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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36185 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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The big story today: Xi Jinping secures historic third term as leader of China

The Communist Party leader broke with the traditional two-term limit, extending his authoritarian rule over the world’s second-largest economy.

HONG KONG — Xi Jinping secured a historic third term as the leader of China on Sunday, cementing his status as the country’s most powerful figure in decades and extending his authoritarian rule over the world’s second-largest economy.

Xi’s third five-year term became official when he was the first to walk out onstage at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, where a twice-a-decade congress of the ruling Chinese Communist Party wrapped up Saturday. He was followed in descending order of rank by the six other members of the new Politburo Standing Committee, China’s top leadership body.

Chinese stocks are falling hard on this news, down 10% or more. Is the prelude to something worse, or will China recover?

Of course, the media has its priorities right:

In his speech opening the party congress on Oct. 16, Xi said he remained “committed to the fundamental national policy of gender equality.” But only 11 of the new Central Committee’s 205 members are women, and there is not a single woman in the new 24-member Politburo. (The previous Politburo’s only female member, Sun Chunlan, retired at 72.)

The second largest economy in the world may be in economic and political crisis, but are there enough women in power?

Dictators always follow the same pattern – start with breaking the two-term rule and then break the country.

Winnie-the-Panda getting a third term is not news, although it is an important event. The composition of the new PSC may be - Western media is saying that it is all "hard-liners" and this is unexpected. I am not an expert, so the only thing I can say is that the promotion of Li Qiang (who was responsible for the Shanghai lockdowns) looks like bad news, but I thought it was expected.

The ejection of Hu Jintao arguably is news. I don't know what it means though.

We can't tell how much of the market drop is reaction to the political news because there was a lousy economic data release at roughly the same time. FWIW the FT blames the economic data.

Winnie-the-Panda

What’s with this? We wouldn’t call Trump “The Orange Cheeto-in-Chief” here, just bizarre

If Donald Trump was aggressively censoring media comparing him to an Orange Cheeto, I would be calling him The Orange Cheeto-in-Chief at every safe opportunity.

A lot of places don't have a two term rule or anything similar, leading to prime ministers who sit 10-15 years and there are no issues. In short, I'm not really understanding the doom and gloom in your post.

If the country has a term limit, and the leader breaks it, it's very likely they're going to move to be a permanent dictator. And most countries without term limits have weaker executives, where most of the power is in how the party votes in parliament, not in the executive themselves.

Saying that countries have weaker executives is irrelevant to the fact that there are people in power who sit there for years.

My country, generally considered one of the best in the world when it comes to democracy stuff, had a president who sat in office for 20 years. An office that had the executive power to refuse to sign laws into effect, which the president used more than once. During the same time the prime minister had held office for 12 years as such. You can play pretend and say that because the country is run by a parliament filled with political parties there is some wiggle room for... whatever it is you think is not 'dictatorship', but in reality, the prime minster was also the guy that had executive control over the biggest party in the country and was very buddy buddy with another party leader of a very big party which meant they had de facto complete control over the country. Having a weaker executive was irrelevant. These guys could do what they want, which they did.

I don't see why the label of 'dictator' is in any way relevant nor, still, do I understand the doom and gloom of your post or the implied optimism of alternatives.

Ironically the PRC has been the opposite. From 1986 until 2018 the office of the president which is considered largely ceremonial had an official two-term limit while general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party does not have a formal term limit. Wikipedia seems to think that the general secretary post had an informal two-term limit after Mao (they mention it on Xi's bio page) in-spite of Jiang Zemin holding the post three times as well. Jiang might be categorized as dictatorial but that's going to be heavily influenced by Falun Gong aligned sources.

This is why we should abolish term limits if we want to protect America from dictators.

All those places have serious issues.

Netherlands, a famous hotbed of authoritarianism and dictators, currently has its longing serving prime minister in history surpassing 3 American president terms.

I don't know even his name. Apparently he is of no significance because the system is stronger than the leader. Very timely tweet from Tabeb in this regard: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1584882478287757312

Stop complaining about the turnover in Britain. You don't seem to get it. It is much healthier and more stable than Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other nations that have NO turnover. The virtue of the system is that it does not depend on a single person

Most places have serious issues.

I don't subscribe to the view that every country is basically the same. Serious issues in poor countries are much much worse than those in rich countries.

I agree completely. Where I don't agree is that if we just had voting booths and term limits, those problems would be in any meaningful way affected.

Why wouldn't stocks already have priced in this event that everyone was certain would happen? Were investors assigning some high probability to Xi suddenly dying?

Chinese tech stocks fell 10%, apparently on the basis that Xi hadn't appointed more pro-market people. Hong Kong stocks are down 6% but Shanghai is only down 2%. There's more foreign money in Hong Kong obviously, so I suspect that's what's going on. I don't know what people were expecting, it's not like there was much chance that Xi would step down. It's pretty obvious that the new Cold War is on and the first proxy wars have begun, it's only that nobody prestigious enough has bothered to name it.

I was also curious - thought it was pretty clear Xi would stay and he had even hinted towards it many times over the last few years. Your comment makes much more sense to me.

Chinese stocks are falling hard on this news, down 10% or more.

I'm not as informed on China as I ought to be, but wasn't this long priced in? It seems bizarre to me that market actors with enough skin in the game to impact stock prices expected anything else. Am I off base here?

There were things priced in, such as Xi Jinping becoming the General Secretary of CCP. However there were many other subtler signals that were genuinely surprising and shocking, one of them being Hu Jintao unceremonious removal from the CCP congress by Xi's bodyguard. Also the fact that no people from Shanghai clique or The Communist Youth clique received any significant positions inside the new administration.

The overall perception is that Xi absolutely cemented his position, removed anybody who opposed him in any - even superficial way - and most importantly he removed all economic reformers who wanted more open economy. Really disastrous news for Chinese people and The World at large in my mind.

I think you're on point. However the idea that an autocratic regime would move to tighten it's own grip on power by removing possible rivals and locking out upstarts shouldn't be surprising in any real sense given all of modern history.

I can count on maybe one finger an example of an autocrat who willingly surrendered their authority and allowed transition of power away from themselves or their allies in the modern era. I can think of like a dozen that went the other way once the opportunity arose.

I guess there was some nonzero probability that Xi stepped down and/or would allow some reforms to occur, and the market finally gave up on those when they didn't manifest.

CCP has famously opaque structure, so it was not necessarily even about Xi "voluntarily stepping down" but maybe being forced by some players to share some power or tolerate some ideas he opposes. The power struggles inside Zhongnanhai would probably fill whole spy libraries, it is insane what is going on in there. If you follow China watchers you will see lengthy analysis of things like what can be the meaning if Xi having two cups of tea in front of him when everybody else has just one. So even if to the outsiders some things like order of seats or looks of congress members may seem innocuous, it is the only signal available given that things like "voting" are well known sham.

Also it has to be said that Xi is only seventh leader of CCP after Mao Zedong and since the reign of Deng Xiaoping the CCP established the system of collective leadership exactly to prevent one dictator to amass power similar to Mao. So in fact it happened in the past that even leaders with total political authority capable of implementing superauthoritarian ideas like one child policy were sharing the power and they were willing to hand the power over to the next chairman. In exchange they had certain level of safety, respect and comfort after they transfered the power. The result of this congress shows that collective leadership is a thing of the past.

Western PRC watchers and analysts in general didn't expect Xi to full sweep the standing comittee with loyalists, instead of allowing some (rival/CYL) reformists to stick around. They're now pricing in Xi/PRC going more autarkic than with a few reformers on board that sectors that had been targeted (big tech) will continue to be targeted), that zero-covid will stick around. Western MSM coverage of HK/SH crashing and foreign outflows overlooks that domestic strategic industries like defense increased. I think AVIC hit 10% daily limit. Just like how wages and employment in PRC hard tech and strategic sectors increased while soft / consumer tech tanked. The TLDR is Xi is going to keep boosting strategic indigenous industries, even if it means slapping others to free up talent and resources. Where "others" is frequently what's in western portfoliios.

Small Costs, Widely Distributed

Often when someone is making a policy argument, they will ignore the costs or downsides to their preferred policy. This is of course quite normal as part of persuasion and rhetoric, but I want to draw attention to a few examples of this where the arguer at least ought to make an attempt at neutrality.

  • Alcohol consumption: Public health officials look just at health outcomes, which are sometimes negative. But alcohol has clear benefits to the drinker (as /u/Difficult_Ad_3879 mentions). Even beyond the personal happiness derived from drinking, it is socially useful as a costly signal proving trustworthiness1. If a social group or an organization can use alcohol as a tool for establishing the trustworthiness of its members, it can reduce internal transaction costs since members don't have to monitor each other as much. This increases economic efficiency. How much I'm having a hard time finding evidence on; maybe because it's unpopular to be seen as an apologist for alchohol consumption.

  • Induced demand: Among urbanists and YIMBYs, the concept of induced demand is often used to argue against increased road capacity. If people just drive more when new roads are added, what's the point? As /u/freet0 notes, of course there is value in driving beyond just driving fast. You actually get places! The fact that people drive more when there are more roads indicates that there were places that weren't worth driving to before, but now they are. Those roads opened up access to useful places to go2.

  • Trans women are women: If some people experience pain because they're not considered to be in the social category they want to be in, what is the harm in everyone else agreeing that they are actually in that category? Why not consider trans women to be real women? This argument doesn't take into account the fact that words and categories are useful. In particular, they're useful to all the other people who are using those words and categories. For people who only want to date partners with whom they can reproduce, and for anyone who wants to predict others' behavior by knowing their biology, diluting the meaning of social categories and blurring their boundaries makes those categories less useful.

  • How suburban sprawl hurts the poor: This Vox article summarizes the sentiment that suburban sprawl is bad because it makes it harder for poor people to get around. And yet people continue to support suburban zoning restrictions in their voting choices. There is a cost that proponents of development and public transit (basically, of making it easy for poor people to get around) are missing though: poor people are bad (on average) to be around3. I'm not talking strictly about dry metrics like crime rate either; at a more basic level, the qualities that cause a person to be poor basically mean they don't produce as much value from their life as richer people do. As a consequence it's not as valuable to have such peope in one's community as it is to have more competent and value-producing people who tend to be richer. The zoning restrictions and bad public transit are just people expressing their preferences to be around people who are more worth being around.

  • Traffic safety and value of time: The discourse around traffic safety almost always ignores people's time and life value in the calculus. Where I live, the city has been building "road diets", where general traffic lanes are removed in favor of bike lanes and center turn lanes. This reduces collisions, especially with pedestrians, at the expense of making every single trip longer for everybody in a car. I did the math, and the reduction in trip times for my family's typical commute (2 minutes) is almost exactly the same as the expected loss in life-minutes from all the risk due to riding in a vehicle (1.46 deaths/100m miles, times ~5 miles, is 1.92 minutes). That estimate of vehicle risk is probably way off, though, since these are city streets at speeds where vehicle passengers are in no danger. So for my family we're losing expected life-years due to the road diet. Potentially even worse is the effect of car seats. Anyone who has had small kids in their life knows how much difficulty car seats add to the logistics of your life. They're gigantic (good luck having three kids if you have a sedan) and any time someone else could help carry a child somewhere in their car they have to have a car seat available on every leg. This actually figures into potential parents' choices and causes some people, on the margin, to not have a child. Someone did the math4, and the loss in children born due to the car seat requirement is about 140x times greater than the children's lives saved due to the extra safety.

One theme here is that the unmentioned costs of policy positions tend to be diffused across large numbers of people, while the benefits tend to be concentrated.

Another theme, maybe more important, is that opponents tend to not want to bring up the costs because they're socially undesirable things to talk about, even if they have significant real-world effects. A really strong theme here is that the unmentioned costs apply to higher-status people, while the benefits to the proposed changes apply to lower-status people. This applies to alcohol, trans recognition, and suburban sprawl (and maybe not induced traffic demand).

Notes:

I think this is a really insightful point you've made. And really, for a lot of these, it's not just about how and where the costs are distributed, but it's hard to convince some people that the costs are even real. It can be very very nebulous. For TWAW, how can you put an exact cost on the value of precise language and blurring barriers? I personally think the value is real and very high, but it's near impossible to prove. Especially because the people I'd need to convince are completely caught up in a framework that benefits immensely from language being not precise. I've had so many arguments with people over the years where I try to say how it is that wokeness for concepts like TWAW has negatively impacted my life and society, and it's so hard to even get the conversation rolling. It usually just ends up sounding like vague gesturing at conspiracies and minor inconveniences.

Excellent point in general, and I think strikes clearly at how the "just the numbers" approach to public policy will tend to only select for the preferred costs and benefits of what the person making the policy wants to select for.

I've got to nitpick though - I think you did the thing you're complaining about! (Although I may be misunderstanding, correct me if I am.)

The discourse around traffic safety almost always ignores people's time and life value in the calculus. Where I live, the city has been building "road diets", where general traffic lanes are removed in favor of bike lanes and center turn lanes. This reduces collisions, especially with pedestrians, at the expense of making every single trip longer for everybody in a car. I did the math, and the reduction in trip times for my family's typical commute (2 minutes) is almost exactly the same as the expected loss in life-minutes from all the risk due to riding in a vehicle (1.46 deaths/100m miles, times ~5 miles, is 1.92 minutes).

Sure, some people are losing time to the change in the roads, but aren't pedestrians and cyclists gaining improvements in both transit times and quality of life? How many people are more likely to take pedestrian or cycling options when those options are improved? Based on both data and anecdote, I would note that good cycling infrastructure induces demand for cycling and that cycling is way more enjoyable than driving when we're talking about short distances at low speeds. I understand the automotive commuter wanting to save those two minutes, but how many marginal cyclists are deterred by this one?

Of course, if I put numbers on that, I'm just doing the same faux-empirical approach in the opposite direction, only counting up the benefits of the thing that I like. Before long, this becomes pretty recursive and we have to admit that this isn't about the numbers, but about a preference for living in a certain sort of place. Yes, I just want things to be better for cyclists even if it's worse for motorists, and no, I'm not going to be sold on the opposite by any degree of numbers-crunching that demonstrates how my bike lane is costing drivers upwards of two minutes per day.

I've got to nitpick though - I think you did the thing you're complaining about! (Although I may be misunderstanding, correct me if I am.)

Yes, you're right - I was trying to highlight the costs that are usually missed; the pedestrian and cyclist lives saved is the front-and-center reason for road diets in the first place so I didn't want to waste space mentioning them.

I would note that good cycling infrastructure induces demand for cycling and that cycling is way more enjoyable than driving when we're talking about short distances at low speeds.

I actually ride a bike to work and my commute is the best part of my day. It's my kids that have to sit in the car those extra two minutes, and their commute is too far to make by bike so they can't take advantage of the extra cycling infrastructure.

The two road diets along my kids' commute are both examples where the city didn't seem to do a cost/benefit analysis and ended up with poor choices for where to do the road diet. In both cases there is already a dedicated bike path nearby that the vast majority of cyclists use to pass through that neighborhood. The new bike lanes only help cyclists that are heading somewhere local. There's good enough access from the dedicated trails that you only need to go one or two blocks on streets, so this doesn't even help much.

Before long, this becomes pretty recursive and we have to admit that this isn't about the numbers, but about a preference for living in a certain sort of place.

There are ways to put numbers on preferences like this. Metrics like walkability scores are a good start. I think what would fall out of a comprehensive adding up of numbers is that clusters of walkability/bikeability with nice local environments (sidewalk trees, street cafes, parks, etc.) and high-ish density are good, and easy travel between such clusters is good (including travel in personal cars because of their convenience). The road diets I mentioned were built in an area that isn't clearly in either category - there is a lot of vehicular through traffic but there are also businesses along the streets, kind of like a low-speed stroad. A better solution (from me as an arm-chair city planner) would have been to push the business district to the adjacent blocks and add any helpful cycling infrastructure there, and leave the through street with more traffic lanes. The through street cannot be moved because of geography. This solution would make for even nicer cycling (no loud traffic passing) and it would reduce trip times for people who have to drive. Cyclists traveling outside the neighborhood already use the aforementioned separate bike path so that's not a concern.

(This is the point at which someone could object that "push the business district to adjacent blocks" has costs for people living nearby which have to be weighed against these other things. Yes, and those should be accounted for too).

I think at least part of the reason for the city to build road diets like this is more of a moral stance against cars. The city is basically taxing driving, making it more unpleasant and time-wasting because the city does not want people driving personal cars. The opponents of bike lanes and road diets refer to this as a "war on cars" and I think there's truth to it. But it's okay to wage a war on car use if it's actually bad! To tell whether it's bad, though, you have to consider all the tradeoffs.

In 4 of your 5 examples (not TWAW, where the benefit is concentrated on trans women), both the benefits and the costs of the policy are small and distributed. The result is that in debates on most of these issues, normies end up ignoring diffuse costs and benefits and arguing purely from aesthetics.

Going through point by point:

  1. The pro-alcohol argument is about the small benefits to a large number of responsible drinkers. The anti-alcohol argument is about the ex ante small costs to a large number of potential victims of irresponsible drinkers (obviously ex post the cost to the people who are killed by drunk drivers are not small, but the traditional public choice argument for why diffuse costs are ignored works ex ante). Absent media amplification of rare negative events, the that-which-is-seen bias works in favour of the drinkers. Media amplification of drink-driving deaths creates a that-which-is-seen bias in favour of the prigs. For an example of how effective this amplification is, consider figure 5 in this report (the report is by a prig lobby group, but I am co. paring costs to costs so the bias shouldn't matter). According to the anti-alcohol lobby, <5% of the negative externalities of alcohol use in the UK are due to drink-driving. (Most of them are due to drunken crime, including domestic violence). But drink-driving takes up a lot more than 5% of the public debate.

  2. Road building is a typical example of a policy with somewhat concentrated benefits (to the people who use the new road, and to the politicians who cut the ribbon) and diffuse costs (to taxpayers) - the induced demand argument (which I agree is stupid in the way it is normally made, but there is a steelman which is worth taking seriously) is an argument that the concentrated benefits will be smaller than predicted.

  3. The benefit of keeping poors out of middle-class neighborhoods through snob zoning is diffuse, but the metro-area-level costs of not building enough housing when every neighborhood is snob zoned are even more diffuse - this is why the NIMBYs have been winning for 50+ years and only started losing when metro-level housing shortages got bad enough to affect the PMC.

  4. The point of a road diet is to benefit non-drivers at the expense of drivers. If the road diet is sane (and I am aware that sometimes insane road diets happen because people support them for aesthetic reasons rather than because any identifiable human being benefits), then both of these groups are actually quite concentrated. A good road diet increases the throughput of human beings going where they want to go because an inefficient use of street space is replaced by a more efficient one.

A good road diet increases the throughput of human beings going where they want to go because an inefficient use of street space is replaced by a more efficient one.

This is of course a functionally equivalent statement to "good policies have benefits that outweigh the harms". Yes, that's the definition. But that presumes the people who are making the policies are competent and well-meaning, and they never seem to be even one. I would expect a 'road diet' (especially when explicitly named so) to be done by politicians who are at best following a fad, at worst intending to hurt people they think are their enemies.

In the city where I live they banned bicycles out of the (old medieval) city center. Technically cars too, but already nobody drove there (who in their right mind would even try). But the American Democrats are hampering transport so we should also hamper transport, it's cargo cult blue-tribe-ism. To top it all of, official taxis can still go in. So the local hoity-toities can still be ferried to and from their subsidized cultural events in style. To their credit (?) I haven't seen much actual enforcement.

Can you provide some context on the bicycle ban? What is their stated reasoning? For example, I could understand such a ban based on a lack of space, because a mediaeval city centre probably has narrow streets, but this can't be the case given the taxis.

They 'pedestrianized' the area. It's been a few years, I don't recall any reason being given apart from the usual platitudes about safety and livability. The place does get thronged on the weekends - or did, prior to the Covid lockdowns bankrupting half the shops.

Official taxis being exempt is a citywide thing, they also get to go on bus lanes, and it's been that way since forever.

what is the harm in everyone else agreeing that they are actually in that category?

Beyond what is already said, I would consider loss of autonomy on determining the categories pretty serious harm. If I am free to define, say, what is beautiful or tasty, these categories have meaning for me. If I have to accept something is beautiful or some food is tasty - or, that some potential sexual partner is attractive - because otherwise I would be punished, these categories lose any meaning to me. I may even comply in some cases, if the consequences of compliance are better than the costs of the resistance, but these categories will never have value for myself anymore - they'd be just something I am forced to do. For me, the implied loss of cultural integrity and necessary forced expression and behavior would qualify as harm.

I agree this is a problem, but it's a different one than the OP pointed out. People should be free to speak as they wish.

I agree with your overall thesis, and I think it applies widely to many things including most economic policies. Also things like Covid lockdowns and school closures, which I'm surprised you didn't mention - even if only small costs were associated with these things, those costs would still be a big deal when distributed across the population.

But I think this is a weak example of your thesis:

Trans women are women: If some people experience pain because they're not considered to be in the social category they want to be in, what is the harm in everyone else agreeing that they are actually in that category? Why not consider trans women to be real women? This argument doesn't take into account the fact that words and categories are useful. In particular, they're useful to all the other people who are using those words and categories. For people who only want to date partners with whom they can reproduce, and for anyone who wants to predict others' behavior by knowing their biology, diluting the meaning of social categories and blurring their boundaries makes those categories less useful.

"Woman" was always a noisy signal for fertility and behavior. Only a tiny percentage of people (<0.5%) are transwomen, and only a fraction of them pass well enough that you would be confused about their birth sex. Injecting a tiny amount of noise into the predictive power of the term "woman" (which already had relatively weak predictive power) is I think too insignificant a cost to worry about, even when spread across the population.

That said, there are plenty of other costs associated with "transwomen are women." Things like transwomen in women's sports, the possibility of regret or detransitioning, and the fact that people are being censored for disagreeing with the orthodoxy.

it is socially useful as a costly signal proving trustworthiness

How? How is it a costly signal and how does it establish trustworthiness?

Drunks and children tell the truth.

OTOH, if you're practiced and can hold your drink better than the other party, now you have the advantage over them.

Exactly what @marinuso said about telling the truth. I will add that in general most people can't drink heavily and still convincingly fake things - even if you have a high tolerance you still get drunk and it's hard to lie about how you're feeling in my experience.

On top of this, people tend to be more open to experience and foolish-acting when drunk. In a healthy, strong social group, sharing embarrassing experiences can help bonding quite a bit. You also share secrets with each other that you wouldn't normally mention.

On top of all this, getting a drink is a good excuse/motivator to get people together in one social space for an activity, with little investment on the event organizer's part.

That seems dubious to me. What portion of most people's drinking involves getting that drunk? We have a lot of mechanisms for signaling and trust; large amounts of alcohol consumption as a way to demonstrate trust seems likely to be limited to frats, gangs, and similar groups.

Depends on the group. Also it doesn't have to be a group activity - two or three people can meet at a group and agree to go get a drink after. That's typically how it happens, and how you form stronger bonds. You break out from a larger group into a smaller subset.

Also, do you really think frats and gangs are the only groups that drink together? I fear you might have a bias against alcohol. Off the top of my head - theater goers, dancers, people who play pool, many people who go to sports game, etc get drunk enough to become more honest than most.

Only ones to drink together? Of course not. Only ones to drink together enough to get drunk, often enough for it to be a significant contributor to trust? Could be. I've been in a lot of contexts where people get drunk (including sports and theater) and can't say trust ever seemed to come from drinking. It came from working together. If anything, excessive drunkenness was associated with less trust ("do they have enough self-control to help the group succeed?", "they did something inappropriate while drunk").

I'm not biased against alcohol. I drink and have gotten drunk. Making such an accusation is a waste of space, and I may as well just accuse you of being biased towards alcohol. Does doing so further the discussion in any way?

large amounts of alcohol consumption as a way to demonstrate trust seems likely to be limited to frats, gangs, and similar groups.

I think this is the fundamental misunderstanding - I see 3-4 drinks to be enough for most people to be more trustworthy. You don't need to get sloshed in order to be more open to telling the truth, in fact if someone is wasted they're probably going to be speaking nonsense. I called you out being biased because I thought you meant nobody besides frats, gangs etc had more than a couple drinks which I saw as blatantly false.

I am still curious as to your thought about sober people being more honest than someone 3-4 drinks in. I hope I've clarified well enough.

Yes, I assumed more than 3-4. That isn't a lot for people who consistently have several drinks at once.

Personally, at 3-4 drinks I certainly will say things I wouldn't be willing to say when sober. Does this reflect increased honesty? Is inhibition due to consideration of social rules dishonest? This seems like a philosophical question; I like to think that who I am sober, including the System 2 considerations, is a more useful picture of "who I am" than drunk-me saying the first thing that comes to mind, like how my choice of hobbies is more reflective of who I am than my reaction to jump scares.

If specifically you mean "are people more willing to say thing they think are true but unpopular" that might be true at 3-4 drinks, but I've been in a lot of situations where people drink that much and it doesn't seem like they say things they wouldn't say normally. Like, I'm more likely to ask someone out, maybe do Karaoke. In my experience I'm not any more likely to say controversial things. It might theoretically have this effect, but as I've said all of the groups I've been in seemed to build trust primarily in other ways.

These are just reasons why drinking is good, not why it is a costly signal of trustworthiness.

Is a social drinker more trustworthy than a completely sober guy? Maybe, but you can make plausible-sounding arguments either way. Maybe the drinker is less likely to have elaborately hidden secrets, but the teetotaler has also demonstrated capacity for self denial and high impulse control, which has to be worth something.

Do teetotalers have higher or lower than average rates of criminality? I would bet lower, but I could be wrong.

I would absolutely argue that a social drinker who is drunker than normal is far more trustworthy than a sober guy, at least if you specifically ask the drinker what he believes.

Please make an argument as to how the sober person could answer more honestly?

I’m not sure, but I suspect “teetotaler” actually includes a weird combination of a few different groups of people for whom the answers will differ:

  1. people who don’t drink for moral reasons

  2. people who don’t drink due to being recovering alcoholics

  3. people who don’t drink due to illness

The key fact about most of your examples (except maybe trans, and I'm not so sure about that) is not that they're diffused among lots of people, but that they have to do with doing things that people want to do. "Someone wants to do it" is one of the first ideas that any social movement tries to nip in the bud, because the whole point of having something as a movement is that you want to force people to go along with it who don't want to. Putting a value on people's desires is contrary to that.

Economists think about this all the time--see, for example, this video from David Friedman, but it's also one of the first things that are discussed in introductory Econ right after the perfect competition model. But I don't think this post does a great job of identifying such cases; the video I linked has what I consider to be better examples.

How much I'm having a hard time finding evidence on; maybe because it's unpopular to be seen as an apologist for alchohol consumption.

For the most part, it's up to each person to determine if the benefits outweigh the costs. Most people can determine how much they like drinking; an estimate of other people's preferences won't help you much. But... what does this have to do with diffusion? Generally, each person experiences the costs and benefits of their own drinking. If anything, the cost of drinking is more diffuse, since health care costs are often socialized even in the US, so non-drinkers will pay for drinkers' drinking-related health care.

Induced demand: Among urbanists and YIMBYs, the concept of induced demand is often used to argue against increased road capacity. If people just drive more when new roads are added, what's the point? As /u/freet0 notes, of course there is value in driving beyond just driving fast. You actually get places! The fact that people drive more when there are more roads indicates that there were places that weren't worth driving to before, but now they are. Those roads opened up access to useful places to go2.

Again, I'm confused as to what this has to do with your general thesis. Generally, both the benefits and the costs of more road space are relatively diffuse, at least in North America, since most people drive most of the time (edit: this depends on the road/project; for one road serving one area, what I said is wrong. For expanding many roads serving many areas, it's more correct, although there still will probably be some agents with more or less benefit and cost). If anything, since many more people drive than bike, the costs are concentrated and the benefits are spread around (sanity check: if the benefits were concentrated, it would be easy to privately fund roads; this almost never happens).

(On a side note, IMO, this is a strawman of why urbanists care about ID. "Reducing traffic" is an explicitly stated goal of a lot of road construction and urban and suburban design, so the fact that congestion isn't actually reduced is an important counterargument. Moreover, the fact that people want to go places but currently can't is not an argument in favor of building more roads: It is impossible to build enough roads to not have consistent congestion in any reasonably populated area. You can certainly reframe ID as "lots of people want to go places but the current infrastructure doesn't allow it" but all this tells you is that roads are an inefficient use of space in populated areas).

And yet people continue to support suburban zoning restrictions in their voting choices. There is a cost that proponents of development and public transit (basically, of making it easy for poor people to get around) are missing though: poor people are bad (on average) to be around

I can't tell what this has to do with costs or benefits being diffuse at all. It sounds like you're just dropping an argument for zoning into the post at random. A zoning law has a very clear, concentrated cost (someone who would like to build a different type of housing unit on their land) with diffuse benefits (spread across all of their neighbors). (edit for clarity: Zoning, like many policies, can have both concentrated and diffuse costs and benefits. I was trying to get at the point that there's nothing particularly concentrated or diffuse about the particular argument you mentioned).

Where I live, the city has been building "road diets", where general traffic lanes are removed in favor of bike lanes and center turn lanes. This reduces collisions, especially with pedestrians, at the expense of making every single trip longer for everybody in a car. I did the math, and the reduction in trip times for my family's typical commute (2 minutes) is almost exactly the same as the expected loss in life-minutes from all the risk due to riding in a vehicle (1.46 deaths/100m miles, times ~5 miles, is 1.92 minutes).

First, I think your math is wildly off. 1.46 looks to be roughly the number of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, while 5 miles is, presumably, the distance of one commute. So 1.92 minutes is the risk due to your car making 1 commute, which means that these values are actually extremely similar.

But also, where are these numbers coming from? If people are biking or walking instead of driving, then congestion will go down and you won't take more time (certainly the converse, where adding road capacity does not reduce congestion, has been consistently observed--see the ID argument just above; you don't seem to dispute that ID occurs, simply how to interpret it).

That estimate of vehicle risk is probably way off, though, since these are city streets at speeds where vehicle passengers are in no danger.

I really want to emphasize this point, though. By driving, you expose other people to danger while slightly reducing your own exposure to danger and increasing your convenience. This is a highly negative externality and deserves to be heavily "taxed" to discourage it, or you should be forced to negotiate. If the math does work out as you claim, it should cost an absolutely trivial amount for you alone to pay off all of the cyclists and pedestrians in the city to keep the roads.

Also, from a more dry utilitarian point of view, expected amount of time is not the only relevant variable. A small risk of dying increases the variance a lot, and is something that people definitely care about. In this case, downweighting the diffuse costs is entirely appropriate.

I don't have time to watch the whole Friedman lecture but his first few examples are about market failures, which is a slightly different topic to what I was getting at. What I was trying to express (and didn't do a great job of) was that in discussions of policies, there are often costs that are not mentioned so we never get a full cost/benefit comparison. The specific examples are just examples of the "missing" costs and I wasn't trying to do a full accounting of all the costs/benefits in each example.

First, I think your math is wildly off.

I used expected life-years lost for driving 5 miles, which is approximately 1.46/100m * (5 miles) * (50 years of life left), which multiplies to about 2 minutes. Urban driving reduces that by about half, so it really should be about 1 minute. The specific numbers are not important though; the public conversation was only ever about Vision Zero rather than trip times.

If people are biking or walking instead of driving, then congestion will go down and you won't take more time

Also true! But the numbers matter. I don't think there are a lot of people in my neighborhood whose behavior will be changed by these particular road diets - as I mentioned downthread, there is already a dedicated bike path a block away, and also the neighborhood is hilly, which is a non-starter for most people to bike. I will state that in a full cost-benefit accounting, the road diet might make sense. No one did that analysis though; it was all one-sided statistics and aesthetic judgments.

One of the causes of market failures is diffuse costs or diffuse benefits. Some examples in the video include tariffs and drug regulation.

The specific examples are just examples of the "missing" costs and I wasn't trying to do a full accounting of all the costs/benefits in each example... I will state that in a full cost-benefit accounting, the road diet might make sense. No one did that analysis though; it was all one-sided statistics and aesthetic judgments.

There are theoretically infinitely many costs and benefits to any policy (or if not, far more than could be feasibly thought of and estimated, especially once you start taking into account 2nd order effects, or 3rd order effects, etc). I don't think the process of choosing what to ignore is really related to whether the costs and benefits are diffuse or not, except to the extent that diffuse costs and benefits may be harder to see. For the most part, I think whether someone thinks of a diffuse cost or benefit is, like most other arguments, related to their bias or personal experience rather than anything else. Like with the travel time example, both of the things you mention are somewhat diffuse (exactly how diffuse depending on how many people cycle or walk vs driving, which depends on the policy itself, which makes it even more complicated). Someone advocating for reducing traffic volume is probably going to focus on cyclist and pedestrian deaths because (depending on how charitable we're being) deaths are more important than commute time and/or they have ideological preferences for bikes over cars.

If you want to say an argument is being unfairly ignored, I think you do have to show that it is at least plausibly of the correct scale to be relevant.

I used expected life-years lost for driving 5 miles, which is approximately 1.46/100m * (5 miles) * (50 years of life left), which multiplies to about 2 minutes.

Ok, but then I think your interpretation is off: Both numbers apply to 1 single trip. Every other person who does the same drive will face the same delay and also increase risk by the same amount (glossing over any issues with induced demand, assuming marginal = average, etc).

(On a side note, IMO, this is a strawman of why urbanists care about ID. "Reducing traffic" is an explicitly stated goal of a lot of road construction and urban and suburban design, so the fact that congestion isn't actually reduced is an important counterargument. Moreover, the fact that people want to go places but currently can't is not an argument in favor of building more roads: It is impossible to build enough roads to not have consistent congestion in any reasonably populated area. You can certainly reframe ID as "lots of people want to go places but the current infrastructure doesn't allow it" but all this tells you is that roads are an inefficient use of space in populated areas).

Thanks for this - this is the correct version of the ID argument against road building that I was struggling to put in ordinary language. In econospeak, the proponents of the new road promised a first-order benefit (shorter journey times for the high-value journeys which are already being made due to reduced traffic) and delivered a second-order benefit (marginal journeys which would not have been made now are, or journeys which would have been timed to avoid rush hour are now made during rush hour for a marginal improvement in convenience). Traffic congestion is pure social waste (in fact it is worse than pure social waste due to emissions of idling or slow-moving vehicles), but if you use efficiently-collected tolls to reduce congestion by keeping marginal drivers off the roads then you can deliver a social benefit from road building - most of which comes in the the form of increased toll revenue.

Interestingly, in cities with successful, widely-used public transport (which includes all European and 1st-world Asian capitals), you see induced demand effects on public transport as well. For whatever reason, the anti-transit-funding libertarian crowd don't normally raise the induced demand objection, and when they do the "unsuppressing suppressed demand is good" response normally is raised, loudly. Whether the transit case is really different depends on what you think about the social costs of overcrowding on roads vs. transit - it feels different because overcrowded tube trains get you where you are going roughly on time, but overcrowded roads cause severe delays.

Yep, congestion pricing plus non-driving alternatives is the correct solution to traffic, not building endless roads.

Interestingly, in cities with successful, widely-used public transport (which includes all European and 1st-world Asian capitals), you see induced demand effects on public transport as well. For whatever reason, the anti-transit-funding libertarian crowd don't normally raise the induced demand objection, and when they do the "unsuppressing suppressed demand is good" response normally is raised, loudly. Whether the transit case is really different depends on what you think about the social costs of overcrowding on roads vs. transit - it feels different because overcrowded tube trains get you where you are going roughly on time, but overcrowded roads cause severe delays.

There's a great youtube video on ID applied to transit: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8wlld3Z9wRc&ab_channel=OhTheUrbanity%21

They make similar points. In particular, it's much easier to both increase capacity (increase frequency of trains, signal priority, etc. which also improves the experience of riding rather than worsening it) and apply congestion pricing (since they already have ticketing systems). It also has a lot fewer externalities, and in the case of walking and cycling, has positive knock-on effects (people getting more exercise).

maybe because it's unpopular to be seen as an apologist for alchohol consumption.

It's interesting that this isn't at all true when you phrase it in, let's say 'populist' terms. But when you try to make the same argument in more academic terms you invite unpopularity.

For what it's worth, I remember learning about this when taking AP government -- that the ability of interest groups to coordinate people result in policies that benefit the few will diffusing the costs on the many.

Farmers care a lot more about getting farmer subsidies than you or I care about paying for our share of them, because the difference in income for the farmers is orders of magnitude larger than the difference in income to your or me. Of course having lots of nakedly rent-seeking interest groups is awful, and one of the values of economics as a field is in providing reasonable criteria for when a policy deserves to be implemented (solving negative externalities, reducing deadweight loss, etc.).

Is the future trans? The Gay Rights Movement Has Been Hijacked by a Radical Transhumanist Agenda

“Transgenderism” is a word acting as a social bridge between transsexualism and transhumanism. It is an umbrella term with weak borders that allows this bridging quality to transhumanism to nimbly evade scrutiny. Transsexualism is largely an adult male fetish that compulsively objectifies and covets womanhood. Men with autogynephila (the professional name for this form of transsexualism) seek to medically appropriate the sexed humanity of women by purchasing surgical simulacrums of their sexed reality, in parts, to assuage their compulsion. It is the apex of the sex industries, reducing women to parts for commercial and sexual use.

“Transgenderism” is an offshoot of both these words and is being used as a rebranding of transsexualism to appeal to a new, youthful market. It is a harbinger of the genetic and technological manipulations we are being conditioned to accept via transhumanism obscured by co-opting the familiar branding of a wildly successful human rights movement. In reality, it is an anti-human agenda.

The next most crucial step toward the transhumanist goal is to usurp human reproduction and move it into the tech sector. The assisted reproductive market is currently $25.6B and is projected to reach $41.4B by 2030. This market is being invested in by many of the same elites investing in the gender industry, who are invested in the medical and tech sectors in general, and who are simultaneously using the LGB human rights political infrastructure to abolish sexual dimorphism—reproductive sex. It’s a perfect fit because individuals in same-sex relationships will need the assisted fertility market if they wish to reproduce—and only those with considerable resources can finance these risky medical procedures. The rest will stand as the medical refuse of eugenicists, sterilized for life.

I don't think the average person in support of transgenderism thinks of themselves as a transhumanist or reads transhumanist literature, they seem to have come to it by way of a strange version of liberalism; not just that you're free to act as you like but are free to be whatever you say, even against the veto of biology, society and basic sense. Combined with a runaway social constructionist impulse and Rousseau-like mindset where the individual is always prior and it's society that corrupts them and you get to the situation where a tiny fraction of people can overthrow the most basic assumptions of a society. Transhumanism by way of rampant individualism .

I also think it's..dubious to frame transgenderism as-such as merely autogynephilic men. Even Blanchard has a two-part typology with homosexual males and autogynephilic males. Even if we want to reduce transgenderism to a mental illness or fetish in men, the article -by playing the traditional leftist game of trying to "solve"' problems by insisting they're caused by male issues - ignores the fastest growing "'transgender" population: young girls.

This would fit well with the trans-as-transhumanism position: girls who would usually go through puberty (a messy time) and the difficult adult life are instead offered a solution to their life's problems via transhumanist surgeries and procedures. Don't like your life? Go be anyone else you want. Never mind that we aren't actually the Culture and you can't mold yourself at will.

Interestingly: this argument actually makes me less anti-trans. I personally see no reason to validate any of the attempts to problematize the sex binary and plenty of reason not to. But clearly the march of progress won't be stopped by me or anyone. Medical technology will improve and people will have the ability to mold themselves more and more.

So really, is the only sin of "transpeople" being early?

So really, is the only sin of “transpeople” being early?

I wonder this myself sometimes. For trans adults, much of my antipathy comes from people who are clearly (visibly) not women forcing people to deny the reality they see in order to validate them. And you can lose your job if you don’t. If surgery were at the point where they all passed perfectly and they had all female parts and not facsimiles, this issue would probably be sidestepped.

Of course, none of this applies to children transitioning. The number of people doing irreversible damage to their bodies without knowing the true risks based on social pressure has exploded, and I don’t want to get too into it because others already have done it much better here. I don’t think it’s a good thing nor do I want it to continue.

And then the natural question is, does tolerating the first thing lead to the second? It seems like it to me. In its current state trans ideology seems to allow for no opinion besides a maximalist one. And despite their small numbers, as an influence group they are incredibly influential in tech and online discourse due to the demographics of most people who transition to women tending to be people who are very online and in tech. See the deplatformings of the Kiwi Farms spearheaded by several trans activists for a recent example.

So futurist medical procedures would sidestep a big issue of mine with transgenderism, but it is far from the only one.

Quick edit: I forgot to mention the people that will want to be considered their chosen gender without doing the work to physically pass, which is a thing now and will most likely still be even in this hypothetical future. The question of how we respond to those people is important. Is it, yes you are your chosen gender? Or will we say l: I’ll call you a woman once you don’t have to tell me you’re one. I’d be okay with the latter option, not the former, but I can’t see it going that way culturally.

For trans adults, much of my antipathy comes from people who are clearly (visibly) not women forcing people to deny the reality they see in order to validate them.

What's your stance on hirsutism? Does a woman with a beard count as not a woman? less of a woman?

I understand the idea of defining a woman as an "adult human female", but using looks as your metric makes me curious.

For me personally (not the person you are replying to), I don't define a woman by looks, but looks are a heuristic. It's obviously unacceptable to go "ok, let's see if you have a penis or a vagina in those pants", so you make an inference based on the overall appearance.

Ironically, I can envision a scenario where the trans movement will have made things harder for people you mention, such as a woman who has a beard. At no point would such a woman have been considered normal and unremarkable (see: every circus with a "bearded lady" exhibit), but I think time was that nobody would've questioned if they were actually women. If you saw a really butch looking woman one may have assumed she was a man, but when corrected one would accept that she's a woman.

Now, though, I can envision that same scenario happening but with people refusing to accept the woman as actually being a woman. Because from their point of view there are lots of people falsely labeling men as women, so now it's not as simple as "she says she's a woman, then she is". Now that person probably has to resort to using looks, and being suspicious of anyone who doesn't appear to be a woman but claims to be one.

I don't actually know if this is happening, so this isn't really meant to be an argument against the trans movement. But it seems very plausible to me, and I can't help but wonder if there have been unintended consequences in a vein like I describe.

I don't actually know if this is happening

From 2016: Connecticut woman says she was harassed in Walmart bathroom after customer mistook her as transgender (archive link because the website is unavailable in the EU). However, it seems in this case there is no evidence beyond the woman's claim.

Also from 2016, this time with a video of the incident: Man follows woman into restroom after mistaking her for a man (archived). This was apparently a simple misunderstanding that was resolved amicably.

While searching, I also found this article from 2008 (!): Woman mistaken for a man settles NY lawsuit.

This Twitter thread discusses another example.

So it does seem to happen. And I would assume that not every such incident makes the news.

But blaming trans people for this is ridiculous. How is it their fault that people prejudiced against them sometimes accidentally target insufficiently feminine-looking cis women? In fact, I've always considered these false-positive incidents a strong argument in favour of letting trans people use the toilet corresponding to their identified gender.

That one is interesting, because Wikipedia is claiming it affects "5-15% of women of all ethnic backgrounds," which is less than the number of women I've seen with facial hair. I'm guessing it's fairly easily managed with a razor, and in any case facial hair is far from the only physical tell of sex, so that doesn't seem to pose an issue to what I'm saying.

To be more charitable we can go with whatever rare genetic condition may cause a woman to appear extremely mannish. In which case I would probably assume she is male unless corrected. That would be very unfortunate and I feel sympathy for her having to go around life that way, but she is by definition a rare genetic outlier. We can openly say that this is not the way it normally biologically works and don't feel the need to collapse biological gender categories over it.

If it was a political issue where people were identifying with this disorder or trying to medically induce it, demanding at risk of job loss you accept it, trying to normalize and give it to children, etc. and this was all surging at once within the last 10 years? At that point it leaves the category of weird genetic outlier and I start to ask what's going on here.

If surgery were at the point where they all passed perfectly and they had all female parts and not facsimiles, this issue would probably be sidestepped.

For some. I think there are probably 95% of trans people who just want to transition and be treated as the sex they identify with, and don't want to rock any boats.

But there's the 1-5% who are narcissistic attention-seekers and want to be both "I'm trans, I'm special, I demand you validate me" and "how dare you notice I'm trans, I'm a real woman, you should be punished!" They are the ones who make a fetish of it. Demand that lesbians have sex with them because "a female penis is not the same as a male penis". Range from the mildly creepy to the psycho.

If they got perfect magical SF transition, it wouldn't suit them because that would be too normal and boring, how could they stand out and demand attention and special treatment?

Demand that lesbians have sex with them because "a female penis is not the same as a male penis".

Of course, lesbians see nothing wrong with demanding access to the output of the penis (ie, sperm) without having deal with the penis itself or the person attached to it. I have trouble bringing myself to care that they are being criticized for not wanting sex with trans women with penises while feeling entitled to subsidized procreation without sex with people with penises.

Wow. Talk about assuming their conclusions. That article is miserable, partly for the reasons you note, partly for the wild lack of charity, but also because of its determination to concentrate all agency in the hands of nebulous elites. In doing so, they ignore the single most important link between transgenderism and liberalism.

There exists some small fraction of the population which feels dysphoria. They can’t prove such an internal phenomenon, and it’s quite hard for those of us who don’t feel anything similar to empathize. Liberalism answers: it’s not our problem. If they want to dismantle the gender binary, so be it. The rest of us can, in theory, go on our merry way.

This leads to obvious criticisms! Chesterton’s fence, externalities, false positives, and so on. I’m frustrated that the article doesn’t address any of them, instead blaming a cabal of autogynephilic billionaires. It just skips over any actual reasoning to argue that a potential to benefit the wealthy poisons the whole concept.

It’s particularly bizarre to see reproductive medical technology branded as the transhumanist devil. One wonders if the author has experienced our current peak of assistive reproduction, the C-section.

Then again, I’m pretty broadly transhumanist, in the aspirational sense. We aren’t there, yet, but some day, I can only hope that humans can shed our features like an old coat. Couple that philosophy with trans people’s self-described feelings about gender, and I started to find it much easier to cooperate.

Chesterton’s fence, externalities, false positives, and so on.

You forgot the most obvious one: demanding that the rest of us go along with their claims, i.e. compelled speech. All other objections rely on values other than liberalism.

One wonders if the author has experienced our current peak of assistive reproduction, the C-section.

I would say that the baby with 3 parents is a more advanced technology, but that would make this jab meaningless and void.

True enough. I was bundling it under externalities, but it’s really the sine qua non for liberalism.

Liberalism answers: it’s not our problem. If they want to dismantle the gender binary, so be it. The rest of us can, in theory, go on our merry way.

Is this hypothetical "real Liberalism" or "actual liberalism we're dealing with in real life"? Cause I can see how ideological liberalism may say that. But not how the one in our world actually does. The one in our world has taken the stance - as of now, it is being rolled back in some places - is basically that the liberal state throws its immense power into coercing all of the rest of us into abandoning the gender binary.

In fact, if anything, what separates the trans movement from the transhumanist movement is that Ray Kurzeweil-disciples can't actually compel you to validate their ideology right now. That's where trans has all of the worst elements of too-early transhumanism combined with the endless moral busy-bodying of rights discourse.

Arguably it is a perverse outcome due to trans being early: if transhumanism actually was viable, there would be no need for this sort of coercion and tyranny in order to be "validated". We don't have heated debates about "validating" that people with cochlear implants can hear.

I’m frustrated that the article doesn’t address any of them

To be fair: this is a substack that has a clear and strong stance on the issue and has basically already laid out its canonical counter-arguments so I think part of it is just not retreading old ground for the choir.

Is this hypothetical "real Liberalism" or "actual liberalism we're dealing with in real life"?

The latter is termed progressivism, not liberalism.

real or actual

A little of both. I think we move the ratchet as we grow in capability. Catholic/Protestant tolerance was an existential threat in 1600; by 1800 it is plausible, and by 2000 it’s normalized in the West. Debating sex changes and related culture was completely useless in the Industrial Revolution. I’d say it’s in the second stage right now.

Cthulhu's swim is powered by technological surplus. If we keep accruing more, we will grow closer to the liberal ideal.

cochlear implants

I’m told this is actually a point of contention among the deaf! Partly generational, but those without implants sometimes view them as breaking solidarity, cultural erasure, etc. The full oppression stack that you’d see for more salient issues. Deafness is “settled” enough, in the mainstream, that there’s no political capital in the tribal lines, so we don’t get the same framework of allies and validation built on top.

I’m told this is actually a point of contention among the deaf!

That's its value: as a contrast. A "marginalized group" complained about being erased and most people don't care - hell, even know about the debate! There's no outrage, no drama in the mainstream. From a naive perspective - if we're just gonna be culture-warring over medical interventions - you'd think the older, already organized, objectively easier to define contingent of deaf people could have some say. But it's never been a live issue.

Meanwhile: the President is weighing in on "gender affirming healthcare" (puberty blockers, mastectomies and hormones) and we can't stop hearing about the on-trans violence because being a sexual deviant/sex worker in Brazil is dangerous.

Oh, I read that a different way.

People got used to making accommodations for the deaf. Subtitles and transcripts. I’d expect most Americans know of ASL, and dismiss it as a fun curiosity, rather than because it’s an imposition. This is despite that fact that it gets taught in schools and pandered in media!

The deaf have already won. They have an obvious disability, and our culture shifted to accommodate it, despite the costs. Something similar goes for the blind and the wheelchair-bound. It wasn’t without a fight, either: this was absolutely one of the culture wars.

Trans people don’t trigger the same flags, and the social and medical costs of accommodation are higher. That’s why I expect acceptance to improve with technology.

It wasn’t without a fight, either: this was absolutely one of the culture wars.

Accommodations for people with disabilities are not nearly as divisive as trans issues. Divisiveness is a key feature for something to be part of the "culture war", according to my interpretation of the term at least.

But it was! Down to the sweeping gestures in DC.

Before that there were legal battles over involuntary confinement and forced sterilizations. People were joining all sorts of inappropriately named (by today's standards) activist groups.

Or to go further back, Helen Keller is a household name. I don't think most Americans could name a trans activist.

Hellen Keller is remembered more as a deaf person than a deaf activist though. Most Americans probably couldn't name Anne Sullivan, the corresponding non-deaf activist. And if you ask Americans to just name a trans person, they'll probably know Caitlin Jenner.

This is a different fight though. There was no question as to whether the deaf could actually hear or whether the best way to help them was to increase accessibility for people who cannot hear. These are not givens for the modern debate over gender.

Even in the trans-human future trans people would still be personality and interest wise more like their birth sex than what they transitioned into. Unless we are also changing our brains now. That is the biggest lie of the transgender movement, that trans people are psychologically more like their preferred gender on psychometric traits than their biological sex. Programmer socks are a meme for a reason.

Or, why not just preemptively use our magical transhuman technology to erase the existence of people who are transgender.

Liberalism answers: it’s not our problem. If they want to dismantle the gender binary, so be it. The rest of us can, in theory, go on our merry way.

"Dismantling the gender binary" is not a personal voyage of discovery, but a broad social program including significant changes to governmental policy at all levels, fairly substantial changes in pedagogy, dissolution of parental authority over their children's upbringing, development and deployment of unproven hormonal interventions, the redefinition and hijacking of ordinary language, willful deception regarding scientific research and suppression of contradictory findings, and coordinated harassment campaigns against dissenters in anything from dating (the "cotton ceiling") to workplaces and academia. It is not as simple as "live and let live."

I’m frustrated that the article doesn’t address any of them, instead blaming a cabal of autogynephilic billionaires.

Insofar as the "cabal of. . .billionaires" is either responsible for the intellectual development of a concept, coverage of that is basic bog-standard pop-intellectual history. Insofar as the cabal is providing a network of organizational and monetary support for activists, then that's worthwhile reportage just like pieces on the Koch or Soros networks, or "Big Tobacco's" involvement in quashing cancer research.

Interestingly: this argument actually makes me less anti-trans.

This is my view as well. I'm often accused of being conservative but there's something beautifully utopian about people just being who they want to be. It's a little messy today, but if technology were absolutely perfect and low-cost, who wouldn't try switching genders for a couple hours?

but if technology were absolutely perfect and low-cost

It'd lead to a lot of craziness I think. Have you been to twitter when people start switching profile pictures to women and then report 4x faster growth in followers, etc ?

Unless gender dysphoria were truly universal of which I'm doubtful a bit*, a lot of ambitious people would just switch because it's mostly men who matter (more drive than women, work harder and more singleminded, so overrepresented in important roles), and attractive women are something like a exploit against men. Most men are flattered and pay attention if a woman hits on them, and they try to impress, thus they're vulnerable.

Only weirdoes get defensive and start clutching their wallet because they correctly percieve this is against the natural order of things hence suspicious.

*unless it's something like an actual mismatch between brain's image of the body and body parts. I suspect dysphoria is more like having very strong feelings about what body parts you have and don't have. I'm okay being male, if I somehow woke up female tomorrow and not missing much of my strength or size, I'd really not mind at all, I think. Especially if we were in the future where biological clock were less pressing.

I think the reason the logic of this article seems so strained is probably that there's a segment of the conspiracy-theorist community which has latched onto "transhumanism" as a buzzword and have a distorted idea of what it is. This allows them to equate stuff like "X once gave money to some sort of group with ties to self-described transhumanists" with stuff like "X wants to inject you with a chip to control your brain". Search 4plebs for transhumanism to see some examples, or conspiracy-theory sites like Transhumanism.news. The author seems to have picked up some of those ideas about transhumanism.

they seem to have come to it by way of a strange version of liberalism; not just that you're free to act as you like but are free to be whatever you say, even against the veto of biology, society and basic sense

Except it's not "whatever you say" - transracialism is largely taboo and otherkin had more success but still failed to become a mainstream part of social justice ideology. Rather there is a whole ideological framework for how people not only can but should transition if they "are transgender". Then there is a social environment in the social justice community (and often among professionals in trans healthcare) with a heavy bias towards encouraging people to think they're transgender at any supposed sign and then "affirming" those who think they are. Like Scott's old post about conceptual superweapons that talks about medical testing, except that was supposed to be an analogy.

The Eighth Meditation on Superweapons and Bingo

But if one side has a superweapon, it's impossible to argue for the other. If the threshold starts at forty, and one doctor says "But we can't be the sorts of monsters who would refuse a potential cancer patient live-saving surgery!", and this argument is a deeply-ingrained part of medical culture and the other doctors don't want to be tarred as cancer-sympathizers, then the threshold goes to 30. Then another doctor brings up the same argument, and the threshold goes to 20. Soon the threshold is at zero and they're referring rashes and hay fever for surgery and no one can protest because they don't want to look Pro-Cancer.

Part of allowing only one side of the argument might be that you sometimes see arguments like "Even if you're worried you aren't 'really transgender' (and if you're wondering you almost certainly are!) there's no harm in having the body you want.", ignoring the serious and lifelong negative effects. But this isn't part of any broader commitment to transhumanism. If anything the mandate towards affirmation of "legitimate" identities means things tends to get squeezed into a dichotomy, where something like transracialism must be not just "weird" and "probably a bad idea" but problematic and racist. Because if it wasn't there would be pressure to apply the same sort of logic used for "misgendering".

Finally, remember the main emphasis of transhumanism is not on people satisfying arbitrary preferences about their bodies to begin with, it's on making people better. Transhumanist fiction might have the occasional person who decides to be downloaded into an octopus body or something, but that's an irrelevant sideshow compared to intelligence-enhancement and immortality, especially outside the realm of fiction where real-life transhumanists are less concerned with imagining exotic visuals than authors are. Needless to say, the social justice community is often intensely hostile to such improvements, being more concerned with the idea that improvements to longevity or intelligence might be used by the rich than with the enormous benefits they would bring. They are also very hostile to anything that can be interpreted as "eugenics", which a lot of the easier transhumanist technologies could be classified as. Unlike the general public they are sometimes even hostile to the idea of curing disabilities and with the idea that being disabled is indeed objectively worse for reasons beside society's "ableism". Those deaf parents who deliberately choose to have deaf children (to be part of the deaf community) through embryo selection might use similar technologies to transhumanists, but doing so is pretty much the polar opposite of transhumanism.

That blog's a better scott-post than most of recent ACX tbh

It was the post that ultimately brought me in this sphere to begin with.

The arc of history certainly bends towards people having greater ability to reshape their biology, leading to the devaluing of fixed identities.

If a man is able to use advanced medical technology to give himself (now herself) a functioning uterus and ovaries, and he convincingly looks the part, I would have no problem saying that he has truly become a woman in all senses.

If it were possible to create a completely new, convincing, and cohesive identity by way of adding it to cart and clicking checkout for a very affordable price, I imagine this would delete 95% of the controversy around transgenderism.

People don't care that the woman in front of them used to be a man so much as care that the man in front of them who has squeezed into a dress and is wearing a wig demands to be treated as a woman. Asking people to deny what they sense is the outrage. Asking us socialize the cost of $100k in surgery so an old man can look like an old man with scars in a dress is the outrage.

I'm not saying any of this is good necessarily just that I don't expect miracles on this kind of trans acceptance front. Indeed, the best thing for trans acceptance would be orders of magnitude improvement in body/behavior modification treatments.

There’s a bit of a motte and bailey at play. Imposed speech and subsidized treatments are objectionable under fully liberal principles. Insofar as our American myths are really big on such principles, this makes for a defensible motte.

Admitting that the presentation is unconvincing, that trans women aren’t women enough to date, or trans men aren’t man enough to compete in men’s sports...these positions are tricky. Ultimately, they still get the aegis of liberal mythology. Whether or not the intentions were pure, it remains relatable to make such objections because the common cultural basis is so pervasive.

Trying to ban trans “ideology” or general services, to wage the culture war, is fundamentally illiberal. There are good reasons to be illiberal! Yet they must be argued on the merits once we leave the common ground of liberalism. Neither side of this particular argument is invested in doing so, in part because the myths make such a good weapon. This is what the parent article has skipped—assuming from the start that trans(humanism) is evil.

Trying to ban trans “ideology” or general services, to wage the culture war, is fundamentally illiberal

Could you give concrete examples here? Because, quite frankly, I believe the word "ban" has been abused by activists to the point I don't trust it.

For example: the GOP has not "banned" transwomen from competing, despite what people say. They've insisted that men compete with men in the male/open category. As is traditional.

Even people who could be said to have "banned" elements of trans medicine didn't ban it as such. Limiting a potentially harmful drug to clinical trials to see the impact is not a ban on trans people getting services, it's basic medical good practice.

Things that have been banned (or people have attempted to ban) like sexually explicit books in kid's libraries are, imo, well within the usual liberal allowances made. Until recently.

Not in all senses unless there's a way to undo all the bodily formative processes that has been going since birth, after the change. I just read a report where a "trans" volleyball player, who were allowed to play in girls league, severely injured a member of opposing team (basically broke her face and caused severe concussion) because of his ability to generate way more force than any of his peers are able to produce or withstand. Even if you somehow stitch on a uterus and make it work, by some technological magic, there will be other differences that are relevant in other contexts.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I meant if he becomes a woman down to the molecular level, female bone structure, average female strength, etc. So no possible physical test could distinguish him from a natural woman.

Yeah, but if he still has a male brain in a female body? That is, a brain influenced/conditioned by male hormones, socialisation as a male, and all the rest of it?

Suppose we managed to transplant a cis man's brain into a woman's body. Is he now she? What if he declares that he is still a man? Is the only difference whether the person claims to identify as male or female?

If you have a man's brain in a woman's body and he still behaves and thinks and acts like a man, is he now a woman?

The idea of gender-flipping by getting a body of the appropriate sex from the start is an old SF fantasy, but I do wonder more how that would work out in reality. When I was younger, I thought it would work, but seeing some trans people online (and yes, I know that's not the ideal), I think there is much less easy change-over than the idea posits. What about trans women who want to keep their 'girl cock'? What about the likes of this person?

Unless we invent time travel, I'm not sure it's going to be technologically possible any time when our current understanding of physical reality is in any way relevant.

, I would have no problem saying that he has truly become a woman in all senses.

The sex differences in emotional processing, cognition etc are .. irrelevant ? Women care about entirely different things mostly. A man who somehow didn't change his brain at all but got female biology would end up being a very butch lesbian, not exactly 'truly a woman'. A woman, but a very unusual one.

I'm imagining us entering into a weird low-level equilibrium trap where the psychological differences remain but a combination of tech and laws (which already exist) make it so that we can't distinguish.

It's...going to be bad for everyone, like a form of societal face-blindness. We'd know people are doing things but we have no way to drill down on the group responsible.

Well..maybe not everyone. It really simplifies the DEI drive to find "women" for any job predominantly favored by men.

Estrogen has pretty profound cognitive effects (though of course hormones aren't literally everything). For example, transitioning MTFs often describe feeling way more emotional, crying more often, etc., while transitioning FTMs describe the same thing in reverse.

Anecdotally, from the perspective of a cis woman who doesn't have a problem with trans women*, the ones I'm familiar with read to me as nerdy girls in terms of affect and personality.

*my own problems with transness / gender ideology / whatever are all about <18yo children transitioning — the adult trans people I know don't bother me (regardless of when they themselves began transition, which I rarely even know)

There's this thing called 'brain development'. Affected by hormones. It's the reason gay men seem feminine - there is an epigenetic mechanism that protects the embryo's brain from too strong effects of cross sex hormones. When it fails you get homosexuals, or that's one of the current theories.

There's a good number of ex-men as Sailer calls them who still behave like .. men. You are surely familiar with the plight of Alice Dreger. That predates world war T.

For example, transitioning MTFs often describe feeling way more emotional, crying more often, etc., while transitioning FTMs describe the same thing in reverse.

I do wonder about that. While there is indeed a very strong hormonal effect, I also have the feeling that people transitioning, particularly male to female, have an exaggerated sense of gender roles to live up to, so they think "women are more emotional, cry more easily and more plentifully, express emotions more easily" and so on, thus they expect to feel a heightened sense of emotion and play up to that. A sort of placebo effect, if you like; 'to be a Real Girl means to be very emotional and now that I'm becoming a Real Girl by taking hormones I should also be very emotional'.

The sex differences in emotional processing, cognition etc are

Hormone driven and vary widely by individual anyway.

Yet iirc, the if you honestly look at personality traits and compare big samples, there are two distinct clusters with not much overlap.

I suspect the same would be true if you graphed hormone levels.

That's true for testosterone at least.

The sex differences in emotional processing, cognition etc are .. irrelevant ? Women care about entirely different things mostly. A man who somehow didn't change his brain at all but got female biology would end up being a very butch lesbian, not exactly 'truly a woman'.

Do this apply to AFAB women as well? Is a woman who is stoic, assertive, things-oriented, solution-oriented not 'truly a woman' even if she is built like a wet dream?

If that's an offer to find people one, you're going to have a lot of takers here lol. Good luck through.

Sure, such one is a woman, but will probably never fit in with other AFABs, at least, same way a feminine gay guy doesn't really fit in with other men.

Transsexualism is largely an adult male fetish that compulsively objectifies and covets womanhood. Men with autogynephila (the professional name for this form of transsexualism) seek to medically appropriate the sexed humanity of women by purchasing surgical simulacrums of their sexed reality, in parts, to assuage their compulsion. It is the apex of the sex industries, reducing women to parts for commercial and sexual use.

Per UCLA, referencing a pair of CDC datasets, “Of the 1.3 million adults who identify as transgender, 38.5% (515,200) are transgender women, 35.9% (480,000) are transgender men, and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming.”

Source: https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/trans-adults-united-states/

My understanding is that the rapid expansion of women as the leading "trans" group is actually what's led to some clamp down in Europe on gender medicine: basically the logic is that most of their long-term interventions were studied on typically males with long-term dysphoria (think Buck Angel explicitly being an experiment) but now a lot of younger women are showing up claiming to be trans, perhaps in clusters (ROGD is...controversial and it's so hard to dig through the noise on this topic). So everyone is slowing down and doing more research.

I think further study is warranted; agreed. Just wanted to highlight, albeit indirectly, the idea that autogynephilla is the primary driver of transsexualism isn’t a claim rooted in certainty.

and 25.6% (341,800) reported they are gender nonconforming.

But...are they Catholic atheists or Protestant atheists?

They hated him for he spoke the truth.

More effort than this, please.

Fair enough. Deleted.

I think the sin of the trans movement is having no coherent ideology, other than to be against anything "traditional", against any prescriptive categories, and against anyone telling anyone "no". Yes, there are some aspects of the modern trans movement that can seem somewhat like a transhumanist end-goal. But they're bedfellows with other people who seem to just want to cause chaos. People who want to take away some of the logic we have in our society, and divorce ideas from where they were traditionally associated.

For example, it's a common trans-adjacent complaint nowadays that when you're referring to reproductive health, you shouldn't say "women", you should say "people with uteruses", because there are trans-men who have uteruses who are affected, too. I see this sort of warring all the time all over my facebook, for example, after the SCOTUS issue this year, people saying "don't erase trans-men from the reproductive rights issue! trans men will suffer as well" as if that even matters, relatively speaking, or is at the forefront of anyone's mind.

Let's say we did have completely perfect transhumanist technology that would allow women to perfectly and in all regards become men. Do you think that these activists I mentioned above would be okay with us going back to the more traditional usage of language? No, I don't expect they would. They want anyone to be able to be called anything, even if they don't choose to fit the biological bill. They want to change the categories to be entirely "you're just whatever you want to be", not just "you're just whatever your current biology supports". They're making up new categories that never existed before, all sorts of in-between, or not related, genders, and then they're also taking all preexisting categories and saying none of the previous definitions matter at all for it. In-effect, they don't want transhumanism, they just want to disrupt the system and anyone who wants to have coherent categorization.

I think the sin of the trans movement is having no coherent ideology, other than to be against anything "traditional", against any prescriptive categories, and against anyone telling anyone "no".

I think this is dangerous underestimation modern "transgender" movement. To large extent it is an on the ground application of ideas from Queer Theory, most importantly a revolt against "normativity" such as fight against cisheteronormative society. All you have to do is just to write down the vocabulary used and check where it originated. It is exactly how it sounds, it is not even fight for making queer people accepted as "normal" in society - similar to how early gay right movements wanted to get some rights and then be done with that. It is revolt against the very concept of normalcy, even to say that something potentially can be considered as normal or abnormal is oppressive and needs to be opposed.

And I agree that this is very much in line with transhumanism. Want to live as a cat person littering in sandbox toilet with somebody who transplanted his lower body into titanium appendage with extra ultraviolet sensor hanging from his left ear in polyamorous polycule with a literal lizzard? Nothing to see here, there are literally no valid philosophical or moral grounds to challenge this lifestyle in any way. In fact any criticism or pushback is (paraodoxically) something that is abnormal and needs to be squashed and this lifestyle needs to be accepted and supported exactly in order to fight against normativity.

I was sympathetic to transhumanism prior to supporting transgender rights to self-modify, simply because of the order in which I encountered both ideas. A clean dividing line between the many ways our lives are technologically augmented and self-modification made little sense to me.

I'd say that trans rights makes me less sympathetic to transhumanism, in the same way that the popularity of quack medicine makes me less sympathetic to the libertarian idea of letting everyone take any medicine they want.

As a transhumanist, the standard culture war trans issues bore me. I don't really care too much either way. Not sure how common of a position this is, but I feel there are far more important things happening in the world.

Just to notify you that you are allowed to care about more than one thing at the time. That there is war in Ukraine or what have you, doesn't make it so we can't talk about other less important things.

I'm not saying you shouldn't talk about it. I guess I'm adding in that as someone who is a transhumanist (which this post is directly related to) I don't see transgender stuff as an all important wedge into the glorious utopia or anything.

So really, is the only sin of "transpeople" being early?

Is the only sin of people who think they're persecuted by the CIA but really aren't, not being CIA targets? After all, CIA persecution does really happen.

I'd say no. People who falsely think they're persecuted by the CIA have skewed perception and skewed reasoning (and may not care about reasoning at all). It's coincidence that they latched onto something that really happens. It's not very different from latching onto something that can only happen in the distant future (like transhumanism), or not at all. In all those cases, their "sin" is disconnection with reality.

Last week the Washington State Supreme Court made a ruling that lowers the bar for parties to a civil case to get a hearing for a new trial based on racial bias, and put the burden on the opposing party to prove that racial bias did not affect the verdict.

Here's the Seattle Times article on the decision: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/justices-unanimously-expand-protections-against-racism-in-wa-civil-cases/

And the decision itself: https://www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf/976724.pdf

The decision introduces a framework with a couple of points:

  1. In civil cases a hearing for a new trial must be granted in case an objective observer (defined as one who is aware that implicit, institutional, and unconscious biases, in addition to purposeful discrimination, have influenced jury verdicts in Washington State) could view race as a factor in the verdict.

  2. At the hearing it will be presumed that race was a factor and a new trial must be granted unless the opposing party can prove that race was not a factor. From the decision: "At the hearing, the trial court is to presume that racial bias affected the verdict, and the party benefiting from the alleged racial bias has the burden to prove it did not."

The ruling doesn't give any guidance on how to prove that racial bias did not affect a verdict. Given that unconscious biases are included in the definition of an objective observer evaluating whether race could be a factor, even subpoenaing the whole jury and asking each juror if bias influenced them wouldn't be sufficient. Jurors could still harbor biases they are unaware of and so cannot testify to. The decision gives the party alleged to benefit from racial bias an impossibly high bar to prove that it did not.

In the case that brought about the decision these factors were cited as things that could have tainted the verdict with racial bias:

  1. Defense said that the plaintiff was "confrontational" and "combative" on cross examination.

  2. Defense said that plaintiff's witnesses all using the same phrase to describe the plaintiff as "life of the party" was suggestive that they colluded on their testimony.

  3. Defense suggested that the plaintiff's chiropractor may be biased because plaintiff is employed by that chiropractor.

  4. Defense said that the damages sought by the plaintiff, $3.5 million, and the timeline in reporting injuries to doctors, were an indicator that the trial was about financial gain.

  5. Plaintiff says the jury asked that the plaintiff not be present in the courtroom for the verdict. This is disputed by the judge, who said it is her regular practice to ask both parties to wait in the hallway for the verdict so that jurors can speak with the attorneys without their clients present.

The motion for a hearing for a new trial was raised at trial. The trial court said it could not "require attorneys to refrain from using language that is tied to the evidence in the case, even if in some contexts the language has racial overtones." The Supreme Court said "that reasoning gets it exactly backward."

In practice it seems like this is going to benefit the richest parties in civil cases. The losing side should always seek a new trial on this basis, even if it's a longshot based on language that few would recognize as an instance of bias.

If you can meet this low bar, which is met by such things as suggesting a witness could be biased because they employ the plaintiff, then a new trial is inevitable. That is, unless you can somehow achieve the impossible and prove that racial bias was not a factor. If you don't have enough money to afford attorneys for another trial, or even to represent you at the hearing, you're at a huge disadvantage.

The jury actually found in favor of the plaintiff in this case, just not in the amount she was seeking. She sued for $3.5 million and was awarded $9,200.

The three Supreme Court justices up for re-election this year are running unopposed.

Since this is for state civil cases getting a trial to the federal Supreme Court is very unlikely, yeah? Sucks to be a defendant in Washington. Is this just another benign tumor of degenerate legal precedence or will this actually effect outcome do you think?

The only likely avenue for getting it to the US Supreme Court is if a white person attempts to use the same tactic, the Washington Supreme Court says "You're white, no retrial for you", and it's appealed on equal protection grounds.

The WA supreme court has been pedal to the floor on radicalism for several years now, and almost nobody seems to have noticed it.

I was thinking about posting their recent "it's legal to flee from the scene of your crime in a high speed car chase with an illegal gun, but only if you're not white" ruling, but... Why bother? Anyone who doesn't already oppose it isn't going to have their minds changed by example #56,663, they'd just cheer and gloat that another blow for "equity" has been struck, or try desperately to ignore it and downvote+report anyone who mentions it.

People keep posting these pathetic "peak woke!" cope articles, as if they can't bring themselves to admit that this will never end. It's only just getting started, and it will keep getting more insane and oppressive for generations, because the hatred, sadism, and power of the perpetrators is inexhaustible.

I was thinking about posting their recent "it's legal to flee from the scene of your crime in a high speed car chase with an illegal gun, but only if you're not white" ruling

I don't see how that is an accurate summary of the decision. The Court said: Here, the State concedes that there was no lawful justification to seize Sum “until he drove off at a high rate of speed, over grass and the sidewalk.” [Citation] As a result, this case concerns only the first step of the seizure analysis: when, precisely, Sum was seized by Deputy Rickerson[.]"

Moreover, the evidence that the Court ordered suppressed was a false name and birth date that the defendant gave to the deputy before he fled.

In other words, the flight was irrelevant, because the issue was not whether his flight gave the cops cause to stop him, but rather whether he was seized before the the flight took place. So, no, the court did not say a thing about when and if someone can flee from the police.

it's legal to flee from the scene of your crime in a high speed car chase with an illegal gun, but only if you're not white

I'd say this is a mischaracterization, but so is how you've summarized the case.

The outrageous part of the ruling was that whether or not someone could consider themselves seized was dependent upon their race. Sum, as a Pacific Islander, could consider him seized by the police even without any language about being detained or arrested coming from the police.

As a result, the cop knocking on the window, saying they'd had some crime in the area, and asking for identification, counts as a seizure. Since it wasn't proper to effect a seizure at that point, all the fruits of this "seizure" are inadmissible.

If Sum were a white guy, this would not be the case, and he could be prosecuted for giving a fake identity to police.

To clarify, I was not defending the decision. It is so prolix that I lost interest in a analyzing its reasoning.

That being said, whether it is outrageous is actually a more difficult decision than it appears. "'[A] person has been "seized" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment only if, in view of all the circumstances surrounding the incident, a reasonable person would have believed that he was not free to leave.'" Davis v. Dawson, 33 F. 4th 993, 997 (8th Cir. 2022) (quoting United States v. Mendenhall, 446 U.S. 544, 554, 100 S.Ct. 1870, 64 L.Ed.2d 497 (1980)).

The "reasonable person" who is confronted with "all the circumstances" shows up a lot in US law, and there is all sorts of case law about what that "reasonable person" is: It is just the average person, or do courts consider specific attributes of the person in determining what a reasonable person with those attributes would do. For example, in a self-defense case, the fact that person is a battered spouse/etc can be used to assess the reasonableness of his or her belief that the victim poses an imminent threat. OTOH, courts have said that, re heat of passion, "the standard always remains that of the ordinary reasonable person. The defendant's conduct is not measured against that of, for example, the ordinary reasonable gang member or the ordinary reasonable person who 'was intoxicated' or 'suffered various mental deficiencies' or 'psychological dysfunction due to traumatic experiences.'" People v. Dominguez, 66 Cal. App. 5th 163, 176 (2021).

Now, regarding seizures, I am pretty confident that there are some interactions with police which a middle aged, upper middle class white guy in Beverly Hills would see as a relatively benign interaction, but which a black teenager in the South Bronx would interpret as indicating that he is not free to leave. Ditto re plenty of poor white young men. Now, whether those attributes should matter is not an easy question: There is a lot to be said for giving police clear rules, and looking to a generic reasonable person does add some clarity. OTOH, a lot of harm, injustice, and poor policy has resulted from assuming that everyone is a generic person who acts like a generic person, esp since those in positions of power tend to assume that the generic person is like them, and that those who respond differently than does a middle class Joe is acting "unreasonably."

Again, as that should make clear, I am neither defending nor criticizing the decision the court reached on that question.

Now, regarding seizures, I am pretty confident that there are some interactions with police which a middle aged, upper middle class white guy in Beverly Hills would see as a relatively benign interaction, but which a black teenager in the South Bronx would interpret as indicating that he is not free to leave.

Perhaps, but I would deny that a perception not based on reality is "reasonable", regardless of how common it is. If a white person in this situation would believe he can leave, but a black person would believe "I'll be shot if I leave", we really ought to require that the court determine whether the police would actually shoot a black person in such a situation. That step seems to be missing here; instead, the court decided that race should be presumed relevant and was perfectly fine with lack of evidence.

No, a perspective not based on reality is not reasonable. But not all perspectives re police held by upper middle class folks are based on reality, either.

As for what the court actually did in this case, the defendant's race does not seem to have been much of a factor in the end. Rather, the key was that the cop woke someone sleeping in the car because he suspected the car was stolen: "Based on the totality of the circumstances, an objective observer could easily conclude that if Sum had refused to identify himself and requested to be left alone, Deputy Rickerson would have failed to honor Sum’s request because the deputy was investigating Sum for car theft."

If Sum had asked if he was free to go he would have had a solid case if the deputy had said no. Instead all we have is speculation on what an objective observer could "easily conclude" the deputy would have done had Sum asked, and we treat that as if it is what had happened.

Also this is the Sum decision's definition of objective observer:

...an objective observer in Washington “is aware that implicit, institutional, and unconscious biases, in addition to purposeful discrimination, have resulted in” many injustices against BIPOC, particularly in the criminal justice system.

Instead all we have is speculation on what an objective observer could "easily conclude" the deputy would have done had Sum asked, and we treat that as if it is what had happened.

You say that because you are not familiar with Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. What we actually have here is a court doing what courts do in Fourth Amendment cases, and have done for at least 55 years, since Terry v. Ohio: Determine whether a reasonable person would have believed he is free to leave, or more precisely in this case, free to terminate the encounter. Florida v. Bostick, 501 U.S. 429, 435-436 (1991) ["when a person "has no desire to leave" for reasons unrelated to the police presence, the "coercive effect of the encounter" can be measured better by asking whether "a reasonable person would feel free to decline the officers' requests or otherwise terminate the encounter"]

In other words, courts do exactly what the court said: Try to determine what a reasonable person think the cop would say if he said, "Go away. I don't want to talk to you"? That is precisely what it mean to say "I believe that I am free to leave."

One of the interesting takeaways from the opinion is that the racial bias required for a new trial isn't limited to the party, but could be the party's attorney as well. I'm guessing this will result in a lot of work for minority trial lawyers from white clients.

Why did the Chinese Communist Party choose an accented translator for its recent new leadership press event?

Below is the CCTV (state media) livestream of the event, time stamped to the start of alternating Chinese / English speaking portions. It continues through when Xi begins speaking with the same translator about two minutes later.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XPElpDddUWo&t=527

The translator, or maybe more fittingly the teleprompt reader, considering the translation was certainly done well ahead of the event, speaks with a clear Chinese-British accent. I would venture to guess that he had gone to university in the UK, and no earlier (i.e. emigrated for elementary or middle/high school). Further, he sounds young, and so it seems unlikely that he is an important party cadre who was chosen for political seniority.

Is there anything to be read into this personnel choice? Considering the event is bilingual and clearly aimed at the international audience, someone in charge of optimizing its success, I'd think, would select for basically two dimensions:

  1. Political purity: no chance a prankster or saboteur would use the opportunity to shout anti-CCP slogans to embarrass the regime

  2. Technical capability: no stage fright, clear enunciation, diction, volume, etc.

Considering how prominent this event was, I'm shocked that the party could not find someone trustworthy who also happened to speak English with no accent. Is it because #1 contradicts #2, whereby someone born in the US or UK could not be trusted?

I think it's fair to claim this is a nothingburger. But the CCP is highly choreographed, so this decision was surely intentional. Does it speak to its weakness, therefore, that it is unable to present a high-quality English speaker whom it can also trust politically?

Alternatively, does anyone think the choice of an accented translator was intentional? That is, the party subtly shows the world that while it wants to keep it informed, it does not care enough to optimize for the listening experience of its international audience?

English with no accent

And what exactly does English with no accent sound like?

Obviously like a person from somewhere in England that's not particularly close to London. /s

JFC, lol.

Just got a flashback to trying to play some DayZ with a couple of British paras on their days off.

You just cannot understand some British regional accents. I forgot what their was.. something NE of London? Around Norfolk maybe.

Often it's on par with trying to listen to AAVE. Extremly strong southern accent is just getting there, lol.

Presumably they meant "with no foreign accent", i.e. with one of the many accents native speakers of English have.

Maybe I'm biased from interacting with Chinese-born folks all the time, but that's a very light accent. A lot of the words are indistinguishable from a native speaker. It's certainly not strong enough to impact communication.

This seems like an odd choice to read anything into? There's no such thing as a non-accented person, and I certainly wouldn't accept that a person with a British accent is not a 'high-quality English speaker'. The translator certainly does have a British accent, and the translator also appears to speak English quite well. Perhaps he is Sino-British, as you say, or learned English in Britain or from a British teacher.

I'm not really sure what weakness that could possibly convey, or how it would show disregard for the listening experiences of foreigners? The translator's English is perfectly pleasant to listen to.

If I notice anything about the translator, it's perhaps that his speech is conspicuously slow and clear. That seems understandable given the context, though. The translation is probably intended for people all around the world, many of whom have their own heavily-accented varieties of English. It's also quite possibly intended even for Chinese people who don't speak Mandarin - China has considerable linguistic diversity, and there may be even within China audiences that understand English as a second language, but not Mandarin.

It's also quite possibly intended even for Chinese people who don't speak Mandarin - China has considerable linguistic diversity, and there may be even within China audiences that understand English as a second language, but not Mandarin.

I very much doubt this is the case. Mandarin has been the primary language of education countrywide for decades. There might be some people in HK that only speak Cantonese and English, but I doubt they were the target audience.

speak English with no accent.

He speaks clearly and is easy to understand, which is what matters, I believe.

I think it may be deliberate. Not having a translator with an American or British accent makes it clear whose event this is - a Chinese event.

Personally I like the Chinese accent when it's not too hard to understand. Probably from too much exposure to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, whose Chairman Yang while .. not really sympathetic is a very memorable character!, partly because of the odd accents and weird musical pronunciation. It wasn't probably wholly genuine- the voice actor lived in the US for quite some time, so I imagine he stopped having a strong accent..

He speaks clearly and is easy to understand, which is what matters, I believe.

The funny thing is that his so-called "accent" is more clear than the literal Queen's English (or the other RP examples in that video).

For a long time, RP or mid-atlantic was the hegemonic "no accent" English for newscasts and politics. This accent is a contemporary RP, but with a mild Chinese accent on some words (e.g. foreign as for-eeyn).

Alternatively, does anyone think the choice of an accented translator was intentional? That is, the party subtly shows the world that while it wants to keep it informed, it does not care enough to optimize for the listening experience of its international audience?

If we're going to assume that it was intentional to send a message, the message was probably not "Fuck you, you have to listen to this awful ass accent" it was more like "A Chinese accent is a respectable high class accent appropriate to this kind of event." You were expecting an accent somewhere in the transatlantic newscaster to Northeastern US between Westchester, NY and Evanston, IL* ; you probably also would have accepted something very BBC newscaster, even though Americans would distinctly call that an accent. You would have been confused, unnerved, or offended if he had come up and delivered it in a non-Chinese accent: imagine if he delivered it with a southern drawl or an Indian quik-e-mart "thank you come again" or in surfer-dude with a litany of "brah" and "rad." Why is that? Because the unaccented English or the oxford English accent are considered high status, and the others are considered lower status. Unaccented English is the English of the wealthiest and most financially and culturally influential part of the United States, where the majority of the historically important educational institutions are located. Southern accents are for hicks, Indian accents for immigrants, surfer accents for burnout losers. Your spokesman typically speaks with a high class accent to emphasize that your organization is high class.

By using a mild Chinese accent where we expect to hear a high status accent, the Chinese are asserting that the mild Chinese accent is high status. All you English speakers, this is the way your corporate bosses are going to sound, the way your most important clients and suppliers will sound, the way the scientists you want to suck up to at research conferences will sound. They are trying to elevate the Chinese accented English above immigrant or FOBby exchange student, and associate it with power and prestige.

Alternatively, their knowledge of America is based entirely on American movies, and they assume that we think that they have their conferences in English with a mild Chinese accent, while Russians hold theirs with a mild but indistinct Eastern European accent.

*This is what we generally mean when we say "unaccented English" in the USA, but there are subtle gradients within even that relatively boring and mild area. Where I'm from most of the country would describe us as having no accent, I had a scoutmaster who could place you within twenty square miles in our county. He just had a freak talent for it. Perception occurs at the level of your baseline skill, what we perceive as an accent is relative to our experience and ability to perceive subtle differences. That guy just had a level of skill much much higher than the rest of us.

Unaccented English is the English of the wealthiest and most financially and culturally influential part of the United States,

Speaking as someone in the UK, those people have a very pronounced accent. You call it unaccented since it's what has become normalised to your ears, but there is very much a "New Englander" accent.

It's such a pity. Southern accent is much nicer, but you hear it so seldom.

Hence the asterisk and the explainer, I assumed the op was American and meant something like that.

Also the New England accent is something else entirely! When we say "unaccented" we tend more to mean upper class and suburban mid Atlantic region.

Newscaster English is actually a Mid-Atlantic English, not New Englander. Yankees have a definite accent (actually, several) that isn't the national homogeneous English you hear in movies and on TV.

Even within the mid-atlantic, cities have distinctive lower class accents. It's only the educated suburbs that lose all or most noticeable accents. A Bronx or Long Island accent is distinct, as is a Philly accent, but I expect to get it from a contractor not a professor.

Thirty years ago New York City newscasters actually had New York City accents. They no longer do, however.

The idea that accented English is a "proper" way to speak English is not unique to the Chinese, there are infrequent but consistent articles in Finnish medias on how Finns should not be afraid to speak English with a Finnish accent ("Rally English"). See this, for example. I've also seen occasional pushes for conceiving an "European English", the sort of a specific variant that is forming in EU institutions due to a mix of accents, certain quirks of language use and so on.

I spent a small amount of time working in China and also visited a number of times to hang out with in laws. In the Shanghai subway 10ish years ago the English translation of the announcements was, to my American ears, a fairly silly fake-British somewhat-Chinese accent. Somehow that’s what they settled on as ””proper”” English translation. Visiting other parts of China I again encountered similar faux-British English official announcements. Strangely the Beijing subway lacked this silly fake accent and had what I can only assume was an American born Chinese state the stops in regular English.

I wouldn’t read into this too much. This is just one of their many strange things.

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Why do you think British-accented Chinese English is "silly fake accent" but American-accented Chinese English is "regular English"? Because you are an American? For the other way round, I find non-Western speakers of English with American accents to be "silly fake accents".

It's fair to say that to count as "regular English", you need to at least sound like some relatively large subset of native speakers who speak it as a first language. Accented Chinese English wouldn't qualify.

Probably more restrictive than that; it's a fairly limited set of U.K. and American accents; Scottish, Southern US, Down East, the old New York accent, etc, need not apply. Nor would any Indian accent qualify.

I say silly and fake because it sounds like a poorly done affectation. They try too hard and screw it up. Not that an actual British accent is inherently silly.

But the American accent in the Beijing subway was spot on. So I’m saying that announcer probably grew up in the US and speaks like a native English speaker. That one announcer doesn’t have a silly edge to their speech.

What do you mean by "speak English with no accent"? Do you mean "sounds like an American"? That is also an accent. Do you mean "speaks English like a native English speaker, with no Chinese inflections"?

I don't think this accent is bad, the speaker is intelligible, and he is presumably native Chinese. The English is also fluent. If that's not enough for "high-quality" in your book, do you also insist that English/American events that have translators use 'unaccented/sound like native speakers' translators, else they are showing political weakness?

So...more people have dropped Kanye West in the wake of his "anti-semitic comments" (it took more digging than it should have to actually see what he said - a few articles just leave it incredibly vague which is...problematic). In this case Anna Wintour/Vogue and CAA, both of which are hugely influential, even though CAA only repped him for touring.

To tie it into another recent trend: the Floyd family is allegedly thinking of suing him for suggesting Floyd died of fentanyl though I don't know on what grounds? I guess people have been emboldened by the Alex Jones verdict?

A while ago a rapper called DaBaby went through a similar thing where he refused to apologize until the consequences got too serious - I personally was interested in how far someone could take it. But the outcome proved that "cancel culture" isn't really a paper tiger that only works when people play along because they're too spineless. Nope, it'll work regardless.

This is an interesting test case because Kanye is basically as close to "uncancellable" as a person in a hugely PR-focused industry like music (and fashion) gets. He has a bunch of rabid fans who will buy his music or gear and he's already so vastly rich and famous that he'll likely always make waves. And , according to him, he has an ironclad contract with Adidas

Presumably he knew all this when he - once again - decided to say something he almost certainly knew would bring controversy. But, unlike the "slavery was a choice" or all of the other shit he did, this one is actually leading to the most serious consequences we've seen yet. Ironically for saying Jews cancel people who don't play by the agenda.

Recall also that Nick Cannon eventually was forced to apologize not for racist, Scientology-esque pseudoscience about white people, but specifically for annoying Jews.

It's a shame we don't have a way to see what the median person thinks about this (it's all just elite shunning and op-eds right now) because my first impression when I saw that happen to Cannon is "this is bad for everyone. White people are seeing this - they're basically seeing that anti-white racism is fine and the only whites you don't get to be racist towards are Jews". I wonder how black people will feel if this is what kills Kanye and not...y'know, going against the strongest racial partisan preference in the country.

Mind linking to sources quoting what Kanye said exactly?

Here's the BBC on the subject.

When Diddy asked him again to stop [selling 'white lives matter' shirts], West replied: "Ima use you as an example to show the Jewish people that told you to call me that no one can threaten or influence me."

...

He followed up with a message saying: "I'm a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I'm going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE The funny thing is I actually can't be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also.

"You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda," he added.

It's classic anti-Semitism, not disguised and not any sort of edge case.

No it’s not antisemitism, it’s critical Jew theory. We need to deconstruct Jewishness in America.

If Kanye identifies as Jew, then he’s a Jew and we must accommodate him by letting him censor other people.

This article goes chronologically.

The portion of his fanbase that posts on Kanye-related subreddits is very displeased with this latest bout of iconoclasm. [Edit: Actually /r/westsubever seems pretty adamant about sticking with the music.] However, I'm curious about the non-Reddit-posting demographic of Kanye fans. I'm not sure whether they're tuned into this issue nor whether they're bothered. I guess I'm basically echoing you: "It's a shame we don't have a way to see what the median person thinks about this."

Perhaps a decent proxy — some comments from theshaderoom's latest Kanye post (celebrity gossip Insta focused on black culture, predominantly black commentariat):

Y’all are not understanding that this guy is trying to build his own empire,but he can’t if he is still in contracts with all them labels and companies! This is all planed

131 likes ^

He’s getting out of his contracts and y’all don’t see the genius in this lmao.

1,707 likes ^

They ain’t move like this when he said slavery was a choice but I guess

1,160 likes ^

Nobody lifted a finger when he was talking about black people though

1,871 likes ^

I think he ending his relationships with the companies but y’all gon spin shit how y’all wanna 🥴🤷

138 likes ^

He used the system to make his money. Now using the platform they gave him to speak uncomfortable truths. The man is a genius. He is already a billionaire he’ll be fine.

57 likes ^

it’s funny when he was saying all this shit against black people (“slavery was a choice”) ain’t nobody end they relationship with him but the moment he speak Jews in the industry and they wrong doings, they ready to clean house with him. It just shows how much they don’t gaf about anybody but them.

3,990 likes ^

For branding purposes , Kanye should at least leave George Floyd out of it. Otherwise, he's not going to have any fans. There is a large overlap of blacks who agree with Kanye regarding Jews and still think Floyd was murdered .

Perhaps a decent proxy — some comments from theshaderoom's latest Kanye post (celebrity gossip Insta focused on black culture, predominantly black commentariat):

TheColi is another site with mostly black membership (I had to laugh one time when there was a thread asking you to post a photo of your hand to prove your opinions on hip-hop were worth listening to), here's what they have to say about Kanye:

https://www.thecoli.com/threads/adidas-to-end-kanye-west-partnership-after-controversies-bloomberg-com.943998/

https://www.thecoli.com/threads/adidas-to-end-kanye-west-partnership-after-controversies-bloomberg-com.943998/

I remember when Nas mentioned Doug Morris in hero lyrics and they censored it and it wasn't even that bad , that's when I realized these guys don't play around

^6 likes

Why would companies do anything to Kanye for his comments about black people when you had countless idiots in the black community co-signing his buffoonery? There’s threads on this very site with people agreeing with him on slavery being a choice.

When he said something about the Jews they came together and packed his ass up. You didn’t have Jewish people stepping out of line and defending him or trying to explain what he really meant.

^30 likes

Boo hoo... it's not on white people to be outraged on our behalf.

Seems you dudes are learning the hard way. We should have cancelled him since slavery was a choice came out his mouth. If we had raised the issues back then these companies would have had to respond as well :yeshrug:

Nikkaz gonna keep crying bout Jew power like they are mythical or embrace collective power and learn how to move accordingly. But most would rather still stay stuck on pretending that we can't amass power as well because we don't have the resources. People are the main resource.

^33 likes

fukk Kanye but it’s funny it takes for him to say one thing about the Jews for him to get cancelled for hate speech yet this nikka been running around literally shytting on black people and our ancestors for years now untouched. Either way. fukk him. But fukk the media and the industry too.

^44 likes

It's a shame we don't have a way to see what the median person thinks about this

How would that look like? You can't just average what 300 millions of people think and get some meaningful picture. It's like composing an "average person", having one testicle, one teat and half a penis, and expecting that construct to give you a meaningful insight into how males and females behave.

As for why talk of persecuting Jews is dangerous, I think there are some examples in history that demonstrate that pretty conclusively. With that, the idiotic theories some of the less educated members of the famous-American community are periodically airing out are nothing new, and have been circulating for decades, some for centuries. Absent proper mental hygiene, some get infected and then sneeze it out in public. With prompt treatment delivered in time, there's nothing dangerous to it, if that's where it ends.

White people are seeing this - they're basically seeing that anti-white racism is fine

I'm not sure which part made you think "anti-white racism is fine"?

  • -16

No one is saying any group should be persecuted. But it would seem as if one group is off-limits to debate or criticism.

If a non-black celebrity was robbed, then tweeted about how he's about to go DEFCON 3 on black people and gave multiple interviews about how he's not about to keep getting victimized by black criminals, would it go very differently?

No, anti black racism is also unaccepted. But racism against non Jewish whites is completely acceptable. Thats the point

Yes, undisputed. That is not the same thing as "jews are the one group that is off-limits to debate or criticism".

That's not true at all. There's a lot of criticism directed at Jews in general and American Jews in particular. It's just "I am going to go Death Con 3 on Jews" is not something I call "debate and criticism". Neither is "you're not real Jews, your identity is fake and I am a real Jew instead". What exactly is being debated here? What is criticized? It's just repeating known false statements in an attempt to hurt people.

Of course in a free country one should be free to say even obviously false and idiotic things. But whoever is saying it also should be told they are false and idiotic, and "it's debate and criticism!" is no excuse for saying false and idiotic things.

It seems like the mere accusation of antiseminitm can end careers and has the effect of ending debate. Maybe Kanye was out of line but people have faced serious repercussions for far less

"I'm going Death Con 3 on Jews" is "mere accusation" as standing over the body with a smoking gun in one's hand and screaming "yes, I killed the bastard, and I am proud of it!" is a "mere accusation of murder". Since antisemitism is not a crime, there never could be anything more official than "accusation" - nobody gets an official Antisemitism League membership card, and organizations that could issue functional equivalents of this are, thankfully, either extinct or far away. But we have very clear expressions that go way beyond "mere accusation" - it's not like somebody just said out of the blue "Kanye said something antisemitic 20 years ago, I don't remember where or when or what it was, but I remember it being said so vividly it affected my whole life, even though I didn't speak to anybody about it for 20 years, but now I'm literally shaking!". That'd be mere accusation. And of course, nobody would think about taking something like that seriously and demand it had far-reaching consequences. But that's not what happened. We have the actual anti-semitic pronouncements. We all saw them. Maybe Ye wants to tell us we misunderstood him and "Death Con 3" actually means "embrace of friendship and love"? Maybe by saying Jews created cancel culture he meant Jews are great people and cancel culture is bad, and nothing more? He certainly didn't tell us any of that.

And as for ending debate - what debate? I don't see him debating anyone. I see him repeating moronic falsities about Jews and promising to do the same in the future. That's not a debate. At least it's not any debate that anybody would value. It's still his free speech, but there's no "ending debate" because there was never beginning the debate.

Maybe Kanye was out of line but people have faced serious repercussions for far less

People have faced serious repercussions for very small things, like walking around White House in a bad time. What's your point here? Do I think Chase should have closed his account? No, I don't think so. I think Chase is bad for doing this, and creates a terrible precedent. But do I think Ye should get his ass kicked, in strictly metaphorical and rhetorical sense of course, for doing something this monumentally stupid? Yes, I think so.

I wonder how black people will feel if this is what kills Kanye and not...y'know, going against the strongest racial partisan preference in the country.

I think they'll feel fear when they see that even their strongest champion (well, one of the strongest) is a powerless commoner, someone to be dragged through the mud and forced to apologize, in this scenario. It'll be a reality check of sorts, like what happens when Kadyrov's folks come to you to discuss your penchant for talking smack about Chechens on the internet. Thought you're a tough guy, huh? Thought we're powerless pussies? Surprise, we are the tough guys and you are the pussy; now display to all that you acknowledge that, and then hopefully we won't have to deal with really tough and much meaner guys than you in the future. It's a normal Asian practice of group self-defense, in fact it follows inevitably from the logic of honor culture. It permeates Israeli foreign policy and Jewish activism and it works well.

This happens to Black Americans and to other groups from time to time. How much has changed since 1996, really? Granted, some things have changed: for instance, we don't have Norm any more. Nor TV programs where his sort of routine, the gentlest, most plausibly deniable criticism of overreaction, the court jester's hint to the king, can be aired.

If we dispense with the individual will and look at this through the faux-Jungian lens of collective group unconscious, Kanye or Nick Cannon going off the rails in different directions is collective Black America testing and learning the boundaries of legitimate aggression. White people are anemic, weak and undefended – soft, allowed targets. Jewish people are so unallowed you'd best not even acknowledge you can distinguish them from Whites unless you're trying to offer some compliment – and this is, of course, one hell of a reason to learn to distinguish them.

"slavery was a choice"

What he said was basically paraphrasing Bob Marley's Redemption Song (which was basically lifted from a speech by Marcus Garvey).

“We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.”

-Marcus Garvey

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds.

-Bob Marley

Kanye was saying that 400 years of slavery is a choice, not that chattel slavery was. 400 years leads up to today. He's saying that people are mental slaves today, and you can choose to set your mind free.

Recall also that Nick Cannon eventually was forced to apologize not for racist, Scientology-esque pseudoscience about white people, but specifically for annoying Jews.

Nick and Kanye are basically parroting a lot of Louis Farrakhan, Nation of Islam, Black Hebrew Israelites, and similar black supremacists. Did Malcom X have some controversial statements about the Jews that were in a similar vein?

Anyways, I think the root of this is that black people moving up in society start 'noticing' how many Jews there are at the top. When half of Hollywood and the media are Jewish, half the white people in Ivy league institutions are Jewish, and Jews only make up ~2% of the population, then it seems logical to a black person to wonder if maybe it isn't the 'white man' keeping them down, since whites are under-represented in the media, in Hollywood, in academia, etc.

And with how connected we all are, now black people (and gentile whites) can peer much further than before. Even the poorest, most oppressed black person in the US can pull out their phone (lol) and quickly discover that half the famous white people he's ever heard of are Jewish.

It's only going to get worse. This is an extremely popular and pervasive topic in the black community. Throughout 2020/21 there were a few organizations that ran into turmoil as the black activists tried pushing out Jews. I think the Woman's March was one. I think the attempts to censor Kanye, assuming he doesn't back down, will lead to more support for him in the black community. This could end up like when Morgan Wallen (country singer) got cancelled for dropping an n-bomb, and then became even more popular. I guarantee most black people hearing Kanye talk about Jews will think every institutional action taken against him is proof he's right.

Kanye was saying that 400 years of slavery is a choice, not that chattel slavery was. 400 years leads up to today. He's saying that people are mental slaves today, and you can choose to set your mind free.

Your steelman captures half of his point I think:

“[T]o make myself clear. Of course I know that slaves did not get shackled and put on a boat by free will. My point is for us to have stayed in that position even though the numbers were on our side means that we were mentally enslaved.”

“[T]he reason why I brought up the 400 years point is because we can’t be mentally imprisoned for another 400 years. We need free thought now. Even the statement was an example of free thought. It was just an idea. [O]nce again I am being attacked for presenting new ideas.” [I've seen this mocked but I never knew someone actually said this lol]

https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/01/entertainment/kanye-west-slavery-choice-trnd

It seems to me that he actually is saying that black people hanging around as slaves was a result of "mental enslavement." And that this enslavement continues today.

Which seems like something that is either true in a banal sense (if you are facing a larger and more technologically advanced civilization that will brutalize you for trying to escape are you "mentally enslaved" in any way similar to what we face today? Or are you just enslaved*) or just outright stupid (said technologically superior foe literally publicly mangling you if you try to leave makes it not a choice)

It wouldn't surprise me if Kanye actually had the quotes you're thinking of in mind and then jumbled it together with a bunch of whatever's flying in his head and gave us...this. The man is talented but he's an ultracrepidarian narcissist who seems to want to be recognized as an iconoclast who goes around saying insightful things but doesn't want to put in the work, so he settles for saying provocative things and then sees the negative attention as weirdly validating.

Anyways, I think the root of this is that black people moving up in society start 'noticing' how many Jews there are at the top.

I mean, this isn't specific to black people. Everyone notices this.

I think the problem for black people is the radfem problem: Radfems were allowed to say all sorts of crazy shit about men by their side. Then transwomen came along. And they just...continued to say crazy shit about men (why would they change when their target hasn't?) but then had to learn very fast that not all men are equal.

Black people are given somewhat of a pass for saying crazy things about white people and have gotten accustomed to it (some of the things they say about whites are similarly deranged or weird). They look around and see a group of affluent whites and naturally start applying the same logic. This is, of course, a no-go. Not only is antisemitism a third rail but, if we're being cynical, there are benefits to claiming to be an oppressed minority (even when affluent) and so people are naturally defensive of someone trying to strip them of their cloak of victimhood in a country where it's currency.

Beyond that: can we just say that they picked it up from around them? Islam and Christianity both have had problems with Judaism, to say nothing of general antisemitism floating around and black people aren't an island.

* The gulf in tech between Rome and the leaders of the Servile Wars was infinitesimal in comparison yet no slave revolt succeeded and, in fact, Romans never suffered another one after Spartacus. A simple explanation is that it's just hard to pull off, especially without external help.

It seems to me that he actually is saying that black people hanging around as slaves was a result of "mental enslavement." And that this enslavement continues today.

Which seems like something that is either true in a banal sense (if you are facing a larger and more technologically advanced civilization that will brutalize you for trying to escape are you "mentally enslaved" in any way similar to what we face today? Or are you just enslaved*) or just outright stupid (said technologically superior foe literally publicly mangling you if you try to leave makes it not a choice)

I don't think it's banal or stupid. Compare this quote, ending with "If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” If there's a difference between that quote, written by a former slave about other slaves, and Kanye's statement, I'm not seeing it.

This is how people who are serious about learning from the past engage with their past mistakes: focus on that which is within one's own control, on the choices one is presented with.

You are entirely correct that it's difficult to pull off. That's why it's important to make the decisions in advance, to cultivate the proper mindset, the proper cultural technology, rather than attempting to put it together ad hoc once the fetters are on your wrists.

It seems to me that he actually is saying that black people hanging around as slaves was a result of "mental enslavement." And that this enslavement continues today.

Which seems like something that is either true in a banal sense (if you are facing a larger and more technologically advanced civilization that will brutalize you for trying to escape are you "mentally enslaved" in any way similar to what we face today? Or are you just enslaved*) or just outright stupid (said technologically superior foe literally publicly mangling you if you try to leave makes it not a choice)

As the old saying goes, you get used to anything eventually. That's what I think he's saying, yeah they were brutally dominated and subjugated into passively accepting their fates, but as any student of the time will tell you, they weren't whipped into submission every day for hundreds of years. They were treated 'decently' if they behaved, and so eventually they all behaved. To the point that yes, there were black people who supported the confederates, there were slaves who believed it was the best they could get.

That is the mental slavery. And yes it absolutely continues to this day, and yes you are one of the slaves, so am I, so is everyone here. But we have never been free - truly free - and so we accept this crude facsimile we are given by the government and corporations and all those who profit from our misery. At least that's what I think he's saying. Maybe it is banal, but so is calling fire hot. People don't lose their shit when you tell them fire is hot though.

As the old saying goes, you get used to anything eventually.

Getting used to literally being brutalized every time you try to rebel or run (and people did try) is not the same as getting used to...I dunno, whatever "slave" situation Kanye feels he and black people are today.

Sure, you could say they got used to both* but the means by which they were made resigned to their fate are vastly different and it's important.

If I look at the situation and think: "I hate the white man, I want to escape but I know so-and-so got lynched and that last rebellion was crushed brutally" that imo that is not some mental distortion or spell. That is a response to force, not a Jedi mind trick.

You might as well say that a conquered state is "mentally" enslaved.

That is the mental slavery. And yes it absolutely continues to this day, and yes you are one of the slaves, so am I, so is everyone here. But we have never been free - truly free - and so we accept this crude facsimile we are given by the government and corporations and all those who profit from our misery.

Sorry, but to me, this falls into the "if it's true it's true in a banal sense". Lots of people are forced into suboptimal political situations. It's not inherently slavery, especially not slavery compared to actual slavery. This is why OP's original steelman assumed that Kanye meant it was like slavery, not that he actually made an equivalence between slaves and black people today. Because it would be ridiculous.

Creating an equivalence between black people who were literally brought to America in chains and black people today seems absurd to me. I find the mindset ludicrous and it leads to all sorts of weird nonsense like Kaepernick comparing the NFL to slavery

Is Kaepernick right? I mean...I guess he is correct that there is a power differential between owners and players. And players naturally are subject to health checks to make sure they are fit to play and they are "sold" but I don't think anyone actually thinks it's anything like slavery and, the sense in which it is like that is so nebulous..

Getting used to literally being brutalized every time you try to rebel or run (and people did try) is not the same as getting used to...I dunno, whatever "slave" situation Kanye feels he and black people are today.

I don't think Kanye is talking about just black people, although I think it's truer of them than most. He's saying the same thing black conservatives have been saying for decades, that blame whitey, blame slavery, blame whatever you like, the real thing holding down black people today is a culture of apathy which tells them living on the edge of poverty is as good as they can get. That it doesn't matter that you live in the ghetto if you have a gaudy platinum chain on your neck. That sure, your daughter is going to end up raising the baby she just learned about alone, because her boyfriend is going to get himself arrested or shot, but you made do in that situation and so will she.

Sure, you could say they got used to both* but the means by which they were made resigned to their fate are vastly different and it's important.

To whom? Do you think it's unimportant to a guy whose ancestors experienced it? Do you think he said it flippantly? I think if he said it the same way black conservatives usually say it it would have been ignored like it usually is.

If I look at the situation and think: "I hate the white man, I want to escape but I know so-and-so got lynched and that last rebellion was crushed brutally" that imo that is not some mental distortion or spell. That is a response to force, not a Jedi mind trick.

It is a response to force, but it is also a jedi mind trick. Black people on some plantations outnumbered whites. But they were kept in line anyway. Not with brutality, with the white man's greatest tool - decorum. As I said, slaves who believed that was where they belonged. That is mental slavery. Slave morality if you like.

He's saying the same thing black conservatives have been saying for decades, that blame whitey, blame slavery, blame whatever you like, the real thing holding down black people today is a culture of apathy which tells them living on the edge of poverty is as good as they can get.

And I don't have any problem with that? The point is that what he actually, explicitly said is banal at best or stupid.

Kaepernick was also trying to make a similar sort of point. What a shame that he felt the need to use slavery eh?

You run into this with Kaepernick too where people defend him because he's attacking a group they like or they like what they believe is under his figurative speech I feel that the people defending both Kaepernick and Kanye are defending what they see as a nugget of a point in their ramblings and absurd comparisons.

I don't even disagree with many of those potential nuggets (empires do have systems to assimilate people and make them accept it, apathy is a thing, we today have been sapped of a certain amount of...I dunno, feeling of control over the destiny of our civilizations?). But that's not what Kanye said.

Black people on some plantations outnumbered whites.

At the time of Spartacus there was a huge glut of slaves. They rebelled. How did that go? Nat Turner rebelled. How did that go? Plenty of peasants around, yet often peasant revolts ended horribly.

The fact that any order comes up with social systems to take up some of the work of force doesn't mean that force isn't lurking, isn't a dominant consideration in people's minds or that force isn't actually effective.

This is giving me "why didn't they just pull themselves up by their bootstraps?"

I don't even disagree with many of those potential nuggets (empires do have systems to assimilate people and make them accept it, apathy is a thing, we today have been sapped of a certain amount of...I dunno, feeling of control over the destiny of our civilizations?). But that's not what Kanye said.

I think it is.

“When you hear about slavery for 400 years,” he said. “For 400 years? That sounds like a choice. You was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all. It’s like we’re mentally in prison. I like the word prison because slavery goes too direct to the idea of blacks. Slavery is to blacks as the Holocaust is to Jews. Prison is something that unites as one race, blacks and whites, that we’re the human race.”

Perhaps this is necessary context. This is from New Slaves, on the album Yeezus -

My mama was raised in the era when,

Clean water was only served to the fairer skin,

Doin' clothes, you woulda thought I had help,

But they wasn't satisfied unless I picked the cotton myself,

You see it's broke nigga racism

That's that "Don't touch anything in the store",

And it's rich nigga racism

That's that "Come in, please buy more",

"What you want, a Bentley? Fur coat? A diamond chain?

All you blacks want all the same things",

Used to only be niggas, now everybody playin'

Spendin' everything on Alexander Wang

New slaves

He's not saying "they only like us when we are rich", he's saying they distract us from the pursuit of freedom with material possessions and with racial prejudice, pitting us against each other so we don't notice them pulling our strings.

He's said similar things in interviews with people like Joe Rogan (and I thought Candace Owens too, but I can't find any interviews between them, google just shows me a billion opinion pieces bitching about the both of them.)

The fact that any order comes up with social systems to take up some of the work of force doesn't mean that force isn't lurking, isn't a dominant consideration in people's minds or that force isn't actually effective.

Exactly. You don't need to whip them every day because they have been mentally enslaved, the fear of the whip, of lynching and brutality keeps them in line. Even after slavery was abolished. The first step in freeing yourself from mental slavery is to say "I would rather die free than live as a slave" and to mean it.

You keep calling it banal, but you aren't explaining why. If it's so obvious and unoriginal, why is everyone flipping out? Why are you explaining exactly what he means as if it is somehow a rebuttal of what he said?

It is a God damned fucking atrocity that black people were so terrorised and brutalised by slavers that it has instilled such a horrible and depressive mindset into them, but agency is agency - you can only be given so much freedom, primarily you have to take it for yourself. And when someone is beaten down so much that they accept living in poverty, they need to be shocked into action, because gentle sympathy just excuses them from trying.

Like Bill Cosby said, it is the soft bigotry of lowered expectations. And we do it to everybody living around the poverty line these days. I don't know if you are dismissing it as "stupid" and "bootstraps" because you are enslaved or because living in poverty is too alien for you to understand and you think middle class sensibilities should be respected at all times, but I strongly disagree.

You might as well say that a conquered state is "mentally" enslaved.

They are. A conquered state is mentally enslaved, else they cannot be conquered. To crack open one of my favorite passages of Herodotus for the second time this week, Herodotus's account of the Xanthians:

The Pedasian stronghold being at length taken, and Harpagus having led his army into the plain of Xanthus, the Lycians came out to meet him, and did valorous deeds in their battle against odds; but being worsted and driven into the city they gathered into the citadel their wives and children and goods and servants, and then set the whole citadel on fire. Then they swore each other great oaths, and sallying out they fell fighting, all the men of Xanthus. Of the Xanthians who claim now to be Lycians the greater number — all saving eighty households — are liars.

Or ask Hasdrubal's wife at the fall of Carthage what slavery means.

Or ask Gandhi when consulted on what the Brits and the Jews should do about the Nazis:

"I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions... If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them."

“Hitler killed five million [sic] Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.....It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.”

There are alternatives to victory or accepting defeat and slavery.

You might as well say that a conquered state is "mentally" enslaved.

People do say that. This is a common refrain among nationalists, and apparently enough motivation for them to put their lives on the line in rebellion.

A simple explanation is that it's just hard to pull off, especially without external help.

A much simpler explanation, that applies to both the Romans and the Americas, is that slavery really isn't that bad. Like, don't get me wrong here, it's worse than anything most people experience in their entire lives, it's clearly a net negative and a moral wrong, but it's rarely constant brutality. It wasn't typically Auschwitz, and Primo Levi tells us that even in Auschwitz there were good days and there were bad days.

Selections from WPA Writer's Project collection of Slave Narratives from surviving former slaves

[All SIC, the writers at the time transcribed to the best of their ability the Negro dialect of the time, which was an interesting choice. I'm not sure if it were me I wouldn't write "Hongry" as "Hungry" even if "Hongry" is how she said it. I feel like the choice reflects some degree of condescension, but was looked on as preserving an American folkway. Swings and roundabouts.]

Yes sir, I was ‘bout fourteen years old when President Lincoln set us all free in 1863. The war was still goin’ on and I’m tellin’ you right when I say that my folks and friends round me did not regard freedom as a unmixed blessin’. We didn’t know where to go or what to do, and so we stayed right where we was, and there wasn’t much difference to our livin’, ‘cause we had always had a plenty to eat and wear. I ‘member my mammy tellin’ me that food was gittin’ scarce, and any black folks beginnin’ to scratch for themselves would suffer, if they take their foot in their hand and ramble ‘bout the land lak a wolf. -- Daniel Waring, emancipated in South Carolina

You ain’t gwine to believe dat de slaves on our plantation didn’t stop workin’ for old marster, even when they was told dat they was free. Us didn’t want no more freedom than us was gittin’ on our plantation already. Us knowed too well dat us was well took care of, wid a plenty of vittles to eat and tight log and board houses to live in. De slaves, where I lived, knowed after de war dat they had abundance of dat somethin’ called freedom, what they could not eat, wear, and sleep in. Yes, sir, they soon found out dat freedom ain’t nothin’, ‘less you is got somethin’ to live on and a place to call home. Dis livin’ on liberty is lak young folks livin’ on love after they gits married. It just don’t work. No, sir, it las’ so long and not a bit longer. Don’t tell me! It sho’ don’t hold good when you has to work, or when you gits hongry. You knows dat poor white folks and niggers has got to work to live, regardless of liberty, love, and all them things. --- Ezra Adams, emancipated in South Carolina

I ‘lieve they ought to have gived us somethin’ when we was freed, but they turned us out to graze or starve. Most of the white people turned the Negroes slam loose. We stayed a year with missis and then she married and her husband had his own workers and told us to git out. We worked for twenty and thirty cents a day then, and I fin’ly got a place with Dr. L. J. Conroe. But after the war the Negro had a hard struggle, ‘cause he was turned loose jus’ like he came into the world and no education or ‘sperience. -- Tom Holland, 97, emancipated in Texas

Or consider one of my personal American heroes: Frederick Douglass. From his autobiography Keeping in mind that Douglass was an extraordinary man, look at the slack he was able to find in the slave system:

Mistress, in teaching me the alphabet, had given me the inch, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell.

The plan which I adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in the street. As many of these as I could, I converted into teachers. With their kindly aid, obtained at different times and in different places, I finally succeeded in learning to read. When I was sent of errands, I always took my book with me, and by going one part of my errand quickly, I found time to get a lesson before my return. I used also to carry bread with me, enough of which was always in the house, and to which I was always welcome; for I was much better off in this regard than many of the poor white children in our neighborhood. This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge...

I used to talk this matter of slavery over with them. I would sometimes say to them, I wished I could be as free as they would be when they got to be men. “You will be free as soon as you are twenty-one, but I am a slave for life! Have not I as good a right to be free as you have?” These words used to trouble them; they would express for me the liveliest sympathy, and console me with the hope that something would occur by which I might be free.

Now compare Marx in Kapital, describing industrial conditions in England (the wealthiest nation in the world contemporary to Douglass' narrative):

“A clause,” says Mr. Otley, manager of a wall-paper factory in the Borough, “which allowed work between, say 6 a.m. and 9 p.m. would suit us (!) very well, but the factory hours, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., are not suitable. Our machine is always stopped for dinner. (What generosity!) ...

The report of the Commission opines with naïveté that the fear of some “leading firms” of losing time, i.e., the time for appropriating the labour of others, and thence losing profit is not a sufficient reason for allowing children under 13, and young persons under 18, working 12 to 16 hours per day, to lose their dinner, nor for giving it to them as coal and water are supplied to the steam-engine, soap to wool, oil to the wheel – as merely auxiliary material to the instruments of labour, during the process of production itself.

Douglass tells us clearly that there existed white children who were jealous of his material condition (bread available!). Certainly the slack available in his workday would have been enviable to thousands of children in Birmingham or London factories, tied to machines 12 hours a day. What hope did the average slave have upon escape? Odds are they wouldn't even be able to achieve the station of those laborers who worked 16 hour days in a factory!

Douglass tells us further:

A slave who would work during the holidays was considered by our masters as scarcely deserving them. He was regarded as one who rejected the favor of his master. It was deemed a disgrace not to get drunk at Christmas; and he was regarded as lazy indeed, who had not provided himself with the necessary means, during the year, to get whisky enough to last him through Christmas. From what I know of the effect of these holidays upon the slave, I believe them to be among the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection. Were the slaveholders at once to abandon this practice, I have not the slightest doubt it would lead to an immediate insurrection among the slaves. These holidays serve as conductors, or safety-valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity. But for these, the slave would be forced up to the wildest desperation; and woe betide the slaveholder, the day he ventures to remove or hinder the operation of those conductors! I warn him that, in such an event, a spirit will go forth in their midst, more to be dreaded than the most appalling earthquake. The holidays are part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrong, and inhumanity of slavery. They are professedly a custom established by the benevolence of the slaveholders; but I undertake to say, it is the result of selfishness, and one of the grossest frauds committed upon the down-trodden slave. They do not give the slaves this time because they would not like to have their work during its continuance, but because they know it would be unsafe to deprive them of it.

Slavery was not a perpetual torture, it was a mode of life, sometimes good and sometimes bad, with sufficient slack in it that a person could "get ahead" to a certain extent. There were happy slaves and sad slaves, lucky slaves and unlucky slaves, hard working slaves and improvident slaves. They had goals, piddling goals but goals nonetheless, they had families and connections, they had food and shelter and clothing.

But there was a ceiling over it all. Mental slavery was the use of goals like "obtain master's favor for lighter work and more bread" and "get enough money put by here and there to get drunk at Christmas" to substitute for goals like "obtain freedom and independence of means" (many slaves did put by enough to purchase their own freedom) and "protect my family."

Interesting comparison is Mel Gibson, who survived his cancellation attempt for antisemitism and became just as popular. Might Kanye pull the same stunt?

He survived in the sense he stopped making any movies or acting . There is a 5-year gap in his filmography between "Edge of Darkness" and "Complete Savages ".

Did Malcom X have some controversial statements about the Jews that were in a similar vein?

"So many Jews actually were hypocrites in their claim to be friends of the American black man, I gave the Jew credit for being among all other whites the most active, and the most vocal, financial, 'leader' and 'liberal' in the Negro civil rights movement. But at the same time I knew that the Jew played these roles for a very careful strategic reason: the more prejudice in America could be focused upon the Negro, then the more the white Gentiles’ prejudice would keep diverted off the Jew." - Malcolm X

So...more people have dropped Kanye West in the wake of his "anti-semitic comments" (it took more digging than it should have to actually see what he said - a few articles just leave it incredibly vague which is...problematic). In this case Anna Wintour/Vogue and CAA, both of which are hugely influential, even though CAA only repped him for touring.

He should have enough money to either buy or create his own agency , venue, or never have to tour again. Good riddance. He does not need them. His brand is big enough. Being dropped only proves his point.

or all of the other shit he did, this one is actually leading to the most serious consequences we've seen yet. Ironically for saying Jews cancel people who don't play by the agenda.

Probably because he refused to apologize. Had he apologized quickly, maybe some of this could have been avoided. Good for him to stand his ground.

I personally was interested in how far someone could take it.

It depends on how much you nan afford to lose. Everoyne has a price

To tie it into another recent trend: the Floyd family is allegedly thinking of suing him for suggesting Floyd died of fentanyl though I don't know on what grounds? I guess people have been emboldened by the Alex Jones verdict?

Probably. The Jones verdict showed that claiming trauma can be very profitable, but obv. collecting is harder than winning.

He should have enough money to either buy or create his own agency , venue, or never have to tour again.

Depends how hard they want to cancel him. All the money in the world doesn't help if payment processors, retailers and local governments refuse to work with you. He'd still get to live a luxurious lifestyle but he wouldn't have any reach beyond the 6 people who read his blog that's constantly DDOSed.

Kanye is a smart man and alt tech is… well getting better.

He can find a way around it if he wants.

Funny how you can literally traffic and kidnap women and still have plenty of work in Hollywood, yet you say something criticizing a certain group and that’s a bridge too far eh?

This is not that surprising, considering not only the group that the person(s) who trafficked and kidnapped women belongs to, but also that people nowadays don't take physical, material violence seriously and put far more weight on to emotional "violence" (i.e. opinions they do not like) despite the fact that words have less material impact than, you know, actual physical action.

If white people were capable of noticing the difference between what you're allowed to say about them vs any other race in America then they would have seen it a long time ago. I would be completely blown away if this was the thing that changed anyone's mind.

The greatest influence on other people is other people. Do you really give a shit if some guy you don't know shows up to a black tie function in shorts and a t-shirt? If it's your black tie function, or someone you care about maybe, but otherwise generally no. But you know other people expect you to dislike it - it isn't proper - and so you are outraged. All that is required to change it is someone ostentatiously doing otherwise.

Someone with power and influence making a big show of refusing to play ball makes it more acceptable overnight. It starts a chain reaction, people follow suit and soon a critical mass of people refuse to play ball, and the rule gets abolished.

Kanye is powerful, influential and, most importantly in modern America, of the caste which is allowed to talk about race. I don't think this will change any minds, but it has already had an impact - the way he went about it made it practically impossible to talk around - although note how hard the media is trying.

Adidas has dropped Kanye West following growing agitation from organized Jewish groups. The move is expected to reduce Adidas revenue by about $250 million.

@freemcflurry is pessimistic that white people will wake up to what's going on. Maybe the prospect of the average person getting any sort of red-pill from this is overly optimistic. But I think there are smart, high-agency people closer to the fringes, and in communities like this one, that may increasingly realize they can't turn a blind eye to this dynamic in the culture war. I even think there are many good-faith Jews in communities like this one who may increasingly be willing to admit to this toxic dynamic between Jews and Gentiles in the West, rather than just dismiss it as the isolated behavior of a few fanatics and interest groups that they don't endorse.

In the past, highly public and economically costly sanctions like these were not even necessary. The fact that Jewish interests find it increasingly necessary to exercise hard-power to eliminate any sort of criticism of their behavior is a sign that these criticisms are not going away. These criticisms, which Jews call "anti-semitism", are anti-fragile. The more they tighten their grip in the form of economic sanctions, online censorship, social credit sanctions, and lawfare, the more they are validating the claims they are fighting against.

I can't remember which, but there's a mod around here who uses the "da Joos" thing to basically try to neutralize criticism of Jews in conversation. I have to think that he or she is going to think twice before dismissing criticism of Jewish influence as some insane conspiracy theory. This $250 million sanction against Adidas for having the unfortunate luck of having its influencer direct his criticism towards Jews instead of exclusively white people must make it harder for smart and honest people to dismiss those criticisms out-of-hand.

The fact that Jewish interests find it increasingly necessary to exercise hard-power to eliminate any sort of criticism of their behavior is a sign that these criticisms are not going away.

Or that they have gathered sufficient power that they no longer feel it is necessary to operate in a non-overt manner.

The move is expected to reduce Adidas revenue by about $250 million.

Apparently 8% of their revenue. So...yeah, cancel culture is not a paper tiger.

The more they tighten their grip in the form of economic sanctions, online censorship, social credit sanctions, and lawfare, the more they are validating the claims they are fighting against.

Apt reference to the Social Credit idea.

Would you say the same logic applies to Xi?

Yet he has become the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao, and all of the (doomed to be destroyed by the West) Chinese civilization now revolves around his whims.

There's a lesson here somewhere. Probably this one: power wins. Its exercise validates protests, but only up to the point where it can be plausibly resisted; past that, people fall in line and learn to excuse the blatantly inexcusable, or perish.

Power wins, but not all power has the same nature. Xi projects power, and I don't think he wants to leave doubt as to where power in China lies. But if you watch the Lex Fridman interview with Kanye, Fridman refuses to even acknowledge any factual basis or underlying reality to what Kanye describes as the "Jewish media." Fridman doesn't dispute the fact of the matter, he just invokes the Holocaust to assert that it's wrong for Kanye to call Jewish people Jewish.

Overt exercises of power like this are contrary to the strategies that have served them well throughout history. Jews cannot exert a Xi-level of power projection in the West, for a number of reasons. At the same time, they cannot allow anti-semitism to grow in public consciousness. It's a delicate balance, and one that is made much more delicate when you get goofy Gentiles like Kanye West and Whoopie Goldberg who do not understand the game they are playing.

Its exercise validates protests, but only up to the point where it can be plausibly resisted; past that, people fall in line and learn to excuse the blatantly inexcusable, or perish.

The other option is to neither protest nor fall in line, but to silently join a growing set of noticers who are unhappy with what they perceive as an unfair arrangement. Kipling's poem captures that mode well.

But this entire affair should not be overstated, I don't think it's going to change anything except slightly grow the set of noticers. Noticing is not the same thing as acquiring power, that's very true. But history shows it only takes a surprisingly small portion of a population to accept a taboo before it inevitably becomes mainstream consensus.

Would you not agree that "I'm going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE" merits a stronger noun than "criticism"? Perhaps "hatred"?

That tweet doesn't strike me as even coming close - within the same universe - to justifying the reaction to it. We are talking about costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Cancelled projects, dropped contracts, boycotts, calls to ban his music on Google and Spotify.

You can use the old 4chan trick of replacing "white" with "Jewish" and asking yourself if the reaction would be remotely similar if that had been his tweet instead.

Economically: There's a lot of money based on his personal brand, and he just dramatically reduced the value of the latter. I find it reasonable that the market would react accordingly.

Practically: "I'm going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE" (henceforth, "his words") aren't acceptable to - rough approximation - anyone, and he hasn't issued retractions or showed signs of backing down in any way (which would have been nice, I do like his music). The straightforward conclusion is thus that anyone would stop associating with him. Which includes people with a lot of money and power. Hence the reaction.

Morally: To misquote an old guy, his words lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value, so I don't know what he was expecting.

Regarding your "old 4chan trick": as a preamble, the fact that it's called an "old 4chan trick" tells me all I need to know about whether the people behind it were genuinely interested in collaboratively discovering truth through discussion (hint: hahaha; and to follow the rule on speaking plainly: not at all). Anyway:

But we don't live in either of those two alternate realities.

I find it reasonable that the market would react accordingly.

Who says I find the market response unreasonable? Adidas for example is responding to market forces. It's the market forces that are the problem. On the contrary, I find it to be a useful quantifier for demonstrating the market cost of criticizing Jews.

There is a gigantic market cost to criticizing Jews. At the same time, there is a giant market benefit to criticizing white identity- with Jews themselves often investing the most money and influence in signal-boosting those criticisms of Gentile culture within popular culture.

This behavior of influential Jews- wherein they invest heavily in patronizing all manner of criticism Gentile culture, history, and morality, and then act hysterically when any measure of criticism is directed towards themselves, is on full display for everyone to see. You can do what Fridman did and just invoke history to try to justify the behavior. And you can try to justify it, but there is no longer any room to deny that this behavior exists and is a powerful undercurrent in the culture war.

I must admit I'm not seeing the distinction, if you're intending any, between market response, market forces, market cost, etc.

What I mean to say is if someone says "I'm going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE", this will piss people off, and they'll stop doing business with that person. Which part of that do you think should not be happening?

So The Gap is now pulling all of his products

"In September, Gap announced ending its Yeezy Gap partnership," the statement began. "Our former partner's recent remarks and behavior further underscore why. We are taking immediate steps to remove Yeezy Gap product from our stores and we have shut down Yeezygap.com."

Between this and Adidas dropping him and saying that they actually own the designs to the Yeezys implies Kanye is deeply in the hole and bleeding out. That Adidas deal accounted for the majority of his net worth and now his other deals are falling through and all of the work he already did with Adidas must stay with them. God only knows how much income he's going to lose which will also shrink his ability to do anything else (like say...make his own shoes).

And we don't even know where this'll stop. I think Spotify hasn't said anything cause, last time they tried to remove a black artist, they got pushback from major rappers but we can't rule out that even his music career - his motte from which he spawned his billion dollar endeavors - could be extirpated.

It's a shame we don't have a way to see what the median person thinks about this (it's all just elite shunning and op-eds right now)

I would find it obvious that the median person agrees with the "elite shunning and op-eds". Can you explain the thought process that would lead a "median person" to a different conclusion?


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