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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   33380 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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A Game of Chairs (At Columbia University)

or

How Trump Defeated Columbia University Columbia University Defeated Itself

The Intelligencer, a generally left-leaning American media outlet of the sort to still refer to anti-Trump actors 'the Resistance,' released a long-but-interesting report on many of the internal dynamics of the road to Columbia University's rise to prominence in the US culture war in the last year or so.

A (brief) recap for this year is that Trump Administration's suspended 400 million in grants and contracts on grounds of Civil Rights Act violations (namely anti-semitism related to Gaza War protests). Columbia's public acceptance of the Trump administration terms for restoring funding was under cut the then-President downplaying any impacts from the Federal agreement in a private faculty meeting.

As the strikethrough sub-title implies, the proximal cause, and political attribution that author (or editor) wants you to take away, is that Trump defeated Columbia. The not-so-deep subtext that is more interesting (and perhaps not surprising) is how the Columbia internal politics sabotaged set the stage.

TLDR: Columbia is currently in an unstable leadership vacuum because of how the university distributed internal administrative powers to students and faculty, how a key (but controversial) past President consolidated power in the office of the president rather than the senate, and how the Board attempted to mitigate/reform the Presidential power centralization led to leaders who were unprepared with the politics of the Gaza War. Would-be ambitious university faculty who tried to take advantage did not help.

This is presented because (a) the Columbia dynamics exposed may help people understand the dynamic of 'marching through institutions' across leadership generations, and (b) rabbit holes be fun to share.

///

The Nature of the Columbia Governance Problem

Even by the cats-in-a-bag standard of modern research universities, Columbia is a cursed place to govern. It’s huge, with 17 schools to manage, and its endowment is the second smallest in the Ivy League on a per-student basis, after Cornell. There’s never enough funding, which means Columbia has an extra-toxic version of a common university problem: resentment between the liberal-arts programs, which are prestigious and lose money, and the cash-cow units that subsidize them.

Two don't-call-it-foreshadowing notes here.

1: Remember that money is fungible.

2: Keep track of which department is offering praise or criticism.

(A) Root of the Problem

Then there are the ghosts of Columbia’s uniquely tortured history. After 1968, when antiwar activists took over five buildings, the trustees made a big change to Columbia’s governance structure. They created a senate with a supermajority of faculty and students and gave it the power to oversee discipline and draft university policies. Over the decades, though, many of these delegated powers eroded, replaced by folkways and presidential work-arounds. The result has been that Columbia has shared governance on paper but not really in practice. It was a legitimacy bomb, waiting to go off in a crisis.

As a result of Vietnam War protests, Columbia delegated various institutional powers to a sub-body that gave faculty and students- but particularly faculty and students coordinating together- not just policy power, but disciplinary power.

Columbia Presidential Centralization

In 2002, after decades of financial struggles, the trustees installed Lee Bollinger as president, and he began to make the university bigger and more ambitious in almost every way. He seemed less interested in day-to-day academic management than in pushing Columbia into exciting new fields, like neuroscience, and creating interdisciplinary centers around the world. He developed a new campus in Manhattanville and paid for it with multibillion-dollar capital campaigns. To accomplish this, Bollinger mostly bypassed the senate and his fractious faculties. It earned Bollinger a reputation as the greatest university president of his generation; it came at the cost of professors and deans feeling disenfranchised. An org chart that circulated among deans and the president’s office each year showed a tangle surrounding Bollinger. Dozens of people reported directly to the president, many of them floating off to the side, outside any recognizable hierarchy.

President Bollinger, 2002-2023, centralized administrative power in the office of the President, and sidelined the faculty/student senate institutions.

While not explicit, this is a two-fold basis of an anti-Presidential-deference institutional bias in the student-faculty senate. First, common grievance / loss of influence to bind teachers, and the students they can influence, seeking to regain influence. Second, and less obvious, that the President would decrease efforts to build/maintain a power coalition in the Senate that he does not need the assistance of... in favor of other, more directly influential, influence areas.

Bollinger Influence in the Columbia Board of Trustees

In his two decades leading Columbia, Bollinger outlasted more and more of the trustees, and he was able to shape the group in his image. “Lee basically seizes control,” an alumnus who has interacted with the board over many years said. “If you’re a trustee, you can yell at your chief executive, but your only recourse is to fire him. And Lee basically would say to the trustees, ‘Oh, you want to fire me? Go right ahead. Guess what? Manhattanville is still not done. And anyone whom you hire as a successor is not going to want to spend the first five years of his or her reign fundraising for my legacy.’”

Bollinger's influence matters because the Columbia Board of Trustees in power now is in a post-Bollinger transition. Because...

That spring [of 2024], Columbia’s board began to show signs of dysfunction. Its 24 members are limited to two six-year terms, and none predated the Bollinger era. It was a group assembled in peacetime that had until recently been dealing with a president who ran the university out of the palm of his hand. Now, feeling like Columbia was spiraling out of control, the trustees became much more assertive.

Reframed- the current board of trustees is not only Bollinger-era, but were used to a stronger University President who was willing to sideline / ignore the student-and-faculty university senate.

But the recent presidents are not strong Presidents, in part by the Board's own design.

The Board Strikes Back

The trustees weren’t oblivious. They knew that Columbia’s economic position was fragile and that success had masked a worrying level of institutional rot. When Bollinger was finally ready to retire in 2023, the board replaced him with Shafik, then the president of the London School of Economics. That school was small and simple compared to Columbia, but Shafik was sophisticated and had a compellingly globalist biography that matched the political moment. An Egyptian-born member of the British peerage, she’d been educated in America and England and held a Ph.D. in economics from Oxford. She would be Columbia’s first female president and its first of color. Her brief was to keep Columbia growing around the world while modernizing its operations in Morningside Heights.

In 2023, the Bollinger-era board replaced Bollinger with a new, and more importantly, foreign and less experienced in Columbia politics, University President. Shafik was a 'can appeal to all interests' compromise. She had the the demographic aspects attractive to the liberal-art progressive wing, the economic background to recognize the role / relevance of the 'cash cow' departments, and for the board she was a deliberate break from the Bollinger-style president.

And she was aware of that from the start.

The night before her investiture, Shafik hosted an intimate dinner in the courtyard of the president’s house, a McKim, Mead & White mansion on West 116th Street. In his later years, Bollinger had become notorious for conducting much of his business there and seldom appearing in his office. One attendee recalled a member of Shafik’s family toasting how they had “quite literally pulled back the curtains and let the light in.” From the perspective of Columbia’s senior leaders, there was a plan in place to shore up the school’s foundation. It would just take time.

And then history happened.

Shafik and the Gaza Conflict on Campus

For a moment, it was possible to think that Shafik was well equipped to lead Columbia through the aftermath of October 7. She had superb knowledge of the conflicts in the Middle East: She had been involved in the Oslo peace process and written books about the economic possibilities of a regional accord. But her perspective was from the Davos-y orbit of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, where debate and respect abound because you’re handing out money. Shafik had no experience of the Israel-Palestine issue as it played at Columbia and on the Upper West Side, with the tabloids and Congress watching. The university is home to both a large population of observant Jewish students and a cohort of professors who are avid supporters of Palestinian statehood. Those two groups were not going to wait for their new president to get up to speed.

The relevant point here isn't that the University had strong pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian groups. The point here is that Shafik was personally involved in the peace process before, which- along with her deliberately non-Columbia Uni/foreign background that went into her hiring- shaped her (eventual) decision to allow New York Police onto the campus to arrest protestor encampments/occupations, after an April 2024 Congressional hearing. (This Columbia-centric hearing followed the disastrous 2023 Congressional hearing that led to the replacement of Harvard's president.)

Skipping forward just a bit for a relevant perspective from her-

Shafik headed back to New York [from the April 2024 Congressional hearing] on the Acela and decided to authorize the New York Police Department to enter campus and break up the encampment. It turned a modest demonstration into an international media spectacle. One professor who spoke with Shafik at her home later on asked why she’d brought in the cops. “She didn’t understand what it meant to call the NYPD,” the professor said. “She was from London. The police in London don’t carry guns.” For her part, Shafik told faculty that anyone who imagined the protests could influence real-world events was delusional: In her World Bank days, when she’d sat in on actual peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, nobody had once mentioned a university.

So Shafik's lived experience- previously considered a virtue in her hiring- led to decisions that ultimately led to her ouster.

But there was more before then, which started the grounds by which the Trump Administration would later invoke the Civil Rights Act against Columbia.

The Rise of the Antisemitism Civil Rights Act Issue

Going back to the immediate aftermath of October 7, even before the Israeli ground incursion...

What happened in those first few weeks, before Israel’s formal counteroffensive, convinced many in the Jewish community that Columbia was home to irredeemably antisemitic faculty and students. One day after 10/7, the most prominent Palestinian advocate on the faculty, Joseph Massad, a professor in MESAAS, wrote an op-ed for The Electronic Intifada that called the Hamas operation “innovative,” “stunning,” “astonishing,” and “incredible.” On the second day, two student groups called for Columbia to divest from Israel and end its academic activity in Tel Aviv, where the university was planning to open a satellite campus. Soon, the first “From the river to the sea” chants were heard at protests. Students, faculty, and outsiders aligned with Israel argue that the pro-Palestinian activists’ claims to be motivated by concern about genocide are false because they showed their colors in this period, before the full invasion of Gaza.

For Shafik and others in university leadership, managing the torrent of activity was not just difficult but perhaps impossible. Every administrative action boomeranged. On October 12, after a protest and counterprotest on campus, public-safety officials directed demonstrators toward separate exits. But that sent the pro-Palestinian side onto West 115th Street, headed toward the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life. The problem was compounded when Jewish students there were locked inside, which several said made them feel unsafe.

This created 2 separate problems for pro-Palestinian institutional interests in Columbia against the office of the President, and the Board of Trustees more generally.

First, the divestment demand went against the Board's mandate for Shafik when they hired her, which is rarely helpful.

Her brief was to keep Columbia growing around the world

Particularly in the light of the 'liberal-arts are prestigious but unprofitable' tension. Spreading the brand is what allows subsidizing such.

Second, and worse, this created a Civil Rights Act violation risk if Columbia did not respond appropriately.

For those unfamiliar,...

OCR also issued a notice (1994) that assists school communities in understanding their obligations under Title VI and discusses some considerations for schools when taking action to remediate a hostile environment under Title VI. The existence of a hostile environment based on race, color, or national origin that is created, encouraged, accepted, tolerated, or left uncorrected by a school can constitute discrimination in violation of Title VI. When a school is taking action to remediate a hostile environment, just as when taking any other action, Title VI prohibits the school from discriminating against students on the basis of race, color, or national origin.

The 'or' is significant. A CRA hostile environment discrimination does not have to be created by the university. It is enough if you accept, tolerate, or leave uncorrected.

Additionally, anti-semitism is considered a violation of title VI CRA, but anti-anti-semitism is not, because the later is a political position, which is not a protected category, but antisemitism is considered an act against a protected category. This is Trump's fault.

In his first term, Trump had signed an executive order that expanded Title VI protections to victims of antisemitism. Biden rescinded many of Trump’s orders, but he let this one stand.

So. In the opening days following the October 7 2023 attack, a Columbia faculty member publicly praised the atrocity in glowing terms, campus protestors chanted slogan with known ethnic cleansing connotations, and at a University permitted protest, pro-Palestinian protestors ignored their designated deconfliction exit and instead mobbed a Jewish center and locked jewish students inside.

Also, later, unrepentent protestors did not help.

Back in the spring [2024], in a gesture of moderation, CUAD had distanced itself from one of the saga’s most objectionable characters, a student who had said “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists” during his disciplinary hearing. Now, CUAD reversed that position and apologized to the student, writing that “where you’ve exhausted all peaceful means of resolution, violence is the only path forward.” (CUAD took credit for organizing the May 7 disruption at Butler Library.)

Remember Title VI, and 'or left uncorrected.'

But back in April 24, Shafik went to Congress.

Early on, Shafik had been lucky to dodge a congressional hearing at which the presidents of Harvard and Penn addressed reports of antisemitism in lawyerly terms and later resigned. But it meant that when the House Committee on Education and the Workforce returned to the issue, it held a hearing focused exclusively on Columbia. Shafik, Shipman, and Shipman’s board co-chair, David Greenwald, went to Washington to testify. On the morning of April 17, 2024, before they arrived on Capitol Hill, they learned that pro-Palestinian students had taken over the university’s South Lawn.

This probably did not help Shafik's position before Congress. It also may or may not have been predictable what the outcomes would be.

In the 30 hours that ensued, Shafik’s presidency was lost and Columbia plunged into true crisis, never to recover. During the hearing, Shafik struck a far different pose from Harvard’s Claudine Gay. She agreed that antisemitism was a major problem at Columbia and discussed disciplinary actions against specific professors without reservation. If this placated congressional Republicans for a nanosecond, it permanently lost whatever goodwill she had left with the Columbia rank and file. As a member of the faculty later put it to me, “A couple other Ivy presidents went to Congress and lost their job. Shafik went to Congress and lost a university.”

A second encampment formed spontaneously after the bust-up of the first. Protest leaders refused to meet with Shafik. Representatives from student government rendezvoused with her in a clandestine meeting in a basement, leaving their phones outside so nobody could make a recording, but there was no meaningful progress. Shafik authorized a second police raid to end the students’ takeover of Hamilton Hall and canceled commencement. The year was in ruins. Shafik’s chauffeur tailed her around campus on foot, concerned for her safety.

Shafik resorted to law enforcement against the encampments. During this times, student government- but also teacher government because the Senate is both student-and-teacher dominated- met with Shafik privately, even as protest leaders- presumably a different and 'unconnected' group- refused to meet her at all.

And this is when we get our next governance turnover.

The Board Intervenes (Again)

That spring, Columbia’s board began to show signs of dysfunction. Its 24 members are limited to two six-year terms, and none predated the Bollinger era. It was a group assembled in peacetime that had until recently been dealing with a president who ran the university out of the palm of his hand. Now, feeling like Columbia was spiraling out of control, the trustees became much more assertive.

Several people with knowledge of the board’s evolution described a dynamic in which a subset of members was convinced that Columbia had a dangerous concentration of antisemites and that strong action was needed to bring the campus back to order. That circle’s most prominent member is Victor Mendelson, part of a four-generation Columbia lineage, whose father was also a trustee. The billionaire Mendelsons run HEICO, a Florida-based aerospace company and defense contractor. There’s also Shoshana Shendelman, whose child is a current student, and to a quieter degree Greenwald, a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who spent his career at Fried Frank and Goldman Sachs. A more moderate set includes Mark Gallogly, who co-founded the investment firm Centerbridge Partners and who has given millions to Democratic candidates for office; Kathy Surace-Smith, a lawyer and partial owner of the Seattle Mariners whose husband is the president of Microsoft; Abigail Black Elbaum, who runs a real-estate management firm; and Jonathan Rosand, a professor of neurology at Harvard. Two others were more clearly identified with the liberal-coded position that antisemitism was a concern but one that was being used disingenuously to stifle speech: Wanda Marie Holland Greene, who runs a progressive school for girls in San Francisco, and Li Lu, a leader of the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square who became a billionaire investor.

If you want to take a guess on how many of these identified members are Jewish, have children on campus who are jewish, or otherwise close connections with jewish friends / family, feel free to look up for yourself. The answer is more than two. I only bring this up to note the only time the article actually specifies someone's Jewishness later.

The point now, however, is that the Board has a positional divide between 'anti-semitism is a big problem' and 'anti-semitism is a concern but is disingenuously used to stifle speech.'

The issue that Columbia ran into was that the protestors lost the Free Speech argument with the Bollinger-era board... despite Bollinger being a notable First Amendment advocate himself in his selections.

Or possibly because of his influence.

In April 2024, the New York Post painted Columbia’s board as “ultra-liberal” and “stacked with Democratic apparatchiks and megadonors.” (Mendelson recently visited an undergraduate seminar and told the students that as one of the panel’s few registered Republicans, “I’m the one the White House calls to yell at.”) But that doesn’t capture how the board behaved in private. There was not a set of trustees that argued as vociferously on speech rights or Islamophobia as the Mendelson side did on antisemitism. Bollinger, a noted First Amendment scholar, had stocked the board with people who held expansive views on speech, yet in practice they found it difficult to side with protesters who knowingly violated Columbia’s policies on when and where demonstrations could occur. “It would have been easier for the First Amendment absolutists to defend the students if they had respected the university’s time, place, and manner restrictions,” a trustee told me.

This point here isn't that the pro-Palestinian protestors agitated their way into a losing argument, though they did. The point here is that the pro-Palestinian protestor advocates were running into the Civil Rights Act issue.

Columbia University had stated policies on time, place, and manner restrictions. These were pre-established, and pre-enforced, restrictions. Not equally enforcing them could become a form of favoritism contributing to, well, a Title VI hostile environment under the CRA.

However, the Board didn't come to a consensus as much as a consensus came with timely personnel turnover.

Antisemitism became the prevailing concern. In a minuted meeting, with colleagues who were whispering to right-wing publications and Republicans in Washington, it was difficult for trustees to take the position that antisemitism was a small or medium-size problem — even if they honestly saw it that way. Greene and Li quietly rotated off the board last summer, further tilting the balance. “The board lost two of its strong oppositional voices when they left,” a person who interacts with the group said. During one session, the trustees had a preliminary discussion about granting arrest power to campus security officers. Within hours, it was in The Wall Street Journal — a leak that some interpreted as an effort to lock in that outcome.

A previous gridlock leads to an imbalance in favor of the clamp downs by the Board. However, the Board doesn't have all the formal power here.

Remember the root of the problem paragraph earlier?

The Student-Teach Senate Demands Control Over The Judicial-Disciplinary Process (And Gets It (Back))

Some trustees became obsessively focused on discipline and pushed Shafik to discuss individual students’ files in detail. If that was deeply inappropriate, it was also true that discipline was where Columbia was opening itself up to attack. Students’ cases were progressing slowly and uncertainly. The rules codified after 1968 established two tracks for students accused of transgressions: Dean’s Discipline, for issues like cheating on exams, and the University Judicial Board, for violations related to protest. The senate controlled who was appointed to the latter. But big demonstrations happened only every so often, and the group was convened haphazardly. Cases sometimes followed both tracks in parallel; other times, outside arbiters were called in. Administrators looked down on the Judicial Board because they were entitled to just one of its five seats, with the others going to presumably softhearted students and faculty. All this meant that after the October 7 attacks, Shafik routed discipline cases through a relatively new office that she controlled, the Center for Student Success and Intervention. The senate, appalled by Shafik’s testimony before Congress and the police raids, roused itself and demanded the cases be run through its group. In July 2024, Shafik and the trustees conceded the point, and the majority of cases related to the takeover of Hamilton Hall were transferred to the Judicial Board.

After the Vietnam War Protests, the (presumably then-anti-war Board of Trustees) gave students (and teachers) the right to sanction protest rule violators. However, this was rarely and haphazardly used.

In the aftermath of Oct 7, Shafik used an office that was created during the Bollinger era of centralizing power into the Presidency to handle protest issues.

After the (highly condemned by student and teacher protestors) start of enforcement, Shafik gives up institutional control of the disciplinary process back to the Student and Teacher-dominated senate. This may be partly out of a (doomed) compromise to stable the ship of office, but it is also consistent with Shafik and the Columbia Board of Trustee's desire to dis-empower the Bollinger-era president.

But what Shafik did on her way out the door isn't what mattered. What the Senate did not do was more relevant.

Months passed [without disciplinary progress]. The delays signaled to Columbia’s gathering adversaries that of all American universities, this was the one least able to get its house in order. “There’s some deep-rooted structural problems,” said Ester Fuchs, a professor who co-chairs an internal group Columbia formed to document antisemitism and recommend reforms. “Everything was broken: the whole freaking administrative infrastructure of the university to deal with protest, the security, the disciplinary process. Why did it take us so long to get that discipline done? Because it was broken. There was nothing there.”

Remember Title VI.

The existence of a hostile environment based on race, color, or national origin that is created, encouraged, accepted, tolerated, or left uncorrected by a school can constitute discrimination in violation of Title VI.

Shafik started in an environment where Columbia professors (and students) were encouraging a hostile environment, faced with clear speech policy and protest management violations that made non-action against violators a form of acceptance / toleration, and then handed off the disciplinary/correction process to an institution that did not work... after her predecessor had given her office the tools to take actions.

In August 2024, Shafik quit, in what was the then-shortest presidential tenure in more than 200 years.

Enter Katrina Armstrong: The Anti-Anti-Bollinger President

Katrina Armstrong, Shafik's successor, was picked from the in-house university leaders to be an anti-Shafik. Someone who was more familiar with Columbia politics, more sensitive to student interests, and, well...

...well, remember the departments praise and criticism are coming from.

Katrina Armstrong loves a medical metaphor. When the trustees hurriedly tapped her to replace Shafik as acting president, she’d been running Columbia’s vast Irving Medical Center for two years, and she started to reassure people that the school was now in the ER or ICU and efforts were being made to stop the bleeding. She positioned herself as the anti-Shafik, ultracommunicative and accessible to all. Matthew Connelly, a history professor and vice-dean — “the lowliest administrative role you can have” — told me that Armstrong would reply to his emails immediately: “I’ve never had that experience with any other principal at Columbia.” Armstrong had a politician’s instinct for telling different constituencies what they wanted to hear. She helped freshmen move into their dorms, had dinner at the Chabad brownstone, and gave an interview to the Columbia Daily Spectator apologizing to students who felt “hurt” by the police raids.

Peter Bearman, a sociology professor who had helped start a vote of no confidence in Shafik, was surprised when Armstrong reached out to him. “I thought, Oh, she’s smart,” he recalled. The two developed a working relationship. Bearman complained that the color-coded system Columbia used to signal whether campus was open or closed made the place feel like a TSA checkpoint. As a hospitalist, Armstrong appreciated such heuristics, but she took the note and made a change. Bearman said, “She also pointed out that the security guards were unpleasant, kind of fascistic, and that she was going to make it a rule that they said ‘Good morning’ and ‘Thank you.’ And you know what? They did.”

However- and forgive the paragraph separation- Armstrong was not as familiar with Israeli-Palestinian politics as she might (not) have been with institutional politics.

On another occasion, Armstrong called Bearman, who is Jewish, into her office and asked him to explain to her the divide within Jewish faculty — why some felt the school had an unforgivable tolerance for antisemites while others considered the issue overblown, a smoke screen for human-rights abuses in Gaza. At the medical campus Armstrong had run, 50 blocks north of Low Library, Israel-Palestine just hadn’t been an issue her doctors and scientists bothered her with.

In other words: the Columbia Board of Trustees replaced an economist directly familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but insufficiency sensitive to the Columbia protests, with a doctor so unfamiliar with it (or inclined to play the part of ignorant) she had to ask the (it's important to note he's Jewish) Jewish professor who ousted her predecessor for being too hard on pro-Palestinian protestors why other Jewish faculty and students might perceive antisemitism.

The Gathering Enemy Action

A Republican blueprint for assailing higher education, with Columbia as its primary target, was coming together. In his first term, Trump had signed an executive order that expanded Title VI protections to victims of antisemitism. Biden rescinded many of Trump’s orders, but he let this one stand. At the end of October 2024, Republican staffers in the House released a 325-page report, “Antisemitism on College Campuses Exposed,” which relied on more than 40,000 pages of internal Columbia documents. The report is heavy-handed, but for those inclined to believe, it substantiates the allegation that Columbia is a breeding ground for antisemitism. And if there’s antisemitism, the government can now drive a school into bankruptcy.

The 'how' to brankrupcy is another para that refers to an American Enterprise Institute paper by Max Eden. I don't feel the article characterizes it well, so link it for your own review.

However, the point is that financial interests were at risk was raised, and...

The Armstrong Denial

At Columbia, much of the leadership was in denial that an asteroid was heading their way. A group of alumni and faculty had recently formed the Stand Columbia Society, which had excellent back channels to administrators. The group worked up a detailed analysis of Columbia’s exposure to a hostile administration — $250 million in the short term, $3.5 billion in a worst-case scenario — and circulated it as a warning. According to Stand Columbia, senior administrators responded that the math was “cute” but far-fetched.

The Stand Colombia Society does not have much of a public facing position on politics in general. However, in March 2025 it did publish a (paywalled even on internet archive) position paper titled: Issue #037: No, the Endowment Cannot Be Used to “Fight Trump”

The public-facing summary is-

Recently, a new narrative has begun making its way around the higher education commentariat: that Columbia University should “use its $15 billion endowment to fight Trump.” It’s a tempting, feel-good slogan, but here’s the problem: this argument is financially illiterate, institutionally reckless, and strategically suicidal.

Pretty strong words. But why might interim president from the medical center have dismissed even a 'mere' quarter-billion million short-term threat?

Because there could be a bigger-than-that short-term windfall incoming, if Armstrong played her professional self-interest cards right.

Armstrong's Nine-Figure Gamble for the (Columbian) Presidency

The false sense of security may have been encouraged by the common view that Armstrong’s tenure was going well. Most people who interacted with her at the time got the impression she was campaigning to get the presidency on a formal basis. There was, however, a nine-figure hitch. Amid an otherwise bleak year for fundraising, Columbia’s single largest benefactors, Roy and Diana Vagelos, had made a $400 million gift to the medical school. They were enthusiastic fans of Armstrong and made the donation contingent on her returning to the medical complex. But Roy Vagelos, the former chairman of Merck, was 95, and that could probably be sorted out. Columbia’s trustees discussed the matter and came close to making Armstrong an offer.

Roy Vagelos's characterization here is interesting, because it provides some interesting sequencing implications, not least because the Vagelos donation was made public on 22 August with no public acknowledgement of the Armstrong condition. Which just so happened to be aweek after Armstrong took the acting-President position after Shafik's resignation on 14 August 24.

Which created a sequencing dynamic of...

  • 14 August 24: Armstrong emerges from the fall of Shafik as the new/acting University President... implicitly as a disconnected / apolitical / temporary choice
  • 22 August 24: Within a week of Shafik's ascent, VIP/Biggest Fan donors who love her so much make mega-donation... conditional on Armstrong losing power

Naturally, knowing that the biggest financial windfall of her university's year is conditional on her future exit, Armstrong...

  • begins campaigning for her temporary promotion to become permanent
  • taking into confidence the (Jewish!) professor who planted the first knife in her predecessor's final fall
  • is remarkably engaged with often-overlooked university faculty, including humanities departments, to building teacher support
  • begins a campaign for student support, apologizing for / signaling non-support of her predecessor's rule-enforcement (and CRA-compliance) policies

Which continues so that-

  • Summer 2024-First Quarter 2025: Armstrong continues this campaign despite the biggest donation of the previous year being explicitly-but-secretly conditional against it
  • Summer 2024 On: The 'we care about antisemtic indiscipline' faction grained predominance on the Board
  • March 2025: A group of well-connected Columbian institutionalists publish a warning that a hostile incoming Trump administration could cut $250 million in the short term

But really, remember the context.

  • $400 million is more than $250 million
  • And the donor who set the condition is, like, 95, and will die in a few years
  • And the Board- or at least Armstrong's allies/supporters on the Board- think that condition 'could be sorted out'
  • So there's not really a risk of losing $400 million!

And Armstrong would look really, really good to the student/teacher protestor block if she heroically stood up to the Trump administration, and held out against to any short-term cuts thanks to her ability to pull in that $400 million mega-donation to cover a year of cuts.

And thus Katrina Armstrong almost got the job of her ambitions, the accolades of her humanity peers, and the support of the Board.

And then the Fire Nation Trump Administration Attacked

Such plans were obliterated when Trump began his assault. On the right, there was a consensus that among elite universities, Columbia was the weakest link. “Columbia is just the least defensible,” Rufo said. “I mean, the conduct at Columbia, the ideologies from Columbia, the response by Columbia were the least defensible. They showed the maximum weakness. And so I think that’s why the president selected them first.”

Initial efforts start small, but escalate week by week.

Trump’s Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism moved rapidly, from a warning shot about cutting $50 million in funds on March 3 to canceling $400 million on March 7. Federal agents began knocking on students’ doors and waiting in the lobbies of Columbia buildings. Ranjani Srinivasan, an Indian national and Fulbright scholar, fled to Canada, and Yunseo Chung, a junior who has lived in the U.S. since she was 7, went into hiding. ICE agents arrested Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, a prominent spokesperson for the lawn encampments, and flew him to a prison in Louisiana to await deportation proceedings. (Another student, Mohsen Mahdawi, was arrested in April; he has since been released.) On March 13, Trump’s task force delivered what faculty refer to as “the extortion letter” or “the ransom note,” a list of nine demands that had to be met before the government would consider reinstating the money, with a one-week deadline.

Yes, those individuals are non-citizens who were involved in participating or leading the Columbia protests. However, one of the interesting demands from the 'ransom note' list is actually institutional power related..

One of the bold letter demands is Primacy of the President in disciplinary matters, i.e. restoring the Bollinger reform, and reversing the late-Shafik power turnover to the University Senate.

Some held out hope for a defiant university administration. There was just one problem for the 'concede no ground' caucus-

Armstrong's support from the (still-Bollinger-era) Board wasn't as firm as she (probably) presumed.

The Fall of Armstrong

But the idea of a defiant legal response was a fantasy. Columbia’s board was already on the same wavelength as the Trump administration. On several of the task force’s demands — including banning masks, restricting protests, stripping disciplinary powers from the senate, and allowing campus police to arrest demonstrators — the group was ready to concede immediately. On March 21, it [the Board of Trustees] sent a letter to the government essentially surrendering. Perhaps reflecting an understanding that the letter would not go over well with the Columbia community, nobody signed it. Jack Halberstam, a professor of gender studies and English, was among the faculty aghast at the decision. “It’s more than capitulation,” Halberstam told me a few hours after the letter was released. “It’s anticipating even more demands that might be made and fulfilling them in advance.” The Trump administration’s initial letter hadn’t mentioned “viewpoint diversity,” code words that generally mean hiring more conservatives as professors, but Columbia pledged that searches for new faculty had already begun.

Again- remember the department.

But also- remember the sequencing.

  • Armstrong is made temporary President on donor big money condition that Armstrong leave
  • Armstrong lobbies hard to be Real President, despite the condition
  • Armstrong starts to go directly against the Board's summer 2024 consensus on the issue
  • Armstrong relaxes policies against student protestors the Board thinks are Very Concerning
  • Armstrong builds ties with faculty opposed to the opposing the protestors
  • Armstrong dismisses increasingly unsubtle warnings regarding the incoming Trump administration
  • Even after Trump's election, Armstrong thinks she is on track to become President
  • The Board encourages this belief, if she'll just hold on a little longer
  • One the first and predictable challenge, the Board folds

A sequence-conspiracist might think that- as Armstrong made her political alliances known- she was left to take an easily foreseeable fall.

Armstrong’s fall in these weeks was astonishingly fast. There were rumors that she and other members of the administration would be arrested for harboring immigrants. At one point, John Kluge, whose late father had endowed a program for minority scholars at Columbia with what was then the largest gift in Ivy League history, emailed Armstrong for reassurance that there was a strategy for defending it. Armstrong did not write back for four weeks. Khalil’s wife, who gave birth to their first child while he was incarcerated, has never received a note or offer of assistance from Columbia. The members of the university’s internal antisemitism review, concerned that their work could have lent legitimacy to Trump’s attack, took it upon themselves to write a statement. Administrators never issued it.

John Kluge's Sr.'s gift had been for... $400 million. Back in... 2007.

While $400 mil in 2007 is more than $400 mil in 2024, 2024 is a heck of a lot more recent- and influential- than 2007. And John Kluge Junior is not the one donating in a year Columbia needs money most.

Or, more relevantly, when Armstrong needs support most.

Faculty who interacted with Armstrong in this period say she was genuinely shocked that the world believed Columbia had caved. It made a certain sense, from the point of view of someone simply trying to survive minute by minute in a crisis: There had been a gun pointed at Columbia’s head, and to get it lowered, all she had to do was agree to some things her trustees already wanted.

Elsewhere...

Armstrong is 59, and in her years running Columbia’s medical center, she had cultivated a bedside manner that was upbeat, kinetic, approachable. Her short time triaging the entire university’s problems had taken a visible toll. “She looked like she was on the verge of collapse,” someone who dealt with her regularly said. To another, “she seemed like a person who desperately needed friends and allies and felt like she was very alone.”

Armstrong's finishing moment was, perhaps appropriately, a matter of record when she tried to make it not. Twice, sorta.

In the end, it was another bit of amateur hour that sank Armstrong. At one of the private faculty meetings where she tried to spin the deal with Trump as a win, participants warned that their videoconferencing software was generating a transcript. “The person who’d set up the meeting said, ‘Oh, I don’t know how to stop that. Can anybody — is there any tech? Can we get any tech?’ And no tech appeared,” recalled one of the professors present. “They allowed a confidential meeting with the faculty to go on, knowing that there was a transcription being made. And then of course it was leaked. I mean, it was such a shambolic event. She wasn’t in control. Isn’t that just an indication of complete discombobulation in our leadership?”

...

She announced that Columbia would comply. And then, when she nearly blew up the deal by privately telling faculty that it wasn’t a capitulation, that in fact there was some wiggle room, she lost her job. On March 28, the same day Armstrong resigned, she learned that Trump’s task force had demanded she appear in Washington without delay.

In the deposition room, Armstrong seemed determined, most of all, to avoid perjuring herself. She could not recall when she had become acting president. She struggled to say who is truly in charge of Columbia — the president or the trustees. Pressed by Keveney to admit that Columbia was indifferent to antisemitism, Armstrong described her tenure as a “blur” five times and as “challenging” or “difficult” 11 times and said she didn’t recall at least 28 times.

There is some irony in how Armstrong was replaced, though.

Members of the board of trustees give different accounts of who broke up with whom. Some maintain that Armstrong was forced out; others say there was mutual agreement she could not remain. Either way, she was gone. Only a week earlier, the former research-university president had joked to me that Armstrong’s job was secure: “You can’t fire an interim. You’re really not going to be able to hire a president after you do that.” With few good options, the trustees replaced Armstrong with one of their own. Close observers of Columbia’s demons noted that Armstrong, a creature of the profitable medical division, had been knifed by someone from the underfunded liberal arts.

So Armstrong was replaced by a member of the (Bollinger)-era Trustee Board member, Claire Shipman.

And not just any board member- the co-Chair.

What Next for Columbia?

In her early days on the job, Claire Shipman, an acting president replacing an interim president replacing a failed president, is beating expectations. At 62, a former correspondent for NBC and ABC News, she is a confident, mediagenic speaker, and as a board member since 2013, she knows the institution. She met privately with 300 restive faculty in mid-April, heard them out, and didn’t commit any gaffes worth leaking to the press. She is taking actions that are symbolic — mentioning Khalil and Mahdawi’s names for the first time — and structural. Shipman announced reviews of Columbia’s communications office and financial model and started a website with resources for international students fearful of deportation. Most significantly, Shipman is calling for the senate itself to be reconsidered. In a letter emphasizing that “I am deeply committed to shared governance,” Shipman opened the door to doing away with major elements of it.

And as an opening policy, Shipman, and the most direct Bollinger-era Board proxy yet, votes to dissolve the Senate.

In the end, perhaps Bollinger, or at least his influence, will win the Columbia game of chairs after all.

What Columbia should do with its governance structure is a wide-open question. The Stand Columbia Society has called for “fundamental reform” and predicted “the end of the University Senate as we know it.” It would likely ignite yet another round of protest on campus if the trustees were to formally reduce the power that faculty and students wield through the senate. And yet the current system, conceived in crisis half a century ago, is clearly not working.

Or maybe not. Chaos is a ladder, and all that.

Then again...

On a Wednesday evening in April [2025], for the first time, two trustees met publicly with students to hear their concerns about the senate — and everything else that had gone wrong over the past two years. The event was held in the auditorium of the Lee C. Bollinger Forum, a 56,000-square-foot building on West 125th Street designed by Renzo Piano’s firm. It didn’t begin well. There was confusion about the start time, and when a moderator said at 6:40 p.m. that the trustees had to leave at seven, there were angry calls of “Is that a joke?!” One trustee, Keith Goggin, a graduate of the journalism school who went to work on Wall Street, remained and gamely took students’ abuse for an hour. “Please let me get through this so you all understand it and then you can yell at me,” he said. The longest applause of the night came when a student noted that while Columbia had formed its own task force on antisemitism, it had not created one to deal with “the demonization of Palestinians.”

After an hour, Goggin gathered his things. “I think we’ve had a good conversation. You want to yell at me, but I really do appreciate all of you,” he said. Someone in the audience shouted, “Is our money going to kill kids in Gaza or not?” Goggin left to boos. In less than a minute, the students and faculty turned the town hall into an organizing session, and someone was at the microphone calling for a general strike.

I am sure they, and their preferred University leaders, will have the Board's full support.

What a silly shitshow. Thanks for writing it out, that was a fun read.

My question is why doesn't the board or president or whoever just launch a crackdown on pro-Palestinian protestors? Students have almost no political power in universities -- they're customers, not constituents. Most of them have political views that are only thinly-held, so just start issuing expulsions for some of the ringleaders and the rest will likely get over the whole thing. If they don't, keep issuing expulsions. Columbia has enough prestige that it won't realistically run out of students willing to go there. Faculty might be a trickier matter and some might protest out of principle, but if the students aren't protesting then that would probably take the wind out of their sails.

Because Ivy League students see themselves as minor royalty and the campus administration agrees.

What a silly shitshow. Thanks for writing it out, that was a fun read.

Thank ye. That was the goal.

My question is why doesn't the board or president or whoever just launch a crackdown on pro-Palestinian protestors? Students have almost no political power in universities -- they're customers, not constituents. Most of them have political views that are only thinly-held, so just start issuing expulsions for some of the ringleaders and the rest will likely get over the whole thing.

My impression is it's not just the students, but the teachers. Part of the article goes into Columbia's self-perceived vulnerability of losing teachers not only the other Ivy Leagues, but foreign universities.

They are (not quite implicitly) concerned that if they go hard on the protestors, the protesting-supporting teachers will go abroad as well. Part of this could be because of 'fascistic' concerns that could be a 'push' factor-

Bearman said, “She also pointed out that the security guards were unpleasant, kind of fascistic, and that she was going to make it a rule that they said ‘Good morning’ and ‘Thank you.’ And you know what? They did.”

-and other parts are the 'pull' factor of other higher education employers. From paras not raised-

After another embittered class has its commencement on May 21, Columbia will lurch into a summer of ugly possibilities. Students are still attempting major disruptions on campus, and the school has laid off 180 employees whose pay relied on federal funding. Scientists are hoarding supplies. “Everything is pretty much being held together with Scotch tape,” the director of a research institute at Columbia said. “The only thing that’s saving us from a wholesale exodus is they’re not funding any new grants at Harvard either, but we’re very worried about the flight of our most outstanding people. The Europeans and Chinese are both circling like mad.”

A lot of the article reflects a subtext / basis of comparison with the other Ivy Leagues, especially Harvard.

Columbia’s feebleness this spring has dismayed the many students, faculty, and alumni who wish it would wage a more principled fight against Trump — as Harvard has done by suing his administration in federal court. But even Trump’s allies failed to predict how much of a pushover it has been. “I was surprised by how quickly and how completely the university folded,” Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who helped develop the strategy to crush Columbia, told me.

Early on, Shafik had been lucky to dodge a congressional hearing at which the presidents of Harvard and Penn addressed reports of antisemitism in lawyerly terms and later resigned. But it meant that when the House Committee on Education and the Workforce returned to the issue, it held a hearing focused exclusively on Columbia. Shafik, Shipman, and Shipman’s board co-chair, David Greenwald, went to Washington to testify. On the morning of April 17, 2024, before they arrived on Capitol Hill, they learned that pro-Palestinian students had taken over the university’s South Lawn.

In the 30 hours that ensued, Shafik’s presidency was lost and Columbia plunged into true crisis, never to recover. During the hearing, Shafik struck a far different pose from Harvard’s Claudine Gay.

In the meantime, the Columbia community is waiting to see whether Shipman can reverse some of the university’s reputational loss. Harvard is basking in the glory of fighting Trump in court, and Princeton’s president, Chris Eisgruber, gave a humiliating interview to the Times offering his fellow Ivy notes on character. “I understand why Columbia might feel that they had to make concessions under the circumstances,” he said. “You have careers at stake. You have jobs at stake. You have the ability to educate your students at stake. And you may say, ‘Look, I wish I could take a stand on principle, but given what’s at stake, I can’t.’ But then you need to say that.” Cogburn, the social-work professor, suggested that the people running the school are too compromised to be credible: “I don’t know what their intentions are, whether they actually want to dismantle the senate or whether they earnestly want to consider the best way to govern, but they are consistently underestimating how much they’ve damaged their reputations and trust.”

And during that final Board-student meeting, I skipped a paragraph (for character limit constraints).

Early on, a student asked, “Why are you not taking action against the government — ” leading to several overlapping calls of “Like Harvard!” “Harvard!” “Harvard!” and “We want you to fight!” Goggin pointed out that Harvard had received more invasive demands from Trump than Columbia had. “If we can do something that we were going to do anyway without having to litigate, and restore the things that we care about here, that is in our opinion — or in my opinion — our best path,” he said. “That is where we are today. It doesn’t mean we’ll be there tomorrow.”

So- in a sense- pride. Or ego.

They are (not quite implicitly) concerned that if they go hard on the protestors, the protesting-supporting teachers will go abroad as well

I always enjoy when I read such statements. Go where? Everywhere else in the world they pay less. Almost everywhere in the world there is less tolerance.

Not having read the original source (which may explain the appeal of foreign universities), I'd also be skeptical that foreign universities are equally attractive, in general, but other Ivy-Plus schools being a threat to faculty recruitment seems like a reasonable fear: If you're trying to make a career at a school, you want to be confident that the school will support your professional goals, and Columbia probably isn't very confidence-inspiring, at present. (And the kind of people who would go to foreign universities don't evaluate tolerance the way you do.)

There would be a deep irony if the money making professors all bailed for China, thus having the opposite effect Trump intended

China seems unlikely, but the EU, on the other hand…

EU wouldn't be much of a problem. If they are in Harvard inventing cool shit, the profits from it sponsor the wokes in Harvard. The cool shit probably would make my life better, but the wokes would make it worse. If they move to EU and keep inventing the cool shit, I'd likely benefit from it no less - maybe I'd pay a bit more because tariffs or get it a little later, but on the bottom line it wouldn't make me substantially worse, as I don't get direct profit from Harvard owning cool shit and indirect profits are nearly the same. On the other hand, all the wokeness will be then concentrated in EU, and it hardly can be worse there already, so to be honest, I don't see much downside. Of course, it would be cool if I could get the benefits without the wokeness at all, but I'm not sure how to achieve that option.

My question is why doesn't the board or president or whoever just launch a crackdown on pro-Palestinian protestors?

Because the administrators and people in charge agree with the protestors. I honestly think it's that simple.

The people involved don’t see themselves as autocrats empowered to run the university however they see fit in order to ensure the maximization of grant-winning. The idea, “Jews have lots of political power, so we need to expel anyone who speaks out against Israel in order to stay in the good graces of the powers that be,” didn’t even occur to them in October 2023.

Why don’t universities simply put out fake studies with made up data that flatters the current administration’s priorities in order to get money? That’s just not how universities think. Even if there are incentive gradients that push in that direction, no university has a department of data fabrication.

no university has a department of data fabrication

Except they do? Soft sciences all suffer massively from replication crisis, but faked data is a huge problem that goes unchallenged and covered up till it could not be hidden anymore. Francesca Ginos work on behavioral science was totally fabricated and earlier attempts to highlight it were quashed till 9 years later. Roland Fryers work on black outcomes was quashed because he went against the orthodoxy of white supremacy being responsible. Hard sciences also suffer from dubious research overenthusiastically seeing shadows in slides.

I think its fair to see the prestige of academic research as a dead end if they don't stand the test of the real world. The endowments and sinecures lavished are rewards for satisfying the emotional wants future billionaires whose nostalgia overweights the contributive effect of their university years to their success. The actual practical knowledge of university is either relevant only to the arcana of the universities internal minutae or only temporarily substantive as the world is so dynamic. Spending eight years locked in your lab to dissect nanoparticle impregnation becomes irrelevant when corning glass comes up with 5 different product iterations in the meantime.

Why don’t universities simply put out fake studies with made up data that flatters the current administration’s priorities in order to get money? That’s just not how universities think.

Given the general direction of the replication crisis in the the social sciences, retracted questionable applications of statistics, and the number of high-profile plagiarism accusations against university leadership in the humanities, are you sure they don't? I don't think anyone is doing it out loud, but it's at least happening in practice through some combination of only studying problems that could have the flattering solution, or just hiding the report when you don't like its results.

Why don’t universities simply put out fake studies with made up data that flatters the current administration’s priorities in order to get money?

Assumes facts not in evidence. I think you'll find they do exactly that.

no university has a department of data fabrication

Well sure, if you call it that it would give away the game.

no university has a department of data fabrication.

You don't need a department of data fabrication to fabricate data, just as you don't need a "department of antisemitism" to be antisemitic. It happens naturally as a product of incentives and cultural trends. There's enough horrible studies, especially in woke "sciences" (though reality-based ones are in no way exempt also). I haven't tracked how Columbia specifically performs on this, but there's no reason why they in particular would be an outlier.

Thank you for the write up. I never would have had the patience to wade through all that university politics myself, your summary was much punchier.

It's amazing how impactful the Vietnam War was on our culture, and that we never really dealt with it. Dave Barry once said that untangling Vietnam is impossible in America because of the conflicts between two groups: draft dodgers who didn't fight in Vietnam but supported the war (George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Joe Biden0, and veterans who served in and opposed the war (John Kerry, Al Gore, Tim O'Brien). Twenty years after he wrote that, most of those people are dead, but we never got any closer to really figuring out what we thought about it. American society has never really come to grips with what we did in Vietnam.

Who was right between the Kill 'em All Caucus who thinks that We Didn't Lose We Left; and the protestors who said we never should have been there in the first place?

Forrest Gump is an entire film devoted to relitigating the boomer generation's trials and tribulations, and of course Vietnam is a major plot; but when Forrest has to get up at the national mall and say what he thinks about Vietnam, they cut the mic.

The protestors were objectively correct about basically everything they said: Vietnam was a pointless war, Ho ho ho Chi Minh did in fact win, the dominos didn't fall, and fifty years later a Vietnam run by the same Communist Party is a close Capitalist trading partner and just on the border of becoming a direct military ally against Red China. It's hard to see how the destruction of several million Vietnamese and the incineration of billions of dollars of treasure made the world today better in any way, compared to a counterfactual in which the United States simply let North Vietnam reunite with the South without outside interference. One has to posit a lot more hypothetical counterfactual moving parts to get there, and I don't think that justifies the costs.

On the other hand, the establishment won, The Man still stands. The institutions survived and thrived, Nixon and Reagan came back. If the pinko protestors turned out to be right about everything they said with regards to Vietnam, they turned out to be wrong about a lot of other things, and anyway their tone was considered a national shame. I grew up hearing these horror stories about returning veterans being spit on in airports, and so much of the GWOT era of "Support Our Troops" and our subsequent combination of distance from and lack of criticism of the military stems from this era. The colleges and police departments that crushed the campus protestors changed their politics, but they never fell. The direct institutional heirs of all the people who committed the crimes of the Vietnam era are in power today, running the same institutions that did committed those crimes, mostly without any formal apology or real effort to avoid such mistakes in the future.

And they never really squared up what it meant to be the President of Columbia University: the campus protestors of the Vietnam era were right, they were correct, especially according to the liberal leading lights of Columbia; but what does acknowledging that mean to an ordered institution that cooperates with the same US Government that dropped the Agent Orange?

So you end up with this generation of students that have been taught that the Protestors Were Right, and that the 1968 Columbia protests were heroic, and it's really hard to come up with a fact-based argument against them; and then you have the institutional heirs to the organization who have the same incentives to restore and maintain order on campus, and the result is this mishmash of actions.

But what's telling here is that the universities completely lack even a semblance of pain tolerance. Nobody, from the president to trustees to faculty to students, seems to be willing to countenance the idea that they can tell Trump "NUTS" and just go on without federal funding indefinitely. While taking a significant haircut in terms of funding, costs, educational opportunities, etc; the Federal Government can't actually force Columbia to do anything. If Columbia really, truly said as an institution: we're a University, we take academic independence seriously, we're not going to let the federal government get involved in hiring decisions or what we teach... Then there's nothing Trump could do about it.

This was the inevitable endpoint of identity politics, a total inability to tell anyone they are wrong.

the Federal Government can't actually force Columbia to do anything

It can force it to comply with Federal law. All of it. Including all those juicy parts about hostile workplace, discrimination, etc. which the ancestors of the current wokes worked so hard to institute. None of it is predicated on getting any federal funding. And then there's federally funded education loans. Check out how many students use those - is Columbia ready to develop its own loan system (and ensure Feds can't dismantle it for violating one of approximately 10 million banking regulations in existence)? And those juicy kuffye-wearing foreign students - guess who controls their visas? Federal Government is a monster - the Left worked for many decades, since the forefather of all, FDR - to ensure it can force anybody to do anything they want. So I have no sympathy for them if that monster turns on them now - but they would underestimate its power at their own peril. Their only hope is friendly federal judges would allow them to stretch things out, and Trump only has 4 years...

The entire history of the debate around wokeness: "Everyone is folding to wokeness, all the time. That's weird"

But also "so-and-so folded because he, specifically, is a pussy".

It's funny that even reversing the dynamic in favor of antiwokes doesn't change the assumption.

I agree that thinking academia admins fold to wokes because they are just pussies is wrong. They fold because they sympathize to them, but want plausible deniability. They don't want chant "kill the Jews" by themselves, but they are OK with shielding people who are willing to, from any negative consequences (and may throw in a couple of positive ones). It's not only about the Jews of course. Now Harvard seems to have abandoned the fig leaf completely, while Colombia is still pretending. It's certainly be interesting to see which strategy works for them and whether their remaining cultural status would allow them to openly defy Federal law.

So I have no sympathy for them if that monster turns on them now - but they would underestimate its power at their own peril.

Who said anything about sympathy?

Nonetheless, they can resist. Just not as the thing they are now.

There's a Unitarian Church down the road from me in a beautiful old building, and a mile away a Lutheran church in a crappy 1960s building. The beautiful building used to be the Lutheran church, until the minister wanted to convert it to a Unitarian church. The Lutheran church has the unofficial motto: "We kept the faith, they kept the furniture."

Columbia University, the concept, can't be forced to do anything, except maybe close its doors.

I want people, even the ones I disagree with, to stand up for what they believe in.

Churches are directly protected by the Constitution, so the government has to be kind of careful around them. Even if specific part of what the church does is not protected, a friendly judge can always spin it that way, and attacking a religious institution is an automatic PR problem for the government. Universities used to have same kind of deference, but their wokification lost them this stance on the right, and given that the left regularly sets their own university campuses on fire, if they claim "you don't respect The Sacred Institution enough!" nobody would really believe it by now. So right now they are much less protected than the churches.

Columbia University, the concept, can't be forced to do anything, except maybe close its doors.

I'm not sure what "the concept" here means, but the government can put Columbia in a world of hurt, causing them a lot of direct (fines, lost court cases) and indirect (limiting their access to things) trouble. Of course, technically this is not "forcing" to do them anything, the same way as "give me your wallet or be shot" is not forcing - you can choose to be shot, a lot of people survived being shot. But I don't think any sane board would be willing to fully explore how deep the rabbit hole goes. Because with Feds it can go very deep.

Of course, technically this is not "forcing" to do them anything, the same way as "give me your wallet or be shot" is not forcing{...}

Yes. Inasmuch as anyone at Columbia actually believes that this is tyranny, they should be willing to let the institution's current incarnation collapse before they give in. Inasmuch as the liberal arts teachers actually believe in their own bullshit, they should believe it would be better to teach in Central Park than to teach falsehoods. If they don't believe those things, they should shut their mouths about them.

Time was that we had a concept of honor that required that one actually tested threats of violence before one gave into them. Now we think that idea so insane that nobody on the Left or the Right believes in getting into a fist fight.

Yes. Inasmuch as anyone at Columbia actually believes that this is tyranny, they should be willing to let the institution's current incarnation collapse before they give in.

Or you recognize that Trumpism may be temporary and letting him destroy Columbia before that would be useless or counterproductive since institutions like that will be needed come the counter-counter-revolution.

I grant it's totally hypocritical if you think there's an active genocide though.

If Trumpism is temporary, then he can't destroy Columbia in three years. If it isn't, then giving in will destroy your institution.

To survive, liberal arts educators have to be willing to become St. John's College. They might not have to buy they have to be willing to.

If they don't believe those things, they should shut their mouths about them.

Oh but they never would. Just as "socialist" and "oligarchy fighter" Bernie Sanders would never give up his third house and be left with only two, to help the poor. Just as various rich "eco warriors" would never give up their personal jets. And they wouldn't need to - their followers, as it is evident, are fine with that.

Bob Jones university gets away with racial segregation.

Bob Jones is already buck broken. They’re 10% minority now and haven’t restricted interracial relationships for a quarter of a century.

They even let women wear pants these days.

They have separate drinking fountains and lecture halls "for whites only"? I kinda find it hard to believe, any documentation to that?

The protestors were objectively correct about basically everything they said

Yes, but no. The protestors (not each of them personally, but in general the movement) was part of the reason why US lost this war. And if US didn't lose the war, Vietnam could be what South Korea is now. Which is better than what it is now. So is the lost war "worth it"? Probably not, that's why it's called a lost one. But if you approach every war with the premise that you may lose and therefore you can't fight, then you lose all the wars in advance. And one of the reasons that Vietnam is now quasi-capitalist is because the US did not lose some other wars, including winning the main one - the Cold War. Did Vietnam war make the world better? No, it did not, because the good guys lost. If they didn't, it would. That happened in other places where the good guys didn't lose.

compared to a counterfactual in which the United States simply let North Vietnam reunite with the South without outside interference

In that counterfactual the US stops fighting the Cold War, USSR still exists now, owns major parts of the world, and half of the US is thinking when we stop being so stupid and join the societal model that is clearly winning, namely socialism. I don't think it's a good future to be in. Yes, losing a war sucks. But losing all wars in advance would suck much more.

This ignores the actual history of South Vietnam, which transitioned from a corrupt Catholic theocracy to being a brutal and corrupt military dictatorship that tended to appoint generals for political reasons because of their tendency to meddle in politics.

The South Korean dictators were development oriented; the same cannot be said for their Vietnamese equivalents.

In that counterfactual the US stops fighting the Cold War, USSR still exists now, owns major parts of the world, and half of the US is thinking when we stop being so stupid and join the societal model that is clearly winning, namely socialism

HOLY FALSE DILEMMA BATMAN

The US didn't stop fighting the cold war when China became the PRC, or when Cuba fell, or when Vietnam did in fact fall. Why would the US have suddenly given in because Vietnam went Red?

The time to make a decision in Vietnam was before Dienbienphu. After that Vietnam was always going to be united under a Vietminh regime.

Not expending national credibility on that lost cause would have made the Capitalist American system more attractive on the global stage, not less. We can tell because US prestige declined after the defeat in Vietnam!

The Sino-Soviet split was already happening before the US entered Vietnam.

What would have helped Vietnam develop significantly would have been ending the destructive war earlier, so they could have gotten along with the industrialization process and started selling me cheap workout clothing. You can tell because Vietnam today is where South Korea was 30 years ago, and Vietnam fought a series of destructive wars for 30 years longer than South Korea did.

Why would the US have suddenly given in because Vietnam went Red?

No, you approaching it with the wrong end. The US that would willingly give up Vietnam to the reds, without trying to do anything, would also give up without trying Poland, Afghanistan, and many other things that together brought the Cold War to victory. By itself, the loss of Vietnam obviously weren't fatal - obviously! - but becoming a type of country that doesn't even try to fight may be fatal for the chances to ultimate victory.

We can tell because US prestige declined after the defeat in Vietnam!

You are comparing it to the situation where US won in Vietnam. Compare to situation where it didn't even try.

Poland

The US DID give up Poland without trying! That's a thing that really happened! Not ten years before the Gulf of Tonkin, the US failed to help the Hungarians who were ready to stand against the USSR. During the Vietnam War the US would abandon the Prague Spring to its fate. The ding to US prestige from failing to aid the Hungarians or the Czechs was small, in fact it was probably less than the debit to USSR credibility worldwide resulting from those invasions. In fact the damage done to the US was so small, you don't even remember it! The ding from losing in Vietnam was large, and the damage done by the United States' behavior in Vietnam (and the rest of Indochina) was even larger. From this we can deduce that US global prestige suffered less from scenarios in which they didn't try than scenarios in which they tried and lost.

The US DID give up Poland without trying! That's a thing that really happened!

Nope. Solidarnosc had a lot of support from the US, though it was not all in the open. Reagan lead a lot of it.

With Hungary and Czechia it was different - those were already considered owned by USSR, so it was USSR atrocities in their own space rather than the US losing to them.

From this we can deduce that US global prestige suffered less from scenarios in which they didn't try than scenarios in which they tried and lost.

If it didn't try, what "prestige" you are talking about? Prestige of doing what? Sitting in their corner of the world and silently watching as USSR eats the rest of it?

Nope. Solidarnosc had a lot of support from the US, though it was not all in the open.

Wait, I missed something, who was Solidarnosc fighting against? Because I'm pretty sure they were fighting against a regime the US simply let walk into Poland.

You seem to be confusing different historical periods. When USSR took over Poland, there wasn't even the Cold War - in fact, most of it happened while US and USSR had been allies and fought together against Hitler. Opening that question back then would hardly be possible. However, things were much different years later, when the Cold War was in full swing.

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And if US didn't lose the war, Vietnam could be what South Korea is now. Which is better than what it is now.

How exactly?

By every sensible measure? Income, GDP, opportunities, quality of life, technological advancement, etc. SK is a highly advanced modern nation, while Viet Nam is "developing". If you take pretty much every criteria that common people would use when comparing one nation against other, SK would come ahead.

Vietnam is just an average, mostly functioning Asian nation free of extremes of any sort. South Korea is a realized cyberpunk hellscape afflicted by every conceivable form of degeneracy and blight brought about by modernity and late-stage capitalism, whereas North Korea somehow managed to the realize the horror of Confucianism and Communism being combined and ruled over by a dynasty. And yet you’re arguing that the long-term outcome of US victory for the Korean Peninsula is preferable to the long-term outcome of US defeat for Indochina.

I'm sorry but I vastly prefer "degeneracy and blight brought about by modernity and late-stage capitalism" - aka civilized living in good conditions, decent income, nice job and all trappings of modern civilization - to "mostly functioning nations" (side note - did you notice how "mostly" became the most deceitful of words in English recently? Take "mostly peaceful"...). Given how many people move from "mostly functioning" to "degenerate late capitalist" nations and how many move the opposite direction, I somehow suspect I am not a rare exception.

LOL...is this what you unironically associate late-stage capitalism and existing cyberpunk conditions with? "good conditions, decent income, nice job"? Do you think this is the lived experience of South Korean normies, for example? People who cannot even reproduce themselves?

"mostly functioning nations"

I meant "mostly well-functioning Asian nation". English isn't my mother tongue. Either way, I think Vietnam, as unified through force of arms, represents an overall outcome that is clearly preferable to both those of all other former COMECON member states and that of the partitioned Korean nation.

Do you think this is the lived experience of South Korean normies, for example?

Yes. It is the living experience of the normies of virtually every Westernized country, I don't see why SK would be an exception.

People who cannot even reproduce themselves?

Viruses reproduce themselves excellently, and they aren't even alive. I think you need a better criteria. And as far as I know, Koreans are capable of reproduction no less than any other human.

represents an overall outcome that is clearly preferable

Preferable to whom? Again, migration patterns show a lot of people prefer the horrors of "late stage capitalism" to the paradise of "mostly functioning". The only exception maybe are wealthy retirees that prefer being rich in a poor country. But the "being rich" part is rarely achieved outside of the capitalist hell. If Vietnam and USA declared that citizens of each country could freely move and remain in the other country indefinitely, without any impediment, how do you think migration patterns would change? Would the oppressed people of capitalist cyberpunk hell rush to escape it into the mostly well-functioning paradise?

Columbia is an influential non-state institution, but it isn’t sovereign. Really us moderns tend to think of sovereignty as so tied in with statehood that the whole idea of institutional rights and prerogatives is undermined. The USFG won’t send in the 101st airborne every time; there are institutions right now who just accept minor sanctions to do thing the government doesn’t like very much. Relevantly for the topic, hillsdale and Bob jones universities. These have a limited sovereignty, not the full non-state sovereignty of, say, the order of Malta, but if the 101st airborne showed up at Hillsdale, well, Andorra wouldn’t exactly fair any better.

I think another sign that something was seriously wrong at Columbia is that they run the Columbia Teacher’s College, the premier destination for teacher training — that is best known in recent years for being the exact ones who were flagrantly wrong on the Science of Reading stuff, ironically mistraining teachers. Great write up.

In related news Trump administration just revoked Harvard's ability to enroll international students by terminating the Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification. Apparently this will also force their current exchange students to transfer to other schools or lose their legal status.

Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification

It's an interesting day when the lookup for a university-oriented program takes you to an ICE website.

Certification is the process schools go through to receive authorization from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to enroll F and/or M nonimmigrants. Within U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), SEVP reviews schools that desire to enroll nonimmigrant students to determine denial or approval of certification.

From a guardian article elaborating the letter-

“The revocation of your Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification means that Harvard is prohibited from having any aliens on F- or J-nonimmigrant status for the 2025-2026 academic school year. This decertification also means that existing aliens on F- or J- nonimmigrant status must transfer to another university in order to maintain their nonimmigrant status,” Noem continued.

Meanwhile, Harvard graduation occurs... a week from today, on 29 May.

My sympathies to foreign students at Harvard thrown into uncertainty by this.

It will, however, be interesting to see how Harvard's position changes. I imagine a court case is imminent. I doubt it will resolve things.

And as an opening policy, Shipman, and the most direct Bollinger-era Board proxy yet, votes to dissolve the Senate.

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Why does the american right tolerate these endowments? I would not let the state grab a single dollar from a red-blooded american as long as these mausoleums hold all this wealth. Every time you breathe, the state takes its share. But dead men’s money stays untouched in the ivory towers. Untouched by you, I mean. Thin men and thick women pay themselves sinecures from the ill-gotten treasure. Worse, these janitors conspire to turn it against the state.

Why does the american right tolerate these endowments?

Because they didn't have the power to take them away. That is starting to change, and Trump has already credibly threatened both Harvard and Columbia.

There's not enough there to make a dent in US tax revenue, though; US tax revenue is almost unfathomably large, dwarfed only by US spending.

Wrong, they always had the power. The best part of the trump wrecking ball program is that it will put to rest the antidemocratic lie, widely believed on both sides, and the source of many problems, that the average citizen has no power and can be safely ignored by the elites.

It might even be worth it to smash some valuable things so people can re-learn that lesson. But these billions in endowments are not even valuable. Well, you know what I mean. It’s actually triple-good to seize those (teach a lesson, eliminate illegitimate unproductive source of polarization, fund the state).

You can’t, in a nation of laws, just go around seizing people’s shit.

First, they are not people. And that’s not a dehumanizing comment about my opponents.

Second, the state constantly seizes real people’s shit, via the salami slicing technique.

Third, despite being considerably less than people, they are exempt from tax, so treated better than people.

If you're talking about a wealth tax or just seizing the money, almost no first-world country does that sort of thing for very good reasons.

If you're talking about subjecting the money to a similar tax rate that normal capital gains have, that's a lot less unreasonable, but universities have historically been granted exemptions since they fund a lot of basic science -- stuff that all of society benefits from, and almost nobody else wants to do. There's really not that much money in endowments relative to, say, what Medicare or Social Security churn through on an annual basis, and the sum long-term contribution to investing in science is much, much higher than it is to funding welfare for old people.

Don't try to engage with this, it's the right wing version of the periodic calls to end tax exemptions for churches. Neither is going to do much of anything.

I also support taxing churches. They are very similar. We give them these exemptions and the worst partisans use the surplus to fight a propaganda war against each other at great cost to the rest of us. It's like a polarization subsidy.

@FiveHourMarathon The tax exemption also makes many churches incredibly cowardly, as they have to refrain from doing or preaching anything that could harm the precious tax exemption.

Fair play.

It would be a good start to remove their tax exempt status, sure. Seizing the money sounds bad, but this is not money that rightfully belongs to an individual proscribed by a capricious state, it’s from a heavily-subsidized institution that in theory performs government-like functions. It could be seen as just correcting some accounting mistake in the financing of government goals, or as making them pay some tax arrears, or inheritance tax.

You’re a reasonable guy, Ben. Maybe you can tell me what the obvious, very good reasons against a 1%/y wealth tax is. All I ever hear is that taxes are bad, which okay fair enough, but that’s not specific, and liquidity problems, which I don’t find convincing. If you can’t cough up 1%, you’re either incompetent or bankrupt, and you shouldn’t be holding assets.

stuff that all of society benefits from, and almost nobody else wants to do.

That’s an argument from laziness, tainted with status quo bias. You want to fund science, fund it. There's no reason to delegate this power to universities, when it's clear their goals can very much diverge from the societally beneficial one. It's spelled out in the OP: they almost used the money society granted them to fight a titanic legal battle against the government for partisan reasons.

Your other argument is that since any one person or institution cannot fund all of USG, they shouldn’t be taxed.

Not all the endowments can be taken at face value. It’s kind of like a university’s 401K, while it’s counted in net worth it’s not immediately accessible. Also the stock market being unusually good the last 20 years has caused some of them to grow more than expected, but that’s not something you can bank on indefinitely. Thus, the 15 billion being unable to entirely sustain current spending. Even Harvard it’s something similar.

Untouched by you, I mean. Thin men and thick women pay themselves sinecures from the ill-gotten treasure. Worse, these janitors conspire to turn it against the state.

I’m not sure I agree with this reasoning. If these people receive payment, then definitionally, they cannot be janitors.

Isn't the term "custodian?"

Did everyone hear about the anti-natalist suicide bombing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

abortion clinic bombings

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

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

For this they have received no credit.

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

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

For this they have received no credit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statistically Muslims in Western countries are perfectly peaceful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah, the JRPG villain ideology

Are anti-natalists citing Marx or the Frankfurt School?

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

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

Overlap with the Zizians, for sure.

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

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

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

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

Did any of them have children or were planning to?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nicholas Roske

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

many attacks on universities I regard as quite warranted

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

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

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

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

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

many attacks on universities I regard as quite warranted

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

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

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

So what was the idea driving Tesla Guy?

feels a bit like trying to make sense of insanity

Pretty much, yeah. I think suicide bombers nearly always are, and have been, nuts. If there’s a trend, I don’t see it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like the Harvey Casino bombing, but on steroids.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because he did it because he hates babies.

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

Also.

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

This is I believe backward. Tribal terrorism is common because most people are, by default, tribal, so under the right conditions it can flourish in any brain, no matter how primitive. It's a pre-rational thing.

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

Their radical egalitarianism also exploited a basic human instinct.

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

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

Which link is inaccessible from outside the US? (How would I even know?)

In my experience, about 50% of US news sites returns error code 451.

Basically every single local newspaper or TV station is inaccessible, at least from Europe. National level sites show up. Allegedly 15% of US websites are inaccessible from EU.

I can usually see everything from Japan fwiw

MAKE ADULTERY GREAT AGAIN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As is become habitual for you, excellent writeup.

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

"1. We want strong men. Warriors!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"2. Shooters gonna shoot and cads gonna cad"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As is become habitual for you, excellent writeup.

I bask in your praise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

On warrior-representatives: I'd be curious to hear your take on Jason Crow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RE: JFK Jr.

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

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

RE: RFK Jr. Sex Diary Entries

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

RE: Physical Stamina

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have a handsome younger brother, and a handsome best friend. At times it bemuses me how eager so many women are to throw themselves at them. And that's in a relatively sexually conservative country like India. That's despite doing pretty well for myself, but whereas it takes me effort, they're turning down more advances because they're full or can't be arsed.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous/envious, but I don't think I've ever behaved in a counterproductive manner. It's not my experience when observing how other men behave either. I've been in friends groups with gross deltas between how successful the guys are with the opposite sex, and beyond the occasional joke, they get along fine. Of course, there's an assortative component, and a group of male friends are looks/success matched more often than not.

One of the most interesting things you can see is a man interact with a man who has fucked his girlfriend or wife, or even with any man who has fucked more than him.

The former? Perfectly true, but rare is the woman who takes well to being introduced to an ex. The latter? Half of men have fucked more than the other half, and it's really not a big deal.

Men are more private about their envy, they redirect it, channel it in different and sometimes more subtle ways; they are more embarrassed of it, more shameful of it.

Men buy sex, women sell sex. (This is just the way incentives work, not a moral judgment.)

The buyer dynamic is that being openly envious of people who have more money than you (and can afford better than you) is a signal you're poor. It is embarrassing and shameful to be poor. As an extension of that, if that man fucks your girlfriend or wife, he is walking proof that he is (and perhaps always will be) richer than you.

The same is not true of sellers; being envious of people who can command a higher price than you is not a signal you're poor in the same way. It is shameful to be outright undesired, but having to mark your body down to get the buyer's money is not quite the same thing.

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

Rather humorously, the last time I made this point it was a woman complaining about it... yet that only served to prove my point further.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Creepy Joe" himself?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t have half as responsible a job as JFK, and I can’t find time to golf let alone to keep a half dozen mistresses happy and on tap. Where did he find the time? Given, he was so hot, with so much social proof, that the seduction itself doesn’t seem to have been difficult, but still: keeping them all reasonably happy, keeping track of who they were, finding time to fuck them all? Where did he find the time?

Didn't he have a large number of trusted staffers?

Very. A large amount of his personal staff seemed to act as pimps at various times. Which is, you know, odd.

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

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

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

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

Today, the US Supreme Court granted the emergency relief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I continue to believe that the stable equilibrium for a democracy is absolute parliamentary immunity. Occasional legislative brawls are normal and healthy, mudslinging is just how politics works, and if you buy a politician’s shitcoin you deserve what you get. In contrast, excluding duly elected representatives from voting is, well, not a democracy.

Article I, Section 6, Clause 1:

The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.

Yeah, legislative representatives should be immune to legal punishment for their speech. Imagine if a legislator gave a fiery speech and then was sued for slander or censured and stripped of voting power. That's not a well functioning government.

Yeah, legislative representatives should be immune to legal punishment for their speech. Imagine if a legislator gave a fiery speech and then was sued for slander or censured and stripped of voting power. That's not a well functioning government.

Note "in any other place" (emphasis mine). It is well established that the US House and US Senate can indeed censure members for their speech in their respective houses. Or for any other reason.

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

That sounds like a Second Amendment sort of question.

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

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

This would probably run into unfixable quorum issues first.

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

The Maine Constitution requires a 2/3rds vote of both Houses to override a veto, not 2/3rds vote of all those voting.

2/3 of that House shall agree to pass it, it shall be sent together with the objections, to the other House, by which it shall be reconsidered, and, if approved by 2/3 of that House

Hence reducing the number of voting legislators doesn't change the supermajority threshold.

Interestingly, the US Senate when it last changed the cloture rule converged on the same logic -- they changed the threshold from 2/3rds of Senators voting to 3/5ths of Senators sworn.

The District Court seems correct here; this is not a matter for the Federal courts to decide, being a purely internal act of the state legislature with respect to one of its members. A consequence of the states being sovereigns in their own right.

But by that reasoning, wouldn't the drawing of state legislative districts also be a purely internal act? Because the states are sovereign, and if a state want one district to be ten times the size of another, that's its sovereign right?

You've got a strong argument, but it flies in the face of decades-old Supreme Court precedent which I haven't heard anyone arguing to overturn.

But by that reasoning, wouldn't the drawing of state legislative districts also be a purely internal act? Because the states are sovereign, and if a state want one district to be ten times the size of another, that's its sovereign right?

Sure; the Voting Rights Act in particular was an intentional degradation of state sovereignty. For very-unequal size legislative districts, you can wave at the Guarantee Clause (which would at least provide constitutional backing for the limit on sovereignty). But censure has been a thing since before the US was founded, and has long existed at the Federal level, so it would be very strange for it to be somehow forbidden at the state level with no explicit language saying so.

I think Maine's in the right here. The first Amendment does not mean politicians cannot retaliate against other politicians for their speech. A Speaker of the House who pisses off too many people will not be Speaker anymore. Can this retaliation go so far as preventing a legislator from voting? The constitution states:

Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.

This is a reference to the federal House and Senate. Nevertheless, it supports the notion that the framers did not think the First Amendment, which they passed shortly after this, which initially applied only to the federal government, limited Congress's right to regulate the speech of Congressmen. The right to expel a member appears absolute, courts have no say. Incorporation means that what initially applied to the federal government now applies to the states. Given that the First Amendment did not limit the actions of the federal legislature in regulating its members' speech, it stands to reason that the same should be true for the state legislators. It's not a matter of "legislative immunity" so much as the parameters of the First Amendment.

Still, the 2/3 requirement for expulsion means the majority cannot use its power to determine rules to expel. That at least implies that it cannot do things that are tantamount to expulsion by a bare majority.

The constitutional problem is effectively disenfranchising a representative's constituents, by preventing the representative from voting. Even if a recall and replacement election could be held and a new representative seated, prior to the following legislative vote, you'd be allowing the majority to choose their own opposition. (This is also true of expulsion, but, as the quote shows, a higher threshold was chosen for that.)

The constitutional problem is effectively disenfranchising a representative's constituents, by preventing the representative from voting.

And this is honestly BS, mostly brought up to protect the left (e.g. to allow Frank Lautenberg to replace Robert Toricelli in NJ after the deadline for changing ballots, or to allow some of the COVID-related election rule violations in 2020). It is fair for the Supreme Court to apply the same standards when they benefit the right, but I don't think this principle is somehow so paramount in the Constitution as to allow violation of every other principle including separation of powers and separate sovereignty.

This isn't a new issue. Most infamous to me are the Smoot hearings. Note that Smoot himself was not a polygamist, so this was essentially at attempt to expel a senator over his beliefs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed_Smoot_hearings

The right to vote is never guaranteed in the constitution. States cannot deny it on account of a list of things.(race, sex, age if above eighteen, failure to pay poll taxes) There is the Guarantee Clause, but courts have ruled (possible wrongly) that it's a "political question" that can only be invoked by Congress.

True, but SCOTUS has finite tolerance for violations of the spirit of the law, including freedom of expression (and choice of representative is a form of expression) and ballot access by candidates.

and has only publicly available information

I don't find this compelling. A vast majority of behavior that falls under "doxxing" involves the collation and signal-boosting of information that is technically 'publicly available' to a motivated sleuth, but not widely distributed. The most familiar example round these parts would be Scott's real name, which was always trivial to find through the Internet Archive if you knew to look for it. That wasn't a good reason for the NYT to publicize it against his express wishes, and I think the same goes here.

(Of course, that only proves Libby's behavior was either knowingly dickish, or irresponsible. There's still a leap from that to arguing it's so beyond the pale that it's worth barring her from fulfilling her duties as an elected representative. But as a matter of common decency, all else being equal, Libby should apologize.)

This is preposterous. Libby posted an athlete's record. Their literal public performance. Not their phone number, address, social media accounts, criminal record, or any other information that might be publicly available but threatening in the wrong context. Conflating that with doxing is just rank bad faith.

What's next, is a Ellen Page's IMDB page doxing? Is Bruce Jenner's Olympic record doxing?

I am not saying Libby's actions were doxxing, or even that they were particularly blameworthy (though I do think they were dickish, a much lesser charge). I am saying that "the information was publicly available" doesn't prove it wasn't doxxing.

Champion athletes are different- anyone paying attention to the sport knows who they are.

Exactly. The entire trans-sports debate needs to be reframed in those terms: the debate isn't really whether MTFs can be allowed to compete, it's whether they be allowed to win.

Which is what's so frustrating about the dishonesty of the debate. Athletics are great, I'm a big advocate for them, but formal competitions aren't a necessary component. There are plenty of hobbyists across many sports who never compete, will never compete, and still get a lot out of it. Most rock climbers never compete. Most golfers never enter a tournament. Most Yogi aren't even aware of the idea of a tournament!

Most of the people at my BJJ gym will never enter a formal comp, and while the girls tend to stick together at need the rolls are co-ed. If a trans girl joined the gym, she'd have every opportunity to advance at the gym, and if I had to roll with her (though I'd probably avoid it if I could) I'd treat her like anyone else weaker than me, and she'd be expected to treat other women the same way. It's only once you start talking about a comp that there's any possibility of real trouble, and most people never enter comps. Hell, my good friend is a black belt, entered one tournament in his life, broke his collarbone, and immediately said "never doing that again."

Trans advocates, taking them in good faith, are giving trans girls terrible advice when they send them to join the track team, where they'll be constantly hounded. If a trans girl has interest in athletics, she should just pick up hobbyist athletics without the expectation of winning medals in anything.

It's a tough question. Normally you'd expect to anonymise the student but in this case, in order to avoid "how do you know that's the same person?" or "this is all fake", she did have to show evidence that it was who she said it was.

The timeline does sound skewed to me, though; I note by the PDF the update was that in 2024 John was still competing with the boys which is where he tied for fifth place, then in 2025 Katie won first place with the girls.

So 2023 or 2024 - ties for fifth, 2025 - first place. I think looking at that leap in performance, it's hard to argue "trans girls in sports don't have any advantage over cis girls" at this stage. I've no idea if the kid is on hormones and we'll have to wait a couple of years into the transition to see any real changes, but that is the crux of the argument: while we're waiting those years, Katie formerly John is now beating girls for places on state teams, college sports scholarships, and possibly Olympic places.

(The irony would be if the reason John only made fifth place competing with the boys is because they were secretly transitioning all along for a couple of years, but now they're fully out as Katie).

Oh, I make no claims as to the merits of the argument. I think publicizing and politicizing a teen's name like this would have been bad form even if we were talking about an unambiguous, garden-variety cheater (say, a kid who'd taken prohibited steroids). It's just not a responsible politician's place to name-and-shame a random minor like this, whether the kid did something actually wrong or not.

The whole legal concept of publicly available information needs to be radically reimagined.

I can get a copy of the deed to someone's house in minutes in most cases, for $2.50 online.

That info being publicly available if I went to courthouse, dug through a pile of books in the basement for hours; versus that information being publicly available via app on my phone. I'm not even sure those are the same concept.

That info being publicly available if I went to courthouse, dug through a pile of books in the basement for hours; versus that information being publicly available via app on my phone.

Or, as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy put it,

"But the plans were on display…” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard."

I think theres something to be said for a concept of a "Friction Threshold", where everything above a certain level of difficulty/cost isn't considered "publically available" for certain purposes. Now, what exactly that threshold is depends very much on the information and medium, I'll grant. But it is very much one thing to be able to access the information, vs sharing/making it easier to find, vs publically broadcasting it. Or, to put it light-heartedly, my mother's age may have been easily findable/public record, but that doesn't mean she was happy when her nieces plastered the telephone poles up and down the block with "Happy 40th birthday!" messages.

If you ever go door to door in local politics, you quickly learn to avoid greeting people by their first name, even if they know you could know their address-name connection, and know vaguely that you looked them up in voter records to know they are regular voters, they still get freaked out by being greeted that way.

I tried finding Scott's real name before the doxx and eventual official reveal. No luck at the time. Where precisely was it revealed?

It was very prominently displayed on raikoth.net, along with a picture of himself when he still had hair.

Though, personally, the first time I found it was when he posted "The Parable of the Talents". The paragraph about his brother was easy to google, which gave me Scott's brother's last name, which is obviously the same as Scott's last name. And since he never made it a secret that "Scott Alexander" were his real first and middle names, that's his full name right there.

I don't know about "revealed", but back then I found it in his hospital's page: psychiatrist named Scott, working in a religious hospital in Michigan, was enough info if you were inclined to figure it out.

I believe the way I found it was that he'd once linked to his pianist brother's YouTube channel in an early post, and that one's under his real name, so combine that with Scott saying on multiple occasions that "Scott" was his real first name and there you have it. But I think it was also possible to find it directly by trawling through his old LiveJournal.

Copying over @RenOS's post from the old thread because I want to talk about it:

Let’s assume you’re a car mechanic. You love your job, even though it is dirty, hot and physically straining. You go through a bookshop, and stumble over one book in particular: “Why being a car mechanic is great”. It explains the importance of the job for society, it talks about the perks, and so on. You look up the guy who wrote it and yep, he runs a car shop. You buy the book and recommend it to many of your friends, maybe even some teens who might consider the path.

Fast forward, the writer is on some talkshow. Somebody asks him how he handles all the grease. He reacts, uh no, of course he doesn’t get greasy, that’s his staff. He just really likes talking with customers. Maybe he does one car once in a while, if the work isn’t too hard and the car is really nice.

I can’t help but think this after reading Scott’s latest book review of “Selfish reasons to have more kids”. No, we don’t have nannies and housekeepers. In fact, almost nobody we know has them. Some have a cleaning lady coming … once per week, for an hour or so. Tbh, this significantly lowered my opinion of both Scott and Caplan. If you want a vision of a more fertile, sustainable future for the general population, it should not involve having your own personal staff. Two hours is nothing.

And I find this especially frustrating since I think it’s really not necessary; Yes having small kids is really exhausting - after putting the kids to bed around 8-9, my personal routine is to clean the house for two hours until 10-11 every day, and then directly go to bed with maybe an audiobook on (but often I’m too tired for even that, and enjoy falling to sleep directly) - but it’s doable, and the older the kids are, the less work they are, at least in terms of man-hours. The worst is usually over after around 3 yo. And the time before that in the afternoon can be a lot of fun.

At least for me, one of the biggest draws of kids is that it’s, to use poetic terms, “a glimpse of the infinite” that is available for everyone. Everyone wants to leave something behind, political activism is sold on making a change, careers are sold on becoming a (girl-)boss managing others. Yet, the perceptive (or, less charitably, those capable of basic arithmetic) will notice that only a tiny sliver of the population can ever cause the kind of innovation that really changes culture, or who can come into positions of substantial power over others.

Kids, however, everyone can have them. And they really are their own little person (especially my stubborn little bastards). And they will have kids as well, who will also carry forward some part of yourself. I’m not just talking genetics here, though that is a large part, the same will go for how you raise them. Unless you leave that to the nannies, I guess, but that’s your own fault.

I wouldn’t have written this since it’s mostly venting tbh, but I’ve seen some here mentioning wanting to discuss it, so I thought may as well start. What do you think?

Dad of five kids here -- I had exactly the same reaction you did. I hadn't read Bryan's book, but I had really hoped that he figured out some ways to be a good parent in a way that was sustainable, practical, and life-giving ... but if the answer is "oh I only take care of the kids 1-2 hours a day and hire out the rest" then fuck that, for real.

As someone who is parenting five kids (one of whom has significant special needs) and has done so through some very poor and hard years, consider this a starting place for actual tips:

  • You are not your kids' playmate / entertainer; don't take that upon yourself any more than you want to
  • Pay less attention to the shenanigans your kids get up to than you think you should; kids need independent play even early on
  • Teenage babysitters are a cheat code, should you be able to find any -- we have a 15ish year old neighbor who comes over once or twice a week during the cursed 4 - 5 PM hour just to help my wife out
  • Older siblings are amazing but you do have to push through some hard years to get there
  • A little bit of cleaning daily goes a long way
  • Your marriage is more important than your kids -- focusing on the kids will screw your marriage and the kids, focusing on your spouse will benefit both
  • Learn to cook
  • If you are the husband, play fewer video games and help your wife out more -- an extra meal or grocery run or massage night every now and again will go a long, long way towards a happy household. Bring her flowers (substitute for your wife's preferences as needed) as often as practical.

That's some high-powered advice distilled down to a single page. Makes you wonder why writing a full on book was really needed.

If you have time for an addendum, I’d be interested in hearing what your wife has to say, since it sounds like she was doing the lion’s (lioness’s?) share of the in-person raising. Or not! Might be wrong on my read.

For instance, mine gets a lot of mileage out of the library, playgrounds, stroller walks with friends, pretty much anything where she can chat with other women and let children be children.

Good question; just understand that you're getting my estimation of her opinion since she doesn't really spend time on the internet at all.

We talk about this a lot and she'd be in strong agreement with all of those bullet points. I think she'd really emphasize that trying to go it alone as a mother (or any parent, really) is a recipe for disaster -- she's spent a lot of effort cultivating a strong friend group and they have really worked to engineer a system of kid-swaps, playdates, evenings out for the moms (while the dads watch the kids), having expectations that if you need help you can just show up at a friend's house and ask "Hey, can you watch the kids for two hours?" and the friend will make a serious effort to accommodate. That requires a lot of vulnerability! It's difficult to ask for help and you constantly feel like you're being a burden to the people around you; there's probably some embarrassment that you couldn't hack it by yourself. This is something my wife and her friends have had to work on with deliberate effort and I think they've built something really beautiful as a result.

This is a problem with society's broader expectations of parents, in my mind. There is a weird sense in which we both expect too much of parents and too little. You're expected to somehow juggle being a parent with being a careerist -- which is only possible in certain specific settings; there are always tradeoffs. You're held to high expectations for carting kids around to activities, paying for the latest thing, playing with your kids constantly -- all of which, to my mind, are tangential to what actual good parenting looks like. At the same time, I think parents are not held to a high enough standard for loving their spouse, working on their marriage, and fostering a loving household.

The family is the fundamental unit of community -- the best way to help your own kids experience a wonderful and loving life is not to become their friend (you are their parent, do not confuse the two) -- it's to give them siblings. The best way to parent is to make friendships with other families and to give (and receive!) help freely.

My wife does do the majority of the in-person raising -- hard to get around that, since I work and she does not (she's a stay-at-home nurse for our special needs kid, so her situation is kind of unique). But she supplements that with active friendships with other moms and has really built a robust community of support and help. I think she would point approvingly to the way I ensure that I always come home on time, actively help with cleanup, give her breaks in the evenings, handle cooking and cleaning when practical, etc. -- but there's also a sense in which trying to keep score wrt work (at home or otherwise) is a bit of a fool's errand. Once you've started keeping score, your marriage is in serious trouble. Our principle (wisdom passed down from my grandmother), which I have mentioned here before and remains the best advice I have for marriage, is make sacrifices and make them generously.

Well elaborated. Thank you!

I agree with most of what you’ve said, so I’ll just riff on a few of the differences or gaps.

In my mind, part of what’s great about kids is spending time with them. That loving, intimate relationship is hard to get outside of family, and it’s built up through closeness and time, just like in a marriage. And while some of that time is spent in obligations, like the family dinner (not always thrilling, always very important), it’s good to spend time together doing something you both enjoy. Playing, in short. Much of my closeness with my own father - and we are very close, I have sought and followed his guidance on some of the most important decisions of my life, and I’ve independently directed myself at considerable expense to bring me physically close to him so that he can stay in my own life and so I can care for him as he ages - comes from the time we spent together in my youth, playing in all kinds of ways, and talking about the world, and learning all number of things. That time was deeply worthwhile, and I’m trying to raise my daughter (more on the way, God willing) the same way.

At the same time, the parent is obviously not responsible for the child’s entertainment, but instead their wellbeing. (My dad: “If someone complains that they’re bored, I can’t help but think: you really have no imagination, do you?”) And what’s best for the child is that they have plenty of places to find whatever they want and need outside of you, such as from themselves. The love of a parent doesn’t need to be smothering and all-encompassing to be felt. It just needs to be warm and present.

And I have a great time with my toddler, and play with her plenty, and leave her to others plenty, or to her own devices, and by the measures I value she seems to be growing up well indeed. Couldn’t be happier.

I agree with you about spending time with kids -- I love playing with them, reading to them, doing crazy games with them, etc. As my kids get older, I'm taking them out to hike or climb or teaching them board games etc. But I also don't hesitate to tell them "no" if they want me to play a game with them and I'm working on dinner and I think modern parenting has this failure mode where you actually spend too much time with your kids and not enough time letting them develop independently ... and then you can actually use that time to help with housework or reading a book you enjoy or what have you.

(and, of course, there's some "should you reverse any advice you hear" stuff going on where some parents need to be told "do not give kids a fucking phone, put yours away, and actually be present for your kid")

At the same time, the parent is obviously not responsible for the child’s entertainment, but instead their wellbeing.

This, 100%.

You are not your kids' playmate / entertainer; don't take that upon yourself any more than you want to

Would that also hold true for only children?

Growing up I never thought I would be so rich as to own an automobile, or so poor as to lack a maid. -- Agatha Christie

Rich people should hire more domestic servants, it is the normal course of life that has been derailed by the universal American pretension of being Middle Class.

Wouldn't encouraging rich people to hire more staff to help them raise more kids be one of the most profoundly eugenic changes we could make to culture? Shouldn't we be happy that they are having more smart kids, and spending their money on that instead of whatever weird dumb crap they'd spend it on otherwise? By having more smart rich kids they're raising the IQ of the next generation, by paying child-oriented young women money as nannies and babysitters they are helping those young women accumulate resources that will hopefully lead to their reproductive success.

-- Being raised largely by a succession of nannies, maids, servants, babysitters, boarding school headmasters, and seeing your father as largely a distant Zeus-like figure is pretty normal throughout human history for much of the upper class. Most of the trad upper class of the old European Aristocracy imagined by the reactionary right was raised that way.

-- Domestic service is a clearly positive sum transaction in which people whose skills max out at watching babies or doing laundry or scrubbing floors get paid to do that, while people whose skills are much more highly paid avoid wasting their time on those tasks. An upper class that doesn't hire servants is in a sense failing the lower class by not providing that employment.

-- Related to this: Successive administrations have made Au Pair programs more onerous and difficult. This is the worst administration policy imaginable: Au Pairs are essentially the best immigrants imaginable, employed family oriented young women. There is no number of them you could bring in that would be harmful the country.

-- I just can't see where Nanny-Envy splits from envy for any other material good or marker of upper class status. This seems like a good place for Scott and his wife to put their resources, a better place than most other things rich people do with their resources! It seems odd to say that a rich person can do whatever they want to do with their money, freedom and capitalism and whatnot, but that it's wrong if they use that money to hire people to make their lives easier. Would the people who are jealous of Scott's nanny, which we'll say costs him $100k/yr, be similarly up in pitchforks if he owned an expensive house or car or bought his wife jewelry of the same value?

I'm reminded here of Arnold Kling's "Where are the Servants?" from back in 2011:

In an economy where some folks are very rich and many folks are unemployed, why are there not more personal servants? Why don’t Sergey Brin and Bill Gates have hundreds of people on personal retainer?

Both in the comments there, and in responses I remember reading elsewhere, some posit cultural factors (I recall someone elsewhere recounting a passage from a history book talking about the culture clash when a European aristocrat visiting a wealthy American in the mid 19th century tried treating an employee like a European domestic servant). But plenty of people point out that the same services are still available to the rich, just in the form of specialized firms. To quote commenter "mark" on that page:

It’s a definitional issue – what is a “servant” vs “employee” vs “contractor”. Think of administrative assistants, personal trainers, personal chefs, cleaning services, car services, handymen, private plane pilots, personal book keeper, family wealth manager (the “family office”) and so on. Would you call them “servants”? I suspect not. But all they do is provide personal services to higher income people who have specialized their labor towards a lot of income. You can call them “small business owners”, “contractors or “employees”. The differences are modest. Maybe “servant” connotes livery, a small room in one person’s mansion etc. But in the old days “servant” was just another word for employee – “master – servant” relations was another phrase for the employment relationship.

And Bryan Willman:

I’m no billionare, though I have known a few.

But there is a squad of people who maintain my lawn – I don’t call them servants, or retainers, I call them the landscaping company, and I hire them for that specialized task like all the rest of their clients. The “manage the staff” bit that a butler (I think) would have done is dealt with by me hiring the company – that company’s management deals with everybody else.

Likewise the house cleaners (again, a company that specializes in that.)

No so different, the garage I take my cars to for maintence (they give me a ride to my office), my Doctor (who is no retainer but certainly provides personal medical services better than any King of England got until fairly recently.)

I do, in a sense, have “retainers” – but we tend to call them lawyers….

I have an accountant, whom I share with his other clients, but is very much paid to tend to a particular part of my affairs.

Bill Gates has private planes, whose pilots are most likely provided by a service like netjets even if the plane isn’t leased out. So there’s a “family transportation staff” even if none of them see a check signed directly by Bill.

You don't have a gardener, you hire a landscaping service to come by regularly. You don't have maids, you hire a cleaning service. Instead of a "lady's maid" taking care of your hair, you've got a hair dresser. You don't have a coachman, you call up a car service. And instead of nannies, you've got daycare.

From other comments there:

Dan Hill:

As Don Bordreaux points out that they probably buy many of these services in the marketplace, rather than employing people to provide those services as rich people used to do.

That’s a function of two things; how efficient and liquid markets now are at providing these services and the significant fixed costs (and legal risks) in being an employer in a modern regulatory environment.

Bottom line, I’m pretty sure one way or another these guys do not mow their own lawns, wash their own cars or clean their own toilets!

Tracy W:

I’m a bit puzzled by your terminology. The labour market is as much a market as the appliance market. Perhaps the main difference is standardisation – if I buy a dishwasher I can get a pretty good idea of the quality by recommendations and reviews of dishwashers, if I own a good dishwasher and I suddenly lose it (say to a home fire), I can buy another of the same brand with reasonable confidence that I’ll get another good quality one. But people differ more, my neighbour might employ a great maid, but her sister might be hopeless, and if I employ a fantastic maid and she quits for whatever reason, I can’t just go out and hire another version of her. (Not that I employ servants, but I have for example noticed far more quality differences between different waiters than between different dishwashers of the same brand.)

More from Bryan Willman:

“Help” is NEVER CHEAP, unless the help ALREADY KNOWS WHAT TO DO.

It’s not just minimum wage, or government regulations and burdens.

It’s that for very many tasks, I can do it faster than I can explain it. That’s not true of landscaping or house cleaning, but it is of many many other tasks. No matter how I value my time, paying somebody else to listen to me explain it and then do it, all more slowly than I could do it, is a loss. Worse when they have to ask me questions about it.

Now add management of people, the risks and hazards of having people around (being sued for something, having stuff stolen, people quarreling with one another, people forgetting their keys, etc.)

Note that most of these issues apply even if the wage rate is 0. That is, I would refuse to have people come “help me” for free.

The person who had a staff in Thailand (which was a pain) only had to put up with that due to lack of appliances and weirdness of the transport system. Who today would hire a dish washer for their household? Somebody to manually do what the clothes washer does?

…

Two more items to add to the thread.

1. My accoutants and lawyers give me a body of advice which can be summed up as “NO EMPLOYEES EVER”. There is a minimum cost associated with having an employee – a minimum (long) list of things one must do and do right to avoid fines, surprize costs, meddling, and sometimes jail. Hiring all services out to companies side steps all of that.

People who already have companies with employees have a much easier time adding a personal assistant using that same infrastructure.

2. A fair part of the current “rich” are folks who are geeks like me, often from modest backgrounds, who made fortunes in the PC revolution (and to a lesser extent the .com bubble.)

There’s a whole host of “fancy services” some of these new rich just don’t care about. Another set that involve human interactions they are uncomfortable with. (Remember, we’re talking programmer geeks here. We can be way stranger than most people realize.)

In short, hiring somebody directly is legally and financially scary, requires out-of-the-ordinary personal interactions, and may have low perceived effective returns.

The modern way is more efficient, taking advantage of specialization and centralization. (Of course one can make the case, as Yarvin once did, that this is the sort of area where increasing employment might be preferable to raw economic efficiency.) Further, the burden of finding and sorting out quality staff, of dealing with all the tax and regulatory burden of employment, the employer liability, et cetera, is borne by the landscaping/cleaning/daycare/whatever service instead of the rich person.

Thus, as Steve Sailer notes:

Life is better for rich people than ever before. They get all the advantages of being rich, including all the personal services they want when and where they want them, without the old-fashioned disadvantages like having to dress for dinner to set a good example and discussing things “not in front of the servants.”

Edit: here's a follow-up of sorts from Kling on his Substack "Servants to the Rich, 1/18" in 2022:

Some of the components of the twentieth-century middle class are declining . The percentage of the work force that can be called manufacturing production workers is down. Many mom-and-pop retail businesses have been defeated by Wal-Mart and Amazon.

Ten years ago, I wrote Where are the Servants?

In an economy where some folks are very rich and many folks are unemployed, why are there not more personal servants? Why don’t Sergey Brin and Bill Gates have hundreds of people on personal retainer?

Perhaps we are now living in the New Servants economy. Tyler Cowen has a series called “those new service-sector jobs.” My favorites include Coffin Whisperer and Wedding Hashtag Composer. The demand for such services can only come from people with excess wealth, and the supply comes from people who realize that their best source of income is to cater to those with excess wealth. This is very different from the age of mass consumption, when Henry Ford tried to manufacture cars that his workers could afford.

Actually, I think that the biggest engine of the trickle-down economy is the nonprofit sector. I don’t have data on this, but I suspect that if you ask the next 10 young professionals you meet where they work, at least 3 of them will reply that they work for nonprofits.

In the 1970s, the catch-phrase “petro-dollar recycling” became popular among international economic technocrats. The idea was that oil-rich countries accumulated substantial wealth, and this wealth would somehow find its way to poor countries, primarily being channeled as loans.

Today, I think that what we are seeing is “techno-dollar recycling.” Winners in technology and finance have accumulated substantial wealth. This wealth finds its way to young professionals, primarily being channeled through nonprofits.

(One interesting bit — for me — that really dates the piece is from the very end:

And here is Sam Harris interviewing, and slobbering over, young billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried. Not once does Harris ask the question of why it is more ethical for Bankman-Fried to donate his money in an unaccountable way than it is for him to invest his money in profit-seeking business. I don’t count on Congress allocating resources wisely, so I don’t favor wealth taxes. But I don’t count on any billionaire allocating resources wisely without any feedback mechanism.

I find Bankman-Fried scary, and my guess is that I would find other billionaires with his approach to altruism just as scary. I don’t think that any one person has as clear a picture of morality as Bankman-Fried and Harris believe that they own.

Yeah, we saw how that turned out, didn't we?)

From "Servants Without Masters" by Harold Lee:

Singapore’s policy on guest workers would make for an interesting essay in its own right. Briefly, though, the government makes it easy for guest workers to come if they can find work in various industries, including domestic service. Once in, you get a visa for a couple years, which does not come with voting rights or many of the perks of citizenship. But because this system is so rigorous in ensuring that would-be guest workers are net economic positives, it’s politically feasible for Singapore to take in a lot of guest workers. Proportionally, Singapore’s guest worker population is equivalent to the US taking in about two-thirds the population of Mexico – with huge net benefits to them and their families.

Which is all well and good from a policy perspective, but did nothing for me when faced with the reality of interacting with my host family’s maid. There, in the flesh, was a middle-aged Filipino woman who was just there to attend to my needs, as a guest of the family. I was expected to ask her to wash my clothes, for example, and prepare whatever I wanted for breakfast. And for all my admiration of the political needle-threading of Singaporean immigration policy, this situation completely freaked me out. It made me intensely uncomfortable to have someone hanging around just to attend to my needs, and tell them to do menial chores for me.

And yet, when I thought about it, I realized that I had no problem with janitors or baristas doing dirty work for me. My emotional reaction was not really about being an American with sturdy frontier values of self-sufficiency. I was perfectly happy to farm out menial work – as long as it was done by a faceless worker in a uniform, rather than a single person I was expected to have a relationship with. This incongruence was one of the major lessons I took from my trip to Singapore. Even after I returned to the Land of the Free, I kept being struck by the ease with which I blithely accepted the service of servants as long as they were framed as business transactions with dehumanized service workers.

And I noticed that the same blind spot applied in the other direction, in people’s attitudes towards submission towards superiors. The very word “submissiveness” tends to raise people’s hackles in our culture, but in fact we are happy to accept it – if and only if it’s submission to a faceless institution, rather than to someone’s personal authority. In an old-school apprenticeship, the master essentially runs your life for seven years and can bring you back if you run away, possibly with a flogging for good measure. This seems incredibly coercive today, and is probably one of the reasons apprenticeship and other forms of demanding mentorship are in short supply. But at the same time, it’s considered completely unremarkable for someone to go into nondischargeable debt to go to grad school and work hard to satisfy every whim of their professors. For a more barbed example, it’s considered entirely unremarkable for a woman to be submissive to her boss, but sounds terribly suspect to expect her to be equivalently submissive to her husband.

Thanks for putting this together!

A fair part of the current “rich” are folks who are geeks like me, often from modest backgrounds, who made fortunes in the PC revolution (and to a lesser extent the .com bubble.) There’s a whole host of “fancy services” some of these new rich just don’t care about.

This is the part that I'm really pointing at and asking why. I think a lot of the cost, trust, complication, regulation, and availability would become soluble if there were more desire. If my entire law school graduating class (sub med school, MBA, or first years at McKinsey as you prefer) were looking for nannies, word would get around, there would be a roster of trustworthy women to do that kind of work that my peers would be able to pass to me in the same way they once passed me lists of classes and outlines and apartments to rent.

If there were a desire on the part of the upper-PMC to hire large numbers of domestics, then we would see the market and regulations alter to accommodate their desires.

But I posit that there is a market-irrational lack of desire to hire domestics, or even a desire to avoid doing so that feeds into the cost disease and lack of choice and poor options all around.

Zooming back in to childcare in particular: annual cost of daycare can run north of $25,000 per child per year. Multiply that by 2-3 kids, and you quickly get close to the cost of a $20/hr full time employee!

So there should be more of a market than there is. This is a soluble problem.

But I look around at my peers in Dual-High-Income/Prestige households, young couples that met at a T10 law school and both work high end jobs, and what I'm seeing isn't that they don't want or don't "care about" the "fancy services" of domestic help. What I'm seeing is a weird cultural tendency to lean towards services and daycares regardless of cost, by equating daycare to "school" (regardless of cost); while an antipathy exists towards having a nanny, something like having a desire to have a slave.

To some extent I do think that the managers and pimps of service providers largely act as very profitable sin-eaters of the PMC, taking on the cost of hiring and firing and disciplining employees. But we see that really break down with child care, where providers are paying employees peanuts and charging families gold, and there doesn't seem to be a will or opportunity to cut out the middlemen.

I looked hard into starting a daycare a couple years ago precisely because the economics were so insane that it seemed like an obvious opportunity. Demand is high and supply is low. The rates are unbelievable.

My findings: The regulations suck but are manageable. The problem is finding any women to do the job. Very few seem willing. The success stories I found leveraged hiring from within a church and so on.

Recruiting for childcare services, if the service is reputable, means that there are basic qualifications the staff must have. If it's not reputable, they'll hire any warm body. The pitfall for workers in both cases is cost-cutting. Labour is a big cost, so trying to keep wages costs down is important in order to be affordable for parents. But if the wages are too low, it's not worth working there. And if it's a shady operation, it'll pay even worse, have higher child-to-staff ratios (even than legal), and the money goes into the pockets of the owners rather than on the premises and equipment for the kids.

People legitimately complain about the high price of childcare, but it's a job and you have to pay employees a reasonable wage. And just brushing it off as "anyone can do it" - well, there's Scott's entire piece about how he can only handle a couple of hours a day taking care of his own kids.

Men are just not generally suited to caring for small children. Last I checked, the highest rate of antidepressant usage by sex and profession was men working with small children, and it was more than twice the next item on the list.

I don't know why people have such a hard time believing that women are psychologically better-suited than men for caring for small children.

Last I checked, the highest rate of antidepressant usage by sex and profession was men working with small children, and it was more than twice the next item on the list.

Possible source (tables 3 and 4)

ProfessionIncrease to chance of
taking antidepressant (%)
for men		…for women
Not human services+0+0
Human services+22+0
Human services:
Education professionals		+9−8
Human services:
Education professionals:
Secondary-school teachers		+8−7
Human services:
Education professionals:
Preschool teachers		+20−2
Human services:
Education professionals:
Childcare workers		+72+7
Human services:
Social workers		+62+19
Human services:
Social workers:
Not benefit administrators
or social care workers		+111+27

Last I checked, the highest rate of antidepressant usage by sex and profession was men working with small children, and it was more than twice the next item on the list.

I mean, have you ever tried throwing a toddler over your shoulder and spinning him around while he giggles? It's pretty great.

I can totally see how childcare at daycare scale with daycare constraints would grind me down. I also wonder how much the current rules are the way they are because they're written by and for women. And I'm also curious how much the depression you refer to is increased or decreased by selection effects.

To play devil's advocate, how much of that antidepressant use is the combination of 1) everyone assuming they're deviants and 2) tail effects from an extremely small population?

I'd be interested in seeing the difference(if it's been measured) between male elementary school teachers and little league coaches.

Devil's advocacy is fair, but this is one of those things where it occurs to me as terminally reddit-brained to ask for a source (not that you did). Someone would have to be so incredibly propagandized and blind to what's right in front of his face to doubt the matter.

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I don't know why people have such a hard time believing that women are psychologically better-suited than men for caring for small children.

Because the follow-up question is "are men better-suited psychologically to certain tasks?", and the answer, "yes", strikes at the heart of how Western society's nobles (women as class) justify their current position as nobility.

For hiring an FTE, keep in mind that you are typically on the hook for all the fun things like healthcare and retirement plans that you never see the costs of as an employee. Those can run hideously expensive. It’s possible to hire someone under the table, but there are risks associated because it is quite literally illegal.

I looked into nanny costs, and in my state, it really isn’t $20/hr. And this is true for most affluent states, to the best of my knowledge. A good daycare built around a tight-knit and inherently somewhat exclusive community will almost always run you cheaper, like the church-associated ones that others have mentioned. (I saved significant cash going from 3/wk to 5/wk from a downmarket nanny to one such daycare.) I think the arbitrage is way less than your instincts are telling you.

I think the obvious answer is that it smacks of slavery.

The very rich do still have servants, though the job titles may be different. It's just that you need to be (a) extremely rich and (b) accustomed to the notion of having servants (or staff). Gates may be extremely rich, but he did not grow up with servants in the house.

Employment agencies aren't a new thing, they were around in the 19th century where people looking for domestic and service positions would hand in their details and clients would seek servants from such, because the idea was (pace that comment about dishwashers versus maids) they would be pre-vetted and a reputable agency would provide good servants.

Domestic labor is broadly unaffordable. When I was looking for a nanny the going rate was $30-40/hour. Between unemployment and demand I'd expect the market to sort this out, but the underclass is apparently comfortable enough, and regulation enough of a hindrance, that it doesn't happen. The only people I know with full-time nannies are single moms who make hundreds of thousands per year.

You don't want the type of people who are unemployed to take care of your kids though.

The people you want taking care of your kids are unaffordable since they've better options. The market can't really solve this for the middle class. The best you can do is usually hiring teenage girls from middle class+ families, but they can't do that full time for obvious reasons.

There's a lot of middle ground between "unaffordable except for the hyper rich" and "just skip your starbucks sometimes and you too can have it."

E.g. once a week for four hours is ~50*4*35 = $3500 7000/yr - considerably less than many people spend on vacation or dining out. I think Scott's point is more that he was failing to acknowledge that even that level was possible for him. Even if you drop that to once a month, it's still a real quality of life change to be able to recharge somehow without the kid as needed.

Of course there's something to be said for living near family and not needing to pay for this, but that's a harder option to make possible for many people than budgeting for occasional help.

E.g. once a week for four hours is ~50 * 4 * 35=$3500/yr

I'm getting $7000, which is almost 10% of the median household income. (Also how the heck can people be making that little?)

Also how the heck can people be making that little?

By having less and lower quality stuff than you.

It's more that I pay something like $70k in rent and my house is... acceptable, in an acceptable neighborhood. Granted this is a very nice town to live in and commutable to Silicon Valley, but still.

Shitboxes in the ghetto are, by world standards- to say nothing of historical standards- perfectly livable, and most towns are far cheaper than yours even for nice houses in nice neighborhoods.

I'm getting $7000, which is almost 10% of the median household income. (Also how the heck can people be making that little?)

I don't understand the question? I make $16/hr plus commissions which amount to about $1/hr, so approximately $17/hr, and work 4 days a week in eight hour shifts for a total of 32 hours. That works out to $2,176 a month or $28,288 a year. My yearly expenses are mostly room and board, for which I pay $1,300 a month or $15,600 a year. Let's add a few more thousand for things like gas (about half a tank at Costco twice a month), car insurance (legal minimum), etc. and round up my budget to $20,000 a year. That still leaves me with a healthy surplus to add to my bank account every year.

I don't know what a "household" is, but if I was married to a woman who made a similar amount as me, that'd bring us up to about $60,000/yr, and of course we could share the same room.

Oops, corrected. 10% is a harder sell, but the general point stands. Knock it back to every-other-week for 5% then.

(Also how the heck can people be making that little?)

Yeah. Slightly less crazy if you look at HCoL, e.g. 95k for California or 141k for San Francisco, but of course then your nanny cost would go up. I suspect $35/hr will do nicely in most of California, but haven't looked into it.

Yes, and your mother took care of you when you were sick. But if you are sick and go to a hospital and have nurses looking after you, they don't do it on the same basis as "well my mom gave me chicken soup and aspirin when I was ill, anyone can do this, why pay the big bucks to have someone just give me soup and aspirin?"

But people go to the hospital for a different set of problems than they're fed chicken soup by their mothers, as evidenced by the fact that children with mothers still end up in the hospital at times.

With childcare it does seem like we're looking for simple skills: I'm sure some people would want nannies that are teaching their kids algebra, but there's clearly a demand for "keep them fed and clean and away from electrical sockets" level of childcare.

The bigger issue is I think trust: the actual tasks are simple but having someone reliable enough to do them every time, not cut corners, and not take opportunities to enrich themselves with access to the family home is a little more difficult when we're trying to bring costs down.

Taxes, regulations, formal employment with fixed/limited hours, reduction of inequality, and Baumol's cost disease have pretty much wiped out any financial advantage for hiring help. It's pure luxury now, and expensive luxury at that. You can't pay someone $30/hr and spend the time saved at your $80/hr job. One, you're probably salaried and the marginal time won't pay at $80/hr. Two, you're paying that $30 out of post-tax money and the $80 will be taxed at your marginal rate, perhaps in the 45% range. Three, you'll have to pay payroll taxes on the $30 too. Four, it won't be $30 on the legal market, it'll be more. So no, you really can't afford help.

You can definitely make it work in the legal market in the UK, and the US has lower taxes and higher inequality, so it should work better in the US. Apart from your maths being off on the wage gap between hired help and the PMC, the crucial point is that in a city professional job the marginal hours are the highest-paying hours in the long run because they are the ones that get you promoted. Professionals who work 50 hour weeks earn a lot more over the length of a career than professionals who work 40 hour weeks, not just 25% more.

In the US, you have to pay for your employee's health insurance. This is cost prohibitive for all but the very wealthy.

By national law, not until you have 50 employees. State law may be more strict.

We have far fewer servants in part because we have far more labor-saving devices. We have a dishwasher and laundry machines with wrinkle free fabric(my wife doesn't have to spend much time ironing) and a microwave and a refrigerator so we can save leftovers and a vacuum cleaner with attachments that let us get behind furniture instead of moving it and etc etc. Domestic labor used to just take so so much more time.

But we also have much higher returns to specialization. A surgeon that’s invested five years and a residency has much higher relative marginal output than in decades prior.

Oh absolutely- and I’d imagine most surgeons don’t mow their own lawns, scrub their own toilets, etc.

I mean this is fine and all, but the angle that frames this as aw-shucksy, give yourself permission to spend on hired-help advice for the masses

e.g.

Instead it had a vibe: stop beating yourself up over your parenting decisions. So I put out a classified ad for babysitters and got two people I really like. Things are a little better now. I can even write research-filled book reviews again!

He is calling 'being wealthy enough to outsource parenting' a vibe

I mean, if you can afford it, go for it. I get the impression that the new babysitters do different times to fill out the childminding over the entire week, not that he has his wife and a nanny and two babysitters all minding the kids at the same time.

It's definitely "yeah this only applies to a few people" but I think the important thing for him and his wife was "we can afford this, so why not? we are not failing as parents if we pay for help" encouragement that Caplan gave him.

You look at pro-natalism from the PoV of an aristocrat (edit: not implying whether you yourself are one or not). I'm not an aristocrat; I want a pro-natalist vision for the general public. I'm already trying to live it, to some degree, and plan to carry on. Caplan's book gives off the impression that he does so, too, but in reality, he lives it in a way that is not generally attainable. He is not a good role model for such a vision. That is fine, I don't begrudge him his privilege in itself and I'm not at all against rich people having nannies. But it also means I have to look elsewhere, and I do dislike the wrong impression he gives.

I think it goes underrated how helpful it is, when it comes to raising kids, to:

A) Come from a mostly intact family, and

B) LIVE NEAR that family.

Some of my best/earliest memories are being dropped off at my grandparents house. My dad's parents had a really cool pool and waterfall and a boat. My mom's parents had... well they had some cool birds who could sort of talk to you. And my step-grandfather taught me chess at an early age. Either way, they were more than happy to pitch in with caring for and raising us, which is to say taking massive cognitive, physical, and financial load off my parents.

My brother has a <1 year old child now, and both his parents and his wife's parents are <20 minute drive away from them. My mother is ECSTATIC to look after the kid regularly, and that kid will have a large extended family (myself included) looking out for her as she grows. My brother has had to make some sizeable sacrifices, but even if he lost his job and home there's several fallbacks because someone would absolutely take his family in on a moment's notice.

Also, he's not going to lose his job since he works for my dad's (the child's grandfather) company, so there's another layer of security.

I think this general arrangement of "living very close to parents who are actively supportive of you raising kids" was extremely common just a generation ago and before, and any advice around raising kids aimed at someone who is not independently wealthy should specify "live near your parents, and lean on them to the extent appropriate" to reduce the stresses that come with it.

Anyway, I think Bryan and Scott suffer from the glaring weakness many elites/intelligentsia have and don't even notice. They aren't exposed to the direct impacts of their own policy ideas or the ACTUAL outcomes of their thinking. Sure, they're aware of it on an intellectual level, but they're far enough removed that they don't feel the impacts enough to truly account for them.

I note the same thing about Bryan's stance on open borders.

Bryan does not live around or interact much with the modal immigrant to the U.S., he pretty much solely gets to reap the benefits of immigrants and doesn't have to, e.g. endure the friction of language barriers, the competition for housing, the notable decrease in social cohesion, and often the increased crime that comes with being 'forced' to live in such communities.

He's a college professor, and he admits happily to staying inside his carefully maintained bubble. That's fine! Indeed, he's an anarcho-capitalist, so he can readily point out that under his preferred system the world would look very different, so his internal consistency is maintained even if it wouldn't interact well with the existing (sub-par) system.

But the reality on the ground is relevant, and those of us making decisions while in contact with that reality probably possess some important information that alters the calculus. You can argue that makes decisions 'more biased' than when you do it from the 10,000 foot level, looking at raw numbers without an emotional connection. Sure.

But as I say often, there needs to be SOME cost for being wrong, especially in ways that harm other people.

Love his clarity of thought when it comes to the world of pure theory, but decades inside your bubble is going to leave you without the tangible tie to 'the real world' that helps you viscerally understand the impact of a given policy.

Anyway, I think Bryan and Scott suffer from the glaring many elites/intelligentsia have and don't even notice

The glaring what?

And yes, this seems correct but is making me sad. My own mom waited until she was 42 to give birth to me, which means she's already aged out of the phase where she can easily look after any kids we have on her own. Sucks.

That being said the lady's family is a little more spry but... have their own problems. Man this whole thing is scaring me off of having kids not gonna lie.

Parenting was never meant to be done as "first time dad and mom, mostly mom, handle it all by themselves". The idea was you're grow up around younger siblings/cousins so you saw how it was done, then when you had kids yourself the grandparents, older married sisters with kids, aunts, cousins, etc. would be living not too far away and would give you advice and help. Those kids would grow up around siblings, cousins, and in neighbourhoods where there were plenty of other kids, and it was socially acceptable for any adult to step in and discipline any shenanigans.

That's a long way from the modern state of affairs.

I've got a 1 year old now. I did the first 6 months in Australia in essentially the standard Western mold of 2 parents and 1 newborn and then moved to Malaysia to live 5 mins walk from about 50 extended family members.

The quality of life improvement for the baby, my wife and I has been immense. I do recognize the privilege of my wife coming from an upper middle class educated subclade so I'm not worrying about any meth addict cousins, but it's hard to overstate how much smoother parenting is in this setup than as a nuclear family.

As the oldest child, I was often put 'in charge' of the house with the younger ones for most of a day if needed.

I was given instructions and restrictions by dad (sometimes mom), and I just had to make sure nothing really caught fire, and know what to do if some emergency DID happen. I took a class centered around first aid and CPR for children when I was, I think, about 13 years old? Had a kit and everything.

My younger cousins lived around the corner from us for a while, so I also helped out there sometimes.

Helps that we lived in a safe neighborhood, with neighbors who would have helped out if something went very wrong.

The daughters of the family across the street were also available for babysitting regularly. Tragically, I'm pretty sure neither of them married.

When I got my driver's license and had about a year of experience under my belt, they would trust me to shepherd the younger sibs around too.

In short, I'm certain that I'd make an excellent father.

Yes, the decline of alloparenting and loss of opportunity to develop child-minding and child-rearing skills shouldn't be underestimated. I made a similar point here 5 months ago (along with discussing children's toys and sex ed classes fighting teen pregnancy).

Sorry, edited it after posting.

That being said the lady's family is a little more spry but... have their own problems. Man this whole thing is scaring me off of having kids not gonna lie.

It really shouldn't if you have a worthwhile community to draw on.

My roommate from college and his wife have popped out 5, and while he makes enough money to support them all, easily, he puts in his fair share of effort, and he and his wife are VERY CATHOLIC so there's a deep well of local experience to draw on.

I think the fear of having kids is really just the projection of having to raise kids all by yourself. In an atomized society that's terrifying. If you have the support network, its very doable. Every single generation before us was able to do so, to varying levels of competence.

Yeah I’m freshly Orthodox so still integrating into the community. I think it will come with time but not sure how much we have before kids becomes a bit harder. We’ll see.

Anyway, I think Bryan and Scott suffer from the glaring weakness many elites/intelligentsia have and don't even notice. They aren't exposed to the direct impacts of their own policy ideas or the ACTUAL outcomes of their thinking... I note the same thing about Bryan's stance on open borders.

Are you gonna explain how they are insulated wrt their parenting ideas?

Money.

Their experience with the actual act of parenting is probably good.

Their experience with the difficulties this adds to every other aspect of life is probably not representative.

Same reason we get those articles about "how I bought a million dollar property at age 24!"

The secret sauce is the parents gave them a ton of money, which is not replicable by 90%+ of people in their situation.

If you want a vision of a more fertile, sustainable future for the general population, it should not involve having your own personal staff.

It's mutually beneficial for the teenager down the street to spend some time with a toddler. They spend their whole lives cloistered into a world with no one outside their age group. Spending time with a small child is (usually) a source of immense joy, by talking down on it you're impoverishing everyone here. It's also mutually beneficial for the auntie whose kids are all older as well -- they remember fondly that time and can recreate it for a few hours.

A sustainable future for generations is absolutely not one in which the entire childrearing time for 9 years is spent by two people. That's part of the parent burnout problem and part of why so many stop at 2 -- because we don't have informal systems for dispersing the load. We used to do extended families, but that doesn't work terribly well any more.

To be sure, maybe this is a "right message for the listener" kind of thing.

It's mutually beneficial for the teenager down the street to spend some time with a toddler.

Wouldn't this also have an unexpected knock-on effect of female teenagers having an elevated desire to have children?

I'm very not certain, but I seem to recall a study they did on female teenagers back when they attempted to educate them on the benefits of abstinence by making them carry around a toddler-like doll for the entire day. IIRC, the result backfired, as the teenagers reported wanting to have children more afterwards, not less.

I could be completely off on this. I'll have to research it later.

I'm very not certain, but I seem to recall a study they did on female teenagers back when they attempted to educate them on the benefits of abstinence by making them carry around a toddler-like doll for the entire day. IIRC, the result backfired, as the teenagers reported wanting to have children more afterwards, not less.

It was a 2016 Australian study; this piece discusses it. (I previously brought this up on the Motte here)

Ah, thank you for this. This looks to be the exact article I recall reading, as well.

Absolutely. Culture makes parenthood seem so daunting, this fixes it doubly

The ideal number of kids women and men want is already higher than the TFR needed for replacement, so desire for children might not be the main issue with falling fertility rates. But if people spend more time with children as teenagers, then it would certainly make it easier for them to have their own children when they are grown up as it wouldn't be as unfamiliar.

Yes! Make teenage babysitting great again!

I think the fact that the modern school system gives teenagers a lot less free time in than in the past hurts this.

Or more precisely, colleges don't count childcare as 'extracurricular activity.'

In general, colleges don't count paid work as "extracurricular activity", and apparently nor (as of 2025) do selective employers when rating new graduates. I think you could make an impressive "hardship story" application essay if your high school education had been disrupted by raising your own kids. (Although you would still be behind the kids who founded nonprofits whose only donors were dad's employees.)

I can't speak for selective US universities because I was dealing with Oxbridge which (as of 2000 and 2025) mostly ignored extra-curriculars, but in 2000 selective employers absolutely expected to see paid work on a new graduate CV - and my interview coach said "an example of an achievement from paid work is always more impressive than an extracurricular even if it doesn't sound like it."

This is ok imo. Competition elevates everyone by driving everyone to work for the thing they are competing for at their maximum capacity. If teenagers spend more of their time learning, they will learn more things than if they spend less.

This is why some of us look back into the past and conclude "your late teens and early twenties are the objectively correct time to raise children; you can go into the higher-education tracks after that, college is free if you've replaced yourselves".

But mass immigration is cheaper than paying the youth of the country to do anything so that's what most of the West picks; much as the upper class is derelict in their duties by failing to hire lower classes to labor for them, so are the old.

Nah, I used those high energy years to grind a solid degree & career that’s got me set for life.

You can’t go back to that — you only have your 20s once. But you can raise kids with a bit of low skill labor help.

I did not have this reaction of begrudging Scott. I was, I suppose, bemused- by problems with child rearing in a very progressive bubble.

There is a tendency to write off blue tribe helicopter parenting as mostly tiger parenting optimization for selective school admissions- and like, yes, these people do need to hear ‘you don’t have to do that. Major state schools are fine and your kid probably is not getting into Harvard anyways’. But it goes deeper than that. Having a teenager babysit is verboten to these people(I’ve had a ten year old do it- although not for more than a couple of hours). Putting the kids in the backyard to amuse themselves is verboten to these people. Spanking the kids when you catch them doing something bad is verboten- you have to just keep a constant watch to prevent the behavior instead. And they intentionally had twins?

I’ve talked before about how the core red tribe looks forwards to having elementary school sons(and they do- T-ball and children’s soccer are not seen as tedious in my circles). I think the blues vision of parenting is having 16 year olds instead and the relentlessly unpleasant nature of it all is by trying to make it more like tiger parenting a late teenager(disclaimer- do not have a teenager, don’t plan on tiger parenting when I do).

I think the blues vision of parenting is having 16 year olds instead and the relentlessly unpleasant nature of it all is by trying to make it more like tiger parenting a late teenager

Interesting point. Perhaps for the blue tribe the portion of the kid's life where they're 'useless' and have to learn all the basic stuff just to function at all is very tedious (and distracts from more 'important' pursuits) and feels like a pure cost center, then their post-adolescence of finding a passion, learning 'real' ideas, and finally being able to have an impact on the world seems like an 'investment!' Under that model, they would 'tiger parent' their young child solely to ensure they're prepared to launch as early as possible, then pull every string they can to get their kid into the elite circles and to boost their status since the parents are acutely aware of how 'important' that status is to outcomes. Which is why they don't like to hear:

‘you don’t have to do that. Major state schools are fine and your kid probably is not getting into Harvard anyways’.

Oy, yeah. Funny enough I did in fact get an interview for Harvard, but did not get in, and went to a State School and had a fine time.

But I was brought up not being certain I would go to college at all so this was not a major disappointment for me!

It wasn't until years later that I finally realized that the Ivy league is just the "budding elite factory" and that if I had optimized harder for getting in, and I managed to attend, my life trajectory would have been MASSIVELY different. And not in all positive ways, I think.

Power laws rule everything around me, and Blue Tribe is probably HEAVILY aware of that, whereas Red tribe may sort of understand it but to them it at best seems a fact of nature, rather than a game to be played.

And they intentionally had twins?

What makes you say that? The babies weren't IVF-conceived according to Scott.

I thought Scott's point is that he finds child-rearing hard and exhausting despite his privileges of wealth (to hire nannies / babysitters) or time (stay-at-home wife, his work-from-home). I haven't read Caplan's book, but the impression I got from reviews is that his audience are striver / PMC parents who tend to stress way to much over their children.

It's more like: Caplan: "Bicycling is great! I do two miles of leisurely bicycling on a dedicated bicycle path each day, and I feel terrific and my pants fit better!"; Scott: "Darn, I try to use a cycling machine for 20 minutes a day, but I get all winded and sweaty, and I find it hard to stick to a schedule."; TheDag: "Ya know, some of us regularly bike to work in the snow through rush-hour traffic, ya dilettantes!"

I give more credit to Scott than to Caplan, who just rubs me up the wrong way. Scott has twins as the first children, which is a big increase in labour all by itself. And I'm old-fashioned enough that I think the majority of child-rearing at that early age will fall on the mother. They have a nanny so that is something a lot of people don't have because they can't afford, but I'm not going to comment too hard on Scott's circumstances.

It does tickle me that the discovery is yes, child rearing is hard and intensive. But Caplan's airy dismissive "oh just hire more nannies" aggravates me way worse. He really is not walking the walk after talking the talk. "Yes, you too can have four kids (if you can afford to hire four nannies so I never have to do more than drop in for ten minutes per day to amuse myself with their little foibles then I can walk away and leave the actual raising to the staff)".

Note: I don't know how many kids Caplan has. But this is the same guy who did the whole "Don't be a feminist" book for his daughter, which even at the time I thought was very dumb advice from a man to a female child, and that was before I found out his version of child raising was "get women in poorer economic circumstances to do it for me".

I don't have much intelligent to say about childrearing, so I'll steer clear of that, but I find it interesting that people are commenting as though Scott was writing without self-awareness. A lot of the post is Scott trying to figure out if parents are actually devoting more time to childcare than in the past, it's liberally peppered with self-deprecation, and it was published a day after "In Search of r/petfree", which was partly informed by Scott's own experience with misophonia.

Ah, dammit. Alright, third time's the charm:

What do you think?

Same as you: https://www.themotte.org/post/1913/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/327871?context=8#context

I read it [Scott's post] and my reaction was pretty much the same kind of loss-for-words exasperation I feel when my wife tells me that I cannot possibly have expectations of her, don't I know she has excuses? Why, Scott, you have a stay-at-home wife, two kids, a nanny, several friendly families living in the same block, and then you feel a need to also hire two babysitters on top of all that? Yeah, taking care of kids is exhausting. No shit, Scott - did you think getting kids at age 40 wouldn't be taxing? Two of them at the same time to boot. And still, his complaints in the face of that many resources thrown at the problem smells of...I don't know what to call it without throwing out schoolyard insults like "sissy" or "pussy". Methinks Scott complaineth overmuch. Or maybe I'm just jealous of his "privilege", be that wealth or whatnot, regardless of whether it's earned or otherwise.

Man, I work full-time and then I parent all the rest of the time except for maybe about two hours after getting my daughter to sleep. If Scott's numbers are correct, then I put in more parenting time than his stay-at-home wife. Which isn't to say that I'm the better man; far from it, my life is a mess. But seriously. They're doing something very wrong if the two of them can't hack it without hiring an entire fireteam of helpers.

Man, I work full-time and then I parent all the rest of the time except for maybe about two hours after getting my daughter to sleep. If Scott's numbers are correct, then I put in more parenting time than his stay-at-home wife. Which isn't to say that I'm the better man; far from it, my life is a mess. But seriously. They're doing something very wrong if the two of them can't hack it without hiring an entire fireteam of helpers.

Amen to that. Your schedule sounds much like my own and it makes his sound completely absurd.

Ahaha much appreciated. And yeah, as I said in my own comment I very much agree:

I also lost a lot of respect for Scott! It sucks. I definitely have some ressentiment for him and Caplan because they're both rich famous writers, and while I don't put a TON of effort in my blog, it would be nice to be rich and famous hah.

Ultimately though I think this is the classic problem with a lot of rationalists, that we were talking about with the poly stuff earlier last week. They are extremely privileged in all sorts of ways, and go on to assume that everyone else is just as privileged or idiosyncratic. They basically just have a very poor theory of mind for even other rationalists a standard deviation closer to normal than they are, let alone an actually "normal" person.

I hate to be bitter and negative about this sort of thing, but man I'm starting to understand the progressive urge to scream "EAT THE RICH!" This sort of complaining despite being EXTREMELY, like top .15% privileged, makes me quite angry.

Well, FWIW, I don't begrudge Scott his privilege. May he enjoy it thoroughly and for a long time yet. But it is very "good times create weak men", in a way.

it is very "good times create weak men", in a way.

I don't think this is true. Scott is just spending his time specializing in a different skillset. That's why he is earning exceptionally well in the first place and why he is an exceptionally good writer.

Agreed - Scott is not a weak man (and nor are his formative experiences a central example of "good times"), unless you define "weak" in an exclusively martial way that causes your society to lose everything, including wars (which are won with logistics, which means they are won by REMFs). If you believe in the cycle, Scott is, personally, at the "strong men make good times" stage.

Will being raised with this much privilege make Scott's kids weak? Too early to tell, but the men who built the British Empire are not a point in favour of "too many nannies and tutors makes weak men."

Too early to tell, but the men who built the British Empire are not a point in favour of "too many nannies and tutors makes weak men.”

That’s because if you were in the English upper class, you turned eight and got packed off to an incredibly hard-ass boarding school for 10 years that would make modern military basic training look like daycare. “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eaton”

That’s because if you were in the English upper class, you turned eight and got packed off to an incredibly hard-ass boarding school for 10 years that would make modern military basic training look like daycare. “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eaton”

The Victorian public school becomes sufficiently effective to attract actual aristos somewhere between Arnold's reforms at Rugby (1830's) and the implementation of the reforms under the Public Schools Act (1860's). Before that the part of the British upper class which was a functioning warrior elite were raised by tutors and governesses, or sent to sea around age 12 if they were going into a naval career.

The point I am trying to make here is that the thing that (may - this is disputed) make rich kids soft is excessive pampering, whereas the thing that we are discussing in the thread is excessive attention by hired professionals. You can hire someone to pamper a kid, but you can also hire someone to stretch them.

And still, his complaints in the face of that many resources thrown at the problem smells of...I don't know what to call it without throwing out schoolyard insults like "sissy" or "pussy". Methinks Scott complaineth overmuch

I am of the opinion that a reasonable society has some expectations of behavior and will self-police. Verbal judgement and sneering is not pleasant, but is also shockingly mild method for self-policing. Insults? It is raison d'être of political cartoons.

Only problem with schoolyard insults is the schoolyard part. Kids pick targets unjustly, and sometimes kids get too nasty about it -- either it doesn't stop at insults or it becomes a self-reinforcing rumor mill. Sometimes slight sneering is entirely deserved and proportional, but becomes unfair when the target has not the ability to either self-correct or cope.

Yes, it's generally better not to broadcast complaints, especially as a man (like being cold on a second date). The exception is when you are seeking advice or building empathy credibility to provide advice or comfort.

Obviously Scott thinks he's doing just this, but the problem is common where the empathetic credibility attempt comes off as tone deaf and out of touch.

Generally if your audience is poorer than you, attempted 'down with the struggle' will have the opposite effect. Poorer in money, time, romantic success, whatever.

Dave Ramsay is at his worst when he tries to analogize some speaker problem to something in his own life (post-success) or parenting experience. His daughter, who's mostly taken over the show is basically a meme of this, constantly thinking her gilded life experiences are relatable.

Due to human variation and hedonic treadmill effects, everyone's feelings of hardship are generally real, but are not objectively comparable.

We should start thinking about raising the birth rates as a practical, logistic and technological problem to solve and not a moral commandment to enforce upon society. And I think Caplan's approach to convincing people to have kids is a step in the right direction.

First, some things have to be be acknowledged. Pro-natalists will not get people to have more kids with moral arguments.

For most, having kids is a risk-reward calculation, and, given freedom of choice, at current levels of expected investment in terms of time, money and effort, less and less people are going to have kids, and TFRs will continue to fall. It just seems like a bad deal to many people – they don't want to give up their free time and life's little pleasures for 5-10-15 years (depending on the number of kids) for dubious benefit. The pro-natalist side may reply that "it may seem like a bad deal now, but your whole perspective on life will change once you have kids!". Well, what if it won't? The life described by you and other people down the thread seems downright miserable to non-parents. Once you have a kid, you're stuck spending most of your time and extra income on them at least for the next 10 years. That is a huge downside risk that you're asking people to take as, essentially, a leap of faith.

Trying to convince young people with spiritual arguments (from Christian pro-natalism to vaguely gesturing towards the fate of the West, human race and the infinite) is laughable. Ain't no one actually, truly believes in those things or cares about them, to the point where it influences their actions, and the minority that does already has kids. Every young Catholic I've met uses contraception, and a few have had abortions. The genie is out of the bottle and it's never coming back. Nor is the "lonely cat lady" scaremongering effective, for that matter.

You have to meet people where they are at, and where they're at is a world of hedonism and infinite alternatives. Unless you have a way take away their freedom, which you don't, you have to sweeten the deal. Alter the risk-reward calculus. Make it drastically cheaper to hire help (perhaps by mass-importing Philippina maids, Singapore style, with no path to citizenship). Offer massive tax credit and subsidize childcare. Somehow convince people that they can relax and not care about extracurriculars and mostly let their kids entertain themselves, which is what Caplan writes about. Create artificial wombs. Whatever. Make having kids somehow take less money and, most importantly, less time and effort. People can spare the money. The hand-wringing about kids being too expensive is mostly cope. But they will not surrender their time, and every attempt to take it from them forcefully will be rejected at the ballot box.

The pro-natalists have to do something other than shake their fists at people and tell them to "suck it up and just do hard things like your ancestors did". No one will "just". No one has ever "just". The left had to learn this painful lesson in the recent years, and it's high time for the pro-natalist right to do the same.

(This rant is mostly aimed at the pro-natalist discourse I see day in and day out in my feed, not your post in particular. If it is not obvious, I sincerely wish them luck, it's not a boo outgroup post)

The anti-Enlightenment polemics write themselves.

18th century Enlightenment: Rousseau writes books on so-called "social contract" and education of children, criticizing practices of handing out their infants to wetnurses and tutor burdened by (what we call today) principal agent problems.

Since mothers despise their primary duty and do not wish to nurse their own children, they have had to entrust them to mercenary women. These women thus become mothers to a stranger's children, who by nature mean so little to them that they seek only to spare themselves trouble. A child unswaddled would need constant watching; well swaddled it is cast into a corner and its cries are ignored. As long as the nurse's negligence escapes notice, as long as the nursling does not break its arms or legs, what matter if it dies or becomes a weakling for life? Its limbs are kept safe at the expense of its body, and if anything goes wrong it is not the nurse's fault. These gentle mothers, having gotten rid of their babies, devote themselves gaily to the pleasures of the town. Do they know how their children are being treated in the villages? ...

Once motherhood becomes a burden means are found to avoid it. They will make their work useless in order to begin it over again, and they thus distort, to the prejudice of the species, the charm which was given them for its increase. This practice, along with other causes of depopulation, forebodes the coming fate of Europe. The sciences, arts, philosophy and customs that are generated will not be long in reducing Europe to a desert. It will be the home of wild beasts, and its inhabitants will hardly have changed for the worse. ...

Do you wish, then, that he keep his original form? Watch over him from the moment he comes into the world. As soon as he is born take possession of him and do not leave him till he is a man; you will never succeed otherwise. Just as the real nurse is the mother, the real teacher is the father. Let them agree in the ordering of their functions as well as in their system; let the child pass from one to the other. He will be better educated by a sensible though limited father than by the cleverest teacher in the world. For zeal will make up for lack of knowledge better than knowledge for lack of zeal.

(Emile, Book 1) Very lofty educational ideals! Also written by a man who abandoned his own kids in an orphanage.

21st century rationalist enlightenment: Galaxy-brained, they hire help (as aristocrats of 18th century did). Presumably kids are left unswaddled and better off than 18th century orphanage. Better than Rousseau, but that is damning with faint praise.

I left the Motte for a week, because I felt kind of embarrassed and irritated based on last time I tried posting here, but did want to post on this.

Anyway, yes, it came across as very odd, especially from Caplan. I had more sympathy for Scott, since he did not write a book about how easy raising kids is, has young twins, and comes across as more self deprecating.

Both Scott and Caplan are writers, which is unusually incompatible with small children. I've mentioned before that I really enjoyed Virginia Woolf's take on that in A Room of One's Own -- mothers were almost never writers, even when they were educated for it, since writing (and she was focusing on poetry) takes an unbroken chain of thought through multiple hours of the day. I would be interested to hear more about George MacDonald's writing habits, since he was poor by modern standards, and he and his wife raised eleven children, and he was en unusually excellent writer. All his stories have the characters wandering around among the heather at sunrise, thinking, and I imagine him doing the same. It's probably no coincidence that his best work is in fairy tales, so he probably told them to his children. David Friedman talks about how much more he enjoyed his children once they learned to read. Dickens sounds like he had a pretty tumultuous home life.

I listened to a storyteller a few months ago, who tells stories to rooms full of children at schools, and also publishes books. He said that his process is to tell the stories to the children first, a lot of times, for months and months, maybe dozens of times, see what gets good responses, and then writes it down afterwards. That's my impression of ancient storytellers as well. I knew a priest who told unusually excellent sermons, but almost never wrote them down, but I think his process was similar: he would watch the people in real time, and iterate off of that. Scott doesn't seem to have a process anything like that, as much as I like Unsung and shorts like the one about the Hinge of History, and wish he would write more fables.

There was a passage in The Road to Wigan Pier, as I recall, where Orwell was talking about how the British underclass weren't really educated to be literate, but that when charity workers would come around and offer books and classes they mostly weren't interested, and Orwell thought that was just as well, reading and writing weren't much compatible with the lives they were leading. Which seems reasonably likely. There's a lot of noise about lower than hoped for literacy rates in America, <a href=https://kittenbeloved.substack.com/p/college-english-majors-cant-read">where "literacy" is, for instance, understanding and appreciating something like Bleak House, but the hoped for outcomes of that campaign are under discussed. I remember my uncle (who owned multiple businesses, was athletic and had a teacher wife and three children) talking to my dad (who reads Kierkergaard out of personal interest) about not reading books. He didn't like reading books, he liked playing sports and doing business stuff. He was probably functionally illiterate, by the Bleak House test. That might be a perfectly valid strategy, actually! Meanwhile, the kids are in bed, and I'm here writing this, which isn't necessarily an improvement, or any more civilizationally useful, even if I can read Dickens just fine.

I mean, for Scott I empathize that he’s dealing with toddlers right now. They’re the perfect mix of capacities and incapacities for demanding hands-on intervention. They climb on things, get into things, scream for attention… obviously they spend some time playing quietly by themselves or napping, and you can get some things done with them around, but it’s a sharp curve when they graduate from immobility to crawling to walking to climbing!

Overall it’s not bad, but it would be worse without other people to help around. I don’t really know what his full circumstances are like, but caring for a toddler more or less solo for a full day, no friends or family around to hang out with, is pretty rough. It’s always best when you can be communal, and for deracinated Bay Area sorts, that’s what you get all the time.

So I have a little more pity. There are things money can’t buy.

They're one year old now and heading into the Terrible Twos. That is going to be the fun experience!

It seems this wasn't my best post. A lot of people concentrate on my negative sentiment towards Scott, which isn't that strong. It's particularly Caplan who comes off poorly, since he literally wrote a book on it. But it's my fault, I clearly wrote as if I judge them equally. And I don't really begrudge either their privilege in particular; That has never much been my thing.

But it's still fine, because it made me think again about what I am unhappy about. And that is the (lack of a) positive vision of a secular, sustainable, fertile future for the general public. I grew up conservative religious, and while it's still among the most fertile regions in germany, even there is now below replacement. And besides - no offense - while I'd love to be capable of believing, pretty much all spirituality strikes me as deeply silly at worst, and obvious motivated reasoning at best. If that is what is needed to get people to have kids, that's how it'll be. But I'd like for us to at least try.

Any social movement needs someone showing the way, not just pointing out the theory, but actually living it. In physics, "you haven't done any experimental verification" is a valid criticism, so it should be the same here.

And Caplan is not that. Yes he at least has kids, but the broader population can't just "hire more nannies". The greater family, or a teenager occasionally, or older siblings or a cleaning lady once a week. But it's striking that this isn't what comes to mind for Caplan; It's nannies, because he can easily afford them. And the family also isn't always regularly available in the modern mobile world. So we need a vision that can make do with the "nuclear family" + occasional minor helpers. Without ruining your work prospects. So who does this leave us with? @ProfQuirrell ? Certainly not Elon, as much as I respect his business sense, he seems like an awful father. Not me, at least not yet, I only have two so far. The Collins don't seem to have official nannies, though renting out an apartment for free in exchange for childcare doesn't strike me as very generalizable, either.

This is a conversation The Motte has had before, but I think the real issue is that society just doesn't value being a parent or raising a family. There's no honor or respect in it -- quite the contrary; broader cultural attitudes are frequently hostile to parents (just scroll up a bit to naraburns' top level post about an anti-natalist suicide bombing). This makes it hard to build a community of friends and support since, as you say, a lot of families don't even have the help from their parents any more.

The fertility crisis, such as it is, is not really an economic crisis (although that doesn't help). It's a crisis of soul. Being a good parent (and good spouse) requires sacrifice and gift of self, and nobody really wants that any more, it seems.

But it's still fine, because it made me think again about what I am unhappy about. And that is the (lack of a) positive vision of a secular, sustainable, fertile future for the general public. I grew up conservative religious, and while it's still among the most fertile regions in germany, even there is now below replacement. And besides - no offense - while I'd love to be capable of believing, pretty much all spirituality strikes me as deeply silly at worst, and obvious motivated reasoning at best. If that is what is needed to get people to have kids, that's how it'll be. But I'd like for us to at least try.

Sorry to hear you feel that way about spirituality. I hate to break it to you, but I highly doubt a secular worldview will ever give you what you want, especially in this lifetime.

If your priors are unbreakable here, I won't try to argue with you. But suffice to say I was a hardcore atheist turned Orthodox Christian. It can happen. Psychedelics could help too ;)

I also lost a lot of respect for Scott! It sucks. I definitely have some ressentiment for him and Caplan because they're both rich famous writers, and while I don't put a TON of effort in my blog, it would be nice to be rich and famous hah.

Ultimately though I think this is the classic problem with a lot of rationalists, that we were talking about with the poly stuff earlier last week. They are extremely privileged in all sorts of ways, and go on to assume that everyone else is just as privileged or idiosyncratic. They basically just have a very poor theory of mind for even other rationalists a standard deviation closer to normal than they are, let alone an actually "normal" person.

I didn't know you had a blog. Where can we read it?

Ahh it is not tied to this account, yet. I was trying to keep them separate but idk.

If you DM me I’ll give you the link.

I liked the cute twins pics. That alone is enough of a reason for him to have more kids by my book.

I don't really understand your complaint, having a cleaning lady is not some rich person extravagance. Its affordable for pretty much everyone in society. If you have a job, you can afford it.

The bay area is a sufficiently broken-by-cost-disease economy that I don't know if that's actually true. In Texas it definitely would be- I can get a cleaning lady to come and clean my whole house for, like, $80 if I'm willing to pay her directly instead of going through an agency.

Bay Area != East Bay.

He's paying a lot less in Oakland than he would be in SF / South Bay / Berkeley. There is a large undocumented/recently-documented population there, who works at or lower than minimum wage. You can get it down to ~$150/month (4 visits). That's not too bad.

Am in HCOL California. Can confirm the base rate for low skill domestic help is in the low $30s/hr if you’re paying cash.

High skilled nannies run $40 and up, paid above the table, plus bennies and insurances that drive the cost up.

Cleanly lady and full time nanny are VERY different things my friend.

Oh, I thought you were quoting Scott.


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