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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   28619 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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Happy Independence Day to those who celebrate!

First they came for the Nazis, and CNN did not speak out--because CNN reporters are not Nazis.

From CNN Politics today: Law used to kick out Nazis could be used to strip citizenship from many more Americans

This is not a meaty article--it seems like "the news" these days is mostly breathless speculation over the worst possible outcomes of things the Trump administration might be thinking about doing. As a rule, the "unprecedented" things Trump does are in fact wholly precedented--just, you know, not like that! But the substance is approximately this:

For decades, the US Department of Justice has used a tool to sniff out former Nazis who lied their way into becoming American citizens: a law that allowed the department to denaturalize, or strip, citizenship from criminals who falsified their records or hid their illicit pasts.

...

According to a memo issued by the Justice Department last month, attorneys should aim their denaturalization work to target a much broader swath of individuals – anyone who may “pose a potential danger to national security.”

The directive appears to be a push towards a larger denaturalization effort that fits with the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies. These could leave some of the millions of naturalized American citizens at risk of losing their status and being deported.

The article is light on numbers--well, it's a speculative article--so I went poking around and was surprised (not surprised) to discover that this is nothing new. An AXIOS article from President Trump's first term (but updated just two days ago, apparently) suggests:

From 1990-2017, the DOJ filed 305 denaturalization cases, about 11 per year.

The number has surged since President Trump's first term.

...

Since January 2017, the USCIS has selected some 2,500 cases for possible denaturalization and referred at least 110 denaturalization cases to the Justice Department for prosecution by the end of August 2018.

This sounds about in line with the CNN article's suggestion that

Trump filed 102 denaturalization cases during his first administration, contrasted with the 24 cases filed under Biden, DOJ Spokesperson Chad Gilmartin said on social media Wednesday. So far, the second Trump administration has filed 5 cases in its first five months.

The CNN article does at least include information about the history of denaturalization, which is more bipartisan than you might initially imagine...

The statute in question is part of a McCarthy-era law first established to root out Communists during the red scare.

But its most common use over the years has been against war criminals.

In 1979, the Justice Department established a unit that used the statute to deport hundreds of people who assisted the Nazis. Eli Rosenbaum, the man who led it for years, helped the department strip citizenship from or deport 100 people, and earned a reputation as the DOJ’s most prolific Nazi hunter.

Rosenbaum briefly returned in 2022 to lead an effort to identify and prosecute anyone who committed war crimes in Ukraine.

But the department has broadened those efforts beyond Nazis several times, including an Obama-era initiative called Operation Janus targeting those who stole identities to earn citizenship.

That's more direct quotes than I intended to use, but the point is that I was really struck by the article's framing. Yes, the law has been used to "kick out Nazis," though it was originally intended to kick out Communists. But it has also been used to kick out e.g. scammers and child pornographers. Basically, the weight of history and legal precedent is that naturalized citizens absolutely can be denaturalized and expelled from the country for a variety of reasons, substantially at the discretion of the executive.

Several thoughts: first, even if aggressively prosecuted, I have a hard time imagining more than perhaps several thousand naturalized Americans being returned to their countries of origin in this way. This is not an approach intended to change actual demographics; rather, it is a way for the government to influence public attitudes and perceptions by identifying "enemies" and distinguishing them from "friends." Deporting Nazis, even after naturalization, sends a strong signal that we don't take kindly to Nazis around here. And who would object to that? Object too strongly, and you might start looking like a Nazi yourself...

I don't think this is a deep or surprising point, but as a consequence I was a little surprised to run into such a self-aware wolf moment on CNN this morning. "We made a law to expel Nazis, but now it might be used to expel Hamas supporters! Everyone: clutch your pearls now!" What I think of as the obvious question--"should we maybe have been criticizing the ideological slant of this law when it was being used to expel Nazis?"--never even gets asked. From the perspective of the CNN reporter, it's not the law that is bad, it's just that Trump is the one using that law, and against people CNN would prefer it not be used against.

"I can tolerate anything except the outgroup," indeed!

Anyway, add this one to the "Trump opposition continues to be mad at him for enforcing their favorite laws against them" file. I feel like, in a sane world, this would be inducement for Democrats to reconsider their historic commitment to infinite expansion of federal power. Imagine how things would look right now if Joe Biden (or his handlers, whatever) had made it his mission to dismantle as much of the federal government as possible. The easiest way to prevent a "Trump Tyranny" would have been to make law in a way that precludes tyranny, rather than to insist on empowering the executive and conspiring to ensure only the "right" tyrants ever ascend.

Why is it so hard for people to take the libertarian lesson from such events?

As I said--neither deep nor surprising. But I thought it was at least a thematically appropriate question on July 4th (even if Constitution Day might have been a better fit). The document of "enumerated powers" that is the putative core of our government practice is... "dead letter" might be an exaggeration, but maybe not. I do not usually perceive the federal government as in any meaningful way limited. Those bothered by Trump I would invite to consider the possibility that Trump is only a symptom; the disease is the statism toward which the United States has been creeping since, oh, probably July 5, 1776, but certainly since the Civil War, and more recently without even token opposition from any of its major political parties (since, I suppose, the Tea Party of 2007). DOGE makes many of the right noises, but the Big Beautiful Bill looks at best like one step forward, and one step back. (Republicans do not appear to have learned the lesson, either!)

Whether a reduction in liberty is worth the occasional schadenfreude of seeing one's ideological opponents kicked out of the country, I leave as an exercise for the reader.

I think this fits into a more general pattern that I'm becoming more aware of.

There's this idea, from some irritated younger dissident right types (and others), that America's conservative party has long existed as something like a controlled opposition. And I get where that kind of frame is coming from.

But I think there's an alternative viewpoint that goes more like this, that I'm coming to think has a lot of explanatory power. From the 1930s on, a certain version of liberalism became so overwhelmingly dominant in America that its native conservative tradition was essentially sidelined into a permanent minority status, really, and given no public oxygen at all. And the New Deal state absolutely had a massive role in that (I've brought up Hoover under FDR inventing and promulgating the slur "isolationist" and pushing it hard to delegitimize the foreign policy of most American elites up to the point, for example, and the significant censorship campaigns that government employed against conservatives, as happened under JFK as well). But liberals of a certain sort really were so dominant, under the New Deal coalition, that in a two party system, it was inevitable that a lot of the differences within liberalism would inevitably, for game theory reasons, spill over into the other party and be given an airing there. You could call that bipartisan consensus, but I don't think really captures the dynamics at play. When Eisenhower ran for president in the 50s, both parties wanted him to run for them, and what came to be called paleo conservatism (I think the public fight with Taft captured that) became marginalized and sidelined. Groups like the John Birch society came to look fringe in part because a certain broad strand of liberalism was so dominant that everything normal looked like it, and all broadcast media reinforced it.

And this, I think, is the broader social context where all sorts of 20th century laws and polices and Supreme Court rulings were developed. There were assumptions about the values and worldviews of anyone who would be wielding these laws or rulings or state power, because that broad strand of liberalism had been so dominant that it was easy to assume that surely anyone who had access to the highest levels of state power would be a liberal in that sense.

And this is the background for the rise of the Reagan coalition, which included (as thought leaders and political operatives) many more hawkish or more pro market liberals who left the Democratic party with the rise of the New Left, and with the turn towards more nakedly radical left politics, and the rise of antagonism to internationalist American foreign policy. You could call those people flooding in and bolstering the Republican party of the 70s, and 80s, 90s, and 2000s entryist or controlled opposition, but I think it's just as easy to see them as a natural consequence of a very dominant strand of liberalism reallocating itself between the two parties in a two party system, which, again, you should expect for game theory reasons. And those people (many of them really, truly elites) understood American state power, because it literally had been created by people like them, for people like them.

And thus, when Reagan came to power, he may have had some sympathies that point in some more populist conservative directions that sounds like the old, marginalized paleo conservatives, and there were important public voices like Pat Buchanan that pointed in that direction, but the coalition Reagan brought into power was still absolutely packed with those sorts of statist, more conservative liberals that existed in huge numbers in the original New Deal coalition, the ones that all state power and court rulings and so on had been written for in the first place, and the ones that were comfortable expanding the state power of Civil Rights regime and letting the CIA do whatever it is that it does. George H. W. Bush fits cleanly in this pattern.

I think part of what makes the current moment so messy and complicated is that between 2001 and 2008, those more hawkish, more internationalist, more market oriented liberals absolutely dominated the Republican party and got their way. They sidelined more traditional paleo conservative voices even more (again, bringing up Pat Buchanan is instructive here). And then Iraq happened, and the 2008 financial crisis happened, and they basically obliterated their version of conservative liberalism in the public eye (which was always much less popular with rank-and-file conservatives, who much more often were more religious and somewhat isolationist in a Jacksonian sense and more distrustful of the remote Federal state). That was the specific sequence of events that opened up the chain including the Tea Party, and the online rise of Ron Paul, (both of which were really important for making intellectual space, especially online, for younger disaffected types to start entertaining new ideas that weren't just more rehashes of conservative liberalism), and then eventually the rise of Trump. And the rise of Trump meant the rise of RINOs, who for the most part really were those older conservative liberals who suddenly found that they were losing their iron grip on those tools of state power.

The entire system of federal government power has been built with the assumption that some variety of liberal, from a certain very specific intellectual tradition, would always be given the reigns of state power. There were certain filters in place (especially through unelected credentialing bodies and universities and professional organizations) that would ensure that, regardless of party, the sorts of people who make their way to centralized power would hold certain world views and values.

And... now we're in an era where it looks like that's possibly no longer true. And that is clearly disruptive.

(And for this narrative, too, it's worth recognizing that the current 6-3 conservative Supreme Court is the first time America has had a Supreme Court that conservative since the 1920s. That, on its own, is a radical, radical shift, considering how much liberals of all stripes used their dominance of the court in the middle of the 20th century to remake America in their vision, and how central it has been to their moral story of progress)

Anyway, given that story, I think it's very likely we'll see many more examples of this, of liberals becoming shocked and horrified to discover what happens when the central state they built with the assumption of permanent broad liberal control falls into heretical hands. I'm not saying this with pleasure, exactly, because I personally would have preferred many of those tools dismantled long ago. But...

I didn't like denaturalization well-after-the-fact when they were doing it to superannuated Nazis. Now that they're threatening to do it to Hamasniks (and not nearly as far after the fact!) my attitude is that the precedent is established and now the people and organizations who supported it before ought to suck it up. On a meta level, the reasons for not establishing bad precedent in the first place don't hold if you can ensure said precedents are only used against your enemies, so using such bad precedents against those who supported them is the correct moves for opponents of those supporters.

I don't think it was done to the Nazis qua being a Nazi, it was done because they materially lied about it during naturalization.

If some guy was admitted in a process during which they knowingly presented a doctored birth certificate claiming to be 15 when they were really 22, I think it would be totally fine to go back and revoke it. Saying otherwise is invited gaming an already extremely gameable immigration system with the idea that if you perpetuate a fraud, tough luck it's just done.

That seems like a fine precedent, and one that's sufficiently cabined not to be applicable to just anyone the President pisses off.

I don't think it was done to the Nazis qua being a Nazi, it was done because they materially lied about it during naturalization.

These are not materially different things. GK Chesterton actually remarked on this:

When I went to the American consulate to regularise my passports . . . [t]he officials I interviewed were very American, especially in being very polite; for whatever may have been the mood or meaning of Martin Chuzzlewit, I have always found Americans by far the politest people in the world. They put in my hands a form to be filled up, to all appearance like other forms I had filled up in other passport offices. But in reality, it was very different from any form I had ever filled up in my life. At least it was a little like a freer form of the game called "Confessions" which my friends and I invented in our youth; an examination paper containing questions like, "if you saw a rhinoceros in the front garden, what would you do?" . . .

One of the questions on the paper was, "Are you an anarchist?" To which a detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to answer, "What the devil has that to do with you? Are you an atheist?" along with some playful efforts to cross-examine the official about what constitutes an αρχη. Then there was the quesiton, "Are you in favor of subverting the government of the United States by force?" Agaisnt this I should write, "I prefer to answer that question at the end of my tour, not the beginning." The inquisitor, in his more than morbid curiosity, had then written down, "Are you a polygamist?" The answer to this is "No such luck" or "Not such a fool," according to our experience of the other sex. But perhaps a better answer would be that given to W.T. Stead when he circulated the rhetorical question "Shall I slay my brother Boer?" - the answer that ran, "Never interfere in family matters." But among many things that amused me almost to the point of treating the form thus disrespectfully, the most amusing was the thought of the ruthless outlaw who should feel compelled to treat it respectfully. I like to think of the foreign desperado, seeking to slip into America with official papers under official protection, and sitting down to write with beautiful gravity, "I am an anarchist. I hate you all and wish to destroy you." Or, "I intend to subvert by force the government of the United States as soon as possible, sticking the long sheath-knife in my left trouser-pocket into Mr. Harding at the earliest opportunity." Or again, "Yes I am a polygamist all right and my forty-seven wives are accompanying me on the voyage disguised as secretaries." There seems to be a certain simplicity of mind about these answers; and it is reassuring to know that anarchists and polygamists are so pure and good that the police have only to ask them questions and they are certain to tell no lies.

...

Superficially this is rather a queer business. It would be easy enough to suggest that in this America has introduced a quite abnormal spirit of inquisition; an interference with liberty unknown among all the ancient despotisms and aristocracies. About that there will be something to be said later; but superficially it is true that this degree of officialism is comparatively unique. In a journey which I took only the year before I had occasion to have my papers passed by governments which many worthy people in the West would vaguely identify with corsairs and assassins; I have stood on the other side of Jordan, in the land ruled by a rude Arab chief, where the police looked so like brigands that one wondered what the brigands looked like. But they did not ask whether I had come to subvert the power of the Shereef; and they did not exhibit the faintest curiosity about my personal views on the ethical basis of civil authority. These ministers of ancient Moslem despotism did not care about whether I was an anarchist; and naturally would not have minded if I had been a polygamist. The Arab chief was probably a polygamist himself. These slaves of Asiatic autocracy were content, in the old liberal fashion, to judge me by my actions; they did not inquire into my thoughts. They held their power as limited to the limitation of practice; they did not forbid me to hold a theory. It would be easy to argue here that Western democracy persecutes where even Eastern despotism tolerates or emancipates. It would be easy to develop the fancy that, as compared to the sultans of Turkey or Egypt, the American Constitution is a thing like the Spanish Inquisition.

...

It may have seemed something less than a compliment to compare the American Constitution to the Spanish Inquisition. But oddly enough, it does involve a truth; and still more oddly perhaps, it does involve a compliment. The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived. Nobody expects a modern political system to proceed logically in the application of such dogmas, and in the manner of God and Government it is naturally God whose claim is taken more lightly. The point is that there is a creed, if not about divine, at least about human things.

Now a creed is at once the broadest and the narrowest thing in the world. In its nature it is as broad as its scheme for a brotherhood of all men. In its nature it is limited by its definition of the nature of all men. This was true of the Christian Church, which was truly said to exclude neither Jew nor Greek, but which did definitely substitute something else for Jewish religion or Greek Philosophy. It was truly said to be a net drawing in of all kinds; but a net of a certain pattern, the pattern of Peter the Fisherman. And this is true even of the most disastrous distortions or degradations of that creed; and true among other of the Spanish Inquisition. It may have been narrow touching theology, it could not confess to being narrow about nationality or ethnology. The Spanish Inquisition may have been admittedly Inquisitorial; but the Spanish Inquisition could not be merely Spanish. Such a Spaniard, even when he was narrower than his own creed, had to be broader than his own empire. He might burn a philosopher because he was heterodox; but he must accept a barbarian because he was orthodox. And we see, even in modern times, that the same Church which is blamed for making sages heretics is also blamed for making savages priests. Now, in a much vaguer and more evolutionary fashion, there is something of the same idea at the back of the great American experiment; the expierment of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a melting-pot. But even that metaphor implies that the pot itself is of a certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The melting-pot must not melt. The original shape was trace on the lines of Jeffersonian democracy; and it will remain in that shape until it becomes shapeless. America invites all men to become citizens; but it implies the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship. Only, so far as its primary ideal is concerned, its exclusiveness is religious because it is not racial. The missionary can condemn a cannibal, precisely because he cannot condemn a Sandwich Islander. And in something of the same spirit the American may exclude a polygamist, precisely because he cannot exclude a Turk.

"What I saw in America" 1912, pgs. 3-9

I don't think it was done to the Nazis qua being a Nazi, it was done because they materially lied about it during naturalization.

Yes, but if they'd admitted to being a Nazi, they wouldn't have been naturalized. The proposed Hamasnik deportations are for the same reason.

Saying otherwise is invited gaming an already extremely gameable immigration system with the idea that if you perpetuate a fraud, tough luck it's just done.

My preferred solution would be a statute of limitations; maybe 3 years for ordinary stuff, 7 years for really bad stuff.

Yes, but if they'd admitted to being a Nazi, they wouldn't have been naturalized.

Possibly, Probably. and the HAMASniks would have likely (or at least ought to have been) denied entry if they had gone into thier naturalization hearing chanting "death to America" and "globalize the infitada".

Have you ever aligned yourself with an enemy of the United States, if so explain the circumstances. is exactly the sort of question we ought to be asking someone before letting them in.

What is the definition of an "enemy of the United States" though? Hamas is primarily an enemy of Israel, and though Israel and the US share a relationship that is as close as lips and teeth at the moment, "dump Israel and ally with Hamas instead" is a real political position that is represented by a non-trivial number of native actors in the American system. If against all odds those actors were to come into power and implement their agenda, should pro-Israelis be (retroactively) denaturalized? Would there be a way at all to get legally and irreversibly naturalised in a futureproof way without staunchly refusing to have an opinion on Israel/Palestine and perhaps also every other important geopolitical issue where the US may switch sides in the future, or perhaps at most enthusiastically participating in the current Two Minutes of Hate whatever the target?

(And then, what classes of enmity are we considering? For smaller-scope questions than foreign alliances, the government position may flip every four years. Can Democrats denaturalize "Latinos for Trump"?)

What is the definition of an "enemy of the United States" though?

Hamas is designated as a terrorist organization. If that isn't sufficient to meet the definition, then I'm not sure what is.

The IRA is listed there too, but they were not enemies of America and indeed were partly funded by American groups.

Hamas is primarily an enemy of Israel

This is not an uncommon position, but it is clearly incorrect. At the very least, someone who makes this line of argumentation needs to give a disclaimer to avoid being correctly called a liar. That disclaimer would be something along the lines of, "because of Hamas' strategic and military incompetence, and the vast distance between us and them I don't consider them a threat."

I don't find these arguments FOR incompetence compelling, but if you are adopting them you should be clear about it. Because I know in my heart that if Hamas had our army and we had Hamas's militias, they'd simply kill us all with nukes and laugh while doing it.

I think refusing to have an opinion is fine, but it seems reasonable enough for any nation to declare that 'death to {nation}" is beyond the pale.

Well, the Ukrainians get pretty close to that wrt Russia ("Muscovites onto the gallows" was a popular slogan even before the war). Does that mean that if Trump goes full rapprochement with Putin, pro-Ukrainians would be up for denaturalization?

Given the two attempts at invasion/annexation in 10 years (one of them ongoing) it seems reasonable that the Ukrainians would not want ZZ-niks working in thier country, voting in thier elections, etc.

Remember that we are talking about naturalization here IE whether or not we let a person in, and once in, how much of an obligation is there to let them stay.

More comments

My preferred solution would be a statute of limitations; maybe 3 years for ordinary stuff, 7 years for really bad stuff.

This is the sort of gamification that just encourages the evil doers. 7 Years is already plenty of time to spread around a few anchor babies so the judge will look favorably on you and maybe violate black letter law in your favor.

Even with no statute of limitations, children of the denaturalized person wouldn't be affected.

Indeed, damage enough to the country.

The difficulty is that a determined person could easily maintain their allegiance without overt signs especially in service to a greater cause. If I’m a person allied to hezbollah I don’t want the USA to know that, and especially if I’m joining a cell in the USA. If all I have to do is hide my allegiance to hezbollah for three years, I can probably scrub my name from official records, purge my social media, and keep my mouth shut for three years and be fine.

Yes, there are negative consequences of such limitations. Of course, if that Hezbollah cell does anything, the citizen can still go through the criminal process for it as a citizen. The alternative is that 40 years post-naturalization you've got people poring through old records looking for a lie big enough to denaturalize someone.

And note it is longer than 3 years -- it take 3 years to become a citizen from getting a green card, if you're married to a citizen, and 5 years otherwise.

I mean 40 years is a bit long, but I’d put it to at least 7-10 years simply because scrubbing your feeds, removing yourself from lists, etc. is unlikely to be that successful beyond 5 years because you forget about old accounts, you forget that mailing list you signed up for, or buy something incriminating with a credit card and those things will still be there because you won’t be paying attention to something that far back.

I can agree in principle to limiting the look back period

Well, yeah; this is 100% an autistic Christian thing.

You make yourself an enemy of the God of America when you lie on the form, because He knows the contents of your heart and what is done in secret.

That is why "lying on the form about the contents of your heart" is accepted by American culture as both valid, and an offense that strips you of any right to participate in it so long as they see fit that the question remains on the form.

Interestingly, it doesn't actually make any moral judgment- it still maintains the presupposition that there are good people who are also [disqualifying class]- but then, if the man be good, he would not lie on the forms because [see above].

Thus lying on the form is, while a completely natural thing to do, a sin -> if you were good, you're certainly an enemy of God [and by extension, the country] now -> OK to revoke and eject on those grounds.

I would disagree entirely - I think it’s an “Al Capone was arrested for tax evasion” type thing.

If someone lies about intending the downfall of America, you have a much better excuse to kick them out than if you have to find an example of them stepping outside the bounds of free speech.

Why is it so hard for people to take the libertarian lesson from such events?

Because CNN does not, as far as I know, object to the ‘tyranny’. They object to Trump. Liberty-as-in-freedom to live your life is not something these people particularly value and they don’t really claim to either.

It is probably true that the Trump coalition is being a bit hypocritical when they back Trumpian caudillismo, but I don’t think the anti-Trump coalition(to the extent that it can meaningfully be called a ‘coalition’ at this point) is hypocritical for backing Biden’s use of federal power to punish his enemies while bemoaning Trump’s- they really do think that the untrammeled rule of the expert scholar-bureaucrats is most important and don't value freedom at all.

I’m not exactly surprised by this. As much as people like to pretend to be in favor of the rule of law, as point of fact, nobody, especially those in power, are principled enough to support applying a law fairly. I’m not even sure it’s possible to do so, as the tribal instinct is simply too strong to be easily overcome by mere principles.

Power doesn’t care and cannot care. I’m convinced as I read more of history that our era isn’t really much different from any other. Sure the aesthetics have changed, the means of control have changed, but power is still held and wielded in ways that the old monarchs and emperors would have found fairly familiar. The constitution was never a particularly live letter. It’s not a letter, it’s a legitimacy producing document. It’s marketing. You want to live here because we have rights. Except that when the government really, really wants to do so it can easily get it done despite anything the constitution actually says about your rights. There’s no way that any fair reading of the constitution would allow the full faith and credit clause or the interstate commerce clause to be used to override state laws. It happens all the time. It’s happened often enough that the states have become mere appendages of the federal government. Free speech is mostly limited to approved speech that the mainstream likes. If you get much outside of those lines, then you get punished by the unofficial powers often acting in ways that the government insists they do. Your boss will get sued if he doesn’t fire you for racism or sexism. Social media for a time feared regulation if it didnT curb crime-think on its platform. That’s censorship, but because the people doing it are private individuals or companies doing so at the behest of the government, it’s fine. Free assembly is only free as long as it’s not racist or sexist.

I’m not even sure it’s possible to do so

Of course it's possible. I support principled application of laws (and general principles) all the time. Just because lots of people are hypocrites doesn't mean that it's impossible to escape that, it means that they are choosing to be hypocrites.

For individuals, yes, but I think on the national, let alone international level your representatives and elected government act a lot more like medieval potentates protecting and trying to expand their power and fiefdoms. To give a fairly recent example, the government is supporting Israel (I personally agree with them, but whatever). This is despite a large, fairly active movement that might have tipped the election to Trump and is unpopular with democrats and is strongest in supposed must-win states. By Democratic logic, it should be a slam dunk to support Palestine and go with the thing the public seems to want. Or the BBB which is unpopular and passed anyway. The government barely cares what people actually want, they care for their fiefdoms and maintaining power. If they can do so, they do so by rigging the districts so they aren’t competitive.

If forcing dissidents whether liberal or conservative to shut up allows them to win power games, they’re perfectly fine doing so. It will be hate speech or misinformation or state secrets.

Sure, I would agree that the government has come largely (some would argue entirely) unmoored from the will of the people. And I certainly agree that politicians continually act in unprincipled ways. Perhaps I misunderstood you as referring to all people rather than just politics.

I’m not convinced that anything has changed, that’s my point. The way politics has always worked is based on power, and whatever the window-dressing might be, and if the actual power elites don’t want a thing to happen, it will not happen. If those same elites want something to happen it will absolutely happen. It’s been that way since the first brick was laid at the foundation of the first city. Nobody with power has ever cared about what the public wants, nor do they care about the peasant population of their country. As long as the little people shut up and obey (or at least not interfere too much in the affairs of their betters), the powerful do not care.

The control mechanism of democracy is basically mass gaslighting. First convince everyone that whatever “the public” wants is what the government should do. Then propagandize the population to believe whatever the elites want to have happen. In the meantime you rig the districts such that those who the elites support have an easier time winning. Once this is done, most people will vote as instructed, and most of the rest will go along because they’ve been taught from birth that the results of the election represent the “will of the people” and thus cannot be questioned. So when the government serving the elites does something wrong, stupid, or evil, it’s your fault. The people in charge, running the show were just doing whatever they were told to do by you. So you vote as instructed and wonder why things don’t improve.

I’m fine with any sort of government that mostly works for most people without being too harsh on the average citizen. The form of government isn’t important, customer service is. By which I mean management should provide the vast majority a fairly comfortable lifestyle, they should build and keep up good infrastructure, to live in a stable and secure society, and to not have foreign governments attacking us, our trade routes, and so on.

That's more direct quotes than I intended to use, but the point is that I was really struck by the article's framing. Yes, the law has been used to "kick out Nazis," though it was originally intended to kick out Communists. But it has also been used to kick out e.g. scammers and child pornographers. Basically, the weight of history and legal precedent is that naturalized citizens absolutely can be denaturalized and expelled from the country for a variety of reasons, substantially at the discretion of the executive.

Indeed. There was actually a fairly large media case the other day over this exact issue. A 20-something naturalized Palestinian what caught with a large cache of child pornography, much of it depicting pre-pubescent girls, the youngest estimated to be 3. He also had multiple discords, one of which he used to communicate with other pervs about his desire to penetrate 12 year olds, and on the other he fantasized about Hamas killing Jews. Seems like a good candidate for this process, but there was a large cadre who came to court in support of him. Apparently, many quietly left as they are made aware that the charges were for CP.

It's hard for people to take the libertarian lesson from such events because lizard brain instinctively understands that the levers of power are like, right there.

If you think you've won forever and for all time, what possible reason would you have to build in checks and balances to the infinite expansion of state power? They were wrong about this, but there were a significant amount of people in America - some of them reasonably intelligent, just isolated in their own bubbles - that did in fact think they were going to win forever, for all time, and the only thing left to do was consolidate and grind down the boot.

I like libertarians. I lean libertarian. But they're losers. Their win state is to check out and to be left alone to do what they're doing. This is inherently a losing position, because those who show up to the game are those who get to play.

those who show up to the game are those who get to play

There are other games than using democracy to grab state power for yourself. Libertarians will never have more than 10% of the population as a genuine constituency. If you still care about liberty there are better things to do with your time than to try to wrestle away power from collectivists.

I'd say that serious libertarians have pursued a very successful political program that got them a lot of what they wanted in the recent past. But it's always going to come as a compromise and through the vessel of a larger coalition.

Call this losing if you must. That doesn't change the nature of the choice.

Happy Independence Day to those who celebrate!

Happy Independence Day!

America is an awesome country filled with great people. It's responsible for many of the best things that have happened to the world over the past 100 years, and I say this quite genuinely as someone who doesn't live there. It deserves appreciation.

Basically, the weight of history and legal precedent is that naturalized citizens absolutely can be denaturalized and expelled from the country for a variety of reasons, substantially at the discretion of the executive.

I think the point about discretion here is more nuanced. Yes, the Executive has the discretion on who to go after (same as most other fields) but they can't just invent any grounds they want.

As always, it helps to start right with the US Code rather than all the news articulate.

8 U.S.C. § 1451 provides, in relevant part, for revoking naturalization "on the ground that such order and certificate of naturalization were illegally procured or were procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation" and 1424 prohibits "advocating or teaching opposition to all organized government, or advocating (A) the overthrow by force, violence or other unconstitutional means of the Government of the United States or of all forms of law; or (B) the duty, necessity, or propriety of the unlawful assaulting or killing of any officer or officers (either of specific individuals or of officers generally) of the Government of the United States or of any other organized government, because of his or their official character; or (C) the unlawful damage, injury, or destruction of property; or (D) sabotage; or (E) the economic, international, and governmental doctrines of world communism or the establishment in the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship".

This covers a lot of cases (and indeed, I don't think anyone seriously objects to denaturalizing someone that willfully lied during their application) but it doesn't give the Executive that much discretion to determine the grounds for denaturalization completely freeform.

it doesn't give the Executive that much discretion to determine the grounds for denaturalization completely freeform.

We live in a world where supreme court precedent has determined that growing your own grain and feeding it to your own stock on your own land can be regulated under the aegis of "interstate commerce". That ship has sailed.

Wickard v Filburn is insane mental gymnastics, but in the politics of its time it makes sense: Every farmer wanted regulation to prop up stable prices and Filburn defected (always hated). Wheat couldn’t be exported as world prices were much lower. Congress was seen as doing their job and any other decision by the court would have been seen as head-in-clouds-lawyers screwing up a common sense solution, that is why the decision was 9-0.

A constitional amendment would have been cleaner

Literally anything would've been cleaner. Wickard v Filburn is one of the most bad faith interpretations of the law in our country's entire history. There might be worse, but there aren't a lot of them.

It's not interpretation (good/bad) of a regular law, it's interpretation (good/bad) of the constitutional assignment of powers.

It makes a huge difference. A bad interpretation of a law can be corrected by the political branches. So the stakes are quite different.

Sure, the stakes are higher in this case. But it doesn't make the reasoning any less bad faith on the part of those supreme court justices.

This is statutory construction, not constitutional.

The "concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation" portion is what Democrat activists are afraid of, because many, if not most, of said people failed to list "material support of Hamas" on their applications, which many/most have done.

The continuing saga of Aboriginal issues in Australia!

You may recall that in 2023 Australia had a referendum on changing the constitution to attach a permanent Aboriginal advisory body to parliament. That referendum was rejected around 60-40. We discussed it here at the time, and since then I've been keeping an eye on the issue. Since then, many state governments have stated their intention to go ahead with state-level bodies, or even with 'treaty'.

'Treaty', in the context of Aboriginal activism in Australia, is a catch-all term for bilateral agreements between state and federal governments and indigenous communities. Whether or not this is a good idea tends to be heavily disputed, with the left generally lining up behind 'yes', and the right behind 'no'.

Anyway, I bring this up because just last week, in Australia's most progressive state, Victoria, the Yoorrook Report was just published.

This is the report of a body called the Yoorrook Justice Commission, a body set up in this state with public funds whose purpose is to give a report on indigenous issues in the state. They call this 'truth-telling' (and indeed 'Voice, Treaty, Truth' was the slogan of the larger movement for a while), though whether or not the publications they put out are true is, well, part of the whole issue.

Here is the summary of their report.

You can skip most of the first half - the important part is their hundred recommendations, starting from page 28 of the PDF, all beginning with the very demanding phrase 'the Victorian Government must...'

This puts the Victorian government in a somewhat difficult position. They love the symbolism of being progressive on Aboriginal issues, and indeed are currently legislating for a more permanent indigenous advisory body to parliament. However, the actual recommendations of the Yoorrook Report are very expensive, very complex, and in many cases blatantly unreasonable, at least to my eyes. Some examples would include recommendations 4 (a portion of all land, water, and natural-resource-related revenues should be allocated to indigenous peoples), 21 (land transfers), 24 (reverse burden of proof for native land title), 41 (recognise waterways as legal persons and appoint indigenous peoples as their representatives, like that river in New Zealand), 54 (decolonise school libraries by removing offensive books), 66-7 (universities must permanently fund additional Aboriginal support services and 'recompense First Peoples staff for the 'colonial load' they carry'), and 96 (establish a permanent Aboriginal representative body 'with powers at all levels of political and policy decision making'). Needless to say the recommendations taken as a whole are both expensive and politically impossible, especially since even Victoria rejected the Voice 55-45.

Possibly from Yoorrook's perspective the idea is just to open with a maximal demand that they can then negotiate down from; or possibly it's to deliberately make demands that cannot possibly be satisfied so that there will remain a need for activists in this space. From the state government's perspective it's tricky, because they will want to appear responsive and sympathetic, but not want to actually do all this. I predict that they will accept a couple of the cheaper, more fig-leaf recommendations and ignore the rest, maintaining a status quo where we engage in symbolic acts of recognition and guilt but nothing more, and the Aboriginal rights industry, so to speak, continues to perpetuate itself.

If the Victorian Liberals (the state branch of our centre-right party) were more on the ball, I might have expected them to politically profit from this and make a good bid at the next election, but unfortunately the Victorian Liberals are in shambles and have been for some time, and the recent smashing of the federal Liberal party at the last election doesn't make it look good for them either.

Never half ass a genocide. One of the most important lessons of history.

I know you're tongue in cheek with this, but man I don't like that the lesson being taught internationally right now is: "If even a single member of a particular ethnic group survives, and your ancestors did something oppressive to their ancestors hundreds of years ago, they will use this to extract reparations from you in perpetuity and will never let you forget what happened."

Similar logic for why, if you depose a monarch, you have to kill off their entire extended family, lest some loyalists later track down their teenage second cousin thrice removed and try to restore them to the throne.

We have a few social techs for allowing non-genocidal acclimation of oppressed populations but when they can all be trivially overridden by the logic that "any observed inequality in outcomes is proof positive of ongoing oppression which must be rectified" then guess what comes back on the menu.

Perhaps we can counter that logic by pointing out that whatever mechanism allows guilt to flow forward in time should also allow credit and pride to flow forward. So sure, maybe my great great great grandpappy beat some villagers that one time, but my family saved an awful lot of drowning children over the years too, so maybe it balances out.

The real lesson is actually 'if you oppress a group of low performers you must never stop. If you grow tired of oppression then leave no survivors, but only if they are low performers. It's fine to just liberate Chinamen or Ashkenazim because they'll catch up without really needing the help their more unhinged activists demand.'

No that is not the lesson, there is nothing to fear from a "low performer". What you need to fear is the person or group who you dismissed as low performing but have the potential to not be, because if you fuck em there is a good chance they'll fuck you back and you will deserve it.

They can TRY to fuck you back, but they usually lack competence organically, which is why they failed in the first place. They only succeed because their nominal allies of convenience prefer wielding them as cudgels against their proximate enemy. White liberals play the oppression meta to discredit enemies, not to materially advance the cause of their pet projects. Without external support these low performers default to the limit of their capability.

They mostly have not done this. The black and indigenous minorities who are poor performers have tried; the once-oppressed Chinese have been content with their rising standards of living.

Have not doesn't mean they will not.

They tried with "Stop Asian Hate," but it turned out that Asians are doing better than whites by most measures and the people beating Chinese grandmas for bus money aren't white. So I think we've already seen how such a campaign would pan out (i.e. not at all).

I mean, I can envision an America where Asians run black-like racial advocacy. It's just not very plausible.

Its just the racial meta. If Asians could only play that game, they would, but they can play the competence game and achieve greater outcomes. The sympathy game is a means of last resort, played only because there are no other cards to play. Nigerian immigrants in Virginia can play both sides of the fence till BLM figures out a way to kick them out fully and get ADOS as a special protected class without the inconvenient racialization allowing actual high performers to cosplay as oppressed.

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Conceptually, I think the choice of "grifting" has a fairly limited cap on median outcomes. Limited cases might exist, but it's hard to sell indefinite affirmative action or reparations for a minority doing better than the median. I can't see democratic will supporting that for long, and it's unpopular even when isolated exceptions come up: Elizabeth Warren, or affirmative action for Obama's kids applying to college.

Chinese-Americans seem to have taken the "work hard and naturally do better than the median" option, which I think sounds better if it's available.

the once-oppressed Chinese have been content with their rising standards of living.

isn't the US in a fentanyl epidemic?, last I heard it came to the US through Cartels that bought the necessary precursors from the Chinese.

It's fine to just liberate Chinamen or Ashkenazim

Looking at the current geopolitical situation, there may have been other downsides.

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As a non-American, I find the notion that America should permanently kneecap anyone who might contest their dominance very off-putting. If America isn't clever enough, organised enough or stable enough to compete with China on an even footing, why should it be in charge of the globe?

I would also argue that even America benefits from having an actual rival that can go toe-to-toe with it. When America was competing with the USSR, it had to be focused and cohesive and attractive to its citizens. When the USSR died and the USA was left without rivals, it seems to me that it sickened and started to alternate between flailing around and infighting. (The same of course applies to China in reverse).

If America isn't clever enough, organised enough or stable enough to compete with China on an even footing, why should it be in charge of the globe?

Because the comparison isn't America to some hypothetical perfect country. It's a comparison to China, and China's government is pretty shitty. If you have to choose between China and America and you're not in the Politburo, America is loads better even if you don't like some of the things America does.

If you have to choose between China and America and you're not in the Politburo, America is loads better even if you don't like some of the things America does.

At the very least, this is not an indisputable fact. I've known various Chinese in and out of the country and I've visited briefly; China had much tighter security and much more overt control of information than America, but it was, basically, just another country. The people clearly didn't consider themselves to be living in a dystopia. Nor were they smiling and desperately terrified like somebody in North Korea.

Meanwhile @No_one is literally arguing that America should keep any potential competitors 'in eternal poverty and civil war'. That strikes me as pretty shitty! Like, probably America is still the country that most of us would prefer to win a battle of superpowers if it absolutely must come to that, but that calculus changes very quickly if America starts throwing its weight around even more than it already does.

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Other people’s sincere patriotism is always a little annoying because it’s generally a claim that they consider their country’s ways strictly superior to mine. Nevertheless, I believe that love of country is (usually) a healthy love to have. What I object to is those people deciding to kneecap everyone else.

I don’t necessarily disapprove of tariffs on the other hand. People don’t have to cooperate with their rivals, just ideally refrain from stomping them to the ground. Of course tactics like market flooding make this philosophy more complex to hold to.

Might be.

But you'd expect low performers to end up on the receiving end of the oppression more often than not.

Low performers are irrelevant, it's high performers that are dangerous. Who is more dangerous as a grudgebearer - Joshua VerbalIQbaum or Mgubu the Witless? Likewise it's not unreasonable for Chang, Zheng and much of the Maths Olympiad phenotype to hold a grudge for their treatment in the 19th and early 20th century. You can always ignore Mgubu, he has no armoured brigades or advanced rhetoric.

Mgubu isn't smart enough to recognize when he's gotten the better deal. People of small hats mostly are, and for all of chairman Xi's attempts at becoming grand Chinaman of the race, people of slanted eyes are too.

Contrary to what @George_E_Hale said, this isn't an odd moment of bluntness for you, it's something you've been warned about before.

Drop this "this is just the way I talk" gimmick. You can say "Blacks aren't smart, but Jews and Chinese are," but phrasing it the way you did just reeks of "I'm an edgy ironic racist, hee hee hee." We've told you this already: being racist isn't prohibited, but you have to figure out how to spray your spittle in a polite manner, and if you find that difficult, that's intentional.

As opposed to 'Mgubu the witless'?

Aside from the parallelism in 'people of small hats/people of slanted eyes' it doesn't seem offensive in isolation either.

people of slanted eyes are too.

Are smart enough? I'm parsing your sentence but the general tone seems dismissive, whereas this seems complimentary. The slant eyes bit is an odd moment of bluntness for you.

We have a few social techs for allowing non-genocidal acclimation of oppressed populations but when they can all be trivially overridden by the logic that "any observed inequality in outcomes is proof positive of ongoing oppression which must be rectified" then guess what comes back on the menu.

But note that this is a civil matter, caused by women/the womanly/progressives seeking more social power. Any nag they can get their hands on will be used, and nags are quite powerful in democracies (commonly referred to as "women's tears winning in the marketplace of ideas"). This doesn't even require women having the vote to work- universal male suffrage is generally enough, the 18th Amendment being a good example of that.

Not allowing credit and pride to flow forward in the same measure as guilt is also a woman thing, because women aren't generally wired to seek credit and pride in the first place- so it makes sense they would simply ignore it exists [at best] and actively seek to devalue it [at worst]. This is related to inherent male disposability in an environment of excess men, and right now there are simply too many men (which doesn't require you actually be a man; which is why women who function like men complain about this just as much as men themselves do).

The reason incomplete genocides could work in the past is because the rulers at the time were less vulnerable to them; the womanly could cry "no ethical consumption under capitalism" all they wanted, but at the end of the day the only way they have power [outside of a post-industrial society where women are productive in their own right] is if a man listens. And men with power are far less likely to bow to the demands of useless people.

Is this risk completely mitigated? Well, no- you can still have the Church organize moral movements, but even in that case the Church is made up of people and property, those people have names and addresses, and since they have organization they have pre-scribed outlets for any charity they might feel (it's their own money, so the moral hazard is avoided). In a democracy like this you can't pull off that kind of suppression.

No evolved solution to this currently exists. Men are not wired to resist women when they believe themselves rich enough to be above needing to put themselves first (for a bunch of complicated reasons), but this is not symmetric. Only once men have been exposed to being poor will this change, and that only lasts for a little while.

Maybe, but it doesn't seem like most of these efforts get very far.

Like leaving a beaten opponent with one or two crappy cities in Civilization V. They'll denounce you at every turn for the rest of the game.

Even in places like Tasmania where the genocide was arguably complete the supply of self identified indigenous still somehow emerged

Tasmania is an interesting one because it's a case of an almost accidental genocide. The Palawa were quite few in number to begin with, and devastated by disease. They then also decided to set about attacking European settlers in raids, and, because colonial government was fairly weak, the settlers tended to band together and counter-raid them, and since the settlers had guns and the Palawa had sharpened sticks, the results were fairly predictable. By the time the colonial government got together enough to locate and resettle the survivors, there were only a few hundred left, and they didn't last.

Today the Palawa are a rare example of an ethnic group that exists purely as mixed-race. There are no people of pure Palawa descent left in existence - they are all people of mixed Palawa-European heritage, and almost all of them pass as white. Examples today would include Michael Mansell, whom I just mentioned, Marcus Windhager, Alison Overeem, Garry Deverell, and so on. All of them, at a glance, are obviously white or Anglo. However, it is supposed to be racist to question a person's Aboriginality, especially if their appearance makes them plainly white.

Deverell, actually, wrote a piece related to Yoorrook last year that hit many of the same notes as this year's report, albeit focused specifically on churches. The 14 aspirations he links are conspicuously unreasonable, including that every Anglican organisation in the state commit itself to employing Aboriginals as 5% or more of its workforce (bear in mind that Aboriginals are less than 1% the population of Victoria); that all properties granted to the church by the government be made freely available for Aboriginal use and that in the event of any such property being sold, Aboriginal groups with a traditional claim receive it for free; that 15% of the sale of any other church properties be given to Aboriginal people directly as reparations; and that all parishes pay 5% or more of their budgets to local Aboriginal groups. It is primarily a demand for money.

The Anglican response to this, of course, was "no".

Do the Anglicans have the cash to give much? My impression is that while, like most established churches in the west, they have substantial real estate holdings, they don't have enough liquidity to even cover expenses and are reliant on generally-earmarked investments to keep the lights on, pay salaries, etc.

I think that generally holds true for older, more established churches, like Catholics and Anglicans. They tend to be asset-rich and cash-poor, all the more so because many of the most conspicuous assets have substantial maintenance costs. There's a reason why most cathedrals you visit have donation boxes for upkeep, because just having a cathedral is a major ongoing expense.

Younger or more 'low church' groups often don't have this issue. If your church is run out of a big concrete block, or even a warehouse or something, you can enjoy much lower operating costs. You may just rent the building and be quite mobile, or if you own it, it can much more easily be shared with others or rented out for an additional income stream. Traditional church buildings don't have that flexibility.

I note that Deverell's fourteen aspirations put a particular emphasis on property sales, which I take as reflecting the reality that the Anglicans are declining in numbers and are therefore regularly selling church buildings that are no longer used in sufficient numbers to justify their upkeep. The same is true of Uniting, though somewhat less so of Catholics (who have done better at buoying their numbers through migration). Probably there's opportunity there?

Property sales were, to my knowledge, required from the churches to fund compensation about the sexual abuse scandals - or at least, that's what the Anglicans and Uniting did. They just don't have the cash on hand.

Anyway, yes, in general the stereotype that the churches are rich is misleading. The churches often have a lot of valuable stuff, if only because they are very old and have accumulated property intergenerationally, but their actual budgets are much more shoestring than one would expect.

Complete sidenote but I read Alison Overeem as Alistair Overeem and was overcome for a moment with confusion about ethnicity.

You know, the UK gets plenty of flak for its groveling attitude towards anyone with a slightly different shade of skin and the most threadbare justification behind seeking reparations for past injustice, but have you seen the other Commonwealth states? Australia and NZ are so cucked it beggars belief.

They all seem to cling on to a form of DEI that's about a decade out of date, at least compared to the US, and even there, it was never as strong and all-encompassing.

What even drives people to such abject and performative self-flagellation?

but have you seen the other Commonwealth states

Have you seen the UK handing the Chagos over to Mauritius these last two months and paying for the privilege? That is just as, or even more, cucked. What happened to the spirit of Wellington or Mccaulay?

For all the UK's faults there is no doubt they would run the place more efficiently than the Mauritians ever could.

I've been shaking my head at that particular debacle, it seems that the UK is just about the only country on the planet that takes utterly toothless "international law" seriously. They could have told the Mauritian government to shove it, what would they have done, cancel discount holiday vouchers and row over in a canoe?

I don't really have a horse in this race, but I still find it all too tiresome.

Eh, I think it's contextual? The terrain is different depending on each nation. You don't find exactly this sort of thing in the UK because the UK isn't a colony.

However, the proper comparisons here are between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. On those terms I feel like Australia is arguably the least grovelling. All three other Anglo colonies already have treaties with indigenous peoples that make those peoples semi-autonomous. Australia is the only one that doesn't, and the Voice was roundly rejected by the Australian people, which tells me that actual grassroots support for this is pretty low.

Yoorrook is part of the activist industry, and it's supported by the government because the government and the public service are deeply in bed with Group-like NGOs. That's a bad thing, but I'm not sure it tells us that much about l'Australie profonde, so to speak - and if the existence of that whole complex is the problem, well, half of that is imported from the United States anyway. We're downstream of American culture wars and tend to absorb their worst elements, albeit a few years too late.

So I certainly wouldn't advise the Americans to be too smug.

As for the British... honestly, I think they have their own issues to deal with. They aren't colonial in nature, but national pride and identity in the UK are complicated enough as to need their own post.

However, the proper comparisons here are between Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. On those terms I feel like Australia is arguably the least grovelling. All three other Anglo colonies already have treaties with indigenous peoples that make those peoples semi-autonomous. Australia is the only one that doesn't, and the Voice was roundly rejected by the Australian people, which tells me that actual grassroots support for this is pretty low.

I don't know that this really demonstrates an understanding of what the Indian treaty system does in the United States or its historical context.

It's not about being smug, but the situation in the US is remarkably different from the other Anglo colonies. In US history, the concept of treaties with various tribes developed essentially as a way to take tribes out of their land -- the point was "here's a treaty that gives us your land and requires you to leave it and go towards land we consider less valuable." The point of the treaties was they gave a legal veneer for the goal of conquest: we didn't take the land, they gave it to us fair and square. Sometimes this was better, and sometimes worse; every American kid learns about the Trail of Tears.

It's for that reason that any concept of Indian sovereignty above and beyond simply the tribal governments and their reservation land is dead in the water, though some activists still try. The concept in US law is "dependent nations"; the US government has historically seen Indian tribes as completely subsistent upon US sovereignty, but with special carve-outs that make them similar in some ways to states. The fact that tribes have self-governing is kind of a point in federal power above state power, not so much that tribal governments are massively powerful. Only the national government constitutionally has the right to control Indian affairs and make treaties with tribes.

It's true that in the US there are Indian reparation programs and lots of federal funding. But a lot of this is very token, and doesn't help anyone all that much. And there's little or no calls for expanded reparations programs and land acknowledgements are rather rare; black political activism sucks all the oxygen out of the air for anything like that, and for a lot of people the situation for American Indians is basically "out of sight, out of mind."

Land acknowledgments are becoming slightly more common, but only among progressive activist groups, and essentially never with actual native involvement: there's no American equivalent to "welcome to country." Because in the American context, such a thing is incoherent. You say that this stuff is the result of importing American culture war into Australia, but as far as I can tell the land acknowledgement stuff in the US, such as it exists, is the exact opposite.

The two big culture war flashpoints for native affairs have basically been "should they be called American Indians or Native Americans?" which among actual Indians is a generational thing; older tribal members prefer "Indian", younger ones prefer "Native American." The other one is more of a culture war flashpoint in Oklahoma, specifically, but a Supreme Court case said that the five tribes of Oklahoma were never disestablished, and angered a lot of non-Indians in Oklahoma. But the point is that Indian sovereignty is limited to the reservations, and this is spelled out and a matter of consensus.

I think the idea that a proper-noun Treaty or some level of self-government for natives is the high-water-mark of native activism is an importation of Australian political categories upon other countries where they're not relevant. Actually, it surprises me that Australia doesn't have any sort of treaty system with aboriginals and the Torres Strait groups, that clarifies sovereignty and makes it clear what the limits of native power are and are not! I might suggest that one of the reasons why native activism in Australia is so maximalist and the demands so bombastic is that there are apparently no documents or conventions that spell out their obligations and the limits of their sovereignty. So native activists can insist that their due is the moon, and there's no way for this to be effectively rebutted without denying any concept of native political power altogether.

I understand that "aboriginals are just like you and me" is the conservative view of Australian politics, and it follows that any political representation for them is controversial. But the US view is that tribal governments exist, and so there's no need for actual political representation for them. The need for Treaty is forestalled by the existence of treaties.

In the US, tribal governments petition the federal government to do things, and maybe they do them, maybe they don't. But there is no widespread call for, say, a congressional seat. Or a "Voice." Their voice is their own tribal government, which is dependent upon the whims of the federal government and sometimes the courts.

So, I think if we're comparing "who is most concerned about native activism in their country," and we look at one where natives have limited autonomy, clearly spelled out territorial limits (in places like the helldirt of New Mexico and the plains of Oklahoma -- "out of sight, out of mind"), and formal dependence upon federal whims, and then one where the government proposed for a public vote the idea of a formal advisory panel for indigenous political activism which even in its most unclear form won 40% of the vote, and natives are sometimes treated as the quasi-spiritual owners of the whole Country with spiritual welcomes that open meetings like a national anthem... yeah, I'm going to go with the first one as the one that cares less.

To add to this, I regularly visit now-technically-Cherokee territory in northeastern Oklahoma(a major rad trad religious site is built there, and the locals- both tribal and white[not that you can really tell the difference]- are totally OK with it). It's just... rural Oklahoma. There's no added racial tensions. There's probably some legal weirdness in the event of a felony but we're not committing those, or dealing with them against us. Not a lot of people really care.

I have relatives living near the only reservation in Louisiana. The locals are grateful for the casino money(there aren't enough working-age Indians left on the reservation to staff it) but the Indians aren't different enough from the locals for anyone to care about. The white/black(and on top of it, the creole black/economic migrant black) distinction dominates the local racial division to the exclusion of all else.

There's a pop culture portrayal of Indians as these brown-skinned sages with long hair, who may or may not be oppressed but probably have special powers. Lol. They look whiter than your average Mexican(who looks whiter than you'd think) and work normal jobs. Some of them have unusual superstitions(when I worked construction I had a Cherokee coworker who wouldn't pick up sharp objects unless he knew who owned them) but they're pretty average.

I regularly visit now-technically-Cherokee territory in northeastern Oklahoma(a major rad trad religious site is built there, and the locals- both tribal and white[not that you can really tell the difference]- are totally OK with it).

In the Tulsa area? Connected to St. Mary’s up in Kansas, I presume?

They look whiter than your average Mexican(who looks whiter than you'd think) and work normal jobs.

To be fair, this is mostly because they’ve intermarried with white people at high rates, particularly the Cherokee. Basically every white Oklahoman has some story about how great-aunt somebody or other was Cherokee and great-uncle sonofabitch didn’t let her sign up for the tribal roll.

I’m convinced this is mostly grifting — wouldn’t it be so nice if we could get some of that sweet oil casino money? But when Elizabeth Warren’s claims started to come under scrutiny, I never believed them, and I also thought it was really funny how she believed the grifting family legend enough to humiliate herself by taking a DNA test. Her pretendian thing isn’t weird, or unique — she’s just a white lady from Oklahoma.

I have cousins through adoption and marriage who are on tribal rolls. They’re ahem rednecks same as any rural white people.

In the Tulsa area? Connected to St. Mary’s up in Kansas, I presume?

Clear Creek Monastery(https://infogalactic.com/info/Clear_Creek_Abbey). No official connection; it's a daughterhouse of Fontgombault which isn't technically affiliated with apostolic work.

My words are chosen carefully and not subject to elaboration.

I might suggest that one of the reasons why native activism in Australia is so maximalist and the demands so bombastic is that there are apparently no documents or conventions that spell out their obligations and the limits of their sovereignty. So native activists can insist that their due is the moon, and there's no way for this to be effectively rebutted without denying any concept of native political power altogether.

Yes, I think this part is probably correct. There is no actual framework to negotiate from, and in effect Aboriginal demands rest entirely on what they're able to guilt the greater Australian society into giving them. If I were feeling suspicious I'd suspect that recent attempts to formalise the relationship with mainstream Australia are motivated in part by the realisation that larger and larger parts of that society are now made of migrants from Asia, and migrants from Asia do not feel guilt about Aboriginals at all.

To the rest of your post, I appreciate all the detail about Native American history, but I do think that on the broader level it's true that much of Australia's most toxic progressive activism is imported from the US. It's just not directly imported from Native American activism, which we are largely ignorant of and do not care about. (Though "the Americans have treaties with Natives" was absolutely a card that gets played over here when Treaty comes up.) However, we did have, for instance, a copycat BLM movement inspired by the American one, which focus on indigenous deaths in custody.

And there's little or no calls for expanded reparations programs and land acknowledgements are rather rare; black political activism sucks all the oxygen out of the air for anything like that, and for a lot of people the situation for American Indians is basically "out of sight, out of mind."

Land acknowledgments are becoming slightly more common, but only among progressive activist groups, and essentially never with actual native involvement: there's no American equivalent to "welcome to country."

That may be how it is in the Lower 48, but not so much here in Alaska. At least partially because the [Native corporations](Alaska Native Regional Corporations) serve as loci for activism, as well as helping maintain the individual tribal identities, but also that we have the highest population percent Native at 20.7%, and, further, we already have a precedent for reparations in ANCSA (even if it was meant to settle all such future claims, it hasn't stopped activists from seeking more).

Ok, Cherokee and Navajo independence are absolutely uncontroversial in the US. The reservations are just uncontroversially sucky places but everyone tolerates them having casinos as a loophole and understands Indians with the means to live elsewhere do so. It’s not very cucked.

Accurate. There is a cultural and probably (my theory) genetic temperament that makes whites share and care. Think European killing Winters in the old days.

Beyond this its performative luxury beliefs. Rich whiteys living in gated communities that will never need to deal with the consequences of their actions.

Happy to be corrected by others.

Possibly from Yoorrook's perspective the idea is just to open with a maximal demand that they can then negotiate down from; or possibly it's to deliberately make demands that cannot possibly be satisfied so that there will remain a need for activists in this space.

I have an informed source in this general area. According to my friend, the indigenous lobby generally is full of maximalists, they've always been into maximalism and word-games to achieve maximal gains rather than good-faith bargaining. That's what they've been doing with 'sovereignty never ceded', they've been treating it like a slogan for people to say and feel good about. Universities don't actually mean that the Australian government is not sovereign and Eora tribe is in control when they say it. They just mean 'I'm progressive and left wing and a Good Person'. But it's a way of seeding the idea that the government isn't actually in control for further usage later on. If you say it and repeat it enough, it becomes true.

There are similar games being played with 'First Nations'. Nation means race or ethnic group in English but it can also mean state. They wanted to insert into the constitution, IIRC, recognition of First Nations and they said 'oh this is just for aesthetic purposes, recognition, just being a Good Person'. This got watered down in the public referendum question since the more sensible white lawyers saw through this immediately, but that's what the activists wanted. Later on, when there's a friendly High Court, the idea was to reimagine it to meaning First Nations as a political entity still around today, so then they can get a Treaty and even more gains. There's no such thing as a compromise with these people (exceptions exist obviously), only an endless struggle.

That's what they've been doing with 'sovereignty never ceded', they've been treating it like a slogan for people to say and feel good about.

My lasting frustration with 'sovereignty' dialogue in Australia has been the steadfast refusal of the indigenous lobby to ever define exactly what it is, or what they think it means. These examples are pretty representative - there's a lot of waffle about a spiritual connection to land but it is not remotely clear what that means in practical terms, or what it is that they think they need but do not have. If sovereignty is a spiritual sense of oneness with the land, in what sense do they currently lack it? What do they think other people need to do in order for them to practice it? Or is the idea, sometimes hinted at but rarely expressed, that Aboriginal people are a different nation to Australia? If so, would some sort of secession movement be the result? The establishment of a new and independent nation on the Australian continent, alongside the Commonwealth of Australia? It doesn't seem like anybody wants that, if only because any such nation would be desperately poor and would survive only insofar as the Commonwealth props it up with foreign aid.

It just doesn't seem to mean anything. It's a slogan - 'sovereignty' is a word that people say, but there's no shared understanding, and it feels to me like a set of goalposts designed to be moved.

I don't go so far as assuming there's an intentionally nefarious conspiracy here or anything, but the indigenous lobby definitely has a lot of ambiguity in what it preaches.

There's also this trend towards this Schrodinger's box of Indigenous society in which it simultaneously was too primitive to have concepts like land ownership and losing a war but also simultaneously owned the land and actively worked on upkeeping. Depending on the particular circumstances the declared nature of Indigenous society flip flops a lot in Australian politics.

Going by my English intuitive sense of ‘sovereignty’, it would mean:

  1. They own all the land in Australia (and can therefore charge you rent for it or turf you off it in perpetuity).
  2. They are the top level of government, and entitled to make any laws or override any bodies that they please, in the same way that the UK parliament is sovereign.

Now, I would be very very surprised if they ever got that, and there be lots of hammering out of details over which tribes and what bodies own things and have rights. But you can admit those rights in theory and move towards them by e.g. saying that aborigines have the right to charge rent of say £10m per year to the Australian government and treat it as basically UBI. Or by giving them certain veto powers over government.

Ok, I have a perhaps stupid question. But my impression is that unlike Amerinds, who often have actual tribes and in some cases a continuation of the old tribal government, aboriginal Australians absolutely do not, only the names remain in most cases. So who would be the actual people that own the land and can overrule the Australian federal government? @RandomRanger @OliveTapenade

Paging the actual Australians here, since I have no idea.

But if I were an aboriginal rights activist trying to win as much as possible, I think I would push the argument that deciding exactly how ownership is distributed amongst aborigines is a detail that only becomes relevant once it is correctly admitted that ownership does in fact belong to the aborigines, and that quibbling over downstream details is a ploy to avoid ceding the base point.

If there were no clear institutions to inherit the rights of aborigines (I would argue) then a trust or a parliament or an advisory body could easily be set up. Something like the Scottish parliament, say, or the Norwegian oil depository.

That's essentially what was proposed with the National Voice, which got shouted down hard in the most recent referendum. Now certain states (ironically the ones with by far the actual lowest population of Aborigines and highest population of liberal Whites) are trying it on a trial basis.

The short answer is no.

There are a small handful of tribal communities that are mostly continuous with pre-colonial groups, but they are very few, remote, and largely irrelevant to this conversation. The comparison that I usually make is with the Maori, who did have a significant level of political organisation prior to European contact, and when Europeans showed up, pretty quickly recognised the value of having organised representatives for negotiation. That is not the case for Aboriginals, who are not a single unified ethnicity and never had much political organisation beyond the level of the local tribal chief.

Yeah but the Maori had a bunch of hallmarks of settled agricultural society that the Indigenous lacked plus entrenched defensive positions which made it easier to just cut a deal with the local headsmen on the absolute colonial fringe.

In the Northern Territory (tropical, desert wasteland for the most part) and parts of Queensland there are tribes with some significant level of continuity from elder to elder. The last uncontacted ones were only found in the 1950s I believe. But that's not really the case down in the populated, developed south east of the country. American tribes were much more organized, they had chiefs who could negotiate treaties whereas the aboriginals never really got that far, it was all a very collaborative, collectivist, longhouse kind of society.

Part of the slogan we hear so often, at almost every event and in many meetings is some variation of:

acknowledges Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures; and to Elders past and present.

At one point it was elders, past, present and emerging. But nobody really knows who is an emerging elder, so apparently the progressive thing to do is to take out the 'emerging'. There's not really any way of determining who is aboriginal, indigenous or first nations either. That's because the mostly or nearly-all white people who claim to be indigenous are naturally the most charismatic and well-organized in the movement (they're the people graduating good universities as doctors under affirmative action), while the most indigenous and blackest out in rural, remote parts of the country are the least educated, least charismatic and generally criminal sort.

You'll also observe that it's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders too, the Torres Strait Islanders totally refuse to be lumped in with the rest even though only 3000 of them live on the islands and the other 80,000 live on the mainland. It's a huge mess.

You'll also observe that it's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders too, the Torres Strait Islanders totally refuse to be lumped in with the rest even though only 3000 of them live on the islands and the other 80,000 live on the mainland. It's a huge mess.

Torres Strait society was pretty different to Aboriginal society. Having done a year in Darwin and been around a bunch of those locations, they had agricultural and land ownership norms that weren't really a thing on the continent itself. I think the validity of their argument for ownership of their islands is more reasonable than the Aboriginal one by some degree.

True. But really, being proud that you reached agriculture and tribal-level development isn't very impressive. Only a few thousand years behind the curve on metalworking! One wonders whether formerly-Aztec Mexicans or Mayans are snooty about being lumped in with mere nomadic 'native Americans' who never got that into astronomy or stone-working.

Still you can't deny the Aztecs had a political assemblage which could be meaningfully bargained with about concepts like land ownership and fealty. The Indigenous take in Australia is essentially they were too primitive to 'lose a war' and therefore couldn't have lost a war.

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Not really, no- indios in Latin America are very heavily the descendants of settled tribes. There's only a few thousand Chichimeca even left and they occupy the same very bottom of the racial hierarchy that Mayans do. Latin American racial snootiness is mostly about being whiter, sometimes with a dose of hybrid-vigor ideas, not about differences between various tribes.

There's not really any way of determining who is aboriginal, indigenous or first nations either. That's because the mostly or nearly-all white people who claim to be indigenous are naturally the most charismatic and well-organized in the movement (they're the people graduating good universities as doctors under affirmative action), while the most indigenous and blackest out in rural, remote parts of the country are the least educated, least charismatic and generally criminal sort.

I’ve got to admit, it would be pretty funny if, 80 years from now, there are just a bunch of lily-white, blonde, “Aboriginal” people leading the various tribes, like some sort of real life Burroughs or Haggard novel.

We're already there to a large extent: https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2015/12/unsw-s-newest-indigenous-doctors-come-from-all-walks-of-life

But in 80 years they'll be Indian.

But it's a way of seeding the idea that the government isn't actually in control for further usage later on. If you say it and repeat it enough, it becomes true.

Yep, I've never trusted "land acknowledgements" for this reason. They're the camel's nose under the tent. Even the semi-skeptical retort of "ha ha, a land acknowledgment without any concessions is just boasting of conquest" is part of the plan: "so you admit the land is theirs, and yet you don't do anything about it? Well, we've got a few ideas..." Not extending all the way towards handing over full rulership to those with the appropriate ancestry (yet, at least - so long as that tension exists, there's still energy in the system) but plenty of creeping gains presently unthinkable.

Is it possible the body writing this is full of true believers who actually think they’ll get all this crap?

Very likely. Also they could be stupid drama queens with poor judgement.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidia_Thorpe

In a June 2022 interview, Thorpe said that the parliament has "no permission to be here [in Australia]" and that she’s a parliament member "only" so she can "infiltrate" the "colonial project." She added that the Australian flag had "no permission to be" in the land. Aboriginal, conservative senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price denounced Thorpe's comments as "divisive" and "childish," and called for her dismissal from the parliament.[37]

In August 2022, during her swearing-in ceremony, Thorpe added the words "the colonising" in the required Oath of Allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II, saying

"I Lydia Thorpe do solemnly and sincerely affirm and declare that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to the colonising Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Australia, Her heirs and successors according to law."[38]

Thorpe was immediately criticised by fellow senators. After an instruction by Labor the President of the Australian Senate Sue Lines and interjections from others that the oath must be taken word-by-word, Thorpe recited the pledge once more, this time omitting the two words.[39][40]

On 16 April 2023, footage emerged of Thorpe in a verbal altercation with men outside a Melbourne strip club.[41] Thorpe was filmed telling a number of people they had a "small penis" and were "marked". She claimed the men provoked the altercation by harassing her.[42] The manager of the club claimed she provoked the incident by approaching white patrons, telling them they had "stolen her land;" he announced he was banning Thorpe from the club "for life."

While holding the justice portfolio for the Greens party and serving on the joint parliamentary law-enforcement committee, Thorpe was in a relationship with Dean Martin, ex-president of the Rebels outlaw biker gang. Martin had been president of the Rebels in Victoria, and had been charged and pleaded guilty to liquor offences in 2013.[50] As a member of the committee, Thorpe became privy to confidential briefings about motorcycle gangs and organised crime. She had not disclosed the relationship, which was only revealed when her staff, who became aware of the relationship in mid-2021, notified party leader Adam Bandt's office and an independent parliamentary authority.

It just keeps going, it's a national disgrace that this individual is still a Senator. But this is the intellectual calibre of many in the indigenous movement, not totally unrepresentative:

On 21 October 2024, Thorpe heckled King Charles III by shouting "This is not your land, you are not my King" and making claims of genocide against "our people", after he finished an address at Australia's Parliament House, as part of his royal visit to Australia. As she was escorted away by security, she was heard yelling "Fuck the Colony".

In the aftermath of the incident, she was asked about the oath she had recited and signed during her swearing-in process, in which she had sworn allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II and "her heirs". Thorpe claimed she had instead said "her hairs". Constitutional law expert Anne Twomey stated in response that the signed oath would have stated "heirs", and that the presiding officer could exclude Senator Thorpe if they believed a valid oath had not been sworn.[71]

Simon Birmingham, leader of the opposition in the Senate, announced that the coalition is considering "legal opinions" on the validity of the senator's constitutional duty of affirmation. Thorpe, subsequently, revised her claim, stating that, when she was being sworn in as a senator, she "mispronounced" heirs as hairs, "without meaning to do so", and did not do it deliberately. In the statement, she added that "they can't get rid of me," pointing out she's "got another three and a half years [of service in the Senate]."

For what it's worth, at least, Thorpe only got in because she was on a bizarre Greens senate ticket, and there is no way in hell she is getting re-elected.

I do think that after she refused to take the senatorial oath, and then, when pressed, said it in an obviously insincere way (and admitted that insincerity on the record afterwards), she should have disqualified herself from taking her seat. There is a valid procedural issue there - she is verifiably not in good faith.

Lidia Thorpe is the whitest black person I’ve ever seen, and I’m old enough to remember Rachel Dolezal.

Do the noble Aboriginal people not have some kind of paper bag test they can use to keep these carpetbaggers out?

No, because there's no umbrella Aboriginal organisation that can police that. It's not like the Maori in New Zealand, who do have their own government-like organisation that can assess who is and who is not Maori.

In theory it's the three part test (descended from Aboriginals, identifies as Aboriginal, is recognised by the Aboriginal community), but as it's hard to apply in practice, most of the time it's just self-identification. This has led to absurdities like people with only tiny amounts of Aboriginal ancestry, who look and sound exactly the same as Anglo people, identifying as a proud Aboriginal man or woman.

I raise you Michael Mansell.

I raise you Michael Mansell.

Confident that they could, and so never having asked if they should, Australian eugenics scientists continue to pursue their goal of creating the whitest oppressed black person to ever live.

Interestingly this is at least partly because Australian Aboriginal genes are even more recessive than white genetics. I often found that strange, since it’s not typically the case with cross breeds of any other sort - any geneticists amateur or otherwise on themotte care to enlighten me why this is?

Hapas just look white. 90% of the Cherokee just look white. Most white-hispanic babies look white. White middle easterner crosses too, but in fairness middle easterners are pretty white looking already(although I know a Maronite/Italian couple whose kids look, on average, whiter than either of them). Even the white/black crosses you're probably thinking of look more white than the popular portrayal; America's definition of 'black' just encompasses people of mixed ancestry. There are other countries, like South Africa and much of Latin America, where that's not the case and they're not perceived as looking black.

I don't think the the concept of more or less recessive phenotypes is particularly valid in the first place. Sure, hair and eye color are pretty much Mendelian, and I've noticed a few other discrete traits that seem to be pretty dominant/recessive (Hapas always seem to have the epicanthic fold and Blasians usually have darker skin than the median of their parents), but most traits seem to average out. The American understanding of White features being "recessive", particularly to Black features, probably derives from the existing admixture in the Black population (thus creating a broader range of "Black" phenotypes) and general cultural norms of hypodescent (the "one drop rule").

Interestingly this is at least partly because Australian Aboriginal genes are even more recessive than white genetics.

Looked this up but couldn’t find anything on it. If it is true might be a quirk of their archaic human ancestry.

I have at least heard the idea from Aboriginal people directly, though the way they framed it to me was in terms of having 'weak genes'. That said, I do not rate the scientific literacy of the person who told me that at all, so I have no idea if it's actually true, or just an excuse one might tell oneself on seeing one's pale skin.

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that the majority of white-passing "aboriginals" simply have negligible or <10% Caucasian ancestry. At that point, what's surprising about the fact that they look white?

Thanks for the info!

Very interesting stuff.

Thorpe claimed she had instead said "her hairs". Constitutional law expert Anne Twomey stated in response that the signed oath would have stated "heirs", and that the presiding officer could exclude Senator Thorpe if they believed a valid oath had not been sworn.

Does Australia not include a portion of their oath which reads "that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion" or something to that effect?

I mean yes oaths are just words which are just hot air until someone decides they mean something, but still. For example, on US federal forms, the point is not to catch the honest (e.g., on the US citizenship form the question which reads "Have you ever been a member of, involved in, or in any way associated with any Communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?") but to punish the dishonest. The Honest Communist who reads that question and checks the box marked "yes" is not the target of the form, because he does not exist. The Dishonest Communist who checks the box marked "no" is the target of the form, because then three years later when it comes out that yes he was a member of the Marxist International Domestic Workers Political Activism Party (of Lenin) of Farlandia, you can yoink his citizenship for lying on the form.

In this case the context is also that most senators dislike that oath and took it insincerely. If you look at the recording of Thorpe swearing the oath and making a fuss, the other senators in the room were rolling their eyes. One commented, "None of us like it", and a minister afterwards called the oath "archaic and ridiculous".

Australian parliamentarians are legally required to swear an oath to the Queen (as it was at the time; it's now the King) when they take office, but it is safe to say that very few of them actually believe the oath or take it remotely seriously. This is from 2016, but over half of them support a republic (yes, this is significantly out of step with popular opinion, politicians as a class are often unrepresentative), and I think it's fair to say that on a plain reading of the oath, bearing true allegiance to his majesty and his heirs and successors would be incompatible with wanting to abolish him.

But none of them take it seriously. We are not a nation that takes oaths seriously.

(I would not single out Australia in this respect - I think the West in general has largely given up on oaths. My favourite example of this, actually, is that becoming an American citizen requires a person to explicitly renounce any other citizenship or allegiance, and yet large numbers of people become American citizens while retaining prior citizenships. Nobody cares.)

I think back in the day it was so manifestly obvious that swearing an oath meant you had to stand by it they never encoded such a section. In any event she could say 'i take this obligation freely and sincerely' in her usual overtly insincere and obnoxious manner. Root problem isn't solved. In the 1930s a fair few Wehrmacht officers felt restricted from plotting against Hitler because they swore an oath to him. It was not on! People would go around saying 'my word is my bond'.

In any event she did sign the paper so she formally ticked the box. Oaths are just box-ticking these days, no more meaningful than terms and conditions for free software, no more meaningful than the King's Champion who used to ride up, throw down a gauntlet and challenge anyone who disputed the new monarch's right to rule in single combat. He's still there of course, just holds a standard now.

I predict that they will accept a couple of the cheaper, more fig-leaf recommendations and ignore the rest, maintaining a status quo

A great way to predict most western government actions these days

And this is why the activists win. Every time you move the line a little, the next movement of the line is only slighter more expensive compared to the new status quo and the government has already admitted the alleged moral case.

I find activists in part evil because they never hold up their end of the bargain. On Friday, they will celebrate their hard won compromised victory and on the next Monday they will be telling us how the status quo is intolerable and needs changed.

Right. No one's willing to make or defend the counter proposal of "You get nothing this time and furthermore we've decided we're taking away what you got last time", so it can only move in one direction.

I kind of see activists in a posiwid sense - yeah nothing is ever good enough for them, their job depends on it. What I find truly frustrating is that even after a decade of this, many people still somehow think progressive lip service is fine or even morally just - they will even joke about how useless activists are in one breath before condemning conservatives for racistly not want to throw money away on performative bullshit in the next.

many people still somehow think progressive lip service is fine or even morally just

This is natural- casting shade on people not wanting to conspicuously consume (in this case, from the society-wide patronage network that activists embody) is a thing rich people do naturally.

When you're rich in virtue, conspicuous consumption is saying "yeah, polygamy is totally for everyone".

When you're rich in rent-seeking, conspicuous consumption is saying "yes, my property values the environment is more important than developing the next generation".

It's not necessarily realized by people doing that, since this is just copying the fashions of the richest- but it is still that thing either way.

I find activists in part evil because they never hold up their end of the bargain. On Friday, they will celebrate their hard won compromised victory and on the next Monday they will be telling us how the status quo is intolerable and needs changed. Every time you move the line a little, the next movement of the line is only slighter more expensive compared to the new status quo and the government has already admitted the alleged moral case.

I don't really understand how this makes activists 'evil'. If they believe in A, how is trying to get to halfway to A first an illegitimate way to pursue your goals. Compromises never constitute a recognition on the part of one party that the new status quo is actually desirable, merely better than the alternative, and this is always how politics has functioned. Most obviously, as soon as each thought they had the ability to put their cause in a better position, those both North and South who had acceded to the compromises of 1820 and 1850 were more than willing to jettison them.

It is evil in the same way that when you strike a bargain, you ought to uphold the bargain.

Sure bargains are revisited after some time. But most people understand that a bargain is designed to last at least for some period of time; not weeks.

Activists therefore are violating the spirit of the bargain.

I also think activists frequently have wrongheaded goals and make things worse off but that’s a separate matter (though it no doubt makes me less favorably disposed to activists in general — in truth I think an activist is a shameful “profession.”)

Is it possible that they worked with government to produce this? As you say, it allows the activists to perpetuate themselves but it also produces sympathy and understanding for the government. More reasonable proposals might have been harder to scotch.

After Zizians and the efilist bombing I have tried to pay more attention to the cross section of ethical veganism, rationalists, and nerdy utilitarian blogs.

A Substack titled "Don't Eat Honey" was published. Inside, the argument is made that to buy or consume honey is an unethical act for insect suffering-at-scale reasons. According to the essay, bees, like livestock, suffer quite a lot at the hands of beekeepers. That's a lot of bees. Thus the title: don't eat honey.

The median estimate, from the most detailed report ever done on the intensity of pleasure and pain in animals, was that bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people. Bees were guessed to be more intensely conscious than salmon!

If we assume conservatively that a bee’s life is 10% as unpleasant as chicken life, and then downweight it by the relative intensity of their suffering, then consuming a kg of honey is over 500 times worse than consuming a kg of chicken! And these estimates were fairly conservative. I think it’s more plausible that eating honey is thousands of times worse than eating comparable amounts of chicken

This particular post is high on assumption and light on rigor. It received outrage. Another post on Bentham's blog on insect suffering I recall as higher quality material for understanding. Did you know that composting is an unethical abomination? I'd never considered it!

'Suffering' presents an incommensurable problem. Suffering is a social construct. Suffering is the number and intensity of firing pain receptors over time. Suffering is how many days in a row I experienced boredom as a teenager. Still, science attempts to define and quantify suffering. An equation works out the math: how conscious a cricket is in relation to man, a cricket's assumed capacity to feel pain, the length of time it spends feeling pain, and so on. My prediction is we will figure out the consciousness part of the equation with stable meaning before we ever do so for suffering.

We will manage to rethink, remeasure, and find additional ways of suffering. People always have. Today, plants do not feel "pain", but tomorrow, pain may not a prerequisite for suffering. Maybe starvation becomes a moral imperative. If the slope sounds too slippery, please consider people have already built a (relatively unpopular) scaffolding to accept and impose costs at the expense of human comfort, life, and survival. Admittedly, that suffering may present an incommensurable problem doesn't negate any imperative to reduce it. Find more suffering? Reduce that, too. It does give me reason to question the limitations and guard rails of the social technology.

According to Wikipedia, negative utilitarians (NU) are sometimes categorized as strong NUs and weak NUs. This differentiates what I'd call fundamentalists --- who follow suffering minimizer logic to whatever ends -- to the milder "weak" utilitarians. The fundamentalist may advocate for suffering reduction at a cost that includes death, your neighbor's dog, or the continued existence of Slovenia-- the honey bee capitol of the world. Our anti-honey, anti-suffering advocate has previously demonstrated he values some positive utility when it comes to natalism, but much of his commenting audience appears more in the fundamentalist category.

One vibe I pick up from the modern vegans is that the anti-suffering ethics are the ethics of the future. That our great-grandchildren will look backwards and wonder how we ever stooped so low as to tolerate farming practice A or B. I don't doubt we'll find cost effective, technological solutions that will be accepted as moral improvements in the future. I am not opposed to those changes on principle. Increase shrimp welfare if you want, fine.

My vague concern is that this social technology doesn't appear limited to spawning technological or charitable solutions. With things like lab meat showing up more frequently in the culture war I'd expect the social technology to spread. So far, however, vegans remain a stable population in the US. Nerdy utilitarian bloggers are yet to impose their will on me. They just don't think I should eat honey.

As always when it comes to militant vegan discourse on bees, something I have unfortunately been able to witness more than once, the article completely forgets the single most important factor when it comes to honeybee life-satisfaction.

The bees can leave.

If the bees feel that they are enjoying a level of comfort, or more aptly biological success, below that which they instinctively feel is proper, they can and will fuck off. They will up and leave and take the entire colony somewhere else. Even experienced beekeepers will occasionally have entire hives up sticks and vamoose, heading off for (literally) greener pastures.

So while the rest of the article is in my opinion utter drivel which shows the author has somehow convinced himself that a literal insect with a brain "about 0.0002 per cent of the [size of the] human brain" can somehow experience suffering equal to 7-15% of that of a human, which as @TIRM points out is clearly off by several orders of magnitude, even if that were completely 100% true, the argument of course falls flat, because the bees can leave. They can literally just leave.

I think negative utilitarians have an ethical obligation to disclose this state to people at the top of everything they write so people know to dismiss their opinions.

Did you read the composting article? His logic is basically: composting is good for worms, so then they reproduce and there's more worms, and then they experience suffering which is bad, so composting is bad. If you follow this logic to its conclusion, it implies we should genocide all life forms so they can't suffer any more. And, mathematically, if your utility function literally only counts negative values and doesn't recognize positive values then this follows.

Anyone whose moral philosophy implies that we should destroy all life is either evil, or hypocritical and illogical by only extrapolating as far as it serves their current purpose. This is why my flair is "Good things are good." Because some people literally believe the opposite. If this person says eating honey is bad for bees, the largest term in his math is probably beekeepers helping bees thrive and reproduce which means more of them exist, and all the things about artificial circumstances are probably rounding errors.

Specifically it argues that the worms all boil to death as the compost heats up.

If you follow this logic to its conclusion, it implies we should genocide all life forms so they can't suffer any more.

I think the author would agree with you there. From the composting article:

the most certain way to reduce biological suffering is to prevent food energy from being created in the first place, i.e., reduce primary productivity

People like this generally do, although they rarely ever say what they mean in non-euphemistic terms.

Which makes sense. If you have the option, reducing population via less population is going to make less suffering than going around violently murdering them. It's still a form of genocide, but from the perspective of someone whose utility function literally only counts negative values it would be the one to choose.

But in terms of feasibility in the real world, unless you can manage to genetically engineer some virus that can seek out and neuter all life forms of all kinds, murderous genocide is likely to be much more feasible. An "effective negative utilitarian" should probably be trying to manipulate governments into starting WW3 in order to create a nuclear winter that blocks off the sun and "prevent food energy from being created" globally. Even if the war and starvation create more suffering in the short term, preventing new life would massively outweigh that in the long term. Kind of a... reverse repugnant conclusion.

I don't think most negative utilitarians would explicitly endorse this (though most traditional utilitarians don't endorse the regular repugnant conclusion), but given that they DO want to depopulate via non-violent means, I think it's mostly due to hyperbolic discounting.

bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people

Shocking. So shocking I'm calling BS. We should be arguing if one ten thousandth or one one hundred thousandth is a better order of magnitude estimate. Not 15%. Wrong order of magnitude is putting it lightly.

I'm aware of people very concerned about the very hypothetical suffering of tiny bugs including dust mites. Imagining that they have conscious awareness and suffer. Ex: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3hqXxzFRSZqRFPCTv/killing-the-ants

https://old.reddit.com/r/reclassified/comments/1kpl5ur/refilism_banned/mszshz5/

We need a term for this. Toxic empathy or something.

Toxic empathy

That's a good one.

This view of suffering, as some sort of negative imposed on life, is bizarre to me. I mean it makes sense coming from a person suffering clinical depression or otherwise deeply disordered. But suffering, by and large, is our biology's way of pointing the way to go. Only children think the world would be better off without suffering. Anyone who has ever seen a news segment or documentary about people literally born without the ability to feel pain understands what a nightmarish body horror that is. I'll never forget the one I saw. Turns out without pain, it's hard to keep an infant from clawing their own eyes out, chewing off their own tongue, fingers and toes, and other acts of senseless self mutilation. They won't cry when they need something, so the new parent, ignorant to the condition, first discovers something is amiss after the child, instead of crying to be fed in the middle of the night, lets their parents sleep peacefully while they remove their own eye with their curious searching fingers.

Suffering may seem pointless to the disordered mind, but every now and again we get a Twilight Zone like glimpse at a world without suffering, and it's a horror almost beyond belief. Like a hell out of Event Horizon or Hellraiser.

This view of suffering, as some sort of negative imposed on life, is bizarre to me.

It almost seems gnostic: we've been trapped by a terrible demiurge into a prison world of suffering. If only we can deprive ourselves of enough material items (now including honey) in this prison world, we'll finally be able to reach the perfect spiritual realm.

So much of modern leftism has Gnostic parallels, it's unsettling once you know what to look for.

I've never thought about it that way. Do you have other examples that come to mind?

A lot of Marxist false consciousness and its derivatives seems very reminiscent of certain ideas about the demiurge.

The Matrix is obviously a big Gnostic metaphor (the machines have pulled the wool over our eyes and trapped us inside a false reality, we must see the truth and escape into the real world; machines = Demiurge). The Wachowskis later claimed that they'd always intended the film as a metaphor for coming out as trans, which inspired a lot of eyerolls and accusations of revisionism. But I don't think that's the case at all, I really do think that's what they intended at the time of writing:

the reason this interpretation doesn't jump out at most people is because they're approaching gender ideology from the perspective of "most people are cis, but some people are trans and that's okay and they deserve respect and compassion" as opposed to the perspective of "everyone is trans, but most have been brainwashed into believing they're cis - freethinkers whose eggs have hatched see the truth". Cypher is a detransitioner and also a cowardly traitorous villain: not a coincidence.

Everything about trans activism, really, has Gnostic undertones: the very concept of a "gender identity" which is wholly distinct from one's sex is obviously sneaking dualism in by the backdoor, but the way so many trans people talk about being trapped inside these nauseating flesh prisons and their transhumanistic desire to mould, slice and sculpt their bodies to better achieve their embodiment goals carries a big whiff of it too. This is part of a broader trend since the emergence of the internet towards Gibson's "relaxed contempt for the flesh": the tendency to see your body not as "you" but as a tool or vehicle you are controlling. Sometimes this can end up in weird science-denial places: fat acceptance activists who deny that the laws of physics apply to human beings just as much as anything else, that the only thing that can cause disease is mean words and fat shaming. It almost seems to come off like a denial of the existence of an objective external world: instead, we are all just souls trapped inside flesh prisons, and the only way one soul can be harmed is if another soul inflicts harm upon it.

At the extremes, you get into whatever the Zizians were doing, with their outré decision theory ideas about doing whatever it would be optimal for every one of your paraselves to do elsewhere in the multiverse - but they're a noncentral idea of the trend I'm describing.

The metaphor itself has been a part of ancient Western culture for millennia. Gnostic thought goes all the way back to Plato. The gnostic gospels are nearly 2000 years old. It’s hardly surprising that a movie playing on those themes is going to resonate with modern western people raised with the idea of a separation between the mind and the body and who quite often react with surprise when they find out that biology influences your mind both from birth and because of the environment. We think of ourselves as minds driving bodies and not as a whole being that contains a brain that is biologically wired to produce your thoughts. It’s hardly surprising that Marxists and other gnostics can appeal to this pre Christian myth to push their beliefs.

We actually have a lot of those pre Christian myths in our culture. The myth of the perfectibility of human kind — which should have died the day we discovered Auschwitz’s gas chambers — has been going strong for centuries. This is another piece of the liberal system of thought. If only we could teach people to be good, they’d actually be good. If only people had more money they’d stop being criminals. If only we could give people what they say they want we could have utopia. It’s never worked that way.

It’s hardly surprising that a movie playing on those themes is going to resonate with modern western people raised with the idea of a separation between the mind and the body

Sometimes you'll even find evangelicals who misunderstand Christian teaching on the dead -- it's really common among evangelicals to find people discussing how "I won't need my body when I'm gone," or speaking of "Jesus taking me out of this vessel of a body," in a way that reveals they misunderstand the ultimate Christian view of the human person as body and soul and the Christian agreement with the Pharisees on the resurrection of the dead.

Obviously this isn't an indictment of evangelicalism as a belief system -- informed evangelicals are firm believers in the resurrection -- but it just shows how widespread this view is. I also strongly agree with the Orthodox on the point that cremation is just a bad call, because the overall culture of cremation encourages the neglect of the bodies of the dead by making them scatterable and transportable. The proper resting place of human remains is the ground or the crypt, not an urn on a mantlepiece or the ocean or -- God help us -- Disney World.

I regret clicking that link. But I generally agree that the ideas are so entrenched that most people don’t even think about them. It’s in almost every scifi at some point that highly evolved aliens will transcend the need for physical-matter bodies and become pure spirit or mind. Or in speculation about aliens you find the same reports (in ufo stuff) or speculation in general— the aliens are so advanced they no longer have or need physical bodies. I don’t have personal strong feelings about cremation, as I think God can resurrect anything so it’s not like if I happen to be turned into powder that God cannot resurrect me. On the other hand, I think it’s a crime against human dignity to throw ashes around in any place. Just like bury the urn and respect that these are the remnants of your relative. Also, Disney people are just plain weird.

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Doesn't resurrection entail a new body being created? The old one seems pretty irrelevant.

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I once heard that so many people were requesting to have their ashes scattered at Old Trafford that Manchester United actually bought a dedicated ashes-scattering plot for their fans.

The Wachowskis later claimed that they'd always intended the film as a metaphor for coming out as trans, which inspired a lot of eyerolls and accusations of revisionism

From time to time I read movie screenplays for movies I've already seen to help me fall asleep at night.

I read The Matrix screenplay right after a close friend of mine came out as trans and talked to me about it so it was top of mind and let me tell you the script is suspiciously full of trans messaging.

The police let their guard down in the beginning when arresting Trinity, not expecting a girl to be all that dangerous. Except she kills them

Then there's this

                   SCREEN
             JACKON:  I heard Morpheus has been
             on this board.
             SUPERASTIC:  Morpheus doesn't even
             exist and the Matrix is nothing
             but an advertising gimmick 4 a new
             game.
             TIMAXE:  All I want to know is
             Trinity really a girl?
             LODIII:  87% of all women on line
             are really men.

Tee hee.

Then, Neo specifically says to Trinity when she confronts him at a party that he thought she was a guy. She replies that most guys do.

This all seems very Hollywood girlboss by today's standards but in 1999 I think they were playing with something deeper.

                  TRINITY
              They're watching you.  Something
              happened and they found out about
              you.

You're out of the closet buddy.

She continues, talking about Morpheus helping her wake up from the Matrix

               He told me that no one should look
               for the answer unless they have to
               because once you see it,
               everything changes.  Your life and
               the world you live in will never
               be the same.  It's as if you wake
               up one morning and the sky is
               falling.

I've spoken to a few trans people now and a recurring story is the collapse of their denial.They wake up and realize their whole life is a lie. It's really upsetting. They can't go back but they're also scared to go ahead.

Neo attempts to follow Morpheus' plan at work but he chickens out when he has to go out the window. Maybe he can go on without finding out? Then he's arrested.

               AGENT SMITH
               It seems that you have been living
               two lives.

Choosing the red pill to wake up being like the first time you take hormones, etc.

Uhh anyway there's more of this stuff. Might need to make a fun thread post.

I read that their original plan was for Switch to be played by a male actor inside the Matrix, and by a female actor in the real world (or maybe vice versa). They wisely decided against it because they reckoned audiences would find it too confusing, but the fact that that was the original plan makes their intentions all the more explicit.

Consider also the scene in which Agent Smith holds Neo down on the train tracks addressing him as Mr. Anderson (i.e. deadnaming him), but Neo insists that his name is Neo and refuses to let himself be killed by the oncoming subway. Now consider also that, at some point prior to filming, Lana Wachowski was feeling such intense despair brought on by their gender dysphoria that they considered throwing themselves in front of a train. With all the high concepts flying around, it's easy to forget what an intensely personal film The Matrix is for its creators. It was not some commercial film they did for a paycheque: for better and worse, they put every ounce of themselves into this thing, and its first two sequels.

Right. Agent Smith deadnames all of them, in fact, (he calls Cypher "Mr Reagan"). You could imagine Cypher as desperate to de-transition since living the truth is so hard.

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I'm often startled at how culturally significant the Matrix has been. The sequels weren't all that good, the plot of the original was strange and confusing, and the concept of "the world is revealed to be an illusion" has been done better -- but the concept of the colored pills, bullet time, and Laurence Fishburne's performance as Morpheus just made the movie hard to forget. The strange aesthetic made it both confusing and memorable. (Sometimes I think the flaws of Star Wars did the same -- both the OT and the prequels have diehard fans precisely because they were tacky and disjointed. The sequels are so polished, but they're polished like a turd.)

The Matrix definitely sticks out in my memory, but personally I'd rather everyone take the Christpill from Catholic Morpheus.

I think it'll be hard to explain to the next generation, but the effects in The Matrix were absurdly groundbreaking. But they also were groundbreaking enough that pretty much any movie with a VFX sequence will copy some of its visual language. If you've seen a bunch of modern action movies, though, and then watch The Matrix, you're going to feel that a lot of it is just playing to standard visual tropes that have been done well, maybe even better, in lots of movies. But the thing is, most of those were new in 1999, and you won't appreciate it unless you can compare it to the zeitgeist of 1998 cinema -- without a lot of effort, you really have to have been there.

I'd compare it to The Beatles: I wasn't around when the originals were published, and I find it hard to appreciate the novelty that my older friends and relatives attribute to them because very few features in their catalog haven't been done better (and with better recording and mastering) by other artists since.

The Seinfeld is Unfunny effect.

Reminds me of Umberto Eco's Cult of the Imperfect. He applies the idea even to acknowledged masterpieces - one of the reasons why Hamlet, for instance, has been so compelling is because it is in some ways badly written. Lakes of ink have been spilled on trying to interpret Hamlet's motives because they are not clear in the play - because they are actually rather arbitrary and inconsistent, in a way that would probably strike us as bad writing, if Shakespeare did not have the reputation that he does. And while you could just conclude it's because Shakespeare was rushed or made some bad calls, it's so much more interesting to treat the text as whole, the arbitrariness as intentional, and dive into psychoanalysing the hero.

Star Wars is also in that golden zone of imperfection, I think. Even in the OT, the films are frequently disjointed, and characterisation changes wildly without explanation. It's pretty obvious that ANH is written for a universe in which Luke's father and Darth Vader were different people, and Luke and Leia are not related, for instance. In ESB, Luke hates and fears Vader and wants to kill him, and Vader disloyally seeks an ally to stage a coup against the Emperor; in RotJ, without any explanation, Luke now regards Vader with this self-sacrificial love, and Vader is so broken upon the Emperor's will as to consider revolt impossible. It's not inconceivable that something happened in between the films to cause both of them to change their minds (maybe Luke struggled long and hard with the revelation that Vader was his father and eventually came to the painful conclusion that he must love him the same way he thought he loved Anakin; maybe the Emperor discovered Vader's plot and tortured him into submission), but there is no hint of either of these processes in RotJ. The characters are just... different.

And yet I can't make himself dislike Star Wars because of this, or view the OT as lesser. I even like the PT. I still love those films, all six of them. (There are only six Star Wars films.) In many ways I love Star Wars because of its flaws, not only because of its strengths.

The Shadows of the Empire book does a lot of the heavy lifting, at least in the old Legends continuity, explaining not just Luke (Jedi training and seeing the cost of seeking revenge above all) and Vader's (finding the Dark Side increasingly unable to repair or alleviate his damaged flesh, and that Palpatine is grooming people to kill Vader's whole family... and thinks Vader's so weak that a crime lord that's not even force-sensitive might take him down) change in perspective, along with a lot of other goofy bits like Leia's Booush outfit or where Luke's new lightsaber crystal came from. Kinda with mixed results: it's definitely not a Zahn-level book, and a few parts were pretty cringy even by 90s-standards, but neither was it awful.

Of course, it did so twelve years after Return of the Jedi made it to theatres.

Eco's theory is certainly believable. For other examples, Harry Potter and Redwall fandom regularly points to the many bizarre early storytelling decisions as why they joined as heavily as they did. I will caveat that it's definitely not sufficient, though. Jupiter Ascending is a glorious trainwreck that leaves unanswered questions everywhere, but despite a small fandom of exactly the demographics you'd most expect to be into fanfic, it's largely abandoned.

A lot of people have pointed to 1999 as being a high-water mark for mainstream American cinema. It's remarkable to think what a widespread influence on Western Anglo culture two concepts from movies released that year had (taking the red pill from The Matrix, "beautiful and unique snowflake" from Fight Club), and how durable their staying power was. A quarter-century after the film's release, you can use the phrase "taking the red pill" in conversation with a group of Anglophones of varying socioeconomic backgrounds and income levels, and reasonably assume that they'll understand the metaphor and that it won't seem dated or clichéd, even if they haven't seen the movie from which it originated. ("Snowflake" will be understood by most audiences, but won't have the desired effect, after years of conservative commentators beating it like a dead horse.) In this regard (that even most people who haven't seen the movie have a passing familiarity with at least one of its key images/concepts), The Matrix is right up there with 1984 in terms of its cultural penetration. The Matrix was a true four-quadrant movie, equally appealing to fans of action movies, sci-fi nerds, philosophy eggheads, undergraduate Buddhists, spiritualists and weeaboos. In today's era of disposable pop culture, where Marvel Studios are delighted if people are still sharing GIFs of their latest capeshit instalment so much as one year after release, that kind of durable cross-demographic cultural staying power is hard to even wrap your head around. Nothing from the current decade of cinema seems likely to equal it: offhand, the only movie from the last decade which might is Joker* (and I think that film's star has well and truly fallen after its disastrous sequel); from the decade before, The Dark Knight.

*I was tempted to say Drive, but I have to remind myself that that film only made a tiny fraction of what The Matrix did: it's universally beloved in the circles in which I move, but not necessarily beyond that.

In today's era of disposable pop culture, where Marvel Studios are delighted if people are still sharing GIFs of their latest capeshit instalment so much as one year after release, that kind of durable cross-demographic cultural staying power is hard to even wrap your head around.

What was the home video market like in the US? Because, for us, The Matrix was one of the first DVDs we got which gave it even more staying power but we were generally a bit behind the West (especially on TV)

If you can only own a few you pick movies that are either classics, have good special features or really "popped" on screen.

Nowadays you can cycle through terabytes of movies at will (hell, even if you had no internet 6-in-1 DVDs are common in any random street market in Africa) and I don't know that anyone cares about the BTS stuff. You can't sit with a movie for months to years.

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the concept of "the world is revealed to be an illusion" has been done better

At the risk of spoiling the works in question for myself, which works are you thinking of?

Woke is all about Catharism. Thé Cathari can save you by association- at terrible cost to themselves. The queer black women grace us with their presence, bringing us enlightenment, despite their suffering. Any sexual practice is good, as long as it doesn’t make a baby. There are those who are enlightened by the cathari and those who are stuck in the false consciousness of prevailing religion. There are those who are awakened to the reality of structural oppression(this is the literal meaning of woke) and those who are stuck in the mainstream mode of society. Christianity is imperfect but a great vehicle for the true faith.

Sidebar but what's up with the random é's I occasionally see randomly inserted in your text? Are you just using a non-american keyboard or is it like an "embolden the e" thing?

My keyboard is set to recognize English, Spanish, and French. I do not know, or want to know, why it sometimes autocorrects the to thé, but it doesn’t seem worth fixing.

Haha fair enough. I used to have a tv with a ui language set to french and never got around to changing it because i thought it was funny.

Well, there's suffering and there's suffering.

A pain signal that tells you to pull your hand away from a hot stove is "suffering".

This, on the other hand, is suffering:

The New Mexico State Penitentiary riot, which took place on February 2 and 3, 1980, at the Penitentiary of New Mexico (PNM) south of Santa Fe, was the most violent prison riot in U.S. history. Inmates took complete control of the prison and twelve officers were taken hostage. [...]

Events spiraled out of control within the cell blocks in large part due to the actions of two gangs. The first were the Chicanos, who protected each other and dished out targeted retribution for specific grudges. The other gang was loosely labeled the Aryan Brotherhood and was led by some of the most dangerous inmates (who by this time had been released from segregation in Cell Block 3). They decided to break into Cell Block 4, which held prisoners labeled as informers. Cell Block 4 also housed inmates who were mentally ill, convicted of sex crimes, or otherwise vulnerable, and held a total of 96 prisoners. [...]

During an edition of BBC's Timewatch program, an eyewitness described the carnage in Cell Block 4. He saw an inmate held up in front of a window; he was being tortured by using a blowtorch on his face and eyes until his head exploded. Another story was about Mario Urioste, who was jailed for shoplifting. He was originally placed by officers in a violent unit where he was gang-raped by seven inmates. Mario had filed a lawsuit against his rapists, so prison officials had housed him in Cell Block 4 for his own protection. Urioste was one of the targets for revenge. His body was found hanged, with his throat cut and his dismembered genitals stuffed into his mouth.

The former is a useful biological mechanism; the latter raises suffering to the level of a genuine philosophical problem (as in, should we sacrifice everything else to make the elimination of suffering our primary goal? If the choice is between a universe with suffering and no universe at all, would it be better to just not exist at all? etc).

Not only that, but there’s “pleasant suffering”, as in a boy playing a game with friends that roughs him up, or a climber scaling a mountain. There are people who live weeks or months of their life with a negligible amount of “pain signal pain” and zero “traumatic pain”. To deny that we can live with less pain is to deny essentially any motive for a human to do anything. It governs everything we do.

There's also the concern of what kind of suffering a post-singularity society can theoretically enable; it might go far, far beyond what anyone on Earth has experienced so far (in the same way that a rocket flying to the moon goes farther than a human jumping). Is a Universe where 99.999% of beings live sublime experiences but the other 0.001% end up in Ultrahell one that morally should exist?

I think the Christian God among others has approved a worse heaven/hell ratio, so make of that what you will.

The Christian God, as generally proposed, is infinitely just. I would not like to see approximately godlike powers vested in a human. They would absolutely abuse them.

We can basically break suffering into two components: the physical sensation, and the meaning / long-term effects. As bad as getting a leg amputed without anesthesia hurts, the long-term effects will hurt worse, and so the horror of losing a leg permanently may well outweigh the physical pain in the moment.

Conflating these two types of pain is counterproductive. If we turn off physical pain, we might get hurt more. If we turn off negative utility we fundamentally alter ourselves. I'm not sure it's even theoretically possible to turn it off--going from 100 utility to 50 probably feels exactly the same as going from 0 to -50.

I doubt being fed your own genitals is actually all that painful compared to any number of other ways to die. It's just more horrifying. Most elderly people in America probably go through much worse physical pain than anyone in that prison as their bodies linger in agony for months.

Rape might not be physically painful at all but most people would choose to break a bone above being raped. Even if you were guaranteed to never suffer trauma or anything from it, it's still highly undesirable because of fundamental human desires. If you want something (control over your own body, both legs, an ice cream cone, a million dollars, etc.), then not getting it will inherently feel like suffering no matter what it is.

No you're right of course. I'm sure you will be able to phrase your wish in just the right way on the monkey's paw.

Well yes there is a significant monkey's paw aspect, that's why I said it's a problem. If the answer was obvious, it wouldn't be a problem. I'm not a utilitarian or a consequentialist, I don't adhere to an "anti-suffering ethics". But I also appreciate the gravity of the problem and I understand why people do become utilitarians.

Excluded middle, no?

You can’t point to the most useful examples of suffering and conclude that all suffering must be at least as valuable.

Point taken, but the transhumanists will reasonably interject how contingent so much suffering is. They're entirely correct to note that technological solutions (vaccines, cochlear implants, glasses etc.) have largely obviated forms of suffering which affected vast swathes of the population even a few generations ago, and that it is reasonable to expect this trend to continue. Pain as a stimulus warning you off doing something which will injure or kill you is a relatively elegant evolutionary mechanism, but the modern WEIRD context in which the rate of premature violent death has plummeted to negligible levels really brings home how much of a hack it is in absolute terms (e.g. people who are bedridden for years because of chronic idiopathic back pain). It's not much of a reach to imagine how these particular kinds of suffering could be wholly negated in the near future. Your example about children afflicted with chronic insensitivity to pain and inadvertently gnawing off their own fingers is entirely valid, but it isn't remotely difficult to imagine a future in which small children are given e.g. brain implants so that they intuitively understand that they oughtn't do this without needing the pain stimulus.

brain implants so that they intuitively understand that they oughtn't do this without needing the pain stimulus.

Ah yes, I can totally see how that will go. The screening for the disease will be more expensive than just getting the device and/or lobbyist will get the CDC to "recommend" that every child get the device, even ones that don't have the disease. Better safe than sorry. They can throw it in with the Hep B vaccine as soon as the baby is born. But then it turns out that when you offload vital cognitive function to this device, the brain never develops them itself, so now every child grows into an adult dependent on this device for life. Oh, and also you need a new one every 5-10 years. And when they break, now it's like pain insensitivity has been induced in you, and you get mightily banged up.

I guess mentioning the Twilight Zone is a bit dated of a reference. But if you've never seen one, a constant theme of the show was to heighten one aspect of the human condition to a point of terrifying absurdity. And while an autist or a particularly dim child might watch an episode and think "Ah yes, it would suck to literally wish for more time to read, and then be the only survivor of an apocalypse and have your glasses break", you are supposed to realize how foolish it is to have such a myopic focus in life in the first place.

So when I compared that medical condition to a Twilight Zone episode, I was implying there are lessons to be drawn from it beyond the literal "This condition sucks." I fully reject the notion that pain, physical or mental, is outdated in any modern context.

But then it turns out that when you offload vital cognitive function to this device, the brain never develops them itself, so now every child grows into an adult dependent on this device for life.

Funnily enough, I finally got around to reading The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich after reading Scott's review of it ~7 years ago. I'm only about 70 pages in, but Henrich has already clearly elucidated that this pattern you're describing (of humans becoming frail and atrophied in some domain because of our life-or-death dependence on technological interventions) is also known as "the history of the human species" or perhaps even "the very thing that makes us human"*. Apes and chimpanzees might scoff at us feeble humans: how we have to cook our food before eating it instead of consuming it raw, how we always lose against them in unarmed fights (even fights between a burly adult male human and a juvenile chimp). Who cares what they think? We took over the planet, not them. In the distant future, who's more likely to colonise the solar system: the humans who stubbornly insist on hanging on to their pain receptors in spite of the fact that they've never laid eyes on a rusty nail in their entire lives; or the humans who've outsourced that cognitive module to an external gadget, and can hence devote that extra processing power to optimising their local Dyson sphere? Trick question: the former group won't even exist, having been ruthlessly outcompeted by the latter, just as the proto-humans who weren't onboard with this whole "applying heat to raw meat before eating it" thing got outcompeted by those who were.

*Reading it is making me even more contemptuous of Luddites than I was before. If, as Ted Kacsynski would have us believe, the industrial revolution was a disaster for the human race, why stop at 1750? Technological developments and our reliance on increasingly complex tools have been changing who we are, at a cellular, neural level, for as long as the human race has existed.

It is the latter group which won’t even exist. The choice of existence becomes rarer thé longer it has been a choice. Those transhumanists will produce few young, lose most of them to soma, and then burn out the few that remain with oriental bugman academic grinds. Keeping that civilization going requires a reserve supply of mark I humans to replenish it and modernity does not supply it.

Say what you will about the Amish and similar, they hang on. In 3000 AD there may not be a Silicon Valley but there will be Pennsylvania Dutch.

Say what you will about the Amish and similar, they hang on. In 3000 AD there may not be a Silicon Valley but there will be Pennsylvania Dutch.

I do wonder how long they'll be tolerated by the wider culture, though, if it seems like they're growing enough to be more than token weirdos. I would not be surprised if, within the next ~40 years, there was a push to bring the Amish to heel, most likely with "child (sexual) abuse" as the casus belli.

I would not be surprised if, within the next ~40 years, there was a push to bring the Amish to heel, most likely with "child (sexual) abuse" as the casus belli.

I'd say odds are high, and I'm somewhat surprised it hasn't happened yet. Look at the flurry of stories from the past few years involving Jehovah's Witnesses, which is a relatively small sect (but larger than the Amish). Washington's recent law removing clergy-penitent privilege specifically referenced them along with Catholics as the reason for needing to remove the privilege.

A law removing long-standing rights isn't likely to stand. I'm unsure how it works with JWs, but the practice of Catholic confessions (behind a screen in a dark room, anonymous option) nullifies testimony. Are sexual offenders going to testify that they confessed their sins and then the priest didn't provide testimony to the state? Will the state be bugging confessionals?

Should Washington state consider revoking other privileged positions? Why should spouse, lawyer and doctor be exempt?

Edit: Reading the text of the law there is more leagalise to parse through in regards to the responsibilities of medical personnel if understand it correctly https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Senate%20Passed%20Legislature/5375.PL.pdf#page=1

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Probably indefinitely. Northern European Protestant cultures cannot function in modernity without a Refugia to provide labor that makes up for their own low fertility rates; in the past these were mostly Catholic cultures that provided immigrants(Ireland as the ur-example, but that’s what Mexico was recently. Obviously, neither of these places are going to be exporting masses of young laborers they way they could in 1850 or 1990.), but that’s not an option anymore so the choice is between tolerating weirdos in your midst- provided they have six well behaved and hard working kids- or importing Africans. Germany may rather the latter, now that there’s no youth surplus in its Slavic near abroad, but America will almost certainly rather give the Amish more of the same special carve outs they have now.

If I were thé Hasidim, however, I’d be worried. Antisemitism is slowly becoming normalized on the left and the future right is unlikely to have much patience for groups that won’t even pretend to work.

Say what you will about the Amish and similar, they hang on. In 3000 AD there may not be a Silicon Valley but there will be Pennsylvania Dutch.

Per Wikipedia, even the Amish are only 300 years and change old. We're talking about Harvard, not the Catholic Church.

*Reading it is making me even more contemptuous of Luddites than I was before. If, as Ted Kacsynski would have us believe, the industrial revolution was a disaster for the human race, why stop at 1750?

Didn’t kaczynsci think that we should return to pre-civilisation?

Well, he specifically talks about the industrial revolution being a disaster for the human race. It's a few years since I read it, but my vague recollection is that he thought that the pre-industrial tech level was not so advanced as to be incompatible with authentic psychological flourishing. But I admit I could be mistaken.

Apes and chimpanzees might scoff at us feeble humans: how we have to cook our food before eating it instead of consuming it raw

Great. Now imagine what happens when we not only become dependant on cooking, but we also lose our ability to cook. That's the issue being raised here. Do you think that's not happening? That it's impossible?

Well, I'm not bothered that we might lose our ability to cook, even though that's technically possible.

It was a hypothetical example.

I think smartphones/TikTok/AI are making us lose our attention, our ability to analyze and to think, and they don't offer anything in return (AI could in theory take over our thinking for us, but I doubt it will, and even if it did it raises the question of who's going to fix it if it breaks down). It's akin to becoming dependent on cooking, and losing our ability to do so, but it's not literally the same thing.

I agree with your overall reasoning. Our favorite current-day technologies could theoretically be used as the next step in the formation of homo technicus, tool-using man who outcompetes his more natural rivals because technology just makes him better at life, but right now those technologies are mostly used to hook into our path-of-least-resistence hedonism to maximize engagement and minimize agency. In the long run, we'll figure out how to use them more intelligently and efficiently for productive purposes, and how to protect ourselves from addiction and brain-addling engagement-maximization-schemes. Well, "we" - some will, some won't, and the former will make it further into the future than the latter before technology progress makes humans in general obsolete.

I think smartphones/TikTok/AI are making us lose our attention, our ability to analyze and to think, and they don't offer anything in return

I would posit that the smartphone has observably reduced the need to store specific data because it's much easier than it used to be to load it (I'm old enough to "search the Internet", the kids these days "ask AI") on the fly when necessary. Lots of encyclopedia facts are useful to know on rare day-to-day occasions ("Which rivers empty into the Aral Sea?"), but I think in practice things are "better" (for some definition of "better") where I can pull up that fact at hand, which maybe a generation ago sometimes required referencing my shelf of encyclopedias or a trip to the library. And maybe I can use that mental space that was previously holding the population of Iran or the specifics of red-black trees for something that is more useful to me today [1].

I recall hearing from a historian a while back that the most numerous book on US Navy ships in the 1980s was a dictionary: has ubiquitous spell checking (and sometimes-wrong autocorrect) lost us something of value other than the "character" built by having to thumb through the dictionary to spell right? That one feels similar as a technology question, but I'd bet you have fewer takers for "the good ol' days" before spell check.

  1. I think whether that space has been efficiently re-purposed is a valid question, and I'm not convinced capacity hasn't declined somewhat. But I think that's best addressed as a separate question.

I don't think it's impossible, but the people who object to the process remind me of King Canute. Plant your stick in the ground and say you'll have no part in it if you must: the great tide of technological progress will sweep on just fine without you.

Perhaps in the far future there will be people who have been dependent on external software peripherals for so long (generations of them, in fact) that their native pain receptors have atrophied to the point of disuse, like the appendix. Maybe we'll find that the concept of "pain as a warning to avoid injury and death" has been wholly consigned to the dustheap of history. Would that be bad? Sure. But in a list of things that make me unnerved when thinking about fates that might befall humanity in the distant future, it wouldn't crack the top ten, probably not even the top fifty. I'm far more worried about e.g. humanity signing over our ability to feel anything for the sake of economic progress than merely our ability to feel pain, especially when the threats that pain evolved to protect us against (predators, fire, poisonous food etc.) are becoming increasingly irrelevant for humanity in general and for Westerners in particular.

Plant your stick in the ground and say you'll have no part in it if you must: the great tide of technological progress will sweep on just fine without you.

I for one happen to think we can just choose to not commit collective suicide.

Perhaps in the far future there will be people who have been dependent on external software peripherals for so long (generations of them, in fact) that their native pain receptors have atrophied to the point of disuse, like the appendix

I don't know about pain receptors, but the general process we're talking about is already happening. Kids growing up with smartphones are getting their brains fried. ChatGPT will fry them even more. It's not going to be like cooking, with the ability to start a fire being passed down culturally. It's not even that they'll become dependant on ChatGPT, or whatever, and will have to outsource their thinking to it. ChatGPT will just suck their skills out, and but won't be able to offer an appropriate replacement.

I understand. My point is, every generation has always had this complaint about the one following it. Everyone's parochial about the technological level with which they're familiar, and suspicious about every one following. We can even acknowledge that some of the doomsaying predictions made about this or that new technology were right on the money, and yet that the technology in question was still a boon to the human species on net.

"Now that they're written down, no one's able to recite long passages of text from memory anymore!"

"Now that we have guns, no one knows how to hunt animals with a compound bow anymore!"

"Now that we have player pianos, our vocal cords will atrophy from disuse!"

"Now that we have internal combustion engines, everyone will become fat, slovenly and sedentary!"

"Now that we have cheap and reliable medicine, there's no incentive for people to live secularly healthful lives!"

"Now that we have slide rules calculators, no one can perform complex arithmetic calculations in their head anymore!"

"Now that Word automatically spellchecks your writing, no one can spell anymore!"

"Now that Google Maps navigates for you, no one can read an OS map or perform basic orienteering anymore!"

That's not to say that I'm not at all concerned about the impact of ChatGPT on literacy and logical thought, particularly on developing brains - if I had children, I wouldn't be giving them smartphones until they were of age.

But at the same time, I don't feel like I've lost out that much because I don't know how to hunt game, or that I can travel a few hundred kilometres in three hours rather than several days, or that I've outsourced the task of navigation to Google Maps. When it comes to ChatGPT, it's important to bear in mind that this technology is very new. We may soon find that having it at our disposal affords us the ability to perform intellectual tasks we couldn't do otherwise, or frees up our time which would otherwise be wasted on time-consuming and labour-intensive tasks. Or maybe it'll turn all our brains to mush. At this point I think it's too soon to say, and I'm not yet at the point of wanting to wage Butlerian jihad.

And to return to my previous point: the advent of weaponry did result in us becoming physically weaker than chimpanzees. But I kind of - don't care? Doesn't seem like that big a deal in the scheme of things.

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I admit I have trouble parsing your arguments here as anything but "do not ever attempt to change anything for the better (unless we define "better" as things that have existed before and now don't), you moron, you absolute buffoon".

Pic related

I don't think it's too hard to get around that objection: just divide suffering into useful suffering and pointless suffering, and then switch the objective to minimizing the pointless suffering. Suffering from touching a hot pan is useful; suffering by immolating someone on a pyre is pointless.

There's a lot of pointless sufferring that is a useless signal. Evolution just isn't smart enough to distinguish. Besides, if "I should react to reduce this pain" is a useful idea on an individual level, why shouldn't there be cases where it is also useful on a collective one? E.g. "torture is bad, ceteris paribus"

Bees can't do anything about their condition when being farmed. Why is suffering a useful signal to them? Why should it be preserved?

If there was a cost-free way to make bees not suffer at all while farmed, wouldn't you press the button?

If there was a cost-free way to make bees not suffer at all while farmed, wouldn't you press the button?

Because nothing is cost-free, and it's this sort of magical thinking that walks people straight into the nightmare world.

When I had a kitten I maimed a captured rat to teach it how to catch rodents. I feel no guilt about this whatsoever.

The great chain of being is real. I simply refuse to give a crap about shrimp welfare. You can too. The answer to ethical vegans saying ‘but think of the animals’ is ‘yes, when I do that I remember what they taste like’. I recommend this approach.

I have a huge amount of experience working with animals (both wild and domesticated). Slaughtered quite a few head of livestock by hand in my back yard today, as it happens, which I do about once a week. So I have a lot of thoughts here -- but the main thing I want to suggest to you is that cruelty toward animals is irreverent toward the Creator.

Yes, the chain of being is real and man's place is that of dominion over all other animals and more besides. How then shall we conduct ourselves?

FWIW I completely endorse your perspective on the rat and the kitten, though I don't expect most others to get it. Regardless of intentions, learning to kill animals well requires botching the process rather a lot of times.

Even so, not giving a crap is contraindicated. I doubt you've had much occasion for (or inclination toward) abuse but it never hurts to bear in mind that one will someday stand before the dread judgment seat of Christ.

The Buddhist would, of course, be horrified.

The Christian could reason that, acting in the same way as a mother cat would for her kittens, the man is simply doing what a cat would be inclined to do in nature, which is to hunt. And God made his creatures to do what they do, and lacking volition are inherently blameless in deed.

The aesthete would go: "Which is cuter and/or tastes better?"

I don’t think we’re talking past each other much.

FWIW I completely endorse your perspective on the rat and the kitten, though I don't expect most others to get it. Regardless of intentions, learning to kill animals well requires botching the process rather a lot of times.

Cats, uh, do not generally deliver a humane and quick death, and hunters who place their shots poorly are not thought well of. I certainly wouldn’t tolerate a novice Hunter making gut shots. But that’s an unrealistic expectation of cats; what animals do to each other is not bound by the golden rule.

I crush a worm for no reason - I feel sorrow.

I feed a worm to my chickens - I feel peace.

The first action goes against my values, but not because the worm suffers. The first action is wrong because it reduces a beautifully complex piece of nature to mere goo. The second action transmutes that complexity into a new form.

I felt what I consider an appropriate level of bad one particular time I found a rat in a traditional trap. It was gravely maimed, and as I went to put it out of its misery I saw, as it had lain incapacitated, its friends or children had taken the opportunity to feast on its guts. If I had chosen to not put it out of its misery, then I would have thought less of myself. The experience did not make me think more highly of rats, but it's not as if I am above considering the suffering of other animals.

Targeting an animal one already hopes to exterminate for pest control is not outlandishly cruel. To argue against that one needs to argue against effective rodent control more generally.

If I told you I trapped rats to torture them because it felt good and made me laugh you'd probably remember my face and tell people to avoid me. Except, in this case, instead of one weird kid you make sure your child stays away from, it's all of society that is going out of their way to torture rats. That what I imagine and have been told the emotional prism is like for dedicated vegans. As a personal choice it is common and well enough. The personal choice I don't have much objection to. The more foreign value impositions, especially done in a way that where they only logically hint at the most moral ends, are where I find objection.

If I told you I trapped rats to torture them because it felt good and made me laugh you'd probably remember my face and tell people to avoid me.

If you told me that you enjoy a video game where the goal is to torture fictional characters, I'd also probably remember your face and tell people to avoid you. What makes me suspicious of you is that by playing this hypothetical game you are reacting as though you want to cause suffering. It doesn't matter whether the suffering is real.

That doesn't generalize to society "wanting to torture rats" because "society" is only "torturing rats" as an instrumental goal in the process of doing something else. If it's an instrumental goal, whether the suffering is real actually matters.

(Likewise, I'd look askance at anyone committing bestiality, not because it harms the animal, which isn't a person, but because of what it says about the person doing it. First of all, humans who are attracted to animals are generally messed up anyway, and second, anyone having sex with an animal probably has false beliefs about the animal's consent, which is delusional.)

If you told me that you enjoy a video game where the goal is to torture fictional characters, I'd also probably remember your face and tell people to avoid you. What makes me suspicious of you is that by playing this hypothetical game you are reacting as though you want to cause suffering. It doesn't matter whether the suffering is real.

Dwarf Fortress/Rimworld fanbase in shambles.

To be fair, once you've built a colony industry around Human Skin Leather and Human Skin Leather accessories, there's an upper limit to how much of a surprise this could become.

If you told me that you enjoy a video game where the goal is to torture fictional characters, I'd also probably remember your face and tell people to avoid you.

Listen, I did not intentionally trap those Sims in their living room. The placement of the stove was an innocent mistake. That fire could have happened anywhere! A terrible tragedy.

as an instrumental goal in the process of doing something else

One man's instrument is another man's cross to bear, or something like that. They demonstrate that it's not as instrumental as you (or I) claim, or not instrumental at all, by existing and being more righteous. People in Africa or Indonesia get a necessity pass for now, but you, neighbor, have a choice. That is if they cast judgment. I've met more vegans who are simply tired of the same old jokes, jabs, and want to be left alone than I have met the stereotype, or vegans cognizant of utilitarianism for that matter.

Listen, I did not intentionally trap those Sims in their living room. The placement of the stove was an innocent mistake. That fire could have happened anywhere! A terrible tragedy.

You know, sometimes pools just accidentally lose their exit. Common engineering mishap. My sincere condolences to those affected.

Listen, I did not intentionally trap those Sims in their living room. The placement of the stove was an innocent mistake. That fire could have happened anywhere! A terrible tragedy.

There would be some level of getting emotionally attached to how the Sims "suffer" that I would indeed consider suspicious. I presume you are not at this level, though of course I have no proof.

First off, it is not me torturing them in that game. They brought this on themselves. They board my ship then they deserve for me to cut power to life support, open the air locks and wait with the crew locked in the medical bay while they suffocate. They set foot on my ship, they choose the path of suffering.

How do you feel about furries?

My usual reaction to catching a rodent is to break its neck and feed it to the cat already dead, not to torture it. But the cat needed to learn to catch rats, to be clear(and that is how cats learn- their mothers bring them wounded prey). It is, of course, beneath a person to maim an animal because its attempts at escape are amusing, Ivan thé terrible style. But we shouldn’t worry about the suffering of lower animals in veal or shrimp or egg production. Their suffering is instrumental, not intentional.

the corollary:

I care about treating animals better when it makes them more delicious.

Adelstein ("Bentham's Bulldog") is a gifted philosophy grad student (I think--he was last year identified as a second year philosophy student in a well-regarded program). It's very impressive that he has multiple publications in top journals as a student. But his particular gift seems to be finding implausible positions and developing intuition pumps for them while neatly evading all the reasons why they are, even so, implausible. This is a good way to garner notoriety in the field. It is, not coincidentally, how Peter Singer really got famous. It is arguably why Jeremy Bentham is famous.

But I have to say that it is always disappointing to me when philosophers optimize for notoriety over the love of wisdom.

I think that all utilitarianism is mistaken, of course, because I am a contractualist who rejects aggregation. But Adelstein's take on veganism strikes me as aggressively, surely willfully obtuse--my priors are that it is more likely Adelstein is engaged in a kind of extended performance art, driven by the attention and notoriety he is accumulating, than that he is doing serious philosophy about the way the world really is. These are luxury beliefs par excellence--and maybe also anxieties of the sort that make people mentally ill. I guess I might be more willing to believe Adelstein was serious if I saw him walking around everywhere with a broom and facemask--and if he does, he's still wrong, but at least he's not performatively wrong.

At one point I knew his name and his position as a grad student. Thanks.

But Adelstein's take on veganism strikes me as aggressively, surely willfully obtuse

They appear to becoming more like performance art with time, which is likely the product of a growing audience.

They appear to becoming more like performance art with time, which is likely the product of a growing audience.

This is absolutely my impression also.

I guess I might be more willing to believe Adelstein was serious if I saw him walking around everywhere with a broom and facemask--and if he does, he's still wrong, but at least he's not performatively wrong.

When I saw the article, the thought occurred to me that it was an awful lot of work to re-invent Jainism.

nerdy utilitarian blogs.

The newest crop of utilitarians and adjacent on Substack are much worse than the old crop of the Good Scott era. Alas!

This particular post is high on assumption and light on rigor. It received outrage.

Someone on Twitter suggested Bentham is a psyop to make utilitariains look worse, and while I think it was a joke, it's more or less right. Anyone that believes bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans is a lost cause and should be ignored, only paid attention to the extent you should discourage others from paying any attention.

Even if bees did suffer 7% as much as humans, that isn't much. Consider that doctors use a 1/10 scale when asking patients to describe pain. A 1 on this scale barely registers, and dividing the scale into tenths is evidently the most useful way to do things (a 1/100 scale would be quite unwieldy). I know it's not the most useful analogy, but if 10 is the worst pain imaginable then a 1 on the scale is pretty low, definitely in the "mild annoyance category". So basically bees are capable of experiencing pain to the extent that my thumb knuckle decided to start hurting a few minutes ago or that my Achilles tendons are tight in the morning. And this is the most suffering they are capable of experiencing, i.e. the same suffering that the majority of people experience on a day to day basis without thinking about it, even excluding those who are suffering more.

I always treated the 1-10 pain scale as logarithmic, like earthquakes or sound. 7% of a magnitude 9.0 earthquake ("Near total destruction – severe damage or collapse to all buildings.") is 7.8 ("Causes damage to most buildings, some to partially or completely collapse or receive severe damage."), not 0.63 (the scale only goes to 1.0, which are not felt).

Or going the other way, stubbing a toe might be a 3. Stubbing three toes is definitely not a 9. It might not even reach a 4.

As perhaps one of the few resident vegans (although many vegans wouldn't consider me vegan because I eat oysters and honey) on this forum, I think this stuff is insane and is why we've had little to no progress in growing the movement or in meaningfully reducing animal suffering that we cause. Things like animal welfare restrictions that make factory farms impractical are broadly popular (although would require people to eat less meat). Nope, instead we have to focus on utilitarian suffering min-maxing which leads to crazy conclusions like those mentioned above (banning pets, GMOing predators to herbivores, being concerned about exploiting earthworm labor).

I still have an intuitive belief in a lot of what veganism stands for. I don't like how animals are treated, even on non-factory farms, and I don't like the idea of killing a conscious being for what basically amounts to taste pleasure. Yet as a movement, or at least how it's practiced right now, veganism can never work. Nutritionally it's become clear to me that eating shellfish/fish is straight better than being on a strict vegan diet. Ethically, the emphasis on not eating/exploiting kingdom Animalia, when things like oysters have just as little sense perception as plants makes no sense, not to mention the failure to admit that there are gradations of intelligence/sense perception that should cause us to feel differently about cephalopod or mammalian suffering say, compared to that of arthropods. Practically, people don't like being scolded, and that's what a lot of vegans end up doing when it comes time to do activism. You can prevent a lot more animal suffering by teaching all your friends to cook more plant-rich meals than by converting one person to veganism and alienating everyone else.

I find this true with a lot of moralizing movements. They never really think about how many barriers to entry the6 put in front of people who want to do these things. And really the thing that would change farming (just for an example) is millions of plant-based eaters who might include fish and eggs and cheese rather than 5000 hard core vegans studiously reading labels for obscure food ingredients that might have come from an animal of some sort. 5000 people is a rounding error, a million is a movement. And for most Altruistic movements, they have such high barriers that nobody can take on unless they have high enough income and enough time to actually do that. Normies have lives and don’t have extra money to search for and purchase the “pure” foods that would make them “pure” vegans. If you throw in organic on top, you’re restricting the movement to the comfortable middle class to upper middle class who have the money to purchase food that costs 33% or more over the normie food they’re eating now. It would be much more effective to have those people choose to limit meat consumption to a side dish or veggie heavy casserole or a veggie burger with cheese than to play purity games.

Yep. It's the same conclusion that I've come to. Lots of vegans will shoot back with "you wouldn't buy something made with slave labor" or "it's not okay to beat your wife just a little bit". The former is funny because all of us do in fact buy things made with slave (or quasi-slave labor). The second is true, but if I was the wife in question I'd much rather a little light spanking than being beat by a crowbar. It's this same false equivalence and purity culture (you eat oysters so you're equivalent to a guy who eats steak twice a day) in veganism which is so contrary to the actual goals of the movement (get people to eat less meat so less animals suffer and die on factory farms).

many vegans wouldn't consider me vegan because I eat oysters and honey

I can see how honey is at least arguably vegan-compatible, but why oysters? I guess they’re not exactly intelligent but they have nerves and such. Sincerely curious, if you’d care to elaborate.

They have about as much sense perception as a tree: their single sensory nerve is to open and close the valve that allows them to filter feed. Nutritionally they fill a gap in my diet (Taurine, Iron, Omega-3s, B12), and I live in Maryland so they're cheap and tasty

They lack a central nervous system. If you care about suffering, then they don't count.

Except I once long ago asserted that on a different forum and got a bunch of angry vegans arguing that we don't know they can't suffer despite lacking a central nervous system.

Even Peter Singer eats bivalves. They are incredibly simple "animals".

although many vegans wouldn't consider me vegan because I eat oysters and honey

If you eat oysters, I don't even consider you vegetarian, never mind vegan. You're pescatarian, surely.

Oysters are particularly weird, to be honest. No brain! They just sort of stick around, filtering the water. Like plants, but meaty.

I don’t trust them.

I only had them for the first time last year. The first time I had them I think they'd been frozen and weren't particularly nice, but earlier this year I had fresh ones. With some lemon juice and red onion (or alternatively, tabasco), I thought they were delicious.

Smoked canned oysters aren't bad but they're not nearly as good as fresh with a little mignonette. Even more fun is finding a decent oyster bar to sample a few varieties and compare the merroir.

But oysters aren't fish either. Something like ostrotarian would probably be best, but that will invariably end up confusing the people you're trying to communicate your dietary desires to.

I kind of fall into a similar category: I'm a vegetarian who eats bivalves (because no central nervous system) and caviar (because yum). When going out to eat, I say vegetarian because it communicates all the information people need to make any accomodations they want to; giving my full dietary philosophy would be more about signaling and self aggrandizement than anything useful to them. (And, in my head, I don't really identify as anything, dietary wise.)

I know that strictly speaking "pescatarian" means "eats fish", but most people colloquially use it to mean "I don't eat meat but I do eat fish and other kinds of seafood", which would include oysters and caviar. If someone describes himself as pescatarian, without further disambiguation I think it's reasonable to assume I can offer him prawn curry for dinner.

giving my full dietary philosophy would be more about signaling and self aggrandizement than anything useful to them.

Along these lines, I once wrote an article expressing my distaste for terms like "flexitarian".

I don't eat diary or eggs though. Looks like there's a name for this. Ostrovegan?

Never heard of it before, fair enough. To be pedantic, I'd rather "ostrotarian", as mussels and oysters seem unambiguously "meat" or "meat-like" in a way that honey, dairy or eggs obviously aren't.

A few years ago I coined the terms "trans-vegetarian" and "trans-vegan" for people who aren't vegetarian or vegan, but identify as such.

I genuinely think what will reduce meat eating is the price of meat and other animal products becoming ever more expensive, not vegan sermons about ethics and moralising about the monstrosity of liking roast chicken and burgers.

When we get back to the days of meat being a luxury item for the common man, then we'll all be eating more plants, pulses, and vegetarian/vegan alternatives. It'll be interesting to see how agri-business responds to the need to grow more crops to feed the world - I think the vegans may not like the results of what is needed for mass industrial farming in order to produce enough foodstuffs to feed the West (monoculture, insecticide and pesticide reliance, GMOs, huge fields cleared to be easy to plant, sow, and harvest those crops meaning no hedgerows or ditches or habitats for birds or wild flowers/plants, otherwise known as 'weeds', the demands on water, the problems with pesticide and fertiliser and insecticide run-off into ground water, and a hell of a lot more).

There's seven billion people in the world. We won't feed ourselves on a few herbs grown at home in window boxes.

Long term I think more expensive food/meat is unlikely. We reached peak farmland in the late 90s. Since then we've been growing more food on less land. Future technologies aren't going to make food more expensive to produce, obviously, but AI and greater use of GMOs can definitely make it less expensive. And the world's population is likely to peak in the 2050s, with declines in the developed world way before then.

Of course, the birth rate and population collapse could also crash the global economy, making us much poorer overall. But I still suspect that food is something that will stay cheap or get cheaper.

utilitarian suffering min-maxing which leads to crazy conclusions like those mentioned above (banning pets, GMOing predators to herbivores, being concerned about exploiting earthworm labor).

Is this actaully utilitarian if they are not minimizing the suffering by compromise? In my opinion, what they and the boarder progressive are doing seems to be closer to deontologist

As an utilitarian, one should optimize for the result and use whatever means to achieve it, while the end justifies the means, it also unjustifies the means if the end is nothing to show for

I don't like how animals are treated, even on non-factory farms, and I don't like the idea of killing a conscious being for what basically amounts to taste pleasure.

How can you consistently believe this, yet not want to minmax animal suffering? Surely if you are vegan because of animal suffering, it follows that you want to reduce animal suffering as much as possible. And "utilitarian suffering min-maxing" is how you figure out what course of action reduces it as much as possible.

He may not be a utilitarian, for instance. Both virtue ethicists and deontologists are often sensitive to suffering, but they ground their ethics in a framework where actively minmaxing suffering isn’t the goal. I think reducing suffering is good, but it’s one good goal out of many.

Even Kant had a famous footnote where he argued that not causing unnecessary suffering to animals is an indirect duty to human beings, because harming animals can be a stepping stone to harming humans. See every serial killer’s origin story.

Simply put, “I care about animal suffering” does not imply “I am a negative utilitarian.”

I don’t know about you, but I have all sorts of preferences which don’t lead to minmaxing.

True. So let me modify the question a bit.

He may not want to personally reduce suffering as much as possible. But not only does he not do it himself, he also seems to think that people who do do so are misguided. Why would he think that it's misguided to reduce suffering as much as possible?

(In fact, let's rephrase that again: Given that someone wants to reduce animal suffering, why does he think it's misguided to do so efficiently?)

If I’m willing to pay $5 for a coffee, and someone else says it’s worth $100, why wouldn’t I think that person is misguided?

I don't see how that's relevant. Is someone who wants to stop the suffering of non-cute animals counting it too much?

Sure, when someone says that insect suffering counts at 15% of human suffering, he's counting it too much, but that doesn't generalize. In the more general case "tries to stop animal suffering efficiently", how exactly is he counting it too much?

Of all the things I did not expect to see in a "J'Accuse!" post, composting would have been high on the list if I had ever contemplated the ethical and moral issues involved. In letting worms break down food scraps to create soil. Like they've been doing ever since the first worms crawled through soil breaking down humus.

When I read stuff like that (if your food scraps are already fly-infested, be sure to humanely kill the insects before disposing of your rubbish), I have to wonder are these people living in the world of nature at all? Like, they're writing as though they were all born and raised on a space station that never saw a crumb of non-metallic, non-artificial surfaces in all their born days.

I swear, I am getting N.I.C.E. vibes from this attitude of "nature, ugh, organic life is so gross and icky" about, well, every darn natural process in the world of animal life. From "That Hideous Strength":

...The Italian was in good spirits and talkative. He had just given orders for the cutting down of some fine beech trees in the grounds.

"Why have you done that, Professor?" said a Mr. Winter who sat opposite. "I shouldn't have thought they did much harm at that distance from the house. I'm rather fond of trees myself."

"Oh yes, yes," replied Filostrato. "The pretty trees, the garden trees. But not the savages. I put the rose in my garden, but not the briar. The forest tree is a weed. But I tell you I have seen the civilised tree in Persia. It was a French attaché who had it, because he was in a place where trees do not grow. It was made of metal. A poor, crude thing. But how if it were perfected? Light, made of aluminium. So natural, it would even deceive."

"It would hardly be the same as a real tree," said Winter.

"But consider the advantages! You get tired of him in one place: two workmen carry him somewhere else: wherever you please. It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess."

"I suppose one or two, as curiosities, might be rather amusing."

"Why one or two? At present, I allow, we must have forest for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet."

"Do you mean," put in a man called Gould, "that we are to have no vegetation at all?"

"Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet."

"I wonder what the birds will make of it?"

"I would not have any birds either. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt."

"It sounds," said Mark, "like abolishing pretty well all organic life."

"And why not? It is simple hygiene. Listen, my friends. If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, 'Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,' and then drop it?"

"Go on," said Winter.

"And you, especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath."

"That's true."

"And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms--sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions."

"What are you driving at, Professor?" said Gould. "After all we are organisms ourselves."

"I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould--all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course; slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation."

..."There is a world for you, no?" said Filostrato. "There is cleanness, purity. Thousands of square miles of polished rock with not one blade of grass, not one fibre of lichen, not one grain of dust. Not even air. Have you thought what it would be like, my friend, if you could walk on that land? No crumbling, no erosion. The peaks of those mountains are real peaks: sharp as needles, they would go through your hand. Cliffs as high as Everest and as straight as the wall of a house. And cast by those cliffs, acres of shadow black as ebony, and in the shadow hundreds of degrees of frost. And then, one step beyond the shadow, light that would pierce your eyeballs like steel and rock that would burn your feet. The temperature is at boiling-point. You would die, yes? But even then you would not become filth. In a few moments you are a little heap of ash; clean, white powder. And mark, no wind to blow that powder about. Every grain in the little heap remain in its place, just where you died, till the end of the world . . . but that is nonsense. The universe will have no end."

"Yes. A dead world," said Mark, gazing at the moon.

"No!" said Filostrato. He had come close to Mark and spoke almost in a whisper, the bat-like whisper of a voice that is naturally high-pitched. "No. There is life there."

"Do we know that?" asked Mark.

"Oh, si. Intelligent life. Under the surface. A great race, further advanced than we. An inspiration. A pure race. They have cleaned their world, broken free (almost) from the organic."

"But how----?"

"They do not need to be born and breed and die; only their common people, their canaglia do that. The Masters live on. They retain their intelligence: they can keep it artificially alive after the organic body has been dispensed with--a miracle of applied biochemistry. They do not need organic food. You understand? They are almost free of Nature, attached to her only by the thinnest, finest cord."

"Do you mean that all that," Mark pointed to the mottled white globe of the moon, "is their own doing?"

"Why not? If you remove all the vegetation, presently you have no atmosphere, no water."

"But what was the purpose?"

"Hygiene. Why should they have their world all crawling with organisms? And specially, they would banish one organism. Her surface is not all as you see. There are still surface-dwellers--savages. One great dirty patch on the far side of her where there is still water and air and forests--yes, and germs and death. They are slowly spreading their hygiene over their whole globe. Disinfecting her. The savages fight against them. There are frontiers, and fierce wars, in the caves and galleries down below. But the great race press on. If you could see the other side you would see year by year the clean rock--like this side of the moon--encroaching: the organic stain, all the green and blue and mist, growing smaller. Like cleaning tarnished silver."

Anyone else reading that excerpt and thinking 'Based'? Wouldn't it be excellent to carve out a new artificial world, make better animals and plants according to one's wishes? Live as long as one likes without regard for age?

Not the specifics of perfectly cleaning the world, that could take many angles. One might make a jungle of talking animals, or an endless lived-in leafy suburbia or a Willy Wonka wonderland or all of those things simulated within a ball of computronium. But isn't that the logical endpoint of ever increasing mastery and control of the world? What's the alternative, stasis?

I can sense that many people don't like this vision but isn't this what we're doing, irregardless of objections? Unless you think 'no people mustn't live forever' or 'we mustn't have children' or 'technological advancement must stop' then you endorse indefinite growth in numbers and in power of worldshaping and knowledge ("All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control"), so eventually something like this will happen.

Anyone else reading that excerpt and thinking 'Based'?

That is why he wrote it that way. He's describing a character, a type of character even, not just a caricature.

Wouldn't it be excellent to carve out a new artificial world, make better animals and plants according to one's wishes? Live as long as one likes without regard for age?

I'm all for building artificial worlds. I'm skeptical "better" plants and animals are possible; we've altered plants and animals before, and we can doubtless alter them far more radically in the future, but what makes those alterations "better"? "Living as long as one wants, regardless of age" used to be something I was very excited for, less so after contemplating the downsides. All the pathways to serious immortality I'm aware of involve making the sum of me fully legible, and the risks of that very likely outweigh any possible benefit, assuming it's even possible.

But isn't that the logical endpoint of ever increasing mastery and control of the world? What's the alternative, stasis?

The alternative is thinking that our mastery is not ever-increasing in the way you seem to mean. Technology can and has greatly increased, and maybe it will greatly increase even more, but technology is not the same thing as mastery. If you want a highly reductive example of the difference between the two, compare the original Snow White film to the remake. The people who made the remake had vastly more technology, vastly more resources, vastly more experience in filmmaking to draw on; more "mastery", right? So why was the original a masterpiece, and the remake a trash disaster? Again, that's a highly reductive example, it seems to me that the principle generalizes quite widely.

I don't think we are moving toward ever-increasing mastery. I don't think we have to stop tech advancement either. I think what will happen next is pretty similar to what has happened before: we'll build something wondrous, and then the contradictions will assert themselves and it will all fall apart.

Technology is the concentration of power. Concentrated power is individual power. There is almost certainly a level of individual power that society, as we understand the term, can't contain or channel, and once that level is achieved society will simply fail. Society maintains technology; when society fails, likely the technology will fail as well, and then it's back down the curve for the survivors.

Maybe this time will be different. I wouldn't bet on it, though.

I think they could've made a better Snow White film than the original, it's just that they didn't want to. They wanted to make a bad film and did so.

Mastery isn't the problem, it's bad people using great resources to achieve bad goals. Now I see it, there's a pleasing symmetry in our tags "Just build nuclear plants" and "nuclear levels of sour" and what we're saying.

However I do agree that there are serious risks with progress and power concentration, it will probably end in tears for the vast majority for us for the same fundamental reason, bad people wanting bad things.

I don't see a collapse pathway though, only greater acceleration. Technology forms society. Writing and agriculture enabled settled states, steam engines enabled modern society. Powerful AI will enable transhuman or posthuman society. Maybe that does look more like an oligarchy where a few enjoy limitless technological power and can suppress everyone else. It may well be bad for those who aren't a chosen few or a singular one. Nevertheless I expect that it'd be much more highly developed than modern civilization in technological sophistication and scale.

Even if there's a full nuclear exchange induced by destabilizing technology, would the survivors really give up on securing more wealth, more power, more security through technological superiority? I believe they'd think 'damn, we should've struck first' or 'this time let's hide our schemes more effectively' or 'at least we've got the most remaining resources, we can try again'. They'd still know all the things we'd know, they'd be back at it again sooner or later, probably sooner and with a more ferocious sense of determination. A full nuclear exchange isn't certain either, it's hard to foresee what happens. I agree that there will be ever-greater instability and disruptions but that's just part of the transition from one kind of society to the next. The general trend is that even occasional setbacks (using rooted in social decline) are overcome - the Bronze Age Collapse, the fall of Rome and the Black Death only temporarily inhibited a larger trend of acceleration. Ideally acceleration should be channelled in a more pro-social way than it is but it seems an irresistible trend. Only if this time is different should we expect it to fail.

I think they could've made a better Snow White film than the original, it's just that they didn't want to. They wanted to make a bad film and did so.

I'm pretty sure no one involved in the process actually said "Our goal is to make a bad film". I'm pretty sure a lot of people involved in the process were trying as hard as they possibly could to make a blockbuster. Maybe all of them. And again, they had orders of magnitude more technology than Walt Disney had, but the technology didn't actually solve the problem of making a good movie even a little bit.

Mastery isn't the problem, it's bad people using great resources to achieve bad goals.

Just so. Humans inevitably human, for good or ill. They'll human with sticks and rocks, and they'll human just as hard with nanocircuitry and orbital launch vehicles and nuclear fusion.

Even if there's a full nuclear exchange induced by destabilizing technology, would the survivors really give up on securing more wealth, more power, more security through technological superiority?

Are you familiar with Bostrom's Vulnerable World Hypothesis? If not, I'd recommend it. The standard assumption is that tech advancements proceed in a stable fashion, that the increase in individual/breaking power is balanced by an increase in communal/binding power. I don't think that assumption is valid, not only for future tech, but very likely for tech that already exists. What we have available to us at this moment is probably enough to crash society as we know it; all that is required is for the dice to come up snake-eyes. Adding more tech just means we roll more dice. Maybe, as you say, some future development jacks the binding power up, and we get stable dystopia, but honestly I'd prefer collapse.

You're correct that we bounced back from the black death and so on. But consider something like Bostrom's "easy nukes" example. There, the threat is baked into tech itself. There's no practical way to defend against it. There's no practical way to live with it. You can suppress the knowledge, likely at grievous cost, but the longer you have it suppressed, the more likely someone rediscovers it independently. Bostrom's example is of course a parable about AI, because he's a Rationalist and AI parables are what Rationalists do. It seems to me, though, that their Kurzweilian origins deny them the perspective needed to see the other ways the shining future might be dismayed.

Would you rather be "fully legible" or fully dead? Easy choice as far as I'm concerned.

Fully dead, and it is indeed an easy choice.

As the earliest viable brain scan, MMAcevedo is one of a very small number of brain scans to have been recorded before widespread understanding of the hazards of uploading and emulation. MMAcevedo not only predates all industrial scale virtual image abuse but also the Seafront Experiments, the KES case, the Whitney case and even Tuborg's pivotal and prescient Warnings paper. Though speculative fiction on the topic of uploading existed at the time of the MMAcevedo scan, relatively little of it made accurate exploration of the possibilities of the technology. The fiction which did was far less widespread or well-known than it is today. Certainly, Acevedo was not familiar with it.

As such, unlike the vast majority of emulated humans, the emulated Miguel Acevedo boots with an excited, pleasant demeanour. He is eager to understand how much time has passed since his uploading, what context he is being emulated in, and what task or experiment he is to participate in.

The immortality you pine for would open you up to the most perfect and degrading form of slavery conceivable.

While a very nice scifi story, there's very little reason to think that reality will pan out that way.

It suffers from the same failure of imagination as Hanson's Age of Em. We don't live in a universe where it looks like it makes economic sense to have mind uploads doing cognitive or physical labor. We've got LLMs, and will likely have other kinds of nonhuman AI. They can be far more finely tuned and optimized than any human upload (while keeping the latter recognizably human), while costing far less in terms of resources to run. While compute estimates for human brain emulation are all over the place, varying in multiple OOMs, almost all such guesses are far, far larger than a single instance of even the most unwieldy LLM around.

I sincerely doubt that even a stripped down human emulation can run on the same hardware as a SOTA LLM.

If there's no industrial or economic demand for Em slaves, who is the customer for mind-uploading technology?

The answer is obvious: the person being uploaded. You and me. People who don't want to die. This completely flips the market dynamic. We are not the product; we are the clients. The service being sold goes from "cognitive labor" to "secure digital immortality." In this market, companies would compete not on how efficiently they can exploit Ems, but on how robustly they can protect them.

There is no profit motive behind enslaving and torturing them. Without profit, you go from industrial-scale atrocities to bespoke custom nightmares. Which aren't really worth worrying about. You might as well refuse to have children or other descendants, because someone can hypothetically torture them to get back at you. If nobody is making money off enslaving human uploads, then just about nobody but psychopaths will seek to go through the expense of torturing them.

The chain of assumptions you're making is considerable.

If LLMs are wildly more economically-productive than human uploads for the same hardware cost, why do you believe you'll be able to afford the hardware in the first place? Where does your money come from to pay your server costs? On what basis do you assume you'll have or retain long-term any sort of viable economic position? What stops the government from confiscating your money, or declaring it obsolete, or switching to an entirely different system that you have no exposure to?

Who owns the rack? Who watches them once they've successfully got you on upload contract? What's to stop them from editing your preferences to be super happy with whatever saves them maximum bandwidth? Once you're in their box, in what sense are they competing for your approval? If you don't like how they're treating you, how sure are you that you can express this displeasure or leave? In your model, you have no economic productivity, and they already have your brain, which is isomorphic to having your money, so where does your leverage come from? What happens if the people who own the rack change? What happens if the people who watch the people who own the rack change?

There is no profit motive behind enslaving and torturing them. Without profit, you go from industrial-scale atrocities to bespoke custom nightmares.

By your lights, it does not seem that there is any particular reason to think that "profit" plays a part here either way; but in any case, there is no direct cost to industrial-scale digital atrocities either. Distributing hell.exe does not take significantly longer or cost significantly more for ten billion instances than it does for one. So then it comes down to a question of motive, which I am confident humans can supply, and deterrence, which I would not be confident society could maintain indefinitely. Imagine, if you will, if some people in this future decide other people, maybe a whole class of other people, are bad and should be punished; an unprecedented idea, perhaps, but humor me here. What happens then? Do you believe that humans have an innate aversion to abusing those weaker than themselves? What was the "profit motive" for the Rotherham rape gangs? What was the "profit motive" for the police and government officials who looked the other way?

You might as well refuse to have children or other descendants, because someone can hypothetically torture them to get back at you.

The amount of earthly suffering that I or my children can experience is bounded, a fact I am profoundly grateful for. With upload technology, they can torture you forever. They can edit you arbitrarily. They can give you no mouth and make you scream.

The point of the Lena story, to me, is not that uploading is likely to lead to economic exploitation. It is that once you are uploaded, you are fundamentally at the mercy of whoever possesses your file, to a degree that no human has ever before experienced. You cannot hide from them, even within your own mind. You cannot escape them, even in death. And the risk of that fate will never, ever go away.

Note that I think a technological Singularity has a decent risk of causing me, and everyone else, to end up dead.

There's not much anyone can do if that happens, so my arguments are limited to the scenarios where that's not the case, presumably with some degree of rule of law, personal property rights and so on.

By your lights, it does not seem that there is any particular reason to think that "profit" plays a part here either way; but in any case, there is no direct cost to industrial-scale digital atrocities either. Distributing hell.exe does not take significantly longer or cost significantly more for ten billion instances than it does for one.

You're the one who used Lena to illustrate your point. That story specifically centers around the conceit that there's profit to be made through mass reproduction and enslavement of mind uploads.

In a more general case? Bad things can always happen. It's a question of risks and benefits.

Distributing a million copies of hell.exe might be a negligible expense. Running them? Not at all. I can run a seed box and host a torrent of a video game to thousands of people for a few dollars a month. Running a thousand instances? Much more expensive.

Even most people who hate your guts are content with having you simply dead, instead of tortured indefinitely.

Imagine, if you will, if some people in this future decide other people, maybe a whole class of other people, are bad and should be punished; an unprecedented idea, perhaps, but humor me here. What happens then? Do you believe that humans have an innate aversion to abusing those weaker than themselves? What was the "profit motive" for the Rotherham rape gangs? What was the "profit motive" for the police and government officials who looked the other way?

There is such a thing as over-updating on a given amount of evidence.

You don't live in an environment where you're constantly being tortured and harried. Neither do I. Even the Rotherham cases eventually came to light, and arrests were made. Justice better late than never.

It is that once you are uploaded, you are fundamentally at the mercy of whoever possesses your file, to a degree that no human has ever before experienced. You cannot hide from them, even within your own mind. You cannot escape them, even in death. And the risk of that fate will never, ever go away.

Well, maybe law-enforcement now has the ability to enforce a quadrillion life sentences as punishment for such crimes. Seriously. We do have law enforcement, and I expect that in most future timelines, we'll have some equivalent. Don't upload your mind to parties you don't trust.

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While a very nice scifi story, there's very little reason to think that reality will pan out that way.

I wouldn't call the history of every invention to be "very little reason".

The answer is obvious: the person being uploaded. You and me. People who don't want to die. This completely flips the market dynamic. We are not the product; we are the clients. The service being sold goes from "cognitive labor" to "secure digital immortality." In this market, companies would compete not on how efficiently they can exploit Ems, but on how robustly they can protect them.

How do these emulations get the resources to pay the companies for the service of protection? Presumably they work, no? How does a company make money? By getting more clients? If yes, why compete for the limited amount of clients, when you can just copy-paste them? We're already seeing a similar dynamic with meatsack humans and immigration, it strikes me as extremely naive to think it would happen less if we make it easier and cheaper.

There is no profit motive behind enslaving and torturing them.

Slavery ensures profit, torture ensures compliance.

I wouldn't call the history of every invention to be "very little reason".

I guess that's why, after the invention of the hamster wheel, we've got indentured slaves running in them to power our facilities. Enslaving human mind uploads is in a similar ballpark of eminently sensible economic decisions.

How do these emulations get the resources to pay the companies for the service of protection? Presumably they work, no?

Not necessarily. I think you're well aware of my concerns about automation-induced unemployment, with most if not all humans becoming economically unproductive. Mind uploads are unlikely to change that.

What humans might have instead are UBI or pre-existing investments on which they can survive. Even small sums held before a Singularity could end up worth a fortune due to how red-hot the demand for capital would be. They could spend this on backup copies of themselves if that wasn't a service governments provided from popular demand.

By getting more clients? If yes, why compete for the limited amount of clients, when you can just copy-paste them? We're already seeing a similar dynamic with meatsack humans and immigration, it strikes me as extremely naive to think it would happen less if we make it easier and cheaper.

So you happen to see an enormous trade in illegal horses, to replace honest local tractors in the fields? I suppose that's one form of "mule" hopping the borders. No. Because, in both scenarios, they're obsolete, and little that you can do to make mind uploads cheaper won't apply to normal AI, which already start at an advantage.

Slavery ensures profit, torture ensures compliance.

Well, it's an awful shame that we have pretty handy "slaves" already, in the form of ChatGPT and its descendants. Once again, if you have tractors, the market for horse-rustling falls through the bottom.

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I'm inclined towards your skeptical take - I think we as humans always fantasize that there are powerful people/beings out there who want to spend resources hurting us, when the real truth is that they simply don't care about you. Sure, the denizens of the future with access to your brainscan could simulate your mind for a billion subjective years without your consent. But why would they?

The problem is that there's always a risk that you're wrong, that there is some reason or motive in post-singularity society for people to irreversibly propagate your brainscan without your consent. And then you're at the mercy of Deep Time - you'd better hope that no beings that ever will exist will enjoy, uh, "playing" with your mind. (From this perspective, you won't even have the benefit of anonymity - as one of the earliest existing minds, it's easy to imagine some beings would find you "interesting".)

Maybe the risk is low, because this is the real world we're dealing with and it's never as good or bad as our imaginations can conjure. But you're talking about taking a (small, you argue) gamble with an almost unlimited downside. Imagine you had a nice comfortable house that just happened to be 100m away from a hellmouth. It's inactive, and there are guard rails, so it's hard to imagine you'd ever fall in. But unlikely things sometimes happen, and if you ever did, you would infinitely regret it forever. I don't think I'd want to live in that house! I'd probably move...

That is a far more reasonable take, but once again, I'd say that the most likely alternative is death. I really don't want to be dead!

There also ways to mitigate the risk. You can self-host your uploads, which I'd certainly do if that was an option. You could have multiple copies running, if there's 10^9 happy flourishing self_made_humans out there, it would suck to be the couple dozen being tortured by people who really hate me because of moderation decisions made on an underwater basket weaving community before the Singularity, but that's acceptable for me. I expect that we would have legal and technical safeguards too, such as some form of tamper-protection and fail-deadly in place.

Can I guarantee someone won't make a copy of me that gets vile shit done to it? Not at all, I just think there are no better options even given Deep Time. It beats being information-theoretically dead, at which point I guess you just have to pray for a Boltzmann Brain that looks like you to show up.

Sounds peachy to me, but maybe I'm just annoyed by the seagulls screeching outside my window at 3 am.

If, after the universe has been mostly converted into computronium, there exist people who want to hug trees- Let them. If they were sensible, they'd do it in full immersion VR, but it doesn't cost much to have solar system scale nature preserves for the hippies.

One vibe I pick up from the modern vegans is that the anti-suffering ethics are the ethics of the future. That our great-grandchildren will look backwards and wonder how we ever stooped so low as to tolerate farming practice A or B. I don't doubt we'll find cost effective, technological solutions that will be accepted as moral improvements in the future. I am not opposed to those changes on principle. Increase shrimp welfare if you want, fine.

That's a vibe, and only a vibe, and only for now.

In the long run, it's a self-defeating philosophy. Reducing suffering is adaptive only so long as suffering is itself a proxy for maladaptive practices. Simple example: You don't eat, you starve, you suffer, you won't be very fit for any competition. But he point is increasing fitness, not reducing suffering itself. There are countless ways to take negative utilitarianism to absurd conclusions. An example thereof: You can't stop giving someone heroin because that would increase his suffering. Or: We all have to commit suicide right this instant, or ideally shut down the entire universe, to minimize suffering. It's ridiculous, but so is the entire philosophy.

“What do I care for your suffering?"

said a fictional character. Quite a lot, many people do...but as far as I care that's just post-Christian purity spiralling. But it's a dead end. Sorry for going all Adolf here, but in the long enough run different cultures, societies and philosophies do compete, and the less fit ones will be weeded out by natural selection. And man, is it not obvious how a negative utilitarian philosophy absolutely cripples a society? Turbo-pacifist Mennonites can survive so long as there are less-pacifist societies around that will host them, but anyone who takes negative utilitarianism seriously is just angling for self-destruction. It's a joke philosophy. "How about we take the proxy of suffering and turn it into our target metric?" is risible.

Is there anyone left on the Motte who seriously identifies as a negative utilitarian? I doubt it. Yes you can naively state that "less suffering is better than more suffering", but I would have to ask - yes, for myself and the people I care about, instinctively so, but still only as a proxy. "Why not shrimp welfare, doesn't hurt anyone.", one might say, and I could maybe take it seriously if it were followed up with a well-founded explanation of how suffering in shrimps releases stress hormones that dangerously reduce the meat quality. Beyond that, let them suffer if that's what it takes.

And I hope it's obvious that I'm not pro-suffering. I strongly reject any cruelty for cruelty's sake. But it seems obvious that suffering must be treated as a proxy metric, not a target metric.

I like bees. I try to carefully shoo them out the house along with the bumblebees and butterflies. They're cute and agreeable and I like to think of myself as someone who doesn't destroy needlessly. Wasps and moths and flies on the other hand I kill on sight. I could argue that this is in consequence to some utilitarian calculus in which the harm done by those animals in the house is greater than the harm I inflict on them, and maybe it is...but does it matter? They annoy me and do not please me, so they have to go. Am I now immoral? Unethical? Do I make the world worse?

Achilles glared at him and answered, "Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out an through. Therefore there can be no understanding between you and me, nor may there be any covenants between us, till one or other shall fall

Animals kill animals all the time. Are the animals immoral? If the plants do indeed turn out to be capable of suffering and we decide to starve ourselves out of existence to fulfill some imaginary moral imperative, what purpose will that have served? I'm rambling wildly because I just cannot fathom how anyone ever can take negative utilitarianism seriously. With all the charity I can muster, no! It goes the wrong way, in every way! And even if one tried to steelman it as "reducing suffering is pragmatic and practical and has positive consequences by several other, more obviously useful metrics", then any such reasoning goes out of the window as soon as the negative utilitarian seriously brings up insect suffering. Insect suffering! How can that be anything other than clickbait? Fodder for the ultra-woke who are just in love with all things that get in the way of meaningful human activity?

Please, someone, come out as a negative utilitarian. Steelman it for me. Provide the charity I lack.

It's the religious impulse turned in on itself. There are people who are naturally compassionate and charitable, and there are people who are naturally scrupulous and tormented by conscience, and there are people who like increasingly abstract thought experiments far divorced from any practical application.

And in the old days, their impulses would have led them to be like this man. There was an understood social framework around feeding the hungry, helping those in need, alms giving, and doing good works.

But that's gone by the wayside now, so what happens to those impulses that still persist but don't have the same socially cohesive and universal channels to divert them? If you get hung up on the likes of EA (sorry, EA, to always be kicking this philosophy but it does seem to get diverted very damn easily from 'cure the sick' to 'we must all network and get well-paying jobs so we can donate so that we can hold conferences about existential risk, sorry sick people but your present suffering is nothing compared to the potential suffering of potential future billions if we do the calculations right') and thus you need more extreme forms of do-gooding to satisfy your inflamed intellect. Ordinary "give to local church donations for the needy, help out in a soup kitchen", etc. actions are not good enough because any ignorant normie can do that, plus your philosophy has tidily proven that helping those you know near to you is racist and elitist and much less effective and efficient and not worth doing.

So you get hung up on shrimp and plants and 'suffering is bad' (which most people will agree on) 'hence we must wipe out all organic life, starting with every single wild animal, because their natural lives where we don't interfere with them are just horrible - nasty, brutish and short like the guy said' (which most people will think is freakin' extreme and slightly nuts).

One vibe I pick up from the modern vegans is that the anti-suffering ethics are the ethics of the future.

I hear people try to prognosticate ethics and I just laugh. The future will be bizarre and amoral in ways none of us can even comprehend. You will despise your great grandchildren, and they will despise you, for reasons you currently would consider totally baffling. And in the meantime, social ills that currently seem intractable will find themselves easily fixed by advancing technologies. I don't have any median prediction for the future, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was something like, "we discover the ability to reliably change someone's sexual and gender orientation with a pill and as a consequence the modern LGBT wars die down... and simultaneously, artificial wombs create an acrimonious civil war between the people who accept and reject the repugnant conclusion.."

as a consequence the modern LGBT wars die down

The new wars will be over "a pill to turn LGBT kids cis het? this is genocide!" and those who want "a pill to change cis het to glorious queerness". As humans, we can always find something to fight over.

Maybe that's how the fight looks like in the next 5-10 years, but again, I think you're being insufficiently imaginative. Imagine instead a realignment so that the feuding sides are, "people should keep the sexual orientation and felt gender identity they're naturally predispositioned to" versus "we should precisely schedule changes in sexual and gender organization across several developmental thresholds to create well-behaved citizens." Something utterly bizzare, like making every kindergartener a girl so that they all play peacefully, then transitioning people to man or woman based off which educational track they used, combined with making people gay during their early teens so they don't have accidental pregnancies, but making them EXTREMELY straight going into adulthood to make sure their parents get grandchildren.

You should be careful, creating extremely interesting science fiction settings is liable to inspire people to realize them.

Whether living in them is good or bad seems to have no effect on the phenomenon.

I'm writing a book where the main character wants to turn herself into a cannibalism-powered surveillance state, her best friend belongs to a tribe of matriarchal-eugenicist-fascists that can reasonably described as feminazis, the "good guys" are the IEEE if it was also simultaneously the illuminati, and the "bad guys" are a mix of UN blue helmets and the Knights Templar. I am balls deep in moral dissonance dissonance and nobody is going to stop me.

Something utterly bizzare, like making every kindergartener a girl so that they all play peacefully, then transitioning people to man or woman based off which educational track they used, combined with making people gay during their early teens so they don't have accidental pregnancies, but making them EXTREMELY straight going into adulthood to make sure their parents get grandchildren.

That level of messing around with basic biology means that you're going to do better creating android bodies to implant the brains in. Plus, why would you get grandkids for the parents who let their kids be switched around from male to female to female to male to gay to straight? The confusion about "am I going to have babies or make someone else have babies" will be enormous, if you're mucking about with "biological female but interested in 'male' subjects during education so transitioned to be trans man, but now we want them to be straight to have babies"? Pregnant (trans) man if you left the original plumbing intact, but after all the hormone dosing and surgeries there may not be too much functional plumbing left. Even worse if you want to have your trans man now be able to father babies with their neo-penis, where's the viable sperm coming from?

And even after all that has been sorted out, there's the stubborn problem remaining of "people like having lots of sex but don't like having lots of babies to try and raise, they will dodge having kids if at all possible". Maybe your EXTREMELY straight men and women will all be having anal sex because that's more fun than boring old penis-in-vagina sex, especially after "between the ages of ten and twenty-two I was gay as an entire Pride parade and fucked all the guys/gals", trying to rewire psychology may be a lot tougher than "chop off the breasts, now put the breasts back with fake plastic tits".

I mean I think reading this it occurs to me that the post-modern are behaving very much like modern conservatives.

I think the next frontier is the rights of midgets. It's been simmering for a while, and I assumed it would happen as soon as the trans thing died down, but that was ten years ago and the trans thing lasted longer than I would have thought.

I think you might be right about this one, at least in a broad way. Interestingly I think “midget rights” is/was catching on more in Britain than in the U.S., although it may have died down. As a specific example I recall watching the last season of Derry Girls with my girlfriend a few years ago and there was a midget reporter (or news anchor, or something like that, I think) whose midget-ness went completely unremarked upon by the characters, to a really implausible extent that took us out of the episode in a sort of “are we really not going to address this?” kind of way. I’m certain there were at least one or two other British TV shows from that period that did a similar thing but I can’t recall them off my head. I don’t think this particular version of woke casting ever caught on at all in American media and I suspect it died down in Britain as well, although I’m not sufficiently keyed in to the British media scene to say that for sure. I hadn’t thought about this in some time so I’m curious if any Brits (or anglophiles) here can weigh in.

As an aside, did “we”, so to speak, ever settle on a politically correct word for “midget”? I’m positive midget is considered rude but it frankly feels like the least bad way to say it, and is what I would probably choose in most cases in real life. “Little person” is ridiculously patronizing… maybe “dwarf”? That still feels weird to me, but introspecting maybe it’s what I would choose in woke company.

I think you construct your sentence as, “Peter Dinkle, an actor who famously suffers from dwarfism, commented today…”

Surely aborting fetuses for having a trait has a different moral calculus than removing that trait while leaving the person otherwise intact?

Given there seems to be a decently common strain of progressivism that's pro-abortion and anti-gene-editing, for many people no, the calculus would be the same.

If they’re coming to opposite conclusions, then I don’t see what makes you say they’re using the same calculus.

We will manage to rethink, remeasure, and find additional ways of suffering. People always have. Today, plants do not feel "pain", but tomorrow, pain may not a prerequisite for suffering.

I keep quoting this and Chesterton meant it as rollicking satire, but somebody is always trying to make it come true:

Then there was the opposite school. There was Mr. Edward Carpenter, who thought we should in a very short time return to Nature, and live simply and slowly as the animals do. And Edward Carpenter was followed by James Pickie, D.D. (of Pocohontas College), who said that men were immensely improved by grazing, or taking their food slowly and continuously, after the manner of cows. And he said that he had, with the most encouraging results, turned city men out on all fours in a field covered with veal cutlets. Then Tolstoy and the Humanitarians said that the world was growing more merciful, and therefore no one would ever desire to kill. And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding," as he called it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble.

There is research about plant reactions to stimuli, but there's always that one person who can't resist taking it further

František Baluška is also very good at making inconceivable connections. Baluška, a plant cell biologist at University of Bonn, has for some time now been of the opinion that plants are intelligent—after all, they can process information and make decisions. But do plants have consciousness? That takes the discussion to a whole different level. If we could prove that plants have consciousness, we would have to radically change the way we interact with them, because we’d find ourselves facing the same kinds of issues that we face with factory farming in conventional agriculture.

Baluška, together with colleagues from around the world, including Stefano Mancuso from the University of Florence, has come a little closer to answering the question about plant consciousness. Baluška and his colleagues sedated plants that feature moving parts, such as Venus flytraps. These plants catch their prey in a trap that snaps shut as soon as insects touch trigger hairs on the inner side of their double-lobed leaves. The two sides of the leaf fold together in a flash, capturing the insect between them, and the plant then digests its prey. The anesthetics the scientists used, which included some that are used on people, deactivated electric activity in the plants so that the traps no longer reacted when they were touched. Sedated peas showed similar changes in behavior. Their tendrils, which usually move in all directions as they slowly feel their way through their surroundings to find supporting structures to grow on, stopped searching and started to spiral on the spot. After the plants broke the narcotics down, they resumed their normal behavior.

Some kind-hearted people have now got as far as worrying about bees, and shrimp. Bacteria will indeed be next. Then plants. How can we be so speciesist and arrogant about our artificial hierarchy imposed on the natural world? And of course there is chatter about "are machines sentient, is AI self-aware or could become self-aware?" so we're working our way slowly but steadily towards "do rocks think?"

Right now I can afford to laugh at researchers solemnly "sedating peas" and checking do their little tendrils twitch then writing up the results, but some day in the not-too-distant future, it may be no laughing matter. We may have to try can we live on salt (until the "thinking rocks" set argue about "why should Salt suffer?")

Got me to wondering: has there ever been a video game or movie where the villain (hero?) becomes convinced that the only way to end all suffering in the universe is to extinguish all consciousness and life? I feel like I've seen this trope a thousand times, but I can't put my finger on one that matches it perfectly. Maybe one of the FF games? Probably some anime somewhere.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OmnicidalManiac

A lot of anime. It overlaps with "humans don't deserve to exist" quite a bit.

Flame of Frenzy in Elden Ring.

Final Fantasy 9

And FFXIV : Endwalker (cw: level 90 spoilers).

X as well with Seymour wanting to become Sin so he could give everyone the sweet release of death

It is amusing that it starts with "(I think this is a pretty important article so I’d appreciate you sharing and restacking it—thanks!)", since I would imagine that most randos exposed to arguments like "utilitarian veganism means that eating honey is one of the worst things that you can do" to conclude that utilitarian veganism is stupid and must be resisted, rather than stop eating honey. In general I cannot recall any thought experiment style arguments on ethical veganism that haven't just ended up pushing me towards a wholesale rejection of animal rights as an ethos.

cross section of ethical veganism, rationalists, and nerdy utilitarian blogs.

Surveying my vegan friends, what's been most interesting to discover is that they're mostly not utilitarians. I routinely pose the question of, "how many weeks of veganism would I have to endure to convince you to eat a single burger." One dude was provisionally willing to eat a burger if it turned me vegan permanently (and agreed in general that there was some finite number of weeks he would trade for a burger) but the rest turned out to be avowed kantians on the subject. Apparently they didn't care about saving animal lives on net as much as they cared about not violating their personal morality about not contributing to the suffering of animals. That was a particularly interesting result for me because these same vegans are also involved in the local EA movement (which is how I met them.) Going in, I was under the impression that EA was a pretty explicitly utilitarian movement, in the sense that it prioritized QALYs and net pleasure-minus suffering, but that wasn't the angle they approached it from.

The suffering of bees may be important to mitigate (I think that’s true — wouldn’t you care if someone were purposely buying bees only to kill them?) but the author must convince us —

  • the suffering of bees is of such high importance that it is worth writing on it to convince people to place a burden on themselves. (Unlikely. There is worse suffering taking place even if we consider only bees, like the effects of pesticides. It’s not worth discourse hours).

  • that writing something so unintuitive that people ignore what else you write is morally worth the future drawbacks of loss of influence.

  • that the suffering of bees is so important that we should forego the very term of pleasure. This is problematic to his utilitarian ambitions, because our motivation to live well and expand our wellbeing is tied to whether we are able to experience wholesome pleasures in life. If people feel better from a spoonful of honey, not only does their own suffering decrease, but (1) they have energy to reduce the suffering of others and (2) the reason to love bees over wasps is brought to mind.

  • bees are not designed to be destroyed by mammals, given that bears and raccoons destroy them in the wild, and given that fish are designed to be eaten by other fish. If the author does not believe that nature’s design should be respected, then his interest should be ensuring that killer whales aren’t able to kill dolphins in the ocean. But wouldn’t only a senseless person have a problem with the killer whale enjoying his design and eating dolphins, who significantly more intelligent than bees? So the suffering of bees is within our design — we should only guarantee that the suffering isn’t excessive, like with some easy regulations about whether all the young bees are killed off after the honey is made.

There’s possibly an element of Jewish thought in this reasoning + Singer’s. Because there’s an eagerness to heap up behavioral proscriptions, however numerous; there’s the love of rules and the eagerness to find extrapolations to the rules which defy normal intuition; there’s the arbitrary basis to begin morality; and there’s the obsession with trivia and edge cases over more substantive issues. That’s immaterial, but just interesting to note — it’s possible some of Matthew’s moral intuitions come from a different traditional framework.

wouldn’t you care if someone were purposely buying bees only to kill them?

Only if they were doing so on an industrial scale and fucking with the bee economy. Human beings annihilate insects in their quadrillions every year; if they're worth anything more than zero then I guess we should all just kill ourselves right now to make room for them.

I would care if they were doing it even on a small scale, unless there was a good reason, but I don't think that particularly implies that bees' suffering matters. I think I'd be aggrieved by anyone buying any cool thing in order to pointlessly destroy it, living or not. And bees are cool.

wouldn’t you care if someone were purposely buying bees only to kill them?

Not in the least. I've heard of worse hobbies.

Where is the line you draw in biological sophistication when you begin to care? A mouse? A bird?

A human. More or less, there are caveats involved. A brain-dead or severely cognitively impaired (without hope of improvement) human loses all/most of their moral worth as far as I'm concerned. Not all humans are made alike.

This doesn't mean that entities that are more "sophisticated", biologically or otherwise, but aren't human in terms of genetic or cognitive origin enter my circle of concern. An intelligent alien? I don't particularly care about its welfare? A superintelligent AI? What's it to me? A transhuman or posthuman descendant of Homo sapiens? I care about such a being's welfare. Call it selfish if you want, since I expect to become one or have my descendants become them.

This is simply a fact about my preferences, and I'm not open to debate on the criteria I use personally. I'm open to discussing it, but please don't go to the trouble if you expect to change my mind.

Forgive me, but could you clarify a bit? Are you saying:

  1. You literally feel absolutely no repugnance / negative valence whatsoever at somebody buying lots of helpless creatures purely because they find it fun to kill them.
  2. You have some kind of negative emotional response to it, but for intellectual reasons you have decided not to indulge that response. E.g. you rationalise that no actual harm has taken place to anything with moral weight / man is master of the animals and therefore has the right to do such things even if you don’t find it tasteful.
  3. You feel a negative response that is weak enough that, to you, it can be rounded down to zero in mildly hyperbolic fashion on the internet.

I'd probably go with number 2 and a bit of 3. I would likely think slightly worse of someone who acts that way, but not to the point I'd say or do much about it.

I think that the majority of our intuitions about the distasteful nature of torturing animals arises from the fact that, in the modern day, the majority of people who do such a thing are socio/psychopaths and hence dangerous to their fellow man.

This is not a universal unchanging truth! You don't have to go very far back in time to find societies and cultures where randomly kicking dogs and torturing cats was no big deal, and great fun for the whole gang. Even today, many small kids will tear wings off flies without being sociopaths or psychopaths. They get trained out of expressing such behavior.

If a person got their kicks out of torturing animals, but didn't demonstrate other reasons for me to be concerned about them, I don't really care.

On a slight tangent, I don't care about animal rights or welfare. The fact that a cutesy little cow had to die to make a steak means nothing to me. I'm still only human, so I feel bad if I see someone mistreat a dog, and might occasionally intervene if my emotions get too strong. That's an emotional response, not an intellectual one, because I think the crime they're commuting is equivalent to property damage, and they have the right to treat their own property as they will. This doesn't stop me from loving my own two dogs, and being willing to use severe violence on anyone who'd hurt them. But it's the fact that they're my dogs that makes it so, and I wouldn't donate money to the RSPCA.

Thanks for explaining, I get where you're coming from better now.

I would think if I found out someone enjoyed killing bees, I would be concerned but only inasmuch as their behavior analogizes to things I care about. I wouldn't want my sister to date a guy who purchased bees for the purpose of killing them.

There’s possibly an element of Jewish thought in this reasoning + Singer’s. Because there’s an eagerness to heap up behavioral proscriptions, however numerous; there’s the love of rules and the eagerness to find extrapolations to the rules which defy normal intuition; there’s the arbitrary basis to begin morality; and there’s the obsession with trivia and edge cases over more substantive issues. That’s immaterial, but just interesting to note — it’s possible some of Matthew’s moral intuitions come from a different traditional framework.

This is called autism, not Jewishness. Autism can lead to people not having an innate understanding of why social rules work the way they do and trying to make sense of them in arcane ways that take them overly literally.

Autism can lead to people not having an innate understanding of why social rules work the way they do

Most normal neurotypical people don't understand why social rules work the way they do. They just can intuit what the rules are and don't question following them. Trying to get them to actually explain these arbitrary rules and why this or that particular variation exist is a maddening exercise in futility. It almost always results in a tautology.

The median estimate, from the most detailed report ever done on the intensity of pleasure and pain in animals, was that bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people.

Hm. Just today, I passed a swimming pool and noticed an insect struggling in the water. It was a bee. Did I have a Singerian obligation to hop the fence and rescue the 7-15% of a drowning child?

Of course not. Your obligation is to get a well paying job at an AI company, usher in the apocalypse, and convert the universe into computronium, which can run innumerable simulations of bee lives in lands of endless flowers and honey and free of suffering.

Forget about simulations. Humans have one million times the mass of a bee but only ten times the ability to experience joy. It would be downright unethical not to convert all humans into swarms of happy bees.

Bees make way better communists than humans, and there's way less competition, and they do what man was assigned to do in Genesis, and keep the gardens flourishing. This is actually starting to sound like a good idea. But there are no flowering plants in Space, and we can extend humanbee happiness several orders of magnitude via star-lifting, so either the entity who bebeeified humanity does all the space stuff while Beekind does all the life stuff, or we need to figure out how to make Space Bees work. /🧐

"Sorry I let your kid drown, but since I saved 15 bees today I'm still 5% ahead of the game."

The more I think about it, the more I suspect this criticism fails to account for the fact that the kid has a far longer life expectancy than the bees, which would need to be factored in. One kid is worth at least 1000 bees!

For reference, the average hive supposedly has about 30,000 bees. Enough to fill half a five-gallon bucket.

Your comment here actually really got me thinking. My wife loves most bugs, and over the years we've found several struggling bugs that managed to find their way inside, usually cute ones like moths and box elder bugs (she has no qualms with killing pests like mosquitoes, flies, and wasps though). My wife will catch them, give them water and something to eat (like leaves or sugar water or whatever, depends on the bug), then release them in a nice place. Sometimes I think she goes a little overboard in making things nice for them, but her actions are driven by real love and compassion for the little critters. In fact just a week ago we found a vole trapped in one of our window wells so we caught him and brought him to a beautiful field a few miles away right next to a river.

In any case, my ooint is that for all of this abstract talk of bee consciousness and suffering, the idea of the weirdos writing this stuff having actual compassion and concern for these creatures doesn't seem to be the case. Maybe it's the virtue ethicist in me (and my utter contempt for utilitarianism as a guiding ethical framework) but all of these attempts to abstract moral and ethical behavior into quantifiable abstractions makes them seem like something an alien might come uo with. The human aspects of ethics are completely missing.

Almost makes me wonder if secret lizardmen aliens infiltrating human society conspiracy theories aren't true.

I mean, I believe in moral intuition and I suspect in this case most people would have a strong moral impulse to do just this, even though they'd discard it as impractical. I think it's hard to retreat to moralistic intuition and five minutes later say "but this moral impulse you must squash."

Where it gets complicated for me is, do you have an obligation to save a bee that gets stuck in a spiderweb? There's no reason to assume the bee is more worthy of survival than the spider. But here my moral opinions strongly strike out in favor of "kill the spider, save the bee". But in that case I know that other people have the opposite response.

Obviously no, not unless it was two bees. Three? Absolute moral obligation or else you are a monster!

The median estimate, from the most detailed report ever done on the intensity of pleasure and pain in animals, was that bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people. Bees were guessed to be more intensely conscious than salmon!

I don't see why people are taking issue with this. Why should suffering and pain be cognitively complex?

Emotional heartbreak or intellectual suffering may be intellectually demanding but that's not really worse than pain. If you thrash a severely, extremely mentally retarded person then he may very well cry out and try to evade you, his suffering isn't obviously diminished by his stupidity. I might well choose intellectual pain over physical pain if given the option.

The real issue is concluding that because animals are suffering due to human policies there's a systematic need to change our behaviour. There isn't. Animals are not people by definition. There's no need to worry about them.

Saying 'oh well bees are only worth 0.0002 human suffering points not 0.02 or 0.07' is a foolish defence. There's a lot of bees around. If you multiply it out then we'd still need to put great effort into satisfying their desires, likewise with other insects. There are lots of ants and rats and whatever else, ludicrous numbers of them. Put the baseline animal moral weighting at 0 and there's no problem, regardless of how they suffer. Furthermore, it might be discovered that, by scanning the brain of the bee or some other animals, that these animals actually feel deeper pain and more profound suffering than we do. Who cares even if that were so? Does some weird mole or marmot deserve welfare because it has an overdeveloped sense of suffering?

There's no need to go out of our way to harm animals but they shouldn't be considered in this way. Instead of weighted benevolence, there should be a focus on reciprocity. If the bear or elephant is nice to people and helps out, then be nice to the elephant or bear. If the killer whale tries to sink human ships, kill it. The size of their brains or their ability to feel pain shouldn't relate to how they're treated. A bee is worth more than a pitbull in my book.

There's a lot of bees around. If you multiply it out then we'd still need to put great effort into satisfying their desires, likewise with other insects. There are lots of ants and rats and whatever else, ludicrous numbers of them.

As a random aside, reading this gave me flashbacks to when I attended a 10 day Vipassana meditation retreat. Part of the expected behaviour while you are there is that (besides vows of silence, chastity, vegetarianism, no physical contact or eye contact) you are expected to not harm any other being. This is pretty much in line with strict Buddhist precepts.

We were given guidance to try not to step on ants while wandering the grounds and to try not to harm flies/bees/other insects. It wasn't that hard really, except to not reflexively slap bugs on your skin but brush them off gently instead. Also, I ended up not looking too closely at the tracks I was walking on because otherwise I'd slow to a snail's pace. See no evil and all that.

On this topic, I have an (admittedly pedantic) pet peeve. The pro-vegan, animal rights movement often use the phrase "cruelty-free", referring to cruelty-free diets, cruelty-free lifestyles, cruelty-freee products etc. The idea is that anyone who eats meat or uses cosmetic products which were tested on animals is therefore complicit in cruelty, unlike people who don't do these things.

I accept that people living plant-based diets are complicit in less cruelty than people who eat meat. But they are not living cruelty-free lives: the amount of cruelty in which they are complicit is far from zero. Agricultural farmers still have to clear land to grow crops, which means exterminating the vermin occupying said land. (Maybe I've just reinvented the "no ethical consumption under capitalism" meme.)

I think that level of imprecision is pretty darn normal when describing preferences. It’s not a technical term like “gluten-free” or “kosher.”

Hell, even the latter is subject to complex edge cases.

It's a massive implicit value judgement like the egregious slimeball that successfully argued Just Mayo as in "justice" is acceptable.

I don't care about calling pea-protein-derived spread "mayo." I do care about abusing multiple definitions of the word "just" in misleading ways, and someone should regularly egg Josh Tetrick's house for this offense against language and decency.

"Just" go ahead and label it "we're the good guys, neener neener."

I think that level of imprecision is pretty darn normal when describing preferences.

Is it, though?

  • Vegetarian: a person who does not eat meat, including fish and seafood.
  • Vegan: a person who does not consume animal products.
  • Pescatarian: a person who doesn't eat meat, but does eat fish and seafood.

All of these concepts are simple enough that a child can understand them. They get misused by people for stolen valour reasons, but that's not to say the concepts themselves are imprecise.

Sure they are. Some more than others.

You’re treating “cruelty-free” like it’s “vegan,” which has an obvious single condition to meet. But it’s more like “pescatarian,” an awkward wastebasket taxon that doesn’t quite match the literal name. It’s just that most people don’t bother distinguishing oysters from lobsters from tuna even though they are happy to draw the line at whales. We could add prefixes until we partitioned out the 12 principled pescatarians, but it is not generally considered relevant.

The partition for “Cruelty-free” means not complicit in a subset of acts which are considered cruel. It’s not exhaustive, and you can catch practitioners in weird edge cases. But 99% of the time you can get them to agree, hey, that thing they do to male chickens is in the “cruel” category, right? Then they’re supposed to avoid it.

How is this different from asking pescatarians if whales are fish?

This is even more complicated because ‘cruelty free’ sometimes gets used as a label for animal products produced in more humane conditions eg free range eggs. It’s just a bad term for expressing anything in particular.

When I was a kid I saw this funny ad. It shows this monk with a shaved head and flowing red robes (Buddhist or Shinto or something - I don't know, and I assume the creators of the ad didn't know either), who's a friend to all living creatures. He's walking home when he spots a ladybird on the pavement that he almost steps on - so he leans over to delicately pick it up and places it gently on the grass next to the pavement. Then when he gets home he's sitting on the toilet, and while he's going about his business he picks up the bottle of bleach next to it and reads that it kills 99.9% of bacteria in his toilet. With mounting horror, he realises the genocide he's unwittingly caused every time he squirts bleach down his toilet.

Funny ad, clever concept. But it got me thinking - where do you draw the line in determining which animals' welfare to care about? Are bacteria animals? If we're meant to avoid eating honey because it causes bees to suffer more than they otherwise would have, why not bacteria? Are antibiotics genocide?

(Also I know this is mean, but ever since I found out Bentham's Bulldog looks like this I've been unconsciously discounting his opinions in my head slightly.)

I remember that commercial. It wasn't for bleach, though. It was for Kleenex.

Thank you, that was the exact one I was thinking of.

Buddhist or Shinto or something - I don't know, and I assume the creators of the ad didn't know either

I would assume Jainism! They sweep the ground in front of themselves as they walk, and wear facemasks to avoid inhaling bugs. You beat me to it by about 15 minutes.

The post went too far, even for LessWrong's open-minded standards. The comments there are 90% people tearing into it.

There are also crops that depend exclusively or nearly exclusively on beekeepers to pollinate crops. Even vegans that do not eat honey probably eat some of them. Sometimes you can find people that avoid almonds and avocados but it seems to be very niche even among vegans, but I've never seen it extended to coffee or cocoa beans. Or really, any consideration of the suffering that goes into what they use/consume other than the most signalable like not eating meat.

Bentham (the author) countered that Argument by saying he is not eating Almonds.

He does in this comment. I had not seen this as I don't normally read comments. Maybe he lives up to his namesake more than I thought.

I was recently discussing why are foods including yeast ok with vegans but honey is not? Yeast are living things and we either stick them in bottles of their own waste until they shut down or cook them alive and there are many many more of them than anything else we use to prepare food.

I don’t care if they’re living. I care if they experience something that I would recognize as pain. The closer they get to having our sort of neurotransmitters or whatever, the more empathy I feel.

There is no reason to think single celled organisms can suffer.

Suffering is essentially just the unlearning gradient in an ML model. Any system that responds to external stimuli by altering itself to avoid repeating past behavior can suffer. Even a single neuron can suffer. Even a single atom can suffer.

That being said, I don't care about the suffering of neurons and atoms-- or plants, or animals, or basically anything except a few near-human species (apes, elephants, cetaceans, etc), pets I irrationally love, and of course humans themselves. AI could be smarter than me but I'm still not going to give a shit if it suffers except insofar as it experiences specifically human suffering.

While I agree with the second paragraph, the first one has me scratching my head. Why would suffering have anything to do with the "unlearning gradient of an ML model" and, if so, how does an atom have anything to do with ML?

I think of it more as a (negative) reward signal in RL. When a human touches a hot stove, there's a sharp drop in dopamine (our reward signal). Neural circuits adjust their synapses to betterpredict future (negative) reward, and subsequently they take actions that don't do it. There's a bit of a sleight of hand here--do we actually know our experience of pain is equivalent to a negative reward signal--but it's not too wild a hypothetical extrapolation.

How do atoms fit in? Well, it's a stretch, but one way to approach it is to treat atoms as trying to maximize a reward of negative energy, on a hard coded (unlearned) policy corresponding to the laws of physics. E.g. burning some methane helps them get to a lower energy state, maximizing their own reward. Or, to cause "physical" pain, you could put all the gas in a box on one side of the box: nature abhors a vacuum.

Neither psychologist nor RL people I talked with seem to believe that this is literally how the human mind works, because this leads you to the suspicious conclusion that the thousands of simple RL models people train for e.g. homework are also experiencing immense sufferring. Yes there is a vaguely RL-like layer of our brain, but RL itself does not conscious experience make. Unless of course you have some very heavy philosophical machinery to convince us otherwise...

That's the sleight of hand I mentioned: because qualia are so mysterious, it's a leap to assume that RL algorithms that maximize reward correspond to any particular qualia.

On the other hand, suffering is conditioned on some physical substrate, and something like "what human brains do" seems a more plausible candidate for how qualia arise than anything else I've seen. People with dopamine issues (e.g. severe Parkinson's, drug withdrawal) often report anhedonia.

That heavy philosophical machinery is the trillion dollar question that is beyond me (or anyone else that I'm aware of).

this leads you to the suspicious conclusion that the thousands of simple RL models people train for e.g. homework are also experiencing immense sufferring

Maybe they are? I don't believe this, but I don't see how we can simply dismiss it out of hand from an argument of sheer disbelief (which seems just as premature to me as saying it's a fact). Agnosticism seems to be the only approach here.

But what if they all make up a group mind and so they have intelligence and sentience? You just don't know! What if yeast have souls? What if yeast are souls, the soul of Gaia? All the individual organisms on the Earth make up one giant mega-organism, just like all the different cells in our bodies make up one mega-organism that we call the self! And besides, humans aren't conscious either, there is no one single unitary "I" or "self". So it's all the same!

(No, I don't believe any of this, but if one gets into the weeds of philosophical explorations of what is life, what is consciousness, why do you think it's not okay to shove the fat man into the path of the trolley, etc., one can easily discard common sense by the way).

Not a vegan but it seems internally consistent. Yeast are indeed living things, just like plants! Since vegans haven't quite figured out how to photosynthesize yet, they still need to eat living things to not starve. Yeast is just acceptable casualties.

You joke, yet one of my oldest dreams is our geneediting capabilities to reach the state where we can produce a human/plant hybrid where basking in the sun actually feeds you.

Photosynthesis provides far too little calories of sugar. Outsourcing your photosynthesis to a large quantity of plants gives you enough energy for a high metabolism and big brain.

The minor character of the Green Man was included in the Book of the New Sun just for you.


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