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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30390 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Everybody knows the war is over

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everybody knows the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

That's how it goes

Everybody knows

-- Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows

Waiting for the cavalry to ride over the hill doesn't work if society has spent fifty years making sure no one like you learns how to ride a horse. Conservatives face the same problem when it comes to boycotting large companies that don't agree with their values. I started replying to @coffee below, where he wished that conservatives would launch a serious boycott in response to social media/tech companies targeting conservative viewpoints, the post expanded to the point where it felt like it ought to go separately to avoid jumping down anyone's throat.

Conservatives talking about launching mass boycotts of any company with liberal values immediately throws me back to Ferguson and over-exuberant BLM protestors shouting "They have guns, we have guns, let's do this!" "Have" and "Guns" being, here, relative values although superficially similar, it is rather important to note how many guns each side has and if they know how to use them. Just as I roll my eyes at antifa types claiming that they're ready for a violent revolution when the majority of their side steadfastly refuses to own or know how to use a firearm and the security services are on the other side; I giggle at Christian conservatives thinking they have the moxie to force a boycott on every industry with liberal values. Because every industry with liberal values is, at this point, virtually every industry that makes the world modern. There is no non-luddite path to an offensive boycott against liberal corporations; there are too many liberal corporations, and if any of the corporations tried to veer right-wing their employees are too left wing and would exit.

Call it the Long March through the Institutions and blame the enemy if you like; or note that Mao's physical Long March was a work, that Chiang Kai-Shek (foolishly, as it turned out) let it happen, practically escorted Mao out of town without too much of a fight or too many efforts to undermine Communist columns on the way. The supposed socialist Long March through the institutions has been mirrored, or exceeded by, a Republican Long Retreat from the Institutions; this started long before Rudi ever wrote about the Long March. God and Man at Yale came out in the fifties, when conservatives still dominated among college graduate voters and colleges were still seen as broadly conservative institutions. Republican skepticism of academic credentials and intellectuals dates at least back to Eisenhower as a political strategy; and accelerated under Bush II, culminating in the Palin nomination. What we see today is downstream of seventy years of anti-academy politics. Just as BLMers' desire to reform police departments will be futile as long as virtually no blue tribers want to become police officers; conservative efforts to reform the commanding heights of American culture will be futile when it is virtually impossible to assemble a critical mass of conservatives in important professions.

In the academy, Democrats are estimated to outnumber Republicans something like 12:1. While studies note that the concentration is highest in Northeastern elite colleges, those are also exactly the colleges that set the trends the rest follow. Is it any wonder that Democrats rack up ever larger leads among college graduate voters?

In the film industry, the biggest conservative political group "Friends of Abe" counted 2,500 members out of more than 300,000 workers in the film colony. And while I loved Gary Sinise in Forrest Gump and in CSI; he's like a C or a D list star. In the music industry, the vast majority of donations go to Democrats, with A-Listers like Bon Jovi and Springsteen and Jay Z shelling out for blues, while Reds get warmed up leftovers like Toby Keith and Ted Nugent. Overall, the entertainment industries shelled out 87% of their money to Dems in most cycles.

In the tech industry, the vast majority of donations from employees go to Dems. The FAANGs in particular all gave over 80% to Ds. Tech entrepeneurs aren't much redder than their employees as a class. Research scientists, somewhere between Academics and tech workers, also lean overwhelmingly left, with 80% Dem/Lean Dem as far back as the Bush admin.

The upshot of all this is that there is no critical mass of workers for red tribe coded projects in the commanding heights of American culture. As long as Blue tribe workers are sufficiently organized to do things like walk out to protest their corporate masters failing to take the correct positions, even a single CEO deciding to give it a try won't work. All the corporations will hold the line on blue tribe cultural values, because if they don't they'll lose their talent, and without talent they are nothing.

Consider the fix Ottowa found itself in from the trucker protests: tow truck operators turned out to be on the other team, and refused to tow protestors. Turned out, basically nobody on team blue knew how to drive a big rig. That control allowed the truckers to shut down a city, and force concessions; the government was forced to seek out blue coded allies (banks) to strike back.

Similarly, blue tribers dominate tech and culture to such an extent that red tribers will be perpetually unable to produce content that is nearly as good quality. As much as I might despise mainstream culture, there's a lot of craft and skill that goes into making a Marvel blockbuster, and it can't be knocked off by amateurs.* I don't know that you can make a Marvel type movie, a workmanlike blockbuster product, without a lot of blue tribers. As long as that is true, the theory that companies will fold to Red tribe boycotts because they don't want to lose 20% of their customers doesn't work, because a united blue tribe labor revolt will cost them 100% of their products. Disney might fear losing customers, but it is terrified of losing talent that it uses to produce products to sell around the globe. And the talent is much better organized than the customers will ever be.

If Red tribers want to play hardball, it must be on their own turf. I said I doubt a Marvel film could be made without blue tribers, I don't know that a cattle herd can make it to a farmer's market in NYC metro without a whole lot of red tribers. The Canadian truckers succeeded for a long stretch because there aren't blue tribe truckers to oppose them, there are a lot of industries in the USA that are the same. An energy strike would be fascinating, fine you want to decarbonize here we'll do it all tomorrow. Or a police strike. The reds are decades behind the blues in the organizational sense, but the second best time to plant a tree is today and all that jazz.

Simultaneously, conservatives need to be building institutions alongside and parallel to blue tribe dominated institutions, producing beautiful cultural content to compete on talent. If cultural production is denigrated as blue tribe, and no red tribers go into it, that's permanently ceding the field, slow suicide. Both compete on quality with blue tribe, and shifting paradigms away from blue tribe framing. But never attempting to stand up inferior red tribe knockoffs, like Turks I have a lot of thoughts on how that would work, but you've read enough of me for now.

TLDR: A conservative boycott of liberal companies would fail because in competitive industries the top talent is all blue tribe, or such a strong majority that it is doubtful red tribe talent can even man a ship together.

*Moreover, making conservative knock-offs of mainstream products has a strong Christian Rock problem. Christian Rock is bad because it affirms the dominance of the secular rock music paradigm.

Good post, and I’m sympathetic with the conclusions. Part of why I think American cultural polarisation is so damaging is that both tribes desperately need each other, all the more so now given that political polarisation is on urban/rural lines rather than northern/southern or other contiguous geographical ones.

Red tribers sometimes like to portray themselves as doing the “real work” of America, while Blue tribers are sometimes wont to portray most of the US outside the major metropolitan areas as sad, economically stagnant, and in decline. Of course the truth is somewhere in the middle, with urban areas concretely dependent on rural areas for things like food and fuel, and rural areas dependent on urban areas for things like finance, communications, and media. I’d like to hope that things like your suggestions — energy strikes, police strikes, transport strikes — could help get convey that fragile interdependence to more Blue Tribe folks.

Also, I do think it’s still vitally important for the Red Tribe to maintain at least some representation in elite spaces like academia and highbrow media. Every mass movement needs its intellectuals, wonks, and diplomats, and you don’t get to ignore the realities of cognitive elite power simply by calling yourself an anti-elitist movement. Moreover, it seems to me — as an academic who’s flitted between a variety of institutions — that there’s a vast difference between 5% conservative and 10% conservative institutions. In the latter, a small set of people are comfortable being openly conservative, and can voice conservative talking points at meetings and lectures (even if they don’t get invited to as many cool parties). By contrast, in 5% institutions, conservatives basically live underground; they don’t have the critical mass to be accepted as a legitimate dissident community. So I think keeping that narrow corridor of elite conservatism open is critical for mutual understanding and acceptance.

and rural areas dependent on urban areas for things like finance, communications, and media

Technology, logistics, military too! That severely understates the dependence (also, the 'rural' population of america is ~ 15% iirc, rest is urban + suburban).

Although, does a WFH stripe employee living in the woods count as 'rural' here?

What I don't get is why Reds aren't better at punishing blue dominated industries when they get power, copyright reform that drastically shortened copyright terms would be a good way to threaten a rich industry dominated by the other sides donors, and could have made a lot of normies happy during the napster/you wouldn't download a car era.

Or siccing anti-trust on tech when the government was unified during the early Trump administration, would have been another target rich environment.

The other side does it to energy whenever they get power. It should be an obvious action.

What I don't get is why Reds aren't better at punishing blue dominated industries when they get power, copyright reform that drastically shortened copyright terms would be a good way to threaten a rich industry dominated by the other sides donors, and could have made a lot of normies happy during the napster/you wouldn't download a car era.

Our institutions weren't polarized like this when George W. Bush was in power, and the only Republican president who has taken office since then was Donald Trump.

So basically another way of phrasing your question is: Why was Donald Trump so incompetent? And the answer is that he's a narcissistic flake.

More like why isn't congress passing copyright reform and daring a Democratic president to veto it instead of passing the 74th repeal of the ACA only to not pass one when there was a president who would repeal it.

Copyright reform seems like it would be pretty popular and mostly harms industries that are heavily aligned with the other party. It should be on the chopping block whenever the GOP gets power, both as direct you oppose us and as a threat to all the other industries out there.

If you're arguing that they should do copyright reform because it "hurts people on the other side more", then you're arguing for copyright reform as not being a terminal goal for whoever is doing this, and they'll always lose to people for whom it is. Namely, the corporations who, without any reference to politics, will pay large amounts of money to persuade politicians against this idea.

Most people don't give a fuck about copyright reform. Go on Youtube and you can easily find clips of movies floating around that the channel uploader most certainly does not have permission to upload, but they do it anyways. Twitch streamers steal hundreds of thousands of dollars of copyrighted content and no one has gone after them, even when they do it to mainstream TV shows like Master Chef.

There are better ways of fighting the Democrats and their supporters than trying to do copyright reform.

Hey, I'm with you. Thirty years ago I was complaining online about the Copyright Term Extension Act and was devastated by the result in Eldridge v. Ashcroft.

But you need a strong and charismatic GOP leader to reorient the coalition in that way. The issue hasn't been polarized. The GOP electorate needs to be persuaded to support a term restriction.

I think it's a bit of a mistake to blame Donald Trump for this. The capture of institutions by woke ideology took pace under Obama's reign. Trump took advantage of a party that had already lost support among the intellectual and creative classes. In addition, the shift of college-educated professionals to the left has occurred in most western countries, not just the United States.

The President does have significant executive authority, and it can be used to advance an agenda even in opposition to the legions of bureaucratic lifers in DC. DeSantis does this in Florida on the regular; it can be done, but it's hard, and Trump didn't do it.

Why was Donald Trump so incompetent? And the answer is that he's a narcissistic flake.

Shouldn't Trumps competence be judged controlling for the much higher level of polarisation, and the media and cultural headwinds against him?

Why should it? He doesn't seem like the kind of person to take anything seriously in the first place.

What I don't get is why Reds aren't better at punishing blue dominated industries when they get power

DeSantis seems to be one of the few who's shown even a basic understanding of how the game is played.

The good news is they're learning how to do this- Desantis and Hegar are starting to figure out how to disincentivize wokeness.

What I don't get is why Reds aren't better at punishing blue dominated industries when they get power

The red public ethos is a grounded and comprehensive peace, not radicalism, extremism, punishment, or other forms of veiled civil war.

punishment

Which is the party of "tough on crime"?

If I were to blame the Right's ideology for this I think the better scapegoat is the right wing's predilection to be more pro-business and anti-regulation.

Wokeness is, after all, a regulatory regime.

Crime is the exception which proves the rule. Red culture decries direct punishment of people who’ve committed no illegal actions to achieve their objectives, and criminals walked straight toward their punishment.

You’ve made my point for me: business is sacred, regulation is bad, arbitrary regulation as punishment doubly so.

Which is the party of "tough on crime"?

When was that? Everyone was in the 1970s

What I don't get is why Reds aren't better at punishing blue dominated industries when they get power, copyright reform that drastically shortened copyright terms would be a good way to threaten a rich industry dominated by the other sides donors, and could have made a lot of normies happy during the napster/you wouldn't download a car era.

The Republican Party would need to do this, and it is not a unified, populist party. And the Democrats would be of little help; Al Franken paid back his Hollywood donors by co-sponsoring SOPA/PIPA (I forget which, specifically).

Ron and Rand Paul aren’t particularly influential with the rest of the party when they (or at least Ron did?) speak Austrian about how intellectual property laws are the state asserting ownership over your private, real, physical property. The MAGA wing don’t hold any strong opinion on IP for its own sake.

A culture warrior like DeSantis would have to take this on not at a state level, where in Florida he’s benefited from political migration surrounding COVID and tax policy, but at a national level where both parties get donations from large corporations as the latter seek to prevent/influence/shape regulation that impacts them.

In part because red tribe is predisposed to be against government meddling. Look at how many got upset when DeSantis introduced anti masking rules despite the upset people being anti masking?

They believe effectively an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. But what they don’t argue well against is that often these rules are necessiti restore the status quo ante that existed prior to state intervention (in this case the CDC).

I do think republicans if they take power should remove tax exempt status for NGOs and actually tax them heavier than corporations. At the very least, most red tribe could get behind taxing NGOs similar to corporations which will make Left Inc. use more resources to push their policies (thereby decreasing their reach).

What’s the difference between NGOs, nonprofits, charities, and 501(c)(3) churches in your plan?

It is a hard line to draw. One way to get 50% of the way there is make college endowments taxable.

Because the red tribe has had no functional fight with its leadership, and developed no ways to pressure them to actually implement policies which favour them when the corporate donor class would rather not.

Its incredibly assymetric. The new deal and civil rights act have created decades worth of administrative and academic muscle to grab corporations and institutions by the throat and make them enforce left wing social norms.

ESG scores are backed through blackrock and co by the full force of the feeral reserve. You creditworthiness and stock value will drop by billions if you are insufficiently woke.

And right wingers are just now developing influencers networks and intellectuals to even notice this is happening because these tactics were so effective they killed even right wingers ability to organize for 50 years outside deep state approved National Review channels, so now everyone has to rediscover shit the John Birch society understood back in the 50s and the old right was actually organized to fight against in the 30s before FDR declared himself god empreror (actually he got SCOTUS to back down to him by threatening to just pack the courts, and made sure voters couldn't hold him accountable through aggressive FCC strongarming of any who spoke against him)

.

Conservatism is a mistake.

By the time the conservative movement happened there was nothing left to conserve, the 50s were just the dying embers of the pre-new deal world the FDR had already killed. Ya you respected proffessors in the 50s, they had gotten their degrees in the 20s and 30s when actually would just be straight denied entry if you didn't know Latin. Not that you'd be failed if you didn't learn Latin, you were expected to show up at 18 practically fluent, and then start work harder than most modern professors don't even rise to doing, and you'd do that on day 1.

Of course all that had to go in 45 with the GI Bill, you can't enforce standards on uneducated war heroes...just make em read an English translation.

Every institution was degraded in this way. The modern university has the IQ required to graduate that a high school did in the early 40s.

Bank managers used to personally know everyone in town or the neighborhood, and be esteemed on par with the Doctors or Lawyers, and issue loans off his expert knowledge not only personal finance but the trustworthiness of the guy across from him... Imagine how conductive that is to building hightrust communities, and getting good actors established... fucking gone.

Everything the right valued: Community, high trust institutions, standards of excellence, opportunity matched with responsibility and consequences...

All these things had been attacked and killed or were just clinging onto life by the 50s...

A war was waged on the constitution, civilization and the idea of community itself... and "conservatives" are still sentimental that instead of fighting that war for basic decency itself, Americans went to die in France and adopted the exact same economic system as the fascists to do it.

It is an action but likely to be an unsuccessful one. Trump could have done more but was heavily constrained by time and having other priorities, like immigration, Covid, tax cuts and fending off the FBI.

I think there are some trends that might help conservatives in areas like Hollywood. China is increasingly important for making a profit with films, games etc. The Chinese government insists on Family Friendly entertainment, while comic book hero-style stories are what Chinese audiences apparently likes from the West.

One precedent is 80s action movies. Home video, plus a Hollywood system that had grown sceptical of indulging "genius" New Hollywood directors after flops like Heaven's Gate, led to the production of a lot of conservative-leaning action films. Think Cobra, Rambo, Red Dawn, Conan the Barbarian, Red Heat, Death Wish etc. etc. Even Aliens has a heroine who is appealing to both conservatives and liberals: the warrior mother is a figure in conservative iconography that goes back centuries; her violence stems from protective maternal instincts that conservatives laud, and she confronts men only insofar as they are weak. Similar women are a stock figure of Western culture, at least in Northern Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Douglas

There's also e.g. the Rocky films from that period, which are some of the best examples I know of traditional working-class American conservative values: nobody owes you anything, work hard, respect your elders, family comes first, don't forget where you came from, stand up for yourself etc. These values are popular among high-orderliness people in pretty much every culture, including China.

Of course, as some people here have already noted, the problems for conservative culture production seem to be more supply-side than demand-side. However, I think that 80s action has lessons here as well. Stallone wasn't consistently a big star until the 80s: Rocky and Rocky II were exceptions in a career of failure and disappointment. Ahnold, Dolph, Church Norris, etc. came from outside the standard Hollywood system. Charles Bronson was a salty veteran and Michael Winner (the Death Wish director) was a sleazy Limey:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=efl5pFTFnBU

So a conservative director looking to make an action movie should try to make something Chinese friendly and go outside the box for the star, e.g. a wrestler, MMA fighter, or boxer as the lead.

I think red tribe dominates podcasts. I guess this is akin to red tribe dominating talk radio in the 90s.

Yeah, I’m always a bit confused by the claim that all of cultural production is blue tribe stuff.

Podcasts and comedy are typically not super progressive blue tribe areas, and actually that’s where much of the thinking and cultural production goes on in our society.

There are still some red-flavored entertainment products, and some do very well. The Fast & the Furious franchise jumps to mind, as does the new Top Gun.

They're all still made by blue-tribers, of course, which means that entertainment is either made to appeal to both tribes or just blue, never just red. (with a few exceptions that prove the rule, like The Terminal List)

Wasn’t LOTR rather explicitly red tribe? The source material is inherently conservative.

Tolkien was English, not American, and the cultural groupings don't entirely translate. LOTR is conservative, across a great number of definitions, but different aspects of Tolkien's creation have resonated with various groups across the political spectrum.

Is it?

LOTR seemed to have pretty universal appeal as far as I’m aware.

red tribe and universal appeal are not mutually exclusive.

It did have universal appeal but that doesn’t mean the messaging wasn’t red tribe.

family comes first

a wrestler as the lead

Chinese director

How popular is the Fast & Furious franchise in China?

Very popular in China and basically everywhere. Interestingly, in the US, Hispanic audiences like it especially, and African Americans disproportionately so:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F9_(film)#Box_office

I have only watched a bit of one of this series briefly, but my impression is that it's the ultimate working class young man film.

Hispanics and African Americans also really like fast cars, so it makes sense it’s popular with those demographics.

John Cena has been a runaway meme in certain corners of the Chinese internet after a video where he talks about eating ice cream in broken Chinese (while also pushing F&F 9), which I think generated ample buzz for it.

Call it the Long March through the Institutions and blame the enemy if you like; or note that Mao's physical Long March was a work, that Chiang Kai-Shek (foolishly, as it turned out) let it happen, practically escorted Mao out of town without too much of a fight or too many efforts to undermine Communist columns on the way

Normally I'm against nitpicking, but I think it's warranted in any case such as this when some off-topic example is brought up to support another larger point.

Considering that you seem to have more than just cursory knowledge of the Long March, I assume you're also aware that Chiang's only biological son was in Moscow at this time, practically as a hostage. That alone I think was enough reason for him not to try eliminating the Communists completely. Also, the reason the Long March out of the the Jiangxi / Chiang-hsi Soviet was decided in the first place because the area was successfully attacked and surrounded by the Kuomintang. Chiang was also aware that any warlord whose area of control was entered by the Communist columns would reach out to him for assistance, which would in turn let him grow his power base; and that the Communists were likely to to become convenient co-belligerents in a war against Japan if they were compelled by the Kremlin (which was likely); and that the Communists were effectively playing into his hands by leaving Central China and retreating to an insignificant corner of the Northern Loess Plaetau.

I agree that US Conservatives were and are likely to be quokkas, cucks, short-sighted, naive, complacent etc., and that they have little excuse for their actions, or more precisely, lack thereof. But Chiang or anyone else in 1935 had precisely zero reason to believe that the Long March will eventually, more than 10 years later, provide the Communist with a suitable base to start out from and conquer the entire country.

Chiang's only biological son was in Moscow at [t]his time, practically as a hostage.

Compare and contrast, Stalin, who upon his son being offered in a prisoner swap for the German Marshal Paulus after Stalingrad famously replied "I will not swap a lieutenant for a Field Marshal." His son would die in a concentration camp in 1943. It is a matter of priorities:

The refusal to swap Yakov has been treated as evidence of Stalin’s loveless cruelty but this is unfair. Stalin was a mass murderer but in this case, it is hard to imagine that either Churchill or Roosevelt could have swapped their sons if they had been captured—when thousands of ordinary men were being killed or captured. After the war, a Georgian confidant plucked up the courage to ask Stalin if the Paulus offer was a myth. He “hung his head,” answering “in a sad, piercing voice”: “Not a myth . . . Just think how many sons ended in camps! Who would swap them for Paulus? Were they worse than Yakov? I had to refuse . . . What would they have said of me, our millions of Party fathers, if having forgotten about them, I had agreed to swapping Yakov? No, I had no right . . .” Then he again showed the struggle between the nervy, angry, tormented man within and the persona he had become: “Otherwise, I’d no longer be ‘Stalin'...I so pitied Yasha!”

Simon Sebag Montefiore, "Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar", p. 1003

To engage directly with the comparison between the Long Marches...

But Chiang or anyone else in 1935 had precisely zero reason to believe that the Long March will eventually, more than 10 years later, provide the Communist[s] with a suitable base to start out from and conquer the entire country.

I do agree that one can't slag off the KMT leadership too much for failing to anticipate facing a world-historic leader who would successfully rally a multi-decade struggle to take control of the country. Hence "foolishly, as it turned out"; not "idiotically" or "inexplicably." It's a black swan event, one can't be shocked that people were caught off guard. But, the same can be said of US Conservatives! That's what makes it a good instructive parallel! Both chose short term advantage (support of the warlords, support of the white working class of the former Confederate states) which opened up opportunities for their opponent's to inflict long term defeats. Conservatives did not think that liberal dominance of cultural institutions could reach this point; the KMT did not realize that Communism was a virus that would spread if not entirely eliminated.

Chiang would repeat this mistake when he chose to align with Mao against the Japanese. Mao kept his eye on the prize, avoiding conflict with the Japanese and preserving his forces, while KMT forces were worn down in conflict with the Japanese army, setting the stage for the resumption of the civil war after the end of WWII on better ground for the ChiComms. Repeatedly underestimating the determination and ability of Communist leaders was a calling card of the countries that fell to Communism.

Yes, I was meant to write "at THIS time", thanks for the correction, I made the edit.

Compare and contrast, Stalin, who upon his son being offered in a prisoner swap for the German Marshal Paulus after Stalingrad famously replied "I will not swap a lieutenant for a Field Marshal."

That's a good story, but unfortunately there's no documented evidence of this. In all likelihood, it became popular because it appeared in the famous but otherwise mostly unwatchable Soviet multi-part epic war movie Liberation. I wouldn't trust anecdotes of his daughter, or some supposed Georgian confidant. According to Russian Wikipedia, neither Molotov nor Zhukov were aware of any such plans of prisoner swap.

On the other hand, the two situations aren't exactly similar. The USSR wasn't the sworn enemy of the KMT, in fact it was mostly a benefactor and convienient ally, excluding the period between the anti-Communist purges of the KMT in 1927 and the start of the Japanese invasion ten years later.

Conservatives did not think that liberal dominance of cultural institutions could reach this point

I think it's more accurate to say that they didn't care i.e. they never noticed that it's an issue in the first place.

Mao kept his eye on the prize, avoiding conflict with the Japanese and preserving his forces, while KMT forces were worn down in conflict with the Japanese army, setting the stage for the resumption of the civil war after the end of WWII on better ground for the ChiComms.

Chiang simply didn't have that option, however. Since his aspiration was to become the national leader and unifier of the nation, he had to oppose the Japanese attacks which targeted areas he controlled - the Communist were never in such a situation.

Yes, I was meant to write "at THIS time", thanks for the correction, I made the edit.

You know, I didn't even notice it in your original comment I read it "correctly," but then when I quoted it I didn't want to confuse any readers.

The USSR wasn't the sworn enemy of the KMT, in fact it was mostly a benefactor and convenient ally, excluding the period between the anti-Communist purges of the KMT in 1927 and the start of the Japanese invasion ten years later.

Which was extremely foolish and shortsighted on the part of the KMT! The USSR were avowed backstabbers of anything that smelled like capitalism! The USSR had a long track record (albeit not as long at the time) of using, then liquidating, putative allies who were not under the party umbrella. Unless Chiang intended to ultimately swear allegiance to the comintern, the USSR should always have been an enemy; the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but the friend of my enemy is my enemy. And the guy who says he has an absolute ideological aversion to every aspect of your existence is definitely an enemy. Trusting ComIntern Communists was a really bad idea, they are never long term reliable allies for any capitalist state or organization. I disagree with Kulak's overall point but the basic idea stands: trusting Communists while being anything other than a loyal communist is extremely foolish and shortsighted.*

I think it's more accurate to say that they didn't care i.e. they never noticed that it's an issue in the first place.

Which is the same thing, just phrased differently. They never thought it would be an issue that the left was slowly gaining control over the mass of cultural institutions, because they never thought it would reach the extent it has. Watching old movies or reading old books, the wild and ideologically extreme student is present in Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile, in Golddiggers of 1937 (or maybe it was 38, it was late and i was stoned watching TCM), in La Boheme, in Victor Hugo's great novels. The disappearance of the stern and staid professor, a fixture from Faustus to Belushi, is a remarkable cultural innovation. But they should have seen that coming if they wanted to rule America!

And because it's remarkable you can say "Well, who can blame them, no one could have known!" Just as you can't really blame the KMT leadership for not realizing that Mao was Mao until it was too late. But when you aspire to rule the world, or at least one of the largest countries in it, you have to know these things, or you lose to someone who guessed right. You've got to be looking out for black swans. Second prize is a set of steak knives, third prize is you're fired.

*Trusting them while being a loyal communist is merely very, rather than extremely, foolish and shortsighted.

It's not like the KMT had many options in that regard either. No nation was willing to help their armed struggle against the Japanese besides Weimar Germany and the USSR.

Sure, I'll take that, but recognize that now we've negotiated down to "it seemed like it was the best of a series of bad and worse options." It turned out to be a really bad idea, but I appreciate that there wasn't an easy sacrifice free "win now" button that Chiang refused to press.

If the KMT had chosen to trade land for time against the Japanese, murdered the ChiComms, then turned against the Japanese and hope they'd overextended themselves and pissed off America by then, there's a better chance the KMT or a related government rules china today.

Same deal with the conservatives in the USA. Maybe the anti intellectual turn was the best call, maybe trying to play literate and skipping the southern strategy costs them a term of Nixon or Reagan or Bush II. But they're paying the cost today, with dissident rightists trying to scheme to start whole new universities. Hopefully not as steep a cost as the KMT has paid.

That's one of the few anecdotes I've heard of Stalin apparently having feelings (along with sparing Boris Pasternak). Quite interesting.

He was quite lively, I don't know why people buy the Man of Steel persona – is it the paranoia of the last years, or the sheer volume of his terror? Georgians are emotional and gregarious in general, and he was not much of an exception. In this specific case I assume he had some lingering feelings for Yakov because by all accounts he loved Yakov's mother.

Her death was announced in a newspaper, Tsqaro (წყარო, "Source"), and a funeral was held at 9:00am on 25 November in the same church she had married Jughashvili. Svanidze was then buried at a church in the Kukia district of Tiflis. According to the Georgian Menshevik Ioseb Iremashvili, Jughashvili was very distraught at the death of his wife, and at the funeral allegedly said "This creature softened my heart of stone. She died and with her died my last warm feelings for humanity."[24] He would also later tell a girlfriend that he "was so overcome with grief that [his] comrades took [his] gun away from [him]."[25] During the burial, Jughashvili also reportedly threw himself into her grave, and had to be dragged out. As he had been trailed by Okhrana agents, Jughashvili fled before the service ended. He left Tiflis and returned to Baku, abandoning 8-month-old Iakob to be raised by his Svanidze relatives.[26] Jughashvili would not return to visit his son for several years.[27][h]

The strongest 20th century leaders truly were larger-than-life, anime characters compared to our oh-so-professional Goldman Sachs analysts with frozen HR-approved grimaces. At least Sunak won't be deporting entire peoples into Kazakhstan.

Isn't this him saying himself that this event basically turned him into a sociopath (except maybe in regards to Yakov who was his last connection to it)? Wouldn't that explain his later ice cold behavior?

See my comment above.

*Moreover, making conservative knock-offs of mainstream products has a strong Christian Rock problem. Christian Rock is bad because it affirms the dominance of the secular rock music paradigm.

You know, in the 00s there were a bunch of Christian rock bands that seemed to break into the mainstream without most people thinking of them as Christian rock.

Maybe I'm telling on myself, but I unironically like Switchfoot (though they're only like half Christian).

  1. If you're thinking of like, the Killers; Mr. Brightside their most popular song is hardly drenched in Mormon values, it's all about casual sex between young strangers at a bar. I guess maybe you could read it as, like, oh I could have saved her from that sin if I had married her, but most people wouldn't get there, it's implied that the problem isn't having fornication it's fornication with someone else who isn't the singer. A Christian performer doesn't necessarily make Christian Rock, my criticism primarily applies to the latter.

  2. If there were a bunch of big Christian Rock bands in the 2000s, look at the top 40 today, and that's making my point for me. The paradigm of sex and drugs and rock and roll working its way to absurdum gives us hits like WAP, Girls, and that great teenage love song Treat me like a Slut. Buying into that paradigm just enhances the dominance of that paradigm, when conservative creatives should have been trying to build new paradigms.

Re: building institutions, conservatives need to begin with things that 1) have a market among their own ranks and 2) are doable without mass blue tribe defections.

So for movies, this would probably be things like making comedies(which are relatively cheap and simple, compared to something like a marvel blockbuster, and red tribe humor is generally popular when it's available, and mormon production companies exist and have experience doing this). For music, they need their own recording studios that can liberate red-leaning music artists from blue shackles(you can find nearly anything labeled "country" these days).

Similarly, blue tribers dominate tech and culture to such an extent that red tribers will be perpetually unable to produce content that is nearly as good quality. As much as I might despise mainstream culture, there's a lot of craft and skill that goes into making a Marvel blockbuster, and it can't be knocked off by amateurs.* I don't know that you can make a Marvel type movie, a workmanlike blockbuster product, without a lot of blue tribers. As long as that is true, the theory that companies will fold to Red tribe boycotts because they don't want to lose 20% of their customers doesn't work, because a united blue tribe labor revolt will cost them 100% of their products. Disney might fear losing customers, but it is terrified of losing talent that it uses to produce products to sell around the globe. And the talent is much better organized than the customers will ever be. The

Let Hollywood have their blockbusters. The right can compete at other things. Not just alt-tech, but anti-woke people gaining ground on mainstream platforms, like we see with Elon and Twitter or Rogan and Spotify. Instead of Hollywood, there is YouTube, which despite being owned by Google, seems to have more conservative or neutral viewpoints than TV or cinema. There is no charismatic left-wing counterbalance to someone like Jordan Peterson or Elon Musk. On YouTube, videos by un-woke people are frequently viral and show up in recommendations, suggesting they are popular (and confirmed by high view counts and lots of comments in agreement).

Simultaneously, conservatives need to be building institutions alongside and parallel to blue tribe dominated institutions, producing beautiful cultural content to compete on talent. If cultural production is denigrated as blue tribe, and no red tribers go into it, that's permanently ceding the field, slow suicide. Both compete on quality with blue tribe, and shifting paradigms away from blue tribe framing. But never attempting to stand up inferior red tribe knockoffs, like Turks I have a lot of thoughts on how that would work, but you've read enough of me for now.

Agree. I think the worst the right can do is brand their entertainment as an alternative. It should stand on its artistic merits alone.

but anti-woke people gaining ground on mainstream platforms, like we see with Elon and Twitter or Rogan and Spotify.

Meh. Elon isn't "gaining ground'. He was just the richest man in the world and straight up bought himself a platform.

Rogan was famous long before Spotify and he faced cyclical waves of pressure that led to minor concessions (iirc Spotify took down some episodes and had some fact checking). But the fact that they got that is illustrative: Rogan is the biggest podcaster around, and they couldn't just ignore the squeeze.

To me, this is akin to when people say "Rowling is still around so cancel culture isn't a thing/is weakening" (without the bad faith) - yeah, a few incredibly atypical people can resist the headwinds.

What about the median celebrity? What about the person who is just starting out? Where is the pipeline for them? "Find someone rich and hope they're anti-woke" is not a plan.

There is no charismatic left-wing counterbalance to someone like Jordan Peterson

So what, when the wokes can maintain a steady drumbeat of negativity about them and then just straight up ban them from the big platforms like Peterson and Twitter or Tate with Youtube?

On YouTube, videos by un-woke people are frequently viral and show up in recommendations, suggesting they are popular (and confirmed by high view counts and lots of comments in agreement).

Andrew Tate is popular.

Popularity is irrelevant when the enemy controls the infrastructure and will periodically cull enemy voices.

Andrew Tate is popular.

Even if he is is sorta cringe, this is still better than young people idolizing Hollywood celebs, who tend to be left-wing .

What about the median celebrity? What about the person who is just starting out? Where is the pipeline for them? "Find someone rich and hope they're anti-woke" is not a plan.

I think YouTube ,podcasts, and other media is the pipeline. People are making $100k+ more with substack..not just well-known pundits, but even obscure people who get hundreds or thousands of subs.

To me, this is akin to when people say "Rowling is still around so cancel culture isn't a thing/is weakening" (without the bad faith) - yeah, a few incredibly atypical people can resist the headwinds.

Yeah, she is also the most popular author in the world , at least as measured by sales. It's one thing to say that the non-woke are outnumbered, which is true, but when consumers have a choice, the non-woke people tend to be the most popular, either Rogan, Musk, Chappelle, Kanye, etc.

Meh. Elon isn't "gaining ground'. He was just the richest man in the world and straight up bought himself a platform.

His popularity has been growing since 2018, when he began going after woke journalists. This is not just buying popularity. He was popular well before buying Twitter. Bill Gates is only half as rich as Musk but considerably less popular outside of the insular left-wing elite and some neoliberal types.

I think YouTube ,podcasts, and other media is the pipeline.

Except the problem is this pipeline is controlled by the woke.

Andrew Tate is a great example of someone who exploited the algorithm to become super famous and...they just snuffed him out on most major social media sites. He can't make money on Youtube right now.

Now, he may have some suckers follow him to wherever so it may not be totally devastating, but how many Youtubers are seeing that and learning a lesson?

And who's to say they're not fiddling around in the back, trying to stop the next Tate?

This is the fundamental problem: you cannot trust these platforms.

This is a bit far afield, but Tate doesn’t exist as an online figure absent the blue tribe. He leaned all the way in to outrage farming in a no-publicity-is-bad-publicity approach. It all depends on how you feel about Wahhabism — it’s certainly traditional and opposed to globohomo — but is he actually helpful to the Western red tribe, as an ISIS-praising supposed Islam convert (who still likes alcohol)? Tate also started up his own MLM/affiliate-marketing program. At least Alex Jones just sells snake-oil supplements as a standard retail operation. I don’t think the enemy of your enemy is always your friend.

Why wouldn't tech and entertainment industries be donating overwhelming Dem? They're clustered in urban, cultural centers. They need prestige and financing. Can you imagine how difficult it is to arrange a shoot in downtown LA, involving an exploding car?

With union workers? With police acting as security? Buses re-rerouted?

This shit takes permits and political approval.

The elites will say anything it takes, so let's not take everything they say seriously.

Waiting for the cavalry to ride over the hill doesn't work if society has spent fifty years making sure no one like you learns how to ride a horse.

This line is frickin amazing

and if any of the corporations tried to veer right-wing their employees are too left wing and would exit.

I strongly disagree with this prediction. The vast majority of people value politics very little in monetary terms. If the pay remains safe and secure, and the extent of labor remains static, people will stay whether or not the corporation celebrates Pride Month or Hitler Day. What actually happens is people who are money saturated (rich) take issue and start materially harming any right-wing business (see Twitter advertiser conundrum for instance) which has downstream effects on the labor pool (Musk had to increase hours and do layoffs to cope with the advertiser conundrum). Also a truly right-wing corporation would be sued under Civil Rights laws which would cause immense material harm and force reversion to leftism if the company isn't totally destroyed.

Some of your links seem at first glance to disagree with this. But what you have found is that among workers who are willing to make political donations in fields that discriminate against right wingers and right wing populations (white men), the majority of those workers donate to Democrats. You also posted an NPR link talking about how <0.5% of Disney's workforce in California took an authorized walkout to protest a bill in Florida. This reminds me of the astroturfed, performative high school walkouts after the Stoneman High shooting https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/stoneman-douglas-high-walkouts/

Some rambling on modern attitudes found generally leftward which I strongly dislike. First, an anecdote:

There was recently a shooting at a gay bar. I share an online space with some friends and some acquaintances for general purpose discussion - no specific focus other than a general lean toward our mutual shared interests, which are unrelated to the shooting or what follows.

One person posted an article about the shooting and then something roughly equivalent to "thoughts and prayers" for the victims, and a follow up note that Bigotry Is Bad. No problem, I'm on board. A second person posted that, as a sexual minority, they are now afraid to go out. They have updated based on this attack to think the world is not safe enough to enjoy. I interjected with something along the lines of "hold on, attacks like this are less likely to get you than car accidents or [insert whatever mundane thing] - yes they're flashy and scary, but you really shouldn't update based on them - they're statistically insignificant AND if you want to view them as terrorism then you living in fear is letting them win - you shouldn't do that"

The response I got was a gentle dogpile (they did start with "I know you're just trying to help, but..." and such), saying that I shouldn't be trying to tell marginalized people how to feel about things and I should let them have space to process their trauma and etc etc, much insistence on "letting the victims speak" (by which they mean indirect victims - people that share a class with the victims, not the firsthand victims) and being a good ally by listening. I pushed back for a bit saying that I'm not making any claims about the general safety of LGBTetc folks (though they are still safe enough to not feel so afraid of the world around them if they live somewhere like the US, this was left unsaid) and that I'm only saying if you previously had the courage to face the world, the shooting shouldn't have changed that and we explicitly had a person saying exactly that they were now afraid based on this event...

But eventually I got the sense they just didn't want to hear me. I gave an apology in the vein of "when people are afraid is exactly the BEST time to reassure them, but clearly I am failing to do that, so I'll back off" and they spent a few seconds talking about how important and good it is to let LGBT voices speak first (of which there were several available in the space, many of which were in the dopile). After those seconds, we have had 24+ hours of silence. Not a word on the topic from any involved or even any spectators, though they all continued talking about unrelated things in other channels of the space.

So. What happened here? I feel like insistence on sitting down and letting marginalized voices be heard is frequently insincere, as it happens even when nobody marginalized (or indeed, anybody at all) has anything to say. It is a "shut up" button, to be deployed whenever somebody says something you don't like that's adjacent to [minority issue]. Even if that isn't how they feel about it, that is functionally what is going on.

Superweapons are bad.

Within the context of the discussion group, the person stating that they now felt less safe was essentially reinforcing the point that Bigotry Is Bad: "this bad thing is so bad that I feel less safe, which shows just how bad the bad thing is!". Your perfectly reasonable and true objection against their unwarranted update is then seen as an enemy argument. In an indirect way, you're arguing that the mass shooting wasn't literally the worst thing in the world, which is perceived as an attack on the in-group. There's also the female vs male styles of communication here, the person who wrote that they felt less safe was really communicating an emotion, whether or not their statement was actually true was much less important than what emotions it communicated, and the name of the game in emotional discussion is validation, you need to either make them feel heard, or respond at a similar emotional level. When your girlfriend says that she feels fat, you don't pull out data from your bluetooth scale that shows that she didn't actually get fat, you go kiss her and tell her that she's never been more attractive to you and that, in fact, you can barely restrain yourself from just taking her right now. Your fundamental faux-pas was that you responded factually to an emotional statement.

This more “female” style of communication is strongly associated with progressivism and has become increasingly dominant in a lot of online spaces and workplaces. I also find it typically eye-roll inducing and unproductive for any purposes beyond mutual emotional masturbation.

I, by contrast, often find that men who sneer at "I feel..." statements and "So what I hear you saying..." acknowledgements are often the first to appreciate genuine listening to their actual feelings, and validation of their emotions as socially understandable. Respecting other people's feelings is an important bit of social glue.

Indeed, in contexts like The Motte, thinking about people's underlying emotions rather than taking their statements solely at face value is a valuable part of my skill set. Often, acknowledging people's feelings can actually be a really useful aid to getting them to step away from their statements and examine them factually without feeling like those underlying emotions themselves are about to be crushed underfoot.

I do not doubt that emotionally respectful conversation can be done badly. I do not doubt that it can be enforced in unproductive ways. But if you think that enforcement of detached manly emotionlessness is the solution then you are very wrong.

The problem to me is that, as much as it claims the opposite, the feminine style of communication seems to be just as often about weaponizing emotions as is it about validly acknowledging them (which I don't think men actually have that much of a problem with).

Yeah, the point is well taken. I agree that there are clear contexts in which focalising empathetic norms in communication is helpful and serves as a social glue, as you say. The cases where that’s clearest to me, though, are ones involving genuinely close and mutually supportive relationships. What I do think is a bit pathological is when these same norms — helpful in intimate contexts — are translated to domains like Twitter or other kinds of social media where most people only have parasocial or pseudo-social relationships with each other. I largely approve of (literal or figurative) hugs, but dislike hugboxes.

Partly that’s because the forms of reassurance you get in online hugboxes are pretty unhelpful psychologically, insofar as they don’t come from someone who actually knows you and cares about you and is in a position to meaningfully validate you, but simply someone with your same political or identity-group values who’s been socialised to praise expressions of pain or victimhood or oppression that are framed in the right political vocabulary. These spaces typically strongly limit actual debate, and what debate actually does occur is often a form of “gotcha” based around identifying when someone is showing insufficient demonstration of compassion (e.g., “doesn’t your analysis marginalise the experiences of group X?”).

I genuinely think this kind of norm is corroding public online debate, but more to the point, I find it often intellectually insipid and emotionally ersatz. But that’s just online with relative strangers — in the real world (or in online communication with close friends or family) there’s obviously a space for primarily therapeutic rather than investigative or forensic communication.

do you have any evidence for these assertions or are you using the female style of communication right now?

Touché! I don’t have useful evidence at hand — it was a grumpy sideswipe, on anecdotal and observational grounds. If I were to make more a extended argument, I’d start by operationalising the specific communication style I have in mind, probably in terms of Trait Agreeableness (Compassion), which is robustly higher in women and higher in progressives, and then look for (or run) a sentiment analysis on left wing vs right wing social media spaces.

Going to echo some other posters, and say it seems like you made the crucial mistake of trying to reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into. I've had ample experience on this with my wife - who, as one might imagine, trusts me and cares a great deal about what I have to say. With that big of a handicap, I should be able to convince her to not worry about things, right? Wrong. She doesn't get mad, she knows I'm just trying to help, but ultimately my attempts at reason don't help her. What she actually wants/needs from me is "I'm sorry you had to deal with that, that really sucks".

Now that's just my wife, but my experience has taught me that the same is true of people generally. If they are irrationally afraid of something, it simply does not matter what you tell them to try to get through. They didn't reason themselves into those emotions, and reason won't get them out. Or, in the cynical case of "they are acting like victims to achieve status", then your reasoning doesn't address what they actually think. Either way, it doesn't work.

Nothing you can do to fight human nature, sadly. Just remember for next time that reason isn't going to work there.

I think you're right that a lot of this is about the emotional response. Without having seen the original conversation, I can easily believe that this is less about "I am specifically scared that there will be a mass shooting next time I am in a gay bar" and more about "I have feelings about the possibility that there are people out there who might hate me enough to kill me, in conjuction with the existence of other people who wouldn't kill me but still hate me." If you address the former in a way that invalidates the latter, then you're going to ruffle feathers.

It might help to deliberately try to phrase the calm-down in a way that actively validates the surrounding messy feelings. As in, "If you are specifically worried about being shot, then I think you can be reassured that the chances of this actually happening to you are very low. But of course I also understand that there are other reasons why you might have really strong feelings about this."

mistake of trying to reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into

As a general statement this just isn't true. I imagine everyone here has 'reasoned themselves out of' dozens of positions they've adopted because they were social/political convention. There are of course a ton of specific cases where 'convincing people' doesn't work, but it greatly depends on broader context, how you approach and talk, etc. I mean - otherwise, how could societal change happen at all?

As a general statement this just isn't true.

No, I think he's right. And it's not that people never change their mind based on reason, it's just that these instances are dwarfed by the amount of times they change their mind based on peer pressure, media, and having opinions banned (or a combination of all of these).

I think it is true as a general statement. In the battle between the subconscious and reason, reason is going to lose every single time. At best you can reason someone into changing their behavior, but you can't reason them into changing their mind. I certainly wish it weren't true, because I view it as a great human failing. But I think it is true nonetheless.

I think it is true as a general statement. In the battle between the subconscious and reason, reason is going to lose every single time.

Well that just intuitively sounds wrong to me. /s

The subconscious will win out initially if entrenched (if not, it's just "huh, I learned something"), but it will remember the counterargument and be weakened in its conviction. Repeat a few times and you can change the subconscious mind. Adjusting with new information is just how humans learn.

However, I do believe that "You can't reason someone out of an emotion they didn't reason themselves into" is mostly* true, and "Scared of X" is an emotional response. You can potentially reason someone out of a position that incites emotion, but the emotion itself will remain. If I'm worried, then I might be convinced nothing will go wrong, but I will still be worried.

This obviously becomes a problem when, like in OP's example, people make it about the emotions themselves.

  • It can be done and is called therapy, but it requires highly trained professionals, lots of time and effort, and the target's cooperation.

What happened here?

Me being a cynical bitch, you harshed their mellow. Here they were, all ready to bask in the rush of assurance, attention and online 'hugs and love' that would result from them posting about being gay and claiming to be too scared to go out, because here is evidence the heteronormative society of bigoted straights around you is out to get you, and then you come along with logic and reason and ruin it all.

Tsk, tsk!

Some people are just attention [sex workers] and will jump on any chance to go "But what about me???". Some people really are that neurotic and fearful that they sleep on the floor because if they had a bed, then that would give the monsters someplace to lurk under.

These kind of post-disaster chains aren't about "so what are my chances of being eaten by an octopus older than the universe, in reality?" They're about on the one hand "I am a Good Ally and extend unconditional love and accept the official version of events" and on the other "I am a special snowflake and I demand your attention".

They’re also about ‘I have a phobia and demand accommodation’.

This guy almost certainly knew that his fear was about as rational as being afraid of entering a skyscraper after 9/11. Pointing that out isn’t welcome, because it doesn’t change his reason for having this fear(which is likely to demand accommodation).

I think this is reading a lot into a comment of which you have only read a (not entirely sympathetic) precis. Seems most likely to me he was just engaging in the sort of hyperbole we all do on a daily basis.

Identity politics.

It doesn't matter what happened or why. It also doesn't matter what you think or what your friends think (and how they think "it"). The only thing that matters is what someone felt and who someone is. That's the goal of the interaction you interfered in, walked right in with your boots muddy with logic, and hands dripping with questions.

It's a branch of collectivism, of elevating the whole over the parts, and simply put: you were an individual interacting with a multi-bodied organism, which rejected you as any body does a foreign object.

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I would echo @MathiasTRex's advice in never engaging in these kinds of discussion online. But I would also say that I think you misread the situation. People were upset after a mass shooting (hate crime?). They were venting and perhaps trying to solicit some sympathy/attention. Wading in with the "well, actually" doesn't really help anybody even if you are, indisputably, 100% correct. This is the kind of situation where more social intelligence and less rational intelligence helps.

I only offer this advice because I myself walk blindly into these snares all the time, and have to try really hard to bite my tongue and not impose Rational Logic™ on people's feelings

Wading in with the "well, actually" doesn't really help anybody even if you are, indisputably, 100% correct

Surely it does help (if it's heeded at all) to the extent that the person's statement isn't totally untrue? If they're going to actually be worried, or act differently in the future, about lgbtq mass shootings, understanding it's not a meaningful risk could reduce that. Which benefits them because they don't take unnecessary action, waste time, avoid useful activity for no reason. I'd personally be annoyed if, e.g., the comments on reddit posts about murders where people said "OMG THIS IS SO SCARY" didn't have replies saying "well, ackshually, P(car crash|LGBT) = 1000 * P(mass shooting|LGBT), so there's nothing to worry about", because that's valuable information. And more generally, 'being scared after a reported violent event', and being upset/fear generally, is an ... adaptation that helps people avoid harm in the future, that's why that particular set of mechanisms evolved. Using that to be afraid in cases of actual harm is just better! "Feeling" does not mean "whenever something might upset someone, that means it shouldn't happen" - it refers to a bunch of contingent adaptations / tendencies with many different roles, and 'feelings' and 'rational logic' are deeply intertwined (i.e., the ability to infer that 'lgbt mass shooting' means 'i might die' is as 'logical' as anything else). That this particular response breaks a social norm isn't because "Rational Logic^{tm}" and feelings don't mix, it's just that ... the response breaks a specific social norm, and OP cares more about other consequences of the response than that social norm.

I think the middle path here is to wait to see if OP's friend is actually serious about not going out anymore or was just expressing their feelings in the moment.

I would agree if I'd received more generic insensitivity responses, but I specifically got "good ally tips" about not talking. Which makes me think less of the people responding that way even if I did misread the situation.

I would agree if I'd received more generic insensitivity responses, but I specifically got "good ally tips"

You committed a faux pas. That is to say, you violated community norms, but not enough to get actually ejected from the community.

The "good ally tips" are the community norms.

People get clout by being a member of an oppressed group*. If you say that these attacks are rare then you are attacking their status by making their group look less victimized. The Coronavirus panic was basically this on a large scale: everybody had the chance to look important by being performatively terrified of a miniscule risk of death. Of course once you start playing the game you usually are able to talk yourself into genuinely feeling afraid which I'm sure is unpleasant, so they suffer for it in the end.

*oppressed in the popular imagination, actual oppression is optional

My version of this take: being safe feels good, but being demonstrably right about the threat feels useful and actionable. GP was trying to make their friend feel better, but at the level of the "group strategy module", they were raining on their parade. Why were they denying the group rhetorical ammunition?

This isn't (just) "leftward behavior". For instance, during the time some years ago when there were a lot of Islamist terrorist attacks in Europe, if one mentioned that becoming a victim of Islamic terrorism was similarly a vanishingly rare possibility equivalent of car accidents etc., you would get chewed out - though it would rather be phrased as "naivete, not understanding the reality of Jihad, leftists loving the Muslims" etc.

I used to make that argument quite regularly, and never got chewed out, so I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Being against the Iraq war was bit more risky, by my estimation, but nothing compared to the sort of ostracizm you go through, if you're not on board modern progressivism.

Seconded, for my experience in northeast America. Here, it was always popular to argue that terrorism wasn't that big a deal (let's say at least since 2003), and it was also always popular to argue against the Iraq war.

i feel like the reason it was popular to argue those things was because at the time it seemed like the broad consensus was that the threat of terrorism was a big deal and that the Iraq war was justified because of it. i don’t really hear those arguments much anymore cause there’s not as many people to argue about it with, but the argument described in the OP seems like it follows the same underlying logic

Well, I guess that experiences simply differ here.

Of course the difference might be that when one makes the argument and simultaneously is known to occupy an explicitly left-wing position, it becomes easier for the other side to just see it as culture warring and respond to it within the framework.

I kind of did this once in response to a Facebook post. An acquaintance of mine posted that he wanted to make sure that he never made women feel unsafe as they walked alone on the street. He's a mildly effeminate super skinny gay vegan, the risk of this ever happening was already close to zero.

At the time I'd recently read some metrics on stranger victimization, and that men were overwhelmingly more likely to be murdered or assaulted by strangers. Women were more likely to be raped, but I think those numbers were still dwarfed by how lopsided the murder/assault numbers were.

I cited the stats and argued that we're miscalibrated. Either men aren't scared enough or women are too scared, but given the facts men ought to be more wary of strangers than women.

I think at least one person blocked me, and another berated me endlessly. I was pretty naive about how this would be taken at that time.

Fear is an excuse to hate.

You're fucking up their hate party, man. Quit killing the buzz.

This just depends on the people, I have serious (including politics-related) discussions with some of my irl friends over group messages all the time, although even face-to-face we're not worried about upsetting someone generally.

So I'm getting an awful lot of responses in the vein of "of course they reacted like that, you responded with [logic] to [emotion] and that's no good" - ordinarily I would agree - case closed. I do get that, even if in this case I may have slipped a bit in practice. I'm generic nerd STEMy, not a complete sperg. That isn't the source of my confusion or the reason to bring it up. That's ordinary human dynamics 101 - and also not the reason I code the reaction as left.

I am confused by/reacting to/coding-as-left the specific reaction of "stop talking and let the marginalized speak" because in this case it demonstrably did not apply. Nobody marginalized spoke before or after about how they felt or what they thought aside from the literally singular sentence that maps to "I don't want to go out anymore because of fear of this" person.

THAT is what I code as left and am confused about. The idea of lived experience is not without merit. Some people have access to experiences others don't. But that's not the same as "always cede the floor, even if they aren't using it".

You are approaching this with a mistake theory mindset instead of with a conflict one. As you surmised their "stop talking and let the marginalized speak" was lefty speak for shut up, why did they do that? because you got between a bunch of lefties and the opportunity to affirm their "victimhood" to the audience and receive their backpats for their incredible bravery in existing. That is all it was, a self-masturbatory session, and you went and ruined it; with the added point that you are now probably in one or more shit lists in your group.

EDIT.- To further clarify: they used the "superweapon" because instead of acting like an ingroup member and praising the "victim" for his bravery and lamenting with the group the continued existance of white supremacy, you acted like a member of their outgroup and tried in their eyes to diminish the victimhood of one of their members.

I share an online space with some friends and some acquaintances for general purpose discussion

If someone showed as little respect for me as everyone in your anecdote showed for you I would not consider them a friend.

I fold in the spots where I'm 60% fave for all my money to save it for the 75% spots.

???

What does this mean, or have to do with the discussion? It's formatted as a quote but I can't find it in OP or anywhere else.

I copied the wrong thing from my clipboard, I edited

I'm still curious what it means though?

I was replying to someone on Reddit about their conservative poker strategy and I accidentally had their comment in my clipboard instead of the motte poster I was replying to here. For the record my reply to the poker poster was that their numbers were off and that being a 60% favorite is actually a huge edge and not a marginal spot at all in a game like poker.

It's a poker metaphor. Basically it means when confronted by a momentous decision with high personal stakes, it is sometimes better to eschew a profitable but high-variance situation in order to wait for an even better situation.

Reading this anecdote was a little confusing to me. That is, your confusion is confusing to me. Of course this is what happens when you act that way. I could have predicted that.

But I do realize, that I can't explain exactly why. I could give a thought-terminating cliche like "virtue signaling" or something, but I don't think it would actually explain anything. I don't think there's a grand psychological theory that can bring you peace.

I think even the closest friends I have behave this way, to a certain approximation. No, none of my friends care about gay people. But, if I shit talked their favorite anime, they'd defend it. To a different group of friends, if I shit talked McDonald's, I'd be banned from the groupchat for months before being invited back in like nothing happened.

Did anything bad happen with your friends because of this? Did you get excommunicated? You apologized, but maybe you were taking it too seriously? Friends have gentle friction all the time, and even you admitted the dogpile was gentle. I agree that cancel culture is real, and out there it can be brutal, but were your friends really being brutal, just because they were talking about the gays?

He didn't shit talk anyone though, he was just trying to temper the high emotions with rational data. The pushback against data in favor of emotions, claiming it's better for people to live their lives based on their own flawed perception, as pushed through the media and popular consensus, is what's scary to me, here. These people should have been comforted by the fact that they're safer than they thought, not upset by it.

temper the high emotions with rational data

Well this is sort of the point. In what seems like a friendly sort of space, not some terminally online debate forum, it's not really good manners to respond to 'high emotions' with a lecture about probabilities and car crashes. He was right to make the point, but made it in the wrong way.

if I shit talked McDonald's, I'd be banned from the groupchat for months

I had no identity idea McDonald's had such intense brand loyalty.

I had no identity

This is not a coincidence...

Like others, I don't understand why you think of this as "generally leftward." If anything, an inflated fear of being the victim of crime (esp after a publicized incident) despite its statistical unlikelihood tends to be right-coded. See, eg, the occasional comments on here re NYC in general or the NYC subway in particular.

If anything, an inflated fear of being the victim of crime (esp after a publicized incident) despite its statistical unlikelihood tends to be right-coded.

I don't think so. It's endemic from women, for instance, who are less likely to be victims of overwhelmingly most types of crime.

I think you are mistaken. It has been right-coded for decades, and virtually every person I have met in my life who has expressed such sentiments has been conservative leaning. In fact, being overly concerned with crime is one of the attributes of conservatism -- hence, the old saying that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.

That isn't usually framed in terms of "oooh it makes me feel less safe" though -- safetyism is absolutely left and female coded. Additionally, only certain sorts of crime are worth consideration -- the aversion to talking about gang shootings and drug crime is notable.

Right wing concern about crime tends to be more of an "it's bad for society and symptomatic of a failing social contract" objection, by comparison. Less personal, most of the time, because conservatives by and large don't live in the (mostly left-controlled) cities where crime is most epidemic. So the specific personal safetyist concerns OP is talking about are absolutely leftist as far as I can tell.

That isn’t usually framed in terms of “oooh it makes me feel less safe”

sure it is. how else would you even frame it? the impression i get from right-wingers who support “tough-on-crime” policies is that their desired outcome is to make things safer.

The OP was writing about people who said, "because of this incident, I am afraid of being harmed if I do X." I am talking about the exact same thing: people who say, "I refuse to ride the subway" or "I refuse to go to neighborhood X" or what have you. I am not talking about policy discussions.

See, eg, the occasional comments on here re NYC in general or the NYC subway in particular

I've seen those. What I didn't see is an implication you're committing some kind of faux pas by disagreeing, particularly when you bring data. I also don't recall anyone expressing how important it is to have "white voices", or something, after someone expresses disagreement.

Otoh, if I say that Gender Queer might not be a threat to children, I run the risk of being accused of being a pedophile. And certainly ignoring data is not the province of any particular team; again, see lots of people on here.

Gender Queer

I had to look up what that was. And then read the Wikipedia article on it.

My opinion?

Eh, if you want twelve year olds to read about strap-ons and oral sex and older guy touching the dick of much younger guy, while I have no objection to Greek red figure pottery, the kids today can do what we did and look for anything about sex on our parents' bookshelves or elsewhere. Heck, they have the Internet today! They don't need to get it in school, are we meant to spoon-feed them everything?

And let's face it, while defending books from being banned might elicit passionate responses from school librarians, when it's "I stand up for the right of schools to ensure every twelve year old can find out about paederasty from the sexual fantasies, with illustrations, as recorded in her memoir by a non-binary woman", that can sound in the general ballpark of "groomer".

I think if you read the book, you might change your mind about what it is about. Note that a review committee in Fairfax County, VA composed of parents, teachers, and community members, recommended keeping the book and explicitly found that "The book neither depicts nor describes pedophilia." Similarly, committees in Rockwood MO, West Chester, PA, Billings. MT, and Yorktown, NY recommended keeping the book, and of course that is just a sampling -- google "keep gender queer" for recent examples.

That is not to say that IMHO the book should or should not be on school library shelves; I am sure that local parents, teachers, etc, know better than I what is best for local students, and many districts have decided to remove the book. But to infer that the book is an attempt at grooming is a very dubious inference.

i think that “kids should learn about sex from the internet and whatever weird porn their parents have laying around the house” also sounds in the general ballpark of groomer for me

Otoh, if I say that Gender Queer might not be a threat to children, I run the risk of being accused of being a pedophile.

a) A groomer, not a pedophile. I don't find the insistance on the most strict, and worst possible meaning of the word to be particularly honest, when progressives often use a broader definition of it themselves

b) Yes, the act of smearing someone with an insulting name is something both sides have in common. But that's not what he, or I was pointing out.

see lots of people on here

What's the point of these passive aggressive jabs? Especially since I didn't say people on the right don't ignore data, I said they don't think it's a faux pas to bring data.

a groomer, not a pedophile.

I agree with the OP here. Well, I agree that accusations of pedophilia are as likely as accusations of grooming, and in fact are strategically conflated. I don’t agree that it made sense for him to bring it up in this context, because...

they don’t think it’s a faux pas to bring data.

Yeah. It’s rare, here, to take offense at actually providing data. I’m not sure how well that holds in sections of the Internet which embrace the “fake news” meme.

A groomer, not a pedophile

  1. That is factually incorrect; if you look into it, you will find that the explicit term "pedophile" is used quite often.

  2. I don't want to get into this tiresome argument about how "groomer" is used, but the fact that "grooming" has several meanings, one positive or neutral ("the executive groomed his son to be his successor") and one negative (referring specifically to the tactics of pedophiles) does not mean that we can throw up our hands and pretend we can't know how particular people are using it. Moreover, the term "groomer" is really only used in two ways: 1) to refer to people who shape the fur of animals" and 2) pedophiles. Finally, if you are going to claim that progressives often use a broader definition of it themselves, you should probably not link to yourself.*

Yes, the act of smearing someone with an insulting name is something both sides have in common. But that's not what he, or I was pointing out.

Though not identical, I would say they are of the same class. Reasonable minds might differ, of course, but OTOH claims that "my out group is uniquely bad" are generally deserving of great skepticism, for obvious reasons.

What's the point of these passive aggressive jabs? Especially since I didn't say people on the right don't ignore data, I said they don't think it's a faux pas to bring data.

  1. You seem to be misusing the term, "passive-aggressive," since "Passive-aggressive behavior is a pattern of indirectly expressing negative feelings instead of openly addressing them"

  2. I am doubtful that the claim that that "think it is a faux pas to bring data" is true in any meaningful way; it is either false, or only true to the extent that it is indistinguishable from ignoring data. In my experience, most people of all political stripes get very upset when presented with data that upsets their hobby horses.

*Especially to a link which is not very honest; you say "It doesn't help that mainstream publications were using "grooming" to describe consensual relations between adults." and link to an article in which the only use of the term is: " “He started grooming me when I was a teenager"

My go-to reference for this is Alexandra Rowland, who was 25.

Adding to what thrownaway24e89172 said, you're getting the same reaction to trying to define away all evidence of grooming because it sets off exactly the same alarm bells as "woah there, how dare you, she's 13 so technically it's not paedophilia." Definition dodging is a huge red flag.

It's just that some groups are used to the privilege of being able to change the dictionary to win, so being forced to use a less convenient definition feels like oppression.

I am not trying to "define away all evidence of grooming." I am clarifying the definition of grooming, which has been defined for decades as "a slow courtship or ’grooming’ process to seduce children with gifts,

attention and affection" employed by pedophiles for the purpose of convincing kids to have sex with them. It not "the left" or "LBBTQ activists" who are attempting to change the dictionary; it is people who are assigning that label to people, such as librarians, who as far as they know have no interest in convincing kids to have sex with anyone. Honestly, this place sometimes seems like the Bizarro world.

That is factually incorrect; if you look into it, you will find that the explicit term "pedophile" is used quite often.

I tried to look into it, while the word "pedophile" appears with some frequency, I don't see it in a context that would imply people who don't think "Gender Queer" is dangerous.

I don't want to get into this tiresome argument about how "groomer" is used, but the fact that "grooming" has several meanings, one positive or neutral ("the executive groomed his son to be his successor") and one negative (referring specifically to the tactics of pedophiles) does not mean that we can throw up our hands and pretend we can't know how particular people are using it. Moreover, the term "groomer" is really only used in two ways: 1) to refer to people who shape the fur of animals" and 2) pedophiles.

That's just not true. You would be correct, if there was only one negative meaning, which would specifically refer to pedophiles. The link I provided has a definition that does not specifically mention children, and another link to a mainstream media article using the word to describe consensual relations between adults.

Though not identical, I would say they are of the same class.

I might agree depending on what kind of class we're talking about. If you mean that these behaviors similarly bad, sure. If you mean these are similar behaviors in terms of their structure, or the psychology behind them, that seems obviously wrong, and we seem to be discussing the latter kind of class.

Reasonable minds might differ, of course, but OTOH claims that "my out group is uniquely bad" are generally deserving of great skepticism, for obvious reasons.

Sure? But I missed the part where OP said that...

You seem to be misusing the term, "passive-aggressive," since "Passive-aggressive behavior is a pattern of indirectly expressing negative feelings instead of openly addressing them"

Like vaguely gesturing at "lots of people on here" instead of addressing them directly?

I am doubtful that the claim that that "think it is a faux pas to bring data" is true in any meaningful way

The example brought up by OP seems to be clearly describing such a case.

*Especially to a link which is not very honest; you say "It doesn't help that mainstream publications were using "grooming" to describe consensual relations between adults." and link to an article in which the only use of the term is: " “He started grooming me when I was a teenager"

Is 18 not a teenager, and an adult?! Who is being dishonest here?

I don't see it in a context that would imply people who don't think "Gender Queer" is dangerous.

I have no idea what that means; I assume that there is some sort of typo.

But I missed the part where OP said that...

Then you need to read more carefully; that is exactly what this discussion is about.

Like vaguely gesturing at "lots of people on here" instead of addressing them directly?

  1. Again, you clearly do not understand what the term means.

  2. I am not talking about specific persons; I am talking about a general phenomenon. I note that you have not claimed that it does not exist, but instead have resorted to a silly ad hominem argument.

Is 18 not a teenager, and an adult?! Who is being dishonest here?

And your evidence that she was referring to his actions when she was over 18 is what, exactly?

I have no idea what that means; I assume that there is some sort of typo.

Possible grammar brainfart. You said that expressing the idea that "Gender Queer" is not dangerous would mark you as a pedophile. I don't see the word "pedophile" being used here, to describe people expressing that belief.

Then you need to read more carefully; that is exactly what this discussion is about.

Can you help me out? I see him discussing a specific type of behavior, which seems to be unique to the left. I don't see him saying the left is uniquely bad in general.

  1. Again, you clearly do not understand what the term means.
  1. I am not talking about specific persons; I am talking about a general phenomenon. I note that you have not claimed that it does not exist, but instead have resorted to a silly ad hominem argument.

These two points are contradictory. If I misunderstood you, believing that you had specific people in mind but are avoiding addressing them directly, then I understand the term, and used it correctly.

And your evidence that she was referring to his actions when she was over 18 is what, exactly?

You know what it is, because you read the article where this is clearly stated:

Wood, now 33 and a star of HBO’s Westworld, has said that she met shock-rocker Manson when she was 18 and he was 36.

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Especially to a link which is not very honest; you say "It doesn't help that mainstream publications were using "grooming" to describe consensual relations between adults." and link to an article in which the only use of the term is: " “He started grooming me when I was a teenager"

If you are going to moan about improper usage of the term groomer, I think it behooves you to use other terms properly as well. Pedophilia refers to attraction to prepubescent children, which mostly excludes teenagers since it is very rare for a teenager to have not yet started puberty. You want to use it to cover attraction to anyone who's not an adult so you can use that taboo to shame a wider group of people for their attractions? Gee, sounds a lot like your groomer complaint, doesn't it?

Yes, I am aware of the technical definition. Do you think that those who bandy about the term "groomer" know or care? Or is it more likely that they are using it in the popular sense, in which "the word pedophilia is often applied to any sexual interest in children or the act of child sexual abuse, including any sexual interest in minors below the local age of consent, regardless of their level of physical or mental development"?

As for "moaning," are you saying it is OK to make baseless charges of sexual impropriety or base motives? I don't, whether that be the left calling everything "racism" or the right calling everything "grooming."

Yes, I am aware of the technical definition. Do you think that those who bandy about the term "groomer" know or care? Or is it more likely that they are using it in the popular sense, in which "the word pedophilia is often applied to any sexual interest in children or the act of child sexual abuse, including any sexual interest in minors below the local age of consent, regardless of their level of physical or mental development"?

Of course they don't, which was exactly my point! The popular definition gets expanded to cover a wider group because people want to exploit the taboo for social power. If you are going to argue it is wrong to expand the definition of groomers, then it was wrong to have expanded the definition of pedophile to the point that "groomer" became synonymous with it.

As for "moaning," are you saying it is OK to make baseless charges of sexual impropriety or base motives? I don't, whether that be the left calling everything "racism" or the right calling everything "grooming."

No, I'm just frustrated that progressive arguments, arguments that the "groomer" narrative targets, used to excuse sexual harassment and abuse I endured growing up are being defended. I'm frustrated that I grew up to find out I'm attracted to kids, but not exclusively, and that those experiences make it extremely difficult to have relationships with the adults I am attracted to. I'm frustrated that rather than asking themselves what they can do to prevent abuse like I experienced, people would rather deflect to the boogieman of pedophilia without concern for what impact that would have on people like me. In short, I see your protestations as nothing more than one last "fuck you" from the people who abused me.

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Otoh, if I say that Gender Queer might not be a threat to children, I run the risk of being accused of being a pedophile.

Do you really think that that's the case in popular society? I think it's only a problem on spaces that are fairly explicitly non-leftist.

Well, part of it is that attitudes about certain issues are what defines whether someone is conservative or liberal, including both attitudes toward criminal justice issues and diversity issues. For decades, and probably to some extent still, the statement, "liberals are soft on crime" has almost been a tautology (though, of course, liberals would not frame their attitudes in that way). If you opposed capital punishment or supported the rights of criminal defendants, historically you were, per se, a liberal (though of course there were a smattering of libertarians), which is why in 1984 future AG Meese was referring to the ACLU as "a criminals' lobby."

women's fear of rape/sexual assault

I would expect that, in fact, conservative women are more fearful of sexual assault than are liberal women, esp controlling for obvious confounders such as age, marital status, location, etc.

While their response was maybe dressed up in very annoying language, and I agree that there's no reason to be especially afraid of hate mass shootings compared to other more mundane risks, I think your response was a bit tone deaf.

hold on, attacks like this are less likely to get you than car accidents or [insert whatever mundane thing] - yes they're flashy and scary, but you really shouldn't update based on them - they're statistically insignificant AND if you want to view them as terrorism then you living in fear is letting them win - you shouldn't do that"

This comes off as slightly, dare I say, smug, even though I'm sure you weren't intending to come across that way. It's a fine point to make, but a more conciliatory tone would have gone along way. Something along the lines of, 'it's certainly discouraging that attacks like these are happening more often, but you should be reassured by the fact that the vast majority of the public is broadly tolerant...' would, I reckon, not have elicited the same response. Just a question of tone and manners really.

This comes off as slightly, dare I say, smug, even though I'm sure you weren't intending to come across that way.

Maybe, but back when Islamic terror attacks were a thing, this used to be a common left wing argument. Would you say we were acting smug back then?

I might well do, depending on the way you phrased your statements. But I should stress I don't have that much wrong with what he said; just a slight change in tone would have made it better received was all I was saying, and I'd say the same in the case of terrorism.

CNBC is reporting that

Although the final official figures have not been released, it is estimated that the Qatar World Cup will cost around 220 billion to 300 billion dollars. This will also make it the most expensive World Cup ever.

Notably

At this year’s World Cup in Qatar, it’s noteworthy that seven of the eight stadiums have been constructed recently. Only one was renovated. Lusail Stadium alone, located north of Doha, cost $45 billion. Additionally, about 20,000 new hotel rooms have been constructed, as well as new driveways.

The USA's GDP is $20 trillion, so a cost of $220 billion is about 1% of the USA's GDP, which should immediately raise some red flags. Now that something smells fishy, we can look up Qatar's GDP and realize that CNBC is claiming that Qatar has spent at least 120% of their GDP on the World Cup.

Unsurprisingly, we can count on Reuters to set the record straight.

Gas-rich Qatar, in an attempt to emulate the dramatic transformation of Gulf rivals Dubai and Abu Dhabi, has spent at least $229 billion on infrastructure in the 11 years since winning the bid to host the World Cup.

Some Googling also gets us news.sky.com being more explicit

Qatar maintains that, while much of the infrastructure included in the $200bn figure will be used during the tournament, its construction would have taken place regardless of whether the cup was being held there, so it should not be viewed as the total cost.

I think it's fair to say that reporting all infrastructure spending in the last decade as "spending on the World Cup infrastructure" is pants-on-fire misleading, particularly when comparing it to the costs other countries paid.

The New York Times does it with a bit more plausible deniability.

For the country of three million people, the monthlong tournament is the culmination of 12 years of preparation and more than $200 billion in infrastructure spending, subsumed into a grand nation-building project for a state the size of Connecticut surrounded by more powerful neighbors.

Although their tweet is more suspect

Qatar opened its long-awaited World Cup with a 2-0 loss to Ecuador on Sunday, a disappointing start to an event that had required more than a decade of planning; $200 billion in investments; and countless uncomfortable questions about human rights.

But what about that $45 billion stadium (which, incidentally, is greater than Qatar's annual government spending)?

That also seems implausible. No source is cited but, for comparison, Yankee Stadium has 12,000 seats (vs Lusail's 9,000) and cost $2.3 billion (or 5% the alleged cost of Lusail). Also sportingnews.com, while also guilty of running that $220 billion number, helpfully lists the costs of each of the new stadiums and claims Lusail Stadium cost $767 million.

Rough order-of-magnitude verification of numbers is a valuable skill. If I tell you the deepest part of the ocean is 500 miles deep you should really be able to know that I'm wrong (the USA is ~2500 miles wide). You should know if the government spends $1 billion or $50 million on something. Reporting that a country spent $200 billion on a sporting event instantly raise a red flag.

Go play Wits & Wagers.

Reminds me a bit of the reporting about suicides at Foxconn and similar places. It's presented as though it's a major problem, but the suicide rate is lower than in the west. It's just that people in the west tend to not commit suicide at work, nor do they live in employer housing.

Do you have any good reads on this?

Yankee Stadium has 12,000 seats

As perhaps an example of your larger point, this seemed implausibly low to me (it's about 20% smaller than the smallest full-time[1] arena in the NHL, a league with a much smaller following than MLB), so I did a quick Google and turned up a figure of 54,251, about 4.5 times your number. Where are you getting 12,000 from?

[1] I'm excluding the university arena the Arizona Coyotes are temporarily housed in, as that's not meant to be a permanent arrangement.

I’m almost positive that was added in there as bait. I’m pretty sure there are HS football stadiums in Texas that seat 12,000.

Might be a few elementary school stadiums that large too.

"Yankee Stadium has no fewer than 12,000 seats"

Just to pick up on one aspect of this, I completely agree about the importance of having decent Fermi estimation skills, and it’s something you can definitely train. I’m continually amazed at how many people don’t have basic frames of reference for things like populations, money, timescales, distances, etc..

I remember hearing a prominent philosophy academic once say in a talk that “octopuses evolved 500 billion years ago”. I assumed it was a slip of the tongue, but then she gave the same talk a month later and made exactly the same mistake. I assume she read “500 million” somewhere and it got transmuted to “500 billion” in her head, but jeez, you should be instinctively sanity-checking and filtering that stuff in your head (“are octopuses an order of magnitude more ancient than the universe itself?”).

In the interests of fun, here’s one of my favourite (paired sets of) Fermi questions for the sub.

(1) Imagine our sun as the size of a baseball located in New York. Mutatis mutandis, how far away would the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) be?

Answer: about 2000km (approximately the distance from NYC to Oklahoma City).

Reasoning: Proxima Centauri is 40,208,000,000,000 km away. Our sun is 1,392,700 km in diameter, so it would take approximately 28 million suns in a line to reach to Proxima Centauri. A baseball is approximately 7cm in diameter, and 28 million baseballs would stretch approximately 2000 km.

(2) Imagine our galaxy as the size of a dinner plate (again let’s say in NYC). Again mutatis mutandis, how far away would the nearest galaxy (Andromeda) be?

Answer: about 7.5 metres away!

**Reasoning: the Milky Way is approximately 100,000 light years in diameter. Andromeda is approximately 2.5 million light years away, so it would take 25 Milky Ways stacked end to end to reach it. A large dinner plate is approximately 30cm in diameter, so 25 of them stacked end to end would extend 7.5m.

My surprised upshot: compared to interstellar distances, galaxies are unbelievably close to each other!

“are octopuses an order of magnitude more ancient than the universe itself?”

"Yes. I refuse to elaborate."

I'd say "if you wish to know more, I would refer you to the works of my colleague Abdul Alhazred".

Turns out, it isn't turtles all the way down, it's octopuses.

The drama of creation, according to the Hawaiian account, is divided into a series of stages, and in the very first of these life springs from the shadowy abyss and dark night... At first the lowly zoophytes and corals come into being, and these are followed by worms and shellfish, each type being declared to conquer and destroy its predecessor, a struggle for existence in which the strongest survive. Parallel with this evolution of animal forms, plant life begins on land and in the sea--at first with the algae, followed by seaweeds and rushes. As type follows type, the accumulating slime of their decay raises the land above the waters, in which, as spectator of all, swims the octopus, the lone survivor from an earlier world.

-- Roland Dixon, Oceanic Mythology, 1916

Yeah, I realise numbers are often used like that, but it still makes me wince at the sheer magnitude of the error. It’s not a mistake that an even vaguely numerate and scientifically informed person should make. It’s like saying “billions of people died in the Second World War”, or thinking a banana would cost $10.

I guess this is what leads to people thinking $500 million dollars is enough to make every American a millionaire.

Or my favorite recently, that charging every American a $1 per Capita head tax would in any way be a revenue raiser instead of a symbolic gesture.

The look on his face as I sketched out how little and narrow a wealth tax on fortunes above $1bn would be necessary to raise that same amount.

The older I get the more wisdom I see in the old Egyptian character for a large number sometimes presented as one million, it was a guy throwing his hands up as if exclaiming how could there even be this many things. That seems to be about where most non math people just stop worrying about numbers.

Same with the Mandarin word for "a big number" being translated as 10,000 (IIRC it literally means 10,000 in Mandarin).

There's a status danger of looking like a trivia nerd. Instead, people want to be the visionary, big picture person.

I think there are a few competing memes that result in this.

  1. The superficial status risk to looking like a nerd.

  2. Implicit in the above is that, it's all book smarts with no actual smarts to back it up. Ignorant to the process that one has to be book smart first let that be through reading books or experience before one can actually be smart.

  3. The belief that the "big picture" is a thing of its own and not a collage of various smaller pictures.

I would classify all of the above as infohazards. I can only shudder at the amount of things people didn't learn because they fell for any of the above, and the collective loss as a result of that.

Shakespeare lived around 1200 or something? Maybe 1930? 1600 BC?

Related to this, I'd often heard the fact that the time between Cleopatra and today is shorter than the time between Cleopatra and the building of the pyramids. I found that surprising at first, but then more recently I learned that Cleopatra was a contemporary of Caesar (i.e., she lived around 0 AD). At which point the fact became obvious to me—the pyramids are 5000 years old, Cleopatra lived 2000 years ago, of course 5000 - 2000 > 2000. My confusion came from "ancient Egypt = 5000 years ago, Cleopatra is ancient Egypt, therefore Cleopatra = 5000 years ago". Not sure if this makes me dumber or less dumb.

Three hundred megabytes!

“are octopuses an order of magnitude more ancient than the universe itself?”

Iä! Iä!

I'm going to type out my unfiltered thoughtprocess. And not use a calculator or spend more than 30 seconds per problem because that would be against the Spirit of Fermi estimation.

(1) Imagine our sun as the size of a baseball located in New York. Mutatis mutandis, how far away would the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) be?

  • I know that the sun is 150*10^6 km away and the nearest start is 4 lightyears away. So it would be cheating.

  • But fuck that, I know it takes light 8 minutes to reach The Sun and 4 years to reach the nearest star.

  • So 8 minutes to 4 years is one ratio, and baseball and the sun is the other ratio.

  • Wild out of my ass guess would be the ball is outside the atmosphere of earth.

Revelation: Annnddd I was wayyy off. By an order of magnitude.

(2) Imagine our galaxy as the size of a dinner plate (again let’s say in NYC). Again mutatis mutandis, how far away would the nearest galaxy (Andromeda) be?

  • I know Andromeda is 2*10^6 light years away.

  • Repeat the same process as before.

Revelation: Wild overestimate again. Off by many orders of magnitude.

I need to get better at intuiting ratios.

Also, a persons Fermi estimating abilities are a very good indicator of how much they read as a child. Serious.

Many of the intuitions such as astronomic distances, evolutionary timelines, depth of natural features like the oceans are things I learned straight out of my middle school textbooks or Children's encyclopedias.

I feel like the magnitudes involved in interstellar and intergalactic distances are so vast that it's not really a mark against your intuition that you find it difficult to wrap your head around. For everyone that isn't an astronomer it's really just trivia anyway.

Whereas people work with and talk about money all the time, so I think people should be expected to have better intuition in that regard.

I know it takes light 8 minutes to reach The Sun and 4 years to reach the nearest star.

Sounds like you are treating the baseball as the size of the earth's orbit around the sun, rather than the size of the sun itself. But that would give you an answer that's too small rather than too big so idk how you got your answer.

So 8 minutes to 4 years is one ratio, and baseball and the sun is the other ratio.

I am confused about your reasoning here...are you calculating (4 years / 8 minutes) * (radius of baseball / radius of sun)? That would give you a unitless value, not a distance. I think you were using the wrong values in your calculation but I can't tell what you were using.

You are right, I goofed by taking the distance from earth to the sun instead of the size of the sun. The answers being even remotely a few orders of magnitude away is a coincidence.

I didn't realize either how close galaxies are to each other compared to stars within galaxies to each other. I overestimated both, with "Los Angeles" for 1 and "Boston" for 2, but 1 was only off by about a factor of 2, while 2 was off by a factor of at least 10, probably at least 50.

My surprised upshot: compared to interstellar distances, galaxies are unbelievably close to each other!

Is that generalizable, or does it only apply to Andromeda and the Milky Way? Because the latter does not surprise me - anyone remotely interested in astronomy will have heard of the impending collision - but the former does!

It can’t be inferred from the calculation I provided, of course, but apparently the average distance between galaxies is just 1 million light years, making the distance between the Milky Way and Andromeda greater than average! (although we also have the Magellanic Clouds for company, and they are MUCH closer to us)

What you are doing is not estimation it is calculation. If you know the facts you need not estimate. The tricky part is if you don't know all of them.

If I ask you: The closest star to the sun is 4 light years away, the whole of milky way is 100000 light years wide, It has 100 billion stars, galaxies tend to cluster in the grand scale of things. Estimate how far Andromeda is. What will be your answer and why?

Of course, the answers I provide here are calculations, and anyone can do that; the challenge I’m posing is for readers to come up with mental estimates which they can check against the calculations to see if they got within an OoM.

No one has any normal references for galaxies and how far/close they are to each other which makes this just a calculation.

I can make references on things associated with daily life or general knowledge. These things don’t fit those areas.

Like most who commented I was very surprised about galaxies being that close. Thanks for the info. But I have no idea how that was supposed to test my estimation skills tbh. It's clearly not common knowledge.

I was also surprised by your Andromeda galaxy example and had to recheck. Turns out it actually is this big in the sky, I just need to move to a darker location. I then checked if it's only the local cluster (Milky Way, Andromeda and smaller friends) that is so close-packed, but even the next cluster over, M81, is "just" 12 megaly away, much closer to our galaxy than Proxima Centauri is to Sol.

(1)

Earth circumference c. 40,000 km (from original definition of meter).

Sun c. 100x size of Earth -> 4,000,000 km -> 4e9 m.

Guess size of baseball c. 1 foot circumference? 40 cm? 4e-1 m.

Ratio c. 10 orders of magnitude.

Proxima Centauri distance = 4.3 ly.

c. 500,000 minutes per year -> 2e6 light-minutes -> 120e6 or 1.2e8 light seconds.

c c. 300,000 km/s -> 300,000,000 m/s -> 3.6e16 m

Apply ratio -> 3.6e6 m -> 3.6e3 km -> 3600 km -> continent scale

Los Angeles?

(2)

Milky Way diameter c. 100,000 ly

Andromeda distance c. 2,000,000 ly

Ratio c. 20:1

Still in New York.

octopuses evolved 500 billion years ago

According to the 15 seconds I spent on Wikipedia, octopuses evolved 155 million years ago, so you can't even fix it by flipping a bit

My Fermi estimate of (1) before looking at the answer:

  • Proxima Centauri is 4 light years away

  • Speed of light is 300 million meters

  • There are 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 seconds in a year

  • The Earth is roughly 20,000 km thick. idk how big the sun is but maybe 100x bigger (by length) so let's say 1 million km

  • A baseball is roughly 0.1 m

Therefore the scaled-down Proxima Centauri would be a distance away equal to

4 light years * # seconds per year / size of sun * size of baseball / meters per km


= 4 * 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 3e8 / 1e9 * 0.1 / 1000

= 3784 kilometers

I didn't do (2) because I didn't see it until after I looked at the answer for (1).

Qatar maintains that, while much of the infrastructure included in the $200bn figure will be used during the tournament, its construction would have taken place regardless of whether the cup was being held there, so it should not be viewed as the total cost.

It may or may not be $200 billion but I don't trust Qatar either.

With these incredibly expensive events like the World Cup or Olympics there's usually some line. IIRC Brazil also came up with some story about how they'd reuse the infrastructure and thus it wasn't as expensive as it sounded. From what I recall, that didn't work out too well.

I find it most interesting that Qatar is being treated like Russia in 2018. The west fought a war against Iraq in 1991 to save the Gulf states. If anything the west has ignored the anti-woke nature of the Gulf states and seen it as cool place for finance, tourism and futurism. It seems like the view of these countries have massively swung in a few years to becoming fairly hostile.

Is it their cozying up to China? Is it that these countries are becoming big and influential enough to have too much free will? Is it that the hypocrisy of being liberal in the west yet doing business in Dubai has become too much?

Then you are either with us or against us attitude of elite class westerners is increasingly putting more of the world in the against us category. They aren't going to give half the world the Iran/Russia treatment and if they do the other half of the world is going to do fairly fine under an alternative system.

The west fought a war against Iraq in 1991 to save the Gulf states.

It's a rather big stretch to include any state besides Kuwait in that statement.

"Save" might be a bit of an excessive claim, but circa 1991 the local balance of power certainly suggested that Iraq could have made attempts to annex all or part of other adjacent states. Before the Gulf War, Iraq had the world's fourth largest army and relatively modern equipment. That the war would end in a curbstomp in hours was not a foregone conclusion beforehand.

Iraq was getting the best of Iran just a few years earlier, but not by enough to prevent them from accepting a ceasefire with little permanent gain, and not by such a large margin that you'd think they were an existential threat to the whole region.

I can't blame anyone for treating them like an existential threat anyway. "Murderous dictator builds rapidly-expanding war machine and uses weak revanchist excuses to start salami-slicing his neighbors" was an uncomfortably familiar story, and "everybody just sits back and hopes that he'll be satisfied after a few slices and stop and reform" was no longer considered to be a safe way to bring it to a conclusion.

Sure, but if Kuwait didn’t have oil- and hadn’t been very firmly willing to play nice with the West about its sale- the reaction wouldn’t have been military intervention, it would’ve been an angsty op Ed in the NYT and a strongly worded letter submitted to the UN, which would then approve it.

Qatar is a peninsula, Bahrein is an island. Speaking of those two realistically, they are only reachable from Iraq's direction through a seaborne invasion. Did the Iraqis ever have the capability to do that?

You are right. The other gulf states tried to starve Qatar with a blockade not that long ago and it failed largely only thanks to Turkish support. Right afterwards Turkey also set up a large military base in the peninsula, which obviously serves to deter further aggression from the other gulf US-client states.

The western elites are currently mad at the gulf for 1) cozying up to China 2) not playing along at pretending trump is an outcast and 3) using opec to keep oil prices high during the war.

They’re also, of course, siding vocally against western sanctions on Russia.

The other factor is that elite westerners will tolerate non-elite-western values and attitudes when it’s barbarian chieftains, which is how the gulf states were perceived when they were Islamic fundamentalists with oil. But now that their economies have gotten more diverse, and they’ve retained their anti-LGBT attitudes even as they’ve gotten more secular in other ways, it’s different.

The western elites are currently mad at the gulf for

4: Slowing down the financing of terrorism. When Islam was the outgroup for the country, the elites couldn't get enough. Now that they've ceded Big Baddy territory to Russia, they're just uncivilized barbarians again. It's hard to muster support for a grubby dictatorship when they won't even murder your citizens for you.

It's entirely because they have the World Cup. You don't see anyone really going after the likes of Kuwait or the UAE.

Yes, and because for the past few years FIFA has waded quite heavily into moralizing politics (mostly as a cover for their own corruption). If FIFA had spent the years of the lead-up to Russia endlessly promoting the inviolable sovereignty of nations, people would have been more critical of the location in 2018. Well FIFA has been vocally supportive of LGBT rights leading up to this World Cup. The hypocrisy is so readily apparent that it even offends people who don't normally wade into these kind of culture war issues.

Well FIFA has been vocally supportive of LGBT rights leading up to this World Cup.

Perhaps they've been vocally supportive precisely because they're going to Qatar?

They were criticized for it, obviously. Of course, if they said nothing they'd be criticized too so they took some face-saving measures.

This is essentially the same dynamic going on with the teams that wanted the "OneLove" armband: everyone knew they were complicit and supporting an anti-LGBT regime in practice so, in true performative fashion, they wanted some nice iconography to wash away this sin. But Qatar wouldn't even let them have that.

I mean, this isn't new.

They basically appropriated the theme of love from Christianity, ignoring literally everything else in the faith (including just why love is important*) that is inimical to their worldview

Why wouldn't they do it to Bob Marley too?

* It's not about hedonism or even freedom to choose romantic relationships...

They basically appropriated the theme of love from Christianity

? I'm pretty sure Christianity didn't invent love or ever have any rightful monopoly on it.

Christianity invented very few things, once you actually start digging into it. But it popularized plenty.

Philosophy schools were opposed to the infanticide found in the ancient world, like the Christians. But who would argue that we owe the disgust of this (to the point where the easiest way to lose an abortion debate is to bite the bullet on "why a fetus but not a newborn baby? They're both not particularly sapient...") to some philosophy school and not the Church?

Monogamy might have been a practice somewhere, but it certainly owes a debt to Paul.

The idea of agape, love-as-central is very Christian. A central idea of Christianity is summed up in John 3:16, one of the most famous verses in the Bible, the Gospel in a nutshell: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son": Divine love is made manifest in the incarnation and the death of God to save us from sin, that's how much he allegedly loves everyone.

"God is love", for example, is something I hear a lot in the West. I tend to hear a lot of progressive policies pushed in the name of "Jesus loved everyone" and "love is love" and so on, so they're very aware of the perception.

IIRC Christian philosophers like Swinburne even make arguments defending other central elements of Christianity via the concern for love: e.g. a loving God would be a Trinity since that is a "'perfect love" - a singular God has no mutual love, a dual pair can be selfish since they'll only focus on one another (don't ask me to defend this, I find everything about the Trinity dubious). Suffice it to say, this is the sort of argument that doesn't occur to the other sons of Abraham.

In my religious education -as a Muslim- love was not specifically emphasized as a value uber alles . Similarly, nobody went around arguing for anti-Islamic things because "Mohammed loved everyone" but I notice that progressive Muslims raised in the West often speak in similar tones to the Christians. If Muslims, why not people who aren't recent transplants?

More comments

The next World Cup is in Texas, which will likely pass a set of laws against ‘grooming’ by the time it starts, too.

It Seems...

Where are you getting your impressions?

I don’t think I’ve seen any glowing coverage of these states since the Burj Khalifa went up. Complaints (with a tinge of respect!) about mega yachts and artificial palm-tree islands, a sentiment that oil wealth is ill-gotten, the odd cry of humanitarian abuses.

Qatar specifically flew under the radar until getting the World Cup, at which point the accusations started flying. They were focused on bribery, not politics or morality, and had plenty of evidence. It wasn’t a great time to work in FIFA’s PR division.

Agreed. Blue tribers clearly do not like the gulf states and think they code as red tribe(devoutly religious, oil money, paranoid blue tribe fantasy of how women are treated).

If you are looking at an American-centric Western view on the two host nations, I think the US team's absence (because they barely failed to qualify) had a profound impact on how most Americans who are not die-hard fans perceived the event (if at all).

The real question is who funneled the journalists these numbers. When lots of papers start using the same made-up numbers all at once, it's time to get suspicious.

Jamal Khashoggi, the 'journalist' who got chopped up by Saudi Arabia, was a mouthpiece for Qatar, pushing propaganda against Saudi Arabia in one of America's top papers. So I wouldn't be surprised if this campaign against Qatar is largely driven by Saudi Arabia. If they are willing to chop up a journalist, I'd imagine they are happy to twist facts and feed them to the media. And western media, particularly Americans (imo), seem to be quite lazy. If you just do their work for them, they'll happily publish it, as long as it doesn't go against their personal biases (and if it reinforces those biases, they'll fall over themselves to oblige).

That's why so many news articles are basically a copy & paste of press releases.

I think he was payback for an attempted coup on the prince. Remember about a year before all the VIPs who got rounded up and got a long stay in the Ritz before singing over vast chunks of their wealth to the crown. I suspect he was a common theme in many of the interrogations.

You come at the king, you best not miss, and they missed.

Aren't there only like a couple of "newswire" sources (e.g. AP) from which all journalists get their first facts from?

Also, most stories are cribbed heavily from interested parties' press releases.

Much of media works on narratives. "Wealthy petrostate spends an obscene amount of money on prestige sporting event" is a nice bite-sized one.

If the journalist mentions that the official numbers might be made up, it adds complicated nuance to the story. How expensive is the World Cup really, if you can't trust the numbers? This leaves the reader uncertain and mildly confused instead of thinking they have learned something about the world. Easier for the article to just print whatever BS amount Qatar says and move on; the vast majority of journalists have tight deadlines and wouldn't have time to investigate it anyway.

Rough order-of-magnitude verification of numbers is a valuable skill. If I tell you the deepest part of the ocean is 500 miles deep you should really be able to know that I'm wrong (the USA is ~2500 miles wide).

I disagree here. It is actually absolutely counterintuitive how shallow the ocean is compared to the surface. Also the whole how thin the crust of the earth actually is.

Right now I think that people want to shape narrative of dumb rich arabs to punish the Qatar and Fifa for the audacity to not be progressive on the world stage and not even pretending to pay a lip service to western values.

The gulf states has extremely low labor costs. I would be surprised if the whole thing costed more than couple of billion of hard costs.

Them spending that much on infrastructure in the last 12 years is plausible - but they also have a lot of big ticket stuff built. I would say they will try to become something like - a bit more conservative Dubai.

The gulf states has extremely low labor costs.

But I would also not be surprised if the harsh conditions require significant engineering work and/or complexity that are not present in all comparable projects, which to some extent makes things more expensive.

I disagree here. It is actually absolutely counterintuitive how shallow the ocean is compared to the surface. Also the whole how thin the crust of the earth actually is.

Also, how many people actually randomly know what the width of the USA is? I certainly don't, and tbh I doubt I'll remember it past 10 minutes from now. It simply is a completely useless fact that has no reason to stick in my brain.

It simply is a completely useless fact that has no reason to stick in my brain

Hardly completely useless. Knowing the rough width of the US will augment your ability to make all sorts of potentially useful heuristic judgments about distances, times, areas, and speeds both within and beyond the US. For example, if you know (or ever learn) the duration of a flight from New York to LA, and you know the rough width of the US, then you can make an OoM estimate of the speed of a jet airliner, which could allow you to estimate other flight times for known distances.

Someone may say that they can Google this stuff if you ever need to know it, but that presumes that you’ll always know when it’s a good time to seek it out, and that’s not always the case. More to the point, inert information on Google can’t help build good epistemic filters, nor can it contribute to creative problem-solving. Knowledge of a broad set of useful facts is very important, and should be a lifelong endeavour for those who want to get the most out of their intelligence.

There's the old saw that Americans have no concept of time and Europeans no concept of distance

You've just proved my point. The example you give of a useful scenario is something which would never, ever be useful to me. I stand by my statement that this is a useless fact.

Your insistence that being able to better estimate speeds,distances and times being "useless" reads more as arrogance than sincere disinterest. Because its not really asking much from you, we ask middle schoolers to do this all the time.

Not to mention being able to accurately estimate those things transfer over to estimating money, timescales, populations, etc. A very valuable skill in making sense of the vast amount of numbers all around you and having a well calibrated bullshit detector.

The alternative is literally memorising things that are "useful". Books can be written on why that is stupid.

In fact I would say the whole covid restrictions fiasco was a result of the masses having bad meta-estimation intuition. They got spooked by arbitrarily large numbers of people dying, with no context to what level of death is acceptable or how much death (or lost life years) is caused by lockdowns and money printing.

I never said estimating distances is useless. I said that estimating the distance of the entire country is useless. In 37 years I have never once needed to know that, and I would bet good money that I never will.

So estimating distances in the abstract is not useless but estimating the distance of the US is? I don't understand how this is contradictory. If you know how to estimate distances, you can estimate the distances of anything to anything else.

The base-level skill is what is being discussed, not a gameified application of that skill. "Estimating the distance of the US from coast to coast" is not the skill, estimating distances is.

No, what is discussed is very specifically the width of the US, and whether it's useful to know that. This is not an abstract discussion about estimating distances in general.

It's just order of magnitudes. I don't expect you to know the US is 2500 miles across. I expect you to know it's not 250 or 25,000.

"It took me 5 hours to drive across Iowa at 60 miles per hour, so Iowa is around 300 miles across. There's no way the ocean is deeper than that." Or, if that doesn't satisfy you, "therefore the continental United States is around 3000 miles wide which is roughly the radius of the Earth. There's no way the ocean's deepest point is anywhere close to 10% of the radius of the Earth".

There's no way the ocean's deepest point is anywhere close to 10% of the radius of the Earth

And now explain your reasoning why if we assume that the person slept through natural science classes. Or never finished high school.

For ocean depth my reference point is knowing a little about oil drilling and how deep that can go. Then guessing that different parts of the ocean do not have more than a 3-4 difference in magnitude.

When [first-tier world-class sporting event] came to my much less contentious area, all reporting on "its costs" included all infrastructure spending that came anywhere near it.

Including "would have taken place regardless" stuff, which is not even close to a hard line (ie, based on other local infrastructure tendencies before and after it, "was going to happen anyways" can read as "within the next 60 years, maybe")

Ours was much less, but we had much less done than an entire city, an entire expressway system, a brand new airport, a port, etc.

I think your issue here is with a precedent that was set a long time ago, and that this does not seem inconsistent with. Of all the crimes of the media, I'm not going to get too worked up about this.

That also seems implausible. No source is cited but, for comparison, Yankee Stadium has 12,000 seats (vs Lusail's 9,000)

Given that Fenway Park seats something like 35,000 and that the Superdome in New Orleans seats 70,000 and that both of these venues are considered relatively small for their respective sports I find it difficult to believe that a World Cup venue would seat only 9,000. That's less than some high-school stadiums SEC country, and about a 10th of what Aztec Stadium in Mexico City (a prior World Cup venue) seats.

Likewise if we're talking about the Yankee Stadium situated on 161st street in the Bronx, it seats between 45,000 and 60,000 depending on how you count the galleries. So while I agree that "Rough order-of-magnitude verification of numbers is a valuable skill." it's one that you seem to be lacking, and this undermines any other point that you might be trying to make.


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