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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   32654 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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Scott Alexander in his recent links post highlights an interesting idea on how to deal with violation of court orders, make them an outlaw , https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-april-2025 (Edit: To clarify, this is most likely not a fully serious idea. Scott would understand how difficult it would be to actually implement, I'm just analyzing it as if it were serious and how that would work with US law.)

Related: the Trump administration seems to be refusing to comply with a 9-0 Supreme Court order to bring back a specific deported immigrant. This is obviously terrifying, but superforecaster Peter Wildeford says it is not technically a constitutional crisis yet (X) because there are still some formalities the courts need to go to before they have officially “ordered” Trump to bring back the immigrant, and he won’t have officially “defied” the order until the formalities are complete. This doesn’t make me too much calmer but I guess is good to keep in mind. Related: Nicholas Decker asks when a violation of the Constitution becomes the sort of wolf-at-the-door dictatorship that we are supposed to violently rise up to prevent; people are mad at him but I think you have to either admit that some level of tyranny reaches this level or else just lie down and die. My proposed solution (drawing, of course, on medieval Iceland) is that the Supreme Court should be able to directly enforce its decisions by declaring violators to be “outlaws”; not only do outlaws lose the protection of the law, but anyone who uses force to defend of an outlaw becomes an outlaw themselves. See here for discussion of the pluses and minuses of such a system.

Taking this idea seriously, it's hard to see how it manifests in the US. Assuming no change to the constitution, which is possible but I think unlikely to convince enough citizens to go for such a change, the protection of the law is clearly outlined to any person within our jurisdiction in the 14th amendment.

nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

In theory we could radically reinterpret jurisdiction as being "within the law" and thus said "outlaws" being outside the law would not be in jurisdiction but that is a pretty far stretch. It also makes an interesting logical question, if they're outside of US jurisdiction then are they really defying the courts anymore?

Another possible theory could hinge on a different odd and radical reinterpretation of wording,

nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;

A radical interpretation of "life" or "liberty" could include removing the status of personhood from violators, therefore removing them from the "any person" line.

Both of these are incredibly radical. The US system is not fully originalist but even the more broader minded living constitutionalists and textualists tend to take the original intent into some amount of consideration and there isn't really any mention of stripping personhood away. And even then, it's still a stretch that one can take away personhood when our definition of person has little to do with one's involvement in the legal system anyway. I don't think many would contest Shakespeare or Genghis Khan as "people" despite being born and dead before the US even existed. And defining outlaws as outside the law could end up suggesting we can not enforce rules on them either if they decide to do something like steal or murder and just hope a citizen takes action to fix it.

Even more so, it remains to be seen if such a thing would even be necessary. I'm not aware of many cases where a ruled upon contempt of court hasn't been resolved in some sort of favorable manner for the courts (an arrest, a fine, obeying the courts after the order, etc) and the ones where it doesn't happen are people who hide away or flee the country. Declaring someone an outlaw and stripping away their legal protections doesn't really help too much in the police not being able to find them, unless we want the outlaw status to allow police to violate the rights of non-outlaws in their search for outlaws.

And even the most famous examples of court defiance tend to be apocryphal historical information, a misunderstanding of the orders by laymen or a mix of the two. Sometimes political leaders will even mislead about their actions, presenting an appearance of "fighting back" for their base while actually pivoting to another strategy that hasn't been ruled on yet. Actually serious major defiance of court rulings just hasn't really happened and thus the need for an alternative solution seems questionable IMO.

Ok but let's assume that the constitution does get changed. Maybe Scott runs for president on the "Let's change the constitution to make outlaws" platform, and the voters all surge for pro outlaw amendment congressmen and governors, and even the politicians currently on the fence are convinced of this idea. What then? That's already been covered decently in depth by Scott years ago and I don't know if I can add too much for this. I don't have much knowledge about the medieval Icelandic system beyond what I learned from this article. But regardless I think the likelihood of such a change is so low the discussion is purely in the hypothetical at this point.

More likely IMO (although still highly unlikely) would be to adopt the punishment of exile. Why do I think this is relatively more likely? It has history in the Roman legal system and British law systems which are already major inspirations for the American legal system so adopting anything from them is more precedented and that precedent may be more convincing to the population for a new amendment.

I've been incredibly bearish on "civil war" rhetoric since it began, but this proposition would be a fantastic way to pluck the dumbest possible outcome out of the haystack of nothing ever happening.

If the Supreme Court did this, Trump would no longer have any incentive to do anything other than march his most loyal thugs into the courtroom, dome all nine on public television, declare himself Emperor of the United States, and simply let the chips fall where they may. Would he do this? I'm not sure, but you never know how someone is gonna behave when they have been truly cornered until it happens.

Is this a risk worth taking to give an illegal immigrant two flights back home instead of one?

Scott of course shows his true colors again as a rabid partisan, by advocating literally unpersoning his political opponents.

In terms of the actual proposal, I don't see him argue in any sensible way why contempt isn't an adequate method of enforcement. Sure the courts may be slow sometimes, but they can be fast when they want to be. And his proposed "unpersoning" would also require the courts to make a move, so no reason for that to be any faster.

Scott of course shows his true colors again as a rabid partisan, by advocating literally unpersoning his political opponents.

I'm pretty sure it's just dark humor there, nor did Scott ever argue for unpersoning them (unless you think outlaws are unpersons by definition?). Those bits about how we might go about limiting a human's protection under the law are theoritical ideas from me, ideas that I disagree with.

In your eyes, is there any threshold that Trump could cross with his actions whereupon making a show of being opposed to them would no longer show one's "true colors as a rabid partisan"?

As I see it, the unpersoning thing is a valid, if silly and ill-thought-through, answer to the question of what the judiciary could do if its orders are ignored by someone too powerful to go after with the forces at its direct disposal. If you think it's an "rabid partisan" thing to consider, then, it seems that you think that someone who is not a partisan or not rabid should not be thinking about ways the judiciary could enforce its will in this case at all. Do you believe that Trump has a mandate to power uncircumscribed by the judiciary?

One can think that the president ought to be circumscribed by the judiciary whilst also thinking that the ways in which the judiciary acts is worthy of ridicule and contempt (in both senses). To make a silly example, if Trump stopped deporting illegal El Salvadorian gangbanger wifebeaters and starts deporting all-American people who can trace their family back five generations for innocently coughing in his presence, that would indeed be considered a step too far.

To make a silly example, if Trump stopped deporting illegal El Salvadorian gangbanger wifebeaters

The woman went back to the man who allegedly abused her, resumed having sex with him, and doesn't think it's a big deal. I don't understand why internet people care so much.

Because wife beating is a SERIOUS character flaw, and not something that majority of people condone. That, plus all of his other flaws makes this specific Culture War Front very revealing.

Scott Alexander is hysterically overrated just because he actually criticized wokes a bit back during the era where the spineless techies that make up his fandom were busy cowering and licking progressive boots.

That's not fair, he used to be a good writer that used to be able to show he properly understood the arguments he disagreed with.

He's a college educated white man and college educated white men have moved away from the Republican Party over the last decade. See Hanania and Spencer for other examples. On the other hand, the Right has gained no-college whites like Tim Pool and Joe Rogan.

Maybe, instead of complaining about being betrayed, you could modify your political platform to make it more appealing to high-income, educated white people?

Isn't Scott jewish?

The logic here being that, since Scott wrote a lot of nice things, he can claim a different ethnicity?

Or is this just some kind of kneejerk ethnocentric defense mechanism that was accidentally triggered?

Has he ever been a Republican?

I don't want either of them to be Republican. Hanania actually is ridiculously overrated and, in contrast to Scott, always has been. Having him on my side would be a liability.

As for Scott, I just want his arguments to be as high quality as they used to be. He was never on my side, but he used to be able to show that he understands it. Maybe it's the Republican party platform that caused the severe drop in his competence, even though he was always a Democrat, but I think we should look for causes elsewhere.

He was never on my side, but he used to be able to show that he understands it.

That's true for me as well, but I really liked "The Colors of her Coat" a lot, and do enjoy seeing aesthetic takes from Scott, more than political lately.

Makes sense. I remember hearing that back in the Soviet days some artists working on children's animation happily traded in any prestige that might have come from on working on something more serious, precisely because the field's lack of political importance meant you didn't have to justify yourself to a political commissar all the time, and could enjoy the art for what it is.

He used to be a somewhat ordinary young man with an eclectic reading habit, allowing him to mix weird rationality ideas while still understanding the opposite perspective. Then he became an incredibly successful and popular writer and moved to San Francisco where he now lives with his wife, children and mistress.

No matter how much he tries, if he does still try, he can’t really empathise with the people outside the blessed circle. They’re just too different from him now. At the same time, general political polarisation has continued to the extent that I doubt he ever meets any right wingers any more, even the weird kind.

It’s the same problem that’s occurred since time immemorial and is the reason why (as I understand it) Republican politicians were discouraged from spending too much time in Washington.

general political polarisation has continued to the extent that I doubt he ever meets any right wingers any more, even the weird kind.

I mean from where I'm standing the opposite has happened - he has been pretty resoundingly cancelled (mostly for the lukewarm HBD support) and is pretty permanently persona non grata in actual leftist spaces. I don't know what sort of people make up his social circles these days - other techie libertarians, probably - but it's very unlikely to be anyone actual leftists, let alone wokes, would recognize as allies they'd give the time of day to.

I don’t mean he spends time in left-wing activist spaces as an ally, I mean that I imagine his friends mostly take cultural left-wing fundamentals as a given. Trans stuff, race stuff*, homelessness, etc. I would be very surprised if he had friends who were actually right of center, let alone someone like Moldbug or Diseach. So he isn’t exposed to those perspectives any more except when he wants to be, and he’s made it pretty clear he doesn’t want to be.

*Yes, he hid his stance on HBD for a long time but even now he’s more open I doubt it actually makes any difference to his day-to-day behaviour.

Again, I'm just not sure how his friends could take the mainstream left-wing view of e.g. race and remain his friends. The mainstream left-wing view of race demands that you cut off anyone who gives the time of day to race science. And defines anyone who does as right-leaning by definition. Anyone who goes to parties with Scott is either not paying attention, or a very heterodox leftist indeed. I think accepting the premise in the original Red Tribe Vs Blue Tribe post that the Grey Tribe is a third, neutral entity is the only real way to describe what Scott's friends are like. He might very well be living in a tighter bubble than before, but it's not a left-wing bubble, because no actual left-wing bubble would tolerate his presence within itself.

(It's not just race, either, though that's the most prominent Schelling point. A mainstream leftist does not tolerate a friend who is outspokenly well-disposed toward capitalism - or indeed, one who casually, openly criticizes "wokeness", by that name. As an actual heterodox. This isn't to say all leftists are actively anti-capitalist and pro-cancel-culture, but nevertheless they treat it as a point of etiquette that the reverse opinions should not be embraced in public, for fear of looking like Those People. Scott, as a good Grey Triber, happily takes potshots at wokeness's illiberalism while taking it as a given that Capitalism is Good.)

Has it ever been different? The change in Scott's attitude is pretty clearly because liberals(ok, progressives[ok wokes]) were the main people who could hit him and then Trump started going after progressives, which he is and always was.

When Scott was taking Moldbug that seriously, I don’t think he was living next door. The whole point of the Internet is that discourse happens at turbo-speed regardless of distance.

Right, but this is my point: times changed. The kind of places where left-wingers might occasionally bump into right wingers have mostly ceased to exist, online and offline.

I don’t think this is strictly true. Especially not for somebody as motivated as Scott. His “Bay Area House Party” series is parody, but San Francisco is ridiculously high-variance. It attracts all sorts of weirdos, especially if they’re making a lot of money.

All sorts of weirdos, as long as they aren't conservative

Then he became an incredibly successful and popular writer and moved to San Francisco where he now lives with his wife, children and mistress.

Wait, mistress?

Quote from Highlights From the Comments on Polyamory:

"I want my wife to definitely be the most important person in my life and vice versa. But I find I can carve out a category “secondary partner” that doesn’t interfere with this, any more than her having friends , hobbies, children, etc interferes with this. Probably other people’s psychology doesn’t work this way, and those people wouldn’t enjoy being poly."

Every time I'm reminded of that quote, I'm reminded of a person who insisted with a straight face that they were mature enough to sleep with a subordinate without it compromising their leadership of their team.

Wait, there's only one mistress? I thought it was mistresses, but maybe it's serial bigamy instead of of polygamy

Last I heard there happened to be one but I don’t think this is a matter of principle.

I think people were literally warning him this would happen if he moves back to California.

There are plenty of us in California who are capable of understanding, and even believing, modern right-wing arguments. We just don't mix in San Francisco techie society.

But putting aside the relative bubbles, I think the background temperature matters a lot for determining what stuff you have to engage with.

As you get older and get more power over your personal life, you tend to stereotype yourself. In practice people rarely choose to encounter things that make them feel uncomfortable. So if the background temperature is ‘bringing up right wing arguments is socially awkward’ and the bubble is ‘comfortable techie’ then it’s not a surprise that Scott isn’t hearing right wing ideas even if the possibility theoretically exists.

They did. But it worked for him, he’s fine. He doesn’t need influence with conservatives and frankly I don’t think he wants it.

I think also that he just made his peace with woke. It’s less confrontational than it was, and he agreed with most of it to start with, and the main issue he had with it (feminism) is no longer an issue for him.

Based on my life experience I think there's a good chance that if he sends his kids to school (as opposed to homeschooling) that he may again confront issues. (Or maybe not, he seems to have done fine in school despite hating it...)

In other words, he betrayed us once it was no longer in his interest to oppose the woke.

He got rich and famous enough that he managed to get married despite being a textbook beta nice guy; what does he care now about the plight of the incel? He makes his money in the normie-ville of substack and his psychiatry clinic; what use does he have now for cultivating a following by spreading heresies? Being controversial now would only threaten all he has.

Telling heterodox truths is a game for anonymous young single men who have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Established men become assimilated into the system.

Betrayed? The man wrote hundreds of pages of content and gave them out completely for free. I guess you could make a case that he owes something to the people who defended him against being cancelled. But I figure that giving people hundreds of pages of writing for free has already paid for that. I don't see why Scott would owe anything to his readers at this point.

Also, as far as I know, Scott has never claimed any sort of alliance with either other anti-wokes or with incels, so there is no alliance to betray.

he betrayed us

He did? Did he make us any promises?

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Who's "us"?

I agree Scott got soft, but stability and family making you more mellow and less of a firebrand is an eternal cycle, it's how things are supposed to be. It's why Kulak in his incessant calls for violence never actually talks about building things, starting families, falling in love, having children. Men who have lives and families to care about don't want to burn down the world.

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He got rich and famous enough that he managed to get married despite being a textbook beta nice guy; what does he care now about the plight of the incel?

The eternal problem of a theoretical incel revolution: anyone with the get-up-and-go to be of any kind of value will get laid.

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That’s where I was going with that, yes. I have no illusions that I wouldn’t do the same but it does kind of make me feel used. I wrote to the NYT on his behalf - I can’t imagine modern day Scott returning the favour.

Then he became an incredibly successful and popular writer and moved to San Francisco where he now lives with his wife, children and mistress.

Berkeley, actually, but yeah.

It’s the same problem that’s occurred since time immemorial and is the reason why (as I understand it) Republican politicians were discouraged from spending too much time in Washington.

That was part of the 1994 Republican Revolution under Newt Gingrich. It wasn't just 'discouragement' either- it was a organizational-restructuring, as the rules of Congress were changed to facilitate frequent travel out of DC. Most notably, Congressional business workflows were centered on the mid-week, so that key votes were Tuesday-Thursday, to make Monday/Friday travel days more viable.

It was part of 'proving independence from Washington' and 'staying in touch with your constituents.' It is the oft-forgotten root of regular complaints that Congress spends too little time in Washington compared to the past, and the associated complaints that Congress gets less done (because they are present less) and don't know eachother as well. On the other hand, it arguably contributes to the dynamic of voters loving their congressperson but hating congress.

It was also, critically, a period where Republicans were also incentivized to not bring their families to D.C., which in turns means the wives and children who stay behind aren't culturally socialized into the blue-tribe-dominated national capital region. But it also means, by extension, that Democratic representative families under the same dynamics aren't socializing with more red-leaning counterparts, and are free to be even bluer influences on their Congressional-spouses.

This is an oft-forgotten / underappreciated rules-level dynamic of national-level political centralization and elite-consensus.

Keeping key elites spending time together and away from their own power-bases that could foster a sense of disconnect from the central authority has been a national cohesion strategy since before Louis XIV and Versailles. This helped political centralization by giving the monarch an easier time keeping an eye on everyone if they were in one part. But it also allowed for political homogenization/consensus-building/shared-identity cultivation of a common French identity amongst elites, as the French nobility were forced by proximity (and tactical political interests) to get along and socialize. Court politics is infamous in fiction for political infighting and drama, but it does create paradigms for collective understandings, interests, and identities, hence the divide of the french estates leading to the French revolution. Nobles infight against eachother, but unite in common cause against challenges to their collective interests and privileges.

Congressional committee placement politics isn't an exact analog to the French Monarchy making appointments dependent on remaining at court, but there are more than a few parallels. If you're not missing key votes because you're spending time with constituents- because Congressional workflows are focused on Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday execution- then you're not losing your chance at valuable appointments to powerful Congressional committees. The lower the opportunity cost of not-being in the capital, the greater the opportunity-gains of being elsewhere for fundraising / political events / etc. And, again, you're away from your family less if you're free to return to them more often.

These are changes that the Congressional Democrats have kept even when they recaptured Congress. They get many of the same benefits as well. And as the D.C. area is something like 90% Democratic for a variety of reasons, it's hard to see them convincing (or, frankly, forcing) the Republicans to revert to the pre-Gingrich status quo in the name of homogenizing them in an expected blue direction.

Interestingly, it's also a dynamic being actively pursued in the reverse by the movement of property, and not just people.

You can arguably see an implicit effort-to-reverse Federal consensus-centralization ongoing right now, as Trump attempts to push the federal bureaucracy away from the capital region.

One of the less-commented efforts the Trump administration is pursuing is moving federal agencies outside of the DC area and to other states. This has been overshadowed by the media coverage of the personnel management, but the property management is (almost) as important.

Among the earliest executive orders was a direction for agencies to propose relocations away from DC and to other states. This purportedly on cost-reasons. DC property is expensive to maintain, employee allowances are higher to make up for the regional cost of living, etc. The actual cost of moving has to be balanced against savings are likely to provide, but states have an incentive to take some of that cost for their own long-term gain in getting the relocated agencies.

Almost as importantly, Congress persons have an incentive to approve federal agency relocations to the benefit of their own state. Even Democratic politicians who might personally hate Trump. Which is to say, Federal government divestment from DC offers bargaining chips / horses to trade in the upcoming year(s) of budget negotiations.

That this is also is likely to have an employee-composition impact, as the hyper-blue DC environment those agencies recruit and socialize and network within get replaced with more purple environments that are geographically dispersed, is probably not going to be a publicized or recognized until it's as locked-in as the Gingrich Congressional travel changes.

As has been seen with some shutdowns like the USAID shutdown, DC-based federal employees have often indicated they want to stay in the DC area. This is natural. Even if they were offered an opportunity to keep their jobs if agencies were relocated instead of shutdown, some percent would refuse and seek other employment in DC. This is just a matter of statistics. It is also an area of precedent. In the Trump 1 administration, nearly 90% of DC-based Bureau of Land Management employees retired or quit rather than relocated to Grand Junction, Colorado.

That's bad if you think an equivalent dynamic to, say, the DC Headquarters of the Justice Department would lose vital experience and expertise and informal coordination with other agencies. On the other hand, if you don't think the headquarters of the US Justice Department should be rooted in the swamp that is 90% blue, and less than a mile from where a 'Black Live Matter' mural used to be maintained on the street...

And once departments are separated, the sort of informal coordination that can occur if you and a friend/ally you know in another part of the government can meet in the same town also goes away. Inter-government lobbying is a lot harder if you are cities apart. Inter-department coordination is also, and almost as importantly, a lot harder to do without a document trail.

And this is where one could infer a non-stated motive for the resistance-shy Trump. One of the only reasons the US electorate learned that the Biden administration white house was coordinating with the Georgia anti-Trump case despite denials was because one of the Georgia prosecutor assistances invoiced the White House for the travel expenses for in-person engagements. In-person meetings, in turn, are one of the ways to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests or Congressional subpoenas for communications over government systems.

This is where the Versailles metaphor comes back, but as an inverse of sorts. It was easier for Louis the XIVth to keep an eye on and manage the nobility when they were in one place. They were scheming, sure, but he could keep watch of them in a single physical location where he controlled the coordination contexts. Trump / the Republicans do not control the coordination context of DC. They can, however, increase political control over the bureaucracy by physically separating it across multiple physical locations, where they have easier means to monitor inter-node coordination.

It is also an effort that will be exceptionally hard for the Democrats to reverse, if they try to. It is a lot easier to divest and reorganize government institutions when you have a trifecta than when you don't. It is also much easier to give up federal property in DC to the benefit of states than it is to get state Congressional representatives to vote to strip their states of jobs and inflows for the sake of DC.

Which means that federal agencies that depart DC will probably not return in the near future. And the longer they stay away, the longer that local employment hiring filters into organizational cultures at the lowest levels. The more that Federal employees have their spouses and children shaped by the less-blue-than-DC environments, and thus shape them in turn. The less engaged, and involved, they can be in the beltway culture.

The Trump administration DC divestment are arguably going to have long-term effects on affected parts of the federal bureaucracy on par with Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution affects on Congress in the 90's. Affected agencies will be less compositionally composed of, less socially exposed to, and less culturally aligned to Blue-dominated DC in ways that will only become apparent decades from now.

Scott knows full well which team would win the ‘legal personhood isn’t universal’ game. He’s spitballing crazy ideas.

After seeing Scott’s suggestion, I was thinking along similar lines.

Consider the bill of attainder. The English occasionally used these to strip rebel lords of their lands and legal protections. When we rebelled, we specifically banned Congress from doing anything of the sort. Clearly, the Constitution didn’t want a few dozen (or, today, a few hundred) people to hold such a power.

How would a smaller group be any better?

I don’t think the outlaw status is compatible with a system founded on “certain unalienable rights.” At least not our particular set. We haven’t drifted so far from the founding ethos that we’d throw that away for one edge case.

I think you’d have a hard time with such a system simply because verification could be impossible. It’s perfectly legal to shoot me, im an outlaw. But what happens if you misidentified someone else as me? There are probably several million people on earth right now that look like me, so what happens next? You thought you were going to get me, who has no legal rights, but you didn’t get Maiq the True, you got Maiq the Liar. Do you go to jail? Is mistaken identity a defense? Can you be sued by next of kin? Must you return the wares?

This is all a pretty silly thought experiment, but Scott seemed to suggest making outlaw status exclusively the Supreme Court's last line of defense against tyranny when its dictates are ignored by the über-powerful and the Court cannot get any other branch of government to enforce its will in the matter. (As opposed to bringing it back as a standard punishment for random criminals.) It would pretty much only get deployed against politicians and billionaires - against people the entirety of a corrupt executive branch is refusing to touch. Were Donald Trump declared an outlaw tomorrow morning, I find it hard to believe that anyone would shoot a random suburban grandpa by mistake.

not only do outlaws lose the protection of the law, but anyone who uses force to defend of an outlaw becomes an outlaw themselves

the clause about transitive outlaw-ness complicates that. If my crazy friend Bob starts raving that he's driving over to settle this presidential outlaw business himself and I try to restrain him am I fair game now?

If the supreme court declares Donald Trump an outlaw tomorrow morning, I can picture some plausible cases where a suburban grampa has political disagreements with someone in the house, a physical struggle starts, then a gun gets pulled, and someone dies in a "legal murder"

In these extreme cases some violence across the nation is maybe impossible to avoid, but it doesn't need to be sanctified.

This is one of those - please adopt it. Since the easiest people to be declared outlaws are the visa overstayers and people entering not at point of entry.

Because if there's one thing that will make this country great again, it's the existence of a precariat underclass with no protection of law who exist at the whim of their criminal masters.

Since the easiest people to be declared outlaws are the visa overstayers and people entering not at point of entry.

Yeah, adopting this at the present time would seem to be a huge loss for the left: it provides an obvious way to convincingly argue against birthright citizenship because "outlaw" seems to pretty clearly to imply "not subject to the jurisdiction thereof" even within the physical borders of the US.

In this case, I'd be pretty uncomfortable with it regardless.

the Trump administration seems to be refusing to comply with a 9-0 Supreme Court order to bring back a specific deported immigrant.

The administration was ordered to “facilitate” his return. That’s different.

It’s unclear why SCOTUS should be able to order the president to take a citizen of El Salvador, who is currently residing in El Salvador, and bring him to the US. What if El Salvador just doesn’t want to give him up? Given these facts, it’s reasonable to read “facilitate” as “facilitate only to the extent possible”.

Even SCOTUS has limits on their powers. I don’t think we should expect them to be able to order the president to bomb another country, for example. Their power diminishes rapidly outside of US borders.

What if El Salvador just doesn’t want to give him up? Given these facts, it’s reasonable to read “facilitate” as “facilitate only to the extent possible”.

Is there any evidence that El Salvador wanted to imprison this citizen for reasons other than US say-so? I'm not sure that's even been alleged.

...are we ignoring El Salvadorian President Bukele's extremely well documented inclination to imprison known and even suspected gang members, which occurred despite US say-so?

Or Bukele's comments last week?

"El Salvador likes to imprison gang members" just brings us back to the question "Did El Salvador have independent evidence of his gang status or is that the result of El Salvador taking the USA's word on the matter?"

Which is a separate question from 'wanted to imprison this citizen for reasons other than US say-so.'

'US say-so' implies the US wants the man imprisoned. It is agnostic on the reason why.

'This man is a gang member' is a motive that can apply regardless of US desired results. It is agnostic as to the source of the information.

The gang affiliation is also a matter of US record that predates the current Trump administration's deportation push. There's no allegation I am aware of that it was invited in the last three months since Trump's inauguration.

Trump could've just asked Bukele to say "I won't let you take gang members back, of course" and then Trump would've said "oh well". Instead, though, Bukele said "I can't smuggle a gang member back into the US", implying Trump's stance stance was not allowing him to come back.

Is this a format the judge would have accepted as 'facilitation'? If not, why does it matter as a proposed alternative?

“facilitate only to the extent possible”.

This is fair, but Trump has absolutely not met even this lower bar. He hasn't even asked. What 'facilitation' has he attempted?

Yeah, I would struggle to understand how 'facilitate' doesn't mean make a diplomatic request. No need to send in a SEAL team if they're told no.

But it also seems so strange to request an extradition? of an El Salvadorean from El Salvador into ICE custody.

That in itself would be a pretty grave intrusion into the President's authority to conduct foreign diplomacy. If that is permissible, it would be a short distance to e.g., court-ordered economic sanctions or court-ordered economic aid.

The administration was ordered to “facilitate” his return. That’s different.

For anyone else just reading this topic for the first time- the lack of definition of what 'facilitate' entails was the crux of last week's discussion thread on this topic.

If 'facilitate' is used in the sense of 'make easier,' then no change in the person's actual location status is required. 'Facilitate' does not mean 'achieve.'

If 'facilitate' is used to demand a result, this becomes a foreign policy requirement, and especially an international sovereignty conflict, which creates a constitutional issue against the court demanding such a result.

As Prima notes, the Supreme Court did not order a result. The courts that have denied 'make easier' efforts as sufficient facilitation are lower courts. Tthe Supreme Court has not specifically weighed in on their ability to demand a result versus an effort.

Yeah the exact meaning here is really nuanced in a way that most people struggle with and it's not fully fleshed out yet either. Courts are not completely blind, there is flexibility for basic human reasoning and interpretation built into them but they are also majorly concerned with procedure.

A (highly simplified) way to explain what will happen is that the courts essentially go "Ok Trump show us what steps you've taken to help to facilitate his return and what barriers prevent you from achieving that goal", the Trump admin responds "We've done X, Y, Z, and have A, B, C barriers", the judges use their sense to determine how serious that response is and if they appear to be acting in good intentions to follow the order and rule accordingly.

As an example, let's say someone (idk John) has a restraining order on him for domestic violence and he has a stay away provision of 100 yards from Jane. However unknown to John, him and Jane both shop at the same grocery store. This happens sometimes and the restraining order typically accounts for it. As long as John takes action to leave immediately and not engage (that includes not finishing his shopping/pumping gas/whatever) then normally a judge wouldn't really punish for that, they know mistakes happen.

However let's say the court received legally admissable evidence of phone records where John messaged his friend Joe "Hah, I just saw Jane at the grocery store. I think I'll keep going there and maybe she'll see me and freak". The judge can take that into consideration and say "John, you violated your order. This was not incidental, you knew it would happen and continued to shop there for that reason".

Now not all evidence is so explicit as John admitting to it himself in text. It could be just testimony from Joe, it could be certain weird actions John took like always hanging around the store on the days and times Jane normally went shopping, whatever. Or maybe John didn't leave immediately and even worse went up to Jane to talk, which is now breaching the order with intent. Quite a few people end up violating restraining orders (to them "unfairly") because an accidental encounter was turned into an intentional breach by their choice to not disengage and make distance. Whatever it is, the judges take context into account.

s Prima notes, the Supreme Court did not order a result. The courts that have denied 'make easier' efforts as sufficient facilitation are lower courts. Tthe Supreme Court has not specifically weighed in on their ability to demand a result versus an effort.

This is currently a moot point given that the Trump administration hasn't put in any effort whatsoever. If he asks Bukele to send him back and he says no, then we can move to the question of whether that is sufficient attempt at 'facilitation'.

Sounds great. Then I could scream "Outlaw Country!" and mean it! As a declaration of intent.

Come to think of it, where does David Friedman post now? Last time I spoke to him was on DSL, ages ago

He's still regularly posting on DSL, and he's also got his own Substack.

I think what you're missing is...

nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;

Contingent on the supreme court actually deciding to go for the outlaw thing (which is won't, and probably shouldn't), a court declaring someone an outlaw would be the due process of law. If you want to talk about traditions, americans have historically been a great fan of lynchings, and very often none of the perpetrators ever faced trial. If one branch of government can simply decline to use its powers because it doesn't like what another branch is telling it to do... well, that's pretty generalizable.

Contingent on the supreme court actually deciding to go for the outlaw thing (which is won't, and probably shouldn't), a court declaring someone an outlaw would be the due process of law.

I think you have completely misunderstood the point. Scott's (somewhat jokey) proposal is for outlaws to be outside the protection of the law, and my point is that this would be incredibly difficult to implement in the American legal system as the protection of law applies to any person and that particular bit does not contain any exception to its removal.

nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

See the reading of this gives an exception for removing life, liberty or property through the due process of law. It doesn't give one for denying equal protection of the laws.

Taking this idea seriously, it's hard to see how it manifests in the US.

At best it manifests in a dictatorship where the victorious side murderously purges the other from any position of leadership, civil, military, or social. At worst you get something like the Spanish Civil War, but in a much larger country.

But it’d be a mistake to take it seriously. It’s a bit of dark humor from Scott.

I don't believe it is serious, Scott at least would be definitely aware of how unlikely it is to implement such a change. Still an interesting idea to entertain.

But it’d be a mistake to take it seriously. It’s a bit of dark humor from Scott.

I don’t know enough about Scott’s current politics to be sure, but it sounds like a piss-take commentary about the court getting too big for its britches.

The Virginia Giuffre suicide brought to mind an idea I've been thinking about for a while: populism works best without the people. Rob Henderson and many others have talked about how certain ideas promoted by the upper class disproportionately harm the lower class. In his book Troubled, he wrote:

Many of my peers at Yale and Stanford would work ceaselessly. But when I'd ask them about the plans they'd implemented to get into college, or start a company, or land their dream job, they'd often suggest they just got lucky rather than attribute their success to their efforts. Interestingly, it seems like many people who earn status by working hard are able to boost their status among their peers even more by saying they just got lucky. This isn't just limited to my own observations, either. A 2019 study found that people with high income and social status are the most likely to attribute success to mere luck rather than hard work.

Both luck and hard work play a role in the direction of our lives, but stressing the former at the expense of the latter doesn't help those at or near the bottom of society. If disadvantaged people come to believe that luck is the key factor that determines success, then they will be less likely to strive to improve their lives. One study tracked more than six thousand young adults in the US at the beginning of their careers over the course of two decades, and found that those who believed that life's outcomes are due to their own efforts as opposed to external factors became more successful in their careers and went on to attain higher earnings.

The problem is that people who entertain populist ideas like the above wind up shoved into the same part of the political spectrum as all these people who rave about "pedophile rings." Along with the internet personalities who won't endorse QAnon outright but pander to their QAnoner supporters with equivocating crap like "why can't they release the Epstein documents? I'm not saying there's a conspiracy, I just want TRANSPARENCY IN GOVERNMENT. Just asking qwestchins!" The populist movement winds up embracing the same mentality of helplessness Henderson is criticizing. Many of the Epstein victims admit they did it voluntarily for money, but you can't say that because it gets in the way of the narrative of helpless proles victimized by evil sex-trafficking finance guys.*

You can only really stand up for the people by keeping them at arm's length.

*The QAnoners are convinced that happens ALL THE TIME but Epstein is the only example they can point to, which is why we're still hearing about it five years after Epstein's death and will probably keep hearing about it for decades more.

Many of the Epstein victims admit they did it voluntarily for money

Examples?

I mean, they were hookers. Definitionally they did it for money.

That doesn't mean it's OK to convince 15 year old girls to enter prostitution(which is what Epstein did- there's no evidence or allegations that he made any threats or kidnapped anyone or whatever).

That doesn't mean it's OK to convince 15 year old girls to enter prostitution(which is what Epstein did

That's trafficking. They were minors.

There's also very clear evidence of favorable government treatment (i.e. his case in Florida).

That's a lot different than him throwing a party with adult prostitutes.

Why the equivocation?

Yes I just said that. Epstein was bad. But there’s no evidence of him being bad in a specific way that it’s often framed as.

I seem to remember that Epstein and/or Maxwell were also accused of taking away at least one girl's passport to trap her. Which is more than just prostitution.

Some victims said Maxwell would make threats like that on the island or at one of their ranches, but compared to the tactics used by even run of the mill pimps they were rudimentary and limited at best.

Either there is no super-powerful deep state or they're ok with Trump. If there was a super-powerful deep state that disliked Trump, Trump would have been killed years ago. I mean actually killed, not just a couple of close calls.

He would have at least been preluded from running . I think the deep state didn't want to risk an uprising if that happened.

My assumption is that a super competent deep state could kill Trump and make it look like a natural death, but maybe that has more to do with thriller novels than with reality.

I think you're ascribing a level of competence not in evidence.

The Epstein stuff was salacious because the people involved were well-known and because the plebs love seeing the high and mighty brought low, love gossiping about the rich and famous. The reality is that while what Epstein was doing (paying teenage girls from poor families for sex; pimping put some of those girls to his friends and business associates) was obviously wicked, and while his early-2000s sentence should have been much longer than it was (and served under less generous terms), far worse happens in working class communities across the West every single day without consequence or penalty.

It’s like the ‘Bullingdon Club’, which captured the British public’s imagination in the 2010s. In truth, its members behaved no worse than countless other drinking clubs, sports teams, fraternities, other social groups of regularly drunk young men. But because they were rich, wore their fancy costumes and counted the prime minister and mayor of London among their alumni, what they did was somehow uniquely awful.

But because they were rich, wore their fancy costumes and counted the prime minister and mayor of London among their alumni, what they did was somehow uniquely awful.

It was uniquely awful, in the sense that we used to have an order in which those that wield great authority or wealth would be held to a higher standard of morality than a drunk peasant and would be obligated to use their station to set a positive example.

I'm not even an actual reactionary (far from it) but I think this one element tracks with the sense of good and has an excellent pedigree back to the ancients.

those that wield great authority or wealth would be held to a higher standard of morality

What's the deal with the people I've seen around here saying that the elite should have greater licence?

Seems like on the one hand there's the argument that they're our betters and should be exemplars of virtue, on the other hand there's the argument that they're our betters and they should be enforcers of virtue because even if they fail to embody the same virtues the rot of the masses is a worse outcome than the transgressions of the elite.

Presumably it's a reaction to the feeling that they're neither exemplars or enforcers and have allowed standards to decline at both ends of the social spectrum. That then raises the question of whether they wanted that outcome and used their power to achieve it or whether they were either powerless or too unwilling to use their power to prevent it.

"Held to a higher standard of morality" is spin. What you describe is enabling the well-connected to get their enemies selectively prosecuted for "crimes" that everyone does, and should not be crimes at all.

I would think the disparity in reaction here is because the upper class are expected to behave better than that, to rise above vice, and they often try to avoid disabusing the public about such a notion.

Consider the meme of pedophile Catholic priests: these are the people who are supposed to be your spiritual leaders, and while all humans are fallible under Christian doctine, molesting boys is a level of sin that one could otherwise not believe a holy man would stoop to.

Maybe it's some sort of hardwired primal instinct. If we gravitate towards hierarchy, we also gravitate towards expecting more out of our social betters.

I am not sure that I see the similarity between "the people on the top got lucky" and QAnon.

Mostly everybody has a story which explains why they are not on the top, and "the people at the top just got lucky" is one such story, while "the people at the top are all lizardmen, and they won't allow humans to join" is another.

The other thing to consider in "hard work" vs "getting lucky" is that being a hard worker is not 100% a choice, but also subject to genetics and nurture, e.g. governed by luck at least in part.

Hard work is necessary, but luck also is a part of it. "I work hard and my dad's a plumber" versus "I work hard and my dad is a partner in KPMG", you tell me who you think is going to get further in life.

JD Vance is a legitimate "I came from poor stock, worked hard, and made it" success story, and look at the shit he gets for his political allegiance. Kamala Harris ran in part on "I grew up in a middle-class family" (where middle-class is supposed to mean "upper working class/lower middle class", i.e. 'just like one of you schlubs') but she is the daughter of university professors. I don't know if anyone has done a comparison between "is Vance more privileged than Harris because he's a white male and she's a biracial female, versus his family were poor and he grew up between Kentucky and Ohio and her mother only divorced once and she grew up between California and Canada". It'd be an intriguing problem to do a privilege walk between them!

I think the word privilege is mostly used by wokes. For them, recognized sources of privilege are ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and being able-bodied1. Social class is not part of it.2 Fighting for the rights of some straight white cis-men would be giving aid and comfort to the enemy, after all. Also, this makes determining the privilege level of random strangers so much more convenient -- just check their skin color and their gender, and if the person is openly LGBT or in a wheelchair. No need to delve to deep into their childhood or finances. The good news is that a poor white guy can still be an Ally, just as a rich white guy. But for cultural and economic reasons most Allies end up being well-off whites (it is much easier to support BLM when you live in a gated community and are a lawyer than when you live in a flat downtown and are a small time store owner). And the label the SJ left uses for (mostly poor, mostly white) folks who are not on board with their platform is, or course, "deplorables".

Personally, I think that economic inequality is likely the most significant inequality within Western societies, and most of the difficulties certain ethnicities encounter are downstream of them being economically disadvantaged. But I also believe that there are a lot of other inequalities, and that crucially that it is not useful to simply sum them up -- that there is no single scalar score which describes privilege in a useful way. Being white is advantageous in some ways. Being male can be an advantage in some situations. Being female can also be an advantage. Being beautiful, young, or hot can be an advantage or disadvantage depending on the situation. It very much depends on individual situations, specific cultural contexts (being gay is orders of magnitude less of a deal if you are living in a student dorm in a coastal city than if you are living in a rural house with your religious parents, for example).

Regarding Vance, part of the process of swearing fealty to Trump is that you deny that he lost the 2020 election, and in my mind, this is a severe moral failing which can not be excused by having had a difficult path in life -- not unless your defense is "I would literally starve unless I took a job in the White House".3

1 Terms and conditions apply. Being on the spectrum might gain you a iota of sympathy, but will not protect you from accusations of toxic masculinity, for example.

2 Yes, the pdf you linked uses economic observables. So technically poor white people get awarded points. I am just arguing that this is not how people actually move up on the totem pole of victimhood in the real world.

3 I suppose that SJ also has plenty of shibboleths, but mostly they require people not to voice certain ideas (e.g. HBD), and don't require them to loudly proclaim that the sky is green like Trump does.

part of the process of swearing fealty to Trump is that you deny that he lost the 2020 election

Given the people who turned on a dime from "election denialism about the 2020 election should be made a crime!" to "Trump stole the 2024 election!" reusing all the tropes they said beforehand were fake, conspiracy theory, etc. (the voting machines being rigged, fake ballots and the rest of it), this shocks me less and less every time I see it trotted out.

Indeed, I'm half-inclined to start to come around to "hey, maybe the 2020 election was rigged!" 😀

My experience in woke circles is that poor people of color get bonus points on the oppression checklist, while poor white people don’t.

Unless the woke speaker is obviously cornered or trying to recruit a poor white person, in which case they briefly revert to doctrinaire Leninism for as long as it takes to keep up the charade in front of their new “ally.”

There was a blog post somewhere about how a lot of poor people, black and white, are intuitively suspicious of philosophizing and big words, essentially, so I don’t know how successful overall this is as a tactic, or if wokeism dropped it at some point.

But I have seen the tactic in operation before.

We live in a society where even approaching young adult women is fraught with risk. 'Inappropriate' comments can ruin careers. Consensual relationships in the workplace are a recipe for disaster if the woman regrets it later on. Even degenerate fictional stories on obscure corners of the web feel some need to say that all involved are 18 or higher.

But billionaires get open license for underage pussy because they're rich? No, they should face the same crushing punishments inflicted on ordinary people who have sex with underage women, regardless of whatever ameliorating circumstances there are. 'But she consented' is not an excuse when some drunk guy hooks up with a drunk girl on a university campus.

Take their money away, ruin their lives, send them to prison, ruin their reputation. Rules should be applied fairly or not at all. If you think the rule is dumb or should be adjusted, even more reason for it to be applied to elites as well.

Furthermore, Epstein committing 'suicide' in the anti-suicide ward while the cameras were conveniently switched off is clear proof of some kind of paedophile-sex ring deeply embedded in the US government. The Q people were directionally correct.

Rules should be applied fairly or not at all.

Look I'm not here to argue at the object level but in general this strikes me as a bad idea. Obviously different social strata should have different rules. Every society I'm aware of has recognized this up until fairly recently. In the vast majority of cases I think it's good that rich people can use the legal system to get off scott-free.

Restricting everyone to behavior suitable for the lowest is literally reducing freedom to the lowest common denominator and this attitude is a huge part of why we can't have nice things. Quod licet iovi non licet bovi.

Anyway, in practice, I have much more to fear from the state than does an inebriated homeless schizo because I have resources to purloin.

they should face the same crushing punishments inflicted on ordinary people who have sex with underage women, regardless of whatever ameliorating circumstances there are.

??? These billionaires lost in the court of public opinion, which seems to be the biggest part of the punishment for statutory.

Furthermore, Epstein committing 'suicide' in the anti-suicide ward while the cameras were conveniently switched off is clear proof of some kind of paedophile-sex ring deeply embedded in the US government. The Q people were directionally correct.

Unless Epstein himself bribed the guards.

I'm with @RandomRanger's objection below - it's not quite clear to me what sort of offer he could make to the guards to incentivise all of this, and why they wouldn't have been caught. I think the better explanation would be somewhat more satisfying - Epstein did kill himself, but this was facilitated by "friends in high places" whose interest in his death aligned with his own. The friends would have coordinated a time with him some way or another, either bribed or pressured the guards to remove all eyes, and taken any necessary steps to ensure that this isn't investigated too thoroughly afterwards.

(Alternatively, for colour, you could even imagine an offer: kill yourself in a relatively comfortable way now, or get a slow agonising death from some particularly nasty poison we will slip you later.)

(Alternatively, for colour, you could even imagine an offer: kill yourself in a relatively comfortable way now, or get a slow agonising death from some particularly nasty poison we will slip you later.)

You don't even need the threat. The fate of a high-profile sex offender with no gang protection in the general population of an American prison is likely to be far more painful than anything the Deep State could engineer.

Well, the guards did get caught, just not fully.

How does he get money to the prison guards as a prisoner?

If he did bribe a guard, presumably it would've emerged. Lots of people were very interested in this case! A guard-level conspiracy should be easy to uncover compared to a 'friends in high places' level conspiracy. Instead we got the 'oh he killed himself somehow' story peddled as the official party line which favours 'friends in high places'.

Did you read the link?

Yes. It doesn't really address this.

It also explains why this plot wasn't uncovered: because there are like, three people that would have to know about it, not even including Epstein's lawyers. Epstein could have just made up a sob-story and convinced a correctional officer to look the other way himself, or promised the officer his lawyers would pay them after the fact, and then didn't, because arranging that would be more complicated and time consuming.

What kind of sob story gets you to erase video evidence and bring down a huge shitstorm on yourself with a high profile prisoner? 'Bro I'll totally pay you after you've done this insanely illegal thing'?

Is it "insanely illegal"? Remember that in the suicide hypothesis, sabotaging the monitoring isn't murder conspiracy with its fuckoff-huge sentence. They skated with no time, and even if they'd gotten caught red-handed my wild guess is that they'd have served under 2 years.

What kind of sob story gets you to erase video evidence and bring down a huge shitstorm on yourself with a high profile prisoner? 'Bro I'll totally pay you after you've done this insanely illegal thing'?

Do you know any prison guards? When they're offered money for bringing in cigarettes, alcohol, etc, the money is paid up front and the guard is simply not hired anymore if they don't follow through.

They also don't have particularly prestigious jobs and most of them know that they never will. Large payments to people being paid not very much to do a job which isn't socially esteemed have a way of changing their attitudes. Hell, in-kind payments can do it.

bring down a huge shitstorm on yourself with a high profile prisoner

None of those guards’ lives were ruined.

I actually suspect that the vast majority of ordinary adults who have sex with minors get away with it. There are probably thousands of such encounters happening every day. There are millions of guys, after all, who do not sit around pondering the risks of having sex with women who might turn out to be slightly underage. They just see someone who looks hot, fuck them, and if they worry about the consequences it's only afterward. Women also sometimes lie about their ages. You might have had sex with a minor and not even be aware of it. I am pretty sure that the majority of the time, no legal consequences ensue from such encounters.

I don't disagree with what you wrote but I think it'd be much more simple to just say that this is pretty much something only the working class and the underclass engages in anymore.

Middle and upper class have more money to spend on means such as gifts, concealment, etc. More opportunities too as the same resources grant greater agency. The only defecit is in motive as they potentially have more to lose.

I bought a house from a homeflipper who had bought it from a convicted pedophile. This was explained to me by my neighbors, who cheerfully explained that his story of 'oh I had a 17 year old girlfriend at 22' was obviously false because nobody would've cared.

Anyways they beat him up and forced him to sell after somebody found out the truth, I don't know how, that he'd molested a ten year old.

But billionaires get open license for underage pussy because they're rich? No, they should face the same crushing punishments inflicted on ordinary people who have sex with underage women, regardless of whatever ameliorating circumstances there are.

Absolutely. There's really no excuse for it. Billionaires can afford to employ a 'fixer' to get them whatever they desire (presuming what they desire isn't something explicitly underage). It's not difficult to do a background check to confirm all the girls are 18+, check them for discretion, make them sign NDA's etc.

I will agree that finding and employing a trustworthy fixer is something that would likely take time and effort though.

Furthermore, Epstein committing 'suicide' in the anti-suicide ward while the cameras were conveniently switched off is clear proof of some kind of paedophile-sex ring deeply embedded in the US government. The Q people were directionally correct.

It was blatant. As soon as cameras malfunction in a prison a tech is called out. High priority camera feeds are constantly monitored by people in a prison's control room on a monitor wall. A camera that is used for suicide watches malfunctioning is not something that can happen unnoticed. If a camera or NVR (recording server) malfunctions, a large blatantly clear alert pops up on the security management system. Most systems, especially those in prisons, have a redundant recording server so there are two copies of the video feeds.

I don't know how they got all the prison guards to shut up about it though. It would have been an expensive and high risk operation to shut so many mouths.

I also don't know if it was a paedophile ring, but Epstein clearly knew something that someone powerful didn't want getting out and that someone tied up loose ends. It must have been very important to them to make such a blatant move that clearly erodes so many peoples' trust in the justice system.

Edit: I should have said I don't know if it was THE paedophile ring and the client list directly that got him silenced or the information that he gained by leveraging that kompromat.

It would have been an expensive and high risk operation to shut so many mouths.

Prison guards don't make very much and the people in a position to want them to shut up are literal billionaires with government connections. They are also unlikely to think that squealing is a good idea when they just took a bribe to shut up about a murder.

You reckon it's the qanoners ruining everything?

I had a different idea. See my thinking is that qanoners are overwhelmingly middle class and below, and a lot of them are the kind of people who couldn't go to college even if they could afford it, which they can't. Not all of them, there are some very clever people involved, but most of the qanoners I've spoken to were primarily uneducated poor people.

I think the bigger problem is that our educated and wealthy people are worthless morons. Qanoners are overwhelmingly uneducated and our Elite Human Capital are overwhelmingly cowardly, narcisstic, and just not that bright. They are so vapid and myopically self centred that they couldn't even save democracy from the proles with the most advanced propaganda machine in history. A centralised bureaucracy supported by media, education and intelligence, and how did they explain the perils of populism to the people? "uh it's right wing! Hitler was populisty! How about it's racist? Or toxic masculinity? It's very passe ok, he's eating McDonald's for fucks sake, what more do you need?!"

Populism is actually pretty simple to understand - it is the game theoretic optimal solution to a democracy for any underclass in a country where they lack (or think they lack) unifying principles or values - if you think, due to a warped media environment, that you can't rally with your neighbour over the constitution or that Jesus is lord, you can still rally around a popular figure. It's basically a coin flip between finally being heard and the stamping boot, so if you already have the stamping boot in your face it's a no brainer.

And the gamble paid off! But what the populists didn't expect was that our Elite Human Capital are so self centred they'll actually defend Epstein Island out of solidarity or something. They even mock the idea of government transparency! Like they either think government transparency is a bad thing, or are just too dim to understand that they are participating in a meme that can directly harm the concept, as that kind of negative association is part of how perverse incentives kick off in the first place.

If only there was some simple fix, like listening to the working class occasionally. Then again avoiding them as much as possible, still sneering at them at every opportunity, but pretending you do care about them has worked out great so far!

And the gamble paid off! But what the populists didn't expect was that our Elite Human Capital are so self centred they'll actually defend Epstein Island out of solidarity or something.

Who's "defend[ing] Epstein Island?" Can you give some examples of defenses?

I had a different idea. See my thinking is that qanoners are overwhelmingly middle class and below, and a lot of them are the kind of people who couldn't go to college even if they could afford it, which they can't. Not all of them, there are some very clever people involved, but most of the qanoners I've spoken to were primarily uneducated poor people.

interesting analysis, although I disagree about them being poor. I think they are representative of the 'low-status upper/middle class'. These are people who may have decent incomes and jobs, like involving contracting , HVAC installation, and small business, but they do not have much cultural capital or influence individually ,unlike journalists or academics. Their impact is felt at the voting booth other other collective action, like putting Trump in office due to high turnout in swing states or memetic warfare online, but they do not write Substakc or think pieces. Their social media accounts have few followers. Individually, they are unimpressive and not elite human capital , but collectively work as a singular driving force.

These are people who may have decent incomes and jobs, like involving contracting , HVAC installation, and small business,

HVAC installers do not get paid well(and are not particular fans of Trump, either), techs get paid well- and they don't believe Qanon(although those of them whose wives stay home as opposed to being nurses or teachers are married to people who do). Small business owners(you know that 'contractor' is literally just a construction business owner, right?) likewise do not believe in Qanon, although they are fans of Trump and often believe in other conspiracy theories(often centering around insider trading to control republicans).

overwhelmingly middle class and below, and a lot of them are the kind of people who couldn't go to college

All the ones I know are educated, e.g. school teachers at districts requiring MAs and midlevel financial analysts e.g. writing mining reports for a Tier II bank.

That's fascinating, @greyenlightenment said similar, but aside from one retired teacher and a group of finance guys who I can never be sure are serious most of the qanoners I know are actually closer to fringe class than working - like my cousin who'd be a drug dealer if it didn't require so much effort and discipline. Could it be geographical? What state do you live in, if you don't mind me asking? And same question for you grey?

I'm not sure what to think or say about the rest of your comment, but this part stood out to me:

See my thinking is that qanoners are overwhelmingly middle class and below, and a lot of them are the kind of people who couldn't go to college even if they could afford it, which they can't.

Anyone can afford to go to college. Anyone. It's just not that expensive. Yes, it's a lot more expensive than it used to be, and yes, the ROI is not as obvious or inevitable (though it was never inevitable) as it once was. But "working class" people buy more expensive things all the time--houses, boats, cars--and those things continue to cost money (beyond loan interest--there's also upkeep). A wisely-curated program of education will in almost any economy be a better long term investment than any of those things.

What is not really plausibly "affordable" about education is failing. Every semester, without fail, I have at least one student who never shows up for class. Then, at the end of the semester, they tell me how they are running out of money and can I please pass them or else they will have to take the class again and they can't afford it...

The people who "can't afford" college are the people who lack the intellect and/or conscientiousness to learn at a higher level. College costs way too much to go there when there is not a reasonable expectation of success.

I think the bigger problem is that our educated and wealthy people are worthless morons.

I think this is almost always false. Our educated and wealthy people are only human, and in my experience almost all of them can have their substantive thinking overwhelmed, at least on occasion and maybe more than that, by the need for social signalling. That is a different problem than being morons. Indeed, I think most normies are pretty smart, within a baseline context of human flourishing--they're just that much more susceptible to focusing on sending the right signals rather than identifying substantially veridical facts.

Our educated and wealthy people are only human, and in my experience almost all of them can have their substantive thinking overwhelmed, at least on occasion and maybe more than that, by the need for social signalling. That is a different problem than being morons.

It's been proposed that there is a comforting impulse behind conspiratorial thinking, to think that even if the mysterious Powers That Be are evil, at least they're competent! I propose a parallel here, that thinking of the EHC as morons is more comforting than thinking of their particular brand of disastrous signaling as only human. Perhaps it is that I do not want to think so poorly of humanity in the abstract, and so I want to disconnect the concept of humanity from the cause of their issues.

I felt your objections were, for most part, addressed by that paragraph. Maybe to change the wording a bit to make the meaning I got from it clearer: A lot of people shouldn't go to college even if they could afford it.

When everyone has a college degree no one does. I think we've already passed the threshold for too many degree holders being paid too much money to do menial wrist and finger labour. Too many people who are actually smart need to spend too much time to distinguish themselves from the average brained but highly industrious. And to that end, too few smart people engage in lower class labour where their big brains could be used for a lot more good than in many other cases.

The education inflation is hitting every part of our lives. How western societies are setting themselves up isn't sustainable. And even if it were, it's so wasteful it shouldn't be done anyway.

I think this is almost always false. Our educated and wealthy people are only human, and in my experience almost all of them can have their substantive thinking overwhelmed, at least on occasion and maybe more than that, by the need for social signalling. That is a different problem than being morons. Indeed, I think most normies are pretty smart, within a baseline context of human flourishing--they're just that much more susceptible to focusing on sending the right signals rather than identifying substantially veridical facts.

I think this entire paragraph is just a key example of how smart people can excuse anything they do with big words and fancy concepts. If your elite class torpedoes your society because it can't resist the temptation to conform and virtue signal to ides they personally find novel then they are ultimately no better than a high time preference, low IQ person that 'fails' the marshmallow test throughout their life.

At some point the elite of the world is no longer owed any leeway or respect on the grounds that they just aren't doing enough work that justifies it.

When everyone has a college degree no one does. I think we've already passed the threshold for too many degree holders being paid too much money to do menial wrist and finger labour.

the data does not bear this out. the college wage premium remains persistently high despite more degrees. They are paid a lot because evidently employers see the value. Companies are obsessed with profit, so they would not spend more on labor, which is among the biggest expenses, unless necessary.

I think the data does bear this out. (15% unemployment and 35% underemployment (rising to 41%in recent years) means we have too many degree holders. And you know profit often isn't the only motive these days, ESG demands environmental and social engineering too.

But like Hani said to Nara, this is a distraction. If the elite ran society well we would not have populism or Donald Trump because they would have ameliorated enough of the concerns of the working class before they snapped and it was too late to do anything. It's not like they were demanding the impossible - they weren't even demanding anything substantial - bread and circuses worked for Rome and it works for America too. But our elites didn't make the bread and circuses for the people, they didn't even make it for everyone - instead they made it for themselves. They can't claim they didn't anticipate the issue, they very loudly did, but they handled it so incompetently that they may as well have not bothered.

And yes it is not deliberate and it's all stochastic or distributed or whatever - like you said in your reply to Nara, it's status games. And sure, on an individual level, if the only thing that concerns you is you, status seeking is a very smart idea. But if you want the prestige attached to running society, if you want to be respected for the way your achievements improve the country, they have to actually improve the country, not just line your own pockets. You have to actually be a better person if you want people to think you are a better person than them.

I can't remember how old you are, but I'm pretty sure you are old enough to be familiar with the way humans can very easily deceive themselves into thinking they are doing good when they are actually only helping themselves. I think that self deception is the core of the current zeitgeist. It's like the unifying principle of the west these days is 'you don't point out my fuck ups and I won't point out yours'. This is a much much larger problem for the elites than the proles, because without competence to back it up status is like running in mid-air like wile e coyote.

Companies are not infallible. Wanting to make money is not equivalent to always making rational and correct decisions that make you money. Nor does it grant companies omnipotence to shape institutions to best and most cost effectively deliver them what they want.

college wage premium remains persistently high despite more degrees

The persistent college wage premium may be skewed by selection bias in who pursues degrees. College graduates often have traits like higher cognitive ability, discipline, that correlate with better earnings, independent of their education. For non-professional or unlicensed fields, we lack solid comparisons of non-degreed groups with similar traits. Without these, it’s tough to confirm if the wage premium stems from the degree itself or from the preexisting human capital of those who go to college.

The education inflation is hitting every part of our lives. How western societies are setting themselves up isn't sustainable. And even if it were, it's so wasteful it shouldn't be done anyway.

Yes, but when you've outsourced your industrial base to other countries because it's cheaper and more convenient to let them pollute their environments and exploit their workers so you can then buy the finished product, you need something to occupy your excess labour force. And that means "more education" because governments think that everyone getting a degree means they will all get good, high-paying jobs and businesses are constantly calling for "we need better educated workers" and all of this means that the economy will (magically) grow once every worker has at least a bachelor's degree (because studies show the college-educated get better jobs and earn more over their lifetimes, so naturally a degree is the magic panacea). So now to have any hope of a reasonable life, you need a good job, and to get a good job, you need the piece of paper.

Developing [rare earth] mining and processing capabilities requires "a long-term effort," meaning the United States will "be on the back foot for the foreseeable future," concluded a recent report by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC.

Policymakers should have seen this coming, analysts said.

"I hate to be the person who says this," said Ms Klinger, "but I remember saying over a decade ago, if we should have a rare supply chain crisis, it would be entirely avoidable".

So how did the world get to this point?

The answer is very simple, according to Ian Lange, associate professor of mineral economics at the Colorado School of Mines: it wasn't that profitable.

"I would have said, it was a conscious decision to get rid of a low-value industry," he told RTÉ News.

It's also heavily polluting.

According to a study published by the Harvard International Review in 2021, for every tonne of rare earth produced, the mining process "yields 13kg of dust, 9,600-12,000 cubic metres of waste gas, 75 cubic metres of wastewater, and one ton of radioactive residue".

For many years, it made sense for the US, Europe and others to outsource to China, which ultimately, through state subsidies, weaker labour and environmental regulations, R&D investment as well as sheer industrial scale could - as in other manufacturing sectors - simply do it cheaper.

you need something to occupy your excess labour force.

Note also that the education-managerial complex itself exists as a type of universal basic job to occupy that excess labor force, and it also serves to keep what would normally be the labor force warehoused and suppressed.

Anyone can afford to go to college. Anyone. It's just not that expensive. Yes, it's a lot more expensive than it used to be, and yes, the ROI is not as obvious or inevitable (though it was never inevitable) as it once was. But "working class" people buy more expensive things all the time--houses, boats, cars--and those things continue to cost money (beyond loan interest--there's also upkeep). A wisely-curated program of education will in almost any economy be a better long term investment than any of those things.

Yes, after accounting for scholarships and other programs, affordability is typically not the problem. The student loan debt is cheap compared to private debt like credit cards or car payments.

meanwhile, plenty of lower-middle-class people go into debt for frivolities as you describe.

Our educated and wealthy people are only human, and in my experience almost all of them can have their substantive thinking overwhelmed, at least on occasion and maybe more than that, by the need for social signalling.

yeah, it's status-seeking behavior, they are not morons. They are optimizing for status and an upper-middle class lifestyle.

I think the thing that annoys me the most about Elite Human Capital is that they are the one class of people that pretends they don’t even belong to it. If you talk to them they’ll all try to act as though they aren’t a member of the elite, they aren’t that wealthy. An aristocracy that owns it would be somewhat more tolerable instead of them all pretending to be middle class

Many of the elite human capital types are nominally middle class or even below, but are elite through degrees and reach, like low-paid journalists/interns or ppl with lots of twitter followers despite not having much money.

To be fair, the reason aristocrats/ECH don't own it is because we've just come out of a century where it was pretty dangerous to be an aristocrat and to owns that. I've said before but both of my parents were actually physically accosted at various points - one had a brick thrown at them, the other was spat on and nearly beaten. When I was growing up in the 90s, pre-woke, being white was fine but being upper-class painted a target on your back. You were expected to accept being the butt of every joke and take blame for everything wrong with the country while everything you owned was siphoned away by socialist tax policy.

One of the odd ironies of the last couple of decades for me is that while the level of identity-based abuse I'm subject to has risen, in a way it's a lot easier to deal with because there are so many more people to share it. There are a lot more white people than aristocrats! I think this is why people have started to be more open about considering themselves EHC - they have successfully diverted the inverse snobbery of the intellectual population onto ethnic and sexual identities rather than class ones.

What’s funny is that people aren’t upset about “millionaires” anymore. It’s billionaires that people continue to get angry about. I guess when everyone’s boomer parent is technically a millionaire it kinda loses its edge

Inflation comes for us all in the end.

They are so vapid and myopically self centred that they couldn't even save democracy from the proles with the most advanced propaganda machine in history. A centralised bureaucracy supported by media, education and intelligence, and how did they explain the perils of populism to the people? (…)

This is the difference between a conspiracy and organic ideological affiliation. The bureaucracy, the media, and the educational system are in lockstep under the mainstream-woke banner, yes; but they don't think of themselves as following centralized directives. Every individual in the chain is acting according to his own conscience. Such a system is capable of coordinating like an astonishingly huge conspiracy so long as everyone's goals are aligned, but it cannot switch gears just because some clever people somewhere in the blob have realized it would be in their long-term interest. Nobody regards themself as taking marching orders, and if someone tries to give them orders that go against their own judgment they'll be ignored.

Such a system is capable of coordinating like an astonishingly huge conspiracy so long as everyone's goals are aligned, but it cannot switch gears just because some clever people somewhere in the blob have realized it would be in their long-term interest.

Pretty much everything about the response to Covid in the West seems to directly contradict this.

Many of the Epstein victims admit they did it voluntarily for money, but you can't say that because it gets in the way of the narrative of helpless proles victimized by evil sex-trafficking finance guys.*

Por que no los dos? It's true that most of the victims were offered money to step on a plane, not forcibly kidnapped. But they were also psychologically manipulated and placed in a strange circumstance way outside anything the expected or had ever experienced. Being teenagers, maybe they thought they could handle it but then the reality was very different than they expected.

People seem to draw this really weird dichotomy where you have to choose between "Epstein was not a good guy" and "the girls were prostitutes." Where the reason Epstein was a bad guy was because the girls were prostitutes.

There's a certain type of girl who, through a weird touchy uncle, a demeaning mother, an absent or hostile father, or just lack of moral guidance anywhere, will end up selling herself for cash. Moving from childhood to the blossom of sexual maturity is in the best of situations a disorienting hormonal surge of conflicting desires. Throw in peer pressure, an amoral upbringing, or the sense that as long as it's secret, anything is permitted (hi, Japan) and you have a recipe for this. Epstein having wads of money and an effective scout in Maxwell (and then girls who would, for even more money, gull their peers into a taste of the glamorous life (TM) didn't hurt.)

A guy I once knew once described Japanese girls as "all whores." I think that's a shittily uncharitable way to view the world. But at the same time I'm often surprised at the amount of prostitution here, from the casual, French-art-film level day hooker to organized crime brothels to high-end callgirls. To say nothing of snackbars (hostess bars) or cabarets, burlesques, etc. My point is that without Epstein these girls may have become prostitutes on their own, but you can't be sure. Zig instead of zag.

I feel bad for Giuffre. She made wrong choices from day 1 (she was a street urchin before she even met Epstein), but one would hope anyone could turn it around, especially with a payout from Maxwell and basically everyone affirming her as a heroine.

Yeah, the daughters of impoverished single mothers living in Hispanic-majority neighborhoods are probably going to get taken advantage of in their teens regardless, and high rates of prostitution can just be expected.

People focus on Epstein because they love hearing about aristocrats- the good, the bad, and the ugly. If the IBEW was arranging underaged mistresses for their members it might be a scandal but it wouldn’t be a front page news story(…Rotherham). This is elites, so it is.

Just a followup: Giuffre was reporting that a bus hit her going 110 kph. The driver disputed that, as did the parents of the kids on the bus. The Western Ozzie police reported it as a minor crash with no injuries. The driver also said he didn't even see Giuffre in the car, but an elderly woman.

Now these sources are all probably less-than-perfect. But this is weird. And then she offs herself? After saying in 2019 that she was not suicidal? My tinfoil hat is right here, but I hate putting it on, it's really stupid-looking.

These are the same reasons I'm sceptical. She posted on Instagram that due to the severity of her injuries in the crash she only had four days to live. Well that wasn't true for a start.

She may indeed have committed suicide, and if so I'm sorry for her, but it could be another fake story. Or she may have intended a 'cry for help' attempt that would have seen her back in hospital, and back in the news headlines, but unluckily for her it really worked (or the person she expected to turn up and find her and call the ambulance arrived too late or something).

I can't work out an angle where she might've been "suicided" as she had already spilled many sacks of beans. Possibly she was covering for her husband's abuse? There was a record there apparently of him beating on her. At the same time he was the one who took out a restraining order on her. None of it makes sense. I suppose nonsensical murders and suicides regularly occur, but I followed the Epstein story fairly closely, read her depositions, even tried to read her poorly written (but interesting) book online (most of it.)

She and Maria Farmer both seemed mildly unreliable. Farmer (also in terrible health) is a bit too loud on the wealthy Jewish angle and prone to bizarre accusations ("Ghislaine gave me cancer!") to get much airtime (unlike her perfectly respectable sister Annie) but Giuffre was more interesting as she had been, for all I could see, a very willing sex slave (if such a thing exists) or at least was aware she was living a much more glamorous life than the one she had left. Apparently Maxwell and Epstein even wanted her to have a kid for them? That's slave, yes, but it's Number One Slave. Millions all over the world have far worse fates.

I'm not saying any of it was wholesome, but it seemed like squalid amoral people doing squalid amoral things, just instead of a trailer park they were on private jets and private islands and a lot cleaner. There's a passage in Giuffre's book where she complains about how healthily Epstein ate and how she herself just wanted a burger most of the time. It's fascinating from a class divide perspective.

And then she saw an out, and eventually realized she could parlay all her terrible self-interested choices into a narrative of victimhood and heroism, and that's the card she played, to apparently grand results--on the surface.

What's sad about this--what's even sadder than all the other sad parts--is that Giuffre apparently never stopped making bad choices. But who knows.

I was thinking more "faked her own death" or even "did a 'cry for help' effort not meant to be serious, but unluckily for her it did turn out to work" rather than "she was offed by Hillary Clinton" type affair.

If she really is dead by suicide, that is a sad end to a sad and squalid story.

Did she really commit suicide? I'm seeing "statements from the family" but nothing official. If that sounds very cynical on my part, it's because it's been "several weeks" since her Instagram post about "I only have four days to live".

Maybe she really did kill herself, but the entire thing is so murky that I'm holding off until we get something from the authorities. I'm thinking of how Ziz faked their death, including family statements that they totally did drown, and then turned up alive and well. Giuffre, whatever her past as part of Epstein's operation, seems to me to have become addicted to publicity in latter years, needing regular doses of acclaim and admiration and support as the brave victim and survivor.

She seems to have been facing a trial about breaching a restraining order, so perhaps she did kill herself, but as I said, I'm slow to believe anything without explicit sources better than "her publicist":

Western Australia state police said they received a report late yesterday local time that a 41-year-old woman, whom they did not name, died at a residence in Neergabby, a rural area on Perth's outskirts.

Police said first aid was attempted to no avail.

... Ms Giuffre, who was believed to have separated from her husband, was treated in an Australian hospital after a serious accident, her publicist said last month.

She did not answer questions about the date, location, nature or other specifics of the accident and about the accuracy of an Instagram post that appeared from Ms Giuffre in which she said she had been in a car that was hit by a school bus, and her prognosis was dire.

She was taken to a Perth hospital following the collision on 24 March.

In an emotional post on social media, she expressed that she was ready to die.

"I've gone into kidney renal failure, they've given me four days to live, transferring me to a specialist hospital in urology," she said.

"I'm ready to go, just not until I see my babies one last time."

According to reports, a spokesperson for Ms Giuffre said the Instagram post was a mistake and she had meant to share the post to her private Facebook page.

She was charged with breaching a family violence restraining order in Ocean Reef, near Perth, on 2 February, Western Australia Courts said.

Ms Giuffre's case was first heard in Joondalup Magistrates' Court in northern Perth on 14 March, where she did not enter a plea.

The matter was adjourned to 11 June for a plea hearing, according to Western Australia Courts.

but Epstein is the only example they can point to

The Dutroux Affair? The Finders Cult? The Emperor’s Club VIP Elliot Spitzer scandal? The McMartin preschool case? The DC Madam scandal and her subsequent suspicious suicide? I forget the name but there was also an incident during the Troubles where MI5 was using child abuse blackmail to force Northern Irish politicians into taking a more hardline unionist stance.

I forget the name but there was also an incident during the Troubles where MI5 was using child abuse blackmail to force Northern Irish politicians into taking a more hardline unionist stance.

Kincora Boys' Home scandal.

On the flip side of this, there was a case where the police and pretty much everyone else went overboard believing the allegations of a fabulist/con artist about alleged child sexual abuse by prominent people and politicians, and ended up with egg on their faces. This was in the wake of the Jimmy Saville case, where there had pretty much been a cover-up, so the reaction swung too much in the opposite direction - make a claim about a public figure, nobody would dare question it because that would be victim-blaming.

The first fallout from the legitimate Operation Yewtree was the likes of Cliff Richard, who got a publicised police raid on his home and eventually nothing went forward. He successfully sued both the police and the BBC over this.

The next was Operation Midland, where the fake accusations were swallowed whole and investigated, including allegations that Edward Heath, a former British Prime Minister and who had died in 2005, was part of a paedophile ring. Heath was either gay or asexual, never married, was never linked with a female partner, and so was someone who was ripe for those kind of accusations. Conveniently, being dead, he couldn't face the accuser or deny the accusations. Beech, or "Nick" as his journalist dupe nicknamed him, created a series of stories about lurid scandals accusing prominent public figures of child sex abuse and murder. He also took advantage of accusations by a former Labour politician, social worker, and head of a child welfare charity, Chris Fay, to weave those into his stories:

In the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal in 2012, police were facing mounting pressure to investigate any and all cases of child abuse, particularly of a historic nature, reported by victims either directly to officers, or through interviews with journalists. Growing national public outcry over the possibility of there being more VIP serial abusers concealing their actions, and political campaigns demanding greater action to investigate cases of historic abuse, greatly affected the need for police to step up their efforts.

In 2014, journalist Mark Conrad came across an online blog containing allegations of a potential case of historic abuse, created by Carl Beech ...Conrad posted his inquiries into the blog and its allegations in a story for the investigative journalism website Exaro, providing Beech with the pseudonym of "Nick" to conceal his identity, as is common practice for protecting victims of abuse from their abusers. Conrad's story was picked up by detectives in the Metropolitan Police, who made requests to see his source, and agreed to allow the journalist to attend their initial meeting with Beech upon Conrad arranging for him to come forward. In these meetings, Beech gave full, detailed accounts of the abuse he claimed he had been subjected to at various locations, including the Elm Guest House, the Dolphin Square apartment block in Pimlico, the Carlton Club, and various other locations in the Home Counties.

Most concerning for detectives were Beech's claims that he, alongside a number of other child victims of the group, had been witness to three murders – Beech claimed that two children were killed for sexual pleasure, while a third was eliminated to intimidate the other abuse victims – in which he supplied the names of two individuals whom he stated had been murdered by the group: Vishal Mehrotra, whose abduction and the subsequent murder in the early 1980s remained unsolved, and Martin Allen, whose disappearance was documented in the late 1970s. Metropolitan Police deemed Beech's accounts "credible and true", though what he told them turned out to be entirely false.

In November 2014, the Metropolitan Police announced a large-scale investigation, codenamed Operation Midland, into Beech's claims."

Many public figures were dragged through the mud as a result of over-eager credulity of dubious claims. So it really goes from one extreme to the other. Blanket denial, or blanket belief.

There Are No Viable Political or Legal Solutions (Drooling Retard Edition with words, words, words fo the slow kids in the back who have hammers they can't be trusted with)

Imagine, hypothetically, your daughter's teacher was a fucking machine. You might have concerns that this literal automaton that is only capable of fucking might fuck your daughter. I mean, you can plainly look up it's product page, seems pretty cut and dry. This machine fucks. You goto your local school board meeting, but inexplicably, the school board is like 70% fucking machines, and they are struggling to understand the nature of your complaints. They actually find them rather hateful, like some sort of personal attack. The police pull your pants down, drag you out of the meeting, and arrest you.

You vote as hard as you can, and bless your heart, you even win! The schools don't care. The dude you voted for specifically tells the schools to tell the fucking machines to stop fucking. They simply can't stop.

When you think about it, it is rather silly to imagine you can vote or law your way out of having a single purpose machine fulfill it's singular purpose. You might as well vote or sue to make a mouse into a lion.

Now, I'm not saying the public education system is literally a machine that fucks kids. Although... No, this is more an allegory that it's impossible to change the nature of a teacher, and the hill they've chosen to die on. Around me free public institutions are risking it all, to make sure kids can keep viewing cock sucking. Libraries are forgoing the majority of their funding from the county, schools are grandstanding on it, it's a world I can scarcely comprehend. Neither politics nor the law provides any solution. Turns out the physical reality of these people's nature, and the fact that they have exclusive control of your child for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week is just immune from votes or the law. It would probably takes the 101st Airborne stationed in every classroom to make it stop, and even then teachers would still do it, confident that the government would never use their monopoly on violence to actually stop them from showing middle schoolers some queer cock sucking.

I repeat, there is no viable political or legal solution. What you do with this knowledge is between you and your own conscience. I've chosen to move counties, keep my child out of public school, and look towards joining a church that shares my values. It's been at great expense, and to my eternal sorrow likely cost me the opportunity to have more children. In a shameful sense, I've chosen to run, because I view my family as something too precious to risk. Other people might have different views, less options, or have already lost the one thing they lived for. I refuse to condemn them for the different choices they may make, nor preface this bare fact, that there are no viable political or legal solutions, with some smooth brained pre-emptive disavowing.

If pointing out the hopeless position we are in amounts to a "call to violence" to you, that is between you and your conscience. It's not illegal to shout fire in a crowded theater if the theater is actually on fire.

Around me free public institutions are risking it all, to make sure kids can keep viewing cock sucking.

By internet standards, this feels like extremely tame. In fact, it is tame enough that the very article which is whining about it felt safe enough to include it in the very post without any pixelation on their presumably otherwise SFW website.

From the link:

Left-wing activists have sought to ban Lee's “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Salinger's “A Catcher in the Rye” and Twain's “Huckleberry Finn” for using language they say is "offensive" to Blacks and women. None of the three books includes any pornographic cartoon illustrations depicting gay sex.

Now, if the Genoa City Public Library has pulled these other books because some wokes were whining about it, then by all means call them hypocrites. But if they have not, I don't see the fucking problem of having a book with that picture in a library.

If it was required reading, then that would be bad, sure. If it was required reading for six-year-olds, very bad, even. But if it is just sitting in the youth or YA section of a public library, I am okay with it. The odd 8yo who will pick it up looking for more brutal comics will just go "eeew, gross!", not be traumatized for life. From the text, it does not even try to be jerk-off material. Not that there is not a lot of stuff which is borderline pornographic in literature, either.

A good library has someone to offend everyone. I think trying to get people to question their gender identity is generally bad, but I also think trying to push for "abstinence until marriage" is bad. So if that library also carries Twilight, that is already two ideas on offer which I don't agree with -- which is of course the purpose of a marketplace of ideas.

In the hypothetical scenario you talk about, it sounds like you only ever considered voting or lawing your way into banning the fucking machine from acting according to their design, and you did not consider to vote or law your way out of letting the fucking machines into schools at all. Why? Alternatively, do schools have some mystical property that gradually converts their staff into fucking machines?

If what you are perceiving is anything close to consensus reality, then surely it should be possible to persuade other people to vote with you, either to kick the fucking machines out, or to shut down schools altogether, or to dedicate significant effort into figuring out if there is a way to change the mystical property mentioned earlier. Do other voters in your country agree about what is going on, but just strongly feel that on the balance it is imperative to continue forcing your kids into the care of fucking machines for 8 hours a day? Then you probably shouldn't want to coexist with them in a democracy, and the obvious solution for you is to legally exercise your still rather generous right to exit to go somewhere where you can live among the like-minded. Do they not see the f(ucking machine)nords like you do? Is there no way to legally make them see?

Nothing about your post suggests that you are interested in exploring serious alternatives and exhaustively searching the space of "political or legal solutions" - you sketch the failure of one fanciful "political or legal solution", declare that its expected failure means there are no viable ones at all, and use this to set up an emotional account of your hardships in coping with this conclusion while also trying to retest the boundaries of anti-fedposting enforcement. At that point, your situation really starts looking like you are reasoning backwards from a specific scenario you wish were real - either you live as part of a free, just and democratic USA that finally recognises the evil of fucking machines at schools and unites to gloriously smite them and restore propriety, or you go out in a blaze of violent resistance against the insanity of the world (or, well, spend your time fantasising about it on an internet forum vaguely hoping that somebody else will light the spark so that following it into the blaze will feel natural and effortless).

This is of course certainly a way to live, and sometimes the "my utopia or exit" approach yields surprising results in politics, but it's worth noting that the successful political movements of the last decades if not beyond generally did this in ways that involved plenty of compromise, "selling out" and delaying gratification. The acolytes of the US Left had to put their signatures on hiring many a competent white male CEO during their Long March through the Institutions, even from their point of view that might have well amounted to complicity in putting a Fucking Machine in charge of their kids (PoCs).

This commenter's post is deeply objectionable for a number of a reasons, but the cherry on top is the dishonest framing of the evidence provided. The link to the comic which was provided displays that this book was available in a CITY'S PUBLIC LIBRARY, not some middle school where it was part of the curriculum. Of course the argument that a public city Library should contain zero material for an adult audience is absurd and I believe hardly anyone would defend it (though I'm happy to be proven wrong), which is why I believe this argument which could be defended on truthful merits was ignored instead for this dishonest framing.

Furthermore, a link to an article shows us the news that some female teachers rape their young male students. This is deeply horrible behaviour that deserves to be condemned, but I'd like to ask the obvious question, which is: what is the rate of teacher rape you are asserting (de facto by not mentioning other professions) is so much higher than other positions that come into contact regularly with children? Do we have reason to believe it's higher than the rate of priests at the hypothetical church you might join? If so, the evidence has not been provided. In the lack of that evidence, it seems a strange leap to assert that teachers are some uniquely dangerous creatures immune to societal condemnation (especially when incredibly disparate things like rape and allowing a graphic comic to remain on a public library shelf are lumped together)

I am happy to defend the idea that drawn erotica is inappropriate material for a public library to carry. Tom of Finland may have made many gays very happy, but if they want his material they are free to pay for it themselves.

I stand on the null hypothesis that public libraries, until very recently, also agreed with me.

Would you like to defend or justify some sort of reasoning for the change?

Are all uncensored drawn images of sexual acts erotica or are you drawing some distinction between the two?

"Tom of Finland may have made many gays very happy, but if they want his material they are free to pay for it themselves." I don't know what this is supposed to be telling me; this is a fully generalizable argument against having libraries at all. If you want a math textbook, you're also free to pay for it yourself if you like math? Would you like to argue that erotic images are a special category that should be treated differently? If so, make the case.

Absent some evidence I am loath to accept your null hypothesis, just as you are clearly loath to accept mine. I will also note that you have chosen a specific slice of the argument I was making to defend by focusing solely on what you call drawn erotica and not, say, graphic images of war in history books. Do you support the latter being available in public libraries? If so, again, why the distinction?

Assuming that you were correct for the sake of argument, I think a pretty good justification for the change would be the Internet. Everyone already has unlimited free access to whatever type of content they want online, so it seems strange to put some special restrictions on an alternative service that is also available to serve the public at large (making it even less competitive than it already is with the Internet). Why would it be incumbent on the librarians to restrict their hub-of-information service when this onus is not placed on the Internet at large to do the same?

I fundamentally don't buy the arguments that children are being nefariously exposed to dangerous erotic content in some unique way through their public (not school) libraries. If their parents are so lax as to allow them to view dangerously inappropriate material in a public physical facility which has demarcated children's sections, when the system requires you to check out books for a defined length of time under a particular name, then those parents are lax enough that restricting the public libraries will have no effect anyway.

And everyone is always free to, you know, not take their kids to the public library if they don't want to. The fact that there is little necessity to do so is a load-bearing part of why the libraries should not necessarily feel obligated to cater their entire catalogue to the lowest age denominator.

And of course, there is room for nuance in all of these points. There is a great difference between erotic books being available in some clearly marked corner of the library vs. being advertised up front and loudly to all who enter.

Would you like to argue that erotic images are a special category that should be treated differently? If so, make the case.

I make the case that erotic images have always been a special category that was treated differently, from the beginning of public libraries. Public libraries were designed and intended to educate, uplift, and edify their users. You have to make the case for why we should change.

My hypothesis is the null hypothesis because prior to May 28, 2019, the question “Should we have comic books depicting blowjobs both in the public library and marketed to under-18s” would have probably caught the questioner a pedophilia accusation. It would have been so uncontroversially a negative that even to ask the question would be suspicious, and yet it only took the release of Gender Queer for a vocal minority to argue that I’m the one who has to explain why it shouldn’t be in the public library.

At some point in the living past, the question “Should we have, in the public library, comic books depicting graphic rape” would have been uncontroversially answered with a negative, and at some point in the living past, “Should we sell photos of naked women at gas stations” would have been uncontroversially answered in the negative, and so on and so forth.

The Internet is mostly a sewage pipe with a small bubble of moderately fresh air trapped up against the pipe, and I don’t find your argument that therefore libraries should also become sewage pipes to be at all convincing. “The Internet is for Porn”, after all, so libraries can and should be for something else.

And everyone is always free to, you know, not take their kids to the public library if they don't want to. The fact that there is little necessity to do so is a load-bearing part of why the libraries should not necessarily feel obligated to cater their entire catalogue to the lowest age denominator.

This reasoning always shows up eventually. Of course I’m free to not take my kids to the public library. But I also used to be free to take them there and be fairly confident the worst thing they could stumble across was some text erotica. My parents could be reasonably certain the worst thing I would stumble across was a kiss and a fade to black in a fantasy novel. Their parents could pretty much trust the worst thing they were going to come across was a “Damn!”

The point is that my freedom to trust that the public library is in accord with what I and people like me view as the public interest has been slowly degrading for 40 years or more. This limits our access to and trust in the library and when we complain about it or express our grievances, we are met with your reasoning.

———

This is obviously a generational battle and will continue to be so. I don’t fault my predecessors for not understanding what was going on, because it probably felt like having to explain to someone that the sky is blue and the grass is green, and that while sometimes the sky is orange and the grass is yellow, they still aren’t the same thing, only to be met with adamant accusations that the sky and the grass are the same thing until their will to resist was exhausted.

Now we are living in the world where everyone is expected to act like the sky and the grass are the same thing, and unsurprisingly it is starting to crack up under its contradictions.

At some point in the living past, the question “Should we have, in the public library, comic books depicting graphic rape” would have been uncontroversially answered with a negative, and at some point in the living past, “Should we sell photos of naked women at gas stations” would have been uncontroversially answered in the negative, and so on and so forth.

The weirdest thing about gas stations stocking porn magazines was the 711 policy of stripping the cover off the damaged magazines and giving them away to customers. It was such a weird blend of considerate and inappropriate.

I am happy to defend the idea that drawn erotica is inappropriate material for a public library to carry.

So I have actually looked at the images in Gender Queer. I would not call them "erotica." It's supposed to be a coming-of-age novel about a queer kid experimenting with sex acts that she ultimately finds unappealing.

Would I want my pre-teen kids to read it? No. It definitely should be age-restricted. But "This shouldn't even exist in a public library" seems a bit much.

Influencing my opinion is the fact that I distinctly remember books like Flowers in the Attic and the John Norman Gor series existing in my school library when I was a kid. Now maybe you can make a case that text is less harmful/dangerous than images, but I would contest that. Those books had some fucked up themes and scenes, and the sex scenes weren't even explicit.

So I have actually looked at the images in Gender Queer.

I extend to people the presumption that if they are engaging in the discussion, they have at least looked at the most salient examples of the topic, and so stating that I have “actually looked” at the examples could only be read as a veiled accusation that the other person hasn’t.

———

It’s a blowjob, dude. It’s erotica by its very nature. It shouldn’t be in the public library. Again I stand on the null hypothesis that until very recently, essentially every library in America agreed with me, and it is the change that has to be justified.

That being said, you bring up a good point. Flowers in the Attic and Gor shouldn’t have been in your school library. It shouldn’t have been in mine.

The sewage was already lapping around our ankles when we were kids, but that’s no excuse for letting things get worse. And yes, on the way back to having no metaphorical sewage flowing through our intellectual and spiritual lives, we have to pump the sewer back down to just around our waists, and then our knees, and our ankles, and so forth.

There are things that can be sexual but not pornographic, but those things are, culturally, well prior to Playboy.

Sex acts aren't inherently "erotica." The idea that no library books ever depicted sex acts (visually or textually) before Gender Queer is false.

Sex acts aren't inherently "erotica."

TIL that should I ever venture onto Pornhub, all the videos will be about cleaning the grout in your bathroom, weeding the garden, the precise temperature at which your roast is perfectly cooked, and giving that mucky wall a good scrub.

Good to know!

I am a tiny bit confuzzled about "it's only a drawing of a blowjob so it's not, you know, erotic" but then that's because I am not ten years old today, and can't parse out "this is someone trying to have sex in line with a particular sexual fantasy but please read it like it's a medical description in a textbook and not about sexy times" from "this is a depiction of sexy times".

Erotica is meant to arouse. It's meant to be erotic. Obviously porn is erotica. But not all naked pictures are porn, IMO.

With the caveat that literally everything is "erotica" to someone, I have a hard time imagining anyone finding the specific scene we're talking about in Gender Queer arousing or stimulating, and it seems pretty obvious to me that that was not its intent. You can take issue with all kinds of things (like its suitability for children), but I think a lot of people are performatively clutching pearls about kids reading about sex.

Well, if depictions of a sexual fantasy are not meant to be arousing (and the author is trying to show that for her it was arousing as a fantasy, whatever it was like in reality) then to quote Gilbert and Sullivan "Why, what a most particularly pure young man this pure young man must be!”

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TIL that should I ever venture onto Pornhub, all the videos will be about cleaning the grout in your bathroom, weeding the garden, the precise temperature at which your roast is perfectly cooked, and giving that mucky wall a good scrub.

Or, to quote Field & Stream,

"Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper.

"Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J.R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping".

Rather like Branch Cabell's Jurgen - why no, prurient minded reviewer, all the passages about Jurgen labouring mightily in the night time with a lady friend on mysterious symbolic tasks are not about sex, how could you think that? (Reader, it was about sex). Suffers from being too clever-clever - if you're going to write fantasy, even satiric fantasy, it has to be less heavy-handed. Reading it today, it's hard slogging because the author cannot help but nudge you in the ribs every so often about "do you get it? do you? huh?"

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Sex acts aren't inherently "erotica."

Sure they are. We can do this all day.

The idea that no library books ever depicted sex acts (visually or textually) before Gender Queer is false.

Not once have I argued this. You brought in the question of text. I’m not sure who you’re arguing with right now.

What I have argued and will continue to argue is that there is a constant churn of Cthulhu swimming left, towards greater and greater degradation of the commons. Today it’s someone defending cutesy drawings of blowjobs in library books that librarians push or market towards young teens or tweens, 10 or 20 years from now it’ll be someone defending librarians pushing kids towards cutesy drawings of some author’s autobiographical exploration of the first time they let their dog fuck them. Maybe sooner! Things are moving fast.

Maybe that will be too much for you, or maybe it won’t, maybe you’ll continue to say, “Well, I read Gor in the school library when I was a kid, and I remember the Gender Queer arguments on the Motte (PBUI) and the kinds of assholes who took the counter-argument to me, so this is fine also.”

Or maybe you’ll find your grandkid reading it in the library’s booknook and you’ll be appalled. I don’t know. But your current arguments are toothless to me because my stance is that Gor in the school library was already too much.

We are merely having the discussion about Gender Queer because that is where the current battlefield starts. Unfortunately, from my point of view.

Sure they are. We can do this all day.

Okay, but using your own personal definitions and saying "Nuh uh" isn't much of an argument.

What I have argued and will continue to argue is that there is a constant churn of Cthulhu swimming left, towards greater and greater degradation of the commons.

Maybe so, though I am unconvinced by arguments that have been made basically since Roman times about the degradation of morals and the corruption of the youth.

I wouldn't have any heartburn about prohibiting Gender Queer from school libraries, but public libraries (which are meant to serve adults as well as children, and which can impose age restrictions on certain books) do not need to cater to your personal preferred level of acceptability.

Or maybe you’ll find your grandkid reading it in the library’s booknook and you’ll be appalled. I don’t know. But your current arguments are toothless to me because my stance is that Gor in the school library was already too much.

Likewise, your arguments are toothless to me, because I don't know anyone who turned into a degenerate because they read spicy genre fiction as a kid. I am not saying there is no line, but the line is always going to be fuzzy and negotiable and subjective. You are afraid I'd be okay with exposing children to bestiality; I am afraid you'd like to censor anything that would raise a maiden aunt's eyebrows in 1890. You're right that this is where the battlefield is, however much I personally find Gender Queer offputting (and inappropriate for pre-teens).

You are afraid I'd be okay with exposing children to bestiality; I am afraid you'd like to censor anything that would raise a maiden aunt's eyebrows in 1890. You're right that this is where the battlefield is, however much I personally find Gender Queer offputting (and inappropriate for pre-teens).

I actually agree with you on this. It seems that, if I'm interpreting @BreakerofHorsesandMen correctly, anything outside of the most saccharine, banal works would be banned. Does description of child abuse warrant censure? How about descriptions of warfare or violence? Where does the line stop exactly? It seems that trying to ban things based off on their "appropriateness" to different age ranges is an inherently moral/political question.

Likewise, your arguments are toothless to me, because I don't know anyone who turned into a degenerate because they read spicy genre fiction as a kid.

However, I have to disagree with you here. It's well documented that watching too much porn can induce transsexuality or autogynephilia at least. I'd also argue that in terms of how well slippery-scope applies, sexuality is one context in which it best applies. Reading spicy genre fiction can easily lead to reading more hardcore fiction, which can in turn lead to joining adjacent online circles/forums/tumblrs that if not encourage, at least implicitly validate non-standard sexual behaviors and identities. Just see cracking-the-egg in trans spaces, or the public and shameless speculation on and encouragement for identifying as gay for anyone who even seems to be gay; see the anger when it comes to "queer-baiting".

Really, I believe the above is the crux of the argument. On one side, you have people who rightly believe that these works of art encourage or at least lower the activation energy of acceptance, so to speak, for sexual identities and behaviors that they perceive to be disordered or morally incorrect. On the other side, you have people who believe that not only are those sexual identifies and behaviors not disordered or morally incorrect, but should actively be accepted and encouraged in society; so, those works of art that can help to either cause people to tolerate those sexual identities or incorporate them into their person should be, in their view, not only permitted, but disseminated.

In Thomas Sowell terms, it's a conflict of visions.

I'd argue that you could actually make an empirical decision on which specific sexual identities are disordered or not based on empirical material outcomes, but that's beyond the scope of this comment.

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What I have argued and will continue to argue is that there is a constant churn of Cthulhu swimming left, towards greater and greater degradation of the commons...

I agree with the pattern you observe (but I have mixed feelings over whether it is a bad thing), and I also find it very annoying that normie progressives simultaeneously show radical acceptance towards the thing of [current year] and hostile disgust towards the stuff that hasn't yet been normalised.

But I believe that: a) In the specific case of gender queer, it is not happening b) When it does happen (now or in the future), it's not that bad.

... it’ll be someone defending librarians pushing kids towards cutesy drawings of some author’s autobiographical exploration of the first time they let their dog fuck them.

And if that does happen in the future, that would also not necessarily be erotica. It's not about whether you, personally, find the lifestyle choices being proselytised gross or icky - the question is "does this work attempt to convey complex ideas and emotions that provoke the reader to think?" (or in the other direction - "would anyone want to read this work with both hands outside of their pants?")

I can easily imagine a serious piece of literature being written on this topic, in the style of "Gender Queer":

  • The author describes feelings of alienation around the time of puberty - the other children keep talking excitedly about having sex with boys, girls, they/thems, and some even express not being interested in sex at all.
  • The author thinks they are asexual, until one day, when they petsit for their best friend, they have a "horrible" revelation that they do have a sexuality after all...
  • Some occassional, short, tasteful scenes depicting their awkward teenage attempts at sex with animals ("Ugh! I didn't know dogs would have such bad breath...", "I guess female ducks really do have corkscrew vaginas!")
  • The author's philisophical musings about the capacity of their partner to consent (how can animals, who cannot speak, convey consent?) and the need for them to consent (we are okay with killing them to eat their flesh - is it that bad to have sex of questionable consent with them...?)
  • Anecdotes about an initially unaccepting friends and family, and teasing/bullying from classmates
  • A saccharine last page showing the author and their non-human SO affectionately licking their face, with captions "I know I've struggled a lot with being your owner... but I love being your partner!"

And yes, we can play this game again for any other "degenerate" aspect of human sexuality that also currently lies to the left of the Overton window (pedophillia, necrophillia, vore, etc)

Or maybe you’ll find your grandkid reading it in the library’s booknook and you’ll be appalled. I don’t know. But your current arguments are toothless to me because my stance is that Gor in the school library was already too much.

Why is it so terribly awful for children to be exposed to actual erotica? (I am now moving onto point b - I maintain that Gender Queer is not erotica) My school library did not stock "Gor", but it did stock an adult fantasy novel, whose last half was a thinly-veiled femdom porn fantasy:

Soon after, Richard is captured by a beautiful young Mord-Sith named Denna, who tortures him for a month. Mord-Sith wear skin-tight red leather catsuit, blood-red, to hide the blood of their captives during the training sessions. They live to torture and condition men into obedient pets, who live and breathe to please them, and Mistress Denna is the best of all Mord-Sith at this task. After only half an hour at her mercy, he is left groveling on the dungeon floor, begging to please his mistress to avoid pain. She chains him up by his wrists from the ceiling, in order to being his 'training'. She then trains and break him into her obedient slave by the use of several instruments, including a painful small red leather rod by the name of the Agiel. Once Richard is broken, she takes him for her sexual mate

The actual book is even more sexualised than even this account would suggest (his "training" spans many pages) - I recall the "Mord-Sith" telling the protagonist to focus on her latex-clad breasts to avoid the pain of the Agiel (it can read the submissive's victim's thoughts, and hurts them when they think bad things about the domme Mord-Sith), another Mord-Sith who is implied to castrate her "pets", and another still who actually makes them communicate in barks and go on "walks" with her through the town naked, collared and on all-fours.

As a pre-teen, I did indeed find this "confusing" (I was not aware that it was supposed to be erotic, so I wondered if there was something seriously wrong with me for finding graphic descriptions of "torture" arousing), and I remember feeling deeply ashamed about my enjoyment of the book and all the fantasies I had that were inspired by the book. And now... I'm an adult - and nothing bad happened. I don't have some kind of PTSD, I understand that was just a fantasy written by a horny guy (and Denna is not an accurate representation of female sexuality), I didn't develop an irrational fear/hatred towards women because I associate them with Denna, etc. Reading this synopsis of the book now, I can only laugh at how silly and over-the-top the whole thing was in retrospect.

This was not a good thing (as in, I'm not going to encourage any future children I have to read TWFR so they can experience what I experienced) - but in retrospect, this seems to be on a similar level of badness to the long list of other minor things that made my teenage years less than storybook.

But going back to point (a) - I think it's borderline even whether something like TWFR counts as "erotica" (the first half was just a normal fantasy novel, with mature themes, and the book did seriously explore the idea of being tortured - the Mord-Siths were not dominatrices, the torture depicted was very real and non-consensual, with blood and genuine agony)

Gender Queer is nowhere close to this border. Having skimmed the book, it totals 240 pages, of which there are exactly 2 short scenes that are of a sexual nature (the strap-on blowjob mentioned by the media, and also a medical exam showing the author naked without any scenery censor) - all of the remaining pages are just ordinary comic book drawings with pro-LGBT storylines and perspectives.

It is a reasonable position to be against titles like Gender Queer on the basis that you are against their underlying message, and do not want to normalise pursuing sexually deviant lifestyles (especially not to impressionable young children) - as I said at the start of the comment, I also have mixed feelings over the LGBTQ+ movement. But I think it is completely unreasonable to object on the grounds that works like these are pornographic (because they aren't)

It's not about whether you, personally, find the lifestyle choices being proselytised gross or icky - the question is "does this work attempt to convey complex ideas and emotions that provoke the reader to think?"

Poor content: outdated/obsolete on subjects that change quickly or require absolute currency (it’s better to be lacking than to have erroneous/outdated material), trivial subject matter, mediocre writing style, unused sets of books (keep only those volumes used), repetitious series no longer popular, superseded editions (get newer edition), resources never reviewed in standard review sources, unneeded duplicates, material that contains biased, racist or sexist terminology/views, self-published or small press materials that are not circulating.

CREW: A Weeding Manual for Modern Libraries

Bolded for the part that gets as explicit as possible, but of course most of the other criteria are easy to apply as well. I'm familiar with the general argument you're making, but I'm also aware that this is not how libraries actually work, and I decline to be a rube.

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It's a blowjob, dude. It’s erotica by its very nature. It shouldn’t be in the public library.

It's actually a strap-on. And neither of the characters finds it sexy. The scene is meant to be awkward.

Confused teens not even knowing how to fuck might be gross but it doesn't strike me as erotica.

I am well aware it’s a strap-on. The facing page in the book in question specifically refers to the act as a blowjob.

I quote:

“I can’t wait to have your cock in my mouth—I’m going to give you the blowjob of your life. Then I want you inside me.”

“This is the most turned on I’ve ever been in my life. I am DYING.”

This writing is erotica.

IMO that's still missing the point. They were excited about it and tried to do it and found out it was awkward and disturbing rather than exciting. Like the same panel and the next several:

"I can't feel anything"

"This was much hotter when it was only in my imagination"

"Hey Z... let's try something else"

In thought balloons: "But now that I've had sex a few times I'm not sure I really need any more. Trying to get off in front of someone is kind of weird."

"I think when I do orgasm, it's not because of my body but in spite of it"

They were clearly acting out roles assigned to them by others and by media. If anything it was saying "putting on a strap-on and sucking it isn't what being queer is about"

To me this is practically anti-erotica. It's like reading about asexual people describing PIV sex as rubbing their elbows together.

It’s about a kid growing up not feeling feminine, struggling to fit into pre-built sexual and gender roles, experimenting, and ultimately realizing she's asexual and nonbinary.

It's definitionally unsexy as a whole.

Sure, but do we really need drawings of it, and not the character as she (or he, if we're being correct in our terminology) thinking about the experience, what he expected, and how that was different from reality?

This is the fundamental division here between the two sides: one set thinks "no, a depiction of a sexual act in a book for teenagers that will be in a school library is not appropriate" and the other set thinks "this isn't sexy like porn, it's fine".

The recommended reading age, looking it up, is for 14-15/15 and up. But will younger kids be able to access it? What's fine for a 15 year old may not be appropriate for a 12 year old, and that's part of the whole fight. Unless the librarians are ensuring younger kids can't get the book, and it doesn't seem like this particular group feels they should be engaging in what they perceive as censorship, then parents can't be sure their kids aren't accessing inappropriate material.

And that's the other part of the fight: what parents think they should be able to decide is appropriate for their kids, versus what the school or school board thinks is okay. Just saying that hey, kids have always sneaked around and gotten into stuff they shouldn't have at that age isn't good enough. Kids might be sneaking drinks at home out of the parents' liquor cabinet, but do we want schools handing out shots of whiskey to 12 (or 15) year olds on the grounds that "they're gonna do it anyway, might as well do it in a safe environment"?

"Oh hey, it wasn't whiskey, it was wine or an alcopop" isn't that much better as justification.

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Or in other words, it’s oppression pornography (or reverse pornography in the "reverse racism" sense).

It's still devoid of any other literary value and is just a masturbatory aid for progressive women, but the difference is important (and the first step to figuring out that in an environment of equality, unusual in a state of nature, their sexual misbehavior is just as much a problem as it is when men do it).

They were clearly acting out roles assigned to them by others and by media.

By this media! There is no reason for young children to know about strapons or blowjobs. This is a self-licking ice cream cone - teaching children about explicit sex acts and then saying ‘well, children these days encounter sex early, they need to be taught about this stuff’.

When my grandfather was sixteen going on a picnic with a girl and her chaperone was considered risqué. Now they’re teaching pre-pubescents about blowjobs.

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Do we have reason to believe it's higher than the rate of priests at the hypothetical church you might join?

While it's entirely possible that one or more of social workers, coaches, pediatricians, etc have a higher rate of taking sexual advantage of their charges(we really don't know this), teachers and priests have well documented abuse rates and priests both offend at lower rates and are more likely to face consequences when they do.

Do we have reason to believe it's higher than the rate of priests at the hypothetical church you might join?

Yes. The rates of abuse documented among teachers are far higher than clerical abuse rates and the intense focus on the latter and not the former is a politically motivated one.

That may very well be the case.

I hate to be that guy, but I'd love some sources for future reference.

You goto your local school board meeting, but inexplicably, the school board is like 70% fucking machines

You vote as hard as you can, and bless your heart, you even win!

Sounds like you voted in the wrong election, if your anti fucking machine constituent turned out across the relevant districts for the school board and won then those board members would be replaced.

The dude you voted for specifically tells the schools to tell the fucking machines to stop fucking. They simply can't stop.

Did the voters turn out for the school board election or state level representatives? Or did they just turn out for a single position and then got confused out of ignorance that there's more positions to vote for with their own different appointed powers, many of which are local? It sounds like the latter. An idiot with a great goal is still an idiot and it's not shocking when their plan comes undone. Likewise an idiot voter with a great goal is still an idiot.

When you think about it, it is rather silly to imagine you can vote or law your way out of having a single purpose machine fulfill it's singular purpose. You might as well vote or sue to make a mouse into a lion.

Well yeah, if your side doesn't turn out for your local school board elections then it shouldn't be a shocker that you lost them. And if you're simply outnumbered then that's local democracy. A fucking machine school board for the fucking machine city constituency, just like a Japanese National Diet for the Japanese citizens.

Did the voters turn out for the school board election or state level representatives? Or did they just turn out for a single position and then got confused out of ignorance that there's more positions to vote for with their own different appointed powers, many of which are local?

One pattern that's come up with a particular strain of reactionary thought is that there is an ingrained helplessness (punctuated of course with an occasional going-off-meds incident) with regards to actually learn about the structural elements of governance. It's true at the local level and the national level and everywhere in between.

It is true that liberals have a natural advantage here in the sense of being active in politics as opposed to being based & grillpilled, but it's become so pronounced that it goes beyond merely believing that being active in political causes is cringe. It's gotten so bad you cannot even explain to some of these folks black-letter facts like (just for example) "if the federal government wants to condition grants on cities dropping sanctuary policies, there has to be specific language by congress creating the condition".

Specific groups, specific people. “Some of these folks” is not enough. Show us stats, show us prominent individuals telling people to opt out. If you can’t, consider whether the generalization you’re making actually holds up.

It’s been like a week since I reminded you that mocking one phrase is not a sufficient argument. Mocking zero phrases is not any better. One day ban this time.

That wasn't meant as a generalization, it was an example. Perhaps that could have been phrased better.

It would help if we weren't constantly gaslit about the nature of what's happening.

For example, the relentless bait and switch around Title IX "interpretations". Obama's DOE famously published that "Dear Colleagues" letter, and all the colleges wrung their hands and went purposely insane under the premise that if they didn't, the DOE might withhold their funding. Trump's DOE rescinds that guidance, and those same colleges turn around and sue him in court. Biden's DOE does an even more expansive Title IX "interpretation" making it so there can be no local discretion in how the school system handles trans issues. You need to flee the country if you want to live in a school district that can't secretly trans your kid. The schools "begrudgingly" comply, none sue. Now many states sue, but the schools, suspiciously mum about it. Trump rolls in, rescinds the guidance, even forcefully reverses it, schools sue again.

It's a constant shell game. When a Democrat DOE is top down forcing local schools hand it's "Oh, elections have consequences, don't want this to happen vote harder next time." You win that game and suddenly the locus of control shifts to the local level "Oh, you have to win at the local level too, too bad, so sad". You can't win both in perpetuity, and somehow things never ratchet back in your direction no matter what you do.

The truth is, public schools, pedagogy, teacher training, the unions, etc have all been deeply captured institutions. It doesn't matter what battles you win against them, they are hostile to your interest, and will never comply. No matter where or how you win, they just gaslight you that the "real" battle was over here. In reality, they are just doing what they wanted to do the entire time, and coordinating with where ever they can to launder legitimacy on their immoral actions.

It is certainly strange that whichever elections the right wins, and whichever court battles they win.... those aren't the ones which result in any change.

Is your claim that there haven't been substantial changes since Trump took office?

That seems about right to me. What has substantially changed?

There's been tariffs, since the Democrats don't want to interrupt their opponent when he's shooting himself in the face. Also deportations, though the Supreme Court has put the kibosh on those for now. But mostly nothing that won't just be #resist'ed until he's out of office.

In 3 months the Trump admin has

  • Started a trade war with china
  • Made a deal with El Salvador to ship some of our illegal immigrants there
  • Killed off most of our foreign aid
  • Significantly altered US international relations
  • Ended disparate impact policies (I bet this one sticks)

What were your actual expectations for the first 3 months of Trump II?

Are you willing to put a bet with cash to a charity of your choice on disparate impact? Because that's not one of the ones I'm certain is going to get TRO'd and reversed the second a Dem President is in office, but I'd probably put north of 70% on the former and north of 90% on the latter.

I would want to have some concreteness on exactly what we're betting on here (e.g. obviously the EO didn't make Griggs completely irrelevant forever, obviously the strong form of affirmative action in college admissions was already on its way out).

But yeah if we can operationalize this and still disagree on expected outcomes vs just disagreeing on what it concretely means for disparate impact policies to be neutered I am up for a charity bet.

Dollar amount of disparate impact settlements in the first 4 years of next dem admin, inflation adjusted to 2018 dollars? Though that is a super noisy signal.

It's noisy, but more critically, it's also a signal that's very sensitive to other stuff. I'm not very optimistic about Ames, for example, but despite not being a disparate impact suit itself, I'm hard-pressed to think of any conclusion but a punt on the underlying circuit split that leaves the rate of disparate impact suits unchanged. There's some cy pres stuff that could have an even bigger impact on settlements in general.

Beyond that, a lot of my position is about the policy, itself. The paper matters, both as something that discourages behaviors well before a court case happens, and in acting as cover for a wide variety of other behaviors that would be legally questionable. Maybe that's not something that we can bet on -- a Dem admin blanket-reversing every Trump EO is possible and wouldn't necessarily mean a reversion to 2024 disparate impact rules -- but it seems more relevant.

I'm sorry, but do you not understand that the elections for governor and the elections for local school board are different elections for different positions? Of course winning a governorship has little immediate impact on the decisions of any individual school because state governors are not meant to be elected kings. They have specifically given powers and limits.

Those particular limits can change as states have pretty broad freedom, but even that still requires more than the governor. It requires a state legislature (something else people vote for).

And if you think it's particularly biased, I recommend looking at North Carolina which has a Dem governor and yet the legislature leans heavily Republican to the point they normally have a supermajority and constantly overturn vetos. In fact just recently they overturned a veto on a law that limited the power of the positions the Democrats won. As supermajority winners of the state legislature, that was their legal right to do and no amount of Dem voting for governor can change that because the governorship is not a king position that assumes full and direct control of everything in the state.

I share in The_Nybbler's frustration because it seems like the only way the right gets what it wants is if it has control of absolutely every branch and level of government, including the entire judiciary at every level and every non-political hire in the bureaucracy (which means they have to be willing to, after winning, use the political capital necessary to fire everyone and replace them with their own). If even ONE of them remains in the hands of the right, then sorry, not only the fucking machines remain, but some local judge is going to rule that the whole country has to hire more fucking machines.

Basically, why is it that in situations where power is being split, the result is invariably "more fucking machines"?

Basically, why is it that in situations where power is being split, the result is invariably "more fucking machines"?

Imagine a country that is perfectly 50% party A and 50% party B. The representative split in power will be 50% both ways, but for individual topics this might not appear the case because many individual topics can't be split. The divide between "Wants a road here" and "doesn't want a road here" isn't easily mitigated by just having a smaller road since having one at all inherently violates the desires of the second side.

But it might mean some places do have roads and some don't. And with negativity bias, each side looks "Ugh those jerks, they built a road here" and "Ugh those jerks denied us a road". This is the type of thinking that led to Scott's caution on bias arguments piece where both sides of a conversation shown the same video viewed it as biased against them.

Now imagine this in real life where the sides aren't exact, they're not set in stone because people change their views, they're not easy to measure perfectly (one side might turn out while another doesn't), they might be distributed in different ways like a rural republican city vs an urban dem city is the common way those go, there's a wide distribution of power among various positions and there might be established rules intentionally designed to prevent fleeting minor majorities from making major changes like the difficulty in making new amendments for the constitution and lots of times there's not even just two sides.

Which is to say that are you sure there's "more fucking machines" than there should be given the constituency they represent?

If your goal is to radically change the legal status quo, US governing systems are generally arranged in such a way where you have to win everything by large margins. The right is generally in favor of this whenever the left wants to do things.

including the entire judiciary at every level and every non-political hire in the bureaucracy (which means they have to be willing to, after winning, use the political capital necessary to fire everyone and replace them with their own)

Given the strong propensity of American conservatives to treat these groups as hated enemies regardless of their behavior, the long-run trend will always be that these groups end up aligned against them. Until such a time as the right can overcome both its ideological hatred of civil servants and its human capital problem, it's not going to produce any solution more sophisticated than either serial arson or bringing back the spoilers system.

The right is generally in favor of this whenever the left wants to do things.

But it does not get its way in this regard.

It certainly does! Most complaints about how the left always gets its way and the right never does are simply selective perception or "not-winning-hard-enough"/"everything-I-want-is-the-bare-mininum" style complaints. The US political system is incredibly status quo biased. Sometimes this helps the right, sometimes it helps the left.

I'm reminded of this comment from a few years ago on the old place:

It's strange, isn't it, how no one feels like they're in charge.

the right never does are simply selective perception

Nah. We all know the issues where the right can make gains and where not, its extremely predictable, and the fact that the typical categorisation of left and right also includes issues where they do have a chance is not actually relevant.

I don't understand why you think this is such a big deal, given that it is legal for parents to homeschool their children or send them to private school.

Besides, modern technology means that pretty much any kid who wants to see porn, will see porn. Compared to the stuff that a kid can find in 2 seconds on the web, nothing in some LGBTQ book in school can possibly compare. Now of course, that doesn't mean that I'm a fan of having my tax money spent on such educational content. But then, I'm not a fan of having my tax money spent on about 90% of the so-called education system to begin with. Largely because modern techhnology means that pretty much any kid who wants to learn outside of school and has normal cognitive capacity can easily teach themselves.

Now, I'm not saying the public education system is literally a machine that fucks kids.

List of alleged abusers in the SBC

Wikipedia's page for SBC sex abuse

Jehovah's Witnesses

Virginia Beach megachurch Pastor who had this lovely adventure:

Authorities say Blanchard believed he was talking to an underage girl on social media but was really chatting with an undercover detective. They add that Blanchard drove to a county hotel for a sexual encounter with the young girl and was met by police and handcuffs.

Study finds that 1/250 Australians report being sexually abused by Clergy during their childhood

I won't bother recounting the history of the Catholic church scandals, everyone knows them and honestly I think they get overrated relative to what you see at every other organization.

I've chosen to move counties, keep my child out of public school, and look towards joining a church that shares my values.

Have you considered that you're fleeing the frying pan of fucking machines for the fire of fucking machines?

I've increasingly become blackpilled on the question of pedophilia. It seems like there doesn't exist an organization that doesn't have a child sex abuse problem.

It seems like there doesn't exist an organization that doesn't have a child sex abuse problem.

Yes, in the sense that pedophiles commonly have the big-brained idea to get a job working with kids.

Child actors are commonly sexually abused by Hollywood executives. I don't think that means the typical Hollywood producer is a pedophile. I think it means the subset of Hollywood producers who happen to be pedophiles make sure to work with child actors.

It's like that with every organization. I don't think the average youth pastor is fucking the kids. But if a pedophile happened to be a member of that church, he might get the clever idea to volunteer to be youth pastor.

It seems like there doesn't exist an organization that doesn't have a child sex abuse problem.

Sure there are. They're just the organizations that don't interact with children.

...That doesn't seem better.

I repeat, there is no viable political or legal solution

Not if you treat "politics" as a zero-sum popularity contest to determine whose side will get to steamroll over the other one in all cases and in all respects. There is an obvious solution if we introduce such concepts as negotiation and compromise.

The way I see it, the school boards are stubbornly refusing to give an inch on "stop showing sexually explicit LGBT material" because they think that giving in would lead to a slippery slope. In short order they'd face a general ban on LGBT materials in schools, and, down the line, a federal ban on homosexuality in general. While a few zealots and a few perverts might specifically want the pornography, it is not the primary concern of the school boards or the general-purpose LGBT activists.

The obvious solution here is meeting in the middle, with credible enforcement mechanisms to enforce the compromise in the long term. The Left pledges to have a zero-tolerance policy for pornographic materials in school; the Right pledges not to play any games like redefining non-explicit LGBT material as "pornography" to artificially extend that ban. Write both of these policies into law, and enforce those laws. Solved. Equilibrium.

It is the civilized solution, and the only reason it couldn't work - the very reason the school boards are refusing to be the ones who take the first step in that direction - is the very existence of rhetoric like yours on both sides. If the loudest voices on the opposite side are always ranting about how there's no point in trying to compromise and they should just exterminate the enemy, you're not going to want to play the mug's game of negotiating with these people. You'll conclude that you should just exterminate the enemy. In fact, if anyone on your side looks like they're thinking about negotiation, you might start ranting very loudly about how pointless that would be… And there you have it, vicious cycle. But I believe that vicious cycle of mutual paranoia can be broken; if it couldn't, we wouldn't have civilization in the first place. Someone's just got to be the bigger person eventually.

So although I agree with you that it would be more productive if we could write these compromises into law, I can also see the OP’s point here too. It feels like there is a never ending game of:

  1. Of course no one believes this, you are nutpicking.
  2. It’s just a few crazy kids on campus.
  3. Well, obviously it’s just something people are talking about, it’s not happening in real life.
  4. Well, those people are adults and can do what they want, it’s not affecting you.
  5. Bake the cake, bigot.

Where I think a lot of the frustration is coming from on the right is that these deals have been made, and made many times - and each time, the deal is expanded into merely the vanguard for the next stage of their subjugation. Gay marriage wasn’t a thing, then it was only nice respectable couples, then it became leather daddies walking their subs on a leash through downtown while you have to praise them at the threat of being kicked out of society. There was a deal to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants if the border rules were enforced - instead, over 5 million illegals were let into the United States under the Biden administration.

I think if you want to see this sort of thing simmer down, you’ll need to appease the red tribe - not just give them empty promises that’ll be rolled back the moment they aren’t watching, but actually give something up.

It feels like there is a never ending game of (…)

I agree, but this sort of disingenuous behavior seems to me like another manifestation of the same lack of trust. It's game theory all the way down. You don't feel you can ask for what you really want up-front without triggering all-out war, so you go for salami tactics and artificially shifting the Overton window. There are other dynamics and incentives at play, like the unrealistic but alluring hope of total victory which means the respective sides pursue dangerous gambits which they dream might give them the edge once and for all, instead of working towards a stable compromise as the expected end-state.

Related still, but distinct, is the endless fool's-quest for the appearance of a total consensus. We as a nation and indeed as a civilization need to be more comfortable with overt compromise. We need politicians who openly say things like "I know 45% of you really want [A] and aren't going to budge. And personally I'm with you, but another 45% desperately want [B], and they aren't gonna change anytime soon, either. Here's what my administration and I are proposing to do to try and keep the peace", instead of pretending they've invented a magic solution that will make everybody happy except for a few meanies on the fringes. I truly think, to an unbiased observer, it would look nuts that so few political issues are phrased in those terms in speeches and think-pieces. Even when they don't actually believe in it, let alone advocate it, almost everyone writes as though the 170 million guys on the other side of the fence are just a temporary inconvenience who can be safely ignored, perhaps reeducated. And yet, this. Never. Works.

If it were easier for opposing sides to negotiate with all cards on the table, we could skip all that tedious, damaging business and skip to the begrudging compromise.

I think if you want to see this sort of thing simmer down, you’ll need to appease the red tribe - not just give them empty promises that’ll be rolled back the moment they aren’t watching, but actually give something up.

Oh, I agree with that, too. The dynamic I outlined was symmetrical for a reason. Alas, I'm not in charge of the Blue Tribe. FWIW, if I somehow was the Blue Tribe Czar, and had a Red counterpart at the negotiating table, there are a number of guarantees I would be prepared to give that differ from my ideal world-state (up to and including "it's the parent's choice whether their child gets to transition before their legal majority, and we will codify into federal law that refusing to aid transition will not, in and of itself, be considered parental abuse").

I think if you want to see this sort of thing simmer down, you’ll need to appease the red tribe - not just give them empty promises that’ll be rolled back the moment they aren’t watching, but actually give something up.

The problem is as soon as they violate the empty promise, they'll say "Well, we didn't make the promise with wording that absolutely forbids that" and/or "Well, the promise was with those other guys over there, not us, we're totally separate". And they can maintain this forever, and half of Red will believe them too.

This is what I was trying to express, but much more succinct; this is what red tribe has seen over and over and over, and many of them are coming to the realization that there are no ways to enforce that the blue tribe actually keep their promises.

To be clear, I do not want a war between red and blue; I want to be left alone, and to leave other people alone. Blue tribe at the moment appears to have adopted the mindset that there can be no 'agree to disagree', and that they must instead must threaten to destroy me unless I am constantly affirming their decisions, and they are willing to use the full force of the government to make me do so. (For what it's worth, I think this is one of the reasons that the blue tribe hates Trump so much - I think he's willing to use the full force of the government to enforce his desires, and there are a number of people who voted for him specifically to do that, and because they perceive his desires as overlapping with their own).

One of the hardest lessons I've had to learn in my cold dead libertarian heart is that there can be no 'peacefully agree to not use power against one another.' Power will always go to those who want to seize it, while it exists. If you want a credible way to defuse the situation? Splinter the power that lets the sides enforce their will upon each other, so that no one can take it and use it on the other.

Power will always go to those who want to seize it, while it exists.

I'm certainly no libertarian, but isn't this the essence of libertarianism -- that power is so seductive and so oppressive that the only way to deal with its abuse is to limit it to just what's absolutely necessary, so there's less power to abuse? It seems to me like you're just growing in your convictions rather than having to learn a hard lesson.

I believe the libertarian solution to "people are abusing the power of the public library" is something like "abolish the public library." (This is also one of the reasons I think the American right and left are closer to each other in terms of general views on liberty than they think -- the right-wing solution to corrupt US government agencies is to abolish them, the left-wing solution to corrupt police departments is to abolish defund them.)

(I may have misunderstood you, and you were saying that your "cold dead libertarian heart" became that way because of this lesson, rather than saying that it startled you and you had to figure out how to square it with your libertarianism. If so, disregard.)

There's also a problem where even when these compromises are written into law, that doesn't hold them very long, sometimes even without a new law. The expansion of LawDog's cake metaphor to all of public policy is going to come at some pretty ugly costs, sooner or later.

11 reports so far. 2 of them "Quality Contributions" from the usual "AAQC anything that drops a hot steaming turd on the floor" reporters. (To be fair, a couple of negative reports from people who negatively report everything they don't like, as well.)

So just to peel back the curtain a bit, there was a lot of mod discussion about your earlier post, and several of us (including me) thought it really didn't warrant a ban. We didn't roll it back (as we did last time) because it was just one day. However, I predicted you'd come back super angry and spoiling for a fight, and here we are.

I think you're actually hoping you eat another ban, because you really like to feel persecuted. But despite your repeated claims that the mod team (and me specifically) are out to get you, this is not true.

The points you make here are valid, including that it's okay to say "I believe there are no viable political solutions or legal solutions left." You can even talk about the potential/likelihood/sad inevitability of political violence. We're not going to ease up on modding anything that even smells like fedposting, but yes, I think you got an unnecessary timeout (even if you did, as is your wont, come back shrieking like the child who screams bloody murder because he got a tap). And for that reason, I'm going to let this:

(Drooling Retard Edition with words, words, words fo the slow kids in the back who have hammers they can't be trusted with)

go.

This time.

But to be clear, this is unacceptable and if I didn't think you'd already kind of gotten a ban you didn't deserve, I'd ban you for this. You do not get to call us drooling retards no matter how indignant you are.

Anyway, since you've blocked me, you won't read this, which doesn't mean it won't apply in the future. So be it.

@WhiningCoil this comment is a reply to a mod-hat comment by Amadan giving you a warning. You deserve the opportunity to read it.

From their links which do not go to youtube or what I presume are amazon pages of sex toys, it seems like the gist of the complaint is that some high school refused to remove two books from their library.

Sure, having a school which allows a book in their library which contains a crude comic of some guy (?) giving another guy (?) a BJ is exactly like the teacher of your daughter and 70% of your school board being fucking machines who are presumably going to rape her or something.

I mean, we had that story with a school district and some ruling wrt religious objections, but that sounded much more serious that this "random school has slightly naughty queer book, and even after possibly someone unsympathetic to these books being elected to some position, they still did not remove them. The soap box, the ballot box have failed, the jury box is just a waste of time so now it is time for the cartridge box!!!11"

a crude comic of some guy (?) giving another guy (?) a BJ

Both women. One wearing a strap on.

There have been school board controversies over Gender Queer when parents discovered what was being presented for elementary schoolers to learn about gender identity.

since you've blocked me, you won't read this

Blocking mods does something?

It means you won't be able to read our posts. But if we modhat a comment to you, we treat it the same as if you read it and chose to ignore it.

I mean, I didn't block amadan because he's a mod, I blocked him because of his armchair psychology every time he engages with me, seemingly for the sole purpose of goading me into breaking the rules further. Whatever warning I'm missing is worth it to avoid the incitement.

However, I predicted you'd come back super angry and spoiling for a fight, and here we are.

There was a post where the moderator said:

Be annoyingly verbose and add a bunch of disclaimers if you insist on doing it.

(I originally thought this was in response to WhiningCoil but I'm not sure now. That post seems to have responded to a lot of people.)

It looks to me as though this was an attempt to follow the moderator request. It's certainly annoyingly verbose and has a bunch of disclaimers.

You should really try reading an entire post before jumping on your keyboard to Au Contraire Mon Frer now and then.

If you had, you'd see I am indeed not blaming him for restating his original message with more words.

I am blaming him for prefacing it with the "drooling retards" crack.

Far be it from me to defend WhiningCoil, whose demeanor and positions I find deeply objectionable, but if you will tolerate my nitpicking - I think that in "(Drooling Retard Edition with words, words, words for the slow kids in the back who have hammers they can't be trusted with)", the opening slur refers to the kind of guy who would post a lengthy verbose message instead of a snappy call to violence, i.e. to the persona reluctantly adopted by WhiningCoil himself - not to the people who asked for the verbose version. Note that, although you quoted it as a plural, it's singular in his post.

Of course, this still leaves "the slow kids in the back..." as being obviously directed at the mod team. As I said, not seeking to help his case, merely indulging my inner pedant.

As I said, not seeking to help his case, merely indulging my inner pedant.

"Your honor, my client could not have committed this robbery, as he was clearly seen committing wire fraud elsewhere at the time".

So, you say you didn’t roll it back because it was just one day, which sounds like there was, at a minimum, no mod consensus that the ban was justified.

In the absence of such a consensus, why is there no wrist slap of the original mod for overstepping his bounds?

If there was a wrist-slap, why is the broader user-base not aware? Justice has to be seen in order to be seen to be done.

We are not cops, and we are often not unanimous. In the event of a serious disagreement, we will very occasionally undo a previous decision, but no one "overstepped his bounds." Mods are autonomous; we will often consult with one another when we're unsure of the most appropriate course of action, but sometimes we'll just act because no one else is around. Sometimes afterwards one of us will say "Eh, maybe that was too much."

You're getting transparency here because I value that, but it's not an invitation to demand a humiliation ritual because you think a mod made a bad call.

So you guys are, internally, an anarcho-syndicalist commune that, externally, acts as an unaccountable oligarchy.

I kinda like it, actually.

Alternatively, if we consider Zorba to be the monarch, mostly focused on foreign policy and economic concerns, you guys are more like an aristocracy.

I like it even more! This is a good experiment. I wish you great success.

I like to think of Zorba, at this point, as a being that has ascended to higher plane and the remaining mods are communicating with his astral essence through sacred rituals and prayer.

Zorbathustrians, perhaps

I mean, it seems likely to me that the mod discussion around the ban would have taken long enough that it was about to expire by the time the consensus was reached.

@zorbathehut any thought of bringing back the ban registry for the sake of transparency?

the ban registry

Do you mean this page?

I'm surprised that modhatted posts don't pierce the blocking feature. I can't imagine that this is the desired behavior.

I asked @ZorbaTHut, and apparently that is how it works currently. He might change it so that mods can't be blocked, but for now, that's how it is.

So if Whining gets banned because he ignored my warning... ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

(No, blocking does not make you immune to banning.)

I was going to tell you you need a double backslash to make the figure work, but for reasons I dont understand that makes both the underscores disappear, and you actually need 3. (It makes sense that they are gone: they cursive the part in between. And it makes sense that one backslash would turn it off and they are there then. But they are there at 0 backslashes also) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In my library, there are more than 100 ebook copies of "This Book is Gay," of which 1 is being read at the moment. That probably costs this particular library system $5000 per year.

I've heard that you can often find similarly ridiculous numbers of copies of some other leftist books at other library systems.

Why is it so important to you that middle and high schoolers do not learn about gender and sexuality? Understanding those things is important for children and adolescents to understand what abuse looks like and how to avoid it and report it. And for them to know what a healthy understanding of themselves looks like and what healthy relationships look like, which is important for any person's happiness and wellbeing.

I believe that you honestly want what's best for your children and somehow think keeping them away from such information is better for them, but I read your posts and just hope your children against the odds manage to become well-adjusted adults despite your efforts.

  • -23

I read your posts and just hope your children against the odds manage to become well-adjusted adults despite your efforts

Perhaps this is my bias as a parent, but insulting the way people raise their kids is often a step beyond insulting them personally.

"You are an asshole" is less antagonistic than "Your kids are assholes, and it is your fault".

Take a time out. 3 day ban.

"You are an asshole" is less antagonistic than "Your kids are assholes, and it is your fault".

This is pretty funny in a modhat comment, considering we have an OP saying "Don't paraphrase unflatteringly."

It occurs to me to ask, when talking to a moderator, is it less antagonistic to say "you are an asshole" than to say "your users are assholes, and it is your fault"?

How about don't say either one?

There is a form of comparison

AA : AA :: BB : BB

This comparison is not meant to say that AA == BB.

No, 'You're a shitty parent' is below the belt in a way that 'you're an asshole' isn't.

Speaking just for myself, I’m not entirely opposed to elementary schoolers (that is, 10 to 12 year olds) learning about puberty in a strictly “changes to the body” sense. I am not opposed to middle schoolers (that is, 14 year olds or thereabouts) learning about sexuality in a strictly heterosexual, pro-natal “this is what sex is and you should wait until marriage” way.

What I am opposed to is a combination of these concepts being introduced at much younger ages (“We’re just teaching them to recognize abuse!!” is a motte at those ages), and the fact that nearly everyone doing the teaching is philosophically opposed to my people’s point of view.

On another note, “Why is it so important to you” questions, and all variations thereof, are silly. It’s clearly important to you or else you wouldn’t be asking the question, so humans being what we are, someone somewhere is going to take the opposite stance from you. Questions like that remind me of the scene in Blindsight where the aliens perceive informationally-unnecessary communication as a hostile attack on their mental processing cycles.

Questions like that remind me of the scene in Blindsight where the aliens perceive informationally-unnecessary communication as a hostile attack on their mental processing cycles.

Delightful comparison

On another note, “Why is it so important to you” questions, and all variations thereof, are silly. It’s clearly important to you or else you wouldn’t be asking the question, so humans being what we are, someone somewhere is going to take the opposite stance from you.

Genuine question to progressives- a nationwide gender and sexuality curriculum is written to be used by all public schools. It reflects my point of view on such matters. How would you take 'Why is this so important to you?'?

Do you want your children reading cartoon pornography in elementary school? Do you want teachers keeping secrets about them from you? Do you want serious crimes against them brushed under the rug because of the offender's identity, as happened in Loudoun county?

These things are all at issue here. I can say that it is... difficult to disentangle my emotions about them from my more general thoughts about sex ed in middle and high school(I consider myself competent to do this for my kids at the appropriate ages without the need for assistance from the school system in any case; I understand that there are parents who are not and that you might count me among them, given my ideas about sex/gender/sexuality. But this simply makes me more adamant that there should not be sex ed or gender education in schools, parents should do it themselves, and this may suck for those kids whose parents are not competent to teach them themselves but thems the breaks).

Gender Queer is, among other things, a book of gay cartoon sex. Targeted at 8 year olds and stocked in public school libraries at my expense.

I support sex ed and some Motte interpretation of the positive things you mention. But the current popular Bailey of sexual cartoon books for young children supplied at taxpayer expense has nothing to do with those positive vibes.

I read your posts and just hope your children against the odds manage to become well-adjusted adults despite your efforts

Sneering contempt against most parents.

I won’t grandstand about these woke boardmembers and administrators not deserving to be shot(the teachers are, very literally, just following orders. If those orders were to eat a bucket of shit before starting classes every day- like a five gallon bucket of actual human excrement- they would complain about the necessity of it but it wouldn’t occur to them that the orders are wrong. This is what teachers are like.) but I will point out that kinetic solutions won’t help anything. We’re not there yet.

I do support political solutions that are bad for public schools as institutions, whether it’s schoolchoice, permissive homeschooling, forced budget cuts, whatever. Many of these can actually get done.

I do support political solutions that are bad for public schools as institutions, whether it’s schoolchoice, permissive homeschooling, forced budget cuts, whatever. Many of these can actually get done.

Can they? I'm just not seeing it.

Eh, from today's Short Circuit:

Allegation: Colorado middle-school teacher invites student—who has never questioned her own gender identity—to an after-school art club. Student is surprised to arrive at what is actually a Gender and Sexualities Alliance meeting, where she is told that students who are uncomfortable with their bodies are more likely to be trans and is encouraged to come out as trans, which she does. Although the guest speaker warned students that it might not be safe to tell their parents about the meeting, she does. The parents sue the school district and its board of education, alleging violations of their parental substantive-due-process rights. Tenth Circuit: We're not sure what the scope of parental SDP rights are, but it doesn't matter because this wasn't official district policy.

Reading through the factual background in the opinion, I could see this stuff being a pet project of a teacher (and apparently a substitute teacher), just with the district administration providing cover for them. My sense is that all of the university teaching programs have been captured by folks who teach all the new teachers that the most important part of being a teacher is being an activist.

My sense is that all of the university teaching programs have been captured by folks who teach all the new teachers that the most important part of being a teacher is being an activist.

My sense is not that, based on acquiring an education degree and teaching in public schools for quite some time. The trainings lately are so anodyne they are actually contentless -- like to the point of having the ice breaker take up literally the entire training time. For hours if necessary. "Have you heard about the iceberg? Let's talk about your Meyers-Briggs type and your own set of lenses for a few hours."

My sense is more that the teachers lately are very low on autonomy, mastery, and purpose in respect to their main job duties, and some of them have a savior complex which comes out in things like that, or filing false abuse claims against families they don't like.

My sense is that all of the university teaching programs have been captured by folks who teach all the new teachers that the most important part of being a teacher is being an activist.

Once upon a time, when my wife was in her 20's she worked at an organic grocery store. The pay was shit, management were assholes, and the benefits sucked. While this is broadly true for grocery, it was especially true there. Anybody with any sense went to go work for Whole Foods or Trader Joes instead. The people who stayed were true believers in organic food. They'd do all kinds of weird shit, like refuse to help customers find products (like honey) because they were vegan and they didn't think it was ethical.

Increasingly I'm finding the same to be the case with teachers. They are overworked, underpaid, and increasingly the only ones sticking around are the ones with some sort of radical agenda that it's worth sticking around to push. Vaccine mandates, like most ostensibly public institutions, flushed out a huge proportion of the dissenters. Though they occasionally still shitcan a few especially stubborn teachers who've manage to hang on this long over their conscientious objection to trans policies.

You vote as hard as you can, and bless your heart, you even win! The schools don't care. The dude you voted for specifically tells the schools to tell the fucking machines to stop fucking. They simply can't stop.

Although the above post focuses on education, this is true broadly. Your vote does not matter that much. Politicians do not care about the secondary consequences of their policy (e.g. small businesses suffering due to tariffs or covid lockdowns). The only option is to become sufficiently wealthy/self-sufficient where it does not matter as much or you can move to better neighborhoods or choose private options, like private school. This is why FIRE is so popular. It's a way for people to make enough money to choose a better life for themselves and family.

Elections have consequences. And I don't mean just one election, but every election, every year, for decades. Somehow in certain districts, 5 year olds have mandatory drag queen story hour, and in other districts this doesn't happen. I wonder why.

Virginia has fallen and it's not coming back. One lucky blip in an otherwise spotless sea of blue results doesn't stop that. So buckle up and get ready for decades more of full throttle insane policies in a race to out liberal California.

I've chosen to move counties, keep my child out of public school, and look towards joining a church that shares my values.

Good for you. Vote with your feet. The Enemy does not share your values. The Enemy wants schools to be run by fucking machines.

Around me free public institutions are risking it all, to make sure kids can keep viewing cock sucking.

To me this is why the argument that some institutions are too important to be subject to cullings for political reasons has to be rejected if those organisations shove themselves into political fights. This tactic of crying "but think about the good libraries/public broadcasting/whatever else does" has to be severely punished, even if it extracts a cost from the punisher, if there is ever a hope for the ratchet to stop.

The one to blame for cuts and cullings is the activist who involved an organisation that is supposed to be owned by everyone into his activism, not the politician who finds himself either forced to do the firings and cuts or literally give taxpayer money to fund his opposition and goals his voters find aberrant.

We do not know that this public library is woke.

Two kinds of libraries might carry offensive queer books:

(1) woke

(2) free speech

You can tell them apart by looking at how they treat books that the wokes hate. Did they get rid of Harry Potter because JK Rowling is a vile TERF? Did they get rid of Twilight because it perpetuates heteronormative and sex-negative stereotypes? If so, that is bad and they should just carry material which offends nobody, which will make them terrible libraries.

If not, then I think in a world where virtually every teen owns a smartphone and finding any act of bestiality just by entering it in a search engine prompt, the shock value of that crudely drawn BJ is minimal. Just write your own book in which two straight cis-gender characters do some chaste dating, marry in a church ceremony and then engage in unprotected PIV sex in their wedding night, and you get to draw a crude picture of that process as well if you like.

This argument is the same as “You already live in a sewer, might as well eat shit, shrug?”

As it turns out, people should not only not eat the shit, but also actively pursue stanching the flow of sewage.

Eating shit has a comparable health effect to living in the sewers.

This is more like "if you sleep on the ground in the woods, it is probably not worthwhile to spend a lot on makeup".

This is a different, less earthy, metaphor, sure, but it means the same thing.

Rather than worrying about makeup, you should stop sleeping in the woods.

You can tell them apart by looking at how they treat books that the wokes hate. Did they get rid of Harry Potter because JK Rowling is a vile TERF?

Harry Potter is so enormously popular that the popularity can overcome the outrage. A better comparison would be a right-wing political book, particularly one on a similar subject (such as an anti-trans book or a traditional morals book targeting kids).


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