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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   28688 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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Zohran Mamdani, who claimed to be black to get into Columbia and is probably going to face zero consequences for it.

Ironically, this could be called a lie. Per the NYT article

But as a high school senior in 2009, Mr. Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, claimed another label when he applied to Columbia University. Asked to identify his race, he checked a box that he was “Asian” but also “Black or African American,” according to internal data derived from a hack of Columbia University that was shared with The New York Times.

This is a man born in Uganda, and lived in South Africa through his early life.

Whether or not he's African American, and likewise with similar non-black Africa > America immigrants is a difficult question given that he literally is an African who became an American, and it's really hard to even think of an alternate term to call them along the lines of what we would call other groups! Like do we say "African-place Americans" instead to make the distinction clear? I'm not sure what the alternative even is here, we clearly don't have an established alternative.

This is realistically more the fault of terrible and misleading categories that are culturally outdated. It is weird, unintuitive and often nonsensical nowadays that Black people who have been living in South America or Europe for generations are considered "African" but someone literally from Africa isn't. And it makes for an interesting question, why do we call them African until they move then?

And if we want to say "well that's because they were originally African" or something, then it's a rather arbitrary cutoff that originally only applies to the great grandparent or great great grandparent or great great great grandparent (depending on the person's particular heritage) but is also a moving definition that applies to the great(x4).grandparent next and so on and so forth to where you could be great(x20) grandparent heritage now and be African but someone with great(X2) heritage now isn't, and also doesn't include we're all from Africa originally so why is there a cutoff to begin with then? Does that mean a black person in the year 300000 will no longer be considered African anymore because we've hit the time limit on African heritage? It doesn't make things much less confusing or weird.

I'm not sure what the alternative even is here, we clearly don't have an established alternative.

The alternative is exceedingly simple. "African-American" is commonly understood to mean American Descendants of Slavery, not Elon Musk. If the majority of your ancestors weren't enslaved Americans, you're not "African-American" and thus not entitled to any of the affirmative action schemes intended to benefit that group. You're just "African", and that's how it will be until race/ethnicity-based affirmative action schemes are totally abolished.

The alternative is exceedingly simple. "African-American" is commonly understood to mean American Descendants of Slavery, not Elon Musk.

We can not expect every single person to have been exposed to everything and culturally absorbed this in their life, especially when it is so unintuitive. Like that XKCD comic that's pretty famous, there are a lot of people out there who don't have or never experienced "everyone knows" situations.

So if your category is unclear and inconsistent, and other more intuitive interpretations clash with the culturally accepted one, then you are inevitably going to land on a bunch of people who use it "wrong".

You're just "African", and that's how it will be until race/ethnicity-based affirmative action schemes are totally abolished.

So he's an African, and he's an American, but he's not an African American? Certainly you can understand how that at face value looks incredibly stupid right?

We can expect it when it comes to the social justice issue that Americans are beaten over the head with more or less continuously. Being allegedly so "out of the loop" that you don't understand what "black American" is typically understood to mean should be an automatic disqualifier for college admission.

Torturing definitions for "face value" to pursue personal gain is undesirable behavior, as is the widespread acceptance of this in elite institutions because they'd rather dole out patronage to like-minded individuals even if it makes a mockery of the patronage's alleged purpose. Yes, "African-American" is an arbitrary definition if one is sufficiently pedantic, but a naturalized citizen born in Africa and a black American from Alabama are obviously not the same thing. Eric Adams is a son of black Americans from Alabama. Ask a high-school educated adult from Mississippi which one is "African American". That's the intuitive interpretation.

I guarantee you that every progressive, and Zohran Mamdani especially, 100% understands the "rules" for calling yourself African American.

Yes and they understand identifying as African American or native when you aren't really is consequence-free. Conservatives can mock Elizabeth Warren all they want, her progressive supporters don't care that she is a fake Indian.

Certainly you can understand how that at face value looks incredibly stupid right?

The more obviously stupid the thing is, the greater the power flex it is to do it. This is why it only works in one direction.

Humorously, Westerners also tend to say 'African-American' even when the subject is not American- because the American propaganda (which they all consume) all says "but describing someone in the most obvious way is Bad, Actually". Capitalizing 'black' is the same thing.

"African-American" is commonly understood to mean American Descendants of Slavery, not Elon Musk.

No, it means "Black" (implication: description + privilege). As a bonus, this works on the entire West, since you can't be ADOS without being A (and it's a great way to tar cultures that were never racist with the same brush they use domestically).

The category "African-American" is neither limited to American Descendants of Slavery nor does it include Elon Musk. The Census definition is "A person having origins in any of the Black [sic] racial groups of Africa."

So it's pretty clear that neither Mamdani nor Musk is "African-American", but Obama (regardless of whether there's really a slave in the family on the white side) is.

The category "African-American" is neither limited to American Descendants of Slavery nor does it include Elon Musk. The Census definition is "A person having origins in any of the Black [sic] racial groups of Africa."

Not only is this silly in that it declares government to be the final arbiter and definer of race, it doesn't even work out well when governments themselves disagree on these types of definitions.

Check out the status of groups like the Brazilian or Portuguese Americans for instance.

For the Portuguese, whether or not they are officially Hispanic depends in part on the state they live in.

Some states, such as Florida, categorize Portuguese Americans as Hispanic, while others, such as California, do not. In a few places, including Massachusetts, laws and regulations treat them as a disadvantaged group for at least some purposes.

Is ethnicity really a concept that is state defined? Does a person's ethnicity really change if they move from California to Florida?

Brazilians are even more confusing, they aren't officially considered Hispanic or Latino either, and yet it seems more than two-thirds of them define their identity that way

This is more people than some traditional Hispanic groups!

In fact, enough Brazilians identified as Latino in 2020 that they would fall in the middle of rankings of U.S. Hispanic or Latino origin groups by size, if they were officially counted as one. In 2020, Brazil would have been the 14th-largest Latino origin group with 416,000 who identified as Latino, ahead of Nicaragua (395,000) and below Venezuela (619,000).

It even changes constantly in this list of racial prerequisite cases on who is determined white

Syrians, Asian Indians and Arabians are both white and not-white. Mexicans btw in the single case for them are white.

Chinese aren't white, but they do get a pass in Jim Crow Era Mississippi to attend the white only schools and join the White Citizens Council so it seems even that isn't fully clear!

Throwing up a lot of words as a smokescreen doesn't change that Mamdani's claim was well out-of-bounds. The category "Black or African-American" isn't nearly as ambiguous as "Hispanic", and neither extends to people of Indian ethnicity born in Africa. Historical changes in the meaning of the term "white" don't matter either, because none of them would make a person of Indian ethnicity born in Africa "Black or African-American" either.

Throwing up a lot of words as a smokescreen doesn't change that Mamdani's claim was well out-of-bounds.

There are people who have called Elon Musk, who is much pastier in skin color an African American before!

The category "Black or African-American" isn't nearly as ambiguous as "Hispanic", and neither extends to people of Indian ethnicity born in Africa. Historical changes in the meaning of the term "white" don't matter either, because none of them would make a person of Indian ethnicity born in Africa "Black or African-American" either.

If every other category we use for ethnicity and race is fuzzy and ambiguous, how is that not relevant?

This argument still doesn't address the elephant in the room, it is patently obvious that the term "African American" for darker skinned people doesn't make sense when a light skinned person whose family has lived for generations in Africa and practices local traditions does not count when they move to the US but a dark skin person whose family has lived in France for generations and has no African cultural identity does.

If there's a major discrepancy between category and reality, what does that suggest? The problem is categories.

There are people who have called Elon Musk, who is much pastier in skin color an African American before!

Yes, it's a common joke. But everyone knows it's a joke, and Musk didn't fill out any official forms claiming to be African American, at least not that anyone knows.

If every other category we use for ethnicity and race is fuzzy and ambiguous, how is that not relevant?

Because the existence of ambiguities at the edges of categories does not mean there aren't unambiguous cases. Especially ambiguities in DIFFERENT categories.

This argument still doesn't address the elephant in the room, it is patently obvious that the term "African American" for darker skinned people doesn't make sense when a light skinned person whose family has lived for generations in Africa and practices local traditions does not count when they move to the US but a dark skin person whose family has lived in France for generations and has no African cultural identity does.

There's no elephant. Mere darkness of the skin is not sufficient. Culture has relevance to Hispanic ethnicity, but not the racial categories. And Mamdani's family hasn't lived for generations in Africa; both his parents were born in India, and his mother grew up in India.

IMO the census definition should be made more specific to include ADOS and ADOS alone, but "Obama, not Mamdani or Musk" is close enough.

Did you accidentally fire off this post mid-write? This seems a little thin for a top-level comment.

I at least can't fathom why this is "kinda important".

I really hope this was the entire intended post because that would be hilarious.

How good a coder even is he? Like all the stories of him being fired essentially as soon as grace period expires indicates that he's not as flash as the guy in the interviews, but then bunch of random twitter takes that he's secretly some godly contributor who's just spreading himself to thin.

Like to me 'guy creates a resume perfectly fabricated to hit the startup filters and is just very good at leetcode' feels more plausible than him genuinely being some star contributor even if it's save face for his potential employers for him to be the spread-thin genius

Wish I hadn't seen the libertarian critique. It was bad like most critiques of libertarianism are bad. Scott still holds the record for the only good critique I've ever read.

Every other critique makes it sound like libertarianism is a group of scolds that just want to take away the toy that everyone calls government.

Government rules are enforced through violence and kidnapping.

Libertarianism poses a simple question for any would be government bans: is the thing you are trying to ban worth killing and imprisoning people to reduce that thing?

For many libertarians there are things that definitely meet that criteria. Murder, kidnapping, serious bodily assault, etc.

They phrase it in the post as "who are you to ban that thing, why should we listen to you?" But really it is "who are you to say we get to kill people just because you think something is bad?"

There are a lot of things that are bad but less bad than killing and kidnapping people. And it sometimes feels like everyone is just playing signalling games when they say the government should ban something but can't affirmatively answer "yes it is worth killing people and imprisoning them in order to ban this thing" Meanwhile it feels like libertarians are one of the few groups acknowledging the on the ground enforcement costs of government actions.

Government rules are enforced through violence and kidnapping.

This is missing some steps. There are plenty of government rules, which, on their face, are not enforced through violence and kidnapping. In many of those cases, you have to posit a persistently-oppositional figure and a continued escalatory cycle to get to an eventual end state where the ultimate response to unending opposition is, indeed, violence/kidnapping.

If such a proposition holds, it should hold in other domains as well. Let's consider household/family rules. At different stages for children, some household/family rules are directly enforced via spanking or timeouts or whatever (violence/kidnapping). For others, you can often find a similar escalatory process if you posit a sufficiently oppositional child. Another end state may be 'exile', kicking someone out of your house. Of course, if we assume a maximally-oppositional child, what might it take to actually enforce kicking them out of your house? If they just refuse to go? Violence? Kidnapping? Calling the state... to use violence/kidnapping?

I think this reasoning about maximal-opposition holds for essentially every rule ever, government or not. That is, under the hypothesis of maximal-opposition, essentially every rule ever is either ultimately enforced via violence/kidnapping or... well, at some point, it just goes unenforced, as efforts are dropped in the face of maximal-opposition. Of course, one might think that choosing to present maximal-opposition is, itself, a rule that is chosen by someone.

That is, there doesn't seem to be anything unique to government rules here. Yet, I don't think that most people are willing to apply this same standard to the entire set of rules in the universe.

This is missing some steps. There are plenty of government rules, which, on their face, are not enforced through violence and kidnapping. In many of those cases, you have to posit a persistently-oppositional figure and a continued escalatory cycle to get to an eventual end state where the ultimate response to unending opposition is, indeed, violence/kidnapping.

It's the same picture. The government won't give up until it has won.

If only I had three further paragraphs.

there doesn't seem to be anything unique to government rules here. Yet, I don't think that most people are willing to apply this same standard to the entire set of rules in the universe.

This is not true. Private citizens can be reasoned and negotiated with. Sovereign rule is absolute. Especially in the context of the administrative state.

The only regress of grievances offered is one that exists at the pleasure of the sovereign and can be abolished at will.

You may argue that the lives of private citizens would bear similar relationships of total violence as they do with the State in the state of nature, but this is an argument against anarchism, not against libertarianism.

The only regress of grievances offered is one that exists at the pleasure of the sovereign and can be abolished at will.

Let's again go back to the analogy. If a parent with a maximally-oppositional child or a board game master with a maximally-oppositional player decides to press with their rule, what redress of grievances is available other than their pleasure? Yes, they can at will decide to give up on enforcement of the rule. There are tons of examples of that happening with the government, too. Moreover, there are many overlapping methods of petition for redress of grievances in a system like what the US has. That was kind of an important part of the founding movement. One might not like them; one might not think they are working in the way that they "should", but that is a separate matter from the mere question of what is required to state that all government rules are uniquely enforced by violence/kidnapping. You need to posit other things like maximal-opposition. In fact, if you ask someone who makes such a claim how they end up in such a situation, they almost by necessity appeal to maximal-opposition. "This rule seems to be enforced by a $5 fine, not violence/kidnapping." "Well, what if you don't pay that fine?" "The next step is X." "What happens if they refuse to comply with X?" "The next step is Y." "...what happens if they refuse to comply with Y?" And so on and so forth until you get to the point where violence/kidnapping occurs. There may be offramps along the way, but they all tend to be ignored in such reasoning. I'm simply pointing out that if we apply the same reasoning to essentially any other rule in the world, you either have to posit an offramp occurring, or you still end up in violence/kidnapping. Fewer people are quite as willing to think about this and apply the same reasoning to any other rule in the world.

There is a bit of a Clauswitzian feel to this reasoning. Any time you're trying to enforce any rule, either someone backs down, comes to an agreement or something, or escalates further. If we take any conflict over anything that seems like 'rule enforcement', if parties are willing to escalate and go further in their maximal opposition, you end up in warfare/violence. Politics is just one form of conflict management, but just as sure as war is politics by other means, violence in general is conflict management/"rule enforcement" by other means. Just take almost any example of a rule you want to enforce and walk through the exact same steps of, "Well, what if they're maximally-oppositional?"

Finally, to be completely clear, this is not an argument "against libertarianism". It is simply bringing clarity to the nature of one particular type of argument.

Parental relationships are indeed similar in nature to that of a sovereign to his subjects. Is is common the words are the same even.

What you seem to be denying is that civilization allows us other types of relationships. But it does.

Equals in rank or station within civilized society have a fundamentally different relationship and method of conflict resolution, one which specifically prohibits or codifies the escalation to a state of war.

Libertarians, Classical Liberals and other legalists seek to extend the domain of this boon granted by civilization to the largest possible extent.

This is not fundamentally opposed to the base idea that this ability is grounded by violence, either in individual self defense or through the means of sovereign enforcement of law. This connection is in fact one of the core components of the philosophy since the beginning.

One in fact so characteristic the derisive name the fascist gave it as the "night watchman state" stuck as a self description of minarchism.

I don't see anything in here about the question of the uniqueness of government rule enforcement being with violence/kidnapping. Mayyyybe this:

Equals in rank or station within civilized society have a fundamentally different relationship and method of conflict resolution, one which specifically prohibits or codifies the escalation to a state of war.

But it doesn't actually discuss rule enforcement. How do you do rule enforcement? Like, any example of rule enforcement? I've given two example scenarios. You can give others. How do you do it in the case of maximal-opposition?

I'll think about this. My sense is that the base relationship is what matters. The base social relationship is talking. The base family relationship is love/nurture. The base relationship with the state seems to be an imbalanced power dynamic in favor of the state.

Possibly so, but then I think the source of the matter does not begin (or end) with a proposition that it seems somewhat unique to government that rules are enforced by violence/kidnapping. I think something else has to be doing the work.

EDIT: I meant to also mention that it's not just child/parent relations. It's genuinely all rules ever. You're playing a board game, and you want to make a 'house rule'? Well, what if someone just refuses to play by it? Escalate? Eventually kick them out of your house? ...we start running into the 'exile' problem again, supposing they become maximally-oppositional. I don't think most people would start off saying, "You should consider whether or not it's worth using violence/kidnapping to enforce a house rule for a board game," even if that is a conceivable end state in the maximally-oppositional case.

I'm sorry, this is where I break with libertarians. What exactly do you think gives courts and contracts their teeth? Violence and kidnapping. Or sovereignty, as it is more commonly known. A monopoly on violence.

Suppose me and a few hundred thousand people came together and formed a corporation with salaried employees with the duties of ruling over contractual disputes, dealing with petty crime, and all issues related to security, and everyone involved agreed to defer to this body in binding arbitration and forgo their right to banditry and warlordism.

That corporation is a state. Congratulations, you've recreated statism with extra steps.

Libertarians aren't prophets in the wilderness screaming about the injustice of collective violence. Yes, it is worth killing people and imprisoning people over. People for thousands of years have valued law and order over the Hobbsian war of all against all and people are greatly relieved to have left the tribal experience of feuds and wergild.

I specifically said that sometimes libertarians agree it is fine to use violence. Its just that they want a high threshold for deciding when to deploy state violence or collective violence. Your point about corporations turning into states is more relevant to anarchist strains of thought.

They are specifically willing to deploy that violence:

  1. In defense against random violence by others i.e. to prevent the Hobbesian war of all against all.
  2. To protect property rights because they don't think most of civilization can function without property rights.
  3. However they are unwilling to deploy it for social projects.

Point 1 puts them in disagreement with various anarchist strains of thought. Point 2 puts them in disagreement with various modern progressive strains of thought and most marxist/socialist strains. And point 3 puts them in disagreement with just about everyone.

Point 3 is simultaneously why most people dislike libertarian thought, and why most critiques of them suck. Its all just special pleading by each specific author on why their specific social project deserves an exception. "Yes, it is good when libertarians want to oppose the social projects of people I hate, but the idiots don't realize that they need to allow my social project or society will of course collapse". The pattern becomes obvious after reading the same type of critique a few times, but I've had the misfortune of reading the same damn thing over a hundred times.

While I fall somewhere in the "state capacity libertarianism" and "liberaltarian" spectrum, I would say my main objection to naive libertarianism is the problem of petty tyrants.

I think there's a sense in which libertarians mostly ignore the ways that a local bully with a lot of property and social influence can make a person's life a living hell. If we live in a Dickensian libertarian utopia, what exactly stops bosses from treating their employees like crap? If the bankers refuse to give you credit because of some immutable trait of yours, how are you supposed to build wealth? If everyone in town refuses to hire someone who looks or talks like you, how are you supposed to make a living?

At best, I think the libertarian just hopes that society ends up supporting a diverse enough set of viewpoints that somewhere there will be a boss that isn't crappy, somewhere there will be a bank willing to take on more perceived risk, and somewhere there will be a person willing to follow the financial incentives and hire you.

But I think similar to the old financial dictum that "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent", there's a societal corollary that "Petty tyrants can make your life hell longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, the bigotry or social censure of a petty tyrant and their supporters ends up "irrational" from an economic perspective, but that can still create situations like those that necessitated black motorists creating the Green Book to help them find gas stations, restaurants and stores that were willing to serve their kind.

If the libertarian response to a black motorist who wants to use the government to make more spaces open for them is just, "Don't worry, it is in their financial interest to serve you, in the long run they'll be out-competed by the gas stations, restaurants and hotels that do serve black people", then a part of me feels like the response is incomplete.

A similar situation emerges with the treatment of untouchables in India. Even without law, people of higher casts often don't want to be in the same room or even have the shadow of an untouchable touch them. How were the untouchables supposed to end that situation in a libertarian utopia? In the real world, a lot of the way it happened is the Indian government using men with guns to integrate untouchables in schools, the same way it happened in the United States.

I'm curious if a more traditional libertarian can point to success stories of an oppressed underclass becoming a normal, accepted part of society without government intervention to force the petty tyrants to comply. I'm a little unclear on how a libertarian watchman state where all of the government enforcers are racist/sectarian/whatever, ever stops being bigoted. If you belong to a class of people whose de facto status is that you can be lynched or murdered and the local government will look the other way, is it not sometimes worth it to have a larger government that sends in men with guns to stop the local government from letting people get away with murder?

See the first part of https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/21/current-affairs-some-puzzles-for-libertarians-treated-as-writing-prompts-for-short-stories/

I don't even necessarily disagree that this might be a good use of government, but this is essentially not an argument for democracy, but an argument for imperialism. Backwards communities need better morals enforced on them by guys with guns from more enlightened ones.

Oh, I'm aware that what I want is essentially imperialism.

I've struggled with how to think about this.

I think that America's individualism and liberalism are highly unnatural and bad fits for human nature. That's why we had to have the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nation in human history, brainwash most of the nation for 13 years via school and media, cultivate a culture of ripping families apart through an expectation of moving out of your parents' house, and impose a taboo on cousin marriage to make it all work.

This is my difficulty. Once we've done all that. Once we've inculcated individualism and little L "liberalism" in the population, then it seems like you can have a form of federalism (AKA imperialism) that is compatible with a form of libertarianism (AKA doing what you want outside of what you're being forced to do via imperialism.)

But I do understand that the basic counter argument is that maybe we shouldn't strip people of the non-liberal parts of their cultures. Maybe we shouldn't impose an incest taboo, encourage the degraded form of the extended family we call "the nuclear family", and do all the other things that make the form of life we have in America possible.

I genuinely don't have a good answer for this. Individualism and little-L liberalism are the only way of life I know. I'm the child of two parents who both moved to different states than my grandparents, and I now live in a different city than my parents.

I've never known a collectivist society. I've never known a tightly knit small town community. I'm mostly happy, and a foolish part of me honestly believes we're a few reforms away from making this bizarre system of ours work with the 2 million year old hardware humankind is running on. But maybe the neo-reactionary and post-liberal right are correct, and it was all a doomed experiment from the start.

'm a little unclear on how a libertarian watchman state where all of the government enforcers are racist/sectarian/whatever, ever stops being bigoted.

How is this problem solved through democracy?

After my reading on Renaissance humanism, I don't really think of the thing that makes our society work (to the extent that it does) as a "democracy", but as an attempt at an Aristotlean "politeia" or constitutional republic.

Many parts of this are tangled up in a system that also sells itself on everyone having a voice (the modern meaning of "democracy"), but I think the lynchpins that make things work are the fact that we brainwash most of the populace for 13 years via public schools and the media, and that we received the individualist-trending practices of Christian Europe (nuclear family, incest taboo, etc.)

It also doesn't hurt that we're the wealthiest, most technologically advanced and highest state capacity nation in history. Even if parts of your system rely on sanding off the rough edges of human nature, where you fail to do that, it is a nice consolation prize to have a system where almost no one is starving, dying of thirst, etc. People don't want to rebel against rulers that keep them materially comfortable, even if they can feel the friction of the society rubbing against their human instincts.

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I think the problem of petty tyrants crosses systems.

Breaking down life into multiple areas:

Family, Social, Market, and Government.

Of these areas I think petty tyrants are weakest and least effective when wielding the market against their victims. The word Tyrant literally comes from someones name in Greece who was wielding a government against people.

The other answer which I know people hate is that markets are going to reflect reality. And when reality is ugly markets will look ugly. But punching a mirror doesn't fix the ugly face staring back at you.

I don't think markets are the end all be all of all problems. There are certain classes of problems that they solve extremely well. And plenty of problems that they do very little about.

I do think governments are generally terrible at solving most problems, and often make things worse They can certainly supercharge petty tyrants.

I think it would be fair to say that Point 2 is smuggling in the idea that it is not a social project, but it appears to me that it is in fact a social project. Civilization is nothing if not a social project and so defending its key cornerstone must also be a social project, I would think. That would then make Point 3 contradictory, as libertarians would appear to be just as willing as anyone else to deploy violence for their social project.

Which would seem to indicate that this:

Its all just special pleading by each specific author on why their specific social project deserves an exception.

is a statement that applies just as well to libertarianism.

If you define property rights as a social project, sure I guess that follows.

I guess I just don’t see a way in which property rights aren’t a social project.

Do you? If so, do you have the time to explain your point of view?

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Four: Enforcing contracts, right?

the idiots don't realize that they need to allow my social project or society will of course collapse

What if some of the people saying this are right, though? That is, excluding the American frontier, which I think was historically unprecedented and will not be repeated, what if a stable society really does need a social code enforced by the state or an entity with equivalent power? I guess that would then pass your bar?

Contracts can pre-agree to enforcement methods. One of them is to just piggy back off of state enforcement and say that one party now owns stuff.

If a stable society needs some form of social enforcement that would pass my bar in the same way that property rights does. But I'm generally suspicious of such requests. Non government entities like religion have had more success and longevity enforcing such things through social means. After all violence is only one means for achieving social ends. You can try to convince people, pay them, or use negative social consequences. None of those things are what I'd consider "violence".

Fair enough. So in your proposed libertarian world, you would not automatically have the right to sue for breach of contract, damages, or debt? Unless these things turned out to be foundational.

I thought those things were more central to libertarian ideology.

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I was more objecting to the provocative terminology that libertarians use: that taxation is theft, that bans are imprisonment and murder, that many straightforward and inoffensive things are in fact statist violence to the individual. It is no more convincing to me than the vegan framing of an industrial concentration camp of imprisoned bovine lifeforms is, in fact, a cattle pen. It is a stupid way to argue and no one is actually convinced by that sort of rhetoric.

The sacral force of the law has always held the connotation of life or death consequence: since Roman times it was thus. Not everyone follows laws because of moral duty: justice carries both the scales and the sword! It is so obvious that only libertarians feel smug about stating the obvious. Yes, the state has the power to enforce its directives with force. That is a good thing. If it did not, then it would not have the power to make anyone heed it. And that threshold of necessary violence is decided by the people of the nation, not libertarians!

If you don't have that, you don't really have a society: only a collection of strangers in an economic zone.

Only a libertarian would believe that without a state, men would follow laws. Thousands of years of history have taught us this, that ambitious men who break weak states soon place themselves above it, to rule like tyrants. Similarly as you have encountered hundreds of critiques of libertarianism, I have read just as much apologia for it and have emerged thoroughly unconvinced of its merit and totally dumbfounded by its complete unseriousness.

You say in the first paragraph that libertarians are wrong and reductive to call government enforcement a form of violence.

You say in the second paragraph that obviously government is violence and it always has been, and only an idiot would think otherwise.

So which is it?

If it is the second paragraph that is true I don't disagree with you. If it's the first paragraph I do disagree with you.

And that threshold of necessary violence is decided by the people of the nation, not libertarians!

If you don't have that, you don't really have a society: only a collection of strangers in an economic zone.

The people of a nation are made up of individuals. You are one such individual. Where do you personally draw the line? What social projects do you think are necessary enough to be enforced with violence? I can't speak with "the people of the nation" I can only speak with individuals.

This vagueness of thrusting off responsibility for calling for the violence is also familiar.

I said no such thing, you set up a false dichotomy. Vegans can call slaughterhouses concentration camps and although there are superficial similarities it is ultimately not a true comparison. The same is true for libertarianism, because collective action in the form of violence (either directly through force or indirectly through coercion) is a normal and trivial thing.

And in a postmodern, Foucaultian sense, I suppose this is tyranny and murder and kidnapping. In this case, I will take personal responsibility, as a individual, to assert my social project of throwing people who assert naive libertarianism into the wood chipper: as a collection of pederasts, drug addicts, and tax evaders who do nothing but redefine perfectly normal things and call it injustice.

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His arguments about drugs also include pornography, which he lumps in with drugs as causing only harm. If you don't count "people like to use it" as being good, you would oppose not only drugs and pornography but also video games, comic books, vacations, and Shakespeare (except that he probably has arbitrary categories of non-harm that would allow vacations and Shakespeare).

Art ennobles the soul. Vices do not.

Refusal to defer the authority to decide what is art and what is vice to others is all well and good, but it does not refute this reality.

He says "Pornography causes nothing but harm. Crystal meth causes nothing but harm." This is not true, but for the sake of argument let's say that it is actually true. What he does not say is that letting the government have the power to prevent people from watching pornography or doing crystal meth also, in the real world, causes harm. In practice, one cannot allow government to have the power to prevent private individuals from watching porn or consuming recreational drugs without also having downsides, such as: 1) you must then give extra tax money to government agents so that they can enforce these laws, and 2) it will probably encourage the growth of government power in ways that even you yourself might not agree with - once you empower government to snoop and to reach into people's lives to that extent, it is unlikely that government will stop at just banning porn and crystal meth.

Now, we can argue about what causes more harm, pornography/crystal meth or the government preventing people from using those things. My point is more that Smith does not even engage with this argument, even though it is a common and fairly obvious one.

The take on “modern art” isn’t great. The impressionists were the first to engage with photography, and everyone loves those haystacks, water lilies, and ballerinas. In its day, the work was criticized for being sloppy, unprofessional , vulgar in technique with visible strokes, not much mixing of color, chaotic, lacking craft, etc, which may as well be Luke’s objections to “modern art”. Photography itself would take a while to be accepted as fine art. All the while the two continued to influence each other. Consider that photorealism was a post war counter movement to abstract art, but that it wouldn’t exist without either the embrace of abstraction or the widespread diffusion of photography and its idioms in society. Or think about Andy Warhol reproducing the objects of mass production in the setting of fine art. Such work only makes sense in a society that can print at will. This is Art having a conversation with the consequences of mass printing and the quotidian. Consider the work of Roy Lichtenstein, who appropriated the techniques used by comic books, but blew them up and put the ben-day dots in the foreground, as if they are the subject. They are striking in person.

I seriously wonder if the author, or the people who levy these criticisms in general, have ever been to a museum. Liechtenstein’s pieces are big and experiencing them is different in person. Clifford Still made huge, abstract, minimal pieces that can only be appreciated in person (20’ wide). Pollock’s paintings are 10’ wide. Reproduction on a phone screen loses something as a medium. It’s not just the form factor, a work taking up your entire field of view, the setting, the loss of texture, etc, but our relationship to our phones themselves. In a museum, when forced to confront a work of art, you have an actual thing in front of you - it obviously took effort and other people value it and think you should value it too. They chose to show it to you and you implicitly accepted a contract when you entered to attempt to engage with it. A phone is just the opposite. Every image on a phone is disposable and ephemeral, and asks nothing of us.

Phones serve us pablum or turn everything else into it. So anyway, go to a museum. As your parents might say, eat your broccoli, you may like it.

Lichtenstein appropriated more than just the look, he stole the panels too.

https://nextpanel.blogspot.com/2011/08/roy-lichtenstein-plagiarist-or-art.html?m=1

Agree with you on the wider point, and that impressionist/abstract expressionist/etc. art needs to be viewed in person. The point I'd add is that paintings might be flat, but they're not 2D objects. You haven't experienced a painting, particularly an impressionist/abstract one, until you've been able to walk around it and see it in 3D space. Both Impressionists and Pollock, for instance, play fascinating tricks on the visual cortex as you walk from side to side, closer and farther. When I'm looking at, say, a Monet, the first thing I try to do is to stop staring at a flat image and to let my eyes relax into it, let the "3D" image appear, let the brain create depth and parallax as I move around it. Same thing with many abstract expressionists, and in some cases they're carried by such subtle features that you can only see them in person, such as Ad Reinhardt's black canvases.

Note that this is not a defence of "conceptual art" that's all concept and no art. The grouches here are largely right about that.

I’m a traditional Christian so I’m not goin* to Wade in the waters of your particular religion or traditions. But to me, having a pillar of “at least I know this is true” (and again mine is traditional Christianity) does allow you to not be sure about the rest without going crazy and being cynical about everything. I know that the Bible and the early Christian tradition is true, and whether or not anything else is lies, I at least have that. Maybe we’re headed to world war, maybe not. Maybe Trump is our Putin or Orbán, or maybe not. Maybe Covid was a deadly virus that killed people or maybe it’s just a flu bug. Let the chips fall.

Book 4 of the Meditations of Marc Aurel:

32: Call to mind by way of example the time of Vespasian: you will see everything the same: men marrying, bringing up children, falling ill, dying, fighting, feasting, trading, farming, flattering, asserting themselves, suspecting, plotting, praying for another's death, murmuring at the present, lusting, heaping up riches, setting their heart on offices and thrones. And now that life of theirs is no more and nowhere.

Again pass on to the time of Trajan; again everything the same. That life, too, is dead. In like manner contemplate and behold the rest of the records of times and whole nations; and see how many after their struggles fell in a little while and were resolved into the elements. But most of all you must run over in mind those whom you yourself have known to be distracted in vain, neglecting to perform what was agreeable to their own constitution, to hold fast to this and to be content with this. And here you are bound to remember that the attention paid to each action has its own worth and proportion, only so you will not be dejected if in smaller matters you are occupied no farther than was appropriate.

33: Words familiar in olden times are now archaisms; so also the names of those whose praises were hymned in bygone days are now in a sense archaisms; Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus; a little after, Scipio too and Cato; then also Augustus, then also Hadrian and Antoninus. For all things quickly fade and turn to fable, and quickly, too, utter oblivion covers them like sand. And this I say of those who shone like stars to wonder at; the rest, as soon as the breath was out of their bodies were 'unnoticed and unwept'. And what after all is everlasting remembrance? Utter vanity. What then is that about which a man ought to spend his pains? This one thing: right understanding, neighbourly behaviour, speech which would never lie, and a disposition welcoming all which comes to pass, as necessary, as familiar, as flowing from a source and fountain like itself.

How do I survive in a world where the heuristics people hold holy on both sides end up being wrong so often?

Von Neumann said "you don't understand things in math, you just get used to them". It's similar in philosophy. You never actually solve philosophical problems, but you can outgrow them.

Most of the questions here are ones you'll eventually outgrow, assuming your development is not prematurely arrested.

Regarding the "Why Modern Art is so awful" essay: Luke’s explanation of “it’s a reaction to photography” is too simplistic. Any theory of "modern art" (bit of a vague term but we'll roll with it) has to account for the fact that there are people who really do like this stuff. Genuinely. It's not (always) a scam.

Nancy McWilliams described modern art as essentially being "by schizos, for schizos":

Sass (1992) has compellingly described how schizoid conditions are emblematic of modernity. The alienation of contemporary people from a communal sensibility, reflected in the deconstructive perspectives of 20th-century art, literature, anthropology, philosophy, and criticism, has eerie similarities to schizoid and schizophrenic experience. Sass notes in particular the attitudes of alienation, hyperreflexivity (elaborate self-consciousness), detachment, and rationality gone virtually mad that characterize modern and postmodern modes of thought and art, contrasting them with "the world of the natural attitude, the world of practical activity, shared communal meanings, and real physical presences" (p. 354). His exposition also calls effectively into question numerous facile and oversimplified accounts of schizophrenia and the schizoid experience.

If modern art is primarily produced and enjoyed by people who naturally feel at home in these modes of thought and experience, whereas the majority of the human population does not recognize themselves in this experience, then that could help explain some of the disconnect.

I once posted Klee's Angelus Novus here on TheMotte as an example of a first-rate painting, and was met with disapproval and incredulity. But you'll have to take my word for it that I really do find it to be quite lovely!

I think that's why I dislike it so much! Not because it's schizo posting, I've been a denizen of /b/ since duck rolling was used earnestly to troll. But because it's schizo posting that has way too much institutional support, which glows.

I think you should stop taking this guy so seriously. He has good advice in some areas of life (financial independence, internet use), but he is a hack in many other areas. For example, he claims that you don't need to learn a ton of vocabulary to be fluent in language and also that he is fluent in Spanish and French just from learning Latin. The first of these is not true, and he should know better as a someone who claims to be a linguist. The second seems to be really improbable: I'd have to hear him speak Spanish to believe it. I'm sure this is true with other areas of his "expertise" that I have less experience with.

I speak Spanish, French, and Latin. It’s just barely plausible that he can understand Spanish spoken deliberately slowly that way but French? Come on.

It’s also a cheat. Assuming he’d learned Spanish including the grammar before learning French and Latin, they’re related languages. It’s like learning Danish, then memorizing words in Norse or Swedish — they’re close enough that it works. Do the same trick with Spanish and Korean and German and it doesn’t work.

I did not find French 'easier' by knowing Latin and Spanish. I suppose they made it easier to learn each other, but French is pretty different from the other Romance languages grammatically and in pronunciation.

Why Modern Art is so awful

I'm not gonna engage with the other articles, but since I have a background and career in Art History, I feel compelled to comment on this essay.

In brief, I find it completely uninteresting and uneducated. He engages in the typical knee-jerk mystification of art that revolves around fixing some specific tipping point in History as the moment when things went from good to bad, and ascribes this turn to a form of malice or stupidity. Unsurprisingly, he can't really offer any concrete examples, quotes, dates, works, exhibitions or discursive shifts and needs to rely on completely nonsensical vibe-based generalisations that are by and large provably false.

There was a fairly obvious point in time, perhaps at the turn of the twentieth century when this changed for worse. Art became perceived as elite and snobbish.

This is pretty much the exact polar opposite of the development of the public reception of art in Western Society. On the contrary, the turn of the century saw the downfall of the Salon, with its highly academic selection process and extreme emphasis on complex, highbrow subject matter (being able to "read" a painting and divulge its mythological, historic or religious contents having been a key element of art discourse and prestige since the Renaissance), and the ineffable rise of the Gallery, which classed taste and value by means of the free market without institutional gatekeeping.

The Impressionists are of course the eminent example of an art movement rejected by the academic elites and their official Salons, only to be such a spectacular success among the general population that Napoleon III saw himself pressured to form an entirely separate Salon just for their work.

Of course, his claim doesn't hold for the avant-garde period either - the 20th century begins with the Fauvist and Cubist movements, both of which draw their names from extremely negative press reviews by the established art circles in Paris ("fauve" meaning savage, and "Cubist" meant to deride its lack of depth beyond its visual formula). Once again, the elite art snobs from illustrious collector families and high positions in art academies were the main push against the early modernist movement. If one has an absolute minimum background knowledge pertaining to the history of Art Academies, this is obviously unsurprising, since elite Academies historically always initially resist stylistic and thematic shifts in art - the same thing happened to David's early paintings, which were Neoclassical at a time when Rococo was still the academic style of choice. It's just the nature of institutions to become resistant to change once their power and status is entrenched.

The actual critique he could have made, but didn't, is that on the contrary, the democratisation of art and art criticism that happened in the 19th century with the proliferation of journalism and literacy, the inauguration of public museums, and the rise of a new class of bourgeois art collectors is what led to the crisis of modern art, which lost clear formal and narrative criteria necessary for its evaluation. Does he seriously believe art during the Renaissance was not an elite, snobbish affair? Pretty much every single painting you will see in a museum up until the 19th century was either commissioned by the Church or the Aristocracy, with more humble social classes contenting themselves with mediocre family portraits and decorative still lives which have largely been lost to time due to no one caring enough to preserve them. The very right to own and perpetuate figurative depictions was considered a noble duty not suited for the common rabble.

Modern art became an elitist affair the moment it became entrenched within the institutions and academies that produce and manage artworks, same as every successful art movement before them.

Years before, painters might painstakingly dedicate hours on end to producing a mural or simple portrait which could easily be appreciated for the skill of the craft.

Furthermore, he places an emphasis on craft being the guiding criteria of pre-modernist art, which is such a hilarious spit in the face of the artistic Western tradition since the Renaissance, which explicitly, insistently and desperately wanted to elevate itself about the status of craftsmanship and join the realm of "high arts" like poetry and literature, whose value is derived by ingenuity, singularity, and formal application of philosophical and intellectual pursuits. Dürer instantly comes to mind as the artist who constantly insisted that no, he was not a craftsman, but something more akin to a visual poet. If he had read some first semester Art History 101 literature like Vasari's Biographies, he would see that this division between craftsmanship and artistry was a foundational concern of Western tradition since the Renaissance and quite literally defined the process and output of many Old Masters.

This obviously doesn't mean that technical and formal mastery was irrelevant or unappreciated, but it was seen as a given for someone who pursued an artistic training since childhood and was considered inadequate to make a painting great without the added components of composition (which was tied to studies of mathematics and proportionality), ingenuity (where the term "genius" comes from, i.e. someone able to innovate and add), and especially subject matter - Botticelli being the eminent early example of someone who purposefully selected obscure and complex myths as subject matters because it proved he was a well-read intellectual and not a handyman.

I recommend anyone to take a look at André Félibiens lectures on painting, which took place during the founding days of the Royal Academy in Paris and explicitly seek to lay out a hierarchy of values and criteria for critiquing painting - unsurprisingly, complex mythological and religious scenes were considered the high watermark, with still lives and landscapes at the very bottom of the list.

The simple yet decisive invention of the color photograph served as a functional coup de grâce for the niche that the more laborious method of hand painting depictions of scenery had formerly filled.

Thus modern artists, many of which with feelings of effective emasculation, had been outdone by their craft.

This is only vaguely applicable to the highly figurative Academicist styles that emerged from David's Neoclassicism and were the elite style of choice in the mid-19th century, placing an emphasis on lifelike details well suited to recuperation by photography. Most Old Masters were obviously interested in expressive and psychological visual effects that go beyond just being lifelike - Mannerism's dreamlike serpentine, elongated bodies, Rembrandts' emotive spatial distortions, Goyas grotesque, writhing faces, the list goes on and on. Not to speak of the expressive caricatural tradition of Dutch miniature painting found in Bruegel or Bosch, nor the exaggerated and bombastic compositions of Baroque art, which was Europe's single most durable and lasting artistic tradition since the end of the Middle Ages.

To reduce Western painting to its technical ability to render figurative depictions on a flat surface is to essentially say that Western art peaked and concluded with the Ghent Altarpiece in the 15th century and had no meaningful developments since.

Now, I'm not really a defender of modernism in art, and I do think the past 100 years have been largely a period of decline and loss of previous artistic achievements - but I am a defender of serious analysis and criticism, and this essay is a complete joke on those fronts. How one can look at the extreme fervour and dynamism of the early avant-garde, its fanatical Utopianism and avowed quest to create forms of expression that resonated with normal people's lives under rapidly changing social, technological and political conditions and come away thinking it was due to the artists feeling "emasculated" is just the boring, vindictive anti-intellectualism of someone who has a bone to pick and lets his emotional resentment get the better of him.

I could go on picking apart more of this essay - he packed an impressive amount of bullshit into one single page - but I think I've largely made my point. Don't read this if you're looking for good criticism of modern art - watch the Shock Of The New by Robert Hughes or Ways Of Seeing by John Berger. They actually know what they're talking about.

This obviously doesn't mean that technical and formal mastery was irrelevant or unappreciated, but it was seen as a given for someone who pursued an artistic training since childhood and was considered inadequate to make a painting great without the added components of composition (which was tied to studies of mathematics and proportionality), ingenuity (where the term "genius" comes from, i.e. someone able to innovate and add), and especially subject matter - Botticelli being the eminent early example of someone who purposefully selected obscure and complex myths as subject matters because it proved he was a well-read intellectual and not a handyman.

Well, isn't that part the crux though? It's not that the "art scene" that only asks for craftsmanship is good, but that the "art scene" that does not ask for craftsmanship is bad. It's the same situation as with poetry and philosophy - technical requirements, whether it's the ability to paint well, to stick to a meter and rhyme in a way that tickles the unexpectedness sense, or to write out your argument formally, are useful because they filter out the uncommitted, the generally incompetent and those whose comparative advantage lies primarily in the social game of becoming respected in a subculture.

Poetry, nowadays, appears to be dominated by harpies writing free-form word vomit about their lived experience as a 1/16 Native American, and being very good at coordinating meanness towards anyone who suggests their poems may be trash or precious limited space in anthologies and events should be allocated to someone who is not of their tribe. If rhyme and meter still were table stakes for poetry, they would not be able to occupy the positions of power and taste-making that they do, because ability in rhyming and ability in coordinating meanness are not very correlated (and might even be anticorrelated because both take time to hone). I assume similar things are going on in art, though there whatever social games the monochromatic-canvas crowd engages in are less obviously entangled with SJ.

Picasso actually could draw when he had to, and therefore unsurprisingly was a good artist even when he drew weird cubist stuff. The golden age of art, indeed, seems to have been the period between the 17th and early 20th century, when craftsmanship was still required but no longer considered sufficient. (Some exceptions before that from good craftsmen that coincidentally also had interesting artistic visions, e.g. Bosch.)

Well, isn't that part the crux though? It's not that the "art scene" that only asks for craftsmanship is good, but that the "art scene" that does not ask for craftsmanship is bad. It's the same situation as with poetry and philosophy - technical requirements, whether it's the ability to paint well, to stick to a meter and rhyme in a way that tickles the unexpectedness sense, or to write out your argument formally, are useful because they filter out the uncommitted, the generally incompetent and those whose comparative advantage lies primarily in the social game of becoming respected in a subculture.

This is completely true, and it's an argument against the point the original essay was making. The democratisation of art has diluted technical and formal criteria by dismantling traditional forms of gatekeeping - not some new-found elitism.

Poetry's downfall in particular which you mention seems to me to be suffering from a similar issue - our elites aren't reading anymore and have little meaningful exposure to the great classics of Western poetry. The Rupi Kaur-style of poetry is successful because it is extremely undemanding to read and easy to consume, perfectly fit for a society that acquired Ivy League Humanities degrees by using Sparknotes and summarized bullet points to interact with a Lord Byron poem. There is a stunning lack of snobbishness even in our most elite universities.

The golden age of art, indeed, seems to have been the period between the 17th and early 20th century, when craftsmanship was still required but no longer considered sufficient. (Some exceptions before that from good craftsmen that coincidentally also had interesting artistic visions, e.g. Bosch.)

I find the concept of a "golden age of art" overly ambitious and reductive, but it makes for a fun dinner party conversation. Your periodisation leaves out the entire Gothic period and the Renaissance, not to speak of Classical Antiquity and Ancient Rome, so I have trouble getting on board with it as the decisive high watermark of art. I also find much of the 18th Century to be a relative low point in the Western tradition of painting before 1900, but I think that's largely a matter of taste.

Thanks, AAQC’d.

For substance to the comment, I find that hoi polloi can appreciate, say, Fra Angelico or other late medieval artists much more easily than Picasso, perhaps about as well as Monet or Van Gogh. The point at which art went off the rails seems to be earlier than you’re pointing to.

Picasso has High favorability, rather higher than Monet.

I have to respectfully disagree with the specific examples you chose - as someone who has worked in public facing art institutions and museums interacting with throngs of tourists and casual museum-goers, Picasso is an absolute hit with the hoi polloi and by far one of the most common name drops for people who aren't aficionados or professionally involved in the art world.

Fra Angelico on the other hand blends into almost every single other "old" painting in the general publics mind, which they can as a whole barely distinguish or situate aside from famous pop culture classics like the Mona Lisa. I tentatively agree that if you were to drill them with questions about which artist has more beautiful formal output or better technical mastery, they might begrudgingly agree to Fra Angelico - but they like Picasso because they think it has a specific coolness, edge, and doesn't leave them feeling confused and uneducated as to the subject matter (the average lowbrow museum visitor couldn't even tell you what an Annunciation Scene is, it all just melts into "old Christian art"). Picasso has also been subject to a vast marketing campaign and has become a pop icon in his own right - and the masses love a celebrity, always.

Now, if we would ask the hoi polloi to choose between any kind of Old Master painting and some overly discursive conceptual art by Joseph Kosuth or actionist performance piece by Herman Nitsch, I definitely agree they would go for the former - and it IS true that modernist art has become a hermetic, jargon-and-discourse-heavy scene that often uses very nebulous and downright non-artistic criteria to evaluate contemporary art. What I'm disagreeing with specifically is that modern art is inherently bad due to elitism and that the central focus of Western art pre-modernism was its craftsmanship.

Also, calling avant-garde artists emasculated when it was quite literally their absolute time in the sun is so pitiful - it was pretty much the apex of the Artist as a public influence on society, a historically unparalleled prestige position that was gradually lost in the post-war Era.

Also, Monet and Van Gogh are some of the biggest crowd-pleasers out there and it's not even close.

Yes, people like impressionism.

My pick of Fra Angelico was more 'random talented old painter' than anything specific to him. I think if shown a cubist painting and a random piece of 15th century religious art, most people would pick the religious art- although I'll agree that people certainly like the cachet of namedropping Picasso. People like well done representation; that's the core definition of 'art'.

I sometimes wonder if there isn't a political analogy to the idea that 'Science advances one funeral at a time.'

I think you could tell a story of the last 400 years as a time of massive upheavals in traditional ways of life, as the rate at which societies had contact with wildly different societies rapidly increased, better instruments and math led to better understanding of and dominion over the natural world, and society began to change at a more rapid pace than ever before.

Different human societies have always been changed by contact with one another. Just look at Ancient Rome, which saw Cato the Elder rejecting Greek philosophy as an anti-Roman thing that Rome had no need of, only for his great grandson Cato the Younger to become one of the most famous adherents of the Greek philosophical school of Stoicism and a sort of secular patron saint of lost causes complete with a pseudo-martyrdom narrative. If we use that as a measure, it took at most 4 generations for the "anti-Roman" Greek philosophy to be Romanized and assimilated by the Roman elites. That's a glacial pace of societal change compared to modernity.

In the modern day, you can be exposed to different ways of life in a thousand different ways. If you want to go deep on modern China or India as a Westerner, you can do so. If you want to dive into everything the Western world knows about modern "primitive tribes" you can do so. You can read about the history of every great Empire and every historical time period and people we have records for. In a way, a modern person is constantly reliving Rome's first serious contact with the Hellenistic other. I think for most people, it is too much too fast. It is impossible to maintain a stable "Romanitas" in the face of all this information.

While I view it with as much suspicion as any of David Graeber's works, I think the book "The Dawn of Everything" made me realize the double-edged sword of the European Age of Sail. Sure, Catholic missionaries were being sent to what is now Quebec, and trying to convert the native Americans, but at the same time they were learning the languages and ways of life of these natives and sending reports back to the Old World which were read with great interest. I mean, just imagine that you're an educated Frenchman and you're suddenly hearing a ton about a bunch of cultural practices, governments, and religions that are unlike anything you've ever heard about. Even if you start out with a firm conviction that your way of life is superior, it would be hard to not update your view of human nature and what makes for a successful society even a little.

I think that there are two basic orientations a society can have: a rigid, fixed view like the Amish which is slow and deliberate about change, and a more open, changing view which tries to update and assimilate all new perspective which are put to it. The problem with the first view is that in many circumstances it might leave you vulnerable to outside invasion by a superior foe. In one sense, the Amish are lucky that people mostly admire their way of life and don't consider them disloyal or "foreign", because if the United States military wanted to take down the Amish it wouldn't even be a fight, it would be a slaughter.

I also think that in some ways "Progressiveness" or a Whig impulse is kind of inevitable over the last 400 years. In the United States in 1790 around 90% of people were involved in agriculture, whereas today less than 2% of the population is involved in agriculture. I don't think there's any set of societal values that would survive a transition like that. A modern American city calls for a different approach to society than what works in a 1790's farm society. Anyone who thinks otherwise is simply delusional. In 1790 there were no engines, no automated factories, no labor saving devices in the home, no video games, no internet. We didn't have modern antibiotics, automobiles, planes, mass surveillance, or a thousand other modern inventions. Frankly, it makes sense that society would change in response to those things.

I don't think we can start having a super viable "conservatism" again until the pace of technological progress slows down, and we artificially limit the number of "first contact" scenarios with very different cultures from our own, but I doubt that is going to happen. Instead, while we still haven't even ironed out all of the kinks of Modern Society + Smartphones and Social Media, we're adding Generative AI to the mix. We don't have time for healthy norms to develop, instead we just panic about the last problem while a new one starts rearing its head on the horizon.

Edit: Grammar.

I mean I think many of the Revolutions are less impressive as they always end up recreating the structures that actually work for human society. It’s the same across cultures and times with various means of control being attempted or various social systems being implemented to try to keep civilization alive and functioning as technology changes around us. But human nature doesn’t change and truth doesn’t change and the hard realities of life on earth doesn’t change. I suspect we’ll probably settle into something that works just as we have every other time

I mean I think many of the Revolutions are less impressive as they always end up recreating the structures that actually work for human society.

I'm not sure I agree. My view of history is that technology often creates a latent possibility for change within society, and that if a Revolution happens "at the right time" it can radically alter the shape of society. If it happens "at the wrong time" it will either destroy a society completely, or just change who happens to be at the top, but reproduce the successful model that preceded it.

The best examples are the French and American revolutions. I think they happened at the perfect time to create a transition from feudalism to capitalism and from monarchy to constitutional republics. The printing press changed us from a network society to a broadcast society, the post-Renaissance engagement with Classical history was stronger than ever, the Age of Sail was exposing European societies to new resources and new ways of thinking, and the Scientific revolution was in full swing. Things were ready for a shake up.

But human nature doesn’t change and truth doesn’t change and the hard realities of life on earth doesn’t change.

I partly agree with you, and partly disagree.

I think there is something to a Steven Pinker-esque argument about how much better our society is from those in the past: Less infant mortality, less war deaths, less starvation, etc. All of those things are tangible differences from the past. (I don't discount that a lot of these could be reframed in a more pessimistic light, where the threat of violence is just as strong as it has ever been - it is just the case that we have created a global system where the stakes are so high that all of the big players with survival instincts choose to engage in smaller scale proxy wars to avoid a nuclear apocalypse.)

However, I think many people feel like something has gone deeply wrong with modern society, and I personally think a lot of it stems from what I like to call "unenriched zoo enclosure syndrome." Anatomically modern humans evolved ~2 million years ago for an ancestral environment very different from anything we see in the modern day. I believe that our basic body plan and capabilities have been enough to give us a massive ability to shape our own environment, but that increased control has allowed us to create societies that aren't good matches for our psychology.

I think things like Bowling Alone, the male loneliness epidemic and many other societal problems fundamentally stem from the fact that we've designed a "zoo enclosure" for ourselves that doesn't fulfill our basic psychological and social needs as animals. It's like the birds that die of stress when put in captivity, or the lions that pace unhappily back and forth in a bad enclosure. Our instincts leave us expecting a highly social world of in person social interactions, full of green and certain kinds of stresses and challenges, and we have produced a world where we get none of that. Materially, we're better off than we've ever been, but psychologically I think we need to find new and better ways to deliver on experiences that "enrich" our zoo enclosures and leave us as happy human animals.

I’m not going to disagree on the zoo-society hypothesis. This is true. But it’s also true that humans are not just social but hierarchical. That’s been true from the start of civilization. And so no matter what the specific shape the government officially takes, it’s always those with power and wealth calling the shots. And while some forms of government might be more open for those on the bottom, but at best it’s illusions. They’re lead to believe they’re deciding the direction of the country, but the decisions are not made at the ballot box, they were made before the election even took place.

Does anyone have anything to say about the OBBB being passed? I was genuinely surprised to see that no one was posting about it at all in this thread.

I'm broadly against the bill but don't have much of an opinion of the specific provisions. I understand that it's meant to neuter the political power of my ingroup and neargroup and it seems like it's going to be effective at that, so I know I'm going to dislike it regardless of whether it has any actual non-partisan merit. I guess if I had to single out few things in particular, I'm selfishly in favor of renewing the R&D tax writeoffs, but also singularly terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget... It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces. There are... historical parallels. I'm (among other things) brazilian, and I can't help but remember the first republic's antipathy towards and neglect of the navy due to their royalist tendencies.

The way it is framed on talk radio is those people losing healthcare are able bodied men who refuse to work and never should have been recipients of government paid healthcare. An unambiguous positive to cut them off Medicaid.

Is it true that an 80 hour per month work requirement for able bodied people without children to qualify for Medicaid is part of the BBB? Yes. 80 hours of work, schooling, training or volunteering. Exempted if the recipient has kids 14 years or younger.

The assertion by conservatives is that Medicare was intended for only the poorest and least fortunate among us. Whether it should be expanded to able bodied people who don't work is a political question.

The cuts to science funding seem likely to do major damage to American R&D, cause a mass exodus of skilled workers to Europe, and give China the opportunity to get even farther ahead of us in key fields such as battery development. As an attack on the woke elements of the Academy they seem both disproportionate and poorly targeted, and as an attempt to burn it all to the ground they are clearly insufficient. I'd like to see someone at least propose a new Bell Labs-type enterprise as a replacement for the scientific infrastructure that they're trying to dismantle, if that's the way we're going.

In other news, Elon promised to start a new political party and to primary a bunch of Republican congresscritters if the bill passed. That should be entertaining to watch if he doesn't chicken out.

The cuts to science funding seem likely to do major damage to American R&D, cause a mass exodus of skilled workers to Europe, and give China the opportunity to get even farther ahead of us in key fields such as battery development.

The damage was done. The science funding was being used for woke first, climate alarmism second, and any useful science well after that. Politico did an article on the "scientific refugees" moving to France; those identified included only a climate historian, a climate scientist and his wife "who studies the intersection of judicial systems and democracies".

Why don't you think that climate science is useful science?

Because it’s ’the End is nigh! Pay attention to me!’ Doomsday ascetic attention whoring.

Many kinds of scientists are irrationally prone to thinking their particular specialty is the most important thing evah, but AI risk is still a real thing, space exploration is still a real thing, deadly viruses are still a real thing, etc. I think the same is obviously true of the climate. Global warming isn't going to literally set us all on fire by 2035 but climate change is still an ongoing phenomenon with massive global implications and it needs to be studied. So long as you don't follow them on X, I think most scientists still produce more light than heat, if you'll forgive the expression.

These scientists continually produce predictions which turn out to be cartoonishly wrong. When they don't come true they just change the date for extinction of the human race and demand more power. Climate science exists for the purpose of pushing a single environmentalist narrative with a single goal(states of nature as close to pre-European colonization as possible) for which they are willing to sacrifice human achievement. I think this goal is stupid, and I'm sure not willing to entertain people wanting to sacrifice human achievement for it. Australian megacats are really cool and a valuable source of scientific knowledge, not a crisis. And if the earth gets warmer this isn't a crisis, either- maybe it'll suck for penguins and polar bears but it'll open more land for settlement and that's good, and there's plenty of animals that aren't penguins.

And if the Earth gets warmer this isn't a crisis

Come on. It would suck for far more than "penguins and polar bears". It'll suck for the current balance of worldwide agriculture, it'll suck for coastal population centers, it'll suck for vast swathes of land that are already near the threshold of unlivable, and, oh yes, it'll suck for all the currently temperate areas which will inherit the latter's status as the arid "well, you can eke out a living there, I guess" hell-holes. This is true even if you're correct about global warming opening as much hitherto-frozen land for settlement up north as it will ruin further south. We'd be looking at a major reshuffle in what countries control what kind of territory and resources, which may not favor the West much. (Indeed, odds are it wouldn't: we'd been dealt a good hand already, to the point that some view sheer luck of the draw on Europe's local climate as, if not the secret to Europeans' worldwide success, then at least a crucial prerequisite. We can really only go downhill.)

Even if it turns out net positive in the end, it needs to be anticipated and planned for in order to mitigate the damaging side-effects of the disruption itself. Which is exactly what I had in mind when I spoke of "global implications" and why we need climate scientists. I agree that the Earth getting warmer isn't x-risk. But there's far more to whether a crisis is worth averting or mitigating than whether it'll literally wipe out humanity. (Particularly if we're talking about a specific country's incentives rather than Homo Sapiens's as a whole.)

Even if it turns out net positive in the end, it needs to be anticipated and planned for in order to mitigate the damaging side-effects of the disruption itself.

Not really. There's a large timescale separation. The dynamics of economic/political/etc systems are significantly faster. I know it's a technical term, and it mostly only applies neatly to second-order systems, but there's a concept of "natural frequency" in dynamics, and it gives you some sense of it. What I'd like to observe about this term is that it is, in a sense, "natural" to the system, itself. It is not something that we need to really plan for in a feedforward fashion. The 'inner' loop is a wayyyyy faster optimization process; it won't be all that affected by a slow parametric change.

Observed warming has generally been less than models predict and has not had the disastrous effects that climate 'science'(read- ideologically driven anti-people crusade) says even the smaller amounts of warming we actually see should cause. Instead the extremely well funded and staffed climate alarmism apparatus is stuck pointing to recurring, predictable phenomena which predate warming like the el nino as 'devastating effects of climate change'.

Which climate scientists have made a prediction including a date of extinction for the human race, particularly one with a date that currently counts as definitely falsified (presumably in the sense of having already passed)?

Because the conclusions of any given paper are the same "Climate change is worse than we thought in some new way, it's caused more by human activity than we thought, we're all going to die even sooner than we thought, and if there's any chance to avert catastrophe it's in turning over control of all energy usage to boards of people like me who will be stewards for the common good." If this is true, we've already heard and we don't need any more. If it's false, it's even more useless.

This only holds for climate scientists trying to come up with new global models. Useful climate science looks like trying to make specific predictions about specific areas on a specific time scale in the context of an extant model, so that human infrastructure can anticipate and adapt to disruptions to established patterns.

(It's the difference between "AI risk researchers" who come up with yet more convoluted thought experiments on how to do timeless bargaining with omniscient gods, and "AI risk researchers" who are actually creating code to interpret and control what's going on inside neural networks. I can see why someone would be fed up with the former, but the latter is actual expert work that needs doing, and - so long as they sub-optimally remain a package deal - justifies the existence of the overall field.)

Useful climate science looks like trying to make specific predictions about specific areas on a specific time scale in the context of an extant model, so that human infrastructure can anticipate and adapt to disruptions to established patterns.

That would only be useful if the models were accurate enough to make such specific predictions accurately.

Does anyone have anything to say about the OBBB being passed

Nothing that wouldn't make me sound like a broken record: an unparalleled triumph of sycophancy, fiscal conservatism is a scam the barons use to con the peasants, dream of Argentinafication, etc...

I find it largely to defy discussion.

It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces.

The Trump administration is run by people who are genuinely rabid xenophobes who view Hispanic day laborers as an existential threat, but I suspect this is in the back of their mind as well. Well, less of a military force per se and more of a political gendarmerie. You want someone you can count on to shoot protestors and whose fortune is tied to the regime.

singularly terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget

They're not that strong though, glorified policemen. The US Army or Marines could surely roll right over them with numbers and heavy equipment.

Also, is there any need to use language like ingroup and neargroup? Do you just mean friends, leftists, liberals, progressives? Fiscal conservatives? Or do you mean well off, upper middle class, highly educated people? Or maybe you mean civil servants? I'm left guessing here. Surely being more precise would be better.

I think less precision is better because more precision would just be unecessary detail. The exact ideology of my in and near groups doesn't matter when the core fact I an trying to convey is that there are people who I emotionally care for that the OBBB negatively affects. Trying to frame that in ideological terms would just ovscure the truth.

The most telling aspect of AI art is what I call "extraneous detail." As a reaction, I've been making a deliberate effort to avoid that in my own writing.

Effectively there are too many people that have to be pleased by the budget for it to pass. Congress, senate and a bunch of other influential people have to agree to it. These people aren't fully autonomous but are being pulled in various directions by people around them. The result is not much can actually be done to cut spending as each cut will be fought by someone. Musk was probably right from an idealist perspective that the bill increased the debt. However, his view is too based on the corporate world in which he doesn't need to get hundreds of people to agree in order to set policy.

The bill highlights one of America's greatest issues, the inability for someone to ram something through and get it done.

If we're looking at individual provisions to hate, the senior citizen tax cut is an egregious transfer of wealth from the productive/fertile segment of society to the geriatric. It is, by any standard of new conservatism, an absolute disaster. If anything, we ought to tax the geriatric to give to young folks that may actually have kids and generate wealth.

Then again, it's hard to evaluate this in the broader context of a huge bill stuffed with hundreds of other provisions. Taken in isolation, it's awful, how the entire cake is baked together into a single must-pass thing is just a failure of our political process to actually deliberate and legislate.

If anything, we ought to tax the geriatric to give to young folks that may actually have kids and generate wealth.

Agreed. We need Critical Age Theory

Fiscal discipline can only be enforced by the bond market, that is the reality. Since both Democrats and Republicans have borrowed and would borrow, the questions around deficit spending are only these:

  • How can we maximize spending to fiscally constrain a future opposition administration/congress?

  • How can we allocate the greatest possible funding to issues we care about?

This bill, while far from perfect, mostly accomplishes both. You can’t mass deport without large scale holding camp infrastructure. $50bn or whatever isn’t enough, but it’s a good start. Immigration is the only thing that matters until immigration is solved (AI matters too, but the state is powerless to stop that march of technological progress).

Psychological factors are understated. All that needs to happen is that a degree of terror is implemented that scares most of the illegal population.

Mexico - even Guatemala - is not Afghanistan. Enough random, arbitrary and terrifying enforcement and enough will leave. Legal immigration can’t be reformed overnight and Trump doesn’t have the votes in congress.

The average daily wage for unskilled labor in the US, even flyover, is higher than a good weekly salary in Mexico, even the DF or Noreste. I don't think you can stop notoriously risk averse unskilled laborers from trying to take advantage of that. You can probably stop them from sticking around though.

And that’s most of what’s necessary. Some kind of soft-kefala where the migrants don’t stay, don’t have or bring over children, and go home at the end of the season.

don’t have or bring over children

I don't see how this is possible when you can't even stop birth tourism from people flying in. Are they only going to work for four months or so?

You can’t mass deport without large scale holding camp infrastructure.

Mandatory e-verify would probably be a lot easier to enforce given that employers, unlike illegal immigrants, usually have names, addresses, assets, registrations, tax returns, etc that can be used to lean on them in legible ways. How many illegal immigrants are going to come here if they can't get a job and can't get benefits? How many will stay?

Vanning ten Guatemalans at a time at the home depot parking lot is not a serious strategy. Of course, Trump has already given carte blanche to continue hiring illegal immigrants to politically important industries, so it's just obvious that solving this is not a priority.

Mandatory e-verify doesn’t work because most settled illegals appear to have stolen social security numbers, as discussed above. It’s a fake solution.

Most illegals have stolen SSNs? Where is the evidence for that? I did not see it in this thread.

If solving the illegal immigrant situation entails solving the SSN theft situation, that's even better. "What if all this is wrong and we create a better world for nothing?"

That or they’re employed in one of a variety of non-w2 scenarios.

There's a lot of hype and bluster but it doesn't appear different in kind than the sort of omnibus bills that have become common. Section 174 is the big win. The SALT deduction cap is a lot of sound and fury signifying little; some house-poors in California and NY/NJ will benefit, but most of those who would benefit from a higher cap will have incomes too high to take advantage of that. I think it ended up being a $40,000 cap up to $500,000 in income, phasing back to $10,000 by $600,000, but the numbers changed a lot and that may not be the final. Reducing the clean energy stuff is all good; getting Tesla (or Tesla buyers, depending on incidence) off the tit is good, cutting off the various scammers is even better.

but also singularly terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget... It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces.

This is just TDS, I'm afraid. ICE is not personally loyal to Trump, and getting more money in a budget will not make them so. If they are loyal to Trump as President and other existing forces are not (perhaps having been captured in the march through the institutions), then that's a bad situation and increasing their budget is probably a good thing.

  • ICE is not personally loyal to Trump

Roman soldiers often became loyal to the generals that distributed them land and victories over the roman state itself. It's really hard to not see this dynamic replicated.

  • -10

Roman soldiers often became loyal to the generals that distributed them land and victories over the roman state itself. It's really hard to not see this dynamic replicated.

Ludicrous comparison. TDS.

There’s nothing wrong with saying that you find a comparison ludicrous, but we ask that you leverage a more substantial complaint than “TDS.”

I'll just STFU rather than sit here doing a stupid monkey dance actually explaining how a federal agency is different than a Roman legion, thanks. I forgot the rules forbid not talking like an autistic alien.

I don't think ICE officers lack a pension like legionnaires so it's a non-issue.

Maybe I need to read more Roman history but all of the times this happened the general's army was already strong enough to contest everyone else in open war (even a less successful rebel general like Sertorius still controlled and defended Spain against Rome).

Even if they do become personally loyal to Trump, ICE isn't a real military force and it is still dwarfed by the regular military.

Wait, what? Trump is distributing lands to ICE officers? Where?

Also, in Imperial Rome, the government - usually magistrates under the guidance of provincial governor - distributed the lands, and usually this was used to colonize the conquered lands. So how this dynamic is replicated? Is Trump personally giving ICE officers he likes the share in the vast riches confiscated from notoriously wealthy illegals? Is he giving them settlement on the lands that those people owned? Are they allowed to conquer Tijuana and settle there? In what part is the dynamic replicated? What is the mechanism inspiring personal loyalty and why this is not an argument against financing any part of the government then - if giving budget to ICE makes them Trump's personal army, then why giving budget to any other of the innumerable set of government agencies doesn't make them into sitting president's personal army?

Did the bill deliver a large bonus to ICE? Offer houses, goods, women, special grocery stores?

Last I checked Trump doesn't distribute the belongings of deported illegals to ICE officers, so I don't know what parallel you see.

Are you seriously blind to the idea that paying people makes them more loyal to you? I guess i shouldn't have brought up the "roman" thing because everyone wants to focus on the specifics of that example instead of looking for broader commonalities throughout history. Like-- do you seriously think the democratic expansion of the administrative state wasn't buying the loyalty of the permanent bureaucracy? This is the exact same thing, except ICE is a literal army instead of a figurative one.

So what exactly do you really believe is the parallel? First, is the increased budget for ICE an increase in the salary of ICE agents or more funding to accomplish their task? Because the second wouldn't make them feel any extra loyalty. Do you also seriously believe that Trump is planning or hoping that ICE is going to stand on his side against... the US military? All other state law enforcement? Seriously, state what you believe Trump is doing here and listen to yourself, and then realize why everyone is telling you this is just TDS. He's just funding the main tool he has to do something a majority of americans explicitely wants him to do, and which fuels his popularity.

Money is fungible. A salary can be used to buy many belongings.

I actually wonder if this is true. I have heard of a few scattered abuses of asset forfeiture by police, no idea how common it is, but I could imagine something similar for ICE.

That’s said I think the more compelling reason to be skeptical is that large government agencies don’t like to be bored. Personally I’m not that torn up about it although my personal ethics would prevent me from working for ICE (which is saying something because I wouldn’t mind working for most defense contractors or the CIA), but you could see an argument that ICE being given too many people will lead them to go above and beyond their mandate.

but I could imagine something similar for ICE.

Not the immigration branch of ICE though. It does have HSI branch that does investigations and asset forfeitures. Curiously, nobody gave a hoot about it until Trump. Trump has this peculiar quality that once he does something people start noticing how big the government is and how much abuse is possible - only to immediately forget it forever once it's not about Trump anymore. Example: https://archive.ph/QiXfH - this is from 2017. For the last 8 years, how much high profile public discussion did you hear about this? I'd assume "none at all" is not too far off the target.

you could see an argument that ICE being given too many people will lead them to go above and beyond their mandate.

If you want to go that road, you have plenty of targets beyond ICE. THe FBI itself, the ATF, the DEA, the NSA, not to speak of the leviathan in the room that is the CIA... I mean, operation Fast and Furious alone is a horrendous example, if Hollywood made a movie where a government agency forces US merchants to sell weapons to drug cartels, and then tries to prosecute them for it and use it as a basis for trying to kill the Second Amendment - people would say it's cartoonish, hammy and bordering on libel. Yet it happened, and people generally just let it slide, shrugged it off. And there are many examples on the same cartoonishly evil level. So is there a danger in a powerful government enforcement agency to go rogue? You betcha there is. Is there anything special in Trump financing immigration enforcement to increase this danger? You'd have to work a bit harder to establish any basis for it. I mean, if you have a hardcore libertarian credentials going back to 1960s on opposing any budget increase for federal law enforcement - ok, kudos for remaining consistent. If that's the first time when you're asking this question, I'd have much harder time taking it seriously.

Think you mean https://archive.is/QiXfh for your link...

The link above works for me... I think it's the same site?

Fair enough, for whatever reason the .ph link flat-out wasn't working for me.

More comments

Illegals don't really have the amounts of property that make that worth it. The processing costs on possessing their cars probably exceed the sales price, because they drive beatermobiles, and they live in shitbox apartments in the ghetto that somebody else owns and will just rent out for below market rates(you ain't gettin' full market rent for that). Is ICE supposed to be making a killing off some Android phones with cracked screens and jeans with holes in them? Heavily used work boots? A half-smoked pack of cigarettes?

Seems mostly fine. It's hard to tell what, if anything, might be actually objectionable. Most of the articles I've seen criticizing it are of the "outrageously stupid and blatant fearmongering propaganda" type, that actively doesn't want you to understand anything at all except Blue Team Good Red Team Bad.

For example, the increase to the deficit seems to be mostly the extension of the 2017 tax cuts? The ones where, after they passed them, tax revenues went up? I feel like I need to see a homework essay about the Laffer Curve and the limits and gameabillity of CBO scoring before anyone complaining about this deserves to be taken seriously.

Same with the Medicaid thing. When this was first being proposed months ago, progressives crashed out about it, and the actual numbers were "lower rate of increase" rather than anything a mentally healthy person would call a "cut". And again, all of the articles look like unhinged fearmongering from wordcels who don't understand calculus, and aren't even trying to understand what is even actually happening.

17 million people losing Medicaid... do you mean illegal immigrants? 14 states openly give Medicaid to illegal immigrants. And that's not counting however many more are getting it on fake SSNs. Some people might lose access due to the 20 hour per week work requirement for healthy people, but let me give you an example.

My employees at MegaCorp are generally hired for full time positions. The starting pay is... not great. Hourly wages, works out to around 75% of the median salary in the state. If you're working full time.

One of my employees has been slowly getting her hours cut back. She's continually late. Frequently calls out. Zero interest in learning the position better, or working towards a promotion. At this point she's working 15-25 hours per week. Her finances baffle me, because I know she had two kids and lives in an apartment by herself. Not only does the math somehow work out, but she takes 2+ vacations a year, one usually international.

But she gets a ton of government benefits. Section 8 housing. Medicaid. Tons of other stuff. My own boss, a woman who varies oddly between pragmatic and bleeding heart, has pulled me aside to express concern about changes to the Section 8 rules. The two of them actually live in the same apartment complex, and my boss pays ~5x as much for a 1BR as the employee does for a 2BR. But her concern was that "they" were going to tighten the rules so that the employee (a perfectly healthy 30yo woman) would have to work more (possibly getting a second job), or pay more, to qualify, because it was absurd that a person like that was barely bothering themselves to show up for part time hours at a single job.

And yet that employee, who is probably subsidized by the state to the tune of something like $50k per year, would still pass the threshold to keep receiving Medicaid.

Also, I'm stoked about the ICE stuff. Democrats are mad about it because if mass deportations happen (or we just stop counting illegals for apportionment in the census), they are going to lose 20-40 House seats and electoral votes, and be relegated to minor league status until they thoroughly reform their extremist ideology.

I really wish that we could give support that prevented recipients from accumulating any sort of status goods while receiving said support. I'd be fine with giving away a relatively generous amount of benefits so long as the condition of accepting them was that they essentially had to drop out of any related status competitions as a condition of receiving that support.

You can build housing projects for benefits recipients to live in. They’ll suck, but you can do it. You can provide recipients with prepackaged meals- they’ll suck, but you can do it.

I think disability actually does work that way, but suffers from benefit cliffs that disincentivize some people from doing the work that they're able to do.

terrified of the massive increase to the ICE budget

Letting in huge numbers of illegals and false asylum claimants by the millions is practically free. Getting them back out is expensive.

The alternative is to shrug and let almost all of them stay. And then the next Democratic president lets in a few million more. Then shrug again. From the point of view of a Republican, you can guaranteed lose hard through inaction, or bite the bullet and go big in reversing the tide.

I think the Democrats will win anyways. It is too great an advantage to be able to let in millions for free.

While disappointed that the hearing protection act got stripped, I’m glad no tax on overtime is passed. The federal government is mostly a machine for passing out tons of cash to people that aren’t me and if that’s how it’s gonna be then fuck you, I want mine.

$0 tax stamps is a big deal though. I'm gonna get some $40 silencers when they come out.

The reaction from some quarters of the online 2a community has been... eyebrow-raising, to put it politely.

It's getting to the point where I unironically suspect there's a fair number of bots and shills coming out of the wood-work to paint this as a loss and demoralize 2a advocates when it's clearly a win. Not the best win, mind you, but still a win.

It's an impact, but it's likely to end up a bigger impact in the sense that this is the first time a federal gun law has been actually rolled back instead of merely sunsetted or outdated.

A 200 USD tax isn't trivial for a gun accessory, especially an expendable one, and having zero tax might allow some manufacturers to start building out entry-level silencers so the cost-of-first-hit isn't 100+ USD on top of the tax. But while that's part of why the NFA was annoying, it's not the biggest or even a primary part. And I'm not even sure we'll see much drop in MSRPs. From the sellers side, they still count as 'firearms' for FFL purposes, you'll still need an SOT, there's still going to be a ton of legal risk, and there's still a hell of a lot of overhead. From the buyer's side you aren't any less afraid of 'oil traps' or accidental 'transfers' or the ATF giving you a free colonoscopy.

((Yes, theoretically zeroing out the tax should also make enforcement of the whole registration schema impossible, but we know how that goes.))

Meanwhile, the parliamentary stuff is pretty obnoxious. I expect a dem appointee to be biased, but Byrd Ruling modifications of a law that has been defended in courts as a tax literally dozens of times is appalling.

Broadly, it's bad fiscal policy in a way that fiscal policy has been bad in an escalating fashion for the last 10-25 years (Any self-described Republican fiscal hawks need to account for Hastert before we get to Ryan/McCarthy/Johnson.).

What I find interesting in the argument over Medicaid cuts is the fact that Medicaid spending somehow increased by 40% in the last five years? How?! I could see 25% given inflation, and a temporary covid bump makes sense, but we've allegedly had a strong working-class labor market for years.

Is a healthcare system that's rapidly approaching 20% of GDP even reformable?

I know a little bit about medical billing and data standards since I work in the industry. More and more, I'm pulled toward the idea that healthcare is so irreducibly complex the only way to cut the red knot is either with completely privatized and unregulated healthcare mixed with trustbusting to break local emergency room monopolies, or by creating a single payer system empowered to ruthlessly negotiate for its own interests. Trying to have a system where a government pays for only the statistically sickest individuals (the poor and old) is just the worst of all possible worlds. (My preference is for single payer, but I have a certain sympathy for the idea of completely obliterating the pharmaceutical patent system, making EVERYTHING legal OTC, and letting God sort it out.)

I do occasionally wonder if you could get to a decent place via:

  1. Get rid of Medicaid. It maybe made sense at one point, but it's current incarnation is, as far as I can tell, such a disgusting mess for all involved parties that it's better to just kill it with fire.
  2. People who would be on Medicaid can now get insurance via the ACA exchanges - they'll get a 94% CSR plan for 2% of their income. There's some annoyance around how they will enter their income, but much less paperwork than it takes to interface with Medicaid. There would need to be a small legislative tweak to allow this to happen (let <138% FPL income people get subsidies), but in practice they should trade a bunch of annoying documentation and everything is free for a functional network (ie a blues plan) and everything is very cheap + 2% of their income.
  3. Expand Medicare to more disease categories other than just ESRD. In practice I think you want to try to capture an additional several million of the sickest people. Hemophiliacs, organ transplant, some cancers, some rare genetic disease perhaps, that sort of thing. This will dramatically lower premiums in the ACA. However power-law distributed you think healthcare costs are, the reality is they are likely more power law distributed than you think.

That's going to create some winners and losers, providers will be upset that people are on Medicare, but shifting people from Medicaid to commercial reimbursement rates should help out with that. The amount of bureaucratic nonsense saved by getting rid of Medicaid should be huge.

IIRC a few states have expanded Medicaid, but anecdotally it’s also just gotten way more normal to be on Medicaid or put your kids on it even when you could technically afford employer healthcare. I think the rising expense of health insurance is the cause; people used to have too much pride to use programs they’re technically eligible for.

Let's talk socialism and the NYC mayoral race. Apparently the All-in podcast people think it's a sweeping wave that will drown out Progress with a capital P. London, Vienna, Chicago, and of course the California cities have already had socialist mayors for a while. Why not New York?

Honestly despite being a "conservative" I am broadly quite sympathetic to socialist arguments. I do think free markets actually kind of suck, inasmuch as we can even have free markets. Personally I think free markets don't really exist when you take into account that power abhors a vacuum, but they are a fiction with extremely high utility to create material goods.

Anyway, socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class. It's weary writing and thinking about politics when even the best laid plans seem to inevitably just get ground down by the dumbest things. I can completely understand why young folks want to just socialize everything.

Not that I agree with them, but hey, sometimes I wish I were still naive enough to think socialism or any -ism could fix the ills of our society. I sadly am not that optimistic.

That being said, I don't think society is unfixable. I just think that political solutions are pointless. We need what has always been the core of strong societies - a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue. Without that, you have nothing.

Nit: when did our definition of socialism become so drowned-down? Is anything that's not free (free-as-in-captured) market capitalism now considered socialism? The only "means of production" that Mamdani is suggesting be owned publicly are a few grocery stores, no? That's hardly a "seizure" of means.

Is FoxNews blocking the term DemSoc from taking off in the US?

You can read the guy's program yourself

https://www.zohranfornyc.com/

rent freeze, state built housing, free public transport, state owned grocery stores, free childcare, - all of this paid by wishful thinking and unicorn dust. Close enough to socialism. His tax plan is for 10 billion from my understanding for his whole term mostly by the rich.

I really wish he will win. And I really wish he succeeds in implementing his program, just so that USA will see first hand the results of those policies.

Close enough to socialism.

I guess this is the issue lol. Point-by-point, why none of this is particularly radical in most societies that people don't consider "socialist":

rent freeze

Rent freezes are controversial cart-before-the-horse band-aid solution to a problem that may or may not be caused NIMBYism. The proposed rent freeze is for rent-stabilized tenants, a specific class of asset. So hopefully you weren't trying to paint this as a city-wide rent freeze, which would never pass anyway. But also not specifically socialist, at all. Very much no means of production being seized.

state built housing

Hardly uniquely socialist. They used to be called "projects". Also controversial because it tends to have extremely high per-unit costs vs. market rent ROI, but that may or may not be attributable to not being able to just build housing, and more to needing to be state-of-the-art energy efficient, fully ADA compliant, up-to-code, etc. etc.

Better than "company towns" imo.

free public transport

Another exaggeration. The free part is for buses only. As someone who's taken a lot of public transit in many different cities, buses are frequently used by more blue collar / "barista" type workers, whereas light rail is more often used by professionals. It's a pragmatically progressive (in the sense of: tax those who can afford it) solution to the problem of rising fare prices, imo.

Also: no one bats an eye about free public roads. Damage to roads is quadratic to the weight of the load: we all subsidize the trailer truck shipping industry with our gas prices and taxes that build our roads. This lowers prices at every checkout, at the cost of an anemic rail system.

state owned grocery stores

Obviously an experimental / pilot project. Curious to see if there's a nice food distribution middle ground between "soup kitchen" and "Whole Foods" that a city government can occupy. An ideal implementation of this looks more like a 7-days-a-week farmer's market to me than a crumbling Aldi with yellowed fluorescent lights and grimey 90s tiles.

free childcare

Are grade school, middle school, and high school not "free childcare"?

The most ambitious and least achievable point in his agenda. To someone completely removed from the situation, I think expanding pre-K and early childhood programs is the more pragmatic way to go about effecting change - but that doesn't pop on a web page meant to excite people about an election campaign.

all of this paid by wishful thinking and unicorn dust.

Along with everything else the government has spent money on. At least these things are attempting to have a positive impact on working class families as opposed to ammunition for a genocide on the other side of the world.

You would better serve yourself and your arguments by affirming rather than downplaying their leftism. I'll also here not take the euphemism, socialism is communism's beachhead in capitalism.

Redistribution of wealth is communist. It cuts both ways, your list includes instances where the primary beneficiaries are corporations, the policies remain communist.

I guess this is the issue lol. Point-by-point, why none of this is particularly radical in most societies that people don't consider "socialist":

Communists, as masters of duplicitous rhetoric, have done an expectedly superb job propagandizing leftist policy objectives as "common sense" and especially as "not communist" or "not socialist." They are not considered radical today because it is the way of things, but those fears named in opposition to, e.g. compulsory education, have been justified. We can't go back, so there's not a real use in invoking either their past appraisal as radical or their current view as normal.

But also not specifically socialist, at all. Very much no means of production being seized.

I would agree directionally, in very strict terms. The concept of regulation is not inherently redistributive, and even in practice I don't know that many examples are redistributive, but they do often impair the market from competition and there corporations benefit.

Another exaggeration. The free part is for buses only. As someone who's taken a lot of public transit in many different cities, buses are frequently used by more blue collar / "barista" type workers, whereas light rail is more often used by professionals. It's a pragmatically progressive (in the sense of: tax those who can afford it) solution to the problem of rising fare prices, imo.

Strictly redistributive. Communist.

Obviously an experimental / pilot project. Curious to see if there's a nice food distribution middle ground between "soup kitchen" and "Whole Foods" that a city government can occupy. An ideal implementation of this looks more like a 7-days-a-week farmer's market to me than a crumbling Aldi with yellowed fluorescent lights and grimey 90s tiles.

The experiment was run for decades and it failed. Communist.

Are grade school, middle school, and high school not "free childcare"?

Compulsory education is indeed free childcare, and it is the perfect example of the myriad failures of ideology in communism:

  1. That inequality in outcome can be solved through money; here school funding
  2. That effective systems create effective people; here that good schools make good students
  3. That a bureaucracy can be trusted with considerable power; here that teachers are broadly competent and judicious
  4. That the system will fulfill its primary objective rather than be co-opted or brought to heel by superior agents; here a minor rehashing of #2, but specifically that the school exists to educate

Compulsory education as the public school doesn't actually exist to educate. It educates incidentally, just as a little less incidentally it incorporates students into the cult of the state. Its function is redistributing wealth to the bourgeoise so they don't have to either pay for childcare, accommodate flexible hours for their laborers, or worst of all, have to deal with a 50% smaller workforce and the massive leverage the laborers would gain in negotiations. All to say, the classic example of bad actors prospering from exploiting the system, here capitalism's maybe third-worst practice.

Where I would say today communist ideology has strength is cynicism toward the bourgeoise, where it fails is not showing enough, as even with the means of production seized, the bourgeoise are not made but born, agnostic to actually being of class "bourgeoise," and a communist system will inevitably be controlled by them. The best system accounts for their chronic existence and allows them to flourish in dozens of lanes of competition with each other, while exerting just enough regulation to prevent their exploitation of the commons. Communism reduces that competition to a single lane, and for that it will necessarily and always fail.

Nothing would help the working class more than our economy returning to one where only a single parent needs to draw a salary to support their spouse and children. To that end, anything Mamdani does that increases or keeps static the supply of labor will have harms outweighing all other benefits, and that's even granting that all of his other policies achieve their stated goals.

They are definitely leftist. But they are not that radical and not even close to abolishing capitalism and to be clear I think a few of these are horrible policy. Namely rent control and free buses but I don't consider these policies communist/socialist. They are common and not terribly radical bad urban policy.

The proposed rent freeze is for rent-stabilized tenants, a specific class of asset. So hopefully you weren't trying to paint this as a city-wide rent freeze, which would never pass anyway.

You're right, it's not all NYC apartments, just half of them.

I really wish he will win. And I really wish he succeeds in implementing his program, just so that USA will see first hand the results of those policies.

Doesn't work. First because he'll declare it worked even if it didn't, and the media will back him up. Second, because "the Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire"

Yeah. If the results were marked objectively it'd be one thing, but combination of the media and some thinktanks declaring a resounding success on the topic will just perpetuate more silliness.

Yes. Anything that can be spun as controversial means no revelation. Even something like bankruptcy can be spun as a cumulative problem that [current mayor] merely had set on their plate. Lag time also plays a role. Costs may only become become apparent after a term is over and he's off to Congress or wherever. Barring an Escape from New York level of catastrophe, then one should expect to fight free stuff in the immediate future forever regardless of results.

As an alternative to the expectation voters learn -- which voters are bad at -- they are pretty good at forgetting. They'll forget the last time it didn't work out, they'll forget why, but if a party wins enough times they might forget about bad ideas. Win so hard, so often, that the bad ideas become foreign. Then there is less voter recognition which creates an additional hurdle for advocates. NYC can still partly do this by embarrassing Mamdani in the general.

NYC can still partly do this by embarrassing Mamdani in the general.

I think the only way that happens is if Cuomo yields to Adams and Bloomberg (or someone of equally high stature) backs him. Which ain't going to happen.

He's at least said for the grocery stores that if they don't work they don't work, and he'll walk away

They won't work, so we'll see if he actually walks away

I really wish he will win. And I really wish he succeeds in implementing his program, just so that USA will see first hand the results of those policies.

I thought this too at first, but let's be honest. It's really, really difficult to reason one's way into socialism, and that says all there is to say about the prospects of reasoning them out of it by adding one more stone to the mountain of its failures. We are not half a century from the collapse of the USSR and yet its example is not a factor in any of the socialist's consideration. Every failure can be decried as either not real communism or a result of treacherous interference from outside influences - we'll succeed if only we conquer those, too. I really don't think a bad example will teach anyone a lesson on this kind of thing. All they hear is "Free public transit" and they think "That sounds so cool!" without the slightest consideration of where the money comes from.

To be clear, you think it is unfair to apply the label "socialist" to a guy who spoke at the Democratic Socialists of America about the "end goal of seizing the means of production"?

I was judging him by his campaign, not by a speech while he was still in his 20s that I wasn't even aware of. Does seem to be a nice gotcha, though. Kudos.

If he brings up any more seizure rhetoric I'll adjust my priors, but for now I'll file it away in "Young politician says something strategically embarrassing to signal being in-group".

It was only 4 years ago. That's hardly an eternity. Is there some evidence he has seen the errors of his ways?

Here's what you actually said

Nit: when did our definition of socialism become so drowned-down? Is anything that's not free (free-as-in-captured) market capitalism now considered socialism? The only "means of production" that Mamdani is suggesting be owned publicly are a few grocery stores, no? That's hardly a "seizure" of means.

Implication is that it's somehow unfair for people to be identifying this guy as a socialist. Given that he has called himself a socialist and he addressed a significant group dedicated to socialism where he quoted approvingly from the Communist Manifesto, seems like they got it right. At the very least, the burden of evidence is on the side that wants to claim he's seen the error of his ways.

If some people were able to determine this just from his campaign rhetoric, all the better for them! They made a correct prediction! The evidence is that their definition of socialism is accurate, not "drowned-down." You should be asking why you weren't able to see it was obvious to them.

If our core criterion for epithets was "one time said something in a speech" then we would be quite exhausted by the amount of "fascist", "Nazi", "communist", "socialist", etc. being thrown around.

Come to think of it, I am quite exhausted by the amount those terms are being thrown around. Maybe we shouldn't use "one time said something in a speech" as a criterion? Maybe we should judge people by what they're campaigning on, and their actions in office?

Edit:

he has called himself a socialist

Does he call himself a socialist now? I see "Democratic Socialist" on his webpage, which is distinct from other types of socialism (e.g. the flavors of authoritarian socialism that are the boogeymen).

You are misconstruing

Given that he has called himself a socialist and he addressed a significant group dedicated to socialism where he quoted approvingly from the Communist Manifesto, seems like they got it right.

as

one time said something in a speech

If Mamdani did actually did actually give a speech at an event for socialism, in which he described himself as a socialist, while approvingly quoting foundational socialist texts - that is very obviously not "one time said something in a speech".

"socialism" = "liberal policies I dislike, the more I dislike them, the more socialist they are"

"Far right" = "conservative groups I dislike, the more I dislike them, the more far right they are"

"Neoliberalism" = "things about capitalism I dislike, the more I dislike them, the more neoliberal they are"

Western political discourse is stupid and getting stupider, because we are becoming stupider

Socialist is also a bit of a reclaimed term. Republicans in the Bush era constantly argued against policies like universal healthcare by proclaiming them socialism as an argument ender. That resulted in people who wanted that and other policies claiming the label.

I like to use neoliberal to refer to things about the establishment domestic policy I don't like, and the more I dislike them the more neoliberal they are. For the establishment foreign policy I use neoconservative.

Based

It’s stupid because nobody really bothers to argue policy (and probably never really did, unless you’re a policy nerd), they’re arguing on the basis of propaganda and vibes. Tge West and especially America are absolutely soaked in propaganda all day everyday and don’t even realize it. Name any issue, and people will be able to quote various talking points for what they want to be true, but won’t understand it. Get them off into the woods where there are no talking points or standard arguments available and people will absolutely sputter trying to come up with any sort of argument or explanation of what they actually want or how the policies they say they want will get them there.

But until people actually see themselves as embedded in the machine they won’t even understand that they understand nothing about the world. So they argue about it and spend a lot of time trying to convince others they’re right. And each set of propaganda has the same feel good stuff in them. My side is the educated side and if the other side wasn’t so uneducated and stupid, they’d agree. My side is the moral side, they’re evil.

when did our definition of socialism become so drowned-down?

The second half of the 20th century. Expansion of the welfare state and government programs are attacked as socialist. The meaning gets diluted through the 90's after the Cold War. In the 2000s-2010s the meaning continues to change rapidly as progressives claim much of socialism for themselves.

Is FoxNews blocking the term DemSoc from taking off in the US?

I doubt it. Mamdani has not, as far as I know, gone to any great lengths to explain what a democratic socialist is or why he is not a socialist. Did Bernie even bother with this in his 2016 bid? That kind of distinction does nothing for Mamdani's campaign. The public does not have that demand for accuracy or nuance if it actually matters or is real. Plus, I suspect the well off progressive base of NYC quite likes voting for a socialist more than they do not-really-a-socialist. A diffuse contempt for capitalism is a popular meme that can be harnessed. No reason to put a damper on that for the sake of centuries old ideological accuracy.

I think if you're going to demand consistency here, then you should do so consistently. Are these capitalist policies he is proposing?

Mamdani has not, as far as I know, gone to any great lengths to explain what a democratic socialist is or why he is not a socialist.

Weird requirement imo. He at least distinguishes himself as DemSoc:

Zohran Kwame Mamdani is a New York State Assemblymember and democratic socialist running for Mayor.

It seems to be conservatives that omit the Democratic half of the moniker Democratic Socialist way more than progressives, but that's just my impression that prompted me to say "Is FoxNews blocking the term..."

I think if you're going to demand consistency here, then you should do so consistently. Are these capitalist policies he is proposing?

I mean, that's a bit of moving the goalposts, no? The argument is that his policies aren't strictly socialist, therefore his policies aren't evidence that he's secretly a socialist despite calling himself a democratic socialist. Why would his policies need to be capitalist in order for him to not be socialist? It's not as if all policies can be neatly placed a spectrum from socialist to capitalist - I don't even think that it's useful for a society to try to think of things in that dichotomy, but it sure is useful for propaganda if that's the way the discussion is forced.

Aside from that, can you name a policy that is purely capitalist? To get ahead of what your answer may be, I would argue that "deregulation" that is often cited as "capitalist" is simply rent-seeking cronyism. As Adam Smith said:

As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords... love to reap where they never sowed.

  • Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter VI

Democratic Socialists are the vehicle for socialism in America. They develop relations with leftists, organize them, use them for elections, and seek to implement socialist policy. Solidarity is praxis.

Differentiating is not a requirement, it's a method to clarify ones own position from another related position. You want Democratic Socialists to stand on their own two legs in America and be less open to smears for bad(?) socialism. I might call it socialism lite or entry-level socialism. Another idea might be for an organization like the DSA -- which Mamdani contributes to and has used to seek power -- to police and toss out the revolutionaries. Truly be a Democratic Socialist organization instead of the place for leftists. I suspect neither of these things will occur. Mamdani is more interested in winning office than standing up for Democratic Socialism. He likely appreciates the fact Fox News will lambast him as a Socialist.

It seems to be conservatives that omit the Democratic half of the moniker Democratic Socialist way more than progressives

It is not unique to conservatives. Parents that object to teacher-student confidentiality are far right. Canadian truckers are far right. J.K. Rowling is far right. Elon Musk is far right and an extremist. All those individuals are probably Islamophobic and racist, too. Many words are unfair. I wish people would be more noble and curious, but this is politics. Being far right is bad. Being a socialist is bad. Being a leftist is bad. There are no goal posts or purity. It is what it is. Don't watch Fox News.

Mamdani has a campaign platform that lists some policy ideas. Several I consider to be bad ideas regardless of how socialist they are. They do appear to be broadly popular among leftists. He also doesn't appear to have an issue using propaganda. Cable news networks are imprecise in their opposition to Bad Ideas from Bad People. That they're imprecise due to a definitional standard that doesn't meet yours or mine is not of consequence. In Bizarro world, Mamdani is a Democratic National Socialist and there's a whole lot of focus on the National Socialist part. Some of it is fair, some not so much.

would argue that "deregulation" that is often cited as "capitalist" is simply rent-seeking cronyism

I share the understanding that, as a general rule of thumb, a more laissez-faire policy is more capitalism. Nuance can be found in every crevice.

The second half of the 20th century. Expansion of the welfare state and government programs are attacked as socialist.

Both sides are to blame here. Socialists were, and still are, marketing their economic system as "let's do what Denmark did".

Tony Blair, Nicolas Maduro, Pol Pot, and Castro walk into a bar...

I think political solutions can encourage personal/political virtue. Imagine a really intense anti-corruption campaign, where high ranking people were actually given long prison sentences or executed for corruption? Wouldn't that work on the simple, clear level of 'cant commit crime if dead'? China has become less corrupt since the mid 2000s after pursuing this approach.

How does a culture become virtuous in the first place if not severe punishment crushing the bad elements? If the bottom-up anti-corruption from virtue angle isn't working, then one may as well try top-down. In the US this kind of approach is complicated because there are certain groups that are innately clannish and corrupt or so inclined in that direction that it's nigh-impossible to correct. I don't know why anyone expects West Africans to perform well in anything. You can look at West Africans in West Africa and uniformly it's a mess, regardless of history or laws (Liberia stands out here). You can look at West Africans in Haiti - standard West African demographics and outcomes but in the Western Hemisphere instead. And you can look at West Africans with a non-trivial amount of white admixture in the US, plus a constant inflow of white money - much less of a mess but still a mess. Certain parts of Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, even areas of Washington DC... these are not places one wants to be!

If you don't want a bloated, grossly inefficient, corrupt government, don't let them have any political power.

To clarify - 'them' in the last sentence means West Africans? Politically empowered West Africans means a bloated and corrupt government, you think?

Do you think the US should aim to disempower West Africans? What would that mean? Banning them from running for office? Banning them from voting?

The US can clearly do fine with a modest number of West Africans dragging it down. But if you want first-world performance... If you want safe, efficient, orderly public transport... If you want a lower burden of progressive taxation and affirmative action... If you want crime at civilized, first world levels...

Then you need to address the problem at the root cause. If you let them have political power they'll cause all kinds of problems, they'll West Africanize the country to a lesser or greater extent based on their number, admixture and so on. Bloated and corrupt government is just one and not even the worst problem necessarily.

Consider a thought experiment - what if all the politicians and powerful officials in America had to be black? Give it 20 years for the effects to settle. What do you expect the outcome would be in terms of performance? Would it look more like a high performance country (Japan, Switzerland) or a low performance country like South Africa? Naturally the US has plenty of capable demographics to squander so the decline wouldn't be as severe as South Africa, whose murder rate is actually comparable to the death toll in the Russia-Ukraine war. Nevertheless, there are no white poor performance countries and no black high performance countries. Even on a city level one can observe that having politics dominated by blacks is not a recipe for good outcomes: Detroit.

Now consider the reverse. All the politicians and powerful officials in America have to be non-black. Give it 20 years. Would the outcome be better than the alternate? Is the US really losing much by banning them from office? All that would happen is some rioting, which can be quickly and easily put down with a little effort. West Africans are notoriously bad at fighting, disorganized and inaccurate marksmen. Of course it's a totally moot point since as bad as West Africans are at fighting, US whites are even less willing to force the issue.

I don't care how utopian your proposed society would supposedly be. I'm not going to let anyone take away my political rights under any circumstances. I won't be a subaltern or slave

I asked a second question as well. To repeat:

Do you think the US should aim to disempower West Africans? What would that mean? Banning them from running for office? Banning them from voting?

Okay, I've processed that you think that West Africans are inherently destructive to national health. Sure. So, you say, you must not "let them have political power". Can you translate that for me into a practical programme? What do you think the US should do?

Is the US really losing much by banning them from office? All that would happen is some rioting, which can be quickly and easily put down with a little effort. West Africans are notoriously bad at fighting, disorganized and inaccurate marksmen. Of course it's a totally moot point since as bad as West Africans are at fighting, US whites are even less willing to force the issue.

I already answered this. There's no practical program because you'd need a game-changing event for this to be possible. We may as well theorize about the balance of power between Earth and Mars or how to restore the Bourbon Dynasty to the throne of France. Maybe I think the Bourbons would be amazing for France. But I obviously have no practical idea to make this happen because it's impractical and would require an incredible turn of fortune to be even conceivable.

Really don't understand the point of trying to get these 'damning' confessions of wrongthink out of me.

I'm not angling for a confession of wrongthink - I'm angling to translate either feeling or theory into practicable action. A political platform naturally requires some sort of plan for implementation. That plan doesn't have to be constrained by the Overton Window. A Yarvin-esque plan to build a shadow regime and step into power when the inevitable crisis of legitimacy comes is a valid answer; likewise a postliberal-esque plan to slowly build intellectual credibility while developing a new consensus in the shell of the old is a valid answer.

But in this case, if I'm reading you rightly, what you've got is basically "West Africans are really bad, and there's nothing that can be done about it".

Okay, so, what's the practical takeaway from that? It can just be "well, the United States is screwed", at which point the next question is, "given that, what do you plan to do, or recommend that others do?" Prepare to leave the US, so that if/when continuing to live there is untenable, you can get out? Build some sort of resilient, presumably West-African-free, community in some part of the US and focus on local welfare? Something else entirely?

It's not unreasonable or searching for gotchas to probe someone as to the practical implications of their politics. I'm not arguing with you in this thread! I haven't contradicted you or challenged any of your points! I'm asking you to elaborate on their practical implications because I'm interested in where they lead you.

Well I have a vague theory that China will demolish the US military in Asia and create the actual conditions for real political change in the US and elsewhere (military defeat + huge economic crisis are a tried and tested combo), whereupon previously unthinkable options become possible.

But the problem with basing a theory on a hypothetical is that it feels like wishing, the infamous 'my ideology will be the one to arise from the ashes'. Trying to predict the world after an epoch-changing event is like trying to look inside or beyond a singularity. Maybe Trump gets the blame for fooling around and the old regime capitalizes it. Maybe the military gets blamed for losing and the US doubles down on democratic-socialist isolationism. Maybe there's a nuclear exchange. Maybe there's an AI singularity. Nothing is inevitable, even assuming a contested hypothetical.

Of course it'd be good to have more accurate, adaptive ideas flowing more widely. The US does not, in my opinion, need more Haitians, quite the opposite. The US shouldn't be spreading multicultural propaganda around the world, that's not a recipe for good outcomes. America isn't screwed, it's powerful and innovative in many areas. But it's running well below peak performance, there are fractures and internal weaknesses based on unsound ideas of human equality.

As for personal advice, well I've read Nightmare Vision's Rosedale thread https://x.com/GodCloseMyEyes/status/1414619671056297984 and 'Don't make the Black kids angry', it seems pretty clear that black parts of the US, London and elsewhere are dangerous and one shouldn't go there or live there. The author of the latter has seemingly been driven into this state of insanity where he just goes on and on, listing all these grievous attacks and perverse instances where white racism gets blamed for black misbehaviour, one after another after another.

How do you change this state of mind, where people speak in code to realtors because they're not allowed to ask about crime, because it's too racist and discriminatory? Who knows, it's bizarre and weird.

I'm not even American and so my theories about US politics are really limited in skin-in-the-game beyond having a lot of money tied up in US shares. Lots of cool stuff is happening in America, it's a country of contradictions.

But the problem with basing a theory on a hypothetical is that it feels like wishing, the infamous 'my ideology will be the one to arise from the ashes'. Trying to predict the world after an epoch-changing event is like trying to look inside or beyond a singularity.

Well, I think it's reasonable to take a position like, "the current order cannot or will not hold, massive changes are likely to come, therefore I/we should try to be resilient for now while being flexible to changing possibilities". If the political order is likely to radically change, in ways you cannot predict but which change the space of what's possible, then it makes sense to avoid investing too much in the current order while remaining open to the winds of change.

That said, oops, I had assumed you were American. Presumably you would need to adapt your specific concerns to your particular country.

Thank you for the serious answer, though. I appreciate it.

there are no white poor performance countries

Argentina, Colombia, Moldova, Ukraine, are all poorer than Russia, which itself is not conventionally considered a ‘high performer’. Indeed, thé entirety of the Balkans generates little ambition in its denizens except to leave the Balkans, and the nice white parts of Latin America are still nothing to write home about.

Russia is a high performer, not the best but still clearly in the top category. The US was relying on their spacecraft for the ISS at one point (which Russia helped to make) plus they produce a wide range of advanced technological products - drones, jets, tanks, warships, nuclear reactors. There are little robots transporting food and parcels on the streets of Moscow. Ukraine is similarly a high performer, also possessing advanced industry, they exported an aircraft carrier to China back in the day.

The whole 'Nigeria with snow' argument is profoundly silly. How hard would it be for the US or any major power to wreck Nigeria? Is anyone really worried about Nigeria? How do Nigerian industries affect the world, what ramifications do decisions in Lagos have on anything? Now, how about Russia?

Colombia is not white, it's 50% mestizo, 26% white, the rest being black or indigenous according to estimates.

entirety of the Balkans

Not amazing but still pretty rich and capable all things considered. Serbia is fine, they manufacture cars and pharmaceuticals. The whole 'former Ottoman Empire' part of Europe is less developed and orderly than one might expect from Europeans but it's not a barren gulf of civilization. That's what happens if you have non-European input into a country, you get less European output.

Depends how you're defining poor performance. Poor relative to other European or East Asian countries, sure. Poor compared to subsaharan Africa? Not really. The average GDP per capita south of the Sahara is $1500. Ukraine is $5000

That’s why I noted ‘doing worse than Russia’ which is crappy by white country standards but able to attract immigration from truly bottom of the barrel countries.

I don’t think this is an exhaustive list, at all. Just that crappy middle income countries are totally a thing that comes in white versions, even if truly awful undeveloped places are mostly restricted to blacks(although Afghanistan is racially white).

The richest black countries (the Seychelles, Trinidad and Tobago, St. Kitts and Nevis) are wealthier than the poorest white countries (Ukraine, Kosovo, Iran, Moldova). The poorest country is Arab (South Sudan).

South Sudan is literally not Arab(thats regular Sudan, and the ethnic difference is the entire reason for the split). The poorest Arab country is Yemen.

The poorest country is Arab (South Sudan).

South Sudan is black and Christian, not Arab or Muslim.

Trinidad: Half the people are indian, half the gdp is oil and gas

Seychelles : island micronation(120k souls) living off tourism

St kitts: island femtonation (50k)

The poorest country is Arab (South Sudan).

The south sudan massacres, war and subsequent independence was fought between the muslim arab north and the mostly christian non-arab south. The name Sudan comes from the Arabic bilād as-sūdān or the "Land of the Blacks".

Nevertheless, there are no white poor performance countries and no black high performance countries.

Argentina?

Low murder rate, relatively rich. HDI is 'very high' what are you complaining about?

I admit that I didn't define the difference between low and high performance but I do strongly think there's a difference between more or less rich, developed countries and places (like South Africa) where the health minister might declare that HIV vaccines are some kind of imperialist plot, or where raping virgins to cure aids is widespread. You can have bad economic policies but still be high performance, all that means is that your abilities are hampered like taking an exam in a loud room. And accordingly Argentina is still decent and safe, they score OK on the test, could be better. The retarded students though, it doesn't matter if the room is loud or quiet, the results aren't going to be good.

Sure but they're the best of the lot (still no STEM Nobels though). It's not that easy to get to the US from West Africa.

I don't deny that whites who voted for this guy are fools but there is at least potential for good things amongst a broad, non-cherrypicked white population. Build up a power base of elite West Africans at your peril, see what happens if they get you to open the floodgates.

There may be some actions being taken that contribute to affirming the success of West African immigrants, over and above similar things for other groups, especially since they are not held back by ADOS culture.

That being said, urban Whites are cooked, this has been a reactionary belief for a while.

The upswing in "socialism"* of late is largely a reaction to the perceived failure of political systems to address socio-economic problems. In particular, the GFC, the failure of the ACA to address the capriciousness of the American healthcare system, climate change, and a general inability to hold economic elites to account for anti-social-but-legal behavior. The price of housing hasn't helped either.

Unfortunately, when people get mad, they often vote for stupid and/or self-destructive policies.

*I use scare quotes because to a large degree modern American socialism is simply a middle class left-populist movement. There are genuine exceptions, but when you press for policy details you'll generally find something that is not in any meaningful sense a break from the past 70 years of left-liberalism. A backlash against decades of "socialism is when the government does stuff" has greatly attenuated the negative connotations of the label.

And when you look under the hood, a lot of it is about laundering handouts to the middle class in the class sense, if not in the material sense. It’s downstream of the class entitlement to a middle class lifestyle without much hard work, from holding a college degree.

Don’t get me wrong, lots of people do this too. Notably seniors. But it is mathematically impossible for everyone to be entitled to an above average standard of living.

Yes and no. The GFC left a lot of college grads with a mountain of debt, short-circuited career prospects, and a sense that they'd been sold a bill of goods. But this sentiment is not limited to middle class dropouts. It is also widespread among the professionally successful. As has been noted, Mamdani did his best with upper middle class white people. These are not just career NGO types anxious to keep the taps open. They are lawyers, engineers, doctors, etc... They are the sorts of people you would expect to be most "pro-system", but they're not. They're increasingly skeptical of it.

Economic precarity is a factor - most are acutely aware of what falling off the white collar wagon would mean for their lifestyle - but the points of highest contention don't fit this pattern. Rather, you have a collapse of faith in the ability of US political systems to solve important problems in a just manner (if at all).

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘falling off the wagon’- they’re already doctors and lawyers(who, I’ll note, have from an objective perspective made large sacrifices to their standard of living to dwell in NYC, doctors in flyover live in mansions not apartments).

Maybe this is one of those things I don’t get and won’t get, like why neurotic strivers think they’re better than me without having the pedigree to back it up, or why people live together for five years without getting married.

Losing a white collar professional job at the wrong time can make it very hard to get back your career back on track. Far less of an issue for doctors than most, but most white collar jobs don't have the same level of stability.

Regardless, my point was the opposite: that by and large economic precarity doesn't explain the growth of left-wing populism amongst college grads. In many respects it is a mirror of Trumpism, being driven largely by cultural grievances around the distribution of prestige and a general lack of faith in the political system (albeit without quite the same degree of authoritarian propensities).

Maybe this is one of those things I don’t get and won’t get, like why neurotic strivers think they’re better than me without having the pedigree to back it up

Neurotic strivers don't think about you at all.

In many respects it is a mirror of Trumpism, being driven largely by cultural grievances around the distribution of prestige

But they have the prestige? What are these middle managers and lawyers expecting?

I just think that political solutions are pointless. We need what has always been the core of strong societies - a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue. Without that, you have nothing.

I feel that, given your own stated preferences, a socialist upheaval should be among the worst case scenarios from your perspective. I get that you said you're not on board with it, but I feel like connecting the dots in what you've said would logically make a sweeping trend of socialism pretty alarming and less seemingly shrug-worthy.

The entire mission of this belief system seems to be dispensing with personal accountability at any cost, rewarding people for giving nothing, and deluding the masses into thinking they can get every possible thing for free. There is no interest in a platform like Zohran's in rewarding people for being virtuous, for working hard or providing things of value, only in redistributing to those who do less of either. Personal accountability is often a dirty term from this perspective, and this sort of belief system explicitly seeks to use political solutions to fix every possible issue, whether it's empowering schools over parents, giving us government-run grocery stores, or censoring for the good of the masses.

I feel that, given your own stated preferences, a socialist upheaval should be among the worst case scenarios from your perspective. I get that you said you're not on board with it, but I feel like connecting the dots in what you've said would logically make a sweeping trend of socialism pretty alarming and less seemingly shrug-worthy.

Surprised so many people think I'm a socialist from what I wrote, lol. I am not. I agree that it's terrible.

You might better have used the term "understandable" rather than "fair". By calling it a "fair response" you are invoking the connotation of "fair" as "just, right, natural" which strongly implies that you believe that socialism is the correct outcome.

Ok, that's fair. Ahaha. I will leave it as it is for now anyway but I'll keep that in mind.

I didn't read you as a socialist, I understood that you said you weren't a fan and all, but that was what I was getting at - Zohran seems like something you'd find more concerning than your comment seemed to indicate given your stated preferences

I feel like the track record of third worldist socialism is such that it cannot be considered a 'fair response'.

Anyway, socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class. It's weary writing and thinking about politics when even the best laid plans seem to inevitably just get ground down by the dumbest things. I can completely understand why young folks want to just socialize everything.

This seems like the opposite of a fair response. If we put a guy on the fry station at McDonald's, and he just constantly screws it up over and over again, in the dumbest ways possible, it doesn't seem like a reasonable response to say, "How about we just put this guy in charge of the entire store?"

Let's talk socialism and the NYC mayoral race

Why?

The primary reason Zohran won in the primary is Andrew Cuomo, the secondary reason that he won in the primary is anti-Zionism and the anti-idpol populist backlash that comes when outside forces try to tell local people who to vote for.

Andrew Cuomo was the candidate the establishment and the financial industry rallied behind in the primary, despite the fact he hasn't lived in the city in years, was covered in scandal on his way to resigning from the governor's mansion, and really didn't have a great record as governor to run on to begin with. There was no good reason for Andrew Cuomo to run for mayor of NYC.

Then the campaign begins and they go after Zohran for his supposed anti-Semitism. Twitter was filled with jokes about Israelis speaking out on the NYC mayoral race from their bunkers in Tel Aviv, and Andrew Cuomo swears allegiance to Israel. Zohran's enemies successfully made the most interesting and present aspect of the race the question of supporting or opposing Israel.

What this tells us is that accusations of racism on IdPol lines are not going to be enough, going forward, to decide elections. The antisemitism stick has been wielded so carelessly, that even cowardly urban Democrats are no longer cringing under the whip.

It tells us that accusations of antisemitism aren't enough to decide dem primaries. It doesn't tell us that racism isn't still a potent political accusation.

As ever, we won't really know the answer until after the question is irrelevant. But we saw the 2024 elections already.

Anyway, socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class.

It is a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class to put our political class in more complete charge of what is now in the private sphere? This seems utterly quixotic.

That being said, I don't think society is unfixable. I just think that political solutions are pointless. We need what has always been the core of strong societies - a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue. Without that, you have nothing.

You cannot build or keep a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue with a political system that does that opposite, like socialism does.

That being said, I don't think society is unfixable. I just think that political solutions are pointless. We need what has always been the core of strong societies - a culture that promotes and encourages personal virtue. Without that, you have nothing.

This is why our politics is broken. The political machine has borged almost everything, and thus the other rival institutions have become rumps of what they would be in a healthy society. Education has been swallowed by the state in the form of mandated curriculum and state testing. Churches have little influence on culture as they have been mostly reduced to the few things that don’t touch politics and then trying to avoid the IRS crackdown for even broaching the subject of some politicized issue. Families are weakened because now that mom works 9 hours and commutes for 1 hour, her children are raised by daycares and the school system, with the parents as minor players in their kid’s lives mostly for a couple hours on weekdays and then on weekends. When politics is everywhere and running everything and no other institutions can match it, people hyperfixate on politics. When it’s not something most people deal with, nobody but us nerds care.

At the end of the day thriving cities need to produce strong middle class families if they want to remain democracies; otherwise it's all about looting.

Thats not democracy, it’s stability. And I agree. I don’t necessarily put democracy on a pedestal as though it’s automatically and axiomatically the best form of government you could have. It’s a social technology much like anything else humans have developed to create orderly societies. I think I’m personally much more interested in the meta part of the question of government— what produces the kind of society where the majority prosper, where the rule of law is more or less kept, and where people are generally left alone to enjoy life. A lot of times, that’s democracy. On the other hand, sometimes it’s something else. The high Roman Empire probably was a pretty good place to live, some of the better monarchies did quite well. On the other hand, there are lots of failed democratic societies as well.

  1. Government creates problem
  2. People ask for more government to fix the problem.
  3. Problem gets worse

Many such cases.

  1. Government solves problem
  2. Rent seekers are inconvenienced, lobbyists are deployed
  3. Problem comes back with a vengeance

Many such cases.

That's...this is bait, right?

  • The government is usually the biggest rent-seeking entity on the block, growing its body of sinecures with every year and funding it through value extracted from the productive classes at gunpoint.
  • The government usually solves problems by implementing solutions that either don't work, or are hilariously cost-inefficient to the point where they could have done better by just distributing the money spent directly to the nominal beneficiaries. Which of course the government doesn't do, because the actually intended beneficiary is (some other part of) the government.
  • Government is corrupt and wasteful; the private sector gets the blame.

I mean, epistemic gap, the rightist and the leftist see two different movies on one screen, yadda yadda. I'm perfectly willing to admit that private sector actors are also self-interested and will bend and exploit the rules as far as they can, but come on. The government is so much bigger, more powerful and further-reaching, it has every opportunity to prove how well it can solve problems. Pointing fingers at filthy corporats and kulaks, as if they were responsible for every government failure ever, regardless of which country and/or system we're talking about...

I rarely come back to look back at comments, but the comment I replied to originally is also bait, when viewed from a different lens.

We're simply arguing about which problem is bigger, not whether either problem exists. Leaving my comment in response to phailyoor cuts back on the circlejerk that regulation is inherently bad. I mostly make comments like this when the circlejerk becomes unbearable.

Which problems are you referring to here?

Because the big NYC ones are:

Housing, which is entirely the fault of local voters using government to prevent more building. I blame the voters for this, not the politicians responding to their voters (selfish) wishes.

Public safety, voters hate all functional solutions to drugs/homeless because they feel "gross" (bleeding heart libtards hate enforcement, delusional rightoids hate proven solutions like SIS, no one wants to pay for more rehab centers).

Traffic/transit efficacy. See the huge backlash to congestion pricing, despite it being an economically sound and obviously beneficial policy. Also note that absolutely no one wants to give the MTA money despite it falling apart all the time (because preventative maintenance is expensive and boring). Admittedly it does seem like the MTA admin is a bit of a shitshow, so I guess we can blame government for that one. Although I've worked for large oligopolistic corporations and their admin was also an inefficient shitshow.

More broadly, in every western nation absolutely every citizen wants more gibs, and absolutely none of them want to pay more taxes to fund the gibs. So they mortgage the future instead.

I find it hard to blame government for all of this, as any politician who actually tried to take action to fix any of this would immediately lose their next election.

SIS

Sorry, but what is SIS? Neither a search for "SIS homelessness" nor "SIS NYC" turned up anything related.

Safe injection sites

They reduce overdoses and time wasted by paramedics/hospitals treating the same 100 people over and over again.

They clearly don't make less people use drugs.

Their biggest issue imo, is that the Venn diagram of people who implement SIS and people who also implement the more draconian measures for the un-savable drug addicts are two different circles. And then the awful addicts are left to ruin it for everyone.

Safe Injection Sites. And the provenness of their effectiveness is certainly disputed. As is that of enforcement, as the 80s drug war showed. And rehab is a joke.

I think it's pretty clear they reduce overdoses and the waste of paramedic/hospital resources.

It's also incredibly clear that alone they do nothing to actually fix anything. They're a Band-Aid for symptom management as we treat the underlying issue. Problem is, we don't bother to treat any of the underlying issues.

I think it's pretty clear they reduce overdoses...

They may reduce overdoses, but I think that's far from clear.

As a (sort of) counterexample, "...B.C. has implemented every harm-reduction program that has been proposed, from safe-injection sites to safe supply and effectively making all drugs legal. As each new measure has been introduced, drug overdose deaths have increased, except for a brief drop in 2019."

The toy model is that they would otherwise stop (often from from death), but instead they continue for longer before stopping (slightly less often from death), and the time they spend doing drugs is higher and therefore the social cost is higher as well.

I agree. SIS reduce overdoses, but don't make anyone stop doing drugs. And people who implement SIS also refuse to make people stop doing drugs.

We should have SIS, voluntary rehab, and institutions for those who can't stop themselves

So we don’t actually know that they reduce overdoses either. There is a plausible mechanism for them to do so, but there are also a few mechanisms in which they could not.

  1. It is possible that fatal overdoses are reduced, which would allow the individual in question to overdose in the future again.
  2. It is possible that SIS increases the number of people who get addicted to drugs (in BC in particular, there is an ongoing controversy where safe supply drugs are sold to get funds for fentanyl, which leads to more people having drugs than would otherwise; although I realize this is not quite the same thing as SIS, the SIS are responsible for the distribution of the safe supply, so I think the consequences apply here too).

I would also caution in believing that the three items in your list can exist simultaneously - although there is no physical reason that they cannot, there are political reasons they will not, and that is much harder to change.

More comments

The "underlying issues" are that your same 100 people want to keep taking drugs to the exclusion of everything else.

Yes and we should institutionalize them forever

Road to hell is paved with good intentions. I am fairly sure that Marx's ideas didn't include people being boiled alive by NKVD but that is what we got in the end.

The problem with socialisms are two - people are selfish and tragedy of the commons. For the first the only socialist solution that works so far is to beat them into submission. For the second - there is no found cure yet for people not giving a shit for the common good under socialism.

I agree with you regarding your critiques of socialism, but

The problem with socialisms are two - people are selfish and tragedy of the commons.

This describes a huge % of issues the capitalist West is currently failing to deal with too

Not quite. The first part - selfishness is usually nudged to be somewhat aligned with the society's interests by the free market. Before Madison avenue takeover of the american economy companies were actually competing with producing better and cheaper items. We had similar boom with electronics in the 80s and 90s, game industry in 2000s. We have such with chinese phones and cars. All those people may have been passionate about their products, but they were passionate about money too.

The second part - yes there is also tragedy of the commons, but just by the nature of the system - the commons are smaller. So there is less tragedy to be had.

Madison avenue takeover

What does this mean?

In a free market the better product wins. In the last couple of decades the better marketed product wins. Which is not optimal for customers

Ahhh

That's an interesting concept. Any good examples? Why do you think the model of "the customer is a rational economic agent who buys the best things for themselves" has fallen apart recently? What changed in the marketing world to allow companies to leverage marketing to make up for sub-par products?

This is for an effortpost that I am not qualified to do. But I think it is combination of two things - women entering the workforce and being single - they just have different buying patterns than men. As every geek that has been forced to buy more expensive and with shittier spec laptop for his girlfriend just because this is such a nice shade of blue. And the other is that marketing stopped selling products, they started selling desire, status, dreams.

For the second - there is no found cure yet for people not giving a shit for the common good under socialism.

How about even more beatings?

Pretending that this is a serious suggestion:

It's not the quantity of the beatings, but their accuracy. You need to

  1. correctly identify asocials, and catch them in the act and
  2. beat them appropriately and publicly.

And this is difficult because

  1. It takes a lot of attention and fine-toothed combing to separate social citizens from asocial ones who have learned to pretend to be social where necessary. They will obfuscate their asocial activities, limit them to settings in which they aren't observed closely, and always keep a plausible excuse handy. After a few months and years of beatings, only the stupidest will be asocial where they can be caught.
  2. If the beatings are too piddly, people will not take them seriously. If the beatings are excessive, people will hate the goons dishing them out rather than the poor asocial who just got his teeth knocked out for taking one minute too long on the loo, which weakens the entire institution. If the beatings happen in secret so that nobody can judge whether they were appropriate, you end up with some kafkaeske nightmare state like the soviet union or Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Either way, you raise up class of violent state-sanctioned thugs who beat people up for not loving the state enough. It's not a winning recipe in the long-term.

Right. Nobody said that all this is easy!

It takes a lot of attention and fine-toothed combing to separate social citizens from asocial ones who have learned to pretend to be social where necessary. They will obfuscate their asocial activities, limit them to settings in which they aren't observed closely, and always keep a plausible excuse handy. After a few months and years of beatings, only the stupidest will be asocial where they can be caught.

This might be a problem after a while. It's not a problem right now. There's low-hanging fruit.

One of the most common jokes in the soviet bloc was - we pretend that we work, they pretend that they pay us. And neither GULAG or their equivalents in eastern europe were productive. And they beat up people.

A couple of things:

  1. The “we pretend that we work, they pretend that they pay us” Soviet joke specifically originates from the post-Stalin era of thaw and stagnation and for a good reason, as the GULAG no longer existed

  2. Marx was already convinced that revolutionary terror is necessary and described it as such

  3. As you stated, the commies noticed that beating up selfish people for their acts of selfishness will successfully de-normalize selfishness socially; in a similar manner, beating people up for not caring about the common good will compel them to care about it or else – it’ll work just as much; however, this assumes that the goons and their commanders will never lose their stomachs for beating people up all the time

I think @Botond173 is referencing the sarcastic quip about how "the beatings will continue until morale improves".

The Juche (kim whatever) guy said it straight face. And in a way the stick works ok up to a point. You can squeeze more productivity. But you rarely can squeeze passion, innovation, and creativity this way - so probably you are doomed to stagnation.

The problem with socialisms are two - people are selfish and tragedy of the commons. For the first the only socialist solution that works so far is to beat them into submission.

Hardly; this just optimizes for the selfish people getting control of the clubs. Marxism has never truly grokked that people's ideological statements and interpersonal solidarity can be faked or hacked.

socialism seems like a fair response to the complete ineptitude of our political class.

It's bizarre to me that you think the political class is inept, and you think the best response is to give them more power to screw things up in the economy.

Socialism at the federal level mostly means endlessly bloating the elder care apparatus, whereas socialism at the state + local level mostly means bribing connected nonprofits and unions to provide various crappy services that don't really work. Zohran's idea for city-run grocery stores is very dumb and will probably be dropped or completely overhauled after a few pilot programs demonstrate how silly it is.

Socialism at the federal level mostly means endlessly bloating the elder care apparatus, whereas socialism at the state + local level mostly means bribing connected nonprofits and unions to provide various crappy services that don't really work.

Neither of these things have anything to do with the ownership of the means of production.

I feel like we've fallen into the trap of using "socialism" as a shorthand for "stupid liberal policy I hate" in the same way the "far right" now means "conservative people with ideas I really dislike"

"Ownership of the means of production" is a niche academic definition that typically isn't used in real-world contexts. Example: Bernie Sanders is a "Democratic Socialist", and most people no matter whether they're for or against him think the label is reasonable. Yet most of Sanders' proposals have nothing to do with the means of production, and are rather just the standard "spend more on social services" like Medicare For All.

He was a speaker at the DSA, which stands for "Democratic Socialists of America."

Clip here: https://x.com/Osint613/status/1939657700553486380 Actual Quotes:

  • "The purpose is about this entire project, it’s not simply to raise class consciousness, but to win socialism"
  • "We have to continue to elect more socialists, and we have to ensure that we are unapologetic about our socialism"
  • "There are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it’s BDS or whether it’s the end goal of seizing the means of production"

Full long video at https://youtube.com/live/9K7HDuoJ0MQ

I'm not saying he isn't a socialist.

I'm saying "Socialism at the federal level mostly means endlessly , whereas socialism at the state + local level mostly means ."

Is not a very accurate way to describe socialism.

To add a similar thought, "bloating the elder care apparatus" is pretty much a bi-partisan issue in the West.

Going further, "bribing connected nonprofits and unions to provide various crappy services that don't really work" is very true for liberals, and so is the opposite "bribing connected companies to provide various crappy services that don't really work" for the conservative side.

Mainstream leftism is just more power to the elites.

Populist leftism isn't. Opposition to the military industrial complex and the surveillance state would increase our freedom.

Sounds more like (possibly-left-)libertarianism than “populist leftism”, fam

It's bizarre to me that you think the political class is inept, and you think the best response is to give them more power to screw things up in the economy.

Oh I am not in favor of socialism. I said I could understand, not that I agreed. Socialism is a horrible idea, I have actually read history.

Socialism at the federal level mostly means endlessly bloating the elder care apparatus

To be fair it also means doling out increasingly huge wodges of cash to professional activist organizations and favored political client groups.

I read this success as a more general rejection of the ruling elite than a specific left or right wing thing. It's New York so of course the populist candidate is going to be a socialist, but is this really any different than the rise of right wing populists in Europe in effect?

"you fucked this up, are insanely corrupt and we want literally anything but that" has been the nexus of pretty much all politics since 2016. All that's changing is that the people who reflexively vote for or support the status quo are dying and not being replaced by anybody.

Of course the same criticism of the right wing populists applies to the left wing ones: they don't really have any realistic solutions and the system will not let them implement any if they do. New York's equivalent to Jeremy Corbyn will surely have that same problem.

It's New York so of course the populist candidate is going to be a socialist, but is this really any different than the rise of right wing populists in Europe in effect?

Yes; the RWP rally around a policy - immigration restriction and recognition of islamicate/SE Asian cultural incompatibility with western norms - which cuts both against official ideology as well as the fundamental moral order of the post-WWII first world ideal.

NYC electing Mamdani is literally a 50-Stalins criticism of the existing order. "We haven't socialismed hard enough/real socialism has not been tried!"

In what way is this true that isn't true of literally any person getting elected that's more left wing than the incumbent?

That really depends on what you mean by "left wing." But yeah, that's a structural problem for left wingers in a functionally one-party progressive political milieu.

Of course the same criticism of the right wing populists applies to the left wing ones: they don't really have any realistic solutions and the system will not let them implement any if they do. New York's equivalent to Jeremy Corbyn will surely have that same problem.

Depends on your diagnosis of the problem. If you believe, as I increasingly do, that most of our societal ills with corruption and collapse of state capacity revolve around the mass importation of high time preference demographics incapable at a genetic level of pursuing generational projects, deporting them is not only a solution, but the only solution. Because with that anchor tied to your feet, no state project, be it reinvigorating capitalism, monopoly busting or state run grocery stores can possibly succeed. If the labor market is flooded with lazy scammers who shameless loot the till, it's not going to matter if the grocery store is a coop, state run, unionized or anything.

If you believe, as I increasingly do, that most of our societal ills with corruption and collapse of state capacity revolve around the mass importation of high time preference demographics incapable at a genetic level of pursuing generational projects, deporting them is not only a solution, but the only solution.

Unfortunately, at least in the US, that's not going to work, for 13/52 reasons.

It’s not going to work in the US because the ship has simply sailed. We’re in far too deep.

The most we can do is try to give the US a smooth controlled landing and encourage European countries to not go down the same path.

Haven't looked deeply into this but my impression is that immigration to the US filters more for competence than immigration to the European countries does, with the latter getting a ton of low quality refugees etc

Deportation won't work because 13/52? What do you mean by this?

As @ToaKraka notes, 13/52 refers to the extremely disproportionate percentage of homicides committed by black people (13% of the population, 52% of the homicides). The US (and the pre-US colonies) already engaged in mass importation of high time preference demographics (I'll reserve judgement on the second part); they've been around as long as most of the white people have, and so deporting them is not possible.

they've been around as long as most of the white people have, and so deporting them is not possible.

One quick conquest of Liberia, and you don’t have to let your dreams be dreams anymore.

You don’t even have to move every black person. For males, 2 or more felony convictions should surely be adequate justification to send them to our new prison colony. For females, you could craft some lifetime welfare income calculation. And for kids, well, better to not break up families, so they have to go as well.

Is this an idea that would take two decades to percolate out of the fever dreams of the right and into plausible reality? Sure, but that’s no reason to give up on it out of hand. Leftists sure don’t!

As the meme goes, despite making up only 13% of the population, blacks commit 52% of the crimes. But blacks can't be deported.

Not with that attitude...

The blacks are a sideshow in the great replacement, more spectators than anything else- the AADOS share of society is actually slowly shrinking and black immigration is barely enough to keep the percentage of black population from dropping.

The demographic story of the USA is white anglos being replaced with hispanics, and this is 1) not a done deal and way overstated in effect and 2) while hispanics are lower performing it's not clear that that's 100% genetic, and assimilation over time is far more likely.

If you believe, as I increasingly do, that most of our societal ills with corruption and collapse of state capacity revolve around the mass importation of high time preference demographics incapable at a genetic level of pursuing generational projects, deporting them is not only a solution, but the only solution.

What? No, that's not true. Granting the (very substantial) premise, the conclusion is obviously going to be "don't let these people run society", but that only requires disenfranchisement, not deportation (except in the edge case of a supermajority that can overthrow the disenfranchising government).

Much like I urged to give the El Salvador solution at least the good ol' college try before cursing entire peoples down seven generations, I'd urge to at least try "assimilate or GTFO" (don't know if there are any success stories as stark as El Salvador, though). People respond to incentives.

What does "assimilate" even mean in this context?

"Adopt local cultural norms"? What else is it supposed to mean?

The last 50 years have been a failure of "assimilate or GTFO". 50 more years and "GTFO" won't be an option any longer. It may already be too late.

At the risk of doing a "real X has never been tried", I think you were missing the "or GTFO" part.

For most of the last 50 years we haven't been doing "assimilate or GTFO". We did it before that and managed to assimilate large groups.

It hasn't "failed" so much as been undermined and attacked at every turn by our so-called elites and the rise of MAGA is in large part a reaction against this. If you aren't down with making America great you can get the fuck out.

To do the El Salvador solution you need a Bukele tier Great Man of History. That's not a reasonable requirement. Take it from someone whose government is tailor made for such a kind of man. They're much harder to find than you'd think.

As it stands, the managerial rulers of the US are so far from having the spine required to tell foreigners to "integrate or fuck off" that they'll let them fly the flags of other countries in violent rebellion and still not consent to crush them. Asking them to do what you want is doomed.

Is it a reasonable requirement to declare that all of society's problems are caused by a group of genetic untermenschen? I feel like asking for another Bukele is at least on-par with it under current conditions, and the latter is quite a bit more humane.

Oh I think it can very well both be true that a whole class of people are undesirable and that there is no realistic way of getting rid of them.

Seems like the Indian upper classes' whole tragic condition.

All I can say is that I share your longing for competent people that have the courage to take it upon themselves to solve the mess of modern society. But prayer is all I can really provide here.

Oh I think it can very well both be true that a whole class of people are undesirable and that there is no realistic way of getting rid of them.

I mean, I would be content to start restricting suffrage, ending birthright citizenship, and generally "fortifying" out democracy from being co-opted by third world mobs.

Unfortunately, the more I study history, the more I see that all political solutions are temporary. There is only one solution that is permanent, and history is littered with the names of long extinct tribes. Mere curiosities with no survivors to complain, and by and large, the world is better off with that being so.

I'd urge to at least try "assimilate or GTFO" (don't know if there are any success stories as stark as El Salvador, though)

The best example in America are Germans. Germans went from being a fairly-unassimilated minority, with high non-english persistence and significant ethnic lobbying...to completely dissolved in the American "white" mainstream over the course of two generations. Of course, we all-but criminalized the teaching of German in schools and fought two wars against their coethnics with pretty stringent propaganda against the inherent evils of "Germanness," but it worked.

It's just the usual - a wrong solution to a real problem. People notice they are getting screwed, they notice some others seem to do well, so it's kind of logical to take from them to give to yourself. It also has always been human nature, unfortunately, and an emotion happily stoked by a certain kind of social elite to their own benefit. People who technically do not own all that much money, but who manage large streams one way or another, and for whom socialism means more money to manage. For the common good, of course! And more generally, just promising a lot with no concern for how to actually get it done is very hard to argue against if most voters have little time or willingness to really look into the details. Without the soviet union as a demonstrable failure in living memory, it will only ever get harder.

London

Sadiq Khan is really more a typical Blairite Labour man than socialist. He's a lot more progressive on cultural matters, but that's par for the course for the wider Labour party these days.

He is also indescribably inept, but I'm not sure his chronic uselessness will open the door for an actual socialist to grab the mayorality of London. They already had that more than two decades ago, with full-blown Trotskyite Ken Livingstone.

Same with Brandon Johnson in Chicago. The man has made enemies out of nearly every faction aside from the highly-controversial Chicago Teachers Union, who basically blessed him with the position.

Humorously enough, Chicago would've been put in a bizarro-world situation if the opponent had made it in (Paul Vallas), with the Fraternal Order of Police pulling the strings instead of the CTU.

I think either way Chicago's budget would've been fucked, which is the number one issue anyway.

Brandon Johnson in Chicago

I've been meaning to read up on him. Sounds like he's a total fucking disaster.

My general vibe is Chicago has been on a pretty good hot streak of terrible mayors.

He's a caricature of a man. Toxic masculinity, minus the overt misogyny. Nothing is ever his fault. No compromises. All decisions are "tough", but somehow don't solve any issues. Manages to piss everyone off every time he opens his mouth.

Probably the worst defeat progressivism has faced in the US since LaFollete lost to McCarthy.

But, Chicago is a powerful economic engine with a multitude of billion-dollar-per-year, both publicly-traded and privately-owned entities across multiple industries. Even a few decades of bad mayors won't stop it, maybe just slow it down. Pritzker seems to be helping at least, too.

Ken Livingstone, on the other hand, did self-identify as a socialist. Apart from some culture-war trolling, he mostly ran London as a pragmatic leftist - both his term as GLC leader (1981-1986) and his terms as Mayor (2000-2008) are primarily remembered for the improvements he made to public transport.

I believe the American term for this type of leadership is "sewer socialism", although by this time London's sewers were controlled by Thames Water (privatised in 1989, and now bust).

Feels like Labour and the UK had their socialism experiment with Corbyn. Didn't last long nor did it do much good, but it was an interesting case study in just what modern day socialism is in practice:

A young and naïve base of support. An old guard of political weirdos who can't decide on if they are doing principled economic classism or third world brown nationalist ethnic warfare. A principled adherence to the former alienates the young, the rhetoric of the latter alienates the old.

It felt like an indictment of the entire left wing project. Insofar as leftism isn't enabling the worst excesses of capitalism, it hardly gets anything done. And what it can get done for its own good takes a lot of time and a lot of hard work, which is not very appealing to young voters who are having their brains bombed with the most impactful political extremism the algorithm can throw at them.

I see it more as a rejection of Cuomo than any great socialist uprising.

My takeaway is that it's just over for white boomer Democrats. They can keep their current jobs but won't be able to win nominations for any new office.

Ezra Klein had some good articles talking about the progressive theory of power and how it causes problems for city administration.

These are more for background than supporting my argument.

https://archive.ph/E6p6W

https://archive.ph/jNDlC

Basically the problem is that progressives are completely dedicated to the idea that billionaires and greedy corporations are the ones causing all of the problems.

However at the city level the problems tend to stem from:

  • Disorderly elements. eg low level criminals like shoplifters, people with sever substance abuse problems, or severe mental illness.

  • Left wing organizations trying to tack on fees to everything to get paid.

Progressives are completely unable to acknowledge that either of those groups cause problems. The idea that left wing groups are just being greedy rent seekers goes against their whole world view.

So you get ideas like government owned grocery stores. During a past attempt to tackle "food deserts", in I think Detroit, a grocery store complained that shoplifting was putting them out of business. A city councillor told them that lossage was just part of the price of doing business in Detroit. So the grocery store shut down the location.

I don't think the solution is really any fundamental social change. The issue is that people on the center left like to play defence for the farther left and hide the crazier elements of their philosophy from the general public. The progressives think that the media hides their beliefs out of some conspiracy against them instead of an attempt to protect them.

There needs to be a documentary series on a major streaming service that, as fairly and calmly as possible, shows what progressive populists believe and what the problems with it are. Right now it's being taught in colleges as the absolute truth with no analysis.

There needs to be a documentary series on a major streaming service that, as fairly and calmly as possible, shows what progressive populists believe and what the problems with it are.

First time? Best case scenario is that this documentary series would be dismissed on sight as right-wing propaganda, worst case scenario is that people making it will have their lives ruined.

Politics is war by peaceful means, you don't win by "calmly explaining", and much more straightforward issues, that would cost a lot less to concede than this, have been a decade long slog of an uphill battle, you have no chance moving people on their fundamental beliefs.


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