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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25766 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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In the last roundup about embryo selection, guy with Greek letters in his flair ThomasdelVasto said the following (emphasis added):

Now I personally have religious reasons to oppose this sort of intervention, but even if you don't, it's not hard to imagine the insane societal consequences of allowing free for all designer babies. As one hyperbolic comment on the slate star subreddit says:

Yet another reason for people to not have kids. This shit is so socially erosive. "Want a baby? Do you want a prole baby, made the old fashioned way? You don't know what you're going to get! It's like a loot box, could be pure crap. You should PAY US to make a cool designer baby, with a 34% increased chance of the ultra-rare and coveted phenotype High Functioning Autist. If you have a loot box baby, they're going to get crushed by Ultra-Rare HFA Baby" Nuke it from orbit.

While this comment is pretty over the top, I still think there's a strong point here! Gattaca was a cautionary tale, not a user's manual. Then again, I suppose the general zeitgeist considers the prole class to be so whipped, and coddled with bread and circuses, that our materialistic transhumanist tech overlords can simply do whatever they want, even if it will end up condemning "natural-born" people to permanent servitude.

Much of right-wing thought is just people looking for "right-wing" language to express low-class envy and grievance. AOC-ism with extra steps. There's long been an element of that in the American Right, and there's nothing wrong with it provided it's based on actual complaints. (Working-class people were entirely justified in their anger at those judges who ordered their kids bussed into the ghetto while sending their own kids to private schools.) But ever since the first Trump campaign, prole resentment has become arguably the defining characteristic of the Right in America. It's the glue that binds together the vulgar, secular, working-class Trumpian Right and the traditional Religious Right. The tattoo-covered WWE fan doesn't want to listen to a sermon from the Southern preacher but recognizes him as a fellow member of the broad ingroup of low-class Americans who share a common inferiority complex toward urbanites with lots of education and money. While not every Right-winger shares this attitude, there's a near-universal refusal to acknowledge or condemn it. Elon Musk is almost a caricature of the "materialistic transhumanist tech overlord," but you won't see him defending himself against such attacks. (You might say this is because he's unaware of them, which might be true of some Silicon Valley Tech Rightists, but isn't true of Musk, considering how much time he spends on Twitter.)

P.S. To preempt the accusation that I ignored ThomasdelVasto's point, I reject the whole theory that poor, low-IQ people are harmed by competition with rich, high-IQ people. People are willing to risk dying in the desert to move from low-IQ to high-IQ countries because high-IQ has massive positive externalities.

P.P.S. I know I might get banned for this post. I was drawn to the forum because I'm a long-time Scott Alexander fan, from back when "right-wing SSCer" meant "secular guy who talks about embryo selection and national IQ," not "guy who thinks we need to go back to 1710 ideas about religion and government and that eugenics is evil." For me, unlike many of you, the former wasn't just a gateway drug to the latter, so I'm "left-wing" now. You can follow me on Substack and Twitter.

P.P.P.S. The mottezien is immunized against all dangers: one may call him a cuck, nazi, bigot, fascist, it all runs off him like water off a raincoat. But call him a resentful prole and you will be astonished at how he recoils, how injured he is, how he suddenly shrinks back, calls you egregiously obnoxious, and then bans you from the forum.

ETA:

@ThomasdelVasto

I'd encourage you to question why so many post-rationalists, like myself, who were deeply involved in the SSC rationalist movement as you were, become Christian or at least religious.

Because they want to do a medieval LARP and don't care about the truth? It's not like they discovered some flaw in science and that's why they changed their minds.

@ChickenOverlord

The latest episode of Hanania's podcast reverberated his entire car, making it pulsate even as the $100 champagne circulated through his powerful thick veins and washed away his (merited) fear of proles exercising political power. "With a car, you can go anywhere you want" he said to himself, out loud.

I shop at Walmart and eat at McDonald's.

  • -39

Have you ever had a conversation with a tattoo covered WWE fan, or a southern preacher?

Those sound like poor people.

Or even worse, low class!

Maybe. The only tattoo covered WWE fan I know is a sysadmin with hilariously idiosyncratic views on politics.

So, to be clear, you made this post not because you want to share something that you think is an interesting observation that you made about the US Right, but (per your P.P.P.S.) because you think that your claim is an insult (seeing as how you gloss it yourself as "calling [the reader] a resentful prole" and group it with a bunch of other standard slurs) and applies to the abstract representation of a member of this forum ("the mottizen")? At face value, I figure your claim is at least wrong because this [ought to/would] be seen as "egregiously obnoxious" and earn a ban no matter the particular choice of insult.

Contrary to what you seem to think, this also doesn't particularly imply that your insult is spot on or hits a nerve; to think otherwise is the same sort of delusion as that of the hobo who screams at passersby that they are all cucked by the lizardman conspiracy, gets himself arrested for public disturbance and hauled away screaming about how this proves the lizardmen are afraid of his message.

Turok, you really don't learn. You don't deserve the courtesy of a long and detailed explanation of why you're being banned. In fact, you seem to be expecting it, and are relishing the opportunity to be a martyr. So be it:

Permabanned.

I think that the main benefit of explaining a ban is not to the user (especially in the case of a permaban), but to the wider community.

So I think that it is helpful to link to the last warning (afaik).

I think another factor might be that the correct place to criticize a top level post from three days ago is as a reply to that very post. Starting a pristine comment thread on Monday in medias res with a reply to another comment seems like a really bad style. By definition, a continuation of a last weeks debate is not about current events, so my personal expectation would be that the comment would strive to be an excellent top level comment in all other regards, charitably paraphrasing a broader debate so far and then adding some useful new commentary. Instead, what he served us was re-heated leftovers from three days ago moisturized with the ketchup of his own opinion.

While most of his comment reads to me as not particularly coherent (but that might be a problem on my end), and also does little engagement with the quoted comment except to sneer and in the "P.S.", I think it is the "P.P.P.S." especially where he goes of the rails completely.

I do not think that we have many regulars who are central examples of "prole", posting long texts on a discussion site seems to select for somewhat educated people, mostly. It is not that he was correct that this was an insult which hurt especially badly, and it was just that he was banned for blatant name-calling.

--

While "you do not represent the true spirit of the left, I do" has been done to the death for a hundred years, I would nevertheless register an objection to him describing himself as ""left-wing"". While his sneering dismissal of the working class is certainly reminiscent of similar dismissals by the woke left in the past decade (e.g. Clinton's "despicables"), I think that it is stupid to give up on the working class. Wokism completely failed to engage with these people ("in my rich neighborhood, I get along fabulously with Blacks and immigrants. If you in your poor neighborhood fail to get along with them just as well, that is because you are a dirty old racist!") and then they decided to vote MAGA instead. But Trump's tariffs have the potential to be a very educational lesson for low-income voters, it is just up to the Democrats to offer these people a stomach-able alternative to populism.

I am being performatively lazy here. Turok genuinely isn't worth my time, and I'm confident that almost all of our regulars are well aware of his bad behavior. That being said, I appreciate you sharing the link to previous warnings.

For what it's worth, I don't see anything wrong in continuing a thread in a new CWR. Most users would prefer more engagement or at least eyeballs on their posts, and once the thread becomes obsolete, it's very unlikely that a significant number of people will even read anything you have to say.

Yeah I actually did appreciate the follow up. It's a shame, I wish he could stay because he's clearly intelligent and willing to stick up for his views. I've even defended him multiple times. He just can't seem to avoid outright asking to be banned and personally attacking people. Alas.

I wish he could stay because he's clearly intelligent

PressXtoDoubt.jpeg

If Turok was intelligent, he hid it off the Motte. If you go by the qualities typically associated with intelligent people making them, well, intelligent, these are traits like being open-minded, curios, adaptable, self-aware, and demonstrating critical thinking. Turok consistently lacked them. Turok was a poster who was consistently unable to even re-state positions that were directly given to him, wildly off-base in his characterization of contemporary events or dynamics in the world, and regularly went off on tangents or tirades that were cliche decades ago.

He might have been articulate political brainrot, but he was still brainrot.

If Turok was intelligent, he hid it off the Motte. If you go by the qualities typically associated with intelligent people making them, well, intelligent, these are traits like being open-minded, curios, adaptable, self-aware, and demonstrating critical thinking.

I mean, personally I'd probably drop two or three of those myself. If only because by defining "intelligence" so narrowly, you begin down the road of implying that every intelligent person must agree with you. But there is always the possibility that a person who seems closed-minded has seen further than you, and understands what an infohazard is. Or the person who seems unadaptable to you has seen further and understands what a maladaptation is. That one person's lack of "critical thinking" is another person who understands perfectly well what you are saying but still disagrees.

That said, you are correct about Turok.

No, he wasn't. The only intelligence that I'd give him credit for was skirting the lines of a permaban for so long, and even that was finally quelled. Like many lolcows, he just couldn't resist having the last word and doubling down on absolute nonsense.

At this point, I'd respect more a 4chan shitposter giving me a scrolling page of n-words: at least, in this example, he isn't wasting my time.

I would nevertheless register an objection to him describing himself as "left-wing"

Being reflexively anti-right-wing is not the definition of left-wing, to the point he couldn't identify posts more friendly to left-wing thought.

Not a mod but I consider his posts to be pretty forthrightly criticisms of people/caricatures of movements rather than descriptions of movements and subsequent criticism. That is, he completely ignores the “discuss the CW don’t wage it” rule which admittedly is a tough one to police and maybe even flawed as a concept but Turok (to me) didn’t seem to even bother to attempt to follow it.

Well that didn't take as long as I thought it would. Not as satisfying without more buildup but today is still a good day.

I am opposed to this permaban.

Like it or not, class resentment drives a lot of what goes on in our world. It's very worth discussing.

Turok was not here to discuss it; he was here to sneer.

My guy, you asked me to go easy on Turok last time. Look how he repaid your charity.

If there's anything useful to be said on class resentment, you won't find Turok saying it.

I also asked for charity last time. Even though this post is directly attacking me, I'm honestly tempted to ask for charity again. But the fact that he is blatantly going:

I know I might get banned for this post.

Makes it obvious to me he doesn't care about the rules or respect the mods at all. Alas. I think he drove interesting discussion.

I wouldn't discount the possibility that even now he has somewhere an alt that will pick up his ball and keep running for the goal. I do not write this based on some knowledge of his character, just that this is a time-worn strategy of many who get banned.

We all come to miss at least some of the fallen for livening things up around here.

Kind of hilarious how much drama is generated here over banning people for being dramatic.

I haven't regularly checked this site in months but my impression as a lurker was that every Turok toppost was some variant of "I found this comment somewhere on the internet: the person who made it is a moron and if you would argue otherwise in the replies you prove that you are less smart than me." Apparently when he was told that unsourced twitter posts from anonymous users were not the kind of thing you make a top level post about, he took the wrong lesson and started doing it with comments from this forum.

It's certainly worth discussing. But is the community really served by having someone "start the discussion" (which I think he wasn't even doing, it strains charity too far to claim that) with sneering at other members of the community and pointing out how bad he thinks they are? It seems to me the answer is no.

Is it worth discussing in the way he's discussing it? And even if it was, 90% of the time the dude runs away when you give him a thoughtful response.

Sadly Turok's discussion of class was less than worthless, and seemed to mostly be about his own unexamined class insecurities. As I said elsewhere, "It's a funny barber-pole-of-status-signaling thing. I have never encountered someone on the internet who is actually upper-class for whom "lower-classness" is an object of vitriol rather than of disinterested study." But bringing that directly into discussion would also violate the norms of this space, such that any discussion from his posts was already drawing from a poisoned well.

It's lame you had to do this but I get it

I did really enjoy his ability to kick off an argument, although I get why the way he does it is against the spirit of this place

Saving this post to talk more about internal dynamics in the red tribe.

So, to start with, almost everyone in the red tribe has higher purchasing power parity than their blue tribe equivalents. This is sometimes from lower costs but it's also often from preferring different goods- and not necessarily inferior goods from an objective perspective. McMansions are better housing than NYC apartments. Literally- they're bigger, they have more amenities, it's harder for neighbors to affect you, they're less likely to be infested by rats, etc. The red tribe is not tormented about the higher status of goods that they see(often, from an objective perspective, correctly) as inferior- they are often bemused by it instead. There are red tribe elites and they have far less of the church crowd/country music crowd/genuinely rural division which is very important in understanding middle class red tribers. These people think their lakehouses are better than selfies on a European beach- partly because they can go every weekend. These people are who the broader red tribe would imitate if they had more money. And by and large pilots and oil executives and contractors and union guys don't want to live in NYC. They're perfectly happy with their kids going to public college. Status just works differently.

Is there resentment about cultural tastemakers pushing bad values? Yes. But this is couched as immorality, the same reason the underclass is poor(actual red tribers would not refer to them as underclass, of course- it'd be '-something- trash').

McMansions are better housing than NYC apartments. Literally- they're bigger, they have more amenities, it's harder for neighbors to affect you, they're less likely to be infested by rats, etc.

This is purely your opinion and given the price people are willing to pay per sqft, one that millions of people do not share with you.

NYC apartments have something McMansions can never have: location, location, location. This is the ultimate amenity.

You may not value it, which is fine, but that doesn't mean it isn't valuable.

That would get into the weeds of what exactly PPP means. You could also say that a big mac in NYC is worth more because you can eat it while being in NYC. But PPP would disagree with you there.

That's an interesting and fair point, obviously a big mac in NYC is not substantially better than a big mac in Boise, but at the same time there is probably some amount of value for what you said about "big mac in NYC is worth more because you can eat it while being in NYC" because that is convenient.

I'll have to think on this more, would you mind expanding on the "But PPP would disagree with you there." part?

Also in general, PPP aside, I just think it's ridiculous to make sweeping judgements about the subjective value of things to people, it's not just clearly wrong, it adds very little value to a conversation to be like "I like X more than Y, thus X is better in all cases".

I wish you had posted this yesterday. It would have gone well with my wine - I had a South African Cape Coast sav blanc, from an east-facing vineyard at the foot of a coastal valley, where the sea air and rocky soil produce a really crisp, refreshing white with an almost salty minerality. Paired that with a very mild, milky cheddar and some raspberries. In the evening, when it wasn't so hot, I cracked a Salamino di Santa Croce lambrusco. Again, that's a bit tarter and more acidic than your typical fruity lambrusco, but I paired it with a rich mushroom bruschetta. I don't actually know that much about Italian wine (the family place in Italy is on the coast, quite some way from the real wine country), but I know what I like.

P.S. I know you're supposed to capitalize "Sauvignon", "Lambrusco", etc., but that's always struck me as a little pretentious.

Now I want an effortpost on wines... I personally am only really familiar with the Niagara region, but would like to become more worldly.

It's a huge, huge topic, and from a Mottizen perspective a lot of the received wisdom on wine is very questionable. My advice:

  • Go region-by-region and familiarize yourself with it. There are some regions I know much better than others, and a lot of depth to go into in each one. This is particularly the case if you're in a marginal wine region, like Niagara, that specializes in particular varietals due to climate.
  • Find a really good local shop and talk to the owners/go to their events. Can be a pleasant way to spend an evening and wine lovers like to go in-depth on why a wine/region is the way it is. Consider joining a wine club that will give you a couple varied bottles along with tasting notes.
  • Stick to wines around the $20 price point for trying new stuff (maybe $25-30 now with inflation and tariffs). Even the experts will tell you that, for the most part, the price difference between $20-$80 is marketing. If you want to splurge, go above $80 on a varietal you know you like.
  • Pairings do make a huge difference, particularly cheese. With a meal, the 'ideal' pairings are generally pretty well-known, just look up what you'll be cooking.
  • It's ok not to like varietals. I don't like merlot and I can count the chardonnays I've liked on one hand (though one Franschoek chardonnay in particular is a grail of mine, has an incredible smoky flavour. Sadly my uncle has a long-running beef with the guy who owns the vineyard so no schmoozing in for me). Don't be afraid to develop your own taste.
  • Don't be a snob. If AlexanderTurok drank wine, he'd be a wine snob. Nobody wants that at their tasting.

Sounds like an effortpost to do!

This is the opposite of an effort post, but I'm fond of La Vieille Ferme Rosé. It blew up on TikTok as "Chicken Wine" (a fact relayed to me by an ex), and I think it tastes great for something that costs £9 at the local supermarket.

(I have no desire to develop expensive tastes)

You know what's funny that just occurred to me? In the background of nearly every optimistic old school sci-fi property is just the assumption that gene editing will be deployed for the good of all humanity. You're enjoying your giant stompy robot Battletech novel, and it just has throwaway lines about how humans live longer and with less disease thanks to the Star League 300 years ago. It was viewed as such an obvious gimme that sci-fi didn't even dwell on it. It was boring, like the precise mechanics of a faster than light drive, or how the Enterprise's computer worked. Give it a few throw away lines and move on with the story. There was a humanity wide genetic uplift program that was 100% successful, now moving on...

I do wonder how much of this was an artifact of the high trust society America used to be, where public works could actually be completed to the good of all with state capacity to spare. Now it's impossible to envision a future where all our children have their disease genes filtered out, have enhanced cognitive functions, and might reasonably be expected to live in relative health until 140. In our low trust hellscape of highly dysfunctional state capacity, corruption exceeding any ability to accomplish anything, massive corporations enshittifying their golden geese with 3rd world scams, and a high time preference work force that can't do even the most simple jobs with trust and correctness, we can only envision the technology heightening the war of all against all.

Add to that the people who (rightly) won't trust the technology, given the institutional own goal "the science" has inflicted on itself the last 10 years. Even if it were possible for everyone to benefit from a genetic uplift program, a portion, possibly a large portion, would choose to be left behind.

Oh the future we could have had. Alas.

nearly every optimistic sci-fi property

Pretty sure it’s the optimism that’s doing the work!

Dune may have been pretty confused about genetics, but like everything else in its setting, the fruits were definitely reaped by the aristocracy. Maybe this is just because the camera follows aristocrats, and there are Mentat-grade weaponmasters hanging out in every village? It takes a millennia-long suicide plot to spread one genetic advantage to the human race as a whole.

Yeah, it's probably fair to say the optimism was doing most of the work. But on the flip side, it's funny to say that Battletech is optimistic. Although I suppose by the standards of "Every human institution is going through a shredder of being flooded with high time preference scammers/thieves that loot it down to the bedrock", it does seem optimistic. Then again it's hard to write a novel in the future where every human society has collapsed and the surface is dominated by feral humans. Though there are a few. I guess The Time Machine could be their ur-text.

I've said this before, but Dune is such a special case. Taken in as a whole work, the overriding theme seems to be that to survive among the stars, humanity will be tortured without end because the human condition is fundamentally incompatible with galactic habitation.

Agreed on all counts.

You get this pre-leftist strain of environmentalism combined with such a feudal, reactionary setting.

Prescient indeed.

Now I'm curious, did you ever read Frank Herbert's other novels? I read The White Plague in highschool when I randomly found it in the library, and then I read the WorShip series when I found it in a used book store, and it definitely reinforces the themes of "Mankind is made to suffer" that compose the core of Frank Herbert's world view IMHO.

I have Godmakers somewhere but never got around to it. Not familiar with the others. Would you say they’re worth it?

Some parts of the WorShip series cracked me up. Like how Plasteel and Lasguns get reused from Dune (or did Dune reuse them from Worship? I should check the publication dates). It's definitely a lesser work compared to Dune, but I enjoyed it. The last novel IMHO was rather weak, I think it was posthumously finished by his co-writer on the series, Bill Ransom. Very Dues Ex Machina and Utopian, which maybe goes against my statements that Frank Herbert's central ethos is that humans are made to suffer. But maybe not, you'll have to make your own judgement about how in tact the human condition is by the end.

I've read the human hive one and the trilogy about the evil Brahmin clones. I think Herbert is just not a very good writer, Dune excepted.

I mean, I guess. On the other hand, how many Dunes do you have to write to be consider a good writer? Is one not enough?

One is enough, but two is better to show the first one wasn't a fluke. And some of the later Dune books aren't anything special.

I mean if we’re talking gene editing in America, there is theoretically a delivery mechanism that could deliver uplift to about 80% or more of the public. You’d just have to pass an Obamacare style law to require health care insurers to cover some degree of the process.

Now at the same time there’s probably a good argument to be made that America (assuming it were invented here! It might be China) might functionally withhold the tech from other countries under IP law stuff. But if China invented it and perfected it then the US might find itself in the weird position of pulling a China and blatantly ignoring IP, stealing it themselves and refusing to impose punishment. And I’d assume other countries stealing it too would also occur.

I view the problem of trust about gene editing to be noticeably distinct from other public health trust issues, if for no other reason than you’d potentially have to wait 100 years to get a good sense for the true consequences of the tech (in the more extreme versions of the tech) since you can’t accelerate human development very much. Literally none of our systems or science are set up to track and process that kind of data. Ironically for you perhaps global climate change is the only similar example.

I mean, sure, if you have no imagination. But choo choo, here we go to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.

Scenario 1: As a cost cutting measure, the Obamacare gene editing doesn't target specific genes, and fixes the narrow pairings that are causing the problem. They just bulk replace, say, 5-10% of everyone's DNA. That's the only way it scales cost effectively. The government contract to make it so goes to a "Minority Owned Business" as many do, and wouldn't you know it, some H1B colony just uses Indian DNA samples to make their gene editing templates. Next thing you know, everyone's kids are coming out just a little bit Indian.

Also it doesn't actually solve any of the diseases it was supposed to.

Scenario 2: The average African American IQ in America is something like 85? But that's the average. Imagine you uplift the IQ of the child of some congenital felon with an IQ of 75. Can you first imagine the very special hell that child now grows up in? I've seen a few his/hers/ours scenarios where a child of a previous spouse is leaps and bounds smarter than the new wife (and the "ours" kids), and the abuse heaped onto them by the less intelligent new spouse is wild. Below average IQ parents can be fucking savage to the high IQ children that end up in their care. Now imagine that at scale.

Scenario 3: Congenital felons again. There is a strong correlation between high IQ and low criminality, but it's not perfect. Imagine we uplift their IQ, but not their criminal dispositions? If you thought "We Wuz Kangs" is bad, wait till you've seen "We Wuz KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN"

I mean, I’m picturing something like an extra 20 years of useful life, 10 years of not so functional life, and maybe an IQ gain of 5-10. I am not an expert but would doubt you could realistically get much more than this. Laying aside the race stuff and caustic negativism, I don’t imagine that would be too societally chaotic. I’d imagine lifespan differences wouldn’t become obvious until the 50s. So I could imagine some strife within families when your child is 50 and you are maybe 80 and it’s becoming obvious that your child will live longer and already has a higher QoL than you did at that age. Families already get a bit dysfunctional around wills and such at that age so that to me is the bigger concern or plausible source of tension. Like Boomer resentment multiplied, flipped, and personalized. Disease resistance as well (if it even works) is largely invisible on a personal level so I don’t think that figures too much.

More to my original point it could very well be that tons of the recipients get Alzheimer’s or some other hitherto unknown condition way earlier and stronger. Causing chaos, and something animal studies didn’t pick up. Our science is not optimized to detect that kind of stuff. And would we really be patient enough to wait for the original test tube generation to fully age before we implement it for others?

More to my original point it could very well be that tons of the recipients get Alzheimer’s or some other hitherto unknown condition way earlier and stronger. Causing chaos, and something animal studies didn’t pick up. Our science is not optimized to detect that kind of stuff. And would we really be patient enough to wait for the original test tube generation to fully age before we implement it for others?

Oh yeah, there are always the fears about pushing straight to production with our children. But honestly I think that's the least of it with how dysfunctional all our institutions are these days. We'd be lucky if all that happened was everyone developed generative disorders by 60 instead of living to 120 when you consider how horribly we'd fuck it up even if the technology worked flawlessly.

Scenario 3: Congenital felons again. There is a strong correlation between high IQ and low criminality, but it's not perfect. Imagine we uplift their IQ, but not their criminal dispositions? If you thought "We Wuz Kangs" is bad, wait till you've seen "We Wuz KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN"

Khan is definitely the civilisation-killer one, the one that (potentially) can't be fixed. But you're over-focusing on pre-existing criminal dispositions; it's entirely possible people will accidentally or deliberately introduce psychopathy via the "high-IQ psychopaths have higher income than high-IQ non-psychopaths due to doing white-collar crime and other exploitation" correlation.

Scenario 3: Congenital felons again. There is a strong correlation between high IQ and low criminality, but it's not perfect. Imagine we uplift their IQ, but not their criminal dispositions?

And now I'm reminded of a classmate in elementary school, the "gifted" class's perpetual troublemaker, who combined high IQ with even higher impulsiveness. At an age where most kids figure out they shouldn't do whatever random, impulsive thing crosses their mind because they'll get in trouble for it, and the rest figure out that they should at least put some thought into how to not get caught doing the thing before they do it, he couldn't even find the impulse control to do much of the latter before following his impulse. Instead, he'd just follow his impulse, get caught, then put his high IQ and high verbal fluency to work trying to weasel his way out of the consequences.

I would be shocked if ThomasdelVasto is a fan of Elon Musk.

The mottezien is immunized against all dangers: one may call him a cuck, nazi, bigot, fascist, it all runs off him like water off a raincoat. But call him a resentful prole and you will be astonished at how he recoils, how injured he is, how he suddenly shrinks back, calls you egregiously obnoxious, and then bans you from the forum.

Er, but... you're the one using 'resentful prole' as an insult.

You're banned, so you can't answer this, unfortunately, but it's unclear to me why being a member of the proletariat would be at all bad, and if you do in fact believe that wealthy urban leftists are bad (contemptible, leading America down a bad path, etc.), resenting them seems like a reasonable response. So shouldn't the answer here just be the chad "Yes"?

(Well, it may not be accurate in my case depending on what you mean by those terms. I work for a wage, so I suppose in the Marxist sense I'm a proletarian, but generally when I hear 'prole' I think 'industrial working class' or something, which I am not. Nor do I think I'm particularly resentful, since I did in fact go to a fancy big city university. But that's just quibbling facts. I would certainly be much more offended if you called me a Nazi or fascist.)

It’s adapting a quote from Goebbels. Using a nominally-accurate term as an insult is the point.

In Turok’s model, mottizens neoreactionaries are strivers in denial. They want to be comfortable, educated, well-connected arbiters of taste, but admitting such would give the outgroup too much credit. So they try to construct a rival hierarchy which puts their class markers at the top.

If this is true, then the most vicious thing Turok can do is point it out, revealing the neoreactionary’s class interest. That’s why Turok assumes that he’ll get banned. “They hated Him because He told the truth.”

"Low class people could be here" he thought, "I've never been in this neighborhood before. There could be low class people anywhere." The cool wind felt good against his bare chest. "I HATE LOW CLASS PEOPLE" he thought.

The latest episode of Hanania's podcast reverberated his entire car, making it pulsate even as the $100 champagne circulated through his powerful thick veins and washed away his (merited) fear of proles exercising political power. "With a car, you can go anywhere you want" he said to himself, out loud.

Why am I getting vibes of renowned author Dan Brown?

It's a reference to this meme (apologies for the iFunny link it was the fastest version I was able to find):

https://img.ifunny.co/images/1fc743a3a8bc67f6f16403b2ef05ae1634dc672725db781e5738c8b384845f0d_1.jpg

Thanks, I chuckled. Hadn't seen that one before.

I laughed out loud at this, thanks. Nothing moves the literary soul quite as deeply as thoughts written in all caps.

"Want a baby? Do you want a prole baby, made the old fashioned way? You don't know what you're going to get! It's like a loot box, could be pure crap. You should PAY US to make a cool designer baby, with a 34% increased chance of the ultra-rare and coveted phenotype High Functioning Autist. If you have a loot box baby, they're going to get crushed by Ultra-Rare HFA Baby"

Prediction: we will see a wealthy, virtue-signalling white couple use gene editing to give their baby Down’s Syndrome.

You know it’s gonna happen. Imagine the social media storm.

Have we even seen the milder version of a wealthy, virtue-signalling white couple finding out in genetic testing that the fetus has Down's and deciding to keep it (and publicly advertising their decision)?

30 seconds of googling later:

She found out Jaxon might have Down's syndrome after being persuaded to have an extra screening and a blood test due to her age.

...

Lorraine and her husband Mark declined all further testing. They wanted to keep their baby, no matter what.

...

Jaxon was diagnosed at birth and Lorraine says the family has never looked back. She says her other children adore him and will fight over who gets to look after him when they are older.

Fair, though I don't think this quite matches the pattern I was looking for, since it sounds like they had to almost be coerced into testing and made it clear beforehand that they would not actually care about this outcome. I guess it would be hard to contrive an actual example where someone wants testing but would make a point of keeping a child with Down's - maybe if they were trying to filter for a less politicized condition, like sickle cell anemia?

She says her other children adore him and will fight over who gets to look after him when they are older.

I really hope that the parents are actually saving enough to pay for services for Jaxon the rest of his life. Thinking your kids will do it, even if you can get them to say they're eager to in the moment, is a terrible plan.

Yeah.

Put bluntly, children looking at taking care of a Down's Syndrome child won't have a good idea of what it would take for an adult to take care of a Down's Syndrome adult. It's very overdetermined:

  • adults looking at taking care of a Down's Syndrome child won't have a good idea of the requirements to take care of a Down's Syndrome adult. Children are even worse at predicting those differences.
  • Children looking at taking care of a normal child won't have a good idea of the requirements to take care of a normal adult (including themselves). This is just a standard part of growing up.

Same goes for any other developmental disorder, of course. I'd take them even less seriously than if they wanted to be a princess or an astronaut.

Isn't that basically the trend of adopting children from Africa or Haiti? It's weirdly popular among white Christians, eg. Amy Coney Barrett and her husband adopted two children from Haiti.

Uh, no?

Would you care to explain exactly how you think being Haitian is comparable to Down’s?

Obviously it wasn't intended as a 1:1 comparison, but Haiti has an average IQ of 82. A significant percentage of that difference is likely genetic, based on our current understanding of the heredity of intelligence. The mother's health and nutrition also plays a significant role, and that's outside the control of the adopting family. A young child adopted from Haiti is statistically going to be at a significant intellectual disadvantage compared to the biological children of that "wealthy white couple".

International adoptions in general come with a much higher risk of a child with physical or mental disabilities. Growing up I knew two families that did international adoptions, one from Russia and one from Asia. The Russian child had fairly significant behavioral issues and developmental delays, and the Asian child had a physical disability likely caused by prenatal or infant malnutrition.

The charitable interpretation is that these families do international adoptions out of a genuine desire to do good and provide a better home for a child, but from a utilitarian perspective it seems to provide pretty low impact compared to other forms of charity in terms of cost effectiveness. What is does provide is a very visible signal of social status and virtue, and the frequency seems to ebb and flow depending on whether it's trendy in a given community. For example, it was a trend in Hollywood in the early 2000s, with celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Madonna. At some point it fell out of fashion, and now international adoptions are practically verboten in left-wing circles, particularly if the parents are white and the child is not. The same dynamics seem to play out on a smaller scale in some Christian communities.

I could see a similar dynamic playing out with Down's Syndrome in the future, particularly for for parents wealthy enough to offload much of the care onto hired help. Let's be real, Angelina Jolie likely didn't change the diapers for all six of her kids while shooting movies every year or two.

The average IQ with Down’s is closer to 50. If IQ was perfectly genetic, nothing about nurture or epigenetics involved, the average Haitian would be almost twice as far from that as from the population average. The difference is more stark if the foster parents have more effect.

I would also say it’s fundamentally different to try for a child (who ends up with Down’s) than it is to knowingly adopt a child from a disadvantaged background.

The similarity lies in the fact that they are both visibly indicated in a way the parents can use for social signalling. Right now prenatal screening is still not ubiquitous, so having a child with Down Syndrome is not necessarily a choice. Ironically that reduces its utility as a signalling mechanism. But in 10-20 years? The only people having a child with Down Syndrome will be doing so because they refused the screening, or deliberately ignored the results.

I don't think this trend will take off in progressive circles though, given how it's uncomfortably similar to evangelical Christian practice. Evangelicals will have staked out a position on this first just by being generally anti-abortion.

I don’t know that I’d call it “virtue-signaling,” but…what did you think “pro-life” meant?

67% aborted means 33% carried.

Yes. They are, uh, not the people who are likely to adopt gene editing.

Didn't Sarah Palin do that? She discovered in 2008 that her child, prior to birth, had Down syndrome, and publicly chose to keep the baby. She was wealthy, it was relevant to the 2008 election campaign so I think it's fair to say she was, at least in part, signalling her strongly pro-life views, and she was certainly white. She's the highest profile example I can think of.

I have very mixed feelings about the topic, but the debate over gene therapy and cochlear implants in the deaf community is at least philosophically interesting. On one hand, functional ears are a blessing and it makes sense to heal people where possible, but on the other it's not wrong that this effectively implies the destruction of a legitimate cultural community built around the disability. Neither answer feels fully satisfying to me.

I have a position that satisfies me: as long as you can support yourself independently, without the subsidy of others, feel free to procreate with whatever disability you want.

But if your disability causes a drain on those around you, then no, you should not be permitted to try to produce children with the same disability.

I find it funny that I gave explicitly religious reasons, but you then made it into a class resentment post. Can you explain how you got there?

Elon Musk is almost a caricature of the "materialistic transhumanist tech overlord," but you won't see him defending himself against such attacks. (You might say this is because he's unaware of them, which might be true of some Silicon Valley Tech Rightists, but isn't true of Musk, considering how much time he spends on Twitter.)

I'll admit I liked Elon a lot before his recent flame out - I still think his companies are doing well. I don't necessarily think that space and electric/self-driving cars have to be related to transhumanism, though I will admit that Elon and I's moral systems are deeply at odds.

P.S. To preempt the accusation that I ignored ThomasdelVasto's point, I reject the whole theory that poor, low-IQ people are harmed by competition with rich, high-IQ people. People are willing to risk dying in the desert to move from low-IQ to high-IQ countries because high-IQ has massive positive externalities.

I'm confused because again, the poor, low-IQ people thing being harmed wasn't really the thrust of my post? My post was arguing on one hand that for religious reasons I don't like this technology, and on the other hand I do think it's socially corrosive not necessarily because high IQ is bad, but because current class relations are bad and this will further the divide.

P.P.S. I know I might get banned for this post. I was drawn to the forum because I'm a long-time Scott Alexander fan, from back when "right-wing SSCer" meant "secular guy who talks about embryo selection and national IQ," not "guy who thinks we need to go back to 1710 ideas about religion and government and that eugenics is evil." For me, unlike many of you, the former wasn't just a gateway drug to the latter, so I'm "left-wing" now. You can follow me on Substack and Twitter.

I don't think we should go back to 1710 ideas about religion and government at all. In fact I'm quite an oddball when it comes to my views on Christianity, syncretism, and I'm pretty hands off on governance. I have pretended to arrogance before during my EA phase, and have decided I don't really know enough about politics to wade into it. I'd rather stick to my own weird corner of oddball religious stuff, philosophy, history, etc. Perhaps that's cowardly of me.

I'd encourage you to question why so many post-rationalists, like myself, who were deeply involved in the SSC rationalist movement as you were, become Christian or at least religious. There may be good reasons for the shift.

Can you explain how you got there?

FYI, no he can't. He was permabanned for this post (although the ban wasn't linked properly so the little symbol doesn't show up).

Ahh yeah I saw while I was commenting. Can't say I'm surprised but I am a bit sad. He brought it on himself I have to admit, but I liked his fighting spirit. If only he could've been a little less aggressive about it and showed some willingness to back down.

I will admit that Elon and I's moral systems are deeply at odds.

I know that this is off-topic - but can somebody explain what is this sentence structure? Is it something similar to the word literally now also having the meaning of metaphorically? So similarly as now it is okay to use X and I in all the formulations - even in those where it does not make sense - we now even upgraded to it into X and I's Y?

Knowledge of noun cases is bourgeois. You would be wise to forget it, comrade.

Not sure this is proper grammar.

It should be “X’s and my Y”, not “X and I’s Y”. So for example, “Elon’s and my moral systems are deeply at odds.” Like people saying “me and him” instead of “he and I”, something being a common mistake can make it acceptable in everyday speech but does not make it correct usage in a more formal context.

Here’s how I understand this tic to have originated (but do take this with a grain of salt). In elementary school grammar classes, students are admonished for saying things like “Me and Tim played baseball yesterday”. (The error in that sentence is that “me” is one of the subjects of the sentence, so it should be “I” instead.) The problem is, when the teachers correct their students, they do so by saying “it’s not ‘me and Tim’, but ‘Tim and I.’” Of course, most kindergarten teachers don’t know what a noun case is, so they sure as hell aren’t going to be able to explain to their students the precise nature of the error. Thus, many native English speakers grow up with this strong sense that “[person] and I” is correct and anything else is wrong. I know that at least for me, even a perfectly grammatical sentence like “I and Tim went to play baseball” feels wrong somehow, presumably due to this childhood conditioning. So if this theory is true, then bizarre locutions like “Elon and I’s” are examples born from hypercorrection based on this conditioning. (And hey, it turns out that the very first English example provided on that Wikipedia page is precisely this one; I actually didn’t know that when I was writing this.)

In elementary school grammar classes, students are admonished for saying things like “Me and Tim played baseball yesterday”.

I always thought about it in a way that if the sentence makes sense with just one person, then I should use I. For instance: I went to school yesterday means that I should use My brother and I went to school yesterday. But when the original sentence makes sense with "me" I should also copy it. E.g: My mother gave me a cookie changes into My mother gave a cookie to me and my brother. I am not sure if this is correct, but that is what I use as a heuristic.

The hypercorrection makes sense, except given how English language forms it means it will actually be acceptable very soon. Similarly to how literally/metaphorically are now basically synonyms, except when they are not.

A post ban edit 5 days after you got banned? Must have really struck a nerve

"Trump fires Bureau of Labor Statistics chief without evidence for political reasons" says the news radio I wake up to, then continues to say he removed the Democrat appointee "without concrete evidence." Since COVID-19 caused lockdowns, the BLS numbers have been revised downward from initial reports regularly, sometimes ridiculously so, which Axios says has justifiable reasons.

So why are the initial numbers even reported if we know the algorithm they use will be wildly inaccurate?

The whole "without evidence" tic is pretty played out at this point. Of course, Trump does have evidence -- the revisions are higher than usual. It's pretty bad evidence (so "without concrete evidence" is true), but it's enough to make "without evidence" naked editorializing.

BLS has been putting out these numbers monthly for many years; I am sure if they proposed delaying the releases two months there would be all sorts of complaints about that too.

Trumps own former BLS chief himself doesn’t like it. And it includes this very damning quote:

“There’s no way for that to happen,” Beach told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on “State of the Union.” “The commissioner doesn’t do anything to collect the numbers. The commissioner doesn’t see the numbers for until Wednesday before they’re published. By the time the commissioner sees the numbers, they’re all prepared.”

Other articles note that usually, initial estimates are based on larger employers, and smaller ones take longer to report. Savvy consumers of the stats know this. Also, what size company has been hit hardest by recent market uncertainties including tariffs? Small employers. The variance is higher.

If a number feels off is your evidence, and it’s plausible or even likely that the explanation could be explained by either malice OR the underlying stats actually being off, it’s still “no evidence” in a statistical sense. We need DETAILS to be able to assess the claim, and Trump provided none, and furthermore if his own former guy says that the chief doesn’t even see the numbers until they are nearly fully assembled, we have strong reason to be skeptical and zero actual reason to trust him (beyond a baseline level of trust in Trump himself).

Trumps own former BLS chief himself doesn’t like it

So? That doesn't mean it's "without evidence".

And that quote isn't damning at all. The fact that the commissioner doesn't collect the numbers herself does not mean she is not responsible for doing so.

I'm 99% sure Trump's wrong and she wasn't cooking the numbers, and it's likely she wasn't doing a bad job.

BLS commissioner 2013-2017, an Obama-era one but still obviously a person in the know:

FADEL: As a former commissioner, is it possible to just make the numbers up?

GROSHEN: No. The commissioner does not see any numbers before they're final. So they are already baked in the cake. The commissioner sees them before they're released and mostly approves the narrative that accompanies the table with the numbers. But the commissioner has no role in estimating the numbers in those tables. The commissioner doesn't have access to any of the systems and the data that go into the numbers. So a lot of people would know if the commissioner were fussing with the data, and the culture of the BLS is such that you'd immediately get pushback, resignations, whistleblowers, something like that.

FADEL: So it sounds like it would be nearly impossible without, as you pointed out, many people knowing to just phony up the data.

GROSHEN: Absolutely. That's intentional. That's not an accident. And when the BLS changes its methodology in any way, it publishes papers about it, it explains why it did it. All of that is very transparent.

I think that elucidates the point a little bit more, especially the bit about how methodology changes are obvious and up-front. The operation in professional statistics orgs like this is pretty plug-and-play on the collection side and there's a lot of cross-checking that happens. Plus, anecdotally, the BLS has one of the better reputations in the stats community and worldwide.

What I mean by evidence is like, if not actual whisteblowers or a smoking gun email or edited Excel file, at least some kind of specific alleged mechanism: did she pressure data collectors to poll only certain forms? Was the sample size abnormally low? Did they go on some kind of fishing expedition? Were internal policies not followed? Something like that.

it’s still “no evidence” in a statistical sense

In a statistical sense, saying "datum D is no evidence for theory T" is "P(T|D) = P(D)". Here we have "P(T|D) > P(D)", which is "D is evidence".

It's not much evidence. It's not nearly enough evidence. It's outweighed by other evidence to the contrary. It's grossly outweighed by reasonable priors. But it's still evidence.

I hate to pick on anti-Trump folks about this, when Trump's own relationship with truth seems to intersect propositional logic only by random luck; forget about Bayesian statistics. But it's still a red flag to me.

Decades ago I waded into investigation of a controversial belief system, a "religion" or a "cult" depending on who you asked. I debated with folks about evidence for and evidence against many of the beliefs, and my eventual conclusion was basically "false religion" ... but the most memorable part of those discussions was, when one guy I'd been debating with was asked by another interlocutor whether there was any evidence against his religion, his answer was a flat "no". Not "yes, but there's more evidence for it", not "yes, but only if you consider evidence out of context", just "no, there's no evidence against it".

I still had lingering questions (of what I'd later start thinking of as "epistemic rationality") to resolve, but now more pragmatic ("instrumentally rational") concerns were screaming at me to be wary in a way that continuing abstract discussion of science or history couldn't have done. It might not have been his religious leaders' fault, but that guy was in a cult.

Such self-inflicted damage isn't worth it for any ideology. You might still end up at a correct belief, or a dozen, but only by random luck.

Sorry and thank you, you're very right and right to call me out, I in fact do know better. I should have written "'no evidence' in the traditional sense* and expressed myself poorly.

Two things are true: in a Bayesian statistics sense most things count as evidence, and in an everyday sense people want to see some kind of fact to support an allegation. Zero were provided, as far as I see. Not even a cogent rationale was gestured at. I do try and consistently be charitable in my comments, I tried a bit in a follow-up comment above, but Trump's method of handling this gives virtually nothing to work with. (And as I stated, the former Trump-appointed commissioner sticking up for her is pretty large evidence against Trump's claim, even if you weight Trump's claims highly on a personal prior level)

Yeah, I can't disagree with any of that. In the colloquial sense "no evidence" fits.

The commissioner doesn’t see the numbers for until Wednesday before they’re published. By the time the commissioner sees the numbers, they’re all prepared.

What does the commissioner... do, then? This feels like the scene from Office Space with the Bobs.

The commissioner is a people person. He takes the figures from the statisticians to the politicians.

Does he physically hand them over?

No, he faxes it. Sometimes the secretary sends the fax.

The commissioner is the boss, in charge of all the people who do things. Or more likely in charge of several layers of sub-bosses before you get to the people who do things.

Which is why the quote isn't damning; with that authority comes the responsibility as well.

Staff organization stuff, I presume. Charitably, she (it was a woman) was in charge of approving methodological changes but presuming no such change happened, there's no reason to cast blame. That's what's so frustrating, there wasn't any specific allegation like, at all, that they released.

Well, no, that's not quite right: we can look at Trump's statement

Last weeks Job’s Report was RIGGED, just like the numbers prior to the Presidential Election were Rigged. That’s why, in both cases, there was massive, record setting revisions, in favor of the Radical Left Democrats. Those big adjustments were made to cover up, and level out, the FAKE political numbers that were CONCOCTED in order to make a great Republican Success look less stellar!!! I will pick an exceptional replacement. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAGA!

That's the entire allegation. Note that the claim is much stronger than a mere claim that methodologies were changed or that the standards were relaxed or whatever. Nope, "concocted" and "rigged" mean something pretty clear. M-W definition for "concoct" is "devise, fabricate"; Cambridge has "to invent an excuse, explanation, or story in order to deceive someone". In other words, intentional manipulation. This would mean something along the lines of entirely inventing a number, or deliberately skewing your sample, or spontaneously cherry-picking a methodology, or something like that.

If this were true (obviously is not) than you wouldn't be firing the commissioner, you'd be firing normal-level staff too, or doing an actual investigation, right? You might fire the commissioner only if their people-leading skills were poor or their methodological direction was faulty, but that's not the case and not what's alleged.

It's nakedly anti-truth, and that's not a TDS thing to say. No need to defend Trump in every instance, this is just straight up wrong per the info we have access to, as it seems to be a top-down doubt on the numbers rather than a bottom-up, facts based one.

This seems like focusing on the wrong part of the story.

So why are the initial numbers even reported if we know the algorithm they use will be wildly inaccurate?

"Moreover, the BLS and other federal agencies are essentially trying to serve two purposes at once. On the one hand, they’re hoping to provide actionable information as fast as they reasonably can to employers, investors, job-seekers, policymakers and the Federal Reserve. On the other hand, they’re trying to formulate a “permanent record”, data that is treated as ground truth in future economic analysis. Those imply taking different positions in the unavoidable trade-off between speed and precision."

Biased estimators can still be useful. If you know an estimator is consistently high, you can account for that in your planning. On the other hand, if political leadership is putting their thumb on the scale to make themselves look good (or salve dear leader's ego), trustworthiness goes out the window. It's one thing to be wrong occasionally, it's another to be bullshit.

If you know an estimator is consistently high, you can account for that in your planning.

If the estimator knows that they're consistently high, why aren't they adjusting the model they're using to produce estimates with to account for that?

If the estimator is wrong consistently but in a predictable way... they should be able to be wrong less often?

At least in this case I think there is an added political dimension of reluctance to update the model: "You were happy enough to overestimate [measurement] for my opponent last term, and now you want to publish lower estimates, maybe even underestimates on my watch. Are you trying to display partisan bias?"

In addition to the value of "we've at least measured it consistently for the last century, even if there are known issues with it it's easier to fix those in post", which also has some value.

Do you want to be the guy in the office who adds in the unprincipled empirical fudge factor to a statutorily mandated report? The verbs in 29 USC 2 are “collect, collate, report, and publish”, nowhere does it say “estimate”, “calculate”, or “determine”.

I'd be the guy in the office suggesting "hey we can publish the report, and show both the standard estimate and the estimate with the empirical fudge factor side-by-side so its clear we're not hiding the ball."

When I say "account for that in planning", I don't mean you adjust your forecasts downward X% from the report because they always overestimate by the same margin. Consistently high is not the same thing as 'always high' or 'consistently high by the same amount'. It just means that on average the estimator is greater than the true value (or, really, the quick estimate tends to be higher than the slow estimate).

If the estimator is wrong consistently but in a predictable way... they should be able to be wrong less often?

Not necessarily. Estimation is always dealing with real world constraints liked limited resources and time frame for gathering and analyzing data, sampling bias, unknown unknowns, etc...

I encourage you to read the Nate Silver article I linked. He talks about this significantly more articulately than I can.

I am somewhat familiar with Nate Silver's approach to modelling and prediction.

And I'll reiterate the general critique.

If you damn well know your model is going to be inaccurate, include error bars, express how much irreducible uncertainty there is. At least acknowledge that the number is most likely incorrect and is subject to large revisions, downplay confidence.

Actually, it looks like they DO have that option on display and HOLY CRAP the bars are really large on some of these.

Maybe its not a particularly useful estimate if businesses are looking for something something reliable to act upon.

This estimator isn't biased though.

On the other hand, if political leadership is putting their thumb on the scale to make themselves look good (or salve dear leader's ego), trustworthiness goes out the window. It's one thing to be wrong occasionally, it's another to be bullshit.

I don't think that's really the danger here. If the BLS statistics aren't trusted, some actors are going to do their best to fill in a trustworthy answer. The problem there won't be their honesty, but that the data are not going to be evenly available. We'll go back to information asymmetries rather than public knowledge.

Reuters has a nice graph showing that large revisions have been made quite often, both downward and upward, for decades.

large revisions have been made quite often, both downward and upward, for decades.

I feel like you're burying some of Reuters own commentary there.

The combined downward revision for the two previous months - May and June - was larger than anything reported outside of the pandemic era. Indeed, the estimates for the two prior months combined have more often than not been revised higher. Since 1979, the median two-month combined estimate change was an upward revision of 10,000.

Yes, revisions have been made quite often, but this one is noteworthy and unusual. I'm not yet willing to ascribe it to malice, but we should acknowledge that it's peculiar.

So why are the initial numbers even reported if we know the algorithm they use will be wildly inaccurate?

Getting the exact numbers 3 months later is just not as useful as getting directionally-correct ones fast.

That's good when the numbers are directionally correct, not when they're completely wrong

Right, well, the FBI stats are not the BLS stats.

The BLS stats have been generally correct (and getting better) and, more importantly, have erred both upwards and downwards approximately equally.

tl;dr ephebophilia is not just an artifact of a fixed age of consent, but an attraction to specific psychological traits

I've been thinking about all the classic American porn paperbacks I've read and it made me realize something about the various flavors of MAPs. A lot of classic smut features ephebophilic scenes. Or, to not mince words, jailbait characters have sex in these books. Why would someone put a well-developed minor (and go into explicit detail about her womanlike voluptuousness) into his story? I could come up with three reasons:

  1. The titillation of the forbidden. It's like eating a Kinder Surprise in the US vs the EU, it's made better by the fact it's illegal. You scratch off number "18" and put "15" instead and suddenly the story is hotter. It's like ubiquitous step-incest in modern video porn.
  2. The needs of the story. Maybe the author wanted his cast to span generations and pushing the numbers down made it easier to explain why everyone involved in the story had no sag or wrinkles or other signs of age.
  3. There's something different with their attitude to sex. And this is exactly the option that I want to explore further in this post.

Reading the books actually shows what this difference (in the mind of the writers) is. A grown woman has barriers around sex. Of course, it's porn, so everyone is a happy slut by the epilogue, but the journey of a woman is about taking down these barriers: she has a lot of ideas with whom it is appropriate to have sex, when, where and what kind of. A girl in a woman's body has no such qualms. Well, maybe she has a few, passed down from her mother or her Sunday school, but as soon as she realizes that sex is a pleasurable experience (or "neat", as the books from the 70's put it), she's willing to have it for the sake of it (and suffer no ill consequences, because it's porn).

And it is my opinion that this attraction to easy-going relationships instead of torturous courtship is what defines ephebophiles and lumps them together with other flavors of MAPs. They want someone who can decouple sex from the rest of the cultural baggage around relationships, even though they are not attracted to actual physical traits of prepubescence. A literal pedophile might be attracted to specific physical traits, but he's also attracted to the idea that it's much easier to explain sex as a harmless game or a sign of special friendship.

However, I don't want to say this approach is exclusive to MAPs only. They are in a good and diverse company. People joking about "genetically-engineered catgirls" express a very similar sentiment: they imagine a female that is naturally loyal and attracted to them, unlike the messy natural femoids (curiously, this sounds more like a dog than a cat). Dudes mail-ordering brides from abroad expect them to follow a simple and straightforward contract: provide meals and sex, get citizenship. And of course, promiscuous gays are living every horny man's dream (modulo the sex of their partner).

This also explains why certain redditors* brand a 45-yo man dating a 20-yo woman a pedophile (steelman incoming). They don't mean he's literally attracted to her prepubescent body, which would be absurd. What they mean is that this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace. He can outbid her 20-yo suitors simply because he has 25 years of career growth on them. The woman should either practice perfect price discrimination or reject him in the name of... social justice?

Does this mean that the instigators of the sexual revolution, who, according to some posters whose names elude me right now, did it all only to bamboozle young and attractive women into no-strings-attached sexual promiscuity were ephebophiles? I guess they technically were.

* just today I noticed a major vibe shift on Reddit. People were discussing the latest anti-porn initiatives in the UK and were mocking those who think a 17.99-yo is a "literal child", treating them as their outgroup.

I think even the label of "ephebophile" is an artificial one. It probably encompasses almost all men. The average man cannot tell, at least by looking, if someone is 16 years old or 18 and a day. If they've got tits and a nice figure, they'll make just about everyone sexually attracted regardless of age. The only difference worth noting is that, at least in the West, there has been so much social conditioning that people are loathe to accept this fact, and those who do take the risk knowingly likely have other issues.

Back when OkCupid's blog wasn't a joke, they shared a chart showing response rates for women by age. The curve peaked at 18, and declined after. I am convinced that if the platform allowed younger women to sign up, then the actual modal value would be ~16 or 17. We have successfully pathologized very natural behavior, but oh well. I'm lucky enough to have a thing for MILFs, albeit they're just women my age these days.

I mean that's part of the Epstein thing to me.

If a given client didn't realize that barely-illegal girls were on the menu it's not like he's gonna be able to tell immediately that somebody's 17 years, 364 days and 23 hours from their aura. Going to dodgy orgy island with Escorts isn't illegal in of itself.

The age thing, whilst more viscerally nasty, is probably not the sole reason for why Epstein and friends are looked at so negatively.

The idea of an upper class that lives voraciously lavish lives, engaging in all manner of depravity and indulgence, is pervasive in history and fiction. I don't think there is a single example where people look at these behaviors positively.

To that extent, whilst one might have to make more nuanced arguments against Epstein and friends on those grounds, the argument is there. Epstein and the people going to parties on private islands were doing something shameful and ugly even without the child rape trafficking.

This ended up on the cutting room floor and didn't get into my post, but Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire, had sex with barely illegal girls not because that was his kink, but because he got burned having sex with a regular escort.

If you're a celebrity or a politician and your good friend Jeffrey invites you to his island for some frolicking and debauchery, you will want whoever participated in frolicking and debauchery with you to keep her mouth shut and not to blackmail you or to go on a talk show crawl peddling her newest book How I Fucked Bill Gates and Why He Isn't Even in My Personal Top 50. So good friend Jeffrey needs someone who honestly thinks she will get in trouble if people learn what she has been doing with her various orifices.

I think a case could be made for making exclusive ephebophilia a pathology. Like "eww, that girl is 22 and has a real job, I don't want to stick my dick into her". Evolutionarily speaking, that would be maladaptive. I do not know if it is very common, however.

I agree that "fuck every woman (except those closely related to you) who looks fertile and healthy if you can", which was probably adaptive for males in the ancestral environment and is probably the most common sexuality in men today does not need a special term.

The kind of "exclusive" ephebophilia you mention seems vanishingly rare to me. Often the kind of men opting to go for much younger women are doing so both because they like them, and because they would have a harder time with the older ones who aren't so tolerant of them being weird/lazy/unsuccessful. Think aging musician or bartender with no other credentials, they can convince a college sophomore that they're super cool, but don't appeal to women in their age group looking for something serious. That is rational from their perspective, they're getting laid at the end of the day. There are rare exceptions like Leonardo Di Caprio, who can afford to make a break for it when they cross 25, as he can easily afford to be picky.

At the end of the day, men tend to prefer youth and correlates for fertility. They might even have preferences that their partners be dependent on them, which describes so many goddamn people that I wouldn't call it pathological. Men were the breadwinners for most of recorded history.

I mostly agree with you here, but I'm not sure about a "preference for dependence". I definitely think that there's something of a provider instinct in men (the proximate cause of findom fetishes and general simpery in its maladjusted forms), but I don't know if it generalizes to an outright preference for incapacity. It certainly doesn't seem like men get the ick from women who are functional and capable as independent adults, and I'll say that men who do recoil in this way are indeed possessed of a pathological mindset/ideology. Caveat: this may not apply if the woman is significantly and obviously better than him at more masculine-coded tasks.

Also, younger women are not necessarily more fertile when you're talking about teenagers. I can't find the source ATM, but I've seen data showing that 14-year old girls are about as fertile as women in their late 20's, with peak fertility being reached at 19 or 20 and then declining linearly from there.

I mostly agree, but I would assume that evolution incentivized attraction to total fertility. If you shack up with a woman in her late teens, you can, at least in theory, get many more kids out of her than you can in the late 20s. We live in a very unusual period of time, when we can take negligible infant or childhood mortality for granted.

I think even the label of "ephebophile" is an artificial one. It probably encompasses almost all men. The average man cannot tell, at least by looking, if someone is 16 years old or 18 and a day. If they've got tits and a nice figure, they'll make just about everyone sexually attracted regardless of age.

Let's say there are two women you met in a bar: Alice is your age but has the face and the body of an 18-year-old. Barb is in high school, and she also has the face and the body of an 18-year-old. Both are making eyes at you. Which one would you (well, the Rawlsian you) rather take home?

Wait, do I know who is who?

Yes, you have talked to both.

Strictly speaking, I'd be happy with either. If I have to choose, the one who's actually my age. More longterm potential there.

Hmmm.

I can point out that pretty much every heterosexual male goes through a period where they're exclusively chasing 15, 16, and 17 year old girls. Its called puberty and/or high school.

And with that in mind, its actually weirder to think that a guy's tastes would change drastically as he aged, why wouldn't he continue to be physically attracted to the same things he was physically attracted to as a teen? Even if, as his brain matures, he can optimize for personality traits more than pure looks.

And a part of me sure wishes I had gotten around to banging more 15-17 year olds back when I was in that age bracket, but alas I was inconceivably ignorant of the signals women would send me... and I'm glad I didn't end up knocking one up and derailing my life plans.

And as discussed last week, I can imagine a world where a 16 year old girl might demonstrate sufficient understanding of the risks and sufficient brain development that she could legitimately "consent" to sex with an older guy.

But even then, I don't think society would look kindly on the guy that did that. There are in fact many 'normal' behaviors that are pathologized to avoid, I guess, a spiral into an unhealthy equilibrium where, say, 40 year olds are regularly snatching up 16-year-old girls and removing them from the dating pool that would otherwise allow teen boys a chance to get some experience.

"15-17 year olds back when I was in that age bracket..."

When you're also young, they don't seem particularly nubile or special.

Going to disagree. But you do have that awkward period where you're still transitioning from finding girls icky and rife with cootie infestations to kinda adorable and then intrinsically appealing.

Although I also have had pretty much the same "type" since I was about that age, and it is fair to say not many high school ladies could fill out those requirements.

Teenage girls are somewhat specific looking, while most men will find them attractive, to prefer them is more unusual.

Teenage girls are somewhat specific looking

?

While there are some tells(acne etc) these are more common on younger teens. Most 17 year old girls are not readily distinguishable from young adult women in the same way that is true for boys.

Yes. I went through a period in my early twenties when I worried about this. But eventually I realized it's all preference falsification: "Women like responsible nice guys who respect women" but for men.

If you've ever thought a 16yo looked pretty as a grown man welcome to the "normal heterosexual male club". Almost everyone else is lying.

I'll also make a point that isn't an endorsement but is an observation I've made a lot, especially as I'm approaching real middle age.

"Introducing" a newbie to something, in general, is a very gratifying experience. Using your own deeper knowledge to guide them, give them little tips, and see their own development generates a strong sense of frission, in me at least. Hugely rewarding.

When it comes to sex, there's the double gratification of showing someone something new and then getting to partake in it with them for mutual pleasure.

I am told that many guys do prefer an older woman as a partner because such women have worked out their preferences, kinks, and limits and are quite practiced in their techniques and thus deliver a much more enjoyable experience overall.

I believe it. But taking a younger woman (not necessarily virginal) and showing her certain experiences for the first time and getting her unfiltered, completely unrehearsed reaction to such an intense sensation never really gets old. But the woman herself does, eventually after she's tried everything then the joy of new discovery is blunted. Novelty squeezed out. Then its just sex. Fun, but without the extra layer of finding new frontiers of eroticism.

And its not easily replicable! There's a finite supply of inexperienced (yet attractive) young women. Can't be recycled once they're despoiled. So it wouldn't be that surprising if some men try to collect 'em like pokemon.

So while this:

They don't mean he's literally attracted to her prepubescent body, which would be absurd. What they mean is that this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace.

Is an unavoidable factor, I think there's 'obviously' a mutual gain to an experienced partner reaching out and lending some of their knowledge and guidance to an inexperienced one so they don't have to fumble around on their own or with an equally inexperienced partner and trying things out without knowing for sure if they're 'doing it right.'

Whereas a jaded, cynical, "experienced" woman who doesn't need a man's guidance to discover new experiences doesn't give that extra gratifying sense of "I alone have given her this feeling that she's never felt before." And, more directly, you also have to assume she's comparing you to those past encounters and you'll never really know if you measure up.

On net, you'd prefer to be the guy against whom all future encounters are measured, vs. the guy who has to wonder if she's being honest about her past encounters.

And lest I get hit with the leery, suspicious eye, my own preference is for a woman who I've been with long enough to learn all her sensitive spots, favorite positions, her strengths, weaknesses (and vice-versa) and develop a sincere intimacy so you can read them easily and adjust on the fly and otherwise maximize the mutual joy. That's the optimal setup. A slightly more experienced guy, an inexperienced woman, and a long relationship to grow into each other so both get the benefit of knowing that their shared experiences are unique and they're not being compared against some unknown third parties.

I absolutely don't relate at all, and I imagine that many men are on the same boat. But I can understand that a large minority of people feel this way and that minority of men due to their tendencies end up taking the virginity of an outsized proportion of all the women out there, thereby ruining it for the rest of us.

Those pokemon collectors are absolutely ruining it for the rest of us.

I've commented on the issue of Lotharios having an outsize (negative) influence on the pool of 'marriageable' women before.

I had the 'insight' that yeah, these types literally optimize for attracting young, sexually inexperienced women, they know exactly where to look, what to say, how to present themselves, and how to string such a woman along without getting in so deep they can't escape. Its a game they get really good at because they are playing it over and over and over again.

They do it a few times and then it becomes second nature, and since they never stick around, they can keep running up enough of a body count in a relatively short period of time to have a noticeable impact on the local singles market.

And some portion of them, I reckon, fetishize the act of despoiling an innocent girl with no intention of committing, but also take some pleasure from knowing she's been ruined for any other partners that might come along.

I am actually willing to consider straight up execution for such men, IF ONLY for the deterrent effect.

The nature of the problem is that a young woman, without having SUBSTANTIAL oversight, can't tell one of these guys apart from a more committed partner, and if one of these guys gets her first (and as stated above, they're VERY GOOD at this game!), as her first relationship experience it can pretty much ruin her ability to identify and trust a 'good' man, and might make her bitter enough to think all men are like that.

a young woman, without having SUBSTANTIAL oversight, can't tell one of these guys apart from a more committed partner,

I think the very traditional advice of "wait until marriage" does actually work here. It may have its other failure modes (well documented elsewhere), but it certainly requires a non-trivial time and legal commitment from a partner that would "tell one of these guys apart."

Or a father who is willing and able to act as the filter.

But yes, 'wait until marriage' works because its dead simple advice (though not easy to follow unless the plausible threat of eternal damnation is attached), it aligns incentives, filters out bad faith actors, and ensures both sides are getting what they want whilst constraining the other side from backing out after extracting value.

If you don't create a Schelling point, the marketplace can end up stuck at a different, very undesirable equilibrium. Rather than agonize over the number of dates before putting out, the issue of trusting the counterparty, or figuring out the 'optimal' period of time to wait... just push everyone towards the same standard and enforce it as best you can.

though not easy to follow unless the plausible threat of eternal damnation is attached

Or the threat of shotgun weddings.

Well yeah, see my point about supporting execution of such men.

I think the very traditional advice of "wait until marriage" does actually work here. It may have its other failure modes (well documented elsewhere), but it certainly requires a non-trivial time and legal commitment from a partner that would "tell one of these guys apart."

The problem with waiting until marriage is that Chad, who has four other girls on his booty call list just waiting for a text from him, is not going to put up with that. And women only want Chad.

The only way this works if you have a third party with a vested genetic interest in the woman's well-being, such as her father or her brother, in control of her sexual choices.

I know of a great many men from older generations, and even in this generation, who are not Chads by that definition yet have had long relationships with women who care for them. I probably couldn’t string along 4 women even if I really, really tried — but I’ve had women ask me out before, I figure if for some sad reason I became single I could find a meaningful relationship within a year or so, and the women I’ve dated have shown every sign of cherishing the relationship. I relate to the feeling of hopelessness and marginalization, but not to the feeling that literally 100% of women are only and exclusively interested in a very small group of men regardless of how poorly they’re treated by them. The reason why “wait until marriage” (or some measure of commitment) works is precisely because many women actually desire that. Not because anyone forced them.

The situation for men is far from great, and the inequality between the haves and the have-nots is quite large, but I’m not convinced it’s so bad that it’s literally impossible.

I am actually willing to consider straight up execution for such men, IF ONLY for the deterrent effect.

Doesn't work. For every Lothario you execute, there will always be another one eager to take his place. Having sex with a bunch of nubile virgins is the ultimate reward. All you are doing is selecting for more impulsive, risk-taking cads. Or, as the Dreaded Jim put it:

Hating this guy is stupid. One pin can pop a hundred balloons. You have to control the virgins, not the poppers of virgins. Getting mad at the men will do no good. The women have to be restrained. Talking about how bad these men are is a distraction and irrelevance.

We have to implement virgin marriage, in that most women will have never slept with any man except the bridegroom before marriage. This is going to require alarmingly drastic coercion starting at a very early age. When a girl goes looking for a dicking she will find what she looks for. That is why we have to apply coercion to the girls, not the males. One pin can pop a hundred balloons. Sperm is cheap, eggs are dear. You guard what is dear, not what is cheap. The double standard is what works. If you do not have a double standard, you will not have children and grandchildren, and the state will not have soldiers.

And, yes, this requires SUBSTANTIAL oversight, which our society is optimized to prevent (starting with the institution of college, which is virtually designed to take young women away from the watchful eyes of their friends and families).

Yes, I've zeroed in on college as a particular problem since it has compounding (negative) impact on a woman's marriageability and fertility. Four fertile years burned, racking up both debt and body count, for a degree that they may not use, and then they often opt to go for MORE schooling rather than enter a marriage or the 'real world.'

And of course it also creates the target-rich environment for the virgin poppers. Women from small towns, leaving their high school boyfriends behind, no parental supervision, tons of drugs and alcohol available, and both blatant and subtle nudges towards promiscuity all around.

Without some strong social pressure its almost impossible to expect women to resist for the full four years. And by the sheer numbers, most women don't resist. body counts at time of first marriage have steadily climbed.

So yeah, more supervision on the women is part of the the solution.

AND YET, removing some of these guys and deterring the rest would likely have an overall positive effect as well.

I mean, lets just use a fox and henhouse analogy. Yes, you guard the hens/eggs because they are dear, but if you catch a fox in the act, you still kill it. You don't want a whole population of foxes that are optimized for henhouse raiding to arise.

Except that (generic) you are not keeping your hens in a henhouse; you are sending them out into the forest without a care in the world, then getting upset because most of them end up eaten by foxes. You are trying to make the forest safe for the hens by executing the foxes one at a time, and that is simply not going to work.

First, you have to keep your hens in a henhouse. And in order to do that, you need a priest who tells you that it is good and proper for a man to lock up his hens, a sheriff who recognizes your legal right to do so as the rightful owner of the hens, and friends and family who will look at you like you are an absolute idiot if let your hens roam free. Only then will there be any point to killing the occasional fox that happens to get in.

Needless to say, our priests, our cops, and our communities do the exact opposite.

Agreed on college. Academia delenda est. Man will not be free until the last professor is strangled with the entrails of the last journalist.

The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity--which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are.

Houellebecq, The Possibility of an Island

I'm sure there is a based tradcath out there somewhere who can contextualize all of these follies of the modern world within the disaster that is the sexual revolution, but 'drastic' age gaps were, as far as my meme understanding of history goes, more common back in the day.

But regardless of that, a part of the issue has to be the lack of a centralized authority that decides on this. Allowing everyone to recognize what the parameters are so that they can at least not claim ignorance of how the dating scene works and where they fall on the value curve.

My question would be, would that change be a good thing? Would that information change peoples behavior at all?

https://acoup.blog/2025/08/01/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iiia-family-formation/

The marriage patterns of high elites in a society are often quite different from the marriage patterns of most of the society. The classic example of this is to note that students are often mislead by European aristocrats in the medieval and early modern periods marrying very young and so they assume that everyone in medieval Europe married very young, but in fact, as we’ll see in a moment, medieval western Europe is notable for very late (mid-twenties for women, late twenties for men) typical age at first marriage among the general population.

So much for meme history.

I'm sure there is a based tradcath

You called?

who can contextualize all of these follies of the modern world within the disaster that is the sexual revolution, but 'drastic' age gaps were, as far as my meme understanding of history goes, more common back in the day.

What do you mean by 'back in the day'? The youngest average female age at marriage since the middle ages was in the fifties.

It's true that teenaged marriage with large age gaps was viewed as more acceptable back in the day, and was more common than it is today- my own great grandparents were seventeen and thirty, marrying during the depression. But today that marriage is, contrary to the imaginings of progressives on the internet, sufficiently rare as to distantly aspire to be a rounding error on a lizardman's constant. IIRC married women under twenty have smaller average age gaps than married women in their early twenties.

The fifties were not trad; they were a social experiment that has been in many ways backed off from. In 1900 dating/courting was serious business for adult men ready to assume the responsibilities entailed in marriage and women who understood that this meant it was rather unlikely the man would be younger than about the mid twenties. Sometimes she was a teenager(Little House on the Prairie portrays this) but the average woman who married in 1890 was 23.

Does this mean that the instigators of the sexual revolution, who, according to some posters whose names elude me right now, did it all only to bamboozle young and attractive women into no-strings-attached sexual promiscuity

Well of course. For a long time, the very powerful (extraordinarily) powerful constituency of men who want to no-strings-attached numbers of nubile teenage girls was kept in check only by an even larger, even more powerful force we might broadly call ‘civilization’. Consider that historically, men fucked large numbers of teenage girls in one of three circumstances:

The first was the large harem, limited to a tiny fraction of the most elite men, and a lifelong financial commitment that also required immense social status and power (having two or three wives the way a wealthy, 99th percentile wealthy Arab trader might have had isn’t the same thing). The full-scale harem with many (heretofore) virginal teenage girls and regular addition of new ones, certainly in the last millennium, was limited to kings, emperors, sheikhs, Beria etc. The second was rape and pillage, mostly in wartime. The third was in the case of prostitution, which involved girls sacrificed on the altar of male sexuality by the forces of economics, war, geography, famine, high maternal and paternal mortality rates and so on.

As social technologies, marriage had been invented to ensure lineage for inheritance and monogamy had been invented to reduce the greater instability, lack of buy-in and poor incentive structure (and not just for men, although that is a discussion for another day) common to polygamous societies. Even comparatively affluent and powerful men could not hope to have sexual access to respectable young nubile women of decent background, especially if they were already married (and marriage, of course, was about much more than sexual attraction) and so could not offer that woman or girl the title of wife.

Respectable young women could not be allowed sexual freedom because that exposed them to the great risk of pregnancy (with no way of determining the father), to (incurable and either fertility-destroying, fatal or both) sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis, and to the social shame that surrounded that kind of thing in traditional societies, and which was deeply intertwined with all the above. These forces (call it the combined weight of fathers and mothers and older brothers of girls, the church, tradition, faith, general propriety) stood firm against even the extraordinary social and economic power of grown men who really desperately wanted no-strings-attached sex with large numbers of teenage girls.

Quietly things started to change in the first quarter of the 20th century, due in part to the sudden emergence of a cure for syphilis and some other common STDs and more viable condoms. Divorce rates increased, which meant a slow decline in the number of two-parent homes when adjusted for lower parental mortality due to modern medicine. Great economic growth meant that young men and women alike could easily afford to live outside the home, not in boarding houses run by prying old women but alone or with each other. Then came the pill and, though it was less important, eventually legal abortion. For aeons, the social bulwark described had effectively precluded sexual liberation. Slowly, the arguments melted away, especially as religiosity began to decline.

Hugh Hefner emerged into a society in which the grand edifice of social tradition, particularly around sex, was uniquely fragile. It existed, but was increasingly little defended, and its defenders were ever less relevant. The men who wanted to fuck teenage girls with no strings attached and who didn’t care about the social consequences made their play, and they won.

I’m not sold by your argument. It sounds like you’re begging the question by substituting the definition of “guy who reads porn about a busty 15-year-old” and “guy who is actually attracted to 15-year-olds.” The most obvious difference is words are just words, you can write whatever number you want down, reality isn’t keeping track. So the guy is attracted to the symbol which is 15, and the signs of an actually voluptuous woman. But then you have a different class which is actually interested in minors, and that tends to be for pretty nasty reasons.

OK, leave the latter group out. The former group is interested in a symbol. Almost always this is because the symbol itself has become a fetish that substitutes for something real so as to deprive it of its reality, to make it easier to digest. How nice are her tits is a complicated question, you have to really experience them to know, there are a lot of details and maybe not all of them are as attractive as the gestalt, and it takes serious concentration to focus on the gestalt and not get distracted, especially if you don’t have much experience actually enjoying tits. How big are they is safer, and you can put a number to it. Now you can enjoy yourself.

So what about age? It could be a symbol for a lot of things. Innocence, transgression, duh. But not a carefree sexual nature. That can be easily written onto a character of any age, and indeed is, in porn. It’s sufficient in itself, it doesn’t need to be laundered through a symbol, the whole point of it is how digestible and convenient it is. (Real sex with a real woman who isn’t infinitely carefree and convenient is great, but can’t really be condensed into a marketable fantasy.) No, what I think age is a symbol for is the reader’s own early feelings about sex. When he was 15 the girls were 15, and nothing can really compare to what they made him feel. Now he’s older and doesn’t really feel the same things, and even thinking about the feelings as themselves is a little much, so he wraps it all up in a symbol that he can find arousing instead. There’s no need to consider why the unmoored sexual energy of his teens has failed to find a mooring, or what that would even mean to him, so long as he has a symbol of his own desire to focus on. 15 means bottomless libidinous desire, to him. And to the people who don’t feel the same way, they can skip to the sections about how voluptuous she is and enjoy all the same.

As someone who has been in a decade-long relationship with a woman who was four years younger than me (from my age 28 to 38 or so, so not a particularly creepy age difference) and not very emotionally mature, but who is better (i.e. single) now, just from an egoistical male perspective, there are serious downsides to seriously dating younger women. (I mean, a serial PUA could just dump them whenever they send him 20 texts and try to call five times for some emotional crisis, but he will also not get very wholesome relationships that way.) Not that my sample is very large, though.

--

What they mean is that this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace. He can outbid her 20-yo suitors simply because he has 25 years of career growth on them.

I think your first sentence is wrong and in direct conflict with the second sentence, which is right.

The median 20yo likely has a good idea of her SMV. She is unlikely to be in the situation where no man has ever showed the slightest interest in her, thousands of men have swiped left on her Tinder profile until finally, some pennyless, ugly 45yo comes along and sends her a dick pick, and she is immediately falling for him because she is just so happy that she will not have to die unloved.

Instead, she likely has a good idea that a ton of men want to have sex with her, and quite a few would actually be willing to dump their current partner or wife to go exclusive with her. If she is going for the 45yo, that is simply because he is making her the best offer. I mean, sure, the hottest 20yo she could get exclusively would probably be quite a bit hotter, but it would also mean that she would have to work some job to have a decent lifestyle. As you say, with 25 years of career, the (well-situated) 45yo can offer her a much nicer life -- at least until she gets replaced by a younger model.

An unpopular belief of mine, although not tightly held, is that women really do NOT mature much when they hit their twenties. Nor are they asked or expected to.

So the difference between dating a 21-22 year old and a 28-29 year old on a maturity level is often negligible. Most women don't take bad experiences and learn from them and improve... they become more bitter about it, and it makes them less appealing overall, because dating the 28 year old means you're getting someone who is maybe marginally more mature and put-together than the 21 year old... but with a lot more baggage that you'll be expected to carry.

And if you were present when all that baggage was acquired, hey maybe that's okay. But walking into a relationship with a 28 year old who has been through a series of negative relationships and hasn't figured out how her own decision-making contributed to the problem, you're now dealing with emotional trauma that you had no role in creating, and a woman who is provably not good at maintaining relationships. That's not appealing, especially if you're looking over and spot a 22-23 year old who hasn't yet lost the basic aura of innocence and doesn't hate the world (yet), and there isn't a noticeable maturity difference.

And yeah, a lot of dudes don't mature much through their 20's either. My brother was/is one of those. But guys, well, they're expected to mature and won't find their feelings coddled during that time.

So the difference between dating a 21-22 year old and a 28-29 year old on a maturity level is often negligible.

What's your sample? As a highly social individual / serial dater between long-term relationships, I've noticed that are shocking differences in maturity between even a 26 year old and a 28 year old. To be clearer, when I was 29-ish I found nearly every 26 year old that I dated (n=6ish) insufferably superficial and indecisive, but I found much more success the further into late 20s I went. That's when you usually get your first biggest pay raise, graduate from post-secondary education, change jobs, move cities, etc. These are all highly formative events that may afford you different privileges or even humble you. As a woman, you may even shift your dating priorities from "want to find love" to "want to find someone suitable to raise children with".

But, my bias is urban and at least the "some university" bullet option on the census form - i.e. since high school, I haven't dated anyone who only has a high school education.

And yeah, a lot of dudes don't mature much through their 20's either.

My bias is also that most people who do not seek complexity in their life (not a value judgment, just an observation) beyond the age of 22 also do not tend to develop personalities beyond the age of 22 - they are essentially frozen in time. In comparison to individuals who do stretch themselves, those "frozen in time" tend to appear less emotionally and socially mature. Those groups also highly correlate with people who chose to (or accidentally) have children "early" (< 22) - but I don't personally believe that's necessarily causal in either direction. It also brings to mind the insult "peaked in high school" which I think has some classist / blue-tribe-on-red-tribe undertones.

Sometimes those emotionally or socially stunted people have a midlife crisis or some sort of later-in-life mellowing that causes a shift ("Barry really got his life together!"). In sadder scenarios, they may fall into alcoholism or other crippling addictions that are associated with an underformed prefrontal cortex. In the worst case they get elected to congress because they manage to get other like-minded people to the voting booth just by screaming and tweeting about complex problems having simple solutions (populism).

Personally speaking, I had some major shifts in maturity around the ages:

  • 12 (puberty)
  • 17 (parental independence)
  • 21 (humility through a challenging experience)
  • 24 (first big job / no longer a "broke college kid")
  • 27 (end of first long-term relationship / lots of dating / big pay raise)
  • 30 (mortgage / no longer talk shit at pick-up basketball)

I was an insufferable asshole at the age of 20. I'm still an insufferable asshole, but in a much different way now.

Aside, as I didn't want it to detract from the thrust of my main statement:

Most women don't take bad experiences and learn from them and improve... they become more bitter about it, and it makes them less appealing overall

This sounds like a character problem, not an estrogen problem. I've met plenty of bitter men who never learn from their bad experiences.

What's your sample?

My immediate social circle and the benefit of social media allowing me to keep some distant tabs on people from high school and college. Seeing a good number of women I thought had good heads on their shoulders go off some deep end and regress to behaviors I recognize from when they were younger. Also including my Ex.

And partially through my job where I interact with people of many ages, and one of the more common and frustrating genres of people I encounter is "neurotic woman in her 40s or 50s who still has the demeanor of a teenager."

Dating has not done a lot to change the perception. I get the sense that women either mature quite fast (usually when they have good parental examples) and are generally self-sufficient by age 22-24... or they hit 25 and if they haven't gotten their mental house in order around then, it just isn't likely to improve from there. There's not likely to be a 'flash of realization' where they renounce their behavior before and suddenly they start 'acting their age.'

I keep making this point, But so many of the people that end up on Caleb Hammer's show are women who are absolutely, GOBSMACKINGLY bad with finances. Which is a decent metric for maturity if you ask me. Oh I'm sure tons of men are in dire straits too, but ain't nobody validating their choices.

This sounds like a character problem, not an estrogen problem. I've met plenty of bitter men who never learn from their bad experiences.

Yes, I cede the point that many men never reach actual maturity. But 'character problem' can indeed be an estrogen problem.

I would suggest that a combination of hormones (keeping in mind that both estrogen levels too high and too low can have huge impact on mood) and a general lack of restraint/correction of maladaptive behaviors on women results in 'stunted' maturity in women even as they approach thirty. And there's nontrivial number of young women taking hormonal birth control in their teens and twenties which can exacerbate the hormone thing.

Then add in that mental disorders, especially anxiety/depression has spiked particularly badly among young women. And as a result young women are increasingly prescribed antidepressants.

This probably exacerbates the hormone issue above. I am highly suspect of what happens to brain development due to said brain being awash with a combination of exogenous hormones (birth control) and SSRI's and similar drugs for the entirety of one's young adulthood.

I dunno man, I get the sense that women are having an increasing amount of trouble coping with the world-as-it-is. That is, they have bad experiences, and rather than process and learn from them... they use pharma drugs to cope. And they become bitter.

I think men will have issues like this too, but they don't tend to go to social media and scream it from the rooftops, so it is harder to see. If it gets bad enough, they tend to kill themselves. Less serious, they may withdraw from society (or society discards them as useless), or go to prison if they lash out, or they become an Andrew Tate acolyte or something.

I am prepared to believe that this will be less prevalent among higher SES demographics.

My immediate social circle and the benefit of social media allowing me to keep some distant tabs on people from high school and college. Seeing a good number of women I thought had good heads on their shoulders go off some deep end and regress to behaviors I recognize from when they were younger.

I'm not trying to dismantle your argument, as I think you made it well. But I do want to point out that, at least in my circles, there's a strong correlation between "actively using social media" and "not having your shit together". In other words, if your sample is just social media, then you're missing out on all the well-adjusted individuals who are keeping to themselves.

And partially through my job where I interact with people of many ages, and one of the more common and frustrating genres of people I encounter is "neurotic woman in her 40s or 50s who still has the demeanor of a teenager."

Do you work in inside sales? Mostly making a lighthearted joke, here. Maybe even healthcare or aviation?

In other words, if your sample is just social media, then you're missing out on all the well-adjusted individuals who are keeping to themselves.

Yes, and indeed, in my social circle, the people who are actually keeping it together the best and who aren't basket cases tend to be the ones with the smallest social media footprint. I remain close friends with these ones.

But, uh, that ALSO tends to be correlated with "Got married relatively early" (before age 25) and "had kids" which is one hell of a major shift requiring one to hopefully become more mature. These folks were hitting their milestones 'on time' and usually had their lives in some kind of order at an earlier age.

I think even accounting for selection effects, I'm detecting a lot of women who hit some kind of crisis in their mid to late 20's and never fully moved on or recovered. In fact, that's often when they stop posting on social media altogether, because life has gone so badly for them they no longer want to publicize it. Hence, that spike in mental illness.

Me, I grew up kind of sheltered, but not bring my parent to an actual job interview sheltered

With Gen Z in general, but with, again, women in particular, there seems to be the double whammy of "taught to be afraid of almost everything" and yet "coddled and never forced to overcome actual challenges" that results in difficulty functioning in the uncertain and messy real world.

Which gets towards my original thesis: Women tend not to mature in their twenties, precisely because they're told on the one hand that the patriarchy is holding them back, many men want to hurt them, control them, that the world is completely slanted against them... AND they're given huge legs up for academics, employment, and general financial assistance.

At what point does your average woman need to gain maturity, if there's always some program or other that will render assistance if she finds herself facing difficulty, or there's always someone willing to take them in and shelter them from the consequences of their decisions?

And the upshot that women are actually less happy than they've been in decades.

The gap between how much assistance women are given, across the board, to succeed in life, and how dissatisfied they apparently are with how their lives are going seems to be at an all-time high. This tends to gel with the anectdotal observations I see, with women in particular having extreme difficulty getting their lives in order despite getting help from all sides, and complaining loudly that its not really their fault.

Which reads to me like they're still stuck in an adolescent mentality.

Do you work in inside sales? Mostly making a lighthearted joke, here. Maybe even healthcare or aviation?

Law. I do a lot of probate work, where someone's parents die and now the children are coming in to close out their final affairs and parcel out their estate.

That's when I sometimes run into the adult woman in her 40's or 50's who starts acting like an entitled brat and trying to boss all the other siblings around and/or acts like everyone else is out to get her/take away what she feels belongs to her, when there's no goddamn reason to do that. Stands out all the more when you've got 2-3 other siblings who are all well-adjusted, and they're saying "yeah we figured this would happen, she's always been like that."

Tends to make the whole process more cumbersome and frustrating (more money for me, though).

They want someone who can decouple sex from the rest of the cultural baggage around relationships... attracted to the idea that it's much easier to explain sex as a harmless game or a sign of special friendship

You've successfully discovered the psychological foundation on top of which "being a liberal" resides: being capable of decoupling X from the rest of the cultural baggage around X (and being disagreeable enough to point that out).

Unless you're in the 1970s (and even then), this is generally a liability, because the logical conclusion of that with respect to sex is "you're OK with fucking 7 year olds", a liberal of this type is ultimately being dishonest if he answers "no"[1], and everyone knows that (and you stated it anyway). This is also the genesis of the traditionalist's "it's a slippery slope from the gays to pedophilia" (but it's only really valid when criticizing classical liberals, which is why progressives appear to be immune to this type of criticism).

What they mean is that this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace.

And the claim that this is "abuse" hinges on this point. As the risk incurred by having sex is nullified and the marketplace value of sex goes to zero (pornography helps with this), this fades into irrelevance, and "the woman wants to have sex, because having sex is neat" becomes the more salient point.

The fact that this is a childish view of sex is actually really relevant (and I do mean that in a literal sense; when kids- the kind closer to 7 than 17- have sex or do sex-adjacent things, I have it on good word that this is generally why they're doing them). Of course, this only results in a neutral to positive outcome if one or both of the participants can say "I'm done, and this sex was only fucking around", and in practice that's not guaranteed[2].

By contrast, a traditionalist or progressive will say that, because sex is the main thing of value women possess (for a bunch of deep-seated sociobiological reasons), that people being allowed to decouple sex from the cultural baggage around sex is devaluing sex -> destroying a woman's livelihood. And because the traditionalist viewpoint is centered around the willingness of men to pay top dollar for sex, and the progressive viewpoint is centered around forcing men to pay top dollar for sex, those types of people are going to argue that abuse occurs when you devalue sex in that way.

(Note that this doesn't actually consider the age of the participant- which makes sense; neither traditionalists nor progressives are particularly bothered about the subject's lack of age- for traditionalists, we can see that ages of consent higher than that are modern inventions so being married was the salient factor, and for progressives, they think 7 year olds can be meaningfully transgender.)

Does this mean that the instigators of the sexual revolution, who, according to some posters whose names elude me right now, did it all only to bamboozle young and attractive women into no-strings-attached sexual promiscuity were ephebophiles? I guess they technically were.

Only if you started from the traditionalist viewpoint: that the liberals are being dishonest about the above and trying to steal [literal] meal tickets from women. If a traditionalist did that, it would be a grave sin for them to do that: it would be exploitation, abuse, trickery given that they naturally understand sex to be a meal ticket in that way, so obviously, because everyone works like they do, the people not doing that must be lying. (Progressives do this too, just from the other direction because they started out in possession of the meal ticket.)

Of course, to the people who aren't lying about that but can't or won't acknowledge why the traditionalist viewpoint exists, that's going to cause some problems and damage their ability to trust traditionalist motives. After all, if the truth is one way, but they say it's the other way, then the only reason to do that must be hatred and stupidity... which, from the liberal viewpoint, it is.

[1] Which is why the more progressive-sympathetic liberals were very keen on the adoption of "consent" as a framework; it allows them to have their cake (we can do whatever we want) and eat it too (unless society has deemed the other partner sub-human), but is ultimately vulnerable to the fact that, when a society gets poorer and due to the fact the sexual marketplace is a marketplace, regulatory capture in the "declare competition illegal" direction occurs.

[2] Which is the main problem with fucking people who aren't necessarily able to judge that up front, or don't (in fact or perception) have the power to force a disengagement (which is why the "single mom's boyfriend discovered to be fucking the daughters too" thing exists, especially since the mother is herself making that calculation, consciously or otherwise).

That said, fucking people who don't believe they have that power, or are merely giving in, tends to result in dead-fish lays, which means the thing they "should" actually be after (described by faceh in a sibling comment) can't exist in that environment... which is an instant fail condition for someone genuinely interested in casual sexploration (and considering how obnoxious adult women are when they go passive like that, imagine how miserable that experience would be were it an actual kid on the other end- impressionability only goes so far). But that's basically just restating the slightly-hidden thesis that "molester/possessor" and "interested in casual/exploratory sex with for its own sake" are very different things.

this man exploits the woman's unawareness of her potential value on the sexual marketplace

But the opposite, right? She is aware of her sexual value. So she doesn't squander it on a 19 year old. He has no money.

Our hypothetical woman is with a financially secure older man with disposable income. Not a penniless 40 year old and not a penniless 19 year old. Call her a gold digger if she seeks marriage. Or chuckle at those charts of Leonardo DiCaprio's age vs his girlfriends' age. But this hypothetical woman has determined her sexual value and found a buyer.

If we are going analogize finding romantic partners to buying and selling, then these women are like me when I sold my last house. I didn't sell it to a penniless college student. I sold it to an older man after he showed me his bank account. He had a million dollars in a checking account. I didn't fail to realize my house's value. I found a buyer and we agreed on a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Not that I endorse comparing dating and marriage to selling yourself, but if we're making the analogy then let's follow it through.

But the opposite, right? She is aware of her sexual value. So she doesn't squander it on a 19 year old. He has no money.

In reality, perhaps this is what’s happening. But I don’t think it’s what’s happening in the ephepophile’s fantasy, that causes him to be attracted to the 19 year old, no. Golddigging is an unattractive trait in a partner even if you are the beneficiary. One would prefer to think that the free-spirited young thing with few sexual hangups is exactly that, rather than secretly calculative.

I think men are attracted to teenage girls because they are hot. Consider /r/jailbait from reddit's bygone time. I doubt people were that interested in the personalities or psychology of those girls, though I have no proof or firsthand knowledge.

There may have been some other factors like them thinking wishfully 'oh she'd be nice and fun to be around and not a gold-digging frigid bitch who treats dates like job applications' but surely the primary attraction is physical rather than intellectual. The majority of men don't masturbate to a charming personality (or an imbalanced power dynamic per feminist rhetoric) in and of itself, they masturbate to a beautiful body first and foremost. There might be other things on top of that but the beautiful body is the basis. Male smut is visual, physical, sex, sex, sex.

Women are more attracted to personality, character (though still very much interested in a body). We see female smut being more status-obsessed - the equivalent is wanting a billionaire werewolf vampire CEO incredibly respected and feared by other men who has an inexplicable desire for the woman and will reveal his emotional side for her alone... he may well have six-pack abs but it's not quite so much the abs they're into. These are the ones who are into written smut.

As the saying goes, you don't go to the gym to collect girls, you just get the attention of men. Going to the gym will help. But if you want to get girls, get rich or famous or fearsome. CEO, rock star, high-ranking drug dealer.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=57S7LFFHA80?list=RD57S7LFFHA80

Hi, uh, I just left the date. Am I asking for too much idk, this guy was super cute, passionate about what he did, was a musician, idk.

I'm looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6'5, blue eyes. Finance, trust fund, 6'5, blue eyes. Finance, trust fund, 6'5, blue eyes.

There's something different with their attitude to sex. And this is exactly the option that I want to explore further in this post.

the journey of a woman is about taking down these barriers: she has a lot of ideas with whom it is appropriate to have sex, when, where and what kind of. A girl in a woman's body has no such qualms.

Huh? The majority of teenagers come with much more programming of anti-slut defenses, parental controls installed, innocence which keeps them away from sexuality. I'm surprised that anyone thinks that human sexuality is primarily innate, rather than cultural, as regards the kinds of things that typically occur in pornographic media.

From personal experience: dating teenagers-to-twenty-year-olds (when I was that age) was mostly a process of breaking down barriers around sexuality, while dating older women they know what they want and they know what they are going to get. Things are much more direct and simple. I can't imagine anyone dating a teenager for the purpose of "simplicity." We can go all the way back to Big Ben Franklin and his advice on why it is better to have an affair with older women than with younger ones, among them:

Because thro' more Experience, they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an Intrigue to prevent Suspicion. The Commerce with them is therefore safer with regard to your Reputation. And with regard to theirs, if the Affair should happen to be known, considerate People might be rather inclin'd to excuse an old Woman who would kindly take care of a young Man, form his Manners by her good Counsels, and prevent his ruining his Health and Fortune among mercenary Prostitutes.

Because the Sin is less. The debauching a Virgin may be her Ruin, and make her for Life unhappy.

Because the Compunction is less. The having made a young Girl miserable may give you frequent bitter Reflections; none of which can attend making an old Woman happy.

All of which amount to a core logic that dating older women is simpler and more convenient than dating younger ones.

So beyond the obvious "They're hot" and "16 or 18 or 21 is just a number with no inherent relation to human development in particular cases" I propose another reasoning for teenagers being the protagonists of your pornographic novels:

#4 For Older Fantasists, when placing a teenager in the leading role of a sexual fantasy, are placing themselves within the fantasy at the appropriate age to fuck such a girl. The fantasy of the younger girl is one of nostalgia for one's own lost youth, the freedom and opportunity inherent therein.

Let's discuss a particular example of this: Billy Joel's Only the Good Die Young. Listen to it, it's a classic and I don't want to hear shit about anyone here loving America if they don't like Billy Joel, but here's some lyrics for close reading:

Come out, Virginia, don't let me wait
You Catholic girls start much too late
Aw, but sooner or later it comes down to fate
I might as well will be the one
Well, they showed you a statue, told you to pray
They built you a temple and locked you away
Aw, but they never told you the price that you pay
For things that you might have done
Well, only the good die young

You mighta heard I run with a dangerous crowd
We ain't too pretty, we ain't too proud
We might be laughing a bit too loud
Aw, but that never hurt no one

I'm pretty sure everyone, ever, who has listened to the song pictured Virginia as a Catholic schoolgirl, around seventeen or eighteen years old; sixteen at the youngest nineteen at the oldest. Now, Billy Joel was twenty seven years old when he wrote this. My parents, who loved this song, were in their twenties when it came out. Does anyone who listens to this song imagine the narrator as twenty-seven talking to his Catholic schoolgirl girlfriend? I mean, I guess somebody might, but if they did we can all agree the song would be deeply creepy and awful, closer to horror than to pop. Even the most determined TRPer can't possibly argue that it's normal or good for a twenty-seven year old to be trying to talk his way into his teenage girlfriend's panties.

No, the normal listener to Only the Good Die Young is picturing a teenage boy talking to his teenage girlfriend. Which is normal, if not necessarily normative. Particularly given the later verse about running with a "dangerous crowd;" we're picturing a charming juvenile delinquent who will straighten himself out later. If we're instead picturing a twenty seven year old criminal, once again, creepy fucking lyrics.

You can tell the song is primarily nostalgic for Billy, and his audience's, younger days in that Only the Good Die Young is the start of Joel's nostalgia-retro-oldies period. You have a series of songs that mime the doo-wop of Billy's youth: Uptown Girl, Tell Her About it, The Longest Time. Then you have a series of songs that explicitly reference and call out Billy's boomer memories: It's Still Rock and Roll to Me, Keepin' the Faith, We Didn't Start the Fire.

Joel is picturing himself at sixteen, talking to his sixteen year old girlfriend, and remembering the joys of being a teenager. The freedom of dating at that age, one's own strength and virility, with no stakes for either of you beyond mom's disapproval.

And I think a lot of ephebophilic fantasy is of this nature: the fat out-of-shape 38 year old porn consumer doesn't picture himself as a creepy 38 year old porn consumer when he watches "barely legal" porn, or reads it, rather he pictures himself at his prime at 22, when he at least had potential. Even moreso in a novel.

Moreso yet in real life. So often the balding but rich middle aged man who marries a young floozy second wife is trying to recapture his own rapidly-fleeing youth, when he had hair and freedom.

I'll also add in as a freebie throw-in:

#5 Male attraction is recursive and social in nature, and younger women provide higher status because they provide higher status

Men want to pretend that our attractions are purely simple and biological, but they aren't, they're deeply social and status seeking in nature. One can see this in the way "trends" in attractive women in pornography occur over time. What men want is what other men want, because when other men see that you have it, they will think that you must be pretty fuckin' bitchin' to attract such a girl. Marty's loser dad gets the hot girl in Back to the Future, and instantly everyone wants to make him class president and hang out with him. This applies to age as well: only rich and high status men can get the twenty year old girlfriend, so men seek out the twenty year old girlfriend as a status symbol. So much more the status symbol to have an illegal girlfriend, and be so powerful that no one can stop you!

As for me, hot women are hot, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The rest is just a question of what price you are willing to pay.

I can't imagine anyone dating a teenager for the purpose of "simplicity." We can go all the way back to Big Ben Franklin and his advice on why it is better to have an affair with older women than with younger ones, among them:

This just means that neither of you are ephebophiles.

I just kind of reject ephebophile as a category.

I can imagine someone who will only have sex with those under 10. I can't really imagine someone who will only have sex with those under 18 or 21 or whatever. I don't think those people exist. I don't think really think any man exists who will sooner have sex with a morbidly obese 16 year old than modern day Jennifer Lopez (leaving aside people with fat fetishes, who in turn I don't think would pick a skinny 16 year old over a properly-plump 35 year old).

Rueters: U.S. states and cities that boycott Israeli companies will be denied federal aid for natural disaster preparedness

The requirement applies to at least $1.9 billion that states rely on to cover search-and-rescue equipment, emergency manager salaries and backup power systems among other expenses, according to 11 agency grant notices reviewed by Reuters.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency stated in grant notices posted on Friday that states must follow its "terms and conditions." Those conditions require they certify they will not sever “commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies” to qualify for funding.

The requirement is the Trump administration's latest effort to use federal funding to promote its views on Israel.

The Department of Homeland Security, the agency that oversees FEMA, in April, said that boycotting Israel is prohibited for states and cities receiving its grant funds.

I've followed the politicization of FEMA grants through the Nonprofit Security Grant Program which overwhelmingly goes to Jewish organizations. The recent Israel supplemental bill included a $390M increase to the Nonprofit Security Grant Program with $230M available through Sept 30, 2026. Schumer is pushing for an additional $500M bringing potential 2026 funding to $730M.

The timing of this is interesting also because it's in the middle of a significant back-and-forth between Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. Tucker Carlson had Candace Owens on his show, where Tucker accused Fuentes of being a fed. To justify that claim, Tucker said that Fuentes accused Carlson's father of being in the CIA which was a fact that Carlson claimed to not know until his father's death in March.

Tucker also gave a line of criticism of Fuentes that Tucker himself gave in nearly exact words to Pat Buchanan in 1999.

How does this tie in together? Where is the pushback against the clear Israeli influence in the US government supposed to come from in the Right Wing? It's only coming from Fuentes and DR Twitter. Stuff like this gives Fuentes credibility regarding his criticisms of Israeli influence- it seems Tucker Carlson is trying to ride the fine line between providing an outlet for criticism of Israeli influence among the Right Wing but still gatekeeping Nick Fuentes from going further mainstream.

While in practice I'll accept that it's complicated, both sides of the aisle seem to have, in some cases begrudgingly, agreed that "discrimination on the basis of national origin" is verboten. Under the lens of the Civil Rights Act, a company saying "We won't do business with Israeli nationals" (note the number of dual-citizenships and US citizens residing in Israel, which is more than in Canada) is a pretty transparent violation.

It is a bit less clear that this applies to foreign companies: "we prefer to buy from domestic suppliers" is well within the Overton Window, even "would prefer not to buy from China" is probably not objectionable (and "do not do business with Iran and North Korea" is effectively mandated, although those congressional mandates presumably trump congressional civil rights law). But in this particular case, "will not buy from Israel-linked companies" is pretty strongly associated with attempts to discriminate against persons of Israeli origin. I think this case is maybe winnable, but you'd likely need to be squeaky clean on the persons (not corporate) level.

Now, there are also good arguments to be made about absolute freedom of association here, but most of those have, to my knowledge, mostly lost in court. Overturning the better part of a century of civil rights law is something that is neither a small ask, nor popular outside of a handful of principled libertarians (and witches). I don't think that's to be done lightly.

In the 1980s dozens of cities and states had taken economic action against South Africa. It's not a Civil Rights issue.

If your goal is the support of civilization - and particularly european-derived civilization - and the flourishing of european-descended individuals, that may not be the best example to cite.

It suffices to dispense with the silly notion that it's a Civil Rights violation to boycott a foreign business. It also demonstrates how a protest towards a white civilization was supported by the government, and also widely supported by Jews (who were very prominent in the anti-apartheid activism), whereas Israel receives strong defense from the highest levels of government and all of a sudden it's racist to support the anti-Israeli activism! It shows how our government and Jews in particular react to protest against a white country versus a Jewish country.

Israel was, quite literally, the only* country which supported the apartheid government until the end.

*excluding bantustans, of course.

I think the vibes of applying civil rights law to "white people" have changed drastically since the 1980s. Certainly not unanimously, but witness the Trump administration's consideration of refugee status for white South Africans (I'm going to choose not to express an opinion on that at this time).

But there have IIRC been a few instances of academic conferences having to walk back "International submissions encouraged. Israeli academics need not apply."

As I often do, I like to consider a counterfactual: suppose there was a movement that existed to boycott only Muslim nations. Now, it wasn't against Muslims, per se, just that for mumblemumble reasons it only called for those nations to be boycotted, and for nations that are demonstrably worse at human rights like the likes of North Korea to be not sanctioned.

I don't think a lot of the people complaining about anti-BDS would also be complaining about being anti-Muslim-Nation-boycotts. Sure, there'd still be some overlap, but not enough to really make the news.

As a member of "some overlap" I'll say this works both way. The people screaming bloody murder about BDS, would see the kind of laws directed against it as an egregious violation of their basic civil rights, were they directed at an anti-Muslim boycott.

If you want to see this in action, the political arguments are practically reversed on the issue of the "Muslim ban" in Trump's first term: that one even included North Korea! IIRC the administration at the time claimed it was based on security cooperation agreements and just happened to hit mostly Muslim nations (but not all such nations) with poor recordkeeping.

I'm not sure I'm happy with that one either, for the record.

The list of countries Trump used was compiled during the Obama administration, four countries in the original "Terrorist Travel Prevention Act" and three more added by Obama's DHS. But, in Obama's term this was a "countries whose citizens and visitors can't travel to the US under the Visa Waiver Program instead of getting a visa first" list, and Trump turned it into a "countries whose citizens and visitors can't travel to the US at all" list.

All 7 countries listed were 95%+ Muslim, but there are another 19 or 20 95%-Muslim countries that didn't make the list.

On the one hand, the popular phrase "Trump's Muslim ban" seems like an inaccurate descriptor for a ban that applied to some non-Muslims and didn't apply to most Muslims based on a list from the Obama administration; he was pretty transparently trying to get as close to his promised "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on" as he could get legally, but the end result really wasn't very close. On the other hand, that transparency made the order still a pretty clear match to our "for mumblemumble reasons" hypothetical, which is part of why the courts kept shooting him down until he'd repeatedly watered down the order.

Under the lens of the Civil Rights Act, a company saying "We won't do business with Israeli nationals" (note the number of dual-citizenships and US citizens residing in Israel, which is more than in Canada) is a pretty transparent violation.

[...] But in this particular case, "will not buy from Israel-linked companies" is pretty strongly associated with attempts to discriminate against persons of Israeli origin. I think this case is maybe winnable, but you'd likely need to be squeaky clean on the persons (not corporate) level.

Discriminating against Israeli citizens in the US seems bad from a civil rights perspective, yes.

Discriminating against Israeli companies or products seems much less problematic, especially if it is just spending decisions. Both states and companies should be free to chose with which companies they do business. If Texas prefers to arm its police force with weapons produced in Texas, that seems the kind of decision a state should be able to make. If Google decides that it hates South Korea and refuses to buy any computer components produced there, that is something for the market to solve.

I think that the use of financial incentives is pretty disingenuous, because it allows the feds to say "we did not violate your rights, you could just opt out of FEMA or not take tax credits".

If federal funds come with strings attached on how to spend that money specifically, that seems fine. "If you buy emergency shelters from your FEMA grant, you may not discriminate against Israeli companies" - "None of the medicaid funds may be spent on medical marijuana" - "5% of the medicaids funds are earmarked for abortion services. If you can not provide these, you do not get the 5%."

But my understanding is that this is not what is happening here. Instead, it is "follow our rules generally, or you don't get money", which I find bad.

Discrimination towards Israel is a convenient legal hammer for Trump to pound on adversaries.

Under 42 U.S.C. § 5151, the President’s regulatory authority is limited to ensuring that all disaster assistance is distributed “in an equitable and impartial manner”

Trump is using Israel because he needs to find a credible example of 'partial' behavior by local govts. The American system has special carve-outs for provable hate crimes. There is decades of precedent on methods for associating anti-Israel-movements with antisemitism and therefore provable hate crimes.

Trump's govt (and the project 2025 playbook[1]) are strategic about finding loopholes for executive overreach. For universities, it was provable affirmative action. For local funding, it's Israel.

[1] I have not read project Esther in detail. But at face value, it seems to be the guiding document on how to use antisemitism as a cudgel to beat opposing institutions into submission.

Israel is effectively a forward deployed state of the USA. They do the dirty work on the vanguard, and shield America from criticism. For ex: I don't believe the Israelis could have developed Pegasus without a soft go ahead from the Americans.

So there are no cases of the local DEI people discriminating against whites and especially typical Trump voting whites? Instead he just happens to chose a small minority that is vastly overrepresented among his donors and his administration. Imagine if a president had recieved a large portion of his funding from China and had a sizeable portion of his administration consist of Chinese people and they were all about owning the libs by taking out DEI efforts specifically hurting Chinese people.

Israel doesn't do work for the US, the US does work for Israel. China doesn't really have a military presence in the region and is the biggest trading partner with most of MENA. Israel wrecks the relationship with middle eastern countries and drags the US into forever wars.

Discrimination against whites is a hard sell when the executives & the board are white[*]. Moreover, 'Trump voting white' isn't a protected category.

The China analogy doesn't work because China is naturally positioned as a competing power while Israel is strategically, culturally and spiritually positioned to be collaborative power.

Broadly, Jews are found in 2 places: US and Israel. When America flourishes, Jews flourish. That's to Israel's benefit. Strategically, Israel's enemies are Islamist. So, they want to ally with an anti-Islamist power : USA. Israel is a liberal & open democracy. It wants to ally with a liberal and open democracy : USA.

Israel wrecks the relationship with middle eastern countries

America wrecked its relationship with the middle east all by itself. Israel fought the Suez Crisis on US & UK's behalf. Saddam Hussein's overthrow was classic American overreach. Intervention in Afghanistan was first a cold war exercise, and later a response to 9/11. Syrian efforts were a proxy war against Russia. Iran-US relationships soured because the Shah was overthrown and Americans were taken hostage. Jordan and Israel actually have pretty decent relations. The Saudi, UAE and Israel relations have been on a consistent up and up. Qatar always plays all sides, Israel or no Israel.

So, can you name a country who's US-country relationships got wrecked by Israel ?

they were all about owning the libs by taking out DEI efforts specifically hurting Chinese people.

The analogy doesn't work because American Jews are 'the libs'. The majority of American Jews live in NY and California. American Jews (pre Oct 23) overwhelmingly voted for deep-blue candidates in deep-blue cities. They subscribed to generally 'blue' opinions such as : 'Netanyahu bad', '2 state solution good' and 'Trump bad'.

There is healthy skepticism towards Israel from within the Jewish community itself. America's temporary sycophancy towards Israel has more to do with recently empowered fundamentalist Christians signalling to their voter-base during Trump2, than a deeply rooted allegiance to Israel.

[*] The discussion of how specific whites are being discriminated against is longer conversation about the sub-racial dynamics among whites people. I think white groups (rich and poor) both benefit from not opening this pandoras box.

Israel fought the Suez Crisis on US & UK's behalf.

UK and France. The US told them quite firmly to stop, which they did. The US was not particularly pro Israel until Lyndon Johnson, who let himself get bossed around by his very pro-Israel foreign policy guys.

Israel didn't directly instigate Iraq 2 of course, but many of the higher ups in the executive branch who were pushing for an invasion of Iraq were ardent Zionists (see the Office of Special Plans, which also involved an espionage scandal involving an analyst passing information to Israel through AIPAC).

Israel didn't directly instigate Iraq 2 of course,

A bit of an understatement: the Israelis advocated against it, on the grounds that if any regime changing was to happen, it should prioritize Iran.

The American response was allegedly that Iran would be next. Which actually makes a fair bit of sense if you are planning to take down both, since it's easier to drive from Kuwait and Saudi into Iraq than do a cross-Hormuz amphibious invasion, but no one exactly remembers them of being good planners.

the Israelis advocated against it

Netanyahu advocated for it and he's by far the longest serving and most influential modern Israeli PM. All of the people who advocated against it are either politically irrelevant or dead.

EDIT: accidentally a word

Sounds like quibbling over priorities. They also said taking out Saddam would aid in regime-changing Iran.

Also, was what you're mentioning said in public, or in private? Because if it was the latter, you can't blame the public for not knowing what was deliberately kept from them.

Sounds like quibbling over priorities. They also said taking out Saddam would aid in regime-changing Iran.

'Don't do [course of action] unless you're going to do it the right way' may be dismissed as quibbling over priorities, but it is still a caution against, and are not even indirectly instigating the [course of action] either.

On a material-level, if you are going to invade both countries as the neocons intended, then your second sentence is objectively true. It would be far easier for the US to launch from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia into Iraq than into Iran (you could drive), and then from Iraq into Iran (you could drive), than to launch an amphibious invasion of Iran.

Also, was what you're mentioning said in public, or in private? Because if it was the latter, you can't blame the public for not knowing what was deliberately kept from them.

When the result of private discussions are later publicized, and have been public for nearly two decades now, it is a distinction without a difference. Someone can claim the later public revelations were lies, or self-serving after-the-fact deflections, but absent that we can absolutely blame people for not knowing a historical record exists.

'Don't do [course of action] unless you're going to do it the right way

When he says "if you take out Saddam, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region... and I think that people sitting right next door, young people, and many others, will say 'the times of such regimes, such despots, is gone'...", to you it sounds like "don't invade Iraq, and if you're going to do it, hit Iran first (or at least do both)"?

When the result of private discussions are later publicized, and have been public for nearly two decades now, it is a distinction without a difference.

If there was no difference, why did they not discuss it in public to begin with?

but absent that we can absolutely blame people for not knowing a historical record exists.

That's like blaming people for being familiar with front page headline news, but not the correction notice on page 19, stuck between obituaries and classifieds.

More comments

The American response was allegedly that Iran would be next.

Assuming that the purpose of a system is what it does, and liberally applying Occan's and Hanlon's razors, the best explanation of the Bush administration's Iraq war policy was that the US Deep State and Republican-aligned elites wanted to invade Iraq in order to replace Saddam with a government that would allow the US to attack Iran from Iraqi territory, and that 9-11 provided political cover. They obviously failed, but they could have succeeded if 9-11 hadn't made it politically unacceptable to include Al-Quaeda in an anti-Iranian coalition.

I'd add 'and Democrat-aligned elites' to that as well. As the quip went, they were for it before they were against it, and Saddam was a long-running sore that Clinton bombed as well. Had he not been taken out, we'd probably be debating how incompetent / missed opportunities the US had to pre-empt the basis for the Iranian nuclear program, and Saddam's inevitable response to that becoming public knowledge.

The US was not particularly pro Israel until Lyndon Johnson, who let himself get bossed around by his very pro-Israel foreign policy guys.

Also because Israel's leading enemies (at that point they were Egypt and Syria) had recently declared for the Soviet side in the Cold War. The reason why the US Deep State allowed the Israeli lobby in in the first place was mostly Cold War politics.

Israel is a liberal & open democracy.

Ehhhhhhhh...it's definitely both of those things when compared to its regional neighbors, but in any sort of absolute ranking it has all sorts of problems; a crazy runaway judiciary, excessive military entanglement in politics, endemic public corruption, etc.

Moreover, 'Trump voting white' isn't a protected category.

Tell that to the FEMA employee that told workers to skip Trump-voting houses in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton. Anti-White discrimination may be a hard sell, but it's not impossible.

Discrimination against whites is a hard sell when the executives & the board are white

Why? They're old, and got into their position before the discrimination regime was implemented. Is there a rule somewhere that we have to wait 2 generations for discrimination to run it's course, before we're allowed to call it discrimination?

Yes, because if the judges don't bellyfeel it, they won't make a useful ruling. Yes, the conservatives on the Supreme Court believe as an intellectual matter that anti-discrimination rules cut both ways and disallow discrimination against whites. But in their gut they know it's all about helping blacks and think that's the right thing, so they make sure to leave a hole any time they make a ruling against discriminating against other races. When it comes to Jews, though, their belly is firmly in line with anti-discrimination.

If our relationship with Israel is characterized by Israel doing America’s dirty work, then: (1) why are our politicians handing synagogues hundreds of millions in free funds, yearly, as SS notes? What does this have to do with our geopolitical interest? This is more readily explained by a group of people having sophisticated lobbying capabilities. (2) Why did Trump specifically go after students who criticized Israel on social media, rather than students who criticize America or the West broadly? (3) Why do we, in effect, subsidize the entirety of Israeli society, from their subsidized colleges and subsidized healthcare to their subsidized religious institutions? We are Israel’s security in the region for free; they gave nothing, not money or troops, for our wars in the region, and they will not be repaying the $1,000,000,000 we spent on their defense vs Iran. If Israel were the client state of our Empire, you would expect them to pay Caesar’s tax, right? Instead, we hand them our resources for no obvious gain. It should be the other way around. As Mearsheimer spoke to Tucker Carlson the other day,

And the lobby is so effective, it is so powerful, that we basically end up supporting Israel unconditionally. What that means, Tucker, is in those cases where Israel’s interests are not the same as America’s interests, we support Israel. We support Israel’s interests, not America’s interests.

[…] anytime the Egyptians or the Jordanians get uppity about Israel, the United States reminds them, “You better behave yourself because we have huge economic leverage over you. You have to be friendly to Israel.” So Jordan and Egypt never cause the Israelis any problem […] as I said to you before, we have a special relationship with Israel that has no parallel in recorded history. Just very important to understand it. There is no single case in recorded history that comes even close to looking like the relationship that we have with Israel. Because again, as I said, states sometimes have similar interests, and this includes the United States and Israel, but they also have conflicting interests. And when a great power like the United States has conflicting interests with another country, it almost always, except in the case of Israel, acts in terms of its own interests, America first. But when it comes to Israel, it’s Israel first. And if you go to the Middle East and look at our policy there, there’s just abundant evidence to support that.

I believe there’s one simple answer [as to why this is the case]. The Israel lobby. I think the lobby is an incredibly powerful interest group, and I’m choosing my words carefully. It has awesome power, and it basically is in a position where it can profoundly influence US foreign policy in the Middle East. And indeed, it affects foreign policy outside of the Middle East. But when it comes to the Middle East, and again, the Palestinian issue in particular, it has awesome power. And there’s no president who is willing to buck the lobby.

If Israel were our forward operating base, then it would be easy to support them: Israelis would be working day and night to secure a better future for Americans. Their tax dollars would go to our institutions and their blood would be spilled in Syria / Iraq / Afghanistan for us. Alas, this does not appear to be the case.

A couple asides on Pegasus: its ancestor PROMIS was indeed developed by the CIA and sold to Israel, and then from Israel it was disseminated to other countries. The person doing this dissemination was no other than Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert Maxwell. But Israel, rather than acting purely as a FOB to America, has its own interests in mind:

"L'Oeil De Washington" contends that a bugged version of PROMIS was sold in the mid-1980s for Soviet government use, with the media mogul Robert Maxwell as a conduit. According to the book, Israel's knowledge of this operation became a bargaining chip in trying to curb U.S. arms shipments to Iraq before the Gulf War; the Israelis threatened to tell the Russians their computers were open to American surveillance. Apparently, the U.S. called Israel's bluff and lost. One of the book's major sources, the Israeli arms merchant Ari Ben-Menashe, told the authors that in 1989 the Soviet spy agency, the GRU, shut down all of its computers for a week after learning that they were bugged by PROMIS.

why are our politicians handing synagogues hundreds of millions

I'm ignorant here. Can you shed light on this ? What were the numbers like pre-Trump ?

Why did Trump specifically go after students who criticized Israel on social media, rather than students who criticize America or the West broadly?

That was the meat of my earlier post. Because Trump can frame criticism of Israel as hate speech in courts. Criticism of America & the West is free game.

Why do we, in effect, subsidize the entirety of Israeli society, from their subsidized colleges and subsidized healthcare to their subsidized religious institutions?

The US has given similar amount in aid to Egypt. Both use the money to immediately buy American weapons. At least Israel operates in tight lockstep with the American military. What does the US get by sending money to Egypt ?

Military funding is very difficult to decode. There's a reason the Pentagon fails every audit. I won't be attempting to itemize it, and neither should you.

no other than Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert Maxwell

Woah. I didn't know that the Maxwells has such deep ties to the CIA. Strong signal that Epstein was on CIA's payroll.

The US has given similar amount in aid to Egypt. Both use the money to immediately buy American weapons. At least Israel operates in tight lockstep with the American military. What does the US get by sending money to Egypt ?

An end to semi-regular wars along the Suez Canal and degrading the arms-supplier influence nexus to Egypt from major American geopolitical rivals?

I'm ignorant here. Can you shed light on this ? What were the numbers like pre-Trump ?

I don't have a link on hand but TL;DR is that there's a grant program for security at houses of worship(it is very common in America for churches/synagogues to hire off duty police officers as security with full police powers during peak hours- and this option is available and used by other organizations as well, it's not specifically a church thing, police are allowed to do security work with police powers when off duty for extra money and this is common at both high security facilities and at places that have regular and predictable peak hours like churches). This program is available to churches but most of it goes to synagogues because Jews are very well integrated in the NGO network that doles out grants. IIRC this is an old program that hasn't really changed over time and it's fairly bipartisan.

The big change is that the grant amounts have skyrocketed in recent years. When the program was created in 2004, funding was around $25 million per year. The program was proposed and lobbied for by Jewish groups. Last year the total was $454 million, and synagogues receive a disproportionate amount of funding.

https://www.fema.gov/grants/preparedness/nonprofit-security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_Security_Grant_Program

I wonder how many ballooning programs like this are there. DOGE was such a waste of opportunity.

Loads, this one only came to prominence because of the recent focus on Israel/Palestine.

Personally as king of DOGE I would have abolished the TSA, fired most of them, and transferred the rest to ICE. It's an obscene waste of time and money on security theater that is universally hated, yet somehow employs over 60,000 people.

The US has given similar amount in aid to Egypt. Both use the money to immediately buy American weapons. At least Israel operates in tight lockstep with the American military. What does the US get by sending money to Egypt ?

Well that's an easy one, the US sends money to Egypt to keep the Egyptian military pointing its weapons at its own people instead of Israel. This should have been obvious to everyone when Rubio made Egypt the only country besides Israel to be exempted from the initial DOGE freeze on foreign aid.

In practice, American aid to Egypt and Jordan is also aid for Israel. Which makes it even more egregious.

The US has given similar amount in aid to Egypt. Both use the money to immediately buy American weapons. At least Israel operates in tight lockstep with the American military. What does the US get by sending money to Egypt ?

Surely this would be worth a few theories on how the Pharaoh's PAC owns the US government but nope. Zilch.

What does the US get by sending money to Egypt ?

It gets them to make nice to Israel. The reason why Egypt is the second-largest recipient of US aid is the same reason that Israel is the largest recipient of US aid - the Israel lobby wants it that way.

I would further add that making democrats spend more effort on Israel-related matters will only benefit the republicans because they fight each other when they do that, they convince talented Jews to accept much higher private sector salaries rather than work in politics(and they get replaced with incompetent and delusional shaniquas), they make the progressive wing more prominent and demanding.

they convince talented Jews to accept much higher private sector salaries rather than work in politics(and they get replaced with incompetent and delusional shaniquas)

Or they get replaced by even more politically talented Brahmin->Islam converts like Mamdani while clearing out the traitors in their midst at the same time.

The actual text, for anyone interested (link from twitter):

(2) Grant award certification.

(a) By accepting the grant award, recipients are certifying that:

(i) They do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, DEIA, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws; and

(ii) They do not engage in and will not during the term of this award engage in, a discriminatory prohibited boycott.

(iii) They do not, and will not during the term of this award, operate any program that benefits illegal immigrants or incentivizes illegal immigration.

As for Fuentes, I think the meaning of 'fed' in these online circles is rather more broad than it ought to be (almost every political radical with a substantial following will deal with the state or states in some capacity), but I don't think he takes himself seriously enough not to be able to justify full cooperation. He has ways of justifying it to himself, as with his Kamala support.

(ii) They do not engage in and will not during the term of this award engage in, a discriminatory prohibited boycott.

They define that term as:

Discriminatory prohibited boycott means refusing to deal, cutting commercial relations, or otherwise limiting commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies or with companies doing business in or with Israel or authorized by, licensed by, or organized under the laws of Israel to do business.

Thanks. I was fairly sure SS would be obfuscating some relevant context, and in this case that includes the text. I'd agree with @DirtyWaterHotDog that this is a legal hammer setup. In this case, mixing something they know states will not refuse (FEMA grants), with something they know the Democratic coalition will struggle to restrain from (DEI / Israeli boycotts / illegal immigration).

Saying this is about Israel is as misleading as saying it is about DEI, or immigration in isolation. It about no one of these things- it's about the collection of progressive/democratic coalition shibboleths, any of which is sufficient for the goal.

Which, in turn, is not 'denial.' That is the provided framing, but there's no provided evidence that the goal is to prevent funding. If anything, it's a hook-setup, which is predicated on someone taking the bait, not refusing it.

Instead, the goal is almost certainly twofold: first, to use the power of the purse to lead state policy (which is very old practice), and second, to punish the states (and state politicians) that would take the money but violate the terms in the name of their political preferences, which would open them up to federal prosecution. The later is not possible without the funding occurring, and if a state insisted on refusing FEMA aid, I am confident the Trump administration would make political hay out of it until they did, on some general theme of how the refusing states are putting politics over lives (and taking the money).

Both of these, in turn, put the Democratic coalition in conflict with itself, by putting the fiscal interests of democratic political machines (the establishment politicians who need federal money, but also want to stay out of jail) against the partisan interests of the progressives (who want the shibboleths and the money, but care less for the Democratic establishment). Given what's already been written about the ongoing Democratic civil war, and the mid-term prospects, the worse the conflict of interests in the Democratic Party, the better.

This, in turn, aligns with the demonstrated practice of the last half year or so of how the Trump 2 administration has been baiting / luring political opponents into untenable positions, where it will happily gleefully enforce the laws against the opposition from a position of legal strength.

Saying this is about Israel is as misleading as saying it is about DEI, or immigration in isolation. It about no one of these things- it's about the collection of progressive/democratic coalition shibboleths, any of which is sufficient for the goal.

The text literally said

Discriminatory prohibited boycott means refusing to deal, cutting commercial relations, or otherwise limiting commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies or with companies doing business in or with Israel or authorized by, licensed by, or organized under the laws of Israel to do business.

They defined "discriminatory prohibited boycott" solely with Israel and nothing else. They've since removed it, however their tweet still specifically says they're gonna deny federal funds to BDS (i.e boycotting Israel) so it's not even different.

You have re-cited one of three distinct conditionals that would enable the Trump administration to lawfully act against its political opponents breaking the law, as a response to a post arguing that any of the three conditionals would meet the probable intent of seeking to lawfully act against political opponents breaking the law.

Yet Trump never seems to apply this sort of reasoning to anyone except opponents of Israel.

I've yet to see a foreign student deported for criticizing Britain, or France, or even America.

It doesn't even make sense as a move against "political opponents" since in practice most anti-Israel protesters hate the Democrats and drag down their support, see the R+122 swing in Dearborn.

But this particular condition is in fact about boycotting Israel and Israel only.

And this particular condition is not characteristic of the whole law either, and as such characterizing the broader law in terms of this particular condition is wilfully misrepresenting the broader law.

Or, to put in other terms, it is missing the forest for a tree. It can indeed be a joo-tree in the forest, but it is not a joo-tree forest. Talking about how the forest is the result of malign joo influence is willfully misrepresenting the forest.

Not least because, and part of that broader context being obfuscated, the joo-tree is coincidentally planted in a specific grove beside the anti-DEI-tree, and the anti-illegal-immigration (ALL) tree, all at the direction of the hated forest-lord. This grove is now being publicized to audiences with people who would like to cut down joo-trees, anti-DEI-trees, and ALL-trees even before their hatred of the forest-lord is considered.

That's bait, and SS fell for it as much or more than the intended targets.

This seems like cope.

Saying this is about Israel is as misleading as saying it is about DEI, or immigration in isolation. It about no one of these things- it's about the collection of progressive/democratic coalition shibboleths, any of which is sufficient for the goal.

No, it is about Israel because nobody is getting deported over DEI. Top federal officials aren't devoting their full attention to girls yelling at guys wearing USA shirts. Not a single person has had the book thrown at them for "anti-white racism".

I believe what the Trump Admin does, not what it says.

Both of these, in turn, put the Democratic coalition in conflict with itself, by putting the fiscal interests of democratic political machines (the establishment politicians who need federal money, but also want to stay out of jail) against the partisan interests of the progressives (who want the shibboleths and the money, but care less for the Democratic establishment). Given what's already been written about the ongoing Democratic civil war, and the mid-term prospects, the worse the conflict of interests in the Democratic Party, the better.

Of course, Trump also is pitting the interests of his Jewish donors against the interests of "America First" voters who didn't sign up for endless glazing of a foreign country. The Democrats didn't need any help to provoke a civil war, Joe Biden did that all on its own. By wading in he's provoking an avoidable Republican civil war instead.

This, in turn, aligns with the demonstrated practice of the last half year or so of how the Trump 2 administration has been baiting / luring political opponents into untenable positions, where it will happily gleefully enforce the laws against the opposition from a position of legal strength.

On the contrary, it looks like Trump is himself being baited into an untenable position by his donors/blackmailers. Unconditional support for Israel to the point of punishing American citizens is taking the 20 on a 80-20 issue.

This seems like cope.

I am not surprised it seems like cope to an account created specifically to defend this OP's premise.

Welcome to the Motte, by the way. I look forward to your unique and diverse posting interests going forward.

No, it is about Israel because nobody is getting deported over DEI. Top federal officials aren't devoting their full attention to girls yelling at guys wearing USA shirts. Not a single person has had the book thrown at them for "anti-white racism".

I believe what the Trump Admin does, not what it says.

'Believing what the Trump Admin does' would entail recognizing that no one is getting deported over FEMA funds at all, which is what this is about, whereas this exact event is proposing non-joo-related basis to throw the book at people.

These may not be the doings that the OP and/or you wish to acknowledge, but that is the sort of thing the OP is typically inclined to obfuscate.

Of course, Trump also is pitting the interests of his Jewish donors against the interests of "America First" voters who didn't sign up for endless glazing of a foreign country. The Democrats didn't need any help to provoke a civil war, Joe Biden did that all on its own. By wading in he's provoking an avoidable Republican civil war instead.

There is no Republican civil war about using Democratic Party shibboleths as a potential legal action trigger against members of the Democratic Party.

There has been plenty of wishful thinking by would-be leaders of the right that [their special interest] would be the straw that broke the Trump coalition's back since theirs was the Truly Popular position, but such as it has long been and so it will be going forward.

On the contrary, it looks like Trump is himself being baited into an untenable position by his donors/blackmailers. Unconditional support for Israel to the point of punishing American citizens is taking the 20 on a 80-20 issue.

'Trump is being bribed / blackmailed into unamerican activities to the disgust all true Americans' has been a political attack line longer than his time in office. It remains as credible as ever.

Well they're denying it's specifically Israel now. https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1952482455954341930

Nevermind that people could see the original document where it literally said Israel, and that this tweet even reinforces that they plan to deny federal emergency aid over boycotting them ("including as it relates to the BDS movement"

I wonder how they feel about putting tariffs on Israeli goods then? It's the government making the Israeli products more expensive through taxes for the express purpose of reducing sales, seems like that isn't far from antisemitism if boycotting is.

As I've said before- the people drawing this stuff up are right wing Catholics(because that is who staffs conservative policy-making/writing) who do not believe there is anything special about Jews and are, currently, not fans of Israel due to some recent events in Gaza. This is about making democrats fight each other.

Judging by the violent reaction from Trump supporters and the instant retraction and attempt at ass covering by DHS it seems the actual reaction has been to make Republicans fight each other* instead. I've hardly seen any reaction to this at all from the dems besides "Fell For It Again Award" memes

*or at least, right wingers; I'll grant most are probably 'right wing independents' rather than registered Republicans

Numerous Jewish activist organizations have long lobbied for anti-BDS legislation and these sorts of measures for decades. Blaming this on Catholics is just delusional.

The people who actually wrote these policies are not Jewish. The people who made the decision to actually go through with it are not jewish. Jewish organizations have been asking for this for a long long time and not getting their way. This is about a cudgel for hitting democrats with.

You do not know any of that. The question is, whoever wrote it, were they influenced by pressure from Jewish interest groups? Of course they are.

Jewish organizations have been asking for this for a long long time and not getting their way.

Per wikipedia:

As of 2024, 38 states have passed bills and executive orders designed to discourage boycotts of Israel.[6] Many of them have been passed with broad bipartisan support.[7] Most anti-BDS laws have taken one of two forms: contract-focused laws requiring government contractors to promise that they are not boycotting Israel; and investment-focused laws, mandating public investment funds to avoid entities boycotting Israel.[8] Separately, the U.S. Congress has considered anti-boycott legislation in reaction to the BDS movement. The U.S. Senate passed S.1, which contained anti-boycott provisions, on 28 January 2019, by a vote of 74–19. The U.S. House passed a resolution condemning the boycott of Israel on 24 July 2019, by a vote of 398–17. Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Mike Braun (R-IN), Rick Scott (R-FL), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), and Steve Daines (R-MT) reintroduced the Combating BDS Act of 2023.

This is about a cudgel for hitting democrats with.

No it is it not. It is about Israeli/Jewish influence in American politics and culture. Here's the ADL's stance on BDS which is now the official stance of FEMA- that BDS is intrinsically anti-semitic and therefore racist.

This is about making democrats fight each other.

This seems like a really sad claim. At least "to counter illegal discrimination" would be a somewhat acceptable excuse for cutting emergency aid for tornado/fire/hurricane/earthquake victims, many of whom of course would be centrist/conservative/griller types because even the most partisan of states still tend to be like 60/40-65/35, it'd at least be for a nominal cause of reducing harm elsewhere even if I disagree that BDS is so harmful that it's worth cutting emergency aid.

But to cut aid to own the libs? That's the reason? Just seems cruel then.

Edit: Oh and just obvious thing, the Dem states could also just be like "nah we don't care about helping out the conservative areas either then" if they felt like being cruel in response and focusing their state level recovery resources on the blue areas. Hopefully they wouldn't do that, but it's very easy for them to just shrug and go "welp it's not enough of an emergency for the feds so that rural area can just deal with it themselves"

If the goal is just discrimination, why single out Israel specifically? It’s an odd flex considering that there are other trade partners that would qualify under anti discrimination rules (India, Japan, Korea, Latin America, etc.) but they don’t get the same protections. If I passed a law in North Dakota that said “no money goes to Asian countries,” it’s perfectly fine. If I do the same with South Asia, again, fine. It’s only when North Dakota says “we aren’t buying from Israel,” that anything happens.

Do they need the protections?

I can see the benefit of writing every law broadly and neutrally based on unchanging principles, but at the same time there's no practical difference between "any country affected by X (it's just Israel)" and "Israel (because it's the only country affected by X)".

As an example, Google negotiated an exemption from Canada's Online News Act (otherwise it would have to pay some unknown hundreds of millions of dollars to journalists, negotiated individually), and the bill calls out the #1 search engine in Canada instead of naming them explicitly.

Note that they've removed this already. It appears they've been adding the same anti-BDS language to various grant proposals; I would guess it's a result of pressure from the State Department, since Rubio is known to be strongly anti-BDS.

If I passed a law in North Dakota that said “no money goes to Asian countries,” it’s perfectly fine.

Is it? The Constitution puts almost all powers of international relations at the federal level. States aren't allowed to engage in treaties or establish their own taxes on goods entering or leaving the country.

Arguably some states do this in practice: a few have somewhat banned certain Chinese companies (TikTok, Huawei), but most of those laws/rules at least claim to be following federal guidance.

States aren't allowed to engage in treaties or establish their own taxes on goods entering or leaving the country.

Yes, but they are allowed to choose how to spend their own money. State governments have the same right not to trade with Israel if they don't want to that you or I do.

Per the Constitution as interpreted by SCOTUS, the right not to do business you don't want to do can be revoked by explicit legislation, but there is no such legislation in this case. In a comedic prequel to the Obamacare litigation, there used to be a law (adopted in response to the Arab boycott of Israel) mandating large multinational companies do business with Israel. Naturally, the mandate was phrased as a tax.

That seems possible as applied to state government expenditures (likely subject to federal rules like the one in question, subject to future court rulings).

We never did get a ruling on California's attempt to boycott several red states, which at least seems related. But in a world in which the court accepts Wickard, I suspect the feds would win both the domestic and foreign state expenditures questions if it makes it to court.

"The Feds" aren't a unitary actor here. The point of Wickard etc. is that Congress can regulate anything as long as it does so as part of a coherent scheme which mostly regulates interstate commerce. If Trump tries to punish states and municipalities which boycott Israel, it will be a statutory interpretation case about whether Congress did or not.

Oh and just obvious thing, the Dem states could also just be like "nah we don't care about helping out the conservative areas either then" if they felt like being cruel in response and focusing their state level recovery resources on the blue areas

These areas are usually not blatantly violating federal law.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency stated in grant notices posted on Friday that states must follow its "terms and conditions." Those conditions require they certify they will not sever “commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies” to qualify for funding.

I don't see any congressional approval for this condition anywhere in the statute, so I expect it won't last long in court.

To back up a bit, there is a whole area of law concerning when and how the federal government can attach strings to money granted to the states, because doing so can in some cases be coercive (see. e.g. SD v Dole). Since it raises constitutional concerns, the Court has said that Congress must do so in unambiguous terms. This is likewise a parallel with various other kinds of Federal preemption: Congress can preempt a variety of State laws, but respect for State's rights mean that if it wishes to do so, it has to legislate it clearly rather than having the courts infer preemption.

As I see it, this is just a totally illegal addition of "terms and conditions" to the spending that Congress didn't justify. It might arguably within the power of the Federal Government to impose such a condition, but seems very obviously not within the power of the executive, acting without a clear congressional statement, to do so.

The FEMA logic is that BDS is intrinsically racist. They stated this directly in their tweet explaining their policy in reaction to the backlash.

Irrespective of whether that's true, there is no explicit intent by Congress here.

There is not some kind of magic escape hatch from constitutional law that is invoked by putatively combating racism. If anything, I would have expected the Biden DOJ to put forward that kind of wonky theory (e.g. in SFFA) not the Trump one.

There is not some kind of magic escape hatch from constitutional law that is invoked by putatively combating racism.

There is. Christopher Caldwell calls it the Civl Rights Constitution. It's what allows the government to require employers to fire you for racist speech on the job, in order to encourage you not to be racist at home either. (Davis v. Monsanto Chemical Co. 858 F.2d 345). It's also what allows the government to engage in viewpoint discrimination with respect to 501(c)(3) qualification (Bob Jones Univ. v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983))

Bob Jones is gonna come in extremely handy in the current administration v university dustup.

It is. I'd prefer it was overturned and we got the First Amendment back, but that ain't going to happen, so sharpening the other edge of that blade is the next best thing.

Yesterday, it was surreptitiously edited to remove all reference to Israel.


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