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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25811 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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FIRE's new lawsuit challenging the Trump admin's deportation policies over speech is pretty interesting. The press release is pretty convincing too IMO. It's not the government's job to be deciding what is and isn't "acceptable" speech outside of the obvious dangers like the true threat limitations we already have.

The First Amendment trumps the statutes that the government is abusing to deport people for speech alone

This lawsuit seeks a landmark ruling that the First Amendment forbids the government from deporting lawfully present noncitizens for constitutionally protected speech

FIRE attorney: ‘In a free country, you shouldn’t have to show your papers to voice your opinion’

One thing that also concerns me when it comes to censorship efforts from the government is the chilling effect it places on speech and voiced opinions. People here legally can agree with the Government Approved Viewpoint all they want, but you're screwed if you dissent.

“There’s real fear on campus and it reaches into the newsroom,” said Greta Reich, editor-in-chief of The Stanford Daily. “I’ve had reporters turn down assignments, request the removal of some of their articles, and even quit the paper because they fear deportation for being associated with speaking on political topics, even in a journalistic capacity. The Daily is losing the voices of a significant portion of our student population.”

This is especially concerning when American politics can shift so much. Government Approved Viewpoints in the Trump admin might not be the same Government Approved Viewpoints from the next president. Criticize Israel today? Bad speech. But maybe the next administration says praising Israel is the bad speech instead. At this point you might as well be saying that you simply don't get to have or voice an opinion of any kind in the country, even if you're a lawful resident who doesn't commit any crimes.

And there are lots of great people who are lawful residents/vistors to the US. Even many celebrities! People like Keanu Reeves, Celine Dion, Ryan Gosling, Hugh Jackman all essentially told to not have any opinion on anything ever in case a future admin decides their opinion was a bad opinion.

Also FIRE so far has also been an interesting insight into what principled beliefs look like. Often on the internet I'll see from both left and right wingers an excuse that it's ok to violate their claimed principles because "the other side did it first" (even though interestingly enough they often can't seem to agree which side did it first, reminds me of something else), but at that point it's hard to say it's a principle if it's abandoned so readily.

Meanwhile FIRE has been pretty consistent in criticizing both the left and right, and even defending their opponents right to speech. It's like the early ACLU protecting the rights of KKK. There are times where I think they overreach on their criticism, I believe that strong free association rights of private individuals and groups are just as fundamental to free speech as the speech itself and restrict more to government actions but even then I still respect that they're consistent.

I would argue that the Trump administration is not abusing the statute, at least in the case of Khalil. The statute specifically allows for deporting people for protected speech, and Mahmoud Khalil -- a "student" who seemingly did not come to the US to study but rather to stir up trouble on campus for the purpose of affecting US foreign policy -- is the exact sort of person it was meant for.

I'd be fine for the statute to be declared unconstitutional on its face. I suspect it will not be, however; the First Amendment protects citizens and probably permanent residents, but possibly not those on temporary visas.

the First Amendment protects citizens and probably permanent residents, but possibly not those on temporary visas.

The text of the First Amendment specifically binds Congress: "Congress shall make no law...", while other amendments say "the right of the people...". Courts have generally read the First pretty broadly with respect to free speech protections. Excluding the no-longer-binding Schenck, I can't think of too many cases the speech advocates have lost. On the other hand, I can't see anyone reading it as preventing a ban on literal propaganda from foreign enemies. Limitations on issued (or renewed) visas for foreign nationals on the basis of their speech seems rather borderline.

I don't think the Founders intended to require letting in visitors who call for, say, the violent overthrow of the US government --- citizens doing so are already barred from security clearances, for example, without too much fanfare.

The text of the First Amendment specifically binds Congress:

Since it's a statute at issue, Congress is implicated; Congress can not delegate the power to throw out people for speech to the Secretary of State if they do not possess that power in the first place. But yes, unlike the Fourth (or the Second, LOL), "the right of the people" isn't implicated and e.g. United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez doesn't apply directly.

Limitations on issued (or renewed) visas for foreign nationals on the basis of their speech seems rather borderline.

Indeed, which why this case will probably end up at SCOTUS.

Why? This seems to be myopically focused on the 1st Amendment, while ignoring the Congress' clearly delineated plenary authority to regulate immigration. The 1st Amendment should not even come into discussion - Congress is perfectly free to impose any limits on non-citizens to enter/remain on American soil, and eject them for any - or even no - reason.

The First Amendment is a limit on all of Congress's powers, including Congress's power to regulate immigration.

Yeah, the distinction there is pretty subtle, and I can't think of a case in which it's ever actually mattered. Maybe we'll see that in the lawsuits over White House press pool access: is there a relevant act of Congress establishing that at all? But it generally seems to be considered to apply to the government as a whole.

Meanwhile FIRE has been pretty consistent in criticizing both the left and right, and even defending their opponents right to speech. It's like the early ACLU protecting the rights of KKK.

This attitude seems certainly praiseworthy. The principled org willing to piss off people on both sides of the CW is much more credible than any organization which only cares about their pet issue when it benefits their side.

Also, calling a freedom of speech organization FIRE (in caps) is brilliant naming.

This is true for American citizens, but the fact that we're even considering applying it to non-citizens shows just how much the concept of "citizenship" has decayed. It also, incidentally, shows how little anyone actually means it when they say America is a "creedal" or "propositional" nation. If citizenship is not a matter of ethnic belonging (i.e. an intersection of familial and cultural ties), it must then be ideological, which necessarily means exercising discretion and control over the ideologies of people allowed in or, at the minimum, allowed the rights and duties of citizenship.

As I've quoted before, GK Chesterton wrote about how this used to work in America, before our imperial phase:

The Spanish Inquisition may have been admittedly Inquisitorial; but the Spanish Inquisition could not be merely Spanish. Such a Spaniard, even when he was narrower than his own creed, had to be broader than his own empire. He might burn a philosopher because he was heterodox; but he must accept a barbarian because he was orthodox. And we see, even in modern times, that the same Church which is blamed for making sages heretics is also blamed for making savages priests. Now, in a much vaguer and more evolutionary fashion, there is something of the same idea at the back of the great American experiment; the experiment of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a melting-pot. But even that metaphor implies that the pot itself is of a certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The melting-pot must not melt. The original shape was trace on the lines of Jeffersonian democracy; and it will remain in that shape until it becomes shapeless. America invites all men to become citizens; but it implies the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship. Only, so far as its primary ideal is concerned, its exclusiveness is religious because it is not racial. The missionary can condemn a cannibal, precisely because he cannot condemn a Sandwich Islander. And in something of the same spirit the American may exclude a polygamist, precisely because he cannot exclude a Turk.

"What I saw in America" 1912, pgs. 8-9 (boldface added for emphasis).

If citizenship is not a matter of ethnic belonging (i.e. an intersection of familial and cultural ties), it must then be ideological, which necessarily means exercising discretion and control over the ideologies of people allowed in

This is a false dichotomy. There are a lot of other possibilities around which to organize citizenship. In the Roman republic and empire, it was for example build around collective military aid: polities on the Italian peninsula which were subjugated by Rome and fought side by side with the legions were eventually granted citizenship. In the French foreign legion, it is individual military aid: mercenaries who are willing to die for French interests get French passports for their service. Or a lot of cultures were willing to integrate women who married their citizens, willingly or otherwise. In Tír na nÓg , citizens and immigrants share a metatype. In Israel, immigrants and citizens (mostly) share a religion (which is only an ideology in the widest sense of the word).

Of course, if America has an ideology, it is the ideology of the American dream. The idea that an immigrant who arrives with little more than the clothes they are wearing can through hard work thrive in the land of capitalism and freedom. Having opinions about which group should murder which somewhere in the old world seems pretty orthogonal to that.

Some rights are clearly citizen rights -- the right to vote is a clear example. Some other rights are basically human rights, and should naturally apply to any human under the power of the state. The right to free speech, freedom of religion, due process, confront their witnesses, or the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments are examples of the latter.

Ideally, I would not want the government to change people's immigration status based on any actions which are not actually criminal (or at least narrowly concerning immigration, such as "lying on your visa application"). A world in which each free country has an LLM which searches if visa applicants have made any statement the ruling party does not like and automatically rejects them is not a freer world than one where no free country does such a thing.

In the Roman republic and empire, it was for example build around collective military aid: polities on the Italian peninsula which were subjugated by Rome and fought side by side with the legions were eventually granted citizenship.

This is a deep and incorrect elision of the same process - the denigrating and hollowing of republican citizenship into imperial subjection - that I am arguing is happening here, today. The socii did not participate in the roman centuriate assembly or plebeian councils, did not serve in roman offices or have any say in roman foreign policy, despite making up at times at clear majorities of roman armed manpower; in fact, the original premise of their becoming socii was that rome would not interfere in their cities' internal affairs at all, in exchange for a territorial guarantee and military mutual aid. In practice, this confederal relationship broke down and Rome did indeed start meddling in the internal affairs of the socii, and the legal distinctions between the various cities began to chafe as rome grew prosperous off war proceeds while the socii were left having to deal with trade barriers that blocked their ability to share in those rewards. By the time of the principate and empire, roman "citizenship" was a very different, much diluted thing.

French foreign legion, RPG, Israel

Of your other examples, it's telling that two are entirely inapposite - one isn't a country but instead a quasi-penal military unit, another is entirely fictional - and the third literally has a religious requirement for naturalization (at least of the type you're discussing). Far closer to my point than yours.

Of course, if America has an ideology, it is the ideology of the American dream.

The term "American dream" is itself an artifact of the modern progressive era, with basically no resonance at all before that (with the exception of a tiny little bump in the years immediately surrounding the founding).

Of course, if America has an ideology, it is the ideology of the American dream. The idea that an immigrant who arrives with little more than the clothes they are wearing can through hard work thrive in the land of capitalism and freedom.

It’s hard for me to see this as other than a placebo ideology – an ideology against any common ideas, a standard against standards. It has no unifying power except that of money. Upward mobility for immigrants is a great thing. But it is not the only thing, and it shouldn’t replace the American heritage.

I remember a clip of a TV interview with a black Alabaman and member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans during the George Floyd protests. He was counter-protesting demands that Confederate monuments and symbols be torn down. He had been adopted by a white family; their heritage became his heritage, and he was defending it. He’d become a true member of a family into which he was not born. But it’s not as though he had somehow ceased to be black. I think about this often as an analogy for immigration.

Some nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants went further in this direction than I could ever ask – for example, refusing to pass on their birth tongues once they’d learned enough English to raise their children in it; I don’t think I could or would have done the same in their shoes. Or consider the spirited embrace of Columbus Day in some Italian-American communities, because it emphasizes the intersection of the Italian and American heritages.

We could do worse than to prioritize those immigrants willing to respect the culture and heritage of the society they are joining.

Some nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants went further in this direction than I could ever ask – for example, refusing to pass on their birth tongues once they’d learned enough English to raise their children in it

This was quite different back then than it would be now. If you live your entire life in one neighbourhood and there are a dozen other ethnicities living there, soon enough everyone will adopt a common tongue. To have separate communities you need a certain amount of space between them.

Nowadays, every Arab youth in Europe is on Arab TikTok, and people don't speak to their physical neighbours anyway, no matter if they share a language or not. With the disappearance of physical barriers, it's the language barriers that define the communities.

This was quite different back then than it would be now. If you live your entire life in one neighbourhood and there are a dozen other ethnicities living there, soon enough everyone will adopt a common tongue.

Except that's not true. New York had significant yiddish, italian, bulgarian, lithuanian, greek, etc. communities, where those languages were spoken alongside, or even to the exclusion of, english in the early 20th century. Chicago had polish, ukranian, etc. Los Angeles today has several areas where spanish is predominant, as well as several suburbs that are at least duolingual with many/most advertisements in mandarin, vietnamese, etc. Up until WWI huge swathes of the midwest spoke german, usually as a second language, but in some areas to the exclusion of english.

Immigrant ghettoization is extremely common, and tends to preserve language use.

it must then be ideological, which necessarily means exercising discretion and control over the ideologies of people allowed in or, at the minimum, allowed the rights and duties of citizenship.

Besides general American values, how do we address the issue I mentioned of idealogy changing constantly? Plenty of Americans shift beliefs given the back and forth between parties. Lots of idealogical goals even within parties change, the republican and democratic party of today looks drastically different then just twenty years ago!

Speak up against Israel now and you're anti American. Speak up for Israel now and it's ok. But every four years it could be completely different. Speak up against Israel in 2029 and you're fine, speak up for Israel and you're anti-American.

Against gay marriage in 2010? Perfectly normal American values. Against gay marriage in 2020?. Anti American values.

Legalize marijuana? Countrywide abortion access? Legality of sports betting? Support/don't support the Iraq war? Edit: here's 2016 Trump saying trans people can use whatever bathroom they want so even with the same person in charge you could be perfectly fine idealogical agreement one day and wrong the next.

how do we address the issue I mentioned of idealogy changing constantly?

This is the price we pay for being a propositional nation; the proposition changes as the populace does...when the melting pot itself melts and Jeffersonian democracy wears away to nothing, there's a fight over how to replace it. And like most fights, there's swings back and forth until a new consensus emerges.

This presumes that "consensus" remains an unbreached scaffold. What do you do when consensus itself melts, and all that's left is a Will to Power knife fight?

Er?

when the melting pot itself melts and Jeffersonian democracy wears away to nothing, there's a fight over how to replace it. And like most fights, there's swings back and forth until a new consensus emerges.

Like I said...there's a fight. And whoever wins, wins. That's not a tremendously happy answer, but I think it's fairly descriptively accurate, no?

Besides general American values, how do we address the issue I mentioned of idealogy changing constantly?

Evidence indicates that we fight, with ever-increasing viciousness, over unilateral enforcement of our tribally-preferred ideologies, and the devil take the hindmost.

This remind me of a thought i had watching the most recent superman movie. DC's Earth dodged a bullet when Kal'El was found by a conservative midwestern couple as opposed to literally anyone one else. As much as James Gunn, the people of Metropolis, and to some extent theMotte like to sneer at Smallville, Smallville is arguably the reason that Superman is a force for good instead of an existential threat.

This idea has been played with. Personally, I liked the resulting comic series, but YMMV.

It's pretty good, as is the movie; Soviet Batman is awesome.

My take on this is that the US is somewhat unique in being a nation founded on a proposition rather than blood, soil, or some historical what-have-you. To that end, i believe it is in the US's interest as a nation to vet those it let's in on the basis of whether or not the are "on board" with that proposition.

Free speech is a human right, residence in the United States is a privilege.

My take on this is that the US is somewhat unique in being a nation founded on a proposition rather than blood, soil, or some historical what-have-you

This depends on whether you consider the UK and USSR to be nation-states, or whether you think they are multinational proposition-states. The process of creating a "British" identity on top of the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Protestant Irish national identities (all of which are conventional land-ethnicity-and-culture national identities) in the 18th century was deeply propositional, with anti-Catholicism being the most normie-friendly part of the proposition at the time. Likewise the only thing that makes Lithuanians, Khazaks, Russians etc. "Soviets" is a (mostly fake) shared commitment to Communism.

My experience is that most normie Brits call England, Scotland and Wales "nations" and "countries" and call the UK a "country" but not a "nation". "National" normally implies UK-wide though. We are confused about the issue. The question "Are you an English ethno-nationalist, a British ethno-nationalist, or a British civic nationalist?" is mild kryptonite to nationalists in England. (British nationalists in Wales and Scotland are either unassimilated English migrants or uncomplicatedly civic nationalists)

The unusual thing about the US is that there isn't a set of subordinate ethnic-national identities that the civic identity is built on top of - the only state that is plausibly a nation is Texas. So civic nationalism is the only American nationalism that makes sense.

Another corner case is France - at the point it became necessary to turn Bretons, Gascons, Provencals etc. into Frenchmen quickly in order to get them to fight together, some but not all of the way Napoleon did it was propositional - France isn't just the land of baguettes and Moliere, it is also the land of liberte, egalite and fraternite.

the only state that is plausibly a nation is Texas

Hawaii?

My impression is that Hawaiian nationalism is only for indigenous Hawaiians, who are <20% of the population - in other words Hawaii isn't plausibly a nation with its current demographics.

the only state that is plausibly a nation is Texas

Alaska.

You're probably right about that one.

More specifically, I would say that those Texans who see themselves as a nation would include most of Oklahoma and parts of New Mexico in that separate nationhood. Maybe parts of Louisiana, Colorado, Arkansas as well- but definitely not all or even most. Alaskans would not have this idea of honorary Alaskan-ness for anyone else. Assimilating requires moving to Alaska.

the unusual thing about the US is that there isn't a set of subordinate ethnic-national identities that the civic identity is built on top of

Not really. Well, this is historically wrong... obviously in the present day this is pretty clearly correct. Besides Texas of course, and for a while Utah to some degree (and maybe also Vermont? It never joined the Articles of Confederation and took a few years to join the United States too, although a lot of this was New York's stubbornness denying them. I don't think my native Oregon Territory makes the cut though), you only have to look at the Civil War and the decisions made by many individuals there to discover that some people did in fact consider other identities as not even necessarily subordinate but even superceding that of full nationality. Robert E Lee as a classic example notably considered allegiance to Virginia as supreme to that of America. However, it's worth noting that this really only applied to the original 13 colonies and weakened substantially over time. And of course every war in particular was a major impetus towards nationalism.

Still, I get what you're saying. There was a sort of "purpose" and consciousness behind the creation of the US that many other [Western] nations lack, at least so quickly. It's nonetheless difficult to say what exactly generalizes and what does not, because historians well know that nationalization somewhat paralleled technologies that facilitated internal movement (e.g. the railroad), internal mixing (e.g. educational and literacy trends), and led to increasing national mobilization in the military realm (post-Napoleonic warfare). The US is also a bit of an aberration in the sense that it has limited history (in a Eurocentric sense, and thus fewer pre-existing loyalties) so it's not an easily extensible template.

I agree that the Confederacy could have been a nation-state if it had successfully seceded, but it didn't, and I don't see a separate nation there in 2025 - the whole point of the "Red Tribe" meme is that the White South now sees its own grievances against the DamnYankees as a part of a broader small-town vs big-city and periphery vs core rebellion against a corrupt establishment. To its supporters, that rebellion speaks for, and deserves the support of, all patriotic Americans. It doesn't want a separate country, it wants to fix the one that exists.

This depends on whether you consider the UK and USSR to be nation-states, or whether you think they are multinational proposition-states. The process of creating a "British" identity on top of the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Protestant Irish national identities (all of which are conventional land-ethnicity-and-culture national identities) in the 18th century was deeply propositional, with anti-Catholicism being the most normie-friendly part of the proposition at the time. Likewise the only thing that makes Lithuanians, Khazaks, Russians etc. "Soviets" is a (mostly fake) shared commitment to Communism.

To me there seems a noteworthy difference between the idea ‘proposition nations’ and ‘collective identity’ nations. If two towns merge - join their municipal councils, share local tax revenue - that doesn’t make them a ‘proposition town’ that any third town can necessarily subsequently join.

A national identity might be built on a shared ethnic or cultural relationship, friendship or heritage that precludes a third-party from joining even it the polity itself is heterogeneous. Different peoples can become American is not the same as anyone can become American. That a Welshman and a Scot can both be British doesn’t mean anyone can, although in the age of mass immigration, I suppose the distinction is moot.

although in the age of mass immigration, I suppose the distinction is moot.

Well that would be the point under contention wouldn't it?

The next obvious question then is, if some people can join together to become another people (ethnogenesis, or if you prefer collective identity formation) then what are the lines of demarcation which define in-group and out-group? In the British case, the factors seem to be:

  1. Common subjects of the same monarch for ~400 years
  2. Common language (strongly with the Scots and the English, weakly with the Celts and the Germanics) and especially shared literary traditions
  3. Common culture, cuisine, and traditions (most centrally religion of course, but these are myriad - most underrated is the musical tradition which is essentially common across the entire Isles, and also sheep farming)
  4. and Geographic proximity
  5. Common blood - the people exist on a spectrum of Celtic flavoured NW European to Germanic NW European, and practically all are somewhere on this spectrum.

But an upper class Indian from Calcutta also fits many of these. They were subjects of the Crown for 300 years (and are still members of the Commonwealth), they speak English, and their own mother-tongue is an Indo-European one. If they're of a certain milieu, they read a paper called the Times, they definitely play cricket, and they might even be Christian. At the very least they're familiar with Shakespeare and Kipling. And of course this person might have grandchildren who are third-generation British born. So they could satisfy the 4th condition.

And yet that 5th will never be satisfied, until intermarriage and mixing occurs. Until recently the vast majority of people in Britain would be willing to acknowledge this hypothetical individual as British, just British (Indian), like British (Welsh). But I suppose something has changed recently, as the previous imperial identity breaks down, and the Anglo identity reasserts itself. In my view this is predominantly down to cascade effects and critical masses. The grandson of the chap from Calcutta might be British (Indian), but does the guy who just flew in from Bihar, who speaks terrible English, who thinks of Manchester, Melbourne, and Milwaukee as interchangeable places that are functionally the same, does that mean that he is British Indian? "But look, people who look like me can be British!" Perhaps, but not you. And then people start to notice that these people who are definitely not British (but who they're told are) actually seem to be pretty similar to these people who they thought were British before.

But back to the question. If e) is important then how come the two "founding stock" Americans are as diametrically opposed as possible? Anglo/NW Europeans and West Africans. Well frankly its because time changes things- most namely it means there's a whole load of "intermarriage" (or, Jeffersonian style encounters) and if the South African Coloureds count as having some commonality with the Europeans, then so do African-Americans. This also solves for sticky identities which persist over time despite consistent marriage with their neighbours, e.g. the Ashkenazi. A Christianised (or secularised) Mischling in say southern France or Italy is of such minute difference to the local population that it's hardly worth differentiating.

The long and short of it is that until extensive mixing and partial homogenisation occurs, collective identity cannot (or at least, it won't stick). The migrant populations must become hyphenated, and hyphenation is not just a matter of paperwork. This hyphenation cannot occur when the numbers are too large OR too concentrated (as there will be the possibility of insularity), but given time, can become a new part of the nation.

Having gone through the permanent resident process for my wife, there were a lot of things that were potentially disqualifying that would have been protected activities for citizens. Being a member of the Communist party*, advocating for the overthrow of the American government, etc.

Does permanent resident status confer the right to participate in those activities that could have prevented you from getting that status in the first place?

* This came up and it seemed like not a big deal if the situation was "everyone has to participate in communist activities in China."

Topics like this are where my nativist impulses collide with my remaining lolbert ones. Recently, some of the foreign national speakers appear to trying to drag the U.S. (further) into their ethnic battle on the other side of the planet, and I would be quite happy to have far fewer of those types around. Other speakers are criticizing the U.S. for being the Evil Colonizer Empire or the Great Satan, and while they might have their valid points, if America is so bad, then they need to go back whence they came and make those arguments from their home country.

Libertarians are most of the reason I no longer have principles. When I was younger, libertarian principles sound awesome. And it's easy to believe that the world would be a better place if everyone followed them.

Unfortunately, like most belief systems, they splatter against the real world, and my entire adult life libertarians have proven themselves to be among the many ratchets built into the system which paradoxically keeps the boot on my neck. It's not their fault. They simply don't understand the world they live in.

Part of this is that "Left Inc" as I've heard it coined, has done such an amazing job of laundering it's soft and hard power outside of any "bill of rights" framework. So you'll often see libertarians defending Corporations, Universities or NGOs for trampling your rights (It's a private entity, it can do whatever it wants!), while they condemn the government for doing the same. Or they'll be a feckless speed hump against the expansion of the welfare state, and crucial allies for open borders, ensuring we get the worse of both worlds.

Their idiosyncratic principles about the increasingly illusory distinctions between public and private actors in practice have left me at the mercy of people who hate me, and offered no succor or relief, or even a theoretical path. So I have discarded them as worse than useless, more akin to an infohazard.

Now, generally I support the causes FIRE has taken up. They've been fighting the good fight against Title IX overreach. To virtually no effect what so ever I might add though. They've helped students here and there sue for damages, but I've never seen them make a university cave and change policy. It took Trump winning the election and cleaning house at the DOE for that to happen. And wouldn't you know it, now they don't appreciate how Trump has attempted to extirpate DEI language and practices from Universities. It leaves one wondering if they actually want the Title IX policies fixed, and what methods of actually fixing them would be acceptable to them. Because their lawsuits sure and shit did nothing.

But that's libertarians in a nut shell. Their world view is that you can ask nicely for people to stop hurting you, but you aren't allowed to infringe on their "rights" to make them stop.

So you'll often see libertarians defending Corporations, Universities or NGOs for trampling your rights (It's a private entity, it can do whatever it wants!), while they condemn the government for doing the same

To play devil’s advocate(and to be clear I am not a libertarian, even if I don’t like the government very much)- a lot of the reason corporations and universities are on one side of the culture war in particular is due to government policy making it hazardous to take the other side. Theoretically in a libertarian world conservative universities wouldn’t be limited to small religious liberal arts colleges.

If that Libertarian world were less than completely theoretical, or if the Libertarian movement gave any indication that they had a method of getting us there, this might weigh heavier of the deliberations of former libertarians.

They've helped students here and there sue for damages, but I've never seen them make a university cave and change policy.

They shuttered the entire "bias response team" of the University of Michigan just a few years

And just recently won a policy change at George Mason University.

Anyone who has said free speech would be easy to defend would be a liar, but anyone fighting for free speech knew that from the start. You don't win by being perfect everywhere at once, you win by taking it on battle by battle.

So you'll often see libertarians defending Corporations, Universities or NGOs for trampling your rights (It's a private entity, it can do whatever it wants!), while they condemn the government for doing the same. Or they'll be a feckless speed hump against the expansion of the welfare state, and crucial allies for open borders, ensuring we get the worse of both worlds.

That's crazy, the idealogy around limiting government and protecting individual private liberty primarily wants to limit government and protect private entities. At this point it might as well be a generic "they don't agree with me about everything, I like it when they're allies but hate them when they're opposed" complaint.

Your whole comment comes off like you're against principles just because those principles sometimes come into conflict with your desires

I think the complaint is more one of prioritizing the letter of those principles in a short-sighted way, that undermines the reasons they were thought to be desirable principles. Like, if your speech rights can be trampled almost as much as if you lived in the old USSR as long as it's not government directly doing the dirty work, even if government played a large role in creating the conditions that made that possible, and libertarians are mostly standing by and letting it happen, that doesn't sound like a very libertarian world to me.

I think politics is the place where principles go to die most certainly, and tbh, it’s a big reason why I just am reaching the point where I don’t even want to be involved in any of it. Let me grill or read books or watch sports or hike or fish and let someone else decide what we’re going to do about the problems.

It's a curiosity because without principles, what makes someone choose any particular side to begin with?

Politics is always compromise between the need to get things done and the need to uphold principles. Quite often because those principles lead to paradoxes and contradictory answers depending upon the questions at hand. The principle of free speech is not infinite, you can’t talk about weapons on an airplane or in an airport, you can’t urge the commission of crimes, you can’t, rather famously, yell fire in a crowded theater (unless of course there actually is a fire), and you can’t lie about a product you are selling. Why? Other very important public goods: public safety, prevention of fraud, etc. need to be protected and cannot be if free speech is absolute.

And on it goes. Policing is a necessary evil, and using force is a necessary part of policing because criminals tend not to respond to polite requests to please stop robbing, raping, murdering, or selling drugs. That doesn’t mean you don’t have rules against overreaching, but one man’s police brutality is another man’s stopping those criminals terrorizing his neighbors.

And balancing this stuff, all these balances between two things that are goods in themselves, or at the very least avoiding some form of known bads, gets complicated very quickly. I’ll be blunt in saying that most people are unqualified for this kind of stuff because they don’t understand the issues involved. Most political conversations are vibes based bleating not even willing to engage in the entire argument, quite often undertaken by people who don’t bother to find out how things work. I put myself there, I have no idea where the highway should go, where the lines of public decency vs degenerate behavior should be drawn, how exactly to police a community without unnecessary brutality or excess permissiveness. And as such I think that politics would go much better if more people tuned out and dropped out and let people who know deal with the problems without me telling them that their solutions are not aesthetically appealing to me.

I mean, for me, it was the realization that principles mean nothing. A sufficiently motivated adversary will find some way of maliciously using your "principles" against you, and then chiding you for defending yourself. You see it with free speech, and malicious actors doxing the families of "free speech absolutist". Congratulations edgelord, you found the edge. Nobody doubted you could.

I think if you grew up in a high trust society, you take for granted that principles are just another part of the social contract. As it descends into a low trust hellhole, where there is no social contract what so ever, principles just amount to handing your daughters over to literal roving gangs of barbarian rapists and sitting idly by because you wouldn't want to step out of your lane and violate the state's monopoly on violence. If you want to stick to your principles, you must allow savages to repeatedly rape her.

As civilization crumbles around us, we repeatedly see what our "principles" are earning us, and it's suicide.

Not an OP in this chain, but I think that's where we disagree. I'm somewhat friendly to the idea of high vs low trust societies, but I don't think that trust is inherently entropic and decaying or else we wouldn't ever have high trust to begin with. I also don't think technological or social movements from the last century or so are inherently corrosive to trust either (maaaaybe algorithmic-driven news but I am hopeful this will self-correct). I think any variation contributed by immigration is within the variation that already exists in the natural ebb and flow of trust insofar as it exists, it's not inherently directional. As an example, some immigrants might even raise institutional trust because they have a vision of America that is more rosy than Americans themselves believe. Or, of course, sometimes they bring prejudice with them, but it's not some broad brush, and it's not some inevitable march to decay. Civilization is not dying, and although history never repeats, I feel like the rhymes are there to justify humanity's continual adaptation and loose progression. As clarification, I think the 'global march of progress' narrative often parroted on the Left is super-duper wrong, but civilization itself has a stubborn tendency to stick around. Empires, of course, do not; mind you don't mistake the two!

Contra MaiqTheTrue, I think I draw the opposite conclusion from similar facts. Even though many individuals may not have full awareness or be capable of navigating balances and tradeoffs and knowing the fine details, we can still accomplish positive and clever execution because the intensities of belief act as "weights" on the system as a whole. Work tends to happen in the middle near the fulcrum, and directional pressures - even if vague by themselves! - lead to a convergence on a balance point actually quite close to the ideal in many cases. The more lower-d democratic a system is (caveat: actually a degree of representative government is also needed, policy is written by individuals after all), the better this tends to work. That is, I think wisdom of the masses theory is broadly true, and that even intelligent individuals in power often respect these counterbalances, even unconsciously, more than is often appreciated. A local administrator might tell you plenty of superficial rationales for choosing certain zoning restrictions, for example, but ultimately there is a lurking calculus of the big players in the city and what kind of things the voters like that has more often than not pre-determined the smaller range of plausible outcomes before they even start drafting them up.

Under this model of the world, even cynical, loud, and evil people who wield principles like a weapon and view politics as a blood sport often act more as weights on the scale than actual participants. Moving the Overton Window and living on the extremes provides a degree of additional leverage, this is true, but that's not a bug it's a feature! The 'intensity of belief' should affect the balance of things (and even pure cynics are downstream of this intensity, not the actual upstream source). Furthermore promoting more lower-d democratic behaviors helps quite a lot, indirectly, to expose them for what they are, and re-weight the balance over time.

See I think we largely agree that absolute principles do not work in the world of actual humans simply because at bottom, everyone is going to be working in their own favor and cooperate only to the point that doing so advances their interests, and the trick is to get pro-civilizational behaviors is to make benefits from society dependent on being beneficial to that society. But of course this is difficult, and probably more so with the hyper-individualism that the west suffers from that says you can do whatever with no regard for others and quite often very few social or legal consequences.

I don’t know how to get there, but I’d love for America to have social cohesion like in Asia and a Scandinavian economic system.

The principle of free speech is not infinite, you can’t talk about weapons on an airplane or in an airport, you can’t urge the commission of crimes, you can’t, rather famously, yell fire in a crowded theater (unless of course there actually is a fire), and you can’t lie about a product you are selling. Why? Other very important public goods: public safety, prevention of fraud, etc. need to be protected and cannot be if free speech is absolute.

Certainly you can talk about weapons on an airplane or in an airport. And that rather infamous "fire in a crowded theatre" case -- it actually concerned people distributing pamphlets protesting the draft as a violation of the 13th Amendment -- is not good law and has not been for a long time. The current law is Brandenburg v. Ohio, the famous "imminent lawless action" test.

This misuse of the "fire in a crowded theatre" incidentally demonstrates the disingenuous of those who use it to justify restrictions. Because on the close order of zero people have gone from "My new proposed restriction is OK because fire in a crowded to a theater" to "Never mind" when it is pointed out that Schenck v. U.S. has not been good law for over 50 years.

It's a curiosity because without principles, what makes someone choose any particular side to begin with?

Familial/tribal/ethnic loyalties? Nobody is born into a void, into the "view from nowhere"; we're all born into a particular place, a particular family, particular conditions; embedded in a specific social context, full of unchosen bonds and obligations, which indelibly shape who we are.

You (generic/rhetorical "you," not making any assumptions here) love your family not because they're "the best family" according to some prior metric, you love your family because they're yours. Much the same with patriotism. To quote Chesterton, "Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her."

I'm curious what family, tribe or ethnicity have to contribute to considering the effects of certain economic policies like price controls, or law regarding the environment, or political and institutional design.

Would you say your family, tribe or ethnicity has helped you determine the answers to the above?

I'm curious what family, tribe or ethnicity have to contribute to considering the effects of certain economic policies like price controls, or law regarding the environment, or political and institutional design.

Read my reply more carefully. You asked why people choose a side. That is the question I answered. It's not about "economic policies like price controls," it's about whose side am I on.

This is pure Carl Schmitt — that the essence of politics is the friend-enemy distinction: who is my ingroup, and who is my outgroup.

It's something I see often among the leftists on Tumblr — they don't have considered positions on issues, or even fixed principles, they have a side. They support whatever their "tribe" currently supports, because their tribe currently supports it, and if that changes, they change with it.

People significantly choose what side they're on by considering the effects of what they believe to be facts beyond subjective self-interest or family ties. They demonstrably spend time researching "the facts" and the "science."

Even this notion of tribal loyalties determining political outcomes is supposedly a disinterested value-free view from above, about human behavior.

People significantly choose what side they're on by considering the effects of what they believe to be facts beyond subjective self-interest or family ties. They demonstrably spend time researching "the facts" and the "science."

We apparently know very different sorts of people, because that's not my experience with most people IRL, unless by "researching "the facts" and the "science"" you mean watching Fox News.

Most people I know determine their positions on "ethnicity have to contribute to considering the effects of certain economic policies like price controls, or law regarding the environment, or political and institutional design" by "what does the Republican party support" or "what does the Democrat party support."

IIRC (I don't recall where I saw the data) most Americans partisan identities develop in their early 20s, and then generally just keep voting for the same party the rest of their lives.

What you describe as how "people" behave is simply alien to my experience.

See e.g. the British Corn Laws. Those lined up very clearly with the aristocrats (who owned the land) and the farmers (who worked it) in favour of tarriffs on imported grain, with merchants / importers / speculators and urban industrial workers against.

Self-interest, life experiences and priorities often line up along familial, tribal and ethnic lines.

"What will the effect be of this 50% tariff?"

"I don't know. Are we talking about Hutus or Tutsis here?"

You can see how un-illuminating this is pretty quickly.

Because I don't know anything about either of those groups. I guarantee you they would be affected differently by tariffs.

I can look it up though:

Rwanda is a small landlocked country in East-central Africa which is home to approximately 12 million people. Historically there are three main social groupings in the country – the majority Hutu (84%), the minority Tutsi (15%), and the much smaller Twa (1%).

The distinction between Hutu and Tutsi was mostly social – the Tutsi forming the wealthy, powerful part of society, and the Hutus the lower, poorer part.

In 1957 The Hutu Manifesto was published which denounced the Tutsis and their perceived dominant position in Rwandan leadership. When the King died in 1959 the Hutus, supported by the Belgians, rose up against the Tutsi leadership. Thousands of Tutsis were murdered and over 100,000 were forced to flee to neighbouring countries including Uganda. The first municipal elections held in Rwanda took place in 1960 and saw a Hutu majority being elected. The monarchy was abolished in 1961, leading to further attacks against the Tutsis. In 1962 Rwanda was granted independence from Belgium and George Kayibanda from the Hutu nationalist party came to power.

The years following independence saw repeated massacres of Tutsis. There were also attacks on Hutus by Tutsis, who saw themselves denied political representation as the nation became a one-party State. Tutsis were denied jobs in the public service under an ethnic quota system which allocated them only 9% of available jobs. Tensions were further inflamed by increasing pressures on the Rwandan economy, resulting in rising levels of poverty and discontent.

So the Tutsis were a minority group that had been in charge in the early half of the 20th century and were then overthrown. When bad economic times struck Tutsis were hit by a double whammy of discrimination from the Hutus government and scapegoating from dissatisfied Hutus. Meanwhile the Hutus are likely propped up by the government and have more access to land and government support.

I strongly suspect that Tutsis would be hit very badly by 50% tariffs and the resultant economic problems. I also suspect that anybody who has serious business in Rwanda thinks about this kind of thing on a constant basis. The failure of foreign hegemons to consider very delicate inter-tribal dynamics in favour of academic theories about what should be important is a recurring complaint since the 1800s.

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Values lie below principles and give rise to them. Principles crystalize in particular environments, and whether they are worth having is dependent on how well they enable the execution of values in that environment.

Both environments and values shift over time, but the point of principles is that they do not shift. Because they do not shift, they are sheared away under sufficient values/environment drift. This does not greatly complicate choosing sides, because that is better done for values reasons anyway.

The most locally concerning precedent being set in immigration cases is the requirement that all social media be set to "public". This is essentially leaning towards the abolition of internet anonymity.

I don't see how one classifies "social media" in a way that doesn't include a place like Reddit, TheMotte, or MetalArchives, or my comments on BleedingGreenNation about Nick Sirianni, or the comments from Carolinian politicians on NudeAfrica. No more usernames, everything must be posted publicly.

And while they might only be talking about Facebook or instagram or Twitter initially, and during the visa process they probably won't be extensively cross-referencing non-public information to figure out your anonymous usernames, let alone utilizing stylistic analysis or correlating personal information to doxx you, the catch-22 is potentially really bad: if you lie on your visa application, you have now committed a crime.

And if they want to get rid of you, all they have to do is utilize the various methods available to a government to doxx you, find the comments you made on BloggingTheBoys about how Jerry Jones needs to get his head out of his ass, and boom, they have you.

first they came for the tumblr users, and I did not speak for I was not a tumblr user.

Then they came for the redditors, and I said “Hey, make sure you get all the redditors.”

Redditor is a unique designation, in that hating redditors tells me instantly that you are, in fact, a redditor. I'm not aware of any similar grouping of humans. Chris Rock might rail about the difference between "Black people and Niggers" but he clearly understands himself to be in the former category. Jews might mock their own foibles, but so does everyone else. Only Redditors complain about Redditors.

Nobody makes fun of weebs more than other weebs.

Huh, interesting. I mostly hear weebs made fun of by Asian girls who want to complain about fetishes.

During the Furry Wars of the 00s it was a common understanding that people who were really obsessed with hating furries were probably furries themselves, or at least felt the call of the fur in some way.

...What were the furry wars?

Starting in 2000-2004, the furry fandom became visible to people outside of the fandom to a much greater degree than before. This also coincided with a lot of social media sites with a large focus on pointing out and sneering at people they thought were weird, with the most famous being SomethingAwful.

This went about as well as a house on fire.

I don't know much about the SA-internal side of things, outside of there just being several purges of people suspected of being furs from their forums (tbf, SA purges people from the forums as a fundraising effort, or just because Lowtax thought it was funny). But from the furry side, it was pretty common for fairly small furry spaces to just randomly get swarmed by twenty trolls out of the blue.

Some of this was tongue-in-cheek or self-deprecating. But a lot of it was just point-and-look-and-the-weirdos, and sometimes surprisingly mainstream. There's a Daily Show skit called To Boldly Gay where furries were a good part of the punchline, and I'm not going to link it because it didn't censor the smut sketch it was making fun of, and that was cable television. CSI's Fur and Loathing is probably the most infamous.

(Sexual politics of the time, given the broad gay-or-gay-adjacent bits of the fandom, probably had an impact, too.)

One of the joking-not-joking responses is that while the media reporting was probably just the standard Jerry Springer stuff, the trolls, at least, sure seemed to spend a lot of time and attention scrolling through art or writing that supposedly made them violently ill. And just like the then-prominent gay marriage debate proposed that the people most strongly opposed to gay marriage were really closeted, after a few high profile (if not very-well-proven) examples, a lot of furries took some cases of user overlap between CrushYiffDestroy (a furry-self-critical forum) and the SomethingAwful forums as evidence that many of others were really using the movement to summon their own army litigate disagreements in a more favorable environment under an alt.

Congratulations on not being a furry (I also, don't know what he's talking about, what're the odds there's a Kiwifarms thread about it though lol)

It doesn't seem like there is such a thread on the Kiwi Farms. I think the topic is sufficiently old (from the 00s apparently) that nobody has explored it yet.

Furries remain something that I can't, quite, accept that they exist.

Maybe in general, but not in my case. A few years back, after a long downward pattern of less & less use, I copped a permanent ban on absurd grounds, and had my appeal rejected.

I had been for many years, as early as 2016, been slowly enjoying the app less and less. Just took it as a sign that my time was done, deleted my profile, deleted the app, never reinstalled it again.

Every once in a while I’d get a link from somewhere else and just reading the comments for a minute before I inevitably closed it, I’d felt like I’d roll my eyes so hard they were about to pop out of my skull.

We are having this conversation at TheMotte.Org , whose very existence is proof of how shitty Reddit is and has been for a long time.

It’s been clear to me for years that Reddit is mostly just a botnet & super astroturfed influence peddling platform that’s been shrinking itself into an irrelevant echo chamber. It’s honestly incredibly boring.

Maybe in general, but not in my case. A few years back, after a long downward pattern of less & less use, I copped a permanent ban on absurd grounds, and had my appeal rejected.

Claims not be a redditor. Used reddit from somewhere prior to 2016 until a couple years ago. Appealed the ban to try to keep using reddit.

Yeah, dude, you're a redditor. Albeit maybe an exiled one. One wouldn't say that an American living abroad has ceased to be an American, and a Catholic who stops going to communion is always just a lapsed Catholic.

One wouldn't say that an American living abroad has ceased to be an American

Yes I would. Sure, it depends on length of time - someone who lives in another country for a few months or even a few years does not cease to be an American that quickly. But when that person has been in the other country for a few decades, I think it's fair to say they aren't American any more. And I think @MaximumCuddles case is more analogous to the American living overseas for a few decades - if he hasn't had an account in 9 years, that's an eternity in Internet time.

He said he stopped liking it in 2016, he stopped using it when he got banned "a few" years back, which I'd normally read as 2-3, giving at minimum double the amount of time of using Reddit as having left Reddit.

Given that it takes five years of residency to be ready to apply to become a US citizen, I'd say leaving for 2 or 3 years isn't enough to shed it. Certainly if one lived in the United States for 20 years, leaving for ten isn't enough to stop being American, you probably never quite stop being American at that point.

I'm curious what the linguistic or philosophical category is for a statement where I would say that someone can't claim something as a positive status, but can't argue against it as a negative status. Like if a teen boy has only received a handjob, one is probably precluded from claiming to be a virgin in the positive sense of being chaste, but probably can't brag to his buddies about having lost his virginity. Or a corporate lawyer who does some pro-bono work for woke causes; he can't claim the positive status of being in public interest because he's a corporate sellout, but neither can he avoid the negative accusation of working for the woke blob.

So the question is, is being a redditor (or an American) more like building a bridge, or fucking a goat?

My bad, I misread the timeframe. I agree that significantly changes the discussion such that it's reasonable to say "you're still a redditor".

So the question is, is being a redditor (or an American) more like building a bridge, or fucking a goat?

Thank you for writing this, it cracked me up.

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It hasn’t been quite that long since I’ve deleted my account, only a few years, but I’d put the probability of me using Reddit again on any substantial level again around 5%. It would take a miracle to get me to use it again even on a weekly basis.

It’s joined a bunch of other sites in the dustbin of things I don’t use. Might as well be Friendster or Snapchat at this point.

I’m as much a redditor as I am a Digg user, or a 4chan User, or a SometingAwful user (goon), or a MySpace user, or a Facebook user.

Which is to say, not at all. I don’t use any of those things much at all anymore, even if I have a still active account.

You’re projecting since you’re still using Reddit. I probably spend less than an hour a month on Reddit, only reading it when shared in some other context on some other site. Or when I do a search and the other results are Reddit. Been that way for 3 years at this point.

It got boring. I appealed my ban in a sort of weary indifference, mostly out of curiosity. I knew it wouldn’t work, the site was too far gone and had been that way for years.

When I finally copped the ban I was using it maybe 2hrs a week when I was very bored, I simply didn’t enjoy it much anymore and most of the good communities had long ago gotten zapped by the eye of Sauron. I knew it was just a matter of time before there was literally nothing of value left so I pulled the plug early.

Just like Digg; not with a bang, but a whimper.

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