site banner
ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31248 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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

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

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

  • Shaming.

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

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16
Top Bottom New Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I recently came across this little quillette article. https://quillette.com/2022/10/14/sundance-succumbs-to-social-panic/ where a film of jihadist rehabilitation is cancelled for being "islamophobic". Part of it as I read in the situation is that is a "white woman" is trying to sell the idea that one can be deprogrammed from ideological capture. I suspect that there is a deeper reason (which I can't prove) that we shouldn't go around believing that extremists can be redeemed or deprogrammed. This includes of course that there is no redemption arc for right-wing white nationalist extremists.

As an outsider to US politics I was fascinated by the apparatus of US media to "manufacturing of consent" to fighting terrorism of the evil jihadists with things like "enhanced interrogation techniques" a.k.a. torture. There is a whole TV-series produced to skew the narrative that torture is effective way to combat terror, despite that there being ample evidence that people being tortured will eventually make shit up to avoid being tortured. Also properly motivated persons can withstand extraordinary amounts of pain and delay the divulging of useful intel to the interrogator. So it is not an effective way of gathering information about impending attacks, because motivated and trained people can delay, lie or do anything in between to fulfill their goals and innocent people will probably just make something up to make the torture stop by guessing what the interrogator wants to hear. Yet we have multiple seasons of 24 to implant the idea that torture is effective. The critique of that show is that it was "islamophobic" because it painted the jihadist as an unredemptive terrorists.

I find it fascinating that less than a couple of decades ago the right thought that extremists where irredeemable from their idealogical capturing, but now the left is touting similar reasoning with white supremacists and throws jihadist redemption under the bus, in the same breath.

I think it's much simpler; a white is daring to criticise a pet pitbull of a group (Muslim radicals). That's just not done.

right thought that extremists where irredeemable from their idealogical capturing

Did it? Seemingly a third of prominent rightwing intellectuals in the US used to be left wing extremists, .g. Trotskyists.

I'm going to doubt that claim. A while back I looked into the backgrounds of neoconservatives - a group probably likeliest to be associated with being former Trots - and far fewer of them had Trotskyist roots than I had assumed. Sure, there were some examples of this - Irving Kristol the most notable one - but the former-leftist neocons seemed more likely to have been social democrats or cold-war liberals than Trotskyites or other sorts of commies.

Up for debate unless we do a headcount, however, neocons absolutely absorbed the hubristic revolutionary zeal of the trotskyists.

Starting during the 1980s, disputes concerning Israel and public policy contributed to a conflict with paleoconservatives. Pat Buchanan terms neoconservatism "a globalist, interventionist, open borders ideology".[110] Paul Gottfried has written that the neocons' call for "permanent revolution" exists independently of their beliefs about Israel,[111] characterizing the neoconservatives as "ranters out of a Dostoyevskian novel, who are out to practice permanent revolution courtesy of the U.S. government" and questioning how anyone could mistake them for conservatives.[112]

What make neocons most dangerous are not their isolated ghetto hang-ups, like hating Germans and Southern whites and calling everyone and his cousin an anti-Semite, but the leftist revolutionary fury they express.[112]

He has also argued that domestic equality and the exportability of democracy are points of contention between them

What was it, seven countries in five years following 9/11?

Buchanan and Gottfried made their statements explicitly in the context of an internal power struggle about the future of the conservative movement, where it was prurient for them to concentrate on the leftist roots of (many) neoconservatives and exagerrate them, ie. portray the comparatively low number of former Trotskyites among them as a formative part of the movement. There's no particular need for finding Trotsky at the bottom of what, in the end, has been a quest for global extension of American power; the paleocons who think otherwise were always fighting a losing game based on an idealistic view of some non-interventionist, "non-imperial" American past that arguably never existed.

What was it, seven countries in five years following 9/11?

Clark mentions two figures here, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Neither was a Trotskyite; Rumsfeld was a lifelong basic Republican, Wolfowitz had by all accounts I've seen been a cold war Scoop Jackson liberal before moving to the GOP side.

Good points.

So, you are essentially claiming the rabid neocon interventionism is not derived from Trotskyist intellectual influences, but rather a case of common ideological descent from the frog headchoppers of 1790s ?

Apparently the film does not criticize Muslim extremists, and based on the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes rather takes the opposite tack.

There is a whole TV-series produced to skew the narrative that torture is effective way to combat terror, despite that there being ample evidence that people being tortured will eventually make shit up to avoid being tortured. Also properly motivated persons can withstand extraordinary amounts of pain and delay the divulging of useful intel to the interrogator. So it is not an effective way of gathering information about impending attacks, because motivated and trained people can delay, lie or do anything in between to fulfill their goals and innocent people will probably just make something up to make the torture stop by guessing what the interrogator wants to hear. Yet we have multiple seasons of 24 to implant the idea that torture is effective.

I think you're missing the simple fact that torture scenes are incredibly dramatic. High stakes, sky-high emotions all around, desperate time tables, etc. And there were still plenty of times in 24 where it didn't work, where the revelation that the torturee held a critical detail back was the dramatic segue into the next phase of the ridiculously circuitous plan of the season.

I think you're missing the simple fact that torture scenes are incredibly dramatic.

No, I'm positing that torture was included to "manufacture consent" in a similar way that the series contained rationalizations of mass surveillance to not get upset at the politicians when they continued to vote through continuation of "war on terror" policy that was eroding their liberties. I'm a total outsider of US-politics and culture in many ways. It is schadenfreude when the Jan 6 republicans got their names in the no fly list that was rammed through by republican politicians in the "war on terror".

OK, but where's the evidence that this inclusion in 24 was at the behest of the CIA or something? Isn't it a lot more straightforward to posit that people just like the drama and the show writers wrote accordingly?

There is a long history of e.g. the US Navy lending "production assistance" to TV series like JAG and NCIS . I have no proof of a such link but is it not a possibility that such a link exist given that the military-industrial complex has supported movies and TV series with the "correct" message in the past?

Yes, it's a possibility. I don't even think it's a weird or remote possibility. But it certainly is an extra step and I'm disinclined to add extra steps without any explicit evidence (or a good reason to have a very high Bayesian prior).

Yes, but still you might not want to assume that the message of adding that to the script comes straight from the CIA. It might have been inserted for political reasons by politicians. It is not even unheard of today that media is changed for political reasons.

Sebastian Junger has a much better piece about this in the National Review. As he makes clear, the criticism is not about Islamophobia bur rather is yet another claim about who is permitted to make what art, a claim made by people who do not understand what art is.

Nearly everyone dislikes competition and uses every available tool to squash it. It's unsurprising that some artists attempt to use woke politics to stop categories of other artists from competing with them. White people shouldn't make films about Muslims, trans women shouldn't compete in women's sports, China engages in unfair trade practices that cost American jobs, and she stole my boyfriend by being a slut are all related complaints.

I liked your inclusion of "trans women shouldn't compete in women's sports," for political balance.

It actually helps highlight what I think is the wrong assertion of stealth, competitive self-interest in so much moralistic thinking. Is that generally what's driving the right's dislike of trans involvement in women's sports, sticking up for their own daughter's spot on the team? Seems like a reach.

I think it's more a TERF justification than a right-winger justification.

Yes reading that gives food for my ordinary bias whenever I see cancellations. The usual it is the elites dunking on the working class. I was trying to avoid it with my reasoning and it is the same old story as we've seen for the last 8 years that I've been aware of the phenomena.

They're using "Allowlist" instead of whitelist on their AdBlock beg? I see the national review's "leftism minus ten years" policy is down to about two years now.

This includes of course that there is no redemption arc for right-wing white nationalist extremists.

Nah, people love Christian Picciolini. Of course, his redemption arc includes uttering all the appropriate pieties about how Trump is beyond the pale and yadayadayada, but that's pretty much expected that converts will be quite zealous post-conversion. There's always room for redemption as long as you're willing to advocate for the Good Guys. There's nothing more that Team Good Guy likes than one of the Bad Guys realizing how terrible they were, adopting Goodguyism, and telling the Good Guys that they're morally righteous. I am not aware of any teams for which this isn't an option.

There is a whole TV-series produced to skew the narrative that torture is effective way to combat terror, despite that there being ample evidence that people being tortured will eventually make shit up to avoid being tortured.

To be honest I am extremely skeptical of this conclusion for two reasons. First, torture including torture as part of military intelligence gathering as well as counterinsurgency was used for thousands of years probably in every war humans fought. For me it is hard to believe that people were so stupid for such a long time and wasted time and resources doing it just for fun. Second, the conclusion that torture does not work is suspiciously close to support moral intuition of modern western researchers, I would hardly expect some research in the vein of "torture is moderately effective, but historical evidence such as study of notes by Gestapo and Khmer Rouge investigators shows that torturing prisoner's children in front them increases investigative efficiency by 346%. Further study in Guantanamo is needed". I do not think this would gather much praise for any Psychology journal.

For me it is hard to believe that people were so stupid for such a long time and wasted time and resources doing it just for fun.

You may be underestimating just how much people enjoy cruelty.

Maybe I'm sheltered but I think it's hard to find people who'd be okay with spending all day sticking splinters under defenseless, terrified prisoners' nails or whatever. It takes a morally deformed person to do that day in day out and enjoy it. I suppose if you have a large enough group of people you'll always find some one like that, but pre modern people didn't always have such large groups.

Pre-modern life, with its constant wars, famines and other horrors, would have surely resulted in a greater proportion of morally deformed people.

"Maybe I'm sheltered but I think it's hard to find people who'd be okay with spending all day sticking splinters under defenseless, terrified prisoners' nails or whatever. It takes a morally deformed person to do that day in day out and enjoy it."

You're absolutely correct. Unfortunately, however, there are a depressing number of morally deformed people in this world (both now and historically).

Spending all day is cruel, executioners should unionize and limit it to 8-hour work shifts.

...

They probably got paid, and maybe even explained why their work is important.

There's a short story by the horror writer John Langan called "In Paris, In the Mouth of Kronos" and it involves ex-soldiers who have been tried and convicted for the kinds of Abu Ghraib misconduct, and worse. There's a way of getting into that mindset:

After that, it had been learning the restraints that would cause the prisoner maximum discomfort, expose him (or occasionally, her) to optimum harm. It was hoisting the prisoner off the ground first without dislocating his shoulders, then with. Waterboarding, yes, together with the repurposing of all manner of daily objects, from nail files to pliers to dental floss. Each case was different. Of course you couldn’t believe any of the things the prisoners said when they were turned over to you, their protestations of innocence. But even after it appeared you’d broken them, you couldn’t be sure they weren’t engaged in a more subtle deception, acting as if you’d succeeded in order to preserve the truly valuable information. For this reason, it was necessary to keep the interrogation open, to continue to revisit those prisoners who swore they’d told you everything they knew. These people are not like you and me, Just-Call-Me-Bill had said, confirming the impression that had dogged Vasquez when she’d walked patrol, past women draped in white or slate burqas, men whose pokool proclaimed their loyalty to the mujahideen. These are not a reasonable people. You cannot sit down and talk to them, Bill went on, come to an understanding with them. They would rather fly an airplane into a building full of innocent women and men. They would rather strap a bomb to their daughter and send her to give you a hug. They get their hands on a nuke, and there’ll be a mushroom cloud where Manhattan used to be. What they understand is pain. Enough suffering, and their tongues will loosen.

Vasquez had learned that her father’s stories of the Villa Grimaldi—which he had withheld from her until she was fifteen, when over the course of the evening after her birthday she had been first incredulous, then horrified, then filled with righteous fury on his behalf—had little bearing on her duties in the Closet. Her father had been an innocent man, a poet, for God’s sake, picked up by Pinochet’s Caravana de la Muerte because they were engaged in a program of terrorizing their own populace. The men (and occasional women) at whose interrogations she assisted were terrorists themselves, spiritual kin to the officers who had scarred her father’s arms, his chest, his back, his thighs, who had scored his mind with nightmares from which he still woke screaming, decades later. They were not like you and me, and that difference authorized and legitimized whatever was required to start them talking.

You don't have to be morally deformed when you torture the first prisoner. You just need to believe that this time there really is the ticking bomb in the school, and that you are being morally serious and avoiding Just World fallacy and all the other things torture apologists have said on this very thread. So you hold your nose and turn the handle.

Then you hear the screams. The screams of the hated, defeated enemy. It feels good. An better still, he screamed a name. You got actionable intelligence - you did the right thing. (You don't know at that point that he gave the same name to the FBI in exchange for coffee and a hot meal three weeks ago). And you did this. You had to overcome your fear of the tofu-eating wokists of North London to do the right thing. Actually, you're kind of a hero. The sense of power is good for the ego too. Your testosterone levels go through the roof. The sex with your wife that night is special.

They bring the guy he named in. The second time is easier. You get another name. But perhaps he is holding back - he is supposed to be the higher-up after all. So you arrange another session. Nobody broke after only one round of torture in the old books, after all.

The third time is even easier. You tell him he needs to name names to make the torture stop. In between the cries, you get name after name.

They bring those people in. You start to realise that they don't talk as easily. They must be particularly hard cases - you have hard evidence that they are baddies, after all. The second guy said so under torture, and if he was lying you would have put him through another session, and he wouldn't want that. You don't consider the possibility that they aren't talking is that they weren't baddies and don't know anything. It would mean you are out of a lucrative job. So you dial up the pain.

Two days later you hear that one of the guys you left in the cold cell overnight died of hypothermia. Can't make an omlette without breaking eggs, after all. But you aren't morally deformed. You are just doing a difficult, unpleasant job that most people are too prissy to do. And you have also tortured an innocent man to death.

You have also booked a one-way ticket to the eight circle of Hell and your family is accursed down to the thirteenth generation.

avoiding Just World fallacy and all the other things torture apologists have said on this very thread

Hey. Asshole.

I think it is good to avoid torture. It is an excellent thing to do.

Do not do it from a position of lies, especially putting lies in my mouth.

You may be underestimating just how much people enjoy cruelty.

I can absolutely imagine torturing certain people just for fun. The list of names is long, and not suitable for discussion on this forum.

I suggest you keep in mind Evil Overlord List item #4 if you ever get the chance.

I suggest you keep in mind Evil Overlord List item #4 if you ever get the chance.

I lack the grit and work ethic needed to be an effective evil overlord, but thanks for the advice. My wife is currently working on an SF novel with an evil overlord inspired by me, but who is able to make up for the work ethic with an Elon Musk level IQ and mild psychic powers.

For me it is hard to believe that people were so stupid for such a long time and wasted time and resources doing it just for fun.

Same could be said of augury and, for that matter, all sorts of political and military configurations that aren't about metaphysics (how's the Drug War going?).

The answer there is often to just bite the bullet: either they were just "stupid" or they were getting some sort of fringe benefit separate from actual divine signs (psychological comfort, political cover, social buy-in).

But I kind of agree: "torture doesn't work" can't really be defended in its most literal sense. I mean: it works some of the time, obviously. But the anti-side never say that in the West.

The most charitable way I can read it is "torture as a practice doesn't work - as in produce better results than alternatives on the whole. So torturing that guy when you have as much intelligence as possible and so can tell when they're lying can still be highly effective, even if the torture of much more dubious cases (perhaps the bulk) of mere suspects may not be. After all: if torture were institutionalized it would involve a lot of such people.

Which I think is similar to the argument against corporal punishment: surely it works as deterrent to beat a child sometimes. The argument is that it's bad on the whole (I'm personally agnostic on both of these).

Same could be said of augury and, for that matter, all sorts of political and military configurations that aren't about metaphysics (how's the Drug War going?).

As far as I know all dictatorships use some method of torture to this day. We are also talking about highly "successful" regimes - if one counts staying in power as success - like that of North Korea. I'd say these people would have much more systematic evidence of efficacy of modern torture compared to US or other Western countries with much more red tape around these practices with deep incentives to hide the existence of torture even if it was succesful.

So torturing that guy when you have as much intelligence as possible and so can tell when they're lying can still be highly effective

I'd say that this may be the most effective way of using torture. You can ask easily verifiable information such as where is the weapon cache hidden or what is the cipher for coded message or maybe just verify other intel possibly also gathered by torture. But even thinking about it logically - what other option is there? I know that British during WW2 were inventive and gathered some intelligence by creating bugged comfy house for German officers, supplying them with steady stream of booze and then recording what they said in unguarded moments. There may also be bribes or blackmail and such - but if none of these investigative methods yield any results what else is there from investigative standpoint? Release them? Even modern western investigators use threat of what to me accounts like torture (e.g. threat of longer prison sentence or being sent into hostile prison and so forth) to get something from criminals. Sometimes investigators may even return to prison and offer deals of shortening the sentence - basically ending the torture - in order to get some intel.

Now obviously I am not even some proponent of torture, but for moral reasons and of course overall impact on society and all that. But just saying that torture is not effective seems a bit hasty conclusion at best. And to be sure lately I am even less inclined to believe any academic research especially if some deeply held political or moral stances are at stake, which BTW also includes spanking.

I tried to qualify it in my post the limited usefulness of torture to gather timely and accurate information from 1. innocent people who are not motivated and trained, so they will make shit up to avoid the torture. 2. Well trained and motivated "enemy combatant" that will mislead you deliberately and feigning that he might have "cracked" and telling truths. But as I wrote in the other reply it doesn't preclude other benefits of torture like spreading fear or gaining assets from the less motivated enemies.

Augury was very useful.

Surprise is extremely effective in warfare, and if the hour you're going to attack is based on augury, then your enemy has no way of predicting it.

If you attack based on an objective judgement of when the conditions are most favourable to your side, aka babby's first campaign, you will quickly find your movements anticipated and hard-countered by your opponent, who was able to predict your movements based on exactly the same objective signs.

Conversely if you attack because the chicken bone pointed towards the Death card, then your opponent will never see that one coming.

This only applies to situations where there are multiple valid ways or timings to proceed and augury can help you to randomly pick one. In other cases, augury might commit you to pointless or even disastrous decisions. Consider this example from the Anabasis (this is quite late in the book where the Greek army had already reached the Hellenized parts of modern northwestern Turkey):

Thereupon the generals sacrificed, in the presence of the Arcadian seer, Arexion; for Silanus the Ambraciot had chartered a vessel at Heraclea and made his escape ere this. Sacrificing with a view to departure, the victims proved unfavourable to them. Accordingly they waited that day. Certain people were bold enough to say that Xenophon, out of his desire to colonise the place, had persuaded the seer to say that the victims were unfavourable to departure. Consequently he proclaimed by herald next morning that any one who liked should be present at the sacrifice; or if he were a seer he was bidden to be present and help to inspect the victims. Then he sacrificed, and there were numbers present; but though the sacrifice on the question of departure was repeated as many as three times, the victims were persistently unfavourable. Thereat the soldiers were in high dudgeon, for the provisions they had brought with them had reached the lowest ebb, and there was no market to be had.

This scene also happened while at the exact midway point between two Greek cities in the territory of a hostile Anatolian tribe. A little while later a scouting party is attacked and almost wiped out by hostile cavalry that had time to arrive in the time the army sat around idle. It's only after the supply of sacrificial animals runs out and oxen pulling the wagons have to be used instead that finally the signs are favourable.

For me it is hard to believe that people were so stupid for such a long time and wasted time and resources doing it just for fun.

So sacrificing food and other resources to gods that there is no evidence for is not wasted time and resources that has been done for millenniums? All of the superstitions that people use to have that where disproved by science in one form another makes them valid again, because they were practiced for longer than it has been disproved.

There is a difference to say that torture doesn't work as interrogation tool compared to informing your enemy of your callousness so they fear you. I never claimed that torture was totally useless, I only claimed that it usefulness was limited for the innocent and the well motivated trained individual! But torture as a tool to strike fear in your enemy it might be effective.

So sacrificing food and other resources to gods that there is no evidence for is not wasted time and resources that has been done for millenniums? All of the superstitions that people use to have that where disproved by science in one form another makes them valid again, because they were practiced for longer than it has been disproved.

They very clearly were not useless. Such rituals granted legitimacy to kings, united the people for whom they were performed, and often gave those people the "why" they needed in order to suffer through the current "how." It doesn't matter that gods are not actually eating the food. If these rituals had truly been stupid and pointless they would have quickly died out and been replaced by something that wasn't.

Other people in this thread are making comments about the Drug War and other failed government programs. Similarly, there is a vast bureaucratic behemoth that benefits from the Drug War continuing. Whole areas of law with specialized lawyers, myriad government task forces and agencies, lots of police work to be done, lots of political points to be scored by being "tough on drugs." The Drug War is a waste of resources if you only measure it's efficacy at keeping drugs out of the hands of Americans. But as a self-licking ice cream cone it's a highly effective.

Similarly, there is a vast bureaucratic behemoth that benefits from the Drug War continuing. Whole areas of law with specialized lawyers, myriad government task forces and agencies, lots of police work to be done, lots of political points to be scored by being "tough on drugs." The Drug War is a waste of resources if you only measure it's efficacy at keeping drugs out of the hands of Americans. But as a self-licking ice cream cone it's a highly effective.

This is the point I'm partly trying to make with the cancellation. Beneath the surface is that the "war on terror" is that the "establishment" (I have no better word for it) doesn't have an incentive for telling the story of the "redemption". So there critique of that the creator isn't the right skin color to tell the story of these people trying to reform themselves is not called out by the "establishment media" as bullshit because it would be against the lucrative paymasters interest to tell a different story of terrorists as misguided human beings.

But it's also fairly effective at its core job if you consider how much more available drugs would be without any kind of war on them.

They very clearly were not useless.

See, I would've said that they very clearly were useless. So I guess the moral for both of us is: it's not actually very clear in either direction.

Religious ceremonies did have strong positive effects. It’s much easiest to control a civilization if the people believe you are a sun god. Even non religious civs built monuments etc.

Yes if some traditions have practical benefits it doesn't mean that all do. There are things done within companies that are superfluous that nobody knows why they are done, yet they are ingrained in the company culture that nobody dares to remove them. So why wouldn't that be in cultures that are much older? Not everything superfluous is removed from company culture and therefore it is likely that superfluous rituals stays in civilizational cultures that are usually much older!

There are Goodhart's law problems with historical torture. Regardless of its usefulness at extracting information, torture has always been excellent at extracting confessions. So any organization rewarded based on confessed criminals/spies/traitors caught will find torture very effective, regardless of how little it actually serves their purported goal.

That would be evidence that humans achieve something by torture. However, that something is not necessarily the exact information that is needed.

In pre-industrial Western countries, use of torture was often doctrinal to obtain not information, but confessions of heresy for the sake of the soul of the guilty. It was quite popular and quite widely applied! Then many death penalties also involved torture, because, uh, reasons? Whatever the reason was, it wasn't just 18th century French, the Romans also had reasons for torturous punishments (ditto for Hammurabi).

I wouldn't simply shrug off the possibility that yes, humans quite like torturing and killing other humans for "fun", and rationalize it. It likely has some reason, maybe something to do with warfare and establishing a domination hierarchy (but which is not necessarily the same reason humans say to themselves).

Speaking of military intelligence, I thought the oldest and most reliable way (even today) to obtain enemy's secrets is to pay agents with money and luxuries. Or that is what Sun Tzu suggests.

The enemy’s spies who have come to spy on us must be sought out,760 tempted with bribes, led away and comfortably housed.761 Thus they will become converted spies and available for our service.

It is through the information brought by the converted spy that we are able to acquire and employ local and inward spies.762

It is owing to his information, again, that we can cause the doomed spy to carry false tidings to the enemy.763

Lastly, it is by his information that the surviving spy can be used on appointed occasions.764

The end and aim of spying in all its five varieties is knowledge of the enemy;765 and this knowledge can only be derived, in the first instance, from the converted spy.766 Hence it is essential that the converted spy be treated with the utmost liberality.

Art of War, Ch 13, Giles Translation

The ball was moved from "torturing people for information" to "torturing random people for random facts."

We can decide "we will not torture even though it works." That is a principle.

"We do not torture it does not work anyway" is a Just World Fallacy.

First, torture including torture as part of military intelligence gathering as well as counterinsurgency was used for thousands of years probably in every war humans fought.

And here is the rub. The argument the anti-torture crowd are making is not "Torture is useless for all purposes." It is "Statements made under torture are unusually unreliable, and therefore interrogation under torture does not produce actionable intelligence." The premise has been a principle of English evidence law since time immemorial (the first explicit documentation that torture evidence is never admissible in English courts is as late as the 1460's, but Fortescue implies that the rule was old in his day), and the conclusion follows from it as night follows day.

The famous medieval civil and ecclesiastical torturers did not use torture to extract intelligence - they used it to extract confessions (usually true ones, as is the case with all corrupt policing, but frequently false ones) - because this worked in Roman-law inspired systems including Canon Law everywhere and Civil Law in most of Continental Europe.

In wartime, we don't have as much visibility because military law isn't a thing until modern bureaucratic states. We do know that medieval knights liked to "get medieval" on defeated peasants and townsfolk, but this doesn't look like torture for intelligence gathering - based on my knowledge it is a combination of sadistic revenge and torture as a terror-weapon to deter future rebellions. "Getting medieval" on knightly POWs was prohibited by the rules of Chivalry (which doesn't mean that it didn't happen, of course, but it does mean that it was not seen as a usual incident of warfare).

When military law does become a thing, the first written prohibition of torturing POWs appears to be included in the 1863 Lieber Code (issued by Abraham Lincoln to govern Union troops in the Civil War - again the Lieber code states that it is formalising a rule that has existed for a long time. The Lieber Code formed the basis of the 1907 Hague Convention which was the first international treaty prohibiting torture in wartime. The Hague Convention was agreed by military leaders who all agreed that aggressive war was legal and sometimes ethical, and from the records of the debates leading up to the Convention we know that they would not have banned torture if they thought it had military utility.

The reason for this is obvious. Telling someone in a position to inflict pain on you truth they don't want to hear is a bad idea (just like speaking truth to power in any other context), and we all know this viscerally. The only way to make the torture stop is to work out what the torturer wants to hear, and tell them that. So the only truth you can extract under torture is the truth you already know. In theory you could develop a technique of interrogation under torture where you "calibrated" the victim's response by asking questions you did know the answer to and punishing incorrect answers before switching to the information you actually wanted. In practice, nobody has done this, and the people who have the expertise required to do it are unanimous that you would be better off offering a hot meal and a cigarette in exchange for sincere co-operation.

The most famous example of systematic use of torture for intelligence gathering in a counterinsurgency was the French in Algeria. They lost that one. The most recent example was the waterboarding of KSM and a small number of other high-value Al-Quaeda captives at CIA black sites. Eventually KSM realised that what he needed to say to stop the torture was that Saddam Hussein was helping him. Obviously, that was believed stat by the Bush administration. They lost that one too.

North Vietnamese, during the Vietnam war, also famously tortured American PoWs, yet they won their civil war.

You provide a link to an example of an American PoW who was tortured into doing propaganda broadcasts for the North Vietnamese (John McCain was another). This is a minor variation on torturing someone to give a false confession. You do not provide examples of American PoWs tortured into giving up actionable intelligence, because there is no evidence that it happened. This is unsurprising - NATO doctrine on intelligence investigations is that a sufficiently large percentage of PoWs will give up the goods for a hot meal and a cigarette that you have to assume anything a PoW knows is compromised and plan accordingly, so we would not expect to see evidence either way.

You attacked US torture programme, merely by the result of the war, without proving that the programme was ineffective. It thus seems fair to defend the North Vietnamese torture by only showing that they won, not proving that it helped.

In any case, in both cases whether actionable information was obtained, is probably classified.

Fine, a CIA operative was kidnapped, soon after undercover agents that he knew were killed.

Thanks. Someone who has been tortured to the point where

Buckley was close to a gibbering wretch. His words were often incoherent; he slobbered and drooled and, most unnerving of all, he would suddenly scream in terror, his eyes rolling helplessly and his body shaking.

is obviously limited in the value of the intel they can provide, but getting them to name names worked for Hezbollah. I genuinely don't know how Hezbollah avoided the problem of continuing to get useless names after the victim has run out of useful ones - this was a major problem for the US in Afghanistan, to the point where the CIA torturing Al Qaeda captives to name names appears to have ended up being a net negative.

In any case, in both cases whether actionable information was obtained, is probably classified.

Unusually, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence declassified a summary of their report into the CIA torture programme, coming to the conclusion that

The CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.

and providing an unclassified overview of the detailed evidence present in the full, classified report. The CIA's internal report into the torture programme (the "Panetta Review") apparently comes to the same conclusion.

The argument the anti-torture crowd are making is not "Torture is useless for all purposes."

That is the exact argument I reliably hear from them. Bringing up that some torture gets useful intelligence generates a lot of hostility and denial.

(EDIT I got called a "torture apologist" for saying that some torture gets useful intelligence by this very person, so, yep, this conversation went exactly the way I thought it would.)

The anti-torture movement has been colonized nearly completely by people opposed to Bush's GWOT and they want him to be both stupid and evil.

Is it controversial that Bush was both stupid and evil?

President George W. Bush didn't even know of the existence of the Sunni and Shia sects in Iraq until 3 months before the invasion, after the decision had been made to attack and they were well into the war-justification phase. Only when they brought in an Iraqi dissident did he tell Bush about it. This is from Galbraith's book "The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End". What kind of idiot doesn't read a brief summary of the country he's planning to invade? The whole war was conducted in an incredibly reckless and ill-planned way, with predictably catastrophic consequences for the region. Bush didn't know about the Shia majority in Iraq, how this would obviously give the Iranians a way to influence the country if he demolished the state apparatus.

Let's not forget the Axis of Evil speech where he threatened pre-emptive strikes against Iran and North Korea. Iran hated Saddam and the Taliban, Bush lumped them all together in the anti-US camp. He effectively told Iran 'make our Iraq experience as disastrous as possible or you're the next target'. North Korea nuclearized and went on to cause more headaches for Washington.

Let's not forget the Axis of Evil speech...

I remember bien-pensants comparing the Axis of Evil speech to Reagan's Evil Empire speech at the time, and thinking they were even stupider than Bush. The point about the Evil Empire speech was that the Soviet Union was both evil and an empire, but there was a legitimate argument about whether the leader of the free world shouting this from the rooftops was a good idea with nukes involved. The point about the Axis of Evil speech was that Iran, Iraq and North Korea were not an axis, and thinking they were should disqualify you from national security policymaking roles. But to treat both speeches primarily as examples of provocative American jingoism is to indicate that you don't care about the truth values of statements.

I'm not saying Bush's use of torture was stupid - it was a logical plan to achieve his goals. He wanted to start a (second) land war in Asia, and in order to sell it to the normally-isolationist Republican base he needed false intelligence that Iraq was helping Al-Quaeda. Torturing KSM was a good way of getting it. (The bad info on WMD had a different target audience, including people like me, and was in any case probably an honest mistake). Nobody is questioning that torture is useful when what you want is a false confession, or even a true one.

I am saying that the intelligence gained by torturing KSM was net-negative for the US, because the most consequential thing we got out of him was false.

I am also saying that John Fortescue writing in the 1460's, Abraham Lincoln issuing executive orders in 1863, and the negotiators of the 1907 Hague Conventions were not motivated by their attitude to the foreign policy of George W Bush.

I'm not saying Bush's use of torture was stupid

I am not saying it was, either. But I am saying the anti-torture movement did not want to have an uncomfortable discussion that we were leaving a useful tool on the table by declining to torture, because "it does not work anyway."

But life is not a morality play. Sometimes making the morally right decision leaves you worse off. That is why it is called the moral decision. If you pay nothing for your principles they are not principles.

Nobody is questioning that torture is useful when what you want is a false confession, or even a true one

See, now, this is even worse. Torture can absolutely get confirmable information out of a person. That is extremely useful in a conflict. Pretending it is just useful for false confessions to manufacture a war is refusing to face reality.

An anti-torture movement that is built the idea that torture does not work is built on a foundation of lies and will crumble to dust in the first strong wind.

An anti-torture movement that says "yes torture works, but we refuse to do it, because those are our principles" is healthy in the long term.

Telling someone in a position to inflict pain on you truth they don't want to hear is a bad idea (just like speaking truth to power in any other context), and we all know this viscerally. The only way to make the torture stop is to work out what the torturer wants to hear, and tell them that. So the only truth you can extract under torture is the truth you already know.

You're confusing torture used to extract a confession with torture used to extract military intelligence. It is possible to have those things entangled in reality, like, the tortured person lies about the location of the bomb because he doesn't know the real location and wants the torture to stop. But if you just want the data and don't have preferences regarding its content other than you get it, and you have a relatively short feedback loop, I don't see any reason for why it won't work.

Torturing someone with an aim to learn that Saddam Hussein gave them money is pointless. Torturing someone to betray their contacts or sabotage targets or whatever useful non-loaded intelligence can work.

You're confusing torture used to extract a confession with torture used to extract military intelligence. It is possible to have those things entangled in reality, like, the tortured person lies about the location of the bomb because he doesn't know the real location and wants the torture to stop.

I am not confusing them. I am explicitly making the claim that this is a distinction without a difference, because torture to extract confessions works so well that even when you think you are trying to extract actionable intelligence the person you are torturing is actually thinking "what does he want me to confess to?" I make this argument purely from authority because I have no experience torturing people, and I sincerely hope that nobody else on the thread does either. But an argument from authority beats a hunch. Note that the required condition for torture to be a good idea is not "You occasionally get true intel you would not have got by being nice" - it is "In expectation, torture for intel produces a net benefit compared to not doing it"

I don't see any reason for why it won't work.

The authors of the medieval law books, the 1863 Lieber Code, the 1907 Hague Conventions, and the US Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogations do. And they have a lot more experience than you.

There have been a number of cases where evil regimes set up permanent corps of professional torturers with doctrine, field manuals, line and staff hierarchies etc. (The CIA torture programme post 9-11 was not one of them - one of the surprises in the Senate report that shocked even the pro-torture Republicans on the committee is just how unprofessional it was) The most famous are the Spanish Inquisition and the Soviet GPU/NKVD/KGB. In all these cases, the aim was to extract confessions. The nearest thing to a corps of professional torturers focussed on intelligence gathering was French military intelligence during the Algerian war of independence. The torturers destroyed their records so we don't know how well it worked, but we do know that the French lost the war.

because torture to extract confessions works so well that even when you think you are trying to extract actionable intelligence the person you are torturing is actually thinking "what does he want me to confess to?"

Yeah, but he knows that if he confesses to the wrong thing, he will be tortured more. So there is a failure mode where he really doesn't know the information that you're interested in and so makes something up, but if you're aware of this failure mode and the subject does in fact have the information you're interested in, you probably can extract it reliably.

Consider for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Reinhard_Heydrich#Investigation_and_manhunt. When Nazis did it, it worked.

The most famous are the Spanish Inquisition and the Soviet GPU/NKVD/KGB. In all these cases, the aim was to extract confessions.

Are you saying that an office dedicated to extracting intelligence tends to transform to extracting confessions? I'm not following, what's the evidence for is this supposed to be?

The nearest thing to a corps of professional torturers focussed on intelligence gathering was French military intelligence during the Algerian war of independence. The torturers destroyed their records so we don't know how well it worked, but we do know that the French lost the war.

As far as I understand from reading Wikipedia, the French military won the war against the Algerians decisively, then lost the war against the French journalists, in a very similar fashion to how the US military utterly destroyed the Viet Cong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tet_Offensive), then lost the Vietnam war to the US journalists.

If you want to torture someone for information, ask them a mix of questions you know the answer to, and questions you don't. If they lie about one of the questions you know the answer to, torture them. Since they don't know which questions you know the answer to, they'll give you good answers for both sets of questions.

You should start with questions you know the answer to and only gradually throw in ones you don't.

Also, this doesn't apply to information that can be verified, like torturing someone to get their password.

I think perhaps the US is just bad at torture and there’s a good chance we tortured a lot of the wrong people.

used for thousands of years in every war humans fought

Sure...but that doesn’t make it good at getting intelligence.

We’ve fought wars for stupid reasons, and we’ve committed atrocities out of carelessness or vitriol. Was sacking Constantinople particularly rational? Compared to waging war, torture is an afterthought, convenient and perhaps gratifying. I don’t think its historical prevalence is due to efficiency.

Was sacking Constantinople particularly rational?

Yes, sacking Constantinople was an extremely good idea.

How about you try being a 95 year old blind man in charge of the excommunicated Venetian troops that just stormed the walls and then you say to them "Actually I've changed my mind, you're NOT allowed to plunder".

How well do you think that's going to end for you?

Oh, I'm sure the commanders were picking the best of bad options. It still would have been better if they had any plausible way to keep the city intact!

Likewise, I'd prefer not to have committed any prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib, even though the perpetrators seemed to be having fun. (obviously NSFW)

Exactly, if it is bad, it must not work. See also this hilarious twitter thread in which Richard Dawkins tries to explain that eugenics would work:

https://twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/1228943686953664512

The way that militaries compartmentalization information is evidence in favor of torture working, or at least that they believe it can work.

Not that torture doesn't work, but enough information leaks through 'spies' or 'telling a friend' or 'posting it on reddit' that it'd happen either way

Sam Harris's recent podcast episode with the filmmaker has some insight into this. One of the groups against the film, CAGE, maintains that zero of the people imprisoned in Guantanamo are guilty of any kind of terrorism. The film is a problem for that narrative as some of the featured residents of Jihad Rehab talk openly about their past terrorist activities.

The filmmaker is an interesting character. She has a level of empathy that would be saintly if she were a person of faith. At one point she recounts how she saw six people she knew beheaded and disemboweled in Colombia. Yet she doesn't really hold it against the killers. A teenage girl was a member of the group that carried out the killings, and the filmmaker talks about how not long after she was conversing about teenage girl problems, and that this girl only joined the group because her family members had been killed by an opposing group.

and that this girl only joined the group because her family members had been killed by an opposing group.

"Only"?

Josep Borrell (EU's top diplomat) summarizes EU's reasons for internationalism: EU is a garden, the rest of the world is a jungle

Mr Borrell said in his speech on Thursday: "Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that humankind has been able to build - the three things together.

"The rest of the world [is] not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden. The gardeners should take care of it, but they will not protect the garden by building walls. A nice small garden surrounded by high walls in order to prevent the jungle from coming in is not going to be a solution. Because the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough in order to protect the garden.

"The gardeners have to go to the jungle. Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means."

This really comes off as a Kinsey gaffe: Borrell is getting reactions of shock simply for elucidating what has been the actual motive for various EU policies for a long time. It's not really about humanitarianism, it's about maintaining EU's soft power and stature so as to keep "the jungle" sufficiently away from Europe in subtle, behind-the-scenes ways - ie. avoiding having to just push the refugees back to the sea, or shooting them at the border.

I summarized earlier how I view EU's migration policies - often portrayed as "open borders" or "EU working to fill Europe with Africans and Muslims" or whatever - like this, and I think it fits in with Borrell's comments:

EU is not taking in an "endless number of migrants from Africa and the Middle East". The total number of migrants to EU in 2020 was 1,9 million, a small trickle compared to the total EU population. Out of this, ca 600 00 are asylum seekers. If EU was actually intent on ushering in an "endless number of migrants", this would be an incredibly weak effort, considering how many Africans and Middle Easterns are actually willing to move; it would also be strange for EU to run a whole agency (and keep giving it more and more funds, and turn a blind eye to its migrant pushbacks) to coordinate ways to keep unauthorized migrants, mainly from these areas, out.

EU countries do, indeed, wish to utilize migration to save the welfare state, but when it comes to first residence permits EU issues for employment/education purposes, far and away the biggest group, already in 2021, were the Ukrainians. That indicates who EU wants to work, currently, and it's not hard to imagine that there's a number of Eurocrats currently seeing the Ukrainian refugee flows to Europe as a major boon, presenting an employable and uncontroversial constituency for further work. EU does, at times, weakly try to get Eastern European countries to take in more refugees, mainly as a form of "burden sharing" to take the load off the Western countries, but as one can see from their demographics, these efforts are not really an example of "cajoling, threatening and twisting arms", since that sort of a thing would presumably actually get results.

EU migration policy can mostly be understood through three mandates: getting a modicum of labor-based migration (often from other, non-EU European countries, though that's a diminishing category) and then trying to balance the quest to maintain some sort of a de jure refugee/asylum system, since that is an important part of EU's self-image/external image as the bulwark of the international system and its underlying human rights treaties, and the quest to de facto ensure there's not too many asylum seekers and refugees, let alone illegal immigrants, since that would be destabilizing. The push/pull created by the conflict of the last two mandates then makes the whole immigration policy rather an unwieldy contraption, not really something that most mainstream EU forces are willing to discuss.

"Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works.

Do these people really think so, or was it a conscious lie ?

What do you mean?

Few things work in Europe. Let's name them: public order, generally okayish. Not too much serious crime. Infrastructure is mostly fine, iirc, with not much 'debt'. Businesses don't get stolen by corrupt officials too often.

But energy policies - the bulwark of prosperity, are absolute shambles. Shale gas is not exploited at all. Nuclear is barely supported.

Renewables are still pushed despite the abysmal track record.

Germany faces deindustrialisation; Americans are talking about inviting in German companies. I'm thinking nothing will come out of that, as the black-worshipping managerial classes are unlikely to start rubber stamping tens of thousands of green cards for German immigrants and families. Can you imagine the racial equity optics of that?

Educational policies are .. risible and a failure. Few now remember the 'Lisbon strategy' which was supposed to make EU the world's most competitive economy.

Youth unemployment is high in many places, particularly southern half.

EU, as a bloc, is mostly unable to deport criminal migrants with no right of being here. The consequence is worst hit places like Italy are leaning very much right.

I don't understand what ECB is doing, but a lot of people whom I follow and who made good predictions re: markets are outraged at the incompetence.

The point is not all of that, the point is that compared to the great majority of the world - say, the countries to the south of Europe - Europe works quite well, and is at any rate considerably wealthier than most of the world. Is this really a statement one could disagree with?

"Things aren't yet as bad as in the rest if the world" or "we have money" is not the same statement as "everything works". When things are working, I expect them to at least be sustainable, and hopefully to be improving. The EU is not giving that impression.

If you go by the blank slate HBD ignorant view, sure. EU beats Africa and those parts of the 3rd world that have inherently disadvantaged populations.

Does EU beat e.g. east Asian countries or other places with similarly capable human capital?

No. It doesn't.

Does EU beat e.g. east Asian countries or other places with similarly capable human capital?

Are those nations the "jungle" in this metaphor?

Can you name a place where you think things do work? Put another way -- a place where that isn't struggling with some form of large scale, systemic coordination problems?

This isn't meant as a counter to your post. I'm seeking clarification about your pov.

Most places have problems, because as soon as we humans can half-ass something, we move onto the next thing.

However, there are many places that have at least the basics right. E.g. Japan/Korea have less insane energy policies.

They also did not outsource their heavy industries to the revanchist communist dictatorship that's worryingly also at the moment the most populous nations.

They aren't engaged in crazy, innumerate attempts at a green 'transition'. Or importing large numbers of people known to be a drain on state finances.

I wouldn't put Japan in the non-insane energy policy column. Have you seen their coal and LNG imports in the last decade? Their air quality must be getting awful from burning all that coal, and they're really paying the trade balance toll.

They went back to nuclear (stopped the phaseout) and want to build more.

Really? I'd have imagined that, being the country that suffered Fukushima, they'd have more strongly moved away from nuclear. Granted, Fukushima's worst effects had little to do with actual radiation leakage, but it was definitely a strong shock.

More comments

Many European countries have also stopped their phaseouts and/or are planning to build more.

More comments

But isn't this picking one set of trade offs for another?

Japan has been wrestling with economic stagnation, where more and more younger people have to bust their asses even more for an uncertain future. Many of them are choosing to completely drop out of society altogether. They're also struggling with low birth rates to the point of working on robotic elderly aides. Also, high suicide rates.

I'm sure if I did the research, I'd find a lot of trouble going on in Korea, too.

That said, I would take all the places we're talking about (USA, most of EU, Japan, Korea, and a few others) as having their shit together enough to be classified as "working." Sure, they're all facing wicked problems, but on the whole, they still exhibit behaviors that signal they are capable of playing the larger game.

USA works in most respects, having a healthy well-rounded economy, resource independence and food/energy/everything security, affordability of goods and housing, and protection of rights (especially negative rights, which are poorly comprehended by European legal systems), retaining its unrivaled attractiveness for world-class talent and the virtuous cycle leading it to hegemony. Days when the EU could be seriously discussed as a peer partner/competitor are far behind us, now it's just a poor brain-drained province.

Taiwan works in most respects, having a humane culture (by East Asian standards, and very much unlike the Mainland), functional democracy and some capacity to innovate in governance, good affordable healthcare, and an economy that benefits from virtual monopoly on the most valuable industry near the top of the global supply dependency graph.

Israel works in nearly every respect, especially considering geopolitical, natural resource etc. challenges it faces; it's truly jarring how its dubious liberal creds are emphasized by lobbyists and sycophants, yet nobody among policymakers cares about its most unlikely successes, unthinkable in the EU (chiefly, the ability to harmonize the economy of a first-tier developed country with tradition and reproduction). Pretty much all bad things about their system are either inherent to the ethnostate model (which is non-negotiable) or not very concerning to locals (bad visual design, accelerating shift towards right-wing ideology).

Those are, I think, the most successful and well-run countries on the planet, insofar as we leave aside European anomalies like Liechtenstein and other memes.

Within the EU, there are also more and less well-run «real» states, e.g. Finnish policymaking is, from what I can tell, generally devoid of bizarre unforced errors or even causes for culture war outrage (@Stefferi is that your handiwork?), but they're not that impressive or globally significant.

(@Stefferi is that your handiwork?)

Shh...

I think that one of the things here is that when people discuss Europe's problems, it is often some sort of a melange of individual country problems. Ie. the biggest issues with energy, including the disdain for nuclear, overreliance on non-European fossil fuels etc. do not affect all EU countries equally; not every country is Germany. EU, as an institution, just recently, classified nuclear as a green energy in its taxonomy.

Indeed. It is the inverse of what you'll find on blue-leaning fora, where Europe is a paradise with Mediterranean food and Dutch cycling culture and Nordic welfare states everywhere and the like. People who turn away from their blue peers reverse such stupidity, and see Europe as an amalgamated hell in much the same way.

Taiwan ... benefits from virtual monopoly on the most valuable industry near the top of the global supply dependency graph.

ASML (which is Dutch) is upstream of TSMC on the dependency graph, and has a stronger monopoly. Right now nobody else is even trying to compete in EUV, and ASML have about an 80% market share in new wet DUV installations (the previous generation of photolithography tech).

ASML is valued like 50% less (it shouldn't be, though); in terms of revenue, TSMC is closer to Apple than to ASML. Also TSMC is only the frontrunner of an entire pleiad of electronic businesses (admittedly more replaceable) – from Asus to Foxconn to Mediatek to Synology, they control many world-class enterprises.

Europeans have a few more extremely successful and entrenched legacy companies of that sort (Zeiss etc.), and of course they're strong in other fields (e.g. pharmaceuticals), but AFAIK no European nation has such an impressively high-tech export structure, pound for pound.

Plus Europeans have other problems. The Dutch, for instance, have imported roughly a quarter of their current population, which the Taiwanese would not even consider.

The Dutch, for instance, have imported roughly a quarter of their current population, which the Taiwanese would not even consider

Hi, imported Dutch here. There are quite a lot of foreigners here for sure (and many aren't very desirable), but these numbers that people throw around are very disingenuous. It typically includes anyone with any parentage from "abroad". Have a Belgian mom? German expat? Fully assimilated and very productive n-th generation Surinamese immigrant? Congratulations you are padding the foreigner statistics. Numbers look especially grim since most locals I know don't think twice about dating a culturally equivalent "foreigner".

Ah, I see. I classify the EU much like Thiel does, as in, that it's a place where the dominant spirit is "indeterminate, negative." I don't have high hopes for its future, even in the near term (10-20 years), but I would still argue that if you're looking for a sleepy little hamlet, the EU is full of them--you get your healthcare and basic security, and you're free to live out your life in the style of Mann's Hans Castorp.

America letting tens of thousands of white Germans move here is far more likely than you think- US immigration laws are relatively loose and bringing in legal high skilled immigration from Europe to open a factory here is probably the least controversial thing the government could do- after all, those Germans would code as blue tribers by default to American managerialists.

the least controversial thing the government

I don't think it'd come to that, however, no, inviting in 100k+ euros would not go without major controversy.

Eh, there would be a few people opposed, but to the red tribe they would code as bringing high-paying industrial jobs and to the blue tribe as fellow blues.

bringing high-paying industrial jobs

Most of the companies that make Germany an industrial powerhouse are making specialist stuff that's not easy to replicate.

Anything that could have been easily outsourced was outsourced to China.

You need knowledge of the processes and the skilled people.

Just buying the companies would get you.. nothing, really, without an arduous multi-year process of bringing over the employees and learning from them.

US immigration laws are relatively loose

People sometimes mention this here, but every time I (as a "highly skilled" European with education and very in demand skills) consider maybe checking employment in the US, it looks basically impossible. Or at least extremely cumbersome. Am I missing something?

It is very easy under certain circumstances, but those circumstances have almost nothing to do with your qualifications to be a productive citizen in American society. Immigrating to the US via qualifications can be almost impossible unfortunately.

Feels like it. My partner is Latina. She has a TON of friends whose immigration path is to take a trip with a tourist visa, start working illegally or stay with family, somehow find a way to legally stay after a while. I feel like people I know that successfully emigrated to the USA are either already really well off in their native countries, or quite desperate and gonna take any chance. Meanwhile I just don’t have the means or don’t feel such a hard obligation.

But energy policies - the bulwark of prosperity, are absolute shambles. Shale gas is not exploited at all. Nuclear is barely supported.

This isn't a statement that things don't work in the EU. It is a not-yet-fulfilled prediction that they will cease to work in the future - to be precise a prediction that they will cease to work in the future in wartime, due to enemy action. As of October 2022, heat and electricity are still available at the push of a button in the EU, and are marginally more reliable than in the US.

Seriously, the key marker of a first world country is that a lot of things essential to civilised life just work in much that same way that MacOS just worked at a time when Windoze didn't. The EU absolutely passes this test - that is what Borrell is talking about. As you point out, basic public safety just works in Europe to a greater extent than the US (or at least is perceived to by both Americans and Europeans - I am aware that US crime is lower than most people think it is). So does access to healthcare. So does urban transport. On the flip side, the only thing I can think of that just works in America but not Europe is clothes driers (and I lived and worked in America for three months - I have some experience). All these things also work in rich Asian countries, but Borrell is almost certainly forgetting they exist, as most European and American pundits do when engaging in civilisational blowhardery.

The US is an extremely successful society, but how that manifests is that the middle class have moar - bigger houses, bigger cars, larger portion sizes etc. It isn't that the US delivers a first world experience that other medium-high income countries can't.

This isn't a statement that things don't work in the EU.

Have you seen energy prices?????

As of October 2022, heat and electricity are still available at the push of a button

Money printing going on to prevent a giant price shock. (I'm assuming they can't sell bonds on that atm, so central bank just does its thing).

Have you seen energy prices?????

Which rose a lot for a while (people generally have yearly contracts, so this didn't actually affect that many people directly) and now the nanny state stepped in in most places to protect the average consumer. I am not saying we don't face catastrophe soon, but the comment above is right that these predictions did not yet happen.

black-worshipping managerial classes

Really?

Who are these people, and why do you think they hold the reins on immigration? And if they’re as partisan as you seem to think, they must be doing a poor job given the amount of Hispanic and Asian immigration.

German immigration is already highly educated, comparable to other first world countries. Setting your fear of PMC racism aside, it sure seems like skilled German labor is reasonably popular.

skilled German labor is reasonably popular.

What's the yearly number? 500? 1000 ?

4400 to 4900. Somewhere in the middle between African countries. I don’t have the tools on hand to normalize by population, though.

What would you consider a high number?

A milion per year? At that rate, the US could import the entire German manufacturing sector and families of the employees in fifteen years.

That part was probably typical EU bureaucrat/politician detachment from reality. The description of the policies strike me as more deliberately dishonest.

I can confirm that this is an actually common belief in the well-off professional classes of the Northern European countries (obviously excluding the UK). At least among the people with whom I have talked about such topics.

The total number of migrants to EU in 2020 was 1,9 million, a small trickle compared to the total EU population.

The EU has population of 447 million and in 2021 the were 4.06 million births here. Having third of the population growth from immigration is definitely not a small "trickle". Even USA that had peak immigration year of 1907 with 1.3 million legal immigrants, there were around 2.7 million people born during that year. So the immigration was also around one third of the population growth.

It also does not look like small trickle in certain attractive countries, regions and cities. And we are talking about comparison with peak immigration in US, which then had efforts of bringing immigration down during the following decades. Which is not how it seems now in EU - especially with speeches like these which paint it it all as nonissue.

I simply used the number to demonstrate that it's smaller an amount that there would be if EU was really intent on letting everyone who wants to immigrate do so.

So white man's burden 2.0 is basically his solution. Problem is that it's a damned if you do / damned if you don't situation. EU help can easily be used as a scapegoat for local failures by local elites, indeed it often is.

Moreover, the idea that the EU has ever gotten serious on border enforcement is laughable. If the people who run the show in Europe cannot deal with the problem, then the electorate will find someone who will. Recent elections in Italy and Sweden demonstrate that very clearly.

"Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that humankind has been able to build - the three things together.

As an American I'll just say that is certainly one opinion. I suppose as a EU bureaucrat he has to say that.

I see a lot of people get indicted and convincted for simple words, stuff that would be obviously and uncontroversally protected speech in the US. That bothers me.

There are other things. Banning homeschooling, banning yawaras, etc.

It's a formal garden. Any plant out of place or even slightly irregular must be removed.

The Beautiful People are in Charge Just Like Everywhere Else.

I don't have anything terribly insightful to say about any of this. It's just another entry in the ongoing process of what I've mentally termed internet gentrification or nerd cultural appropriation. I attempt not to get bent out of shape over these things, lest I tip over into the "ugh, normies..." nerd-hipster trope but this article resonated with me. I miss the pre-Dice CmdrTaco-era of Slashdot (fuck Beta!). I hate influencer culture and every YouTube video telling me to "like and subscribe". There used to be a commenter on SSC whose entire schtick was something like "Everything is a popularity contest and all is lost" and he's starting to make sense to me. Moloch will have his sacrifices.

I appreciated the article, but it is a little funny watching Millennials reinvent the Eternal September.

One thing that the essay suggested to my mind is that maybe I should think more about how the Internet and academia have co-evolved in the last ~50 years. The geekiness of American universities was eroded first by athletics, but later--and much more powerfully--by credential inflation in the job market. The essentially "democratizing" process of expanding college from perhaps 5% of the population to nearly 50% has had similar effects in higher education as democratizing the Internet has had in online spaces, with popularity crowding out capability as the primary measure of success. Increasing competition for "top spots" without proportionally diversifying the availability and character of what gets recognized as a "top spot" has injected all sorts of crab-bucket distortions into both systems. But the Internet's development arc has moved much more quickly; if the analogy holds, then watching how the Internet develops from here may be informative as to the future of academia. Which I do not find encouraging.

Guess I will just have to hope the analogy is bad...

Yeah, I thought about that as soon as I hit comment. Everything old is new again.

I'm increasingly finding my solace by avoiding the Internet, except for very curated spaces like this place.

The geekiness of American universities was eroded first by athletics, but later--and much more powerfully--by credential inflation in the job market.

Universities have always been jock and job factories. It was probably worse a long time ago than today, when favoritism was more rampant in the Ivy League (such as gentile favoritism). Despite democratization, top colleges are more exclusive and competitive than ever. The student body today is probably smarter and more meritocratic, some affirmative action notwithstanding, today for top colleges compared to 50 years ago. More college demand means more colleges. The overly competitive job market tracks increased competitiveness seen everywhere in life.

Making video the primary form of communication has ruined the internet.

I think centralization also ruined the internet (to go back to the days of forums where we didn't have constant culture wars over who controlled the four or five social media sites...).

What a coincidence: video probably requires the most centralization and capital.

Not exactly: copyright compliant video does. Bittorrent was wiping the floor with mainstream services for a long time. Now they're about on par.

Even putting aside ease of use (I know people here will object but some people really don't want to do the minimum and would just rather use Youtube/Netflix/whoever) there are forms of media that aren't best suited to Bittorrent.

For example: obscure stuff was often a problem due to the need for seeders. I imagine a lot of stuff (e.g. low-view, long runtime streams) would also have issues lasting.

I dunno, I'm still happily using it, and obscure media are a lot easier to find there.

Yeah I was going to say torrenting is my first choice for obscure shit these days. You might not get it immediately due to seeding, but at least it's there.

The centralization trend was already present, hell Usenet was a central forum before people used the term forum (compared to contemporary BBSs.)

Twitter is an obvious exception to this. Same for Substack, Reddit, Facebook, and blogs. It's not that video has taken over the internet , but video has consumed the attention of those who are receptive to it.

Twitter is an obvious exception to this.

No it really is not. Twitter is, if anything, patient zero.

TikTok is poised to overtake Twitter as the main wellspring of culture. Facebook and Reddit both let you post videos. Substack, tumblr, and other blogs are an increasingly irrelevant fraction.

Since when was Twitter a wellspring of culture at all, let alone the main one? Twitter is 90% people saying stupid shit and getting into Internet drama.

I think that a lot of the people who live and breathe internet drama forget just how niche it is.

Internet drama that we all subsequently talk about and/or elect president.

That's not at all incompatible though. The other 10% could be influential, and that's what you'd expect - 90% of everything is shit, elite theory, whatever

In order for TikTok to "overtake Twitter as the main wellspring of culture". Twitter would first have to be the main wellspring of culture, which I find difficult to believe. While Intellectually I recognize they must exist, I don't know if I've ever actually met a real live human being that uses it regularly.

You definitely have, see the mau chart.

I suspect lotsa lotsa botsa there. No way almost every fourth American (excluding kids too young to know what Twitter is) is an active twitter user.

"MAU" is an industry term that means something like 'people who have used the service in some way in the past month', like, if you have an account and went to twitter.com at some point. It doesn't mean 'number of people who have a twitter account and actively post'.

From twitter's most recent financial report

We define mDAU as people, organizations, or other accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given daythrough twitter.com, Twitter applications that are able to show ads, or paid Twitter products, including subscriptions. Average mDAU for a period represents thenumber of mDAU on each day of such period divided by the number of days for such period.

(mDAU is monetizable daily active user, not monthly active user - "In Q2 2019, Twitter discontinued publishing MAU figures in favor of figures regarding monetizable daily active users (mDAU)")

Worldwide - "Average monetizable daily active usage (mDAU) was 217 million for the three months ended December 31, 2021, an increase of 13% year over year.". In the US - ". In the three months endedDecember 31, 2021, we had 38 million average mDAU in the United States".

For the monthly active user number - afaict, all that requires is 1) have a twitter account and 2) be at 'twitter.com' sometime in the past month. It makes sense that 1/4 of americans do that.

Oddly, this means I'm not counted as a mDAU, despite spending at least an hour on twitter.com today. And most of that was w/o adblock.

Anyway even if for the sake of argument it's 1/4 that, that's still 1/16th of all americans, meaning HIynka has interacted with many of them

I don't think most of those are bots.

We define mDAU as people, organizations, or other accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given daythrough twitter.com,

That includes every bot that logs in at least once a day, and pro-rated count of every bot that logs in less frequently.

  1. have a twitter account and 2) be at 'twitter.com' sometime in the past month

Once per month would only give 1/30: "number of mDAU on each day of such period divided by the number of days". If you go once a months, that's 1/30 on average mDAU. And no, even that doesn't make any sense for 1/4 of Americans. 1/4 of people living in a posh neighborhood of San Francisco, maybe, but that's not everybody in America.

I do not see any mention of the filtering of the data to exclude bots, and I imagine they have zero incentive to do this - most casual readers would assume it's "number of people using Twitter", and for the litigious types there is actual definition that covers their asses. I think this number however is grossly inflated and actual people constitute maybe 1/10, maybe even 1/100 of that number. Maybe even less, who knows.

More comments

I don't believe that chart proves as much as you think it does. If we assume for the sake of argument that every single one of those 70 million north American accounts corresponds to a real live flesh and blood person. IE that the number of bots, corporate PR accounts, and users operating multiple accounts on Twitter is 0. That works out to a little under 1 in 5 people, or around 18% of the combined population of the US and Canada. In contrast creationists are estimated to be around 30% of the population. How many creationists do you know?

Of course thing is that while the number of bots on Twitter is in dispute, we know for a fact that that a substantial portion of Twitter accounts are official corporate PR, and that a lot of people have multiple accounts so that estimate of 1 in 5 people or 18% of the population is almost certainly overgenerous.

I was specifically rebutting the " I don't know if I've ever actually met a real live human being that uses it regularly." claim. Obviously a MAU chart proves nothing about 'wellspring of culture', as the creationist example, or something like 'red tribe', 'christians', 'reality tv fans', 'old people' - all of which have large populations yet aren't culturally dominant - nicely shows.

and I'm pointing out that it's not much of a rebuttal, for instance that 18% of the population (if we're feeling overgenerous) might be concentrated in a specific geographic area. Likewise "cultural dominance" is a difficult measure. IE Gamergate is really big deal amongst a certain subset of the extremely online left, and has been characterized by a number of different users here as "the most culturally significant event of the last two decades" but I'd be surprised if more than 10% of the general population knew or cared anything about it. Publishers sleeping with and/or buying off reviewers oh you sweet summer child this has been the norm since the 19th century.

Longreads and effort-writing is not dead yet, but I do hate when people assume I want to watch video of them essentially reading a text. Unless there's content that is not representable in a textual form, I don't want to see your video.

Podcasts are fine, OTOH, I can listen to them while driving or mowing the lawn or doing some other stuff that leaves higher brain functions free.

Marie Le Conte, indie music blogger and BuzzFeed News’ media and politics correspondent, who was named one of Portland’s Rising Stars in 2016, and Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2018...

Takes off problem glasses, stares directly into mirror: "who could have done this to the internet?! Where did all these clout-obsessed influencers come from?! And why is it all so tiresome now I'm no longer an Under 30?"

Yeah it's quite ironic seeing her complain about pretty people taking over the internet... then looking at a picture of her and realizing she's decently attractive. It's attention-seeking all the way down.

Was compelled to check her background because indie music hipsters were the very first people I met on the internet who got into modern cancelling campaigns over IRL clout, using it to get jobs at... Places like buzzfeed.

yeah she embodies that which she opposes

and realizing she's decently attractive

This is disproportionately the case.

I'll add that absolutely ugly people are also disproportionately underrepresented in terms of making arguments like this/being taken seriously.

The idea that the internet has been taken over by any one group or people is wrong. The internet is way bigger than ever. Even the smallest or most esoteric of niches are finding large audiences and making decent money. There are plenty of YouTube channels that do not have influencers. Social media made the internet bigger and maybe angrier, but there is still tons of non-social media stuff.

There are still tons of people making stuff who aren't currently influencers, and most of them never will be. But increasingly it feels like everyone would be if they could be, if given the opportunity most would jump on being invited to panels and give Ted talks and monetize their podcast and whatever else.

What it's most comparable to is punditry. I've known very few people who can get the talking head gig on Ms/CNBC, CNN, fox, oann whatever who turn it down. It eats interesting newsmen and journalists and even authors!

My rule of thumb is that no one can resist getting paid for their thoughts.

And even if I avoid monetized content, the possibility changes how people work.

My rule of thumb is that no one can resist getting paid for their thoughts.

I think there is a serious survivorship/availability bias involved in this assumption as 100% of the people you know of who get paid for their thoughts are definitionally the the one's who could not resist.

Hence why it's a jokey heuristic rather than a real theory of human behavior, similar to the theory that you should assume all professional athletes do steroids because so many who have gotten popped for steroids were previously on record as "clean" and lauded in the press as too honorable or too concerned with their health to take them.^1

When content as homegrown as Jomboy and RiverAveBlues Yankees analysis can get brought onto CBS and YES, when writings as honest as SlateStarCodex analysis and as off-kilter as KulakRevolt Reddit rants are providing livings to their authors, when podcasts as niche as the #1 Bachelor recap podcast hosted by a male interracial best friend duo and the MoneyBall of The Bachelor hosted by a former shockjock bro-lit author are all selling merch I think we've passed the point where anyone gets into the game without knowing that it can happen to them. And even if it doesn't ever happen to most of them, it impacts how they think and write and act. These are all example I've followed in real time, from hobby to vocation. It could happen to you! I've even had my own joke-y conspiracy theories get picked up by the media and become brief micro-trends in a particular subculture. And to be honest, I see the appeal, so maybe in another life I'd start churning out more and more unhinged tinfoil hat theories in the hope of bringing in more attention.

I don't subscribe to it as a complete model, but The Beef-Only Internet Model of Rao is kind of a relevant reference. The knights and bishops and rooks and queens of the great internet battles duke it out, and their loyal pawns join the fighting, but every pawn secretly thinks that he's just one clever comment in support of his knight or reply-guy-ing the other knight from getting a battlefield promotion. Which really happens! You really can go from nobody on Twitter to having a career, getting interviewed on legacy media, getting invited to the good parties. And as we have no effective way of determining morality in advance, we have to assume that everyone is out there trying to get attention.

^1 Rick Reilly on what to do when Barry Bonds passes Hank Aaron

• Send rabbits' feet, four-leaf clovers and two-headed pennies to Alex Rodriguez and Ken Griffey Jr., letting them know that you're pulling for them to pass Bonds like he's a hitchhiker in an orange jumpsuit

It still boggles my mind that you can find YouTube videos on how to rice out your vim editor's status line that have 30,000 views.

The internet is so big that your weirdest subculture will still have hundreds of thousands of people who are into it who can find each other.

I personally wouldn't take views as a solid metric, there's probably bot inflation in a lot of places.

There used to be a commenter on SSC whose entire schtick was something like "Everything is a popularity contest and all is lost" and he's starting to make sense to me. Moloch will have his sacrifices.

You can still follow that guy on Tumblr if you like.

Yep. BrazenAutomaton's not the only good tumblr ratsphere culture warrior, but he remains a frustratingly good if depressive read.

I'm going to stay with my usual schtick and say actually everything is fine. The weird corners of the internet are still there. In many cases they're doing better than ever, because the nerdy adolescents have been nerdy adults with software engineering jobs and six figure incomes to throw at their esoteric hobbies. Yeah, the normies invaded the internet, but the normies didn't get online so they could join SomethingAwful or 4Chan or your sci-fi versus debate forum with twenty users. They joined the internet to use Facebook. The only thing that is truly lost is the sense of exclusivity - the feeling that the internet as a whole was a preserve from normie influence.

I think Le Conte's problem (cf. @MeinNameistBernd) is that she has chosen a life path that demands she be engaged with the most toxic parts of the normie web.

I've actually been meaning to write a response along those lines to that "dead internet" post that was going around. Most of the internet really is a stale wasteland infested by bots, zombies, and normies, but the poster upset about /l/ being gone just hasn't found his way to where all the interesting people went.

Problem is it's a hard post to write in enough detail about esoteric corners of the internet without revealing enough to make some people break their scouters and run for the hyperbolic time chamber.

I mean its not hard. A significant portion of the interesting internet is now on Discord (and private discords), another chunk is on (niche subreddits on) reddit.

More esoteric than that? Certain forums that you cant easily find with a google search or web-scrape off the top of my head. More than that and I cannot say.

On a decent chunk of the popular internet - discord, reddit, twitter - many involved posts no photos of themselves at all, so her complaint about 'beautiful people' is bizzare. (also, why is she including photos of her in the article??)

Is 'toxic' really a useful descriptor here? Her issue seems to be with ... normie culture as a whole, the fact that beautiful people are on instagram, etc. And while that does suck, is it 'toxic'?

There's plenty of surviving online spaces populated by ugly people. She should check out Tumblr.

Or reddit, or discord... outside the porn subs, few in any position of e-"power" or e-"influence" are 'beautiful'. (Also, almost nobody outside the porn subs posts their faces at all)

Conversely, there are some internet subcommunities whose members are both quite conventionally attractive (due to working out, eating well, etc) and also incredibly edgy, niche, and 'online'.

At the age of 12, in 2003, Le Conte and a group of friends played a contest to “find the weirdest porn on the internet.” Today, the results of such a search would be unpublishable

On the 12 + porn bit, controversial claim: it doesn't actually do that much, she wasn't really injured by it. men were much more violent with women (on average), not less, in pre-modern life, and choking-violent-sex-bad thing seems like a strange male-power-bad/early-feminist thing.

As for 'unpublishable' - no? there are plenty of places that'll "publish" that, including substack, or random subreddits. Reddit still hosts all sorts of weird porn. It's not going in the NYT, but why does that matter?

I’m never going to have TikTok on my phone because I tried, and I hate that it doesn’t let you search or watch what you want. It is fully algorithm-driven. It’s incredibly frustrating

tiktok actually does have a search function, and you can also browse by hashtags? No idea what that means. Tiktok is designed for the algorithm-driven mode, and it's more effective for most people's use cases, but it isn't even that different from 'searching or watching what you want' - it's still the same content, and most people click on the cat videos or half-naked women either way.

In charge of what? I have no idea how most of the authors I read look like, and frankly couldn't care less. I never, in my life, had a virtual encounter with a creature called "instagram influencer" (let alone a meatspace one), and I imagine this cherry will remain un-popped for a long time, maybe forever. I am probably not that special, so I assume there are millions of people like me. Of course, there are also millions people unlike me. But I am not sure what "instagram influencers" are in charge of? The instagram influencing market? Whatever it is, let them have it, I would never know it and would never care. Why bother?

I was reflecting on how western politicians today use terms and words that have double meaning with the media and the electorate, with one meaning the one that people usually understand, while the other is academia-made and is often a true example of Motte-and-Bailey.

For example, terms like minority;

Minority for the common man (and the electorate!) means a group that is inferior in numbers in comparison to a majority. So, if you survey with a poll the opinion of the people, it appears that the majority (!) is in favour of helping minorities (because it is the right thing to do!).

Meanwhile, the de facto academic term for minority is "a group that is ontologically oppressed, and so it needs social justice in order to destroy the oppressive hierarchy of the majority"

This has as a consequence;

  • That politicians and their class of activists have the second definition in their minds, and do policies that follow it.

  • Meanwhile you (an individual in a debate, a party, a media organization) cannot dispute the effect and the reasoning of the former set of policies because, if you do, everyone and your mom assume that you are against the minorities as affirmed by the common sense definition, and so you are a political extremist!

This manipulation of language at a core level create a situation where extremists do policies that are extreme and unpopular while being elevated as sympathetic moderates, and the moderates that try to oppose them for whatever reasons are labeled as political extremists.

I have no idea if this kind of method to do politics was common in the pre- internet or pre-neoliberal era or whatever, but it creates an insurmountable situation where, unless the people "begin to notice", it is impossible to oppose the manipulators, starting from the point that the manipulators have probably the majority of media and capital behind them.

Isn't this just the dog whistle theory, but applied to leftists?

I do not think so, because dog whistle means saying some words while you are trying to send an hidden message to your group

Here is more hiding the true meaning of common words in order to have the power to pursue radical policies.

Dog-whistling is supposed to hide the true meaning from political opponents and the media, whereas (if I'm getting this right) what @Armin is discussing is meant to hide the true meaning from the electorate, including one's own voters.

You wrote better the conclusion I was trying to reach.

Similar in only very rough terms, dog whistles are euphemisms, meanwhile, the woke left has its own special vocabulary that while sharing the words with ordinary English doesn't share the meanings.

E.g. 'ally' in critical theory means something different than in ordinary English.

It seems to me the difference in your definitions are

  1. The academics include women in the "minority" group.

  2. The electorate includes non-oppressed minorities in the "minority" group.

Fine, but then you claim that the electorate is in favor of helping minorities "because it is the right thing to do". But, by your own definition, the only differences are the above.

So, your complaint is... activists want to help women and don't care about helping non-oppressed minorities. This does not strike me as a significant disagreement with the electorate.

"Don't care about helping" means different things for the two groups. For the activists, they are doing things at the expense of the groups they don't help, while the electorate just wants to stay neutral about the groups they don't help. And "help" itself means different things for the two groups; to the electorate it's closer to "don't discriminate, and maybe help the ones who are poor", while to the activists it includes all sorts of things the electorate wouldn't think of.

the de facto academic term for minority is "a group that is ontologically oppressed, and so it needs social justice in order to destroy the oppressive hierarchy of the majority"

...Politicians and their class of activists have the second definition in their minds, and do policies that follow it.

Isn’t this assuming the conclusion?

There is room for plausible deniability between common, practical definitions and academic ones. Politicians are capable of exploiting this for tactical advantage. I’m sure they do so...occasionally.

I scanned a few Democrat sites to see if I could find any examples.

  • Beto O’Rourke: no dice, even on the LGBTQ or voting rights or immigration pages.

  • Adam Schiff only uses “disadvantaged communities” or “people of color” when laying out his priorities.

  • Bennie Thompson doesn’t use “minority” either.

I don’t think this sort of word game is as popular as you suspect. If you have examples, I’d be happy to discuss whether or not they really meant the strong form.

"People of color" still includes Asians, who the left often wants to exclude.

As a further piece of evidence:

As a light-skinned East Asian man, I have never been randomly stopped by the police, and no doorman has ever assumed I was the delivery boy. None of the serious indignities and disadvantages of being a minority in America has been inflicted on me, yet I have accrued all the benefits of being a person of color, particularly when it comes to my career.

…

[the white people in my life don’t realize I am, if not white, then about as close to it as one can get.]

(It is telling that the author of that piece reveals to being of mixed East Asian/white heritage but is still handwringing about all this.)

The entire issue was ostensibly about “Asian-Americans”, but my East Asian girlfriend got was not very happy about the coverage (she said outright that she thinks it is discriminatory from the progressive writers, that if it were South Asians or black or any other race/ethnicity, they wouldn’t have done such a dreadful job and had such awful art). While I am agnostic to those particular claims, I am inclined to agree that it represents ; most of the pieces don’t deserve to be taken seriously. Nevertheless it is evidence of attempting to equate “Asian” (esp. East Asian) with being white-adjacent, whatever that means.

I recall at my job hearing a Sri Lankan colleague remark casually about how “we three ethnic people” (in a group) have culture and whatnot, while white people didn’t; I remarked that the rest of the group there were not white, but East Asian; she replied kind of dismissively that “you know what I mean, you know, brown people”. I think that is as clear a sort of equivocation of East Asian with white as I can find, and that it can be said casually to other people in a work environment tells me much.

Or take this piece of ridiculousness, such that it is.

Or take this piece of ridiculousness, such that it is.

Oh, my.

The Japanese derided the Chinese as "yellow". As Michael Keevak points out, Japan saw itself on par with Western powers. Its imperialism mirrored the imperialism of white colonisers. In the West, the Japanese were still seen as "coloured people", Keevak says, but "maybe not as yellow as the Chinese." For the past three centuries, power and whiteness have been synonymous. From the British Empire to the American century, white nations have exported violence, committed genocide, stolen land and made it all legal. China, like so many other non-white nations, has felt the sting of white imperialism.

Uh... is the claim here that the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere was a white supremacist project?

the Chinese Communist Party itself mirrors whiteness. The irony is Xi has also become what he opposes. He is a Han nationalist — his idea of Chinese power is ethnic Han superiority — persecuting non-Han, non-white people in his own country. If whiteness is power, Xi Jinping is its champion. The continuation of white power, in darker skin.

And that the CCP and Xi are white supremacist? Like, is the idea that anyone who's not a helpless victim and who has agency in the world is white?

Uh... is the claim here that the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere was a white supremacist project?

Not even just that, but:

For the past three centuries, power and whiteness have been synonymous.

So the Manchu domination of the Han, quite explicit in the Qing, is also white supremacy.

And that the CCP and Xi are white supremacist? Like, is the idea that anyone who's not a helpless victim and who has agency in the world is white?

I assume that is what they are getting at.

Is this some sort of AUKUS plan to poke the Chinese Tiger? Publish journalistic equivalents of this meme aimed at Xi?

This was before racialised thinking was popularised in the 18th century.

It was then that scientists started to divide the world up into groupings of colour. Colour denoted civilisation. At the top were white Europeans, at the bottom black people and all others, graded on a sliding scale.

This idea that white people invented the concept of racism and racial supremacy and that they did so relatively recently is an idea that's absolutely ridiculous. I find it very difficult to believe that tribalism based on appearance is something that just became entrenched in the 18th century and that one race is responsible for - race is a fairly strong visual indicator of cultural similarity and in-group status, and would've been an even more useful heuristic in the past when international travel was more difficult and people couldn't so freely move from one place to another.

And not to mention, of course, the obviously tautological nature of this:

For the past three centuries, power and whiteness have been synonymous. From the British Empire to the American century, white nations have exported violence, committed genocide, stolen land and made it all legal.

If whiteness is power, Xi Jinping is its champion. The continuation of white power, in darker skin.

If you define every act of imperialism and racism as an act of "whiteness" regardless of if the people who are doing it are actually white or not, then of course over any time frame power and whiteness are going to be synonymous since you have by definition made it so. There is no circumstance where it won't be whiteness.

This idea that white people invented the concept of racism and racial supremacy and that they did so relatively recently is an idea that's absolutely ridiculous. I find it very difficult to believe that tribalism based on appearance is something that just became entrenched in the 18th century and that one race is responsible for - race is a fairly strong visual indicator of cultural similarity and in-group status, and would've been an even more useful heuristic in the past when international travel was more difficult and people couldn't so freely move from one place to another.

I don't know whether phenotype-based tribalism was a thing before 18th-century Western racism (I suspect it was in China, at least), but it wasn't the main thing. Our very word for a tribal membership test (shibboleth) is a reminder that the OT Jews (who were a tribe defined by common genetic descent) nevertheless used diction and not appearance as the practical sorting algorithm. There is an ongoing argument about how many "Aethiopians" (actual Sub-Saharan Black Africans, as opposed to "Africans" who were whitish North Africans) there were in the Roman Empire, but the number was a lot greater than zero, and they were seen as just as Roman as anyone else who ate garum and aspired to own and wear a toga.

In the Middle Ages in Europe, religion-based tribalism trumped phenotype-based tribalism. When the Crusaders established contact with Christian Ethiopia, they didn't think "Black and heretic - must be outgroup". They thought they had found the lost kingdom of Prester John and immediately sought an alliance.

I don't know whether phenotype-based tribalism was a thing before 18th-century Western racism (I suspect it was in China, at least), but it wasn't the main thing.

There is always a mix of factors influencing how tribal lines get drawn. However, I think there's evidence that phenotype-based tribalism is very old, challenging the idea that race thinking developed in the modern West. And it's not just China that did this, there's other pre-modern societies where racial prejudices are evident.

For example, the medieval Arabs had a phenotypic race classification, and seemed to have quite a negative view of African blacks (having enslaved a lot of them).

"Many medieval Arabic texts categorise people phenotypically into three types of skin-colour: white (al-bīḍān, 'the white ones' associated particularly with Arabs), red (associated particularly with Romans, or Europeans more generally), and black (al-sūdān 'the black ones', associated particularly with darker complexioned Africans)."

"[E]thnocentric prejudice towards black people is widely evident among medieval Arabs, for a variety of reasons. ... [I]n the Islamic period, dark-skinned Africans in the Arabian Peninsula and elsewhere in Caliphate tended to be slaves. For example, al-Ṭabarī estimated that in Southern Basra alone there were around 15,000 around the 870s.[6]: 122  This situation encouraged Arabs to view themselves as superior to Black people, not least as a mechanism for Arabs to justify the enslavement of others.[6]: 98–101  For example, Ibn Buṭlān composed a noted, stereotyping description of the qualities of slaves of different races, which is relatively positive about Nubians, but otherwise particularly negative about the characteristics of Black people.[7]: 108, 122–23  These negative characteristics included the idea that black men were sexually voracious; thus the most recurrent stereotype of black people in the Thousand and One Nights is the black male slave fornicating with a white woman,[12] while the Egyptian historian al-Abshibi (d. 1446) wrote that "[i]t is said that when the [black] slave is sated, he fornicates, when he is hungry, he steals."[13] Allegedly, such was his distrust of Black people, Abu Muslim al-Khurasani massacred four thousand of his own Black soldiers after completing the Abbasid Revolution.[6]: 122  Abuse of phenotypical features associated with Black African people is found even in the poems composed by al-Mutanabbī (d. 965) in both praise and criticism of the Black vizier of Egypt Abū al-Misk Kāfur (d. 968), which variously seek either to excuse or to lambast Kāfur for his colour and heritage."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Arab_attitudes_to_Black_people

Of course when it comes to things that far back, there's often a problem with simple lack of documentation. And there's also a lack of drive or motivation to assess historical racism perpetrated by non-Westerners (because it can't be slotted into the woke worldview, and because they believe acknowledging this would shift a portion of the blame off the people they would like to scapegoat for the social ills they denounce). But the evidence that we do have seems to suggest that phenotypic tribalism was very much a thing long before the time that the social constructionists believe white Westerners to have "created" or "popularised" racism.

the medieval Arabs seemed to have quite a negative view of African blacks

The 9th and 10th century attitudes you quote weren't just a Dark Ages fluke, either. Look at Ibn Khaldun, 14th century. Wikipedia still calls him "one of the greatest social scientists of the Middle Ages", but Wikiquote reveals that some of his social "science" was ... not so great.

From your link:

"The only people who accept slavery are the Negroes, owing to their low degree of humanity and proximity to the animal stage. Other persons who accept the status of slave do so as a means of attaining high rank, or power, or wealth, as is the case with the Mameluke Turks in the East and with those Franks and Galicians who enter the service of the state [in Spain]."

And this from an Arab who lived long before the 18th century.

BIPOC to the rescue.

BIPOC still includes "people of color" at the end, therefore literally including Asians.

But no. It is exclusively just the black and indigenous ones. So the not-Asian POCs.

BIPOC is generally known to be an acronym for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Given that People of Color covers the 1st 2 anyway, it seems like there's an implicit "other" before "People," and it serves as a rank ordering.

That's not my understanding. Black and Indigenous People of Color. Asians need not apply.

According to set theory, whether you say "the integers" or "58, 59, and the integers", you get literally the exact same set. According to Grice's Maxims, though, only in the latter case do 57 and 113 need to make sure they know their place. Keeping such distinctions overtly deniable feels like just an attempt to placate literalists, like reiterating "All animals are equal" before clarifying that "some animals are more equal than others"?

Well, that's the whole point of the original post. The public understands the phrase to mean its literal definition, but academics are manipulating language so that they can intend one thing and have their own supporters take it to mean something else.

Unless you're trying to get into Harvard...

Minority for the common man (and the electorate!) means a group that is inferior in numbers in comparison to a majority.

to the electorate / common man, 'minority' absolutely has a connotation of 'oppressed group that people are racist or bigoted against'


What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats