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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   23127 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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Ezra Klein in the pages of the NYT on why the Democrats need to Shutdown the government.

TLDR: Trump is an authoritarian.

Back in March, Democrats justified keeping the government open by saying that the courts were restraining Trump, that a shutdown would only accelerate his executive power, and that markets were already punishing his recklessness re tarrifs. But now with Trump firing dissenters, using federal agencies against political enemies, and enriching himself and his allies through foreign investments and unchecked power, Klein says that none of those arguments hold anymore. The Supreme Court is now backing Trump on key issues, DOGE’s chaotic dismantling of the bureaucracy has slowed because Trump loyalists are running it, and the markets have largely adapted to the new normal.

Maybe the markets have normalized, but we shouldn't according to Klein. Democrats are politically and morally failing by continuing to fund a government that has become an instrument of authoritarianism. He outlines how Democrats could frame a compelling message around corruption and abuse of power, citing Senator Jon Ossoff’s July speech as an example of effective messaging that ties everyday struggles (like high medical costs and housing insecurity) to elite corruption. Specific examples the firing of agency heads like those at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Defense Intelligence Agency for political reasons, targeted investigations into critics such as Senator Adam Schiff and Attorney General Tish James, the FBI’s raid on Bolton’s home, masked ICE agents now conducting raids without identification or warrants, and National Guard troops being deployed to cities LA and DC.

Ezra Klein is a woke idiot who lied about Charles Murray to push blank slate liberalism and he did it knowingly, and not out of ignorance, because the narrative was more important than the truth.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=IeWMw2hb4gY&ab_channel=Motte%26Bailey

So why should we believe him now?

Edit: Tretiak beat me to the punch, but I directly linked to the podcast he mentioned. Take a listen. If Ezra Klein posted here, on the motte, with the same tone and argumentation he did on the podcast, he'd be permanently banned within the hour. Why should we listen to someone who would be just as obnoxious as Alexander Turok or BurdensomeCount?

Frankly I’m stunned that Ezra has ‘any’ audience at all. It’s even more concerning to me I live in a locality that’s colored by the mentality of his type of thinking. I understand the backdrop people like him are coming from, but he is a ‘horrible’ advocate for the cause. Sam could’ve had a much more sensible discussion about this with someone like Shaun. Ezra is too psychologically fragile and had a hard time stomaching and keeping down what he was hearing. He is not the guy for practically any subject out there.

I understand the backdrop people like him are coming from, but he is a ‘horrible’ advocate for the cause.

Is he? Refusing to engage with these claims is the cause. Giving them too much legitimacy would be the opposite of being a good advocate.

It's not an accident that the wonky side of the Left wing media system reacted much like the rest when this topic came up. The point of having wonks is so you can get some answer for how science can serve your values while drawing the line on what beliefs are worth taking seriously or investigating. So Vox will have Turkheimer on to both admit that IQ is correlated with X, Y and Z but also that anyone who suggests a gap with origins in genetics or one we can't easily change is suspect because of how far out ahead of their skis they are.

The point of Vox is that you don't need to consider Charles Murray because you already have the answers.

If Ezra wanted to refuse to engage the claims then he should’ve refused to appear on Sam’s podcast altogether. Agreeing to it and then looking like a fool trying to be obscurant over every point doesn’t only make you look disingenuous; it also makes you look like an idiot.

This isn’t an ongoing debate that’s being had behind closed doors in lab coats and under microscopes. What Ezra did was the equivalent of walking onto a debate stage and try to lecture an astronomer that the Earth is flat. Maybe he’ll end up appeasing everyone in his political circle who’s got blinders onto the world. To everyone else, he looked like a moron; because he was one.

I don’t know what anyone has to consult Murray over. Scholars like Richard Haier have already upheld his claims and have said Murray was being very conservative in presenting his findings. This says nothing of the idiots on the popular left circuit like Seder who contend Murray is a racist, while having never read his book. In fact, Seder hasn’t even read Murray’s Wikipedia page; if you think a man who married and had children with a one handed Thai Buddhist in a foreign country is a racist. You’ve exposed nothing but your own ignorance at that point. Most of his critics are idiots because they refuse to read or actually engage his arguments. Ironically, his conclusions are also very much in line with policy works like Ezra in the first place. It goes to show Ezra has likely never read a word of anything Murray ever wrote.

if you think a man who married and had children with a one handed Thai Buddhist in a foreign country is a racist. You’ve exposed nothing but your own ignorance at that point.

In fairness, there’s a non-negligible amount of genuine racists who include Asians alongside whites in the “civilized” category.

What Ezra did was the equivalent of walking onto a debate stage and try to lecture an astronomer that the Earth is flat. Maybe he’ll end up appeasing everyone in his political circle who’s got blinders onto the world. To everyone else, he looked like a moron; because he was one.

I wasn't making a moral defense of Klein, I think his behavior speaks for itself. But I think you're underselling just how many people have these same beliefs. Most people don't care and/or instinctively side with Klein (or know they should if they know what's good for them).

In this environment, this behavior can work or fill an important niche. Who is more likely to get a say in polite circles? Some Vox writer posting about an exciting study on some teaching intervention that showed IQ improvements or a more Murrayist take?

Ironically, his conclusions are also very much in line with policy works like Ezra in the first place. It goes to show Ezra has likely never read a word of anything Murray ever wrote.

I don't think you give Klein enough credit. He is a higher class of commentator than Seder. He reads. By his own account he has read and reviewed Murray, and at least knows Murray is for UBI:

The other thing you brought up his UBI work. The reason I bring this up is that, the reason Charles Murray’s work is problematic, is that he uses these arguments about IQ — and a lot of other arguments he makes about other things — to push these points into the public debate, where he is very, very, very influential. He’s not by any means a silenced actor in Washington. He gives Congressional testimony. He won the Bradley Prize in 2016 and got a $250,000 check for it. His book on UBI, it is completely of a piece with this. I reviewed that book when it came out. It’s an interesting book, people should read it, but it is a way of cutting social spending. According to Murray’s own numbers, he says it would cut social spending by a trillion dollars in 2020. To give you a sense of scale, Obamacare costs two trillion dollars over 10 years.

This is another book in a different way that is a huge argument for cutting social spending, which in part he justifies by saying, we are trying to redress racial inequality based on an idea that it is a product of American history, when in fact it is some combination of innate and environmental, but at any rate, it is not something we’re going to be able to change, and so we should stop trying, or at least stop trying in the way we have been.

Because Klein is cleverer than Seder he can see that Murray is offering a poisoned chalice. Vox is about enhancing the arguments of left-wingers so they can advance their agenda. Focusing on the short-term gain of having Republicans agree with you on one program when it undercuts the central pillars of that agenda would be deeply unwise. Social constructionism is far more useful to Klein than Murray's tactical (in his mind) retreat. Setting up a test that could obviate the need for any left-wing policy by attacking the basic assumptions is also incredibly unwise.

Klein doesn't want to cut social spending. Klein doesn't believe that such spending cannot solve persistent problems or that the government should accept that it can at best ameliorate some human capital gaps. Why would he want to? The alternate thesis is what allows his side to accrue power and, hopefully, fix problems. What's Vox's reason for being if the answer is that there's no clever move to be made, let's just stop people starving?

Harris understandably had no patience for engaging in the discussion given how the conversation started, but Klein basically states that not moving towards a more socialist and redistributive position when citing these facts is itself suspect:

This is something you brought up earlier when you brought up that quote from Murray about luck, and I think it’s an important conversation. I think that if you follow Murrayism on this, if you were doing it without the political commitments he brings to it, it actually takes you to a very radical and interesting place.

If you say that our IQ is genetic and environmental, but at any rate, it’s not our fault, because we don’t choose either one of those, and there’s not much we can do about it. Not just our IQ, but something you’ve said is that, you know, a lot of traits come down like this — the big five personality traits, determination. Look, you can connect genetic inheritance to divorce. I think it’s a .2 or .4 correlation. So, if you begin to believe that, actually you begin to ask the question of, should, do we deserve what we have? Should society be vastly more redistributed than it actually is? Should we be much less within this construct that what we’re getting, we’re getting because of hard work and determination and intelligence and the application of our talents? In fact, we need to move to something that is, I’m not literally advocating this, but more in the range of full socialism.

What I think is so interesting about the way he takes this debate — and I recognize this is not somewhere you took the debate, but I do think this is a useful thing to talk about — is that if you really did believe things immutable, if you really did believe that this was our inheritance both environmental and genetic and we can’t do much about it, then I think the implications of that are radical, and the implications aren’t that you take away help from people. It’s that you say pretty much what all of us has is primarily illegitimate. We didn’t do anything to earn it. I just happened to be born with the collection of talents that got me where I am. And as such, what we should spread around in society is much more vast.

Funnily enough, I don’t ever see people take that attitude on this. Again, the history of these ideas in America is they tend to be used to justify the status quo, not radically more generous versions of the status quo, but I do think that’s interesting, and I don’t understand why people don’t take that leap. I think that the implication of this is, it’s luck, and if you want to believe that — and, again, I don’t believe they’re immutable, I don’t think that’s what the evidence shows — but if you do believe they’re luck, I don’t think it takes you where he went in your conversation.

Believing in HBD is itself bad, but using it to cut state spending...beyond the pale.

I don’t know what anyone has to consult Murray over.

Murray seems to be the Bart Ehrman of intelligence research. Attacked because he's prominent, but there is also an incentive to make it a lot more about him than may be necessary, since it gives a certain view a convenient avatar to attack and to thus marginalize amongst your audience by proxy.

I wasn't making a moral defense of Klein, I think his behavior speaks for itself. But I think you're underselling just how many people have these same beliefs. Most people don't care and/or instinctively side with Klein (or know they should if they know what's good for them).

Virtually my entire critique of Ezra was the intellectual indefensibility of what he was saying. I wasn’t primarily talking about his moral characteristics either.

I’m actually very concerned about the number of people who think like Ezra does, because I live in an urban center that’s full of people as insane as he is.

In this environment, this behavior can work or fill an important niche. Who is more likely to get a say in polite circles? Some Vox writer posting about an exciting study on some teaching intervention that showed IQ improvements or a more Murrayist take?

Ezra would, sadly enough.

I don't think you give Klein enough credit. He is a higher class of commentator than Seder. He reads. By his own account he has read and reviewed Murray, and at least knows Murray is for UBI…

And that’s the sad part if people consider Ezra a cut above the rest, because his analysis is almost equally mediocre by comparison. If Ezra does read, he shows little in the way of his ability to comprehend and integrate what he’s read. And his appearance on Sam’s podcast in particular is but a small indication of that.

If Vox is trying to enhance the arguments of the left, then they’re incredibly bad at it. The best critique of Murray’s argument that could be characterized as ‘left-wing’ came from Chomsky in the appendix of The IQ Controversy which was published several decades ago. And it’s one that doesn’t begin with the premise of how butthurt you are over basic scientific facts. I suspect Sam had more than enough space to have a sensible discussion with Ezra about policy specifics, if only Ezra were able to get past the most basic hurdles in the argument; which he failed to do.

I don’t know how influential people like Murray are today. I suspect he’s hardly animating activity in the social sciences or having an analogous impact like the shadow of neoliberalism that Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys cast over our economic policy, which still rules the day, today. Maybe he’s inspired present day researchers like Razib Khan or others, but I don’t know.

I realize that I just duplicated your post - yeah, Ezra is a dumb policy wonk who is trying to pretend that he wasn't a fellow traveller of woke to push neoliberal policy. If he recommends anything, much like the anti-compass, we should do the opposite - because anything this smug prick recommends or advocates for is the the will of smuggest of LA radlibs.

he's like a less intelligent and more liberal and sanitized version of Matt Ygalsias

I understand the worry people like Ezra have. His appearance on the podcast was a horrible debate for him, but it was highly instructive for illustrating a similar view the left and the right both share. Ezra has a view of these topics that’s almost on par with the way the right-wing views the concept of a gateway drug.

Weed is an innocuous drug. We have known that chemically, medicinally and almost every other way you want to have it for a long time. So why do so many on the right remain so uptight about it even though society has become more acceptable of its use? Well because there’s at least one way a gateway drug retains a valid use as a concept. It’s proximity to everything else.

I knew a person once who wanted to open a dispensary in a state that had at that time fairly recently legalized recreational marijuana. And he was well positioned to do it. But after thinking over it for awhile he decided against it, because of the ‘type’ of clientele that’s mostly associated with smoking it. Yes, otherwise normal people also smoke weed, but we all know the popular images of the kind of people who use it. And those types of people do exist. In large numbers. And much of the time, those ‘are’ the kinds of people you’re dealing with.

But it goes even further than that and also puts you in proximity to other people. Hard drug users, or maybe not people who do hard drugs, but drug dealers who sell weed along with hard drugs. And that puts you in closer proximity if not outright in the same circle with those people. If you are a person who doesn’t want the risks associated with that kind of activity or it’s more than you want to think about from a business perspective as the person I was talking to, you’ll abandon the idea entirely just as he did.

Yes, of course IQ exists. Of course there are differences between people and populations. Just as there are height differences, skin tone differences, hair and eye color differences, the whole 9 yards. But these are all differences in a mundane sense and shouldn’t attract such significant attention to them that the KKK and every Neo-Nazi group closely follow your research activity and publication pipeline, and it places those people at the discussion table along with you; because these differences are truly inconsequential and meaningless. And yes, I don’t want those assholes at my table either.

Large swathes of my family are racially intermixed. Several cousins are half Hispanic. I have a red head cousin who’s been in a long-term relationship with a black man. When I was in high school I was in love with a black girl. But you can understand why the whole table becomes quiet and nervous if you bring up a topic like that, especially when large audiences are tuning in to see what you have to say. I think Ezra feels the same way. And I don’t blame him for it. But his approach for handling the matter is not one I would adopt. Sam was having a debate. Ezra was speaking to the mob.

The poisonous conception of the schoolmarmish imagination that ideas can be dangerous as drugs. That, for the good of people that certain ideas must be censored to prevent their 'radicalization' goes against liberalism and democracy.

Who, whom? Who are these exalted figures who get to determine what is and what is not permissible?

Trust the science, except when it goes against the narrative. Free speech and academic freedom, except when it upsets our deep-seated beliefs - that are not beliefs, but just moral decency.

I am tired of it all.

Weed is an innocuous drug. We have known that chemically, medicinally and almost every other way you want to have it for a long time.

Far from it. Plenty of people in psych wards would disagree strenuously with you.

I’m actually curious now. Got any stats and case studies on this?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2424288/

This study says people who used weed prior to age 18 were 2.4 times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than those who hadn't, and rates scaled with heavier use:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2424288/

They also estimated that about 13% of all schizophrenia cases could be eliminated by eliminating cannabis usage.

Huh. That’s interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Weed is an innocuous drug.

No it is not. Weed, unlike alcohol, has massive long term mental health consequences. Modern weed also isn't really a 'soft' drug; it's so potent that the ancestors would have recognized it as more like hashish.

Plus weed makes you lazy.

I was wondering when I would see someone make this comment.

(Not insulting you at all. But I knew it was coming. Lol.)

I mean, pot advocates never seem to address that weed isn't really a soft drug anymore; weed users are basically using hashish. Society harshly judges everclear drinkers in a way it doesn't for even straight whiskey drinkers.

I think that is more about the class signification than the percentage ABV. High proof whisky is seen as a premium product and the people who drink it as whisky connoisseurs.

You and I, I suspect have the same stance on this. I’m not a supporter of drug use and have never taken any drug in my life.

But on this particular point, you’re drawing up a distinction that isn’t relevant to what I’m pointing out. Is the problem ‘weed’ or weed smokers who are “basically using hashish?” I’m pretty judgmental in general of casual drinkers who help themselves on far too casually an occasion, never mind the scorn I have for truly intense drinkers. But there is a qualitative difference to be between comparison someone who picks up a joint and someone who picks up a container of everclear.

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