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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   33224 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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The NYT wants you to know that Harvard has "no way out." I'm sure Harvard University with its 53.2 billion dollar endowment is going to start having trouble attracting researchers:

Trump has stripped extensive federal funding from Harvard. Let’s say a judge gives back all of that money for this year. Half of the university’s research budget comes from the federal government. Where is Harvard going to get the money in the year after that, and the year after that? If you’re a researcher, do you want to be doing research at a school where your funding is in question?

I suspect they're scaring their readership to rack in the clicks. The article is being embraced by Rightist influencer people eager for confirmation of their "victory." They're COOKED! Back in reality, the Democrats will likely take back the Presidency in 2028, if not then then very likely by 2032. It will eventually dawn on these people that Harvard remains massively prestigious while nobody knows or cares about Fred's Car Wash in Des Moines Iowa.

I hope Harvard stands firm and puts the admin in its place. It's one thing to be against Affirmative Action but a completely different one to oppose academic independence say you want MAGA leaning professors in the physics department.

Fight Fiercely Harvard!

  • -10

While you can probably find conservative professors in most subjects, MAGA is a populist movement which doesn't appeal very much to the educated crowd, so I'm doubting you can find that many of them.

Actually, you can't for most subjects.

I spent the last 20 minutes looking for it and I can't find it but a number of years ago I remember seeing data about the political afflication of professors by party, either Democrat or Republican (I think it was out of Jonathan Haidt's work but not 100% sure).

Anyway, the end result was that the balance (and this was back in the 2016-2018 era) was abysmal. Like really really bad. Most subjects had maybe 10 out of every 100 professors were Republican or Republican leaning. Some even lower. There was one or two subjects (I think was English literature and one other thing maybe) where they could not find a single Republican leaning professor at all, from their survey. The only subjects that had a "reasonable" balance of Democrat and Republicans were I think engineering and economics (unsurprisingly), but even that was like 60-40 D-R.

It means in most colleges, outside of engineering and economics, you might have 1 or 2 Republican professors in the whole college, and the vast majority of disciplines in any given university would not have a single Republican leaning professor.

I know Republican != conservative (honestly it's probably worse), and I might be misremembering the data slightly.

But there are more qualified applicants than professor jobs.

I think this is what you're looking for, and no it's not Jonathan Haidt's work. Here's a prior summary I wrote of the findings while TheMotte was still on Reddit: "It used data from voter registration data for faculty members to determine the Democrat to Republican (D:R) ratio of an array of social science fields, namely economics, history, communications, law and psychology. Out of a sample of 7,243 professors, 2,120 were not registered, 1,145 were not affiliated, 3,623 were Democrat, and only 314 were Republican. That's a D:R ratio of 11.5:1. Of the five fields, economics was the most mixed, with a D:R ratio of 4.5:1 (which fits pretty well with my perception of economics). History was by far the most skewed, with a whopping D:R ratio of 33.5:1." Note 60% of history and journalism departments, 45% of psychology departments, and 20% of economics departments have not even a single registered Republican in them. Granted there were a significant portion of people that were not registered as either Democrat or Republican and it's not beyond the realm of possibility there are some hidden conservatives in there, but still a failure to find even one registered Republican professor in such a large percentage of departments is really bad and rather shocking.

There is, however, also a paper Haidt participated in that reviewed a lot of evidence of bias against conservatives in academia (specifically social psychology) though. The rundown of the findings is basically that in social psychology 82% of people identify as leftist, 9% are moderate, and only 6% are conservative. Only 18% of respondents within academia state they would not discriminate against conservatives; 82% admit they would be at least a little bit biased against a conservative candidate. This is only capturing what they are explicitly willing to state; the actual prevalence of bias against conservatives is probably higher.

In some ways the precedent for the administration was set long ago. The only real question is whether the executive can deem Harvard, of all institutions, of similar legal stature to Bob Jones University. They may have the text of the law on their side: Congress not infrequently writes "If the Attorney General decides...", presumably giving her a lot of discretion in this case, subject to its other rules about capriciousness.

Alea iacta est, but I know not which way the legal cards will fall in this case.

The only real question is whether the executive can deem Harvard, of all institutions, of similar legal stature to Bob Jones University.

That is what equality under the law means.

Some of Trump's demands in the funding case seem unreasonable, but both going after the tax status (which hasn't actually happened yet and is the same as what was done to Bob Jones for similar reasons) and Noem's letter about foreign students which demands only information, not policy changes, seem well within the law, except perhaps the demand for disciplinary records.

Alea iacta est, but I know not which way the legal cards will fall in this case.

Over time? Almost certainly against Harvard, especially after the current fiscal year ends in about 3 months.

At the end of the day, Harvard's relationship with the US government runs through the regulatory state, not by statute. There is no law that says Harvard must receive funds, or even that- once approved- Harvard cannot have funds taken away if it is found to no longer meet requirements. Congress (and most legislatures in general, even outside of the US) by design gives the regulatory state significant deference to who, how, and whether to give out grants and funds and determinations to those effects. As this is a pretty well established federal government power, even injunction-inclined judges are working against a dynamic where other parts of the judiciary do not go along with a 'well, it's illegal when Trump does it' approach.

What limits the ability of even sympathetic judges to freeze the status quo with injunctions is that the US government largely spends year-by-year, or the ability to compel future actions.

Even when litigation can successfully freeze currently granted expenditures, there is no legal basis for courts to require future funding. Funding, after all, does not derive from the executive branch in the first place. It derives from the Congress, which puts its own terms and conditions, which include, well, executive discretion on approving grants on a going-forward basis.

Similarly, an injunction doesn't really work on, say, issuing student visas. Harvard can request a freeze on current student visas, to try and protect what it has, but Harvard cannot demand future visas still be granted. For one thing, Harvard doesn't even know who those future visa-holders even are. But more importantly is that in pretty much every country in the world visa issuance is a 'may', not 'must' responsibility of the government, and specifically its embassies. Embassies in turn have considerable discretion when issuing visas, such as if they have reason to believe the visa recipient would be able to keep their status inside the united states... say, for example, that they are requesting a visa on the basis of a specific university that the government is going through a process of invalidating for student visas.

It doesn't even matter if there is a judicial injunction stopping that from being affirmed for the moment. The visa-issuance discretion isn't on the basis of 'the university is ineligible'- it can be issued on the basis of reason to believe that the university will be ineligible during the student's time.

As a result, the current litigation is about stanching the bleeding (losing current grants / foreign students who already have visas), but the real issue is the lack of inputs over a longer term (lack of incoming grants / foreign students).

Over time, sure. But Harvard may well win by hanging on until the next administration reverses course.

If the next administration has to reverse course for Harvard to win, that is simply defining away Harvard's loss.

Harvard University with its 53.2 billion dollar endowment

Norman_Rockwell_Freendom_Of_Speech.jpg

It's OK to pay money to billionaires.

Federal grants to research universities are just a commission to research some topic that an agency finds valuable enough to fund with taxpayer money. If I don't feel swindled when I buy groceries from a multi-billion dollar corporation like Walmart then I don't believe I should feel bad just because my taxes are funding research at an institution with a multi-billion dollar endowment. We all got what we paid for and at a reasonable price. There is plenty of culture war slop research that should be defunded, but the endowment is a red herring in my opinion.

Does there exist a class of research that is so speculative and/or long-term that it's beyond the quarterly target cycles of companies? Who would fund that kind of research if so?

Norman_Rockwell_Freendom_Of_Speech.jpg

God I hate that painting. Rockwell wasn't even a good artist btw., unfortunately people have only really seen that particular work by him and his wider artworks have that uncanny valley feeling to them...

  • -14

have only really seen that particular work

You trippin foo, "Freedom from Want", "Rosie the Riveter", "Dreams", "The Runaway", and "Soda Jerk" are all at least as common in the US outside of the Extremely Online, "Freedom From Want" quite a bit more so. I've also seen "Be a Man", "Sunset", and "Sunday Morning" around pretty often. While I will otherwise refrain from offering opinions on artistic merit in this comment, I'll add that when I was trying to find links to all these pictures I'd seen but didn't know the names of I encountered "CPA" and "The Lineman" for the first time, and I quite like them both.

Same thing applies to the Blue-Tribe hue and cry over the government paying Elongated Muskrat to put their satellites in orbit....

(edit: the government's satellites; NASA, USGS, NRO, &c. &c.). Sorry if that wasn't clear.

  • -23

Could you elaborate on what you mean by this?

What does this add?

Do you have an issue with SpaceX? If so, what?

I don't have an issue with the government paying SpaceX to launch government satellites.

The Blue Tribe has similar antipathy for Mr Musk as the Red Tribe has for Harvard. I was making the point that the monies that they get from the government are both of the form 'Government gives money to rich person/organisation in exchange for services rendered', and thus they are both analogous to @Soul_Stuff giving money to Walmart in exchange for groceries.

(As for my general Views on SpaceX, while I have a few notes on Mr Musk's politics, I suspect that the people calling for his head are not being entirely honest about their motives, and are more driven by resentment not that he is wealthy per se so much as his having the temerity to not be subject to the high-school-cafeteria-style pecking order. I could be wrong.

Futhermore, even if one accepts the aspersions cast against Mr Musk's character, ending the eight-year, ten-month, nine-day period in which America Could Not Into Space has to count for something.)

Elongated Muskrat

Let's not do this.

Norman_Rockwell_Freedom_Of_Speech.jpg

For some reason this reminds me of @coffee_enjoyer

Can anybody give a QRD of why Trump seems particularly pissed off at Harvard?

Harvard stood up to some Republican bint (Elise Stefanik) demanding they be more of a safe space to an alleged vulnerable minority group.

Trump is just generally going after elite universities to try to force them into being... well 'allied' is probably not in the cards, but at least 'not aligned with his enemies'. It's just Harvard's turn.

He's not. If anything, Harvard is getting its turn after Columbia, which was targeted first due to its weaker position.

(Warning - link is not QRD. But it may be interesting.)

Aside from what others have said, the fact that just 2 years ago they lost at the Supreme Court on their (obviously) racially discriminatory admissions process and are proceeding to not actually take the L and comply is not helping.

I don't think he's actually particularly pissed at Harvard specifically. It's really the combination of a few things.

  • It's the most sacred institution to DC people.
  • If anti-Trumpism has a Westpoint, it's Harvard Kennedy School
  • Harvard administrators are unbelievably arrogant and will be unable to present a sympathetic defence in public
  • The Trump base has zero sympathy for Harvard and love to see them get put in place
  • Harvard isn't what it used to be at the administrative level. Claudine Gay isn't up to the standards of Harvard 30 years ago
  • Harvard admin doesn't seem to grasp that a lot of their behaviour over the past few decades is explicitly illegal and they only got away with it because the feds were on side. There's no case law protecting them.
  • As the most prestigious school they make an obvious target for all of Trumpism's issues with academia.

Now, I hate the NYT as much as anyone, but the first paragraph after your no way out quote says:

The Trump administration’s attempt to block international students from attending Harvard University was a sharp escalation in the showdown between the federal government and one of the nation’s oldest and most powerful institutions.

This is the real threat, not the squabbling over federal funds. Harvard might swim in cash, but they also live of their ability to draw in the best students from half the world. For billions of people worldwide, the answer to the question "Where would you study if you were super-smart and wanted to win a Nobel?" is "Ivy league, or a few prestigious state-run universities in the US". In the future, the answer for all but 340M (plus Canadians, perhaps?) will change to "... except Harvard, which does not take international students."

My understanding of the US private universities is that their students are either very rich and smart or brilliant and on a stipend. It is a symbiotic relationship: the rich student pays for both of them getting a prestigious, excellent education, and the brilliant student makes sure that the prestige of the university is maintained.

About 27% of Harvard's students are international (a lower number than I would have expected). I think that the "rich and smart" internationals can be replaced without too much trouble, you would not have to lower standards very much to find still very smart Americans willing to pay for the privilege of studying at Harvard. I did not find what fraction of students is studying for free at Harvard, never mind how many of them are internationals, but I suspect that the overall fraction of students on a stipend is small, and that a significant fraction of them are internationals. Replacing these with US nationals will likely hurt.

Also, there are cascading effects. If you are a brilliant young American, would you rather go to a university where you can meet the best minds of your generation (or so they would claim), or one where you can only meet the best US minds of your generation who do not care about that very fact?

The obvious reaction (if the courts uphold Trump's decision) for Harvard would be to announce them opening a branch in Canada, but that is not easily done.

their students are either very rich and smart or brilliant and on a stipend.

Nope, not for undergads at least. You only get free money based on "need". And I believe that all international undergrads pay full price no matter what.

Phd is a different story, but phds in all US universities get paid slave wages for going to school

I feel like people are giving institutions like Harvard the benefit of the doubt in a way that they do not deserve. If we where talking about MIT or caltech (and maybe even Stanford) I believe that most of these arguments about having the best international students would be correct, and while Harvard is very good, it’s not as if their institutions primary purpose is supporting ground breaking work in the physical sciences, it’s there to provide the most privileged children in the world a place to mingle and make connections.

I suspect the elite truly see themselves as post national “global citizens” and removing that from Harvard will hurt their image.

More broadly I don’t think that people have really thought through how corrosive having tons of international students is to the us university system (this comment applies to state schools as well as elite institutions). Put succinctly, academics advance their careers by getting grants, and publishing papers. This means paying talented post docs and graduate students. Having an essentially open boarders system for this means that academics can access foreign labor at a fraction of what it would cost to hire us students, so instead of having one or two students who are paid slightly more, you end up with academics who have 8-10 students, 2 of whom are domestic and the rest are international.

This leads to worse mentorship and the situation we have now where the us tax payers is funding efforts to educate a bunch of foreign nationals who then leave.

I have worked with plenty of brilliant people with PhDs, it may just be my particular background but it seems to me that the main trait shared by the best ones was that they had received good mentorship from their advisors. You’re less likely to get that when the advisor is able to recruit an army.

Finally I would add that giving them all green cards would just make the system even worse since it would give academics even more power over their international students than they have now and would make these positions even more attractive.

So while I don’t have a problem with some international students, I think it’s important to reco

This leads to worse mentorship and the situation we have now where the us tax payers is funding efforts to educate a bunch of foreign nationals who then leave.

Universities already charge foreigners far more than natives for tuition.

As I said in my comment above, I believe that academics should be incentivized to support a smaller number of students who they actually mentor and otherwise invest in.

What if the academics don't agree that some people are entitled to their attention because they were born on one side of an arbitrary line? You can say "well I don't want to subsidize them" which I would agree with. But Trump's actions go far beyond that.

Harvard is top tier in the life sciences , same league as MIT.

while Harvard is very good, it’s not as if their institutions primary purpose is supporting ground breaking work in the physical sciences

Harvard's graduate programs are top tier in basically every science. Schools like Harvard and Yale may think of themselves, and wish to be seen as, liberal arts institutions that act as finishing schools for America's future elite while letting the eggheads at MIT and Caltech do the dirty work of science and engineering, but in practice every elite university has the same set of R1 research programs in STEM, and trying to shut down any of the top ~20 will do approximately the same amount of damage to American science as any other.

More broadly I don’t think that people have really thought through how corrosive having tons of international students is to the us university system (this comment applies to state schools as well as elite institutions). Put succinctly, academics advance their careers by getting grants, and publishing papers. This means paying talented post docs and graduate students. Having an essentially open boarders system for this means that academics can access foreign labor at a fraction of what it would cost to hire us students, so instead of having one or two students who are paid slightly more, you end up with academics who have 8-10 students, 2 of whom are domestic and the rest are international.

Domestic and international grad students and postdocs are paid the same and receive the same benefits. It's not as though you can accept a bunch of Indian PhD students and give them half the normal stipend, at least at any institution I'm familiar with. The size of a lab is usually dictated by how much grant money a particular professor can bring in, with salaries for each position fixed by the university. A new assistant professor might only have enough funding to support a handful of students, while an academic superstar could have dozens of lab members and spend very little time with each one as he jets from one conference to another or advises startups on the side. Some immigrant professors may prefer to bring in people from their home countries, which is annoying, but their labs tend to stay small because they are recruiting from a more limited pool and they write worse papers without native English speakers to assist.

In my experience, a decent fraction of international students at the undergraduate level are spoiled rich kids who could not have gotten into an American university on their academic performance alone, but at the graduate level you get students who are much less concerned with empty prestige (not even Asians would get a PhD just for bragging rights) and are on average smarter and harder working than their domestic counterparts. The ability to brain drain the rest of the world is the superpower that has enabled American dominance in science and technology ever since Operation Paperclip, and destroying it out of spite (at what, I'm not even sure) would be an act of such catastrophic stupidity that it would make a communist dictatorship green with envy.

This doesn’t really make sense. If you shut down Harvard’s STEM stuff, why wouldn’t most of it end up over the Charles at MIT or down the 95 corridor at Yale or across the country at Cal Tech? The researchers don’t disappear. The other universities could scoop them up.

Because the research is limited by both funding and competent people. Unless the first gets transferred more or less immediately, the competent people will disappear because they don't want to wait years in a limbo before getting on with their career. Sure, you'll eventually get replacements but those are effectively brand new research programs and it takes years to get them off the ground.

the us tax payers is funding efforts to educate a bunch of foreign nationals who then leave.

Do they leave? I work with tons of very smart foreigners who got an advanced degree at an American university, so they can't all be leaving. We'd definitely be worse off if we can't brain drain the world anymore.

And let's not forget that Trump once proposed a drastic solution to retain international students:

You graduate from a college, I think you should get, automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country. That includes junior colleges, too.

As I said in my comment above, I believe that academics should be incentivized to support a smaller number of students who they actually mentor and otherwise invest in. I might not have been explicit, buts my experience is that most work completed by graduate students is of relatively low quality and the point of the exercise is to train people so that they are equipped to do actual science. The foreign students I have interacted with are usually at around the same level as the domestic students but are more desperate because they are trying to escape from a shithole. Automatically giving green cards to people would just make the situation worse by further increasing the pool of labor available for exploitation.

As for the ones who stayed, how many of them are actually doing science? I bet the majority of them used it as a pathway into the us labor market and are now working fairly standard jobs. Had they not come these jobs would have still been filled (probably at significantly higher cost, but if that’s the cost of a more equal society, so be it).

Indeed I work in industry, not academia, but I don't see it as any way bad if foreign students use American academia as a stepping stone into American industry. It's still a net benefit to the US.

Had they not come these jobs would have still been filled (probably at significantly higher cost, but if that’s the cost of a more equal society, so be it).

It's unlikely that these jobs would have been filled at a higher cost on account of the cost already being very high. It's more likely that the job would have been not filled or filled with inferior people.

An example of the top of my head - all but one of the authors of Attention is All You Need are foreigners. I don't know if you count Google Research/Brain as a "fairly standard job" but it's pretty obvious to me that there aren't seven foreigners on this paper because they're cheap.

I might not have been explicit, buts my experience is that most work completed by graduate students is of relatively low quality and the point of the exercise is to train people so that they are equipped to do actual science.

What fields have you observed this in? In capital intensive STEM research, the senior grad students and postdocs do all the work and the PIs are out of touch managers who have to spend all their time grubbing for money. I could see your statement being true for like economics or something, but it is not at all what I observed in the hard sciences.

Its the opposite of what your gut instinct was. International students are the "rich and mediocre" type, overwhelmingly. And there is a surplus of brilliant, nonrich, Americans, not just for Harvard, but for the Ivy League.

Do you know if the undergrads are any better? My primary experiences have been with international ms (the worst) and PhD (who seem average to slightly above average) students.

In law school, I remember people deliberately choosing classes with high numbers of international students specifically to benefit from the more generous curve of competing with the mediocre Chinese kids.

In my experience, the typical elite undergraduate student is a capable smartish rule follower, regardless of if they're international or domestic. Dirt poor internationals don't ever make it to elite schools, and dirt poor domestics rarely do. The dirt poor domestics aren't particularly brilliant.

The occasions where someone is brilliant are rare, and they tend to be children of middle class professionals, regardless of if they're international or domestic. They do attend at higher rates than typical universities.

Technical PhDs are always smart. Masters students are universally idiots.

Harvard Related piggyback: Steven Pinker published a mostly defense of Harvard in an NYT opinion piece titled "Harvard Derangement Syndrome". I call it a mostly defense, because I don't think the title is appropriate. While the purpose and conclusion of the article is to defend Harvard against Federal interference the meat is more rational examination.

Some pulled paragraphs:

Finally, our students are not blank slates which we can inscribe at will. Young people are shaped by peers more than most people realize. Students are shaped by the peer cultures in their high schools, at Harvard and (especially with social media) in the world. In many cases, students’ politics are no more attributable to indoctrination by professors than are their green hair and pierced septums.

A poll of my colleagues on the academic freedom council turned up many examples in which they felt political narrowness had skewed research.... In climate policy, it led to a focus on demonizing fossil fuel companies rather than acknowledging the universal desire for abundant energy; in pediatrics, taking all adolescents’ reported gender dysphoria at face value; in public health, advocating maximalist government interventions rather than cost-benefit analyses; in history, emphasizing the harms of colonialism but not of communism or Islamism; in social science, attributing all group disparities to racism but never to culture; and in women’s studies, permitting the study of sexism and stereotypes but not sexual selection, sexology or hormones (not coincidentally, Hooven’s specialty)...

Universities should set the expectation that faculty members leave their politics at the classroom door, and affirm the rationalist virtues of epistemic humility and active open-mindedness...

If the federal government doesn’t force Harvard to reform, what will? ... Universities could give a stronger mandate to the external “visiting committees” that ostensibly audit departments and programs but in practice are subject to regulatory capture. University leaders constantly get an earful from disgruntled alumni, donors and journalists, and they should use it, judiciously, as a sanity check. The governing boards should be more tuned in to university affairs and take more responsibility for its health. The Harvard Corporation is so reclusive that when two of its members dined with members of the academic freedom council in 2023, The Times deemed it worthy of a news story.

Pinker concedes much. Too much for the NYT commenters who might lambast him more in other contexts. He likely doesn't concede enough for those that want to see Harvard suffer. His position negates neutrality, though he attempts to refute this conflict of interest with with his own demonstrated principles.

I find the antisemitism weapons repugnant. I would consider it a good thing for student-activists and campus administrations alike to learn the value of viewpoint diversity, limitations of protest, boundaries of conduct at university, what an education is meant for, and so on. That's not going to happen regardless. Pick your poison.

In many cases, students’ politics are no more attributable to indoctrination by professors than are their green hair and pierced septums.

This is such a funny sentence. It feels like it belongs in the 1960s, when I can imagine a stuffy old-fashioned college professor being shocked by dyed hair and piercings.

Nowdays... well, first it's not very shocking. Second, the students who have that kind of fashion are almost all liberal, sharing the same politics as the faculty. Many of the faculty probably had those fashions when they were younger (or still have them). And the school's admissions policies actively select for those kinds of kids via their vague "personality" rating, which rewards people for personal demonstration of radical leftist politics. Which is to say, it rewards them for having the right fashion, and for a college, that means counterculture punk shit.

Ah yes, the personality assessment. In which the assessor looks at an applicant's race and marks them down as an unlikable unrespected coward if they are Asian.

The holistic interviews being originally invented to limit the number of Jews at Harvard, now easily repurposed for more modern racism.

Sure, the college professors aren't shocked by hair died in unnatural colours and piercings where they don't belong. But they are also not the originators- this stuff comes from peers.

I've made this point before, that colleges are essentially compounds full of unsupervised teenagers and that, elite colleges being still sort of meritocratic, they adopt the politics which justify the preferences of unsupervised teenagers writ large, because that makes them popular among their peer group- not their professors.

I considered the point of that statement as connecting political beliefs of students with their fashion choices and not something that professors influence compared to other cultural forces (including and especially social media).

If none of the political opinions are brought in with the students, why are students beliefs so uniform? Why are all the kids with or without green hair so uniformly aligned to the values, attitudes, beliefs and ideals of the left liberal wing of the Democratic Party? If no indoctrination is taking place such uniformity should not happen. Yet on every issue, the students agree with the far left. There are protests for Palestinians, yet you can’t find any students— not even the Jewish ones — openly saying that Hamas had it coming. There are protests against Trump, but are there any MAGA hats or signs? The dude got 50+ percent of the vote.

A very clear sign of indoctrination is agreement by the populace on major issues. And going down issue by issue, it’s impossible to not notice just how closely modern college students align with the far left, especially when compared both to the surrounding communities and the communities these kids came from.

There were pro-Israel protests on college campuses. There's fratboys wearing maga hats.

Campus conservatism exists, it's just a minority tendency for a variety of reasons and the kind of mass-popular soft-social conservatism that Trump embodies isn't super appealing to the highly intellectual crowd.

So drawing on a population that elected MAGA with half the vote, a tiny minority is pro Trump? A population that has lots of Jews yet again only a tiny group of them protesting for their brothers in Israel? It still doesn’t track. Sure you don’t have 100% uniformity, but drawing from a highly polarized population that runs 45-55% between D and R and ending up with the vast majority of students would align with the far left which in the general population of the USA is maybe 20% of the population. If there’s no indoctrination, why doesn’t a typical college campus mirror the USA ideologically?

I don’t observe the same thing in business. If you hire 100 people, they’ll generally be pretty close to the demographics of the region. If I hire 10 people from Alabama, I get probably 9 southern Baptists, most of them very conservative, and so on to attitudes about abortion, gays, and proper grits. If I hired 10 people from Alabama and four years later they were mostly pro LGBT episcopal Christians and socialist to boot, you’d probably be right to suspect that there’s something fishy going on.

You can find well educated conservatives they’re usually just not maga. The religious right and the pro-business right are coalition partners, not loyalists.

Selection plus social pressure

I think most of the students are left-leaning even before they enter the university, they just don't express it so strongly. But yes, some indoctrination is clearly taking place. But it's more from student clubs and off-campus organizations than from the classes. Also probably pressure from dudes trying to impress women to get laid, and women are usually more left-leaning than men.

Women are more left leaning than men because they're more conformist and left-wing politics is the norm in those circles. It used to be the reverse.

Left wing politics is the norm in those circles because they're compounds full of unsupervised teenagers which award status for intellectual achievements, and unsupervised teenagers broadly want to get taken care of without having rules on themselves(and also often to get laid, dabble in substances, stay up late, etc). This is something that's pretty easy to justify from a far-left framework but can't be justified from a right wing framework at all. And there is a subset of high-status college kids at elite universities who are more than smart enough to understand that- how much of the football team is showing up at palestine protests(they don't care about intellectual consistency, by and large)? There are obvious reasons why future thought leaders are aggressively left wing when they're in college and our culture is just not good enough at making them be adults to exert a moderating influence.

Women are more left leaning than men because they're more likely to benefit from government services (healthcare during pregnancy, support for children, longer lives meaning social security and medicare, etc.) There's no need to point to indoctrination when self-interest is already more than explanatory. In the same vein, most people go to college to become professionals in dense urban centers, which also happen to be where government administration and benefits tend to be the most concentrated. There's culture war stuff going on too, but that's basically a proxy for self-interest. It's a mirror of how conservative denial of climate change and performative love of big trucks is downstream of the fact they're more likely to be involved in primary industries, and that people who drive big vehicles long distances are more affected by the price of gas. Throw in people making costly signals of ingroup affiliation and we have the modern situation.

There are protests for Palestinians, yet you can’t find any students— not even the Jewish ones — openly saying that Hamas had it coming.

Well, yeah, that's probably a great way to get punched in the face.

One of the first things I saw in a modern university was a lengthy 'do consent, don't be rapey, don't use words like bitch, also there's a wage gap between men and women plus a race wage gap (which inconveniently shows Asians are on top but we'll skip over that)' session. There was one guy who raised his hand and made an argument of it, saying men were more likely to do engineering and highly paid subjects which is why they earn more money.

But there was visceral, audible groaning from the audience at this display, about the only interesting thing that happened. The presenters basically just ummed and ahhed in response, they weren't really angry or anything. It was leftism on autopilot, leftism by default, apolitical leftism.

Somehow they'd already gotten to most the students. High school or maybe society generally is the key thing. Maybe the kids who pay attention to high school because they're going to uni actually soak up the message in high school and that's what's really happening? But they also do change people there, I saw a fairly normal albeit somewhat edgy guy turn into an Extinction Rebellion climate believer seemingly overnight. I saw none of this actually happening and don't understand the mechanism, only the effects. Dark leftism.

This essay feels out of place in the NYT. Which is to say it's well argued, nuanced, a bit witty, requires more than twenty seconds of short-term memory and it advances claims that readers are not going to like. Also it's about 5x longer than usual. I am curious how many readers actually even get through it. The carrot and stick of the article (Harvard good but also bad but also good and Trump bad but also has a point but also bad) is potent but attention spans are so short and nobody is open to ideas.

Which is to say I think the article is excellent!

I don't think the essay is out of place in the NYT. At least I can understand why the paper wouldn't think so. The Atlantic also might have published it to reach the Quarterly Heterodox quota. If you judge how much the reader engages from the Reader Picks comment section, then the answer is no one read it.

One commenter opens with a claim they "often appreciated Prof Pinker's heterodox views" and "no ideas or philosophies either on the left or the right should be above challenge and criticism." They immediately follow that introduction with "the attacks are largely coming from conservative Christians (see Heritage Foundation) that simply don't believe in a plural democracy. There's a fundamental flaw when you take the Bible to be infallible as your primary tenet..."

Comments ignore most of the things in the article and focus on the things they already wanted to shitpost about. They might not have read it or understood it. They might not be American at all. Comment sections are universally bad. The reader base the NYT imagines justify its status and dominance aren't shitposting under articles and op-eds. If these people are real (they are) and they still read the NYT (they do), then the piece is understood as some uncomfortable nuance from an insider with a comfortable conclusion. That's not out of place in the NYT.

If these people are real (they are) and they still read the NYT (they do), then the piece is understood as some uncomfortable nuance from an insider with a comfortable conclusion. That's not out of place in the NYT.

Yes that part fits like a glove. I still think it required (e.g.) more IQ points than the median NYT essay to follow though. But perhaps that's part of today's performance.

isn't that just the meme about questions at academic lectures. its not usually about asking a question, its usually just the person pushing their hobby horse.

I would consider it a good thing for student-activists and campus administrations alike to learn...limitations of protest, boundaries of conduct at university... That's not going to happen regardless. Pick your poison.

As an empirical question, they are learning the limits and boundaries through personal experience. I just don't like what the limits are.

The limits of protest conduct are:

  1. Protest for causes the establishment likes (unlimited violence allowed)

  2. Don’t protest for causes the establishment dislikes (seriously, don’t even bother leaving the house)

From the article:

The nation desperately needs this sense of proportionality in dealing with its educational and cultural institutions. Harvard, as I am among the first to point out, has serious ailments. The sense that something is not well with the university is widespread, and it’s led to sympathy, even schadenfreude, with Mr. Trump’s all-out assault. But Harvard is an intricate system that developed over centuries and constantly has to grapple with competing and unexpected challenges. The appropriate treatment (as with other imperfect institutions) is to diagnose which parts need which remedies, not to cut its carotid and watch it bleed out.

Fact is, the right has tried that, most recently with SFFA v Harvard, which Harvard essentially thumbed its nose at. And Pinker himself, by his own testimony in this article, has tried that. It did diddlysquat; Harvard doubled down on the bad behavior. So either those opposed to what Harvard is doing must back down, or they must escalate.

Also, universities are committed to free speech, which includes speech we don’t like. A corporation can fire an outspoken employee; a university can’t, or shouldn’t.

FIRE (not a right wing organization) listed Harvard as the worst US university for free speech two years running. And it got the worst score EVER for any US university in 2023. Harvard cannot credibly use a commitment to free speech as a defense for anything, because it lacks one. Yes, I know Pinker objects to this ranking, but not really credibly.

Fact is, the right has tried that, most recently with SFFA v Harvard, which Harvard essentially thumbed its nose at. And Pinker himself, by his own testimony in this article, has tried that. It did diddlysquat; Harvard doubled down on the bad behavior. So either those opposed to what Harvard is doing must back down, or they must escalate.

If you want to govern, you're going to deal with problems that transcend politics. There are potholes in the road, Democrats and Republicans both want them fixed. You might need to work with the guy who fixes them even if he's an a**hole.

The "friend-enemy distinction" people lack a theory of politics for that. Harvard is the enemy, Carl Schmitt, blah blah blah. Never occurs to them that their job fight involve literal or figurative pothole-filling rather than zero-sum political warfare. As Pinker said:

Just as clear is what won’t work: the Trump administration’s punitive defunding of science at Harvard. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out that research, which would not be done otherwise.

The "friend-enemy distinction" people lack a theory of politics for that. Harvard is the enemy, Carl Schmitt, blah blah blah. Never occurs to them that their job fight involve literal or figurative pothole-filling rather than zero-sum political warfare. As Pinker said:

What is the pothole in this scenario? Harvard is the avatar of a parasitic system which is higher ed. People have been tinkering at the edges for a long while now. Some people like Mitch Daniels have had some local success at keeping costs down while not allowing overt politicization of the campus. Others like Rufo have had to take a scorched earth view to get anything accomplished at all.

What is the pothole in this scenario?

Scientific research.

Having worked in a lab with Ph.D candidates, I am pretty skeptical that we benefit from that system over just letting them free into the world to be employed.

They won’t be outside of hard sciences and engineering. There simply aren’t a lot of skills a PhD student has that a normal employer wants. Basically the phd programs outside of really hard science and engineering are jobs programs for the graduates of those programs. It helps hide that such programs are useless because those students do get jobs after graduating. If we didn’t have that, maybe the top 1% of those students get real jobs while the rest learn to take orders at coffee shops.

I worked in a hard science engineering lab for most of my time in undergrad. The people work incredibly hard as Ph.D candidates and post docs, but so much of it is dedicated to grant writing, only a small bit of the work is working on the projects those grants are for. It seemed a lot like (frankly) college admissions. You have to apply to a dozen schools to get into one, and its not really clear why you got into that one instead of the others.

It becomes inevitable, at the start of the new dynasty: to throw all the old scholars and burn them with their books. There is approximately a snowball's chance in hell that anyone in Harvard will cooperate, Politics is the question of the posssible. It is impossible to do politics with the left. Best to cut the gordiian knot.

If someone calls you Hitler, believe them as an honest expression of non-cooperation.

If you want to govern, you're going to deal with problems that transcend politics. There are potholes in the road, Democrats and Republicans both want them fixed. You might need to work with the guy who fixes them even if he's an a**hole.

LOL. Harvard, and in general the entire left, have refused to do that when presented with said "a**hole". (Two of them, actually, Trump and Musk). Because this is false. Democrats (except a few marginalized dissidents) are happy with the situation as it is, and Republicans are extremely unhappy with it. If Democrats in general wanted to fix the racial discrimination problem at Harvard, they could have done so by now. If Democrats in general wanted to fix the issue of violent Palestinian protests at universities, they could have done a more credible job at it by now. If Democrats wanted to fix the problem of ideological uniformity at universities, they could have not contributed to it on purpose.

Just as clear is what won’t work: the Trump administration’s punitive defunding of science at Harvard. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out that research, which would not be done otherwise.

This is a theory, anyway. But dangling funding to force grantees to do whatever it wants is the standard situation -- he who pays the piper calls the tune; Trump, as you may recall, eliminated some of that which was pointing the other way (requiring various DEI things), to a lot of crying from the same people crying about Trump's actions against Harvard. In fact the government funds a lot of useless stuff that is basically alms for the universities, and that stuff which isn't... well, there are other universities which aren't so intransigent.

I mean I disagree. The reason people think of Harvard as a top tier school is because of the faculty it attracts and the work they do. If they all leave for greener pastures, the only thing left is the name. Sure you can coast on that for a while, but other schools who get the great professors and scientists will see their stars rise against Harvard’s downswing. If you can’t argue that you’re doing the best research, or developing minds under the best professors, on what, exactly is the prestige based? Name brand can help, but if it becomes obvious that Harvard graduates are not as good as in years past, they lose.

They're sitting on a $50b pile of money, surely they can bridge the Trump administration if they want to?

A bunch of that $50B is earmarked for something specific, though. They don't just have a swimming pool full of gold coins they can do whatever they want with.

A quick google search indicates that Harvard’s annual operating expenses are over $6 billion. Ten years of cushion is a lot, but not so much that they never need to worry about money again.

Probably the next administration rolls all this stuff back, but that’s not guaranteed.

The problem for them is that it’s mostly illiquid. So you’d have to borrow against it.

If it’s illiquid on a 10-year timescale then it’s not worth anything IMO.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

I didn't mean to imply otherwise. As I said here, my point is that appealing to phrases like "the dictatorship of the universe" and "look in the mirror" fail to make the concept of a telos in its full Christian sense compelling. They're rhetorical smoke and mirrors. The desirability of following one's telos in the theological sense doesn't follow from the blunt fact of the impossibility of ignoring one's material circumstances.

To put it another way, I think "biological males can't get pregnant" cannot get you to "therefore they shouldn't get genital surgery and change their names even if they want to" any more than "humans are not swans" can get you to "therefore they shouldn't become airplane pilots", no matter how loudly it is repeated.

(not falsified, however).

Is too. At least if by God we mean "an omnipotent omnibenevolent being" as opposed to an entity that's one but not the other. Still, let's not get into that.

I'm not sure which theological/philosophical tradition uses the word "omnibenevolent" when describing God, but it's not mine. It kind of implies that a theist believes that he is "well-behaved," which is a category error. God is good, in that he is "actual" - to say that X is good is to say that it has succeeded in being in some way. A pencil is a good pencil when it is able to draw, is sharp, long enough to be held easily in a hand, etc. God is good in that sense. God is not good in the sense of being accountable to others for duties and obligations that he performs admirably.

I was specifically talking about Catholics, since I was arguing with one. I grant that they don't seem to use the term "omnibenevolent". They do routinely say "God is good", though, in such a way as to imply we ought to look to God as a moral paragon and do what He says. 'By "God is Good" we just mean 'God is Actual'" doesn't pass the sniff test, as it seems to imply that Satan is a "good" Satan so long as he is able to tempt and torture, his hooves are duly cloven, he is able to strike terror into the hearts of men with the merest glance, etc. but you certainly don't see the Church teaching that "Satan is Good" (let alone implying that this is grounds to do what Satan says).

I am specifically a Catholic, so great.

I would recommend reading Brian Davies "The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil" for a study on this topic. Catholics do not believe saying "God is Good" is tantamount to saying "God is well-behaved."

Satan is not good, his nature is to be an angelic messenger in constant adoration of God and serving humanity. He is not living up to his nature at all. He is a very bad example of an Angel.

Catholics do not believe saying "God is Good" is tantamount to saying "God is well-behaved."

I'm sure that isn't the motte, but I rather think it's the bailey. Or rather, the bailey is "God is Good and therefore, among other qualities, benevolent". And even doctrinally, while I take the point about God necessarily not being accountable to anyone in the way that a human being is accountable for his actions, it seems incoherent to conclude that God is beyond human judgement, while also asking man to sing His praises. Praise is by definition a value judgement. If God isn't an admirable being, then on what basis could the Church recommend that I praise Him, i.e. express admiration? What does it even mean to praise an entity whom I would not be allowed, counterfactually, to criticize?

(Fair enough on the Devil-as-fallen-angel angle. Still - supposing you substitute your preferred nonexistent deity whose nature is destructive and malevolent, then I don't think the logic of Catholic morality can sanely hold that human beings could make no moral judgement of that being if it existed. But I recognize that Catholic theology wasn't really developed to return sane results in frictionless thought experiments that abstract away core tenets of dogma, so maybe it's okay to bite that bullet and say it's irrelevant because that's not the world God made, so it's alright that if Baal existed it would be moral to worship Baal? Still seems off.)

I'll take a look at the Brian Davies book, though going off the title - unwise, I know - I do want to clarify that I'm not talking about the general Problem of Evil here. I'm not convinced it would be immoral for a human being with arbitrary magic powers to create a universe like ours that contained evil - so the conventional Problem of Evil is not necessarily a defeater to "God is morally good". The Catholic God, however, is asserted to have actively performed deeds which I would judge as immoral if performed by a human being of equal power in the same circumstances.

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Do angels have free will in Catholicism too? If not, I do not understand how come Satan could defy God without that being a part of his nature. And as far as I recall the Serpent tempted Eve before the Fall, so whatever flaw caused the Serpent to introduce sin into the world could not have come from man's original sin - if indeed it was a flaw.

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The telos of the devils is not to tempt, torture, and frighten men- like the other angels, their telos is to serve and glorify God. Lucifer’s ‘non Serviam’ makes him a bad angel, for which he will be tortured like the other damned and tempts men because misery loves company.

A pencil is a good pencil when it is able to draw, is sharp, long enough to be held easily in a hand, etc.

By that reasoning, if God punished people for being kind and generous, he'd still be good.

God is not good in the sense of being accountable to others for duties and obligations that he performs admirably.

The word "accountable" here is tricky. Clearly nobody can punish God if he doesn't act appropriately. So in that sense, God isn't accountable. But surely people can come up with conclusions about whether God's acts live up to his principles, and if they don't, conclude that God is acting badly.

I'm not sure I would agree that God has principles. He has a nature, and this nature cannot deceive or be deceived. Would you describe that as a principle that God has to live up to? I wouldn't.

if God punished people for being kind and generous, he'd still be good.

I don't see how. Or rather, I think you need to expand upon the scenario a lot more. What are these people's natures, can God make a creature whose nature is to not be kind/generous, does God punish people or simple refrain from rewarding people?

I'm not sure I would agree that God has principles. He has a nature,

Then rephrase it. People can come up with conclusions about whether God's acts are consistent with his supposed nature. In that sense, yes, they can hold God accountable, even if they aren't able to punish God.

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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.

When conservatives appeal to a telos they aren't saying that things are against the laws of physics.

I'm not saying they do. I'm saying that, when arguing that the concept is intuitively correct, they appeal to the tautological inability to do impossible things - to actually rewrite physical reality - and then act like that should generalize to the full theological concept of telos. I think this is rhetorically disingenuous.

Appeal to the tautological impossibility hmm. Can you give me an example? I don’t see the point of appealing to something like that if you think it’s impossible anyway.

I'm not going to go into the semantics game of gender. It is a trap that has consumed too much time for ultimately no purpose.

Sex is far more important: and indelible in which the exceptions make the rule in nature. The male anglerfish is a male anglerfish. Evolution has shaped him to end his life as a vestigal set of gonads, his face permanently melded into his mate's flesh. It is a horrible fate, but that is what nature dictates his life and function to be. A transgender human is more capable, for human beings in general are more capable, but all humans are animals and must obey what nature has endowed them with.

A MtF lacks the qualia of female-ness... womanhood is not acquired, but innate. As a 4chan shitpost brilliantly in my memory states: the state of being is inachievable by any level of becoming. They may claim to have been born a woman and assigned male, but they have the sex organs of a male: the body of a male. Their conception of what a woman is no different than their conception of what a transcendent posthuman intelligence would be. Or what an anglerfish imagines a man to be: fundamentally limited by the limitations of their bodies.

In other words: women don't have to think about passing, and neither do men, because by nature they are effortlessly what their birth sex is as their gender, to the point where the two terms are identical. It is only the trans perspective that insists on a duality!

Even if the technology were perfect: if it were a machine that turned XY to XX, they would still not be a woman. They would be a man who has become a woman through scientific miracle. The transgender demand is not 'I can do what a woman can do' but 'I was always, in essence, woman in nature, in defiance of my biology'. That is the contentious part. In the modern day, the best they can do is 'you are a man who is trying to become a woman, and failing'. And, in spite of that failure, demanding the special privileges of those who are women anyway.

To contrast, human flight has obvious and inevitable consequence for those who do not respect the natural law: that we lack a righting instinct to pull out of death spirals, that we are susceptible to horizon illusions that kill many pilots, etc... it is not comparable. That is the price we pay for heavier than air flight. Transness would be to insist to the universe that you be treated like a swan.

The transgender demand is not 'I can do what a woman can do' but 'I was always, in essence, woman in nature, in defiance of my biology'. That is the contentious part.

But see, I don't think it is, or rather it's not the only contentious part. It might be the sole sticking point for a few idiosyncratic philosophers on Internet forums, but it isn't the objection in the real world. I think the conservative position, and in particular the argument from telos, is very much "you shouldn't cut your breasts off, inject yourself with testosterone, and change your name to Jonathan", not just "by all means do all those things if you want, but in an important philosophical and semantic sense, they still won't make you a man, sorry". I don't think most conservatives, let alone tradcaths, would suddenly be fine with transition if MTFs gave up on any "woman" talk and, say, went back to calling themselves queens, or indeed (if that's still smuggling too much spurious femininity in there) started calling themselves fnarglebargles.

The ontological impossibility of becoming truly indistinguishable from a biological member of the sex towards which you wish to transition cannot in itself be a compelling reason not to transition, any more than "you'll never be a bird" is a compelling reason not to build a plane. The telos framework which argues otherwise is smuggling in more assumptions than the physical impossibility of ignoring the universe. I'm not saying there's no philosophical background behind those additional assumptions, but I do think they're a lot less intuitively compelling than "you can't ignore the physical universe" and it's disingenuous to hide them behind the can't-ignore-reality thing. Hence the motte and bailey accusation.

I don't think most conservatives, let alone tradcaths, would suddenly be fine with transition if MTFs gave up on any "woman" talk and, say, went back to calling themselves queens, or indeed (if that's still smuggling too much spurious femininity in there) started calling themselves fnarglebargles.

If MtFs transitioned but didn't call themselves female or otherwise associate themselves with femininity, then why did they transition? This scenario would mean that they're physically altering their bodies to crudely resemble women while vehemently denying that they're doing so for any reason having to do with women--their chosen method of surgical self-expression just happens to be sorta based on physical attributes of women. Nobody would believe them if they claim it has nothing to do with women because that would be a really weird coincidence. And most conservatives (and most people) would look askance at someone surgically reducing the function of their body for no articulable reason whatsoever, which this would be.

If MtFs transitioned but didn't call themselves female or otherwise associate themselves with femininity, then why did they transition?

Well, for a start, they might think it feels good, and/or makes them attractive. You may be interested in parts of this Ozy post, though it's not making this argument:

I inject testosterone once a week. I have the changes everyone admits: my voice deepens, my chest hair thickens, my face grows a beard. But I also become stronger and more athletic (…) I stop crying at movies. My sexuality becomes more insistent and ever-present. (…) These observations are commonplace among trans people. Everyone knows that testosterone makes you more athletic and that hormones change your sexuality and your emotions. (…) I feel more like myself when my system runs on testosterone rather than estrogen — a phenomenon that is harder to explain if you don’t know how pervasive its effects are.

Indeed, even today there are people who seek hormone therapy without shooting for a binary transition - starting with various non-binary/genderfluid types. I know many vaguely nonbinary transmasculines who are happy going by "he" or "they" but don't break off in hives at being "she"-ed. (As a matter of fact, Ozy is one.) Those people would still seek breast reduction and testosterone injections even in a world where there was no concept of social transition and they remained classified as women, which they'd be basically fine with so long as they got to be very butch women.

As such:

This scenario would mean that they're physically altering their bodies to crudely resemble women while vehemently denying that they're doing so for any reason having to do with women--their chosen method of surgical self-expression just happens to be sorta based on physical attributes of women

This feels like a strawman. My proposed gnarglebargles don't pretend that it's a coincidence that transition makes them outwardly resemble the other sex in some ways. They would just give up on the semantic debate, and admit that their lifestyle still leaves them closer to very committed crossdressers than to the sex they emulate. Compare furries, who don't need to pretend that their aesthetic is completely unrelated to dogs to acknowledge that they have little in common with real dogs, and generally don't want to be exactly like real dogs anyway.

My proposed gnarglebargles don't pretend that it's a coincidence that transition makes them outwardly resemble the other sex in some ways.

If they are doing it for reasons related to wanting attributes of the other sex, and admit it, then they are trying to be a woman after all, they are just trying to be one partially, and they aren't labelling it as "I want to be a woman". But the original objection applies: conservatives will know they are saying "I want to have these traits, and these traits are associated with being female, and that's not a coincidence", correctly read that as "I am partially trying to be a woman", and object on those grounds.

They would just give up on the semantic debate, and admit that their lifestyle still leaves them closer to very committed crossdressers than to the sex they emulate.

The same people who object to people trying to change sex also object to crossdressing, for similar reasons, so this doesn't materially change the scenario.

If they are doing it for reasons related to wanting attributes of the other sex, and admit it, then they are trying to be a woman after all, they are just trying to be one partially (…) The same people who object to people trying to change sex also object to crossdressing, for similar reasons, so this doesn't materially change the scenario.

I reject the validity of that framing. Sure, conservatives object to crossdressing as well - for separate reasons. At least if they have any sense. By way of analogy: no doubt telos-brained conservatives object to eccentric transhumanists who want to become actual flesh-and-blood anthros. And that can certainly be grounded in teleological thinking. But they will also typically object to women putting on Playboy bunny-girl costumes as a form of sexual foreplay. And they might have coherent, respectable reasons for doing so (ie "it encourages sinful lust and fornication")! But "it goes against a human's telos to try and become a rabbit" would be an outrageously stupid reason to be against sexy bunny costumes. That's just not what those are about. Good old-fashioned drag queens aren't trying to become women, falling short, and lying about what they want. They're just men who think it's fun to cosplay as women. And again you might have moral objections to sexually-motivated roleplay, but I don't see how you can object on teleological grounds unless you think all forms of disguise and pretend are immoral even if it's children playing dress-up at the playground, or indeed, in a school play.

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Indeed, even today there are people who seek hormone therapy without shooting for a binary transition - starting with various non-binary/genderfluid types. I know many vaguely nonbinary transmasculines who are happy going by "he" or "they" but don't break off in hives at being "she"-ed. (As a matter of fact, Ozy is one.) Those people would still seek breast reduction and testosterone injections even in a world where there was no concept of social transition and they remained classified as women, which they'd be basically fine with so long as they got to be very butch women.

I'll note because others haven't that I don't know if I'm a conservative even if I often side with them on the trans question but I basically can get behind the "I just like it and it" justification for adult transition. It's the reality claims that I can't square with my other observations like the existence of some kind of gendered soul that make me get off the train. I do believe what follows from this formulation is no child transition, gendered sports and a fat maybe on trans people in women's restrooms depending on a lot of negotiated factors.

See the trans debate- the core of the conservative objection is

You really think the average trucker in Iowa opposes the pronoun people because of this "telos" stuff? He just says "that's a man in a dress" and leaves it at that. As do I. Just as a matter of political strategy, maybe it's a good idea to try and seem more normal and less weird than the people surgically mutilating their genitals.

I support the dictatorship of the universe. No good comes from defying it.

Couldn't you say that abortion bans and child support laws, rather than the absence of those things, violate the dictatorship of the universe? There is none of that in the animal kingdom, if a young animal can't secure voluntary provisioning from adults, it doesn't get to live. If you really take this ideology seriously, you don't get Ned Flanders, you get the Roman Empire, where there were no child support laws and infanticide was regarded as a private family matter. I don't go as far as Roman Empire morality, I think slavery is wrong, but I'm probably closer to it than 80% of Roman Statue accounts, which is why they don't like me and call me a lib.

I share your intuition that no good comes from defying human nature - which is precisely what abortion bans and child support laws do. Abortion bans are dysgenic in effect, fostering low intelligence, criminality, and low-investment parenting. Likewise, child support laws replace the natural order, in which women had to carefully choose (and work to attract) responsible mates with one in which they are "freed" from the necessity to do this, ultimately leading to more low-investment parenting. Think about all these NBA players paying child support to multiple women. The kids at least receive money, but they will probably wind up replicating the culture and genetics of their parents. The sons will share the same impulse to low-em and leave-em, while probably not having NBA-level salaries.

You really think the average trucker in Iowa opposes the pronoun people because of this "telos" stuff?

Yes, but as the poster you're replying to pointed out, he wouldn't say it that way. He believes in human "nature" and that human beings have different "purposes" or roles depending on their nature (i.e. a teleogical belief). But he doesn't know what "telos" is, so he would just say:

'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.'

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.

I see classical liberalism, or libertarianism, as being very much about better everything. It creates more wealth, allows you to live you to live a hedonistic lifestyle, and also creates the strongest families and communities, because voluntary association is the key to building those things. When you use force to compel people into situations they don't want to be in, that's what produces the low-trust, every-man-for-himself world that these communitarians say they're fighting. Rent control leads to hatred between landlords and tenants. Classrooms become chaotic when you force kids who don't want to be there to attend.* I saw the culmination of this on DSL recently, with someone arguing that once we get artificial wombs we should force women who want abortions to transfer the fetuses into them and bill them and father for the cost, the same way the state goes after men for child support:

https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,13608.msg668940.html#msg668940

Just think about how low-trust and low-class that is. So when you hear things like "the conservative telos tends to be duty," it's all well and good when it's people voluntarily adopting a socially conservative lifestyle. When you force that on people you get this low-class low-trust Jerry Springer paternity lawsuit world. It is not going any place that you want to be.

*I understand there's a reason mandatory schooling exists, but we should acknowledge the downside.

So you’ve successfully argued that many people are not virtuous, in the sense of wanting to do good. But that is ultimately irrelevant for the framework, why is it better for people to do bad than it is for people to do good by force?

As I said in another comment:

Abortion bans are dysgenic in effect, fostering low intelligence, criminality, and low-investment parenting. Likewise, child support laws replace the natural order, in which women had to carefully choose (and work to attract) responsible mates with one in which they are "freed" from the necessity to do this, ultimately leading to more low-investment parenting. Think about all these NBA players paying child support to multiple women. The kids at least receive money, but they will probably wind up replicating the culture and genetics of their parents. The sons will share the same impulse to low-em and leave-em, while probably not having NBA-level salaries.

It is true that forced duty can backfire and create resentment. In fact, I think my own repudiation of the progressive left's control of our institutions made me doubt all structure for a time due to me seeing how structure was weaponized against me. However, as my intuitions and experiences evolve, so does the realization that structure is necessary, and that to always err on the side of freedom over any structure removes all durability from society.

A "culture" that prizes individualism above all else will eventually treat its own moral frameworks and shared norms as arbitrary and/or oppressive. The meaning of words, morals, etc. are challenged and end up being replaced or evolve at a rate that doesn't allow the members within this "culture" to adapt to or internalize. The obvious strength of liberalism is the freedom it allows and pushes for, but the not-so-obvious weakness is that it offers no internal mechanism to preserve that freedom or the culture that allowed to exist in the first place. Over time, this pursuit of individuality erodes the foundations that made "free" expression possible, which results in the ultimate irony of Liberalism unintentionally serving as the driving force behind a new structured (and sometimes more oppressive) system replacing the old one.

I'm no advocate for a hyper-structured or authoritarian society. That being said, a society with no sense of shared purpose, no accepted moral vocabulary, no uniting telos, is one that drifts toward decadence. Liberalism, in its purest form, ends in fragmentation. Fragmented societies typically don't do well.

That being said, a society with no sense of shared purpose, no accepted moral vocabulary, no uniting telos, is one that drifts toward decadence. Liberalism, in its purest form, ends in fragmentation. Fragmented societies typically don't do well.

It's unclear to me whether this is true. Leftists have long used "diversity" to mean "underclass blacks" leading many to think "diversity" is obviously bad. But is it really? If diversity erodes state capacity, is that a bad thing? Maybe it's a good thing if the government is less able to rile Americans up to fight a pointless foreign war.

Even if you accept that fragmentation is bad, that it would be better if we were all Ned Flanders types, the fragmented society is here. Trying to get people to convert to Christianity is not a new idea. They've been trying it for decades and (on the macro level) failing. Hitching your wagon to that is not a good idea.

We don't disagree that diversity has been used manipulatively and that it has become a loaded term. The deeper point here though is about the loss of a shared version of reality, and our liberal framework's helplessness when it comes to stopping it. Diversity of opinion and thought is great, but not at the expense of an epistemic unraveling that was built over countless generations. State capacity can be quite a burden if it's no longer representative of its people, and in a society that can't decide what it represents, state involvement is obviously becoming more and more in the way. The problem with the liberalist notion is that the absence of a state or central authority results in a vacuum that will inevitably be filled whether you'd like it or not. To that, I would say the state isn't created and maintained out of desire. It's created and maintained out of necessity.

I can't tell if you're addressing me personally, or the idea of people in general pushing Christianity, but if you're presenting that as the only alternative then, yes, I would support that change in direction, at least temporarily. I see a world where people crave meaning, and while the response doesn't need to be some 1950s style cultural Christianity, my intuition and experience tells me there probably should be some type of fundamental moral architecture that can't be uprooted so easily.

I feel very much the same. Hedonism is problematic because it means that the cultural, social, and economic commons get raided rather quickly as people choose to defect every single time they can get away with it. Such societies tend to end up being very low trust very quickly as people learn they can’t depend on others to keep themselves from overusing welfare systems, cheating the system, creating moral chaos, bribing people, etc. when you realize that you get screwed by people maximizing their hedonistic score at your expense.

I tend to favor the Confucian approach of seeing things in terms of relationships. If I owe something to you, in return it’s just expected that you likewise owe something to me. A parent owes a child safety and provision, so it just makes sense that the child ought to obey his parents.

What are some anti-hedonistic policies you think will make society better?

Perhaps I'm misreading you, but voluntary associations and state power aren't all there is. It's true that state power often tries to replace, or even actively attacks, voluntary associations. But it often acts the same way toward natural bonds which impose duty.

I'd argue that child support in 21st-century America is more often an effort to replace natural duty by state power than it is an effort to enforce that duty. But when the state does try to backstop natural (or even long-established social) institutions, it has the option to do so with a much lighter hand than when it tries to replace them.

Perhaps I'm misreading you, but voluntary associations and state power aren't all there is. It's true that state power often tries to replace, or even actively attacks, voluntary associations. But it often acts the same way toward natural bonds which impose duty.

This sounds a form of special pleading people do where they proclaim themselves supporters of freedom and small government but say that state interventions they like don't count because it's just enforcing some pre-existing "natural duty."

I am not a libertarian, and I am certainly no ancap. I have some very strong classical liberal leanings, but classical liberalism is not the summum bonum.

The family, as a classic example of natural duty, is one of the great weaknesses of a thoroughgoing, non-agression-principle–centered libertarianism. Libertarianism in its heart of hearts wants to divide the world into free agents and property; children are neither. They are both human and inescapably dependent. It is baked into the order of creation, and no one can will it away. They are not the only example, but they are by far the clearest.

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!).

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.

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.

While anti-natalism is indeed generally left-oriented, this is a bit of an odd argument. Have a happy smiling mixed-race family or an immigrant family in the West, and the negative commentary is going to come from a different direction. Fear of demographic replacement is related both to non-natality of one group and (often over-perceived) natality of another group. Heck, "billions must die" is a far-right meme.

Good point, it does matter a lot about who is having children to each side.

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.

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

I think this is generally true, but there are right-coded (religious, at least) "anti-natalists" like the Shakers (there are two left), or, more arguably, any absolute-celibacy endorsing religious order (nuns and monks, for example).

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.

"The Population Bomb" was published in 1968, and was very much a leftist phenomenon. At no point did the failure of its predictions hurt his prospects with Stanford where he continued to teach. Anti-natalism has always been pretty closely tied to the Environmental movement, and this is in turn a big part of why the Right has ceased to trust environmentalists. It was a probably a big influence behind India's sterilization campaign, under its socialist government. The One-Child Policy was implemented by literal Communists.

Basically, anti-natalism has been a left-wing thing longer then most of us have been alive, and implemented by the left in some of the largest countries in the world.

What's the right-wing equivalent? I think you're over-indexing on a few outliers and twitter edgelords.

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.

David Cole has quit Takimag:

I had several reasons for leaving Takimag but one was that I was told not to criticize Elon. I'm happy to have traded my paycheck for the freedom to do so.

{snip}First I was told to not criticize Musk. I actually said okay. Then I was told not to criticize anything on or about X. I even said okay to THAT, silly as it was. But my compliance led to even MORE demands for self-censorship, and that's when I was like, "fuck this, I'm out."

He's enjoying his freedom from The Crowd:

Rightists one week ago: Raise $800,000 for a woman who shouted "Fucking N-GG-R N-GG-R N-GG-R N-GG-R" on a playground. FIGHT THE WORD POLICE! NEVER CANCEL ANYONE OVER WORDS!

Rightists today: "Comey said '86?' IMPRISON HIM! DESTROY HIM! Bad hurty words can cause GENUINE HARM!"

This is why I don't miss my column. Writing for this crowd requires stupidity (mindless rah-rah cheering regardless of contradictions), insincerity (knowing the contradictions but catering to the morons anyway), or scolding (which by my own admission was what I'd started doing).

This follows the end, earlier this year, of the Unz Review. Of course the website still exists, though I have no reason to go there after Steve Sailer, the last interesting writer, left. If you believe Unz, he quiet quit:

I’d actually been thinking of suggesting the exact same thing if Steve has indeed stopped posting here. {snip} Since it’s now been more than a couple of weeks since Steve’s last post

This was probably a (well-deserved) gesture of disrespect toward Unz for his descent into increasingly conspiratorial beliefs, ultimately culminating in Holocaust-denial.

I still remember fondly how I would read UR and Takimag in the 2010s. Too bad they succumbed to brainrot and audience capture.

Run Unz's article on Holocaust Denial is excellent actually, and takes a different approach than the usual Revisionist introduction but is very strong in its own right. It also provides some context on the early Holocaust Revisionist movement and its outgrowth from libertarian circles which is very interesting.

ultimately culminating in Holocaust-denial

Alas, that was merely a step in the downward trajectory that resulted in Unz releasing a lengthy series of ever more unhinged schizoposts alleging, essentially, that the entirety of modernity itself dating back to the 18th century was a Talmudic conspiracy, finally synthesizing both religious and ethnic antisemitism in a way, dare I say, that only a Jew could. It was sad to see, but it was also inevitable, probably many years ago, given who he surrounded himself with and hired.

{snip}First I was told to not criticize Musk. I actually said okay. Then I was told not to criticize anything on or about X. I even said okay to THAT, silly as it was. But my compliance led to even MORE demands for self-censorship, and that's when I was like, "fuck this, I'm out."

Taki was always the most well connected person on the (or adjacent to) the dissident right. His great (all inherited) wealth and connections to pretty much the entire right wing establishment in the UK and the neocon right in the US (who humored him and loved him as an eccentric even as he frequently slammed them in his pieces) meant he was essentially immune from cancellation; at the height of Takimag (after Richard Spencer’s editorship) he was still regularly published in The Spectator despite having published and written hundreds of columns that would have gotten any other writer or editor fired. He was at every party. He was astoundingly well-connected; whenever he said anything about the Jews (which was semi-often) many of the most powerful Jewish people in Britain - all his friends, of course - would quietly ensure that the usual censure never really happened to him. He was finally cancelled from The Spectator only when handed a 12 month suspended sentence by a Swiss court for attempted rape (and then only after the full and final conviction) in 2023.

That same network was of course also his weakness. He couldn’t and can’t stand his friends being criticized. He is at his heart a lecherous old libertine, a ‘racist liberal’ par excellence, a man who lived a life of unfathomable hedonism and excess with zero real consequences and who has had a tremendous time doing so. Cole was amusing for a time, but he can’t threaten the real relationships Taki has; that’s just not who his employer was.

Wow, didn't know all that! Thanks.

I actually wrote one piece for Takimag 15 years ago. Just one, after 5 failed submissions to his daughter who managed the site at the time. Something about BART lunacy in SF.

Notable that Taki's 88 years old.

Really? I used to read High Life in the Spectator but I always thought the character was made up. Life stranger than fiction, I suppose.

Cole, like many disillusioned members of the right-wing commentariat, is really telling on himself here. If all you can do is churn out Takes on this week's story to an undifferentiated mass of readers, you will eventually come to see them as a giant lump of aggregate stupidity, and caricature accordingly. I assume this explains most of the phenomenon - I wouldn't want to make a guess at how much is internalized self-loathing for one's writing career terminating in what is essentially slop (that is to say, Takes).

This was probably a (well-deserved) gesture of disrespect toward Unz for his descent into increasingly conspiratorial beliefs, ultimately culminating in Holocaust-denial.

Unz has been like that for a decade at least. This is more likely connected to Sailer's newfound career opportunities with Passage et al.

Antisemites will say "If you were kicked out of 100 different bars, maybe you're the problem." Maybe the reason so many writers, Richard Spencer, Richard Hanania, Anatoly Karlin, David Cole, along with of course the liberals, never Trump conservatives, etc., regard the populist right readership as a giant lump of aggregate stupidity has something to do with said readership.

Richard Hanania, Anatoly Karlin, David Cole, along with of course the liberals, never Trump conservatives, etc., regard the populist right readership as a giant lump of aggregate stupidity has something to do with said readership.

It's hard to take the criticism seriously, when you propose any of these people are supposed to be barometers warning against aggregate stupidity.

Care to elaborate? I haven’t really read them.

Two ex-wignats, one guy mindbroken by Russia's failed blitzkrieg, and a former holocaust revisionist who changed his mind after seeing a gas chamber (apparently he just... hadn't thought about that?) are not exactly the cast of the Level Headed Good Judgement Hall of Fame. A casual browse of David Cole's spittle-flecked twitter feed may help to confirm that impression.

My point is that far-right people once looked up to them. Particularly Spencer, the original king of the Alt-Right. If you can't get on in mainstream society and then join a fringe political movement whose leaders wind up thinking you're stupid and crazy, maybe you're the problem.

Richard Spencer had no organic relevance to the first wave Alt-Right. That short-lived moment coalesced out of things like GamerGate, rather than the irrelevant swamp where Spencer lurked. Functionally none of them knew who he was, and if told, would have called him stupid and crazy. But after Trump started gaining momentum in the early 2016 election cycle, CNN dug Spencer out of a landfill because he had once used the term a decade earlier, and practically gave him his own show called "FACE OF THE NAZI ALT-RIGHT WITH NAZI ALT-RIGHT KING RICHARD "NAZI" SPENCER".

Rather like exactly what you're doing here.

My point is that far-right people once looked up to them.

If it makes you feel better, anyone who ever hyped Hanania up took a massive hit to their credibility from me, it was clear from the start he has nothing interesting to say. But you're clearly not making that point, as you have a track record of putting him forward as someone worth looking up to yourself.

one guy mindbroken by Russia's failed blitzkrieg

Are you talking about Hanania or Karlin here?

Karlin

Hanania in particular. It baffles me that anyone takes that creature seriously.

Why, because he looks weird?

I think he‘s smart and feisty. You guys complained for years that Scott is too nice, but when a guy gets a little combative, then you‘re offended.

What are the public intellectuals you guys approve of, anyway?

Why, because he looks weird?

Yes, that's definitely part of it. Hanania has gone off about how he hates the Republican masses because they're fat and ugly. Meanwhile, he's more visually repellant than any Person of Walmart I've ever seen. He's like the Platonic Ideal of what generations of fantasy writers have been groping towards, when they want you to know a character is a contemptible pussy you should hate just from the initial description. Every time I see that PFP, my lips curl into a feral snarl. I feel like a dog that is sensing that the stranger knocking on the door is a corruption demon in a skinsuit.

Richard Hanania makes the Devil from the Constantine movie look like wholesome Brad Pitt.

I think he‘s smart and feisty. You guys complained for years that Scott is too nice, but when a guy gets a little combative, then you‘re offended.

"Combatative" is all he is. The man is a LOLcow, farming engagement by using his own idiot takes as bait. Even before I saw what he looked like, he gave me a consistent impression that he was the human hardware equivalent of AI slop. I don't think I've ever seen something he wrote that made me feel like a concious mind was having thoughts and trying to communicate them. Even on topics where I did, or used to, agree with him, there was something off, some failure of the intellectual Turing Test. If we could get a Neuralink installed to observe the process, I would bet money that Hanania goes vibes->wordcel vomit. "Mexican twinks are hot, therefore yay immigration." "Fat daddies are yucky, therefore boo Trump."

And that's what Hanania comes down to: vibes. He's junk food for people like Trace, who want to imagine that they're ivory-towered, neutral intellectuals, but can't shake the vibe that makes them heavily tilt the scales. His "feistiness" lets them get that ArrDrama hit of being a total bitch while pretending to be chaste maidens. His appeal is entirely a function of aesthetic preference for pseudointellectual slop in a sweater vest. Which is hilariously ironic coming from a viscerally disgusting creature whose entire oeuvre consists of LOLcow vibes-posting.

I see, you make fun of his appearance because he made fun of your friends‘ appearance. His point about the low caliber of right-wing discourse stands.

What else? „lolcow“… if you could look into his brain argument… wrong vibes… „total bitch“ . You‘ve convinced me he‘s actually more correct than I originally thought.

His point about the low caliber of right-wing discourse stands.

The discourse I'm familiar with is pretty high caliber, while Hanania is there throwing schoolyard insults, and crying when anyone returns fire. He is wrong, and a hypocrite.

What?

His take on Putin's interview with Tucker is a classic:

https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1755750991964913902

I still go back to it from time to time.

Really? That? It's kind of exactly my problem with him. Very much a "written for Twitter" piece. It could have been a single snappy-if-kinda-vacuous sentence, but instead it's putting just enough vague wordiness into pretending to be an essay, so you can imagine there's some real knowledge and insight there, if you already wanted a reason to think badly of Putin.

How does that post not trigger your bullshit detector? The person who wrote it clearly doesn't actually know anything about Russian or Ukranian history. If they did, they would have actually worked it in in a meaningful way.

But I'm sure it was great for engagement farming. People can both dunk on Putin and argue about the history.

Ironically this is the kind of comment that makes me like Hanania more out of contrariness, because this sort of bile itself is repulsive.

It was fun to channel John Oliver for a minute.

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Having never seen a photo of Richard Hanania, I just now googled him. I guess he looks kind of smarmy. But not even 10% as bad as you make him out.

I mean "Richard Hanania makes the Devil from the Constantine movie look like wholesome Brad Pitt." Come on man. No he doesn't.

I used to like him before I knew what he looked and sounded like, back when all I knew about him was his pretty good breakdown of the Afghanistan debacle, where he did a fair amount of work and before most of his now infamous antics.

His book on US foreign policy also seems remarkably interesting., partly because he is now covering for the same people he was criticizing back then.

He is smart and hard working, yes, however, there are mysteries. Consider this video interview of him.

Give him a listen. Do you find him sympathetic or trustworthy etc?

He made my skin crawl lightly before his implausible turn to 'enlightened centrist'.

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For a more concrete criticism, the goal of getting a more combative Scott Alexander would be to get someone who was smart and interested in the truth to not flinch from the truth. That's the problem with Hanania. He isn't.

This weekend's example is this quote:

Pinker: Woke classes make up 3% of what is offered at Harvard. The rest of the time, students are learning about the Roman Empire, quantum mechanics, or the functioning of the brain.

I'm sure there's some exceptionally technical read where Pinker's actual quote wasn't strictly lying; I'm sure this student exists, and their AI tool might even be more than an Excel spreadsheet with Copilot use. But ignore for now the unsolvable question of whether the sentiment analysis was calibrated correctly, or whether the 150 courses focusing on woke bullshit might not be the best use of literally thousands of dollars of student debt.

You know, I know, and Hanania knows that not every single bit of left-wing propaganda marks that out in sharpie on its forehead. Pinker is not very clear what "about a third of these had a discernible leftward tilt" is referring to, and whether it's the 5000 courses for the Arts and Sciences (aka 1600+!), or just the 3 or 6% of 'woke'-topic courses (which would be, bluntly, a lie; you can leaf through the course catalogue and find more than 50 course that obviously lean left). It's not even an accurate summary of what Pinker said, and it's certainly not interested in examining what Pinker actually spelled out rather than what Hanania wishes were the case.

Ok, well, 'public intellectual plays game-of-telephone to munge data, doesn't bring any skepticism to dubious claims', yeah, we've all seen it. But there's another half of the tweet, and it's the sort of writing Darwin would put out.

A movement that wants to abolish the intellect as a response to woke is a cancer.

Does the conservative movement want to abolish the intellect? Well, Hanania wants that to be his thesis; why bother engaging with anything else!

Or for another example, from Will DEI Make Airplanes Fall Out Of The Sky, where Hanania quotes a Spirit Airlines exec saying:

As importantly, these 1,500 hours can all be earned flying small, single engine planes in rural areas, or even flying hot air balloons. During the years of building these hours, most applicants do very little to train themselves in the career they plan to enter, such as flying big jets into New York and Chicago.

I've got complex feelings about the 1500 hour rule, but this is a commercial exec making claims in his commercial interests, not a factual analysis, and those claims are not actually true. No airline would accept a pilot with that sort of experience -- and most would consider significant balloon experience a demerit -- but even if you're trying to Well Akshully about the strict terms of the 1500 hour rule, it includes 75 hours of instrument flight time that you can't get in a hot air balloon by definition (IVR-certified lighter-than-aircraft count as 'airships'). More critically, flying big jets into New York and Chicago are not the career an airline pilot will be entering, and a large portion of new ATPs come to the exam with recent experience with stuff that is like the regionals that their career will actually start with in a big airline.

Even when he has claims that could have defensible versions, he does this sorta thing. A certain class and theme of paranoid is becoming accepted on the conservative sphere? Maybe, though you have to draw a bit of a post-hoc description. "Unfortunately, Gribbles are more upset about the approval of life-saving vaccines than any other [ed: emphasis added] aspect of the pandemic response, showing that podcasts and a community of paranoid individuals all doing their own research is not an acceptable replacement for medical experts." I betcha I can name something they care more about! There's another (paywalled) bit that, and it's kinda hilarious how aggressively he avoids mentioning the then-current scandals about late Biden pardons.

He does it even when it's stupid, pointless, meaningless shit.

It's the same reason that Yglesias and Matthews are so appalling. It's not that they're wrong; it's that the sounds coming from their mouth are nothing more than noises they think most likely to persuade some portion of their readers. I had the same criticism back when he was aiming this at the left, and I've bashed right-wing writers here and elsewhere for doing the same thing, I'm certainly not going to find it more appealing because he's aimed at the other direction today.

I appreciate the attempt. I guess we just disagree on the charitability threshold, specifically the distinction between being wrong and lying. Of course I agree that the woke problem is not limited to 3% of Harvard’s output, but being wrong on this, and making a few flippant tweets, does not make hanania a bad faith actor.

And “Avoiding mentioning” is not a crime sufficient to establish mens rea. I also think Darwin should have been treated more charitably, so there you go.

Could I get a brief explanation of who David Cole is, and why anybody should care?

He's a jew who did some holocaust denial work in the 90's. It's of great cathartic importance for some people here to notice and comment on his woes.

David Cole never denied the Holocaust.

Did I get the wrong David Cole at Taki mag? Or are you arguing for some specific definition of Holocaust denial?

@2rafa is correct. You can read Cole’s own description of his changing beliefs on the Holocaust here.

Here’s an excerpt relating to his current beliefs, which he has held since the mid-90s:

Korherr, with unfettered access to all SS documents, definitively concluded that as of the beginning of 1943, slightly over 2.4 million Jews had been killed in the Reinhard camps, the Ostland ghettoes (which functioned as death camps), and by the Einsatzgruppen execution squads.

You’d think that Himmler’s official death census would be in every Holocaust book. But no. “Great” scholars like Yad Vashem’s Yehuda Bauer rarely if ever cite it (in his 1982 magnum opus A History of the Holocaust, Bauer doesn’t cite Korherr once).

Deniers never cite Korherr either.

Amazing, huh? With the Mao and Stalin death toll, we’re forced to roughly calculate the figure via demographic extrapolation. But with the Holocaust, we have the main perpetrator, Himmler, commissioning a specific census of the murdered. A number. Everyone agrees it’s a legit document, yet few use it.

Why?

Because if you accept 2.4 million for the beginning of 1943, you cannot get to six million by April 1945. From ‘43 to ‘45, there would simply not be enough Jews subjected to “aktions” to get to 6 mil. Every mainstream scholar agrees that by the close of 1942, two-thirds of all Holocaust deaths had already occurred. So Korherr’s figure presents a problem.

That’s why I put my approximate figure of total Holocaust dead at 3.5 to 3.6 million. But not six. You simply cannot get to six in the two remaining years of the war.

Meanwhile, deniers won’t accept a figure above 271,000. Accepting 2.4 million by 1943? That blasphemes the tenets of their cult. It can’t be more than 300,000, period! Their pseudo-religion dictates it.

Korherr, with unfettered access to all SS documents, definitively concluded that as of the beginning of 1943, slightly over 2.4 million Jews had been killed in the Reinhard camps

It should be noted that the Korherr report says no such thing at all. The Korherr report says explicitly that the 1.2 million Jews were resettled through the camps of General Government, which is what the Revisionists say happened. And Richard Korherr himself wrote a letter to Der Spiegel in the 1970s clarifying that he specifically asked what that number referred to, and was told it referred to resettlement.

So the document directly states what the Revisionists say happened, Richard Korherr confirmed that was his own interpretation of that number in the 1970s, and the "2.4 million Jews had been killed in the Reinhard camps" is not stated in the report whatsoever, that's just the mainstream position begging the question.

David Cole is just relying on the fact that his audience doesn't know better, so they'll believe him when he just lies about what the Korherr report says.

David said "Deniers never cite Korherr either" is his typical style of outright lying when he knows his audience won't have background knowledge to verify what he's saying. Here's the Revisionist work on Treblinka Ctrl + F "Korherr"- 17 results with good discussion.

I’m not hugely familiar with him but my recollection is that you’re both kind of right. In the early-mid 90s when he was associated with Jim Goad and the Answer Me! counterculture zine circle he was essentially a ‘classic’ holocaust denier, probably mainly out of edginess.

By the time he was writing for Taki he believed (and as far as I know believes) that at least 3-4 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust by various methods that were ultimately the fault of the Nazi government. That probably still counts as denial for Deborah Lipstadt types but neither I nor actual Holocaust deniers of the “only 200,000 died of typhus, the rest either didn’t die or never existed” variety would consider it thus.

Cole takes a very rare position held by, maybe, 2 other people, which is that he is an Auschwitz Denier but a Treblinka Believer. He doesn't believe the Holocaust story at Auschwitz, which would make him a Denier according to any mainstream standard. It's also strange because an "extermination camp" at Auschwitz would be fundamentally more plausible than the Treblinka story. For example, Auschwitz at least actually had real crematoria which could be used to cremate large piles of body (according to Revisionists, not nearly enough but still). But Treblinka had nothing like that at all.

There's very scant evidence that "Treblinka" even existed at all. The total absence of evidence regarding Treblinka is beneficial for the Mainstream, because the large amounts of physical and documentary evidence at Auschwitz and Majdanek have made it easy for Revisionists to reconstruct what actually happened. For example, "oh you said this room was a gas chamber at Auschwitz, but according to all these construction blueprints we found, they all say it's a morgue. If this was just a fake morgue where's the real morgue?" The mainstream says it was really a gas chamber that was a fake morgue according to construction documents and also a fake shower room, the Revisionists say it was a morgue which is what construction documents say it was. So Revisionists have it easy at Majdanek and Auschwitz, but there's basically no evidence regarding Treblinka making it harder for Revisionists to make a more solid case. But of course the inverse is true, it's much harder for the mainstream to make a case but they have political power so they don't need to rely on solid evidence to retain hegemony over the interpretation of those camps.

David Cole vastly overstates his own contribution to Revisionism- he never published a single page in the mountains of volumes of Revisionist research, much less on the camps he "Believes" which are the most ridiculous of all frankly. David Cole's hybrid-position was just a convenient way for him to distance himself from Revisionism while retaining his ego with respect to his prior positions. "I was right about Auschwitz but I totally believe the Holocaust story at Treblinka!" There's a reason almost nobody in the world holds that position.

There's very scant evidence that "Treblinka" even existed at all.

Sure, except the antisemitic Polish resistance having people manning the station there, the complaints from locals about foul, disgusting smoke, the bone fragments found in the soil there etc, the secretly recorded interviews of perpetrators, the admissions from SS who worked in Auschwitz etc.

True, the Polish resistance was operating in the area. Yet there are 0 contemporary reports of a 120-day straight open-air cremation operation. Imagine cremating 5,000 people+ per day in the immediate vicinity of several Polish villages and a civilian rail-line with 0 contemporary reports of such an operation.

According to GPT 4o, the smokestack from an open-air fire large enough to cremate 5,000 people (only a single day's requirement at Treblinka) would be so large it would be visible from Warsaw and even Lublin! But nobody said anything about the 24/7 raging infernos.

It's a silly story.

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David Cole vastly overstates his own contribution to Revisionism- he never published a single page in the mountains of volumes of Revisionist research, much less on the camps he "Believes" which are the most ridiculous of all frankly.

Come on. The published word isn't the only word that matters. He made a direct-to-video documentary and local report on the Auschwitz camp back when distribution via VHS was the norm.

David Cole's primary contribution was that, while presenting as a sincere Jew who was studying the Holocaust, he got Franciszek Piper, who was head of the Auschwitz Historical Department, on camera to admit that the Auschwitz Gas Chamber shown to millions of tourists was not an original structure, it was "restored" post-war in Soviet-occupied Poland. The Soviets converted an air-raid shelter to a gas chamber and presented it as all original. That is the reason for certain anomalies, like the infamous Wooden Door that attracts the mockery of low-level Deniers- ("A wooden door with a window to a gas chamber?"). This was immediately after Cole was told by the Auschwitz-trained tour guide that it was an original structure.

But he was never a serious researcher. Piper only admitted what Revisionists had already known. I won't discount the value of that moment, but he just hasn't made any contributions to Revisionist research. He has brought publicity and that's the extent of his contribution.

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David Cole denies the Auschwitz extermination camp story, that makes him a Denier according to any mainstream position. His position on Auschwitz would be illegal in Europe for example.

Technically that part is true, yes.

Republican Party Animal (an actual banned book, have to pirate it on libgen) is fairly entertaining. I found the bit about how the CA GOP types he was hanging out with (before being outed as David Cole) were legitimately surprised by Romney/Ryan losing and having a post-election meltdown to be interesting given that I considered that election to besuch a foregone conclusion that I barely paid attention to it.

Never read the book, but those GOP types were definitely way high on their own supply in retrospect. Having been there at the time, I would say that in the right-coded media of the day, there was a commonly shared perception that the Obama campaign was weak and that much of his campaign was artificially inflated, whereas the Romney campaign, despite suffering the traditionally-perceived pro-Blue bias, was doing better than reported. Regardless of the perceived weaknesses of Obama the incumbent (and I believe he did lose a significant amount of votes from 2008), they paled in comparison to the actual weaknesses of Romney the candidate as revealed by the voters.

The replay of these dynamics in subsequent presidential elections has been an endless source of fascination to me personally, though I have long since given up on personally having any decent idea who would emerge victorious as I have lost both the ability and the desire to separate the signal of actual voter sentiment from the noise of propaganda.

before being outed as David Cole

I think it's warranted to add that explicit death threats from Zionist terrorist groups were the reason he changed his name and identity and left the US for a longer period.

They had internal polling that adjusted for the longstanding bias in polls for overestimating Democratic performance. Given that adjustment, Romney would have won big in the electoral college.

That adjustment was not valid for Obama. Polls broadly correctly estimated Obama's performance. He is not the median Democrat and applying a "median Democratic candidate" correction factor was a bad idea.

Obviously Romney loses. But he and his staffers are blindsided. Supposedly he didn't even have a concession speech written, because he was certain he was going win Florida and a handful of swing states.

But he and his staffers are blindsided.

So they actually believed that the GAE's Deep State will permit the first African-American president to go down in history as a one-term disappointment and failure?

If we were to go with your framing, perhaps Romney and his fellow old-style Republicans did presume the Deep State would work for them and not Obama, because they had good heuristic reasons to believe so at that time.

Well, I can definitely understand pursuing a parasocial internet vendetta. I hate-read a few authors and feel my share of schadenfreude when things go badly for them. But for a top-level like this, I'd ideally want the self-awareness to realise that not everybody knows who this person is, and the understanding that their importance may not be immediately obvious.


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