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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   34382 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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By vague request of interest in the topic, I am copying over a post I made elsewhere to this thread.

The Chagos Islands Deal, or, The Next Westminster Scandal Is Already Here, You Just Haven't Noticed It Yet

The British-owned Chagos Islands, in the Indian Ocean, host a major US military base, Diego Garcia. Our government is now planning to sell the islands to Mauritius, and to pay them for the privilege.

Brief on the background. The Chagos Islands were originally uninhabited until France brought slaves from Africa to work on plantations in the late 18th and early 19th century. The descendants of these workers became known as Chagossians. The islands, along with Mauritius, came under British control in 1814 through the Treaty of Paris, and were administered as a dependency of colonial Mauritius for administrative convenience rather than any historic connection. In 1965, three years before Mauritius gained independence from British colonial rule, the UK separated the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius to create the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Then, the UK removed around 2,000 Chagossians from the islands to make way for the Diego Garcia base. Mauritius maintains that the separation of the islands was illegal under international law, and has waged a legal battle to get them. In 2019, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion that the UK's ownership of the Chagos Islands was unlawful. The UN General Assembly subsequently passed non-binding resolutions demanding the UK withdraw.

Alright, onto the actual scandal. Over the last few months, the British Government has been rushing to put together a deal that would hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. This rush was likely prompted by fears that the next US administration would oppose the handover, and seemingly because of this rush, the British government has kept giving in to new concessions that Mauritus is demanding to seal the handover. So now the UK will also pay $9bn over 99 years to lease the base. Oh, and it'll be inflation-linked. Oh, and front-loaded. Oh, and maybe it'll actually be $18bn instead. A substantial amount of money for a government that is raising taxes, cutting spending, and claiming there's a £22bn 'black hole' in the finances. In addition to the loss of a strategic military base, There are further concerns that the islands would likely end up hosting the Chinese military at the end of all this, too.

And in return for all this, in return for the territory and all that money, the UK gets... Nothing.

So to justify the seemingly impossible, the government has offered an increasingly bizarre list of reasons to hand over the territory, none of which hold up to scrutiny.

  • It is good for the Chagossians, and redresses their grievance for being expelled.

No, it is not. The Chagossians hate Mauritius and reject this deal because it doesn't give them self-determination and ownership of the Chagos Islands. In 2021, Mauritius criminalized "Misrepresenting the sovereignty of Mauritius over any part of its territory" i.e criminalized Chagossians stating they should own the islands themselves.

  • It is required by international law.

Nothing that would be binding. And besides, international law and what army? This is a US military base. If we care to hold it, it will be held, and there's no force that can take it from us.

  • It will increase Britain's soft power by showing commitment to international law.

No. It will cause other countries with dubious territorial claims on the UK, like Spain and Argentina, to smell blood in the water. Not to mention generally making the government look like gullible idiots.

  • As a former human rights lawyer, Keir Starmer can't help but autistically lawmax, so when he hears international law, he is compelled to obey it.

Unfortunately, it is untrue that Keir Starmer monomaniacally follows international law. For example, his support for arresting Britons over speech crimes violates international law. "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." - UN General Assembly, Resolution 217A (III), Universal Declaration of Human Rights, A/RES/217(III) (December 10, 1948)

  • The Tories also started negotiating to hand it over so really it's their fault.

In 2022, they agreed to enter negotiations. And then in 2023 they realised how stupid handing the base over would be and pulled out of negotiations. This is also, of course, not an argument in favour of the deal.

  • If we don't hand over the islands right now, a Swiss Quango might magically change the laws of physics to create a zone over the islands where the electromagnetic spectrum is shut off, disabiling communications for the military base.

I wish I was joking, but this is actually the argument they're currently using.

  • The Islands are next to R'lyeh and we don't want to be holding the ball when Cthulhu wakes up

Okay, I did make that one up.

So what's actually going on here? There's not much that can be said with absolute certainty, but there is certainly some plausible alternative reasons that the government aren't so willing to state. For example, Keir Starmer was well aware of this case before becoming Prime Minister. In fact, Mauritius's chief legal advisor, Philippe Sands KC, is one of Keir Starmer's friends. Sands has seemingly (and maybe illegally) entered the islands in the past. Oh, and that last thing about changing the laws of physics to switch off the electromagnetic spectrum. That's also Philippe Sands. In other words, what's been presented as a national security claim from our own government is, in fact, smuggling a claim made by an adversary instead. There's another figure involved, too. Lord Hermer, who is seemingly involved in negotiations on the UK's side in some capacity, while also harbouring life-long anti-British sympathies. But his involvement seems less obvious here.

Anyway, now we have multiple opposition figures accusing Keir of, effectively, treasonous corruption.

Conservative MP Robert Jenrick:

Keir and his mates are colluding against the British people to surrender the Chagos Islands

The cast of characters involved in this ‘negotiation’ absolutely stink - and they all link back to Starmer 👇

Representing the Mauritian Government as their lead negotiator is Philippe Sands KC. Sands campaigned to elect Starmer as Labour leader and described him as a ‘great friend’. Sands has previously spoken about ‘humiliating’ Britain through his legal work.

Reform MP Nigel Farage:

Lord Hermer hates our history and our country. His role in the betrayal of our national interest over the Chagos Islands is unforgivable. Starmer should fire him.

Dominic Cummings:

When we recapture No10 we’ll then retake Chagos, fuck Starmer’s treacherous sell out using his scum lawyer friends getting rich from betrayal - and investigations into everybody involved in the deal. We can roll that into the investigations into Grieve et al and the need for jail sentences for those who worked with foreign enemies to overturn British democracy…

I am gleefully awaiting the next reason the government presents for why we need to hand the islands over in full expectation that it is even more hilarious than the last.

When we recapture No10 we’ll then retake Chagos, fuck Starmer’s treacherous sell out using his scum lawyer friends getting rich from betrayal - and investigations into everybody involved in the deal. We can roll that into the investigations into Grieve et al and the need for jail sentences for those who worked with foreign enemies to overturn British democracy…

There is something deeply ratlike about Dominic Cummings. His ideology is entirely amorphous, and always has been, spanning everything from technocratic neoliberalism to a form of nativism. As Boris’ most senior adviser, he did nothing in office or beyond it to stop the “Boriswave” of 2m third world immigrants (which, yes, was set in motion while he was in office); he was more concerned with bureaucratic efficiency. Today, of course, he has very convenient justifications for why none of it was his fault, and who exactly is to blame (never him; he never admits fault except forgivable naïveté in dealing with people far more stupid / evil than he possibly imagined). Plus, his physiognomy is terrible.

To be fair, an advisor who was bounced out as the Boriswave began can't really do anything. He didn't hold "office" in the sense of being an MP who might influence the government.

In the counterfactual where you think Cummings took big actions against the wave of immigration, what do you suppose he would have actually done?

He was the person who was speaking to Boris every single day for his entire first year in office. He coordinated the entire Covid response (and was ultra pro lockdown for a long time while Boris was opposed, another thing that he has conveniently memory holed). Boris himself has no real ideology, and Cummings was the man who insisted that Brexit was the best way to “neuter” British nativism by offloading rage onto the EU even as he (and the campaign he led with an iron hand) openly acknowledged that Brexit would see big increases in non-EU immigration, so I find it hard to believe he bears no responsibility.

Perhaps, we probably won't ever know. Cummings own story was that Boris simply couldn't bear having the liberal media against him and wanted to bring them onside, but of course he would make himself look good. The best evidence in favour of Cummings is that none of the other Tories have mentioned him or even come out against the Boriswave, with Patel the most recent to defend the legacy. Seems like the Tories are quite happy to own the disaster entirely

Jenrick came out heavily against it, Braverman and Patel basically blamed the treasury. They seem to realize they can’t get away by denying all responsibility, whereas Cummings knows that it isn’t survivable for him given his main future is in the US right-sphere (Farage doesn’t like him and he has no place in Reform) and he was a liberal (including on immigration) for many many years until the early 2020s, plus he seems more craven.

There is something deeply ratlike about Dominic Cummings. ... Plus, his physiognomy is terrible.

To be clear, do you think he looks like a rat, or are you just insulting him? He doesn't look ratlike, to me.

No, she's right, it's the unfortunate wide but shallow forehead to chin ratio and hairline. He looks a lot better in hats

Of course 90% of the people photographing him are deliberately choosing the worst possible photo, but still.

Real rats don't have large, domed heads, though, and his face is fairly flat.

My nerdtribe (a quant team at a bank) used the expression "a stable genius in an ill-fitting gilet". At the time Dom's enemies (and, because British sense of humour, his supporters) tended to focus on his dress sense and not his receding hairline (always an easy target) or eminently punchable* face.

* You couldn't say that, because in British political discourse at the time the expression "eminently punchable face" had become attached to far-left Grauniad columnist Owen Jones, who looked about 12 at the time. (Googling, he looks noticeably less punchable in more recent photos).

I’m saying he’s a rat in terms of his level of loyalty and lack of willingness to admit any real fault on his part, and also his physiognomy is terrible. He doesn’t have a ratlike face (would be uncommon for his people).

How is his physiognomy relevant, if it's not ratlike? (And who do you consider to be "his people?")

I think it's fine to focus on bureaucratic efficiency. He could never have done everything, and that seems like as reasonable a thing to focus on as any.

Ratlike, as in rationalist?

Also, checking a map shows that the islands are about 1200 miles away from Mauritus.

One good thing about having Trump as your head of state is that he would never negotiate a deal like this. Because a cursory look at the deal makes it look bad the idea would be toxic to Trump even if a full understanding of the context would make the deal seem more reasonable. I assume if Trump was negotiating he would try to get the lease for free but maybe that just incentivises the Mauritians to walk back the lease in the future.

You missed the part (in this article you posted at DSL) about Mauritius closing the airspace over the the Chagos Islands thereby requiring the US and UK to supply the base only by boat.

I can go there with a sling and shoot down the Mauritius airforce if push comes to shove. If they have something heaver you may need to add one Australian with a boomerang.

Lizzardspawn has made the the anti-Mauritian forces so efficient that now all the work is done by a single Australian man.

Mauritius closing the airspace over the the Chagos Islands

🇬🇧: You and what army Air Force?

To be clear, the airspace is not closed. That is merely a "possibility" in a world where swiss quangos declare that the chagos islands are rightful Mauritius clay.

How do they do that? They can close their own airspace, but you could fly around that, no?

The theory is that because the ICJ said the islands are theirs, they could close the airspace over the islands too.

That's a theory. How would an airspace closure work in practice?

Mauritius announces the airspace is closed. The UK immediately halts all flights until Starmer is out of office. The US military has a hearty laugh and continues to fly there. The UK protests to the US. The US sends some statement from a State Department lawyer saying the terms of the US lease say they can fly. Paperwork goes back and forth until Starmer's successor confirms that the islands are the UKs and the US lease is valid.

US levies a 10% tariff on British goods. 15 minutes later, Karmer and Trump have a "productive phonecall" and Karmer does whatever Trump tells him to.

Genuinely not sure it would work. Starmer is a fanatic, he treats the Rule of Law (as he sees it) like a fundamentalist treats Jesus. I suspect he would just see it as a test of decency and dig in. Might get him thrown out of office though.

Might get him thrown out of office though.

It's an interesting possibility. "Standing up to Trump" would probably be pretty popular to the UK electorate, but things that that cause damage to the economy tend not to be. I wonder how that would play out.

More comments

A consequence of just copying over the original post and not any follow-ups.

No one's talking about the most important thing: if this goes through, it would be the first time in over 200 years when the sun sets on the British empire.

Thanks for cross-posting this!

I think that all the talk on DSL/reddit/twitter about Starmer secretly being secretly anti-British, receiving bribes from China or even trying to enchance Britain's mythical "soft power" is missing the point. My impression is that Starmer is a lawcel for whom the idea of not following the ICJ ruling - or whatever it is - is unthinkable at a deep personal level. My read is that from his perspective, the UK isn't paying Mauritius to take a group of strategically valuable islands of their hands; rather the UK will be paying Mauritius to lease land that is now legally indisputably in the possession of Mauritius. In his view, legal declarations are imbued with their own power, regardless of whether they can be enforced or not, and ignoring this one would make the UK a hostile occupying force on the islands.

As already explained in the post, Starmer is not a lawcel dispassionately following the letter of the law, because it's possible to find areas of international law he's happy to ignore.

Nearly all of us are hypocrites one way or another. It'd be very human and understandable for Starmer to consider himself a staunch defender of and believer in the International Order and Liberal Democracy while maintaining a position at odds with that. All it takes is one tiny brain worm and his mind works it out for him. Plus, he is a politician. A major one! Has he been questioned on this inconsistency?

Brits seem set on hate speech laws as amenable to their society or even righteous. If it's dissonance it is a form he shares with a a significant number of his constituents. A politician expressing ideas he thinks his population is fond of isn't a mystery, even if it is at odds with what he says his values are.

Enjoyed the post!

I would say the traditional British sense of ‘free speech’ is pretty similar to the Motte’s: modding for tone rather than content. People should be able to have intelligent conversations about sensitive subjects without fear of censorship or retribution. But that doesn’t mean that every place is appropriate for those conversations and it doesn’t mean that you aren’t bound by conventional standards of politeness in the way you have those conversations.

I was always raised to believe in standards like “no politics or religion at the dinner table”. Thus the strong libel laws and the laws against Gross Offence and so on. Ideally they’re meant to protect you from berks who want to ruin free speech for everyone.

Like the Motte, it held up pretty well for the most part but falters when any faction gets strong enough, especially the “wokeness is human decency” crowd. And like the Motte, the way those rules are enforced is unavoidably tinged to some extent by the dominant mood amongst the public and the modders.

The end run around the “tone” thing is what makes it useless in a state — the way to prevent criticism is to be offended easily. Islam has weaponized the concept as any negative statement about Islam is blasphemy and therefore rude. Any criticism of certain parts of woke are offensive just because those things have been defined as sexist, racist, X-phobic. And thus you can rudely defy it (and risk arrest) or simply remain silent and let them win.

Not exactly. What was offensive and what was not was determined by tradition, and not by the feelings of the people in question.

As an example, I could pretend to be offended by your post and call it a dismissal of British cultural values or whatever, but the mods wouldn't mod your for offending me. If anything, they would mod me. The culture here (rightly!) doesn't consider your post offensive.

The Motte attempts to provide a venue for 'free speech' (the free exchange of ideas) in a way that requires restricting free speech (your ability to boo-outgroup, recruit for a cause, etc.). It's impossible to do that without having some requirement for what speech should be restricted (the rules in the header) and people who interpret them (the mods). If the mods go woke, we as users can't stop them. It's the same in the UK - the relevant systems were taken over by the woke and now we can't do anything about it. You could say 'no modding' or you could say 'new mods'.

Though my American sensibilities lean more toward tolerance for all but the most immediately threatening or dangerous speech, I understand the British impulse. In a truly civilized society, it would be reasonable to restrict the most annoying, uncouth, rude, harassing, cruel, generally ungentlemanly behavior, legally speaking. But the laws Britain has (even its jury trial system, as that recent case of the footballer acquitted of anti-white racism by a jury shows) are unfit for the situation in which it now finds itself.

They are a remnant of a bygone age, a time of that unspoken concept of ‘fair play’, of what is and isn’t ‘cricket’, of unspoken honor, that simply no longer exists. Like the newspaper sellers who would leave their carts and simply expect their customers to drop the purchase price in a collection box (and expect nobody else to steal it) who Lee Kuan Yew saw as the very height of civilization, they were designed not only for a high trust society but for a very particular high trust society at that.

The American system, in its own way, after 200 years of the Anglo inhabitants being replaced by various outsiders, is more hardened against that kind of thing. It expects greed, selfishness, dishonorable behavior. Sometimes it even revels in it.

Yes. When I was younger, it always seemed to me that “Americans expect very little, and get it”. Now I watch the British impulse towards fair play drive us to suicide - conservative friends and family who, even now, expect gentlemanly behaviour in combat with people who have no honour.

In fairness, it was the Marxists more than the foreigners who broke the system, taking gleeful pleasure in the bewilderment of their elders. With the advent of Thatcher that was mostly pushed down again. I think the British model can work, we just need to replace the mods. Trump has shown it’s possible.

The UN and EU / ECHR don’t prevent hate speech laws; in fact all have officially endorsed them and numerous challenges to hate speech laws from across Europe have failed at the ECHR with rulings that explicitly upheld national laws restricting speech as entirely acceptable.

The failure of the UN and ECHR to enforce hate speech laws does not mean those laws aren't on the book. Starmer could be the one to start enforcing them in the UK, if he wished, but instead he seems very selective about what parts of international law he wants enforced.

No, the point is that the international legal framework, such as it is, encourages Euro-style hate speech laws.

There are multiple possible explanations here. Regarding the Chagos Islands, the ICJ made a direct ruling requiring the UK to take a specific action. Locking up people for free speech might go against the spirit of some international law or other but unless he was specifically ordered not to I could imagine him feeling less constrained by that. It also wouldn't surprise me if he personally feels the jurisdiction of international law is solely that covering disputes between nation states, and not domestic affairs. He might also feel that as PM, he's in a sense above the law as it relates to domestic issues, but that international law as decided by various global bodies exists on a higher level that the UK must be subservient to. Someone showing authoritarian tendencies when they have power but being a stickler for rules imposed on them by what they feel to be higher bodies isn't displaying a particularly unusual personality type.

While I agree that the Chagos deal is terrible for the UK, I don't think it is Starmer's folly, and I don't think it is worth trying to psychoanalyse Starmer to understand why it happened. The decision to do the deal stems from the British Deep State. The opening of negotiations was formally announced to Parliament by Tory foreign secretary James Cleverly in November 2022. If you read these columns on conservativehome.com where Deep Stater David Snoxell defends the likely deal to grassroots conservatives (again, while the Conservatives were still in office) you will get the gist. The change of government in the UK does not appear to have affected the progress of negotiations at all.

Tory caterwauling about the deal in opposition is entirely dishonest and opportunistic (I know, politicians. I don't even want to blame them) given that they could have blocked it when in government and didn't. But I think the reason why they didn't is that they didn't care and were letting the Deep State make decisions. So the first interesting question is "why did the British Deep State do such a terrible deal?" And the most obvious answer is that the Americans asked them to. (The British Deep State set a lot of store in maintaining the so-called Special Relationship with the US Deep State).

This David Allen Green post is the best summary of the argument. One piece of evidence he misses out is that Snoxell repeatedly cites to remarks by Blinken praising progress in the negotiations. DAG's key arguments are

  • Firstly that (while apologising to the Speaker for making an important but apparently not time-sensitive announcement when Parliament was in recess) the Foreign Secretary said that the timing was forced by a foreign election. Both Mauritius and the US had elections in November 2024, but the negotiations weren't an election issue in Mauritius because both parties supported them. And after the US election, lame-duck Blinken puts a lot of effort into trying to get the deal over the line before inauguration day.
  • Secondly that the Biden administration put out an announcement (now taken down by the Trump administration, screencapped in the DAG post) praising the deal sufficiently quickly that it is obvious that they knew about it before it was announced.

The deal failed because the incoming Mauritian government realised that the British (and the lame duck Biden administration) were desperate to seal the deal before Trump came in, thought this gave them leverage to ask for more money, asked for too much, didn't get it, and ran out of time. The deal is now presumably dead unless the US Deep State manages to roll the Trump administration - certainly the Mauritian government says that they are not willing to do a deal that the US don't sign off on.

The second interesting question is "Why does the US Deep State support the deal?" Lawcellism is part of the answer, but the US is not a particularly lawcelled country, and nobody in a position of power is willing in the US is willing to let international law interfere with a vital interest like retaining Diego Garcia. But (unless the US is secretly paying for the lease) the deal isn't that terrible for the US. There are some obvious pragmatic reasons why the US might prefer a Guantanamo Bay-style arrangement where Diego Garcia is nominally Mauritian sovereign territory but US-controlled under a long lease to sharing the island with an ally:

  • There is no loss of control - Mauritius has even less ability to assert sovereignty over Diego Garcia than Cuba does over Guantanamo Bay
  • There is a potential gain of control in that the UK has a degree of veto power over US operations out of Diego Garcia that Mauritius would not.
  • Guantanamo Bay was useful to the US Deep State when they wanted to break their own laws without embarrassing an ally by doing it on their territory. Diego Garcia could serve the same purpose.
  • Regularising the status of Diego Garcia would increase the willingness of countries who pretend to take international court rulings seriously to allow the base to be resupplied from their ports or by flights through their airspace. At the moment Diego Garcia is resupplied from Singapore, but India is much closer.

And of course the third question, which is the one which is culture-war salient, is "Why is Starmer still noisily supporting the deal?" The anti-Starmer case has been made ably below. The pro-Starmer answer is that the deal is dead, Starmer knows this, but he wants (mostly for the benefit of elite opinion in relevant neutral countries who pretend to take international court rulings seriously, especially India) to ensure Trump gets the blame. So he is continuing to noisily support the dead deal until Trump unambiguously kills it.

Small oversea territories provide little value to a high cost. The UK has to be able to control and defend a bunch of insignificant islands half way around the world. This ranges from peacetime patrolling of fisheries to a potential falklands like war. Having small islands doesn't provide any real strategic benefit, it just provides a few thousand citizens for whom providing NHS services will cost a fortune and provides the military with a continuous headache.

The UK would be far better off if it stopped larping global hegemon and simply accepted that it is a mid sized country like Holland and stopped getting involved in far away places.

Britain does have an aircraft carrier and enough H-bombs to put a real dent in any country on the planet. The weakest of the strong powers is still a strong power.

Uhhhh Diego Garcia is there, the United States will defend the islands for free I would imagine :p

Diego Garcia is extremely important for it's location. There are no islands that can replace it

it is a mid sized country like Holland and stopped getting involved in far away places.

The Netherlands has claims on its own small overseas territories in the Caribbean.

It's not just claims, there are three Caribbean countries that are a part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (Aruba, Curaçao, Sint-Maarten)

Bonaire too! Or at least sort of. I suppose it's not really a country though.

Half an island in the case of St Marteen.

This may be true of other outlying possessions, but one of Diego Garcia's larger tenants would probably help with defense of this particular small island.

Perhaps there’s a simple reason for this anti-British deal. Two of the key players you mentioned, Philippe Sands and Lord Hermer, are both Jews. You even mentioned that Lord Hermer harbors anti-British sentiment. Subversive Jews are trying to undermine the UK’s geopolitical power when the nation is weak and vulnerable. Starmer, though not a Jew, fits the role of the useful idiot here.

Since you’re looking for possible explanations for this seemingly irrational behavior, I thought I would supply an explanation.

  • -11

Lord Hermer is a hardcore very pro-Palestinian Jew, though, who has implicitly (not explicitly, since as AG that would contradict Starmer’s own position) defended the ICC’s warrant for Netanyahu among other things:

In May 2023, Hermer was amongst many lawyers who signed a Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights letter addressed to Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, which called on the government to constructively participate in the International Court of Justice advisory opinion on the legal consequences of the actions of Israel in occupied Palestinian territory including East Jerusalem.[15] In July 2023, Hermer stated that he believed that the "continued Israeli occupation of the West bank" was "unlawful, deeply damaging to the interests of Israel and wholly contrary to the values of tikkun olam" which Hermer grew up with and continued to be guided by.[2]

In October 2023, Hermer was amongst eight prominent Jewish lawyers, which included former Supreme Court President Lord Neuberger, who signed an open letter to call on Israel to follow international law in its response to the 7 October attacks.[193] Later that month, in an interview with LBC whilst speaking to Sangita Myska, he said that it was "impossible to conceive" how Israel's siege was "in compliance with international law".[194] He went on to say that "for a very long time" Israel has had "effective control" over the borders of Gaza, which he said was reliant on the "need to have electricity, water and food coming in"; and that the "cutting of that off" was "very, very difficult to reconcile with obligations of international law" and described that as a "deliberate understatement" from him.[194]

If he is interested in advancing Jewish interests, he is doing a very poor job of it.

As an aside, international law is a dumb concept when it obligates you to actively help your enemies in a war. It is one thing to say “don’t aggressively torture PoWs.” It is another thing to say “power your enemies stronghold.”

Can not the international law types see the obvious futility of demanding these kinds of “laws?” They invite contempt and thereby prove out the weakness of international law as a concept.

I'm pretty sure that's specific to Israel. The theory is that Israel isn't at war with Gaza, they're an occupying power with responsibility to their population. This is a stupid theory, of course, but twisting international law into pretzels to reach the conclusion that Israel should assist its own destruction is pretty much par for the course. Fortunately for Israel, Netanyahu isn't Keir Starmer.

Random accusations toward Jews seem to have become commonplace enough that I just sorta started screening them out. So what occurred to me as odd here is the idea that any organization with that sort of capacity would be so bothered with the UK. Pretty sure it's at the point where you could just leave it alone for a couple/few more decades then come back and declare victory.

My biases would have been much better-flattered by a tenuous insistence that this is some sort of Chinese plot.

Random accusations toward Jews seem to have become commonplace enough that I just sorta started screening them out.

Agreed. There are people who are obsessed with Jews for some reason, and this is one of the few places that won't immediately shut it down so we get all the witches.

It's honestly not even offensive, just boring and annoying.

It's not that that aren't any decent anti-Jewish takes. It's just that the ones we tend to attract are low-IQ by the standards of this forum.

"When they send their anti-semites, they're not sending their best."

This doesn’t even make sense from an antisemitic standpoint. If anything Jews want English-speaking nations to dominate geopolitics because they already have ready-made English-language propaganda infrastructure

You really don’t have to reach for antisemitism to explain left-wingers doubling down on doing stupid things. It’s like Ford Prefect about vogons- ‘the scary thing about vogons is their absolutely mindless determination to do whatever mindless thing they’ve mindlessly determined to do’. The tories pulled out because it was an obviously bad deal. Now labour wants back in because ‘fuck tories’, and they’re not going to reconsider their course of action because left wing parties don’t do that- and Mauritius knows it and is using the opportunity to try to grift, they know Trump won’t shut the base down no matter what some courts say. They might as well try to get something out of Britain while they’re at it.

Why would Jews want to weaken British power? England generally stacks up in favor of Israel and/or Jews, does it not?

Anglos aren't ready for ethnic cleansing. They are convenient allies but the strings attached to their aid are a nuisance.

A Jewish hegemony would put their vassals only in the position of following and giving tribute, not complaining.

So the best way to do this is by making the UK look dumb and kneecapping American power in the Pacific so that the United States is more likely to lose a war with China, making it more likely to pull back its Middle Eastern commitments, including the missile shield that's been protecting Israel from Iranian ballistic missiles and the foreign aid they've been receiving ever year?

I don't think that this conspiracy is likely or that anything is so rationally planned, but Israel might prefer a more multipolar world. China doesn't care which tribe occupies a particular piece of land or how it governs it, so long as it's pliant to China's national interests. A realignment with China would mean much less finger wagging, no threats of boycotts, no constraints around solving security issues. It's not altogether clear that access to weaponry would even suffer too much, especially a decade from now (and if Israel's primary problem is controlling an insubordinate population, China already has the US beat there in technology). And, if nothing else, Israel could play the US and China against each other, hoping to get the best deal from both. The only big question is whether Israel can offer more to China than China's Middle Eastern allies can (which seems unlikely, but maybe China could find a way to thread the needle and work with both).

China is relatively pro-Palestinian and long had been. Not to the extent of actually becoming involved in the conflict or ending diplomatic ties with Israel (at least since they were established in 92), but it was part of the general anti Israel shift observed in the communist world from the 1970s onward. In addition, the useful Chinese diasporas in Malaysia and Indonesia, which China has worked hard to build ties with and be seen as defenders of, are dependent to some extent upon Islamic tolerance.

Uh, Israel has strong interest in a world police existing, and china’s local Allies are firmly anti-Israel.

Which nations are ready? If Jewish interests are in line with Israeli interests, then seems like they should push the West towards more revanchist focus, assertive actions, and more power. Then these nations have fewer reasons to denounce actions of Israel abroad. If Israel does want to commit an ethnic cleansing. If Jewish interests are separate from Israeli interests it would make sense that Israeli policy would be a focus rather than irrelevant Britain.

You're breaking so many damn rules in one comment I'm mildly impressed. You have not proactively (or on demand) produced any evidence to suggest a conspiracy of the Jews. Or that they have anything to gain from weakening the British state. Inflammatory, boo-outgroup, throw it all in, toppings are free with this sandwich.

You've been warned in the past, and I'm giving you a short ban so you know they have teeth. Even our most fervent anti-semites hustle to meet posting standards, and I'd advise you do so too.

I agree with this, but I also had the impression lately that these rules have become much more relaxed when its not about the Special People.

Eh, I’ve gotten banned for ranting about Haitians.

The rules are as equally enforced and many recent bans for vulgar racial hatred haven’t been for antisemitism iirc.

Do you have concrete examples in mind? I don't think we treat Jews any different, it's just that they're probably the ethnicity most singled-out by our resident witches. I'm pretty sure we'd at least warn if not ban for similar comments for other groups that don't meet our standards for effort or pro-active production of evidence.

Do you have concrete examples in mind?

our resident witches

This is a good one. Scott's Seven Zillion concept has normalized deprecatory terms towards those people that would be auto-banned if used against other groups.

Do you think Cirrus is a witch?

I'm a witch. Or a principled libertarian advocating for free speech, if one cares to split the difference.

The Motte grew out of a desire for more free speech, including speech on topics that are/were verboten on most of the internet. There is absolutely no pejorative intent, we invite all comers as long as they're polite about things. https://www.themotte.org/post/1657/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/293159?context=8#context

You happen to have a quasi-ideological dispute going here, but I must remind you that this place is a watering hole for heathens and witches, and often all we ask is that we don't bare wands or claws at each other. Even if someone pisses you off, especially so

There you go. I'm on record saying the same thing with a mod hat on. It's a term I use with pride, and if it's deprecatory, then it must be conceded that it's also self-deprecating. Ever wonder why the volunteer janny page uses a picture of a quokka?

That's fair. A Yankee-Doodle style "We are taking it back" approach to has been successful in the past for sure.

See "Keep Your Rifle by Your Side" for the modern version.

If Ubisoft didn’t want us to identify with it then they shouldn’tve made it such a banger.

In the original metaphor, libertarians or principled free speech advocates were explicitly distinguished from witches. The witches are posting here because they can post things that are banned for ideological reasons elsewhere- HBD advocates, the pedo guy, securesignals, etc.

I think most of us who considered the original metaphor have realized that, whatever label we might prefer to apply to ourselves, we are in fact witches by the lights of the other side of the culture war; that is, we are not at risk of being targeted because of a mistake or a misunderstanding, but because those doing the targeting wish to target people with our actual views. We are not temporarily embarrassed members of "polite society". We left "polite society" behind a long, long time ago.

I've argued at length against the HBDrs and race-essentialists and white-identitarians here. All the same, here at least, I've long ago bothered arguing over the label "racist"; the people using it know what they mean, and I know what they mean. We both agree the Progressive definition of Racist applies to me, and there's no amount of MLK quotes that will change their mind.

More comments

If you can look up what I got in janny duty the last few days, there where a few in there that I didnt recognise a distinguished comment responding to in modlog now. But I dont remember in particular - I kind of thought this is just the new standard until now, so I didnt make a note of them. I guess I will going forward.

I don't have any way to do that, though I think Zorba might. I recall there was a measure of how close someone's volunteer janny choices correlated to final moderator action. It's just not exposed with my current privileges.

The comment isn't especially rule-breaking on any of those fronts. It brought useful context to the original post. I learned something from it. If there were a top-level post about, say, people behaving in a strikingly unruly manner in public, and a reply added that they were black as a partial explanation (and obviously it could only be a partial explanation), there is no way that would get modded, let alone as casually as this. Just like the ungovernable black, the far-left Jew who loathes his host country's past glories and dominant ethnic group, and is politically engaged enough to act on it, is a recognizable type. Both Jews and gentiles have been writing about it for over a century, sometimes sympathetically. It shouldn't be necessary to break out the stats/conspiracy board every time one wants to gesture at it (and doing so would probably only derail the conversation and make the pile-on worse).

I'm mostly a lurker here, but I've noticed that when I do find the motivation to post, it's often to defend others from anti-anti-semitic dogpiling and mod action. Maybe this is my own bias talking, but it seems to be the one topic where The Motte loses all reason in its eagerness to shut down conversation, and the quality of the responses drops off a cliff. Besides the ban itself,

@2rafa

If he is interested in advancing Jewish interests, he is doing a very poor job of it [by opposing Israel]

It's common knowledge (I hope this point is simply consensus so that I can't be accused of building one) that far-left, white-hating, anti-colonial Jews are often, perhaps usually, also anti-Israel. Obviously this would make it hard to argue that Hermer and Sands are part of a conscious international conspiracy to promote Jewish world domination or whatever, but @Cirrus said no such thing. While, if Cirrus took your rebuttal on board, he might have to posit a more complex motivation for the antagonists in this story than raw will to racial supremacy, that is not really a problem for him, as highly prominent Jewish public figures are obviously smart enough to have more complex inner lives than that (that still, demonstrably in some cases, reserve a place for hating white gentiles). For me, learning that both the key figures in the Chagos story happened to be Jewish had the total effect of minimizing the cognitive dissonance/surprisal/confusion I had on first reading OP, and learning that Hermer favors Palestine did little to increase it again.

@Quantumfreakonomics

This doesn’t even make sense from an antisemitic standpoint. If anything Jews want English-speaking nations to dominate geopolitics because they already have ready-made English-language propaganda infrastructure

OP established that whether or not it has anything to do with their Jewishness, Hermer and Sands appear to be acting against national interest, even out of contempt for the English people, as some have alleged. So taking that as given, do you think it is more natural that they should be ethnically English or Jewish? Of course there are many self-hating English people as well so it's not a slam dunk, but I think the point stands. I might have predicted that Hermer and Sands were Jewish on first reading the story, and although I can't honestly say the thought occurred to me, I attribute that to being less vigilant than I could have been (to be honest "Phillippe Sands" should have been a dead giveaway). Thanks to Cirrus' comment I am less slightly less likely to miss such details in the future.

@TitaniumButterfly

Random accusations toward Jews

"Random accusation" would be if the key figures in the story weren't literally Jewish.

@jeroboam

There are people who are obsessed with Jews for some reason, and this is one of the few places that won't immediately shut it down so we get all the witches.

It's honestly not even offensive, just boring and annoying.

It's not that that aren't any decent anti-Jewish takes. It's just that the ones we tend to attract are low-IQ by the standards of this forum.

You're a thoughtful poster most of the time, but here we go with the anti-anti-semitic tropes. It's always the same "low-IQ" verbiage.* What's conspicuously low-IQ about his comment, of all the comments on here? It is at least coherent and well-structured (though short), and it contains no spelling or grammar mistakes. Most commenters who can meet those standards don't have to worry about being tarred as "low-IQ", at least not based on a single post. Admittedly it doesn't take a very high IQ to google someone's ethnic background, but the same goes for any low-effort reply that just serves to add context. "Low-IQ" is boo lights for any criticism of Jews that falls below @SecureSignals' standard of eloquence (which is met by maybe two or three other posters forum-wide).

For every "boring and annoying" antisemitic post on here, there are 10 NPC-level rebuttals. I urge all of you anti-anti-semites to consider if the fact that every drive-by post like this spawns a chorus of affronted Jews yelling "Shut it down!" helps your case.

*I saw a lot of this in the weeks after Oct. 7: according to several prominent internet Jews, not supporting Israel makes you "low-IQ" of all things. Other positions might be perverse, misguided, unsound, averse to facts, ideologically motivated, evil, even dumb, but somehow the word cloud for opposition to Israel and other positions that are facially unfavorable to Jews usually contains "low-IQ". What seems pretty plainly to be going on is that these Jews are leveraging their reputation for high IQ to give their attacks on the "low-IQ" extra bite. After all, they are the final authority on IQ.

It's common knowledge (I hope this point is simply consensus so that I can't be accused of building one) that far-left, white-hating, anti-colonial Jews are often, perhaps usually, also anti-Israel

But are they then distinguishable in any way from non-Jewish far-left white-hating anti-colonialists? If not, then what explanatory power does harping on about their Jewishness bring to the equation?

For every "boring and annoying" antisemitic post on here, there are 10 NPC-level rebuttals that add no substance.

This is why boring and annoying antisemitic posts are strongly discouraged -- maybe the antisemites should try posting something interesting?

Like, SS is not my favourite poster (and I hate to encourage him), but his holocaust denial posts do bring in some interesting history at times -- I don't believe that a meticulously researched post about the connections these two Powerful Jews have to the International Zionist Conspiracy, and the specific actions they took to broker this ridiculous deal; maybe wrapping up with the was in which the ridiculous deal makes these Jews more Powerful and will enable the IZC to take over the UK -- would face mod sanctions.

It would probably still get a lot of pushback, but steel sharpens steel, right? Have at 'er.

I urge all of you anti-anti-semites to consider if the fact that every drive-by post like this spawns a chorus of affronted Jews yelling "Shut it down!" helps your case.

Very few of those people are Jewish at all. The majority of Jews on this board just don’t engage with those posts except occasionally.

which is met by maybe two or three other posters forum-wide

Not a bad writer but ridiculous suggest only two are three are on his level (many more are better).

that is not really a problem for him

That is kind of the point, the argument is so poorly made that it doesn’t exist, it’s noooticing with no backing, it says very little. If the argument is some KMac group evolutionary strategy, Hermer has clearly acted against Jewish group interests by using his extremely prominent position in what is still a major nuclear power to relentlessly and publicly bash the only Jewish homeland. If it’s that there some progressive and powerful Jews (for relatively dull HBD reasons especially overrepresented in wordcel careers like law) who fully buy into anti-colonialist ideology, then sure, although there is absolutely no shortage of those among the native population. But it’s not really clear what he’s saying, beyond saying nothing except that he can look someone up on Wikipedia, then click early life.

Very few of those people are Jewish at all.

I at'd 4 people. You are Jewish, and unless you are including yourself in "those people" you must know at least one of the others to be Jewish. In which case that's half.

I'm sure The Motte has a fair number of Jewish users, and given the highly disproportionate reaction every time a Jew's being Jewish is brought up, it seemed reasonable to expect Jews to be amply represented in the pile-ons. I didn't seriously mean to suggest it was all Jews.

But it’s not really clear what he’s saying, beyond saying nothing except that he can look someone up on Wikipedia, then click early life.

Well, his post (unlike all the replies to it) was an observation about the topic at hand. It wasn't about how finely wrought a theory of Jewish group behavior he could shoehorn two relatively obscure public figures into (and again I don't think Motte users would actually appreciate every throwaway antisemitic comment turning into a paragraphs-long screed about group evolutionary strategy and so on). As a reply, it was up to par. It reduced perplexity. I can see why it would be annoying to be faced with refuting a direct association between an isolated fact and a statistical pattern without any mediating causal link. That said, I feel like that's not an uncommon form of argument around here, so if you don't dispute the pattern (i.e. that Jews are overrepresented compared to non-Jews in radical left-wing/anti-white politics/culture production, and more overrepresented than can be predicted from their verbal intelligence alone), you could just let it go.

You're breaking so many damn rules in one comment I'm mildly impressed.

'Perhaps there's a simple reason for this anti-America deal. Two of the key players you mentioned, Alice and Bob are both radical leftists. You even mentioned that Bob harbors anti-America sentiment. Subversive radical leftists are trying to undermine America's power when the nation is weak and vulnerable. Biden, though not a radical leftist (I know, I know), fits the role of senile idiot here.

Since you're looking for possible explanations for this seemingly irrational behavior, I thought I would supply an explanation.'

Surely the above would just be Tuesday at the Motte rather than a banworthy post, no? I'm fairly confident I can find a number of comments like the above with minimal effort. Posts without any evidence to suggest a conspiracy, things that are inflammatory and boo-outgroup, etc.

The Jew-haters' brigade is right, tbh. Their comments mostly aren't treated the same. I just happen to think that's a good thing and think you should just ban anything that crosses the line to clear anti-semitism, while they don't.

Tongue-in-cheek suggestion: Replace janitorial duty with an AI that flips the political valency of a given comment before someone is asked to judge it. Bonus points if you can train the AI to learn a given user's ideology. If we manage to abstract reality enough, it's the first step towards black mirror!

You're correct that that hypothetical comment wouldn't be moderated, even if it's not quite the level of quality we hope users aspire to.

If you had to ask for my rationale in not moderating it, my reasoning would be along the lines that it is a far less inflammatory claim. It doesn't take much effort to show a dozen examples of far-leftists strongly advocating for the death of the American Empire. I'm sure if we asked politely, we'd find a few on the site itself!

Our rules about inflammatory comments and evidence implicitly assume a subjective reference frame. That is sadly unavoidable. Someone advocating for the death penalty for pedophiles and rapists would be treated very differently from people saying that miscegantors and homosexuals should be put to death, in the former cases, the arguments being made draw on significantly more cultural consensus and common-knowledge (implicitly). We allow the latter class of argument, you can call for homesexuality and race-mixing to be made illegal, we demand additional explanation and rigour to your argument even if it bottoms out in subjective personal beliefs.

Speaking ill of the Jews is allowed, or else Secure Signals wouldn't be posting here. That he is, is a sign that he (usually) meets our standards of discourse.

It would be too much to expect that we can keep everyone happy when it comes to our judgement about what counts as inflammatory and needing justification versus what is a clear and self-evident Truth™, but that's unavoidable, and we try to find a balance.

Saying that groups are conspiring to do the thing that the group would describe themselves as doing is different from accusing them of an unrelated conspiracy. For instance, stating that groups of Jews are plotting to enjoy Passover is, I would hope, uncontroversial. Similarly, stating that groups of Communists are plotting to abolish the private ownership of capital is also uncontroversial. All accusations of conspiracy fall somewhere on this scale but accusing self-identified left-wing people of wanting to do left-wing things (even uncharitably) is definitely different from accusing Jews of wanting to do things unrelated to Judaism.

I assume this is the more detailed reasoning for why one claim is considered inflammatory without sufficient evidence, while the other wouldn't be.

Saying that groups are conspiring to do the thing that the group would describe themselves as doing

I had said:

'Perhaps there's a simple reason for this anti-America deal. Two of the key players you mentioned, Alice and Bob are both radical leftists. You even mentioned that Bob harbors anti-America sentiment. Subversive radical leftists are trying to undermine America's power when the nation is weak and vulnerable. Biden, though not a radical leftist (I know, I know), fits the role of senile idiot here.

Radical leftists is usually a stand in for anyone who voted blue in the last election cycle, and I doubt that any significant number of democrats would describe themselves as being anti-Americans trying to undermine America's power.

Saying that 48% of the US electorate are "radical leftists" is more controversial a statement than saying radical leftists are anti-American.

The mods are very clear that single or few-issue posters are treated much more harshly for completely reasonable reasons, namely that they end up using the community as their soapbox for their ONE thing. It happens that floating around right-leaning forums with lenient speech policies are a not insubstantial number of people for whom their One Issue is the Jews. The main reason treatment of secure signals actually improved recently is that he decided, in a welcome shift, to start discussing other things in addition to his single issue.

Unless this is someone's alt, doesn't look like they're a regular Jewposter.

Anyways, object level aside since obviously I don't like the people obsessed with Jews either, this is just a much less lofty expression of free speech ideals for a community to follow. What @self_made_human articulated was more or less reddit with a right-shifted Overton window, but not far right enough (yet) to tolerate regular Jewposting. What's the difference between 'we treat anti-semites more harshly because our userbase finds their opinions inflammatory' and 'we moderate conservative opinions much more harshly because they're just sealioning single-issue posters?' There's plenty of garbage posts here with nary a fact in them and packed chock-full of opinions I find plenty inflammatory (and even articulated in a much cruder and more inflammatory way than the Jewposter!), and the only difference between them is the opinions of the majority.

Sure, if the mods make enough unpopular decisions the community dies. Sure, nobody can reach some platonic ideal of objectivity or impartiality. But abandoning the pretense so easily is a bit of a letdown.

What @self_made_human articulated was more or less reddit with a right-shifted Overton window, but not far right enough (yet) to tolerate regular Jewposting. What's the difference between 'we treat anti-semites more harshly because our userbase finds their opinions inflammatory' and 'we moderate conservative opinions much more harshly because they're just sealioning single-issue posters?'

I will push back against this claim. The Motte isn't just reddit with a right-shifted Overton window.

Our Overton window is wider. Enormously so, though not as unique these days as Twitter competes in terms of permissivity if not quality.

There are very few topics that are outright verboten on this site. Most of them would be spam, harassment and the like. You can just about advocate for any viewpoint as long as you do it politely and with enough explanatory force behind the views you endorse.

There's plenty of garbage posts here with nary a fact in them and packed chock-full of opinions I find plenty inflammatory (and even articulated in a much cruder and more inflammatory way than the Jewposter!), and the only difference between them is the opinions of the majority.

Report them! Few of us mods have the time to read each and every comment posted on the site. I once did, when I was rather underemployed, but if something doesn't show up in the report queue, it is much less likely to be moderated, at least promptly.

It's inevitable that unpopular topics will get reported more often, and will thus be moderated more often, even while holding the quality of the comment equal.

For this particular one, the volunteer janny system flagged it as a bad comment, it had multiple reports to boot. We take that into account when making moderation decisions, but it certainly isn't the only thing that matters, our discretion overrides it if we deem a comment to be within the rules despite people (rarely) reporting on vibes rather than the merits of a comment. There are users so consistently downvoted that they'd never leave the filter queue if we didn't override it. This place isn't a majoritarian free-for-all, we do our best to accommodate unpopular viewpoints.

Cirrus had multiple warnings, and was hit with a ban for a single day. That's a slap on the wrist as punishments go, and he is welcome to reframe the same point as long as he meets our other guidelines.

This is a false equivalence.

First of all, "Radical leftists want to undermine America" is itself a bit more Fox News than I think we normally go. I would probably say something more like "The left wants to weaken America's military, so of course they support closing overseas bases." I think a lot of leftists would actually agree with my framing, and would disagree that closing bases counts as 'undermining' America. They would probably say that America should spend its money on welfare rather than overseas bases, and that closing bases actually strengthens America in all the ways that count. Thus, they don't want to undermine America, they just want to close bases.

The Jewish conspiracy angle leaves a lot of unanswered questions. I do not actually accept the reasoning that Jewish people want to undermine the UK any more than I accept the reasoning that the American left wants to undermine America. I think that the thing you most need to justify when making that argument is the premise. Any time anyone posits a Jewish conspiracy, they never explain the alleged motivation of the alleged Jewish conspiracy. I believe that the American left wants to close military bases, because it makes sense according to their goals (spend less on military and more on welfare). I do not believe that British Jews want to 'undermine the UK’s geopolitical power when the nation is weak and vulnerable' out of sheer evil Jewishness, because that is not a real motivation.

I think if someone went around suggesting that the Vegans were the masterminds behind every Islamic terrorist plot, they would be banned in short order. The problem with the Jewposting isn't the form, it's the sheer nonsense of it. You can't post crazy gibberish and expect to be taken seriously.

The Jewish conspiracy angle leaves a lot of unanswered questions. I do not actually accept the reasoning that Jewish people want to undermine the UK any more than I accept the reasoning that the American left wants to undermine America. I think that the thing you most need to justify when making that argument is the premise. Any time anyone posits a Jewish conspiracy, they never explain the alleged motivation of the alleged Jewish conspiracy. I believe that the American left wants to close military bases, because it makes sense according to their goals (spend less on military and more on welfare). I do not believe that British Jews want to 'undermine the UK’s geopolitical power when the nation is weak and vulnerable' out of sheer evil Jewishness, because that is not a real motivation.

Au contraire, I can promise you that we have some very elaborate explanations for the motivations of the Jewish conspiracies.

Paging @SecureSignals - What do you think?

I doubt that there is a 'Jewish Conspiracy', but if it exists, its motive is probably something along the lines of 'not being murdered or driven from their homes.'

The Jew-haters' brigade is right, tbh. Their comments mostly aren't treated the same. I just happen to think that's a good thing and think you should just ban anything that crosses the line to clear anti-semitism, while they don't.

Should we also ban anything that crosses the line to clear racism, misogyny, *phobia, etc.?

You should:

  1. Yes. Safe space. I think we all know the failure mode of this one.

  2. Double down on your commitment to free speech. Let the Jewposters have their say, and treat them like anyone else. If they're polite and they bring receipts, who are we to judge their speech any more than judge those who hate democrats or think that mandatory schooling is the greatest injustice of all time? You'd win my respect, although we probably also all know the failure mode of this option too.

  3. Give me the satisfaction of admitting to ourselves that we're basically reddit with a rightward slant and that free speech maximalism is dumb. Moderation (heh) in all things.

  1. No.

  2. I disagree with you that we treat Jewposters differently.

  3. No.

We definitely also mod stuff like that. The ceteris is never paribus, sure, but it’s still against the rules.

I recognize that we don’t see or choose to act on everything.

It would be helpful to understand sometimes why you don't mod particular posts, such as this one. Reporting, most of the time, just feels like a waste of clicks these days; raising a stink in a comment sometimes attracts a statement, but between poisoning the atmosphere (you can't really publicly call out a comment without it coming across as a personal attack) and most likely putting whatever moderator chooses to respond on the defensive from the outset, it's also not really a good way to go. Would it be possible for the mods to aim to make a public statement on every post that receives more than a certain number of reports, even if just to explain why they disagree with the reporters' view of it violating rules?

(I don't think "you are the only one who reported that particular post though" would be a slam-dunk retort; if you look further downthread, there were definitely more people who were unhappy with it, so if this didn't translate to reports that is just a sign that this part of the community has given up on the reporting mechanism)

Would it be possible for the mods to aim to make a public statement on every post that receives more than a certain number of reports, even if just to explain why they disagree with the reporters' view of it violating rules?

Fuck no.

Well, maybe if someone else wants to do it. But no, we get enough flack when we do mod posts and people are unhappy about it; now you want an open forum for people to bitch every time we don't mod a post? Fuck if I'm going to explain myself for every post I mod or don't mod. (As for "a certain number of reports," it's pretty rare for a post to receive a large number of reports and not get modded. Usually those are unambiguously pretty bad.)

Look, I think we are pretty damn transparent. We usually explain ourselves, we let people argue with us, we engage civilly on threads where people are calling us shitty mods. Sometimes we are too transparent, because it just invites ankle-biting and rules-lawyering. I go through phases where I will patiently explain to someone why I modded them and let them argue with me for an entire thread, and phases where I just say "Banned, bye" because I feel like it's a waste of time explaining things to bad-faith grudge-holders who don't really care about our reasoning, only that we didn't mod the way they think we should.

We do read every single report. Including yours. I would guess we actually act on about 5% of all reports.

Why does any particular mod not mod a particular post? It might be because the mod thinks it's okay, it might be because it's borderline and the mod isn't sure whether they think it merits action. It might be because the mod thinks it merits action but doesn't want to be the one to make the call, for various reasons. I will frequently look at a mod queue full of "borderline" posts and think "I don't want to deal with these right now." Maybe I don't have time to think about them, or maybe I'm in a bad mood and am afraid I might be too trigger-happy, so I will hope some other mod makes the decision. Then maybe I see three days later no one has made the call and it's still in the queue, and I sigh and approve it because clearly no one felt strongly about it and I'm not going to come and ban them three days later.

As it happens, that particular post by @crushedoranges was discussed in the mod channel. It was definitely borderline. We were split about 50/50 between "It's a bad post but not a rules violation" and "This deserves a warning." In the end we defaulted to no action. On a different day, a different mod might have warned or banned him. @crushedoranges posts a lot of crappy comments like that so he's on thin ice, but this time he skated. Does that mean we are not always 100% consistent and that sometimes a much worse comment will pass while a less bad comment earns the poster a ban? Yes, yes it does mean that! Yes, that definitely happens!

So it goes.

I feel called out at the moment, so, first, my mea culpas.

@Amadan I am aware that being a rightist partisan is not very conducive to the kind of space that the moderates wish to nurture. I, myself, personally moderate spaces where I have to manage people being political. Knowing this makes my behaviour even more unacceptable, and for that I apologize. I don't really have an excuse for my rhetoric, for liking the heat instead of the light. But I am not a passing internet troll, or fishing for responses from outraged liberals. I have been here in one form or another, and I actually like being here.

Moving forward, I will try to not clog up your moderation queue with my hot takes. I'll try.

@4bpp I disagree with the notion of reports as an enforcement mechanism because it is trivially easy to game, if one is a motivated bad actor. If an individual post is bad, one can downvote it. If it annoys one sufficiently, one can rebut it (although I concede the effort may not be worth the squeeze in nearly all cases.) Reporting is the tool of last resort, when something is noisome and of no value whatsoever.

But you report so much that the lack of response feels like a waste of effort?

I can't recall the last time I reported anyone. That's how little I use the feature. Do you want to be a moderator? You have a thousand posts... a lot more than me. Obviously you have opinions on what the Motte should be. But the demos has an opinion, too. Expressed through upvotes. Metathoughts about the pernicious nature of such social media systems nonwithstanding, is that not the fairest way of determining the merit of what someone is saying?

(I admit that the proposition of 'being maximally evil in posture to EA people' is horrifying, but no more so than the people who constantly talk about 'race realism'.)

I am also aware that the Motte has problems with ideological diversity. But that isn't my fault, that those on the left evaporatively leave. It's not like I'm running around conspiratorially reporting the TracingWoodgrains of the world. They left. Cannot I talk to those of a similar ideological bent? It's not like I'm pretending to be objective or anything. Am I being asked to keep it down to make sure the last leftists don't just pull up stakes and leave, leaving the Motte a witch-chamber?

I've been on a hot streak of hot takes recently, so I'll probably take a step back for a while. But if you have a problem with my posts or you believe that I don't belong here, you can say so. You don't have to write me up in a post complaining about moderation. That's all I have to say.

@Amadan I am aware that being a rightist partisan is not very conducive to the kind of space that the moderates wish to nurture.

We aren't trying to nurture a "moderate" space. I personally am a moderate, but many of the mods are not and being "moderate" is not the Motte's ethos. We have lots of rightist partisans here (and a few leftist ones). The problem is not being partisan; the problem is being antagonistic and inflammatory just to dunk on your enemies.

In what way are reports an "enforcement mechanism"? They do not enforce anything - unlike votes and comments, they don't even leave a public record. Reports are a mechanism for drawing the attention of moderators, and nothing else.

I do not come here for a discussion that is curated solely or primarily by the demos, as defined by everyone who has an account and bothers to click arrows getting a vote. There are plenty of spaces like that all across the internet, many with bigger crowds, and they generally don't work, or at least they don't work to produce a space in which political discussion that is worth reading can be had. An internet forum, in its natural form, is an island in Scott's meta-libertarian archipelago, not a community of people who are chained together by birth and geography and are thus compelled to organise in a way that to them feels fair - it is easy to join, and fairly easy to leave. The appeal of the archipelago is that any island can offer whatever it wants, be it democracy or compulsory-two-buckets-of-shit-a-day Soviet hell; and if you don't like it, you can just leave for a different island, or go and create your own and hope that the customers will come. The Motte's pitch was not a democracy, but a carefully tended autocratic garden with a particular prominently stated set of rules. If it devolves into a democracy, and if these rules are being enforced selectively or not at all, then in the best case it is simply because its operators are inattentive, in which case reporting helps draw their attention to the right place. In a worse but more realistic case, they are failing the criteria they promised to uphold due to bias or the human fear of social censure, as hinted at by @Amadan in his parallel response, in which case reporting serves to convey my disapproval, thus levelling the social censure incentive landscape a little. In the worst case, they are simply committing sticker fraud. I cling to the hope that that is not the case, because exit, while cheap, is not free, and the archipelago is actually finite and shrouded in a fog of imperfect information.

On top of this, on the object level, the main signal that our demos sends by up- and downvoting is "we want more content that helps the right wing". I can see that from my own posting history easily enough - I generally make posts in a fairly narrow range of length, type and sophistication, and the only ones that reliably get over +20 upvotes are those that contain strong unhedged defenses and concurrences with right-wing talking points. Conversely, any attempt to directly argue against right-wing positions is capped at +10, and without careful hedging and gratuitous but-of-course-leftists-also-bad disclaimers it's easy to land in the negatives.

I can't recall the last time I reported anyone. That's how little I use the feature.

That's perfectly consistent with a scenario in which the community heavily leans towards your preferences, and you trust that the mods will take care of it when it doesn't even without your prodding.

Do you want to be a moderator? You have a thousand posts... a lot more than me. Obviously you have opinions on what the Motte should be.

At this point I am so exasperated with the moderation that the answer to that is "yes", which of course categorically disqualifies me. So, reinterpreting your question, the reason I am reporting is not that I want to be a moderator. If I were to aim to become one, what I did (picking fights with and getting myself personally loathed by most of the current staff, antagonizing the ideological core of the community and saying we actually need more of that, ...) would be among the dumber approaches - I should instead have made a point to defend the mods in public, posted solidly right-wing but slightly more thoughtfully and measuredly than everyone else, and perhaps helped Zorba with backend work at some juncture.

I am also aware that the Motte has problems with ideological diversity. But that isn't my fault, that those on the left evaporatively leave.

Of course it is also your fault. When you make posts that are actively unpleasant to a class of readers, such as ones that are pitched to rally your tribe to bring about their defeat or ones that say it's "always acceptable to [engage in the act of harassing, intimidating, or abusing them, especially habitually or from a perceived position of relative power]" (circumscription courtesy of dictionary.com) (here), you encourage them to leave. The obvious mirrored example is unfortunately not so effective because American online right-wingers have all grown a thick skin out of necessity, so maybe try to imagine how inclined you would feel to stay in a forum where a bunch of Mexicans are circlejerking each other about plans on how to illegally immigrate into the US and defraud dumb gringos out of their money, or Russian soldiers planning torture of American volunteers they caught in Ukraine if you want an even more colourful example.

At this point I am so exasperated with the moderation that the answer to that is "yes", which of course categorically disqualifies me. So, reinterpreting your question, the reason I am reporting is not that I want to be a moderator. If I were to aim to become one, what I did (picking fights with and getting myself personally loathed by most of the current staff, antagonizing the ideological core of the community and saying we actually need more of that, ...) would be among the dumber approaches - I should instead have made a point to defend the mods in public, posted solidly right-wing but slightly more thoughtfully and measuredly than everyone else, and perhaps helped Zorba with backend work at some juncture.

Why do you think the current staff loathes you? I have no negative feelings about you. Your record is 2 AAQCs and no warnings! You're a good poster. You're just on the left which means you get downvoted a lot. Sorry about that, but that is how the community is, as you've observed.

Whether or not Zorba uses his "doge" mechanism next time he needs new mods, the way to become a mod is not by kissing our asses.

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At this point I am so exasperated with the moderation that the answer to that is "yes", which of course categorically disqualifies me. So, reinterpreting your question, the reason I am reporting is not that I want to be a moderator. If I were to aim to become one, what I did (picking fights with and getting myself personally loathed by most of the current staff, antagonizing the ideological core of the community and saying we actually need more of that, ...) would be among the dumber approaches - I should instead have made a point to defend the mods in public, posted solidly right-wing but slightly more thoughtfully and measuredly than everyone else, and perhaps helped Zorba with backend work at some juncture.

It doesn't disqualify you, and none of that would have helped you. If you want the job, I'll be more than happy to vote for you if I'm nominated for nominator the next time around.

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No mod hat?

Oops. Thanks for the reminder.

As a side note, I moderate less than I could because I have to switch themes every time, and the default white flashbangs my eyes. Trivial inconveniences stack up :(

This isn't a simple reason at all. You're supposing the existence of an international Jewish conspiracy to explain an odd policy decision. You're raising more questions than you're answering. That's the opposite of an explanation!

It's Different When We Do It, Chapter 27

or

Did I Just Get Trolled?

tw: old news, unapologetic whataboutism

Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have a free essay at the (reportedly centrist!) Foreign Affairs: "The Path to American Authoritarianism: What Comes After Democratic Breakdown." (Archive link.) You may notice the URL has "trump" in it, despite that word not appearing in the title. Curious.

But wait--who are Steve Levitsky and Lucan Way? After all, one can scarcely throw a cursor across a website these days without hitting, say, six or seven hyperlinks to "think pieces" about Trump, fascism, fascist Trumpism, or even Trumpist fascism. But never fear--this is no Average Andy/Joe Sixpack collaboration. This is professional work by a team of scholars whose most famous contribution to the canon of political scholarship is the term "competitive authoritarianism." What, you may ask, is competitive authoritarianism? Read on!

Steve Levitsky, according to his employer (Harvard University, naturally), is a

Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America.

His focus is not exclusive--he also writes on Israel policy while calling himself a "lifelong Zionist" (admittedly, in an article endorsing something like BDS)--but his interest in Latin America is apparently more than skin-deep:

Levitsky is married to Liz Mineo, a Peruvian journalist with degrees from the National University of San Marcos and Columbia University who currently works at The Harvard Gazette.

Lucan Way is no less distinguished. Well, maybe a litte less--the University of Toronto is not even the Harvard of Canada, much less the Harvard of, well, Harvard. But his title--his title! He is literally a Distinguished Professor of Democracy. Where Levitsky's focus is Latin America, however, Way's might best be described as "Cold War and Cold War adjacent." He credits at least some of that interest to family ties to historical events:

My stepfather's family were Jewish socialists, and his grandfather, Henrik Ehrlich, was a Menshevik during the 1917 revolution. This familial link to such a pivotal historical moment gave the chapter on Russia a deeper, more personal resonance.

This is an academic power couple, right here. Get one expert on authoritarianism in the New World, one on authoritarianism in the Old World, and baby, you've got a stew going! A book stew. An article stew. A bottomless cornucopia of cosmopolitan political commentary and analysis. Their 2010 text, "Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War," focuses on democratization (or its lack) under authoritarian regimes. David Waldner gave a blurb:

Regimes that blend meaningful elections and illicit incumbent advantage are not merely resting points on the road to democracy; Levitsky and Way guide us along the multiple paths these regimes can take and provide powerful reasoning to explain why nations follow these distinct paths. This deeply insightful analysis of an important subset of post-Cold War regimes is conceptually innovative and precise, empirically ambitious, and theoretical agile, moving fluidly between international and domestic causes of regime dynamics. Read it to understand the dynamics of contemporary hybrid regimes; then read it again to appreciate its many lessons for our general understanding of regime change.

So: you've literally written the book on how democracies are (or are not) born. What are you going to do next? No, no, you're not going to Disneyland--you're going to witness the election of Donald Trump and stop telling people that you study the birth of democracies, but instead the death of democracies. From the Amazon page for Levitsky's (but not Way's) How Democracies Die:

Donald Trump's presidency has raised a question that many of us never thought we'd be asking: Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes.

That's the preliminaries. This week, Levitsky and Way published an article, and I have to say, I found it... kinda convincing? Except, I couldn't help but Notice some things that gave me pause. The thesis of the piece, as I mentioned, was that the United States is headed toward "competitive authoritarianism." The article provides a small explainer:

The breakdown of democracy in the United States will not give rise to a classic dictatorship in which elections are a sham and the opposition is locked up, exiled, or killed. Even in a worst-case scenario, Trump will not be able to rewrite the Constitution or overturn the constitutional order. He will be constrained by independent judges, federalism, the country's professionalized military, and high barriers to constitutional reform. There will be elections in 2028, and Republicans could lose them.

But authoritarianism does not require the destruction of the constitutional order. What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism--a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent's abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. Most autocracies that have emerged since the end of the Cold War fall into this category, including Alberto Fujimori's Peru, Hugo Chávez's Venezuela, and contemporary El Salvador, Hungary, India, Tunisia, and Turkey. Under competitive authoritarianism, the formal architecture of democracy, including multiparty elections, remains intact. Opposition forces are legal and aboveground, and they contest seriously for power. Elections are often fiercely contested battles in which incumbents have to sweat it out. And once in a while, incumbents lose, as they did in Malaysia in 2018 and in Poland in 2023. But the system is not democratic, because incumbents rig the game by deploying the machinery of government to attack opponents and co-opt critics. Competition is real but unfair.

(As an aside, Way seems to think India is doing alright, actually? Not sure where that fits in with the above but, co-authored pieces do sometimes result in these little puzzles.)

What actually struck me first about this description was my memory of posters here in the Motte discussing "Brazilification," the process by which the U.S. is, as a result of economics, immigration, and identity politics, gradually adopting the political norms of South and Central American nations. But my experience has been that it is usually more conservative, even arguably nationalist people expressing this concern. While Levitsky and Way do not use the term "Brazilification," they definitely seem to be placing the United States on that trajectory.

They elaborate on the problem at length:

Competitive authoritarianism will transform political life in the United States. As Trump's early flurry of dubiously constitutional executive orders made clear, the cost of public opposition will rise considerably: Democratic Party donors may be targeted by the IRS; businesses that fund civil rights groups may face heightened tax and legal scrutiny or find their ventures stymied by regulators. Critical media outlets will likely confront costly defamation suits or other legal actions as well as retaliatory policies against their parent companies. Americans will still be able to oppose the government, but opposition will be harder and riskier, leading many elites and citizens to decide that the fight is not worth it.

This is where I started to wonder, just a little, whether I was being trolled. While Trump's second term has indeed set a record pace for executive orders, Joe Biden's early flurry of dubiously constitutional executive orders was a greater departure from the norm. Most readers here will be well-acquainted with the IRS targeting of conservative groups. Many will also be aware of the time regulators inappropriately targeted the NRA. Conservative media outlets faced expensive defamation lawsuits (losing some, winning others). The fit with the Biden administration just seems too close in this paragraph, to be pure coincidence... but what am I supposed to conclude from that? Am I supposed to be doing a Straussian reading?

The piece continues:

[M]uch of the coming authoritarianism will take a less visible form: the politicization and weaponization of government bureaucracy. . . . Even in countries such as the United States that have relatively small, laissez-faire governments, this authority creates a plethora of opportunities for leaders to reward allies and punish opponents. No democracy is entirely free of such politicization. But when governments weaponize the state by using its power to systematically disadvantage and weaken the opposition, they undermine liberal democracy. Politics becomes like a soccer match in which the referees, the groundskeepers, and the scorekeepers work for one team to sabotage its rival.

Republicans have long complained against the weaponization of government against conservatives, and Democrats have long ignored those complaints. Whether it's a county clerk jailed for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses or the throw-the-book-at-them attitude toward January 6th protesters, conservatives regularly find the scales of justice thumbed against their interests. Similarly-situated Democrats need fear no prosecution at all.

Levitsky and Way have more to say about this sort of thing:

The most visible means of weaponizing the state is through targeted prosecution. Virtually all elected autocratic governments deploy justice ministries, public prosecutors' offices, and tax and intelligence agencies to investigate and prosecute rival politicians, media companies, editors, journalists, business leaders, universities, and other critics. In traditional dictatorships, critics are often charged with crimes such as sedition, treason, or plotting insurrection, but contemporary autocrats tend to prosecute critics for more mundane offenses, such as corruption, tax evasion, defamation, and even minor violations of arcane rules. If investigators look hard enough, they can usually find petty infractions such as unreported income on tax returns or noncompliance with rarely enforced regulations.

Tax evasion, you say? As for minor violations of arcane rules and rarely enforced regulations, well, the whole "Trump committed a felony" charade in New York was recognized well in advance as "novel" and "built on an untested legal theory."

The argument continues!

Moreover, much of the Republican Party now embraces the idea that America's institutions--from the federal bureaucracy and public schools to the media and private universities--have been corrupted by left-wing ideologies. Authoritarian movements commonly embrace the notion that their country's institutions have been subverted by enemies; autocratic leaders including Erdogan, Orban, and Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro routinely push such claims. Such a worldview tends to justify--even motivate--the kind of purging and packing that Trump promises.

Why would the Republican Party embrace the idea that America's institutions have been corrupted by left-wing ideologies? After all, just 63% of senior executives in government posts are Democrats; only 58% of public school teachers identify as Democrat; fully 3.4% of journalists identify as Republicans, and the ratio of liberal to conservative college professors is a measly 17 to 1!

I guess "believing facts about the ideological makeup of our country's institutions" qualifies as authoritarian, now?

There's more to the article--I invite you to read it. But maybe some of you want to ask, in total exasperation, "What difference, at this point, does it make?" Maybe none! I am not here to do apologetics for Trump. I was just really struck by the idea that this article could have been written, almost word for word, about Biden, or even Obama. Maybe Bush! Maybe others--FDR for sure, right? But I can find no evidency of Levitsky or Way ever actually noticing, or worrying, about American competitive authoritarianism, until Trump. They think he's special. I don't think he's special! I think that, so far, he has actually committed far fewer of the sins on their list, than Biden did. That doesn't mean I endorse Trump's actions, so much as I am confused that a couple of highly-credentialed experts on the matter only seem to recognize American authoritarianism when it is coming from their right (or, more accurately, even when it might eventually be coming from their right).

Aside from that, I don't see any obvious problems with the picture that they paint. Having pundits on both sides of the aisle say similar things about our nation's political trajectory serves to increase my worry that "Brazilification" might be a real thing, and makes me wonder how quickly it might happen, and how seriously I should take the possibility.

(Insert butterfly meme: is this authoritarianism? Insert spaceman meme: always has been.)

Some time ago, I sat in on a tenure-track sociology job talk. The candidate researched something about "universal human rights" through examining UN declarations. I pay a lot of attention to definitions, and I remember that this candidate did not define "universal human rights" during the talk yet talked about the study of UN declarations through a framework that assumed that "universal human rights" had some particular meaning. During Q&A I tried to get some clarification on the matter:

"What, exactly, makes something a 'universal human right'?", I asked.

The candidate replied that a right is universal if it's applicable to everyone.

So I followed up, "For example, would it be a 'universal human right' to save one's soul through worship Jesus Christ in the one-true-way of Catholic faith?"

The candidate replied, "You mean the right to religion? Yes, the right to religion would be a universal human right."

And I said, "No, I mean specifically the right to save one's soul through, specifically, converting and adhering to Catholic faith."

The candidate, showing some confusion: "But that's specifically a Catholic perspective..."

And I replied, "But it's nonetheless universal. A devout Catholic truly believes that the only way for any human being to save their immortal soul from eternal damnation is by converting to Catholic faith, and, out of sheer compassion for all fellow human beings, declares the universal human right to convert and adhere to Catholicism."

"I'd have to think about that," said the candidate, but I have clearly monopolized enough of Q&A time, another colleague jumped in with a different question, and the discussion moved on.

Later, in a more informal setting and without the candidate, I was chatting with some of my colleagues about the job talk and my question. Some thought that it was indeed an interesting and important question, whether we can define 'universal human rights' without supposing a particular framework of values. But the most common response was: Look, we all know what he means by 'universal human rights', and editors in sociology journals know what he means, and reviewers know what he means, so it doesn't matter that he defined the terms so poorly as to include the Inquisition, because it will in no way impede his publication record.

(This was the tenure-track position where the sociology department deliberately cast a wide net to diversify the research within the department. I asked if that means they are looking for a conservative candidate, and we all had a laugh.)

To bring it back to "competitive authoritarianism": I am not at all surprised that two social scientists swimming in the liberal-left bubbles of Harvard and U-Toronto would fail to consider how their abstract terms for "competitive authoritarian" techniques instantiate from a conservative perspective. The specific examples you bring up may have not even crossed their path, like the IRS investigations into politically conservative non-profits a few years back, though more likely the authors don't feel like the examples fit their "competitive authoritarian" framework because the authors agree with the aims of those instances of techniques--they therefore feel simply like the correct application of law. Prosecution of J6 participants? Surely it's right and proper to prosecute insurrection. Same for that county clerk who refuses to follow the new marriage law. Same for going after conservative news--must stamp out misinformation. It takes someone outside of that bubble to notice the similarities.

A big part of The Motte's value is giving cross-bubble perspectives, a place where someone posts "Just keep swimming", someone else goes: "Running gets you further", and yet another pipes in: "Fly, you fools!!"

Look, we all know what he means by 'universal human rights', and editors in sociology journals know what he means, and reviewers know what he means

I feel like this is getting at why the political divide has become the way it is: a generation ago I suspect even lay members of the public would understand and (broadly, if not uniformly) agree on "universal human rights", for Americans probably citing either the Constitution or Declaration of Independence. Today, the ivory tower definition has moved on at least a bit, and while the academics probably agree with each other, the lay public has started noticing when The Powers That Be have tweaked the definitions to mismatch the populace and they don't feel like they've been consulted or heard on how it impacts them through issues like refugee status or (youth) gender medicine.

I obviously didn't sit in on this talk, but when someone says "Universal Human Rights" in reference to the UN, they probably specifically mean the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is a specific document.

To bring it back to "competitive authoritarianism": I am not at all surprised that two social scientists swimming in the liberal-left bubbles of Harvard and U-Toronto would fail to consider how their abstract terms for "competitive authoritarian" techniques instantiate from a conservative perspective. The specific examples you bring up may have not even crossed their path

As always on the topic of authoritarianism, I have to beat my usual drum. It is unlikely for someone to swim in a bubble so enclosed that they wouldn't notice the covid-related authoritarianism. It is exceptionally unlikely if those bubbles are US academia rather than red state small towns or Sweden. More likely is that they agree with that particular kind of authoritarianism.

I'm a mathematician, so I get antsy when someone doesn't clarify their definitions of key terms. I would have accepted something like "By universal human rights I mean whatever was declared in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948". But no, this candidate was presenting a framework that (and I won't do it justice here) kind of assumes some platonic version of "universal human rights" that international bodies like UN can discover, even if imperfectly, and this framework was intended to model the process of such a discovery. So understanding what this Platonic stuff is was kind of important, I thought.

So I followed up, "For example, would it be a 'universal human right' to save one's soul through worship Jesus Christ in the one-true-way of Catholic faith?"

The candidate replied, "You mean the right to religion? Yes, the right to religion would be a universal human right."

And I said, "No, I mean specifically the right to save one's soul through, specifically, converting and adhering to Catholic faith."

"Yes, that is a subset of the right to one's religion. If you have come to the conclusion that Catholicism is true, wish to join the Catholic Church, and they wish to welcome you as a baptised and confirmed member, you have the right not to have that interfered with."

That's how the candidate first took it, too: if someone reaches a decision to convert to Catholicism, don't interfere.

But from a perspective of, say, a devout 16-century Catholic, the "if" part is not there: If you come to the conclusion that you don't need to convert to Catholicism, you are deeply mistaken (and probably being lied to by the devil), and your immortal soul is still in danger. That perspective is what drove so many missionaries to risk their lives in the Americas and Africa. That perspective stroke the fires of Inquisition: what matter a few minutes of physical agony if it helps you see the light?

But all I was trying to determine is whether this perspective fits the candidate's definition of "universal human right" as "a right that's applicable to any person". I think it does.

I think I see where you're coming from. I suspect that the candidate may have been grasping at the concept of universalisability, in the Kantian sense. (See "You Kant Dismiss Universalizability", Slate Star Codex, May 2014.)

Catholicism and Protestantism are the type specimens for freedom of religion in Western political thought, precisely because 16th- and 17th-century Catholics believed that 'everyone has the right to save their souls through converting to Catholicism, adhering to Catholic faith, and worshiping Jesus Christ according to the teachings of the Holy Roman Church', and 16th- and 17th-century Protestants believed, just as strongly, that 'everyone has the right to save their souls through converting to Protestantism, adhering to Protestant faith, and worshiping Jesus Christ according to the principle of sola scriptura'; they also both believed that they had the right to impose the true religion by force on those who did not accept it willingly.

This culminated in the Thirty Years' War, which caused a six-foot decrease in altitude for 4-12 million people; seeking to avoid further bloodshed, Europe and its descendants arrived at today's conventional understanding of religious freedom; that if Mary believes in Catholicism and Elizabeth believes in Protestantism, Mary has the right to be Catholic without interference from Elizabeth, and Elizabeth has the right to be Protestant without interference from Mary; each doing unto the other as she would have the other do unto her. (This is the 'reciprocal liberty' of the Quakers, described in Albion's Seed.)

Good point: at least, if I were to go back in time and steelman my own question, I would use 'universalizability' to convey my notion, despite the ugliness of the term. I mean, it has both the -alize suffix that turns a noun into a verb, and then the -ability suffix to turn it back to a noun.

Catholic, quite literally, means universal in the sense that everyone ought to be a member, and to put aside other religions. Starting assumptions matter, that was the point of his example.

Now, you and I have quite different starting assumptions. But from my starting assumptions allowing other religions to proselytize undermines the universal human right to salvation through the Catholic church, and error does not have natural rights at all. It might incidentally be tolerated to avoid a worse evil(eg false conversions at gunpoint), but you simply happen to believe that Catholicism is not true and that the UN universal declaration of human rights are a reflection of natural law.

But Catholicism is a monotheist faith, which denies that any other religion has validity and it is the one true path to salvation.

To get away from the analogy, it would be like say that Wokism is a tolerant and diverse sociological lense, but it doesn't consider any other interpretation to disparate impact other than racism.

It is trivially easy to assert that your parochial views are actually universal unpartisan principles. Or 'just being a good person', as I've heard it being told.

That was the idea behind the question. The catholic part was a proxy for the presuppositions of any world view. What happens when you give someone the right to choose but only if they accept the presuppositions that lead to that conclusion you want them to draw?

One thing I think everyone forgets about the excesses of the early Soviet Union was that this was a polity that already had a long history of severe political repression and extreme political violence. It wasn’t some paradisal democratic wonderland that was suddenly plunged into horror after the revolution. The gulag archipelago, the secret police hauling people off in the middle of the night, the mass executions, the periodic famines— that already existed under the Tsar and had existed for hundreds of years. Stalin was definitely worse than the Tsar, but it was a difference in degree not a difference in kind.

Nazi Germany is bit closer than Russia to the nightmare scenario these people are contemplating, but they forget that Germany had been a monarchy until about 15 years before the Nazis took power, and had about as many internalized democratic norms as post-2003 invasion Iraq. Also the Weimar Republic had been constantly under siege from various stripes of illiberal movements since it’s inception, the first occurring in 1919.

Probably the closest actual analog for democratic backsliding in the US is ancient Republican Rome, but they intentionally don’t want to think about that one because it would require meditating on uncomfortable truths. Yes, Caesar killed the Republic in the end, but he was only able to do that because the Optimate oligarchs had been slowly strangling it for the last 150 years, and had been turfing out the native labor force in favor of foreigners that had fewer legal rights and therefore cost less to work.

Stalin was definitely worse than the Tsar, but it was a difference in degree not a difference in kind.

I disagree, I think there is a difference in kind between authoritarian and totalitarian governments, because they have different strategies of repression.

The ideal authoritarian regime has an ideal authoritarian citizen. One who is disinterested in politics, disinterested in ideology, disinterested in who rules them, and simply lives a normal, private life as a disengaged citizen. While those close to the regime, such as the military and bureaucracy, need to be kept specifically loyal, the wider public only needs to be kept not actively disloyal. They can even hate the regime if they want, as long as they don't actively threaten it.

The ideal totalitarian regime, however, has a different ideal totalitarian citizen. One who is actively interested in politics, ideology, and who rules them, all aligning with the current regime. It is not enough for you to be disinterested. You need to support the party. You need to actively promote it's beliefs. You need to hang the propaganda posters inside your home. And, eventually, you need to rearrange your entire private life in service to the regime and whatever ideals it believes in.

Probably the closest actual analog for democratic backsliding in the US is ancient Republican Rome,

Republican Rome had very weak democratic institutions because the narrow franchise of the Centuriate had more power than the broader franchises of the Tribune of the Plebs. There is no equivalent to this stratification in the US. It's never going to be a good analogue for the US backsliding because the starting points are so dramatically different.

As for the other examples.

Tsarist Russia was heavily authoritarian, and the Bolsheviks made it totalitarian. It was no longer enough to be a disinterested peasant doing your own thing.

The German Empire was a hybrid regime, authoritarian compared to France or the UK but not as authoritarian as Russia. The Nazis also went totalitarian. So there was democratic backsliding here (or really, more of a yoyo, as it went down during WWI as the country became a de facto military dictatorship, up during the "Golden Twenties", then down again before diving off a cliff).

Japan is also an example worth listing, with the Taisho Democracy being undone mostly by the May 15 incident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_15_incident

Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi was shot by eleven young naval officers (most were just turning twenty years of age) in the prime minister's residence. Inukai's last words were roughly "If I could speak, you would understand" (話せば分かる, hanaseba wakaru) to which his killers replied "Dialogue is useless" (問答無用, mondō muyō).[1][better source needed] The original assassination plan had included killing the English film star Charlie Chaplin who had arrived in Japan on May 14, 1932 […] Chaplin's murder would facilitate war with the U.S., and anxiety in Japan, and lead to "restoration" in the name of the emperor.[3] When the prime minister was killed, his son Inukai Takeru was watching a sumo wrestling match with Charlie Chaplin, which probably saved both their lives.

Crazy.

Inukai's last words were roughly "If I could speak, you would understand" (話せば分かる, hanaseba wakaru) to which his killers replied "Dialogue is useless" (問答無用, mondō muyō).[1][better source needed]

...That will stick with me for a while.

話せば分かる

Nitpick, this can be translated as 'if we talk (for a while), you'll understand'. It's not necessarily super-profound. It's basically just "listen to me, idiots!" to which the reply is "too late". This is why translating is hard.

(The absolutely literal meaning is "if speak, understand". Everything else is context.)

Man, I kinda want an alt-historical fiction movie made out of this, where Charlie Chaplin has to outrun a bunch of assassins.

I disagree, I think there is a difference in kind between authoritarian and totalitarian governments, because they have different strategies of repression.

I agree this is important. For example, german and italian (and as far as I can tell, british) fascism were totalitarian, the hispanic and the austrian intermediary fascism were authoritarian. I disagree with your assesment of Soviet Russia as totalitarian, they never had the state capacity to do that. Unless youre counting land collectivisation per se, most peasants didnt have to actively participate. As far as I know, only the east german communism really was totalitarian.

Unless youre counting land collectivisation per se, most peasants didn't have to actively participate.

All organizations had to be explicitly communist, even for doing hobbies, which is definitely totalitarian.

One thing I think everyone forgets

One of the things that really struck me about the article was that the authors introduced the concept of "competitive democracy" in a book that explained how, to the best of my understanding, Western ties and influence were a major distinguisher between autocracies that "fully" democratized, and autocracies that did not. Way in particular seems to have in mind exactly your points about Russian history. It was weird to read an article that appeared to be written by two scholars who knew substantially more about the 20th century history of other nations, than about the 21st century history of the nation they were writing about.

turfing out the native labor force in favor of foreigners that had fewer legal rights and therefore cost less to work

A common complaint about illegal immigration today. Who will our Caesar be?

Tiberius Gracchus

Giaus Gracchus <——— you are here

Marius

Sulla

Pompey

Caesar

Just a random thing, Pompey has to be one of the most egregious exonyms ever. We are talking about Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, one of the most powerful and famous Romans in history. Pompey sounds more like a name of your neighbor's chihuahua.

I mean, anglophone people used to call Marcus Tullius Cicero "Tully" - leading to his most famous book, De Officiis, being known as "Tully's Offices", so there's plenty of underwhelming exonyms to go around.

We still do it with Mark Antony (Marcus Antonius), Livy (Titus Livius), and Pliny (Gaius Plinius Secundus).

I think of Pompeii, the city that got burned and buried under ash by Mount Vesuvius.

It sounds even more like a football team. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portsmouth_F.C.

Who is the Tiberius Gracchus here? First term Trump?

Tiberius Gracchus was the one they killed/tried to prosecute, for disturbing their hold on the levers of powers. I think he most maps to Trump.

Trump 45, yes. Pre assassination attempt.

Probably the closest actual analog for democratic backsliding in the US is ancient Republican Rome, but they intentionally don’t want to think about that one because it would require meditating on uncomfortable truths. Yes, Caesar killed the Republic in the end, but he was only able to do that because the Optimate oligarchs had been slowly strangling it for the last 150 years, and had been turfing out the native labor force in favor of foreigners that had fewer legal rights and therefore cost less to work.

The truth really isn't that uncomfortable. If the problem is underpaid foreigners who have no rights... why not just grant them rights so they can't be paid less?

Open the borders! Stop having them be closed!

...I admit that I'm biased as a software engineer though. I'm not afraid of globalization because my field is already near-perfectly globalized. Anyone who wants software cheaper can already buy labor from the third world (aside from national-security sensitive domains, but natsec-relevant software engineering is only a tiny fraction of the market.) I don't see why I should be forced to pay for american carpenters if they're not going to be forced to pay for american software.

(Not that I want carpenters being forced to pay for american software. IP law is bullshit and knowledge should be free, etcetera etcetera.)

Also as a software engineer, I take the exact opposite approach; close the borders right up. Importing lots of people puts a strain on resources in the host country, and counteracts the will of the native population in favour of "GDP line go up" type thinking.

Indians in Canada are willing to live in situations that are a massive downgrade in QOL to the non-immigrant population - Brampton is famous for having slums with 20+ Indian individuals packed into a tiny apartment. It isn't rights that prevents them from doing better - it's that it is still an upgrade for them.

and counteracts the will of the native population in favour of "GDP line go up"

I know the will of the population isn't "open borders." But still-- the will of at least ~half the citizen (i.e., native) voting population is that "lots of people" should come in. There are some quibbles about the exact rates, and which immigrants are acceptable, but I don't think the median position is, "everyone except O-1A visas can fuck right off."

The example you give me about the Indians is illustrative. You mean to tell me that there's an entire population of hard workers who don't demand much in the way of resources and you want to keep them out? In the old days we used to have to round these people up with wooden ships! I can see how certain low-skilled segments of the populations are threatened by immigrant labor, but I'm not part of those segments. I'm sympathetic to appeals about helping the cultural ingroup-- but I'm catholic, and an urbanite, so rural southern heretics aren't really any culturally more similar to me than rural latin catholics or urban indian hindus. There's the issue of language barrier, but I find it non-salient. Our modern media environment is more effective at acculturating immigrants than at any prior point in history.

Finally, as per the question of resources: America has no shortage of land. We do have a shortage of buildings (houses), and services (healthcare, childcare)... but just take a guess at what I think the best way to remedy that is.

You mean to tell me that there's an entire population of hard workers who don't demand much in the way of resources and you want to keep them out? In the old days we used to have to round these people up with wooden ships! I can see how certain low-skilled segments of the populations are threatened by immigrant labor, but I'm not part of those segments.

You are quite literally wrong about this. Looking at Canada, even the middle and upper classes are struggling, primarily because of a real estate bubble that is continously being inflated with a stream of as you would say "low-skilled" workers. Furthermore, wages in Canada are aenemic, partly because the bottom quartile drags compensation down. You are mistaken in assuming that changes in the "low-skilled" segment of the population do not propgate to the "higher-skilled" segment.

They're struggling because of anticonstruction nimbies. Their wages are anemic because they're unproductive lazy canadians. (\s a little bit but not really. I know the full explanation for the low wage growth is complex, but also canadian productivity growth is really not very high)

I can't rule out that immigration has an effect on high-skilled labor in general but I'm speaking for me, personally, as a software engineer. I personally am not threatened by immigration because my job is already perfectly globalized. If you actually want me to have an interest in supporting anti-immigration policies you're going to have to add "ban the use of foreign software" as a policy plank because otherwise its just a conspiracy to force me to pay more for lazy american carpenters while you all enjoy using cheap or free linux distros built partially by government-subsidized europeans.

The canadian construction sector is a greater proportion of its gdp than the US construction sector is. They are literally building as fast as possible.

Furthermore, the reason productivity growth is so bad is because of the complex interaction between the real eastate bubble and indian immigration. Why invest in capital when you can invest in the real state bubble? Why try to be more productive when you can import more low-wage low-skilled immigrants, who coincidentally also inflate the real estate bubble?

I can accept that your job is globalized. But everything else in your life isn't. Your house, your food, your health care, your social services, your assabiyah are all local; they aren't competing on a global level, with a global population. Your job might be fine despite it being globalized, but I can almost guarantee it that if everything else was globalized, you wouldn't enjoy it.

My food is imported from across the world, and I definitely don't want to pay a 25% tarriff on Columbian coffee because some Hawaiian producers wanted to rent-seek.

As for services-- if I concede that immigration depresses wages in the long run (and so far, I don't) then for that exact reason I want my services to be more global. I don't want a tyrranical government forcing me to pay more for american services.

Housing is the closest you get to a winning argument, but only in the short run. Cheap labor leads to more construction in the long run. And in particular, it leads to denser construction, and as someone that likes living in a city I view that as intrinsically desirable. Kowloon walled city WAS real neoliberalism and it was a GOOD THING.

I can understand all the americans making a cynical, oppressive power-grab by forcing me to buy their goods and services. That doesn't mean I have to like it-- and it definitely doesn't mean I have to shut up and take it like a good little paypig. I WILL use cryptocurrency to dodge tariffs. I WILL fly to latin america to buy over-the-counter drugs and get elective medical procedures done. I WILL hire illegal immigrants to get construction work done. (In minecraft.) And no lazy, blood-sucking protectionists are going to stop me.

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(Writing carefully here. I do have an opinion on this topic; this post is intended to be about understanding the conflict as opposed to my particular view.)

You may make better progress if you understand the other side's actual typical arguments more. Let me lay out the more common complaints I have heard:

There are some quibbles about the exact rates, and which immigrants are acceptable, but I don't think the median position is, "everyone except O-1A visas can fuck right off."

Said side sees ~all discussion along these lines as a motte-and-bailey argument:

Motte -> "unrestricted immigration prioritizing other places undesirables"
Bailey -> "restricted immigration of skilled workers we cannot get replacements for at any price"

Convince them otherwise and you'd make far more progress.

There's the issue of language barrier, but I find it non-salient.

Initial language barrier is not the issue here! Said side sees a perceived trend of immigrants that make no attempt to integrate, instead forming and maintaining foreign-language & foreign-culture clumps.

America has no shortage of land.

In much the same sense as the world has no shortage of water.

I don't think I can convince Zephr (or the median trump voter) that immigration isn't against their interests. Frankly, I agree with them that it probably is. It's just that by the same token, there's no way that they can convince me (or the median Harris voter) that immigration is against our interests. That's why I'm speaking in terms of the median american here-- or rather, of the compromise position that we get when we calculate a weighted average of every american's preferences via democracy. Some of the immigrants some of the time makes everyone unhappy, but it's worth recognizing that neither extreme is ever going to be a viable option (though of course us radicals will keep pulling on our end of the overton window.)

If it helps, I'm Canadian, and the Indians we get are not considered to be very hard workers.

https://www.indiatoday.in/world/indians-abroad/story/indian-origin-canada-td-bank-free-food-data-scientist-video-fired-students-food-bank-university-2531178-2024-04-24

I'm not gonna lie, that sounds like a skill issue on the part of the canadian culture and government. I mean, it definitely confirms my priors to hear about canadians failing at things because I'm convinced that you're a fake country, to the point where it's the one thing I agree with donald trump on. (That and the need to annex greenland and panama). But anglophones have been successfully exploiting immigrant labor for literally a thousand years. Fix your shit, canada, or we'll come in and fix it for you.

I'm being a little facetious here. Not entirely facetious, but I can see how america is vulnerable to similar attacks. That being said, the very article you linked is an example of a culture successfully punishing someone who's violated a social norm. I know you're making a point along the lines of, "this is the one we caught-- just think about all the other fish out there!" But my response is still going to be, "then make a better net instead of nuking the pond."

Since when does anglophone society have any tradition of immigrant labour whatsoever? Britain had no significant (relative to population) immigration until the latter half of the 1900s, which coincided with our total collapse as a world power. Australia and NZ didn't have immigration until the same period, they just had transfers from the homeland. And America's endless racial struggle with the black labourers they imported and then the Ellis Islanders and the resultant machine politics forms a cautionary tale for the rest of the world. Canada I'm not sure about.

(Colonising foreign countries is not the same thing, and doesn't produce the same issues, since you don't have to interact with your labourers and their native taskmasters except to extract money and resources from them.)

Canada I'm not sure about.

Canada’s population was 10% of Ukrainian descent before the recent immigration wave. They definitely had mass immigration before the iron curtain.

Since when does anglophone society have any tradition of immigrant labour whatsoever? Britain had no significant (relative to population) immigration until the latter half of the 1900s, which coincided with our total collapse as a world power.

If you don't count Irish workers in the mainland as immigrants, this turns into an argument about the definition of "significant" (Hugenots were something like 2% of the population of England in 1700, more in London) - clearly the immigrant percentage now is an order of magnitude higher than any of the precedents wokists love to point to. But if we arguing about the social consequences of immigration, I don't see why the Irish don't count. They had a wildly unpopular foreign religion that made them hard to assimilate, were generally considered to be prone to drunkenness and criminality, and were openly and notoriously used by employers to bid down wages.

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I don't disagree with you in that it is definitely a skill issue; I just don't trust a government to ever do better.

In a perfect world a commoner of one ethnicity wouldn't even know about the existence of other ethnicities at all.

In a perfect world a commoner of one ethnicity wouldn't even know about the existence of other ethnicities at all.

I see no way to accomplish this other than restricting people to never contact or travel beyond their immediate physical neighborhood. Is that what you consider a perfect world, or are you intending a different method of accomplishing this? If so, what?

I don't understand the thrust of this comment. And anyways, groups divide fractally so I disagree that it's even possible to create a society without cultural-linguistic-historical divisions.

Little pupil: But Mrs. Teacher, what is there beyond the borders of our $ethnostate? Whom do we trade with?
Mrs. Teacher: An excellent question, please see the headmaster after hours.
Headmaster: *loads his shotgun*

I would have been so much happier without any contact with other races and ethnicities and the other sex.

I would have been so much happier without any contact with other races and ethnicities and the other sex.

Wait are you an actual honest-to-god homofascist?

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Okay, you seem to be on some kind of spree with this comment and this one and this one. All of which seem to be testing the limits of what you can get away with. Given that the common theme is "I hate a lot of people (and fantasize about violence a lot)" paired with the obvious fact that you are a returning alt who we probably banned not long ago, and I would suggest you cool it.

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There's more to the article--I invite you to read it. But maybe some of you want to ask, in total exasperation, "What difference, at this point, does it make?" Maybe none! I am not here to do apologetics for Trump. I was just really struck by the idea that this article could have been written, almost word for word, about Biden, or even Obama. Maybe Bush! Maybe others--FDR for sure, right? But I can find no evidency of Levitsky or Way ever actually noticing, or worrying, about American competitive authoritarianism, until Trump. They think he's special. I don't think he's special! I think that, so far, he has actually committed far fewer of the sins on their list, than Biden did. That doesn't mean I endorse Trump's actions, so much as I am confused that a couple of highly-credentialed experts on the matter only seem to recognize American authoritarianism when it is coming from their right (or, more accurately, even when it might eventually be coming from their right).

In one of the last episodes of Breaking Points I could stomach, the hosts were arguing over whether Trump was an authoritarian fascist. And no matter what the right cohost pointed out that Biden had done too, the left cohost just said "But authoritarian fascism is by definition right wing, therefore nothing Biden did was authoritarian fascism because he's on the left". That was it. And it was more or less the moment I realized the show I'd been a patron of since it began wasn't worth watching anymore.

But that does seem to be how those people think. Whether something is authoritarian is not a matter of specific actions, but actions coupled with intent. If you assume your guys have good intent, they are never authoritarian. If you assume the other guys always have bad intent, everything they do is authoritarian.

There seems to be a strain of people who absolutely cannot look past labels in any way. I recently read a highly upvoted comment on Imgur (which is extremely left wing) which went something like:

"Remember when they tried to call Antifa a terrorist organization? It's proof they're fascists that they're so afraid of an antifacist idea!"

The people in question seem absolutely unable to see that you can make up your own names for things, and people are absolutely not bound to follow them.

To tie it into the point above - I'd argue that a salient comparison with Antifa would be the National Socialists Party of Germany's Brown shirts - but the sort of people who claim that all of their opponents are Nazis can't even see the comparison, because their opponents are the Nazis, not them, and Nazis used the brown shirts.

If you wanted to stir the pot, you could ask those folks how they feel about the demolition of the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart (Antifaschistischer Schutzwall).

Based on my experience on Tumblr, they tend to be very unhappy about it, since it very much did what it's name said, and was about keeping fascists out, not East Germans in, because who would ever want to leave the socialist paradise of East Germany? Fascists resisting de-Nazification, that's who! Which is why, while some people did sneak out of East Berlin across the wall, we can thus know, with absolute logical certainty, that every single one of them was a Nazi.

Again, I've seen people literally argue this, and then proceed to call people's relatives Nazis (in that distinctly condescending "sorry to break it to you, sweetie" manner) when presented with counter-examples.

I've seen similar discussions about Cubans. Someone flees Cuba? That's an enemy of all good leftists.

I think the critics from the right are at least partially correct that Donald Trump wasn't "supposed" to win, that after eight years of Obama and nearly unmitigated cultural Ws many on the left had convinced themselves that the pendulum would not swing back, that they would never have to live through eight years of George W. Bush again, and then...

There's obviously a danger that the pendulum will swing back on the righties, but if Elon keeps going like this for four years it will take more than four years to rebuild the absolutely gutted institutions. And it's quite possible (looking at Trump's favorability ratings, the meh Democratic slate, and the popularity of downsizing measures) that the GOP will get another four years or more.

Which is why I think people on the left and the right should be careful about memeing "Brazilification" into being. Maybe instead lefties should take this opportunity to consider the many benefits of federalism that righties have been screaming about for literal centuries and maybe righties should let them beat a graceful retreat back to California instead of fighting to the death over the scepter of federal power that was never meant to be.

Obama staffers read and evangelized The Emerging Democratic Majority. A book fantasizing that changing demographics would make future national Republican electoral wins impossible. They thought they were approaching an era of total victory. At least in the sense of congressional majorities and winning every presidential election and then those presidents appointing federal judges. Which is a clear path to total federal control.

But it just didn't work. Trump won Hispanic men 3 months ago ago. The more Hispanics are eligible to vote, the more they vote like white people. I see a future in which a significant minority of Americans are Hispanic, and when they fill out government forms they check the "Hispanic (and white)" box, then vote accordingly. And as of 8 years ago, 1/3 of American Hispanics married non-Hispanics. They are assimilating into American white culture in a rather literal sense. Barely behind American Asians in interracial marriage rates.

Yes, I think this is correct. From what I can see, Hispanics often aspire to become American, and that means owning a small business, getting married, sending kids to school, having enough money to have a nice house...all the things that make you a quintessential GOP voter.

I'm reminded often of the fact one of the first, if not THE first, official Presidential campaign ads in Spanish was from the Bush 2000 campaign. The fact that hispanic voters are by every metric natural GOP voters (religious, family-oriented, anti-socialist, pro-immigration control) yet continued to vote Democrat was one of the great political headscratchers of the 00s-10s. It's been surprisingly vindicating to watch that vote trend in the way I long believed it "should" trend.

Hispanics aren't that religious(less so than blacks) or socially conservative(again, less so than blacks, muslims, or republicans). Notably up until recently church attending white Catholics were far more likely to vote D than church attending white protestants, too, and we can probably expect that to generalize.

Hispanics are normies with some quirks. When the democrats are wedded to insane ideas about gender and an anti-growth mindset, that makes them natural republicans, but in 2010 democrats were not, so hispanics voted mostly D because they're poorer than average. Assimilation(and red tribe culture is much easier for poor second gen immigrants to grok- football might not be their sport but they understand the concept of sports pretty easily, country music might not be their genre but it's closer than rap, upward mobility as a good thing even if it isn't huge status boost, suburban lifestyles are popular with anyone who has access to them, etc), the move of church attending Catholics towards the republicans(driven by social issues polarization changing from 'one party is mostly liberal and one party is mostly conservative, with considerable exceptions' to 'one party wants to make social conservatism illegal or at least officially frowned upon and one party wants to enshrine protections for social conservatism'), and the recent insanity of the democrats are the main factors. Add in racial/ethnic tensions between blacks and hispanics(seriously, the two groups do not like each other) that don't exist between hispanics and whites, and upwards mobility which makes the GOP more appealing, and you've got a formula for hispanics moving towards the right.

Which is why I think people on the left and the right should be careful about memeing "Brazilification" into being. Maybe instead lefties should take this opportunity to consider the many benefits of federalism that righties have been screaming about for literal centuries and maybe righties should let them beat a graceful retreat back to California instead of fighting to the death over the scepter of federal power that was never meant to be.

I'm not exactly pro-abortion but trans-border abortion bounty laws are sort of proof for why that won't work out. That, and the fact that states can't tax nonresidents to prevent people from taking advantage of their services but living in a lower-tax jurisdiction. (America as a whole can tax nonresidents, and that's a good thing-- citizenship has privileges and duties.)

That being said, as a thought experiment, I do actually wonder how a truly federalized america would actually work out. I imagine the federal government would tax states by their land value to fund nationally-relevant institutions like the military, NASA, and NOAA, but leave control of welfare and commerce to the states. Probably there would be pretty complicated internal politics as states take competition-over-industry to the next level, with the larger states involved in dirigiste intervention to make sure the businesses providing services are headquartered within them. California could tariff texan companies as a retaliation for Ted Cruz existing, for example, while floridian anti-trust law could force google to operate a local subsidiary with partial state ownership and knowledge transfer.

I'm not exactly pro-abortion but trans-border abortion bounty laws are sort of proof for why that won't work out.

Mmm yes this reminds me of fugitive slave laws in some ways.

That, and the fact that states can't tax nonresidents to prevent people from taking advantage of their services but living in a lower-tax jurisdiction.

Arguably this is a feature. But states can tax nonresidents. For instance, if you aren't a resident of a state, but you keep a car there, you are supposed to register the car in that state.

California could tariff texan companies as a retaliation for Ted Cruz existing, for example, while floridian anti-trust law could force google to operate a local subsidiary with partial state ownership and knowledge transfer.

Well part of the point of the OG Constitution was specifically to prevent this by gently removing commerce from the hands of the states, while letting them retain power over most local regulatory and criminal law. Nowadays the federal government has a lot of say about that!

Arguably this is a feature. But states can tax nonresidents. For instance, if you aren't a resident of a state, but you keep a car there, you are supposed to register the car in that state.

Let's be real here: the vast majority of these laws are toothless. I guess at least in theory states could mandate the tracking and taxing of out-of-staters at all times, but that doesn't remove the concern of sick people demanding residency so they can access services... unless, I guess, we make state residency requirements as onerous as federal nationalization requirements. I can kind of see how that system would work-- after all, I'm in favor of open national borders so people can come to live and work here without restriction, but see the utility behind withholding, e.g. SS, medicare, medicaid, etc. until after the ~10 year naturalization process. (Birthright citizenship should stay, but that's because babies are power. If you have your kid in on american soil they belong to uncle sam now.)

Well part of the point of the OG Constitution was specifically to prevent this by gently removing commerce from the hands of the states, while letting them retain power over most local regulatory and criminal law. Nowadays the federal government has a lot of say about that!

You have to remember that the "OG" wasn't the constitution, it was the articles of confederation. The constitution was a reaction to the articles being too weak. To the extent that the federal government is too strong, the constitution is to blame, because it was developed with the specific purpose of forcing the states to cooperate. Maybe the supreme court could have interpreted specific clauses differently, but in the end, it wouldn't have mattered-- the constitution can be amended, or worked around. Neither of those things are trivial, but they're bound to happen when the structural incentives are strong enough. Just look at the department of education, for example. Countries that require and encourage a high level of trans-regional political-economic-cultural unity are inevitably bound to develop some sort of centralized control apparatus for education. The fact that "regulating education" isn't one of the enumerated powers doesn't matter, because it's not strictly illegal for congress to fund educational institutions, and large carrots are isomorphic to sticks.

The only way to make america permanently less unitary would be to give states back the instruments of economic belligerence-- border controls, tarriffs, their own coinage, etcetera. Not that I think that's a good idea, of course. (Ref: constant EU dysfunction.)

I guess at least in theory states could mandate the tracking and taxing of out-of-staters at all times

I mean - it's not really practical to bar out-of-staters from enjoying your parks and highways, I agree. If you want out of staters not to access your schools or disability benefits you can simply require a state-issued ID or other proof of residency. I think this is probably typical, actually, although I haven't tried to access anything along those lines for a while and therefore can't speak to it.

Maybe the supreme court could have interpreted specific clauses differently

I mean I do think they could have decided what constituted interstate commerce in a...more restrained fashion, yes.

The only way to make america permanently less unitary would be to give states back the instruments of economic belligerence-- border controls, tarriffs, their own coinage, etcetera.

I think there are other, less forceful ways to do it! America is permanently(?) less unitary because the Obama administration decided not to enforce federal drug law, and by the way that the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs, for instance. You could likely continue to make America less unitary by removing direct election of Senators, by (to take your example, and something that plausibly may happen soon) trimming the Department of Education into a machine for distributing block-grant funding and administering student loans, by shredding federal firearms regulations, etc.

Now, you might object that these changes can be rolled back - and fair - but that's also true (as you point out) of giving states back the instruments of economic belligerence. I'm not sure that making America less unitary is by itself a laudable goal, though - but what I do think is laudable is ensuring that the states can function as "laboratories of democracy." This requires the federal government to do some things (protect them from invasion), permits the federal government to do others (highways I guess) and I think should discourage the federal government from doing others (e.g. writing a federal housing code).

but that's also true (as you point out) of giving states back the instruments of economic belligerence.

I think either I misspoke, or you misinterpreted what I wrote. If the government gave the states back their commerce power that would permanently increase federalization because it would dramatically change the incentives available to the states and their citizens. But short of that, not much would change. I think across the multiverse that most versions of america would convergently evolve something like the department of education, even if it had a slightly different role or function in response to the initial conditions of its creation.

Now, there is a caveat to all this. Though many aspects of the federal bureacracy serve a real purpose, that doesn't mean that they're destined to grow indefinitely. For that reason, I suspect that trump will manage to-- in the medium term-- cut the DOE back. In fact, I think the very existence of trump is proof that there's a sort of logistic growth curve for federal agencies. Agencies start small, grow rapidly as they become popular for solving the lowest-hanging problems, then exceed their carrying capacity and become bloated and therefore unpopular and subject to cuts. And we're obviously in an "exceeded the carrying capacity" era, vis-a-vis deficit spending.

But in the longest term, I think the DOE is more-or-less guaranteed to bounce back. The state apparatus is something darwinistically selected for the ability to increase its own carrying capacity. If we were at the knife-point of optimization where no additional changes could be made to the government to increase its absolute ability to generate revenue then it would be permanently doomed, but we're far from fully-optimized in terms for taxation. Even ignoring the possibility for technological economic growth, we're quite far from the bureaucratic state-of-the-art. Switching to the land value taxe, for example, would permanently move the laffer curve to the right-- governments could extract a higher total share of taxes for any given level of free-market economic performance.

Meanwhile, the "federal housing code" thing you mention would be, I think, destined to fail for essentially the same reason the current "federal drug code" is failing. That being, that housing-- and drugs-- are locally and culturally specific in a way that doesn't benefit from the federal government trying to enforce nationwide uniformity.

Putting that all together:

I think there are other, less forceful ways to do it! America is permanently(?) less unitary because the Obama administration decided not to enforce federal drug law, and by the way that the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs, for instance. You could likely continue to make America less unitary by removing direct election of Senators, by (to take your example, and something that plausibly may happen soon) trimming the Department of Education into a machine for distributing block-grant funding and administering student loans, by shredding federal firearms regulations, etc.

Removing direct election of Senators would plausibly alter the power calculus, but trimming the DOE is either structurally predetermined or guaranteed to fail.

If the government gave the states back their commerce power that would permanently increase federalization because it would dramatically change the incentives available to the states and their citizens.

Or people wouldn't like it and would return the commerce power to the feds, just like they did last time – that's what I meant.

That being, that housing-- and drugs-- are locally and culturally specific in a way that doesn't benefit from the federal government trying to enforce nationwide uniformity.

This is also true of education! Which, to sort of play in to your point – it is possible that the path that worked in the past, or that we took in the past, was not guaranteed to be the best path forward, or the best path now. Even if, as your suggest, certain outcomes in the past were predetermined, that does not necessarily imply the same thing in the future. If Team Trump transforms the Department of Education into a block grant funding machine, it's possible that will work considerably better than the prior department and nobody will want to change it back.

Removing direct election of Senators would plausibly alter the power calculus, but trimming the DOE is either structurally predetermined or guaranteed to fail.

I am not convinced history is quite this inflexible.

I'm reminded of two things here. First is the discussions about the supposed "democratic backsliding" into "electoral authoritarianism" in Hungary. When I've asked people just what's so "authoritarian" about Orbán, beyond him just winning massive electoral majorities as an unacceptably right-wing candidate, and I get vague handwaving about the media and him having an "unfair" advantage. Whereupon I make comparison's to the Time magazine "election fortification" article and ask what the difference is, beyond that Orbán's actions aren't even so much that sort of "fortifying" as they are preventing left-leaning media from doing so in Hungary. Mostly, the answer ends up in angry sputtering that reduces to "it's different when we do it." The more coherent defenses end up being about how 2020 "fortification" was different because it was the media putting their thumbs on the metaphorical scale to influence election outcomes of their own accord, which is perfectly democratic, and thus it's interfering with their ability to do so that is "authoritarian." Because it's long been the media's job to determine a candidate's "electability" — to enforce the limits of which candidates and positions are "acceptable," and which are too far to the right. Because we've long ago accepted that "democracy" does not mean unfettered majority rule, therefore we can limit the voters' choices as much as we want, let an unelected bureaucracy decide the vast majority of political issues, put as many popular positions "off limits" as we want, so long as you have two candidates who aren't literal clones (a la Futurama), and you can vote between a corporate tax rate of 25% and 30%, it's still fully democratic. And we're a representative democracy… which means our politicians are supposed to "represent" us the way a parent or guardian represents a small child, or a person with power of attorney represents a demented elder or a schizophrenic mental patient: by doing what the expert consensus says is in the people's best interest, whether the people like it or not.

Second, there's what someone on Tumblr pointed out about recent media articles, about how the USAID freeze is threatening various "independent media" organizations, because they "rely on" said funding to remain viable. As the Tumblrite noted, quite early in the thesaurus entry for synonyms to "rely" is "depend." And if you depend on USAID funding to keep operating, how are you "independent"? Which, of course, undermines the whole bit above about how 'it's different when the "independent media" does it,' and makes it very much more 'it's "democracy" when the left does it and "authoritarianism" when the right does it.' While I wouldn't go as far as Neema Parvini does in declaring he was "90% right" and Yarvin "100% wrong" on their respective models of the system, recent events do make the media institutions look less like they're purely ideologically captured, and more like they're downstream from various deep pockets. (Much like how I've seen academics argue that much of academia's political slant is driven by pursuit of grant money.) That this is less the leaderless, incentive-driven emergent behavior "prospiracy" that some would have it, and more a matter of old-fashioned top-down political coordination via patronage networks; which is a lot harder to defend, except by "we're the good guys, it's good when we do it" tribalist appeals.

Unapologetic whataboutism is the best kind. It's no good when people say 'I decided the subject of discussion will be something that paints me in a good light and you in a bad light. No it's actually a fallacy if you try and do the reverse'. The rhetorical tool of whataboutism favours those with the bigger megaphone, those with agenda-setting power.

The problem for the thesis that Trump is going to usher in an era of “unfair elections” is that the system has worked this way from the literal inception of the American government. The electoral college has long overpowered urban areas in elections, to the point where California with 50+ electoral votes, alongside other large urban centers like New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas, etc. are so important to the presidency that they spend most of their energy trying to win those states. The last election hinged on three states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia. If you live in Wyoming, your vote literally doesn’t matter. Your whole state gets three votes. If Pennsylvania and Michigan wanted to have Wyoming nuked as a major election issue, pack your bags, because you’re getting the bomb.

To be honest, this is the veneer rubbing off to the point that most people can now see what our Republic always was. We were always a nation ruled by the coastal elites, pushing those concerns and values. The question is what to do now with a brief window in which the peasant population in flyover states is given brief control over the levers of power. And this is where the “our democracy” rhetoric is coming from. Not because we are losing democracy, we never really had it. But now the left is on the side the right is usually on, and they don’t like it. They don’t like having alien values forced on them, or having their institutions disempowered. So this is the end of democracy.

Who is spending money on winning California or New York? Republicans haven't broken 40% in 20 years in California, and except for the last election, ny is the same.

In fact the classic criticism of the electoral college is that if you live in CA or NY then your vote doesn't matter. The ad spending bears this out. And this isn't a new trend - twenty years ago candidates were also focusing little on California and New York and way way more on Ohio.

It doesn’t matter if your a red tribe Californian as the state has three huge blue urban centers that outweigh the red vote, so the state is a lock for tge blues. The state isn’t competitive, but on a federal level, if you removed those few locked in states, the country is actually far redder than most people actually believe. Further, there are states that are only blue because of a huge blue city in an otherwise red state. Illinois has been this way for decades. 99% of tge state are red tribe. The state is solid blue because of Chicago.

Yes, cities are blue, this is a fact.

Nevertheless, it's obviously false that presidential candidates are elected by the coastal elites or that candidates spend most of their energy on California and New York.

The majority of ad dollars and pandering do not go to convincing the coastal elites. The coastal elite vote is, as they say, priced in.

At best you can say that the coastal elite in California mean that the rest of the votes in the state don't matter. Of course, this is simply a popular vote, so it's a little strange to call them an elite when they apparently have the majority opinion in the state.

if you removed those few locked in states, the country is actually far redder than most people actually believe.

I agree, if you remove all the democrat voters the country would be red like you wouldn't believe.

As a point of fact, the state, like almost all states is winner take all, either by district or in the case of the president, the entire state. So the state goes democratic, and because of that, Democrats get an automatic 54 votes for president.

And the huge locked in states have basically kept democrats in the game much more than they would be if they weren’t guaranteed the entire state of California. Removing the large locked in states means Ds get something like 108 electoral votes in the presidential election rather than the close race we see. Now yes, some of this is organic but because those states are winner takes all, it’s a huge boost to blues to have 150 or more votes locked in before a vote even occurs.

Yes, by land area the US is more red, but deciding that land area is what matters is even more ridiculous than the people who think the popular vote is all that should matter. Chicago dominates Illinois because the population of Illinois is under 13 million people and the population of chicago and its suburbs is almost 10 million people.

You're justifying in terms of capital-centric paradigm that doesn't work at a continental scale.

One of the historical failing points of empires / large states is that the capital politics is going to prioritize the benefits of the capital region to the disadvantage of the peripheries. The periphery regions, in turn, begin to build up grievances and divisions against the capital regions, which- over time and exasperation- can lead to resistance / revolts / insurgencies that threaten the capital's ability to control the peripheries, particularly when the costs of trying to maintain control threaten the ability of the capital elites to maintain control. This elite capacity is further complicated by the willingness of elites to trade off elements of the periphery for personal advantage in control over the rest, or the ability of external states to support the periphery against the core.

Historically, there are three main outcomes of this: (a) the peripheries are lost until the capital reaches an equilibrium of being able to maintain control as a small-to-medium state, (b) an extensively resourced suppression state apparatus is built and maintained to suppress separation for as long as the means to do so are available, or (c), the core region's institutional powers are deliberately limited so as force greater consideration of the periphery territory's interests.

The US, as a federalist system, commits to (c), which in turn allows the periphery power centers to become miniature capital centers and dominate their peripheries... but only to the point within the system. The California elite can dominate California, but it can't dominate the power center of Nevada. The California elite can't in turn build their own suppression state, and so have to balance how they deal with people with the ability of people to migrate out. If California were to leave the protections of the federalist system, the capital-periphery dynamic of the state would change- not least because they could be supported by the now-external federalist state to break apart the California core zones against the periphery zones (see the prospect of California spin-off states).

The inverse of that federalist system, however, is the systemic protection of the voting power of the periphery states against capital-group interests. This means states who power is in a sense decided by land area (namely- they control an area of land sufficient to be a state, which has equal senate representation).

Rather than being a ridiculous way to allocate power in a system, this is the way to have a federal system in the first place once you hit a point where core centers of power can no longer maintain control of the peripheries. The alternatives are for a still-born system where periphery states wouldn't join in the first place, or a suppression-state system which the periphery states wouldn't willingly join in the first place and would have much higher tendencies to fight back against.

Systems where a populated core dominates the periphery aren't formed of willing members, they are conquered or converted from more restricted beginnings. There are reasons that even the EU has gotten less stable as it has tried to concentrate powers that functionally consolidate the influence of the core regions (Germany and France) at the expense of periphery regions.

If I were arguing for using the popular vote instead of the electoral college you might have a point but that's not my position. Neither is it my position that Chicago should be allowed to impose its culture and rules on wider Illinoisans. The capital of Illinois isn't even Chicago as a concession to this idea that the wider state ought not be totally dominated. What voting rule specifically do you even advocate here? That the ~20% of Illinoisans who don't live in Chicago but own a great deal of much cheaper land outside of the metropolitan area should dominate? It's going to be a hard sell to say that farmers are treated poorly by the federal government given how large farm subsidies are.

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New York State is the same way. Georgia is competitive for democrats for the same reason.

I’m going to steelman him a bit- the USA becoming a hybrid regime is indeed a specific danger of a Republican dynasty founded by a Trump successor winning in ‘28. Abbott/Vance/Desantis/Don jr are all probably more competent and ruthlessly power-hungry than Trump himself.

The main danger to democrats’ electoral prospects is their absolute and steadfast insistence on purging anyone who suggests moderating on issues in which they are unpopular. This is a limiting factor to their ability to have the kind of winning streak you need for a hybrid regime, especially if the civil service is going back to the spoils system, and it’s deeply structural to the party. The staffers and over educated progressive wing seriously expect to be in charge and the democrats have so far shown no interest in moving outside their bubbles.

By contrast the Orthodox Jews and conservative Catholics staffing the republican political machine understand they’re a junior coalition partner and settle for minor concessions. Republicans also tend to have a better farm team for recruiting good candidates.

The main danger to democrats’ electoral prospects is their absolute and steadfast insistence on purging anyone who suggests moderating on issues in which they are unpopular.

Can I make a counter argument for capital-D Democratic municipal government? Specifically, planning commissions/zoning boards, etc.

You cannot build housing in blue cities without a huge fight. Changes in density are opposed. New construction on vacant lots is opposed as gentrification. Construction that requires no zoning waivers makes the local busybodies angry if they can’t demand input for new housing that already meets all existing laws/requirements.

The amount of negotiation and community hearings drag out the process and developers have their capital tied up for additional months, so they can’t afford to build as much as they otherwise might.

Nationally, the number of units of housing per capita has declined, as housing stock hasn’t kept pace with population growth.

But red states have less regulation, and often laws that restrict the power of local planning commissions and zoning boards. We’re, nationally, in a supply-side housing affordability crisis. But it’s not as bad in red states. And while not mono-causal, it has been significantly shaping population growth.

Blue states like NY, CA, and IL are seeing their populations decline and housing costs are a huge driver. MN’s population is roughly stagnant. All four of these states are currently projected to lose seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as electoral college votes if trends don’t reverse before the 2030 census. The reapportionment of house seats and EC votes will happen before the 2032 elections.

Red states like TX, FL, TN, MT are projected to be the recipients of those lost blu state house seats and EC votes.

Interest in politics in the social media age has collapsed focus onto national politics. But meanwhile, municipal Democratic politicians may have inadvertently given the Republicans a huge structural advantage set to kick in, in seven years.

If a mixture of R and D voters are leaving blue states, this dilutes red states - actually a substantial structural flaw in the Republican electoral map. Same is true if mostly D votes leave, until the incredibly unlikely scenario where enough D votes leave to change Senate elections in previously blue states.

If R-leaning voters are leaving blue states for red states, this only moves the house if the R-leaning voters are coming from House districts that weren't already R-leaning.

If R-leaning voters are leaving predominantly blue districts in predominantly blue states for predominantly red or purple states, that could create a House advantage - assuming it doesn't get gerrymandered away during redistricting.

There's a very narrow path to D municipal governance having any significant structural impact on elections. I think it's correct to suggest their greatest threat lies elsewhere.

It is, actually, more republicans than democrats moving out of blue states and into red ones, though. Texas’s transplants are the reason Ted Cruz is still a senator.

Again, this only matters if they're leaving D-leaning districts. If they're being chased out of the tiny handful of R-leaning districts, this is just changing the letters after the R in the House seat.

IIRC the average transplant to Texas comes from Las Angeles.

I mean sure, but how is that a counter argument? If anything it reinforces my point.

It's interesting to see this written from the opposite perspective since it's a constant complaint on /r/politics that Republicans falsely accuse Democrats of doing $BAD_THING and then later actually do $BAD_THING themselves claiming they're just reacting. Of course, that interpretation relies on the belief that Republicans were actually lying.

To be concrete, you mention the example of the IRS targeting conservative organizations under Obama. The Democrats' narrative on that is that it's a misinterpretation of the facts: there was no targeting of conservative organizations, those organizations were just bad at doing their taxes due to a combination of the grassroots part of the Tea Party movement just legitimately being new to running organizations and getting things wrong and anti-tax advocates unsurprisingly not being the best at actually paying their taxes. I'm sure there's been plenty written about which side is right, but my point is that the author of the article probably actually believes that those examples are not symmetric.

What about debanking? Is there any symmetry there?

I'm sorry, I don't understand the question. Wikipedia tells me "debanking" in the United refers to banks freezing crypto assets dropping Muslim clients? Neither of these I'm familiar with and I'm not seeing them mentioned in the top-level comment I replied to, although there's a lot of links, so I may have missed something.

Obama's Operation Choke Point allegedly pressured banks to stop serving gun-related businesses.

Also crypto. Sorry for the salon link but I wanted the bipartisan angle.

Thanks. I do remember hearing about that now that you mention it. I don't have anything to add past the links you provided, though.

It's just one of those irregular verbs.

I am targeted, you are bad at filing taxes, he must explain how all his activities, including the prayer meetings are considered educational as defined under 501(c)(3), explain in detail the activities at these prayer meetings and provide the percentage of time his group spends on prayer groups as compared with other activities of the organization.

This is interesting because I think the government should influence the peoples political opinions. Democratic competition naturally encourages division. If the losing side gets to stick around and try again indefinitely, you quickly end up with a whole lot of people who are really angry about how at least half the decisions went. You want a population that mostly agrees with each other as a backdrop against which the current battles are fought, and unless you believe in the right side of history to a truely insane extent, thats not gonna happen on its own.

What distinguishes this from authoritarianism? Perhaps here we can steelman Levitsky and Way: The left, for all the questionable things they may have done, really have influenced public opinion to a great degree. By contrast, the measures that they worry about with Trump would attack relatively "late in the pipeline" - prosecuting rival candidates for example doesnt do a lot for public opinion, but its good at winning elections. Obviously, this kind of influence has failed eventually, as shown by Trump 2x (and maybe some of the more extreme measures against him are because of that), but maybe as an optimistic lefty you see this as an abberation - bad macroeconomic luck, or the left overplaying their hand, or something like that. Certainly it seems easier for the left to regain this influence, than for the right to build its own version in 4 years. So a republican competitive autocracy would look like those third-world examples, and a democrat one wouldnt necessarily. Here I go doomering again I guess.

See this is where I disagree vehemently. To have the government effectively decide where the Overton Window sits and basically indoctrinate its people into a set of beliefs and values in order to swing the elections is tyrannical. And at least in a bad old tyranny there was a limit to the things that a tyrannical regime would care about. The old tyrant wanted my loyalty, he wanted my obedience. He did not, however care if I agreed with trans ideology, if I agree with blank slatism, if I think that Israel or Palestinians are in the right. That is honestly something I’d rather like about a monarchy or something like that. Instead of having to teach everyone to agree that we need to support some side in a conflict, you just tell me we’re sending weapons to Kazakhstan and be done with it. Instead of teaching my kids to see trans as an option, just decide you’re allowing it and leave my kid alone.

I feel like no democratic society actually is allowed to have an organic culture because it’s all being manipulated all the time. You’re being told what you must think and believe by professional opinion shapers rather than allowing opinions to develop naturally.

In particular there are always motives for a government in control of the Overton Window to push the window towards Big Government and away from checks & balances.

Not only that but weakening any competition. Churches and the family are competition for the loyalty and power of the state. A state full of strong families doesn’t need to provide nearly as many social services. Because the wife raises the kids, they grow up healthy and well adjusted, achieve more, and are less likely to engage in self-destructive or criminal behavior. But this leaves a lot less need for government intervention in social structures. A society of weak families needs government services: subsidized daycare, welfare, addiction counseling, abortion, etc. and to boot is less able to teach its children itself which means less competition for the tender minds of the youth. The same is true at larger scale of churches and communities. Yet, to listen to modern culture, none of that is true. The modern culture, through every organ teaches that parents are at best clueless, and at worst bigoted. Women must be protected from their husbands, schools must act bravely to protect kids who want to change their gender, etc. now abuse can and does happen, but it’s much much rarer than it’s held out to be by official organs. And again the same applies to churches and communities: the abuse and rabid fundamentalism the public is told to fear are rarer than advertised.

But all of those are competition. So the public must be taught to be selfish (to break community bonds), to fear religion (which provides help and might contradict the government on some issue), and to prioritize everything else over the family (and thus remove competition for values and services).

For an extremely literal example, see kulturkampf- although the German state lost that time, this has been an enduring tendency of German centralization of power.

Congratulations: this is a point that makes considerable sense in retrospect that I hadn't seen before. Thank you!

I understand that you feel that way, but I think youre not engaging with my arguments at all. Im not saying the government should "decide what the overton window is". I think they should apply some effort to persuasion. The whole reason youre worried youd have to agree with trans ideology is that your country is already so divided that theres two diametrically opposed ideologies which can change places based on 2% fluctuations of the vote. Wouldnt it be great if you hadnt gotten into this situation to begin with?

We worry a lot about factions in power being corrupted by that power, but we should also worry about factions out of power developing unrealistic and insane standards because they can afford to. In your comment below, you like church, family, and community: do those work without something to pull the people in them towards agreement? No, but you arent paranoid about it there because youre not worried about the enemy tribe. Very well then: have a national divorce, once, and then run your government as I described. Dont raise paranoia into a general principle which would in the end tear down that new nation as well. The liberal principle of the separation of state and society that you want to use to protect traditional institutions, is the same principle by which the state thinks it needs to protect individuals from them.

But the thing is that you can only actually get there by manufacturing consent. The only way to get from a very divided situation of a 2% swing on a major issue like trans, and especially trans kids is to do exactly what was done (and had been done previously to normalize gayness and before that integration) take control of the education and mass media systems and pump the culture with pro trans content. Which is why kids are getting easy-read books in their schools so that five year olds can be taught tge wonders of grown men pretending to be women. And then when they turn on the TV every citizen will be given hours of such propaganda and every show must have a token gay, trans or bisexual character.

If people were honestly coming to the conclusion that such things were good, fine. But that’s not how most of this stuff happens. Most of the ideas that we have consensus on are not coming about from people in their own homes and communities wrestling with the issue and spontaneously deciding to go along. It’s people being subjected to propaganda, then eventually accepting that they have to go along because they don’t want to be seen as the bigot. And eventually they are made to understand that HR will be+displeased if they say such crimethink out loud.

The only way to get from a very divided situation

I agree, thats going to be diffcult to get out of either way. But if you could start out in a situation without problems like that, do you think theres no reliable way to prevent opinions from shifting too far apart other than evilbad propaganda?

Stop resting the legitimacy of government decisions on the backs of the peasants. When there was a monarchy, people didn’t try to convince the peasants, they tried to convince the king.

Lucan Way is no less distinguished. Well, maybe a litte less--the University of Toronto is not even the Harvard of Canada, much less the Harvard of, well, Harvard.

If anything is the Harvard of Canada it's the U of T, but perhaps you mean to suggest that's not saying much.

If anything is the Harvard of Canada it's the U of T, but perhaps you mean to suggest that's not saying much.

That was ever-so-slightly tongue-in-cheek bait for the enjoyment of McGill stans. Though my understanding is that they are close in many ways--U of T generally ranks higher in U.S. News, but McGill is both slightly older and generally held to have the finer medical school.


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