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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25676 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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)

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.

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.

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)?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

OP quite confidently has the Stirnerite position here.

I understand you cannot be brought around to prosocial motivations.

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

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

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

I never said it was pro-social.

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

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

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

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 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?

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

saying "vigilantes" are just as bad as predators

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

so they can justify implementing draconian ID verification measures

They were going to do this anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

they foul up any actual investigation

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

intentionally antagonize existing users

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For obvious reasons, I should hope.

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

It's in the article.

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

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

impressionable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes? They're desperate for adult approval.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discord

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The second says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the alternative to an opt in system?

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

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

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

Easier said than done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

letting pedophiles run rampant

It feels to me like 1985 all over again.

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

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

No responsible adult would violate a custody order.

EDIT to flush out:

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

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

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

No responsible adult would violate a custody order.

Irresponsible adults also have children.

The courts are not always known for speed.

Even you don't think this is true.

When tyranny becomes law, resistance becomes duty.

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

Do you, a responsible person, comply?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sure, added. Seemed obvious enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

See, e.g. here and here.

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

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

I think you may have misunderstood my argument.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you think those cases are even remotely representative?

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

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

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

EDIT to flush out:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The police are not invincible

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

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

the courts are not infallible, the law is not incontestable

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

This isn't a normative statement.

we ought to advise people against it

Sure. What you said was:

No responsible adult would violate a custody order.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

children who have voluntarily run away with strangers

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

children who have voluntarily run away with strangers

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

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

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

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

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

including romantically involved peers

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

Sure, you might start here. Some tidbits:

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

or as a result of it

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

The demand for abducted young women far exceeds its supply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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