site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31622 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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

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

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

  • Shaming.

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

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9
Top Bottom New Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The first month of the new Italian Government and Parliament has passed, and we had a bit of small culture wars that were in majority very amusing;

The first African-born and black member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, Aboubakar Soumahoro, was elected for the Italian Left and Green Alliance. Soumahoro is know as a farming trade unionist, fighting for the rights of African-born illegal farmers working in the Italian, especially southern, fields. He was elected in an iron-granted center-left coalition college, and was one of the star of the Left, entering the Parliament with dirty boots, symbolizing his struggle for farmers. Ensuring elegies by left-wing journals, anti-racism as a flag, and promising a lot of progressive/left reforms etc

After less than 15 days, one center-left newspaper drop the bomb: Soumahoro's wife, chief of one of the immigration NGO that were part of this left-wing affiliated network of NGO and trade unions, stole millions of euros in public money destined for illegal immigrants, using them to buy property, dresses, Gucci handbags etcetera. While the immigrants and ex-collaborators of Soumahoro denunced, immediately after, that Africans were left without heating, food and water, and obliged to work in the fields under terrible conditions.

Immediately there is a storm, the Italian Left MPs denounce him, and other newspapers let know that there were a lot of doubt from many people in the coalition when Soumahoro was candidated, and at the end it was a forced decision from the top. Soumahoro first says that he does not know anything, than he published a video where he cries on camera. He went then to a TV transmission, saying that he does not know anything, and that his wife is autonomus. After a bit he suspended himself.

Way to go, I guess.

Another minor war was on credit card payments. The government permitted private business to not accept electronic pament under a certain sum, and the entire cadrè of center-of-left journalist began a 20 days straight, that is still going on, campaign of how much they hate cash and how much they use only credit and debit cards when they pay, and how much they hate people using cash.

Useless to say, this was not a very good tactic when a good chunk of your population or does not have a credit card at all, or struggle to mantain their small business in front of high taxes and high cost of energy.

Fratelli d'Italia reached 32% of popularity in the last polls.

Corruption in Italian politics? Say it ain't so. Nobody could've guessed.

No, but really, do people out there genuinely expect politicians not to be dirty? Insofar I've talked to Italians, this kind of behavior is more norm than exception.

What percentage of Italian politicians do you believe profitted several millions from corruption? If this number was trully above 50, that is it was expected, Italy would be much poorer than it is.

I expect a painfully large amount of them to wish they could, and to grasp the opportunity to do so if they should get one.

Italy would be much poorer than it is.

Not sure why this keeps popping up, but Italy is the 8th largest economy in the world by GDP, and 30th on per-capita GDP. Those are respectively 3rd and 12th in the EU, and Italy is almost exactly average for per-capita GDP in the EU (behind France, Germany, Benelux, and Scandies but ahead of the Iberians and far ahead of eastern Europe). Certainly there are impoverished areas and populations, but on the whole Italy is a wealthy country, and corruption at the higher ecehlons of society would certainly amout to millions.

It is unclear from the summary that he, rather than his wife, did anything wrong, nor is there anything stating that his wife took advantage of his position in order to misappropriate the money. Anyhow, in fact I expect that neither politicians nor their wives will steal public funds, because in fact such incidents are exceedingly rare.

He did nothing, from what we know until know. The problem is purely political, because the deputy that was elected as a symbol of the fight against oppression of immigrants in the fields and against the right-wing rhetoric of NGO that steal public money in the name of inclusion and integration actually has a wife who is chief of an NGO that stole money for this reason and who imported immigrants to work in the fields.

He did nothing, from what we know until know.

He is either extremely dim or he must have known what was going on and failed to prevent / right it. Both possibilities are quite damning.

The psychological mechanism is less "Orders from above" and more "I am an enlightened journalist who is above the deplorable working class who votes right wing and likes cash", I guess.

Do they really? Utopian weirdos hate cash more than random normies like it, I think.

Corner store owners selling kebab aren't really representative of all plebes, I guess. I'm sure the guy who doesn't wanna shell out the cash to debit card providers prefers cash. I'm not sure rando dockworkers or truck drivers do.

They would now! If they would two years ago.. Not a clue.

I think cash is a way of understating income for tax purposes. The benefit of this tax evasion is customer price is cheaper.

I’m American working class, not Italian or even European, but the social norm over here is for blue collar workers to carry around quite a bit more cash than their white collar counterparts.

They do so out here, too. I just think there's a pretty wide gap between preferring cash and hating debit cards, credit cards, what have you. It's just not really a political issue here, and I pray it will elude Moloch's notice.

Because taxes are very high, a lot of the Italian economy is a bit grey, especially SMEs and local shops and sellers, and the population is old. A lot of people doing so can evade a bit of taxes.

A lot of them like it for the same reason. You don't have to be terminally online to recognise that at least a third of the populace creams their pants at the idea of pushing others around.

I help out at a farmer's market on the weekend (it's challenging, good exercise, and a great way to meet women) and when covid hit it was necessary to get an eftpos device, and a lot of people only carried their cards. But over the past six months the trend is starting to go back to cash, and by far the reasoning most often cited is "we have to use cash more or the government will completely control us".

And while farmer's markets are a libertarianish concept, you get people from all over the political spectrum and all walks of life - teachers, bankers, small business owners, labourers and traders (those are the professions of the first five people I can recall saying they are using cash because of government control.) Farmer's markets were rated essential in my state during covid however, which might be skewing things a bit. But I think it opened up a lot of people's eyes to the issue of authoritarianism.

I also believe that this is inevitable and that we will find ourselves in some government-backed social credit "crypto" dystopia in the not-so distant future

I see this as the most major threat to human welfare that is coming our way and it's much more tangible than AI risk or climate change or what have you, because the tech exists right now and the will to use it is there right now also, the only reason we are not already in such a tyranny is inertia. It wouldn't take much to get us there, just 5 years and a couple of crises.

Sadly the only way out that I see is to induce a circulation of elites and replace the managerials by the rising technocapitalists. They alone have the power base to challenge the established elite and the potential ideological commitments to prevent them from being a cure worse than the disease. But what a tall order this is.

The problem besides the dystopian control aspect is the destruction of the price signal. We already see a lot of weakness in price function with government putting thumbs on scales, etc. But social credit system goes further.

Social credit system effectively replaces market transaction. In doing so, it replaces effectively allocating scarce resource with allocating scarce resources based on what the government believes is best (which I think is less efficient).

Consider the classic I, Pencil. The argument was no one in the world can fully build a pencil. But via market transactions, a vast swath of people can interact to build a pencil. Moreover, if there are disruptions (eg Forrest fire destroying a lot of trees) prices send signals to change the composition of pencils (eg if I’m a pen manufacturer, then I raise the cost of wood pencils and likely increase the production of say plastic pencils; the public reacts on the margin to buying more plastic pencils thereby rationing the now more scarce wood.)

The brilliance here of course is that consumers don’t need to know why wood pencils cost more; they just need to shift their consumption. In the end reality trumps belief (despite how one might feel that pencils should be wood ultimately there will be a shift — either perm or temporary to plastic pencils because wood pencils relatively become more expensive)

Stated differently the market is of human action if not human design.

But let’s say social credit system replaces money. Let’s say the person in charge decides wood pencils are better and gives bonus points for manufacturing wood pencils and punishes people for raising prices on wood pencils. What happens there? Well, I the pencil manufacturer follow my incentive and keep the cost of the wood pencil the same. But reality is still reality and there is only so much wood. Thus, there is either a shortage of pencils (as consumer patterns don’t change) or there is a shortage of another good that uses wood. And maybe the person in charge of the social credit system institutes a cross subsidy for that other good further distorting the picture.

Prices are an elegant spontaneous order system that clears markets precisely because it doesn’t require human design (just human action). As communist bloc showed, economies are too difficult for human design. Social credit system is again trying to put human design back into the system which will cause the same problems.

Fratelli d'Italia reached 32% of popularity in the last polls.

In most places it seems like it is unusual for a party to keep gaining in the polls like this (~+4% in two months) after an election win. Is this normal for Italy or is there some other mechanism explaining this?

Probably the rest of the Italian right wing camp flocking under the banners of the leader of the pack?

Most places like where..?

It isn't so unusual in Europe at all for that to happen. I don't know what it's like elsewhere, but it doesn't look that unusual to me.

It isn't so unusual in Europe at all for that to happen.

This was basically the question. The "In power -> Less Popular" flow is obvious in US/Canada, and also what seems like the UK.

Not OP but it's a valid question not even borne of ameri-centrism. It seems rational to me that most of the worldwide electorate believes politicians until they're in power and don't do what they say.

what seems like the UK.

The UK has had Conservative rule for such a long time now that I don't see how this follows. People keep voting for them. Their party is a hugely succesful one. How exactly does it seem like in power -> less popular applies there?

It seems rational to me that most of the worldwide electorate believes politicians until they're in power and don't do what they say.

Why? The world is a pretty big place, and most democracies don't look like the Anglo ones do.

The government permitted private business to not accept electronic pament under a certain sum,

Is this a tactic for avoiding VAT?

The "Twitter Censorship Files" (WSJ, archived link) promise to shed some light on the Hunter Biden's Laptop Saga:

The Twitter documents published by Mr. Taibbi include part of what appears to be a memo from James Baker, the Twitter deputy general counsel. “I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked. At this stage, however, it is reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that caution is warranted,” Mr. Baker wrote.

He continued that “there are some facts that indicate that the materials may have been hacked, while there are others indicating that the computer was either abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes. We simply need more information.”

With an election so close, any delay helped the Biden campaign, which was trying to squelch the Hunter Biden story that raised questions about what Joe Biden knew about Hunter’s foreign business dealings. Twitter went ahead and suppressed the story across its platform, going so far as to suspend the New York Post’s Twitter account.

Apparently, no light can be shed without heat. Matt Taibbi agreed to certain conditions in obtaining the files:

Very shortly, I’m going to begin posting a long thread of information on Twitter, at my account, @mtaibbi. [...] There’s a long story I hope to be able to tell soon, but can’t, not quite yet anyway. What I can say is that in exchange for the opportunity to cover a unique and explosive story, I had to agree to certain conditions.

The conversation is therefore veering towards journalistic ethics rather than the content. That WSJ op-ed I linked to above leads with the following:

Elon Musk’s release of internal emails relating to Twitter’s 2020 censorship is news by any definition, even if the mainstream media dismiss it. There will be many threads to unspool as more is released, but a couple of points are already worth making.

The first is that Mr. Musk would do the country a favor by releasing the documents all at once for everyone to inspect. So far he’s dribbled them out piecemeal through journalist Matt Taibbi’s Twitter feed, which makes it easier for the media to claim they can’t report on documents because they can’t independently confirm them.

FYI the URL that the text "archived link" points to is the same as the one "WSJ" is pointing to.

Thanks! Fixed it.

Mr. Musk would do the country a favor by releasing the documents all at once for everyone to inspect.

When Snowden leaked all the NSA files, he made the journos agree to terms as well, and knew well not to do a Bradley Manning. And as I recall the WSJ was of the opinion that this was prudent and that you should never just throw confidential material out in the open without the scrutiny of journalists.

Given we don't know the nature of the agreement, and that the same reasons might be operating here (Twitter is very much an intelligence asset and I'm almost completely certain there were spooks on staff), it seems like special pleading to me.

Covering the story around the story to avoid covering the story is the canonical way to bury scandals after all, as French politician Charles Pasqua would say: "when one is getting fucked by a scandal, one must induce a scandal-inside-the-scandal, and if necessary a scandal-inside-the-scandal-inside-the-scandal, until nobody understands anything anymore".

Covering the story around the story to avoid covering the story is the canonical way to bury scandals after all, as French politician Charles Pasqua would say: "when one is getting fucked by a scandal, one must induce a scandal-inside-the-scandal, and if necessary a scandal-inside-the-scandal-inside-the-scandal, until nobody understands anything anymore".

That's a good summary of the laptop story in general. Every time I try to figure out why we're supposed to care about the laptop, it's some amount of 'because look who suppressed the laptop story' and never 'because the following turned out to be on the laptop.'

I'm also a little confused about the importance of the laptop. I thought the publicly known facts were damning enough. Hunter Biden got a cushy very high salary job with a company in Ukraine, and Hunter Biden's only real qualification for that job was that he was the Vice President's son. It seems pretty clear that he was selling insider access to the US political process.

Hunter could possibly have gotten a cushy job for nothing and then done nothing; given his personal history, that seems like it should be the default assumption. But this would have only looked especially bad for Hunter Biden, and no one was voting for him.

At the very least, the laptop includes cryptographically-signed e-mails from Pozharskyi, a Burisma executive, thanking Hunter for an introduction to his father in 2015, which the White House denied and continued to deny after the e-mail was first released. There are some ways that this might not be illegal, and a far greater number where it's the sort of illegal that doesn't actually get prosecuted (who wants to learn about FARA today, not fucking me), but it's still much stronger evidence of a scandal involving Joe Biden.

Separately, there's evidence included that is almost certainly violation of the law for Hunter, in ways that mouching off international executives might not be, and that had connections or funding from Joe Biden. The first half of that's not new -- getting the kid glove treatment when a drug addict was throwing around handguns was an older story -- and while it's improper it's one of those things that's got a long history. The latter is a more serious issue. I don't think Joe realized he was funding Russian-linked prostitution rings when wiring his son cash, but it's also a pretty big oopsie.

It’s about tying it to Biden Sr.

Hunter is thoroughly damned and will never hold public office in America, but that isn’t a strong attack on Biden. Failing to control/raise/whatever his kids is a legitimate criticism that’s too decoupled to disqualify him from the Presidency. If the VP was personally involved in delivering his son a cushy job, that’s a lot more ammunition.

So long as the laptop remains “suppressed,” it gets to be a Mueller report, sure to destroy Democrats’ faith in Joe Biden. It turns out most people don’t really want to see pictures of Hunter’s dick, so hard-hitting investigative reporting has been...limited.

Hunter could plausibly have lied to foreign companies about influence that he would never deliver on, and Joe could have been 100% ignorant that Hunter was doing this.

If Hunter was giving Joe a 10% cut, funneling the money to him by paying his credit card bills, Joe not being on the take or being in the dark becomes very implausible.

William Clinton was done in for a blowjob. Nationwide riots errupted due to a drug using felon. Sometimes the underlying thing is unimportant, but the way it is dealt with arouses concern.

William Clinton was done in for a blowjob

If he hasn't gone on TV sitting next to his wife and lied about it to the American public he wouldn't have suffered for it as he did.

Nationwide riots errupted due to a drug using felon

... getting murdered slowly in front of a camera.

Seeing a pattern here?

I'm pretty sure that was the point @huxley5000 was in fact trying to make.

You could say the same thing about the Watergate scandal. The initial story was small potatoes compared to the actions to suppress it that followed, but in the end it felled a US president.

But that's all incidental details on top of 'some guys broke into a building' which is obviously illegal to anyone watching.

I don't think the initial story is small potatoes. The initial story is the VP of the US trading money for influence.

It’s just the GOP version of the Russian collusion hoax- it justifies their base’s preexisting prejudices and looks ridiculous to the opposing tribe.

Whether either is accurate is completely irrelevant.

A quick summary...

  • Biden had long been suspected of being in the pocket of the Russian mob with rumors to this effect dating back to the late 90s.

  • Biden's son Hunter, leaves his broken laptop at a one of those "Geek Squad"-type repair places and forgets to pick it up.

  • The tech snoops around the hard drive and in addition to a lot of sex and drug stuff they find correspondences that appears to confirm that Biden had been accepting money from foreign (mostly Russian and Ukrainian) oil oligarchs in exchange for political favors during his time as VP with his soin the conten acting as the intermediary. (Whether it was legal for the tech to go snooping in the first place is part of "the scandal within the scandal")

  • The tech contacts the FBI with the above evidence sometime in the spring of 2020.

  • On October 14th 2020 the NY Post publishes an article claiming that the FBI has proof that Biden has been accepting bribes and is actively working to suppress this information lest it help Trump win reelection.

  • 12 Hours later the NY Post's official Twitter account is suspended and the FBI raids the home of the article's author. Ostensibly for distributing illegally obtained documents. (see previously mentioned "the scandal within the scandal")

There's lots of talk in the moment about whether the FBI documents and alleged contents of the laptop's HD linked in the article are genuine and whether the NY Post violated journalistic ethics by publishing them, with the general consensus being "no", and "yes" respectively. The latest wrinkle is that it looks like that the FBI believed the documents and contents to be genuine and formally asked social media companies to suppress the NY Post story.

Edit to clarify: As to "why we should care" it's yet another instance in recent memory of the FBI acting as a partisan hit-quad. It also undermines the wider "Russian collusion" narrative by putting the media in the position of having to defend Biden against the very allegations that they had leveled against Trump.

There's lots of talk in the moment about whether the FBI documents and alleged contents of the laptop's HD linked in the article are genuine and whether the NY Post violated journalistic ethics by publishing them, with the general consensus being "no", and "yes" respectively. The latest wrinkle is that it looks like that the FBI believed the documents and contents to be genuine and formally asked social media companies to suppress the NY Post story.

This paragraph appears backwards, to me. My understanding is that the general consensus is that the FBI docs/HD contents are legitimate (as recognized by the WaPo last week), and that the NYPost did not violate journalistic ethics by reporting on them. Maybe I'm misreading but that appears to be the opposite of what the quoted paragraph implies.

Also, my read of the Taibbi release is that there was no official government pressure to censor the Hunter Biden story directly; instead, there were lots of internal Twitter T&S types running around desperately trying to backfill reasons for their own desire to squelch the story, and sticking by those reasons even when told by Comms that their reasons were wrong.

The Zuckerberg interview on Rogan, and now the Special Agent Elvis Chan deposition show that the FBI had told FB and other social media companies that they had reason to suspect a non-specific information op around the time they became aware of the Hunter Biden allegations, but I haven't yet seen any indication that the FBI specifically ordered the story in particular squelched. Instead, right now it appears to be yet more Moldbuggian effortless coordination, where the FBI could count on ideologically-simpatico T&S teams to squelch the Hunter Story if given any vague, non-specific excuse to cover their asses with.

[Edit: okay, so it appears that one of the Twitter people responsible for the decision to kill the Hunter Biden story was James Baker, former general counsel for the FBI, and who appears to have been key in keeping the Russiagate hoaxes going, including laundering the false Alfabank story through the press. I take it back; no particular coordination between FBI and Twitter was necessary. There was an inside man.]

This sounds about right. No idea if it reflects the consensus among media outlets. I think the OP was skewering them as dishonestly running damage control.

This paragraph appears backwards, to me. My understanding is that the general consensus is that the FBI docs/HD contents are legitimate (as recognized by the WaPo last week),

The general consensus now may be that the laptop story is probably legitimate but back in October of 2020 is it was pretty much impossible to bring up the topic of the NY Post getting banned from twitter without someone linking some variant of this story in response.

FWIW there are a couple users here from whom I'm still waiting on an apology. Or at least an acknowledgement.

Ah that makes sense.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-biden-censored

Hunter Biden was employed in highly paid positions despite being a very unstable guy. Joe Biden was a partner or possible partner in Hunter's business deals. Hunter Biden wrote in the emails insisting that most discussion of Joe Biden's involvement happen not in writing. We know that Hunter said that Joe Biden was going to be paid for his involvement in at least one business venture, although we don't know if that deal was ever completed. We don't know that it wasn't completed either. There may be other Joe-Hunter joint business ventures that weren't featured in the emails because of the aformentioned desire for them to be not-in-writing.

It seems like Hunter was getting money from these companies in exchange for favors from the VP of the US.

One such favor:

Concurrently, Biden was involving himself in ousting the Ukranian General Prosecutor for alleged corruption, an action that benefited Burisma.

"how Biden could justify expending so much energy as Vice President demanding that the Ukrainian General Prosecutor be fired, and why the replacement — Yuriy Lutsenko, someone who had no experience in law; was a crony of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko; and himself had a history of corruption allegations — was acceptable if Biden’s goal really was to fight corruption in Ukraine rather than benefit Burisma or control Ukrainian internal affairs for some other objective."

"Third, the media rush to exonerate Biden on the question of whether he engaged in corruption vis-a-vis Ukraine and Burisma rested on what are, at best, factually dubious defenses of the former Vice President. Much of this controversy centers on Biden's aggressive efforts while Vice President in late 2015 to force the Ukrainian government to fire its Chief Prosecutor, Viktor Shokhin, and replace him with someone acceptable to the U.S., which turned out to be Yuriy Lutsenko. These events are undisputed by virtue of a video of Biden boasting in front of an audience of how he flew to Kiev and forced the Ukrainians to fire Shokhin, upon pain of losing $1 billion in aid."

"But two towering questions have long been prompted by these events, and the recently published emails make them more urgent than ever: 1) was the firing of the Ukrainian General Prosecutor such a high priority for Biden as Vice President of the U.S. because of his son's highly lucrative role on the board of Burisma, and 2) if that was not the motive, why was it so important for Biden to dictate who the chief prosecutor of Ukraine was?

The standard answer to the question about Biden's motive -- offered both by Biden and his media defenders -- is that he, along with the IMF and EU, wanted Shokhin fired because the U.S. and its allies were eager to clean up Ukraine, and they viewed Shokhin as insufficiently vigilant in fighting corruption."

I'm having difficulty summarizing. Just read the article.

Every time I try to figure out why we're supposed to care about the laptop, it's some amount of 'because look who suppressed the laptop story' and never 'because the following turned out to be on the laptop.'

It's supposed to matter because it's evidence that a former the the PUSA was, in his former role as Vice PUSA, accepting bribes from Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs. This was hardly a nothingburger then, and in 2022 it's more like a nukingburger.

I don't think having journalists agree to terms is per se improper, and I also don't have reason to doubt that the general thrust of Taibbi's reporting (Twitter employees tried hard to make up reasons to suppress the Hunter story) is off-base, but I'm not really a fan of how this is being deployed. Musk has an obvious incentive to tar the previous management of his company in as bad of a light as possible, and he has a long practice of having his employees sign NDAs. He can't claim to be motivated by the noble pursuit of transparency here, and it's reasonable to be suspicious that he's potentially hiding some things. Taibbi is just one journalist, and he has his biases. Although I don't have reason to believe Taibbi is acting dishonestly, I can't think of an argument against having more scrutinizing eyes examine the document trove. It's needlessly giving ammunition to people who are already primed to dismiss the revelations.

The comparisons to Edward Snowden establishing conditions don't really match up. Similar to Musk, Snowden would be incentivized for his leak to be as much of a bombshell as possible. But if I recall correctly, Snowden had multiple journalist outfits examine the documents, and all of them were transparent about what conditions he set (namely, don't disclose things that could endanger current operatives or something) edit: this did not happen

But if I recall correctly, Snowden had multiple journalist outfits examine the document

You do not recall correctly. He took his leaks to the guardian, because he trusted Glenn Greenwald, and the guardian decided to involve the nyt because they were outside the British government's jurisdiction and the guardian was being threatened with legal action.

Also I don't understand what you are talking about re transparency about what conditions he set? Don't disclose things that could endanger current operatives wasn't the only condition, Snowden wasn't the only one who set conditions (both newspapers did too, and both had conversations with their governments about it) and there is zero reason to believe they were transparent about every condition.

You're right and I was wrong. It's true that several journalistic outfits had access to the data, but my recollection about how transparent they were about their publication decisions was faulty.

It is funny how establishment mainstream media is now clutching its pearls with journalistic ethics when they have the FTX fraudster running around in an "apology tour" and saying that he was bumbling buffoon, where there are court filings showing corporate malfeasance by the fraudster. We are witnessing corruption in the establishment political class of every color and the media is simply trying to protect itself with misdirection of their own corruption when it comes to Twitter! This is not about politics anymore it is about the powerful establishment doing whatever it wants without the interest of the public in mind anymore. So whatever I see more Twitter revelations I'll just consider it corruption, it is as simple as that.

Eh, what’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?

There’s more than one outfit covering the news. Some of them might even employ more than one reporter. Why would you expect coverage of a billionaire scammer to match opinions on coverage of censorship for a political hot potato?

Well if you think that WSJ has covered SBF the same way that the editorial board goes after Musk in various opinion pieces since the Twitter take over it is up to you. The point is that the billionaire scammer was a significant contributor to politicians that regulated the financial market which should be a political hot potato too, the same way that elected officials having back channel to remove tweets and twitter accounts is. But if you think that is unreasonable to hold politicians accountable for actions or inaction that obviously isn't in the public's interests, you are missing the point of journalisms role in a democracy.

So far he’s dribbled them out piecemeal through journalist Matt Taibbi’s Twitter feed, which makes it easier for the media to claim they can’t report on documents because they can’t independently confirm them.

Dribbling out documents piecemeal is standard procedure. Your opponent doesn't know that you may produce a document tomorrow that contradicts some excuse he gives today, so it's harder for him to lie about it. (Although that doesn't work so well if he doesn't have to lie because the media buries the story and he doesn't need to say anything at all.)

It was doomed from the start, from the second the media busted out the 'you have to release them all at once' shit they mercilessly mock any time they want to leak things and the government says that. Who, whom as always.

NYTs has finally covered it

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/04/business/media/elon-musk-twitter-matt-taibbi.html

Ignoring the story, ironically, only drew more attention .

Now Elon is revolutionizing journalism, after cars and rockets.

See also PMCM’s commentary from the previous thread. I won’t go quite as far as he did, but I think he has the gist of it: no smoking gun, no government backchannel, “just” Twitter being reflexively partisan. It’s shitty management and removing the Post was an injustice, which is strictly less exciting than CEOs bending over for the Deep State.

The lukewarm coverage probably has something to do with all the sex and drugs. If you’re going to pick a headline that makes your paper look like a tabloid, I think the reflex is to try and justify it. Without a more salacious connection to Biden Sr., mainstream outlets find it easier to ignore.

Did anything come of /u/MaxwellHill?

For those unfamiliar, /u/MaxwellHill is a Reddit account that moderated a bunch of big subreddits and posted a lot, many of their posts being highly upvoted and widely seen. In short, it was very influential on Reddit. When Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested, the account suddenly stopped posting (and it hasn't posted since). Some people noticed this, and, speculating that Maxwell herself was behind the account, started looking through its posts. They found some more circumstantial evidence, like a mix of British and American English (Maxwell moved between the two countries), and breaks in posting lasting a few days at a time that lined up with major events in Maxwell's life, during which she would have been distracted or busy. There's much more to it than this; you can read a summary here.

The little media coverage it received at the time was of course entirely dismissive; see for example the article in Vice.

I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories – I think Epstein may well have killed himself, for example – but this one aroused my suspicion at the time, and it's strange how it suddenly fizzled out. The Vice article above mentions private messages exchanged between /u/MaxwellHill and some other moderators (there are screenshots out there, but those are trivial to fake), but if the person behind the account was still there, why did they stop posting, and why haven't they started again after over two years?

If it was Maxwell, why didn't she give the password to someone to make a post and remove any suspicion? "Hi, I'm still here and I'm not Ghislaine Maxwell, but I'm going to abandon this account because of all the harassment I've been receiving." (Whether there was any harassment is irrelevant.) Would she have been prevented from doing this? I assume she was able to communicate with her lawyer, at least.

At the time, it was speculated that Reddit wanted to cover this up, as it would be embarrassing if it was revealed that one of their most influential users was an international child trafficker. Why didn't they just take control of the account and post something? Surely the admins can do this. Or just edit the database manually, as /u/spez infamously did. To me it seems like they wanted to sweep it under the carpet, and they thought any activity would just bring more attention. If this was their strategy, it appears to have worked.

IIRC, maxwellhill was spotted responding to PMS/modmails after the maxwell thing. https://web.archive.org/web/20211213031223/https://twitter.com/hasharin/status/1280890362945560577

They've also requested their comment/post history be excluded from pushshift, for some reason, which i don't think was true a year ago. "ghislaine maxwell was /u/maxwellhill" fundamentally doesn't make sense, mrs. high flying elite mistress doesn't gain anything from being a reddit mod and providing the same kind of 'post pop science' or 'censor 1000 spammers and 1 bigot per day' service that tens of thousands of random normal people do.

IIRC, maxwellhill was spotted responding to PMS/modmails after the maxwell thing. https://web.archive.org/web/20211213031223/https://twitter.com/hasharin/status/1280890362945560577

As I said, this is trivial to fake.

"ghislaine maxwell was /u/maxwellhill" fundamentally doesn't make sense, mrs. high flying elite mistress doesn't gain anything from being a reddit mod and providing the same kind of 'post pop science' or 'censor 1000 spammers and 1 bigot per day' service that tens of thousands of random normal people do.

She was a rich heiress. It's not like she had anything better to do all day.

The bit about Pushshift, if true, is the only real piece of evidence against the theory that I've seen. Every other argument boils down to "it sounds implausible" – and I agree that it does, but considering all the evidence, it would have to be a hell of a coincidence.

I’m pretty confident it was her. She even posted about her pet interests (ocean projects), and one of her earliest Reddit comments had to do with how to make bot accounts. The probability of posting almost every day for years and then suddenly stopping for good when she’s arrested is highly significant. I believe her family home was called “Maxwell Hill” or some variant.

I think what happened is that early in Reddit’s rise, they gave individuals connected to the media Reddit accounts, which said individuals handed over to paid employees for manipulation. They were associated with the person but used by employees of organizations of interns. Maxwell would then push up articles that her friends / clients wanted boosted, censor others, etc. She was known for doing things like deleting when a news post didn’t do well, and then re-publishing at a time for greater engagement.

I remember this story vaguely but haven't thought about it since. Alternative unhinged theory explaining this:

At the time, it was speculated that Reddit wanted to cover this up, as it would be embarrassing if it was revealed that one of their most influential users was an international child trafficker.

Much, much more embarrassing: if an international child trafficker used Reddit to recruit underage prostitutes. That's not just a bad story in the press, it's a potentially fatal dagger to the heart of a company cleaning itself up for an IPO. While conspiracy theories around this tended towards the bemused "Oh, isn't that funny, a billionaire hanger-on also just loved karma-whoring on default subs posting Trump Derangement Syndrome bullshit, she's just like the rest of us!" I think a much darker theory makes more sense of why she would spend this much time on this particular project. Theoretical support:

-- Reddit's userbase is majority male, somewhere between 61% and 75% depending which shitty survey you use, but the nested nature of Reddit makes that number play differently. There are tons of subreddits that are supermajority female, though ironically the female focused defaults like twoxchromosomes and actuallesbians probably aren't among them; if I go on /r/thebachelor I'm nearly guaranteed to be talking to actual women. And with 50 million daily active users at last guess, that would give us somewhere between 10 and 15 million female daily users. Age was harder to pin down from casual googling, the numbers all came up weird, and underaged users probably tend to lie about being 18 rather than admit to being 14 anyway. /r/teenagers has ~3,000,000 subs and 6,000 users browsing as of this writing, so that gives us a lower bound, then again who knows how many are real teenagers? We can probably guess that several million teenage girls use Reddit on a daily basis if we assume a kind of bell curve around the ages of users.

-- A well-used reddit account is a great source of credibility. I buy vintage watches off /r/watchexchange in a trusting way that I really wouldn't off any other internet site, even ebay or other retail sites, because I can look at the seller's profile and go through his old comments and determine if he seems "real" in a way I can't anywhere else. I bought a vintage Omega Seamaster as a graduation gift for my wife off /r/watchexchange, and I gave the guy credibility because there were so many comments in /r/dickstretching (or something like that, I might have the name wrong years later) where he talked about trying to lengthen his dick/restore his foreskin. And, look I know GPT has improved since then, but it's tough to fake that kind of weirdness sprinkled in among stuff about watches and sports teams. I know with a great deal of certainty that's a real guy, and the transaction worked out perfectly, great bargain. Because the trust problem can be solved on Reddit in a way that it can't on other transaction sites, I'm more willing to make risky real life transactions with Reddit users than I would be with any other internet population.

-- As a sub-conclusion from the above, Reddit is the best dating app on the internet. it is astonishingly easy to get laid on Reddit if you try.* Because reddit allows you to very easily produce a curated and credible profile. Make a new account where you only comment in fitness subs, high-status hobby subs, subs for female interests, probably not dickstretching, get above 1k comment karma. Tell the truth, but only the truth that shows your good sides, stay positive, probably don't do culture war stuff. Now you can use this account to message women on r4r subs, or start pm convos with women on associated interest subs and see where they go. They look at your profile, they see your post in /r/weightroom about your recent Smolov Jr for OHP run, they see you post in /r/longboys about your rescue greyhound, in /r/books about your thoughts on The Committed, you seem like a real well-rounded person in a way that can't be achieved on any other dating app.**

-- Reddit already has a sex worker problem. /r/gonewild girls probably don't stop at pics for the right fees, and I'd imagine the subreddits just go down like nesting dolls from there. I'm not that familiar with this end of reddit and idk how to find out about it, anyone here know more on the topic? But I'd guess that there are escorts on the site, and reddit doesn't really age verify so...

-- The MaxwellHill account accumulated millions in karma from posting banal articles in default subs. The kind of milquetoast blue tribe stuff that gets upvotes, but that I can't imagine why one would bother doing it over and over. Unless one is collecting karma. Probably because the user is a weird basement autist, possibly because the user was trying to accumulate massive karma as massive credibility.

So, unhinged conspiracy theory concluded from the above: Ghislaine Maxwell used her Reddit account to recruit young girls into the Epstein scheme. Or at least attempted to, it would probably be just as damaging to reddit to have evidence she tried as to have evidence she succeeded. Slide into their PMs about a comment they made in /r/environment, after a bit drop that she is actually on the board of several environmental charities (Maxwell was) and would love to fly a bright young girl like you out for a conference, we love to hear young voices, oh don't worry we can pay for everything, we can even get you a job...

Reddit is letting the story die silently, wisely, rather than offering anything to address it such that problems might result with the story given.

*YMMV, and before anyone asks, No, absolutely not, I have no idea how this would project downward to underage girls. But I see no principled reason to think it wouldn't.

**Insta, TikTok et al can achieve something similar, but only via photos/videos, and they're known to be more curated and fake, so less credible. Reddit is known, even amongst its own users, as a dirty little secret and thus the "real" you. Twitter could probably achieve something similar, but while I'm not a power user I feel like it's harder to navigate Twitter in such a way as to produce the same effect, and it typically is less pseudonymous. Regardless, none would offer Maxwell the mix of normal pseudonymity and extensive credibility that Reddit can give. A well used Reddit account is unique in giving something approaching old-style bluecheck credibility without ever posting your real name or face.

Don't know anything about it but wouldn't shock me, and all the more reason to bury the high profile story.

Goes back to the "internet content is produced by insane people, or at least outliers" stats.

He states, nervously looking at his own post and personal histories.

You can say “jannies.” Some of our resident custodial specialists even self-identify as such.

Sorry, this is not addressing the content of your comment, but "I bought this expensive watch because of what the guy posted about trying to make his dick bigger" is certainly an unusual way to do comparison shopping, but if it worked out for you, best of luck! 😁

I just can't see Maxwell herself putting in time on Reddit like this. Maybe hiring some assistant to do it, which would also tie in with the account going silent when Maxwell was off doing stuff etc. But in general, didn't she have easier ways of finding impressionable and naive young women?

He was selling it though, because it didn't work. If I'm reading this right it only made his dick stretchy. This would have been obvious to any student of history - the omega seamasters were used by regimental soldiers of the British navy in world war 2, whose balls hung so low that they could swing them over their shoulders.

Sorry, this is not addressing the content of your comment, but "I bought this expensive watch because of what the guy posted about trying to make his dick bigger" is certainly an unusual way to do comparison shopping, but if it worked out for you, best of luck!

A fancier way of saying this is that I bought it for half of dealer cost, and he sold it for more than a dealer would have given him, and we were able to cut out the middleman because his comments bridged the trust gap; reading his comment history passed the Turing Test for me, bots and scammers aren't yet that sophisticated ime. I've done this a lot of times, I mentioned the dickstretcher because that's hilarious.

But in general, didn't she have easier ways of finding impressionable and naive young women?

I have no idea of the difficulty level of finding impressionable and naive young women and recruiting them to be prostitots, in real life or online. I know it's easy to seduce of-age, mature women on Reddit while remaining pseudonymous; so it strikes me it wouldn't be a bad choice, but idk how it translates to young girls. Paging Dr. Pedofascist, I need his opinion on this one.

I just can't see Maxwell herself putting in time on Reddit like this.

Why not ? Was she in some high-pressure position ? Doing some important job ?

You'd think that seeing first literally the most powerful man on Earth and then literally the richest man on Earth post obsessively on Twitter day in day out would show the idea that "people with names" wouldn't spend their time posting on social media, which Reddit, in the end, is, to be false. Sure, tweeting is faster than Reddit-posting, but still - I certainly write most of my posts here quite rapidly in the middle of doing work.

first literally the most powerful man on Earth

xi Jinping never posted on twitter, as far as I know.

As someone who semi-regularly browses /r/watchexchange (and its breakaway, /r/watch_swap), I will suggest that buying any vintage watch opens up unsavory possibilities regarding its antecedents if you allow your mind to wander that way. I generally don't. Part of the attraction of vintage timepieces is their history (though sometimes they just seem designed beautifully) the opposite of the "where has that thing been?" perspective. A chacun son gout, as the Frenchies say.

I thought it's hard to improve on the original quote in terms on "how weird can the stuff get on the internets today for you" but this response is definitely an improvement. Well done.

...is anyone else imagining an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry buys a watch like this for a friend's wife's birthday but doesn't initially let on where he got it, only to have the whole thing blow up in his face in a busy restaurant in the middle of the birthday dinner? "What kind of a sick man buys a watch from a dick-stretcher, Larry?!"

[Scene: Larry, Jeff, and Susie are getting cocktails at the bar before Ted Danson's wife, Mary's 70th birthday party.]

Susie: This is a big birthday for her, you better have gotten her a good gift Larry.

Larry: What are you picking on me for? I get great gifts.

Susie: You're always cheap, you get cheap gifts.

Larry: I get great gifts! And anyway, I got her a very nice gift! She said to me the other day she always wanted a Rolex watch, well I got her a Rolex.

Jeff: You got her a Rolex! What, are you sleeping with her? Are you having an affair with Ted's wife?

Larry: No, I'm not having an affair!

Susie: You bought her a Rolex. Why would you buy her a Rolex if you weren't having an affair?

Larry: Oh, first I'm cheap, now I'm having an affair. Well, I'll have you know, I got a really good deal on the Rolex, it wasn't that expensive. I got a good deal, we're not having an affair.

Jeff: Now I know you're lying. You're having an affair, Larry, Rolexes don't go on sale. There is no deal, you're lying.

Larry: No, it wasn't on sale. I bought it online, used. It was a good deal, I got a discount.

Susie: What discount. They're just as expensive at the dealer used you lying sack of shit. Ted's gonna kill you when he finds out.

Larry: Look, I didn't get it from a dealer, I bought it from a, from a guy on Reddit. I trusted him so I bought it from him.

Jeff: You trusted some guy on Reddit? Why would you trust him? He could be selling you anything.

Larry: Jeff, I knew I could trust him. I went through his profile and he posted things nobody would post if they were running a scam. He was posting about, about dickstretching

Susie: Dickstretching? I should have known you sick fuck with your sick fuck friends.

Jeff: Why would that make you trust him?

Larry: Well who would post that if they weren't a real person, it's too weird. He spent all that time writing about stretching out his dick, you wouldn't do that just to sell a fake Rolex.

Susie: You sick fuck! I should have known. You can't give Mary a dick stretcher's Rolex! That's disgusting.

Larry: What's disgusting? It's not like he stretched his dick with the Rolex.

Jeff: It was probably on his wrist when he was stretching.

Susie: It was on his wrist! When he was dickstretching! You sick fuck. And I knew you were cheap! You got her a disgusting dickstretcher Rolex. Ted's gonna kill you when he finds out you bought his wife a dickstretcher Rolex.

[Ted Danson enters from behind Larry]

Larry: Oh now I'm cheap again. I got her a Rolex!

Ted: You got my wife a Rolex! Are you having an affair?!

Susie: No he's not having an affair he's a sick fuck!

Larry: No, we're not having an affair, she said she always wanted a Rolex, so I got her a nice birthday gift. It's a big birthday!

Ted: You can't give her a Rolex! It's too expensive! You don't give a friend's wife a watch like that!

Jeff: Wait 'til you hear why it was cheap! He got her a dickstretcher Rolex.

Ted: A what? Larry, what is he talking about?

Larry: Look, I bought it from a guy on Reddit, he also goes on /r/dickstretching. To stretch his dick, make it longer. I got a really good price, so really, it's fine, it's not too big a gift. I got, ya know, I got the dickstretcher discount. So it's all good.

Susie: Dickstretcher discount...You sick fuck. [Hits Jeff] You and your sick fuck friends.

Ted: You can't give her that watch. You don't understand, she has always said she wanted a Rolex, but I don't like them. I got her a watch too, a really nice Grand Seiko, you can't upstage me with your dickstretcher Rolex.

Jeff: You got her a Seiko?! Instead of a Rolex?! What were you thinking?

Ted: Hey! Hey! It's a Grand Seiko! It was probably more expensive than that disgusting Rolex!

Larry: What? It's not disgusting, I cleaned it.

Susie: The fact that you think that isn't disgusting is disgusting. He stretched his dick with that watch.

Larry: Not with the watch! He stretched his dick with the watch on, at worst. Probably on his other hand! He probably stretched his dick with his right hand, and had the watch on his left wrist. So really, it was just in the room.

Ted: That's disgusting Larry. That's my wife. You're trying to give my wife a dickstretcher watch.

Jeff: You have to get that watch back. If you get her a Rolex when Ted got her a Seiko, people are gonna think you're having an affair.

Ted: Hey! I told you, it's a Grand Seiko.

Susie: Nobody cares Ted, it's still a Seiko. Larry's is a Rolex, even if it is a perverted Rolex. For her 70th birthday, a Seiko? You're both cheap fucks.

Ted: She's right Larry, you have to get that Rolex back. It would be embarrassing.

Larry: What? Then I have no gift for her? Everyone will think I'm cheap.

Susie: It's better than people knowing you're a pervert. Which is what I'll tell them if you don't take it back. You sick fuck. Dickstretching.

[Theme Music]

Compare to the scene in my home.

Mrs. FiveHour: [Opens box] OH MY GOD AN OMEGA! OH MY GOD! IT'S LIKE EXACTLY THE ONE DON DRAPER WEARS! HOW MUCH DID YOU PAY FOR THIS! WHERE DID YOU GET IT?!

Me: I got a really good deal on it! I got in on Reddit. I got a great price on it, actually. I was worried it was fake or something, but I went through the guy's profile and he seemed real.

Mrs: FiveHour: That's hilarious. How could you tell he was real?

Me: He posted a lot in weird subreddits like /r/dickstretching. You know, for restoring your foreskin and shit like that.

Mrs. FiveHour: Wild. Oh my God this is so pretty, I love it. I can't wait to get it sized down.

...

Mrs. FiveHour: Dickstretching? Well, whatever.

But we're freaks. We barely buy new shoes. Disgust reactions about things like that seem odd to me.

8/10 solid effort, but Larry would say "penis" instead of "dick". I suspect he's never said "dick" at all.

I was disappointed with it by the midway point. It's funny picturing it in my head, but it's really just the delivery I'm imagining from the actor.

Isn't it pretty trivial to figure out an account is kidnapping girls?

If any girl tells their parents that they're going to go visit a redditor and then never returns, isn't this mysterious benefactor the number one suspect for the investigation?

I don't think Epstein and Maxwell ever "kidnapped" girls, certainly not ones anyone was looking for. It was less chained in a basement and more recruited into a job you didn't want and leaving would be highly inconvenient. I don't recall any allegations of violence used to restrain anyone.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/29/ghislaine-maxwell-jeffrey-epstein-accusers-stories

All five report being approached directly in broad daylight, no indication their family's "didn't know" where they were beyond ordinary teen stuff.

then again who knows how many are real teenagers?

A lot fewer than you might think. It's really too bad the /r/drama mods didn't end up letting people know how many such PMs they received. Even assuming some totally rational explanations (someone on reddit for a decade could have easily aged in and out of /r/teenagers and gotten caught up in the mass ban) it's still rather sickening.

Well, that's disturbing but expected.

Next you'll be telling us /r/lesbian doesn't have many women on i-... Oh... Oh dear.

I could have sworn there was some Motte debunking about this particular theory closer to the actual arrest. Camas search doesn’t give me anything, though.

My prior for a wealthy English socialite trolling around on reddit is pretty low. It’s such an odd situation that I wouldn’t expect to reason out why she did(n’t) disavow the account. As such, going on a comment-history deep dive is not particularly informative.

My vague recollection is that theMotte investigation based upon Maxwell Hill being a location in Malaysia and some Malaysia specific info/comments made by the poster was that it was more likely they someone from/in Malaysia. But I don't recall the specifics, so I could be wrong.

Some of her recent comments had misspellings unusual for a native English speaker iirc

I also remember a post like this, but can't find it either. I also recall some analysis of the timing and it would have been at best very weird (i.e. middle of the night in America/England, or at the time that Maxwell was attending some public event).

The replies to https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hm1kjn/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_06_2020/fxjpqjx/ have some counter-arguments, at least. One user investigated the account's breaks in activity, and found they don't line up as well with Ghislaine's life events as is implied. Some other users chime in that the p-p-p-p-penguin reference isn't that obscure. At least one user points to activity from long ago that would make the Ghislaine hypothesis extremely strange (such as claiming to be living in the far east back in 2010--if this is just a lie, why would they use their real name and reference their home in their username?).

I think it was her too. Too many coincidences.

This talk of councidences reminds me of my second-most favorite niche conspiracy theory: “Ghislaine Maxwell killed Aaron Swartz.”

  1. Ms. Maxwell’s dad Robert made a huge part of his significant wealth by monetizing academic publishing. “Improbable as it might sound, few people in the last century have done more to shape the way science is conducted today than Maxwell.” Her Lichtensteinian trust fund is probably partly funded by remaining interests in those businesses even after they changed hands before Bob’s death.

  2. Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz famously committed suicide when facing criminal charges for trying to free academic publishing from the profit motive through piracy. “On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet, and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT.”

Trying to destroy someone’s family legacy and powerbase is a pretty classic motive for murder. Both /u/AaronSW and /u/MaxwellHill are pretty thoroughly archived, so it would be trivial to see what public interactions they had, if any… or any pattern of MH removing replies to AS. Unfortunately, I don’t have the programming experience to code something up to compare their post histories and where they intersected.

FINNISH MP LEFT OR RIGHT QUIZ - PART 2 AND FURTHER ANALYSIS

(Previous results/analysis post here)

The second part of my quiz for trying to guess whether Finnish MPs are left- or right-wing based on pictures got 70 answers, less than the first one (very expected) but still enough to get some more statistics. This time the average number of correct answers was 11.62 / 20, slightly better than previously but still essentially not that different from random chance.

List of MPs based on how many got them correct (ie. guessed correctly that left-wing MPs are leftwing and contrariwise)

LEFT MPs

99 %: Satu Hassi (Greens)

83 %: Eveliina Heinäluoma (Social Democrats)

81 %: Mirka Soinikoski (Greens)

70 %: Eeva-Johanna Eloranta (Social Democrats)

47 %: Tuula Väätäinen (Social Democrats)

43 %: Jari Myllykoski (Left Alliance)

29 %: Johannes Koskinen (Social Democrats)

Right MPs:

73 %: Veikko Vallin (The Finns)

73 %: Markus Lohi (Centre)

73 %: Kalle Jokinen (National Coalition)

71 %: Tuomas Kettunen (Centre)

61 %: Sari Multala (National Coalition)

61 %: Mika Lintilä (Centre)

57 %: Paula Risikko (National Coalition)

54 %: Terhi Koulumies (National Coalition)

53 %: Marko Kilpi (National Coalition)

54 %: Pekka Aittakumpu (Centre)

41 %: Jaana Pelkonen (National Coalition)

21 %: Sari Essayah (Christian Democrats)

17 %: Ruut Sjöblom (National Coalition)

General comments:

Physiognomy isn't really scoring points, as a theory. There are certainly indicators in dressing styles etc. (ie. red glasses and huge jewelry signifies left-wing allegiances, clean conservative dressing implies the right camp) that allow people to assign people to left/right camps, even across a modest cultural barrier, and some people were indeed succesful using those indicators, but faces alone don't seem to suffice for this purpose. Like someone said, when people talk about physiognomy, it probably usually just means "I can pick my political opponents from my political supporters because my opponents are ugly and my supporters are not).

The trend of people generally getting left-wing women and right-wing men correct continues. There's probably a strong association, particularly, with young women being left-wing and older men being right-wing, and indeed similar there is currently a developing tendency in Finland for this direction - but the traditional left parties (Left Alliance, Social Democrats) continue have a large amount of traditional working-class older male politicians still drawing a lot of votes, while the National Coalition has made a huge (and succesful) effort to draw in young women and offer them important roles in the party.

The American association of right with red tribe and left with blue tribe also creates a certain difference to Finland, where there are still significant (though contracting) pockets of rural left-wing support and, contrariwise, a right-wing party (National Coalition) that is both urban and urbane, getting some of their largest support from the capital region of Finland and also having worked hard to create an image of a right-wing party than educated, cultured urbanites can very well support, at least if they are wealthy enough.

This might be one of the things where MPs are less-than-optimal for making such guesses, as political parties will know their "type" and also know they have to sometimes actively work to privilege potential applicants outside of this type to expand their appeal. On the other hand, I'm not sure there are optimal constituencies for an experiment like this.

Cultural signifiers continue to play a role. For instance, while one might argue about the definitions of left and right here - many of the right-camp MPs here would probably be the sort of social liberal pro-market types who would make absolutely no bones about that in US they'd be Democrats - there are also some strong social conservatives here that were difficult for many. Sari Essayah represents Christian Democrats, probably the only party in Finland that really represents Christian conservatism (The Finns also sort of do but mostly concentrate on anti-immigration, anti-EU and anti-environmentalist agendas) and which still campaigns against permissive abortion laws or same-sex marriage.

Pekka Aittakumpu, who was put on the right by 54 %, is also a Christian conservative, one of the few ones in parties outside of Christian Democrats or The Finns. So many people putting Aittakumpu on the left was a surprise to me, he's a conservative Lutheran pastor from Northern Finland and to me he also very much looks like one.

If one wants to run such an experiment in the future, it might be interesting to use American state-level politicians - I would not expect Americans to know state-level politicians from outside their state, or inside their state, as well. And could Europeans pick Democrats from Republicans by face alone? Of course there would be the factor that most ethnic minority politicians would be Democrats, but it would also be interesting if there are different looks between, for instance, Democratic and Republican Hispanic pols.

You are really milking this arent you?

I'm not trying to piss on your bonfire, but you can't pull a signal out of all that noise; it's statistically impossible. All the commentary could have been made independent of the test results.

I'm not about to post any more about it (here at least), myself. Since some indicated they wanted to see if they notice more patterns, I created another test and then presented the results.

I'll second that it was a cool exercise and analysis!

It might be interesting to do the state house from states like Texas and Louisiana which still have an appreciable number of rural, blue dog democrats to see if people mostly guess them as republicans.

which still campaigns against permissive abortion laws or same-sex marriage.

That reminds me of a question I wanted to ask an actual Finn: as I understand it, Finnish abortion law requires (or required until recently?) medical justification for abortion. Was this strictly applied, or were medical justification given as a matter of course, or somewhere in between? Or am I completely misunderstanding Finnish abortion law?

From what I've heard, it was basically a formality and given as a matter of course. The main sticking point to pro-choicers (maybe a slightly odd term, as there's not a "separate" pro-choice movement here - the campaigning on this is done by feminist movements in general, and the clear majority of the society shares the pro-choice view anyway) was that abortion required approval (again, usually given as a matter of course) by two separate doctors.

The Finnish parliament just recently liberalized this law, moving to a general European practice of abortion on request before 12 weeks (and removing the two-doctor requirement). This was actually not a major culture war in Finland and, outside of people specifically interested in this issue politically, probably passed with little notice.

Some feminists tried to get a little bit of a thing going to present this as a response to the fall of Roe v Wade, if I remember correctly, though the citizens initiative had started collecting signatures a good while before last summer. This is actually probably pretty typical of European political efforts that are sometimes seen by Americans as overt European reactions to American internal affairs, they are usually related to European internal politics with someone then just inventing some connection to American current events as a hook for a bit of media attention.

I wonder if the physiognomy applies better to the foot soldiers of the movements, not to the elites. Like, if we redo the same test with CHAZ/J6 mugshots it should be much easier, shouldn't it?

The 11th Circuit put the whole Mar-a-Lago Special Master saga to bed last week. You can read the unanimous opinion here (for those counting, the judges were two Trump appointees and one Bush).

This outcome wasn't surprising at all, especially with how oral argument went. As background, the FBI raided Trump's home in Mar-a-Lago because they convinced a federal magistrate that they're likely to find evidence of criminal activity there. They were right on that front, and they recovered various classified/restricted documents in Trump's possession. Although it's not clear why Trump was so stubbornly enthusiastic about holding on to the documents, there doesn't seem to be much evidence thus far that the documents in question were particularly damning/dangerous, nor that he was holding on to them to sell them or whatever. Nevertheless, the warrant means the FBI lawfully (distinct from morally/ethically/correctly/whatever) seized the property pursuant to a criminal investigation.

If the government takes your shit because they had a warrant, the recourse available to you is virtually non-existent. The traditional avenue available within a criminal investigation is to wait for the indictment and then challenge the legality of the search and seizure through a suppression hearing. If you can convince a judge that the property was illegally obtained, your remedy is that the government is prohibited from using the property as evidence against you. Very often, this destroys the government's case against you and the charges get dismissed. Only after the criminal saga is over can you ask for your stuff back from the government. I routinely help my clients get their stuff back once their case is over, including things like firearms and (my favorite) a small jar of weed. Sometimes I just contact the detective directly, sometimes I need a judge to sign an order. It's routine.

But what if you want your stuff back before even an indictment? The typical answer is that you are shit out of luck, because the government is presumed to be entitled to use property they lawfully took from you. But there are some limited exceptions. In the Richey v. Smith case, an IRS special agent stopped by Richey's office and asked to examine some business records and the guy complied (no warrant, and no Miranda warnings). But after talking to an attorney, Richey changed his mind and asked for his stuff back and the IRS said they'll hand it back once they're through with them. The district court initially ruled they lacked jurisdiction to order the government to return the documents, but on appeal is where we get the "Richey four-factor test". That ruling says that courts can have what is termed "equitable jurisdiction" provided the person asking for their stuff back satisfies every factor:

  1. Did the government act in a "callous disregard" of the person's rights?

  2. Does the person have an interest in and need for the property?

  3. Will the person be irreparably injured by not having his property back?

  4. Does the person lack other legal remedies for not having his stuff?

This is what Trump was asking district court Judge Canon to do. There were several problems with this request, chief among them that unlike the Richey case, the government had a warrant for Mar-a-Lago. The other problems were that Trump's lawyers didn't even try to hint at satisfying any of the four-factor test (See starting on pg 12 of the opinion: Did the government act in a "callous disregard"? No, because they had a warrant. Does Trump need his property back? No, because Celine Dion pictures are not a priority right now. etc.). The closest Trump's lawyers got to a coherent argument was when they vaguely intimated (without saying it outright) that Trump's circumstances were special because he is a former president.

Around the 21:00 mark of oral argument, the judges asked James Trusty if any other person whose property was seized during the course of a criminal investigation would have access to the same remedy Judge Canon gave Trump, and Trusty swallowed the pill and said yes. I'm definitely in favor of having higher scrutiny levied on government search and seizure, but this would be a completely bonkers departure from the current status quo. Nobody likes having their stuff taken and being the subject of a criminal investigation! Applied consistently, the courts would be flooded with these requests and it would become near-impossible to prosecute anybody.

As the court opinion says:

In considering these arguments, we are faced with a choice: apply our usual test; drastically expand the availability of equitable jurisdiction for every subject of a search warrant; or carve out an unprecedented exception in our law for former presidents. We choose the first option. So the case must be dismissed.

As far as I can tell, James Trusty is a competent attorney with the requisite experience to litigate issues at this level but he just fell flat on his face hard. No amount of legal acumen can compensate for having a client who insists on unreasonable demands and tactics.

As Glenn Reynolds would say, "the process is the punishment". The goal of siccing the IRS, FBI, SEC, etc... on one's political opponents is not to catch them in a criminal act but to bleed them.

The "well funded cabal of powerful people" that bragged about foisting Biden on us needed to keep Trump in the news through the midterms lest the spotlight turn on them.

How is this a case of the process being the punishment? Trump had multiple opportunities to voluntarily hand over the documents in question privately and only after failing to do so did the DOJ get a warrant.

January: plaintiff delivers 15 boxes to NARA.

February: plaintiff asks NARA to delay DoJ access to boxes

April: plaintiff threatens “protective assertion of executive privilege”

May: FBI reviews anyway; simultaneously subpoenas any remaining documents

June: plaintiff delivers more documents, claiming a “diligent search”

Early August: FBI obtains and executes warrant, finding an additional 15 boxes with classified material, and denies requests for special master

Late August: plaintiff asks district court for all sorts of concessions via a vague civil filing; court complies, and federal government immediately requests partial stay

September: district court rejects stay, feds immediately appeal to circuit

October: plaintiff denied appeal by Supreme Court; circuit responds to feds

Where, in this timeline, did the federal government stall? Looks to me that Trump’s team caused most of the delays.

It's not about the government "stalling" anything its about forcing the plaintiff to spend time and money hiring lawyers and filing appeals. Again the process is the punishment.

How did the government force Trump to file his entirely frivolous action?

The "well funded cabal of powerful people" that bragged about foisting Biden on us needed to keep Trump in the news through the midterms lest the spotlight turn on them.

If Trump had actually complied with the January request, he wouldn’t be in this situation. Had he sorted it out by June, same deal. This week the court slapped down a suit which never had to happen, one based on absurd jurisprudence and an insistence that the normal rules don’t apply.

We may never know why Trump refused to turn in all the classified material he kept with his golf shirts and Celine Dion memorabilia. But we’re not having this conversation because the Deep State needed a distraction. We’re having it because Trump doesn’t take anything lying down.

Did you know that it was Trump who chose to file this lawsuit? Perhaps you're confused and thinking about a different case?

Business as usual.

When writing on this subject before, it was very hard for me to read Trump’s team as acting in...I don’t want to say “good faith,” given that they may well be executing his best option. In expectation of having the facts on their side. This was the case for most of the Kraken lawsuits, too. Throw shit at the wall and hope for enough FUD that something sticks. The upside there was obvious—validation for his political campaign, hurting his enemies—but what does Trump really get from demanding his documents back?

The man likes winning. Has done quite a lot of it, even. In real estate, that meant throwing his legal weight around until something gives. Maybe you step on some toes, but you can’t make enemies with people who already hate you. I think Trump has no expectation of neutral observers. That removes one of the main downsides to frivolous suits. Whether or not he gets his stuff back, it’s a chance for subordinates to demonstrate their alignment.

The implication for any future lawsuits is clear. Trump consistently provides evidence that he is more interested in team loyalty than in objectivity. Attempts to use his suits as evidence to the contrary should be discounted.

I agree. This also seemed to successfully take some steam out of this story. He stopped the momentum and I'm sure that a large portion of people have forgotten about this. If it does pop up again, it'll be even easier to convince his audience that this is fake news Russiagate stuff again.

I was pretty certain that the way the events unfolded suggested trump was not in imminent trouble.

As far as I can tell, James Trusty is a competent attorney with the requisite experience to litigate issues at this level but he just fell flat on his face hard. No amount of legal acumen can compensate for having a client who insists on unreasonable demands and tactics.

Seems most likely that this was a (seemingly successful) delay tactic.

Delay what exactly? Canon had issued an order that stopped the DOJ from reviewing the documents for their criminal investigation, but the order was quickly overturned and might have been issued too late to have prevented anything. All of this could have been much more easily avoided if Trump just returned the documents way back when.

So I finally installed tiktok. While registering, I indicated I was male. I was immediately shown what I can only describe as "anti-feminist" videos, women winning arguments against feminists, jordan peterson interview clips, etc. I generally scroll past these videos quickly, but they got more and more frequent, I probably made it worse for liking a few bill-burr clips early on, but it certainly started very early on.

My wife is a frequent tiktok user, she likes videos you'd expect of women, crafting stuff, recipes, etc. She gets also gets ton of overtly political feminist videos. Neither of us have strong feelings towards feminism. If anything, she's to my right on the gender issues.

I hear a lot of anti-tiktok rhetoric along the lines that china is invading our privacy. I'm much more concerned about tiktok dividing the younger generations and pitting groups against each other. This is probably more algorithmic than intentional, but this effect is almost certainly worse than the privacy concerns. I know this isn't anything new, other social media apps have similar effects, but I think the effect is much stronger with tiktok. With facebook, you inherit the political environment of your friends. With reddit and twitter you can choose your own echo-chambers. With tiktok, the decision is made against your will and almost instantly.

While registering, I indicated I was male. I was immediately shown what I can only describe as "anti-feminist" videos

I've had the exact same experience across all platforms (Tik tok, youtube, & instagram mainly). I used to be right wing but have solidly been on the left more several years now. Whenever I start any new account or social media I'm always bombarded with classic man-oriented 'right wing-ish' content (Peterson debunking feminists, gym bro complaining about girls, Shapiro clips, etc). Even now, after having these accounts for years, I'll still get random suggestions for this content.

What's even funnier is that if I watch a man-adjacent video (non-political workout vids or a video about guns) my algorithms get fucked up for weeks. I really do have to wonder if the right-wing influencers have a crazy high budget in comparison to the left. At this point they have to know my stats well enough to know that I'm not interested in those videos but they keep pushing. I admire the effort.

As someone who became more right wing over the years, I’m curious what caused you to have the opposite trajectory?

It's quite a long story (and I can go into more detail if you want). Overall, I realized that certain beliefs I held weren't as supported as I was led to believe by conservatives. I attended a conservative Christian college but had two left-leaning professors in particular & a few new left-leaning friends who broke me out of my conservative bubble and challenged my previous beliefs. Growing up I was taught that issues like racism & sexism were issues of the past (and totally blown out of proportion by virtue signaling woke libtards). This new group of people gave me a different story via personal anecdotes (from my new friends) & substantial research (from my professors). Over the course of four years and lots of debating, I came to the conclusion that the biggest pillar of my ring-wing belief (namely the idea of merit, aka 'you can do anything as long as you work hard' & the inverse "If you're struggling it's primarily your fault") wasn't as absolute as I thought it was.

Trust me, I was not looking to turn to the left in the slightest. I mean, who wants to be associated with woke feminists (or worse, liberals)? Of course, I don't agree with everything the woke crowd believes nor do I have many positive things to say about Biden & other libs. But overall I'm now firmly planted somewhere on the left because the right just didn't have sufficient support for the biggest issues. Feel free to ask any other questions but that's the basic story for me.

Interesting. I’m curious if you have read a lot of Thomas Sowell? Also I’m assuming you aren’t an HBD enthusiast?

Also, it’s interesting that meritocracy created a big change in you. Did you believe in meritocracy solely on deontological grounds (ie just deserts) or utilitarian grounds (ie meritocracy leads to generally the best outcome in a kaldor hicks sense, even if it doesn’t reflect just deserts)?

If the latter, what was the basis that led you to change your mind re the outcome?

If the former, do you reject utilitarianism as an appropriate framework or think the calculation comes out to reject utilitarianism?

Yes, Sowell used to be my guy haha. If you want to talk more about Sowell or why I longer find him persuasive I'd be down.

I'm not an HBD enthusiast on the grounds that I don't find its support convincing nor its utility to be of much benefit.

I'm not familiar with the two types of meritocracy that you provided. Meritocracy might be too strong a word in this sense too. Here's what I mean in simple terms: I believed that (in general) people could achieve positive outcomes if they worked hard enough. On the flip side, people who weren't achieving positive outcomes (or people who were experiencing negative outcomes) were primarily at fault for their own situation. The solution to most problems was individual in nature: If you wanted to improve your life, work harder and be better. And especially don't rely on government handouts or assistance in the meantime. We can take my previous beliefs on homelessness for example: In 99% of cases, being homeless was the fault of the individual (drugs, behavior, work ethic, etc). Therefore, the solution to homelessness was focused on the individual as well: Pick yourself up, get clean, apply for jobs, and get back on your feet (and don't mooch off other people while doing so). You can copy/paste that reasoning to just about every political issue (racism, sexism, immigration, income inequality, welfare, etc).

So what changed? The primary factor was one of my economics classes called "the economics of race, class, & gender" (trust me, my past self was NOT happy to see this liberal bullshit on the schedule lol). Growing up well-off (and in a well-off area), I was hilariously naive when it came to the economics of class in particular. Life's trajectory was simple: do well in school, do well in college, do well in your career, and you'll never have to worry about being poor. This class quickly showed me why my simple plan was highly dependent on where you grew up. I'd heard a similar story before but this was the first time that I saw real statistics & research to back it up. I saw similar evidence for things like racism & sexism.

I finally came to the conclusion that some people were much worse off than others due to no fault of their own.

I know, not exactly a mind-blowing conclusion (and really speaks to my ignorance and naivety more than anything). But this had a domino effect on almost all of my other beliefs. For example, welfare. Since some people are 'poor' through no fault of their own, I could no longer justify my disdain for government handouts. Morally, I don't want people to suffer due to something that is likely out of their control. Even if becoming poor was a personal choice, escaping poverty is a vicious cycle. Economically, I found strong arguments for buffing up welfare systems in order to turn poor people into economically productive, tax-positive citizens. Homelessness is another example: Moral reasons were the same as before. Economically, in addition to making homeless productive citizens, I saw decent evidence that aggressive left-wing solutions were more cost-effective in the long and short term. I came to similar conclusions on other issues regarding race & gender. Morally, I find it wrong for someone to suffer because of something they were born with. Economically, I concluded that protecting these groups leads to positive economic outcomes for everyone involved.

I want to stress that I still value hard work and individual responsibility highly. I do believe that hard work can and will solve certain individual problems and that bad decisions/lack of effort can cause certain individual problems as well. But overall, I think that external, uncontrollable factors are the root causes of many of the issues we see today. Since being on the left I've also become more sympathetic to the idea that we should assist others even if they are entirely to blame for their situation (given that said assistance is effective, addresses root causes, and comes at a reasonable economic cost).

Fantastic question - I'm admittedly still undecided on exactly how to approach this issue. But here's my basic moral justification:

All people should have equality of opportunity

Discriminated groups have less opportunity

Privileged groups have more opportunity

Therefore, discriminated groups ought to have more opportunity so all people have equality of opportunity.

('Equality' in this case simply means 'as equal as is possible to realistically achieve')

As a simple hypothetical, I would support increased government funding to schools with predominately black student bodies. This would privilege the discriminated-against but is justified based on my value of equality of opportunity. (Edit: I would also support increased government funding for schools in poorer areas using this same logic as well).

I'm curious, what is your opinion/justification on the same issue?

I really do have to wonder if the right-wing influencers have a crazy high budget in comparison to the left.

I don't think they have a greater budget, but it has to be similar. The right-coded videos (IME) are more directly monetizable. Jordan Peterson is selling self-help videos. Workout Bro has supplements, and Gun Guy has training and $100 anodized aluminum pistol accessories made for $2 in china with his logo plastered. These guys are truly able to use a marketing budget to push algorithmic weight. Of course there's plenty of leftist grift out there, but I've found it's a lot simpler to see where the money would come from.

At this point they have to know my stats well enough to know that I'm not interested in those videos but they keep pushing. I admire the effort.

I've found that "bad for you" stuff for some reason is just so sticky. The sexualized content on instagram is something where if you hover over a reel or a post (much fucking less click on it or like it) you're going to be sent down that rabbit hole, and have to spend quite a bit of time manually de-weighting it.

There's also the element of the algo being aggressive in responding to your tastes. I think they've done this incorrectly as a rule across platforms. I search for science fiction images on Instagram? My feed is inundated for at least 3 days. Let it ramp up in proportion to my history.

Tech companies were literally funding and pushing antifa felons' videos because conservative content was doing better organically. https://twitter.com/fingerishatroc1/status/1601729418640371712

Same for YouTube..they always recommend Jordan Peterson clips even though I seldom watch his videos. I think this puts a dent in the narrative that social media is always pro-left. I suspect the reason for this is because Jordan Peterson and non-PC political videos have a high retention rate and follow-through rate. People who watch one video are highly inclined to watch more , probably more so than other niches.

This is probably true.

It’s also the origin of complaints about an alt-right “pipeline.” You watch one Peterson meme and your recommended videos will be destroyed by FACTS and LOGIC. Never mind whether or not you actually cared about Shapiro or whoever, YouTube knows that some people are really into both, so that’s where you’re sorted, bucko.

I’m of the impression that the effect waxes and wanes based on YouTube’s current algorithm. Though it could just be trends in how much vocal notice it receives? Either way, this phenomenon applies to the left as well. “Breadtube” was explicitly created to harness similar network effects. It’s best known for Contrapoints and I think hbomberguy. People make long-form talky videos and try for algorithmic cross-pollination.

The YouTube algorithm is notoriously opaque from the end user perspective, and truly is hasn't been transparent since YouTube made the first major adjustment to it by disincentivizing clicks over watch time and website retention. Back when they were on their meteoric rise in popularity, the Paul twins were famous for directing their viewers to their brother's videos and using each other's channels to 'trick' the algorithm and they both got really famous really quickly as a result. The algorithm correctly identified that viewers who watched Jake Paul very often watched Logan Paul videos, so as soon as you click on one of their videos in your 'Recommended' tab, YouTube had already started the process of tailoring your user profile to watch videos from the other brother.

Information about how and why the YouTube algorithm was changing from 2015-2020 would be so incredibly valuable for contextualizing a lot of the social movements we've seen recently, but too bad that this is information we will probably never get publicly.

Many successful youtubers emulate this by having multiple channels even if all of them have basically the same type of content. They just advertise content on the other channel during the video and maybe with a link in description. Sometimes this secondary channel gets even more popular than the main one, so this crosspollinating definitely has some effect.

It does seem to create weird trends. I like to watch videos of people building things. One day, I watched a video of somebody building a bizarre contraption termed a turbo burn barrel, which involves connecting a automotive turbocharger to a sealed metal barrel full of burning wood and starting the turbo going with a leaf blower. Pretty amusing, I thought. Well it seems either this was a Youtube creator trend or the algorithm decided I loved it (or both), since I kept seeing a constant stream of turbo burn barrel videos for the next few weeks, which I mostly did watch. Then all of the sudden it just stopped and I hardly ever saw them anymore. I saw a few hints suggesting videos in that genre were still getting made, but it seemed more like the algorithm just decided to stop showing them to me for some reason.

I got the turbo barrels too! Does youtube push them to people in a broad demographic or do they have an implicit characterization of people wherein we both fall into the same narrow bucket of turbo-woodstove-video susceptibility? I honestly find this question rather disturbing, in that unless I choose to buy print media it's getting harder and harder to tell what's going on in the general populace. As in, how am I to tell whether something gets to me because it's in general circulation, as opposed to having been precisely targeted?

I saw that one in action! Thing was terrifying. I have no idea how much thrust a regular turbo is supposed to produce, but it certainly looked like a lot.

However, it didn’t mess with my recommendations. No idea why.

Depends which one - at least 5 or so channels that I saw built them, probably more.

Those automotive turbos aren't supposed to produce thrust at all, the exhaust is supposed to be run through the usual mufflers. With bare exposed turbine exits, it'd be just a little. You'd probably need to build a proper nozzle to generate much thrust.

I suspect the reason for this is because Jordan Peterson and non-PC political videos have a high retention rate and follow-through rate. People who watch one video are highly inclined to watch more , probably more so than other niches.

100% this. Youtube's metrics include the following:

  1. How much did you watch a video?

  2. Did you leave after watching this?

Sure, it's the same idea, but tiktok is much more powerful. You don't have to follow, like or even watch an entire video for the algorithm to respond. Being even slower to dismiss a video will boost similar videos. The youtube equivalent would be something like tracking your eye movement to see which thumbnails you're looking at. I know because I'm now getting porn-ish content after being slightly slower to dismiss videos with pretty girls.

I would be willing to bet YouTube does timing stuff too, if only because ad revenue is definitely based on watch time.

There’s a possibility that TikTok’s is more aggressive, or maybe it just gets more independent data points due to the short form. I wonder how fast Vine adapted to users.

Youtube created an entire Shorts product that's a direct clone of tiktok, so they're definitely paying attention. And even before tiktok YT creators believed YT used watch-time as part of their recommendations and tried to keep it high.

How does one explain how incredibly bad YouTube recommendations are? If I go to YouTube and just look for something interesting to watch, I have to scroll past dozens and dozens of videos to find something interesting. The most baffling thing is that it can't figure out that if it shows me a video every time I go to YouTube and I always scroll past it and don't click on anything until it has shown me about 40 videos, I probably don't want to watch that video and it shouldn't show it to me 20 times before giving up.

It also seems to have a long memory and a short memory for the wrong things. If I watch one video from a particular channel, it will suggest videos from that channel every day for a few weeks even if I never watch any more. But if I watch a lot of videos on a particular subject, if I stop watching them for a few weeks, it will completely forget that I was interested in that and never show me one of those videos again. It should be the exact opposite. If I just watch one video about something and don't keep watching more videos that it suggests on the same subject, it should assume I'm not that interested in it or was only interested in that particular video. But if I watch a lot of videos on a subject, it should assume I will be somewhat interested in that subject for the long term, even if I go a week without watching one of them.

Another thing it struggles with is it seems to put too much weight on the channel the video is hosted on and not enough on the actual content. If I watch a video because I am interested in the interviewee, it will keep recommending videos with the same interviewer, but it won't recommend other videos with the interviewee.

The other thing is that it clearly grouping certain channels into clusters and cannot figure out that I actually really dislike certain types of videos in that cluster. So like if it clusters videos about Alice and Bob together because people who like one tend to like the other, if I watch a video about Alice, it will immediately start suggesting videos about Bob, even if I never watch a Bob video. It cannot figure out that I am in some way different from other people who like this cluster of videos.

I think youtube wants to drastically reduce the amount of niche content they host and broadcast, so they're always recommending stuff from only the channels they want to keep, even if it's not what people want to watch.

At a guess, shoving in 400k/4M view videos increases watch time overall, because most people do want them - but people hre tend to not want them?

How does one explain how incredibly bad YouTube recommendations are? If I go to YouTube and just look for something interesting to watch, I have to scroll past dozens and dozens of videos to find something interesting. The most baffling thing is that it can't figure out that if it shows me a video every time I go to YouTube and I always scroll past it and don't click on anything until it has shown me about 40 videos, I probably don't want to watch that video and it shouldn't show it to me 20 times before giving up.

I actually like this feature. I watch different categories of videos ranging from various debates and podcasts, gaming videos, historical videos and documentaries, videos about technology from solar to new weapons and I also follow some channels due to them being entertaining or just cute to clean the palate with something wholesome such as some animal stuff. I often think something may be interesting but not right now as I am interested in different topic at the moment. But I like it if it remains in the feed for some time - even for a day or two - as I can return to it.

On the other hand I do use "not interested" feature for content I do not find interesting which helps. I am also blocking/unsubscribing whole channels a lot if the algorithm thinks for some reason that I should watch the content even if I find it uninteresting. One example is that I do watch League of Legends content from one youtuber/streamer when I am chilling in the evening or drinking my coffee as he has soothing voice and it helps me vent off stress. Of course as soon as I subscribed to his content and watched a few of his videos, I was slammed by other League content that I am not at all interested in. It took me weeks of religious blocking of random League stuff until the algorithm realized that no, I do not want to watch anything else from that category.

Chinese Tiktok:

This is probably more algorithmic than intentional

Well. The choice of algorithm is probably intentional.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=0j0xzuh-6rY

TikTok the company does that, limiting access of young children, because the chinese govt mandates it - they wouldn't do it on their own! And for adults (which OP is), the algorithm isn't obviously different - from using douyin briefly, and I also got half-naked women, sports videos, animal videos, dumb social situations, all of which, like US tiktok, are stupid.

TikTok the company does that, limiting access of young children, because the chinese govt mandates it - they wouldn't do it on their own!

Tiktok is owned by Bytedance.

From Bytedance' wikpedia page:

In April 2021, a state-owned enterprise owned by the Cyberspace Administration of China and China Media Group, the China Internet Investment Fund, purchased a 1% stake in ByteDance's main Chinese entity and placed a government official, Wu Shugang, on its board of directors. The Economist and Reuters have described the Chinese government's stake in ByteDance as a golden share investment.

https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3145362/chinese-government-takes-minority-stake-board-seat-tiktok-owner

You may be missing how "the company" and "the chinese government" are pretty aligned on the issue regardless. They wouldn't do it 'on their own' except they're doing it and one should probably not ignore the incentives at play here.

Was that meant to be surprising? The chinese govt is deeply personally tied to, and exerts direct guiding power over, its economy in a way the US govt isn't.

That doesn't mean chinese tech companies aren't trying to make profit, grow, or get user attention, or that they aren't trying to get users otherwise. These limits exist, and their recent creation is newsworthy because before them, tiktok and other apps were showing 'unwholesome' content to underage users, and letting them use the app as much as they wanted to. And not by corrupting intent, but because that is what got the most views.

You may be missing how "the company" and "the chinese government" are pretty aligned on the issue regardless

Aligned in the sense of taking action, yes. To a lesser extent, but similarly - tech companies in europe are aligned with the GDPR, and Apple is aligned with the chinese government in China. But absent the guiding hand of the government, they'd be happy to let people use their product more.

OP claimed "Well. The choice of algorithm is probably intentional." - as if TikTok being attention-grabby in the US was intentional by china to harm the US somehow, compared to a tiktok wholesome algorithm in the US. This is very incoherent, and very common, something I've had irl friends and internet friends tell me dozens of times total. Aside from US companies using the same algorithms, and surfacing almost identical content for adults, and OP being about content presented to adults in the US, while douyin produces similarly cute girl / stupid content for adults in China, douyin was less-filtered for chinese youth years ago before those changes were implemented! The desire to claim China is Hurting Us without much justification seems prevalent - similar are "tiktok is a chinese privacy violation operation we must ban it" - much of US social media is already public and china can get most of what it gets via owning TikTok just by scraping twitter, facebook, instagram, etc, just as you yourself can. (the only place I've seen that statement made is, funnily, a CSET report)

People fit into archetypes. Particularly, for social media, there are archetypes for the type of content people engage with. Trying to build a more socially beneficial public square deemphasizes or ignores that aspect, and so you will be competed out of existence. That's why TikTok is dominating: you get an echo chamber telling you things you want to hear. You can imagine fixes to this, but that ends up costing you real money and provides a path for someone to usurp you.

I don't think there's a way out of this, except by refusing to use social media. That can work for an individual but doesn't do much for the broader social damage.

TikTok falls somewhere between addictive and cringy. It shamelessly refines media bubbles, and it’s certainly mining as much of your data as it can manage.

So...why are you making an account?

I vote cringey. I've fortunately not used TikTok much, but man, from what I've seen of it, it really seems like it's lowering the intelligence waterline. The only thing I ever hear about it is stupid stupid content, like challenges which will result in people hurting themselves (like chicken a la NyQuil), or else just plain old dumb shit I can't believe anyone cares about (like fake life hacks and all the controversy about pink ranch dressing). Granted, I probably hear about these things more because of molloch. But TikTok is basically Twitter for videos, and it shows. I refuse to have anything more to do with it.

With tiktok, the decision is made against your will and almost instantly.

I've seen a claim on twitter it takes like hours of effort to train tik-tok to stop showing you crap you don't want.

I just downloaded it and it showed me mostly dating advice videos and a mix of videos about Canada and animals videos. No political content at all.

I just downloaded it and it showed me mostly dating advice videos

Depending upon what kind of dating advice videos they were giving you, I might consider that political content. I'm honestly not sure what apolitical dating advice TikToks would even look like.

These algorithms are mysterious.

Geographical location is a factor. Most of the videos I get in TikTok and Instagram Reel are the majority of whatever cluster of videos I liked in a previous slice of time, with some random videos local to my area scattered in.

Also, for a deeper look at how these things work. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison, But if you have Spotify, you can download some of your metadata. They have a dizzying amount of what I'd suppose are advertisement categories. I was categorized as anything from "Midwest Truck Driver" to "Hot sauce enthusiast" (the former is way off, but the latter is somewhat correct, I mean, I like hot sauce but am not sure If I'm an enthusiast) and a whole host of other things that makes 0 fucking sense. There were soo many categories!

I would assume TikTok et al. use similar clustering techniques of users for their content recommendation as Spotify does for targeted advertising. WAG though.

As for "training" the algorithm, the longer you use a platform, the better it gets. I have been using my YouTube account for over a decade, and the recommendations are more or less precisely what I would have wanted to watch.

Geographical location is a factor.

It's a significant one. My wife has been served the inane thottery published by our teenage next-door neighbors. There's no reason for a woman into golden retrievers and 'mom life' videos to be also interested in thirst traps besides location.

I'm much more concerned about tiktok dividing the younger generations and pitting groups against each other. This is probably more algorithmic than intentional, but this effect is almost certainly worse than the privacy concerns.

Yeah, this seems like the obvious problem with social media controlled by your geopolitical enemies. Maybe they don't want to call attention to it because that leads to the question of why is it okay for any company to be able to manipulate our youth that way?

The Munk Debate with Matt Taibbi, Douglas Murray, Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg is now online: Be it Resolved: Don't Trust Mainstream Media.

Contrary to many alternative media takes, I thought that Goldberg had a surprisingly strong showing. I remember her from the Peterson, Fry, et al. debate where she seemed too crude at times. This time Goldberg's opinions clearly came from experience, and her points were well conveyed. Briefly she claimed that there are clear signs that the media does learn from its mistakes and "overcorrects," that the media would not have driven you to make bad decisions if you followed it, and that the processes and culture of the media remain in place. The debate was worth watching just for her.

Murray conveyed a deep sense of moral disgust at what he saw as the carelessness of the Con side. This too came off as having come from experience. There was a point lurking here that I thought needed more articulation. The Con side said that they were professionals who were still doing what needed to be done, and they pointed frequently to successes on their side. But can one be called a professional if only the broad "process" is followed, and no attention is taken to details such as promptness of reporting, accountability, and the taking of personal responsibility rather than pointing fingers? In the absence of the markers of professionalism, it seemed more like they were claiming that their status as mainstream reporters performing an essential service gave them the right to lead people to a better future. In this I am reminded of the film The Verdict. Few people really care if a doctor will do a fine job in the future, if he can get away with criminal negligence just this one time.

Gladwell's performance dragged down the debate consistently, but I feel some sympathy for him. His system of diversity has left him in a place that he didn't think it would take him. His constant complaints about white people did not seem enlightened, but as bigoted as any racist tract. Still, his point about whether people like him would have been "included" in the past did have something to it. What we've seen in recent times is a concept of diversity that succeeded in pushing people forward, but failed in the end to bring them up to the same standards as those who they have joined. It is just like programs which try to give educational opportunities for the disadvantaged, but which children finish without learning proper English. If you forget the goal, then you have failed and must try again. Similarly, Gladwell wasn't supposed to end his journey as something that strongly resembles a bigot, but he seemed unable to stop himself from doubling down on it despite it being obvious that it was doing them no good. If men like Gladwell begin to recognize failure and try again, perhaps building on what they have learned so far, I have little doubt that they will do a lot of good.

Taibbi did well, not much to say there. I do think that the Pro side didn't adequately answer questions about their alleged fixations on culture war (edit: and Twitter) issues, but it seems like a charge that could easily be thrown back at the mainstream media over the past decade.

The complaints about who was "allowed" to be in the media during the Cronkite era are ahistoric. Cronkite was on the air at the same time as the first black national news anchor. During this era the NYT put a woman in charge of the Op-Ed section for the first time, had women reporting from Vietnam, Ms. Magazine was founded. The National Association of Black Journalists has plenty of hall-of-famers from this era: https://www.nabj.org/page/PastHallofFame.

I do think that the Pro side didn't adequately answer questions about their alleged fixations on culture war issues, but it seems like a charge that could easily be thrown back at the mainstream media over the past decade.

That seems almost tautological that the points of contention are going to be Culture War issues. Those are the issues that that get a thumb on the scale.

No one has reason to complain about how the New York Times covers, say, long lines at the airport at Thanksgiving, unless they decide to put some ideological spin on it.

I thought that Goldberg had a surprisingly strong showing

Goldberg was better than Gladwell but she, at one point, did something you should never do in a debate: she basically ceded the argument to the other side by admitting that the media is captured and distorted...by consolidating corporations and powerful moneyed interests like Bezos.

Um...you can't do that. As a sign of good faith it was better than anything Gladwell said. As a matter of tactics, that probably made her, on net, worse than he was.

I might be accused of being uncharitable, I think a lot of this debate employed very common "woke" argumentative tactics that were simply out of place due to the different debate topic, which led to a worse showing than expected.

  1. Turn it into a semantic discussion by insisting no one can define their terms. Gladwell tried this, no doubt having seen it work as a useful defense mechanism/way to run out the clock when progressives ask conservatives to define "woke". The problem is that it obviously doesn't work because all sides seemed to have relatively similar views of what the mainstream media is. Gladwell was guilty of the very thing he accused the other side of (wrongly, since they did define their terms both before and after being asked): just assuming we had the same definition of mainstream media in his anecdotes. Which he was right to do since "mainstream media" is not as contentious as "woke".

  2. Grant that something is happening but it's for [Other Reasons Here]. No, that college professor wasn't fired for saying gays should be careful in conservative African countries. It's actually for this Other Thing That Doesn't Indict Wokeness (e.g. higher tuition fees leading to the idea that the customer is always right). Therefore it isn't damning to wokeness. It's a very common thing around college kerfuffles. Well, yes, the college students overreacted but there was this Holy Context^(tm) of this supposedly egregious thing that happened that makes it make sense besides wokeness being bad.

  3. Yeah, well, everything sucked in the past and you're suspect for even thinking anything was better then (though Taibbi should have really clarified the difference between the media being racially inclusive and politically polarized. Murray's catty defense of Taibbi was true but not really substantive)

Suffice it to say, #2 may work in debates centered around how bad wokeness is, but is horrible in the case of this proposition. Since it doesn't matter why we can't trust the press, the question is merely if we can.

Briefly she claimed that there are clear signs that the media does learn from its mistakes and "overcorrects,"

She's probably correct actually but, again, it doesn't help.

There's a very good argument, made by people inside the media who would understand the psychology, that the media assumed Clinton was going to win because they were in a bubble and, believing this, pivoted to attacking Clinton to prove their bipartisan bona fides.

The problem is twofold:

  1. They had to do this because of the accurate perception that the mainstream media skews to the Left/would support Clinton

  2. The backlash to Trump's victory led to the criticism of this very tendency and the belief that bad actors exploit false balance (see "butter emails"). Arguably, this "overcorrection" led to things like the reaction to the Hunter Biden story or the firing of anyone who broke message in any way during the 2020 riots/protests. Nobody wanted to be the "rube" who helped Trump win again by reporting something that was unflattering.

The problem is: this isn't actually flattering for the MSM since the underlying fact here is that it is biased towards the Left and its attempts to fix this are intermittent, doing their own harm and will be washed away when things get tough.

I do think that the Pro side didn't adequately answer questions about their alleged fixations on culture war issues, but it seems like a charge that could easily be thrown back at the mainstream media over the past decade.

I think this was balanced by their focus on the Hunter Biden story which was probably what Taibbi hammered on the most.

(I guess the trucker protest counts as culture war but the implications Murray was concerned about don't seem to fit in the same bucket as shit like the Covington kid or the other such "meaningless" topics).

Um...you can't do that. As a sign of good faith it was better than anything Gladwell said. As a matter of tactics, that probably made her, on net, worse than he was.

This is public forum, hardly even a debate. Unlike political debates, there is nothing at stake, hence no need for 'strategy'.

There's only a need if you want to do well. If the argument is that she didn't feel said desire, fair enough.

I think it's silly to go up there and make bad arguments for your side (then why bother going?) but YMMV.

Still, his point about whether people like him would have been "included" in the past did have something to it.

The problem is, he immediately turned around and undermined his own point by arguing that it would be bonkers to expect that media writ broadly take into account and reflect the political diversity of the country. Either we're aiming at representation, or we're not, "Malc."

Yeah, Gladwell's monologue near the end was an incredible display of compartmentalism. He really didn't seem to realize what he was saying.

I don’t mean to make light of it at all, but it is one that makes me a little uncomfortable. Because I don’t think that you can ultimately say that trust in institutions is reserved solely for institutions that perfectly match the characteristics of the general population. It is like saying that we don’t trust kindergarten teachers, because kindergarten teachers are over-represented with people having an enormous amount of patience for the temper tantrums of four year olds. I mean they are an extraordinary and very specific subgroup of the population that performs very well in that particular task more generally.

Murray's objections about the disorderly manner they conduct their thoughts was spot on.

It's a standard form of double-talk amongst the liberal elite: they must simultaneously claim to champion the people and their will, while believing that the people are not necessarily fit to lead or take care of themselves.

Matt Taibbi

It seems he contradicts himself. He says journalism should aspire to impartial, bipartisan, and fact-orientated ideals, yet he made a huge name for himself doing the very opposite, like his highly viral article about Goldman Sachs role in the 2008 financial crisis, which was as much fact as it was editorializing. Same for that Trump book.

regarding Michelle Goldberg, covid, and the MSM, everyone was wrong. The MSM overestimated vaccine, lockdown, and mask efficacy . They overestimated the infection fatality rate. The finge-right was probably wrong about underestimating death toll. But probably many deaths were erroneously labeled as Covid deaths.

Gladwell is predictably bad in debate form, like his books.

I have found that it's not so much that the media is right or wrong, although it is wrong a lot, but it's like wrong through omission, not admission. There are always key details left out. Most media sucks, either mainstream or alternative. Alternative is better ,but not that much better. I think random blogs, anons on 4chan, and twitter accounts of people with few followers and no status/clout, are the most accurate. Mainstream and alternative media are both affected by the same clickbait incentives, just different biases. Non-profit media is bad, too, because it's also biased , even if not as click-baity.

Regarding Douglas Murray, the media dropped the shooting story in part because it was no longer in the news cycle. the media does this even when the perpetrator is white, like the 2017 las Vegas shooting, which also inexplicably vanished from the headlines despite being a much worse shooting and having far more unresolved elements, so it's not so much a race or identity issue. I think though the media is more likely to omit information if the perpetrator does not fit a convenient archetype or narrative. But a story is dropped when the key details are resolved, and or it stops being interesting, or it is replaced by the latest outrage or whatever is attention-grabbing at the moment. The Canadian trucker story also vanished equally abruptly. It's interesting how stories end so fast sometimes. but other times they drag on forever even though nothing has changed much, like Ukraine.

Gladwell makes a compelling case that old time media was right to exclude people like Gladwell! Kidding aside, there needs to be more to the argument than “diversity good.” Question is has diversity improved the media product.

Did Gladwell turn out to be the long lost father of Sean King and Rachel Dolezal? What exactly is Malcolm's claim to being "diverse"?

Apparently both of his grandparents on the mother's side were of partial black ancestry. This is also news to me.

So he's.....an octaroon? A quintroon?

I found her (Goldberg's) arguments to be the complete opposite of good straight from the get-go. The first point that stood out to me in her opening statement, that 'the media' is not 'ideologically captured' is just wrong. Like she doesn't understand what people are talking about. To reinforce her point she brings up the 'Red Wave' phenomenon the blue mainstream media were pushing in unison. A phenomenon that can be characterized entirely as 'I am afraid my enemy is going to win like they did last time'.

It seems to miss the point of what people have been saying about media bias. The point of the 'displeasure' of how the media was shilling for Hillary Clinton in 2016 wasn't that the media was saying that she was going to win. That was just a consequence of the actual problem. That problem being that 'the media' was obviously and completely in the tank for Hillary and an ill-defined political direction that we can code as 'blue'.

Because of this lack of understanding Goldberg's whole concept of 'over-correction' is just irrelevant at best. The media didn't 'correct' itself in any sense that relates to 'ideological capture'. It's still just as captured, just expressing itself differently. They recognized that they might have harmed 'the cause' and changed gears. They didn't change gears to correct their own beliefs. They changed gears so that they would stop harming the cause. From their perspective, in hindsight, it was obviously folly to say to your prospective voters that the election was in the bag. If you want to aid 'the cause' you must gin up your voters to vote. So you tell them that the enemy is mounting for an attack and that you must brace the gates, or you will lose everything you care about.

At risk of being too uncharitable to a person like this. Is she just that stupid? How can someone in her position look at this entire debacle, ongoing for years now, and still be so far off the mark? Is she a malicious actor?

She then moves into 'the big stories'. And says the mainstream media got most of them 'right'. She doesn't expand on what that means beyond that Trump and COVID where events that happened. Which, as a standard of 'rightness' doesn't seem to elevate mainstream media far above 'alternative' media but that's neither here nor there since she backpedals the argument a bit and says that you would be 'closer' to the 'truth' if you followed mainstream media and not 'alternative' sources. This is not really a truth apt claim since the 'truth' given out by blue media and non-blue media is simply not the same. This muddy language is then used to support her argument where she says that the hysteria ginned up about Trump was largely correct because January 6 happened. The problem here being obvious, one 'truth' says J6 was a coup attempt, the other 'truth' says it was a valid protest. If she is malicious, she is brilliant at what she does. If she isn't, she is an idiot savant at making stupid arguments.

I don't think you could underpin the concept of 'ideological capture' better that Goldberg does in her opening paragraphs of her opening statement. Not only does she demonstrate what it looks like, and that she is suffering from it. She also demonstrates that if blue journalists were fish, 'ideological capture' is the water they swim in. Lacking self-awareness to the point of absurdity.

Yeah, it's a tactic I can't really describe charitably, but it has been becoming more and more common since 2016. One way to think of it is like a reverse application of hanlon's razor - it is better to appear ignorant than malicious.

“Open democracy is only working properly if it consistently generates the outcomes we deem acceptable.”

I'd definitely agree that this level of self-deception is pretty par for the course. There's a massive streak of illiberalism buried in the progressive mindset, but it is usually buried in a layer or two of obfuscation and framed as "making people free" (or something along these lines). This allows them to put enough distance between their openly endorsed values and their actual positions for them to live with the cognitive dissonance.

I have far more respect for totalitarian hardliners. At least they're honest and open about what they want.

I have far more respect for totalitarian hardliners. At least they're honest and open about what they want.

Yea, if the "liberals" said, in old time aristocratic style:

"The people are ignorant and vicious mob. We are in charge, because we are the best and the brightest."

it would be more "honest", but open to easy reply that, judged by fruits of their work, they are not the "best and brightest" at all.

Now they have the best of both worlds.

Things are good? We did it!

Things are bad? Not our fault, we are just humble servants of the people. The racist and bigoted people voted for it, and got what they wanted!

Everyone has blind spots it's true. But how can you tell if they are legit blinded or just behaving that way? One of the other benefits of trying to appear ignorant is that it is really easy, because even if you do a bad job of it you still look stupid.

Also what would be the benefit of pointing out the contradiction if you were partisan and thoroughly on board with the narrative? All you would be doing is giving the opposition ammunition. You might even put one in the white house. You would be better off keeping up appearances at all times. Eventually you won't even have to think about it, it will become muscle memory. Do you think those people would have been silent about the contradiction if the sides were switched and a right wing workshop told them the problem with democracy was left wing opinions? Because in my experience they would not. In my experience people these days who would, usually end up on obscure internet forums for wordy misanthropes.

We were taught about the Hollywood blacklists in school in the 90s, not long after the Berlin Wall fell, when the full extent of Soviet deprivation and historical oppression was becoming clear, and I thought it was so noble of everyone in these more enlightened times to be willing to stand up for the political and economic freedoms of even such dangerously foolish people. The architects of the Holodomor and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had been slipping spies up the ranks, trying to subvert Western governments and culture, and acquiring nuclear weapons secrets, but if we couldn't ferret out the evil people without doing evil things ourselves, hurting innocent and merely-mistaken people in the process, that was too high a price to pay.

It's been so dismaying, in the decades since, to discover what fraction of the modern population loves blacklists after all. Of course you're supposed to boycott anyone who would hire someone with bad politics!

Were we actually enlightened before but we fell so far in a single generation? Was so much of the "opposition to blacklists" never truly more than a love of communism, reexpressed in a way that wouldn't spook idealists like me who bought the cover story?

I don't think you could underpin the concept of 'ideological capture' better that Goldberg does in her opening paragraphs of her opening statement. Not only does she demonstrate what it looks like, and that she is suffering from it. She also demonstrates that if blue journalists were fish, 'ideological capture' is the water they swim in. Lacking self-awareness to the point of absurdity.

I recently had a discussion with a guy who had a take along the lines "We should focus more on economy and not on culture war such as abortion or gay things that conservatives jin up constantly". When I pointed out that this would require the same sentiment from the left: stop going for trans rights, extending term of abortions or stop going for women quotas in professions and so forth. His answer was something along the lines that these are not CW topics, they are matter of unalienable rights that are outside of any discussion. And to me it seemed that he really believed it, he could not probably comprehend that let's say abortion from the position of conservative can be also viewed as question of human rights and preventing genocide. It just did not click.

I think that the whole "justice" angle fried the brains of some people. Everything is now matter of justice, fairness and human rights: we have climate justice, racial justice up to mundane things like dental care justice. In a sense this is "genius" position: every topic and policy I am in favor of is domain of fairness, justice and basic human rights. These are nonnegotiable and there is no compromise possible here, these are topics outside of standard political process and all reasonable people already agree. If you disagree it means you are extremist and not worthy of engaging in a discussion.

When I pointed out that this would require the same sentiment from the left: stop going for trans rights, extending term of abortions or stop going for women quotas in professions and so forth.

I'll grant you diversity quotas as a culture war topic the left is actively pushing on... but from my perspective the abortion and trans rights issues look entirely defensive from the left. The left wants the status quo ante of Roe v. Wade and wants trans people to be left alone. The right is the side making those into culture war issues, not the left.

  • -21

The left wants (...) trans people to be left alone

Pushing for minors to be allowed to have surgeries and drug therapies with permanent effects over the wishes of their parents, is not wanting "trans people to be left alone" under any reasonable definition.

I regularly see claims like that with no evidence that anyone actually believes that. The closest I've seen is arguments over whether puberty blockers are appropriate for trans teenagers (and the pro-trans people like to point out that no one thinks puberty blockers are inappropriate for cis teenagers when medically indicated). I'm not sure exactly what age children are normally allowed to make medical decisions without parental approval, I'd assume 16? But it probably varies by jurisdiction. And it isn't a trans-healthcare-specific thing.

Well, if no one actually believes this, can you go to whatever progressive hangout you have, and say "I believe parents should have the right to prevent their children from getting blockers, hormones, or trans-surgeries, until whatever age people are allowed to make their own medical decisions", and tell me how it goes?

The closest I've seen is arguments over whether puberty blockers are appropriate for trans teenagers

Sure, and if you express the sentiment that you don't want your kid to take puberty blockers, you will be called every name in the book, and it will be implied that you want to kill trans children. That's not a defensive posture.

And it's not just blockers. Minors are also getting surgeries.

(and the pro-trans people like to point out that no one thinks puberty blockers are inappropriate for cis teenagers when medically indicated).

That argument does not make sense, when the validity of the medical indication is precisely the thing in question.

That argument does not make sense, when the validity of the medical indication is precisely the thing in question.

Exactly. "Rights of parents" are red herring - no one except of few ultra weirdos, least of all the left, respects decision of parents to deny their children medical care necessary to save their life and health.

Try "in this house we believe in Bible and prayer, not surgery and blood transfusion", you will not get too far anywhere. Many such legal cases.

Is "trans health care" really necessary to save life and health? This is the question what is it all about.

To be fair, I'm perfectly willing to sacrifice as many progressive and Jehovah's Witness' kids as it takes, to secure my right to prevent gender experiments on my kids.

More seriously, I think those are parallel debates. There might be parental rights ti decide this stuff (why do parents get to veto tattoos or piercings otherwise?), and it may or may not be true that trans-medicine is life saving.

Is "trans health care" really necessary to save life and health? This is the question what is it all about.

In actuality the question seems to be about who has the power to determine what "necessary to save life and health" really means, by imposing a conclusion on the matter on the entire populace and quelching dissent.

That is, much like certain other important questions of our time, they claim 'the science is settled' and then use this as a basis to impose the outcome they wanted anyway because who can argue with science?

There seems to be no desire to engage with the question you brought up because that would imply being willing to meet the opposition on somewhat equal footing.

Try "in this house we believe in Bible and prayer, not surgery and blood transfusion", you will not get too far anywhere. Many such legal cases.

Are you familiar with Jehovah's Witnesses? They refuse blood transfusions, and have won every court case that has challenged that practice.

More comments

I'm not sure exactly what age children are normally allowed to make medical decisions without parental approval, I'd assume 16?

That seems to be around the general age, yes. But fear not, WPATH is out there fighting for the rights of 14 year olds to start on hormones!

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health said hormones could be started at age 14, two years earlier than the group’s previous advice, and some surgeries done at age 15 or 17, a year or so earlier than previous guidance. The group acknowledged potential risks but said it is unethical and harmful to withhold early treatment.

Look, my position on this is: you're 18, you want to chop your breasts off because you're mentally ill, I don't like it but you're a legal adult. Go ahead, even if a few years down the line you will then be suing the doctors who did the surgery you are now demanding:

In South Carolina, where a proposed law would ban transgender treatments for kids under age 18, Eli Bundy has been waiting to get breast removal surgery since age 15. Now 18, Bundy just graduated from high school and is planning to have surgery before college.

Bundy, who identifies as nonbinary, supports easing limits on transgender medical care for kids.

You're 14-16, you're too damn young to know and evaluate the long-term effects of this stuff. Your parents are not horrible monsters who want to mistreat you, they are genuinely trying to do what they believe is good for you by not giving permission.

Look, my position on this is: you're 18, you want to chop your breasts off because you're mentally ill, I don't like it but you're a legal adult.

Even this requires precision because it may concede more than we otherwise do, a sign that the Overton window has been shifted.

My framing would be: if you wish to cut off your own breasts you are free to attempt it and take the attendant risks. But you are not entitled to help from licensed medical professionals to do this, anymore than someone who has alien limb syndrome gets to have that procedure or any teenager with body dysmorphia but wants to get jacked instead should get on demand access to test.

Because, before this started, those things were unquestioned as being unacceptable.

In Washington state a child can access certain "sensitive" health care services starting at age 13 without their parents being in the loop. These are services related to reproductive health, sexually transmitted diseases, substance use disorder, gender dysphoria, gender affirming care, domestic violence, and mental health.

So, your kid can be addicted to heroin, have been beaten and raped by their older brother and have contracted HIV, be suicidal about the whole mess, and you have no right to even be consulted about it, or even know about it.

Oh, and they can also surprise you when they show up with bandages where their breasts used to be.

and the pro-trans people like to point out that no one thinks puberty blockers are inappropriate for cis teenagers when medically indicated

Puberty blockers are in fact considered inappropriate for cis teenagers in all use cases that I'm aware of -- they are normally given to kids experiencing puberty many years before they come teenagers, to delay it until a more age-appropriate time.

The use-case for trans teenagers seems to be mainly "park 'em on blockers until they are old enough to consent to hormones/surgery"; this seems quite different, most obviously in that the patients never do experience puberty.

I'd argue that demanding other people to use neopronouns or different pronouns or in general pushing for hate speech laws or pushing DEI trainings and initiatives is exactly opposite to your claim that left wants to "leave people alone". I do not think we need to rehash the whole CW discussion of left vs right that is discussed here every day.

Rather the point is that whatever the case - be it "leave trans people alone" or "go back to Roe v. Wade" - is automatically taken as natural and proper value to hold, everybody who argues against it is evil. Which would BTW mean that the SCOTUS members who struck down the law are somehow evil and they should not even be allowed to discuss ever weakening these "human rights".

Even if we assume that the left is "just defending", I do not see why this should be redeeming in any way. This means that any left wins are to be enshrined in sacred text as unassailable rights? Why should the left have power to create this new holy book of human rights, which is then used to forcefully prescribe social values and that can never be questioned? Who defines what is a "right", what is the source of the legitimacy for it and who adjudicates in case when different rights are in conflict? Apparently it is not SCOTUS as the left went bonkers after the judgement, immediately questioning legitimacy of the ruling and rehashing all the possibilities like packing the court and so forth. Also what you say would basically guarantee that the Cthulhu can ever only move left or at worst stay in place. Why can we not say that conservatives are just "defending" a position that existed prior to Roe v. Wade? What made the year 1973 so special that we can never move before that in any shape or form?

I think that most people on the left do not even think about these issues - as the OP said, they just swim in the water of their own values and do not even consider them as such. They see them as something natural, as "a right" and enforcing those values as "doing good" and unlike religious people they are often unable to articulate source of those values. I think that it is a feature and not a bug. Every other value system is "ideology", our own value system is the default and correct one, and thus above even being included in ideology category.

Even if we assume that the left is "just defending", I do not see why this should be redeeming in any way.

The comment I was replying to started

I recently had a discussion with a guy who had a take along the lines "We should focus more on economy and not on culture war

The "just defending" is relevant because it's a claim that if the other side stopped talking about it, it would no longer be an active culture war fight leaving more air in the room for discussions about economics or whatever other political issue is more important. You and the other replies have given some reasonable pushback on that actually being the case for the two issues I mentioned. Maybe it is true in the other direction for diversity quotas?

Maybe it is true in the other direction for diversity quotas?

Actually, yes. Diversity was pushed offensively in some spaces a few years ago, but now it's just how things are run, and it's the non-progressive side launching attacks.

The "just defending" is relevant because it's a claim that if the other side stopped talking about it, it would no longer be an active culture war fight leaving more air in the room for discussions about economics or whatever other political issue is more important.

Or more likely, the next culture war issue the left wants to push.

People have already addressed the trans issue, so I'll tackle the Roe v. Wade one. With regards to abortion rights, the right views the "status quo ante" of Roe v. Wade as being premised on illegitimate grounds and essentially sees it as a form of imperialism where liberals are imposing policies they want on largely conservative states that would otherwise not adopt them. I think this view has merit, given that Roe v. Wade was quite honestly a bad ruling with the flimsiest of rationalisations offered up to justify overriding state autonomy on the issue, and so the right likely views what they've done to overturn it as defensive action on their part (returning things to how they should be). They probably identify the moment Roe v. Wade was decided as the attack, and I don't think they're wrong.

I'm not actually very strongly opinionated about abortion myself and I think it is a complex issue with a lot of moral greyness involved. But it seems to me that the pro-democracy move here is to allow states more decision-making power on the topic of abortion, and it's fairly easy to see that the left's position on this is "It's perfectly okay for the Supreme Court to explicitly misconstrue the U.S. Constitution and pretend it protects an activity that it clearly does not - if we think it is for a good cause".

the right views the "status quo ante" of Roe v. Wade as being premised on illegitimate grounds

Not just the Right, frankly.

Legal theorists on the other side have criticized the grounds for Roe.

The difference is that the Left obviously has a pragmatic incentive to maintain it and many feel like the outcome was right, if not the reasoning.

No reason why a conservative would adopt that position so, to them, the problems are disqualifying.

Certainly it's just an empirical fact that Roe wiped out a bunch of anti-abortion laws across dozens of states. The fact that it took this long for the GOP to respond effectively doesn't mean that that wasn't an attack. If you are defensive only insofar as you've pulled off a Pearl Harbor-like legal coup, you're not really defensive imo.

Seems like an entirely arbitrary place to draw the starting line.

You should be telling the OP that, not the users providing arguments as to why the OP's starting line is flawed. The OP was claiming "The left is defending against conservative attempts to attack Roe v. Wade" when in fact the right-wing attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade can be seen as a defence against a very questionable attempt by the left to impose their preferred policy decisions on states which would not otherwise have adopted them.

The left doesn't get to claim "I'm defending against an attack" when the act that they are purportedly defending against is, in and of itself, an attempt at defence against something that was initially done by the left. You might be able to push the starting line back further and place conservatives as the first stone-thrower if you could prove that 1: before Roe v. Wade conservatives were imposing their preferences regarding abortion on liberal states or something along those lines, and 2: Roe v. Wade was a leftist attempt to defend against this somehow, but you'd actually have to convincingly make your case instead of simply claiming that Tanista's argument is an arbitrary one.

the right-wing attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade can be seen as a defence against a very questionable attempt by the left to impose their preferred policy decisions on states which would not otherwise have adopted them.

And Roe v. Wade can be seen as a defence against attempts by the right to impose their preferred policy decisions on women who would not otherwise have adopted them.

More comments

entirely defensive from the left.

It is not.

It is not defensive to tell confused teenagers that they might be trans, hide any concerns from their parents and then push them into the pipeline, where they're quickly given hormones, hormone blockers without any serious evaluation.

It is not defensive to redefine asking confused people whether they're sure they want to undergo irreversible medical procedures as 'conversion therapy', which, in case you don't remember was trying to condition homosexuals with aversive stimuli so they'd stop being same-sex attracted.

The clockwork orange treatment. Didn't really work to no one's surprise.

All without proper psychiatric evaluations or any sensible measures that are standard in somewhat well-run countries such as Finland or Sweden.

It does seem all the PR efforts have paid off. I'd feel pity about all the female to 'male' types who get into this.

A lot of people have already given the Red Tribe arguments, but I think there's a more complex underlying one that's easy to miss.

This morning, literally, I had a discussion about whether overheard joking or misunderstood naming or pronouns applied against a trans person (in this case, trans male, but I've had the awkward 'you know she used to be a he' version before from a guy who apparently thought I was very clueless) could be unlawful harassment. It's not wrong, either as a matter of law or a matter of policy.

And yet, it's hard to understate how much of a change this is from even local Blue Tribe norms less than ten years ago! I'd had similar conversations in deep Blue Tribe LGBT-friendly spaces at that time, but the equivalents were over things like when and how it becomes appropriate to handle pronouns without risking involuntarily outing someone. There was interest in passing something like GENDA, but it was far from an obvious and certain thing. Even in LGB-specific spaces, trans men are pretty new to a lot of people's radars.

That's not to say that makes the novel standards wrong. But they are, to a very large part of society, both novel and potentially ruinous to violate, while also completely unknown to one side and wildly obvious to the other. I don't think people understand the extent this make the 'defensive vs' offensive' framework even less useful than it might otherwise be.

trans men are pretty new to a lot of people's radars.

There's a darkly humorous irony there. Transmen hitting the point where they're completely ignored and no one acknowledges their existence is a big sign that they've made it and are passing. Welcome to manhood, brother, no one gives a fuck, have a beer and deal with it.

Welcome to manhood, brother, no one gives a fuck, have a beer and deal with it.

Obligatory Norah Vincent reference.

There's a "funny" corollary to that with detransitioners, where everybody's focused on the harm done to FtMtFs, while MtFtM's tend to get the "have a beer and deal with it" treatment.

This is somewhat justified with FtMs being the majority of trans people, but given their invisibility while trans, your theory is probably more likely to be correct.

FtMs are the majority? Maybe recently but historically the ratio is 10:1 in favour of MtFs

More comments

Ah, sorry, that is the case to some limited extent in a few subcultures now -- furry treatment of the topic isn't great, but it's closer to the 'have a beer and deal with it' than anything else -- the post I'm linking to is more about a period where it was not really understood as a possibility, even for people who did not pass and were recognized. There were some places that were aware enough: eg, Norah Vincent's Self Made Man is further complicated by her own politics, but recognized the possibility of a "man trapped in the wrong body", as did some NPR interviews with her. But a lot of places could and did just treat as butch female, and not in a 'just one of the guys' tomboys extent even then.

trans men are pretty new to a lot of people's radars.

Women secretly passing as men is a common literary trope partially because there are multiple instances of it happening historically. How many of those would identify as trans men by today's definitions is impossible to know (probably some, certainly not all?). But all of them would have expected to be treated as their identified, not birth, gender.

That said, putting trans people on people's radars is exactly what the left is accusing the right of here. Until the right started making noise (and laws) about which bathrooms people were using, it wasn't something people were paying attention to, so trans people were often able to fly under the radar.

Until the right started making noise (and laws) about which bathrooms people were using, it wasn't something people were paying attention to, so trans people were often able to fly under the radar.

This seems like reversing cause and effect to me. Isn't it quite likely a more accurate explanation that people simply noticed some odd presences in their bathrooms, that those who objected to them were the only people who had any reason to "mak[e] noise" about it, and that those people by implicit virtue of objecting to them automatically became right-sorted on the issue (even if they're perhaps otherwise fairly centrist (or even left-wing, those exist) or politically apathetic)?

Your version implies that, for example, the classic image of the "MtF" aspiring transsexual who looks, in terms of the general strength and direction of their biological secondary sex characteristics, somewhat like "Macho Man" Randy Savage in a dress (and though this obviously isn't all of them, they absolutely do exist and in many cases the volume of their behavior matches that of their appearance) was just hanging out in women's bathrooms with nobody the wiser or concerned until some dedicated, already dyed-in-the-wool right-wingers (like I'm imagining a MAGA cap-wearing "bathroom patrol" clothed in all red, not that I imagine that you meant to imply something quite so strawmannish) started "making noise" about it. Even a heavily toned down version of that doesn't seem realistic to me.

Do I think that your Average Joe who wasn't personally affected by the issue was paying attention to it? No, as they rarely do to any issue other than to maybe drop a quick virtue signal about the designated cause of the week. But it wouldn't have been something that "noise" was fit to be made about unless actual real people were affected by it. I guess what I'm trying to say that is that right-wingers by no means invented the inherent weirdness and discomfort for many people of certain gender/sex presentations and characteristics showing up in contexts where they traditionally had never and that "noise" almost certainly would have been made about it in any case. (I certainly remember much "noise" being made about it before any laws regarding the subject were even proposed much less passed.)

People were going to notice if they had seen so much as more women with prominent Adam's apples in their bathrooms (and even left-wingers probably would have "ma[de] noise" about this if they hadn't been given the appropriate ideological mandates), much less the more extreme retention of masculine secondary sex characteristics by many feminine-identifying aspiring transsexuals. You can stop many people from declaring their findings out loud, but, at least for now, you can't stop most of them from simply noticing (in the unofficially illegal sense) themselves.

There's a gradient here between more and less gender-non-conforming (to be clear, I mean identified gender, not sex-assigned-at-birth; I am intentionally not using "trans" here because gender-non-conforming cis people are also affected). I expect that more gender-non-conforming people have always had trouble in gender-segregated spaces while only moderately/lesser gender-non-conforming people may have been more likely to go unnoticed. The recent culture war over the issue means some people are a lot more aware of looking for gender-non-conforming people and therefore noticing ones that are only slightly gender-non-conforming that would have gone unremarked on before.

The question is who made the first attempt to move the Chesterton's fence of what level of gender-non-conformance is acceptable in gender segregated spaces. I had pointed to the North Carolina bathroom bill, but there was apparently a year or so of lead-up involving the left winning court cases and making rules at various legal levels that that was in response to. Of course, with court cases, it can be difficult to determine the aggressor (e.g. was it an intentionally set up test case), but it looks like the left started it, not the right.

The recent culture war over the issue means some people are a lot more aware of looking for gender-non-conforming people and therefore noticing ones that are only slightly gender-non-conforming that would have gone unremarked on before.

That's just like if a few high-profile heists make shopkeepers more alert and thus more likely to detect petty shoplifting though. Nobody's fundamental values have been changed.

The question is who made the first attempt to move the Chesterton's fence of what level of gender-non-conformance is acceptable in gender segregated spaces.

That is, similarly to how there's never been a "Chesterton's fence" among shopkeepers declaring any amount of shoplifting acceptable (as opposed to simply too financially trivial and difficult to detect to be worth worrying about), I don't think there was ever any "Chesterton's fence" declaring any level of "gender-non-conformance" in regards to not belonging to the biological sex conventionally associated with a particular space acceptable. (Meaning I don't think there was ever any point at which people who objected to the more extreme cases of highly visible biological males in spaces generally reserved for biological females accepted the less visible ones, just that, like petty shoplifters, they weren't worth trying to detect because the overall general risk of having any biological male in such a space was seen as lower.)

So unless you deny people's rights to those values/boundaries, a positive service has been performed in increasing their vigilance in enforcing those values/boundaries.

but from my perspective the abortion and trans rights issues look entirely defensive from the left. The left wants the status quo ante of Roe v. Wade and wants trans people to be left alone. The right is the side making those into culture war issues, not the left.

Only in the "cries out in pain as he strikes you" sense, holy cow.

It's really interesting that you simultaneously suggest that "the left wants the status quo ante of Roe v. Wade," (nevermind that was imposed by SCOTUS and not anything like the result of a legislative process where all citizens had their say) because when it comes down to it the right wants the "status quo" of people with penises and Y chromosomes to have separate bathrooms, prisons, sports teams, and certain other facilities from people with uteruses and lacking Y chromosomes.

And definitely prefers the status quo where it doesn't matter what the person claims to identify as, the term 'man' and 'woman' has an easily verifiable component that isn't subject to the individual's personal preference. And that, on it's face, is entirely compatible with trans people being 'left alone.'

If trans people 'just want to be left alone' that message REALLY hasn't gotten through to the actual left.

Why else are, among other things, the existence of a biological male competing against biological females and unsurprisingly dominating the sport supposed to be celebrated as an achievement, even if this ruins the competition for biological females?

In what sense does this gel with trans people being 'left alone,' if it imposes on people who are trying to compete on something like a fair playing field?

Because blanketing a whole town with flags that represents your identity is almost fundamentally opposed to the concept of 'being left alone.' By this very act you are demanding people confront, acknowledge, accept, and support your particular beliefs. In so doing, you are requiring them pay attention, which is the opposite of leaving you alone.

Similarly when you make biological females wax your penis. That's not 'wanting to be left alone.' Nor is insisting to be allowed into a women's changing room with pubescent females. If this isn't some version of culture warring, then what is it?

You don't get to call it 'defensive' and then literally threaten to take people's kids away for failure to comply with your beliefs.

Or appoint openly trans officials to high ranking federal government positions seemingly only on the basis of their trans identity. This is not behavior that implies a desire to be 'left alone.' It is being openly stated there:

As many facilities across the country face harassment, including death threats to providers who offer gender-affirmative care, Levine told physicians “to highlight the importance of the work that they are doing for vulnerable, transgender and gender diverse children and their families, and to continue to do that work and to keep the faith.

What is 'the faith' in this case?

“You can see a pattern here in terms of the attacks on rights,” she said. “I really reject the language that the opposition is using. I reject their terminology. I reject their ideology.”

"Just want to be left alone" but if you disagree with them, people at the very highest levels of government are ready to come for you.

I don't know that you're even arguing in good faith, but assuming you are, please put forward a plausible narrative of the last twenty years in which the right is the side that pushed trans issues to the forefront of public conciousness as a culture war issue.

I think the majority of trans people probably do want to just be left alone. But the loudmouth activists, and the mentally ill, have captured the microphone and are the ones getting all the publicity, and then you have the cis 'allies' who want to be patted on the head as one of the Good Ones who are marching right alongside them in the increasingly bananas demands.

But the loudmouth activists, and the mentally ill, have captured the microphone and are the ones getting all the publicity, and then you have the cis 'allies' who want to be patted on the head as one of the Good Ones who are marching right alongside them in the increasingly bananas demands.

Most likely. But that position blows up the claim that its the right who opened up this particular culture war front.

The left, once they won on same-sex marriage pivoted to this specific battle and pushed it forward with aplomb, anything the right did was directly in response to that.

If trans people 'just want to be left alone' that message REALLY hasn't gotten through to the actual left.

I mean, have you tried getting anything through to Twitter activists? They will call LGBT people bigots just as easily as straight white men for disagreeing with the agenda. In short, I agree, but I'm not sure we chill trans people can do much about it.

I will say there's a few concessions I'd really like, such as having gender neutral cubicles available as standard (often there's a disabled bathroom that works for that, but also often not).

The left, once they won on same-sex marriage pivoted to this specific battle and pushed it forward with aplomb, anything the right did was directly in response to that.

The left pushed it forward? To my memory, the North Carolina "bathroom bill" was what pushed the trans rights discussion to the national stage. You apparently remember things differently? Wikipedia does mention various events leading up to the passage of that bill.

The original pushing forward of LGBT issues was actually still done with gay rights, when they sued that Colorado bakery, and we went from "just leave us alone" to "bake the cake, bigot".

As for trans issues, was the enstunnening and enbravening of Caitlyn Jenner before or after the bathroom bill?

More comments

Yes, it is right there in your link:

On February 22, 2016, the Charlotte City Council passed by a 7-4 vote the Ordinance 7056, a non-discrimination ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity in public accommodations or by passenger vehicles for hire or city contractors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Facilities_Privacy_%26_Security_Act#Background_and_passage

The right was responding to a direct action the left took in favor of removing the status quo.

"Oh, but the right escalated it!"

Okay. Remember what happened after that?

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/may/13/obama-public-schools-transgender-access-restrooms

Or is it ONLY an escalation when the right does it?

But let's wind back the clock a bit further:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obamas-quiet-transgender-revolution/2015/11/30/6879527e-95e4-11e5-b5e4-279b4501e8a6_story.html

Obama being the same guy who ran on the concept of marriage being between a man and a woman then oversaw the enshrinement of same-sex marriage into the constitution. Remember?

The Department of Health and Human Services now allows Medicare funding to offset the medical costs of a gender transition and has warned insurers that prohibiting coverage for such transitions can be discriminatory.

The Agriculture Department bars discrimination based on gender identity in any USDA program, while the Department of Housing and Urban Development has applied a similar provision to its federal housing programs.

The changes began quietly when Obama ordered all agencies in 2009 to review what could be done to eliminate disparities between same-sex and straight couples, a directive that administration officials ultimately interpreted much more broadly.

You notice that the left isn't HIDING the fact that it is pushing this agenda? Indeed, celebrating it? Back in late 2015?

Obama wasn't doing all this stuff in response to the right attacking transgender persons or passing laws that oppressed transgenders in particular.

He was doing it because, as mentioned, THE LEFT IMMEDIATELY PIVOTED FROM SAME SEX MARRIAGE TO TRANSGENDER RIGHTS. As stated multiple times now.

This is a basic fact that I am pretty convinced on, and you've presented no evidence to change my mind.

Indeed, it looks like the left was planning all along on this tactic, and what we're seeing now is simply the continuation of their long-term strategy.

More comments

I think the majority of trans people probably do want to just be left alone. But the loudmouth activists, and the mentally ill, have captured the microphone and are the ones getting all the publicity, and then you have the cis 'allies' who want to be patted on the head as one of the Good Ones who are marching right alongside them in the increasingly bananas demands.

To me, this is what should be front and center in any discussion about trans issues or more broadly the culture war. The so-called "pro-trans" activists have absolutely no credibility when it comes to representing what trans people actually want. They didn't take a poll of all trans people, they didn't win an election held by trans people, they didn't even take some survey of a randomly selected distribution of trans people. As it is now, none of these things might even be possible, since we don't have some Great List of All Trans People that we can refer to.

It's just some people, some of them trans, claimed really loudly that the things they want are the things that are good for trans people. This isn't "pro-trans" in any meaningful way, and neither is opposing them "anti-trans" in any meaningful way.

So maybe a majority of trans people just want to be left alone. We have no way of knowing. What we do know is that there's no reason to believe that what any activist says has any sort of relationship to what the majority of trans people want.

the right wants the "status quo" of people with penises and Y chromosomes to have separate bathrooms, prisons, sports teams, and certain other facilities from people with uteruses and lacking Y chromosomes.

I think this is a major part of the disagreement. Genetic testing for Y chromosomes is not exactly something done often. Literally checking people's genitals to determine which sex-segregated group they belong in as opposed to relying on appearance of secondary characteristics which can be faked with varying levels of success (generally much easier for trans men than trans women, the latter usually requiring some amount of surgery to pull off) or just trusting their identification or (possibly faked) documents also seems like an escalation.

Genetic testing for Y chromosomes is not exactly something done often.

Yes. That proves we used have a high trust society, where people expected everyone to follow the rules without having to be verified, not that we as a society used to believe in the concept of "gender identity", by which we decided to segregate our bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, and prisons.

Literally checking people's genitals to determine which sex-segregated group they belong in as opposed to relying on appearance of secondary characteristics which can be faked with varying levels of success (generally much easier for trans men than trans women, the latter usually requiring some amount of surgery to pull off) or just trusting their identification or (possibly faked) documents also seems like an escalation.

Yes, this is why one designs laws that punish defectors who manage to evade detection, since we choose NOT to adopt more intrusive measures and trust people to follow generally accepted social edicts. You're just quibbling about the enforcement mechanism, not the validity of the norm it enforces.

A trans person who wants to be 'left alone' need only choose the bathroom or facility that corresponds to their biological sex and I daresay they will be left alone. Maybe they're a bit offput because social norms aren't 'accepting' their identity, but we COULD have a discussion to weigh the costs/benefits of accepting their identity vs. enforcing said norms.

But we HAVEN'T had that discussion and at present CAN'T have that discussion because even attempting it will get you literally banned from most social media sites. And that's not the right doing the banning.

But you'll have a hard time convincing me that the left is willing to cede any ground on this debate.

Prisons, of all places, are CERTAINLY capable of checking people's genitals before admission, and yet:

https://nypost.com/2022/04/25/transgender-rikers-inmate-gets-7-years-for-raping-female-prisoner/

If the left is incapable of even admitting that there exist valid reasons to keep people born with penises out of facilities delegated specifically for people who menstruate (I don't know what the most up-to-date prog terms are and don't care enough to check) then THEY are the source of the disagreement here.

But then again, if they admit to such valid reasons, this pretty much unravels the entire "your gender identity is what you believe and say it is!" logic.

A trans person who wants to be 'left alone' need only choose the bathroom or facility that corresponds to their biological sex and I daresay they will be left alone.

Back a few years ago I saw multiple social media posts along the lines of this selfie of a trans man in a woman's restroom with a caption asserting the absurdity of that belief. Following the hashtags in that tweet finds some similar ones (although mostly a lot of screenshots of that one as far as I can tell).

Again, you're just quibbling about the enforcement mechanism, not the validity of the norm it enforces.

Do you think there are valid reasons for the social norm of penis-havers and people of menstruation being assigned separate lavatory facilities?

Why should the extant status quo be altered?

More comments

The left wants the status quo ante of Roe v. Wade and wants trans people to be left alone

And I might even have believed that, were it not for things like the Kermit Gosnell case, and now the whole "Drag Story Hours" rubbish. Are trans people disproportionately represented in modern drag is a theoretical discussion I have no idea about. But taking primary school children to drag shows for some nebulous notion of "allyship" or even worse is stupid. If anyone suggested "let's bring kids to strip clubs because sex work is real work" then they'd be pilloried. "Let's bring kids along to a club with signs like this in the background, but oh no it's nothing sexually-tinged at all, how dare you say that you bigot" is the new orthodoxy.

And then we get stupid, stupid clashes like antifa versus Proud Boys because both sides want an excuse for a rumble, and some UU church was dumb enough to provide them with one.

So "the left just wants trans people to be left alone" is not going to wash anymore.

If anyone suggested "let's bring kids to strip clubs because sex work is real work" then they'd be pilloried.

Don't give anyone ideas.

If I left this comment at that, I'd have to mod myself for low effort, so to expand on this: among the things that have nudged me further into sympathy, if not allyship, with the right, is the speed at which drag shows - which have always been explicitly sexual events, the whole point is for men who like to dress as women and act slutty to parody and exaggerate female sexuality - have been relabeled as "family-friendly" events that are intended to show children the beautiful rainbow of diverse gender expressions. Like, no, everyone knew until a minute ago that a drag show was meant as adult entertainment. The fact that a child too young to know much about sexuality or "gender expression" just sees a man dressed as a lady clown doesn't mean it's children's entertainment.

And I'm not even addressing the sexuality of drag show participants, because it doesn't matter if all or most of them are gay or trans or just straight men who like dressing as women or whatever. Their costumes, their dances, their displays, are very obviously sexualized. I would have qualms but not severe apprehension about a drag queen just going into a library and reading books to children who only see a pretty clown, but apparently sometimes they do the routines too. This really pushes it over the edge for me: I definitely do not think most drag queens are groomers, but I do suspect some groomers are drag queens.

Right now, if you suggested taking children to a strip club to show them that sex work is real work, yeah, you'd get pilloried. But if I were, say, the leftist accelerationist groomer out of right-wing nightmares who actually wanted to achieve that, I do not have a hard time imagining a campaign to first introduce strippers and the concept of sex work as legitimate and worthy of respect, and then some strip club putting together a very cleaned-up version of a strip show (no actual exposure of R-rated parts) for kids, who just see a pretty lady dancing in swimwear, and that being pushed as a family-friendly event. (I mean, pole-dancing is now marketed as a kind of aerobic exercise and you can buy pole-dancing kits for children, ffs.)

The left wants the status quo ante of Roe v. Wade and wants trans people to be left alone.

I don't like lying to my face. They don't want trans people left alone, they want them brought front and center, celebrated and glorified, shoved in my face relentlessly. If only I could simply leave them alone, but no, that hasn't been the case for years.

The right is the side making those into culture war issues, not the left.

The left took the W from Obergefell v Hodges, then immediately escalated and moved on to the next fight, which was the T. This is the culture war of leftist aggression.

The slippery slope has proven to be prophecy, not fallacy.

I don't lying to my face.

Don't accuse people of lying unless you can prove they are lying. (Hint: unless you can read minds, you probably can't.)

@token_progressive may be demonstrating exactly what @hanikrummihundursvin is talking about (and man, it is not often that I agree with him...), that he is a fish who doesn't recognize what water is, but that indicates a difference in perception, not dishonesty.

Talking about how we genuinely see things differently, even if you literally can't believe that someone else sees things the way they say they do, is what the Motte is for. Calling people liars because they see things differently than you and you don't believe it is not.

trans rights issues look entirely defensive from the left.

Does it really? Can you really look people in the eyes who've been ordered to put pronouns in their bios and stop using the word "mother", and say that you are just defending yourself against them?

Tell me, do you keep a diary of your political goals and beliefs? I think it would be very interesting to see how it evolves over time as the Overton window in your head is shifted by party doctrine.

Tell me, do you keep a diary of your political goals and beliefs? I think it would be very interesting to see how it evolves over time as the Overton window in your head is shifted by party doctrine.

Banned for a day. You've been told repeatedly to knock this shit off.

The left wants the status quo ante of Roe v. Wade

By their revealed preferences, they do not; they knew it was going to get repealed in that leaked decision and they did nothing, and then it was repealed and they still did nothing.

If they cared that much, I would have expected a bill on the floor of the House the next day- but they didn't even bother to even do that. It's not like they're incapable of throwing together a law quickly; after all, they do that for assault weapons bans at every opportunity- so they must not value it that much. (That said, the ruling by and large didn't affect the people agitating for abortion rights.)

The right is the side making those into culture war issues, not the left.

There was nothing stopping a Blue state from making their abortion laws even more liberal than they were in the RvW times. You can certainly argue "the right is imposing its standards on us" in the context of, say, Bruen (imposing gun rights on Blue states), but not so much for this.

If they cared that much, I would have expected a bill on the floor of the House the next day

I definitely saw social media comments on the left annoyed at this... but also, this is all about noisemaking, not policy. No one was under any illusion that such a bill would pass the Senate, so it's just a question of whether it was good politics to force a (virtual filibuster) vote in the Senate. Maybe the Democratic Party made a tactical error by not forcing a vote (i.e. maybe making Republican senators commit to their abortion views would have been bad for them in the midterms... but I'm guessing the Democrats would have held the vote if they believed that), but they lacked the power to pass a bill so it seems strange to blame them for not doing so.

but they lacked the power to pass a bill so it seems strange to blame them for not doing so.

Hence why I brought up the gun bills; they still present them even if the same thing would happen (passes House, stalls Senate). Just because it's (locally) bad politics doesn't mean they're not going to do it anyway; this is true to an extent for the Republicans winning the abortion battle in the first place, if you believe the pundits.

maybe making Republican senators commit to their abortion views would have been bad for them in the midterms

Interestingly, the only thing that makes sense here (and their failure over the past 40+ years to actually back up abortion rights with legislation) is that making Democrat politicians commit to their abortion views would be bad for them. But then again, this makes sense if you assume the left's distance from "center" is larger than it is for the right's.

Just say you want this and stop the equivocation and gaslighting. https://twitter.com/TheLaurenChen/status/1543405646049058816

And don't you fucking dare pretend it's "defense" to push this shit.

This muddy language is then used to support her argument where she says that the hysteria ginned up about Trump was largely correct because January 6 happened.

Not to absolve Trump of anything -- I'm not a fan, and it seems like most of his problems are self-inflicted -- but I would also suggest that January 6 would be far less likely to happen if the media had been less hysterical about Trump from the outset. Trump and the oppositional media were like one of those dysfunctional abusive couples who thrive on fighting and then hate-fucking each other. And if you remove Trump from January 6 and look at the hectoring attitude of mainstream media toward Trump's supporters, there's an even more clear cause-and-effect feedback loop of distrust and antagonism from which the media cannot claim its part as an innocent dispassionate chronicler.

but I would also suggest that January 6 would be far less likely to happen if the media had been less hysterical about Trump from the outset.

My understanding about this topic is that Trump was the one promoting the election fraud narrative in question. Why would his decision be conditional upon his relationship with the media?

I've honestly never watched a more useless one of these. Gladwell is so bad he makes the whole thing into a nonsense omelette. He sounds like a robot programmed by GPT 0.2


What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats