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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38090 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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About the hype around nuclear power generation among conservatives. Sorry, I do not have a well articulated text to defend here, this is more of probe into the subject, since I feel I am probably missing some fundamental logic here.

It seems to me the support for nuclear energy is a sort of pet cause for conservatives. Not because of the wonders of the technology, but for what it signals.

Given the financial cost of this type of energy source compared to other low emission energy sources, I am yet to find a defense of Nuclear as a feasible strategy for lowering CO2 emissions that comes across as based, good faith argument by someone with true concern about the issue, rather than an attempt at subverting the discussion around energy transition.

Or are there people who truly believe that nuclear energy is a part of energy transition strategy so meaningful it is worth joining forces with those raise the flag as a form of subversion? Any reading recommendation of up to date, nuanced, good faith arguments for nuclear energy?

  • -16

The electrical grid needs baseload power. In this graph green represents wind production in Sweden each day. A serverhall or steel mill has a fairly constant consumption rate. During During various Dunkelflautes the wind power production has dropped to low single digit percentages of installed capacity.

Some countries like Norway and Iceland are blessed with boundless cheap baseload power from hydro and geothermal. The rest of us need to create it. Nuclear is reliable, not dependent on weather and provides a stable and green electrical grid. There wasn't a single hour in which Germany's electrical grid was greener than France's last year. France bet on nuclear, Germany on fossil fuels with wind when the weather is good.

Too much focus is spent on electricity production and not enough on the grid. A nuclear powerplant 50 km from a city requires a 50 km cable that is operating at an average of 90-95% capacity. Windpower requires multiple power lines that can be a thousand km long to connect the city to various different wind parks, where it might be windy at different times. This is not green, cheap or efficient.

I understand solar and wind have their shortcomings when in comes to production stability, and that they may have hidden costs. But that it is long stretch from there to concluding nuclear power is generally a worthy complement to them, with aims at minimizing emissions.

As clean and safe and whatever else it may be, there is no way around the price. It consistently ranks among the most costly sources. And budget being the tightest constraint, I cannot imagine it being an important part of the strategy for energy transition - maybe some minor and localized cases, but not more than that.

For a curious layman like me, it is hard to tell serious speech from the noise. But just pointing out that something has a problem does not sell well that nuclear is the best solution.

  • -14

As clean and safe and whatever else it may be, there is no way around the price. It consistently ranks among the most costly sources. And budget being the tightest constraint, I cannot imagine it being an important part of the strategy for energy transition - maybe some minor and localized cases, but not more than that.

As another commenter asked, are you calculating the insane and targeted regulatory burdens as part of this price? Most nuclear plants that have gone up have undergone extreme lawfare designed to put them out of business. Without all of that, do you suppose the cost might go down?

Absolutely that is an important factor for understanding how nuclear weighs against alternatives. I cannot say where we should draw the line between lawfare and necessary checks and rightful disputes, nor can I say what the actual political cost it is to have nuclear powerplants. But would be very interested in reading a source that makes a good case for nuclear power using uo to date data, and its nvironmental and economic effect under different scenarios

Nuclear isn't that expensive. France managed to build a majority nuclear grid that has been safe and stable for decades while maintaining sensible electrical prices. The price comes from building one of a kind reactors by companies with little experience while contending with insane levels of regulation.

If you know of a source that demonstrates that and contrasts with alternatives, I would be interested in reading

  • -10

Transmission is under-discussed because most people handwave it, yeah. Our electric co-op is trying to make everyone move to electric heat while already hitting the limits of the undersea cable. So they want to spend another x-million to replace that to meet the peak of winter demand, which means it will be used at 20% capacity the rest of the year.

That's an awful lot of expensive copper just sitting in the ocean not earning its keep. Greens always say "oh we'll just build more X" without ever considering the capital costs, then ban copper mining.

If you want good-faith engagements, it would probably help not to poison the well by categorically dismissing all previous (but ambiguous) engagements as bad-faith and aligned with a general political tribe.

Particularly when you base it on a conclusion as a settled point (relative financial cost) without even making a position on the elements that make it a disputed premise. (I.E., what the relative costs are by what metric, what you believe the relative costs would be if you remove imposed regulatory burdens from one side and regulatory subsidies/requirements on the alternatives, what the relative costs of the political advocacy/opposition dynamics were reversed, etc.).

The crux of pro-nuclear arguments is that the technology provably exists and does not require assumptions of future technological breakthroughs, many of the more often cited relative costs are either imposed (regulatory over-engineering requirements no other power sector has to fail) or selective (concerns over nuclear-related costs in excess to equivalent welfare risks from others), that nuclear is effective baseload power (which is needed for sustained industrial economics at scale) rather than intermittent (which functionally requires additional baseload generation regardless for load-balancing, see Germany), and that many of the premises of 'low emission' energy sources just smuggle away the relative costs (such as not considering the extraction / processing / recycling / end-of-lifecycle costs) or have never been feasible requirements for the goals they were meant to support (i.e. the required amounts of rare earth minerals to supported estimates being magnitudes beyond actual rare earth mineral production) in ways that are both highly grift-able and grifted (see carbon credit markets relations to organized crime).

I do not mean to disqualify the argument. It does seem productive to me, however, to observe the correlated occurrence of seemingly contradicting positions within a group - a lesser regard for climate change, but defending nuclear power - and be extra cautious about potential interests in disguise inside the discussion.

The aspects you brought up are absolutely pertinent to investigate in order to establish a good judgement about the role nuclear should have in the energy transition, but ones that I seldom hear in the public debate. That's why I am out for good sources.

  • -10

In 2025, I see the good-faith conservative pro-nuclear stance as mostly a reminiscent stance on "what could have been". It would have been absolutely viable, it would have been the better decision. Noah Smith describes the sentiment well in his introduction here.

But in 2015, this wasn't clear at all, yet. There is a long history of even experts catastrophically underestimating the exponential growth of solar and battery industrial capacity (that first graph is powerful). So in today's discussions, there's always the chance that conservatives are comparing 2015 nuclear against 2015 solar + batteries. This is a much easier proposition to defend.

But yeah, last year the US installed over 40 GW nameplate capacity of new solar. We won't ever be below that in the next 5 years, either. Grid-scale storage of this much solar might also shortly be a non-issue, since forecasts are that the world economy will produce at least 8 TWh of new lithium batteries this year. That's several hundred percent over demand, and it's hard to describe how insane that development is. That's enough batteries to put a 50kWh battery into every single new vehicle built in 2025. Since we're not doing that, batteries will get cheap enough for grid-scale storage.

Even with conservative estimates for the capacity factor of those new panels, that's the equivalent of at least 7 new reactors completed, each year. I don't think there's any case where we relax regulation sufficiently and then plan, develop (if we want to do any of the cool - small modular, thorium, ect. - things pro-nuke people want) and finance that many new reactors per year, even if we grant a 10 year lead time.

Seems to reinforce my impression that people who insist in this are either acting in bad faith, or echoing those who are.

I'm out for the serious actors who defend expanding nuclear programs, have palpable knowledge, and concern for climate change - if there is anyone who fits this description.

  • -12

I'm not sure it's all bad faith and malice. I don't want to downplay the amount of uncertainty with the geopolitics and economics of renewables and storage, and the facts still change quickly.

For one, the vast majority of production capabilities (solar, wind, batteries) is in China, of course. (Trade) war would put all developer timelines in peril. Also, it's not so sure how energy pricing on a grid heavy on renewables and storage will shake out. Sweden stopped building several large wind projects because of their economics: if it's windy, all the wind parks ruin the spot market for each other and don't make money. Is it's not windy, they don't make money. Storage could change that, but of course installing to much storage to quickly could result in the same thing...

So in a way, nuclear is a classic conservative position. We know almost everything about how a nuke-heavy grid would look like. The geopolitics are far safer. We know exactly how much over budget each rector would land.

And I also believe it's important to dream big. Maybe the trump admin deregulates nuclear in a big way. Maybe some republican states move in concert, and also deregulate and unify their remaining regulations. Maybe there's a subsidies project on the scale of what other countries have been pumping into renewables. Maybe there's a Manhattan project 2.

And while I'm a firm believer in solar+batteries, I would welcome it. We really could use all hands on deck when we Electrify Everything^TM...

I don't know any highly technical pro-nuke experts, but construction physics has the analysis on the regulatory landscape

While people do overstate the difference, solar nameplate and grid-scale storage nameplate and practically usable values are not identical. I'm pleasantly surprised by the growth of solar, as someone who was genuinely very pessimistic in the late 00s, but there's still a number of limitations to the technology.

On the flip side, a ton of the financial limitations to nuclear power are regulatory, and often regulations established by people who explicitly want to smother nuclear power completely. It'll require some uptooling to bring down costs, but there's a massive amount of low-hanging fruit. I like the SMRs for a variety of technical reasons, but even 300-800 MW plants are really not the sort of thing that should take decades to construct, and that time component is what absolutely murders the financial model.

Now, there are limits to the technology -- just as solar can't beat nuclear for baseload capacity, nuclear's near-uniquely bad for peaking power. I don't think nuclear can or should displace most renewables, and I'd be surprised if they all together can completely displace LNG peaker plants in the next couple decades. But there are reasons beyond politics to argue for them both.

And, of course, just as Biology is Mutable argued, just because the problem is political doesn't mean it's solvable. It may be that there's no way to get those anti-nuke nuts out from regulations, or the only way to do so is extraordinarily costly.

I'm not opposed to solar, but it takes up considerably more space than an equivalent nuclear plant, and is worse for the environment.

These figures are only possible because China massively over invested in production. They're all losing money hand over fist right now, and we're getting cheap overproduced EV cells because of it. I talked about my new bargain basement solar UPS in the last fff thread for an example of the fire sale deals you can get.
And even with those deals (6 cents/Wh!) my batteries for a 1 day backup were still 3x more expensive than the solar.

But this isn't sustainable long term, even assuming relations with China don't deteriorate the way everyone seems to be planning. And it's certainly not sustainable on the backs of the laughable US solar industry, which is a mix of subsidy farmers and outright scammers.

Storage might solve the daily duck curve, which is more than I expected to ever be possible, but there's no way to meet seasonal demand with batteries; in most of the US winter energy use more than doubles while solar produces 1/10th of what it does in summer, because the sun just isn't here (Europe could solve this one by colonizing the Sahara, admittedly). There's no way to make solar scale with those numbers, especially when you're trying to make that winter energy demand double or triple again with electric heating mandates.

I want to run the math on North-South and East-West HVDC transmission that all the greens handwave as a solution, but just don't have the figures to make a useful guess. But as seen in the northeast they won't let us build power lines either, so it's a moot point.

I've heard that wind energy is an effective complement to solar; when solar is weak wind is strong. Can wind energy make up for the solar energy shortfall during the Winter?

No, that was something the German greens picked up as propaganda. Wind is just incredibly intermittent. Where I live it will go still for a week at a time. It survives because of massive per-mhw subsidies that pay a flat rate even if nobody wants to buy the power produced (currently $27.5/MWh, but only for union-built projects, thank you "inflation reduction act" lol).
Btw, that green "biomass" line on the first chart is literally wood chips imported from the US and Canada. Nobody ever talks about this, but I find it hilarious that Germany replaced the power of the atom with wood fires for base load, to "reduce carbon emissions".

In a lot of places the meh wind areas do see a slight increase during winter, but the best ones come from summer diurnal winds blowing through passes.. So a propagandist can quote the 16mph figure to give a low price, then quote the winter increase to excuse variability.
Similar trick with quoting on-shore costs together with off-shore production.
(For reference any site under 9mph is rated "unacceptable" and anything under 13mph is "meh", so none of those other sites could be developed. Any wind below the turbine cut-in speed of ~6-9mph is wasted, and they only produce rated power at like 15-20mph)

In both Europe and the US, wind stops producing at all during those cold still days in winter, when heating demand is at peak.
Hilariously in Washington wind also vanishes during heat waves, because the ocean air is no longer cold & high pressure enough to flow up the Columbia gorge to the low pressure interior. So all wind energy does is get paid to make energy when nobody wants it and screw up energy markets with "you must buy renewables first" mandates.

Fascinating. Is off-shore wind any better? Furthermore, is it plausible, or even feasible, to get around renewable energy intermittency by using hydrogen or other means of chemical energy storage? If, as you say. wind energy produces energy when it isn't needed, it seems potentially lucrative to buy that low price energy, transform it into a chemical, then sell high when the wind isn't blowing. This would also mitigate the energy efficiency blow you eat when converting to chemical energy, because you'd be using cheap excess energy in the first place.

Plausible? Sure. Feasible? Not really. It's one of those things that is technically do able, but so inefficient it begs the question of why other than ideology.

All 'we'll store on green energy when it's on for use when it stops' schemes fundamentally require (a) excess capacity when the weather is 'on' (or else there is nothing to store), and (b) so much excess capacity that the energy-ecology 'savings' of the green production aren't outweighed by the energy/ecological costs of the energy storage infrastructure.

Consider your chemical storage premise. Your wind power / solar power / whatever power has to be so much savings that it can not only cover the utility of the off-cycle power load, but also the ecological costs of the storage system. If this is chemical, this means all the ecological costs of producing the chemicals, moving the chemicals on-site, storing the chemicals, utilizing the chemicals, dealing with the chemical byproducts, and all the human personnel / infrastructure upkeep associated with running the site.

And if this does pan out... it's useful for precisely one geographic location, and all the green energy infrastructure inputs (rare earths, etc.) that could have been used elsewhere, aren't, because you're building over-capacity for the storage system.

By contrast, you could just... have a single power planet capable of meeting baseload power, and then let the same green-material inputs be used elswhere.

And this doesn't get into the questions like 'how can I get the most efficient use of my limited green tech input materials.'

There is far more energy demand than there is green energy supply, and in any combination of 'clean' and 'dirty' fuels, your ecological maximization isn't 'how do I get a specific city green,' but 'how do I minimize the total amount of dirty outputs.' It turns out, this is often best done by... targeting the least efficient dirty-fuel economies first, not the most.

As a general rule, bigger / more capital-intense generator plants are more efficient per volume of fossil fuel than smaller / cheaper engines. XYZ gallons of fuel in a generator plan will produce more energy, and at less greenhouse gas, than XYZ gallons of fuel distributed to cars. Since electric power grid charged vehicles are still getting their power from the generator plant regardless, you'd rather fuel-generators / battery cars than battery-generators / fuel cars.

Now consider that your chemical-storage thought is really just an awkward battery, and the feasibility should be clearer. Could it be done? Sure. Would it be better for the environment than not? Probably not, given that the 'not' isn't 'nothing is done' but the alternatives that could be done.

Solar+storage+nuclear are all complementary technologies.

As I understand, grid-scale storage allows nuclear to operate at a high load factor by soaking up extra overnight production when demand is super low.

I think what you are missing is that there are parallel developments which call into question whether the high price is actually inherent to the technology in the way we've been led to believe. The most direct parallel here is space launch. Not very long ago, the price per kilogram to orbit was high enough to make satellites prohibitively expensive for anyone but nation states and extremely well-capitalized corporations. Human spaceflight was all but unthinkable for anyone except national astronautics programs. The conventional wisdom was that this is just the nature of the problem: rockets are expensive and expendable, development requires decades of engineering, and there are no real major technological advancements achievable without new fundamental breakthroughs.

But this turned out not to be the case! SpaceX entered the market and proved that using iterations of well-known designs, hiring the right people and compensating them properly, and leadership pushing hard at schedules and milestones while also driving on costs, you actually could dramatically lower the cost to orbit beyond what anyone thought possible, while still being profitable!

So with this context, there's lots of reasons to be skeptical that the cost and feasibility barriers cited for nuclear power are real. As with liquid-fueled rockets, this is a reasonably well-developed and very well-understood technology. The bulk inputs are concrete and steel, inexpensive things we know how to build with. We don't need fundamental breakthroughs. What we need are industry leaders with the drive to engineer better reactors designed for safety and mass production and for the NRC to streamline the permitting process to something with clear, reasonable requirements. Unlike with rockets, we unfortunately also need reform in the building permitting processes that are also used to block or delay every other major infrastructure project, but I don't think that's an impossible dream.

So, your interlocutors may well believe that the cost factor, as real as it is today, not be inherent to the technology, and that we have everything we need to unlock the capability to manufacture and deploy nuclear power facilities as quickly and cheaply as combustion turbines, if only the right combination of leadership and policy falls into place.

I do not think this is the reasoning behind it. I personally believe that nuclear fusion may render all other power sources obsolete in our lifetime, but I do not think more nuclear powerplants with out current tecnology in the foreseeable future.

As far as I know and until I see sources that convice me otherwise, they are too costly, and that gets in the way of more cost-efficient green power generation - and even of nuclear research, depending on how you allocate the budget.

I am yet to see in the general debate someone trying to defend nuclear energy with the argument of accelerating technology development

Would it be fair to say, then, that if it could be demonstrated that the costs are not inherent to the technology, then you would support (or at least not oppose) nuclear power installation?

Have you done any research on this yourself? Are you familiar with, e.g., the very low cost of nuclear energy in South Korea?

I'm pro-nuclear, but I don't exactly have an essay written up on as to why – it's an aggregation of various things I've read over the years. But if you do a quick Google you'll find sources like this one (I haven't read it, but I've skimmed it and I think it covers the points you are interested in).

Obviously, if nuclear isn't financially acceptable in cost, I am interested in hearing about it. But my priors, based on osmosis, is that that cost is at least partially artificially inflated, and that there are a lot of hidden environmental costs to "clean" energy methods like solar.

One of the things the article I linked notes to is that wind and solar (which take up tremendous amounts of space) are heavily subsidized, whereas nuclear energy (at least in the US) is burdened by overregulation. In South Korea, nuclear is cheaper than wind and solar.

Check out the article I linked, maybe do some research yourself, and report back :)

Is it possible to look at the state of Germany and think the other side of the issue is correct? It seems so simple there's no reason to discuss it, except as a distraction from the obvious example of terrible "green" energy policy.

I just don't feel the need to argue at this point. Just cut green subsidies and purchase mandates, and run cover for a NuclearX to solve the problem.

I'm not even particularly pro-nuclear, because solar-gas-hydro might very well be cheaper. I'm just fed up with green manipulation, dog piling, excuse-making, and histrionic crusading. And I'm especially sick of arguments that go "prove X to my satisfaction, haha you didn't satisfy me I win again"

I think the fundamental logic is also that we (broadly we, humans) get better at the things we do more of. So looking at nuclear in the US right now is not really looking at its potential had we stayed the course in 1970 rather than taking a left turn towards fossil fuels.

We can also look at France and their experience scaling expertise. They are one of the few countries actually lowering their CO2 footprint despite continuing to export energy to Germany.

Given the financial cost of this type of energy source compared to other low emission energy sources, I am yet to find a defense of Nuclear as a feasible strategy for lowering CO2 emissions that comes across as based, good faith argument by someone with true concern about the issue, rather than an attempt at subverting the discussion around energy transition.

OK I'll bite. There is a huge difference in used land area used when compared between the same amount of power generated between wind power when compared with nuclear power. Because when you calculate in the Capacity Factor (and actually look further down on the actual combined capacity of wind compared with nuclear you see the difference is 3x). I'll give you the initial number 1000 MW of power from a nuclear power plant and the average size of wind power plant of 3 MW. How many turbines do you need to get the same amount of power when you have the Capacity Factor in the calculation? I'm not going to run the numbers for you! You need to calculate them yourself to understand the argument. You need educate yourself on how much forests are cut to avoid wind shear on the turbine blades, to have maintenance roads and so on. And how that deforestation affects the fauna around the turbines. There are cost calculations on the displacements of humans but seldomly I see a monetary value associated with the environmental costs of displacement of wildlife. I crunched the numbers and I think that the environmental costs of just the land use with what I know about wind power made me pro nuclear.

I am not defending that solar, hydro or wind power have always the lowest environmental impact, everywhere.

But environmental impact is hardly the only factor we look at when developing powerplants, and cost is often the main factor.

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” - Oscar Wilde.

No but the question here is that you are explicitly looking for an good faith argument for justifying Nuclear Energy even if it costs more, without specific political valence added to it. My argument is that we shouldn't sacrifice the environment to save the climate, even if nuclear costs more. You need almost a thousand average size windturbines to replace a single average nuclear power plant if you calculate it with the Capacity Factor. And then you start looking at the lifespan of the wind power vs nuclear power it isn't looking that nice either.

It's a while since I read The Whole Earth Discipline, it was published in 2009 so I'm not sure whether that counts as properly up to date, but the author Stewart Brand is Bay Area hippie royalty and the book is vocally pro nuclear as well as pro genetic modification and pro urbanism.

An official annotated online version is available at https://discipline.longnow.org/DISCIPLINE_footnotes/Contents.html

Perhaps the "fundamental logic" at issue is geography.

Think about the viability of solar power for providing electricity to power air-conditioning in Arizona. Peak generation is around noon. The air is still heating up, so I guess that peak demand is around 2 or 3 pm. A bit of a mismatch. Curing that only needs two or three hours of storage. Overprovisioning might be cheaper than storage, there is still plenty of sunshine at 3 pm. The occasional cloudy days reduce the output of solar power plants, but those days are cooler reducing the power needed. It looks to me that this will work well and cheaply, and contribute to people saying that solar power is economically viable.

But I live in Scotland. Long days and some sun shine in summer. Short days and thick dark clouds in winter. The demand for power is for space heating, not air conditioning, and is in winter. I pay attention when I see reports of exciting new technologies for grid scale energy storage, but it all seems to be half day storage; keep the electricity on over night. The resource - summer sunshine - is six months out of synchronization with the requirement. Solar power, to generate electricity to run heat pumps to keep homes warm in Scotland is beyond the reach of current technology. Suitable grid scale storage doesn't exist, and huge overprovisioning would be fabulously expensive.

I favor nuclear power for Scotland. And people in Arizona should make their own choice based on how things really are in Arizona.

The anti-nuclear power argument seems to be "solar is cheap, therefore no nuclear". Prod a bit and it seems to be just missing the geographical factor. Putting geography in unsympathetically and it becomes "solar in cheap in certain circumstances, therefore no-one may have nuclear, and people in the wrong circumstance must freeze to death in winter."

Another contender for "fundamental logic" is that many technologies have an early dangerous stage.

The medieval cathedral builders had collapses. Ship stability wasn't properly understood leading to capsizes, even of giant prestige warships. Steam engines were indirectly dangerous because their high pressure boilers would explode. Railway trains had lots of disasters before signalling got sorted out. There is also an interesting technology progression with making braking systems fail safe, with the fail safe version of vacuum breaking getting displaced by Westinghouse's fail safe version of air brakes. The Tay Bridge disaster isn't really a railway story, it is about structural engineers not knowing about wind loading. Civil aviation started off really dangerous and is now very safe.

So it is odd to give up on nuclear power when you can look at the details of accidents, such as Chernobyl, and say: we don't build them like that any more, we are past the dangerous stage. We also understand key parts of the sociology. Nuclear power was cloakatively about providing electricity to civilians, but really about creating plutonium for nuclear weapons, so corners were cut on safety in the rush to Armageddon. Today we know about gotchas such as Wigner Energy and this time around is 100% about providing electrical power. I think that the safety issues really are in the past.

Overprovisioning solar power for peak demand is cost prohibitive in Texas, and you need storage anyways because of night time. Needless to say, overprovisioning for almost everwhere else is not going to happen.

Overpaneling is actually pretty cost-effective right now, even for home users. Until bidens tariffs hit this year, Chinese panels were just that cheap. The actual panels are a small fraction of system costs at this point, with the mounts, wiring, charger/inverter, and especially batteries being far more expensive. If you can rig up cheap ground mounts it makes sense to overpanel almost everywhere now.

I'm planning to expand to about 1200W of panel in a 3s2p for a tiny 30A charge controller for example. That's anywhere from 3x to 1.5x overpaneled depending on 12 vs 24V battery setup.

People are doing neat stuff with parallel east-west strings sharing hardware, min-maxing DC transmission wiring to reduce system costs, finding cheap DC dump loads for clipped power, HV batteries, etc.

It doesn't solve the seasonal issue of course, but it's definitely economical, and making hr-scale battery systems even more viable.

It seems that the vibe has definitely shifted in politics and general social spaces, as many folks last week commented on here. People are more open to using language that used to be termed offensive, right-wing political statements are more in vogue, etc.

I'm curious specifically what all of this means for feminism, and the gender war subset of the larger Culture War. I saw an interesting piece which blew up on X lately, that, in discussing the Neil Gaiman situation, argues:

Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich's behavior (including the "it was wonderful" text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that's just because women do be like that sometimes.

Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I'm more interested in what happens to women when they're cast in this role of society's unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.

The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they'll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it's not just sex they can't reasonably consent to. It's medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world's adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can't have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn't mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.

Now many linkers and commentators on X are basically arguing - why yes, women don't have agency, and that's why most cultures have reflected that in law and social practice. I think this sort of smugly satisfied mocking of women is in quite poor taste, and not likely to be productive, but there is a deeper point in there. Unfortunately it seems that, even after decades of propaganda, rewriting of tons of laws, giving women voting power, dismantling "oppressive" cultural structures like religion, etc. etc., we still as a society are not able to treat women as adults with agency, and consequences for their actions.

Now a progressive might come in and say - ok, fine we do still struggle with this issue, but hey, it's because of bad social programming! Just give us another 100 years and we will totally hold women responsible just like men, we promise!

That has basically been the progressive line to justify going further and further to the left with social and legal programs. Problem for them is, with the vibe shift I mentioned earlier, I think that argument is running out of steam. The average person no longer seems to be convinced that this is just a cultural problem which will go away.

So, where do we go from here? Do you think feminism will actually be rolled back in a meaningful way? I'm skeptical myself, but I'm also skeptical we will magically start holding women accountable. Not sure what happens next...

The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they'll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it's not just sex they can't reasonably consent to. It's medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements.

The one obvious and crucial difference is that all those examples are forms of written, signed agreements with detailed rights and responsibilities of the signing parties, effecting penalties in case of breach of contract etc. In the current year, trying to regulate human mating would be seen as an enormously icky idea and would never fly.

See, as someone who is actually quite fond of women- but not delusional- this is quite sad. Getting taken advantage of happens whenever women aren’t protected, either because no one cares or because of recognizing their ‘autonomy’ or whatever.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure the greatest opponents of any potential measure to introduce contractual agreements in the realm of heterosexual mating would be women.

There is a figure you sometimes see, the ‘abortion bro’. He is strongly pro-choice because, although he doesn’t care overmuch about women’s freedom or health, he definitely does not want to wind up a dad by accident. He’ll make arguments along the lines of ‘what if your girlfriend got pregnant- see that’s why it’s important to protect women’s reproductive rights’. Some of them will talk about the need to firmly tell partners interested in keeping the baby that paying for an abortion will be the last help they ever get, and they’re going no contact afterwards regardless of her decision.

For obvious reasons, this figure is not allowed to headline pro-choice rallies. But you find them on Reddit, sometimes IRL, and occasionally in op-Ed’s in lowbrow newspapers. But they definitely exist. I suspect they’re much more common than women who actually want low commitment relationships.

Men have identical happiness whether married or cohabiting- women are far happier married. Women are nearly four times as likely to say they want to save sex for marriage as men are- and by relationship progression, men get their way. The median woman has socially-conservative-in-practice preferences for relationships and sex; in fact feminists generally do too. They’re just unable to advocate for themselves effectively in the face of men’s preferences. And that is the reason for patriarchy. We don’t tell children to stick up for themselves against adults and expect them to do it, at least not well. There are frameworks for dealing with relationships between adults and children- teachers have extensive rules governing how they relate to students, for example. Likewise you can’t reasonably expect an unprotected woman to not be at the mercy of whatever man is around.

Yes, the people most offended by this are women. I have no doubt that the feminist will answer with ‘that’s NOT true’ or some variant thereof and the abortion bro will answer with ‘not my problem they’re like that’. But a typical woman flourishes better with couverture than as femme sole.

Hmm.

Or even... a marriage certificate?

Situations like this are precisely why progressives are skeptical of employee/employer sexual relationships and it sounds like it was worse here because Gaiman and Palmer were also providing Pavlovich housing as part of the deal. If your combination landlord/boss came onto you one day might one go along with it even if they didn't want to? Might the implicit threat of "I could make you unemployed and homeless" convince someone not to resist? I hardly think we can generalize from "a woman might pretend to enjoy sex to keep her job and housing" to "no women anywhere can be treated with as having agency."

In any case I feel very comfortable asserting that ~no one enforces their own desires and boundaries as they might like 100% of the time. Do you tell your boss how bullshit it is every time they drop work on you that you think you shouldn't be doing or have to do? Do you bitch to your spouse every time they want to do That Thing they like but you don't? Or do you sometimes suck it up and do the thing with a smile anyway? Sexual assault is an extreme case of this but the consequences of not doing so (unemployment, homelessness) probably seemed pretty extreme to Pavlovich.

Situations like this are precisely why progressives are skeptical of employee/employer sexual relationships and it sounds like it was worse here because Gaiman and Palmer were also providing Pavlovich housing as part of the deal. If your combination landlord/boss came onto you one day might one go along with it even if they didn't want to? Might the implicit threat of "I could make you unemployed and homeless" convince someone not to resist? I hardly think we can generalize from "a woman might pretend to enjoy sex to keep her job and housing" to "no women anywhere can be treated with as having agency."

So how does this square with the general feminist sex-positive ideology? Are you saying we should restrict all sex at the workplace and in any relationship where power dynamics could be employed?

I think one can generally be (and feminists are) pro-sex generally while thinking particular categories ought to be prohibited or warrant additional scrutiny.

Are you saying we should restrict all sex at the workplace and in any relationship where power dynamics could be employed?

I think those relationships at least warrant extra scrutiny but I wouldn't be opposed to a general prohibition.

I think those relationships at least warrant extra scrutiny but I wouldn't be opposed to a general prohibition

So you are in favour of segregation of men and women in society writ large? Thats the only Way such a prohibition would function

It already functions in most workplaces, honestly. At least everywhere I worked at there was a clause about notifying management when you start dating another employee, with the underlying assumption that it would prevent uncomfortable situations regarding power dynamics. It's not that uncommon, you don't need to introduce new laws to do this.

Most workplaces don’t prohibit coworkers from dating, true

This seems very straightforwardly false. I've worked with a lot of women, none of whom have had relationships with management.

The question is whether it's false in general and over time. If it works for some people some of the time, but also results in reduced family formation and below replacement birthrates on the whole, then it will be replaced by something else in the long run. Segregation is part of a historical package that could make a comeback.

This is low effort and seems entirely part of your pattern of worthless sneering.

Spacing out your visits to drop shits in the pool does not automatically reset the timer. Banned for two weeks this time.

So how does this square with the general feminist sex-positive ideology? Are you saying we should restrict all sex at the workplace and in any relationship where power dynamics could be employed?

Yes. This is bog-standard just about everywhere. You can consensually fuck/date anyone you want at the workplace except those that you have a supervisory or evaluative relationship. The same is true of police, they can consensually fuck/date everyone except those they are investigating or arresting.

That's the motte, I think it's probably good not to sweep away this particular motte with the bathwater here, and of course I agree with the broad stroke that some are trying to claim an entire bailey of "it's not consensual if later on one party believes it wasn't".

In any case I feel very comfortable asserting that ~no one enforces their own desires and boundaries as they might like 100% of the time.

Yes, but that doesn't mean that I don't consent to it. I make the decision to accept that I am working late instead of hang out with my husband. I make the decision to watch the show my husband likes and I don't really care about. I consent to all these things because I weigh up their plusses and minuses, and make a decision. That's just what it is to be a human person in an imperfect world making decisions. "Sure, I decided to take on student loans, but I felt pressured from my parents to go to the more expensive school and I don't like the idea of paying them back." Still consent.

An employer or landlord trying to get sex out of an employee/tenant is bad for reasons that have nothing to do with consent. It's bad because it creates an unfair labor or housing market, which is based around who is willing and able to provide sexual favors.

The point is that maybe sex is special, and consent is necessary but insufficient to guarantee an ethical sexual encounter.

And this is why ‘consent based sexual morality’ is full of obvious rule patches tack-welded on in the most awkward possible way.

and consent is necessary but insufficient to guarantee an ethical sexual encounter.

The sufficient level of consent might be a highly expensive (in terms of social capital both now and in the future) public ceremony of consent that also indirectly involves your closest family members.

That's right; marriage.

While I personally think it's goofy, I can at least understand the idea that a breathy "yes" in the middle of buttons unbuttoning and belts unbelting during a steamy makeout session is, perhaps, rushed and ill-considered. Not so in a multi-hour (or day) ceremony with religious overtones and even clergy present all while grandma and grandpa look on with (dis?)approval.

I don't think a marriage certificate ought to be required for sex, and I don't think we should be imprisoning people for the crimes of fornication or adultery. But I'd love to see a culture where casual sex is once again considered a weirdo fringe thing much like married couple swinging still is.

If I'm a young person dating right now, there is a constant suspicion that the other person is not entirely exclusive and that, due to that fact, I may be less than number 1 on their list. So dating turns into this exercise in competitive mistrust and a prisoners dilemma of commitment-investment, rather than a steadily progressing exercise in value and life ambition matching and bonding.

People choose to take on too much frivolous debt and destroy their lives. Is the whole lending project dead? Should the media no longer write op-eds about payday loans with a 400% ARP? The average person no longer seems to be convinced that this is just a cultural problem which will go away.

That Pavlovich bird does not a summer make. There are global differences in median male and female traits, but I see no reason to treat them differently under the laws of a free society. Globally, men are vastly more violent, more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, get into gambling debt, fall victim to romance and finance scams. We somehow manage to treat them like adults. I've never even heard it argued that we should do otherwise which is weird.

People choose to take on too much frivolous debt and destroy their lives. Is the whole lending project dead? Should the media no longer write op-eds about payday loans with a 400% ARP? The average person no longer seems to be convinced that this is just a cultural problem which will go away.

Uhhh this is unironically also a big societal issue. Lots of people have been agitating to nationalize the credit card industry for this exact reason.

That Pavlovich bird does not a summer make. There are global differences in median male and female traits, but I see no reason to treat them differently under the laws of a free society

Ok but the issue is that we do treat men and women differently under the laws of our society...

Most of my critique revolves around extending a single instance of an unreliable narrator into viewing women as children, and questioning their right to vote. This is an insane extrapolation of the data, and wouldn't be accepted as a fundamental policy or philosophical argument.

Lots of people have been agitating to nationalize the credit card industry for this exact reason.

I know, and the govt heavily regulates lending anyhow, but less now than ever in terms of max ARP.

My point being that even the most egregious instances of usuary (ie pay day loans) do not portend the end of lending. Nationalizing the credit industry seems less fringe and hairbrained than not treating women as adults. However, neither are practiced anywhere worth living.

I'm sure there is bias in the law as practiced, and men and women suffer unfounded disparate impact, but AFAIK the laws theoretically apply equally wherever possible. Given men's propensity to fall for romance, finance, and gabling scams, its odd that I've never seen it argued that we should view all men as hapless children, and restrict their rights. A maximally insane take would be restricting unrelated rights like driving or, I dunno, voting.

I'm sure there is bias in the law as practiced, and men and women suffer unfounded disparate impact, but AFAIK the laws theoretically apply equally wherever possible.

Theoretically is doing a lot of work here. There are all sorts of issues with women's vs men's shelters, funding for female programs in schools, affirmative action type things for women in corporate, etc etc etc.

I think that we are disagreeing on the fact that I absolutely do not think that women and men are treated equally right now, even though the laws say they do. In fact I think there's a big difference. Do you agree with that or not?

EDIT: FWIW I'm not actively arguing we take away rights from women, which you seem to be implying. I'm just saying that culturally, there seems to be an issue with having women occupy both the role of equal to men and also getting much more benefit than men socially.

Yeah I agree with your assessment quite a lot. My point is that extrapolating these outlying male deficits in self-control/agency all the way to questioning if society can treat men as adults is absurd.

I don't think that society should treat alcoholics or degenerate gamblers as adults... and in fact we don't in many cases, in similar ways.

I can grant that, and the original hypothesis still doesn't follow. We're talking about an entire category of people, only some of whom demonstrate lower agency in at least one area. Men are less able to control their drinking and gambling, but we wouldn't consider all men to be children. Its the same in the Pavlovich et.al cases. Some women claim they can't meaningfully consent to sex even when they do. They're insane and a moral hazard. I'm not gonna play in that framework. Whether they like it or not, they're adults.

Again I'm not saying that women should be denied rights or anything. I edited my earlier post to clarify. No need to play in a framework that doesn't exist.

I'm really just asking the question of like - what do we do with this? How can we make it more fair, perhaps by changing the culture, or at least make things make more sense?

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But it's not weird. Men treating women as having less agency, and also women claiming less responsibility, has been normal throughout human history. Women have more agency and responsibility than children, but less than men. At the same time, exceptions have always been recognized (some women, and even some children, have more agency and responsibility than some men). However, not until the last few decades has anyone tried to reorganize society and culture around the exceptions rather than the norm. This is natural human social behavior. Fundamentally, a woman crying is psychologically (and even physiologically) more like a child crying than a man crying, and that matters more than any ideological principles or even the letter of the law.

My personal preference is for the classical liberal ideal of legal equality but cultural inequality. However, that does not seem to have been a very stable equilibrium. It seems humans as constituted are unable to cope in that kind of world. There is no returning to the past, but the future will not look like the present (if only because birthrates among these cultural groups are unsustainable).

Of course the sexes are unequal. This is undeniable. But I have yet to hear any argument why basic rights should differ. What is being proposed here is an anathema to classical liberalism. Sure, people are free to debate the cultural inequality of agency or roles between men an women, so long as they're treated equally under the law. If it wants to fit into classically liberalism, the individual takes precedent over group based rights.

Women demonstrate more agency than men when it comes to getting romance or finance scammed, abusing drugs and alcohol, or murdering people. Of course, it doesn't follow that we should take the vote away form men, or consider them children. Men are full adults, and are responsible for their choices. So is Pavlovich.

Women demonstrate more agency than men when it comes to getting romance or finance scammed, abusing drugs and alcohol, or murdering people.

How much sympathy do men get for being romance scammed? Or being murderers?

Now, ask yourself the same question for a college aged woman who reports being sexually assaulted at a party?

I probably agree with you a lot here. But it would be laughable to argue that these outliers at the margins are a serious reason to question if men are adults.

They seem to be making the opposite argument? Basically: we don't question men being adults because, when men fail, they're expected to handle it . Even if the consequences are ruinous and/or not even their fault.

Women demonstrate more agency than men when it comes to getting romance or finance scammed, abusing drugs and alcohol, or murdering people

What do you mean by this? For example, men do most of the murder, and murder is a high-agency activity. Agency doesn't mean "good outcomes".

No, not good outcome. But in general males are more impulsive, in humans and lab animals. Thats more direct. Murder was a proxy, but its multifactorial. My point being men around the world and across time seem perennially unable to control their behavior when it comes to murder (for the subset of murders that are heat of the moment, impassioned, impulsive, etc). This is because the sexes are inherently different, yet we still prioritize the individual and their choices. We don't call into question men's right to vote.

Women are more likely to be "scammed" of sex, where men are more likely to be scammed out of money. Of course men aren't spinning yarn about how they're really not responsible for their own free choices in romance scams, or divorce rape, etc. Women arguing that Pavlovich wasn't responsible are insane (as far as I understand the details).

They don't show more agency, they don't do those "bad" things. Agency is actively making choices that don't strictly follow others. This is the same mistake as thinking someone too incapable to commit crime virtuous.

Avoiding those bad things requires agency, and women demonstrate more of it than men in those contexts. This is true around the world. In general, males show greater impulsivity in both humans and lab animals. Nobody has argued for a broad societal reconsideration of whether men are adults. People would laugh that argument out of the room.

Is there a problem with women claiming a sexual encounter was consensual, and arguing for a take-back some time later? Absolutely. Does it follow that we should seriously consider whether women are adults? No. Thats insane.

Nobody has argued for a broad societal reconsideration of whether men are adults

Everyone who has uttered the words "the brain doesn't finish development until you're 25" is making this argument.

It's not laughed out of the room.

To the extent that observation constitutes an argument, its completely different. Any serious proposal to push back legal adulthood to 25 is generally laughed at as an impractical nanny state absurdity. Men demonstrate less agency in some areas, women in others. Why consider one adults, and not the other.

Why consider one adults, and not the other.

Because man bad, woman good. Young men are also more physically disorderly than young women (despite 48% of population, overwhelming majority of violent crime), so you can sell it as risk control.

Any serious proposal to push back legal adulthood to 25 is generally laughed at as an impractical nanny state absurdity

It's certainly laughed at less than any proposals to lower the age of adulthood, which suggests the average person believes it should be higher.

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My usual remark is along the lines of "the brain isn't finished development until you enter senescence". But most people seem to believe that nonsense.

But most people seem to believe that nonsense.

It’s just modern phrenology.

The Rich treating The Poor as having less agency, and also The Poor claiming less responsibility, has been normal throughout human history. The Poor have more agency and responsibility than children, but less than The Rich. At the same time, exceptions have always been recognized (some Poor Men, and even some children, have more agency and responsibility than some Rich People). However, not until the last few decades has anyone tried to reorganize society and culture around the exceptions rather than the norm.

Do you think the above is a fair or an unfair summary of human history, and do you think it is equally recommended by an examination of history to have class inequality as to have gender inequality?

Do you think feminism will actually be rolled back in a meaningful way?

The motte part -- surely not. Various absurd baileys that have emerged, for sure. They are already in retreat in some places.

Louise Perry (a British 'reactionary feminist') argues that agency is distributed on a bell curve, with some people being very agentic and some people being very passive/conformist. She also acknowledges that young women are particularly conformist, and so more vulnerable to doing things that are socially promoted (Louise was talking about Only Fans) even if they are damaging to the woman in question.

It's easy to focus on young women having sex because it's titillating, but I'm happy to accept the premise that lots of people need protection from their own choices by the state/society. Whether that means banning sports betting, making it harder to get drugs/alcohol, or for parents to stop their daughters from making poor choices about who to sleep with.

The state is a blunt instrument, of course, so it's better to have it regulate concrete things like gambling than messy things like sex.

The idea of an agency bell curve is intriguing. It seems to make a lot of intuitive sense when one acknowledges that IQ is a bell curve and that people also have broadly identifiable personality traits - neuroticism, openness etc.

I do not want to see the State, however, making decisions in relation to the agency bell curve. IMHO, the State dictates the limits to the playing field - laws are, mostly, what you can't do at the outer extremes. No killing, no theft of property, you have to conform to contracts you've entered into. Other than that, let culture and subculture take precedence.

If you want to adhere to cultural norms that place no penalty on pre-marital promiscuity, this is fine. If you feel you ought to have your father's consent before you are married, that's also fine. Cultures and subcultures that do a better job of fostering pro-social systems and reinforcement loops should, naturally, win out over time.

I think one of the meta-narratives on the Motte is that when the State thumbs the scale on one side or the other of the culture war, that's always bad.

A big part of my growing into maturity sexually was moving past taking a legalistic attitude towards consent ("If I obtain agreement, then all questions about her needs are off") towards a more paternalistic approach with partners ("Do I think this is good for her?"). For me, this was the result of repeatedly having women say yes to things ("Yeah, I'm not looking for anything serious either!") that clearly they didn't mean. And for me, it was about realizing that I didn't want to have sex that hurt women, and that if I didn't want to have sex that hurt my partners I had to take responsibility for it, and not just take her word for it.

What an impressive propaganda technique. That's my one-line review to the "Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat", and I mean it most sincerely. I really am impressed.

This quote from a New York Times film critic serves both as a quick plot summary and as the main impression the film conveys:

... a sprawling film that's a well-researched essay about the 1960 regime change in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the part the United States, particularly the C.I.A., played.

Let's focus on the "well-researched" part, the part that lends the film a documentary gravitas, the propaganda technique I so admire.

The documentary is a collage of footage, archival audio and video clips, and quotes with careful citations that briefly appear on screen. It doesn't have a narrator--except occasionally it does, like from 22:56 to 24:19, where English text quoting In Koli Jean Bofane's Congo.Inc overlays archival footage while the said author reads his work in original French:

The algorithm Congo Inc. was invented Africa was carved up. Capitalized by Leopold II, it was quickly developed to supply the whole world with rubber and smooth the way to World War I. The contribution of Congo Inc. to the 2nd World War was key. It provided the U.S. with uranium from Shinkolobwe that wiped Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the face of the earth while it planted the concept of 'mutual assured destruction'. During the so-called Cold War the algorithm remained red-hot. It contributed vastly to the devastation of Vietnam allowing Bell UH1-Huey helicopters, sides gaping wide, to spit millions of copper bullets from Kolwezi over the countryside from Hanoi to Hue via Danang all the way to the port of Haiphong.

Here's the beauty: "Congo Inc." is a work of fiction. It is a novel. It is not, and never claimed to be, an accurate and contextualized account of history, nor is it subject to the kind of critique for accuracy that a work of non-fiction would receive.

The technique allows the film to convey the impression of historical gravitas while absolving it of any responsibility for truth, accuracy, or context. What is there to criticize? All the film does is feature a Belgian writer connected to Congo by birth and some years of residence, reading from his work. It's a work of fiction--so what, when the main theme of the film is to suggest the interweaving of art and politics. The film's omission of the category of the work is completely in line with their omission of such information about their other sources. Surely the film has done its due diligence by accurately citing the sources, thus providing any interested viewer with the requisite information to establish the necessary level of epistemology for the content of any citation it happens to feature. If anything, it's a mark of respect for the sophistication of the viewer that the film doesn't bother contextualizing these works, since surely the viewer is quite familiar with both the history of Sub-Saharan Africa in general, and prominent literary works of authors with Sub-Saharan African ties in particular.

Yes, its Sundance Festival Special Jury Award for Cinematic Innovation is well-deserved. I look forward to future adaptations of this technique, where documentaries about the CIA quote John Grisham's novels, and documentaries about the Catholic Church quote "The Da Vinci Code".

So what's the problem? Where is the historical inaccuracy? Yes, it's a work of fiction, but works of fiction are often based on real historical facts. The producers probably included it because it elucidates their point better than some dry as dust historical tract about how raw materials from The Congo were often used to produce military equipment. They didn't alert you that it was a work of fiction, but is this really necessary? If a documentary about WWI were done in the same style but quoted "For Whom the Bell Tolls" instead, would you insist that they flash "Work of Fiction" in yellow Impact font on the screen just to remove any ambiguity? And who are they supposed to be propagandizing, anyway? You can't stream it without paying extra, unless you have Kanopy, which most people technically have access to for free but don't know about and probably wouldn't be interested in. I'd be more concerned about historical movies that clean up the plot for narrative convenience and leave the viewer with an incorrect impression. These aren't even trying to pretend to be documentaries, but the fictionalized movie version ends up being cultural canon.

I did watch it on Kanopy, through my local library.

I am watching a film about a subject about which I have, at best, a cursory knowledge; how much can I rely on its factual claims? If it's a work of fiction: not at all. Just enjoy the story. Some historical background might be rooted in fact, but I am not in a position to tell. If it's a documentary: I expect that factual claims are, to a large extent, true. Sure, I expect a documentary to cherry-pick its facts to present a compelling narrative, but that's what distinguishes a documentary from a work of fiction: the narrative is constrained by at least a few asserted facts. It's common for a film-maker to outsource the actual statement of facts to an expert. The expert bears the cost of getting the facts wrong; the film-maker bears the cost of choosing experts poorly.

So here I am, watching this acclaimed documentary about a topic I know little about. It shows archival-looking clips, with meticulous citations -- I trust that those clips are what they appear to be. It shows quotes from diplomatic archives, with meticulous citations -- I trust that those quotes are from actual diplomatic archives. Twenty minutes in, it (for the first time) appears to have an expert contextualizing the main subject, again with citations. Do I continue to extend my trust to the presented facts, confident that a meticulously researched documentary would feature solid expertise in the subject matter?

The two-minute narration is a mixture of factual claims and narrative spin; yes, I understand that "Congo Inc." is a metaphor, but: Did Congo's rubber really "smooth[ed] the way to World War I", or is that a terrible pun? Was Congo's uranium key to US bombing Hiroshima, or was it just the most convenient source? How much did Congo copper contribute to the devastation of Vietnam, and how much of that devastation would have happened with other sources if Congo's copper was not available?

What is this guy's expertise in, anyway? Fiction. He is a writer of fiction. He may be a very good writer, and he may even meticulously research the background setting for his novels. But he claims no historic expertise. And the work he's reading in claims no historical accuracy.

There was a saying from this past election, something like "Trump lies like a used car salesman, Harris misleads like a lawyer." (No offense to lawyers.) The film didn't lie, it misled, and it misled subtly; it misled about the apparent level of expertise.

If I were already an expert in DRC history, it wouldn't matter. As an expert myself, I would evaluate any claims by their content not provenance. But I am the opposite of an expert; I can point to DRC on the map and I have some vague knowledge of the 20th-century history of Sub-Saharan Africa in terms of de-colonization and a tug-of-political-influence between USA and USSR (and later China). So I cannot possibly evaluate these claims by their content, and I must cautiously rely on expertise. That's why presenting someone as an expert when he's not is a big deal for me.

So, maybe, this film just isn't for me? Maybe it's aimed at people who are far more knowledgeable about the subject matter, who would not possibly mistake the expertise of Bofane? The film-maker is, after all, Belgian, and maybe the local audience is far more steeped in the history of the country's former colony. But I don't buy it. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, it's clearly shooting for a broad audience.

I would therefore like to make a prediction, even if I am too lazy to actually carry it out. Let's say that a poll is conducted among the film's audience. The poll takers watch the two-minute clip of Bofane talking (22:56 to 24:19). Then they respond to a question like this one:

Which best describes "Congo Inc.": (a) an academic publication by a professional historian, (b) a non-fiction account by a professional journalist, or (c) a work of fiction by a professional fiction writer.

My prediction is that less than 10% would choose (c).

The line about "copper bullets" instantly jumped out to me, because it's obvious bullshit. The US only just introduced a copper rifle round in an attempt to go lead-free, and regular jacketed bullets are only like 15% copper

The Manhattan project did get the majority of its uranium from the congo mine though, because it had already been dug and stockpiled in New York before the war. Without that one specific mine with the magically high purity of uranium, I'm not sure how practical a bomb by '45 would be. Historically the limiting factor was enrichment, but maybe it would have been mining if they'd had to source it domestically. The Canadian mines were inaccessible hellholes and the US ones were just shit.

I'm aware of and have in the past used Kanopy.

Growing up, multiple Vietnam war vets I worked with or had as scoutmasters or baseball coaches told me that to understand what Vietnam was like, I should watch Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and Apocalypse Now.

I'm not sure what you find objectionable about a work of historical fiction being used to illustrate a period. It's a tradition that dates back to...I'm not sure it actually has a beginning. If it does, it certainly goes back so far that it predates or mingles with the creation of our concept of fiction.

Growing up, multiple Vietnam war vets I worked with or had as scoutmasters or baseball coaches told me that to understand what Vietnam was like, I should watch Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and Apocalypse Now.

I can't help but object that those are all really different movies, which makes me confused about those people thought Vietnam was like? Full Metal Jacket is mostly famous for the first half showing the brutal boot camp. The second half is pretty forgettable, with the main character working as a journalist in Saigon. Apocalypse Now is based on Heart of Darkness, a book set in 19th century Africa, so it makes the Vietnamese look like primitive savages, which always bothered me. Platoon is by far the most realistic, since it's based on Oliver Stone's own experiences in the war, although of course it focuses on the most sensational parts and ignores all of the bland, boring parts that would make up any normal soldier's life.

I'm not in a real position to argue for or against them as factual representations of the Vietnam war, I've never been in a fistfight in Vietnam let alone a war there.

But I can tell you that's what these guys told me. They experienced it, and they felt that the information from that experience could best be communicated to me by those fictional films. They felt it captured something about what it felt like. When you say the films are all very different: the experience of the war was different for different people. When you say they drew influence from other fiction: there's a universality to the experience, and the soldiers themselves would have viewed it through those narratives.

They experienced it, and they felt that the information from that experience could best be communicated to me by those fictional films. They felt it captured something about what it felt like.

I agree that the value of fiction is, among other things, in its success in conveying emotional truths. If "how it felt" is best conveyed with disturbing depictions of atrocious savagery told in flat matter-of-fact manner (like in Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"), then that's what the author does. Nobody need question whether this specific instance of atrocious savagery happened, or even whether this type or this level of atrocious savagery happened somewhere in this time-and-place. Nobody need question such thing, because that's besides the point, so long as the depiction serves to convey "how it felt".

The problem arises when fiction gets presented as historical fact. I would have a problem if a documentary on Vietnam intermixed historical footage with scenes from "Apocalypse Now", while Tim O'Brien reads excerpts from "The Things They Carried", especially if the intended audience is not familiar with either work or the author and thus is unaware that they are works of fiction.

This just feels very standard in a lot of documentaries.

Ken Burns used to use actual letters and archive documents, and made it work without being scummy.

Maybe you're right. I have drifted away from watching documentaries in the past decade, and even then my preference was for nature and science themes. It's possible that the standards of presenting evidence have significantly changed (deteriorated?) since then.

The technique of collageumentary propaganda has been perfectly refined in the last few years. The whole scene is people going "how can we craft this edutainment experience to make the audience bellyfeel rightthink?" and iteratively getting better at it.

There's not much you can do about it. If you criticize you'll just get the "clown nose on, clown nose off" excuse: "it's just fiction, you can't expect it to be accurate. And anyway, fiction tells Important truths that are truthier than what 'really' happened"

President Biden has "pre-emptively" pardoned

General Mark A. Milley, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Members of Congress and staff who served on the Select Committee, and the U.S. Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan police officers who testified before the Select Committee

Or at least, he has made a statement to that effect; compare the Hunter pardon, which was fairly detailed, complete with dates. The "pre-emptive" pardon announcement has no details. What are they pardoned for? During what time periods? This appears to be a blanket memo to the future: "these people are immune from prosecution, for whatever, because fuck you that's why." It's not quite at the gobsmackingly presumptuous level of inventing fake Constitutional Amendments, but it seems like yet another example of the Biden administration (and its propaganda arm, the mainstream press) being everything it ever accused Trump of potentially being someday.

I admit: I do not have high hopes for the Trump administration. Mostly I'm hoping that Justices Alito and Thomas have the good sense to step down from SCOTUS before the Democrats are able to take back the Senate. Perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised? But the outgoing administration is acting like it has been dipping into the till and never expected it might actually be held accountable for that. In particular, the possibility that the January 6th riots were fomented by justice department lackeys, whether as a conspiracy or a prospiracy, is something the Biden administration absolutely does not want anyone looking into.

Biden insists:

The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.

Historically unprecedented, although the Hunter Biden pardon definitely moved things in this direction. Malicious prosecution of political enemies has long been a standard play for Democratic politicians and bureaucrats--the failed prosecution of Trump himself, of course, but also the well known IRS prosecution of conservatives, throwing the book at local conservative officials who defy federal law while winking at local progressive officials who defy federal law, et cetera.

Of course, the famous MAGA "lock her up" chant should not be forgotten, and Trump has indeed suggested on many occasions that certain people should probably be investigated for wrongdoing. But the presumptions on display--"Trump (who has never actually carried through on these threats) is just doing this illegitimately for political gain, but Democrats doing the same thing (and actually doing it) to their political enemies are just rooting out corruption, which is totally legitimate"--seem clear. I don't doubt that corruption is fairly rampant in DC, on both sides of the aisle. Politicians in general make my skin crawl. But I feel like the Democratic Party's catchphrase has very thoroughly become: "It's Different When We Do It."

If Trump doesn't blanket pardon everyone convicted of an offense on January 6, 2021, I will be disappointed in him. And if he does, the propagandists in the news media will cry bloody murder about it. I wish I was in a position to extract shame or embarrassment from them for this, because I feel like the world would be a better place if more journalists paid a heavier price for pretending to be "neutral" when they are actually functioning as shills.

My view is that the appropriate response to this is for the incoming DoJ to open an investigation on every single person pardoned with a statement that "no one is above the law". Did they do anything? I have no idea and neither does anyone else, but the sitting President just pointed a glaring GUILTY spotlight at them by preemptively insisting that they're definitely not guilty of anything. People that can't be convicted by a jury don't need pardons. Would they be able to make this blanket pardon stand up in court? I have no idea, but I think we should find out whether the President actually has the ability to preempt any efforts to bring justice to his cronies.

The answer is to conduct congressional hearings and hold them in contempt for some stupid bullshit- pardons can’t be preemptive.

They can propably still prosecute them if they lie under oath about a pardoned offence.

Hasn't pardoned Reality Winner (which I did expect four years ago) or that IRS leaker (which would unpleasantly surprise me, yet, growth mindset), so there's still some downhill to go. But there's another couple hours left to slide down the slippery slope.

I'll also add to the extent that media coverage of 'normal' pardons is obfuscating things:

The other people pardoned include Darryl Chambers, a gun violence prevention advocate who was convicted of a non-violent drug offense, immigration advocate Ravidath “Ravi” Ragbir, who was convicted of a non-violent offense in 2001, the White House said in a statement.

They are, unsurprisingly, also strong political advocates for the President's (aides') political positions, but they're also separately testing the limits of Scott Alexander's 'media doesn't lie' spiel.

> Following a jury trial in January 1995, Defendant Darrell Chambers was convicted of several counts: Count 1, continuing criminal enterprise, in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 848; Count 2, conspiracy to distribute cocaine, in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 846; Counts 4 and 6, false statements to institution with deposits insured by the FDIC and aiding and abetting, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1014, 2; Counts 8 and 9, laundering of monetary instruments and aiding and abetting, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1956, 2; Count 10, attempted possession with intent to distribute cocaine and aiding and abetting, in violation of 21 U.S.C. §§ 846, 841(a)(1) and 18 U.S.C. § 2; Count 11, false statement in connection with the acquisition of a firearm, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(a)(6); Count 12, possession with intent to distribute cocaine and aiding and abetting, in violation of 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1) and 18 U.S.C. § 2; and Count 13, felon in possession of a firearm, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g). See ECF 220, PgID 161-162.

I don't have high expectations for Reuters, but I would hope they were able to count.

Are "Darryl" and "Darrell" Chambers the same person? Five minutes on Google has not cleared this up for me in any way.

No, you're right, I'm wrong, and Reuters didn't goof this one. Sorry, that's embarrassing, and what I get for trying to do this sorta check on a cell phone. Correct person had one charge for dealing crack cocaine.

The actual pardons (Milley, Fauci, Committee) are significantly more detailed regarding what and when.

Thanks for digging those up!

Have you got any tips for finding such things? I feel like it should be a lot easier, in the 21st century, for me to find such documents. Most news outlets don't even link to the White House announcement page, much less original documents. SCOTUS makes it pretty easy to see their official opinions; Congress is a bit more complicated, especially with bills that aren't yet laws, but usually I can manage there. The White House seems much less interested in even a hint of transparency.

Unfortunately not. I saw them linked elsewhere. I do with discoverability of things like this was more of a priority for the government.

Compare and contrast the operative text of these pardons (e.g.):

BE IT KNOWN, THAT THIS DAY, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR., PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, PURSUANT TO MY POWERS UNDER ARTICLE II, SECTION 2, CLAUSE 1, OF THE CONSTITUTION, HAVE GRANTED UNTO GENERAL MARK A. MILLEY A FULL AND UNCONDITIONAL PARDON FOR ANY OFFENSES against the United States, including but not limited to any offenses under the United States Code or the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which he may have committed or taken part in during the period from January l, 2014, through the date of this pardon arising from or in any manner related to his service as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

with the Nixon pardon, (from Ford's online Presidential library):

Now, THEREFORE, I, GERALD R. FORD, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9,1974.

So this looks like the standard form of pardon for pardoning a pattern of behaviour if you don't know what specific crimes it could be charged with. These pardons are actually narrower than the Nixon pardon, because they are restricted to acts taken in relation to specific offices held. (So if the Trump admin is determined to do that, they could go after Liz Cheyney for campaign finance violations or some other three felonies a day bullshit).

The argument about the political wisdom of the Nixon pardon is a pot-boiler, but AFAIK nobody has ever challenged its constitutional regularity.

In terms of the wisdom of this one, the Fauci pardon seems an obviously good idea - I don't know why the anti-lockdown movement has chosen to make criminal charges against Fauci it's preferred strategy for relitigating COVID, but Fauci didn't commit the substantive crimes - the lockdowns etc. were ordered by other people (mostly at State level). Prosecuting advisors based on technical disagreements over the quality of advice is a bad idea. Prosecuting advisors based on how other people used their scientific advice is a very, very bad idea if you want honest advice. This applies whether Pam Bondi can find a three felonies a day process crime he is actually guilty of or just uses meritless criminal investigations for process-is-the-punishment reasons.

The whole thing about prosecuting the members and staff of the Jan 6th committee is silly, including the pardon, but I think the pardon is reasonable given the Republicans started the silliness. A moron in a hurry can see that the business of the committee is protected from criminal prosecution by the Speech and Debate clause.

The pardon of the witnesses is mildly improper, given that the only crime it could plausibly cover is perjury, which is inexcusable. But no more so than the Iran-Contra or Scooter Libby pardons.

All in all, these seem fairly low down the list of bad pardons.

Fauci did a lot of bad things and some of them were criminal (eg perjury, attempt to get around FOIA, conspiracy to do the same). We can’t stop the next one if we can’t agree on what caused the first.

Is circumventing the US FOIA a crime? I couldn't google an example of anyone being prosecuted for it, and 5 USC 552 doesn't contain any criminal penalties.

[Circumventing the UK FOIA is a crime, but it is almost never prosecuted and the maximum penalty for a person is a £5,000 fine]

Re: The Fauci pardon, Congress instituted a ban on Gain of Function in research in 2014. Fauci's work with the CCP to circumvent this ban and the efforts of his office to conceal this work (not the lockdowns) is presumably what he is being pardoned for.

I think Vance said something to the effect that they are going to pardon the non-violent offenders from January 6th. And they don't want to do a blanket pardon because they may need to prosecute government agitators.

Maybe it's misguided hope, but it seems they want to take the time to pardon the ones who deserve it and not the ones who don't.

Maybe it's misguided hope, but it seems they want to take the time to pardon the ones who deserve it and not the ones who don't.

Indeed. I don't know if fire extinguisher guy was a plant or not, but either way he deserves jail more than the mass of people there.

Nope, he went full retard and pardoned extinguisher guy.

Damn, the key is to never have hope, I guess.

What did extinguisher guy do, bash someone with a fire extinguisher?

Chucked one into a capitol police officer.

The pardon is pretty broad -- I think the guy who shot Babbitt is now immune from prosecution as well. (in case that makes you feel any better!)

I would have supported prosecution for Milley for at a minimum his apparent call to China. I would have also supported a fair investigation without necessarily a trial for Fauci, as I could believe he was the voice for a large or even very large group of people. But for both, I never actually thought they would be prosecuted. Even after everything it's still not quite how we do things in this country, and these men are old and already disgraced, they were before Trump's victory, and now especially, and so it's free, empty and yet still symbolic magnanimity to let them go off into retirement.

A pardon is a brand of shame. Granting implies guilt, accepting confirms guilt. For Milley, it's confirmation of his mutiny and sedition. For Fauci, whatever the specific crime being pardoned, probably gain of function, it will be viewed as a confirmation that everything he did was illegal and thus wrong. The right I see just knew they were criminals, they feel affirmed their beliefs. Some I see on the left are glad because either they fear tyranny and view this as protection or because of open spitefulness, others I see are blackpilling among themselves about the confirmation of guilt, about another new and terrible precedent, and about the general degradation of justice.

I wonder about "arising from or in any manner related to his service" per the actual text of the pardons @Gillitrut links below. I'm not a lawyer, so for all I know this phrasing is known by precedent as synonymous with a blanket pardon, but it reads to me like it's clausal to what they did in the course of their official duties, meaning it's not a blanket pardon. That if Milley killed a prostitute during lockdown the pardon wouldn't apply because it didn't arise from or relate to his official duties and that makes me think, mutiny isn't part of his official duties either.

Edit: Glazed right past "Any offenses against the United States"

I thought the odds of their prosecution before this it would be low, I still think it's low, but I think it's higher now than it was before. Whatever happens, for their legacies, they weren't mercifully granted pardons, they were inflicted with them.

these people are immune from prosecution, for whatever, because fuck you that's why.

This is not a charitable framing. The President is empowered to pardon people unilaterally and we elected Joe Biden to that office. It's not because "fuck you", it's by the power we chose to vest in him.

I wish I was in a position to extract shame or embarrassment from them for this, because I feel like the world would be a better place if more journalists paid a heavier price for pretending to be "neutral" when they are actually functioning as shills.

I think the urge to revenge or shame is understandable, but unproductive.

What's more, compared to 2016 there are now scores more independent journalists that have far more integrity. Building is harder than tearing down, but it's also more durable.

I think the urge to revenge or shame is understandable, but unproductive.

Please explain why, because that feels like a thought terminating cliche to me. A journalist who can't be shamed is a short story writer.

The consequences of anger are graver than their causes.

In particular, I think the only viable long term strategy is to create a dependable and trustworthy media ecosystem. That can't be done purely out of anger or spite for the existing media. Otherwise they'll just continue lying.

Even today, the partial emergence of a real press is forcing legacy media into admitting more of the truth.

In particular, I think the only viable long term strategy is to create a dependable and trustworthy media ecosystem. That can't be done purely out of anger or spite for the existing media. Otherwise they'll just continue lying.

I don't think this is true. I think the old media will be outcompeted by new independent media, and there will be a rotation. This is already happening in large part.

I think anger needs to be carefully directed to be useful, but my real issue is the addition of shame there. That's the part that accrues it the label thought terminating cliche in my eyes. All cliches are thought terminating in a way - they are like stereotypes, a useful heuristic that applies most of the time, so you can reference it and go about your day instead of having to constantly interrogate your thoughts and feelings on the subject. So if you had just said the old version of this - revenge is unproductive - I would have agreed with you, revenge is just gratification and should never be a goal - maybe a nice side benefit, at best.

But shame is a very useful tool for social cohesion - it promotes following the law without involving the law, it strengthens group identity and harmony, it encourages empathy by allowing for a wider range of expressed emotions and most importantly it fosters accountability - so if you are going to say it's unproductive you need a good reason. Just adding it alongside revenge skips right past the reasoning.

Eta: I agree constructing a media ecosystem out of spite would not go well, but I also agree with dag - the old media is being replaced by the new media, and without any form of accountability they are not going to be any better than the old media (Tucker Carlson excepted of course).

But shame is a very useful tool for social cohesion - it promotes following the law without involving the law, it strengthens group identity and harmony, it encourages empathy by allowing for a wider range of expressed emotions and most importantly it fosters accountability - so if you are going to say it's unproductive you need a good reason. Just adding it alongside revenge skips right past the reasoning.

Can you explain how shame encourages empathy and a wider range of emotions?

So I think of the love is God cult, the "everyone be nice, love is everything" mindset as pretty much working like the way we used to think an antidepressant worked. We all have a range of emotions going from high to low, but the cult of niceness restricts the height and depth to a comfortable middle range. This is not noticeably different to how it always was for a lot of people, and indeed they mostly only notice that they aren't sinking to the depths they had previously, but they also can't reach the heights they used to.

I still don't understand how shame equals more emotions. Shame is generally fear of judgment of others - that tends to lead to far less emotional expression. We may be using the term differently.

I agree that blind positivity tends to deny emotions as well - by shaming anyone who isn't happy and "loving" all the time.

Oh sorry man, I was typical minding. I've had a piercing headache now for two days, it's destroying my concentration. I'm talking about shame as a verb though, the expression of displeasure when someone fails to live up to their values.

Society is better off imo when as many emotions as possible can be expressed. We need guardrails of course, so anything that escalates to violence is no good, but anything short of that is good, because it allows others to empathically model their behaviour better, which everyone does all the time without thinking. Without that we drift apart, because we can't connect as well as we might, and like Mr Plinkett used to say we might not notice that but our brain does.

To be fair it was probably the weakest of my points lol.

The pardons only absolve the accused from being indicted, right? They don’t restrict Fauci and Milley from being investigated, do they?

Fauci is old enough at this point that sentencing him to a jail term is meaningless. Destroying their legacy and reputation would be much more enduring; no lobbying firm will touch Milley with a ten-foot pole if he’s the subject of a Congressional investigation, even if it doesn’t result in an indictment. Fact finding, getting to the bottom of it, etc. That’s what voters wanted when they pulled the lever for Trump, isn’t it?

I don’t know — Fauci having to spend a large chunk of his limited time left in jail would’ve seemed like justice.

Perhaps it should be house arrest.

Justice for what, though? If what he's technically being accused of would have been attributed to some faceless administrator whose name didn't come up until the middle of the investigations, few people would care about whether this person technically lied about funding an organization that may or may not have been funding gain of function research into coronaviruses. No, the ire directed at Fauci is almost entirely due to the recommendations he made during the pandemic and the people who didn't like them. These people had no love for Fauci before he was dragged in front of the committee and were looking for an excuse to nail his ass to the wall.

This is true. But at the same time it's remarkable that a person who bore some amount of responsibility for the existence of the pandemic in the first place then came out as a major advocate to curtail civil liberties as a response to the pandemic he helped create.

The sheer evil is off the charts.

I agree, being evil isn't a crime. Neither is funding dangerous research. But is it any wonder they want to bury this guy?

In any case, he won't get off scot free. The process is the punishment.

I agree, being evil isn't a crime. Neither is funding dangerous research.

When Congress explicitly banned the dangerous research it kind of is?

Unfortunately the 2014 prohibition didn't include any penalties so if they did go after him it would effectively be for embezzlement/misuse of government funds and property.

That would be OK -- maybe the whole pardon issue could be sidestepped by Trump ordering the DOJ to sue him (as a civil matter) for any and all damages incurred due to COVID?

While i feel like that would be reasonably justified i don't think it will happen.

More comments

Fauci worked with a major geo-political rival (China) to funnel US tax-payer money into performing bio-weapon gain of function research. Research that Congress had explicitly banned.

Sure, I'll cop to that. I don't really care whether Fauci did something illegal or not; I want revenge for the lockdowns.

I want Fauci to be subpoena'd and forced to testify until he does something technically illegal and goes to jail. I want the same thing done to the other covid hawks. It was knowable at the time that the lockdowns weren't justified, weren't going to be justified, and would do a lot of harm(after all, I predicted it in March 2020). Execute an admiral to encourage the others. This was an absolutely enormous public policy mistake.

Update: Around 11:40 AM (while he was physically at the inauguration ceremony), Biden announced pardons for his three siblings and two siblings-in-law "for any nonviolent offenses against the United States which they may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014, through the date of this pardon".

The concept of blanket pardons for crimes that have not yet occurred seems like a pretty major vulnerability for the American constitution. I'm imagining this enabling a President's creation of a legally-unassailable paramilitary brute squad solely loyal to him personally. I don't think the pardon power was meant for that. (Still wouldn't be as stretched as the commerce clause, though.)

The concept of blanket pardons for crimes that have not yet occurred

Well, in this case we're talking about crimes that could have possibly already occurred, but are not proven yet. But at this point, why not a future pardon? "How dare you accuse me of assassinating my political opponent?! I merely gave blanket a future pardon to someone! That they just so happened to murder someone is mere coincidence, and completely unrelated to the act of me issuing the pardon!"

The Hunter pardon, at least, covered a period that ended slightly after it was issued. Perhaps I can hope that that was simply not valid (or that I'm misremembering.)

You remember correctly, but it was a matter of a few hours and visibly an effect of poor drafting, not a deliberate attempt to give him future immunity. The span of time was negligible. (I suppose this doesn't disprove the theory that the mistake was deliberate, and intended as a benign-looking battering ram through which to set a precedent for genuine future immunity. But I'm loath to ascribe to machiavellian malice what can be explained by incompetence.)

for crimes that have not yet occurred

Based on my reading, pardons only cover past crimes. Though the Hunter one illegitimately technically extended a few hours into the future due to the date range and announcement timing.

He also pardoned his extended family. And I thin it is once again after 2014. I mean why not since 2000. What is so specific in that year that the whole family was involved.

Joe Biden in the final minutes of his presidency on Monday issued pardons to five more members of his family—his brother James and wife Sarah, his younger sister Valerie Biden Owens and husband John T. Owens, and his brother Francis Biden—after he says they were "subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats" motivated by a desire to hurt him.

...did you have a point you wanted to make?

Your post seems to be a stream-of-consciousness panic dump, ticking off a laundry list of fears of varying degrees of plausibility, rhetorical questions and sweeping pronouncements without the slightest effort toward evidence or even argument, to say nothing of focus.

Donald Trump will not be the President of the United States for another 105 minutes, at this writing. Pick an issue, make an argument. Trying to fit everything you're scared of (or every news media talking point) into one post is not really conducive to productive discussion.

The post you responded to is filtered.

I might need to spin a local instance of The Motte for this, and it's been a while since I tried, but would some kind of custom CSS showing "hey this post is filtered out" help you guys at all?

Also, going only by your description, is there any chance that this is another Impassionata alt?

My apologies. I'm sure if you have the ability to improve the codebase, you'd be welcome on the development Discord.

As for the post, looks like they've deleted it, so, I guess it's a moot point.

I might need to spin a local instance of The Motte for this, and it's been a while since I tried, but would some kind of custom CSS showing "hey this post is filtered out" help you guys at all?

Maybe a little, though as @naraburns says, there is a development discord and I think there are a lot of more urgent needs. The problem with filtered posts is that we (mods) can see all of them in the Filtered queue, but if we're reading the forum in normal mode, a filtered post appears like every other post to us (unless we happen to notice the little "approve" link at the bottom, so I guess having that appear in green or red to a mod might be of some use.

Also, going only by your description, is there any chance that this is another Impassionata alt?

Nah. Impassionata has a very distinct style, and like most dedicated trolls, he's basically incapable of hiding it.

but if we're reading the forum in normal mode, a filtered post appears like every other post to us (unless we happen to notice the little "approve" link at the bottom, so I guess having that appear in green or red to a mod might be of some use.

Right, this is what I meant. It might even be possible to highlight the entire post, rather than just the link.

there is a development discord and I think there are a lot of more urgent needs.

I tried to tell this to Zorba when he announced the discord, but I think he picked the absolutely worst way to coordinate development. Oh well, I'll hit him up and ask if there's anything high-priority.

Ok, now Im confused. Last week I asked nara about this post, which says "Removed", but was apparently deleted by the author. I thought ok, maybe theres only one lable used for both - but now this one says "Deleted by author", when its apparently filtered?

A post can be filtered. It can also be removed either by a mod or by author, either while it's still in a filtered state or after it has been approved.

I think what happened in this case is that @naraburns responded to it while it was still filtered, and then the author deleted it before any mod approved it.

Thats what I would have thought as well, but then why does the old link say "Removed", if it was deleted by the author?

Clever idea: Create a robot moderator which queries the website both through itself and through incognito mode every say 5 minutes. If it sees posts present on its own version but not the incognito one it knows the post has been filtered. It can than auto approve it since it has mod privileges.

What do you find "clever" about it?

Or else just disable filtering? I'm not sure what your rube-goldberg bot would add.

Filtering is baked into the codebase in a way that's difficult for zorba to disable, although I don't understand how or why.

Past peak woke? Don't count on it

(c) J. Nelson Rushton. Jan 20, 2025.

1. The culture war

In December 2021, engineer-entrepreneur Elon Musk made the following enigmatic tweet: "traceroute woke_mind_virus". The term "traceroute" is an inside joke for fellow computer geeks; basically, it is a request for information about where something came from and how it got here. The phrase "woke mind virus" refers to the woke movement, aka social justice movement, aka political correctness. I define wokeness -- or, as Tom Klingenstein has called it, woke communism -- as an ideology incorporating the following elements:

  • victim identity politics: a caste system based on historical class grievances
  • authoritarianism: a feeling of being entitled to control other people, which naturally leads to censorship, militance, lawlessness, and arbitrary, oppressive governance
  • radical progressivism: extreme disregard for traditional norms and values

America, and, with it, all of Western civilization, is now embroiled in a culture war. This war is often portrayed as left vs. right; indeed, pundits on both sides of the corporate media make their living peddling the left vs. right drama in the style of a pro-wrestling production. But the reality is that, in a sane world, conservatives and progressives are not natural enemies. They are people of different temperaments, who tend to have different blind spots, and therefore tend to make different sorts of mistakes -- and who need each other's input to see into those blind spots and to temper those mistakes. Of course, conservatives and progressives often hold different opinions about how to achieve their common objectives, but that is not what makes people enemies. My wife and I often hold different opinions about how to achieve our common objectives, but that certainly doesn't make us enemies. At the end of the day it makes us a better team, when we can put our egos aside and work together.

In the long run, the real culture war is a war against fundamentalism -- aka radicalism, extremism, or supremacy movements. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, the line between good and evil is not a line between nations, classes, or political parties, but a line that passes through every human heart. Fundamentalists are people who have worked themselves into a sustained frenzy, in which they've redrawn the line between good and evil to lie between their people and certain other people. Fundamentalism, thus defined, has two broad consequences. First, because fundamentalists vest ultimate moral authority in people rather than principles, they tend to actually abandon the precepts of the ideology from which their sect sprang up. For example, the woke movement has abandoned liberal principles like free speech and equal treatment under law -- just as Christian fundamentalists often abandon Biblical principles like grace, charity, and loving their enemies. Second, fundamentalists often feel entitled to suppress the speech of their ideological adversaries -- the bad people -- as well as to forcibly control their behavior, seize their property, and target them for oppression of any sort they can get away with. These oppressive sanctions are administered by the fundamentalist regime, not as punishment for any crime the target has committed as an individual, but simply for being a member of the targeted class -- whether that class consists of the Jews, the "bourgeoisie", the Tutsis, infidels and heretics, straight white males, or the unvaccinated.

Any ideology or identity -- from progressivism, to conservatism, to Islam, to Christianity, to being black, to being white, to being German, etc. -- can spawn a degenerate, fundamentalist strain. Wokeness is such a degenerate strain. Wokeness is not progressivism, or even "extreme" progressivism, and it is certainly not liberalism. Essentially, wokeness is a fundamentalist leftist cult masking itself as compassionate progressivism. Wokeness is not too much of a good thing, or even too much of a decent thing; it is a warlike tyranny that has infected the progressive political parties of the West and begun to transform them into something unrecognizable to their well-meaning forebears.

Unfortunately, many progressives today have cozied up to the woke vampire, holding their tongues about its obvious dark tendencies for the sake of forming a political coalition. I assume they believe this is a price worth paying to accomplish otherwise laudable aims, and that the insanity can only go so far. I believe they are woefully mistaken.

2. The (probably growing) danger of woke communism

It is human nature to assume that our children's future, and their children's future, will be fundamentally like the past we grew up with -- even when we have good reasons to believe otherwise. For example, it would have seemed alarmist to most Russians in 1900 to talk of omnipresent secret police, mass torture, and death camps on the horizon in their country. Yet, these developments, though they may have seemed far-fetched at the time, were in fact less than twenty years away under the grip of the Bolshevik communist ideology -- which at the time appeared to be nothing more than a fringe movement. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would later write,

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings; that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the "secret brand"); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.
-- Solzhenitsyn (1973): The Gulag Archipelago

I believe that wokeness represents a grave and growing threat to Western civilization. I am not saying that we are going to have death camps in the United States in a generation or two. I am saying that, if we continue down the path we have been on, America's future is going to be considerably less safe, less comfortable, and less free than its past, as a result of the influence of woke communism.

Since the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 US Presidential election, there is speculation that the worst of wokeness might now be behind us. History suggests otherwise. Tyrannical ideologies often endure political setbacks, even seemingly crippling setbacks, only to later reemerge with renewed strength. Soviet communism seemed all but dead when its leaders were exiled in the 1890's. Nazism took a direct hit when an attempted Nazi coup d'etat was thwarted in 1923 and the party leader, Adolf Hitler, was sentenced to prison. Shia fundamentalism ebbed for a time in Iran when its leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, was exiled in 1964. But each of these movements came back with renewed strength within a generation -- because the culture was invisibly moving in a direction that was susceptible to their influence, even while their leaders were temporarily out of the picture.

Most Americans are not actively advancing the woke agenda. In 2018, around eighty percent of Americans, including a majority of Democratic voters, affirmed the statement that "political correctness has gone too far" [source]. But this matters less than it might appear. The vast majority of Russians were not communists in 1917, and most probably thought communism had gone too far, when the October Revolution swept away democratic governance in Russia. Most Germans were not Nazis in 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and most never became Nazis -- but World War II and the Holocaust happened all the same. Most Iranians were not Islamic extremists in 1979 when the Ayatollah came to power in the Iranian revolution. Only 2% of Vietnamese are members of the communist party today -- and yet the party rules that country with an iron fist. Tyranny grows from the seeds of a militant and vocal minority, in the soil of a fearful and silent majority. As long as the majority remains fearful and silent, it is naive to expect a tyrannical ideology to fade away just because its leaders have been removed from power for a time.

Though its devoted constituents were a minority of the population, the hydra of political correctness -- or social-justice, or wokeness, or whatever you want to call it -- got its way more and more in the period from 1990 to 2020. For a thumbnail sketch of the cultural shift that occurred over that period, consider the following public statements by leading American politicians in 1987, 2012, and 2020:

Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. . . . Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar. . . . As long as this gate is closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind. . . .General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
-- Ronald Reagan: address at the Brandenburg Gate; June 12, 1987

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges; if you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.
-- Barack Obama: Campaign speech at Roanoke, VA, July 13, 2012.

Defund the police, the issue behind it is that we need to reimagine how we are creating safety. And when you have many cities that have one third of their entire city budget focused on policing, we know that is not the smart way, and the best way, or the right way to achieve safety. This whole movement is about rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities. For too long, the status quo thinking has been that you get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that's wrong.
-- Kamala Harris: radio interview, June 2020.

Each of the last two statements might have been considered unthinkable for a national leader in America just a generation before it was made. Yet, wokeness kept gaining ground over the American mind -- even while most Americans believed it had already gone too far. And, of course, the cultural shift toward woke insanity was not just talk. As Richard Weaver famously wrote, ideas have consequences -- and crazy ideas have crazy consequences. If you once believed, as I did, that woke bureaucrats would never allow DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) to override meritocracy in safety-critical professions such as those of physician and airline pilot, you'd have been wrong. If you once thought they would never defund and demoralize the police to let criminals rampage against law-abiding citizens in broad daylight, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they wouldn't open the Southern border of the United States to invite millions upon millions of illegal aliens into the country with no immigration enforcement whatsoever, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never push aggressively for biological males to compete in women's sports, or house male sex offenders in women's prisons because the convicts claim to have gender dysphoria, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never arrest hundreds of people each year in a Western democracy [the UK] for political speech posted on social media, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never advocate rationing lifesaving medicine based on race (whites to the back of the line), you'd be wrong yet again. If you thought they would never let immigrant gangs rape tens of thousands of young girls, while police deliberately ignored the situation on the grounds that it would be "Islamophobic" to intervene, you'd have been wrong yet again. As Sam Harris has asked, if we will allow our daughters to be raped in the name of diversity and inclusion, what won't we allow? And if the rapists' woke government benefactors give them high cover for their crimes, what won't they do if we allow them? Can you look in the mirror and say out loud what you still think they'll never be willing to do? or what they will never be able to get away with -- even if most people know it's wrong, and secretly, silently oppose it?

Since the election of Donald Trump, there have been some encouraging signs in the struggle against woke communism. Several advertisers have come back to Twitter/X, who had previously boycotted the platform because it refused to censor what they call "hate speech" (broadly defined to include a great deal of right-leaning political speech). Many corporations, including Facebook/Meta, McDonalds, and Harley Davidson, have dismantled their DEI (diversity-equity-inclusion) programs, and so have several universities. Even Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has removed her pronouns (she/her) from her Twitter bio! But recall -- or be informed, if you are not old enough to remember -- that when Ronald Reagan left office in 1988, no advertisers were boycotting anyone for refusing to censor anything; few if any corporations or universities had active DEI departments, and no one of either party had pronouns in their bio. Yet, somehow, in thirty years or so we got from "Tear down this wall" [Reagan, 1987] to "You didn't build that" [Obama, 2012], to "Defund the police" [Kamala Harris, 2020]. On a crazy-scale from 1 to 10, if we seemed to be at 3 in 1987, and a 7 in 2020, we have perhaps now clawed our way back to a 5 or 6. And if long term momentum was in the wrong direction in 1988, after eight years of Reagan presidency, why would it be in the right direction now? In my opinion, wokeness isn't going anywhere -- at least not if our culture continues down the path of business as usual.

3. The constitution of the people

So how did we go from "tear down this wall" to "defund the Police" in just thirty years? I submit the root of the problem isn't wokeness itself, but the moral rot that gave wokeness room to breathe in the first place. Honest men and women, even honest men and women who lean left politically, do not become woke "social justice warriors", or indulge the woke's illiberal schemes in silent complicity for political or personal gain. Nor do brave men and women, of any political leaning, cower down and keep silent in the face of "cancel culture". If we had more honest men on the left like Michael Shellenberger, and more brave women on the right like Riley Gaines, we would never have been dragged into the swamp of wokeism in the first place. But we have too few, and I submit that is the heart of the problem. This condition of moral rot -- the soil in which tyranny grows -- does not change when the leaders of an extremist movement are exiled or imprisoned, let alone defeated in a single election.

In every nation, at all times, the militant, tyrannical minority is there lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce upon weakness. That is an eternal given. What matters is what the rest of us do. Tyranny requires tyrants, of course -- but, more importantly, it requires a meek and passive populace, minding its own business while the tyrant and his minions eat away at the roots of their civilization. What arrests and beats back tyranny is not a policy written on paper, but the moral character of the nation. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government, that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey [Common Sense].

Our forebears, the first Americans, left their families and farms to go to war against the greatest military power then in the world. They did this not knowing whether they would die in battle, not knowing whether they would be hanged as traitors, and often not knowing whether they would even be paid for their service. The continental soldiers risked all they had -- not for their personal gain, but to defend the natural rights of their countrymen and their posterity.

Today, by contrast, many of us -- that aforementioned posterity -- will not dare to speak the plain truth before our eyes if it means we might be passed over for a promotion at work, or be made to feel socially uncomfortable. In that respect, we are not living lives worthy of the sacrifice our forebears made for us, let alone living up to the example they set. Can such a nation dodge the bullet of tyranny for long? I doubt it. That is not how the world works, or ever has worked. As economist Walter Williams noted, the freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the normal state of human affairs; the normal state for the ordinary person is tyranny, arbitrary control and abuse. Why should the United States be any different, if it ceases to be the home of the brave?

To be clear (since this is the Motte), the cultural shortcoming that let wokeness wedge its foot in the door is not intellectual, but moral in nature. Tyranny does not gain ground with logic, and logic is not the weapon that beats it back. The vast majority of Americans already know that wokeness is wrong. What people need to stand up against wokeness is not a higher IQ, or a seminar on rationality, but the courage to say out loud, in public, what they already know to be right. If men do not stand up and speak the truth when it is uncomfortable, it will become expensive. If we do not stand up and speak the truth when it is expensive, it will become dangerous. If we then do not stand up and speak the truth when it is dangerous, only God can help us. If we are not willing to speak the truth and we do not believe in God, we will certainly believe in Hell -- because it is coming to us.

I think the question is, what will be the synthesis to the thesis/anti-thesis you have pointed at. People will eventually realize they can speak up but someone needs to do the work to fill in what comes next.

I don't think we will go forward to the world that the woke want. Neither do I think we're going back to the 80s. The only way forward is through.

I believe in a synthesis of conservatism and progressivism, but not a synthesis of any honest, well-meaning worldview with wokeness. "For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?" [2 Corinthians 6:14]

It won't end until someone synthesizes with it.

Funny that you quote Corinthians, because as soon as early Christianity was over, Christians became amenable to absorbing the beliefs they once fought against.

Since the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 US Presidential election, there is speculation that the worst of wokeness might now be behind us. History suggests otherwise. Tyrannical ideologies often endure political setbacks, even seemingly crippling setbacks, only to later reemerge with renewed strength.

I'm rather sure that Trump's victory last year is by far not the first setback of wokeness in the US, and arguably not the biggest either. I recall reading the argument from Walt Bismarck and maybe other rightist bloggers as well that the period between Nixon's reelection and the LA riots of 1992 can be interpreted as two decades of racial detente, for example.

Nixons silent majority, and Clintons Sister Souljah could only have come about because of progressive overreach. Turns out Weathermen college kids did not have a large corpus of auto workers eager to join the cause of socialism, and whites were not willing to lie down and die to sate black bloodlust.

It is telling that progressivism has reverted to black issues once again despite decades of demographic progression. ADOS remain an intractable feature of US cultural dissonance, and the (bad) intellectual arguments used to externalize self responsibility for their poor state has been more deftly coopted by intellectual superiors such as sexual paraphiliacs, islamists and Indians.As more are included in the umbrella of 'other people are responsible for why we are so shit', the umbrella shields less and less. Eventually everyone just loses, and the next phase of wokeness might be the scramble to see who gets to remain under the remnants of this intellectual umbrella.

I'm rather sure that Trump's victory last year is by far not the first setback of wokeness in the US, and arguably not the biggest either.

I'm curious what your top three candidates would be.

The reelection victories of Nixon, Reagan and Bush Jr. GOP midterm election victories in 1994 and 2010.

I wouldn't count that because the left was around, but modern wokeness wasn't.

At what point did modern wokeness become modern then?

1990's political correctness becoming a laughing stock.

That set wokeness back 20 years. I don't know what the mechanism was because I was too young to be paying attention, and both sides of the culture war agreed to airbrush it out of history because the woke wanted to make their victory look more inevitable and the antiwoke wanted an excuse for losing.

I started graduate school in 1990, and I got a glimpse ahead of the woke curve because my girlfriend was in a humanities department. They were in the ballpark of as crazy then as they are now, but the movement didn't have fangs yet, outside certain small and isolated spheres of dominion (such as, evidently, clinical psych departments, even in the Southern United States).

In my observation, there was never an inflection point from 1990 to 2020 -- just a steadily accelerating creep, into more and more places, to ever increasing effect, of identity politics and leftist authoritarianism.

such as, evidently, clinical psych departments, even in the Southern United States

Could you talk more about this?

Sure. For example, in the office my girlfriend shared with some other students, there was a map on the wall that was an equal area projection with Africa in the middle. The title was something like, "Socially Just Map of the World", and the heading under that said that usual projections of the globe onto a map "disadvantage Africa and South America, and Asia" (their words) by making them look smaller than they are by land-area comparison, and by placing them at the edge of the map, either horizontally or vertically. This level of pettiness over race was then new to me, and I chuckled and asked how anyone was "disadvantaged" by having a smaller land area on someone else's map halfway around the world. My girlfriend looked at me like I had blasphemed in front of a Bishop. She wasn't surprised that I had the thought (which was roughly as obvious to her as it was to me); she was appalled that I broke the taboo of questioning a bit of PC craziness in front of her classmates, and that she might be implicated by association ("Do you let him say things like that at home?"). This was in 1990, in the clinical psychology department at the University of Georgia, and it was the water they swam in every day.

I would emphasize that, at the time, she knew almost as well as I did that this stuff was silly, but lived in a state of ketman every day for fear of cancel culture. She gradually became more woke on the inside, though. If you think you can pretend to be something for long without becoming that thing, talk to a man who's been through a mock POW camp in SEER school (or else read "The Lucifer Effect" by Philip Zimbardo).

The leftist fundamentalists in the psych department in 1990 felt the same sense of entitlement to control other people as they probably do now, as long as they were in their element. We were going out to dinner with a group once, and one female grad student said, "If anyone orders veal, I am going to have a real problem with that." If veal had been on the menu, I'd have ordered it to find out the exact nature of the problem she was going to have -- but I suspect in my absence that would have been considered General's Orders. Another time, another girl said she had a problem with anyone who hunted. I asked if she was a vegetarian, and she said 'no', looking (1) guilty and (2) surprised, as if to say "you're not supposed to ask such things".

I only observed this directly for one semester, because my girlfriend -- who I had had a long-distance relationship with for four years of college -- broke up with me 3 months after we moved in together for grad school. There were several reasons for it, but I think one of them was that, while I was not particularly conservative at the time, my indefatigable Gomer-Pyle common sense (as I came from the math department were none of this was going on yet) was not only an embarrassment to her, but a danger to her career by way of voluntary association.

but a danger to her career by way of voluntary association

This sounds similar to that one scene at the beginning of Cryptonomicon (granted it's been a few years since I read it).

I think even at the time people knew what was up if they wanted to.

You mean the scene where Randy the Dwarf gets into it G E B Kistivik the Hobbit over the Information Superhighway being a stupid metaphor? I freaking loved that scene, one of many that I freaking loved throughout the book!

PC at the time failed to achieve critical mass for a variety of reasons. I think the largest reason, compared to 2010s version, is that culture was still top-down. Music was what the big record companies approved. News came through the TV or paper. Comedians could mock PC as blue-nosed university primping and get rewarded for it.

The breaking of the top-down cultural monopoly in the 2000s weakened the gatekeepers who (probably not intentionally) kept PC quarantined to the university humanities departments.

This seems correct to me, with two addenda.

First, there's been an explosion of oppressed identities accessible to the majority, in the form of disabilities, queerness, plus esoteric sexualities and genders. This vastly increased the surface of potentially receptive people that would have previously considered themselves targets.

Second, the development of social media, especially Tumblr (as Katherine Dee has documented) provided a vector for the reemergence of political correctness as wokeness.

Link got cocked up appending the motte url, don't know why that happens. Clean one:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/tumblr-transformed-american-politics/

I think the root of the woke mind virus (and a lot of other mind virii that are in the mix as well) is that we’re essentially an immunocompromised society. There’s no lines in the sand that can’t be crossed. The evils always exist, but we’re the polite people who refuse, on the grounds of “being nice” to say anything about them. The urge to cancel people has always existed, we just don’t stand up to them anymore. There were probably always perverts who want access to children. Now we’ve lost the ability to say “we don’t do that here”. There was always a push to try to get sinecures for our own ethnic, religious, or sexuality tribes, but again, there wasn’t any sense that the rest of us wouldn’t push back. And radical Islam has been pushing through the same gap. They want to impose on us, we more or less don’t want to be rude by saying “no, you cannot do that.” They want to impose their view of the world on us, or to be allowed access to children. They want every child to be taught about Islam, but pushing back is rude. And I think until the West regrows it’s spine and decides that it’s ideas are pretty good and it has every right, not only to teach its own religion, culture, and legal theory in its own country, but the right to insist that people who choose to live here abide those beliefs and systems. No, you may not rape 12 year olds. No, you don’t get to throw people out of work for offending you. No, men don’t get to go into women’s private spaces, especially changing areas. No, you don’t get to trans kids in schools.

And until that part is fixed, until there’s enough spine in the west to be willing to impose its will in its own territories, and do so no matter how many ways the carriers of mind viruses try to brand us as crime thinkers, I don’t see it stopping. I think the west made a mistake in removing Christianity from government entirely. Yes it can be annoying, but if my options are “we’ll arrest you for protecting your children from rape, while teaching them to salute th3 gay flag” or “were all Presbyterians now, and if someone wants to hold office they have to be a confessional Christian,” im signing up on the second one. At least they can tell people to stop stealing, raping, and say no to teaching kids to switch genders while hiding it from parents. At least there’s no reason to think that such a society would go woke out of politeness.

At least there’s no reason to think that such a society would go woke out of politeness.

Presbyterians have totally gone woke out of politeness. So have Episcopalians, Methodists, and mainstream Lutherans.

I disagree about the lack of an immune response, the issue is that wokeness thrives off that immune response. The reason classical liberalism didn't take off virally is the absense of the religious purity culture component. Classical liberalism says "let's all be equal and respect each other and let everyone do what they want." Which is too inoffensive of a message. Wokeness says "you're privileged and inherently a bigot, now pay me for my emotional labor." That's a message that provokes a response. Either you convert, apologize for your original privilege, and accept equity as your lord and savior, or you become an uncouth MRA chud who supplies exactly the examples of oppression that can be used to justify future wokeness.

I disagree about the lack of an immune response, the issue is that wokeness thrives off that immune response.

I don't want to put words in MaiqTheTrue's mouth, but, speaking for myself on behalf of his basic thesis, the problem isn't a general lack of thymos [Greek: spirit; cf. Plato's chariot allegory], but a lack of thymos among the non-woke majority. The woke brigades have plenty of it.

I agree with this as far as it goes. Any thoughts on how to thread the needle between an "immunocompromised society" and a despotic theocracy (like Iran)? IMO, Israel kind of does that, but what's the secret sauce?

Being one of the progressive stack's sacred cows probably gave them a layer of insulation. It seems to be wearing thin, but it's there.

Not really. The kind of person who talks about the "progressive stack" unironically has hated Israel since before they knew what the "progressive stack" was.

The secret sauce in Israel is that the pro-establishment left (in Israel's case, the historically Labour-voting secular Ashkenazi elite) are fiercely patriotic in a way that the pro-establishment left is not in most other Western countries, either because of woke, because of American cultural capture, or (in the case of the UK) both. That, in turn, is probably due to the role of the Holocaust as part of the Israeli founding myth. The pro-establishment right tends patriotic everywhere, and the anti-establishment right almost everywhere, but you need patriotic factions on both sides of the aisle if you want to ensure generally patriotic government.

Israel is in danger of losing its secret sauce because the pro-establishment right (i.e. Netanyahu) is increasingly dependent on the votes of the Haredim (who are functionally unpatriotic because they see the Israeli state as a food animal).

you need patriotic factions on both sides of the aisle if you want to ensure generally patriotic government.

Thanks. This explanation is new to me, at least regarding Israel specifically, and feels plausible.

On the other hand, we can't deliberately subject our nation to decimating attacks by outsiders as a means of forging a shared national identity. Any ideas on how to recreate the effect without the cause?

To be fair, I think the Palestinians help as well. It’s very hard to get a Woke mind virus when you’re surrounded by people who want you dead. The two almost need each other as they’re defying themselves against each other an an enemy unites tribes.

To be fair, I think the Palestinians help as well. It’s very hard to get a Woke mind virus when you’re surrounded by people who want you dead. The two almost need each other as they’re defying themselves against each other an enemy unites tribes.

Agreed. Jonothan Haidt said that historically, shared identity typically springs from some combination of shared blood, shared gods, and shared enemies. The more I thought about it, the truer it seemed, but shared enemies may be the most important of the three. Even with shared blood and nominally shared gods, large societies often fracture and fall into civil war without a shared external enemy. As a famous example, the decline of Rome from a republic to an autocracy in the context of a class war (plebians vs. patricians) was rapid and almost linear over the 100-year period from found 150 BC to 44BC, following what seemed like Rome's greatest triumph: the total, permanent defeat of its archrival, Carthage, in a struggle between two global superpowers. (Sound familiar?)

As someone who has kept an eye on this forum for a long time now - ever since it was launched in the SSC days - but never cared to register, it may interest you that your appeal to the "courage (…) to stand up and speak the truth when it is dangerous" got me to register so I could post this reply. You… may not care for it. But it is meant in good faith, and I would be interested in your reply to the question at the heart of that reply.

You write:

Wokeness is not progressivism, or even "extreme" progressivism, and it is certainly not liberalism.

My question is this. How, according to you, should a genuine radical progressive behave, if he does not wish to behave as a woke fundamentalist?

The problem is nothing new; I suppose the question is analogous to "what to do if you are a genuine socialist and find yourself in Soviet Russia". I would not have been a Stalinist, but neither could I ever see myself taking up the banner of a czarist White Russian; that would be akin to asking me to inject myself with the plague as a protection against cholera. There are many more evil positions than good ones, and too often seeking the converse of the evil ideology du jour will simply land you in a different quadrant of evil.

A haven for dissident right-wingers should be sympathetic to this point, I would have thought, as unless they are themselves ethical monsters they must often dwell on the precariousness of their own position, insisting, as they must, on the individual intellectual merits of positions which their opponents ceaselessly remind them were most famously endorsed by Nazis and slavers. And yet… and yet, banal as the sentiment is, it always comes back to the forefront of my mind when I read an articulate tirade against "wokeness". No matter how much sense the writer is making, there nearly always comes a point when they inch out of the motte and into the bailey.

So when you say: the problem of "wokeness", what makes it a "mind virus" and not simply a political paradigm you don't agree with, is not what it claims to stand for, but the underhanded tactics which have been used to advance them, and the moral cowardice which have allowed these tactics to proceed — I can agree, to a point. I think opponents of a given political view are biased towards see only the worst in their adversaries' behavior, but certainly you'd have to be blind, mad, or a liar to deny that bullying tactics, and worse, are routinely deployed by the modern Left, particularly online. Sure.

But suddenly it's no longer the medium being attacked; suddenly it's the message.

Here we come to the problem. I do, as a matter of fact, believe in the objective reality of human-caused climate change and the effectiveness of most vaccines. I believe - as a non-exhaustive list, presented in no particular order - in the moral abhorrence of racism, in every human being's inalienable right to shelter and healthcare, and in the moral imperative of LGBTQ rights and acceptance.

I don't see that any of the above means I have to endorse underhanded tactics, censorship, and witch-hunts if they happen to be in pursuit of goals adjacent to those - any more than a nationalist has to endorse Mein Kampf. And as a matter of fact, I don't. Surely I'm not alone. Surely it should be possible to find great treasures of anti-political-correctness manifestos written by people like me, who believe in all the fundamental values "wokeness" espouses, but rejects, absolutely, the defilement which is brought upon them by the use of unacceptable tactics, and denounces the moral cowardice of those who turn a blind eye to such abuse because they agree in principle with the perpetrators.

If such a movement - "Reform Progressivism"? - existed, I would be a card-carrying member. It doesn't yet. But it can, and it must. How would you treat it, if it did? Would you and your ilk accept us as respectable fellow-travellers in the fight for intellectual honesty and freedom of speech? I would like to think so. If you, personally say yes, I will unreservedly welcome that hypothetical support. But if that is so, I would ask that you keep your arguments straight, and refrain from randomly kicking the message when you have decided to fight the medium. If there is one key reason Reform Progressivism has not yet come into being as a coherent movement, it must surely be this worrying trend I see in exposes like yours, whereby it is taken for granted that what wokeness stands for is in and of itself unacceptable, quite apart from disagreement with its methods.

And perhaps that's how you really feel. Perhaps what anti-woke rightists hate most are still diversity, homosexuality, etc. in and of themselves, and they only take issue with the means because they hate the ends. I don't want to believe that, because I don't like to believe that those who rail against the other side's hypocrisy could be so totally hypocritical themselves, even in places like this. But be aware that this is certainly what most of us progressives tell ourselves as we ignore and defund and delete your anti-wokeness tirades, quite unread. If you want to prove that wrong, then you know what (not) to do.

Otherwise - by all means feel free to simultaneously attack cancel culture and trans rights, but don't bother to claim that you're fighting wokeness as opposed to extreme progressivism.

Thanks for this comment...its good to hear these perspectives.

You make a distinction between the medium and the message...but isn't the medium the message? Whether it be BLM and LGBT in 2010-2022 USA, the "woman question" and "serf's rights" in 1870s Russia, or the Jacobins in 1770s France; the superficial message may change, but the medium stays the same: the attainment of power through societal disruption, revolution, and chaos. It usually begins and ends in blood. In Dostoyevsky's Idiot and Demons there are conversations and confrontations in those books that could be ripped straight out of a 2020 struggle session.

But, if you must make a distinction between the two (and acknowledging that I am not the OP and he/she may have a different take): yes; I dislike both the medium and the message. I think racism is sub-optimal and is a "lesser" sin of envy, but not "abhorrent". Humans cannot have an inalienable right to shelter and healthcare because these things depend on other humans. Did Robinson Crusoe have a right to shelter and healthcare? (He did, as an aside, have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness). I think it is a moral imperative to restrict LGBTQ rights and acceptance (uh oh, there goes our shot at a pluralistic society).

In short, I fight both wokeness and extreme progressivism, if it is even possible to disambiguate the two.

You make a distinction between the medium and the message

To be more exact, NelsonRushton made that distinction, or in any case, affected to make it. I was questioning whether he really believed in it.

But if we define "wokeness" as the cancel-culture apparatus and associated phenomena, then it seems clear to me that they can be "disambiguated". Here I stand, living proof. The temptation of blood-soaked revolutions is one of mankind's greatest ethical pitfalls, but reducing all ideologies used by power-hungry revolutionaries to superficial excuses seems absurd. Taking the French Revolution, surely a majority of Americans would describe themselves as anti-monarchists, and that doesn't inevitably make them Robespierre's useful idiots.

My view is that any violent revolution can be hijacked by power-hungry sociopaths. This is a very good reason not to start violent revolutions, no matter how right you feel. But it is not a reason to unilaterally condemn or ignore any political or moral position that some people, at some point in history, have been tempted to start a revolution about. I should hope that things like the abolition of hereditary monarchies and the abolition of feudal serfdom are recognized by a majority of Americans today - indeed, by a majority of the developed world - as morally-justified causes. Their righteousness is precisely why they were able to generate mass popular support the nearest charismatic sociopaths found themselves motivated to redirect for their own ends. It has no bearing on the underlying question of right and wrong.

yes; I dislike both the medium and the message.

That, I never doubted. That is why you are in fact a right-winger. As a true liberal I do not begrudge you - or indeed Nelson! - the right to that opinion.

However, Nelson's rhetoric implied that he had special animus for the medium in and of itself, distinct from his dislike for progressives qua progressives. He wrote wrote of wokeness as a specific phenomenon which it was urgent to quell, while he is happy to live-and-let-live with non-'woke' progressives (who he explicitly believes needn't be "natural enemies" to conservatives "in a sane world").

The impetus of my post was as follows. If this truly represents Nelson's beliefs and priorities, then it seems to me that he could and should, for his own side's interest, enter into an alliance of convenience with principled progressives like myself in the war against runaway political-correctness/cancel-culture/"wokeness". Then we can slay the dread beast and go back to fighting each other civilly on the object-level questions of policy and morality. This is self-evidently the rational thing for both of us to do, particularly if, as Nelson also argued in the OP, most progressives aren't actually pro-"woke" but are just going along with it out of apathy and fear.

And yet - I observed - Nelson, and people like Nelson, seemingly can't stop themselves from letting their object-level disagreements with progressivism into arguments which they profess are only about the meta-level. Conclusion from this progressive: either

1- for the sake of a few incidental jabs which have no bearing on his overall argument, Nelson is stupidly discouraging us progressives from entering into an alliance that would be mutually satisfactory

or

2- he isn't really serious about this business of reserving special hatred for cancel culture and being willing to play fair with progressives who play fair in return.

If it's #1, people like Nelson should reconsider their argumentative strategy; if it's #2, they should stop lying. It's wrong. And serves no purpose in a place like the Motte where they would face no backlash for stating that they just hate progressivism itself, as you have done.

It seems that you consider fighting radical progressive ideas ("the message") to be as high a priority as fighting cancel culture etc. ("the medium"), meaning you have no incentive to enter into an alliance with a Reform Progressive. If you admit as much then I don't have any intellectual disagreement with you on how you're conducting yourself - only the ordinary object-level disagreements about the nature of good and evil and all those superficial little details.

Did Robinson Crusoe have a right to shelter and healthcare? (He did, as an aside, have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness)

Morally: yes. Whether he had any chance of getting it or not in practice. I'm genuinely not sure what that observation is supposed to prove and would appreciate some elaboration. Surely a man who, by force of circumstances, is about to be lethally hit by - say - an unavoidable tidal wave, still has a "right to life" in all morally and politically relevant senses. The unfortunate nature of his circumstances has no bearing on that principle.

But that brings me to my more politically-relevant point, which is that I don't recognize a difference between the right to life and the right to healthcare; one is the implementation of the other.

There is, of course, an enduring moral question of action-vs-inaction. Granting that I have a moral obligation not to drown my fellow man, do I also have an obligation to save him from accidental drowning if I happen to be passing by? But I think the "good Samaritan" question doesn't apply in the case of the State which has actively pledged to proactively protect its citizens' lives. I, personally, may or may not have a duty to intervene to save a random stranger from drowning; but then, I am not generally regarded as having a moral obligation to save random strangers from being mugged at gunpoint, either. The State has pledged to safeguard my life, and already takes measures to proactively save me from being shot or battered or strangled. In my book, that should extend to proactively saving me from disease, starvation, and exposure.

Morally: yes. Whether he had any chance of getting it or not in practice. I'm genuinely not sure what that observation is supposed to prove and would appreciate some elaboration. Surely a man who, by force of circumstances, is about to be lethally hit by - say - an unavoidable tidal wave, still has a "right to life" in all morally and politically relevant senses. The unfortunate nature of his circumstances has no bearing on that principle.

It's about you committing a category error. Nobody would think that saving Crusoe would be bad. However, society-granted rights are about the most basic imaginable, things that a society can always grant no matter how poor it currently is. "Right to life" has never entailed immortality, it merely means that society should not take or needlessly risk your life. If you're alone, there is no society to threaten you (I guess you can kill yourself). If there's two, the "right to life" principle merely states that neither of you should (lightly) take actions that threaten the other's life.

Once you have some fuzzy number n and you need a leader or a group of leaders (called government), it means that those leaders shouldn't take actions against your life, and protect you from deathly threats from the other members of your society (ideally also other societies, but that is not always feasible given size differences, so again not really a right). A society can always protect its members from itself, if someone can take your life with a gun they can necessarily also protect you with the same gun. It's merely about whether they elect to do so. Yes you can confuse this by dividing a society strictly into government and non-government, but this is mostly evidence of a failed society; In a functioning one, the relevant parts of a government can always be extended or reduced (though this process may take some time).

The obvious retort here may be, but what if you have subsistence farmers so busy that they can't even organize the most basic militia to protect themselves from each other? But the answer is equally obvious, namely that if you spend all your time on your farm and can't spare any time outside of it in a militia, you also have no time forming a society in the first place; in which case you're, again, only a society with yourself, the other farmers merely geographically close but not part of the same society, similar to how irl tribes can be quite close without having any (positive) interactions whatsoever.

So in short, it's about how a society ought not being in the way of each other's life, liberty and happiness. Outright helping each other achieve it is of course desirable, and almost all societies try! But the degree to which it is attainable is dependent on many outside factors, so it makes no sense to construe it as a right, and the way progressives try to pretend they're special by doing so is simply presumptuous & arrogant.

And this distinction is still critical nowadays, since in particular healthcare is a black hole capable of eating arbitrary amounts of money. Ironically, the primary difference between America and other western countries isn't that Americans have worse healthcare outcomes (let alone "thousands dying due to unavailable treatment") - in fact, if you compare like-for-like, such as, say, japanese in America vs japanese in Japan (and most other groups), then Americans actually have significantly better healthcare outcomes then most others. It's merely that they spend excessively more compared to modest improvements; But this is simply a function of the fact that healthcare has starkly diminishing returns, the same can be seen for rich vs poor people.

Construing healthcare as a right, on top, has terrible incentives. It means that the moment a new technology to save lifes is developed, it needs to be used on everyone who needs it, costs be damned. In other words, developing new technology becomes negative sum for a society. Modern western countries have somewhat found a way out of this conundrum by labeling all new technologies unsafe and unusable by default (usually even for those who can privately afford it!), and only if you can prove it is safe by running a large-scale study (which incidentally is only really feasible with somewhat cost-effective treatments) it is allowed to be used.

But it's no accident that the overwhelming majority of new treatments is developed in America, since the incentives are much better aligned if you can develop a new treatment, let it be used by everyone who can afford it, it then gets improved (or discarded) depending on performance, and then the masses get access. Ironically, it de-facto also turns the richest into (willing, at least) guinea pigs. But of course, this is then easy to present as some sort of evil rich people conspiracy, keeping the good treatment from the regular people and letting them die. But in the rest of the western world, the people also don't get the good treatment (in fact they get it later or it doesn't even get developed in the first place), it's merely more equal by keeping it from the rich as well. This should be considered an abhorrent outcome - literally everything is worse for everyone - under most reasonable ethical systems. But the superficial optics are better, so it's favored by the easily swayed.

However, society-granted rights are about the most basic imaginable, things that a society can always grant no matter how poor it currently is.

I think we were talking about different things. I was talking about moral rights - natural rights - inalienable rights. You know, the one imbued into Man by his Creator, if there is such a being (but He is, in this context, a convenient philosophical abstraction whether one materially believes in Him or not, provided you are some manner of moral realist). These are famously distinct from legal rights. So when I said that human beings had a right to healthcare, I meant that it is prima facie morally wrong to withhold it from them; that they ought to have it. What moral rights the state turns into legal rights, by pledging to proactively safeguard and guarantee them, is a very different question, and involves plenty of trade-offs and choosing the lesser evil.

I view the Declaration of Independence's "life, liberty and the pursuit of happines"" as acknowledging three of these natural rights and writing them into law as a pledge on the part of the US government to protect these rights as best it can. For all the reasons you outlined, "as best it can" doesn't mean it can actually keep you alive forever, or even really guarantee that you'll only die of old age. Sure. So if you want to argue something like: yes, if the US government had infinite money and we had infinite medicine, it would have a duty to distribute that medicine to everyone, but resources are scarce, and it's just not an effective use of the limited resources to die on the hill of universal healthcare - that's an object-level conversation we can have. I'm not intractable; So - I don't oppose triage in an imperfect world. Actually, triage is probably the hardest and most important job of any government.

What I do want, however, is for everyone to be on the same page with regards to the moral truth that in an ideal society, everyone would have access to healthcare. I would like everyone to agree that this is what we're working towards in the long term, whatever the current state of affairs permits. The right-wing position I was reacting against (by which of course I mean a position that is comparatively common on the right, not universal) is the denial of that moral right to healthcare; the sentiment that healthcare is simply a luxury good. Something you or I can quite naturally desire, perhaps; but not something which adds a black mark in the book of Mankind for every day that goes by where someone is deprived of it.

I notice this is similar to one of the places the race subthread ended up, and I think it's a crux of my biggest meta-issues with the right: where the progressive position is "X is desirable, so we should do X", the right-wing will be a coalition behind the banner of "not-X" that lumps together people who think X is desirable, but impractical at present; and people who think X isn't desirable. I can never shake the sense that despite appearances, the "not-X because we can't" people's natural allies are the "yes-X"ites much moreso than the "not-X because we shouldn't" people. After all, there's only object-level uncertainty separating the "yes-X"s and the "not-X(1)"s, whereas the "not-X(1)" and "not-X(2)" seem to have much more fundamental value differences. Whenever I get into an intelligent conversation with a not-X(1)-ite like yourself, I just mourn that I can't full-throatedly collaborate with their bloc because I suspect it to be full of not-X(2)s.

I believe in a Creator but I do not see how He could have endowned mankind with an inalienable right to healthcare given that we haven’t had any for 99.99999% of our existence.

The same works from the philosophical perspective IMO: if you start from the position that ‘healthcare’ is a marvellous thing that we only invented very recently, then people aren’t being deprived of it but instead they simply don’t have it.

I know you say that you are merely arguing that it would be immoral to deny people ‘healthcare’ in a world where that was practically achievable, but I think that talking about inalienable rights is confusing the issue rather than clarifying it. For example, I think that it would be poor form to actively deny air conditioning to everybody if the alternative is practically achievable but I would find it very odd to say that ‘mankind has an inalianble right to air conditioning’.

In general, you are also confusing the issue a lot by using the term ‘access to healthcare’ as if it were a singular thing with an agreed-upon definition. Are we talking about setting broken bones? Antibiotics for sepsis? Polio vaccines? Talk therapy? Hair loss treatment? In our perfect society, do I have an inalienable right to a team of doctors dedicated to optimising my biochemistry for maximum happiness and performance on a moment to moment basis, and who is going to be made to do that for me? These aren’t rhetorical questions, I think you need to clarify your position, because in my opinion it would be immoral to deny some of these and not others.

I believe in a Creator but I do not see how He could have endowned mankind with an inalienable right to healthcare given that we haven’t had any for 99.99999% of our existence.

I think this line of thinking proves way, way too much. 99.9999% of human history consisted of brutes braining one another with carved rocks. Does this disprove the right to not be murdered? No, it just proves that immorality is rampant/the material world doesn't care about what hairless apes believe to be the moral law. I find this point obvious both from an atheistic (there is no external source of morality outwith ourselves; the world isn't inherently just) and Christian (the terrestrial world is imperfect; the whole point of human life is the struggle to do right by your fellow man despite the odds) perspective.

Again, I regard healthcare as a necessary part of the the practical implementation of the right to life first and foremost, and of other rights in a secondary capacity - after all, it is difficult to describe an unaided paralytic, or indeed an unmedicated madman lost in delusions, as possessing anything that could fairly be called freedom, and either situation makes the pursuit of happiness a tricky proposition. Granted, it is not impossible to be free and happy in your own mind no matter how wretched your circumstance, but at that level of pedantry, it becomes meaningless for the State to pledge to protect these rights, since one starts to wonder what infringing on them could even look like. Hence the forms of healthcare you list are the right of any human being to the extent that they are necessary to preserve that person's life, agency, and capacity for happiness. Not maximize them - preserve them. Broken bones, antibiotics, vaccines: yes. Therapy: it depends. Hair loss treatment: nah. (I mean, you can imagine some mentally ill person for whom, for whatever reason it would make such a difference in quality-of-life that it'd be worth it. But that would have to be vouched for by a psychiatrist and fall under psychiatric treatment.)

Still, if you think "talking about inalienable rights is confusing the issue rather than clarifying it", I don't want to get hung up on a turn of phrase. "I believe giving everyone access to healthcare is the moral duty of the state"? "I believe we should institute universal healthcare if at all possible, because it's the right thing to do"? Put it how you like; I don't really see how this would make you less confused about what I'm advocating.

Oh, but by the way -

who is going to be made to do that for me?

…this seems to be refusing to take the premise of the thought experiment at its word. The perfect society is defined as one in which things like medical staff shortage are handwaved away, spherical-cows-style. I don't know if this perfect society has foolproof robot doctors, if it's got money to throw on incentivizing promising students to join the medical profession, if it has really inspiring educational programs that get doctors and nurses to work for a song and the satisfaction of helping their fellow man - whatever. Unless you outright believe it is literally impossible without actual magic to get everyone in the country healthcare, ever, making the thought experiment void, then the specifics of the thought experiment are besides the point.

Hence the forms of healthcare you list are the right of any human being to the extent that they are necessary to preserve that person's life, agency, and capacity for happiness. Not maximize them - preserve them.

You make this distinction as if it's obvious, but I'm not sure it is. If an 80 year old is blind, deaf, arthritic, has a gimpy knee, and then breaks his leg, what healthcare is he owed in our perfect society? Are we just going to fix his leg, and tell him, 'Rejoice! We have preserved your miniscule ability to pursue happiness'? Do we fix him back to the physical and mental condition of an athletic 18 year old as a kind of human baseline? Do we immediately fix any negative physical/mental damage as he's growing up, preventing him from becoming old and blind, but ignore the fact that he's genetically stupid and inclined to depressive melancholy?

Unless you outright believe it is literally impossible without actual magic to get everyone in the country healthcare, ever, making the thought experiment void, then the specifics of the thought experiment are besides the point.

That's exactly what I'm getting at. Whether your demands require actual magic or not depends strongly on exactly how you're going to define healthcare. If your proposition is 'in an ideal world, we should not refuse to fix people's obvious ailments as long as it doesn't cost us any meaningful amount of money or time to do so' then I'm right there with you, but you seemed to be aiming at a much more far-reaching proposal. I suppose even this limited proposal rules out darwinian 'the weak should perish to strengthen society' philosophies, if that's what you're going for?

I have quarantined this in a separate section because it would derail the conversation:

I think this line of thinking proves way, way too much. 99.9999% of human history consisted of brutes braining one another with carved rocks. Does this disprove the right to not be murdered?

Quite so. How can we have an inalienable right (an absolute moral guarantee) not to be murdered if it happens all the time? Say that murdering people is immoral all you like, and I will agree with you. But I think lots of things are immoral: do I have an inalienable right not to be cheated on by my wife? To not have my colleagues speak languages I don't understand in the office? Is a black mark placed in the book of Mankind every time these things happen? From where I'm standing, you're using grandiose moral claims about the nature of the universe to back up your personal preference about how much it should cost to go to the doctor. This is exactly why the concept of 'rights' in last half-century has become so fraught: because everyone asserts their personal moral code as if it is an inalienable fact of the universe that never has to be compromised upon (how 'rights' is usually used in conversation and rhetoric).

As far as I'm concerned, the Declaration of Independence was written by revolutionaries high on their own supply: a fairly transparent attempt to claim that not wanting to repay the Crown for the money that was spent protecting them from hostile nations was a grand moral project, as if nobody else had ever thought that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were pretty nice as long as they didn't get in the way of anything more important. And indeed I note that the US government is quite happy to kill people, imprison them, or otherwise inhibit their pursuit of happiness in order to achieve goals that it thinks are more important.

Addendum: For example, even the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not obviously without complexity. If you believe, as I do, that what people (those flawed beings) do with their time is not necessarily what will make them happy in the long term, it seems entirely possible to deprive them of some of their liberty to ensure their right to pursue happiness. So I find it hard to see these three things as inalienable gifts I have been given by my creator. I am much more comfortable with the inalienable duty to Do Your Best, Do What I Told You To Do, and Don't Fuck It Up.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

it may interest you that your appeal to the "courage (…) to stand up and speak the truth when it is dangerous" got me to register so I could post this reply.

Awesome! I'm flattered.

I do, as a matter of fact, believe in the objective reality of human-caused climate change and the effectiveness of most vaccines. I believe - as a non-exhaustive list, presented in no particular order - in the moral abhorrence of racism, in every human being's inalienable right to shelter and healthcare, and in the moral imperative of LGBTQ rights and acceptance.

To be frank with you, I think most of these are truisms, behind which thornier propositions are hiding. The thorny propositions mostly involve the use of violence or threats of violence against our neighbors, to compel them to behave ways that we believe are beneficial. You and I do not necessarily disagree about what is beneficial. What I suspect we disagree about is the intrinsic harm in using threats of force, including government force, against fellow human beings. For example,

  • The question is not whether human-caused climate change is real, but what its future trajectory is under different scenarios, and exactly how much the government should force its citizens to do about it.
  • The question is not whether most vaccines are effective, but whether people to be required by force to take particular vaccines under particular circumstances.
  • The living question is not whether racism is wrong, but what to do next about it -- and in particular whether the remedy to past racism is any degree of current racism in the other direction. What exactly do you propose?
  • With regard to every human being's inalienable right to shelter and healthcare, the question is not whether it would be nice for everyone to have those things, but whether that alleged right entitles me to force other people to pay for it, against their will, at the point of a (government) gun. What policy do you propose?
  • The question of LGBTQ rights and acceptance, in practice, is not whether I should be allowed to infringe on their negative human rights to safety and property, or even whether it is socially acceptable ostracize someone who is gay or trans -- but whether I should be pressured, or even forced, to use the language they prefer, etc. What policy change do you propose (or what controversial status quo policy do you endorse)?

by all means feel free to simultaneously attack cancel culture and trans rights, but don't bother to claim that you're fighting wokeness as opposed to extreme progressivism.

I'm not attacking anyone at the moment. I disagree with progressivism, while I have disdain and enmity for wokeness. For example, I probably disagree with your position on "trans rights", and on most of the topics you mentioned -- but I presume you hold those positions with an eye toward the benefit of humanity at large, that you are open to changing your mind, and that you are interested in calmly listening to counterarguments. I also presume you hold those positions in good faith, and would continue to hold them even if it cost you something.

I do not make those same presumptions about people who have shown themselves to be woke authoritarians. What distinguishes them is a feeling of being entitled to be agreed with and obeyed, concomitant resistance to dialog, and a penchant for obsequious, opportunistic bandwagoning for social and material gain.

Thank you in turn for this reply.

As I've now told others in this thread, my intent with this comment was not to launch into object-level debates on the progressive 'articles of faith' I listed. It's certainly not to rehash the Root Question of Libertarianism, interesting though I find it. It was specifically to hash out whether you genuinely thought extreme progressivism could be separated from wokeness, and whether you genuinely thought the latter a more pressing enemy to defeat than the former - in which case, again, I would recommend making sure to distinguish the ends and the means more carefully than you had done in the OP. Your last two paragraphs lay it out quite nicely.

That being said, wading into a few of these questions without quite diving head-first into them, I also doubt that my disagreements with most conservatives boil down to my being less of a libertarian than they are. Some sort of Rand-by-way-of-Kant view that climate change may very plausibly cause human extinction within a few decades; but that's still no excuse to resort to forced taxation, and if we die because the funds couldn't be raised any other way, so be it,…… is not a take I've very often encountered in the wild, I'll say that much.

And indeed, with regards to policy hot-takes on trans rights, my leeriness of state violence is essential to one of the "controversial status quo policy [I] endorse": i.e. I think trans women criminals should, in fact, go to women's prisons if they want, if we are to have gender-segregated prisons at all. "We can't do that," you cry: "they'll rape the cis female inmates". The common riposte from trans advocates is "how dare you suggest a trans woman could be a rapist", of course, but I think that misses the point by a country mile.

No - I regard the prevalence of that objection as a scathing indictment of the entire American prison system, one which calls into question its very legitimacy as an arm of the justice system. If the State is going to commit such a direct violation of the personal freedom of its citizens as "locking them in little grey rooms for years at a time", I consider "guaranteeing that more vulnerable inmates will not be raped while in custody" to be a pretty low bar to clear before I'll even entertain the possibility that such actions are morally justifiable for the greater good of society. If female prisoners truly are so totally at the mercy of a trans inmate, then they are also at the mercy of a lesbian rapist who works out, and that is flatly unacceptable. Society should fix that. Imperatively. And once it is fixed, the objection against putting trans prisoners where they want to go dissolves.

To round back to my original point, as you can see, I hold this position very strongly, and I hold it as an extension of underlying moral principles on which it seems you can find common ground. So you can probably imagine how jarring it was to see it listed quite casually in a list of "crazy ideas" which no non-mind-virus-infected progressive could possibly hold in good faith.

Some sort of Rand-by-way-of-Kant view that climate change may very plausibly cause human extinction within a few decades; but that's still no excuse to resort to forced taxation, and if we die because the funds couldn't be raised any other way, so be it,…… is not a take I've very often encountered in the wild, I'll say that much.

I accept it is plausible that climate change will cause human extinction within a few decades. The same is plausible for nuclear war, an asteroid impact, a superbug, a super-volcano, renegade AI, et. al. If there were a policy on the table, with good evidence suggested would mitigate one of those, at reasonable cost, without being liable to cause greater harm of some sort, I would be all ears. Do you know of one? Absent that, I don't think this is relevant unless it is just a thought experiment. If it is a thought experiment, and you are asking hypothetically what I'd say if there were such a policy, I might be open to it -- but everything depends on the details, costs, and consequences, because...

We can't spend 20% of GDP mitigating climate change, 20% mitigating nuclear war, 20% mitigating an asteroid impact, 20% mitigating superbugs, 20% mitigating super-volcanoes, and 20% mitigating runaway AI -- because that adds up to 120%. Would you spend 10% on each one? I bet I can name four more plausible humanity-ending disasters before you post your answer. There is an interminable list of national and global disasters that are plausible within a few decades, and from that I infer that paying heavy costs to mitigate merely-plausible disasters is bad for our health and welfare -- unless some particular disaster is particularly plausible, and some particular plan can be shown to mitigate it without doing more harm than good.

I think trans women criminals should, in fact, go to women's prisons if they want... So you can probably imagine how jarring it was to see it listed quite casually in a list of "crazy ideas" which no non-mind-virus-infected progressive could possibly hold in good faith.

To the object-level point, if we had a crystal ball and a magic genie, we could house all inmates safely and humanely... No, wait, there wouldn't be any inmates, because there wouldn't be any crime, because we'd all be drinking free soda pop and eating rainbow stew for every meal. But, since we don't have a crystal ball or a magic genie, some things can be achieved in a shorter time frame than others. The policy of (1) not housing trans women sex offenders in women's prisons is an issue of living debate which is short-term achievable, while the policy of (2) having a humane prison system is not. If you push for (1) before you can achieve (2), then in the real world you are advocating for what you know, or ought to know, will make prison more dangerous for women. Sometimes you have to break some eggs to make an omelet, but that's not an egg I'm willing to break.

To the meta-level point, I don't have data for the US, but in the UK only about 15% of people firmly believe that trans women sex offenders with penises should be housed in women's prisons [source]. That is about the same as the percentage of Americans who believed that Elvis might still be alive in 2017 [source]. I don't have anything against either the trans-women-are-women crowd or the Elvis-is-alive crowd, but I also don't think I am obliged to consider their beliefs morally tenable or epistemically plausible. If I am talking directly with someone who believes a certain thing, I would politely entertain that thing -- but I can't entertain everything all the time just because somebody somewhere believes it. Some of my beliefs are out of the picture for other people, and vice versa, and I am OK with that. What I'm saying is that some charity is warranted here -- and I think your life would be better if you relax and stop being jarred when people, who are not speaking to you directly, are dismissive of things you believe, especially when you know to be on the fringe. Maybe you're right, even though almost everyone laughs off your theory, like Nikola Tesla or Alfred Wegener -- but even if you're right, it doesn't pay to get wound up about it.

If it is a thought experiment, and you are asking hypothetically what I'd say if there were such a policy, I might be open to it -- but everything depends on the details, costs, and consequences, because...

It was a thought experiment, yes. I'm not particularly concerned about short-term human extinction from climate change myself - my irritation with right-wingers' tendency to hedge and obfuscate on whether it's real at all has more in common with HBD types' very understandable annoyance with progressives who try to change the subject or discredit the science, rather than bite the bullet of "yes, the science says what you think it says, but your idea of what to do about it is still bad". My position on climate change, roughly expressed, is that it is obviously real bad, and obviously a very worrying crisis even in cautious estimates of how bad it will get; but, equally obviously, that private individuals' behavior, especially in the West, is a drop in the bucket, to the extent that it is a waste of energy - pun surprisingly not intended - to guilt-trip them about their personal carbon footprint or whatever. I would like more right-wingers to say this head-on and stop with the bullshit about "well, maybe it isn't completely human-caused, who's to say". It's not the point. I'm not accusing you of that particular epistemological sin but I see it a lot, and conversely I see a lot of, to my mind, completely unwarranted "har, har, woke buzzword, brainwashed morons" sneering whenever someone acknowledges man-made climate change as A Bad, Obviously Real Thing That Is Happening, whatever policies they recommend.

But as for everything after your "but", well… insert the Winston Churchill joke about haggling and prostitution. It seems there are crises of sufficient urgency that you are willing to entertain the validity of government action funded by taxation, provided the policy looks promising. Why is the death of humanity by hypothetical runaway climate change on that list, but not the preventable deaths of thousands of private citizens for lack of affordable healthcare? And either way, haven't we already gotten rather afield from a clean position where our disagreement is not on the facts, but on what it is morally acceptable for the government to do about the facts? There seem to be several points of confusion here.

To the object-level point, if we had a crystal ball and a magic genie, we could house all inmates safely and humanely... …If you push for (1) before you can achieve (2), then in the real world you are advocating for what you know, or ought to know, will make prison more dangerous for women

If you like.

I don't think you actually need a magic genie to prevent 99% of prison rapes. You may or may not need a kind of a crystal ball, but it's a kind we know how to make! It's not a uniquely hard problem - it is a problem that there has been very little political will to solve because a lot of people not-so-secretly want prisoners to suffer above and beyond being deprived of their liberty, and a lot more people don't really care about prisoners' welfare very much compared to other issues even if they'd marginally support improvements to their condition. I don't think it's remotely fair to compare the problem of "stop prison rape" to the problem of "stop all crime everywhere": the whole point of prison is that it is a controlled, tightly-monitored closed-system.

Yes, creating "a humane prison system" in all respects is a taller order, but rapes are the one thing that the presence or absence of trans inmates has an influence on. I would be happy with first solving the narrow problem of stopping the rapes, then allowing trans women into female prisons, then going back to the drawing board to draft a more ambitious, wholesale prison reform. And I reckon you could achieve the first two simultaneously, as two clauses of the same bill. Hell, if you wanted to be really kludgy about it, you could even set up special security measures for trans women inmates, without yet tackling the broader problem of prison rape, to guarantee that the addition of the trans women doesn't move the needle. Why not?

But also… even if you couldn't - even if it turns out that, in terms of practical implementation, the only sane way to get trans women in prison to work is ten years down the line after we complete wholesale prison reform - surely I'm allowed to state what my endgame is? When I say everyone should have guaranteed healthcare, I don't expect to snap my fingers and make it happen overnight. All sorts of things need to be thought through and organized, all sorts of sub-reforms and necessary steps introduced into law, before we get where we're going. I understand that, you understand that I understand that. I'm still allowed to say I "support universal healthcare". Why shouldn't I say, in general terms, that I "support trans women being allowed into women's prisons" even if I acknowledge, or acknowledge the possibility, that this aim can only be reached after other reforms I also want go through?

EDIT: this has no bearing on the meta argument(s) but I also remembered that there is another prong to the ethical cost-benefit analysis here, which I elided in my first message on the topic because unlike the "the state shouldn't be throwing its hands up and saying 'rapists gonna rape' in the first place" thing, it has nothing to do with my feelings on the government's right to inflict violence on its citizens. Namely: aren't trans women - commonly regarded as highly effeminate men - very likely to be raped themselves in men's prisons? Doesn't it at least seem worth investigating that, in expectation, all else being equal, putting a trans woman in a men's prison might be more likely to result in rape than putting her in a women's prison - because the trans woman in the women's prison may or may not be interested in raping women, but it is all but guaranteed that at least one man in the men's prison will be interested in raping a sissy?

I accept it is plausible that climate change will cause human extinction within a few decades. The same is plausible for nuclear war, an asteroid impact, a superbug, a super-volcano, renegade AI, et. al.

Nuclear war: no, there's no mechanism that lets you get to extinction. Nuclear winter is literally a hoax, blast/heat/local fallout are too localised, and global fallout's too weak (I ran the numbers on Cold War arsenals and those weren't nearly enough). It could get to #2 on the list of "disasters in history by %humanity killed", but #1 is dubious, let alone X.

Supervolcano: another Yellowstone wouldn't do it (this is known fact; humanity already survived Yellowstone three times before we even tamed dogs). Another Siberian Traps might, admittedly.

Climate change/superbug: not in the normal senses. A normal pandemic can't get everyone because R drops below 1 before #humans reaches 0. The only "superbug" (i.e. infectious agent) that could get actual everyone is a full-blown insect-zombifier-for-humans where victims actively and intelligently attempt to infect others (rabies and toxoplasma are nowhere near precise enough), and that's highly implausible without intelligent design (there's nothing with this level of precision in any mammal, and it's generally thought to get harder with brain size). For climate change to get us would require, well, another Siberian Traps, or a Chicxulub+ impact (another Chicxulub wouldn't do it, due to preppers if nothing else), or some omnicidal maniac deliberately manufacturing and releasing millions of tonnes of fluorocarbons; I'm specifically not including "some idiot blocked out the Sun with a solar shade" because people would notice that and destroy it (with massive casualties, but not X).

Asteroid impact: technically no (at least not without terrorist redirection), but in practice I'll grant this one (we've found all the Earth-crossing asteroids of sufficient size and ruled out collisions, but comets are harder to predict). Low probability, though, particularly given the requirement for a Chicxulub+ one.

AI can do it. Life 2.0 can do it (here I'm thinking of things like a non-digestible alga that doesn't need phosphate and has better-than-RuBisCO photosynthesis, not a pathogen - an independent lifeform that terraforms the planet in ways that are incompatible with human survival, in this case by causing a superglaciation plus total failure of open-air crops). New physics catastrophes and terrorist geoengineering might do it, although I'd be more concerned about those on the scale of centuries rather than decades. And obviously there's the "unknown unknown" term which is unknowable by definition. But AI and Life 2.0 are the known X-risks that scare me. (Obviously there are GCRs that are significantly more likely than any X-risk. Nuclear war's highly likely to occur sometime this century if we don't get X first; I just expect not only people to survive but myself to survive.)

I would recommend making sure to distinguish the ends and the means more carefully than you had done in the OP. Your last two paragraphs lay it out quite nicely.

Sorry I haven't had time to respond to this thoroughly yet. However, I have rewritten my private copy of the original post, with your feedback in mind, and I think it is clearer in the new draft that my fight is not with progressivism/liberalism/leftism (though I don't want to heavily edit the original draft on the Motte, because that would make it less clear what people are responding to in some cases). Here are the relevant excerpts from the latest draft:

  • America, and with it all of Western civilization, is now embroiled in a culture war. This war is often cast as a struggle of left vs. right. Indeed, corporate media pundits male their living peddling the left vs. right drama in the style of a pro-wrestling show. But the fact is that, in a sane world, conservatives and progressives are not enemies. They are people of different temperaments, who tend to have different blind spots, and therefore tend to make different sorts of mistakes -- and who need each other's input to see into those blind spots and to temper those mistakes. Of course conservatives and progressives often hold different opinions about how to achieve their common objectives, but that is not what makes people enemies. My wife and I often hold different opinions about how to achieve our common objectives, but that certainly doesn't make us enemies. At the end of the day it makes us a better team, when we can put our egos aside and work together.
  • But I do not think of wokeness as "the left". Wokeness is not progressivism -- or at least any sane form of progressivism -- and it certainly is not a movement for civil rights. Wokeness is to the civil rights movement what communism is to liberalism, and what the inquisition was to Christianity: it is a warlike tyranny, masking itself as a civil rights movement -- which has infected the progressive parties of the West, and is in transforming them into something unrecognizable to their well-meaning forebears.
  • In the long run, the real culture war is not against the left or the right, but against fundamentalism -- aka radicalism, aka extremism, aka supremacist movements -- of all forms. Basically, a fundamentalists are those demonizes their ideological opposition for personal or political gain. The fact is, tempting as it is to feel otherwise, there is some good and some bad on both sides of every argument and every conflict. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart. But fundamentalists are those who have rejected Solzhenitsyn's maxim, and, in their minds, redrawn the line between good and evil to lie between their people and certain other people.
  • Whether it wears the mask of the political left, the political right, or fundamentalist religion, fundamentalism has certain distinguishing hallmarks: the fangs that peek out from under its sheep's clothing. First, because fundamentalists vest ultimate moral authority in people (their people) rather than principles, they tend to abandon the precepts of the ideology they claim to uphold. So, if you watch a fundamentalist movement closely, you will notice that the things they do often predictably lead to the opposite of what they say they want (know them by their fruits). Second, fundamentalists feel entitled to suppress the speech of their ideological adversaries, as well as to forcibly control their behavior, seize their property, and target them for oppression of any sort they can get away with -- not as punishment for particular crimes they have committed as individuals, not even exactly because they are bad people, but because they are the wrong kind of people. The wrong kind of people could be Jews, heretics, the "bourgeoisie", or even straight white men -- whomever the regime finds it expedient to portray as a historical class enemy, and blame for all the world's ills.
  • Finally, a resurgence of wokeism is not the only ideological shift that we have to fear. While wokeism is the most visible threat today, in the long run we are also in danger of a pendulum-swing toward totalitarianism of a right-wing variety. Recall that in depression-era Germany, Nazism grew in just 20 years (approximately 1915 to 1935) from an obscure fringe movement to national dominance -- largely as a backlash against the very real and radical leftist threats of communist revolution and libertine excess. Such a quick swing from one form of extremism to the other may seem puzzling to those who view the culture war in terms of left and right, but it makes sense if we consider that fundamentalist regimes of the left and right are essentially more alike than different, and both grow in the same soil of moral decay.
  • Even if my theory of how and why is all wrong, the fact is that quick swings from one form of extremism to another taken place before, and not just in Germany. Russia was a Tsarist autocracy in 1900, and by 1920 it was a Communist police state. France had a populist left wing revolution in 1789, and then welcomed Napoleon in as a military dictator in 1804. It is true that woke leftists have a habit of gratuitously labeling people who disagree with them as white supremacists, Fascists, and Nazis -- but is also true that there exist actual white supremacist, Fascists, and Nazis, who love to see that name calling go on, because the fog of crying wolf gives them a smoke screen behind which to operate and gather power. "It can't happen here" are the famous last words of many a nation through history.

Below is a link to the updated draft in my Google docs. If you have time to look it over, I would welcome further comments.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_d0pip_lYB5utNiyHA3mJfmQWo8isSUzBECjyf1FyxU/edit?usp=sharing

NR

Ah, this is an unexpected and welcome surprise! I will try to review this over the week-end. Thanks for letting me know.

My question is this. How, according to you, should a genuine radical progressive behave, if he does not wish to behave as a woke fundamentalist?

Not to pull an Uno Reverso, but the Golden Rule is usually a good first step in these kinds of questions - how would you want the radical right to behave?

My wishlist is pretty basic:

  • Don't go after people's jobs
  • Don't censor people
  • Don't assault people for doing counter-activism
  • Don't politicize spaces that aren't meant to be political

I always said I wouldn't mind losing to progressives if the fight was fair. The problem seems to be that progressives tend to believe that the ends justify the means, and anything is allowed to prevent defeat, because defeat means fascism, so there's no such thing as an unfair fight.

I would add "don't dox" to that, including technically-not-doxing doxing.

Also, don't support lawfare.

In what sense do you consider yourself radical while at the same time rejecting woke tactics?

Because my goals sit far left of the Overton window on many issues (e.g. queer rights, universal healthcare). I thought the post outlined that much clearly enough. For a simplified example, I'm not precisely a communist, but surely you can see how someone whose position was "we should abolish capitalism in America completely, but this should only be done through free elections within the boundaries of the Constitution after convincing a majority of the population that Marx was right about everything in an open marketplace of ideas" would be a radical.

There is a simple(ish) solution to your dilemma then. You basically act in the opposite fashion that mainstream Democrats acted during the George Floyd era. If there is a policy position you are favorable to and the groups start acting like mobs with street violence, intimidation, etc you just immediately pull support from those groups and any politician that doesn't act the same as you. In other words, you are actively policing your own side the way Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy would routinely police fringe Republicans. They would primary people in red states even if they were short of crazy. They would certainly intentionally lose winnable elections in swing states just to make a point. You on the left can do this too. You don't have to wait for suburban women to have buyer's remorse about 2020 and realizing their kid's school now had more Hamas and Pride flags than American flags on display. You can help those people not have remorse.

And the great thing about doing this if you are on the left is you have so many built in demographic and other advantages that you can easily win by simply abandoning the terrorist wings of the big tent and focusing on doable things that don't make people cringe in the polling booth.

This is a valuable and clarifying comment. I’m by no means even close to the most right-wing person on this forum; I’m sympathetic to progressives, because I used to be one, and one of the drums I’ve beaten most consistently (both here and elsewhere) is that progressives are mostly good people, and that their terrible ideas should not be taken as reflecting any poor character on their part.

That being said, I do genuinely think your stated positions are very bad. Thinking that “racism is morally abhorrent” is a genuinely wrong-headed, delusional viewpoint, given the tirelessly-documented and scientifically valid evidence of wide disparities in intellect between broad racial groups. Pathologizing and anathematizing people who are simply trying to respond rationally to this reality is a recipe for cultivating a society built upon a foundation of clouds.

Believing that “every human being has an inalienable right to shelter and healthcare” creates a bottomless obligation on the productive and normal members of society to subsidize the self-destructive (and socially corrosive) behavior of the most dysfunctional, mentally-unsalvageable individuals among us. It is a blank check for parasites who either cannot, by nature, contribute productively to civilization, or who otherwise elect not to. It’s a nice-sounding truism, sustained only by the fact that the people advocating it will, by and large, not be held directly and personally responsible for providing the relevant shelter and healthcare to the individuals demanding it.

“The moral imperative of LBGTQ right and acceptance” is simply a poorly-defined applause light. It could mean anything. Some plausible interpretations are fairly uncontroversial, while others are clearly extremely tendentious and enjoy close to zero popular support, which is why it’s necessary to fold them all under a superficially-anodyne umbrella statement.

Now, I also believe that the praxis of so-called “wokeness” consists of behaviors and tactics which are bad, independent of the ideological positions they’re being used to advance: coordinated bullying mobs; censorship of true but politically-inconvenient information; the use of weasel words and strategic equivocation (AKA the “motte-and-bailey” approach) wherein public statements are tailored to create a certain impression of the speaker’s meaning/intent, while in reality the speaker knows that his or her actual intent is quite different from that surface-level impression, and that the esoteric will be correctly understood by politically-subversive behind-the-scenes actors. These would all be morally-blameworthy tactics even if employed by people whose political positions I share. To the extent that right-wingers do these things, it reflects very poorly on them.

In a better, more functional, less divided country, progressives would have to compete on equal footing with every other ideological faction; I would oppose most of what they’re attempting to achieve (because their ideas produce bad outcomes, and because their analysis of the world is based on false premises) but I would recognize them as a valuable counterweight and as a complement to other factions within an ideological spectrum. I wouldn’t want them ostracized or imprisoned (even in the fanciest and most comfortable crystals) because many of them are great people who contribute immeasurably to society, independent of their political beliefs. They’re my friends, my family members, my coworkers, the men and women who create the art I consume and the products I buy. I would simply have to coordinate, to the most effective extent possible, to thwart their efforts at political change, and to demonstrate to them the profound error of their ways. (As the error of my ways was persuasively demonstrated to me, which is why I no longer hold the beliefs I used to hold.)

This will, necessarily, involve the use of political power to not only reverse the effects of progressive governance, but also in some cases the disempowerment of progressive organizations before they’re able to achieve their stated ends. This will probably appear hypocritical to you — “I thought you guys said you just wanted to grill! I thought cancelling people was bad! I thought you don’t hate black people, or gays, or women, and that you just wanted everyone to live and let live!” — and to a certain extent you’ll be correct, because there are a lot of people who haven’t fully thought through their actual core disagreements with “wokeness”. People who barely understand what “wokeness” is. People who think the Civil Rights movement was the greatest thing to ever happen to America, but that somewhere along the way people just “took it too far”. (Or, amusingly, that modern black activists have “betrayed the vision of Martin Luther King”, not realizing that King was a socialist and that his speeches were ghostwritten by a literal member of the Communist Party.) For those of us who are actually committed to opposing the ends of progressivism — rather than just whatever means Fox News and Right-Wing Twitter are able to meme into the news cycle this week — I agree that it’s important not to get distracted by chopping at the branches instead of the roots.

You ask what you should do, as a committed progressive who wants your side to win, but to win fair-and-square without any underhanded tactics. My only answer to you is: stop being a committed progressive! Stop believing in ideas that are bad, and that have bad outcomes. Channel your pro-social impulses — which I believe are real and valuable — toward ends which are actually conducive to the flourishing of civilization. Keep your eye on the prize of climate change and vaccines, and you’ll have no conflict with me. Tinker around the edges of government policy, and find avenues to expand the safety net for the people in our society who are actually equipped to be able to create a return on that investment, rather than wasting your efforts (and other people’s money and safety) on worthless schizophrenic bums who will never appreciate nor reciprocate the compassion you’re trying to extend to them. Extend personal warmth and friendship to whomever you wish, but do not demand that equitable outcomes redound to populations with severely inequitable distributions of traits. (Or, alternately, join me in supporting non-coercive eugenic policies which will actually ameliorate those unequal distributions of intelligence and aptitude.)

I hope you stick around and keep posting here. We could use a lot more intelligent progressive voices here. (And, hopefully, over time your mind will be changed, as mine was, and you will be persuaded out of your progressive commitments.)

You ask what you should do, as a committed progressive who wants your side to win, but to win fair-and-square without any underhanded tactics. My only answer to you is: stop being a committed progressive!

Well, yes. Obviously what any committed conservative will want me to do is stop being a progressive, ultimately, just as I wish for the reverse. But I was replying to NelsonRushton, whose opening post explicitly cast his position as that of one who thought we should table the regular right-vs-left fight on the object-level questions, and focus on fighting wokeness considered as a "degenerate" form of progressivism that can and should be distinguished from mere "extreme progressivism". I am not so naive as to be asking you guys to start agreeing with me on everything; I am asking you ("you" as in "people like Nelson"; you, Hoffmeister, may not be included) to make a serious commitment to put these disagreements to one side if you're really serious about wanting to end the cancel-mobs more urgently than you want to defeat progressivism at the object-level.

As such, I don't want to get bogged down too much in arguing about the object-level beliefs in question, because whether or not you guys agree with me on there really wasn't my point. My point was "if your problem with wokeness/cancel culture really isn't reducible to disagreeing with me on these object-level points, and you hate wokeness much more than progressive beliefs in and of themselves, then perhaps we could cooperate to get rid of cancel culture, which we both dislike".

But I do want to address this:

Thinking that “racism is morally abhorrent” is a genuinely wrong-headed, delusional viewpoint, given the tirelessly-documented and scientifically valid evidence of wide disparities in intellect between broad racial groups. Pathologizing and anathematizing people who are simply trying to respond rationally to this reality is a recipe for cultivating a society built upon a foundation of clouds.

It's hardly your fault for assuming, given it's my 'spiciest' position relative to orthodox progressives; and I suppose it's partly on me besides, for using a term with as many different competing definitions as "racism". But I am not, in fact, a blank-slatist. "Dan" in the first section of Scott's Against Murderdism describes me pretty well. When I say that I find racism abhorrent, I mean racism as a value system; not what its opponents tend to call "scientific racism".

What I find morally abhorrent is to treat thinking, feeling human beings differently because of their race; to make them feel that they are somehow lesser, less deserving of happiness or respect, because of inborn characteristics beyond their control and which constitute part of their very identity. I am perfectly willing to believe that there are statistically significant cognitive differences between ethnic groups. I don't entirely trust the existing science in its specifics, but I would still be against racism if the Bell Curve-type science was completely convincing on all questions of fact. I oppose discrimination against neurodivergence as it is, and there the whole point is that I recognize the material existence of inborn mental differences between e.g. autistics and allistics.

I believe that my fellow progressives initially started suppressing racial science because they thought it would be an easier line to argue, than to fight the trend of sloppy, amoral thinking that draws a line from "blacks may be tend to be less good at math than whites" to "therefore slavery was okay all along". "HBD is probably broadly- correct, but even if it is, that should have no long-term political implications whatsoever" being as far outside the Overton window as it is for either side is at once the result of that cowardly dereliction of moral duty, and the reason it has not yet been rectified.

Me, however, I reject g-supremacism as an ethical position. Certainly I.Q./g (yes, I know they don't exactly correlate, whatever) is instrumentally useful in certain tasks, and we want to hire high-I.Q. people to be jet pilots for the same reason we want to hire strong people to be firefighters, tall people to be basketball player, and red-haired children to play Ron Weasley. But even if we boil down all dimensions of intelligence into a smart/dumb binary, I reject absolutely the idea that, all else being equal, it is "better" to be smart than dumb; that the life of a smart human is somehow more worth living, or worth preserving, than the life of a dumb human. If a linearly-I.Q.-boosting pill existed I wouldn't particularly want to take it, any more than I especially want to be ten inches taller.

(Granted it might be instrumentally better for society as a whole if there were more high-I.Q. people around. But it would also be better for society if I ate gray slop and worked ten hours a day with precisely no more breaks than required for my bodily health. However, none of this is society's business and running a government any other way is an inhuman abomination.)

And from where I'm standing, the sooner right-wingers forsake any hint of bigotry in that sense, the sooner the saner people on my side will be able to prevail and break the scientific deadlock, secure in the knowledge that the research will no longer risk being used as ammunition for a position which I find, yes, viscerally abhorrent.

I don’t think you’ve really thought through the practical implications of your stance on race. "HBD is probably broadly- correct, but even if it is, that should have no long-term political implications whatsoever" is incoherent. That’s why it’s so far outside of the Overton window. How could it possibly not have political implications?

You acknowledge in one sentence that it is perfectly reasonable and salutary for businesses to preferentially hire applicants who have the requisite skills, traits, etc. You even acknowledge that many of those traits are inborn — that the NBA can and should discriminate based on height, which, outside of desperately poor and malnourished circumstances, is nearly entirely genetically-determined.

By implication, you acknowledge that many traits along which it’s justified for at least some businesses to discriminate are unequally distributed between population groups. Perhaps the least controversial would be that if you’re looking to hire an actor to play Ron Weasley, you’re only going to be auditioning male actors of Northwestern European descent. (Or, I suppose, Udmurts, a small Russian ethnic group who also have a lot of redheads. Although good luck finding one who speaks English as well as Rupert Grint does.) This is probably somewhat hurtful if you’re an actor who is a huge Harry Potter fan, and Ron is your favorite character, but you’re black, or female, or just have jet-black hair. Although there has been, as of late, a move toward “race-blind casting” in order to prevent precisely this (supposedly unfair) outcome, most people, even progressives, appear to agree that this is silly and wrong-headed. Film studios and theater companies are making reasonable and practically-justified decisions, and the disparate impact of those decisions is an acceptable byproduct of those decisions.

Only slightly less uncontroversially, the NBA has very few players with significant Amerindian descent; while part of that is cultural — people from Latin American countries generally prefer soccer to basketball — it’s primarily a function of average differences in height between population groups. (The NBA has only had the number of Chinese players it’s had because the Chinese government decided to eugenically breed exceptionally-tall individuals to play basketball. Otherwise the number of Asian NBA players would asymptotically approach zero, Jeremy Lin notwithstanding.) We can acknowledge that this might make aspiring Asian and Latino basketball players feel discouraged and underrepresented, but we recognize this as an acceptable byproduct of NBA teams making sensible business decisions instead of using affirmative action to reserve roster spots for short guys to make them feel included.

Moving up the controversy ladder, the strong preference for physical strength is going to result in fire-fighting being a heavily male profession; female firefighters are few and far between, and the reality is that they tend to be worse at their job on average than their male coworkers. Again, this is probably discouraging for young girls who dream of fighting fires. However, because affirmative action would require putting a thumb on the scale to force the employment of less-qualified applicants into a high-stakes profession whose performance has momentous important consequences, most people are willing to let firefighters keep being overwhelmingly male, even if that makes some women sad.

And I’m sure you would agree that there are a great many professions for which mental and personality traits are also extremely relevant. Doctors, engineers, astrophysicists, quantitative analysts, take your pick. And it’s not just intelligence; traits such as diligence, selflessness, punctuality, and empathy are all very important across a wide range of occupations. In fact it’s difficult to imagine many professions wherein an employer would not have a strong preference for employees who display more of those traits, rather than less.

And if you take seriously the available psychometric evidence about racial groups, you can see that there are differences between racial groups which go beyond simple mental computational capacity. It’s not just “black people are likely to be a bit worse at math on average than Asian people are.” It’s also “black people are likely to be less fluent at written communication.” It’s “black people are likely to have poorer ability to regulate emotional impulses.” And when you start taking this seriously, you realize the likely ramifications of this: black people are likely to end up highly underrepresented in a wide range of prestigious and remunerative occupations, because those occupations justifiably select for traits (many of them substantially mediated by heritable genetic potential) which black people have less of on average.

And black people are going to notice this. Why wouldn’t they? It’s going to result in them being poorer on average, since they are going to be underrepresented in professions which pay well. They’re going to feel less empowered, less valuable to the society around them in general, because they are underrepresented in professions which provide the capacity to significantly impact political and cultural trends within society. You and I might privately understand that these inequitable outcomes are the (inevitable, barring corrective measures) of an unequal distribution of valued traits. But there will be — there already is, and has been for over a century — important policy questions raised by this state of affairs which will demand answers. Will affirmative action be imposed in order to artificially balance out these outcomes? Are the potentially negative impacts on the overall performance of the affected industries a worthwhile tradeoff? If not, and if colorblind meritocracy is a non-negotiable end goal, how do we deal with the massive cultural and political fallout resulting from entrenched, generational resentment and low performance among a large, culturally-distinct, politically-unified, and visually-identifiable segment of the population?

All of these questions have obvious and unavoidable political implications. There has to be some answer to these questions, and if you believe HBD is true, I don’t understand how you can advocate for a solution that isn’t informed in some level by what you actually believe is true. Saying “it’s wrong to discriminate, unless the qualities for which you’re selecting are important to the job” has the same functional outcome as “it’s okay to discriminate based on inborn characteristics”, precisely because different groups have different characteristics on average! A “colorblind meritocracy” has the same end result as a “systemically racist” regime, assuming that psychometric differences are real and large.

It appears you’re trying to retreat to a position of “Actually, employers shouldn’t have a strong preference for smarter employees.” I suppose that’s one way of getting equitable results. Just decide that the unequally-distributed traits on which we’ve been filtering are actually not particularly valuable or desirable. An employee with an IQ of 120 isn’t likely to be any better at a randomly-selected job than an employee with an IQ of 90! If employers stopped caring about the qualities white people and Asians have more of than black people, we wouldn’t end up with more whites and Asian getting hired than black people!

This is utterly doomed to fail, though, because those qualities do matter quite a bit. Sure, pure cognitive acuity might not give one a decisive advantage as, say, a Jamba Juice employee. (Things like “reliably showing up on time” and “not ending up getting into trouble with the law and needing to miss work because of it” are, though, and those things are also directly correlated with intelligence and impulse control.) If your concern with “racism” is only about people not calling black people racial slurs, then you’ve already won; almost nobody does that. But that’s not what anyone actually cares about when it comes to the “racism” discussion. They care about unequal life outcomes, and those aren’t going away until the unequal capabilities go away. (Again, my proposal to make them go away is eugenics; what’s your proposal?)

"HBD is probably broadly correct, but even if it is, that should have no long-term political implications whatsoever" is incoherent. That’s why it’s so far outside of the Overton window. How could it possibly not have political implications?

You've dropped the "long-term". Obviously it would have immediate political implications, of the variety "we need to get rid of misguided disparate-impact legislation and the like". But once that paradigm has been abandoned, the word "race" should have no further impact on policy decisions. If specific metrics which happen to differ between racial groups are relevant, talk about the metrics directly. My concern is that accepting the objective reality of HBD should not entail giving the ethno-nationalists anything.

And when you start taking this seriously, you realize the likely ramifications of this: black people are likely to end up highly underrepresented in a wide range of prestigious and remunerative occupations, because those occupations justifiably select for traits (many of them substantially mediated by heritable genetic potential) which black people have less of on average. (…) They care about unequal life outcomes, and those aren’t going away until the unequal capabilities go away. Again, my proposal to make them go away is eugenics; what’s your proposal?

Well… in the truly long term… luxury space communism? But in the shorter term, and without making any controversial predictions about future technology, I think a just society would decouple the property of "prestigious and remunerative" from "best reserved for those with a high I.Q." in how it thinks about jobs. Think of Scott's musings in The Parable of the Talents.

Regarding "prestigious", if a just society has zero-sum social status at all, it should be given to those who virtuously turn whatever talents they do possess to particularly pro-social ends - whether that's a musclebound hulk who becomes a fireman instead of a pro wrestler, or a dexterous polymath who becomes a brilliant, life-saving surgeon instead of sitting around at home speedrunning video games. (I stress that this wouldn't be some sort of Stalinist nightmare enforcing "from each according to his ability" at gunpoint - doing the prosocial thing should be incentivized, but supererogatory.) I don't think this is a particularly unrealistic wish; if anything it's almost reactionary of me. It used to be that you didn't have to be a genius to be a fulfilled, well-liked pillar-of-the-community type; it used to be the way the world worked in civilized countries, that firemen and nurses and farmers could count on the respect of their peers if they went conscientiously and honestly about the business of doing useful jobs, just as much as the doctor or the mayor. Maybe part of the problem is that our communities nowadays are too damn big… Every day I'm a little more hostile to 'big cities' as a concept.

And regarding "remunerative", if nothing else I am strongly inclined to think that a large part of the anxiety around wealth disparity is a negative desire to avoid poverty, not "greed" in the conventional sense. Hence, my preferred policies of universal healthcare, zero homelessness, a strong UBI, etc. should mitigate the sting of unequal life outcomes. I am not so naive as to think it would eliminate economic resentment completely; greed exists, jealousy exists. But would we get race riots if the difference in outcomes was "fewer blacks can afford second homes and pools" rather than "fewer blacks can afford life-saving surgery"? I think a strong welfare state makes biting the bullet of unequal economic outcomes viable in a way it isn't without one. It seems worth a try.

But if that doesn't work, if nothing else works, I will bite the bullet of "well, we need (something a lot like) communism, with wealth caps and redistribution", centuries sooner than I will bite the bullet of eugenics. What you propose horrifies me, all the moreso if it's clear that we're talking about a much broader spectrum of traits than just a linear I.Q. graph. Isn't the point of "biodiversity" that it is an inherently beautiful thing that should be preserved? I already don't think we should allow rare species of dull-as-brick newts to go extinct just because it's economically expedient; I'm sure as hell not gonna accept erasing whole human phenotypes, whole ways of seeing the world, just to make society run more smoothly. Society is meant to facilitate human flourishing, not the other way around.

My parents were/are liberals/progressives. I was raised that the most important part of that was freedom of speech; that "We on the left do not blacklist" (the implication behind that statement, the specter of McCarthyism, was felt to go without saying).

OTOH, my grandparents were Rockefeller Republicans who referred to FDR as "that man in the White House."

As for me, I "turned FDR's picture to the wall" in 2016, and I was literally (for the literal meaning of literally) shaking when I did so. (Suggested that vote to my husband too, but who knows if he did it of course, ballots are and should remain secret.)

So hey I followed my family's tradition of switching "sides" I guess? :D

But also: You can see why.

In my (sub)culture, "the culture of freedom of speech" includes the idea that it's every citizen's right and duty to express their sincere opinion so that the marketplace of ideas can include it. "We" (as a society and polity) can't do our best if we aren't aware of all possible perspectives and ideas! (So I agree with the OP there, and I'm glad to see yo uinspired by the same sentiment.) Similarly, in my subculture it's every citizen's right and duty to improve on ("steelman") ideas they find in said marketplace, if they see ways to do so. It's also every citizen's right and duty to meet argument with argument rather than silencing tactic, because if you allow silencing tactics (or other "debaters' tricks" for that matter) then the marketplace of ideas no longer selects for truth. After all, in "the culture of freedom of speech" (inherited from the British Parliament, after all), the point of freedom of speech is to have an effective marketplace of ideas to guide the government. It's just that in the USA the government is [supposed to be] the people (rather than the monarch).

But also I react to the OP with, "Where have you been? It's already expensive to dangerous." I was first defenestrated 15 years ago (in what in retrospect was an aftershock of Racefail '09). Lost my online home, had people threatening to track me down and physically attack me, no one did and I can never know if my opsec was good enough or if they just didn't try very hard...that time. More recently, people have been arrested for defending their homes from riots. (The process should not be the punishment, but these days, it is.)

But also

I am asking you ("you" as in "people like Nelson"; you, Hoffmeister, may not be included) to make a serious commitment to put these disagreements to one side if you're really serious about wanting to end the cancel-mobs more urgently than you want to defeat progressivism at the object-level.

Well, now I have offspring. And many of both my family and my in-laws tend toward the "socially awkward nerd" type. So any daughter of ours would seem to have especial vulnerability to ROGD, based on how those who seem to have experienced it tend to describe it. A relative of mine married someone whose kids from their first marriage included a natal female who seems to have fit the ROGD profile and who no longer speaks with them. Another relative seemed to flirt with ROGD for a while before returning to a more liberal-feminist, "Why are there so few girls in [insert one of her interests here]?" perspective. (Must ask her parents how they did it! :/) And another married someone who later appeared to fit the AGP profile (complete with military background), and who, when their wife died, transitioned and abandoned their minor children. (I came along on a visit to them once. They spent most of the visit droning on about their many different guns.) So yeah right now actually...well, it's something I'd have to think about.

Still, I don't expect to ever give up my culturally ingrained support for freedom of speech, so I'm happy to make common cause with whoever else supports freedom of speech, regardless of our object-level political positions. Hi there comrade! :)

But I wonder about the viability of this movement. I mean, that's what "we" used to be. "We" got defeated by "the woke movement" so...how will "Reform Progressivism" be different?

The thing, here, is that I disagree with the framing that being trans is undesirable (in an ideal environment, anyway; obviously, in a right-wing dystopia where it gets you fired from your job and alienates you from your prejudiced family, it's less likely to come out net-positive on life satisfaction).

For most trans people I know, transitioning has been a joyous and fulfilling experience. Actual trans subreddits, Discord servers, etc. are full of trans people actively delighting in their transness, not dens of wallowing and self-pity. I think the over-medicalization of what is at heart a lifestyle choice has done the whole thing a great disservice; in my book the "oh woe, gender dysphoria is soo bad, you have to let people transition" thing was another one of those well-intended white lies from 'my side' that I cannot abide, because what they've done is muddled what should be a moral slam-dunk to anyone truly concerned with liberty by trying to hitch it to a murky question of fact. I support people's right to transition whether or not they have such a thing as medically-defined "gender dysphoria". It's not a medical question, it's a moral question about autonomy, about freedom and self-determination. I support trans people in exactly the same way that I support people's right to have plastic surgery or change their name or dye their hair or dress up as anthropomorphic dogs - and for the same reason that I will support people's rights to become all kinds of cyborgs if that sort of technology ever becomes something more than one of Elon's pies-in-the-sky.

Now, with that cleared up… I don't want to come across as if I'm totally unsympathetic to parental concerns in those cases. Of course it would hurt for your child to reject the name you gave them. I understand that. But moody teenagers, and indeed grown adults, have gone "oh my god, mom, stooop, everyone at school calls me Jay, 'Jeremiah' sucks" since the dawn of time. It didn't use to tear families apart. And sure, if your kid were to be the kind of trans who wants actual surgery and not just a change of wardrobe (remember, that's by no means everyone!), you can be concerned about the mild but real risk of health complication. But again… kids get into dangerous hobbies their parents are queasy about all the time. In my view, you shouldn't be more concerned about a daughter of yours wanting top surgery than about a child of either gender getting really into biking, or rock-climbing, or, really, any high-level competitive sport. Call me when there's a moral panic about high school football.

(Whether young children are competent to make such a big lifestyle choice is a whole other discussion, but has no bearing on whether it's okay to let them experiment with a cross-gender name if they want. We don't let nine-year-olds get into cave-diving, and by my own analogy it's sensible to heavily frown on underage gender surgery; but that's no reason to bar them from dressing up in a cool plastic helmet and exploring dark corners of the playground with a flashlight.)

But I wonder about the viability of this movement. I mean, that's what "we" used to be. "We" got defeated by "the woke movement" so...how will "Reform Progressivism" be different?

The practical argument is that, as Nelson outlined in the OP, there are a lot more sincere progressives than cancel-happy sadists. All pro-free-speech conservatives + all pro-free-speech progressives = winning coalition. My hope is that it's just one of Scott's coordination problems, and Reform Progressivism only needs to achieve escape velocity to win the teeming masses over from the witch-hunters.

The more idealistic argument is that, you know, I think I'm right. I think I am putting forward the banner of "good ends, achieved via good means"; and I am optimistic enough about human nature to hope that, so long as the idea gets out there at all, this will be naturally attractive to people who had hitherto had no choice but "good ends, achieved via evil means" or "evil ends, achieved via whatever means". (No offense.)

Broadly the biggest issue with wokeness is the introduction of thought terminating cliches that only require self-invocation to exercise, as opposed to collective consensus. Terms have been assigned significant valence without need for review, and at peak wokeness it was necessary to grovel in advance at the mere prospect of a new term being theoretically introduced at an unspecified future date, leading to pre-emptive self-abasement and outgroup preference signalling to convey ideological purity. The keystone logic allowing this subversion of logical order is the attribution of all disparate outcomes to external factors, placing the burden of responsibility on others who are presumed able to exercise power. This incentivizes weakening of self to force others to exercise their power and resources for yourself, and this is the defining presentation of wokeness.

Wokeness required coopting existing high-valence terms and applying it without necessary scrutiny. Genocide is thrown about casually by wokists because genocide is understood to be a Bad Thing. But what if there is no actual genocide? Then just change definitions! Trans genocide is because trans people commit suicide at higher rates, and the lack of trans health care is what causes suicides, so trans health care MUST be mandated to prevent genocide. To effect this, suicide must be redefined as solely due to the trans experience or lack thereof instead of considering other psychological or temporal events, health care must be expanded to include puberty blockers for minors so as to prevent even the possibility of suicide, and trans people must now encompass the entirety of nonconforming presentations so as to ensure everything gets redirected to trans advocacy instead of considering crossdressers or tomboys or autogynephiliacs. With social justice language employing the progressive stack to artificially inflate the moral value of the disempowered, it was inevitable that actors would seek to performatively disempower themselves to exploit the social meta.

Accepting this unreality was acceptable only when indulging it had manageable consequences. ZIRP facilitates economic unaccountability, allowing all manner of sinecure and commisars to be present because scalping a few sacrifices was preferable to having mass revolts from employees more scared of peer social sanction. But as economic and social reality ground its way back to the forefront, it became impossible to continue hiding behind social justice language. Crime is real, even when committed by blacks. Mass child rape of white girls by muslims did happen, despite frenzied attempts to abuse statistics. Migrants did surge over the US border, bringing crime instead of good vibes. Transwomen are actually stronger than natal women, because men are THAT much stronger and transwomen being 30% weaker than men matters little when men are 70% stronger than women. DEI hiring did not increase corporate bottom lines and instead brought increased dysfunction. And with each turning of realities screws, it became more and more difficult for wokeness to assert the value of its foundational presentation. Given the speed of the vibe shift, it just transpired that the screws were much shallower than even skeptics may have dared realize.


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