site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31207 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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.

14
Top New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Anti-Semitism: It's not rocket science

The familial relationship takes certain actions of the table and requires others, even when it's bad. You may at times despise a member of your family, think their ideas or values are terrible, have had awful experiences with them... but a bridge remains despite the gaps. You probably wouldn't want him imprisoned, hanged or shot, even under pretty hostile circumstances. On a more general note, there may be countless family members who are not awful people but are simply less capable than you. If they weren't family members, you might have little to do with them and might rarely even consider them in your plans. But because they are, you do. Ethnies are partly socially constructed, but largely racially constrained families, and they contained a weakened form of the same instinct of moral obligation towards the members of the ethny. Elites from the same ethny may see their peasants as retrograde, but they don't normally arrive at the belief that these should be mercilessly crushed, or that public policy should show no concern whatsoever for their wellbeing.

Now take an ethny with a dramatically higher average IQ (10 -15 points) than the members of the society they live in. You have at once, a guaranteed factory of new revolutionary ideas; and no instinctive limiting concern for the vast majority of people who will be affected by those ideas. Now sometimes ethnies merge and form new identities. Most British, Germans, Irish and even Italian Americans eventually came to see themselves as Americans first. But the gaps between your average German and Italian are not remotely similar to the gap between your average Jew and non-Jew. This is without mentioning the massive religious elephant in the room, or the thousands of years of hostility it involved. No one wants to merge with a family that has a comparatively large percentage of loosers to the one they came from. So the Jewish ethny remains separate, and as such it's members pursue their ideological goals without any concern for the damage these impose on the host society. Naturally, eventually people get tired of this and respond with anti-Jewish measures.

Note that this theory of Jewish gentile relations requires no belief in a unique Jewish malevolence in order to arrive at the conclusion that the relationship between Jews and non-Jews will always naturally develop into hostility.

  • -17

This argument does not seem intuitive to me because I do not feel any special love for my family qua family, let alone people who share my ethnicity. Definitely I do not think I have any special moral obligations towards my family or members of my ethnicity that I do not have for others.

deleted

Note Urquan that your ancestors would have said the exact same thing about ethnic loyalties. Or rather, it would have gone without mentioning. There is no justification for special familial bonds that does not also encompass ethnic bonds and I suspect a similarly brutal campaign as the one that turned the first taboo, will do the same to the second.

Surely one can derive rich life meaning by dedicating oneself to serving the needs of strangers. Many people do, after all. And it does seem a bit . . . unreflective to cast what is little more than ingroup bias as " a moral world of intimacy." Not all that is normal is good.

Depending on what we mean by 'rich'. You can derive a 'rich' life from servicing a litter of cats. That doesn't change the fact that the people who do so look, for some reason, desperate, pathetic and pitiable next to a person who serviced their own children instead.

I'm not trying to cast shade on people who dedicate themselves to servicing animals. It's just a matter of fact. Any substitute for an actual child and an actual family looks like the cope that it is. All energy expended in a direction that's not familial has, in some sense, an essence of waste about it in comparison.

Compare the 'tapestry' of life of an ancient rvman warrior or military commander to that same person's life if they stayed a family peasant for life. Or CEO of company vs janitor who spends lots of time with his wife and kifs. Multiple things compete with 'intimacy with family' in 'purpose for life', and the latter isn't always, or even usually, better. Dedicating oneself to animal rescue, which isn't a strawman so much as a massive field of charity, may be worse than 'family', but that's a criticism of the former, not an endorsement of universal superiority of the latter.

I'm not sure if I'm understanding you correctly. You can find purpose in life pulling the handle on a slot machine. The point being made is that even if it might not be obvious to the one emotionally invested in buying spins, it's very obvious to the outside observer that they are doing something sad. That there is in fact a universally superior alternative to spending all your time devoted to your pet animals. Even if it might be hard for the animal lover to see. Just like it might be hard for the slot machine player to see. None of that changes the superiority of the alternatives.

I don't understand how how it looks to others is relevant. And, is every Catholic priest and nun "desperate, pathetic and pitiable"? Their congregations, etc, are explicitly described as substitutes for actual children, if I am not mistaken.

I think the truth value of the pity people feel towards a person who dotes over their cat as if it were a child is that cats are not children. A cat will never say 'I love you' back. So much emotional effort being spent on something that will never return it to anyone. It's the same reason people feel pity when watching someone earnestly playing slots as if they were going to win their money back. It's not visible to the person that is emotionally invested in their little world. But from an outside view the entire endeavor is obviously sad, since you can so easily see the futility of it. Instead of throwing your money away, maybe save it or buy something useful. Maybe instead of investing all your love into a cat, invest it into a child.

I think Catholicism is much more than just desperate, pathetic and pitiable. It's tragic. And that's, I think, part of the point of the plight of nuns and the burdens of celibate clergy. There is beauty in sacrifice. There is honor in deadly devotion. And those elements exist precisely because of what is being sacrificed. None if it changes the fact that it is stupid, and that I am against the practice of celibacy for those who have so much to give. But at least, to some extent, they are self aware. It's a plight. A burden. A sacrifice. Proof of devotion to a higher power. An overcoming of sin. I don't think many cat oriented people couch their love for animals in the same manner.

deleted

I would not describe feelings of intimacy and obligation to one's family as "little more than ingroup bias," and I would hold that describing it in this way demonstrates my point that something is lacking in the moral worldview of someone who describes it as such.

I didn't say that. OP said: "I do not feel any special love for my family qua family, let alone people who share my ethnicity. Definitely I do not think I have any special moral obligations towards my family... that I do not have for others."

So, IF someone feels intimacy with his family, great! But OP didn’t say otherwise. OP's point is that one need not feel greater moral obligations to your family , qua family -- simply because they are family, than you do to others. The argument otherwise -- that you per se have a greater moral obligation to your cousin than to a stranger, regardless of your personal feelings for him, is precisely a form of in-group bias. Your argument re the value of feelings of intimacy relate to a different question.

Have you considered that this is because you’re weird rather than being an experience to model the general public off of?

Yes! I think it is quite likely that others feel quite different on this question than I do, but the fact that others feel differently doesn't make me feel differently.

I have many objections to the OP apart from the one I articulated in my original post. Ones other posters have articulated at length. But I expected those other positions would be articulated and so thought I would share an objection I had that I expect others would not.

And your objection is to the vanilla observation that most people feel an affinity for their relatives? Because of your personal experience, which you admit is highly unrepresentative?

I object more to the notion that people feel an affinity for people of their own ethnicity than family. I might agree my lack of familial affinity is "highly" unrepresentative but I am much less sure about ethnic affinity. I'll also note OP has provided as much evidence for his generalization about ethnic and familial affinity over the groups he generalizes over as I have for mine (i.e. none) while receiving approximately none of the same pushback on that point.

This might be meta, but why are all my posts getting delayed by several hours? @Amadan

You are a new poster which means all your posts are automatically filtered until a mod manually approves them. Once you've been posting for a while, you'll no longer be caught in the new user filter.

Got it. Thanks.

It really boils down to ethnocentrism and xenophobia.

African-Americans and their allies commit large-scale arson for several months and the result is the non-African-American majority's response is : 'Well maybe they have a point, maybe we can be nicer to these people, let's give them some reparations or whatever'.

Meanwhile African-American entertainers complain about unfair business practices, nepotism, dishonest contracts and other unfortunate experiences from Jewish millionaires and billionaires and the response is 'oy vey, how dare you claim I hold disproportionate power in this society, I'm shutting down your contracts and your bank accounts.'

As a group, the Jews encourage and profit from multiculturalism in other countries, where they have access to the highest positions and where they deploy extensive lobbying groups, but they can always retreat to Israel that they have shaped as an ethnostate where they have primacy over other groups.

The worse thing? It's not the scheming, the money-laundering, the international human trafficking / blackmailing networks... It's the hypocrisy!

All you're observing is that Jews tend to be liberal, and the things you describe are done by liberals. Being Jewish has nothing to do with it.

'being liberal' didn't fall from the sky. The direction of American liberalism has been influenced and directed by jews for close to a century.

Yes, but often jews self-consciously running from a judaism that they found embarrassingly backward and medieval. One could (and the Orthodox often do) equally say that American liberalism has infected judaism and perverted it from its historical and religious roots.

Isn't the birth of Reform Judaism literally basically case of (non-American) liberal/enlightenment thought and trends originally formulated in progressive Protestant churches being adopted by various Jewish congregations and figures? At least Wikipedia says:

With the advent of Jewish emancipation and acculturation in Central Europe during the late 18th century, and the breakdown of traditional patterns and norms, the response Judaism should offer to the changed circumstances became a heated concern. Radical, second-generation Berlin maskilim (Enlightened), like Lazarus Bendavid and David Friedländer, proposed to reduce it to little above Deism or allow it to dissipate. A more palatable course was the reform of worship in synagogues, making it more attractive to a Jewish public whose aesthetic and moral taste became attuned to that of Christian surroundings.[39] The first considered to have implemented such a course was the Amsterdam Ashkenazi congregation, Adath Jessurun. In 1796, emulating the local Sephardic custom, it omitted the "Father of Mercy" prayer, beseeching God to take revenge upon the gentiles. The short-lived Adath Jessurun employed fully traditional argumentation to legitimize its actions, but is often regarded a harbinger by historians.[40]

A relatively thoroughgoing program was adopted by Israel Jacobson, a philanthropist from the Kingdom of Westphalia. Faith and dogma were eroded for decades both by Enlightenment criticism and apathy, but Jacobson himself did not bother with those. He was interested in decorum, believing its lack in services was driving the young away. Many of the aesthetic reforms he pioneered, like a regular vernacular sermon on moralistic themes, would be later adopted by the modernist Orthodox.[41] On 17 July 1810, he dedicated a synagogue in Seesen that employed an organ and a choir during prayer and introduced some German liturgy. While Jacobson was far from full-fledged Reform Judaism, this day was adopted by the movement worldwide as its foundation date. The Seesen temple – a designation quite common for prayerhouses at the time; "temple" would later become, somewhat misleadingly (and not exclusively), identified with Reform institutions via association with the elimination of prayers for the Jerusalem Temple[42] – closed in 1813. Jacobson moved to Berlin and established a similar one, which became a hub for like-minded individuals. Though the prayerbook used in Berlin did introduce several deviations from the received text, it did so without an organizing principle. In 1818, Jacobson's acquaintance Edward Kley founded the Hamburg Temple. Here, changes in the rite were eclectic no more and had severe dogmatic implications: prayers for the restoration of sacrifices by the Messiah and Return to Zion were quite systematically omitted. The Hamburg edition is considered the first comprehensive Reform liturgy.

and

In the 1820s and 1830s, philosophers like Solomon Steinheim imported German idealism into the Jewish religious discourse, attempting to draw from the means it employed to reconcile Christian faith and modern sensibilities. But it was the new scholarly, critical Science of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) that became the focus of controversy. Its proponents vacillated whether and to what degree it should be applied against the contemporary plight. Opinions ranged from the strictly Orthodox Azriel Hildesheimer, who subjugated research to the predetermined sanctity of the texts and refused to allow it practical implication over received methods; via the Positive-Historical Zecharias Frankel, who did not deny Wissenschaft a role, but only in deference to tradition, and opposed analysis of the Pentateuch; and up to Abraham Geiger, who rejected any limitations on objective research or its application. He is considered the founding father of Reform Judaism.[46]

At the very least it would seem to be a process of reconciling Judaism with the modern society being borne all around them by the (post-)Christian reforming and progressive Europeans.

Also worth noting that probably the most famous (ethnically) Jewish radical of them all, Karl Marx, had grown up in a liberal Protestant convert family. One might at the very least take this background in account when considering that his co-partner, who had independently already formulated many of the most important "Marxist" points before meeting Marx - Friedrich Engels - came from a similarly liberal Protestant background, expect without being ethnically Jewish.

Yes, and what to make of "judaeo-bolsheviks" like Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein) who, yes, abolished the Pale of Settlement, but also were equally devoted to destroying the particularity of Judaism (alongside all other nationalisms and religions) as just another backwards false consciousness preventing people from becoming enlightened socialist deracinated "new men"?

Not really, Israeli ethnonationalists are a target for liberals.

Here's an article detailing the root of the issue with Israel-affiliated lobbying groups like the ADL.

On Wednesday, the left-wing Jewish columnist Peter Beinart tweeted that the contradiction identified by Carlson makes the ADL vulnerable to criticism.

“This is the problem with being an anti-bigotry organization in the US but opposing equality for Palestinians,” Beinart tweeted. “You have a glass jaw. As I wrote a while back, white nationalists like Carlson see Israel’s system of ethnic privilege as a model for the US.”

That's one way of looking at it.

The 'lack of gratitude' is not the issue in this case.

One could argue that Jews are not necessary to elevate the talented African-Americans. Even Hitler recognized the talent of Jesse Owens for example.

American entertainment Jewish millionaires and billionaires are not exactly acting out of pure disinterested concern for their brothers.

The issue is that African-Americans who are not grateful for billions (trillions?) of dollars of welfare and other perks associated with living in a Western country, can freely criticize white Americans, even colonize or burn down their city centers, and not much happens to them.

Yet for some mild criticism of Jewish billionaires, they get fired, unbanked, etc.

And everybody has to say 'Jews don't have power' or a similar fate awaits them.

Why would you have to be grateful for the perks of living in your own country?

Most of the perks come from living in proximity with the people they complain about.

Broadly speaking, African Americans in entertainment and in general have benefited from Jewish involvement in Civil Rights groups, media organisations and business much more than they’ve suffered from it. My heart bleeds for the leading sports player who thinks they should be worth $400m instead of $300m while ignoring their Jewish lawyer who negotiated a much better deal with Adidas or Nike, the Jewish PR guys at their agency or the team’s agency who promoted them and built up their public reputation, the Jews who run the league that provides the other half of their income, the Jewish activists who were instrumental in them even being allowed to play in said league, and so on and so on.

Now extend that argument on behalf of the rest of Western civilization.

I meant that your argument seemed like it could generalize out much further, into the land of spicy takes like "Getting to live in the West is such a benefit that you should consider slavery a net gain." Or "Having a large, functional economy to be a financial professional in is so beneficial that Jews should just eat some predatory clawbacks and random hate crimes." "English speaking empires ended slavery and crushed the Nazis, so quit your bitching."

Meanwhile African-American entertainers complain about unfair business practices, nepotism, dishonest contracts and other unfortunate experiences from Jewish millionaires and billionaires

This is a...strained reading of what Ye et. al. have been saying. I think if they came out and said "the studios are not treating us fairly; agents take disproportionate cuts of money; contracts are written to take advantage of poorly-educated but suddenly-wealthy celebrities; we are targeted disproportionately by fraudsters and other nefarious individuals" they would get some sympathy, because their claims would be true. But instead they've sublimated these object-level complaints into meta-level theories about group-wide tendencies that somehow both claim too much (religio-ethnic conspiracies) and not enough (not detailing specific abuses or problems).

Also, American jews and Israeli jews are very different; there really isn't some grand unified plan here.

But instead they've sublimated these object-level complaints into meta-level theories about group-wide tendencies that somehow both claim too much (religio-ethnic conspiracies) and not enough (not detailing specific abuses or problems).

It's a matter of habit for social justice movements. Gender Critical Radfems, bless their hearts, still frame their activism in terms of fighting the patriarchy, women's rights, etc. Why is it a surprise that after years and years of "white privilege" and "white fragility", religo-ethnic conspiracies are suddenly beyond the pale? If anything, the experience of only receiving praise for one and scorn for the other, might actually strengthen the conspiracy theory.

I'm not saying the framing's a surprise. But it's still bad. The fights against "patriarchy" are also bad when they're not pointing to specific, object-level claims of disparity which can be assessed on their merits. White privilege and white fragility are also extremely bad. The whole edifice is bad! I feel like my posting history, both here and at the old place, should buy me some credibility here.

In mild fairness:

-Kanye put his weight behind Tidal, which promised a more competitive cut for artists (or at least a whole-ass stake), and exclusively released The Life of Pablo through it.

-There was that time he went a rant on Twitter about the record industry, and posted an entire PDF (of his record conract, I think) as a long thread of images (yes, seriously, but I don't think I can find it now...).

-Kanye also backed the Stem Player (a device and streaming service(?) whose whole shtick was being able to isolate instrument and vocal stems/tracks from songs, allowing you to customize your listening experience, though it works best with albums that are already broken-up into stems), releasing Donda 2 exclusively for it (which was such an album, alongside the original Donda which released around the same time as the Stem Player).

It's possible that Kanye started out being frustrated at the music industry, but Kanye being Kanye, his...unique mind probably led to him escalating his frustrations into conspiracy territory.

Not being an assiduous Kanye-follower, I did not know this! Those seem like good things for him to have done (without knowing more about the particular projects involved), and it seems a shame they didn't work. I agree that Kanye is much more a tragic, rather than wicked, figure.

Doesn't this theory suggest welcoming with open and encouraging arms atheist jews who integrate and marry into normal western society? Yet almost all antisemites suggest that left-wing or revolutionary ordeconstructing jews, most of which aren't that ethically jewish and marry into broader society, are a key driver of societal decay or w/e.

It's members pursue their ideological goals

If jews had a pattern of malevolent "ideological" (or non-ideological) goals (in a way gentiles didn't), and had disproportionate power due to their IQ, that'd be enough to prove antisemitism without the 'and it works better because of lack of care for non-co-ethnics' part. Conversely - if they don't, caring less about gentiles doesn't matter that much. Most ideological goals today claim they benefit the general population / people of all religions, including most of those held by jews - so "loving the gentiles" wouldn't restrict the ideological zeal of powerful jews - if you're a communist, "caring more about people of all races" in a simple sense won't stop you from being communist even given that as a matter of fact communist harms people of all races, because the communist doesn't believe that.

Doesn't this theory suggest welcoming with open and encouraging arms atheist jews who integrate and marry into normal western society? Yet almost all antisemites suggest that left-wing or revolutionary ordeconstructing jews, most of which aren't that ethically jewish and marry into broader society, are a key driver of societal decay or w/e.

The problem with 'atheists' is that they actually follow a different religion. From example egalitarianism, or 'woke' religion.With Western Jews I would say that their primary religion is the holocaust / antisemitism.

Bad things happen to everyone every day, but every time somebody steps on a Jew's toe, it seems to make international news.

There seems to be a lack of self-reflection as well. Show me a person descended from Jews who says :'you know what, Kanye and Kyrie Irving have a point, these Jews sure have a lot of wealth, maybe they ought to act nicer', who is not trashing Jesus Christ, who is not lambasting white people or anyone else for freedom of association, and I'll be pretty welcoming to them.

Stephen Miller is pretty okay I guess, from what I heard about him.

Egalitarianism is not wokism, and neither are inherently religious.

I’m sure some “atheists” are really filling a God-shaped hole with social justice rhetoric. I’m not one of them, and I doubt that most are. Some of us just don’t have that need.

It's not a very common occurrence but here's an example from h3h3

His job is, in part, to make edgy-but-still-socially-acceptable jokes though. Religion is an acceptable target for mocking among people who lean left. compare to "racist comments against asians". This is like using nick mullen to prove all whites are racist.

He has a job because he's not cancelled. I think he helped cancel Sam Hyde's tv show.

It's acceptable to hate on Jesus but hating on Mohammed will get you killed while hating anything that has to do with Jews will get you cancelled.

All I'm saying is that part of my personal minimum for acceptable non-Christians is that they show some respect to the faith.

Then one of the other thing, if you're wealthy and powerful, and this is not specifically a Christian thing, is to not lord it over other people. Noblesse oblige they call it?

Antisemitism is hardly ever 'punching down' as the progressives put it.

H3H3 may not be "cancelled," but he's lost quite a lot of his respectability among his creative peers, and that can be effectively the same thing.

Sorry yes the twitter acct was deleted today and I found an alternate youtube commenting on it but somehow did not copy it. Fixed.

Agree on this. Progressive narratives about Christianity can be annoying and offensive, but it doesn’t seem like they’re disproportionately Jewish. And religious Jews have narratives about Christianity which are offensive to Christian(and yes, the double standard where that’s all well and good but Christians need to tailor their narrative around not offending the Jews needs to be called out), but it doesn’t seem like it influences anything that isn’t directly connected to religious Judaism.

See also - Amy Chua's discussion of market dominant minorities in World on Fire. This phenomenon plays out any diaspora that has human capital advantages over the local population.

I'm not at all convinced that ethnic subgroups can maintain their heterogeneity through brute force IQ gaps.

-there is some evidence for assortative mating based on IQ, but there's also plenty of confounders. (college professors are likely to marry within their profession, but inevitably share much more than above-average cognitive ability)

  • if humans really have a 'your brain must be this big to ride' rule, intellectual accomplishment should be percieved as way sexier than it actually is, being a reliable proxy for IQ.

-in any case, it would be inadequate to maintain small minority groups of high IQ - if your people are only 1% of the population, ten IQ points on average is going to slightly increase the fraction of (your group) in the pool of intellectually attractive potential partners, but you'll still be massively outnumbered & swiftly assimilated into the majority population without other forms of cultural protectionism.

-if we're at the point of invoking cultural awareness of 'comparatively large percentage of losers', there's no need to involve IQ gaps on top. It's not really controversial to note that cultures that last tend to include beliefs & practices that encourage conversion & expansion, and discourage apostasy and assimilation. This sort of cultural perception doesn't even need to be accurate! (It's not like medieval Christians were lining up to marry off their daughters at the local synagogue) It can function just fine as pure unsupported protectionism.

Jewish communities in Europe also historically "pick lemons". Anyone not bookish enough for a bar mitzvah always had the option to convert to Christianity and leave the Jewish community.

We don't have any stats. But there were times when labour demand was high, and I imagine a lot of boys were tempted by the idea of spending their days outdoors taking care of horses.

We don't have any stats.

No, but we have stories, and they show that Jews who converted were always rare, either sincere believers in Christ or totally desperate.

But there were times when labour demand was high, and I imagine a lot of boys were tempted by the idea of spending their days outdoors taking care of horses.

Yes, future of backbreaking labor outdoors for starvation wage, abuse and beatings 24/7 from your fellow Christian for killing Christ (In theory, Jewish convert was to be welcomed as beloved brother. In practice, attitude of Christians on the ground was somewhat different.) and, when the next plague comes, being burned at stake for poisoning the village well.

You might be tempted by this life, but few people would agree with you.

What did happen with Jewish failsons and adventurous young men, then? In Christianity they were mostly absorbed by the church or military, but medieval Jews didn’t have that option.

Jews and non-Jews will always naturally develop into hostility.

Only if we keep playing the identity politics game. Erroneously ascribing group traits to individuals, or conflating group criticism with bigotry, is the poison pill which melts brains. For example, its possible to criticize aspects of 'black culture' (population level) without impugning individuals. I'm not claiming people will interpret such criticism charitably, but that's because they swallowed the poison pill. It's possible to notice that the Jews are successful without spite for members of that group. It might be expedient to simply join a different tribe (American, the middle class, Democrats, Republicans, Unitarians, (who, coincidentally, may have the highest IQ's)). But this is only because people keep playing identity politics.

Anglos stopped playing identity politics and in exchange got pushed out of virtually every powerful position in their own country, which now demonizes them and their accomplishments. Dropping identity politics doesn't lead to a multicultural utopia, it just makes you lose to groups that didn't do that.

Anglos ... got pushed out of virtually every powerful position in their own country

Come now. The halls of power in this nation are overflowing with Anglos. At least "Anglos" in the American sense where they're probably part Irish and German and French and English. But they're part Anglo and live in American Anglo culture. And they are largely in charge.

I don't think they are though. Biden's cabinet has no white protestants (unless he appointed someone recently I'm forgetting). The Supreme Court has one. I'm sure they have some state level representation and congress members, but the founding ethnicity of the US has very little influence. That's what happens when you stop fighting for your place.

While I can empathize with discontent caused by anti-Anglo identity politics, the claim that they have been pushed out every powerful position is so factually incorrect it borders on fantasy. Wealth, political power, judicial power, institutional power, and business power is overwhelmingly and disproportionately in the hands of Anglos. This is neither inherently good nor bad, but it can take thick skin to understand. I fail to see anything wrong with aspiring to achieve the highest ideals of the declaration of independence and US constitution.

You think that political and judicial power are overwhelmingly in the hands of Anglos? IIRC Gorsuch is the only WASP on the Supreme Court. Biden isn't an Anglo, Kamala isn't Anglo, the Cabinet is mostly Jewish or Catholic. I'm sure there are plenty in congress but McConnel's not and Schumer's not. I don't know what "overwhelmingly dominant" would look like but it's not that.

Are you intepreting Anglo to specifically mean Anglo Saxon Protestants, so Anglo Saxon Catholics don't count? Let alone the other northern Europeans usually included?

You probably need to specify that as modern usage would generally include any non Hispanic white. Let alone exclude Anglo-Saxon Catholics.

"A white person in the U.S. who is not from a Latin American country: The students are Anglos, Latinos, and Native Americans." from Cambridge English dictionary.

Anglo Saxon Catholics would count I guess but how many of those are there? Anglos are people of English descent, otherwise I would just say white people.

Under your definition, people have been “playing identity politics” for thousands of years. Why would they stop now?

People can stop out of self interest. The strength and nature of identities can have varying utility. For example, it isn't optimal to violently persecute the Quakers because they're a different tribe, or hold back the Irish because they're more recent immigrants than, say, the English. Being a Yankee vs Red Socks fan isn't likely to produce huge negative externalities for the individual or society, whereas being a Hindu or white nationalist would. If the irrationality of identity politics can't be eliminated because it is innate to some extent, we can chose more optimal levels of identification and tribal delineation.

how do you convince other people to stop

That's the million dollar question. It don't think it will be easy, fast, and I don't claim that it's necessarily possible. Tribalism is almost certainly a useful evolved trait. Nevertheless, the long view of history makes me optimistic that slow incrementalism can get us to form tribes/tribal identities which lower net human suffering compared to the status quo. Within the US, The Know Nothing party would seem absurd today. So would a war of Quakers vs Catholics, or whatever. Skin color, ethnicity, and religious affiliation are the lowest hanging fruit. The fact that Thomas Sowell and Glenn Lowry are black is the least interesting thing about them, and reveals almost no useful information about their essence.

The modern west is a hajnal shredder and talking about the exact selection pressures involved is interesting, but suffice to say for now that we are not hurtling towards lowering net human suffering through more intelligent tribalism.

No one wants to merge with a family that has a comparatively large percentage of loosers to the one they came from. So the Jewish ethny remains separate, and as such it's members pursue their ideological goals without any concern for the damage these impose on the host society. Naturally, eventually people get tired of this and respond with anti-Jewish measures.

I recall a different line of argument which argued that those Jews who were most inclined towards Western civilization left and intermarried with gentiles. Eventually, only those who were least favorable towards the West, as it was then, remained Jewish.

Interestingly, the rate of Jew-Gentile intermarriage has increased massively with the 'Reform' movement in Judaism and liberalization across the Western world. The world of 1850-1890s was very different socially, intellectually and politically (even ignoring the gigantic economic changes). That was the era of scientific racism, now science is racist. Jews had no small part in these transformations - Boas, Freud, Gould... Jews were integral to the US civil rights movement, apparently making up 90% of the civil rights lawyers in Mississippi for example. If one quickly checks wikipedia there are considerably more noteworthy Jewish feminists than the next largest most prominent ethnic group, British feminists. I already wrote about Jewish prominence in US entertainment, finance, media and politics here. I noted then that Jewish political megadonors tended to be liberal in the pro-LGBT/minorities sense, while gentiles didn't. Disney, Blackrock and the New York Times have a similar tendency, similar controllers.

So I disagree with the conclusion that Jewish-gentile relations will always develop into hostility. Gentiles in the West have been consumed ideologically/culturally but now Jews are being consumed demographically, at least outside of Israel. Perhaps this is an example of suffering from success?

The TDLR about this is that Jews being very well represented in the cathedral is the null hypothesis from everything else we know about them and doesn’t require any additional information to explain. Jews on the whole are wealthy, secular, well-educated, high-IQ, white passing people with a history of(in the US relatively minor) discrimination. Of course civil rights lawyers and editors at prestige newspapers and academics are going to be disproportionately Jewish and Jews are going to lean fairly progressive. There’s a similar dynamic, in reverse, where Mormons and conservative religious Catholics are way over represented among the conservative equivalents of these things.

Is "ethny" some kind of slang for "ethnicity"?

But the gaps between your average German and Italian are not remotely similar to the gap between your average Jew and non-Jew.

Why do you believe this?

A German Jew would have much more in common with a German gentile than a German would have in common with an Italian.

More broadly, your thesis that Jews are clever parasites who prey on their host society and anti-Semitism is just the natural response of people who resent being preyed on is not a new one. Nor does it really stand up to scrutiny. There are many reasons why Jews tend to remain insular, not least of which is external prejudice. Jews are not at all unusual in this regard, nor is it unusual for the majority to view a small, insular minority that keeps its own customs and religion with suspicion.

You're right that anti-Semitism isn't rocket science, but your final graf notwithstanding, this just reads like yet another version of "Why the Jews have it coming."

IQ! The fact is your average normie isn't all that interesting, and can be pretty dull and annoying. Now elites are kind of stuck with the normies in their ethny and if another ethny has a similar proportion of normies, forming a common identity is plausible (though difficult). But to form a common identity with another group that has a dramatically higher proportion of normies?

Is "ethny" some kind of slang for "ethnicity"?

Poster might be German; "Ethnie."

edit: Or French, apparently.

I ran into the term in sociology/anthropology literature, though I can't remember where.

Umm, the cathars were very distinct from their catholic neighbors, and were crushed because they represented a threat to royal power. Saying that they were indistinguishable and persecuted entirely due to religious bigotry is a misreading.

They shared a language and ethnicity and probably an IQ(I mean we’re not going to get data on the subject from medieval France), yes. But cathar and catholic religious practice would have shaped the lives of believers in immediately obvious ways and the Albigensian crusade was foremost an exercise in royal power rather than a case of straightforward religious persecution.

No, we don’t, especially because it seems like Jews actually assimilate all the time.

You may at times despise a member of your family, think their ideas or values are terrible, have had awful experiences with them... but a bridge remains despite the gaps.

And yet, there's nothing quite so terrible as the hatreds caused by family splits. The heathen is combatted less fiercely than the heretic or apostate.

This is without mentioning the massive religious elephant in the room

What, the elephant that most Americans are blindingly philosemitic? Or is the elephant that religion is less and less important in most people's lives, particularly the young?

So the Jewish ethny remains separate

72% of non-Orthodox Jews who married since 2010 married a gentile.

as such it's members pursue their ideological goals

Which ideological goals? The goals of insular hasidic sects in NY? The goals of deracinated "cultural jews" scattered all over? The goals of Reform Jews (basically the same as Unitarian Universalists at this point, including the whole "god" thing being pretty much metaphorical)? The Jews that support Israel or the Jews that oppose it? There is no uniform "Jewish" ideology.

without any concern for the damage these impose on the host society.

Nope. Jews are more charitable, on average, than gentiles, and jewish charitable fund money goes overwhelmingly to non-sectarian causes.

jewish charitable fund money goes overwhelmingly to non-sectarian causes.

That article seems to dispute this, describing Jewish philanthropy as heavily weighted towards "non-religious but ethnic Jewish" causes and organizations. A rich doctor donating to the ADL is not quite a counterpoint.

This is the section I was referring to:

For the past year and a half, I have been studying the giving patterns of North American Jewish grant-making institutions.

These include nearly 150 Jewish federations. There are also thousands of Jewish community foundations, family and corporate foundations and donor-advised funds, such as the Jewish Communal Fund, which pools giving by about 6,000 affluent people.

I found that many of these U.S. and Canadian institutions actually give more to non-Jewish causes than to Jewish ones. In fact, my preliminary findings suggest that despite differences between distinct categories of grant-makers, at most an average of 25 percent of this money backs Jewish causes.

There is also a link in the article to this 2013 piece from the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

What's a non-sectarian cause?

'Helping everybody move to the USA' would clearly be a non-discriminating type of charitable act, but also very clearly politically-slanted.

There's probably a lot of Jews working for and supporting NGOs helping refugees move to the USA but how many of them support helping refugees move to Israel, or to their own neighborhood (Martha's vineyard anyone?)?

What's a non-sectarian cause?

Presumably one not identified with a particular (religious) sect.

There's probably a lot of Jews working for and supporting NGOs helping refugees move to the USA

Well, the House GOP just told three NGOs to preserve documents in connection with the southern border, and the three are each overtly religious. One Catholic, one Lutheran, and one Jewish. Just because of the religious affiliation of the migrants in question, I would naively expect the Catholic group to have an easier time networking, but who knows?

how many of them support helping refugees move to Israel

Jews in the U.S. care more about US politics than Israeli politics, for the sensible reason they live here, not there.

or to their own neighborhood

Jews tend to live in the biggest American cities, like LA and NYC. Aside from border areas which directly process new arrivals, those cities have the highest foreign-born population in the country.

I think the op is saying it's a vicious cycle where nobody/everybody is at fault. Some Jews feel distrustful of gentiles and some gentiles distrust Jews, and those people will act in ways that hurt them, which will then cause other gentiles/jews to defend them and other Jews/Gentiles to be suspicious and on and on.

Don't worry, I wasn't so great at the motte when I first started either. But through hard work and perseverance you'll get there.

Less sarcasm and condescension please. His response is exactly what I would have said in response to your deleted post addressed to me.

What would you have liked me to say? Being charitable is one of the rules of this place. I genuinely think I am getting better at motting since adopting this stance.

I...do not think the OP is interested in such a game-theoretic interpretation. He is asserting, in spite of historical evidence, several patterns of human behavior. Then assuming the Jews fit all of them at once.

Antisemitism as Marxist class struggle.

Possibly! A lot of things do happen because of misunderstandings! But a lot of the object-level claims are inaccurate, which makes me distrust the meta-level conclusions/narratives.

Jesus wept.

But because they are, you do.

Not necessarily. The parable of the prodigal son hinges on the contrition of the son, not on his foolishness.

Ethnies [?] are partly socially constructed, but largely racially constrained families, and they contained a weakened form of the same instinct of moral obligation towards the members of the ethny.

Do they? How weakened? I can find plenty of examples of intra-racial snitching, backstabbing, shifting alliances, or outside allegiance. You are glossing over the step where I am supposed to find the Jews uniquely scary on this front. This is the usual demand for a "belief in a unique Jewish malevolence."

Elites...don't normally arrive at the belief that these should be mercilessly crushed,

Oh, is that so?

or that public policy should show no concern whatsoever for their wellbeing

But of course. I notice you also don't bother to demonstrate that the Jews do both those things.

a guaranteed factory of new revolutionary ideas

Ah yes, the famed revolutionary zeal of the Ashkenazim. Except when it's time to talk about Israel, and suddenly the modal Jew is a Hasidic fundamentalist and a hidebound reactionary.

no instinctive limiting concern for the vast majority of people

It may beggar belief, but some humans are capable of extending empathy--even charity!--beyond their racial group. Again, you assert that Jews must be unusually malevolent, yet do not provide your evidence.

[rambling about how Jews can't integrate]

Uh huh. The Jews that you Notice™ in our American elite sure look like they're engaging with American culture. "The enemy must be both strong and weak," I suppose.

You conclude by, yet again, forgoing evidence in favor of assertions that your enmity is "natural." Congratulations: now that you've solved the Jewish problem, you can go back to living in the woods and getting in tribal fights with bands of monkeys. Civilization is about being better than this, about breaking the defect-defect equilibrium and unlocking a world of unnatural ideas like "comparative advantage" and "law."

If anti-Semitism were rocket science, it would be far more coherent.

''' It may beggar belief, but some humans are capable of extending empathy--even charity!--beyond their racial group. '''

People are also capable of extending charity outside of their family, yet the norm for most people, most of the time, is to extend far more empathy and charity to family members than to outsiders. In fact, most people would seriously distrust a person who told them, hey I care about family members and non-family members equally.

''' Again, you assert that Jews must be unusually malevolent, yet do not provide your evidence. '''

Once again, I think that every elite group is tempted to feel contempt for those it rules, and that the vast majority of it's capacity for benevolence towards those ruled stems from ethnic identification with those ruled.

In fact, most people would seriously distrust a person who told them, hey I care about family members and non-family members equally.

This seems like a strange assertion. If I told a stranger "I care about you as if you were family" I think most people would think it was a compliment!

Yes, because you're elevating that person to a special importance. Literally, the complimentary nature of the line is entirely dependent on the unique care level of family. If I told someone "I care about you as much as a random North Korean peasant", they would think of that as an insult.

To an actual stranger? Like, if you told that to someone on the day you met them? Nope, I'd start looking around for exits the moment I heard something like that.

Ah, but what people hear given that phrasing is “I care as little for my family as I do for any stranger on the street.” It sends up sociopathic flags.

You are, of course, correct. Charity may well be applied inversely proportional to distance. I think I've seen it described as a model of concentric circles, in which the closest (and smallest) circles receive the most attention.

But that does not mean the outer circles are empty. You could have someone who cares strictly less about those outside his immediate family, yet still be able to treat with them, even respect them. I say "could," but as you observe, this is the normal state of affairs.

the vast majority of it's [sic] capacity for benevolence towards those ruled stems from ethnic identification with those ruled.

Why do you believe this?

Why do you believe this?

Because as soon as our elites oficially abandoned racial identification as a legitimite value they immediately transferred their allegiance to racial minorities, advancing their alleged interests with psychopathic disregard for the safety or security of their primary citizens. Nixon for example, dramatically expanded affirmative action, despite being at least tentatively convinced that Hernstein was correct and racial intelligence gaps were genetic - https://youtube.com/watch?v=PwXOEFK6Swo.

The link is to one of the Nixon tapes, in which he discusses race with Moynihan.

Your evidence for a grand historical trend...is just Nixon?

I don’t find that very compelling. How does removing segregation cause Nixon to go mask-off? Why should any particular citizen be treated as “primary?”

Wouldn’t this predict that Jewish elite should favor gentile subjects over Jewish ones?

The elites of every major western European nation have accepted massive populations of migrants despite these being entirely a financial negative, several times more violence and criminality prone than the native populations, and on top of that open hatred for western society and social attitudes that were in every way the polar opposite of everything enlightenment or post-enlightenment. And they've done this wave after wave, with full awareness of the consequences. They did this despite massive public disaproval, with little to no opposition by conservatives.

In America, A black man born to a family in the top one percent is as likely to be incarcerated as a white man born to a family making 36K. The average black teenager in a family making 200K will get the same SAT score as a white child from a family making 20K. Our elites (including the conservative ones) respond by discriminating against whites, decreasing penalties for criminality and burying the race of anti-white criminals while boosting every single case of a white hurting a black.

The nature of America's new creed is so obvious, that even white red tribe normies whose family members are murdered by blacks understand that they are expected to express their forgiveness for the killers to the national press.

AS FOR JEWISH ELITES:

  • ''' Wouldn’t this predict that Jewish elite should favor gentile subjects over Jewish ones? '''

In many cases they do. But the important divide isn't Jewish vs gentile, but Western vs foreign. You could make hundreds of millions of people temporarily better off by bringing them to European countries. But they inevitably make European society worse. If a non-ethnocentric Jew does not gain a special willingness to privilege the interests Europeans over non-europeans, being a general lover of gentiles makes them a worse enemy than an ethnocentric Jew, because then undermine your society even when their ethnic interests are aligned with it (keeping muslims out).

Who are primary citizens in this context?

Nixon is the worst possible example for this argument. It was perfectly possible in 1969 to believe both that 1) black people are genetically inferior; and 2) nevertheless, most of gap in economic success was the result of other factors. It is even possible that both of those things are true.

But that does not mean the outer circles are empty. You could have someone who cares strictly less about those outside his immediate family, yet still be able to treat with them, even respect them. I say "could," but as you observe, this is the normal state of affairs.

Not sure about the original thesis, but this counterpoint ignores the ingroup/outgroup/fargroup dynamic. It is common for some of those concentric circles to include functional complete apathy and even outright hostility. The "Early Life" trope does exist, and politics is the mindkiller.

True. But then, assuming there are only three circles (family, “ethnie,” and “no instinctive limiting concern”) isn’t compatible with it, either. I think OP needs to do more work to explain why everyone is in an “outgroup” circle and not one of the more favorable ones.

What’s “Early Life?” Kind of hard to google.

What’s “Early Life?” Kind of hard to google.

When you see some paleface writer, journalist, researcher, etc, condemning western civilization and white people, check the "Early Life" section of their wikipedia article. Purportedly, it will let slip their otherwise unremarked Jewish heritage. Obviously subject to massive selection effects and convenient memory loss when it doesn't hold, but it does seem to bear out more often than I would have expected.

Ahh, I see.

It’s the section I checked, yesterday, when trying to see if recent newsworthy figures were suitable examples for my post...so yeah, the trope is real.

"Early Life" is the section in a person's page on Wikipedia that usually mentions if they were born in a Jewish family.

Interesting topic in a thread below

Consider: a society of just downies and Henrys* wouldn't even be a society, while a society of Enron, Google, and AXA is just ... our society.

A society of my aunt and Henrys would necessarily devolve into hunter gatherers who would be in a precarious position.

A rival hunter gatherer society of entirely Enron, Google and AXA professionals would be a tribe that my retarded aunt and Henry with comparable numbers of similar nature would probably subjugate easily, eventually integrating violent strong men or wise old women, humiliating the rest in servitude.

I think this is probably a point of disagreement for many here and so worth discussing on its own. I see two larger topics that this could become a test for: One is the model of "general competence"/IQ maximalism, expecting successful people to be successful at ~everything, vs a tradeoff between abstract thinking and practical or social skills. Second, whether our current elites are in some sense a paper tiger - bullshit jobs, Overcredentialism, etc.

*"I had a patient, let’s call him ‘Henry’ for reasons that are to become clear, who came to hospital after being picked up for police for beating up his fifth wife."

If violence is not solving your problems, you are not using enough of it. We the techies live in incredible layers of abstractions enabled by the state, economy and the cities. Majority of us will be helpless without internet, even more helpless without electricity. Few of us have the knowledge, tools and resources to black start a society. Even if we pool it.

For a person to use leverage his brawn needs not much, for brains we need insane infrastructure.

Only, outside of a few techies, intelligence seems to broadly correlate with every other positive trait, including brawns.

Is that actually true? Professional athletes don’t seem like a notably bright group.

I’ll grant you that most positive traits have some level of correlation together, but I don’t think brawn in the sense of pure physical strength and speed is particularly tightly correlated to intelligence in the same way as height.

Are tech nerds actually worse off on brawn and know-how than other urban denizens, on average? My experience is that techies have quite a few hobbyists in various physical, martial, or practical skills. Within the few dozen people I was close to at my old tech job, I can think of at least a few that are heavily armed, some hunters, some gardeners, a woodworker, some marathoners, a bodybuilder, a jiu jitsu guy, a blacksmith, and various other hobbies that seem esoteric, but would be useful in reset environment. I'm sure that the typical rural, blue-collar guy has a greater array of practical skills, but I actually doubt that the typical lower SES urban resident is as interested in these sorts of things.

I have observed the same as well. People with high IQs fall into one of three categories: being really good at strength, really good at cardio, or neither (usually being fat, overweight). People with average IQs tend to almost always be in the neither category, especially by 30.

Are tech nerds actually worse off on brawn and know-how than other urban denizens, on average?

As a tech bro, I'll say that my coworkers are reasonably fit. They are not typically fat. They typically have physical hobbies. Compared to median Americans they're doing well.

Lower SES residents can’t even shoot straight - what makes people think they would be good at any sort of organized violence?

The fact that the criminal organizations controlling large portions of entire countries south of the border are often the same ones the American underclass joins in droves, most likely.

The people running cartels aren’t dumb…?

Even the high level enforcers for cartels are former spec-ops soldiers.

The gay techie I used as an example earlier looks like this. (warning: rest of his mastodon profile is nsfw + gay). Not that big, but i'd definitely pick him over randomly-selected-red-triber in the survial-teleportation-hypothetical. My experience more generally is the same - quite a few hobbyists, although most aren't particularly fit or experienced with that stuff.

I’d buy that, but he’s not exactly randomly selected either.

Yeah, I think if you rounded up all the LGBTQ techies, many, many more of them would look like Contrapoints than this guy. (not that the not-gay ones would be much different, apart from the makeup and loungewear)

The urban working class typically has a very high degree of automotive skills that the UMC lacks, but widespread skills in things like plumbing and carpentry are more of a rural thing. There’s a straightforward class explanation for this- the urban working class drives old, shitty cars that need to be worked on a lot, and so learning to do things themselves saves them a lot of money(and being able to handle your wife’s/girlfriend’s auto problems is a mark of status and sometimes expected), which is often a scarce resource. By contrast their housing is usually rented until they’re old enough to not want to learn new skills.

Meanwhile the UMC not only can afford a mechanic more easily, they can also afford cars that don’t break down so often.

so learning to do things themselves saves them a lot of money

No joke, I saved $700 last year by replacing brake pads in my car myself, as three different shop in my west coast city quoted $900+. Took me 2-3 hours because I was doing it for the first time, will likely take less than 1 hour next time, and I won’t have to rebuy the tools I bought for this, so I’ll save even more.

And ‘ability to borrow tools’ is a key benefit of working class social networks, so the urban working class would save even more.

Discount auto parts stores will loan tools to any customer free or for a nominal charge. They don't check the color of your cooler either.

They don't check the color of your cooler either.

? can you explain this one? I am really confused here.

It was supposed to be collar but I misspelled it. They're happy to loan tools to white collar or blue collar customers.

More comments

Not sure if I’m following that comment’s train of thought. History has proven time and again that organized armies are superior to disorganized but strong foes. The Romans were able to beat the stronger, taller Germans mostly because they had better organization. The Google employees have passed through numerous filters for conscientiousness, intelligence, health (a necessary precondition for good work), industriousness, and cooperative ability. In a “state of nature” they would be creating spears and bows and Henry would be their slave on week 2. They would be spending 8 hours a day on specialized labor, trusting the labor of their neighbor, according to a hierarchical common plan. Henry would be singing old Henry Rollins songs to himself and failing to ferment fruit into alcohol.

Yep, doesn't matter if Henry is 4x as phisically strong. The Googlers just have to form ambush parties of 6 men each, wait for Henry to idiotically stray a bit too far from his group then spring upon him while 4 of them hold down his limbs and the other two crush his underdeveloped skull with a large rock. Repeat until the enemy tribe is no more.

In a state of nature, Henry would be killed as useless (or after getting caught with the chief's wife or daughter), the Google employees would be the slaves creating spears and bows, and the same people on top now would be the chiefs.

Or been killed directly by an angry father or older brother- lots of premodern law codes considered unlawful seduction to be a crime which entitled the male relatives of the woman to the use of lethal force.

There exists no such tradeoff. IQ is correlated to just everything good if you are willing to proxy a few things.

Also, the situation matters here very much so. Currently, our current elites are paper tigers in terms of numbers. They would also be paper tigers if dropped on a deserted island and forced to fight to the death an equal number of the not-elites at that very instant. Things might change if you give both groups 1 week to prepare. Things will change if you give each group a year to prepare.

Yep. Let's not forget that our best theories are that intelligence evolved to help humans navigate social relationships. The low IQ group is going to collapse in on itself the moment some medium degree hardship comes along which pits group members against each other, simply because low IQ people are less adpet at forging and maintaining complicated relationships and at giving up a small reward now for a larger expected reward later.

The CEO/Execs group doesn't even have to do much to win, they literally just need to wait for the other group to implode.

This isn't really what we are looking for in a top level post.

Problems:

  1. Without going off and reading the attached links and discussions it is impossible to know what is going on.

  2. The content of your post amounts to "here is a thing, lets discuss". At a minimum it is helpful to at least give your view on the topic. Extra good if you include other viewpoints and how you disagree with them.

Seems like Im a bit rusty. Better now?

Yes, better

CDC has released a report today finding preliminary association between the Pfizer vaccine and stroke for those over 65 years of age.

Another drop in the bucket - or is the bucket spilling out the top now?

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/bivalent-boosters.html

Following the availability and use of the updated (bivalent) COVID-19 vaccines, CDC’s Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), a near real-time surveillance system, met the statistical criteria to prompt additional investigation into whether there was a safety concern for ischemic stroke in people ages 65 and older who received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent.

Pfizer is associated significantly with strokes - CDC is keeping us in the dark about the exact data.

This preliminary signal has not been identified with the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent. There also may be other confounding factors contributing to the signal identified in the VSD that merit further investigation. Furthermore, it is important to note that, to date, no other safety systems have shown a similar signal and multiple subsequent analyses have not validated this signal:

They then list multiple studies that did not replicate this finding for the BIVALENT vaccine - well of course, this vaccine was testing on mice, and then deployed without long term testing. Do they have monovalent data they are not mentioning?

EDIT: Is it possible monovalent risk benefit analysis is simply using a different pathogen, and now with the advent of Omicron, this is a medical update saying this level of strokes is no longer worth the benefit vs the current pathogen? Food for thought.

No change in vaccination practice is recommended.

This contradicts what Paul Offit's opinion is, which was posted in the NEJM. Paul Offit believes we should not give bivalent boosters to young healthy patients.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2215780

It would be much more shocking to announce a chance to the vaccine campaign, than to keep the current inertia the same. I think we are seeing a communication strategy developing to deliver the population into accepting yearly mRNA vaccines - instead, they will be directed to other worthwhile candidates for vaccination - IF pharma companies can even deliver those.

In my eyes: mRNA vaccines are dangerous, so you need to determine how dangerous the pathogen presenting is. I see a great use case for mRNA developing for Airborne Ebola Zaire strains (90% mortality) or other disease of similar magnitude. Simply put: your vaccine should not significantly increase cardiovascular risk. It should be absolutely negligible. 1 in a million, whereas these vaccines might be 1 in 100,000.

What we need to compare this to is the pre-existing risk of stroke in people over 65 before getting any vaccines or treatment of any sort for any condition, and that appears to be high already:

About 75 percent of strokes occur in people 65 or older. In other words it is an increasing problem the older we get. It has been estimated that the chance of having a stroke double every decade after 55.

Stroke afflicts about 800,000 people a year and is estimated to occur at the rate of one American every 40 seconds. About three-fourths of the annual strokes are first-time strokes and the other quarter are recurrent. In other words most strokes are first-time episodes.

Stroke is the third leading cause of death among Americans. It kills about 140,000 people a year.

So this is the same question as the one about miscarriages etc. - are they directly attributable to the vaccine, or are they being noted and recorded as vaccine-related/Covid-related, just because a lot of people are being vaccinated/contracting Covid? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Now, if you pull up a link about 30 year olds getting strokes at the higher than normal rate, great, that's something to be addressed. But "population already at high risk of having strokes are getting strokes" is not, not unless "the rate is usually 75% but now has increased to 90%".

CDC has released a report today finding preliminary association between the Pfizer vaccine and stroke for those over 65 years of age.

That is not what it says, upon reading. It says that there was a signal which "met the statistical criteria to prompt additional investigation into whether there was a safety concern for ischemic stroke in people ages 65 and older who received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent".

They investigated, and found nothing of concern. This is because:

Often these safety systems detect signals that could be due to factors other than the vaccine itself. Although the totality of the data currently suggests that it is very unlikely that the signal in VSD represents a true clinical risk, we believe it is important to share this information with the public, as we have in the past, when one of our safety monitoring systems detects a signal. CDC and FDA will continue to evaluate additional data from these and other vaccine safety systems. These data and additional analyses will be discussed at the upcoming January 26 meeting of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee.

So you leading off with "Guys, guys, CDC found the vaccine booster causes strokes!" is incorrect.

met the statistical criteria to prompt additional investigation into whether there was a safety concern for ischemic stroke in people ages 65

You think that the CDC's statistical criteria don't involve exceeding the base rate in a statistically significant manner?

What's the base rate, what are the criteria for reporting?

So what we have is this: CDC did additional investigation, found nothing. Two conclusions:

(1) There is nothing there, the initial system that triggered the investigation was just picking up usual numbers

(2) There is something there, and the CDC, Pfizer, and other countries are all lying and covering up

Original post is trying to incline us to number (2). I want to know what is the base rate and how was it exceeded, if it was exceeded, before I throw ni with "it's all a cover-up".

Even if it is a real risk, how many of us are over 65? OP is using "risk of strokes in over 65" as an argument not to get any boosters, on the grounds that "if this is happening to them, what is happening to younger people?" and that's where the link needs to be demonstrated.

For instance, stroke is increasing among younger adults. Down to the vaccine? No, this is the conclusion of a 29 year study looking at data from 1990-2019:

Overall, in 2019 in the U.S., there were an estimated 460,000 strokes (of those, two-thirds were ischemic), 190,000 stroke-related deaths and 3.83 million stroke disability-adjusted life years.

From 1990 to 2019, the change in the prevalence of stroke in the general population increased by about 60%. Incidence, death and disability-adjusted life years also increased by about 20%.

However, the age-standardized rates of stroke incidence, death and disability-adjusted life years declined by 20% to-30% in that same period, and the prevalence of stroke did not change. These decreases have plateaued in the last 10 years of the study period.

Since 1990, stroke incidence among older adults (age 50 and older) decreased nationwide, yet increased in younger adults (ages 15 to 49) in some geographic areas, including certain states in the South (Alabama, Arkansas) and the Midwest (Minnesota, North Dakota).

So the reporting system may well be picking up something to do with strokes, but that it's down to the Covid vaccine alone has not been proven. Apparently, globally the incidence of stroke is going up, due to increased risk factors like obesity, high blood pressure, smoking, etc. And the rate of brain hemorrhage amongst younger adults, due to uncontrolled high blood pressure, is also increasing:

In the new study, lead researcher Abdulaziz Bako, a postdoctoral fellow at Houston Methodist Hospital, and colleagues used aggregated nationwide data from 803,230 ICH hospitalizations. They calculated the rate of ICH over five consecutive three-year periods from 2004 to 2018. People were divided into four age groups: 18-44 years; 45-64 years; 65-74 years; and 75 years and older.

Overall, researchers found an 11% increase in the rate of ICH among U.S. adults over the 15-year study period. ICH increased at a faster rate for adults under age 65 compared to those 75 and older. The rate of increase also varied by region, climbing faster in the South, West and Midwest than it did in the Northeast. ICH stroke rates were 43% higher for men than women.

Among those who had ICH strokes, the percentage of people who had high blood pressure also rose, from 74.5% to 86.4% over the study period.

Now, if you pull up a link about 30 year olds getting strokes at the higher than normal rate, great, that's something to be addressed. But "population already at high risk of having strokes are getting strokes" is not

I think this is totally wrong. If two people get strokes instead of one, that's not a worry. If two thousand people get strokes instead of a thousand, that is way more of a worry, the absolute amount of people being affected is much higher. I get the logic. Strokes happening to old people is Normal and to young people is Scary. But often Scary problems are Scary precisely because they're uncommon, while we shut our eyes to bigger problems precisely because we decide they're Normal.

You forgot this part:

When one system detects a signal, the other safety monitoring systems are checked to validate whether the signal represents an actual concern with the vaccine or if it can be determined to be of no clinical relevance.

and this part:

Although the totality of the data currently suggests that it is very unlikely that the signal in VSD represents a true clinical risk, we believe it is important to share this information with the public

which is probably why they said

No change in vaccination practice is recommended

Seems pretty reasonable.

And, you are being dishonest when you say:

They then list multiple studies that did not replicate this finding for the BIVALENT vaccine - well of course, this vaccine was testing on mice, and then deployed without long term testing.

The evidence they cite is:

● A large study of updated (bivalent) vaccines (from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) using the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services database revealed no increased risk of ischemic stroke

● A preliminary study using the Veterans Affairs database did not indicate an increased risk of ischemic stroke following an updated (bivalent) vaccine

● The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) managed by CDC and FDA has not seen an increase in reporting of ischemic strokes following the updated (bivalent) vaccine

● Pfizer-BioNTech’s global safety database has not indicated a signal for ischemic stroke with the updated (bivalent) vaccine

Other countries have not observed an increased risk for ischemic stroke with updated (bivalent) vaccines

None of which seems to have anything to do with mice.

Yes, they say it's unlikely - but it's possible. SO now that we've established, it is unlikely, but possible that the vaccine can cause harm (which is occult and being undetected in other countries - if this possibility fleshes out).

No change in vaccination practice is recommended

The vaccination process will still be based heavily on a paradigm that humans MUST avoid circulating respiratory pathogens, yet if they must get infect, their best course of action is to take EUA vaccine (of which options are limited and you still cannot acquire an FDA approved and labelled vial of vaccine), at any age. They have said, the possibly the vaccine has a problem is not worth their time changing their public health campaign goal.

The evidence they cite is:

They do not submit any evidence regarding the monovalent vaccine. Yet the bivalent has the same synthetic mRNA transcripts as monovalent. Do we even know if bivalent mRNA is transcribed as a single strand, or seperated into two seperate mRNA molecules?

Not seeing any reason to get vaccinated for omicron, at almost any age or health, with an mRNA vaccine. We need a diversity of vaccines in this country, since efficacy is going to eventually drop for each mRNA boost.

of which options are limited and you still cannot acquire an FDA approved and labelled vial of vaccine

... do you think there's a meaningful chemical difference between a 'FDA approved and labeled vial' and earlier vials? Imagine a hippie liberal who refuses to buy fruit that's not labeled "non-gmo", even though the alternative fruits aren't crispred anyway.

No there's a meaningful legal, judicial, and regulatory framework surrounding those vials. And the public health vaccination campaign.

SO now that we've established, it is unlikely, but possible that the vaccine can cause harm (which is occult and being undetected in other countries - if this possibility fleshes out).

No, from reading the report, they have a system which records symptoms in people who have received the vaccines and report side effects. There was a blip which they are required to investigate. The blip was "population at high risk of strokes are getting vaccinated and reporting strokes". So what has to be established is "does the vaccine cause, or elevate, a risk of having strokes?", and that was not established.

You could do a trial recording people who are in that age range (over 65) and do they report colds, sickness, arthritis flare-ups, gastro-intestinal problems and so forth after being administered a placebo, and see if that is reported. But we don't do that, because we expect people to have more health problems as they get older. Strokes and heart attacks are some of those problems. I'm sure that after getting the yearly flu vaccine, people also report first time strokes. But that doesn't mean the flu vaccine caused it, it means "you're over 65 and this is the risk of health problems you are going to have from now on".

Your own phrasing gives it away - hidden harm which is not detected in other countries, but you're sure it's happening anyway, because your prior is "The vaccine is dangerous" and you're grasping at straws to find anything to support that. So invisible danger nobody can find is there and that means the vaccines should be banned!

The vaccines are dangerous precisely because we are analyzing and looking for hidden harm, after we already administered a billion doses without fully understanding the consequences and outcomes.

mRNA cardiovascular toxicity is a severe problem and if it's at all likely, the hammer should drop. This "blip" is an 18 year old about to get mandated with mRNA bivalents before going to a community college.

Simply put: your vaccine should not significantly increase cardiovascular risk. It should be absolutely negligible. 1 in a million, whereas these vaccines might be 1 in 100,000.

Why? This seems to me like you picked "an order of magnitude safer than what it allegedly is" and if the alleged rate of danger were different, you would have picked a different goal. Unfortunately I can't easily find the serious side effect rate for various common medicines, but https://www.medsafe.govt.nz/consumers/Safety-of-Medicines/Medicine-safety.asp says that a "very rare" side effect means one that happens to 1/10,000 people or less.

I find these numbers to be particularly confusing in light of how dangerous COVID itself is. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02867-1/fulltext#seccestitle140 says that at age 65, the IFR for COVID is about 1.7%, 1,700 times higher than your alleged risk of the vaccine and 17,000 times higher than what you claim the risk should be.

And according to https://www.cdc.gov/stroke/facts.htm, the baseline rate of ischemic stroke in the US is slightly over 2 per 1,000 people, again much higher than the alleged risk of the vaccine. For those of age 65, it seems to be slightly higher, increasing quickly with age: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/STROKEAHA.120.031659

For additional context, to have a 1 in 1 million risk of dying while driving, you would have to drive less than 100 miles (overall rate is about 1.5 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles in the US, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States, although I think that number is outdated and is even higher now).

No medicine is completely safe, but this seems like a real no-brainer to me.

Why? This seems to me like you picked "an order of magnitude safer than what it allegedly is" and if the alleged rate of danger were different, you would have picked a different goal.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35653-z

Here's one estimate. I would never base policy on one study, usually that's something the CDC would do.

I find these numbers to be particularly confusing in light of how dangerous COVID itself is. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02867-1/fulltext#seccestitle140 says that at age 65, the IFR for COVID is about 1.7%

This is data from a year ago. We are talking about how the bivalent booster is associated with ischemic strokes, especially held against the risk of omicron.

And according to https://www.cdc.gov/stroke/facts.htm, the baseline rate of ischemic stroke in the US is slightly over 2 per 1,000 people, again much higher than the alleged risk of the vaccine.

Let's stick to relative risk? This is not useful.

Driving is dangerous.

Agreed. But we have to go places, like schools, small business, and our places of worship. So no one proposes stopping driving. I'm proposing stopping the EUA novel biotechnology vaccination campaign.

We are talking about how the bivalent booster is associated with ischemic strokes, especially held against the risk of omicron.

Which it is not by the very report you are using. You've jumped from "The CDC reported a signal which they investigated and found nothing" to "The vaccine is associated with strokes" as though that were proven and established.

Why not go the whole hog and say the vaccine causes women to ride broomsticks to the meeting with the Devil? You are determined the vaccine is bad and then go looking for straws to build your house with, instead of looking at established risks and then forming an opinion.

Definite side-effects of getting the vaccine that have been established: muscle pains, fever, diarrhoea, mild allergic reaction.

Possibility of more serious side-effects: anaphylactic reaction

Very rare side effects

Very rare side effects may affect up to 1 in 10,000 people.

These include:

myocarditis

pericarditis

Myocarditis and pericarditis are inflammatory heart conditions.

The risk of these very rare conditions is higher in younger men.

These conditions are more likely to occur after the second dose and mostly happen within 14 days of getting the vaccine.

2 European studies have estimated the risk of myocarditis, after the second dose of the vaccine as:

1 additional case for every 7,600 men aged 12 to 29 (within 7 days)

1 additional case for every 5,320 men aged 16 to 24 (within 28 days)

We do not know the risk of myocarditis or other rare side effects after a booster dose yet.

If you want to argue that the risk for young men is too high as compared to the risk of contracting Covid and the effects of that illness, you have a valid case there. You do not have one for general scare-mongering.

Fair, I'm not going to rip off my wallpaper over elderly and at risk people receiving bivalent vaccines - precisely because I have a calculation of their quality life years remaining, that is very different from younger healthy people.

The exact people who benefit from a covid vaccine have less quality life years to live than those who do not.

The vaccine has a novel, not totally understood method of mRNA translation, and then goes through another not completely understood process of protein folding, and then enters the immune system (not completely understood). The pharmacokinetics of the nano lipid particle are not characterized or understood. And there is a concerning signal of a blood clot appearing in patient's brains.

I am not scare mongering, I am being highly critical, since I'm not the one defending the novel RNA transfection vaccines.

When they run trials for new vaccines, they will compare them to the harms that the RNA transfection vaccines caused, and the new vaccines are going to look amazing. My guess is they will use protein-adjuvanted methods.

Here's one estimate. I would never base policy on one study, usually that's something the CDC would do.

I didn't ask for an estimate, I asked why 1 per 1 million is the higher tolerable level of risk.

This is data from a year ago. We are talking about how the bivalent booster is associated with ischemic strokes, especially held against the risk of omicron.

Why does it being a year old matter? Even if the IFR is a few times lower, it's still much, much, much higher than what you're talking about.

Let's stick to relative risk? This is not useful.

Do you plan on explaining why or are you just going to make assertions?

But we have to go places, like schools, small business, and our places of worship. So no one proposes stopping driving.

It's entirely possible to build towns and cities that don't require you to drive literally everywhere, but no one seems to care about the risk from driving when designing cities or choosing where to live. At least, not at the magnitude you're talking about: 100 miles could be saved in 2 months by moving 1 mile closer to work, but does anyone care about that? Not in the slightest. A minuscule improvement in civil design would save orders of magnitude more lives than eliminating all risk from vaccines, with lots of other positive side effects to boot.

This entire post of yours is just one big isolated demand for rigor.

1 in one million, compared to 1 in 100,000, in our current data collection environment, is a good signal to keep track of if you are considering your options to receive a covid-19 vaccine. Perhaps you can take J&J, Novavax, or Covaxin and maintain protection against SARS-2.

The IFR is lower and vaccines are not denting hospitalization or death rates as they plummet from their previous heights (mass naïve infection). Most people have had a much better inoculation than a monovalent vaccine - they've had a SARS-2 infection.

Do you plan on explaining why or are you just going to make assertions?

Well, because a stroke as a cardiovascular event, I'm interested in the dynamic between mRNA vaccination and your cardiovascular system. A stroke, downstream of pathology, will offer valuable information when it goes above the baseline.

It's entirely possible to build towns and cities that don't require you to drive literally everywhere....A minuscule improvement in civil design would save orders of magnitude more lives than eliminating all risk from vaccines, with lots of other positive side effects to boot.

Well, you are demanding rigor, and yet I feel like this is a complex claim. Even a city would involve having people driving to bring supplies and transportation towards these centers - a mandatory risk.

We should be paving our public serology with only the best, most well understood vaccines that we are capable of developing and testing and passing on in our limited lifetimes. There is a broader umbrella of rigor that I am requesting to be frank.

A lot of the rigor I'm demanding will also take time, more time than has been allotted for these Bivalent updates. The first injectable, multi-transcriptional (unknown if combined or separated) mRNA vaccine to market has shown an unexpected safety signal.

1 in one million, compared to 1 in 100,000, in our current data collection environment, is a good signal to keep track of if you are considering your options to receive a covid-19 vaccine. Perhaps you can take J&J, Novavax, or Covaxin and maintain protection against SARS-2.

...why? What makes it a good signal? Again, compared to the baseline number of strokes, you probably would not ever be able to detect these increases. If you wouldn't seriously consider the risk of driving 1000 miles, why would you seriously consider this risk?

The IFR is lower and vaccines are not denting hospitalization or death rates as they plummet from their previous heights (mass naïve infection). Most people have had a much better inoculation than a monovalent vaccine - they've had a SARS-2 infection.

Do you have some data for these claims? I've seen them, but I've also seen the opposite (e.g. that vaccine provides a better immune response than previous infection). Case and hospitalization rates are certainly nowhere near their high of a year ago (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html) but if the virus is mutating to become more contagious and less severe over time, and vaccines aren't actually effective, you should still see a high case count.

A stroke, downstream of pathology, will offer valuable information when it goes above the baseline.

What valuable information? How does this answer my question?

Well, you are demanding rigor, and yet I feel like this is a complex claim. Even a city would involve having people driving to bring supplies and transportation towards these centers - a mandatory risk.

I'm not really sure what you are trying to say. There are plenty of alternatives to using large motor vehicles in city centers, near pedestrians. Also, deliveries of goods represent a tiny fraction of all trips taken in populated areas, so you can still have those while reducing personal car trips. Urban design is a complex topic, but so is medicine. Do you want me to recommend you some urbanist sources?

has shown an unexpected safety signal.

This seems like a much weaker conclusion than:

Another drop in the bucket - or is the bucket spilling out the top now?

mRNA vaccines are dangerous

your vaccine should not significantly increase cardiovascular risk. It should be absolutely negligible

Vaccines have to be more good than bad. Almost all of them are. The covid vaccines get a wee bit murky in that regard when you get to younger age cohorts - especially younger male cohorts. There's a lot of good evidence that for young males in particular the virus carries fewer side effects than the mRNA vaccines, especially the 2nd dose of said vaccines. For older age groups I think you'd have to show pretty awful side effects for vaccination not to be worth it - so, for instance with over 65s you'd have to really have some bad frequency of side effects since they're so vulnerable to covid.

The other issue at hand here is efficacy, however. If the bivalent booster has risks but doesn't ultimately protect anyone any better than the 2x shots they already had (or 3x with the original booster) then there's really no good argument for them. The FDA lost two of its most experienced vaccine regulators over the Biden admin's "boosters for all" push, which wasn't based on any data whatsoever - we don't have any data showing that a 30 year old vaccinated woman will have further reduced mortality and morbidity with a booster shot or a bivalent booster. Most other countries, where their medical systems are more tuned towards cost and efficacy, have only authorized boosters for elderly people and those with severe immunocompromise (cancer patients). The US chose to push a one-size-fits-all policy with boosters, with zero evidence, and so...when a safety signal like this bubbles up it looks even worse than it would have if they'd pursued more evidence based recommendations.

Absurd safety standards for medicine are the norm. Lots of things with side effects and uncertain cost-benefit profiles (like lockdowns themselves!) are acceptable when if they happened to take the form of a pill or injection they'd be ten different kinds of illegal.

I am much more worried about real, physiological implications of nanoparticle technology uptake. Not simple safety standard concerns (those already seem tattered).

It is the norm, but even by those standards it feels inconsistent. I agree that many other policies are handled too cavalierly, but that's not really a good argument against what appears to be a legitimately safe vaccine.

It's an EUA vaccine approved for an emergency. I think if you want to say "legitimately safe vaccine," it would be easier if Pfizer or Moderna could actually distribute an FDA approved and LABELLED as approved "Comirnaty" or "Spikevax" vial of vaccine.

if Pfizer or Moderna could actually distribute an FDA approved and LABELLED as approved "Comirnaty" or "Spikevax" vial of vaccine

Isn't this what they are already doing, or are you engaging in legal hair-splitting of the type about "the FDA issued approval labels for the original vaccine but the boosters are only recommended"? So if they're only "recommended" or "authorised" but not "approved" this means they're dangerous? There's a whole article about the difference between "approved" and "authorised" here.

If EUA is essentially the same process, only faster, what’s the benefit of the full FDA approval process?

It’s not really an “apples-to-apples” comparison.

In public health emergencies, the development process may be a little different. The world experienced—and is still experiencing—a global pandemic, which means there was an outpouring of resources and energy on one goal: developing vaccines and treatments against COVID-19.

To that end, early on the FDA provided clear communication to the pharmaceutical industry about the scientific data and information needed to ensure the timely development of vaccines. And among other efforts, the government developed a coordinated strategy involving its own agencies, academia, nonprofit organizations, and pharmaceutical companies to prioritize the development of the most promising vaccines.

That focus—and the resources applied to it—isn’t typically available for every vaccine or medical product, especially those that fall outside of a public health emergency.

Also, the processes are not designed to be nimble. They’re designed to give people confidence—and peace of mind—that products receiving FDA approval continue to be viewed as the gold standard of scientific rigor.

You may have a point somewhere buried beneath all the scare-mongering, but it's hard to discern. Maybe less "The vaccine has been proven to cause strokes!" when no such thing has been established would make your case better.

The irony here is that people have been complaining the full FDA approval process takes too long and a modified version (say, where drugs are trialled for a shorter period and the FDA approves them but you take them at your own risk, or that drugs legal in the EU shouldn't have to go through the same process in the USA for approval) would be better to get drugs to market and treating patients faster.

You can't please everyone!

Your response didn't address the crux of FDA and EUA labelling. The entire power structure of our country, legal recourse and all, rests along these lines. Sorry to bring Foucault into the mix, but he's the ultimate nightmare of a public health pandemicist.

https://www.comirnaty.com/

There are no data available on the interchangeability of COMIRNATY with COVID-19 vaccines from other manufacturers to complete the vaccination primary series. Individuals who have received 1 dose of COMIRNATY should receive a second dose of COMIRNATY to complete the vaccination series.

Is this not VERY different from the medical advice given to people getting the EUA? Mix and match the first vial you can even get your hands on?

I'm arguing in favour of the vaccine. It has a much better safety profile than a lot of things - it's just because it happens to take the form of medicine that we want a frankly ridiculous safety standard.

The vaccine debate has to be the least productive of any topic. has anyone on either side ever had their minds changed on this issue despite all the ink spilled? Given how many people have taken the vaccines (billions worldwide) if there was even a small uptick in deaths and other complications, it would be a huge deal and unavoidable. You would not need to comb through huge troves of data to find maybe a tiny uptick in deaths for some small cohort

Well, let's say you did not want to take the vaccine, and you were mandated to take it. You could choose either J&J, mRNA, Novavax, or even fly overseas to get Covaxin. You may begin debating at that point.

mRNA vs. Other vaccines is a very difficult topic, because defanging a countries ability to give mandated vaccines is bad, but mandating vaccines that are bad isn't good. In fact, perhaps extreme caution should be taken based on the prior.

Why should a state even have the ability to mandate medical treatment when that's a very clear bright line violation of natural rights?

I care much more about the ethics of mandates than I do the specifics of efficacy. The individual must make the informed decision on this, not the state, and any mandates are tyranny that must be defended against to the death.

There is certainly a debate to be had about mRNA, a very necessary one, which was poisoned by the will to impose without discussion as we now know for a fact, but the idea that we should assume from the beginning that the State has to retain tyrannical powers in the name of public health is insane.

any mandates are tyranny that must be defended against to the death

This seems like overly dramatic macho posturing. Obviously you are still alive and didn’t do anything of the sort.

Can you seriously not imagine a situation where mandates would be warranted? I don’t support the mandates for COVID, but being unwilling to even consider that there might be a point where the tradeoff scales tip is just an unreasonably ideological suicide pact. If there were a hypothetical disease much more deadly than COVID, surely you must be able to imagine such a thing

This seems like overly dramatic macho posturing. Obviously you are still alive and didn’t do anything of the sort.

If someone is charged by a needle-wielding thug with the intent to stab them with it, I believe they are entitled to defend themselves, up to and including using lethal force against the assailant. Even if said thug is an agent of the state. Of course, this would be analogous to compulsory vaccination, which is not the form most vaccine mandates took in 2021. Rather, they are more akin to a mugging, and that's a slightly greyer area when it comes to whether lethal force is appropriate for self defence.

Regardless, medical coercion is a gross violation of ethics. Even in the absence of vaccine mandates themselves, lockdownist regimes violated medical ethics in how they offered the vaccines. They advertised that restrictions would go away without vaccines, hence created the implicit threat of more restrictions in the case of refusal.

My judgement on this comes from the UKDH reference guide to consent for examination or treatment, which says:

To be valid, consent must be given voluntarily and freely, without pressure or undue influence being exerted on the person either to accept or refuse treatment. Such pressure can come from partners or family members, as well as health or care practitioners. Practitioners should be alert to this possibility and where appropriate should arrange to see the person on their own in order to establish that the decision is truly their own.

[...]

When people are seen and treated in environments where involuntary detention may be an issue, such as prisons and mental hospitals, there is a potential for treatment offers to be perceived coercively, whether or not this is the case. Coercion invalidates consent, and care must be taken to ensure that the person makes decisions freely. Coercion should be distinguished from providing the person with appropriate reassurance concerning their treatment, or pointing out the potential benefits of treatment for the person’s health. However, threats such as withdrawal of any privileges, loss of remission of sentence for refusing consent or using such matters to induce consent may well invalidate the consent given, and are not acceptable.

On this basis, the existence of vaccine mandates clearly poses a risk for violating informed consent, as it introduces duress in several ways. Firstly, it means pressure or undue influence being exerted on the person to accept treatment from government, employers, retail services etc. Secondly, it also means threats of the withdrawal of privileges in an environment with involuntary detention. See how specific the language here is, how closely and specifically it applies to the circumstances of vaccine mandates in countries that carried out lockdowns, despite the age of the document long predating covid. That should hint that these recommendations are not simply some backporting or recency bias for the sake of winning an argument, but instead represent best practice as it was already understood.

Even political leaders broadcasting claims that vaccines are a route out of lockdowns, or that unless X% of the population are vaccinated that restrictions will continue, introduces duress. However, this is more of a footnote, as regimes that carried out the false imprisonment of the entire population are already instantly rendered illegitimate by doing so.

Personally, I found the whole process so fucking disgusting that I refused to take the vaccines purely on the basis of that. I don't care if they're the best or the worst vaccines in the world. The rubicon is crossed, and the relevant institution is no longer trustworthy. For the state to insist that people are born subhuman, and only acquire rights after jumping through regime-approved hoops and injecting regime-approved substances on a regime-approved schedule... The very thought sickens me. The fact that a large proportion of my fellow countrymen, as if somehow I can regard them in such friendly terms any more, agreed with these mandates sickens me even more.

If someone is charged by a needle-wielding thug with the intent to stab them with it, I believe they are entitled to defend themselves, up to and including using lethal force against the assailant. Even if said thug is an agent of the state. Of course, this would be analogous to compulsory vaccination, which is not the form most vaccine mandates took in 2021.

Even mandatory vaccinations would not consist of "needle-wielding thugs" charging you trying to stab you.

For the state to insist that people are born subhuman, and only acquire rights after jumping through regime-approved hoops and injecting regime-approved substances on a regime-approved schedule...

Is not a remotely rational description. Nowhere in the Western world did vaccine requirements come anywhere near the level of the unhinged rhetoric you keep repeating. (China wielding people inside their houses? That's legitimately terrifying, but also not an aberration in China.) You are not describing reality. You are not describing actual events, behaviors, or policies. You have never, in all the time you have ridden this hobby horse, described the world we live in. Nothing you have described actually happened, ever.

Austria came close to criminalizing being unvaccinated, aborting plans to do so at the last minute.

Nowhere in the Western world did vaccine requirements come anywhere near the level of the unhinged rhetoric you keep repeating.

Some countries implemented lockdowns on the basis of vaccine status. Again Austria comes to mind as an example. Austria's regime did decide that people who did not jump through regime-approved hoops and take regime-approved medication on a regime-approved schedule are so unworthy that they do not deserve the right to leave their homes. I don't know what to call that beyond treating them as subhuman. Many more places decided that they couldn't be allowed to attend events, restaurants and bars, shops etc. Even the US, to this day, continues to regard unvaccinated people as lesser by making it illegal for them to enter the country.

And I've seen enough rhetoric from governments and supporters of mandatory vaccinations to know that, without pushback, they'd have gone further. Because of this, I'm not particularly interested in merited impossibility, nor lockdown denial.

Austria came close to criminalizing being unvaccinated

Even if I believe you (I don't), you're describing something that was floated as a proposal, not something that actually happened.

Austria's regime did decide that people who did not jump through regime-approved hoops and take regime-approved medication on a regime-approved schedule are so unworthy that they do not deserve the right to leave their homes.

I could reword almost any law to sound ridiculous and dystopian. "Some people are treated as so subhuman they aren't even allowed to get behind the wheel of a car!"

I don't know what to call that beyond treating them as subhuman.

There are many situations in which the government can restrict your freedom to travel. While you may not agree with all (or any) of them, they are not "treating you as subhuman." Unless you're an anarchist and you believe all laws are treating you as subhuman, in which case, okay, that would at least be consistent if still irrational.

Even the US, to this day, continues to regard unvaccinated people as lesser by making it illegal for them to enter the country.

All countries have restrictions on who can enter, and the US is not the only one that includes vaccinations as a requirement, and not all vaccination requirements are COVID-related. So every country in the world regards some people as "lesser" in this fashion.

Your rhetoric is unhinged and counterfactual.

More comments

I will not fedpost, but I quit my job over this and moved to a sane country, I think that's enough skin in the game for this conversation.

And no I don't see a point where the government is allowed to become tyrannical because the very legitimacy of the government stems from it not being so. Not even if the bodies are piling up in the streets will I accept to be injected with drugs against my will.

Mary Mallon would have been entirely justified to kill her captors and escape for by the point they imprisoned her in perpetuity they broke the social contract and returned her and themselves to the state of Nature.

Health decisions about one's body must rest in individual will however much it is possible. Informed consent is the bare minimum. Anything else is ethically unacceptable.

Mary Mallon would have been entirely justified to kill her captors and escape for by the point they imprisoned her in perpetuity they broke the social contract and returned her and themselves to the state of Nature.

I was unfamiliar with that but assuming that following is accurate I do not consider it as straightforward. And if you go "returned her and themselves to the state of Nature" then it anyway justifies using raw power to overpower everyone else anyway - and I do not think that it is in any way better.

Mary Mallon (September 23, 1869 – November 11, 1938), commonly known as Typhoid Mary, was an Irish-born American cook believed to have infected between 51 and 122 people with typhoid fever. The infections caused three confirmed deaths, with unconfirmed estimates of up to 50. She was the first person in the United States identified as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogenic bacteria Salmonella typhi.[1][2] She persisted in working as a cook and thereby exposed others to the disease. Because of that, she was twice forcibly quarantined by authorities, eventually for the final two decades of her life. Mallon died after a total of nearly 30 years in isolation.[3][4]

(...)

She used fake surnames like Breshof or Brown, and took jobs as a cook against the explicit instructions of health authorities. No agencies that hired servants for upscale families would offer her employment, so for the next five years, she moved to the mass sector. She worked in a number of kitchens in restaurants, hotels, and spa centers. Almost everywhere she worked, there were outbreaks of typhoid.[35] However, she changed jobs frequently, and Soper was unable to find her.[13]

In 1915, Mallon started working at Sloane Hospital for Women in New York City. Soon 25 people were infected, and two died. The head obstetrician, Dr. Edward B. Cragin, called Soper and asked him to help in the investigation. Soper identified Mallon from the servants' verbal descriptions and also by her handwriting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon

f you go "returned her and themselves to the state of Nature" then it anyway justifies using raw power to overpower everyone else anyway - and I do not think that it is in any way better.

I don't think you understand, one has a duty to escape the state of nature if at all possible (at least according to Hobbes) and enter into more adequate equilibria in general. That tyrannical governments force us out of it by defecting is a moral sin. But once it's you vs the world, yes anything is permitted. John Smith is perfectly legitimate to blow away any and all law enforcement sent by a congress that would pass the kill-John-Smith-on-sight act, or to break any laws passed by such a body as they are now null and void concerning him.

This is not an argument against rebellion, it is an argument against tyranny.

In the case of Mary specifically it's extremely debated whether she knew for a fact she was responsible for those illnesses (which I do believe would carry some amount of responsibility vis à vis nonagression), but I'm merely referring here to the injustice of her perpetual imprisonment as punishment for existing as a danger.

In such a circumstance I would rebel, because there would be nothing else to do than rebel, asking for people to acquiesce to the destruction of their autonomy or indeed to their own destruction is game-theoretically unreasonable, and that's the fundamental truth that natural law attempts to point out.

And this truth, embedded in the concept of natural rights is what makes forcing people to engage in medical procedures unreasonable. You can't reasonably ask people to give up control of their own body. And I don't think it's overstating it to say that this is a matter worth dying over because people have done so in its name in the past.

The issue is they tried to give her several outs, as in not working as a cook. Its only when she went to some lengths to continue doing that, that they locked her up entirely.

If she was justified in killing those who imprisoned her then those she endangered would be justified in outright killing her. But they tried not to do that.

If being imprisoned allows one to kill to stop it, then being infected with a deadly disease by someone who has been told multiple times to stop doing the thing that caused outbreaks should also meet that bar.

I had my assumptions challenged. I thought the vaccines would be fine (ie a net benefit across all age cohorts), but when they were being recommended to children and young men I found myself to opinions other than the vaccines are the best/worst thing ever.

if there was even a small uptick in deaths and other complications, it would be a huge deal and unavoidable.

In a bunch of countries there is newish data indicating increased excess deaths not attributable to Covid. The confounders are myriad, but there is allegedly an unattributed signal to analyse.

I’m not sure we haven’t. Look at this. https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/another-look-at-uk-all-cause-mortality

Where is the author wrong?

I'm thinking of doing a top-level post on this next week, but it seems like this data doesn't necessarily jive with results in other countries. For example, in France, in a country with high vaccination rates, 2022 excess deaths in the 15-64 age category are actually down considerably from normal levels:

https://mpidr.shinyapps.io/stmortality/

England and U.S. mortality is up however. Perhaps its obesity or fentanyl related?

It would be interesting. And maybe there are just abnormalities in country by country numbers but given the high excess deaths in 20-21 you’d expect a large drop in excess deaths in 22.

Would also be interesting to see data on births. I’ve seen some series suggesting there has been a large drop in births and there was the Israeli data on sperm motility. It’s frustrating that we don’t get this info easily since a lot of country possess this info.

Don't regret the first two shots, regret the booster and don't think the vaccine should be taken by people <50 years of age.

I also changed my opinion after researching it. I was happy to get the first 2 jabs knowing what I did then, but the case for boosters in a post-Omicron world seems weak at best. Agree, however, that the magnitude of vaccine-related deaths is very small at this point.

Yes? Many people took the first round and adamantly refuse to take any boosters.

Almost all those not taking boosters - which is more than half of those who've had a shot - do so because they think they're already vaccinated and protected / the pandemic's over / don't see the point, but are still happy about the first shots.

How do you know it's almost all? The first booster was out before the pandemic was "over" (the mask/test/recovery/vax mandates were still in effect, and the propaganda was still in full force). Me and my wife took the first 2 shots, and now regret it, several of our friends are in the same situation, and some even took the boosters against their will.

Both from talking to people IRL in a variety of walks of life, casually browsing many parts of the internet - probably 10% of the population at least has some form of vaccine-concern, but at least >75% of the vaccinated-non-boostered are content with the initial vaccines, probably.

Glancing at a study here - data from june/july 2022, published a week ago - seems to agree.

... okay, more than glancing, I downloaded the data, and filtered for the US (idk maybe i messed something up, but it matches with the figures):

\3. The risks of COVID-19 disease are greater than the risks of the vaccine

{ 'Strongly Agree': 507, 'Somewhat Agree': 202, 'Unsure/no opinion': 157, 'Somewhat disagree': 64, 'Strongly disagree': 70, Unanswered: undefined}

\4. The COVID-19 vaccines available to me are safe

{ 'Strongly Agree': 470, 'Somewhat Agree': 238, 'Unsure/no opinion': 156, 'Somewhat disagree': 60, 'Strongly disagree': 76, Unanswered: undefined}

And when filtered for answered anything other than 'no' on 'have you received a dose' q7

\3. The risks of COVID-19 disease are greater than the risks of the vaccine

{ 'Strongly Agree': 493, 'Somewhat Agree': 172, 'Unsure/no opinion': 94, 'Somewhat disagree': 27, 'Strongly disagree': 20, Unanswered: undefined}

\4. The COVID-19 vaccines available to me are safe

{ 'Strongly Agree': 465, 'Somewhat Agree': 224, 'Unsure/no opinion': 89, 'Somewhat disagree': 20, 'Strongly disagree': 8, Unanswered: undefined}

Open access data is really nice.

On the other hand, here's a rasmussen poll - https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/covid_19/concerns_about_covid_19_vaccines_remain_high . Polling is hard.

I took the first round and then later got COVID. And then later got COVID yet again. My understanding is that getting COVID gives immunity around as good as the shot. I'm not sure if boosters would significantly help me.

Raising my Hand. My mind was changed on vaccine. Never a mandate fan. And I do think one dose of vaccine is useful if you haven’t had COVID but I’m solidly against jabbing every 6 months.

I think a lot of people on this camp

An easy way to falsify 'has anyone on either side ever changed their minds' is to ask: "where did all the anti-covid-vaccine people come from"? There are many more of them than there were vocal antivaxxers in 2016. It's not really productive as it stands though, few involved (I'm not one of them) understand enough about immunology, pharmaceutical development, epidemiology to really add anything .

It's not really productive as it stands though, few involved (I'm not one of them) understand enough about immunology, pharmaceutical development, epidemiology to really add anything .

I'm having a hard time seeing how even experts are adding much here. The subject matter is too complex. It's like trying to describe the flight of a baseball by the interactions of the atoms within the baseball. Theoretically possible, but not likely to be useful. That's why we need to take an outside view. Group A takes the vaccine. Group B doesn't. What are the outcome differences of those groups (taking into account externalities as much as possible)?

We can talk about spike proteins until we're blue in the face, but that's just theory, compared to the results which can be measured from a vaccine given to billions of people.

As an observer of the vaccine debates, its not useful to me on the specifics of the vaccine. I didn't take it and probably wont have to ever, had covid, its over.

But the meta-debate does allow me to calibrate my opinion of who to trust. Whose predictions panned out, who lied, who was okay with lying for the "greater good", etc. Im predicting in the coming years, a lot of people will be vindicated and a lot of people will have pies on their faces. The rhetorical stakes are too high for it to be any other way now.

If anything, atleast now I know who (almost everyone) is totally okay with me being a second class citizen on the premise of refusing certain medication. Some masks are off permanently. Them denying this in the future wont change my opinion of them.

Agreed. I personally have a high esteem for many people on both sides of the issue - that's what makes this query so incisive and important.

As an observer of the vaccine debates, its not useful to me on the specifics of the vaccine. I didn't take it and probably wont have to ever, had covid, its over.

same here. i got it twice. the first time it was like a cold, second time only very mild. it's over .

Isn't there some worry that repeated Covid infections (or boosters) could cause long-term damage? I've definitely heard this claimed. Not sure how much of this is crackpot.

its over

Unfortunately, there are a whole bunch of people for which it's not yet over. The federal gov't is still litigating at least two of their mandates, a mandate is now firmly implanted in immigration law, and there may well be state mandate battles still going on to boot. I probably cannot capture the absurdity of it, either, because what they are still trying to force on people is the original vaccine. Not even updated vaccines that are tailored to the current strains. They're still fighting in courts for the ability to force people to take shots now that are essentially useless (especially since most non-vaxxed folks have almost certainly had some strain of COVID by now), under threat of firing them, taking away their contracts, or prohibiting them from entering the United States.

In the Fifth Circuit's en banc oral argument, the fact that the vaccines don't do a great job at preventing infection or transmission came up, and the gov't said that their position could still be sustained on the grounds that it reduces the risk of severe cases/death. When pressed on whether the gov't could, on the same grounds, require everyone to get below a certain BMI, as obesity brings severe risks which are endemic in our society, they basically just said, "Yeah, we wouldn't do that tho."

If anything, atleast now I know who (almost everyone) is totally okay with me being a second class citizen on the premise of refusing certain medication. Some masks are off permanently. Them denying this in the future wont change my opinion of them.

This is why it's still so important. If there is not enough anti-authoritarian energy to form a hard consensus that the gov't should not even have the option to do such things, those people will go beyond the mask of "we won't force you to take certain medication". There will be more masks to come.

the absurdity of it

I am fully aware that the "real fight" is far from over given that many questionable laws are put into place and there is no precedent that all that was done for covid would not be repeated in the future. If anything the probability that it would be repeated is not infinitely higher. So that is a new CW battlefront in the making.

However, this seems to be mostly a (country with high state capacity) problem. Many countries have really left covid in the past and anything associated with it altogether.

has anyone on either side ever had their minds changed on this issue despite all the ink spilled?

I used to do vaccine research for a living and when the Covid vaccines rolled out, I advised people that asked me that they should take them because they'll probably work just fine. The couple years of evidence that we now have has led me to switch over to saying that the Covid vaccines are comically bad, the authorities saying otherwise are ridiculous liars, and the retconning to "it was never supposed to prevent infection" undermines the credibility of all future vaccines. So yeah, I'd say that my mind has changed.


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