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PaperclipPerfector  20d ago (text post)   2948 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 22, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Why are politics in the US so completely dominated by the Republicans and the Democrats, even at the municipal level? In Canada, for the most part, provincial legislatures have their own political parties that have nothing to do with the federal parties, and municipal councils usually don't have parties at all, with the only exception to this that I'm aware of being Montreal. But the municipal parties in Montreal are completely different than the provincial and federal parties.

The fact that everyone has to be either a Democrat or a Republican in the US creates this absurd situation in places like New York City, where the Democratic primary basically determines who will be the mayor.

The traditional argument is that US voting systems are mostly first-past-the-post (aka FPTP, single winners on plurality), and this naturally creates a two-party system due to fears about third parties just being spoilers/wasted votes (see Duverger's Law for the poli-sci theorizing). However, there is a counter-argument in that some other countries did not turn out this way despite similar voting systems, like Canada or India (for now). The traditional answer to that is that the US selects a president directly, while the PM can be chosen via some more indirect process. This is on purpose! Historically, although Parliament was kinda-sorta democratic, there was this weird interplay with the King. Baby America vehemently hated kings, and was trying to challenge the whole idea altogether! A directly-elected president is the ultimate rejection of a king-model. The modern reality of directly elected presidents being more powerful than confidence-of-Parliament heads of state was a bit unforeseen.

However, I want to make a different appeal, beyond structure: it might just be the way history shakes out! Remember the US is inventing representative democracy almost from scratch! Now-common ideas like political parties weren't even concepts yet, much less actual practice. The specifics of history have had very strong impacts on how the vote has gone. The first two pseudo-parties formed pretty early on over a mix of national vs state power, with a dash of foreign policy disagreement, pretty natural. One collapses and you get a brief mega-party period. Then Jackson shows up and is Trump-level controversial, setting up Democrats vs Whigs, partly stylistic but economics plays a big role here, and this starts to create more noticeable party-level mechanics as well (beyond voting blocs, you start getting them more involved in vote-getting, persuasion, and financing). Worth noting that at this point voting also starts to expand to non-property owners. Slavery eventually guts the Whigs a bit more than the Democrats, and you almost get a three-party scenario developing, or even a four-party one. It was probably the most likely electoral outcome for a while!

...and then a literal Civil War happens instead of waiting to let elections resolve things. At the end of which, you get two parties again, and surprise surprise for a while these line up neatly with the boundaries of the two actual contenders of the war. And yes, one of the two (the winner) is more powerful for a while. Also, every time an international war happens, you tend to get dominance by a party in the nationalist afterglow (sometimes backlash), and the US has had semi-regular wars. Since then, many of the issues have been packaged in such a binary way that arguably the "need" for a third party wasn't super strong. There's an interesting scenario where the Civil War doesn't happen and you do get some more regional powers competing, maybe even forming individual parties. However, circling back to one part of the "structure" argument: only one person can win the Presidency outright, otherwise the decision goes to the House. This happened, but was messy and unpredictable, so no one really wanted that to happen again. And remember, the president is increasingly powerful, and drives the big issues in politics, rather than reflects it! So there's motivation for regions to group together if only for convenience.

Since the US was first, many other democracies formed since then sometimes deliberately structure their democracies to be multi-party, such as via proportional representation or so such. Historically, though, again the US was first, so not only was our system the only one in town, but parties had to be "invented"! It took like 40 years for them to start to take shape, and the issues that became big deals in the US were also often of a very specific flavor: how to use the national apparatus to help specific local regions. Thus state-level and national politics are very intertwined. Also, due to the historical structure of state government, as well as state loyalty and identity, municipal power would very rarely be competitive with state power, so those elections were often done in tandem. And national issues almost historically have very often driven voting enthusiasm more than municipal issues (!!), so splinters in local approaches within one party almost never lead to local-only splinter parties. Furthermore, state and national candidates have to come from somewhere! If you have ambitions to be a bigger fish, why would you join a smaller party? I buried a lede for voting expansion in the earlier paragraph. It's my (weak) understanding that some important "third-party" groups in Canada formed in the aftermath of increasing suffrage. In the US, these new constituencies were often rapidly absorbed.

India is the other major counter-example of the FPTP theory. Duverger notes that FPTP works on a district-level, and this is low-key the case in India. However, India has also had extreme local social, religious, and economic stratification! This pairs with fewer major wars and international crises (we are in the post-WWII era exclusively, remember), which also means that there are fewer overpowering national questions. To some extent, there is economic motivation to create more national party-coalition blocs, but local identity politics is very strong to this date. While in the recent decade the BJP is showing early signs of a dominant party, it is yet to be seen if and how that might trickle down to state and municipal contests. Finally, India has a president, but they are also chosen indirectly, and are mostly ceremonial, but it's still worth pointing out how they are chosen: members of parliament (!) combined with locally elected leaders (!) use a secret ballot (!) of RCV-IRV ranked voting (!). The president in turn works basically like the Crown does for the UK, where the PM is chosen, again indirectly, via a confidence-based coalition approach (and can lose said confidence), and then basically appoints all the top level executive branch themselves.

So in short: I'd argue history mostly, which has heavily involved the president. A typical political scientist might say it's structurally all FPTP, with the constitutional role of President being relevant as a tiebreaker. Furthermore many modern democracies deliberately construct themselves to be different than the US in some way, despite the obvious influences, so it's not really a fair comparison in the statistical-causal sense.

Apparently some Amish people about 15 years ago were charged with hate crimes for cutting other Amish men's beards.

They tried to argue that the federal government had no constitutional authority to prosecute them, but the judge ruled that since the scissors used to cut the hair, and the vans used to drive to the men, had at some point crossed state lines, this was a valid prosecution under the interstate commerce clause.

I don't really have the time right now to make this into an effortpost for the main thread. But this is crazy. I'm living in crazytown. How we reached the point where such rulings aren't immediate grounds for revolution, I'll never know.

That "interstate commerce" stuff has been going for a while now. I remember a case where a guy grew weed on his own backyard, and was prosecuted under "interstate commerce" with the logic somewhat like: if you grow it, then you would consume it or sell it. If you'd consume it, you wouldn't buy any other weed on the market, and if you sell it, you participate in the weed market. Since weed is sold and transported across the state lines, participating in the weed market influences interstate commerce, therefore the interstate commerce clause gives the state power to regulate what you grow on your own backyard and smoke in your own house. Yeah, it's nuts and nobody cares. Welcome to the clown world, we have cookies.

Gonzales v. Raich

Thank you! I haven't remembered all the details from 20 years ago (the anniversary this month!). Re-reading it, the especially evil part is that the weed in question was absolutely undoubtedly for personal consumption, to treat a severe debilitating condition, with medical approval and supervision, allowed by state law - and yet Feds were absolutely adamant torturing a couple of women to death is what is right and proper to do.

And the dissent was all conservatives. The Democrats were happy to throw chronic pain patients under the bus in order to preserve an obviously wrong interpretation of the Commerce Clause because it's the source of the Federal Government's power to regulate purely intrastate affairs.

Did they die?

As far as I know, they did not, and continued to use cannabis despite the loss of this case. Eventually the policy of USDOJ changed to a less insane one towards medical marijuana patients (thanks Obama), so the feds stopped harassing them. The SCOTUS decision, however, remains as another milestone in the long road from the limited federalist government to "you got only the rights that the feds want to give to you".

Scalia's concurrence in that case, relying on the Necessary and Proper Clause, made a lot more sense than the majority opinion.

It’s no hair off my chin.

Seriously. On the long list of questionable bits of jurisprudence, intervening in an interfaith beard dispute is incredibly niche. There’s plenty of things more threatening than the government overstepping its prosecution authority.

Part of the answer is that some people wait-and-seed, and eventually the hate crime convictions were overturned for boring technical reasons, and their sentences reduced. There's a fair argument that the results still weren't fair -- the sentencing judge overtly said that he was still trying to give sentence enhancements for the religious focus of the crime, which is kinda sketchy even if specifically authorized by statute -- but it's enough that people who weren't that interested in philosophy of law could claim that everyone had a fair day in court and a neutral law was applied, whether or not it actually was.

Part of the answer is that the Amish are considered weird, and breakaway Amish weirder, and most people don't care about weirdos even where the court is unfair or the law illegitimate. As the list of awful things the government does to weirdos go, it's not going to take a top ten slot, and the people who do care about those top ten slots don't exactly get invited to a lot of parties.

Hell, even as sketchy trials before biased judges go, I can point to worse in pretty recent times.

Reality all adds up to normal. The fiction where one action by a government is so corrupt, awful, self-dealing, evil, and malicious as to result in major political upheaval or revolution is... not impossible, but it's the exception, rather than the rule, and usually downstream of a large mass of other motivating factors. If you look at the motivations for times these sorta things do go hot, there are patterns, and they're often not about anything so prosaic or useful.

It's an unpleasant revelation. Sorry.

If you like that, then you will love Wickard v. Filburn, where the supreme court ruled that the federal government had a right to prevent a farmer from growing wheat in his own land for his own use because, if a bunch of farmers did that, it would substantially lower the price of wheat in the national market, thus affecting interstate commerce.

And of course, we have all heard about Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges, so it's not a problem specific to the commerce clause; a court that can find the right to abortion and gay "marriage" in the fourteenth amendment is a court that can find anything in anything.

If you like that, then you will love Wickard v. Filburn,

I purchased this mousepad my 1L year.

Obergefell is correct. The right to marriage does not distinguish between same-sex and opposite-sex couples just as it doesn’t distinguish between same- or mixed-race ones.

Referencing the shortest AAQC I’ve ever gotten, that is because a same sex marriage is not real under historical understandings of marriage.

What the Supreme Court actually did was impose a new definition of marriage on the states.

I mean, if we had a clean EPC opinion, you might have a case. (Of course, Skrmetti is already casting doubt on whether there's support to push the (often claimed dubious) Bostock reasoning in Title VII into EPC.) But we didn't get that opinion. We got the cluster that is Obergefell. It should be pretty high on the list of people who are pro-SSM-from-a-policy-perspective for "opinions where I agree with the outcome, but disagree with the reasoning".

Is the right to marriage written into the constitution?

As I understand it, Virginia v. Loving says yes.

I will admit that I’m not an expert. But I don’t think the dissents rejected the idea that marriage was a right protected by the 14th. They were more concerned with 1) whether the historical use of the term included the opposite-sex qualifier and 2) whether the due process clause protected positive rights in addition to negative ones. Or maybe that was just Thomas?

As I understand it, Virginia v. Loving says yes

No, I don't care about rulings, I mean the actual text of the actual constitution.

Maybe if one reads the 10th amendment broadly?

I suppose the real question is about what relation the founders would have intended the common law to have to the state governments, and what would they have considered to lie within their powers.

I would say that marriage is firmly under “equal protection under the law.”

That never held water. All people, regardless of their sex or sexual orientation, can marry someone of the opposite sex of any sexual orientation. Gay men are just as free and equally allowed to marry a woman as any straight man. If the gay man doesn't want to marry a woman, that's his choice, but he's legally allowed to.

And pretty much all of the equality under the law anti-discrimination stuff has carveouts for compelling state interests. Like, say, bearing and raising children and ensuring the survival of the species.

Telling gay people that it's illegal to have sex with each other would be one thing: the state intervening in a place where it has little compelling interest or jurisdiction (an argument could be made about preventing the spread of STDs, but it's weak, and promiscuous straight people do that too). But marriage, at least from a legal perspective, is a privilege the state recognizes for people to incentivize the formation of healthy and stable families, which gay people do not do. Arguing it's "equal protection under the law" is like arguing that childless people should get the same tax deductions and/or welfare aid as people with seven children because otherwise you're discriminating against the childless.

This was the same argument that Virginia made in Loving and the court rejected it then. Black people are free to marry other black people and white people are free to marry other white people so what's the problem?

But marriage, at least from a legal perspective, is a privilege the state recognizes for people to incentivize the formation of healthy and stable families, which gay people do not do.

Well, at least that's the conservative fantasy. If you look at the way the laws surrounding marriage actually operate, and have historically operated, it's pretty clear that the legal purpose is to regulate property transfers among family members. The only historical precedent which has to do with natural children is the legal presumption that a woman's husband is the father of her children, absent other evidence. While this may be a useful feature these days, it's no longer a necessary one, as states have been keeping records of these things for over a century, and technology has allowed paternity disputes to be resolve fairly easily. Beyond that, historical laws relating to marriage were based on the presumption that women couldn't own property in their own name, that wealth was basically synonymous with real property, and that widows were likely to be an undue burden on society. Today, of course, we live in a property where women are more economically equal than men, where the family farm isn't the primary source of income (or, realisitically, doesn't exist), cash is more important than real property, birth control exists, Social Security exists, etc. As a consequence, the laws surrounding marriage have changed since the turn of the last century to keep up with the times.

An along the way, we've created a whole host of new rights relating to marriage, notably ones concerning medical matters like the right to make certain decisions and the right of visitation. In other words, as the circumstances surrounding marriage have changed historically, the laws have changed along with it, and if you want to figure out the legal purpose of marriage, you have to look at those laws. If you want to believe in an idealized version where the laws that matter are the ones that have "stable families" or whatever as their obvious goal, you're going to be left with very little.

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This would be an interesting case if some state decided it wasn't going to recognize marriage at all.

Exactly. Maybe there’s something analogous in the way certain states recognize different corporate structures? There are only a few which allow forming anonymous LLCs.

I would say it's a massive rabbit-hole with the outcome being far from certain. How do you determine "equal protection under the law" for people who aren't the same? We're kind of debating it with the trans stuff right now. Does a man have a right to women's facilities, explicitly demanded by various "equality acts", for example? Some people say "yes", other's say "men are not women, so a law demanding the creation of women's facilities does not demand that men are given access to them". I would say that whatever the answer is, it's not written in the constitution, and we should stop pretending that it is.

Roe wasn’t a 14th amendment ruling, it was a right to privacy under the ‘penumbra’ of the constitution. Famously Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought it was badly written and not grounded in anything.

It missed its chance to be the one and only 10th Amendment precedent.

10th Amendment

The one that was supposed to be the most powerful of them all and ended up being the most useless. We've got the concept of "enumerated rights" instead, which is a diametrical opposite of what 10th amendment says. The Federalists were absolutely right - they warned us this will happen, and it happened. Though without the Bill of Rights it probably would be even worse.

The Federalists were absolutely right

The Federalists were against adding an explicit Bill of Rights, and only chose to do so as a compromise. The Anti-Federalists wanted to enumerate the rights, and I think have ultimately been proven right.

The Federalists were against adding an explicit Bill of Rights, and only chose to do so as a compromise.

Yes, but why they were against? Because they argued if you explicitly make a list "there's a right to X, right to Y, right to Z" - and then somebody comes with the question about whether or not the government can regulate R, then people would say "well, it's not X, Y or Z, and there's a list and it must be for a reason, those are clearly more important than others, so R not a real right, it's kinda secondary one, so let's regulate the heck out of it" - completely opposite of what 10th Amendment was intended. And they were right - we hear arguments like these all the time now. If it's not mentioned in the plain text of the Constitution, good luck limiting the government reach into it. The Anti-Federalists were kinda right too, in that that without Bill of Rights, we probably wouldn't be able to hold on even on those enumerated rights either - see Europe as an example. At least this way we got something out of it, even though much less than we were originally supposed to.

A lack of revolution is understandable, it's not a trivial matter, and the regime is otherwise not that terrible. What I have very little patience for is our local lawcells acting, and expecting that others act, like law texts are meaningful, and that matters of law be debated within their framework.

A lack of revolution is understandable

Critically, this is a federalism issue with no important underlying policy disagreement. Non-consensually cutting people's hair (except in specific situations like the military draft) is uncontroversially illegal everywhere. In the modern US, nobody cares whether the same policy is implemented by the States or the Feds except in so far as it works as a litigation maneuver. (This isn't true in Europe, where the EU is not a country and the member states are still seen by their electorates as countries, and a substantial minorities of people are deeply attached to the idea that certain types of decision are made at country level)

Since America became a country and the individual States ceased to be countries (which a lot of people date to the Civil War, but I think happened somewhere between the Monroe and Jackson administrations) federalism ceased to be a principle people actually believed in and became a peace treaty. (Compare the infamous Yonatan Zunger essay making the same argument about liberal tolerance.) And right now, politically engaged Americans on both sides unfortunately don't seem to believe in abiding by the long-standing peace treaties between the Red and Blue tribes.

Critically, this is a federalism issue with no important underlying policy disagreement.

No, critically this is an issue of whether words in legal texts mean anything at all, whether George Bush was right about the constitution, and of whether, as erwgv3g34 points out, "rule of law" is even a coherent concept. Whether or not I agree with a given policy, or the manners in which powers are delegated between administrative units is completely irrelevant to whether or not judges are making shit up out of thin air.

Since America became a country and the individual States ceased to be countries (which a lot of people date to the Civil War, but I think happened somewhere between the Monroe and Jackson administrations) federalism ceased to be a principle people actually believed in and became a peace treaty

Then they should have changed the constitution to reflect that. By not doing so, they are either admitting to be in it's blatant violation, or to it not having any meaning to start with.

"A government of laws, not of men", as John Adams put it, is an incoherent fantasy. Laws are nothing more than ink on paper; only men can rule.

Rulers rule by codifying their rules into written laws out of a pragmatism that allows them to rule more effectively.

This thread smells of "there's a law I disagree with, therefore all law is illegitimate".

Rules are the peace treaty after the war was fought, and are only binding as long as all parties agree to be bound by them. If the parties agreed tomorrow that the laws against slavery would no longer be enforced, you’d have slavery. The law against it still exists in the constitution, but if no one will enforce it, it’s a dead letter.

No.

The problem is that there are enforcement of laws that people disagree with, which have very overt parallels to matters where the other tribe received broad victories, which any reasonable reading of the text of the law would not permit, and where defendants either lose in court or never have a fair day to start with. It's a problem when the Constitution seems a scam, and where the BATNA looks like a direct improvement on the very measures that negotiated agreement is advertising itself on.

Rulers rule by codifying their rules into written laws out of a pragmatism that allows them to rule more effectively.

Some rulers do that. Other rulers claim they're doing that and then rely on manipulation of procedural outcomes instead. And likewise, some critics are pointing to actual abuses, and some are simply mad because they got caught breaking black-letter law.

I believe I and others here are pointing to actual abuses. Between formal complexity, subjective interpretation, selective enforcement and corruption, Rule of Law is not a sustainable assumption in the United States. We cannot passively trust the legal system to fulfill its promises to us; pressure must be constantly applied, and some of that pressure must be illegible and outside the formal bounds of the law.

Not to turn this into a travelogue with my fellow traveler heading to China later, but I’m heading to Washington State and the coast of Oregon in early October.

One full day at Olympic National Park coming from the north entrance (Port Charles or something?).

Five days on the coast of Oregon (Arch Cape?) - literally right on the beach.

And then like three hours south and inland for three days. (Scott’s Mills)

What should I and my wonderful wife do?

Specifically anything can’t miss in Olympic? It’s been a dream of mine to go there.

I like waterfalls and short hikes and maybe a brewery or two. I love scenic stuff and have never seen the fall.

Oregon: Ask the locals where the good tidepools are at! Washington has some, but there are some great ones in Oregon too, and poking sea anemones is never not fun. Also, dress WARM, and prepared for rain just in case. The beach is often cold (and windy), though not always; the water is always super-cold, wetsuit territory, suitable for "how long can you stay in" competitions. Kites are fun for the wind! And the scenery is pretty, and you can still do sand castle things if that's your jam. Speaking of wind, if you want to try wind or kite surfing and are in the right spot, the Columbia gorge has some of the best in the whole world, but there are a few places on the coast that do it too. And yeah, of course there are great hikes everywhere, including waterfalls.

I would just recommend you take your time travelling on highway 101, it's such a beautiful piece of the country. If you can swing it, I'd recommend not cutting through Portland and going the long way down 101 before heading east through Salem. Tillamook is a nice little afternoon getaway if you're big fans of dairy products, Astoria is a cute cozy little city, and the area around Tillamook Bay is wonderful (if a little touristy).

  • Hoh Rain Forest and the short hall-of-mosses hike is unmissable. If you had to pick one. It has to be this. There is no place in the US like Hoh-rain-forest. Olympic national park is massive.
  • My 2nd recommendation would be Hurricane Ridge and the Hurricane hill hike. Great drive, great views.
  • Rialto Beach-> Hole in the wall is the perfect long stroll. The day I was there, the Pacific was roaring. Gives you newfound respect for this behemoth of an ocean. No other Ocean compares to the Pacific. The hike doesn't end at any point. You can keep going forward, but be wary of the tides.
  • Cape Flattery is a nice short walk. The drive is amazing, if a bit out of the way. The views at Cape flattery are beautiful. And for cookie points, it's the lower-48's north western most point.
  • Mt. Storm king is a short but demanding hike. The views are unbeatable. The last section has ropes and is a bit vertigo inducing. Still recommend it. I generally love this area. There is kayaking near lake crescent. And Granny's cafe has good food, as does the lake crescent lodge.

Some tips:

There are nice waterfalls in Olympic, but Oregon has the best waterfalls in the country. So nothing I can recommend would impress (Solduc, Marymere). Definitely spend one day up the Columbia river in Oregon.

On the way down from the Olympic, stop by the world's largest Sikta Spurce and the Tree of life. They should be 5 minute stops each.

Don't stop by Forks, Washington. It was popularized by Twilight. I passed through it, and the town made me feel uneasy. It's probably safe, but has the air of a sad place that's been left behind.

Thank you so much!

Definitely gonna take the two hour trip to hall of mosses and then take the rest of the day to explore and work our way back it looks like!

For Hall of Mosses, remember to get there early. Parking can be tricky if you get there past 8-9 am.

So I'm planning a trip to China this December. It's a gigantic place with a lot of history and I find myself a bit paralysed with indecision as to where I should go, I've drawn up about five or six different plans in multiple different parts of the country and can't choose between them.

I'm not sure how many people on this forum have actually visited China at all (there's at least one I guess), but anybody here have any recommendations to share? Any parts of the country in particular stand out to you?

For winter I'd focus on the south. Beijing is going to be pretty cold and miserable and most of the sites that you'd want to see are outdoors and cold why do that when you can go to the South and see equally cool stuff in walking around weather. If I were you I'd go to Kaifeng, Chongqing and Guizhou province or maybe Guanxi depending. That gives you historical places. modern cyberpunk China and beautiful nature. I'd add Xian to your trip as a maybe depending on how bad you want to see the terracotta warriors.

Kaifeng has a lot of history that wasn't destroyed. It was the capital of the Song dynasty and there are lots of remaining pagodas and relics. I spent a week there with a rented ebike just going from site to site and didn't run out. It's a smaller city so easy to get around it was important historically not so much now. Xian has less little sites then Kaifeng but the city wall and terracotta army are wonders of the world and Xian also has better museums.

For a modern city in China I highly recommend Chongqing. Chongqing is having a moment now as a cyberpunk wonderland but that hasn't translated into more tourism it's an off the map megacity with few foreigners and very unique geography. I'd choose it over Shanghai anyday and I actually don't think Shanghai is a very good place for a tourist to go it's got lots of Western amenities but in terms of tourism going to excellent albeit pricy Western restaurants should be pretty far down the list. I just don't see what going there as a tourist gets you over the other big cities.

Guizhou and/or Guangxi get you nature and rural China you can visit picturesque mountain villages and picturesque mountains. It's evergreen so while the skies may be grey in winter the mountains will still be green and lush. Anyway that's what I'd do in your situation it gives you all parts of China while avoiding the worst of the cold. Before you go be sure to get a VPN for your phone and computer and connect your bank card to Alipay. Nobody here uses cash these days and although vendors are legally required to take it many can't make change and no one here uses it so trying to get around with cash is a a huge pain. Take the train when possible China highspeed rail is amazing, Wherever you decide to go i'm happy to answer any questions about those places I've lived in China for the better part of a decade and have been the places most tourists would go. Feel free to comment or PM me also happy to answer cultural questions but most of the dos and don'ts are fairly obvious.

Thanks for the detailed advice. At the moment I have six different possible plans featuring separate parts of China, all of which are still open to very heavy revision:

  • Beijing - Datong - Pingyao - Linfen - Xi'an;

  • Xi'an - Tianshui - Zhangye - Jiayuguan - Dunhuang (so basically travelling the length of the Hexi Corridor);

  • Suzhou - Tongli - Hangzhou - Hongcun - Wuyuan (as a jumping off base for Sanqingshan);

  • Chongqing - Chengdu - Leshan - Langzhong - Guangyuan - Xi'an;

  • Xiamen - Quanzhou - Tulou - Chaozhou - Kaiping - Macau; and

  • Kunming - Dali - Shaxi - Lijiang - Shangri-La.

I'm interested primarily in history + some natural sights (preferably without too many tourists!). Feel free to comment on some of these destinations if you've visited. But I realise that's a lot of items, way too much to individually work through, so I'll only ask questions about the destinations you've specifically mentioned.

Chongqing is definitely a place I'm highly interested in, not just because of the outright strangeness of the city itself but also the Dazu rock carvings outside of it. There are five main locations (Baodingshan, Beishan, Nanshan, Shimenshan and Shizhuanshan) and there's also yet another lesser known complex of rock carvings called the Anyue grottoes relatively close by. I've been wondering if the site is interesting enough to justify spending a night in Dazu just so I can explore all the grottoes at a leisurely pace, or if a day trip from Chongqing to see the main two sites of Baodingshan and Beishan would be a better use of my time. From Chongqing it is about 1.5 hours each way, which is making me wonder just how rushed a day trip would be just using public transport.

With regards to Chongqing itself, what are the main places you would recommend? I know of the famous Hongyadong and Kuixing Building, as well as Shibati, Xiahaoli and the Shancheng footpath. There's some historical/cultural sites such as the Huguang Guild Hall, Luohan Temple and Laojun Cave, which I will certainly visit if I go to Chongqing (Erfo Temple in Hechuan seems to be an easy day trip out too). I also hear about lots of old bomb shelters built during the city's short stint as a wartime capital, which have been converted into public spaces and libraries and restaurants and galleries. Is there anything else I've missed?

Kaifeng is an unexpected recommendation because I haven't heard anybody else speaking about it as a destination in spite of its historical importance (perhaps on the Chinese internet they are). What would you say are the best things to visit in that city? I broadly know about Daxiangguo Temple, Yanqing Taoist Temple, Shanshangan Assembly Hall, Kaibao Si Pagoda, Po Pagoda, Dongda Mosque and so on but they don't seem like enough to fill out an entire week. Would be interested to hear about your itinerary when you were there.

Guizhou's mountain villages are interesting and I've been looking at them for a while but haven't been able to fully narrow down what I want to see. Happy to hear your personal recommendations for the province. Something I keep hearing about a number of these villages (I hear it a lot about the Xijiang Miao Village) is that they're overly Disneylandified and set up for tourists? If possible I'd like to avoid that. Langde, Nanhua and Basha Miao Villages as well as Zhaoxing Dong and Dali Dong Village are some of the ones I'm interested in, I'm wondering if staying in one of those villages for a night is worth it. Fanjingshan is another big destination I am interested in.

Finally, how far north would you say I could go in December before the cold starts to get intolerable? Shanxi province has a lot of ancient Tang and Liao architecture and that makes it very attractive to me, but it's also very far north in China. Just trying to see how much my scope is limited by the climate.

Hope this isn’t too much, feel free to respond to as much or as little as you want.

Haha it's not to much I'm impressed with your research.

Sounds like you've got a pretty good idea of the sites in Chongqing only places I would add are Ciqikou (磁器口) a tourist street in Chongqing. Touristy but for Chinese tourist and if you've never been to China before it's definitely worth it to take on the spectacle and Liziba station which is a station inside an apartment block it's very cool and cyberpunk. For Dazu i'd do a day trip but it really depends on what you want you could definitely make a day of it. In my opinion Chongqing is better for vibes than for sites to see, so be sure to leave some time for urban exploring. That's where Chongqing really shines in my opinion the nuts geography and cool alleys and architecture are it's high points I could also give you a tour of my university and/or arrange a dinner with some Chinese university students. No pressure and I know some people would find this dreadfully dull but others might be really interested. I'd have to vet you a little first to make sure you aren't an axe murderer or a missionary or something but if your interested DM me.

You hit on two great places in Guizhou Zhaoxing Dong village and Fanjingshan are both great places and if you can work one of them in I highly recommend either. Let start with Zhaoxing, So Zhaoxing is easy to get to because it's on the highspeed train line. The station is Congjiang (从江）which is right next to it. it's a four hour train ride from Chongqing. Zhaoxing itself is an overbuilt tourist trap, however the villages around it aren't so you can stay in Zhaoxing there are a half a dozen much less touristic villages around the valley that you can hike to in an hour or two or hire a car to go up and see them they are a little rebuilt and they do make some money off of tourists but they lack the Disneyland feel . Alternatively Congjiang town itself is an interesting little town with essentially zero tourism and a lot of traditional Dong architecture. Congjiang has one main street with modern concrete buildings but other than that it's all traditional wooden Dong buildings and several Drum towers. It's completely off the tourist trail and a pretty cool hidden gem. I definitely think staying the night is worth it if you can arrive in the morning and leave in the evening.

Fanjingshan is one of the coolest places I've ever been. A lot of pilgrimage places and cool stuff doesn't live up to the hype Fanjingshan does it looks unreal like something out of a Fantasy novel it's super cool. The downside is it's a little tricky to get to. The ways to get there are a 8/9 hour bus ride from Chongqing or taking the high speed rail to Zunyi (two hours) and then hire a care 2/3 hours or take the bus 3/4 hours to where you are going. You could also go via Tongren but probably wouldn't have a reason to. The town adjacent to Fanjingshan sucks it's all hotels and tourist restaurants like one big base camp. However there is a town nearish Fanjingshan Sinan (思南县)that I personally like and I feel ins interesting but it is just a town and way off the tourist trail. It's pressed between the river and the mountains so it has a very narrow interesting architecture and a cool vibe with the river on one side and the mountains on the other. It also has an old section with some wooden buildings an ancestor hall and a hill with a little pagoda you can hike to. I don't want to oversell it to much it's just a random town but it's a fun little town to explore in a day and give you a sense of rural Chinese life. I wouldn't go just for this but it will give you something to do in the afternoon after Fanjingshan. Zunyi is also good for a day or two of red tourism . Not sure if you are interested in that.

As for Kaifeng yeah if I was doing your trip I wouldn't spend a week there. But When I went I kept extending my trip because I loved it so much but part of that was just vibes and noodling around on a ebike so I wasn't getting to sites in any efficient manner you got most of the big ones the Iron pagoda is probably the most must see. Theres also a Maoist village commune nearish Kaifeng thats doable on a long day trip, interesting because they use the old communist system and have no private commerce and also a giant portrait of Stalin. Even Kaifeng is pushing it a bit weather wise and that's the issue with traveling in China in the winter generally Shanghai and south of it is ok. North of that it just gets snowy and miserable. Yes you can bundle up but Chinese cities kind of suck in the snow and you miss out on all the cool streetlife which makes China so fun. Shanxi is awesome but it's going to suck in the winter and there's a whole half of the country not covered in snow. If you have an hour or two of downtime in Shanxi your going to sit in the warm hotel or wander empty streets but in the southern half you can find all sorts of cool stuff going on outdoors. That's why I said maybe add Xian, Xian maybe to cold or not but you can go see famouse places there and do outside stuff else where and Xian maybe fine idk I don't have a good sense of their winter weather.

Chongqing - Chengdu - Leshan - Langzhong - Guangyuan - Xi'an; This is the one I like the best because you start with a little variety. Hitting Chongqing, Xian and Sichuan. But you have four cities in Sichuan here you should definitely take one or two off and add some variety like one of the Guizhou places above and maybe or maybe not Kaifeng.

Beijing - Datong - Pingyao - Linfen - Xi'an; A great itinerary but not for winter

Xi'an - Tianshui - Zhangye - Jiayuguan - Dunhuang (so basically travelling the length of the Hexi Corridor); Probably the most interesting of your itineraries, I love the China silk road stuff and farwests China but if you were going to do it i'd definitely take off one of the a Gansu cities and add a Uighur city like Turpan and maybe sub in Linxia for another. Definitely save this for if you ever come back in the summer.

Suzhou - Tongli - Hangzhou - Hongcun - Wuyuan (as a jumping off base for Sanqingshan); Not a bad trip good weather wise good mix of history and nature a little limited to the Shanghai area you might sub one of these for Xian. Suzhou is amazing.

Xiamen - Quanzhou - Tulou - Chaozhou - Kaiping - Macau; Pretty decent weather wise and trip wise.

Kunming - Dali - Shaxi - Lijiang - Shangri-La. This will have stunning natural beauty but understand that this is basically a list of some of the top tourist destinations in China, now there's a reason for that but all of these places get the majority of their income for tourism. It's like going to Hawaii or the Caribbean very very hard to get out of the tourism bubble. I'm not saying don't do it just be aware.

Just a note on planning I'm not sure if your looking at the Highspeed train lines but some of these clusters make me suspect you might not be so if your not definitely include them in your plan. Often it's quicker to go to a town the next province over on the train than taking the bus to the adjacent town. You could easily do something Like Xian-Chongqing-Congjiang-Yangshou-Kaiping. Because all those have train connections you don't need to cluster them. Trip.com has the Chinese trains if you get the app you can see where has connections and what time by plugging them. A detailed map of the Chinese rail lines can help but it's hard to find up to date ones because they are always adding new lines and stations.

Anyway once you do decide on an itinerary feel free to ask me specific advice

Don't focus too much on the cities. The cultural revolution destroyed a ton of history all across the nation, and the development boom finished the job on a lot more. They all have a lot less to see than equivalent cities of their size and history in other nations. You can go to one big city - Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, etc. - and you'll have seen them all.

Since you're going in December, how much does weather matter to you? You might be able to catch Harbin Ice Festival if you're willing to bear -20 or lower temperatures.

A nitpick, but after having done some really deep digging I would actually say China has the richest historical sites of all of Asia, even if much of it is terribly marketed to international tourists (the Cultural Revolution was bad, but there's so much history in China that it's impossible to Thanos-snap most of it away in a relatively short period, and other countries in Asia have also had somewhat analogous periods of cultural destruction like the Meiji Restoration).

I'll definitely agree that most of the really big Tier-1s like Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou are historical deserts, but that's in part because these cities got big relatively recently; they're nowhere near the core of historical Chinese civilisation. Shanghai was a small agricultural community for most of Chinese history and only really came into its own in the 1930s, and Shenzhen barely even existed until 1979. Most megacities in China are relatively history-poor, but that's in part because there wasn't that much history there to protect in the first place - the cities that are global hubs in China today are, for the most part, not the cities that were historically important. OTOH many of the older cities like Beijing, Chengde, Xi'an, Suzhou, Luoyang etc seem to have way more historical sites than your modal Asian city, not less. And Pingyao looks insane. I do plan to incorporate a lot of areas outside of the cities into my itinerary though.

Weather doesn't really matter that much to me, though -20 is pushing it a little bit and I'm mostly going to China to see history and culture (Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces are very attractive in that regard). I've heard of the Harbin Ice Festival before; have you gone yourself and would you recommend it?

I didn't claim that China lacked historical sites, rather that the cities themselves were somewhat lacking. The issue is that all the sites are dispersed throughout a continent-sized nation, making it very difficult to plan a trip - as you've discovered. Personally Suzhou, Luoyang, and Chengdu did not stand out as markedly different from the tier 1 cities in being composed of vast sprawls of communist blocks and a small handful of proper history. At least everyone likes Xi'an, but that seems to be the exception to the rule.

I lived in Harbin for a short period, so it's more that I passed through while the ice festival happened than I visited. Certainly it's very unique, and Harbin isn't a bad city as some of the Russian influences have still remained. But I recommended it more because much of China is quite grim to visit in December, particularly further south: I moved from Harbin to Shanghai in January, and found it worse in the 0-5C of Shanghai to the -20C of Harbin just because so many places lacked proper heating.

Shanghai, although it's been a decade since I've been and has become much less kind to foreigners/laowai/like a weird, high-tech slice of Europe since I've been there.

Chengdu for food, views. Pandas are lame, not worth visiting for pandas.

You can pick any of the major cities in Hubei province and find a well-reviewed tour guide with English language skills.

In general, the further you go from an urban city center, the kinder and more generous people are. The trains are exceptionally good for covering distance if you want to hit up several places.

Check out these posts from a few months ago.

I liked Xi'an. The terracotta army is genuinely worth seeing, and the centre of the city is surrounded by a medieval fortress wall about 15m high and 15m across - it's pretty unique and impressive. About 5 hours from Beijing by train.

Thanks! Xi'an features in two or three of my itineraries - I've heard good things about it from most everyone, so I'll try to prioritise the plans which pass through the city.

Can anyone explain America's love affair with the pickup truck? This is prompted by this Matt Yglesias post talking about abundance politics, and acknowledging that for working-class Hispanics (among others) owning a pickup is a key measuring stick for material prosperity and that it would be politically stupid for abundance-orientated Democrats to argue this point.

This isn't a question about why Americans drive much bigger personal vehicles than people in other countries - that is obvious. (Generally richer country, cheaper fuel, wider roads, more idiot drivers such that "mass wins" is seen as an important part of being safe on the roads). I think I understand why so many of these are built on a truck chassis (mostly CAFE arbitrage). But the thing I don't get is why the pickup as the big-ass form factor of choice. If you look at the big-ass personal vehicles in the London suburbs, you will see at least 5 full-size SUVs (as in the US, the most common form factor in affluent suburbia is the crossover, which no longer counts as big-ass) for every clean pickup. And if you look at work vehicles, you will see at least 10 vans for every pickup. Most of the work pickups I see in the London suburbs are owned by landscapers who regularly haul large quantities of fertilizer, so "ease of cleaning the bed" is the obvious reason for them. The pattern seems to be the same in other European cities, and googling "Tokyo traffic jam" brings up pictures with more pickups than Europe, but still many fewer pickups than vans or big-ass SUVs.

So my small-scale questions are:

  • Is it true that there are more clean pickups than full-size SUV's in the US? Everywhere or just in Red/Hispanic areas?
  • Is it true that there are more work pickups than work vans in the US?
  • Does anyone have a sense of why Americans choose pickups over other big-ass form factors?

I'm amazed that hardly anyone has mentioned what I think has to be the top practical reason to own a truck: they're the only vehicle class capable of towing more than trivial amount. That's why the pickup truck is practically indispensable to the suburban class (at least, here in benighted flyover country).

If you have have ambitions of boating, camping, jet skiing, four wheeling, motorcycling, or snowmobiling, then having a vehicle amply capable of towing the trailers or self contained mobile structures used for these activities is a prerequisite. And if you need a truck for towing anyways, might as well get one that can serve as a commuter and haul family and friends too. This is why the beds keep shrinking and the engines keep embiggening: the utility of the bed for cargo is secondary in most cases to its utility as traction motor.

If a pickup does, in fact, tow significantly better than a full-size SUV that would be a large part of the answer (even if just by perceived option value). Does it?

It would also explain some of the national difference - heavy-duty towing (>750kg trailer and >3500kg combination) requires a license endorsement in the EU (and thus in the pre-Brexit UK) so a lot fewer people imagine themselves doing it.

Yes, I think generally similarly-sized SUVs have a higher vehicle curb weight, which cuts into towing capacity. Trucks also generally have much better rear visibility.

In the US towing ~4000 lbs is pretty normal and one of the things a pickup might get used for, I wouldn’t say a pickup is necessarily better for it but everyone just assumes it is.

People in Europe have no problem towing their boats and trailers with regular cars.

You can throw things in the back without opening the door is the basic answer I think. Very casual, like you're getting stuff done on you're own time, your gear exposed to the elements etc. Work vans are more ubiquitous for actual company cars.

Can anyone explain America's love affair with the pickup truck?

I'm reminded of the odd demographics/tribal affiliations of this forum reading the replies you got. The luxury 4wd pickup truck is the greatest motor vehicle ever constructed for your average American suburban/rural man, it's available at a reasonable price from numerous manufacturers, and the drawbacks mostly don't matter to the people who buy them. If you compare them to other choices along the metrics that matter to the people that buy them, the big dumb pickup truck, much maligned, wins frequently.

The modern American pickup truck is as comfortable as any luxury car, with enormous storage capacity, complete capability across any situation, power and style. But most importantly: people buy them because they like them:

So what do people actually like about trucks? According to Edwards, the answer is counterintuitive. Truck drivers use their trucks very much like other car owners: for commuting to and from work, presumably alone. The thing that most distinguishes truck owners from those of other vehicles is their sheer love of driving. “The highest indexed use among truck owners is pleasure driving,” says Edwards. Truck drivers use their vehicles this way fully twice as often as the industry average. “This is the freedom that trucks offer,” says Edwards.

People like big V8 engines. Not even necessarily for speed reasons, but they like the way they feel, the sound, the rumble, the sense of owning and using a powerful well engineered machine. A family friend of mine recently signed to buy a Z06 Corvette, which gets to 60 in under 3 seconds, but told me he never intends to drive it fast at all, he simple enjoys the sound and rumble of the bigger engine. Of course, modern pickups are about as fast as sporty cars of the past: a V8 F150 in 2025 gets to 60 in about the same amount of time as a V8 Mustang from 1995. They're not exactly slow, they cruise at highway speeds and pull out no problem.

People like big comfortable cars. They like having space to stretch out. They like having an excess of space for stuff, so they don't have to worry about how much they are carrying, or carefully clean and sort things each day.

People like having an excess of capability. Being able to haul things at any time, even if you don't need to often, is nice. Being able to haul way more than you need, is nice.

The reasons not to get one: it's difficult to park, it's bad on gas, stylistic reasons. Most suburbanites and rural dwellers never parallel park, and live in areas with abundant parking, so it doesn't matter to them. The increased gas cost of a pickup vs an SUV or full size van is pretty negligible. Gas might be annoyingly pricey, but it is factually cheap: the price difference between a 20mpg vehicle and a 30mpg vehicle is $600/10,000 miles, or about $6k over 100k miles, assuming an average of $3.50/gal. $6k is a pretty unimportant difference over the life of a car between one you like and one you don't, probably shouldn't make your decision for you. Stylistically, some people don't like them, some people do. The people who do, buy them.

Vehicle purchases are, at heart, irrational. Trucks are tough and fun and capable, and people dig being associated with that, in the same way that they seem to enjoy dressing up like their favorite sports stars and watching games, or putting on cowboy clothes on Halloween. I like to say that All Cars Are Drag, costumes that we put on and take off. And nowhere is this more relevant than with the Butch Drag offered by pickups. “When asked for attributes that are important to them,” Edwards says, “truck owners oversample in ones like: the ability to outperform others, to look good while driving, to present a tough image, to have their car act as extension of their personality, and to stand out in a crowd.” Trucks deliver on all of that. At a price.

I do think part of this discourse is poisoned by a weird belief in the anti-pickup truck crowd that if they see a truck without anything in the bed once or twice, it must never have anything in the bed. So I'd ask the crowd: how many times a year do you need to use your truck for truck things before you are "allowed" to own a truck?

Personally: I have a distaste for anyone who doesn't use the things they own. I have an American aristocratic horror of things that are "kept nice."

Of course, modern pickups are about as fast as sporty cars of the past: a V8 F150 in 2025 gets to 60 in about the same amount of time as a V8 Mustang from 1995. They're not exactly slow, they cruise at highway speeds and pull out no problem.

Can confirm. I've rented pickup trucks for cross-state drives, and when they're hauling nothing and you shift them into "sport" mode, they accelerate effortlessly and will blow doors on most other vehicles that aren't trucks or sports cars.

And since muscle cars are functionally illegal these days, a truck with a giant engine is arguably the only way you can GET that 'performance' for an affordable price.

But you have to be fair and also include repair costs in the delta between owning an efficient sedan vs. a big ol' truck.

That's the big reason I'd prefer to rent them for now rather than own.

But you have to be fair and also include repair costs in the delta between owning an efficient sedan vs. a big ol' truck.

Are these significantly different over the lifetime of a like-for-like comparison? Does a Tacoma or Tundra have that much higher costs than a Rav4 or Camry?

I don't think that has been my experience where usage is similar.

Well just an example:

A set of Tacoma tires will set you back $500-700, compared to a set of Camry Tires being $320 on the high end.

That's pretty marginal though, unless you're getting lots of tire punctures.

This Source puts the maintenance costs for a Tacoma at $6,731 for the first ten years (most of that almost certainly after the first five, and a Camry at $4,455. So you're spending a least a few hundred extra bucks a year on average, on top of the up front costs.

On the full list, large pickups are listed as the most expensive for maintain, almost all of them requiring over $10k over the first 10 years.

Whether that is all worth it for the cargo capacity, towing, or extra performance, well, I dunno.

I think if I had my choice, I'd own both a smaller electric car for local commutes and have a mid-size pickup for long haul drives or moving cargo around.

Less than $3,000 over ten years on a $30,000-50,000 purchase is fairly unimportant. If you can't afford the maintenance on your Tacoma, it's unlikely that the extra $3k over ten years would save you.

Whether that is all worth it for the cargo capacity, towing, or extra performance, well, I dunno.

It all comes down to style. People buy a car primarily for what they want to look like, not for what they need or want to do. You can tell, because minivans are a tiny segment of the market these days.

I think if I had my choice, I'd own both a smaller electric car for local commutes and have a mid-size pickup for long haul drives or moving cargo around.

I've always been in a weird place with cars, I've always had multiple vehicles available to me. Having a truck available is the best, driving one everywhere all the time less so.

People buy a car primarily for what they want to look like, not for what they need or want to do.

Probably.

But I'd bet a lot are getting in over their heads on payments up front, which is starting to show up in delinquency rates.

I think some people are just not good with money and they buy cars that make them look good but I really don't know how to translate the status and affirmation points having a really nice car gets you, into a dollar amount.

I've only ever driven Honda or Toyota for the last 15 years since their engines cannot be killed by conventional means and I do NOT like large unexpected expenses from my vehicles.

I definitely don't need to tow or tote stuff around on a regular basis, and its pretty trivial to rent a truck for a while for when I do, so it never made sense for me to buy a truck when I have other things I'd rather do with the spare money.

But I'd bet a lot are getting in over their heads on payments up front, which is starting to show up in delinquency rates.

I think some people are just not good with money and they buy cars that make them look good but I really don't know how to translate the status and affirmation points having a really nice car gets you, into a dollar amount.

Absolutely, but this is a general financial intelligence/literacy/freedom of choice question, not one specific to pickup trucks. From long experience of trying to explain to Red-Tribe Pickup-Truck-Shoppers in my immediate circle that they don't need to spend all that money, they aren't cross-shopping with a Toyota Corolla or even a Rav4. If they didn't blow $50,000 they didn't have on a pickup, they would blow it on a Land Cruiser, or a Mercedes E Class, or a tarted out Jeep Wrangler. "Why do Americans like pickup trucks?" is mostly a separate question from "Why do Americans go into too much debt to buy vehicles they can't afford on loans that will bankrupt them?" The former is about the traits of the pickup truck, the latter is about the traits and cultural choices of individual Americans.

Or, generally, we can ask "Why do companies like Dodge Nissan and Land Rover continue to exist when they consistently sell inferior products?"

I'm considering getting a truck as my next vehicle (currently have a crossover) because there have been a handful of times in the last year when it would have been convenient for moving bulky items. It would also open up a new world of possibilities - I could get into several different (manly) hobbies if I had the means to pick up the materials needed at my convenience (e.g. woodworking).

From my point of view, it seems to represent blue-collar working-man masculinity for most people who have them. The point is to signal that you’re a hard working man’s man. Most of the drivers are actually urban professionals of one type or another, at least where I am, most actual contractors use minivans.

Vans or, it must be pointed out, it's pretty darn common for a pickup truck to have one of those pop-up covers (some of them extremely stock or permanent-looking). I'd say the actual contractors get a nice cover more often than a van, especially if it doubles as a personal vehicle. True minivans are basically reserved for secondhand purchases by the illegal immigrant.

I've never seen a minivan on a jobsite here (working on new-built commercial/industrial buildings). It's all either pickup trucks or full-sized vans.

Full-size vans dominate minivans on UK worksites too.

I'm on the boarder of the midwest/upper south, so there are some hispanics here but not a large fraction of the population. Pickup trucks, however, are extremely common and popular. Some of them are work trucks, though vans are more common as actual work vehicles. The overwhelming majority of pickup trucks on the road here (I'd estimate 80%+) are single passenger commuter vehicles. 99% of their drive time is to carry their driver to and from their job that doesn't require a truck at all, or running errands. Nothing has ever been, nor will ever be, transported in the (tiny) beds, which generally have a hard cover of some type so they don't need cleaned. Many of them boast considerable off-road capabilities yet will never have a single tire touch dirt, short of occasionally hopping a curb to get out of a small driveway or parking lot. All of my neighbors, the men anyway, drive one of these as their primary vehicle. If they do find themselves actually needing to haul something, the more well off actually buy a second, usually older, truck to use for that, or they have a trailer. Trailers are very common and popular; nothing really fits in the beds of these trucks anyway. They are essentially lifted SUVs with enormous engines with the rear storage area converted into a semblance of a truck bed that is never used. Decades ago this same demo (their parents and grandparents) would have driven Lincolns and Cadillac sedans. The interiors of these trucks often have the same luxury options as the current Lincoln/Caddy offerings. More offroad vehicles like jeeps and hummers are also popular with the younger men. These are slightly more likely to be used for their ostensible purpose, especially if they've aftermarket alterations, but I'd guess at least 50% of these vehicles are also single passenger commuter vehicles. The locals who are fans of offroading/mudding disparagingly refer to both types of vehicles as pavement princesses or mall prowlers. As mentioned down thread, all of these commuter trucks are in impeccable condition, regularly washed and kept away from any scenarios that might scratch or ding them in any way.

As to the question why? They are men, and men drive trucks. There isn't much more introspection than that. A non-trivial amount of women use pickups as their primary commuter vehicle too, but they also tend to prefer jeeps, or the jeep pickup, which I'm seeing more of, or just regular giant SUVs. Many of the wives of the men who own the giant commuter trucks near by me have nearly identical black Cadillac Escalades with the silver trim. I have a Lincoln Navigator personally, I think Ford makes better vehicles, at least right now. I also have a Nissan pick up that is used as a farm truck mostly, and looks like it.

I see tons of pickups in my blue/Hispanic area in absolute mint condition and empty beds. Fairly often they drive around with tow mirrors extended despite not towing anything. Sometimes you even see "duallies" (trucks with four wheels on the rear axle) in similar pristine condition. Hispanic landscapers drive beat to shit Ford trucks.

Does anyone have a sense of why Americans choose pickups over other big-ass form factors?

I think in my area, suburban office workers are alienated from anything to do with manipulating the physical world rather than symbols and feel that a very large and expensive truck connects them in some way to rugged manual labor.

I have no answers to offer, but I can tell you that the Thai are just as obsessed with pickup trucks. Half the cars I saw on the road were one variant or another, and they rarely seemed to be used for their nominal purpose. Thankfully, much like the people, they were on average much smaller than American pickup trucks.

Work vans are far more common than work pickups in the USA. ‘White van man’ is not a usual American phrase, but everyone here understands what it means. The reason is obvious- it’s harder to break into the back of a van than a pickup bed.

Pickup trucks are the single most common vehicle in red/hispanic areas. It comes off as masculine and respectable(some form factor of success, maturity, decent behavior) for cultural reasons. Remember the American concept of masculinity, even upper class masculinity, is much bigger on ‘can personally go and do work’ than in the old country and utilitarian-but-not-really pickups make sense in that mold.

This is a bit regional -- pickups are more common for rural tradesman than urban -- partly maybe for high/low trust society reasons as you touch on, but also decreased feasibility of having materials delivered to the jobsite leading to an actual need to, uh, pick things up yourself.

In my experience (southeastern US) it depends on the trade. Plumbers and HVAC guys tend to run in vans while construction guys tend to run pickups.

During my brief membership in the white pickup mafia (I was a service/install technician for draft beer systems.) I drove a quad cab Chevy Colorado with a bed cover. Most of what I did could be accomplished with a van, but I occasionally hauled large refrigeration units (glycol chillers) that wouldn't easily fit in one. It was also nice to carry dirty/smelly equipment in the bed instead of the cab.

I'm not a truck guy, but I was honestly impressed with that Colorado (aside from. It was faster than it needed to be (300HP V6), nice for a base-trim vehicle (power windows/locks, excellent AC and stereo), and got decent fuel economy (21 MPG mixed and 24-27 MPG highway) while being easy enough to park (Backup camera is a lifesaver here.).

The external bed of a pickup truck is also easier to clean than the inside of a van, so you can haul dirty things that you might not want inside your van (cans of gas for your lawn implements, deer carcasses, brush) and hose it out when you're done.

This is prompted by [this Matt Yglesias post] talking about abundance politics

You forgot to add the link.

Thanks, fixed.

What are some interesting contrasts on the same issue in your personal policy views?

For me, I think it should be illegal to sell already cold beer for off premises consumption, because people use it to drink and drive- but also that lowering the drinking age would probably be a good idea.

Heavily against mass immigration, but many of my friends are new immigrants of the type that I don't want to see coming here en masse. This includes some of the women I've dated (some even without PR visa).

I've thought about this before and have compared it to Ayn Rand claiming welfare. I'm against the policy, but while it exists I will exploit it in my personal life.

-- I'm extremely personally non-violent, I haven't been in a fistfight in a good decade or more at this point and avoid personal violence, and politically I am typically anti-war; but we should vastly expand the legal and social acceptability of mutual combat and "fighting words" defenses to normalize fighting between men.

-- I'm anti-tariff, but I personally try to buy MiUSA (or at least MiFirstWorld) items, and think we should make it a goal to foster and preserve at least some American manufacturing across all categories of goods.

-- I'm in favor of high legal immigration, and of a fine-based or Jizya oriented path to citizenship for aliens already in the country; it's a national travesty to have illegal immigrants holding jobs and owning homes in the USA. Just not enforcing the laws and not living with the consequences of laws that have been passed is insane.

but we should vastly expand the legal and social acceptability of mutual combat and "fighting words" defenses to normalize fighting between men.

Same thoughts here. I've defended the concept of dueling in here quite a few times.

“Social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it.”

― Mike Tyson

And ironically with cell phone cameras everywhere, its actually EASIER to have evidence of whether a given confrontation was in fact 'mutual combat' or not.

We've got a whole generation of kids growing up on the idea that you can antagonize people incessantly and then cry immediate victim if they retaliate... as long as you do it on camera!

I'm reminded of that one guy being let off by a jury after he shot a youtube prankster.

If it were legal to throw hands when confronted like this, you MIGHT avoid it escalating to shooting.

If I were obscenely Bezos-Musk-Gates tier rich, I would organize a season of the reality TV dating show The Bachelorette with every contestant having the option to challenge every other contestant to a formal sport-rules fight at any time. The fight would have no non-social impact on the competition: the loser doesn't have to go home, the winner can be sent home by the lead; and the challenged competitor doesn't have to say yes, it can be turned down without being sent home automatically. So the season would be a real-time experiment in how women (both the lead and audience reactions) feel about men engaging in violent duels. Is challenging someone attractive or unattractive? Is it deadly to refuse a challenge? Is it sexy to fight even if you lose, or are you better off refusing if you think you might lose? How much sexier is it to win? Is there a point at which winning too hard is actually less sexy, because you look like a jerk?

I don't know the answers to these questions, though I can guess. But I want to know! I think we'd watch two dozen former college football players invent the code duello from scratch as they went along!

I'm also of the opinion that paparazzi, and anyone else filming anyone in public, should be subject to physical violence by those they are filming.

Normalizing personal violence is agency-producing: men who get into fights learn that they can fight, men who never do fear that they can't. It allows people like landlords and shop owners and teachers to engage in self-help when dealing with jerks. It will improve society in numerous ways!

And I'd still hope to never get into a fight.

You have described a reality dating show that I might be willing to watch.

Every single contestant has a glove or gauntlet they carry around to throw down a challenge. There should be a board that tracks challenges made, challenges rejected/accepted, and fights won or lost, but yeah, no other consequences than that.

For additional fun have one of the contestants secretly be a trained MMA fighter.

I'd imagine there'd be alliances formed early with the best fighter, but then later some betrayals as they try to get him removed. Maybe you have 4-5 guys each throwing down challenges to the same dude forcing him to decide if he wants to lose some face or actually fight each of them in a row. I'd bet that under almost ANY circumstances, sleeping 5 dudes in a row buys you immense status points.

(Most TV shows or sports could be improved by allowing contestants to fight it out)

For additional fun have one of the contestants secretly be a trained MMA fighter.

I don't think it's much fun if it's secret, it's more fun when everyone knows what's up. Does the MMA fighter take a pissant attitude around the house, being unafraid to step on toes because he knows no one will challenge him? Does he have trouble getting anyone to accept his own challenges, since there's less shame in avoiding him than in avoiding someone who has an "unfair" advantage? Also, in my ideal libertarian-hellscape version of this contest, the contestants would be allowed to choose any amateur ruleset to fight under. So they could choose boxing, wrestling, kickboxing, kyokushin, MMA, muay thai, etc. So maybe you know that so-and-so wrestled D1, so you challenge him to box. Etc.

We have very limited data from the "enforced violence" dates which occur roughly once in each season of The Bachelor/ette. Every season the contestants are forced to box, wrestle, or otherwise scrap on one group date. Notable observations:

-- Women give credit to the winner of the boxing tournament even if he outweighs the other guys by 40lbs

-- Men don't care who wins.

-- Only one contestant, to my knowledge, has ever refused to participate on principle, during the Covid season in 2020. She was summarily given a terrible edit and booted off the show.

-- On the other hand, it's nearly always a good move during a rugby or football date to claim an "injury" preventing you from participating, which will allow you to hang out on the sideline with the Lead.

I'd imagine there'd be alliances formed early with the best fighter, but then later some betrayals as they try to get him removed. Maybe you have 4-5 guys each throwing down challenges to the same dude forcing him to decide if he wants to lose some face or actually fight each of them in a row. I'd bet that under almost ANY circumstances, sleeping 5 dudes in a row buys you immense status points.

I suspect we wouldn't see that many fights, with the fights primarily being used to settle "drama" problems in the old fashioned way: camera cuts to Chris telling us "Trevor told Kaylee I said X but I TOTALLY DIDN'T SAY THAT; Trevor must meet me on the field of honor or yield his argument!" If Trevor isn't willing to get in the ring, then he doesn't really think that X was said, does he? If he persists in lying, but refuses to back it up, Trevor's probably headed home, right? At the same time, if Chris keeps whining about Trevor lying about him, but never challenges Trevor, then Chris is probably headed home. And if they both get in the ring and bang around with no clear winner, does it overly impact either of them, positively or negatively? They both showed they were willing to fight to defend their honor, and both put up a good showing, is that enough?

But then the structure of the show is that there's normally out of 24 guys only about 6 Kaylee is actually interested in, and as the show winds on you'll also see challenges made in desperation, from guys who are about to be sent home because Kaylee doesn't like them. Trevor, who is definitely going home soon, will challenge Mike, one of the frontrunners, making up a bullshit offense as a reason and trying to get some juice out of the fight to get attention. Does Mike feel like he needs to accept the challenge, given that Trevor is so far beneath him? Does Kaylee feel that Mike needs to accept it, and will lose attraction to him if he doesn't? What if Trevor is much bigger and stronger? Might Kaylee choose to send Trevor home immediately, for trying to pick a fight without cause, or just to protect her favorite boy?

And because you get a wide range of size, strength, skill in fighting, and toughness in your contestants, do you get a white knight? Trevor, a former college football tight end, picks a fight with David, a scrawny software developer, and intends to challenge him publicly. Thad, a former amateur boxer who has made friends with David but also needs the attention, steps in and challenges Trevor first. Who does Kaylee end up falling for in this scenario?

I'm some places it already is illegal to sell cold beer for carry out. Indiana I believe, and maybe Oklahoma. Actually it looks like OK repealed it a few years ago. Some beer is also meant to be consumed at room temp, but the people that are into this type of beer are probably not drinking it in the car. Most of the degenerate alcoholics I've known, people who literally can't wait to get home and have to drink in the car, do not care in the least what the temperature is and have often also bought a half-pint which they downed in the parking lot before even getting back in the car.

Degenerate alcoholics with the shakes mostly have enough tolerance that their trip home from the convenience store isn’t that dangerous. There are simply people who will not follow rules they can easily get away with breaking(and you can’t visually tell a coke can from a beer can at distance- nor can you tell if someone has poured it in a big gulp cup[and I see construction workers doing this on their way home, regularly, in gas station parking lots]).

Why is it even illegal to drink while driving? If you can drive after having a beer, it should be fine to have it during, no? (I have also never heard of anyone doing this, but Im far away.)

Oh I know. My father ultimately lost his license after his 9th DUI. He started racking them up in the 60s, before they put increasing penalties on subsequent violations. He drove everywhere with a tallboy in the console. After he finally lost license around '94 he transitioned to drinking and biking. He'd be 2-3 cans into the case before he even arrived home. He had a sleave that he put around his beer can that made it look like a Pepsi. He could have gotten his license back with a hefty fine after 5 years but he knew he'd just lose it again. He had to choose between drinking and driving, and chose drinking. Some people will never stop. It ultimately killed him early, along with the smoking, at 62 via colon cancer. He actually started drinking more when he was diagnosed.

sell already cold beer for off premises consumption, because people use it to drink and drive

Do you think that the coldness of beer is a large determinant for whether or not people drink and drive?

I figured people were mostly driving to their friend's house, or a bar (or other location, such as fishing), drinking there, and driving home sooner than is a good idea. I've never actually heard of an American drinking in the car. There are lots of signs at parks about not bringing glass bottles, but I don't think I even disapprove of them buying a pack of cold beers, driving to a park, drinking it with their friends, then driving home -- just that they shouldn't be drinking the whole pack by themselves. Authorities clearly don't care about it, since they allow bars to serve not only beer, but hard liquor, in places that clearly need to be driven to, full of people who very obviously drove by themselves, and are not carpooling with a designated driver (nor is there public transport available).

I see, regularly, construction workers(you can tell by the clothes- expensive boots not taken care of, everything else absolutely cheap and dirtier than you'd believe, often with things like sheetrock mud that you can only run into on a construction site. Super casual but very high coverage.) walk into the QT or 7/11, buy a soda and a cold beer, then pour the soda out and put the beer into its cup before getting into their car and driving home. That's not counting those who buy it in a can, open it, and then drive off. Cops tell me they enforce open container laws semiregularly.

It's definitely class and ethnicity coded- lower working class(you can tell by the vehicles) hispanic men are most of the offenders.

Interesting, I wonder if there's any way to tell whether that practice is contributing to crashes very much.

My intuition would be no, in comparison to drinking tequila or vodka at a bar, but maybe I'm wrong.

Hispanic men have a reputation for poor and/or reckless driving at times when the lower working class is going home from work(3:00-3:30 end times are pretty typical), but there's no real indication as to causation- driving in Latin America is notoriously poor(as everywhere else in the developing world) so it might be continuing cultural stuff other than the idea of cracking open a cold one on the way home from work. Presumably if that was the common thread DR twitter would mention the open container violations in their regular noting of an immigrant getting into a wreck in a school carpool line he had no business being in.

My intuition is also that 1) drunk driving accidents are disproportionately from 'not going home from a bar(think friend's house, family get together, etc)' because the barflies a) have a tolerance and b) stay later so there's fewer other cars to get into accidents with, and non-barflies are likely to have a plan for getting home safely from the bar and 2) far less drunk driving is due to straight spirits than you'd think because American heavy drinkers sensitive enough to cost to choose straight hard liquor are also sensitive enough to cost to not be doing their drinking in bars much. IME regular heavy drinkers seem to have a code to stick to beer or mixed drinks in social settings, and there's very strong ethnic patterns to drink of choice to begin with that override maximizing alcohol per dollar.

There is something so grim about driving by a bar just off a highway with a parking lot full of cars.

Also grim in that no one even bats an eye at the implications

Obviously. The truly desperate might still drink warm beer and drive, but it would help reduce the numbers.

I think nobody drinks warm beer, yes.

How long am I driving? 20 minutes in the icechest isn't too long.

But people also use it to re-load for parties, go from the store to their event, enjoy their new beer when they get home, etc.

I feel pretty similar about Gambling.

Adults should be allowed to gamble.

But there should be some friction in order to participate, so I'd like to remove e.g. scratch-off cards at convenience stores and force all casinos into specifically designated areas.

I feel the same way, I don’t think online gambling (which in my mind includes buying loot boxes for regular games as well( should be legal simply because it removes all friction from the process and allows for much easier age check bypassing. By requiring a gambler to get into a car, drive to a casino and put a physical credit card into a physical machine, you force enough friction that a person would have a harder time gambling when they weren’t thinking about it. It’s also much harder for a child to fool an employee of the casino if they must be physically in the same building.

so I'd like to remove e.g. scratch-off cards at convenience stores

When I worked in a convenience store the people who would hang around the till buying and scratching cards until they were out of money were a big annoyance, the more inconsiderate ones would let a queue build up behind them while they did it.

Can't lie. At least part of my animus is from getting stuck behind people buying like 12 scratch-off tickets at a time, and oftentimes trying to claim winnings at the same time.

In my state you don't even have to scratch them off, the cashier has a machine they can scan the ticket on and tell you if you won or not.

At that point, where's any of the fun?

I know these folks would probably just find a way to get their jollies elsewhere, but seeing how gambling has penetrated every aspect of society now, I really do want to put this genie back in its bottle.

I'm so torn on gambling. I'm generally staunchly in the "let people do things" camp, and I dislike regulating things that will immediately create uncontrollable black markets because the demand is very strong.

But holy shit gambling is a fucking disaster for our society. The explosion of sports betting has made me firmly convinced of this.

Crypto at least is harder to get into and plausibility useful. Same with prediction markets

Gambling is very tricky for me because it doesn't usually create obvious externalities.

Other than being stuck in line while someone buys scratchoffs.

Its unclear what interest I have in whether someone is spending their money 'wisely' or not. There's an argument that someone who would gamble money away would probably do something else stupid with it, like play with options on Robinhood or fall for some crypto rugpulls, so really they might be better off giving up control of their money entirely.

But its increasingly clear to me that I don't WANT to live in a society where gambling is everywhere. I don't like the ads, I hate having the odds splayed across the screen constantly, I'm old enough to remember the time before this was ubiquitous, and sports gambling indeed had a sheen of shame on it.

The one time I went gambling in a Casino was a rush. I see why people get really into it, I felt an urge to return and try my luck for months afterwards.

The optimal amount of gambling in a society is (probably) not zero.

The compromise that seemed to mitigate the harms is to keep legal gambling relegated to certain geographical areas. This makes it easier to keep things restrained or dare I say 'regulated.'

Otherwise, every single business out there tries to inject some gambling aspect into their products and services to capture some of those sweet addict dollars.

And all THAT said, I'm also not in favor of having police raids on grandma for running a BINGO game out of her backyard.

The one time I went gambling in a Casino was a rush. I see why people get really into it, I felt an urge to return and try my luck for months afterwards.

Can you elaborate? I dont understand this at all. Some games of chance are fun games, but they are so also without staking money.

So I went into the Casino with the commitment to "only" risk $400 at most. That was my whole budget.

I sat down at the Blackjack Table with a $15 minimum bet size. I hit what the gambling community calls a "Hot Streak" and within like 10 minutes I'm up by $500. I pocket $400 worth of chips, Now I'm playing with house money.

After a bit longer, suddenly I'm up like $1500. I'm placing bets worth $500+ per hand. i.e. I'm betting more than the whole budget I had set out on single hands of blackjack. Its feels pretty awesome.

"Why don't you just cash in your chips and take the money?"

Well I wasn't there to make money, i was there to have fun. And its FUN to risk a whole day's salary on the turn of a card, its FUN to have the other players going hype over your success, its FUN to tip the dealer like $10/$20 at a time, its FUN to imagine somehow hitting it huge and walking out with $50k, it is FUN to have drinks delivered to you as you 'lock in' to try to keep the streak going. It is even fun to LOSE a big amount, when you still have a whole stack of chips to burn.

After, I dunno (literally, you lose track of all time), 30-45 minutes total, I force myself to take a break to 'cool off.' About then I notice my pulse racing and hands shaking. Not aggressively, just the little tremor. I've got about $600, plus the chips I stashed earlier. I stash another $400. Now my day is profitable regardless.

I wander for about an hour, then come back to the same table. It feels right. No rational reason for it, but why change? I put down my $200 in chips. And lose it all in, no joke, about 5 minutes.

Just like that.

So I leave with about $800 and one hell of a dopamine rush.

And for weeks I kept thinking back to that rush, and my brain keeps saying "holy cow remember how awesome that hot streak felt? I bet you could hit that again if you went back." My rational brain is able to quell that. "The house wins this is precisely how they get you," but neurochemicals are a helluva drug.

I could see myself doing something like that every week. Go in with $400-500, make it last as long as possible. Some days I'd lose it quick, some days I'd lose it slow, some days I'd double or triple it, and I'd be having tons of fun but it would basically be an addiction at that point, and I'm not sure I could keep myself limited to a small budget once I was hooked.

Have you ever actually gone in, and lost the whole budget quickly? I can understand that the experience of winning might override the knowledge of -EV, but thats definitionally not something that can happen most of the time.

Im especially wondering about the olde times when there was no house and its all peer-to-peer betting, where presumably the others want to stop betting as you want to keep going.

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You have described my feelings about marijuana. As with obesity, the real enemy is our culture’s allergy to moderation.

+1 on the marijuana thing. In principle, I want it to be legal to smoke weed because it's not my business what people do to their bodies. But in practice, it turns out that legal weed emboldens a bunch of jerks who think it's ok to smoke absolutely everywhere, so that I can hardly drive around my city (Denver) sometimes without having to smell their foul-smelling weed. I'm to the point that I would rather make it illegal again, which I know sucks for people who act reasonably. But I don't see how else we can make it so that the unreasonable folks don't get to make everything smell like weed.

That one seems pretty straight forward: no smoking in public, ever. Throw in tobacco while we're at it. Done.

The French (of all people) pretty much did just that.

Ding ding ding.

If gambling was a "once in a while, for fun" activity, or people smoked weed in their house and NOWHERE else, or people would only eat McDonalds once a week at most, then we absolutely wouldn't need any kind of laws in place, legalize it all.

But our brains didn't evolve that way, we want to gorge on certain things because in the ancestral environment times of true 'abundance' was rare.

My vice is fuckin' sugar. Right now I'm stuffing my face with candy that has 19 grams of it per serving. I work out like crazy to keep it from making me fat, but I'm well aware its just my caveman brain telling me I need to store up fat for the winter or something.

If we could just accept the basic idea that "willpower isn't enough", then perhaps the next discussion is what the appropriate time and place for things are, and how we should intervene to help those who can't control themselves well enough.

If weed was confined to frat parties and the bar district, and hippie retreats that normal people avoided for fear of public nudity drills…

But see, as a society, we have this arrangement set up for alcohol. We have it set up for sexually oriented businesses and casino gambling. But we don’t have it for porn, or weed, or junk food, or sports betting or any other of these modern vices. And there’s incredible resistance to it for these things- where alcohol and strip club laws are mostly uncontroversial.

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I'm for the dual-pricing system in Japan-- one for Japanese (or local residents) and a different, higher price for tourists, who are almost always disruptive and are seemingly everywhere in Osaka now. This could be charged to me unless I initiated some negotiating tactic, which would itself be disruptive.

I've seen some countries have separate (generally shorter) lines for locals at major historical/cultural sites, which is something I can get behind. It only makes sense that people get first dibs on experiencing their own history. It's a little annoying as a tourist abroad, but I would be more than happy to trade longer lines at the Louvre if it means my kids won't have to get in line behind a bunch of foreigners to see Yosemite, the Declaration of Independence, etc.

I'm sure you've seen the recent stories about tourists being squirted with water guns in Barcelona. As I was reading that story I could understand the locals' frustration (though were I to go to Spain again I would certainly be the one getting squirted).

The downturn of the yen, the very modern era attraction of live streaming from an exotic locale, the now-happening Osaka Expo, and perhaps a general interest in Japan fueled by anime/manga and Shogun and whatever else, have combined into a perfect storm where currently large areas of Osaka are bereft of Japanese people, though they are still full of people. At an outdoor bar by the river in Namba recently (I know, what did I expect?) the bartender didn't understand my Japanese (he was from Vietnam.) The shopping arcades are thronged with tourists. At least in such places one can adopt a sense of free-for-all and just push through. My commute, however, takes me through a hub on the way to an international airport, so the subway cars are routinely filled with giant suitcases rolling on casters and you see a lot of behavior that is notably non-Japqnese.

Yesterday at 5:50 am three British travelers were so loud on the train (just having a good time, but annoyingly so) that I could see the Japanese passengers were disturbed (though the British group probably had no idea they were causing any disturbance...maybe). A Thai woman was speaking extremely loudly into her phone while standing in a crowded, moving subway car. One group of New Zealand kids on some school tour made a crack about my suit (which I heard and then began to discuss with them).

Most behavior is very benign. Probably even just reading my descriptions of what I've seen as faux pas seems absurd, as if I am fretting over the most insignificant nothings in a world where bombs are falling. And this is true of course. But it reminds me how Japanese people probably regularly expect me to behave like an unschooled savage most of the time (and honestly, because I am always learning new Japanese I realize I probably screw up a lot still.)

The kicker is that generally no Japanese will ever say a word about this. The very first rule of 和 is that you don't talk about 和. I have been intending to write an effortpost about this but life keeps getting in the way.

Man... now I kind of want to not visit Japan, because I feel guilty about the prospect of making life suck for the residents there.

No, don't let me put you off. Anyone who is halfway self-aware and tries to do as the locals seem to be doing will be welcomed with open arms. It's everyone else that is tedious. There are also many places to go besides the usual tourist areas--and even they are not so bad if you go during off hours.

For what it’s worth, I was fairly neurotic about this before my trip to Japan; my number one concern was to not be the careless foreigner causing offense or giving Americans (even more of) a bad name. I got over that anxiety pretty quickly once I was there; since almost nobody speaks English and I could barely communicate with anyone, and because I quickly intuited that they would not honestly express their offense even if I caused some, I determined that it was a fool’s errand to continue to micro-analyze every action of mine to try and figure out if it had offended someone. I just decided to avoid making any obvious faux pas, to keep my voice down as much as possible, and to otherwise just act naturally and count on the majority of people to interpret my actions in a spirit of good faith. Which they mostly seemed to do! (Although, again, they could have all found me unbearable, and I’d never know!)

You have my vote, brother.

That sounds like it would only be enforced in major international tourist destinations - which could be a lynchpin argument for my long-term goal of never going to Tokyo or Kyoto again in favor of the places I actually like.

Kyoto during COVID and just after was as it should probably best be experienced. Only Japanese, no tourists whatsoever. It is currently a kind of hellhole.

I only went there as you describe once, some ten years back. I was very young and dumb and spoke none of the language so most of it was wasted on me. Most of my experience is of the hellhole sort… oh well. At least I met some very nice people each time I went!

I have done and been the same in various places on earth, and also Japan. The only difference is that, in Japan at least, I remained, and have to some degree matured, and, to some degree, have become able to reflect and revise my behavior.

Oh, I didn’t do anything bad there, I just didn’t have any of the experience I needed to enjoy it. Going back much later and speaking the language well enough to hold a (simple, very patient on the part of my interlocutor) conversation, I’ve had a much, much better time with the country. And in retrospect, I would have liked to explore a less-overrun Kyoto more using those skills.

I was recently at a Faire type event and briefly saw a family I've known for a long time. The mother was a part of my college-aged social circle, and the older daughter is my son's age. They live down the street, and we have little contact for reasons that will be made abundantly clear.

The younger child, chronologically 5, biologically a son, was clad in a full Faire style Faerie Princess regalia, complete with wings. His long hair was plaited, and every article of clothing was not even unisex, but just straight up girl's clothing and sandals. Anyone seeing a picture of the lad would have thought him a girl, and anyone seeing him as I did, in the minute before I made hurried excuses and fled, would have suspected he was a boy by the way he reached insistantly for an ornate foam weapon, like the song in his blood knew his hand was made to grip a sword. He was stymied in his efforts by the gentle chiding of his blue-haired pussy cuck "father" (I use the scare quotes because I'd bet 5:1 odds that the kid is literally not his).

In the time I've known them, in all my observations, I've never seen the boy hold a ball. Pick up a stick. Have a single instant of non-supervised or mildly rambunctious fun.

I feel so bad for that boy, and so angry at his Devouring Mother, who homeschools both children because our Blue State curriculum isn't woke enough. That situation seems at least as bad as gay conversion camp, and I would call it flatly worse if and when it progresses to medical interventions.

And yet.

I'm not going to violently free the poor oppressed child. I'm not even going to call out his mother. I might say something to the daughter's father, a close friend. I feel a deep aversion to so overtly criticizing the way other people raise their kids, even when I find it abhorent. I might try to slip the kid some ball games, and maybe leave a few High Quality Sticks in his yard, but I probably wouldn't even risk a socially awkward conversation for the sake of it.

Where do you all draw the line? At what point would you intervene? When should the State intervene?

I have a friend I refer to as ‘the at risk youth I mentor’, even though I met him when he was in his twenties. His family dropped hard off the homeschooling deep end when he was growing up and I taught him how to be an adult(not his parents) when he was 24 years old. He’d been acting like an unusually tall middle schooler before then.

I didn’t intervene in this family’s poor management of their 21 year old who acted 12. It wouldn’t have done anything but burn bridges.

If we're going to allow people to teach their kids there is an invisible man in the sky who judges them, then you're going to have to allow this. You can brainwash your kid into almost any belief set.

Personally I'd take banning this in exchange for banning exposing kids to religion until they are 18, but I don't imagine that would be too popular.

I think part of the reason the sight was so viscerally upsetting to me is that I think early childhood is a critical time to develop core physicality. Beyond the forced feminization, the forced passivity feels more akin to foot-binding or raising a vegan cat than religious beliefs.

But I don't think the comparison is entirely invalid.

the forced passivity feels more akin to foot-binding or raising a vegan cat than religious beliefs.

My grandparents were raised in a super pacifist offshoot of Christianity, you also have Jainism and the like. Passivity is also part of what people get to indoctrinate their kids into. And of course I am sure the other way round, you can put your kid in boxing and martial arts at an early age if you want.

It's possible the US would be more cohesive if public education was centralized and everyone was taught the same value system, and parents were not allowed to go against it. But I'm not sure it would be the US at that stage, quite.

I kinda feel the same way about my sister in law (who is Catholic and has huge problems with Catholic guilt which she incessantly complains about), raising my nieces and nephews in Catholicism. I think she is causing them significant damage. But if my brother is ok with it (he like me is an atheist) then I keep my mouth shut. People get to raise their kids in ways I find stupid and damaging.

The alternative is you giving swords to their kid secretly, me telling my nieces and nephews that God doesn't exist and is made up, and so on and so forth. But that's not likely to be any better I don't think in the long run.

The alternative is you giving swords to their kid secretly, me telling my nieces and nephews that God doesn't exist and is made up, and so on and so forth.

I think some level of stating your opinion is a normal part of social relationships. I dont know if /u/Iconochasm's situation is like that, but handing the kid a foam sword there when youre talking with them, or saying you dont believe in god when it comes up, seems pretty reasonable. Dont do it in secret, dont make a plan for converting them, but expecting your kid to have zero exposure to the beliefs of a dinner guest seems pretty crazy to me. Yes, it will be a point of friction, of course it will be, but some level of friction is also a normal part of social relationships - interpreting any amount as a sign youre doing something wrong is a symptom of nerddom.

It's possible the US would be more cohesive if public education was centralized and everyone was taught the same value system, and parents were not allowed to go against it.

My analysis of this kind of proposal is based on what I call the riddle of the flute children. The ordinary concern is that power is abused. The riddle of the flute children is that power is fought for. The optimum amount of Government power is less than you think, because it is only the survivors of the fighting that live to suffer the abuse.

The idea that you mention takes the lid off a power honey pot of such extraordinary sweetness that opening it will attract more hornets than wasps and lead to fighting on the scale of the Thirty Years War. I think that the Thirty Years War is the appropriate comparison because it too was about which value system, Protestant or Catholic, was to be the sole value system, regardless of parental wishes.

The glibertarian answer to the Riddle of the Flute Children is "Kill the man who asks who gets the flute." But that doesn't change the fact that someone gets the flute and others don't. If nobody is allowed to ask the question, we will get the default answer. And if the default answer is that the flute children fight among themselves then the flute will be broken as surely as it will be broken by the rival Grand High Flute Adjudicators in the Thirty Flutes' War.

Protection from organised predation is absolutely necessary for survival, and social insurance is mostly necessary. And neither can be practically provided by someone who lacks the powers of a Grand High Flute Adjudicator. If the State doesn't provide those things (or fails to do so effectively), other institutions will. And those institutions will coerce their members, and will seek to coerce nonmembers. And that coercive power will be fought over.

Now if we treat the flute metaphor as fact, the question has an easy default answer, that is revealing in the real world. Daddy decides which child gets the flute. "Kill the outsider who questions Daddy's decision" is a peace treaty between lineages. In the cis-Hajnal context where Daddy is the actual married biological father of actual minor children, it is one that works well.

But cis-Hajnal nuclear families are not the default, and "Kill the outsider who questions Daddy's decision" is a bad treaty if the flute children are productive adults with children of their own and Daddy is an increasingly senile paterfamilias who might not even be a blood relative. The human default is to look to extended family for protection against predation and for social insurance, and the normie way of thinking about other institutions that provide those things (including the State, the Mafia etc.) is as fictive extended families - hence Don Corleone's English-language title of "Godfather" and the often-accurate libertarian jibe against the Mummy Party and the Daddy Party. And in practice the people who find themselves inside those kind of extended family institutions are treated like naughty children whose flutes can be taken away if they backtalk Daddy. And so they work (and, more often than not, fight - Western civilisation's record at kicking the asses of fuzzy-wuzzies on the battlefield is even better than our record of delivering unimaginable universal material prosperity) like naughty children. The canonical book on this point is Mark Weiner's Rule of the Clan

The Peace of God predates the Hajnal line, the Hajnal line predates the Treaty of Westphalia, and the Treaty of Westphalia predates SpaceX. This isn't an accident.

Thank you for engaging whole heartedly with the riddle of the flute children. Your excellent comment has given me the push back I need to rethink my position (or to retreat from the bailey to the motte)

The suggestion "kill the person who asked the question" is to be taken seriously but not literally. Think of it as a cry of pain: For fucks sake, notice the fucking problem.

Taking one step upstream, the intellectual default is to treat power honey pots as exogenous. They exist. There is nothing to be done about it. Cope as best you can.

That is at least half true. Consider the maxim "those who do not work, neither shall they eat". Not true individually. Perhaps society is organised as 50% Slaves who grow twice as much food as they eat and 50% Masters who eat but do not farm. Or perhaps society is organised as 50% able-bodied who grow twice as much food as they eat and 50% children, elderly, and sick, who eat but do not farm. The fundamental point is that the collective cannot eat more food than it grows. This is going to create a power honey pot around farm work and the distribution of food, which is intrinsic to the human condition.

Endogenous honey pots are real too. Sometimes it is a matter of degree; we leave the lid off the honey pot, forgetting that it will attract wasps. Sometimes we create a honey pot that needn't actually exist. (Weak example: We need to mandate vaccinations to counter the distrust created by mandating vaccinations. If government had focused on earning trust, rather than demanding it, we wouldn't be in our current mess. Explanation.

A strong historical example flows from the slogan "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". I used to believe that the problems in the USSR in the 1930s were fully explained by incompatible incentives. Implementing the slogan will lead to increasing problems with people hiding their abilities and accumulating needs. But I gradually noticed that death toll from the Terror was too high, and reached too far into the ruling class. There was something worse, down stream from "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need".

The problem with Utopian ideas that are not incentive compatible is that things go to shit. Then the ruling elite must construct mechanisms of coercion to create artificial incentives. There must be an Ability Finder General. There must be an Adjudicator of Needs. Imagine the surprise among the more idealistic members of the ruling elite when the battle for these position leads to them being sent to the Gulag.

Endogenous! The power honey pot exists because it is created by the unfolding logic of that particular system. It didn't have to exist. People could have looked ahead and decided on a different path. It would have saved their lives.

A weaker example, (but from 2025, so more relevant) is UK Prime Minister Starmer putting VAT (the UK's fancy sales tax) on "School fees". The UK has a "pay twice" system of secondary education. Government run schools are free at the point of use. You have already paid for them through your taxes. If you are unhappy with the education that your child is receiving, you can send them to a private school (traditionally called a "public" school, meaning open to any child whose parents were rich enough to pay the fees, and contrasting with the practice among the nobility of engaging a private tutor to teach their children exclusively.)

Sending your child to a private school saves the government money. They don't have to provide a place for your child in the government school. However, you get no refund of taxes. You have already paid taxes to provide that place and must pay a second time to fund the private school.

Starmer had two motivations. Tacitly, levelling. He wants to destroy private education so that every child has the same education, even if it is not very good. Explicitly (fig-leafly? cloakatively?), money. The money has run out and the government is thrashing about, desperately seeking new sources of money. This has somewhat backfired. Many of the parents who send their children to private schools struggle to afford the fees (the pay twice structure makes this hard). Some are admitting defeat. The addition of VAT makes the price too high and they send their child to the government run school. Providing the place costs the government money. (Hence the sense that though the government says it is trying to raise money, this is a fig leaf over levelling.)

For fucks sake, notice the fucking problem. If we want to remake society according to our own Utopian design, our best bet is to capture the education system. Then we can design the curriculum and ensure that every-one's children are taught right-think, regardless of their parents wrong-think. Starmer hasn't noticed this. He wants money. He wants equality (but doesn't much care what is in the curriculum, provided it is the same in every school). But he is squeezing private schools. Every child moved from a private school to a government school is a drop of honey in the pot. VAT is only a small matter; he is leaving the lid of the honey pot ajar.

Nobody else in the UK is noticing that the lid of the curriculum honey is left ajar. This is what I am trying to point to when I say "the intellectual default is to treat power honey pots as exogenous."

This example might not resonate in the USA, because the right has noticed that the public school curriculum is a power honey pot and maybe the left noticed first and its wasps have already arrived; the fight is starting.

I think that the Thirty Years War is the appropriate comparison because it too was about which value system, Protestant or Catholic, was to be the sole value system, regardless of parental wishes.

Absolutely, which is why the time to do that would have been at the founding. Trying to do it now would be a huge mess to say the least.

The only thing I would disagree with is that power honey pots are inherently bad, they do attract wasps, but to do anything requires power, so wasps must be planned for and tolerated. The optimum amount of government power is more than you think, because otherwise the honey pot will still exist and will be exploited by wasps anyway. At least if the hive is in charge you might get something useful done while the wasps are grifting.

Anabaptists are the future.

Mine brother, we shalt party like it’s 1699!

The state already intervenes unfortunately, only for the other side. The laws are broken and against the father or anything patriarchal. The state sends money for drag queen story hour equivalent programs.

I hope the boy can play wiht older boys around him. Many a times, parents longhouse kids and other young ins are a good way ot break that sowly. I was trying to kiss girls at age 4 because you cannot deprogram hetersoexuality out of a child that easily.

At the point where the father prevents the boy from picking up a sword. That's where you should have stepped in, enthusiasticaly pressed the foam weapon into his little hands, and distracted or even confronted the "father".

Of course I'm heavily biased here. I'm doing what I can to teach fencing and grappling to my 3-year-old daughter, who at least humors me even if she has no drive to fight. Kid wants to pick up weapons? Great! What parent wouldn't want their child to develop a healthy enthusiasm for self-defence, or maybe even the capacity to defend others? Boys may be boys and girls not as given to physical fighting, but even then, kids of either gender benefit from learning how to handle themselves.

I have a habit of alienating my wife's friends and family members by telling them straight-up what I think on controversial issues. My own family members know better than to start, by now, and my own friends either have no opinion on childrearing or are conservative enough themselves. So I don't think I'm playing internet tough guy when I say that I would have no problem telling the parents in your tale that what they're doing is straight-up horrifying and that I hope the child grows up to escape their influence ASAP. If they want to virtue signal to provoke the squares, fine, consider this square provoked, but they won't get off uncontested.

Now, as for the state...eh. In an ideal world, the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-competent yet all-benevolent state will have prevented that scenario from occuring in the first place. In our current world, with our current states, I think it's better for the state to stay out of it.

Brother, you do not interfere in the affairs of a neighboring tribe unless you want to start a blood feud. It's a shame for the boy, but the world is full of such evils, and there is no state powerful enough to root them all out. That tribe has their customs, we have ours. They have their rituals, we have ours. They have their god, and we have ours. The best course of action is to interact with them as little as possible, only to trade goods and reach agreements about territory. With the passage of time, we will see whose tribe flourishes and whose tribe withers.

That situation seems at least as bad as gay conversion camp

If it makes you feel any better (and it is literally the same thing, I'll add), my outgroup claims those don't work. Of course, they would say that, wouldn't they?

Where do you all draw the line? At what point would you intervene?

Depends on the kid, depends on the family. And really, you just do what you can within your strategic and tactical realities/liabilities; you can't influence if you're dead (either to them or more literally).

There does come a point where you just kind of have to trust the kid'll figure it out. Parents stop being the prime authority figures around physical adulthood sexual maturity (for blatantly obvious evolutionary reasons) anyway; this is why, when I hear "the teenage years were hell", I think "yeah, that's 'cause you were bad at parenting/were still under the pretense that the biological age of adulthood is 18, expecting the tricks that worked when they were 5 to work when they're 15, and taking it personally when they do not".

I once met one who was like this- 12 years old, standard fundie-type Christian family, tracked out the ass. Had a bedtime on vacation (wtf?). We watched Dirty Harry and he didn't object over the scenes I would have expected him to get upset over were he a party-liner.

Observably, he's going to be fine. Likely, so will this one.

His long hair was plaited, and every article of clothing was not even unisex, but just straight up girl's clothing and sandals.

Remember, the specific reason those who worship LGBTesus are destructive is that they impose an adult (sexual) outlook on a child not strongly caring about which gender clothes they wear (his behavior is still male, after all). I suspect that it would have been a fight to get him into those clothes if he actually cared; merely failing to care at this age is not really a sign of malfunction.

Actively adopting the other gender's clothes for the sexual reasons that the other gender wears them at a post-sexual-awareness age... that's different. (It's also only a reliable signal of malfunction in men, since there are no male gendered clothes except maybe boxers.)

When should the State intervene?

Given how hard it has been abused against me in favor of specifically this kind of child abuser? So long as the State is unable or unwilling to punish abuse from women in the same degree it does men my answer is "never".

It's also only a reliable signal of malfunction in men, since there are no male gendered clothes except maybe boxers

While it’s not controversial anymore for women to wear pants in broader society, men’s and women’s pants are definitely a thing.

The zipper and button closures on men's and women's jackets and shirts are traditionally reversed from each other, too.

Because it's easier for a right-handed man to button his own shirt, and easier for a woman's right-handed maid to button hers, is the story I heard.

(It's also only a reliable signal of malfunction in men, since there are no male gendered clothes except maybe boxers.)

Not true above a certain level of formality - women's trouser suits look very different to men's suits, starting with the acceptable colour palette. And as the level of formality increases the expectation that women wear dresses gets stronger. This is why tomboys hate formal events - they are used to being able to be performatively androgynous without looking like they are cross-dressing.

This is why tomboys hate formal events - they are used to being able to be performatively androgynous without looking like they are cross-dressing.

And, in reverse, this is how you can trivially differentiate autogynephiles from everyone else (AGPs dress as formally as possible all the time).

I agree that autoandrophiles can exhibit this, but they often don't because the pull effect from "guy clothes" isn't as strong considering there's no article of clothing (except ones you can't see) that aren't trivially available for women; you'd have to go out of your way to be transgressive and most people wouldn't understand it being "designated guy clothes", they'd just see as "woman with unusually poorly fitting clothes".

Do you mean that "normal" tomboys are autoandrophiles?

Normal tomboys want to date straight men. Autoandrophiles (such as exist) want to date gay men.

Not unless they dress for a black-tie event in a badly fitted tuxedo, or are wearing a male sleeveless shirt and shorts with no bra (or binder) and a packer.

I don't think normal tomboys are autoandrophiles any more than men working an email job are autogynephiles.

Are autoandrophiles even a thing? Blanchard was sceptical.

Heck, now the option of identifying as non-binary is more salient, FtMs are barely a thing for autoandrophiles to be a sub-thing of.

Are autoandrophiles even a thing?

They undoubtedly exist, although they’re quite rare, partially because paraphilias in general are rare in women.

Personal intervention? Not unless I was literal family to the kid, or similarly close due to other events. Adults trying to slyly undermine a parent’s agenda is a nasty thing even when well-intentioned. The kind of bond needed to trust that from the kid’s perspective is significant. Otherwise, it’s either not going to stick, or you’re gonna have erratic results because the child has no training or instinct to defend against grooming. From what you say, the parents do seem to be abusing the poor boy, but being quite frank, child abuse is a fairly common thing in various gradations and breaking out of the abuse is usually going to happen in or after puberty if it’s going to happen at all. Trying to break a five-year-old’s trust of his parents sounds like it could lead to some much darker places.

As for the state. Essentially never, outside of truly bright lines, like permanent mutilation or death. The state is so ponderous and ignorant that bringing its power to bear on something as delicate as personal relationships is incredibly unwise and guaranteed to yield destruction. So forbidding hormone poisoning and surgical mutilation of a minor who cannot consent to such things (which adult consent would lower them to merely, in my eyes, deeply unwise self-experimentation) well within the state’s purview, with little possibility of overreach.

Of course, this is from the perspective of one who would rather other moral busybodies and the cruel state stay out of the serious business of how he does good for his children and is willing to yield some theoretical power over the families of others for political consistency on that point.

Where do you all draw the line? At what point would you intervene? When should the State intervene?

I'm sufficiently white trash that the cultural norm of my people is to call out bullshit, but not so white trash I'm willing to cavalierly go to prison. I'd take a foam sword for myself, offer one to the kid, and ask if he wanted to play. If the parents seemed reluctant to let him, I wouldn't force it -- legally I couldn't -- but I would obnoxiously question why they're doing this to their son.

I'd willingly burn down every bridge I had with that family to force a social confrontation. If I ended up convinced the situation's abusive, I'd call CPS.

So, what are you reading?

I'm adding Hall and Stead's A People's History of Classics to my list. Definitely the most interesting open access find I've made.

The French Revolution by Christopher Hibbert. This is my second attempt to learn about the French Revolution, having previously read Mencius Moldbug's recommendation, same title, written by J. F. Bosher. I'm starting to think that there is so much going on that a single volume treatment leaves stuff out and the reader notices the gaps and goes "Wut!"

Hibbert is great on how terrible the Terror is. I've read as far as the execution of Danton, and now Robespierre is getting nervous. His denunciation of atheism as aristocratic has gone down poorly. I'm feeling a little lost. Is calling something aristocractic a general purpose insult, like calling some-one a NAZI is today? Was there an actual link, with atheism arising due to wealthy aristocrats sponsoring philosophes. Did the denunciation upset atheist sans culottes?

Ten years ago I wouldn't have had a problem with Hibbert's description of the Terror. But in recent years I've read the line "They tell you what happened to them, but they don't tell you why." too many times. Perhaps The Terror is warning me that we live on a frail raft bobbing on a sea of psychopathic cruelty and must be careful that it doesn't capsize. Perhaps The Terror is darkly hinting that the outbreak of unhinged violence is a response to previous horrors, too terrible to mention.

I have a weak clue that it might be the later. I recently blundered across this paragraph

In early 1726, Guy Auguste de Rohan-Chabot taunted Voltaire about his name change, who retorted that his name would win the esteem of the world, while Rohan would sully his own.[40] A furious Rohan arranged for his servants to beat Voltaire a few days later.[41] Seeking redress, Voltaire challenged Rohan to a duel, but the powerful Rohan family arranged for Voltaire to be arrested and imprisoned without trial in the Bastille on 17 April 1726.[42][43] Fearing indefinite imprisonment, Voltaire asked to be exiled to England as an alternative punishment, which the French authorities accepted.[44] On 2 May, he was escorted from the Bastille to Calais and embarked for England.

in Voltaire's wikipedia page. This hints that aristocrats in pre-revolutionary France abused their power unconstrained by any sense of honour or proportion. And general principles suggest that the lower classes would have got it a lot worse than Voltaire. But by page 257 Hibbert hasn't yet addressed the issue, so I don't think he will.

I am particularly troubled by the executions of nuns. If The Terror had involved gang raping the nuns, in an attempt to fuck some hedonism into them, the gears in my head would have turned and I would have computed: wait, I'm on Earth, this is a mammal thing isn't it?

But execution? Is this the Lizard People resenting that mammals are viviparous? No. I have turned aside from reading science fiction (worried that it is just made up) and I'm reading orthodox history, stuff that really happened. Yet it makes no sense. Hibbert doesn't notice that it makes no sense and makes no attempt to explain it. Hibbert is doing his job correctly; as a historian he should be telling me what happened and not filtering out the bits that make no sense. There is a dark abyss containing peoples motivations. I don't know how to look inside it, and rather suspect that it will be better for my sanity that I never do.

Trying to work my way through NoStarchPress's Computer Graphics from Scratch (caveat: got it deeply discounted during a Humble Bundle, definitely wouldn't pay full price). It's a little obnoxious because I've dabble enough in newer technologies that a lot of the early tutorials are annoyingly useless, but I'm also finding all the places I've missed conventions or misunderstood processes before.

Re-read The Left Hand of Darkness which I had read a very long time ago and remembered almost nothing from that time, so it can be counted as the first reading essentially. This novel is well known for it's exploration of gender topics, which got me interested in how it would read in 2025, being written in 1969. It actually read quite well. Since then, a lot of efforts have been made - including, unfortunately, by Le Guin herself - to make the novel be more woke then the text would support, but it did not ruin it for me (one of the reasons being I only read most the commentary after finishing the novel). Wikipedia's description of it is one of the examples of such wokification, which is as expected, and serves as another warning, if one still needs it, that trusting an anonymous woke mob to pre-chew your information for you may be convenient, but has significant dangers. I don't think I agree with all the ideas implied in the book (like "wars are caused by male hormones") but I found reading it and thinking about it enjoyable.

I love that book! Still my favorite read of all time, and one I've been intending to re-read for, fuck, over a decade now. It was a remarkably profound book when I first read it, and significantly more so for its time. Like you, I didn't agree with every idea LeGuin entertained in the novel either, but between the extensive world-building and the evolution of the relationship between the main characters I quickly went from almost bouncing off of it the first time I read it due largely to said world-building at the beginning to completely enthralled.

Picked up Cyrano de Bergerac without realising it was a play instead of a novel. Makes quick reading though.

About three-quarters of the way through Unsong.

Dungeon Crawler Carl, on the third book. It’s decently fun after the disappointing “The Devils” from Abercrombie.

The latter was not that bad, by the way. I just have to accept that Abercrombie will never reach the level of his first five books again.

I just have to accept that Abercrombie will never reach the level of his first five books again.

He's hit Brandon Sanderson levels of mediocrity.

If Mistborn is at all representative, there’s a long way to fall yet.

He started declining after The Way of Kings.

Death of the Ideal: Godclads Book 2 by OstensibleMammal. Still like Cyber Dreams overall, but by book 4 some of the plot devices were becoming repetitive and one of the major plot threads felt majorly "off" to me so I'm putting that series down for a while.

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