal immigrants for a job that has requirements which can only be met by legitimate citizens, his compensation payout being declared too high, etc. The lawfare was already happening, and I think there's a very good chance he would have been extradited abroad and prosecuted for misinformation/hate speech if Trump didn't win.

I wouldn't recommend throwing Musk off a building; he'd probably shoot flames out of his ass and land safely.

I would imagine they think by the time the Dems regain power, the impossible-to-work-with faction will have been soundly defeated and whoever takes over will only be a drag on their businesses, not anything worse. I don't believe that, but Musk, at least, is an optimist.

Tulsi Gabbard got Director of National Intelligence. Rubio is still twisting in the wind waiting for his position to become official. I wonder if Trump is just doing his ritual humiliation ceremony, same as he did with Chris Christy.

Gaetz immediately resigned from his house seat...maybe this is a bureaucratic poisoned chalice for the senate, which has the choice of either confirming Gaetz as AG or facing a potential appointment of Gaetz to Rubio's vacant seat?

I do think that we need some bulls in china shop in washington if the western civilization is to be ok in the next century. So Tulsi is a good pick. But gaetz is not qualified I think and probably couldn't pick up to speed fast enough.

Gaetz is funny enough to be trolling, but more likely Trump just wants someone willing to be enough of a hatchetman. Be interesting to see how much of the confirmation fight circles around his actual philosophy, rather than around how oily he is (spoiler: yes) or the reputed and increasingly dubious allegations of the most sexual impropriety.

Can someone explain to me why is everyone freaking out about this guy? I pick up a fair amount of American politics by osmosis in places like this, and the name does sound familiar, but I have no idea why everybody is losing their damn mind.

He's an idealogue who tracks further to the right of most conservatives, essentialy a slightly more credible version of Lauren Boebert or Marjorie Taylor-Greene. He's known for making intentionally provocative statements that his colleagues don't even try to defend, as well as engaging in stupid publicity stunts. After the GOP took the House in 2022, he insinuated that they should put policy-making on hold and focus on investigating and impeaching Democrats they didn't like. He was the ringleader of Kevin McCarthy's ouster as speaker, earning him a lot of enemies in his own party. He's also a sleazeball, having been accused of sexual misconduct, illegal drug use, showing other members of congress nude photos of women he'd slept with, misappropriating campaign funds for personal use, and accepting impermissible gifts. The centerpiece of all of this is a sex trafficking investigation he got roped into. A close associate of his pleaded guilty and while the evidence didn't support an indictment for any of the crimes that were being investigated, it's pretty clear that Gaetz was partying with this guy and paying him for prostitutes. It didn't help that Gaetz was the only member of congress to vote against a sex trafficking bill. He topped it all off by asking Trump for a blanket pardon for any crimes he may have committed.

While he is a barred attorney, his legal career isn't one typically befitting of an Attorney General. The sum total of his legal experience is a few years as a junior associate at a small law firm, where he handles pennyante matters like debt collection, a dispute over a volleyball net, and a stolen boat. He owes his entire political career to his father, a successful Florida politician who bankrolled his first run for office. the only conceivable reason Trump would nominate him for AG are his personal loyalty (he supported Trump from the beginning and hasn't wavered) and his zeal for going after political enemies. Gaetz resigned from the House after being named as AG; the mainstream view is that he was under investigation for numerous ethics violations and used the nomination as cover to avoid the issuance of the report, now that the House Ethics Committee no longer has jurisdiction. It seems unlikely, however, that Gaetz will ever actually be AG. No Democrat will vote for his confirmation, and only 4 Republicans would need to oppose him to block his nomination. Susan Collins of Maine has already suggested that he's unacceptable, and the guy has enough enemies within his own party that it shouldn't be too hard to find three more (Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell are almost certain nos, and one more wouldn't be hard to find). Any confirmation hearing would air all this dirty laundry publicly in a way that hasn't been done yet. To this point, news of his improprieties has been of the continuing story nature where information comes out in dribs and drabs over the course of years. The only people who can tell you all the ins and outs are the kinds of political junkies who follow scandals involving minor figures. Given the increased scrutiny that's already being given, I'd be surprised if this nomination isn't withdrawn before we even get to the confirmation stage.

So he's scandalous and unqualified? Again, why is everyone losing their shit?

https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/26/the-fbis-matt-gaetz-operation-sidelined-an-effective-republican-voice-at-a-crucial-time-that-was-the-point/

He was one of the more effective pro Trump voices in congress after 2021, and it looks like the DOJ took a run at him.

What they had on him was a crypto guy invited Gaetz on his yacht, afterwards Gaetz venmo'd him $900 and the crypto guy venmo'd two women who were there the $900 split between them. The problem was they couldn't turn that into a federal crime. Even as a state crime they couldn't prove the women were prostitutes or that Gaetz knew the money was for them.

Sending a friend money to cover party expenses isn't a crime. Sending money to a girl you just had sex with to buy herself a present isn't even a crime. It's a bit sleazy but pretty common among the party yacht crowd in Florida. The crypto bro was being threatened with charges and would have been useless as a witness.

So the DOJ leaks facts about the case to the press along with rumours that the girls were underage. They were published March 30, 2021.

Shortly after Gaetz is approached by an ex-military type who claims he can make the charges go away with a donation to a "veterans group". The guy was probably a fed and paying him off would have created federal charges that the DOJ could prosecute. However Gaetz reported it to someone he knew at the FBI instead so that went nowhere.

Basically the DOJ was leaking rumours for 18 months until they admitted there would be no charges. The press is still running with innuendo about it.

But we're approaching 4 years and it seems like the put up or shut up point has passed.

DOJ staff are typically institutionalists and will always circle the wagons to protect the DOJ.

But Gaetz would come in with a personal interest in investigating bad behaviour by the DOJ. They wouldn't be able to try to shame him into hiding things to protect the institution.

For Trumpists that's his big selling point. He's not likely to be highly effective in getting things done at the DOJ but he'll be eager to fire problem people even if it nets him bad headlines from the NYT.

For anti-Trumpists who support the shadier things the DOJ has been doing he's a nightmare.

For people who don't believe the DOJ does anything shady, he just looks like a poor candidate and they want someone more dignified.

Gaetz rubs a lot of people the wrong way because he looks like the rich kid villain from an 80s movie. That's probably not too far off the mark, only as an adult he went to DC and found out people there love to shit on his hometown. So he basically had a heel-face turn where he wants to defend the people of his city against DC.

He's a Republican, he has troll energy, and he has Matt Gaetz's face.

That last one is a little jokey, but I do think that's what tilts it into a furor relative to any average Republican the left hates. He has a supremely punchable face that screams "douchebag", even to me. And I think he even knows it.

Edit: Ya'll a bunch of fucking cowards downvoting while not defending your beliefs.

In 2020, Biden got 2,473,633 votes in Georgia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United _States_presidential_election_in_Georgia

In 2024, Harris got 2,548,014 votes in Georgia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election_in_Georgia

I hear that Republicans stopped the democrats from stealing the election again with their superior election observation efforts this year.

But how come we haven't seen any evidence of the fraud Harris had to perpetuate to maintain and improve on Biden's 2020 numbers in Georgia?

I assume the question here has an intended answer (there wasn't much fraud).

Anyway, asking anyone who does think the 2020 election was stolen, do you have any examples of things that seem like obvious problems or evidence of substantial fraud? I'm currently inclined to think that there wasn't anything of that sort, but a lot of people seem really firmly convinced, so I'd be interested in seeing the evidence.

Yes, that's the answer I understand.

But I also understand people here to still believe there was fraud in 2020. And that doesn't seem easily reconcilable woth what happened in 2024 and Trump's people being "on guard".

It’s not reconcilable with what happened in 2020. And that is because there was no election fraud. Those who believe there was have been duped.

Ballot counting stopped in Fulton County on election night 2020 because of claims of a burst pipe that later turned out to be false. But after poll watchers went home ballot counting continued and the next morning the largest pro-Biden ballot drop of the entire election was delivered.

Fake news as usual, unless you believe the AP or those they interviewed are in on it.

The report went out that a water pipe burst. This caused people to change their behavior. The fact that it wasn't real is even more suspicious. How did this story get out there? Poll watcher went home!

My personal belief is that the election was "stolen" but I take a very limited perspective that I don't think really provides the information you're looking for - I think that the amount of actual electoral fraud wasn't that much greater or smaller than what is normal for American elections, but the "steal" largely happened when the intelligence community knowingly lied to the public about the provenance of the Hunter Biden laptop. There have been studies done which plausibly make the case that this actually tipped the election towards Biden, and it isn't really something that anyone on either side of politics tries to disagree with.

If we're going down that road of calling things stolen you can call any election stolen if you were so inclined. 2016 was stolen by Comey reopening the emails investigation, 2004 was stolen by the swiftboat lies (ok that one probably didn't tip the balance but probably neither did the Hunter Biden laptop), 1856 was stolen by Democrats claiming Fremont was a Catholic and would a lead a slave rebellion, etc. etc. 'Stolen' is a pretty extreme word that I think in common parlance would only apply if you thought there was something nefarious about the election/voting process itself.

Sure, I definitely think that people were manipulating the public in this way, and that there's a decently high chance that that could have been the difference.

I haven’t done a deep dive, but there exists this website to compile evidence:

https://hereistheevidence.com/

That lists the 2020 election as an "open case" but not 2024.

I suppose it will be updated, it was sections for Jan 6 and Covid. 2024 tomfoolery as seen by the right focused on down ballot.

Page was created from scratch on Nov 16 2020. I wouldn't bet on a 2024 update.

Ballot counting stopped in Fulton County on election night 2020 because of claims of a burst pipe that later turned out to be false. But after poll watchers went home ballot counting continued and the next morning the largest pro-Biden ballot drop of the entire election was delivered.

The burst pipe was media confusion, not lies by the county. There had been a burst pipe in the morning in a different part of the building which delayed the opening of postal votes. The delay in the counting was an administrative screw-up. [As far as I can see, staff opening postal votes who had been working since the morning were allowed to go home at 1030pm. Some staff counting who were supposed to work overnight if necessary also left, and the party poll-watchers left with them, but the SecState office ordered them back to work after a short delay.]

And if you believe that this event was used to squeeze a substantial sum of ballots into the count, how did Harris similarily squeeze a substantial sum of ballots into the count in 2024 without anyone noticing? She did better than Biden by 75k votes.

Your question is a non-sequitur: why do I have to prove anything more? There is clear irregularity in 2020, either give an innocuous explanation for the counting stopped over a water pipe, or concede.

There could be all sorts of trivial reasons why Harris would grow from Biden:

  • They learned how to cheat better
  • Population Growth
  • Demographic Change
  • Georgia flipping blue in 2020 excited more blue voters to vote in 2024

Comparing two different numbers from two different moments in time without any context is, pardon, complete apples to oranges.

Your question is a non-sequitur: why do I have to prove anything more? There is clear irregularity in 2020, either give an innocuous explanation for the counting stopped over a water pipe, or concede.

I don't see why a claim of a burst pipe that turned out to be false is proof of fraud? Why should AppleyOrange need to concede anything? There might be many explanations for concerns about a burst water pipe other than deliberate malfeasance. A single bad actor might submit a false report about a burst pipe. A good faith error might have occurred. There might have been a real but small leak that was exaggerated. There are too many possibilities to reasonably jump from a report of a burst pipe to fraud.

But suppose we grant that there was a suspicious irregularity in 2020 worthy of investigation. It's not proof of fraud, but maybe it's something people should look into. Sure.

I think the point about 2024 holds up?

Let's grant hypothetically that large voter fraud in Georgia in 2020 delivered the state to Biden. Let's also grant that Harris outperformed Biden in 2024. There are two possibilities here - either Harris also committed fraud, or she didn't.

If Harris also committed voter fraud, then we should reasonably expect to find evidence of that fraud. Maybe they did it better, sure, but a large-scale operation like state-wide voter fraud ought to leave some evidence. We might also be inclined to ask why, if Harris' campaign is capable of successfully rigging an election in Georgia so professionally, Trump still won Georgia by a decent margin, and why they apparently failed to rig elections in other states, including much more significant swing states.

If Harris didn't commit any kind of fraud, then we'd seem to have to conclude that her performance in the state in 2024 is not prima facie suspicious. If so, then we have a strange question to ask ourselves - why, after rigging it in 2020, would they not bother to rig it in 2024? Moreover, if the Democrats performed better when they weren't rigging it to when they were... that seems strange? That seems like Dick Dastardly stopping to cheat? If Harris didn't cheat in '24, it seems like it just makes more sense if Biden didn't cheat in '20.

Let's consider the four possibilities here: 1) Biden cheats in 2020, Harris cheats in 2024, 2) Biden cheats in 2020, Harris doesn't cheat in 2024, 3) Biden doesn't cheat in 2020, Harris cheats in 2024, 4) Biden doesn't cheat in 2020, Harris doesn't cheat in 2024. It seems like option four just... makes the most sense of the observed data.

Jesus, you made my point far better than I could. Thank you.

There are too many possibilities to reasonably jump from a report of a burst pipe to fraud.

I was talking with a local friend who works elections in [red state] and apparently at the end of the night they loaded the local machine-counted sums for the precinct into the back of a personal vehicle (in tamper-sealed boxes) and drove them to the county central counting facility to hand them off. Apparently last time it was just the driver, and this year they were instructed to at least drive together in pairs, potentially followed by the poll watchers.

My thoughts were roughly (1) I think I mostly trust these folks to do the right thing, but (2) it'd be really easy for anything dramatic here to make national headlines, and I'm kind of surprised it hasn't. I guess you have burst pipes as an example, but "DC ballots stolen when election worker gets carjacked on the way to deliver results" seems quite plausible as a random happenstance but also looks a lot like deliberate election fraud. We're IMO lucky that doesn't seem to have happened.

Also that securing a distributed secret ballot is a fundamentally harder problem than most would give credit for.

Georgia flipping blue in 2020 excited more blue voters to vote in 2024

Why don't you put forth a hypothesis that you personally take seriously.

They learned to cheat better than in 2020, but not good enough to win.

They didn't cheat THIS time, but Harris excited GA voters s o mich that she made up all the 2020 cheating and then 75k more.

These hypotheses are laughable. I don't see any that make sense, but I don't believe in 2020 Fraud.

If you believe in 2020 Fraud, you should be able to offer a coherent explanation.

I offered one: vote counting stopped simultaneously across several swing states, poll watchers were sent home, then huge pro-Biden ballot drops were delivered. If you can't respond to that, this is not an argument, this is just two people posting text.

Again: comparing two numbers from two different events without any context is apples-to-oranges. Harris got more votes in Fulton County than Biden did: ok, what does that mean? How do we sort out confounding variables? I weighed 100 pounds four years and 150 pounds today, I must be getting fat! (I was 8 then and 12 now, I've put on one and a half feet and I'm junior varsity swim.)

I offered one: vote counting stopped simultaneously across several swing states, poll watchers were sent home, then huge pro-Biden ballot drops were delivered. If you can't respond to that, this is not an argument, this is just two people posting text.

That's not an explanation for how Kamala managed to get more votes without being caught in similar fraud.

I'm honestly not sure what you even want me to respond to. I am not saying that nothing sketchy happened in 2020. I'm saying how is fraud in 2020 and fraud in 2024 consistent. Your response of "but 2020!" is a literal non-sequitor.

Again: comparing two numbers from two different events without any context is apples-to-oranges. Harris got more votes in Fulton County than Biden did: ok, what does that mean? How do we sort out confounding variables? I weighed 100 pounds four years and 150 pounds today, I must be getting fat! (I was 8 then and 12 now, I've put on one and a half feet and I'm junior varsity swim.)

This looks like sophism because you don't have a coherent narrative. You know people will laugh at the idea that Georgians were earnestly more excited about Harris than Biden. You know that "they got better at fraud" makes no sense with them 1) losing and 2) Trump's people being on guard for fraud. You decline to provide an explanation because you have none that are credible, and hence: "like, apples and oranges, man...".

Same state. 4 years apart. Same office. One candidate the same, the other previously on the ticket.

It's Gala vs Red Delcious. And if that distinction is relevant, you ought to be able to explain why, rather than vaguely complain about the difference.

The post I replied to originally said there was no proof of fraud in 2020. I provided some. I can't make you argue that, but I don't see why you would want to join this thread if not to respond to that specific point.

You know people will laugh at the idea that Georgians were earnestly more excited about Harris than Biden.

This isn't even an argument, this is just shaming a plausible idea as a priori ridiculous so you can assume me of some sort of bad faith or sophism. If you think 2020 and 2024 were both legitimate, isn't Georgians being more excited about Harris imminently plausible? Ok, yeah, I guess you can keep claiming to have never seen a good argument when you reject mine out of hand.

More comments

I think the suspect counties still generated about the same number they always do. Slightly less probably than 2020 because that was the easiest its ever been, but sometimes 100k doesn't cut it. See, e.g. the 1980 and 1984 IL presidential elections.

So you're saying the same amount of fraud happened as in 2020, but there's no evidence this time despite Trump's people watching diligently?

Nothing changed.

So why didn't Trump find evidence of it in 2024?

Nothing changed.

So you believe there was fraud in 2020 and 2024, but no evidence of fraud in either years?

There is plenty of evidence. Just not evidence that fits into the special box that people ask for which is "cannot be explained innocently for other reasons". Look at the PA senate race now. The steal is being attempted, it may or may not prevail.

The only way to find definitive proof of fraud, given our current system, is sting operations. A thing the current DOJ refuses to implement, and which they would also put you in prison for life if you attempted.

Georgia. 2024.

Give me a link.

I'm not expecting anything conclusive. But Trump's poll watchers and attorneys don't seem to be claiming there was any fraud in Georgia, and the various fraud proponent parasites don't seem to be interested.

So I'm not asking for evidence.

Where's the rank speculation of vote fraud in 2024 Georgia?

Because I don’t honestly think she was cheating. There just aren’t any statistical red flags of cheating that I’m aware of in any direction. There are no wild swings that don’t match the polling data, there aren’t any places with oddly high turnout. Even in the other direction, the places she lost match perfectly with the places with high Pro-Palestinian sentiment who might well have chosen not to vote for her out of anger over her tepid support of Israel. Those numbers are pretty consistent with ordinary population growth.

The strange thing is, there are zero articles, videos, discussions, HN comments or even tweets about this.

I think the real question you need to be asking yourself is why do you find this "strange".

Or more pointedly what specific facet of your current worldview/model is it that this particular fact seems to invalidate or contradict?

there is zero corruption here, no scope for dishonest people to survive, those at the very edge are people who are not only competent but just better people

This is the most shocking thing I've read in months. No wonder I didn't understand what the conspiracy was. Surely you did school projects and saw people do little getting a lot of credit, surely you've heard of Enron, Theranos and thousands of other companies...? How could you suspend such a thought for so long? How did this Bolt guy of all things break the glass?

In the case of Elizabeth Holmes, I think people were desperate for a female Steve Jobs. Don’t forget she never got significant amounts of VC money; she got the funds from blinding politicians and supermarket CEOs with science.

Oh, I’m sure the backstage can be pretty grim, I’ve heard bad things about VCs.

Regardless, it's strange to raise 100s of millions without a working prototype for a single valuable feature for a firm that existed for close to a decade.

They had a prototype that seemed to work (with faked results) and legitimately did work for a few tests. Holmes’ genius was getting stuffy septuagenarians into such a bidding war that they overruled their own analysts who said the prototypes were insufficient and urged caution.

Were there shenanigans behind that? I don’t know. Possibly. But I think it would have come up in the investigation along with all the other criminal stuff that was going on. Did you read Bad Blood? It’s a fantastic book.

I think it's worth pointing out that the companies you named aren't exactly comparable. Taking them one by one:

  • Theranos was a fraudulent company that made an ineffective product, lied about its effectiveness, faked demonstrations and test results, and not only parlayed that into a ton of VC funding. The weird thing about it is that they nonetheless plowed forward by entering into contracts with large retailers that they couldn't possibly deliver on, and the whole operation was soon revealed as a sham.

  • FTX was a legitimate investment firm that fraudulently mishandled client funds. Years ago, my grandparents were victims of a similar fraud when their investment manager was telling them he was investing their money in the market but was really using it to make loans to his son's woodworking business. When the woodworking business couldn't cover the loans, he didn't have the money for investors withdrawing funds, eventually someone called the DA's office, and the guy was convicted and died in prison. This guy was a legitimate locally trusted investment manager that normal people used, not some obvious fraudster. When rumors started circulating that he was crooked, a lot of people, including my parents, pulled their money out, but my grandparents had been investing with him for years and said they trusted the guy.

  • WeWork was a legitimate company that was able to hype itself into a valuation so high it defied common sense. It was effectively a commercial real estate company that marketed itself as a tech company. The estimated valuation was so high leading up to the IPO that investors realized there was no real room for growth, not to mention that they were losing more money than could be reasonably explained. There were some questionable valuation processes (e.g. counting every desk job in a city where they were operating as a potential customer rather than a more reasoned analysis of the market for ad hoc office space), but none of this was exactly secret.

  • Broadcast.com was a successful company that Yahoo ran into the ground after acquiring it for a lot of money. I don't even know why it's included here because it was well past the VC stage at the time of purchase and it's just another failed acquisition.

So of the four companies, Theranos was the only one that engaged in fraud to attract VC money. FTX engaged in fraud to prop up another business. WeWork used non-fruadulent puffery to attract investment, and Broadcast was badly managed by a corporate giant.

Tbh that does sound incredibly naive. The start-up scene, or more generally capitalism, isn't good bc everyone involved is a perfect angel. It's because the competitiveness forces you to develop a good product that people actually want to buy, and to cut the slack and produce it reasonably cheaply. That's it. Worse yet, there are many tricks how people try to get around the competition with backhanded, negative-sum strategies, and you have to account for them & stop it. The problem with everything else, such as bureaucratic institutions, is that they often don't even attempt to account for these strategies so they run even wilder. Or worse yet they naturally incorporate the opposite.

It's douchebag who needs to please you vs douchebag you need to please. Nothing more, nothing less.

The VC scene has been shady and two-faced forever. Graham is bad, so are the rest of them. Johnson has an extreme axe to grind and is a fabulist of hilarious proportions, but like you say he’s never entirely wrong. He’s basically an extremely autistic compulsive liar with a huge axe to grind.

The impression people have of Indian politics is that BJP is some hyper-casteist political party that wants to impose Hindu and caste supremacy on the world

I think it’s more that there’s a clear delineation between caste supremacy and Hindu nationalism. The latter can’t be too casteist because most Hindus are of either middling caste or casteless. For the same reason a British nativist might be hard-pressed making the argument that the aristocracy should be put back in charge of everything after the revolution.

I used to see Peter Thiel as someone who embodied values I admire but the information about him from Charles completely breaks that for me.

The boyfriend died shortly after he showed up unannounced at Thiel and his husband’s Christmas party and apparently made a big scene. (Classic case of a mistress with unwarranted confidence). Was he killed? Hard to say, but probably not. Thiel stayed out of this election to hedge his bet, he still needed all those contracts for Palantir etc if Harris won, and Vance is his guy so he doesn’t need to suck up to the Trump campaign.

What do you make of the old anthropologist’s argument that the varnas are sublimated remnants of an ancient, long forgotten cow/bull sacrificial cult, with the Brahmins and accordant ritual purity taking the role of the bovine? (Sam Kriss is awful, but he has a brief summary here)

Ancient germanics had a distinction between Noblemen and commoners, with nobles having priestly privileges, just like Ancient Rome. There’s no evidence for some kind of hardcoded up and down social hierarchy like the Indian caste system.

Indus Valley civilisation had a concept of caste despite not being aryan and the Aryans who came from the Eurasian steppes had Varnas, two are different but nearly identical in most cases now.

Eh? I'm not aware of any reason to think the IVC had a caste system, and I couldn't find a reputable source that says so. We know fuck all about them really, their language is undeciphered, and their cities show only the same kind of social stratification that most civilizations do, in other words the elite living in the nicer places.

There is no caste supremacy, arranged marriages exist a relic, and people who are living in urban centres and not poor don't really care as much about who they marry.

I don't know about you, but arranged marriages are very much a thing and far from deprecated. The BBC says that in 2018, 93% of all marriages in the country were arranged. That hasn't changed noticeably in the last 6 years.

The BBC says that in 2018, 93% of all marriages in the country were arranged.

Wow. I knew arranged marriages were a thing, but I didn't know they were that ubiquitous. With that many marriages being arranged, are the handful of people who don't go that route looked down upon as weirdos or anything?

Not really. For the middle class and above, nobody would really bat an eye unless the proposed spouse was otherwise socially undesirable.

If we're talking the lower class, it's still largely acceptance, albeit the picture becomes more murky when you consider the variation inevitable in such a large country.

The biggest issue is avoiding falling in love with the wrong person, defined as probably being poorer, in a bad job, wrong caste (which matters far less than it used to) and so on.

Even then, arranged marriages are nowhere near the popular misconception where the bride and groom only get to see each other before marriage (in most of the country). It's far closer to family-mediated speed dating, as opposed to having friends introduce prospective singles as is more common in the West (until dating apps steamrolled everything else).

Ever since you reach a Certain Age, your family, including bored aunts-twice-removed, begin putting out feelers or become more receptive to the same. Or they make a profile on a matrimonial site I guess. Then comes the carousel of cups of tea in living rooms, families and prospects vetting each other. Assuming both sides like what they see, the couple is encouraged to become familiar with each other, often unsupervised (or at least nobody in the living room) and them genuinely falling for each other, while not strictly necessary, is a welcome outcome. I'd be so bold as to claim the would be partners have veto rights throughout the process.

When everyone is happy and no skeletons or jilted lovers have turned up, then it's time for a big fat Indian wedding.

This isn't particularly different from a modal love marriage either! You take your partner home one day, introduce them, and then both families nigh inevitably begin giving each other a closer look. Objections may or may not be raised, but there's still a lot of reconciliation to do. You marry not just a person but their family, after all.

It's a pretty reasonable system, and God knows that there would be fewer NEETs and incels if more families in the West took hints from Indian mothers exasperated that their kids took their advice to ignore relationships and study for the NEET a little too seriously and need coaxing to produce grandkids eventually.

Uh, westerners trying to do the rough equivalent has mostly not worked very well, although the neuroses of fundamentalist Christianity may be a major explanatory factor there.

It's a civilizational issue. Westerners have this combination of individualism and guilt based moralism that prevents this sort of rigged-for-your-own-good type of institution from lasting in the face of principle.

If you want to make this idiotic romanticism manifest, try to argue openly that Romeo and Juliet are evil for engaging in a wholly destructive act of lust that shirks all their duties, and see people jump to defend vehemently characters whose ostensible fate is death.

This particular mode of being is not without its virtues, but we can plainly see the limitations of it now that it's been pushed to its logical conclusion.

try to argue openly that Romeo and Juliet are evil for engaging in a wholly destructive act of lust that shirks all their duties, and see people jump to defend vehemently characters whose ostensible fate is death.

You've baited me here. Romeo and Juliet have, even in death, done a great deal towards mending a wholly destructive blood feud between their families; if Shakespeare wasn't writing a tragedy of errors they would have been successful. What good would their duties have done?

More comments

The boyfriend died shortly after he showed up unannounced at Thiel and his husband’s Christmas party and apparently made a big scene. (Classic case of a mistress with unwarranted confidence).

Do you know anything about the personality this guy had? Stories like this almost always pattern match to certain kinds of mental illness (in this case maybe Borderline Personality Disorder).

Unstable relationships, attractive and likely to get in a superficial relationship, aggressive and maybe suicidal when spurned, possibly paranoid...

Likely someone who knows the people involved would be like "oh yeah that checks out he was crazy."

But outside looking in it isn't as obvious and these other explanations pop up.

My impression is Johnson's brain got eaten by the sorta connection-stitching that normally gets thrown up on Pepe Silvia walls. Might not make everything false, but you might as well read chicken entrails if you want something specific enough to actually say.

Austen Allred of Sigma Bloom formerly known as Lambda School lied about everything until his firm blew up and PG still defends him.

There's probably a steelman of that Allred piece -- heaven knows Lambda's collapse has a lot to be embarrassed about -- but it has such a scattered grab-bag of every disagreement possible that it's a little hard to take at face value. The clear illegality of operating as an unregistered school is damning, and then it's undercut by the 'oh and the legislature had to update the law later to make clear it was really-illegal not just I-want-it-to-be illegal'. Allred's homelessness was a lie, because he could have gone back to his parent's spare bedroom, as evidenced by this example of a guy who... was homeless until he made calls and went to a friend's spare bedroom. He did that incredibly dumb Sample Size of One Gimmick, but he also considers a court holding an arbitration clause intact as winning (spoiler: yes) and ran a pretty stupid 500 USD hustle to try to promote a YouTube channel (congrats, you've found an influencer). He's made three references to Elon Musk, which is tots a sign of delusion, and not just having different political aspirations, which is near-certainly what really set Sandusky off. There's some serious criticisms of Lamda excluding 'no-longer-searching' students that weren't searching because Lambda left them with no change or dropouts that Lamda went after for pennies, and also here's a claim of 27% job placement that's behind a paywall, which, once you roll the rock aside depends on interpretations of a leaked slide deck that, afaict, isn't anywhere online and allegedly is disputed by third-party auditors.

Which is probably is big difference. Graham's definitely got some serious faults here, and that he's not more critical where Lamda has fucked up says a lot about whether he's on the outside pissing in or the inside pissing out. But his sort of people have an answer about an indefensible fellow insider: they never mention them again. That's what you're seeing with Breslow -- Bolt faltered like most companies trying to upscale too fast in a highly competitive field (albeit with some hilarity when the pivot to profit collapsed, which isn't especially interesting, but that he dissed them and no one cares enough to accuse Breslow of eating faces means you couldn't get Graham et all to mention his name without a set of pliers.

Graham doesn't damnae memoria Allred not because of some complex conspiracy, but because he thinks there's some defensible variant of Lamda's goal that the school simply missed (and to be fair, I could be persuaded!), and at a more importantly, because so many criticisms of Allred were and are somewhere between exaggerated and junk.

My impression is Johnson's brain got eaten by the sorta connection-stitching that normally gets thrown up on Pepe Silvia walls.

I think my grandparent's called that paranoid schizophrenia. Everything is connected, if you are mentally ill enough.

This is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence :)

Quite possibly! It’s actually a quote from Scott’s web novel ‘Unsong’, which I recommend if you haven’t read it. It’s a bit clever-clever in places but pretty good and genuinely intelligent for the most part.

most of what we see, believe and hear about is in fact mostly fabricated

Yes, but I'm not sure what the conspiracy theory is. It seems like a paragraph or two was lost before the edit.

I do not believe fully that all the super mega corps that are being run are completely clean entities that represent everything good about the world

? that is widely shared knowledge...

Someone believing that they are unfairly persecuted would be a conspiracy theory.

Are you serious with this and https://www.themotte.org/post/1252/wellness-wednesday-for-november-13-2024/268562?context=8#context comment? Because both takes are just weirdly bad.

Your conspiracy theory is… big business probably has some skeletons in its closet?

Hell, Wells Fargo Bank got caught knowingly laundering money for the cartel, and they only got a slap on the wrist. I would not be surprised if all manner of shady business is occurring in lots of other industries and companies.

Donald Trump nominates RFK Jr. to be Secretary of Health and Human Services.

I am not naturally sympathetic to criticizing policy or personnel decisions on the grounds that they "embolden" the wrong people, but I am going to make an exception here. The sheer magnitude of human suffering prevented by vaccines and antibiotics is hard to comprehend. Due to complex structural and psychological reasons, the developers of these treatments capture a miniscule fraction of the total utility surplus created.

Enter the pharma skeptics: I do not know what RFK Jr.'s specific stance on vaccines is, besides "more skeptical than the liberal establishment will accept", but I do know how Twitter works. Twitter is real. It affects real events in actual reality, up to and including the US presidential election. Trans issues are getting dumped from the mainstream Democratic Party agenda because of how much it gets dunked on on Twitter.

In this Twitter thread, the entire concept of rewarding companies for treating disease is getting dunked on like it's a Lia Thomas podium. This is of course not the only example I could have pulled, but it shocked me both because of it's location (Alex Tabarrok's feed), and because of the sheer intensity of what can only be described as concentrated stupid.

But perhaps the most alarming implications are for democracy itself. RFK's endorsement likely won Trump the election, not least because it paved the way for the Rogan endorsement. Republicans won by increasing their share of the stupid vote. Indeed, no party can win a national election without winning large swaths of the stupid vote. There simply aren't enough smart people to win. Perhaps this explains the modern political environment. The decision between Democrat or Republican boils down to a decision on which party's concession to the stupid vote will do the least amount of damage.

I am not naturally sympathetic to criticizing policy or personnel decisions on the grounds that they "embolden" the wrong people, but I am going to make an exception here.

I think this is a much-longer bow than you need to draw to be opposed to RFK being in charge of vaccines. Because, y'know, he might defund or ban them, which would very directly suck.

Also, remember that Twitter replies will skew in favour of opposition, because there's a thumbs-up and no thumbs-down.

Because, y'know, he might defund or ban them, which would very directly suck.

Defund I guess maybe -- but most vaccines were invented 50 like years ago and are kinda cheap?

By what mechanism do you think RFK would ban vaccines though?

By what mechanism do you think RFK would ban vaccines though?

Unless I'm misunderstanding something about the org chart, the Secretary of Health and Human Services is among other things in charge of the FDA and could order it to rescind approval, and unless I'm misunderstanding something about US law that would mean they couldn't be traded in or administered.

It's worse than that -- as I see his successful confirmation would be a powerful advanced signal to those involved in the research and development of novel vaccines. Not just because of what he would literally do (although he could indeed have the FDA hold them up or otherwise increase the already-staggering cost of new treatments) but because of what it implies about the range of consensus views on vaccines.

At the same time, defeating his nomination would send a signal that his views are sufficiently out there that firms making vaccines don't have to worry about it.

Given the timelines of these things, these dynamics seem far more important than the specific FDA decisions to be made in the next 4 years (which, anyway, were baked-in years ago).

What probability do you assign to this outcome? You may be poorly calibrated here.

Of him trying? Dunno, don't know his positions or conflict-comfort well enough.

Of him trying and it sticking? <10%, if nothing else he'd probably be impeached for that.

Thought about editing one of the above posts to note these but didn't get around to it.

There's essentially zero possibility of this. Congress doesn't exercise direct oversight much, but they do on occasion, and RFK attempting to ban vaccines would certainly result in it.

Even before that, any serious changes to the FDA's approval process would either trigger the APA, or be close enough that courts would have easy opportunity to be pulled in. And attempting to slowboat things by just crawling up vaccine production facility tailpipes with thick rubber gloves trying to find the slightest mistake runs into the problem where that's already the FDA's normal procedure.

Wouldn't it be awesome if we had a category for things other than "mandatory" and "banned"?

Of all of Trump's cabinet picks, RFK Jr is the most unserious.

The credentials of the others at least seem fit for the positions.

Gaetz seems like a POS. RFK is a philanderer who fried his brain, but did some good and doesn’t seem particularly malevolent.

Are you a measles virus or something? From a human perspective, RFK is visibly malevolent in a very obvious way.

Before he got on the Trump train, RFK devoted a significant part of his activism to discouraging parents from vaccinating their children against measles based on false claims that vaccines cause autism. His activism caused a measles outbreak in Samoa with 83 deaths.

If we measure malevolence by the degree by which the harm-to-victim exceeds the benefit-to-wrongdoer, killing kids for social media klout is the worst.

His activism caused a measles outbreak in Samoa with 83 deaths.

No, it didn't. The outbreak was ultimately caused by two nurses who diluted two measles doses with muscle relaxants instead of water. Two children died as a result, and the government paused MMR immunization for several months. When they restarted, they didn't immediately release the reason for the children dying, which probably limited uptake after that. The outbreak started in this environment, the government imported a lot of measles vaccine from India, the outbreak continued. It is at this point Kennedy comes in. He does claim the measles vaccine from India was probably defective and caused the outbreak to continue, but HE certainly was not the cause of it.

my guess is that RFK Jr won't last very long. Remember Scaramucci? Trump likes to reward people for loyalty, and HHS is a decent prize, but RFK Jr has too big an ego to play subserviant to Trump for long.

The high number of people claiming that the trump picks won't last long seem to be hoping against hope. Trump does have a core number of people who do and are able to work with him over years and years.

RFK Jr is clearly a different personality than the establishment that wasn't able to last, so claiming that rfk will not last long seems premature.

Bannon was also idiosyncratic and he didn’t last long. So was Scaramucci.

I'm not against Trump, I consider myself neutral. But it's just an objective fact that he churns through people around him quite quickly. I've never before heard of a president where his own vice president publicly came out against him, for example.

Steve Sailer once said that this kind of constant churn is common in a certain type of hard-charging, 80s, NYC business guy. I think that's a fair description for Trump.

I think some non-trivial portion of his starting picks won't remain in their positions until the end of his term. I'd say 25%. Either because Trump removes them or they remove themselves.

There's more to political legitimacy than skill.

It is a bit odd how worried people are about credentials. Look at the last number of HHS secretaries. Do they really have better credentials?

In this case, being anti-vaccine and alt-health should be considered actively malicious.

The problem of the US are the high prices of finding and getting good care, and the byzantine system. The frustration of that has been successfully redirected into whole-system skepticism.

Which, fair enough. But outbreaks of preventable disease are bad. In the end, it will be interesting to see if RFK and the gribblers end up biting off more than they can chew by going after the immovable corn lobby.

The current HHS head is a HerbaLife fan.

I’d love to have better options, and I’m disappointed that the Trump one is this, but I think people badly underestimate how bad our institutions are.

It is a bit odd how worried people are about credentials.

"Remember, a lone amateur built the Ark. A whole team of professionals built the Titanic."

This is insightful. Xavier Becera is a completely empty suit, devoid of any substantive (object level) merit. And somehow we're willing to chalk that up to normal politics.

In truth, I think it might actually be directionally correct. An actual idiot that does nothing and thinks nothing of substance may actually be preferable to someone that knows enough to confidently fuck up.

Call it the Sorcerer's Apprentice Curve -- the utility function is concave in intelligence.

what substance he had was quite partisan - he argued against Little Sisters of the Poor, for instance

Of course he did -- any D appointee would have. That wasn't some personal view he brought with him to HHS.

any D appointee would have, maybe, but he was the one who actually had.

For me it is amusing how much overlap there is between people who yell about their political opponents being communists, on the one hand, and people who would prefer that medical innovation be driven by a socialist rather than a capitalist system, on the other.

I would be fine with a free market system if the liability shield was removed.

But in a real free market, a condition of sale could be that you wave any legal liability for injury.

Agreed you could waive liability but again I’m struggling with the basic economics. If the vaccines offer a lot of value and very limited harm the liability point shouldnt be a big issue.

The issue is that rare coincidence do happen and causality isn't well-defined on an individual scale anyway.

For example, a lot of farmers used glyphosate (roundup) and, of them, a number of them (somewhat proportional to the overall risk) got rare cancers. Then those folks sued on a theory of causality that most scientists roundly reject, but won anyway.

But consider a hypothetical second agent that we know beyond a doubt increases the risk of some rare cancer by 25% (a huge relative risk). 5 farmers get this cancer and sue. Of them, 4 would have gotten it anyway and 1 got it due to agent. It's not just that a scientifically ignorant jury can't figure that out -- there is no answer. We can't assign that down to the individual level in that way -- all we know is something about aggregate risk.

You can't trust the US legal system to determine if a vaccine caused an injury.

Why?

The jury system is not good at determining medical causation.

Total immunity is a problem, but if the government had agreed to take on the risk for the pharma companies in this emergency situation instead of just waving it away (including paying out for vaccine injuries) that seems much more balanced. Operation Warp Speed was pretty much about "how fast can we get this done?" and that includes speeding up the safety trials. I don't know what the US actually did here.

The US situation is kinda a clusterfuck.

Most vaccines fall under the NCVIA, so any claims of injury go to the NVICP, where the standard of proof is hilariously low. It's a little more strict than a 'damn that's an ugly baby' fund, but not by much, and the willingness of the program to accept sometimes implausible alleged links has been used as support for no small number of implausible further links. Funds are drawn from a vaccine excise tax, which in theory, and in practice is a mix of Medi*, insurance and private dollars.

COVID vaccines were specifically exempted by the PREP Act in a different way, falling under the CICP. Where NCVIA is extremely fail-positive, CICP is the reverse: requiring "compelling, reliable, valid, medical and scientific evidence", and very happy to can claims over minor paperwork faults. As a result, the lack of any successful claims even into mid-2022 drove a lot of skepticism, and while they've since recognized some, the numbers remain implausibly low.

((There are some similar exceptions for smallpox vaccines and I think the military anthrax vaccine.))

I think it's more incompetence than malice, but the inability to find the Goldilocks zone badly undermines institutional trust.

The issue with that is the government socializes costs but privatizes benefits. So what do you predict would be the outcome?

The fact that the State is an infinite well of everyone's money in this case makes this functionally the same.

Without a bounded fiscal policy, there is no incentive for the government to take the liability risk seriously. For this decision to have any chance to be good, whoever takes it actually has to shoulder some risk if they take the wrong one.

Yeah but who would buy cures that have waivers?

Some people would I suppose, but only some, and with governments you don't get to price in that choice, you get to be experimented on regardless.

Yeah but who would buy cures that have waivers?

Probably approximately the same proportion of the population that uses software and websites with terms of service saying you promise to hand over your first-born have no privacy? i.e., nearly everyone because that's just every product on the market.

The problem is, we don’t have cures. We have drugs that at particular doses have positive risk/benefit ratios for a particular condition for most patients. If every bottle of Tylenol is priced to cover the liability for liver damage I’m not sure pharmacies continue to exist.

"I'm a free speech absolutist! [...] Of course burning the American flag isn't free speech!" Normies gonna normie, Conservatives are not Libertarians. Democrats have wanted a nice big government and now they're gonna get it good and hard... which is kind of fun but I'm gonna get it good and hard too and when the lefties take over I'm gonna get it good and hard again.

RFK Jr provided a reasonable critique of vaccines. They are shielded for liability. Arguably the fox is guarding the hen house. So all things equal you’d expect vaccines to marginally fail the learned hand formula though not massively because reputation still matters.

That doesn’t mean vaccines are bad or even most vaccines or bad. It does mean bringing back liability seems like a reasonable step to encourage pharma companies to internalize the costs of vaccines.

Does RFK go too far? Almost certainly. But the core economic argument doesn’t seem fallacious.

They are shielded for liability. Arguably the fox is guarding the hen house.

I think there is a distinction to be made here between proven, old vaccines for serious diseases, and everything else. I'm much more comfortable with no liability for the former. I don't know to what extent this distinction is feasible in reality, tho.

I'm much more comfortable with no liability for the former.

Why? If the technology is proven and established with no problems, that is exactly the sort of situation where a liability shield provides the worst incentives. If we know that a given product is reliable and problem free, then shielding the manufacturer from liability gives them a direct incentive to reduce quality control and otherwise take risks/cut corners. If we know the technology works reliably, that's exactly when people SHOULD be liable for damages if they get nasty consequences from it.

I assumed no liability applies to known and expected side effects, and that for proven vaccines you can cheaply and reliably test for any outright manufacturing trickery since it is possible to just settle on a standard.

The motivation in part is that I think diseases like polio or mumps should be a separate conversation. Clearly those vaccines had gigantic positive effects, and take attention away from questionable products and tactics used to push these products onto the public.

Speaking of that, I've seen the vax schedule for children these days and it does seem a bit... extreme.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-schedules/downloads/parent-ver-sch-0-6yrs.pdf

Like, does my kid really need 3 shots for Hep B? Can I just skip all the ones added after 1990 and call it good?

It's not like kids today are healthier than they were 35 years ago. If anything, the opposite is true. Given a messy, politicized epistemic environment, maybe it's best to revert to the last "known good state". There is knowledge encoded in survivorship.

In other words, I'm sure as hell not giving my infant a Covid vaccine.

From my research, they are all pretty clearly worth it in cost/benefit terms except the Covid vaccine (cause Covid hardly affects young kids). I have a baby and the pediatrician didn't even bring up the Covid vaccine - idk if she's tired of getting yelled at or also agrees with my analysis. But I'm happy to have given my baby all the other vaccines.

The main health difference between kids today and 35 years ago is obesity, and it's hard to imagine a mechanism where vaccines cause obesity. Especially when you look at the crap people feed their kids these days. So I'm just going to try to minimize that crap and I figure that'll probably prevent me from having a fat kid. Wish me luck! If your plan is to achieve the same thing just by not vaccinating, I wish you luck too, but you might need a lot more luck than me.

From my research, they are all pretty clearly worth it in cost/benefit terms except the Covid vaccine

Even Hep B? My kid's not going to be engaging in sex tourism in Thailand (prior to age 18 at least).

On the potential negatives of vaccines, I won't pretend to be an expert. People are who very smart and know the science way better than I do say they are safe. But there are others who are just as smart (admittedly rarer) who say they aren't safe. The problem is that I can't trust the experts because I don't have Rube Goldberg amnesia. I see how full of shit experts are on all sorts of topics. So I can't trust them fully on any topic. If high quality anti-vax research was produced, it would be politically suppressed and careers would be destroyed. In that environment, truth seeking is impossible.

I'm not anti-vax. I think vaccines are one of the best inventions of all time. But I do see the large rise in childhood mental illness, autism, and yes, obesity, and I struggle to explain it. I don't see any harm in waiting to take the post-1990 vaccines when the benefit is not there and the risks (though probably low) are a hot button political topic.

From what I’ve seen, the majority of vaccines are very low risk. The concern I have is that the combined cocktail hasn’t really been studied.

My kids got most but not all of their vaccines.

You need the Hep B vaccine in case some of the doctors and nurses giving all those shots have been engaging in sex tourism in Thailand.

And if they aren't, you're probably doing it wrong.

Yeah, side effects from the Hep B vaccine are so low that the very low risk of Hep B itself (I know 99% of cases come from sex tourism in Thailand, but there's still that niggling 1% remaining) makes it worth it. But that probably is the closest one to not being worth it, after Covid.

Mental illness is social contagion and increased diagnosis. Autism is increased diagnosis. Obesity is eating more food and exercising less. Obviously there are other factors, but overall they don't seem too hard to explain. But even if they were hard to explain, idk why vaccines seem more plausible than 5g or chemtrails or whatever. It's all just vague gestures at stuff with no mechanism and no evidence.

Autism is increased diagnosis.

How sure are you of this? It might be worth an effort post sometimes. I've seen some stats that suggest this is not the case at all, and that the real rates of autism have skyrocketed. I'll admit low confidence, so it might be worth it to hear from someone who knows better. Maybe you?

Obesity is eating more food and exercising less.

This is certainly the normie belief. But many serious people disagree with this hypothesis. I am one of them. A properly functioning human body will regulate hunger and activity levels to ensure homeostatis. In any case, this has been discussed ad nauseum in this forum, and is perhaps the hottest flame of the culture war. Probably best to just agree to disagree.

But even if they were hard to explain, idk why vaccines seem more plausible than 5g or chemtrails or whatever. It's all just vague gestures at stuff with no mechanism and no evidence.

Yes, I mostly agree. Or, rather, the science is so bad and politicized that I certainly don't trust anti-vax research. If you listen to RFK talk, he does seem to propose some pretty solid reasons for why vaccines (as they are currently administered) could be harmful. But he's a lawyer, not a scientist.

In any case, if you are looking for someone to make the anti-vax case, it's not me. I will, however, not be giving my children Covid or Hep B vaccines. I will look into the benefits on the other ones, and probably stick to the rest of the schedule.

Yeah a lot of this has been debated to death. But I'm not sure if "eating more food and exercising less" is the normie belief. A lot of normies seem to believe in other stuff - some kind of poison in our food, some kind of environmental contaminant, some metabolic issue where 1000 calories/day doesn't result in weight loss, the belief that obesity is normal, etc. There may not be a majority belief about the cause of rising obesity, idk.

More comments

The reason that vaccines need to be protected from liability is because the cost of a wrongful death lawsuit is orders of magnitude higher than the value the vaccine manufacturer can extract per life saved. Tort litigation is just a really terrible system for dealing with diffuse risks like this, especially when the expected net public good is overwhelmingly positive.

This suggests the costs of vaccines don’t equal the value form vaccines unless the courts are overvaluing wrongful deaths.

What is the argument that there is a very large positive externality?

Let's do a little back of the envelope calculation.

Infectious disease mortality declined during the first 8 decades of the 20th century from 797 deaths per 100000 in 1900 to 36 deaths per 100000 in 1980.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9892452/

The actual infectious disease mortality in 1980 was 80k people. At 1900 mortality rates, it would have been 1.8M, so let's ballpark it at 1.7M deaths averted thanks to sanitation and antibiotics. FEMA values a human life at $7.5M. 1.7M people * $7.5M/person = $13T. US GDP in 1980 was $3T.

Obviously this is highly simplified, but I think it's safe to say that vaccine companies did not capture a large part of the benefits of vaccines.

But a large part of that value was captured by the customer (ie not an externality).

The argument for eliminating liability is that the cost benefit to the individual is negative (otherwise pharma could raise the cost to account for liability while customers would still buy since positive EV) but the benefit to society is positive.

Of course there could be an elasticity issue but that implies the cost to vaccines are much higher compared to what people think.

If the vaccine manufacturer is not capturing all the benefit of the vaccine but is liable for all the downside, it's clear that the math isn't mathing even for plainly good vaccines.

That just isn’t correct. The vast majority of manufacturers are subject to strict liability and they don’t capture all of the benefit. Yet they survive because they make an EV+ product.

Just to expand, the three theoretical cases where liability prevents a valuable good from being produced is where there is a large positive externality (ie a benefit derived by neither the seller nor buyer such that the buyer is not willing to pay more), ability to pay for buyers, or where liability isn’t properly measured (eg the Bronx jury). Before we accept that the case applies here, we ought to actually prove it out. After all, vaccines didn’t have immunity from liability until the 1980s

A number of diseases have been functionally eliminated in the USA; polio, measles, diphtheria, rubella. One person foregoing the vaccine gives them some small value with negligible cost, although who knows, maybe the value proposition is still there if you plan on traveling to the third world. Some of these things are really nasty if you get them as an adult.

The entire population foregoing vaccines would lead (eventually) to these diseases becoming endemic again. Polio alone was paralyzing 15,000 kids a year prior to the vaccine and killing a fraction of those. I suppose we could decrease the amount of vaccination to allow a little bit of endemic disease back just to improve the value proposition for individuals and please the economists. Thankfully, our forefathers knew that was Fucking Stupid as they watched kids dying of preventable diseases and made vaccines as mandatory as they could.

So, if you want to translate the above into econ-speak - where is the positive externality? And if you agree that eliminating diseases via vaccination is preferable to the alternative, how would you like to give pharma companies enough of a profit motive to make the things?

While we're on the subject, COVID notwithstanding, vaccines are horrifically underfunded for this exact reason. The USA vaccine market was 29 billion in 2024, and pre-COVID was only 17 billion. As an aside, the entire biotech ecosystem in the USA is only ~800 billion; just over half the market cap of Meta, a single tech company. The MMR vaccine costs 100$ and you get two doses over your entire life. This isn't exactly some massively profitable scheme whereby Big Pharma is fleecing hapless poors, it's just a convenient punching bag that plays well with the base.

I’m suggesting that just like pretty much every other product there is no liability shield. It is a weird argument — if Person A can be vaccinated then Person B being unvaxxed ought not impact Person A. That’s where I’m not seeing the externality.

If we allow for liability, then Pharma will increase the cost of vaccines to cover liability. The vast majority of vaccines would show a small cost increase. The ones that don’t probably aren’t that valuable in the first place.

No it doesn't, because people don't pay anywhere near the QALY value of vaccines to the vaccine company.

Let's pretend we have a vaccine for smallpox (40-50% fatality rate in babies). People/governments pay maybe $100 per dose (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines-for-children/php/awardees/current-cdc-vaccine-price-list.html). The value of a wrongful death is $10M, so you would break even on a $100 vaccine for smallpox at one wrongful death in 100,000, while the vaccine would save 40,000 to 50,000 lives per 100,000.

I actually have to compliment @Quantumfreakonomics here, because until 15 minutes ago I thought liability was reasonable.

Why wouldn’t pharma just increase the cost of the vaccine to cover the increased cost of liability?

In the end that's exactly what would happen. Rich people would pay a lot for vaccines, poor people wouldn't get them at all, and grifters would get rich off the back of lawsuits.

Measles would go back to killing thousands of people a year in the U.S.

Is this the world you want to live in?

These concerns just seem internally silly. The only reason prices would rise a bunch is if there are a lot of vaccine related harms. If the harms are very small, then the cost for pharma would be small meaning costs would not increase much.

So what is it? Do vaccines cause a lot of damage meaning drug costs would need to increase a lot? Or do vaccines cause little harm meaning costs would rise only a little?

So what is it? Do vaccines cause a lot of damage meaning drug costs would need to increase a lot? Or do vaccines cause little harm meaning costs would rise only a little?

Neither.

Vaccines (at least the non-MRNA variety) cause little harm but the American legal system often assigns huge legal damages that are not warranted. For reference:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/business/j-and-j-talc-cancer-lawsuits-settlement/index.html

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-29/3m-to-pay-6-billion-to-resolve-vast-military-earplug-lawsuits

More comments

They might, but that ignores the collective benefits of vaccines. Imagine that our smallpox vaccine from above kills one in ten. Surely, compared to four in ten deaths from smallpox, we collectively are vastly better off with one in ten deaths and immunity to smallpox, or zero deaths if we can beat smallpox and phase out the vaccine. But now the vaccine company has liability for post vaccine deaths, and so a single dose of the vaccine is going to cost... $1M just to cover the liability. No patient/government is going to pay $1M to save a 4/10 of a life when there are cheaper QALYs to save elsewhere, so we will never beat smallpox and we will see 40% fatality rates in perpetuity.

The fair mathematical solution might be to limit the vaccine manufacturer's liability to the collective damages or to damages external to the vaccine (i.e. negligence). So if you have a vaccine which saves lives (or QALYs) on net, you have no liability, but you'd better be sure your vaccine saves lives.

This is the liquidity problem I mentioned but the reality is that practically speaking there aren’t vaxx that kill 1/10 (they would never hit the market because few diseases are so ubiquitous and deadly that it would make sense to take the vaxx).

But if a human life is worth 10m then this is spending a million to save 4 million. That’s great ROI! Why wouldn’t you spend that if you were a government?

In any event not sure it is worth spending so much time on a non central example.

Surely the answer is that the life of an arbitrary stranger is not worth anywhere near 10m. If you tout for charities based on cost per lives saved, as EA does, you find that the majority of people are not willing to spend $1 to save a life, much less $10,000,000. That figure is a political fiction designed to reflect voter’s estimation of their own (or a loved one’s) life so as not to make the government unpopular.

They’re protected from liability because the US legal system is this complete bullshit thing where 1% of users complaining about a thing can bankrupt a company.

I was talking to someone who develops and sells their own perfumes recently and they mentioned that when getting insurance to sell their products it costs them more to get covered for sales in the US than the entire rest of the world combined!

One day I'll write an effort post about this, but the legal environment makes producing products in the U.S. impossible.

Good luck suing the Chinese company with brand name MoonShenBubble when your baby pacifier has lead in it.

On the other hand, if an American company makes 10,000 products, and even one of them gets targeted by lawyers, the whole company can be strip mined for cash. There will never be another Johnson & Johnson or 3M. It's all going to be made in China forever.

Might not be China, specifically, but yeah. International liability basically doesn’t exist even in the face of ruinously and maliciously bad behavior, local liability is absolutely crushing even in face of well-intentioned and innocent mistake, and the old solution of importers being responsible has collapsed in the face of big names outsourcing that to tiny and judgement proof third parties in the Amazon Marketplacificiation of internet sales.

the entire concept of rewarding companies for treating disease is getting dunked on

But Tabarrok didn't say "we should reward companies for treating disease". What he actually said (if you scroll up a few posts) was:

Pharma stocks nosediving means your life expectancy is nose diving.

This is not good.

When I read this in the political context of the ongoing vaccine debates, the implied connotation I get is something like: "Listen here, you ignorant yokels. You might like to think that you're 'self-sufficient', but you're not. You depend on me, my tribe, the educated elites. Without us, you'd be dead. Specifically, you are dependent on the stock valuations of big megacorps continuing to rise. You know; stocks, the global finance market, i.e. that same thing that is the engine of mass immigration, the offshoring of industrial labor, the woke-industrial complex, and so many other things that you find politically abhorrent."

Obviously, he didn't write those exact words. But that's how it comes off. And that's a poor way to endear people to your cause, regardless of the actual merit of your claims. So the backlash he got on twitter makes perfect sense to me.

Listen here, you ignorant yokels. You might like to think that you're 'self-sufficient', but you're not. You depend on me, my tribe, the educated elites. Without us, you'd be dead. Specifically, you are dependent on the stock valuations of big megacorps continuing to rise. You know; stocks, the global finance market,

I mean, yeah. That is the implied connotation, because it's true. It's true the same way that you or I would tell the guys who set up the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone that their project is doomed without the support of public infrastructure. That's just not how the world works. If they can't tell the difference between investment in medical innovation being driven by the expectation of future profitable sales, and the nebulous forces driving the educated consensus on immigration, then they are just stupid.

That is the implied connotation, because it’s true.

Well, not in an entirely unqualified sense, obviously. We know that people can live without vaccines, because they did so for thousands of years. Life expectancy may have been lower, sure, but modern medicine is not a necessary precondition for human civilization to exist.

Vaccines are not even the sine qua non of modern medicine- no doubt they’re much cheaper than things like modern sewage systems and mass availability of antibiotics, but life expectancy started skyrocketing with improvements in sanitation and treatments for infection with vaccines more an acceleration of trend than a cause of it.

Smallpox vaccine was great because it put a stop to outbreaks of mass death. Measles and diphtheria vaccines were great because it ended a whole lot of infant and child mortality. Mumps vaccine is pretty good because it nearly wiped out a less deadly but still nasty childhood illness, similar with pertussis. Rubella also, and rubella is really bad for fetal development. Tetanus immunization is probably less important in the first world, but it is a bulwark against less-than-perfect sanitation.

Chicken pox vaccine is a step down from mumps vaccine; chicken pox is rarely fatal, though it is common and nasty. But when you're immunizing children against hepatitis B in the first world, then unless that vaccine is perfectly safe, you're probably past the point of diminishing returns.

Why is Tetanus less relevant in the first world? Are we less likely to get dirty cuts?

Most people in the first world don't roll infants around in the dirt, certainly. Also, there's something called neonatal tetanus which is probably caused by contamination of the blade used to cut the umbilical cord -- but not only is that something that should be very rare in the first world, the vaccine has to be given to the mother, not the infant.

And this is what is frustrating about modern vaccine discussions. Take for example the covid vaxx. It basically was useless unless you were old. But modern vaccines use the goodwill earned from the old vaccines to short circuit discussions on whether the new vaccines are worthwhile.

I refused hep b for my kids. It’s clearly a scam and exhibit 1 in terms of the fda hhs and pharma collusion. It was an expensive to develop vaccine for gay men and it drug users. They couldn’t get enough customers to cover the cost of the drug so they got it on the newborn schedule. They give it to a baby in the first 24 hours.

Even if it were a miracle vaccine, it is absurd to give it to a baby in the first 24 hours of life. It’s obvious that the reason they do this is because it’s a garunteed touch point for doctors to administer it. Prioritizing vaccine sales over all other considerations.

“The people who disagree with me are stupid” is massively uncharitable, and well below what I expect of this place. That’s a stereotype of boo outgroup, and you’re saying it to the very word.

There’s a lot about what you’re saying that’s right! But you don’t seem to have understanding of the reasons people are critical of big pharma, and instead are just calling them dumb. It’s exactly the fact that people who criticize these things are immediately called every insulting name in the book that makes them become distrustful, resentful, and vengeful.

Are you trying to move past shady thinking here, or are you more interested in dunking on your outgroup? It would be much more productive to try and engage with what @Primaprimaprima said and develop a greater understanding of where your opponents are coming from — that will make you much better at being able to be both compassionate and convincing.

I suppose I could have called them, "unable or unwilling to understand the production function of medical goods, the capital structure of pharmaceutical corporations, the inherent unfairness of mass tort litigation, the difficulty for an individual consumer to determine the expected utility to himself of a given medical product, p-hacking, and the extent of the natural human disease burden," but that would be just padding the word count.

Doesn't all of this get side-stepped if we're talking about a system where that isn't the case at all? Surely the Soviets developed some genuine medical tech all on their own state dime.

No, that’s not just padding out the word count: the two things you’ve said are not equivalent.

In particular, now you’re actually discussing the values, beliefs, and arguments behind your position, which is a dramatic difference from “all my opponents are dummy dumbs”.

And actually stating plainly your values means that people who are actually smart can now productively disagree with you: maybe someone can go “actually the production function of medical goods doesn’t work like that,” or “maybe tort litigation isn’t actually all that unfair,” or “it’s actually not that difficult for the average consumer to make an informed decision about the expected utility of a medical intervention” — and then what you’ve got is an actual discussion that can illuminate both sides!

And even if you’re right about 100% of your claims, the way you stated it before didn’t make you sound right: it made you sound like a bully relying on thought-terminating cliches. Someone whose arguments are well thought out and informed by evidence doesn’t need to act like that. Providing evidence, discussing trade offs, and engaging in constructive debate is what smart and credible people do. Calling people stupid is just, well, stupid.

But perhaps the most alarming implications are for democracy itself. RFK's endorsement likely won Trump the election, not least because it paved the way for the Rogan endorsement. Republicans won by increasing their share of the stupid vote.

While going full "vaccines are bad and unecessary" is stupid the pro establishment fanatical close minded position is also stupid and there are valid issues animating RFK and others.

Most of twitter reactions you quote is in fact about the covid vaccine which isn't the same as vaccine in general.

It really seems that you haven't learned any of the lessons of covid, opioid crisis and Sacklers malfeasance. Or even the lesson of the eternal Marcuse's "we enlightened elites against stupid masses". The masses can be stupid, but the problem is that self proclaimed enlightened elites can be even stupider, or just have a tunnel vision that is animated precisely by this idea of them possessing all wisdom and others just wholly irrational idiots. Another complication is this resentment and hatred leads these self proclaimed enlightened elites to support harming the "stupid" under pretext of safety, and we saw with the reaction to the unvaccinated.

Pretending that this faction are the smart enlightened ones and others are idiots is Hanania tier propaganda talking point repeated ad nauseum. I find it interesting how a rationalist esqe associated space have this bad behavior as a common norm. A lot of shared people from both spaces and Tabarok retweets approvingly Hanania promoting a Thiel guy as the preferred option over RFK. Unfortunately it is propaganda here because the pro big pharma establishment faction is close minded and has huge tunnel vision.

Consider Covid's origins, which is actually a pretty big deal that it is plausibly developed for gain of function research (or perhaps that is the pretext for bioweapon research). That would be an example of a genuine overreach of the industry.

As would the overpromotion of opioids and the Sackler's malfeasance that lead to appreciably different outcomes in life expectancy between USA and other developed countries.

There is also an issue of whether foods in the USA are under-regulated since they do seem to have different and more risky substances than foods produced by at times the same companies for other parts of the developed world. Although overegulation can be a problem.

There is also the possibility that report from the national toxicology program that high fluoride water might be linked to lower IQ scores. Complaints about fluoridation has been another issue dismissed who pattern matched it as kooky, and low status.

Or whether these vaccines which are based on new technology actually are genuinely safe.

If we are going to have an authoritarian pro science regime, it should shut down wannabe "I am the science" types pro establishment types who are fanatical and close minded in a heartbeat and allow informed debate and not put in the pedestal those who don't have a willingness to oppose what ought to be oppose.

What we don't need is the dominance of those who are in practice pro corruption if it is entrenched elites doing it and servile to them and demonize those raising a fuss. Or have build up an understanding based of symbols of prejudged kooky issues not to be touched and side automatically with the way things are going. The "don't question XYZ sacred cow, you morons!" are a net negative that not only shouldn't be authoritarians but should experience themselves exclusion from running institutions and media, moderating social media and forums on the basis of their inadequacy for what their role ought to be.

Scientists, Big Pharma, politicians are all accountable for fuck ups and can only work well if they are willing to listen to reasonable criticisms and in fact, even among people whose agenda can include both some unreasonable stuff and some genuine opposition to corruption and plausible problems, there is a duty for those who pretend to be the smart people to be the types who can separate the baby with the bathwater. Those who want to be close minded and not accept valid problems, and promote this stupid "we the enlightened versus idiots" should make way for actual genuine enlightened elites instead of self proclaimed ones full of hubris.

Indeed, someone who claims to be a scientist might in fact be mistaken about their own essence, if they abandoned their role to be a scientist, and came to believe that "I am the science" and became a believer in unshakeable orthodoxy. Much of this problem can also relate to symbols like the fluoride one that had the symbol to their mind of ridiculousness even though it is a legitimate issue to consider and determine.

Of course, since I say you shouldn't throw the baby with the bathwater, we do need pharmaceutical companies developing cure. It is good when they get things right to be rewarded. But corruption and failure needs to be examined, opposed, and stopped. And it is in fact valid to consider the issue of whether expediency let standards to drop in vaccine development. Whether it is sufficiently safe and so on.

In climate change, and in other issues, the close minded fanaticism of pro establishment types is dangerous. Although the issue when it involves certain people involved with lobbies and networks, might include corruption and willingness to back down entrenched elites for their own benefit of being rewarded from it. Which can include funding, it can also include getting a more positive response from the media.

The reality is that the gains of function research that probably lead to covid might not have happened if the right people were in charge, and we had more people willing to question and oppose corrupt and immoral activities by powerful groups whether these is scientists or are pentagon if it was actually weapons research masquerading as research on diseases. It is dangerous to have people promote close midned, pro establishment gullibility and painting it as the epitome of enlightened intelligence thinking and demonizing opponents of it, by overly focusing on weakmen. While we can oppose both approaches of throwing away the baby with the bathwater, the entrenched elites are actually the bigger problem.

RFK who has wrote a book attacking Anthony Fauci therefore does not represent only a possible overeaction to elements of big pharma, and pharmaceutical research, but also part of a legitimate reaction. There can be both elements in people like him.

After covid, I see the climate change frontier as the one that raises the issue of overreaction of the "we are the science" types both in terms of reduction of freedoms, overreaction against opponents of their agenda who are going to be branded as enemies of science and in terms of a destructive net zero agenda.

Thank you for pointing out the major issues and reasons why RFK got put in this position.

Pretending that this faction are the smart enlightened ones and others are idiots is Hanania tier propaganda talking point repeated ad nauseum. I find it interesting how a rationalist esqe associated space have this bad behavior as a common norm. A lot of shared people from both spaces and Tabarok retweets approvingly Hanania promoting a Thiel guy as the preferred option over RFK. Unfortunately it is propaganda here because the pro big pharma establishment faction is close minded and has huge tunnel vision.

This is the biggest issue for me. Science(TM) has become a religion, and many rationalish types still follow that religion even when it's obviously promoting false beliefs.

This isn't even really an example of the markets rewarding companies. Their stocks went way up because the government gave them blanket immunity from liability to bring to market a technology that would normally take years of RnD and also preordered massive batches. This ended up being a failure of central planning because millions of doses went to waste after they failed to convince the court systems they could strong arm people into getting vaccinated and demand for the vaccines was lower than anticipated.

There are probably good reason to criticize this pick. You have not presented any of them. By your own admission, you don't even know what RFK Jr's stance on vaccines is (though you can probably guess it's not "ban them all"). Your linked twitter thread is about nothing more than the announcement hurting pharma stock, with the claim (from Taborrak) that "Pharma stocks nosediving means your life expectancy is nose diving." This is a silly claim on its face and Taborrak gets dunked on for it.

Indeed, no party can win a national election without winning large swaths of the stupid vote.

As George Carlin once said: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

But that doesn't really have much to do with RFK Jr., who may be crazy but isn't stupid.

Taborrak

Aside is it just more or is Taborrak way better in podcast than text? I don't usually enjoy his posts on Marginal Revolution but think he's good on podcasts. I don't know what that says about me... but he's not the first person I've encountered that with.

Is he better in longform? Maybe this is just “twitter brings out the worst in people.”

He puts up much longer posts than Tyler does. My hunch is in light listening he just confirms my priors more. I think we're both keeping it a little more surface level.

Taborrak tends to justify his points in a very academic style with lots of citations to studies and statistics. Tyler lives on vibes and has strange infatuations with people like Girard and Zizek, not to mention his continual infatuation with Austrian economics. His greatest weakness is his belief that any prominent public intellectual actually has something meaningful to say and isn't just a charlatan.

Man, lately Tyler just seems so off the mark. He keeps talking about AGI in the most head-in-the-sand, dunky and dismissive way without even making clear claims or any concrete arguments. I think AGI doom is one of the most mind-killing topics out there amongst otherwise high decouplers.

Views like your own do not seem uncommon to me, but they seem disconnected from common sense and I can't tell if I'm taking words too literally or if people have internalized so many weird perspectives on things that they've lost their clear-sightedness.

1: If somebody wins democratically, then that's democracy. If you dislike a democratic process, then you're arguing against democracy, and not for it. I can't make sense of rejecting a democratic result with the argument that something democratic is a threat to democracy.

2: I do not see anybody, anywhere, downplay the importance of vaccines and antibiotics. Not even when I follow your link. People dislike one specific vaccine (if you can even call it that), because it wasn't tested properly. And many of the connected companies have some shady histories. I don't even think it's relevant if these companies did anything bad or not, or if the vaccine is harmless or not. A large amount of people lost all trust in these companies and those who support them, and for perfectly valid reasons.

3: The correlation between IQ and ideology is weak, and it doesn't tell you which side is more correct.

I do not see anybody, anywhere, downplay the importance of vaccines and antibiotics.

RFK supporters I know personally are highly vaccine skeptical and believe in a kind of vaccine/autism link bailey. They do not support vaccinating kids for e.g. measles due to low death rates and are convinced that the only reason kids get so many vaccines is due to the pernicious influence of pharma companies. They are members of Facebook groups of hundreds of people where the consensus view aligns with their beliefs.

The vaccine schedule now includes hundreds of vaccines and the incentives are all screwed up. I think it's pretty reasonable to believe in vaccines as a technology in general and that a lot of them have been captured by special interests.

The vaccine schedule now includes hundreds of vaccines

False. I count 32 doses recommended to all children from age 0 to 18, not counting a yearly flu vaccine and one dose of a covid vaccine.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines-children/schedules/index.html

This is a perfect example of the belief set I am talking about. The RFK supporters I know believe that kids are getting tens of vaccines in a single day.

I think it's pretty reasonable to believe in vaccines as a technology in general and that a lot of them have been captured by special interests.

Okay. Which vaccines in particular do you believe in?

My mistake, I should have said dozens. I think I saw "hundreds" somewhere recently and internalized that for some reason.

Okay. Which vaccines in particular do you believe in?

The technology for smallpox vaccines could be totally sound, and the company that makes the shots puts too much mercury in them or something. A batch could be bad. Maybe the adjuvants are too strong. We have good heuristics for noticing when something causes noticeable immediate side effects, but not when something contributes to chronic stress. Maybe every shot contains one of the 32 arms of Exodia, and you need to catch them all to visit the shadow realm.

So... there's no actual vaccine that you "believe in", and your belief is strictly in the theoretical (but so far unattained) possibility of producing a good vaccine?

It's imminently reasonable to suspect that some vaccines are not manufactured well. That would be a very explanation for why 1) vaccines are a good technology that save lives 2) some people seem to be getting sick from them.

But there's no way to distinguish well manufactured and poorly manufactured vaccines?

Children in the US are no longer vaccinated for smallpox because the disease is extinct.

I count 32 doses recommended to all children

how many of these doses include multiple vaccines?

to be frank, it's asinine to claim someone "wrong" if they believe MMR is 3 vaccines instead of one

not counting a yearly flu vaccine and one dose of a covid vaccine.

why wouldn't you count these?

"hundreds" is wrong, but so is "32" even if we accept 1 dose=1 vaccine which is hardly some sort of objective fact

Sure, we can break down dtap and mmr into three vaccinations. That brings the total to 48. Still a far cry from hundreds, so I don't see what's asinine about saying that hundreds is wrong. There's just no way you can torture the numbers to get to hundreds.

why wouldn't you count these?

Simply because in my experience most kids don't get these on a regular basis.

Simply because in my experience most kids don't get these on a regular basis.

they're on the schedule

hundreds is wrong, but so is 32

the number of vaccines on the CDC schedule for a child born today through age 18 is ~80

How is it 80? 48 I counted above, plus 18 flu, plus 2 covid makes 68.

More comments

What’s your experience?

Let's not do the thing where the poster is directionally correct, but we're nitpicking the details. Yeah, it's not 100 shots, but it's a lot, and it's a lot more than before.

Let's flip it. Why should an infant be receiving Hep B and Covid vaccines? Why should they receive any vaccines that they didn't in 1990 (or whenever the Chicken Pox vaccine came out).

The post-1990s vaccines to have vanishingly little benefit and unquantified risk.

Let's not do the thing where the poster is directionally correct, but we're nitpicking the details. Yeah, it's not 100 shots, but it's a lot, and it's a lot more than before.

Wait a second. There is no "directionally correct" here - the poster said not 100 but "hundreds" and the true number is around 30. It's "directionally correct" in the sense that the sign is right, but that's about it. If he said "thousands", would that still be "directionally correct"?

And it's not a semantic nit, because we can mostly all agree that the ideal number of vaccines is greater than 0 and less than "hundreds". So where exactly we are on that spectrum is basically the entire discussion.

Let's flip it. Why should an infant be receiving Hep B and Covid vaccines? Why should they receive any vaccines that they didn't in 1990 (or whenever the Chicken Pox vaccine came out).

I don't think there's a good reason to vaccinate infants against COVID.

I don't know why infants are vaccinated against hep B but it's been recommended for newborns since the 1991 (and patented in 1972), so by your heuristic that one seems pretty safe.

The post-1990s vaccines to have vanishingly little benefit and unquantified risk.

It's not clear to me that this is the case, but I'd be curious to see if anyone has actually looked at this rigorously. I don't know off the top of my head which ones are post 1990s.

the poster said not 100 but "hundreds" and the true number is around 30.

*not including the annual flu shots (sometimes multiple) and covid shots

I guess we'll just forget those even exist

Please show your math for "hundreds" of vaccinations on the schedule. I went through and counted, you can surely put some minimal effort in rather than low effort sneers.

More comments

The RFK supporters I know believe that kids are getting tens of vaccines in a single day.

The RFK-associated site I saw claimed 7 shots in one day, which appears to be true. (RSV, Hep B, Rotavirus, DTaP, Hib, Pneumococcal, Polio).

That's much closer to the truth but not necessarily true.

  • RSV is required depending on the mother's antibody status.
  • Hep B can be done in the second month of life.
  • So can the RSV vaccine.

So taking those two at 2 months instead of 3 months cuts the number to 5.

And polio is a going concern only in a couple of third world eastern hemisphere countries, so you can safely skip that one.

What's old is new again

More comments

Polio doesn't work like that.

IPV which we use in the US (and basically anywhere where with the infrastructure to manage the necessary cold-chain) has no effect on infection or transmission of polio. It is highly effective at preventing severe disease (although polio normally presents as just a cold with no distinguishing symptoms, so we've never actually studied the vaccine's impact on mild disease), which is what we mean when we say the US has "eradicated polio". In practice, polio spreads largely through poor sanitation, not direct person-to-person contact, so improved sanitation has probably actually reduced spread a fair bit, but there's no reason to believe the vaccine has done so. And we don't know because no one tests for polio (although there's some small push to start doing some wastewater testing).

More comments

7 shots in one appointment, however, is a plausible claim, even if it isn't necessary to do it that way.

Regarding 1: I don't know that I'm convinced by this. Suppose someone is the candidate of the "End Democracy Party." Someone who is pro-democracy could understandably be disappointed with their election. Of course, that would still be the democratic result, so their complaint is really with the populace that they have, that it is not a suitable one to attempt to maintain a democracy in.

Similarly, one could be disappointed with a decrease in the effectiveness in democratic governance. I think this was closer to what they were complaining about: that this indicates the need to win the "stupid vote," pointing to tangible harms wrought by people finding the wrong things appealing. "Democracy makes us listen to and appeal to the people with the bad opinions" is a valid critique of democracy, and so saying that that seems to be more the case than they once thought is an entirely reasonable sentiment.

2 is false. Vaccine skepticism in general has definitely risen since 2020 (the people putting in place mandates should really have considered the second order effects).

I'll in large part grant 3, though.

If a majority of people want to end democracy, I cannot think of an argument against it. If you're pro-democracy because you think the majorty is right, then you wouldn't be justified in stopping the majority from ending democracy. If you value democracy because it's correct, then you're also saying that you're wrong when the majority disagrees with you, which it would in this example. I can still save it, though. Suppose democracy was not about correctness, but rather about freedom. Then it would pain you to see people having the freedom to choose that they wouldn't want to be free anymore. But this choice imposes on the freedoms of those who still wants to be free. But if people say "I like democracy" when what they mean is "I like freedom", then people become confused and we reach the wrong conclusions, so it's important not to confuse ends and means. Democracy is not your highest value, it's something else which is unstated and which correlates with democracy.

is a valid critique of democracy

Yes, but then it's not democracy which is optimized for, but rather "good opinions", which democracy once did better. But now we have a problem, for while I can agree with your take, there's no objective way to measure if we're correct or if we're mislead. For democracy used to be how we measured, and now we have made something out to be more important than democracy, which we have no way to measure.

the people putting in place mandates should really have considered the second order effects

Vaccine skepticism can be blamed on those who promoted the vaccines. They repeatedly acted like people who were out to mislead you and put you in danger, while stating the opposite. For instance, they said "These vaccines are completely safe", but also that neither these companies, nor the government, would be to blame if getting the vaccine went horribly wrong for you. "I promise you this is safe, but I take no responsibility for the consequences" is a statement which will make people distrust you. Now, this doesn't imply that the vaccine isn't safe, merely that it's reasonable and logical to doubt that it is. About 10 more things like this happened (documents being held back, people being told that herd immunity would occur, being being told that the vaccine prevented you from spreading or getting Covid, both claims which turned out to be false), etc etc etc.

So, again, even if the vaccine is perfectly safe, the only reasonable response to somebody repeatedly lying to you, and even trying to use political and legal pressure to force you to inject something in your body which hasn't even been properly tested, is resistance. It's not the counter-movements fault that people distrust vaccines, but the sheer incompetence of the main movement.

I do not see anybody, anywhere, downplay the importance of vaccines and antibiotics.

It's actually pretty easy to find such people in some corners of the Internet. For example: https://x.com/Inversionism/status/1857457277860540898.

Easy to find them on 4chan, too.

This is literally my first time seeing such a person. I've never intentionally looked for them, but I've interacted with quite a lot of people in the past few years.

Of all people that I have seen who refuse to get the Covid vaccine, everyone still get (and support) literally every other vaccine. I'd estimate people who are against all vaccines to be 0.1-1% of the population at most. You can't really go lower than that. 1% of the population has an IQ below 65, 1% of the population are psychopaths, 1% of the population are pedophiles. If an issue is so rare than it applies to about 1%, I don't think coordinated efforts to improve them (like education, peer pressure, or more laws) is going to help any. I just accept that a small portion of the population is a little crazy by statistic necessity.

Umm, the percentage of people who are just generally anti vax is not a majority, but it’s much higher than 1%.

I usually go to more right-leaning websites and communities, and I recall seeing maybe 6 or 7 actual neonazis, but I have never seen anyone write that all vaccines are bad. Maybe a tiny bit of tech-savviness filters out the low-IQ schizophrenics who recommends "all-natural" alternatives to everything. 1% sounds like a lot, though, but I can't refute it if I include the offline population and Facebook users.

Yeah, I imagine there's some level of selection in who you end up interacting with.

Yes, it's much higher than 1%.

It's worth pointing out that nearly all the anti-vaxxers were far left until Covid.

Near Seattle, there is a place called Vashon Island which has long been famous for its loony leftists. Until recently, they had one of the worst childhood vaccinations rates in the country. About 20% of children weren't vaccinated.

Of course, when Covid came around, they immediately pivoted to pro-vax and are lining up to get boosters at rates far above the national and state average: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-the-anti-vax-rate-in-v-w87v8jS0S26qIiStqdWwUw

It's worth pointing out that nearly all the anti-vaxxers were far left until Covid.

I don't think that's true.

It's true that being categorically anti-vax was extremely rare to the point of being unheard of among normie republicans, but the Alex Jones crowd had conspiracy theories out the wazoo about vaccines and it was common to object to the HPV vaccine. Yes, my filter bubble is less likely to vaccinate their kids against MMR, but the fringes already didn't trust vaccines. It's probably more accurate to say that antivaxxers were mostly far left; the far right getting majorly into alt medicine and opposition to vaccines was not my top prediction five years ago, but it's not a surprise at all. Normie republicans listening to the far right post covid, on the other hand...

it was common to object to the HPV vaccine.

Isn't this more of a 'why should my son take a shot so your daughter can (slightly) lessen the risk of her slutting around' thing than a true concern about vax safety?

That was a big part of it, but maybe another part was it seems like it requires a few doses and lots of people are afraid of needles and want to minimize the number to just the bare essentials (an underappreciated element of vaccine opposition). I was too old by the time it became common, so HPV was never folded into my normal course of vaccination. I'm fairly pro-vaccine, so if I thought my monogamous self would benefit from it I would have consented. But then it became, "well, now I have to talk to my doctor about my lack of sexual partners, do I really want to have this conversation to get a shot that's not even marketed for my protection?"

Really, the fact that the HPV vaccine is marketed as protection from promiscuous sex is a bad, bad strategy because it pushes culture war buttons. But maybe that's the only reason at all it has any value. Does the HPV vaccine provide any protection against the many other kinds of HPV infections people can be exposed to, like warts on various parts of the body and things like that?

More comments

Opposite valence- the culture war objection was ‘why are you assuming my daughter is a whore?’.

I mean, yes, but the fact that vaccine safety was brought up as a serious objection to it indicates that anti-vax sentiment on the right isn’t entirely foreign.

If US big pharma is so great, why is US life-expectancy declining? Not just since the pandemic but even before then. Biotech and pharma shares were making huge gains in that period 2014-2019, yet life expectancy was stagnant at best. We can toss Tabarrok's thesis that pharma shares = life expectancy straight out the window. Consider US life expectancy compared to peers: https://x.com/The_OtherET/status/1857207679011180938

https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/djuspr

https://www.investing.com/indices/nasdaq-biotechnology-components

Why are there umpteen billions going into a massively drawn-out and complicated drug research process that barely seems to produce many good new drugs - and pennies for anti-aging research?

Why was there a massive opiate crisis, founded in part due to dodgy advertisements and concealment of risks?

Why is such an enormous proportion of the US population on anti-depressants? Why are so many children on ADHD medications and adderall? Overmedicalization has been linked to all kinds of problems.

Capitalism is not an unalloyed good. I believe in the market system. I believe it's generally superior to central planning and state-directed approach. But there are roles for regulation or state enterprises. Of course regulation can also create perverse incentives which I suspect is a big contributor to the problem. But free market fundamentalists like Tabarrok are nearly as bad as banocrat regulatory fiends and communists.

The fentanyl dealer on the street is nearly universally considered a social malefactor, I doubt Tabarrok would defend this particular class of entrepeneur. What about the pharma exec who launders standard human behaviour (unsatisfaction with a boring life or children not sitting still in class) as a disease, intensively advertises a 'cure' which is only partially effective and causes all kinds of side-effects later down the track? Regulation is needed to confront both of them.

The whole US health system is a Gordion knot that needs to be decisively cut through by some Alexander.

Why are there so many firefighters at house fires?

Firefighters arriving after the fire starts is perfectly fine.

However, if the firefighters are wandering around with petrol and matches before the fire starts, then we have problems - especially when it comes to paying them a hefty bill for their services.

"The fentanyl dealer on the street is nearly universally considered a social malefactor, I doubt Tabarrok would defend this particular class of entrepeneur."

Legalization of drugs is a standard libertarian belief.

"If US big pharma is so great, why is US life-expectancy declining?"

It was declining due to covid and a bunch of people choosing to put fentanyl in their bodies. Many Americans choose to be fat. There was a time when individual responsibility was something conservatives believed in.

If the state lets fentanyl be sold in supermarkets, prices will fall and consumption will rise.

If the state shoots fentanyl dealers dead, prices will rise and consumption will fall.

If the state subsidizes corn production, HFCS will get added to more things and food will become more fattening...

Each individual choice swims in a sea of policy, that's why policy exists.

I do not know what RFK Jr.'s specific stance on vaccines is

Republicans won by increasing their share of the stupid vote.

You don't know what your opposition believes, but you're sure they're the stupid ones. Thanks for putting these two sentences in the same post because it saves me the trouble of having to argue them out of you.

While their language could have been more clear, I read OP as using "stupid" as a gloss for "without college degree." Obviously there are the kinds of people Taleb calls "intellectuals yet idiots", but I don't think that's who OP had in mind.

I don't know that I want to stan RFK here, but the status quo isn't inherently better: public health generally has a lot of egg on its face, not just from the pandemic. Attempts at COVID vaccine mandates seem pretty ham-handed in hindsight given their lack of long-term immunity. The FDA approved, over the advice of its own scientists, a very expensive drug for Alzheimer's that wasn't even found to be effective. Literally the current assistant secretary of HHS was found to have put political pressure on WPATH to remove age limits from gender medicine in its guidelines at a time when many Western countries have reviewed the literature and are questioning the practice for youth.

I get where you're coming from, but I find myself questioning whether putting RFK in charge will actually make things worse. At least he'll get push-back against crazy policies.

I am not going to die on the hill that COVID vaccine mandates were a good idea, but I am absolutely going to die on the hill that Pfizer deserved to make shitloads of money for developing and manufacturing the product that effectively ended the COVID pandemic as a going concern.

Oh fucking bullshit. The war in Ukraine ended the covid pandemic hysteria. Nothing Pfizer or any of the other big pharma companies did.

Calm down.

Oh fucking bullshit. The war in Ukraine ended the covid pandemic hysteria.

Covid hysteria was pretty much entirely over in the UK (thanks to vaccines!) by the time of the Ukraine war.

The vaccines were widely available by early to mid 2021, and yet hysteria continued in most western countries until everyone actually got Covid in January 2022 thanks to Omicron.

I don't doubt that vaccines saved lives in 2021, but they didn't stop the spread or end the pandemic.

Omicron ended the pandemic.

I can only relate my experience of what happened in the UK, as that's where I was living at the time, but fwiw this isn't really how things played out there. Once we reached mid-2021 all restrictions were lifted and people broadly went back to living their lives normally. There was some debate about whether to shut things down again due to Omicron, but this ended up not happening.

Didn't the UK have some sort of "Freedom Day" and then totally renege on it?

Yep, that's what people were colloquially (and maybe even officially, I don't remember) calling the day all restrictions were set to be lifted. I don't recall any limitations being re-imposed after that. I admit that for a while if you tested positive for covid you were still required to self-isolate for 10-14 days, but I wouldn't call that hysteria.

Prominent health officials were arguing for re-establishing some level of restrictions around the time of the Omicron variant but Boris Johnson overrode them on that.

Omicron ended the pandemic.

While I agree that Omicron as an event, i.e. the infection wave around January 2022, was the end of any real mainstream concern about COVID, there's pretty good reason to believe the apparent increased transmissibility of Omicron was an illusion: there's no significant differences in transmissibility between COVID variants (the technical term in that paper is "SAR" for "Secondary Attack Rate").

In other words, we would have seen a much smaller wave in the winter of 2021-2022 if everyone acted like they did in the winter of 2020-2021 (when vaccines were new enough that only the highest priority/luckiest had gotten them), but they didn't. Probably due to people worrying less about being careful due to vaccines, although probably also a good amount of people feeling like they had had enough of isolating after several months.

Interesting and probably true. If we just "let it rip" it's likely we would have ended with fewer overall deaths as the disease would have quickly exhausted itself. The Omicron event would have happened in March 2020 instead of January 2022.

Obviously, in this counterfactual, the acute phase would have been awful. Hospitals would have been overrun, but it's unclear how much lifesaving care was happening anyway. Irresponsible use of ventilators definitely killed lots of people who would have survived otherwise.

In nearly every country, the damage caused by the Covid response was worse than the disease itself. China gets an F. Australia gets a D-. Sweden did it best, but I think that's only because there wasn't a "Super Sweden" that simply ignored the disease completely. (Maybe some African countries fit that bill due to lack of state capacity).

It depends on how you define hysteria. Most left-leaning people in my neck of the woods were pretty much done worrying about COVID as soon as they were fully vaccinated. There was still some residual level of concern, which I will agree largely ended with Omicron, but by Memorial Day 2021 very few people were doing anything beyond possibly masking up in busy areas.

Mask mandates remained in place. Mask mandates are hysteria.

I don’t know why people want to retcon what happened. Many doctoral theses should be written on this phenomenon

More comments

Truckers (very memorably) were (newly!) banned from crossing the Canada-US border in early 2022 without proof of vaccination -- whether this was hysterical or not is I suppose something we could discuss, but I don't see how it could be because of a thing that was not 'a going concern'?

I see outdoor maskies every day, and they almost always have leftist signifiers.

Mask requirements for businesses didn't end in my city until...well, I got so frustrated that I left for six months in January 2022. When I came back in 2023, they were finally gone.

I had predicted this at the beginning of the pandemic; people don't generally understand that even the yearly flu vaccine is ~70% effective. By the time they get a vaccine, they'll be so wound up and terrified that it won't be good enough; like a neurotic, there is no threshold of proof that will make the anxiety go away.

I remember the day the CDC officially ended the pandemic, a customer at work said it wasn't over for him. Gay. Corpo Tech job.

It’s amazing how only two years later people are re writing history.

I am not going to die on the hill that COVID vaccine mandates were a good idea, but I am absolutely going to die on the hill that Pfizer deserved to make shitloads of money for developing and manufacturing the product that effectively ended the COVID pandemic as a going concern.

They were behind the South African mad scientist who produced Omicron?

The 6 to 9 months between when most people were able to get the vaccine and when Omicron became prominent was worth a lot.

Maybe -- but the pandemic was still very much a 'going concern' in that period?

Yes. Tons of people were dying during that period. Even worse, the people in many countries such as Australia and China experienced mass imprisonment.

Vaccines saved lives, but they did not end the hysteria. Far from it. I still remember when they reinstated the mask mandate in Seattle in summer 2021 after a couple blissful months of freedom when we still thought the vaccines stopped the spread.

Except it didn’t “end it as a going concern.” People were still crazy and you still had cases.

I heard rumors that Omicron looked like it was developed through serial passage in lab mice, but do you have any details?

Nothing more than you do. The official story is some immunocompromised patient had it for a long time, but I go with "second lab leak".

Not all lab leaks are bad after all I guess?

Joking, obviously, but Omicron was probably the second most positive world event in my lifetime after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

If they ever find the guy who did it, I hope he gets a Nobel Prize for Peace and for Medicine.

public health generally has a lot of egg on its face, not just from the pandemic.

Agreed. If we're going to go with the "a purpose of a system is what it does", then the US public health apparatus is awful. We spend by far the most money in the world and get the life expectancy of (checks notes) Turkey, Ecuador, and Albania.

We spend by far the most money in the world and get the life expectancy of (checks notes) Turkey, Ecuador, and Albania.

It would probably help if Americans drove less, exercised more, were less fat, did fewer drugs, and stopped shooting each other and themselves. However, the public health interventions needed to address these cultural and lifestyle issues are fairly unpopular.

Let's see what RFK can do. Maybe we'll start directing dollars towards effective interventions and away from ruinously expensive and ineffective ones.

I agree that America should be more like Europe and Asia by harshly prosecuting violent crime and refusing to tolerate drugs. We should probably also adopt European food standards where breakfast cereal has 5 simple ingredients instead of 20 unpronouncable ones.

Can you to be more specific about what effective interventions you're thinking about? The main causes of the European-American life expectancy gap is not a mystery, and I promise you it's not tripotassium phosphate or excessive vaccinations.

Like, stricter regulations on microplastics or whatever would be great, but the effects on life expectancy are going to be completely swamped by obesity, drugs, car accidents, and suicides. (Not to mention, the GOP traditional stance on environmental and health issues makes me think there's not going to be much appetite for imposing additional standards on industry).

I agree that America should be more like Europe and Asia by harshly prosecuting violent crime and refusing to tolerate drugs.

The US prosecutes violent and drug crimes far more harshly than Europe, as I'm sure you are well aware. Tolerance is not the issue.

Can you to be more specific about what effective interventions you're thinking about?

A focus on reducing obesity and preventing sickness would be a welcome change. Will it dramatically increase life expectancy? Maybe not at first, but it's a start. And it might at least stem the rapid increase in costs. We're getting very little for our expensive medical system.

What changes would you propose? Cities like Chicago and DC have done literally everything that establishment figures say is good, and look at the results. These are intractable problems. The state can't simply snap its fingers and will away problems. Except crime. That can be made much less via mass incarceration.

The US prosecutes violent and drug crimes far more harshly than Europe, as I'm sure you are well aware. Tolerance is not the issue.

I am not aware. Here in Seattle open air drug markets are tolerated and people who have been arrested for dozens of crimes (including violent crimes) are frequently released onto the streets without trial. It's hard to imagine a more lenient system.

A focus on reducing obesity and preventing sickness would be a welcome change.

Reducing obesity is a goal, not a policy. Obama focused on reducing obesity. Didn't achieve much. What is the Trump administration and the GOP going to do? What policies that are both effective and palatable to a) Republican voters b) Republican elites do you expect them to pursue

What changes would you propose?

Tax sugar (or Ozempic4All, if you're feeling pro-injection and like free healthcare). Invest in public transit and rework urban planning (15min cities are back, baby) so people drive less (fewer car accidents) and have more active lives (-obesity, +basically every other aspect of human health).

Of course, these are already ballot box poison (and that's before we even try to do anything about suicide, where massive social engineering might be more politically viable than restricting access to guns). Which points back to what I was originally saying: low American life expectancy is revealed preference re: lifestyle. Policies to address these issues have been floated repeatedly and outside of a few locations they've been shot down.

(Not a clue, re: drugs. There's some proximate interventions you can do to reduce OD deaths, but that's just nibbling around the edges of the problem)

Cities like Chicago and DC have done literally everything that establishment figures say is good, and look at the results.

Can you be more specific? Which establishment figures, which policies?

Sidebar: I would note that the stereotypically very liberal states like CA and NY have the highest life expectancy; the worst states are in the ultraconservative Deep South. Again, I don't think this is really about policy (cf. Idaho, which is also extremely conservative), except perhaps insofar as state governments could spend money on ameliorating the consequences of Southerners' unusually unhealthy lifestyles but don't (generally with the support of their electorate).

I am not aware. Here in Seattle open air drug markets are tolerated and people who have been arrested for dozens of crimes (including violent crimes) are frequently released onto the streets without trial. It's hard to imagine a more lenient system.

Well I'm pleased to inform you that the world did not start three years ago, nor did America's durable problems with drug use and violent crime, nor its unusually harsh sentencing practices. The US has mass incarceration. It, rather notoriously, has more prisoners per capita than almost anywhere on Earth, including actual totalitarian regimes. It doesn't seem to have had the desired effect. Unless you can do something about the processes that produce new criminals, the problem isn't going to go away just by throwing more and more people in prison.

Invest in public transit and rework urban planning

I'm 100% with you. But first, we need the DOGE man to come and fix government.

Too many people think that dollars = progress. This is obviously false. California has spent on the order of $100 billion on high speed rail and has nothing to show for it. If we had the efficiency of Spain or China we could do stuff. Unfortunately we are hamstrung by a corrupt and incompetent government.

Until that is fixed, we could spend infinite dollars and get nothing for it.

So I assume that you agree with me that the best way to get car-free cities is to start by gutting the corrupt people who are preventing public money from being utilized.

Sidebar: I would note that the stereotypically very liberal states like CA and NY have the highest life expectancy; the worst states are in the ultraconservative Deep South.

Yes, rich people who benefit from our economic system have better life outcomes. How can we help disadvantaged people get the same thing? I don't think standard liberal politics have the answer. Look at Philly, DC, and Chicago.

Perhaps the argument could be made that we can in fact throw the book hard at drug offenders, and that we have indeed done so to the point that DAs, lacking a less-harsh punishment, choose not to punish at all.


What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats