site banner
PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   35488 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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

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

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

  • Shaming.

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

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3
Bottom New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

So, I can often be found posting on here complaining about bias in medicine (although I disagree about some of the kinds of bias with quite a few posters here).

We do have something of an update to a long running story that’s worth sharing.

Meddit link for more discussion and detail: https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1jotpzz/follow_up_on_the_study_showing_discrepancies_in/

Basically, awhile back there was a headline about how black babies received worse outcomes when care for by white doctors. Apparently, this went so far as to get cited in the supreme court.

Sometime later someone on Meddit (which is still quite pro-woke) noticed that they forgot to control for birth weight, which would likely completely kill the effect size (explanation: white physicians have more training and take care of sicker babies who have worse outcomes). At the time there was a significant amount of speculation essentially going “how do you miss this? That would be the first you would control for.”

Well, it turns out that someone filed a FOIA request and well, to quote Reddit:

“A reporter filed a FOIA request for correspondence between authors and reviewers of the article and found that the study did see a survival benefit with racial concordance between physician and patient, however it was only with white infants and physicians. They removed lines in the paper *stating that it does not fit the narrative that they sought to publish with the study.” *

While I often criticize medicine for being political, I’m often found here telling people to trust the experts when it comes to (certain aspects) of COVID or whatever, and well this kinda stuff makes it very very hard.

The initial findings were passed around very uncritically and sent up all the way to the supreme court.

How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back? How do we stop people from doing this kind of thing? I just don’t know.

This is the professional website of the study's lead author

This is me reading tea-leaves a little bit, but some things stand out to me.

The majority of his academic background is in business (MBA) and a fanci-fied version of IT. His professional experience was with CACI which is laughably described as a "mid-size" consulting firm. CACI is a notorious "body shop" Beltway Bandit that makes billions of dollars off of staff augmentation for Federal Contracts. Their own website states they employ about 25,000 people.

This provides a mental model, at least, of how this study - and its accompanying malfeasance - came into being. This is a consultant in a classroom. "What does the client want as an outcome? Racism. Okay, great! We can work the numbers to make it say that."

In the Daily Caller piece that the reddit post links to, they have a screenshot of this guy's Microsoft Word comments - one of them literally says, "this is not the story we're trying to tell." This is straight out of a consulting 101 MBA class.

At some point in the 2000s, Academia became a kind of side option career for people who aren't actually serious academics or researchers. You could pickup up a PhD from somewhere in something and then get associate or adjunct status. Sure, this salary wasn't great, but it gave you that credential to pass around as a digital hustler - you could go on podcasts, do paid speaking engagements, consult on the side for $300 an hour. It was a weird kind of self-reputation-maxxing. And that's part of the real long term rot of the academy. If you got a PhD in the 1950s or before, it's because you were almost monkish in your devotion to serious study in a field.

How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back? How do we stop people from doing this kind of thing? I just don’t know.

I say this of any institution public or private. The answer to restoring trust is a simple but apparently too difficult to actually do — be trustworthy. It’s kind of a crazy question. When doctors lie and misrepresent the truth, when they openly try to manipulate the public into believing things that are not supported by research in order to get them to obey, or when they push unneeded drugs and treatments on people, it’s easy to lose trust. And I find the loss of trust in medical professionals and institutions to be actually dangerous because honestly most people are horrible at understanding health information without a doctor to help them.

More directly:

Being untrustworthy should come with fairly immediate consequences upon revelation.

And you should DEFINITELY be kicked from any position of trust and banned from future ones.

That sort of mentality would probably do a lot for police reform, too.

Yep. I think it was Yudkowsky who had a list of possible police reforms in the wake of the Death of George Floyd that included immediate and permanent removal of any police officer who is involved in the death of an unarmed person during an interaction. They just cannot work in law enforcement thereafter.

Drastic, but if there's an extremely low rate of deaths in police interactions (that's a claim the pro-police side usually makes) then it restores trust to know that no cop will ever be put back on the streets after killing someone without justification. And of course, prison time can still result if there wasn't justification. Minimal cost overall.

It would be really handy to remove the massive 'benefit of the doubt' that goes in favor of on-duty cops that allows the actual nasty/predatory ones to act with impunity for far longer than they would if they were held to the standard of a normal citizen. And it aligns incentives so that cops are really motivated to avoid doing anything life-threatening to unarmed persons.

At its core, that is what feels like is the major problem. Incentives aren't aligned in a way that points towards outcome everyone wants. We'd all like to be able to take scientific research seriously and NOT have to be immediately skeptical. Scientists would like to believe they're pushing boundaries of knowledge forward and have some social prestige from that pursuit. We want policies to be informed by good, accurate, reliable information, while accounting for uncertainties.

But that requires screwups to be uncovered and corrected quickly and bad actors to be removed before they cause too much damage. It ain't what we have currently.

Yudkowsky who had a list of possible police reforms in the wake of the Death of George Floyd that included immediate and permanent removal of any police officer who is involved in the death of an unarmed person during an interaction

I remember seeing this from Yudkowsky and thinking it was ridiculous and yet another example of how unserious a person he is. Many ""unarmed"" people killed by the police attack a cop and try to take their gun. You cannot "unarmed" fight a cop. That's a fight with a gun involved.

Perhaps, but look at the exact context of the incident that led to this.

George Floyd died while he was in handcuffs, face to the floor, with a grown man kneeling on top of him. He was 'unarmed' by any fair definition of the word.

A lot of people believe the cop's actions killed him, a lot of people believe it didn't, and say it was probably the drugs. Indeed, the mainstream conservative position is turning into Derek Chauvin deserves a pardon.

The rule proposed by Yudkowsky cuts the knot and just removes any 'bad' cops from the job even if we don't know for sure they're bad cops, so as to restore trust to the police as a whole, where the people who believe ACAB at least see that there's a consequence for the death of 'innocent' (yeah, I know I know) people in police encounters, and the "law and order" people can see that its the simple application of a facially neutral rule that holds the police to a 'high' but not unfair standard.

George Floyd was murdered and his murderer is currently in prison. The system worked, to the degree it does for handling murderers after the fact.

I would rather point to Michael Brown of "hands up, don't shoot" fame. He severely beat a cop with his bare hands. Fractured skull while in a car wearing a seat belt level beating. But Mr. Brown failed to take the cop's gun despite trying. Many cops have retention holsters and merely grabbing the grip of their gun and pulling won't get it out. Michael Brown then briefly ran away, but stopped, turned and charged the cop. It was then this cop defensively and justifiably shot an unarmed man to death.

Despite attempted railroading by the Obama administration, this cop escaped criminal punishment for his entirely justified defensive shooting of an unarmed man. Good thing Yudkowsky doesn't have some special veto power to punish this cop regardless. There's a reason we don't just cut knots. We need unruined un-carved-apart basic government institutions.

How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back?

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, a powerful immortal trickster being ("Q") who has tangled with the Enterprise many times appears on the bridge of the Enterprise. He tells a story of having his powers stripped for his sins and begs the crew's help. The crew are, understandably, skeptical. He plaintively claims to be mortal and asks what he can do to convince the crew that he is indeed mortal. The Enterprise's Klingon security officer has the answer:

Die.

Die

Very funny Worf, eat any good books lately?

Wouldn't a powerful immortal trickster be able to successfully trick some muggles into believing he was dead (e.g. and then engage them again as a different person)?

Yeah, that's why everyone was reluctant to trust him.

How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back?

The same way you get trust back in a normal human relationship: you apologize unreservedly, make concrete steps to prevent the issue happening again, and accept that it will be a long time (if ever!) before the trust is rebuilt to what it used to be.

In this case, that means that first, everyone who repeated this false evidence needs to retract it, and apologize for their error in repeating it. No holding back because they think that fighting racism is a noble goal, no minimizing to try to avoid reputation damage, nothing. Full on admit the fault and apologize. Second, this man himself needs to be banned from ever doing research again without supervision from someone more trustworthy. Third, publications which repeated this falsified research need to brainstorm a plan for how they will catch future problems like this, and that should include a good honest look at how their own biases helped it to happen (because I have very little doubt they didn't check too closely because this research confirmed some editors' biases).

The medical profession needs to do that not only for this case, but for any other cases that come to light. And then wait. They will no doubt be beaten up in the short term by people who are angry at having been betrayed. They will get this thrown back in their faces from time to time. But eventually, if they are patient and keep acting with integrity, the wound will (probably) heal and the trust will be back. It's not an easy or fast process though.

The same way you get trust back in a normal human relationship: you apologize unreservedly, make concrete steps to prevent the issue happening again, and accept that it will be a long time (if ever!) before the trust is rebuilt to what it used to be.

That's not how it works with institutions. They lack that kind of singular agency and direction. There is no Emperor Of Medicine that can credibly make that kind of commitment.

There was no Emperor of Medicine that made medical professionals overall trustworthy to the general public in the first place, either. I'm thinking that it was probably done piecemeal, by having doctors be credible by actually correctly diagnosing and fixing problems based on research that other doctors did, and having organizations that certified these people as competent being correlated with these doctors actually being competent, and the like. So this could be repeated, where whatever organization these researchers are part of taking the steps SubstantialFrivolity suggested, and this being repeated by other organizations whose employees and associates did similarly untrustworthy things. If the organizations are too big with diffuse responsibility, then we can get smaller, to the departments these researchers were part of. If the departments are similarly too big, then we can get down to the individual researchers themselves. It just needs to be done rigorously, each and every time, and eventually, over time, the overall credibility of the field will go back up, though perhaps never reaching what it once was.

There is no Emperor Of Medicine that can credibly make that kind of commitment.

For a few years Fauci was as close as anyone has ever been to being such a singular figure of The Medical Establishment, but he clearly had no interest in acknowledging the failures and making any sort of credible apology.

How do we get the trust back?

I think one thing that American liberals / institutionalists desperately need to recover is an understanding that most people don't see themselves in some universal, internally sympathetic class with our well-credentialed elites, and thus that the claim of such elites earning and maintaining trust is itself nothing like a default. And "But I did well on the test administered by elites like me" isn't enough. I think that's a really hard pill to swallow for people who have put all their chips on the current meritocracy, though, and it's understandable, because we were all born into a world that once had more default institutional trust.

It's interesting, because I don't think these ideas are hard to get across in the abstract.

I've asked before, as an example, some well-credentialed liberals I knew if they would accept universal health care funded and run by the government, with the constraint that it would be entirely run and maintained by experts from the Communist party of China, with their own internal methods for determining who was an expert. And (it should go without saying), I have not got any takers - and honestly, it's a bit interesting to try to tease out why exactly. And yet, realistically, for many Americans, administration by the current system internally gatekept and administered by American liberals is obviously not that dissimilar to that thought experiment for large swathes of Americans who are entirely alienated from those liberal gatekeepers too. They could well be forgiven for suspecting that the American liberal gatekeepers, as a class, despise them much more, and are much keener to socially engineer away their communities, than a similar program administered by the Chinese might be. At the very least, they can go read what the American version are actually saying in English about them on social media.

I get why it's a tough spot, emotionally, to be in for the winners of the meritocracy I'm gesturing at. It's really nice to get free institutional legitimacy, and it totally sucks to lose that if you were accustomed to having it, especially if you are the tail end of a long process of drawing down that legitimacy that had been built up by your forbearers who understand power and public trust in deep ways that they apparently didn't pass on (which I personally think is an accurate description of the institution builders of the progressive era compared to their "progressive" great-grandchildren). But from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in 3 generations is a thing. And I think American liberals simply no longer have the luxury of being oblivious to the realities of where power and legitimacy come from, and thus how they absolutely HAVE to rigorously publicly police themselves and their institutions to regain that trust. This stuff isn't magic. But I see a whole lot of behavior that looks like magical thinking, with a complete obliviousness to cause-and-effect when it comes to public trust.

Even if "Racism is a public health emergency" made any sense at all, people who want public power have to be smart enough to understand that you can't announce that stuff and then be surprised and huffy when large amounts of white people ignore your authority when you announce you intend to squirt novel fluid in their kids arms via flu vaccine. There's a total misunderstanding about the role of "consent of the governed", and how it means something much bigger in the way Americans organize themselves culturally than just questions about law and the Federal government...

I think one thing that American liberals / institutionalists desperately need to recover is an understanding that most people don't see themselves in some universal, internally sympathetic class with our well-credentialed elites, and thus that the claim of such elites earning and maintaining trust is itself nothing like a default. And "But I did well on the test administered by elites like me" isn't enough. I think that's a really hard pill to swallow for people who have put all their chips on the current meritocracy, though, and it's understandable, because we were all born into a world that once had more default institutional trust.

The problem is that studies like this make this harder. It's a cycle.

They do think they're smarter, but that's not all of their claim. Or they wouldn't find it so hard to grant that someone like Elon is smart.

It's that they are necessary, precisely because the bigotry and ignorance of the unsympathetic part of the populace can't be left unchecked. It's not only harmful to them, it disproportionately harms those America owes a blood debt. It hurts the marginalized the worst and, to steal a line, that's too serious a matter to be left up to the voters to decide themselves.

They know they are disliked by some, they expect it. But a) people always resist progress and b)those people are people who don't know about things like this.

It's much harder to climb down this sort of moral position than it is to admit you're not as certain about a purely technical matter. It's much harder to see the necessity.

But many of these institutions are suffering self inflicted wounds. It’s been obvious since I’ve been paying attention to news (starting in junior high) that the news “of record” was liberal to a fault, was generally secular, and that it was pro-LGBT (this was in mid 1990s so well before Woke). And once you understand such a thing, and understand that “the news of record” has no interest in telling unbiased news, and will happily distort, misreport, play up or down different stories in order to create the impression that they want you to have. Learning that basically killed my trust in mainstream news.

University was much the same way. Outside of extremely skill or maths heavy courses, you could just simply expect that ideas like social libertarianism if not outright celebration of degenerate if not destructive lifestyles, government control, generous welfare states, free college, free healthcare, and basically socialism. And so you eventually understand that these scholars are not disinterested Confucian scholars simply looking for knowledge. If that were the case, it seems that at least some of them would come out t9 be socially conservative, or economically libertarian.

And once you understand such a thing, and understand that “the news of record” has no interest in telling unbiased news, and will happily distort, misreport, play up or down different stories in order to create the impression that they want you to have. Learning that basically killed my trust in mainstream news.

Agreed. The mainstream media is a joke - even "reputable" institutions like the NYT have very little interest in providing balanced coverage of things. What interest exists is generally from an older generation of journalists, who are aging out and being replaced by young zealous partisans. And by and large, people not only have no interest in fixing it, they don't even have interest in seeing the problem! See smug slogans like "reality has a liberal bias" - that sort of attitude is just not indicative of genuine intellectual honesty and willingness to see things from other points of view.

If that were the case, it seems that at least some of them would come out t9 be socially conservative, or economically libertarian.

In fairness there were libertarians in the economics department where I went to college, so that does happen some of the time. I don't know how often, but it does at least seem that some academics do come out the way you describe.

And this is why those old institutions are no longer trusted by anyone under 50. Nobody under 50 cites a story on the NYT website as a truth claim, because they have known since they began to understand the concept of bias in reporting that NYT and similar news sites are Cathedral sources and will push The Narrative. Getting that trust back would obviously require admitting it, fixing it, cleaning house to prevent it, and begin writing the news as it’s actually happening and not twisting it.

That’s what rebuilding trust is — until tge problems that caused the lack of trust are dealt with, trust is gone.

I've asked before, as an example, some well-credentialed liberals I knew if they would accept universal health care funded and run by the government, with the constraint that it would be entirely run and maintained by experts from the Communist party of China, with their own internal methods for determining who was an expert. And (it should go without saying), I have not got any takers

That's a wonderful hypothetical.

They seem to be coming around though!

https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1906727995307381025

Summary: TracingWoodgrains ran a poll for both left and right respondents, asking if they'd rather have their opposite running the world vs. China.

For left respondents, China won handily, opposite for right-responders. Obvious selection bias and all, but troubling. The days of substantial fifth-columnism may be returning.

  1. This is an online poll.

  2. The alternative was Trump, so it became a fargroup vs. outgroup question.

I really don’t see the left having much admiration for China, they’re too involved in religious repression of Muslim minorities and too ethnically-chauvinist for the social-and-not-economic left to find them appealing. There’s also the one-child policy legacy, widely understood as a policy that led to mass-murder of female infants and thus is seen as horrifically misogynist (it’s literally an example of the government controlling women’s reproductive rights!). I’m sure there’s some tankies somewhere who admire Mr. Xi, but they’re not mainstream.

If anything, “China is not trustworthy and can’t be allowed to grow in power” is the one foreign policy matter where there’s broad agreement across the political spectrum in the US. See strong support for the Hong Kong protesters, spy balloon fiasco, scandals about Chinese students being spies, fear of a war over Taiwan, the CHIPs Act (that failed). There’s bipartisan support for a firm position against China and the progressive left has no interest in allying with them. I suspect if tensions over Taiwan ever went hot, left-wingers would be more likely than right-wingers to support war; it would be another Ukraine.

I know some grassroots right-wingers who’ve bought into the propaganda that Russia is some great haven for social conservatism, but I don’t know any left-wingers who believe China is anything but a repressive authoritarian regime. Unlike the Soviet Union, they don’t have the cover of limited information — when an elderly official was dragged out of a party meeting it was all over Twitter — and people on the ground who speak English like the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan can speak to how China’s actions threaten their freedom.

Plus, their regional dominance threatens Japan, and everyone in America seems to agree the Japanese are cool.

Conspicuous China hatred is a racially tinged deep red thing to me; it might have religious overtones(persecution of Chinese Christians) and almost certainly has fifties level anti communist paranoia.

Maybe conspicuous Chinese hatred is like that, but my point is that low-level suspicion and dislike is so ubiquitous that it's not conspicuous. Particularly when it's focused on the CCP and not Chinese people, as it almost always is.

I'm not really talking about "The Chinese eat dogs!!!" stuff, which I agree has a racial component. Though I do believe there's growing suspicion more broadly about Chinese attitudes towards animals after the China-sympathetic view of COVID's origins was that people in Wuhan were eating bats, and especially after reports that the Chinese government was mass-killing family pets of infected people.

(If you want to find the few tankies who like the Chinese government, find the people who would get mad at me using the acronym "CCP" and loudly insist it's actually the "CPC". It's the lowest tier of language policing, which is why you'll only find it among internet communists.)

The question is not whether the left has suspicion and dislike of the Chinese, it's whether that level of suspicion and dislike is lower than the levels of suspicion and dislike of the right in their own country.

And to answer that question, we’re going to need something much better than a Twitter poll.

This might just be a measure of partisanship, though. Two years ago, would the results be different?

Is there one offering Russia and Iran as possible alternatives instead? I suspect Putin is slightly more popular than democrats among right wingers, the ayatollah in between democrats and xi, and and the CCP last of all.

They could well be forgiven for suspecting that the American liberal gatekeepers, as a class, despise them much more, and are much keener to socially engineer away their communities, than a similar program administered by the Chinese might be

The core red tribe does not believe this. The Chinese are dirty uncivilized commie barbarians, they’re even worse than democrats.

I've mentioned several times here, I've been reading Gibbon's Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire. By Volume 3 and 4 (where I currently am), the citizens of the Western Roman Empire, crushed by taxes and "illiberal edicts" whatever that means to Gibbon or the Romans, were in some proportion somewhere between indifferent and cautiously optimistic for Gothic, Vandal or Frankish rule. Of the Gothic rule in Italy in particular, in some ways and for some time Theodoric was perceived as protecting the glory and the ways of the Italians.

From an intellectual perspective, you read the sequence of events, and it makes a certain neocon "We'll be welcomed as liberators" sort of sense. But as often as that hasn't played out in our age, we know it's not that simple. It's profoundly rare for a peoples to willingly accept a foreign tyranny over a native tyranny. There are usually at least some vague feelings of tribal unity lying around in mothballs to man the lines against the invaders. They won't make slaves out of us! We're already slaves of one of our own god damnit! How completely detached from your ruling class, how utterly neglected is their noblesse oblige before the peoples are willing to trade one slave master for another?

Now I can only speak for myself, but this is the kind of shit that makes me go "Oh, I get it now." The relentless naked blood libel from my "betters" directed towards me is insufferable. If any other country attacked the US with intentions to conquer it, I'd at least be willing to hear them out.

The relentless naked blood libel from my "betters" directed towards me is insufferable. If any other country attacked the US with intentions to conquer it, I'd at least be willing to hear them out.

Yeah, I get what you mean. We've had some posters talk about how they wish China would take over the country, and on the one hand that's an obviously bad idea. The Chinese government really is a repressive, authoritarian government with a culture very foreign to ours. It would be rather miserable to have them rule us. But on the other hand, I get why people say it. There's only so much naked hatred and contempt you can see your countrymen show for your values and your way of life before you go "fuck it, maybe at least those other guys would consider letting me live the way I want. I know this group never will".

Does China even want to rule us directly? Like Russia straightforwardly would, yeah, but does China want more than trade and foreign policy concessions?

No idea. It's just something I've seen kicked around on the motte in the past; I'm way too ignorant of Chinese goals to say if that's something they'd want even if offered it.

If you check the raw emails you can also see someone warned them about controlling for birth weight but they ignored the warning.

https://cdn01.dailycaller.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/U-MN-FOIA-concordance.pdf

I was talking with a health economist about it & he asked 2 questions.

...

[2] When discussing possible mechanisms, he asked whether there is an effect on birth weight (and I would add gestational age). I said that this is conditional on the hospital stay when giving birth, so there's not much scope for affecting these at that point. He suspected that the patient-physician relationships might pre-date birth and we might see a legitimate good effect on it. Alternatively, seeing nothing could be interpreted as evidence against selection, a placebo. These competing interpretations make it a bit dicey.

[2] We do have controls for low weight and early term in the estimations. Do you want me to split based on these?

[2] No. The idea would be to use them as outcomes, rather than controls. But I'm not sure we want to go down that road. It could be a mechanism but it requires that the baby's doctor (not the mom's) exert some influence during the pregnancy. Given that we think the mother's doctor is more important prenatally than the baby's, it would be more informative if we could see the effect of mother's doctor race on child birth weight and gestation. But this is not possible, I think.

Yeah the Meddit thread goes into some of this and that's a very sympathetic audience going.....oh my.

How do we get the trust back?

You don't? I'm pretty sure the correct answer is "make like the police and get defunded." Or get subject to a constant background level of social opprobrium for the rest of your life. Same difference.

Everybody knew what they were getting into when they kicked this off. They just thought it was worth the risk.

They just thought it was worth the risk.

No, most people were fooled just as much as anyone else was. Everyone in medicine is in the academia basically, and most of the academy are true believers.

No, most people were fooled just as much as anyone else was.

They were warned. Repeatedly. Not quietly. Not by conservatives.

I really don't think that is true. People in medicine are there because they are willing to suffer to help people. They are getting it wrong because of propaganda efforts by the university administrations and journalist classes.

They are just as fooled as everyone else, even the bad actors in this case think they are helping and doing the right thing because "these things are true, if the data doesn't match we must have done something wrong!" after years of being brainwashed.

I really don't think that is true.

You really don't think it's true that people were warned? That's really not a question of mental state.

I'm not sure what you mean.

"The mental state of people in medicine isn't related to whether they were warned about what they were normalizing."

I'm sorry you still aren't being clear.

They are just as fooled as everyone else, even the bad actors in this case think they are helping and doing the right thing because "these things are true, if the data doesn't match we must have done something wrong!" after years of being brainwashed.

So I don't know if this is the point that Listening is getting at, my take on this is that anyone in academia - which medicine counts as close enough and people who do medical research certainly fit - who is brainwashed is entirely responsible for their being brainwashed. One of the core themes of academia is to be skeptical, especially of oneself. This requires checking things against objective reality and listening to people who disagree with oneself, especially when it comes to narratives that sound convincing. If they bought into the propaganda efforts by the university administrations and journalist classes, then they ignored these basic, fundamental "warnings" that are core to any form of higher education.

On a practical level I think that sort of thinking is gone from almost all modern education - we don't really focus on critical thinking any more and much of the university experience in America is essentially just a fancy trade school.

In medicine in particular you have to get phenomenally good at box checking and thinking too much is going to get you in serious trouble and unable to advance. This is magnified by downstream pressures - people who are republican or unable to hide being republican don't get admitted to medical school, people who aren't willing to engage in games about social signaling don't end up at good programs for residency, teachers who don't engage with wokeness either get fired or pushed into non-teaching roles and so on.

Outside of medicine most disciplines in school don't really select for or allow much in terms flexibility on this front.

Some people do still have those chops but you have to be very good at turning them off and not saying shit to succeed.

Basically blame the framework for brain washing people, not the people who got brainwashed.

If your job requires you to not notice - at every level, for years, with tremendous pressure to do so....it's hard to keep noticing.

And while the impacts of not noticing from medicine are higher, I'm not sure we should be held to a higher standard than anyone else - all the other disciplines are having this problem and medical professionals are already held to a higher standard in so many different ways that put much of the community on the knife's edge of burnout, suicide, substance abuse, and exit. Don't add more.

Basically blame the framework for brain washing people, not the people who got brainwashed.

I blame both. The framework didn't fall from the Heavens on a tablet that we must follow lest we be barred from Paradise forever, it was formed by individuals making individual decisions. The framework of brainwashing is maintained in a large part by people who were - and continue to be - brainwashed in the past, and it is only maintained because people are willing to be brainwashed. Refusing to blame the brainwashed because of the framework just reinforces the framework.

Perhaps critical thinking in higher education is truly almost all gone - I'm skeptical that "almost all gone" is an accurate description, but it's not an absurd proposition - but it's not all all gone, and it's also something individuals can develop on their own. Anyone who's intelligent enough to become a doctor - or any other sort of high level professional in such an academic field - has the full capability to develop in their own. They can notice the framework and play the game while not being subsumed by it, so as to improve the framework in the long run. Yes, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, as Upton Sinclair said - this is a fairly well known quote, and educated people ought to be expected to at least understand the concept and to counter it in themselves. After all, it's difficult, not impossible, and one of the entire points of being a professional in an academic-related field is that they're capable of doing things that are intellectually difficult.

I think this is easy to say in principle but if you look at how successful identity politics were at taking over such a large part of the public discourse and intellectual framework...well we don't need to speculate what happens in practice, which is that some people figure it out (cough cough looks around) but most don't and it isn't enough.

Moral panics and crowd hysteria and Hersey have always been part of human culture. Expecting that to not be the case is foolhardy, even if we can feel comfortable tossing out labels about lack of ethics or whatever.

More comments

On a practical level I think that sort of thinking is gone from almost all modern education

This seems more like an argument for the dissolution of the monasteries than a defense.

And while the impacts of not noticing from medicine are higher, I'm not sure we should be held to a higher standard than anyone else

Of course not—the sea pouring in certainly won't be confined to just medicine.

How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back?

From personal experience: you just wait a little. The medical establishment has the gigantic advantage of actually performing miracles every day. Doing that reliably certainly helps in (re-)building trust.

I used to be very skeptical, almost averse to what doctors and the medical establishment were doing.

But then they just healed a very annoying genetic condition I have, restored 100% of physical ability after life wrecked my body, I watched them save my child by emergency C-section, and a family member was diagnosed with advanced cancer. The last two were scary, of course. Seeing the medical machine throw its full weight towards you with urgency puts some real fear into you.

But it worked. Healthy son, cancer in remission with remarkably little side effects. So I had to admit: "OK, many of you actually know exactly what you're doing." And of course, they're pretty nonchalant about it. "Chances were decent to begin with, actually so much better than 10 years ago..."

Sure, the field is a mess and some skepticism is more than justified. But I mostly trust doctors again.

I love this comment, well said! Medicine does do a lot of amazing work.

My mother was saved of a stroke a few years back that would've killed her for sure just a decade earlier. It truly is amazing.

I think the flip side of this is important to hold onto when it comes to why so many people hate medicine.

For most people, the most important things that happen in their lives (aka life and death and the prevention of the latter) involve interaction with medicine.

When it goes poorly, that sticks and it hurts. If your mother passed away as a complication from a clot treatment (assuming ischemic stroke) you'd hate that intervention, and maybe even your doctor and healthcare. Maybe you have the wherewithal to know that's an emotional response - but it would still hurt and feel that way.

One invalidating interaction, one missed diagnosis or bad outcome...and suddenly the emotional connection to the idea that the system is useless and needs to be burned down is established. It's really hard to avoid and generates a lot of the ill feeling.

The opposite happens too! But you only have to get it wrong once and that's not avoidable.

why so many people hate medicine.

For me, my defining moment when dealing with medical professionals was when I began having irregular heart rhythms, along with a boatload of other symptoms. Unfortunately, one of those symptoms was weight gain. Once that happens, doctors will not, in any way, listen to a single thing that you tell them.

Every time I would go to the doctor, they would tell me to exercise and lay off the junk food. The fact that I had completely cut out junk food and upped my gym routine to 90 minutes a day/5x a week sailed in one ear and straight out the other.

Eventually I collapsed at the gym and showed up at the ER with a 240 bpm heart rate. It turns out I'd had an autoimmune disorder for several years that had wrought absolute havoc on my body's symptoms. A doctor ran a simple, inexpensive blood test and had me diagnosed and medicated in a few days. All my problems went away and I lost 65 pounds in six months.

Every single one of those events could have been prevented if any doctor in a three year period had actually listened to me instead of telling me to go fuck myself.

How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back? How do we stop people from doing this kind of thing? I just don’t know.

TAPS

THE

SIGN

Although admittedly this is not about 'elites' doing things on behalf of a whole society. A lot of blame can probably be ascribed to people who spread this information without checking it or by uncritically accepting it and parroting it as if it is true.

Which, it turns out, includes a SCOTUS Justice. Its in an actual, published SCOTUS opinion now (albeit a dissent, so it probably won't be used as precedent).

Should she formally retract that, somehow?

The study that was a big part of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling was later revealed to be complete bullshit and nobody cared about that, so I think she is probably safe.

There's probably a pretty solid essay or law review article to be written (probably already has) pointing out that empirically, it is better for the courts to stick to textualism/legislative intent when interpreting the law, as they have an extremely dubious track record when it comes to interpreting science and statistics while reasoning about what laws mean or 'ought' to mean.

Recent decisions the go into the form and function of various firearms/ parts of firearms when ruling on gun control laws suffer from similar issues.

To be fair, she did tell us that she was not a biologist.

How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back? How do we stop people from doing this kind of thing? I just don’t know.

I see you’re starting to understand how me and mine felt during/after the scamdemic overreaction.

Fucked if I know how you get the trust back. It’s gone. We’re just going to have to, as a society, deal with a permanently lower vaccination rate. I don’t have a solution, except to say that defenestrating the people pushing the medical… narratives, not just the Covid one but lots of other blatantly political stuff, would start a slow process of rebuilding trust. Not regaining, rebuilding. The uncritical trust in doctors is dead, and the medical establishment killed it.

I’ve been harping a lot recently on the need to build new, functional, things to replace the old ones going haywire in entirely predictable ways. I don’t really have a ‘solution’ solution in the case of the medical establishment but I’m pretty sure the medical price transparency crowd will be the ones best positioned to come up with one.

I don’t really have a ‘solution’ solution in the case of the medical establishment but I’m pretty sure the medical price transparency crowd will be the ones best positioned to come up with one.

Nope. This is a culture sort of thing that pretty much cannot be fixed by any sort of discrete and minimal use of political power which can plausibly be granted to humans. A major reason for this is the speech/opinion vs. conduct divide.

Fundamentally, medical price transparency can be viewed as a discrete regulation on conduct. Thou shalt simply give thy patient a couple numbers that thou unquestionably has (even if thou wants to play dumb/lie and pretend that thou art incapable of even identifying the names of the numbers in question). We can easily check if you're giving your patients the numbers or not. It can be mostly checked by people who know almost nothing about medicine, using a simple bureaucratic process, which has proven itself capable in many other domains.

We don't have to care whatsoever about your opinion-based speech. In fact, if you want to be really bold, you can even persist in telling your patient that you don't have the numbers in question, so long as you still actually hand those numbers over. (I have to imagine that, in practice, even doctors would manage to conjure up some feeling of shame in going that far in telling such obvious, in your face, observable lies.) No penalty whatsoever for even the most boldly false speech, so long as you just do the simple thing of handing them a piece of paper with a couple numbers on it.

Whereas the production/dissemination of knowledge is inherently riddled with opinion/speech, through and through. In my nonpolitical field, it is my personal opinion that there are tons of papers that are just garbage... some of which I believe are simply wrong or not true. But that's just, like, my opinion, maaaaaan. I'm sure that popularizers of science outputs ("science journalists") have varying opinions on what makes for good popular science... and of course, I have my own opinions on which such institutional outlets I think have reasonable such opinions vs. those which I think have gone off the rails. But again, those are just my opinions. I may be wrong! I may be wrong within my own field! It is entirely possible (though I think unlikely, at least in the extremely narrow domains in which I hold the strongest opinions) that future developments will demonstrate that some of my opinions are, indeed, flatly wrong! I know that I have been wrong in the past (thankfully, most of the examples I can think of were very long ago while I was still a learning student, including one where a mistake was found in the review process that I was thankfully able to fix before publication). I've pointed out to colleagues where they've been wrong in some of their prior publications (and thankfully managed to convince them and maintain incredibly good working relations with them).

How could we possibly impose some external, bureaucratically-enforceable rules on that world? Yes yes, we might be able to slice off one tiny little fraction where we have indisputable proof that someone engaged in willful, knowing fraud. But I think the standard of proof needs to be pretty darn high in order to avoid catching a bunch of people who are just "innocently" wrong.

All of that is, unless, of course, you somehow want a Ministry of Truth to determine when anyone is merely wrong. But I have a feeling that such a Ministry would make haste to torch its own credibility even more rapidly than many folks are currently doing so.

[Culled a bunch of rambling about the side-hobby of trying to come up with various ideas that could help and all the problems with them. Maybe I'll post on that another time, but it's probably just distracting here.]

If you probably don't want a Ministry of Truth and basically none of the ideas for little tweaks can really cut through the inherent subjectivity in the process, it's probably simply subject to culture and commons-problems. We probably don't have much of a solution besides just watching which cultures are more prone to commons-burning. Given that the medical industry is willing to torch its credibility on simple, objective shit like numbers on pieces of paper, I'm pretty doubtful that its culture has the soul/spirit to carefully tend to its knowledge-production garden. There really is something to the virtue ethics point of view that lies and being accustomed to lying really does damage the heart/vigor to pursue the truth elsewhere in the face of likely personal consequences.

Kudos to you for updating after seeing a particularly bad case of massaging the science for political outcomes. I also genuinely don't know how you reform academia and medicine when they are willing to be this blatantly political in their "science."

It's a shame because I love the Academy as an institution and an ideal, but it has become so corrupted it's shocking to me even on the 100th example. I hope for all our sakes we can find a way to save science without burning down too much.

I wouldn't call this an update/change haha. Because of how far people go in the other direction here I'm often defending the academy but not always, and out in the real world I'm almost always complaining about it. I do however this example is particularly egregious and because it's a multi-year follow-up too many people will miss it.

Priors here slanted opinions against the academy regardless of the legal outcome, because the only presentation the academy cares to display is sanctimonious moralizing. The only change would be whether the judiciary is viewed as equally captured.

I found the old /r/Medicine thread when this study first came out, and I saw that even the, the majority of opinions were skeptical. I'd upvoted all of them.

It's a shame that there isn't much legal penalty for such knowing academic fraud, but if any of the authors are doctors, the AMA should throw their license in a bin and light it on fire. Knowing what I do about the AMA, that is unfortunately rather unlikely.

but if any of the authors are doctors, the AMA should throw their license in a bin and light it on fire.

-They weren't doctors IIRC.

-Lol don't listen to the anti-AMA nonsense, they aren't that influential.

Yup. I forgot the AMA is analogous to the BMA, and that you guys don't have a central regulator like we do in the form of the GMC.

Yeah we have a bunch of national and state level regulators and things. It. Is. A. Nightmare.

Also great! (but often for bad actors)

I don't know how to fix it either and I have been losing sleep about it for a while, but I am glad to know you can see it now too. In the broadest scope @faceh nails it with consequences, but enacting consequences is going to be a real challenge. It does seem like we're going to need a significant numbers of lives lost in an actual disaster to occur before we can snap enough people out of the fog of complacency, because until lives are lost the buck is too easy to pass, it's too easy to downplay and dismiss it as 'misinformation'.

I think the best 'consequences' are those that follow naturally/intrinsically from failure to be honest. Lying must have a cost, one that cannot be avoided if you lie/defect consistently.

If you're flying a passenger plane, you probably shouldn't have an ejection seat or parachute if your passengers don't have such an escape option. That way you will be extra sensitive to possible danger. The norm that The Captain is the last to leave a sinking ship operates similarly. And you can also surmise that the more responsibility inherent to your position, the more severe the consequences should be for misuse or screwup.

Sometimes you can't make the consequences that immediate but you can still align incentives. Did you (or a company you run) design an airplane? You should be forced to take flights on that particular model of plane regularly for a couple years to showcase your confidence. Boeing should probably take this idea.

For politicians, I'd suggest that they must be forced to endure the direct consequences of rules they impose. If you are supporting criminal justice reform, you should probably be required to live at least part-time in the most crime-ridden districts in your jurisdiction. If you want to drastically increase police authority or make penalties for crimes harsher, you should be subject to 'random' investigations where you will be arrested and tried for ANY crimes discovered. "If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide," right?

The penalty for publishing bad science or bad statistics, especially if you intentionally hide the stuff that would destroy your conclusions... well that's tricky. We discussed this a while back and I admitted to not having a solution. Prediction markets are a decent mechanism, require scientists to put their money at risk on a market betting on whether their results will replicate or not.

Many institutions seem to have failed or been corrupted by introducing 'false' consequences, where a member who is caught screwing up is 'publicly' reprimanded but privately, they're not punished, or maybe they're even rewarded, and rather than removed from power, they get shuffled off somewhere else in the system and hope that nobody notices.

Partially this is due to a 'circling the wagon' effect, if someone is part of your ingroup you don't want to let the outgroup hurt them so that you, too, can be protected if they come for you. Even a 'good' person would want to insulate their fellows from consequences since they are insulated in return.

But I suspect a lot of it comes from malicious actors FIRST convincing members of a group to remove the factor that actually punishes malfeasance, and then grabbing up as much power as they can for their own purposes... and other bad actors see that there's power to be grabbed and minimal consequences, so it becomes attractive to bad actors.

So the REALLY important factor is that the consequences actually have to filter out bad actors or incompetents from the system entirely, which allows the system to improve via iteration. You can't have consequences that ONLY inflict pecuniary loss, for example, if the person can afford to pay the 'fines' and yet continue to maintain their position of influence and authority.

A friend works on high-danger vehicles (let's say helicopters) as a software engineer. The first thing that happens when they push a software update is that as many engineers as possible get rounded up to take a flight on the helicopter.

Similarly Kawasaki Heavy Industries used to show off their confidence in the precision and reliability of their industrial robots by having the CEO and various others sit on a sofa while their biggest robot moved it around, although that's obviously more staged.

My favorite example of this is the weird enthusiasm with which Richard Davis loves to shoot himself to promote body armor.

It has to be quite exhilarating. All your instincts telling you you're done for, only to escape death without a scratch. I could see myself getting addicted to it.

I wondered for a second why he has to pull the trigger himself and not a trusted, very steady-handed compatriot.

But it actually occurs to me he probably didn't want anyone to risk ending up with a death on their conscience, or worse a manslaughter charge, if something goes wrong.

I vaguely remember hearing something about architects in ancient Rome (?) being obliged to live in houses directly under the bridges they'd designed.

Probably made up and didn't actually happen, but its the exact kind of idea that would align incentives.

Did you (or a company you run) design an airplane? You should be forced to take flights on that particular model of plane regularly for a couple years to showcase your confidence.

This assumes that you have control over the dangerous parts of producing the airplane. If you run the company, perhaps you do in some sense. If you're an engineer or software developer, you do what the company tells you to do, and you can't resign from the company after every poor decision outside your control that goes into the airplane, so this is just a way to doubly screw employees over by management.

Management, up to and including C-Suite, should really be the ones on the hook as they're the ones with authority and responsibility.

Did you (or a company you run) design an airplane? You should be forced to take flights on that particular model of plane regularly for a couple years to showcase your confidence. Boeing should probably take this idea.

Modestly related: Boeing Everett, their biggest factory, is attached to a WPA era airfield. Over the last decade or so there was a big push to add a passenger terminal and start up scheduled flights. But it's still a small regional airport with very little passenger volume, so all the planes are little regional jets, a type of plane Boeing hasn't made in decades. So all the traffic in and out of Boeing's airport are Brazilian single aisle jets: https://www.flightstats.com/v2/flight-tracker/departures/PAE

Wouldn't surprise me if lives were already lost from black parents losing trust in white doctors or similar effects, just not in a legible way.

but I am glad to know you can see it now too

Nah this problem is why I first started posting way back in the days where some of our most reasonable contributors didn't see that the news and "science" was biased. I think pretty much everyone still here gets that at this point, so I've spent more time arguing about overreaction lately, but my views haven't changed.

This is a particularly good example for everyone to toss into their brain for later though.

You should never trust a single study. Scott said it well “beware the man of a single study”

However there is a fair bit of research on racial concordance and how this improves healthcare outcomes. Apparently black people feel better about having black doctors and are more likely to adhere to their meds if a black doc prescribes them. Makes sense given how extreme the ingroup bias is among black people, so I don’t doubt the results. On the other hand, does this mean I as a white pefson can legitimately demand I have a white physician because that would make me feel more comfortable? No?

On the other hand, does this mean I as a white pefson can legitimately demand I have a white physician because that would make me feel more comfortable? No?

Tons of people pick a doctor on the basis of ‘bedside manner’ or otherwise feeling comfortable with the doctor. It’s everywhere.

Pick a doctor? Sir I don’t speak American, can you rephrase?

Where I’m from, you’re sometimes lucky to even have one at all. Mine is Filipino and I’m white. Which is fine, he seems pretty competent although truth be told I’d still rather a white doctor.

In American major cities people with good insurance usually have the ability to choose between several primary care physicians; crappy insurance means you’re stuck with the one who accepts it, rural areas means there’s probably only one nearby.

Most people with the ability to choose doctors are not going off of any sort of proxy for being good at doctoring. They tend to go off of bedside manner.

I believe that's usually attributed to Aquinas:

"Cave ab homine unius libri."

And, as I understand it, he meant it admiringly, in the Bruce Lee "I fear the man who has practiced one kick a thousand times, not the man who has practiced a thousand kicks one time" sort of way.

Interesting. I've heard others imagine it as a compliment as well. I always took it as a slight --the obsessive who can see no other perspective than his own. One of those quotes you can read however you want, I guess.

I felt like this fell within the realm of social science (especially since authors weren't doctors) rather than medicine even when it came out and as such should have been treated with extreme skepticism just the same as other social "science". No need to really update beyond the already existing heuristic of social scientists are lying charlatans who shouldn't be trusted.

That is not to say that there isn't problems within medicine but this felt a bit orthogonal to that.

The problem is that I saw plenty of doctors uncritically citing this, using it to mentally update, and using it define future research and goals.

Much of medicine is social science or even just art (they call it the art and science of healthcare for a reason!) often this is because patient interaction and buy in and convincing is most of the job and ethics impairs how much hard science we actually have.

“A reporter filed a FOIA request for correspondence between authors and reviewers of the article and found that the study did see a survival benefit with racial concordance between physician and patient, however it was only with white infants and physicians. They removed lines in the paper *stating that it does not fit the narrative that they sought to publish with the study.”

How does this fit together with this:

(explanation: white physicians have more training and take care of sicker babies who have worse outcomes)

If white physicians get sicker white babies as well, they should do better on average with black physicians as well, no? Or did they account for birth weight?

Black physicians deal with healthier babies including healthier black babies. The sick black babies go to white physicians. Therefore black physicians have better outcomes for black babies than white physicians do.

They focused specifically on what happened to black babies for the paper.

I understand that point, I don't understand why white babies are doing better with white doctors: "the study did see a survival benefit with racial concordance between physician and patient, however it was only with white infants and physicians".

The Great Le Pen Conviction Saga

Yesterday, Marine Le Pen, a French politician sometimes called a (female) French Trump and once called the Devil's daughter, was convicted in France of embezzling EU funds in the early 2000s. She is to be sentenced to house arrest for two years, and barred from politics for five.

The significance? That takes her out of the next presidential election, in 2027, where she is the current front runner.

The other problem?

When the original sentencing judge says Le Pen and other co-defendants didn't enrich themselves personally, 'embezzling' may have the wrong connotations. The judge who made the ruling preferred a 'democratic bypass that deceived parliament and voters.'

How does this lead to a leading political candidate getting imprisoned and disqualified in a leading western democracy?

Oh boy. This is a long one.

TL;DR: Banal political corruption insinuations ahead. And more. And more. Bless your innocent hearts if you have high trust in government, and don't be surprised if what follows starts to echo in your culture war interpretations in the months and years to come.

Disclaimer: What follows is a mix of plentiful citations, and some things that can only be noted with an eyebrow. Which is to say- some pretty hefty suspicion of impropriety, in ways that aren't exactly public record. However, if you want to believe that all governments are innocent unless proven guilty, by all means. Be ye warned.

What is this scandal?

It's more of a funding-code issue that results when you deliberately overlap organizational interests but establish conditionals that can be used as gotchas depending on whether the anti-fraud office wants to pursue.

EU funding for european political parties is normal. The overlap between national parties and EU political parties (Members of European Parliament, or MEP) is normal. The transition between national parties and nominally distinct EU parties is normal. Money is fungible. Even political aids are fungible- an aid who helps in one respect of a politician's work load enables the politician to work on others.

What Le Pen is charged / guilty of is that EU MEP party-member funds were used for someone who was working for Le Pen, the National Party leader, rather than Le Pen, the MEP party leader. Part of the basis of this claim is where there aid worked from- MEP assistants getting EU funds are supposed to work from / near the EU parliament, but around 20 of Le Pen's aides worked from France. As a result, they did not qualify for the funds they drew for being an aid to MEP-Le Pen, since Le Pen's MEP-aids are supposed to be geographically bounded.

Hence, embezzlement. Did the aids help with MEP work from France? Not actually relevant. Did the aids enable Le Pen to better focus on her MEP duties, as was the purpose of the money-for-aides? Also not particularly relevant.

What gives the saga more backstory, and scandal potential for those who think it's a gotcha, is that it's part of a much, much longer multi-decade saga.

Who is Le Pen?

Marine Le Pen is the daughter of Jean Le Pen, her father who founded the party. In short, he was the political outsider / far rightist / probable fascist sympathizer / possible nazi sympathizer, or at least dismisser, who was absolutely hated by the French political establishment. He's the guy who's synonymous with the National Front, unrepentant French far-right of the post-WW2 variety .

One of the key notes of Le Pen is that he ran the National Front like a family business... not successfully. Whether by purely coincidental mismanagement, personal bilateral animosity with French industry, or possibly indirect state pressures after the National Front's surprise and embarrassing showing in the 2002 presidential election, the National Front had some troubled finances.

And by troubled finances, I mean that by 2010 the French Government was progressively revoking the government's political party stipend that made up a plurality of its funding, even as Jean Le Pen was unable to get bank loans from French banks and unable to find a buyer for the 10-to-15 million Paris HQ to raise funds in 2008.

Where does the money come in?

The financial situation is where Marine Le Pen really enters in earnest. Marine Le Pen was given control of the party by her father in 2010. This was notably after she had already entered the European Parliament for over a half decade. Marine Le Pen was a MEP from 2004 to 2017, which is to say she inherited the National Front- and its financial issues- when she was already a MEP with no particular issue.

Marine's political priorities in the early 2010s was the rehabilitation of the National Front as a party. In 2013, she was still being called the Devil's Daughter by publications by the Atlantic. In 2018, this was when the National Front became the National Rally.

But the other part of Le Pen's job was to right the fiscal ship to keep the party viable. This is why across the 2010s Marine Le Pen was seeking foreign bank loans from abroad, including from US banks. This was where the Russia bank loan line of attack starts, since it was a Russian bank in 2014 that ultimately ended the credit embargo, but also saw Le Pen adopt a more pro-Russia rhetorical position. This challenge / options for loans has endured, and is why Le Pen more recently got a loan from Hungary in 2022.

So, to restate- Marine Le Pen was a reasonably-long-standing MEP in the 2000s with no major alleged issues at the time. In 2010, she took control over the national front. At this time, the NF was in financial distress.

This is the context where the misuse of European funds arose.

The Start of the Scandal

The Marine Le Pen allegations arose in Feb 2015, when European Parliament President Martin Shulz, a German MEP, raised complaints against her. Le Pen's party promptly counter-accused one of Shulz's own aids of a similar not-in-the-right-location violation. This didn't exactly get anywhere, because as noted at the time-

Machmer explained that one of Schulz’s assistants organizes study trips for a local branch of the SPD, but said this was “in his spare time, for free, because it is his hobby.”

Remember: it's embezzlement if you take EU money and work for the party. It's not embezzlement if you voluntarily do national party work for free as a hobby.

Who was Martin Schulz?

Well, in 2014, the year before he initiated the Le Pen allegations were made, Schulz was generally considered a bit... lacking in ethical enforcement. He was one of the European leaders who may / may not have turned a bit of a blind eye to notorious Malta corruption. After his time in the EU parliament, he made a brief but ambitious play in german power politics as the actual head of the German SDP in the 2017 German election. He lost to Merkel, of course, but so do they all. But he had the ambition to try, and had a history of building favors and friends.

But back to the earlier 2010s for a moment. Besides being President of the European Parliament at the time, he was a member of the Party of European Socialists in the European Parliament. He was also a (clearly important) member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Germany, i.e. part of the key governing coalition which itself is part of the Franco-German alliance that is the heart of the EU. Schulz was in the running for being the German foreign minister following the 2017 German election,, which might have some relevance to foreign relation implications with France.

Why does Martin Schulz matter?

Why does this party orientation possibly matter?

Because in 2015, the President of France, Francoise Hollande, was a French Socialist. Unsurprisingly, French Socialists tend to caucus well with the European socialists in the European parliament, though party politics being what it is I'll just ask you believe me on that.

Did they get alone? It's hard to say. But in May 2015, just a few months after the le Pen allegations were leveraged, Hollande was among the heads of state awarding Schulz the Charlemagne prize 2015. The Charlemagne prize is bestowed to those who have advanced european unification, which means as much or as little as you think it means. Typically it's an insider's appreciation award for strengthening European Union politics, which is to say strengthening the Franco-German influence on the continent because that is, in most practical respects, what EU centralization entails.

More relevant was that Schulz's very diplomatic interest in working with French rose above partisan politics, such as his notably high-profile willingness in 2017 to work with Macron, the current (but currently troubled) French president whose political fortunes have gotten a bit better with Le Pen's disqualification.

Would a German politician-

  • with a spotty ethical record
  • who stood to personally benefit
  • from a political favor
  • to the ideologically-aligned current French president
  • or the subsequent french president
  • who they might closely work with in their post-EU political career

-ever leverage a politically motivated ethics complaint against a MEP with a decade of non-complaints, over an issue that they themselves might be guilty of?

Heavens no, that's absurd.

Ahem. Sorry. Back to 2017 for a minute?

2017: Enter Macron

2017 is when Macron enters the Le Pen tale, since the 2017 election is what established them as rivals.

The 2017 French elections were notable for that they benefited both Macron and Le Pen as anti-establishment candidates. The election saw the collapse of the French establish right and left, and while that left a vacuum for Macron, it also benefited Le Pen. Macron ultimately won by the French firewall when the French socialist-left voted for him and against Le Pen, but it was historically remarkably close.

What was also remarkable is that Macron's party position has gotten worse over time. His party did very poorly in the 2020 municiple elections, though this was more a collapse of his left than a rise to Le Pen on the right. Macron pulled out another win in the 2022 election, where Le Pen, again, made it to the final round after a stronger-than-most showing.

This creates a certain... shall we say complication for the 2027 election, because Macron can't run for re-election in 2027, and he's known to not like that. Macron managed to beat Le Pen twice- was arguably the only person who could have- but the 2027 election would see him leave the stage and Le Pen be... well, a clear leading candidate, if by no means a guarantee.

Unless, of course, the judicial block-out is coincidentally underway even before the 2022 election is over.

And starting in a way that is- coincidentally- convenient for Macron's re-election.

2022: The Year the Scandal Returns In A Most Convenient Way

Five years after Macron takes the presidency, and nearly 7 after the Le Pen EU funding scandal starts, it returns in ways whose implications to the surrounding context become a bit clearer if you lay out relative dates of events. (Most of these dates are in the above al jazeera link.)

11 March 2022: The European Anti-Fraud Office provides the French prosecutor's office it's report on Le Pen.

Clearly the French government was taken by total surprise, and had no hand or insight into this EU process delivering this package.

12 March - 9 April 2022: No mention of or publicity is given to this report in most media. As such, no voters are aware of the duplicitious deception of French voters by a former MEP for whom this is an old scandal, forgotten scandal from over half a decade prior.

Which might have been slightly topical, given that...

10 April 2022: The first round of the French Presidential Election occurs.

After the French government sits on the report for a month, Le Pen places strong but somewhat distant second place, out-performing some expectations and underperforming others. 28% Macron, 23% Le Pen. The third-place runner up, and thus the potential second-round candidate party is a leftist party that garnered... 22%.

Which is to say, the French Prosectors really did Le Pen a favor by keeping that potentially embarrassing and undemocratic revelation a secret! Why, if she hadn't made it to the second round, Macron would have faced a broadly united left against him rather than for him in the name of the anti-le pen firewall!

It's a good thing that this virtuous adherence to principle applied for the rest of the campa-

17 April 2022: French prosecutors announce the new (actually old) Le Pen fund appropriation report

Coincidentally, 17 April 2022 was a Sunday, meaning this would be one of the opening media report for the next week's media cycle.

24 April 2022: The second round of the French Presidential Election occurs. Macron wins, 58% to 42%.

Fortunately, Macron's presidential margins are great! Any effects from the timing of the report probably had no result on a 16% gap.

June 2022: Unfortunately, Macron's parliamentary margins in the June 2022 elections are dismal, as his party loses control of the parliament and Le Pen's party gains 81 seats to become a key power player in government (in)stability for the next year and a half.

July 2022-February 2023: No particular action or movement is made on the Le Pen case. Nominally this is when the French prosecutors are developing their case, but given the substantial prior awareness in practice the case remains where it was since between rounds 1 of the election: available as a basis of future prosecution if and when desired.

The key point of 2022 is that the Le Pen scandal resurfaced coincidentally in time to shape the 2022 Presidential Election, where it was sat on when it might have hindered Le Pen's ability to get to the second round, but publicized right at a time to maximize Macron's electoral margins. Afterwards, it was further sat on until future timeliness.

2023 - 2024: A series of Correlating Progressions

March 2023: After Macron does the eternally popular thing of cutting welfare in the name of reform, the Macron government (in the legislature) comes less than a dozen votes from falling in a no confidence vote after Le Pen's party largely votes for no confidence.

June 2023: After about a year of political paralysis and parliamentary instability, a Macron ally who totally likes him for real guys raises the prospect of amending French constitution to give Macron third term. This totally-not-a-trial-balloon proposal flops like something that has no life.

August 2023: French Prosecutors announce intent to prosecute Le Pen for fraud. From the start, though buried in the article, implications are identified as up to 10 years in jail, and 10 years disbarment from politics.

October 2023: Just kidding about before, Macron makes a personal call for constitutional amendment for a third term.

8 December 2023: The French government announces Le Pen's trial will start in March 2024.](https://www.france24.com/en/france/20231208-french-prosecutores-order-le-pen-to-stand-trial-in-eu-funding-scandal)

20 December 2023: Le Pen does the unforgivable, and gives Macron a 'kiss of death' by forcing him to compromise on immigration legislation in return for support. This actually triggers an internal party rebellion for Macron. Unrelated, establishment French media wonder how Macron will manage Le Pen's ever-rising rise.

The 20 December events aren't particularly causal in the process, but are amusing context.

The more relevant point of 2023 is that Macron's decision to prosecute Le Pen, an act which would bring favor from the French establishment, comes amidst his very unpopular bid to extend his time in office, which would require support from the French establishment. At this time, the Macron administration adopts a Tough-on-Le Pen position of 10 years- a period of time that would easily take her out of two elections- that will later be taken down to two years out of [insert choice here].

Also notable in the August 2023 initiation of prosecution of that it is both a starting block for the timer, and all future events. Whether there needed to be a 7-month gap between the announced intent to prosecute and the trial or not, had the prosecution train been started seven months earlier- during the large gap after the 2022 elections- then the future 2-year house arrest would have by consequence ended before, rather than probably after, the 2027 election. An 18-month bar, for other cases, would have been even less likely have a presidential election impact... had that been desirable.

2024: The Trial of Political Opponents with Absolutely No Political Parallels Or Impacts Elsewhere

March 2024: The Trial of Le Pen starts, about 24 months after the French government received an EU report of the 2015 report nearly 108 months prior. Truly the gears of French justice turned as fast as they could.

Completely coincidentally, this corresponds to the AFD trial in Germany, where a German court found the AFD 'pursues goals against democracy.'

Also completely coincidentally, this happens to be timed to roughly the same time as one of the Trump lawfare trials in the United States, which was the 'we can bar Trump from running if we convict him' theory.

These are completely unrelated. Just because three major democracies of mutually-sympathetic ruling parties had parallel legal cases against leading opposition parties that threatened incumbent interests, and just because they did so on similar narrative themes/justification sof protecting democracy and rule of law themes, does not mean there was any sort of wink or nod or feeling emboldened by the example of others. Every case was independently moved forward on its own merits, with monetary judgements appropriate to the severity, and the mutual commentary by the states on the other's prosecutions was exactly what you would expect.

Also also coincidentally, this happened to be timed to roughly the same time that a UK court not only rejected a Trump lawsuit over the Steele dossier that was the root of the Russiagate hoax, but ordered Trump to pay 6-figures in legal fees, which was helpfully noted as adding to the half-billion in legal fees Trump had accrued so far that year and not at all contributing to pressures or efforts to drive Trump into bankruptcy analogous to the Le Pen experience earlier in the experience. Note that was before the historically unprecedented further half-billion fine from the New York judgement.

Now, admittedly, the Trump fiscal correlation must be a total distraction. Reputable democracies do not try to bankrupt their oppositions out of politics, and France failed to force Le Pen into fiscal insolvency years ago. The French government would only seek a 300,000 euro fine against Le Pen. And a 2 million euro fine against her party. And opened up a new case in September 2024 alleging illegal financing of the 2022 election.

This, clearly, is utterly unrelated to any other aspect of handling the Le Pen case, and not the initiation for a future basis to further fine and disqualify Le Pen from politics in the future after the current judgement runs its course.

And returning to the only relevant case itself, Le Pen trial that began in March in turn would certainly have no impact on...

June 2024: Surprise! Macron triggers snap elections in effort to overturn political gridlock and break his dependence on Le Pen. Perhaps the ongoing Le Pen trial will at last get rid of this troublesome opposition party?

July 2024: It, uh, doesn't work. Le Pen's party gets about 1/3 of all votes, and about 13% more than Macron's party.

The snap elections are generally considered a strategic mistake for Macron, doubling-down on his issues.

They also, coincidentally, totally kill any talk of Macron's constitutional reform for a third term candidacy.

A candidacy that- remembering previous elections- would have been substantially improved with a Le Pen in the field to rally a resentful Left to his side.

But now that Macron's political hopes for a third election are dead and buried...

November 2024: The French Government announces it seeks 5 years in jail, on top of the political bar, for Le Pen. However, conflicting reports say 2 years., with judgement expected in march 2025

Notably- even a 2 year sentence from vaguely April 2025 to April 2027 would release Le Pen right on / after the 2027 election, and thus totally unable to compete. And, depending on the terms of the house arrest, unable to speak or influence.

31 March 2025 (Yesterday): Le Pen is sentenced to 4-but-2-if-she-behaves years of prison, 2 of them under house arrest and 2 suspended, and a five year bar from political office. She is allowed to appeal but...

Even if she does appeal the ban on public office, only an appellate ruling could overturn it and restore her hopes of running, although time is running out for that to happen before the election as appeals in France can take several years to conclude.

Gallic shrug

I am sure the French government that took a decade to bring this conviction about will speedily process the appeal of the Le Pen who recent French polling suggested was somewhere in the 40% voting range for the first round. (Usual French first round poling disclaimers abound.)

Functionally, this ruling conveniently clears the deck for France's nominal establishment left and rights to make a return, without Le Pen in the way.

Call it Macron's farewell gift to French democracy. It's not like he disqualified his own presidential election opponent...

...though that's more because he failed to get the constitutional change he wanted that would have allowed him to run again...

...in which case, perhaps prosecutorial discretion might have leaned another way.

Summing It All Up

Le Pen (Senior) was an all-around tosser and more or less enemy of the French establishment, if not the French State per see

  • Le Pen (Senior) embarrassed the French Establishment in the early 2002 election where he made the second round of the presidential election
  • Le Pen (Senior) thereafter suffered years of unfortunate financial prospects that would have driven the Le Pen party out of politics
  • Misfortune including perfectly neutral reductions in state stipends for political parties, a bank blockade, and an inability to sell a multi-million dollar property in Paris
  • Le Pen (Senior) is politically toxic, and fiscally insolvent, before his daughter takes over the party

Le Pen (Marine) is Le Pen's daughter who inherited his mess, and his enemies

  • Le Pen was an unexceptional MEP for over a decade with no notable scandals or accusations of fraud of this sort at the time
  • In 2011, Le Pen inherits the party, and its finances, from her father. Money is tight.
  • During this time, and probably before, Le Pen deals in the technically-illegal-but-totally-not-widely-practiced practice of paying national party members with EU funds.
  • No one cares.
  • Le Pen spends the next years working to rebuild fiscal solvency, including taking foreign loans to break the Parisian bank blockade
  • The foreign loan most in question is Russian, marking a turn towards a more Russian-friendly narrative line, and increased institutional and international suspicion

President of European Parliament Shulz was a totally-not-corrupt German politician who totally didn't do a political hit job on the rival of an ally in furtherance of his own political ambitions

  • Schulz had a notable, internationally-reported reputation for corruption, including on a similar issue
  • The issue that will be the basis of the scandal is, uh, not unknown in his circles
  • Schulz takes a particular stab at the political rival of a major political partner
  • and potential future diplomatic partner who could help Schulz's ambitions come true
  • Schulz definitely doesn't get awarded for services rendered for French-appreciated interests
  • Or eagerly try to sustain the relationship with surprise arrival Macron
  • But Schulz is not the villain
  • Merely the tool providing the French establishment their means to prosecute Le Pen when desired

President Macron was totally not letting Le Pen stay in politics as a foil to bolster his personal electoral prospects against the French left

  • It's not like Le Pen automatically invoked the support of the French left in every second round election
  • Or bolstered his parliamentary prospects against the left that would, absent her, happily no-confidence him
  • Or that his administration hid scandalous information that might have let her fail to be the foil when his left flank was weak
  • It just takes an additional half-decade to complete investigations to find prosecutable evidence of something that was recorded and reported on more than half a decade prior
  • You know, to develop the case until the time is right

Macron was totally not prolonging the case management by months or years in parallel to anticipation of extending his own political career

  • Extending his jupiter-style presidency to a third term would have been more unpopular than he was
  • In which case a free Le Pen sure would have been useful for those second-round elections
  • But keep her and her party in a slow boil post-2022 with unclear intentions or scope
  • As insurance policy, or leverage on the parliamentary politics

But Macron's efforts to garner support for a constitutional amendment failed

  • And Macron's snap election gambit to regain control of government failed
  • And when it failed, so did his prospects at constitutional change
  • And if he's not running again, there's no electoral advantage in Le Pen to run again

Which makes it naturally the best time to announce the intent to jail and disqualify the clear frontrunner

  • A merciful 'mere' 2 years house arrest just coincidentally scheduled to time to the next election cycle
  • It certainly could not have occurred earlier, and thus mitigated the perception of intentional procedural manipulation
  • This is justified because embezzlement of EU funds is a critical subversion of democracy the voters should know about
  • Just not when it might have harmed Macron's electoral prospects
  • Or by letting voters vote accordingly against Le Pen with the knowledge

In Conclusion

Is there a 'benign' explanation for all this? Sure, if you want.

Is this a sketchy-but-will-be-claimed-above-reapproach series of events? Also yes.

The Le Pen saga doesn't actually require some all-encompassing conspiracy. La Pen (Senior) can have his own political feuds with the French establishment separate from La Pen (Marine). Schulz was a means, but hardly the start or the end of the Le Pen family feud with the French establishment. Macron was (probably) never involved in the early phases of whatever French state pressures may or may not have been used to try to bankrupt the Le Pen party.

But unless you believe the French prosecutor's office is completely independent of Macron and only coincidentally schedules things to align with electoral milestones and key dates to Macron's benefit, the Macron-era Le Pen saga has plenty of its own implications of, shall we say, politically considerate handling.

And those Macron handlings were built on a history of the Marine Le Pen handlings. And the Marine Le Pen handlings were built on the Le Pen (Senior) handlings. This has been a political fight for longer than some of the posters on this forum have been alive.

None of this means that Le Pen didn't actually 'defraud' the EU of however many manhours of political aid hours she charged the EU. If that's all you care about, this can be 'just,' sure. Let justice be done though the heavens fall, and all that.

But the other part of 'just' is if this is handled the same as other cases. And to an extent this is impossible, because no one else in France gets handled like Le Pen, because no one else represents what the Le Pen family represents, or threatens, to the French establishment.

What Next?

Don't be surprised if this becomes a significant reoccurring propaganda / european culture war theme for the anti-establishment skeptics, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Establishment European media are already signaling an expectation of further political chaos in France, and trying to coax/signal Le Pen to 'help her party' over 'seek revenge.' (Politico) The National Rally remains in position to topple the government by contributing to a no-confidence vote if the other parties oppose Macron.

The New York Times, which is broadly sympathetic to the French government effort and hostile towards Le Pen with the NYT's characteristic framing devices, concedes that-

Ms. Le Pen, like it or not, may now become another element in the Vance-Musk case for European democratic failure.

This is surrounded by all the appropriate signals that this is bad thought, of course, but it is unlikely to be solely an American critique. Various right-of-center politicians across Europe were quick to condemn, and the culture war lines will write themselves.

Not all are unhappy or afraid, though.

In Paris’ Republic Plaza, where public demonstrations often unfold, Le Pen detractors punched the air in celebration.

“We were here in this square to celebrate the death of her father,” said Jean Dupont, 45, a schoolteacher. “And this is now the death of Le Pen’s presidential ambitions.”

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front and a figure long associated with racism and Holocaust denial, died earlier this year at age 96.

Sophie Martin, 34, a graphic designer, was among those in a celebratory mood. “I had to check the date — I thought it was April Fool’s Day,” she said. “But it’s not. She’s finally been knocked down. We’ve lived with her poison in our politics for too long.”

If the establishment's goal was to prevent the rise of Right in France(and more importantly Europe) then conviction of Le Pen and removal of her candidature on such shaky ground was clearly a bad move and will definitely come back to bite them one way or the other. On a short term basis yes this removes a long standing thorn on their side by the name of Le Penn and energizes the left leaning base with that sweet sweet nectar of schadenfreude, it does nothing but push away the patient fence sitter mulling which side they should take. Even worse it gives the Right all over Europe an agenda to rally around and a martyr to celebrate. How will the left, positioning itself to be fairer, more democratic and incapable of abusing sacred institutional machinery(positioning not related to actual behaviour) deny comparison to Erdogan's similar disqualification of his own rival using state machinery. Saul Alinsky in his influential book Rules for Radicals laid down the rule "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.", and it certainly seems that the opposition painting the Left violating their own values for political gains will reduce their power. Add in to that the fact the Gaullist positions have recently been vindicated does will also contribute to the rising Right in France.That being said it remains to be seen how the Le Pen and her allies play this situation out.

Notice that the party of current Prime Minister Bayrou (a historic ally of Macron) and several of their MEPs were also condemned for the exact same crime, to be inelegible for 18 months to 2 years:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_des_assistants_parlementaires_du_Mouvement_d%C3%A9mocrate_au_Parlement_europ%C3%A9en

There is no English version of the page, but use a translation tool of your choice.

If I put on my conspiracy hat, I would say that this is exactly what you would expect from a group that wants to get rid of certain politicians without making it look like their actions are politically motivated: throw a few of their allies under the bus too, to make it look like the actions are politically neutral, while knowing full well that the impact on your enemies is much more severe than on your allies.

This gives your actions the veneer of neutrality while still achieving your political aims.

This is silly damned if you do and damned if you don't logic. If every possible cases can be used as affirmation for a your claim, you are not reasoning at all, you are using partisan lines to draw conclusions.

Unfortunate as it may be, when one discusses the actions of politicians, the base assumption has to be that everyone involved is a schemer with no principles.

The choice is between incompetence and malice everywhere, because in this context good faith itself is incompetence except when used as a tactic.

Sure, that's why I started my comment with “If I put on my conspiracy hat...” At the same time, it's naive to assume that an attack on the opposition couldn't possibly be politically motivated because there is some friendly fire.

Bayrou always had a weird proximity to the RN. He helped Marine Le Pen get the necessary signatures to run for President last time and while I still have some residual idea that he believes in fair elections in principle, my cold analysis is that it was to ensure the Center-Far Right duel that has secured Centrist dominion over French institutions for the past decades.

In fact what I was expecting is that he would be negotiating leniency in this particular case against the safety of his wobbly government against a no-confidence vote. And thus keep power and secure the duel again for Macron's successor.

I guess I was wrong.

At this point in time all this makes scant difference. French society is in terminal decline, ideologically captured and on an irreversible path of racial replacement. In this it's not different from other Western European societies, of course, but one aspect that does set it apart is its proven ability to regenerate and transform itself by itself through upheaval and bloodbath. After all, it's no coincidence that the current French republic is the fifth such in history. This is something the Germans or the British will never be capable of doing.

Ignoring all that, it's a great write-up indeed.

Great write up, Dean.

One last point that is hinted at only implicitly:

Even though the Le Pen family was good for French centrist politicians, it was bad for the French establishment because of the outlier possibility that the RN might win and then - with understandably extreme resentment - act very harshly against them, far beyond the action required simply to implement their program. This is especially true in the context of the French presidency, which in theory affords the president extreme power.

Bardella - Le Pen’s likely replacement - is preferable on all fronts. He is young and lacks the same familial resentment for and antagonism toward the establishment that Le Pen does. He is less likely to swear revenge. He is more moderate on immigration and even to some extent the economy. His ideology is loose and he is easily persuaded.

It’s like the difference between your daughter dating someone you vehemently hate, but who you think she’s unlikely to marry, versus dating someone you merely somewhat dislike but who is marginally more likely to marry. The tail risks are worse in the former case.

Is Bardella really a more likely replacement than Marion Marechal le Pen?

Marion betrayed Marine to go into Zemmour's party and then betrayed Zemmour again.

There is not a snowball's chance in hell she'd be allowed to run as RN's candidate.

Meanwhile Bardella was the official party choice for a PM bid. It's his turn, I doubt anybody has the stature to question his legitimacy for a presidential run within the party at this point.

When reading Orbán: Europe's New Strongman, my main thought was "why are the EU so reluctant to have an illiberal dictatorship like Turkey join the EU? In Hungary, they already have an illiberal dictatorship in their ranks."

After reading your post - well, I'm not going to say that France is as bad as Hungary, but Macron certainly can't throw any stones at Orbán.

Turkey is much more illiberal than Hungary, which is a bit more illiberal than France and Germany. Hungary doesn’t jail regime critics(although it does threaten their livelihoods).

It also seems worth noting that le Pen committed an actual crime. Not the sort of thing that’s regularly prosecuted but this is a scene out of the US rather than Russia or Turkey.

In true culture war fashion, it seems like there's a dilemma that is "obvious" from either side of the lens.

The strategy from the left is well-documented here: any opposition can simply be hamstrung with "lawfare". This is especially effective since within recent history the left's opposition in the "West" is led by strongmen populists of personality - there's no depth in terms of charismatic leadership within the movement at large, so if you cut off the head the beast is dead. Unfortunately for the left, that's also the case in places like Russia and Turkey, where it seems like it takes a cult of personality to "grassroots" a movement capable of opposing the entrenched right - so the whataboutism is baked in (as seen in your write-up).

But the strategy from the right can't be ignored either: snowball small crimes and cry lawfare on your way up to the larger (antidemocratic) crimes. White collar crimes are hilariously underpunished (unless you've already climbed the "lawfare" ladder), so the risk is extremely low: move a few decimal points here or there on some tax returns, make the SEC slap you on the wrist for misreporting on financial statements, etc. Then, when you're punished for something meaningful, simply appeal to your followers that you're only being punished because of your politics, and bring up all the other cases where white collar crimes were hilariously underpunished as a double-standard.

In fact, to "climb the lawfare ladder", you don't even have to have personally performed the smaller crimes first, like some perverse inversion of "guilt by association". It appears to be possible to utilize the (just) prosecutions of others as evidence that you yourself are being unjustly persecuted. Maybe one could even pardon those individuals, some of them on the left, to cast even more doubt!

Unfortunately for us plebeians of the non-accelerationist variety, I don't see this deescalating any time soon. Reactionary strategists have surely caught on to the pattern, and are probably quite pleased how much the term lawfare has spread like wildfire amongst the even the most moderate conservatives, thanks especially to news outlets that act like a memetic megaphone.

Likewise, the left seems to view a stronger judiciary as one of the only ways of stalling a full-on reactionary revolution - something that some on the right seems to acknowledge as well judging by comments from the Speaker of the House and the once-leader-cum-ex-leader-cum-leader of DOGE. Just browse Reddit for a bit to see how much the left sees the judiciary as the last bastion of hope against a unitary executive and a doormat legislature.

Edit: spelling, formatting

Thanks for this!

June 2024: Surprise! Macron triggers snap elections in effort to overturn political gridlock and break his dependence on Le Pen. Perhaps the ongoing Le Pen trial will at last get rid of this troublesome opposition party?

I don't think the trial was the main motivation here, I think the idea was more that the National Rally's shocking victory in the European Parliament elections held just 3 weeks before would motivate people to put their differences aside and vote against Le Pen.

Insider sources say that what was "sold" to Macron was putting the RN in power in a bad situation, letting them run it into the ground since they would be obstructed everywhere and come back next presidential election as the I-told-you-so serious people party.

Usually I wouldn't give that much credit to that kind of stratagem, but cohabitation governments are know to become immensely unpopular and Macron was out of cards to play.

Probably nobody expected that the already untenable assembly split would become more untenable as a result of the snap election.

Any guesses as to what happens in the next French elections?

Bardella (Le Pen's successor) makes the best first round score.

He ends up in the second round against a Macron successor (likely Edouard Philippe) or Qatar funded Dominique De Villepin.

He gets beaten in the debate because whoever his opponent is is an experienced politician and loses anyways thanks to left wing ballots.

Legislative elections still don't give the government a workable majority or barely give it one and the gridlock continues.

Until the bottom truly fall out of the budget and a debt crisis turns this country into 1990s Russia.

All that is the base case, so it's probably not gonna happen because random things will disrupt the course of events. Someone might come out of nowhere like Macron did. The debt crisis might happen before the election. And who knows what the consequences of Macron's succession crisis will look like.

One thing is for sure, every existing party is too weak to govern with internal divisions stronger than they have been in years. Any serious bid will have to play at uniting more than one faction and the situation the winner will inherit is really really bad.

Just to be clear- is the situation the winner inherits bad politically or bad in other ways? I know France has lost a lot of influence in Africa and has a fairly high debt with some youth unemployment problems, but by the standards of Latin countries I thought it was much better than average economically.

The economy itself is doing well, its the government budget that is unsustainable. Extremely high levels of government spending as a percentage of GDP (literally the highest in the world) and high taxes makes taxation not really a viable solution to balance the budget but cutting the drivers of the large deficit (mostly unsustainable pensions and elderly entitlements) is extremely unpopular and there probably needs to be a severe financial crisis for there to be sufficient legitimacy to balance the budget, so kind of similar to America in that sense.

Is calling France a Latin country a joke? If so, it's a pretty good one.

It's a long used term for non-germanic western Europe. Countries with Romance languages and cultural Catholicism or other such remnants of the Roman Empire.

I'll grant you France has always been the most Anglo of the Latin countries in Europe, but it still counts. Romania also does, despite being the most Slavic of such.

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

Now this is a wild theory, but how about a quid pro quo between Macron and Le Pen. Macron takes care of the accusation so that Le Pen is cleared and NF supports the amendment for increasing the presidential term limits.

The A&W Halberd

The A&W Halberd is a makeshift weapon, an artifact most likely inspired by meth demons or related brain damage. It is a fine piece of methgineering. The weapon is composed of a crimson plastic broomstick, two chef knives (dull), and copious amounts of grey duct tape. One of the knives was attached to serve as the tip of the Halberd. To poke with. The other, perpendicular to the broomstick, is evidently for striking overhead.

One cold morning, armed with this masterpiece of a weapon, a knight possessed by evil methgic hastily stumbled into A&W. He was agitated, yelling, mumbling, shifting in unnatural ways. We'll never determine whether he arrived to vanquish the demons or to aid their evil cause; the knight was captured by the police of my beautiful, medieval city, Vancouver, BC. We'll never know the real cause. But there is a silver lining to this incident: nobody, not even a single Teen-type burger, was harmed.

Did you know that one homeless shelter in Vancouver, according to this commenter, has a weapon locker that has seen all sorts of medieval arms? Crossbows, maces, flails, swords, shurikens, you name it. If you can imagine it, methiculous methgineers can construct it. Guns are for modern times. Guns are boring. Halberds, spears, whips. Bows, nunchakus, quarterstaffs. These are the weapons I find infinitely more appealing. Infinitely more appropriate for a medieval city like Vancouver. The shelter staff agrees with me: they only reported guns to the police and not anything else of the endless selection of arms surrendered to the locker.

Shortly preceding the A&W Halberd incident, there was a hostage situation involving a dagger-wielding rogue (it might have been a knife in all actuality, but bear with me if you will). That wretched 7-Eleven is not two blocks away from the unfortunate A&W, to which the knight showed up with the halberd. The rogue was shot with the boring guns by the boring police. In the summer of the same year, a machete (let's imagine it as a shortsword) was employed by one raging barbarian to sever an arm of one stranger and a head of another.

These are the three incidents that were deemed worthy of reporting on by newspapers in our boring non-medieval world. But there are many more that go unreported, evident to me by the fact that I had a personal one in the time between the Halberd one and the 7-Eleven one, right by Vancouver Public Library, just across the road from the very same 7-Eleven. A tall 6'5" warlock, dressed in scraps, eyes devoid of any emotion but rabid madness, was trying to obstruct the path of a maiden, and I'm proud to say I fended him off. I waded into the dark medieval fairy tale of Methland for a quick second and became a hero of the day, saved the maiden. In all honesty, it was not really a great act of heroism; I put myself between the warlock and the maiden and with an awkward yet firm gesture kinda shooed him away, more like. His excuse for being creepy was yelled in our backs: "I was just trying to get directions!" If you say so, but I don't trust mad warlocks. If you commute to downtown Vancouver, I wouldn't be surprised if you had an encounter like this yourself.

I have many more incidents to spin my yarn about, much less scary ones, but for now, behold this map. I put all of the four incidents mentioned above on it. With the red cross, I marked my personal treasure: it's a Japanese cuisine place called Ebiten, serving a delicious plate of Kimchi Yaki Udon. I work 10 minutes away from it, and on the days I'm overcome by a bout of laziness sufficient enough for me to forego cooking for the next day, I fancy myself this succulent Chinese Japanese meal. Also on the map, you can find that murky, dark place, the infamous East Hastings street and it's younger brother Granville street, where I was told all of the vagrants are localized and who never stray from those regions.

I live in this fairytale city. I'm on Robson St every work day, commuting. I'm here to tell you that this predicament Vancouver and the whole of Canada found itself in is crazy. Having my office building do multiple lockdowns in one year is not in any way, shape, or form normal. I'm an immigrant here in Vancouver, and I readily admit I don't know the customs and traditions as well as the natively born Canadians, but when they tell me in the comments to the Halberd incident article on Reddit that I lead a sheltered existence, I have to respond: you've lost your mind. It's hard for me to express how thoroughly the Forces of Evil defeated everyday citizens of Canada.

I'm originally from Russia, that backward warmongering authoritarian country, and naturally, I made friends with Russians here in Vancouver. One of my friends waded into that dark domain of East Hastings drove through East Hastings in order to record it, by the request of her father. He's a teacher and now uses the footage as a piece of propaganda about the decaying West - it's that jarring to us Russians. It's bizarre to our sheltered minds: the tents, the drug use, all of the fent zombies bending down, all of the trash piling up on the sidewalk. Not to say that homelessness doesn't exist in Russia; it naturally does. Just take the Three Station Square in Moscow (famously visited by Tucker Carlson) that serves as a shelter for the homeless during the winter frost and in all other months too but especially during the cold winter months. When the denizens get kicked out of one station, they migrate to another - a perpetual problem for the guards and the police, an eyesore for the commuters (more of a nosesore? is that a word? they smell is what I mean).

(Sidetracking, calling a station on Three Station Square "a station" is a disgrace to it, to be honest. It's vokzal (вокзал). A big station. A grand station even. Each vokzal is a huge pavilion and for you North Americans to understand - it's big-mall-sized. More-than-a-big-Costco-sized. Imagine enormous Stalin-era-skyscraper style waiting halls and nooks and crannies and unused toilets where you can sleep, drink and shoot up at night)

Homeless people in Russia are neatly tucked away for the most part. It's harder to see them than in Canada, where they sit or lay everywhere cocooned into blankets. In Russia drug users mostly use drugs in condos and apartments. For the most part homeless people huddle in the aforementioned vokzals and stations, underground walkways or maybe along insulated pipes, anywhere warm, in fact. Train drivers traditionally turn up the heat in one or two cars on the last late-night intercity train for the homeless to warm up and sleep in peace during the winter (a small act of kindness, but not a sentiment broadly shared by the public. From 2023 onwards, persons in dirty clothes are forbidden from entering public transport, as if it wasn't already hard to be a homeless person). Sewers and entrance halls for apartment buildings can tide one over for a night. Public spaces like vokzals are the main ways to survive - various NGOs like Nochlezhka and government organizations like Doctor Liza are much more scarce and have much less funding than their Western counterparts.

I didn't live in Moscow, but I lived next to Moscow, commuted there every day. To me, trains, train stations, subways, and public transport are familiar environments, so naturally, I met a decent amount of homeless people. Maybe they were fragrant and unpleasant and often drunk, but I was never afraid of them (and I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm afraid of the Vancouver ones). The homeless in my motherland were rarely drug addicts, and even then, never were they really aggressive. I felt (and still feel) pity for most homeless when they were harassed by the police. I still perceive them as people down on their luck and for the most part they were. From what I know, it is not uncommon for Russian homeless people to be working towards reintegration. They weren't scary and that's the most important part. They lived a regrettable existence, but they were still humans who held on to some semblance of dignity that I almost never see in homeless people in the West.

As sheltered as my upbringing was (I like to think that it wasn't), I was never on guard when I was at Three Station Square; I could never imagine an "unhoused person" in Russia threatening me with a makeshift polearm, it just wasn't an issue for me or anyone else commuting downtown. Did I expect them to beg for change? Yes. Stab me? No. Expecting it and just accepting it as a status quo, from my oh so very sheltered perspective, is crazy. This commenter, and from my perspective, Western society at large just gave up, surrendered after a few policy misses, and just left this wound to fester and fester until cities like Vancouver ended up magically teleporting back in time, to medieval Europe with polearms and all. Don't westerners want to enjoy their burgers without being embroiled in a 100 year war?

My first idea is that everyone just fled downtown to quiet and comfortable suburbs and this is why Canadians don't care, but don't Vancouverites work downtown, commute there and have to deal with this shit and squalor every single work day of their lives? Downtown Vancouver is chock-full of offices, various government services, restaurants, sight-seeing attractions, doctor offices, etc. There are legit reasons to go there every day of the week. Well, I find one. I don't want this to become an urban vs suburban debate: it's just that as a person who grew up in a very urban environment of Moscow, I'm shocked to see the neglect of the shared parts of your city.

One big difference I see between how Russia treats homeless people and how Canada does is that it's just hard for them to live as vagabonds. Yes, you technically can tuck them away in vokzals and underground walkways, but it doesn't mean that the police aren't harassing them constantly. Yes, it's not illegal to live as a homeless person, but it's also really hard and shameful. You can't really sleep in a vokzal without getting woken up every hour by a cop who tells you to remove your feet from the bench. And cops will kick you and punch you too, a big taboo in the West (those damned "human rights or whatever). Having less funding, NGOs can't provide the same level of care as in the West. They don't receive as much in subsidies. Homeless are routinely getting kicked off public transport by the police or even commuters. They are refused entrance to grocery stores and medical facilities.

It's really, really cold during winter in Russia. The most common cause of death for a homeless person in my Motherland is freezing to death. That fear of death, less drugs on the street, constant harassment and shame are crucial motivators. These things sound bad, but the fear of getting beaten, the fear of hardship, the fear of freezing to death can be drivers for rehabilitation and, most importantly, prevention.

In 2024 Scott wrote about homelessness. I posted the article. When I hear about the Finnish model touted by Scott, it makes me laugh. If you see a medieval encampment like the Skidrow on your street and your thought is "let's make their life even simpler" you've given up on the homelessness problem. It's honestly self-evident to me: make their life harder for them! Not simpler! Scott admits himself that draconian ways work in the article, so let's do it, why not do it the draconian way? We are not even talking about people experiencing temporary homelessness, we are talking about hardcore drug users who are dangerous to themselves and to the society at large. They don't feel any sympathy for me or a for a guy getting stabbed when he buys a Monster Energy Gold at a 7-Eleven, so to me, a foreigner to this culture it's impossible to understand why Canadians still feel sympathy for them. It's so evident to me: no more safe-injection sites, no more funding to NGOs, no more investment into safe supply, no more free money and food to subsidize drug-addiction lifestyle with it.

When I see Ken Sim, the current mayor, do a "fire inspection" clean up of East Hastings it makes me... audibly sigh. You have this dangerous, armed medieval brigade and your best idea wasn't to make their life harder. Your idea was to evenly spread them across the city. With all of their weapons. Huh?

When I see a safe-injection site next to the most hipster movie theater in Vancouver (VIFF) and a playground for kids, it makes me laugh, again. The West truly may have fallen, I refused to believe it until I saw it with my own eyes: a guy smoking meth (presumably he got it from the safe-injection site) on that playground and not a single father to even try telling him to fuck off. People just stopped using that part of the playground, moved aside in fear. Not a police officer in sight too. Don't even get me started about a meth zombie erratically waving a knife near kids with a knife in a school. (While trying to find the exact article I saw, I found out that there were multiple incidents involving schools and men armed with knives).

My solutions for this problem are as radical as they come and I feel silly typing them out because they seem so self-evident to me:

  • You need to empower police to be brutal, make it dangerous to your life to be a homeless drug user. This part will serve as a replacement for a cold Russian climate. Make it known to every homeless drug addict: you will not be warm, you will not be fed and you will be jailed and sent to rot in prison for life if you do this. Human rights are for upstanding citizens and if you abuse drugs, you forfeit your human rights just as you have forfeited your brain cells in a pursuit of a cheap thrill.
  • The patchwork of useless bleeding heart NGOs managing this crisis must go. It's time to reinstitute all of the previously closed mental health hospitals like Riverview, for the sole purpose of safeguarding citizens and especially children.
    • The libertarian objection of "who's going to pay for it" is obvious here: IMO the value of shared urban areas is self-evident enough to use tax-payer money to clean up the streets. I'd like to argue about this from-the-first-principles-style some time in the future, but this post is not about the inherent social value of urban areas.
  • This one is much harder, but if I could, I would drill it into every Canadian's head: it is your business when someone acts anti-socially. No shaming, no disgust, no pushback only empowers the belligerent homeless population and disempowers police.

There's one and only one takeaway from this whole ordeal for Canadians, the one that will prevent the worsening of already bad areas once and for all: you can't entrust your safety to someone who fundamentally cares about fent zombies more than they care about making your presence in the city safe and pleasant.

So when a commenter tells someone who is surprised by the plethora of weapons in the homeless shelter weapons locker that he lived a sheltered existence, maybe I did live a sheltered life, maybe I did, but I also know when I'm afraid and I see with my own eyes that you are afraid of the archers and infantrymen of Methland too. I've seen liberals go "I'm not actually uncomfortable about them, homelessness is just a part of life and you need to be okay with it. That's just what Downtown is like" and at the same time conveniently avert their eyes from a situation where your compatriots yield completely when a part of a playground for kids is occupied by an invader. Well, in any case, their compassion for drug addicts seems horribly misplaced, at the very least.

The question of "why and how did we allow all of this to go to shit?" is the hardest part. Does it all go back to the old Motte argument that the police in the West exist to protect homeless people from you, not vice versa? (I'd be grateful if someone could link). If so, why? Or is it just a temporary liberalism pendulum swing that happened perfectly in sync with drugs becoming more potent than ever before in history? I don't know. I'm just an observer whose opinion on homelessness was shifted to a diametrically opposite one by real-life experiences of living in a West Coast city.

I'll close with this: Canadians, you don't have to give up multiple streets of your beautiful city. This city doesn't really need to stay medieval. Neither you need to give up your emergency room — it can be safe, actually — for the staff and for the patients.

A&W can be safe, too! Take your A&W back! Be mad! No sane person should have more sympathy for Methland invaders than for little children! My message to proud Canadians: you don't deserve to live in fear of being stabbed by a polearm!

Haha, a fellow Vancouverite! You mentioned the safe-injection site above. Let me tell you a story about that site which, to me, illustrates all the problems with the system.

When the safe-injection site was first proposed, it was proposed as an experiment. The proponents had several outcome metrics and statistics which they said the safe-injection site would improve. As part of the two-year pilot, money was allocated for a study which would verify these metrics and provide a solid scientific basis on which to continue or stop the project. So the pilot was approved and started up.

Six months before the pilot was to end, the study was canceled as the safe-injection site was "obviously working". And thus the site was made permanent.

The problem is that the people in charge simply deny reality. They'll tell you that all of this is sensationalized. They'll say that you have no proof or studies that your solutions will work. You can't appeal to metrics, because they're the ones in charge of generating those metrics and they're cooking the books.

I always thought Seattle should have a Safe Injection Site by its most famous landmark, just to make clear to all the tourists what Seattle is really all about. Call it the Space Needle Needle Space.

Just reverse the name and call it the Needle Space. Simple, and neatly inverts the optimistic futurism of the original.

Imagine telling someone in 10 years it used to be called the space needle and having them go "space? Who cares about space? Why would we ever name something like that? It's always been the needle space, you must be a fascist trying to Undermine Community Wellness!"

But all the hobos hang out by Pioneer Square (or at least did when I had the misfortune of living in Seattle a decade ago), and it would be oppressive to force them all to trek up to the Space Needle to shoot up safely.

Especially when they'd get run down by the mounted police posted to keep them out of the pikes place tourist zone. Do they still do that?

Imagine owning a business around pioneer sq and being told "you have to pay taxes so the police can herd all the vagrants onto your doorstep so politically connected businesses can actually make money at your expense"

Not going for the obvious "Space Needle Safe Needle"?

Safe Needle Space Needle?

Perhaps I'm missing something but are you talking about Insite? Because that was the first such sanctioned facility in all of North America, and AIUI how that went was somewhat different: Insite was started in 2003 as part of a three-year pilot study, with a special exception to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act applying to it so it could function as a safe injection site. The exception was slated to expire in 2006, but it was granted yet another three-year extension so more research could be conducted. Health minister Tony Clement eventually stated there was a lack of health benefits and denied it yet another extension, meaning Insite would close, but a constitutional challenge was brought by the operators and proponents of the facility.

The case eventually reached the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled that the benefits for already-existing users were clear and that failing to extend the exception would violate the rights of its clients as outlined by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, specifically the Section 7 rights to not be deprived of life, liberty or security in accord with the “principles of fundamental justice”. Note that the Court did not establish a positive right to safe injection sites, but did make it so that once InSite was established, depriving its users of that benefit would be a violation of their s7 rights. Because of that ruling, BC is now obligated to continue exempting Insite.

Case in question is Canada (AG) v PHS Community Services Society.

Funny how the judges never seem to care how the injection site might impact the broader public. That’s never a consideration it seems - what about MY right to security?

Here's where the YIMBYs lecture us about how we have no right to veto ruinous forms of construction and zoning. Such as homeless shelters and safe injection sites anywhere near where I live.

Yeah, I think this story would have been printed in the first 3 year pilot, before the Conservatives came to power. The situation may have changed after it was published.

And I think the point holds, the Conservatives attempted to stop it with research, but failed.

I didn't know about the study. Would you share a link with me?

But also, the baffling part, regardless of why was it put there in the first place, legitimately or illegitimately, is the common sense of the situation: the playing ground was already there, less than a block away.

Unfortunately, it was a long time ago, maybe 20 years. I read it in an actual paper newspaper (maybe the Georgia Strait, if anyone remembers that, one of those free very left-wing weeklies). To be honest, I only remember it because it was a strong point in flipping me from a Chretien/Martin Liberal to conservative. Along the lines of if you agree to try a potential solution, it's permanent regardless of effectiveness, then it's better not to try anything unless you absolutely have no choice.

Though I think your second part is a little unfair. In a crowded city, there will always be a park or school or something with a couple blocks of the site. And I imagine that the proponents would assume that junkies would shoot up inside the site, rather than just outside it. It might even have the effect of reducing the number of junkies in the park.

Though I think your second part is a little unfair. In a crowded city, there will always be a park or school or something with a couple blocks of the site.

There are a few stories of that. IIRC, one city has "sex offender bridge", which is the only location within city limits that's more than X distance from Y locations, and therefore the only legal place for registered sex offender to live in the city.

When the safe-injection site was first proposed, it was proposed as an experiment. The proponents had several outcome metrics and statistics which they said the safe-injection site would improve. As part of the two-year pilot, money was allocated for a study which would verify these metrics and provide a solid scientific basis on which to continue or stop the project. So the pilot was approved and started up.

Six months before the pilot was to end, the study was canceled as the safe-injection site was "obviously working". And thus the site was made permanent.

Do you have a link discussing this, for the benefit of us non-Canadians? The nefariousness of that situation seems fairly extreme; I'd like to say it's shocking but truthfully I find it pretty believable.

Edit: Posted this and immediately noticed there was another comment already asking for a link... whoops. I'd like to see it too though, fwiw.

Vancouver homeless have nothing on San Francisco homeless. A&W halberd? I'll raise you a McDonald's raccoon corpse. Hand separation by machete? Have a do-gooder who invited a homeless man into his home for shelter and ended up dismembered in a fish tank. And we exalt them enough that we don't even punish them:

SFPD officers responded and gave the [raccoon carcass man] a mental health evaluation and determined he did not need to be detained.

And:

Police found a body without a head or hands in a large fish tank. They arrested Lance Silva and another transient, Robert McCaffrey, living in the house. Both were charged with ID theft, financial crimes, and homicide. Through DNA, the mutilated body was identified as that of Brian Egg. An autopsy concluded he was murdered and died from blunt trauma... Lance Silva and his friend were released.

The question of why things are the way they are is a good one, and I think it just comes down to costs. It is expensive to impose costs on the homeless: you have to get involved physically with them to impose any kind of penalty. If things go awry (which they inevitably will), you end up with either a dead police officer (costing the city hundreds of thousands of dollars) or a dead homeless guy (costing the city millions of dollars). And, when arrested, they are just an endless pit you throw cash into. Put them in prison, and you're talking a process and punishment that itself costs hundreds of thousands. Letting them wreak havoc on the local populace has its own costs, but those are diffuse and don't immediately harm the government budget: it's a tragedy of the commons.

The non-homeless, though, are cash cows who are easily... cowed. So the city focuses a disproportionate amount of its law enforcement capabilities on them, and it's self sustaining. Sure, SF might shrug at someone being murdered and dismembered, but that's because they have to focus on much more serious issues like a businessman spraying down a homeless woman with a hose, which gets everyone from the NAACP to the New York Times weighing in.

I think it just comes down to costs

I think this is true, but I think it's also very important to be clear exactly why there are the costs there are - I think they're far from inevitable.

From Tanner Greer's piece in Palladium, A School of Strength and Character

"When Alexis de Tocqueville compiled his reports on America for a French readership, he recalled that “In America, there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined powers of individuals.” Yankee agency became an object of fascination for him: “Should an obstacle appear on the public highway and the passage of traffic is halted,” Tocqueville told his readers, then “neighbors at once form a group to consider the matter; from this improvised assembly an executive authority appears to remedy the inconvenience before anyone has thought of the possibility of some other authority already in existence before the one they have just formed.” This marked a deep contrast with the French countryside Tocqueville knew best, where the locals left most affairs to the authorities."

The whole piece is worth reading, but I think the case is strong that, in reality, whatever was good and useful about decentralized democratic power, it has been largely drained by the rise of 20th century managerialism going hand-in-hand with the Civil Rights revolution (which in practice has made lots of basic democratic self-government entirely illegal). Or as Greer also states, "The first instinct of the nineteenth-century American was to ask, “How can we make this happen?” Those raised inside the bureaucratic maze have been trained to ask a different question: “How do I get management to take my side?”" I think this stuff also dovetails nicely with James C. Scott's "Seeing Like a State". If you're allowed to solve your problems in tacit, illegible ways, a lot of problems are actually pretty simple to solve, and they respect the Gods of the Copybook Headings too, so you don't get more of it... which I think was the OPs point. But if the entire power of the remote state requires that everything be legible... well. Costs clearly skyrocket, and massive amounts of inertia and veto points kick in. (This also clearly mirrors the experience of working in a motivated, small, mission-focused startup versus working at a giant, wealthy, extremely hierarchical corporation, for similar reasons).

I think after much of the experience of the 20th century, a lot of people in the most "civilized" places have just internalized a massive degree of fatalism about everything. Everyone knows, really, how to solve these problems. It's not like no civilization in the history of the world has figured out how to make safe streets in urban areas, and so we have no models or something. Westerners simply aren't allowed to, that's all.

They arrested Lance Silva and another transient, Robert McCaffrey, living in the house. Both were charged with ID theft, financial crimes, and homicide. Through DNA, the mutilated body was identified as that of Brian Egg. An autopsy concluded he was murdered and died from blunt trauma... Lance Silva and his friend were released.

What the hell? They were released? At minimum, they are plainly guilty of trespassing on property that isn't theirs. And there's good reason to suspect them of murder (in my opinion they definitely murdered the guy, but due process and all that) so they should be held for an impending trial for both those things. That's the minimum that needs to happen here. What kind of feckless idiot was in charge of that situation, that they went "eh let em go"? Is it always that bad in SF these days, or was this some kind of isolated incident based on a particular DA (or whoever) being bad at his job?

The DA at the time was Gascon, who's usually described as "would be the most lenient DA of San Francisco of all time, if not for his successor Boudin."

If I recall correctly, after a wellness check by police (who knocked on the door, didn't get an answer, and decided, well, I guess that means he's fine), the vagrants got spooked and used the victim's credit card to hire a professional cleaning company (named, appropriately enough, Aftermath Services) to fix up the mess. This destroyed most of the evidence, though not the dismembered body in a fish tank.

I suspect there are also aspects of the circumstances which would complicate the case. Why would someone let a homeless vagrant live in his house with him? Absolutely everyone, even (or especially, really) in San Francisco, knows this is a really bad idea. But, to add some color, Brian Egg was a single man who worked as a bartender at a gay bar. My speculation is that this was actually an exchange of sexual favors for housing. In this type of situation, with no witnesses or material evidence, it'd be easy enough for the vagrant to claim the homicide was in self-defense against a rapist. And who knows, might even be true; even if so, the killing, dismembering, covering up, and other crimes would be enough for me to convict.

But that makes this an absolute stinker of a case. It would be salacious, the public would project whatever their own opinions are onto it, and the jury would get confused about what they're supposed to be considering. Better to just dump the case in a fishtank and hope no one notices.

My speculation is that this was actually an exchange of sexual favors for housing.

This reminds me of the sad story of Kai, who found himself in a similar circumstance and also murdered his host.

the vagrants got spooked and used the victim's credit card to hire a professional cleaning company (named, appropriately enough, Aftermath Services) to fix up the mess. This destroyed most of the evidence, though not the dismembered body in a fish tank

So was it the cleaning service that found the body and reported it to the police, or did they just assume it was some weird art installation?

The fish tank was tucked away in a small room, which was hidden behind some furniture or something.

Supposedly the neighbors called again when the cleaners came. A crime-cleaning business probably doesn't get good reviews for calling in the crimes you want cleaned up.

That story in your link had quite the quote

“ Scott Free was also a neighbor and good friend”

We definitely live in a simulation

Oh certainly, other cities have it bad too and I didn't intend to present Vancouver as a uniquely bad locus of dark forces. Certainly no dismembered people in fhish tanks. It's just that Vancouver suddenly became medieval, I found it strange, funny, worthy of weaving the narrative around.

Try searching up 'killed by homeless person New York' and 'killed by homeless person Moscow'.

In New York, homeless weirdoes kill you or eachother:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/24/us/ramon-rivera-nyc-stabbings/index.html

https://abc7ny.com/nyc-manhattan-stabbings-homeless-man-stabbed-stabbing/12048673/

In Moscow, you kill homeless weirdoes:

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2015/10/26/russian-teenagers-kill-homeless-man-for-fun-a50464

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5015259/Woman-killed-14-homeless-Moscow-jailed-13-years.html

Of course there's the Neely case but it does not fit into the Russian paradigm of pre-emptive strikes (special urban operations?) on the homeless.

From a New York link:

Ruben Arias, a retired correction officer, spotted Murphy sitting at the bus stop and called 911. Police say he was dressed in the same "Innocence Project" sweatshirt and distinctive neon sneakers he was wearing in surveillance video released by police.

This is it in a nutshell. The Innocence Project would never exist in Russia. It only exists in countries infected by cuck politics. By cuck politics I'm thinking of a status quo where Pakistanis will move to the UK, become MPs and ministers, then feel confident and secure in asking the government to build a new airport... in Pakistan: https://x.com/SamanthaTaghoy/status/1906001493997547538

In foreign affairs, cuck politics is sending aid not as a bribe but out of genuine selflessness, it's climate commitments, paying random countries billions and handing over key bases to them because of international law (see the whole Chagos islands scandal, again in the UK)... At home it's providing all these accommodations and umpteenth chances to hardened criminals and negative-value people, refusing to be racist and crack down on those Asian grooming gangs. It's when nobody can ever be punished for anything serious, no matter how damning their failure or negligence, when there are whole organizations trying to reduce the amount of punishment going on. It's the part where people are induced into accepting anarcho-tyranny and railing against safe, acceptable targets like the stupid youtube-commenter rightwinger.

Cuck politics is where people feel this pressure to pussyfoot around the issue saying things like 'this is insane' or '!!!' or 'PC gone mad' or 'imagine if it was the other way around' rather than 'Let's smash this via X method, Y policy and Z action' or 'I will make this illegal, enforce the law and drive them out'. It's the reverse of everything Kulak says.

I think it’s a specific case of the more general hyper-normalization. The west has mostly given up on even trying to make life better for citizens. Cops are barely allowed to do anything about crimes that happen in front of them, and resources are limited so there’s pretty much permission to do low level street crimes as unless the cops happen to witness actual and undeniable stealing (they basically have to watch you take something off the shelf, stick it in your pocket, and walk out the door, and aren’t allowed to give chase off the store property). If a guy is walking around looking for a car to break into — literally shining a flashlight into cars to see if there’s anything there, the cops can be standing right there, but until your window gets smashed, he’s not allowed to do anything. If you call the cops? They take a report that both you and they know will never be read, let alone investigated. And even with an arrest, prosecutors are not going to actually prosecute the crimes that don’t involve a corpse.

Other parts of society are accepted as always been shitty and will always be shitty. Schools are expected to suck, which is why almost every person of means tries to send their kids to private schools rather than public schools, and the first question anyone asks about a property is “how bad is the school district.” Nobody expects potholes fixed, or safe public transport. In fact, Americans hate public transport because unlike Europe, it’s basically a skid row on tracks, and if the stop is close to a place you care about, you’ll watch is skid row moves in. Nothing will get Americans to oppose you faster than trying to put a public bus stop or train in their safe neighborhoods as the6 know it’s a rolling skid row and it will ruin their neighborhood and basically devalue their house.

The west has mostly given up on even trying to make life better for citizens.

That is not the aim of Western governments and has not been for some time. At least not "all citizens". The aim in terms of citizens is leveling -- making life better for the worst off and worse for "the rich". Outside of that, governments explicitly prioritize things which traditionally man has struggled against -- predators, "the environment" -- over citizens.

edited to focus on a different aspect

Do western governments prioritize these other aspects because there is the presumption that the base citizenry is a hemostatically stable organism able to self regulate? Whether this assumption is wrong or not, this is a first order difference vastly different from the Asian societies I am familiar with. Here the governments view the citizenry as needing a level of government management to internal forces spiralling out of control or external forces from disrupting what is posited to be a delicate balance. Social shame is employed and even sanctioned by governments to effect this ethos, and it seems much less expensive than deploying active state resources to gently encourage irredentist antisocials back into the fold.

I am not afraid of the homeless, because I live in Texas, where upstanding citizens can shoot ne’erdowells threatening them with makeshift medieval weapons. I expect them to try to steal, but not get violent(and street toughs won’t typically try to fight blue-collar tradesmen, even if they’ll happily steal unattended items).

I wonder how effective / causally important this really is. I suppose it would be quite difficult to study empirically even if one wanted to. But, for example, to my knowledge there are places like Albuquerque which have a reputation for violently drugged-out homeless people and also permissive gun laws; on the other hand here in Boston, which has famously draconian gun laws -- up until a few years ago you couldn't even carry pepper spray, although that was eventually repealed on the (annoyingly identitarian but frankly correct) grounds that it was bad for women (as a small aside, I have known two separate women here who regularly carry knives, which is still quite illegal) -- the bums are not that bad, in the grand scheme of bums, and the bad ones tend to stay localized to known bad areas.

To be clear, I broadly support gun rights, and certainly if I lived in a city known for having violent addicts on the streets I would want to be able to carry a gun. However, while this would certainly have a benefit for the safety of the individual gun owners I am not convinced it would actually have any meaningful impact on the broad behavior of the homeless population -- I would expect the fear effect to be minimal on strung-out junkies who have already largely taken leave of their senses, and I would expect the, shall we say, culling effect to be negligible.

New Orleans and St Louis are extremely dangerous cities with very lax handgun laws. Concealed carry is not a solution to general crime. But it does serve to raise the stakes for homeless psychos; few of them are hassling bodybuilders.

I support concealed carry because the people who carry concealed should be prioritized over the people who attack them. This is clearly accomplished. I agree that the worst handful of homeless are unlikely to be deterred but most of even the psychos make some risk calculations.

I support concealed carry because the people who carry concealed should be prioritized over the people who attack them. This is clearly accomplished.

Yeah, this part I very much agree with.

Acceptable outcome for me, but what's interesting is that weapons in Russia are very illegal and controlled, much like in Canada. If I'd rank my preference for the outcomes it would be:

  • No guns / Limited homelessness (i.e. Russia)
  • Guns / Limited homelessness (i.e. Texas)
  • No guns / UNLIMITED homelessness (i.e. Canada / California)

Alas, I don't think it's possible to easily legalize guns in very very progressive Canada

Alas, I don't think it's possible to easily legalize guns in very very progressive Canada

If we are trying to be accurate here, handguns rather than guns. Long gun regulation in Canada is lax by international standards. The permit to own a shotgun, rimfire rifle, or bolt-action centrefire rifle is shall-issue, and 22% of Canadian adults have one. Relaxing long gun law further is within the Overton window and will probably happen if the Conservatives get a majority - the last time they got in they destroyed the gun registry.

What isn't in the Overton window in Canada is US-style mass handgun ownership, and a long gun is the wrong tool for plinking fentanyl zombies.

Canadian gun laws are almost certainly much better enforced than Russian ones, as in many other differences between the two countries.

I was in Vancouver a few months ago and my main feeling was how much safer and cleaner it felt than Seattle or San Francisco. I stayed out of Chinatown on my friends’ advice, but I went around most of the rest of the West End and it was pretty fine. Some fent zombies out at night by Davies Street, but otherwise I walked downtown to the Pacific mall, the stores didn’t have every item in locked cabinets, there was still some high end retail, families were walking around outside together (not something one saw much of in downtown Seattle). I went to the convention center and walked all the way around to the aquarium and I remember thinking how nice it was, actually very pleasant as a city.

I don't want to seem as I backtrack from the original statement - I think the situation in Vancouver is worse than it's ever been in Moscow and I'm baffled that nobody is working towards improvement. Moreover, people accept it as status quo, turn a blind eye to it, which is reflected in your mindset of "only some fent zombies". The correct amount of fent zombies, according to my impossibly high foreigner standards is "none".

With that out of the way, The Halberd + Medieval Weapons Locker struck a chord in my brain: did we Vancouverites somehow found ourselves in medieval times? And that's how idea the post was born. Am I worried for my life every time I go downtown? No, it's fine most of the time and the problem really is localized to East Hastings, Granville, Chinatown. I found it weird to have 3 cool meth-related incidents in one year around where I have lunch sometimes, far outside of those isolated areas. Do other cities have it worse? Absolutely.

Vancouver overall is beautiful and I do love living here, I wouldn't stay if I didn't love it here. The positives absolutely outweigh the negatives.

Honestly, yes.

I also live in Vancouver, and while parts are bad, they're not that bad compared to what I've seen in other cities. Overall, I feel safe except for perhaps a few blocks in a few areas. That's not to downplay the deleterious effects of shambling fent zombies, A&W pikemen, and other baddies from the medieval monster manual, but in my opinion, the disorder is usually more of the theft/streetshitting/nuisance variety.

Anyway, here's a fine specimen of a methhead light skirmisher attempting to fell an Amazon truck (not pictured) with an improvised javelin.

Yeah I think /u/teleoplexy might want to avoid Seattle, SF or Portland if you’re already feeling blackpilled by Vancouver. Those other cities might radicalize you.

Dodge this you bastaaaaaaaaaaards

This would be a great Halloween costume if it were more popular. I could totally see myself running around at party dressed up like this and screaming that over and over.

I have to disagree with the premise that too much liberalism created the problem. The solution is more liberalism: legalize gun ownership and deregulate housing. This approach has proven itself effective in the real world, it doesn't cost anything, and it doesn't require an authoritarian state.

Please explain to me how expanding civilian gun ownership is going to significantly improve the issues OP is talking about. Are you proposing that we simply let people fire a gun at homeless people who start acting erratic on the subway? Does this state of affairs strike you as more safe for bystanders than the status quo is?

Similarly, “deregulating housing” doesn’t begin to engage with the question of what happens when insane homeless junkies move into an apartment complex, tear through the walls to strip the metal piping and the electrical wiring, and sell those things on the black market to buy more drugs — something which has occurred time and time again when serious efforts to provide homeless with housing have been enacted.

An expansion of liberalism means an ever-growing list of “human rights” for homeless to exploit — ever more legal hoops for police and social services to jump through in order to be able to take any serious action against a class of individuals who are inherently exploitative of those “rights”.

Cheaper housing does reduce homelessness, but it probably disproportionately gets the individuals who are least problematic off the streets.

The mechanism here is one that tends not to occur to functioning upper-middle class people; poor households are incentivized to get the number of contributing adults into a household which fit in it. The more dear housing is, the stronger the incentive. When you already have a roommate sleeping on the couch your cousin who’s down on his luck cannot just sleep their instead. But in areas with cheaper housing, it’s not worth it to let someone sleep on your couch. So your down on his luck cousin gets it instead.

Cheaper housing does reduce homelessness, but it probably disproportionately gets the individuals who are least problematic off the streets.

Right, I have no problem in theory with policies that would make housing more plentiful and affordable. I just don’t think it would have any tangible effect on the “chronic homeless”, whose problems go far beyond a simple lack of funds.

I am focused on empirical evidence rather than theory. Houston, with no zoning and few impediments to building housing, has a homelessness rate of around 30 people per 100k residents. Canada as a whole has an average homelessness rate of at least 90 per 100k residents. Vancouver appears to be something like 728 per 100k with 4,821 homeless and a population of 662k.

Why are you assuming that these things are causatively-related? It’s well-know that other states literally send their homeless people to more homeless-tolerant states like California, giving homeless individuals one-way Greyhound tickets to various destinations on the West Coast. I’m also betting that police in Houston are far less indulgent toward the homeless and the drug-addicted, and far more willing to use forceful means to deter and harass them, than Californian and Canadian police are. Houston also has far less effective public transit than large West Coast cities do, making them less favorable places for homeless people to live.

I want to be careful to make sure that you and I are both talking about the same thing when we use the word “homeless”. There are essentially two mostly-distinct populations both referred to by that term. There are individuals who are genuinely down on their luck, struggling financially and unable (for whatever reason) to rely on the assistance of others for long-term housing. These people often live in their cars or couch-surf, or they stay temporarily in homeless shelters. Obviously housing being cheaper will reduce the number of these individuals, and I’ve no doubt that the statistics you’re pointing to are related to that.

The homeless population I and the OP are talking about are an entirely distinct class of people. (Some of them started out in the first class and, through contact with the chronic homeless or as a way to self-medicate depression or trauma, got addicted to drugs, leading them to transition into the second class, but they’re nowhere near as common as the popular narrative makes them sound.) The “chronic homeless” — what I simply call “bums” — are not going to be able to access and maintain housing even if it’s substantially cheaper than it is currently. They suffer from some combination of severe mental illness, drug addiction, criminal background, and personality disorders. They end up on the streets even if homeless shelters are available, because they are unwilling or unable to comply with the rules shelters put in place. As I noted, if they are given a place to live of their own, they tend to irreparably damage said housing, due to intentional actions or simply profound neglect and disorder. I don’t know how different Houston’s number of bums is than California’s bums, but whatever difference there is is probably because of the policy differences I noted in my first paragraph, and not because of “zoning regulations”.

In DFW you have plenty of bums- generally less threatening bums but bums nonetheless- in Dallas county, but in tarrant county(Fort Worth) you have very few. The judges and prosecutors in tarrant county are all republicans; cops know this and make more arrests and are more willing to use force. In Dallas county judges are almost all democrats(and there are fewer bums in the areas under Republican circuits), and so bums are often ignored when they do minor crimes, because city of Dallas police know there’s no point.

The Republican Party runs campaigns on the difference in public safety between the two counties. They’re right next to each other.

Are you proposing that we simply let people fire a gun at homeless people who start acting erratic on the subway? Does this state of affairs strike you as more safe for bystanders than the status quo is?

There's this point I've made before: given a constant source of dangerous people who commit loadsacrime which sometimes results in fatalities, and a lack of effective official countermeasures, the death rate is static regardless of how lethal each incident is (at least for a given ratio of deaths between perpetrator and victim; see below). This is because the dangerous people will keep committing crimes until killed by one of them going wrong, so raising the death rate per incident by a given ratio lowers the equilibrium number of these people in circulation and thus lowers the rate of incidents by the same ratio. So as a third-best solution (the first-best being removing the source of these people, in this case largely "meth", and the second-best being fixing your justice system so there are other ways of removing these people from circulation), you want to:

  1. make the deaths hit the perpetrators as much as possible (in particular, make sure that the most lethal easily-constructed weapons are legal, because the dangerous people will probably have them anyway but law-abiding citizens won't if they're illegal), as this lowers the death rate via lowering the number of kills each dangerous person gets before dying;

  2. jack up the death rate per incident as high as possible, because this won't affect the death rate per unit time but will lower the rate of incidents (and nonlethal crime still sucks).

legalize gun ownership

Canadians define themselves as a society, that is more civilized, more progressive, more better than USA. I don't think this is going a popular proposition amongst the majority of citizens, unlike dealing with the homeless in one way or another.

deregulate housing

Vancouver desperately needs more of this, but not to get rid of homelessness, just to make the city more affordable, which will tackle homelessness to an extent. However my argument is that creating more housing isn't enough. There should be more incentives for people to not go homeless. By carrot or by stick. Would I prefer carrot? Yes, I'm enjoying my carrots already. Some people just need a stick, don't you agree?

just to make the city more affordable

Repealing the ALR- you know, the thing that'd solve the problem more or less immediately- is coup-complete for the same reason dealing with the homeless is: it's what the average Vancouverite (and Victorian) votes for.

I don't think this is going a popular proposition amongst the majority of citizens

It's not popular amongst the majority of Vancouverites, who vote to have more homeless on the streets because [reasons]. Once you leave the city, the viewpoints tend to become a bit more realistic.

If I were a Tzar of BC, and had a save file to roll it all back when Vancouverites inevitably try to kill me, all of the zoning laws would go. There would be two zones: "mixed use" and "industrial", the minute details I'll figure out as we go.

I don't see how "you can carry a weapon" would come off as significantly less civilized to Canadians than "police can beat you up because they deem you a socially acceptable target (and socially acceptable targets include the homeless)".

Because carrying a weapon is done by an individual -- i.e. those civilization are intended to keep down -- and the police beating up people is done by the authorities -- i.e. representatives of civilization.

We just came off of two years of police being allowed and encouraged to mace grandmas for not wearing masks at the beach. Do you really not see how that works? And isn't the entire leftist theory about the police that they are "descended from slave-catchers" and only exist to oppress acceptable targets?

To me the difference is imminently obvious:

  • I can't start beating up or threatening people I find unpleasant. Dangerous? Threatening me with a polearm? Yes. Unpleasant? No. Most of the Vancouver's homeless are unpleasant, but as others pointed out, they are more of a nuissance. I just don't see the utility of a gun when someone is shitting on a sidewalk.
  • Police, on the other hand, have the authority to stop the shittening, the Methland invasions but their most important power is to shape the society in a way, where people will think twice before shooting up in the first place.

The catch is that the nuiscance stage is only the beginning of backsliding. Police has the unique opportunity to stop the freefall into the nightmare stage. You think about dealing with the nightmare stage, where crime is through the roof and you need to defend yourself, I think about how we can prevent it.

Europe seems to be the opposite of what you suggest as a solution, but as far as I can tell it's also way more successful in dealing with homelessness and the problems it can cause than the USA or apparently Canada.

Houston's homelessness rate is about 30 per 100K. Denmark's homelessness rate is about 112 per 100K.

Houston seems to be quite successful with the housing first policy indeed, although providing housing for homeless people isn't quite the same as deregulating housing. Deregulating housing probably does make it cheaper to provide housing for homeless people, so fair enough. Houston isn't the only place with liberal gun laws, so I'm not convinced gun laws have anything to do with it though.

I tried looking up some statistics for a bit to check my intuitions in homelessness overall, but the statistics seem to be not very straightforward. For instance, the list on wikipedia for countries by rate of homelessness has the USA at 19.5 per 10.000 people and France at 48.7, however the table also a column called 'unsheltered per 10.000' and there USA scores 12, whereas France scores 4.5. So I have no clue whether France or the USA has more people living on the street now based on these statistics. I've never been in the USA personally, but I have been to lots of places in Europe, including non-touristy bits and not so nice parts of various towns and I've never seen a fent zombie or anything like that and I've never been harassed by a homeless person beyond obnoxious begging and I do know various Europeans who were shocked at the amount of (visible) homelessness when traveling to the USA. Whether there are more or less of them I do not know, but homeless people anecdotally sure seem to cause more problems and be more visible in the USA, despite the USA's liberal gun laws. I don't know that much about housing regulation in the USA, but I certainly would not describe housing in my own country of the Netherlands as deregulated.

The places in the US with high rates of homelessness (e.g. San Francisco) are places with restrictive gun laws and restrictive housing and building regulations. The places with liberal gun laws and liberal housing regulations have low rates of homelessness. It's very consistent.

Houston's housing first policies are good, but they only work because the baseline rate of homelessness is already extremely low. This is mostly due to cheap housing. When the lowest tiers of housing are so affordable that someone with drug and mental health problems can afford to live there, you end up with far fewer homeless people. You also avoid negative feedback loops where, once someone becomes homeless, their lives tend to spiral and their issues get worse. When housing is attainable for even the lowest income people, it provides a sort of "ladder" people can climb to get their lives in order.

Also, just to clarify, I am not arguing that liberal gun laws reduce homelessness. I'm arguing they make homeless people far less likely to hassle or assault people because you never know who's packing heat. For example, you will see some homeless people on public transit in Houston, but I have literally never seen one approach other riders to ask for money, make a bunch of noise, or threaten anyone, all of which are common behaviors in other cities.

Also, just to clarify, I am not arguing that liberal gun laws reduce homelessness. I'm arguing they make homeless people far less likely to hassle or assault people because you never know who's packing heat. For example, you will see some homeless people on public transit in Houston, but I have literally never seen one approach other riders to ask for money, make a bunch of noise, or threaten anyone, all of which are common behaviors in other cities.

You never answered my question about what specifically liberal gun laws are doing to facilitate this state of affairs. Is there even a single recorded case of a transit rider firing a gun at a homeless person in Houston? If there is, do you believe that this would be the correct course of action for a gun-carrying rider on a bus? (Homeless guy asks me for money, I quick-draw my gun and start blasting, and hope none of the bullets hit anybody else on the bus?) I’m as anti-homeless as anybody on this website — I’ve argued that they’re an inherently parasitic class with essentially zero legal rights, and that an appropriate course of action might be to round them all up into something like concentration camps — but this strikes even me as a dangerous and wildly irresponsible overreaction.

I maintain that you continue to posit causal relationships between different things which are, in reality, only correlated.

It should not be legal to shoot someone on the subway except to defend against deadly force. But the deterrent effect of guns extends beyond these situations. People have broad incentives to respect others' boundaries when it's unclear who has a gun and under what circumstances they might be willing to use it. I never carry a gun, but I look like I could be carrying one, and that by itself changes the way people treat me and others in public.

I can't conclusively prove causation, but the observable correlations are so strong it should at least give you pause to consider they might be causal.

It should not be legal to shoot someone on the subway except to defend against deadly force. But the deterrent effect of guns extends beyond these situations. People have broad incentives to respect others' boundaries when it's unclear who has a gun and under what circumstances they might be willing to use it.

If everyone is aware that firing a gun on the subway is illegal and will result in serious prison time, and therefore anyone carrying a gun is extremely unlikely to use it in that circumstance, then I’m not sure what would actually be causing the deterrent effect. Leave aside that the average bum is not even in a clear enough state of mind to seriously consider who might have a gun; even if the bum is thinking in that way, I would assume he’d also recognize the likelihood of an otherwise-law-abiding citizen would fire his gun on the subway as very low, and therefore not weight it significantly in any cost-benefit consideration.

I can't conclusively prove causation, but the observable correlations are so strong it should at least give you pause to consider they might be causal.

The correlations you’re observing are simply an artifact both things being true under Republican government. As @hydroacetylene notes, Republican-run areas tend to give their police and prosecutors far greater leeway to punish vagrancy, and these areas also independently tend to support expansive gun rights. The former policy has a lot to do with curbing the behavior of bums, whereas I believe that the latter policy has very little effect.

More comments

I don't know that much about housing regulation in the USA,

It depends. Generally in cities in blue states residential construction is illegal and only happens by special exemption.

For people who dislike both homeless having halberds and Moscow-style oppression, I want to note that middle ground exists.

For example in Eastern Europe homeless exists and resemble in level of problem Moscow ones described in this post.

Yes, it's something like the Finland solution that Scott talks about in his article. It works in a lot of places, but (without knowing the specific countries you are talking about), Finland has:

  • Cold winters as a deterrent. You can't live on a street, just like in Russia.
  • Institutionalization without needing consent.
  • Good system of reintegration.

In Canada I want us to move the needle towards safeguarding citizens even a little bit, so proposing the most expensive solutions that require a lot of funding and good will from the public seems like kicking the problem down the road because Canadians neither want to fund, nor do the politicians have the good will.

If you are talking about something else, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how you think this was achieved without the oppressive way of dealing with the problem.

I was thinking about Finland, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Croatia etc.

Not sure is that I have not visited homeless-infested areas (though in Germany I kept encountering them despite the same pattern of travels), how much is that their homeless moved to Germany, how much of it is having cold part of year.

But each of this places has no problems with taking weapon from homeless, homeless are kicked out from nicer parts of cities. At least in some of these places police can lock disorderly drunks overnight (this is AFAIK used to collect especially irritating drunk tourists and homeless drunk in public).

At the same time police is not brutal in Russian style and you can get help in form of food/place to wash yourself and there is some escape ladder for more functional ones. AFAIK such escape ladder is quite well paid in Finland.

(I see no problem with donating some of my old stuff to homeless shelter and at the same time expecting to not be harassed at railway station. If it would happen I would call police and I expect that they would come and remove offender - I see them several times taking away drunks from city center or waking up homeless trying to sleep in public view)

As a Muscovite, I'll note that local cops don't usually brutalize the homeless. They will beat you up if you challenge their authority, but so will the American ones. The homeless are simply not allowed to loiter, let alone literally set up camp.

I've been in Vancouver about 10 years ago, and I remember it as a beautiful city with some pretty scary Methland downtown. Looks like nothing much changed since then.

But if they vote for decades for people who are doing this to them, isn't there a point where one should conclude they want it this way, and thus deserve it this way?

More on Trump's tariffs.

I ran into a very interesting comment on reddit last night:

Trump's ICE thugs raided a roofing company in Washington State to arrest three dozen people.

https://apnews.com/article/immigration-raid-bellingham-washington-roofing-company-73dfd3d3ca1af12503108616f3726e12

I guess my 31 year old unemployed brother that weighs 400 pounds and plays Halo all day and occasionally destroys the plumbing and breaks the toilet seat and makes my 68 year old mother clean up the mess will just have to get out his tacking hammer and get busy.

MAGA.

To which I respond... yes. That's exactly right. Suppose ICE actually deports enough illegals to cause significant shortages in farming, roofing, factory work, construction, etc. Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?

The author of this comment would immediately answer with "well, he's so fat and lazy that he ain't gonna, so there". To which my response is, very well! Then we shall all go without roofs. Now of course, people are capable of far more than you expect them to be once their backs are actually up against the wall. People will leap into action if there's no other choice. But, supposing he's right and it does turn out that no one answers the call, then we shall simply go without. A nation, a culture, a race that does not provide for itself, should go without. This, I imagine, is one of the core ethical commitments that separates MAGA from its opponents.

Are we actually going to deport enough illegals to make a difference? Probably not. Is anyone in the administration consciously implementing the program I've described here? It may have occurred to someone in passing, but it's probably not written down in a secret master plan anywhere. But still, you can see here, dimly, the outline of a program that would actually give Trump's base exactly what they wanted, in a very direct way. Which is pretty neat.

To which I respond... yes. That's exactly right. Suppose ICE actually deports enough illegals to cause significant shortages in farming, roofing, factory work, construction, etc. Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?

The dream held by parents around the world is not 'I have done backbreaking labor roofing the houses, tilling the fields and manning the production lines - I hope that my child will live the same life,' it is 'I have done backbreaking labor roofing the houses, tilling the fields and manning the production lines so that my child doesn't have to.' Rather than grubbing around in the dirt with a hoe, we built massive tractors and combines to the work of dozens? Hundreds? of men. And more cynically, we outsourced the production lines to Bangladesh and roofing houses to illegals. But boomers and their children got to put on their white collars and push papers around in an office all day! Or, you know, become neets and shitpost on 4chan.

Tell me, do Chinese people tell their children to dream of a job on the production line or do they force them to study 20 hours a day for the gaokao in hopes of escaping a life of manual labor to do the white collar jobs that you sneer at? The future is not retvrning to backbreaking labor, but forging a new path that avoids both the perils of neetdom and the grievances of the dispossessed. The future lies in recognizing our love of zero-sum status games and squaring that with a world where there's fewer and fewer high-status jobs to go around.

A nation, a culture, a race that does not provide for itself, should go without. This, I imagine, is one of the core ethical commitments that separates MAGA from its opponents.

Really...? When is the last time you heard MAGA supporters agitating for cuts to welfare and entitlements because those who do not provide for themselves, should go without? When has Trump ever supported anything resembling what you just said? The core ethical commitment that separates MAGA from the rest of the country is a revanchist bent to make the libs/globalists/elites suffer as they have. The reaction to the supreme court striking down Roe v. Wade wasn't jubilation about saving the unborn (although I did hear of some Catholic circles where this was the case), it was gloating about how arrogant Hillary and RBJ were in assuming that the arc of history was inevitably bending their way as they girlbossed their way to grinding the deplorables beneath their high heels. The reaction to DOGE isn't that cutting government spending would improve the union (see: all the arguments regarding the magnitude of the spending cut versus the actual federal budget), it was joy at the suffering of entitled, lazy government bureaucrats and globalists who care more about HIV in Africa than fentanyl abuse in the rust belt.

Whether the anger is justified is a whole other conversation, but consider this: If MAGA were forced to choose between 1) a debatably prosperous country where libs in New York and San Francisco flourished via tech/healthcare/finance and MAGA strongholds stagnated or 2) crushing the 'globalist agenda' and doing to those industries what was done to manufacturing, with questionable benefit to MAGA strongholds, which do you think they would choose?

If you take away the animus for the libs, the MAGA coalition collapses. You see it here where there is largely consensus against any kind of woke topic, but bitter arguments around the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the tariffs.

“The dream held by parents around the world is not 'I have done backbreaking labor roofing the houses, tilling the fields and manning the production lines - I hope that my child will live the same life,' it is 'I have done backbreaking labor roofing the houses, tilling the fields and manning the production lines so that my child doesn't have to.”

This is true but I would also strongly prefer my son to be a roofer or an assembly line worker than a 400 lb NEET. While the idea that we’ll automatically get back to the idealized somewhat fantastical version of the 1950s of good values and high employment in a productive industrial economy if we just mass deport and tariff is also a fantasy…. I do think we’ve gone astray as a society when able bodied men are permitted to be jobless parasites while we’re also importing a helot class to do the types of jobs we need able bodied men to do. I don’t have all the answers on how to fix this but I think it’s at least worth commenting on

Happily, MAGA does not have to choose between just the two options you listed. There is a middle path where the globalist agenda is crushed via onshoring manufacturing which yes, will increase costs for the coastal elite who own big corporations, but will also raise wages for the working and middle class.

I think it is a serious error to assume the MAGA coalition is held together by a desire to "own the libs". Thats what some figures may cathartically tweet about, but the actual voters that matter care about their jobs, the cost of groceries and morgtages, and their kids education. On all of these the proggo left has failed misrably the past few years, which is why in 2024 the GOP, not the DNC, won the lion's share of the working class vote.

Happily, MAGA does not have to choose between just the two options you listed. There is a middle path where the globalist agenda is crushed via onshoring manufacturing which yes, will increase costs for the coastal elite who own big corporations, but will also raise wages for the working and middle class.

Or alternatively, the economy crashes as it will if the current trajority continues and the MAGA coalition gets kicked in the balls and tossed out of office in 2026 and 2028 after which all tarrif powers are taken away from the president and things are put into place to stop them from ever having this much power again.

Certainly a possibility, but I think it unlikely.

Expound if you will, People always vote against the party that is in power when a big crash happens and that is in circumstances where it isn't immediately obvious who and what caused the crash.

the cost of groceries

Is the cost of groceries going to go up or down with tariffs on imported groceries and with reduced Mexican farm labor?

After democrats have restricted demand and subsidized supply right into the toilet, republicans seem to be interested in doubling down on restricting supply but this time without demand subsidies. Have we tried increasing supply instead?

After democrats have restricted demand and subsidized supply right into the toilet

Did you mean this the other way around?

Hah, yes.

There is a middle path where the globalist agenda is crushed via onshoring manufacturing which yes, will increase costs for the coastal elite who own big corporations, but will also raise wages for the working and middle class.

Do you actually expect that onshoring manufacturing will raise wages (relative to the cost of goods and services) for the majority of working-class and middle-class Americans? Have similar approaches worked in the past?

Yes, because yes. 1945-1979 saw a massive expansion in the American manufacturing sector with wages that were, adjusting for inflation, median wages, and CoL, comparatively much higher than they are today. Now will a new American manufacturing boom look like that one? No, it will be much more heavily automated and high tech, but the funny thing about robots is they still need a large number of people to operate, maintain, repair, upgrade, and pioneer more uses for them. A factory I worked at actually hired more workers despite completely automating the actual assembly line and ended up passing out a lot of raises as people skilled up.

1945-1979 saw a massive expansion in the American manufacturing sector

A good place to start in analyzing this (which is true, btw) is to ask "why?" Better yet, to ask "what were the prevailing macro conditions that allowed this to happen?"

Tracing that, you'll probably stumble upon the answer that is accepted by all serious economists and historians; after world war 2, ALL of the countries that had the human capital, technological proficiency, and public infrastructure to support a massive scale manufacturing sector were literally blown to shit and had suffered massive amounts of prime age male death ..... except for the USA.

1945 to 1979 happened as a fait accompli because no other country on earth could - at scale - do it.

In 2025, this is not the case. We would be immediately competing (with drastically higher labor costs by law) with several other countries (two of which who have larger absolute populations than us) who have spent the last 40 years (re)developing their manufacturing sectors.

But wait - we're already close to optimal in terms of manufacturing value add. The Chinese beat us out because they have three times the population and negative three billion times the respect for human rights. So when you, or anyone, says "bring back manufacturing!" - what in the actual hell do you mean? It's already here. Especially the best of it. In terms of high-end technical manufacturing (complex systems, aircraft, large machinery, etc.) the U.S. is so far out in first it's not even a competition.

The "manufacturing jobs" people like you seem to want are, what, exactly? Lightbulbs? Tee-shirts? Flip-flops? These are not jobs that pay well. These are not jobs that support families. These are not jobs that make strong communities. These are subsistence level toil.

Shit that will never happen. Building a factory takes longer than these tariffs will ever last, which is just under four years tops if Trump is willing to let the entire GOP burn to death in the midterms. This is a historic fuckup, Trump just metaphorically blew his brains out on live TV with this shit.

You underestimate the economic illiteracy of the Democrats. I can see them keeping the tariffs and adding more taxes and redistribution on top to "reduce the impact on marginalized members of our society"

Nah dog, that's crazy talk. It's Trump, doing the opposite of him is the only thing the Dems really stand for. They'd want to overturn this shit even if the tariffs were actually good.

Biden kept Trump's China tariffs. Trump even made a point of it during the campaign.

I can see them keeping the tariffs

Biden, who is probably the most protection-friendly figure in the entire Democratic establishment, had a whole four years and didn't do anything significant. Any of the plausible 2028 Democrats at the moment it is hard to see continuing with this policy.

You what. The 100% EV tariff and massive solar and battery tariffs he did just don't count? Or do you count on people not knowing about them?

https://x.com/HouseDemocrats/status/1908218153404117109

For today's Democratic Daily Download: meet @RepDeluzio from Western PA.

He explains how Trump's trade policy has been a chaotic mess, but that tariffs—if done right and paired with strong pro-worker and industrial policies—can help supercharge manufacturing.

We're offering hardworking Americans real policies to strengthen their families and communities—not fake populism to distract from tax giveaways to robber barons and huge corporations.

You should consider that the odds of "literal war with China" happening in the next four years is relatively high, possibly 100%, the odds of the US winning are decent, and if Trump gets the US started onshoring before obliterating the industrial capacity of our main rival (which is why the US had such a nice industry between 1945 - 1979) before that happens he might be hailed as a hero and genius.

possibly 100%

The odds of me shitting my pants in the next five minutes are possibly 100%. I probably won't, but if I do then I guess the odds were 100% all along. Also you're not obliterating the industrial capacity of China WW2-style with anything less than carpet-nuking.

No, what I mean is that it is possibly already baked in – I dunno how likely this is but Trump, as POTUS, may know that we're going to war with China in less than four years.

Also you're not obliterating the industrial capacity of China WW2-style with anything less than carpet-nuking.

On the one hand, touché.

On the other hand, Chinese trade flows through overseas shipping. A war with Taiwan might involve carpet nuking levels of destruction (the Three Gorges Dam is within Taiwanese striking range) but is more likely to involve interdicting Chinese trade routes and might also involve striking their port assets. If China loses the war, its fleet, its merchant marine, and its port infrastructure, even without destroying industrial capacity or critical infrastructure it will hamper their exports for years.

More comments

If the US goes to war with China it will have to be over Taiwan. Now, given that the American right has spent the last year + in outrage at the notion of sending military aid to help a foreign nation, what do you think the reaction would be if Trump declared war in a situation where the Chinese claims are way more credible than any of the Russian bullshit. I know MAGA world hates China, but after spending years positioning itself as the remedy to failed interventionist establishment foreign policy, declaring war on China seems difficult to square with that.

After the Chinese kill American service members? Forget Trump declaring war, Congress will.

There is a middle path where the globalist agenda is crushed via onshoring manufacturing which yes,will increase costs for the coastal elite who own big corporations, but will also raise wages for the working and middle class.

It could also decrease those wages, in fact it‘s very likely. First there‘s the obvious loss in purchasing power through tariff-induced inflation. And secondly, the american consumer loves consooming too much. He will eat the seed corn if you leave him alone with it. Other countries used to make up for it with their savings, ensuring the american worker‘s productivity was higher than it would be if he had to rely on his own meager savings for investment.

I find this economic story at least as plausible as trump‘s ‚my trade deficit is your profit‘ . Partly because my theory doesn‘t rely on the very adventurous claim that the rich guy is actually being exploited by the poor foreigners who send him the stuff he consumes.

Dubious and clashing economic narratives aside, you have to concede that the argument in favour of tariffs is necessarily weak and specific to certain non-typical situations, else tariffs between US states would be a good idea.

Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, [...]

Sure. Let us crash the economy so that the PMC will have to work in the fields instead of designing iPhones or being a DEI compliance officer or living from day trading. The basis for a prosperous nation is honest, back-breaking work, not fancy technology.

A nation, a culture, a race that does not provide for itself, should go without. This, I imagine, is one of the core ethical commitments that separates MAGA from its opponents.

Sure. If cocoa beans do not grow in a country, its citizens should go without chocolate. If they don't have oil, they shall go forgo petrochemicals and combustion engines. If they can not support a semiconductor production chain, they shall not have computers. The population shall acquire disease resistance the hard way until they can develop a vaccine, just as God intended.

After all, this is kind of the program which turned Cambodia into a superpower when it was implemented by the Khmer Rouge, so it will surely Make America Great Again as well.

The tariffs discussion has made me realize that some people who praport themselves as intellectual, above the average redditor, are just as childish in there understanding of how the world works just in different ways, often interpreting reality through overly idealized or abstract neoreactionary frameworks instead of lib marvel ones.

Sure. If cocoa beans do not grow in a country, its citizens should go without chocolate. If they don't have oil, they shall go forgo petrochemicals and combustion engines. If they can not support a semiconductor production chain, they shall not have computers. The population shall acquire disease resistance the hard way until they can develop a vaccine, just as God intended.

Is it go without or 'only the wealthy and the black market?'

If cocoa beans do not grow in a country, its citizens should go without chocolate.

The US grows a small amount of cocoa (and coffee) in Hawaii. Both can also be grown indoors, which is a function of capital costs (and energy, I suppose) in ways that aren't economically competitive today because cheaper (import) alternatives exist.

Note: I am not suggesting that this is a good trade policy, only that "go without" is maybe a bit overstated.

Iirc greenhouse grown products are generally more efficient than conventional agriculture; third world labor costs are the main reason for importing so many tropical fruits.

Coffee and cocoa are specifically difficult to grow so they might be an exception.

Iirc greenhouse grown products are generally more efficient than conventional agriculture; third world labor costs are the main reason for importing so many tropical fruits.

That second part is another way of saying "It's more efficient to grow tropical fruits conventionally with third-world labor than to grow them in greenhouses anywhere".

Well yes, child labor in impoverished countries is the reason oranges are cheap. But an autarkic America wouldn’t need to give up oranges or pineapples or sugar or rubber. Possibly tequila or rooibos or saffron, but those haven’t been successfully grown in other low-labor cost environmentally identical locales.

tequila

You can't make tequila in America because "tequila" has to be produced in specific regions in Mexico, rather like Champagne from France. You can get American agave spirits, which may be made similarly but has looser rules like the "sparkling wine" moniker. Agave can be grown in a couple of southwestern states.

If they can not support a semiconductor production chain, they shall not have computers.

We have already produced and imported so many electronics, there is most likely a decent amount of perfectly-good computing power that is just rotting away in landfills right now. If we lost the ability to make more microchips, it would certainly suck, but also, we're probably already drowning in chips that are powerful enough to run Half-Life 2. Your smartphone is powerful enough to run at least 50 copies of Microsoft Excel. It won't be the end of the world.

There is a vast gulf between "it is the end of the world" and "it is no big deal".

For example, if I were to lose the use of my legs tomorrow, that would not be the end of the world. Wheelchairs exist, and my job does not strictly require me to be able to walk. However, it would be a big deal, on roughly the same order as if an economy is forced to rely on salvaging landfills for working computers.

Capacitors die, mobos fry. WCoil knows a lot more about restoring old hardware, but I do know it doesn't run forever and refurbing them needs a similar level of technology to creating them.

Let us crash the economy so that the PMC will have to work in the fields instead of designing iPhones or being a DEI compliance officer or living from day trading.

In all seriousness, all of these things have extremely dubious and probably negative value to society. Two of these are very directly negative-sum extractive behaviour with sketchy arguments for redeeming value, and the third arguably is plus has staggeringly-negative externalities including the prevalence of one of the other two.

The maze has you, Neo; doing these is not prosocial or something that should be aspired to. The most that can be achieved building a society on those is being a rich city-state like Dubai or Singapore, not a great power.

In all seriousness, all of these things have extremely dubious and probably negative value to society

If you're a Luddite; I see no other way to object to designing iPhones. Day trading is volunteering to be a cog in the machine which discovers prices, which is useful (most people who try end up as lubricant instead of cog, which is why you probably shouldn't do it). DEI compliance is net negative of course, but there are easier ways to get rid of them which Trump has already started doing.

The most that can be achieved building a society on those is being a rich city-state like Dubai or Singapore, not a great power.

Dubai has only the day traders. Singapore has only the day traders and the DEI compliance officers (a bit different than the US version). The US, a great power, has all three. So does China (at least including Hong Kong), another great power candidate at least. So does South Korea. So does Finland.

If you're a Luddite; I see no other way to object to designing iPhones.

With respect to smartphones: yes, I'm a Luddite. Zvi's made the case at length regarding the depression epidemic. Also, since I know you don't like SJ, and it's pretty obvious that smartphones helped it nucleate by bringing normies and, well, women onto the Internet, the only hole I can currently see through which you can maybe wriggle out of damning them for that would be to claim that (smartphones helped the alt-right more than they helped SJ ∩ the rise in culture war temperature from amplifying both sides is outweighed by the differential).

The literal iPhone i.e. Apple smartphone also has a business model heavily based around fashion cycles. Fashion cycles are waste, pure relative-at-expense-of-absolute.

Day trading is volunteering to be a cog in the machine which discovers prices, which is useful (most people who try end up as lubricant instead of cog, which is why you probably shouldn't do it).

I'm generally of the view that this beach can tolerate wooden shacks but that building multi-storey brick buildings on it is asking for trouble.

The most that can be achieved building a society on those is being a rich city-state like Dubai or Singapore, not a great power.

To be clear, "building a society on those" =/= "having those in existence". The USA, USSR and PRC all built their power on manufacturing, which is real positive-sum activity.

The USA, USSR and PRC all built their power on manufacturing, which is real positive-sum activity.

There's nothing in particular positive-sum about manufacturing compared to other things. Manufacturing things people don't want, or at least less than they'd want the raw materials, is negative sum

As for the USSR... have you noticed it isn't around any more?

And the USSR did exactly that- it turned perfectly good raw materials into products no one wanted and paid for it with the money from exporting oil.

manufacturing, which is real positive-sum activity.

Unless it's iPhones being manufactured, presumably?

I'd split hairs to some degree regarding manufacturing vs. marketing, but I'll admit to a flub there.

(I'm not at 100%; I've been doing a circadian rhythm loop-de-loop the past, uh, two? three? days. I think I've been up for nearly 24 hours, though I'm barely even sure of that at this point. Might try and sort this out after some sleep; I don't think attempting it now would be productive.)

In all seriousness, all of these things have extremely dubious and probably negative value to society. Two of these are very directly negative-sum extractive behaviour with sketchy arguments for redeeming value, and the third arguably is plus has staggeringly-negative externalities including the prevalence of one of the other two.

If this is true for the two non-governmentally related jobs of the three, why do they pay well? Of course, day trading usually doesn't (and for the purposes of the entire economy the number of people who support themselves off of it is a rounding error to zero), and yes maybe the Iphone designer produces value only by harnessing pointless fashion cycles, but a) this is a symptom of a wealthy society that there is enough excess productive value to be poured into what is fashion, and b) the average white collar American is not a DEI officer or Iphone designer, they are in prosaic but necessary fields like logistics or accounts.

If this is true for the two non-governmentally related jobs of the three, why do they pay well?

Well, "negative-sum" doesn't mean an activity doesn't pay well, or even that it doesn't provide value to an organisation paying you in excess of what they're paying you - it just means that it hurts others by more.

To give an obvious example, fraud is highly profitable, but it's negative-sum; it hurts the fraud victims (and those who have to put in effort to not become victims) more than it benefits the fraudster. A less-obvious example is modern advertising - there is certainly a positive-sum component to advertising (specifically, creating awareness of deals) but there's also a negative-sum component (specifically, manipulating the advertisee into taking deals that do not benefit him) and as marketing psychology has improved that negative-sum component has grown very large (if I were Czar, I'd at least consider requiring advertisements to be as unsophisticated as 1930s ones; 1930s advertising, when it wasn't just straight-up fraud, was clearly overall positive-sum). Zvi makes a case that online gambling is negative-sum, despite it being profitable. There's a case that TikTok and other social media are negative-sum, and while certainly some of these are unprofitable others aren't, which is related to why I think an outright "smartphones were a mistake" is a colourable position (certainly I've specifically avoided getting one for myself).

There are a bunch of profitable negative-sum activities around. Obviously, a lot of them wind up illegal, because this is like the 101-level case for where governmental intervention can benefit everyone, but a lot are legal at any given time due to either novelty or potential collateral damage/political costs of attempting to stamp them out.

I guess my 31 year old unemployed brother that weighs 400 pounds and plays Halo all day and occasionally destroys the plumbing and breaks the toilet seat and makes my 68 year old mother clean up the mess will just have to get out his tacking hammer and get busy.

These people might be screwed, but it would be nice to catch a guy like this when he's 18-25, before he's 400 lbs and has a decade of habitual sloth. There are many people right now in their prime years who have the potential to turn out like this brother, and changing the incentives might prevent them from falling into such a grim fate.

Then bring back the draft. The army is quite good at turning loser 18 year old boys into functional men.

It's not incentives that need to change, they need to be raised right.

What is "raising right", if not setting the incentives around a developing youth so that he grows up, instead of out?

(Wordplay aside, it's on the parent to set those incentives, not the state.)

Because those incentives are tied to other matters -- they are not completely independent choices.

For example, if you want to live in a high-trust neighborhood where people don't lock their front doors, this implies leaving an incentive for thieves to defect. If you want to be able to have Amazon leave packages on your stoop, that implies leaving an incentive for porch pirates.

To quote John Adams, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." The point is eminently not for our children to go back to the manual labor or agricultural drudgery of our ancestors. Any immigrant will tell you that they are working hard to enable their descendants to be lazy.

Does the sequence proposed by Adams lead to a "weak men, hard times" cycle? Perhaps, but it seems profoundly stupid to deliberately crash the good times in the hopes of producing strong men, instead of finding a way to preserve them for as long as possible, when we are on the cusp of technologies (AI, eugenics, etc.) that may allow us to do just that.

it seems profoundly stupid to deliberately crash the good times in the hopes of producing strong men, instead of finding a way to preserve them for as long as possible, when we are on the cusp of technologies (AI, eugenics, etc.) that may allow us to do just that.

If you actually think that AI is going to make a big impact on the economy, it seems rational to try to onshore industry and crash the email/finance/coding class. In an AI boom scenario, the email/finance/coding classes will be out of a job first, and it will take time and human elbow grease to get the AI-run-and-assisted factories up and running. Whatever happens with the tariffs will be gentler than what would happen if every single corporation in America replaced ~everyone whose primary job was with a computer with GPT-7 Pro once it demoed.

If you are an AI near-term-ist it makes a ton of sense to blow up an industry that is going to be destroyed anyway in order to begin rebuilding an industrial industry that might-or-might-not be accelerated to stratospheric levels by AI. If we assume that AI can radically reshape industry, we might as well start working on that project now, particularly if we are in a competition with China, who is roughly on par with us in AI and already has a large industry. Supposing that AI makes industry 100% more powerful over the course of ten years: the United States needs as big of an industrial base as possible when that AI drops or it potentially loses in meatspace very badly to countries like China.

Eugenics will not meaningfully affect anything for 40+ years (if it takes off, which it is unlikely to).

I am not an AI near-term-ist but if you really think AI is going to take off, worth considering what that might mean.

The desired cycle does seem to be of the "Hard times create strong Slavs, strong Slavs create hard times" version.

It's perfectly reasonable for a parent's preferences to run artist>engineer>war>400 lb NEET who acts like an ungrateful wretch>homeless addict.

A son who reads poems at coffee shops and has interesting friends is nice. A son who's mostly known for eating all their family's food, messing up the plumbing and leaving it that way is not. The latter is surprisingly common among the working class families in my life.

I won't discipline my kids well enough so they can live in a prosperous economy without wireheading themselves off scraps, therefore we can't have a prosperous country.

Can't have shit in Detroit vibes

The good times are always temporary. Having an entire society essentially doing nothing but poetry simply means that no production happens and you import laborers and goods because you don’t want to produce things. And eventually your wealth dissipates shipped off to other countries or paid out to guest workers who send the money home.

To build on this, I want to just quote Kelsey Piper's tweet discussing jobs programs versus domestic manufacturing https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1907980342272852436:

"well, we need to bring manufacturing back" this isn't how to do that. "well, how would you do that, then?"

First, think about what you are hoping to accomplish. Is this a jobs program? Is the point to have high-paying factory jobs for the non-college men who used to work in those jobs, independent of whether the output of those factory jobs is cost-competitive or quality-competitive with foreign-made goods? You can run a jobs program, if you want - America is absurdly rich, we can really do absolutely anything at all that we choose to make a priority - but you can't serve two masters here. If the point is a jobs program don't expect high quality goods or goods that are competitive on the export market, because that requires embracing automation and new mechanical processes and the people working these jobs have no incentive to go full speed ahead on that, and since you've chosen to give them a captive market you don't have a good way to push them on quality or on price.

To my mind, if we're going to do a jobs program it's silly to make it a factory jobs program. Factory jobs kind of sucked. My own quixotic dream of a jobs program is to put our national muscle behind fixing our perilously broken education system. Kids benefit a lot from one on one tutoring; hire a million Americans to offer one on one tutoring to every student between the ages of 5 and 9 to fix our horrifying collapse in general reading ability. Boys learn better if some of their teachers are men, so make sure half of your hires are men. There, jobs program, and the work isn't 'undercutting Vietnam in the garment industry', it's raising the next generation. If you don't like my personal idea, fine, but I think if you list the pros and cons of five different jobs programs you thought of in ten minutes apiece 'take back the textile industry from Vietnam' isn't going to be the most appealing of any of them.

What if your aim isn't a jobs program? What if it's defense? That's also fine, but keep in mind you still can't serve two masters; if this is about defense then we are going to laser-focus on defense production, and we're not treating this as a jobs program at all. Go to every manufacturer of munitions, planes and cars in the country. Ask them for all their suppliers. Acquire those companies, or partner with them, or hire a bunch of their leadership, and pay them to start up a plant in the US. Instead of scaring our allies with bizarre threats to add them to our territory, which has made many of them back away from commitments to the American defense industry, build those ties very strongly and start asking them for purchase agreements. Find really good CEOs who grew a complex logistical business in a related industry rapidly - yes, Elon Musk absolutely qualifies here, frustrated as I am with him - ask them to take responsibility for a supply chain and 10x production in the next two years, and give them the resources they need to do it. Send Ukraine an obscene amount of materiel, enough to actually win the war instead of just be stalemated in it. Make advance commitments to buy the munitions to do that, to support those companies in growing capacity.

What if your goal is neither jobs nor defense, but fostering the growth of an industry in the US that could stand on its own two feet once it existed but will never get started? Here's where tariffs actually make sense, but they should be relentlessly narrow, specific and targeted. What do you want to sell? Who in America is trying to build it? What inputs do they buy from abroad? Make it a priority of our trade policy to get them those inputs cheaply. Most of what you're doing is, once again, buying bits of the supply chain and hiring people who know how to do it, plus subsidizing them, but tariffs will be part of the picture. The CHIPS act was this done well. Every single tariff and every single subsidy should have an incredibly specific objective in mind, and if it isn't working to achieve that objective should be adjusted.

What if your goal is to negotiate a free trade agreement? Well, we've successfully negotiated lots of free trade agreements, it's not exactly a totally unknown art form. Have smart, competent, skilled negotiators with knowledge of the other side's constraints, resources, political concerns, and where we have leverage. Have bilateral negotiations; emerge with a deal; have Congress ratify it. Trying to do many-to-one negotiations doesn't work because it is so visible that a country's behavior to date has nothing to do with the tariffs that were imposed, because the way the tariffs were imposed puts many other countries' leadership in a position where doing what we want would be deeply unpopular at home, and because no one involved knew anything about the countries they were throwing tariffs at.

Again, we can do any of these things. We are not a country on the brink of becoming a failed state; we can execute on ambitious, ludicrous, serious things, and we absolutely should. We just have to figure out what we want and then line up the levers to get it done. I've always found something beautiful about the capacity of healthy societies to change gears on a dime, to set down their knitting and go do a shift at the munitions factory, to build cities in the dust overnight. We can reshore

Endquote (I'm too lazy to do the block quoting for all that.)

I actually disagree with her - I think we have proven relatively definitively that jobs programs in the United States currently do not work. Not because jobs programs are a bad idea in a vacuum, but because the government and the way we as citizens interact with the government has become so corrupted, that major government programs are doomed to fail horribly in my opinion.

Then again, perhaps a blatant jobs program would be better than the corrupt crap we have going on today?

Also, I don't think that manufacturing in the U.S. would lead to low quality. Yes we would have automation, but we would also need people to staff the plants. And the fact is, young men just tend to enjoy and be more drawn to working with their hands than working on computers all day. For the most part, at least.

Her take reads to me as a very well thought out, but stereotypically feminine and coastal elite view of the problem.

Again, we can do any of these things.

This is the part that is wrong. We actually can't do any of these things, at least not to any degree of scale and competence. There are too many veto points, too many interest groups, and too many fief-building bureaucrats for anything that requires coordination beyond an executive order. And, there is insufficient faith in competent government execution and trust in expertise even if these things were not true, such that it would probably fail from lack of good-faith cooperation anyways.

That doesn't mean that tariffs are better than nothing. I appreciate Althouse's dictum that better than nothing is a high bar. But for all the people who cry that we have to do something, well, this is something and it can be done.

Kids benefit a lot from one on one tutoring; hire a million Americans to offer one on one tutoring to every student between the ages of 5 and 9 to fix our horrifying collapse in general reading ability.

Whom do you plan on hiring for this? I can assure you, the median underemployed/NEET man is not a fit for the role.

Kids benefit a lot from one on one tutoring; hire a million Americans to offer one on one tutoring to every student between the ages of 5 and 9 to fix our horrifying collapse in general reading ability. Boys learn better if some of their teachers are men, so make sure half of your hires are men.

Yeah, that's a good point, but the problem is, for example: the kind of guys who would have gone into teaching instead of doing blue-collar work, because their families wanted them to get out of the manual labour grind and improve themselves, are still going to go into teaching today, but the guys who got a job on the assembly line instead of becoming teachers are not going to do that today.

It's not a simple choice between "well gee will I study to become a primary school teacher or get a job in the box factory, I have the skills and aptitude for either". The guys who got a job in the box factory were not academically qualified to be teachers (I'm not saying they were stupid, I'm saying they were never going to be teachers and they knew it, their families knew it, everybody knew it).

So it's a bit like the "learn to code" mantra - if there aren't any box factories anymore, those guys are not going to be teaching nine year old boys how to read gooderer.

So there is going to be a tranche of people who would have done manual labour/blue-collar work, but now manufacturing is either off-shored or automation is coming for those jobs. What do you do for them? Some of them may be able to start up small businesses of their own (there is certainly plenty of room for 'local guy to do small handyman jobs around the town') but not all, and certainly not all of them are going to be able to pivot into teaching.

AI is probably coming for the white-collar jobs as well, but there may be more wiggle room there for "okay so maybe I'll re-train as a teacher". I think something like a jobs programme probably is the best we can hope for, and there is a ton of work in the voluntary/public sector that could be done under the aegis of that, but it'll be tricky to implement: local government that isn't cutting the grass or filling the pot holes because of lack of budget to do that kind of work. Voluntary services that need a handyman/janitor/caretaker but don't have the funding to employ one full-time.

These are called community employment schemes over here, I don't know if there is an American equivalent, but if manufacturing/heavy industry is now dead as a source of employment, unless you're expecting everyone to start becoming an Uber driver or the likes, then some kind of government jobs programme is what is needed. The ideal would be "these are real jobs where people are employed at market rates and get health insurance and pension benefits" but the problem of course is no money to pay for that, so that's where government has to step in and then we're talking about spending even more on social security/social services which is another problem in itself: where does the money come from to pay for that, unless we're expecting the Miracle of Superhuman Intelligence AI to make things so cheap, and the economy so booming, that there is the magic money fountain flowing to pay for all this.

Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations

Sorry, is the theory here that inducing a recession will increase labour force participation? That is very observably not what has happened in every previous recession. If the theory is that mass deportations will mean this time is different and the reverse will happen because there will be millions of new vacancies opened up, well there are demand side effects too. Obviously no-one knows precisely, but estimates of illegal immigrant remittances tend not to be above 20% of total earnings, so even before considering any other mechanisms you'd need to deport at the very least four illegal immigrants to create one vacancy in an equivalent role on average, and this is before one even begins to consider things like complementary task specialisation. This means that any increase in unemployment downstream of a recession will be extraordinarily difficult. Given that the US labour force is something like 170 million+ people, if a Trump recession produces just a 1% increase in unemployment, you'd need to deport over 6 millions illegal immigrants just to get back to where you started. This isn't just a question of, as you say, 'he won't deport enough illegals to make a difference'. It's that even a small recession would wipe out any possible labour market improvements from even the most thoroughly pursued program of deportations.

The fact is that being able to coast by on gig economy money, for instance, is a symptom of a society becoming wealthier. It might be bad from a social cohesion and personal fulfilment perspective, but 'make society poorer so people have to work harder' seems like a pretty silly experiment to carry out, and rather unfair on everyone else who doesn't fall into that category and whose lives will become a whole lot harder.

I'm also not convinced this is a major problem. U-6 unemployment is below 8% at the moment, which is only marginally above the lows it reached prior to the early 2000s recession, GFC and Covid.

The fundamental error is supposing there's some huge reserve of able-bodied but idle people sitting around. Prime Age LFPR is near an all-time high. Most of the people who don't have a job have a good reason for it (e.g. caretaking, education, age, disability) or are looking for one.

Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?

Why is it wonderful? I actually don't think Trump's base voted for a plan to make everyone so poor we have to flog the elderly and disabled back on the assembly line.

As @Primaprimaprima observes, I think a moral judgment towards those unwilling or too lazy to support themselves is one of the distinguishing features of Tea-Party/MAGA right. That there is dignity and virtue in hard work and doing the needful but dirty job. That the slothful degenerate should be either pittied or whipped into shape rather than catered to. The "Gods of the Copybook Headings" are real and walk among us.

Also, it seems I have been blocked by this user. That's news to me.

So I fully agree with that on principle. There were two generations of overly soft parents that lead to a reasonable number of sociopathic moochers.

But living in a prosperous and high-trust society without degenerating into sloth, that's a core piece of what makes anglo civilization worthwhile. Destroying the prosperity rather than reinforcing those values is madness.

Destroying the prosperity rather than reinforcing those values is madness.

The dissidents already believe that half of the political spectrum has effectively forbade the American public from ever reinforcing those values, what is your solution to that?

One parent refuses to teach the child not to scoop the butter off the butter dish and eat it.

The other decides that everyone must go without butter.

What is to be done?

The other parent presumably believes that going without butter will force the first parent to work towards actualizing responsibility instead of whinging when told to do what they need to do.

Do I think this is realistic or practical? Not really, but that is the framing you are fighting.

Not only is it not realistic or practical, the goal is to have a house in which there is butter. Fixing the problem by removing the butter only gets us further from that goal.

Prime Age LFPR is near an all-time high.

Overall lfpr is in the dumps right now. No idea where to find "prime age" lfpr but some links would be nice.

Found some fred data:

The overall participation rate is doing ok, but not majorly changing recently: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 But something is wrong, the line goes up way too much before 2000.

Let's delve into the cross tabs: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01300025

Overall lfpr is in the dumps right now

The population is getting older and more people are going to college.

No idea where to find "prime age" lfpr but some links would be nice

FRED would be good place to start: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

doing ok

And by doing ok, you mean nearing all-time highs?

Let's delve into the cross tabs: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01300025

When you take out retirees and students it looks much less dramatic, and even in the 25-54 bracket per some mercatus paper I can't find now even a substantial portion thereof is early retirees. Especially given that the figures for men have been stable post-GFC, it hardly seems like something worth crashing the economy over.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Hv9x

I would also be fine with making the equivalent weight in illegal roofers legal and deporting the 400 lb Halo players -- it's a quicker way to get a legal labor force and likely will improve the culture too. I find it hard to comprehend the mindset of someone who thinks this is a good way to get sympathy. Aren't they supposed to claim he's got some disability? Are you sure this comment on reddit wasn't a conservative trolling?

You’re not supposed to feel sympathy for the 400 pound space marine, you’re supposed to feel disgust tinged with the hope that hard work will make him a real man.

Suppose ICE actually deports enough illegals to cause significant shortages

...

Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point

My first impressions is that it does not seem that the specific means matter at all in the reasoning here. Suppose you had some other mechanisms, any other mechanisms, let's call them X and Y. Suppose they were actually really good at performing these functions, so that we're able to say:

Suppose X cause[s] significant shortages

...

Suppose that Y contract[s] the economy to the point

Then presumably, the important bits of the conclusion hold, and you would still be in favor of X and Y on the grounds of the conclusion. Thus, I sort of don't think that there's anything really about immigration/tariffs, specifically, that matters.

So what do I think is really going on here?

Now of course, people are capable of far more than you expect them to be once their backs are actually up against the wall. People will leap into action if there's no other choice.

My read is that this is just standard leftist wealth envy/hatred. You're upset that people exist who are not satisfying "from each according to his abilities". Thus, you have to find a way, any way, to force them to "contribute" to "society" according to their abilities. There are humans out there who are not doing the specific thing you want them to do, so you will simply tweak society to engineer conditions that force them to do your will.

If this doesn't work, or X and Y fail to complete your goals, perhaps some still manage to mooch and others just feel some additional hardship, then we must go further. Perhaps we'll need to turn up the screws and wreck the economy further. Perhaps we'll need to conscript folks to work on farms/factories. Maybe just confiscate any wealth that might be sufficient to allow someone to buy leisure (or their family to buy it for them). The details of whether they're state-owned or not or what specific means are to be used are mostly irrelevant. It's the same impulse with the same lack of a limiting principle, and very likely very similar sort of just destroying the economy, and making everything worse for everyone, just to get at some perceived freeloaders.

I think the most common response is, "I don't care if some wealthy people are lazy." Yes, this includes people who have part of their "wealth" in family connections, no different from the hatred for "generational wealth". Instead, if they or their family generated wealth (which, by the usual means of market economies created value for others), it is sort of irrelevant if they use it to buy leisure for themselves or those close to them. They created the value and the wealth; they are free to use it as they please.

I would like to note that I think there are plenty of other grounds on which to dislike significant immigration. There are probably even other grounds on which to like tariffs (even if I generally don't find them persuasive). All I'm saying is that this is my read of this particular line of reasoning.

My read is that this is just standard leftist wealth envy/hatred. You're upset that people exist who are not satisfying "from each according to his abilities". Thus, you have to find a way, any way, to force them to "contribute" to "society" according to their abilities.

The funny thing is there IS a way to force (most) people to "contribute", one agreed upon between such disparate figures as Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Lenin. Lenin got his version from the Bible, good atheist that he was: "He who does not work shall not eat"; this was incorporated into the Soviet Constitution. Kipling's version was one of the Copybook Headings, "If you don't work you die." But this is one thing that less-than-tankie leftists (including social democrats of all sorts) will absolutely not agree with.

My read is that this is just standard leftist wealth envy/hatred.

I'm not wealthy wealthy, but I am significantly wealthier than the median American. I could drop to zero net income and live off my current wealth for years without having to work a day. And I feel no moral guilt about this whatsoever. So no, I have no envy/hatred of wealth.

You're upset that people exist who are not satisfying "from each according to his abilities".

I'm upset that our vital and necessary work is being done by immigrants and illegals instead of native-born American citizens.

If we get back to the point where the work of maintaining American society is again being done by Americans, and there's still enough surplus to go around to enable some people to live as NEETs, then fine by me. Bully for them. Being a NEET is great! I've done my share of NEETing in the past. I empathize fully with why people want to do that and I have no criticisms of them from a moral perspective.

There are humans out there who are not doing the specific thing you want them to do, so you will simply tweak society to engineer conditions that force them to do your will.

There is no politics unless someone is being forced to conform to something. There is no civilization unless someone is being forced to conform to something.

Obviously some civilizations are much more totalitarian than others. But even the most libertarian among us will still usually support some minimal state order for the purposes of punishing violent crime, enforcing property rights, etc.

If this doesn't work, or X and Y fail to complete your goals, perhaps some still manage to mooch and others just feel some additional hardship, then we must go further.

Incorrect, see above.

I'm not wealthy wealthy, but I am significantly wealthier than the median American. I could drop to zero net income and live off my current wealth for years without having to work a day. And I feel no moral guilt about this whatsoever. So no, I have no envy/hatred of wealth.

I'm sure every Party member in good standing could use a similar defense. They don't hate luxuries; they have them! (They certainly earned them, unlike those other freeloaders...) It's just when those other people have their luxuries and aren't contributing "according to their abilities" that there's a problem.

I'm upset that our vital and necessary work is being done by immigrants and illegals instead of native-born American citizens.

Whence tarrifs? (The proposed point of the OP.) They have nothing to do with immigrants or illegals. Like I alluded to, there are plenty of other (I think potentially good) reasons to go after immigration/illegals. Those motivations are different. I maintain that the ones you presented are just standard leftist wealth envy/hatred. (...at least, any wealth that you perceive wasn't as 'deserved' as your own.)

I could drop to zero net income and live off my current wealth for years without having to work a day

Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful?

Does anyone else find this morally despicable? "It's ok for me to be able to never have to work another day, but wouldn't it wonderful if we make the country so much poorer that everyone else has to spend the rest of their lives doing manual labor?"

No, it's "I worked hard and produced enough money/value that I have the option of no longer working if I wanted it. Wouldn't it be good if the chronically idle were forced to do the same, given that their idleness is making them bloated and unhappy?"

The rich tend to be much more clear-eyed about the downsides of having enough money that they no longer need anything, in the same way celebrities are clear-eyed about mass fame not actually feeling that good.

Personally my feelings are mixed. I want a good long holiday to really get into all the hobbies that I never had time for; at the same time, whenever I'm left without external whips for too long I sink into a morass and get less done. I suspect the optimal amount of non-chosen labour in someone's life is greater than 0 but less than 8 hours a day. In an ideal world I would be interested to see a 4-hour-day work program.

EDIT:

If we get back to the point where the work of maintaining American society is again being done by Americans, and there's still enough surplus to go around to enable some people to live as NEETs, then fine by me. Bully for them. Being a NEET is great! I've done my share of NEETing in the past. I empathize fully with why people want to do that and I have no criticisms of them from a moral perspective.

I might have been projecting in my analysis of @Primaprimaprima's motives. Although I can see an argument that maintaining America on the manual labour of Chinese/Guatemalans is not morally better than maintaining it on Americans.

For all intents and purposes, yes. This (among other things) is what i voted for.

Democrats' rhetoric surrounding immigration and wages has always stood out to me as an obvious example of politically-motivated doublethink. "The experts" are asking us to hold two contradictory axioms simultaneously. One is that maintaining a supply of "off the books" labor is essential to the survival of multiple industries (such as roofing and agriculture) and that ideally we should be increasing the supply of labor to reduce costs (ie wages) even further. The other is that the available supply of labor has has little if any effect on wages (ie costs).

This allows the Democrat to maintain a smug confidence in thier own intellectual and class superiority through convincing themselves that the working class only opposes immigration because they are a bunch of ignorant racist hicks who do not understand the nuances of economic theory, and have been "tricked" by men like Trump into voting against thier own interests, rather than people with legitimate grievences and concerns, who don't like seeing thier wages under-cut and culture denigrated.

I also agree that the moral judgment towards willingness to work and "going without" is one of the core ideological differences between the Tea-Party/MAGA right and other political factions within the US.

Democrats' rhetoric surrounding immigration and wages has always stood out to me as an obvious example of politically-motivated doublethink. "The experts" are asking us to hold two contradictory axioms simultaneously. One is that maintaining a supply of "off the books" labor is essential to the survival of multiple industries (such as roofing and agriculture) and that ideally we should be increasing the supply of labor to reduce costs (ie wages) even further. The other is that the available supply of labor has has little if any effect on wages (ie costs).

These are not contradictory because immigrant (especially illegal immigrant) and native pools of labour are not easy substitutes, they have very different skill mixes - and when I say 'skills', I don't mean that American citizens are all accountants or nuclear engineers, I mean in the most basic sense. Hence because of complementary task specialisation it is possible for new illegal immigrants to, on average, depress the wages of other illegal immigrants but not, on average, natives, and for such influxes to improve native productivity. It's a bit of a waste of a median American to be working in the fields, but in a constricted labour market wages in non-skilled fields get pushed up until people are pulled out into those fields, which is bad for productivity and standards of living in the long run. In a way it's the logic of automation.

Of course, there will be some in the American citizen labour pool (especially, ironically, recent legal immigrants) who are similarly unskilled to the average illegal immigrant, but the way to remedy that is via fiscal policy and redistribution of the native productivity gains which immigration facilitates.

the way to remedy that is via fiscal policy and redistribution of the native productivity gains which immigration facilitates.

It's pretty amazing that the solution to the harm caused by liberal immigration policy is to give even more money to liberals in the department of economic equity to distribute according to equity metrics designed by some other liberal consultant from harvard.

Like all those "teaching coal miners to learn to code" programs that, wow, didn't get any coal miners good jobs, but sure did hand out a lot of money to the kind of people whose nonprofits run those programs.

It's so obvious to anyone on the outside how relentlessly self-serving this leftist managerial ideology is, how is it seemingly impossible to notice from the inside?

It's pretty amazing that the solution to the harm caused by liberal immigration policy is to give even more money to liberals in the department of economic equity to distribute according to equity metrics designed by some other liberal consultant from harvard.

To my knowledge, the primary means of redistribution in the US is the EITC which does it on the basis of income. That doesn't seem very objectionable to me.

The primary means of redistribution is Social Security, which does it on the basis of age.

It's pretty amazing that the solution to the harm caused by liberal immigration policy is to give even more money to liberals in the department of economic equity to distribute according to equity metrics designed by some other liberal consultant from harvard.

Don't be facetious. The proportion of money redistributed via welfare which goes to administration of that welfare is pretty low, and that mostly consists of ordinary administrative workers not high-level policy wonks.

Like all those "teaching coal miners to learn to code" programs that, wow, didn't get any coal miners good jobs, but sure did hand out a lot of money to the kind of people whose nonprofits run those programs.

Lol. To the extent that 'learn to code' was ever a real policy, which it never really was, the vast vast majority of the funding changes downstream of that discourse didn't go to non-profits. In any case what I meant by redistribution was, well, redistribution.

It's so obvious to anyone on the outside how relentlessly self-serving this leftist managerial ideology is, how is it seemingly impossible to notice from the inside?

Lazy and trite. There are problems with left-wing non-profits, especially in the post-Floyd period, but that has nothing to do with genuine government redistributive programmes which do a lot of good and have relatively low overheads.

I do not believe you.

I believe that to the degree that substitution might be difficult it is difficult because affluent blue tribers on the coast want it to be difficult, and actively work to make it so.

I believe that "They are doing jobs Americans wont" is code for "I don't think I should have to pay 'the help' the going rate" and "I don't want an emplyee with legal rights and delusions of equality, I want a serf I can exploit"

Finally i beleive that @coffee_enjoyer is correct that roofing companies will start increasing the wages and quality of life they offer thier employees before we go without roofs. If they don't, screw 'em.

I guess it's time to drop this take: did we accidentally end up reintroducing slavery?

I don't say this lightly. The archetype/stereotype of the immigrant worker is a man who has come over to America to work for an illegally-low wage (that is still more than he could earn by staying in the corrupt shithole he fled from), and faces challenges such as: he can't get the law on his side if his employer abuses him (because then he'd be caught and deported), his failure to meld with the local culture places him at odds with the native population, and his children are pseudo-orphans because their parents are only able to raise them for as long as they aren't caught and deported. And what do we, the natives, get out of the exploitation of this man's travails? Cheaper products as a result of cheaper labor.

"Cheap labor" is the motivating force for capitalism, and business owners have always sought it out wherever it could be found. First, it was slaves taken from Africa and the Native American population. After the Civil War, it was the native-born blacks and dirt-poor whites who helped build the industrial cities of the Eastern US. Towards the end of the Cold War, it was overseas countries where quality of life, wages, and cost of living were all low. At some point, immigrant labor also gained a share of labor power.

Now, to an extent, I like the world that the Neoliberal World Order built, but all those blue-haired Adbusters-reading leftists are directionally-correct that we are addicted to cheap labor and ignore all the externalities that come with it. Is it right to just shut off the supply like Trump is trying to do? Should we not wean ourselves off of it now that the world is so interconnected anyways? Is it fair to keep racing to the bottom for more-work-for-less-paychecks even as we speculate about the wonders of total automation that seem so tantalizingly closer with every passing day?

The bad thing about slavery isn't that they did it for free. In fact, they didn't even do it for free, they got room and board.

The bad thing about slavery was that they (or their ancestors) were forcibly abducted, transported (across state lines!), and put to work at gunpoint, with their children being born into the same situation. Illegal immigrants can leave at any moment and their kids cives Americani sunt.

It sucks that there are people born every day into poverty in third world countries. However, people who illegally (often perilously)come to this country for opportunities they don't have at home obviously will not benefit from being sent home. They know what home is like and they made the decision to come here anyway. We can talk about whether they are good for the country, but the argument that illegal immigration is bad for the illegal immigrants just doesn't hold water.

I can acknowledge that, yes, obviously, it still really beats slavery, but I can see that it still seems unfair and quite uneven.

While illegals make less than native workers doing the same jobs would, their wages aren’t illegally low and most don’t complain about the treatment from their bosses.

Yeah, certainly in large wealthy cities most illegal migrants make much, much more than the federal minimum wage.

Before we go without roofs, roofing companies will increase the wages they offer employees, and roofing companies will increase the quality of life they offer employees (fewer days a week, shorter hours). This is exactly what we want: greater quality of life for lower income and middle income Americans, at the direct expense of the upper class who waste our precious resources on ugly cars, biohazardous laws and Peloton machines. Contrary to popular belief, it has always been a zero-sum game.

Increasing roofing prices increases housing prices. That affects far more than the "upper class".

The rich can absorb the hit if fixing their roof goes from $15K to $35k. The middle class, less so.

Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?

This depends critically on the amount of collateral poverty you would need to create for each such vacancy filled.

That in turn is an empirical matter.

Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?

I absolutely agree! I'm tired of people acting as if we don't have a labor force. We clearly do, we have just decided to let them not work and survive on handouts and other people's largesse. It's high time the situation is remedied.

Not only that, but I think we have a lot of over-education in America where people are choosing college as a path of least resistance who really don’t have the talent or inclination to succeed in academia. I think if given a viable alternative— trades, culinary, or general labor — a lot of people would choose that instead.

Oh absolutely. I think its the #1 reason the academy has fallen apart over the last few decades. 50% of people should not be going into academia. At most it should be 15-20%, and even that is quite high imo.

If you make something less selective, it becomes much much harder to police for good behavior.

Most college educated unsuccessful people will not succeed in the trades because there is something wrong with them. That’s assuming they’re willing to take a blue collar job to begin with, and society increasingly sees a college degree as the price of admittance to the class of people who shouldn’t have to work for a living.

I’m assuming that they went to college assuming they were that good of students that such a path was open to them. For the vast majority, that was never true, and if we had a university that could only extract loan payments for those who successfully graduated and got good jobs afterwards, the university would not have admitted them. There are students in university paying 100K over 4 years and who need remedial math, reading, and writing courses. We’re letting them basically LARP for the government backed loans; they have absolutely no business going to university, and a sane education system would have told them no probably long before they got onto the college bound track in the first place.

If the students in question are not capable of college level work, then they need to get over it and look for other options more in line with their actual intellectual capacity. I’ve always been firmly convinced that schools should track kids (with periodic reassessment) so that we don’t create the glut of overeducated “failsons” that are too good to work with their hands, yet too unaccomplished to get jobs doing mental work. If you aren’t suited to the work you’ve been trained to do, it’s the education system exploiting you by dangling dreams in front of you.

Ending the handouts seems like a better way of dealing with that then wrecking the economy.

The author and his brother needn't worry anyway, Polymarket chance of recession is at almost 60% already and that's with the high levels of uncertainty that Trump might just fold. There'll be plenty of unemployment and moving in with parents to go around again if we go into recession territory.

Especially since as we tend to see with businesses from steel and sugar tariffs, all the downstream employment depending on those inputs gets way more fucked than jobs in the industry being protected get grow.

60% chance of recession seems far too low given that the priestly caste is fully capable of manipulating the definition of "recession" to punish Trump just as they did to protect Biden.

Trump just stood up and said "Hey everybody, watch this!" and dropped a nuke. There won't be any room for the usual quibbling over what constitutes a recession or whose fault it is. The GOP will be lucky to elect another President before 2040.

I tend to agree unfortunately. The GOP's single largest electoral asset before all of this was being seen as better stewards of the economy. A large number of people voted for them purely based on that. If that image is utterly destroyed, we might see an electoral swing on a scale we haven't in recent memory.

Polling hasn't moved that way yet. But this also hasn't hit the working class yet. This is going to get messy.

We shall see.

Trump just stood up and said "Hey everybody, watch this!" and dropped a nuke.

Wait, are you being literal or metaphorical here? If literal, could I please have some further reading?

It's a pretty clear metaphor.

'Dropped a bomb' is an idiom that means delivering bad news. 'Dropped a nuke' is the former but much more impactful.

I figured I'd better ask because, well, it's not like Trump can't order a nuclear test, and it probably wouldn't even be the most shocking thing he's done this year (though ordering a nuke used in anger would). Hell, I'm not even sure it'd be a bad idea, if only to check that they still work.

just as they did to protect Biden

This is simply not true. Under Biden the US only had one quarter of negative real GDP growth, which is not famously less than two quarters, which not only is conventional definition but pre-Covid there is no recession typically considered so which was less than six months. The 'Covid recession' was obviously a special case because of the scale of the decline in a single quarter - 19% decline versus around 0.25% for the single quarter of 2022 contraction. If you consider 2022 a recession then you also have to include patently non-recessionary years a recessions including 2014 and 1956.

So we're just throwing the spring and summer of 2022 down the memory-hole are we?

What is this article supposed to prove exactly?

What is it supposed to prove? It is supposed to prove that the economy under biden was not all sunshine and cute woodland creatures. That the official definition of recession used by NBER, the FED, Et Al. was revised from "more than three consecutive months of negative growth" to "more than one full calandar quarter" the same week Biden would've crossed the old three month threshold.

That is that, the definition was revised such that declining growth for the last 2 months in Q2 plus the next 2 months of Q3 would not count because even if together they constitute 4 consecutive months of negative growth (a quarter being 3 months long), niether of the 2 two month blocks together would constitute "more than a full calendar quarter".

It is supposed to prove that the economy under biden was not all sunshine and cute woodland creatures

I didn't say it was. The economy does not have only two states of 'good' and 'recession'. Nobody considers any of the years of 1975-1980 as recessionary even though everyone agrees the economy was in the shitter.

That the official definition of recession used by NBER, the FED, Et Al. was revised from "more than three consecutive months of negative growth" to "more than one full calandar quarter" the same week Biden would've crossed the old three month threshold.

This is false (and if not do please provide a source), but it couldn't even possibly be true because there is no 'official' definition of recession in the US, recessions are determined by the NBER business cycle dating committee who don't follow any strict set of rules. Even here, there was never ever any kind of rule of thumb of three months of consecutive negative growth - the only widely accepted definition (to the extent that people accepted that there was one at all) was two consecutive quarters of negative growth, though there are good reasons for the NBER not to strictly stick to this (the 2001 recession saw three non-consecutive quarters of growth, but nobody doubts that as a genuine recession). So the question then is, should the dating committee have declared a recession based on past behaviour? Well, no. If 2022 were a recession it would be the first one in American history to consist of a single quarter of negative growth, and not even a particularly severe quarter of contraction either at -0.25%. It would have been completely at odds with past practice to declare 2022 a recession - there were single quarters of greater or roughly equal contraction not declared a recession in 1947, 1956 and again in 1957, since when there hasn't been an isolated quarter of contraction, until 2022.

Does the math work? Average apartment rent in the US is $1750 / month, so $21000 / year. Some quick Googling shows that in the US, the average factory worker salary is about $35000 and average construction worker salary is about $40000. In reality it's probably significantly less since I am guessing that the available figures don't include many illegal aliens' wages and under-the-table arrangements.

So unless something changes to either increase the salaries or make housing cheaper, we seem to on average have a situation where as a blue-collar worker you'd be paying half of your salary in rent. Add on other vital spending like food and health insurance, and pretty soon you have a situation where there isn't much money left over to do anything besides just survive.

Granted, deporting illegal aliens would likely drive up blue collar wages, but it could also lead to increases in prices on things like food so the benefits are not completely straightforward. Let's say that deporting illegal aliens does substantially increase blue collar wages. Even then, unless the government does something to lower housing costs, it still seems that the situation would be pretty dicey for the average blue collar worker. And Trump, as far as I know, barely talks about housing. He and his administration do not seem to give the issue of housing affordability much attention at all. Yet it is probably the single biggest economic expense for most Americans, and the supply is not matching the demand.

You know that average apartment rent is higher than something approximating half of apartment rents?

In any case, many construction workers do not live in apartments. They might rent a room in a house($600/mo in my metro) if not living with a partner(and if they are, two incomes makes rent much more affordable). They might live in a trailer park(generally cheaper than apartments). They might already own a house.

uppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for?

I recall a lot about inflation, crime, and illegal immigration. I don't recall any complaints about fat obese people not working. Think people are projecting their own ideology onto the Trump campaign.

I don't recall any complaints about fat obese people not working.

There's been an undercurrent of it. Even the lyrics of "Rich Men North of Richmond" mention it:

Well, God, if you're five-foot-three and you're three-hundred pounds Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of Fudge Rounds

Maybe not in the Hanania/Moldbug/etc online intellectual right. The thing is, that's a vanishingly small percentage of the population/voter base, they're just overemphasized because they write all the blog posts/legitimizing arguments, so they always get pointed to when discussion happens. America's hinterlands are filled with people who are proud of working and think other people should work too.

To which my response is, very well! Then we shall all go without roofs. Now of course, people are capable of far more than you expect them to be once their backs are actually up against the wall. People will leap into action if there's no other choice. But, supposing he's right and it does turn out that no one answers the call, then we shall simply go without. A nation, a culture, a race that does not provide for itself, should go without.

Does your wife agree with this "go without roofs" thing? When the water's coming into your house, remind yourself of that core ethical commitment.

The wife probably expects him to be a "roof fixer of last resort" (or at least this would be the case in a traditional marriage). Maybe not as pretty as a professional job, maybe it doesn't last as long, but good enough to get through the next rain storm.

I would expect most men, with a couple hours of watching youtube, and a day off for the project could fix a leaky roof.

It’s so interesting seeing the justifications change in real time at such breakneck as speeds. I’m no political strategist, but “make ourselves poorer because we’re simply so rich and prosperous that it’s made us soft and lazy” does not seem like an argument that will resonate with anyone outside the true believers.

I think there is a sort of religious-revival component to Trump 2. Now, that sounds lazy and snide, I admit, but I don't mean for that to be the case. I've stated before that the new direction from the administration, the current motivation, seems to be from the values-aesthetics angle. The package offered by MAGA does indeed seem to be "America has grown soft and complacent, we must make it great again by reaffirming our values and rejecting the soft-power view of American greatness."

The problem is the unemployed brother whose elderly mother is cleaning up after him, and what is this guy doing about it? Why is he not kicking his brother in the behind to sort himself out? Why isn't he fixing the toilet instead of letting Mom do it?

Whether or not there are illegal immigrants being used as cheap labour, this is nothing to do with his family problems. If he's unable to help, or unwilling to help, blaming Trump for "ICE thugs" is not going to be any good for his elderly mother trying to survive in her home with this kind of constant hassle.

Maybe a few "ICE thugs" showing up to drag the brother out of the house wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. Then this guy could go virtue signal about "I love the idea of persecuted brown people so much more than my own real family" somewhere else.

This is a confusing post because as of the end of the Biden administration, the unemployment rate was very low and prime age labor force participation rate was very high.


What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats