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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27683 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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Back in 2021, Reuters published the following about the Ghislaine Maxwell trial:

Shawn, now 38, recalled traveling to Epstein's house with Carolyn for the first time with a girl named Virginia Roberts and Roberts' boyfriend after Roberts told Carolyn the pair could make money by giving "a guy a massage."

"She was excited to make money," said Shawn, who has not been accused of wrongdoing in the case.

He added that he and Roberts' boyfriend saw Roberts and Carolyn go into Epstein's home, waited for them for more than an hour, and saw them leave the home with hundred dollar bills.

{snip}

Shawn's account of that first trip largely matched up with Carolyn's version. After that first trip, Shawn said he drove Carolyn to Epstein's home every two weeks, and that Carolyn would leave with hundred dollar bills. They would use the cash to buy drugs, Shawn said, echoing his former girlfriend's statement on the stand on Tuesday.

{snip}He said he also drove two other girls he was dating at the time, Amanda and Melissa, to Epstein's home.

{snip}He said he sometimes received calls from Epstein employees seeking to schedule a massage appointment for Epstein with Carolyn{snip}

"not accused of wrongdoing," LOL, when the guy's a f***ing pimp. The Online Right could use this to dunk on the dishonest mainstream media and in defense of high-minded Western ideals like telling the truth and not putting much stock in the testimony of admitted drug-using pimps and hookers. Instead, the Online Right has gone in a very different direction, being convinced that it would severely disrupt the status quo if they could prove the Epstein murder/pedo ring conspiracy is true. ActuallyATleilaxuGhola asserts that the only reason people would doubt that Epstein was murdered is a desire to avoid a backlash against the status quo or Jews:

I really think that, if Epstein were not apparently connected to intelligence, powerful people in government, and were not Jewish, nearly zero people would argue that he killed himself. There are simply too many "coincidences." But there are people who like the political status quo (or at least despise the upstarts trying to disrupt the status quo), and there are other people who perceive the emphasis on Epstein's Jewishness/Mossad connections as dangerous to themselves (I have sympathy for this second group).

I think it's the "Epstein was murdered" people who are engaging in motivated reasoning, since the evidence for the conspiracy is very weak. Instead of another perhaps pointless argument about the evidence, let's look at the underlying assumption that "exposure" of the supposed conspiracy would "disrupt the status quo." Would that actually happen?

Suppose the Clintons, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Prince Andrew, Jean-Luc Brunel, a few Democratic Senators and governors and a bunch of celebrities go to prison for "pedophilia."(more on that later) Throw in some top FBI/CIA people responsible for the Epstein murder.

Here's what won't happen. They will not go to white separatists, revolutionary communists, trad Catholics, and the Nation of Islam and say "your hands are clean, now it's your turn to exercise power." Governors will appoint replacements for Senators. Minor actors will receive major actors' roles. The bank's vice president will replace the imprisoned CEO. Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, who were too unimportant at the time to be associated with Epstein, will still be there. It might even benefit the Democrats by clearing out the gerontocrats.

You may say that, over the long term, voters will be more open to anti-establishment voices. I wouldn't be so sure. Won't take long for the establishment to come up with its equivalent of "the Soviet Union failed because it wasn't communist enough." They'll point out that the vast majority of the accused/convicted individuals are men, so we need more control of male sexuality. Most of the Epstein victims were 16 or 17. "Pedo ring" people don't talk about this fact, gambling that fear of being called a pedophile will dissuade people from bringing it up. But if you want there to be a "reckoning" over this, it's unavoidable. If it's your position that attraction to 16-17 yo girls is "pedophilia" and there's a national emergency of "pedophiles" in positions of power, why not just bar heterosexual men from positions of power? After all, most are "pedophiles" by that definition. Indeed, the establishment might use the necessity of preventing further pedo rings as justification for Patriot Act-style restrictions on civil liberties. You might not fall for that, but what about the average 55-year-old woman who gets all her news from the MSM?

Thankfully the pedo rings don't in fact exist. Hopefully Rightists will grow more comfortable in saying so. Epstein conspiracism is not only wrong on the facts, it's a pointless political dead-end.

  • -17

But it’s a big deal if a group of Zionists, by way of Mega Group founder Les Wexner who seeded Epstein with 200-400 million dollars, was involved in blackmailing influential Americans to do Israel’s bidding as part of some insane fifth-gen lobbying campaign. It’s a very big deal that Jeffrey Epstein’s own brother says

In the 2016 election, we were talking about the election and Jeffrey told me that if he said what he knew about the candidates, they would have to cancel the election

(as I predicted in a comment weeks back). There’s a lot of evidence that this is what happened which I won’t rehash as I’ve commented on it enough recently.

Epstein making allusions is peak Epstein. There’s nothing in this statement. What did he know? As usual, unreported because there’s a good chance it was either third-hand hearsay or nothing.

Thankfully the pedo rings don't in fact exist. Hopefully Rightists will grow more comfortable in saying so. Epstein conspiracism is not only wrong on the facts, it's a pointless political dead-end.

I don't think you can conclude this.

It's a pointless political dead-end because it can't ever be adjudicated. At best you can say the epistemic commons are so poisoned on the issue that Epstein Files is now 9/11 Conspiracy is now JFK Conspiracy. No majority will believe any explanation, no matter how bipartisan the committee and how much evidence gets dumped.

Acktually the whole Epstein saga isn't related to pedophilia because 16 year old girls are sexually mature so there is nothing wrong with being attracted to them.

You are again purposely ignoring and denying what people mean when they talk about the situation. It's a ring of geriatric men trafficking and abusing a bunch of underage girls. Most people would agree that such a thing can be described as a pedo ring.

Nobody cares that technically, abusing 16 year old girls does not meet the criteria for a DSM-5 diagnosis for the mental disorder. People are still going to call them pedos.

It's not pedophilia, but we should still call them pedos anyway. However, there's only so far you can push this socially useful equivocation before it starts backfiring.

People are still going to call them pedos.

Then people are wrong. I discussed this before.

Let me put it more plainly and provocatively. The problem with calling a 50yo who fucks a 16yo teen in a clearly coercive setting "pedophile" is that you are equating something which is deeply morally objectionable with something which is fine.

In case there is any doubt about which is which, yes, I am claiming that there is nothing morally wrong with being a pedophile, in the technically sense of the word.

Now obviously, it is a sexual orientation which sucks greatly for anyone with a remotely working moral compass (and will lead to behavior which is very wrong for those without one), and I thank my maker that I am into women with tits instead so I have access to ethically produced porn and ethical opportunities to have sex (even if being bi would be strictly preferable in that regard).

Sure, there is a large overlap between child-fuckers and pedophiles, but my problem is with child-fuckers as child-fuckers. If some asshole decides to sexually abuse a kid, I don't give a rats ass if they were into kids or watching MILF porn at the same time to keep aroused, they should go to prison either way.

Using pedos as a synonym for child abusers is bad. Expanding it to include creepy sex pest-ry targeting underage victims is even worse. I also do not think that the general vibe of "your sexual orientation makes you the likeliest group to be deported to death camps without anyone else saying a word in your defense" is actually very effective at keeping ethical pedos (who are not complicit in sexual abuse) ethical, probably a society which was meh about ethical pedos but very much against child abusers (which mostly describes western legal systems) would offer a better gradient.

I am not much of a linguistic prescriptionist, normally. I use to beg the question correctly, but it is not a hill I am willing to die on. Still, words matter, and I think that on this forum we should strive to use accurate terminology even if 85% of the general population is using it in a more diffuse manner, especially if it involves emotionally charged words which are intentionally repurposed for clear political goals.

As another example (without a strict 1:1 correspondence), consider a (perhaps hypothetical) attempt to redefine "rape" as "any sex act perpetrated by a man which involved a woman who either did not consent or regretted consenting subsequently". (It is not entirely divorced from common usage, people have sex under the influence of voluntarily consumed drugs which would inhibit their legal ability to consent all the time, and end up in situations where they can decide on the next day that they were raped (and then decide to report it or not) or retroactively grant consent. (Perhaps not legally, but practically. Legally, "last night when I was dead drunk, I urged my hot husband to fuck my brains out and he did" might still be rape, but unless she bring that up in divorce proceedings eventually, nobody cares.)) Still, I would definitely argue against anyone here who would try to push such a new definition, because it hopelessly muddies the water by using the same term for different things which are not remotely morally equivalent.

There's nothing morally wrong with being a psychopath either but the stigma around that term isn't going away anytime soon either. Having a mental disorder may be morally neutral but the results are not for the vast majority of those afflicted, so I can't blame the public for having prejudice.

Another thing to consider here, is that within the past 20 years, the Catholic Church did suffer tremendous fallout for this thing.

It suffered massive losses in cultural influence, credibility, financial payouts, and legal win against it.

There’s two points here: one is that to the average person, this is a massive point in the “it could happen” column. Justice can be seen at least to a degree that isnt zero.

Second, all the excuses AT is making about technicality of ‘pedo ring’ applied here as well, but didn’t matter to the public perception. was widely regarded and reported as a pedo scandal, when it was mostly gay pederasty. The same mainstream taking down the Church downplayed this, not to justify them, but to avoid crossfire against homosexuality as well as get maximal outrage.

So again, ATs cutsie sneering at MAGAs that “this isn’t how it works” is completely at odds with how it actually did work and recently.

not accused of wrongdoing," LOL, when the guy's a f***ing pimp. The Online Right could use this to dunk on the dishonest mainstream media and in defense of high-minded Western ideals like telling the truth and not putting much stock in the testimony of admitted drug-using pimps and hookers.

Or maybe they read it like I do as "not being charged with crime".

Suppose the Clintons, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Prince Andrew, Jean-Luc Brunel, a few Democratic Senators and governors and a bunch of celebrities go to prison for "pedophilia."(more on that later) Throw in some top FBI/CIA people responsible for the Epstein murder.

Here's what won't happen. They will not go to white separatists, revolutionary communists, trad Catholics, and the Nation of Islam and say "your hands are clean, now it's your turn to exercise power." Governors will appoint replacements for Senators. Minor actors will receive major actors' roles. The bank's vice president will replace the imprisoned CEO. Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, who were too unimportant at the time to be associated with Epstein, will still be there. It might even benefit the Democrats by clearing out the gerontocrats.

Certainly there's room between "literally nothing changes" and "the white nationalist commie trad NOI extremists take control" right?

Most of the Epstein victims were 16 or 17. "Pedo ring" people don't talk about this fact, gambling that fear of being called a pedophile will dissuade people from bringing it up.

Bruh, people call that pedophilia all the time in other cases too. The "it's actually ephebophilia" statement is practically a meme of its own! And lots of people do get arrested for sexting/banging minors so I don't see why elites should be any different.

Also interesting little hedge in there of "most", ok so what about the ones that were a fair bit younger?

After all, most are "pedophiles" by that definition.

But they weren't just attracted to the teens! They were apparently trafficking them, pimping them out and having sex with them. People already get arrested for that and called pedophiles.

Indeed, the establishment might use the necessity of preventing further pedo rings as justification for Patriot Act-style restrictions on civil liberties. You might not fall for that, but what about the average 55-year-old woman who gets all her news from the MSM?

Doesn't seem like they need it too much, even just the stuff we publically know suggests they have access to a lot of our phone and computer data already.

Turok: the Epstein saga is materially true in a broader sense. Leave the conspiracy aside for a moment. You only have to look as far as his first brush with the law over the issue, where he leverages connections and money to get off with a slap on the wrist and the government not looking too closely. Even if the public is fuzzy on the details they more or less have the right general direction here in terms of rich shadowy men with connections getting away with stuff. Also: shocker alert, what you call the "online right" is not entirely made up of dishonest hacks who only care about the returns. Nope, they are by and large true believers. They don't give a fig about the actual long-term second-order effects. It's not some big plan that you're bursting their bubble about. There's no Santa Claus, here, in the first place, so pointing out he's not real doesn't do anything. In that light, I find your comment to be pretty pointless, and that's coming from me who kind of agrees about the status quo being unreasonably sticky *taps username, this time unironically and that generic replacement figures obviously quite often come from a similar statistical ideological and demographic distributions as the prior ones.

In fact I also happen to think that a large proportion of politicians are also either true believers or so ideologically captured as to make little difference, because of the pipeline that produces them, but most people seem to disagree and consider them almost all pure ambitious sociopaths with agnostic or apathetic personal politics, with a handful of outright corrupt ones on the side.

where he leverages connections and money to get off with a slap on the wrist and the government not looking too closely

Nobody disputes this, though. Well connected billionaires getting away with stuff is Tuesday.

The rich and powerful are expected to get away with some crimes. Sex trafficking children is not on that list.

In a civilized society, that kind of behavior gets you executed, and not because you know too much.

In a civilized society

So your contention is that there has never been a civilized society?

Rather, that we are not living up to much of our ideals.

Real civilization has never been tried.

The rich and powerful are expected to get away with some crimes. Sex trafficking children is not on that list.

Err, the west covers for sex trafficking kids all the time, and you don't need to be rich and powerful to get away with it (though it helps). Popular entertainers get away with it. Politicians cover massive-scale abuse - far beyond what Epstein is accused of - up and journalists look the other way to avoid having their foreign policies outed as idiotic, avoid having to be on the same side as icky migration restrictionists, or to avoid being called racist.

Don't we all regard those examples as moral failures though?

I've yet to see anybody seriously take the position that grooming gangs were okay, I've only seen shameful denial.

And yet lots of people keep covering such things up and not freaking out and leaking them out of moral outrage.

I think your viewpoint slots into a general pattern of enlightened centrism chilling effects denial, where people of various colours explain to you why electing this or that candidate, winning or losing one token court case, or taking one town of 10k in Ukraine or successfully defending it will not actually make a difference.

In reality, so much political power is determined not by what battles you can win, but what battles you can avoid even having to fight because your enemy is demoralised about his prospect of winning. The superior fighter will win 100 battles and lose his 101st because he is worn out, while the superior posturer will be secure in his position without having to fight a single battle.

The whole Epstein situation is a fuck-you flag planted in the town square, saying "we can even get away with this sort of thing". That this is about pederasty doesn't even matter, except insofar as there is common knowledge that a majority of people considers it the most heinous of crimes. While the flag stands, how many people who might otherwise choose to expend effort to go after a politician or dignitary for some lesser conspiracy or abuse of power will wisely choose to not even try?

If it's your position that attraction to 16-17 yo girls is "pedophilia" and there's a national emergency of "pedophiles" in positions of power, why not just bar heterosexual men from positions of power?

These men aren't being lambasted for being attracted to 16-17 yo girls. Men are being lambasted for fucking them with dubious consent and legality. It's the difference between desiring money and defrauding. Impulse control.

Furthermore, having extremely restrictive rules of engagement for hoi polloi while the billionaire elites get away with it is a cucked attitude.

Elites should not be breaking the law, they are supposed to be exemplars. Higher standing, higher rewards, higher standards. The FBI and CIA especially are not supposed to be breaking the law, they're supposed to be enforcing it.

How are you supposed to have a functioning country if the elites and officials are basically robbers, here for temporary gain, don't believe in anything except personal gratification (financial or sexual), don't care about enforcing rules evenly, take bribes or implicit promises of favours from powerful figures, take revenge on you if you report them? This is third-worldism not in the geopolitical sense but the social sense, third-world values. 'We shouldn't report or rally against the corrupt official because maybe the central government will punish us in retribution' is a supremely servile attitude. The Taliban were formed in large part to massacre child rapists amongst the warlords of Afghanistan. We may not share all their values but at least they believed in something more than short-term political gains, that's surely a large part of why they won the war. Why should those from the richest, strongest, most cultured nations hold lower standards than illiterate Afghans?

The rule of law is usually only brought up to justify judges or international courts nobody's ever heard of issuing strange and bizarre orders but this is a core example of where the rule of law should be invoked. No cover ups.

It’s just extremely disingenuous to suggest that warlords raping 8 year old boys is the same as Prince Andrew having sex with a 17 year old who may or may not have been a prostitute.

I support the latter being illegal, but there are obviously tiers of criminality. The sad reality of prostitution is that a large, disproportionate number of prostitutes are 16/17 and lie about their age, particularly in the poorest parts of the west, street walkers and truck stop sex workers, sometimes escorts on seeking arrangement / sugar baby sites too. Underclass and working class men hire them all the time without consequence, buying into the implicit suggestion they are adults if their conscience cares at all (it usually doesn’t).

It’s like the outrage over rich young actresses fucking ugly fat producers to become movie stars. I sympathize, but these are not the top victims of male predation. The purchasers of sex do something I think is wrong, but they aren’t worse than the millions of other men who do the same every day.

It’s just extremely disingenuous to suggest that warlords raping 8 year old boys is the same as Prince Andrew having sex with a 17 year old who may or may not have been a prostitute.

Those things aren't the same. However it is important to take a political stand in honest defence of values even if standing up for those values has short-term costs and ruffles feathers.

If we're gonna accept light statutory rape amongst elites (if it is even limited to light statutory rape, since the documentation and evidence of whatever's really going on remains concealed), why not medium statutory rape amongst grooming gangs? Where does it end? There are laws and those laws should be enforced. Laws and proper behaviour mustn't seem to be 'for suckers'.

What's the source of sympathy over casting couch situations? It's gross and worthy of judgment, but against both participants. The only people getting screwed are 1) the investors in the project, as the caster is misusing their authority to choose a (presumably inferior) casting option instead of fulfilling their responsibilities; and 2) the superior casting option who gets passed over. Just a particularly sleazy form of graft.

The young women choosing to do this might have economic struggles, but those aren't unique to them; whatever empathy they deserve for that should also be extended to all the women (and men!) who have the same economic struggles but don't choose the couch.

It depends on specifics, but in a lot of casting-couch cases I think the actress who's been offered the deal has a credible fear of retaliation if she says no - not just that she won't get the job, but that the spited producer will pull strings to get her blacklisted and ruin her career, leaving her much worse off than one who was never offered the deal in the first place. While you can still view giving in as the morally worse option, I think even an actress who gives in to that kind of ultimatum deserves a lot more sympathy than one who tries to sleep her way to a job of her own volition, with no expectation of actively negative consequences if she doesn't.

The only people getting screwed are

Hmm I can think of at least 2 other people getting screwed…

I would argue that Epstein and his guests are different from random truckers in that they purposefully selected for underage. If Epstein had hired 18yo's from escort websites only, this thing would be an absolute non-story, and nobody except a few prudes and feminists would get upset.

Being a sex worker at a truck stop is very likely not a great job. I would expect that the pay is lousy (because your clients do not have a lot of disposable income), it is rather dangerous (because "trucker", unlike "bank executive" does not filter for "intelligent person with an appropriate discounting function who will avoid any homicides they will not get away with") and that the clients are not particularly hot or skilled at sex. If you can make ends meet using OnlyFans or doing escort work, that seems much preferable. So I can totally see that this job selects for 16yo runaways who need to pay for their next meal or their next dose, and have neither the wardrobe nor the age to make it in the more respectable branches of sex work (where underage is likely a hard no, because it attracts the eye of Sauron like little else except murder).

Unlike the US, I have no problem with prostitution per se. I certainly do not think minors should be prostitutes, but also admit that I have no good way to align the incentives of a 16yo drug addict to that end. Still, I think informed consent is as important for sex work as for any sex act.

Some time ago, there was a scandal where some porn company would hire women for what they claimed to be modelling (or something similarly tame), then get into a plane to some other city, and suddenly be confronted with the fact that they would be shooting hardcore porn instead. This put the women in a position where they could either walk out, and find themselves in a city which they knew nothing about without a return ticket home, or they could conform with the expressed opinion of the set crew that shooting porn was not a big deal and believe their lies that their video would only be sold to foreign collectors and not be put on the internet. Eventually, the company got sued and is out of business now, and good riddance. By contrast, no hooker who climbs into a truck is under any illusion that the truck driver is going to do a photo shoot to kick off her modelling career. She might still get raped when the trucker violates the agreed boundaries, but that would then at least be a criminal matter (not that this would buy her anything, realistically).

Now, in theory, it could be that Epstein recruited his victims by driving to local truck stops and telling the sex workers: "I am currently recruiting underage prostitutes for a sex party. Here is a brief detailing transportation, accommodations, sex acts, payment, and safe words. Please read it, think about it for a week and then mail me what sex acts you feel comfortable with and I will get back to you."

However, in my world model, this is exceedingly unlikely. It is seems far more likely that the girls travelling on the Lolita express had at best a vague idea what would be required of them, and then were coerced in pretty much the same way as the victims of that unethical porn company were, except worse, because they were underage and actually trapped on an island.

I base this on my general impression of Epstein's MO wrt consent and also one major thing which I think is appealing in men about young partners, which is sexual inexperience. If you want an eager escort who has a great technique in oral sex, your ideal woman is likely a 25-30yo who has given head a few thousand times in her life and perfected her game, not a 16yo hooker. On priors, I don't think that Epstein specifically recruited virgins for his guests, because most of his guests would not appreciate a woman who curls down on the floor and starts crying when she is told what is expected of her, but I think that the whole setup was pretty much build around maximizing the power difference, his guests were probably into making their victims submit to sex acts which were way out of their comfort zone.

If you want an eager escort who has a great technique in oral sex, your ideal woman is likely a 25-30yo who has given head a few thousand times in her life and perfected her game, not a 16yo hooker. On priors, I don't think that Epstein specifically recruited virgins for his guests, because most of his guests would not appreciate a woman who curls down on the floor and starts crying when she is told what is expected of her, but I think that the whole setup was pretty much build around maximizing the power difference, his guests were probably into making their victims submit to sex acts which were way out of their comfort zone.

It's much easier to get a 16-yo to keep her mouth shut. A 26-yo will go to a gossip rag to tell everything about the sexual preferences of VIPs she was paid to have sex with the very moment her escorting career starts to wind down. A 16-yo is still young and stupid enough to be coerced into keeping her mouth shut, even stupid stuff like "would you like your parents to learn what you did?" will work on them.

My impression is that Epstein's clients were not particularly requesting for underage, that was Epstein himself, and that he deliberately recruited teenaged girls who were vulnerable because they did not have great lives with bright futures ahead. 100% of these girls understood when getting on the plane that 'I need you to work a high end party' meant 'have sex with the guests'- especially because my impression is that, like most pimps, Epstein himself was having sex with them.

It seems likely to me that many of Epstein's guests were getting off on the taboo aspect of having sex with minors. I doubt that 'power differentials' are a big part of the explanation for the simple reason that his guests already have a very high power differential compared to the vast majority of possible partners. Epstein wasn't offering anything special enough there to make committing crimes appealing.

who may or may not have been a prostitute

I found Giuffre more sympathetic than, say, Maria Farmer, who seems a little crazy (but at least said No to Maxwell). I also think it's clear from Giuffre's own barely readable biography that she was definitely whoring herself out from a very young age, well before Maxwell marked her for Epstein. Now did she have a terrible home life? It certainly seems so. But Epstein didn't make her a prostitute. That she happened to be working at Mar-A-Lago was an absolute fluke. It's also clear she ran the game as far as she could until she felt she was fed up with it, at which point she bailed to Thailand on Epstein's coin and decided to run for it. It's a compelling dramatic story but the narrative (now set in stone after her death) that she was always Epstein's victim leaves out a lot of her own really shitty choices. I do feel bad for her, but hers is a tragedy in the Greek drama sense --her determination, her ability to push through and survive, ended up leading to the life that destroyed her.

What is that quoted from?

Fixed. Apologies.

Why is nobody talking about the trade deal that EU stroke with Trump

* BASELINE TARIFF RATE: Almost all EU goods entering the U.S. will be subject to a 15% baseline tariff. The 15% tariff is not added to any existing rates.

  • CARS: Cars and car parts will be subject to the 15% tariff, compared to the 27.5% they face now. The European Commission said it would eliminate remaining low-level duties on industrial goods from the United States, although EU officials said for cars they would cut the import duty from 10% to the previous U.S. level of 2.5%.

  • PHARMACEUTICALS AND SEMICONDUCTORS: The White House says EU pharmaceuticals and microchips will be subject to 15% tariffs. The European Commission says this will only be the case after the United States concludes Section 232 investigations in the coming weeks and sets new global tariff rates for the two sectors. For the EU, the maximum rate would be 15%. For now, there are only subject to low or zero pre-existing duties.

  • OTHER SECTORS: The United States is also carrying out Section 232 investigations on grounds of national security into timber, trucks, critical minerals, commercial aircraft, polysilicon and drones. EU officials say that for all of these, a maximum 15% tariff would apply for EU goods.

  • METALS: Tariffs on European steel, aluminium will stay at 50%, with the same tariff also applying from August 1 to copper. However, the EU and the U.S. have agreed that they will be replaced by a quota system, whose details still has to be negotiated, EU officials say.

European exports within the agreed quota would face the most-favoured nation tariff rate agreed under WTO rules, which are low and in some cases zero depending on the grade. Exports outside of the quota would be subject to 50% tariffs.

  • ZERO-FOR-ZERO tariffs: According to EU officials, the U.S. and EU will have zero-for-zero tariffs on:

  • all aircraft and aircraft parts,

  • certain chemicals,

  • certain generic drugs,

  • semiconductor-making equipment,

  • some agricultural products but with the exclusion of all sensitive products like beef, rice, ethanol, sugar or poultry.

  • Natural resources and critical raw materials. More products could be added.

  • WINE AND SPIRITS: A zero tariff regime for wine and spirits - a point of friction on both sides of the Atlantic - is still under discussion. EU officials said talks were more advanced for spirits.

  • AGRICULTURE, FISH: The EU will open new market access for U.S. Alaska pollock, Pacific salmon and shrimp, subject to quotas. It will also offer improved access for U.S. soya bean oil, planting seeds, grains and nuts as well as processed food such as tomato ketchup, cocoa and biscuits, again subject to quotas.

  • STRATEGIC PURCHASES: The EU pledged to make $750 billion in strategic purchases, covering oil, liquefied natural gas (LNG) and nuclear technology during U.S. President Donald Trump's term in office.

This will come as a mix of spot purchases for oil, long-term contracts for LNG and government procurement for nuclear technology. The amount has been estimated on the basis of Europe's planned phase out of energy purchases from Russia. The EU will also purchase 40 billion euros ($46 billion) of U.S. AI chips would be on top of the $750 billion.

  • European companies are to invest $600 billion in the U.S. over the course of Trump's second term. Japan's package will consist of equity, loans and guarantees from state-run agencies of up to $550 billion to be invested at Trump's discretion, Tokyo says. EU officials, in contrast, said Europe's $600 billion investment pledge is based on the combined investment intentions expressed by European companies.

  • DEFENCE PROCUREMENT: EU member states will purchase U.S. military equipment. The deal does not specify an amount.

  • OTHER ITEMS: The EU says it will cooperate with the U.S. on automotive and food safety standards, while retaining its current rules. Cooperation could take the form of streamlining certification for U.S. pork or dairy products. The two sides will also cooperate on investment screening and export controls as well as addressing 'non-market' policies, such as China's subsidised production.

TLDR is that EU makes Trump a blowjob and in return they get the privilege to swallow. The deal is one sided and quite good for the US. The other thing is that if EU is hoping to weather the storm and then it will be off - yeah right. There won't be a person as stupid as Carter in the white house anytime soon. No matter if 2028 is dem or rep year - this deal will be requested to be honored.

Trump's idea to sell access to US market is not without merits even if it is implementation is botched as hell. And no one is brave enough to even propose retaliation.

The deal is one sided and quite good for the US.

One sided yes, good for the U.S. no. Fundamentally a 15% tariff is still just making the economy less efficient for no benefit besides some tax revenue that could to collected in less distortionary ways. Plus, unlike keeping tariffs that already exist which at least reduces disruption at the cost of long-term growth, new tariffs actively cause disruption. Pretty much the only possible advantage would be slightly increasing resiliency to trade disruptions, and even that isn't that likely because the inherent instability of tariffs imposed by the President without Congress means investors are unlikely to make long-term investments based on avoiding the 15%. Imposing tariffs without retaliatory tariffs in return is like if the U.S. bombed some EU factories and got them to agree not to bomb the U.S. in return, it's one-sided but that doesn't mean it's beneficial.

The deal is very good for the US but all the spending pledges are, as with Japan, pure fiction and essentially the counterparty just tallying up broad estimates of outbound foreign investment, government procurement and so on. The “EU” has no mechanism to force $750bn of investment, no framework to make it happen, and certainly can’t force sovereign governments to spend x amount on their own militaries in American weaponry. But, as the Gulf Arabs also figured out, if you add together all of your companies’ total spending in the US over the next y years that was already going to happen, it sounds like a big number.

As far as trade deals go, the EU sacrificed a a moderate amount to continue exporting at near-current levels to the US. The tariffs are too low, given huge US salary differentials for skilled manufacturing, to reshore manufacturing that is currently done in Europe to the US. But tariff revenue will rise and, on the margins, some US skilled manufacturing will become more competitive.

Yeah, Trump won this particular round of chicken. Of course, another way to spin it is that 15% tariffs are not a world-shattering amount, especially to the numbers he originally proposed. But all in all, it seems a bit more than just a token amount to allow him to save face.

If two people are in a positive-sum, mutually beneficial relationship then it is very likely that one of them can leverage the relationship for short term gains. "If you really love me, you will cancel on your buddies and go watch that movie I like with me tonight instead" will probably work fine the first time you pull it if your partner is invested in the relationship. On the short-term, tangible level, that is a clear win.

But just because long-term consequences may be more difficult to quantify, that does not mean that they are not there. Every time you pull a stunt like this, your partner is adjusting their valuation of your relationship a tiny bit downwards. Eventually, your partner might suddenly decide to move out and dump you.

Mutually beneficial trade relationships are not so different. I would argue that for past decades, both the US and the EU have immensely profited from the free trade with each other. Zero tariffs are a rather obvious Schelling point. But now Trump with his zero-sum mindset is in charge, and thinks that either the US is fucking someone over, or it is getting fucked over. In the short and medium term, the EU needs trade with the US, so they can not afford a trade war. In the long term, Trump is a red flag. If I was the EU, I would be working hard to secure other trade deals with other nations, so that when another MAGA president decides in a decade that he will not settle for anything less than 30% unilateral tariffs, we are in the position to tell him to fuck off.

If I was the EU, I would be working hard to secure other trade deals with other nations

What other nation nations? Witch China which we talk down to, with Russia which we hate, with India that will never develop, with Africa that is doomed, with south america that is firmly in US sphere of influence or with Australia, Japan, Korea that depends on US for protection, all while we are crybabies about bullshit like human rights.

We could create a potent anti US union - but we will actually have to do what other players do - play realpolitik. Not play "performative morally superior" just because a century ago some people did bad things.

Exactly. There is no alternative. China and Russia are the only other independent players in the world besides the USA, and China is the only one with a comparable size economy.

If a President decides to squeeze the imperial provinces, they will get squeezed.

Now, the genius move would be to build momentum with these trade deals to try to squeeze China in the near future. China also can't afford to walk away from the table. Let's see how it plays out.

I think this so-called "deal" is very silly. Obvious points:

  1. This is a public humiliation for von der Leyen, whatever the actual deal turns out to be. For too many MAGA supporters, that is sufficient for it to be a good deal for MAGA.
  2. Unlike the Japan "deal", where the Japanese authorities publicly disavowed the investment pledges the White House announced, the EU is being low key about the fact that there is no agreement on what the investment pledge actually is. But the White House explicitly say that the $600 billion investment pledge is additional to existing commitments, and the Commission explicitly say that it is a restatement of existing plans.
  3. The energy purchase pledge is fake. The EU Commission has no authority to make the Member States or European companies buy American energy they don't want to. And even if they did, the US lacks the physical capability to increase energy exports that much, and the EU probably lacks the physical capability to increase energy imports that much.
  4. As with the UK "deal", the EU announcement says that the US will cut steel tariffs subject to a quota arrangement to be agreed as part of the legally binding agreement. Unlike the UK "deal", the US announcement says that this will not happen. Given the political importance of steel tariffs, this would normally be sufficient to prevent ratification if this were a real deal.
  5. The non-tariff part of the announcement is very thin indeed - basically just paperwork reduction. Trump implied on social media that the EU would accept US manufactured goods based on US safety standards - both the US and EU announcements say this won't happen.

This is significantly further from being an actual deal than the UK "deal" was - the UK "deal" was thin but the UK and US announcements were sufficiently similar that you could imagine smart people who wanted to do a thin deal closing the gaps over the course of negotiating the legally binding agreement. This looks suspiciously like a kayfabe deal (similar to ones Trump did with Canada an Mexico back in March) where von der Leyen allows Trump to announce a yuge win while giving up very little of substance - the only part of the deal which is likely to actually happen is cutting EU tariffs on US manufactured goods from an average 1.6% to zero.

The other thing is that if EU is hoping to weather the storm and then it will be off

There are two ways this can blow over in less time than it takes to negotiate the legally binding deal (which, even if it is possible, will be of order a year). One is that the legality of the tariffs works its way up to SCOTUS who (correctly) say that the President does not have the authority to do what Trump is doing. The other is that the impact of the tariffs on US manufacturing (which is net hurt by the tariffs, both because there are higher tariffs on raw materials than on manufactured goods, and because tariffs hurt disproportionally hurt complex supply chains in general) and US consumers forces the final TACO. I personally rate the chance of SCOTUS overturning the tariffs at 75% and the chance of a TACO over the summer at 20%, for an overall chance of 80% that the political environment is completely different by the time the deal could be ratified.

No matter if 2028 is dem or rep year - this deal will be requested to be honored.

Midwestern MAGA (including Vance) or Dems will want to renegotiate the deal because they will want to change the underlying industrial policy (of promoting natural resource exports at the expense of US manufacturing). Continuity Trump will want to renegotiate it because Trump renegotiates everything as a matter of course.

even if it is implementation is botched as hell

The craziest thing here is that the Trump administration is trying to negotiate an accounting identity. Trump is bragging about securing $600 billion in investment pledges. But the whole point of the new approach to tariffs is to reduce the trade deficit, which is equal by accounting identity to net foreign investment in the US. The only way the EU can invest $600 billion in the US is by running a trade surplus, which is precisely the thing Trump says he wants them to stop doing.

If the deal actually happens, it would be bad for American manufacturing (partly because of the de-escalating tariffs, but most importantly because exporting $250 billion a year of energy will mean diverting energy away from domestic industry). But I don't think that bothers MAGA - as I say here, at the level of vibes MAGA want to go back to exporting natural resources like in the good old days, not to reindustrialise America. And if the deal actually happens it would be great for American natural resource producers.

And no one is brave enough to even propose retaliation.

Lets see what happens with China.

Mostly this. There's probably more to be said about that optics of the deal than the substance, not least because of the multitude of interests in inflating / signal boosting the more propagandastic elements for, well, propaganda. At the end of the day, though, it doesn't 'make' people buy stuff, and almost certainly includes a lot of purchasing that would already happen regardless.

I do think one of the more salient / relevant / 'why this deal will pass despite the critics' is that it puts an end (for now) the tariff issue, whereas deliberately trying to scuttle it would re-raise the issue and likely lead to higher. As much as, say, Paris will love to hate on this bill and decry it and so on, the BATNA tariff is higher, not lower, to the tariff in this agreement.

I suspect- though can't say with too much confidence- that another of the elements of this deal is how it will probably shape the European military modernization funds. A lot of the most recent discussion on the face-saving/'what's really in it' has focused on the limits of compulsory purchasing. However, a bigger issue is if EU-wide funding mechanisms will have the 'buy Europe' clauses that were being pushed for. I wouldn't be surprised if even if this deal doesn't 'make' anyone buy US military goods, it also undoes legal restrictions on EU funds being used for that purpose. As in, no one has to buy American, but at the same time people can buy American with funds that were previously being advertised as excluding American.

trying to negotiate an accounting identity ... which is precisely the thing Trump says he wants them to stop doing

And is now firing people for similar! If he wants Powell to lower rates, bad job numbers would help...

How is monetary policy an accounting identity?

A lot of monetary policy thinking starts with MV=PY which is an accounting identity.

For non-economists - M is the total quantity of money in the economy, V is the number of times each dollar is spent in a year, P is the price level, and Y is real GDP. So we say that the total amount of money spent is equal to nominal GDP. A lot of monetarist and monetarist-adjacent macroeconomics is arguing about which elements in this accounting identity are causes and which ones are consequences.

Sure there are accounting identities involved. But the way I interpret the phrase is as saying that the action favored by Trump has a necessary consequence because of such an identity. For example, if your assets increase, either your liabilities or equities increase.

This is not the case for employment (what the comment I was replying to mentioned). There is no accounting identity in monetary economics (that I know of) which links interest rates and employment. There is the Phillips curve, but we can argue about the slope, causality, etc.

Lowering interest rates is not crazy, even if Trump suggests it. Even Milton Friedman recommended it.

What he really needs to do is negotiate tariffs with Powell instead of the Europeans. Powell has more of what he wants, and is a better negotiator.

Luddites unite! Anyone else here not own a cellphone?

I don't even own a dumb-phone. If someone wants to talk to me IRL, I insist there be no electrons involved. It goes without saying I'm not very popular :(

I own a dumb-phone and keep my cell in a box for when I need to use it for GPS/internet/etc in some situations (like when travelling).

In such circumstances, the mods have the option to remove a comment entirely. This seems like an honest, harmless mistake, so I'll let it slide. Ideally you'd be the one deleting and re-pasting your message elsewhere, but eh.

I thought about it, but then I didn't think the right people would find the PR subthread.

wait, how do you actually make that work? Do you just tell people to come knock on your door at any time? Do people actually do that?

I'm not very popular even though I do my best to reach out on social networking. If I didn't have a cellphone I'm pretty sure no one would ever talk to me except my fellow drunks at dive bars.

My wife basically arranges all my/our socialization. From my perspective, people just randomly show up and leave. I login to the motte when I'm waiting for the code to compile.

This doesn't belong in the Culture War thread, at least not with a lot more added to an and some attempt to make it relevant to the culture war

How embarrassing... this was intended as a reply to @WhiningCoil's post https://www.themotte.org/post/2277/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/352249?context=8#context

I never understood how other people make this mistake, but now I realize it's due to a number of confusing interface features. (Or at least they are confusing to this Luddite...)

Mods/Zorba: Maybe the following interface changes could help:

  1. change the button text for posting a reply from "comment" to "reply"
  2. remove the ability to make top level posts when you are not "at the top level"; for example, in the link above there should only be the ability to reply since I am "zoomed into" a comment, and not the ability to make a top-level post, since no one should be doing that from the linked page.

I'm pretty sure I could submit a PR that makes these changes if you all are too busy, but I forget where the github repo is at.

I forget where the github repo is at

It's linked in the menu at the upper right corner of the page (under your profile image).

Thanks. PR submitted at https://github.com/themotte/rDrama/pull/748

Arguably the most luddite guy here busts out a PR to fix a minor site annoyance in a matter of hours. Incredible.

The Ludditism stems from spending so much time on the computer for work... but here I am on a Friday night replying to a forum post instead of doing luddite things...

I do own a perfectly modern smartphone and use it, but with the practiced disdain of someone who refuses be beholden to it. I make a point of not using it in human company, and I absolutely will chide anyone who pulls out a phone mid-conversation. I often leave it at home when I go out, so as to travel lighter and not be disturbed. I have every app except the nominal "phone" muted at all times, and even that is muted at night (lest some annoying robo-call wake me).

Humans are tool-users. I just insist on not being abused by my tools, and I try to remain independent of them. Hell, I even regularly spend a few days with my glasses off just to make sure I can function without them. I sometimes go out barefoot to make sure I'm not shoe-dependent. I'll spend a few days without coffee to spite the addiction. And so on. I'm sure this is all just pontless eccentricity and won't ever do me much good, but I grant myself these little things.

I tip my Amish hat to you, but no, I am nowhere near as disciplined as you are.

In today's "old man yelling at clouds" news, it appears that leftist memes (e.g. on imgur) have taken to calling Trump a pedophile due to his connection with Epstein.

As someone who does not give a damn about Trump, but who cares about the language we use to describe reality, I want to object.

A pedophile, in my book, is someone who is sexually attracted to pre-pubescent kids. Often, the term might imply exclusive pedophilia, e.g. someone who is only attracted to pre-pubescent kids. This seems like the worst sexual attraction card to be dealt, while being straight, gay, bisexual, into MILFs, or into BDSM, or most other kinks means you have a decent chance of getting laid, the lack of adults who could pass as pre-pubescent means that there are no sex partners who could consent. If used as an insult, the unfortunate implication is that people are morally responsible for their sexual inclinations.

Naturally, there is an overlap with people who end up molesting children, which is rightfully considered a serious crime. It bears saying that a significant fraction of child molesters are not exclusive pedophiles but just men (mostly) with broader sexualities who use the opportunity of the power discrepancy between kids and adults.

In general, I think that power discrepancy is why we have age of consent laws. Using the age is obviously a crude approximation, I can think of situations where a 15yo having sex with an 18yo would not be problematic from a power discrepancy point of view, and also of situations where two 18yo having sex would be problematic from a power discrepancy view without being criminal. But still, one has to draw the line somewhere, and age is at least something which can reasonably be verified, while "would a judge like the power dynamics in that relationship?" is much more diffuse.

If we tie consent to age, then it makes sense to dis-emphasize physical development. After all, a woman consents with her brain, not her boobs. It might certainly make a difference if the defendant claims he was mistaken about her age or that she was the one who initiated sex (not that either defense would help much, likely).

To get back to Trump, I think it is pretty clear that he is not an exclusive pedophile. That guy paid for sex with Stormy Daniels, hosted beauty pageants and boasted about grabbing post-pubescent participants "by the pussy". Based on the women he married, "small and flat-chested" does not really seem to be his type.

He is also a sex pest. I can not imagine him going "Dear Jeffrey, this is very flattering, but I do not think it is appropriate. Look at that poor girl. She is a minor who possibly did not have a clear idea that she would be expected to do sex work here and is effectively trapped alone on an island with some very powerful people. Besides her being below the age of consent, this whole setting is intrinsically coercive. If you want me to fuck someone, please get an experienced sex worker of legal age for my next visit." Instead, he probably went "great, I will take the one with the bigger tits" and committed a particularly vile act of statutory rape.

From a culture war point of view, I can see why the left is pushing the pedo angle. It basically comes from qanon, where "oh, did I mention they also rape kids" was used as a boo light to drive home the fact that these were Bad people. MAGA pattern-matched Epstein to this, which was fair enough. Now that it looks like Trump might have been a visitor to Epstein's Island, the likely factually accurate claim "Trump is a sex pest who has no conception of consent and will happily commit statutory rape" is not going to do much damage. The American people have known that he is a sex pest with no conception of consent since 2016, and in their heart of hearts they also know that someone who is generally loose on consent will also not be a stickler for the rules as far as age of consent is concerned. By contrast, going "that pedophile world-controlling elite you were always talking about? Trump is their chairman!", or more shortly "Trump is pedophile" is obviously superior as an attack in the CW.

Still, a lot of epistemic commons are burned in the process, and I really don't like that.

I think the entire game here is so obvious that it’s actually getting frustrating to me to even read people talk about this.

Epstein was an Israeli intelligence asset. This should be as obvious as saying that the four legged furry animal that barks at the mailman, chase tennis balls, that lives in my house, and had two parents who were both dogs, is, in fact, a dog.

It should not be lost that this entire Epstein stuff made a 180 pivot about three days before The United States was needed to clean up yet another of Israel’s messes by bombing Iran.

Trump is also just obviously not a pedophile or whatever other cope term that Redditors from 15 years ago were using to justify their creepy interest in teenagers.

Jeffrey Epstein was a NYC and Palm Beach socialite at the same time as Trump. Yeah they shared a plane a few times, were at some of the same parties, and had some social overlap.

The people trying to tie this into the same vein as Clinton or Gates, who appear to have flown to Epsteins private properties a bunch of times and do seem to have creepy sexual interests are being obtuse.

This whole topic is so tired. It has been beaten to absolute death.

If you want an incredibly detailed and well sourced deep dive on this topic which also goes into pedophilic tendencies of the people around the levers of American Democrat power, then here is a podcast which does that:

https://www.martyrmade.com/featured-podcasts/the-jeffrey-epstein-series/ L

Epstein was an Israeli intelligence asset. This should be as obvious as saying that the four legged furry animal that barks at the mailman, chase tennis balls, that lives in my house, and had two parents who were both dogs, is, in fact, a dog.

He may have been an asset (and probably was), but the controversial claim being made here is more than that. If Epstein was entrapping and blackmailing people like Clinton, Trump and Prince Andrew on behalf of Mossad, then he was a Mossad agent and the people he was blackmailing were assets. And at most intelligence agencies, including the CIA and MI6, Epstein would fail the character and loyalty tests to be recruited as an agent. You don't want someone who might predictably find themselves in a position where they are tempted to blab in exchange for a reduced sentence knowing the things Epstein would need to know to do the job of Mossad blackmailer-in-chief.

Epstein was an Israeli intelligence asset. This should be as obvious as saying that the four legged furry animal that barks at the mailman, chase tennis balls, that lives in my house, and had two parents who were both dogs, is, in fact, a dog.

Do you have any evidence to support this? All I've really seen is a bunch of sus shit that could easily be alternatively explained as "person with a lot of connections has a lot of connections" and sensible counter arguments like "the first rule of spy club is don't tell random people you are a spy..."

I don't think it is as clear as you think it is or alternatively - it is very scissorish.

Can I prove that my dog is a dog? Can you prove that Robert Maxwell was an Israeli intelligence asset?

Listen to the podcast I linked. It’s a 6 hour long answer to your question.

I listened to Carlson's interview with MM and I remember MM making a claim that Epstein was more of a freelancer. Surely at times he worked for Israel and other western services , but mostly he was in it for himself and for profit - and what he did was help with tax evasion using shady financial means, steal from his clients - more for the love of the game than actual need and so on.

I'm not going to listen to a six hour long podcast, if their is any evidence that isn't circumstantial and isn't just "that sounds weird" feel free to send it along.

But my point is that it isn't reasonable to think some of that kinda business was going down, it's that it's also perfect reasonable to be unconvinced.

Almost every conspiracy theory that turns out to be true was also widely known in the relevant communities just underreported (ex: Weinstein being a sex pest).

This matches more to conspiracy theories that turn out to be untrue.

The same was true of Jimmy Saville:

The BBC allowed all manner of creative swearing and graphic insults to air during The Thick Of It.

But there was just one line in all of the scripts that made executives so nervous they insisted it be censored, creator Armando Iannucci has revealed.

The excised line, spoken by Peter Capaldi’s fiercely foul-mouthed spin doctor Malcolm Tucker was: 'That's inevitable. It's as inevitable as what they'll find in Jimmy Savile's basement after he's dead.'

'The BBC lawyers said you can't say that,’ Iannucci told an audience in Melbourne

Although Savile died in 2011, between seres three and four, the extent of his sexual abuse of children only began to emerge in September the following year, a month before the final episode aired.

https://www.chortle.co.uk/news/2017/05/12/36483/revealed_the_one_line_the_bbc_censored_from_the_thick_of_it

Everybody in TV knew. And were performatively shocked later on, of course.

IIRC John Lydon of the Sex Pistols fame was making noises about this open secret in 1978.

Eeesh

Sure enough.

“I don’t know, I just want to make a film of it. I want to kill Jimmy Savile – he’s a hypocrite. I bet he’s into all kinds of seediness that we all know about but aren’t allowed to talk about. I know some rumours,” he added.

Right most people know "open secrets" in their community or profession. Sometimes they get picked up by the public, sometimes they don't, but conspiracy theories that actually come out are almost always in this category.

You can’t prove that the mob killed Jimmy Hoffa either. Sure he had been in bed with the mob for years, had recently pissed them off, and disappeared on his way to meet with a high ranking mobster. But there’s no smoking gun, no witness testimony, no body. Shockingly enough the organization of professional murderers that specialize in getting away with murders made sure there wasn’t any definitive iron clad evidence of the murder.

You've got alternative possible explanations for Epstein - legitimately it seems like he would commit suicide, he might have bribed others to allow it, this guy bragged about being a spy which isn't really something most spies do and so on.

I don't know enough about Hoffa but I doubt we have other significant ideas.

Still, a lot of epistemic commons are burned in the process, and I really don't like that.

Americans conflating ephebophilia or simple assholery with pedophilia is nothing new. It's standard and widely made fun out of, spawning several memes..

Still, a lot of epistemic commons are burned in the process, and I really don't like that.

Compared to what went on before - e.g. transgender self-id, male pregnancy etc.. I don't find this newest, frankly pathetic attempt meaningful or even very aggravating. It's just what the post-tumblr left does. Back before it's brain was melted by lack of talent and internet, they just played games with language.

Now, the games are stupid, nobody who isn't a tumblr-type person can take it seriously and they keep engaging in circular firing squads.

Not sure this is going to influence anyone - people who already believed Trump is a philandering stupid bald nazi clown etc.. he's already maximally bad in their eyes. Everyone else has tuned out their yammering and they no longer have much of a megaphone to command with the decline in TV viewership.

Not sure this is going to influence anyone - people who already believed Trump is a philandering stupid bald nazi clown etc.. he's already maximally bad in their eyes. Everyone else has tuned out their yammering and they no longer have much of a megaphone to command with the decline in TV viewership.

IME it is influencing some people — primarily elderly Boomers who still watch TV (particularly Fox News). That, and some of the "global satanic-Jewish-pedo conspiracy" Q-anon types a la Vox Day.

I think it was... Nate Silver who posted that it doesn't seem it's hurting him at the polls. Vox Day and such are very special people who aren't that interesting.

A pedophile, in my book, is someone who is sexually attracted to pre-pubescent kids. Often, the term might imply exclusive pedophilia, e.g. someone who is only attracted to pre-pubescent kids. This seems like the worst sexual attraction card to be dealt, while being straight, gay, bisexual, into MILFs, or into BDSM, or most other kinks means you have a decent chance of getting laid, the lack of adults who could pass as pre-pubescent means that there are no sex partners who could consent. If used as an insult, the unfortunate implication is that people are morally responsible for their sexual inclinations.

Your book is not the book most people are using. Most people don't think about sex in those terms (they don't really think 'straight' or 'gay' either)- otherwise, the group(s) that wants to impose those definitions/morality on everyone else wouldn't need words words words to do it.

For most people, "pedophilia" means "man on little girl" exclusively.

Men can't be raped, so we don't really care about man on boy (unless it's a political group we hate for other reasons that was covering it up, which in combination with that hatred is sufficiently scandalous to destroy them- we're not really after boyfuckers qua boyfuckers, that's a side-effect). As for woman on boy, our reactions range from Nice to "if we don't throw you in jail for this, society's standards might shift and allow man on girl, so off you go". And woman on girl is a statistical anomaly.

Feminists/gynosupremacists launder the moral disgust with "man on girl" into the "man on any woman" definition they've always wanted (though note that this is fundamentally a woman vs. woman thing about how best to exploit men rather than primarily being man-hating, which is how men perceive it). This is why they push to have older and older women be considered "children", and why white-knights (traditionalists and progressive men) accept that. It's also why all the "pedo" literature progressives use only features man on boy (or man on boy-dressed-like-a-girl).

As you noted,

I think that power discrepancy is why we have age of consent laws

is correct, but those laws aren't set up that way to protect children (they aren't the right tool for that). They're primarily for keeping young women out of the sexual marketplace and providing women-as-class a weapon to exploit men more powerful than them (to which they are inherently attracted).

Once you understand the concept of "consent" is a lie (and intended to confuse "raping little girls" with normal human behavior) you can start to understand how people actually think about sex. Then, you can also see that Rs have a better understanding of this than Ds do because they're more likely to reject this framework (to the point that even traditionalist Christian sexual ethics paint a better picture), so Rs are less likely to be concerned with "non-consentual" behavior than Ds are.

Also, a tangent:

It bears saying that a significant fraction of child molesters are not exclusive pedophiles but just men (mostly) with broader sexualities who use the opportunity of the power discrepancy between kids and adults.

Well, if you're only looking for physical penetration as a subset of "abuse with sexual intent", yes, you'll find that's mostly men.
Men and women are different especially when it comes to the way they think about sex; thus we should expect the ways they intend and perpetrate sexual abuse would be different.

but those laws aren't set up that way to protect children (they aren't the right tool for that).

I disagree, I think that age of consent laws are mostly doing their job well enough.

The thing which horrifies me about ancient marriages was the power imbalance. In Rome, the wife was not even a separate legal entity, she was just a part of the household (which was the legal entity), represented by the husband. From my understanding, it was not so much that the husband had an explicit right to beat or rape his wife, and more that what went on within a household was simply not a matter for Roman law. Outright murder or maiming of the wife might get the husband into trouble with the father of his wife, but anything short of that would probably be tolerated. In that setting, the power imbalance is already over-determined. If a 32yo veteran marries a 13yo instead of a 20yo, this would also on its own determine the power imbalance, but given the context we are already way into diminishing returns wrt power imbalance.

As one of these bleeding-heart liberals, I have this idea that power imbalances in sexual relationships which do not stem from a sufficiently informed consent are bad.

If a 30yo is grooming 13yo's, he will probably succeed with a decent fraction of them, if he is average-looking, average-income and has an average skill at manipulation. "No, he is not some creep who wants to fuck 13yo's, he just recognized that mentally I am already 18 and our souls fell in love with each other. It is so romantic!"

With child marriages, at least there is a sharp limit on how many girls a bad actor can victimize (though the magnitude of victimization per victim is of course much higher). With Westerner morals around dating, our average adult man could probably seduce, fuck and dump several 13yo per year if that was his hobby. Now learning the hard way that men will sometimes talk about being soulmates to manipulate you into doing sex acts you would not do otherwise and then display no inclination towards an exclusive romantic relationship is not the end of the world (unless you kill yourself over that), but it is clearly making the world a worse place.

If we had headbands of WIS+6, INT+6 that would probably suffice to cancel out the power imbalance due to the 13-vs-30 age gap, but without that tech having an AoC seems like a good idea.

Or if that is not convincing for you, consider the AoC not in the context of a 13yo, but a 5yo. Adults are great at manipulating kids into doing stuff they have no inclination to do, from eating spinach and getting poked with needles to sitting still in school and doing homework. Child molesters could easily manipulate kids into all kinds of behaviors which will be demonstrably harmful for their normal development. With AoC, we can simply say "well, the kid may have consented, but their consent was invalid, so off to prison you go".

They're primarily for keeping young women out of the sexual marketplace and providing women-as-class a weapon to exploit men more powerful than them (to which they are inherently attracted).

I am sure that there are some adult women who wish that they had lost their virginity at age 14 to a 40yo driving a Porsche instead of a 15yo driving a scooter, but I am also convinced that they are a small minority.

If we generously say that half of the men who groom underage girls (if it was legalized) are interested in a exclusive long term relationship, and half of them are interested in sex without having to work as much on a relationship framework as they would when dating an adult woman, then most girls will end up dating the latter type.

I do not think that the motivation of fathers and feminists to be against minors dating adults is that they fear that they will ruin the sexual marketplace for women. Few fathers will say "I don't want my 13yo to date adult men because she does not know the proper price range of sexual favors and will happily give them blowjobs after getting invited to the cinema". More likely it is something like "I do not want some creep to use his power to manipulate my daughter into doing sex acts she is not comfortable doing and then break her heart. I will grudgingly tolerate her dating a boy a few years older, as at least the boy will not have a ten year head start on how to manipulate woman into sex."

The thing which horrifies me about ancient marriages was the power imbalance.

Yes, the conditions in the state of nature are indeed horrifying. I wonder if the past 200,000+ years of human evolution had anything to do with the incentives, motives, and options typically leveraged by its participants? Surely modern peoples are trained to understand those core motivations, and are honest about them, at all times, and not forming their basis of what is and is not good and proper based solely around purely instinctual self-interest. (Now if you'll excuse me, a pig just flew past my window.)

So I think we can get a better picture- both of what's fair, and by how men and women should act and be biologically wired to be attracted to- by imagining our initial conditions and going forward solely from there.

And in the state of nature case, for women, power is "you get to eat, have a roof over your head, and strike the best deal for resource sharing", and consent is "you enter into a relationship that provides the above provided you cook the meals, maintain the household, and open your legs as desired".
Informed consent is "if you don't, you'll die, or take a serious haircut on your lifetime earnings and potential standard of living". From a modern lens, that seems unbalanced, until you notice that men die if they don't work too. Sexual dimorphism means that men have to contend with the environment to eat, and women have to contend with men to eat- in both cases, of course, you're still working.

Now that we've described the contract- one that inherently includes sex work, it's worth noting- now we'll look at the incentives. For men, they want someone as young and attractive as possible (they heal faster from childbirth and it's easier for them to have kids, sex is better without having to turn the lights off) at as low a standard as possible (so they can get away with paying them next to nothing compared to themselves, to the point they could afford more than one). For women, they want someone as old and powerful as possible (more secure, more resources, more even-keeled) with as little competition as possible (so they're not outflanked by younger, prettier competitors with lower standards[1]).

The thing that sets the lower limit on the age of the women participating in this, especially when there's an oversupply of them[2], is sexual maturity. It may shock you to know that most men aren't sexually attracted to little girls[3]. They can't do the domestic stuff as easily, they aren't developed enough/don't have the v1.1 firmware update you get at puberty that makes them particularly interesting in bed, and they don't quite get how to provide the whole SaaS (that's sex-as-a-service) experience that is attractive to men (that thing they do where they act as a desirable sex object: women do this, girls only cosplay it)- in short, they're still growing.

Now, let's apply that:

"No, he is not some creep who wants to fuck 13yo's, he just recognized that mentally I am already 18 and our souls fell in love with each other. It is so romantic!"

So those are the words that come out of her mouth, but what is she actually saying? A steady union-backed job is absolutely an attractive, freeing prospect for a man, why wouldn't [something a woman instinctively sees as the same thing] be highly desirable for a woman? I can see an interview process going badly, or the job not turning out to be what was agreed to, to be damaging just as much as it would be for a man to suffer that- but in terms of "my prospective employer firing me or discontinuing my contract", which is what [at a fundamental level] this is, I see no need to protect women from this more than we protect men from the same. Residuals (i.e. pregnancy) are a different matter, of course.

Child molesters could easily manipulate kids into all kinds of behaviors which will be demonstrably harmful for their normal development.

Yes, that's the female interest motte (but, again, see [3]). The bailey is "men could easily manipulate women into all kinds of behaviors, and as a result the only women who will get men's resources are those more willing to do things that men want, and that's a problem for us women who don't want to do those things but still want those resources". (The fact that this slots women into the "kid" position is relevant- in an environment of equality, women have equal agency, so they're just as resistant to being manipulated as men are.)

As far as "well, we want a blanket law because we don't want to pay attention to circumstances"... I think the criticism writes itself, but other laws, properly enforced, should cover most to all of these cases. The thing that makes this abuse in the first place is specifically "submissive has no ability to disengage" [the motte of the term "consent"- where the bailey is any degree of "I'm not getting paid enough for those acts of submission"], which is the same thing women are trying to control with blunt instruments like this (and it is important they be blunt so that judgments default in their favor- an age of consent is intended as a bracket under which All Women Are Believed [to have been seduced], which is why places where either women or fathers have outsized levels of social power have higher ages of consent in modern times.)

[1] The female talking point around "protecting women" is equal to the male talking point around "protecting the borders/protecting jobs". In both cases, their direct competition are other men/women willing and ready to take their job- we use words like "exploitation", "minimum wage", "human trafficking/illegal immigration" (when those people are foreigners)- it's just that for women, the job is sex work and being attractive.

[2] Which is the reason polygamy exists, why limits on it benefit young men at the expense of everyone else, and why young men are alone in enforcing any prohibitions thereon- if sharing a husband will be a better contract for a wife than going with someone poorer, and if young men are drastically poorer than old men, then the rational choice for a women is to share.

[3] As I've described, it's in the interest of women to conflate "grown women just beyond the male evolved optimal sexual attraction age" and "sexually immature girls", so this needs to be restated even though it should be obvious. Actual pedophilia is a maladaptive anomaly, men wanting just-mature women is not.

I have this idea that power imbalances in sexual relationships which do not stem from a sufficiently informed consent are bad.

And I get this idea from the pornography romance media that women watch where it involves a complete lack of "sufficiently informed consent" (but lots and lots of the instinctual dynamics I described above), so I suspect women are lying about this being a negative in and of itself. I'm also not surprised they'd never admit that, because screaming "I don't want a consentual relationship" is obviously not in women's sociofinancial/sociobiological best interest.

I am sure that there are some adult women who wish that they had lost their virginity at age 14 to a 40yo driving a Porsche instead of a 15yo driving a scooter, but I am also convinced that they are a small minority.

I am not convinced: groupies are a thing for this specific reason and the 60s-80s were rife with them for that reason. (What, you thought women throwing their underwear at Elvis was somehow not sexual?)

I do not think that the motivation of fathers and feminists to be against minors dating adults is that they fear that they will ruin the sexual marketplace for women.

I do not think the motivation of (implied: traditionalist) fathers and feminists are the same. I've discussed why feminists do it, but for fathers it's much simpler: that daughter is his property, and he will manage and discharge it as he sees fit. Non-virgin daughters are worth less to men than virgin ones are, and it is in the father's interest that the daughter fetch a man of maximum price (i.e. a man that is maximally fit to protect her, and a rich man is obviously better-positioned to do this).

Note that the moral hazard here doesn't actually exist in the way feminists think it does (property can be managed incompetently, yes, but it's still ultimately in the interests of the property holder to manage that property appropriately), and most of that is an artifact of conditions changing faster than male instinct was equipped to deal with. Which is a great argument for "daughters shouldn't be property", just like it is for humans more generally.

Yes, the conditions in the state of nature are indeed horrifying. I wonder if the past 200,000+ years of human evolution had anything to do with the incentives, motives, and options typically leveraged by its participants? Surely modern peoples are trained to understand those core motivations, and are honest about them, at all times, and not forming their basis of what is and is not good and proper based solely around purely instinctual self-interest. (Now if you'll excuse me, a pig just flew past my window.)

If I understand your sarcasm right, this seems like a fully generalizeable counterargument to most human progress. If you want to argue "back in the ancestral environment we (likely) did not have a conception of sexual consent, so I do not see why we need one now", the same argument could be made against other civilizational projects like trying to limit the murder rate, curing diseases or preventing starvation.

For women, they want someone as old and powerful as possible (more secure, more resources, more even-keeled)

I think that both in the ancestral environment and agrarian societies, age (above 20) was directly negative in a husband, but sometimes positively correlated with beneficial qualities.

Evolutionarily speaking, if you are a 14 and looking to marry, you perhaps have 15, 20 years of fertility ahead of you. Sure, there is some heavy discounting because chances are that you will die in childbirth or some unrelated cause before you reach age 30. Any children you have will be a net drain on resources until they are perhaps 14 (when they will either be in the position to sell themselves into sexual/domestic/reproductive bondage or work to produce their own calories). If your expected age at the birth of your last child is 25, that means you would want your husband to provide for your family until you are about 40 (or possibly 50 if you are really lucky wrt fertility).

That is a tall order in the best of circumstances! If the husband you marry is 20, he would have to be able-bodied at age 46. If he is 35, he would have to be able-bodied at age 61.

Now, I will grant you that in the ancestral environment, humans might not have had a conception of fatherhood, or long-term monogamous mating patterns, so let us consider agrarian societies instead, where both of these were generally a thing. (Absent paternal involvement, the trade-offs for age in mating are that on the one hand, paternal age is indicative of a higher genetic fitness, but also will increase the mutational load.)

In an agrarian society, almost everyone is a peasant. Most girls will not marry some noble land-owner. Working marginal fields is back-breaking labor, my guess is that most men give out before 40. What happens then is very dependent on the customs of the society. In the best case, your husband dies quickly and you inherit his land and can marry some landless 20yo who will be happy to breed you for the rest of your fertility window. In most cases, this is not how societies organize. The realistic best outcome is that your husband had a younger, landless, unmarried brother who will just take both the land and you over for him, but more realistically, he will inherit the land and marry a fresh 14yo. He might keep you around and feed you and your kids while times are good, but if he has to chose between his wife and his kids and you and his nephews, things will look grim for you. Realistically, the land might never have belonged to your husband in the first place, but just been leased out from a local noble, who will simply proceed to lease the land to some other guy once your husband fails.

Obviously, if you can become the nth wife of some guy rich enough that he does not have to work the field, that would be preferable from an evo PoV, but realistically that is not an option most girls have.

In conclusion, from evo, you would want to go for a rich man if you can, but settle for a young, strong man if you can't.

Once you understand the concept of "consent" is a lie

clarify, please

Sure, here you go. You'll have to excuse me from re-typing all that, though if I have time I'll re-state a good chunk of this later in this thread anyway.

The "word on the street" among the conspiracy crowd is that the "most requested" age range at Epstein Island was 14-16. That was typical. It was mainly Epstein himself who had the more, well, "unusual" preferences.

Completely unverified rumors! Make of it what you will!

This is kinda what I figured. I think that the women being underage was kind of the point, every taboo is also a fetish, and "what we are doing would land a normal guy in jail but we are powerful men who are above plebeian moral and legal considerations" probably aroused them, but at the end of the day most of Epstein's guests were guys with pretty normal preferences (and evolutionarily speaking, "society permitting, have sex with any women who look healthy and fertile, no matter if they are 15 or 35" is probably the dominant strategy for men). Thankfully, raping toddlers, murdering them and drinking blood from their skulls is something very few people are into -- and even if some of Epstein's guests were into that, they likely had more sense than to share that desire with him.

I do work from the assumption that having a ton of power probably feels a bit pointless if you aren't able to flex said power to flout the rules that bind us mere mortals, and there are so very few strong taboos left these days.

The thing is that Trump's style is Turbo folk divas. He likes women with big plastic boobs and more surgery than brains. His type is Jenna Jamison in her prime. Nothing in his public dating life even hints that he is attracted to the types of poor Florida girls that were hauled on the Lolita express.

Honestly I think that the whole thing is to protect Andrew - probably UK has threatened to make a big stink. And some nice blackmail materials on all levels of USG and titans of industry.

Trump is scared even if he’s not on the list, because a full accounting of the truth would have people seriously calling for revolutionary tribunals and guilotines. And not just the types that are always calling for that.

Honestly I think that the whole thing is to protect Andrew - probably UK has threatened to make a big stink. And some nice blackmail materials on all levels of USG and titans of industry.

What is surprising to me is that Trump would be willing to alienate a large part of his base for that.

My understanding of Trump is that he has a fragile ego and really needs to be popular. I think his refusal to believe that he might have lost to Sleepy Joe stems from that, ultimately. A more cynical power player might determine that two dozen influential people on the top beholden to him are worth more than ten million supporters, but Trump does not strike me as that kind of guy.

But Epstein stuff is not hurting Trump Much with his actual base. It’s the twitterati resistance libs making a stink about it once more, as they have over a thousand other things, and Trump digging in his heels because that’s always worked for him before.

In general, I think that power discrepancy is why we have age of consent laws. Using the age is obviously a crude approximation, I can think of situations where a 15yo having sex with an 18yo would not be problematic from a power discrepancy point of view, and also of situations where two 18yo having sex would be problematic from a power discrepancy view without being criminal. But still, one has to draw the line somewhere, and age is at least something which can reasonably be verified, while "would a judge like the power dynamics in that relationship?" is much more diffuse.

Okay, second thread of thought, separate from the Trump issue below:

I'm never a fan of the 'power discrepancy' argument since 'power' is usually very hard to define in tangible terms. We know it when we see it, sure, but it comes in different forms. The person who holds financial power might not be the 'more powerful' person in a confrontation where the other party holds... a gun.

"Coercion" is a more tightly defined, and the law has pretty decent standards for recognizing where coercion has occurred. Power can be used to coerce, but it can also be used to 'persuade' in the literal "convince someone that it is good/right for them do to the thing" definition.

Should we differentiate between a rich/powerful guy saying "If you don't sleep with me I will make your life a living hell" vs. saying "If you sleep with me I'll give you a ride in my private jet"? Probably. Either one is the result of a 'power' imbalance.

And, finally, the existence of statutory rape laws can, arguably, invert that power dynamic, rather than eliminate it! A particularly sociopathic 15-17 year old can tell someone slightly older than themselves "Sleep with me/give me money or I will tell the cops you raped me."

I don't think that's a common situation, but you see the point, if we're worried about power imbalances it doesn't do to just hand more power to the alleged less powerful person in this situation.

What's my solution? Bring back literal rites of passage rather than tying things to a strict age-based formula.

Philosophically and psychologically, 'consent' is based on state of mind and understanding of the acts in question, age is only very loosely correlated with those factors. And we have the ability to measure those factors more directly. So why use the less reliable metric that is constantly being gamed anyway.

So I see the "what should age of consent be?" debates as a massive red herring. Understandable one since its the standard in place now. Yet everyone has secondary motives for what they'd prefer the age be. And there legitimately is NOT some 'one size fits all' answer!!

Just cut through that stupid knot and tie legal adulthood to some test or other obstacle that a young person must clear before they're recognized as full adults. Some will pass the test at age 15, some at 18, some at 25, and some never at all.

So basically, maturity. That’s what I think at least you and I agree is more accurate than power in terms of what’s ickier. An immature child really doesn’t fully understand decision making, and sex is a big thing. An immature child is more persuadable and doesn’t have as firm boundaries. An immature child is more likely to have their sexual development harmed by unhealthy dynamics or acts. (And by the way most states already have a patchwork of laws and norms of enforcement that cover the gradients in age with some granularity, though it can be jagged in some areas).

But if you want something other than age, which is a good proxy for maturity but not perfect, I think it’s incumbent upon you to provide some test of maturity that would work. I am not sure I could think of one. Most historical rituals I’m aware of were in fact age based and were more symbolic in many cases than practical. EDIT: strike this paragraph. I didn’t check the link, looks like you have played with it a bit. But I will still say that historical precedent doesn’t seem that helpful.

So basically, maturity.

Bingo.

An immature child really doesn’t fully understand decision making, and sex is a big thing.

Double bingo. A person that doesn't fully grok that sex makes babies, what STDs are, and the other more subtle risks to intercourse with another person is, definitionally, less capable of consenting to it.

Of course, this puts the onus on the MORE MATURE person to NOT initiate the sexual relationship when they realize the other side isn't really ready.

I think it’s incumbent upon you to provide some test of maturity that would work.

I would be fine with a test in the same vein as that given to teens who want to get their driver's license.

A comprehensive exam that tests, for example, if a person REALLY understands the implications of a sexual relationship. Not on like a deep scientific level, mind, but at least the "ins and outs" (pun intended).

This means that young people can in fact study and prepare for the test, which is a GOOD THING, since it encourages them to learn the necessary information that will prepare them for adulthood. I would also include testing for, say, contractual rights. Maybe someone can't be give student loans unless they can prove they know how compound interest works!

Of course we'd have to have significant anti-cheat measures in place. Which is why I really would prefer there to be some 'objective' "test of willpower" element involved. If you force them to endure some sort of uncomfortable experience without giving in to temptation or dropping out before the finish, its MUCH harder to rig the system.

Yes, this could be the literal equivalent of The Gom Jabbar (but with less severe consequences). If you can't endure a couple minutes of excruciating (but not injurious) pain... I DARESAY you probably aren't 'mature' enough to handle real life. Note that this is LITERALLY how some traditional tribes do it.

I would like to couple that with a requirement that someone, ideally their parents, sponsor them for the test, in the sense that they're affirming "yes, this person is ready for adulthood, and if they screw up I am prepared to help accept the consequences for promoting them too early." So for the next, I dunno, 3 years if they screw up somehow the sponsor is also on the hook for helping fix it.

Which is why I really would prefer there to be some 'objective' "test of willpower" element involved. If you force them to endure some sort of uncomfortable experience without giving in to temptation or dropping out before the finish, its MUCH harder to rig the system.

Yes, this could be the literal equivalent of The Gom Jabbar (but with less severe consequences). If you can't endure a couple minutes of excruciating (but not injurious) pain... I DARESAY you probably aren't 'mature' enough to handle real life.

One problem with that is that some people are born with high pain tolerance and would be able to pass such a test well before they are even close to mental maturity, while others are born with low pain tolerance and could not pass such a test at any age despite having far better judgement than the former.

(Another issue is that the entire point of improving society is to reduce the amount of human suffering [some would include animal suffering in this] in the world, and such measures would be a gigantic step backwards for very uncertain, if any, benefit.)

Edit: Would a society, which officially considers those with lower pain tolerance to be lesser, be willing to offer a child undergoing chirurgery for a malfunctioning gallbladder pain management beyond 'bite the leather strap'?

Specifically, this makes women legally children again.

Turns, stares directly into the camera.

I mean IF THE SHOE FITS.

If we're building our notion of consent from a starting point that assumes/accepts that men and women are generally different, this would probably inform many other ways in which we arrange society.

And the thing about children, at least the law attempts to protect them from exploitation.

Consider, math is the one subject that women haven't caught up with men in despite best efforts over DECADES.

Consider Women hold the majority of student loan debt.

And they pay if off slower than men in general.

If it turns out that a lot of women didn't understand compound interest and the actual implications of accepting loans when they signed up, I would 100% be in favor of releasing them from their loans and making the lenders eat it, b/c there was no true 'meeting of the minds' at the time the loans were incurred.

Under my proposed regime, banks could be forced to write off debts made to any persons who didn't pass the 'maturity test' that showed they actually understand how money and interest actually works, if said person defaults on their loan. No actual consent = no enforceable contract. So banks would prefer to lend to 'mature' individuals.

"But that means women aren't able to attend university as easily!"

Maybe a good thing. But the obvious solution is that they can get someone who does pass the maturity test, maybe their parents... maybe their husband to Co-sign a loan. If they think its a good idea.

Isn't that BETTER than saddling them with a debt they'll quite possibly be stuck with forever? Do we PREFER the world where women unknowingly become debt slaves to the one where they have to either actually learn and understand math OR get someone else's help before they can get loaned money?

Do we PREFER the world where women unknowingly become debt slaves

For Western and majoritarian values of "we," the answer clearly appears to be yes.

There's a hypercapitalism argument for it, I think.

If we can get them to inject their dollars into the system and saddle them with a requirement that they must stay productive for years and years on end to service their debt, in theory the system captures more of the value they produce than it otherwise might.

And its even BETTER if they eventually get married, and now their husband's productivity can be siphoned off to service her debt too.

That is, people who aren't smart/informed enough to use their debt load wisely are probably never going to make good decisions with money, so maybe it's better than they hand a decent chunk of their salary over to their creditors in perpetuity, since the creditors can at least invest it more wisely.

I despise this argument line, but I can see why some might support it, EVEN aside from egalitarian concerns.

If it turns out that a lot of women didn't understand compound interest and the actual implications of accepting loans when they signed up

Student loans in the US are generally simple interest, as long as they are paid on time.

And yet there's a whole genre of social media post where a loanholder bemoans the fact that making minimum/interest only payments results in the debt increasing/never going down. or doesn't even bother to check.

(some of these might be playing dumb, but I think most are honest).

I'm genuinely uncertain which percentage of loanholders are literally too innumerate to get what interest and debt ARE. Its more than 1%. I'd bet more than 10%, honestly.

You could put the actual amortization table in front of them and it might not click.

Look at how many people who end up on Caleb Hammer's show are women. (yes, selection effects are in play).

You cannot convince me that these folks should have been entrusted with the ability to take out 5 figure loans.

See also: This recent tweet.

Essentially all loans are simple interest if paid on time. Negative amortisation is a notoriously toxic feature, prudent lenders don't allow it, and regulators generally stop imprudent lenders touching it. Negative amortisation was widely available on secured loans (both home mortgages and corporate loans) in the run-up to 2008, and the consequences were as predicted.

So... Instead of the sloppy but intuitive test of "does she look old enough" one would now have to literally ask if she has a license?

Is that any different from checking a girl who looks questionable's ID to check the age?

Very

  1. I can with a great degree of safety (90%? 95%?) avoid questionable girls right off the bat by sight.

  2. I can avoid places where underage girls hang out pretty easily and costlessly

  3. No one actually checks their dates ID.

I can't avoid places "people who didn't take or can't pass the sex test" hang out. I can't read it at a glance. I'd HAVE to actually check.

I can't avoid places "people who didn't take or can't pass the sex test" hang out

I mean, yes you can.

This allows any venue to directly filter out people that haven't passed the maturity test.

Go places that bounce anyone that isn't 'sexually mature' from entry.

I'd HAVE to actually check.

I'm unclear why this seems like an ardurous burden to you.

I'm unclear why this seems like an ardurous burden to you.

Perhaps he believes that having to assess documentation to ensure that the state has allowed you and the young woman in question to bang is going to be deeply unsexy. Not unlike mandating STD test results or consent forms beforehand.

We used to have fucking licenses, it was called “marriage”

And people used to fuck before marriage anyways. The puritans commonly had premarital pregnancies. Covered up by rush marriages.

Fornication was indeed a crime. Like smoking weed today. Illegal and popular.

Seduction laws, on the other hand, were enforced. It’s probably impossible to have this setup without them- get married and hope for the best is a great alternative to getting prosecuted.

Fornication was usually punished with a fine, though it could be punished with whipping when the fine was too far out of reach. Both men and women were prosecuted, with an exception that took me embarrassingly long to understand: When accusing a married couple (for conduct before the wedding, naturally), it was common to prosecute only the groom. This is an unspoken discount for the couple out of respect for their subsequent marriage, without having to admit it and undermine the social norm.

Even if we assume that most fornicating couples got away with it (a fair assumption, I think), it still reflects a very different set of norms than those of modern dating.

Now that's interesting. I would have assumed married couples would get a free pass for possible past fornication. Sometimes the first baby comes a bit quicker than normal for some young married couples.

Fornication was usually punished with a fine,

Fornication was usually covered up (if no pregnancy resulted) or "punished" with a shotgun wedding (if it did). Actual enforcement of the laws against it was vanishingly rare.

When accusing a married couple (for conduct before the wedding, naturally), it was common to prosecute only the groom.

I wouldn't say it was common to prosecute anyone at all for pre-marital sex leading to a shotgun wedding. I can believe it was an order of magnitude more common to prosecute the groom than the bride.

undermine the social norm.

Given the actual customs in cisHajnal Europe and Colonial America between about 1600 and the Industrial Revolution, I strongly suspect the actual social norm was "maintain plausible deniability and don't complain if you end up shotgun-married".

More comments

After some thought, and spending time with kids, I have come to the opinion that my own transition to adulthood is probably best delineated by when I stopped being bored: the world is an interesting place and there is far more stuff I want to do and skills I want to acquire than time to do them all. I won't say I don't procrastinate ever, but I am never sitting around wondering what to do. Kids aren't very good at this, in my experience.

To consider a hare-brained thought, The Internet is a (questionably ethical) form of Gom Jabbar. "What's in the box?" "Slop. Endless slop. And also the collective knowledge and creative works of mankind."

The test is whether you fall for any of the well-trod failure modes of The Internet, or actually drive to and engage in self-actualization as Maslow intended.

Very interesting take on it.

MAYBE if we coordinated well as a civilization we could test everyone before they are allowed access to the free-range internet. If they fall into the slop and gambling and scammy side of things, we restrict them to the Kiddie pool. "You can access Streaming Sites, Facebook, and play multiplayer video games. You can send and receive e-mails and you have access to porn if you're old enough, but you are intentionally unable to ever transmit your financial information to anyone."

(I will grant that this is just begging for a larger censorship regime. Remember I'm already doing magical thinking that we could have civilizational coordination to safely protect kids and the vulnerable)

To play along with the analogy, the Gom Jabbar doesn't work if the test is safe. It may not be enough to run the test in a sandbox: it's easy enough to behave "correctly" a limited test, and far harder to consistently buckle down and get work done instead of Motteposting watching TikTok videos all day.

I had the discussion with friends recently about what being an adult is, and my position was kind of close to yours, it's that an adult has agency and initiative. If an adult sees that something has to be done, he will take into consideration that he can be the one to do it. He doesn't have to always do it, but he is confident he could and sometimes will. A child will only do things when asked or encouraged to do it, or by following others. An adult will plan a vacation trip unprompted, a child will wait for friends or family to invite them. If someone doesn't do it for them, then they will complain that their life is boring, even though they will not do anything to improve it themselves.

There are many old children. Some even elderly. And there are some very young adults.

I do not believe emulating African tribes is a good idea when it comes to maturity rituals, either with this or your idea from the other post about getting beaten up by 10 guys in a row. Firstly, it doesn't seem correct to me that a ghetto thug should be ahead of a glass-jaw nerd on any maturity test in a first-world country (even if the thug is objectively more "fit" for life, the status is wasted on him). Secondly, immediate pain is not a well-optimized maturity test for a first-world country regardless. What brings prosperity in first-world countries is long-term thinking and the ability to lock in over months and years. Not enduring physical pain for half an hour.

Even if Gom Jabbar tests a necessary quality it is far from sufficient.

Secondly, immediate pain is not a well-optimized maturity test for a first-world country regardless. What brings prosperity in first-world countries is long-term thinking and the ability to lock in over months and years. Not enduring physical pain for half an hour.

Fine, include a version of The Marshmallow Test if you want!

There's a plethora of ways to measure a person's understanding of the world and their ability to endure discomfort for future gain.

Under the current regime, the ghetto thug AND the glass-jaw nerd are granted "adulthood" status with all rights that entails by the mere fact of turning eighteen. Do we think this is optimal?

People generally accept that taking a driver's test and passing some arbtitrary standard is enough to get the stamp of approval to operate a 5000 lb vehicle on public streets. I'm mostly suggesting just an expansion of the existing system there.

Under my ideal system, too, anyone is free to transact with a non-adult, but they bear ANY losses that may result if the other non-adult party reneges.

If, for instance, you give $100k in student loans to an 18 y/o who hasn't passed the maturity tests, and they default on them years later, they can't be forced to repay because from a contractual standpoint, they lacked the ability to consent. So they can have the debt dismissed if the lender is stupid enough to give them money.

There's a plethora of ways to measure a person's understanding of the world and their ability to endure discomfort for future gain.

In modern urban society, the fundamental task of adulting is to cash a rent cheque against a pay cheque. If I was going to set up a test for adulthood, the main route to passing it would be to demonstrate that

  • Your name is on a lease
  • The rent has been paid on time for x months (probably x=12)
  • You have paid payroll tax or self-employment tax on earned income of at least double the rent over the life of the lease.

I would also grant adulthood to anyone who completes 2x months of military service with a satisfactory disciplinary record (who otherwise would not be named on a lease) or to students who have reached a certain academic standard (whose income includes scholarships and financial aid which are effectively earned in that the money is paid out against demonstrated responsibility, but not taxed as earned income). The standard I am thinking is roughly completion of the standard maths sequence through linear algebra and multivariable calculus (for STEM students) or completing a course which requires reading a complete Great Book in the foreign-language original (for humanities students).

Whether adult privileges should be granted to married mothers who don't qualify under the other heads is a complication I won't discuss in public.

I am also open to the idea that access to the four boxes of full citizenship should be restricted to people who qualify as an adult under at least two of the above headings.

Under the current regime, the ghetto thug AND the glass-jaw nerd are granted "adulthood" status with all rights that entails by the mere fact of turning eighteen. Do we think this is optimal?

I mean, the optimal test would exclude the thug while including the nerd. It would be nice if the incentives were aligned to teach the nerd some toughness that he is capable of learning along the way, but it shouldn't come at a cost of putting thugs ahead. That would be a perversion of what I believe a society of legal adults should look like (i.e. it shouldn't look like a hunter-gatherer tribe).

It would be nice if the incentives were aligned to teach the nerd some toughness that he is capable of learning along the way,

Agreed and endorsed.

but it shouldn't come at a cost of putting thugs ahead. That would be a perversion of what I believe a society of legal adults should look like (i.e. it shouldn't look like a hunter-gatherer tribe).

I would certainly make the point that thugs will commit thuggery whether or not we give them the license to do so or not. I think the reason we want to toughen up the nerd is so they are capable of embracing ALL of the responsibility we might expect of an adult, including coming to the defense of their community if a bunch of thugs band together and try to take the things they feel they're being denied.

So yeah, we might want to have a test that exclude thugs from certain legal rights... but the larger question there is what do we do with them after the test, they're still around, and still able to act on their preferences, even if our legal system doesn't recognize their status.

Fine, include a version of The Marshmallow Test if you want!

The Marshmallow Test is billed as a test of delayed gratification, but I suspect it is more a test of whether the subject trusts authority.

Little of both.

The Marshmallow Test is billed as a test of delayed gratification, but I suspect it is more a test of whether the subject trusts authority.

Given how small the marshmallows used in the experiment were, it is also a test of the intrinsic desire to pass tests - the reward for passing is the marginal difference between two tiny marshmallows and one, which would not be sufficient extrinsic motivation to get the average 6 year old to do something they don't want to do.

If you're going to consider "coersion" and power dynamics in this context, the question of whether an intern (age 22) can consent to "sexual relations" (depending on the meaning of the word "is") with the de facto Leader of the Free World is going to come up at some point. And I don't think it's a question either side really wants to dig up and grapple with deep down: Clinton mostly won the issue, but modern leftist views on the issue look a lot more like Republicans in the '90s than either side would care to admit.

While I agree that it's out of the Overton Window of what I expect to appear in the pages of the Huff Post or NYT, "Bill Clinton is a rapist" is something that is commonly stated on /r/politics (in the context of the right countering claims against Trump by bringing up Bill Clinton), and I'd be astonished if any millennial or younger person I knew would disagree.

Monica Lewinsky unambiguously consented, and was over age. (I don't think that excuses Clinton's behaviour - I think supervisor-subordinate sex in the workplace is almost always wrong, and banworthy, and I separately think that thou shalt not commit adultery.) She wasn't the plaintiff and only became the centre of the scandal because she was the woman who retained evidence that could prove Clinton committed perjury. Some of the other women didn't consent.

Yeah, ‘bill Clinton treats young women like he’s bill Cosby’ seems like common, barely even denied knowledge on the progressive left. Few will bring it up, even if trying to laundry list powerful men getting away with it, despite being a much more central example than most of those they will bring up.

The history of "credible accusations" against Bill Clinton has been noted for a long time, as has the long history of influential democrats running interference for him and attacking his accusers, starting with his wife. Around 2020 or so, the dissonance was bad enough, and the Clintons declined enough in influence, for a few prominent Blues to tentatively begin asking the uncomfortable questions out loud. A cynical person would note that this was only after the Clinton political machine had well and truly collapsed, but still, one might plausibly argue better late than never.

And yet in 2024, he was back to headlined the DNC during a national election.

Likewise, the "credible accusation" of rape against Biden turned out not to be quite credible enough.

I've talked a few times about topics where there's not much left to say, where the entire conversation is essentially pre-scripted from the start, and there's no real room for charity any more. This seems to me to be a good example of the type.

The history of "credible accusations" against Bill Clinton has been noted for a long time

I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not asserting that popular opinion among younger people is that Bill Clinton raped some unnamed woman. I'm asserting that there's a significant portion of younger people on the left who would be straight-up confused by the question because his relationship with an intern is undisputed and that's obviously one where there couldn't have been meaningful consent according to their modern sexual mores (and this opinion is frequently expressed in /r/politics threads about Epstein). Since millennials are young enough that they couldn't have voted for Bill Clinton, they're a lot more willing to throw him under the bus than the older Democrats who actually control the DNC.

Surely a 90s Republican didn't think Clinton's targets were unable to consent. Rather they thought his affairs were gross, adulterous and disqualifying.

Plenty of contemporary commentary, admittedly not all from conservative partisans, used the phrase "taking advantage", which IMO is at least suggestive of the question, but not directly implying non-consent.

The nineties was a wild time but it was widely recognized that supervisors fuck their underlings was coercion. The Republicans had nearly used expulsion to remove a sitting US Republican senator at the beginning of Clinton's 1st term.

No, ‘your intern deserves protections from being asked to have an affair with you’ is something that modern neo-morality and tradcon morality would agree on, although they would phrase it differently. Modern neo-morality is all about trying to find ways in which consent isn’t really consent when the tradcons would disapprove, because consent is a woefully insufficient standard.

The moral majority probably wouldn’t have seen it as wrong for a boss to date his intern/employee if he was single. But the idea that an extramarital affair is much worse if it’s with your employee, or with an impressionable teenager, is pretty core to moral majority views about sex.

Maybe but I definitely remember Lewinsky being villified across the political spectrum, which wouldn't make much sense if she was viewed as a a non-consenting victim by either side. Here's one example from a republican rabbi, as I remember it there was a lot of this sort of thing around: https://observer.com/2014/05/monica-should-apologize-to-hillary/

Yes, two people can both be wrong in this framework- unlike the neo-morality view that there is a victim and an oppressor.

Under classical morality, Clinton is a cad and a rake and Lewinsky is a slut and a home-wrecker.

Under classical morality, most sex is illicit, and most illicit sex has two perpetrators - rape stricto sensu is the rare case where one partner is wholly innocent because she didn't consent, not something that is only illicit because of the lack of consent.

Its complicated by the fact that women are attracted to power, so where I'd never characterize the leader of the free world as a victim, and Clinton in particular is obviously a horndog, an intern can still throw off tons of 'hints' that she's down to clown b/c the mere fact of having access to a powerful man can be enough to 'persuade' her to sleep with him.

Thinking about the Pence/Billy Graham Rule for avoiding the appearance of impropriety.

Avoiding the creation of these power imbalance situations is much simpler than trying to remove power imbalances.

Unfortunately, I think this ship sailed decades ago. In the public imagination, "paedophile" scans as synonymous with "person who has sexually assaulted a person below the age of majority, without penetration" or "person who has committed statutory rape" or "person who has been accused of committing statutory rape" or "person who seems interested in committing statutory rape" or even in some cases "person who is significantly older than his or her romantic or sexual partner (even if said partner is of the age of majority)". (Hell, in at least one case it was seen as synonymous with "paediatrician" - this article is twenty-five years old.)

A person who is eager to draw a distinction between "paedophilia" and "ephebophilia" will be accused of pedantic hair-splitting at best and nefarious motives at worst (honestly, I don't even think the latter is unreasonable, unless the person drawing the distinction is a literal clinical psychologist or similar); likewise a person who is eager to draw a distinction between "paedophilia" (a disorder of sexual attraction which does not imply a particular pattern of behaviour) and "child molestation" (an actual behaviour).

Yeah, this might be the most egregious motte-and-bailey that is currently widely accepted.

Call someone a 'pedophile' because they express attraction towards someone just barely under the age of majority, and uninformed onlookers might very well imagine that they're a predator who stalks 10 year olds with designs on kidnapping and molesting them.

And since Pedophiles (the actual child-attracted kind) are virtually the LAST remaining 'identity group' which it is universally accepted are okay to hate, abuse, and maybe even murder, there's huge incentive to get an outgroup member classified as such.

And deeper than just your point:

A person who is eager to draw a distinction between "paedophilia" and "ephebophilia" will be accused of pedantic hair-splitting at best and nefarious motives at worst

Defending pedophiles AT BEST gets you marked as 'low status' and 'weird.' I don't think any person, in the history of EVER, has managed to increase their social standing by being the guy advocating for a nuanced view on child-diddling.

So anyone sensitive to social status just WON'T defend them, even if they do have nuanced beliefs on it.

the most egregious motte-and-bailey that is currently widely accepted

No, the most egregious motte-and-bailey is "consent".
Note that this statement:

Call someone a 'pedophile' because they express attraction towards someone just barely under the age of majority, and uninformed onlookers might very well imagine that they're a predator who stalks 10 year olds with designs on kidnapping and molesting them.

is a specific version of the more general form, which is:

Call someone a 'pedophile' rapist because they express attraction towards someone just barely under the age of majority a woman who isn't interested, and uninformed onlookers might very well imagine that they're a predator who stalks 10 year olds with designs on kidnapping and molesting them.

and the popular definition of "pedophile" is fundamentally just the most defensible/best Think Of The Children extension of that core idea. (Because no, that definition only includes man on girl; we pretend it includes man on boy when it's politically convenient to do so, but we don't treat the two equally.)

The "Trump is a paedophile" stuff is fitting in with the "Trump is a rapist" stuff. People who hate him and are dazzled by the whole "they're going to throw the gays into concentration camps and shoot all the brown and black people and force women to be pregnant every year of their lives" material are just going "well of course he's a rapist, of course he raped thirteen year olds, look at this very credible case of an accuser we should all believe" (I've seen the Jane Doe/Katie Johnson story floating around again recently online years after even the journalists who wanted this humdinger of a story to be true dropped it) because they so desperately want it to be true. Cue relevant C.S. Lewis quote here:

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”

In today's "old man yelling at clouds" news, it appears that leftist memes (e.g. on imgur) have taken to calling Trump a pedophile due to his connection with Epstein.

The left finally learned how to meme I guess. Is this the source of the latest round? All I hear is it being spun as "Trump mad that Epstein was stealing underage sex workers teenage employees from his resort" With lots of dark hinting about why Trump would hire teenagers in the first place. Fucking pervert.

And I'm sitting here, feeling the class divide between reporters and everyone else more starkly than ever. I think it was Matt Taibbi who was talking about how reporters used to be a blue collar profession, but they've been increasingly infiltrated and gentrified by ivy league grads. And if this has any validity at all, it comes out here. The people reporting on this are a class of human being with no concept of a highschool summer job. That's what illegals are for. The idea that teenagers are in the service industry is on the face of it suspicious to them. Or that teenage girls (attractive ones to boot) would be in "front of house" positions. I was going to say something like "Has the world really changed that much since I was a teenager?" except all this shit would have happened when I was a teenager so I feel I can speak on it with more authority.

Ah well, I guess you had to be there. A shame these people get to write the first draft of history.

Not sure which comic said a joke to the tune of - pedophilia is liking kids, ephebophilia is liking underage, the problem is you can't explain the difference without sounding like a pedophile.

Since pedophilia is the last standing hard taboo in the society, there is a incentive to push it's boundaries ever higher. Because the other sticks just got softer - no one is scared of being caller racist, sexist or phobic anymore. To the point where some fringe activists include even persons above 18 to it. Which will lead of course to dilution, people discarding accusation more easily and give the Jimmy Savile's and Epstein's even more freedom. But this will be in 10 years.

His name is gianmarco soresi. You can see the joke here https://youtube.com/watch?v=nu6C2KL_S9o

I can cut through most of the murk wrt Trump's actual involvement with Epstein with a few observations:

  1. Any negative fact about Trump that could be leaked has leaked over the last 10 years.

  2. Any criminal charge that had the barest chance of sticking was thrown at him in the last 5 years.

  3. Biden and Co. were in possession of the Epstein files from 2021-2024.

  4. Nothing in the Epstein files that directly implicated Trump in criminal activity was leaked.

  5. No criminal prosecutions for such behavior were attempted during the last five years (caveat: those prosecutions would probably take place in Florida, which is friendly ground for Trump).

MY Bayesian priors on Biden and Co. deciding to leak nasty Trump stuff are extraordinarily high. So the lack of such leaks indicate that salacious Trump stuff just wasn't there... or the ongoing possibility that there's a MAD situation where tons of people would get burned if Epstein stuff goes public. However if that were the case, why'd the attack Trump from every other angle?

Does this prove Trump didn't commit statutory rape, or that he's objectively not a pedo or hebephile or whatever? Nah. But looking at the longer Trump record, it doesn't fit any other observed fact, unless he's just a general, indiscriminate horndog.

Lemme put it this way, if you believe that Trump did indeed bang Stormy Daniels (lol remember that name?) in 2006, when she was in her mid-20's and an active porn star... I REALLY think you have to downgrade your belief that Trump actively prefers young teens. Keep in mind this was around when the Epstein stuff was coming to light! There's just no way a guy would look at THIS (SFW) as a workable substitute for a teenager. And for the record I do think it is more likely than not that he did bang her or at least have a sexual encounter.

Anyhow, I remain glad that people are refusing to let the Epstein issue die. I grew up in Palm Beach County during the time his activities were getting investigated and prosecuted, I've been aware of the basic facts of the situation since I myself was in my teens. I hope enough pressure builds to force some actual revelations and possibly prosecutions... but it'd be nice if people were a bit more realistic about what they'll probably find.

Trump digs himself in deeper with every new quote. Epstein "stole" young girls from him? Now why would he say something like that?

As far as I can tell from the clip in question, those were literally women who worked for his company or resort, and they left his employ because Epstein tempted them away with some other offer. And he's not particularly happy that it happened!

Is "stealing" employees not a relatively common phrase?

If Trump had said something more literal in terms of "abduct" or "kidnap" I'd perk my ears up for sure. As it stands, this makes it marginally LESS likely Trump was complicit, because it indicates he was NOT facilitating Epstein in trafficking his employees. If Trump was helping Epstein, why would Epstein need to 'steal' the girls?

Am I wrong?

Is "stealing" employees not a relatively common phrase?

It was a not entirely unheard-of plotline in Edwardian-Era comedies.

The preferred term is normally "poaching".

"Stealing" implies you have a property right in your employees. "Poaching" suggests that the employees are wild animals who you have customary rights over as long as they are on your territory.

I REALLY think you have to downgrade your belief that Trump actively prefers young teens.

I don't think he actively prefers them.

Suppose some elite socialite organized a hunt for migratory birds on their private island. From my knowledge, Trump is not much of a hunter and has never displayed any intent to break federal wildlife statues.

However, if he were to learn that the creme de la creme, including British royalty, is along for the hunting trip, he might still come along and shoot at some birds. He will probably not kill the most, but in my model he would certainly enjoy rubbing shoulders and doing something naughty with the rest of the elite.

Likewise, if it is an open secret that the rich and powerful enjoy banging underage girls on Epstein's Island, I do not think that Trump will go "too bad that is not my cup of tea, they will have to have their secret club without me". Instead, he is likely deviate from his usual preferences a bit to be part of the secret club. After all, few men are so much into MILFs that they would not enjoy a blowjob from a busty 16yo.

I don't think he actively prefers them.

A single look at the period photo of the prostitute he got into trouble with - Stormy Daniels(middling tasteful nude) makes it pretty clear he's not interested in teens.

After all, few men are so much into MILFs that they would not enjoy a blowjob from a busty 16yo.

Yeah, but the allegations are not "blowjobs from 16 or 17 year olds who would be legal, depending what jurisdiction you were in", it's "Trump and Epstein raped twelve and thirteen year olds".

If it were just "sexy hot 17 year old" nobody would much care. It has to be "frightened coerced beaten thirteen year old" or nothing, because the mud has to be the blackest, dirtiest, stickiest mud to throw.

Politico, back in 2019, did an article on all the assault allegations (as of then) against Trump. While there's plenty of gross, disgusting, and immoral acts (by my sex-negative prudish religious anti-fun judgement), there's only two (unless you go by the updated definition of rape) charges of rape: 'Katie Johnson' with the Epstein allegations, and E. Jean Carroll with her Bergdorf Goodman adventure - which, let me say, I don't believe or at least do not think it proven. Read her account, replace "Trump" with "Biden" and imagine for yourself all the media articles ripping the holes in the story wide open and claiming she was trying to smear a decent man for nefarious reasons, ranging from trying to extort money to being a Republican plant.

The rest are all of the "grab 'em by the pussy" kind: groping, kissing, unwanted touching, invitations to go back to his room. Distinct lack of "I was only twelve and he raped me in the hotel bedroom" accounts:

Sixteen women have come forward with allegations against President Donald Trump, each accusing him of inappropriate conduct. The most recent, from writer and columnist E. Jean Carroll, appeared in NY Magazine on Friday.

The women’s charges range from unwanted touches and aggressive, sudden kissing to the latest accusation against Trump — that he attacked a woman in a dressing room and forced his penis inside her. Donald Trump, his campaign and the Trump White House have insisted all of the stories are fabricated and politically motivated.

Yep.

But Trump deviates from the elite norm in more ways than one. Being a Teetotaler, for one.

Is there any evidence that Trump gave in and accepted an invite to sample the finest wines or spirits in the world with his elite buds? It wouldn't be very scandalous, but I've heard no such fact.

Dude also happily enjoys diet coke and McDonalds, to boot. I get the feeling he knows what he likes and indulges in it, and isn't easily tempted to do things just because the cool kids are doing it.

I'm not saying this means he wouldn't want to have the 16 year old, just that he's far enough outside the celeb/power broker stereotype, I don't think he's the type to try something just to fit in with the crowd.

He has some sort of trauma because someone in his family died bc of alcoholism? I've seen similar behavior in Russian expats. They won't even have a beer bc of what they saw in 1990s Russia. Very odd people.

Yes, his brother had very serious alcoholism and died early as a result.

I think Trump would happily go to a wine tasting with other powerful people, even if he wouldn’t personally drink.

I'm a liberal who's been here for a while but doesn't post very frequently. I wanted to argue about the core disagreement I think I have with the prevailing political views and values on this forum. Specifically, whether this disagreement is real or just against a strawman, and if it is real, what are the best reasons why the disagreement is not serious enough to justify conclusions like "despite all their craziness, I would rather the woke have power than people with TheMotte-like views".

I think the prevailing views and values here are anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic. To make more precise how I'm using these terms

  • Individualism means people should be judged based on their own personal qualities and actions instead of based on groups that people assign them membership to. Since the groups someone belongs to often give you information about their personal qualities, this needs to be made more precise as a conditional independence statement: conditional on someone's personal qualities and choices, judgements about them, their obligations, what they deserve, etc. should be independent of the groups they belong to.

  • Meritocracy means that positions of influence and power should be given to those best able to wield them in service of society's goals. While you can get into a lot of arguments about what society's goals should be in corner cases, for most practical decisions---who should become a doctor/lawyer, who should get research funding, who should run a company---this rounds off to two soft consideration: competence, that when someone wants to do something related to their position, they actually can, and personal virtue, that people don't use their position in ways that help themselves at the the expense of others.

The first point of argument is whether these definitions are reasonable and deserve the good connotations that "meritocracy" and "individualism" have. Therefore we should discuss what the point of these terms is and why they're considered good things:

  • Individualism is important for motivation---if people know that they're life outcomes are dependent only on them and their choices, then they have the strongest possible motivation for improving themselves as much as possible. Secondly, most people are happiest when they have a sense of agency and control over their lives. Individualism maximizes this control.

  • Meritocracy is important to make society as effective as possible in achieving its goals---this is the standard "if a surgeon is operating on you, you want to surgeon to be as competent as possible" argument.

Note that neither of these justifications are about "fairness" or anything like that (even though they line up with a many widely-held intuitions about fairness); they're both just very powerful instruments for achieving whatever terminal values society actually has at the bottom.

Now as for why I think this place does not follow these values, it might be most productive to focus on a very specific example instead of a billion arguments about racism, skilled immigration etc. A few weeks ago, J.D. Vance made a statement that citizenship in the US should be based on ancestry instead of individual choices and beliefs:

If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists. Even those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it’s absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying, you don’t belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.

I am under the impression that most posters here who care about American politics would 99% endorse this statement, even though it's pretty strongly violating meritocracy and individualism---judging people based on what their ancestors were regardless of their own qualities and competencies. Now, in the quote the the alternative is judging based on if "you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025" for rhetorical punch, but the way it's framed, he likely would also be against the alternative of e.g, "whether you agree with 1995 tolerance and colorblindness"---otherwise the entire frame of the argument wouldn't be against deciding belonging based on personal choices.

So now the specific questions:

  • Does this place actually overwhelmingly support JD Vance's statement?

  • Is this statement actually anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic as defined above?

  • Are the above interpretations of meritocracy and individualism reasonable and consistent with anti-individualism and anti-meritocracy being very bad things or are they just word games?

First, the immediately preceding paragraphs to the quote, might be relevant context I will put below. This is at risk of drifting too much from your prompt, but I feel like they are pretty important and the excerpt doesn’t stand alone. (Also I am an avowed moderate so might not be the intended audience)

Too many on the far left seem destined to erode the very thing that makes Americans put on a uniform and sacrifice their lives for our common nation. Now, part of the solution, I think the most important part of the solution, is you first got to stop the bleeding. And that’s why President Trump’s immigration policies are, I believe, the most important part of the successful first six months in the Oval Office. Social bonds form among people who have something in common. They share the same neighborhood. They share the same church. They send their kids to the same school. And what we’re doing is recognizing that if you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow that social cohesion to form naturally. It’s hard to become neighbors with your fellow citizens when your own government keeps on importing new neighbors every single year at a record number.

But even so, if you were to ask yourself in 2025 what an American is, I hate to say it, very few of our leaders actually have a good answer. Is it purely agreement with the creedal principles of America? I know the Claremont Institute is dedicated to the founding vision of the United States of America. It’s a beautiful and wonderful founding vision, but it’s not enough by itself.

If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence, that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic…

I think Vance is using a straw man here. He even kind of acknowledges it (charitably it’s a rhetorical device at best). Are there really many influential political people who think this is the sole criteria for immigration? Don't think so.

I think it’s fair to say the far left has a disdain for America that’s a more caustic than hopeful, and that’s bad. But I think the regular left, yes even their leaders, tend to be more aspirational to American principles than Vance gives credit for. It’s also wrong what he says about them on the first place: I’m not aware of many even on the far left who advocate to kick people out of America if they don’t share the principles? At worst they display schadenfreude or want to put you into eternal lecture-detention.

And does a disdain for America, where it exists, also directly translate to weaker social bonds, his original concern? No, there’s no real link, really he just thinks the number of immigrants is too high and too ‘other’. It’s also a bad argument because he’s saying that too many immigrants worsens anti-nationalist pride… but at the same time alleging that the leftists deliberately want to import people based on agreement with American ideas or principles? Pick a lane, man. Weirdly he suddenly makes a U-turn and now describes this American creed as a progressive leftist thing, despite literally just talking about it as a good, general, national pride thing. Again, pick a lane man.

I think your read of this attitude as anti-meritocratic is accurate. He’s underestimating, ironically, America’s own extremely strong assimilation forces. He’s not considering immigration as a potential strength. I don’t really see too much of a statement on individualism. My main critique is that this vision is confused and intellectually incoherent. Ironically, he is great and even accurate about identifying some big problems with the left, but not so great at building something in its place (the same accusation levied at far leftists w/r/t America)

More broadly however I think the distinction between individual advice and public policy choices is the biggest issue of our age and most of the left-right divide generally. Right wingers preach personal responsibility which is good, but on a public policy level this means they ignore real suffering and policy can be weak. Left wingers preach social responsibility which is good, but on a personal level this means they fall into a cult of victimhood and their happiness and effectiveness goes down. Good policy and good individualism both require a degree of what to many feels like cognitive dissonance or hypocrisy, even though it isn’t. So they often default to one or the other exclusively and engage in tribal debates, trying to hammer home their strong points while being blind to the weaknesses.

I think Vance is using a straw man here.

I think the rhetorical device is called a "reductio ad absurdum."

I’m not aware of many even on the far left who advocate to kick people out of America if they don’t share the principles?

A bit slippery and perhaps deliberate on Vance's part, I'd read at they want to deny right of representation to people that don't share their principles. They won't send Vance (for example) or people like him to a prison in El Salvador, but they would do everything in their power to deny that he's a "true American" and prevent him from ever having a position of influence.

And does a disdain for America, where it exists, also directly translate to weaker social bonds, his original concern? No, there’s no real link

I want to say citation needed but I don't know what evidence I'd accept here. I do think that's a pretty fair correlation but other things occurred over the last few decades that also affected social bonds.

He’s underestimating, ironically, America’s own extremely strong assimilation forces.

Historically speaking, with a 70 year pause and a few wars between big waves.

He’s not considering immigration as a potential strength.

His wife is an immigrant and he explicitly says the country is better with her in it.

they would do everything in their power to deny that he's a "true American" and prevent him from ever having a position of influence.

Right wing complaints of voter suppression? Realistically this just looks like scolding. Not the scariest of threats even if annoying.

He frames social bonds as something that happens naturally with time within locales. The argument that social bonds are weaker because new people showed up seems weak and weird. Why I say he’s trying to have it both ways and it doesn’t appear to be a coherent worldview, not as presented.

I mean theoretically there’s a tipping point when it comes to immigration, where the new drowns out the old, or even “pollutes” it like Trump once said (gross language if you ask me). Maybe the point is subjective for many voters. At least when I lived in Miami a decade back, assimilation seemed to be doing just fine. Tons of kids refusing to speak Spanish even at home, for example. Historically I think we’re on the highish side but within norms (a backlash isn’t too surprising either at this point in time).

However we don’t really see this show up in the rhetoric is my point I suppose. It was my understanding that Republicans wanted any legal immigrants to be super woohoo about America, so it feels weird to see Vance say effectively the opposite. Unless I am misreading him here. The fact that the administration has done worse than nothing to make legal immigration work better, putting it off until later, also makes me feel like the pro-immigration stuff is lip service, and the speech more a stump speech to a smarter audience rather than a real attempt to lay out a coherent view of what America needs or should be.

Right wing complaints of voter suppression?

Maybe not direct voter suppression - at least I don't have a definite proof of it yet - but we have multiple and very well verified instances of speech suppression, economic suppression, access suppression etc. And this happened both on governmental level and on the level of various non-governmental gatekeepers, such as academia, media industry, entertainment industry, big corporations, etc. - every level that defines how the society is managed has multiple examples of people being suppressed for being on the Right.

The argument that social bonds are weaker because new people showed up seems weak and weird

How it's weird? Who am I likely to bond with - the person I (and my ancestors) lived next to for three generations, or with somebody who showed up around yesterday, doesn't speak my language, has totally different culture and beliefs, wears something I can't even name, and can't answer positively to any of my "remember when" questions? I'm not saying the latter is impossible, but claiming it's less likely than the former - if anything is ever "weird" is claiming something like that, and without any justification, just dropping it like it's the most obvious thing in the world. Of course it's not.

I mean you’re citing the maximalist case, that I don’t deny happens occasionally, but sure. What I mean is that obviously bonds are relative. Bonds with whom? Is the bond of a neighbor with their longtime neighbor diminished because they have a third new neighbor? Not really (that’s how I initially parsed it). If we’re talking some kind of ambient social identity or affiliation, that’s more culture than sociality.

And I think there’s an excellent argument to be made that mere locality is a weaker bond than it used to be, with the decline of community institutions and our new media age, independent of who exactly is moving in. Plus, although I totally get where you’re coming from about ‘oh we might have less to chat about’ I think that’s not necessarily the case. If both newcomer and old timer have an interest and/or motivation to connect, it will still happen! Maybe you chat about football and they chat about soccer, to mutual interest, your Christmas invite is responded to with an Eid invite, etc. No need to be rosy here - maybe statistically there are fewer connections overall. Is that enough to matter? ‘Avoid the Polish kid Grzegorz with a weird name’ is a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy just like ‘Don’t even hang out at a food place that isn’t halal’ is too, attitude matters on both sides of the coin.

Is the bond of a neighbor with their longtime neighbor diminished because they have a third new neighbor

No, but if I have N neighbors, then if those neighbors are all from "common ancestry" set, the number of bonds I'm likely to form would be larger than if they would be in "alien ancestry" set. Thus, the expected number of bonds, statistically, would decrease for the same N neighbors, if ancestry heterogeneity would increase. Note that it's not the same case as adding one neighbor to existing set of N - that's not likely to decrease the number of bonds. But replacing one set of N with another set of N would. Note that this is of course very theoretical and generic statement. But my point is it's not weird and novel thing, it's very much expected and natural to conclude that. It might be that after careful empirical study it turns out the common sense does not work in this particular area - non-intuitive empirical results happened in the past - but until it happened, it's not "weird" at all to think that.

And I think there’s an excellent argument to be made that mere locality is a weaker bond than it used to be

Yes, it is, but that's a different dimension, which is orthogonal to the one we're discussing there. And yes, if there's a will there's a way - I am not saying this is some kind of universal impossibility and individuals are not bound by statistics, they can do whatever the heck they want. But on the societal level, statistics will assert itself.

It was my understanding that Republicans wanted any legal immigrants to be super woohoo about America, so it feels weird to see Vance say effectively the opposite.

He says, "And I happen to think that it’s absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying, you don’t belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025."

My understanding is that people who agree with progressive liberalism are not people who are "Woohoo" about America. One of Progressive Liberalism's main points is that America was conceived with the original sin of racism and needs to be born again.

It is my understanding that Conservatives would prefer that every immigrant be the kind who loves America, 4th of July, the Federalist Papers, George Washington, Apple Pie, Hamburgers, and basically be a Weeaboo but for America. Basically support the prior civil religion. Immigrants who support the current civil religion are disfavored which seems to be exactly what JD Vance is saying here.

I should have been more clear, yeah. But the thought remains, because as I mentioned the normal left (which even Vance distinguishes from the far left) are still mostly fans of the civil religion stuff. Other parts of the left aren’t as loudly America Sucks and in fact disagree. So I think he’s exaggerating the trend.

To attempt being more specific, if we use the Pew Political Typology groups, as of 2021 the “Progressive Left” is 12% of Dem and Lean Dem people, and though there isn’t an exact question on patriotism, there is this perhaps-proxy: “there are other countries better than the US”. It might interest you to know that there’s a huge chasm between them and the rest of the main Dem alliance. They respond 75% yes. “Outsider Left” (16%) also land at 63%. Here’s the catch, every other group, Left or Right, is at under 25% on this same question including Establishment Liberals and Democratic Mainstays.

If we’re talking immigration, as of then the “Democratic Mainstays” (28% of coalition) were notable doubters on a few measures. It depends heavily how you slice the adjacent questions though, for example “America’s openness to people from around the world is essential to who we are as a nation” has a sharp divide (70 and up vs 30 and below) but the Stressed Sideliners join an actual defection from the Ambivalent Right on the upper end.

Offering a data point of myself:

Does this place actually overwhelmingly support JD Vance's statement?

I would reject it, though I'm not sure I represent the typical Mottezan's viewpoint. Then again, I question whether the typical Mottezan is even a meaningful category.

Is this statement actually anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic as defined above?

Yes.

Are the above interpretations of meritocracy and individualism reasonable and consistent with anti-individualism and anti-meritocracy being very bad things or are they just word games?

Word games, but "meritocracy" and "individualism" are just pointers to confused concepts that are themselves products of a long series of word games.

I don't think you're wrong, exactly, but I think you're ignoring an important dimension of the disagreement. That being the distinction between positive and negative rights (freedom from vs freedom to).

The traditional American view of rights is almost entirely negative, and each of the amendments in the bill of rights that grants a specific right frames it as a negative right (generally the right to be free from some government action).

Rights during/post FDR tend to be framed as positive rights (new deal/great society), or possibly "entitlements".

Your distinction is important, but I don't think it can be understood properly without examining the underlying disagreement about rights.

The first point of argument is whether these definitions are reasonable and deserve the good connotations that "meritocracy" and "individualism" have.

While formulations similar to yours are often endorsed, theyre not usually understood to work in the absolute way that you use them. For example, imprisoning anyone with a job for reasons unrelated to that job violates your meritocracy, but its generally thought that society has a compelling interest in imprisoning people anyway. Birthright citizenship violates your individualism. In fact, Im not sure there is anything short of granting citizenship to everyone whatsoever, that complies with both individualism and international law against creating stateless people. The absence of a 100% inheritance tax might violate both, depending on whether you consider bestowing inheritance a "judgement", or investment a "position of influence". Clearly, committing to this kind of absolute interpretation puts you into an extreme fringe position. This is especially strange combined with your claimed instrumental justification for these principles - those are usually quite open to compromise.

Now, maybe youll bite those bullets because thats just the true liberalism, but that really changes the conversation. I also dont think throwing your lot in with the wokes is the obvious response there. By those exalted standards, theyre barely different. You would be deciding based on ultra-low probability scenarios where your ideas gain any noticeable influence, and its hard to say where those are better.

Does this place actually overwhelmingly support JD Vance's statement?

"This place" can't support anything, not unless we form a representative government and give it the rights to represent us in this matter. That's certainly not what I am here for. I think if you want to talk to people, talk to people. If you want to fish for a sweeping statements like "this place is full of X", whatever X is, please don't. Yes, for some values of X it may be true, but it's not the point of the thing.

I personally think Vance's statement makes sense - if somebody traces their ancestry from before the Civil War they certainly should not be excluded when defining what "America" is.

Is this statement actually anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic as defined above?

No. This statement does not say America must only be hereditarian, it says common history must not be excluded. I think this is true - while for a startup nation, bare idea may be enough, for the nation with 250-year old culture history is a big part of it. True, 250 years is not a lot, some nations measure in millenia, but it's enough to consider it seriously and not throw it out, especially because of momentary partisan considerations.

A few weeks ago, J.D. Vance made a statement that citizenship in the US should be based on ancestry instead of individual choices and beliefs:

I don't think you are describing the content of this statement properly. The proper description would be that Vance thinks just individual choices and beliefs are not enough to make somebody an American, but being a part of ancestry that created the culture we now call "America" may also be considered as a factor. If you lived somewhere in Galapagos Islands and you've just read the Declaration of Independence and you thought "actually these guys have some pretty decent ideas!" that doesn't automatically make you an American. You can become an American, and maybe you will, but you are not yet are. I don't see anything wrong with this claim.

Moreover, Vance specifically said he does not have the answer to the question of what is an American, and only calls to begin working it out. Presenting it as he already prescribed the "ancestry" answer gives me the strong "fine people" vibe. This is not a good way to conduct a discussion.

Are the above interpretations of meritocracy and individualism reasonable and consistent with anti-individualism and anti-meritocracy being very bad things or are they just word games?

No, the definition of individualism does not exclude considering the individual's history or culture. No person exists as an island, people are social animals, and being a social animal means being part of the culture. And culture is rooted in history and ancestry. True, history and ancestry does not define the individual, as doesn't genetics or, in general, any wide-area criteria - it's impossible to define an individual by metrics that count in millions. But that doesn't mean those are to be completely ignored. Cultures exist, and individuals are heavily influenced by them. That does not deny the fact that the individual has to be evaluated on their personal merits, at least when it is possible. But one also has to realize these merits do not come from nothing. Ancestry is not the destiny, but it's often the foundation.

The tools you have described are indeed powerful, but they are secondary to defining the goals. To illustrate that, let's abstract them out and define a quality called "awesomeness". The person is more awesome if they are more efficient in achieving whatever they want to achieve. Looks good so far? Now, do we want to have more awesome people? Do we want to make immigration policy depend on awesomeness - the more awesome you are, the higher your chance for a citizenship. Before you answer, consider an awesome drug addict, an awesome psychopath, an awesome flat Earth cultist, an awesome Islamic (or, if you wish, Christian) fundamentalist. Does "awesomeness" looks as good as before, or do you want to put something in front of it? And if so, what exactly?

The problem with meritocracy is that it has Implications.

The best fit for the best able, sure. But what if you aren't? There's also no clue about what's best. If you apply evolutionary logic to society, then who knows what will end up surviving and what won't? As someone else noted, it's easy to talk about meritocracy when you win, and it's very attractive. But what if you lose?

I would think that most meritocratic societies need to have some method of dealing with the people who lose. "You're a loser in a meritocratic system and you lost because other people are better than you in this system" is not a popular message. q.e.d. the woke: why not burn the system down instead?

As an alternative we can have a system with losers but instead of the winners being chosen by merit we can use an alternative criteria like knowing the correct people or being born to the right parents.

But what if you lose?

Would you rather be 95th percentile in Lesotho, or 40th percentile in America?

Revealed preference suggests that most people would rather "lose" in a wealthy country full of highly-skilled people than "win" in a third-world country run by incompetent people.

Would you rather be 95th percentile in Lesotho, or 40th percentile in America?

I think it would actually be quite competitive. 95th percentile in Lesotho would put you into literal top 100,000 people in that small nation. We are talking about a country with Gini coefficient of 0.44, being part of top elite would mean being very rich even in nominal terms - probably scion of some well connected family a respected local businessman or government official who studied in South African university (5,6% people have university degree in Lesotho) and goes there for shopping trips. Not to even talk about things like social status or what you can afford - things like your own maids and servants, housing etc.

UBS estimated that in 2022, 96.6% of Lesotho's population had a net worth of less than $10k.

https://rev01ution.red/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/global-wealth-databook-2023-ubs.pdf

In 2017, 89% of Lesotho's population lived on less than $10/day:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-living-with-less-than-10-int--per-day?tab=chart&country=LSO

Edit: Also, top n is less informative than top x%. The poorest person in Tuvalu is in the top 10,000 richest adults in the country. Top 100k in Ethiopia (pop 132 million)? Sure, probably richer than the average American. But Lesotho's economy just isn't productive enough or large enough to support 100k genuinely wealthy people.

Revealed preference here is related to switching costs, not to which someone would prefer in a vacuum.

Immigration preferences partially demonstrate that it's more than switching costs in most cases.

Let's say you currently live in Botswana. You could move to Lesotho, where you'd be 95th percentile, or to America, where you'd be 40th percentile. I think most people in that situation would still choose America, even though there's no substantial difference in switching cost between the two options.

From what I've observed, revealed preference seems to be "make money in America, then retire somewhere much, much cheaper."

Every system has losers, and the winners have to be able to do something about them. Meritocracy has an advantage in this in that the losers, by definition, suck.

I wanted to argue about the core disagreement I think I have with the prevailing political views and values on this forum.

It's not a great sign that it's been 8 hours and you haven't been arguing with any of the responses.

Of course there are vanishingly few self made men, everyone gets almost everything from their family, nation, ancestors, etc. That's proper, right, and necessary.

I don't believe very strongly in meritocracy. Reports of the striver rat race to get into the best colleges, of South Korean grind culture, and of elite overproduction suggest failure points. I would be alright with a world where people mostly followed their parents' professions (assuming they're competent enough for the position -- the child of a brain surgeon might be a more generalist doctor, or if they don't want to do the work, some other PMC for, for instance), aside from the obvious issues with underclass kids with no profession to look to (sure, intermittent work in a warehouse or fast food restaurant is not a good life plan), and technological obsolescence. Trying to get everyone to go to college because blue collar is just so terrible was a bad idea. America should focus more on making things like working in all aspects of chicken farming/processing less terrible, not on importing desperate Guatemalans who will work until their fingernails rot off.

Individualism is fine to the extent that it's possible to interact with people as individuals. If there were some wise judge who was actually wise reviewing all potential immigrants as individuals, and they really had the best interests of the nation in mind, over multiple generations, then sure, fine. But that's not going to happen, just like the communism of a monastery isn't going to scale to a whole country, or even city. States often can't operate at that level (cue Nikolai Rostov "they're actually trying to kill me! Me, whom everybody loves!")

Anyway, yes of course most Americans are citizens because their parents were. Just like everywhere else. There's no frontier that could absorb large numbers of stateless people who failed to earn their citizenship. I guess if the Starship Troopers plan were on the table, where people had to earn the right to vote through national service (but still retained the right to live and work through birth), that would be fine. I dislike the custom of anchor babies, but doubt that anything much will change in that respect.

Rat races are only an issue when being at the bottom is so horrible that people are desperate to avoid it. In this case, any way you set up society is going to be horrible---what's the alternative to the rat race? Most people are just screwed because of the circumstances of their brith and can never have a reasonable life no matter what they do? If we actually do as you say and make chicken farming less miserable, then the rat race would also weaken.

I think this is a little bit of a distraction though since you aren't supposed to try to justify meritocracy by fairness. Someone has to be the surgeon hypothetically operating on me and I would much rather they were chosen by meritocracy---it's not about the person who gets the position but an instrumental goal to make things best for everyone else. Like many more things than people realize, surgery is really hard and it does actually matter to have the 0.1th percentile performer instead of just the 10th percentile one. Being "competent enough" is beyond humanly possible---medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the US according to this.

Finally, while the Korean educational rat-race has gone way over into Goodhart territory, a little bit of rat race is great for motivation and helping everyone become the best version of themselves. I am very happy for the extra motivation this gave me to study for math contests since that made me a much better technical problem solver. I am even more happy for the extra motivation it gave me to do the much less fun writing practice for English class.

Meritocracy is probably useful at very high, best in the world levels. Like I said, I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with an actually wise judge, who would look at a surgeon, or researcher, or entrepreneur -- how competent they are, who they're planning to bring with them, how excited they are to become American, etc, and let some number of competent, excited potential Americans over. On balance, I'd rather have Musk as an American than not. Or even Ramaswamy, despite having mixed feelings about some of the things he stands for. If there are 100 Von Neumanns out there somewhere, sure, let them in. If some of them are Chinese, let them in but watch them. If they start complaining about whiteness, or prom queens, or high school football, let them go back. Not that I even care for those specific things, but those are pretty bad red flags.

At the same time, no, I do not want Ramaswamy or Musk to be able to each import ten thousand compliant, desperate engineers from India. Even if they are marginally better than the locals (though I mostly doubt they are). They should have to work with Americans. If they're trying to do things Americans don't want to work on, for wages Americans are not willing to accept, while they should change their plans. I'm not so desperate for a Grok powered humanoid robot army in ten rather than thirty years.

While it's useful to have meritocracy at the top, I'm less convinced of its usefulness at the middle and bottom levels, especially with automation proceeding apace. I would prefer to live in a world where I work fewer hours, then bake, sew, and pick fruit with my kids. I already do that to some extent, and there's a lot of angst about how all the straightforward housewife tasks have been outsourced, and that it's not entirely a good thing. Like the communist Xitter about wanting to lead discussion groups and make clothes out of scraps. Things like sewing undergarments and picking strawberries are fine in moderation, and terrible as a full time job. Keeping a flock of chickens is fun, people will do it at cost. There are a decent number of tasks like that. American boys won't pull weeds for nine hours in the sun for $10/hr, while others might -- but the people who have accumulated nine hours of weeds are doing it wrong.

While it's useful to have meritocracy at the top, I'm less convinced of its usefulness at the middle and bottom levels

This has been debated before---look up the o-ring model of economic development. One of the conclusions you can draw from this is that it does matter to have a very deep pool of talent to draw from. Again, people have a general bias towards underestimating just how hard most jobs are, especially jobs with technical content to them.

Even beyond that, the measured outcome of letting the side that's seemingly ancestry-over-all-else have power is to not even have meritocracy at the top: Terry Tao also appears to be getting his grants cut (though this is recent news so take it with a large grain of salt. EDIT: confirmation).

America should focus more on making things like working in all aspects of chicken farming/processing less terrible, not on importing desperate Guatemalans who will work until their fingernails rot off.

There are some jobs so terrible that they can only be done by the desperate or by forced labor. There's fewer of them than there used to be, but picking strawberries is still a job that really sucks, and there's no improvement on the horizon. There can be people doing certain jobs because the carceral system forces them to work full time and they can't get a better job, or there can be people doing it because they're desperate third worlders.

picking strawberries is still a job that really sucks

I've heard that mentioned a lot, as a reason it's so, so important to have slaves. It just seems incredibly weak. Coal, sure. It was super important. But... think of the strawberries??

Sure, this is a stupid example- and we can do without them(or with them being prohibitively expensive). But there's numerous jobs(many in construction) in which every single person who does it long term is permanently on probation because they are legally required to have jobs and can't find other ones. Lots of much-harder-to-do-without agricultural jobs, too.

There's something biblical about the idea that the men who build homes (and other buildings) are the same men society has determined aren't quite worthy of being a full part of society.

I suppose I have less of an issue with citizens who have done bad things having to get shit jobs, since they're their home country's problem to deal with either way.

Still, I'm confident that our economic system is robust, and we'd figure something out if we had to. Would our houses be slightly worse? I don't know, since you didn't say what the jobs are, specifically. If it's roofers working in Phoenix when it's 120 out or something, maybe it would be more expensive and certain styles of roof would become less feasible, hard to say, it would be worth trying. Almost everyone used to work in agriculture and repair their own houses, I'm sure the current arrangement of turning everything into an assembly line isn't the only possible one.

The argument from @Gaashk stands, I think. We didn’t need slaves in the northern states since the founding, in the west since the early 19th, and the south since the mid-19th. Suddenly in the late 20th we discover slavery to be a necessary institution for agricultural work that was heretofore done even by so cushy an ethnicity as the English. Construction, same deal. What has changed? Does nobody sense something wrong in the fact that the Land of the Free is suddenly regressing so far as to demand a permanent underclass? This is why I don’t trust any of the economic statements on this matter. The whole argument has no sense of history to it.

There were far more desperate people in nineteenth and early twentieth century America.

Of course there are vanishingly few self made men

Ahem. I would think my precise gender identity is irrelevant, but just about everyone knows who I am here.

Going back in time to create your own cloning and quick aging vats is deeply respectable commitment to your transhuman philosophy, and, if you’re looking for literary criticism, a bit of a ripoff from Warhammer 40K.

Look man, turning out to have been my own mom and dad because I mixed up the time-travel and gender reversal devices is hard enough, I don't need the accusations of plagiarism. Just consider your own username, are you looking for a complaint to the RSPCA?

I’ll light a candle and pray for you to overcome your traumatic time-travel travails.

I’ve chipped in my 10 quid at enough popup RSPCA booths on British Town High Street that I think I’ve bought an indulgence or two. The sad dog posters always get me.

My primary concern is the ghost of Hector haunting me for my presumptuousness.

Look man, turning out to have been my own mom and dad because I mixed up the time-travel and gender reversal devices is hard enough, I don't need the accusations of plagiarism.

Then don't plagiarize Heinlein. Sheesh.

With time travel, Heinlein may well have been the plagiarist.

Now you're ripping off Jack Lewis Todd Thromberry.

It's not a great sign that it's been 8 hours and you haven't been arguing with any of the responses.

The post was filtered pending mod approval. I believe it's been more like 2 to 3 hours.

Oh, I see. Looking at Netstack's post I guess it's only been 4 hours; maybe he'll come back.

I was getting pretty tired of the AlexanderTurok inspired you people posts, with minimal drive by engagement.

If the first post was filtered, it's likely the responses have been filtered as well. An annoying artifact from rDrama. Try to upvote them even if you disagree with their post until they break free.

No one but a mod should have been able to see it or reply to it before it was unfiltered.

I know that it's hard, but this imo really needs to be changed. It's bad enough for progressives to be regularly downvoted (even if I may disagree as well) but probably unavoidable, but longtime posters constantly getting filtered without mod action has to be supremely frustrating and I probably would also leave eventually.

The moderators are allowed to run the site however they want---they managed to make something providing significant value that's hard to find anywhere else. It's only frustrating when they continuously claim that the site is something that it isn't.

Advertising a place like this as purely a place

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

is basically a sneaky way to wage the culture war by sanewashing a lot of very sketchy racist arguments through giving them a very tilted playing field and a sort of "controlled opposition" (for this and many other reasons).

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is basically a sneaky way to wage the culture war by sanewashing a lot of very sketchy racist arguments through giving them a very tilted playing field and a sort of "controlled opposition"

But no. Unsupported assertions are easy to make. This one is false.

"Sanewashing"? A thought defeating cliche used against statements for which someone lacks an argument against.

It's very late in the time zone I'm currently in and I probably won't be replying to anything in detail until tomorrow. I don't have time to write long posts every hour of every day---like waiting 24hrs is the standard for written communication.

I think in one of your past posts you called yourself "a one issue voter on the subject of identity", and as time goes on I think I agree with you more and more... in a very Anakin and Padme kind of way... In any case, yes, it's one of the most important questions of our time, though I'm somewhat frustrated by the conversation not really going anywhere, and just getting restarted every few months.

You focus on the disagreement with the part where he says having ancestors that fought the civil war grants you a stronger claim to the country than agreeing with it's creed, but can you talk about your agreement with the concept of the "credal nation"? Vance picked "agreement with the ADL" as a criterion for adherence to the American creed, would that something you agree with? If not that specifically, what would you say is the American creed? If we're going by the credal nation, and the historical core principles of the USA, doesn't that imply that any socialist, communist, critical theorist, non-liberal feminist, devout Muslim or black separatist, can be deported on sight? Regardless of whether or not he was born there, and regardless of any heritage?

Does this place actually overwhelmingly support JD Vance's statement?

That's a very collectivist question, woudn't you say? But if you want my personal opinion, I agree with his statement.

Is this statement actually anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic as defined above?

I think the most you can get is "anti-individualistic", and once someone takes that on the chin, claims of "anti-meritocracy" start falling apart. For example, does Ukraine have to hire a Russian general as there supreme commander of their armed forces, if his resume looks better, or else accept they're being "anti-meritocratic"?

Are the above interpretations of meritocracy and individualism reasonable and consistent with anti-individualism and anti-meritocracy being very bad things or are they just word games?

That's probably the most complex question you asked here. Yeah, sometimes people play word games. Sometimes consciously, because they want to win, sometimes unconsciously, because they really like the idea of something being true. Sometimes a completely sincere person uses the exact same argument that a 100%-dishonest word-game-player.

Either way, I don't think you're playing word games, but I disagree with either your basic assumptions, or a logical step you're taking somewhere, but I'm not sure which.

I find it more interesting that this is a statement I've seen voiced by others in the past few years, that's only come up recently. That we have the Vice President of the United States voicing this aloud indicates... well, it certainly indicates something.

Part of the issue, I feel, with modern immigration is that people have bought into the myth and propaganda, and if you question this, you're, well, a bad person. 'Give us your tired, your huddled masses, your poor' is basically good advertisement, but it doesn't reflect the reality on the ground. 'Melting pot', too, was a statement by a visitor from Europe to describe New York City, and I can't help but feel trying to make all of America look like New York City makes my skin crawl.

As far as mythology goes, again, I feel that people have this mistaken assumption that people just came into the US during the heyday of 20th century immigration and merely stayed and settled. Not true. In truth, it was a two-way free-flow of people that came to the US to make their fortune and then left if they couldn't do so.

Many European migrants who moved to the United States in the early twentieth century eventually returned to their home country. The US government collected official statistics on both in- and out-migration from 1908 to 1923. In those years, the United States received 10 million immigrant arrivals and lost 3.5 million emigrants, a return migration rate of 35% (Gould 1980; Wyman 1993: 10–12; Hatton and Williamson 1998: 9). Return migration rates may have been even higher than the aggregate statistics suggest. Bandiera et al. (2013) found that in order to reconcile micro data on migrant inflows to the stock of migrants remaining in the United States during census years, the return migration rate may have been as high as 70%

Source

More, was serious concern over said glut of immigration, to the point where moratoriums came down to stifle said flow of people because of concerns regarding the people that actually lived there.

More, as someone whom considers himself... well, I can't say 'amateur', I won't grace myself with such a title, so let's call me a 'dabbling fumbler of a historian' - someone who's looked into the past on this topic, the one thing I never see brought up in regards to early 20th century immigration is the one of distance and time. I go to local places that were settled as ethnic enclaves and I put myself back in the days of yore, both in terms of distance and logistics, and I come to a stark realization - people talk of this 'founding myth' of immigration for America as if it perfectly applies to the modern age, and, no, it doesn't - because these were groups of people who basically came to America, staked out a section of land days travel from others in the middle of nowhere, and lived their lives, alone and away from others and not causing any trouble.

We don't have that today. Travel from port city to said settlements take days back then of hard travel now take a few hours at worst. We have a free flow of people undreamt of in the past, over vast distances and in a fairly trivial fashion. What would take places in another section of your own county could be ignored with a fair amount of ease if you so wished - now we need to pay attention to what occurs in other states because the people over there could very easily come over here with all their issues and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.

Talk of meritocracy and individualism applied to Immigration is a bad argument from the get go, I feel, because it's based on a host of assumptions that are not historical truth. America was never a melting pot, it was a crucible - one that people could leave and did so. And even if they stayed without being a success, they were not necessarily a failure, as they could simply live their lives without bothering anyone and not being bothered in turn.

That age of history is done and gone. We no longer have that luxury. The myths of yesteryear may speak of something that people want to be true, an ideal to aspire to, but the set of circumstances that allowed for that myth to flourish no longer exist, and it's time people acknowledge that. We can't look to the past for solutions, because the past people expect to find never existed, and the solutions that did exist people don't want to use.

TLDR: While I'm sure there are applicable arguments about Meritocracy and Individualism, I feel this is a bad one built upon bad assumptions and so I'm dismissing it entirely in favor of focusing on other aspects.

Taking a step back, I think you are begging the question by smuggling in the premise that the principal test of someone's stances on individualism and meritocracy should be whether they are in favour of granting or withholding American citizenship on individualistic and meritocratic criteria. I think that most right-wingers, and many people more accurately described as "left-wing heretics", disagree with the idea that citizenship is or should be anything like an award, reward, occupation, office or responsibility, which are the things whose distribution based on merit are what is usually taken to define a meritocracy.

Imagine a strange world in which there is a real broad-based political movement holding that family membership should be treated like a public-sector job. Your sister, who is an adherent of this movement, says she got a strong application from India for the position of your father - the candidate is stronger and healthier than your current dad, has better educational credentials (a degree from an IIT in parenting, even!), and in fact a narrow majority of your present family members were polled and found to have much better alignment with his values. In that world, if you were deeply opposed to the idea of replacing your dad with the Indian candidate (or even just admitting him as a second dad), do you think you would have to hand in your individualist meritocrat card?

If yes, sure, you are at least consistent - get in touch so we can work on putting out some ads for any family positions our present system might let us legally fill with better-qualified individuals. There are however strong arguments for the "no" answer here: the uses and expectations of family membership are so far removed from any standard transactional notions of merit that it is nonsensical to award it based on them - you are expected to spend all your time around family members, sacrifice for them even to your own straight detriment if they need it (and expect that they would to do so for you, even if this hypothetical is one that will never come to pass in reality; your washing and clothing a paraplegic relative is not in expectation that they might actually repay it), and share illegible life experience that is only cross-applicable because you are actually genetically similar.

Many will hold that citizenship is the same! After all, you do have to spend time around your countrymen, benefit from illegible cross-applicability of life experiences (progressives would be the first to tell me that something as random as skin cream formulations might unexpectedly not work as well for people who are genetically far from those that they were optimised for!), and sometimes sacrifice for them in the purely hypothetical expectation that they would do the same for you (whether it is a small sacrifice for someone else's big benefit, like paying taxes that go into medical benefits, or a big sacrifice for everyone else's small benefit, like going to war and dying).

Of course, there is also a sort of third answer, that the family example was contrived because the notion of merit was not right. All these things - genetic similarity, giving other family members the lizard-brain reassurance that comes from looking and smelling like them, willingness to sacrifice for them - are what is asked of family members, so your slightly deadbeat dad is in fact the most meritorious candidate. Only, if you lift this answer back to citizenship, you get an answer that you may not be happy with either, which is that JD Vance was also being perfectly meritocratic there! It's just that the main qualifications for American citizens are "convince yourself and others that your ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War", "be genetically close to white Anglos" and "be someone the current residents of America would like as their neighbour".

(@OracleOutlook had a similar response so I hope this works as a reply to both)

First, since citizenship in certain countries has such a huge material impact, it is a "reward" whether people want to think of it that way or not. I think your argument boils down to saying that citizenship has some extra, special qualities that make thinking of it as a reward misleading word games.

The special quality you're focusing on is an analogy to family membership. There are two reasons why I think family membership is special

  • An ideal family is supposed to provide unconditional love and support---it's an insurance policy in the world that no matter how much you screw up, you'll always have something. In particular, you should never worry about being completely disconnected from other people.
  • Families are very small sets of people. Due to Dunbar-number effects, morality in small groups (that our instincts are perfectly optimized to handle and where you actually personally know everyone you're interacting with) is very different than morality applied to broader society. Tons of things are ok in family settings that would be horrible corruption in a corporation---since our instincts are so finely tuned in the small-group case, we just feel the exact cases when its ok and when it's dangerous.

Of these two, only the first really applies to citizenship---that's easily resolved by rules against making someone stateless. So with that one exception, it should be fine to reason about citizenship as other rewards, particularly positions in other sorts of large organizations. Sacrifices happen in these too!

Are there other important special qualities of citizenship over other material rewards that would change this?

P.S. I'm not sure it's reasonable to say that genetic similarity is the best way to judge if you can relate to someone. Here, education, values, and interests seem to matter much more. It's way easier for me to relate to a random mathematician of any race than a random person of the same race as me. I don't think this is that unusual---at the very least, having a college degree is probably more relevant to relatability for you than race.

Of these two, only the first really applies to citizenship---that's easily resolved by rules against making someone stateless.

I don't understand your argument there - these rules exist as international agreements that are generally fairly well-respected, so doesn't that in fact make citizenship more like family, and therefore make moral intuitions about family membership more applicable to citizenship?

Are there other important special qualities of citizenship over other material rewards that would change this?

I think @OracleOutlook's response below already addressed the most important ones, so I'll just +1 it.

First, since citizenship in certain countries has such a huge material impact, it is a "reward" whether people want to think of it that way or not.

I think that in saying this, you also betray an interesting conflation of two different understandings of what meritocracy is. One of them is a sort of deontological one, under which to be a meritocrat is to hold that it is morally right that boons go to the most meritorious, while the other is more utilitarian, where to be a meritocrat is to say that granting awards and positions to the best is the optimal way to organise a society.

Your responses seem to place you in the former camp, while many of your interlocutors consider themselves to be meritocrats in the latter sense. As usual, non-central examples are the ones that really put the differences between deontologists and utilitarians in relief. The utilitarian case for meritocracy seems strong, but in reality most of its strength is concentrated in theoretical argument and precedent for the beneficial effects of central examples of it, that is, meritocratic distribution of awards and public positions within a nation. There is little to no precedent for meritocratic award of citizenship (outside maybe of the occasional microstate selling it), and a good volume of theoretical argument against it that is unique to the nationality case (see OracleOutlook's and my own response). Accordingly, the utilitarian who sees himself as a meritocrat because the benefits of meritocracy are well-supported will be parsing this label as referring to the well-supported core of meritocracy only, and not feel particularly compelled to support meritocratic award of citizenship either on the basis of "meritocracy is good" (deontologism!) or "how can you claim to be a meritocrat otherwise" (word games? virtue ethics?).

P.S. I'm not sure it's reasonable to say that genetic similarity is the best way to judge if you can relate to someone. Here, education, values, and interests seem to matter much more. It's way easier for me to relate to a random mathematician of any race than a random person of the same race as me. I don't think this is that unusual---at the very least, having a college degree is probably more relevant to relatability for you than race.

On an individual level, I don't deny that background winds up being more relevant (though it is by no means everything - my SO is in fact a random mathematician of [not my ethnicity], and for the least controversial example where genetic distance still rears its ugly head, when we are both sick, we can not eat the same things), but nobody is about to run a country that is all mathematicians. On a population level, all these individual values and interests and social niches level out - the Japanese mathematician and the Mexican mathematician might get along swimmingly, but if the Mexican mathematician then has a kid with his Mexican mathematician wife and it is sent to a kindergarten to be watched by the Japanese mathematician's kindergarten teacher cousin, I figure there will be friction.

One of them is a sort of deontological one, under which to be a meritocrat is to hold that it is morally right that boons go to the most meritorious

This is interesting! I do think I disagree with the deontological case for boons going to the most "meritorious." It's usually sheer luck and good external factors (genetics, environment) that puts people on the top. It's not always the "most diligent" person who gets the best compensation. And if we did sort society based on something that is within people's control, (like "works hardest") instead of things outside people's control (like "is smartest") then it would overall be a worse society.

People didn't actually do anything worthy of merit to be the smartest, best looking, most talented, etc. At best they worked hard to improve on something that was already there, but that doesn't mean they worked harder than someone who is disabled and works twice as hard to do half as much.

But if you want to incentivize the best to do their best, you need to give them the best rewards. And it is one of the jobs of society to incentivize the best to do their best, partly because a rising tide lifts all boats. In this regard I follow the utilitarian model it seems.

(this didn't ping me but fortunately I saw it while scrolling.)

See, here the analogy deepens further! Citizenship in certain countries has a huge material impact, but so also with families! I hit the jackpot by being born into a family where they didn't beat me, prioritized my education, didn't molest me, etc. I did not earn this. It was not my reward to be born into a good family or a good country. How can someone earn such a thing? To describe it in such terms cheapens it.

There are two reasons why I think family membership is special

I'd like you to elaborate on what you mean a family membership is special compared to. Compared to Rousseau liberalism where everyone is born as individuals with no prior obligations who only relate to each other through contracts? Special compared to something else?

There are more than a few other traits that make a family and a nation special. For one, I would die for my children and I would die for my country. This makes absolutely zero sense if you view a country as a community of like-minded individuals who can be swapped around if their opinions shift. If your country has no relation to you after you are dead, buried, and opinion-less then there is no reason to die for it. But if your country will also be the country of your nieces and nephews, second and third cousins, dearest friends and their children, then perhaps it is possible to die for it.

And countries need people to die for them lest they will be ruled by those willing to die for theirs.

That's just one thing, perhaps the biggest. But there are so many ways in which a nation is different than a free market meritocracy - common goods like roads and utilities and schools and on and on. And these items are paid for collectively, sometimes financed on the futures of generations to come. Which implies, for these goods to exist, that these generations do come and have a pre-existing duty to the land of their birth to pay for the good things that were given to them and their forefathers.

Would you like an anarchy instead? Because only in an anarchy is there any kind of liberalism to the extent that a country could be just like a "large voluntary organization."

I am under the impression that most posters here who care about American politics would 99% endorse this statement, even though it's pretty strongly violating meritocracy and individualism---judging people based on what their ancestors were regardless of their own qualities and competencies.

I don't really think this is the correct way to look at this question. If you are selecting for proficiency at being an American you are overwhelmingly going to be choosing Americans. Being good at e.g. surgery doesn't really tell you if someone will be good at being an American.

I think this is true even if you're holding to a creedal understanding of Americanness (e.g. a random American is MUCH more likely to register vehement and enthusiastic agreement with widespread firearms ownership or an expansive definition of free speech than someone from almost anywhere else on Earth.)

As the highly official representative for "this place", I conclusively answer your questions with

  • No.
  • Possibly to some extent, but in between implications lost in hostile interpretation and and the high probability that the defintions are doctored specifically to serve the argument here, I'd say not enough to allow for an actual yes. The strictly correct answer seems to be "Yes if you want to, else no.".
  • 120% word games. I mean, your entire setup here is...weird.

Here's a suggestion: If you want to know what people here think on individualism and meritocracy, then just plain open a discussion about individualism and/or meritocracy. If instead you try to play semantic games with highly controversial public figures in order to attempt getting a blanket statement describing the ideological degeneracy of "most posters" here...I dunno, seems crooked.

But I don't care much about American politics, so I'm probably not the target demographic.

In summary, I just wished you had started a more open-ended discussion instead of laying out bait, no matter how openly you did that.

Part of the problem with just opening a discussion on "individualism and meritocracy" is that these are very fuzzy and connotationally charged words. It's therefore best to talk about specific examples as much as possible---this was just a relevant one that's somewhat timely. Any specific example is going to have a billion imperfections and distractions, but I really think it's still better to be concrete. If your quibble is that I picked a bad example, maybe you have a better one in mind?

I also think there's an huge difference between saying "most posters here are ideologically degenerate" in some absolute sense and saying "I have the impression that most posters here have values that are incompatible with my own for these reasons, am I right or wrong about this?".

Citizenship is in fact based on ancestry and/or birth location. That is true across the globe. Most countries additionally lack birthright citizenship and require an ancestral justification for citizenship. Vance is stating the most common legal norm regarding this. So I would not portray it as a particularly Vancian/Mottish view.

As a separate matter there are immigrants who apply for citizenship. I suppose some ideological test is valid for them. Not being former SS officers or terrorists or anti-capitalist revolutionaries, etc. But not an ideological test checking for 2025 progressive values. There's no "trans lives matter" loyalty statements in the paperwork or interviews.

Broadly speaking: Vance is correct in this quote.

Hello fellow lurker. I used to be a leftist. Then the left changed. Now I consider myself a classical liberal.

I happen to agree with what you claim is the "Motte consensus", but I think most modern social justice "liberals" would agree, too.

  1. "Anti-meritocracy." Just like everybody likes the idea of free speech and nobody actually likes free speech, everyone likes the idea of meritocracy, but nobody actually likes it, especially for their children. The elite who created Harvard instituted admissions interviews 1922 so that they could keep the high-performing jews out. Now that Asians are the outperforming minority, they discriminate against Asians. More generally, elites consistently find ways to game the metrics of meritocracy so that we can live under a facade of meritocracy, which justifies their social status. In reality, our institutions love putting weights on the scales, and those who pass the "meritocratic" tests have been selected because their selection benefits the elites.

Note that here the social justice position is the anti-meritocratic one.

  1. People who believe they gained their position through meritocracy are less likely to be charitable to the less fortunate: Prompting people to attribute their success to skill or hard work lowers their willingness to share windfalls or support public goods.. As I read it, less likely to believe in a noblesse oblige. This is, to me, a classic symptom of American dysfunction: instead of thinking a la Henry Ford about the impacts of their greed on the less fortunate, the modern upper-class is happy to raise the rent on the rest of us until we can't pay anymore. (This is enabled by their ability to financialize, lobby, and snuff out actual market competition.)

  2. I would submit that the modern left in academia also dislikes meritocracy, but because it sets up a heirarchy. Example 1, Example 2

  3. On Individualism. The individualism/collectivist dichotomy is something that every society needs in moderation. Too much collectivism, and you get stuck in your current rut. Too much individualism, and you cannot solve collective action problems. Too much collectivism expresses itself as groupthink, stifling social pressure, following tyrants, and people voting for the "popular" candidate in elections. Too much individualism and you have a bunch of selfish psychopaths who are impossible to govern. To put this another way, collectivist meritocracy is why every Korean kid is pushed to go to the same colleges, but rampant individualism is why Russians and Americans cannot exit burning planes quickly, but Japanese can.

  4. Anti-individualism. I would assert that both the left and the right in the US are currently anti-individualist. The social justice left is collectivist in that it sees people as representatives of their demographics and in that it will brook no dissent. The moderate left is collectivist in that it believes that children should go to public schools for their education. The moderate right is collectivist in that it embraces orthodox religious and moral norms, and the radical right shuns leftist-adjacent behaviors and has its own shibboleths.

  5. But individualism is all highly relative. Any American plopped into Japan would struggle to maintain Japanese social norms, whether that individual be from the left or the right. There is a certain socialization and mindset that is inculcated in early schooling in more collectivist societies, and Americans don't get that in their kindergartens and elementary schools.

Vance did not make a statement "that citizenship in the US should be based on ancestry instead of individual choices and beliefs". He said that choices and beliefs were neither necessary nor sufficient. He implies ancestry is sufficient, but not that it is necessary.

Specifically, whether this disagreement is real or just against a strawman, and if it is real, what are the best reasons why the disagreement is not serious enough to justify conclusions like "despite all their craziness, I would rather the woke have power than people with TheMotte-like views".

If you put any value at all into individualism and meritocracy, then there are very few groups you should rank as less deserving of power than "the woke." Even if you find The Motte undeserving, you're still betraying those values.

even though they line up with a many widely-held intuitions about fairness

Strongly disagreed, they are almost entirely counter-efforts to what many people would consider "fairness" for the last 30-50 years.

And I happen to think that it’s absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying, you don’t belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025.

It's disagreeing about what the creed of America is. The people who fought in the Revolution and the Civil War (charitably, one could think the North; being a Borderer, Vance undoubtedly had ancestors on both sides) stand for one set of creedal ideas of America.

Progressive liberalism, to the extent one can call it liberalism without choking on their words, rejects everything that came before and represents another- IMO murky, and to the extent defined at all completely unworkable for a multicultural society- set of creedal ideas.

Is this statement actually anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic as defined above?

5-10% anti-meritocratic at most. Liberalism isn't a suicide pact, don't have a mind so open your brain falls out, yada yada. Rephrased, "we want useful, competent people- so long as they don't hate Civilization."

Right, so the comparison to the woke needs more justification (I'm sorry for the repetitiveness I've made this point before to you in the past, but I think there's some new aspects).

Most people I talk to in person who would describe themselves as woke seem to actually agree with me on at least the thing I called "individualism". Their belief is rather that the world is so far from achieving this that we have to do extremely drastic things in response. When they make mistakes, their mistakes are factual---that their extreme remedy is going to make the situation better than the status quo. These mistakes are not that hard to correct---no getting rid of standardized tests won't help because every other measure is even more skewed towards the rich, etc. In everyday life, I've found it very easy to argue/convince very woke people on most concrete policy issues relating to "individualism".

"Meritocracy" is harder, seemingly because the very woke that I know don't see its need---we already have enough, why do we need growth, why does it matter that jobs are done well, etc. However, in cases like medicine where you can argue that we don't already have enough you can argue in the same way. The "we already have enough" is also not so hard to argue against by just having them look up global GDP/capita and speculate on what sort of lifestyle that allows in comparison to what they're used to.

Conversely, a hypothetical group that actually accepts the ancestry-is-paramount interpretation of JD Vance's statement just disagrees on these values completely. There's no resolution to be had here.

Anyways, this is all theory. Since January, we can see how the comparison worked out in practice. I think even the worst 2020 wokeness was better for getting skilled people into positions in the US than the attacks on skilled immigrants from the Trump administration---the stories like this that keep coming out every few weeks and the chilling effect they create.

When they make mistakes, their mistakes are factual---that their extreme remedy is going to make the situation better than the status quo. These mistakes are not that hard to correct

I think the past decade or so of history has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that these mistakes are, in fact, insanely hard to correct.

My hypothesis is that this is due in large part to the fact that people don't just make unbiased, truth-oriented judgments on what is true and false, but rather use judgments based on what one is motivated to be true. Ironically, the "wokes" should be more aware of this phenomenon than the average person, because so much of the "woke" worldview is based around invisible/unavoidable biases that people have due to the conditioning they received from society. It's somewhat confusing why they don't use this insight to introspect - figure out what oppressive societal forces pushed themselves into their own ideology that posits a narrative about "patriarchy" and "white supremacy" as hegemonic forces shaping our society. Figure out what personal psychological blind spots and failings are causing them to find this narrative of oppression so attractive and convincing. At the same time, it's not at all confusing why they don't do this. People chase their bliss.

When the so-called factual mistakes are driven by ideology, then correcting them seems at least as hard as correcting simple disagreements in ideology. In part because the people making these factual mistakes mistakenly think that their mistakes are factual in nature, rather than ideological, and so they lack the knowledge to actually correct their mistake, dooming them to keep making the same mistake. Well, dooming others to being subject to them making the same mistake, perhaps.

These mistakes are not that hard to correct

This then raises the question of why these mistakes are so pervasive. This is somewhat understandable for the average, random wokie, but why is it also true for the intelligentsia of this movement, who are presumably paid to know how to bring about individualism?

I think even the worst 2020 wokeness was better for getting skilled people into positions

Indeed, irreconcilable differences of opinion here. The FAA scandal, nominating a Supreme Court justice who can't even say what a woman is, choosing a VP on similar grounds who failed hard at everything she tried, and countless other attempts to put identity over skill or even mere humanity, like highly-credentialed psychotic freaks that suggested teachers deserved to die for "health equity"? Lipsitch and Schmidt should be scourged and sent to the salt mines.

The worst of 2020 wokeness was violent psychopathy and promotion of the unskilled, unwilling, and in some cases just plain evil. While I do not approve of much that Trump has done, he has not done and I predict will not do even 1/10 the damage.

Whatever you think got skilled people into useful positions, it was due to whatever liberal remnant that hadn't completely rotted its brain out with wokeness.

the stories like this that keep coming out every few weeks and the chilling effect they create.

These individual cases are quite bad, though I suspect there's a major attention component to your noticing. I continue to think they are nothing in comparison to the vast racism propagated by wokeness against whites and Asians, and Jews on alternating weeks.

Indeed, irreconcilable differences of opinion here

I'm sorry, do you have any real-world experience with the impacts of this administration's policies or are you just judging this based on what you hear from the internet. Because if you did have actual real-world contact, making a judgement that the damage is solely at the level of the FAA scandal and some awkward interviews and media quotes is completely absurd.

Do you have any idea how many grad students are deciding to only apply to postdocs outside of the US? How many people from outside who would've a year ago loved to come here deciding not to apply to any schools in the US? How many people are leaving research because of 60-70% funding cuts to hard sciences and the subsequent hiring freezes? The rumors in my field are that young people shouldn't even try applying to Canada because all the openings are going to be taken by senior researchers leaving the US. From anecdotes on the ground, literally hearing what people are saying at conferences, the destruction of the scientific research infrastructure in the US is unmatched by any event in a western country since Nazi Germany.

Yes, I don't give a damn about whatever stupid ultimately superficial nonsense you can pin on the woke if the other choice is this! Seriously, most of you're examples are quotes and words, it's obnoxious how much you're ignoring actual material impacts.

EDIT: and as you can see from the responses below, it seems that some prominent posters here seem to think that this is a good thing? Do you understand now why I would pick the woke?

EDIT: and as you can see from the responses below, it seems that some prominent posters here seem to think that this is a good thing? Do you understand now why I would pick the woke?

Whether good or bad, it's a thing that had to happen. You can bemoan it or regret it or celebrate it or stand puzzled by it, and still I'd ask you to answer this question: What would you have asked the enemies of the woke to do? Leave academia alone, no matter the degree to which it has been weaponized against them? Come to their senses and realize they're on the wrong side? What else?

There's a general argument pattern that goes like this: "here's a problem, look how bad it is, we need to do something!" and then "this is something! I'm doing this to solve the problem, how can you oppose what I'm doing? Do you think the problem is actually good?" Finding a problem in the world does not give you a blank check to do whatever you want as long as you can write some words arguing its related to solving the problem.

So the answer here is they should do nothing until they find an action that's actually effective and doesn't have much worse side effects than the actual problem. This is same thing anyone trying to fix any other problem in the world should do.

You are giving the impression that the culture war is so important to you that it's worth burning the world to make sure your side wins. There are other things in the world that are important besides the culture war and once you start destroying those other things as part of some sloppily-targeted crusade, it's a pretty reasonable conclusion to say that you shouldn't have power.

I'm quite skeptical about an exodus of American academics. I'll believe it when I see it. My prediction is a tiny portion actually leaves.

I think a screenshot of this comment without context would do very well as a LibsOfTikTok-style righty meme. Can you guess why?

I assume some kind of "yes, good" thing? Otherwise, do you care to explain? I know that there exist people with incompatible values to me, so what---I mean someone was complaining that my post was condemning the average poster here as ideologically degenerate. I wasn't doing that, but if you're saying that this is the response I'll get then maybe I should have been?

I'm replying to someone who I thought cared about scientific progress and meritocracy (as defined in the OP) more than any kind of ancestral/racial purity however. Now that I think about it more, I guess this might be a better concrete example to focus on than JD Vance's quote. What are you willing to sacrifice to keep foreigners out of the country?

The angle is "These people are cutting my job - theyre just like the Nazis".

For posterity, grandparent said:

EDIT: and as you can see from the responses below, it seems that some prominent posters here seem to think that this is a good thing? Do you understand now why I would pick the woke?

in response to this.

Yes, I can see how people with low reading comprehension might interpret it that way. We know otherwise however---much of the value provided by this place is that I don't have to write for people with low reading comprehension. I am not in fact optimizing for how it comes off to libsoftiktok readers and I don't think I should be?

More comments

Can you speak plainly for the benefit of those few who genuinely don't know what kind of meme you describe there?

As I said, literally just the screenshot, in a context where its understood that youre supposed to "look at this lefty".

EDIT: and as you can see from the responses below, it seems that some prominent posters here seem to think that this is a good thing? Do you understand now why I would pick the woke?

Consider this a general reply to the quoted comment as well as to https://www.themotte.org/post/2277/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/352758?context=8#context .

Look, I'm not trying to convince you to not "pick the woke", or that I or anyone on my side as it were should "have power". I don't meant to tell you what to support or oppose. I'm not trying to convince you of anything, really. I don't think you made a mistake in your thinking, or that you should support a different side. I think you need to acknowledge that there's a good deal of conflict theory playing out. And I think arguing that the goings-on are good or bad in the framework of mistake theory misses the more tangible points of why and how this happened and why and how it will happen again.

Co-opting institutions in the name of ideology taints them.

If I turn the military into a bastion of reactionary thought, then I shouldn't be surprised that a century of leftist agitation works to erode the military even if that means that modern European nations have to piss their pants when Putin knocks over some border towns in Ukraine (though, granted, much of that panic be performative), or that we flail helplessly as pauper pirates in the Red Sea take our shipping hostage. We're materially worse off for it, and now untold billions of Euros will be wasted on incompetent rearmament programs to pretend to remedy the problem, but what good is any complaining? Socialists and communists and their green and woke successor ideologists have dismantled the military not because it wouldn't have been useful to them, but because the military was inseparably linked to reactionary ideologies.

The church - really any Christian church, all of them, doesn't matter which - has undergone the same process, though over a longer period of time. I'll skip the blow-by-blow, let's just say that in between the middle ages where the church wasn't just a major power-broker but also an absolutely essential insitution in almost matters social and cultural, at all levels of society, in all stages of life, it now mostly isn't. And it's left a giant God-and-Church-and-Community-shaped hole in western people's lives. Why did we do that to ourselves? Why didn't we take it slow and wait for a superior alternative to be developed? Why didn't we just root out the pedophiles and the nazi sympathizers and the intolerable profiteers like the prelate of Limburg and then go back to our congregations? Because again, it wasn't about troubleshooting or optimizing a socially useful institution, but about destroying an ideological enemy. Whether you were an enlightenment firebrand, a libertine who didn't want his hedonism criticized, a revolutionary who wanted to design his own institutions, a socialist who saw it as a tool of the burgeosie, or a late 20th century progressive who really needed to show off how much better he was than the primitives of yesteryear - they all had their various tactical reasons for destryoing the standing of religion in society, even without providing a better alternative. And they were right to, because the church wasn't just there to provide spiritual care and moral support, it absolutely was in their way and unwilling to give up what authority it had over peole's lives.

Or think about the immense economic damage caused by various green ideological warfare. For every sensible ban on a poisonous but replaceable substance, and for every much-appreciated restriction on the pollution of the commons, there's at least one other ideologically motivated but completely superfluous and highly harmful obstruction to economic activities. Pouring massive public funding into electric cars, for example. But it will save the climate, you might say. Then how about scrapping Germany's safe and productive nuclear power plants on what was little more than a whim?

And let's not even get started with "The Pandemic" or "The Refugees".

And by all means, maybe I'm just not aware of the full scope of the goings-on in America right now, but I doubt that what President Trump is doing to public university funding is anywhere near on that level.

In any event, my point is just this: I encourage you to consider these events in terms of conflict theory, because conflict is what is happening. Neither side is trying to do what's best for society; both are vying for influence, standing, authority and power, and whatever socially useful institution gets ground up on the way is just collateral damage. And neither side can, at present, afford to play nice. I leave it open to you whether you want to see the two sides as a left-vs-right, woke-vs-antiwoke or trump-vs-antitrump. But it's a conflict. In game-theory/prisoner-dilemma terms, both sides are in the business of defecting, and whichever side opts to cooperate instead loses. It would be terribly nice if both sides cooperated, but that's not what's happening, and asking only one side to cooperate while the other defects amounts to asking them to lose gracefully.

Destroying the commons for ideological gain is not new or unique to one side in the culture wars, and both will do it when it ends up being strategically feasible.

@FCfromSSC used to have a pithy phrase about this. Something about maximizing inconvenience for the outgroup?

The current era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.

Thanks!

Hm. It may not be as applicable to my topic as I thought. "Without getting in too much trouble" doesn't seem very accurate at the current stage.

Edit: No, I'm wrong. It remains accurate. It's not like POTUS Trump is getting into any trouble he wouldn't have been in anyways.

I'd say it's entirely applicable. "without getting in too much trouble" is one of the two main throttling mechanisms on the tribal hatred engine, and is tightly linked to the other one, the fact that the search is "distributed". The search being distributed reduces how much trouble individuals get in, and reduces the efficiency of the search because it's conducted in a less-conscious fashion. It's the part people miss when they niavely predict the outbreak of civil war over the atrocity du jour.

Here's a gradient:

"X are bad" > "X shouldn't be tolerated" > "It's pretty cool when an X gets set on fire" > "you should set an X on fire" > "I'm going to set an X on fire" > actually going out and setting an X on fire.

You can graph the gradient in terms of actual harm inflicted on the outgroup, by the danger of getting in trouble, or by the amount of trouble you'll get in. There's a sweet spot on the graph where you find the greatest harm inflicted for the least cost incurred. The Culture War consists of people, with various degrees of consciousness, searching both for that sweet spot and for changes to social conditions that make the sweet spot larger and sweeter. Increasing consciousness of the nature of the search increases search efficiency greatly. Being unaware of the mechanics of getting in trouble likewise increases the efficiency of the search, since even if you get in trouble, you still provide valuable data to the rest of the search nodes. Various coordinated actions, changes in social norms or in formal policies likewise increase the efficiency of the search by asymmetrically reducing the threat of trouble being gotten into. Affirmative consent policies, DOGE, "who will kill Elon" and "are those level-4 plates?" are all variations on a theme.

Blue hostility toward the Church and Red hostility toward Academia are the same thing: coordinated meanness against an enemy tribal stronghold, moderated by the need to not individually get in too much trouble. The tribes successfully purge each other from their institutions, and then are shocked when the other side no longer values the institutions they've been purged from and begins reducing them with metaphorical bombardment.

...And for those who've read this far, this is your reminder that this process is not your friend. Our capacity to maintain flowing electricity and running water rely on the sweet spot staying quite small and the search being quite limited and stable over time.

it's obnoxious how much you're ignoring actual material impacts.

Thousands of extra murders? Billions in property destruction? The renewal of abject racism being acceptable as long as it has the right targets? Tiers of justice based on identity? Explicit discrimination in hiring and education?

What have been the benefits of wokeness if you consider these costs acceptable?

I don't consider these costs acceptable; as always, I consider them the least bad option. The alternative seems to be to not have scientific research happen in the US to anywhere near the same efficacy and scale as right now, thereby destroying the biggest engine of human progress and flourishing existing in the current world all because of some people's irrational focus on people's ancestry over all else.

It's also telling that your two most concrete costs aren't really that large on the scale of a country. Billions in property destruction is the same order-of-magnitude as badly-written liability laws letting oil drillers think they can get away with too-lax safety standard and causing some medium-sized spills, and one or two orders of magnitude less than a large-city government not taking disaster scenarios seriously and building good flood protection before a major hurricane. Thousands of extra murders is the same order-of-magnitude as making the wrong decision for whether to intervene in some standard once-per-year foreign conflict or the effect over a decade of not regulating lead well enough in one large state. These are not the order-of-magnitude that deserves such a national policy freak-out and not even close to the percents of GDP growth you lose from the kneecapping of the country's research infrastructure and skilled-immigration pipeline (and really, it is this big when a single skilled-immigrant's company is somewhere between 5-10% of the entire SAP500).

The other two are so fuzzy. How bad they are is so hidden in all these imprecise words like "acceptable", "tiers of justice", "explicit discrimination" that can be interpreted as anywhere from a nothingburger to one of the worst things that's happened in the last decades. Again, please try to be more concrete---it's impossible to reason accurately about this otherwise. I personally think you have such a skewed view of the relative impacts because you have never tried to be concrete about this before and are instead getting distracted by the exciting, culture-warry nature of the fuzzy words you can say instead.

Yes, I don't give a damn about whatever stupid ultimately superficial nonsense you can pin on the woke if the other choice is this! Seriously, most of you're examples are quotes and words, it's obnoxious how much you're ignoring actual material impacts.

I'm just a bystander of course, and affected only in so far as both woke culture warring and American scientific achievements spill over the atlantic, but as a right-wing culture warrior, my impression is one of "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.". By politicizing academia and turning into one of the if not the main engine for leftist propagation and legitimacy, no matter who started or drove it, it became a legitimate target in the culture wars. One can lament it from either perspective, but letting the left have it uncontested would have been strategically insane. And if it can't be converted to rightism or dragged into neutrality, then destruction seems like the natural next-best option.

If you keep your cruise missiles or drone factories in a hospital, then complaints about it getting bombed ring somewhat hollow. Yeah the material impacts are a shame, but what did you expect? I'm not surprised about how leftist media have picked apart the church and the military and other former bastions of rightism, and you shouldn't be surprised about how rightists are doing the same to leftist-dominated institutions.

If you want something to be exempt from fighting, to not become a battlefield, to be beneficial to mankind, to be valued and cherished by all, then for God's sake don't let it become the centrepiece of anyone's war machine unless you are that certain of its invulnerability.

Here's a better analogy: there are two conflicting gangs D and R that sometimes go over and graffiti/smash windows in each other's territory. There's a hospital in gang D's territory that pays its protection money. Once, one of of gang D's members runs and hides in the hospital after smashing a window (with the support of the hospital director and staff---though it's unclear how much of this is actual sympathy to gang D). Gang R dramatically escalates the conflict and blows up the hospital in response.

In addition, many of the hospital employees wear glasses and there's a vocal contingent of gang R that keeps talking about how much they hate people who wear glasses. Once the hospital is blown up, the responses from gang R are basically "ha, good! down with people who wear glasses" and "that'll teach those D-sympathizers".

I think I'm correct in judging gang R as by far the more evil side here. Either, they massively escalated the fight and targeted pretty uninvolved parties just doing good or they let their irrational hatred of glasses overwhelm much more important values in their decision making. If I had to choose between gang D and gang R to rule, the choice is obvious (we don't have the option of no gang).

Even more, gang D might be saying "see, we warned about R and their hatred of glasses, you told us that it was 'just a few fringe voices' and even treated their chief chemist for food poisoning. Look what they do when they have the chance", and it seems that maybe they actually have a point.

My bad for starting with the analogies, but I'm not going to have us ride them into the sunset.

Let's get back to reality. Leftism dominates in academia and media and leftist ideologies effectively utilize them as central organs for spreading their way of thinking, for recruitment, for drowning out opposing opinions and for legitimizing their own. Do you disagree with this?

No I don't disagree, that's within the realm of plausibility as far as I know so I won't argue against it very confidently.

There are two reasons why I'll say "so what?" to this however. First, the charge you're making is just about speech and recruitment. Having opinions you disagree with is not a reason to destroy something---rather you should focus on the people acting on those opinions. This is why I really think it's important to focus on concrete material impacts, like the example of researchers fleeing the US and the subsequent significant hit to research output and therefore general economic productivity in the US. In the long run, scientific and technological development is and has always been the single most important thing for making people's lives better, so hindering it is a really big deal.

The second issue is treating academia as a monolith---you might as well say that the San Francisco Bay Area is dominated by Leftism, etc. etc. so when the next big earthquake hit we shouldn't disburse federal disaster aid. Sure, there might be specific parts of academia that are organs of the far Left, and these parts may be the most loud and visible. However, the vast majority of it is not. The current US administration's response seems particularly insane since it's targeted at exactly these parts that aren't. This really pushes me to the conspiracy theory of "well, that's the part that has the most people with glasses so of course that's the part they'll target" from the analogy---that the damage is exactly motivated by ancestry-over-meritocracy and not any good-faith attempt to fix the problems with academia.

can't even say what a woman is

A nitpick, perhaps, but I really don't think that's a fair description. Refusing to step on a trap isn't incompetence.

That's not to say Jackson handled it well. Maybe there was some response that turned it around, suggesting the question was ill-formed? But that's something I'd frame as a failing of charisma more than intelligence.

Refusing to step on a trap isn't incompetence.

The only way to win was not to play. Given that the question would surely come up in cases shortly after her nomination, too, it was an unfortunate fumble.

Also seconding Arjin that a simple question becoming a trap is a symptom of a much larger problem. It might be a loaded question but it's hardly "yes or no, have you stopped beating your wife?" The culture that loaded that question by hollowing out language created its own issue.

But that's something I'd frame as a failing of charisma more than intelligence.

I didn't say it was a failing of intelligence either; the implication is that it was a failing of skill defined generally. Charisma is a good suggestion for a narrower term; I'd also accept wisdom or to be playful, dexterity.

I think KBJ is quite smart, less of an institutionalist than ideal but I liked the KBJ/Gorsuch pair-ups from last term.

A nitpick, perhaps, but I really don't think that's a fair description. Refusing to step on a trap isn't incompetence.

Sure, except that explanation has much bigger implications about the state of meritocracy among the progressives. Not knowing what a woman is would be an individual failing, putting enough people with weird ideas in positions of influence like academia, so that giving a straightforward answer to such a basic question becomes a trap, is a collective failing of massive proportions.

I wouldn't worry so much about the Kim case. Didn't we JUST have a case where some Trump admin atrocity turned out to not be what it seemed? Or rather, not to have happened at all?

It turns out people will just make stuff up.

It is possible, as the stories have been speculating, that Kim was refused entry to the US and detained because of his past drug offense. If so, this is not new with the Trump Administration. Here's a 2015 document from the Immigration Legal Resource Center noting that such an offense makes a person inadmissable but not deportable. If he actually completed pre-adjudication probation (resulting in no conviction), he should be admissible, but it's not clear that happened..

I think most attempts to characterize “this place” are misguided. General agreement with a principle isn’t enough to make that principle representative, especially where political coalitions are involved.

I also think that, compared to the vast majority of people who want to generalize about “this place,” you’ve put more effort into doing so politely and constructively. It’s a good post. The least I can do is answer for myself.

On the first point of argument: that’s not what I would call “individualism,” which normally refers to the weighting of individual interests as opposed to collective ones. What you’re describing is like the opposite of “collective punishment.” Perhaps “personal responsibility.”

Your use of “meritocracy” is more agreeable, though I don’t know how many people would limit “personal virtue” to avoiding self-interest.

With that out of the way,

I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War [Group R] have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong [Group D].

If Group R gets privileged based only on the deeds of their ancestors, then that’s corrosive to meritocracy, to personal responsibility, and to individualism.

If the two groups start out with equal claims, but Group D has thrown theirs away by rejecting the American ethos, then it flips. Now meritocracy demands we prefer Group R, since at least it isn’t trying to wreck the project. We’re supposed to hold Group D responsible for their individual actions.

Guess which of these is closer to the modal Republican worldview?

Vance’s dogwhistle motte and bailey is consistent and defensible to his intended audience. It’s actively hostile to anybody who doesn’t already agree. I don’t think he cares.

If Vance wanted to talk about the second case where the groups start with equal claims, he could've said something like (I'm trying to make this rhetorically charged in the same way) "church-going, law-abiding patriots have a hell of a lot more claim over America than ungrateful socialists who say they hate our country". Specifically focusing on "people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War" really makes it that Group R being privileged just based on their ancestry is a strong part of his statement.

Maybe this is too much psychoanalysis, or maybe I'm falling for some rhetorical game where Vance is baiting responses by purposefully saying something in a more controversial way then he needs to (I mean, focusing on the Civil war without specifying which side instead of the Revolutionary war definitely seems to be something like this), but my gut feel is that going out of the way to bring up such a specific thing as ancestry means that this is actually what he was trying to say.

So I honestly don't know anymore what's close to the modal Republican worldview (or more relevantly, what vision the current Republican party pushes for during the current and future times it has power). Figuring this out was the main reason for the post since I really think this forum gives a good sense of the intellectual arguments that eventually work their way down to driving Republican goals.

Maybe this is too much psychoanalysis

Yes, you are massively overreading a verbal quote and adding information to it in order to make a larger point beyond its actual scope. I don't think Vance was cleverly baiting you. I think he was giving an innocuous speech.

FYI the post you're replying to is Filtered.

Fixed. Thanks.

I disagree with your definition of Individualism, the word is usually meant to describe something more like "every man for himself." I do agree with the statement that "every man should be judged for his own capabilities and qualities." I also agree on the Meritocracy front - we should have the best people in the toughest jobs getting the biggest compensation.

I suspect JD Vance would agree with these two statements as well.

Where I disagree with you is the idea that this would apply to membership in a nation. It's really odd to me that you see the two as connected so I will try to make analogies and you tell me where you think things are dissimilar.

Membership in a family is not based on meritocracy. There aren't game shows where kids compete against each other to have the best parents. There aren't quarterly reviews of a child's grammar school progress lest it turns out a child is not good enough for their current last name and have to move down the road to join the Johnson's.

For most people, membership in their family is based on happy accidents of their parent's geographical proximity and how well they got along.

People can join a family without without genetics, too. There's adoption of young kids. There's adoption of older kids. There are people who declare themselves brothers as adults because they enjoy similar interests and look out for each other. There is marriage.

Within a family there is a hierarchy and meritocracy to an extent. Parents are usually the most competent members of the family and are rewarded with the majority of decision-making. But being a member of a family is not a measure of merit. For most people it's something that just happens to them and even if they are disabled and need extra help they usually don't run the risk of getting disowned.

A nation is like a family in this way. Membership in a nation is generally an accident of geography and family tree. There are ways of getting adopted in, but this requires agreeing to conform into the nation's culture/mindset and should be a very limited, personal, and slow process. A child can't just crawl in through your window and declare they are your child now. Adopting a child is deliberate, adopting a new citizen is also deliberate.

Within a nation, there should be merit. The best people should be governing, doctoring, etc. But I strongly disagree with any conception of American citizenship that perceives it as a reward.

It's utterly ridiculous if you take it to the logical conclusion. Every year, let's send our bottom 20th percentile to Mexico and let in their top 20th percentile! No, there just isn't a hierarchy among nations like that.

American citizenship is not a prize, is not fungible, is not tradable. American citizenship is an identity. American citizens are the group of people who elect American leaders who in turn make decisions to prioritize the well-being of American citizens over everyone else. There are smart Americans, stupid Americans, lazy Americans, hard working Americans. Our leaders represent us all. Or at least, they should.

"despite all their craziness, I would rather the woke have power than people with TheMotte-like views".

I think the prevailing views and values here are anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic. To make more precise how I'm using these terms

Ok so the motte has anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic views, to the extent you would prefer the woke to have power. But the woke are notoriously and unambiguously anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic. One would think that if those were your reasons you would prefer the motte, no?

A few weeks ago, J.D. Vance made a statement that citizenship in the US should be based on ancestry instead of individual choices and beliefs:

J.D. Vance does not actually say that. If your quoted paragraph was the entirety of his words on the matter then I think that your reading would be a fair one. However in literally the next paragraph, w/ emphasis mine:

So I believe one of the most pressing problems for us to face as statesmen is to redefine the meaning of American citizenship in the 21st century. I think we’ve got to do a better job at articulating exactly what that means. And I won’t pretend that I have a comprehensive answer for you, because I don’t. But there are a few things I’d suggest off the top of my head. And given that you guys are all brilliant intellectuals, I see Michael Anton back there. He’s the most brilliant. Given that you guys are all brilliant intellectuals, I think this is one of the main things that we need to run with over the next few years in our country. What does it mean to be an American in 2025?

Vance goes on to list what he thinks citizenship means. They are: Sovereignty, Building, Obligations to Fellow Americans / Gratitude. Noticeably absent is ancestry.

When Vance explicitly addresses what he thinks citizenship means and you ignore it in favor of an implicit reading it comes across as dishonest.

citizenship in the US should be based on ancestry instead of individual choices and beliefs

Is that what he said? From the same speech:

I believe, and my own story is a testament to that, that yes, immigration can enrich the United States of America. My lovely wife is the daughter of immigrants to this country, and I am certainly better off, and I believe our whole country is better off for it. But we should expect everyone in our country, whether their ancestors were here before the Revolutionary War, or whether they arrived on our shores just a few short months ago, to feel a sense of gratitude. And we should be skeptical of anyone who lacks it, especially if they purport to lead this great country.

I actually think he's saying the exact opposite of what you claim: the ADL (they wouldn't be my first example, but whatever) are the one's who brand people unAmerican if they don't comport to the ADL's definition of who an American is. Based on the bolded sentence, it seems like he wants to hold everyone to the same standard, not give preferential treatment.

I think you're hyper-focused on this sentence

I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.

but charitably, one thing that Vance may mean is that branding others as unAmerican for the beliefs they hold is itself unAmerican. And yes, I think he also means that people with deep ancestral roots in this country – people whose ancestors died fighting for this country – have a special right to call themselves American. That's...reasonable. It's a standard used by people in literally every country in the world. It's natural to feel a connection to a nation if you can trace your ancestry back hundreds of years. Vance is implicitly signaling to the audience that they shouldn't be ashamed of these feelings, but he's also saying immigrants are welcome to the American project if they "feel a sense of gratitude" towards the country. I get that's too far for the left, but I don't think it's unreasonable, and I think a great many immigrants share Vance's sentiment.

Look, I'm more on your side here. I'm a bit nervous about some of the ideas of the Online Right, Dissident Right, whatever you want to call them. But Trump and Vance are not the Dissident Right; not even close, at least not in any meaningful way. Vance's wife and children are Indian. That matters. I believe Vance sees his wife and children as American as he sees himself and therefore he has no intention of pursuing policies that disenfranchise or otherwise hurt non-white (that is what you're hinting at, despite never using the word "white") American citizens.

You are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic. I am responding with a modhat but this is not a warning and will not be noted on your account, even though your past posting history weighs against you on this.

The reason this is not a warning is because you are plausibly making an effort to understand something, which is good.

The reason I am responding with a modhat is because we have a growing problem with posts like this, namely, posts that begin with the framing that "the Motte" can be helpfully or usefully addressed collectively in connection with particular ideological commitments. I believe this is mistaken as a matter of substance, but even if it weren't, it would be a violation of the rules:

Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible.

Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.

The paradigmatic consensus-building post is "I'm sure you'd all agree..." Lately I have seen too many people approach that from a position of disagreement instead--as here:

I am under the impression that most posters here who care about American politics would 99% endorse this statement

You've couched this in sufficiently perspective-taking language that it's not an egregious violation of the rules, but it is nevertheless not the way to approach questions like this. You could (and should) have written your entire post as a clear question without reference to a monolithic Motte: "what do you [whoever is reading] think about these ideas, or this claim?" You don't need to accuse your readers in advance of being wrong about something; if you have a question about what people believe, ask them, don't tell them. If there's a specific ideological position you want to address, address the position, not the people you imagine to be holding it.

"This place" is a website

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

That's all. You may see some people in other parts of the Internet characterize this as a site catering to some particular ideology, but those people are wrong, often maliciously so, and they tend to spread misconceptions about the community that are harmful to the community. I can't do anything about that in other spaces, but I do what I can to try to stop it from happening here.

(And that is actually kind of an answer to your question, if "the Motte" is what you are interested in understanding: the foundation generally manifests as individualistic and meritocratic, because individuals (not groups) post here and individuals (not groups) get upvotes or downvotes, AAQCs or warnings or bans. But individuals here have many different views on meritocracy and individualism, I'm sure, and honestly I'd be surprised if even 60% of participants here held the beliefs you have, entirely without evidence, attributed to the entire group.)

Heavily endorse this. It's frustrating to have positions put into my mouth that I do not hold. I think many people feel a knee jerk need to defend positions attributed to them and that only reinforces the implied consensus.


What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

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