site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17332 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The US government is seeking stakes in Intel, TSMC, and Samsung, among other firms:

Expanding on a plan to receive an equity stake in Intel in exchange for cash grants, a White House official and a person familiar with the situation said Lutnick is exploring how the U.S. can receive equity stakes in exchange for CHIPS Act funding for companies such as Micron, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Samsung. Much of the funding has not yet been dispersed.

Similarly, a few months ago, the Trump administration approved Nippon Steel's acquisition of US Steel contingent on the USG receiving a golden share that gives it considerable supervisory authority:

The golden share gives the US government veto authority over a raft of corporate decisions, from idling plants to cutting production capacity and moving jobs overseas, as previewed in a weekend social media post by the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick.

It's an interesting turn for the traditionally market-oriented, small government party to start making a play for the commanding heights of the economy. The Federal government has a long history of giving out subsidies as a matter of policy, but it generally hasn't tried to assert an actual stake in recipient businesses (it will sometimes assume control of failing institutions, but this is generally an emergency measure rather than a long term plan).

  • Does this represent a leftist turn in the Republican Party's view on the state's role in the economy, leaning more towards a nationalist democratic socialism?
  • Are there risks of corruption arising in the Trump administration related to government acquisition of major shares in large companies?
  • Does this represent an expansion of executive authority? What do we expect USG to do with its stakes in these companies?
  • Does this raise potential conflicts of interest, directly aligning the interests of the Federal government with large firms (rather than their merely influential status today)?

Libertarianism as the only right wing ideology is a flawed view of the left/right spectrum. Most right wing governments have historically been involved in the economy and securing essential resources for the nation. Mercantilism, fascism, monarchy etc are completely compatible with a nationalistic economic policy. If anything the liberal factions have often been aligned with leftist groups against nationalists and traditionalists.

Does this represent a leftist turn in the Republican Party's view on the state's role in the economy, leaning more towards a nationalist democratic socialism?

I mean, Trump representing a turn from free markets was something talked about since his first term. If I remember correctly all the Blues were mocking the very idea, even endorsing Rainbow Capitalism, starting with Clinton's "will breaking banks up stop sexism?".

Disney is back where it started:

Disney’s Boy Trouble: Studio Seeks Original IP to Win Back Gen-Z Men Amid Marvel, Lucasfilm Struggles

But we've been here before. Around the late '00s, Disney felt that it was shackled by its perception as a girl brand, and needed some boy-friendly properties. There were some that had had some success - Pirates of the Caribbean, Cars - but it wanted more. (Article 1, article 2 on marketing research in 2009 about this.)

They took a few gambles on intellectual property they already owned (or at least that wasn't too expensive) - Tron, The Lone Ranger, John Carter of Mars and so forth - but those didn't give them the wins they wanted.

So they bought Marvel and Lucasfilm and, over the 2010s, got a good many billions of dollars in box office returns from them both. But now both Marvel and Star Wars are sputtering at best, so it seems they think it's time to start up the search anew.

The obvious question is what happened to their last investments. The polite answer is that they stopped producing acceptable stories, or overexposed or overextended their franchises with TV shows and the like beyond general audiences' interest. But is that all? "To lose one strategic franchise may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness." What's to say that they won't make the same mistake again, whatever it was?

So there are less polite answers. That link leads to the /r/saltierthancrait discussion of the article (taken down now, by the looks of things. Too impolite even there!) where the poster summarizes their take on the story as "1. Buy new IP to have something for boys 2. Alienate them by pandering to girls 3. Repeat."

And even if it's so that both franchises' declines followed girl-power (or other identity-politics) pushes, that's still not a correlation that one's supposed to draw in polite company, not without a lot of throat-clearing. And true: the orthodox explanation of quality decline and overextension has much truth to it, and it's even possible to explain any alienation of target demographics as being due to such overextension: the same ambition that led Disney to want to give itself some appeal to boys also could lead it to try to make Marvel or Star Wars appeal more to girls. Maybe pure greed is the only explanatory factor needed.

Still, though, I have my doubts. I feel like there's a cultural undercurrent, much broader than just Disney, that it's a problem whenever anything is enjoyed by boys(/men) and not girls(/women). Perhaps there's an element of blank-slatism here: the belief that gender differences are all due to socialization, and in a perfect, prejudice-free world, male and female tastes would be the same.

That is: if there were any value to [something], then girls would see it. If they're not there with the boys, then either they're being kept away by something toxic or exclusionary, or there isn't any value to the thing and the boys shouldn't be having fun with it, either. Anything with predominantly male enthusiasts therefore should be either integrated or banned. (Going the other way, it seems much more easily accepted that boys are at fault for not being interested in something that girls are, for example.)

But if it's not true that, but for patriarchy, boys and girls would have the same interests, then the pursuit of this equalization can result in feeding a whole lot of interests or fields or value in general into the void. If lightsabers and starfighters appealing more to boys than to girls was not a problem that needed fixing, and Disney doesn't realize this, then they'll slide right back into this pit every time they try to escape. And if it is true, well - they'd better hope that they can somehow find fixes that work.

starfighters

Such a good example. In the second most recent Star Wars movie they had a dyed-hair girlboss talking down to a fighter pilot saying the last thing they need are any more “trigger happy fly boys” … in their ongoing ship vs ship combat. The writers repudiating the spacefighter dogfighting aspect of Star Wars. Something that hypes boys much more than a disapproving HR manager talking down to a combat veteran for being too high-T.

What's strange is I've known many women who are into Star Wars. It's basically a tentpole franchise, at least before Disney bought it. My mom loves Star Wars -- even was on Star Wars fan forums back in the 2000s. I almost dated a girl back in high school who was really into me; I met her in school, and we flirted (to really date myself) at a Star Wars premiere, which she was really excited to go to. I don't think Disney needed any help making Star Wars appealing to women.

I don't know that it's about wanting to make franchises appeal to women over men, even if Kathleen Kennedy liked implying this. I think Disney just has serious cultural problems with telling stories that men like. Too many creative leaders at the company have spent too long telling stories that women like, that they don't have experience telling stories that men do. This applies to their parks as well: long before lightsabers were the hot Disneyland souvenir, Davy Crockett coonskin hats were the big seller in the 1950s. Walt Disney was a man who loved cowboys-and-indians stories and trains: Disney was a children's brand, not a girls' brand. There are plenty of heterosexual male fans of theme parks, but show me a straight man who likes EPCOT and I will show you a man who is incredibly angry at the Disney company. They took a park about science, technology, and cultural awareness -- a "permanent world's fair", as it was described -- and turned it into a place to get drunk and ride rollercoasters.

Once upon a time, Disneyland was a place about exploring the frontier, riding canoes, riding on a train, riding on a space-age train, there was a show where they simulated going to space on a rocket... the Disneyland of the 1950s and 60s was a respectable place for a little boy to be into. But more and more Disney's parks feel like places for little girls to wear dresses, women to go on a "girls' trip", and gay men to be Disney adults. They've lost touch with what boys are into, and have gotten stuck in a rut of being a "girl's place." I genuinely blame the introduction of the Disney princess dress -- which, surprisingly, dates back only to the late 90s -- as the beginning of Disney as a brand being wildly associated with girls and not boys. (Disney Channel basically being "dumb sitcoms for preteen girls" probably didn't help.)

That said, I don't believe girl-power storylines are the problem with Marvel. I also don't think it's "franchise fatigue." I think the problem with Marvel is that the early MCU films had a kind of grounding in the real world: Iron Man had war on terror connections (and got worse over time), Thor was relatively grounded and intimate for a story about a norse god and at least had the real-world mythology connection, Captain America had the historical fiction angle and the connection to fighting pseudo-Nazis (which they later handwaived away as villains because ???). Avengers feels realistic compared to what comes out of Marvel these days.

Guardians of the Galaxy was wildly successful, but I guess I'm in the minority who didn't like the first film and preferred the second, and especially the third. I actually fell asleep at the theater watching the first Guardians, the only time I've ever done that. Marvel seriously overreacted to that success, and took everything in a cosmic, ungrounded, fantastical direction. The early Avengers films earned their cosmic dimensions. The recent films ask viewers to accept a lot of wild and unbelievable stuff without earning it. Time travel! Multiverse! Alligator Loki! Wanda creating an entire fictional town! Apparently Kang (and Loki?) has the ability to CONTROL ALL OF TIME now? Or he did, because Kang is no more.

Really, the problem with Marvel is that they're running into the limits of comic book stories trying to reach general audiences. I don't read a lot of comic books, and generally don't care for superheroes. But I liked Iron Man 1; it didn't feel like a comic book story. It felt grounded and human, and was more like a science fiction film than a comic book movie. The real problem with Marvel is baked in: most of their stories are about fantastical, ungrounded, space events involving mutants and aliens, and this quickly becomes confusing and alienating for general audiences. There's a reason comic books aren't considered hard sci-fi.

There are lots of complaints from comics fans about what they did to MODOK in Ant-Man, but my response is always that MODOK as a concept looks hilarious and stupid, like something a child would design. There was no way to translate this into live-action in a way that general audiences wouldn't find ridiculous. Making it a joke was inevitable.

(And the new Fantastic Four felt genuinely AI-generated to me, all of the effects had a ludicrious quality and the soft, undefined edges I associate with AI video. I don't think they used AI to create it, but dang if they didn't create a great imitation of AI art.)

I don't know that it's about wanting to make franchises appeal to women over men, even if Kathleen Kennedy liked implying this. I think Disney just has serious cultural problems with telling stories that men like.

In contrast to you, I think the ideological reason is very important here - it's not the only problem, but ignoring it brushes over a big part of the picture.

I doubt their explicit goal was to alienate men, but there's an exceptionally female-biased undercurrent behind a lot of Disney's decisions that can't be ignored - see: Star Wars, She-Hulk, Captain Marvel, etc. They certainly believed they were regressive franchises that alienated women due to their supposed focus on male characters and upheld harmful stereotypes by failing to depict strong female heroes the way they wanted. As such they were very intent on portraying "powerful and strong women", and creating storylines which preached to men about their supposed privilege and shoved women in their faces which were ostensibly supposed to be admirable but just ended up being odious. Hell they placed ideological messages in media for female audiences too - see: the Snow White reboot. But these narratives are particularly repulsive to men due to the consistent portrayal of them as incompetent, oppressors, or dutiful little allies whose only role within the story is to lift up the strong female Mary Sue. They chose to belittle their male audience instead of appeal to them. You get what you deserve.

I think what happened here is that once they acquired Star Wars and Marvel properties, many of the creatives behind the scenes saw the opportunity created by the fact that these were primarily male-dominated IPs which they could use to incalculate the existing male fanbase into feminism while bringing in a fresh crop of female viewers. They assumed they had a lock on the existing fanbase due to their significant legacy power. When that didn't succeed, and their audience then went on to complain about the fact that they were being forcibly shut out of cultural properties that they were patrons of in the beginning, the answer was always to double down with something along the lines of "If you're not progressive enough to get with the times, you deserve to be alienated. How sad for you to live in a world where men aren't catered to all the time, you misogynist". Then the original audience left and Disney panicked. In practice, they did in fact "alienate them by pandering to girls", and some of that was intentional on Disney's end.

What really gets me is that Disney is actually capable of creating pieces of media that are worth watching if they didn't prioritise progressivism over actually good storytelling (in practice, this does end up being a tradeoff; if you prioritise irrelevant metrics of success, that will sometimes come at the cost of other considerations, especially when it means your main female character might need to fail and be very imperfect in order to be a realistic and relatable character). Andor is a sterling example of this, with a grounded premise, nuanced character writing and believable portrayals of the banal nature of evil that resonated with mostly everyone. Disney's not entirely incompetent and are actually capable of creating properties that cater to the original fanbase, they have just chosen not to in favour of other considerations due to heavy ideological capture.

Until they learn to stop doing this and openly issue a grovelling apology for the last decade, I hope they keep losing their male audience. Vote with your feet.

So they bought Marvel and Lucasfilm and, over the 2010s, got a good many billions of dollars in box office returns from them both.

Did they actually get a return on Lucasfilm? I know they made a decent profit on the first few films, but Lucasfilm cost them 6 billion, IIRC, I don't know if they managed to net that much across all their SW projects.

It seems like they are still pretty deep in the hole. They paid $4 billion in 2012 dollars, and the movie profits are nowhere close to this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2024/04/14/disneys-star-wars-box-office-profits-fail-to-cover-cost-of-lucasfilm/

Note those numbers also don't include marketing costs, which are often $100 million plus for a blockbuster.

Disney+ lost $11 billion, the theme parks have been a bit of a mess apparently, so I don't see how merch could come anywhere close to filling in the gap.

Merchandise is the biggest earner for IPs by a huge margin, indeed the value of Star Wars was probably 90% merch sales when they bought it

Do you have any numbers on that? Like I said, from what I remember the Disney Star Wars merch didn't move at all. Star Trek had the same problem. Was actually enough to cover the movie shortfalls, or were they making money with the legacy merch, or something?

Maybe not by box office receipts alone, but counting other revenue streams like merchandise, I wouldn't be surprised.

Sequel trilogy merchandise was also a complete dud from what I remember. So where the theme parks (which themselves cost billions to build).

So I'm starting the search for a literary agent for my fantasy adventure novel. I haven't sent out any queries yet-- I've got at least one more round of beta readers and I still need to perfect a query letter-- but I've been looking through manuscriptwishlist and querytracker for prospective agents. Now this didn't come as a surprise or anything, but the ratio of female to male agents is something like 7:1. And making some assumptions based on biographical elements, I'll wager that the ratio of female to straight male agents is something like 15:1. And despite the fact that as a catholic I'm already pretty redpilled culturally in spite of my neoliberal principles neoliberal-- wow is the performative support for alphabet + "marginalized" (read: nonmale, nonwhite) identities off the charts. It's genuinely pretty disheartening.

Now I could, in principle, present myself as exactly the kind of person these agents want; a brown author with a story set in a non-euroamerican inspired fantasy and female gender-non-conforming main character. (She actually conforms pretty well to the gender norms of her own culture, but I made a concerted effort to have all my cultures be strange and bizarre.). I even address a "socially relevant cause" (immigration) as a secondary theme. But the idea of contorting myself into their box disgusts me. And besides that, my treatment of the theme draws intentional parallels between immigration and imperialism, and poses the question of tradeoffs: security vs prosperity, the right to preserve your culture vs. the need to enforce uniform standards of good behavior, the interests of the immigrants vs. the interests of the locals, etcetera. And also the main character is genuinely racist. I don't think that'll go over well with the kind of people who "care deeply about supporting marginalized voices" and specify, "NO MORE BORING CIS WHITE GUYS" in all caps.

Despite that, I'm still going to go through the submission process. I'm not going to cope about sour grapes-- most probably, if I can't get an agent, it'll be because my manuscript just isn't good enough. Or, even if it is, it might just not be marketable enough, for reasons completely unrelated to politics. I was this close to listing "made in abyss" as a comp title; my level of politics-neutral degeneracy is high enough that I'll be genuinely surprised to earn out an industry-standard $10,000 advance.

But still-- if anyone can point me to resources for finding agents who aren't NPCs, I'd appreciate that. I'm also thinking about direct submissions to conservative-leaning mid size presses but worry those will just pose the equivalent-but-reflected problem.

Your best bet is to go indie. If you absolutely must attempt traditional publishing, skip the agents and try submitting directly to Baen.

But, seriously, go indie.

Trad publishing would be hard enough if you were willing to play the idpol game, because you'd be competing with all the other people who are also willing to play the idpol game, and trad publishing is a tournament market where a few well-connected authors make it big and everyone else waits tables. But the fact that you are not willing to play makes it hopeless.

You are like a student applying to Harvard on the strength of his SAT and AP scores, unwilling to do extracurriculars or networking because that's not what education should be about, refusing to disclose his URM status and without a legacy family member to vouch for him; it's not going to work.

I see from the sibling comments that you don't want to publish serially. That's not ideal (you are leaving money on the table), but not quite a dealbreaker; while serial publishing on Royal Road or similar supported through Patreon is the usual way to fund a work in progress, once it is finished the standard practice is to delete the free copy and put it on Kindle Unlimited, so you can just jump straight to that.

And I also see that your goal is to make enough money to quit your job. As you correctly note, if an online novel gets popular enough it will eventually be acquired by a trad publisher anyway. If not, it is very unlikely that it would have ever gotten traditionally published in the first place, or that it would have paid back its advance if it had. None of those self-published guys you see at your local's writer groups would have made it big if they had tried trad publishing instead of online publishing; they would have just failed.

If you are serious about this, you have to commit one way or the other. Make a desperate all out effort to get traditionally published, including ticking the idpol boxes, and understand that you will most likely fail anyway. Or put all your effort into being an indie author, including adapting your writing to the serial format, and understand that you will most likely end up as a midlister doing his own marketing and outreach and never making as much money as you are currently making in a well-renumerated job.

And if neither of those are acceptable to you, just quit now, before you waste any more time on this.

This is entirely obvious advice but I would read the bios of individual agents on literary agency web pages and then research any who seem promising -- you'll likely be able to find e.g. video of them speaking on panels. When you find a hit, write to them in earnest as if you are someone they'd want to talk to outside of a business transaction. Given the economics of publishing, you are shopping for them not the other way around.

Self publishing is much more profitable:

My old publisher pays me 10% royalties on net profit of books sold, which ends up being more like 5% of the sale price. Leanpub is paying 80% on sticker price as royalties. One copy of LfP sold nets me about as much as 15 copies of Practical TLA+.

Trad pub has a much higher risk of failure, but if you pick the right lottery numbers it massively magnifies your success. That's why even the most popular selfpublished works eventually get aquired and sent down the traditional route-- because they know they'll benefit from the investment of institutional resources.

If I wanted side-hustle money, selfpub would be better. But I'm aiming, however foolishly, for quit-your-job money, which is a much higher bar since I'm already well renumerated. To that end, I'd much rather have 10 trunk books or flops trying to pen a bestseller than 10 books that get a modest audience but require a permanent time commitment for marketing, events, merch, kickstarter, etcetera. I'm not interested in the fate of all selfpublishing authors I know in my local writer's groups. Death or glory. Nothing else.

I believe the standard advice nowadays is to ignore the traditional publishing process, and instead publish for free in serial format (possibly with a Patreon) to drum up interest, before depublishing that preliminary version and publishing a final version on Amazon.

>>>/lit/wng says:

>Why write web novels?

Ease of access & potential for Patreon earnings. Many successful authors gain an audience on their website of choice and funnel their readers into a Patreon. See graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/writing for an idea of what some are earning.

Also, once an author has earned a fanbase, transitioning into an Amazon self-publishing career is several orders of magnitude easier than starting 'dry'.

>>>/lit/wg says:

Traditional Publishing

Pros:

  • you get to focus mostly on writing
  • you must write a proposal to the publishers and sell your story to them
  • you make 10-15% profit max, but they also eat all the risk and the costs
  • self publishing is basically like running your own company
  • you only need to do some simple marketing and reach out to readers

Cons:

  • you make 10-15% profit max
  • self publishing you make 70%+
  • they’ll still require you to do all the leg work of a self published author anyways

Self Publishing How-To

  • risky, but much more profitable
  • you must pay for everything yourself
  • if you do, you will spend more time on running a business than writing, but can be worth it

I can say that, over the past few years, I have purchased several books through this pathway.

I'm a big fan of serial novels, and I've previously written (fanfiction) serially before. But as an art form, it's like comparing a TV show to a movie-- for all the things that are similar, there's still plenty of things that change. For example, I'm committed to polishing to book to a mirror finish, which means obsessing over line-level prose, snipping dangling plot threads, and cutting out fat like I'm sculping a character from greek myth. But all of that goes directly against the grain of serial fiction, which favors expansive plots, slower development, excessive-- almost extraneous-- detail, and update rate over polish.

I'm not going to rule out publishing serially in the future, but this book specifically would only work as a traditionally published work

Redistricting fight

It's been in the news that Trump is pushing for mid-decade redistricting. Yesterday, the Texas house approved a new map(https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/20/texas-house-vote-congressional-map-redistricting-democrats-trump/) which nets the GOP five seats- while not a done deal de jure, in Texas politics when something the republican party wants passes the house, it's as good as done. Texas has only in-person filibustering(that is, a filibuster in the Senate needs to talk the entire time), so democrats can't delay the map for weeks in the upper chamber.

Separately, Gavin Newsom is pushing for redistricting California to gain more seats for democrats(https://apnews.com/article/california-texas-redistricting-congressional-map-4c22e21d5d4022d33a257045693b6fd4). One problem: California law doesn't allow the legislature to unilaterally do this. They need voter approval to override their independent redistricting commission. As gerrymandering tends to be unpopular with actual voters, their odds are a lot worse than Texas'. Other solidly blue states like Colorado have the same issue that they can't actually gerrymander on short notice due to their 'independent' redistricting commissions.

Trump is going beyond Texas as he tries to ensure Republicans maintain their House majority. He’s pushed Republican leaders in states such as Indiana and Missouri to pursue redistricting. Ohio Republicans were already revising their map before Texas moved. Democrats, meanwhile, are mulling reopening Maryland’s and New York’s maps.

The other problem for democrats in an all out gerrymandering war is that they simply have fewer seats to eek out. The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; red states going tit for tat isn't actually something they can escalate that much against. Combine it with red states not being dumb enough to establish independent redistricting commissions and it's pretty clear that democrats will lose in an all-out war of redistricting.

Can immigration be considered a form of gerrymandering that dilutes the voting power of the existing population? Just a thought that occurred to me, I welcome pushback.

No, it could certainly be vote manipulation of some sort (I think Singapore did it effectively by importing a lot of Chinese), but it’s not gerrymandering. That term is fairly precisely about redistricting.

The other problem for democrats in an all out gerrymandering war is that they simply have fewer seats to eek out. The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; red states going tit for tat isn't actually something they can escalate that much against

Is there a ranking of states and how gerrymandered they are somewhere that you would recommend? I briefly looked at https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/redistricting-report-card/ and wasn't able to find like a CSV or something.

The Princeton site does have individual report card data in JSON format. There is a download button slightly inconspicuous.

How gerrymandered is difficult to score in a single metric, but the largest tell tail is probably a step jump in the "District by average partisan win percentage" chart. It is evidence that the districts are being arranged to isolate one party in fewer districts. Especially if the jump spans the "competitive" line. Shape irregularity is the most common "look at this map it must be gerrymandered," but is not a necessary or sufficient condition to show a map is gerrymandered. That video cites openprecincts(dot)org, but it seems to be down now.

Some of the step jumps are also simply the results of people "gerrymandering" themselves. e.g. Drawing a box around metro-Miami could be chosen based off of pure geographic considerations, but if all the Ds in Florida move to Miami they have secured on "safe" district but given up contesting every other district. It seems this a natural result of choosing to draw the boundaries based on geography, but there being clear partisan differences in geographic distribution. Maybe someone has a clear counter example, but shouldn't there be a trivial lemma as a result of Arrow's impossibility theorem where you just substitute candidates with candidate map. Essentially saying there is not perfectly "fair" map. Or if you substitute candidate representation system for candidates to show that there is no perfectly "fair" representative system.

Edit: To add an example of why you can't just take the grade from Princeton. VA gets an A because it is fair in the sense of proportionate. The jump around the competitive zone on the average partisan win percentage chart is still there. This is probably so that the vote is proportionate for court intervention prevention, but locks in a strong gerrymandered incumbency advantage.

The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue

Evidence for this?

Combine it with red states not being dumb enough to establish independent redistricting commissions

Note that California's process in particular was enacted in 2008, opposed by the democratic party and supported by the Republican party, but they shot themselves in the foot and lost several seats. calling California "dumb" for this is probably ignoring a lot of path dependency and/or requires applying some double standards.

Should minorities be guaranteed representation, even if they are geographically spread out?

If you say yes, then you're in favor of majority-minority gerrymandering, which is the cause of the most egregious electoral maps in the United States. If you take a look, you can see the individual buildings carved out to create a electoral district in the name of equity. Yes, this is for the benefit of black people in urban districts. Yes, they are primarily Democratic - even in deep red states.

This has been the status quo for so long that people forget that yes, it is a scandal.

Should minorities be guaranteed representation, even if they are geographically spread out?

No. They're not special; they're either Americans just like the rest of us, or they can go found their own country (with or without blackjack and hookers according to their national custom). Creating specialized ethnic ghettoes is empire shit (Ottoman millets, Soviet ethnic republics), and that's precisely what America was founded not to be. I know we're probably too far gone for this to be a meaningful position, but a man can dream.

Bonus quotation:

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all.

This is just as true of the man who puts "native" before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance.

But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic.

The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.

Teddy Roosevelt; Address to the Knights of Columbus, New York City. October 12, 1915

Does that actually benefit Democrats though? Concentrating your safe voters in a single district is generally the opposite of what you want to do if the goal is maximizing number of seats or attaining a majority. My default guess would be that majority-minority motivated gerrymandering would actually hurt Democrats, but I assume somebody has done the actual analysis.

Wonderful. Another norm for the shredder. At least this time it’s closer to a tenuous gentleman’s agreement than settled law, right? Right?

From my perspective, gerrymandered districts are an insult to the idea of representative democracy. I hope CA fails in its shenanigans. I hope we Texans find a spine. Failing that, it would be nice if our leadership could pander to anyone other than Trump.

But I know how much those hopes are worth.

Texas being gerrymandered isn't exactly new. Trump et al. just want to make it more gerrymandered.

Prior to the mid 2000s there was gerrymandering in both Red and Blue states, but it was piecemeal and wasn't that impactful because it was largely aimed at protecting state-level incumbents (and, in the South, keeping the wrong people out of power), not generating national political advantage (also it was harder without computers). Still not great, but not a hugely pressing issue.

In the mid 2000s the GOP put together a national strategy for gerrymandering their way to success. They largely succeeded, which is also why they've repeatedly refused offers of mutual disarmament. (That and the tribal mindset of the many conservative struggles with the idea of independent redistricting - a process which isn't biased in their favor must necessarily be biased against them).

Two critical problems with gerrymandering reform: 1) virtually nobody prioritizes it highly enough to mobilize voters against it, and even if they did, gerrymandering makes it extraordinarily difficult for electoral reform to win 2) even when the electorate avails themselves of means to override state governments, it is not uncommon for the state government to simply ignore them.

Texas wasn’t that gerrymandered before this. In fact thé worst gerrymanders in terms of the difference between popular vote percentages and congressional results are in Oregon and Illinois, a complication for the ‘evil republicans’ narrative.

i've always wondered instead of a commission you could just agree ahead of time on some rules on how redistricting would be performed and then just have the rules execute at a fixed time period. i assume one problem with this is people would try and simulate the rules in the future and try to choose rules that would benefit them. i guess maybe the current districting is so ridiculous that it would be difficult to come up with rules that can handle that as an initial state and be somewhat stable.

i've always wondered instead of a commission you could just agree ahead of time on some rules on how redistricting would be performed and then just have the rules execute at a fixed time period.

It's relatively straightforward to figure out how any given rule would alter the existing electoral chances. Announce your commission, and people will figure out what ruleset gives them the best advantage, and then insist that this ruleset is clearly the "unbiased, optimal" rule and that the commission should adopt it.

Obviously we should give each party a bull's hide, and they may claim any land it encloses as their own.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

I've always favored assigning voters to districts by valid dice roll. Nothing up my sleeves there, must be fair.

Is statistical joke, if unclear: each individual district becomes a random sample of the whole and converges to such, such that this is the worst possible gerrymander. But I didn't do anything obviously against the rules like taking race into account.

To be fair, there's not a correct answer to how districts should be drawn. One view is that districts should be competitive, as this encourages moderation and tends to be more proportional. Another is that districts should do their best to represent communities of interest, as that will make it more straightforward for elected officials to represent their constituents coherently. Yet another is simple compactness: districts should be as regular as possible.

There are arguments for and against all of them, but none of them is obviously right and not all are amenable to algorithmic solutions.

What's interesting to me is the latter argument. Putting political advantage aside, an ideal district would be not competitive in the slightest. The reason being that districts exist to serve the needs of the local, and a politician with 100% of the vote is perfectly representing everyone in the district rather than half.

I’ll be honest with you that most normies just don’t really care about politics and thus don’t really care if their votes actually count. It’s not a question of getting people upset about losing their vote in whatever form it takes, people honestly don’t care about politics except as a means to amuse themselves on social media or feel important because they’re “informed.” Go to any school board or planning committee meeting — these are things that have a real and lasting impact on community life — and nobody shows up and you’d have a hard time to find anyone who knows one out of 5-6 members of that board. Politics for the rabble isn’t about making decisions and changing things, it’s about feeling powerful feeling like they’re the good ones for being informed, and yelling at opponents who are “obviously screwing everything up.” As long as those things remain intact and the country is more or less running smoothly, the normies will be too busy watching sports and yelling at people online to notice that the votes the cast don’t matter.

I’ll be honest with you that most normies just don’t really care about politics and thus don’t really care if their votes actually count

I don't think this is right - people get extremely mad if they feel their vote is being taken away. What I think is true is that very few people have a sense for the details of politics. They want to show up once every 2-4 years and vote for someone they vibe with and otherwise not think too hard about the substance of policy.

Go to any school board or planning committee meeting — these are things that have a real and lasting impact on community life — and nobody shows up

In addition to the point I raised above, these meetings are often contrived to be difficult to attend and your individual participation is not particularly meaningful. Showing up as an organized group does have an impact (which is why these processes are often dominated by small groups of angry retirees), but that's contrary the central tenet of neogrillism, i.e. only absolutely minimum effort participation in the political process.

But as long as they get to vote, sure they argue about politics but, at least from my personal observation, the participation is mostly about feeling as if they participate, and very little about outcomes and certainly not about what happens after they vote. Like if they get little of what the6 say they want, sure they grouse, but it’s not like they’ll do much more than tantrum on social media and talk about lying politicians. So the median American “votes”, fails every time to get politicians to do what they actually want done … and are mostly perfectly okay with it. That’s not “caring about the vote” so much as “caring that they get to cast a ballot every couple of years.” Which is different, and furthermore doesn’t bode well for the predictions that people will get upset about their district being rendered non competitive. They still get the parts they care about: the process of casting a ballot, the ability to complain, the constant need to stay informed so “they know how they should vote.” The only part missing is the steering wheel being connected to the wheels. It’s like those little car-seat steering wheels kids have. The kid is perfectly content with turning the little wheel and couldn’t give a care that it doesn’t do anything to the car.

And really, for most human behavior, the truism holds that if a person really truly cares about something, they’ll find a way to do it. If they really cared about local politics, they’d find ways to participate, it’s not impossible. Yet nobody cares about that stuff. If people thought that politics was important, they’d at minimum know who sits on these various boards and committees, who’s mayor and which county ward they live in. They’d know the issues and vote accordingly. It doesn’t happen. Turnout for city races is somewhere near 25%, board meetings are not full of citizens concerned about the issues. Unless some sexy national issues come up, nobody attends school board meetings. Real politics is a ghost town, nobody knows or cares what happens there.

My hypothesis is that the modern hyper fixation on federal politics is bike shedding writ large. It's easy to have a strong opinion on federal issues (name one). Local politics deals with practical, boring questions about zoning, school bonds, and such. We spend way too much time arguing over the easy-to-understand bits (what color should the bike shed be), not on most of the details of governing.

It’s also the things that even in a direct democracy you’d personally have very chance of actually having much input on the issue. It’s the perfect way to get credit for being “concerned about the community” while having no real requirements to understand anything. It doesn’t matter, and you won’t be held responsible for making a mess of things. So you get to argue about it, thus appearing knowledgeable and caring about “the issues”, while facing absolutely no consequences if you get your way and are wrong. Call it M’aiq’s Law. The more visibility the debate has and the less responsibility anyone has for getting it right, the more likely people are to debate it.

Go to any school board or planning committee meeting — these are things that have a real and lasting impact on community life — and nobody shows up and you’d have a hard time to find anyone who knows one out of 5-6 members of that board.

People sometimes do show up for those things. The boards then move to private session or otherwise make their decisions where the public can't interfere. Or on some occasions have people arrested for trying to speak; consider the infamous beating and pantsing of the Loudoun County VA father who spoke up against his daughter's sexual assault in school. People don't show up because they correctly conclude that if their showing up could change anything, it wouldn't be permitted.

The number of people who don't show up because they think it will be ineffectual (I somewhat agree) is dwarfed by the number of people who don't show up because they don't really care. Because however ineffectual it is, it's still more effectual than updating a profile pic with a slogan, retweeting something, or liking a TikTok short, which far more people do.

Wonderful. Another norm for the shredder. At least this time it’s closer to a tenuous gentleman’s agreement than settled law, right? Right?

What part of "the most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; there is no more gerrymandering blue can do here" don't you understand? The norm goes into the shredder when the first side defects, not when the patsy notices and finally decides to fight back.

To be fair, mid decade redistricting is, while definitely signaled well in advance, not very precedented.

What part of "the most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; there is no more gerrymandering blue can do here" don't you understand?

The part where it's not true. TX in particular is not gerrymander as aggressively as it could be (though it is still gerrymandered). The same is not true of, e.g., WI, NC, or OH.

Conversely, NY, CA, WA, etc... could be significantly more gerrymandered. The biggest limitation here is not "room" for gerrymandering, but legal constraints for doing so.

Characterizing Texas' current actions as "a patsy finally noticing and fighting back" is a-historical nonsense im afraid. Republicans have had their share of innovation in the gerrymandering space. See operation REDMAP.

Yes yes, and Phil Burton and Willie Brown were gerrymandering California - home of Reagan and Nixon - blue in the 1980s:

After the 1980 census California became entitled to 45 congressional districts, a growth of two.[4] Democrats controlled both houses of the legislature and the governorship but were feeling vulnerable after former Governor Reagan had won California by a landslide in the 1980 presidential election. Democratic Congressman Phillip Burton and new State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown devised a redistricting plan that would result in five new safe Democratic seats.[5] Congressman Burton would boast that the bizarrely shaped map, which included a 385-sided district, was "My contribution to modern art".[6] Reacting to what was called "one of the most notorious gerrymanders" of the decade,[7] Republicans successfully placed a veto referendum on the primary ballot and California voters overwhelmingly rejected the legislature's redistricting plans in the June 1982 election, the same election that enacted the California Constitution's Victim's Bill of Rights.[8]

A majority of the California Supreme Court justices, however, had been appointed by Governor Jerry Brown and a sharply fractured court ordered the rejected districts to be used in the November election because only it was "practicable".[9] Democrats won 60% of the congressional seats despite only taking 49.9% of the statewide vote.[10] Democrats still lost the statewide elections, losing the governorship and incumbent Governor Jerry Brown losing his U.S. Senate bid to San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson. Governor Brown responded by calling an extraordinary legislative session, amending a previously passed bill with the redistricting plan that had just been rejected by the electorate, and signing the redistricting plan into law hours before being replaced by Republican George Deukmejian.

That's arguably significantly worse than what the GOP is trying to pull now in Texas.

You say that the Dems clearly started it. Others says the Reps clearly started it.

Without reading (at least) 50 years of redistricting history, how does one possibly get to the bottom of this? As time goes on it becomes increasingly obvious to me that it's a folly to believe there is anything resembling objective truth on almost any contentious issue.

I read something on TheMotte that appears to be well-argued, some guy replies with what appears to be an equally compelling argument, and some other website has information that contradicts them both. My brain feels like it's going to explode. There is no hope.

Without reading (at least) 50 years of redistricting history, how does one possibly get to the bottom of this? As time goes on it becomes increasingly obvious to me that it's a folly to believe there is anything resembling objective truth on almost any contentious issue.

I'm really struggling not to read this comment as "without expending energy to assess the evidence, how can I find truth?" Or, alternatively "figuring things out is uncomfortably hard, therefore it can't possibly be done." Except that feels really uncharitable and I really hope that's not what you meant.

Yes, motivated argument and even honest disagreements exist. It's true of most things, not just politically/culturally controversial ones. That doesn't absolve you - or any of us! - of the burden of assessing things for yourself as best you can. What hope is there for democracy, the idea that common people can be trusted to manage their own affairs and be entrusted with political power, if the default attitude when confronted with dispute and contention is "welp, no way to determine who's right here, fuck it!" That's not the attitude of a citizen; it's the resigned fatalism of a slave.

Look, I’d absolutely prefer a norm of independent redistricting. Sweep away the decades of bullshit. Make everyone fight for their seats.

Divorcing redistricting from the census is going in the wrong direction. It is strictly worse to have the winners of each election clamoring to entrench their lead. But Trump and Newsom think they can score some points by mashing the big Defect button, so that’s what we get. It’s like calling a snap election. It’s chicanery.

Look, I’d absolutely prefer a norm of independent redistricting.

Several states have "independent" committees to draw district lines, but still manage to have drastic swings between party votes (let's use "votes for presidential candidate from each party" as a good, but imperfect proxy) and congressional representation. California comes to mind, but certainly isn't alone. I've even seen this defended with "but reds choose to live in dense blue areas, so we can't draw lines to create majority-red districts". Note that the Civil Rights Act requires, and we manage to generally, draw districts that are majority-minority (Q: if neighborhoods broadly ever become effectively non-segregated, can we throw up our hands and say this isn't possible?). The Louisiana SCOTUS case recently included peripheral questions about whether two disconnected historically-Black areas (one urban, one rural) could reasonably be drawn into the same district for this purpose.

Honestly, I've come to the opinion that in this day and age, good geographic district boundaries just aren't a solvable problem, and that we should probably move to proportional slates of candidates by state like some parliamentary systems do. This has its own problems, but I think if limited to one house of Congress would balance reasonably well. Pity that existing law disallows such schemes, I believe.

Good geographic district boundaries wouldn't matter if we expanded the House properly. The entire need to mess around with district borders is downstream of them being so huge that the decision has to be made, but fundamentally there's no good reason why the House shouldn't have a membership in the thousands, and it's the most straightforward solution we could have to a number of issues; it wouldn't require overturning SCOTUS precedents, it wouldn't require overturning CRA district rules (the smaller districts would be easy to make compliant), we wouldn't have to spend years in a domestic political fight about whether Americans would go for multi-member districts, and so on.

One of my more unhinged pet ideas for the house is that the the main problem with Arrow's impossibility theorem and Gibbard's theorem are the requirements for a deterministic process.

In my fantasy each voter would be able to nominate one person to serve in the House for a two year term. You would then select 2,500 ballots to establish the house for the next two years, continuing to select random ballots one at a time in the case of duplicates. No one would be guaranteed incumbency, so you couldn't trade as much on future electoral success. Very popular politicians would still be more likely but not guaranteed a spot, so they would also have to maintain a real job or do a good enough job to maintain influence even when not in power. With a 2,500 strong body crazies should be a small enough minority, on an given issue, to be safely ignored. And if the sample is random you would have enough statistical representation to match the populace to within 1% on any given topic, even tighter if things are not 50/50. The idea would be that the majority go back to their regular life after serving.

Leave the institutional knowledge building and statesmanship to the Senate.

Article going into detail on this topic

AMENDMENT XXXI: There shall be not less than one Representative for every thirty thousand persons, and not more than one Representative for every twenty-five thousand persons.

I'll admit that that was exactly the article I was thinking of; I rounded off the 11,000 member proposal just for convenience's sake, even though it probably shouldn't scare anyone here.

Norm. LOL. Here is the New Jersey map. District 10 is a triskellion. District 6 is your classic salamander. District 3 for some reason has a dagger through the heart of Monmouth County. District 11 is a Republican area plus just enough of deep blue Essex to flip it Democratic. And District 8 is just WTF.

The only "norm" broken here is the Republicans are doing it loudly instead of the Democrats in a back room.

We don't have to go back far in time to find a situation where NJ was roughly 50-50 in party congressional seats (2014 and 2016). The big swing towards Democrats happened in 2018, but new maps were not drawn until 2021, so partisan gerrymandering could not have played a role there.

the previous district map was drawn in 2011 by a bi partisan committee, in which a Republican cast the tie-breaking vote.

Looking at the two maps, one is not clearly more gerrymandered than the other.

So my conclusion is that regardless of how squiggly lines on the map are, Republicans have historically been proportionally competitive in nj-- so the squigglyness tells us little.

Of course cherry picking squiggly districts is orthogonal to the question of whether Republicans in this specific case are smashing the 'defect' button and trying to pick up extra house seats 'for free' . (They definitely are.)

You've provided a map without much context with regards to population or voting demographics, so in the absence of that information the map doesn't demonstrate much of anything about the prevalence of gerrymandering

Gerrymandering as a term dates to 1812. Some gerrymanders are more egregious than others, but the practice is very hard to expunge. It’s also limited by the fact that the canvas these districts are painted on, and the political parties themselves, are ever-shifting. A gerrymander can only ever be a temporary success. If a party gets too strong, and too unrepresentative, people will successfully organize to take it down a notch. That’s how it’s always been.

I’d relax about this particular problem. Unless your specific qualm is that you’re a Democrat in Texas and are worried about being disenfranchised. In that case I fully understand your concern and would recommend you view it as a personal issue (and move states) or a local issue (and organize with state Democrats to undermine Republican rule by adopting a more Texan-palatable local platform). I wouldn’t think of this as the end of Democracy in America. It’s just the usual political grift. Unpleasant but sustainable.

I can buy the argument that the specific shape of a district matters less over time as people re-assort themselves. The corollary to this is that what does matter is the cycle-to-cycle changes in the districts. But on this basis, Texas' current actions are more likely to be a unilateral defection versus a tit-for-tat against previous democratic actions.

Also, if the district maps can be drawn at the whims of the legislature then the incumbent party can in general continuously redraw the map to maintain their advantage. This hurts your argument that everything will equalize eventually. The only way to prevent that is a norm that says "redistricting with the purposes of consolidating partisan advantage is bad". But your argument is the opposite of this.

My argument is effectively that trying to secure power in a democracy through anything other than pleasing the majority of constituents is eventually opposed to its own goal. If you can get away with pleasing your constituents less by virtue of a gerrymander, then they will come to distrust you. If they distrust you, your voterbase will erode out from under the gerrymander, and when the dam bursts you will be in real trouble. The one-party democratic systems, like in Singapore and Japan, are obsessed with pleasing the majority of constituents and use the opposition parties as ways to find areas where they are falling behind public opinion. That’s the heart of it.

Worried about? Ha. Ha ha.

Any plan which relies on our state Democrats is probably less effective than shooting myself. At least with that strategy, I’d reduce our share of the next census.

Gerrymandering every four years instead of every ten is obviously not the end of democracy. It’s just another thing made shittier to score a couple points in the here and now. You’d think I might be used to it by now.

State democrats are very effective at turning money into pointless drama, much moreso than shooting yourself.

If a party gets too strong, and too unrepresentative, people will successfully organize to take it down a notch.

Gerrymandering is sustainable in the sense it's not a catastrophic disruption to the function of government. It is still less than ideal. Safe seats lead to more important primaries which leads to more important primary voters. Primary voters skew radical, older, and more influenced by interests. It is poorly representative practice, but not in any positive "the King knows best" sort of way.

The pendulum is a comforting idea. It's also not an Iron Law of democracy. Political machines entrench themselves and last much longer than they should because people don't successfully organize to take them down a notch. Chicago has been poorly governed by a political machine for a long time. I consider competition closer to an Iron Law of Good in democracy, and gerrymandering reduces it.

That said, if we want to stop arguing about gerrymandering we need a new system. I'd choose a limited form of proportional representation for the house. Limit the number of parties represented with thresholds to preclude 1% parties. I don't know how other places do that, but pick whatever is the best I'm sure it's easy. Keep the senate as is to preserve the contract of the Union. Oh, I guess we have to start by killing all current representatives to not slow or obstruct the reform process. Tree of liberty, etc.

and organize with state Democrats to undermine Republican rule by adopting a more Texan-palatable local platform

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

I've heard less realistic jokes, but not many. Texas democrats exist to expend out of state donor money on various retarded bullshit, not to win elections.

Listen, man, Donald Trump the New York Democrat managed to convert the Republican Party (organization of “pretend to care about Christianity so we can deliver tax cuts for the rich”) into a bunch of bootlickers and imitators that are seriously if sometimes ineffectually trying to deliver the platform they were elected on. It’s patently possible to take advantage of deliberate sandbaggers and repurpose their organization to your own ends.

Not saying it’s easy, duh. But if it matters to you…

Yeah it's a problem as old as the republic and has a buncha good to go with the bad - making a minority district so the minority actually gets a representative instead of just getting diluted is a good thing. Or a bad thing?

...It's deeply complicated.

Yeah my understanding is that even in a lot of gerrymandered situations the boots on the ground for the party that's losing out would frequently rather have one ultra-secure seat to enable a 30 year tenure in the House versus 2 55-45 seats in which they've got competition coming both internally and from the other side. Plus more vulnerable to random macro upheavals.

There's a reason a bunch of the longest house tenures are Southern Democrats who essentially sit in Rotten boroughs.

There's a reason a bunch of the longest house tenures are Southern Democrats who essentially sit in Rotten boroughs.

A non-trivial number of these are effectively required to exist by the Civil Rights Act.

How does that work? I genuinely do not know.

Very roughly: If there is an opportunity to give black people a majority black district, then it is required to do so. The American south has lots of black people. Some of whom packed into gerrymandered districts giving them black congressional representatives. This is “good” gerrymandering required by law.

I'm not the election law lawyer you're looking for, but in short I'd say "it's a mess". Longer: the law in question is Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, accompanied with a bunch of court precedents, of which the Gingles test. Per Wikipedia:

Under the Gingles test, plaintiffs must show the existence of three preconditions:

  1. The racial or language minority group "sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district";
  2. The minority group is "politically cohesive" (meaning its members tend to vote similarly); and
  3. The "majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it ... usually to defeat the minority's preferred candidate."

There is some relevant more modern precedent, but that's the basic part. IMO it's not a good answer because it effectively dilutes the no-longer-majority votes that end up in that district (in largely the same ways, just reversed), and because putting too many minority voters in one district is "packing" which is also disallowed.

This is what happens when you don't have a constructive example of what should exist, just congressional and judicial legal wrist slapping saying "no, but not that".

ETA: Hopefully someone else can give a more complete answer.

Exactly! Is that enabling sclerotic politics? Is that perfect for enabling minority representation?

Shit I don't know but it is complicated and not a new political ethics problem caused by modern political division.

Norms only matter insofar as they're supported by a belief in a level playing field. Outside of boomers and some nothing-ever-happens centrists, both left and right seem to believe that the other side is an existential threat that cannot be stopped within the boundaries of our current norms, and so the shredding will continue at an increasing speed. At this point, all democratic norms should be considered pre-shredded, they are in a stack next to the shredder waiting their turn. The only reason they have not yet all been shredded is that the shredder operator works with an urgency that is proportional to the amount of political unrest in the U.S., which is currently only at a moderate simmer.

There's no reversing this until either both sides believe the other is acting in good faith, or (IMO) more likely the losing side is shut out from power and the winning side splits into two factions with enough political common ground to trust one another to uphold a new set of norms.

Which doesn’t matter at all because we basically never lived in a true democracy. I’m just kind of tired of the elite playing games as if they’re actually worried about the votes of the plebs.

Wonderful. Another norm for the shredder.

I'm not sure if that norm wasn't shredded years ago. I've been hearing complaints of gerrymandering since at least Bush II, and that's only because I wasn't really paying attention before that.

In your opinion, what makes this qualitatively different than past instances of gerrymandering?

Traditionally, redistricted has been restricted to the years immediately after a census, with outliers being driven by judicial command (or the results of recent judicial command, like the 2005 Georgia redistricting being driven by Cox v. Larios). In this case, the charitable motivation is downstream of the serious errors by the 2020 Census; the less charitable explanation is just politics.

Whether this difference matters or is anything but an ex post rationalization is left as an exercise for the reader; as long as it's a compelling and coherent rationalization the difference is pretty academic.

One might also note that until fairly recently, "judicial command" based on the Voting Rights Act included a mandate to maximize minority (in practice, Democratic) representation.

Packing enough minorities into a district minimizes Dem representation overall.

Yes, but both "packing" and "cracking" minorities are disallowed.

The way Texas politics works if this was going to be stopped it would've been stopped in the house.

Combine it with red states not being dumb enough to establish independent redistricting commissions

Well, one formerly red state did. It turns out that "the Legislature" and "the People" in the U.S. Constitution mean the same thing (or so 5 Supreme Court justices thought).

It's worth reading Roberts' dissent if you enjoy that kind of thing. (starting at 2678 by the pagination on the left side).

Just over a century ago, Arizona became the second State in the Union to ratify the Seventeenth Amendment. That Amendment transferred power to choose United States Senators from "the Legislature" of each State, Art. I, § 3, to "the people thereof." The Amendment resulted from an arduous, decades-long campaign in which reformers across the country worked hard to garner approval from Congress and three-quarters of the States.

What chumps! Didn't they realize that all they had to do was interpret the constitutional term "the Legislature" to mean "the people"? The Court today performs just such a magic trick with the Elections Clause. Art. I, § 4. That Clause vests congressional redistricting authority in "the Legislature" of each State. An Arizona ballot initiative transferred that authority from "the Legislature" to an "Independent Redistricting Commission." The majority approves this deliberate constitutional evasion by doing what the proponents of the Seventeenth Amendment dared not: revising "the Legislature" to mean "the people."

Yeah, I’m not very sympathetic to Roberts here. This precise case is, I believe, best read as a naked power struggle between the voters and the legislators. The latter had a privilege the former believed was being misused and wanted stripped from them. The defense of the legislature was best read as “you don’t have the right to tell us what to do, only we can decide whether we have this power (or Congress with an amendment), and we say no.”

Given this, what recourse would the voters have? They’d have to make this a single issue or else give up. And I’m really not sympathetic to the idea that a certain class - and politicians are by now definitely a class - deserves inalienable privileges over the rest.

Finally, his example of senator elections is trite. The question for senators was formally, how those elections should be operated. That obviously requires an amendment, since it’s changing a specific process. The point of the section on state elections is that the details are deferred to the state. Nothing more is specified beyond “the legislature.” Would Roberts have objected to a legislature voting for their own independent districting body on the basis that the Constitution forbids it? Or if you want something even wackier - the US Constitution does not specify the political structure of the states (beyond saying that the federal government will ensure they can have a republic, which was not defined as the American structure prior to America)! That is done by the state constitutions, individually. It is convention that they all resemble one another. But if a state rewrote its constitution to move the legislative power to something like, say, a series of elected bureaux, what in the Constitution would forbid this? Is this not a power delegated to the states? And then would “Legislature” in the Constitution refer to the legislating bodies, or to nothing at all, rendering the point moot? Or what if, oh, I don’t know, the state had rewritten its constitution to allow voters to legislate through the ballot? Does that include them in the legislating body? If not, then was the ballot initiative law unconstitutional? How can there be one without the other, when the Constitution does not state explicitly what structure it wants the states to have?

Roberts’ dissent is beyond specious. I rest my case.

The defense of the legislature was best read as “you don’t have the right to tell us what to do, only we can decide whether we have this power (or Congress with an amendment), and we say no.”

Given this, what recourse would the voters have? They’d have to make this a single issue or else give up. And I’m really not sympathetic to the idea that a certain class - and politicians are by now definitely a class - deserves inalienable privileges over the rest.

You're in good company since 5 of the Justices thought this way. They thought the result was good policy (as opposed to the many, many times the Supreme Court dislikes ballot initiatives, as Thomas lists in his dissent) and therefore the actual language of the Constitution didn't matter.

As to your other points, I suspect you didn't read Roberts' full dissent since he addresses some of your concerns. Not that you have to; there are better things in life than reading random SC decisions from 10 years ago about election laws.

Does he? I certainly didn’t find that when reading it. He certainly doesn’t present a compelling case that the US Constitution provides for any specific organization on the part of the states beyond assuming that they all must follow a familiar pattern. Well, now they don’t. So what now? Rule the very practice unconstitutional because it was not anticipated by the initial authors? He doesn’t make that claim ever. Why not?

His whole initial section on the definition has a particularly laughable moment where he undermines his whole argument, if he had been aware of it. Quoted in full:

Moreover, Dr. Johnson's first example of the usage of "legislature" is this: "Without the concurrent consent of all three parts of the legislature, no law is or can be made." 2 A Dictionary of the English Language (1st ed. 1755) (emphasis deleted). Johnson borrowed that sentence from Matthew Hale, who defined the "Three Parts of the Legislature" of England as the King and the two houses of Parliament. History of the Common Law of England 2 (1713). (The contrary notion that the people as a whole make the laws would have cost you your head in England in 1713.) Thus, even under the majority's preferred definition, "the Legislature" referred to an institutional body of representatives, not the people at large.

That is, in the initial definition of legislature, THE KING OF ENGLAND was a necessary component. We obviously don’t have that. The institutional body of representatives was ONE house of Parliament. The Lords Temporal and Spiritual were institutional, but not representative. The King was not a body in the sense he intends at all. Yet “the voting public when they select a ballot initiative” is somehow excluded from a definition of “legislature” that is obviously descriptive as to how the laws are passed in the country of concern? On the basis of THIS paragraph? Did this guy read what he was quoting?

Like I’m telling you, specious in its entirety. Come on, you can’t read this and tell me the guy doesn’t come off like Sotomayor.

To be clear, said legislatures are allowed to vest that power in an independent committee, right? Why was a ballot initiative even on the table?

Because the legislature refused to do it and voters pushed it through via the ballot measure.

A Look Into Indian Gender Relations (And Marriage)

I have this habit of staying in touch with exes and former romantic interests. There are some acrimonious exceptions to this rule, but generally speaking, it leads to interesting places. Today was one of those days.

About a year ago, I found myself in that peculiar liminal space between the end of a serious relationship and receiving news that I'd successfully matched into psychiatry. I was consumed by severe anxiety during this period, convinced that my odds of making it were poor. With nothing to lose, I decided to cast a line into the dating pool and see what the ecosystem had to offer. Some of the fish, you could immediately understand why previous anglers had practiced catch-and-release. A small minority appeared mentally stable but lacked long-term compatibility potential.

Getting into psych felt like divine intervention. I still had several months to kill before starting, and dating apps became more of a time-killing mechanism than a serious commitment strategy. During this brief interregnum, I dated a model. Or arguably the second one, depending on whether you count a fashion designer who occasionally modeled her own products.

The stereotypes about models turn out to be empirically accurate. They constitute one of the most neurotic, high-strung demographics I've encountered. This particular specimen was gorgeous, came from a wealthy family, and within a few dates was proposing marriage.

She was also, unfortunately, somewhat unhinged. She carried an OCD diagnosis that manifested in an inability to use public restrooms (at least in India), complete inability to look at or touch bare feet, and dietary restrictions that bordered on eating disorder territory. In theory, I could have managed all of that. What proved insurmountable was the fact that she wasn't very bright.

I sometimes wonder whether men who marry purely for aesthetics fully grasp that children inherit genetic material from both parents. I would never marry someone intellectually deficient, simply because no offspring of mine deserves the curse of inheriting my appearance and her cognitive abilities. This woman had drawn the genetic short straw; the rest of her family consisted of high-achieving intellectuals.

Her problems stemmed primarily from extreme naivety. When we first met, she'd recently been dumped by a boyfriend she'd dated for several years. He was the archetypal fuckboy: a weaselly individual who owned and managed a popular nightclub and showed few compunctions about leveraging this for personal advantage. She explained that he'd attended a bachelor party in Thailand (the implications are identical to what Western readers would assume), and had sworn extensively that he'd maintained perfect fidelity. Then an anonymous contact had direct-messaged her photographic evidence of him engaging with local sex workers, plus clear documentation of him bringing one back to his hotel.

She'd been devastated and sought comfort from her mother, who remained remarkably unconcerned: "What's the big deal? He didn't cheat on you, did he? All men are like that, they need to satisfy their needs elsewhere." The boyfriend proved unrepentant, initially denying the allegations, then immediately ending the relationship when confronted with evidence.

I remember one eyebrow threatening orbital escape velocity when she related this story, with the other joining it somewhere near my hairline when she declared that I seemed like a good man and we should get married. I attempted polite deflection; I maintain certain ethical standards about removing undergarments under false pretenses. I told her she seemed nice, was extraordinarily attractive, and would definitely find someone willing to commit (Someone Who Isn't Me). The usual diplomatic pablum.

To avoid unfair character assassination, she possessed redeeming qualities. She was relatively down-to-earth by hot model standards, not particularly promiscuous (she even usually only slept with the men who had already lied about marrying her, which in a way is practically Victorian by modern standards), and didn't exhibit excessive enthusiasm for depleting her father's or future husband's finances. She was family-oriented, good with children, etc.

I saw her a few more times, sighed when she revealed she'd visited her ex, departed for Scotland, and experienced severe secondhand embarrassment when she had a pregnancy scare and decided I was the appropriate person to consult. I provided general advice mostly out of sympathy. Life presents unique challenges when you lack intelligence and constantly get manipulated by men seeking short-term pleasure when you want long-term commitment. Nevertheless, she continued calling at inconvenient hours requesting that I return and marry her, which became increasingly awkward after I acquired a girlfriend here. I changed phones and neglected to provide my new number.

We maintained Instagram connections, and she suddenly contacted me after an extended silence requesting a call. I was bored and agreed.

She'd been dating someone seriously for most of the year, with genuine intent to commit. He owned a small business in the same industry as her father (who was significantly more successful). She described him as kind and thoughtful ("he's almost as good at putting me at ease as you are!") and they'd discussed marriage.

I'd previously noted that she was relatively undemanding. This man was, if not impoverished, financially struggling. He lived with his parents and younger brother in a cramped house in an undesirable neighborhood, where said brother slept on the sofa due to insufficient bedrooms. Worse, his family maintained extremely conservative values. She'd once visited wearing a perfectly reasonable sundress, and his mother had become hysterical and demanded she cover herself during future visits.

When their relationship became serious, she'd issued a quasi-ultimatum. He needed to move out and secure independent housing before she'd cohabitate. He'd objected, claiming financial impossibility and, more importantly, cultural violations. In his tradition, men remained with parents unless circumstances provided no alternative.

(She genuinely impressed me by stating that she ought to tell him that in her culture, it was expected that the bride and groom get their own place. I almost clapped like a seal.)

I can't fault the financial reasoning, but surprisingly, she revealed that her father supported the marriage idea and offered financial assistance for property purchase or rental. She'd specifically mentioned openness to relocating within the same apartment complex or neighborhood to maintain family proximity. This would represent a massive downgrade in living standards for her, given her upscale current neighborhood.

Her father had actually offered to transfer control of his business empire to this man. The boyfriend couldn't claim financial hardship; his prospective father-in-law would fund the relocation and provide the keys to the kingdom. The man remained unhappy. His pride was wounded by the concept, and he claimed his family would judge him for accepting.

(He also had the audacity to demand substantial donations in the form of thousands of dollars worth of gold jewelry for his extended relatives.)

As I, self_made_human, absorbed this information, I was shaking my head vigorously. Some people genuinely don't recognize good fortune. As an honest wage slave in a foreign land, I could only marvel at this man’s ability to fumble the largest economic windfall of his life for the sake of an ideology built out of sticks, mud, and maternal approval. If some elderly gentleman developed such fondness for me that he offered both his daughter's hand and most of his wealth, I'd definitely give it serious consideration. I'd be tempted even now, except for my complete lack of interest in operating a large clothing business. This guy already ran a struggling version of the same thing. What did he have to lose?

I expressed sympathy and truthfully stated that I considered him an idiot with either no backbone or one bent in the wrong direction. The latter might be attributed to a stick lodged in his posterior. Speaking from experience, I explained that I had previously stood up to my parents when I was dead set on marrying one of my exes, even when all the world had protested that she wasn't good for me (it's neither here nor there that the World, or at least my parents, were right about that). She wanted me to communicate this to him directly via video call. Her plan involved presenting me as a UK-based psychiatrist she'd consulted for advice (technically accurate, I suppose). She offered substantial payment for this service. Then she requested assistance with her cervix, because I had, for reasons that escape me now, mentioned hymenoplasty.

"Do men really care if their partner is a virgin?"

"Some do? But it's 2025, you can work around it. But didn't you tell me you'd been together for a year? Don't tell me you didn't sleep with him."

"I did."

"Then how is he going to object to you not being a virgin on your wedding night? You can claim that's his fault!"

"Nooooo... I was thinking about if it doesn't work out, what about the next guy?"

I desperately pleaded with her not to approach my own parents (gynecologists) seeking that service. That isn't quite the kind of referral they need from me. A Muslim female gynecologist? Experts in that field, please look up one of those. She remained persistent, so I attempted to discourage her with graphic details about how women in historical periods would use bladders filled with chicken blood to simulate the expected gore. I recall conducting basic sex education using conveniently positioned curtains to demonstrate hymen rupture and restoration. Med school has taught me many things, some of them useful.

I eventually managed to escape, but my conversations with this woman are fascinating solely due to the absurd destinations they reach. I declined another round of marriage proposals, citing prior commitments, but mentioned I'd contact her during my next visit. I probably will, because getting laid is likely the minimum compensation I can expect after the sheer confusion and bewilderment she generates.

Models? Not even once, specifically not twice.

I sometimes wonder whether men who marry purely for aesthetics fully grasp that children inherit genetic material from both parents. I would never marry someone intellectually deficient, simply because no offspring of mine deserves the curse of inheriting my appearance and her cognitive abilities. This woman had drawn the genetic short straw; the rest of her family consisted of high-achieving intellectuals.

I mean if her family is relatively smart probably your children will be fine as well?

This woman had drawn the genetic short straw; the rest of her family consisted of high-achieving intellectuals.

Then any potential offspring would probably be fine, intellectually speaking at least.

Your kids aren’t a strict combination of you and your spouse - it’s your respective whole families being blended

I would be more worried if she was smart while her whole family were mouth breathers

Perhaps I oversold it. Her brother is highly intelligent and competent. Her dad is a reasonably successful businessman. Her mom is a housewife. I can expect that the brother is the smartest, though I'm sure the dad is no idiot. I don't know enough about her mom to really comment.

Desi women are so beautiful. I don't know what Nixon was talking about.

Desi women are so beautiful

Is it possible to learn this power?

(I’m, uh, asking for a friend)

The power to find Indian women attractive?

Belonging to the Global Latina Belt has its perks.

So he wasn't willing to marry a non-virgin he apparently liked well enough to date in exchange for a large dowry? Am I hearing that right?

she even usually only slept with the men who had already lied about marrying her, which in a way is practically Victorian by modern standards

Even in India?

I don't think her lack of virginity was an issue, he wasn't quite that hypocritical. She'd told him about her previous partners (but probably not me). That was her worrying about the potential next guy.

Even in India?

India is a big country!

We have:

  • Extremely conservative rural enclaves where premarital sex might get you disowned, or in the worst case, killed. Leans poor.
  • More moderate areas, where people are allowed to date in college or after, but with the clear expectation that such dating is serious. You meet a good boyfriend/girlfriend in college, get engaged after graduation, and marry afterwards. If you don't, no shame in that, arranged marriages are the default. Maybe 300-500 million people might count.
  • The liberal elite or UMC. The part I, and this girl, live in. Norms around sex aren't quite as liberal as in the West, at least for women. Nobody would really care that I have a double digit number of partners. For a woman? That's a big deal, and something to hide or deny. You are allowed or expected to have a few partners in college, uni or after. Your parents would be very happy if you were serious about it, but they're mostly accommodating. If you make it to your late 20s without that happening, arranged marriages are the BATNA. Nobody will look down on you for having one, but they might think that you just couldn't hack it. Perhaps a hundred million, maybe two hundred million.
  • This is a spectrum, of course. On one end, I know people who know people who are in swinger clubs. That is very much not normal, and would be broadly condemned if news got out. I won't even go into the finer details of North vs South, East vs West, or the norms in big cities versus podunk nowhere.

In our semi-shared social milieu, her behavior is excusable, even if it's a negative. People aspire to have a virginal, unblemished wife, but usually cave in and settle for something more realistic. However, she's an ethnic Punjabi, and they're usually rather hypocritical (more than most) when it comes to this. Men are encouraged to sow their wild oats, their moms might tut, but won't do anything. Women? Uh..

She's had maybe 3-5 sexual partners, and most of that happened during longterm relationships. It's not that big a deal to a liberal man, but his family might raise objections. My dad called me later that day, and I told him the whole story to general merriment. I also, half-jokingly, asked if he'd be okay with me marrying her, to which he replied that he hoped I could do better than "second hand goods".

You can see my reply to sun_the_second for a more exhaustive take on why she's right to be concerned. If it weren't for her other issues, I personally couldn't care less about it.

As I, self_made_human, absorbed this information, I was shaking my head vigorously. Some people genuinely don't recognize good fortune. I, honest wage slave in a foreign land, could only marvel at this man’s ability to fumble the largest economic windfall of his life for the sake of an ideology built out of sticks, mud, and motherly approval. If some elderly gentleman developed such fondness for me that he offered both his daughter's hand and most of his wealth, I'd definitely give it serious consideration. I'd be tempted even now, except for my complete lack of interest in operating a large clothing business. This guy already ran a struggling version of the same thing. What did he have to lose?

I catch myself thinking that if accepting the business was a precondition to marriage, it would feel more like a downside to me, on account of having neither experience nor desire nor, I suspect, much talent in running businesses. But I suppose what Fang Yuan would say is along the lines of "even if you run it into the ground within a year, you've benefitted as long as you don't go into debt".

You know, I was just browsing the RI sub, mourning the fact that I had finished the novel again.. Fang Yuan would have put a baby in her, then refined them both into Gu.

Anyway. Her dad didn't frame it as a precondition, it was a genuine offer. He's getting on in years, and he'd love to have someone take over the business. His son is busy doing something that makes too much money in an MNC abroad to bother, his daughter? She couldn't run a Nestlé distributor during a drought. So the only real options are to sell, or to look for a SIL who can handle things.

I can only stress how hard they're bending over backwards to accommodate this guy. Indian families tend to be very class/wealth conscious, she's marrying down in that sense. Different ethnic group, different religion. This is incredibly rare, and the boyfriend really thinks too highly of himself for his own good but that's his prerogative.

You must consider that the boyfriend is not being pigheadedly stupid and recognizes the offer on the table: and she is really that bad. That even a life of easy living is not worth the trouble of marrying this particular woman.

That is a possibility that I can't rule out with any real certainty, I did just date her casually over a few months. However, I still think that's unlikely. She's not a bad person, from my perspective, she's doing everything she can to help herself, just severely handicapped by not being smart.

He stayed with her for a year, took the idea of marriage seriously, indirectly asked for a dowry. That's not really the behavior of someone who doesn't want her, even if a combination of pride and adherence to protocol means he isn't willing to follow through. I still think that his ego getting in the way is the most parsimonious explanation, he's definitely not reading articles on the heredity of intelligence and taking them seriously.

If you date enough absolutely gorgeous women you will find out two things:

  1. A shocking number of them are obnoxiously perfect (by which I mean they are smart, kind, and functional). It's quite unfair! ...And it puts pressure on the relationship because they know they can have anyone.

  2. For the ones that aren't, well it gets tiring and it happens oddly fast (especially because most of them aren't good in bed). A girlfriend + porn rapidly starts to seem better than the 10/10 girlfriend who is annoying. If you happen to know a bunch of beautiful women closely you'll be shocked at how much some of the complain about not getting laid especially the ones in a serious relationship. The quote "no matter how hot she is, someone out there is sick of dealing with her shit" is prescient.

I imagine this guy is having some number two action.

'Not very smart' in the sense of unexceptional or in the sense of actually retarded? Like they are two different things.

Noticeably below average, if not actually retarded. The kind of person who is literate, but definitely struggled in school, not that I have her test scores at hand.

Maybe he has other aspirations?

"Desolate Ancient Moon looked at him with pity, but her voice was tranquil: 'Rockman, I did not want to kill you. But you blocked my path to success.'"

Tao Zhu also comes to mind on the topic of RI and blowing a cute wife and huge wealth... Also, people can just be dumb without higher meaning in their actions.

My life is better when a random post of mine receives not just one, but two RI related replies. I can die happy.

Everyone has their own values/utility function, but this guy seemed quite serious about wifing her, right till the issue of the move arose. I get the cultural issues and desire to stay close to family, but she was willing to help him find an apartment in the same building! My parents might as well complain of abandonment if I move to the basement (if we had one). The barriers seem insignificant, it's no Five Regional Wall.

I can only stress how hard they're bending over backwards to accommodate this guy.

Why though? Just because he's so much better for her than the usual fare she gets around her?

Fang Yuan would have put a baby in her, then refined them both into Gu.

I highly doubt the Gu of Cute but Retarded would be of more use to him than securing the favor of a wealthy righteous clan.

It makes sense to me; he needs someone to marry his daughter so she stops her bad habits(after all, it sounds like it's mostly her getting taken advantage of) and take care of her and someone to take over his successful business. Win-win. It's a scenario that would strike me as plausible but not exactly common- sort of like winning the lottery- in the modern US, let alone India.

I don't know for sure, but that's a likely reason.

She's late 20s, same age as me. That is slightly long in the tooth by Indian standards. Not the end of the world by any means, but it'll only get harder once she hits her 30s. She was fretting about this during our video call.

It's also bad from the perspective of being a trophy wife, with little to offer except looks and decent familial wealth. Her family are well off, but not ridiculously so. If she was a working professional, she could probably delay till her early 30s before things got really bad.

The arranged marriage market in India is quite brutal. I would flourish in it, because I'm a qualified guy (age is far less of a factor). Her family is quite liberal in mostly turning a blind eye to her romances, but if I had to guess, largely because she seems serious about locking a guy down and it saves them a lot of hassle. Love is a great lubricant, and at least cuts down on dowry demands.

To the modal, conservative leaning potential marriage partner:

  • She's getting close to too old.
  • She's a model, which is scandalous. The looks are a positive, the career a negative. Her parents wanted her to do something else, but she talked them into this. Most families would prefer a housewife or career woman, and not this.
  • She has had multiple previous sexual partners. This is a big deal, it would be easier to suppress this than to talk it through.

She has no end of guys down to fuck. I remember, on one of our dates, she showed me her Bumble matches. So many the counter broke. But how many would want to put a ring on it? Most would be like me, in for a ride but not willing to take the car out of the dealership for good.

To an extent, her anxiety is well founded. She only has a few years before it becomes an uphill struggle, even if it won't be literally impossible to find a good partner. Ed creds and a good job would have sweetened the deal, but she's not there, and she's not a supermodel either.

This guy was:

  • Relatively serious about marriage
  • A semi-compatible background
  • Apparently honest and entrepreneurial
  • Decently handsome

To a family that has wealth but concerns about the continuity of said wealth, she could do worse. I presume her family would have loved me, but we never got to the stage of introductions. I made it clear I was leaving soon, and it would be a good while before there was a chance I'd be back.

I mean, this is a sad story. You didn't want to marry her for reasons, this guy doesn't want to marry her for reasons. (I do think there's an element of pride there about not wanting to be perceived as the male version of a gold-digger, but whatever).

She's not sleeping around because she's riding the cock carousel, as the crude phrase has it. According to you, she only had a handful of boyfriends and slept with them in the context of 'this is a serious long-term relationship'.

She wants to get married, but can't. This is not the temptress of redpill lore, she has all the perceived advantages in the dating marketplace but can't find a guy who wants to marry her, and it's not because she's looking for unattainable perfection.

An arranged marriage would be the best chance for her: her parents find a decent guy who will be happy enough with a ditzy (but loyal) wife who looks good, has enough knowledge of wealthy social circles to fill the role of running the household and hosting and supporting his career, and he is capable enough to take over the family business and not run it into the ground.

I hope she finds someone soon, this is wasting her life and chances for what sounds like a nice (if dumb) girl. Remind me to say a prayer for her, the traditional one I know is "St Anne, St Anne, find me a man" but looking it up online the other matchmaker saints (for women) are St. Andrew, St. Anthony of Padua, and the Archangel Raphael. I guess St. Nicolas of Myra fits there too with the dowries he arranged.

You're welcome to say a prayer for her, I'm sure she'd be touched if she knew, and I might well tell her if you do.

I do pity the lady. Her situation isn't the best, and she's stuck in the very common trap of being used to romantic relationships and feeling unwilling to settle for a more pragmatic arranged marriage; all while a pit of dread forms in her gut telling her the former isn't working out. She's not a bad person, even if I'm not seeking to marry anyone until, at the very least, I'm done with my current training.

(It's not that arranged marriages are bad, even I don't really think so. But they're usually seen as unromantic, even if, in my experience, the people involved do quickly become very fond of each other. A hot woman used to a great deal of male attention might feel let down by one - and if the guy was a real catch, he likely wouldn't be looking)

Thanks for the writeup and several flashbacks I had while reading this. It feels weirdly comforting to see situations similar to (formerly) my own, I remember being haunted by fumbling such a rare chance encounter but it seems to be common enough to crop up even here. At least this is my cope now.

Her problems stemmed primarily from extreme naivety.

I consider myself a hard-ass individual in most respects but extremely naive women being totally clueless about anything beyond the words exchanged are my fetish the one thing my heart cannot bear to witness, especially when I get told about all the times she got duped in the past cpt. Save-a-Hoe calls all hands on deck reflexively. Last time I tried my damndest to get the girl's mental toolbox up and running in at least some basic capacity, and while it lasted it even worked, but as soon as the romantic attachment was gone everything else went with it, and she was right back to the old habits (including picking a new guy to cling to) in literally a few days. She did write me an apology later, wanted to stay friends and promised to internalize things and change, but ngl I'm not holding my breath.

I honestly got the impression that people like her prefer having no agency beyond the choice of partner; in my own case (likewise wealthy and insulated, with her entire life unsubtly arranged by her parents behind the scenes - e.g when I pointed out the possibility that her getting into the top university with below-average grades was not exactly a stroke of luck, she was genuinely shocked, and shortly devastated when she got curious, asked her father, and he bluntly told her their family made a uh, generous donation) this was all but explicitly stated, with a strange sort of pride even, something like "yes I may be stupid but at least My Heart Is My Own". At times like these I felt my rational-ish influence was actively dragging her down and introducing unwelcome doubts into a blissfully empty head that consciously looks away and refuses to entertain worldly concerns. I distinctly feel that if I'd been any good at manipulation and was less conscientous I would've gotten anything I wanted out of her, up to and including keys to the kingdom, with very little resistance.

On one hand the failure to do so still stings, as a wise man once said - hesitation is defeat; on the other hand, put this way I would not want to roll the dice on child genetic makeup either, girls are cutest when they're almost retarded but I imagine it hits differently when you're the father.

on the other hand, put this way I would not want to roll the dice on child genetic makeup either, girls are cutest when they're almost retarded but I imagine it hits differently when you're the father.

I mean her parents and brother aren't retarded, right? Won't she just revert to the mean with her genetic contributions most like?

It’s a strange sentiment to me… I’ve never really thought it or felt it. Idiocy in a girl kind of gives me a sinking feeling, “oh no… ugh.” Intelligence is interesting and makes me want to stick around. I guess I’m the odd duck if people are stating it so confidently, though.

I don't know, a bit of naivety in a girl is cute... but being able to keep up intellectually, and even contribute to an intellectual conversation, is beautiful.

A fresh and youthful attitude is lovely and joyous. Is that what people mean by retarded, do you think? What, do you have to be jaded and brooding to be intelligent?

Well, whatever. I’m in agreement with you in any case.

The best partner is both, imo. Half my jokes are silly stupid nonsense (I can't even count the number of times my wife and I have accused each other of being a "Sneef Snorf") and the other half are clever and elaborate constructions designed to sound like something reasonable and/or intelligent until they think about it for several moments and untangle the hidden meaning: which turns out to be silly stupid nonsense. I once wrote a two page short story with seemingly arbitrary fantasy and fairy tale features all to build up to the conclusion which was a sentence consisting of weird typos my wife (then girlfriend) had sent me while drunk the previous night.

I suppose someone less intelligent could still have appreciated the goof, but probably not to the same extent. Or wouldn't have taken the teasing in as much fun, as part of the embarrassment at her misspelling is because she ordinarily spells things correctly while sober. And someone less intelligent probably wouldn't have been able to respond to my hack MSPaint "photoshops" of our cat's head onto movie characters with an even higher quality photoshop of her own. And someone who took themselves seriously just wouldn't have appreciated the goofs at all.

You need both.

I still don’t get it. That sounds like regular silliness to me, not idiocy. Intelligence doesn’t preclude goofiness; good comics tend to be pretty bright, because they need to put their finger on the audience’s pulse.

But people seem to be talking, sometimes, about feeling attracted to “tee hee math is hard” kind of nonsense. And I don’t get it.

My guess is that they're being attracted to the silliness part of it and attributing the lack of intelligence as a cause of the silliness. Which potentially has some merit: I think there is a negative correlation between intelligence and silliness on average. I could be wrong, some people do just want to be way smarter than their partner, as some combination of pride and the ability to win arguments and control things, but I think most of it is correlations and stereotypes connecting intelligence to other things. If I had to choose between an intelligent bitter feminist constantly comparing everything I do to a historical dictator, and a sweet highschool dropout country girl with rocks for brains and a heart of gold, I'd choose the latter. If for some reason I was convinced that intelligence inevitably produced the former and wasn't aware of the exceptions I would have been tempted to join more unintellectual activities to try to find unintelligent women. Or just despaired and given up because I don't think they would like me even if I did like them.

The point being, I think some men do think this way. And I think statistically they're partially correct but missing plenty of exceptions.

More comments

For the sake of argument:

Dude with an IQ of 130. Girl with an IQ of 90. Her parents and sibling are roughly 130.

The heritability of IQ is between 0.5-0.8. Let's run with 0.6.

Mid parental IQ is 110.

Deviation from population mean: 110 - 100 = 10 With heritability of 0.6: Expected deviation = 10 * 0.6 = 6

Expected IQ = 100+6 = 106

My understanding is that this would have an SD of about 10-15 points.

If the girl too had an IQ of 130, the expected value would be 118, which is a big jump.

I'm not quite sure how to account for the fact that in the 90 IQ scenario, the girl is more likely to have environmental contributors that lower IQ rather than genetic issues. I'm not Cremieux. All else being equal, 12 IQ points is a big deal! I'd pay a lot to have my kids come out with an additional 12 points. I would fistfight a dog smaller than a labrador for a mere five.

I don’t know about the chick described in the OP, but in my Lived Experience women are smarter than you (the general you) think. That is, women’s IQs are higher than what their personalities would suggest—as holding IQ constant, on average women are more basic and boring than men.

Men have the burden of performance. Hence women being less (intentionally) funny than men, and women consistently, signficantly underperforming men in knowledgability tests, despite only a modest IQ gap if you’re Hanania-pilled. I doubt, in a hypothetical where their life is on the line, an above-Lizardman’s-Constant proportion of people would pick a randomly selected woman over a randomly selected man to win a trivia game to save their life.

The basicness is amplified for young attractive women, who are generally kind of “retarded” and clueless about the world, even if you know that their grades and test scores are/were high. Talking to a given hot chick outside of her preferred topics such as herself, TV/movies, make-up/fashion, celebrity gossip, or interpersonal drama runs the risk of her finding you WEIRD or—ironically enough, BORING—just as you might talk to a little kid about his or her favorite toys, movies/TV shows, school friends to keep him or her engaged. I suppose there is no reason to be interesting or knowledgable when you’ve been coddled all your life, and people will pay attention to, help, and accomodate you no matter what.

So the IQ gap between oneself and retarded hot chick [X] might be surprisingly small. And thus marrying a retarded hot chick doesn’t necessarily mean dooming your kids to be mid IQ-wise, or possibly retarded themselves.

Your calculations using the input assumptions look correct, but I question the applicability of the inputs to most situations smart young men would find themselves in, given assortative mating and homophilic social sorting (“Different Worlds” and Young Earth Creationists come to mind). A 40-point IQ gap is pretty vast for just an acquaintanceship to be made and maintained, much less a potential relationship.

A typical 130-IQ young man likely doesn’t have that many <= 90-IQ people in his social circle. Even without social sorting/assortative mating, <=90 IQ people are only 25% of a population with a mean of 100 and an SD of 15. If one’s social circle has a still-pretty-modest average IQ of 115 and an SD of 15, this already drops to under 5%. He likely doesn’t have too many prospects from online dating, social media, or IRL cold approaches (each of which would still have some social sorting and assortative mating). Plus, in your hypothetical, the girl’s offspring IQ would likely regress to a higher mean than 100 given her parent and sibling IQs.

I'd pay a lot to have my kids come out with an additional 12 points. I would fistfight a dog smaller than a labrador for a mere five.

If that dog is a near-labrador-sized member of the Breed of Peace: after the nannying experience, you might not still be around to see a given kid come out.

I don’t know about the chick described in the OP, but in my Lived Experience women are smarter than you (the general you) think. That is, women’s IQs are higher than what their personalities would suggest—as holding IQ constant, on average women are more basic and boring than men.

In the specific me, I'd say I'm pretty good about gauging how smart women are. I know plenty of them are incredibly basic despite, by other objective metrics, being highly successful. The number of female colleagues here who are whip-sharp docs while being enthusiastic fans of Love Island aren't low at all.

I've ended relationships because the women in question were either too dumb, too boring, or both. And I have met one (or two, perhaps three) who were both attractive and interesting, or at least able to hold a conversation.

In this particular case, I think I'm quite well founded in my belief that she's not smart. She has no real interests beyond partying and makeup, she told me she always struggled in school and whatever "educated housewife" degree she did was for the sake of it, and she'd wistfully say that her brother was both the smart one, and that he looked down on her because of it. And the questions she sometimes asked me, it was like meeting someone from an uncontacted tribe...

Your calculations using the input assumptions look correct, but I question the applicability of the inputs to most situations smart young men would find themselves in, given assortative mating and homophilic social sorting (“Different Worlds” and Young Earth Creationists come to mind). A 40-point IQ gap is pretty vast for just an acquaintanceship to be made and maintained, much less a potential relationship.

Not on a dating app! I was swiping on pretty faces, and only filtering later. This current boyfriend met her during a modeling gig, and that means that the IQ in the room was probably not much hotter than room temperature (in Fahrenheit).

If that dog is a near-labrador-sized member of the Breed of Peace: after the nannying experience, you might not still be around to see a given kid come out.

I probably wouldn't beat a Velvet Hippo. I'd just try and protect my genitals, so that they could suck out some sperm IDF-style when they found my half-eaten corpse. For the sake of argument, I'll recalibrate it to labradoodle or smaller.

when it comes to IQs the testing is done so the population mean for men and women are both 100. i assume you could alter the composition of questions so men or women as a group had a higher mean than the other group. so your impression of women's IQs being lower than what a test might show could be because you are measuring based on aspects that men generally do better than women.

Maybe I misunderstand you, but this is imo calculated the wrong way. Presumably, most of the dudes family is also 130 IQ, and you already explicitly spelled out that her parents and siblings are all 130 IQ. If the expected child IQ of a 130 IQ pairing from a 130 IQ wider family is actually 118 ... What astronomical luck did the families have up to then?

First, heritability is a red herring, since we're not in an adoption study or similar situation. These are rich parents raising their own rich daughter. The relevant factor is regression to the mean, which is generally estimated to be ca 0.5, i.e. if you take your spousal IQ_s, and compare it to the population mean IQ_p you're descended from, then you're kids IQ will be roughly (IQ_s + IQ_p)/2.

The population mean you regress to is generally speaking that of your actual sub-population, which is your wider family; Ideally you also know the IQ of your grandparents and uncles and aunts, that improves the estimate further. It's not always 100, which is a very common misconception. It's generally trivially acknowledged for clear examples, such as ethnic ashkenazi jewish among gentiles, but it even holds among seemingly homogenous groups. The reason you see regression towards 100 is partially that assortative mating in superficially homogenous groups is only moderate, so usually there is some difference between the respective spousal family background, and partially an artifact of averaging. But it certainly holds for ethnically separated groups with rather strict assortative mating as is typical in large parts of India, as I understand it.

So the expected child IQ of a 130 IQ pairing from a 130 IQ wider family is simply 130. With a single spouse at 90, the spousal average becomes 110 instead, and the final number after regression is around 120. Still a 10 point difference though, so I guess not a big difference on that account.

Goddammit, I knew I'd done something wrong. I was actually aware that it's not correct to use the population mean of 100, but I was unsure how to account for it. Thank you for the correction.

A cute girl who is retarded can usually make it work. There are plenty of men thinking with their dicks who would snap that up and be very happy about it. I'd be concerned about a son who came out a himbo, sure, that's not the end of the world, but I personally aspire for better.

She did write me an apology later, wanted to stay friends and promised to internalize things and change, but ngl I'm not holding my breath.

My condolences. She clearly means well, but I share your suspicion that she lacks the ability to actually enact her wishes. Not everyone can be above average in terms of intelligence or common sense, if only because that's logically and statistically impossible.

Her problems stemmed primarily from extreme naivety.

Many such cases. I knew an attractive, intelligent woman who was incredibly sheltered and naive (raised wealthy and insulated). She ended up dating a rather oafish guy for several years (who similar to your example, was also offered the keys to the kingdom by her wealthy father but turned it down because he was "going to make it on his own" [he did not]), and seemed to date him because he was the first man to speak to her at the first student mixer before classes started. It was fascinating to watch someone so intelligent at coursework and tests have zero practical intelligence for interacting with people who might have ulterior motives.

Is she still single? I can fix her, or at least I could use a green card.

Although I enjoyed reading this and enjoy rubbernecking at a potential car wreck as much as anyone, what's the point of staying in touch with her? It seems she provides mostly idle amusement and the possibility of future sex. It also seems to have some outside risk of blowing up in your face--e.g. ruining a hypothetical future relationship that does have real potential. If it's primarily charity, then there are millions of other recipients who would likely benefit more from your ministrations with a much lower risk profile.

A fair question to ask. I do it both because I'm bored, and because I genuinely enjoy helping people. I feel bad for her, she lacks the kind of agency that most people on this sub takes for granted. I genuinely don't know very many stupid people in my personal life, it's amazing how much good looks and money can cushion you from the consequences, right until it doesn't. She lives her life in a daze, circumstances seem out of her control, everyone seems nice, but they're often just lying through their teeth to get into her pants. Someone who was smarter would confidently wrest that to their advantage, she just suffers. I suppose that's why she likes me, I'm one of the few men she knows who never lied to her, or stopped treating her kindly when she had nothing left to give. (The bit about getting laid next time I see her is mostly in jest, I'm a red-blooded man with no serious objection to sleeping with hot models, but I'm not going to go out of my way to achieve that)

The most influence she plausibly has over her life is her choice of partner, and giving her some advice doesn't cost me much.

If it's primarily charity, then there are millions of other recipients who would likely benefit more from your ministrations with a much lower risk profile.

All they have to do is ask. I try and help just about anyone who does, male or female! I'm not quite Captain Save-A-Hoe, but I know my tendencies. Am I drawn to broken people, or are they drawn to me? God only knows. In my day job, the answer is clear.

e.g. ruining a hypothetical future relationship that does have real potential.

I'm presently single. Just like last time, it wouldn't be very difficult for me to cut her off should that change. In the meantime, I would genuinely be happy for her if she did find a nice guy to settle down with, she's not a bad person. I will probably wrangle invites to the wedding, God knows I miss hitting the buffet line at the Big Fat Indian ones now I'm away. It would be very funny, if nothing else.

Although I enjoyed reading this and enjoy rubbernecking at a potential car wreck as much as anyone, what's the point of staying in touch with her?

Fuel a sense of superiority. Won't lie, I was guilty of rubber necking in the same fashion when I was in my 20's. You take the short path, lock down your education and career, it's a good feeling. But your peers might have taken the short path in other aspects (family, investing, home ownership, etc). It compensates for the lack of other life milestones in those other areas.

Oh, I definitely did the same thing in my 20s. Sooner or later, though, you end up with that hot fling you stayed in touch with breaking into your condo and threatening you with a handgun unless you get back together with her. Which teaches a useful lesson, but it may be one of those lessons that can only learned by direct experience.

Trump's civil fraud convictions (regarding intentional misvaluation of properties) have been upheld by the state appeals panel. I hope that distilling the three opinions down from 230 letter-size pages to something slightly more digestible counts as sufficiently high effort for a top-level comment.

(1) Moulton, joined by Renwick: All the convictions and most of the penalties should be upheld, but the sanctions against Trump's lawyers and the disgorgement penalties against Trump should be reversed.

This decision is one of three issued by this Court today. Presiding Justice Renwick and I agree with our colleagues on certain points. Most importantly, we agree with Justice Higgitt, who is joined by Justice Rosado, that the Attorney General is empowered by Executive Law § 63(12) to bring this action. However, our remaining disagreements with our colleagues' decisions are profound. In sum, Justice Friedman finds that Supreme Court's rulings are infirm in almost every respect and would hold that the Attorney General had no power to bring this case under Executive Law § 63(12). He would dismiss the complaint outright. Justice Higgitt, while agreeing that the Attorney General had the power to bring this lawsuit, finds that errors made by Supreme Court require a new trial limited to only some of the transactions in question.

Because none of the three decisions garners a majority, Justices Higgitt and Rosado join the decretal of this decision for the sole purpose of ensuring finality, thereby affording the parties a path for appeal to the Court of Appeals. Like Justice Friedman, we commend them for doing so. Unlike Justice Friedman, we do not find that this necessary measure is unfair to defendants.

This Court has already ruled in Trump I that the facts of this case warrant the application of Executive Law § 63(12), and that the Attorney General is vindicating the public interest in challenging the transactions in question. The law of the case doctrine "is designed to eliminate the inefficiency and disorder that would follow if courts of coordinate jurisdiction were free to overrule one another in an ongoing case". This Court departs from the doctrine only when a prior holding is clearly erroneous, or where there has been a change in law or evidence. None of those circumstances are present here. Defendants cannot relitigate the issue of the scope of Executive Law § 63(12) under the guise that Trump I that was decided at the motion to dismiss stage (where the Attorney General is entitled to the presumption of the truth of her allegations and the benefit of all favorable inferences), as opposed to the summary judgment stage (where the Attorney General is held to the record evidence).

In this appeal, we have before us an actual record which demonstrates clearly that defendants committed fraud and illegality squarely within the ambit of Executive Law § 63(12). We do not have before us some hypothetical future misuse of the statute. The record also refutes Justice Friedman's implication that the judicial system is being used for "political ends" in this litigation. The antithesis is true. Given the evidence uncovered during the Attorney General's investigation, which is discussed at length below, the "political" choice would have been to not bring this case, thereby avoiding a fight with a powerful adversary. Her allegations have been tested at every stage of this maximalist litigation and for the most part have been upheld. We now have before us the evidence the Attorney General amassed and it demonstrates that defendants engaged in a decade-long pattern of financial fraud and illegality.

Supreme Court correctly awarded partial summary judgment to the Attorney General, and correctly denied defendants' motion for summary judgment, after determining that the Attorney General proved that there were no triable issues of fact concerning the Executive Law § 63(12) cause of action insofar as it was based on fraud (not illegality). This type of section 63(12) claim is sometimes called a "standalone claim" because it is not predicated on violation of another statute.

The record before the court on summary judgment was voluminous. However, volume does not inevitably demonstrate the existence of issues of fact. For the reasons set forth below, we find that the record made on summary judgment clearly demonstrates defendants' liability under Executive Law § 63(12). Moreover, as discussed in section C below, even if Supreme Court erred in granting summary judgment to the Attorney General, the record at trial overwhelmingly supports Supreme Court's finding of liability for violations of the Penal Law.

Our colleagues agree with Presiding Justice Renwick and me that Supreme Court improvidently levied sanctions on defendants' attorneys. The parties in this litigation had to contend with novel legal issues. In grappling with these issues, defendants offered colorable arguments in their defense. Consequently, their arguments were not "completely without merit" under 22 NYCRR 130-1.1(c)(1). Defendants' summary judgment papers certainly repeated arguments advanced in opposition to the Attorney General's motion for a preliminary injunction and in their motions to dismiss the complaint. However, the court made no findings that the arguments were made primarily to delay or prolong the litigation or to harass or maliciously injure the Attorney General under 22 NYCRR 130-1.1(c)(2).

While we find that Supreme Court erred in imposing sanctions, Justice Friedman is incorrect in divining that this somehow reflects a subliminal "tacit" conclusion that Supreme Court was biased against defendants. We agree that Supreme Court's two decisions are sometimes conclusory and insufficiently rigorous in their legal analysis. However, in the pressured environment of a heavily scrutinized trial Supreme Court produced a clear and complete record for this Court to review. In the course of reading and re-reading that record we found that the court was even-handed at trial, and allowed both sides to "make their case."

For the reasons set forth above, we find that Supreme Court properly awarded partial summary judgment on the standalone claim. We disagree with Justice Higgitt's view that Supreme Court engaged in improper fact-finding and credibility determinations in its summary judgment decision. However, even if my colleagues are correct that Supreme Court erred on summary judgment, we also have before us an extensive trial record that amply establishes defendants' liability. At the bench trial Supreme Court was not constrained by the rules of summary judgment. Fact-finding and credibility determinations are among the central tasks of a judge presiding over a bench trial. As set forth below, our de novo review of the trial record supports Supreme Court's findings of illegality. Accordingly, there is no need to remand for another trial.

In connection with our review of the Posttrial Order, we defer to the court's findings that the testimony of President Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, Jeffrey McConney and Allen Weisselberg were not credible, and that the testimony of Michael Cohen was credible. The court cited various reasons for finding that the individual defendants' testimony was not credible which, depending on the witness, included obfuscation, equivocation, evasiveness, gaps in memory, and initial denials until being confronted with contrary evidence. Although Michael Cohen acknowledged at trial that he had pled guilty to perjury, the court nevertheless found his testimony credible, noting the general plausibility of his statements, his demeanor, and the fact that his testimony was corroborated by other trial evidence.

While he is silent concerning Supreme Court's findings that the individual defendants were not credible witnesses, Justice Friedman chooses to devote a number of pages to his own analysis of Cohen's lack of credibility. He quotes at length from Cohen's testimony and draws his own conclusions about its veracity. We do not parse Justice Friedman's exegesis on Cohen's credibility—and do not conduct our own credibility determinations of Cohen or of any other witness—because that is not the job of an appellate judge. Credibility determinations are for the judge who presides at a bench trial. "In a nonjury trial, we defer to the findings of the trial court 'unless it is obvious that the court's conclusions could not be reached under any fair interpretation of the evidence, especially when the findings of fact rest in large measure on considerations relating to the credibility of witnesses'".

Applying the appropriate standard of review, we find that the record amply supports Supreme Court's determination that the Attorney General established, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the individual defendants violated Executive Law § 63(12) by violating New York Penal Law §§ 175.05 (falsifying business records in the second degree), 175.45 (issuing a false financial statement), 176.10 (insurance fraud in the fifth degree),[FN52] and 105.00 (conspiracy in the sixth degree). The evidence, in turn, also established the liability of the corporate defendants by operation of Penal Law § 20.20.

Although the court heard at trial all of the expert testimony that Justice Higgitt viewed as necessary to decide this lawsuit at the summary judgment stage, he nevertheless concludes that defendants were deprived of a fair trial. According to Justice Higgitt, the court's improper "focus and reliance on magnitude of disparity" at the summary judgment stage continued into the trial and affected the court's assessment of whether the individual defendants possessed the requisite intent to defraud under the relevant Penal Law provisions. Justice Higgitt also maintains that the court improperly admitted evidence related to time-barred transactions, which, when superimposed on the court's misunderstanding of materiality, requires a new trial.

We disagree. Because this Court's authority in reviewing a nonjury decision is as broad as that of the trial court and because the trial record before us is clear and complete, there is no need for a new trial. In other words, we are not bound by any legal or fact-finding errors made by Supreme Court at trial.[FN55] In addition, contrary to Justice Higgitt's position, the court's misunderstanding of materiality at the summary judgment stage had no bearing on the court's assessment of the individual defendants' intent to defraud in connection with the relevant Penal Law provisions. As Justice Higgitt acknowledges, intent to defraud is an element under the Penal Law (but is not an element under Executive Law § 63[12]) and looks only to a defendant's state of mind.

The remaining question is whether the disgorgement levied against the defendants in this case is an excessive fine barred by the Eighth Amendment. We believe that it is.

A fine is excessive when it is "grossly disproportional to the gravity of the defendant's offense". Defendants' attempt to deny the gravity of their actions with blithe claims that none of the counterparties were harmed ignores a core reality: a bank making a loan seeks not only repayment, but also compensation for the possibility of default. Nicholas Haigh, the managing director of the Deutsche Bank Private Wealth Management Division, the entity that approved the three loans issued by that Bank herein, testified that "just getting repaid on the principal" of the loan "doesn't address at all whether we got properly recompensed for the risk we were taking." However, while harm certainly occurred, it was not the cataclysmic harm that can justify a nearly half billion-dollar award to the State. It is a virtue of the statute that the Attorney General may act, as she did in this case, before a potential catastrophe occurs, to deter further fraudulent business behavior by defendants specifically, and to police market behavior generally. However, having achieved these goals the State is not entitled to compound its victory with a massive punitive fine.

The Attorney General did not carry her initial burden. Indeed, the calculation of the disgorgement in this case was far from a reasonable approximation. Contrary to Supreme Court's finding, the profits from sales of the Ferry Point License and the sale of the OPO Lease (which, in tandem, accounted for $194.8 million of the disgorgement awarded plus a substantial amount of interest) were not "reasonable approximation[s] of profits causally connected" to defendants' wrongdoing.

For the foregoing reasons, we vacate the portions of the Posttrial Order directing disgorgement in its entirety.

This does not leave the Attorney General without a remedy. In contrast to its order on disgorgement, Supreme Court properly granted injunctive relief.

On the record before us, we find that Supreme Court properly exercised its discretion in awarding injunctive relief. Defendants persistently and intentionally inflated the asset values reported in their SFCs from 2014 to 2021, for numerous assets per each SFC. Despite the wrongfulness of their conduct, Supreme Court believed that defendants lacked remorse. Indeed, when asked at trial whether he still approved of McConney and Weisselberg's work in preparing the SFCs, President Trump stated "[y]ou haven't shown me anything that would change my mind."

Contrary to defendants' arguments, Supreme Court's injunctive relief was not "breathtakingly overbroad." The Court of Appeals recognized in Greenberg that lifetime bans on business activity may not "be a justifiable exercise of a court's discretion". Even so, the majority of Supreme Court's injunctive relief spanned two or three years. The court's only permanent injunction barred McConney and Weisselberg—who were primarily responsible for preparing the SFCs and maintaining the Trump Organization's books and records—from controlling the finances of a New York corporation or business entity. Considering the significant likelihood that defendants would reoffend, Supreme Court's injunctions were measured and fair.

(2) Higgitt, joined by Rosado: The convictions should be vacated for a new trial. However, in the interest of finality, we will concur in Moulton's opinion so that it has a majority and can be appealed to the state Court of Appeals (supreme court), rather than having Engoron's opinion "vacated by an equally divided court".

We and our colleagues generally agree on the facts and evidence. On the import of those facts and evidence, however, we differ with our colleagues—in reasoning, result, or both—on a number of fundamental issues, and the path this action should now take.

For the reasons that follow, we conclude that the judgment must be vacated and a new trial ordered.[FN2]

[FN2]Notwithstanding our analysis, as reflected in our writing, that vacatur of the judgment and a new trial is the appropriate resolution, Justice Rosado and I, after much consideration, with great reluctance and with acknowledgement of the incongruity of the act, join the decretal modifying the judgment to the extent of vacating the disgorgement and sanctions awards. Under the truly extraordinary circumstances here, where none of the writings enjoys the support of a majority, we are moved to take this action to permit this panel to arrive at a decision and to permit the parties and the Court to avoid the necessity of reargument. Moreover, joining the decretal effectuates the core point of agreement among the members of this panel: that the judgment, as entered by Supreme Court, cannot stand. The parties must have a decision on this matter and, concomitantly, the option of further review of this matter by the Court of Appeals, as recognized by Justice Friedman. We must therefore agree with Justice Friedman in his observation that a remarkable situation has necessitated a remarkable solution.

Our colleagues have thoroughly and thoughtfully examined and analyzed the parties' arguments and proof and Supreme Court's determinations, reaching opposite conclusions. We find that the application of the same well-known fundamental summary judgment principles leads to the conclusion that summary judgment was improperly granted to the Attorney General. Supreme Court did not view the evidence in the light most favorable to defendants, as the nonmovants; it resolved, rather than identified, questions of material fact; and it did so by applying its own interpretive standard to the evidence without explicitly finding defendants' experts to be incredible as a matter of law or rejecting the bases for their multi-pronged analyses. Central to the motions and Supreme Court's decision, and indeed the action itself, was the valuation of the various assets listed in the SFCs. Defendants argue that Supreme Court's rejection of the expert evidence they submitted in opposition to the Attorney General's motion affected every valuation decision Supreme Court made, and fatally infected the subsequent trial.

Supreme Court found (correctly) that materiality was not an element of the Executive Law § 63(12) fraud claim but recognized (correctly) that it is "relevant" to determining "tendency or capacity." Supreme Court found that the magnitude of the difference between defendants' and the Attorney General's valuations, alone, was material and, in essence, the single factor informing "tendency or capacity." According to Supreme Court,

OAG has submitted conclusive evidence that between 2014 and 2021, defendants overvalued the assets reported in the SFCs between 17.27-38.51%; this amounts to a discrepancy of between $812 million and $2.2 billion dollars. Even in the world of high finance, this Court cannot endorse a proposition that finds a misstatement of at least $812 million dollars to be 'immaterial.' Defendants have failed to identify any authority for the notion that discrepancies of the magnitude demonstrated here could be considered immaterial.

Supreme Court's rejection of defendants' evidence reduces to an unwarranted (i.e. the Attorney General had not offered competent competing evidence) rejection of the notion of a subjective appraisal. In doing do, Supreme Court relied on an inapt case, its interpretation of which was flawed. Supreme Court stated, "Accepting defendants' premise would require ignoring decades of controlling authority holding that financial statements and real property valuations are to be judged objectively, not subjectively".

For the proposition that subjectivity has no place in real property valuation, Supreme Court cited Matter of FMC Corp. and Assured Guar. Mun. Corp. v DLJ Mortg. Cap. Inc. For the proposition that market value is the most reliable valuation method, it cited Matter of Great Atl, & Pac. Tea Co. v Kiernan and Matter of Consolidated Edison Co. of N.Y., Inc. v City of New York. These cases are of little to no value with respect to examination, let alone resolution, of the issues presented by the motions.

It bears noting that no one, including Supreme Court, identified, as a matter of law or fact, singular, correct inputs from which valuation methods should have emanated. Supreme Court declined to acknowledge the validity of alternate valuation methods, disregarding that every method of valuation ultimately seeks the same goal. Therefore, Supreme Court's usage of the word "appraisal" did very little to help us stratify valuation methods into echelons of accuracy. Our jurisprudence with respect to property interests teaches us that every parcel of property is unique, meaning, therefore, that similarly situated properties cannot be presumed to have identical value for comparison. Further, value is made up of many intangible factors, such as proximity to a geographical or topographical feature, remoteness from the nearest neighboring property, and cache, none of which has anything to do with the features of the actual parcel or the construction of the actual structures. The premise from which Supreme Court set out, therefore, was a false one. This is borne out by the fact that the Attorney General was able to identify only very specific misstatements that were truly, objectively "wrong," as opposed to inflated or creative, even expansively so, which is not necessarily fraudulent, given the breadth of permissible valuation methods.

Considering the effect of our prior determination and all applicable tolls afforded by the agreement and the various Executive Orders issued during the coronavirus pandemic, the correct date for determining the timeliness of all claims against all defendants is July 13, 2014. Supreme Court thus erred when it considered instances of false statements with respect to the Doral and Chicago loans, both of which closed prior to July 13, 2014, in calculating damages, awarding injunctive relief, and in directing judgment against any defendants alleged to have participated in only those transactions. The exclusion of untimely transactions significantly reduces Supreme Court's disgorgement award. The $168,040,168 award based on interest rate differentials must be reduced by the $72,908,308 attributable to the Doral loan and the $17,443,359 attributable to the Chicago loan, for a reduced total of $77,688,500, assuming Supreme Court used the correct metrics in making the award.

The impact of Supreme Court's erroneous interpretation of our prior holding with respect to the statute of limitations on its posttrial disgorgement award is not harmless. This is true not merely mathematically, but also foundationally. Given the unique nature of the Executive Law § 63(12) cause of action and the relief afforded by it, we cannot know the evidentiary significance of otherwise-excludable SFCs and transactions to the primary determinations required for a successful Executive Law § 63(12) claim. We cannot know whether or to what extent the consideration of otherwise-excludable SFCs or transactions influenced the finding of repetition or persistence of defendants' acts or statements, or whether their consideration produced a course of repetition or persistence that influenced the decision to grant any aspect of the injunctive and other non-monetary relief awarded, whether at the motion or trial stage, the type of relief, the nature of the relief, or the severity of the relief, such as its duration or breadth.[FN29] While the granting of such relief is not mandatory when the cause of action is made out, it bears noting that this is the primary form of relief envisioned by Executive Law § 63(12).

Accordingly, Supreme Court's statute of limitations finding, together with the other fundamental errors described above, merits, among other things, a new trial.

We and our colleagues agree that granting the motion for sanctions was an improvident exercise of discretion; that defense counsels' conduct could not be fairly characterized as "egregious," "preposterous," "inscrutable," "risible," "obstreperous," or "bogus"; and that such determination should be reversed on the non-parties' appeal. That Supreme Court's prior decisions had been affirmed on appeal did not render defendants' repetition of the arguments insupportable: our pronouncements with respect to the Attorney General's authority to pursue the action and the availability of disgorgement as a remedy were statements of general law appropriate for a CPLR 3211 dismissal analysis where the sole question was the complaint's statement of a cognizable cause of action.

(3) Friedman: The convictions should be reversed.

This action essentially turns section 63(12) on its head. The leniency with which the courts have construed the requirements for pleading and proving fraud under section 63(12)—a leniency that has been extended for the purpose of facilitating the use of the provision to prevent the exploitation of unsophisticated consumers, investors and small businesses—is here being used by Attorney General Letitia James to apply section 63(12) to a scenario to which that provision has never before been applied, or even thought to apply. Specifically, the Attorney General in this case has utilized the flexibility afforded her under section 63(12) to unwind complex financial transactions that were negotiated, face-to-face and at arm's length, between a privately held real estate organization—that of defendant Donald J. Trump, the former president and current president—and ultra-sophisticated banks, insurance companies and government entities, which were advised by equally sophisticated lawyers, accountants, and other business professionals.

The Attorney General complains, and Supreme Court found, that the statements of financial condition (SFCs) that President Trump provided to the counterparties in connection with the transactions at issue overvalued certain of his assets. However, each of the SFCs included written disclaimers advising, in no uncertain terms, that President Trump's valuations of his various properties were estimates that had not been audited and were not beyond dispute. Each counterparty was further warned that it should do its own due diligence and draw its own conclusions about President Trump's net worth, which each counterparty actually did, as it was obligated to do for its own protection as a matter of New York law. Moreover, President Trump paid all the principal, interest, and premiums he owed, and no counterparty ever registered any complaint about the deals before the Attorney General began publicly accusing President Trump of issuing fraudulent SFCs. Had any counterparty been dissatisfied with its transaction, it would have had the incentive and resources to seek redress for violation of its rights through private litigation—litigation that, according to the Attorney General, would have yielded scores of millions of dollars of damages in some cases. No such lawsuit was ever filed.

On this appeal from the nearly half-billion dollar judgment against President Trump and his codefendants, two of my colleagues have cited scores of cases in an attempt to shoehorn this case into section 63(12). They have gone so far as to claim that the Attorney General, by bringing this action, has possibly saved the world from a replay of the financial meltdown of 2008; how this might be is not explained. Despite their efforts, they are unable to point to a single precedent—not even one—for the use of section 63(12) to target transactions such as those at issue here—bilateral, negotiated, arm's-length transactions between highly sophisticated parties, which had no effect on any public market, and which were, so far as the parties to the transactions were concerned, complete successes. Given the absence of any public interest in unwinding these deals, I would not stretch the scope of section 63(12) to reach them.

Moreover, even if bringing this action were within the scope of the Attorney General's power under section 63(12), Supreme Court erred both in granting her summary judgment as to liability on her first cause of action and in rendering a decision in her favor on all causes of action after trial. As explained below, the Attorney General simply failed to prove her case. Accordingly, I would reverse the judgment and dismiss the complaint. Thus, while I concur in the decretal's vacatur of the constitutionally unsound (and otherwise defective) half-billion dollar disgorgement award, I respectfully dissent insofar as the decretal affirms the judgment as to liability and as to the award of nonmonetary relief to the Attorney General.

I note that, of the four justices voting for the decretal, two — Justice Higgitt and Justice Rosado — do not actually agree with the resolution of the appeal for which they are voting. As stated in Justice Higgitt's opinion, he and Justice Rosado believe that the grant of summary judgment to the Attorney General (as to liability on the first cause of action) should be reversed, the judgment vacated, and the matter remanded for a new trial on all causes of action. I commend Justices Higgitt and Rosado for their selflessness in putting aside their personal views to allow this Court to dispose of this appeal. However, I find it remarkable that, although a three-justice majority of this five-justice panel believe that the judgment in favor of the Attorney General should not stand, as she has not carried her burden of proving a violation of the statute, the result of the appeal is the affirmance of the judgment, albeit as modified to eliminate the disgorgement award. To draw a sports analogy, it is as if a team is awarded a touchdown without crossing the goal line. In any event, it seems to me that the result I would reach is more consistent with the outlook of Justices Higgitt and Rosado than the affirmance of the judgment, as modified, for which they are voting.

This leads me to explain why, given that I am alone on this panel in my view that the complaint should be dismissed, I am not voting for the result favored by Justices Higgitt and Rosado — namely, vacatur of the judgment and remand for a new trial. First, I do not believe that we can ignore the fact that ordering a new trial of a case in which the primary defendant and witness is the sitting president of the United States (and will remain so for approximately another 3½ years) would disrupt the political life of the United States and would undermine its national interest, particularly at a time of high global tension, with ongoing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. Second, while it is obvious from the divergence of opinions among the justices of this panel that this case calls out for further appellate review, an order by this Court directing a retrial is not immediately appealable to the Court of Appeals unless the appellant stipulates to be bound by the prior judgment in the event his further appeal is unsuccessful. It seems inconceivable that defendants would stipulate to a judgment carrying a half-billion dollar award against them. Finally, even if Justice Higgitt is correct that neither side should have been granted summary judgment on their dueling pretrial motions, I agree with Justice Moulton that the record before us—more than 100 volumes, comprising nearly 50,000 pages—is more than sufficient to decide the case without holding another trial. In that regard, I agree with defendants, and respectfully disagree with my colleagues, on the standard of proof applicable to the Attorney General's claims. In my view, the Attorney General should be required to prove her claims under section 63(12) by clear and convincing evidence, not by a mere preponderance of the evidence.

I turn first to the question of whether defendants' present argument is precluded by this Court's decision on the earlier appeal. At that juncture, in rejecting defendants' attempt to have the action dismissed at the pleading stage based on the absence of a state interest, we wrote: "The Attorney General is not suing on behalf of a private individual, but is vindicating the state's sovereign interest in enforcing its legal code—including its civil legal code—within its jurisdiction". It must be borne in mind that this statement was made in reviewing the disposition of a pre-answer motion to dismiss, made at the outset of the action, before the development of a full record. The Court's decision does not state that the Attorney General could ultimately prevail in this action without establishing some sort of state interest, differentiated from the interests of the sophisticated institutional "victims" of defendants' alleged misconduct, of the kind that has historically been recognized as conferring parens patriae standing "to commence an action to protect a public interest". Accordingly, in my view, the doctrine of law of the case does not preclude us from considering defendants' standing argument on the merits.[FN11]

[FN11]As I shall discuss subsequently, even if the law of the case doctrine would otherwise apply, I believe that the unique circumstances presented—and, in particular, the constitutional concerns raised by the Attorney General unprecedented use of the statute in this case—justify departing from the doctrine in this instance. In either case, I do not, as Justice Moulton asserts, "ignore[]" this Court's prior consideration of this issue in Trump I.

Neither Justice Moulton nor Justice Higgitt cites any precedent holding that privately actionable conduct—standing alone, and without proof of any grounds for a belief that the public good would be jeopardized if enforcement of the relevant rules were left to private litigation by the parties concerned—suffices to support a judgment in favor of the Attorney General under section 63(12). Indeed, Justice Higgitt candidly admits that in this case, "we are confronted with an unprecedented use of the statutory power" conferred by section 63(12).

Justice Higgitt is correct in stating that the manner in which section 63(12) is being used in this action is unprecedented. Earlier uses of section 63(12) all involved a specifically public interest, apart from any injury to sophisticated commercial parties fully able to monitor their own interests and to seek redress through private litigation for any violations of their rights. For example, such actions often target deceptive or otherwise unlawful commercial conduct directed toward the general public, most of whom are unsophisticated and whose individual losses may not be large enough to justify private litigation. Section 63(12) has also been used to attack deceptive conduct that influences the price of a publicly traded security, which is bought and sold anonymously on exchanges where traders rely on the issuer's public disclosures and do not conduct independent due diligence. But neither the Attorney General nor either of my colleagues has identified any prior case in which section 63(12) was used, as it is being used here, simply to assert a claim that a sophisticated commercial party was duped, in a face-to-face, arm's-length transaction, into accepting a lower interest rate, or a lower insurance premium, than it would have accepted absent the alleged deception.

In adopting the Attorney General's reading of the statute, my colleagues are empowering her office to attack, at will, virtually any business transaction, regardless of its success or failure, and in the absence of any discernable effect on the public. This is because—as a moment's reflection will disclose—a substantial business deal that goes awry (which none of the transactions at issue did) typically will give rise to a claim by the losing party that, in hindsight, the transaction was induced by some misrepresentation made by the counterparty. This is not surprising, since it is easy for inaccuracies to creep into the description of large business enterprises and certain kinds of representations — such as estimates of value, the kind of representation chiefly at issue here—are inherently subjective and disputable. Indeed, every day on which appeals are argued before this Court, at least one of the appeals (and frequently more than one) involves allegations of fraud in business transactions between sophisticated persons or entities—allegations frequently more serious than those made by the Attorney General in this case. By the reasoning of my colleagues, the Attorney General has the power to involve her office in any one of these disputes and to bring her own suit under section 63(12) against any defendant accused of "repeated" fraud, even if the counterparty's suit falls short under the more exacting rules applicable to common-law fraud claims. By holding that section 63(12) authorizes the Attorney General to pore over the records of private transactions, even successful deals, years after they closed, in the hope of finding at least two inaccurate or disputable statements on which to predicate a lawsuit, without any need to identify a greater public interest at stake, my colleagues invite arbitrary, unpredictable, and inevitably selective use of the judicial system for political ends, and not to "vindicate[] [any] public purpose".

And regrettably, the record makes plain that in this matter, we see an attempt to use section 63(12) and the judicial system for political ends. The proof of this is found not in anything written by me but in the words of the Attorney General herself. Specifically, as previously noted, the Attorney General, in her 2018 election campaign for her current office, repeatedly promised the voters that her top priority, upon being sworn in, would be to bring down President Trump and his real estate empire. The Attorney General made these statements long before February 27, 2019, the date of the supposed trigger for her investigation of President Trump and the other defendants—namely, the testimony before the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform (the House Oversight Committee) of Michael Cohen, the convicted perjurer and disbarred attorney, in which he claimed that the SFCs of President Trump, his former client, contained inflated valuations of his assets.

As previously noted, the test for fraud under section 63(12) is whether the targeted act "has the capacity or tendency to deceive, or creates an atmosphere conducive to fraud". In adjudicating this case, Supreme Court quoted this standard but disregarded it. In the order disposing of the summary judgment motions, the court held that the Attorney General was required only to prove that the SFCs were "false and misleading," and that the defendants had "repeatedly or persistently used the [SFCs] to transact business" to sustain the standalone Executive Law § 63(12) claim—nothing more. Likewise, in its decision after trial, the court held that plaintiff need only prove that "defendants used false statements in business." Thus, under Supreme Court's view, falsity was all that is required to be shown. In effect, the court adopted a strict liability standard for business representations. This was error.

Contrary to Justice Moulton's mischaracterization of my position, I am not arguing that the determination of whether a defendant has violated section 63(12) should be "tie[d] . . . to whether a counterparty exercised due diligence or justifiably relied on the [allegedly] fraudulent conduct." I agree that whether the particular counterparty in fact conducted due diligence, or in fact justifiably relief on the subject representation, is not a necessary element of the Attorney General's case under the statute. However, to reiterate, whether a defendant's representations to professionals in a given industry had a "capacity or tendency to deceive" or created "an atmosphere conducive to fraud" cannot be determined in a vacuum, without considering the generally accepted conventions and usages of that industry. If the universal practice in the relevant industry is not to take representations such as the SFCs at face value, to hold that the SFCs nonetheless had a "capacity or tendency to deceive" is to fashion an artificial construct of fraud — to treat the sophisticated, professional recipients of the SFCs as if they were naÏve consumers or small investors. Nothing in section 63(12) or the case law thereunder requires us to ignore reality in this fashion.

Turning first to the nature of the asset valuations, Supreme Court apparently took the view that valuations are "objectively" either right or wrong. However, expert testimony in the record establishes that, for a unique asset for which a current market value cannot be obtained with certainty, an appraiser has a choice of different methodologies by which to value the asset, and these different methodologies may yield significantly different valuation figures. As defendants' accounting expert Dr. Eli Bartov testified, a valuation is "an opinion on price derived from a valuation model" and, as an opinion, "can never be objective." Valuations of an asset are "subject to substantial variation," depending on the definitions, assumptions, and methodologies chosen by those preparing the valuation. Thus, the valuation process is inherently subjective, and the Attorney General's disagreement with the valuations of certain assets set forth in the SFCs, and with the supporting opinions of defendants' experts, did not establish "fraud" within the meaning of section 63(12).

In my view, the Attorney General failed to prove her case under any of the Penal Law causes of action for the same reason she failed to prove her case on the stand-alone section 63(12) cause of action — the valuations in the SFCs, as plainly labeled subjective estimates of value of unique assets, simply were not false, even if disputable, in the professional context in which they were used. That being the case, I really need not say more about the Penal Law causes of action. However, some comment is warranted on the dubious evidence on which the Attorney General relied to establish the intent element of these causes of action.

To prove intent in support of the Penal Law causes of action against President Trump, the Attorney General relied almost entirely on the testimony of Michael Cohen, the disbarred lawyer who pleaded guilty to (among other offenses) willful tax evasion, making false statements to a financial institution, and perjury. As summarized by Justice Moulton, Cohen testified that he and defendant Allen Weisselberg were, on occasion, "direct[ed]" by President Trump to "reverse engineer" the valuations in the SFCs to reach a "desired goal." To this end, Cohen testified, he would search for comparable properties on the Internet and base valuations of President Trump's assets on the results of his search so as to reach the predetermined goal. For several reasons—perhaps the same reasons that the Attorney General has, as previously noted, avoided referring to Cohen by name in her appellate brief, and has limited her citation of his testimony to the absolute minimum—Supreme Court's crediting of this testimony does not, in my view, warrant the deference that Justice Moulton extends to it.

Initially, as Justice Moulton acknowledges, Cohen's credibility is undeniably undermined by the crimes to which he pleaded guilty in federal court, which included willful income tax evasion (over a period of five years), making a false statement on a personal credit application to a financial institution, perjurious testimony before a congressional committee, and making an illegal political campaign contribution. A harsh but illuminating light is cast on Cohen's character by the Government's sentencing memorandum, dated December 17, 2018, that was submitted in his case to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Cohen's unreliability as a witness is further demonstrated by his testimony in this case specifically disavowing his guilty pleas to the tax evasion and false statement charges. Cohen went so far as to testify, under oath, that he had been lying to the federal court when he pleaded guilty to those offenses.

Since my view is that the complaint should be dismissed in its entirety, both for the Attorney General's lack of standing and for the failure of her proof, and given that I am in dissent, I need not reach the issue of the statute of limitations. Nonetheless, I note that I agree with Justice Higgitt on this issue to the extent he holds that, with regard to defendants bound by the relevant tolling agreement, the Attorney General's claims are time-barred to the extent they are based on the issuance of SFCs pursuant to transactions that closed before July 13, 2014. This is the necessary implication of our holding in the previous decision that "claims are time barred if they accrued—that is, the transactions were completed—before [the applicable cut-off date]".

(Rather hilariously, when I originally clicked on this HTML opinion, it contained several element-nesting errors (unclosed <b> and <i> elements), and even some mojibake at the top. But it looks like those problems were fixed between then and when I finished writing this comment.)

Articles: AP, Reuters

Enlighten my ignorance. I'm going by headlines I see online, so is it that the court decided the damages awarded against Trump were too high so they were struck down, but the charges can stand?

And what does this mean for the NY AG Letitia James? Is she okay on the grounds that the charges were legit to bring against him, or is this going to damage her?

My guess is that under the hood this was a political grenade and everyone deemed this the easiest way to defuse it without causing other problems. The reality of the law was likely subordinate to getting out as clean as possible.

So we get this - and move on.

The trial judge convicted Trump of fraud, and on that basis imposed on Trump two separate punishments—disgorgement of several hundred megadollars, and disqualification from serving as an officer or director of any New York business for several years. Disgorgement is, not really punitive, but compensatory, meant to undo any damages that were done. The appeals panel ruled that the prosecutor failed to prove the quantity of damages caused by Trump's fraud, so the disgorgement had no basis. But the punitive disqualification still stands.

I have no opinion on what effect this will have on the prosecutor's reputation.

True but a majority of the court would’ve voted to vacate or overturn the entire conviction. But they couldn’t agree on vacate v overturn.

I dunno, feels pretty fair as an opinion. The book-cookers get blocked from business, Trump gets a shorter-term injunction for orchestrating it, but because no real harm was done, the penalties are struck down as deranged and vindictive. I don’t see a better way of threading the needle between condoning fraud if you’re important enough and deciding on damages based on how much our feelings are hurt.

Reducing the financial penalty (and the sanctions that looked like they were aimed to discourage preserving an argument for review) helps a lot of the most egregious abuses, here, but it's still an absolute mess of the case and an opinion, here. Friedman's "However, I find it remarkable that, although a three-justice majority of this five-justice panel believe that the judgment in favor of the Attorney General should not stand, as she has not carried her burden of proving a violation of the statute, the result of the appeal is the affirmance of the judgment..." isn't inexplicable, but it's hard to read as anything but a strong bet by two judges that the state supreme court is willing to do their dirty work for them.

Is it because she didn’t carry the burden, or is it because the “divided court” somehow ruins a retrial? I don’t understand why that isn’t an option.

I think only Friedman found a case-wide failure to carry the burden of proof; the rest of the judges mostly focus on the burden of proof for disgorgement aka the high fines.

In New York, as in most other jurisdictions, appeals courts can only overturn an action from a lower court with a full majority of the appeals court judges. Here, there's a majority (5/5) on the fines and sanctions, and division on everything else, and it's not even clear that Higgitt and Rosado want a retrial here so much as think it would be appropriate in a non-Trump case.

Beyond that, there's also just a lot of issues with this specific case getting a retrial -- Higgitt/Rosado might have settled for a dissental because they couldn't get a third signing onto a retrial, but they might have not really wanted a retrial in this case and only argued it for others in the future. Everyone else gives a different reason why they don't want a retrial. From the Moulton/Renwick:

Returning this action to Supreme Court for a new trial as urged by Justice Higgitt is both unnecessary and likely terminal. It is difficult to imagine that a trial could proceed while one of the principal defendants, and a central witness, is President of the United States. The inevitable elapse of time and the attendant difficulties in recreating a vast record of testimony and documents — an exercise that is both Sisyphean and unneeded, because an extensive trial record already exists — would likely consign this meritorious case to oblivion.

From Friedman:

First, I do not believe that we can ignore the fact that ordering a new trial of a case in which the primary defendant and witness is the sitting president of the United States (and will remain so for approximately another 3½ years) would disrupt the political life of the United States and would undermine its national interest, particularly at a time of high global tension, with ongoing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.[FN3] Second, while it is obvious from the divergence of opinions among the justices of this panel that this case calls out for further appellate review, an order by this Court directing a retrial is not immediately appealable to the Court of Appeals unless the appellant stipulates to be bound by the prior judgment in the event his further appeal is unsuccessful (CPLR 5601[c], 5602[b][1]; see Trezza v Metropolitan Transp. Auth., 23 NY3d 1011, 1011 [2014]; Maynard v Greenberg, 82 NY2d 913, 914-915 [1994]). It seems inconceivable that defendants would stipulate to a judgment carrying a half-billion dollar award against them.[FN4] Finally, even if Justice Higgitt is correct that neither side should have been granted summary judgment on their dueling pretrial motions, I agree with Justice Moulton that the record before us — more than 100 volumes, comprising nearly 50,000 pages — is more than sufficient to decide the case without holding another trial.

This is not a very substantive comment, but you are most lawyer-brained non-lawyer I know. It's impressive (and I mean this as a compliment), I had a career counselor once suggest I take my wordcel self down that path, and I'd have probably gone insane.

I don't think that merely summarizing court opinions is an appropriate basis for being considered "lawyer-brained".

My brother in $deity, you do this every week, and also in the Fun Thread. I look forward to those posts, but I think it makes a powerful statement.

Calling a random civil engineer who reads court opinions for fun and summarizes them for karma "lawyer-brained" is an insult to the multiple actual lawyer denizens of this forum.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Lawyers typically do the following:

  • Advise and represent clients in criminal or civil proceedings and in other legal matters

  • Communicate with clients, colleagues, judges, and others involved in a case

  • Conduct research and analysis of legal issues

  • Interpret laws, rulings, and regulations for individuals and businesses

  • Present facts and findings relevant to a case on behalf of their clients

  • Prepare and file legal documents, such as lawsuits, contracts, and wills

Lawyers, also called attorneys, research the intent of laws and judicial decisions and determine whether they apply to the specific circumstances of their client’s case. They act as both advocates and advisors for one party in a criminal (offense against the state or the nation) or civil (matters between individuals or organizations) proceeding.

An actual lawyer-brained person would argue with other users about complicated issues, would complain to the moderators regarding poorly worded rules, and would present his learned legal interpretations of various cases. I do none of those things.

Calling a random civil engineer who reads court opinions for fun and summarizes them for karma "lawyer-brained" is an insult to the multiple actual lawyer denizens of this forum.

If anything, it's a compliment to the actual lawyer denizens here. Or at least compared to the many other insults I've heard.

Hi, one of the 'actual lawyer' denizens speaking, you're doing great, please keep that up.

Being able to summarize legalese in human-readable terms is probably the most immediately useful part of being a lawyer.

Arguing over the definition of "lawyer-brained" is about the most lawyer-brained thing there is. I legitimately can't tell if you're trying to satirize yourself here. Either way, I love it.

…this can’t have been any easier than including a paragraph or two of your own commentary.

I will rule that it does clear the bar, but dang, I’d have preferred page numbers instead of block quotes.

This can’t have been any easier than including a paragraph or two of your own commentary.

I don't have any opinion on which judges are correct.

I’d have preferred page numbers instead of block quotes.

Preliminary "slip" opinions from New York's appeals panels are published in HTML without page numbers, not in PDF with page numbers. I have seen people refer to a 320-page PDF, but it's not official.

(Weirdly, New York's trial courts publish slip opinions in a mixture of HTML and PDF.)

I suppose you’d know better than I.

In lighter news, the FDA has taken it upon themselves to improve shrimp welfare by calling on Americans not to eat certain shrimps.

The level of Cs-137 detected in the detained shipment was approximately 68 Bq/kg, which is below FDA’s Derived Intervention Level for Cs-137 of 1200 Bq/kg. At this level, the product would not pose an acute hazard to consumers.

Then why recall them?

Avoiding products like the shipment FDA tested with similar levels of Cs-137 is a measure intended to reduce exposure to low-level radiation that could have health impacts with continued exposure over a long period of time.

This is a weird statement. If you are concerned about radioactivity below 1.2kBq/kg, then why not have a lower threshold?

At the bottom of the page they state:

Consumers who have symptoms should contact their health care provider to report their symptoms and receive care.

Comedy gold. They should mention that the relevant health care provider for symptoms from a couple of 100 Bq of Cs-137 is your psychiatrist.

The steelman, from what I can tell, is that this is concerning not because of the dose but because it is unclear where the Cs-137 is coming from:

FDA determined that product from PT. Bahari Makmur Sejati violates the Federal Food, Drug, & Cosmetic Act in that it appears to have been prepared, packed, or held under insanitary conditions whereby it may have become contaminated with Cs-137 and may pose a safety concern.

Cs-137 is a classic mid-lifetime (T1/2=30a) fission product. Whenever you have an atmospheric nuclear weapon test or a reactor disaster, it will be one of the relevant radioisotopes.

In its decay, it also emit 660keV gamma rays, which together with its half-life make it a widely used gamma ray source.

Without knowing what exactly is going on, I see two main possibilities. One would be that the shrimps were fed contaminated food, e.g. freshwater fish from some lakes in Scandinavia. Per the FDA release, they do not believe that this is what is going on.

The other plausible explanation I can think of is contamination with Cs-137 used for food irradiation. WP:

Conversely, caesium-137 is water-soluble and poses a risk of environmental contamination. Insufficient quantities are available for large-scale commercial use as the vast majority of Caesium-137 produced in nuclear reactors is not extracted from spent nuclear fuel. An incident where water-soluble caesium-137 leaked into the source storage pool requiring NRC intervention has led to near elimination of this radioisotope.

Food irradiation is safe for the food if you take great care to not get your radioisotopes into your food. This is typically easy because you can encase your source in a few millimeters of stainless steel, and plenty of gamma rays will still make it through. If you get any radioactivity into your food during irradiation, then something has gone terribly wrong. Given the ungodly amounts of activity involved with food irradiation, this is a major concern.

I admit that my knee-jerk reaction to the FDA warning was to think that an agency which warned about a dose which was a whopping 6% of its threshold had probably not been DOGEd sufficiently. On further reflection, I think that it is more like faintly smelling smoke suddenly. Not itself very concerning, but if you did not expect to smell smoke then it might be indicative that there is a worrisome problem somewhere.

This looks like a very fishy (ba-dum-tss!) situation. I'd agree it looks very much like somebody mishandled a radiation source and the contamination went into the food supply, which is horribly bad. And for FDA it may be nearly impossible to find how it happened, because there are so many moving parts, and people would not be very forthcoming given it's a really bad fuckup. So FDA has a case on their hands where something is obviously very wrong and they can't fix it. So they do "something" because something must be done - they kill the messenger, i.e. recall the slightly contaminated shrimp, because that's the only thing they can do, and if later it turns out the source is found, they could say "we did all we could!".

Every few years a radioisotope source from an abandoned hospital or lab in a third world country goes missing and ends up in a junkyard. There are hundreds of slightly radioactive buildings in Northern Mexico because one guy sold a dismantled cobalt-60 radiotherapy machine to a scrap metal company.

The nightmare scenario is that there is some town in Indonesia somewhere whose entire water supply has been contaminated because someone threw away some old medical equipment.

There are hundreds of slightly radioactive buildings in Northern Mexico because one guy sold a dismantled cobalt-60 radiotherapy machine to a scrap metal company.

I recall a similar apartment building somewhere in SE Asia that wound up providing decently strong evidence (for a given value of "strong"; low-level exposures tend to have weak effects regardless of which side of the debate one is on) for opponents of LNT; that is, cancer rates were lower in the irradiated apartment building than its neighbors, despite similar demographics.

Edit: it was in fact Cobalt-60 contamination in Taiwan:

Based on the investigation conducted by the RSPAT,[10] the total number of cancer deaths among these residents is only 7 in 200,000 person-years or 3.5 deaths per 100,000 person-years—only 3% of the rate (i.e., 116) expected for the general population

The one I always think of -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Consumers who have symptoms should contact their health care provider to report their symptoms and receive care.

“Please, stop calling us.”

I think you’re correct about smelling smoke. Especially if the sampling was random. There’s no guarantee this was the only contaminated shipment, so further investigation is justified.

Also, this might be the most exciting thing that’s happened to them since RFK took office.

Incidental contamination isn't impossible -- they're usually Cobalt, but Cesium has gotten into the scrap metal supply before -- but yeah, accidental food irradiation release seems more plausible. In turn, it's weirder, though: while there are some types of food irradiation involve just slapping raw and open product through the processing line (eg, fruit), for seafood specifically the norm is to pack the food first and then nuke the hell out of it. It's not great to have it on the wrapper, or maybe the original packaging is getting opened and the product repacked in ways that would get the material onto the food, but it's a weird bit compared to everything else being discussed.

I only glanced at this story briefly last night, but: isn't 68 Bq/kg less than the radioactivity of bananas?

I also concluded that they must be worried about contamination that they missed - if some cesium capsule leaked a tiny bit into these shrimp, does that mean there was a tiny leak, or does that mean there was a big leak but this particular sample only included a tiny bit of it? Imagine if the most contaminated packages ended up near the center of a different shipping container, hidden from detection by a meter of cargo in every direction.

Switching from normal brain to crazy internet-addled brain: is there any chance this could have been a penetration test rather than unintentional contamination? Customs doesn't check every import for radioactivity because they're worried about shrimp with the power of bananas, they do it because after 9/11 we spent like a billion dollars on radiation portal monitors designed to detect "dirty bombs". If I was a psychopath looking to slip something by those monitors, I wouldn't want to blow my shot without a test run first, and I would want that run to have some kind of relatively-innocuous plausible alternative explanation in case the pen test didn't pen. If a dirty bomb hidden inside a bunch of radiation shielding still leaks as much gamma as a pallet of barely-contaminated frozen shrimp, well, then, barely contaminate some shrimp and send them through first and see if anybody freaks out.

My tinfoil theory is that this is a false flag by the Louisiana seafood industry to scare people out of buying imported shrimp.

"After an incident involving an undersea nuclear test, Forrest and Dan turn out to be the only shrimpers catching non-radioactive shrimp..."

It checks out- everyone already knows in the back of their mind that the Chinese have no standards for what they feed their shrimp and crawfish before exporting the things.

Also, I checked the banana stats. A single banana might output 15 Bq…but this is not directly comparable to the dose from eating one. That has more to do with how the body eliminates the potassium. It’s different for every isotope, and the FDA doesn’t even bother to set a standard for potassium.

The work to intentionally contaminate some shrimp is going to bring plenty of scrutiny. That’s like preparing to hijack a plane by carjacking an 18-wheeler.

I hear that if you eat them you'll gain the powers of a shrimp: having EAs actually care about you.

You could just go to a tanning booth.

I'll become your friendly neighborhood Shrimp-Man and the FDA can't stop me.

I've been chewing on an idea and wanted to try a steel-manning exercise.

The premise is this: If we grant that the cultural right is "winning" right now, what's the strongest possible argument that this is leading to some genuinely bad outcomes for the country?

I have a few specific angles in mind. How would you build the strongest case for these ideas?

  1. A more "gloves-off" approach to online speech is a win for free expression, but its most visible result has been the normalization of unapologetic racism. The core of this argument isn't just that it's unpleasant, but that it's actively corroding social trust and making it harder to have a unified country. Not sure if you’ve seen this too, but I see tons of ‘black fatigue’ and explicitly white nationalist people in my feed and there’s not much I or anybody else can do about it. What does the most persuasive version of this argument look like?

  2. It seems pretty clear that rhetoric from the top, especially from Trump, has pushed nativist ideas into the open. The strong version of this argument is that this has moved beyond simple policy disagreements (like border security) and has become a real cultural attitude of exclusion. How would you build the case that this isn't just a fringe phenomenon anymore, but a significant and growing force in American life?

  3. This flows from the last point. For decades, our biggest strategic advantage has been that the smartest, most ambitious people from all over the world wanted to come here. The argument to be steel-manned is that we're actively squandering that. Between the nativist vibe and a chaotic immigration system, we're sending a signal that the best and brightest should maybe look elsewhere. What's the most solid case that we're causing a real "brain drain" that will kneecap us economically and technologically for years to come?

What makes me think about this point is all of the talk about Indian people online. Like them or not, they are STRONG contributors in the workplace. If the rhetoric gets to a point where legal immigrants and contributors to our society feel unwelcome, there could be real brain drain effects that we’ve never experienced before. The Vivek backlash a few months ago also is probably related.

Again, knowing that ideas like these are losing right now, how you would argue them to the best of your ability? I’ll admit I kind of want to hear them outside a setting like X where communities are isolated and you’re mostly preaching to the choir / your ingroup

I think it's a real problem that our culture has conflated racism and bigotry.

If racism is rational, it's not bigoted, and it's not clear why it should be a bad thing.

When did we decide that hatred is always inappropriate? Or that it can't be tempered by compassion?

I should hate the tiger that is trying to eat me. I can also respect it and wish it well in other circumstances.

First things first, though.

I should hate the tiger that is trying to eat me

…Wait, what? Why? Feeling hatred for a non-sapient animal seems bizarre to me. Never mind whether it's ever good to feel hatred even about fellow human beings - I find your example baffling on its own terms. You may as well hate a thunderstorm when it threatens your town, or rage against the concept of gravity as you're falling off a bridge. Like… you can hate any one of those things if you really want, I guess. By definition it's not like they're going to mind. But it seems deeply pointless, bordering on maladaptive. I certainly don't see why you "should" hate the tiger, whether that's a moral argument of a practical one. If it's a moral one, what has the tiger done to 'deserve' hatred that the concept of gravity has not? If it's a practical one, what does hating the tiger accomplish that is not better accomplished, and in less stressful a way for you, by dispassionately, rationally accounting for the tiger's behavior, or indeed, by simply being afraid of the tiger?

The tiger, like a political opponent and unlike gravity, is a problem that you can at least theoretically end. And once you've made that decision to seek it's end, it is an adaptive simplification to just psychologically refer back to that seeking of ends as a terminal value.

Thus, it makes perfect sense to hate the tiger.

psychologically refer back to that seeking of ends as a terminal value

I think that's a very lacking definition of "hate". I would associate that word with an obsessive, rage-filled state of mind - which is both unpleasant for whoever feels it, and more likely to cloud one's judgement than to help with the task at hand. You don't need to hate a deer to successfully hunt and kill it; why should the tiger be any different?

I think we have been trained to associate the word 'hate' with low status, by people who have much to gain from our reflexive aversion to it. Those whom we should hate, i.e.

The tiger is an active threat. The deer is not. Hate walls off the vile spark that spares the foe. And if you were at risk of starving, I bet you'd muster up the courage to hate that deer - for your family's sake.

If racism is rational, it's not bigoted, and it's not clear why it should be a bad thing.

If sexism is rational, it's not bigoted, and it's not clear why it should be a bad thing.

If the logical consequences of labor meriting little to no wage is rational, it's not bigoted, and it's not clear why it should be a bad thing.

As soon as you start asking "why it's clear it should be a bad thing", it's a direct attack on the social license of the people whose set of characteristics predict they'd be on the low side. This is why the left is the way that it is, in attitude and in membership. Parasitism is a valid evolutionary strategy.

Now, liberalism had an answer for this in the "accept a dead weight loss to the incapable such that the categories stop being easily predictable [in the sense that it becomes more likely a citizen X is being treated as they deserve individually, not citizen X having special/non-special protection for being a hypenated-X]". But that process takes time and is vulnerable to being hijacked by "therefore the standard is evil".

It seems to me that almost every woman is more cautious around any individual man vs any individual woman (especially in isolated situations) due to the risk of sexual assault. Is this sexist? Should they not discriminate in this manner?

Isolated allowance for pattern recognition. The usual Who? Whom?

A woman more on guard around men than around women is being smart in looking out for herself.

A woman less relaxed around black men than she is around white men is a racist who should be ashamed of herself.

Yes, that would be an example of the phenomenon that I am referring to. I am interested in the justification for this discrepancy in the mind of a progressive or even classical liberal. @ThisIsSin care to weigh in?

And so at the end of the day, you end up with the choice of being hijacked into accepting unlimited loss so the people on the low side feel better, or saying "yes, chad" to "If X is rational, it's not bigoted and it's not clear why it should be a bad thing". Or not saying it but acting in the same way, as with Jesse Jackson's famous remark about being ashamed at his relief that someone he heard walking behind him turned out to be white.

Well, all organizations that aren't explicitly progress-minded/right-wing eventually gain a parasitic load right at the border between stability and collapse/become left-wing, after all.

Or not saying it but acting in the same way

Which was the '60s-'90s compromise. It's actually kind of interesting that the balance between [what everyone else typifies as] left-wing and right-wing takes on the character of a marriage between the statistically-mean man and the statistically-mean woman.

I remember reading years ago about a survey someone gave to Christians and atheists, asking them what they find to be the most compelling argument for either side. It turned out that the most compelling argument for atheism, as rated by atheists didn't rank all that high for Christians, and the one rated by Christians wasn't all that compelling to atheists, and you saw the same patterns for arguments for Christianity. So what is the steelman argument for atheism? The one rated highest by atheists, since that is presumably what made them lose their faith (as that was in the times when people were Christian-by-default, rather than atheist-by-default), or the one rated highest by Christians, as that is what they consider the most challenging for their faith?

You asked for me to defend these arguments to the best of my ability, and that would indicate that answering in the mode of a Christian giving the best argument for atheism would be ok, but my best argument for the ideas you outlined might contain assumptions that you disagree with so deeply, that you want recognize my defense as defending your ideas anymore. On the other hand, without these assumptions, I won't find these defenses particularly compelling, so how much of a steelman are they then? Still, the best of my ability sounds like I would have to be the one to find them compelling, so this is the perspective I'll be taking, while trying to preserve your core premises as best as I can.

The kinds of arguments that I find the most compelling on these issues are ones that acknowledge that certain things happened that got us to where we are now. Regarding your first point, this would mean reformulating the part about unapologetic racism being suddenly more visible. There was plenty of unapologetic racism before Elon bought Twitter and changed the rules there, what changed is that the list of acceptable targets was expanded. The other part of the argument, about corroding social trust and making it harder to have a unified country is pretty straight forward. It's not sustainable for pretty much the same reasons why unapologetic anti-white racism turned out to be unsustainable. "We don't have to live like this, we can respect each other and work together for the common good" sounds like pretty good deal to me. It's most compelling version is liberals like TracingWoodgrains LARPing as Lee Kuan Yew, even if I don't find them credible. If concessions are made about the things that went wrong in the past, and I get assurances that skulls will be cracked and kneecaps will be broken to set it right, or better yet I get to see some gesture-of-good-faith kneecappings firsthand, I might indeed be compelled to drop the hammer on internet racists from - roughly speaking - my side.

Regarding your second point:

How would you build the case that this isn't just a fringe phenomenon anymore, but a significant and growing force in American life?

That sounds like it's mostly an empirical argument, correct? If so, that's probably the easiest case to argue. If you look at Vivek / Elon / H1B-Gate, such strong pushback would have been hard to imagine even as recently as Trump's first term. The ideas might not be completely dominant on the right, but they're definitely not fringe anymore either.

Your third point is the most difficult to argue, because it requires the acceptance of several premises. First, did the strategic advantage of the US stem from the smartest and most ambitious people coming there, or did they come there because of American strategic advantages? As an americanized by media Europoor, that saw a bit of your country, I can tell you this isn't just a chicken vs. egg thing. My experience of America is that it has (or used to have) an entire culture conducive to making things happen, that you won't find anywhere in Europe (with the possible exception of the UK, where you might get but a glimpse, but not more). I better not get into that too much, because the more I talk about it, the more it will undermine the core premise of your argument, and you asked me to argue for it.

The second part you have to argue is that the US is indeed losing it's economic advantage. That's the part I'm quite open to. A fellow motte-poster made the argument a few times that China's culture is adapting to enable the kind of cutting-edge innovation that was typically associated with America. Again, quite compelling, and all the denials feel pretty cope-y to me.

With the third part we start running into problems again, as you have to show that it's the lack of openness to immigration that would be responsible for the loss of the strategic advantage. I haven't really heard an argument for that, not even an unconvincing one, and I drawing a blank trying to argue for this. I can say what would convince me if you could demonstrate it: if you could see countries like Canada, that imported millions of immigrants, suddenly zoom past it's previous economic performance, that would make a very strong case for your argument.

Thank you for the thoughtful response. Agreed that arguing from the perspective of what you would find compelling makes sense, as it's the only way to find the real weak points.

On Point 1, your proposed solution is interesting. That idea of a negotiated peace is pragmatic. It frames the problem as a failure of mutually assured destruction and suggests restoring it. If people saw that bad behavior was being addressed universally instead of just selectively, they might actually buy into the system again. However, I think the cat is out of the bag now. The decadent 2010s seem to have ruined any chance of this working. The 90s feel like the last time there was a real effort towards a color-blind society where character matters most. Things are too tribal for that to work nowadays. There are literally advanced degrees for studying how persecuted X group is. We get worked up over unfair treatment of our own group and are convinced other groups are getting away with it / getting a better deal, generally speaking.

On point 2, it seems we’re in agreement. These ideas have moved from the comment section to the core of the debate. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I feel it’s harder to make progress when the ‘real’ arguments are more antagonistic than Ken Bone saying we can all get along.

On point three, I completely agree that America has/had a unique "secret sauce" for getting things done. My contention is that it's part of a feedback loop. Our culture of ambition creates opportunities, which attracts the world's top talent. That talent reinforces and evolves the culture, starting new companies, creating new norms, and building towards the next thing.

I’m sure it’s been talked to death here but I had a professor in college who talked about how Japan will likely never have a magnificent growth period again because their reluctance to accept immigrants, combined with their demographic cliff, means they're stuck on the sidelines (in terms of real growth at least). They have a productive culture, but they're starved of new talent.

I visited Guangzhou about 10 years ago and saw the opposite problem. Their immigrant population comes largely from very poor areas in Africa. They're treated like second-class citizens, are watched constantly, and frankly, fit Trump’s language about immigrants more than the hard-working people in America. There’s no real chance for them to work hard, integrate, and have their kids become strong citizens.

That's why I think our system is so special and powerful. We have the culture that Japan lacks the people for and we offer the opportunity that China denies to its immigrants. We have the ability to give people a chance to join our hard-working culture and succeed. When we send signals that they're no longer welcome, I feel we're choosing to break the most powerful engine for prosperity the world has ever known

On point three, I completely agree that America has/had a unique "secret sauce" for getting things done. My contention is that it's part of a feedback loop.

I'm not sure if we're talking about the same secret sauce. The feedback loop idea makes sense to me if the process is: America gets things done -> this attracts people from other countries who want to get things done -> they get things done -> it attracts more people who want to get things done... but what I meant was America's culture being the infrastructure enabling things getting done. "The best and the brightest" don't enter into the picture here, honestly my view of the average IRL American's intellect has been rather dim (and I'm far from the only one)... and yet, when I witnessed their ability to coordinate when a problem arose, it was uncanny, almost like telepathy. Apparently de Tocqueville had a whole bit about that, so it's a phenomenon that's been observed for quite a while.

Under my model immigration might be a force multiplier, but not a feedback loop. You can point to me at all the wonderful goods being transported by trains and trucks, and indeed if they stop coming, my standard of living might decline, but might point is that they're driving over a bridge, which doesn't seem to be doing so well. Halting the traffic to do maintenance might not be pleasant, but far less so than exploiting the bridge to the point of collapse.

If you want to show that your feedback model is more accurate than my base infrastructure model, you'd need to show how immigrants are feeding back into, and maintaining that culture of getting things done, because it's not obvious to me at all. Sure, they can integrate and assimilate, but even in the optimistic "magical dirt" model, first-generation immigrants are usually written off, and it's their children who are expected to integrate. Personally I'm not so optimistic, and I think it's a process that needs to be promoted actively, or else the native culture will become gradually diluted. On top of that, "assimilation" has become a bit of a dirty word to begin with, making it all the harder.

I visited Guangzhou about 10 years ago and saw the opposite problem. Their immigrant population comes largely from very poor areas in Africa. They're treated like second-class citizens, are watched constantly, and frankly, fit Trump’s language about immigrants more than the hard-working people in America.

Doesn't that throw a bit of a wrench in your argument? Of all the countries in the world, China seems to have the best chance for potentially overtaking America,

I don't think the "secret sauce" was ever that immigrants were universally viewed as just as good as anyone else. German immigrants, Irish and Italian immigrants, Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and now Mexican immigrants have always been viewed with suspicion and some resentment by large segments of the American society they were immigrating to. They came anyway because the opportunity afforded by the runaway growth of the American economy was irresistible to those with incredible grit or just those with no other options. And as a class they worked hard to seize that opportunity and to prove that they could belong just as much as native-born citizens, despite the suspicion they faced.

If something has changed in the modern era, I would argue that it stems from the welfare state. If you make it to America, you are effectively guaranteed some share in its riches whether you then work hard or not. This has the two-fold effect of removing the implicit filter on immigrant quality, and of creating larger proportions of the resulting immigrant population who bear out the nativists' suspicions. Also add to that the effect of explicit multiculturalism which weakened the incentives for immigrants to assimilate quickly.

It all adds up to a world where the nativists are increasingly justified in their complaints. If the dynamic driving modern immigration does not change, two out comes are possible. The nativists will eventually be strengthened to the point that they will kill the golden goose, using the power of the state to throw the baby out with the bathwater by cutting off opportunity for immigrants across the board. Or the center will not hold and American society will dissolve into disconnected groups of takers squabbling over their share of a rapidly shrinking pie.

If something has changed in the modern era, I would argue that it stems from the welfare state.

I am amenable to data that shows otherwise, but it seems to be that in ye olde days you came to America assimilated and depending on who and where you were you might be prevented from doing so by disgruntled locals.

Today the (hispanic at least) immigrants make no effort and seem to have no interest in assimilation. Even outside of Texas and California you see signs in Spanish everywhere, official governmental communication in Spanish and so on.

This is a huge difference in character of immigration with respect to previous waves of it.

Amusingly, I disagree with pretty much all of your premises. But #1 is interesting as a jumping-off point, so I’ll address it.

There’s a broad concept that left-wing sentiment is pro-black and right-wing sentiment is anti-black, and the two forces battle over how nicely to treat blacks. I think this is a misconception. Neither side, from what I can tell, really likes blacks, and both surface their antipathy in different ways which wind up being one and the same larger system.

By blacks, I don’t strictly mean people of African heritage. What I’m pointing to here is a subculture in America that is descended from slavery and which exists substantially outside the main drive of society. It has its own norms, doesn’t intermarry too often, doesn’t economically interact that much, watches its own TV, listens to its own music, and so on. This is what is disliked in its actuality by the political wings, because it’s not really part of either of them. The reality is, of course, more nuanced than this, but this is a good overview.

The left nominally likes blacks, until it comes to the problems that really do exist in black communities. These can be broadly described as symptoms of poverty, or of an underclass. I'm talking crime, of course, but homophobia is a pretty serious repellent here. The left response to these is to pretend they don’t actually exist, or are somehow caused by systemic pressures, which of course is besides the point. The left loves blacks who have integrated thoroughly into their cultural milieu.

The right is simpler. They just don’t like ‘em. There are some good ones, but the rest are bad. Best to stay away as much as you can.

So, neither wanting to get deeply involved, a fairly predictable pattern emerges. First, the left tries to support the “black community,” or at least the image they have of them. This tends to be through charity and lenience towards crime. This generally does not go well, and without seeing any positive outcomes, the general public starts getting sick of crime. Then the right wing sweeps in, declares the problem in racial(-ly coded) language, and cracks down hard. It doesn’t take long to notice that this policy rests on practical elements of prejudice against blacks, and so the general public starts swinging the other way…

So you get this effect, where first the left comes in and says: listen, you don’t need to work, have these handouts, shoplifting isn’t that big a deal, neither are drugs, no we won’t stop the violent gangbangers, we believe in community justice… so black people take that at face value, huh, guess dissipation and petty crime aren’t a big deal, and if anyone disrespects me I’d better deal with it myself. Then the right comes in and says, HA! You idiots believed that? Nope, it’s prison for you. And we know you’re all like that. So now obviously a lot of blacks are in jail, but also the kids start to learn: this is what it means to be black, they all see you that way… and maybe start thinking it’s right.

So I see these two movements as the greater American ambivalence towards blacks. There was a great injustice done to them, and they are suffering from it generations later. This is felt on a wide scale. It makes people uncomfortable. So people aren’t willing to see blacks as other people, and instead hide their individuality under the label. When a white person does something, or feels something, it’s because of who they are, but when a black person does, it’s because of who blacks are. But if you want to change a group’s behavior, you need to change the behavior of the individuals in that group, one by one. There is no other way.

Any serious attempt to deal with the troubles afflicting black Americans, and those they inflict on others, has to start with this view on individuality. “Blacks” are not like you and me, but individual black people can be. Others might not, and they might be criminal, and if so they need to be dealt with, but this is a fact disconnected from the rest. Some might need more explicit inculturation. That will require generations, and the removal of any privileges for being black. The end result of this must be the destruction of a uniquely black culture in America. This is inevitable. If we’re all alike, then there will be nothing left to distinguish that unique culture, except in superficial and vague elements. Anyone know what it means to be Irish besides wearing green on St Paddy’s? Or Italian besides having prejudiced views of different brands of San Marzano tomatoes? Or German besides living in the Midwest? Neither do I. And with intermarriage the distinction breaks down further.

So the current Trump thing is more of the same… except that politics is becoming less racially split. A lot of black men voted T last time. This means they’re not voting as a bloc, that they’re not voting for historic reasons, that there’s something they want past their race. Class is up, comparatively. Maybe that’s the end of black America: in our workers, uniting against the Man. We’ll have to see, I guess.

I had a comment a while ago about how people outside America looking in are still at the "call a spade a spade" level of meta, and when they do what they say and yell about what they want they're confused about why the dominant American culture doesn't get it. The dominant American culture has been sipping industrial grade postmodern self-aware media propaganda and their mainstream entertainment is constructed out of large irony blocks.

Maybe African-Americans are not deep enough within the levels of simulacra to have internalized not to take either wing of the political aisle at face value yet.

So, neither wanting to get deeply involved, a fairly predictable pattern emerges. First, the left tries to support the “black community,” or at least the image they have of them. This tends to be through charity and lenience towards crime. This generally does not go well, and without seeing any positive outcomes, the general public starts getting sick of crime. Then the right wing sweeps in, declares the problem in racial(-ly coded) language, and cracks down hard. It doesn’t take long to notice that this policy rests on practical elements of prejudice against blacks, and so the general public starts swinging the other way…

The language always becomes racially coded because the underlying phenomenon is too. If you have one group that's massively more prone to crime, any attempt to attack criminals will lead to that word being associated with that group - until the problem resolves itself.

How do we know this? Because even left-wingers do not escape. Hillary Clinton was criticized for her own usage of terms like "superpredator" - meant to describe young, "feral" teens committing crime with abandon but it was then taken to be a racial dogwhistle based on who it was applied to. Trump, bizarrely, used it against Biden as well.

I’m not sure that ‘the good ones’ and the ‘black activists working to improve their communities’ are meaningfully different concepts. Sûre, one is a polite euphemism, but the red tribe uses a lot fewer of those in general.

As far as politics getting less racially split- well I think that’s probably downstream of social dysfunction. The deal was always ‘blacks vote Democrat, democrats take care of the black community through their machines’, but when the community gets worse young men are going to be the first defectors(and old women thé last)- almost exactly the pattern we see with black Trump supporters. At the end of the day thé black tribe is its own thing, much more ethnic than thé basically-assimilatory red and blue tribes. It’s urban, poor, southern, and honor driven. ‘Blue’ whites might really like black tribe music, and ‘red’ whites might do so much more quietly, but they’re still separate- and both tribes of whites only offer assimilation over the long term. Now this isn’t particularly realistic for blues because there is no place in the blue tribe for 85 IQ types, so the process is a lot slower and less insistent(the red tribe answer would be that there are many eg truck drivers who make a good living while not being good at school, disproportionately black), hence really identitarian blacks are stuck in a coalition agreement with the blues. But college, reparations, and progressive values are the same package as hard work, family values, and Christianity- just with different components.

But college, reparations, and progressive values are the same package as hard work, family values, and Christianity- just with different components.

I’d disagree that these are comparable, in line with your 85 IQ observation. The urban intellectual model of advancement is through education and a high-skill career, which is simply not in the cards for people under 120ish IQ. That’s the equivalent to family values and hard work, respectively, which targets a different demographic. So what can those urban intellectuals offer blacks? In this case, I think it’s race-based action and reparations (welfare etc). The final item is what’s expected of each group once they’ve advanced - for the urbans, it’s progressive values, like you note, and I’d place patriotism (especially local) over Christ for the workers (of course the individual workers have their own priorities - but this appears to me to be what the system, the tribe, wants out of them). And from the blacks, the only thing needed is the vote. This is what consistently pisses me off about the Democratic plans for black Americans. It reduces them to a client class. They get treats, the party gets votes. This is intensely degrading. Shouldn’t they get something to be proud of in themselves, the power of their work, things they acc do beyond asking for more?

So that’s why I don’t think they’re comparable. The rule system that urban elites hold themselves to is different from the rules they require of others.

I’m not sure that ‘the good ones’ and the ‘black activists working to improve their communities’ are meaningfully different concepts. Sûre, one is a polite euphemism, but the red tribe uses a lot fewer of those in general.

I don't think the right wing would consider black activists to be "the good ones". Or at least not the same black activists that the left wing would describe as "black activists working to improve their communities".

I think they were saying that black activists are to the left as “the good ones” are to the right, not that they are the same group.

But it’s not like they’re different concepts

I think they are. The "black activists" are leaders of generally good people in bad circumstances, who are uplifting the rest of said people. The "good ones" are decent people in an otherwise bad bunch, who may be stuck with them or may have escaped but in either case aren't bettering their hopeless community. Sowell's unconstrained vision versus constrained vision.

Normiecons do not think every Quantavius and Latisha is evil. They think that they are mostly decent people shaped by a bad culture(which was ruined by liberals because they hate families). 'The good ones' are doing their part to fix that- by assimilating into the red tribe and hopefully leading their fellows to do the same.

C'mon, these community activists aren't doing shit to benefit the average Shaniqua and Tyrone either, don't be stupid. The main difference is that the red tribe is just willing to openly point to 'bad culture' as a major part of their bad circumstances whereas blues only hint at it and use euphemisms.

Or German besides living in the Midwest? Neither do I.

The presence of German culture in the US was pretty much forced out of the popular consciousness in two waves in the 1910s and 1940s for obvious reasons. It used to be a common language, even with German-language newspapers. Somehow the folks that get very upset about "destroying subcultures" never notice that example. You can still find bits and pieces around: Oktoberfest and such, and amusingly in elements of polka in Norteño music.

It’s still quietly dominant in Texas, the Midwest, and chunks of New England. But none of those are leading cultural centers like California.

Texas BBQ, country music, craft beer are all Having A Moment and all are very German influenced.

Also shiner bock beer, German influence in barbecue, etc.

It seems pretty clear that rhetoric from the top, especially from Trump, has pushed nativist ideas into the open. The strong version of this argument is that this has moved beyond simple policy disagreements (like border security) and has become a real cultural attitude of exclusion. How would you build the case that this isn't just a fringe phenomenon anymore, but a significant and growing force in American life?

I don't take those immigration arguments seriously. America is and will remain an attractive destination because America is doing better than most of the world, same as always. Americans are still, factually, incredibly immigrant-friendly by most standards. Hell, I think Trump may end up suffering because of the one thing he undoubtedly did well: closing the border reduces the salience of the matter and normies become much less willing to tolerate his other immigration shenanigans.

Complaints by downwardly mobile people online won't change than an Indian American woman is married to the VP right now and is closer to power than any online dissident rightist or person bitter about being driven out of a Google job

The argument I would make is that the left is better at this, according to the Right's own theory of the case. They took over the institutions more effectively, to the point where the attempted populist reclamation (which came pretty late) looks hamfisted and illegitimate in comparison. They possess the bulk of the human capital and their ideology is just baked into the culture now. So there'll be huge payback when they inevitably get into power with the support of a radicalized normie base. If you think this leads to awful decisions and a never-ending polarization spiral, it's pretty bad for everyone, not just Republicans.

A more "gloves-off" approach to online speech is a win for free expression, but its most visible result has been the normalization of unapologetic racism. The core of this argument isn't just that it's unpleasant, but that it's actively corroding social trust and making it harder to have a unified country. Not sure if you’ve seen this too, but I see tons of ‘black fatigue’ and explicitly white nationalist people in my feed and there’s not much I or anybody else can do about it. What does the most persuasive version of this argument look like?

This is "wet streets cause rain" thinking. Unapologetic racism was always there, it was just some people weren't allowed to participate. Consider the recent blowup over Doreen St. Felix, a writer at the New Yorker who published an insipid bit of Sydney Sweeny commentary. She was discovered to have a decade+ long history of meme Nation of Islam tier racism against white people, and that was considered perfectly socially acceptable.

Have you ever actually looked at black twitter? Indian twitter? The stuff you're complaining about is still tame in comparison.

What makes me think about this point is all of the talk about Indian people online. Like them or not, they are STRONG contributors in the workplace.

Are they? Then why is India a dumpster fire? American culture has had the stereotype of the soullness, number-pushing striver for centuries. Are they STRONG contributors in a way that, say, Ayn Rand would recognize? Offering high value for high value? As opposed to ethics-free system-gaming? From the country famous for scamming and fake degrees?

Are they? Then why is India a dumpster fire?

Cause all the good Indians are overseas, obviously.

A more "gloves-off" approach to online speech is a win for free expression, but its most visible result has been the normalization of unapologetic racism. The core of this argument isn't just that it's unpleasant, but that it's actively corroding social trust and making it harder to have a unified country.

I can't steelman it because it's begging for "remove the beam in your own eye!" or "your rules, applied fairly" and devolving into a chicken and egg argument. Unapologetic racism was already normalized, but only against certain groups. A win for free expression just opened that up to all groups on social media; it's still restricted in any meaningful publication and the consequences are quite different for racism against protected groups versus unprotected.

Apparently "no racism" wasn't an option on the cultural table.

How would you build the case that this isn't just a fringe phenomenon anymore, but a significant and growing force in American life?

Surely the DHS twitter feed does enough to provide that case?

we're sending a signal that the best and brightest should maybe look elsewhere.

The problem with this one is, there's nowhere else to look. Much of Europe is having its own nativist backlash and if you're particularly high-achieving in a technological field, you won't get paid a fraction as much. The H1B changes will mean fewer low-level people coming in that route, but I don't think the announced changes will affect the "best and brightest" that much.

The premise is this: If we grant that the cultural right is "winning" right now, what's the strongest possible argument that this is leading to some genuinely bad outcomes for the country?

I think your premise is dubious, but assuming it's true, mostly what I see is a victory for accelerationists.

Everything Trump is doing now means when Democrats come back into power, they are going to try to reverse everything he did and then set the dial at eleventy and make sure no MAGA ever again. The MAGAs currently in power, of course, know this is what will happen, so they're doing their best to make their changes difficult or impossible to reverse, while hitting eleventy themselves.

I think Trump and Desantis and Abbot have demonstrated that the accelerationists were already in charge on immigration. There really was basically no control of the border and no attempt to remove obvious criminals once they got here. That's why Trump was able to get at all that low-hanging fruit, and why there haven't been really compelling immigration atrocity stories. The best they could do was Abrego Garcia... and he certainly seems like a bad hombre, even if his case was screwed up procedurally.

Immigration is one of the issues where I tend to be more in agreement than not with the "anti" side.

Which is why I think your fist-pumping for "fuck yeah faster harder" accelerationism is ill-considered.

Because if you think future Democratic administrations cannot open the borders more than previous ones did, I think you're in for a world of disappointment. And that is frankly what I expect to happen.

Skipping the NGO middlemen of bus passes and providing guidance by running direct flights instead, or what?

Skipping the NGO middlemen of bus passes and providing guidance by running direct flights instead, or what?

No, they were already doing that also. The AP confirms this in the process of denying it.

Ha, I was thinking of the recent brouhaha in the UK with the Afghans, this one had already slipped my mind. Thank you for the reminder.

I see tons of ‘black fatigue’ and explicitly white nationalist people in my feed

Your feed is your own problem. Both the comments about black fatigue and the white supremacist remarks are mostly bots designed to grab your attention, and even the ones that are real are chosen by bot to grab your attention. Make better choices.

I don't think that's possible at scale. You could get smarter, more self-aware people to do this, but most people aren't either one of these things. In fact, I think bots designed to grab your attention implicitly makes this point. The bots will grab the people's attention, so "Make better choices" isn't really feasible for the population.

The Left's attempt at trying to "end" racism by shifting blame onto the history of white people while also censoring their opinions made things worse, so I'm not advocating for going back to that, but the algorithm and its recognition of our tendency to gravitate toward controversy should maybe figure out better ways to redirect the energy people have for hating others.

If we grant that the cultural right is "winning" right now

They’re not. All you’re seeing is a “10 steps forward, 2 steps back” kind of situation.

A more "gloves-off" approach to online speech is a win for free expression, but its most visible result has been the normalization of unapologetic racism.

For me, as much as I've been infuriated with progressive activism the past decade, the censorship rollback has revealed that the leftists were, in fact, right about many of the rightoids. Many actually are racist -- not in the "oh, there may be group differences" sense, but in the "I hate colored people and I want them out of the country" sense.

Why we can't have a single group that has stable, high-IQ people in charge advocating for basic civic decency, responsibility, and functional society is beyond me. Yes, we can and should imprison colored people for committing violent crime. No, this is not racist. No, that does not mean we ship all the colored people away at gunpoint. As Bukele has so clearly demonstrated, even in a country quite literally full of brown people with a globally chart-topping murder rate, all you have to do is put the violent criminals in prison and the crime magically drops to levels of western Europe. It is, in fact, that simple.

Alas, this is all clearly too much to ask of the Americans.

Why we can't have a single group that has stable, high-IQ people in charge advocating for basic civic decency, responsibility, and functional society is beyond me

We really tried. Politicians were supposed to be that (that's the whole point of having representative republic instead of direct democracy). They are obviously nothing of the sort. Journalists were supposed to be that. They sold their mission for clicks and ideological peer adoration. Academia was supposed to be that. They sold their mission for grants and ideological power. We don't have it because - collectively, as a society - we tried it and we fucked it up. We don't have currently any institution that is interested in doing that.

That said, anti-immigrant sentiment is nothing new. It has been about the Irish, about the Germans, about the Chinese, about the Japanese (US people literally put them in camps!) and so on, and so forth. Cross-cultural encounters will always produce people that reject the other culture and hate everything and everybody that has to do with it. It can be worked through - provided that there's a working integration process. Multiculturalism broke that process though because it's ideological premise has been that integration is evil, demanding newcomers to adapt to the host culture is evil, the host culture is by default oppressive and guilty, and must go out of its way - including throwing out the rules that apply to the members of the host culture and hold it together - lest the newcomers feel inconvenienced or sad. The result has been a predictable disaster everywhere it has been tried. If the right wants to recover from this disaster, they need to formulate a coherent integration policy, and build a clear ideological wall of separation between anti-immigrant sentiment (which will not go anywhere, it is an inevitable consequence of culture heterogeneity) and enforcing integration policy. Which may piss off some loudmouths but there's no other way if there is to be an ideologically sound platform that does not cut ties with the centuries of American tradition.

With violent crime it really is the same very small number of people doing it(yes, I’ve seen whatever Twitter thread you want to reference trying to prove mathematically that 13/52 means some notable percentage of the black male population will commit murder over the course of their lives- it’s all bupkiss because they don’t account for repeat offenders). With school performance and demands for a bailout because of it it is not.

For me, as much as I've been infuriated with progressive activism the past decade, the censorship rollback has revealed that the leftists were, in fact, right about many of the rightoids.

They've always been right that some people are racist. The steelmanned counter-argument is just that the cure is worse than the disease . Progressives themselves agree that pure racial animus alone is not that important, which is why they define it away via "racism= prejudice + power" . Progressives can't be trusted not because racism doesn't exist, but because it's a blank cheque for a bunch of very stupid and/or illiberal policies.

I think the logic largely goes like this:

  1. The solution is just to jail the blacks who are committing all the crime and loudly say its a bad thing and then do nothing to the non-criminals
  2. The left has made clear that is not an option, as long as the levels are disproportionate doing anything about the problem members is not allowed, and loudly decrying them is absolutely verboten.
  3. Fine then, if the existence of a black population implies a large level of criminality and disfunction which we are not allowed to address then the problem is the existence of the population.

Its the same way that most people are not immigration absolutists but if the left and center refuse to deal with them problem and indeed insist on making it worse then I guess I'll vote for the right, even though they will go much further than I'd prefer. Or if the right insists on full abortion bans then I'll vote for the left and their up to the moment of birth plans, even though I'd prefer reasonable limits.

If the left was open to fixing the actual problem then throwing the baby out with the bathwater would be less popular. Though the fact that in this case the non-problem population is also very loudly offended by the idea of solving the problem makes it worse.

Perhaps racism evolved because it is useful? I’m not suggesting there are t terrible failure modes but if multiculturalism actually is bad, then maybe some soft racism is actually good?

At risk of reductio ad fascism, there are quite a number of things which are useful but not good. We should not do those things.

I too am terrified that if we deport more Guatemalans not enough Indians will come here and do the jobs Americans just won't do (for less than minimum wage).

There's one major factory company left in mid-Michigan, but they hire their engineering and technical staff entirely from the subcontinent. Now, because I've seen the unemployment numbers and because this used to be a manufacturing hub, I don't think this is because there aren't enough locals to do the job. It just costs more when you can't ship them back after their visa is up. Every hotel in fifty miles smells like curry, but at least Dow doesn't hire Americans for jobs outside the warehouse.

It would be a real tragedy if those indians were so enraged by anti-black racism they see on the internet that they no longer wanted to come here. Why, companies might have to pay real wages and benefits, and not be able to hold a work visa over their recruits' heads, and that would be bad. Our economy cannot survive without a constant stream of immigrants, because we have laws that force employers to meet certain minimum criteria when hiring Americans, and that's bad.

It’s entirely plausible that the talent these people actually need isn’t available in the US due to the skilled labor shortage. Particularly the U.S. no longer bothers to produce skilled factory labor.

This just looks like you are deliberately misinterpreting OP's point. Surely some random "factory company" in mid-Michigan is not where the "smartest, most ambitious people from all over the world" congregate to give America a strategic advantage. Instead, if we are talking about Indians, it's going to be the likes of Google, Microsoft and SpaceX. The Gemini whitepaper, for example, has plenty of Indian names on it.

The problems prospective workers at those companies (or people who may or may not enter as students, and then later would naturally go on to work there) face are not "anti-black racism on the internet" either, but onerous checks and arbitrary rejections in the visa process and at border controls and the perceived increased probability that you will be deported over a random tweet. Now, a red-blooded red triber will for sure be cheering if some Indian Googler who retweeted an "America is helping Israel establish neocolonial apartheid" tweet gets unceremoniously deported, but it is unlikely that any damage to American interests from that retweet is greater than his contributions to American tech dominance, and other potential Indian Googlers who would never even have retweeted such a thing will only see "our countryman was deported for capricious reasons".

Now, a red-blooded red triber will for sure be cheering if some Indian Googler who retweeted an "America is helping Israel establish neocolonial apartheid" tweet gets unceremoniously deported,

This is a weird scenario partially because Indians themselves (well, some) likely have at least interesting views on the situation between the Indian minority in South Africa during actual Apartheid (not entirely from within the borders of modern India), and modern day India's relations with Israel largely vis-a-vis it's relations with its Muslim neighbor Pakistan.

History and society is complicated.

For decades, our biggest strategic advantage has been that the smartest, most ambitious people from all over the world wanted to come here.

There's a relevant essay from Arctotherium on this, you don't have to have mass immigration to bring in the top Taiwanese semiconductor experts, or German nuclear scientists or post-Soviet Russian STEM experts. You can bring in a few hundred or a few thousand people on 10x wages, have them stay for a few years to teach locals the skills and then have them leave or retire into obscurity.

China for instance brought in South Korean shipbuilding experts on high wages, worked out how to build ships and now dominates the world shipping industry. They tried this with semiconductors too, Taiwan actually passed laws to stop Chinese companies poaching semiconductor talent with high pay. Meiji Japan did this too, alongside others he mentions. Targeted skill acquisition does not require mass immigration.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-169701612

The US is very wealthy, they could close the door to the median-wage immigrants and keep the top talent, even aggressively headhunt top talent with high payouts. Not 'I published a crappy paper in one of those journals that exists for resume packing' but 'I'm actually really smart and have these rare skills'.

Furthermore, there are all kinds of problems with relying on mass immigration.

There is indeed a large amount of Indian talent, I see Indian names on various AI papers regularly. So why isn't India rich or at least on par with China? There's no Indian Deepseek, Huawei, BYD, J-20. There may well be something wrong with Indian culture or society that impedes this kind of development. Mass immigration would likely import this problem to some extent.

Suppose there's a disaster in America, it's one of those situations where all hands need to be on deck for a massive crisis. Would the Indians, Chinese, Latin Americans perhaps think 'not my problem' and head back to their home countries rather than giving their utmost? If they leave their country for a better life once, they can do it again if the situation changes.

Whatever issues with unity there are in America, it's hardly going to be helped by mass immigration. More ethnicities and diversity increases the potential for conflict. There are also the more basic costs of unfiltered 'Fuck Trump' mass immigration of randoms who come in via Mexico: drugs, crime, welfare payments, gaming the electoral system, demographic replacement.

Now it's fairly reasonable that some truly elite people will be turned off by the administration's rhetoric, even if the Trump admin did go 'we want the super smart but not the mediocre'. They might not want to come to America because overseas mainstream media blares out FASCIST USA. But it's not clear that this would be that bad compared to mass immigration.

We can see the results: Australia, Canada and the UK have been doing mass immigration. Racism has been suppressed by hate speech laws. The economic results/innovation in these countries have been underwhelming at best. Canadian GDP per capita has stagnated over the last 10 years. Britain is mired in all kinds of problems.

The strongest argument against Trumpism IMO is that it puts these loudmouths in charge, who go around openly declaring their strategies and letting their opponents counter them: https://x.com/Jukanlosreve/status/1958334108989530207

They're simple and unsophisticated thinkers in a complex world.

But even there, you don't have to be loud and obnoxious to be dumb. The EU is full of sober, hard-working, reasonable and civilized leaders who do immense damage to Europe by constantly making terrible decisions.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-169701612

My impression is that almost everyone on the Grok and OpenAI teams are either the children of immigrants or people who came to the US as the children. This seems to be the case for almost all of our very highly successful first and second generation immigrants.

If they leave their country for a better life once, they can do it again if the situation changes.

Lots of these people are second or third generation immigrants by now. They're Americans.

In my opinion, US immigration seems to be broadly work. If Arctotherium had made these predictions 30 years ago, he would have been proven wrong. Sure, we can reduce immigration, but what we do re Chinese and Indian immigrants seems to be working very well.

What predictions does he make that you think are wrong?

Arctotherium says this regarding AI:

For example, much writing on AI accurately points out how reliant the US AI industry is on foreign talent, with around 70% of high-end researchers being foreign born, and then condemn the Trump administration for hostility to immigration. But they typically fail to point out the tiny numbers involved.

We’re talking maybe 10000 people total in the entire world, with annual fluxes into and out of the US, including during the open-borders Biden years, in the hundreds. It is entirely possible to recruit as much of this talent as is willing to move to the United States while cutting skilled immigration by 99%, and we should. OpenAI technical staff and people Mark Zuckerberg is willing to pay a hundred million dollars to recruit are not generic H-1Bs or foreign students, and conflating the two is dishonest.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats