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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   32580 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Stealing a comment in a subthread from @Samizdata that I liked a lot:

I posted this in the Weekly Culture War Roundup, but I think I got filtered out as a new user. I’ve deleted and reposted, so apologies if you’re seeing this twice!

There’s a recurring juxtaposition of views on /r/parenting that I find interesting. For context, the parenting subreddit, like most of Reddit’s forums, skews left-wing. There are periodic posts where parents try to determine what to do after their child engages in some kind of undesirable behavior. The typical suspects are drugs and alcohol, with most of the posts looking similar to this one.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/1fc70nm/appropriate_stance_on_alcoholdrugs/

This parent is worried about their 17-year-old daughter, who admitted to turning off her Life360 before going to a house party and having several drinks. Most commenters recommend clemency, with the top comment saying:

“Honestly, I think you are going to have to let go a little bit or she might go crazy after she gets out yalls house. All of her behavior was appropriate for a 17 year old. I was doing these things at 17. Almost all of my high school and the high school down the road were doing these things. And worse…. The way you go forwards is going to determine whether you are in her adult life.”

There’s a significant attitude of “Teens are going to engage in risky behaviors no matter what, your punishments and restrictions will have zero deterrent effect, and the best course of action is some kind of harm reduction.”

In contrast, there are periodic posts with parents hand-wringing about their son “being radicalized” by YouTube. This is a fairly typical example:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/1dqk7fs/son_caught_the_andrew_tate_bug/

Some of comments just suggest alternative influencers to watch, but many are out for blood, one saying:

“If I caught my kid looking at extremist material it would be a two prong 'congrats you just lost ALL media privileges' and a 'instant therapy or else'.”

If it’s not clear, I think both of these approaches are wrong-headed. Andrew Tate, while execrable, is reasonably widespread and popular among teenage boys. I don’t think treating him as an irresistible gateway drug to the alt-right is useful or true; most of the teens that watch him manage to do so without falling down some rabbit hole of extremism.

In contrast, I think even moderate drinking or drug use is fairly risky for developing brains, and I think the laissez-faire attitude towards it is dangerous.

When I search my own heart, I come to the exact opposite conclusion of the /r/parenting hivemind, both in practical and moral terms. Even if I banned my kids from watching or listening to a particular influencer, and set up bulletproof content blockers on every device in our house, it seems pretty futile; they’re around other teens with smartphones 30-40 hours a week while they’re at school. Surely there will be plenty of opportunities to watch whatever they want on a friend’s phone?

In contrast, I honestly think reasonable restrictions on a teen, like curfews, are more likely to curtail behaviors like drinking and drug use. I know that some teens can get around these restrictions, but these are the kind of obstacles that legitimately stymied me when I was a semi-wayward teen. Maybe I wasn’t a sufficiently motivated delinquent, I don’t know.

But the bottom line is: Isn’t it kind of convenient that my moral inclinations and my opinions of the practical difficulties of implementing a ban line up so well for different activities?

It’s easy to practice gentle, permissive parenting with a nonchalant “Teens will only rebel harder against strict rules” attitude when your child isn’t actually doing something you have strong feelings against.

So, my question for the forum would be: how do you balance letting your child(ren) make their own mistakes and take the consequences in a controlled environment, even when you disagree with their choices? When do you step in?

It's a small world indeed; I responded to that comment just now. Here's the original:

https://www.themotte.org/post/1286/smallscale-question-sunday-for-december-8/275626?context=8#context

In contrast, I think even moderate drinking or drug use is fairly risky for developing brains, and I think the laissez-faire attitude towards it is dangerous.

Teen drinking is universal outside the US, near-universal in the US, and lindy. "Moderate drinking at 17 damages developing brains" is only relevant if you think everyone was brain-damaged in a relevant way back in the day. Unless you are trying to raise your kids teetotal for religious reasons, you are raising them in a culture where drinking is ubiquitous, and the distinction between "drinking sensibly" and "drinking too much" is far more important to teach than the one between drinking below and above an arbitrary cutoff age. The punishable misbehaviour in that anecdote was travelling to a secondary location without informing the parents, which is a basic safety issue, particularly for girls.

Andrew Tate, while execrable, is reasonably widespread and popular among teenage boys. I don’t think treating him as an irresistible gateway drug to the alt-right is useful or true; most of the teens that watch him manage to do so without falling down some rabbit hole of extremism.

This is the classic religious indoctrination problem, and it would be helpful if the Reddit mums grokked this. If you want your children not to adopt the lowest-common-denominator version of the locally prevailing culture, you either need to present them with a better (by their light, not yours) alternative, or control their information diet by heavy censorship. (This can be done - fundies in the US seem to do it successfully until the kid is 18 and goes off to university or gets a job at a non-fundie-owned business). And unfortunately it is hard to present civilised behaviour as a better alternative to what Tate is selling until he is finally convicted and jailed.

My sons are too young for this to be an issue yet, but I am reasonably clear that the product I am selling is a working marriage (and children), that In This House We Belive that Andrew Tate is a gypsy's prison bitch, and that part of men raising men is letting them know the well-known true facts about women that the RedPill crowd present as a new and subversive discovery. The reason why people like Tate have an audience is that both mainstream red-tribe Christianity and mainstream blue-tribe feminism are lying about what women want. The rest of the culture need to find a non-toxic way of sharing the truth if they don't want to be outcompeted. I used Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynmann when I was a kid.

Teen drinking is universal outside the US, near-universal in the US, and lindy.

This. In my town, it was normal to start drinking beer around 12-14, and to start drinking hard alcohol (up to blackout drunk) around 14-16. And I'm not talking about poor white trash, this is a prosperous, unusually high TFR conservative & religious farmer's region in western germany.

prosperous, unusually high TFR conservative & religious farmer's region in western germany

Sounds lovely. Is it still like this? I was a surprised at the number of closed Gaststätte / Wirtshaus in towns in rural Germany on a recent trip. Reminded of all the towns that lost their pubs in Ireland and the UK. ☹️

For better or worse, we've went through that process before my time; In our Bauernschaft of 500 people, there used to be 5 Kneipen, of which only a single one was still open when I was a kid (an I never went there myself, it was oly old people). I have been told that during covid, one secretly opened again though that has stopped once the measurements had been lifted.

During my teen years, it was typical to first meet at someone's place with a group to get drunk except for the designated drivers, and then you drive to wherever is the nearest current fair (usually a Schützenfest) at that weekend, which could be 20 kilometers or more. My friend group was with more than 20 people of both genders pretty large, so we would often just get drunk together and skip the part of driving anywhere.

From what I've heard, the region hasn't changed much culture and living standard-wise; It's not comparable to the pitiful misery that is the contemporary british countryside. In terms of TFR it's still among the highest in germany, but unfortunately it went through the same 2022 post-covid crash as the rest (up to that point, it had actually slowly been increasing for nearly a decade).

Same experience i had at an expensive private school in a western german city

where do kids there go to drink? Do they just openly drink with their parents?

I think the most sketchy thing about it for teenagers in America is there just really isn't a good place to drink. Bars won't serve you of course, or even allow kids to enter. They don't own their own house so they can't host a party. You could maybe drink get away quickly in the car or outside, but that's highly illegal and risky. Going to the house of some strange adult who's willing to host an underage drinking party is... suspicious at best, and can lead to really bad things happening.

this might have been different in the past, when it was more common for parents to work late or go out alone and leave the kids home alone.

where do kids there go to drink? Do they just openly drink with their parents?

It's complicated and not just about alcohol, but generally yes, or with their tacit acceptance. I'll use the example of a specific festivity, "Maibaum pflanzen" ("planting the May-Tree"), because it's a nice progression from young to old, but just our small town would have a low double-digit number of festivities like these (for the interested germans, the others I remember in my town were: Straßenfest, Dorffest, Gemeindefest, Wursteball, Osterfeuer, Schützenfest, Karneval, Vaterstag). Once you're 16, you'd also be allowed to drive over to other towns, which meant that there was something going on every weekend.

End of April, we would celebrate the start of spring by going into the nearby forest, cutting down a birch, and setting it up in our local neighbourhood. All neighbourhoods around would do this, with around 20 people per tree, so you would have something like 10 trees up in walking distance, and of those everyone would know literally everyone else. You'd sit down in a circle around a fire and the tree would be some meters away so that it's hard to see from the fire in the dark. There would be a game of stealing the trees from others, mostly played by teens and young adults, and next day the captured trees would be chopped into small pieces and distributed among the group, some keeping their piece as a celebration to commemorate the number of trees stolen, but usually just for burning wood.

Before you're 12, you'd generally just help decorate the tree, eat Bratwurst, play games with the other kids, maybe visiting some other trees with a group of kids. Some neighbourhoods would put up a "kid's tree" which was just a branch from the larger tree, and which would be small enough for the younger kids to steal without needing an axe. Once you're around 12, you'd be allowed to help cut and carry the tree in earnest and drink your first beer (obviously, cutting the tree was itself a beer drinking game) and help protecting the adult tree. Around 14, you'd be allowed to join the older teens when stealing adult trees (which is mostly done between 2-6 in the morning when the majority of the adults went to bed, and the few left over to protect the tree will be drunk or even sometimes fell asleep), and the older teens would let you drink your first hard alcohol with them. This would often also be the first time when you get REALLY drunk once, and you (as well as the older teens that supplied you) would be lightly punished or at least reprimanded by your parents to be more careful next time.

Around 16, you'd be strong enough to carry a tree with a group of other teens, which meant that you'd be allowed your own tree altogether. Whether you actually did this depends on whether you can organize a group of older teens/young adults large enough, a place where you'd be allowed to put up the tree, and food & drinks for everyone, including visitors. This would be the time when getting REALLY DRUNK will be fully tolerated. When I was around 17, we'd set up a tree with 6 teens my age at my parent's house (since they were away for the night at the neighbourhood's tree) and vowed we'd protect our tree by putting a nail in the tree for every finished bottle of hard alcohol and hang the bottle there, and when we woke up the entire tree was decorated fully with more than 20 bottles. We've had a few visitors, but even accounting for that it means everyone drank at least 2-3 full bottles of hard alcohol (and we also drank at other trees we visited), in addition to copious amounts of beer which is generally not even counted (we literally have the saying "you can't get drunk on beer") and which we obviously didn't even bother putting on the tree. We all had such a bad hangover that we didn't go out drinking the next day, which you'd usually do as it is worker's day with lots of bigger festivals. My parents just laughed and made fun of us.

So you usually don't drink much hard alcohol directly with your parents as a teen, it's expected of you to help organize events with friends which then allow you to get drunk. Most parents directly help supply some amount of alcohol for every celebration you throw or join, but usually you have to organize some on top of that (which isn't difficult). Drinking alone or at any time that isn't a designated known event is heavily frowned upon(except beer, since, again, it doesn't count). Some teens would only join events with their parents, and correspondingly drink much less, much later.

Interesting! Thanks for the detailed discription. It sounds fun, and also uniquely German in an interesting way.

So you were mostly drinking outside in the forest? Who bought the drinks, the older teens or the parents?

As an American, the laws for liquor were very strict, so it was hard to get any. We would occasionally have "field parties" where you drive out to some random rural location, sit around a circle, maybe a fire if someone was prepared enough to bring supplies, and pass a bottle around (usually bought by someone with a "fun" older sibling). Really a miserable experience all around I think. The more common way was that we'd go to the house of our friend who had an alcoholic single mom, wait for her to fall asleep, and then raid her liquor cabinet. Yeah... not good times. We'd also have to think of a cover story to tell our parents.

i went to highschool in the USA in the 90s: there were mutiple parties every weekend at various houses of kids whos parents were out of town, when the weather was good we'd sometimes have huge keg parties just out of town in a sort of nature area. something like the moon tower party in dazed and confused. not infrequently, people would get a hotel room to hang out in. pretty typical to go to multiple stops on a friday or saturday night.

even i, described once by a friend of my girlfriend as being a "cool nerd", knew multiple people who could get me weed, beer or liquor. friends of a friend would rarely show up with cocaine or acid, and i knew of older people using heroin but never saw any.

this type of partying was by far the main highschool social scene, i would guess 40% of kids were part of this including most of the athletes and popular types.

looking back, it seems like a major factor was parents constantly going out of town and leaving the kids in charge of nice single family homes, kind of surprising how much that was happening

So you were mostly drinking outside in the forest?

Uh, no. For may-tree planting it varied wildly since you needed lots of space, but never in the forest since you want to make a camp fire, and a camp fire in the forest while drunk is how you get forest fires. Typically it would be something like a paddock, or a large roundabout, or in someone backyard if it's large enough. For other events it would usually be some large communal building, such as the old school building.

Who bought the drinks, the older teens or the parents?

The parents usually supply whatever is on the high end of acceptance for your age, older teens whatever is on the low end. So for, say, a 14yo, parents would supply beer and older teens would supply harder alcohol (and it would be expected of the older teens to look after him, and this can be enforced since the parents know exactly who the older teens are). But it also varied a lot depending on the parents opinion.

As an American, the laws for liquor were very strict, so it was hard to get any. We would occasionally have "field parties" where you drive out to some random rural location, sit around a circle, maybe a fire if someone was prepared enough to bring supplies, and pass a bottle around (usually bought by someone with a "fun" older sibling). Really a miserable experience all around I think. The more common way was that we'd go to the house of our friend who had an alcoholic single mom, wait for her to fall asleep, and then raid her liquor cabinet. Yeah... not good times. We'd also have to think of a cover story to tell our parents.

Yeah sounds sad. I used to believe in the idea that some things can't be enforced, such as limiting alcohol, since it fit very with my experience and we were taught in school how badly prohibition fucked up. But nowadays I think it all is just secretly revealing your preferences, or at least of society at large - limiting alcohol can't be enforced if people don't want to. But if they do, it works.

A quick google says that the drinking age in Germany is 14 if a responsible adult is buying the drinks, and 16 if the kids are buying beer or wine for themselves (18 for spirits). I'm not sure about Germany, but teens openly drinking with parents including in bars and restaurants is normal in France and Italy, even when it is technically illegal (which it now mostly is - France raised their drinking age to 18 in 2009 and Italy in 2011). I used to travel round France a lot with my parents, and I was noticeably younger than 14 (at that time the legal drinking age for wine with a meal) when waiters at respectable French restaurants started offering me a glass of my parents' bottle of wine.

"Moderate drinking at 17 damages developing brains" is only relevant if you think everyone was brain-damaged in a relevant way back in the day.

...which is, IMHO, not that far-fetched of a hypothesis.

Looking at people nowadays they seem neither happier nor smarter. Is the take here supposed to be "brain damage good, actually"?

My instinct is that the substitute activities people are engaging with are actually even worse than what happened to teenagers before for your brains.

I’m actually fine with teenagers drinking beer and wine in moderation, I learned to do so because I reached legal drinking age outside of the USA and I had a parent who was very modest in their alcohol consumption. Basically all of my bad alcohol habits I picked up when I came back and lived in the burbs and attached myself to the local party scene.

It may have some negative consequences, but as stated above it’s one of lindy-est things to ever lindy.

Internet brain rot, social media obsession, binge video gaming, and a sedentary indoor life style seems much much worse to me in terms of damage to young people’s brain. Massive spikes in youth depression, anxiety and isolation seem to bear this out.

Pick your poison, I imagine every generation since the first has had to deal with this issue.

I read speculation along those lines once somewhere in the SSCverse, that when you look at the behavioral symptoms of CTE in football players, veterans, and boxers they look more or less like severer and maladaptive versions of the traits that we view modern men as lacking. Aggression, risk taking, etc.

And the theory was, the human brain is actually adapted to getting a few concussions. If you look at history, most men would get a few growing up. The human brain essentially comes from the factory with too much risk aversion and doesn't reach optimal broken in condition until getting whacked a few times.

I find it wild speculation, but then I look at my own life and I suffered a severe concussion, and more or less contemporaneously I snapped out of my doldrums and started acting with a bit of ambition.

Sometimes it hard to know where your limits are until you get your bell rung a couple times.

I haven't seen "grok" in at least forty years!

Should be less than forty. I’m not that old.

I'm not that old either, it was definitely a popular term on the net in the nineties.

I feel I see it fairly regularly.

You might start hearing about it a lot.

It's the name of X AI's product. Apparently, they made some pretty big advances in networking large numbers of GPU's together and have now built the world's largest computer which they are using to train Grok3.

I remember seeing it in an issue of Wired from like 20 years ago.

The reason why people like Tate have an audience is that both mainstream red-tribe Christianity and mainstream blue-tribe feminism are lying about what women want. The rest of the culture need to find a non-toxic way of sharing the truth if they don't want to be outcompeted. I used Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynmann when I was a kid.

How would you share the truth about What Women Want?

It's interesting that everyone here is ignoring the sex of the child in question.

Teen drinking is universal outside the US, near-universal in the US, and lindy. "

Teenage drinking is lindy for teenage boys ... but not for unmarried, unchaperoned girls.

When I was a teenager, I was allowed to drink at parties as long as I didn’t drive back. For my sister(one grade below me), I had to be there and in a state cognizant of what was going on. Even at the time, we both understood the reason well enough to never break the rule.

What the heck is "lindy", anyways? I've only ever seen that in the context of swing dancing and I'm pretty sure that's not what @MadMonzer meant.

It refers to the Lindy Effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

The basic idea is that something that has been going for a long time is probably going to go on for a long time.

you either need to present them with a better (by their light, not yours) alternative...The reason why people like Tate have an audience is that both mainstream red-tribe Christianity and mainstream blue-tribe feminism are lying about what women want. The rest of the culture need to find a non-toxic way of sharing the truth if they don't want to be outcompeted.

I agree with these bits, that essentially you need to offer a more persuasive product. I think for parents that are intelligent and informed it is not so difficult to do this. For example my father always gave me a sort of "redpilled" view on HBD, and being a geneticist it wasn't hard for him to make a more convincing case than netflix and my grade school teachers. For parents that are stupid and don't lead exemplary lives (as arguments can be made by words or by examples) I think unfortunately for them their children are at the mercy of the broader culture.

My parents were normal, middle class people. I remember being warned that certain discussions about race did not leave the family- although they didn’t use the word ‘HBD’.

For parents that are stupid and don't lead exemplary lives (as arguments can be made by words or by examples) I think unfortunately for them their children are at the mercy of the broader culture.

Perhaps that, then, is the fundamental horror of raising teenagers for most parents- especially the ones who are just intelligent enough to know this happens, but are unable to stop it. It's especially important for parents who want to retain beliefs that are more incompatible with local reality [as contrasted with simply 'untrue', which is how the wise-to-wicked pipeline works] to be much more intelligent/capable than the general population such that their child retains them.

Hence the attempts to ride the ever-decreasing amount of power they have into the ground.

"Moderate drinking at 17 damages developing brains" is only relevant if you think everyone was brain-damaged in a relevant way back in the day.

Factually, they were. From the 20th century via leaded gasoline & lead paint, & as far back as Babylon with lead glassware, flatware, pipes, etc.

Disclaimer, I don't have kids yet, so this is all hypothetical, and people are famously bad at predicting what they would do in a hypothetical.

I did a moderate amount of drinking and drugs (and in fact I still do!) and I turned out fine, so setting hard limits for my kids here would be hypocritical and seemingly unnecessary.

I also personally know a couple people who either died or fucked up their lives pretty significantly due to drug-related issues. So I know that there can be serious consequences and I don't take the issue lightly. But at the same time, I know that outcomes this severe are uncommon, assuming no exacerbating circumstances. Everything carries risk. I'm not going to ban my kids from driving just because they might get in a car accident.

As for the political content that reddit is worried about, that's just the stuff I myself watch/read anyway, so stopping my own kids from watching/reading it would be even more bizarre and hypocritical.

As for the political content that reddit is worried about, that's just the stuff I myself watch/read anyway, so stopping my own kids from watching/reading it would be even more bizarre and hypocritical.

So you'll need to signal flip the political content in the thought experiment to stuff you profoundly disagree with.

As for the political content that reddit is worried about, that's just the stuff I myself watch/read anyway, so stopping my own kids from watching/reading it would be even more bizarre and hypocritical.

So you'll need to signal flip the political content in the thought experiment to stuff you profoundly disagree with.

It's hard to think of content that arouses in the anti-woke right the sense of a priori absolute evil that Tate does to the feminist left. Maybe MAP advocacy? Children-targeted sissy hypno?

Sure, righties "hate" BreadTube, but it's not quite the same hate.

I remember when this forum discussed Cuties, and there was no shortage of right-wingers who aired out their righteous seething fury about it.

The entire trans memeplex. Cheerios ads featuring miscegenation. Razor ads that are perceived as anti male. Christmas ads that are insufficiently religious.

But there's my point. The right wing "hates" that stuff, but they would not send their son to therapy (or I guess, Bible camp) and remove their access to a phone/all media if they caught them watching those.

Vaush and Tate are comparable poles of youth-targeted far-left and far-right influencerism, but the chud dad reacts to Vaush with a contemptuous snort, not like the /r/parenting folks above.

You must have had very different experiences of Evangelical parents than my friends had growing up. The question of "worldly" things which were a bad influence infected all questions of music, books, movies, friendships.

I can attest to the same, a LOT of media was disallowed due to my evangelical parentage. But I think most people answering this question do not think of evangelicals first, especially since they don't seem to be as numerous as they were 20 years ago. How many parents are banning Spongebob in 2024?

Damn, that makes me think that I will be compared to the evangelicals if I keep my kids from watching modern Blues Clues due to the pride parade segment they showed several years ago. There's a secular basis for my restrictions, damnit!

I think the most logical comparison is probably the right wing Boogeyman of online groomers, turning your kid gay or trans.

The Evangelical treatment of knowledge about homosexuality as inherently seductive towards homosexuality has been widely examined and derided already.

I do think there’s something to the “right and left have switched polarities” theory. The people who go the hardest for wokeness today would have been the strictest Christian moralists if they were alive in the 1600s.

I am anti-disapproving-schoolmarm. Back in the 90s and 2000s that means Focus on the Family style religious right. Fretting about sex in movies, bad music and the evils of DND.

Nowadays the culturally dominant disapprovers are progressives. Fretting about Tate and Jordan Peterson and making it a felony to deface a rainbow crosswalk by putting scooter tiremarks on it.

But there's my point. The right wing "hates" that stuff, but they would not send their son to therapy (or I guess, Bible camp) and remove their access to a phone/all media if they caught them watching those.

If I thought my child was actually being influenced by trans-influencers, there is no limit to the drastic action I might take, and many on my side feel the same way. Ideally, I would be able to get them off of it just by explaining how dumb and wrong the influencers are, but if that was not enough, and I had to remove them from a peer and school and institutional situation that really had the tentacles wrapped around my child, God grant me the courage to do any action necessary, including selling my house and moving to a different state.

My parents weren’t even that religious and they would’ve sent me to Bible camp(or something like it; possibly a summer on a farm with a fundamentalist family) for trans stuff. Possibly for gay stuff, too.

When I listen to clips like these from Diane Ehrensaft or Johanna Olson-Kennedy I absolutely get a sense that The Adversary is in the room.

Right. Well, if my kids are going to become woke Maoist third worldists, then I can't really stop them, nor do I have any desire to. The whole point of being anti-woke is that people should be free to think for themselves. If I set limits on what my kids are allowed to think, then I'm no better than the wokeists.

I think the influence of external propaganda on political belief formation is not quite as big as is generally supposed anyway. Many years ago I stumbled on /r/shitredditsays when it was relatively new. The whole concept of "SJWs" was quite new and I was like, hey this seems kinda fun, I could get into this. You get to call other people racists and sexists and then feel morally superior to them. You're doing a good thing AND earning social credit in the process. That seems like a great deal. I imagine that's how most people initially get involved in social justice.

So I genuinely tried to be a leftist and integrate myself into the community for like a month, but I just couldn't do it. I was too viscerally disgusted by the behavior I saw there and I quickly turned on them. I tried to make myself believe in the content I was reading, but I couldn't. There was something about it that intrinsically disagreed with me.

I think that if someone is intelligent and independently-minded, they're going to believe what they're going to believe. And if they're not, they're just going to get swept up by the socially dominant ideology regardless, so why fret?

I think that if someone is intelligent and independently-minded, they're going to believe what they're going to believe. And if they're not, they're just going to get swept up by the socially dominant ideology regardless, so why fret?

Your guess is correct.

Heritability of political ideology goes up as a person becomes more informed about politics.

Basically, normie teenager who only gets her news from Instagram will follow whatever her friends/the algorithm decides, even if she has the genes of a conservative.

But her identical twin sister who starts reading more broadly will see her own innate beliefs/preferences manifested in what she reads. The more informed she becomes, the greater the pressure to align her beliefs with what feels instinctively right to her.

Basically, normie teenager who only gets her news from Instagram will follow whatever her friends/the algorithm decides, even if she has the genes of a conservative.

But her identical twin sister who starts reading more broadly will see her own innate beliefs/preferences manifested in what she reads. The more informed she becomes, the greater the pressure to align her beliefs with what feels instinctively right to her.

This could be true. I don't even necessarily disagree with it. The question however, is what life altering decisions that can't be taken back will "normie teenager" get talked into by the relentless tide of propaganda?

I know you’re worried about trans, but at least for the moment drugs and promiscuity are still the main ways teenagers wreck their own lives.

I think the principle cause of the difference in behavior in the two linked posts is simply that reddit has a strange fixation on the idea that underage drug use and sex is okay. Not merely that punishing kids for those things can go too far, but that these behaviors are always a good thing that isn't any of a parent's business, ever, and it's weird that any parent would make a big deal of it at all. They don't think these are bad things, period. They will claim that any effort to monitor this behavior is an intrusion on the kids' lives, which can only harm their development.

By contrast, they do have reservations towards political youtubers, at least, those of a persuasion they disagree with. And so, any heavy-handed intrusion on kids' lives is not only justifiable, but mandatory. It's a case of "no bad tactics, only bad targets" but applied to parenting. The only difference in the two behaviors is that they think one thing is bad and not the other, everything else was thought of in light of that consideration.

I think the principle cause of the difference in behavior in the two linked posts is simply that reddit has a strange fixation on the idea that underage drug use and sex is okay.

Yeah I agree. I'd say not even Reddit just our culture at large. It's really shocking how seriously people believe this.

Because most people on Reddit were friendless shut-ins who stayed indoors and played video games all the way through the end of college. They still seeth with envy at their more socially successful peers, and hatred for the helicopter parents that they blame for their poor social skills and emotionally impoverished lives. Since they never partied hard they also have zero frame of reference for all the ways that kind of lifestyle can go sideways or backfire.

This doesn’t strike me as a plausible account at all.

I do not understand where the issue is here. Interpreting it in a Schmittian way;

  • Restriction against dangerous behaviour is rightwing and enemy-coded, so it is bad
  • Restriction against extremist consuming behaviour is leftwing and friend-coded, so it is good

There is no principle or morality here, only that one restriction is good because friend and the other is bad because enemy.

I think the main problem, when here we try to talk about the reason behind certain behaviours motivated by ethics, is that we always try to rationalise problems and find where is the source, intellectual or moral, behind actions. But often there is no one, it is simply behaviour motivated by friend/enemy distinction.

My kids are far too young for these particular topics, but it's pretty simple in principle: You decide beforehand where your red lines are (which should be mostly concentrated on whether something is time-consuming/expensive/impossible to undo) and communicate that as clearly as possible. If you get the impression they're trying to skirt the edges and/or rules-lawyer, you may let them get away with it the first time but with a warning, after the second you put your foot down. As usual when it comes to social topics, the trouble is in the specifics.

On drinking, I'll probably, like my own father (I literally had fights with my dad since I wanted to stay home and play video games, he told me "what are you doing on a friday night at home? Go out and get drunk!" - I was annoyed, but imo he was mostly right), actively push them towards going partying & drinking early-ish, but in environments I trust such as local fairs or the CVJM (I'm not religious, but I've had good experience with these kinds of organizations as a teen). Ideally I'm also present & available if they need me, but where it's too large and crowdy to have them in my sight all the time so they can goof of with friends, as they should. Also, imo as a parent you deserve knowing your kids friends, and they should only go partying with friends they've known for a while and which I know as well. So I know that somebody is looking after them and I know who to ask if they don't come back at the agreed time. Obviously, going to an entirely different place without telling me would include a strict punishment, since that's how teens go missing.

On internet usage, I really don't care much as long as it's age-appropriate, and I'm already even quite laissez-faire on what is "age-appropriate" to begin with.

On reddit, it is extremely lopsided towards the ultra-online with very large amounts of free time and has a strong tendency for circlejerks by basic design, and very biased towards progressive by moderator action. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if half or more of the frequent posters are young women without children, but some child-related degree/occupation that makes them feel like they know what they're talking about. So tbh I'd discount pretty much all opinions there as neither good nor representative of the average parent.

I literally had fights with my dad since I wanted to stay home and play video games, he told me "what are you doing on a friday night at home? Go out and get drunk!"

There's always a relevant xkcd....

I wouldn't be particularly surprised if half or more of the frequent posters are young women without children, but some child-related degree/occupation that makes them feel like they know what they're talking about.

Or possibly having been a child....

Or possibly having been a child....

When it comes to children, most parents are Last Thursdayists- that they believe they sprang into existence as a fully-formed adult and, while they might have distant memories of childhood, have never actually been one. Sometimes they might even say the words "when I was a child" but their subsequent behaviors tend to suggest they [believe they] have never, in fact, been sullied by the experience- either that, or they are forgetting on purpose to prove a point.

Part of this might also just be typical mind fallacy. I was a weird introvert who liked reading books and playing videogames more than going out partying with friends. I never even befriended party friend people anyway because they didn't like me and I didn't like them. I never did drugs as a kid, I never had sex as a kid, I never drank as a kid, and I considered myself morally and intellectually superior to all the degenerates who did.

I had issues, got into fights, got in trouble, but typically it was either spats with my brothers when they annoyed me or I annoyed them, or being lazy and then getting angry and lashing out when I had to do boring, time consuming, and unfulfilling things like clean my room or waste hours going to a museum that could have been spent reading or playing videogames.

I would be great at raising a kid who was exactly like kid me. I know me, I understand me, I'm pretty introspective and, above all, I really really like me and respect me and my values. And I think I would emphasize and know how to explain the importance of things that little clone me wouldn't want to do. I would be able to explain game theory way earlier which would make social things make so much more sense to little me's brain.

I would have absolutely now idea how to raise an extrovert, or a sports jock, or a depressed goth, or a slut. My explanation for why not to do drugs is because "drugs mess with the health and integrity of your body, and they're expensive, and don't accomplish anything you can't get from videogames, and worst of all, you'd have to hang out with the kinds of icky people who do illegal drugs, and you're better than them." And a lot of people would not find that convincing and in fact might rebel harder because it makes me sound like a jerk. But it's how I convinced myself. And while I'm confident on illegal drugs, I'm not sure how to handle other things like sports. What if my kid wants to play football? Football is stupid and gives you head injuries, also the equipment is expensive, but everything has tradeoffs. How can I tell how important that is in comparison to the potential positive value (both extrinsic as a form of exercise and financial opportunities if they're good, and intrinsic via letting them do a thing they enjoy), when my own valuation for it is negative. It seems stupid and boring and pointless to me even without any injury risk, but obviously a kid asking to do it doesn't see it the same way and I don't know how to evaluate that. My instinctive response is "don't play football, it's stupid" and I can't disentangle all of the legitimate reasons from my instinctive gut response.

I think a lot of the "not knowing what it's like to be a kid" is actually typical mind fallacy in disguise. There are lots of different types of kids, and each parent was only one of them. If they think that's how kids are then they won't understand when their kid diverges from that, and the reasons in their own head that convinced them to not be that way won't be convincing to their kid.

you'd have to hang out with the kinds of icky people who do illegal drugs, and you're better than them.

'Drug addicts are low lives and you should shun them' is in fact a convincing argument. It happens to be an unpopular argument because of the zeitgeist.

This is literally how my dad raised me to be more straightedge than him. He introduced me to all his brain fried retard friends from his San Francisco days, and from the age of 4 told me stories about his lawyer friend who ended up in prison for cross-border drug smuggling, emphasising how embarrassing it was he married a fat druggie bitch from jail rather than "crime bad."

Grew up with more "winners don't do drugs" messages than a 90s arcade.

"Convincing" is a subjective property, a function that varies based on the listener, as opposed to something like "correct" which is mostly objective. I certainly find it convincing, but if people are not convinced by it then tautologically it's not convincing.

Once you've got a 17-year-old on Life360 (Slogan: "Family-proof your family"), you've pretty much fouled up completely anyway. If you want your children to achieve independence, making lax rules for them is insufficient; you need to actually allow them some actual independence. Or at least enough that they don't know you're still watching.

In contrast, I think even moderate drinking or drug use is fairly risky for developing brains, and I think the laissez-faire attitude towards it is dangerous.

Drinking, at least, has been done by people possessing developing brains more or less forever. The "developing brains" meme is mostly an excuse for infantilizing younger people anyway -- look in the past at what young people were capable of and compare it to now for evidence. I'm not saying that drinking is GOOD for teenagers, but I'd be willing to bet it's less harmful than keeping them in a cybernetic panopticon.

Monitoring your teenage daughter out of the house is lindy and normal.

Finding out from other parents what your teenage daughter has been up to is lindy and normal. Keeping an electronic leash on her is anything but.

That’s because electronic leashes are new technology, like air travel or dishwashers. If people in 100 AD had the ability to track their unmarried daughters electronically they would have done so.

But they could not, so they did not, so it is not lindy.

Correct, they used 24/7 chaperoning. One of these things is less invasive than the other.

Sometimes, as with laparoscopic surgery, newfangledness is an improvement.

There are societies with social classes which had 24/7 chaperoning. But certainly not many; it's far too expensive a luxury.

Once you've got a 17-year-old on Life360 (Slogan: "Family-proof your family"), you've pretty much fouled up completely anyway. If you want your children to achieve independence, making lax rules for them is insufficient; you need to actually allow them some actual independence. Or at least enough that they don't know you're still watching.

This is good advice for a son. Not so much for a daughter.

Giving your daughter independence is how you ensure she gets her cherry popped by a fuckboy.

Then you don't let her go to sleepovers at all. You don't let her go then track her every second.

See, the trick in that situation is that he doesn’t actually have the power to stop his adult daughter from doing that. And he knows it. She can trivially acquire a boyfriend that can support her and physically defend her from her father when required.

Parents are naturally anxious about that, because if you’re going to pay the bills for the kid you are owed power (and power used to make true what just ain’t so is still power), hence the obsession with chaperoning (virtual or physical in times gone by).

Chaperoning isn't a practice of times gone by, it is still very much practiced in religious communities. My cousins all "courted" that way. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, it's much better than Life360.

But I will say that any restriction you can think up, there's a daughter I knew that grew up under than restriction and turned into a slut. It's life. Having kids is a gamble. The obsession is with trying to pin down outcomes that are ultimately random, and only mildly related to your actions as a parent.

Since we do not, in fact, live in a society where women are transferred from the custody of their father to the custody of their (arranged and vetted) husband, it is as necessary for daughters to grow up as it is sons.

I'd take fear mongering around Tate a lot more seriously if they didn't condemn in the same breath Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Trump, and virtually every man who displays any masculinity what so ever. The only form of masculinity that the average redditor on /r/parenting is probably comfortable with is one totally subservient to Wonderful Women. A demoralized abuse victim in waiting.

As for the drinking and drugs, well, drinking is what it is. Young men risk profound bodily injury when they get too drunk, young women risk making very poor decisions (at best) about young men. Maybe you just need to see a friend make a life changing mistake due to alcohol to earn a healthy respect for it. And with fentanyl poisoning everything, drugs are a whole different ballgame than when we were kids.

That said, we've all got our red lines. I'm profoundly sensitive to demoralization and trans propaganda in children's programming. We basically have a rule in our house that our daughter doesn't read or watch anything newer than 2000, with older generally being better. She's still little, I don't know how well this will hold up. She's starting to ask if we can get Paw Patrol like all the other kids at school. We've heard through the grapevine from other parents with concerns like ours that "the first few seasons" are fine. But we aren't interested in playing whack-a-mole with a franchise our daughter grows to love trying to sneak bullshit past us. We know this isn't sustainable forever, but god damn. The media put out there for children just keeps getting worse and worse.

Sometimes I think back to my own childhood watching G.I. Joe and Transformers, wondering if there were sneaky bit of propaganda snuck into them. I do remember some pretty on the nose storylines from G.I. Joe about the drug war, the government defunding G.I. Joe because some senators were working for Cobra, run of the mill American Exceptionalism, etc. That said, I'm not exactly against a cartoon talking up our national values... or at least our national values circa the 80's and 90's. I guess now that our "national values" are that children should choose their own gender, and if you disagree the government should take them from you and facilitate them sterilizing and mutilating themselves I feel significantly differently about it. But then again, that takes for granted the illusion of consensus control of the institutions granted trans activist. All the same...

I donno. Once upon a time in highschool I met a girl who's family didn't have a TV. I almost couldn't wrap my mind around it, but she was the smartest most original girl I ever met back in school. So presumably it's not impossible.

Sometimes I think back to my own childhood watching G.I. Joe and Transformers, wondering if there were sneaky bit of propaganda snuck into them.

You could certainly make a case that the jinogist and glorification of war that was common in all media from 1900 to 2005 or so, was it's own egregore that was interested in propagandizing your sons and feeding them into the meat grinder. Is a media diet of the Union Jack which results in your son volunteering charging a machine gun in World War I actually all that much worse than a media diet of something that risks turning your son gay or trans? It seems there are always powers and principalities who wish to chew up, use, and discard your children for their own purposes -- defending against these is the difficult and never-ending job of a parent.

I hope to be able to teach my own sons the proper balance between having a healthy desire for cultivating manly valor, but also not jumping to volunteer for stupid wars for stupid and evil leaders.

You need a community which agrees with you on these kinds of key questions. Unfortunately there’s no alternative; you will never be able to shelter your daughter from peer influences more than you are now. People are designed to grow up to become members of a tribe and not clones of their parents- pick a tribe.

Sometimes I think back to my own childhood watching G.I. Joe and Transformers, wondering if there were sneaky bit of propaganda snuck into them.

Did you ever recognize what was snuck into Scooby Doo?

TV networks, because they reach so many people, are always being sued and/or protested, often over things you could never imagine would create problems. Most of the time, the network position is defensible and the outrage falls into the "nuisance" category…but even nuisance suits and protests can be a nuisance. And expensive to defend against. In kids' television, the stakes seem higher. A protester yelling, "This show is poisoning our children" will usually get more traction than someone bitching about a show for general audiences. The sponsors of kidvid are especially frail and known to atomize over very little negative feedback.

Censorship of broadcast television has declined greatly in the era of HBO, Showtime and DVDs…but in the early eighties, if you were creating a show for CBS, NBC or ABC you usually found yourself in the following dilemma. You had to please the Programming People who bought the show and prayed for ratings. They wanted your program to be edgy and sexy and full of action and excitement. And then you had to please the Standards and Practices People. They wanted your show to be nice and quiet and non-controversial. The two divisions rarely spoke with one another. In fact, in some cases, they hated each other too much to converse. Either way, they fought their battles by playing tug-o'-war with you and your show.

We quarrelled often and usually unproductively with these folks over what we called "action" and they called "violence." Sometimes, their definitions were insane. You'd write a scene where the good guy grabbed the fleeing bad guy and held onto him until the police could arrive and the Broadcast Standards people would react like your hero had chopped off someone's head. Criminals could rob banks and cops could stop them but neither could brandish weapons. One time, a writer friend did a script (a pretty good script, I thought) where the climax depended on the hero cutting a rope at a precise moment. The hero, it had been established, was a former Boy Scout…so my friend had the hero whip out his Boy Scout pocket knife and use it to cut the rope.

Well, that couldn't be allowed. Encouraging children to carry knives, even though the Boy Scouts do? You might as well have them packing howitzers and blowing bodies away on the playgrounds of America. There was much arguing and the scene ended up being staged with the rope being cut by the edge of a sharp rock, which was just silly. The rope was being used to lower a car. Given how sturdy it would have to be to do that, it was already stretching reality for it to be cuttable with a pocket knife. A sharp rock was ridiculous.

At times though, the bickering went beyond Broadcast Standards trying to prevent the network from being sued or having its advertisers shrink from advertising. Every so often, someone there got it into their heads that childrens' television could mold the youth of today into the good citizens of tomorrow. That's a questionable premise but let's say it's so. The question then becomes what you teach, how you mold. I found that those who approached the arena with that in mind had some odd ideas of what we should be trying to impart to impressionable viewers. Acts of extreme violence — like carrying a pocket knife — weren't as big a problem as what they called "anti-social behavior" and what I called "having a mind of your own."

Broadcast Standards — at all three networks at various times — frowned on characters not operating in lockstep with everyone thinking and doing as their peers did. The group is always right. The one kid who doesn't want to do what everyone else does is always wrong. (I rant more on this topic, and show you a cartoon I wrote years later for another show just to vent, in this posting.)

Scrappy Doo was intended, as per his name, to be scrappy — scrappy and feisty and in many ways, the opposite of his Uncle Scooby. Faced with an alleged ghost, Scooby Doo would dive under an area rug and you'd see the contours of his doggie ass shivering with fear beneath it. Scrappy, as I wrote him in his first script, would go the other route: He'd say, "Lemme at him" and go charging after the bogus spirit of the week.

Shortly after the last of many recordings of "The Mark of the Scarab" (that first script), it dawned on ABC Broadcast Standards that maybe Scrappy was a bad role model for the kiddos. He was — and one person in that department actually used this term to me — "too independent."

Transition to break quote blocks...

That said, I'm not exactly against a cartoon talking up our national values... or at least our national values circa the 80's and 90's. I guess now that our "national values" are that children should choose their own gender, and if you disagree the government should take them from you and facilitate them sterilizing and mutilating themselves I feel significantly differently about it. But then again, that takes for granted the illusion of consensus control of the institutions granted trans activist. All the same...

This strikes me as a possible rationalization for retro-future genre IPs, like the Fallout Series.

In the Fallout universe, why might the 2077 USA have embraced the cultural aesthetics and appearances of the 1960s? Well, the story is very vague about what happened in the century between WW2 and the Great War that led to the nuclear apocalypse...

Captain Planet was never particularly subtle about being political agitprop for kids: I think I understood that even at the time, and I'm not even one opposed to rational environmental protection laws. I think this to some extent merits the Ohio meme: "Wait, all kids shows have some element of propaganda to them?" "Always has been."

I remember my parents looking down at Power Rangers because it was kinda violent (dunno, haven't watched much because of that, although kids really do act out scenes from TV shows and such). And The Simpsons because the humor was often lowbrow, which I have more complex thoughts about.

Although I would highly recommend Bluey if you're looking for something modern.

I'm profoundly sensitive to demoralization and trans propaganda in children's programming. We basically have a rule in our house that our daughter doesn't read or watch anything newer than 2000, with older generally being better. She's still little, I don't know how well this will hold up. She's starting to ask if we can get Paw Patrol like all the other kids at school. We've heard through the grapevine from other parents with concerns like ours that "the first few seasons" are fine. But we aren't interested in playing whack-a-mole with a franchise our daughter grows to love trying to sneak bullshit past us. We know this isn't sustainable forever, but god damn. The media put out there for children just keeps getting worse and worse.

A quick online search reveals that the Paw Patrol spinoff Rubble & Crew features a nonbinary character, River, in its first season. So, good call.

But I think your first mistake was sending your daughter to school. It's not going to stop at TV shows. Everything that your family does differently from the mainstream is going to be something that she learns is not normal from her peers, and become a point of contention. If you think it's bad now, wait until she hits 15 and she is yelling that she hates you and that you are ruining her life because you won't let her go out to a date or party unchaperoned like her friends. You cannot send your children to Caesar for their education and then be surprised when they come back as Romans.

From "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" by AntiDem:

First, as the leftists used to say, “Kill Your Television”. I am not one who generally thinks that machines are inherently evil. Television is an exception. It is no more and no less than a hypnotic mind control device. Don’t believe me? Sit a hyperactive toddler in front of a television and watch what happens. They freeze, turn away from everything they were doing, and stare at the screen. Gavin McInnes once noted that the “on” switch of his television was an “off” switch for his kids, and so it is. Do you think this device does not place ideas in the minds of those who fall into a trance in its presence? And what ideas do you think the Hollywood/New York axis wishes to place there? I recall reading one account of a father who, tired of his two under-10 daughters’ bratty attitudes, limited their television viewing to a DVD box set of Little House on The Prairie. The change in his daughters’ behavior was dramatic – within a couple of weeks, they were referring to him and his wife as “Ma” and “Pa”, and offering to help with chores. The lesson is obvious: people (and especially children) learn their social norms from television, far more even than from the people around them.

Ideally, one would cut oneself off from it totally. Many find this rather difficult (I must admit, myself included at times). Some keep a television set, but make sure it is disconnected from broadcast channels and use it only as a monitor for a carefully-selected library of DVDs. Others (myself included) don’t own a set, but download a few select programs from torrent sites and watch on laptops or tablets. My total viewership of television programs tops out at perhaps 3-4 hours per week during particularly good seasons. Any traditionalist should strive to do the same. In fact, traditionalists should reject – should “drop out” of – all popular culture (especially that produced after, say, 1966) to the greatest degree possible, and make sure their children are exposed to it as little as possible. Music, video games, even the web – either drop out of it completely, or, at very least, carefully limit the time and scope of it in your life and the lives of your children.

While we’re on the subject of children: DO NOT send your children to a public school. “Drop out” here too; by which I do not mean that your children should go uneducated, but that you should – you must – homeschool. To do otherwise is pure child abuse. Perhaps fifty years ago, this was not the case, but these times are not those times. The failures of the public schools need not be repeated here, but they are undeniable, and any reasonably smart ten-year-old whose attention span hasn’t been destroyed by television can learn more by being left alone all day with a stack of books than they can in any public school classroom anyway. As for the universities, there are not quite any suitable replacements for them yet, but some lurk just over the horizon and will appear before long.

To say that one should “drop out” of – not bother listening to and not ever trusting – the mainstream news media goes without saying.

I have kids, plural, and it sounds more or less correct to me. I would be interested in hearing what "costs" you believe homeschooling imposes on the kids involved. My wife and I have zero interest in our kids attending public school, ever.

I believe this same dynamic applies to "harm reduction" policies more broadly, like safe injection sites where they give drug users free clean needles and promise not to arrest them for drug usage. People only accept "harm reduction" when it's something they really don't have a problem with to begin with, so the whole framing is dishonest. Would they accept "harm reduction" centers for domestic violence? Perhaps we could offer boxing gloves and have doctors on hand so you could bring your wife and beat her up in a safe way that didn't cause any serious or permanent damage. I don't need to poll leftists to know they would be opposed to this no matter how many studies I had.

Would they accept "harm reduction" centers for domestic violence? Perhaps we could offer boxing gloves and have doctors on hand so you could bring your wife and beat her up in a safe way that didn't cause any serious or permanent damage

Woah this is a brilliant and spicy framing. Thanks for showing that.

Ehhh… I see the point you’re trying to make with this, and in one sense it is valid (namely, that “harm reduction”-ists don’t see drug use as an inherent evil), but I also don’t think “safe DV sites” are equivalent. One could, with perfect moral consistency, be in favor of safe needle sites and against “safe DV sites” on the grounds that using drugs does not intrinsically and non-consensually harm anyone else, while DV definitionally does.

Of course, one can object to the framing that drug use only affects/harms the user, but that’s a difference of values, or of how you define “harm”, not a matter of moral or logical inconsistency.

That's merely the distinction between why they think it's wrong in the first place, not the harm reduction variable.

That is, a general form of the "Harm Reduction" argument says that if thing A is bad because it leads to bad outcomes, then a decriminalized harm reduction environment where it can be done more safely with fewer negative outcomes is good because, although the thing is still bad, it's less bad here and they were going to do it anyway.

The tradeoff is that you are implicitly endorsing the behavior in exchange for this harm reduction. This argument doesn't really depend on the type of harm involved. If someone is being non-consensually harmed by DV, and this is extra bad, then the harm reduction is even more good, and the implicit endorsement and incentives are more bad, and presumably these are proportional so it should still be worthwhile or not for the same reasons as with drug use.

I suppose you could try to make specific mathematical arguments about the tradeoff values where harm reduction facilities for DV would be less effective at reducing harm and more legitimizing to DV such that the net effect would flip signs for this but not for drugs, but we've never tried it before, nobody has that data, and nobody who advocates for harm reduction for drugs seems to do any math or acknowledge tradeoffs in the first place.

OK, I guess we have two different notions of “harm reduction”-ism in mind.

The one I was thinking of is internally consistent, because it is as follows: Call an act personally risky if it is performed with the consent of its actor, and poses a risk to life or limb of that actor, but not to any other party. Call an act evil if it harms (or threatens to harm) another party without that party’s consent. We should endeavor to reduce the harm/risk of harm faced by people who engage in personally risky activity, without requiring them to refrain from the act entirely, but we should not tolerate evil activity.

Drug use should be made safer by safe needle sites and the like because it is personally risky. Domestic violence must be cracked down on with the full force of the law because it is evil.

In other words, my imagined “harm reduction”-ist is not a pure utilitarian/consequentialist. His consequentialism is conditional on the acts in question not nonconsensually harming anyone.

Drug use should be made safer by safe needle sites and the like because it is personally risky.

....and all the externalities caused by strung-out junkies are just an unrelated random happenstance? Like, the part where they are using drugs is entirely unrelated to all the other stuff they do because they're a person addicted to drugs?

A consistent harm reduction-ist would say yes_chad.jpg; if a junkie robs a convenience store to get his fix, the crime is the robbery, and the drug addiction is irrelevant.

A consistent harm reduction-ist would say yes_chad.jpg; if a junkie robs a convenience store to get his fix, the crime is the robbery, and the drug addiction is irrelevant.

People care about cause and effect. If junkies commit wildly disproportionate amounts of crime, people are going to converge on the explanation that they commit crimes because they are junkies, and they are going to recognize that preventing people from becoming junkies is clearly consistent with harm reduction.

Drug use should be made safer by safe needle sites and the like because it is personally risky.

Wait, you just converted that "personally risky" activity to "evil" by imposing the cost of safe needle sites and the like on other parties (taxpayers) without their consent.

I’m not a “harm reduction”-ist myself, but if I had to provide a steelman here I would point out the various arguments for why taxation is not theft (the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, for example).

The Rawlsian veil of ignorance, which says one must privilege the slightest improvement in the situation most miserable cuss in the society over any improvement to anyone (or everyone) else? I think I'll just reject that one. Anyway, I'm not arguing taxation is theft, I'm arguing that it is harm.

Arguments that taxation is not theft generally advance the view that the “harm” caused by taxation is, in some sense, consensual*, and therefore not evil per the definition above. So, my imagined “harm reduction”-ist would say, we face a tradeoff between two personally risky things (namely, drug users using drugs and taxpayers having to pay taxes—both of these are consensual, but have their downsides). How we optimize between both sides of this tradeoff is a matter of administration, an implementation detail; there’s no fundamental inconsistency here.

Look, this is all my attempt to pass an ITT, to steelman a view that I don’t even hold. I just happen to think that this particular case is a values difference, not an instance of one side or the other being irrational/inconsistent.

*There are better and worse arguments out there for the “implicit consent”/“social contract” views of taxation, and I agree with you that the Rawlsian one is not without its shortcomings. FWIW I am in reality much more libertarian than the median American, so it’s hard for me to give more than a halfhearted defense of this take.

This argument is like "eating sugar harms society because of health care costs". It's the taxation that imposes it on other parties, not the needle sites.

Exactly as I would have said just much more intelligent and coherent. Thank you for elucidating my point!

That's a great point, but I think aesthetics and branding still matter for people's acceptance. I expect there are plenty of people who would be opposed to the "safe domestic violence site", but would enthusiastically support the presence of a "bdsm dungeon" in their town.

It's simultaneously profound and trivial that BDSM is a safer way to satisfy the same urges that lead to domestic violence. Too much of the "community" is tied up in consent ideology and PR to really dig into the implications of this.

It is worth noting that every cop who has dealt with DV says that the vast majority of DV is just mean drunks, and that the "research" suggesting otherwise comes from an ideologically compromised part of academia. I don't think mean drunks and bad doms are the same category of thing.

There’s a lot of studies showing reciprocal intimate partner violence, which is not the preferred feminist finding.

Findings regarding bidirectional violence are particularly controversial because, if accepted, they can serve to undermine one of the most commonly cited reasons for female perpetrated IPV; self-defense against a controlling male partner. Despite this, many studies have found evidence of high levels of bidirectionality in cases where women have reported intimate partner violence. Wikipedia

The thing that bothers me about harm reduction is the absolute refusal to grapple with the fact that such policies (like any other policy) have two sides. Specifically, the insistence that they don't increase drug use. In my opinion that's a crock of shit. Even if it's only .01% of the "clientele", there's going to be some non zero amount of people who would not be using drugs if they couldn't get the paraphernalia these facilities offer. And honestly, I'm fine with that. What I want is for the proponents to act like adults and say "yes we acknowledge this downside, but we think the benefit is worth it", not to claim that there's no downside at all. As the old adage says, don't piss on me and tell me it's raining.

But the bottom line is: Isn’t it kind of convenient that my moral inclinations and my opinions of the practical difficulties of implementing a ban line up so well for different activities?

Eh, I think a teenage daughter becoming a party girl, a slut, or even a fornicator is bad, but I think figuring out how to ban it is a very difficult problem. I think the optimal strategy is to control the peer group years ahead of time by selecting locations and activities -- but that itself is very difficult, because there are few communities that are aligned on these kind of values any more.

There’s a significant attitude of “Teens are going to engage in risky behaviors no matter what, your punishments and restrictions will have zero deterrent effect, and the best course of action is some kind of harm reduction.”

It's wild to me that according to the hive-mind, the only thing you should teach your child about sex is 1) the importance of proper consent and 2) birth control. There is never anything on /r/parenting about teaching your the importance of discerning proper character of the person to have sex with; nor anything about teaching your child how long to wait or under what circumstances to have sex (waiting for love, waiting for marriage, etc.). The idea that "consent" is the all-important thing, and marriage or even "love" doesn't matter at all seems like a complete shift from the Zeitgeist 30 years ago. I mean, 30 years ago was a pretty loose time, but at least there was a debate about the proper time to have sex, now it is just assumed that parents should not give any guidance about it.

teenage daughter becoming a party girl, a slut, or even a fornicator is bad, but I think figuring out how to ban it is a very difficult problem

Going nowhere without a chaperone was the traditional solution.

BDSM is a fetish and participation in it motivated presumably by lust. DV, while superficially similar in that both involve violence (simulated vs. real) seems to come from a completely different place than BDSM. Anger, low impulse control, and both intensified by alcoholism in most cases. Presumably no one wants to be the target of DV, but it would not surprise me if the BDSM community contained more subs than doms.

Edit: I've caused quite a ruckus with misplacing my comment it seems. That's what you get for posting on mobile. But I'm still on my phone and at work so I will move this later when I find the time

I think maybe you meant to reply to a different comment?

I just had this comment in the "The Motte needs your help" report queue. Obviously it's in the wrong spot, but also I can't flag it as "this needs a moderator to move it maybe" because the report queue doesn't show context, and on its own this is a perfectly normal comment. Bit of a weakness, idk.

teenage daughter becoming a party girl, a slut, or even a fornicator is bad, but I think figuring out how to ban it is a very difficult problem

Going nowhere without a chaperone was the traditional solution.

Yeah, this. It's how Muslims solve the problem. It's how Christians solved the problem until very recently.

I was watching ¿Qué Pasa, USA?, a bilingual sitcom from the 70s, and one of the big conflicts between the Cuban immigrants and their American daughter is the need to have a chaperone on her dates, as in episode 7, "The Super Chaperone". That's because America had already gone through the sexual revolution, but Cuba hadn't.

There is only one thing a woman wants to be alone with her date for. Chaperones are how we kept girls from becoming sluts.

I don't know as much about latin America, but in Spain the chaperone thing is often solved for with a double date, where one of the couples are older and generally married, and the other couple are youths. The older couple are often family, but usually not the parents. You want them to be a couple that the younger people will respect to some degree. An older married cousin and their spouse in their 20s is usually pretty good, or the older child of a god-parent and their spouse etc. An aunt/uncle who is quite a bit younger than the parent is good too, and more common in a Catholic country. I'm not sure how much this is still done now; my mother is Spanish and used to talk about doing this in the 60s/70s.

Eh, I think a teenage daughter becoming a party girl, a slut, or even a fornicator is bad, but I think figuring out how to ban it is a very difficult problem.

No it isn't, the problem has been solved multiple times.

I think the optimal strategy is to control the peer group years ahead of time by selecting locations and activities -- but that itself is very difficult, because there are few communities that are aligned on these kind of values any more.

There are plenty of filter bubbles where teenagers don't fornicate or drink all that much.

First off, /r/Parenting is not the only game in town. I personally prefer /r/Daddit, largely due to earlier members posting actionable advice like the concept of 20 second hugs. There is some reee'ing as the sub has grown (e.g. "Why do people default to moms as the relevant authority?!", relationship troubles above the paygrade of Internet Strangers) but it generally upvotes posts displaying agency so I lurk there more often.

To answer your question, I only have experience with toddlers so my perspective is limited. Right now the majority of the behavior work we do is picking up toys, tantrum mitigation & risk management during playtime. For the latter, partner & I have settled into classic gender roles: mother's "safety first" vs. father's "she'll succeed or she'll learn something".

Generally, daughter isn't doing enough yet to put herself at enough risk (as I perceive it) where I have to intervene much. I'm sure that will change, but I don't know when or how that will be. Maybe drugs, maybe content diet, maybe choosing her friends - hard to say. But I know I'll have to draw lines eventually.

I tried to check out daddit today, lot of dead kids under "top". Ruined my evening!

I think that the problem with both of the examples you cited is the extreme nature of the response. Like no, going out and drinking behind your parents' back is not an appropriate teenage activity. It's perfectly reasonable to be upset that your kid did that and try to impose consequences to deter them (though I do think that it's not reasonable to have omnipresent tracking of your kids at that age). And on the other hand, it's fine to be upset that your kid is soaking in a media environment you think is bad for them, but it's not reasonable to flip your shit and impose harsh consequences. Just have a talk about how you don't want them to be watching those things and why, before you escalate things.

But... Reddit is full of crazy people who have no maturity whatsoever and just do extreme knee jerk reactions to every situation presented. There's a reason that people joke about stuff like the relationship advice subreddit and how their "advice" is always to break up with the person. So I guess it probably shouldn't be a surprise that parenting advice is similarly retarded.

So, my question for the forum would be: how do you balance letting your child(ren) make their own mistakes and take the consequences in a controlled environment, even when you disagree with their choices? When do you step in?

It seems to me that the line where you should get very involved and upset is permanent consequences. Things like STDs, pregnancy, bodily injury, criminal records etc. It's fine for kids to make mistakes and take consequences in a controlled environment, but some things aren't up to you as the parent. They are dictated by things above your head and you probably are going to have to use a firm hand to keep your kids from going down that road.

Thoughts on both your post and @gorge’s reply.

My parents were (and are) ex flower power hippies who fucked, drank and smoked their way through the late 70s before becoming respectable yuppies. They’re the parents from Easy A. The most they told their three children about sex was to use protection, don’t do anything you don’t want to do, and have fun. If I had brought home an older boyfriend (or girlfriend) at 15, they’d have made him coffee in the morning and asked him if he wanted to come back for dinner the next day. My mother opposed ‘MeToo’ because she thought that new sexual harassment policies would ‘take the fun out of’ the workplace. My dad got stoned with my brother and I in our late teens and reminisced about doing business with a women he was 85% sure he’d hooked up with in a bar bathroom as a student, then asked us if kids these days still do that kind of thing or if the whole AIDS crisis really did ruin sex.

Both my siblings and myself are huge prudes. My younger sister was the only person who brought home a partner at high school, and that was her long term boyfriend when she was 17. There was some light experimentation with drugs, and I got (not very) drunk a few times in high school, but that was it. I don’t think any of us have ever been promiscuous by any modern colloquial standard.

At the same time, this is far from a perfect strategy, since I knew at least a few people with similarly small-l liberal parents who became complete degenerates (some still are). Likewise, there were children of more conservative families who stayed true to that belief system, and those who rejected, subverted and rebelled against it at every turn. My guess, though, is some part of us saw casual sex and hedonism as inherently uncool because our parents were so open about it (and were, and are, openly flirty with each other, which on balance is a good thing). But I’m not really sure.

(I do think a big part of Gen Z’s alleged prudishness is the result of lib Gen X parents, though).

I had an initial very strong negative response to the mother saying that finding Tate stuff on her son's devices would result in immediate media lockdown and therapy.

But, in an act of enormous charity, I have reversed the situation to one I would care about equally. The reddit "egg" communities are devoted to convincing children that they are actually trans. Getting a kid to come out as trans is "cracking their egg". A prominent mod in these subreddits brags about meeting with kids and giving them hormones. Google strangely won't show me the relevant links.

I'm a father. If I found this or equivalent on one of my kid's devices I'd throw away the device and our very nice wifi router. There's a level of brain poison seeping in to make me decide no one in my family needs a personal PC or a smartphone.

Trans is a special case because the trans social contagion encourages permanent harm to themselves. If they're just swerving to the right (or are gay, or a furry, or a Goth, or pretty much anything else that a parent would likely worry about) they can change their mind later and no harm will be done aside from having spent a year being Goth or whatever.

I'm a father. If I found this or equivalent on one of my kid's devices I'd throw away the device and our very nice wifi router.

This, too, would be an overreaction though. I understand your concerns, but I don't think they justify going nuclear right off the bat. You might need to go nuclear in the end! But I think starting there is bad.

Agreed. But it would be a very rapid escalation in this case. I wouldn't throw away my router as step one. But it would be on death row unless this immediately stopped.

Fair enough, I wouldn't blame you at all for doing so.

“Honestly, I think you are going to have to let go a little bit or she might go crazy after she gets out yalls house. All of her behavior was appropriate for a 17 year old. I was doing these things at 17. Almost all of my high school and the high school down the road were doing these things. And worse…. The way you go forwards is going to determine whether you are in her adult life.”

There’s a significant attitude of “Teens are going to engage in risky behaviors no matter what, your punishments and restrictions will have zero deterrent effect, and the best course of action is some kind of harm reduction.”

I'm more of the opinion that it is preferable to not be in their life when they aren't your responsibility anymore, than being present in their funeral when they still are. That sub sounds like a bunch of childless kidults with a "hello, fellow kids" attitude.

Liberalism's Failures in Family Matters

Last week there was some discussion on the recent Lindsay Hoax. I would like to bring up some criticisms of liberalism, and why I think societies that follow it as a singular goal will inevitably suffer from the problems we see (birth rate collapse, sex wars, etc.)

On a newsletter warning of the dangers of sports gambling, Oren Cass wrote:

Careful readers, like all of you, will surely have noted that The Economist asserts not that the gambling frenzy is about people enjoying themselves, merely that it is about their being free to enjoy themselves. And in the distance between those two concepts is the gaping maw into which our society has plunged itself with this and many similar missteps.

The liberal ideal relies on many huge assumptions. Two of those assumptions are that people will choose things that bring themselves happiness and that externalities (or times when an individuals choices impact others) will be easy to detect and foreseeable. In reality, people will choose things that bring them temporary pleasure or help them avoid temporary discomfort over things that will bring them greater happiness and peace. And maybe the executives of the sports gambling company and the 19 year old with a phone can consent to enter into a relationship where the 19 year old gives the executives all his money, but the 17 year old girlfriend did not consent to being beaten more often. (After the legalization of sports betting, home team losses increase domestic violence by 10%.)

Another assumption of liberalism is that we enter into the world as individuals, without owing or being owed anything. Marc Barnes of New Polity wrote:

It is the basic thesis of liberalism—that philosophy embodied in all our modern technologies and institutions—that we are not social by nature, but individuals, and that anything that looks “social” is in fact some amalgamation of individual things and persons. The most famous one (repeated by weird people who talk about “marriage markets,” Redditors, and evolutionary psychologists to this day) is the Hobbesian argument that society itself is “really just” individuals making contracts with each other in order to pursue their own self-interest...

Rousseau posits that man, in his original state, was an individual, a silliness that necessitates that he imagine babies as proto-individuals, kept for self-interested reasons and then abandoned:

The mother gave suck to her children at first for her own sake; and afterwards, when habit had made them dear, for theirs: but as soon as they were strong enough to go in search of their own food, they forsook her of their own accord; and, as they had hardly any other method of not losing one another than that of remaining continually within sight, they soon became quite incapable of recognising one another when they happened to meet again.

Now, Rousseau gave all five of his kids up to an orphanage, so I concede that some may be nearer to his “state of nature” than others. But, for babies, it is quite literally a joke. Losing the mother is a game they love to play, precisely because it affirms the non-individual status of both: “peek-a-boo” makes known, by way of contrast, that the two belong to each other; that they are members of one body; that the mother is made mother by the child even as the child is made child by the mother, and that this is an enduring metaphysical relationship and a social reality; that, in short, they cannot lose each other, even if, God forbid, they do. Imagining this social reality as actually being a mere individual contract—that the mother might walk away, that she might disappear, that she might hide her face, that the so-called bond is just her choice—all of this is hilarious to the kiddos.

It's hard to believe, but the Enlightenment thinkers really thought that pre-historic humans didn't band together in family or social units. And this complete falsehood is somewhat required to make liberalism work.

The word "atomization" is thrown around as a negative. No one has friends to help them, we have apps that facilitate economic contracts with others to help us move houses or buy groceries if we're sick. Children move thousands of miles from their parents to pursue economic opportunity, leaving behind free family babysitting for the kids they'll never have. Men and women are supposed to be equal, but we're obviously not the same kind of human at all. Atomization is the founding assumption of Liberalism though.

Saying atomization is negative is accepted. But to say that Liberalism has negatives is still very unpopular. The only alternative to Liberalism is Authoritarianism, and Authoritarianism is always Bad.

But there are places where Authoritarianism is needed, particularly in family life. Parents have authority over their children. More than that, there is a pre-existing bond between parent and child to which neither consented. A child cannot consent to their parents before they are born. A parent has no idea what their child will be like before they are born. And yet, by virtue of biological reality, they are committed to a shared project of helping the child become a good adult. The child cannot grow into a good adult without this relationship.

In the latest edition of Dr. Leonard Sax's The Collapse of Parenting, Sax describes a family that comes to him for help. The 12 year old daughter has suddenly shown signs of ADHD. Her teacher filled out a form indicating that the 12-year-old's concentration levels are off the charts in a bad way. The girl's family doctor prescribed her ADHD medication to help alleviate her symptoms. They worked, but also left her jittery with heart palpitations and anxiety symptoms.

Sax's first question to the girl's family is how well she slept. Confused, the parents said the girl slept ok, but when Dr. Sax drilled into the details the girl nonchalantly said she was on her phone until 1-2 AM most nights. "Of course, doesn't everyone?"

Dr. Sax told her parents to take her off the Amphetamines and instead keep the kid's phone in the parents' bedroom at night, starting 9 PM. The parents' response was, "Oh, no, we couldn't do that! She'd be so angry at us."

The parents found it easier to give their 12 year old daughter a schedule II drug than to set a simple limit that would have made her healthier. And Dr. Sax says that this is a very common example that he sees often at his practice.

In The Collapse of Parenting, Dr. Sax theorizes that American parents, especially Liberal/Leftist parents, are uncomfortable with the idea of wielding authority over their children. Longitudinal studies show that kids who have strict but unloving parents grow up without knowing how to form loving relationships of their own. Kids that grow up with permissive parents are incapable of balancing a checkbook and make poor decisions due to a high time preference. The best kind of parenting is both loving and strict - a combination the Literature refers to as "Authoritative Parenting." Authoritative Parenting used to be the default, but among left-leaning families there has been a surge of parents fearing that they are overriding their kids innate preferences. Proper parenting is illiberal, and therefore immoral.

One young child arrived to the practice with a sore throat and fever for three days. When Dr. Sax asked the child to open her mouth, she refused. Dr. Sax looked to the mother, and said, "I need your help to examine your daughter, could you help encourage her to open wide?" The mother responded, "Her body, her choice."

The liberal order worked when it was founded on an illiberal order. When humans acted like humans most of the time, raised their children like humans, formed natural hierarchies like humans, liberalism worked fine. I think it falls apart when the government tries to impose liberal presuppositions on every-day human interactions. It falls apart when people think they are supposed to act perfectly liberal in every social interaction. A society based around consent instead of love (willing the good of one another) will fall apart.

I love liberalism, in a way. I love how it shaped American culture for hundreds of years. But I think the evidence points to a need for a safeguard somewhere, similar to the separation of Church and State. A separation of State and Hearth? Americans need to parent better than Rousseau.

Tocqueville famously believed that religion, particularly Christianity, was necessary in America to create and sustain our Democracy. It provided shared values. People had shared common ground beyond their mere desires which which they could identify what is good for all. There is a benefit to having an ultimate Authority, in Heaven, who everyone agrees to serve but who seldom gives specific commands.

Maybe the problem will resolve itself, as atheists fail to reproduce and the deeply religious take over again. Or maybe the cat's all the way out of the bag. But the evidence seems to point towards Liberalism being good but insufficient, and the next best thing needs to be figured out before we lose the goods of Liberalism as well.

Saying atomization is negative is accepted. But to say that Liberalism has negatives is still very unpopular. The only alternative to Liberalism is Authoritarianism, and Authoritarianism is always Bad.

It would be great if this wasn't just another lie that Liberalism tells about itself. If Authoritarianism was always Bad, we would not be seeing cancelled elections, officials playing with the idea of banning opposition parties, or young women being sent to prison for sending mean WhatsApp messages to gang rapists.

Nitpick: the abstract says that the effect of home team losses on rates of DV goes up by 10% in the presence of gambling, not that DV goes up by 10%. I wonder if there is a corresponding improvement for victories.

One of the main problems outside of science in academia is that they never had to confront the poor axioms. Physics had to throw out Archimedes and then throw out Newton. It was painful but it had to be done. Accepting Darwinism invalidated a large body of work based on prior ideas. It was tough for the people whose papers got invalidated but it had to be done.

In Social science people can still pretend that the garden of Eden existed, that fanciful tales of people on paradise islands living in absolute freedom were true etc.

Economists still talk about how money was created from people who wanted to barter more efficiently even though this has been disproven and even though writing is older than money. The idea of a social contract is still used even though humans lived in groups for tens of millions of years before we became human. The social sciences are stuck in a worldview in which humans spawned on Earth as individuals and invented all social structures even though this goes against all evidence.

The idea that women were historically oppressed is based on the assumtion that the natural state of women is a state of absolute individual freedom. The reality is that no hominid females of any species live in such a state. An animal that lives in a social structure isn't going to be happier if they are deprived of that social structure. If women were historically oppressed they could have packed up and walked into the woods. The reality is unless the family was exceptionally abusive most women clearly prefered belonging to a social structure over complete personal autonomy in the great wild.

I've been uncomfortable with the "Authoritarianism is always bad" line for a while. I don't love or seek authoritarianism, but clearly it's something people want because we keep bumping up against two of it's many flavors: top-down bureaucratic oligarchy or Strongman monarchism. I've been in discussions with very smart quasi-famous idea generating people who simply refuse to accept that Authoritarianism can be useful and desirable.

I think the reason is that an authoritarian state has no exit, once you're in it, there's no way out except violent revolution. So it's to be avoided because you'll get crushed...even though you're going to get crushed regardless. If the POTUS had meaningful executive powers, I could see how every 50 years or so, we'd want a person to come in, clean house and then depart once their time was up.

That is effectively what the Trump election was all about. But the reality is he's stuck muddling around with the same bench-warmers and institutions every other president has to muddle about with. Sure, he might find some loopholes and it's always possible that some appointee will be surprisingly capable, but the course for humanity's destruction (nuclear war, AI safety, energy and environmental limits, etc.) is set and on-track barring some miraculously gifted leadership.

Bureaucratic oligarchy's are simply too beholden to self-interest and bad incentives. They can manage but not lead. Monarchies are too easily converted to tyrannies, they can lead but not manage. Liberal democracies are racing to the bottom pandering to every whim, they can't lead nor manage long-term. It absolutely disgusts me to find myself agreeing with Yarvin on so much, but as the threats increase and we near the great filter, it seems impossible that Democracy can solve the problem.

Someone turn my black pill white...please!

It absolutely disgusts me to find myself agreeing with Yarvin on so much

Why does this disgust you?

For the same reason some people are disgusted by sushi. They register disgust because of a fear of eating raw things, even though they understand it might be delicious and millions of people eat it without issue. The disgust is a conditioned reaction, not a rational point of view. Rationally, I'm mostly on board with Yarvin and his essays are fun to read. As a conditioned American, classical liberal, democratic patriot type, the thought that we should just give ourselves over to our most wild monarchic instincts makes me feel queasy.

the thought that we should just give ourselves over to our most wild monarchic instincts

Monarchy is a model of government which has independently emerged in nearly every human civilization known to history. Why are you suggesting that the only reason to favor it is “giving into wild instincts”? As if it’s nothing more than some atavistic act by primitive savages, like ritual human sacrifice. Like, I grew up in America the same as you, and although the patriotism and the pro-revolutionary sentiments never really took root in me the way they appear to in you, I was certainly exposed to the same information and the same memes. I don’t recall the primary criticism of monarchy ever being that it’s the mere result of wild instinct.

You can appreciate a thing without having it rule you.

Autocratic monarchies and tyrannies were the rule for most of human history. Arguing over the system of government is a very modern problem. Previously, unga bunga with the biggest bunga stick wins, and the biggest concern was either getting curbstomped by some other unga's tribe or that your unga wasn't great.

Tyrannies are problematic because the quality of them depends massively on the quality of the individual person ruling them. And even then, the person has to spend most of their time maintaining their tyranny. Diffusion of power also means diffusion of responsibility, and vice versa.

The weirdness we have now is because people want all of the power and none of the responsibility. If anything, there might be a valid argument to bring back landed gentry and give people a free pass to move to whichever fief suits them best.

Tyrannies are problematic because the quality of them depends massively on the quality of the individual person ruling them.

I'd agree that the quality of 'tyrannies' (a rather loaded term for "rule by one") "depends massively on the quality of the individual person ruling them"… but only because all governments depend massively on the quality of the people in them. Personnel is policy, personnel will always be policy. If 'tyranny' is thus problematic, it's only because, like Aristotle noted, it's higher variance than the "rule of few," and "rule of many" is lower variance still, as larger numbers "average out" the extremes of both vice and virtue.

Going back to my comment in the "liberalism and parenting" thread, the liberal project has been about seeking out a set of top-down institutions so well-designed to align incentives that the quality of individual people within the institutions no longer matters, working even for Kant's "rational devils." I'd argue that this is an unworkable project with an impossible goal; any government depending upon human beings depends massively on the quality of those human beings, so we must stop "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good,” and start cultivating virtuous leaders.

But we will never stop dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. Five minutes with the average person should tell you all you need to know about including them in your system. You either have to build a more perfect system, or exclude those people entirely.

People consistently try to build a more perfect system because they notice things are broken, and correctly intuit that building a more perfect system is preferable to trying to make other people perfect.

But we will never stop dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

Why not? Were people in the Middle Ages doing so? Or did they hold that

The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate.

And that the world is fallen, we are barred from Eden by the sin of Adam, the poor we will always have with us, and perfection will only be in the Kingdom to come?

People have always worked to make things a little better, but they accepted that some things are just facts of life, that cannot be changed, only endured. Only with the "Enlightenment" did the West really start trying to immanentize the eschaton.

Why can't we reverse this? Why can't we get back to people accepting that parts of life, including the government from time to time, are simply going to suck, and that's just how it will always be?

Much as with the medieval era, it seems like a total civilizational collapse back into barbarism and pre-industrial technology would probably do the trick, so why not something less extreme?

Why can't we reverse this? Why can't we get back to people accepting that parts of life, including the government from time to time, are simply going to suck, and that's just how it will always be?

I hope I don't need to point out that this is a hard sell to anyone in the information age. Please, by all means, share your less extreme plan for getting people to accept this.

More comments

Tyrannies are problematic because the quality of them depends massively on the quality of the individual person ruling them.

Tyrannies are problematic because there's rarely a good plan for what comes next. Once a tyranny ends (i.e. tyrant dies) there is chaos or more tyranny. The purpose of the liberal order is to try and preserve some semblance of continuity through time culturally and politically, too smooth the road, so to speak.

The weirdness we have now is because people want all of the power and none of the responsibility. If anything, there might be a valid argument to bring back landed gentry and give people a free pass to move to whichever fief suits them best.

Agree. Another belief that is simply accepted by most people is that universal suffrage is 100% right and good. Try arguing the opposite! I agree that landed families probably ought to have more of a say than renters or welfare people, but of course I think that...I own property. How we would manage giving some people more than others based on some type of meritocratic system is kind of the base level problem. The simple solution is 'might makes right,' but 2k+ years of human society have brought us to a point where most people globally think there's something wrong with that formulation, largely that the mighty (not the same a noble, merely those with power) shit all over the weak. So we have an ideal--a liberal ideal-- that we give everyone the same amount of liberty, or whatever, and here we are...the mighty shitting all over the weak, again.

The Yarvin solution, as I understand it, is to stop pretending that liberalism exists and embrace the power of the strong and attempt to wield it...somehow. My main disagreement is that it just gets right back to the starting point where it's a coin flip if the monarchs will curb-stomp you or not and there's no exit, just monarchs/tyrants/oligarchs all the way down.

Tyrannies are problematic because there's rarely a good plan for what comes next. Once a tyranny ends (i.e. tyrant dies) there is chaos or more tyranny.

No, this is why hereditary monarchy was invented.

(After the legalization of sports betting, home team losses increase domestic violence by 10%.)

Considering that a similar claim made about the Super Bowl turned out to not be real, I'm going to be skeptical of this.

Also, for every loss is a win on the other side. Does it cause a corresponding reduction, eliminating the net effect?

Not necessarily; loss aversion is a thing....

In terms of "liberalism", this post is a big old strawman akin to e.g. an orthodox Maoist claiming any slight movement towards free markets is functionally indistinguishable from anarcho-capitalism.

Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things if it thinks the externalities are too hard to control, e.g. hard drugs. There's no reason it couldn't do the same to sports betting.

Children move thousands of miles from their parents to pursue economic opportunity, leaving behind free family babysitting for the kids they'll never have.

This is a consequence of the Internet making it easier to apply for distant jobs, not of liberalism. It's happening in China too.

The argument goes that they're only capable of doing so by justifying it with illiberal principles, which the society also holds.

Can you name, using Liberal reasoning only, the reason you should ban an individual from gambling? All the reasonings I can think of rely on some kind of collectivist ethos.

I'll take a swing at it: some people are incapable of good decision making about specific things, in this case gambling. They are effectively mentally incompetent in this narrow area but are otherwise generally mentally competent enough to be responsible for themselves. Therefore, similar to how we don't allow children or the insane to buy guns, we should ban people who have demonstrated this incompetence from gambling.

This is the mental illness or childhood or savage argument. And it is an unprincipled exception that cannot stand.

Most instructive here is the case of John Stuart Mill. Ever the archetypal liberal. Who makes this argument for India, but makes the argument that destroys this one for Women.

It is no surprise that Liberals have had to give up this, because it isn't motivated. Ultimately it is not principle that prevents the Liberal from giving children or the mentally ill dangerous weapons, but mere pragmatism. Indeed one can perfectly imagine (and scifi authors do) a world where these actions would be without lasting consequence. And in the Culture, giving children guns isn't really that big an issue, after all we can resurrect them if they splatter each other's brains. The question of whether this is reasonable is entirely evacuated, because it is an individual whim, and those are beyond question.

This entire line of reasoning is vulnerable to the Critical Theorist demand of realized freedom instead of procedural freedom. i.e.: you have constructed a society that has enslaved the mentally illl or children or gamblers, and this makes you their oppressor, your own principles demand that you create the condition where they can roam around thinking they're Napoleon/eat infinite candy/gamble their life savings without consequence.

This has been the ultimate Liberal project since Rousseau. Your pragmatic objection runs against the General Will, which means you're a counter-revolutionary that doesn't actually want to return us to the State of Nature. And these pragmatic demands are reactionary.

Or at least so says pure ideology.

If you want an ideological counter to this, you have to reach for Hobbes and become what Nick Land calls a "cold liberal" and reject the egalitarian and humanist part of the package to let markets and rationalism stand on their own. But then you are something different.

"Don't trick people into making decisions they wouldn't make with adequate information and time to reflect", "Don't build a business around looking for suckers and taking them", and "Don't deliberately place harmful addictive products in the stream of commerce" are all very much ideas in the mainstream of the big-picture-liberal tradition despite not being consistent with Nozickian libertarianism. Prohibition was a Progressive cause in the US, and temperance was a Liberal cause in the UK. Conservatives and socialists favoured the brewer-and-publican interest - Churchill (while a Liberal) famously attacked the Tories as the party of, among other things, "The open door at the public house".

"Don't trick people into making decisions they wouldn't make with adequate information and time to reflect"

This is mostly a smokescreen for absolute paternalism; that is, "don't convince people to make decisions that I wouldn't make".

No, because "don't convince people to make decisions that I wouldn't make" is an overly general category that includes not only gambling, but a lot of other things that gambling opponents genuinely don't also want to restrict.

Prohibition was a Progressive cause in the US, and temperance was a Liberal cause in the UK

I'll disagree those were on the grounds that you state. Rather on "stop beating your wife", public health and religious considerations. And those were, in fact, defeated by the superior Liberal argument of personal freedom.

I'll concede that there has been a strong Liberal movement for personal empowerment including freedom from such influences in the past. But the contention here is that this has been soundly defeated with Liberals' own arguments. Much like Churchill's support for eugenics was.

Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things

Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things if they still have illiberal understandings of a common good that can supersede any single individual's will.

I am criticizing the idea that liberalism can stand on its own. The event that prompted this post was the Lindsay hoax, in which he re-wrote a section of the Communist Mannifesto criticizing Liberalism. I'm not going to dive into that specific criticism of Marx, but I am surprised at Lindsay calling all criticisms of Liberalism "Woke Right." There is a lot to criticize and debate about liberalism as an intellectual tradition.

Liberal societies are perfectly fine banning things if they still have illiberal understandings of a common good that can supersede any single individual's will.

Again, you're playing games with definitions here. It's like saying "capitalism is fine as long as people still have a Maoist-Communist understanding of common good that can supersede the free market".

Which might be true if capitalism is implicitly defined as "crazy anarcho capitalism", and Maoism is "anything that's not that". But those are silly definitions.

I think you should look at this comment, but I thought it was pretty clear that I meant Liberalism as the political philosophy tradition begun by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.

The parents found it easier to give their 12 year old daughter a schedule II drug than to set a simple limit that would have made her healthier.

I don't think either of those¹ should have been the first choice. Maybe ask why she wants to stay up until 0100-0200, and address that.

¹Beware the false dilemma!

Getting the girl to sleep more is the first choice. It is the only way to improve her concentration and the path to health.

They did ask why she wanted to stay up that late. The answer was that she was scared to miss a message and that any delays in responding to messages might decrease her social status.

How to address this? It is unusual for kids to be more attached to peers than parents. You might scoff, but in the sixties a survey of high schoolers found that, if all their friends wanted them to join a club but one of their parents said no, most would not join the club. Most said that they would respect their parents' decisions over peer pressure. Now most kids don't even understand the concept of their parents having a say at all. Kids need security in an unconditional relationship, and that relationship is with their parents, not with the teenage totem pole.

Getting the girl to sleep more is the first choice.

True, but there is a difference between 'address why she isn't sleeping' versus 'ignore her goals and just issue a decree'.

They did ask why she wanted to stay up that late. The answer was that she was scared to miss a message and that any delays in responding to messages might decrease her social status.

That would not have been my first guess: I would have suspected either the standard circadian-phase differences¹ or bedtime procrastination².

If someone finds 'loss of social status from not responding to messages quickly enough' to be a worse outcome than 'lack of sleep leading to poor concentration'; the answer isn't to force her to endure the former, but to find a way that she can avoid both. (Note that when she is fully grown, she won't have parents there to limit when she can respond to messages.)

¹There has been much research showing that adolescents tend to function on later time-zones than other ages (possibly as an evolutionary adaptation ensuring that someone would always be awake to tend the camp-fire and watch for hostile mega-fauna), and that later start times for secondary schools would be beneficial.

²A phenomenon in which someone stays up late because they perceive that that is the only time that they have to themselves.

If someone finds 'loss of social status from not responding to messages quickly enough' to be a worse outcome than 'lack of sleep leading to poor concentration'; the answer isn't to force her to endure the former, but to find a way that she can avoid both.

Personally, I think that the answer is to take the phone away so that the child can see "oh, actually this isn't that bad". Fears about ostracization like that are almost always severely overblown, in my experience. But I think what is clearly not the answer is for the parents to refuse to parent (putting limits on the phone) because "oh she'll be mad if we do that".

Like I can respect that one might not want to turn to taking the phone away (and damn the consequences) as a first resort. But if it comes down to it, your One Job (TM) as a parent is to put your foot down when your kid is doing something self-destructive. Whether or not they will have teenage moodiness about it doesn't even remotely factor in IMO.

It is unusual for kids to be more attached to peers than parents.

Small-n and possible bias due to typical-minding, but this was not at all what I observed in my environment growing up (and I would expect the schools I went to to be biased for some measure of well-adjustedness if anything).

You might scoff, but in the sixties a survey of high schoolers found that, if all their friends wanted them to join a club but one of their parents said no, most would not join the club.

What was the exact survey question/setup? Did it come with a guarantee that if you join, your parents will never find out? Otherwise, this would have been confounded by fear of consequences. (Many people are not confident that they can maintain a lie in front of their parents, which could be internalized like "I wouldn't want to live with the guilt".)

More than 50 years ago, Johns Hopkins sociologist James Coleman asked American teenagers this question: "Let's say that you had always wanted to belong to a particular club in school, and then finally you were asked to join. But then you found out that your parents didn't approve of the group. " Would you still join? In that era, the majority of American teenagers responded No. They would not join the club if their parents did not approve.

These figures are provided in Edwin Artmann's doctoral dissertation, "A comparison of selected attitudes and values of the adolescent society in 1957 and 1972," North Texas State University, 1973.

I think liberalism has two main discomforts: Impositions of will or power, and hard natural limits. It’s not like they won’t ever impose, but they do so with reluctance, and further are often deeply suspicious of anyone who would use power to impose limits on others’ behavior. Saying that a behavior is “bad” is seen as a denial of autonomy and integrity. I should be able to do anything I want to, especially things that are seen as integral to one’s view of himself. If I see myself as a man I am one and you must treat me as one. If I want to get a tattoo or dye my hair, you thinking less of me, or not hiring me, or saying it’s a bad idea is oppressive.

Now the other thing I notice is the temptation to “snowplow” life. To remove the negative consequences of choices made, to make life less demanding, to lower and weaken standards that keep those who cannot meet them from sharing the resulting benefits that come with success. If someone has more, it’s unfair.

And yet, by virtue of biological reality, they are committed to a shared project of helping the child become a good adult. The child cannot grow into a good adult without this relationship.

I’m pretty sure you can raise children in orphanages and they turn out fine (They may whine, more on that later).

You just assume that parenting matters. Why? I don’t think anything my parent did made me taller or smarter (aside from feeding me and not hitting me with a rock), so why would it have made me more well-adjusted (or whatever parenting is supposed to achieve) ?

I think the main reason for the

birth rate collapse

is just everyone obsessing about parenting. The idea that, if you fail to provide the exact balance of ”loving, but strict“(plus ridiculous amounts of money, time and attention), you should not have kids.

Adult children are always whining that their parents either were or were not strict enough. They, as well as parenting experts should be ignored, and apathy should again become the cornerstone of parenting. Before contraception, kids used to just show up, and life just went on as usual, with just slightly more crying and laughter.

Now that a woman has to make a conscious decision, it opens the door to all this anxiety and neuroticism and talk and judgment about what should be an easy, natural and popular path. What’s needed is less your strict authoritarian father than a deeply apathetic one, who just goes “I don’t care”, “It doesn’t matter”, “Have another kid if you’re worried about this one”, “Of course it’s not your fault our son’s a junky”.

You just assume that parenting matters. Why?

Because if you spend any time around children at all it is immediately apperant which ones have more engaged parents/caregivers.

The idea that it doesn't matter is another one of those ideas so manifestly absurd that you need to be an academic to take it seriously.

It is a question of selection IMO. The issue of using like-like samples here is it eliminates the bad outliers. And bad outliers do have significant effects (I think its a bit more shaky on the great vs. average side). If you are a girl and never have a husband, but instead have 3 baby-daddies, and some of your other boyfriends do what they do (molest the kids) its going to be a real negative compared to if you had locked down man 1, even with his flaws (usually). But so few of those women do lock down man one, and even fewer really are on anyone's radar.

How do you separate it from a genetic influence?

Most academics think parenting is very important, they’re into the rousseauian blank slate, nurture not nature. Is this your opinion as well, groups that fail are just badly parented?

Genetics provide a high water mark that a human can aspire to, but there are obvious ways a bad parent could cut that short. Concussing the kid, starving the kid, locking up the kid so they never learn language before that critical period is passed.

There is a large body of work suggesting that not setting rules and limits for kids is one of these blunders that prevents a kid from reaching their full potential.

I did note that feeding and not-hitting-kid’s-head-with-rock was a non-optional part of parenting.

After that, I don’t trust this body of work about parenting styles. It sounds like another spurious explanation for group differences, of the kind that produces new and revolutionary interventions in schooling every few years.

Think of it less as a parenting style, and more as a complete neglect of acculturating a child into society. If a kid never learns a word is spoken before sometime between 6 and 12, they will never understand language syntax. Never ever, no matter how smart their parents were or how dedicated their speech therapist is.

If a kid never has a single rule enforced by a grown up and is shielded from the consequences of their actions, are they capable of learning executive function and how to behave in a society which has authority over them? I'm really surprised if you think it doesn't matter, when it is clear from several fields that there are "critical periods" of brain development, and if certain stimuli are not provided during those periods that the window to learn certain skills closes.

Is this language example an analogy? I’m not proposing to lock children outside in a stall for the first 12 years of their lives and never letting them hear a human word. And if it is an analogy, I don’t think a permissible parenting style is comparable to being raised by wolves.

People used to beat their kids. My father was occasionally severely beaten with a hose. Not because my grandfather drank – he didn’t – but because that’s what the parental-educational fashion was at that time. He would know, my grandfather was a schoolmaster. Teachers back then thought they could beat the stupid and evil out of children – and they had a duty to. At some point before he retired, he got a directive from the education ministry that teachers weren’t to do that anymore. He told me he had to let go of a few of the old-timers, who could not stop beating children – they had always done it this way, this was what education was to them, teaching children how to behave in a society that has authority over them.

So after the beatings era, the experts came up with a new theory, where strictness was excoriated, damaging the child’s ‘true potential’ etc. In my opinion they were not any more correct than their predecessors (because parenting and schooling don’t really matter), but at least the unnecessary beatings stopped, and that’s a small win, because it’s unpleasant for both parties, and you could break something.

And now the experts have turned the wheel again and apparently children need strict rules or something. I am skeptical.

The language example is something that has happened several times in highly abusive situations, and has been studied in detail, for example, see Genie. Not enforcing any rules at all may be a similar form of neglect, lesser in severity, but still with consequences.

Yes, people used to beat their kids. As far as I can tell, that is ok, as long as the parent shows love at other times.

The experts have not turned the wheel, the experts have always said "Strictness and love," it's just interpreted through the popular self-help books differently through the generations.

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Teachers back then thought they could beat the stupid and evil out of children – and they had a duty to

And if you're a teacher who is wicked (I beat my students because I enjoy it), simple (I beat my students because I'm not capable of getting them to learn any other way/it's the path of least resistance to the required outcome), or just going through the motions (I beat my students because everyone else does), what a convenient boon! Why do the work to justify anything in a house of learning when you can just let the lash do it for you?

So after the beatings era, the experts came up with a new theory, where strictness was excoriated, damaging the child’s ‘true potential’ etc.

Sure, but the problem is that once you make it a blanket rule (otherwise known as "going too far"), the wicked, the simple, and the checked-out start taking advantage of it. Fast-forward a generation, and compound that with changes in labor laws that compromise the quality of your labor pool, and you get the fart-huffing "no wrong answers, only wrong targets" education system of today that's merely cargo-culting what was once valuable about that way of doing things. So the wise are now punished for trying to mark on right answers since that's the only way students learn, the wicked teach grievance studies to get that same personal euphoria as they used to get with the beatings, the simple think having no standards... well, that's great, they don't have to do any work now, and the checked-out are happy so long as the official metrics look good.

I am skeptical.

I am too- replacing abusive men (and the ways men conduct abuse) with abusive women (and the ways women conduct abuse) didn't actually reduce the amount of abuse in the system. My skepticism rests on the degree to which the balance will tilt- if we can let the wise do their jobs and sufficiently protect them as they run into the practical challenges of the policy, delay the wicked sufficiently until it's time to change the system wholesale and knock them off balance again (I think government central planning tends to call these '5 year plans'), get a little more out of the simple, and motivate the checked out into wisdom, we're going to succeed in some way.

Changing policies always have this effect to a minor degree at first so it's hard to tell what shifted, and by the time you know, the will is gone. (This is why tech companies believe in 'moving fast and breaking things'- it is in theory an institutional policy that really hurts the wicked. But it also really hurts the customer, who can trust dishonest, self-interested men to be consistently dishonest and self-interested; it's the checked out in the process of becoming wise that really screw everything up.)

because parenting and schooling don’t really matter

They don't to/have a negative effect on children born wise. For everyone else, it's "we know you're going to try and fuck up everything, so the best we can hope for is that those energies are channeled in at least a coincidentally-productive way", "you're too stupid to figure this out but our society is very insecure about some people being objectively better than others so we launder this through our daycare system", and "learning how to learn" for those who don't know but, if they knew, could perform very well.

I did note that feeding and not-hitting-kid’s-head-with-rock was a non-optional part of parenting.

Except it isn't. People can, and do, abuse their kids and ruin them in horrific ways. You don't get to claim "parenting doesn't matter" by gerrymandering "parenting" to exclude the sort of behavior you agree would make a difference in a child's outcomes.

Do you have kids?

How do you separate it from a genetic influence?

Why do you want to?

Its readily apparent that the absense of engaged parents/caregivers has a deleterious effect on a child's development, that in itself should be sufficient to declare that "parenting matters".

Imagine the conterfactual where your parents and entire extended family were simultaneously struck dead on your 8th birthday, how would your life today be different?

I think it'd be painful at the time, but I'd basically be the same person I am now - same personality, intelligence, looks, height... maybe slightly darker sense of humor.

Adoption studies usually find that you take way more from your biological parents than your adopted ones.

Saying atomization is negative is accepted. But to say that Liberalism has negatives is still very unpopular. The only alternative to Liberalism is Authoritarianism, and Authoritarianism is always Bad.

…

In The Collapse of Parenting, Dr. Sax theorizes that American parents, especially Liberal/Leftist parents, are uncomfortable with the idea of wielding authority over their children.

This is something I find myself talking about more and more online. I just finished writing a short essay to post on Tumblr (it's a little too heavy on pathos and light on logos for the Motte's rhetorical standards), after I listened to a portion of this "Dad Saves America" interview with Michael Munger. Specifically, at about 20 minutes in, Munger says:

Liberalism is the actual belief that no one should be in charge… Even I, if I have the chance to be in charge, I should say no, no one should be in charge. Because anyone who’s in charge, it’s like the Ring of Sauron; it will turn you, and it will make you evil.

I recall a couple of Tanner Greer posts on the popularity of YA dystopias, and the passivity of their heroes, gesturing to this point: that so many of us in the West have so thoroughly internalized this distrust of human authority — any and all human authority — that they can no longer even conceive the idea of a good leader, that power and authority can be used for good ends. Thus, like the parents described above, they are deathly afraid of taking charge of anyone or anything — a deep terror of responsibility, of exercising leadership, because they're convinced that such authority can only ever be oppressive and abusive.

But power must be wielded — sovereignty is conserved. Man is a political animal; and decisions — political decisions — have to be made. Someone, singular or plural, has to make them. But if no humans, singular or plural, can ever be trusted to make such decisions, then the only choice is to have something non-human make them. Hence, Weberian rationalization — the replacement of human judgement, now deemed too terrible and corruptible to ever be trusted, by rules and procedure; that is, by algorithms. In Weber’s day, implementing them still required human bureaucrats in all cases, but nowadays, ever more of them can be done by our machines — "software eating the world."

Liberalism, in this view, is simultaneously severely misanthropic, and yet highly utopian, in that it holds that if we just design our rules and procedures well enough — whether implemented on bureaucracy, or on silicon (the "alignment problem") — we can achieve a perfect "moral alchemy" that can get virtuous outcomes from even a society of Kant's "rational devils":

As modern folks, we love this kind of solution. It promises a sort of “moral alchemy.” Take the base stuff of human self-interest and turn it into the gold of a functional—maybe even a “just”—society.

You can see this kind of move all over the place. Take the problem of value, for example. It would be overwhelming if we had to figure out and agree on what things are really worth. How would we even get started? Markets, we’re told, solve the problem for us. Money translates countless different forms of value-comfort, usefulness, safety, nutrition, beauty—into a single, eminently countable measure, and the intricate workings of supply and demand yield prices. Everything can be compared. The question shifts from "What is this worth?” to “How much does this cost?” None of us needs to know what anything is really worth. All any of us has to do is buy what suits our preferences and our pocketbooks. Out of the mess of market interactions comes a price—which isn’t really the same as the value of a thing, but it’ll do.

Moral alchemy is built into our legal system too. A defense lawyer’s job isn’t to seek the truth, but to represent their client’s interest, even if that client is guilty. They aren’t directly responsible for discerning the truth. The process is supposed to suss out the truth—at least often enough that we can feel OK about it.

The same impulse is behind interest group politics. Your job as a voter isn’t to discern what’s right and just for your society and the world. It’s to represent your interests. Elected officials, in turn, are there to fight for what their districts want. And the process is supposed to sort it out into something like fairness and justice.

It’s easy to see why procedural moral alchemy is so appealing. “Only you” responsibility can be daunting. How can we be expected to discern the good (value, truth, justice) over and over again as life throws us into the daily grind, not to mention the crises and conundrums and dilemmas that crop up more often than we’d like?

The problem is that our trust in moral alchemy may be un-founded, and depending on it may leave us unable to do what we need to when systems fail. These days, there are plenty of reasons to doubt that democratic systems and free markets can produce virtue despite the nefarious actions of vicious participants. A Western world once confident that the line between good and evil ran between democracy and autocracy now worries about democratically elected autocrats. Increasingly, we see that discerning the truth by letting opposing views argue it out doesn’t work if both sides don’t actually have some sort of basic commitment to truth-seeking. And free markets regularly seem to miss crucial components of the value equation, like the CO₂ emissions that are destroying the planet. Unfortunately, the longer we lean on moral alchemy, the more dependent on it we become. Our moral discernment muscles atrophy. And precisely at the moment we need to discern what is just or true or to assess value for ourselves, we find ourselves and our societies unable to do so.

(From Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz.)

Munger's "liberalism", which matches my experience of actual liberals in this vein, ends up holding that if parents are allowed to exercise authority over their children, the bad caused the parents who abuse their children, however few, will always outweigh the good done by all other parents. If you applied this sort of reasoning about the avoidance of any bad outcomes to your personal life (and I can't believe I'm the one making this argument), you'd end up at "euthanasia for a sprained ankle" thinking.

(Alternately, one can ditch the utopianism, accept the inevitability of imperfection and failure even as we strive against them. Bad leaders will happen… but so will good ones. Some parents will abuse any authority they have over their children… but far more will exercise that authority to their children's benefit. ersonnel will always be policy. Power will end up in human hands, and thus the personal virtue of those hands will always matter. Good parenting will always be dependent on good parents. Good governance will always be dependent on having good men. So stop "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good,” and start cultivating virtue.)

Alternately, one can ditch the utopianism, accept the inevitability of imperfection and failure even as we strive against them. Bad leaders will happen… but so will good ones.

Unfortunately, I don't think American society is able to do that any more. We (on the whole) are so, so risk-averse that it is unbelievable. This has been the case for a long time (see for example the "people will die" video from the halcyon days of the Internet mocking this tendency) but it seems to be getting worse over time. Safetyism is rampant, and not a lot of people are willing any more to bite the bullet and say "yes, it's not worth (obtaining some good) at that cost". This strikes me as a profoundly immature way to approach the world, but it's not clear what one can do to improve it.

Unfortunately, I don't think American society is able to do that any more. We (on the whole) are so, so risk-averse that it is unbelievable.

Perhaps, but I'll point out that this is far from uniform. It varies on factors like class, education, race, religion. Safetyism may be especially rampant among the PMC, for example. But, while inner city black communities have plenty of problems, I wouldn't say that this sort of rampant safetyism is one of them. There are plenty of smaller rural communities, of a religious conservative character, where older, more lax norms of parenting still persist. And then there are professions that pretty much select against risk-aversion, most notably front-line combat troops. If you go by Munger's definition, then "lead, follow, or get out of the way" is a pretty illiberal motto, no? And I'd note that from where I sit — though I don't have the hard data — it looks like safetyism is negatively correlated with birth rates. So, these lingering adherents of Thomas Sowell's "Tragic Vision" have advantages in both fecundity and in undertaking the risks involved in violent confrontation.

The problem is organizing them to step up, overthrow our safetyist elites, and take charge of society. Contra David Z. Hines perpetual calls for the right to learn from and adopt lefty organizing, those decentralized methods are really contradictory to our nature. We're hierarchical. We "organize" by falling in behind a leader.

Thus, the solution to this, as with so many other problems in our society, is for our own Augustus Caesar to arise.

This post confused me when I realized you had written "Liberalism" instead of "libertarianism". I don't see what liberalism has to do with liberty. It seems like a purely a collectivist ideology to me. Only if we replace "liberalism" with "libertarianism" does the post make sense to me, and afterwards it's great reading rather than merely confusing. I will engage as if you wrote libertarianism for this reason (not that you're making a mistake. It's likely me who is confused here)

In reality, people will choose things that bring them temporary pleasure or help them avoid temporary discomfort over things that will bring them greater happiness and peace

This seems like what we'd call "brainrot" or "degeneracy". I started using this latter word almost 10 years ago after reading Nietzsche, and nobody else seemed to use it at the time, so I wouldn't be surprised if I'm the reason the word came back. Anyway, freedom is actually the freedom to command yourself, not the freedom not to be commanded. One should only seek freedom if they don't need being told what to do in order to succeed in life, if they don't use their freedom to destroy themselves.

We're deeply social by nature (and the most oversocialized lean left! They just want to socialize without taking responsibility for anything, which is why they want the government to do everything for them). It seems that being around a lot of other people is bad for you, for the same reason that social media is bad for you. People start competing and aiming for superficial appearances of what people value while neglecting what actually matters.

The advantage of libertarianism is that you can choose which group you want to depend on and have depend on you (living as a hermit for very long is almost impossible). People are only equal in value, that they're actually equal is a stupid idea. I also agree that family values are essential, and throwing them out is basically taunting darwinism to remove you from reality. I also don't see how anyone would disagree with "The best kind of parenting is both loving and strict".

I consider myself pro-freedom, and around my friends I give myself all the freedom that I want, and I give them all the freedom that they want, too. But this only works because we're all reasonable and because we can take responsibility for ourselves. Those who believe "freedom" to be the freedom to indulge in vices (because it seems unpleasant for them to resist unhealthy urges) cannot live like this.

I agree with your conclusion, but you can word it differently. We don't need "authority" but "coherence". The advantage of Christianity is that it gives value to things which are healthier than our random urges/impulses. The disadvantage is that you can lose faith in Christianity (but if you have a preference like vanilla ice cream, you don't care if there's no objective proof that it's good - you still believe in your own preference). We also need Reponsibility (this is one of Jordan Petersons core values too) and you don't have to call this "authoritarianism". Being overly lenient with others only works when they're being too strict on themselves. I feel like this might have something in common with "we praise those who degrade themselves and degrade those who praise themselves". We recognize the need for a balance. As long as internal control + external control > X where X is some threshold, the individual will turn out alright. To the extent that a person is able to control themselves, they've earned the right to be free from external control

This post confused me when I realized you had written "Liberalism" instead of "libertarianism". I don't see what liberalism has to do with liberty. It seems like a purely a collectivist ideology to me. Only if we replace "liberalism" with "libertarianism" does the post make sense to me, and afterwards it's great reading rather than merely confusing.

The most common (and therefore correct, at least in American English) meaning of "liberal" in the US context is as a slur used by both the right and the left against the centre-left. Occasionally this extends to using "liberalism" to mean "whatever the US centre-left does". This is also slur-adjacent - the American centre-left generally call their own ideology "Progressivism" because their political tradition (with some degree of continuity in institutions, personnel and practice) goes back to the early 20th century capital-P Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt and Bob La Follette. There is a similar but different use of "liberal" and "liberalism" in British English (in this case not a slur - it is what we call ourselves) to describe the political tradition which runs through the British Liberal Party (1859-1988) and its predecessors and successors and their international imitators - there is a similar degree of continuity in institutions, personnel and practice that begins with John Locke advising William III and runs through to Earl Russel negotiating the Whig-Peelite merger and on to Nick Clegg and Justin Trudeau doing the things they do.

But @OracleOutlook, and the Economist (which he cites supporting it) and Marc Barnes (which he cites opposing it) are using "liberalism" in an even broader sense (which, for the avoidance of doubt, is also correct in both British and American English) - to refer to a whole panoply of mutually sympathetic political traditions based on ethical individualism, limited government, respect for a private sphere than includes religious belief, etc. All of British liberalism, American "liberalism"/Progressivism, Reagan/Thatcher conservatism, technocratic-elitist "One Nation"/"Rockefeller Republican" conservatism, and Cato Institute-style libertarianism* can trace their political traditions back to John Locke, and occasionally do so with pride. This is the background that mainstream political actors in the Anglosphere can not notice in the same way that fish don't notice that water is wet. (Many leftists, including the British Labour party, are swimming in the same water). Increasingly, it is the water that everyone is swimming in because the British won the 19th century and the Americans won the 20th.

But big-tent liberalism is not actually universal, even if it is foundational to Universal Culture. All the sub-varieties of liberalism would look at online sports betting and see "This is probably a vice, but that is a comment about private morality, not political morality. It may be so harmful that we need to ban it, but it should be legal by default because you only harm yourself." Most would cite to John Stuart Mill for justification. But a fascist, a communist, a Catholic integralist, a Christian fundamentalist, a Muslim fundamentalist, a Confucian, or a Lee Kwan Yew style technocratic-elitist would all ban it without a second thought, with "It's a vice." being sufficient justification.

* The brand of libertarianism being pushed by the Ludwig von Mises Institute and such-like is arguably not part of big-tent liberalism for reasons that this post is too short to discuss in detail.

Liberalism, historically, meant something more like libertarianism (though probably a little less anarcho-capitalist than libertarians will get). It is sometimes still used in that sense. You'll see people calling themselves classical liberals from time to time, and these are pretty much always right-leaning people.

Last week there was some discussion on the recent Lindsay Hoax.

I must have missed this, can you link to the thread you're referring to?

From personal second-hand experience, the difference between a parent who tells another adult, "Oh, I would never strike my child!" and the parent heard uttering to their child, "Look at me right now or you are getting a spanking and going to your room!" is about twelve months.

Daniel Penny Acquitted

Last Friday after several days of deadlocked deliberations, the judge agreed to the prosecutor's request to drop the most serious charge of manslaughter, and asked the jury to consider the lesser charge of negligent homicide. It's strange that the jury was so quickly able to dismiss this charge while spending multiple days debating the more serious one.

This case was pretty controversial but judging by the political temperature I don't forecast any major protests or riots.

Explain like I am not a NY lawyer: why would everyone in the jury find him not guilty of Criminal Negligence but be split on Manslaughter?

The vibes based arguments I've heard, is that after the judge ordered them to keep deliberating after they announced they were hung, NYC Mayor Eric Adams came out and said the entire trial was politically motivated, and that Penny should never have been tried.

Adams had some critiques of the Democratic establishment on migration before but he seems utterly unburdened by any sense of loyalty since the election.

Interesting to see.

but he seems utterly unburdened by any sense of loyalty since the election.

More cynically, since it came out that he'd been taking bribes from Turkey.

That seems to be the general right wing take, that he's singing for his pardon.

He was to the right of the Dem establishment on crime well before he got elected. That was in fact why he got elected.

Well, that and his skin color means that he can pursue (relatively) “tough on crime” policies without being tarred as a racist

Maybe people on the jury saw the dropped charge for what it was, a naked attempt to still send Daniel Penny to prison when it looked like their case was lost.

My guess is that there were one or two people on the jury who saw Penny as a hero who wouldn't agree to any conviction no matter how minor. I would have been one of those people, and would have more than willing to hide my power level during jury selection.

I'm sure our lawyers will chime in, but they always seem to miss the point. It's not about the nitpicky lawyery details most of the time. It's about who has the power to get what they want, using the law as a pretense to achieve this.

Regardless of the instructions, the jury was really asked to consider "do you think Daniel Penny is a murderer who you want to see rot in prison"?

Maybe the DA will face some blowback for wasting the public's money trying to send a good man to prison while routinely failing to prosecute career criminals who prey on ordinary people.

I'm sure our lawyers will chime in, but they always seem to miss the point. It's not about the nitpicky lawyery details most of the time. It's about who has the power to get what they want, using the law as a pretense to achieve this.

Whatever residual doubts I had about this have left my body after listening to the recent US vs. Skrmetti hearing. It's all just word games to provide the thinnest veneer of legitimacy + how many judges are on your side.

My guess is that there were one or two people on the jury who saw Penny as a hero who wouldn't agree to any conviction no matter how minor.

It doesn't look like it played that way. If 10 or 11 of 12 are willing to convict then they aren't going to decide to acquit because of 1 or 2 people, especially not so quickly after the higher charge is dropped. If the jury is mostly willing to convict the guy of manslaughter after days of deliberation, I don't see 2 people turning around the other 10 in a couple of hours. This looks more like most of the jury wanted to acquit but one or two holdouts wanted a conviction. Dropping the manslaughter charges may have signaled to the jury that the prosecution didn't really believe in their case, which may be enough to flip these people.

I would have been one of those people, and would have more than willing to hide my power level during jury selection.

I'm generally curious; what makes you think you could hide your power level during jury selection? How do you think you could accomplish this?

I'm generally curious; what makes you think you could hide your power level during jury selection? How do you think you could accomplish this?

By not being too gung-ho in either direction (so neither side vetoes you) and possibly playing down your IQ somewhat?

The one time I was in a jury pool, it did seem like the lawyers from both sides were trying to get people to self-identify as independent thinkers and then veto them. Probably both lawyers thought that they were in total control and wanted to have a jury of relative simpletons that they could guide. Of course, not both can be right.

I'll admit, I know almost nothing about jury selection except for what I've read in John Grisham novels, lol. I think it would be fascinating to hear about how trial lawyers approach selection in a big case like this one.

The goal is often just to reduce variance. If whether lawyer thought they were going to lose, they wouldn't be there, they'd have settled/plead/dropped the case.

It's not so much that we don't want smart people or independent thinkers as it is that we don't want overly opinionated people who will fuck up the deliberation process. A jury full of relative simpletons isn't a good thing because they won't want to pay attention, won't be able to understand the testimony or jury instructions and will instead just rely on whatever biases they have. The Chauvin jury was composed almost entirely of people with professional or managerial backgrounds. What we're trying to avoid is the kind of person who is overly opinionated and is unwilling to work with the other jurors. We need people who can deliberate, not just voice their opinions. If 1 juror gives the other 11 the impression that he isn't fully invested in deliberating and has already made an unchangeable decision, all it's going to do is piss of the other jurors and increase the chances of a hung jury.

That brings me to another aspect of your plan that was faulty: The presumption that you would be able to hang the jury on your own. Hung juries are almost always fairly evenly split. If you find yourself in a room with 11 people who are voting to convict after several days of deliberation, then it's unlikely that they're doing so purely for political reasons. If you haven't turned at least a few members around in that time, then you're probably wrong, and unless you're a total moron, you'll probably come around yourself. In a high-profile case such as this, there is going to be a lot of pressure for a verdict, and the judge isn't going to send everyone home just because you say you're deadlocked; the system is willing to keep you there a lot longer than you think they will.

I think it would be fascinating to hear about how trial lawyers approach selection in a big case like this one.

I can't speak for big cases, and there are differing theories, but a few general truisms hold. Basically, I aim to have a discussion with prospective jurors, not an examination. In big trials they might interview the jurors individually, but most of the time they bring them in 10 or 20 at a time. I'll start by making a general statement that I expect most people to agree on, just to get people comfortable with raising their hands. There will inevitably be someone who doesn't raise their hand, so I'll pick on that person first to see why they don't agree with everyone else (it's usually because the person is incredibly shy). From there, I try to focus on open-ended questions that don't suggest an answer and give the prospective juror a chance to elaborate on their views. I try to avoid anything that can be answered with a simple yes or no.

For example, in this case I might ask "In the past several years there has been a lot of discussion about how people are increasingly feeling unsafe on public transit. What do you think about that?" And this is where @ArjinFerman's comment ties in. Most people will speak freely about controversial subjects during voir dire. Most people will offer opinions that have the potential to get them booted. You don't know what my trial strategy is or what evidence is going to be presented. You haven't read all of the other jury questionnaires. You don't know where I'm going with my questions. If you think that straddling the line between both sides is going to work, you'd better be sure that you know what the sides actually are. If I'm the prosecutor on this case, I'm not trying to get a bunch of woke-ass do-gooders on the jury, because that isn't going to happen. I've probably accepted the fact that the jury pool is frustrated about erratic behavior on the subway and is sick of having to deal with it. Yeah, some people are more liberal, but they're going to be outspoken and probably get the boot from the defense. I'm trying to craft an argument at trial that acknowledges Mr. Penny's right to intervene but that the problem was in the execution. The only question is whether I think you're willing to accept my argument, and you don't know my criteria for that.

"In the past several years there has been a lot of discussion about how people are increasingly feeling unsafe on public transit. What do you think about that?"

"IDK, maybe -- I haven't really noticed anything, myself"

Thanks for sharing. Your post is very interesting, as always.

For the record, in my one jury selection I did get booted for raising my hand when it was pretty clear that the lawyer asking the question didn't want me to. It was a long time ago, but IIRC, he said something and then asked if anyone disagreed. The jurors seemed pretty intimidated. I'm probably not the only one who disagreed, but I'm the only one who raised my hand. The other jurors seemed pretty intimidated. When I raised my hand, the lawyer then immediately pounced on me in a fairly harsh way and forced me to defend my statement. It was then I realized that the trial was already under way. (Note: My uninformed belief is that it's probably against the rules to prejudice the jury during this stage, but that everyone does it in an oblique way anyway).

In the end, I was the only one dismissed by that lawyer and the defendant ended up settling.

When it comes to where I could pull a Henry Fonda, I do understand your skepticism. I can't confidently say that I'd succeed because I've never been in that position before. But I think I am pretty high on verbal intelligence, charisma, and disagreeableness. I like my odds.

If you haven't turned at least a few members around in that time, then you're probably wrong, and unless you're a total moron, you'll probably come around yourself.

Well, give me some credit here, surely arguing with the Motte's finest all these years counts for something that would help me turn people to my side?

the system is willing to keep you there a lot longer than you think they will.

So I get that I might have shit to do, and might be worried about losing my job or something, but when we're talking about something like the Penny case, I don't know if I could sleep at night if I had the power to let him off the hook, but caved in because I really had to run some chores.

For example, in this case I might ask "In the past several years there has been a lot of discussion about how people are increasingly feeling unsafe on public transit. What do you think about that?"

Would some bland answer like "If people feel this way, maybe the city could hire more cops or something, but I dunno, I'm not an expert" immediately flag me in a case like this? I guess I'd be a bit more careful expressing pro-cop sentiment in something like the Chauvin trial.

Most people will speak freely about controversial subjects during voir dire. Most people will offer opinions that have the potential to get them booted. You don't know what my trial strategy is or what evidence is going to be presented. You haven't read all of the other jury questionnaires. You don't know where I'm going with my questions.

None of this is relevant. The game I'm playing is "hide my power level" not "ensure I will be selected for the jury". I'm mostly trying to look normal, not read your mind. The latter sounds like an easy way to play myself like in that Princess Bride "only a great fool would reach for what he was given" skit.

If I'm the prosecutor on this case, I'm not trying to get a bunch of woke-ass do-gooders on the jury,

Exactly, which is why I said won't go gung-ho in either direction.

If you find yourself in a room with 11 people who are voting to convict after several days of deliberation, then it's unlikely that they're doing so purely for political reasons. If you haven't turned at least a few members around in that time, then you're probably wrong, and unless you're a total moron, you'll probably come around yourself. In a high-profile case such as this, there is going to be a lot of pressure for a verdict, and the judge isn't going to send everyone home just because you say you're deadlocked; the system is willing to keep you there a lot longer than you think they will.

How democratic!

You can make any choice as a juror, so long as you make the one everyone else is making. And if you don’t make the decision everyone else wants you to, the state will use force to intimidate you into changing your mind.

We might as well just use Nazi ballots, if the whole point of juries is to use social and economic pressure to force people to vote the same way, and using confinement and isolation to overcome conscientious disagreement. These are totalitarian tactics, incompatible with freedom.

The one time I was in a jury pool, the lawyers were going through the pool trying to find people biased in their direction.

I'm generally curious; what makes you think you could hide your power level during jury selection? How do you think you could accomplish this?

Good point. Many smart people think they can outsmart cops and lawyers but fail spectacularly because they are playing a game for the first time against people who play it for a living.

And I'm not willing to perjure myself either.

So... all I can say is that I would do my best to try to get on the jury and, once there, acquit. Would our genius lawyers be able to ferret this out? Maybe, maybe not. They're probably not quite as smart as they like to believe either.

My plan would be use low-key Golden Retriever mode, channel humility, vacuous attentiveness, and moderate excitement to be involved in this novel experience: a wide-eyed, gawking tourist enjoying their guided walkthrough of the famous American Justice system. I'd be interested in hearing how or why this would fail.

I'm generally curious; what makes you think you could hide your power level during jury selection? How do you think you could accomplish this?

Watching that dude do it in the Derek Chauvin trial. He got away with wearing a 'get your knee off our necks' shirt to a protest by claiming to not know the details, it looks pretty easy to do. I'm not black though.

I was selected on a murder trial a couple years back and it was easy as hell. Nobody wanted to be there. Over half the jury pool was rejected on spurious reasons.

Getting on a jury was relatively easy in my recent experience.

If over half the jury pool was rejected for spurious reasons then it doesn't sound like it was that easy to get on. I'm assuming you answered the voir dire questions honestly.

No most of the jurors obviously wanted to get out of jury duty. They cited things like missing work, obviously lying about strong political opinions, etc.

obviously lying about strong political opinions

As someone who has strong political opinions about criminal justice, I have no idea what I’d do if I were picked for jury duty. Either I’m honest about my very strong views and I look like a crazy liar, or I lie about them and perjure myself. It’s a tough break.

Perplexity tells me the difference between criminally negligent homicide and second degree manslaughter in New York is in the defendant's state of mind. Under criminally negligent homicide, the person failed to perceive the risk of death, while under second degree manslaughter, they were aware of the risk of death but consciously disregarded that risk.

With bystanders saying Neely was going to die, combined with Penny's training, it seems hard to justify the idea that he just didn't see a risk of death from a six-minute chokehold, including nearly a minute after he went limp. The trial's outcome could be reasonable if the jury agreed that Penny knew what he was doing while disagreeing on whether he was justified in doing it.

The holdouts got tired.

It was a nice case of jury nullification, which of course it a nice tool to counteract the absurd practice of piling charges that is perverting the justice system.

The real criminal is the MTA - they chose to make the subway and the public transit unsecure. If they had put the safety and comfort of the passengers, if there were people to respond there wouldn't have had a need for vigilantism.

I think that Daniel Penny contributed substantially to the death, but we can't be put in a situation in which to evaluate how crazy a crazy is before the bystanders have to intervene. A stabbing could take a tenth of a second.

I think this is the right decision for the charges that were brought.

Also what is the idiocy of the American justice system that allows civil law suits for criminal matters? Talking about the one filed by his father (also - if you have a father, how the fuck are you homeless, i would really like to hear said father on the stand about the relationship with his son)

I think Jordan Neely was batshit crazy and chose to live on the streets because of it.

Yeah, how does that work exactly? How does the father have standing to sue for the death of an adult child?

How far does this go. Can I sue for the wrongful death of a brother, a cousin, a distant relative, a friend, an acquaintance...?

In kind of "rough order," first the surviving spouse, if no surviving spouse (or if spouse doesn't sue), then the children, if no surviving children, then the parent, if no parents then dependents (not applicable here, dude was homeless...), and then if none of those, the executor/representative of the estate (again, not applicable here). Friend/acquaintance only applies if you qualified as their dependent.

Wrongful death is a creature of statute, and as such the statute defines who has standing to sue. A rough approximation is that you'd have standing if you'd be entitled to inherit under the state's intestacy law.

You want some kind of civil wrongful death statute, otherwise someone who gets killed by a reckless driver or due to a defective product couldn't get money damages for it.

Also what is the idiocy of the American justice system that allows civil law suits for criminal matters?

Every Common Law jurisdiction allows this, see the recent McGregor case in Ireland, various cases in the UK etc.

A shared idiocy is no less idiotic. At some point the supreme court should empower the fifth to mean that for one event there should be only one trial and probably also limit the charges that can be piled on.

This creates a conflict of interest between the interests of the individual and the interests of the state, and it comes up much more than you think and probably has affected you at some point. Consider the following: A runs a stop sign, causing an accident that totals B's car. A policeman on the scene finds A at fault and issues a ticket for running the stop sign, the penalty for which is a $100 fine and points on the license. A pleads not guilty because he wants to avoid the points and it's customary for the state to agree to drop the points in exchange for a guilty fee where the defendant only pays the fine. A enters his plea a week after the accident, and the court schedules a hearing for two months after the accident.

Meanwhile, B is without a vehicle and puts a claim into A's insurance company. She is relying on the insurance payout to buy a new car, which she needs to get to work. Since the civil claim is rolled into the criminal claim, however, the insurance company can't pay out until the ticket is resolved, which it won't be for two months. Furthermore, B now has to be ready to present evidence at trial since she doesn't know that A just intends to get a deal and may be arguing that he didn't actually run the stop sign. Plus, there's always the risk that the cop just doesn't show up and she's the only witness available to testify, so she has to show up lest the whole matter be dismissed.

So now B is stuck waiting months for an insurance payout that A's insurer would have just paid, and making things incredibly more complicated than they need to be.

I dont see how this is a case of jury nullification. From a reading of the medical records, its pretty hard to see that the state even carried its burden of proof on the most basic of questions: That but-for Penny's actions, Neely would still have been alive at the end of the encounter. That is even before the prosecution's difficult case in proving criminal recklessness and/or negligence given the chaotic situation and that the actual witnesses on the scene were pretty evenly split.

He was alive at the end of the encounter. He was pronounced dead in the hospital.

I called it nullification because the trial always hanged on if the jury would see him as good Samaritan or reckless vigilante. Not on the facts.

Assume that surfaced a lot of posts of him being storm front member or racist or whatever - do you think he would still have been acquitted?

That's less jury nullification and more just how juries work. A NY jury is going to convict a white supremacist of murder of he's credibly accused of eating at Katz's while a patron nearby chokes on pastrami.

He was pronounced dead in the hospital.

I didn't follow this part of the case closely so I'm not sure if this applies here, but it is very common for someone to be "dead" for all useful purposes, but we don't formalize that until they end up in front of the Trauma/ED team and they've given up.

I've seen the EMTs bring in someone on a LUCAS who was stiff and cold but until the doctor takes a look at them...other staff don't want the responsibility/documentation/risk of getting it wrong.

Color me somewhat surprised.

I was somewhat expecting a guilty verdict, and my guess was that'd trigger another wave of emigration out of NYC.

Depending on whether this results in large scale riots, it still might.

Depending on whether this results in large scale riots, it still might.

I predict with 95%+ confidence that this will not happen. Large scale defined as > 5 people dead or > 100 million in property damage.

I doubt we'll see any rioting or even protesting beyond the usual Antifa bullshit, sparsely attended at that.

New Yorkers have to live in New York. There’s nobody who lives in NYC who hasn’t been scared by homeless psychos over the last 5 years.

Depending on whether this results in large scale riots, it still might.

It's cold and rainy. No one's rioting in this, spontaneously or otherwise.

Good timing on releasing the verdict, then.

I find it interesting that the people celebrating the "vigilante justice" of the UHC assassin are the same people upset about the Daniel Penny verdict.

Goes both ways, people celebrating the vigilante justice of the Penny verdict criticizing the assassination of the UHC CEO. (For the record, that is the correct, prosocial position.)

vigilante justice

Was it though? A sane account of the event is that the guy was out of his brain, drugs likely involved, and he may have had an OD related cardiac event while he was being restrained. Guy was even still alive when the cops got there, and they refuses to touch him to try to save his life because he was so filthy they were afraid they'd catch something. I'm not sure preventing someone from harming others with a fundamentally nonviolent hold (Neely wasn't bruised, broken or bleeding) and then handing them over to police who allow him to OD to death counts as "vigilante justice" in the same way Batman or The Punisher conjures up.

Vigilantism isn't just when someone ends up dead. Spiderman is still a vigilante when he leaves perps bound and webbed for the cops to find (fits the legal definitions of battery and false imprisonment).

Spiderman is a vigilante because he seeks out crime to stop. Penny is a guy who had an assault nearly happen in front of his eyes. He finds himself in this situation again I'll have questions. But we can't just expand the definition of vigilante to "Anybody who's not a police officer who makes a criminals life harder in any way, shape or form." And it's especially egregious in a self defense situation. Makes it sound like you are obligated to allow yourself to be victimized, which I know the tribal "restorative justice" types actually believe, but all the same, no.

I agree. I just wanted to say that vigilantism isn't just limited to extrajudicial killing.

Is blood vengeance vigilantism? It's not exactly seeking out crimes to stop, after all.

Unless Penny set out that particular day to detain someone on the subway, he was not a vigilante. Defending yourself or others is not vigilantism, it is defence.

What's prosocial about profiting in death?

Health insurance is a fleeting necessity. It's been useful as structural opposition to American single-payer, but AGI approaches as does the panacea, and the industry will cease to exist by 2100. Healthcare as a whole has to put a price on human life, health insurance does too, it's the cold calculations of what's needed to stay solvent and I would only say remain attractive to investors where this latter is necessary to the former. Not when it's simple profiting, and that's what's happening here, profiting in death.

There is nothing prosocial about that behavior. Civilization does have a long relationship with profiting in death, but the avarice underlying that is iniquity's millstone we trudge ever against. Great men have been driven by their want for something to make the most lasting achievements, but it is grossly reductive to categorize it as greed. If that is a fair term, then it applies truly to precious few men who have ever lived. Better to know those traits are found commonly, and those great men were motivated by something ineffable and gestalt, rather than mundane greed.

So to suggest, in this not being prosocial, that civilization was not raised on the line of people being murdered randomly in the street, is to view it in a hypermodern and wrong lens. Thompson was not a random person, he was a modern nobleman who led an organization that profits in death and reaped finally a historically appropriate reward. That historic archetype did fear murder in the commons, so whoever among them today who do not fear being struck down, or who did not, they are or were living in that hypermodern lens, and that's not civilization, it's castration.

AGI approaches, the panacea approaches. Some here, I hope all, will live to see the extinction of health insurance, but regardless, by the end of the century it will be gone, as will the majority of occupations in healthcare, and civilization won't bat an eye. In 200 years it will be a morbid curiosity of 20th and 21st century life, and probably considered in studies as part of humanity hurdling the real problem of the lost jobs and purpose caused by AGI. But those are the things that matter, not "lost" profit opportunities, and not a nobleman dead in the street.

This guy worked for an insurance corporation that had like an 8-9% net margin. That’s not exploitative. That’s not greed on a grand scale. The US public consistently rejected single payer at the ballot box. They are frustrated with the current system, but cannot propose an alternative upon which most can agree.

I think it's not exactly useful to gauge a company's level of "greed" by its profit margin, particularly these huge companies. They are not tight ships running as lean as possible: they inevitably swell with thousands of useless, well-paid employees. Not to mention well-paid executives. These firms love to tighten the screws on their clients in order to avoid cutting the fat.

And of course using this as your proxy will make out better-run companies as being "greedy", and poorly-run ones saints.

And you ask, How magnanimous is Lockheed-Martin? I tell you yea, they profit one cent off the dollar when Hellfire smites an apostate's wedding.

I recognize the necessity of health insurance, I endorse it verbatim as part of the bulwark against single-payer. I understand they have to make hard decisions, because healthcare is triage, and when resource allocation literally is life-and-death, cold calculation is required. This makes it better, it does not make it good. While I'm at it I guess I also should clarify that I see no good in a man being murdered in the street. This may cause deaths downstream, I assume no one's taking that CEO role now without United providing private security, that cost, likely trivial as it is, may be pushed on the consumer, so a rise in rates or claims denied and both lead to reduced life outcomes and death. On the other hand if it causes them to approve claims they otherwise wouldn't, we might see life downstream of this, but I'm not saying let us do evil that good may result. It was murder, and his condemnation will be just. I only plea to history in what constitutes "prosocial" behavior: Thompson was a plebeian who made himself a patrician, and civilization continued all the same through those periods where noblemen who profited from commoners' deaths still feared earthly vengeance.

It doesn't matter if it's 8%, the misdeed is not meted off the margin.

Do you have examples of this? I was perusing Bluesky today, and none of the lefty accounts I follow on there have said anything about the Penny verdict.

Same with me, Twitter search shows a few disparate BLM posts but no major interest from lefty accounts otherwise.

Do you have examples of this? I was perusing Bluesky today, and none of the lefty accounts I follow on there have said anything about the Penny verdict.

This is the real story. Cases like this have been rallying points for activist progressives since Michael Brown, at least in the meme's current iteration. That they make very little hay of this and prefer not to discuss it at all is a potent sign that they feel on the backfoot in the culture war.

Given how much of the Neojacobin's success I attribute to their relentless will to just keep pushing and pushing and pushing, this is remarkable. Maybe the optimists were right and we have indeed reached peak woke. It won't mean anything of course as long as the institutional capture is not at least partially reversed.

There's no mystery to solve. The leftist instinct in America is always to sympathize with the poorer person whose life is in disarray. It's extremely clear which way this breaks in both cases (everyman subway rider / deranged lunatic and CEO / presumably indebted twenty-something).

But isn't Luigi Mangione from a rich family? It seems like people on Tumblr that I follow still stan him (and are posting joke quizzes asking if he's hot), so it's not obvious to me that he's an underdog in this way. Like, sure, he's objectively poorer than the CEO, but I think a lot of the "appeal" of the assassination is the "righteous fury" at insurance companies, which many Americans have had bad experiences with.

We know that now but I think the sides had already been chosen before that became know several hours ago. I don't disagree that there is a special hatred for the insurance CEO but I don't feel that the overall reaction would have been any different if this had been any other major company's CEO, do you?

Definitely yes. Killing Bezos or Pichai or Nadella would have gotten a much more mixed reaction, for instance. Musk, the same times a billion. Killing the CEO of Ford probably wouldn't have garnered any positive reaction; killing the CEO of GM would have gotten the "horrible to kill a woman" thing (at least from the press). I'm not sure if there's any CEO universally loved, but this guy (or rather, anyone in his position) was likely among the most universally hated.

Disagree. People who are already celebrities like the names you listed have battle lines already drawn around them to some degree, so let's leave them aside. If it was the CEO of Ford, my gut instinct is that on e.g. Reddit the reaction would be essentially the same. They would have to work a little harder to identify the "violence" that said CEO had inflicted on employees or consumers, but not that hard. It's second nature for "late stage capitalism" thinkers. "I'll extend him the same consideration that he extended to the thousands of drivers who died when Ford covered up evidence of faulty brakes / the millions dying from climate change due to lobbying against emissions standards / the families who went hungry when layoffs happened while he pulled down $50M / year."

I suppose you're right that commies will be commies and you would see that sort of stuff, but I still think you'd see a lot less hate for the Ford CEO, and a lot less sympathy for the killer.

The left construes violence incredibly broadly and intentionally eliminates distinctions between different types of "violence". The mere existence of socioeconomic inequality is a form of violence/genocide to them. I imagine that if Bezos was killed the reaction would be even more positive just due to him being wealthier and infinitely better known.

Disagree, with an insurance-related CEO one can immediately think "that guy's responsible for denying care to thousands of people, literally killing them", and that goes much farther to intuitively justify it than "the CEO of Ford ... didn't pay workers enough? Polluted?". Maybe from very committed anticapitalists it would, but the average person on reddit or twitter isn't one

I suspect that those people would have been more sympathetic to Mr Penny if Mr Neely had been responsible for the cessation of the metabolic processes of an order of magnitude more Americans than Usama bin-Ladin....

The jury was 7 women and 5 men. I do wonder who the holdouts were at first.

I could see men being all about frontier justice while the women give into empathy, but I can also see a jury of women who have years of experience feeling vulnerable on the subways swooning over Penny.


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