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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25930 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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Canadian judges routinely give lighter sentences to immigrants than citizens for the same crimes. This started in 2013, when an immigrant was convicted and sentenced to 2 years for drug trafficking, and successfully argued that it should be two years less a day to avoid extra immigration consequences. Now, a sex offender gets discharged instead of sentenced after being found guilty.

From another case:

“Mr. Khant [accused of arranging sex with a 15-year old] is a permanent resident seeking Canadian citizenship and professional licensing,” wrote the judge. “A conviction would not only delay his citizenship by four years but could also prevent him from sponsoring his wife and obtaining his engineering licence.

To which I respond: Good. The tests for citizenship, sponsorship, and professional licenses are supposed to exclude sex offenders, and doing so by looking at criminal convictions and sentence length should be a reliable standard. Instead, the judge decided he didn't like what they would do with accurate reports, so he gave a different answer instead.

If I was in charge of the professional licensing body or citizenship and immigration, that would piss me off to no end. I want to know if the accused's conduct was 90-days-of-prison bad, or not that bad. Given that information, I would choose to kick them out (or not). Instead, the judge is taking that out of my hands by reporting whether it's 90-days-of-prison-and-loss-of-licence-and-deportation-and-etc. bad or not. If the judge doesn't share my opinion on the value of a sex-offender-free workplace (and there's no indication that he does), then I can't trust that he summed it up properly.

Also: The Onion hits different 14 years later: Being tried as a black man would be great given how pervasive sentencing adjustments are.

From your 2nd link

he did show “some response to younger females” in phallometric testing, but he agreed to take therapy in light of the finding

TIL.

We have discussed this before. As Scott writes when describing US sex taboos:

Acknowledging even the slightest attraction to anyone under 18 makes you a monster, but people who are just slightly older than 18 - even by one day - are called “barely legal” and feature especially prominently in sexual imagery.

Personally, I suspect that a majority of men are hard-wired to be attracted to any fertile-looking female. Some might be more into teen porn and some might be more into MILF porn, but very few will say that B cups or D cups are a hard no in the same way a beard and a cock are for most men.

So I do not think that measuring if the perp gets a boner from the average 15yo female is going to be very crucial information. If he has two brain cells to rub together, the next hooker he will hire will be of legal age. Who gives a fuck if it is a 19yo who could pass for 15 or if she is a 30yo MILF?

Personally, I also do not think that we should take all the information which affects re-offending probability into account. If the perp was sexually abused as a child, has a brother who is serving time, comes from a bad neighborhood, was raised by a single parent, has a father with a criminal record, is black, is unemployed, or is irreligious, that could all be statistical risk factors for re-offending.

But criminal sentencing is not only about preventing re-offending (even if harsher lower the risk of re-offending after release -- which may or may not be the case). It is also crucial for a stable society that it is seen as broadly fair. In fact, this very discussion is about a way in which it is unfair!

In my opinion, besides the specifics of the case, sentencing should only be based on prior convictions. Of course, the defense is free to argue that the accused has found god or is really into MILFs or whatever.

Also from your 2nd link:

At the top end, Canadian law requires that judges take immigration consequences into account in sentencing “provided that the sentence that is ultimately imposed is proportionate to the gravity of the offence and the degree of responsibility of the offender.” At no point did we explicitly legislate this: rather, in 2013, it was decided by the Supreme Court, in a judgment authored by now-Chief Justice Richard Wagner.

So the case with the 15yo sex worker sting was not an activist judge, but simply a judge applying the law as it is.

I certainly think that the SC ruling is bad. I mean, it is good that courts can take into account consequences outside of criminal law when determining what punishment is appropriate. If someone has spent a decade on the run in shitty conditions, or had his marriage or professional life destroyed by his deed, that might be factors to reduce their prison sentence compared to someone who experienced no negative feedback. If you know that the defendant will get deported after his sentence either way, you might shave off a year off the sentence (on the assumption that most citizen criminals would not take that trade).

However, doing this proactively -- to avoid issuing a prison sentence because it would have further unpleasant consequences -- seems silly. I mean, I can construct a case where the predictable consequences of a 90 day prison sentence are deportation to Afghanistan and getting beheaded by the Taliban, and I can see that a judge would be unwilling to sentence someone to their death for a minor crime. But this is not the case here. Staying in Canada as a permanent resident for another four years before getting his citizenship does not seem like undue harshness.

the value of a sex-offender-free workplace

Hard disagree here. If you really think that workplaces should not employ convicted sex offenders, are you then willing to pay them unemployment benefits for the rest of their lives? Or do you think they should just get the death penalty, or be forced to beg in the streets?

The idea of criminal rehabilitation requires people to find employment. After an offender has served their sentence, they should join the workforce again.

For professional licences, there are sometimes higher standards, because these come with a lot of additional responsibility. You do not want a habitual drug dealer as an officer of the court, or drunk driver as a doctor. Because of the privileges offered by such jobs, we want to filter for people who take laws extra serious, on the presumption that if they do not take general laws serious, they might also cut corners in professional regulations.

So the case with the 15yo sex worker sting was not an activist judge, but simply a judge applying the law as it is.

There's actually an interesting question there: if something is not legislated, but a judge sets a precedent (particularly without apparent basis), is that "the law"?

Yes, if the judge is high enough in the food chain. This is called case law.

For example, Roe v. Wade was case law made by the SCOTUS which made abortion legal in the US on a flimsy interpretation of the 14th amendment, and that stood for 50 years.

I'm getting at the philosophy-of-law question, not current custom. Lots of non-Anglo countries reject precedent. The philosophical question is mostly reliability vs. justice (after all, a bad precedent is literally judges getting a decision wrong; following that precedent is getting it wrong again).

Precedent also potentially worsens the "rogue judiciary" problem, since it allows a few rogue justices to control their inferiors more easily and their successors at all.

so the presumably if we follow this logic a CEO of a company would get a shorter custodial sentence than an unemployed person because the extra consequences will be much larger for the CEO. if you have special circumstances that will make punishments extra costly then you should make extra effort to not break the law.

Of course, this is not the actual logic. What's actually going on is plain old sympathy.

Directionally, I am okay with that, provided that the long term consequences for the CEO are real, which seems doubtful. On the other hand, having a fat bank account allows for a much nicer prison term ('work' release etc), and having a nice life despite a criminal record.

As another example, suppose someone kills a kid in a DUI crash. If it is their own kid, then it seems very likely that the killing will haunt them for the rest of their days. If it is some unrelated kid, it will not affect the median person as much. So I am fine with giving the filicide a shorter prison sentence.

The problem being that except for a fairly small number of jobs, there’s no way to prevent this person from having contact with children. Warehouses might be about the only low-skill job available where you could guarantee that at no time is he in contact with a child. As far as professionals, most of them are public contact jobs, so again he’ll be able to contact children.

Well, he was trying to hire what he believed to be a 15yo sex worker, not luring 8yo's into his van.

While I think that putting him in a person with authority over minors (e.g. teacher, youth pastor, pediatrician) would be a bad idea, I also think that jobs where he just might have occasional contact with minors seem non-problematic. Car mechanics typically do not spend a lot of time alone with kids, for example. Nor do construction workers.

In most jobs, you have fewer opportunities to groom minors during working hours than you have once your shift is over. Even working in a supermarket would be fine. Sure, there is some chance that he ends up with another 15yo alone in the market, but "trying to get random 15yo girls to do sex work" is much stupider than "trying to hire a 15yo sex worker".

If the individual is allowed to be out in public unfettered he will have some non-zero contact with children. For example if he gets sent to do community service picking up trash in a public park, there likely will be children playing in the park at some point. The bigger issue is making sure that someone like that is not in a position of trust or authority over minors that they could leverage inappropriately. If they can't be trusted in public spaces at all, they should be incarcerated. Obviously this guy should have been deported though.

Do we have to guarantee that absolutely zero contact with children of any kind is had by that person to be reasonably sure they don't have opportunities to diddle them?

At the top end, Canadian law requires that judges take immigration consequences into account in sentencing “provided that the sentence that is ultimately imposed is proportionate to the gravity of the offence and the degree of responsibility of the offender.” At no point did we explicitly legislate this: rather, in 2013, it was decided by the Supreme Court, in a judgment authored by now-Chief Justice Richard Wagner.

Singh was found guilty of sexual assault at trial. But he wasn’t convicted. Instead, in January, he was given a discharge by Justice A. J. Brown. The judge explained that a conviction would automatically result in deportation without a right to appeal

A lenient sentence is not the same thing as no conviction.

Both are insane. The former perverts the intent of the legislative branch of government, and the latter is some form of bizarro judicial equivalent of jury nullification.

It is clearly, completely and permanently over for Canada. It’s interesting that there was a huge drama in Britain a few months ago over the possibility that certain kinds of sentencing impact reports (which were non-binding but could theoretically play on the emotions of a judge) would be granted automatically for non-whites, LGBT and women but not automatically for straight white men. The (Labour) government threatened to abolish the commission that determines this kind of thing and then forced them into repealing that guidance.

Meanwhile Canada has been officially and openly granting huge sentence reductions on the basis of race for years. The left just won another majority. Even the Canadian right is less anti-immigration than Keir Starmer. Canada’s constitutional system and political deadlock make major reform of human rights law that would allow for mass deportations (which would require packing the Supreme Court, which has rules about who can be elevated that limit it to the almost entirely progressive judiciary) effectively impossible.

Canada and Belgium are the two western countries that are furthest gone with regards to mass immigration, and the two for which I would argue recovery is categorically impossible1, without any likely or reasonably viable routes. Both share the misfortune of having developed as multi-national states with little shared loyalty or national character, making them perhaps uniquely incapable of articulating any kind of anti-immigration position. Maybe the numbers will wane a little, but nobody already there (now getting citizenship and permanent residency by the hundreds of thousands a year) is going home.

1 it is probably also over in The Netherlands, England and Wales, Ireland and Sweden. Weird and unpredictable things will happen in France, although I think hardcore republican assimilationism is more likely than remigration. I think the far right will come to power in Germany, Austria or both. Spain and Portugal will become Latin American countries with large African diasporas. The rest is harder to predict.

I think the far right will come to power in Germany, Austria or both.

Don't get my hopes up, and don't you dare be wrong about it.

Also, even if - the far right is known to bungle it.

The left just won another majority.

Small comfort lies in that it was not in fact a majority -- nobody else is keen to force an election at the moment, and Carney is vulnerable on way too many fronts to easily juggle.

Unless he's a lot more competent than he looks, I give him 18 months.

We're probably still fucked (2019 was our "let's roll" moment, and we... did not roll) but there's still faint hope.

This assumes that there will be a Canada in the future, which is increasingly doubtful- Alberta and Saskatchewan hate their status as provinces that pay all the bills, and Quebec only stays in because of bribes paid for with their money, and discontiguous states fighting over a shrinking pie have a way of dissolving.

Has there been a non-Baltic Western state that dissolved in the last couple of centuries? I can't think of any offhand. Austria-Hungary was dissolved by force post WW1, as was Germany post WW2.

Dissolved as split into smaller states, or dissolved as abolished?

If the latter, numerous small (but very ancient) small German and Italian states vanished during 19th century.

Has there been a non-Baltic Western state

Did you mean non-Balkan — meaning to hold the breakup of Yugoslavia as an exception — or did you really mean non-Baltic? Because I'm not familiar with any of the Baltic states having "dissolved."

Because you really shouldn't confuse those two.

Because I'm not familiar with any of the Baltic states having "dissolved."

They got invaded and conquered by the USSR, and then the USSR-including-them dissolved.

Sorry :) I meant Balkan, I was trying to exclude Yugoslavia.

Ireland and the vast majority of the British empire, including Western countries like Canada, Australia...

Czechoslovakia, and if you include them as western, the Mexican Empire and Yugoslavia.

Canada’s constitutional system and political deadlock make major reform of human rights law that would allow for mass deportations (which would require packing the Supreme Court, which has rules about who can be elevated that limit it to the almost entirely progressive judiciary) effectively impossible.

The government can bypass the Courts even on issues of fundamental rights. Poilevre threatened this as a way to get round judges blocking penalties for criminals.

So, theoretically, a Canadian PM could come in and just hit ignore every time the judiciary tries to interfere with their immigration law. But this has never happened and I don't even know how people would react if it did.

In Lieu Of Dystopian Sci-Fi Movie, American Just Watching News From England. I've been unironically doing this for a few weeks now.

Canada is even worse. It's time to start building a wall to the north, and thinking about how we're going to handle it when that expanse of desolate wasteland fully devolves into a third world shithole.

Building a wall is a little silly. I'm pro-immigration, but in this case that l means I think the amerian military should immigrate into ottowa and annex it. Canadians are very aware that they aren't a real country-- this is the obvious solution to that.

As a Canadian, I would be in favor of this on the condition that you get your own shit under control before you start messing with ours. When I make a list of possible solutions to Canada's political dysfunctions, "Invasion by US military under Donald Trump" does not rank highly.

I mean, also as a Canadian - I’d definitely take “Invasion by US military under Donald Trump” over “Liberals import 3% of our population per year.”

YMMV.

The problem is that judges are people.

For example, it used to be the procedure in the Netherlands that, assuming good behaviour, you only served two thirds of your sentence. The remaining third you'd normally be on parole.

This was removed in order to be tough on crime, and this changed pretty much nothing, because: judges are people. They're using their judgement. They also know the laws and procedures, including this one. So under the old system, if you really wanted to put someone away for ten years, you'd give fifteen. And now, if they want to put you away for ten years, they just give you the ten.

We also have that same law that foreigners who are sentenced to two years or more in prison, should be deported afterwards. This seems on the face of it like a very reasonable law. If you've done something that bad, we'll probably be better off without you around.

But again: judges are people. If the judge doesn't think someone should be deported, they are not going to hand out a sentence that automatically comes with deportation. They are going to hand out a lighter sentence. So now we're having Afghan rapists sentenced to 20 months.

The politicians are now talking about implementing mandatory minimum sentences in order to fix the problem. My guess is, it won't work. If a judge doesn't want to give a sentence, he won't. If he has to acquit the criminal entirely in order to avoid it, he will.

If you want tougher judgements you need to appoint tougher judges.

I don't see the connection between 'being a person' and therefor automatically being inclined to give foreign rapists light sentences.

To me it doesn't seem reasonable or humane, just cowardly and sick. Being so wrapped up in and simultaneously so blind to ones own twisted moral intuition that it becomes practically impossible to differentiate between the person raping a 15 year old and the person calling them a pig is not 'normal'.

I think it would be a lot more pertinent for people like this to examine their state of mind and how it has managed to drive them towards results such as this. But it seems like we've managed to build an impervious wall that keeps people away from exploring the true extent of the problem and just what feeds these 'outgroup sycophants' to do what they do.

Judges are people in the sense that they have the ability to do what they want. Judges can just change what they do(remember, they're on average very intelligent individuals). This makes bossing them around complicated.

Considering what's on display, it doesn't seem very complicated to boss them around. As they look to be captive by the same process that most others are captive by. The belief is that the ingroup needs to sacrifice to make amends with the outgroup.

People who hold this belief feel it is their moral right to sacrifice other peoples children to make the bigger picture come together. And considering it has been decided as an economic policy to move vast amounts of third world browns around, and Europe has built a justice system based on European peoples and their comparatively more peaceful and redeemable criminals, what else is there for these judges to do? Just like the government and journalists in Sweden who hide the knowledge of race based crime statistics from the public in the name of solidarity and progress. It's literally the only play that makes sense when holding oneself to egalitarian priors.

Judges being people doesn't seem to be a problem at all. It actually looks like a perfectly functioning limb of an unassailable system that one can't be against without being literally Hitler.

It's also hard to overrule a judge and even harder to get rid of one. They aren't vulnerable to the normal ways of forcing public servants to follow instructions from above. Western democracies are designed to make it difficult for politicians to directly control the judiciary.

Western democracies are designed to make it difficult for politicians to directly control the judiciary.

Which is yet another reason "Western democracy" needs to go. Bring in an Augustus who will solve this swiftly and decisively.

There ARE ways to deal with bad judges in Canada. For instance we had a case where a judge asked a raped women why she didn’t simply shut her legs harder. Iirc the law society basically got him off the bench for that, a big No No. if we wanted the public could pressure similar measures, but we probably won’t. Canadians are addicted to being Nice but even moreso to being Not Like Americans. If America is deporting foreigner criminals., why, we’ll just NOT deport them and maybe even give them a reward for it too. See how not American we are? Such moral superiority is truly a reward on its own.

Yes this problem is everywhere.

Judges were originally given a tenure-like 'life' appointment to protect them from short term blowback from their sentencing, but by doing so the system can't deal with them if they repeatedly hit the defect button against community expectations.

There needs to be a way to indict, recall or otherwise censure judges that do this. Maybe an oversight sentencing board that can be appealed to by victims to review sentencing. And have members of that board be elected for a term of 2-3 years.

The politicians are now talking about implementing mandatory minimum sentences in order to fix the problem. My guess is, it won't work.

America ran this experiment. Did it fail?

My impression is that the subversion of the punishment now happens when prosecutors refuse to charge or hold criminals or the law is changed on things like felony shoplifting, not judges failing to deliver the legally mandated minimum.

I think the overt politicization of the American judiciary makes it better in this case. Each individual judge may be biased, but since both sides get to appoint judges, and fight over it, the justice system as a whole ends up fairly representative.

In most of Europe on the other hand the justice system is treated as an apolitical, bureaucratic organization. The judges should be professionals, and leave their biases at home. The public shouldn't care about the judges, in the same way that we shouldn't have to care about minor functionaries in other random government departments, who are just hired on the basis of their skill set and are there to do a job.

So in the Netherlands: the Minister of Justice appoints the head of the Council for the Judiciary. This council in turn appoint the heads of the courts. The courts then hire judges. In practice even the ministerial selection is done based on a shortlist, and the courts too make shortlists. The minister could maybe ram through a political appointee if he really wanted (and get everyone to yell InDePeNdEnT JuDiCiArY), but that political appointee would have no institutional support and get nothing done.

This all sounds very nice in theory, but in practice everyone (except, depending on how the election went, the minister) is a fairly serious progressive by now, and they will always make progressive rulings, and hire more progressives. And there's no way to change that except by going full Orban.

prosecutors refuse to charge or hold criminals or the law is changed on things like felony shoplifting

I don't actually have much of a problem with this in the American context. The laws are made democratically, and almost everywhere in the US, the district attorney is also an elected position.

If a DA gets elected on the promise not to charge criminals, then indeed doesn't charge criminals, then gets reelected, then clearly the people actually want this. At that point I can't really disagree with it. I disagree with the stance, but not with implementing the results of the vote. If the median voter of e.g. Portland really is this progressive, then yes, so should the government of Portland be.

The problem comes when these people are appointed by "the system" and cannot be removed.

Judges do all kinds of dubious things beyond their social remit. Just today I was reading a long book-screenshot thread from arctotherium that touched on this: https://x.com/arctotherium42/status/1956872568637739354/photo/1

"Racially and socially homogenous schools damage the minds of children who attend them" per the judge. And so there was all this white flight and bussing because some judge was allowed to run rampant.

In Australia we had a judge ruling that a minister handling approvals for a coal mine had a duty of care to teenagers who would be affected by the 'climate crisis'. This was later overruled as the Federal Court decided that this was really a matter for legislation and the government rather than judges. But the fact it was even considered is bad. Judges should be limited to obviously legal cases like crimes and straightforward application of law. You can introduce a duty of care argument for any policy if you really try. Duty of care should be restricted to more direct, obvious examples like making sure that stairs in a supermarket aren't slippery and hazardous, not social or economic engineering.

In the Netherlands, courts order Shell to reduce emissions under duty of care and EU human rights regarding 'right to life and the right to family life': https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57257982

Or in Britain they take on the role of Gosplan, issuing decrees on worker's wages under the equality act and wrecking local governments with huge payout bills. There's a pattern of naive/stupid legislators giving judges the right to interpret laws reasonably a

Or in Britain they take on the role of Gosplan, issuing decrees on worker's wages under the equality act and wrecking local governments with huge payout bills. There's a pattern of naive/stupid legislators giving judges the right to interpret laws reasonably a

He must have died while writing this. Perhaps he was dictating?

It's been a longtime since I've seen Candle Jack, maybe he did i

I often edit my posts after writing them (a short while after, before anyone can read them). Sometimes I cancel the edit, or alter something else and leave a thought unfinished. On balance it wasn't a good line of argument and should've been deleted.

Sometimes it's the legislative branch assuming that a court should interpret this reasonably and then the court going all the way, other times it's just bad politics that makes bad law and then that ties the judges hands so they have to make bad decisions.

Some irony in me criticising others and failing to finish the very sentence where I bemoan, though my opinions on this thrice derived rationality forum don't matter at all.

So Roblox is getting a lot of press lately, and it's been very negative. They're ostensibly a place for kids, but it's been known for years that pedophiles and child predators are on their platform, they keep grooming and raping minors, and barely anything is done about them if ever. Lately they banned Chris Hansen 'To Catch A Predator' style stings, banned and sent a C&D to someone who has gotten multiple pedophiles arrested using those stings, and defended their ban by *checks notes* saying "vigilantes" are just as bad as predators. As a result, they're being sued by the Louisiana attorney general, and even Chris Hansen is getting involved (by making a documentary).

It's too early to tell what the outcome of all this will be, but some people are concerned about potential government overreach, especially with recent pushes for mandatory online ID verification (and we all know people doxing themselves like that never goes wrong) and other laws passed in the name of children's online safety (like the UK's Online Safety Act, which proved to be too burdensome for a hamster forum to continue operating). Especially because Roblox isn't the only platform with a predator problem that isn't getting better.

I think that ID verification is bad, but pedophiles are also bad. My take (if slightly conspiratorial) is that people in positions of power are deliberately letting the pedophile problem grow out of control so they can justify implementing draconian ID verification measures. The public sees this false dichotomy between letting pedophiles run rampant and ID verification, and chooses ID verification as the lesser of two evils, when that's far from the case. Roblox (and Discord) had people working for free to rid their platforms of predators, and all they had to do was let them be. Yet they deliberately went out of their way to ban anybody who got pedophiles arrested, meanwhile doing little to the pedophiles themselves. It's a huge WTF moment and makes you wonder what the end goal is.

It's a huge WTF moment and makes you wonder what the end goal is.

Why? This behavior chain is quite comprehensible once you're willing to put the associated emotions aside.

Sure, you could go full Club Penguin and make the service as useless for actual communication as you can, but if you do that the ability for users to interact with each other more generally is severely curtailed. Once that happens, and they jump to other less-secure platforms like IRC[1], now all bets are off- and if you consider "it started here and then it moved to [X] platform" to still carry a risk of reputational damage (and we'll note the article validates this perspective) you're likely going to decide to thread the needle by attempting to keep your chat platform just functional enough that your users stick to yours, where you at least have control of content filtering (and again, you can't turn it up to max because if you do your users are more likely to take the cues and leave or find parallel methods of communication, so you're not going to put many resources into this and are going to focus on keeping a low profile).

saying "vigilantes" are just as bad as predators

Well, they kind of are- they foul up any actual investigation, intentionally antagonize existing users, and they actively encourage the bad behavior. "Wow, how horrible, people are willing to give you free Vbucks if you send them nudes" is not a meme I [as a platform] would want to encourage, because there are obviously plenty of kids willing to make that trade if prompted![2]

(The same argument can be made for not glamorizing mass killers/shooters- it puts the meme in public consciousness, much like "hey kid, want a ride in my van/some candy/to help me find my dog?" is, which is why even though kids are heavily inoculated against it those lines still get used by predators today.)

So then, in an environment of such inoculation, what could they possibly be doing? Well, about that...

It appears to me that there are a couple of pathways this stuff typically follows. Most of this is obfuscated for reasons- some honest, some not, but examining the nature of what happens is important if you actually want to reduce incidences of the actual problem.

The first one is the OnlyFans model, which works on anyone literate enough to read a DM. This can take a few forms- the "send me nudes and I'll send you Vbucks" one perhaps the most common, but can extend into non-monetary goods like gaining access to more exclusive social groups as well. This is a standard commercial transaction, and any kid who's ever run a lemonade stand understands how that works.

Now, how does that go wrong? Well, either the goods aren't ever delivered (and I'm more concerned about the contract violation than I am about what's being transacted), or the 'price' of entry to that club is raised (either 'send more nudes to continue' or 'because I know who you are, I'll tell everyone you know about this business') and the calculus now being made is 'send the nudes or lose all my friends'. The problems with that should be obvious- everyone hates getting ripped off that way.

Obviously the way to avoid that is simply by teaching kids to practice safe SECS with the end goal of making sure that, should they engage in this business, they retain the ability to disengage without further cost. You'll recognize that as the conceit of the "meh, sex isn't a big deal" point of view, and that's not an accident. The other way to do it is simply ensure your child artificially puts a price on their nudes that's so high there's no risk of them selling it, but this abstinence-only method tends to disappoint parents with its effectiveness. (Which, naturally, is why it's only these people that ever go pedo-hunting.)

The second one is the "secret romance"/"special friend" model, which only seems to work on young adults (13-16) and not actual children (<12), probably because their biology isn't demanding that from them yet. It's naturally more prevalent here than it is anywhere else because this is basically the only place left that age group can interact with older people with some low-barrier common cause and with relative safety to disengage.

Hardening your targets against that is... more complicated.

[1] Discord is literally just IRC, so the same complaints we had back in the 90s remain true today. The same mitigations do too- "don't use your real name or give out your address because if you do, your ability to control the engagement goes out the window"- but whoring for favors (and just... general stupidity) is pretty clearly perennial.

[2] One man's victim blaming is another man's disregard of obvious agency, and online is, perhaps paradoxically, obviously the most difficult place to try and rape someone specifically because your power is gone as soon as the victim reaches for that "off" switch (unless other conditions are met) in a way that really doesn't exist when they're right in front of you. This interaction takes two in a way most other environments do not, and ignoring that truth is not doing one's analysis any favors.

In a fight against "preventing pedophilia at all costs" and "making sure de facto freedoms for the under-18 set are not sacrificed on the pyre of protecting the stupid from themselves", I'm picking the latter. Bearing witness to the horrors that have been unleashed upon (and by) my generation that destroyed everything except for the Internet as that frontier has hardened my heart against those that would destroy that too.

so they can justify implementing draconian ID verification measures

They were going to do this anyway.

It's never about reducing kid-fucking, literally nobody cares about that, it's all about paying your supporters with the right to fuck kids (the "drain the swamp" people are directionally correct here). Quite literally, when we're talking about the UK.

Well, they kind of are- they foul up any actual investigation

I'm not in the loop on this one. Has there been any actual investigation since the game got popular with the youth? If so, have we seen any punishments handed out, or changes to the developer's behaviors and practices?

Sure, you could go full Club Penguin and make the service as useless for actual communication as you can

You don't need to do this. You just need to ban pedophiles when people report them. Which Roblox seems to be refusing to do.

they foul up any actual investigation

This doesn't make sense to say when Schlep (the banned "vigilante") has gotten multiple pedophiles arrested in real life.

intentionally antagonize existing users

I'm not aware of any instances of this happening.

"Wow, how horrible, people are willing to give you free Vbucks if you send them nudes"

To my knowledge, none of the investigations involved the bait sending nudes of a child to a predator for currency. I would assume you were just throwing this out as an example but then you spend a lot of words elaborating on exchanging nudes for Vbucks. In any case, it is extremely oversimplified to think that children are being sexually exploited only because they're being paid to do so.

your power is gone as soon as the victim reaches for that "off" switch (unless other conditions are met)

That "unless other conditions are met" is doing a lot of work in this sentence. In most cases it's not as simple as blocking the predator precisely because of conditions like: the fact that minors are easily impressionable and manipulated into doing what predators want them to, the perpetrator has gotten their nudes and is threatening to send them to family and friends unless they do what they want. The 764 sextortion cases show that these conditions hold quite frequently.

You don't need to do this. You just need to ban pedophiles when people report them. Which Roblox seems to be refusing to do.

This seems trivial in theory but I encourage you to spend some time thinking about how this process would work in practice, keeping in mind that you need to deal with people who sometimes lie.

Do you just ban everyone who gets accused of being a pedophile? Trivial to implement but obviously abusable.

Do you just ban everyone who has documented proof of being a pedophile? People are willing to go to significant lengths to fabricate evidence, whether for their own fame and attention or to harm the target of a grudge. This adds a lot of work and I still don't think this would weed out false accusations at a satisfactory rate.

If you want a reasonably low false-positive rate I can't see a good way around actually investigating yourself. This takes a lot of work even if everything happened on your own platform. If the first step of the process is to establish off-platform communication and the bad behavior occurs there it's likely impossible to properly investigate.

You don't need to do this. You just need to ban pedophiles when people report them. Which Roblox seems to be refusing to do.

This is the bit that baffles me. I remember the whole Ashton Challenor situation on Reddit and how much pressure it took for Reddit to crack. AIUI, the people doing this on Roblox aren't even employees or mods or anything.

To my knowledge, none of the investigations involved the bait sending nudes of a child to a predator for currency.

For obvious reasons, I should hope.

I would assume you were just throwing this out as an example

It's in the article.

to think that children are being sexually exploited only because they're being paid to do so

Why else would they entertain weird nonsense from a stranger unless they're getting something out of it? (Have you ever seen a child before, much less interacted with one?) Most people only grant access to their nudity behind a paywall because it is actively unpleasant to show it off [much like how most people won't labor unless they're getting something out of it]. Unless they're nudists, I guess, in which case it's questionable if they're being hurt at all (but that's an entirely different conversation).

impressionable

If this was the immovable force you assert it is we wouldn't have this problem, since in that case children would always listen to authority figures that tell them not to do this.

the perpetrator has gotten their nudes and is threatening to send them to family and friends unless they do what they want

And this is unique to online gaming... how, exactly? "Fuck me or I'll kill everyone you know" or "fuck me or I'll get you in trouble" has been part of the bog-standard predator playbook for ever; in my time as much as it is in theirs. The mitigations around it can't be solved for through technological means alone.

The 764 sextortion cases show that these conditions hold quite frequently.

For a playerbase in the tens of millions I don't think this constitutes "frequent". While it may be true that Roblox should ban people more frequently, that wouldn't actually fix their PR problem (like the bomber, the predator will always get through), and the optimal rate of FAFO per year remains nonzero.

Why else would they entertain weird nonsense from a stranger unless they're getting something out of it?

It's not just currency. They can want the approval of adults, the satisfaction of curiosity, or simply somebody to talk to. Many groomed kids have a tumultuous home life and are extremely lonely, for example. My point being that it shouldn't be thought of in pure economic terms, so predators doing this to children is (or should be) unacceptable and predator catchers finding predators this way is (or should be) acceptable.

If this was the immovable force you assert it is we wouldn't have this problem, since in that case children would always listen to authority figures that tell them not to do this.

Again, it's oversimplified to think this way. Being impressionable goes both ways. Sure, some will listen to authority figures and not do this. But some will not, for many reasons such as a preconceived distrust of authorities, being curious thinking "what could go wrong", or simply not knowing of the dangers.

And this is unique to online gaming... how, exactly?

It's not. But Roblox is uniquely refusing to ban predators when people report them.

The mitigations around it can't be solved for through technological means alone.

Yes, but you can just ban predators who are reported to do this. You can at the very least also not ban people who find predators and get them arrested in real life.

While it may be true that Roblox should ban people more frequently, that wouldn't actually fix their PR problem

It's not just "ban people more frequently", it's not banning people who find predators too. I feel like the latter is the biggest cause of their recent PR problem. Their tendency to not ban predators has been reported and documented before but it hasn't caused a huge media circus. Going after people who find predators is just a huge WTF moment.

I do agree that it's impossible to rid platforms of pedophiles before they strike but I'm willing to bet a lot of money that if Roblox suddenly reversed course, unbanned Schlep and started banning reported pedophiles, that their PR problem would virtually disappear overnight.

Have you ever seen a child before, much less interacted with one?

Yes? They're desperate for adult approval.

But as far as these kids know, the person asking them to send nudes is roughly their age. They don’t know they’re talking to a 40-year-old. Plus, I would say that, in general, kids are desperate for the approval of the adults who are already in their lives, not of random adults whom they’ve never met.

I preface this by saying that I'm happier not being on discord or knowing very much about it.

But isn't the whole thing driven by adults entering a child's life with ill intentions? Like isn't that the definition of grooming? I'd suspect that the request for nudes comes when the relationship is already underway.

Discord, Roblox, and Telegram are currently the big 3 IMO when it comes to enabling Child Porn and Child Predators. Other big sites have much better policing, particularly of the images, and the more "specialized" sites usually are more for just the Child Porn, which is of course bad, but there wasn't many child users of Kik, for example, despite of, or perhaps because it was, a hive of scum and villainy.

Discord

Every time I'm foolish enough to venture into a Discord for a game or youtuber I'm interested in, it's full of trans poly individuals proselytizing their lifestyle to children. It's like all those people ever talk about, despite the server ostensibly being about anything else. And of course all the discords have rules against "hate" which means you can't ask them not to.

Roblox has posted two separate responses to the vigilante bannings and none of them come close to saying they're just as bad as the predator. Not even the PCGamer article you're linking to even intimates that. It makes sense that people breaking the terms of service should be banned regardless of what their intention was behind it and anyway if they let this go on, knowing about it, doesn't that open them up to liability in the same way that NBC was potentially going to be held liable for the guy who killed himself on To Catch a Predator before they settled?

I'm not sure about the ID thing, the reason, I've been led to believe, why it's hard for Roblox to police who is actually underage or not is because of COPPA where they can't legally ask for more information from a user that has identified as under 13 unless they get their parents permission. Also, the online Safety Act shutting down that hamster forum was because it has additional requirements not related to age like submitting some kind of safety report on their website and making sure there was no possibly illegal content on the site or be subject to a fine and they opted to shut down rather than risk having to possibly be subject to a fine (or deal with writing a report, maybe).

Recently, when I saw this first come up on reddit there was a comment that talked about how robust the child safety controls are for Roblox, now. You can filter content by maturity or by sensitive topics (political/culture war things), you can hide microtransactions, only allow certain players you designate to join their server and not allow them to join other servers, DMs are not possible to anyone under 13, you can limit their playtime, you can also go through and look at what your kid has been playing, who they've been playing with, their recent public and private chat history. This is just from making a Roblox account and linking it to your kids' account.

I'm not saying there's not a problem but the predators go to Roblox because it has their prey. So, naturally, it has a predator problem. But there's probably (potentially) going to also be a similar problem for any kid that goes on the internet without any supervision or guidance at all.

Roblox has posted two separate responses to the vigilante bannings and none of them come close to saying they're just as bad as the predator.

The second says:

Similar to actual predators, they often impersonated minors, actively approached other users, then tried to lead them to other platforms to have sexually explicit conversations (which is against our Terms of Use).

I don't know how else to read this besides "'vigilantes' are similar to predators". It sounds like a defense attorney arguing that the cop who impersonated a drug buyer is just as bad as an actual drug buyer, on the sole basis of their actions being superficially similar.

It makes sense that people breaking the terms of service should be banned regardless of what their intention was behind it

Unless it updated recently to ban "vigilantes", this is quite a novel interpretation of the terms of service.

if they let this go on, knowing about it, doesn't that open them up to liability in the same way that NBC was potentially going to be held liable for the guy who killed himself on To Catch a Predator before they settled?

Liability for what? The "vigilante" they banned, Schlep, didn't do anything remotely near what NBC did to Bill Conradt. Schlep was just somebody who collected evidence and reported pedophiles to law enforcement.

Arguably, Roblox has just as much liability if not more for the pedophiles they do know about but never ban. Schlep and other so-called "vigilantes" have consistently reported them to Roblox, but they refuse to act in most cases, even if the pedophile has been arrested, and only rarely actually bans them if there is a highly publicized video made about them. Remember that Louisiana's lawsuit isn't the only one Roblox is facing as a result of their refusal to ban pedophiles.

Recently, when I saw this first come up on reddit there was a comment that talked about how robust the child safety controls are for Roblox, now.

Consider the fact that there is an arbitrary limit of 100 games that parents can block for their child before they can't block any more games. This isn't sufficient to prevent their child from being exposed to sex games because there are way more than 100 sex games on the platform and Roblox seemingly does nothing to ban them.

But there's probably (potentially) going to also be a similar problem for any kid that goes on the internet without any supervision or guidance at all.

If the platform they visit actually bans pedophiles when they are reported, there will be much less of a predator problem compared to Roblox.

Similar to actual predators, they often impersonated minors, actively approached other users, then tried to lead them to other platforms to have sexually explicit conversations (which is against our Terms of Use).

I don't know how else to read this besides "'vigilantes' are similar to predators". It sounds like a defense attorney arguing that the cop who impersonated a drug buyer is just as bad as an actual drug buyer, on the sole basis of their actions being superficially similar.

There are a lot of things we let cops do which we do not let random citizens do. If you try to by drugs from a cop and get arrested, "but I was running a vigilante sting operation" is not going to fly.

From my understanding, all relevant parties on Roblox appear as minors. The actual minors appear as minors. The child buggerers pretend to be minors because that is much more likely to be successful -- a 14yo might send nudes to what they perceive as a 15yo, but not to some 30yo creepy dude. The vigilantes pretend to be kids because otherwise the predators would not be interested in them.

Crucially, none of the parties knows the identity of the other party. If two bi-curious 14yo girls trade nudes, then that could be two girls (or 15yo boys!), or any of the five other combinations.

Both the predator and the vigilante have an interest to lure their conversation party off-site and then get them to do something incriminating.

An ethical vigilante would just sit there and wait to be hit on, then play the reluctant-but-willing-to-be-persuaded minor. Even then, that would be rather icky, because there is always a chance that the person on the other end is a minor. Flirting with someone who poses as a minor and might be a minor is bad. And if they go off-platform and the first thing the suspected predator does is sending them a nude selfie which confirms he is indeed a 15yo kid, they might be on the hook for CSAM.

And simply joining with a username like fluttershy_2011 and talking about MLP all day waiting for some creep (or boy) to hit on you might not work very well for vigilantes. So they might take a more active role instead, which would be even more problematic.

So then would you agree that Roblox has said or implied "vigilantes" are just as bad as predators?

You have to get halfway through the Discord article before you get this section:

Many of the parents CNN Business spoke with said they did not enable any of the offered parental controls at the time, mostly because they were in the dark about how the platform works. If enabled, those parental control tools, including one that prohibits a minor from receiving a friend request or a direct message from someone they don’t know, likely could have prevented many of these incidents.

"Yes Discord does provide parental controls that would have prevented these incidents, but we didn't use them so it's still Discord's fault!"

No, your quote says that the parents didn't know that they existed and that's why they didn't use them. And this matches my experience after reading through hundreds if not thousands of publicly available cases of minors being groomed on Discord. The majority of minors don't have parental controls enabled. I don't have any hard figures but my gut feeling is that roughly 0.01% of minors on Discord have an account that is actually under parental controls, if at all.

I think the main problem with them is that it's a completely opt-in system and the minor has to intentionally share a QR code with the parent in order to be connected. So even if we assume they voluntarily link the accounts or are forced by their parents to do it, at any time they can just create another account that is outside the purview of the parents, and they would be none the wiser.

Discord parental controls look to me to be something that Discord can point to and say "hey, we're safe for children!" rather than actually being safe for children.

Bro come on. At some point a parent has to take responsibility here. Why would anyone let their kids just hop onto these websites without doing basic due diligence or educating them on the reality of predators?

If a platform provides robust parental controls then they've done enough, full stop. The baton of responsibility is passed.

Why would anyone let their kids just hop onto these websites without doing basic due diligence or educating them on the reality of predators?

See downthread. There is a pervasive culture of letting your kids have unrestricted Internet access, it's hard to change, and anybody going against it will be seen as overly paranoid.

If a platform provides robust parental controls then they've done enough, full stop. The baton of responsibility is passed.

They should also ban pedophiles when they are reported and proactively look for them too.

I understand there's a culture of letting your kids do whatever they want. I see it every day. It doesn't make it right and more importantly doesn't transfer responsibility to someone else.

My parents (admittedly over 60 now) can't reliably open a browser on a laptop. They certainly have no idea what a QR code is. The idea that parents will be able to find the parental controls, understand what they're doing, and set them independently is unlikely in many cases, so they have to trust their children. In ten years it may be quite different but right now I think that's still the reality and realistically Discord has to bear that in mind.

I don't find this convincing at all. The parents failing here are elder millennials with a smattering of young gen Xers: digital natives. They're being lazy and stupid, and they should know better after being on the Internet at similar ages as their kids.

If your parents are over 60, they are presumably no longer expected to be taking a hand in managing your online activities? (if not, better not tell them about The Motte!)

I'd think that this level of technical incompetence would be a pretty big outlier for anyone much younger than that (ie. current parents of young children) -- anyone I know born after 1970ish can certainly find and navigate parental controls if they have to.

What is the alternative to an opt in system? In this specific case we're taking about the ability to add friends. Is no one allowed to add friends on discord until they prove they are a legal adult? Is that accomplished by setting a drop down box in their profile or must they upload a government issued ID?

How about parents take responsibility for their kids instead of imposing restrictions on all the rest of us because of their laziness.

What is the alternative to an opt in system?

Banning pedophiles from the platform as soon as they are reported, and proactively looking for them too.

How about parents take responsibility for their kids instead of imposing restrictions on all the rest of us because of their laziness.

Easier said than done. There is a pervasive culture of letting your kids have unrestricted Internet access, and I have a feeling that any parent who goes against this norm and, for example, stringently monitors their access or even prohibits them from using the Internet entirely (because arguably, kids shouldn't even be on the Internet at all) is going to get looks from other people, or at least their kid will say "Billy gets to use the Internet, why can't I?" Unless everybody in a community agrees that the Internet is too dangerous for kids to be used unsupervised, reasons like "but predators are online" sound a lot like "I don't let my kid outside after 3 o'clock because a stranger might come and snatch her."

Easier said than done.

You misunderstand: that norm is enforced merely by intentionally refusing to prioritize your version of safety.

reasons like "but predators are online" sound a lot like "I don't let my kid outside after 3 o'clock because a stranger might come and snatch her."

Yes, which is why they're both treated as absurd by psychologically-healthy individuals. Interestingly, the latter is espoused by more parents than it would naturally be since the stranger is far more likely to be the State, which is far more dangerous.

because arguably, kids shouldn't even be on the Internet at all

It is interesting to see the parallels between how the paranoid in our culture seeks to treat children and how fundamentalist Islamic cultures seeks to treat women. I'm not convinced it's good for their personal development, but personal development is not a terminal value in these cultures (Islam worships Allah, westerners worship Safety) and "but muh risk of predation" is merely a fig leaf over that.

I have to admit, this is a bit like kneecap getting accused of terrorism. AFAICT, there is no positive- literally none whatsoever- to children's screentime, and videogames don't have great social effects either. But government overreach is also bad.

The kneecap thing was a hardcore Irish republican activist with a name that directly referenced the IRA telling (if insincerely) a large audience to kill their MP. He could be credibly accused of more than hate speech.

Fair, but I still don't sympathize with the UK government.

letting pedophiles run rampant

It feels to me like 1985 all over again.

Thanks to a legal system that often fails to draw (and often fails to even attempt to draw) a distinction between children who have been kidnapped by strangers, children who have voluntarily run away with strangers, and children who have simply been moved by a responsible adult but in violation of a custody order, it's nigh impossible to say for certain how many pedophiles are out there snatching kids... but "run rampant" does not appear supported by the evidence. I am... skeptical, let's say... that the people "working for free to rid their platforms of predators" should be allowed to do that, because I suspect there are many, many more vigilantes (and aspiring vigilantes) out there doing real and serious harm, than actual child-snatching pedos.

Of course we needn't get all the way to child-snatching; simply exposing children to various forms of degeneracy probably has long-term psychological impacts that are worth considering. But the research on this seems to be hopelessly muddied by culture war matters; moral panic over children's media exposure reaches all the way back to Plato (at least!). I expect we are all shaped by the media we consume, but not always in the most obvious or expected ways.

A while back, when I lived closer to the coast, I typed my address into the national sex offender registry to see how prevalent sex offenders were in my area. I was shocked by how long the list was.

children who have simply been moved by a responsible adult but in violation of a custody order

I assumed the high number had to be related to something like this, so I started looking up news articles and court cases. It's something I regret doing to this day.

The depths of human depravity are far deeper than most people could imagine. Even someone like myself, who was the victim of childhood abuse, failed to realize how profoundly fucked up things can get.

I am... skeptical, let's say... that the people "working for free to rid their platforms of predators" should be allowed to do that, because I suspect there are many, many more vigilantes (and aspiring vigilantes) out there doing real and serious harm, than actual child-snatching pedos.

The "vigilante" that Roblox recently banned is Schlep, and I take issue with him being described as a vigilante. It implies that he is imposing justice on the pedophiles himself, when he is not. All he is doing is collecting evidence and reporting them to law enforcement, as he should. He also reports them to Roblox, but Roblox has consistently refused to ban the predators from their platform, even after they've been arrested, until he makes widely publicized videos about them.

children who have voluntarily run away with strangers

You have to wonder just what % of such strangers are not pederasts or pedos.

children who have voluntarily run away with strangers

You have to wonder just what % of such strangers are not pederasts or pedos.

I mean, presumably most of them are. But what does that amount to? The article I linked suggests that more than 95% of "missing children" cases are runaways, but it is not clear what percent of those run away with someone else. If a 15-year-old runs away with her 16-year-old boyfriend, that often seems to get dropped into the same statistical bucket as a 6-year-old getting snatched off the street, or a 12-year-old who gets removed from an abusive home by her own mother or father violating a custody order. The numbers get turned into a narrative of rampant child endangerment, but the reality is more complicated than that.

Does the 16-year-old boyfriend count as a "stranger" in this context? Either way, whenever teenage girls or boys run away from home, I'm assuming it's usually done on the initiative and with the support of an older man who's usually interested in her sexually, who may or may not be a pimp in reality. In a small minority of cases they run away completely alone, and in another small minority of cases they do so with another teenage love interest. On the other hand, I'm not an expert.

Either way, whenever teenage girls or boys run away from home, I'm assuming it's usually done on the initiative and with the support of an older man who's usually interested in her sexually, who may or may not be a pimp in reality.

This is definitely not true. Most runaways are going solo, or with the assistance of peers (including romantically involved peers). Pimps and predators are real, but far from common.

including romantically involved peers

If that includes people over the age of 18 then we're largely talking about the same thing. I imagine most of these people aren't pimps and they definitely don't think of themselves as sexual predators either way. If any stats are available about this general subject I'd be interested in them.

Sure, you might start here. Some tidbits:

In effect, the more disrupted the family, the greater the likelihood of running away. Youth living with both biological parents were least likely to run away, followed by those with at least one nonbiological parent, those with single mothers, and those in other family structures.

...

The finding that females were more likely than males to run away was unexpected given results from prior research showing that males are more likely than females to have spent the night in a shelter, public place, abandoned building, outside, underground, or in a stranger’s home. In that study, however, youth were not asked directly if they had run away, and some may have had other reasons for being away from home, such as family homelessness. It also is possible that female runaways are more likely to stay in locations not included as response options in that study, such as with a friend or acquaintance (sometimes known as “couch surfing”). Although perhaps less dangerous than other destinations, couch surfing still constitutes a risky environment for youth. Future research should investigate gender differences in patterns and contexts of runaway behavior.

In other words, there is some information available, but for the most part researchers aren't drawing the lines we're drawing here, which is what I mean when I suggest that the statistics on these things conflate a great many complicated and distinguishable events.

It's sad that there's this misapprehension that girls are being kidnapped by abusers, when a huge number of runaway girls (something like 20%-40% in most studies) are fleeing sexual abuse in the home.

It's sad that there's this misapprehension that girls are being kidnapped by abusers, when a huge number of runaway girls (something like 20%-40% in most studies) are fleeing sexual abuse in the home.

Right--I've seen other studies suggesting that a majority (perhaps more than 70%) of runaway girls experience some kind of sexual abuse, but I don't have access to the study to see whether they distinguish based on when and where that abuse occurred (i.e. prior to running away, or as a result of it).

Also, no small number of teens run away from home because they are addicted to drugs and their parents are trying to stop them from using. It really is an extremely multifaceted problem.

or as a result of it

Which is then further complicated by statistics intentionally erasing the distinction between "getting laid was the participant's explicit intention" (and she made the mistake of disclosing it after the fact, or was pressured into such a confession), "had to put out for lodging/food", and "got far more than they bargained for".

The demand for abducted young women far exceeds its supply.

There was a local case recently where a 15 year old runaway became a Qanon cause celebre, with the parents and the local whackadoodles accusing random local families of being child traffickers and having kidnapped her.

She turned up a few weeks later in the deep south with a 20 year old boyfriend.

Obsession with some kind of Pennsylvania Pizzagate distracted from any actual effort of finding her, to say nothing of the harm done to those accused in public of child trafficking.

No responsible adult would violate a custody order.

EDIT to flush out:

Willfully violating a custody order will just get your ass thrown in jail and the custody order enforced and discredit further attempts to challenge it. Which, if it's a bad order, just makes it a lot worse.

This makes about as much sense as "if a police officer is violating your 4A rights, try to steal his pepper spray". I absolutely am not denying the predicate here: officers do sometimes step over the 4A, just that reacting in that way is straightforwardly counterproductive.

There are plenty of people who are no particular danger to children in their care despite making rather poor life decisions overall. Very few custody agreement violations present much danger to the child, even if at some level they need to be enforced.

No responsible adult would violate a custody order.

Irresponsible adults also have children.

The courts are not always known for speed.

There are some cases where someone can violate a custody agreement in such a way that the courts have very little chance of reversing matters. In particular, people often get away with kidnapping their own children to a different country that either holds a different view of who ought to have custody or refuses to extradite as a general principle. In fact, this even happens between US states (I know of some cases where California has refused to uphold Texas custody agreements related to trans healthcare for the kids for example).

In that kind of circumstance, and if the ex is horrifically abusing the child, it may in fact be reasonable to pull the trigger on violating the order. Your argument is that people don’t get away with kidnapping, so they shouldn’t do it even in extreme outlier cases, but people do in fact get away with kidnapping pretty commonly when borders get in the way.

Sure. Some people get away with getting into a shootout with the police. But very few do, and the kind of people that think they will win in a shootout with the cops are the last people that you should encourage to do so.

The stories of people that successfully jump the border with their kids are like man bites dog.

I’ve seen it come up with enough regularity on personal drama subs that I think it is not actually that uncommon. Why are you so confident that it is?

Getting into a gunfight with police and traveling across a border with your own child are two wildly different things. The state has a very strong interest in dropping the hammer over the first because not doing so would be giving up it’s monopoly on force.

It's pretty trivial in some cases, depending on the citizenship of the parent. Japan is notorious for example, there have been hundreds of cases where a parent takes their child to Japan in violation of a custody agreement, and then just refuse to go back. Japanese courts do not take into consideration foreign custody agreements, and strongly favor Japanese parents.

To date, no child has been returned to his/her country of habitual residence as a result of any action taken by the government of Japan.

https://web.archive.org/web/20101122071433/http://tokyo.usembassy.gov/e/p/tp-20100122-85.html

Do you think those cases are even remotely representative?

Granted they exist, they are the exception that proves the rule applies to the rest of cases.

How many Japanese nationals are there who get involved in a custody dispute in a foreign country? A surprising number of people avail themselves of the option when it is available to them. Japan is just the most notorious example, plenty of countries will drag out an international custody dispute for years until the issue is effectively moot. Once a child is 12 or so years old, it becomes very hard to force them to live with an estranged parent they have not seen in years, who lives in a foreign country.

I get your overall point though, most people who disobey custody orders are not exactly masterminds, and likely don't have a foreign abscondment planned.

EDIT to flush out:

It's "flesh out"--like filling out a figure that began only as bones (i.e. in outline).

Willfully violating a custody order will just get your ass thrown in jail and the custody order enforced and discredit further attempts to challenge it.

Sure, if you get caught in the wrong jurisdiction. But violating a custody order doesn't even have to be willful; often it is the result of a misunderstanding, or an emergency, or just panic. Even responsible adults can panic! That doesn't mean they aren't generally sufficiently responsible to care for a child.

This makes about as much sense as "if a police officer is violating your 4A rights, try to steal his pepper spray". I absolutely am not denying the predicate here: officers do sometimes step over the 4A, just that reacting in that way is straightforwardly counterproductive.

Again: only if it doesn't work out for you. Which it often won't! But there are literally times when your choice is "break the law now, and it will be bad, or don't break the law now, and it will be worse." In that case, it's not irrational or irresponsible to decide that "bad" beats "worse." That's the unfortunate nature of reality. The police are not invincible, the courts are not infallible, the law is not incontestable. I wouldn't, as an attorney, encourage a client to ever violate a custody order! But I can imagine, as a parent, circumstances that might demand it of me.

Even responsible adults can panic! That doesn't mean they aren't generally sufficiently responsible to care for a child.

It doesn't mean that in the sense of being sufficient, but surely it's at least a few bits of information in that direction.

Again: only if it doesn't work out for you. Which it often won't! But there are literally times when your choice is "break the law now, and it will be bad, or don't break the law now, and it will be worse."

Well, if it often won't work out then, on the balance we ought to advise people against it.

The police are not invincible

Sure, but I still wouldn't advise anyone about to be caught with a few grams of drugs to escalate it into a shootout with the police. Sure, some fraction of people that do so get away with it (that is, agreeing the police are not invincible) but on the median

  • The odds are extremely bad
  • The kind of person at the time is going to severely misapply the odds
  • Unless you're already about to charged with murder, you're gonna make it much worse than just eating the drug charge

the courts are not infallible, the law is not incontestable

Of course not. But the fallible courts have fairly-reliable armed men that, if you decide to contest their possible-mistakes via physical force, will enforce them against you.

This isn't a normative statement.

we ought to advise people against it

Sure. What you said was:

No responsible adult would violate a custody order.

This was false. You now seem to admit that it was strictly false, and that what you really meant was something much more reasonable, like "it's an extremely bad idea to violate a custody order." I don't know why you made such an obviously false statement to begin with, unless maybe you were trying to pick a fight. The comment improved substantially when you fleshed it out, but did so by retreating from your original claim.

If you want people to write plainly, you ought to read plainly too.

Moreover, it's not false (let alone obviously false), any more than any statement that has an exception, no matter how non central & inconsequential, is false. Applying this level of pedantic precision requires also rejecting as false the statement that "smoking causes cancer" because it not every smoker gets cancer or "summers are hotter than winters" because one July was January. Or if you want an SSC example, to object to "criminals harm society" by pointing out that MLK was a criminal.

If you want to consider this a "retraction" rather than "a clarification that in most polite conversation it would be considered peevish of a listener to insist upon" that's fine. But it's probably among the least enjoyable aspects of discussion on the internet when readers do that.

Applying this level of pedantic precision requires also rejecting as false the statement that "smoking causes cancer" because it not every smoker gets cancer or "summers are hotter than winters" because one July was January.

No--it would reject as false the statements "smoking always causes cancer" and "at no point during summer is it ever cooler than at any point in winter." Remember, you did not say "Violating a custody order is itself a sign of irresponsibility," but "no responsible adult would violate a custody order." Pedantic precision is a virtue, here.

The larger problem, though, as was already explained, was your lack of effort to explain and engage. If you want to talk about the "least enjoyable aspects of discussion on the internet" then "people who drop a low effort, single-sentence sneer instead of engaging the substance of your comment with a thoughtful and amicable reply" is not only high on the list, it's high enough that we have rules against it. This was explained to you, and you largely rectified the situation, which really would have been the end of it had you not also continued to defend your overstatement to multiple commenters, in persistently dismissive tone.

This kind of nitpicking desire for pedantic precision is at odds with speaking plainly. Otherwise every possible statement has to be qualified with a bunch of extra drivel.

  • No responsible adult would violate a custody order outside of vanishingly rare situations that are inconsequential to the claim that it is impossible to infer anything about kidnappings from crime statistics.

This seems far less plain nor does it add much information to my ear that wouldn't be covered by a plain reading.

I mean in most circumstances sure, but I think the thing gets a bit complicated when you know your kid will be horrifically abused raped etc. every day he remains with the custodial parent, you don’t have the months to years a court process can take. A kid getting pimped out nightly to men so mom can afford drugs doesn’t have years. The environment is much too dangerous, and leaving them there while they languish is unsafe for the child.

First rule is the health and welfare of the child. The second rule is follow the law if possible.

The health and welfare of the child is not served by having the only responsible parent thrown in jail and discredited in the eyes of the court.

So I agree with the standard that it's the health and welfare of the child. But unless you have a strong predictive reason to think you can beat the law, it's extremely unlikely that disregarding the court order meets your first rule rule.

That's a very absolute statement for which it's very easy to come up with counterexamples.

This is pretty low effort but just below the threshold at which I feel a need to drop a mod warning (people are allowed to make bad arguments and absolute statements that don't stand up to any kind of scrutiny). However, given your track record, I would suggest putting more effort into your arguments if you wish to actually make an argument.

Sure, added. Seemed obvious enough.

Even you don't think this is true.

When tyranny becomes law, resistance becomes duty.

Let's imagine a plausible scenario: you live in Germany during the Kentler Project. One of the placed homeless children draws your attention to the fact his foster parents are pedophiles and that he's afraid of them. You decide to allow the child to stay at your place. This escalates into a legal battle where a German judge orders you to return the child to his legal guardians.

Do you, a responsible person, comply?

Now of course this is a non central example, but if you think it's impossible for judges to be morally wrong in a way that's terrible enough as to require risking everything by running afoul of the law, you clearly have unreasonable faith in the institution.

Now of course this is a non central example, but if you think it's impossible for judges to be morally wrong in a way that's terrible enough as to require risking everything by running afoul of the law, you clearly have unreasonable faith in the institution.

Of course they can be morally wrong! Or factually wrong! Or legally wrong! Or any combination of the 3.

The issue isn't that they are right, it's that violating a custody order will just get your ass thrown in jail and the custody order enforced and discredit further attempts to challenge it. Which, if it's a bad order, just makes it a lot worse.

It could also draw media attention to your case, cause a shitstorm, and force somebody to actually look into it and fix the problem. The martyr strat sometimes works.

It could. But I predict it is extremely unlikely in any given chance.

So much so that I think any parent gambling on "I'm gonna defy the court and get a media shitstorm that causes it to reevaluate in my favor" is making an extremely irresponsible bet.

I disagree. If the court got it wrong somehow, no responsible parent would let their kid stay in an unsafe situation just because the law said they had to.

Of course plenty of irresponsible parents think they're responsible, so it's almost impossible to tell from the outside without an investigation and trial.

I disagree. If the court got it wrong somehow, no responsible parent would let their kid stay in an unsafe situation just because the law said they had to.

A responsible parent with a reasonable predictor of the external world would realize that violating the order will lead to their child shortly being returned to that unsafe situation with less chance of ultimately getting a better solution.

You have statistics on overturning custody agreements to back that up?

I have an extremely strong prior that courts very reverse custody agreements in favor of a parent that violated their previous order. In fact, there is standing caselaw that violating of a family court order is unfit.

See, e.g. here and here.

I'm also kind of shocked. The statement "if you violate a custody order you are more likely to be judged unfit" is so much the default presumption that I think the burden really ought to be on the contrary of "the court will not construe violating an existing custody order against the violating party".

In any event, there is sufficient citation to it in existing caselaw.

I think you may have misunderstood my argument.

if you violate a custody order you are more likely to be judged unfit

I agree with this. P(judged unfit | violate order) is significantly higher. Hence my comment about requiring a trial.

But we're talking about a theoretically individual case. Statistics don't matter to the individual.

Let's take someone who was given no custody and has a child in an unsafe situation. A few days out of that situation might be better than none. I'm not sure that parent is automatically irresponsible.

Sure, there is some outlier case that is possible. That exceptional case is both extremely rare and inconsequential to the point.

Federal Medicaid cuts in the OBBA are hitting NC in two months and they're pretty severe. The effects of this funding cut will slash a lot of things that I think most people right or left wing would agree are useful to have.

First every provider gets at least a 3% rate cut. Then due to the share of spending, a much larger rate reduction of 10% is on inpatient and residential medical institutions. This includes acute care hospitals, nursing homes, PTRFs (basically the mental hospitals/modern asylums), and intermediate care facilities (these are for intellectual/developmentally disabled people who need intermittent nursing).

The rate reductions will see an already stretched mental health system in the state need to cut back on access more. For an admin that claims to want more institutional treatment of the mentally ill, addicts, etc, this will ironically be one of the biggest deinstitutionalization effects in the state.

Another effect is the removal of GLP-1 drug coverage for obesity. I don't think I need to prove that they're very effective at weight loss, and obesity is a major health issue so a lot of people finally finding themselves losing weight are going to be hurting in the next few months as their prescriptions get cut. While GLP-1 medications isn't yet a net positive financially, the impact it has on people's health can not be ignored.

This also will likely hurt their ability to ensure proper compliance with the program.

Sangvai also indicated administrative cuts ahead, including ending or reducing contracts, letting temporary employees go, and ending some quality control and compliance functions. “These cuts will significantly impair NC Medicaid’s ability to be responsive to emerging needs and inquiries, monitor services for quality and compliance, and continue making timely operational improvements,” he wrote.

And as they point out

“Despite careful efforts to minimize harm, the reductions now required carry serious and far-reaching consequences. Most immediately, reduced rates and the elimination of services could drive providers out of the Medicaid program, threatening access to care for those who need it most,” Sangvai wrote. “NCDHHS remains hopeful that additional appropriations can be made to prevent these reductions.”

Medicaid reimbursement rates are already lower than commercial insurances tend to be and plenty of providers won't take it for that reason already.. This will likely get even worse, as poor and disabled people struggle to find providers.

This is especially going to hurt the poor rural areas (ones that voted Trump in) that are already struggling financially and don't benefit as much from economy of scale like the local areas.

About a week ago The Asheville Citizen Times did a report on the nearby rural Mitchell county and their upcoming fears over the cuts.

For example, they're worried that the already tight financials of the Blue Ridge Regional might be forced to close

During a June 19 special meeting of the Mitchell County Board of Commissioners, Jeff Harding, chair of the all-Republican board, said the hospital’s closure “could be devastating to our small community” and urged residents to contact their elected officials.

At the meeting, commissioners passed a resolution in support of the hospital, calling it a “vital resource,” one that saved lives during Helene, which devastated Mitchell and the surrounding counties the hospital serves.

Immediately after the storm hit, the hospital became a hub for relief efforts. It wasn’t just where people could go if they were severely injured and needed care, it was the one place where nonprofits, the federal government and others could show up and help, Kimmel said.

Blue Ridge Regional is the hospital of Spruce Pine, a town you might recognize from coverage of last year's storm as being one of the only places in the world with high quality quartz. It's still important to have some people in the surrounding region for this work (and other work providing for the quartz industry and workers) but their small size as mentioned before doesn't benefit from economy of scale and impact of automation has had a toll on their wealth too. Still they're very important to have around, making up anywhere from 80-90% of the high quality quartz used in the world. And sometime soon, they may be without a hospital, a hospital that was pretty useful during Helene.

So that's the issues my state is going to be facing soon. How is it going to impact your state Motte users?

could

could be

could drive

When reading a news article, let the word "could" serve as a little bell. In journo-speak, it means "isn't technically impossible". When someone knows they'll be sued and they'll lose if they say something "will" happen, they say it "could" instead. Any time you see the word "could", it negates everything that follows.

I've a similar feeling when the word 'must' appears in journalism.

In other fields, 'must' is an obligation, or a consequence of a previously established condition. An apple must fall when subject to the law of gravity. A spouse must maintain a certain level of relations lest they be divorced into an ex-spouse. A racer must move faster than the competition to win. A legal contract must be fulfilled to avoid the penalties of breaking the contract.

In journo-speak, 'must' is much more likely to mean 'something the writer wants the subject to do, but they don't actually have to do.' The politician must take a certain position. The government must take a certain policy. In such cases, though, the consequences of not abiding the 'must' are, well, that they clearly did not have to do what they must have done.

To me it's a red flag of advocacy journalism, outside of specifically technical/consequential framings of the earlier sense.

When reading a news article, let the word "could" serve as a little bell. In journo-speak, it means "isn't technically impossible". When someone knows they'll be sued and they'll lose if they say something "will" happen, they say it "could" instead. Any time you see the word "could", it negates everything that follows.

That heuristic goes way too far into the point of absurdity. Sometimes they say could just because they don't want to appear like psychics with 100% accuracy when they aren't that. Especially since policy can always change. You don't wanna say something will happen only for the underlying causes to disappear underneath your claim.

Especially since policy can always change. You don't wanna say something will happen only for the underlying causes to disappear underneath your claim.

Hedging oneself with careful verbiage about one's predictions about the future (which I hear are quite hard to get right) is indeed good practice. However, this argument doesn't make that case. Because there's nothing wrong or shameful or embarrassing or negative at all about saying that something will happen if [underlying cause] holds true. This is a positive claim about cause and effect which could be proven false if the underlying cause continues to hold but that thing doesn't happen. Unlike saying something could happen, which is really just a nothing statement that is almost entirely unfalsifiable.

You could be right.

Another effect is the removal of GLP-1 drug coverage for obesity. I don't think I need to prove that they're very effective at weight loss, and obesity is a major health issue so a lot of people finally finding themselves losing weight are going to be hurting in the next few months as their prescriptions get cut. While GLP-1 medications isn't yet a net positive financially, the impact it has on people's health can not be ignored.

Here is a fun idea maybe the junk food producers lobbied to get the coverage removed. It is a net positive in cost for everyone except those who profit to keep people eating pseudo-food and selling medications to fix the symptoms caused by obesity.

I just googled "medicare GLP-1 costs", and found this article:

Trump wants Medicare to pay for your Ozempic treatment. Taxpayers may foot the bill for billions in fraud

I am happy to hate Trump because he cuts of GLP-1 for millions. I could probably be persuaded to hate Trump because he wastes billions of dollars on GLP-1 drugs.

Unfortunately, I can not help but notice that both reasons to hate him seem mutually exclusive. While it is nice to know I can hate him no matter what he ends up doing, until he moves out of that superposition of bad options, I am stuck in a state of cognitive dissonance.

The annual US revenue of Novo Nordisk (Semaglutide) seems to be 45G$, while that of McDonalds is 25G$. Likely, NN's profit margin is a bit higher, so they could afford to out-lobby fast food.

--

The question if GLP-1 drugs are a net positive financially for the medical system is extremely cynical. Given that the lifetime patient costs mostly occur in their last years, it basically reduces to of the obese cost more before croaking than the non-obese or not. From a purely financial consideration, the most effective intervention (short of killing them outright) would probably be to offer free base-jumping courses and equipment to medicare patients. The government might spend 10k$ per death caused, which would be a lot cheaper than bypass surgeries, chemotherapy or keeping a dementia patient alive for a decade.

The compassionate, EA-ish metric would be cost per quality adjusted life-year (QALY). Both measles vaccines and doing a full-body MRI scan for tumors once a month are interventions which would boost the QALY of the median patient. But the former is pretty cheap and pretty effective and the latter is very expensive and not very effective, so we pay for one and not for the other.

For GLP-1 agonists, a lot depends on the cost per month.

That fortune article with their moral panic about fraud mentions:

The government recently estimated that covering GLP-1 drugs for obesity would cost Medicare alone $35 billion from 2026 to 2034.

What they forget to mention is that this is peanuts. If half of the patients enrolled with medicare get GLP-1 drugs, that is 35M patients. So the cost per patient per year would be 200$. That is a factor of 60 less than the sticker price of 1000$ a month! If somehow every obese American defrauded the US government into paying 200$ per year for GLP-1 drugs, that would be even better.

I do not think that this is happening, though. I recently turned to biopiracy to knock a few points of my BMI (I will write an article about my experiences on LW at some point), and I will likely spend north of 100$/year on peptides from China. Of course, the medical system will not have patients reconstitute peptides in their kitchen and inject what they think is the correct dose using insulin syringes with no medical or pharmaceutical oversight. Even weekly subcutaneous injections of saline would probably cost 500$ a year.

The annual US revenue of Novo Nordisk (Semaglutide) seems to be 45G$,

Isn't it a Danish company? I've wondered about that because I've seen lots of concern about cuts to research funding citing GLP medications as an example, but it seems odd that my tax dollars payed for the research, and now I would have to pay the Danes, as it were, to use it.

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;

But we've proved it again and again,

That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld

You never get rid of the Dane.

it seems odd that my tax dollars payed for the research, and now I would have to pay the Danes, as it were, to use it.

I don't see the contradiction. Basic research is mostly funded through taxes of Western countries, and here the US was most prolific. This research is then made available to the public (though sometimes you have to pay Elsevier, which sucks).

Pharmaceutical companies then use that basic research to discover active ingredients and go through the long, grueling and expensive process of getting them approved as pharmaceuticals. In return, they get temporary monopolies ("patents") on their active ingredients. There is a lot to criticize about how this system works. Details about what can or can not be patented, and how the latter means that nobody will pay to turn it into approved pharmaceuticals. Drug pricing both generally and within the US in particular. That the financial incentives make it much more profitable to sell lifestyle medication to rich Westeners than to cure debilitating diseases in the developing world. The general role of the medical priesthood as gatekeepers which determine which substances I can or can not put into my body.

Criticizing that in this case, one of the companies which holds the patents is nominally Danish (Eli Lilly is nominally US -- but at the end of the day, most are publicly traded and probably have campuses in multiple countries) seems rather low on that list.

Paging Alfred the great... a fine king, the best! He had some great people in Wessex, it was a very dangerous situation. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Yeah, this whole thread, I'm thinking, "someone mention that the costs are too high", and you got the closest. If you showed this thread to Trump, he'd probably argue that he's working on pressuring the drug companies to bring prices down. How likely that is to work is another matter entirely.

I suspect that, if prices don't come down, this will mean budget cuts for my workplace, and that will almost certainly result in some unpleasantness with supplies and their quality.

While they're not currently a net positive financially, there's a lot of invisible societal gains even for thin people.

  1. Less fat people in general means a better looking world. You'll see less chubby kids with chubby parents while at the mall or the park or other public spaces and more attractive looking people. You'll have more hot women and men available for dating, no longer having to settle as much on looks for someone with a good personality match.

  2. Less fat people gives gains elsewhere like not ending up sitting next to a fat guy on a plane or being able to do physical activities with your formally fat friend. All sorts of little small annoyances and issues that will be alleviated by a thinner world.

  3. Resources can benefit even more from economy of scale when we can start assuming people are within a certain size range more often. For example clothing stores can offer larger selections in your size and not have to spend as much space on having XLs and XXLs and the like because the market demand for those will be much smaller.

  4. Your family and friends who are fat will be healthier and prettier and that's just a good thing too if you care about your family and friends.

And that's just on top of not currently a net positive financially. We might be able to improve on it more and get to the point where we have a world of thin hot people for cheap.

I would argue that all of these benefits (which I do not dispute) can be captured very well by the QALY/$ picture -- just add a term for quality of life effects on people other than the patient.

From a purely medical system costs picture, they are all externalities.

Still, from any non-terrible POV, GLP-1 drugs will at the latest be worth it at least when the patents run out and they can be sold for what it costs to produce them.

The question if GLP-1 drugs are a net positive financially for the medical system is extremely cynical.

Well I agree that it is cynical. But I also find the view that it is a pure plutocratic exercise of who has the most lobbying dollars as equally cynical. Those who are interested profiting the issue that Semaglutide solves is not only McDonalds. It is is a whole host of US domestic companies that extract profits by providing both the cause and management of the symptoms as a result. A weekly shot from a Danish company is a threat to the bottom line of fast food, healthcare providers recurring visits and lifelong medication by domestic pharma. Maybe the politicians gives patriotic rebate to the lobbyists?

But Nestle and coca-cola are already losing a fight with the Trump admin; obviously someone can outcompete them if need be.

Yeah but my hypothesis has nothing to do with Trump. It is just suggestion to ask: "Cui Bono?". I make claims with little elaboration and very little proof but gives my view that it is an useful avenue of thought if it is simply matter of corruption regardless who occupies the White House.

How is it going to impact your state Motte users?

As usual per republican policy, it'll probably affect poor areas more than rich areas, and rural areas more than urban or suburban areas. Can any poor or rural republican reply if they think otherwise? I can understand why most republican policy is in the best interest of republicans, but I'm honestly stumped on this. Is it legitimately just ideological consistency? A willingness to suffer to Do The Right Thing?

Rural republicans are mostly people who are stuck 'in the gap' where they don't have medicaid to begin with- they make too much. Rural medicaid users might vote republican if they voted, but alas, they do not.

You are forgetting that medicaid is not actually universal healthcare. It's entirely possible to go without healthcare in the US because you don't qualify for welfare. There are some pretty brutal benefits cliffs.

Are you a poor or rural republican? Your logic makes sense, but I'm looking for insights specifically into their psychology.

I am connected to two tribes of rural republicans, albeit not the poorer sorts. Having been around poor people who didn't like democrats, their likelihood of voting is rather low.

brutal benefits cliffs

Very true, and in some states it's a cliff on both sides of the coin. In some states that didn't adopt the medicaid expansion portion of obamacare you can't get government insurance in a situation where you don't have a job yet if you had anything other than the very lowest paying job possible you wouldnt qualify anyway.

I understand the reasoning behind not wanting to subsidize jobless bum's insurance, but it isnt hard to imagine a case of a non bum falling into this crack and having to go into medical debt over a broken arm or whatever.

Insufficient resolution in your maps. The rural Republican counties that are pointed to as examples of Republicans voting against their economic self interest don't consist of 100% Medicaid users, they consist of a class of Medicaid users and a class of non-Medicaid users.

The latter class votes Republican because they hate the former class and want them thrown off Medicaid. This isn't poor people voting to throw themselves off Medicaid, it's contractors voting to throw addicts off of welfare.

Empathy and charity are easier at a distance. Racial Diversity is correlated with racist attitudes in the general public; this is equally true of economic diversity.

The latter class votes Republican because they hate the former class and want them thrown off Medicaid. This isn't poor people voting to throw themselves off Medicaid, it's contractors voting to throw addicts off of welfare.

This is also Republicans possibly losing their rural hospital

From the article again

During a June 19 special meeting of the Mitchell County Board of Commissioners, Jeff Harding, chair of the all-Republican board, said the hospital’s closure “could be devastating to our small community” and urged residents to contact their elected officials.

This is an all-republican board concerned about the impact.

Unless the good hard working rural Republicans are superhumans who don't need a hospital and anyone who is concerned is just a RINO, it's going to hurt them too because the economics of rural healthcare is already tight.

Actually, many rural republicans I know do self identify as people who don't need to or just don't go to a doctor. But that's more a matter of stupidity in those cases.

At no point am I arguing that rural healthcare won't be harmed, I'm arguing that they don't think it will be.

Yeah, a lot of these people think doctors are for 1) childrens and maternal care 2) emergency medicine and 3) really serious illnesses like cancer. Normal adults go to chiropractors, nutritionists, etc.

What are all you guys going to nutritionists and chiropractors and so forth for? Doesnt all that stuff just happen automatically if you eat right and exercise?

I can see a reason to go get cancer, heart, etc, screenings starting at a certain age, but I actually am quite confused why a healthy lifestyle 20-50 year old needs doctors at all beyond screenings and acute things.

How old are you? I would say things generally start going wrong at about 30 - I got a gastric problem from a not-great diet that had been fine up until then plus some heart stuff, my friend did something permanent to his ankle skiing, somebody else started getting serious insomnia, etc.

Early 40s. The skiing injury/insomnia/gastric/heart items are all things that I would put in an acute, or at least "actual malady", category. Your friend's lingering ankle injury is probably more like a chronic condition than acute if we are being really choosy on our diction, but it is nonetheless something being clearly wrong, not the maintenance/preventative work that a nutritionist would generally be for someone without a physiological nutrition/diet problem. I am still missing the purpose of chiropractors, nutritionists, etc, for "normal adults".

Because few Americans lead healthy lifestyles.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ERNAqqNSId0?feature=shared

This matches my experience (growing up in a rural deep red area) of medicine. You go to the doctor for broken bones, bleeding you can't stop, or when you're in enough pain your wife makes you go.

This is also Republicans possibly losing their rural hospital

At least here in the Appalachians, those rural hospitals have been closing down since at least 2010 and nobody other than the local residents has given a shit.

Could you explain how this is different and why I should be more concerned? Or, for that matter, why people who aren't from here and didn't care then should care now?

and nobody other than the local residents has given a shit.

That's not true at all, there's programs like the rural health fund and the the start of rural emergency hospitals program in 2023 and stuff like that being created to help keep them open and functioning.

Rural healthcare struggles to break even yet alone turn a profit, even more would be shutting down if it wasn't for Medicaid/Medicare and programs like that.

And there's extra benefits even within these programs like how sole community hospitals get higher rates

Sole community hospitals (SCHs) are hospitals that are the only source of short-term, acute inpatient care in a region. Medicare reimburses some SCHs at higher rates than they would have received under IPPS, including based on historical costs. Since 2006, CMS has also increased OPPS rates for rural SCHs. SCHs receive $0.8 billion in higher payments annually (including low-volume adjustments to SCHs) according to a 2022 MedPAC report.

It's arguably not enough, but it's definitely helping rural healthcare stay afloat when they're literally just given more money.

Could you explain how this is different and why I should be more concerned?

It's not different, we are doing stuff to try to help our rural hospitals already and we should keep doing that stuff and help more.

Or, for that matter, why people who aren't from here and didn't care then should care now?

Rural communities and urban communities depend on each other. Urban zones might be the main money areas but they need things from the rural areas still like food or that high quality quartz.

Also ya know, empathy, religious duty, etc other general reasons to help out others in need.

Also keep in mind these cuts aren't impacting just the rural areas anyway. Less funds for mental institutions and the like will have an impact on the urban areas.

But does the former class not also vote Republican? Folklore seems to say that they do, and are motivated by a mixture of "willingness to suffer to Do The Right Thing" and spite ("we suffer either way, but at least this way we get to wipe the smug grins off the city-dwellers' faces").

A lot of rural welfare users simply don't vote. It's extremely common.

The rural poor also understand that they're a peasant class and hate everyone who's in line ahead of them, which to be clear is most people. Given the economics of rural areas these people are a lot more dependent on local elites(who are very solidly republican) than the poor elsewhere; and a condition of that dependency is voting correctly.

we suffer either way, but at least this way we get to wipe the smug grins off the city-dwellers' faces

I genuinely believe what you call city-dwellers have absolutely no idea how strong that impulse is in a lot of rural Americans.

If I asked ten of my neighbors if they'd do something that harmed themselves if it hurt the nearest city twice as bad, I think twelve of them would say yes.

Trump's election in 2016 and 2024 represent the apex of this phenomenon, but it's not the only one.

This is admittedly speculative due to a lack of contact with the former class but my general assumptions are that they aren't exactly hardcore voters to begin with.

I also suspect that if they do vote for the GOP, they probably aren't thinking "I'm going to get thrown off of Medicaid but it will make the blue-haired freaks unhappy so it's a net win for me," they are voting GOP under the theory that entitlement reform never happens but maybe their neighbor with the string of misdemeanor assaults and restraining orders will finally be locked up for good, or that it will help the economy, or things like that. My general assumption is that people who are "on the fringes of society" in the sense of being on welfare and not being particularly poor are more likely to be sensitive to the economy and crime, not less.

There's two separate questions in there.

  1. Are they in the Taker class?

  2. Do they perceive and identify themselves as being in the Taker class?

Broke trailer trash generally abhor trailer trash, which they perceive as their neighbors rather than themselves. "I'm poor because I have to support all these people on welfare," "I'm a hard-working man, if I could, and my disability payments would be higher if it weren't for all the immigrants we're supporting..." "I'm just a drinker, he does meth," "I only do a little meth I'm not an addict like that guy over there," "I wouldn't be on the meth if it weren't for trying to compete with illegal immigrants..." There's various degrees of magical thinking involved in excusing one's own temporary circumstances, such as "Rural areas really produce things while urban gdp is fake and gay" or "Once you throw the bums off welfare and the immigrants out, I'll make more money and I won't need Medicaid." I do not think many GOP voters perceive themselves as takers, even if they mathematically are.

I do not think a significant number of Republican voters believe that bad things (for them) will result from Trump's policies and are willing to suffer for them. You can tell because Trump doesn't talk that way, more or less ever. They think that the policies Trump is pursuing will result in the instant improvement of their lives.

I do not think a significant number of Republican voters believe that bad things (for them) will result from Trump's policies and are willing to suffer for them. You can tell because Trump doesn't talk that way, more or less ever. They think that the policies Trump is pursuing will result in the instant improvement of their lives.

This might have been true at the beginning of the year, and still be true for a majority of people who will be badly affected by his policies. I am not sure that it will still be true at the end of his administration, depending on how bad his policies will get. He got a trade deal with the EU which will increase revenue and not directly hurt US industry (but I am less optimistic about the long term effects for the US hegemony). However, a trade war with China still has the potential to wreck the economy. Likewise, cutting medicare has the potential to be ruinous for a lot of his voters.

Most people have some awareness of their relative economic situation under different administrations. They suck at attributing it to specific policies (and often make off-by-one errors when policies take long to yield results) and economic effects unrelated to government policies, but they will notice if they are better or worse off. A few idiots will double down on their partisan preferences when things go badly for them, but I am hopeful that many will not vote for the leopard eating people's face party after having their face eaten for 3.5 years.

I am not sure that it will still be true at the end of his administration, depending on how bad his policies will get.

You're assuming the horror stories about the effects of Trump's policies are going to be both true and one-sided. This may not be the case. If his policies hurt Republican "takers" but help the working class (according to their own perceptions), that's probably a net win for Republicans. Republican takers are probably one of the least-reliable voting blocs (especially since Republicans lack the ground game to get them to the polls), and the working class has only recently turned Republican.

Yeah — the other poster who is anti Trump believes Trump’s policies will be bad and therefore Trump’s voters will abandon him.

That is not unreasonable for anti Trump person to believe but isn’t necessarily the best reflection of reality. Take tariffs. Suddenly Democrats hate tax increases*. But it’s far from obvious how much of a tax increase it will be for American consumers. First, tariffs are on the import price which often is a small fraction of the overall price. Second, some of the incidences of the tax will fall on non Americans or capital. To the extent the tariff revenue is used to shrink the budget deficit, it could on net help consumers. Doesn’t mean tariffs are good (or this will work) but the idea that it’s the end of the world doesn’t make sense (especially by people who were pushing for mark to market taxation and significantly higher corporate and individual tax rates).

Take immigration as a concrete example. Jobs are meh but the mix of the jobs were foreign less and natives more. A dem would point to “limited job growth” whereas a Republican would point to “our people are getting jobs.”

I would bet all things equal life is pretty similar for a lot people on 2028 as it was in 2024. I think the one thing Trump could do to change that is passing some kind of massive zoning reform (he is stealthy doing some of that for large projects via the EPA).

*there are of course arguments that tariffs are bad kinds of taxes precisely because they are easy to avoid and therefore people will make non economic decisions. But this second order thinking is always absent in democrat plans so hard to take it seriously.

I can understand why most republican policy is in the best interest of republicans, but I'm honestly stumped on this. Is it legitimately just ideological consistency? A willingness to suffer to Do The Right Thing?

I'd say it's that, despite all the talk of MAGA having wholly taken over the Republican party, much of the institutional core of the party is still the "what's good for Wall Street is good for Main Street" crowd. As someone in a several-hour-long Youtube video (on the county-level political map for Congressional elections, every two years, from the end of WWII to the turn of the century, with a focus on how, once you set aside the highly-granular and variable presidential elections — particularly the Reagan landslide — the South didn't really stop voting (D) until the 90s, as all the old "Dixiecrats" finally died, and the new generation of Dems were abandoning the working class for the professional managerial class and minorities) I once watched said, "the Republican Party was founded as the party of New England banking interests… and that's what it always will be."

I also recall, but can't find again, an interview with a GOP campaign strategist who got a bit too candid with the interviewer and ended up saying something to the effect that Republican candidates already know that their job is to make empty promises to working class rubes to get elected, then deliver for the "donor class" instead once in office, so his job, as strategist, is to help the politicians lie to those flyover rubes more effectively.

Both party elites are elites — while only Hilary may have said it openly, plenty of the top people in both parties consider blue-collar rural whites "deplorables" — R's are just the ones more reliant on winning their votes, and thus given more incentive to hold their noses and pander.

Watching Trump's approval rating fall even more will affect my mental state by making me smile and laugh as Americans realize they fell for it again

  • -30

Please remember that this is not PoliticalCompassMemes; pointing and laughing in the style of Nelson Muntz invites only heat, not light.

That's incredibly fair

The first article is about how all of this was locked in back in March by the Democrat governor. There's one off-hand reference to the OBBBA, and no effort made to connect anything.

Which makes sense, since, last I saw, the bill just decreased the rate of increase in spending. Remarkable how consistently people miss that. Some antimemetics shit, really.

Despite having a Democrat governor, the Republican (almost) supermajority in state congress and the past decade of slowly removing powers from the governorship combined with NC already having a low power governorship means a lot of things that would normally be in the governor's hands are instead in the state Congress. North Carolina might even be the weakest governor in the nation

As governor, Stein holds essentially no power over the state budget other than the obligation to share his vision with Republican lawmakers who are free to promptly discard it in favor of their own.

His veto power is one of the weakest in the country, with no ability to object to specific items in budget bills, redistricting legislation, constitutional amendments or bills that apply to fewer than 15 counties.

He doesn’t even get to appoint his executive team. The attorney general, secretary of state, superintendent of public instruction and six other primary executive offices are elected by the people.

Just curious where you are reading that? The NC Newsline article doesn't say that:

"The Governor has been clear since March that the General Assembly needs to fully fund the Medicaid rebase, and he recently reiterated his concern when their Band-Aid budget fell $319 million short of what is needed to fund North Carolinians’ health care,” the spokesperson wrote.

The NC Governor doesn't have much power because the NC legislature has a veto-proof Republican majority so I don't really see how you could lay this at his feet.

Edit: Oh, actually they aren't technically veto-proof anymore by the margin of one seat. One or two Democrat representatives have also been voting in step with the Republicans to override governor's vetos.

That's a valid enough point. I checked for the governor, but didn't think to look at the legislature.

Regardless, there's no reason to think there's a connection to Trump and the OBBBA based on that article. This was decided at the state levels months before the bill passed, or was even finalized.

A note on motivations.

I often see people making arguments of the type of "we need to get fertility rates (across the board, or maybe just for group X) up otherwise human civilization will collapse".

Here's the thing though. I'm fine with human civilization ending. I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization continuing. And I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization ending. I'm neutral about it. If human civilization ends after my generation, I'm fine with it. Of course I want living standards to continue to be good during my generation at least, but that doesn't mean that I have any attachment to the idea of wanting to maintain human civilization 100 or 1000 years from now. And if human civilization continues after me, I'm fine with that too. I don't care much one way or the other.

Humanity has been doing this whole reproduction thing for hundreds of thousands of years now. Repetition and quantity is not the same thing as quality.

I get that it feels different if you have kids, which I don't. I might be interested in having kids, but I'm not sure if I want any or not yet.

In any case, if you have kids, I didn't force you to have kids. I hope your kids do well, but it doesn't change my fundamental calculus.

I enjoy being alive, but I see no fundamental deep importance in keeping the human species existing. I'm not a nihilist in the least bit. I love being alive in a very visceral way. I love the smell of flowers, the look of sunshine in the sky. I just see no clear positive advantage to continuing the species. Or to ending it. Like I said, I'm neutral on the matter. If the species continues, cool. If it ends, cool. I don't want to end, and I don't want any currently alive humans to end, but to me the idea of continuing the species beyond that is very abstract and I really don't care about it.

I often see people making arguments of the type of "we need to get fertility rates (across the board, or maybe just for group X) up otherwise human civilization will collapse".

I do not think that this is true. Amish civilization would probably be sustainable with a few million humans. And even a technological civilization could probably work with less than a billion people (though with higher friction -- tech development would take longer, and there would be less entertainment with very high production costs).

Also, not having kids is something which is very strongly selected against both in biological and cultural evolution. If TikTok caused 90% of societies to stop reproducing, human civilization would still be fine in the long run.

Amish civilization is dependent on trade with their technologically advanced neighbors, though. You can have premodern subsistence farmers at shockingly small scale, that's just not what the Amish are.

Their lifestyle would change, they would face the 50% child mortality that plagued humanity most of its existence, but within a generation they would adjust to the new normal. They wouldn't die out entirely.

Yes, but that’s not ‘thé Amish’. What we think of as ‘the Amish’ depend on antibiotics, solar panels, air compressors, credit card processors that they buy from the secular world. You’re describing little house on the prairie.

There were certainly Amish people around in 1920. Most certainly, they did not have credit card processors or antibiotics or solar panels.

Of course, even in 1920 the Amish likely depended on outside trade for a few crucial supply chains, because their shtick is rejecting technology, not insisting on 100% autonomy. I suppose they did not refine their own iron, for example.

This is why I said a few million of them could exist independently rather than saying they could be autark on the level of a few villages.

I'm fine with human civilization ending. I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization continuing. And I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization ending.

This kind of intellectualised lack of care and concern for the world has the pretension of being a serious opinion with some form of philosophical caché, but can really only be understood as a spiteful lashing out at life itself by someone who feels slighted and betrayed by their own expectations at what human existence should be. It's juvenile, provincial, extremely transparent in its self-loathing origin, and can only stem from a position of weakness and defeat.

The inherent good of human civilisation goes without saying - we are the only species in the entire known world that does not solely operate around cruel instinct, we can peer beyond the vulgar material veil of constant frenzied self-preservation and extract beauty, love, and meaning from the violent chaos of the natural order - only in the world of Man can a living being pass away with a semblance of dignity and comfort. No animal in nature dies peacefully. We can create abstracted systems that bind otherwise distinct people and groups together, pool our labour and knowledge into cohesive willpower, and turn base matter into magic. Modern medicine, high-speed global transportation, satellites crowding the stratosphere, the welfare state, not to speak of the surplus of beauty and meaning we have added to the world by means of artistic endeavours. The pleasure of good food (not raw meat torn straight from the spine of a wailing animal), good company, lovely music, light-hearted conversation, a charming landscape, the sound of cicadas on a summer night, its all there for us to enjoy and cherish and compound our fates upon.

For 4 years, I lived in an apartment in Paris that shared a courtyard with an elementary school. Every day, I would hear children playing during their lunch break - laughing, shouting, exclaiming, crying, giggling and scheming in exactly the same way my childhood friends and I did when we were small, and doubtlessly in exactly the same way the children of the Persian Empire, the Neolithic, or the Early Modern period did in their times. I felt an endless cycle of joy and curiosity and willpower and ecstasy at the world and the gift of live we were given to be in it and a part of it, unchanged since the first day of Creation. To look over this vast and endless sea of human joy and pleasure at being in the world and to claim to see nothing inherently valuable in it one way or another is not an intellectual or philosophical position - on the contrary, it is the spiteful grumble of the slave who considers his own wretched existence to be the Alpha and Omega of all human experience. It is the position of a self-loathing man to cowardly for suicide, so he demands the entire world should commit suicide in his stead.

Remember Goethe - "the world a man sees around him is nothing else than the world he carries in his heart". The world I see around me is a big, flashing YES - YES to beauty, YES to pleasure, YES to friendship, YES to love, YES to the bountiful harvest of our labours, YES to the innocent sincerity of a child at play, YES to drunken dancing on summer nights, YES to music, to painting, to cathedrals and to operas, YES to the gift of life, so precious, so explosive, so free.

My cup runneth over - doth thine?

caché

Cachet.

Caché means hidden, cachet means sceal (hence approval, officiality, prestige)

The most important motivation for caring about civilization is igniting an individual will to overcome obstacles and shape the world. It's an innate desire, a personality trait that not everybody possesses.

It requires empathy to care about civilization. Because it means understanding that there are people just like yourself who will be living in the far future, though they do not yet exist, and they matter as if they were your friend or cousin. Humans come equipped with an interest in securing the wellbeing of those who are like themselves, though there have been some mutations which express other inclinations usually deemed antisocial. If civilization, then their happiness is secured. If barbarism, then doom —

cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Also, interest in civilization is usually a proxy for intergroup competition. The failure for your group to be fruitful simply means that another group will dominate yours. This will probably be the Chinese when they eventually realize how easy it is to increase TFR. All of your descendants will be less happy, just as the celts were less happy when the Anglo-Saxons ruled over them. Many of their descendants will beg and prostitute themselves. A well-tuned empathy makes you feel about future members of your tribe in the same way you feel about your own child. This is why Kings with paternal feelings toward his subjects were beloved in history; it is probably evolution’s favored form of governance, given that the primates the dominant member shares food and protects the lesser members.

If you truly

get that it feels different if you have kids

you would recognize there is a chain of empathy descending from “caring about someone who has kids”, to “caring about their kids”, to “caring about their grandkids”, all the way down. Because if you care about them then you also have some care for their terminal values, which is going to be their children. Our present happiness is related to our future predictions, so it’s reasonable to feel unhappy if your civilization is trending toward doom.

This will probably be the Chinese when they eventually realize how easy it is to increase TFR

Uhh... Fertility is a coordination problem. Coordination problems are hard.

This will probably be the Chinese when they eventually realize how easy it is to increase TFR.

Easy ... how?

Countries have tried in both recent and historic times, but AFAIK the only time a national policy has significantly increased TFR (from sub-replacement to above 3) was in Ceausescu's Romania, via "outlawing abortion and contraception, routine pregnancy tests for women, taxes on childlessness, and legal discrimination against childless people". Lots of countries have tried various "carrots" to little effect; it seems like only such big "sticks" work. You'd think China would be uniquely positioned to be that oppressive today, but even for them it might not be possible soon - they only ended the One-Child Policy a decade ago, and it'll be embarrassing (and hence politically risky) for the old guard when they have to admit that continuing it so long was a mistake big enough to require a similarly hard push in the opposite direction.

Even in Romania, fertility didn't stay above 3 for long, though - it was below 2.5 in a few years, and dipping below replacement again well before the policies ended - though it plummeted to 1.5 after, so it's not like the polices weren't still doing something, they just weren't doing enough.

The strongest correlate to fertility is probably the inverse correlation with years of education for females, but I don't know if China is the type of brutal to try fiddling with that. They're certainly not a gender equality utopia, but in higher education women there now outnumber men, despite solidly outnumbered by men in that age range.

It is trivial to change TFR and eventually China will realize it, and they will be able to solve it via totalitarianism while we are unable to follow suit. You (1) judge the social value of girls and women exclusively by their aptitude and progress in motherhood; (2) inculcate pro-fertile values in adolescent girls (eg media, stories, idols), (3) train girls in the skills for motherhood.

The reason the Haredi female TFR is so high regardless of country or income is because they do this. The reason that you have some fundamentalist Christian families with high TFR is because they do this. The reason the Gypsy TFR is 1.5 to 2x the national average of whichever country they live in, despite being urban-dwelling, is that they do this. The reason I have cousins on one side of family who are going to average 4 kids each is that I know their parents so this. There was a longitudinal study where girls were given a fake baby that they had to mother throughout school; the longterm effect was 1.5x higher TFR. (I think I found this on themotte but forgot the poster).

carrot on the stick

Women care so much about their social valuation that they will starve themselves to gain more more of it; they will spend two hours a day decorating their face and hair and wardrobe; they will even go through a miserable period of hard work and stress with little monetary reward only because it secures status (we call this “academia”). In more fertile eras, these pressures were toward motherhood; a woman who wanted to be an academic would be laughed at and derided.

Anyway, China will realize this, they will totalitarianly implement changes and likely in such a way that it targets high IQ Chinawomen, and we will be fucked (impotently) because we are ruled by entertainment and corporations, not a centralized communist party.

(also paging Mr @hydroacetylene)

It is trivial to change TFR

It's not even close to trivial -- you're just flatly using the wrong word here. If it was trivial, then most countries would have done so by now. Changing people's behaviors is already tough enough, but changing them on a wide scale and with something as nebulous as social standing is going to be monumentally difficult. The word you probably want instead is "obvious", that it's "obvious how to change TFR", and I'd agree with you there that this will almost certainly be the most effective method. Perhaps it would be the only effective method, at least assuming societies aren't suddenly willing to plow 50% of their GDP into natal subsidies.

The reason I call it “trivial” is because it is easy to change behaviors and values when you have complete control over education and media. As I mention, China can do this while America will be unable to do it. Education and media are antecedent to social values which are antecedent to behaviors. You can train a woman to crave settling down to have children young through exposing them exclusively to media where women receive respect and esteem and attention for doing so, where the women doing this are shown as beautiful and alluring, where it is depicted as a satisfying and an all-moral purpose, where “maternal moments” are artfully selected in media to only show its positives, and where everything which opposes this is shown as psychologically disastrous / ugly / low-status / shameful / selfish. At a more sophisticated level, you apply all of this to prenatal behaviors beginning at the doll-carrying age, eg the traditionally feminine qualities of being meek, caring, loving, and docile, which makes a woman more likely to have children later on for a variety of reasons. A girl who grows up attached to the idea of loving and caring for a doll becomes a woman who wants to do this to a child; a girl who grows up with a modest sense of worth is a woman who does not fantasize about marrying a werewolf pirate billionaire. This is all easy, it is trivial. Two weeks of cognitive labor by a CCP-appointed team of 140iq social psychologists will be able to fix their fertility eternally.

Or, more likely, they'll declare war on sparrows and lose. This is the CCP approaching a task that's legitimately difficult.

Again, I'm not disagreeing with you on the efficacy of what you say if it was aggressively and correctly implemented. I'm saying none of this is "trivial" or "easy". Human culture is notoriously fickle, and governments can waste tons of effort trying to change it without having much of an impact. If any large nation would be able to do it I think China would be one of them, but that said it's not like China is run by some ultra-competent entity. The CCP has made tons of buffoonish errors, and it's very plausible that they end up spinning their wheels on this problem.

judge the social value of girls and women exclusively by their aptitude and progress in motherhood

As if you can snap your fingers and just do it. As if you can make women incapable of looking around them and seeing every large family poor and miserable. How many instances throughout world history can you find where social status was not tied to material wealth?

The reason the Haredi female TFR is so high regardless of country or income is because they do this

Is that the cause? Or is it that they are a welfare class engaged in a holy war?

The reason the Gypsy TFR is 1.5 to 2x the national average of whichever country they live in, despite being urban-dwelling, is that they do this

Is that the cause? Or is it that gypsy children are an economic resource to gypsies?

As if you can snap your fingers and just do it

You can if you’re China or some other centralized totalizing social environment. China can snap their fingers and mandate films, books, adverts, lessons, and class trips. These can successfully change norms so that women are socially judged by their motherhood + pre-motherhood behaviors.

How many instances throughout world history can you find where social status was not tied to material wealth?

In any with strong religious norms, a childless woman was seen as beneath a woman who had many kids. Religious communities do a good job at redirecting social status, but so can any totalizing social environment. In America you have the enormous problem of capitalism / consumerism which will need to be fixed for any national solution to occur, because you have some of the smartest people continually telling women that their social value is determined by buying and experiences things, with universities (effectively all of them behaving as businesses) telling them they need to be educated. And so lots of smart people actually think it’s higher status to be a poor academic (or even a struggling artist) than having a lot of money. If you’re at a party and there’s a poor artist, a prestigious academic, and then a plumbing company owner who makes $400k yearly, the status is not dictated by the one who makes more money. Heck, someone owning a cute coffee shop that barely turns a profit is going to have more social status in many circles than someone who does slant drilling and turns $500k a year. This is because our culture’s media / stories signal that these things are high status.

Or is it that they are a welfare class engaged in a holy war?

Their leaders are engaged in a holy war but the average member is just a normal person doing what their culture says to do, and in this culture the number of children is prized over everything. Both men and women are judged harshly or celebrated strongly based on their fertility. It’s seen as both a commandment and a blessing. The average member isn’t having kids for a nefarious reason, they are just taught through custom that it’s prized.

Or is it that gypsy children are an economic resource to gypsies?

Unlikely now that Gypsies are forced into schools in Europe. And look at historical figures: Ben Franklin’s father made candles, was his 17 children necessary for the candle business in an era with slaves and indentured servants? Of course not. Albrecht Dürer‘s parents were goldsmiths, did they need to have 18 children? Of course not. “Economic resource theory” never made any sense because you can look at rich non-farmers in history and see high fertility.

In any with strong religious norms, a childless woman was seen as beneath a woman who had many kids. Religious communities do a good job at redirecting social status

In any place with strong religious norms children were also very cheap, nearly free, or possibly even negative cost. The two things correlate that one wonders if it isn't religion that produces high fertility but the reverse: high fertility produces a religion that promotes high fertility. If you look really hard at christianity, for example, there's a lot of antinatalist messaging in there that almost nobody uses: yes be fruitful, yes onan but also "For there are some eunuchs who were so born from their mother’s womb, and there are some eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it".

Are religious communities redirecting social status or getting bent around by what people consider social status anyway? Look at how many churches display pride flags despited that being a far more clearly condemned practice than just not having children.

In America you have the enormous problem of capitalism / consumerism which will need to be fixed for any national solution to occur, because you have some of the smartest people continually telling women that their social value is determined by buying and experiences things

Yes, but surely we can agree that buying and experiencing things, and that having lots of free time, is something that is pleasurable in itself, that it isn't all just a big psyop.

with universities (effectively all of them behaving as businesses) telling them they need to be educated

But do they go to university because they are told to do so or do they go because it's not their money (either it's coming from mom and dad or from a loan) and they get to party for 5 years? Are they doing it for the status or are they doing it because they expect to be fun and they are correct?

If you’re at a party and there’s a poor artist, a prestigious academic, and then a plumbing company owner who makes $400k yearly

Being a rich owner of a plumbing company is not so much a job as it is a wish. It doesn't matter if you think something is beneath you if it's also unavailable to you. What's available to you is being an employee of a plumbing company and that makes little money and is phisically draining on top, hence nobody wants to do it.

Their leaders are engaged in a holy war but the average member is just a normal person doing what their culture says to do, and in this culture the number of children is prized over everything. Both men and women are judged harshly or celebrated strongly based on their fertility. It’s seen as both a commandment and a blessing. The average member isn’t having kids for a nefarious reason, they are just taught through custom that it’s prized.

I think the Haredi are in a position similar to the lifelong Seaorgers: the community is so closed and dependent upon itself that leaving is not just discouraged socially but it's also economically very difficult. Nevertheless the percentage of people that leave that lifestyle is growing.

Unlikely now that Gypsies are forced into schools in Europe.

You're overestimating the mighty power of europe here.

And look at historical figures: Ben Franklin’s father made candles, was his 17 children necessary for the candle business in an era with slaves and indentured servants? Of course not. Albrecht Dürer‘s parents were goldsmiths, did they need to have 18 children?

Some people are just weirdos.

What's available to you is being an employee of a plumbing company and that makes little money and is phisically draining on top, hence nobody wants to do it.

Plumbers make a lot more than the members of the social class they're recruited from typically do.

I believe the theory that Gypsy kids are an economic resource to their parents is due to their utility for typical Ziganeur activities like welfare exploitation, petty crime(which can combine with schooling pretty well), and charity scams.

And I'm going to talk a bit about ultra-religious communities, because I can tell you don't actually live in one- the highest status thing in an ultra-religious community is to become a member of the structure of the religion. This is why Haredi families gamble on their boys becoming rabbis even though the supply exceeds the demand and yeshivas provide no secular education whatsoever(and ultra-islamic families do the same thing with madrassas). For tradcaths grandmotherhood is higher status than having single adult children, but not as high status as having nun/priest children. The desire to be mothers comes from exposure to babies and small children, not from social status(which pushes young women towards the convent). You could not replicate this effect in a society where people don't already have 5+ children. Now of course there is no option for tradcaths to drop out of education at the age of 7 or 8 and enter full-time preparation for the cloister, so it kinda comes out in the wash(and haredi women seem like an afterthought/ultra-islamic women like property).

I’m familiar with the social ecosystem of the Haredim. It’s super interesting. The women are not involved in religious learning, they are raised to support their husband. Because the Rabbi credential is socially important, the women work to support their husband pursue it. But just as important to this is that the women have children. This is going to be the first question asked to married Haredi women. This is why they have a lot of children. What the men learn in their Yeshiva is that having children is a mitzvah, and so they fulfill their nocturnal obligations. This is an easy ask because all childcare duties fall on the women. The Rabbi credential system is not as competitive as, like, getting into a PhD program, because the big Rabbi positions are handed down via nepotism; my understanding is that it’s often a factor of showing up.

The desire to be mothers comes from exposure to babies and small children

Lol no

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-019-09525-0

”The difference between a firstborn and fourth-born woman (0.09 fewer children) is equivalent to a change in 0.04 standard deviations in fertility for our outcome variable. (For birth order 6, the effect is 0.13 fewer children.) Thus, the results suggest that birth order shows a negative relationship for women, with more children amongst early-born sisters than later-born sisters, though the effects are not very large in substantive terms.”

Firstborn women with one additional sibling show an increase in own fertility by 0.12 children, two additional siblings increases their own fertility by 0.22 children, and three younger siblings increases their own fertility by 0.30 children

Do you really think that a Haredi woman who happens (due to some cosmic accident) to be an only child herself, will not go on to have many children? My intuition tells me she will have a lot; perhaps not as many as her many-sibling peers, but still way more than an American with four siblings

For tradcaths grandmotherhood is higher status than having single adult children, but not as high status as having nun/priest children

I would consider this a perversion of the religion. The Epistle to Timothy is clear that women “will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness with self-control.” These are bad Christians if they are giving a woman status for raising a priest instead of a dozen kids. I actually find Catholicism horrifically anti-natal because the most devout are pressured into producing impotent clerical heirs. It made sense in Malthusian times for the youngest male without property to join the church. It doesn’t make sense now. In more traditional, medieval Catholicism, even these priests had concubines

https://www.medievalists.net/2012/08/clerical-concubines-in-northern-italy-during-the-fourteenth-century/

https://www.medievalists.net/2011/08/priestly-marriage-the-tradition-of-clerical-concubinage-in-the-spanish-church/

I don't claim that my co-religionists are perfect- and it's worth noting our actual religious elders don't either, undue pressure on your children to have a religious vocation is explicitly a sin.

I think I found this on themotte but forgot the poster

I know I, for one, referenced it (indirectly) here eight months ago, but other people have probably mentioned it on the Motte as well.

Centralized communist parties don't have a good track record in increasing TFR. Ceaucescu tried and only managed a blip. Even taking the rest of your thesis as true, it doesn't work because Communism is essentially modern in the ways you're objecting to. Communism (theoretically) values work, not motherhood.

Nazism did value motherhood, and does seem to have increased the birthrate, but unfortunately also massively increased the death rate.

Because humans are not motivated to fundamentally change their life for a trivial amount of extra money. In fact, insofar as this is an extrinsic reward, it will decrease the intrinsic desire to be a parent, as it signals to the would-be parent that the reason to do things is to spend money, reinforcing the salience of being an independent capitalist-consumer slopenjoyer. The very offer of the extrinsic reward is demotivating to its intrinsic pursuit. (In the same way, it is terrible to give students candy for doing math correctly, as it teaches them not to intrinsically value learning and success, but only candy). If humans fundamentally changed their life for a small increase in funds, all retail workers would be flocking to the oil rig, and everyone in Appalachia would have left. Becoming a parent is the oil rig of human activity. It needs to be promoted through social influence.

Totalitarian societies are fantastic at increasing pronatality when they understand how to do it, which Romanians and Hungarians do not. The best to do this through essentially non-theistic measures were the Nazis (as you mention). They increased the birth rate by 40% in 7 years, even though their understanding was also pretty mediocre.

Child-bearing is considered holy and a pregnant woman is shown the utmost consideration as one unselfishly doing her part for the good of the state. Children are extolled as worth far more than material comforts. In the schools the youth are being inculcated with these beliefs.

Nazis say that under the individualistic point of view a pregnant woman was treated with a certain amount of derision and scorn; she was foolish to undergo pregnancy; she and her husband would be more sensible to buy an auto or spend money on themselves in other ways

[Integral was the] “reviving of self-respect among the German people, and of their faith in the future of Germany. They claim that both feelings were dying out under the previous régime, and people were increasingly unwilling to raise children in such an atmosphere”

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/217103

(Unlocked link) https://sci.bban.top/pdf/10.1086/217103.pdf?download=true

Nazism did value motherhood, and does seem to have increased the birthrate, but unfortunately also massively increased the death rate.

This prompted me to look at other fascist/military dictator states around then. It looks like Italy crashed hard, Portugal stayed about flat, and Spain was flat with a small increase. I haven't found a good chart for Peronist Argentina specifically. I had seen the Franco chart before, but interesting to see that Italy was so different.

It's interesting to note that Argentina is notable for it's anomalously high fertility rate into very recent times; this was plausibly due to its policy of targeting pro-natal gibs at lower class teenagers(which they had a lot of).

anomalously high fertility rate into very recent times

Huh, no kidding (only goes back to 1960). ~3 until the early 90s, then a slow decline to about 2.4 until about 2014, and then a dramatic fall.

Here's a more historical one (by 5-year increments). That late 70s/early 80s bump is intriguing.

Right, the coordination problem to actually do this is a tough nut to crack, even in a totalitarian society.

TradCaths do this by having enough babies/toddlers that there are generally more of them wanting to be held than there are adults wanting to hold them; thus teenaged girls get lots of baby holding time and decide they like it(because most do). This is likely not an option for a country with a TFR of 1.0. The party might bring this up at meetings, but they probably bring up lots of stuff no one believes. China also strikes me as an… unlikely candidate for the kind of religious revival which boosted fertility in the stans.

It’s hard in a non-totalitarian, non-centralized social ecosystem. Otherwise it’s as easy as top-down educational reform and media promulgation.

It’s not religion qua religion that’s essential here, it’s how women are reared and judged. Gypsies aren’t very theistic. China can implement these changes without touching religion. I think the few pronatal factors which are intrinsically theistic are just: (1) increased sense of social safety and abundance from a God, (2) increased use of exaggerated paternal / filial language (when one speaks of God being a Father and Provider, they don’t realize it but this is implicitly pronatal, inspiring a desire to be a parent as God parents). The other pronatal factors in religion can be divorced from the religious package. You can induce obedience to many behavioral prescriptions without God.

China's fertility rate is low enough, and has been for a long time, that it's pretty much stuck. Exposing teenagers to childcare causes higher fertility desires but China does not have enough children to do this; China is also aging rapidly and will be running out of impressionable young people sharpish. And orientals have low rates of coupling, too.

There are many ways to promote pronatal attitudes & behaviors that do not rely on exposure to childcare. It is easy to imitate this with imitation like the “infant simulator programme” study I linked, and with media.

China does not have universal high school.

No doubt the Chinese are capable of psyopping the crème de la crème of their society into three kids is better than none. But effective government propaganda is hard, and it has to hit the middle and lower classes in these cases. Does China have an equivalent of country music pushing the idea that having kids is the obvious culmination of a romantic relationship? Is the ministry of culture able to pivot to producing this, or is it stuck with the usual East Asian model of gay virgins who might think you in particular are appealing but really, focus on your studies? Is there a critical development window for exposure to childcare(afaik we really, actually DON’T know this, but it’s plausible)? And I mean obviously, is China just old enough that the damage is done, a 2.5 ish tfr among current twenty year olds won’t change much? Are the economic incentives too hard against women having kids(in practice female coded jobs in America expect resume gaps and maternity leave even if they don’t like them)?

I wonder if this is really true. Let's say you're on your deathbed, everyone you personally care about is dead, you have the option to give yourself a bit of morphine on the way out but it will make everyone currently alive not want to have children and as such humanity will die out in a few generations . Do you press that button? I consider myself rather nihilistic but I wouldn't press the button, so I have to assume I have some preference somewhere for humanity to continue on. This means it's not actually a categorical preference but one based on trade offs.

My ancestors (please forgive the cliché term) expended a lot of effort to get me where I am, and I won't be the one to chuck it all overboard because "lol who gives a shit about anything so long as I go to the grave on a road of dopamine". I only have it as good as I do because others worked hard and contributed to the edifice of the commons to the best of their abilities. To look to myself and only myself instead of paying it forward strikes me as the very peak of ingratitude.

And I guess that's where the exchange ends. You just put your view out there, here's mine, I don't think there's much to be done either way. Enjoy continuing to extract benefits from those who care more than you.

Of course I want living standards to continue to be good during my generation at least

Ay, there's the rub, isn't it?

I understand your thought process, despite being ideologically opposed as someone who is very much attached to civilization and its fruits. But what makes you think that your living standards might continue to be good during your generation? There is a lot of decline to go, and you can always be one of the rats clinging to the planks, but the effort required to do so will only increase in future.

My interest in cratering TFR is not because I find it an interesting hobbyhorse in the abstract, or because I am attached to the idea of human civilization, even though I wholly admit that is where my biases lie. I am extremely worried about what the governments of the world will enact on me and mine in the pursuit of keeping the flywheel spinning just a bit longer. Maybe you have some idea or experience dealing with others when you threaten their rice bowls. If you do, you should have at least some inkling of what it is like or what things they will do.

I believe, in the name of restoring TFR the tax base to pay for benefits their own salaries, there will be a huge attempted clampdown on sexual freedom with predictable results. Governments will first offer tax breaks for families and then increase taxes significantly on the single. I also see this having predictable results: imagine, if you will, the nothing-to-lose incel hordes stitched to financial incentives. And who knows, maybe there will be more countries led by the lizard-brained enough to go back to pillaging other countries to take their stuff, or willing to feed large numbers of their population into the meat grinder of drones, artillery and shrapnel so they can make a dent in those depending on the government for long-term palliative care.

The year is 2100. The US, China, even Brazil- all, faced with declining populations, they drain their hinterlands- not exactly demographically healthy themselves in lots of cases- for workers to maintain their economies. Vast swaths of Latin America are empty; the world's largest hippo population is now in lake Maracaibo, Venezuela, having expanded from their range in Columbia since the human population left the place empty, having walked to the US or Mexico or Brazil for better economic opportunity cleaning bedpans and pouring concrete and sewing jeans. Venezuela itself has not a single soul under fifty; they export all of them to be hired by Exxon and Pemex and then expat in their home country extracting oil. In China, Tajik and Kazakh workers earn a good wage in the factories, they fly back to their home countries on the holidays to build better hovels they'll retire in. The taliban still holds on in Afghanistan, having deported their entire Hazara population to Iran, desperate for young shiites to prop up the country.

India can no longer fill its sweatshops; Pakistan has attained conventional military superiority due to having more young people and retaken Kashmir. US backing is sufficient to keep Pakistan from expanding further south. In the middle east, Israel regularly conquers territory from its neighbors with declining population, and partners with Ethiopia to occupy Yemen and keep Egypt occupied. Further south in Africa, the megastates launch grinding trench warfare over resources they can trade for Russian or American or Canadian or Argentine grain. A small handful of western mercenaries can turn the tide for million man armies; the Afrikaner breakaway state in South Africa secured international recognition by acting as backer in several cases.

Senator Armstrong's babble makes more sense every day. Sad pepe.

Future world contains Outer Heaven?

wtf, I love low TFR now?!

I admit to having enjoyed coming up with this.

Maybe 'oddball future history' will be a feature I start on in the friday fun thread.

I get joy at the idea that some small part of me will help someone down the line. I don't claim any deep philosophical justification for it; it's the same part of my brain that picks up a piece of litter to throw it away in a place I'll never revisit. Meaningless in the grand scheme of things, perhaps, but it still makes me happy.

Do you pick up litter? If so, why?

Are all the accomplishments of humanity fated to be nothing more than a layer of broken plastic shards thinly strewn across a fossil bed, sandwiched between the Burgess shale and an eon's worth of mud?

Are we supposed to just totally fail the final and most blatant Marshmallow test? If we extend your logic to the next step, it follows that nobody should accept any sacrifices to sustain civilization (at least after you/we die). This is the ultimate Baby Boomerism, extractive selfishness taken to its ultimate conclusion.

Walk the stars or die trying

At least we have some flags on the moon to show for it I guess.

Ha, can you imagine if civilization collapses and doesn't rise for another 100,000 years. Then that civilization thinks we were cavemen and finally gets to the moon only to have their heads spin over abandoned flags and moon rovers. Or in another unlikely scenario, we get to Ganymede and find some weird cro magnon trash and porno mags in a pre-fab.

From "The Next Ten Billion Years" by John Michael Greer (The Archdruid Report):

One hundred million years from now:

Retro-rockets fire and fall silent as the ungainly craft settles down on the surface of the Moon. After feverish final checks, the hatch is opened, and two figures descend onto the lunar surface. They are bipeds, but not even remotely human; instead, they belong to Earth’s third intelligent species. They are distantly descended from the crows of our time, though they look no more like crows than you look like the tree shrews of the middle Cretaceous. Since you have a larynx rather than a syrinx, you can’t even begin to pronounce what they call themselves, so we’ll call them corvins.

Earth’s second intelligent species, whom we’ll call cyons after their raccoon ancestors, are long gone. They lasted a little more than eight million years before the changes of an unstable planet sent them down the long road to extinction; they never got that deeply into technology, though their political institutions made the most sophisticated human equivalents look embarrassingly crude. The corvins are another matter. Some twist of inherited psychology left them with a passion for heights and upward movement; they worked out the basic principles of the hot air balloon before they got around to inventing the wheel, and balloons, gliders, and corvin-carrying kites play much the same roles in their earliest epic literature that horses and chariots play in ours.

As corvin societies evolved more complex technologies, eyes gazed upwards from soaring tower-cities at the moon, the perch of perches set high above the world. All that was needed to make those dreams a reality was petroleum, and a hundred million years is more than enough time for the Earth to restock her petroleum reserves—especially if that period starts off with an oceanic anoxic event that stashes gigatons of carbon in marine sediments. Thus it was inevitable that, sooner or later, the strongest of the great corvin kith-assemblies would devote its talents and wealth to the task of reaching the moon.

The universe has a surprise in store for the corvins, though. Their first moon landing included among its goals the investigation of some odd surface features, too small to be seen clearly by Earth-based equipment. That first lander thus set down on a flat lunar plain that, a very long time ago, was called the Sea of Tranquillity, and so it was that the stunned corvin astronauts found themselves facing the unmistakable remains of a spacecraft that arrived on the moon in the unimaginably distant past.

A few equivocal traces buried in terrestrial sediments had suggested already to corvin loremasters that another intelligent species might have lived on the Earth before them, though the theory was dismissed by most as wild speculation. The scattered remnants on the Moon confirmed them, and made it hard for even the most optimistic corvins to embrace the notion that some providence guaranteed the survival of intelligent species. The curious markings on some of the remains, which some loremasters suggested might be a mode of visual communication, resisted all attempts at decipherment, and very little was ever learnt for certain about the enigmatic ancient species that left its mark on the Moon.

Even so, it will be suggested long afterwards that the stark warning embodied in those long-abandoned spacecraft played an important role in convincing corvin societies to rein in the extravagant use of petroleum and other nonrenewable resources, though it also inspired hugely expensive and ultimately futile attempts to achieve interstellar migration—for some reason the corbins never got into the quest for fusion power or artificial intelligence. One way or another, though, the corvins turned out to be the most enduring of Earth’s intelligent species, and more than 28 million years passed before their day finally ended.

Awfully bold of you to assume the Dinosaurs didn't build a civilization.

At the Mountains of Madness truly deserves a remake in Spess

Thats another horrifying masterpiece.

But if we know of one place where the capitalists can't go... its SPACE!

I mean there are philosophical arguments that can be made, and I'm sure people will make them. But there is also the cold hard economic argument to be made that a population collapse means a whole lot of old people in your cohort are going to die slowly alone in pools of their own waste.

You find life "viscerally" valuable, you find the fruits of your society enjoyable enough that you want to be alive for them. You clearly value your civilization and its continued existence. You just don't care if someone younger gets to or at least gets out before it all goes to hell.

I don't see why this would change anything about the pro-natalist/pro-civilization argument. Is it providing new information? This all seems like the prosecution's case being made for it.

People who benefit from a thing but refuse or are unable to care for its continued existence for whatever reason have always existed - usually people assume they're talking to people prosocial enough to not bite that bullet, invested enough in the common good to not benefit from doing so (what if you were twenty years younger and can't count on croaking before it gets really bad?) and agentic enough that they can impact the outcome if they're convinced. And it is also debatable if you can enjoy that standard of living without a concern for fertility.

The standard of living is good across the developed world, by definition, but there are also clear signs of strain due to the aging population. What if you're the one fucking up the math? Live a little too long, run out of money too soon before you croak? Assuming a safety net that isn't there? Your own logic should drive you to care.

Most people really don't think in thousand or even hundred year timescales. They think about what would stop them and their children from losing out on the sorts of fruits you enjoy and that's enough. Their grandchildren can run the same logic, ad infinitum.

Here's the thing though. I'm fine with human civilization ending. I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization continuing. And I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization ending. I'm neutral about it.

There's a saying about this..."so open-minded his brain fell out."

I enjoy being alive, but I see no fundamental deep importance in keeping the human species existing. I'm not a nihilist in the least bit. I love being alive in a very visceral way.

Okay, so you're a solipsist, not a nihilist [edit: fixing a brain-fart]. This is not an improvement.

An egoist. A solipsist would argue the world outside themselves doesn't exist, not merely that it doesn't matter.

OP quite confidently has the Stirnerite position here.

I understand you cannot be brought around to prosocial motivations.

Who do you expect to pay your social security and wipe your ass when you’re old? Is it a work until MAID plan?

I don't think it would be prosocial to bring humans into the world just to pay my social security and wipe my ass.

Of course I would love for people to take care of me when I'm old, but to me that just doesn't seem like a good enough reason to bring new people into existence. It's very selfish. If I'm going to help bring new people into existence, I would probably like to do it for less selfish reasons than that.

I never said it was pro-social.

Ultimately fertility is a coordination problem and coordination problems are hard. But you have selfish reasons for wanting it to be solved even if you don’t care about the prosocial ones or the intangibles.

If you're an anti-natalist who believes that life is inherently suffering this makes sense.

I'm not really sure why you'd be that bothered about it given your own experience. By your own account life can be very good. Seems like you got a good deal here.

Here's the thing though. I'm fine with human civilization ending. I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization continuing. And I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization ending.

What can I say, I live here.

I'd like to see what else is out there in this gigantic universe.

If Civilization recedes in my lifetime, there's a serious chance it won't come back to the tech level necessary to get off the planet. At which point, we are STUCK here until a rogue asteroid smashes us, solar flare fries us, an alien Civ shows up, or some other cataclysm. Eventually the sun dies out too.

Then its game over for reals.

If there is any real purpose, any endgame, any way to discover the answer to the last question, it's probably only accessible to Kardashev II and above civilizations.

But really, I just think its more fun for everyone if civilization continues. One thing I think that is fair to say about most of human history: MOST of humanity was not having fun MOST of the time. Quite the opposite. Wars suck. Famine Sucks. Manual labor for sheer basic survival sucks. So civilization receding will suck.

We should be trying to have more fun.

But since we're bootstrapped sentient primates running on ancient murder monkey software and have access to nuclear weapons and we're bad at large-scale coordination, maybe this was always our fate. But I prefer to believe not.

Seeing this written out explicitly, it makes me wish that more people would be open and honest about their view on this like here. Because this comment reminded me of 3 different things.

One was during the aftermath of 9/11 when the PATRIOT ACT and War on Terror were pushed through, with one of the arguments from the Republican/conservative side in favor of these things being that "the US Constitution is not a suicide pact," which was completely ineffective as an argument against most Democrats/liberals/progressives by my observation. The reasoning being that, if adhering to the Constitution would result in the destruction of the country that follows it, then that justifies not adhering to it, so that the country that actually makes the Constitution meaningful beyond some scribbles on paper, can keep on keeping it meaningful. And the most common counterargument was some variant of, "If this means the USA is destroyed, then so be it, at least we followed principles of civil liberty and privacy and etc. along the way."

Another was part of an interview in a documentary called The Red Pill, which was made by a feminist named Cassie Jaye as a way to explore the red pill community/movement/whatever and related man-o-sphere groups like men's rights activists and men going their own way. She interviewed a lot of people, but one of them was a feminist academic, and one of the questions had to do with the idea that, what if the Patriarchy, as feminist academics like herself, understood it, was something that was needed in some form in order to keep human civilization going, since women freed from its shackles empirically keep choosing to have too few children to keep above replacement. Her answer was pretty much "that's a depressing thought," followed by a non-answer in a way that gave the impression that she clearly had thought very little about this possibility, i.e. that this possibility just wasn't something she particularly cared about.

The third is more general throughout the interminable arguments about US immigration, where a common conservative argument against open borders is that allowing anyone in who wants to come in would cause US society to worsen, including, at the limits, just destroying the country altogether. And one common sentiment, though rarely stated explicitly, among progressives who reject this argument, has been something along the lines of, "If open borders would destroy the USA, then so be it; at least we didn't discriminate against foreigners along the way." This happened to explicitly be my own position for a while, before I decided I was selfish enough to want to keep some of the benefits of USA society for myself in the future.

In each of these, one can make some argument based on facts for why the bad thing won't happen: even without the PATRIOT ACT, USA would remain a safe and powerful country; even with maximal female emancipation and sex equality for whatever those mean for any given feminist academic/activist, human society could keep surviving and even thriving; even with open borders, it's possible that USA will be just as prosperous and safe a nation to live in as before, just servicing more and poorer people. There are good and bad arguments for and against all of these positions. But looking from the inside, it seemed to me that these arguments weren't made based on good faith belief in them, but rather based on motivated reasoning, in order to avoid having to make the argument that the benefits are worth the harms, in favor of just denying that harms exist (this is a common pattern you've probably seen in every aspect of life, from the most minute decisions one might make in everyday life all the way to the biggest, most world-altering policies or military actions).

Now, I have little idea if this is a left/progressive thing; I've just observed it in that group because I am part of that group and have spent most of my life surrounded by people in that group. I suspect that conservatives, by their nature of preferring tradition - such as the tradition of keeping civilization going for the next generation - have a greater tendency to want to keep humanity and human civilization going than progressives, who tend to be skeptical of tradition. But either way, I'm quite sure this attitude of "why care about humanity's survival when we have my favorite principles to worry about" is extremely common among progressives. Usually, it's not explicitly spoken or even thought, it gets laundered in, as alluded to above, by motivating oneself to believe that the evidence indicates that one's principles don't actually conflict with other goals such as survival of humanity/human civilization (in fact, I see such motivated reasoning often leading people to believe that their principles are actually synergistic to good goal, such as game devs genuinely believing that putting in characters that conform with their ideology would also lead to more sales due to expanding the market).

Which, to me, is interesting to think about with respect to the concept of a "progressive," which indicates someone who wants to "progress" - but what's the point of progress if there's no one around to enjoy its fruits? One way to think about it might be that we've "progressed" beyond ideologies for the benefit of the comfort and life satisfaction of mere animals such as ourselves and to pure principles that are Good or Bad due to arguments that I found convincing, rather than due to empirical consequences of following them. Which looks a lot like inventing a god or a religion.

Traditional religions make this kind of argument all the time, of course, under the justification of God, who is said to be intrinsically good and beyond understanding and judgment by mere mortals such as ourselves. And He might also punish/reward us in the afterlife, which means even from a completely selfish cynical perspective, following His principles is in my interest. Convincing if you already believe in Him, not so much if you don't. But progressive ideology largely rejects religion and associated supernatural beliefs, and so there is no Heaven or Hell to reward the souls of extinct humans; we just stop existing. And there's no God or faith in God to use as a compass for figuring out what principles are good, we just have academics at our local Critical Theory-related college departments to instruct us what's good. I'm reminded of the criticism often thrown at "wokes," that they copied the original sin of Christianity without copying the forgiveness and redemption.

There's also the reality of a group like "Extinction Rebellion," which is explicitly against the extinction of humanity and what most people would agree is a "progressive" group. However, the fact that the group's mission has to do with stopping global warming, something I don't think I've seen anyone seriously argue has a meaningful chance at making humanity go extinct or even destroying human civilization to enough of an extent to be close enough, makes me think it's more motivated reasoning with an intentionally eyebrow-raising name than genuine motivation.

In any case, I doubt that more than a handful of particularly honest and self-aware progressives explicitly believe this notion, but I commonly see this attitude of "human civilization is a small price to pay for achieving our principles" at virtually every level of analysis and rhetoric put forth by people belonging to this cluster of ideologies. I just wish everyone was more honest and open about this. A progressive who thinks like this and a conservative who wants human society both to stay alive and stay just as good, if not become better, are actually, fundamentally, at odds with each other in terms of goals, not just the methods. If people actually have honest, true, correct beliefs about the goals and principles of others, a lot less time and effort can be wasted in making arguments that falsely presume a common ground.

I'm also reminded of the commonly known "thrive/survive" dichotomy, where progressives are characterized as focusing on how we can thrive, which is only possible in times of plenty, and conservatives are characterized as focusing on how we can survive, which is most relevant in times of not plenty. Sacrificing thriving too much for the sake of survival seems like a likely failure mode of the latter, while sacrificing surviving too much for the sake of thriving seems like a likely failure mode of the former.

Speaking briefly on ultimata.

The primary purpose of an ultimatum is to force the listener to accept the form of the argument: A or B. The argument then splits out along lines of A-support, B-support, A-opposition, B-opposition... etc. It begs the question on whether A and B are in fact linked.

Take your PATRIOT example. The post-9/11 question is: how can we protect ourselves from future attacks? Supporters of the PATRIOT Act alleged that the only effective method was curtailing the rights of Americans. But this is not obviously the only way to protect ourselves from these kinds of attacks. Suicide terror attacks are, and were, overwhelmingly favored by a certain type of extreme Muslim on the world stage. Governments and mafia (i.e. small governments) don't really like them, as they expend valuable trained human resources on frankly trivial strategic goals. (Unless they can convince a third-party stooge to do it, like Iran.) The only time people favor suicide terror attacks is when they kinda want to die (or have their people killed) as a side effect. Consider Japan's suicide bombers. They were very clearly a statement more than a strategy. So, taking this all into account, you could theoretically solve the problem by tightening the visas you give to foreign Arabs substantially, or some other form of discrimination against the highest-risk group. In practice, I think this is what we did. There were lots of racism complaints during the Bush admin. But as far as the PATRIOT debate went, it was about the ability to spy. It's not obvious that this had any bearing on the real problem, and was instead about the ability to spy itself. Call me cynical, but I think that if there were more guys in the White House with strong prejudices against Islam, we'd have been having a different Constitutional debate, one about outlawing a certain religion.

OK. Taking a look at the feminism/fertility debate, or the environmentalism/survival debate, and so on, I believe the not-so-subtle move is that the two are necessarily linked and we must "choose." I call bullshit. Around the world, patriarchal societies still have cratering birthrates. This is easy to find information. Similarly, a ruined environment has explicit costs to human survival, as we undermine our own productive capacity through poisoning ourselves, wrecking good farmland, denuding the seas, etc etc. The existence of those binaries can only be understood as a deliberate attempt to link these unrelated topics for the purpose of controlling the debate, steering it towards one's desired outcomes.

For feminism/fertility, I think the real move is getting attention off of fertility itself. Lots and lots of women want to have kids, and yet they don't, or put it off until the numbers just go down. Why? The feminist (or anti-feminist) answer is to hide it behind the "right to choose," but it's pretty obvious in context that it's only a (colloquially) feminist choice in one direction. (Not all feminists believe this, but it's what dominates the conversation.) I suspect the real reason is a confluence of factors, mostly cultural (lower respect or understanding for the importance of reproduction) and partially material (increased life expectancy screwing with wealth movement and life stages relative to fertile windows). But as long as it's about feminism, which everyone has already made up their minds on as a matter of principle, we don't have to think about maybe changing our individual values and cultural practices to reflect this new reality. Almost the same description can be applied to environmentalism with some mad-libs substitutions.

That's why I'm so skeptical of simply accepting the frame on these things. OP, for his part, didn't actually frame any of this as an ultimatum. He was actually just negating the antecedent, showing that (for him) the presented argument was insufficient. Sure, I happen to disagree with his stance quite fervently, but reading him closely - he doesn't say that he values certain things above the survival of the species, he says he does not value the survival of the species at all, one way or another. There's no ultimatum there, Therefore, one had to be provided for him.

(As far as the OP is concerned, all I can make is a value statement: that it is ugly and sad to have nothing to recommend one's time on Earth to posterity, be one's contributions ever so humble. We are all destined to die, and pleasures are fleeting, and the march of old age makes the immediate world increasingly bitter, it behooves one to seek value in something a little more distant and external. Say, the future in which one is invested. People who do this seem in my experience to die more comfortably.)

Now, I have little idea if this is a left/progressive thing; I've just observed it in that group because I am part of that group and have spent most of my life surrounded by people in that group. I suspect that conservatives, by their nature of preferring tradition - such as the tradition of keeping civilization going for the next generation - have a greater tendency to want to keep humanity and human civilization going than progressives, who tend to be skeptical of tradition. But either way, I'm quite sure this attitude of "why care about humanity's survival when we have my favorite principles to worry about" is extremely common among progressives. Usually, it's not explicitly spoken or even thought, it gets laundered in, as alluded to above, by motivating oneself to believe that the evidence indicates that one's principles don't actually conflict with other goals such as survival of humanity/human civilization (in fact, I see such motivated reasoning often leading people to believe that their principles are actually synergistic to good goal, such as game devs genuinely believing that putting in characters that conform with their ideology would also lead to more sales due to expanding the market).

I tend to perceive progressive strains of liberalism as making the assumption that civilization as they know it is tge default state of humanity and you can’t really destroy it. It’s not “sacrifice survival for thriving” it’s “survival is a given, so let’s thrive.” On tge conservative side it’s understood that civilization is not the default state, decorum, high trust, low crime, safe environments etc. do not just happen, nor will they just continue without some efforts put toward maintaining those things or preventing their destruction. Now I think you can have thriving as well as civilization if you bother to do so correctly. If you make sure that the support structures aren’t destroyed or that public morality, health, and welfare are preserved, then you can do things to allow people to thrive. It’s not a zero sum game.

I tend to perceive progressive strains of liberalism as making the assumption that civilization as they know it is tge default state of humanity and you can’t really destroy it.

This is difficult to square with the constant neuroticism around reactionary enemies who seek to destroy this state or return everyone to a much worse status quo. There's always someone about to put y'all back in chains.

I recognize the quoted section describes a psychological tendency amongst some very sheltered leftists especially, but "you can't destroy what we have" doesn't really fit the hysteria shown by the references to The Handmaid's Tale or - of course - Weimar Germany and the Nazis.

Without opining on the object-level question, I will point out that there is a difference between tyranny on the one hand, and civilisational collapse on the other. One can believe in one without believing in the other, and certainly the latter is pretty far from experience in the West (I mean, when was the last time a Western country had state failure? The Wild West kinda counts - although it wasn't a case of state failure so much as a state not previously existing there - but I can't think of anything more recent).

I don’t see it that way simply because none of the actions they take are consistent with the idea that “reactionary enemies” are about to end civilization as they have known it. The same people refer to ICE as the Gestapo and to Alligator Auswitz and Palentir reading their social media posts also are mostly bitching on the Internet, and occasionally attending a weekend protest that doesn’t interfere with normal life at all. I think most of the “reactionary Nazi” stuff reads more like a psychological need for significance in their own times than the thought that these are actually threats to civilization. Even in Congress, the minority leader is Jewish and he’s not doing anything more than sending angry letters around. If they really believed in Trump’s Nazi party, it seems like you’d be doing a bit more than leaving tge equivalent of 1-star reviews on the internet.

There's a lot of inconsistencies among Democrats'/popular progressivism's stated beliefs. Plenty of courses of action available but untaken that aren't even the least bit risky or illegal.

Suppose it's 2024, and you believe Trump is neo-Hitler and also that America is a fundamentally racist and sexist society. Doesn't that then call for nominating a relatively milquetoast white man who takes no unpopular stances? You might have to put off your more out-of-the-mainstream policies for awhile (or at least implement them surreptitiously), but that is still far superior to having a Fourth Reich.

All you've got to do is vote in a primary as if winning the election is important as opposed to moral posturing. Instead, identity issues dominate.

I mean exactly. It’s not a serious thing, at least not in the sense that they literally believe in theNeo-Hitler theory. If they did, and they wanted to stop it, they’d be doing that. I find it rather fascinating just from the psychological aspect as it almost seems like a rape fetish, but political. They want to be brutally repressed. They want the camps. They want the mass arrests. It’s exciting to them. That’s why they’re always speculating about canceling elections, martial law, and camps. Not because they believe it’s going to happen (in fact Trump would be stupid to cancel elections or declare martial law because it would create a huge backlash from the general public), but because they want to play out their vision of themselves as plucky rebels defying their Hitler. But because it’s a fantasy and they at least unconsciously understand that, they aren’t willing to accept loses of their lifestyle. They aren’t willing to be arrested, risk their job, make their kid miss practice, break the law, etc. they want to appear to have resisted without the messy stuff.

I mean, if they really believed that Trump was going to institute an authoritarian regime and they couldn’t stop it… well none of these people strike me as true believer martyrs(republicans usually don’t either). They’d be loudly cheering on Trump so they don’t get purged.

Isn’t that what we’re doing here? To my mind, this explained better by @kky’s theory of traction.

The average person has no idea how to get from “I am upset about this” to “I am taking effective (paramilitary?) action against it”. If I remember correctly, both the CIA handbook for building an internal insurgency and the famous “Rules for Radicals” both hypothesise that showing supporters intermediate steps along this path is the primary purpose of an effective resistance movement.

I’m not demanding they form a militias or something to be taken seriously. But the complete lack of any action beyond standing outside with signs doesn’t really do much to convince me that these guys are serious. It’s like someone screaming that tge house is on fire from the bedroom while queuing up a Netflix movie. The actions don’t match including the actions including by people who have power and should know what to do and could do things to either slow it down or impeach or launch investigations or hold hearings. Yet… they don’t.

Now if this were 1935 Berlin, and these people believed that the crazy Austrian was about to destroy democracy, the actions don’t remotely fit. They can’t be made to fit unless they don’t actually believe what they’re saying, or they’re actually okay with it, but playing tge part. Psychologically, I think the LARP angle makes a lot of sense. It explains the sort of slacktivist protests, the lack of fear of saying something that the reactionaries don’t like (a good way to get arrested in actual authoritarian regimes), the lack of action by anyone in congress, and on it goes. Now there’s always been a certain romanticism of “plucky resistance movements.” The genre of resisters bringing down or stymies an authoritarian regime is a staple in Hollywood. Star Wars, Red Dawn, Lawrence of Arabia, pretty much every WWII movie ever made, Handmaid’s Tale, Hunger Games. It’s a trope buried pretty deep in American mythology. And so people who are disappointed in losing the culture war might well project that movie trope onto American politics, especially because it allows them to cast themselves as the heroes of the psychodrama. It’s easy to cover up a life you aren’t happy with by pretending to be on some kind of great crusade for Justice. It’s also great for a party that barely has a real agenda because if you are fighting Palpatine, it doesn’t matter that your big idea is shovel-ready projects or something — you’re fighting evil.

A leftist might also argue that shooting first and helping the descent into lawlessness without public buy-in benefits fascists, who already believe in violence and want to discredit the status quo. It's especially bad if Trump already controls the government.

A much less extreme form of trying to play the man (all of the prosecutions, which Democrats do not see as unprovoked) has arguably already backfired.

I tend to perceive progressive strains of liberalism as making the assumption that civilization as they know it is tge default state of humanity and you can’t really destroy it. It’s not “sacrifice survival for thriving” it’s “survival is a given, so let’s thrive.”

I perceive the same, but I disagree with that last sentence. One is the other. If you care so little about survival that you haven't done the research to learn just how unusual and precarious modern society is, then you're deciding that sacrificing survival for the sake of thriving is worth it.

The third is more general throughout the interminable arguments about US immigration, where a common conservative argument against open borders is that allowing anyone in who wants to come in would cause US society to worsen, including, at the limits, just destroying the country altogether. And one common sentiment, though rarely stated explicitly, among progressives who reject this argument, has been something along the lines of, "If open borders would destroy the USA, then so be it; at least we didn't discriminate against foreigners along the way." This happened to explicitly be my own position for a while, before I decided I was selfish enough to want to keep some of the benefits of USA society for myself in the future.

This is just as often reversed on immigration, though.

Lib: We need immigrants for economic growth, to bring in young productive people to support social security programs, to do jobs that are otherwise difficult to fill. Immigration makes America stronger!

Con: What does American economic growth matter if it doesn't benefit Americans? I'd rather see the American economy grow or collapse on the strength of Americans, than sell out my country to foreigners to get stronger.

Purity is typically a conservative basis for morality in Moral Foundations Theory. Refusal to compromise on one's beliefs is the essence of having beliefs, of having principles. Life for the sake of life is the philosophy of bacteria, the life has to mean something, be something.

Speaking as an anti immigrant person, I’m concerned we let in people who are ill suited for our culture and who aren’t the brightest. I don’t think the brazilificarion of our nation will lead to economic growth per capita even if it might increase overall gdp; I think it will per capita make it worse.

I'm not addressing every single person who holds a position. People think things for many reasons!

Surely you can recognize that there exist some anti-immigration individuals who would not care if the GDP went up if it meant the Great Replacement occurred.

Of course. But you made a claim about the mass of conservatives. I think a big piece is that there will be a net decrease in utility. Some of that is eco ionic and some of that is cultural.

At some level though what OP is positing is equally mixed: libs believed that torture was bad, that it wasn't useful (delivered no usable Intel), and that even if it did it would still not be worth the compromise in morals. The degree to which the middle term is driven by motivated reasoning is the battleground.

Similarly, anti immigration folks claim immigration is net negative in every way, pro immigration folks tell me it's positive in every way. The degree to which motivated reasoning, or per op simple dishonesty, is present is the battleground.

I don't think the broad mass of conservatives are motivated purely by economic concerns. That isn't contradicted by somebody popping up and saying well actually me personally... And even you yourself admit that some of it is cultural for you, so once again we're in the battleground.

To me, there is a difference between pecuniary and the common good. I can imagine some communities that are slightly poorer compared to other communities but better places to live due to non pecuniary reasons. Of course, the larger the pecuniary gap the more difficult it is for the non pecuniary benefits to outweigh the pecuniary ones.

There's a reductio ad in either direction right?

On the one hand, replacing every American with a higher-IQ Chinese or Indian person might raise the GDP by 15%, but it's weird to say to say it would be good for "America."

On the other, admitting Jensen Huang to the country obviously benefits America, even if it dilutes the pool of Americans. 1/333000000 dilution, versus a roughly $500 estimated increase in GDP per capita.

More comments

Life for the sake of life

It's religious conservatives who believe every life has intrinsic value, though

Every life has intrinsic value.

Yet, Christianity honors the martyrs who refused to renounce God even in the face of death.

There is a value above life in this view. There are forms of continuing human civilization that would not be worth it.

Human extinction is 100% inevitable. Because of that I am sympathetic to the idea that acting on one's values is ultimately more important than survival. It's the same as preferring to live a beautiful short life over a pointlessly prolonged one in a state of senility.

Btw I think extinction rebellion is named that because of mass wildlife extinctions rather than human extinction.

Human extinction is 100% inevitable.

I don't think anyone knows this with any meaningful level of confidence. The heat death of the universe through entropy is the only thing that I can think of that could guarantee this, but I don't believe we have a complete-enough understanding of physics and cosmology to state with 100% confidence that that's inescapable.

Because of that I am sympathetic to the idea that acting on one's values is ultimately more important than survival. It's the same as preferring to live a beautiful short life over a pointlessly prolonged one in a state of senility.

This is perfectly cromulent, but also, I think most people would prefer to live a beautiful long life over a beautiful but pointlessly short one. And the thing about prolonging versus ending life is that it's asymmetrical; if you prolong life when human civilization is barely lumbering along in a state of senility, there's always the chance in the future that that civilization becomes beautiful and prolonged. If it ends in a blaze of beauty, then no one ever gets to discover if there was a way to have a prolonged beautiful civilization. Believing that the end of civilization/humanity is worth it as long as my own principles and values got met by the last generation requires a God-like level of confidence in the correctness of one's own values. Which points to faith.

Which is also perfectly cromulent! I just wish people would talk about this honestly and openly.

What can I say, I just want to starve on a dying planet in the arms of my loved ones, instead of having to eat or be eaten by them.

(In reality most of the time I am personally extremely unconfident about whether AI, low fertility or climate change will in the long-run hasten or put off the demise of our species, so actual existential continuity tends to fade into the background of my thinking on most issues.)

Also, yes, you are right, heat death is not actually certain.

Which, to me, is interesting to think about with respect to the concept of a "progressive," which indicates someone who wants to "progress" - but what's the point of progress if there's no one around to enjoy its fruits?

If progress results in civilization ending within a generation, then at least one generation has enjoyed the fruits of progress. If civilization continues forever without progress, then, from the point of view of at least N=1 progressive, what's the point of civilization?

If progress results in civilization ending within a generation, then at least one generation has enjoyed the fruits of progress. If civilization continues forever without progress, then, from the point of view of at least N=1 progressive, what's the point of civilization?

I mean, okay, let's run with this hypothetical.

You do progress. This undermines the basis of civilisation (this being your "if"). Civilisation "ends", by which we mean there's no stable law, the modern economy (including agriculture) disintegrates because you can't have trade without functioning laws against theft, half the population eats the other half, infrastructure disintegrates.

But that's not extinction. Humans still exist, a lot of knowledge will be retained, agriculture will persist in some less-efficient form. You'll get governments, sooner or later, as warlords put together enough force to cow people. I don't think their policies are going to be very progressive, particularly since they'll (correctly, in this hypothetical) blame your progress for the apocalypse and warlords are not known for wanting to be eaten.

Sure, maybe they'll come back to where we are now in a hundred years or so. But this doesn't seem to maximise the average amount of progress over time. Unless you think that very-recent and near-future progress is far more important than that from, oh, 1770 to 1970?

Progress doesn't exist. There is only degrees of survival and almost everything is a tradeoff.

Things that don't sustain themselves die. In the long run no other phenomenon really matters.

from the point of view of at least N=1 progressive, what's the point of civilization?

Not dying. Maintaining the level of success, arete, and prosperity that has already been obtained. These are not only good insofar as we get more of them - they are good in and of themselves, and forgetting and taking for granted the successes of the past is one of the chief flaws of modernist thinking.

If progress results in civilization ending within a generation, then at least one generation has enjoyed the frouts of progress.

It's certainly perfectly cromulent to judge that as good and even better than the alternative of a civilization that keeps chugging along in a way that improves people's lives compared to not having civilization - and even improving the amount by which this is an improvement - without enjoying the fruits of progress, where progress here refers to the types of societal changes pushed for by people identifying as "progressives," rather than something more generic like "improving over time" or "moving forward." I don't think this is a common sentiment, though; what I see by and large is motivated reasoning that circumvents the issue altogether, by adopting a genuine, good faith belief that progress - again, referring to the specific meaning alluded above, not the general term - not only won't result in civilization ending within a generation, but that progress will help make civilization more robust against ending.

As a progressive, I would say that the odds that I'm mistaken about the goodness of my ideology - and more generally that people who agree with me are mistaken about the goodness of our ideology - is sufficiently high that I have a general preference to hedge my bets by having humanity keep moving forward long after my death. It's possible that we'll create literal heaven on Earth that you and I can enjoy until we die as the last humans to have ever lived, but it's also possible that, when good, intelligent, well-meaning people do their best, in good faith, to implement ideas that I consider to be good, this actually creates a hell on Earth that we all have to suffer through before we die as the last humans to have ever lived. I would prefer to avoid that.

If civilization continues forever without progress, then, from the point of view of at least N=1 progressive, what's the point of civilization?

The way I see it, the point of civilization is to organize humans in a way that helps make both surviving and thriving easier or more likely for them. Not uniformly or monotonically, but in some vague general sense. Which some/many people see as a good thing worth sacrificing for, even if no one ever enjoys the fruits of progress, again, by that specific meaning referenced above.

The problem with the end of civilization is that the alternatives suck.

Furthermore, I think we have a serious problem in humanity civilization or not if basic biological necessities like perpetuating the species or not eating ourselves to death, or those kinds of things. I’m hypothesizing that we’re creating a very hyper stimulating environment that hijacks our normal biological systems in ways that are more stimulating than the normal activities that our hyper stimulating environment creates. I’m looking into a minimalistic sort of entertainment tech detox that im suspecting will prove this out. But if people are hyper stimulated by media, technology and so on to the point that they don’t end up socializing as much as they should, or if porn (which I don’t do) is hyper stimulating to the point that real life humans and dating them cannot compete, I think we may be engineering our own species out of existence much like we created beer bottles for Australian beetles to prefer to hump over real female beetles. If this is the case, it needs to be dealt with unless the royal we are perfectly okay with killing off the most intelligent species we know of in the entire universe to make the money printer go brrrrr.

I always imagined the Great Filter might be something exciting like a war or a plague. Turns out that it might be us creating systems that stimulate our brains too much.

Annoying nitpick. Civilization ending and the human species existing are not necessarily equivalent.

I personalty would prefer for any future descendants to live in a high functioning civilization, but presumably the anarcho-primitivists might still have preference for human species existing but also for civilization ending. Return to Monke, and all that.

I think this kind of thing actually does affect life right now. There’s a qualitative difference in what life is like in a civilization that is alive, growing, and still believes in itself and what we have now.

That's a good point. Yeah, abstractly I don't care whether humanity survives in the long term or not, but in practice it would probably be very unpleasant to live in a society that is convinced that humanity is about to go extinct.

Aren’t their pockets they believe this right now, due to climate dooming? They don’t seem like the happiest people.

Have you read Children of Men or watched the movie? That’s the kind of society I think we would have this attitude was widespread.

Have you read Children of Men

Is the book good?

And I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization ending. I'm neutral about it. If human civilization ends after my generation, I'm fine with it

Tell me you don't have kids without telling me you don't have kids.

The idea that your views on this stem from whether you've got kids or not is dubious. My father had a bunch of kids, who've now got kids who have their own kids, and his opinion is still the boomer holdover of there being too many people on earth. Like that 80s song by Genesis, "...too many people making too many problems."

I already covered that.

Responding before reading the whole thing is indeed my weakness.

Your first impulse was the right one. A person without kids musing about why legacy doesn't matter is the same as a person without sex organs musing about why sex doesn't matter.


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