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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12126 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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In the eight decades since Lewis coined the term, the popularity of this fallacious argumentative strategy shows no signs of abating, and is routinely employed by people at every point on the political spectrum against everyone else. You’ll have evolutionists claiming that the only reason people endorse young-Earth creationism is because the idea of humans evolving from animals makes them uncomfortable; creationists claiming that the only reason evolutionists endorse evolution is because they’ve fallen for the epistemic trap of Scientism™ and can’t accept that not everything can be deduced from observation alone; climate-change deniers claiming that the only reason environmentalists claim that climate change is happening is because they want to instate global communism; environmentalists claiming that the only reason people deny that climate change is happening is because they’re shills for petrochemical companies. And of course, identity politics of all stripes (in particular standpoint epistemology and other ways of knowing) is Bulverism with a V8 engine: is there any debate strategy less productive than “you’re only saying that because you’re a privileged cishet white male”? It’s all wonderfully amusing — what could be more fun than confecting psychological just-so stories about your ideological opponents in order to insult them with a thin veneer of cod-academic therapyspeak?

Your post is overall good, but I think you take this part too far. There are questions, indeed including on issues you've listed here, where a genuine issue of material fact exists, and is not and likely cannot be resolved in the near term.

My example would be climate change. I have slight confidence, approximately 65%ish that the climate is warming faster than it would without human CO2 emissions. This is hardly the sort of confidence level one should have if you are deciding major issues. It gets even lower when I ask the question, "assuming it is true the climate is warming because of human CO2 emissions, is that bad?" On even that question we are at 50% max, most credible people I have looked at seem to indicate slight warming is probably good for the earth and humanity. And then there is the next question of, will the policy proposed by this politician/advocate meaningfully change the outcome, and there I estimate abysmal results in the 1-5% range.

So I am left with a confidence chart of(when being favorable to environmentalists): A) Global Warming is true and humans contribute: 70% B) That is bad: 50% C) The proposed policies can fix it: 5%

For a composite confidence level of 1.75% that environmentalist proposals will solve the problem they are purporting to solve.

And yet, environmentalists act as if they have 100% confidence, and they commonly reject market solutions in favor of central planning. The logical deduction from this pattern of behavior is that the central planning is the goal, and the global warming is the excuse. It is not bad argumentation to say to the environmentalist, "you are just a socialist that wants to control the economy, and are using CO2 as an excuse" because a principled environmentalist would never bother raising a finger in America. They'd go to India and chain themselves to a river barge dumping plastic or go to Africa and spay and neuter humans over there. If you are trying to mess with American's cars, heat, and AC, its because you dont like that Americans have those things, because other concerns regarding the environment have been much more pressing for several decades at this point, and that isn't likely to change.

And yet, environmentalists act as if they have 100% confidence, and they commonly reject market solutions in favor of central planning. The logical deduction from this pattern of behavior is that the central planning is the goal, and the global warming is the excuse. It is not bad argumentation to say to the environmentalist, "you are just a socialist that wants to control the economy, and are using CO2 as an excuse" because a principled environmentalist would never bother raising a finger in America. They'd go to India and chain themselves to a river barge dumping plastic or go to Africa and spay and neuter humans over there. If you are trying to mess with American's cars, heat, and AC, its because you dont like that Americans have those things, because other concerns regarding the environment have been much more pressing for several decades at this point, and that isn't likely to change.

This is a failure of theory of mind.

As a general rule, when there's a situation where person A insistently tries to solve problem B with method C rather than more-effective method D, the conclusion "A is secretly a liar about wanting to solve problem B and just wants to do method C for other reason E" is almost always false, outside of special cases like PR departments and to some extent politicians. The correct conclusion is more often "A is not a consequentialist and considers method D sinful and thus off the table". "A thinks method D is actually not more effective than method C" is also a thing.

So, yes, a lot of these people really are socialists, but they're also environmentalists who sincerely believe CO2 might cause TEOTWAWKI. It's just, well, you actually also need the premise of "sometimes there isn't a perfect solution; pick the lesser evil" in order to get to "pursue this within capitalism rather than demanding we dismantle capitalism at the same time", and a lot of people don't believe that premise.

One thing I often find annoying about this sort of conversation is we are often talking about someone's internal state of mind. I find that irrelevant. See also trans/gay and "groomer." When your outward actions are indistinguishable from the person that thinks the thing I think they think, they have to bring the chits. This is true whether you are a teacher talking to 13 year olds in private about how anal is great and they don't need to share this conversation with their parents, or whether you are a legislator voting for an arcane and complex regulatory system that will commandeer 1/10th of the economy instead of a simple flat tax.

Edit: And by the way, the suspicion gets worse because you, Mr. Legislator, always want the arcane and complex regulatory system whether it is carbon, or medicine, or banking... Very suspicious.

What's a "chit"? I think that's an Americanism.

A chit is a record of a debt, bringing chits is paying debt, and not a common phrase even among americans. "calling in a chit" is more common.

I would say that your assumptions are way off with regards to your opponents.

The environmentalist would say that:

A) Global Warming is true and humans contribute: 99%

B) That is bad: 95% (addendum to B) How bad? Coastal areas become flooded. Increased deaths due to heat. Increased frequency of natural disasters. Risk to food production due to unstable weather. We're talking potentially millions of deaths.

C) That due to the severity estimates of B, if proposed policies won't work, increased attention must be given to come up with policies that will.

And yet, environmentalists act as if they have 100% confidence, and they commonly reject market solutions in favor of central planning. The logical deduction from this pattern of behavior is that the central planning is the goal, and the global warming is the excuse.

Alternatively, their confidence levels of capitalism solving societal problems are low as a general rule, and in this particular instance capitalism literally has negative incentives to solving this problem. How does one monetize the ability to bring the global temperature of Earth down? How do you monetize clean air? The only thing I can think of are carbon credits, and Republicans oppose implementing such a system in the first place. Conversely, you make money by producing things which pollute the air as a byproduct, and putting in effort to mitigate pollution costs money for no monetary benefit.

a principled environmentalist would never bother raising a finger in America. They'd go to India and chain themselves to a river barge dumping plastic or go to Africa and spay and neuter humans over there.

This strikes me as comparable to saying that pro-life people should be shooting up abortion clinics. Your average environmentalist believes they have 0 influence on India's policies because they are not Indian, and India's government gives every impression they don't care. People believe lots of things they don't follow through fully on, even assuming the assertions that if they believe X they should do Y are reasonable. Do all the people complaining about western fertility have 10 kids?

If you are trying to mess with American's cars, heat, and AC, its because you dont like that Americans have those things, because other concerns regarding the environment have been much more pressing for several decades at this point, and that isn't likely to change.

That's incredibly boo outgroup. How many people out there actually hate that people have things, as a primary motivation?

A) Global Warming is true and humans contribute: 99%

B) That is bad: 95% (addendum to B) How bad? Coastal areas become flooded. Increased deaths due to heat. Increased frequency of natural disasters. Risk to food production due to unstable weather. We're talking potentially millions of deaths.

C) That due to the severity estimates of B, if proposed policies won't work, increased attention must be given to come up with policies that will.

Those number are just bonkers, and makes reasonable people want to just write off environmentalists (if true).

Alternatively, their confidence levels of capitalism solving societal problems are low as a general rule, and in this particular instance capitalism literally has negative incentives to solving this problem. How does one monetize the ability to bring the global temperature of Earth down? How do you monetize clean air? The only thing I can think of are carbon credits, and Republicans oppose implementing such a system in the first place. Conversely, you make money by producing things which pollute the air as a byproduct, and putting in effort to mitigate pollution costs money for no monetary benefit.

But despite the failure of environmentalists to implement their preferred policies, capitalism has brought down carbon emissions in the US quite a bit. So this part is just them screaming that reality is wrong. And actually, its easy to use the market to monetize reducing carbon usage. You put a carbon tax at a per ton basis and then you cut taxes elsewhere to make sure that the carbon tax doesn't cripple the economy. Notably when such a proposal was made in Washington State, environmentalists were part of the coalition that killed the proposal. The fact that they have this specific bundle of beliefs appears problematic for your thesis. The central planning thesis is actually strengthened here.

This strikes me as comparable to saying that pro-life people should be shooting up abortion clinics. Your average environmentalist believes they have 0 influence on India's policies because they are not Indian, and India's government gives every impression they don't care. People believe lots of things they don't follow through fully on, even assuming the assertions that if they believe X they should do Y are reasonable. Do all the people complaining about western fertility have 10 kids?

Valid to an extent. But, what if this is just another irrational part of their bundle of beliefs. That being that being an environmentalist and anti-capitalist is also highly correlated with being...anti-white/western? Perhaps all these beliefs are in conflict for achieving each seperate stated goal, except as to the part where all the policies trend toward...more central planning.

That's incredibly boo outgroup. How many people out there actually hate that people have things, as a primary motivation?

Lots? There are a bunch of large subreddits dedicated to these beliefs like /r/fuckcars, and the mods of those are typically powermods that also control super large subs like /r/politics and /r/askreddit.

Those number are just bonkers, and makes reasonable people want to just write off environmentalists (if true).

I was personally just making up high numbers, but over the long term (meaning I make no prediction about if it will be 5 years from now or 500), I do believe these things to be true.

But despite the failure of environmentalists to implement their preferred policies, capitalism has brought down carbon emissions in the US quite a bit. So this part is just them screaming that reality is wrong. And actually, its easy to use the market to monetize reducing carbon usage. You put a carbon tax at a per ton basis and then you cut taxes elsewhere to make sure that the carbon tax doesn't cripple the economy. Notably when such a proposal was made in Washington State, environmentalists were part of the coalition that killed the proposal. The fact that they have this specific bundle of beliefs appears problematic for your thesis. The central planning thesis is actually strengthened here.

That's easy to square. Capitalism created the pollution, particularly during the industrial revolution when pollution was largely ignored, then government (not capitalism) intervened to force companies to change. Having government push companies to reduce pollution is their preferred policy and was enacted, if not to the extent that they want.

Reading your link, it sounds to me like they believed that if they killed this bill they could get a new, more aggressive version pushed. Progressives letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is nothing new.

Valid to an extent. But, what if this is just another irrational part of their bundle of beliefs. That being that being an environmentalist and anti-capitalist is also highly correlated with being...anti-white/western? Perhaps all these beliefs are in conflict for achieving each seperate stated goal, except as to the part where all the policies trend toward...more central planning.

The reason I'm a Democrat but not a progressive is because I think that progressives are somewhat good at identifying problems (if oversensitive) but bad at solving them. It's the same personality trait that lead to becoming an environmentalist that lead to every other cause du jour.

I don't think brainstorming solutions to problems is bad, I just think they tend to weight real-life problems high and problems with their hypothetical alternatives low. They aren't central planning for the sake of central planning, they're central planning because it is the most obvious instrument that could potentially do all the things they feel must be done.

Lots? There are a bunch of large subreddits dedicated to these beliefs like /r/fuckcars, and the mods of those are typically powermods that also control super large subs like /r/politics and /r/askreddit.

True, I was not thinking of fuckcars. I think I'd only really heard the name once. A quick scan seems to me that their primary issue with cars is the number of people who die in car accidents. I disagree, but that does sound like a motivation that cars are harmful rather than a motivation that because they don't like cars that nobody should have them. Though to be fair I am also seeing some who do hate cars, mostly due to hating parking lots.

That's incredibly boo outgroup. How many people out there actually hate that people have things, as a primary motivation?

The hairshirt environmentalist is not at all uncommon. Just because something is uncomplimentary to the outgroup does not mean it is not true.

I live in a college town. I honestly can't think of a single person right now in real life that I would describe as a hairshirt environmentalist. Online, I can only think of Greta herself and her refusal to take an airplane, and she's a massive outlier because she pretty much uses her influence to bum rides around the world on an eco-friendly yacht. A quick check of Just Stop Oil shows that most of their antics result in 50-ish arrests, which seems like peanuts to me.

Your average environmentalist is a middle class college kid with an iPhone. They aren't giving up much of anything except maybe biking more and eating less meat.

With the caveat Rasmussen and N=1000.

Interesting. I do think Rasmussen is biased, but biased doesn't necessarily mean wrong. So I am genuinely trying to see if my mental model needs to be updated. I expect my mental model for the number of people who think that is too low but probably for many here theirs is too high.

I was having trouble finding other sources about wanting to ban AC. Thoughts on banning cars yielded far more results. Based on this thread, the steelman version of this argument is that many of the anti-car people don't want to ban cars so much as they want to prop up alternatives to the point that others don't feel the need to buy them. Which Noah Smith pointed out that Japan has both great public transit and a lot of car ownership. Though I think they'd still count it as a win if cars are driven less.

Your average environmentalist is a middle class college kid with an iPhone. They aren't giving up much of anything except maybe biking more and eating less meat.

Perhaps not, but they want YOU to give up your car, your air travel, your air conditioning, your single-family home and yard, your meat, etc.

But how much do they want that?

Saying “I think St. Thomas was pretty admirable” isn’t the same as putting on the hairshirt yourself.

But how much do they want that?

Enough to support politicians and policies which will result in people being forced to do it.

Your average environmentalist is a middle class college kid with an iPhone. They aren't giving up much of anything except maybe biking more and eating less meat.

The comment I've heard several times from middle class environmentalist friends is, "Of course, people are going to have to stop doing [thing I don't do]". Biking and recycling make them feel that they've made their sacrifices and they can happily start requiring things from other people.

Oh, I absolutely agree that their actions are often superficial and having unreasonable expectations of others. That was part of my backhand comment about college kids with iPhones. It's much like wanting to lose weight but not dieting (outside of switching to diet soda) or exercising.

My point of disagreement was anti-dan's framing was that they're not actually motivated by a desire to reduce pollution, instead they want people to live worse lives for the hell of it I guess? Because they derive enjoyment out of decreasing the total happiness in the world or something?

My model is that lots of people want to have their cake and eat it too. That they end up eating the cake is because obviously they can't have both and base desires won out. I'm more objecting to what I see as someone going:

I keep seeing people saying you should save your cake but they end up eating it. The logical conclusion is they hate the sight of cake and want to destroy it.

I think there's some of both. Someone was talking last week about how much environmentalism is an aesthetic: happy, multi-coloured people in harmony with nature and each other, living in beautiful garden cities. And that aesthetic is both positive and negative to some degree. Pro-local neighbourhoods has to mean anti-car, pro-clean-air means anti-smoke and therefore anti-factory, anti-wood-fires, anti-gas-hobs etc.

I think @anti-dan is correct in that often the 'anti-' aesthetic comes first, people dislike chaos and capitalism and want central planning, they dislike 'dirty' industry, they dislike racism and nationalism and parocialism and this plays a big role in their willingness to become Greens and to believe the more extreme takes on that side.

As always, I default to Bertrand Russel's method: any deeply held belief requires at least two of [personal desire, +/- social pressure, and preponderance of empirical evidence]. You will believe something if you really like it and the evidence seems to line up that way (HBD, often), or if you like it and your community agrees even though the evidence doesn't really line up that way (most religion inc. mine IMHO as a Christian), or if the evidence lines up that way and there is social consensus (we're probably not going to get lots out of interstellar space races).

The Puritan impulse that is driven by "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy" is not limited to guys in funny hats and capes

In point of fact, I do literally believe that a great many Western environmentalists are only tooting the horn about climate change as a convenient pretext to instate global communism or something approximating it. (I think Greta Thunberg had a bit of a mask-off moment in which she more or less copped to this.) But even if that was true of 100% of them, it wouldn't change the factual question of whether or not the earth is actually getting hotter because of human activity. "You're only sounding the alarm as a pretext to instate global communism" could be literally true of the entire movement's motivations, and yet completely irrelevant for the narrow question of fact under discussion.

many Western environmentalists are only tooting the horn about climate change as a convenient pretext to instate global communism

I started drafting a top level post last week touching on a related trend but I didn't have enough to round it out. I still don't really, but I think there's something in there. Anyway, last week I saw a poster for an Alternative Pride March in my city. My CW radar was pinged, I looked it up and found out that it's explicitly Marxist ("Pride without cops or corporations!" etc). Events under the same banner are being organised in other cities suggesting it's unlikely to be a grass roots movement.

So now the social acceptance and establishment endorsement of LGBT is... bad? That doesn't seem convincing.

What I think is happening is that Marxists prey on these fringe movements. It's not that LGBT and environmentalists are eager for Communism. I think many of them are sincere that what they want is no more than reasonable policies addressing their defined political interest (gay marriage, say, or clean rivers). I suspect that Marxists court and enter these movements that are made of what are already soft radicals who are acculturated to being unhappy with an aspect of the status quo and begin efforts to turn them into hard radicals who will become convinced that the status quo has to be disposed of wholesale (our revolution is necessary for the sake of your own cause, Comrade).

That is to say it's not environmentalists who are tooting the climate change horn to instate Communism, nor is it LGBTs, it's Communists. The fact that these movements are already socially accepted gives them cover to expand the agenda because now they can condemn resistance to the veiled Communist ideology as eg ecocidal transphobia.

But even if that was true of 100% of them, it wouldn't change the factual question of whether or not the earth is actually getting hotter because of human activity.

It wouldn't change the question but it would change the most credible answer (if you didn't already believe it, anyway). Ad hominem is a formal fallacy, but once you're out of the purely formal world, the credibility of the people making the propositions matter. If everyone sounding the alarm is doing it as a pretext to instate global communism, chances are good it's a false alarm.

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