site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30982 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 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.

13
Top Bottom New Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Why I don't think that Ukraine has bright future ahead
Disclaimer: This is not an anti-ukranian or pro Russia post, I wish only the best for Ukrainian people and Russia has most of the same and many unique problems.

Ukraine in 1991 was one of the richest countries in Eastern Europe, being on par with Russia and above such countries as Poland and Belarus. The crisis of the 90s escaped Poland, but was shared by the rest, after which Ukraine lagged behind its neighbors in development. We can say that this is due to such factors as Poland's membership in the EU or the presence of oil in the Russian Federation, but a noticeable lag even behind Belarus shows that this is not the sufficient explanation.

Such estimates of GDP PPP per capita in this context are often criticized for ignoring the problem of the shadow economy or, in plain language, "envelope wages". Only this problem is not unique to Ukraine, but a common feature of the CIS countries, and in it, it is more pronounced than in Belarus or Russia, but not enough to explain such a large gap.

Also, quite often one can hear about the supposed difference in the distribution of economic development in the Russian Federation and Ukraine, allegedly in the second there is greater decentralization and a smaller difference between regions. But in terms of GRP per capita, excluding, for obvious reasons, oil and gas regions like Yamal, in both countries one can see approximately same and strong difference between the capital and the poorest regions. This is also true for Belarus. Similar trend can be seen in HDI ranking - Russia standing at 52nd place, Kazakhstan at 56th Belarus at 60th and Ukraine at 77th.

There are many possible reasons that could explain such an outstanding backwardness of Ukraine even by the standards of the CIS. From crazy theories about the genetic or cultural inferiority of its inhabitants to a more adequate analysis of the particular corruption and arrogance of the elites. I won't pretend to know the right one and I don't even need to find some exact answer to this riddle. It’s enough to ask the question: “Why and what will change or has already changed in 2022, which has not happened in the history of this country?”.

War that will make patriots out of corrupt oligarchs? It started in 2014. A new president who promises to fix everything and fix corruption? It's happened so many times it's not funny anymore. Additional grants/loans/Marshall Plan 2.0? Didn't billions of dollars and euros already have go one way into Ukraine? Where did they go? They will go there the next time if there current corrupt system remains. European integration? It has been talked about since the 90s and European leaders are now talking about "the long road ahead for Ukraine", the status of a candidate is not at all a guarantee of an early entry, ask Turkey, Serbia and Montenegro. Why would EU want the poorest European country after Moldova, with the highest corruption and similar to Georgia problems(that of course could be theoretically solved in the near future but this is beside the point)? EU had enough of one Hungary with Orban stealing economic aid with his cronies, it doesn't need a second one. These internal problems will have to be corrected on their own, before, and not after, entry.

But there might be not enough time to for solving them. Ukrainian demographics are awful, a very old population with average age much closer to western countries and not states with similar economic development, which, at the same time, also has the opportunity to relatively freely leave for better countries. For the same reason that Ukrainian patriots in Canada still not returned and will not return in their entirety to help their homeland, major part of today's refugees have already found or will find work and will remain in Europe, having made a reasonable, rational choice.

P.S. It is more my personal pet peeve and not part of the argument but I think that this and similar economic deals that still going on are very strong evidence of some corrupt dealings going on between oligarchs from both sides.

Ukraine has sucked since the 90s and I see no reason why bombing its population centers will cause a change of course

Okay, I get why you might argue that. But what's it got to do with the EU? Leaders will continue talking about "the long road" as long as Ukraine is politically popular. Which will remain true as long as they keep making Russia look bad. So I agree that Ukraine will not enter the EU any time soon. But funding them against Russia is still the rational choice.

I mainly talked about economical matters in context of Ukrainian prosperity. Maybe even giving bribes to their politicians is rational choice for EU but this is besides the point.

The liberation of Kherson is the first time in the history of the EU that victorious troops raised the European flag in celebration. People care about that kind of thing.

Ukraines was on a fairly similar to path since 2014 as other former Soviet colonies. First you have the corruption but eventually you clean up you system in a second step and then you end up rich like Poland.

Demographics are an issue but if they start having more sex after the war I would expect them to end up a higher income country.

I think the point of your comments is to imply that Ukraine deserves war because they are bad corrupt people. But these issues were similar in every other CIS and over time were fixed. There is no reason to have expected Ukraine to follow a different path than their neighbors who were all successful after Ukraine became free in 2014. It takes time.

Demographics are an issue but if they start having more sex after the war I would expect them to end up a higher income country.

That will be difficult if all the women stay in western Europe. It's likely a lot of them will want to stay instead of returning to a bombed out country, especially considering that they will have built lives while the war is going on.

It could be an unfortunate side effect of a policy designed to save their lives.

But if you look at economic data there no great change after 2014. Ukraine is still poorer than even Belarus, country not known for being free from corruption or russian influence.

Ukraine's tfr is at western Europe levels. People have sex enough already, they just don't want the kids. And there was already mentioned current situation with many women in Europe. Men could join them there and maybe even have higher than average birth rates but many of them wouldn't want to return to war torn poorer than Belarus homeland.

No, this wasn't the point and this senseless war makes things in both Russia and Ukraine worse. "But these issues were similar in every other CIS and over time were fixed" presicily the opposite, in all those countries corruption reigns supreme and wasn't even remotely fixed, you can check this in any independent corruption index. It doesn't mean that it categorically impossible to solve this kind of issues but it seemingly takes way more time than 8 years. And this is the time that Ukraine doesn't have based on its demographics.

Post 2014 could be argued that it takes time to reorient economy. I would expect a more recent pop but they have been at some degree of war too during that time.

Is your data just picking up oil? I’m seeing 34% of Belarus exports are energy and while I thought Ukraine did some it seems like agriculture is more important. Also a good bit larger country so perhaps Belarus has performed better because of more energy per capita which depends less on trade networks.

Id still call fighting this war as Ukraines only choice. Long term they should look more like Poland.

What oil? There is less oil reserves in Ukraine than in Belarus. And this 34% figure is for export of refined petroleum products, that while can only be possible because of the export from Russia is still option that was not locked for Ukraine.

"Id still call fighting this war as Ukraines only choice" Of course it is but main point of my post was disagreement with this "Long term they should look more like Poland" sentiment.

I was trying to explain your income gap. Oil would be convenient and that is the first thing that popped up on Wikipedia as a difference.

Unless there is specific genetic weakness in the Ukranian people I see no reason to not expect them to reach the income levels of their neighbors when there is a clear desire to adopt the policies of the neighbors. That seems like a reasonable bet.

But there many more possible reasons. For example in difference with Belarus or Russia political structure where there aren't any one ruling oligarch clan and instead several competing. Better theories can be found in economists' works.

What oil? There is less oil reserves in Ukraine than in Belarus.

Export of oil and fertilizers is a huge source of Belarus income. Cheap oil and gas from Russia are necessary for those industries to be viable, and are de facto subsidies from RF to Belarus. Lukashenka's regime , despite being much more brutal than Ukrainian even during Yanukovich times, ensured that most enterprises were state owned, and larger share of profits stayed in Belarus (unlike Ukraine, where whole industries got privatized, their owners through lobbying avoided large taxes, and profits were rerouted to tax havens somewhere in Cyprus and later used to buy mansions in Nice).

The crisis of the 90s escaped Poland, but was shared by the rest, after which Ukraine lagged behind its neighbors in development. We can say that this is due to such factors as Poland's membership in the EU or the presence of oil in the Russian Federation, but a noticeable lag even behind Belarus shows that this is not the sufficient explanation.

I think this is an important part of your argument but it's based on fuzzy culture ideas whereas we have access to less fuzzy economic policy history.

After the fall, Poland enacted far-ranging, unpopular economic reforms--the Balcerowicz Plan--the essentially transformed the economy from a state-run one into a "free government w/ some government intervention" type. Similar reforms were attempted in Ukraine, but leadership balked in face of how unpopular these measures were. As a result, Poland economy was able to grow at a higher rate than Ukraine's, so the two became less alike as time went on.

Without a doubt, Poland joining the EU had a big impact on the Polish economy, but that became reality in 2004, when Poland was already on a nice growth path. Another way to look at this that I found helpful was that Poland, among other post-communist countries, can be categorized as a "Sustained Big Bang" transformation, where Ukraine falls under "Gradual Reforms" (Russia falls under "Aborted Big Bang").

Now, this still leaves the question open of why Poland decided on bold free-market reforms while Ukraine didn't? Sure, I think your general argument about corruption was a component here, but I'd wager that a much bigger component was that Poland was much more separate from the Soviet Union than Ukraine was, meaning, it the influence of Russian corruption and neglect was lesser. Look at how eager Poland was to join NATO and the EU--after independence, it was clear to Poland that the optimal direction to align themselves with was "the West", especially the US. In contrast, Ukraine seems to have been more skeptical toward aligning itself with Europe/US, which is evidenced in the slow rate of reforms and its close ties with Russia in the immediate aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Why and what will change or has already changed in 2022, which has not happened in the history of this country?

A few things appear to have happened to Ukraine since 2014 that haven't happened to it before. For one, there has been a crystallization of the Ukrainian national identity. Another is the massive migration to and out of the EU, which I think entails two things: first, real-life experience of life in "the West" that forces the question of "why can't we have the same?" This was a huge undercurrent in Polish culture that led to a lot of emulation of not only things like food or music, but also management and leadership practices. (There is also the curious pattern of early Polish emigrants staying abroad, whereas much of the newer emigrants return to Poland. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar pattern will play out or is already playing out among Ukrainian emigrants). Second, is the realization that there is no reason to look eastwards. That way lies only corruption, humiliation, and death.

Of course, I wouldn't expect positive changes to come fast. Poland is still struggling with its communist legacy--corruption, lack of civic engagement, watered down national identity, etc.--30 years after becoming independent. If anything, Ukraine is much earlier on a similar path, so we should expect to see the corruption you describe. But, if we compare Ukraine with Russia, which in all aspects appears to be in a state of stasis since the early 90's, Ukraine is changing, which creates opportunities for something better to come about.

After the fall, Poland enacted far-ranging, unpopular economic reforms--the Balcerowicz Plan--the essentially transformed the economy from a state-run one into a "free government w/ some government intervention" type. Similar reforms were attempted in Ukraine, but leadership balked in face of how unpopular these measures were. As a result, Poland economy was able to grow at a higher rate than Ukraine's, so the two became less alike as time went on.

During Solidarity, emigré publications like Kultura were read through and discussed in Poland, with the anti-communists reaching a clear consensus of what to do. Upon coming to power, they had coherent policy already drafted and prepared. Elsewhere, only after the Warsaw pact or USSR fell were they able to start discussing policy etc. but were then under pressure of momentary politics, corruption, people fiefdoms etc. This is how Poland was able to immediately sign treaties with Ukraine and Lithuania, abandoning revanchist territorial desires - they had already long since decided on this.

Poland is still struggling with its communist legacy--corruption, lack of civic engagement, watered down national identity

I am not sure is "watered down national identity" a real problem in Poland. Other two are problems, but ones with noticeable progress.

I am not sure is "watered down national identity" a real problem in Poland

Which level of Narcissist's Prayer are you on? It's not happening, or it is happening but it's not a problem?

(a) It is not happening on large scale

(b) In cases it is happening then it is not "communist legacy" but "I am European, and I do not care about Poland" euposting.

Less antagonism, please. Don't accuse people of being narcissists or arguing in bad faith just because they have a different viewpoint.

This wasn't intended as antagonism; The Narcissist's Prayer is literally the name of the thing. I am in the same unfortunate situation as the residents of Fucking: in that the name itself carries unfortunate connotations.

If there's a more plain-spraking way of denoting the concept I am happy to switch...?

Okay but how Poland explains Ukraine being poorer than Belarus? Is Belarus engaged in successful free market reforms? Is it free of corruption or Russian influence? Of course polish western turn is the best strategy available, but Ukraine fares quite worse than its neighbors that didn't took it. And migrants generally return into their country of origin only if they see real raise of standards of living there. Ukrainian ones didn`t do this before the 2022, why would they return now. And this general take "Yes, Ukraine maybe poorer but it changing" is popular since 2008 and Ukraine stays mostly the same in economic terms.

Okay but how Poland explains Ukraine being poorer than Belarus?

Belarus hasn't been under attack for 9 years? Plus terrorism going back further, e.g. the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko, president after the Orange Revolution? Investors would be worried about France's stability if Macron was disfigured after being poisoned by terrorists plausibly linked to Joe Biden.

From 2015 to 2022 Donbass situation for Ukraine was more like Afghanistan war for America than anything. But you could say this yes. Still before 2014 Ukraine already was poorer than its neighbors.

Like the Afghanistan war, if it was happening across the entire West Coast, and it was led by people who wanted to join China, and China had a large border with the US, and China had a large military base on Staten Island, and the US was very inferior to China in conventional military terms, and the US had given up its nuclear weapons, and there was a large risk of China intervening if things went too well for America, and China was providing military/financial support for the Taliban.

So not very like the Afghanistan war for America, and certainly not more like that than anything else. Under those circumstances, I would expect investment and confidence in the USA to be low. When you're over a barrel, people tend not to trust that you have their back.

If by neighbours you mean nearby ex-USSR states, there were three of them: Belarus, Moldova, and Russia. Ukraine had roughly similar conditions and GDP per capita to Moldova. It had worse GDP per capita than Russia, which was less corrupt/better run/more stable than Ukraine + has a lot of natural resources per capita, and Belarus, which is less corrupt/better run/more stable than Ukraine + economically supported by Russia. Remember, Ukraine had a major revolution in 2005, plus a very messy 9 years after that, and e.g. Leonid Kravchuk's control was never comparable to Yeltsin, Putin, or Lukashenko. Ukraine has always no more than a few bad decisions away from civil war and possible Russian intervention to e.g. safeguard Crimea in a Ukrainian civil war.

A paragraph of questions is generally not one actually looking for them to be engaged, but I'll take a stab.

War that will make patriots out of corrupt oligarchs? It started in 2014.

And has had multiple decisive impacts against Russian intentions since 2013.

Multiple Russian efforts failed due to various sorts of nationalism by oligarchs refusing to cooperate with Russian pressure efforts. This started with the elite split over the Russian pressure on Yanukovych's corrupt reversal on the European Union association agreement in favor of the Eurasian Union in 2013, and dramatically escalated when many of the oligarchs in Yanukovych's own power base refused to support his Russian-pressured effort to start shooting protestors during Euromaidan, and then the major flop of the NovaRussia uprising in Eastern Ukraine where oligarchs generally supported post-Maidan Kyiv rather than join the Russian effort to astroturf a grassroots popular revolt. This doesn't even touch on the 2022 government cohesion in face of Russian invasion.

It's not that war has made patriots out of corrupt oligarchs. There is a war because a surprising number of corrupt oligarchs were already nationalists even before 2014.

A new president who promises to fix everything and fix corruption? It's happened so many times it's not funny anymore.

The relevant consideration for Ukrainian corruption considerations isn't because there's a new president, but that the war has created a new legal contexts and oversight measures with Ukraianian political support. This has not happened so many times before.

First, let's just be clear on something. The primary donor of economic aid, the states of the European Union, are not out to 'fix everything and fix corruption.' This is a false standard.

It also misses a key point of the European Union, which uses what others might call obvious corruption via patronage networks as a standard cohesion mechanism. The European Union is absolutely involved in the patronage system, and the way that even internal EU aid works is that governments taking aid are expected to use it broadly in the categories intended (agriculture subsidies on agriculture, not yachts), but who, exactly, gets the funds and how are left to the governments. It's a basic pro-European incentive scheme to build pro-EU interest groups who really like getting money and so are positively inclined to European influence in order to keeping it coming. This sort of pork is not what the Europeans consider unacceptable corruption, and patronage network of government elites building pro-government business elite networks is not the problem.

Since the war has started, Ukraine has gotten not only increased aid, but increased attention and various oversight mechanisms. Western donors, after all, have strong interests in seeing where their increase goes, and that it's having the desired strategic effect. The Ukrainian government, which is dependent on them in a way it was not under previous presidents, is in little position to refuse access, and has actually had an interest in granting access to its own information systems just to underscore how desperate the situation is. What has resulted is various access and tracking systems to western backers, which both gives institutions like the IMF insight on what is needed economically, and the Americans access militarily, but also also establish mechanisms. While some level of fraud is unavoidable- just look to the various western corruption issues around COVID monies- the war has brought new access into systems were the unacceptable corruptions rely on being opaque.

The war has also changed the political dimensions for western-pressured reforms. The Europeans have absolutely used the leverage of aid and Ukrainian desires/desperate to join the European community to pressure the Ukrainian government to make legal and administrative changes to improve on corruption. One of these results- something no previous president did- was dissolve the Kyiv Administrative District Court, one of the most notoriously corrupt court systems in the countries.

Between a confluence of crisis letting the government act, unique access and leverage by westerners pressing reforms, and domestic political support for the both, Ukraine has been undergoing major legal and structural shakeups no previous president of the last decades has matched.

Additional grants/loans/Marshall Plan 2.0? Didn't billions of dollars and euros already have go one way into Ukraine? Where did they go?

To the front, to salaries, to infrastructure and item purchases, and many other things needed in a war.

This is what I mean by question streams not actually being asked with the intent of receiving answers. The first is not a question or even referring to a specific thing (or, in the case of Marshal Plan 2.0, a thing that has happened), the second conflates the value/cost all forms of assistance, and the third presumes corruption for unanswered questions, even when the question doesn't even make sense.

Where does aid go? It depends on what the aid is, and when, and how one calculates. Since Ukraine is in a war, let's just take a single example: a single vehicle donation to the Ukrainian military.

Let's take a BMP-1. A BMP-1 is an early Soviet-era armored personnel carrier. It's not particularly good, but it serves a purpose. A google search says a single one costs roughly 1 million USD. But what is the cost? Not, actually, 1 million USD. BMP-1s are old, the cost of production was already consumed long ago, and in many cases are just legacy hard ware not intended for current use by their own militaries, and were slated for eventual replacement by more modern kit. Giving 30 BMP-1s is not equivalent to taxing your citizens $30,000,000 and then handing it over to the Ukrainian government for them to turn into yachts.

The answer to all unknown expenditures is not 'it was all wasted due to corruption.'

It has been talked about since the 90s and European leaders are now talking about "the long road ahead for Ukraine", the status of a candidate is not at all a guarantee of an early entry, ask Turkey, Serbia and Montenegro.

Appealing to the 90s, when Ukraine's elite and public were very indifferent about European association (and the European Union did not exist), and not 2014, when a major seminal moment saw the Ukrainian body politic actively affirm a desire for European association, is willfully ignoring quite a bit of context. Euromaidan wasn't a pro-European fanclub protesting, it was a result of long-established European-supported engagement structures successfully connecting with both publics and key elite interests to such a degree that a Russian-pressured lethal force crackdown was rejected by key members of the ruling coalition. The pro-EU political base in Ukraine has not been fair-weather or transient, enduring almost a decade of war now and demonstrating both enduring strength and conviction in a way that many of your examples have not, divided as they were for internal reasons.

Turkey is an interesting argument if you want to make it, but I'd argue Turkey was more interested in joining in the 90s/early 2000s than the EU was in letting them in... but this is due to factors not relatable to Ukraine, such as being a large muslim country and UK internal politics. The Ukrainians are not seen as outsiders in the way Turkey was, nor are they an election or two away from a conservative muslim government.

MTF for character limit.

Why would EU want the poorest European country after Moldova, with the highest corruption and similar to Georgia problems(that of course could be theoretically solved in the near future but this is beside the point)?

Global food stability, advanced chip making, strategic depth, sentiment, internal European power struggles over the political center of gravity take your pick. The question is not 'why', but rather 'why are not you aware of the following?'

To start, being poor is not the issue for Ukraine. A poor GDP per capita in the European context is a cheap work force, which is a significant part of corporate viability in the European model. This is absolutely a mixed bag, but also kind of the point for the european economic model of the internal market and internal migration from east to west. Nor is the monumental costs of rebuilding Ukraine the objection- this is, after all, money that will be spent by European countries on their European companies to do business in Ukraine, in the name of integration. Different stakeholders have different interests, but no one expects Ukraine to circle a drain of constant recession and de-investment, which means there is profit to be made.

First, global food stability under European influence. Ukraine is poor in many things, but very, very rich in food, and had roughly a global share of nearly 9% global wheat, 10% barley, and 16% corn. This is 'regional famine prevention' levels of food production, and having it under European auspices- and not under Russian, where the food pressure has been used already for macroeconomic blackmail attempts- is a major global asset in the expected decades to come of global demographics. When the third rail fear of European politics is mass migration, having the food stability of the middle east not under Russian influence is rather important.

Second, Ukraine was responsible for 50% of global production of neon gas, which was a byproduct of industrial plants specifically built for it during the Soviet Union. This is relevant because industrial-grade neon is a key resource in high-value chipmaking. Any polity wanting to play for the advanced technology spheres needs a good source of neon, and while the war has degraded/destroyed a lot of Ukraine's, it's still a strategic interest to have regardless of corruption.

Third, strategic depth between Europe and Russia doesn't just go in Russia's favor. One of the key shocks to the European public was the realization that war was literally only a long day's car drive from Berlin, and the prospects of a Russian-dominated Ukraine on the border of Poland is a significant concern to countries like Poland. Among other things, Ukraine is a buffer, and like Finland a demonstrably capable buffer able between Russia and others.

Fourth, sentiment is not to be overlooked. European governments are broadly accountable to their voters, and the pursuit of re-election does mean that things that are popular with the voters will effect decision maker cost-benefits. This is most obvious in leading power Germany, where the government's obvious resistance to aiding Ukraine- from the helmet fiasco to stated fears of escalation- have been regularly overpowered by not just external pressure, but internal pressure. A German government whose voters supported neutrality would be much more resistant to pressure- a German government whose own voters want it to deliver arms finds itself backtracking its prior concerns. The same applies to corruption- corruption of Ukraine is not the most significant emotional concern European voters have about it, and corruption is only an obstacle in so much as people are otherwise neutral.

Fifth and finally, internal EU politics. There are two key nexus of interests that have an interest in resisting Ukrainian entry regardless of corruption- EuroFederalists, who fear a new nation will be too emotional to defer to the EUropean nationalism intended to replace nation-based nationalism, and the French-German axis, whose power within the EU frays as more members join, to the point that the French-German alignment is no longer the 'motor' of European policy in the way it once was. To those groups, any entry of a state of 40+ million people (half of Germany) would be a major barrier to the centralization of European Union power over European states, or the ability of France and Germany to jointly dominate that power over the other European states. To other countries, this isn't a bug, it's a feature, and expansion-of-the-EU-to-weaken-it has been a core policy of much of the European Expansion advocates, which has included powerful countries (UK, previously), weaker countries (who want to keep the EU loose instead of centralized), and especially the Eastern countries (who doubt Germany/France having their interests at heart vis-a-vis russia policy). Regardless of any level of corruption in Ukraine, people who want to move the political center of gravity eastward, or at least away from France and Germany, and who are not on board with a European unitary state will have an interest in Ukrainian ascession. Notably both parties are flexible on this as part of the give-and-take of European politics- the French and Germans have raised the prospects of watering down the veto as a precondition to allowing entry, others have used the Ukrainian issue to leverage the French and Germans into Russia policies that both were inclined to resist until dragged across the line.

There are plenty of reasons, and whether you find them compelling or not, you should at least be aware of other people's perspectives.

EU had enough of one Hungary with Orban stealing economic aid with his cronies, it doesn't need a second one. These internal problems will have to be corrected on their own, before, and not after, entry.

The EU's problem with Hungary and Orban isn't 'stealing economic aid,' it's that he uses the patronage network funding for non-pro-EU patronage networks. He's a fly in the ointment, but the ointment has always been largess to build patronage influence.

All in all, my position is you radically misunderstand the corruption dynamics involved in both Ukraine and in the EU itself, and are over-fixating on this issue. Corruption isn't why Ukraine will be barred entry by the likes of Germany or France- corruption will be the pretext used to facilitate, further, and defend their own interests within the European Union, that a Ukrainian entry might disrupt. The Europeans engage in their own corruption a plenty, and are quite willing to turn a blind eye when it suits them- what matters more is not that there is corruption, but the sort, and the tradeoffs.

Ukraine was responsible for 50% of global production of neon gas, which was a byproduct of industrial plants specifically built for it during the Soviet Union.

This is interesting, and I'm totally unfamiliar with neon production. What is the realistic medium term impact of, say, this production disappearing completely? Are there significant barriers to production being ramped up elsewhere? Is it mostly just some capital expenditure, and since the Soviets dropped das capital previously to build it, it hasn't been profitable to build much else, but if it disappeared, then within 5-10 years, new capital could be easily dropped to pretty much make up for the gap with some modest final price increase?

Not exactly an expert on neon production, though for a good pop-culture roundup on the importance of neon production that overlaps, try this-

https://www.rdworldonline.com/why-theres-a-neon-shortage-and-why-it-matters/

That is where the current situation in Ukraine enters the picture.

Air separation plants are expensive to build and operate. The products aren’t particularly difficult to transport, whether as a cryogenic liquid or compressed gas, but they are expensive to transport. Air separation plants generally serve a relatively local market or a large consumer. Distillation processes scale well, benefitting from what is commonly called the “two-thirds scale factor.” This is a mathematical relationship between how big something is and how much it costs to build. The capital investment to build an air separation plant grows at only 2/3 the rate of the capacity. Stated simply, bigger is better.

The neon industry in Ukraine takes advantage of very large air separation plants associated with steel manufacturing. These have economies of scale. They are a source of low-cost, crude neon-containing material that is a great starting point for making the purified neon used in lasers. Two manufacturers, Ingas and Cryoin, came to dominate the neon supply. They built on a feedstock advantage, gaining a further scale advantage. By some accounts, Ukraine was supplying about 70% of the world’s neon. Others estimate closer to 50%. No matter what the exact figure, the result is a dramatic and significant drop in the supply due to the war.

The current disruption is making many re-evaluate the global neon supply chain. It will likely lead to new entrants into the high-purity neon market. It is also causing a re-examination of neon use in excimer lasers. There is no replacement for neon, but use patterns are being examined in an effort to reduce consumption. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 prompted a flurry of research on reducing neon usage. Recycle systems for neon are commercially deployed, but are costly.

So to guess at your questions-

-From what I've read, the chip market is going to suck for the forseeable future, and this is separate from the US lawfare against Chinese chip-making capacity. (One may even suspect that it was timed and launched with this expectation.) Chip production bottlenecks for the next several years- easily 5-to-10?- are going to hurt a lot of industries, and compound the economic woes of anyone currently either unable to afford relevant industries (potentially Europe with energy prices), legally access relevant technologies (China and Russia), or just weren't a player.

-Ramping up production elsewhere is possible, but difficult, and it's unclear how fast/able anyone is able to do this. Ukraine was used during the Soviet Union for reasons including steel production and logistics. Steel production- which provided the economies of scale mentioned before- is very energy intensive. The European energy-intensive industries were based on assumptions of cheap Russian energy imports... which aren't here anymore. I'd bet my blouse that China and the US have efforts, but I'm not familiar with anything specific.

-While in the longer term I'm given to understand a lot more people will develop neon production capacity out of need, the issue isn't so much the final price of neon then, but what the dynamics of the interim are between now and then. By the time neon supply restabilizes, the world could go through some major economic transitions or inflection points that radically reshape the global economy. Europe's efforts to combat Russian energy warfare are disguising a lot of the industrial pain behind consumer price controls. China has basically given up deflating some serious economic bubbles in the name of social stability... which means worse effects if they pop. Global demographic changes are accelerating, as rich countries get older and smaller. This great chip disruption could be the sort of thing that snarls a lot of countries on that front for a few years... by which point it's too late.

Or maybe that's over-stating it. Regardless, having any sort of control over a vital high-technology input resource is useful.

Thanks!

"It's not that war has made patriots out of corrupt oligarchs. There is a war because a surprising number of corrupt oligarchs were already nationalists even before 2014."

This irrelevant to my post about economical prospects, nationalist corrupt oligarchs are still corrupt oligarchs that prevent any meaningful raising of quality of life. "

"Between a confluence of crisis letting the government act, unique access and leverage by westerners pressing reforms, and domestic political support for the both, Ukraine has been undergoing major legal and structural shakeups no previous president of the last decades has matched."

This is a good point and you can say that maybe western oversight in relation to war will fix things generally. I personally don't believe because western influence while helping to win wars generally doesn`t fix corruption, but this can be special case because of the closeness of Ukraine to Europe, so there only way to test this is wait a couple of years.

"To the front, to salaries, to infrastructure and item purchases, and many other things needed in a war."

I know why would you think that I am talking about recent military help by US but I not. This text could have been written and posted before the war with almost no changes. I'm talking aid and loans that were given before and didn't help Ukraine reach at least Belarus level. Military aid mostly goes to the front because it is question of survival to the corrupt elites(and many civilians but they aren`t people who decide) and most of them are nationalists.

"Appealing to the 90s, when Ukraine's elite and public were very indifferent about European association (and the European Union did not exist), and not 2014"

Do you disagree with the factual statement talks of the euro integration started in the 90s? In my opinion this is objectively true and this is why I written it like I did. I don't say that ascendancy to EU is impossible in the next 20 years. I just showing of countries like Montenegro that widespread support isn`t enough to join quickly. If war related campaigns will succesfully pressure European countries into accepting Ukraine with all of its barrage of problems than it will be great but I don't think this is likely.

"The question is not 'why', but rather 'why are not you aware of the following?'"

You can list similar benefits for any country bordering the EU problem along this pros there are cons, some them not so obvious.

"To start, being poor is not the issue for Ukraine"

But why is it poorer than Belarus - this is the issue. And actually it very much the problem for people who live there and that's why they are trying to escape it, sometimes going through the occupied territories because borders of their own country are closed for half of population.

"The Europeans engage in their own corruption a plenty"

For some reason corruption perceptiveness and other indexes don`t show it. Corruption in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus is staggering, you can't talk about it lightly. You at least should agree that your view of EU is quite unusual.

This irrelevant to my post about economical prospects, nationalist corrupt oligarchs are still corrupt oligarchs that prevent any meaningful raising of quality of life.

This is entirely relevant, because nationalist corrupt oligarchs have priorities greater than solely self-enrichment. Hence the qualifier.

I know why would you think that I am talking about recent military help by US but I not.

You didn't talk about any specific sort or amount of aid. Raising military aid as an example demonstrates the shortcoming.

This text could have been written and posted before the war with almost no changes. I'm talking aid and loans that were given before and didn't help Ukraine reach at least Belarus level.

Are you? Because you're not actually identifying any specific aid packages, by any specific amount, with any targetted goal that they failed to meet. You're continuing to conflate different types and targets of aid, and inventing a metric they failed by. This is basic assuming the conclusion.

Even the metric you're probably referring to- GDP per capita- doesn't actually speak to corruption or failure of aid. Belarus is a country of about 10 million people, whose economy is a not particularly impressive but still established manufacturing economy in value-adding industry. Ukraine is a country of about 40 million, but far more of a farming and resource-extraction based economy, much further down on the value chain. The fact that Belarus has a GDP per capita of about $8.5k USD to Ukraine's $5k USD is neither particular surprising.

Nor does it indicate a failure of aid, because- again- you're not identifying any actual aid amounts give, or what their target effects are. Raising to $5k GDP/capita could be an amazing result, or a normal result, or a terrible result- you're not indicating. Raising GDP per capita may not be the goal of aid at all- the aid could be going to other purposes, like developing civil society institutions, or developing state capacity, or other things for which raising average citizen salaries is neither the point or the goal.

Do you disagree with the factual statement talks of the euro integration started in the 90s?

Sure. I disagree it's the relevant facts to assessing or characterizing the situation that you are describing, and thus an unfit argument. If you are almost two decades out of date of relevant context, you are two decades out of date.

The nature, characteristics, level of social and government commitment, and reciprocal interest in Ukrainian association with the EU is entirely different between now and the 90s. Making a like-to-like argument of the conversations of the 90s to today is a false comparison, even if individual facts are true.

In my opinion this is objectively true and this is why I written it like I did. I don't say that ascendancy to EU is impossible in the next 20 years. I just showing of countries like Montenegro that widespread support isn`t enough to join quickly. If war related campaigns will succesfully pressure European countries into accepting Ukraine with all of its barrage of problems than it will be great but I don't think this is likely.

To restate- you're not giving relevant facts, because the relevant fact isn't 'widespread support,' but a collection of dynamics of which 'widespread support' is just one. You did not make the argument on the basis of broader contexts.

You can list similar benefits for any country bordering the EU problem along this pros there are cons, some them not so obvious.

Of course I can, but the topic of your post isn't other countries bordering the EU, it is Ukraine, and you were the one making on argument on the reasons, or lack of reasons, for the Europeans to consider it.

If you intend to make an effort post on the pros and cons of Ukraine, I expect you to be able to competently speak to the pros.

But why is it poorer than Belarus - this is the issue.

While I am always pleased to see a motte and bailey alive in the wild, this is not the issue you were basing your argument on before, and is not actually an obstacle to joining the European Union. It's also appealing to a selective metric- while GDP per capita is poorer than Belarus, GDP is richer, and this is without considering other factors like the ongoing consequence of the multi-year war.

For some reason corruption perceptiveness and other indexes don`t show it. Corruption in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus is staggering, you can't talk about it lightly. You at least should agree that your view of EU is quite unusual.

Of course it is. It's also coming from someone unusually well read, and unusually interested in understanding how states interact. It doesn't change that "treason never prospers, for if it prospers none doth call it treason" has been an insight older than most of the modern states of the EU.

The reason that corruption perceptiveness doesn't register for most forms of corruption is because they aren't perceived as corruption by the societies doing them. It's 'just a way of business,' or cultural tradition, or some other euphism. What makes corruption distinct is that it is treated as a pejorative... but if it's treated as a euphism, or a beneficit thing, it's categorically different. That's why it's a corruption perception index, and not a patronage network index, even though patronage networks are one of the most classic forms of corruption.

In the European Union, one of the various systemic patronage network on the continent is the European Cohesion Fund. Between 2021-2027, it is allocated a 48 billion euro budget. The description of the fund, in its own words is: The Cohesion Fund provides support to EU Member States with a gross national income per capita below 90% (EU-27 average) to strengthen the economic, social and territorial cohesion of the EU. It supports investments through dedicated national or regional programmes.

This is not some secretive conspiracy. It's proudly announced in the European Commission website, including a nifty map graphic tool to look up individual projects to see just how much is being spent in your country or region:

https://commission.europa.eu/funding-tenders/find-funding/eu-funding-programmes/cohesion-fund-cf_en#budget-and-performance

It American political terms, this is pork barrel projects. In systemic power structure terms, this is a 8-billion-euro-a-year patronage network system in which richer countries pay the poorer countries for deference and continued alignment with the policy preferences of the EU's leading (donor) powers... and, as demonstrated in 2022, punish the poorer dissenters by withholding the patronage until compliance improves, when Hungary and Poland had their cohesion funds suspended (or threatened to be suspended). This is power of the purse politics.

In outsider terms, this is also a pretty basic form of monetary influence influence over elected leaders. Legitimately elected politicians are variously being bribed to support policies their electorates may nor, or being fiscally punished to coerce them into changing policies that do have electorate support. This is being done across levels of society to create parallel influence structures outside of electorate control, as these pressures can be used to target national leaders (nationally-distributed funds) but also bypass national leaders to pressure select regions or targeted dependencies (regional funds) to apply political effects in exchange for cash. These funds are broadly going into efforts that are not, and would not be, economically viable without these grants, developing dependencies by special interest groups hooked on maintaining, and expanding, these artificial funding stream and do so by applying influence from the inside of the power politics in favor of external monetary interests.

But it's not going to be perceived as corruption to most Europeans because this is accepted business, and the petty nuances of political policy changes in exchange for money aren't bad if you use the right words. It's about Fortifying Democracy, or Countering Far-Right Governments, or Restoring Rule of Law. It's Good Things, and thus cannot be corruption because Corruption is Bad.

But it's still a patronage network aimed at creating political effects in favor of the patrons. Corruption is a pejorative, but at its heart most corruption at a social level is various forms of patronage networks and groups making deals with eachother. Corruption is just what people call these dynamics when they don't approve of them- it's just a 'who, whom' instead of actual opposition to patronage networks trying to influence politics.

It's about Fortifying Democracy, or Countering Far-Right Governments

The practical effect of the Cohesion Fund thus far has been channeling vast amounts of €€€ to the same far-right governments, though, arguably helping them maintain the economic growth that has, in the end, underpinned their rule (and also served as an avenue of corruption, ie. Orban's childhood friends getting real paid and so on). Of course, one can see the (heretofore ineffective) threat to end that money as EU pulling leash... but another way of seeing it is that it really is bad when Orban sends my tax euros to some guy's companies because he can, and it's good if that sort of a thing is ended even if Orban's show of picking conspicuous fights with EU is effective for making it look to some like he's just being punished for loving his country too much.

I don't disagree that you can have that perspective, but this gets back to my point that Orban's sin isn't running a corrupt patronage network, but in running a corrupt patronage network in the wrong way. The patronage network itself is not the problem- the European Union system wouldn't care if Orban was sending your tax euros to some guy's companies if Orban was singing the right tune, just as the American system doesn't really care when the family members of leading politicians end up as well compensated members of corporate or charity boards, or retired from government directly into media gigs of the Fourth Estate supposedly watching them during time in government.

At the end of the day, the European Union, and the governments of Europe that compose it, are groups of people grouped by political alliances and mutually beneficial arrangements. 'I scratch your back and you scratch mine' is one of the oldest quid pro quos there is, and it only sounds nefarious if you call it quid pro quo as opposed to 'compromise' or 'horse trading' or 'coalition building.' Different words can be used to re-characterize the same pushes and pulls of power.

There's actually an argument I've read before that corruption- at least in these more modest forms of mutual benefit- is a key part of building and maintain broad social groups, which would fall apart into zero-sum infighting without the common largess. This does seem to be a deliberate point of the European Project- a sort of bribing everyone to go along and get along- and is one reason the Polish and Hungary 'rebellions' are so politically disruptive. It's not about the money itself, but the rejection of a social contract that used money to mitigate the issues / autonomy of minor states, even as the European Project focused on the highest priority issue of controlling the risk of conflict between the most power (and richest donors), Germany and France (and, to an extent, UK). The EU, as a project designed to keep peace on the continent, has no higher priority than keeping Germany and France at peace, and certainly not beneficit corruption to keep others happy enough.

Where it falls apart, however, is when people start stigmatizing the natural, or the common, and losing sight of what their euphemisms actually decide. When people talk about Ukraine as a corrupt system, it's not a corrupt system in the sense of 'the cartels have intimidated the government into turning a blind eye,' or 'the police chief is always drunk and just does what the occupying army says.' It's important to understand that there are different types of corruption, the types that are relevant in different ways, and how different they are from your own euphisms and accepted practices before you point them out as the Obvious Reasons This Won't Work.

(Which you didn't, but I'm just rambling.)

This is entirely relevant, because nationalist corrupt oligarchs have priorities greater than solely self-enrichment. Hence the qualifier.

It can be relevant to political discussion, it is not to discussion about Ukranian economy.

You didn't talk about any specific sort or amount of aid.

The point in the post that you replying served only to answer sentiment that bright future for Ukraine is guarantied because of American and European aid. I don't need to delve in the specifics, I just need to cite the existance of aid before and that this didn't help economical development of Ukraine. Maybe its givers didn't have this as a goal, but this is one of the many explanations of ukrainian poverty that I decided to not list to limit size of the post.

Belarus is a country of about 10 million people, whose economy is a not particularly impressive but still established manufacturing economy in value-adding industry. Ukraine is a country of about 40 million, but far more of a farming and resource-extraction based economy

You can propose this as an explanation but is wrong and obviously wrong to any person that lived or lives in those countries, if you don`t could have at least looked at the Wikipedia's page for both nations' economies and than find that in both nations majority of gpd claims service sector(Belarus 51% Ukraine 60%) and agricultural sector being minor differs slightly between countries(Belarus 8% Ukraine 12%). If we decide to compare Ukraine and Belarus we can say that Ukraine has modern service based economy while Belarus still has large industry sector. But this can't be explanation to anything as can't be alternative reality Ukraine where it farming and resource-extraction based economy, they aren't categorically poor.

If you intend to make an effort post on the pros and cons of Ukraine

No, I'm not trying to show pros and cons, only the reasons why I'm not as optimistic about Ukraine's future as an average twitter user(Ukrainian, Russian or American). Pros are already assumed in the context of discussion and I replying to them by showing economic data and trends that show that these benefits didn't help Ukraine before.

While I am always pleased to see a motte and bailey alive in the wild, this is not the issue you were basing your argument on before, and is not actually an obstacle to joining the European Union

You misunderstood me, not poverty, not gpd per capita, not giant shadow economy are issues that are in my opinion are an obstacle to join EU but the cause of these issues, cause that I don't name because nor I nor experts in the field are sure about it.

Of course it is. It's also coming from someone unusually well read, and unusually interested in understanding how states interact

Thank you for expressing your point and I will not argue with it because while I disagree with it, I'm not well read on this to try to defend my position on EU.

From my discussions with Ukrainians and Russians, it was commonly understood before the war that Ukraine was actually far more corrupt than Russia was. It also doesn't have any resources like you pointed out. Belarus doesn't either, but it gets subsidized with cheap oil/gas from Russia to help its economic growth.

Corruption and the low growth it brings are difficult to change, but not impossible. And if there's anything to catalyze change, an existential war has to be one of the best. After the war, there's going to be a massive political push from Ukraine and likely the broader EU to get Ukraine entrenched in Western institutions like the EU and maybe NATO. A precondition for this is anti-corruption reforms, which could plausibly put Ukraine on the same path as Poland.

Turkey and Serbia's accession bids stalled because the political will to join the EU died out in both countries before they could join. That's not going to be the case in Ukraine.

Slow morning, eh?

For some time now, we've been discussing the implications of Hunter Biden's laptop, and whether the information it contained was relevant to our political system. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we know that the FBI knew about the laptop's contents roughly a year in advance of the 2020 election, and used its official access with the major social media companies to prepare their censors to perceive the story as Russian disinformation. Then when the story actually broke in the press, the FBI successfully pushed the social media companies to censor it.

From the laptop information itself, we know that for quite a while now, Hunter Biden has been engaged in various grifts, selling purported access to his father in exchange for lucrative sinecures with various foreign corporations, selling "art" for amusingly inflated values, and so on. The supposition on the Red side has been that this grift implicated Biden as well, and Trump's attempts to have that theory investigated led directly to his first impeachment. The laptop emails backed this story with evidence, with Hunter referencing how "the big guy" was getting a significant cut of his grift money, and one of his associates confirming that "the big guy" was in fact Joe Biden.

Blues on the other hand claimed that there was no reason to suppose any corruption was happening. While Hunter was obviously a junkie fuckup grifter, and was obviously making his money claiming to peddle influence, there was no evidence of actual payments going to Joe, so this was all meaningless. My impression of the previous threads is that even those here who thought Hunter was paying Joe, assumed that there would be no formal exchange of money, but rather quid-pro-quo.

Now it appears that Hunter Biden has been paying rent to live in his father's residence in Delaware, to the tune of $49,901 per month. For completeness' sake, it must be mentioned that this is the same residence where Joe was found to be improperly storing classified documents, alongside his Corvette. While it seems doubtful that the files would be of interest to a junkie who prospers by peddling influence for foreign corporations, it's a detail that does add a touch of piquancy to the overall narrative.

So this appears to me to be pretty open-and-shut. Joe Biden is corrupt, selling influence to foreign corporations in China and Eastern Europe through his son Hunter. Hunter collects the money, then kicks a large slice back to Joe through rent, and quite possibly other, yet undiscovered "repayments". Trump was impeached when he attempted to have these activities investigated, while the FBI sat on the information they were given, and engaged in a protracted disinformation and censorship campaign to keep that information from leaking elsewhere. That information does in fact lead to provable direct payments from Hunter to Biden.

Impeachment when?

[EDIT] - ...Or perhaps not! @firmamenti points out that while Hunter is apparently living in the residence and renting an office space for 50k, the office space is not specified to be in the residence, and very well could be an entirely separate location entirely unconnected to Biden. The hunt continues...

I don’t think that’s what that document is implying.

The document appears to say that Hunter was claiming Bidens Delaware house as his own residence, and that also the business listed on the document was paying $50k of rent, presumably for an office space. That office space could also be Joes house, but that doesn’t seem to be indicated by the document.

There should be an investigation into this, and it should be public. I want these people in front of congress or a adversarial lawyer, and I want them questioned, including Joe.

Impeachment for Joe is a dead end, but his son needs to answer some tough questions, and if he doesn’t have the correct answers he should probably be in prison.

Agreed. The form was far from clear. I think there is a “there” there but this form doesn’t really move the needle.

Best case for Joe is that Hunter have the impression Joe was involved and all other evidence can be explained. But there is a lot of smoke here.

What's the over / under on whether (conditional on actually being guilty), Hunter Biden is actually investigated, convicted, and serves a sentence comparable to what a "regular Joe" would serve?

I would give something like 1:1000 -- or about the likelihood that the true "alt-right" has some sort of overwhelming awakening and victory (if a Mitt Romney or even Ron DeSantis-type Republican were magic-wanded into the Presidency tomorrow, I do not think he or she would push for much beyond some media noise).

On a related note, what would other people give as the odds ratio of the "alt-right" gaining some sort of overwhelming victory in the next 10 years? To me it seems like this would require some extreme sequence of events, for example DJT is assassinated by the FBI [1] and an overwhelming evidence trail comes to light.

[1] Dear Secret Service, I am not advocating for this to happen, it is a purely hypothetical scenario.

Didn’t the ALT right by the biggest media property in the world and has an owner followed by nearly everyone who spouts ALT-Right constantly.

That seems like a large victory.

Are you talking about Elon Musk and Twitter? Because I'm going to need some good evidence that Elon is an Alt-Righter, or some sort of White Nationalist.

Also, there is a new motion in the FBI Seth Rich FOIA case from the plaintiff that seems to make the claim that the FBI covered up Seth Rich's involvement in the email leak.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txed.197917/gov.uscourts.txed.197917.92.0.pdf

Previously from the FBI:

https://twitter.com/Ty_Clevenger/status/1601780110117703680

https://lawflog.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/2022.12.09-FBI-reply.pdf

Ben Schreckinger’s book, The Bidens, builds a pretty strong case that both Hunter and Joe’s brother, Jim, have tried to cash in on Joe’s name with varying degrees of success and failure over the years, and when people close to Joe have raised the issue, Biden has repeatedly chosen to plug his ears, out of familial loyalty, and the belief that if he doesn’t know about it, he is in the clear. But also, that links actually connecting Biden to any corruption have not been uncovered.

Yes, Biden has ignored conflicts of interest and in a better world he would have been disqualified from holding office. But in terms of Washington, he’s sadly rather benign.

The darkly funny thing is the Bidens are so small-time when it comes to money, and a savvier man than Joe could have cashed in far more than Biden did, at least in his senate years when representing a state with only a million people and two-thirds of America’s Fortune 500 companies registered, there. But Joe was always far more interested in holding office, with a personal dream of becoming president. In one sense, hats off to the senile old mick — privately, Obama was never bullish on his prospects — but he did it.

Impeachment when?

This is a culture war section, so one joke of an impeachment needs to be met with one that also appears to be built on flimsy ground, because the other tribe did it? I’d rather wait until some substantial proof is uncovered. Let’s say a benchmark of something worse than Jared Kushner getting $2,000,000,000 from the Saudis six months after his father-in-law left office.

A tangent on Jim Biden — the seedier folks involved with Dickie Scruggs were tossing Jim’s name around as part of a new lobbying firm they were going to open in D.C. before the feds came down on them.

100% Joe needs to be impeached by the House. Retaliatory strikes are necessary in war. GOP can’t let the first impeachment stand unpunished.

This is what Trump should've taught the Republicans, but didn't really: you must fight.

But that just raises further questions! Like if you were a politician with presidential aspirations, would you let family members repeatedly cash in on your good name in shady ways for decades? Or would you try to distance yourself from them as much as possible? Imagine your brother or son just got caught for the third time doing corrupt shit and linking it to you, but they swear they did nothing wrong. Do you believe them?

What about if your boss did that at work, just let his family run around embroiling him in scandals and doing things that made him look corrupt - would you believe him when he said he believed they did nothing wrong? If you did believe him, would you trust his judgement or would you think he had an obvious blindspot rendering him easy to manipulate?

Biden is savvier than some give him credit for, and I think playing dumb is the right move here. If he gets himself actively involved in his brother and son's shady dealings, well, that raises the risk of being dragged down if they're caught. If you speak against them loudly and distance yourself as much as possible, as you say, you will have convinced approximately nobody that you're clean and have attracted approximately five million sharks who smell blood in the water.

Or you play dumb, do your own thing, and don't begrudge your family some cash paid by shady parties who think giving your relatives cushy jobs will buy them influence.

I mean - really, think about it. Suppose Biden came out tomorrow, and spoke out against his family. Suppose he condemned their influence-seeking and money-grubbing ways, coasting by on their surnames. That he'd swear up and down he had nothing to do with it, honest, fingers crossed.

Do you see that as a good move? Do you think that'll convince any single one of the people currently in doubt? Do you think it'll put the matter to rest even slightly?

I don't think it would. And in doing so he'd get people he loves and cherishes thoroughly incensed with him while just getting his opponents more ammunition: 'He knew all along! What isn't he telling us?!'

Better to play dumb. It is what it is.

The point of Joe denouncing Hunter's influence peddling operation isn't to make him look cleaner - as you point out, this wouldn't work. Never apologise, never explain is the right way to handle a scandal that isn't bad enough to concern people who are not political news junkies or enemy partisans.

The point of Joe denouncing Hunter's operation would be to let foreign crooks know that Hunter doesn't have the influence he is selling, because that would make Hunter stop. I will admit that I don't know if that would work either - I suspect the average corrupt Ukrainian businessman would assume that Joe's denunciation is performative and of course Hunter has the influence he is selling despite it.

I think pet of the issue here is that the prior on Joe Biden being corrupt is low, so you need more than circumstantial evidence to make people who are not already anti-Biden partisans care.

The theory that the MAGA crowd are pushing is that Joe Biden decided to run a large scale influence peddling operation, employed his junkie failson as a key fixer in it when he could have hired a professional, and then didn’t spend the money. That is possible, but it is not likely compared to a junkie failson ripping off clueless foreigners by selling influence with Dad he didn’t have and spending the money on blow and hookers.

I don’t see how that is true.

Biden had a cheating scandal at university.

Biden had a plagiarism scandal in the 80s.

Biden has had questionable dealings with his brother and certain banks.

Biden doesn’t come off as squeaky clean. He comes across at least to me as a cheat.

Remember when the Democrats had Biden look at the camera, break the fourth wall, and say "do I look like an extreme leftist to you?"

They know that as long as Biden has the looks and mannerisms of an upper-middle-class grandpa with a touch of dementia, most people will map him to "harmless and with good intentions".

In reality, Biden is a lifelong politician who has likely never worked an honest day in his life. All the things you cited reinforce that. The fact that his son Hunter is all sorts of fucked up to me also reinforces that (although only as part of a constellation of data points; it is far from conclusive by itself).

Yep. Perception rules.

I thought the prior on Joe being corrupt was quite high. And basically assumed (along with most career politician earning thru some kind of grift). I also assume McConnell is probably corrupt. Nancy has likely traded on inside information.

The question on Joe i feel is whether he was being corrupt in ways that everyone does their corruption. Hunter Biden getting 300k a year to to work for the Delaware teachers union is corruption that we all accept and tolerate. Hunter working for a ukranian oligarchs energy firm was in my view past the line for acceptable or legal corruption.

Also been noticing on oline message boards a shift in tone of Joes corruption. People use to deny he was “the big guy” and that he did the bad kind of corruption. Now it seems like arguments run to sure he’s corrupt but you can’t “prove it”.

I agree - I meant that my prior on Joe Biden being corrupt in ways that are unusual for Washington is low, not that my prior on his being corrupt at all is low. Hunter's early career at MBNA and Amtrak board seat stink to high heaven and would not be allowed in sane world, but that sort of crap is common in the US (and most other countries). I don't buy the claim that Joe was running an influence peddling operation with Hunter as fixer which brought in tens of million dollars, mostly because Joe Biden does not appear to have tens of millions of dollars.

At this point it seems true that Joe was in fact attempting to run an international influence peddling scheme.

Not sure where your getting he doesn’t have 10’s of millions. This looks like a proper mansion.

https://www.housebeautiful.com/design-inspiration/a34430021/joe-biden-mansion-greenville-wilmington-delaware-dupont-nemours/

Did you even click the link? Biden bought it as a fixer-upper for $185k, and sold it for $1.2 million in 1996 (no publically available information as to how large the mortgage was). Mansions in the sticks (and an exurb of Wilmington is the sticks) are upper middle class purchases - the rich buy in prime locations. At modern prices that looks like a 3 million dollar home.

Based on his published tax returns, Biden made about $15 million before taxes legally from book royalties and speaking fees between his terms as VP and President. His lifestyle at the time was entirely consistent with that level of wealth.

Think you framed “10 million”. Price would depend on location and was owned by the DuPonts. It still screams mansion and fits the demands of someone with 10 million. Could be more.

The prior is low because actual corrupt people who have served as a US Senator for 40 years make a lot more income than he did. And, yes, the relevant source of information is indeed the person's tax return, since that is the point of becoming a politician if you are corrupt: to earn lots of legal, or at least apparently legal, income.

We had corrupt politicians in Slovakia who owned literally nothing on paper and were regularly seen inhabiting multiple small palaces in various countries, sailing on yachts, riding in expensive cars owned by other people and so on. You must have a legal term for this - not owning but using property as if you owned it.

Are we supposed to believe this sort of trickery isn't possible in the US ?

EDIT:

Okay, well, this is an alternate explanation:

https://www.themotte.org/post/317/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/54089?context=8#context

Yes, of course it is possible. The question is whether it is likely in this case, given the evidence we have. And, it is pretty common knowledge that Biden was vastly less wealthy than was the norm for Senators. So, are we to believe that he engaged in Slovakia-esque "trickery," but no on else did.

And, remember, the issue here is ONLY what our prior should be. That is all.

That link estimates his net worth in 2008 as $24,000. That doesn't sound reasonable to me. Even the $360k for total investments it has below that sounds preposterously low given that he'd sold his mansion for over a million back in the 90s.

Given the performance of the stock market in 2008, the 360K is not surprising. Had he had it all in the SP500, it would have been 586,000 at the beginning of the year.

As for the house, if I buy a house for 500K and put 20% down, then sell it for 1 million, I walk away with $600,000. (And that does not count the apparently extensive renovations that were done on the house, which can easily run to the hundreds of thousands). But if I then buy a slightly nicer house for $1,100,000, my net worth, looking only at the house, is -100,000. And, depending on timing, given the housing market in 2008, it might be a lot less: If I bought in 2006, the house I paid $1,100.000 for might be worth only $900,000. It is completely believable that, because 2008 was such an outlier, his net worth would be unusually low that year. And note that the subsequent numbers are what you would expect from the recovery of the stock and housing markets.

And, don't underestimate the cost of putting three kids through private school, college, and in two cases, law school (and I guess in one case, rehab).

More to the point, as I said, the chart indicates that he was vastly less wealthy than the norm for Senators. Unless you think that he is somehow much, much better at hiding assets than are other Senators.

The chart only indicates anything if it's accurate. It looks auto generated to me, maybe scraped from public data. It's conceivable that a 65 year old lifelong senator had less savings than your average boomer but I'm gonna go with that unsourced website being bullshit. If it's not then he's certainly done well since then, Forbes put him at $9 million in 2018, so almost 400x as wealthy as he had been a decade before according to your numbers.

More comments

Of course that is a bit question begging if the source of the info doesn’t contain the undisclosed payments.

As I said, "So, are we to believe that he engaged in Slovakia-esque "trickery," but no on else did." And again, this is about establishing a prior, nothing more.

Well it seems others did engage in corruption in different ways. For example, it seems obvious that Pelosi engaged in legal insider trading. Others do the “pay me outrageous sums for speaking fees.” These things are technically legal and therefore outside of political embarrassment need not be kept on the downlow.

Biden’s purported influence peddling is arguably illegal and therefore would need to be kept on the downlow. The question would be why he didn’t do the legal methods. My view is Biden isn’t particularly intelligent.

Hunter seems to pay for a lot of his dad’s expenses. This would be a way to funnel money to his dad without reporting it. Of course, that means Joe also committed tax fraud. So perhaps another thing to impeach him over if true.

Of course, that means Joe also committed tax fraud.

No, it doesn't. Gift income isn't taxable. You may have heard of gift tax but that's something entirely different—the purpose behind it is to prevent people from ducking the estate tax by giving all their money away before they die. As such, the burden of paying the tax is on the donor, not the recipient. In other words, if Hunter giving his dad large sums of money causes any tax issue's, they're Hunter's tax issues.

No. If I am performing services and are paid for said services, but instead of receiving compensation directly the party receiving the services pays my expenses, then that is disguised compensation and is certainly taxable income I failed to report. Key case here is Commissioner v. Duberstein.

The recipient of a gift does not have to report the gift as income. The giver reports the gift and pays any applicable gift tax.

Read my response to Rov Scam? There is a lot of caselaw (see what I cited) distinguishing between a gift and payment for services that results in taxable income. Assuming Joe is being paid as part of the influence peddling scheme, then the transferor (ie Hunter) isn’t giving Joe the money just because Joe is his dad but is giving him the money due to the business arrangement. Accordingly that means the payment is not a gift but is actually income.

Assuming Joe is being paid as part of the influence peddling scheme

Well, that is a pretty big assumption. And, I said: "The prior is low because actual corrupt people who have served as a US Senator for 40 years make a lot more income than he did." Your response is "well, if you assume he was part of a influence peddling scheme, his true income was higher." But whether he is corrupt is the question at hand; that assumption assumes the conclusion. So, yes, if you already "know" the answer, all evidence to the contrary is supposedly false or actually supports your conclusion. But you don't know the answer.

You said we shouldn’t expect Joe Biden to be corrupt because he has a low amount of income. My retort was you are basing low amount of income because of what Biden reported. If Joe Biden’s expenses are paid by Hunter (consistent with what Hunter claims in the email) then of course Joe’s low amount of reported income is not predictive at all of whether Biden is corrupt. That is, what you are basing your prior off of is questionable because of the known arrangement. Neither of us can prove it either way right now but it isn’t fair to use a highly questionable prior to make a Bayesian judgement here.

My comment about tax fraud is to say that it’s possible Biden has committed more crime than merely influence peddling.

More comments

I think pet of the issue here is that the prior on Joe Biden being corrupt is low

Biden seems to say whatever is most convenient at the time, whether that be flip-flopping on policies or just making up stories about his own life. My prior is that Biden can't stay bought. So some interest might funnel him some money and get a meeting, but as soon as they are out of the room Biden will be playing to whoever is in front of him next. It's also just generally difficult for a President to have that much discretionary power to personally significantly damage the realm by selling out to some pecuniary interest. The worst things his administration has done seems to involve selling out the realm to some activist/ideological interest. Although if Ukrainian money getting to Joe Biden is the reason USG is involving itself in the Ukraine war, that would be big deal and potentially catastrophically bad. But I'm not sure that is the case, Biden might actually be more of a voice of sanity in his own administration, with the meddling in the Ukraine really being driven by the overall Zeitgeist.

There are many influential groups in and around Washington strongly in favor of supporting Ukraine and opposing Russia. Foreign service lifers like the Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland wing who are neoliberal interventionists, and folks working for the military industrial complex that had to delay buying a second vacation home or remodeling their mansion in northern Virginia when the Afghanistan tap got cut off, to name two of the more powerful. The likelihood that Biden is the primary advocate for the U.S.’s involvement seems slim.

That is possible, but it is not likely compared to a junkie failson ripping off clueless foreigners by selling influence with Dad he didn’t have and spending the money on blow and hookers.

We have no reason to believe that's the case. And that Biden went after the Ukrainian prosecution suggests he was involved in the corruption, if it was just his son doing stupid shit, he'd not have lifted a finger. Biden bragged on video about having the prosecutor fired!

And that Biden went after the Ukrainian prosecution suggests he was involved in the corruption

This is precisely what was in issue in the performative criminal investigation that Trump asked Zelenskyy to launch, and therefore in the first Trump impeachment. He probably didn't.

Biden bragged on video about having the prosecutor fired!

If Biden went after the prosecutor for other reasons, then it was stupid (because you shouldn't act where a conflict of interest exists, even if it is just for appearance's sake) but not corrupt. And there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that this is what happened - notably that the EU, the IMF, and the Ukrainian opposition all agreed that the prosecutor should be fired for slow-walking corruption prosecutions.

But there are a lot of corrupt politicians. Does tying aid to firing happen all of the time? Maybe — but it seems no one made that argument or at least no one that I’m aware of

Tying aid to progress in anti-corruption investigations happens all the time. According to a wide range of western-aligned institutions, the main way to speed up anti-corruption investigations was to fire the prosecutor who was slow-walking them.

Do you have sources on that? I know IMF ties funding to certain things, but wasn’t area of the US doing so (I thought it was military aid but could be mistaken).

Rarely is it mentioned that Shokin was then replaced with a prosecutor who dropped those prosecutions entirely.

This makes me uncomfortable because it reminds me so much of those times that the Democrats would push narratives about Russia and Trump. I remember making arguments at length that regardless of whether or not Trump was 'polite' the office of the presidency should still command respect; I thought these were strong arguments and maybe I still do. When are we going to try to be a more uniting force instead of continuing to hunt down scandals involving relatives?

Kushner being sent to build peace in the middle east was unorthodox in the appearance of nepotism, but in unorthodox times we need unorthodox solutions. I dare call this preoccupation on Biden's spawn obsessive. You're trying to hold 'the system' to a consistency it never had. Trump did things that angered the left and that made me glad, but as I think about a divided country I feel some shame for embracing that power, for now I see in you someone who is angered, much as the left was, over trivial, irrelevant, and imagined corruption.

Do you need to be told that Trump lost, get over it? Do you need to be told to look to the future and not the past? What are you looking for? What are you hoping to find?

I guess the question is what is an acceptable level of corruption taking into account the cost of trying to stamp it out.

If Biden corruption is worse than acceptable level, then trying to make an issue of it is part of looking forward. Of course, the IF is playing a large role there.

Some of these points might be true but everything changed when they impeached Trump the first time. The right still needs to fight for getting to play by the same rules. Otherwise you would lose every elections and never project power.

While I have come to a conclusion we should respect the presidency and ignore small crimes the rights fighting culture war right now which means using power.

Otherwise you would lose every elections and never project power.

The right just lost elections because they can't let go of Trump. Trump doesn't project power he projects weakness. He used to be able to do it but his time is done. DeSantis has some strong points but I'm still hoping for someone a little better at silencing wokeness without feeding division.

Im not saying run trump. I’m saying we should be fighting back and one of the steps is impeachment of Biden.

I don’t think not being divisive is a choice. The war is here and the woke won’t quiet down because you asks them nicely.

I think RD can. You don’t win by that many points in Florida without getting some dem voters.

What are you looking for? What are you hoping to find?

You can't tolerate corruption like that.

... you think it's normal that Biden bragged about having Ukrainian prosecuted fired for investigating Burisma, the company that was paying off Hunter Biden ?

This is just corruption. In any western European country, that'd cause the government to resign. Ministers there resign over some piddly plagiarism nonsense, or minor oversights. Even in eastern Europe it'd be a major scandal and probably require new elections.

... you think it's normal that Biden bragged about having Ukrainian prosecuted fired for investigating Burisma, the company that was paying off Hunter Biden ?

Probably Bundestag MPs also had their children employed by Burisma.

https://www.uawire.org/news/german-deputies-advise-poroshenko-to-consider-changing-of-the-prosecutor-general

And some guy from SBU who accused Shokin of corruption and demanded his resignation also had dealing with Burisma.

https://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2015/11/12/7088525/

And members of Kharkiv Human Rights Group...

https://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2016/01/7/7094715/

And dozens of Ukrainian MPs...

https://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2015/12/22/7093387/

... and that proves what? That Biden jr. being paid off is okay ?

No, that disproves your assertion that Shokin was fired on behest of Biden Sr because the latter wanted Shokin not to investigate his son. Of course, you could say that it WAS the real reason, and Biden just used reputation of Shokin being a corrupt prosecutor for plausible deniability in getting him fired. But then argue accordingly, not just put it as an undeniable fact.

Also Hunter Biden didn't commit any crime according to Ukrainian law by working there. Zlochevsky, the head of Burisma, most likely did - but then it was during presidential term of Yanukovich, a figure very much beloved by some on American far right and far left, deposed by the evil CIA.

No, that disproves your assertion that Shokin was fired on behest of Biden Sr because the latter wanted Shokin not to investigate his son.

Yeah, it looks like Shokin was fired because he wasn't investigating the 'right' people.

**It still doesn't explain to me why you think politicians getting paid off by through their family getting cushy sinecures in foreign countries is remotely okay. **

It's okay in Ukraine. We get that, it's why Ukraine is that way.

In any normal county, a politician whose junkie son gets $50k a month from a sinecure in a famously corrupt country overseas would instantly be embroiled in a huge scandal.

In any normal county, a politician whose junkie son gets $50k a month from a sinecure in a famously corrupt country overseas would instantly be embroiled in a huge scandal.

Says a person from Slovakia 😩

Our graft is these days mostly limited to 15-20% cost inflation on government contracts. Your president is a an actor whose show was funded by an oligarch, who among other things,stole how many billion $ from Ukrainians by running a bank and giving out loans to friendly companies.. Was it 2 or 5 billion ? They still haven't bothered to wipe that shit off the internet. We had shit like this in mid to late 1990s. That was .. quite some time ago.

If these days Ukraine was as corrupt as Slovakia, you'd probably be as prosperous as Poland what with the better climate, natural resources and sea access.

Now, Slovakia isn't a normal country, but at least half of the parties wouldn't tolerate something like this, and it definitely wouldn't fly anywhere in western Europe.

More comments

In any normal county, a politician whose junkie son gets $50k a month from a sinecure in a famously corrupt country overseas would instantly be embroiled in a huge scandal.

No, this is business as usual in the UK, France, the USA and more. You usually don't hear about it it because of how accepted it is. And that is because compared to corruption in Pakistan, China and yes Ukraine and so on it is tiny. There is no non-corrupt country but most of the wealthy Western ones have fairly minimal levels like said Hunter Biden issues. The amount of effort it would require to eradicate is just not worth it. And of course it's not like elites whose families benefit from it would want to. Even if they are temporarily on the other side of it for short term political gain. Trump does it even more directly with Jared and Ivanka and so on. It isn't exceptional, it is the norm.

Putting relatives of people with power on boards and in cushy executive positions is endemic almost everywhere. That might not make it ok, but please do not underestimate how common it is in "normal" countries.

That might not make it ok, but please do not underestimate how common it is in "normal" countries.

As an eastern European, we used to look up to Germany when it came to political culture, and they seem fairly intolerant with corruption.

Do they do this too ? Or is e.g. Schröder involvement in Gazprom only a scandal because it's politically advantageous to bash Russians ?

More comments

But you've been tolerating corruption like this the entire time. The system is so corrupt that picking any one portion of it to get angry about is missing the point and falling into partisanship. Do you really want to debate the Democrat talking point of Trump's Ukraine phone call? It's a losing game.

The US government exerting influence like that over foreign countries is part and parcel of post-war foreign policy. Relatives of important officials getting cushy jobs in the hope that it buys favorable treatment isn't good, but that's about the level of corruption that I've always assumed to be present anyways.

Well, maybe, if US is so corrupt and so crazy it needs to stop telling other countries how to mind their business or conduct their foreign policy.

And other countries should not listen to it. Especially not countries that aspire to some level of good government!

If America has a corrupt and inefficient federal government, of a kind that'd not be tolerated in Europe, 100k dead per year from overdoses, people looting shops in major cities and a homicide rate a nice third world country might be mildly ashamed of, **why do we care about them **?

Europeans need to have their noses rubbed in American dysfunction till they stop giving America attention or caring about it.

**If Americans can't even run their own country, why are we listening to them ? ** Their governance is even more catastrophic than in Europe.

Their army is falling apart due to low retention and recruitment, their defence contractors can't even produce enough ammo, etc.

Europe is big enough and rich enough to deal with Russia...

Europe 'needs' the US same way NY delis used to need the Italian guy in a nice suit who came around from time to time and asked if everything was okay and got some money.

If Europe pitched in with some resources, it could have a perfectly good strategic deterrent in Force de dissuasion.

As much as I dislike French state, the French are orders of magnitude less nuts and hubristic than D.C.

You can't tolerate corruption like that.

Can't you?

I remember a bit in the 90's that Lewis Black did about how bad government corruption had gotten. That when he was a kid, you knew it was happening. It was like being in a hotel, and you don't know which room, but you know somewhere, someone is fucking. "Now" in the 90's government corruption is like two dogs stuck together in the alleyway, and you just can't stop them. You spray water on them and it does nothing.

In the 2020's, we're how many generations into open obvious corruption being all American's have ever known? As much as I hate it, it's hard for me not to treat politicians like I do auto mechanics. I know they are going to fleece me, the question is, will they at least keep my car, or the country, running while they do it?

Of course, my charge is that the current neoliberal successor ideology isn't even doing that. But it's probably an orthogonal issue to their blatant corruption.

In the 2020's, we're how many generations into open obvious corruption being all American's have ever known?

We have a rather different take on this in eastern Europe. Corruption needs to be fought. They'll keep doing that shit anyway, but as long as you're trying, the graft doesn't exceed 15-20%.

The only thing I have to add here is that Matt Taibbi mentioned something on his premium podcast that I haven’t heard elsewhere.

He said he believe this is a DNC opp to sideline Biden in ‘24. He implied that he believes this is the case based on certain unreported facts about the source of this brouhaha. He didn’t elaborate. More of a passing comment to his cohost.

Sideline Biden in favor of who, though?

The left does seem to have a weak bench because their national candidates come from very liberal places and they’ve struggled to gain any traction in a lot of regions but they still have a few options especially when Biden isn’t all that desirable.

Newsom - good looking big state governor

Pritzker - think he’s very age and not charismatic but I would think he can be the not a GOP candidate as well as Biden

AOC - I know some Guiliani people who say they would prefer her over Biden because there is no fear she’s compromised. Charismatic/good looking/social media game. Seems to be moving somewhat more to mainstream Dem and away from squad leader

There’s no real rising star I can see but between these candidates and a few others there are generic Dem candidate who aren’t much worse than Biden at turning off moderates

Polis could be the move.

But surely Biden wouldn't even contemplate running in 2024? Everyone was saying that Trump was too old in 2020, and Biden is 80 now, he'll be 82 in 2024 and already there are health (and cognitive decline) queries around him.

I can't see any reason for him to go for a second term other than vanity, and that would be stupid. The Democrats must have a better way of telling him he can't run than working up a scandal?

he’s never seemed to be particularly interested in acquiring great wealth the way that the Clintons and Obamas have.

This is like comparing a handsome lady's man with many conquest to a dopey homely schlub with a wife who tolerates him, and thinking of the second man "He's never seemed to have a particular interest in hot women."

You are confusing Joe Biden being terrible at corruption to not being interested. And, hypothetically, it's not hard to understand why this might be the case. Biden's entire career has been defined by telling obvious stupid lies, and saying the quiet part out loud. No matter how corrupt Obama, Clinton or Bush may be, no matter how absurdly obvious to all observers it might be, they still make the correct deflecting mouth sounds. Mouth sounds about process and bureaucracy and partisan critics. Any prospective lobbyist attempting to corrupt Biden through the usual Washington means risks Joe just openly bragging about it in much the same way he bragged about getting the prosecutor investigating the company that hired his son fired.

Now it appears that Hunter Biden has been paying rent to live in his father's residence in Delaware, to the tune of $49,901 per month.

Do we know that Hunter did in reality pay this rent, or is it him fucking up claiming that it was a mortgage payment (I see by the linked story he also claimed to own the house) or that he was trying to pull some tax dodge (e.g. claiming an expense against income)?

I mean, it's Hunter, the guy might not even remember how to put his socks on let alone fill out a form correctly depending on how drunk/high/shagged-out he was on any particular day, and that's not including his tendency to be massively dishonest anyway.

Hunter Biden revealed in a 2019 text message to his daughter that the family has an arrangement where Joe Biden collects half his son’s salary.

To be frank, this seems like simple prudence. The family knows he's a fuck-up and will only blow his money on (literally) hookers and blow, so to have any money at all for general expenses of life, someone needs to take it off him. That's Joe, it would appear. Maybe that is what the "rent" payment really is; they just call it 'rent' to put the best face on it, when really it's "Joe taking half Hunter's money to put it away for him, because Hunter can't be trusted with it".

The latest abortion kerfuffle is decently well in the past now, and we've had a number of good threads on it in various places. I think it's a reasonable time to ask here:

Have you changed your personal opinion or political position on abortion access at all over the course of the last year or so? If so, to what, and based on what?

No not really. Seems like the political calculus is 15 weeks.

I had been pretty default pro-choice, having been basically a 90s libertarian. I feel like I've moved a little bit in the pro-life direction. Reasons:

  • This article detailing how abortion access actually works across the first world. It seems to be significantly less accessible than the seeming American / Feminist default position of on-demand all the way up to birth across the rest of the first world.

  • Among left-wing activists, they seemed to have moved from the previous default of "safe legal and rare" to being proud of abortions, shouting them from the rooftops, and openly advocating for as many of them as possible. This seems sick to me.

  • A thought I had that doesn't seem to want to go away: If you're actually raising a child, would you tell that child at some point in their life that you had had an abortion previously? What would you expect them to think of that? Children can be really annoying and inconvenient at the best of times. Virtually all of them will be imperfect in some way. The reason why we give children unconditional love is because they are so extraordinarily dependent on their parents and they know it, so they're naturally terrified at the idea of being abandoned. How can a child expect that from you once they realize that you basically killed your previous child because it was inconvenient? Oh, we didn't have a good job and weren't sure how we would support ourselves - does that mean that once you actually have a kid, if you lose your job or get in an accident or things get tough some other way, it's bye bye kiddo? Okay so you don't tell them. Unless they manage to find out some other way. Or maybe just don't do something that you'll never be able to tell your kid?

This article detailing how abortion access actually works across the first world. It seems to be significantly less accessible than the seeming American / Feminist default position of on-demand all the way up to birth across the rest of the first world.

No compromise breeds no compromise. Supporters of abortion rights know well that pro-lifers do not want "reasonable regulations", but want to ban abortion completely at any place and time (and then move to ban contraception, pornography, "sodomy", race mixing and everything else they see as immoral).

The same in gun politics - gun right supporters know well that anti-gunners do not want "reasonable gun control", but ban everything that looks like gun (and then move to knives and all sharp instruments, like in UK). If you compromise with the uncompromising, you always lose.

Among left-wing activists, they seemed to have moved from the previous default of "safe legal and rare" to being proud of abortions, shouting them from the rooftops, and openly advocating for as many of them as possible. This seems sick to me.

Again, the same with guns. Instead of fudds who just wanted to shoot Bambi, you got hard core gun nuts openly carrying big scary black rifles. This seems sick to gun controllers, and this is the point.

deleted

I personally have no interest in banning contraceptives because, again, who cares.

I want literally the opposite, largely because I am pro-life. I am tentatively in favor of forcing unmarried people to use contraceptives, except that there's no reasonable to enforce it without authoritarian government control that I'm not in favor of. At the very least, we should bring back all of the shame and stigma that used to be attached to unmarried sex a couple centuries ago, but only apply it to people who don't use birth control. Also make it free to incentivize people to use it.

First and foremost, this will reduce abortions. The argument against outlawing it is that people will just do it anyway but in unsafe ways. If so, the only way to truly prevent abortions is to prevent unwanted pregnancies, so we should be pushing legal and social pressures towards doing so.

Second, I believe it is immoral to bring an unwanted child into existence. They will not have the love and support from their parents that a child deserves. Again, pro-choice people use this as an argument in favor of abortions, but I think having an unwanted child is less evil than killing them (otherwise we could replace orphanages with euthanasia clinics). But it's still evil, and more birth control would also reduce this.

Thirdly, I believe it is immoral to deliberately have a child as a single parent, even if you want one. I feel less strongly about this, and I'm not sure I would go so far to call it "evil", just misguided and irresponsible. All of the science shows that children with two parents have significantly better life outcomes, I don't think one parent alone can fulfill all of the responsibilities of both paying for and actually educating and caring for a child, and doesn't have the full breadth of wisdom and life experiences to impart, since they only have their own perspective.

Unmarried people should not be conceiving children, because it inevitably leads to one of these scenarios (unless you have a shotgun wedding, which is still likely to lead to suboptimal results if your partner wasn't someone you were previously planning to marry). Therefore, unmarried heterosexual people should not engage in unprotected sex, at least in any form with a nonnegligble chance of conception. I'm not convinced it is the responsibility of the government to prevent this, I don't think it's within the range of powers they ought to have. But at the very least anyone who does this is a bad person and we need social pressure that disincentivizes people from doing it. Slut shaming is a lost cause, but I hope that unprotected-slut-shaming (Of both sexes. Men are equally culpable for their actions.) can make a comeback.

The problem with this position is that it's precisely contraception that enables people to think about sex in a way that makes abortion seem desirable. As long as sex is something that is done primarily for fun, and only incidentally, sometimes, if it's desired, for procreation, then the "what if the contraception fails" argument for abortion will always loom large in the background.

Now one might respond to this point with resignation, "the cat's out of the bag", but the point is that this cat creates a gravitational pull toward liberal abortion laws. Because when you have a culture of people who believe they are entitled to have sex for fun, it doesn't work to tell them, "if you forget to take your pill, or if the condom breaks, etc. etc. then sorry, you're out of luck, you have to have that child." That runs totally contrary to the way they understand sex and so it seems unlikely to me that they will accept that state of affairs. Why should they have to give up that entitlement to consequence-free sex and accept a dramatic change to their lifestyle simply because they made a little slip-up one time?

So sure, who knows, maybe we'll never be able to undo the sexual revolution...but in that case I really don't see how we'll ever shift the landscape conceptually and fundamentally away from abortion, such that abortion loses its gravitational pull. Success, if it's obtained through political wizardry, would always be an unstable imposition on a culture that would naturally incline the other way.

People have had sex for fun throughout all of human history. Even in times with serious social stigma for it, people did it in secret anyway. Even the Bible is absolutely riddled with people having sex they're not supposed to. The cat was never in the bag: people have always and will always want to have lots of sex. It has gotten worse in recent years, but it has always been there.

The most realistic path forward that I see is advances in technology making better, easier, safer forms of birth control that don't have the flaws of current ones. Something like an IUD but less invasive and easier to just give to everyone and then not remove until they get married. Or some fancy injection you can regularly give people like a flu shot sterilizes them for a year before it wears off (with reliable predictable timing so nobody ends up permanently sterilized or having kids if it wears off too soon). At the very least, some sort of significant birth control pill or IUD-like-thing for men so that both people can independently control their reproduction status and not be vulnerable to the other one lying.

But in the meantime, we have to work with the technology that exists. And while I do agree that it does contribute to promiscuity, I think that the effect there is secondary and minor while the effect on reducing pregnancies is direct and significant such that the net effect at saving unborn lives is definitely positive.

If I had some god-given certainty that any population with legal access to birth control would, independently of any soft pressure or incentives other than the force of the law, end up with fertility below replacement, then I would begrudgingly accept legal controls on it to prevent the extinction of the human race.

With anything less than said absolute certainty, I would attempt to explore a number of softer options. You could provide tax incentives and/or literally pay people to have children. You could attempt to increase the social status of good parents and shame childless people. You could attempt to advance technology to create artificial wombs and have the state make and raise babies (not at all an ideal outcome, but better than extinction or forcing people to breed against their will). You could explore the replacement rates of different subpopulations and attempt to preserve and promote cultures with higher fecundity. Maybe all the liberal white atheists voluntarily go extinct as their population exponentially declines, and they get replaced by immigrants and Amish people who keep having babies. I suppose a religion which forces people to avoid birth control taking over the population is comparable to just directly outlawing birth control, but not the same because people can leave. Maybe we end up in a long term equilibrium where 1/5 of the population are strongly religious with a reproductive rate of 3, and 4/5 of the population are atheists with a reproductive rate of 1/2, so the total population remains constant (1 religious person and 4 atheists have 3 and 2 kids in each group respectively), and some fraction of the religious children leave the faith every generation such that the sizes of each group remain constant.

There are a lot of possibilities that would mitigate the effects. Extinction of specific subgroups and cultures via demographic replacement is a valid and realistic concern for people who care about those subgroups and cultures. But I don't think extinction of the entire human species by perpetually lowered birthrates is a realistic threat unless some sort of chemical pollution actually destroys biological fecundity such that even people who want kids can't have them.

The cat that I'm referring to isn't having sex for fun, it's believing that you should be able to have sex for fun without incurring any consequences. That social attitude, which is enabled by contraception, is what (it seems plausible to me) creates the gravitational pull in favor of allowing abortion. Without that attitude, it's just seen as foolish conduct, not something that people are victims of and need to be rescued from.

All of the science shows that children with two parents have significantly better life outcomes

Is this true after controlling for money and intelligence?

I think so. It's been a while since I learned about this so I don't remember all the details or studies off the top of my head. But I'm pretty sure there were many such studies and probably at least some controlled correctly. I'm not completely certain though.

However I don't think it would even be appropriate to control for money/wealth/family-income directly, because part of the value of a two-parent household is the increased income. And even if you look at income per parent that's not necessarily appropriate because being a single parent forces them to juggle career and child rearing which would lead to less opportunities to take on high paying but demanding jobs. You'd have to control for socio-economic status of the families the parents came from (ie the grandchildren of the kids) or something complicated like that which controls for potential earning power rather than actual earnings.

I think "but extremists" is hardly ever a useful take. Yes, of course there are extremists on both sides of every issue. Most of the time, they aren't relevant due to being small in number. It might be a useful barometer if we can show somehow that the extremists are growing in number. Or if we can see their positions changing.

I don't agree with the pro-life extremists, but I don't think their positions or numbers have changed much. The pro-choice extremists may still be small in number, but their position does seem to be crazier than it was before. Free abortion on demand for everyone is one thing, but is it really appropriate to brag about it?

This is a massive strawman. Do you really believe that there's a meaningful number of pro-life advocates who want to ban race mixing? Do you for that matter believe that there's even close to a plurality that want to ban contraception(no, the government not giving condoms to middle schoolers is not a ban on contraception)? Even Texas has committed to keeping the morning after pill on the shelves.

This is a massive strawman. Do you really believe that there's a meaningful number of pro-life advocates who want to ban race mixing

I don't believe there was a meaningful number of 1750s voting-reform advocates who wanted 18 year old non-landowning born-out-of-wedlock black women to vote.

But that's where we ended up by following (the coherent extrapolated volition of) their 1750s logic.

So the answer to your question is "No, but I know a slippery slope when I see one"

I don't believe there was a meaningful number of 1750s voting-reform advocates who wanted 18 year old non-landowning born-out-of-wedlock black women to vote.

But that's where we ended up by following (the coherent extrapolated volition of) their 1750s logic.

So the answer to your question is "No, but I know a slippery slope when I see one"

Yes. We do not have to extrapolate anything - we see slippery slope in practice.

As for guns and weapons in general, we all know example of UK. Were gun controllers satisfied with making Britain gun free? No, they moved forward to knives and other sharp instruments.

What is next in line? Logic says it will be martial arts and fitness training. You got rid of guns, you got rid of knives, why should you let people got to gyms and turn their hands and fists into murder machines?

If it saves only one life, it is worth it.

As for abortion and "Christian morals" in general, we see Poland. Abortion ban with small exceptions was passed, and as time moves, the law is tightened more and these minuscule exceptions are rolled out.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/10/22/polands-constitutional-tribunal-rolls-back-reproductive-rights

And so go other "moral issues".

If you really wanted to minimize murder of innocent babies you would encourage gay sex as much as possible - no danger of unwanted pregnancy here. Of course, we all know it is not about saving lives, it is all about ending sin.

s for guns and weapons in general, we all know example of UK. Were gun controllers satisfied with making Britain gun free? No, they moved forward to knives and other sharp instruments.

Britain is not gun free let alone knife free. Much of my family have shotguns for example, my cousin is a sport shooter and has multiple rifles. Handguns are mostly banned it is true but that is not the same thing as guns in general being banned. And mostly every kitchen has enough knives to murder a few people were you so inclined.

The UK has significantly more restrictions than the US, but guns are not banned, let alone knives. You do need to get the appropriate license or certificate but you are very likely to be able to get a rifle or shotgun license as long as “they require their firearm on a regular, legitimate basis for work, sport or leisure (including collections or research)”

Some of my in-laws live in a rural area, plus I spent a lot of time around the culture while trying to buy a cocker spaniel puppy raised in a shooting household - I can confirm that rural shotgun culture in the UK is as strong as rural gun culture in other countries, and that shotgun licenses are easy to get. The rules are designed to discourage using a shotgun which is owned for sporting purposes as a home defence weapon (you have to store the gun unloaded, with the gun and ammo in two different locked compartments), but 100% of the rural gun owners I spoke to planned to shoot a burglar if the opportunity arose. Armed farmers were generally aware of the Tony Martin case, and thought that he shouldn't have been convicted, but also that they were not in danger from the law because they wouldn't be as stupid as Tony Martin (who had already lost his gun license in a separate incident to the one he was jailed for for shooting at a moving getaway car).

And what is the slippery slope here? Loving was decided primarily on Equal Protections ground so can easily be differentiated from Dobbs.

You're making a legal argument here, which is, in Cercei Lannister's words, "some flimsy piece of paper". Law is an untrustworthy ally; it will not save anyone from any slipperiness, long-term. Your enemies will just change the law when they get legislative power.

By way of example: naturalisation of anyone other than "white persons of good character" was illegal until 1795; your argument is that of a man in 1794 claiming "No-one has to worry about demographic change ever, it'll never happen, it's the law!".

I accept that. Even agree with it. But I don’t see the slope between interracial marriage and abortion outside of the legal one. So can you tell me the slope?

What slippery slope exists between abortion and interracial marriage?

What slippery slope exists between abortion, contraception, porn and homosexuality?

All these things are seen as sins, regardless whether they increase or decrease killing unborn babies, and opponents of abortion hate them all.

Interracial marriage and race mixing in general was traditionally considered as extremely serious sin in American Christianity, for far longer you would imagine.

If proponents of war on sin get their way on all of the things above, it is not impausible that they will bring back this issue too. Slippery slope all the way up, all the way to heaven!

You are making the unwarranted assumption that racism is something the pro-life movement is generally in support of, as opposed to something they grudgingly tolerate from their political allies. And, historically, the pro-life movement has been extremely honest in describing their unpopular policies, and so it should take some pretty strong countervailing evidence that it’s secretly in opposition to race mixing.

The irony was, the reason God told the Jews not to marry outside the nation of Israel was to avoid idolatry and dissolution of their faith, not their blood.

Paul, in his second letter to the Corinthians, revisits the command explicitly on the grounds of faith alone, not blood: “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?”

Racists who never read Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians decided God's command to Israel, along with the genesis of nations following the Flood and the Tower of Babel, was Biblical justification for their very human isolation of races.

Yet we Christians believe we have two natures (births), a human birth into the species of Adam and a spiritual birth with God as our Father. The second birth, a birth chosen by us, regathers us whose families were scattered by the Curse of Babel and joins us with Jesus, the second Adam, in a new nation, the Kingdom of God. Among Christians who take the whole Bible as holy and sacred, there are no races among us.

What slippery slope exists between abortion and interracial marriage?

If your model of pro-lifers is "conservatives who want to turn the clock back to the social mores of 1950", the answer becomes obvious. It's a slope of "concessions to that agenda".

First they go for the least popular and legally flimsiest 2020s social more (abortion). When they succeed at that one, it's easier to knock down the next domino, both because the conservatives are energised by the proof that liberal progress can be reversed, and because their opponents have to concede "OK when the conservatives won last time the country didn't immediately get consumed by hellfire". Slip!

But that model is wrong, and contra-indicated by every piece of evidence available.

Not sure I follow. Has your support waned because American liberals "seem" to be calling for more dramatic action?

If so, I can assure you that the maximalist position is not a popular one. Consider the DNC party plank: fund Planned Parenthood, repeal the Hyde Amendment, oppose federal and state "barriers to reproductive health and rights." Wishy-washy, meaning amenable to a compromise.

Or look at public support. 19% "legal in all cases, no exceptions." Most of the rest say that length of pregnancy matters, that parents/guardians need to be informed for minors, that violating such laws should result in penalties. This is compatible with a compromise position where we get some restrictions and some protections!

Most Americans support abortion up to 6 weeks. 14 weeks is more evenly split, and 24 weeks is unpopular. Isn't that more or less in line with the rest of the first world?

Regarding your third point--doesn't this all rely on one assumption?

you basically killed your previous child because it was inconvenient

Okay, so if you don't believe abortion kills a child, you're not really going to worry about the rest of those hypotheticals. Looking back at the Pew survey, only 15% of "most/all cases" respondents agreed with a similar position. Out of those who did agree that a fetus was a person, yet still supported abortion, how many were thinking of rape exceptions, or other awful dilemmas that you'd "never be able to tell your kid?"

I think a lot of the feeling of liberals calling for more dramatic action was the recent federal legislation proposed had only an extremely vague limiter on post-viability abortions, any risk whatsoever to physical or mental health, and so people feel that Democrats are looking to enforce abortion until birth. It also doesn't help that no Dem politician seems to be able to come up with a limit on abortion they would be ok with during interviews. At least assuming the use of "liberals" from the OP is more as a stand-in for Democrats rather than something like "classical liberals". Sometimes hard to tell. If it was meant as just "classical liberals" then I'd agree with your post.

I have yet to meet a single child who developed the kind of neurosis or anxiety you envisioned from learning that their parents had an abortion.

As far as I'm concerned, that's a non-issue for anyone not a delicate neo-Victorian waif struck by consumption haha

If you're actually raising a child, would you tell that child at some point in their life that you had had an abortion previously?

I am in the situation of being the baby that was supposed to be aborted, but contractions started and so I was born instead. It wasn't really a choice on my mother's part: she needed to undergo chemotherapy and they couldn't do it while she was pregnant.

I think I first understood the import of this story in late middle school, and it didn't have much of an effect on me: I was surprised, but my parents love me and our relationship didn't change. I probably went back to thinking about what teenage nerds think about. Now that I think back on that story it just makes me feel lucky. But I'm an outlier who leans toward stoicism, positivism, and "life is tough. Get over it". YMMV.

The type of unconditional love you describe is not universal. In some, maybe even most, non-western cultures (the one I am familiar with is old rural China), children are expected to "pay their rent" in terms of household labor from a young age and during hard times a child who isn't pulling their weight may be sold off for adoption to a wealthy family or to better-off distant relatives. Statements along the lines of "If my children are disobedient, I can always get rid of them and make more," though now mostly in jest, can still be heard in many Asian and Asian immigrant households as a vestige of these practices. While I don't condone all these behaviors, most of the people who experienced them seem to have turned out fairly well-adjusted.

This was also true in some premodern western cultures. (source: this book, which I did read, although I think it presented a rather negatively-biased picture).

An interesting point as well. I have wondered at times if we're a little over-concerned with how safe our children are, harkening back to the 90s era of complaining that everything is "for the children" and Free Range Kids and all that. I may need to think a little on how those basic beliefs intersect with the abortion stuff. I wonder how much the Chinese care about abortions?

If you're actually raising a child, would you tell that child at some point in their life that you had had an abortion previously?

Yes?

My mother told me that. It means I was actually wanted. If your mother had never had an abortion, how do you know you weren't just an accident she was pressured to keep?

If your mother had never had an abortion, how do you know you weren't just an accident she was pressured to keep?

I wouldn't care if I was an accident she was pressured to keep, because social shaming women out of making bad decisions is perfectly legit. This is an example of "patriarchy working as intended towards good outcomes".

Conversely I would be quite mad to find out my mother murdered my older sibling.

I can't imagine feeling better that I was possibly unwanted and merely tolerated over actively wanted. But you do you.

Would you be in favor of removing taboos on infanticide for these reasons? Many parents go through quite stressful times when raising a small child. This stress causes a not insignificant fraction of those parents to desire no longer having said child. Some fraction of those parents consider the possibility of killing/abandoning their child to remove such concerns. Some fraction of those parents actually do the deed, regardless of the current social pressure against it.

You may feel comfortable believing that you were actively wanted in some period between approximately -9mo and -3mo. After that time, say, between -3mo and +2yr, perhaps a very substantial portion of that time, you could have been very unwanted. Perhaps you were very barely marginally merely tolerated, and that only due to the extreme quantities of social pressure exerted on your parents.

Do you think the world would be a better place if we removed all that social pressure, so you could make sure that you were, like, actually actually wanted?

"Actively wanted" means fuck-all. It can just as easily apply to "I wanted a child who would be happy, successful, and popular - but I got you. You've been a disappointment to me all your life, and it's worse because you were an intended pregnancy".

Most people have been born because their mothers got pregnant at some time that wasn't timed down to the minute. "Actively wanted" pregnancies are a result of the pressure on women not to have babies until it's convenient for the economy, when their employer has obtained maximum return on them. Now that you're in the final years of your fertility and it's 'now or never' to have a child, then you are graciously permitted to try for one.

I didn't say "better", I said "don't care".

My mother is here the beneficiary of my soft bigotry of low expectations. I don't expect good life choices or coherent cost-benefit-analyses out of women in their 20s, especially when they're hysterical from pregnancy hormones.

It also means that given an small change in circumstances she wouldn't have hesitated in killing you.

Eh. Given a small change in circumstances, most mothers wouldn't hesitate to significantly delay having kids, and ones does choose number and timing of kids based on life circumstances. "Not existing" isn't better than "existing for a few months".

But "not producing" is morally very different from "killing". And yes, not existing is very different from being killed too (I won't say better or worse), even if what exists is not fully human yet.

We don't live in that universe, though.

If your mother had never had an abortion, how do you know you weren't just an accident she was pressured to keep?

My mother never having had an abortion means that I and my siblings were born like most of humanity: married people having sex, getting pregnant from that, everyone knows sex means babies and once you're married, babies are expected.

People did have accidents and unplanned pregnancies, but that was also taken in stride because accidents happen. This modern attitude about demanding extreme control over every aspect of life is excessive, and anyways - if your mother didn't kill you when you were still an infant, how do you know you weren't just an unwanted baby she was pressured to not murder because society frowns on infanticide?

What a question. "How do you know your mother didn't want to kill you but wasn't allowed to do so?"

Well that's a point. Maybe the whole thing is me just over-thinking things. If you're happy with the situation, then all is well and good I guess.

I'm pro choice, and also pro-infanticide (of disabled children). Not as prescriptive policy, but something that ought to available as an option to parents.

However, I feel extremely disgusted and strongly about abortion activists, and think there need to be limits. Generally EU seems to have fairly sensible legislation.

Abortion and any similar killing is an extremely serious affair, and should be treated as such. Being proud of having an abortion seems completely perverse.

Hard to express what I hate about them. It's the same sort of disgust I have to people who treat dead enemy combatans with disrespect.

also pro-infanticide

I'll take the bait. Go on then, spell it out

I am absolutely not pro-infanticide, but the killing, or at least exposure of crippled or deformed infants is extremely common throughout history. In ancient Rome it was considered something you kept quiet, but by no means a crime or a horrific crime as it might be considered today. Oftentimes people were not considered 'full' humans until they had lived a few years already, partially because mortality rates among infants and young children were so high. The idea infanticide is a heinous moral abomination seems to be a product of the slow christianization of western morality.

You could say that about a lot of things. Institutionalised rape, slavery and child brides were pretty common and accepted throughout the ancient world as well, but it would be unusual for a person to defend those things today.

Ancient world? A lot of the things were popular at most 200 years ago.

Some forms of institutionalized rape I think I could still argue for in an anonymous format. I think a reasonable argument can be made of a husband having sexual rights in a marriage presupposing he’s being a good husband and it’s part of the marriage compact. And Russian serfdom (which was supposedly quite harsh) and Chattel slavery was less than 200 hundred years.

That's the marriage debt, it applies to both spouses (wives too have a right to sex) and it's not rape, since in marriage you are presumed to give consent to sexual activity with your spouse. There was a fine-grained legal distinction that rape was sex without consent, and since married couples consented to have sex, the crime of rape could not be committed within marriage (which is not to say that the act of rape could not be committed).

Forcing someone unwilling, by threats, violence, or other coercion, is wrong. That's not what marriage is supposed to be. So even if the spouses have a right to ask for sex from each other, and merely "I don't feel like it" is not good enough reason to refuse, you should not rape your wife (or husband).

So even if the spouses have a right to ask for sex from each other, and merely "I don't feel like it" is not good enough reason to refuse, you should not rape your wife (or husband).

Well then what IS your prescription for the scenario where Spouse A says "Sex please" and Spouse B says "No I don't feel like it"?

I have enough Chestertonian-fence respect in the wisdom of the ten thousand generations before me to suspect that if there WAS a solution better than marital rape, they'd have thought of it.

Don't marry someone who doesn't feel like it for longer periods than you can tolerate?

More comments

Well then what IS your prescription for the scenario where Spouse A says "Sex please" and Spouse B says "No I don't feel like it"?

That's always going to happen occasionally. The idea that any religious authority would approve of forcing it in all cases is silly, so I won't address that, instead I'll assume you're saying something like Partner B has been refusing sex for an extended period of time, say six months at a time.

While I'm a big Chesterton guy, you also have to consider that the thousands of generations before you lived in different circumstances. Particularly, I don't think you can keep the "forced sex is ok if you're married" fence up if you've torn down the "living within a community of people who you can talk to about it" fence. Maybe a Benedict option argument at some level? The idea of Marital Debt comes largely from ecclesiastical court cases where spouses literally went to a formal tribunal to determine the answers to these questions! At a less formal level, you and your spouse go to your mutual priest and confessor, alone or together, and seek guidance. Today, we call this practice marital counseling, the only difference is the training of the counselor changing from theological to psychological, from one brand of nonsense to another more cynically.

We've also lost the kind of family honor-bonds that protected both parties to a marriage. A woman in an abusive marriage might count on pressure from her father, brothers, uncles, male cousins, and general social opprobrium to prevent overly vicious abuse. A husband who was too violent with his wife risked social outcast status, or revenge, even if divorce was impossible. Today, that kind of thing is unthinkable: we don't live in close knit families, private violence is anathema, and there is no sense of honor that would lead a would-be-Sonny to defend his sister.

Catholicism, of course, absolutely forbids divorce. Other religious traditions, nonetheless quite strict on their own views, take different attitudes:

Most Islamic scholars agree that it is forbidden for husbands to forgo sex for more than four months, and Sharia law allows a wife to seek a divorce if her husband is unable to satisfy her physical needs.

"Satisfying sexual desire is one of the two main purposes of marriage in Islam," said Abdul Wahid Asimi, the director of Herat's department of haj and religious affairs. "When a man deprives his wife of sexual intercourse, he will have to answer to Allah for his actions." He added, "If a woman complains that her husband has refused to have sex with her, the court has the right to order their separation."

So what does a solution look like? Compromise, talk to each other, talk to spiritual/moral counselors you respect, reach a place where things work for both of you. Just like you would for literally any other marital issue.

The solution was to consider it being a bad wife, and still not grant license for forcible rape.

This reminds me of many of Vox Day's blog posts back in the day. He'd say "Marital rape doesn't exist" and "Getting married implicitly gives permanent consent." People would ask him "Does that mean if your wife says 'Not tonight, I have a headache' you can just smack her around until she submits?" He would always dodge or just sneer at the question.

I thought he was being disingenuous then, and I think your "Chesterston's fence" here is a bit disingenuous.

I have enough Chestertonian-fence respect in the wisdom of the ten thousand generations before me to suspect that if there WAS a solution better than marital rape, they'd have thought of it.

Well, first of all, no, I think it's ridiculous to think that we should just accept the received wisdom of ten thousand generations of savages. There are a whole lot of things our ancestors believed for ten thousand generations and we only realized in the last few hundred years were stupid.

So legally, yes, a husband in most societies historically had the right to literally rape his wife (by which I mean "rape rape", not just threats, pressure, and cajoling), but even the most misogynistic cultures generally didn't think highly of a man who physically abused his wife and had to force her to have sex with him. I strongly suspect that even back in caveman days, couples with genuine affection for each other were looked on with much more respect than couples where the man was literally having to knock his wife over the head and drag her by the hair to get laid.

On to the present day, which you seem to think is missing a little something something because a man can't knock his wife over the head and drag her by the hair anymore. But presumably you didn't mean literally that. But then I would ask you the same question put to Vox Day: what did you mean? If your wife says "Not tonight, I have a headache," are you claiming that you should literally have the right to say "Tough shit, on your back," backed up by force if necessary?

So presuming the actual question is not "What if she's not in the mood sometimes?" but "What if she refuses to sleep with me, ever?" Well, obviously, your marriage is dysfunctional, and you have a range of options from counseling to divorce. Even if you're a tradcon who believes divorce should be off the table, I would think you would want to find out why your wife is refusing to have sex with you, and try to fix that. If it's a physical ailment, well, you did promise "in sickness or in health," right? If it's depression, she needs help, not being compelled to put out because it's her "wifely duty." If it's none of these things, and it's genuinely not your fault for being a jerk husband - if you're stuck with a woman who pretended to like sex until you got married and then turned it off afterwards, like in those horrible old Playboy cartoons, well, I guess if you won't divorce her, then it kind of sucks to have made a poor life choice. But seriously, what do you think should be your options in that case?

(And yes, I've made the assumption above that we are talking about the woman being the one who refuses sex, because realistically, if it's the man refusing to have sex, it's very rare that his wife has any ability to force him. But I'd say the same thing to a woman whose husband rejects her and the situation doesn't appear fixable: if you won't consider divorce, then I guess you're trapped in an unhappy marriage. Which is why I don't think divorce should be off the table.)

More comments

Technically illegal but socially tolerated infanticide was a thing in a society as rich and Christian as Victorian England. Very quickly after the practice is stopped, we get a change in the law to make infanticide a relatively minor crime (which it still is in most of the Commonwealth).

Society can't make women raise unwanted children (it can barely make deadbeat dads pay child support, and collecting cash under threat of violence is something states are good at) and generally doesn't try. The real-world feasibility of a pro-life regime depends on the availability of loving adoptive parents (which is currently not an issue, at least if you are willing to see large-scale interracial adoption).

I mean, you could also have orphanages, which is strictly worse than adoption, but it does do the same job.

What meaningful difference is there between a fetus and a newborn? Neither can survive independently and neither has a sense of self. Killing one is like killing another.

There is some fuzzy boundary when a zygote becomes a "person", but I would argue it happens far enough after birth for it not to make a difference here.

Ironically your/Singer's position makes more sense to me than the ones claiming a baby is just a morally valueless "clump of cells" until it magically becomes fully human the second it's out of the womb. Like either of us could be wrong, but at least both positions are coherent.

I agree with your view of coherence, but not completely: why stop at children?

Bravo, this is my position too, all the way up to being pro-murder. After all, what is a full grown adult except an especially large fetus? So if you accept abortion as morally permissable for the convenience of the mother you must accept straight-up murder of adults as morally permissable for the convenience of... the people who might find that adult inconvenient.

So if you accept abortion as morally permissable for the convenience of the mother you must accept straight-up murder of adults as morally permissable for the convenience of... the people who might find that adult inconvenient.

That's called death penalty.

I don't think there's a substantial moral difference between killing a fetus and killing a full-grown adult that cannot survive independently and does not have a sense of self (e.g. unplugging the life-support of someone brain-dead). If anything, I think the moral case for allowing someone to pull the plug on a brain-dead adult is stronger than the moral case for allowing abortion.

I basically think of abortion as morally equivalent to pulling the plug on someone who is currently comatose, but has a good chance of becoming functional if given expensive life support until they awaken, and then a decade or two of rehabilitation (for the sake of the analogy, said comatose adult will never regain their past memories).

I unironically am pro "murder" in the case of the "pull-the-plug-murder" scenario above -- I genuinely think that killing someone in that situation because it is convenient is justifiable (though note that the "they will never regain any past memories" is a load-bearing part of that judgement for me).

What meaningful difference is there between a fetus and a newborn?

One is strictly dependent from a specific, non-replaceable (with current technology) human body, the other is not. You can agree or disagree that this is morally relevant, but this is a significant difference between a fetus and a newborn. At the very least, it implies a very different distribution of costs.

Plus, birth as a Schelling point -- the development from a single cell to basically-a-newborn and from a newborn to a fully sapient human are both gradual, hazy, and complex, while birth is an unambiguous, easily observable discontinuity.

We should allow parents to kill their severely disabled children - e.g. more than light mental retardation, the bad cases of autism, very severe health issues. Not have them euthanised, have to do it themselves.

It greatly saddens me to see parents caring about practical vegetables with devotion for decades, forgoing having healthy children. It's sad and infuriating see people caring for such beg for charity on social media. Heartbreaking dysfunction of instincts, enabled by bad cultural attitudes.

Children are precious because they represent future human potential, continuation of our families. Our emotions make us care about them for that reason. Our emotions are functional, yet most people don't care to think about that for even a smidgeon of a time. Every major emotion exists for some reason, they're something like control variables.

A mentally retarded cripple who's never not going to slobber represents nothing but a resource sink. A violent, non-verbal autistic who is a physical danger to his carers, to the point that in 'enlightened' countries like the US they inject such with hormone blockers iirc or growth retardants.. .. what is the purpose of such a life ?

Call me a monster, call me a high decoupler, I don't really care. Not like any of this matters, as we're probably all going to be biodiesel within a couple of generations.

It greatly saddens me to see parents caring about practical vegetables with devotion for decades, forgoing having healthy children.

Or having healthy children who are severely neglected because all the care and attention goes to the vegetable sibling.

Seeing people ask for donations for someone who isn't even there is almost as psychologically damaging to me as watching those dating tiktok video compilations.

Personally I've thought more about the dynamics of state level abortion bans. The result of banning it in some states and allowing it in others is that you only ban it for the poor, stupid, low conscientiousness, hesitant, unconnected. Which means there probably won't be any increase in babies born to high IQ, high conscientiousness women who have the money for a bus ticket. While I'm not broadly in favor of eugenic policies, I am broadly opposed to dysgenic ones. It simply isn't practical to ban abortion at the state level in most states.

Before I was pro abortion in some cases, against it in others. Now, having thought about it more, I'm very against it on a state level. Probably a national level ban is the minimum to achieve any benefits. I still think it should be handled socially rather than legally.

It seems like we have real world data on the decline in abortions(most of which is probably from Texas, which is the big state with the least abortion access)- is it concentrated among blacks, poor, stupid, apathetic?

It skews black and rural when you consider % of population.

https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/state-indicator/abortions-by-race/

I'll have to look into it, but I think what we're looking for isn't abortions per se but changes in number of live births. It's not really a question of who gets abortions, but of who has more kids as a result. I would be shocked to find out that there was any change in the birth rates of upper-income highly-educated Texan women. I might even expect a decline, as reduced abortion access leads to a climate of fear and less sex overall. I think we'll have to wait 1-2 years to really see how it shakes out though.

As for race, Abortions are overwhelmingly non-white, looking at @FirstfullOfCrows data below the only states with a majority of white abortions were 90%+ white.

Not over the course of the last year, but I went through a personal experience with abortion that has changed my feelings. I have always leaned heavily pro-choice since I see the value of human life as something that basically starts from zero and accumulates over time as we develop. Any other position is extreme, the only room for uncertainty is in drawing the line of when a life is valuable enough to protect against the potential harm of bringing a child into the world who is unwelcome, un-cared for, or has some condition that makes them unequipped to lead a good life. And as I see it, the potential for suffering is low for an embryo or an early fetus that has a brain significantly less developed than a newborn baby. So I would have said, go ahead, abort as many as you like! As long as it’s the first trimester. Plenty of valid reasons to abort well into the second trimester as well, but at that point I would not allow it just for poor planning or inconvenience. Lastly, it’s important that women have good access to abortion to prevent the societal harms of unwanted pregnancies.

Then, at the age of 24, my girlfriend and I got pregnant. We caught it a bit late at six weeks. It came as a real surprise because she was on the pill, it turned out later there was a recall on her medication. But we figured we weren’t ready, so the very next day after we found out we headed into the clinic.

At the clinic it turned out she was carrying twins. That made it a lot harder, for some reason, maybe because it felt special and unlikely to happen that way again if we decided to have kids later. But we still went through with it.

The reality of going through an abortion is it’s a highly unpleasant experience. No matter how much you attempt to detach from it, you will still find yourself emotionally attached to this thing that you created, as if it was another part of you. I felt, and still feel deeply ashamed about the whole thing. Not because of societal pressure or stigma or anything like that, but because fundamentally I killed my unborn children.

I am still pro-choice and my views around timing and access to abortion have not changed, but I now think it is not a decision to be taken lightly and there are valid reasons to be hesitant to have an abortion. I am far more sympathetic now to doctors who refuse to perform or condone abortions as well (it’s also explicitly forbidden under the Hippocratic Oath). And paradoxically, I have a lot less sympathy to those who attempt to interfere with couples seeking abortions and the doctors facilitating that process. It’s extremely difficult to make that decision and carry through with it, and any barrier to access could lead to an outcome they will regret for the rest of their lives.

No matter how much you attempt to detach from it, you will still find yourself emotionally attached to this thing that you created, as if it was another part of you.

I don't want to detract from the pain you went through in that situation, but please don't assume everyone who goes through an abortion will have the same feelings about it that you did.

I went through something similar with my girlfriend around that same age - we were both 22, I think. I felt no emotional attachment to it myself. I can't know everything that went through her mind, but she certainly didn't give any indication that she had any emotional attachment to it either. And looking back at it, many years later, I can say that I've never felt any shame or regret about it whatsoever.

It's not related to politics, and I can't say the experience changed my views at the policy level, but after seeing my wife's ultrasound at around 8 weeks I just couldn't imagine going through with aborting your own child. I felt a really strong and immediate attachment that I wasn't expecting to have until after it was born. I guess it feels different if it's not a kid you're hoping for, but I just can't put myself in the mindset of someone who would want to end that life.

Was a moderate on the issue fine with some restrictions but changed to total pro-choice over the last year. I was ok with "safe, legal and rare" but unfortunately pro-life activists got greedy and broke that compromise, instead going for broke with overturning Roe v Wade, total bans and taking the mask off with closing exemptions and targeting contraception. Given that I want abortion available as an option, and that past talk of exemptions and the like proved to just be the equivalent of the gun control cake slicing meme, I started donating to pro-choice efforts and voted accordingly to swing the pendulum in the other direction.

Same thing also independently caused a bunch of my friends (Trump voting hard red state pipe fitters, electricians, etc) to flip shit because they didn't want to be forced to have more kids than they already had or get trapped into child support, and they voted accordingly. Another who'd gone from lib to DeSantis fan over COVID lockdowns and anti-woke stuff swung back to the Democrats over it. I can't emphasize this enough; people I know who use the N word as an adjective on a daily basis for household objects and even bird species + believe in Q-anon stuff were incensed and pulled the lever to give the pro-choice side a landslide victory when abortion rights came up to a vote.

Banning abortion might be popular in the pulpits of some dwindling denominations and internet forums, but it is highly unpopular outside of specific geographic and religious bubbles that are way out of touch with most Americans. Those in favor of banning abortion punch above their weight in primaries and state house compositions due to unrepresentative political systems, but they were BTFO when it was a straight up popular vote even in Kansas, Michigan, Kentucky, and Montana.

I was ok with "safe, legal and rare"

I mean, we were never okay with that. So it seems like this is less about "mask off" and more that we just started winning for once, and then people who don't like that noticed and decided to react accordingly.

So from our perspective, we can either (1) do nothing and lose every battle, or (2) do something and win some battles but cause people who disagree with us to push back and potentially lose some or all of what we won.

2 seems strictly optimal in comparison with 1.

The story of the parent poster does not sound like it is adequately summarised by "people who disagree with us push back"; these people directionally agreed with you, up until the point where you won too much and it went too far for them. Being able to offer a compromise and stand by it, rather than always trying to seize a bit more, seems to be an ability that is tragically lost on all sides of the culture war.

these people directionally agreed with you, up until the point where you won too much and it went too far for them.

But this person says that "I want abortion available as an option". We don't. To the extent this is directional agreement, it seems quite weak and not really worth preserving at the expense of giving up on our actual policy goals. I guess you could say we might be alienating people who are willing to agree to a 20 week abortion ban or something, but not an earlier one, and sure, that's possible, but I'd just say the terms of that compromise are unacceptable to me so that's okay.

So, fair, my initial statement might have been a bit of an oversimplification.

He specifically mentions closing exemptions and having certain modes of contraception at all. There is a non-trivial of people who align with pro-life politics: no abortion.. Unless it's rape or incest. They're also basically normal people, insofar they don't want plan B or hormonal contraception banned. Pro-life activists getting both of these struck alienates these people, and taking note of this seems entirely valid.

And so is, yes, deciding you don't want these people on your side. That's fine too.

deleted

The case I'm most familiar with is Louisiana. There may be others. Louisiana's proposed law on abortion was to prohibit the practice of it in every circumstance, to charge every single purveyor of it with murder, and to legally codify life as starting at fertilisation. This would make the sale of hormonal IUD's and plan B murder under Louisiana's law. Louisiana's legislature is full of people who would prefer not to be voted out immediately, so the fertilisation bit was struck - to the tune of much complaining from those who'd drafted the bill in the first place. This is not a motte of 'we just want to keep people twelve weeks in from aborting-by-pill', and I can very much see how moderate pro-life sorts might come to distrust the movement when their representatives try to pass laws like these.

This is probably just me being out of the loop, but I wasn't aware that this was happening. I thought descriptions of contraceptives being banned was just motte-and-bailey'd references to abortifacent pills. Can you talk a bit more about this?

Emergency contraception can work either by preventing ovulation or by preventing a fertilised egg implanting. In practice, the types that can be taken up to 3 days after unprotected sex work entirely by preventing ovulation, and the types that work up to 5 days after sex work using a combination of both methods. If you believe that life begins at fertilisation then intentionally preventing implantation is abortion, and using emergency contraception is at the very least taking a reckless risk of causing an abortion. I don't think this view makes sense given that nobody cares about the vast number of early miscarriages by non-implantation, but it is sincerely held by the people who hold it.

So the problem is that a subset of pro-lifers (including the people in charge of the movement, and the median voter in a non-Presidential Republican primary in a red state) have a genuine disagreement with everyone else about whether the meaning of the term "abortifacent" includes emergency contraception.

As a separate issue, mifepristone (which is undoubtedly an abortifacent) is marketed as emergency contraception in some countries (but not the US), so I imagine pro-lifers have slippery slope concerns about admitting a distinction between "emergency contraception" and "early medication abortion".

Ya I do not see the masks coming off it’s just that they won. And Roe let’s be honest was a constitutional issue which a lot of scholars on the left disagreeing with the reasoning. That wasn’t legislation.

If anything I think the Pro-life people have moderated since Roe ended. From memory the legislation they went for at the federal level was closer to the moderates position of having federal rules similar to the rules in Europe. I think the left just played the politics well to make you think they went extreme - when a lot of GOP politicians moderated their public positions after.

1 in 6 of anything is in no way shape or form rare. There are about 6 million pregnancies per year in the US, about 1 million are aborted each year and about 1 million end naturally, with only 4 million ending in a live birth.

Trump voting hard red state pipe fitters, electricians, etc) to flip shit because they didn't want to be forced to have more kids than they already had or get trapped into child support, and they voted accordingly. Another who'd gone from lib to DeSantis fan over COVID lockdowns and anti-woke stuff swung back to the Democrats over it. I can't emphasize this enough; people I know who use the N word as an adjective on a daily basis for household objects and even bird species + believe in Q-anon stuff were incensed and pulled the lever to give the pro-choice side a landslide victory when abortion rights came up to a vote.

This is hard to believe that they would react so strongly to largely symbolic bans coming from a party that has been saying this is precisely what they want to do for decades. It would be like suddenly losing it and flipping republican because Democrats decide to give blacks some effectively symbolic reparations checks for $100 or something.

It would be like suddenly losing it and flipping republican because Democrats decide to give blacks some effectively symbolic reparations checks for $100 or something.

I think that's also quite plausible, perhaps because of the symbolic element: symbols can be precedents unto themselves, "making an example" of someone or something is effectively establishing that you could do the same thing to others, and overturning Roe was, in a sense, a reservation of the right to make impositions.

That scenario would totally happen, though.

With Roe v. Wade overturned, a guaranteed floor on abortion access that previously existed was removed and folks who voted Republican but did not favor hardcore pro-lifer bans now had real skin in the game and the opprotunity to vote directly on it in multiple states.

If it's "symbolic" because of varying state laws, I disagree. I would not consider NYC gun bans, mandatory registration and other impositions "symbolic" just because a New Yorker could hypothetically go to New Hampshire and buy an AR15 in cash from some guy outside Denny's. Additionally, pro-life factions are creating and promoting legislation to penalize people who travel out of state for abortions or those who assist in such.

Also the scenario you describe sounds pretty realistic to me. In this case though it's not total party flips, it's people voting contra most expectations on an issue when that issue is put before them directly.

1.) People don't hurt parties for what they say they'll do - this is consistent. This annoys us lefties when the GOP consistently (outside of a small period when Trump initially won) want to privatize or radically cut Social Security or Medicare, and voters in focus groups literally don't believe it. For both sides, the voters only hurt them when they actually do things.

2.) There was a very decent chunk of what could be described as 'leave me the hell alone' voters to Trump - anti-immigration, pro-gun, but also pro-choice. Blue collar non-college educated non-religious voters who don't hate religious people, but also don't like God botherers sticking their nose into their business.

I was ok with "safe, legal and rare" but unfortunately pro-life activists got greedy and broke that compromise, instead going for broke with overturning Roe v Wade, total bans and taking the mask off with closing exemptions and targeting contraception.

Some on the pro-choice side took the mask off about rare before that:

Despite the Democratic Party dropping “safe, legal, and rare” from the party platform in 2012, politicians are still repeating it nearly a decade later to signal their moral superiority and supposedly commonsense position on abortion. Even Hillary Clinton, who, along with her husband President Bill Clinton, is credited with popularizing the phrase, eventually stopped saying it, opting for “safe and legal” during her 2016 presidential campaign. Yet some pro-choice politicians can’t let it go.

...Demanding abortion be “rare” is stigmatizing at its core; it posits that having an abortion is a bad decision and one that a pregnant person shouldn’t have to make, and if they do, it must be in the direst of circumstances. This messaging tells those of us who’ve had abortions that we did something wrong to need an abortion, and we shouldn’t do it again. It unfairly stigmatizes people who will have more than one abortion, which is nearly half of abortion patients.

Hillary gets mentioned here as well:

Clinton used this language in her 2008 presidential campaign; Bill Clinton, meanwhile, had introduced it into Democratic politics back in 1992. The language was likely meant to appeal to people who supported the right to an abortion in principle but still felt morally conflicted about the procedure — a large group, according to some polling. But many abortion rights advocates argued that calling for the procedure to be “rare” placed stigma on people who seek it.

“There’s a fundamental notion of bodily autonomy that we’ve been fighting for as advocates and activists on this issue for years,” Destiny Lopez, co-director of the All* Above All Action Fund, a nonprofit that works to expand abortion access, told Vox. Saying abortion should be rare “completely negates all the work that we’ve done to really make this about the ability to decide what’s best for your body, for your family, for your community,” she said.

Trump voting hard red state pipe fitters, electricians, etc) to flip shit because they didn't want to be forced to have more kids than they already had or get trapped into child support, and they voted accordingly. Another who'd gone from lib to DeSantis fan over COVID lockdowns and anti-woke stuff swung back to the Democrats over it. I can't emphasize this enough; people I know who use the N word as an adjective on a daily basis for household objects and even bird species + believe in Q-anon stuff were incensed and pulled the lever to give the pro-choice side a landslide victory when abortion rights came up to a vote.

Who is this supposed to endear these people to? Racism and 4chan originated conspiracy theory adherence are vices that the pro-life religious group puts up with to get the policy they think will end the baby holocaust, not the other way around. To the degree that these people vote against pro-life measures they are not allies of the pro-life movement.

It's a description, not a personal endorsement of racism or that Qanon conspiracy stuff. Those individuals are separate from people I'd count as friends, though I realize now the wording was somewhat ambiguous.

The point being to describe people who were far from Republican moderates pulling the lever in favor of abortion rights against ban attempts when the chips were down.

https://civiqs.com/results/abortion_legal?annotations=true&uncertainty=true&zoomIn=true&choice=Illegal%20in%20all%20cases&party=Republican

The point being to describe people who were far from Republican moderates pulling the lever in favor of abortion rights against ban attempts when the chips were down.

Right, and the point here is that (speaking as a pro-life person) if a condition of us getting their vote is that we don't do anything to ban abortion, we don't want it. So if you are arguing that we should moderate (in the sense of giving up on making abortion generally illegal) because of this, my response is no. If you are arguing that as a descriptive matter we'll have a harder time winning because of this, that may be right, but the alternative is a hollow victory that doesn't accomplish enough of our goals to make it worth it for us, so it's worth the risk.

If the proposal is a less stringent ban that actually gets us a lot of what we want but not all of it, like a total ban but with certain specific exceptions, then I think a lot of people would be open to considering that. But safe legal and rare isn't good enough.

It's not advice, it's a description of the recent votes having unusual line crossing.

Safe legal and rare was never a compromise, though, because there never was a compromise. There’s been one side imposing its values on the other for 50 years, sometimes with more moderate rhetoric.

I find your post interesting because we probably have the same actual positions on abortion and directly related issues, but I've mostly taken the opposite conclusion from what happened with the overturning.

My impression overall is that the bottom line is that pro-life leaning people are roughly 50% of the population (including 50%-ish of women by the way). The Constitution, Bill of Rights, Amendments, Supreme Court, all of that stuff, is meant to cover things we have more like 90% agreement with as a society. In this view, Roe v Wade was always an ugly hack. There's nothing about it in the Constitution and it's ridiculously stunted reasoning by abortion activists to get their preferred point of view enacted as court precedent and thus immune to legislative processes. Keeping it in place only serves to ensure we are constantly fighting Holy Wars over Supreme Court nominees over whether they will or won't swear to keep the ridiculous charade in place at all costs.

The Constitutional Amendment process is very tough for a reason - only things that we have very broad and long-lasting agreement on in our society should end up enshrined at that level and protected by court rulings. If we desire to have abortion granted that level of protection, it should be done right - by passing an explicit Constitutional Amendment about it. If there isn't the support level needed to do that, then abortion doesn't belong there and issues around it should be resolved by state and federal legislation, the way it was intended to be. That's why I think this is a good thing - states where pro-life is strong will now be able to pass and enforce the legislation they wanted to, hopefully without bothering people outside their state much. States where pro-choice is string will continue to be able to have abortion on-demand. People with strong positions on the wrong side of one of those lines will be able to move somewhere that their preferred policy is in place. Democracy in action!

Bottom line, pro-life is a solid segment of our population and they aren't going away. If your political position is that their policy preference must be absolutely suppressed at all costs, then what you're advocating for is not Democracy.

I lean red overall politically, and I am aware that this may have cost red team / Republicans some degree of the gains they would have expected in the recent midterms. I think that's a reasonable price to pay to get this issue off of the national stage. Let the states make their preferred laws, let them sneer at each other, and keep the courts for things we aspirationally have broader agreement on.

I mean, the reality is, with the advent of mass media, people will only put up with what they see as people within their coalition being hurt by people outside of their coalition, and being told they can't stop it because of some lines on a map. That started, at least in the US, w/ Uncle Tom's Cabin, and has only expanded with the advent of radio, TV, and now social media. People at least get nations are nations - the argument over state's rights was shot in Appotomax, and then put into the ground at Selma.

Not to bring Civil Right's into it, do you honestly think the 60's and 70's would've gone better if interracial marriage stated illegal until the early-to-mid 80's, which is when it crossed 50% approval in Gallup polling?

We're a representative democracy bounded by a Constitution that guarantees rights - we've never been, and nobody close to power has ever really advocated for total legislative supremacy or direct democracy.

I get your first point, though I suppose that's something that all movements of any sort will have to live with in the modern age.

On the second, I don't think I agree. I'm saying we need to make a reasonably good-faith effort to follow our constitutional processes in the intended ways. As far as I know, nothing that could reasonably be described as that took place with respect to the civil rights conflicts. I think Roe v Wade is pretty far from that.

My opinion has remained more or less the same. I was always pro-choice, though I found the procedure itself distasteful and the legal reasoning behind the Roe decision quite shoddy. The latter position has led to several arguments with liberal family members and friends over the past few months, but nothing enlightening. I would guess that the only thing that would cause a substantial shift in my thinking on this issue would be having a child, as several others have pointed out.

No, I haven't. I still think it's unwise to have different limits on abortion in different states and I think it's not the job of the legislators or the judges to regulate it. US PHS should be in charge of whatever restrictions medical professional have to abide by when performing abortions.

Also having a child this year and I can say my opinion hasn’t moved at all. I personally would want access to abortion if my child had some sort of problem. That said, overturning Roe or various state level bans wouldn’t prevent me from getting an abortion in that situation, my wife could just take a trip if I happened to live in a state where it was illegal.

To me the handwringing about access to abortions reminds me of handwringing about people unable to get any form of ID in order to vote. I refuse to believe there is anyone so poor or stupid they’d be unable to get an abortion or an ID if they wanted. I only see it affecting extremely lazy, short-sighted people who simply hardly care one way or another.

So taken together, I would prefer abortion to be legal but I hardly care either way, it will always be readily available regardless of law

I think you're underestimating how stupid some people are

To me the handwringing about access to abortions reminds me of handwringing about people unable to get any form of ID in order to vote. I refuse to believe there is anyone so poor or stupid they’d be unable to get an abortion or an ID if they wanted. I only see it affecting extremely lazy, short-sighted people who simply hardly care one way or another.

I'm very much with you on this for the most part. The voting ID thing drives me bananas.

However, back in another thread, @daseindustriesLtd provided a relatively compelling study about abortion access near the border. In short, lower access didn't reduce abortions very much. But it did make them occur later. People were lazy and stupid. Not enough to go through with an unwanted pregnancy, but enough to terminate it a month later than they would have otherwise.

For people who think personhood is an exponential gradient, this is a point for access. I want the sociopathic monster who should never be a mother to be able to walk next door and terminate.

This is in stark contrast to the 2-4 year timeline to get a voting ID. IMO, if you can't get an ID, you're too lazy and stupid to vote. It's that simple.

deleted

So like, not to nitpick, but this seems particularly egregious expansion: What "Genos" exactly is being "-Cided" such that Abortion can be called Genocide? Genocide is the killing of a people, the extermination of a race/ethnicity/group, its total elimination on at least a local basis. The trope-namer events that give us our entire concept for Genocide are things like the Holocaust (Jewish populations locally eliminated in much of occupied Eastern Europe, global Jewish Population still hasn't recovered), the Armenian Genocide (Anatolian Armenian populations have never recovered), and the Rwandan Genocide (Tutsis, in spite of regaining political power, have failed to regain control over much of the land from which they were exterminated). The modal abortion-seeker already has one-or-more-children, and while there is some ethnic difference in abortion rates I don't think you're repeating NoI talking points about legalized abortion being a way to keep the Black Man down, and anyway abortion rate doesn't really track demographic changes.

So what ethnic group is being wiped out here? Or do you use Genocide as synonymous with "mass killing?" Personally, I really do think there is something significantly and substantively worse about wiping out an ethnic group than just killing a lot of people, and that is the purpose of the term Genocide.

deleted

Atrocity? Bloodbath? Industrial-scale killing?

Abortion can be more accurately described as decentralized eugenics and has been hypothesized as a long term crime reduction policy. Those who are least willing and able to raise children choose to abort. This skews towards impoverished single mothers, the demographic most at risk for raising dysfunctional children. The fathers tend to not be involved either, presumably due to low impulse control, inability to provide materially, drug abuse, criminality, etc.

Even if you believe that abortion is murder, there is a strong argument that it is the lesser evil compared to forcing these types of women to birth and potentially raise these children. I doubt adoption would be an effective replacement, since the current number of abortions per year is roughly an order of magnitude higher than the number of adoptions. You would have to dramatically liberalize the adoption process, which would increase the risk of unfit parents adopting orphans. I also suspect there would still be low demand for children suspected to have come from drug addicted underclass mothers, resulting in further stress on the foster system, damaging most of these kids and dooming them to the underclass.

Even if you believe that abortion is murder, there is a strong argument that it is the lesser evil compared to forcing these types of women to birth and potentially raise these children

I believe unborn children are morally equivalent to everyone else in regard to their right not to be intentionally killed. So if you think I should treat abortion as a lesser evil because the children who are aborted might turn into dysfunctional people (and please correct me if that's a misrepresentation of your argument), then shouldn't I also treat killing dysfunctional people at any stage, whether child or adult, as a lesser evil than banning the murder of them generally, given that I think both have an equally strong right not to be murdered?

I share your frustrations. I would, however, suggest to you a third alternative when you say:

So, my options, as a person with my personal convictions, have grown to encompass 1) believing a majority of people even in red states are willing to tolerate and enable genocide, or 2) moderating my stance such that what is happening is no longer a genocide.

I think you need to consider option 3: a majority of people even in red states do not believe abortion to be tantamount to murder. That takes it from "these people are willing to callously slaughter innocents" to "these people don't believe that what they are doing is an act of murder". I think that it's both less of a blackpill, and more accurate, to believe the latter of people than the former.

That isn't to say I think those people are right - I don't. But a person who says "no, this isn't murder because the unborn child doesn't have moral rights" is someone I can accept much more easily than someone who blithely shrugs and says "yeah it's murdering a child, what of it?". As you indicate, it's far more distressing to think your countrymen believe the latter than the former.

I agree it's a fundamental value difference, I just think the distinction does matter. Like I said, for me personally it's a lot less horrific if someone thinks the unborn don't have rights than if they agree the unborn has rights but don't care if they hurt them. The first person is a person who I can accept is wrong but not necessarily a bad person. The second is just a bad person.

After seeing the general pattern of "no limiting principle" coming from the blue side (on at least trans issues, abortion, and assisted euthanasia), my views have swung towards the pro-life side but in a way that isn't really backed by the traditional axiom of fetal personhood. Instead, it is backed by the revulsion I feel towards people who gleefully abort instead of using birth control, and my view that sex is a serious thing with serious consequences that you do not frivolously engage with. I also strongly believe that humanity needs its best and brightest to reproduce if we want to pass the great filter, and am much more in favor of good people having kids than I was even three years ago. Unlike the traditional red-tribe view, I am somewhat okay with people aborting severely disabled or nonviable fetuses. But that road leads to dark places unless stopped with a limiting principle of its own, and so I cannot endorse it unreservedly either.

but in a way that isn't really backed by the traditional axiom of fetal personhood

How does this play with viability, BTW?

Unless I misunderstand you, I think I answered that above. Did you mean something else by your question?

Unlike the traditional red-tribe view, I am somewhat okay with people aborting severely disabled or nonviable fetuses.

How many of those people are there?

I worry that the sides in this culture war have obvious incentives to paint opponents as uncompromising extremists, while in reality, most Americans support restrictions. And most women getting an abortion haven’t had one before, which suggests abortion-as-birth-control is relatively rare. I would still like to see that eliminated, and easy access to contraception is probably the best way to do so...but the constituency interested in banning abortion is also proud to make that more difficult.

That’s why I’m not fond of arguments from “no limiting principle.” It is easy to mistake the political value of extremist stances for an actual desire to implement them. Plus, the media has every incentive to demonize their outgroup with its worst examples. In the interest of avoiding toxoplasma of rage, I try to focus on the grounds for compromise. For abortion, that’s far more popular than the media suggests.

How many of those people are there?

Probably fewer than it looks like when I spend too much time online.

By all means, believe that the 8% of Americans supporting unconditional abortion are extremists. That shouldn’t prevent treating with the broader group. There are ~5 times as many people who believe in restrictions, in exceptions, and who vote against the absolutist measures proposed by the other end of the spectrum. Why should the extremists get to drown them out?

There are responses in this thread claiming that “left-wing” excesses have pushed them away from compromise positions on abortion. That is letting the terrorists win.

I also strongly believe that humanity needs its best and brightest to reproduce if we want to pass the great filter, and am much more in favor of good people having kids than I was even three years ago.

I agree with this strongly but I have the opposite takeaway on abortion. Statistics show that those having abortions are disproportionately poor, black and uneducated. They're the opposite of the kind of people we want reproducing. The best and the brightest need abortions less frequently because they're more capable of effectively using birth control

No, my opinion is much the same as it has ever been, and probably has hardened due to things like thinkpieces and articles about "now here is how you explain abortion is a good thing to the ignorant" which want to reach out to people on the pro-life side, but in essence give nothing as a compromise; we'll teach you how to persuade pro-lifers abortion is fine, but we won't give in on anything we believe about it.

What ground my gears recently was someone writing a Substack article about this where they explained to their (presumably) pro-choice readers that "pro-lifers think the foetus is a baby and that it is a person". So if you can just convince us dumb pro-lifers that a foetus is not a baby or a person... oh, and yes, the pro-lifers do use "baby" for the thing that is inside the womb, instead of the more correct "fetus" even though etymologically, fetus is Latin, derived from a verb meaning "to breed/bear" and refers to "being pregnant; having young, progeny; those young, progeny" - so in effect, 'fetus' is just medical Latin for 'baby'. I have noticed this kind of language-juggling before - "baby" means something different and is emotive, the real neutral scientific term is "fetus" which doesn't mean a baby, it means something like a clump of cells is all.

Convince me first that the noodle who wrote that is a person with rights and not just a particularly large clump of cells, and then maybe I'll change my mind on "the products of conception".

"Legal but commonly recognized as immoral" does not seem to be an option.

One counterexample here would be adultery. It's not illegal, or in the cases where it is the laws are never enforced but almost everyone agrees that it's immoral.

That is changing too. Bit by bit "monagamist" is becoming an epithet, the sign of a closed-minded, selfish, insecure loser. You won't want to come across as being polyphobic.

I'm curious where you see this happening outside of poly arrangements and their communities. Even for all the promotion of LGBT+ people in culture and media, you don't tend to see cases where they promote having more than a single partner at a time. The only one that comes to recent memory for me is Sex and Love, where a woman cheats on her husband with her ex and the show shows this ending as something happy and joyous. But even they don't go as far as calling monogamy evil, just unfulfilling.

My take concerning the ethical issues is very similar to yours.

I have gained a greater appreciation of just how difficult it is to write a sane law banning abortion. ... However, laws should be written to give the maximum benefit of doubt to the doctor and mother. There should be a medical emergency exception. To prosecute an abortion as not being medically necessary the state should have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the doctor was, not just wrong, but actively acting in bad faith.

I have come to conclusion that the difficulties are not about the law as written, but the societal and cultural stuff it is supposed to reflect. Namely, there is nothing to reflect. You can not write a law and have it obeyed if it doesn't "fit" the society.

(Draconian authoritarian enforcement may help, but that option comes with a risk that the draconian authoritarian enforcers will take bribes to look the other way because they don't agree with law either. Part of the risk in a police state is that it won't be the ideal Spartan "tough but just" police state but the draconian police state where widespread corruption and disrespect of the law is a norm, which is worse.)

If people have a commonly shared moral framework broadly accepted by mostly everyone, you can write a law "abortion is generally banned except in medical emergencies" and have outcomes you expect. Without the such shared moral framework, you either get "no medical emergency is serious enough, women suffer / die of complications" or "having an unwanted baby would cause some unwanted mental distress, which qualifies as a medical reason".

Thus, my opinion is that any serious [1] legal solution is downstream of values. Why people no longer want kids? Why they are viewed as a burden? If we'd solve that, and there is a possibility for long-term effective change.

[1] There is a possibility there are legal changes that could go together with a successful values reappraisal, or some marginal tweak will improve individual outcomes. But in big picture, it won't move the overall statistic / sentiment.

I don't think I've changed my position but my commitment definitely feels more intense than previously. Reading accounts like what happened to Kaitlyn Joshua (Or Marlena Stell or Nancy Davis) make me think the United States having our own Savita Halappanavar moment is inevitable and it will have been totally preventable. Hell you can read accounts of non-pregnant women with psoriasis or rheumatoid arthritis or cancer being denied access to medication for their condition because that medication can also be used to induce abortion.

The steady drumbeat of pain and suffering of women due to increased restrictions on access to abortion and its means reinforces my desire to see all such laws ended.

This is my experience also. While I always opposed an abortion ban, I honestly had no idea how many downstream repercussions there would be from them. It's kind of shocking how people cannot be depended upon to make common sense decisions.

Not American and not Catholic, not a woman, I usually collapse the abortion threads.

I haven't changed my position but I've had a little more flesh added to the bones of the various arguments. Ultimately nobody thinks abortion is good as an end in itself, it's a lesser-of-two-evils debate where one side chooses the mother (and alleviating social ills downstream from unwanted children) and the other side chooses the child (and alleviating the moral ills downstream from permitting unwanted children to be killed before they reach the cradle. Note that it's permitting, abortions won't effectively stop if the permission is withdrawn). It's a poisoned chalice but I'll prioritise lowering the burden of social dysfunction over evading the gravity of moral judgements.

I will caution against using absolutes when talking about political sides, as the "Shout your abortion!" crowd can be used as a rhetorical weapon against your argument.

Ultimately nobody thinks abortion is good as an end in itself

Sorry to nitpick but plenty of people do think it's good as an end in itself. I see it as a sort of "moral induction" where the thought process goes

  1. Access to abortion good

  2. (Fuzzy, unconscious step where counterarguments gain a negatively charged emotional valence, abortion itself gains a positively charged emotional valence, reasoning is obscured, allies become good and enemies become bad)

  3. Abortion is good in and of itself, because to suggest otherwise would be to hint at a counterargument which is bad

I realize we're meant to steelman here but we shouldn't do so to the point of denying that any fleshmen exist.

A few years ago I was a pretty straightforward "legal safe and rare" bro, but the last year has really pushed me towards being anti-abortion.

  • Leftists seems to not just accept abortion, but celebrate it.

  • They do this while also taking extreme anti-natalist positions, attacking the concept of public school, attacking the concept of families, etc.

  • They refuse to condemn late stage abortions, or refuse to even offer an explanation for how this isn't just blatant murder.

If you dropped me into the middle of a movie which was the world we are currently living in, it wouldn't be a bad assumption to see leftists as cartoonish villain trying to collapse society. I mean seriously watch any of the congressional hearings about this. The abortion advocates won't acknowledge that murdering a living child the day before it is born is morally hazardous. It just goes so far beyond anything I could have ever imagined. The only word I can think of to describe this behavior is evil.

The RvW stuff finally just fully removed the leftists mask. No, actually they aren't just okay with murdering unborn children, but they actually celebrate it like some sort of sacrament.

So yeah: I have moved to the right on this topic.

While I would like to celebrate that you are joining the "obviously correct" side I think it is necessary to caution you about basing your political positions in what someone else says or does. If you think or thought it was a necessary evil or even a reluctant burden for abortion to be legal, safe and rare and just changed your position due to the disgust you felt with the craziest of your ingroup advocates; maybe it's better to maintain that position but condemn the crazies?.

Now with that nasty business out of the way, Welcome aboard!. Good of you to join all the correct thinking people!.

My position is in alignment with the Catholic Church. Basically: if a mothers life is being threatened, then abortion is permissible.

Those would be the legal, safe, and rare abortion im talking about. I still support those, because I don’t see the surgical removal of an ectopic pregnancy as the same as murdering an unborn child.

The reaction from me is because before, leftists were essentially saying that they needed this tool, but that they would use it responsibly. My reaction is due to learning that their “use” is industrial scale murder of children.

One thing I've somewhat internalized is that if there isn't a bright-line rule that is strictly enforced regarding [practice] one can expect that said practice to expand to be far more common than one might consider reasonable.

I don't know for sure if this is an example of totalizing ideologies that can't broach compromise or if it's a natural molochian process where anything that isn't forbidden is considered permissible and every step down a given path to 'hell' makes every subsequent step easier.

I think we're starting to see it happen with Euthanasia in Canada, too.

If there's no law preventing the practice in question from becoming common, and we're no longer allowed to use social shame and other 'soft' pressures to make people reluctant to engage in the practice, and we throw out the concept of divine punishment for 'sin,' either in the current world or the afterlife... then we are resigned to accept it becoming a pure exercise in economic viability/incentives.

In short, the slippery slope is not a fallacy if you tear down all the Chesterton's fences that might have arrested one's slide down the mountain.

I decided a long time ago now that I myself wouldn't be willing to hold a gun to a woman's head to prevent her from getting an abortion, so I can't in good faith support laws that would likewise use violence to prevent women from carrying out abortions.

But there's still plenty of approaches that could keep it "Legal, safe, and rare" such as restricting the ability of doctors to perform the procedure, or impose 'time, place, and manner' restrictions so there aren't abortion clinics on every corner.

Incidentally, I might be willing to hold a gun to a Doctor's head to keep him/her from performing an abortion.

If you are seeing people as “cartoonish villains trying to collapse society,” you are probably missing something.

Consider the leftists who think Republican policy is Literally 1984. Or who assert that corporate executives are thrilled to destroy the planet. Do you think these people have an accurate model of the world?

If not, then consider that you might also be wrong about their motives.

I don't think you understood my comment. I'm not saying that leftist are trying to collapse society, but I'm saying that they're acting like it.

Consider the leftists who think Republican policy is Literally 1984. Or who assert that corporate executives are thrilled to destroy the planet. Do you think these people have an accurate model of the world?

Do you think it's possible that one ideology could be more long term stable than another one, or are they all perfect mirrors or one another?

False dichotomy, no?

Conservatism could be strictly more long-term stable. Perhaps conservatives are more likely to be correct on the object level, too. I still wouldn’t believe that liberals in the general sense are out to destroy society. Outside of the lunatic fringe of doomsday cults, they expect to live in it, too. That is a pretty strong incentive not to do society-destroying things. If you’d like to assert that, no, they’re poo-poo heads who don’t care about looking bad...why? Why would anyone do that?

I don’t understand your distinction between “acting like” and “trying to” destroy society.

Acting like and trying is the difference between malevolence and incompetence or apathy.

I don’t think most leftists are destroying society on purpose, I just think that they’re too lazy of horrified to think through to the conclusions of the policies that they support.

But then there are some large leftist groups who say things like that their goal is to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.”, and I’m not really sure what to do other than take those groups at their word.

I just think that they’re too lazy of horrified to think through to the conclusions of the policies that they support.

Or dumb, or very biased (like having a strong bias for perfection, resulting in them rejecting any solutions where they can see the flaws, which naturally selects for solutions that they cannot understand, since perfection is impossible).

Or a combination of factors, of course.

I'm still pro abortion but I am coming around to the idea that the original Roe v Wade decision was poor constitutional scholarship. I support the right to abortion, but I don't think it's actually in the constitution. That decision was more than a little bit of a stretch.

I'm still pro availability-of-abortion, fairly neutral on frequency-of-abortion (i.e. I care about "legal" and "safe", but don't have a strong opinion on "rare"). However, I went from pro Roe v Wade to anti -- I think that was a terrible precedent to set, and I think this past year really opened my eyes to how often the supreme court has been legislating from the bench (and how rarely our legislators have been meaningfully legislating).

I've always believed that personhood and potential personhood are qualitativly different and sans any eviedence that fetuses are persons have been pro-abortion (among other arguements such as right to procreate or not, right to privacy, right to bodily autonomy, freedom from religion, etc).

My normal position was that, in an abundance of caution and as a practical concession to the emotionally sensitive pro-life position, abortion should be restricted after the second trimester except in cases of rape, incest, abnormal risk to the health or life of the woman or in case of sever conditions of the fetus.

Now I am firmly in the camp that abortion is morally just in Western societies up until 6 mos after birth. I'm willing to go up to 2 years old. They aren't people people. Make abortion legal agian and I'll accept the arguement that you don't need to throw babies in the dumpster.

In short my compromise position has changed. It should now be legal to throw babies into dumpsters. They are not people.

It didn't change my position on abortion, but it did coincide with a shift in my attitude towards American culture generally. I now see both sides as explicitly anti-sex, anti-life and anti-humanity. For example, a conservative might say that "unrestricted abortion allows for consequence-free sex." The implication of this statement is that sex is a vice and babies are a consequence. This anti-human view is pervasive on both sides and throughout American society. I thank God every day that I don't live in that country anymore.


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