site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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

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

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

  • Shaming.

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

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Back in February, Maine state representative Laurel Libby got censured by the states House of Representatives for posting a tweet featuring state track-and-field champions photos with the same kid that won the recent women's pole vault also placing fifth in men's poll vault two years prior. (Tweet on page 9 of this pdf.)

The censure (passed narrowly along party lines) is based on the notion that Libby is endangering the minor athlete with all this publicity, and that she must apologize. She refused to do so. The rules of the House of Representatives say that "is guilty of a breach of any of the rules and orders of the House … may not be allowed to vote or speak, unless by way of excuse for the breach, until the member has made satisfaction." So until Libby apologizes, she is barred from speaking on the floor, and barred from voting.

Libby sued in federal court for 1st Amendment violation. Meanwhile, she has been seeking emergency relief to restore her voting rights (and thus also the representation rights of her constituents). Both the district court and the First Circuit court of appeals have declined to grant her the emergency relief:

finding that legislative immunity precluded it because her sanction by Maine's House speaker was a legislative act, and the disenfranchisement of her district's voters could not overcome that immunity.

Today, the US Supreme Court granted the emergency relief.

The tweet in question is on an important current political topic made by an elected representative, is inline with her platform (which is likely why she got elected in the first place), and has only publicly available information. The censure bases its rationale on possible harm to the minor athlete, based on indirect evidence that harm could happen (but didn't): tweets by others about this kid, and some study finding that trans kids are four times more likely to be bullied. So it seems to me that this is a clear-cut case of clearly protected political speech by someone whose job it is to speak it.

I am therefore trying to wrap my head around the "legislative immunity" argument that both the district court and first circuit found persuasive. In Maine House of Representatives, some things require a super-majority (2/3 votes), e.g.: overriding the governor's veto. What is to stop the slim majority of one political party of censuring enough members of the opposing party based on similar fig-leaf reasons, depriving them of the ability to vote, and thus gaining the super-majority?

What is to stop the slim majority of one political party of censuring enough members of the opposing party based on similar fig-leaf reasons, depriving them of the ability to vote, and thus gaining the super-majority?

I don't know anything about the Maine constitution, but it's interesting to consider the US constitution. Article 1 Section 5:

"Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members [...] Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member."

Technically, yeah, any majority could sieze housewide legislative power for itself by changing the rules. The real reason they don't do this is that political legitimacy does not stem from the plain text of the constitution alone. There are the written rules, and there are the real rules. Sometimes, they even overlap.

What is to stop the slim majority of one political party of censuring enough members of the opposing party based on similar fig-leaf reasons, depriving them of the ability to vote, and thus gaining the super-majority?

That sounds like a Second Amendment sort of question.

More realistically, they lose legitimacy, people defy them, and they stop going down that path before reaching that point. That's hardly the only open road to tyranny.

It would also become a federal constitutional issue. The Constitution requires that the states each have a republican form of government. While that is pretty loosely enforced as to form, it would be hard to argue that Maine is if it became a one-party state and 45 percent of the people’s elected legislators were barred from voting.

I want to follow up on the earlier discussion about anti-natalism and natalism. I find it interesting that some people see anti-natalism as being a leftist phenomenon. I feel that this is true if you limit your understanding of leftism to stereotypical Redditors. However, historically speaking, philosophical pessimism, deep skepticism about the value of life, and doubt about the value of reproduction as anything other than an animal instinct are, I think, far from left-oriented. If you think about some of the most famous people who have held such views, such as Arthur Schopenhauer, H.P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, Michel Houellebecq... well, these are certainly not leftists by any common definition of leftist. And then there is Nietzsche who, even though in his writings he constantly insisted on the value of healthy virile life, did not leave any offspring even though, despite his various health problems, he probably would not have found it that hard to get married and have kids if he had really wanted to.

I do not think that being dubious of natalism is a right-wing phenomenon, but I also certainly do not think that it is inherently a left-wing phenomenon.

Well it is predominantly held by left-wingers today.

You can see all this commentary about how the aesthetic of the happy smiling white family is racist, fascist, possibly nazi - it comes from the left. I've yet to see any right-wing critique of such imagery. Discourse about liberating women from the burden of motherhood comes from the left, while discourse about the 14 words and fear of demographic replacement comes from the right.

Whether something is essentially right wing or left wing is secondary to whether it's presently right-wing or left-wing. The evolutionary history of the bear isn't that important compared compared to whether the bear in front of me is good at climbing up trees, if it's aggressive towards people, if it's confused by loud noises...

For example, the Soviet bloc was broadly pro-natalist. But what impact does this have on modern leftism? Soviet leftism is all but dead, they were also big fans of heavy industry, nuclear energy and military power which aren't beloved by the modern left.

Am I wrong to think generally speaking it is the right that makes appeal to nature argument? (or fallacy, if you want that fork of the Russel Conjugation)

Given that we are animals and so have self-preservation instinct, it doesn't surprise me that "of course life is good" is what all right wingers think; and that "actually life is bad" only ever could be a left-wing take (but not all left-wingers).

I somewhat disagree. You're probably right in general. However, there is a strain of right-wing thought, and there has been for a long time, that isn't pro-life - it just thinks that life sucks and the desire to reproduce is a cheap joke that nature instilled in people, but also thinks that even despite all that, whatever decent things exist in life are more likely to be perpetuated by right-wing politics than left-wing politics. The stereotypical highly-online right-winger these days might be a trad "let's have 10 kids" type, but this is not the only type of right-wing thought.

I myself am not anti-life or a philosophical pessimist, but I have enjoyed and perhaps benefited from reading such strains of thought.

I think if we're talking about the classical antecedents of modern leftism -- the anarchism of Proudhon, or the work of Marx and Engels -- I don't think that stuff can be described as anti-natalist or anti-life. I think the humanist tendencies in Marxism are generally underestimated and underappreciated by critics of Marxism. But it's clear that now, today, there's a strong link between anti-natalism and leftism: you can't have kids because it's destroying the environment, you can't have kids because it's racist and colonialist, etc.

It's harder to think of examples of anti-life attitudes on the right. Maybe you could talk about the sorts of Gnostic and neo-Platonist Christian sects that were popular in late antiquity and the early middle ages: you must abhor the flesh, abhor reproduction, abhor pleasure. But were they really "rightist" just because they were religious? Does religion automatically make you a rightist? Or is the left/right spectrum inadequate to describe their views?

And then there is Nietzsche [...] he probably would not have found it that hard to get married and have kids if he had really wanted to.

Nietzsche was by most accounts what we would call, in modern parlance, a "weirdo autist". His few romantic advances towards women were rejected. (Famously, a woman named Lou Salomé spurned him in favor of their mutual friend Paul Rée.) Allegedly he was once alone with a prostitute and he fled from the room when she exposed her genitalia, although that story may be apocryphal. In his later years he seems to have consigned himself to the fact that he wasn't marriage material:

"Which great philosopher, so far, has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer – were not; indeed it is impossible to even think about them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception, Socrates, the mischievous Socrates, appears to have married ironice, simply in order to demonstrate this proposition."

In the opening pages of Twilight of the Idols, he addresses your central question directly:

"You really have to stretch out your fingers and make a concerted attempt to grasp this amazing piece of subtlety, that the value of life cannot be estimated. Not by the living, who are an interested party, a bone of contention, even, and not judges; not by the dead for other reasons. - It is an objection to a philosopher if he sees a problem with the value of life, it is a question mark on his wisdom, an un-wisdom.

Ok but skepticism about the natural course of reproduction is almost the sine qua non of progressivism(and there are no non-progressive leftists today, or very few). Progressivism was all about eugenics, originally- and it continues to be about birth control and transhumanism.

This seems to tie into a deeper division in the west, that of a telos, whereby creatures(defined broadly as 'part of the material universe') have their purpose not set by themselves. The right in the west basically believes in this; continuing itself is a telos of human life. The left in the west broadly doesn't; the purpose of human life is to do whatever it wants. There's a theistic/nontheistic division but which comes first? My philosophical commitment to the idea of a telos comes from my theism but there are many whose theism was derived from their belief in telos. In turn this ties into the commitments to stability and continuity vs individualism and self growth.

Under a 'your purpose is to do what you want' framework obviously that can't be wrong, because it's subjective. Yes, most leftists would be skeptical of a young woman claiming she wants to take care of babies and bake, but that's what false consciousness is about- it's not wrong to want that, she's just wrong about what she wants. It's an epicycle, not a real course correction. Contrast a framework which believes in telos- if what you want is to 'advocate' then you are wrong for writing off just being normal. You 'make a difference in the world' by fulfilling your appointed task, which probably isn't something particularly notable.

There's far less charitable ways to phrase these things, obviously. But the core of conservatism is this idea that, yeah, you kinda just have to, circumstances beyond your control have spoken. See the trans debate- the core of the conservative objection is 'drop your pants in front of a mirror- you see a penis? Yeah, it means you have to be male. It doesn't matter if you're sure you'd rather be a girl. Sometimes you have to do the things you have to do.'. It's why normiecons don't get conspicuously upset about child support laws even when they suck for individual men 'supporting their kids is what dads do. Suck it up, it's your job.' or think that unwanted pregnancies don't justify an abortion 'yeah, moms put their child's needs before their own wants. Get over it, that's what you are now.'.

I support the dictatorship of the universe. No good comes from defying it. Progressives simply think it's unfair that being male means being male- after all, you didn't get to pick. That's why they're so obsessed with consent all the time.

I’ve always seen the left as very much about hedonistic urges. The idea being that freedom means freedom to do whatever you want, and that anyone or anything that restricts your ability to live out whatever hedonistic urges a person has.

Anti-natalist ideas fit perfectly well, as having a child introduces obligations, personal, financial, and emotional. A parent is simply not as free to act on hedonistic desires because the child needs things. You can’t just travel on a whim, as you need to arrange for how exactly you accommodate the little child. You can’t spend your last dime on yourself, you need to buy formula.

This is still a telos. It’s just not your telos.

The conservative telos tends to be duty. It’s told in lots of different ways I suppose, but the general idea is that you might have a technical right to do as you please, but it’s not always good to do so unless you deal with all the duties you have. If you don’t keep up your end things fall apart fairly quickly.

Anti-natalist ideas fit perfectly well, as having a child introduces obligations, personal, financial, and emotional. A parent is simply not as free to act on hedonistic desires because the child needs things.

The more consistent version of that is that it's imposing obligations on the child. The "childfree" strain of thought you describe is much more common than the "philosophical antinatalist" one, but I think they're worth distinguishing.

Under the lens of "obligation", the parents are forcing an entire lifetime of choices and tradeoffs onto their new child, while the more neurotic of the obligation-thinkers would hesitate to extend an invitation to someone because it creates the obligation to respond (even if it's to decline!).

This is a good summary, but speaking as a transhumanist and progressive my objections to teleology are - obviously - more complicated than "simply thinking it's unfair".

Basically, I think there's a kind of motte-and-bailey inherent in political discourse that purports to be telos-based. Your argument draws its rhetorical force from its tautological conclusion. Reality is going to be reality whether we like it or not - the dictatorship of the universe is absolute - if you have a penis then you can't wish it away. But, by definition, nothing which humans can achieve, nothing we can physically implement, is ever going to be in defiance of "the dictatorship of the universe". Gender reassignment surgery doesn't break the laws of physics. If I have a penis I "have to be male" as a biological trait - in the logical sense of "have to" - but that has no bearing on whether I "have to" wear a suit and tie rather than a skirt, which I clearly can physically do.

I fail to see how "If you'd been meant to wear dresses and be referred to using the phonemes /ʃi/, you'd have ovaries" is different from "if God had wished for Man to fly, He'd have given him wings". Only the hopelessly insane would today argue that flying a plane is immoral due to not extending from Homo sapiens's innate qualities. Why should transgender be any different?

I mean, to start with, you’re mixing up motte and Bailey here- ‘only females wear skirts’ is very much a fact of our culture, and not a fact of nature, in a way that ‘only females breastfeed’ is the opposite. Leaving aside that skirts are generally designed for a woman’s body and not a man’s and so some adjustments might need to be made(but they clearly can be, see eg kilts), you wearing one would simply be odd, not female. Gender roles are a cultural universal but many of their specific expressions are not.

If God had intended for you to present and be seen as a woman, he’d have given you ovaries. That’s the actual statement. And as a teleological matter it’s straightforwardly true- it is simply impossible for you to get pregnant, large health improvements or further development will not enable you to get pregnant, you have xy chromosomes, etc. Your disagreement is too fundamental to be resolved on the level of ‘changing your gender can fit with your telos’. You don’t agree with the concept of a telos. And now we’re at the postulate level. Sure, I can write a ten thousand word essay- if I had the time- about why the balance of the evidence favors the existence of the Christian God as described in the Bible and expounded by the Catholic Church. But it is, fundamentally, impossible to falsify the statement ‘there is no God or higher purpose’- although my statement, ‘God is real, came to earth 2,000 years ago, and founded an institution which is incapable of erring from His will, which continues to provide knowledge based off of His intellect’ is falsifiable(not falsified, however).

Basically, I think there's a kind of motte-and-bailey inherent in political discourse that purports to be telos-based. Your argument draws its rhetorical force from its tautological conclusion. Reality is going to be reality whether we like it or not - the dictatorship of the universe is absolute - if you have a penis then you can't wish it away. But, by definition, nothing which humans can achieve, nothing we can physically implement, is ever going to be in defiance of "the dictatorship of the universe". Gender reassignment surgery doesn't break the laws of physics. If I have a penis I "have to be male" as a biological trait - in the logical sense of "have to" - but that has no bearing on whether I "have to" wear a suit and tie rather than a skirt, which I clearly can physically do.

When conservatives appeal to a telos they aren't saying that things are against the laws of physics. This isn't even close, I mean have you read the Bible at all? Humans do things that are sinful and bad all the time, so much so thta God sends a flood to basically wipe most of us out.

God gave humans freedom to act as He had, and we can choose to do evil things. That's religion 101, even outside of Abrahamic faiths. The point is that if you continue to miss the mark, you will eventually reap what you sow.

Antinatalism may not have been left wing, but it is definitely left-wing now and that's what matters for both movements, not what men from a century ago thought.

Can’t speak fully to the others, but Ligotti is very leftist.

Q: Does it irritate you to hear that some people consider you a nihilist?

A: I would call myself a pessimist. At one time I thought it simply inaccurate for anyone to call me a nihilist, since the dictionary definition of nihilist applies to me in very few of its aspects. The term nihilist is more apt in connection with someone like Nietzsche, for whom I have no use at all. Nietzsche also considered himself a type of pessimist, but after he ceased to admire Schopenhauer he modified the term pessimism so that it carried almost none of its original meaning. These days I don’t mind being called a nihilist, because what people usually mean by this word is someone who is anti-life, and that definition fits me just fine, at least in principle. In practical terms, I have all kinds of values that are not in accord with nihilism.For example, I politically self-identify as a socialist. I want everyone to be as comfortable as they can be while they’re waiting to die. Unfortunately, the major part of Western civilization consists of capitalists, whom I regard as unadulterated savages. As long as we have to live in this world, what could be more sensible than to want yourself and others to suffer as little as possible? This will never happen because too many people are unadulterated savages. They’re brutal and inhuman.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110716140816/http://www.thedamnedinterviews.com/2011/01/author-thomas-ligotti/

Ah, sorry. That's on me, then, for assuming that Ligotti was not a leftist based on a very shallow knowledge of him.

That said, I don't know if he is more of a leftist in the typical modern highly online sense of the word, or if he is a socialist in the same way that H.P. Lovecraft supported some flavors of socialism and supported FDR while having extremely right-wing social attitudes even by the standards of his era. Lovecraft favored a sort of technocratic socialism that would ensure his own kind of people a decent living while keeping out the people whom he found undesirable. Not surprising given that he spent much of his adult life in poverty during the Great Depression as a random kid from a broken-down family who probably felt himself to be an aristocrat at heart and had a viscerally racist reaction to pretty much everyone other than people whose stock was from North-West Europe.

But Ligotti is not Lovecraft, and I should not let their surface-level similarities make me assume things about Ligotti.

I wonder if there might actually still be, even in our modern world, some major intellectual insights that future generations, once those insights have appeared, will think of as relatively low-hanging fruit and wonder why it took so long for their ancestors to come up with them, and wonder why their ancestors did not come up with them given that they already had every necessary bit of knowledge to come up with them, and maybe only lacked some spark of genius.

Some examples from history:

  • Calculus - You can teach this to any decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, but, while there were some remarkably close predecessors to it in ancient Greece (the method of exhaustion), it was not formalized as a rigorous concept and method until about the 18th-19th centuries.
  • Antibiotics - As far as I know, there is nothing about penicillin as an antibiotic agent that could not have hypothetically been developed and systematized 2000 years ago - this would not have required any modern technology. To be fair, there may have been ancient cultures that had an intricate knowledge of plant-derived drugs and so on that are at least relatively comparable... but to my knowledge, none of them developed something like modern antibiotics, which revolutionized the world and basically immediately did away with the whole literary genre of "lonesome poet dies at 30 from tuberculosis".
  • Free markets - It seems at least plausible these days to many decently intelligent people that free-ish markets (too much freedom in markets has its own problems but...) serve as a good communicator of economic information, and that this can help relatively free market economic systems at least in some cases to outcompete central planning (there are many other factors involved of course, but this is one of them...). I'm not aware of anyone having had this kind of hypothesis until a few hundred years ago. But it's the kind of idea you can explain to a decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, it's not something that requires mountains of highly specific knowledge to grasp.
  • Natural selection - The idea that the combination of survival pressure and reproduction will over time cause better-adapted entities to out-reproduce worse-adapted entities is so logical that one can demonstrate the truth of it through pure mathematics. But as far as I know, it did not become a popular explanation for the evolution of living beings until about 170 years ago, even though people 2000 years ago were both familiar with so-called artificial selection (breeding of livestock and so on) and probably had the intellectual background to understand the concept of natural selection mathematically (people who were advanced enough mathematics thinkers to create something like Euclid's Elements certainly had the raw brain-power to model natural selection mathematically, if a certain spark of genius had struck them).

It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.

The problem with free markets is that they require a modern state.

Modernity provides the scale and technology to enable now commonplace and relatively undistortionary forms of taxation (e.g. income, sales) with ease and precision. Premodern societies struggled to raise taxes in non-distortionary ways, because anything they taxed needed to be highly legible to a tax collector. Hence, the widespread practice of building taxes becoming taxes on windows, gross floor area, and so on - leading to predictable results of fewer windows and slim but tall buildings in those areas. The most effective way of generating long-term revenue was in the form of tariffs levied at trade checkpoints. ~20% of the British State's revenue during the Napoleonic Wars was from customs duties, so you can imagine there was little incentive to reduce trade barriers even then, despite whatever Adam Smith had to say.

Premodern states simply weren't powerful enough to enable free markets. The local baron was powerful enough to enforce his idiosyncrasies within his domain. Certain products were restricted for his use, others might be required to be produced in a certain way, while 'his' peasants were tied to the land. A king attempting to change this would be attempting to upend feudalism, and find himself killed or forced to agree to limit his powers. In fact, the incentives usually ran the other way, with the crown being encouraged to grant certain monopolies or rights in return for support for new taxes or causes. Meanwhile, while Guilds notoriously fixed prices and restricted supply, they were sufficiently embedded in the social fabric that the King would find breaking them up or restricting their behaviour essentially impossible. Their dealings would be almost completely illegible to a premodern state, who anyway lacked a police force loyal to the crown able to punish cases of the guild breaking the legs, say, of a non-compliant journeyman.

Free markets are reliant on trust. For a village, the trust networks are already there, but at scale, what's needed is homogeneity and stability. Coinage was often inconsistent, and subject to frequent debasement. Only the modern state has the reach to provide consistent governance and enforcement for contracts, arbitrate disputes and so on.

Finally, only modern economies are sufficiently productive to allow free markets without frequent bread riots and the demand for price controls.

Yes, you can explain free markets to an intelligent 17-year-old, but only in modern times could it be anything more than a thought experiment.

I think the thing about free markets is that the premodern state doesn't necessarily want economic growth, they want boots on the ground and stability.

The roman empire was broadly free market. They had strong property rights and relatively low taxes. They thought trade was pretty good. But they were quite worried about bread prices, so they arranged for food shipments to Italy to keep the plebs happy. And money had to be found somewhere for warfare, they struggled with getting the tax base to pay for all these wars. It's hard to extract money from all these entrenched aristocrats who naturally develop wealth trading.

In an agrarian economy, food is money so why not have as many people making food as possible? You can get pretty good results with legalist policies of strict state control and contempt for trade. If you read the book of shang yang, it's basically just 'the wastelands must be cultivated' and 'don't let people do what they want, fancy silk clothing is not needed for fielding a gigantic army'. There's not much need for a dynamic private sector economy when you only need grain, swords, salt and horses in huge quantities. The state can handle that quite well with economies of scale alone and conscripted labour.

Only when you start needing hugely expensive ships, optics, cannons, advanced metallurgy and innovation does a private sector economy really start to shine.

The problem with free markets is that they require a modern state.

The movie "Becoming Jane" sees a lawyer talking to a judge:

  • Why are you here?
  • To learn the law
  • Which has no other end but what?
  • The preservation of the rights of property.
  • Against?
  • The mob. Therefore order is kept because we have (the army? prudence? I forget how it goes past here and the transcripts cut off)

I have a feeling we'll find some cancer cures that make us go 'doh'. Growing organs in vitro will probably take a breakthrough that seems obvious in retrospect. I'm guessing there's probably a few breakthroughs in nuclear technology, or power transmission, which will be in the same category.

I hope we get wireless power transmission like Tesla always dreamed of. Would also make space exploration easier.

Personally I think we'll find a more dense fuel for space travel at some point as well.

Wireless power transmission is very much already a thing, you do it with powerful microwaves.

The issue is any suitably powerful and efficient means of wirelessly transmitting energy is indistinguishable from a death ray should some unfortunate soul happen to stumble into the emission cone.

WOAH I had no idea! You just blew my mind.

Can we do it efficiently though? Is the only problem the danger?

Its nowhere near as efficient as just using a conductive cable certainly. IIRC its something like 50% efficient in a lab, so probably half that in real applications. You have to have a really, really good reason for not just running a power line for it to be worth it for high power applications.

The FCC actually approved charging via WiFi a few years ago, but its limited to maybe 1 W at most, not too many commercial applications at the moment to my knowledge.

But yeah, the lowered efficiency and substantial safety risks are the barriers at the moment. Maybe that will change in the future.

wireless power transmission like Tesla always dreamed of

Tesla's dream of wireless power transmission was mostly just him going senile / developing schizophrenic symptoms. His earlier inventions that he made his fame from relied on the same laws of physics that were well known by then to make such long distance wireless power transmission inherently extremely inefficient (there's a reason any modern "beamed power transmission" concepts use parabolic antennae and microwave wavelengths).

We probably have different views on what schizophrenia is.

We already have wireless power transmission, you can charge your phone etc wirelessly very easily these days

Yeah but my understanding was that it's extremely inefficient over anything past like a couple inches?

Not over space distances.

Depending on the charger you can actually wireless charge a phone with a 1cm air gap between the charger and your phone.

And if you want to see wireless power transmission over long (many meters) distances then this MIT demo is basically the best out there I know of, even though technically it's to show dipole radiation and not power transfer. Also it's a very good demonstration that you don't need to have a complete circuit for electricity to flow.

Most people, even the scientifically inclined, have absolutely zero idea of how electricity really works. And yet their vote counts just as much as mine... (yes I am salty about this)

I am confident there are many insights out there that remain to be "discovered" that will seem obvious in retrospect. So much of the history of human progress is discovering obvious (in retrospect) insights. Even something as simple as wheels on luggage. People pushed luggage around on wheeled carts for decades before figuring out we should just put wheels on the damn suitcases. Insights from Taleb and Mandelbrot about tail risks and black swans are another good example of something "obvious" that it took smart people a long time to come to terms with. It's really hard to see obvious things until they are pointed out.

Somewhat of an aside, but I have found Taleb supremely frustrating - he sounded like a typical "empirics bro" making wild in-principle-statements as if hes disproven mathematics, which I rounded down to "dont be too confident in your models". It took a completely different branch of thought for me to learn about the problems of infinite variance for decision theory.

People pushed luggage around on wheeled carts for decades before figuring out we should just put wheels on the damn suitcases.

Is this true, though? Wheels are only effective if they're large relative to the bumps on the surface you're using them on. Modern wheeled luggage (2 inch wheels) is only effective on smooth, swept concrete surfaces. And those are a quite modern invention (maybe we can blame the ADA here?), at least in quantity as far as I can tell. Having once lugged a wheeled suitcase a mile on cobbled European roads, a cart would have worked better. I wouldn't even try on an unpaved road.

Yeah, wheels add volume and weight to the luggage that is not required at all times (most of the use time of luggage is spent not being wheeled around). Weight and volume that travelers pay for in one way or another. The wheels themselves, even on many expensive luggages, are of dubious quality, with little way for the customer to know whether this luggage's wheel are durable, or if they will start blocking and dragging everywhere after 3 trips.

Though my experience of wheeled luggages breaking all the time might be personal; coming from a city with a lot of snow and ice, slippery surfaces are dealt with with pebbles, sand, salts/other chemicals, which remain on streets, sidewalk and indoors floors where people come in with their outdoor shoes (airports, shopping malls, hotel lobbies) for a significant portion of the year, even after the snow and ice are gone. These wreak havoc on small wheels.

The wheels themselves, even on many expensive luggages, are of dubious quality

I've heard a theory that this was the problem: if even modern wheels are of dubious quality and capability, how much worse would they have been a hundred years ago? I'm not sure that makes sense, though. The invention of wheeled luggage is at roughly the same time the transition of roller skates from all-metal wheels to hard polymer wheels (which were lighter and smoother-rolling and less expensive), but all-metal wheels aren't that much worse in utility and they were probably better for durability. The most important invention for small wheels is ball bearing support, and that's more like 100-150 years old (at various levels of quality and expense).

The two other common theories are more situational:

Wheeled luggage came about during the expansion of mass air travel, with it's corresponding huge concourses and lack of porters. This was the first time people really had reason to want to carry their own luggage for long distances.

Wheeled luggage came about shortly after the Women's Rights Movement made it more common for women to travel on their own, and whereas a typical man would feel weak if he avoided carrying his own luggage, a typical woman would feel foolish if she didn't.

I'm not sure either of these really works either, though. Wheeled luggage was invented in 1970, but as another comment points out it didn't become popular until the 1990s. Perhaps that's because of the addition of the retractable handle (invented in 1987) finally making them more ergonomic to roll around? And maybe 17 years isn't too painfully long for someone to come up with that idea once it finally had a use case; "The Retractable Handle" isn't exactly the sort of thing you find at the start of the Civ tech tree next to "The Wheel".

I've heard a theory that this was the problem: if even modern wheels are of dubious quality and capability, how much worse would they have been a hundred years ago? I'm not sure that makes sense, though. The invention of wheeled luggage is at roughly the same time the transition of roller skates from all-metal wheels to hard polymer wheels (which were lighter and smoother-rolling and less expensive), but all-metal wheels aren't that much worse in utility and they were probably better for durability. The most important invention for small wheels is ball bearing support, and that's more like 100-150 years old (at various levels of quality and expense).

Ball Bearings have been around for a long time, but they have been improving all of that time in size, quality, reliability, and price. Just taking your example of rollerblades is pretty illustrative. I had a very good pair in high school that were pretty top of the line at the time. I played outdoor hockey all the time, blading was a pretty common date in my small town with few other places to congregate, etc. If I go to Wal Mart and try on a pair, they roll even better than those ones used to. Same with the skateboard bearings, they are cheaper and better now. By a lot.

Considering that luggage wheels have to be small to be practical, the timeline makes sense to me.

Wheeled luggage came about shortly after the Women's Rights Movement made it more common for women to travel on their own, and whereas a typical man would feel weak if he avoided carrying his own luggage, a typical woman would feel foolish if she didn't.

The typical man should still feel this way. Traveling with something like a Cotopaxi backpack is superior for the vast majority of applications to the point where I wonder how so many people got psyopped into using these unwieldy rollers that I watch them fighting to fit into overhead compartments.

I wonder how so many people got psyopped into using these unwieldy rollers that I watch them fighting to fit into overhead compartments.

This is why checked baggage will always reign supreme. I used to always fly Southwest for that very reason. No need to try to get huge bags in the overhead bin, at best I'm putting up a small tote which has a change of clothes and valuables I don't want to let out of my sight. The rest is in my big checked bag. Alas that they too have joined the legion of airlines trying to turn basic parts of the experience into an upcharge.

Even still, all this does is shift the explanation from one product to another. Backpacks have been around for a while, but they were mostly limited to outdoor and military applications. It wasn't until the 1980s that they became popular for carrying books to school, and it probably wasn't until the 2000s that you began to see them used among normal tourists who weren't going on vacations that would require them to carry everything around with them for long distances. The typical tourist or business traveler who stays in a hotel and travels by car wouldn't use one.

That being said, I own more backpacks than Imelda Marcos owns shoes, and I still use traditional wheeled luggage for most of my normal travel. Why? Because they keep clothes folded. I don't fly much so I rarely use the wheels and could probably do without them, but it's much easier to keep everything together when it's in a rigid box. I would add that I'm also the kind of person who makes use of hotel dressers and closets, despite my tendency to avoid overpacking through the realization that unless I'm going out to dinner a lot or am engaging in messy activities I'm probably going to wear more or less the same thing the entire time I'm away.

I've gotten a bit obsessed recently with the idea of one bag for travel. I got a 30L backpack I stuffed it with an absurd amount of (carefully chosen, but still far from "essential") equipment that would be enough to and it all fits very comfortably, leaving room for 3-5 days of clothing (assuming I will wear on myself the heaviest, bulkiest clothing while traveling).

And when I say an absurd amount of equipment, I mean stuff that would make any minimalist shake their head. I have a laptop, a mechanical keyboard, a folding laptop stand, a travel router, and optionally I bring a portable second monitor.

I have a hard time understanding how I ever needed checked baggage, let alone feel constrained by only having an allowance of one.

*EDIT: A sketchbook (and pencil and eraser), tons of electronic security related gizmos, a game controller, chargers and cables for everything, 2 retractable ethernet cables and 1 retractable HDMI cable... An international solution for plugging in and charging everything. I'll grant the bag is probably heavy, or so I've been told by people trying to pick it up, but while I'm not exactly in good physical shape, one thing I've always had for me is being a pack mule, the bag weighs subjectively very little to me.

absurd amount

IMO the practically available volume is the biggest advantage of using a wheel-less bag. On a standardish 22"x14"x8" (~55x35x20 cm) international carry-on size bag, one with no wheels can easily have 25% more interior volume than an identically box constrained wheeled bag. Especially those four castor bags you are losing a full 3 inches off of the bottom of the bag. People also underestimate the volume used for the collapsing handle and structure to transmit the load to the wheels.

In practice for me, this means that I can fit a "normal" amount of stuff in a max size personal item 18"x14"x8", and never have to worry about being forced to pay for a carry-on or have my bag gate checked.

People have become convinced they need all kinds of stuff to get through a vacation.

The old timey Jersey Shore slur for a lower-class tourist is a Shoebie, which comes from a time when working class people would catch a bus or train to the beach with everything they needed for the day in an old shoebox tied with string. You don't see people traveling light like that anymore.

I've noticed it in myself, I nearly always drive to my vacations, and I overpack because why not? Pretty quickly I'm packing for a weekend trip to my in-laws as though I'm going to shit my pants three times, work out three times, go to church twice, and have absolutely zero opportunity to do any laundry even in an emergency.

If you limit yourself to packing less stuff, and wearing your clothing multiple times without washing, you don't need so much bag space.

Seconding @pigeonburger, I'm not even packing light! I always have a laptop (Macbook Pro, not even a slim one) and iPad. I'll usually have two pairs of shoes in the bag (running shoes and dress shoes). Running clothes, dressier clothes for work, a hat for running, a warm hat for chilly days, and more.

I'm with you on overpacking for driving trips because it just doesn't matter - throwing another bag in the car is pretty much the same thing as doing one fewer. On flying trips though, it's just unreasonably convenient to have the soft-sided bag to avoid ever needing to even gate-check a bag. I wouldn't quite go so far as calling it a virtue to figure out travel economy, but it's something in that direction.

I'd put it under the broader virtue of Adaptability in the same way I think that having an adaptable diet is a virtue.

Be vegan or Paleo or keep keto or bread and water. That discipline is a virtue. But so is being the kind of person that can eat something anywhere without being sick. When your diet causes you to not to be adaptable to being out of your comfort zone it ceases to be a virtue and becomes a vice.

In the same way, being able to pack light is a virtue, even if doing so in every case isn't the best choice. Only being able to travel with multiple checked bags is bad, so is being the kind of person who comes to a formal wedding in cargo pants because you refused to pack anything else.

Idk I'm working on it.

Airports and train stations have always been perfect use cases for wheeled luggage, but nobody started using them until the late 90s/early 00s. I remember as a child in the early 90s every airport had huge racks of carts you could rent for $0.25 because nobody had wheels on their suitcases.

Isn't this largely a case of democratization?

Luggage before wheeled suitcases didn't look like wheeled suitcases without wheels. You had the small suitcase and the sailor's duffle bag, which were have hand mobile and held a change of clothes or two that an ordinary traveler might pack for a trip, and then you had the steamer trunk an upper class traveler would pack which was designed to be moved and stacked primarily by porters and maximized for durability when stacked in a luggage car or the belly of a ship.

The value of an individual traveler moving a large bag by themselves really only comes into play recently, with the democratization of middle class travel and the disappearance of porters. Along with people having the expectation of packing more clothing!

Every airport I've been to recently still has carts you can just pick up and use for free, and they work much better than wheeled luggage.

I'm sure luggage makers love the wheels though, because they break and make people want to buy new luggages much more often.

If you're going to be walking at all with your luggage outside the airport then carts don't help you at all. The lack of wheels only works if you're assuming a car direct from your house door to the airport and vice versa, that's very much not the case in large parts of the world (in London I'd take the Elizabeth line underground tube from Heathrow to Liverpool Street and then take a taxi from there if necessary, I wouldn't take a taxi from Heathrow back home).

Antibiotics - As far as I know, there is nothing about penicillin as an antibiotic agent that could not have hypothetically been developed and systematized 2000 years ago - this would not have required any modern technology. To be fair, there may have been ancient cultures that had an intricate knowledge of plant-derived drugs and so on that are at least relatively comparable... but to my knowledge, none of them developed something like modern antibiotics, which revolutionized the world and basically immediately did away with the whole literary genre of "lonesome poet dies at 30 from tuberculosis".

They did have something like that; using poultices and the idea that "mouldy bread is a cure" was around for a long time:

Moulds (i.e. filamentous fungi) were widely used as curative agents in all of the world’s cultures well before Fleming’s famous discovery of penicillin in 1928. Imhotep, an ancient Egyptian practitioner, for example, used mouldy bread to treat infections of the face (Wainwright et al., 1992). The literature from more recent folk medicine has documented some other examples of the use of moulds on infections. For example, mouldy jam and mouldy bread were widely used in folk-based therapy in Quebec (Canada), Devon (UK), and Kansas (USA) and poultices made from mouldy chewed barley and apple have long been used in Asia to cure surface wounds. In 1640, one of London apothecaries also advised that moulds have a curative effect when applied to infections (Wainwright, 1989).

What they did not have was Science! Or rather, the development of technology, theory and knowledge that gave us modern science. Fleming's discovery was accidental, but he was looking for it. What the ancients did not have were petri dish cultures or the means to isolate and scale up production of useful fungi and bacteria.

It's the same old story: hindsight is great for telling us how easy it is, once you already know how to do it. But even being very smart two thousand years ago will not get over the gap of "we just don't have the devices, or the tech to make the devices, or the engineering standards to make that tech". You can't speedrun growth from "baby to adult, six weeks", it has to be done incrementally.

This makes me think AI might very well be in that "it's so obvious what they were looking at in hindsight" department. We're so obviously bumbling around with not enough of a theoretical framework for what we're building in a way that is reminiscent of pre-scientific ways.

There was that famous post that GPT-2 would have been possible with early 2000s and possibly even late 90s supercomputer compute with the right optimizations, so it language models surely count as one of these inventions.

Most insights are far easier to understand in hindsight. Personally I think as enlightenment culture sort of slowly sloughs off we will have all sorts of new discoveries, freed from the blinders of our past.

Free markets - It seems at least plausible these days to many decently intelligent people that free-ish markets (too much freedom in markets has its own problems but...) serve as a good communicator of economic information, and that this can help relatively free market economic systems at least in some cases to outcompete central planning (there are many other factors involved of course, but this is one of them...). I'm not aware of anyone having had this kind of hypothesis until a few hundred years ago. But it's the kind of idea you can explain to a decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, it's not something that requires mountains of highly specific knowledge to grasp.

I disagree on both counts.

You can find vague rumblings about something like free markets for thousands of years, we don't tend to find a fully fleshed out theory mostly because of what texts survive and what and who was politically effective and powerful throughout most of human history. It took centuries for merchants to be powerful enough to write important texts, and for enough writing to be preserved that we could read them, but you find evidence that people understood the idea of market pricing forever.

The flip side is, free markets are radically counterintuitive, and almost no one actually understands and believes in them because of their understanding. A bright 17 year old who "understands" free market superiority is just doing so in the way that a 17 year centuries before us "understood" the trinity: they can't work it out from first principles, but they can recite it.

Almost no one actually believes in free markets in the true sense, witness the recent Republican turn against the free market while still claiming to be free market true believers. Every government thinks price controls will work for them, just this one time. Every government believes that just a few subsidies and tax benefits here and there can build an industry. Surrendering fully to the impersonal evolutionary logic of the market is near impossible for most people. When you talk to people, almost no one can truly grok that it's all by accident, they point to designs, to national or international planners, to individual heroes; they have trouble emotionally comprehending the idea that the market is made up of an infinite number of selfish actors.

Similarly with evolution, the belief in micro-evolution may be obvious, but the idea of macro-evolution from single-cell to elephant, is not at all intuitive, and requires an understanding of time scales that almost no one possesses.

And it seems worth noting that the scientific consensus only pushed for massive timescales around the time macroevolution started catching on, and animals changing from one kind to a slightly different kind has been around forever.

Good point! I didn't think about the introduction of geological time into the mix.

IIRC- I could be wrong- the Usher chronology(what most people in the anglosphere think of when they hear 'young earth creationism'- there are other chronologies based on biblical literalism, this is just the most popular. Eastern christianity has usually thought the earth about a thousand years older, for example) was actually criticized when first introduced for being longer than the earth was usually understood to be.

Every government thinks price controls will work for them, just this one time.

The rationing systems during WWII I think were a success.

Every government believes that just a few subsidies and tax benefits here and there can build an industry.

And they are sometimes right.

Free markets are a tool. They are not ideology. They are not a goal. What governments don't understand is that to have price control you have to manipulate demand and supply one way or another for them to match at the price you want.

The rationing systems during WWII I think were a success.

Yes, but the objectives of the market change between war and peacetime in highly relevant ways.

A market has no objectives aside from matching buyers and sellers.

Free markets

I suspect the reason free markets took so long to catch on is that the most valuable commodity in human history does not respond particularly well to free markets - namely, annual staple crops.

An ideal free market good is fungible and does not spoil, easy to transport, and has flexible supply and demand. Excess goods on the market can be absorbed through lower prices and reduced production, while deficiencies spur increased production through higher prices, resulting in rapid recalibration towards efficient prices for the good.

Staple crops are obviously not like this at all. They spoil fairly rapidly if overproduced (mostly through pests eating them), and excess food is worthless at any price - a person can really only carry so much fat on them. Meanwhile, underproduction is a literal life-and-death affair, and bringing the goods to market a few months late is going to be less profitable, because everyone involved is dead. To reap crops you need to sow them well in advance, and even when you do, you really have very little control over what is produced (good year? Bad year? Who knows?). Even with all that in mind, most people are self-producing anyway, so the “market” would only be skilled labor and up, which is what, under 10% of the population? Finally, they’re really not efficient to transport on anything but a boat, and even then it’s somewhat risky and therefore expensive business.

So the right model for staple crops is a lot less free market and a lot more risk mitigation. Most of that risk mitigation is decentralized, but central authorities were very interested in helping out, like the Roman dole or the Egyptian granaries. Either way, there’s more demand for theory on agriculture, harvests, and models of good and bad kingship than for free markets, and that’s exactly what we get for most of history.

It’s only once advances in European sail coincide with the durable products of flexible industrial manufacturing to create new centers of value that the free market becomes a more relevant abstraction, and just at that point, the theory emerges to explain why merchant powers are dominating the old land-bound interests. C’est la vie. (I’m sure the spice trade factors in too.)

Prediction markets were probably viable as soon as the first stock exchange was established in 1602. But Robin Hanson did not invent them until 1988, and they are still mostly illegal. If humanity ever gets it act together, we are going to be kicking ourselves for a long time.

(Okay, yes, the idea relies on the efficient market hypothesis, which wasn't really popularized until 1970, but people had already noted that the market was unpredictable as early as 1900. The core insight of "market movement is unpredictable because the current price of an asset already incorporates everyone's best guess about its future value" took a surprisingly long time.)

As far as historical examples, we can add the printing press (much better than scribes), the codex (much better than scrolls), Arabic numerals with a dedicated zero symbol (much better than Roman numerals), and the alphabet (much better than logographs; looking at you, China).

They did. They were called insurance markets. See this 1907 article in the New York Times titled The Greatest Gambling House in the World. It outlines how since the company's founding the legitimate marine insurance business has been walled off from the "prediction market" aspect, which was wholly underwritten by individual members.

It's an interesting question of why the Chinese never switched to an alphabet. The Egyptians invented it(that's what demotic script is). The Koreans invented it. The Japanese derived a sort-of alphabet from the same script, even.

As far as I know, writing was invented independently in Egypt, Sumer, China, and the Maya. Egyptian and Sumerian writing became alphabets in regular use, Chinese writing was developed into an alphabet multiple times but not used that way in the heartland, and Mayan writing was replaced by Spanish before the question could come up.

They have lots of languages in China. Most Chinese people historically didn't speak Mandarin and had no use for Mandarin speech transcribed one phoneme at a time. Characters that mean entire words are quite useful as a common written language in a nation that is so pluralistic that most people lack a common spoken language with people outside of their local region.

This is true even in the modern era. Chairman Mao learned Mandarin as an adult and it shows in his strange accent and phrasing. Like almost everyone, he grew up speaking his local language, not a common national language. But any text written by any Chinese person would be understood by him.

Today Chinese schools demand students speak the common language in class. Outside of school many still speak in local languages which are entirely different than Mandarin. I've seen shanghaiese people switch to shanghaiese to prevent people from other regions and foreigners from understanding them. Rudely right in front of everyone obviously talking about us.

But yeah, bit odd they didn't think to also make a phoneme based script so they could write out their local languages. I was going to say they actually have that, but Google tells me that was invented in the 20th century. And even the Koreans had periods in which hangul was banned and all writing was mandatory Chinese only.

It's an interesting question of why the Chinese never switched to an alphabet.

My take is that it allowed mutual intelligibility between various Sinitic languages. You can have a man speaking Mandarin write a text and a man speaking only Cantonese or Wu will be able to read it. It will sound weird, like German translated into English word-for-word (yesterday is a female patient in the clinic come that such fear before tooth doctors had that she during the examination to scream begun has then upstood and out the building run is), but it will be legible. Without it a unified China would've been very unstable.

Now that everyone is taught Mandarin it might be easier to switch to bopomofo, but this would separate the newer generations from China's massive literary legacy.

I'm confused. Prediction markets are a re-codification of a bunch of already-existing markets and are more 'a proposal to try and regear betting exchanges' than they are anything essentially new.

and they are still mostly illegal

In the US. Licensed bookmakers in the UK can take bets on almost anything - betting on election results and royal baby names has been commonplace since well before 1988 - Robin Hanson did not invent prediction markets, and knows this. The commentariat on www.politicalbetting.com was the place to find the best non-partisan discussion of UK politics in the heyday of the OG blogosphere. I do not think that the existence of liquid prediction markets on UK politics (particularly after the foundation of Betfair reduced the large bid-ask spreads implied by dealing with a traditional bookmaker) has delivered the kind of benefits that US boosters of prediction markets expect.

My gut feeling is that the reason why prediction markets are currently the cool thing in non-leftist rationalist culture is:

  • There were two close elections in the US (2016 and 2024) where biased pundits mis-represented the polls (which said the election was too close to call) and implied that the Democrat was well ahead. Prediction markets outperformed the pundits to a much larger degree than they outperformed honest polling aggregators like Nate Silver.
  • Cryptobros looking for a less obviously anti-social use case for crypto than scams, ponzi schemes and ransomware.

Antibiotics - As far as I know, there is nothing about penicillin as an antibiotic agent that could not have hypothetically been developed and systematized 2000 years ago

If this had happened, would we know? What if overuse caused antibiotic resistance and caused it to be abandoned?

I'm not saying I believe this, I just find it interesting to ponder.

Natural selection

I seem to recall that the idea of common descent (which might imply or include natural selection?) was known to the ancient Greeks. I don't recall the details, though!

What if overuse caused antibiotic resistance and caused it to be abandoned?

AFAICT, antibiotic resistance is likely to be a big problem with STD's in the near future, and is a minor problem with certain skin diseases in the present(think staph, athletes foot, etc), but it probably won't be a problem with other diseases because the actual mechanisms for antibiotic resistance are mostly fitness reducing in a vacuum.

Song China was relatively free market over 1000 years ago. And yes, this led to them having much more prosperity for everyone than either the dynasty before or after them.

There are also pretty well founded arguments that periods in the Roman Empire had - especially in Rome proper - relatively free markets for many goods and to some extent land. Market capitalism in various forms has existed for at least a couple of thousand years.

The importance of status and peer judgment for promoting behavior. Outside of the workplace, there are few social contexts that try to guide or optimize behavior by consciously and meticulously allocating status. Especially not in a rigorous way to curb antisocial behavior.

Institutional cycles of growth and decay. To some extent of course people were writing about this in 'Decline of the West' and 'Hard times -> Strong men' but the knowledge hasn't widely circulated. Management of large organizations is still generally awful, there is no science of good management, only vague notions and a few people who have some opaque skill at doing it.

Also state-sponsored eugenics isn't exactly a new idea... but nobody does it. It's not that complicated to gather the smartest, most agentic, most capable men and women and encourage them to marry and raise many children, or collect sperm, let alone direct genetic modification. But not a single state is interested in this, everyone prefers to pour trillions of dollars and billions of child-hours into education where the returns are dubious in many cases.

Institutional cycles of growth and decay. To some extent of course people were writing about this in 'Decline of the West' and 'Hard times -> Strong men' but the knowledge hasn't widely circulated.

Within my church (Latter-day Saint i.e. Mormon) this has been common knowledge among members for almost 200 years. One of the main themes of the Book of Mormon is what we call the "pride cycle." People follow God and are blessed with peace and prosperity, their prosperity causes them to forget God and become prideful in their own accomplishments (instead of giving the credit to God), and this causes them to be brought low by God (whether through external invasion by the Lamanites, internal dissent/civil war, or other things like famine etc.).

These ideas are also present in the Bible (Deuteronomy 11 is one of the better examples) but the nature of the cycle is far more explicit in the Book of Mormon.

Ibn Khaldun and Carol Zimmerman have also derived this from historical studies.

Calculus - You can teach this to any decently intelligent 17 year old kid nowadays, but, while there were some remarkably close predecessors to it in ancient Greece (the method of exhaustion), it was not formalized as a rigorous concept and method until about the 18th-19th centuries.

Calculus doesn't become low-hanging fruit until you have co-ordinate geometry. Descartes publishes La Geometrie in 1637 and Newton publishes Principia in 1687. In between you have a lot of work that develops calculus - most notably Barrow's proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus in 1670. (Barrow is conventionally listed in academic genealogies as Newton's PhD-supervisor equivalent.) The first analysis proof that is considered rigorous by modern standards was Rolle's theorem in 1690 and the first important result in analysis is Taylor's theorem in 1715. That is a much faster development than implied by your post, although I suppose you can argue that something that should have taken years took decades.

But that just pushes the problem back a step. Co-ordinate geometry was low-hanging fruit for the 1800 years between Apollonius and Descartes. I think the explanation here is that mathematics got stuck on a local maximum. Apollonius developed the classical geometry of conic sections to the point where (for the few people able to master it) it was more powerful than co-ordinate geometry without calculus. There is also a weird status thing going on. The mathematical brain finds co-ordinate geometry ugly and hackish. As late as the 1990's, part of an old-school mathematical education was the idea that submitting a correct co-ordinate geometry proof when a classical one was available would get you full marks and the lasting scorn and derision of the examiner. In the 17th century, this was compounded by the problem that calculus arguments (though not co-ordinate geometry without calculus) could not be made as mathematically rigorous as geometric ones because modern analysis hadn't been developed yet. Barrow lectured on co-ordinate geometry (that's how Newton learned it) but he published on classical geometry (he started his career as a classicist and his work that was most prestigious in his own lifetime was new translations of the great Greek geometers). Both Barrow and Newton published work that to modern eyes was clearly done using co-ordinate geometry and pre-calculus, but was re-derived using classical geometry for respectable publication.

Antibiotics - As far as I know, there is nothing about penicillin as an antibiotic agent that could not have hypothetically been developed and systematized 2000 years ago - this would not have required any modern technology. To be fair, there may have been ancient cultures that had an intricate knowledge of plant-derived drugs and so on that are at least relatively comparable... but to my knowledge, none of them developed something like modern antibiotics, which revolutionized the world and basically immediately did away with the whole literary genre of "lonesome poet dies at 30 from tuberculosis".

Fleming's original discovery could have been made by anyone, but actually synthesizing penicillin in useful quantities required (in our timeline) modern industrial chemistry. I think it could have been done 50-100 years earlier if alt-Fleming takes his discovery to the brewing industry (the hard part is growing fungus cleanly on a carbohydrate feedstock) rather than pharma, but not before that.

It makes me wonder what kinds of insights might be lying around these days, which future generations, if we do not discover them, might wonder what took us so long.

I think the physical sciences have been picked pretty clean by now - my best guess of where to look next is that there could be simple models of the human brain that will be obvious in hindsight to someone with access to 2050's neuroscience and psychology that isn't neutered by political biases, but that could be discovered today.

It is a small local example, but the discovery of superconductivity in MgB2 in 2001 was an example of unpicked low-hanging fruit in solid-state physics - the stuff had been available in obscure chemical catalogues since the 1950's but nobody had tested it for superconductivity.

I think the explanation here is that mathematics got stuck on a local maximum. Apollonius developed the classical geometry of conic sections to the point where (for the few people able to master it) it was more powerful than co-ordinate geometry without calculus.

Interestingly enough Spengler (himself a math teacher) had this as one of his illustrations of the difference between classical and faustian mentality. I have found this to be a great unintentional illustration of the idea.

As late as the 1990's, part of an old-school mathematical education was the idea that submitting a correct co-ordinate geometry proof when a classical one was available would get you full marks and the lasting scorn and derision of the examiner.

Funnily enough classical geometry can be made to admit a coordinate system over it so both classical and (basic) coordinate geometry are effectively isomorphic in the sense that C++ and Conway's game of life are isomorphic (both are Turing Complete). Both classical and coordinate geometry have a proof theoretic ordinal of omega and even more there's actually a canonical way to convert statements of coordinate geometry to statements of classical geometry and vice versa so it's not even like using coordinate geometry when there's a classical geometry proof is like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Both theories are equally powerful in what they can do, it's just that the coordinate geometry formalism is easier to build upon which in my view makes it superior.

(Can you tell I hated the geometry problems in olympiads?)

Funnily enough classical geometry can be made to admit a coordinate system over it so both classical and (basic) coordinate geometry are effectively isomorphic in the sense that C++ and Conway's game of life are isomorphic (both are Turing Complete).

The cry of the Intercal programmer. Whether classical geometry corresponds to Intercal and co-ordinate geometry to Python or the other way round is let as an exercise to the interested reader.

(Can you tell I hated the geometry problems in olympiads?)

So did I, but then I don't claim to be a mathematician.

I never did figure out why classical geometry was given such place in our high school curriculum. It seemed that any time I wanted to actually use geometry for anything, it was strictly better to use coordinate geometry and trigonometry. Then again, I still consider proofs to be a waste of time unless you want to study mathematics for its own sake.

And it took a good twenty years to figure that out, the first large scale use of antibiotics didn’t start until 1944.

Thanks for this deep analysis, much of which I don't have the scientific background to understand. If I may ask, why would it take modern industrial chemistry to synthesize penicillin in useful quantities? I suppose that I have been wrong in thinking that it could be synthesized by pre-modern techniques?

Edit: I should also note that to me, a dabbler in mathematics, this survey of mathematical thought-trends and their impact on the history of mathematics is fascinating.

I'm not the relevant expert, but my understanding is that it is basically just scaling. You need a clean culture of penicillium mold (in optimal culture conditions other species of molds, most of them toxin-producing, outcompete it), and you need enough of it to produce enough penicillin to extract and use. Florey had a cottage industry set up in his lab with a low-double-figures number of labtechs making the stuff, and was not able to produce enough penicillin to run a clinical trial.

I recently watched a video of a guy making penicillin. Unless I'm really missing something I don't see how you could safely produce it at any sort of reasonable scale without countless advancements in in dozens of fields from glassmaking, chemistry, genetics, germ theory, etc. Even with the knowledge of the 1930s it took them two decades from discovery to use it effectively.

Shoot, maybe I really underestimated how hard it is to do this.

I've had this fantasy of traveling a thousand years into the past and trying to teach monks and engigneors modern technology with just my layman's understanding. I was pretty much going to try experimenting with feeding moldy bread to dudes with the bubonic plague.

Welp... if I ever get a time machine I guess I won't be doing that.

You could write a whole genre of fiction about that.

The destiny's crucible series by Olan Thorensen is like this. The writing is not amazing but if you don't care too much about that it scratches that kind of itch.

You can introduce the spinning wheel, four field system, new world crops, and printing press and see big QoL improvements though.

I've had this fantasy of traveling a thousand years into the past and trying to teach monks and engigneors modern technology with just my layman's understanding. I was pretty much going to try experimenting with feeding moldy bread to dudes with the bubonic plague.

Just try to get everyone to wash their damn hands and you're golden.

That is not how the plague spread- the plague, typhus, etc are spread by fleas carried by rodents. As it turns out, most people don't like drinking dirty water or eating with dirty hands for 'ew' reasons, even without germ theory.

It's possible that the premodern custom of controlling cat populations by killing them for sport was an exacerbating factor to the plague, but rat and mouse overpopulation also kinda just happens in densely packed slums.

Hard to do when everyone is shitting in the water supply.

Better be careful it's the right sort of mould; not just useful penicillin grows on stale bread, the wrong species of aspergillus will make you very sorry you tried it. And again, without the theoretical knowledge and tech to identify "is this blackish mould the right one or not?", you're taking a big chance.

Some Aspergillus species cause serious disease in humans and animals. The most common pathogenic species are A. fumigatus and A. flavus, which produces aflatoxin which is both a toxin and a carcinogen, and which can contaminate foods such as nuts. The most common species causing allergic disease are A. fumigatus and A. clavatus. Other species are important as agricultural pathogens. Aspergillus spp. cause disease on many grain crops, especially maize, and some variants synthesize mycotoxins, including aflatoxin. Aspergillus can cause neonatal infections.

Off the top of my head:

Computer algorithms. I consider this basically the new literacy.

Quantum Physics: I firmly believe we’ll have a pretty good idea how it all works, probably by 2050.

I’ll agree with the idea of dietary guidelines being much better than now, but I don’t think it’s that we have absolutely no idea how it works so much is that nobody actually likes the results. Food manufacturers do not want to hear and the public doesn’t like. Basically the solution is to eat mostly vegetables with meat and starches being about a quarter of the meal each. Eat as minimally processed as you can, and avoid refined carbs. It’s not that we’re stupid, it’s that we don’t like that kind of food, and billions are made catering to what people want even though we know it’s bad.

Computer algorithms. I consider this basically the new literacy.

I took a first-year Computer Science course ten-ish years ago, and at the end the prof said: "If you went back in time 50 years with what you know now, you'd be one of the most knowledgeable Computer Scientists alive."

We were doing simple things like algorithmic complexity, sorting algorithms, linked lists, binary trees, and object-oriented programming (and did conditions, loops, control flow, etc. in the previous class), and...he might not have been exaggerating. A lot of the things we learned were discovered/created in the past 50 years, and they aren't just minor pieces of trivia.

What part of quantum physics do you think isn’t understood? Quantum mechanics is the foundation of modern physics so much so that it seems very mundane by the time you're done with grad school. It's not only the relevant to what's going on in physics-y things like colliders and quantim computers but it's the basis of our understanding of the properties of materials, chemical reactions, MRI, transistors, and geckos' feet.

There are two pieces of quantum mechanics that don't quite mesh with other things we know about reality. The first is quantum gravity, which the physics community thought was just around the corner for decades, and which now I think most people feel we aren’t going to definitively answer until we can probe significantly higher enery scales to be certain which of the possible approaches is correct. Most people don't really expect this to change what we understand about the way quantum mechanics works (which you can derivce from classical physics plus the uncertainty principle). I fully do not believe that quantum gravity will be figured out by 2050, because it hasn't happened in the last 80 years, and we've been stuck at the "maybe string theory?" stage for about 50.

The second "missing piece" is related to decoherence and wave function collapse. It's weird the extent to which certain parts of the community think this is a solved problem by just hand-waving it all as decoherence. But a diagonal density matrix isn't the same as picking one specific outcome, and so you need something like many worlds (which actually has a significant problem in that probabilities don't emerge correctly, which is generally also ignored) to ensure everone only sees one outcome.

I don't expect this to be solved by 2050 either because A) vanishingly few people seem to care B) the answer doesn’t affect much of anything C) most hypothetical sutions are untestable even in principal (some involve non linearities or relationships between mass and collapse rate that are testable in principal, but I think most of those have been ruled out).

I think dietary science is an open field for this. 60 years of scientists bumbling around about monosaturaded vs polysatured fats, or whether carbs are good this year. How long to fast, when to eat a big meal, etc.

Reminds me of the per-rigerous calculus days, and one day a bright 17 year old with a simple model would find all our scientists embarrassingly naive

Yeah, the entire field of dietary science always reminds me of the factoid that Aristotle thought men had more teeth than women - and then the entire "scientific" establishment believed that for several centuries without ever just... checking.

Hopefully, it'll turn out that we can just measure this. Take a couple of hundred people on a retreat and count what you feed them.

Aristotle thought men had more teeth than women

I wonder if part of that was from the old idea that "you lose a tooth for every child". Lack of proper nutrition means the developing foetus leeches nutrients from the mother's body, and if you're an ancient empiricist and you go about counting the teeth of women of child-bearing age versus men in the same age range, it's entirely possible you might end up with "men have more teeth than women".

Childbearing has an impact on the health of women, and the impact grows with the number of times a woman has been pregnant for longer than 24 weeks. Pregnancy and breastfeeding put energy demands on a woman and can cause permanent changes to a mother’s health.

What’s less well known is the relationship between parity and oral health. That’s despite a widespread customary belief that having an increasing number of children results in tooth loss. “Gain a child, lose a tooth”, or “for every child, a tooth is lost” are common proverbs in many societies. The biological basis of these beliefs is still questioned.

There are few studies on parity and tooth loss. In addition, the available results are inconsistent. Nevertheless, increasing number of children in women has been associated with tooth loss in some populations, as seen in studies in Uganda and the US.

Yeah, there's several theories like that. It's also possible he counted including wisdom teeth - because women are statistically more likely to never have (some of) their wisdom teeth break through.

The point is, he (and his followers across the centuries) evidently never just counted the teeth (or the tooth gaps) of people.

There is also some variance in wisdom teeth: most people have 4, but other numbers happen from time to time. I know some family members of mine had only 2 or 3. More than 4 is possible too.

We've been doing detailed studies for 80 years!

And we still have this deep confusion about whats going on. Citing an old SSC post:

In 1965, some scientists locked people in a room where they could only eat nutrient sludge dispensed from a machine. Even though the volunteers had no idea how many calories the nutrient sludge was, they ate exactly enough to maintain their normal weight, proving the existence of a “sixth sense” for food caloric content.

Next, they locked morbidly obese people in the same room. They ended up eating only tiny amounts of the nutrient sludge, one or two hundred calories a day, without feeling any hunger. This proved that their bodies “wanted” to lose the excess weight and preferred to simply live off stored fat once removed from the overly-rewarding food environment. After six months on the sludge, a man who weighed 400 lbs at the start of the experiment was down to 200, without consciously trying to reduce his weight.

Yeah, this confusion is kind of my point. The lipostat hypothesis is still a bit controversial after 80+ years. If a "set point" for weight truly exists somewhere in the system, it's still not clear what raises this set point, and why lowering it again seems extremely difficult.

There's plenty of studies that indicate that once the set point has been raised, it can't be easily lowered again. This is, funnily enough, contradictory to your 1965 study (unless the 400 lbs -> 200 lbs guy was short, and 200 lbs was still obese). Or maybe only more modern food additives raise the set point permanently? I don't think we know, and almost nobody (relative to how important those questions are) seems to actually test things on large groups of people.

Some other Scott quotes. From "Book Review: Good Calories, Bad Calories":

The failure of small dietary changes to produce major changes in weight suggests something more complicated is going on.

Nutritionists tend to scoff at the idea that weight is anything beyond a simple calories in - calories out balance, and for understandable reason. The First Law of Thermodynamics, that mass/energy can neither be created nor destroyed, means that food mass/energy has to go somewhere. If you put it in your body, either you burn it for exercise or it stays in your body and becomes fat. This is why smug people sometimes say that they're following "the physics diet" of eating less and exercising more as opposed to thinking diet pills or fad diets can do much good. Fancy biochemistry stuff has nothing to do with it, mere sophistry on the part of people who claim to have "bad metabolisms" in the same way people used to say they were "big boned".

But even my limited amount of medical knowledge is enough to know this isn't true. There are a bunch of diseases - Prader-Willi Syndrome, hypothyroidism, hypothalamic lesions - that cause obesity. There are even drugs you can take that cause obesity - some of the antipsychotics are famous for this. And by playing around with mice genes, you can get anything from disgusting spherical mice to mice that look like they just got out of a concentration camp, even if they're all feeding out of the same bowl of Mouse Chow.

The book's solution - which I think is pretty standard now - is to say that yes, fat has to follow the laws of thermodynamics, but thermodynamics doesn't specify what is controlling the equation. It could be that your diet and exercise are controlling the weight gain. Or it could be that some innate tendency to weight gain is controlling the amount you diet and exercise.

And it seems to be some combination of the two. Realistically, I know not everything is determined by some mysterious inner process - sometimes I just see a cupcake, and want it, and eat it, and I know my having eaten it is determined completely by the fact that I happened to come across it at that moment and no one was watching (obviously a mysterious inner process could have prevented me from eating it by making me feel really full, but that's different). On the other hand, I accept that a lot of the time I eat things it's because my body is telling me I'm hungry, and a lot of the time I don't eat things it's because my body is telling me I'm full, and a lot of the time I exercise it's because my body is telling me I'm antsy, and so on.

So the idea is of an obesity set point. If you get fatter than your body's hidden set point, it makes you a little less hungry and more willing to exercise until you get back down. If you get leaner than your body's hidden set point, it makes you a little hungrier and more tired until you get back up. It is subtle, complicated, and more than enough to sabotage the diet plans of nearly everyone.

Taubes' work supporting the concept of an obesity set point is really spectacular. He talked about both terrible-sounding studies where scientists forced people to subsist on starvation diets, and fun-sounding studies where scientists forced people to eat as many sundaes as they could stuff into their faces. In both cases, people went to desperate lengths to return to their previous weight, and felt absolutely miserable when denied the opportunity (these studies disproportionately came from the military - in every other setting, people just gave the scientists the finger and broke the study rules after a few days). And this happened whether or not the subjects were fat or thin - it wasn't like being fat provided a "buffer" where you were okay with a semi-starvation diet while your fat burned, you were just as desperate to return to your (high) set point as your thin friend was to return to her (lower) one.

This was accompanied by fascinating animal experiments where they would try to trick rats. Suppose a rat usually ate a 10 calorie diet. They would try to trick the rat by giving it a food that looked and tasted exactly like its old food, but was ten times as calorically dense; the rat would eat a tenth as much food and maintain its weight. If they gave it a food that was only a tenth as calorically dense, the rat would eat ten times as much - and maintain its weight. If they surgically stuck food into the rat's stomach, the rat would eat exactly as much additional food as was necessary to maintain its accustomed caloric input and its weight.

So people (and rats) are really good at maintaining their obesity set point. How come some people have higher set points than others, and why does this change over time?

And from "Contra Hallquist On Scientific Rationality":

Taubes believes the human body is good at regulating its own weight via the hunger mechanism. For example, most Asian people are normal weight, despite the Asian staple food being rice, which is high-calorie and available in abundance. Asians don’t get fat because they eat a healthy amount of rice, then stop. This doesn’t seem to require amazing willpower on their part; it just happens naturally.

In a similar vein is one of Taubes’ favorite studies, the Vermont Prison Experiment, where healthy thin prisoners were asked to gain lots of weight to see if they could do it. The prisoners had lots of trouble doing so – they had to force themselves to eat even after they were full, and many failed, disgusted by the task. Some were able to eat enough food, only to find that they were filled with an almost irresistible urge to exercise, pace back and forth, tap their legs, or otherwise burn off the extra calories. Those prisoners who were able to successfully gain weight lost it almost instantly after the experiment was over and they were no longer being absolutely forced to maintain it. The conclusion was that healthy people just can’t gain weight even if they want to, a far cry from the standard paradigm of “it takes lots of willpower not to gain weight”.

Other such experiments focused on healthy thin rats. The rats were being fed as much rat food as they wanted, but never overate. The researchers tried to trick the rats by increasing the caloric density of the rat food without changing the taste, but the rats just ate less of it to get the same amount of calories as before. Then the researchers took the extreme step of surgically implanting food in the rats’ stomachs; the rats compensated by eating precisely that amount less of normal rat food and maintaining their weight. The conclusion was that rats, like Asians and prisoners, have an uncanny ability to maintain normal weight even in the presence of unlimited amounts of food they could theoretically be binging on.

Modern Westerners seem to be pretty unusual in the degree to which they lack this uncanny ability, suggesting something has disrupted it. If we can un-disrupt it, “just eat whatever and let your body take care of things” becomes a passable diet plan.

I sometimes explain this to people with the following metaphor: severe weight gain is a common side effect of psychiatric drug Clozaril. The average Clozaril user gains fifteen pounds, and on high doses fifty or a hundred pounds is not unheard of. Clozaril is otherwise very effective, so there have been a lot of efforts to cut down on this weight gain with clever diet programs. The journal articles about these all find that they fail, or “succeed” in the special social science way where if you dig deep enough you can invent a new endpoint that appears to have gotten 1% better if you squint. This Clozaril-related weight gain isn’t magic – it still happens because people eat more calories – but it’s not something you can just wish away either.

Imagine that some weird conspiracy is secretly dumping whole bottles of Clozaril into orange soda. Since most Americans drink orange soda, we find that overnight most Americans gain fifty pounds and become very obese.

Goofus says: “Well, it looks like Americans will just have to diet harder. We know diets rarely work, but I’m sure if you have enough willpower you can make it happen. Count every calorie obsessively. Also, exercise.”

Gallant says: “The whole problem is orange soda. If you stop drinking that, you can eat whatever else you want.”

Taubes’ argument is that refined carbohydrates are playing the role of Clozaril-in-orange-soda. If you don’t eat refined carbohydrates, your satiety mechanism will eventually go back to normal just like in Asians and prisoners and rats, and you can eat whatever else you want and won’t be tempted to have too much of it – or if you do have too much of it, you’ll exercise or metabolize it away. When he says you can “eat as much fat as you want”, he expects that not to be very much, once your broken satiety mechanism is fixed.

Taubes is wrong. The best and most recent studies suggest that avoiding refined carbohydrates doesn’t fix weight gain much more than avoiding any other high-calorie food. However, the Clozaril-in-orange-soda model, which is not original to Taubes but which he helped popularize, has further gained ground and is now arguably the predominant model among dietary researchers. It’s unclear what exactly the orange soda is – the worst-case scenario is that it’s something like calorically-dense heavily-flavored food, in which case learning this won’t be very helpful beyond current diet plans. The best-case scenario is that it’s just a disruption to the microbiome, and we can restore obese people to normal weight with a basic procedure which is very simple and not super-gross at all.

Reading those Scott quotes makes me wonder if the idea of a "set point" has just been tainted by association with low-status people, much like his observation on how Alex Jones latched onto a real environmental effect and turned "they're turning the frogs gay" into a national joke because people think he's lame.

I don't know man I think @MaiqTheTrue gets it right. We know what the best diet is (Mediterranean/Japanese diet). Mostly vegetables, some starches, fish, and a little bit of meat. It's just that no one wants to hear this. It's bad for food manufacturers because it obviates the need for their existence and most of the public wants to eat junk food or is ideologically opposed to certain elements of this diet.

Also it’s tasty but just… not as tasty as modern less healthy food. There’s a reason that as soon as Mediterranean people themselves get wealthy enough, they ditch.

I think hyper palatable foods represent a real hazard to the health of tge general population , and it’s something I think needs to be dealt with on a policy level alongside providing good public nutrition training in schools. It simply cannot be good for a nation to have 75% of the food in a typical grocery store be the highly processed hyper palatable foods that drive obesity, especially if you have them in single serve ready to eat formats that are found in every venue open to the public. America is a nation of snacking, and any place you go there will be snacks available for sale, even when it should not make sense. Do you really need to be able to buy a bag of chips (that’s actually 4 servings) at a hardware or clothing store? It’s weird to think about.

MAKE ADULTERY GREAT AGAIN

A Man's Review of Rivals by Jilly Cooper and Ask Not by Maureen Callahan, two books my wife made me read after she finished them so we could talk about them walking the dog.

Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles is a famously horny pile of romance novels, the best and most famous of which were published between the mid-80s and the mid-90s. The series is loosely connected by a series of common characters across novels, all members of British old gentry, media, arts, and show-jumping worlds. The primary theme is that everybody fucks everybody. They are constantly fucking their own and each other’s wives, girlfriends, husbands, toyboys, mistresses, daughters, sons, employees, members of parliament, friends, enemies, business partners, bosses, employees, coworkers. There’s always an animating plot around Olympic show jumping, 80s business backstabbing, competitive polo, or some other thing; but the plot just exists to throw the characters into bed in different combinations. In this case, Bad Guy Lord Tony Baddingham's television empire is up for government license, and faces off against a rival consortium of the Good Guy Rupert Campbell-Black’s scrappy band of upper class upstarts for control of the airwaves.

— Bad Laws Make Good Stories: The animating MacGuffin of Rivals is the regional television franchise for Corinium’s fictional region. The byzantine set up of the old British IBA was fairly enough explained in the book, but I had to look it up anyway because I didn’t believe that any country could run a system that tremendously stupid. England was split into regions which each had a single licensed broadcaster. Periodically, the license would be subject to a new competitive bidding process. New television companies are created and bid for the franchise of the existing broadcaster, claiming they could do a better job. Some government commission reviews the applications, trying to determine who would produce the best PBS crap as a sop to the goals of the government. The consortiums in turn put in an application pretending they are going to make all kinds of socially responsible PBS crap for the community, while privately planning to make immense amounts of money off of the limited government monopoly they’re going to be granted. The animating story here is that you have Tony Baddingham, hard charging first generation nobility and businessman, who owns Corinium which has the regional television franchise from the government. A number of Tony’s enemies (his Rivals if you will), who mostly hate Tony for a variety of personal reasons related to business society or romance, lead by Rupert Cambell-Black Declan O’Hara and Freddie I-Don’t-Remember-His-Last-Name, form a new consortium, Venturer, to try to take the franchise from Tony’s Corinium. Around this core conflict, the characters form alliances and betray them, they spend themselves into bankruptcy, and they mate. Boy, do they mate. I’ll grant this: the premise is irresistible. An absurdity of British law in the 80s creates this high stakes, cloak-and-dagger cutthroat business process; and Cooper spins it into a lost world. Eighties upper class England is as foreign and fascinating a world under Cooper’s pen as Tolkien’s Middle Earth or Rowling’s Hogwarts.

— When Does Sexuality Stop: Almost every POV character gets through at least two other POV characters. Nobody married stays loyal, for the most part spouses don’t even overly care about infidelity, the jealousy comes when your mistress fucks someone else. At most, revenge for a spouse’s affair takes the form of one’s own affair. And on balance, there’s something charming about it all. The thing I like about Rivals is that it is primarily and unapologetically about adult sexuality. The major characters are in their thirties and forties, and it is their romances that concern us. There are some teenagers and twenty somethings who hook up, some with adults, but the teenagers aren’t privileged as more attractive physically or otherwise except as specific facts about individual characters. This is mostly a book about characters firmly in middle age falling in and out of love and each other’s beds. Maybe I find that reassuring: I’m a thirty something man, so reading about women finding forty something men immensely attractive is speaking to me. Cooper’s characters are scrupulous about consent without being at all annoying about it; the rakes never cross that line, though a spot of domestic violence is presented as bad but no worse than anything else. Adultery and infidelity are bad, but not fatal, at some level they represent vitality and masculine virtue (in both men and women). Review a list of US Presidents, and the notorious philanderers land higher on the list than the prudes. FDR, Jefferson, JFK, LBJ, Clinton, Trump, Eisenhower, Reagan; all effective and important presidents, all had issues with marital fidelity. In recent years Carter, Dubya, Obama, Biden all appeared to be above suspicion with their wives; none were very effective presidents, none left much in the way of a positive legacy. Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue; adultery affirms traditional values of marriage better than promiscuous serial monogamy or divorce at the first sign of trouble.

— The Phrenology of it All: I've said about critiques of stereotypes in James Clavell’s Shogun that saying Clavell was racist against the Japanese is inaccurate, because Clavell is really a mostly extinct kind of British racist who thinks that everyone who grows up more than twenty miles from London is just a gross stereotype. Cooper is the same. The entire book is built around racial stereotyping within the white British characters, the black characters are arguably the least stereotyped by race. The core trio: Rupert, Tony, Declan are nothing but racial caricatures. Rupert Campbell-Black is tall, thin, blond, elegant. He’s described as 6’2” and 155lbs at his athletic peak. He’s old-old money, his family seat is full of first editions and rare art, he went to the best schools and loves horses and dogs and hunting. One of them probably philandered with Charles II. Lord Tony, his rival, is up-jumped bourgeoisie, his father was the first Baron, and he’s physically the opposite: darker, shorter, thicker, bull necked, muscular, his body built by a “merciless” exercise routine. Disney's casting choices de-emphasize this, most modern American readers probably miss it, indeed Jilly Cooper might not have intended it, but what we’re seeing here is the English racial caste system. Rupert is Norman descended, probably straight from a companion of William the Bastard, from Cavaliers in the English Civil War, centuries of breeding and refinement. Tony is a stereotype of a lower class Englishman, descended from mixed Celts and Anglo Saxons, with the build of a blacksmith, a Roundhead stereotype, and with the chip on his shoulder to match. Rupert’s ease and confidence to the manor born is what makes him so attractive, Tony’s arriviste's grasping need for approval is what makes him so hateful. One of the most fascinating economic studies I’ve read is that Norman descendants remain richer than those they conquered 900 years ago. This insight animates a lot of my intuitions about race, nationalism as spook, and social class. Declan O’Hara, the Irish newsman who is the third pole of the leading tripod, is creative, brilliant, great hearted…but melancholy, moody, alcoholic, incapable of managing his life without the help of his English friends and managers. Where have we heard that before? I recall one day a friend of mine, an actual honest to god Blue-Haired Liberal with tattoos to commemorate her BLM protest attendance, saying that Mexicans were all either tall and hot, or short and ugly; not realizing she was basically talking about more heavily European Northern Mexicans vs indigenous Southern Mexicans. That people who talk about race talk about the US Census categories represents a narrowing of human perception, a reduction of perception as a function of baseline skill. The American audience might not recognize the Cavalier vs Roundhead conflict at the heart of Rivals, Jilly Cooper herself might not even realize it, but it’s there.

— Recursive Attractiveness: Rupert is attractive because he is attractive. He is of course tall and blond and rich, but the women in Rutshire find him irresistible because all the other women in Rutshire find him irresistible. He’s likened to “a bad cold that everyone’s wife catches eventually.” It’s a woman writing a book for women, there’s a certain revelatory nature to it: more than anything what makes him hot is that everyone thinks he is hot.

— The show is good, but the book is better. If you liked the show, you’ll love the book.

— I had a moment of sympathy for #menwritingwomen when I read Rupert think to himself that he needed to lose weight to seduce Cameron, as he was a little soft at 6’2 175# and should diet down to 155#. Here I am at 5’11” 195, thinking, jeez Jilly Cooper must think I’m a real porker! Jilly in general is torn between making her protagonist tall, and making him a competitive horseback rider.

And now for some real life rakes: Maureen Callahan in Ask Not sets out to catalogue the women ruined by the Kennedy clan over the course of generations. She starts at old Joe Kennedy and works her way down to RFK Jr. She plays the classics: Marilyn, Chappaquiddick. She does original interviews with secretaries seduced by JFK, brings out obscure women molested by his father, surfaces accidents and incidents involving cousins that were hushed up or too small to make the historical record at all at the time. While when I read Rivals in bed, my wife noted that I would giggle occasionally at a particularly funny quip or description; when my wife read Ask Not in bed, she would periodically gasp in horror and shock at the things that Kennedys got up too.

— You don’t know how much JFK Fucked. You think you do, but you don’t. His career starts with PT 109 and Profiles in Courage, but he wound up on PT 109 because he lost his desk job in Naval Intelligence in DC after he had an affair with Inga Irvad, a Danish journalist and Nazi spy. He kept giving Jackie Chlamydia, and as a result she threatened divorce, only stepping back when old Joe offered her a million dollars not to break up the marriage. He didn’t just fuck his secretaries, he seduced college girls at campaign rallies then hired them as secretaries then shuffled them off to jobs elsewhere in DC once he only wanted to fuck them occasionally, or transferred them out of town if their fathers were important and kicked up enough of a fuss. RFK meanwhile was the MAC to JFK’s DENNIS system: when JFK was done with Marilyn Monroe and she was falling apart trying to get through to him at the white house, RFK would Move in After Completion and seduce her himself. He frequently did this with JFK’s castoffs. This was in addition to RFK fathering 10 children on his wife, Ethel, so many that they named two of them Mary. When you consider RFK Jr.’s infamous diary (covered at length here by Callahan) it almost feels like it must be genetic. Though at the same time, imagine being the famous son named for a famous father who is both sainted and famously libidinous…it must be a strange way to live.

— The Kennedy Curse: Much has been made of the Kennedy Curse. Joe Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy were wealthy and powerful and had four beautiful and talented and brilliantly educated sons, groomed for power and success from birth. Joe Jr. would die in WWII, blown up in an experimental drone aircraft bomb gone wrong. Jack was shot. Bobby was shot. Ted would be the only one to die in old age, and not without his own tragedies: a dead girl at the bottom of a river, a wife gone mad. The five daughters fared a little better: Kick died young after her husband died at war, Rosemary was lobotomized, but the other three did ok I guess. In the next generation, JFK Jr. would crash his small plane into the ocean, RFK Jr’s wife would kill herself, RFK Jr.’s brothers David died of a drug overdose and Michael in an idiotic skiing accident, Maria Shriver would be publicly cucked by her husband Ah-nold with the couple’s maid, a cousin raped and murdered a neighbor in Connecticut, two of RFK’s granddaughters would die of a drug overdose and a canoe accident respectively, Joseph P. Kennedy II crashed his jeep in Nantucket and paralyzed his girlfriend. So, yeah, a lot of bad shit happened. But when you dig through it, you start to see the seams: half of the incidents were just driving drunk, JFK Jr. wasn’t actually licensed to fly that plane, Michael Kennedy died trying to play football while skiing which they had been repeatedly told not to do, Joe Jr. died while flying an experimental suicide B-17. So much of the curse could have been avoided by doing a little less stupidity.

— How Do You Square the Circle?: I read Robert Caro’s series on LBJ, and a major part of the story is how much LBJ hated the Kennedys, and especially RFK. And Caro hates LBJ, and worships RFK. And reading Caro, I rolled my eyes a lot, at one point he talks about how RFK despised LBJ because LBJ was a liar and RFK had “an essential devotion to truth” or something like that. And I just absolutely GAGGED on that one, because how does Robert Caro of all authors not interrogate that line of thinking? Not ask what it means to have an essential devotion to honesty while also cheating on your wife with Marilyn Monroe? Not ask what it means to have an essential devotion to truth while also covering for your beloved brother’s numerous infidelities? How do we square the two RFKs, Caro’s devoted father who doted on his ten children, with Callahan’s hornball jetting to California to fuck a fallen starlet? I think you can draw a coherent set of values, a classical masculine set of values, that explains how a man can call himself a man of honor, and be seen as a man of honor by his peers, while lying to his wife about sex. This was the norm for much of history. But I’m frustrated that I so rarely find a piece on the Kennedy brothers that tries to square the circle, you have the soft focus Camelot heroic histories and you have the hit pieces. I want someone who tries to do both! We see the same, for what it’s worth, with Trump today so often. You get the turbolibs who view him as a pig-slimeball rapist; and then you get some in the MAGA crowd who will with a straight face claim that none of it ever happened and he’s a good loyal husband.

— Amateurs Talk About Strategy, Professionals Talk About Logistics: Bill Clinton famously wandered how exactly Kennedy got away with it, how he smuggled girls in and out of the White House. And the sheer scale of the operation blew my mind. I don’t have half as responsible a job as JFK, and I can’t find time to golf let alone to keep a half dozen mistresses happy and on tap. Where did he find the time? Given, he was so hot, with so much social proof, that the seduction itself doesn’t seem to have been difficult, but still: keeping them all reasonably happy, keeping track of who they were, finding time to fuck them all? Where did he find the time? And the things he did to buy off Jackie! He exclaimed after a Chanel shopping spree in the thousands “She’s breaking my God damn ass!” But he couldn’t say anything, he couldn’t afford the messy public blowup If she left him. The strategic blow by blow of the operation would be legendary.

There’s such nostalgia for the Kennedys, for that era. I have a velvet picture of JFK in my basement, in honor of my great grandmother who had it in her kitchen for forty years. But it was an era when patriots were patriots, when men were men, when presidents were hot brilliant war hero ladykillers. And somehow, I don’t know how to square that circle. Was the adultery somehow necessary? Or an inevitable side effect. I’d take JFK over Biden any day. As a president, or a golf partner, or a drinking buddy out on the bay with the sails full and the glasses half empty. But maybe never leave him alone with my wife.

I have to be honest, I've never been terribly impressed with JFK as a president. He seemed to nail the performance aspect of it, but in every other particular he was mediocre or ineffective, and being a brilliant performer without material competence behind it (it doesn't necessarily have to be yours, personally) is not a virtue for leaders.

More broadly, I am unconvinced by the Adultery Theory of Masculine Competence. I think all it tells us is that many men, given wealth and power, will leverage that to get laid. Which is... not exactly a revelation. Some successful presidents were horndogs, some were not. And vice versa.

The politics of male envy are interesting. Everyone knows how women act around sexual competition, around women more beautiful, younger, more skilled at seduction. It’s a meme, a joke, a retold story, a familiar motif. Men are more private about their envy, they redirect it, channel it in different and sometimes more subtle ways; they are more embarrassed of it, more shameful of it. One of the most interesting things you can see is a man interact with a man who has fucked his girlfriend or wife, or even with any man who has fucked more than him. There are things men yearn for but can never admit. I will refrain from further judgment, given the demographics of this forum, but I find it fascinating.

I very much enjoyed the Rivals show on Hulu (Disney+ in the UK). They advertised it very heavily here, but it did very well; everybody was talking about it.

I will refrain from further judgment, given the demographics of this forum...

I mean, posters here aren't shy about analyzing women even though we have women who participate. It seems only fair if you ladies do the same to us, so I say go for it.

Likewise, plus I think it is a fundamental piece of the puzzle that @FiveHourMarathon's op was missing - the female perspective. I didn't want to say anything in reply to five, because the op was insightful in other ways and I didn't want to put our few women on the spot, but since it's been brought up I think it would be great to talk about, because I also find it fascinating. Also you are at your rhetorical best on two subjects imo @2rafa, class and gender dynamics, I am always keen to hear what you think about them, even when I find what you say upsetting or even degrading.

JFK Jr. wasn’t actually licensed to fly that plane

The US doesn't really have licenses or endorsements for individual small aircraft (or even have that specialized training, with one singular exception, and Jr. had a complex aircraft endorsement, which is the big thing for the Saratoga (albeit for reasons not relevant here: retractable landing gear). The problem was that the man had no Instrument Flight Rules certificate, very little instrument flight experience, and flew in extremely marginal conditions over an area with very poor visual reference, taking off at the very end of civil twilight, with little moonlight, while flying east.

This was arguably legal, and remains so today, but in the same sense that throwing a football while skiing was. Doing so with multiple passengers was unforgivable, especially for a route that could have been covered by car in about five hours, plus or minus the ferry. From contemporaneous AOPA coverage of the incident:

The instructor stated that Kennedy had the ability to fly the airplane without a visible horizon but was not ready for an instrument evaluation as of July 1, 1999, and needed additional training. The CFI observed that he would not have felt comfortable with Kennedy conducting night flight operations on that route and in those weather conditions. On the day of the accident, the CFI offered to accompany them that night but Kennedy replied that "he wanted to do it alone."

This wasn't the 1970s, where spatial disorientation training was solely the providence and concern of fighter pilots, nor was it some unpredictable black swan event. Those do exist, in general aviation; losing a vacuum pump in marginal VMC is Not Fun, and it's literally run with a drive coupling that looks like a McDonald's toy and is a single point of failure. I don't like to speak ill of the dead, and I think 'stupidity' is missing a bit of the more serious failure mode, but it's a very frustrating incident.

I will caveat that on the other side nickel meme re: political assassinations.

I read Robert Caro’s series on LBJ, and a major part of the story is how much LBJ hated the Kennedys, and especially RFK. And Caro hates LBJ, and worships RFK. And reading Caro, I rolled my eyes a lot, at one point he talks about how RFK despised LBJ because LBJ was a liar and RFK had “an essential devotion to truth” or something like that.

It's also kinda hilarious given the overlap in behavior, from modern eyes. We consider massive infidelity today on the same spectrum as LBJ flopping Little Johnson out to prove a point (and LBJ had so many affairs that his wife focused more on where they were serious), but contemporaneously?

I could write just-so stories about how pre-antibiotics and pre- (or given the Catholics, non-) contraceptive spheres made sex a lot less attractive for the women these men were married to, regardless of 'normal' sex drive. Or that the aftermath of WWII's impact on gender relations busted things so broadly that an underclass of unattached women (but a lot of these affairs were with married women! sometimes, as with Monroe, married to other Kennedys!). Or that mistresses (and misters?) and such were long-standing cultural expectations for a long period in certain classes and that the real offense were the emotional stuff -- you do still get a decent amount of this in certain spheres, or cfe the early airforce not-quite-polyamory swinging.

((Maybe we're just getting representation bias, and the horniest motherfuckers in the last hundred years are the only ones whose sexuality gets these sort of writeups.))

But I dunno that any of them are 'real' answers. The tempting bit is to look at Caro instead, not just in finding the contrast from infidelity and honestly different than you or I, but that what he consider 'essential devotion' isn't what you or I would. The contrast isn't LBJ; it's Moses.

Where did he find the time? Given, he was so hot, with so much social proof, that the seduction itself doesn’t seem to have been difficult, but still: keeping them all reasonably happy, keeping track of who they were, finding time to fuck them all? Where did he find the time?

I wonder where they found or find the balls. Money can cover a lot of problems, as can power; affairs that are to mistresses what escorts are to prostitution doesn't completely remove the time complexity, but it drops it down to an 0(3-5).

But much of this was pre-Viagra (approved 1998). No matter how willing the spirit might get, or how much abstention from jorking it might back things up, there's a certain point where the flesh is weak and spongy. Instead:

It was a hectic month for Kennedy, who traveled to ­Toronto, Louisiana, and Washington, DC — and listed at least one woman’s name on 22 different dates, including 13 consecutive days.

I get that I've got a weird drive, but on the other extreme I know guys who literally optimize their lives and lifestyles for convention orgies, (often don't have to worry as much about refractory periods for it), and have far greater access to willing holes and/or poles willing to meet up for sex and nothing else. Not my thing, but I can definitely understand the Braeburned interest. And they (cw: extremely gay) aren't as heavily sexed as these guys. Like, what the literal fuck.

RE: JFK Jr.

Your writeup is more accurate, I simplified what was an extensive discussion in the book because my comment was already far too long.

But I think you also have to look at getting into that plane in terms of a broader pattern of behaviors. He came close to death on cockamamie adventures like that several times before. He was still recovering from broken bones sustained when he had crashed another aircraft, he was still using crutches immediately before the flight. He had a history of doing things like kayaking into the open ocean and being blown miles from his intended route. His wife begged him not to fly, saying it was too risky, and he insisted. It's within that context that making a reckless decision to fly a plane in bad conditions goes from iffy to pretty stupid and symptomatic of his himbo lifestyle to that point.

RE: RFK Jr. Sex Diary Entries

RFK Jr. listed each woman with a scale of 1-10 with "10" being "full intercourse." Given that ten steps is a lot of intermediate levels to get to before intercourse, "1" must have been a relatively mild transaction, perhaps a kiss or even a flirtation. So all the women he listed interactions with each day weren't necessarily women he had sex with at that time. Perhaps my wife will finally succeed in locating a scan of the diary, and then we can do a better investigation without the NYP in the middle!

RE: Physical Stamina

The Coolidge Effect probably does a lot of work to get you to stand at attention when you're constantly rotating through many partners. That and the expectations he was playing to were very different: fuck a refractory period, Jack got one into the secretary and rolled off and went back to work. The idea of going many times with the same woman each night was for freaks or the French. I find the contrasts of what we call normal and what they call normal fascinating.

I read Robert Caro’s series on LBJ, and a major part of the story is how much LBJ hated the Kennedys, and especially RFK. And Caro hates LBJ, and worships RFK. And reading Caro, I rolled my eyes a lot, at one point he talks about how RFK despised LBJ because LBJ was a liar and RFK had “an essential devotion to truth” or something like that.

I think Caro is very critical of LBJ, but I am not sure "hates" is the right word. In his own interviews, he says he admires and is fascinated by LBJ. Of course he's also very critical of him and one of the things that makes his monumental biography so much better than most is that it's not particularly flattering (having read a lot of presidential biographies now, I think it's hard for most biographers to avoid sympathizing with their subject). But it's hard to see a 4+ volume magnum opus being motivated entirely by hate. (OTOH, I think Caro probably does hate Robert Moses.)

I don't remember the exact line you are referring to, but my impression from volume four is that Caro probably does view RFK through a political lens and cares less about his sexual misdeeds. As you say, many politicians have been honorable and principled while not extending that to their marital relations. Reinforcing this is Caro's general blind spot in this area: he certainly talks about LBJ's affairs, but is far less critical of them (almost treating him as a horny rascal with Ladybird being a long-suffering but complicit wife) than he is of his electoral hijinks or his political dealings or his failures on race issues. Caro cares a lot about politicians' politics, and not so much about them screwing around.

(OTOH, I think Caro probably does hate Robert Moses.)

Much of my criticism of Caro in his work on LBJ comes from a sense that he could have done better. Given The Power Broker is arguably in the pantheon of great non-fiction books of all time, so it's an unfair standard to hold him to. The Years of Lyndon Johnson series is brilliant, but I notice repeated tendencies to show LBJ's enemies in soft focus. He takes great care to puncture every myth ever told about LBJ, in minute detail; if LBJ lied about what he ate for breakfast Caro is there with the diner menu saying he couldn't possible have ordered eggs AND oatmeal. On the other hand, LBJ's rivals are often given maximum charity. Coke Stevenson was the first eye-roller for me, he gets this "honest country lawyer who studied by lamplight on the trail next to his ox-cart" thing, with not a scandal in sight. RFK is the next, with his "devotion to truth" or whatever it was. And I'd just love to see an author like Caro, who clearly has room to run in terms of pagecount, explore that kind of thing! I want to know LBJ's scandals, and ALSO the scandals of the men he ran against.

The Power Broker worked so well because it followed a track of "Robert Moses as Hero," "Robert Moses as God," "Robert Moses as the Devil" through the three volumes. His LBJ work, by contrast, seems to throw periodic episodes of heroism in among endless incidences of cupidity. So I get what you're saying that...

Caro cares a lot about politicians' politics, and not so much about them screwing around.

But I want to hear Robert Caro, brilliant writer, justify that philosophical choice! Because I think such an examination would be interesting and have a lot to say about the world, and I can't seem to find it anywhere. The coverage of the sainted martyr Kennedys run into either hagiography or hit piece, with little balanced intelligent effort to understand the fullness of their characters. Robert Caro may be one of the few writers who truly could explore that contrast between RFK, pious Catholic fighter for truth and the little guy and devoted family man, with RFK, philandering unserious dilletante scion of a corrupt political dynasty.

As is become habitual for you, excellent writeup.

The problems for the "hot brilliant war hero ladykillers" archetype gets complicated with details, scale, and scale's inverted cousin, depth. Let's approach this from a few angles.

"1. We want strong men. Warriors!"

I do bemoan the fact that Congress is now only 5% or so military veterans. And, of that, an elevated amount are non-combat veterans (this in a nation coming off of 20 straight years of deployed warfare). And isn't masculinity in crisis? Shouldn't we have more ass-kicking real life G.I. Joe's on Capitol Hill?!

Well thank god for the likes of Eli Crane, Dan Crenshaw, and Marcus Luttrell! Not exactly. These guys are all former SEALs. They're badass credentials are unimpeachable. And they're wildly ineffective in congress. This is not only objective but obvious. One of my favorite examples is Eli Crane who for some reason decided to go on record with a gossip columnist for politico. This is bizarre. Politico is a DC specific news outlet that covers the "deep inside baseball" of Congress and The White House. Their reports are often ex-communications junior staffers and they live and die by their connections to politicians and their offices. There's a lot of quid pro quo and handshake deals. To be en effective politician, you have to know how to handle the press. You can't be too coy, you can't be an open book.

The one thing you don't do is go on record, multiple times, talking shit about your colleagues personal lives. It doesn't matter the party affiliation. There are 530+ members of Congress with complex networks of personal friendships, loyalties, and favors. Saying crazy shit about each other's policy positions is totally fair game, but you don't tell a reporter - on record, cited by name - "yeah, actually, that person drinks too much." This is because it will then be impossible to get anything done because no one wants to spend time with or trust you - you might dime them randomly in a gossip column.

But Eli Crane isn't thinking this way because Eli Crane is a SEAL. That's a hypermasculine world where everyone talks shit about everyone all the time. If there's a real problem it is handled directly and head on - "hey, bro, you and me slug it out in the parking lot." That was his professional calibration for years. And I am very happy we have thousands of other men like him on our side with their guns pointed in the other direction. But the job of "warrior" today (in the most traditional sense -- being an Air Force cyber general doesn't quite relate) is a hyper-specialized role because today's true warriors are the best in history; they are in the best physical shape, with the longest and most rigorous training, with an insane level of technological proficiency, and a support structure that costs billions of dollars.

Applied to other domains, however, they don't generalize well. So, back to the archetype, the problem here is that what the archtype assumes (at a higher level of resolution) is the JFK (and generations past) version of a warrior; a dashing young officer (because enlisted is low class, ew) who did a few years of service but not a full career, maybe saw some combat, and was in an elegant role; Navy PT boat captain, a British Cavalry officer, WW2 Fighter Ace.

Navy SEAL, Green Beret in GWOT? And enlisted? I dunno ... those guys can get into some shit. Again - I firmly believe these are the most pure form of "warriors" we have on the planet today. But the archetype model I started with above doesn't want that, they want Romance Novel Ready Warriors.

"2. Shooters gonna shoot and cads gonna cad"

This is more directly related to @FiveHourMarathon 's post. Can adultery be heroic and masculine if done correctly? If I am flying around bedding starlets instead of masturbating with my goon goggles on, my wife could maybe find some pride in that, right?

The problem here is when we consider scale, both large and small. It's possible to read the JFK sex files, chuckle, roll your eyes and go "Different times. Guy was an asshole. Got laid a lot, though." But what you're dismissing is the real human toll it all had on people like Jackie, Marilyn, and the countless nameless secretaries who undoubtedly went through all kinds of mental and emotional anguish (and, in some cases, physical - STDs, yall).

Okay, but, that's a couple dozen (a hundred) people. And it's not my problem. Can't we still, you know, try to support the idea of "Responsible cocksmen-ery"? No, we can't, because people will be irresponsible and, frankly, bad at it and irresponsibility and incompetence at scale are awful for society.

If men are suddenly "empowered" (lol) to run around like JFK trying to seduce the pants off of every waitress, it ends with the emotional and mental anguish of full families, with violently acrimonious divorces, with kids with fucked up families, and, on the harsher end, with actual no-debate-about-it sexual assault. Additionally, if I a have reasonable suspicion that my drinking buddy wants to Oval my Wife's Office, I might get a few whiskey's in me and decide to take a swing at him. Remember, men kill each other for money/drugs, respect (hierarchical preference in a male dominated space), and for control over specific females. Making Adultery Great again is a good way to Make America Murdery Again.

The archetype fails, here, when it's extropolated to scale. The sociological mechanism of monogamy-marriage is explicitly to create high social penalties to being a cad so that society doesn't eventually devolve into jealousy-motivated murder madness.

Was the adultery somehow necessary? Or an inevitable side effect.

It wasn't at all necessary and, mostly as you pointed out, the product of the lack of concept of real consequences for multiple generations of a family who had grow up as the elite of the elite of the elite. There's a reason they called it "Camelot" - the Kennedys, specifically, are the closest American got in the post WW2 era to anointing our own royal family.

As they say, one of the the best things you can do for your career is die. JFK catching a hot one from Lee Harvey Oswald's blammer prevented what I think was a highly likely outcome for his presidency - nothing gets done and JFK flames out publicly when his affairs become too much for Jackie to bear. The seduction of the Hot Young President gives way to the ugly truth. Goldwater wins in '64 - running on an even stronger "morality" platform.

But Eli Crane isn't thinking this way because Eli Crane is a SEAL. That's a hypermasculine world where everyone talks shit about everyone all the time. If there's a real problem it is handled directly and head on - "hey, bro, you and me slug it out in the parking lot." That was his professional calibration for years. And I am very happy we have thousands of other men like him on our side with their guns pointed in the other direction. But the job of "warrior" today (in the most traditional sense -- being an Air Force cyber general doesn't quite relate) is a hyper-specialized role because today's true warriors are the best in history; they are in the best physical shape, with the longest and most rigorous training, with an insane level of technological proficiency, and a support structure that costs billions of dollars.

Applied to other domains, however, they don't generalize well. So, back to the archetype, the problem here is that what the archtype assumes (at a higher level of resolution) is the JFK (and generations past) version of a warrior; a dashing young officer (because enlisted is low class, ew) who did a few years of service but not a full career, maybe saw some combat, and was in an elegant role; Navy PT boat captain, a British Cavalry officer, WW2 Fighter Ace.

I think actually this is exactly the mindset needed to fix most of our political problems. We absolutely need no nonsense leaders who aren’t afraid to at least verbally meet each other on the parking lot after work. The current crop of “leaders” have long since perfected the art of doing things that they procedurally cannot do (thus ducking the responsibility of not actually doing the things that need doing), or hiding really bad ideas in thousand page bills full of nonsense and then pretending that in order to get something done, they simply had to vote yes on a bill with “let’s shoot Taylor Swift” in it, because it had something else in there. You still own voting to shoot Taylor Swift. The mindset drilled into the elite and leadership of the military is that you are responsible. You are responsible for yourself, your team, the results of actions you took or didn’t take, and the actions and decisions of your team that you didn’t do anything about. They are not likely to pull the same kinds of things that our leadership does now.

A couple of reasons why you don’t see that many soldiers in political office anymore:

  1. With a couple of exceptions like Grant and Eisenhower, most soldier-politicians are not career military. Most of them joined because of a big war, did 3-5 years in the military, and then got out and and started climbing the political ladder. You don’t really have that kind of soldier any more. Most people who join the military are either working class and trying to get some civilian job market skills and education for free, or they really want to be in the military. The first type likely isn’t going to have any bourgeoise-class political ambitions anyway and the second is just going to stay in the military for life because they like it. The especially elite units are often made up of the second type.

  2. The really elite units like the SEALs, green berets and snipers tend to select for a certain personality type, they even run psych evaluations to get that personality type. And to put it bluntly, that personality type is “lightly on the sociopathy spectrum”. You need that if you want a guy who can kill 50-200 people over the course of their career without having a mental breakdown, and who can fight in the pretty calm and detached method of modern warfare and isn’t just a Viking berserker. I want to be clear, these guys are (mostly) not bad people or serial killer types, and most of them have very peaceful and mostly pro-social lives outside of the military. The problem is that type of person often comes off as weird, and often comes off as a jerk. If you want a good example, look at how many people (even conservative pro-military types) were kind of disturbed by Chris Kyle’s autobiography. This guy never did anything bad outside of combat and had a stellar service record, but it sounds like it was written by a working-class Patrick Bateman. As much as we joke about politicians being psychopaths, that is not a personality type that really gels well with politics.

And to put it bluntly, that personality type is “lightly on the sociopathy spectrum”

However, when you hear "the smart but lazy, you make into officers, as they have the mental clarity to make the tougher decisions", this is what they actually mean. You can't command an armed force (or a nation) if you're not willing to make decisions that can get your men killed, or to be more precise, ones that will outright cost you men. This can be direct, or it can be indirect (letting the CIA create a crack epidemic on your own streets so you can free some hostages means some of your men die, for instance).

If, at the end of the day, you're not willing to painfully incinerate the cutest little girl (regardless of whether or not it's actually her or you), you're not fit to command [and to be perfectly honest, you're not fit for politics either]. And that's just the way it is.

This is a distinction that's lost on many people: it's the difference between Jack Nicholson's character in A Few Good Men and Brad Pitt's character from Fury (referenced above). The difference is, ultimately, that the former was stupid/lazy about it and the latter is not.

If you want a good example, look at how many people (even conservative pro-military types) were kind of disturbed by Chris Kyle’s autobiography.

This is also why certain tactics are derided as "Machiavellian" despite that being how systems of governance must work to be stable. It is readily apparent that Machiavelli thought in this same way; that's why people are disturbed by his observations even though I find them to be made in perfectly good faith.

that is not a personality type that really gels well with politics

That is because Western democracies are kayfabe and the power rests elsewhere. The people in power are all like this, make no mistake.

As is become habitual for you, excellent writeup.

I bask in your praise.

Applied to other domains, however, they don't generalize well. So, back to the archetype, the problem here is that what the archtype assumes (at a higher level of resolution) is the JFK (and generations past) version of a warrior; a dashing young officer (because enlisted is low class, ew) who did a few years of service but not a full career, maybe saw some combat, and was in an elegant role; Navy PT boat captain, a British Cavalry officer, WW2 Fighter Ace. Navy SEAL, Green Beret in GWOT? And enlisted? I dunno ... those guys can get into some shit. Again - I firmly believe these are the most pure form of "warriors" we have on the planet today. But the archetype model I started with above doesn't want that, they want Romance Novel Ready Warriors.

Perhaps there is an advantage to service being a normal, expected thing of men of a certain class: it allows us to have the benefit of having veterans in leadership, without those veterans being likely to be freaks. War is a good activity for a man to be exposed to, but men who maximally choose war as a profession are bad choices? At a smaller scale you see that with combat sports, where some exposure to them is a positive for any man, but the men who devote their lives to it are...different.

It wasn't at all necessary and, mostly as you pointed out, the product of the lack of concept of real consequences for multiple generations of a family who had grow up as the elite of the elite of the elite.

Sure, but then you look at the other examples. Clinton certainly wasn't royalty, but he was the only president to run a federal budget surplus since Nixon, and he fucked like an irresponsible rabbit. Eisenhower was a professional military man his whole career, he kept a mistress. I'm sure the accusation of "Cargo Culting" can be made here, but odds are when you talk about your heroes before the millennium, they had a mistress (the best odds remaining that if they didn't they were gay, or completely bizarrely sexually terrified). So I'm thinking it means something!

The seduction of the Hot Young President gives way to the ugly truth. Goldwater wins in '64 - running on an even stronger "morality" platform.

I disagree, if LBJ made Goldwater look ugly and unstable, Jack Kennedy would have trounced him even harder. Goldwater was a bad candidate for the time.

Supporting your point, LBJ was very much a non-combatant officer who did a minimal stint as an officer during World War II because he knew his political ambitions required it. His one encounter with enemy fire (he was on a plane that got shot at by Japanese) became embellished in his retellings until years later he was giving speeches about how he "fought in the jungles with our boys." And no one can deny that LBJ was an extraordinarily effective politician.

Undermining your point: LBJ was also a cocksman who cheated on his wife constantly. He might not have run through as many starlets and secretaries as JFK did, but he did flaunt mistresses in DC.

I remember once reading that LBJ bragged that he got more tail by accident than Kennedy ever did on purpose.

Might be true, might not - one thing I am sure of after reading Caro's biography is that absolutely nothing LBJ said about himself could be taken at face value.

You get the turbolibs who view him as a pig-slimeball rapist; and then you get some in the MAGA crowd who will with a straight face claim that none of it ever happened and he’s a good loyal husband.

Maybe in 20 years we’ll be able to know the truth here. But for now I just throw up my hands.

I can’t think of any honest broker of information that claims to have solid evidence either way. And the negative would be very difficult to show evidence for in any case.

I feel comfortable in putting him among the goats when dividing out presidents, whether any particular story is true he clearly belongs among the philanderers like FDR and Clinton, not among the sheep like Dubya and Jimmy Carter.

We'll never know the real truth in any substantive sense, 20 years from now or a century from now. At the same rate that tempers cool, memories fade.

In recent years Carter, Dubya, Obama, Biden all appeared to be above suspicion with their wives

"Creepy Joe" himself?

Sniffing little girls and "probably inappropriate" showering with them doesn't count. Literally grabbing grabbing Tara Reade by the pussy doesn't count. He didn't seem to have a mistress despite the hair sniffing and pussy grabbing.

I don't really buy most of the accusations against ol' where-am-I Joe, and at any rate even if we credit the nutcases they accuse him of being a creep, rather than of having a mistress; where the effective presidents I listed all had ongoing consensual adulterous liaisons.

I'm pretty late to the party on discussing the Ashli Babbitt shooting, but I now get my chance, because the Trump administration is going to pay $5 million to her family. (Archived link.)

I once discussed January 6th with a conservative in real life, and his stance was that the Ashli Babbitt shooting was an example of police brutality. He said that she was issued no warnings at all before being shot, and she wasn't directly threatening anyone's life. Taking a look at the footage, I don't know how she would have been warned at a volume that she could hear, and any of the police with rifles would have been jeopardizing their own safety and the safety of the other officers to lower their rifles and physically restrain her. I think the barricaded door and the cops with guns trained on the entrance should have been enough to signal that breaking through would be a bad idea. Given all these circumstances, I think that awarding $5 million to her family is a stupid thing to do. Add it to the pile of other conflict-theory-esque actions that make this presidency a seriously mixed bag for me. regrettable. Sometimes settlements are the cheapest thing for suits.

I took a look at the video, and I can count 6 uniformed and heavily armed police just standing around right next to where Ashli is about to climb through the window. (undoubtedly there were more out of the frame of the video) Meanwhile the agent who did the shooting was hiding behind the barricade and probably not visible to most of the rioters. https://files.catbox.moe/8p11px.jpg

Of course, seconds after the shooting, those exact same police came in and took full control of the situation.

Most charitably, the police gave up on trying to take control of the situation, and just let the rioters riot. This is despite the fact that they were equipped with full riot gear and assault rifles, and were able to take over immediately after the shooting. Less charitably, they were ordered to stand down for some reason or another, possibly with the idea that the riot would burn itself out if not provoked more.

Of course this doesn't fully excuse the rioters for fucking around. But if you are doing dirty literally right in front of a heavily armed and equipped squad of police, and they are just milling around and watching you, it's understandable that you might expect that whatever you're doing is not going to get you shot.

Meanwhile the agent who did the shooting was hiding behind the barricade and probably not visible to most of the rioters.

The picture of the gun poking out from the doorway tells the tale of the discomfort with this shoot to me -- cops 'get away' with shooting people at times where there's at least a nominal case to be made for self-defence, and this is not that.

It just looks so chickenshit -- step out into the hallway, square up, present your weapon and say "stop or I'll shoot" and I don't think anyone's complaining if Babbit keeps trying to climb through the door (which she might have!) and gets the bullet.

Officer safety is a thing, but at least this much risk tolerance is expected of any beat cop confronting an aggressive individual -- however violent the riot may or may not have been, it was clearly not a warzone, and Byrd was not a soldier.

Of course this doesn't fully excuse the rioters for fucking around. But if you are doing dirty literally right in front of a heavily armed and equipped squad of police, and they are just milling around and watching you, it's understandable that you might expect that whatever you're doing is not going to get you shot.

Not understandable to me at all. Participating in a riot directed at country's legislative trying to interfere with its proceedings to elect president in the very same building, and Powers That Be have called the armed police present? I would expect bad times just by being here. Not only the armed police are present, they have barricaded a door? You trying to climb through a door, behind which the police are? All the bad shit is on you. If the police have not shot you, drawing inference that "they are not going to shoot if I do this" is like "after I jumped, I have seen 99 floors go past, the ground has not hit me yet".

A century ago, any sane government would have had troops shooting indiscriminately until everyone is either dead or in custody. It would have been correct and just, too. Insurrection (to prevent legal transfer of power) is not a thing that you can kinda maybe have or kinda maybe defend against. If they would have acted like peaceful protestors, there would have been no need for barricades at all. First step of "not getting invaded by hostiles" is to recognize that you are being invaded, and not only it is legal but you are supposed to shoot at the invaders. (Before you ask, this is my stance on BLM protests.)

The US is too scared to oppose extra-legal politics, and consequently the society suffers for lack of respect for the law and its rightful authorities.

The police are not behind the door. They are milling around in front of and next to the door, doing literally nothing. Did you look at the picture?

A century ago, any sane government would have had troops shooting indiscriminately until everyone is either dead or in custody.

That's not how it works. In history class you should have learned that about 250 years ago this happened and it ended up kicking off a big mess.

Did you look at the picture?

I looked at the video. The police are confused but the guy behind the door who shot is clearly not pleasantly chilling about.

That's not how it works. In history class you should have learned that about 250 years ago this happened and it ended up kicking off a big mess.

That is the problem with Americans, you read only the American history. The indecisive inaction or half-measures or measures taken too late fails, too. American revolution is one example of that, too. Had the British acted differently prior to Boston shooting, precluding it, or more decisively afterwards (either leniently or far less leniently), it would be half-remembered footnote to history of British empire alongside its many other brutalities.

Speaking of Brits, they still celebrate the failure of the Gunpowder plot, which they put down successfully.

But what I was thinking was all the coups and revolts that worked because nobody whose job is to be last stopgap to stop it happening realized they should have start shooting until it was too late. In particular, the French revolution. The royal family always fell one more step towards guillotine when they found themselves at the mercy of the mob. Any steps to avoid those situation would have been crucial to them. After the royalty were disposed of, the party who controlled whether the mob (which mob, whose mob) had the access to the National Assembly and later Convention ruled Paris, then the country. It was how Girondins died, it is how Robespierre died, it is how Napoleon couped the Directory. A legislative organ of a country of millions is always at mercy of concentrated minority of few thousand people gathered in the capital, so it must be able to deploy force to remain sovereign.

Turning to back BLM -- general unlawful rioting is less serious concern to the sovereign, but it is a concern to citizens. A firm response would have been good, just and required for keeping up the appearances of rule of law.

In these cases mentioned in particular, BLM and Capitol, I am of the mind that a bit larger mess done quickly would have resolved the matter with more clean state afterwards. Unlike in a slow-boiling conflict, when conflict turns to crisis it is dealt with. There is room for catharsis afterwards, and respect for public order is maintained.

Rereading what I wrote, it is very abstract. To be more precise, I think a better response would have been to maintain a clear perimeter and apply deadly force after it was breached. Admittedly, had there been appropriately massive deployment of lawful authority to maintain a perimeter, there would not have been a breach and perhaps no fatalities -- but that is not what was happening. It becomes an exercise in judging how they should have dealt with a situation they were ill-prepared to deal with, and in the particular context the use of firearms must certainly be an anticipated option. To abuse a metaphor, the police have not many options on table after the table has no legs (perimeter, manpower, clear coordination) and it has fallen down.

Ashli Babbit is a national martyr with several movies about her if she's left-identifying and the exact same sequence of events happens. I don't think the shoot was necessarily unjustified but the optics were poor.

And the idiotarian left would be marginally more intellectual coherent in doing so than the right are in our timeline given the two sides respective views on lethal self-defence, but still wrong.

Ashli Babbit fucked around and found out. De mortuis nil nisi bonum so I won't say anything else.

Apologies for what seems even to me an asinine comment but I think 'left-identifying' would be a helpful hyphen in this sentence.

Yes, I was like "left identifying what, and why did she in particular need to identify it?" until I read it a second time.

The rant from "A Few Good Men", presented without comment.

Can you give the comment? I don't know what you think relates these things to each other.

The "walls guarded by men with guns" in the clip relates to the wall (well, barricaded door) guarded by a man with a gun in the footage of the shooting.

I'll say what I said after it happened: Libertarian thoughts on “public property” and politicians being High Value Target quibbles aside, I am not virulently against the norm of shooting people in these types of situations. I am against what I perceive to be a massive double standard. For many on the left it’s super clear that Kyle Rittenhouse is a mass murderer, that all these police shootings are racist, and that it’s lives over property. But shooting Ashli Babbitt crawling through a window is a good shoot.

Norms need to be consistent, or they aren’t norms: Ashli Babbitt saw the left violently rioting, looting, committing arson, and occupying government buildings for months without getting shot. If we’re gonna play the game this way, fine, as long as everyone knows the rule: it’s legitimate to shoot you - even if you’re protesting - when you start breaking stuff that’s not yours or try to go places you’re not supposed to go.

Ashli Babbitt was a very stupid person who got what she was asking for. Putting barricades in place is a signal that one is willing to use violence. It may not be an accurate or reliable signal, but it is a signal. Therefore, Ashli should have been prepared for and expecting violence when she overcame that barricade, just like the first man reaching the top of the wall expects the defenders to use extreme violence to deter him and everyone after him. Her being shot and killed is not police brutality, or a crime. It is one side engaging in violence in the pursuit of its goals.

That being said, movements run with the martyrs they’ve got, even if I could wish for a higher caliber of martyr.

How many barricaded doors must the police retreat behind before they are justified in opening fire? I think pretty much every armed conservative would have lit up a left-wing Ashli Babbitt if they found themselves in an analogous situation.

Ashli Babbitt did not deserve to die, in the sense that the punishment did not fit the crime. But that is true of most people killed in police / self defense shootings.

Ashli Babbitt did not deserve to die, in the sense that the punishment did not fit the crime. But that is true of most people killed in police / self defense shootings.

I think that this is an important point. Ashli Babbitt's death was the result of both her own criminal stupidity and culpably poor policing. Both were necessary, neither sufficient. "Police are not required to take risks to protect criminals from their own stupidity" is part of conservatism 101, and in the case of criminals threatening physical violence is also the law. "Police should be sufficiently competent that situations where the police need to shoot at idiots are minimised" is non-partisan good government 101, but is not a legal requirement for good reasons.

Ashli Babbit FAFO, but it was also a bad shoot. This is kind of like sure the guy was doing 30 mph over the speed limit, but the person he hit shouldn't have been dancing in the middle of a busy highway.

I'm pretty sure it'd have been entirely possible to restrain and arrest her without resorting to lethal force. She was just an average White normie.

"Barricaded doors" is doing too much work here. The fact of the Capitol riot is that the police were intentionally undermanned, and also engaged in basic incompetence at nearly every phase of the event. The long and short of it is that they never actually barricaded anything. The Capitol is essentially a medieval fort, and over a hundred armed men let it get sacked by a bunch of unorganized people essentially engaging in Brownian motion in the general vicinity of said fort. The fact that the whole force wasn't fired is...questionable. The fact that all of leadership wasn't is conspiratorial.

What was the defensive setup? Well, most of the police were deployed behind small lines of these things which are used for directing orderly lines of humans into an entrance, they are not appropriate for riot control. These are not barricades.

Because the forces were isolated and far from the building, they immediately began panicking and ran to the door. The doors were never closed or locked. Hardly a barricade. Again, the slow pushing mass of unarmed people overcame this "defense". Then we had some chaotically strewn furniture in hallways. Not really what we'd call a barricade either.

In the end, Jan 6 is the answer to a very specific question: What would happen if an understaffed, poorly trained, and even more poorly managed police force faced a crowd composed of people who could easily kill them all, but had absolutely no intention of actually doing so? Is Babbit's payout comically high? Yes. But that always is the case with these cases. She certainly has a pretty good case compared to the average rioter case. If she wanted that officer dead, he would be. She was, by all accounts, a competent combatant when armed, which she was intentionally not.

There is a sliding scale of "adequate". All the members of congress were unharmed and successfully certified the election despite a riot. Minimum viable standard, but still successful. Why would it be the responsibility of the Capitol police to handle an unprecedented riot better than the rioters themselves.

The fact that all of leadership wasn't is conspiratorial.

The straightforward conspiracy when guards are undermanned is "the guards are expected to fail at protecting what they are supposed to be guarding". A conspiracy plot to the effect that "the guards are supposed to look like they almost fail protecting congress from a riot in a way that makes the riot look extra bad and scary" is a conspiracy theory with additional epicycles. Did the nefarious conspiracy organize the riot, too, or was it counter-conspiracy organized in response to the planned riot to storm the congress conveniently organized by parties-unrelated to the nefarious conspiracy?

The fact that Trump had given orders to protect the rioters and thus National Guard was not in vicinity of Capitol puts a bit of evidence towards the first kind of conspiracy than the second kind.

There is a sliding scale of "adequate". All the members of congress were unharmed and successfully certified the election despite a riot. Minimum viable standard, but still successful. Why would it be the responsibility of the Capitol police to handle an unprecedented riot better than the rioters themselves.

Riots happen, or rather they can happen. Why they happen is based on a confluence of factors, but the police deployment and response is always an important factor. People rarely riot when law enforcement is well deployed and competently managed. This riot was not unprecedented in any way other than it was comprised of Republicans. The failings of the police force is basically the only interesting part about what happened.

conspiracy

Its not a conspiracy. We generally know what happened. The chief of the Capitol Police has testified to this many times. His deputy (who was promoted to chief after he was let go) was briefed about an increase in the expected crowd size and an increase in potential agitators in the crowd. She did not give him that information. Regardless, he requested additional troops including overtime and National Guard. Those requests were denied by leadership (Pelosi and McConnel's offices), possibly because he did not have the additional credible threat information, possibly just optics. Then as the riot developed he requested National Guard again, and this time both offices took about 5-6 hours to give him a response.

And in any case, conspiracy or not, who benefited from Jan 6 clearly the Democratic party and anti-Trump Republicans, so we don't need epicycles, just knowledge of how media coverage works and insight into the minds of Capitol leadership, which is not hard to divine.

The fact that Trump had given orders to protect the rioters and thus National Guard was not in vicinity of Capitol puts a bit of evidence towards the first kind of conspiracy than the second kind.

Here is an actually conspiratorial idea, which is directly contradicted by tons of public evidence, but you seem to think its worth talking about.

I mean what exact intent is implied by invading a Capitol and attempting to breech the doors of the legislature and ignoring multiple commands to stop? I would undertake the sympathy if she’d gone wandering around the roduntra with a sign or upside down flag, or if she’d been going into offices or something because those things do not represent the same sort of threat as attempting to invade the house floor as member of congress are fleeing. She clearly intended to do something by those actions and so did those with her.

same sort of threat as attempting to invade the house floor as member of congress are fleeing.

If I were far more right-wing than I am and feeling snarky, I'd probably say something about the right to petition one's government here, but I'd generally agree with the "play stupid games" line in this sort of scenario. Maybe that particular argument would be different if members of Congress were known for ignoring their constituents generally.

But it's also not terribly out of line with the times for police shooting "unarmed" but hostile citizens: Ferguson settled with the family of Mike Brown — of "hands up, don't shoot" fame where forensic evidence suggests his hands were not, in fact, up — for a bit under $2M 8 years ago, which is not that different adjusted for inflation.

I think you can make an argument she was playing stupid games, but the public response to it is almost totally informed by 'Blue Team Good, Red Team Bad' factionalism. People who were vehemently pushing BLM and Defund the Police slogans a month before suddenly became totally cool with the idea of a justified shoot, whilst if Babbitt had been shot as an unarmed woman in a similar circumstance whilst say trying to approach Trump during a BLM protest or entering a capitol building she would be held as a martyr to the cause.

I understand why the Red team hasn't pushed her since they tend to be more accepting of violent consequences to 'fuck around and find out' but the handling feels deeply hypocritical on part of the Blue Team.

People who were vehemently pushing BLM and Defund the Police slogans a month before suddenly became totally cool with the idea of a justified shoot

Ironically one of the loopier members of the BLM movement, Shaun King, was the only one who actually took a principled stand and said he thought the Babbit killing was a bad shoot and an act of police brutality.

Good man. Props to him even if we do disagree.

I was writing a reply to zoink above but this is ridiculous standard. Yes, many on the left are hypocrites. Somehow, it is turned to equally hypocritical defense of a riot -- see, the problem with the riot is not the riot, the problem is that out-group who are all hypocritical angry when my-own-group does a riot but they don't care when their ingroup does it.

It is extra ridiculous because this being the internet, it takes no effect effort (ETA) at all to defend consistent standards for dealing with riots, left or right. Yet somehow the most important thing when discussing news of Trump awarding 5 megadollars to Babbitt family is complain loudly about BLM.

Can you give me some context for this? I looked at the video and I have no idea what is going on.

I am impressed you are unfamiliar with this shooting.

The shooting took place on January 6th, 2021, during the riot; the officers were positioned to guard the House chambers. I don't know if there were any House members inside those chambers, but the police apparently thought they would be in danger if the rioters broke through, and there was no other place for the officers themselves to retreat to. The door that Babbitt broke through was to the Speaker's Lobby which led to the House chambers. Ashley Babbitt was the only direct homicide of the day, and she has become something of a martyr since then on the right wing. Her family started a suit for $30 million based on wrongful death and it was just settled today for $5 million.

Ohhh this is the January fifth riot ok. Yeah that provided the context I needed thanks.

I think those amounts should be underlined, if Trump wanted to send a CW coded message, the administration should settle the suit for more than the $30 million they sought.

Per this database compiled by the NAACP, $5 million is well above the typical wrongful death settlement paid out by police departments, and Babbitt's case is pretty weak. (There are a fair few >$5 million settlements in the database, but most of them involve multiple plaintiffs). That said, more media-famous cases tend to attract bigger settlements.

Paying out $5 million for a legally meritless wrongful death case that would settle for less than half that under normal circumstances seems a big enough signal to me.

On the other hand, Trump is notably profligate, and he really can’t afford to relitigate J6 in the public eye again, so overpaying on his shut up money is very possible.

For sure, I had to edit it once already to update that it may not be a culture war thing since it was a settlement for a larger suit. Apparently the Biden administration resisted harder, but I don't know if it made more sense to resist at that point than to settle, especially for an administration that would really want to avoid the optics such an outcome would bring. I'm not much of a lawcel.

Did everyone hear about the anti-natalist suicide bombing?

I feel like this warrants a lot more attention than I have seen it getting so far. Of course, antinatalist spaces are working to clarify the difference between anti-natalism and pro-mortalism, but bombing a fertility clinic is not merely pro-mortalism (unless you count embryos as human lives, I suppose, which none of the anti-natalists or pro-mortalists I know do).

But this looks like it was a suicide bomber on American soil in advancement of a radical leftist position. If you count Matthew Livelsberger (maybe you don't, since I guess he shot himself first?) this is our second leftist suicide bomber this year. Are these just not getting more attention because they failed to produce a significant body count? Because they didn't come with articulate manifestos? Because they were "lone wolf" actors? Because we want to keep the oxygen out of that room, lest a greater conflagration result?

Considered alongside the whole Ziz cult murder thing, I feel like I am watching the tentative re-emergence of something I have long associated with the 1970s or thereabouts (when it was all letter bombs and airplane hijacking)--radical intellectualism. From the 1980s through the 2000s, painting with a broad brush, my reflexive stereotype of terrorism was Islamic terrorism. This is very American of me, of course--this was also the operating era of the Tamil Tigers, for example, but most Americans could not say what country they threatened, nor point to it on a map. Terrorism--loosely defined as violence in furtherance of an ideology--is an idea that can be applied much more broadly than it normally is, but the central case seems most often to involve a racial, religious, or ethnic group acting in furtherance of identitarian interests. The connection between identitarianism and terrorism seems to me underexplored! But as a liberal who eschews both left- and right-identitarianism ("woke" and "alt-right," respectively) of course I would put it that way.

Anyway intellectual terrorism seems like a different sort of animal. It seems difficult to really get a group of people to cohere around pure ideas. The "rationalist movement," for example, is deeply fractious despite having managed to develop into something of an identity group, at least in San Francisco. But the left-wing prospiracy appears to have advanced to the point where it is sparking an increased number of violent radicals, declaring for causes that average people seem more likely to find confusing than anything else. To the average American, bombing a fertility clinic in the name of anti-natalism is like bombing a Chuck-E-Cheese in the name of anti-baloonism. "Well, that's obviously bad, but also... WTF? Was the bomber schizophrenic? Who's anti-baloonist?"

Here in the Motte we have rules against writing posts that are purely "can you believe what $OUTGROUP did" or picking the worst, most extreme examples of a group and holding them up as representative--so I want to add that I do not think anti-natalists are usually violent, or that bombing fertility clinics is especially representative of leftist political action. But of course the corporate news media gives no such disclaimers concerning, say, abortion clinic bombings or other right-coded "terrorism." Hell, they wouldn't even call it terrorism, when George Floyd extremists went around lighting things on fire in protest of a vibe. To some extent I guess I'm Noticing this particular suicide bombing in part because the FBI is actually calling it terrorism--and maybe in part because the intellectual, rather than identitarian, nature of the terrorism makes me a little bit worried. Because on reflection that doesn't actually sound like blue tribe terrorism, quite, even if it is "radical left" coded; it sounds like grey tribe terrorism. And while I am clearly not a member of either the Zizian or anti-natalist factions of the grey tribe, I think that distinction would be utterly lost on most people.

(Actually I experience something similar when people attack universities; many attacks on universities I regard as quite warranted, but sometimes I find myself wishing I had more of a platform, so that I could remind Republicans that there are still many conservative causes served by academia, and that some faculty members are broadly on their side and want to help. Please don't catch me in the crossfire...!)

You should link to wikipedia rather than a new site that's inaccessible from outside of the US.

Also.

and maybe in part because the intellectual, rather than identitarian, nature of the terrorism makes me a little bit worried

This is I believe backward. Tribal terrorism is common because most people are, by default, tribal, so under the right conditions it can flourish.

But this is harder with intellectual terrorism. Anarchists and bolshevik types weren't a real big deal, terrorism wise outside of Russia and they had much more of a following back then when people were actually pretty poor and suffering.

Their radical egalitarianism also exploited a basic human instinct.

Anti-natalism and efilism are unappealing ideologies that attract people who are not doing well at life, typically because they hardly try. These are not the kinds of people you have to worry about much. The only real danger is some heir or heiress later buying an AGI and prompt-engineering it while it's offline hard enough to get it to help with infectious disease design. That'd be a real issue with possibilities of megadeaths.

a suicide bomber on American soil in advancement of a radical leftist position

I'm nominating this guy as a 6 years ago almost-example. Cops killed him before he could blow up that propane tank. And he isn't quite a suicide bomber. But he was a bomber, suicidally attacking ICE because of his leftist ideology. I say he counts. Bonus points for being a John Brown Gun Club member putting their ideology and training to use.

I have blown up a number of propane tanks on BLM land by taping road flares to them and shooting them with rifles. It's good fun but I don't think the explosion is large enough to do much in an ICE detention center parking lot.

On one hand, you’ve got a (former?) Trump enthusiast who blew himself up in front of a Trump property. On the other, a self-proclaimed misandrist and nihilist who went 0-1 against a bunch of babies. There’s a common thread here and it isn’t intellectualism.

Hell, they wouldn't even call it terrorism, when George Floyd extremists went around lighting things on fire in protest of a vibe.

Were they wrong? I think most riots belong in a different category from hostage situations, hijackings, and bombings.

many attacks on universities I regard as quite warranted

Please tell me you mean political attacks rather than terrorist ones.

There’s a common thread here and it isn’t intellectualism.

Intellectualism isn't necessarily intellect. Being driven by ideas (as opposed to group identification) is not the same as being driven by good ideas.

Were they wrong? I think most riots belong in a different category from hostage situations, hijackings, and bombings.

I mean, they were literally wrong, yeah. But while I agree that "riot" is qualitatively distinct from "hijacking," they're different categories, but both can certainly also be terrorism.

many attacks on universities I regard as quite warranted

Please tell me you mean political attacks rather than terrorist ones.

Hahah, yes, I certainly mean political attacks. Though now you mentioned it--there was that kid in Florida who shot up his university recently, in what seemed potentially a right-coded anti-university terrorist attack. But it's not clear that his extremism was specifically anti-university...?

To some extent talking about any of this feels a bit like trying to make sense of insanity; if sense could be made of it, then couldn't the argument be made that it's not insanity? It's entirely possible that I'm spooling through arguments about the shapes of clouds, here. Still, it seems like we are headed back in time, rather than forward, in terms of political terrorism.

I don't think Islamist terrorism is more identitarian than intellectual? The archetypal Muslim terrorist is you actual religious zealot who's trying to do God's work, maybe bring about the End of Days in the bargain while he's at it - motivated by his absolute confidence in the rightness of his cause, and not caring whatsoever about his own fate or his people's. This isn't to say there isn't also an Arabian racial-supremacist movement, but it and Islamism seem like uneasy fellow travelers at best.

I don't think Islamist terrorism is more identitarian than intellectual?

Anyone committed to Islam is committed to a "group or organization" in a way that lone wolf intellectual terrorists generally aren't, and Islamist terrorist groups often claim credit for terrorist acts, while the reaction from e.g. anti-natalists to this anti-natalist attack has been "that guy doesn't represent us."

Would you not classify Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, and abortion clinic bombers as being intellectual terrorists same as this anti-natalist? I do not see anything particularly left-wing about this flavor of terrorism.

Kaczynski was so very ineffectual as a terrorist. It's a good illustration on how little people achieve when they're lone wolves with no one to consult.

Someone like him could have easily managed to build gigantic bombs causing billions in damages had he, for example, found work in a quarry or at least used purchased components, reliable, tested bombs and so on.

Imagine an IRA style truck bomb blowing up Wall street, shattering windows in half a kilometre, with nobody dead because the cops who opened the truck ended up staring at a mess of traps and large warning signs and decided evacuation is the sensible idea.

Like the Harvey Casino bombing, but on steroids.

Instead he chose to live in poverty, chose to use a maximally inefficient yet repellent strategy and ultimately achieved very little.

Would you not classify Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, and abortion clinic bombers as being intellectual terrorists

Kaczynski for sure. McVeigh and "abortion clinic bombers," not so sure.

I do not see anything particularly left-wing about this flavor of terrorism.

This was part of my overall thinking (the "grey tribe" stuff at the end, sorry for burying the lede) in that comment. Anti-natalism pattern matches to leftism for me--all the anti-natalists I know are leftists--but not in an "identitarian left" way, so I am thinking about how I should accommodate that in thinking about this phenomenon of intellecually radicalized suicide bombers in 21st century America.

Ted K probably counts but McVeigh and the abortion clinic bombers had more classical terrorist motives.

Both had an actual plan as to how their actions would translate into a political program that they could and did clearly explain. You might judge how realistic those were or how successful, but the plans existed.

I'm not actually sure that's the case here, this looks more like "crazy person with suicidal intent reaches for any justification".

Granted, a lot of terrorism actually looks like that these days, but I think there actually is a difference between someone waging war on society and someone trying to die and take as many people with them as possible. Both practically and morally.

Ow. Lost my comment. Brief, broad strokes repeat. Gotta get in before the blackpill from FCfromSSC.

A plug for Katherine Dee's substack article from yesterday which reported on "Efilism" as a branch of pro-mortalism. It appears more like like a collection emotional intuitions of disaffected radicals than principled philosophy. Although that could just be because I don't like it. He looked to Adam Lanza for inspiration.

An archived link to promortalism.com which is part of Bartkus' manifesto that the FBI references. I think?

No, understand your death is already a guarantee, and you can thank your parents for that one. All a promortalist is saying is let's make it happen sooner rather than later (and preferably peaceful rather than some disease or accident), to prevent your future suffering, and, more importantly, the suffering your existence will cause to all the other sentient beings.

What group of philisophies does this all relate to? Negative Utilitarianism, Efilism, Abolitionist Veganism, basically, philosophies that have realized religion is retarded, but that there is objective value in the universe, and it lies in the harm being experienced by sentient beings. So, although it all may seem "dark", it's the polar opposite of nonsense like nihilism.

Eco-fascists might want to rid humanity to save Earth, but Efilists want to rid the Earth of all sentient beings to tackle suffering. Overlap with the Zizians, for sure. Conveniently, the position justifies limitless violence near as I can tell. "Polar opposite of nonsense like nihilism..." ehh.

Regarding leftism and its role. If you polled anti-natalists the majority would consider themselves leftists. That does make anti-natalism left coded. They are revolutionary, they are making trade offs in the name of the collective, they dislike hierarchy and standard order of things. Leftist, but it's not anchored in traditional leftist doctrine or theory as far as I know. Are anti-natalists citing Marx or the Frankfurt School? I picture them as more lefty than leftist, but I'm not sure how useful that distinction is. It's obviously a useful distinction for the leftists, even radical ones, so they can get far away from this mess.

Certain lefty impulses, preferences, and perception of circumstance (including ailments), and manners of thinking are facilitated by the internet that facilitates any cult. Death ones, too. Mangione was acting alone from a well known position to the public, people understood his position, and yes he had a grey tribe tinge. This guy acted for an entirely unknown, foreign cause.

An age of boutique terrorism. It does all have 70's-esque feel, eh. These people should look to Buddhism if they can't stomach Christianity, or wood chopping, instead of lusting after wicked martyrs.

Overlap with the Zizians, for sure.

I dont think those are exterminsationist, or even anti-natalist on principle?

I don't know if they are anti-natalist on principle, I guess not, but they are/were anarchists with a deep, moral revulsion to animal suffering. Which doesn't demand senseless violence against people on its own, though they were apparently quite willing to commit senseless violence anyway. Did any of them have children or were planning to? Not damning evidence regardless, but is food for thought. Maybe they are more anti-natalist than they even know. Were they less familiar cult and more isolated, instanced movement, then they might have landed on bombing instead of interpersonal conflict.

There's not much transhumanist about exterminating life, but the acts and rationalization are second cousins. The ideological overlap is more distant. However, if the guy identifies Abolitionist Veganism as an adjacent ideology I'd say there's cause to question.

I'll also accept a charge that I consider radicals to be too similar in general. I'd protest we do seem to be making a few too many lefty radical doers for there to be no overlap.

Did any of them have children or were planning to?

No, but thats more to do with other demands on their time - an idea found in normal rationalism as well, though obviously not as serious/demanded. Ive talked about it before, but the zizian doctrine blows up even independently of the values.

What do they want to exist? Plants? Maybe only rocks, because plants compete with one another for resources and that causes suffering?

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I read these sorts of manifestoes, because they make no sense at all to me. "Suffering is bad, let's kill everything"? "Everything is going to die anyway, it's just not dying fast enough for us"?

Suffering would be defined as a specific process in the brain, so plants for example don’t suffer. It is a sort of extremist veganism where you posit that, on average, (animal) life is a net negative in terms of suffering, therefore the moral position is to prevent/end it. A biosphere-wide euthanasia

Life will undoubtedly sprout elsewhere, though. Really the only moral position is to DESTROY THE UNIVERSE!

Found the solution to the Fermi paradox: negative utilitarians of such extremity that they sterilize all possible life to prevent the suffering of dust mites and other microscopic bugs and that means all animals. Yes, especially bugs.

I don’t understand the negativity. When I clean up my sheets, I like to think those dust mites getting boiled on the 70C program look on fondly on a life well lived in my bed. To me a little bit of suffering, a little bit of death, does not invalidate the awesomeness of living.

I don’t want to give insect welfare people any ideas, but if you assingn some utils to a dust mite’s life, it would make sense to farm gajillions of them for their utils. For a nominal sum, you could be creating entire universes of all singing all dancing beings. Accessorily, you wouldn’t have to worry about clipping a mite life here and there when you’ve been raising throngs of them from the ether.

Are anti-natalists citing Marx or the Frankfurt School?

I feel like you could also reference communist China's deliberate embrace of Malthusian ethics in adopting the One Child Policy. I can maybe imagine a right-leaning government adopting such a plank — I've heard radicals suggest that legalized abortion is a deliberate policy to depress the TFR of certain supposedly-less-desirable subgroups — but in practice I associate it with left groups. There is also a left-coded streak of anti-human environmentalism that seems relevant (the right-coded environmentalists have a religious concept of human "dominion" that the left lacks).

When eugenics was a mainstream part of political discussion it was typically a left wing position; you can actually predict modern views on abortion based off of 1920's views of eugenics better than off of 1920's views of abortion. The closest thing to righty antinatalism is maybe the Singaporean two is enough campaign.

What is it about modern society that has given rise to this absolutely overblown concern for “suffering?” We live in the most hedonic times imaginable in all of human history, and so the idea that anything less than total hedonic pleasure, or even less than net (50%+1) hedonic pleasure makes life not worth living is utterly bizarre to me. Millennia of people, intellectuals and not, passed through life experiencing plague, famine, short life expectancies, unanesthetized surgeries and dying of untreated cancers without coming to the conclusion that the best thing to do was to stop having kids, kill themselves early, or kill everyone.

This doesn’t even get into the issues surrounding this anti-life thinking and the hedonic treadmill. If my Oreo is good today, should I live? If it is slightly less good tomorrow, should I propose panicide?

I don't think it is the main reason (except for EAs), but if you believe that

  • The suffering of an animal is worth an appreciable fraction of the suffering of a human
  • Factory farming is as bad for the animals as it looks

then the rise of factory farming means that the amount of suffering for which the average human (and even more so the average lower-middle-class American) can be held responsible really has increased by an order of magnitude in the last 50 years or so.

Concern for animal suffering became a big deal within a generation of avoidable human-blameable animal suffering becoming a big deal. Charity prohibits us from psychoanalysing why people hold true beliefs.

The Course of Empire, cyclical history, decadence, hedonic treadmill, luxury beliefs...

Around here, when you see someone do something that is both stupidly destructive and utterly unnecessary, you cry out "Ich glaub dir gehts zu gut!", i.e., "I think you're doing too well!". Bad ideas invent themselves, but normally they fizzle out before being put into action because of practical constraints. When someone is doing too well for their own good, they lack those exact practical constraints that would nip bad ideas in the bud. Instead, they can go down the most ridiculous rabbit holes and never be called out for it.

There are no atheists in foxholes, women who are busy keeping house don't go around preaching feminism, men who are one paycheck away from actual starvation don't preach anti-work, liberals do a 180° on blank-slatism when it comes to choosing a school for their own kids, and right-wingers do the same when it comes to picking cheap enough contractors to build their houses for them without whom they couldn't afford it.

It's all the same idea. If you're sufficiently well-off, materially and otherwise, you can afford to engage in stupid behavior and take it much too far. And given the near-infinite production of stupidities, someone will find some very stupid and highly infectious meme that never would have survived in a more resource-starved environment, but does just fine and makes the headlines in our age of undeserved prosperity.

I think it’s that modern people no longer see themselves as part of a greater purpose. There’s no meaning to the universe, therefore no meaning to the suffering that exists. A person living through a famine in 1225 did so knowing that the sufferings would unite him to Christ and His Church. It was still unpleasant, obviously, but it wasn’t meaningless and random. A person experiencing a famine in 2025 does so in an uncaring random universe in which the famine is caused by random chance. Suffering that means nothing. Suffering is pointless, and in fact would seem to mean the wider society and nature is letting them down.

It makes it difficult for me to take it seriously. The demonstrated violence helps a little, but still difficult.

Humanity of all types at all times, creed, race, culture, and ideological persuasion has faced and examined suffering. We have thousand year investigations into what the condition of suffering is, what it means if anything, what we can or should do with it. Yet only now a culture of fat, bored consumers lands on a decadent despair. As we all know, there is nothing sacred, there is no meaning, but we are definitely not related to stupid nihilists. We, good people, are compassionate. We care. We've also done the math. Every discomfort, every ounce of pain, can be refunded by merely removing all sentience.

Don't worry, you don't need to commit suicide or harm anyone else, as one redditor explains:

As for the second bit, it is in each individual's rational SELF interests to die as early as possible. But one's own self interests aren't the only factor which comes into the equation. If those other sentient beings are going to be alive, and you can help them to suffer less by staying alive, then you can alleviate more suffering in the world than you experience and cause. The best possible outcome is that there aren't any sentient organisms to stay around to rescue. But if that isn't on the table as a possibility then one might rationally decide to live for the purpose of preventing the suffering of others.

Yes, it is a moral imperative to stop existing as soon as possible to reduce suffering, but don't forget about your compassion for others in the calculation. You might have other considerations on your utilitarian spreadsheet. We can't just round up all the dolphins to exterminate them. Despite their silly clicking noises and hijinks they suffer quite a lot, but we can't drive them extinct. We definitely don't endorse someone taking our beliefs to their logical ends in the extreme. No, that's very naughty. Bad, very bad indeed.

Sorry for not answering your question. I vote a combination of time to think, access to ideas to think about, and personal mental state. We create a lot of depressed people for various reasons. Give them all girlfriends/boyfriends, compensate them decently for picking and packing oranges 8 hours a day, have them live by the beach or somewhere with lots of sun, and force them to share drinks at the end of the day. Voila! Only the most serious of believers are left.

I think it's just personal deep depression compared with some form of a myopia that makes you think everyone else is suffering and joyless all the time too and is just faking otherwise. Psychological condition expressed as a figleaf ethical view.

I think these feelings arise because we eliminated these external causes of suffering and so we are left with the internal ones. It's the difference between a house battered by winds and one with rotting foundations. When you eliminate all external causes for your unhappiness, you are left with the fact that there is simply not much capacity for happiness within you. The starving can hope for food, the plague-ridden can hope for healing, but what do you do when you have everything you could realistically want and you don't enjoy it?

Part of it also is that huge chunks of our lives no longer have tangible, close-time reward. We train for fifteen years before we can hope to get any value of that training for ourselves. It's only natural to long for respite, and the gap between longing for respite and longing for death is not so large.

It sounds to me like they’re people who realized all the nasty anti-life implications of modern left ideology, didn’t realize it was all a big joke for status signaling points and actually started taking it seriously.

I seem to recall reading somewhere that Nicholas Roske, the guy who attempted to assassinate Brett Kavanaugh, also had some anti-natalist leanings, but I can't find a source for it after a cursory Google.

Edit: @DoctorMonarch tracked it down, thanks a lot!

Nicholas Roske

...weird. I can't decide if you're Mandela Effecting me, but I have the same memory--that Roske participated in the reddit anti-natalism sub, or something like that. It's surprisingly difficult to find this information, presumably because his identified accounts have been memory-holed by reddit.

(In today's weirdly bizarre coincidence, this document (PDF warning) identifies one of Roske's pseudonyms as HelenKiller1969. Today's Penny Arcade comic references the gamer name "HelenKillerWeed420.")

You and @FtttG are remembering correctly https://archive.ph/b6SpY

CMV: I am pro-abortion (in favor of aborting fetuses, not pro-choice) submitted 3 years ago by by AmericanNick7

I think that something as significant as consciousness should not be imposed on matter (the person before they gain consciousness) without consent, and as a non-conscious person cannot give consent, being born is inherently done without consent. In addition, as a negative utilitarian, I wish for suffering to be reduced as much as possible. If abortion were mandatory for pregnant women, no new people would be born, and thus no new people would experience suffering. If no new people are born, humanity will end and thus human suffering will end. This would require no deaths of people already in existence, it would simply prevent new people from coming into existence. Over time, resources would become more plentiful, another benefit of this method. I am aware how radical this view is, but I do hold it sincerely.

Thanks for digging that up. I did not remember this when I wrote the original comment, but it strengthens my feeling that we should be paying more attention to this sort of thing, and preferably not memory-holing it...

Yeah, I remember it so vividly. I even remember sending my brother a screenshot being like "look at this dorky edgelord".

But this looks like it was a suicide bomber on American soil in advancement of a radical leftist position. If you count Matthew Livelsberger (maybe you don't, since I guess he shot himself first?) this is our second leftist suicide bomber this year. Are these just not getting more attention because they failed to produce a significant body count? Because they didn't come with articulate manifestos? Because they were "lone wolf" actors? Because we want to keep the oxygen out of that room, lest a greater conflagration result?

To me the key question is whether we are seeing a rise in serious political violence, or whether we are seeing the usual violent unhinged people shifting to political-looking violence, rather than admitting that they trying to impress celebrities.

Looking at Crooks, Routh, Livelsberger and Luigi Mangione as the central recent examples of violence that looks like left-wing political violence, none of the four have conventional far-left or radicalised-centre-left political views, or other fringe political views that would make their crimes make sense as a move in an intellectually coherent (if not exactly rational) plan to achieve their political ends. Compared to the far-left political violence of the Days of Rage or the c.1900 anarchist bombings (let alone the Tamil Tigers or Hamas), I think the explanation for this rash of "political" violence lies in psychopathology and not political science.

Based on the limited available info, this case looks like the same pattern. The FBI have Bartkus' manifesto, and based on media leaks it is generally nihilistic rather than being political in a way which could be described as left or right-wing.

I think politics is now eating celebrity. It’s just inescapable at this point that no matter what it is, it will be political and those involved will be political. There’s not much that’s made in America or done in America that doesn’t somehow touch politics. And so if you want to get Noticed, it’s probably going to be going after a political target is going to be the kind of thing you do. In 1980, we had a pretty strong celebrity culture and everybody had their favorite movie star in poster form on their bedroom wall. There were magazines devoted to hot male singers that would be roughly analogous to the stuff you’d see around K-Stan’s. Most normies would maybe read a single newspaper or watch a half hour of national News nightly. The rest of life was just about normal human activities— listening to music, watching TV, hanging out with friends, watch the ball game. And so people who wanted to “go out with a bang” tended to go after famous entertainment figures.

Whether or not anyone doing these things cares about politics as actually caring about a policy, I tend to doubt it. I’ve yet to see anyone who commits an act of violence like this who had ever worked for a local political organization or canvassed a neighborhood or even donated to a campaign. They don’t hold specific political ideas, they don’t know policy or anything. At best, they tend to vibe. Believing in universal healthcare is a policy position. There are various models, but it’s a policy on how one should fund and deliver healthcare in the country. Shooting a health insurance CEO has nothing to do with it. And to my knowledge, Luigi never really seemed to have a firm view of healthcare delivery before he shot the UHC CEO.

Honestly I don’t think our current situation is healthy simply because is not normal or desirable for government to be the singular touchstone of a culture. Politicians cannot work that way, and probably shouldn’t be running through a million polls asking stupid people how to solve the problems of the world. It doesn’t work because people mistake the theatrics for the substance or a smooth delivery for thought. And once you take away the smoke filled room in which the real business was done, the result is shitty and subject to rediculous purity games that preclude dealing to get things done. Furthermore, it breeds the perfect storm of division. If the most important thing the thing you spend the most time talking about is politics, you’ll naturally divide the country. And there are few if any neutral places. You can’t turn it off and just enjoy a brew and some baseball or hockey with someone who doesn’t share your political beliefs. Fandoms are almost all coded either liberal or conservative. Beers seem to be as well. Shopping and the brands you buy. Politics as identity is how you get dark things, as it makes those who disagree enemies.

For the people, and truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as any body whomsoever. But I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consists in having of government those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having share in government, sirs. That is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things, and therefore until they do that, I mean, that you do put the people in that liberty as I say, certainly they will never enjoy themselves.

I think it’s more that Europe has the right formula as they don’t have elections that begin the moment the current government is sworn in. The campaign seasons are fairly short and unless there’s some vote of no confidence or something, the government can run things and people don’t feel the need to consume political news to follow it all.

Given the political patterns of mental illness 'people who commit terrorism because they're batshit nuts' looks an awful lot like left wing political violence in our hyper-polarized and pillarizing society.

The FBI have Bartkus' manifesto, and based on media leaks it is generally nihilistic rather than being political in a way which could be described as left or right-wing.

This is on me, I suspect, for kind of burying the lede by walking through my thought processes chronologically, but--this is kind of what I was getting at. I think of anti-natalism as "left wing" because all the anti-natalists I know are to my left, politically. But where you see psychopathy as an explanation, I am kind of asking whether people are, in effect, intellectualizing themselves into psychopathy. Radicalization seems to generally be studied as an outgrowth of identitarianism; this writeup on the stages of radicalism leads quite explicitly with "the person joins or identifies with a group or organisation."

But with the anti-natalist bombing (and various others through history) it's more like, "the person identifies with an idea." Be that nihilism or philosophical anti-natalism or whatever, this pathway doesn't seem to be the one that governments and think tanks are really thinking about, when they speak of extremism.

I did. I was surprised to find out the exact ideology, but the first reports I read had some Dark Hinting about "maybe it's one of those crazy bigot pro-lifers, they're against IVF for religious reasons". Being one of those crazy bigots myself, I found it highly unusual that an IVF clinic would be bombed, not unless it was mistaken for an abortion facility.

Well, well. Turns out it was an atheist? Or anyway, not one of the standard Christian pro-lifers. Don't suppose we'll be getting any apology from the news outlets, don't expect one to be honest.

abortion clinic bombings

When was the last abortion clinic bombing? Literally. There was a 2015 shooting at a planned parenthood by a man who, though clearly motivated by anti-abortion sentiment, was unable to express this in full sentences.

The pro-life movement is an interesting example of a movement which had a violent fringe that it then decided to get rid of(oftentimes that mechanism was to inform the Clinton DoJ). For this they have received no credit.

If you go through Wikipedia's anti-abortion violence list and take bombing literally, that would appear to be 2012. The chief method of anti-abortion violence/vandalism since then appears to have been arson.

The more recent parts of that list are mostly trespassing and minor vandalism(there's as much spray paint as gasoline involved), with a smattering of genuine crazy in the actually completely schizo sense(the last anti-abortion fatality was committed by a man declared unfit to stand trial), while earlier examples are lots of otherwise-sane fanatics causing serious property damage, killing specific targets, kidnapping people, causing severe injuries, etc. Anti-abortion terrorism is genuinely on the long term decline and has been since some time in the nineties.

For this they have received no credit.

Oh, it's the good old Catch-22. "If you really believed abortion was murder, you'd be out there shutting down clinics by force! Since you're not doing that, then you don't really believe abortion is murder, it's all about hatred of women's free sexuality!"

Then someone does shoot an abortion provider or bomb a clinic, and it's "See, we told you they were all violent murderous brutes!"

For this they have received no credit.

Right--putting myself in the shoes of their critics, I would guess that this falls under the "you get no points for being a decent human being, being a decent human being is the baseline expectation" clause. Of course, this clause is only ever applied in one direction, and also I am suspicious of the claim that there is anything "baseline" about humans being kind to one another, but nevertheless--the rhetoric is the rhetoric.

That said, I have to wonder how much of the decrease in violence against abortion doctors can be explained by pro-life activism self-policing, and how much can be explained by the successful psy-op of raising two or three generations of citizens who just don't think that killing the unborn is a very big deal, and often think that subjecting women to authority, ever, for any reason, is peak oppression.

Right, I don’t expect a ‘congratulations, you haven’t killed anyone this year’ award. What seems much more reasonable to ask for is to stop claiming that the prolife movement is violent- it’s not. The answer to ‘who is bombing abortion clinics?’ is ‘statistically, nobody’.

That said, I have to wonder how much of the decrease in violence against abortion doctors can be explained by pro-life activism self-policing, and how much can be explained by the successful psy-op of raising two or three generations of citizens who just don't think that killing the unborn is a very big deal, and often think that subjecting women to authority, ever, for any reason, is peak oppression.

It’s an interesting question how much of the end of the violent fringe of the prolife movement was due to self policing and how much was due to the Clinton DoJ making it a priority. But the prolife movement is as strong as ever. I don’t think secular trends are a major factor.

Right, I don’t expect a ‘congratulations, you haven’t killed anyone this year’ award. What seems much more reasonable to ask for is to stop claiming that the prolife movement is violent- it’s not. The answer to ‘who is bombing abortion clinics?’ is ‘statistically, nobody’.

Statistically Muslims in Western countries are perfectly peaceful.

In the US at least, ‘Muslims are about as peaceful as native whites’ is a statement which at least passes the sniff test.

Last I checked, Muslims commit about 4% of the domestic terrorism despite being only 1% of the population.

Can you say more about how Livelsberger was a leftist suicide bomber? According to the article you link:

On Friday evening investigators released a note found on the suspect's phone where he claimed to have major grievances about the country and military.

In one of the letters police say were found on his phone, Livelsberger expressed support for Donald Trump and the president-elect's allies, Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He also expressed disdain for diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and income inequality and expressed a concern about homelessness, according to the letters.

Can you say more about how Livelsberger was a leftist suicide bomber?

It seems like he changed his mind about those things, and indeed that the change was a sufficiently traumatic experience that he became radicalized against things he once believed. But I acknowledge that is not the only possible explanation for his actions.

I'm confused why anti-fertility clinic would be considered a leftist position, or did I misread OP?

Because he did it because he hates babies.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats