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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25678 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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Modern India, modern South Asia are completely dysgenic hellholes with terrible human capital. India of all places, stands out here because castes ensured clusters of higher IQ people in the elites which is also why you see many Indians doing well.

Whenever I read wholesale dehumanization of groups of people who live in squalor I think to myself: maybe it's the empathetic part of the human brain becoming overloaded and the response from the rest of the brain is to rationalize it as "Well, they're not humans like me.". Yes, words like "dysgenic" and "caste" and "elite" qualify as dehumanization for me, even if they don't for everybody.

The alternative is the empathetic part of the brain continuing along in pain from the knowledge that humans no different from itself are living in abject poverty and destitution. It could cry out, "Why do you do nothing for your fellow man?" - but it would be simply silenced by the retort "They are not my fellow men." This dovetails nicely with some of the alt-right "empathy is weakness" messaging that's been floating around.

But maybe it's more along the lines of prosperity gospel, "I deserve this because I am special / chosen / of higher genetic quality": a defense mechanism against self-doubt that the only thing separating you from such a life are a coin tosses of fate. It would be crippling to spend every day contending with the possibility of living that way due to random chance, and so it's better to destimulate the brain and rationalize it away with a convenient belief system.

Not that it's been solicited, but my take is that the world changed too fast for India, and India grew too fast for how the world has changed. I see a similar story in the favelas in South America. Some peoples had the joy of riding the wave of modernization like surfers, and others were hit in the face by the break - like a Maxim gun nest firing on charging Ndebele warriors. To your main point, could the sociopolitical structures that Hinduism built play a role in India having not been prepared for modernization?

Whenever I read wholesale dehumanization of groups of people who live in squalor I think to myself: maybe it's the empathetic part of the human brain becoming overloaded and the response from the rest of the brain is to rationalize it as "Well, they're not humans like me.". Yes, words like "dysgenic" and "caste" and "elite" qualify as dehumanization for me, even if they don't for everybody.

I mean, maybe. But my entire life has been living in a boomer project of trying to uplift these communities... to no impact what so ever. Build them critical infrastructure and they destroy it. Give them free resources and they just have as many kids as it takes to reduce them to their prior squalor. At the end of the day, they live like that because they choose to live like that. At least in so far as any of us choose to live any particular way while struggling with the human condition. It just seems that the human condition they struggle against seems to be on the extreme tail and at a horrifying scale.

A society that is 1-2% horrifying unreformable anti-civilization monsters might be able to get away with putting them up in nice abodes, letting them have a terrifying number of children, and generally dealing with the disproportionate drain on society this minority creates. When that rises to the level of a voting block of a country, it gets into "I don't fucking know man, it's literally impossible to accommodate them all, they're gonna drag us all down with them!"

How is this different from general misanthropy?

I could also define my own measure of utility for a person a declare anyone under a certain threshold as "dragging us down". My measure wouldn't be by skin color, of course, so it would be a lot harder to implement punitive measures for anyone below that threshold. E.g. I could say that all obese people have an extreme negative impact on the public welfare, but that doesn't trigger our tribal primate brains so no one is out there blackbagging obese citizens to alliteratively-named concentration camps.

Who said anything about concentration camps? All most people want is to be left alone. Stop taking my money to provide for them, leave them to their own devices, stop creating a dependent population with excessive charity, and the problem, if it doesn't go away on it's own, will at least develop some sort of homeostatic boundaries.

But if we insist on having a welfare state... well... then we need to pretty aggressively determine who deserves to be a part of it.

I was referring to Alligator Alcatraz, and how much of the most public support is brazenly transparent about how the current push against immigration is about race and genetics - and not just illegal immigration, but immigration of all types.

stop creating a dependent population with excessive charity

This seems to be a bedrock of how you feel about this topic. How did you first form this opinion, and what keeps you feeling this way?

I personally don't think that many people create much value for society. Big David Graeber fan over here. Furthermore, I think a lot of people who think they create value for society are in the best case simply leeches on the public welfare, and in the worst case actively harming society. I see eye-to-eye with many of the posts on Hacker News lamenting that an entire generation of our greatest engineers were gobbled up by big tech in order to serve hypertargeted advertisements - with a sprinkling of all the negative externalities that the attention economy creates.

It's funny, actually, as I think some of the work that (illegal) immigrants do create the most directly positive value for society, like harvesting fruits and vegetables and building and improving housing stock.

I don't really see much difference between Reagan's welfare queen and the Walton family, whose business is only viable because the government enables them to pay below-livable wages with their welfare programs. Both parties simply exploited a bureaucracy.

Walton family, whose business is only viable because the government enables them to pay below-livable wages with their welfare programs.

I don’t understand this common argument. Without welfare, wouldn’t the employees be more desperate, enabling walmart to pay them far less?

And to look at the problem from the other side: let's say Bernie decides that the state guarantees a minimum standard of living to everyone, regardless or work status, and raise that to equal or higher than whatever walmart pays : as a consequence, no one works at walmart anymore and the state pays everyone a walmart salary. It's a gigantic loss for the state. What I mean is, it's actually walmart who helps the state give money to people so they have an acceptable living standard (which is the responsibility of the state, according to leftists), not the other way around.

I think the argument is basically feudal. The employer is basically considered a liege lord to its employees, owing them some minimum standard in living. If the king (government) has to step in and provide additional largesse directly, that's a failure on the lord's part.

I don’t know, bit anachronistic, and they don’t bring up this ‘liege solidarity’ anywhere else.

My theory is that employees think they produce a lot of value, at least equivalent to their wages + welfare (+ a share of ‘unfair’ walmart profits, which they reluctantly grant those bloodsucking capitalists), and that this sum is stable and independent of other actors, and prices. They equate the value they provide with the effort they put in, which is usually a lot, because low-wage jobs really are tedious and unrewarding.

So they think that without the welfare, they’d just get more wages. The idea that someone's work might only be worth 5$/h just will not compute.

This seems to be a bedrock of how you feel about this topic. How did you first form this opinion,

Taxes

and what keeps you feeling this way?

Shit like this..

I don't really see much difference between Reagan's welfare queen and the Walton family, whose business is only viable because the government enables them to pay below-livable wages with their welfare programs. Both parties simply exploited a bureaucracy.

Yes.

I don't know what to say. I have a visceral disgust reaction towards people who can't even support themselves. Taking my money to give to them, no matter how round about it is, just adds insult to injury.

Sometimes I think of the wisdom of say, giving out free food on Thanksgiving versus all year round. If the food is a one day thing where you get to enjoy a nice meal with some dignity, awesome. If it's a stipend that lets you indulge in the dangerous delusion that you're actually taking care of yourself, or capable to producing dependents, well that's another thing entirely.

But then you started circling the idea of bullshit jobs too, and how much work is actually productive. One man's blue sky research is another man's wasteful spending. Sometimes you get Xerox PARC or Bell Lab's Idea Factory, and sometimes you get whatever the fuck this is, NSFW btw. I might have a bullshit job. I might not. Gun to my head I might just be a bit player on the outskirts of an industry that may or may not generate some ecosystem of products that makes the world marginally better to live in. If I'm lucky. What can I say?

FWIW, democracies are always susceptible to growing dependant underclasses that only exist to vote for "more gibs". It's a self-reinforcing tendency, and much more stable than any anti-welfare or anti-voter-generating tendencies.

Perhaps somewhat off topic but do you mind if I ask your personal theology when it comes to God(s)? Do you see Shiva as your personal god above a multitiude of others (who also exist) or as the ultimate, true God of which the others are simply aspects? Or Shiva perhaps as a co-reflection of a more ultimate divine source? Honestly I think the religious commitments between the 4 largest branches of Hinduism seem to be much, much larger than the gap between e.g. Protestantism/Catholicisim, to the point where I'm not sure it makes sense to refer to them all as the same religion.

That's interesting. I know of these differences just from reading around, wikipedia and the like.

I suppose why I said that they, to me, seem like different religions is that the differences theologically between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are essentially whether the single supreme God (who we all agree behaved in the same way up to ~0 AD, and is the same entity) sent a Messiah or not, the nature of that Messiah, and then subsequent contact and contracts he had with the human world (via a prophet and a book). Then there are somewhat different practical legal matters that must be resolved. Islam and Judaism differ remarkably little in core theology imo.

The differences between the branches of Christianity, which have sparked wars, range from the relatively large (the precise metaphysical nature of Jesus, or different aspects of God) to the small (the matters of ordination, celibacy amongst priests). Considering your own former branch vs. say Advaita Vedanta (or even your current path), one strictly monist, one dualist, the different devotional practices and liturgy, the different teachers, the different Gods, the disagreements in the nature of those entities. I'm sure you know much more about this than me, and I guess you could say "well at the end of the day they still have the same origin", but they do seem rather different. What counts as a religion is probably a bit like what counts as a different language, relying on socio-political aspects as well.

And then finally it doesn't appear to me to be immediately obvious that the more refined and philosophically elite practices of Hinduism (e.g. Kashmir Shaivism or Advaita Vedanta) are the same religion as that of the Indo-Aryans, let alone the Indo-Europeans. There have been centuries of Buddhist, Jain and Islamic influence on these practices, even Christian, so a 19th century or 20th century revival which posits essentially a monotheistic faith with dharmic elements doesn't appear to me to be obviously close to ancient polytheism as does say neo-Platonism or Sol Invictus to the faith of the anicent Greeks or Romans. And as we know, those practices influenced early Christianity heavily, especially aesthetically.

The problem is that the Brahmins could not control their own poor. This is what I have come to believe is the foundational problem of modern India. Land reform is impossible, because the peasants will revolt. Behavioral reform is impossible, because the peasants will revolt. Even political reform is impossible, because the peasants will revolt. Why did your tribe, your caste, grant them endless reservation, government employment, political power? Because you could not stand against it! I have met many extremely intelligent higher caste Indians, far more intelligent than me. This is clear by their extraordinary success in the West, especially by niche subgroups like the Tamil Brahmins, the Iyers and Iyengars and so on.

But in the homeland, they were too weak to conquer their own common people. This is the ultimate failing for any ruling class. You must save India before you can do anything else. I respect that your religion neither destroyed you nor saved you, but it is not important now.

We do not want to be like the Greeks, powerful and prosperous wherever we settle, but with a dead Greece behind us - John Buchan

The problem is that the Brahmins could not control their own poor.

The problem is that the Brahmins created their own poor. Enforcing a caste system is intrinsically anti-meritocratic; it's not a surprise at all that the various castes specialized culturally for space-filling internal competition rather than competition across the entire breadth of the roles available in a society. It's accurate to point out the high performance of indian elites exported elsewhere, but compare the relative performance of the exported euro-american middle class, not even the elites, over the 19th and 20th centuries and even today. The british soldiers that conquered india weren't from a special military caste, they were farmers and the urban poor. Britain had an ingrained system for assigning social roles by ethnicity, but by its permeability succesfully channeled the impulses of its poor toward competing within rather than against the system. India, meanwhile, is caught in a power struggle. If every caste somehow agreed to stop viewing itself as a unitary cultural group overnight it could make much more progress; as it is, I find it unlikely to settle down until either interbreeding becomes commonplace or another coalition of castes finds themselves on top.

These are very half formed thoughts. Musings really. So take everything I'm about to say with a grain of salt.

I think a lot these days about what makes a civilization. I definitely lean towards the line of thought that culture is downstream of genetics. If you replace a people inhabiting a land wholesale, you get a different nation and a different civilization. I harp on IQ a great deal, but there are all manner of uncorrelated or weakly correlated personality traits that influence a civilization at scale.

And then I look at the fall of the Roman Empire. On the one hand, there is a story that can be told where the Roman Empire became just another economic zone, too decadent and corrupt to bother with the labor of maintaining it's own existence. On the other hand there is a story where Christianity somehow carried the seeds of Roman greatness through the ages so that they could flourish among dozens of different people's in the successor Kingdom's in Europe where the rapacious barbarian's settled. They were taught to settle, cultivate, and have a lower time preference. It's hard to imagine a pagan Europe, where Christianity had never been invented. I don't think anyone can figure that counter factual. But it does appear, or at least a story can be told, that the religion of the Roman Empire which outlived it, helped elevate the dozens of tribes that brought it down in it's place.

Although I suppose there is also a discussion to be had about the role of Christianity in allowing infinite rapacious barbarians inside it's open doors these days. I donno, I can see it both ways.

To address your post more directly, even were I to assume that ancient aspects of the Pagan Hindu faith are the only living, practiced Pagan tradition between some far flung Ayran common ancestor... what does it have to offer me to "retvrn" to it? Compare the post-Pagan European society to a Pagan India today? You can make the appeal to some sort of authentic ancestral legacy, but it takes more than that to sell me. There are a few peer nations that seem to have something over on modern day European civilization which I would consider taking a lesson or two from. India is probably in the bottom quintile of that list.

Or to phrase it another way, take what Christianity did to recivilize Europe in the aftermath of one of the most devastating civilizational collapses since the Bronze Age Collapse, and compare it to what the Vedas have done to uplift India.

I have been reading your posts for quite some time now. I do not understand, you are in a dire situation without career/future/life and you are writing irrelevant articles after articles doing absolutely nothing. Please help your self. None of this matter really. Look at your last 10 posts in this light. Come to your senses man. Hello???

This is not the sort of engagement we are looking for here. You are a brand-new account, and do not appear to understand the rules here or the intent behind them. Banned for a day; please familiarize yourself with the rules linked in the sidebar before engaging further.

You are replying to a filtered comment.

TBH I think I'm struggling with a culture and language barrier, but would it be fair to summarize your rebuttal as "Hinduism didn't fail India, India failed Hinduism"?

I read it like Chsterton's:

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

The aryans from the steppe were not white

The Aryans from the Steppe were white and commonly descended from Corded Ware culture along with the majority of European cultures, including the Italo-Celtic, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic languages. The Aryans are genetically closest to modern-day Northern Europeans. It's a cope from Indian Nationalists that they were not white.

This is not to say the development of Hinduism was purely white or that Hinduism is a white religion, neither of which I believe. But the Aryans were white.

The central argument is that these people, upon falling out with their Abrahamic faith, look to the past and cannot deny the appeal of the most fleshed-out aryan faith.

They see a religion that ultimately precipitated the degeneration of the ruling caste and the dysgenic hellscape that followed. The caste system was implemented too late. There are important lessons there but there's certainly not a religion to follow. Although I also have criticisms of Christianity, and there's a lot Christians who IMO don't have a lot of credibility to be hostile towards Hinduism given what they themselves worship.

Greek/Roman paganism is a way better inspiration for those people than Hinduism.

Edit: To provide some more data on the first point...

David Reich described the Aryan invading population in 2019:

... the population that contributed genetic material to South Asia was (roughly) 60% Yamnaya [my note: European steppe ancestry], ~30% European farmer-like ancestry"

And the remaining 10% was of West Siberian Hunter-Gatherer origin, a population which is similar to Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers.

That ethnic composition is nearly identical to modern Northern Europeans (note "Earthly Neolitic" == European farmers).

In comparison, even among the Brahmin, >70% admixture from the Indus Valley and the indigenous Andamanese.

Obligatory /pol summary of the question.

There's a huge divide among "neo-pagans" between Greek/Roman interpretation and Norse paganism.

But the vast majority of the sources we have on Norse paganism are very late, post-Christian, and preserved (and thus filtered) through Christian sources. Take a figure like Odin who appears to be heavily influenced by Christianity - as is well known Odin was hung from a tree. Odin himself is a trickster, appears to be more of a (Christian-influenced) archetypical confabulation of Jupiter and Saturn. Norse paganism may have developed as a sort of temporary bridge between the two traditions.

In contrast, the proto-indo-european "Sky Father", Dyeus Phter, the seat of the gods, is very clearly transmitted in the Greek Zeûs Pater and Roman Jupiter. Of course Jupiter derives from the Proto-Indo-European compound Dyeus Phter- "sky-father" or "shining father". The lack of an unequivocal solar chieftain god in Norse paganism stands out here. There's also strong evidence for such tribal organization in Greek society.

My own curiosity in these questions pertains to the interactions between myth and genetic evolution. Hinduism would be an example par excellence for the extremely underappreciated interaction of the two, but it's not a good example of the preservation of proto-indo-european religion. I still think Greek/Roman paganism is the best we have on that front.

It's just begging the question though- according to ancient myth the colonizers who constructed the temples to Apollo at Delphi and Delos were the race of hyperboreans emerging from the northern-most land in existence. Of course Apollo himself represents a Northern European phenotype and physical ideal- Apollo was called "the most Greek" by the Greeks themselves. It points to a common ancestry with the warring tribes that did the same on the Italian peninsula- as foundational colonizers. An important element of those myths was to preserve lineage of the noble class, with the issue being much more pressing and therefore developing differently in modern-day India.

In contrast, the earliest archeological reference to Odin ever is the 5th century AD, centuries after the development of Christianity. But we know Tyr was worshiped for thousands of years before that before being eclipsed by Odin. The Edda was written in Medieval times, hundreds of years after Christianity. Norse Paganism is not a better representation of pre-Christian Germanic worship, given it was established after Christianity and was clearly influenced by Christianity. Greek/Roman paganism remains the supreme representation of pre-Christian, European worship.

The attempts at a preservation of a nobility were carried out here in a much stricter sense.

Right and that's my point. There's very clearly a modus operandi in what you could call "Aryanism." This is well embodied in Greek/Roman religion, I agree it is very influential in Hinduism, but Norse mythology is something clearly different.

Norse Paganism isn't that Christian though

But if you're trying to understand European, pre-Christian worship then I am very hesitant to look towards a religion in which the central figure was created after Christianity and very obviously influenced by Christianity. And the most important texts were written a thousand years after Christianity and preserved/transmitted (potentially even subversively editorialized) through Christian sources.

What happened in India is just a late stage version of what is already happening in Brazil and what will happen in America, it happens whenever these kind of ethnic merger events happen. Over a long enough time, two ethnically different populations who share the same land will intermarry. Ethnic enclaves - in the Ottoman lands, in 30s Shanghai, elsewhere - can last a while, perhaps even a few centuries - but in the end shared ethnogenesis is inevitable. Even Ashkenazi Jews are the product of Levantines and Italians, after all, and today over 60% of American Jews intermarry. If two people inhabit the same soil long enough, they will breed.

This dates back the full length of human prehistory, it encompasses even Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal interaction, or those other early hominid interactions in Southeast Asia that led to the situation in Australasia and Melanesia etc.

You complain about "poor human capital" and "dysgenics" seemingly ignorant of the fact that if you're right, hinduism-- specifically, any proscriptions regarding caste separation-- must be the direct cause. The very existence of an "upper caste" requires the existence of a lower caste. And once you've created one, you can't turn around and complain that that caste then turns around and wants to become the "upper" caste themselves.

It's dysgenic in that the more blue blooded simply let the underclass run wild due to cheap labor, now that we are in a democracy, the extant of that damage is incredible.

It's incredibly unlikely that the effect of government policy post-independence has had more of an effect on local genomes than the effect of literally thousands of years of caste-based rule. If you have less smart people now, it's because of the castes. And in any case, while I'm inclined to doubt IQ research in general, even if I were to accept it, IQ looks like it's basically just correlated with cold weather, and high-iq countries almost invariably lack castes. Actually, if I was going to bet on anything increasing IQs, it would be the existence of longstanding meritocratic civil-service exams tied to a powerful, well-renumerated bureaucratic class. Tying wealth and therefore reproductive fitness directly to a measure of analytical fitness seems like it would apply the most powerful selection over the broadest possible pool of candidate genes.

Also, England didn't replace their underclass. It did literally the exact opposite-- replacing celtic with roman with germanic with norman nobility. The underclass sticks around and interbreeds with the newcomers every time, both accepting "fallen nobility" but also producing its own occasional homo novus granted land and titles. Honestly, if you want a genetically elite upper class that's just objectively the sane way to do it-- instead of assuming prima facie that your ancestors 3,000 years ago had the very best genes and you're going to preserve them forever, just continuously skin the cream off the top while siphoning the congealed milk off the bottom.

Replying here to both your comments.

Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are inherently worse than India despite the only major difference being lack of Hinduism and castes.

This is a big claim when from my perspective the historical performance of pakistan and india have been pretty similar in terms of GDP per capita. The main reversal has come only recently, which seems like it would directly counter your complaints about indian society becoming more dysgenic. And saying that there's not a lot of differences between those countries-- and that those differences are shared with countries that perform both better and worse than india on an IQ and economic basis-- indicates that those differences are not decisive in increasing indian IQ.

India needed castes to create smarter outliers at the cost of dumber underclass which is a better deal than Bangladesh.

Elites are smarter than their underclass everywhere. You don't need castes to do it. Rather, the evidence is that creating caste-based elites makes your nation underperform relative to other nations with similar capacity for elite formation. Consider Mexico, which got mogged by brazil and the US in the 20th century at least in part due to political instability caused by the remanants of its caste system. Consider how recent european history is basically just relatively meritocratic states stunting on relatively aristocratic states. Picking smart people to form your elite just works better in every way that picking an elite and trying to make them smart.

This is simply untrue, these exams are the reason why French revolution happened

source? And what does that have to do with my argument about selecting for IQ? Even if you're right, it seems to fit pretty smoothly into my model of, "create intermarrying genetic castes -> castes put on bottom have a rational reason to revolt".

and also why you see Asians represented disproportionately in places as their society lives and dies by exam conferred status.

And this counters my argument how?

Did China or Korea produce anything resembling what Indo Europeans did until the 21st century?

Um, yes? From here:

For the Roman Empire ca. 165 CE we accept an estimate of a total population of 75 million and of an imperial income per capita of kg750 of wheat equivalent...$900

For the Han Empire ca. 2 CE we accept an estimate of a total population of 57.7 million and of an imperial income per capita of 1.88 times the subsistence minimum, or $750.

Also relevant,

1.72 subsistence minima ($690) recently estimated for the Aztec Empire ca. 149211. For the Byzantine Empire ca. 1000, an income level comparable to the Aztec has been proposed38.

It's not an exact match, but considering that rome then proceeded to collapse and never re-unite while china had long stretches of stability, it's fair to say that European and Chinese civilization were probably fairly comparable at various points in history.

The world has natural order which wants the blue blooded to be with the blue blooded, the son also rises as they say. Why are castes bad? Do you prefer a slightly higher median with a way fewer smart people. Castes are religious but I'll only defend the sociological factors here.

You foundational assumption-- that castes increase the total amount of very-smart people-- is wrong. India has the same normal distribution of IQs as everyone else. If you were right, India would have a right-skewed distribution. The caste system may or may not provide IQ benefits to the elite castes (I'd guess "not" looking at how the Indian elite underperform relative to the european and chinese elite), but it definitely fails to provide that benefit to society at large. At best, castes don't do anything except split India into a variety of fueding interest groups. At worst, they reduce global selection pressures for IQ without actually doing much to improve outcomes locally.

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 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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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)?

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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)

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?

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 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. 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Walk the stars or die trying

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

So there's generally a lot of questions about why R politicians such as Ted Cruz are so pro Israel.

There are a lot of theories about AIPAC, money, and Evangelical beliefs about judgement day.

But from what I've seen the truth is that it's about staff. More specifically, lawyers.

To start off with a bit of preamble, it's more common to get screwed in the legal system than a lot of people think.

While the ideals of the practice of law talk about the zealous representation of clients, in reality lawyers have their own careers to worry about. Judges hold grudges. Other potential clients hold grudges.

Most of the time things work out because in a typical criminal or civil dispute the judge is genuinely disinterested. There are a lot of business lawsuits, there are a lot of criminal prosecutions. The one before them isn't special.

However there are a lot of legal issues around political campaigns and judges definitely have opinions about which party they'd like to see win.

Election law is a legal specialization. There are also relatively few clients since lawyers typically only work for either the Rs or Ds.

So for a local lawyer going against party brass in court because their client is getting screwed in the nomination is a potentially career limiting move. They may get cut off from representing other candidates in the future.

There's a similar problem with judges. In theory if a judge is being biased the lawyer should call him out and aggressively go after him in the appeals court. But if the lawyer expects to have twenty more cases before that judge, is it really a good idea to do that? Letting your client get screwed is just so much easier.

In theory the bar association should step in when something like that happens, but they really don't. They tend to defend their own, especially if the client who got screwed is someone they don't like.

Remember it was easier to throw Michael Avenatti in prison than to disbar him.

So where do the pro-Israel Jewish organizations come in?

Simple, they know a lot of lawyers with experience on election issues. They can fly someone in, pair them with local counsel, aggressively defend their client, then fly home and go back to their normal practice.

They are unconcerned with local patronage networks or pissing off local judges, within reason.

It's just incredibly beneficial to Republican politicians to stay friendly with the pro-Israel Jews.

This is way too much words and speculation. The actual reasons are quite simple: Muslim Arabs did 9/11; Muslim Arabs would do 10k 9/11s if they were capable of doing so, they say so themselves; Muslim Arabs also hate Israel and sometimes divert their hate in that direction; Muslim Arabs also disrupt other important interests to normal people like international boating trade; Muslim Arabs that have been allowed into America or borne to such people statistically disfavor the Republican party.

There is no reason for a Republican to be in favor of any Muslim Arab until you get to the "they hate Jews" dregs level. Instead, what the actual question is why would anyone support Palestine ever. They are losers who lose, and they lose while intentionally killing civilians. It is hard to think of a valid reason to support not just Hamas, but ANY Palestinian. They elected Hamas after all. Hamas continues to sustain support at levels unheard of in the US for a political party.

So it is all odd, probably nonsensical, arguments to convince anyone on the American right that Palestinians aren't bad. I certainly think that there is good evidence that they are deserving of a nuke to the face and subsequent scattering if not deserving in a full elimination.

I think you'll enjoy John Derbyshire's take: https://www.nationalreview.com/2002/05/why-dont-i-care-about-palestinians-john-derbyshire/

Little has changed in 2 decades

GWB, is that you?

So Muslim Arabs are terrorists, disrupt international shipping with rockets, and vote Democrat?

9/11 was masterminded by a rogue Saudi. The vast majority of Arab Muslims do not make it their life's work to blow up anyone. Of those that do, most will join regional projects like Daesh and murder their local neighbors (who are often also Muslim), not far-away Americans.

There are causal arrows in either direction for "the US supports Israel" and "Muslim Arabs tend to hate the US". Sure, in an alternate world where Israel had been founded in the Mojave instead, Muslims would still not be thrilled about the US support for various repressive regimes starting with the Shah, but I think 90% of the butthurt is about Israel (which is seen as a US colony).

Hamas needs to be wiped of the Earth in the same way that the NSDAP was. However, the Allies got rid of the Nazis (at least as a relevant political force, many adjusted well to the post-war environment) without genociding Germany. Starving Gazan kids in the hope that sooner or later Hamas will also starve seems a terrible way to accomplish that goal.

I think that apart from minor dogmatic differences, American Muslims and Evangelicals have a lot in common. The idea that sex should only happen between husband and wife, with implications for birth control, LGBT rights, abortion. I would expect that Islam would have a generally similar attitude towards germ-line gene edits in humans, embryo selection, MAID. Neither seem to care a lot about key concerns of secular Westerners such as animal welfare, climate change or AI x-risk.

It's a multi-factorial issue.

There's a bunch of pro-Israel political donors who'll spend lavishly on Israel supporters/threaten attack ads against perceived hostile politicians. Republicans grovel for the Adelson seal of approval. Media power. Lawyers may well be part of it too.

But these politicians like Cruz also say 'god commands us to support Israel'. Why disbelieve them? Furthermore the US is a special outlier in support for Israel, much more than say Britain or Australia or Canada. The US also has a large evangelical contingent while lawyers are more international. Presumably it's not just about lawyers.

But these politicians like Cruz also say 'god commands us to support Israel'. Why disbelieve them?

People are frequently dishonest about their motivations. Often they don't even understand them.

You'll never hear a politician say "I don't really care enough about X to have an opinion, but I think position Y is what voters want." People don't want that kind of honesty.

"god commands us to support Israel" is rhetorically useful because it ends the conversation.

But is that really a popular message? Does Cruz think it makes him look good? It might make him look good to evangelicals who he might want to rely on or court favour with but America as a whole? Surely it's a small minority who believe 'we should support Israel for theological reasons'. That just opens up all kinds of problems for Cruz such as 'why should you be trusted with the nuclear codes if your foreign policy views are so dependant on religion', it makes most sense if he's just being honest.

I think one factor everyone is forgetting is that it didn’t actually cost much to be pro-Israel for the last 20 years. It didn’t cost much to be pro-Palastine either. Go to AIPAC conference once a year “blah blah unbreakable commitment to the continued existence of the state of Israel blah blah” pass Go, collect 2 million dollars in PAC money. Or alternatively, “blah blah illegal apartheid regime, boycotts and sanctions” all the college students clap, your leftist card is now good for another three years even though 80 percent of your votes are solely for the benefit of Raytheon. There had only been minimal violence since the end of the Second Intifada, and it looked like things would only get better in the future.

Now, supporting one or the other carries significant costs, and someone is going to hate you whomever you pick. Each choice is also going to permanently associate you with it’s own set of gory videos showing various unsympathetic behaviors by your guys. Politicians have spent the last two years trying to figure out the new reality and how to best exploit it for votes and campaign contributions. In conclusion, blah blah rational argument, blah blah updating my Bayesian priors blah blah Aella HBD whatever give me updoots.

But the Republican legal movement is overwhelmingly Catholic, which is not by the standards of US conservatives particularly Zionist.

People on the Republican judge track don't get involved with small legal troubles of senate nominations or congressional campaigns. The disputes are too small and they don't want to make enemies in the party.

Getting on the bad side of a Republican patronage network (https://scholars-stage.org/patronage-vs-constituent-parties-or-why-republican-party-leaders-matter-more-than-democratic-ones/) can tank any future nomination.

edit:

Also I have the sense that it's more acceptable for a lawyer at a prestigious largely Jewish firm to do pro bono work for a pro Israel Republican than it would be for a lawyer at a prestigious non Jewish firm to help a pro life republican.

Do you have any evidence or specific examples? Even anecdotes? Or is this merely idle speculation?

Partially speculation, partially extrapolation from what I've seen in Canada.

Really what I've seen is more organic than how I've presented it... Pro-Israel Jews make it a point to get their kids to volunteer on campaigns or get summer jobs in politics. Some of people they meet end up as future candidates. If they become lawyers then they end up getting phone calls to help out because people know them.

I was trying to give a framework for understanding influence and glossing over some of the details.

How could you extrapolate from what you've seen (As a lawyer? As a politician? Have you ever worked in politics? Have you ever been to a legal society meeting?) to a country with a different legal and political culture? Why not just ask these politicians why they support what they do, they will probably just tell you. You can glean from interviews that he sees Israel as a strong military ally against a number of nearby states that the USA is hostile towards. Why is that less convincing to you than a conspiracy theory?

Why is that less convincing to you than a conspiracy theory?

I don't think it's fair to call it a conspiracy theory.

I see it as more of an important life lesson. If you want people to care about what you want you'd better make yourself useful first.

Sure, there's a lot more to it. But I don't think anyone really wants to hear me recount USSR geopolitical strategies in the Middle East lead to the Palestinian activist networks in the west.

But I don't think anyone really wants to hear me recount USSR geopolitical strategies in the Middle East lead to the Palestinian activist networks in the west.

The thought of starting a top level comment with the question "where did all these pro-Palestine activists come from anyway?" did enternmy head more than once, as their level of organization is obviously inorganic to me (and somewhat scary in it's efficiency).

So yeah, I think I kinda do want to hear you recount it, as it would provide something in the way of an explanation.

  1. WWII mortally wounds the British and French Empires, meaning their holdings all over the world are now up for grabs.
  2. World War Two was (among many other things) an extremely violent six year long PowerPoint presentation about how controlling major oil fields is really really important.
  3. For this reason both the US and USSR are very interested in getting friendly proxy nations in the Middle East.
  4. For various cultural and political reasons, the US ends up backing the new state of Israel and the old British and French backed Arab monarchies. The USSR ends up backing the rising tide of Arab socialist movements. This was not set in stone, and there are plausible alternate scenarios that end up with the USSR backing Israel. It just didn’t shake out that way.
  5. Now that everyone has chosen their fighters, a forty year war of proxy battles ensues to control the Middle East. For the USSR, that includes eventually knocking out Israel.
  6. The USSR and various Arab states begin arming and training nascent Palestinian paramilitary groups as part of this strategy. Most of these groups like the PLO are pretty secular and vaguely Marxist even while they pursue goals that are basically ethnic nationalist with religious characteristics. If you want a western example for reference, look at the Provisional IRA.
  7. If you are an American Soviet fifth columnist (read: “University Professor”) the hip thing to do is to ardently support these Soviet-backed paramilitary groups and denounce Israel.
  8. The Soviet Union and the Islamic world suffer a messy break up over Afghanistan, immediately followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without the Soviet backing to keep them nominally on the socialist track, the Palestinian militant groups increasingly drift in an Islamic and nationalist direction.
  9. University professors are mentally stuck in 1968 and they don’t receive the memo about anything that happened in paragraph 8.
  10. In the 2000s, George Bush’s adventures in the Middle East reawaken and inflame the dormant Islamist sympathies of the University professor set. This passes it on to a new generation and sets it in stone as a foundational left wing tenet.
  11. Fast forward to modern times and now leftists endlessly simp for various Islamic militant groups even though it really doesn’t make sense anymore given that these groups are all reactionary religious organizations with a heavy overtone of ethnic nationalism and ethnic supremacy.

I don't know if I buy that it's just "simping". Organic trends come and go, they aren't usually capable of maintaining world-spanning activist infrastructure for decades on end.

Well the Arab world maintains its own massive charity-lobbying-propaganda industrial complex that works to keep that alive, but I think the historical outline I have is the reason that sympathy is around to exploit.

Following up on the post about assisted suicide, here's more about that Swiss clinic which is the subject of allegations by an Irish family:

Two families whose loved ones ended their lives at a Swiss clinic in secret have said they are heartbroken that another family has been put through a similar ordeal.

Anne Canning (51), from Wales, travelled to the Pegasos clinic, near Basel, to end her life in January following the tragic death of her only son. She told her family she was going on holidays.

Under similar circumstances, Alastair Hamilton (47) travelled from the UK to the clinic in 2023.

Following Mr Hamilton’s death, the clinic reportedly promised last year that it would always contact a person’s family before carrying out an assisted death.

However, Ms Canning’s family claim they were never informed.

Last week, the daughter of a Co ­Cavan-based woman who ended her life alone at the same clinic told the Irish Independent that the first she knew that her mother had died was when a volunteer for the group sent her a WhatsApp message.

Maureen Slough (58), who had a history of mental illness, travelled to the Pegasos clinic on July 8, having told her family she was going to Lithuania with a friend.

Now, I'm not going to argue over the right to die, when is suffering intolerable, religious objections, slippery slopes or the rest of it. What I'm going to do is say that this is a business (indeed, this is a claim made in the story by one of the families). And, just the same way that IVF has become a business, and embryonic selection (see the Herasight proceedings) will become a business, when we get into business territory, it's about profit. And to maximise profits, we reduce costs. If that means setting up a clinic that looks like a blocky industrial estate unit and skimping on postage, so be it.

There's some indication, at least from claims by these families, that procedures are not being followed through, or at the very least, merely rubber-stamped and not, in fact, keeping the promises they made about communication with and informing the families:

The Pegasos group said it received a letter from Ms Slough’s daughter, ­Megan ­Royal, saying she was aware of her mother’s wishes and accepted them.

It also said it verified the letter through an email response to her using an email address allegedly supplied by Ms Royal.

Ms Royal said she never wrote such a letter or verified any contact from ­Pegasos, and her family think Ms Slough may have forged the letter and verified it using an email address she created herself.

Her family have questioned why ­Pegasos staff did not ring Ms Royal on a number that Ms Slough had supplied to them for her.

The same way that someone in the comments over on ACX described her experiences with IVF and why the clinic downplayed/ignored her problems, it's the same answer here: it's a business now, and profit (not the message about "we'll compassionately give you what you so emotionally desire") is the motivation. And the more it becomes just another business, the more slippage we'll see. No, I don't mean slippery slope, I mean this kind of thing: we don't email you, you have to track your mother's ashes "using a code, like she was a parcel in the post", and hey, verbal promises aren't worth the paper they're written on, we're legal in this country so too bad.

Standards only last as long as the brakes are on. When we take the brakes off, then it's a business and death (and life) is a commodity to be monetised.

I don't see the need to complicate things. Assisted suicide is objectively bad, and restricting a persons freedom to commit suicide is objectively bad if and only if said person is having an episode (a temporary state of mind of lowered lucidity).

Making it into a business incentivizes death (by incentivizing profits, which is a trivial result of the death of unproductive members of society). Do I need more arguments? Did I even need this one? Assisted suicide is never needed. Suicide is trivial, and obvious. Obviously trivial. But in case there's some psychological defense mechanism which blind people to obvious, painless methods of suicide, I'm not going to write the method for now. If anyone reading this is suicidal, it's a good thing that they think they need to travel to an entire other country just to stop being alive. Being unable to think of a fast, easy and painless way out is great.

Can you, uh, rely on the most miserable, desperate portion of the population to make optimal decisions? Optimal for the rest of us, that is. It’s not like they’re going to be around to clean up.

In the best case, that’s first responders removing a body. I think most cases are messier, more personal, or otherwise worse. They’re externalities to the suicide. Mitigating those is worth something.

incentivizing profits

Okay, but that’s a fully general argument against doing stuff. Plenty of companies are naturally incentivized towards collateral damage. We generally handle this by regulating them instead of banning their industry outright.

Well, you can't, but I still think this is the only correct answer. If somebody wants to kill themselves for say, a year non stop, then at that point, it's not just a hasty decision they've made because they sank into a bad mindset for some time. Depriving them of freedom for extended periods of time in order to 'keep them safe' wouldn't be right.

Assisted suicide is a terrible idea. You cannot possibly regulate this, it's simply a lost cause. It will be used to mass-murder the elder population for economic reasons. I can see many many ways to abuse this and zero ways to make it even slightly unlikely to happen. Suicide should remain one of these things which is illegal, but which nobody can stop you from doing if you really, really want to.

I'm skeptical of every popular modern thing which could have been introduced decades earlier if we wanted to. In almost every case, the reason we didn't do said thing earlier is because we argued that they were terrible ideas. And only now, as the modern world is becoming increasingly ignorant of traditional arguments against these things do we consider them "good ideas". They're chesterton's fences. Other examples are IoT, online IDs, social credit scores, mass immigration, censorship laws, guilt by association and "fact checking". I'm too lazy to think of more, but the years to come will provide us with plenty more examples

Given that somebody has waited a whole year longing, nonstop, for death, he should be allowed to die. If he must die, it should minimize the harm done to those who survive him. Therefore, he should be allowed to seek assistance.

I understand the perverse incentives for his caretakers, his beneficiaries, his insurer, and the welfare state. A random nonprofit in a foreign country does not have these same incentives.

I'm skeptical of every popular modern thing which could have been introduced decades earlier if we wanted to.

Naturally.

In almost every case, the reason we didn't do said thing earlier is because we argued that they were terrible ideas.

This is certainly not true. It’s not even true for your examples. Some of them didn’t make any sense before modern technology. Others are playing games with definitions—how much immigration is “mass” immigration, exactly? And the others are laughable. Do you seriously think censorship laws were held at bay by “traditional arguments”?

I think assisted suicide also harms those close to you, so being found in your apartment is not that much worse. Except maybe for the cleaning. Anyway, I'd agree if not for the pervsese incentives. You can have two entities A and B which are structurally safe from exploitation, but which can be exploited if you connect them as (A + B). An easy example is that countries cannot lagally spy on their own citizens, so they spy on each others citizens and share the information (FVEY). In my intuition, corruption is the inability to keep things separated, but "optimization" pushes us in the direction of centralization and higher connectivity between everything, which is why I expect these issues to get worse.

IoT is kind of new, but you still have this line from 1979: "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision". 46 years later, and idiots go "What if my fridge could order new milk by itself!? I'm a genius!"

"mass" is quite subjective, but the numbers have gone up a lot and there's many clear reasons for that. One of them is that we used to filter migration so that people who seemed skilled/competent and at least somewhat aligned with the culture of the destination made it through. That filter is now gone, immigration is purely altruism, it's not an economic investment.

And yes, censorship was held at bay by clear principles. Almost everything wrong with the internet is because we've ignored these insights:

1: You're innocent until proven guilty.

2: Guns are not to blame for murderers, knives are not to blame for stabbings, supermarkets are not to blame for theft, an online service is not to blame for criminal behaviour by users, car manufacturers are not to blame for my reckless driving, Google is not to blame for torrent websites, and torrent websites are not to blame for pirated content, and I'm not a criminal if a friend of mine commits a crime. Sentences like "You're either with us or against us" are mere propaganda. These are basically all the same thing, but I'm not sure there's a word for this concept, so I cannot describe it well.

3: Open communication is the best path to truth. Silencing anyone is objectively worse. An arbiter of truth is a ridiculus concept (which is why the 1949 book 1984 ridiculed the idea). Blind faith to science, too, goes against the principles of science.

4: You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

5: Ownership. You don't really own anything like you use to. This has a lot of negative consequences as well.

I'm fairly sure even John Stuart Mill understood all these principles, why there can be no exceptions, and why there can be no hybrid solution which is better. I'm not too knowledgable about politics, or even history, but I do know some very important principles, and most issues which appears "new" to regular people is something that I consider solved more than 100 years ago. My heuristic is "if it breaches any of these principles, it's bad", and no matter what issues I throw at my principles, they gracefully solve them

If those principles were enough to gracefully preempt censorship, we’d never have had the original Comstock Act. Puritanical book-bannings. Witch hunts for communists and anarchists. Acting as if our elders had it all figured out is the laziest sort of rose-tinted glasses.

I find myself curious. Are there any cases where your principles haven’t guided you to agree with whatever Fox News has most recently said?

That's likely due to the influence of Christianity being stronger than the influence of classic liberalism. But isn't this also explained by most people being stupid? I think most dumb ideas are prevented by a low ratio of the population (perhaps 10%) knowing that they're dumb ideas. When the ratio of knowledgeable people falls too low, bad things happen. This is especially true today, since the dumb average person has more decision power than ever, and since there's a lot of money in promoting dumb ideas (smarthomes, cars with internet access, useless LLMs in every product, etc). It's memetic warfare. Since most people are too dumb to think ahead, they will need to experience negative consequences first hand in order to learn. And these learned lessons are quickly forgotten. Online IDs are being now implimented in the UK, but this was actually tried before in the past, around year 2020. The idea was already shut down once before, and the arguments that people wrote against it online were a sort of vaccine, but like I said, insights disappear, and then people retry terrible ideas.

I can't answer your second question as I've never watched Fox News. I basically reject everything modern. How could anything I say be downstream of recent propaganda when I came to these conclusions more than 15 years ago?

And only now, as the modern world is becoming increasingly ignorant of traditional arguments against these things do we consider them "good ideas". They're chesterton's fences. Other examples are IoT, online IDs, social credit scores, mass immigration, censorship laws, guilt by association and "fact checking".

  • IoT and online IDs and social credit scores are becoming a thing because technological progress makes them feasible. In 1994, when most people were offline and the few which were online were mostly running PCs with Windows 3.11 and a modem, a dishwasher costing twice as much with a BNC port to connect to a home network which 98% of the population did not have would not have been very successful. Today the hardware costs are basically nil and most customers have WiFi in their kitchen. That does not mean that these are good ideas! Mao simply did not have the tech level to track which of his countrymen were good commie citizens and which ones were bad at the level of granularity, but I think he would have liked the idea.
  • Censorship is an ancient idea. When the first warlords turned into nobles at the dawn of civilization, they very likely reacted badly to anyone claiming that Kodos would make a better king than Kang. You put "fact checking" in scare quotes, and I get it -- calling biased fact checkers neutral and objective does not make them so. My personal approach to fact-checking would be bottom-up. Rather than having a fact-checker in chief appointed by the president, I prefer random bloggers who have a track record of being credible in my book (i.e. Scott Alexander). I would also add that fact checking has become a thing because populists have increasingly told the public laughable lies. A lot of politicians lie, but GWB lying about WMD in Iraq (which CNN was not in the position to call BS on) is different than Trump lying about Immigrants eating cats and dogs or the size of his inauguration crowd. News organizations should call bullshit on provably wrong claims of fact. (Like SA, I have a bounded distrust for MSM. They will certainly report selectively and apply spins, but they will rarely conjure a story out of thin air. My distrust for Trump is unbounded -- if he told me the sky was blue I would go outside to check.)
  • Guilt by association is likewise ancient. In Rome, the smallest legal unit was generally the family. It mattered little who in a family had committed an offense, the head of the family was on the hook for paying the fine.
  • "Mass immigration" is likewise nothing new for the US. In 1850 and 1930 and 2000, about 11% of the census were foreign-born. In 2022 it was about 14%. More, but not dramatically so.

Tech is making it more feasible, but keep in mind that these ideas have not been promoted to the extent that they've become feasible. There's forces pushing back against them. What are these forces if not competent people?

Second point makes social norms and systematic censorship into the same thing. The second one can be automated, and it only requires following strict rules. The problem with this is that one can follow rules for so long that they stop considering the reasons behind them, and also that rules are rigid - they lack the flexibility that people have, they cannot take context into account. In short, "Seeing like a State" is a great book.

You cannot really outsource trust. Here's my reasoning: If you're more intelligent than the person you're outsourcing your trust to, then you don't need them to judge for you. If you're less intelligent than them, then you cannot reliably assess whether or not you can trust them. They could just be lying to you.

So, how did you decide that Trump was actually lying? You likely updated your belief over time based on things you couldn't verify. Don't get me wrong, Trump does lie a lot, but if they compared Trump's inauguration crowd to somebody elses, they'd take pictures of his at the time of the day where the least people arrive, and then find pictures of the other crowd which makes it look at flattering as possible. People who support Trump experienced the opposite, they saw the flattering image of Trumps crowd, and the unflattering images of the other. And who told you that Haitians don't eat cats? I don't read the news, this is one of the reasons I'm so clear sighted.

Populists have increasingly told the public laughable lies

The "fact-checkers" are the same people as the liars. Every original fact-checking website is propaganda. The term might have caught on, leading to independent people having "fact checking" blogs online or whatever, but the concept is still ridiculous. Plus, no meaningful conversation can be had about any modern events, it's just people throwing sources at eachother that the other party already considers completely untrustworthy. If you ask me, nothing but raw evidence is worth anything, and people should use just that (and if they can't, then they're not competent enough for truth-seeking in the first place)

Again, people have been lying for 1000s of years, it's an ancient problem, so why have there been no "fact checkers" until now? It's simply because the modern world is retarded.

You make a good point about the family traditionally being one unit, but being judged by your family is still way different than being held responsible for how people (edit: ones who are complete strangers) use the things that you've sold them.

Foreign-born

The problem is not immigration itself, but the mass import of people who are incompetent, culturally incompatible, 10 times more likely to commit crime, or otherwise a net drain for the destination. Again, only the modern world is too stupid to realize this.

Suicide is trivial, and obvious.

Also incredibly unfair to subject innocent bystanders to. Jumping in front of a train is horrific for the train driver, plus the massive inconvenience to thousands of people as train schedules get disrupted.

Jumping off a high structure runs the risk of hitting someone at the bottom, and guarantees some flavor of first responder has to scrape you off the pavement/fish out your bloated corpse. Let alone the trauma to whoever finds you first if it's just a random who gets to watch you splat.

Basically every flavor of at home suicide also involves at minimum a first responder having to deal with your aftermath, and again runs a very high risk of traumatizing a friend or family member who discovers your corpse.

Also people are fucking stupid, so failed suicides are guaranteed. That means you also eat up finite medical resources AND probably have a lower quality of life.

Suicide is fucking barbaric, and honestly pretty selfish.

Suicide is fucking barbaric, and honestly pretty selfish.

That depends on the alternatives. If you want to argue that jumping of a tall building after we have reasonable legislation for assisted suicides, I agree with you.

But as long as such legislation is not in place, my attitude is fuck society. I would still prefer methods which are unlikely to endanger or traumatize others, but if society does not provide a non-messy way out, they can hardly expect me to stay alive just to avoid making a mess.

Look at it this way. I believe in my autonomy to decide if I live or die (within the obvious biological limits, until we can get around them). I would happily blow the brains out of someone who is attempting to murder me. If some 6yo sees this they will likely be traumatized, and that is bad, but at the end of the day I value my autonomy over my life more than the kid's lack of trauma. I do not think that this is unreasonable, and few would suggest that I am not justified here.

But this autonomy is a double-edged sword. Wanting to die is just as valid a choice as wanting to continue to live. I would not blow my brains out in front of a group of kindergardeners if I have a better choice, of course. But at the end of the day, my autonomy comes first.

I agree with everything you said and that's why I'm very much in favor of MAID

Suicide is fucking barbaric, and honestly pretty selfish.

By that measure, every kind of death is. Someone always ends up having to deal with the corpse.

One of the methods I have in mind can be done at home, and if they fail, I don't think they do lasting damage (though I'm not sure). Of course, somebody will find your corpse, which might traumatize them. Suicide can at best be painless for the person who dies - it's painful to everyone connected with them.

I think many suicidal people won't go through with it as long as they know that somebody actually cares about their well-being (even if only superficially). One of the things which leads to suicide is the fear that the world doesn't care about you. Of course, there's multiple kinds, and some of them are rather selfish. Suffering generally leads to selfishness as it turns your perception inwards.

It's pretty much a given that somebody is going to have to deal with each and every one of our corpses at one point, unless (maybe) we get buried in an avalanche and churned into a glacier while on some sort of Hock submarine ride expedition; even then, you can't really say whether somebody might come across your mummified corpse 30,000 years from now.

It doesn't strike me as obvious that paying a Swiss person to murder you and deal with your corpse afterwards is less harmful than a paramedic finding you poisoned in the tub or something -- in fact the sterility of it all is a big part of the problem for me.

I mean one big difference is the Swiss person is consenting to dealing with your body and is paid explicitly to do so.

You might argue the paramedic consents by virtue of their job, which is true, but their time is also finite and could be better spent on a QALY-basis helping alive people.

Also the person who finds you might be a family member, friend, or random innocent, none of whom contented to this or are paid to deal with it, which is just pure negative utility.

You might argue the paramedic consents by virtue of their job, which is true, but their time is also finite and could be better spent on a QALY-basis helping alive people.

And the Swiss presumably have better things to do than killing people?

Also the person who finds you might be a family member, friend, or random innocent, none of whom contented to this or are paid to deal with it, which is just pure negative utility.

Perhaps this encourages the suicidal people to rethink their course of action?

In an case, life and death are both messy -- and I'm not a utilitarian.

Assisted suicide is never needed. Suicide is trivial, and obvious.

An able-bodied person has a million ways to kill themselves. It looks very different when you are paralyzed from the neck down and lying in a hospital bed with a heart rate monitor connected and a reanimation team on standby.

Reading between the lines of your post, you are saying that a person of sound mind should have the right to kill themselves. But for most rights people have, there is an assumption that they also have the right to hire others to secure their rights.

  • I have the right to buy a car => I have the right to send a properly authorized agent to buy a car in my name.
  • I have the right to defend myself (in some circumstances and jurisdictions) => I have the right to hire a bodyguard to defend me.
  • I have the right to freedom of expression => I have the right to hire contractors to spread my ideas (e.g. running a webserver, or a billboard campaign) instead of just yelling them at random pedestrians.
  • I have the right to face my accuser => I have the right to let my attorney cross-examine my accuser.
  • I have the right to masturbate => I have the right to hire others to masturbate me (in the civilized world, anyhow).

Now, society can impose reasonable restrictions on what agents I am allowed to contract -- I can not send a 10yo to sign a contract in my name, and I certainly can not hire them as a prostitute.

Garden variety suicides are unregulated. You can't imprison a dead person, so there is little society can do to deter them. This leads to a lot of messes. Bystanders become traumatized, or get killed. People who survive but at large costs to their health. People who die on an impulse action they would have regretted five minutes later.

With homicides, there is a wide understanding that there are different categories, that some are vile crimes while others are tragedies or even completely justified. With suicides, there is little distinction that way. The lovesick 16yo and the 60yo cancer patient who jump of a bridge are lumped together in one category.

Rather than leave it up to chance who gets to die, I would prefer legalized but regulated suicides. Let the people who are of sound mind and have a stable commitment to end their lives do so with a minimum of harm to themselves and others, and delegitimize unilateral suicides. "If you want to exit the building, we ask that you walk out through the corridor and the front door and not try to jump through the closed window."

I agree with this first claim, but I imagine that the "suicidal and paralyzed from the neck down" crowd is pretty small. My arguments so far have not accounted for that one situation, but I think a good rule is "Follow their instructions, even if they request something which will kill them". You cannot really implement this legally, so this should be one of those things which are technically illegal but which everyone pretends that they don't see when they happen.

There is an assumption that they also have the right to hire others to secure their rights.

This is basically the right to give away some of your agency, which could lead to consequences which harm your rights. Tricky situation, but I don't think it's bad from this direction. Having the right to ask somebody to end your life isn't the issue - the issue is that, if we make institutions which can legally end your life, then your environment could systemically pressure you to make this decision.

To give an example, you're not forced to marry anyone. Being able to marry is a freedom you have. But there may be economic benefits to marriage, and this is where the problem starts. Do you know why I'm not an organ donor? It's because it seem that some doctors don't really do their best to save you if you're an organ donor and they're short on whatever organs you have. I haven't looked into it much, but it's not hard to imagine how this incentive might come into being.

There is little society can do to deter them

This is how it should be. For instance, I could grab a hammer right now, run out of my apartment, and start bashing random people with it. I won't make this choice, but you cannot deprive me of the ability to make it without depriving me of my fundamental human freedom (the ability to use tools, the ability to open my front door, the ability to move my body, and the ability to interact with other people). My neighbour has the same freedom. This is exactly how it should be, every alternative is worse.

I'm alright with temporarily putting suicidal people under watch, since they might be acting on impulse. But if they continue being suicidal for longer periods of time, it becomes apparent that it's their genuine will.

I would prefer legalized but regulated suicides

Here's what will happen: Millions of old people will be considered a drain on society and made to kill themselves. There's a million paths leading to this, and number 13215 is "Accidentally give older people medicine which has the side-effect of increased risk of suicide". An AI will A/B test medicine, and then look at the results. Would you look at that, medicine X leads to greener numbers: Lower costs, and less complaints about pains. The reason you don't see: The lower costs are due to less old people remaining alive, and the lowered complaints are because those who suffered the most have died. Another possibility is that they're given medicine which is stronger but accelerates their death, this also leads to less pain, and thus less complains, and it also makes other numbers on the spreadsheet look green in that more deaths mean lower costs. Did you know that "we don't know" how most modern algorithms actually work? It's just a blackbox with an input and output. Well, that's why we won't see that we're just killing old people faster, all our metrics will show "improvements".

Let the people who are of sound mind and have a stable commitment to end their lives

Except I've seen plenty of people argue that these are completely mutually exclusive — a "commitment to end one's own life" being itself proof positive of an unsound mind. I once had a therapist argue, in all seriousness, that the 47 Rōnin must have been clinically depressed — along with every other samurai who ever committed seppuku — because suicidal intent always means depression, without exception.

This can be used to turn your proposal to a clear Catch-22: you can kill yourself via "legalized but regulated" suicide so long as you're of sound mind… but the fact you're seeking to do so proves you aren't — the only people allowed to kill themselves, then, are those who don't want to.

suicidal intent always means depression, without exception

I find this view fascinating, like flat-eartherism or young age creationism. Like learning about the biotopes around hydrothermal vents which work without any sunlight and are utterly alien to any life forms I regularly interact with.

9/11 was not a self-help group for depression gone horribly wrong. These jerks were fully expecting to respawn in heaven and be rewarded for their great deeds. Their final moments were the best moments of their lives.

Even a pure suicide without any intended side effects can be very rational. The caught spy biting on his poison pill is a well-established trope. He is not depressed because he is anticipating getting tortured and betraying his secrets.

If some comic book super-villain captures a person and her loved ones and tells her that she can either kill herself and save her loved ones or she will spend the next month first watching her loved ones being slowly tortured to death and then being tortured to death herself, suicide is an entirely rational response.

A toy model of endogenic depression would be that it just imposes some mood penalty, which adds to situational modifiers. So a person who had just been dumped by their girlfriend (-30), buried a parent (-40) and got caught in the rain (-1) might not attempt suicide, but a person who was also melancholic (-20) might.

Or one might describe depression as an epistemic attractor state -- a strong belief that one's life is shitty which is self-reinforcing through confirmation bias.

I generally support interventions to prevent suicides if it seems likely that the mood penalties can be fixed or that the patient can be moved away from that attractor state. Turning a depressed person into a non-depressed person is much preferential to turning them into a corpse.

But at the end of the day, people's emotional baselines differ, and it is not up to outside society to tell them if their permanent modifiers make their life worth living or not. And I would fire any therapist who could not agree to that on the spot as fast as if they had suggested that I should just let Jesus into my heart.

9/11 was not a self-help group for depression gone horribly wrong.

The 9/11 Attack Considered as a Self-Help Group for Depression.

Osama Bin Laden was the organizer of the therapy session.

The north tower got off to a bad start.

Something I feel has been under-discussed so far:

Estate planning, and assisted suicide as a tax avoidance tool.

Estate tax rates have been a classic political football for decades, with policy shifting radically between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans want higher exemptions, so that the tax starts at a bigger estate, and lower rates; Democrats want lower exemptions and higher rates. Republicans cry crocodile tears about family farms forced to sell; Democrats whinge about billionaire feudal dynasties. Each administration has made moves towards eliminating, or raising, the estate tax; often unsuccessfully but always attempted. It's reasonable for any wealthy American to be concerned about major changes in the estate tax system, they come around every decade or so, following party politics.

I've often joked that a particularly wealthy family I know would Weekend at Bernie's their patriarch if he died during a bad (Democrat) period for the estate tax, as one could reasonably hold out for another five to eight years and expect a better (Republican) estate tax law to pass. They could drive him around to various places where he could be "seen" in the window of the family Escalade with heavily tinted windows, and just keep it in the family until it was time to "declare" his death publicly and pay the taxes.

But with assisted suicide, new options open up.

It's November 2032. JD Vance has lost in a landslide to AOC, the Republican party having been crippled by a "True MAGA" independent run by Donald Trump Jr who claimed that Vance's administration had betrayed his father's legacy. AOC and her fillibuster-proof Democratic majority plan to increase the estate tax to a punitive 95% on all estates over $50mm. Does a 95 year old multi-billionaire decide to take a one-way vacation to Switzerland to avoid the tax? Do his children pressure him to take the trip? It's Succession supercharged. When death is a taxable event, you choose death at a convenient time for taxes.

But, for that matter, if suicide vacations become routine, then that makes for quite an opportunity for fraud, right? Ok, I don't want to get hit with the AOC taxes when I die, but I'm only 80 I've got years left to live, what to do? Well, Switzerland might be out, but Columbia allows MAID. ((I'll note I'm probably engaging in gross American racist stereotyping here)) I travel to Columbia, pay to obtain a death certificate from a MAID clinic to send back to the USA with the kids, and then I start a new life in Costa Rica, where my kids will send me cash to support my Jimmy Buffet lifestyle.

Columbia -> Colombia

one could reasonably hold out for another five to eight years

I’m no doctor but you’re going to need a really oblivious mortician to present an eight year old corpse as fresh :P

Bonus question: if a man dies at 40 and gets WfB’d for another 3 years, is he:

  • a 3 year old corpse
  • a 40 year old corpse
  • a 43 year old corpse

Genuinely not sure.

Wherefore do you need a corpse to present publicly at all? You presumably have been telling everyone for years that he suffered from a disfiguring illness which lead to his reclusiveness, he sure as hell wouldn't want an open-casket. Unfortunately in his disfiguring illness he turned to a lot of weird woo-woo spirit healing, and there are no medical records for several years because he refused to see a doctor. We're talking about billionaire local feudal lords here, the death certificate comes from the [Family Name] Building at the local hospital, paying off a mortician is the least of the concerns.

Keep in mind that the only cheated party is the government. All members of the family are presumably on-side, the hospital suffers no harm (in fact, under the new will, they're getting a new surgery wing!), the mortician suffers no harm. Even the local government suffers no harm. Only the Federal Government is concerned, and there's not actually much nexus for them to check if someone is alive.

Bonus Question: A 3 year old corpse of a 40 year old man. This is obvious if you think about the corpse of a young woman from the perspective of a necrophiliac.

A person who travels to another country in secret to end their life has, by their actions, expressed a powerful preference. That preference is not just for death, but for a death conducted on their own terms, which in these cases explicitly involves secrecy from their family. They tell their loved ones they are going on holiday. They, allegedly in one case, forge letters and create fake email accounts to maintain the deception. This those not strike me as ideal, but I can't really condemn someone who is clearly this desperate to die.

From the patient’s perspective, the ideal outcome is one where their autonomy is maximally respected. For the clinic, this presents a dilemma. Who is their client? The patient who is paying for a service and demanding confidentiality, or the family who is not their client but has a profound emotional and moral stake in the outcome?

If they were merely a profit-maxxing company, the answer becomes clear. They could, with ease, tell the family to fuck off, or something a tad bit more polite than that. After all, they followed the letter of the law.

When the clinic reportedly promised to “always contact a person’s family”, it may have been making a well-intentioned but practically impossible promise. What does a clinic do when a patient insists their family not be contacted, or provides false information for them? If Maureen Slough did indeed forge a letter from her daughter, the clinic was not simply "skimping on postage". It was being actively deceived by its own client in a way that pitted its promise to families against its duty to the patient. The failure to make a phone call seems like a clear error. But in a context of deliberate deception, we can see it not just as a cost-cutting measure, but as a failure to be sufficiently paranoid in the face of a determined client. And the paranoia would have been pointless, the family has no legal right to stop the process. At most, everyone feels better if they're on board.

I run into similar issues every week. Hospitals are forbidden from divulging patient details, even if the voice over the phone claims that they're a brother/wife/best friend. Especially if the person has capacity to make decisions, and this lady seems to fit the bill.

Second, the characterization of Pegasos as "a business" may be both trivially true and misleading. Of course it is a business in that it charges fees for a service. But reducing its motivation solely to profit maximization seems to be a category error. It appears to be a mission driven organization, an ideological entity that must also be a business to survive. The people running it are almost certainly true believers in the cause of bodily autonomy and the right to die. They charge money, like many an NGO does, to pay the bills and keep the lights on.

Their own site says:

At Pegasos we philosophically believe that no one should be prevented from a VAD with us, simply because they lack the financial resources. Pegasos hopes that in the future we will be in a position to provide financial aid to those who would otherwise be unable to avail our service.

And I believe them. The regulatory paperwork alone must be an awful nightmare. If Charles Schwab is handing out big bucks to save on the expenses of more longterm pods and chicken feed, they're not getting a cut.

Finally, we must be wary of the availability heuristic. We are reading these stories in the newspaper precisely because they represent catastrophic failures. The family who has a peaceful, well-communicated experience with an assisted dying clinic does not generate headlines. At least not after the first dozen times.

We have no access to the base rates. How many clients does Pegasos serve in a year? For what percentage do these communication breakdowns occur? It is possible that these tragic cases represent a small number of "glitches" in a system that, for the most part, functions as intended by its clients. Or it is possible that they represent a systemic failure. The point is that from this handful of terrible anecdotes, we cannot know. You can come up with lurid anecdotes for just about anything, and in medicine?

I've already presented a quantitative analysis. The slope doesn't seem very slippery to me and it certainly hasn't reached the point where fair and open-minded advocates feel beholden to shut the whole thing down.

The Swiss have had legal assisted dying since 1941. If the "businessification" of death inevitably leads to this kind of procedural slippage, we should have seen decades of this. We should have a mountain of data on Swiss citizens being bundled off to industrial parks by greedy doctors against their families' wishes. Instead, we have a few tragic stories, mostly involving "suicide tourism," where the informational and logistical challenges are exponentially greater.

The complaint about tracking the ashes "like she was a parcel in the post" is emotionally powerful. But what's the alternative? A private courier hand-delivering the ashes internationally? Who is paying for that?

will become a business, when we get into business territory, it's about profit

A tired and overly generalized critique. Do the police run Burglary 101 classes when the crime rates get too low? Do cardiologists open McDonald's outside their hospital? Do the hospital admins squeeze tubes of trans-fats into the sandwiches served at their cafeterias?

In most professions, especially those with an ethical or ideological core, the profit motive coexists with, and is often constrained by, professional ethics, reputational incentives, and a genuine belief in the mission. A scandal like this is terrible for Pegasos, both for its "business" and its "crusade." It invites negative press, legal scrutiny, and tarnishes the very cause they champion.

At Pegasos we philosophically believe that no one should be prevented from a VAD with us

The tipoff that these people know that what they are doing is not quite right (or at least that they are running against thousands of years of ongoing overwhelming consensus, and run a strong risk of hanging from a tree themselves if the public at large were to start paying attention) is that they will never call a spade a spade -- "VAD", "MAID", whatever other cutesy acronyms they might generate, the fact is it's suicide (at best) -- why not call it that?

The tipoff that these people know that what they are doing is not quite right (or at least that they are running against thousands of years of ongoing overwhelming consensus, and run a strong risk of hanging from a tree themselves if the public at large were to start paying attention)

The thing is, there's a vast gulf between your first phrase and your parenthetical. If they knew what they were doing is "not quite right", that would be damning. If all they actually know is that they're running against overwhelming and violent consensus, it is not.

I mean I'm more sympathetic to the latter for sure -- but "thou shalt not kill" has a little more weight of history behind it than "two weeks to flatten the curve" or whatever.

In my heart-of-hearts it's probably that it smells like a sales-job, as much as anything -- and I hate those.

Moses brought back "thou shalt not kill" from Mount Sinai, it had more exceptions to it than any rule stated so fundamentally should possibly have. It did not apply to people from other tribes -- killing the kids of enemy tribes was fine. It did not apply to people found guilty of any of the numerous crimes which were punished by stoning. Or being willing to sacrifice your kid if God gaslighted you into thinking that this is what he wanted. And don't even think about non-human persons.

non-human persons

Is there such a thing? I mean, AIUI, unless you're talking about the legal construct that is the "legal personhood" of things like corporations (and I don't think you are), modern US law says humanity is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for personhood; and, also AIUI, most countries aren't much different. (I've seen this discussed in the context of legal issues surrounding potential future contact with intelligent alien life, including the claim that the branch of the US Federal government with the proper legal authority over such contact would be the Fish and Wildlife Service.)

Killing people just because they ask you to has always been kind of fraught though -- particularly doing it exchange for filthy lucre.

Do cardiologists open McDonald's outside their hospital?

Genius vertical integration, we should find some VCs

Look, Private Equity firms have a reputation for evil, but I haven't heard of them going that far.

When the clinic reportedly promised to “always contact a person’s family”, it may have been making a well-intentioned but practically impossible promise. What does a clinic do when a patient insists their family not be contacted, or provides false information for them?

If it is not possible to do what they advertise, they shouldn't be advertising it. False advertising doesn't cease to be false because the thing you advertised was impossible, but you really wanted to do it.

And if truthfully advertising what they actually do leads to bad publicity, so be it.

This is an isolated demand for rigor. Even the KYC protocols for banks don't have a 100% success rate at stopping identity fraud or impersonation. Out of N Pegasos clients, it hardly strikes me as worthy of damnation that one of them went to such lengths to throw them off. What if she'd hired an actor to come along with her? What if she brought forged legal documents? How easy is that to check from Switzerland?

  1. Your argument also included "What does a clinic do when a patient insists their family not be contacted" which is a much easier case. They should have a policy of dealing with such requests, and they should be able to describe this policy in advance of it actually happening.

  2. If she brought forged legal documents that can't be checked, they can have a policy that treats patients who show up with uncheckable documents as patients who have no documents. If legal documents are even an issue, the whole point of having them instead of taking someone at their word is so that they can be checked; if they cannot, they are useless.

If she hires an actor, you're probably stuck, but then, she didn't.

If she brought forged legal documents that can't be checked, they can have a policy that treats patients who show up with uncheckable documents as patients who have no documents.

I hate to break it to you, but most legal documents are basically uncheckable. Even a notarized document can likely be faked without too much trouble. Government-issued documents (id cards, passports, banknotes) are certainly harder to forge, but also require someone who is familiar with the safety features.

If legal documents are even an issue, the whole point of having them instead of taking someone at their word is so that they can be checked; if they cannot, they are useless.

That is not at all the point. The point is that verbal statements reported by third parties are notoriously unreliable. If Susan says: "Bob said I can sell his car", that is bound to create a he-said-she-said situation. Nobody will ever untangle if it was a honest misunderstanding or if one of them was lying.

This is why Susan needs a signed document to sell Bob's car. Can she easily forge Bob's signature? Sure. But that is now a serious criminal offense! If it is found that Bob never signed the paperwork, she is looking at jail time, and can not claim that she just misunderstood Bob's intention.

With assisted suicides, the difference is that nobody is going to put Susan's urn into jail.

I am sure that for every such sob story, there is also a sob story where someone could not get their next-of-kin to sign a paper stating that they were aware of the patient's intention to opt for MAID. A patient in Ireland would be hard-pressed to compel a relative to sign such a document through the court system. Likely, they would get themselves committed.

So I can totally understand that Swiss law does not require patients to provide a notarized genealogy with all the relevant death certificates to prove that whom they say is their next of kin is that.

With assisted suicides, the difference is that nobody is going to put Susan's urn into jail.

That reasoning proves a little too much--it's basically saying that because Susan can't be put in jail, legal documents aren't useful at all. In that case there's no point in even asking "what if she brought forged legal documents". And this also amounts to admitting that the whole system has a fundamental, unfixable, flaw in it--there's no way to verify that Susan is telling the truth.

The proper response to this is not to say "well, they can't verify the documents so that doesn't matter", it's to say "well, they can't verify the documents, so the system is unworkable". Making sure that they're not killing more people than the assisted suicide law allows is actually important; if they have no way to make sure, they shouldn't be doing it at all.

I am sure that for every such sob story, there is also a sob story where someone could not get their next-of-kin to sign a paper stating that they were aware of the patient's intention to opt for MAID. A patient in Ireland would be hard-pressed to compel a relative to sign such a document through the court system. Likely, they would get themselves committed.

The answer to this is "only take patients from places where they can legally get documents", not "stop asking for documents".

Making sure that they're not killing more people than the assisted suicide law allows is actually important; if they have no way to make sure, they shouldn't be doing it at all.

Suppose that you are a Swiss marriage registrar, and that Switzerland does not want to facilitate marriages where one or both partners a coerced into marrying. There are approaches with very different costs to filter these out. You could just keep a lookout for people who look unhappy or nervous. You could have a separate private chats with both the groom and the bride and mention that there are ways out for people who are coerced. You could require both of them to separately talk to a psychologist for an hour. You could require both to undergo psychotherapy for a year. You could just declare defeat and refuse to marry anyone, because it is not possible to know what motivations people have for sure.

In reality, you will probably not do that last thing generally -- even if you are fine with not having marriages, the same argument would also extend to employment contracts, loans, purchases, sex, etc. Or few people would argue that as you are quite likely to be able to smuggle a few grams of cocaine in a truck without it getting detected by customs, we either should abolish customs or stop international trade.

The assisted suicide case here was not even a matter of consent. But I will be sure that sooner or later, a case where consent is violated will appear. The chance that the evil family of some rich guy will kidnap their beloved pet and threaten to torture it horribly unless they opt for MAID is low, but not zero.

There is a conversion factor for violating the autonomy of those who would really want to live to violating the autonomy of those who really want to die. We probably disagree about the magnitude. From a utilitarian standpoint, I think that we should not minimize the suffering of those denied MAID.

Suppose a djinn offered you to prolong your life by a decade. If you accept, they will flip a coin. Heads, you get to live in the 98th percentile of happiness. Tails, you get to live in the second percentile of happiness (for your age cohort), with no way out. They also reveal that you will be 70 at the time your extra decade starts.

Personally, my answer would be fuck no. Sure, that decade in the 98th percentile would be sweet -- travelling, having sex with a great partner, enjoying life without being trapped in the rat race, playing with your grandkids. But the horror of the 2nd percentile would be much greater. You body failing, your mind fogging -- but not to the point where you do not notice any more, without social contacts, getting bedsores in some retirement home, in constant pain, waiting for a death which will not come for a decade.

In reality, we are not subject to the veil of ignorance imposed by the djinn. We can just ask the 70yo's what their quality of life is and if they want to die or not, and we will mostly get accurate answers. Nobody suggests randomly murdering elderly in the hope that they might welcome death.

So the next djinn offers their deal, which is the same as before, only you have a way to die before the decade is over -- say by stating your wish to die on seven subsequent days. They warn you that it is possible that someone will pressure you into taking that option even if you are in the happy branch.

This seems like a great deal to me. Sure, I lose some utility in the happy branch, but I also reduce the suffering in the pain branch by a factor of 5000.

The answer to this is "only take patients from places where they can legally get documents", not "stop asking for documents".

Luckily, this is not how liberal governments deal with foreigners whose governments are uncooperative. If you are a refugee from Iran, and the regime hates you and will not give you any ID documents, then a reasonable country would recognize your plight and try to work around it, not just ship you back to Iran because without ID you can not stay legally.

The Swiss people (or their representatives) have decided that humans in Switzerland should have a right to assisted suicide. Why should they deny this to foreigners just because their backwards government is uncooperative?

This is the same problem as I have with open borders proponents: If you want to have open borders, then make your case for it and get laws passed which say that we have open borders. But don't have laws which say that we don't have open borders, but then work to make it easy as possible to not follow the laws.

If you really want there to be no conditions for assisted suicide, then have policies (and laws if necessary) saying "there are no conditions for assisted suicide". But if you can't or won't do that, don't have policies that say that there are conditions, but then set things up so that they are trivial to work around.

Arguments like "what if we compare various possibilities a djinn might give you and what if we ask the 70 year old", etc. are arguments that there shouldn't be conditions, or at least not the conditions we have now. They are not good arguments for "we should have conditions but since conditions are bad let's make sure they don't work".

If you are a refugee from Iran, and the regime hates you and will not give you any ID documents, then a reasonable country would recognize your plight and try to work around it,

If you are a refugee from Iran, and Iran won't let you have documents, the other country should try to determine that you actually are a refugee and from Iran, even if it is not as easy to determine this as it would be if you had an ID. If the other country says "Iran doesn't give out IDs, so we'll just accept everyone who claims to be an Iranian refugee", that's a bad policy which is forseeably going to be abused. (In fact, similar policies are abused in real life by "refugees" that aren't really refugees.)

Also, it's a lot easier to revoke a bad refugee status (or a marriage, or your other examples) than to revoke a suicide.

A person who travels to another country to end their life has the agency that they can commit suicide the normal way.

I don’t advocate for putting cancer patients on a list of prohibited firearms possessors, even if I think them killing themselves is a bad thing.

Travelling to Switzerland to get MAID will impose much lower externalities on society than most other suicide methods.

Leaving aside obviously bad suicide methods like trains, you will in any case place your corpse in the way of people who did not sign up for this. EMTs. Loved ones. Police who break your front door after the neighbors complain about the smell. Random members of the public.

I have it on good authority that there are also other Swiss jobs than suicide assistant. They know what they signed up for, you pay them for handling your corpse and all the paperwork.

There's a good deal of overlap between support for assisted suicide for everyone and support for nerfing the world so it's really difficult for anyone to kill themselves (e.g. bans on weapons, dangerous sports, etc)

Booooooo outgroup bad

Is it? Please explain.

He made a sweeping statement about people who's views he dislikes having other views he dislikes with 0 evidence or support

Is that not the definition of "booing the out-group"?

Well, fair enough. I suppose it didn't seem that way to me because

  1. I'm probably very biased,
  2. He hedged via "good deal of overlap", and
  3. It actually sounds correct, on the object level.

I actually suspect he's probably not wrong, but I'm unimpressed with the lack of rigour

Have you ever seen someone advocate for sports restrictions on the grounds of preventing suicides? I don’t think I have.

Firearms are a different story. People certainly make the argument. But I suspect causation goes the other way, and they’re using the suicide statistics as a motte for policies they want anyway. Ex. Prevent Firearm Suicide.

Have you ever seen someone advocate for sports restrictions on the grounds of preventing suicides? I don’t think I have.

No, nor am I claiming anyone has. I'm saying they'd nerf the world for other reasons as well.

If we respect basic autonomy, why should an adult’s adult children have to sign off on whether they are allowed to end their life? As @self_made_human says, Switzerland has had legal euthanasia since the 1940s, and major clinics offering the service since the 1980s.

This is in possibly the most civilized country in the world, certainly in the top 3. People live better, longer, healthier lives in Switzerland than almost anywhere else. Things in Switzerland just work. Even from other wealthy countries like the US, going to Switzerland often feels the way a Malaysian must feel going to Singapore or something - there is a clear upgrade in the quality of life in a general sense, things are just cleaner, better, more efficient, more advanced, more premium. Along almost any scale it would be good for any other country to become more like Switzerland, and bad for Switzerland to become more like any other country.

The functional outcome of articles like this is for other Western countries to try to start banning their terminally ill citizens from going to Switzerland. This would be laughable, since you can just cross the border, but the effect would be to harass innocent people for no reason.

Because it's the adult kids end up with "hi, here's your mother's ashes in a parcel, oh you say nobody notified you? not our problem anymore!"

And they're likely the ones who'll end up walking into a house to find the body unexpectedly if they do just commit suicide.

Thats a problem with suicide generally, not the Swiss system specifically. The Swiss system at least means some kids will be informed in advance who wouldn't otherwise be.

You have to compare it with "standard" suicide and in almost all of those relatives are going to have to unexpectedly deal with remains. Excepting those where the suicidal person tries to disappear themselves. But that of course leaves family members with other issues instead.

often feels the way a Malaysian must feel going to Singapore or something - there is a clear upgrade in the quality of life in a general sense, things are just cleaner, better, more efficient, more advanced, more premium

To a certain degree this is the case though the gap's closed a lot between the absolute nicest parts of Malaysia and Singapore. Also Singaporeans radiate a certain energy of chipper productivity which is Flanders-like and annoying.

That is because the nicest parts of Malaysia are essentially outposts of Singapore, demographically speaking.

Yes and no.

I live in a 'demographic outpost of Singapore' suburb in the Klang Valley which is nice for that reason. Kuala Lumpur City Center is an outpost of oil money and is also pretty nice without being a demographic outpost of Singapore perse. Malaysia's rich enough and construction's cheap enough that the better areas are on par with what's available down South. The gap's closed in a lot of ways

KLCC and the wealthier suburbs, like the gated communities around Putrajaya, are pretty unique. I think we discussed them before. Clearly the oil money is going to someone, but much of Malaysia is still pretty poor, and comparable with other parts of ASEAN that aren’t Singapore.

Also, even in KLCC there are pockets of low quality. Car-focused, walking very difficult, those meth / crack addicts on the pedestrian foot bridges just behind the big mall itself, still quite noticeable garbage on the street even sometimes. It’s just very clear it’s still a developing country, and of course plenty of developing countries have rich elites who like Chanel and Lamborghinis.

I agree that Malaysia walkability is generally awful, but I've been to about 60% of the country's major cities and have only seen pockets of what I'd consider proper Poverty. Even places like Sabah and Sarawak tend to have a floor of 'okay' housing, for a given value of okay. I've lived in Darwin and spent time in Broome & a few other parts of Northern Australia and I've seen a lot worse than the typical Malaysian dwellings in a similar climate.

Personally I'd consider KLCC a bit of a confusing dump. Petaling Jaya is where most of the best areas for livability are, partly due to demographic reasons and there's islands of gated communities practically everywhere in the greater Klang Valley. Also the vibes in Putrajaya where it's the government swinging around large amounts of oil money and still a bit of a ghost town are quite different to the affluent suburbs of PJ.

There are things that work in a high trust society that don't in a low trust society. Switzerland, notably, almost singularly in Western Europe, is still super homogeneous, and hasn't thrown open it's welfare state to 3rd worlders. Good for them that they haven't manage to slide down some slippery slope when it comes to assisted suicide. But they've made profoundly different choices about the type of nation they want to be than just about all their peers. I doubt we can pick and choose how we wish to emulate them without there being significant unintended consequences.

super homogeneous

Is there any other country in Europe that has as many official languages (4, not including English as a common lingua franca)? Granted, Singapore has that many too, but I'd hesitate on calling either "homogeneous" across the board.

Switzerland is less homogenous than much of Western Europe and has relatively large amounts of non-European immigration. In any case, given that legal euthanasia is nonexistent in the Islamic world (for largely the same religious reasons Christians oppose it) I find it hard to believe mass immigration from there will lead to greater permissiveness.

A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’.

Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either’

Source

I fear the steps to solve such issues involve impossible tasks. If the first step on your master plan involves 'First, you must become Swiss', we have quite the road ahead of us.

I'm rather torn on this issue.

On the one hand, I do think that people have a fundamental right to commit suicide if they want to, and I think it would be healthy if we as a culture took some steps to demythologize suicide. Specifically, it would be nice if we could revoke its status as a "superweapon"; all too often, certain unsavory individuals will use "you're making me suicidal!" as an emotional manipulation tactic to immediately end all rational discussion and assert the priority of their own immediate desires. If these outbursts were met with indifference instead of panic, maybe people wouldn't be so quick to go there. Alan Watts once mentioned that he would occasionally get people coming up to him and telling him that they were suicidal, and his response was always, "Ok! Well, you can do that if you want". And in the majority of cases, the person would immediately start feeling better upon hearing this; it simply "deflated" whatever problem they had become fixated on. What happens sometimes is that people get stuck in a powerful negative feedback loop where they feel suicidal, and then they realize that that desire is bad and wrong and they shouldn't want to do that, which makes them feel even worse, which makes them more suicidal, and so on and so forth. By demythologizing suicide, you make it a less attractive option in the first place and you cut off the feedback loop.

On the other hand, you are correct to point out that there are clear dangers associated with suicide becoming a "business" (or even worse, an "institution"), and this institutionalization is indicative of a fundamental underlying current of cultural nihilism.

Specifically, it would be nice if we could revoke its status as a "superweapon"; all too often, certain unsavory individuals will use "you're making me suicidal!" as an emotional manipulation tactic to immediately end all rational discussion and assert the priority of their own immediate desires.

Way ahead of you. If someone threaten to kill themselves to get something from me, I will happily call the cops and they will spend a night or two in an asylum. I have done it before. It is unlikely to restrict the patient's long-term autonomy, and will put an end to further blackmail attempts. (Not that I would stick around such a person, these days.)

OTOH, when someone were to tell me about suicide plans which are not conditional on my behavior, I would probably let them do it if I came to the conclusion that they had made up their mind.

I think another comparable industry is trans-medicalism, which is clearly, and documentably associated with profit motivations, and led to an incredible rise of something that was once much much rarer.

much of self_made's response below is a predictable mix of techno-libertarian priors and false assurance against corruption (or simply runaway incentives to overexent) by profit-seeking via ideological purity.

In most professions, especially those with an ethical or ideological core, the profit motive coexists with, and is often constrained by, professional ethics, reputational incentives, and a genuine belief in the mission.

Again, with the case of trans, we can se that was is laughably not the case. We saw the ideological core of trans distort and blind a lot of otherwise obvious ethical, and reputational issues. And we are seeing the backlash now.

Also much like the trans question, we are going to have two movies on one screen interpretation of any rapid rise: A need being met vs creeping pressure and social memeplex.

Self-made's objection is again the same tautology that is used to defend an ever growing number of trans individuals as self-justifying:

A person who travels to another country in secret to end their life has, by their actions, expressed a powerful preference.

If powerful preference is the driving justification, then people with ideological motivations will push their hand on the social memeplex / overton window, even if just to make the existing number with these preferences or marginal preferences more free; it will cost lots of money to do this, and lots of money with be made. And then the number will grow inorganically.

This is exactly how it works.

Most people’s opposition to the trans thing is solely aesthetic, in that it is about pretending that a physical state of being is something other than that it is. It is biologically impossible to go from being a man to a woman or vice versa. Suicide has no such mythos, in fact legalized euthanasia is to some extent about the end of a particular mythology surrounding suicide in which the body belongs not to the man, but to God. It is about cold, hard, material reality.

I find the 'it's just aesthetics' argument to be an empty dodge in these spaces. I understand the intended usage, but it's almost a nonsequitor. Rather, your attempt to distinguish the aesthetics of suicide from trans, kind of makes my point; Because the trans-advocate doesn't see it in your terms.

The point I'm making does not rely on trans and suicide being ontologically similar; only that the nature of the social-legal issue will follow similar social-activitst/profitmaking paths.

You can regard the end result of those paths as of different moral worth based on the object level issue, but the libertarian objections which try to deny that social modulation and profit-making greatly influence these systems, is naiive or lying.

Most people’s opposition to the trans thing is solely aesthetic

Not if you have kids.. The consequences go far beyond "solely aesthetic".

I've got a 1 year old.

If a magical pill existed that instantly flipped my daughter's gender to male and then society proceed to see her as a male and she went from quite-likely to commit suicide with 'gender dysphoria' to absolutely cured of 'gender dysphoria' by the pill. I would probably be a little put-off by her taking the hypothetical magical pill when she's an adult, but largely fine.

Alternatively if we existed in an alternate universe where gender was solely defined by what color badge you wore, and everybody was happy to change their perspectives of an individual's gender if they swapped from the blue badge to the red badge. Bit weird, but nothing fundamentally wrong with it.

Unfortunately the current gender-transition thing is an insane death cult that overwhelmingly leads to suicide and invasive surgeries that create a very distant proxy of the target gender appearance.

I am very skeptical about profit motive in trans medicine being a notable cause of the rise, rather than both being a result of a social movement that involved true-believers creating or taking over trans medical institutions. As a matter of chronology I'm pretty sure the movement came first, I remember the ancestor of the present trans movement (and SJW stuff more generally) already existing back when a common complaint was that medical gatekeepers would require prospective (adult) trans people to live as the opposite gender for a year before prescribing them hormones. That wasn't a policy designed to maximize the number of trans people, and I believe it fell to the trans movement not them suddenly realizing it was reducing profits.

The rise of "non-binary gender identity", for instance, doesn't seem like something that would have happened if it was mostly driven by medical profit motive. Yes it is sometimes medicalized - a few days ago The New Yorker had a puff piece about a mother and her "non-binary"/"demi-girl" daughter who went on testosterone at 11 and got "top surgery" at 13 - but it seems much less common than with conventional binary trans identification. The trans movement has similar patterns to all sorts of SJW stuff with no profit motive. Nobody is going to doctor due to identifying as "demisexual", and indeed people who identify as "asexual/grey-asexual" are presumably less likely to seek treatment than those who identify as having "hypoactive sexual desire disorder".

While it isn't well know, there is an immense profit motive for trans medicine. Jennifer Pritzker came out as trans as an adult man in 2013, well before the social movement spun up in its modern incarnation. The market cap for gender transitioning is $200 billion. While I wouldn't say that the profit motive is the main reason for the increase in trans identification, it's at least a contributing factor, just because of the immensely powerful players identifying as trans, as well as the immense size of the market. The state of trans research is a mess, and recommendations are made based on faulty evidence; it is plausible that such reduced standards are pushed (or at least encouraged/ignored) by pharmaceutical/insurance companies that just want to make a quick buck.

So I had a cousin commit suicide this year. I don't know the exact means and methods he used, seemed garish to ask at his funeral, and frankly it doesn't change anything to me how he did it. He suffered into his 50's with mental health issues, and I can only assume the ruins of the life he was still inhabiting overwhelmed him. I wish he hadn't done it. I wish I could see him again, have a cigar, and shoot the shit for another evening. I wish it wasn't so hard for him to exist. But I can't change it.

The pain it caused in his mother, who he saw all the time, and his sister, who he saw less often being states away, was beyond words. That said, as nightmarish as that act was to them, there at least was no 3rd party to the act to complicate their feelings of grief. There were no accomplices who gave him advice, walked him through the act, supplied him with means and methods, or even just did it for him. When all was said and done, he took all the guilt for the act to the grave with him, and saved his family the further grief of having anyone else to be angry with, anyone else's actions to judge.

I can accept that some people just want out. I can accept that though it may be painful for their families, their decisions about what to do with their life is theirs to make. I don't think I can accept third parties being involved, making it easier, "normalizing" it, and complicating the grief of an already unimaginable difficult thing to cope with.

Before I was born, a culture war was fought over ending life, and the defenders of it ran on the slogan of "Safe, Legal and Rare". 63 million abortions in the United States later, it's clear this was just a slogan. I don't know why I would trust these same people a second time.

Well, not me personally, I wasn't alive for "Safe, Legal and Rare", but you know what I mean.

That said, as nightmarish as that act was to them, there at least was no 3rd party to the act to complicate their feelings of grief.

I actually think the method in which he committed suicide does matter somewhat.

It's hard to make up a counter factual when we don't know the "factual". Would his mom's pain have been better or worse if the two options were:

  1. he goes to a clinic and gets euthanized painlessly

  2. she discovered his headless corpse after he takes it off with a 12 gauge?

I don't have a child, but I think stumbling into the horrific aftermath of a DIY suicide would be infinitely worse than receiving the worst phone call of my lifetime.

For 2), I can think of many many more colorful horrible scenarios. Including but not limited to walked into a failed suicide, where instead he's writhing around on the floor blind, as he shot out his optic nerves but didn't die (never shoot temple to temple kids, in your mouth, up and back).

I guess the counter-counter factual is how would they feel if they discover him in bed peacefully lying there after ODing, or slumped in his car after flooding the garage. I guess that's probably roughly equivalent to receiving the "we just euthanized him, sorry" call.

But the call will always "work", DIY guaranteed 100% will result in all the hypotheticals I'm making up, and more.

It’s worth noting how total the failure of safe, legal, and rare was- this ain’t even a ‘in practice, Dutch hospices give power of attorney to people who don’t agree with their patients on end of life issues’. Abortion advocates literally don’t advocate for it being rare.

Abortion advocates advocate for widespread education about and research on alternative contraceptive methods like the iud / coil, condoms, the pill and so on, which with regular and responsible use significantly lower the likelihood of someone needing an abortion.

And they don’t consider ‘there will be fewer abortions’ a reason for pushing IUD’s the way they did in the 90s. Fewer babies yes, but not the ‘rare’ part of abortion.

I think that for a typical liberal woman not looking to conceive, the preference order is:

  1. not get pregnant (using birth control)
  2. getting an abortion
  3. giving birth

So birth control is absolutely preventing abortions. It is also preventing some babies being born.

Of course, the pro-life crowd has largely not embraced birth control as a method to prevent abortions, which is telling. While I get that there are age-old Christian objections to abortions specifically, I think that a lot of the point of being pro-life is to want to punish women for a sinful lifestyle. "If you fuck around, you get punished by being a single mother."

You believe pro-life advocates see motherhood as a punishment?

Only in the uncharitable case; more charitably, the inevitability of motherhood as an inescapable consequence of sex forms exceptional leverage when arguing for the cultural aesthetic they want.

If they can (unnaturally) impose the former condition, the latter naturally follows- it's the same thing the abortionists are doing when they argue for their aesthetic.

"More sex, less baby death" is not a goal the anti-sex side or the pro-baby-death side can publicly profess, since the anti-sex side promises less baby death as a consequence of less sex[1], and the pro-baby-death side promises more baby death as a consequence of more sex[1].

[1] Well, I say 'sex' but it's more 'choice', as in, which faction gets to write the social rules about how women get to leverage sex as a meal ticket. The "celebrate my abortion" stance is consistent with this, as is the "life begins at conception" one (but requires a bunch of other social context to fully understand why, since this is more a piece of a larger system that adds up to leverage rather than bestows it by itself).

I believe that the Christian right, which is the camp of most pro-lifers, see non-procreative sex as inherently sinful.

There are probably some people who really hate abortions but are fine with fucking around, and will get their daughter an IUD at age 12 so she is protected from pregnancy, while also being fine with her experimenting with her 14yo boyfriend.

But the modal pro-lifer would emphasize that abstinence until marriage is the only 100% effective birth control. (For perfect use. For hormone-laden teens who do not typically get married before 20, I think that the Pearl Index for abstinence would be rather abysmal.)

Take the official Catholic position (my emphasis):

Therefore We base Our words on the first principles of a human and Christian doctrine of marriage when We are obliged once more to declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children. (14) Equally to be condemned, as the magisterium of the Church has affirmed on many occasions, is direct sterilization, whether of the man or of the woman, whether permanent or temporary. (15) Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means. (16)

So it is not that abortion is very bad and using a condom or getting a sterilization after your fourth kid is a little bad -- they are all similarly worthy of condemnation. At the end of the day, at least the pope cares little about unborn kids being killed and a whole lot about people having deliberately non-procreative sex.

I think from a Catholic theology point of view, abortion, sodomy, sex outside marriage, sex within marriage with contraceptives and masturbation are all mortal sins. If you commit any of them and are not cleansed by baptism or confession, you go to hell. Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, and all that.

In conclusion, I think that the CR does not see single motherhood as a punishment for fornicating women, but simply as a natural consequence of her act which should be her cross to bear. But the underlying idea seems to be that during the heydays of Christianity -- in the good old days -- the choices of a woman were (1) marriage, (2) chastity (e.g. becoming a nun) or (3) being a fornicator, which meant to be an outcast of polite society. (Sure, gays and lesbians could always fuck around without biological consequences, but at least for men there were severe legal consequences instead.) Birth control and abortion have changed that equilibrium in a way which leads to a lot more sexual immorality especially from women (as men were probably always going to whorehouses). If birth control is illegal, then a woman are much less likely to engage in PIV sex outside marriage and will have their hands full with their kids instead of dyeing their hair green and studying feminism, or something -- I do not claim that I would pass the CR ideological Turing test.

Clearly you wouldn’t pass a CR ideological Turing test- literally, having a kid is seen as a blessing. Do you hate children or something? Evangelicals and Catholics don’t either.

Do they not?

The women who are getting IUDs obviously prefer them to abortions. Providers like Planned Parenthood seem happy to offer them. What more do you expect?


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