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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30862 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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ICE arrests superintendent of Iowa's largest public school district

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency arrested Ian Andre Roberts, who is the superintendent of the Des Moines (IA) public school district. If you've been following along with this aspect of the culture war, you probably figure he was arrested for abetting or protecting a student or faculty or staff member from them. But no; the guy is, according to ICE here illegally and was given a final order of removal in May 2024. ICE is strongly implying he never had any work authorization beyond a long-since-expired student visa. It seems to me pretty bold for someone here without work authorization to be in such a high-profile position. Even more surprising for him to be hired; the district claims to have done a background check on him; you would think this would result in them finding out he was not authorized to work and not being hired. Someone screwed up there.

Other aspects are that he had a weapons possession charge in Pennsylvania from 2021, but this was a pissant ("5th degree summary offense") thing about having his deer rifle on his seat still loaded. More serious is that he fled the ICE agents when stopped; his car was found with a loaded handgun, a hunting knife, and $3000 in cash. I don't much care about the illegal-alien-in-possession aspect; making a whole range of normal activities super-illegal based on a status offense is a tyrant's trick. But fleeing certainly seems to indicate a guilty mind rather than some sort of error or misunderstanding on ICEs part.

At first I thought they might have the wrong guy; there's an Ian Andre Roberts from Guyana who competed in the Olympics. But no, that's actually the same guy.

On reddit, /r/desmoines is up in arms... about the arrest, of course, not about the school district hiring a guy with no work authorization.

This is confusing on so many levels.

Everything the district has on file indicates Dr. Robert affirmed that he was a citizen who was eligible to work for the school district

The district claims that he completed his I-9 verification. I can understand why they'd be in none the wiser. But to fake a citizenship ? He must have created a fake passport or a social security card. That's hard mode.

competed in the Olympics

Why was he illegal in the first place ? A nation's olympic representative would qualify for an O1 with an instant EB-1 green card. Public school districts are also eligible for cap-exempt H1bs. He could've become a citizen legally by now, if he wanted to. I won't be surprised if this is a case of 'dude keeps choosing the contrived illegal option over the straightforward legal option because people can be selectively stupid like that'.

That aside, I am a big fan of national ID cards. The US should have one, and so should every other country. I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it. It's the easiest way to control illegal immigration.

I-9 only requires proof of identity and proof of eligibility to work in the US. Most people use a driver's license for the former and a Social Security card for the latter, neither of which requires citizenship. And the law only requires that the employer inspect the documents for their authenticity, not conduct an investigation to determine if the person is actually, at this moment, eligible to work in the US. He could have easily gotten a Social Security card when he was here legally on a student visa, and used that for all his I-9s.

The ones you get as a student prominently say something like "valid for work only with DHS authorization" on them, though.

Yep, citizen and green card holder social security cards look very different than that of visa holders.

I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it.

Same reason we don't use the metric system:

And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

Revelation 13:16-17

This is overstating it a bit, but there is some portion of America that opposed the metric system and opposes things like national IDs or implantable payment chips as being "the mark of the beast". The beast being a seven-headed monstrous enemy of God. Or at least symbolically represented as such.

...the metric system? Really? Are you sure? I grew up on a lot of anti-metric-system propaganda but it was all just about it being smug Euro garbage that infringed on American pride and so on. And on the other hand I've heard a lot of interesting (conspiracy) theories on what the mark of the beast might be but none of them remotely resembled the metric system. That's unusually stupid.

There was a minor American evangelical opposition to bar codes and the metric system. Both accused of being the mark of the beast. I'm not clear if these people in particular were able to block it's adoption, but they existed.

Of the era ramblings in this manner.

Much more modern example of similar ramblings.

Accusations that the metric system is somehow linked to the mark of the beast originated in, at the latest, the 1870s. This is an OG conspiracy theory picked up by some Americans in the 1970s.

There are other fringe Christians also long opposed to metric system based on an unrelated understanding of the holy meaning of the inch. So metric system advocates are also working for the devil.

"Let's count units by 10s."

"The devil put you up to this?"

Kind of approximately the last century and a half. At least for some fringe minority.

Same reason we don't use the metric system

We don't use the metric system because it's not in the rational interests of people to switch. The imperial system sucks for kids (because they have to memorize the conversions), and if you have to do the math by hand I guess, but your typical adult already knows the conversions they need and has a calculator to handle the math. So they get no benefit, but would have to put up with learning all the new measurements. There's no upside for them.

What you describe is a textbook example of an inadequate equilibrium.

Most people will only need a few formulas. A carpenter is going to encounter yards, foots and inches, but unless they are building a really long fence, they are unlikely to encounter miles.

Still, it does create friction, making everything slightly more complicated than it would have to be, otherwise.

Not that SI is perfect, either. The Faraday constant being 96kC/mol instead of 1C/mol is not very reasonable, and the Boltzmann constant should be one as well. If I were to design a system from the scratch today, I would anchor mass so that a mole is a nice round number, like 1e24. Still, SI is a valiant effort, at least, and making it so that the density of water is approximately one (or 1000, if you go for cubic meters) was a brilliant move for everyday usability.

As an European, I have happily never been subject to having to learn that there are 231 cubic inches in a US gallon. The closest I got to this was having to suffer through seven years of music education in school, which even in Europe used a terrible archaic notation which works well to represent C major which was then improperly extended in a way which would make even ISO 8859-* blush with shame. Exams had tasks like "transpose this melody to a different scale", which would be utterly trivial in any adequate system -- "add three to every integer on this list". In short, it was the equivalent of a math class deciding to teach multiplication with Roman numerals.

Personally, I found this to be a big turn-off. Reasonably smart kids will grasp the difference between things being complicated because they are intrinsically complicated (there is no way to make pi come out to be three in Euclidian geometry) and things being complicated because none of the practitioners could be arsed to make them less complicated. So if I had had a physics teacher who was a proponent of imperial units and expecting me to learn all the weird conversion factors decreed by Queen Anne or whomever, I would reasonably have concluded that physicists have no interest in describing the world in easy terms and instead use their cleverness to build pointless mind mazes for their own amusement.

As an European, I have happily never been subject to having to learn that there are 231 cubic inches in a US gallon.

As an American, I have never been subject to that either. Europeans love to bust out obscure conversions that nobody knows as evidence for the imperial system being bad, but nobody knows it because nobody needs to ever make that conversion. So who cares? I long ago memorized the very short list of conversions one encounters in everyday life:

  • 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard (also 5280 feet to a mile though that isn't exactly everyday)
  • 16 ounces to a pound, 2000 lbs to a ton
  • 3 tsp to one tbsp
  • 2c to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 4 quarts to a gallon

I'm willing to concede that metric conversions are easier than these. But they aren't hard to learn either, and there aren't that many of them. It's not actually onerous in practice. I think that the inadequate equilibrium framing is not wrong, but it risks overstating the extent to which the equilibrium is actually causing problems in anyone's life.

12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard (also 5280 feet to a mile though that isn't exactly everyday)

You can easily derive the 5280 feet from 3 feet to a yard, 440 yards to a quarter mile.

16 ounces to a pound, 2000 lbs to a ton

Except troy pounds which are 12 (slightly larger) ounces. Though if you're dealing with troy pounds you can hire someone to remember that. Also the ton can be the long ton of 2240 lbs.

3 tsp to one tbsp

And 2 tbsp to the fluid ounce.

I never quite understood why Europeans think that somehow there is a huge amount of friction with the every day usage of US customary units. They are customary for a reason.

Like if a carpenter in the US dealing with dimensional lumber the US you deal with a 2x6 on 2 foot centers. That is nominally 2 inches by 6 inches, but of course not actually. If you were building the same wall in Europe you are dealing with a 6x2 on 60 cm centers. That is nominally 6 by 2 cols but actually 148 mm by 48 mm. No one who does not deal with that stuff every day has to care about why the nominal or exact dimensions are not the same in either system. People who deal with it every day are used to it and there would be a cost for them to switch. Clearly 2 and 6 as nominal measurements are easier to deal with than exact measurements of 148 and 48, that's why there is a customary unit that those timbers are still sold in. Marking off in units of 60 is not easier than marking off in units of 2. 60 is used because it is divisible by 3 while the nice round 50 is not. This is not a problem in customary units because the next unit down from feet is already divisible by 3.

Not that SI is perfect, either.

There is also the strange habit of talking up the metric system, but then acting like everything is in SI. This is not the case. For scientific use CGS is still extremely common for practicing professionals.

There are also extremely common metric customary units that are in use that are not SI. You still have to specify the unit, no one who regularly deals with a given application is confused by that unit, and if you have to make a conversion it's trivial to look up. This is exactly the same as if you deal with US customary units.

For example tire pressures are often quoted in the metric customary Bar in Europe. The SI unit of pressure is the Pascal. You also see in the extant literature depending of field: technical atmospheres, standard atmospheres, Torr, and mmHg. That's 6 metricish systems for the same unit. No one who deals with Bar when they pump up their tiers and Torr when they pump down their vacuum chamber gets confused or thinks its hard. Just like no one who deals with psi when they pump up their tiers and Torr when they pump down their vacuum chamber gets confused or thinks its hard.

The Americans similarly often seem to think that there's a huge amount of friction in the everyday use of the metric, though. "Lol do women in Europe put "no men under 182.88 cm" in their dating ads?" No, though they might put no men under 180 cm.

I think it's because the United States already uses imperial, switching over carries a cost, the United States is large enough that there is no pressure to switch for the sake of standardisation with neighbours, and the United States is historically quite bad at top-down standardisation and national reform. There are fifty states, some might embrace metric and some would resist it, and the federal government would struggle to make it compulsory - it would incur both state resistance and widespread popular resistance. Whichever government tries to make the switch is going to face a lot of complaints, and the other party is inevitably going to seize the issue and portray themselves as soming to save your measurements. Lastly, Americans hate being made to conform with the rest of the world - there is a very strong sense of national exceptionalism and defiance. The ingrained sense of "but we're different" wins out - from everything from climate agreements to conventions on landmines, the US has a tradition of being the exception. Telling the rest of the world to piss off usually goes down well domestically. It's a bit like the British attitude to EU regulations, or the Japanese attitude to whaling. Maybe on its own it wasn't a big issue, but the moment it becomes an issue of pushy, arrogant foreigners telling us what we ought to do, the US goes, "You know what? I'm gonna start doing it even harder."

Disclaimer: I'm Australian, Imperial units are garbage, metric is superior.

There's also just a massive amount of equipment, material, hardware, and even facilities designed around imperial units, sometimes practically irreplaceable. Switching over to metric, even solely for new projects, isn't just or even mostly a matter of getting people to use new units on drawings.

But again: somehow the rest of the world did. Their precious tooling using only Troy ounces, Whitworth screws and French inches except when needing 尺 instead was swapped decades ago. Weird how the other 96% of the globe somehow managed.

It doesn't really help the "switch to metric" argument that unit conversions are typically done by computer these days anyway. The marginal cost of doing calculations in "harder" units isn't worth it because the calculations aren't really the hard part any more. Consumer products are pretty universally labelled with both, but the imperial units are round numbers: the box in front of me here is "16 oz (1 lb) 454 g".

Raw material stock sizes are probably a more difficult transition at this point: changing to size of the "2x4" (1.5 x 3.5 inches, naturally) would impact pretty much all construction heavily with seemingly little upside.

I think the best bet would be California mandating metric. "If you want your products sold in CA, they have to state weights in kg and dimensions in meters. Gas stations are required to (also) display liters for fuel and hPa for tire pressure." Most manufacturers would probably print both imperial and SI units on their products.

Almost all products sold at my grocery store are labelled in both metric and imperial. A quick search suggests this has been federal law since 1992, with a few exceptions.

Weird the entire rest of world somehow switched.

Yeah, weird. Almost as though they had different conditions which led to them taking different actions.

They almost all either switched prior to mass education and industrialization in their countries, or they half-assed it and ended up with a weird Frankenstein system like the UK, Canada, and Australia

Most of Europe also did not switch entirely voluntarily. Probably the best thing Napoleon ever did. Too bad he never invaded England, though.

The only thing Australians generally still do in Imperial is human height measurement.

In Canada:

Air temperature (as in the weather) is in C. Pool temperatures are in F. Cooking temperatures are in F. Body temperature in F.

Short distances are in In/Ft/Yd, but laws often are written with metric (for instance, in driving), but travel distances are in km.

People's weight and height are in Lbs and Ft/In.

Volume units in cooking are lol whatever; there's a preference for imperial measures but you'll have to deal with stuff in liters too (milk, soft drinks are sold by the L or 2L).

Note also that:

  • 400m is almost exactly 1/4 mile, which is part of why highway signs are marked like that instead of a round number
  • A full-sized plastic jug of milk is still a "gallon", and cans are all in a weird number of milliliters because they're a round number of ounces (when things are rounded off in metric it's generally done to hide shrinkflation)
  • The measure of land is still an acre until it's a forest fire (nobody knows nor cares about what a hectare is)
  • People who give their weight and height in metric are generally recognized as being obtuse/snooty

Canada's a great case study for why English Imperial measurements are better than French Imperial metric when you're operating on human-sized scales. But then again, that's not what the French were going for when they designed that system, they designed it with the intent on forcing it on everyone else at gunpoint under the banner of rationalism.

But there's a reason nobody copies the French.

That's my experience, anecdotally. People sometimes measure things in feet and inches, but I take that as just because feet are a practically useful, everyday measure that there isn't a good metric equivalent for. Every now and then I hear people say 'miles', but at least in my generation, every time I hear 'mile', I need to mentally multiply by 1.6 in order to visualise what it means.

That aside, I am a big fan of national ID cards. The US should have one, and so should every other country. I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it. It's the easiest way to control illegal immigration.

Because it will not be so used. We already have sanctuary cities which house most of the illegal immigrants in the nation. Their cops will be mandated to not check that, as they currently are in those jurisdictions.

If you actually look at the US laws, you would observe that it is seemingly a very strong immigration code that should already be easily able to deal with the illegal immigration problem. The reality is tens of millions of illegals in America. How? Sand in the gears. No law can get rid of the sand. You could try to mitigate it by hiring millions more ICE agents and immigration judges. The sand throwers would re-direct enough of their efforts to preventing that hiring to continue to stifle you.

That aside, I am a big fan of national ID cards. The US should have one, and so should every other country. I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it. It's the easiest way to control illegal immigration.

Moreover, in many other democracies that the US left idolizes, every contact with the government ends up being a check for immigration status, similar to how in the US all police will run you for warrants.

American liberals do not understand that the US has by far the most permissive immigration policy in the developed world.

It depends. Annual immigration as a proportion of the total population is low relative to other Anglo countries and most of Western Europe.

And recently one of the most permissive abortion policies.

I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it. It's the easiest way to control illegal immigration.

I think most don't truly oppose it, but it risks alienating some member of their coalition, the sovereign citizen, anti-government types who think not having a national ID is impeding the federal government.

Well, it seems to kind of work. Can't remember how many times i've read news that so and so has been in the US illegally and occupying a high position almost reaching congress or whatever while being illegal.

A nation's olympic representative would qualify for an O1 with an instant EB-1 green card.

No, the US is much harsher than that -- you need an Olympic MEDAL to automatically qualify, though I believe even bronze is accepted. Without that, an olympic athlete needs 3 of 10 criteria. Though two should be easy:

  • Evidence of receipt of lesser nationally or internationally recognized prizes or awards for excellence (anyone who gets on a national olympic team should have this)

  • Evidence of your membership in associations in the field which demand outstanding achievement of their members (the Olympic team itself should qualify)

Given those, he'd need to have one of

  • Evidence of published material about you in professional or major trade publications or other major media

  • Evidence that you have been asked to judge the work of others, either individually or on a panel

  • Evidence of your original scientific, scholarly, artistic, athletic, or business-related contributions of major significance to the field

  • Evidence of your performance of a leading or critical role in distinguished organizations

  • Evidence that you command a high salary or other significantly high remuneration in relation to others in the field

Without any of them, no EB-1 for you.

I mean he was in the Olympics, it shouldn't be hard to dig up some "evidence of published material about [him] in ... other major media"?

Evidence that you have been asked to judge the work of others, either individually or on a panel

This one's basically a free space. Reviewed coworker's code? Check. Gave your teammate feedback on their performance? Check. Etc.

No, you need evidence that you've been asked to do it. Informal stuff that doesn't generate such evidence won't work.

Code review has a paper trail. It's easy to make a paper trail for reviewing your teammate's performance too.

You're not thinking outside the box.

That aside, I am a big fan of national ID cards. The US should have one, and so should every other country. I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it. It's the easiest way to control illegal immigration.

As someone who is opposed to it, what I'm most worried about is the possibility of the government being able to 'unperson' someone. I live in Canada, where the government literally banned people who had not taken the COVID vaccine from entering a lot of establishments, enforced by presenting positive proof that you had been vaccinated. This severely curtailed my ability to participate in society until the restrictions ended.

Here are some of the wonderful things that a government could do with a national ID, ranked approximately in order of how long it would take the slippery slope to get to that point.

  1. Require it for the purchase of (guns/abortion drugs/hormones). Use the fact that the person purchased them as an excuse to '3 felonies a day' them.
  2. Require it for sign on to the internet, in the name of 'safety'. This would probably start by requiring it for access to online government services, then expand to being required for internet sign on for people caught committing a felony involving the use of a computer network (think like, child pornography, or large scale fraud), then to children to ensure they only access the 'safe' parts of the internet, then to everyone, as a generation has grown up thinking it is normal.
  3. Require it for transit (for example, to use a bus, or to start your car); track people's movement with this (to be fair, this would require a digital ID; to also be fair, the chances of it being non-digital in this day and age approach 0).

One thing I think is a very big disconnect between the left and the right is that a lot of the right (the libertarian/small government part) sees governments as (at best) a necessary evil, while the left doesn't necessarily think of it the same way. As someone who has libertarian leanings, what I see is that the government is constantly expanding its own power, while making decisions that are not to the benefit of the majority of its constituents. Elections tend to be shams, as we don't get to vote on the policies we actually want - we instead vote only on the policies we are allowed to vote on (for example, a large portion of Brexit was people voting against immigration; but the government decided it wanted more immigration anyways, so did that all on their own; in the last Canadian election, none of the parties that have ever formed government before ran on decreasing immigration - and we have roughly the same absolute amount of immigration as the US does, with 1/10 of the population). Here are the results of the last Canadian election; notice all the blue in Western Canada? It doesn't make a difference at all, as Quebec and Ontario voted to continue allowing Central Canada to loot the piggy bank in the west (and from my awareness, this occurs in the US too; cities have a lot of seats, and overwhelm the nearby countryside, even though the policies that are desired by the city are not in the best interests of the countryside). They also constantly violate their own rules; in Canada, it was determined that the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was 'not justified' in breaking up the convoy protest against him and his COVID policies. He suffered no consequences for this action. The order in the Canadian military to take the COVID vaccine was determined to be unlawful; however, by the time the ruling came through, it was too late to seek recompense for it (as a member of my family personally experienced).

To take a slightly more 'hinged' take on it; right now, in the US, I think it's fairly safe to say that a large percentage of leftists consider the current government to not only be illegitimate, but evil on top of that. I can assure you that when Biden was in charge, a large percentage of rightists considered it to be the same situation. Both parties spend approximately 50% of the time feeling like they're under siege from a government completely unaligned with their values; why would they ever accept anything that would make it easier for the government to do evil things to them?

Require it for transit (for example, to use a bus, or to start your car); track people's movement with this (to be fair, this would require a digital ID; to also be fair, the chances of it being non-digital in this day and age approach 0).

You don't need a new form of ID to track this. Multi-use transit cards already let you track their movement and if you bought them with a card, are linked with your identity. If bought with cash, you leave enough PII around the Internet even if you click "reject all" on every cookie banner that you can just buy a "people that live in A and commute to B by bus" dataset from them that includes their phone numbers. Another dataset from mobile phone operators later and you can find out which one rode that particular bus.

I'm sure you don't need reminding that the Canadian government weaponized the financial system against domestic dissent during the Freedom Convoy, but it's worth pointing out that's the sort of action that "first-world Western democracies" now consider appropriate (even if the courts eventually disagreed, and even that is still under appeal).

Such governments should not be trusted with the ability to issue national ID cards, and since it's clear that even "liberal democracies" can evolve into this sort of government, they shouldn't be trusted with them either.

@anon_ is correct that the government is a necessary evil, but even before COVID I felt that it should be kept as small as possible. Now I think the argument is even clearer.

This may be true, but the price of accepting that (for us in the US) is that our government will never get a handle around removable aliens.

there wasn't a national ID in 1954 and yet the Eisenhower administration expelled the vast majority of removable aliens they targeted

identifying illegals and removing them isn't difficult to accomplish because of a lack of national id, it's difficult to accomplish because the government and powerful interest groups don't want it to happen

it's not some big mystery where the vast bulk of illegals are in the US and it's relatively easy to identify the overwhelming vast bulk of them once they're encountered (race, language, documents)

the reason the right doesn't want national id is because it just gives even more power to the federal government which, for approx 80 years, may as well be structured specifically to harm the right

whether or not it's possible this increased power would make it marginally easier to id illegals doesn't matter because that's not what it would be used for and we know that because there are already on the books strict laws and requirements which are not followed or used

We should revisit this in a year or two to assess whether Trump's ICE, plus all the funding it got from the OBB, was able to accomplish this easy task.

the point is specifically about national id

if in a year or two, with vast resources or whatever you're implying, and the removable aliens haven't been removed, are you really trying to imply the reason is because there is no national id?

that's silly so I'm going to assume you were trying to make another point

what is it?

No, that’s kind of my point actually. Even employers that want to verify applicants aren’t able to do so accurately.

A government that cannot maintain territorial integrity is a government I consider to be "too small".

Well there ya go -- now we're at the point of tradeoffs with respect to the functions that are absolutely necessary.

It would be kinda silly if we both had government as a necessary evil and it was too disempowered to actually accomplish those ends.

I believe the standard rebuttal is "cannot ≠ will not".

I think the libertarian right is coming around to the fact that government is a necessary evil, and to that end it needs the powers to effect those necessary functions competently.

There has also been questions about his education credentials as well. I see two extreme interpretations of the current situation. Either he is extremely unlucky and has been a victim of ICE and now the internet sleuths have been activated and is now is whole life is being painted in the worse possible light or he is a serial grifter archetype. Laura Powell has a breakdown here: https://x.com/LauraPowellEsq/status/1971811032235753770

The other weird thing is in that twitter thread from Laura Powell it shows he was married and presumably married to an American for a long period of time. It seems to me to be a massive screw up if you do not become a citizen through marriage if you are not already a citizen.

It's also interesting to read his statement about the hunting rifle while imagining he is either this unlucky victim of circumstance or he is the grifter. He even implies that maybe it was not a case of luck but rather that he had been targeted due to race and that the citation was due to him trying to create a safer situation for the law enforcement officer. His statement could definitely be true. There is no doubt that there are law enforcement people out there that might see you place a rifle back into your vehicle temporarily and then write you up instead of letting it slide. (https://www.yourerie.com/news/local-news/millcreek-superintendent-issues-statement-after-receiving-hunting-citation/)

He also has not made everything up because is is an olympic athlete and did compete in the Sydney 2000 Olympics where is ran 1:52.32 in the 800m qualifier. (https://worldathletics.org/results/olympic-games/2000/27th-olympic-games-6951910/men/800-metres/heats/result)

Some people are claiming he is was able to get a pass due to his ethnicity but maybe he was able to get a pass because of his sporting accomplishments. Maybe the school board thought that employing an Olympian would help inspire kids regardless of his actual suitability for the job itself.

It seems to me to be a massive screw up if you do not become a citizen through marriage if you are not already a citizen.

If you’re an illegal immigrant can you easily naturalize by marriage? Presumably you’d have to leave the US (and they would have recorded no exit stamp from his student visa 20 years ago, which means he’d have to pretend he left the country without passing through any controlled emigration point), pretend you’d lived abroad for 20 years, and then apply from abroad for a marriage visa (concocting another fake narrative about how you met).

Depends on how quickly you act. But sure, if he had already way overstayed his student visa before getting married, then it would not have been easy to get a green card.

Tbh last time I left the USA I did find it odd I didn't seem to pass through any specific exit point, so I'm not sure if that's hugely unusual

I had a domestic flight from Vegas to Los Angeles then my Los Angeles to overseas flight was just 2 gates over from my domestic flight at the terminal and the attendants said it'd be fine if I just boarded but as far as I can tell I didn't actually go through a formal border control spot.

Tbh last time I left the USA I did find it odd I didn't seem to pass through any specific exit point

The US doesn't make people leaving the country by air get a stamp, but flight (and ship) manifests are tracked for that sort of thing, I understand.

Needing permission to leave sounds a lot like the Berlin Wall, but I think makes sense for the EU combined area.

Yeah I'm just used to having very explicit entry and exit stations from countries. I don't think I've ever seen anybody actually barred, but atleast a quick look at a passport before ushering people into international limbo.

Honestly vaguely worried I'm in some random DHS checklist as an overstayer even though I very much complied with my suggested itinerary.

Needing permission to leave sounds a lot like the Berlin Wall, but I think makes sense for the EU combined area.

You don't need permission to leave. Just EU airports (and most in the world) are separated in international and domestic flight sections. To get in the international part you need to pass border control. And it is impossible to move between the two sections. I think that usa is unique in that regard.

US airports sometimes mix international and domestic gates. The difference is that on arrival international flights kick all the passengers over to customs and usually make them go back through security before flying onward. But that can just be rearranging a couple doors.

In a just world we would have passed legislation allowing prosocial and well behaved people the chance to make their decades-long participation in the country’s social and economic fabric official. Maybe tax them higher for a while as a sort of restitution or something.

We do not have such laws as far as I can tell. So in the absence of such, I see no fundamental issue with deporting him, even if it’s morally mean and probably counterproductive. I also don’t begrudge people mad about it, you know, unjust laws exist and objecting to those is normal political discourse, though this concept is on a sliding scale. Does the lack of a just law “fixing” an unjust situation have equal impact as a literal on the books unjust law? Can we allow characterization of an otherwise just law as unjust by virtue of ‘external’ flaws alone? Those questions aside, in that light some conservatives rub me the wrong way when they insist that it’s a clinical issue with correct and incorrect answers, and ‘why could liberals possibly be so mad’ is a dumb thing to wonder.

I do often wonder about what it must be like to live for decades presumably looking over your shoulder. I once drove with expired plates for nearly a year (insurance was current though) and I was constantly a little bit on edge every time I saw a cop car, and then some. Not fun, a little tiring. To do the same for decades? I guess if enforcement is spotty maybe you just forget - perhaps it was only a year or so of this (since the deportation order).

Possibly unrelated: I have no issue working for even big defense contractors, generally speaking, although a few friends and two siblings might disapprove some. But ICE? Personally I find the idea of working for them right now morally repugnant. That’s not to say ICE shouldn’t exist or anything, but my conscience simply would not allow it.

In a just world we would have passed legislation allowing prosocial and well behaved people the chance to make their decades-long participation in the country’s social and economic fabric official. Maybe tax them higher for a while as a sort of restitution or something.

But there is no such system that would allow a guy like this to remain. He's not productive, he's an active participant in the public schools system. Not just at the teacher level, which IMO is bad enough in most scenarios, but at the administrative level. The argument that this isn't a parasite class is incredibly weak. At best he's just following the incentives laid out before someone who wants money and prestige and has a passion for progressivism. 99% of the other scenarios he's cynical and knows he's part of a parasite class.

If you declare "My ideological opponents (including people who work in fields I disapprove of) are not productive citizens" you are not striving to create a just system, just one that rewards your ingroup and punishes your outgroup.

But I actually think most school administrators are not productive in a "positive net value of their labor" sense. There's been a multi-hundred percent increase in school administrators in the past few decades. There's some correct level of administration and then there's the Iron Law of Institutions run wild. I think we are far into the second case regarding public school administration.

I don't really disagree with that, but it's not relevant to the argument. I can think of a lot of jobs I think are net negative.

Fair enough if you're complaining about free enterprise that you don't approve of, but it's rather different if the job in question is paid for by your own money taken at the proverbial gunpoint.

An ancap argument is essentially the same argument.

public school teachers are a parasite class? this seems like it's painting with a broad brush.

Public school administrators as a parasite class. The teachers are far below these people.

I think @anti_dan is reflecting a broader ratsphere view which sees schools as child prisons. Personally, I would agree that the public school system is far from optimal.

On the other hand, I also do not have a solution ready to replace the US public school system at scale. If one simply gets rid of the schools and hopes that kids will learn how to read from their smartphones, that will likely backfire spectacularly for most kids.

If we fired all the teachers tomorrow and spend their salaries on licensing LLM-powered learning apps, that would be unlikely to be an improvement over the status quo.

The purpose of the public school system is to 1) provide state-funded daycare, and 2) force kids to socialize with each other and give them hands-on experience with navigating social hierarchies. The "teaching" and "learning" of objective information, to the extent that it occurs, ranks at a distant third (or it might rank even lower, depending on how much weight you assign to "Pavlovian conditioning with regards to how to follow orders" and "repeated IQ testing and sorting based on future potential", and how tightly interwoven you think those things are with the actual teaching/learning).

So in order to fulfill (1) and (2), you still need to gather all the kids under one roof with adult supervisors.

The purpose of public schools is to spend taxpayer money on themselves. They don't prioritize state funded daycare any more than they prioritize education.

Parents consistently say that they prioritize job prep. Teachers mostly prefer general education. Admins prioritize spending as large a fraction of society's resources as possible and also their ideological crusades. Statefunded daycare and actual education are not priorities.

I think the assumption is that public school administrators are, which seems broadly fair at first blush.

Does it?

I’ve met my fair share of public school administrators. They were 1) very small in number compared to the total school staff and 2) did the necessary ground level admin work mandated by the law and city, required planning (eg. resource allocation depending on student numbers, scheduling classes etc), hiring teachers and so on. They had zero input into any of the ”improved” education styles and similar foolishness (that was all mandated at city / ministry level). Of course this wasn’t in the US, but I’d be surprised if it was all that different.

Now university administration is a whole different game.

Administrators are (obviously?) necessary and useful, so it's not a purely parasitic function. Imagine a world where we have a good public school system, but a teacher is refusing to teach or use effective methods to teach. Who will discipline or fire them?

In the world we actually have, they... fall short of that ideal, to say the least. But it seems alienating to call them a parasite class. For people who do want a public school system but one that's better run, it's better to distinguish between good administrators and destructive ones, even if as a class a current supermajority of them can be fairly described as destructive and self interested.

Good administrators can be good, but it's not the sort of specialized position for which no qualified citizen is available, and must be drawn from the pool of foreign Olympians.

This seems beside the point given that we are seemingly not talking about a case where a "foreign Olympian" was invited to the position because no qualified citizen was available. Rather, the employers either (charitably) thought he was in fact a qualified citizen, or (less charitably) thought that he should be considered one.

Imagine a world where we have a good public school system, but a teacher is refusing to teach or use effective methods to teach. Who will discipline or fire them?

Well...

DENNIS: We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting. By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more--

ARTHUR: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!

More seriously, lots of schools like Oxford and Cambridge seem to have been able to run themselves without a specialised professional administrator class until recently.

In a just world we would have passed legislation allowing prosocial and well behaved people the chance to make their decades-long participation in the country’s social and economic fabric official

Isn't this just 'complying with the immigration law of the country you're trying to enter'? It's not like the guy entered originally through a Coyote over the Southern border. He had multiple hearings regarding his immigration status and then chose to ignore the final result.

having his deer rifle on his seat still loaded

Sounds like the kind of Stupid Human Trick that ends up with "and the guy was shot by his own rifle" that may engender amusement in those who think hunting is immoral.

Even more surprising for him to be hired; the district claims to have done a background check on him; you would think this would result in them finding out he was not authorized to work and not being hired.

Depending on how well the vetting was done, I guess. There was a story about someone working in a crèche here who had all the relevant clearance for working with kids and still got caught on CCTV being physically abusive. And I remember years ago when I was in third level education where the college hired someone who later turned out to be on the run from charges of assault in Sweden.

So even good checks can have someone slip through the cracks, and maybe this guy used the fact that he was an immigrant to cover up any gaps in the background check? (e.g. "Yeah, I am waiting for the government office back home to get that paperwork, you know the kind of delays that happen").

The story sounds odd, though. Wikipedia has a scanty article up, and it says that he was working as school principal back in 2012. So he was in the US presumably on some kind of sports scholarship, graduated, got (it would seem) a fairly high level of education - and then started work? But he was supposed to be finally deported in 2024? I don't understand what was going on there.

It is a strange situation. U.S. employers are usually required to confirm US citizenship or legal residency and work authorization before hiring someone, and while some employers are notoriously lax about this, school districts and other state institutions usually are not. If you don't produce a birth certificate and social security card at some point before your first paycheck, you won't be able to keep your job.

U.S. employers are usually required to confirm US citizenship or legal residency and work authorization before hiring someone

Is that true for state/city governments? I'm reaching back a lot here, but I thought a lot of the laws the government uses here required the torturing of the commerce clause that was common between ~1940-2000 and didn't apply to government agencies themselves.

Of course, plenty of government positions do background checks for their own reasons, but I thought there was a big difference in this particular case.

Federal law requires employers to submit an I-9 employment eligibility verification form for all employees. Employees have to provide suitable documentation proving they are eligible to work legally in the US. Technically you can't require someone to be a US citizen, but proof of citizenship would be one way to prove you can legally work here.

There was a story about someone working in a crèche here who had all the relevant clearance for working with kids and still got caught on CCTV being physically abusive.

This seems apples and oranges. There is no background check which can 100% assure you that someone is not abusive, or not a North Korean spy.

By contrast, if someone has a work visa is something which can be determined on a prima farcie basis. Sure, it is possible that he forged his visa, or stole an identity, or obtained his visa based on false statements, or blackmailed an official into improperly granting his visa, and I would not expect a school district to do the kind of digging to find these. But from what we know so far, it sounds more like they did not even check.

Is employing someone without checking their visa status (or nationality) an offense, criminal or regulatory?

There is no background check which can 100% assure you that someone is not abusive, or not a North Korean spy.

I don't expect 100% of background checks to be 100% perfect.

The guy in question has held at least 4 different jobs in four different districts (three different states plus DC). All four either didn't do a background or the background failed? Dude's got pretty good luck or the background check system school districts use is a farce.

prima farcie

What a great typo!

My assumption is that he had some sort of bridging status that got formally revoked at the end of 2024, which might answer the question of how he managed to get into the job (since I assume HR's not doing quarterly immigration status checks)

My experience with school districts is that anything Principle-level(and sometimes Assistant-Principle) and above are pure political appointees.

Old-style politics, in the form of whom you know. And if you're lucky, they're somewhat competent at thier job. If not...

So it doesn't really surprise me that he got hired. He knew the right people, and they didn't care about his bona fides.

The head of a school is a principal. A principle is an underlying idea.

I have never claimed to be a clever man.

"Remember, the principal is your pal"

More generally, "principal" means "first". Which I assume is the origin of principal as the head of a school, but IDK for certain.

Same origin as the word "prince" for first son, I would assume.

'Princeps' means 'first citizen' and was used as a euphemism for the institution of a de facto hereditary monarchy(same as 'imperator' which just meant 'person holding authority'). Over time it morphed to refer to a minor king which then became used as a courtesy title for a non-reigning royal.

prīnceps merely means 'first' - the prīnceps senātūs ('first of the senate') originated during the Republic, and later Augustus took the title prīnceps cīvitātis ('first of the citizens') to pretend that he was merely first among equals rather than a king.

One of my favorite bits of historical PR. "No, of course I'm not a king. As a proper Roman, I hate kings just as much as the rest of you do! I'm just the first citizen, with near-absolute power over the government and whose children will reign after him. Totally different!"

If the domain of a prince is a principality, does that make the domain of a principal a principalipality?

As I understand it, the purpose of ICE is to make a big theatrical show of removing a few unfortunate illegals pour encourager les autres, and, even if that doesn't actually do anything on a large scale, at least make the administration look like they're taking a hard stance.

With that in mind, what better target than this guy? To others overstaying their visas: if they can get him, they could get you too. To the voting base: "Look, this guy thought he could get away with blatantly flouting the rules for two decades, and in case you thought he was an upstanding citizen, pillar of the community, Olympian, etc. He had weapons charges and was fleeing the law"

As I understand it, the purpose of ICE is to make a big theatrical show of removing a few unfortunate illegals pour encourager les autres, and, even if that doesn't actually do anything on a large scale, at least make the administration look like they're taking a hard stance.

There are many purposes, but yes, the idea is to encourage self deportation, and discourage illegal crossings, by making the environment not feel overwhelmingly pro-illegal as it has for most of the past 30 years.

This is a good target for that, but it also just seems like an insanely flagrant violation that couldn't be ignored once anyone at ICE got a whiff of it. This is one of the highest paid public employees in a swing state.

Iowa isn't a swing state, democrats haven't won a statewide election there in over a decade- and that was mostly Obama's personal magic.

As an aside, it's actually crazy how much school district admins get paid, especially considering that what they mostly do is make things worse.

Iowa isn't a swing state, democrats haven't won a statewide election there in over a decade- and that was mostly Obama's personal magic.

You need to excuse the olds.

There job is to make sure the district is eligible for funding and doesn’t get sued. These are much more important functions to the district than educating the children.

Much more important to the district's union, the district is best off when someone comes in and burns everything down.

Making sure you have funding is still an important function. And I'm not sure it's actually better for the district to have a principal who makes a courageous stand against bad policy as opposed to one who secures funding. If nothing else, the district already pays taxes; if the school district is better described as babysitting than an educational organization, at least there's the befit of getting the babysitting you pay for.

In theory yes, in practice nearly every superintendent wants to make their “impact” and so tosses any program affiliated with a predecessor and replaces it with their own shiny new toy that they obligate teachers to drop everything and follow. And yes, it’s horribly inefficient.

Well yes, and as someone not employed by the district I take this as evidence that district bureaucrats should be shot and district functions sold to vendors, pour encourager les-autres.

a loaded handgun, a hunting knife, and $3000 in cash.

Iowa is a constitutional carry state.

What percentage of men have hunting knives in their car? 100%? I've had some sort of knife on my person at all times where it was legal and practical since I was like 12 years old. A pocket knife is as much a part of my pants as my wallet is.

$3000 cash? Who cares?

If you pulled me over and tried to write this story about me it would be like: "man found with a loaded handgun (normal where I live), multiple tactical knives (a leatherman in my pocket, and the one that fell between the seats and I never found), spotting equipment (binoculars I keep in the glovebox for monitoring the situation), and hundreds of thousands of dollars of untraceable cryptocurrency (my coinbase account viewer on my phone).

I hate that this is highlighted on these stories.

The story here is: illegal immigrant given job as head of DMPS. Apparently the weapons charge he had was bad enough that he was given a deportation order by the Biden administration in 2024. Maybe that was a legit gun charge?

"Had gun in car" is a pointless non-fact.

I like when then they bust someone and scarily state that he had a few guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition in his home. Pretending as though that is noteworthy or strange.

I mean, aside from his woke crap (which was likely a grift), this guy sounds like a good Red Triber. Carries a knife and handgun, goes deer hunting, presumably thinks physical activity is important, etc. If it weren't for the woke stuff, I'd have wished he tried to become legal; he probably could have managed it after his Olympic appearance. But he didn't.

It’s a relevant fact. Not to ICE, you’re right that they like police often toss prejudicial technically-facts in press releases all the time. But to the district, because it’s against policy to carry guns onto school properties there, so if those are regularly in his car they are regularly showing up at schools. (Now do I care actually, and is that a good policy? Not actually sure.)

This would only matter if he was arrested on school property or on his way to/from school.

Also, while it might technically violate the policy, it seems like it is also utterly unenforceable at scale. Letting everyone walk through a metal detector is feasible if expensive. Searching every car which enters the school parking lot is just not feasible. From a safety point of view, people keeping their guns in their cars seems closer to them keeping their gun at home than them keeping their gun on their person or in their bag or briefcase.

I would also estimate that people who keep a handgun in their glove compartment are feeding the illegal gun market, which seems bad.

From a CW perspective, this also pretty much destroys his woke credentials, I would say. Being a school official who hunts is one thing. But while hunters carry pistols for defense against boars and the like, my priors for anyone who keeps a gun in their glove compartment is that the gun serves for self-defense against fellow humans. OTOH, if his area is rural and has a severe coyote problem, that would make things look different.

This is Des Moines, it's not gonna be rural enough to have a serious problem with feral hogs or whatever, and carrying a gun to defend against coyotes as a grown, lone human is... unnecessary.

Now technically as a matter of law, you can generally have guns in the car in the parking lot of a facility that bans them. Your car is your personal property.

It depends on if the parking lot is considered to be on the facility's property - I know some federal facilities are like that (the parking lot is "federal property", and then there's another "controlled area" beyond that). For schools, a lot of gun laws are I believe based on the distance from the school, if not based on "yes the parking lot and green fields are school property". If I'm correct about the distance thing, I'm sure there's a case out there where someone couldn't (or was legally found that they could) have a gun or something in their own home due to being within that limit.

You don't have that crypto in the car with you any more than I have the cash in my bank account in my phone, that crypto is actually in some coinbase server somewhere and unless it's Monero, it's very much traceable. It's not the same. If you had a Ledger with you, that would be analogous.

My point is to illustrate how deceptive reporting is on these things. My choice of “coinbase app on my phone” was a deliberate choice for the exact reason you are stating.

I don't see how the reporting is deceptive. They're implying that this illegal immigrant from Guyana is a sketchy character and it seems like he is a sketchy character. How did he come to get a highly paid job in the administration? How did he pass the background check? Why is there all this cash in his car? Why did he try to flee law enforcement? These questions are probably not unrelated.

It's not a crime to have lots of cash nor should it be. But it is useful in trying to analyse the situation.

Not all people with certain kinds of obnoxious tattoos are criminals. But they do send a message and wisdom involves receiving that message and calibrating appropriately.

They're implying that this illegal immigrant from Guyana is a sketchy character and it seems like he is a sketchy character

This is profoundly circular

"The media is trying to make them look sketchy, and from media reporting, they seem sketchy, so that makes sense"

"The media is trying to make ISIS look like bad guys and from media reporting, they seem pretty bad..."

They could just be bad! It is very, very likely that an illegal immigrant from Guyana who gets a position of high office is a sketchy character. Even without the cash, guns and so on he'd still be a sketchy character.

Reporting on things is always deceptive. "High School Graduate Gunned Down While on Stroll" was essentially the initial Michael Brown reporting. If you read the OP's news article, they frame all these allegations as allegations made by ICE, which is a far less credulous stance than federal law enforcement would be given by NBC news if this guy was being arrested on lynching charges.

The story here is: illegal immigrant given job as head of DMPS. Apparently the weapons charge he had was bad enough that he was given a deportation order by the Biden administration in 2024. Maybe that was a legit gun charge?

The earlier weapons charge anyone has been able to find is a penny-ante summary offense about having a loaded deer rifle on the seat of his parked car. It's not clear whether that charge had anything to do with his deportation order, nor whether that is the February 5, 2020 weapons charge that ICE is claiming exists. ICE is implying he last entered the US in 1999 on a student visa, but this clearly isn't the case since he competed in the Sydney, Australia Olympics in 2000. It does seem clear that either ICE has screwed up big time, or Des Moines Public Schools has.

having a loaded deer rifle on the seat of his parked car.

Not aware of the law here: what's the legal status of illegal immigrants possessing firearms? IIRC In theory it was at least an ITAR issue for dumb reasons ("export") until the first Trump term when regular ol' guns left that list.

Not aware of the law here: what's the legal status of illegal immigrants possessing firearms?

Federally speaking, there's a specific statute prohibiting possession (or sale to) to illegal aliens, or to legal aliens on non-immigration visas (with a tiny number of exceptions not relevant here):

It shall be unlawful for any person... who, being an alien... is illegally or unlawfully in the United States... to ship or transport in interstate or foreign commerce, or possess in or affecting commerce, any firearm or ammunition; or to receive any firearm or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce.

The ATF has taken an unusually even-handed approach to this matter and does not consider the bare possession charge to apply to nonimmigrant aliens (though they can only purchase lawfully from private sellers), but it defines those who have overstayed their visa as specifically not in nonimmigrant status.

Theoretically speaking, this only applies to firearms or ammunition which has been shipped or transported in interstate/foreign commerce, but I wouldn't be my dog's life on the ATF making a distinction.

In practice, prosecutions are rare.

Constitutionally speaking, there's been some recent cases about how much the illegal immigrant must know that they are illegal, (caveat: I can't find if he was retried; the man was almost certainly guilty under the new standard of proof, but that doesn't always mean much). The prohibition itself hasn't made it to SCOTUS, but it's been pretty universally upheld by appeals courts. Some states prohibit possession by even federal-permitted lawful aliens (or even non-citizen US nationals), and those are on sketchier constitutional ground in my opinion, but they've also been difficult to challenge for procedural reasons.

Thanks!

I wonder what that means for the legality of the "I am visiting the US and want to shoot a gun" folks. I've seen billboard ads for "shoot a machine gun" in at least Vegas and some red-state cities.

I guess that might not be legal "possession", though.

Renting a gun at the range is legal and not considered possession as long as it stays at the range.

One of the nonimmigrant visa tiny exceptions is :

admitted to the United States for lawful hunting or sporting purposes or is in possession of a hunting license or permit lawfully issued in the United States.

It's... much easier to argue for recognized sports or permitted hunting than for machine gun tourism, though I'm not aware of any prosecutions in either case.

"sporting purposes"

"Why yes officer, there is a bullseye downrange somewhere. It's very rare one of our new shooters actually hits it, though."

I think it's complicated -- although in some cases having a hunting license makes it pretty OK. (Assuming he had one?)

Canadians deal with this all the time -- other than a hunting license in some state, if you have something like a letter of invitation to a pistol competition or something, maybe it's OK? I think there's some ITAR form that you might need to fill out for whatever guns you are bringing with you, but that wouldn't apply if he bought his hunting rifle in the US.

its quite possible Des Moines Public Schools has an unofficial policy of not complying with immigration law. there is presumably a lot of this going on in the private sector i guess it should not be surprising if its happening in the public sector as well. also this seems to be a failure of the federal government. the federal government is able to coerce banks into acting as policeman for all their crazy money laundering laws. if the federal government were seriously interested in cracking down on immigration then they could just coerce private and public employers in a similar manner.

Non-commandeering says otherwise, with respect to public officials.

Laid out in a case against commandeering local police to enforce federal gun laws, no less

A new post then. Below @samiam linked to a National Review piece that mocks a recent article in The Atlantic titled "Left-Wing Terrorism Is on the Rise".

The Atlantic is a center-left institution of American journalism. The not-magazine is capable of pushing certain signals over the hill into respectability status. This signal: it's okay to acknowledge left-wing violence as a problem, because we can remind ourselves the right's stochastic terror was successfully defeated, but not forgotten. How significant is it that a couple CSIS think tank goons can send this signal, and how much impact can they have?

Actually stanching political violence will require America’s leaders to commit to fighting all forms of extremism, not just those associated with their opponents. The Trump administration has prioritized combatting the rise of left-wing terrorism but not right-wing terrorism, which remains a concern despite its decline this year. Developing the programs and expertise to suppress different forms of terrorism takes years, and ignoring a long-term threat to go after a more immediate one could be deadly over time.

In the previous paragraphs the authors set-up their prescription of "programs and expertise" only this time aimed leftward. They justify this by granting the Biden admin (and probably themselves) credit for throwing the book at Oath Keepers and Proud Boys following their January 6th doings. If memory serves the Proud Boys were a group of capital P-atriots who showed up to protests, dared their opposites to do the same, then engaged in fistfights. This is political violence and its escalation can be a concern, but it's not the same risk as a growing number of political assassinations. Assassinations seemingly perpetrated by culture warriors first, not ideologues.

The programs and expertise of think tank goons are unlikely to bring about an effective reversal in cultural trends. Disaffected radicals aren't in the habit of being persuaded by them. I offer two actionable alternatives:

Idea #1: Indoctrination works. Reinvigorate civic indoctrination in schools. Sell this one as renewed civic literacy and try not to pollute it too badly with culture war. Federally fund it as an opt-in for states to participate.

I suspect we do a piss poor job of teaching civics, politics, or anything in the shape of political philosophy in K-12. We do a poor enough job educating kids on subjects we care enough about to measure. We do not even attempt to teach kids to think about social fabric. Instead, we water it down to be meaningless or replace it with with diversity-isms and sin. Then we are surprised the kids go on to be demoralized by short-form videos which they accept as valid belief generators.

Idea #2: Semi-mandatory service. Want Pell grants or Medicare? Better sign up, 18 year old you. You can join the military, or you can go to a national forest to survey land for a year. Compulsory-but-not-compulsory service might sound like state violence to some, and fascism to others, but maybe we can find a few programs in addition to the military that a supermajority could support staffing with conscripted teens.

If the alternative of New Deal conscripts is instead waiting to figure out how to best Balkanize I say we give it a go. What might be other ideas for actionable things to combat the misery and cultural malaise?

I don’t think civics courses by themselves are a good answer here. Turning down the temperature on this stuff requires that the discourse changes as well. Civics and required volunteering are good ideas, as I think is the habit in some Asian countries to require kids to join clubs in school to kinda force proper socialization. But having a kid learn civics and join the chess club isn’t going to do much as long as he’s immersed in an online world in which it’s common to see content dehumanizing people who disagree with you and an algorithm that rewards him for participating in that dehumanization of his supposed political or social enemies.

The best thing we could do to stop this is to bring back and enforce minimum standards of decorum in media or at least mainstream media including social media. It’s unacceptable in a civilized society to be calling the sitting president and his party “fascist”, “Nazi” and “authoritarian”, and you should not be equating winning the next election to “saving democracy”. You should not be celebrating the death of a political opponent. You should not be allowed to dehumanize other people online. What we have right now is a bifurcated hate box that pushes people to radicalize and rewards them for doing so. Then we’re wondering why people participating in the hate box are popping off and shooting each other. And unless we deal with this directly, it’s just going to get worse as the algorithms push people farther and further down these pipelines with more sophisticated algorithms that know exactly how to keep people scrolling through millions of messages highlighting all the bad stuff the “enemy” is doing while hiding his answers or anything positive about him.

Indoctrination works. Reinvigorate civic indoctrination in schools.

I am not sure it does work very well. Any message which comes down officially from the school, no matter if it is about drugs, rape, abstinence, civic pride, the glory of communism or whatever is inherently uncool and cringe. Good luck competing with TikTok.

Semi-mandatory service.

This seems like a terrible idea. At its core, pressuring young people into service is fundamentally gerontocratic, democratic only in the "two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner" kind of way. I abhorred the draft when I was 16, and I am happy to say that I still abhor the idea decades later.

Besides, if you are worried about political violence, then the last thing you would want is to give a lot of people technical and psychological training in shooting other humans.

a group of capital P-atriots

This is a vacuous claim. I am sure the PBs see themselves as ultra-patriotic. Of course, different people had very different ideas about what being an American was all about, from lofty ideas about the relationship between the state and the individual over an entity who protects their god-given right to own other humans to run of the mill nationalism you find in any nation. Some would see the J6 efforts to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as quintessentially anti-American instead.

Any message which comes down officially from the school, no matter if it is about drugs, rape, abstinence, civic pride, the glory of communism or whatever is inherently uncool and cringe. Good luck competing with TikTok.

That's not what i've been told by various leftists, wasn't there a "hitler-jugend-like" school excercise one teacher ran and had to put the breaks to it because the kids were too much into it once? Perhaps it's not whom the information comes from but how it's presented. Zoomers would be marching and yes chadding if what they are doing is associated with power, influence and coolness to their peers and more importantly the zoomettes.

That's not what i've been told by various leftists, wasn't there a "hitler-jugend-like" school excercise one teacher ran and had to put the breaks to it because the kids were too much into it once?

The Third Wave but that was in 1967.

I am not sure it does work very well. Any message which comes down officially from the school, no matter if it is about drugs, rape, abstinence, civic pride, the glory of communism or whatever is inherently uncool and cringe. Good luck competing with TikTok.

Not all propaganda efforts are effective or worthwhile. I don't feel compelled to stamp out teenage contrarianism, rebellion, or progressive resistance.

The mandated schooling already does some indoctrination. That indoctrination doesn't spit out perfect American optimists, no, but it doesn't try to do that. I don't think it needs to. Nations shape culture through education all over the world. Maybe my ideal program isn't more myth based story telling in history. The program could be physical, fun, and/or charity focused. I'm open to better ideas.

At its core, pressuring young people into service is fundamentally gerontocratic, democratic only in the "two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner" kind of way.

If we speak only of compulsory military service, then it's more accurate to say using bodies to achieve physical tasks is fundamentally a young man's game. I like the idea of a civil service that ships you around to travel, help with charity or maintenance work, and creates bonds with Americans. FEMA disaster relief that uses our college aged manpower 19 year old. The goal isn't to only reduce propensity for violence, but to increase our commonalities through exposure, shared experience, and civic duty. If achieved, these could do more than reduce a trend of support for political violence.

I am sure the PBs see themselves as ultra-patriotic. Of course, different people had very different ideas about what being an American was all about, from lofty ideas about the relationship between the state and the individual over an entity who protects their god-given right to own other humans to run of the mill nationalism you find in any nation.

It doesn't seem we disagree too much. 'Capital W-ord' isn't a plain construction it's shaded with some irony. I don't consider their branding, self-image, or claim to 'patriot' as legitimate. I explain what I recall of their image in the following sentence and mentioned January 6th prior. "Real American Patriots®" might have been a stronger form. Perhaps a case of thinking myself clever.

This definitely reminds me of the communist student work camps, where they would do things like reforesting or minor construction. I'm not sure it's that bad of an idea, you get the teens together in a common work environment and the more aware of them get to score while being away form their parents.

This definitely reminds me of the communist student work camps, where they would do things like reforesting or minor construction. I'm not sure it's that bad of an idea, you get the teens together in a common work environment and the more aware of them get to score while being away form their parents.

Construction was very different from other student work, because you were paid. Paid by the output. Agricultural and forestry work were mandatory volunteering of the worst sort, made barely tolerable by the whole "camping out in a rural school gym" being a break from the usual monotony. And yes, scoring for the more aware.

I’d say civil indoctrination isn’t wildly effective but it does provide a decent “anchoring” effect, where kids assume it as a baseline truth and adjust from there, rather than a first exposure be TikTok.

Also the point about mandatory service seems strange since many countries do it, and it doesn’t seem to have the same claimed impact. If anything, it often permanently disillusions young men who are experience a lot of the “sitting around bored” aspect, and witness corruption firsthand, at least in cases like Taiwan and South Korea. I assume you could figure out a better donated labor system - the Inca would have people build roads or otherwise build stuff in addition to military service and it worked well - but that would be a pretty broad change and difficult to implement well.

Outside of a major economic collapse, that is.

can join the military, or you can go to a national forest to survey land for a year.

Bringing back the civilian conservation corps would be cool

Good new deal program there that could get much broader support than only compulsory military service. Also would probably be a bigger benefit for the mental health of the youth, not to mention benefitting the country.

Even things like beautifying broken down or trashed areas, give people a way to serve the country that actually is visibly improving it.

I think both sides could agree on this sort of thing, but it’d be hard not to politicize it.

Periodic reminder that state and regional conservation corps exist all over the American West and possibly elsewhere (see e.g. http://ccc.ca.gov/, https://sccorps.org/, https://thegreatbasininstitute.org/nevada-conservation-corps/, https://www.rockymountainyouthcorps.org/cc-field-life) and are sometimes cool but generally a bad deal relative to entry-level land management jobs.

The US was founded by people who used violence against the government and made it a constitutional right to bear arms. If you had asked the founding fathers about the NSA, the crazy levels of nepotism and corruption and how self-centred the American elite is, they wouldn't have called shooting them terrorism. What level of incompetence and acting like the elite in Versailles is required for the constitutional right to fight back to take effect?

The US was founded by people who rebelled against an overseas government they considered illegitimate (albeit for quite selfish reasons of their own). They were not against the very concept of government and notwithstanding that Thomas Jefferson quote everyone likes so much, they were not advocating regular revolts and coups.

The founders would be aghast and agog about many things in today's world. However, one thing you can definitely say about them is that they anticipated and expected that the future would be very different from their own time and they knew they could not anticipate or dictate to future generations what government they would choose. They set down guidelines and checks and balances they hoped would stand the test of time, but even in their era there were cracks showing, and there was violent disagreement over the Constitution itself and the Bill of Rights.

There was also no shortage of nepotism and incompetence and self-centeredness among the elites, from the era of Virginia's dominance to Tammany Hall, and most certainly within the Confederacy.

The founders, if you took to the time to explain to them how institutions like the NSA came about, would eventually understand the concept of intelligence and national security, be concerned about privacy and individual rights, but would probably be a lot more upset about rise of federalism following the Civil War. (Though they would probably understand why and how the Civil War happened.)

Please put to rest this tired argument made by people like you and Kulak that "The Founding Fathers lived for violence and wanted regular bloodbaths, would be horrified that you have allowed (Thing I Don't Like), and cry from the grave for you to slaughter your political opponents." That is not who they were and it was not the world they sought.

If you had asked the founding fathers about the NSA, the crazy levels of nepotism and corruption and how self-centred the American elite is, they wouldn't have called shooting them terrorism.

If you had explained that these were the product of a representative government, they might feel differently. The Founders were not of the opinion that one has the right never to lose an election.

The whole bit about violence against a government was about the fundamental lack of representation. That's what the DOI is all about. It's not an anarchist document that entitles anyone to pick up a gun because they don't like the NSA or the FTC or whatever else. Indeed, the DOI spends a lot of time explaining that very point.

If you had explained that these were the product of a representative government, they might feel differently.

The Anti-Federalists among the founders would not be particularly impressed, seeing as they insisted on that Bill of Rights.

The Founders were not of the opinion that one has the right never to lose an election.

Well, Aaron Burr was also a founder.

Well, yes, but the AF were largely outvoted at the Constitutional Convention.

Im also real sick of “the bill of rights mandates (whatever political platform I’m on today)”. When my side wins election, it’s a principle of democratic governance. When my side loses, it’s about minimum liberal rights. Even Scott succumbs to this in latest ACX.

I am behind reinventing accountability for officials, functionaries, and politicians. Bring back competence while you're at it. The likelihood we bring back competence or accountability depends on what you mean by fighting back. If you mean random, indiscriminate killings of various public figures that increases in frequency over time I don't think this will end up constructive or constitutional. If you have some Washington-Cincinnatus figure in your back pocket to lead the cleansing fire of rebellion, then I say bring him forth let's just vote him in 3 or 4 times. It'll be easier.

Here is the thing. The US is still, for all its flaws, democratic.

When people got fed up with the DC elites, they voted in Trump, who at least set a new baseline for corruption and nepotism.

If you have a good majority (say 60%) of the citizens behind you, then you do not need to shoot at the feds, you can simply elect one of your own as the next president.

If you do not have such a majority, then using violence to enforce your norms seems bad. I will give you a pass if your group is oppressed to the level of the Jews under the Nazis, but whatever the rules about trans people in gendered bathrooms your society has are, they are insufficient reason to start planting bombs.

If I endorsed a "constitutional right to fight back" for minority positions, then I would have to endorse proponents of mutually exclusive policy proposals to use violence to settle their difference, because saying that violence is only justified whenever I personally think that the advocated policy would be a good idea does not universalize.

Violence sucks very hard. It does not show who is right, only who is left. It can paralyze societies, and is a habit which is very hard to kick even after your side has won. The French and Russian revolution are both cautionary tales here. A democratic process, even as flawed as the US one (FPTP, EC, gerrymandering and so on) is much preferable to bombs and rifles.

If you have a good majority (say 60%) of the citizens behind you, then you do not need to shoot at the feds, you can simply elect one of your own as the next president.

Except I'd argue that the past decade and change serve to illustrate why that doesn't work, because the president isn't actually in charge of the Executive any more (see basically everything MacIntyre talks about here, or this from Jim). FBI JTTF goes after the "domestic terrorists" it wants to, not the ones the President directs them at — as we saw when Bush the younger tried to redirect them from chasing specters of the Klan to Muslim jihadis.

Our democracy is a sham. It's as fake as pro wrestling.

Funny, from where I stand, Trump is actually getting the executive to accomplish his goals. The national guard did occupy the cities he ordered occupied, and his ICE is busy deporting foreigners, just as his constituents wanted. His military is very willing to bomb Iran on his orders or blow up suspected drug smuggling ships.

Any bureaucracy created by a presidential edict can be destroyed by another. Any created by an act of congress can likewise be destroyed through an act of congress. Last time I checked, MAGA controlled both chambers of congress. He also has a supreme court which decided that he gets away with anything. If congress wanted to pass an act tomorrow which said that the EPA was shut down, all their guidelines void and all their employees fired, they could do that.

I mean, Trump is probably hampered by his lack of qualified personnel, with RFK just being an especially shocking case. But that is a skill issue.

I am not saying that the game is not rigged on some level. Most congress critter are likely beholden to some rich donors, and constrained with regard to what they can vote for without pissing them off. Likewise, the two-party system and party control over who gets the nomination make it hard for outsiders to win. And vast parts of the media landscape are in the hands of a few very rich people who use it to push views which are in their interests.

But the game is always going to be a bit rigged in favor of the status quo. This is why I said you might need 60% instead of merely 51%. Also, to the degree that liberal deep-state DC elites are a thing, they certainly did not prevent Trump getting elected, twice. And the media landscape is actually a lot more diverse than it ever was before the internet.

Our democracy is a sham. It's as fake as pro wrestling.

This is certainly a minority view. Now, you can of course claim that most people have been brainwashed, and if they saw reality as clearly as you do they would support the destruction of the system. In some countries, e.g. Russia, I think you would be right. But US citizens have all sorts of news sources at their fingertip, if they listen to ${EVIL_PROPAGANDA_MEDIUM}, that is by choice and not by coercion.

I mean, Trump is probably hampered by his lack of qualified personnel, with RFK just being an especially shocking case. But that is a skill issue.

RFK specifically is in his job as coalition politics, rather than because Trump can't find anyone else.

Note that most of your comments on Trump actually getting the executive branch to do what he wants are part of the Trump 2 administration, not Trump 1 when overt and covert acts of deviance were regularly reported. Trump 2, in turn, has been an administration with exceptional deliberate pre-planning on how to try and make politically unpopular changes over the objection / resistance over the minority party, particularly with the atypical advantage of a governing trifecta, and has been accompanied by explicit denunciations for Trump installing loyalists and opposing 'independent' agencies.

What level of incompetence and acting like the elite in Versailles is required for the constitutional right to fight back to take effect?

It's simple. If the person fighting back is part of the in-group, they are based and understandable, if maybe a bit over the top.

If they're in the out group... They are horrible borderline terrorist individuals who are wholly representative of the entire out group, justifying why the out group sucks and must be crushed into impotence.

Idea #2: Semi-mandatory service. Want Pell grants or Medicare? Better sign up, 18 year old you. You can join the military, or you can go to a national forest to survey land for a year. Compulsory-but-not-compulsory service might sound like state violence to some, and fascism to others, but maybe we can find a few programs in addition to the military that a supermajority could support staffing with conscripted teens.

Semi-mandatory is a dangerous line to ride.

We have protections from certain kinds of fully mandatory actions. But Semi-mandatory is protected from court challenges, and can really ride the line on "semi" hard enough to make it meaningless. Turning down someone for a job because they have a felony on their record is illegal (unless you are the FBI). But anyone doing background checks is generally turning down felons. Its possible to make something extremely adverse selection. Signing up for the draft at 18 is one of those things that already sort of rides the line. Its not been relevant for a long time, but it can cause trouble for men who don't do it. I was certainly tempted not to when I turned 18, mainly for ideological reasons. Practical concerns won out, and I signed up. I'm now out of draft age. My plan at the time if being drafted was to plead flat feet (I do have that, and all running sports are generally off limits to me).

What might be other ideas for actionable things to combat the misery and cultural malaise?

Lean into sports and competition. E-sports is a growing area. Find more professional sports to elevate. I wouldn't mind my favored sport of underwater hockey achieving more widespread adoption. But realistically you could go for existing sports that already have international adoption. The Romans held their empire together for a couple extra centuries by just feeding everyone and providing "circuses".

Semi-mandatory is a dangerous line to ride.

I consider semi-mandatory as preferable to an amendment. The US is at least relatively accommodating for conscientious objectors, although that's more a necessity determines grace deal. The cost to living in a powerful nation that likes to wage war is sometimes you're a slave for dumb and unnecessary reasons. That's a fair enough thing to object to.

Lean into sports and competition.

The US still has a relatively healthy recreational sports industry that still can create fads and innovate. Disc golf or pickleball as two examples that come to mind. Underwater hockey might yet take off for you. I'd prefer to subsidize getting the youth outside, but if video games are a reality then competition e-sports are of higher value. Team based games at least provide a way to develop teamwork, communication, and leadership ability. Might even be able to route around the Hitler Youth comparisons by promoting e-sports in addition to real ones.

Underwater hockey has a difficulty with the underwater part, which requires special equipment and access to a pool. I think 7s rugby is a good game, or maybe Aussie football.

What is being taught in school today?

I went to public school in a liberal area during the 2000s/10s. Here are some things I learned:

  • The United States is a great nation, largely because of its Constitution. The amendments, Bill of Rights, and separation of powers (along with access to plenty of natural resources) has kept our nation alive for (by now) almost 250 years.

  • The first amendment is very important, and it grants true free speech which is a very good thing. The exceptions are specific and largely uncontroversial, like direct threats, leaking classified information, and (the textbook example) shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. The other amendments are also important, although we covered them less, but I do remember covering the second, fourth, fifth, and tenth.

  • George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, MLK Jr...these people were covered extensively and framed very positively. Even Christopher Columbus and Thomas Edison were framed positively in elementary school, although later I learned they were immoral and fraudulent (Columbus was not the first person to discover America, and Edison ripped off Nikola Tesla).

  • Slavery, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights era were covered very extensively. Fascism, communism, and Nazism were covered extensively. I remember socialism being described as maybe OK, but the way it was implemented in the USSR was catastrophic. "Jingoism", Japanese internment, and the Red Scare were shameful and immoral, although covered minimally. The Enlightenment era, factories, robber barons, unions, United Fruit, "The Jungle"...capitalism as a whole wasn't irredeemable, but certainly in need of regulation. The atomic bomb was...controversial, but it was effective and there wasn't a clear alternative. The US destabilized foreign countries' governments for profit and the Vietnam War was largely a failure. 9/11 was a tragedy, and the Taliban and terrorists are barbaric, but the GWOT was too recent to really judge.

  • History in the early years was almost entirely positive, but in high school I learned more and more of the unsavory details. However, I never got the impression that the US as a whole was bad, just imperfect. We still looked up to the founding fathers and the Constitution (I learned that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves and had a child with one, but he was still portrayed as humane overall because "it was a different time"). We still learned about and looked up to the "great men" (and some women, we seemed to focus on individuals more than groups). We still celebrated the US's success, it's growth and eventual dominance, victories in World Wars I/II, and cultural influences ("the American Dream", the Wild West, Hollywood, Woodstock, 80s, 90s). I graduated with (and to this day have) pride and patriotism, albeit nuanced; our nation isn't without flaws, because no human, group, or nation is without flaws, and acknowledging your mistakes is how you overcome them and improve.

  • I did learn about other countries and history before 1776, but my lessons were very US-centric.

Granted, this is only some of what was covered, and of what I remember. It's (not intentionally but) certainly biased towards the lessons I felt were important and my interpretation of them. But when I hear what people in the US are saying and doing today, I wonder if they grew up learning something completely different. I've always thought the above is a general curriculum that exists in most schools, but maybe not so?

and (the textbook example) shouting "fire" in a crowded theater

This one always sounded very weak to me, mostly because what if there actually is fire in a crowded theater? Apparently even the sentence itself is incorrect compared to the original which also included the word falsely. It is also interesting to see, that the same argument was used in 1919 against somebody protesting draft service in WW1 under enforcement of Espionage Act and his anti-draft speech was likened to falsely crying fire.

Not exactly a stellar argument either historically or even on its face.

Thats about what I learned approximately five years later from your timeline.

Catholic school, same time period-

Lot of emphasis on colonial history, very in depth on the runup to the revolutionary war. Lewis and Clark and the Louisiana purchase were triumphal statecraft. We kind of glossed over the civil war era. We learned about religious discrimination in 19th century America- the know nothings, the mormon pioneers, the need for the knights of columbus, the KKK.

Lot of emphasis on the industrial revolution. US intervention prevented the European colonizers from doing far worse things to China and Latin America than they wound up doing. Monroe doctrine, Teddy Roosevelt, USA good. The AFL, Teddy Roosevelt, Cornelius Vanderbilt were all portrayed as good guys at the same time. Intervention in WWI was sadly necessary.

The depression was emphasized, but not as much as WWII. Oh gosh WWII ate the rest of the curriculum. Patton was a good guy, Macarthur was more conflicted, the new deal was a good thing but might not have worked as well as it's thought. Straightforwards USA and Britain good, Germany and Japan bad. The soviets were portrayed as bad, but maybe a lighter shade of black than the Germans and Japanese- but still very evil.

We learned about the cold war. Not a lot about anything in specific, but USA good-commie bad. JPII's role in ending the great evil of communism was very important. That's about where it ended.

For the world in general, we learned a lot about Rome, the renaissance, and the age of exploration. There wasn't a true global focus but we probably got a lot more latin american history, especially early latin american history, than a typical public school would have.

Same time period. Blue state. I would say at least my middle and high school history had much more discussion of pre-American history than yours seems to have had, and also a much greater emphasis on slavery, civil rights, and the vietnam war once we get into the post 1776 era.

This tracks with my experience in a roughly similar age bracket. I'd guess you were in accelerated tracks and likely took AP courses. This is the basic way we teach history: start with basic myths then add nuance as a child develops. Myth making has taken a backseat to nuance at earlier ages, but your mileage may vary. There's a lot of districts with a lot of different teachers and schools. If I had to guess, your experience with history is still the modal experience of American children that attend adequate schools.

Most kids don't get much out of history. Girls, especially, consider history boring and irrelevant. History is old and they are young. Which is why I think you deploy my brainwashing program in a national civics curriculum. That's my thought anyway.

and (the textbook example) shouting "fire" in a crowded theater.

I feel compelled to point this out every time it comes up but this is not a true exception. It was briefly law as an example to justify banning handing out communist pamphlets but it was struck down as plainly unconstitutional.

communist pamphlets

IIRC they were anti-draft pamphlets.

Yes, anti-draft pamphlets handed out by the Socialist Party of America (motto: "Workers of the World, Unite!").

I think you're of the age where your school experience was a "last chopper out of Saigon" situation.

Grievance politics is larger now, although I strongly suspect it's incredibly school and teacher dependant.

In "generic suburban highschool #42 outside of Boise, Ohio" I bet it's similar to what you wrote. In "MLK Jr highschool in Bushwick" I bet it's a lot more grievance-y

That's... remarkably similar to what I was taught; same time period. And I moved around the country and went to both public and private schools, so it wasn't just localized.

What might be other ideas for actionable things to combat the misery and cultural malaise?

Unironically ~all of this is downstream of broken dating/relationship-formation norms and scripts among young people. The sexual revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race, and I am extremely blackpilled and pessimistic about our odds of putting that particular genie back in the bottle whence it came.

Any worldview of the current era which does not factor in the internet- tiktok and phone apps, specifically, is particularly worthless.

There was more political violence in the 1960s and 1970s than there is today, and the young leftists who were driving much of it were not having substantial problems having sex or forming romantic relationships, from what I understand based on what I have read of the time period. To whatever extent they were driven by misery and cultural malaise, I don't think dating and relationship problems were a significant factor. And they weren't just indulging in the kind of casual sex or short term relationships that you might find empty. Plenty of them were getting into long term relationships or getting married all while continuing to pursue militant politics.

So while it's possible that today's political violence is significantly driven by problems in dating/relationship-formation, we have plenty of historical examples of violent political militants who do not seem likely to have been motivated by such problems.

That said, I do think that reducing sexual and romantic frustration among young men would do something to reduce the level of political violence. I just don't think that unwinding the sexual revolution is any sort of fundamental recipe for making politics calmer. There is no sign that the average level of political militancy and violence within Western societies was any lower before the sexual revolution than after it. Indeed, it is pretty clear to me that it was much higher, although I don't believe the level of violence has decreased mainly because of the sexual revolution.

Political violence, militancy, malaise among the young, and revolutions of all kinds have been a staple of the history of the West just as they have been a staple of the history of all societies. There is no reason to believe that the sexual revolution has made things worse in that regard.

I am sure this has been asked before, but why is it that these purported consequences of the 1970s sexual revolution have not shown up until the past 10-15 years? It really took 50 years to come to a head?

While I agree with Tractatus' reply as well, I've also had a recent post on a very related topic, namely the dissolution of marriage. Social changes are rarely actually instant; They are spreading & compounding. Just because something became legal, doesn't mean that everyone is doing it. Usually it's only a small community really taking advantage of the most recent change, while the majority just mostly carries on with what they grew up with, unless they have a very good reason.

If you think the consequences only showed up in the last 10-15 years, you are necessarily insisting that the sky-high divorce rates of the 60s-80s, the latchkey kids of the 80s-90s, raised on "the electric babysitter" and Nintendo (who emphatically did not turn out "ok"), the rise of hookup culture and dating apps, and so on, were actually Good Things. I don't know what to tell you, other than that you're being incredibly myopic. Great evidence for Chesterton's quip about the whole world being nothing but Progressives who go about ruining the world, and Conservatives who insist you cannot undo what the Progressives have done, because they have already adopted those changes as "tradition," as being Gospel truth.

The modern buzzword du joure "Parasocial Relationship" was coined not in 2020, but in 1955; much different than the modern use (which is just describing a dysfunctional form of propinquity; if I didn't know any better, I'd suspect the definitional drift was deliberate), it described disconnected housewives who legitimately behaved as though the fictional characters on the soap operas were really their friends. The standard description was "newlywed leaves her family ties, moves out to the suburbs, doesn't really gel with the neighbors, and, with entirely too much time on her hands due to kids and school, along with modern conveniences making housework take up much less of her day, vegs out in front of the boob tube and goes haywire." This was not treated seriously because this extreme was so rare, and the solution was to get the women involved in the community; after all, it was the 1950's, everyone was having 2.5 kids and making good money, so it could not possibly be the case that cookouts with the HOA, bowling leagues, Avon parties, et al, were actually not viable long-term replacements for blood-and-soil family ties. In fact, other than Christopher Lasch, I don't know anyone that even thought to connect the dots.

This new paradigm, that you must leave behind your family, you must "find someone that's right for you" (no-one ever seems to notice the narcissism inherent in such a statement), that the friends you choose are more important than the family you had no say in, these all moulded the Baby Boomers; it should be no shock to us when the Boomers had half the kids their parents did; that they slapped bumper stickers on their overpriced RVs, proudly proclaiming how they weren't going to leave a dime to their kids, spending it all on themselves, and eagerly consumed media praising them for this choice ("It will teach them to earn it on their own, like I did!" >conveniently forgets all the bailouts his parents and/or grandparents gave the Boomer after every fuck-up); nor should it be any shock to us that they would ultimately decide that "find someone that's right for you" necessirly implies "and if this person no longer feels right for you, or if you meet someone new who feels "more right" for you, well, it's time to blow up the marriage. It'll be hard on the kids, sure, but if they loved you, they would want you to be happy."

No, inceldom is not some wholely new phenomenon that can only be attributed to technological changes, it is just the next stop on the slippery slope of the radical change to the family that has been ongoing such Industrialization. It isn't even new; mass societies destroying families is so common across history that Spengler includes it - in the form of his comparison of the City versus the Country - in The Decline of the West and that was published in 1917, long before Tiktok, Youtube brainrot, and AI slop was even a twinkle in anyone's eye

Hell, Cesare Beccaria described something like this in 1768!

The problem you get with an argument that goes that far back to claim that actually people were already unhappy and things were bad is that in order to actually make your case to RETVRN to something, you now need to make the argument that things were better and people were happier before that.

You've just implicitly accused a lot of people of being naive and unable to see the unhappiness and rot in the Boomers' generation. Granting this for the sake of argument, would this not be a strong argument that it is surprisingly easy to be naive in this way about a relatively distant time? Accepting that, would any ideas that you may have about things being better once upon the time, before the boomers with their individualism, television and love marriages came along, not be subject to the same concern, turned back at yourself? How sure can you (and we) be of any impression that the Victorians or Edwardians were happy, when we just saw so many people erroneously believing that the Boomers were? Given that we know even less about those generations, they are more strange to us and have left behind fewer records, misunderstanding their lives would be even easier. At some point you might just wind up believing a nonstandard version of the noble-savage trope that involves your ancestors.

Couldn’t you answer the question by looking at communities that didn’t go down those roads. Off the top of my head, any form of Anabaptist community, Orthodox Judaism, Hasidic Jews, or similar groups that chose not to go modern.

No, because they are heavily confounded in both directions. The people who choose to remain in such communities against the backdrop of modernity are bound to be ones that are relatively happy to do so, and the sight of modern living is bound to induce some jealousy. It would in many ways be like trying to make inferences about cavemen from the San Francisco homeless.

No model is perfect, and im not aware of any uncontacted tribes that would answer for the control group. Maybe isolated villages in Bhutan or Nepal or something. Even then, they know modern civilization exists. Even going back to early psychology is difficult because psychology itself is a modern concept— it started as a field in 1900 Or thereabouts, and we don’t have much before then except maybe someone occasionally notices people acting weird and records it or reports on it. There’s not any clean data to be had, but I don’t think that means you can’t find hints by comparing different subcultures and the pathologies they tend to have or not have.

If “modern approaches to community” are causing unhappiness or causing relationships to break up, cultures that do otherwise are less likely to have those issues. If the concept of “love marriages” breed narcissism and divorces, then there are other cultures that have arranged marriages (Orthdox Jews do, so do Hindus). If there’s a positive effect in arranged marriages, it should show up. If TV and screens cause short attention spans, we have plenty of places on earth that don’t have them. Comparing those differences correcting for other confounding variables should give us hints about this kind of thing.

There were two sexual revolutions and they both had major social instability coming in about forty years later. Can I explain it entirely? Not really. But the 2010's social chaos occurred roughly the same timeframe after the sixties/seventies sexual revolution as the sixties/seventies social chaos occurred after the 20's/30's sexual revolution. Perhaps we'll see in the 2050's some chaotic results of something LGBTQ related, history rhymes.

As for the forty years timeframe, I would suggest that it's when children who grew up entirely under the new paradigm are reaching the age to start making bad decisions. Social change is slow even if at the surface level it looks like lightning.

But children of the 90s are like 40 now and would have also grown up entirely under the post-1970s paradigm, while the rise of incel culture (and various other apparent symptoms of dysfunctional romance) seems like a phenomenom of the past 10-15 years. I am having a hard time ascribing this to the 1970s rather than technology shifts (Tinder, etc), high pace of housing inflation (which reduces incentives for household formation and makes it much harder to not rely on also-expensive daycare, aka the two-income trap), or the transition of church and religion out of mainstream (which I would argue began to rapidly occur during Bush 2 and was basically complete mid-Obama).

My understanding of the data we have on sex and partner count is that you had the sexual revolution in the 60s, which took until the ~late 1970s/early 1980s to filter down into mainstream society. From that point (ie the youth of Gen X) everyone has been having pretty similar amounts of sex. Millennials weren’t much more promiscuous than GenXers, and Zoomers are as or less promiscuous than millennials.

The emergence of apps, online dating, social media, none of these seem to have substantially affected population-level promiscuity, only shifted it. The (heterosexual) people hooking up with dozens of people on the apps are the kind of people who would hang around dive bars and clubs until closing time to pick up the best option left had they been born twenty years earlier.

I think it may be different for gay men, although large parts of that are surely increased social acceptability and the fact that HIV is no longer a death sentence, but even then, my guess is many people racking up 4-digit grindr body counts would have been anonymous bathhouse regulars back in 1977 too.

10-15 years lines up pretty precisely with the advent (or at least the widespread acceptance) of online dating and hookup apps. Dating and sex are commodities now, and the experience is significantly cheapened as a result.

10-15 years lines up pretty precisely with the advent (or at least the widespread acceptance) of online dating and hookup apps. Dating and sex are commodities now, and the experience is significantly cheapened as a result.

And yet everyone is having significantly less sex today than 10 years ago.

Are you saying this contradicts the original theory? I can understand being surprised by this, but it isn't even that strange when you think about it for a moment.

I absolutely am saying that it contradicts the original theory. And it is strange if you think about it. Intuitively. it makes sense that easier access to sex through dating apps should make it more widespread.

It would make sense if men and women were looking for sex for the sake of sex with the same frequency, intensity, etc, and the only thing stopping them from getting it in the past, were those evil traditional sexual mores. This is the case with gay hookups, and you indeed see amounts of sex orders of magnitude beyond what straights can achieve. However, in the case of relations between men and women, the sexual mores performed a regulatory function (rather than a purely restrictive one), attempting to give the most amount of people at least some of what they want. But because men and women have different preferences, and are looking for different things, by abolishing the sexual mores, instead of "lifting restrictions on sex" all we accomplished was locking men and women into a defect-defect spiral, which resulted in less sex for everybody.

But because men and women have different preferences, and are looking for different things, by abolishing the sexual mores, instead of "lifting restrictions on sex" all we accomplished was locking men and women into a defect-defect spiral, which resulted in less sex for everybody.

Describe this defect-defect spiral. Because to tell you the truth, I don't see it in my experiences, and it seems to be a post-hoc explanation for an unexpected outcome.

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People laughed at Rudyard Lynch's incel revolution predictions but historical trends don't lie: having a lot of disaffected men with nothing but violence to turn to is massively destabilizing.

Robinson had a partner but threw his life away anyway. I mean, technically. Presumably they were intimate.

Yeah but the rise of absurd Trans polycules and whatnot is downstream of all these guys being unable to participate in standard heterosexual relationships and gooning themselves into psychosis

Many male porn addicts seem to be in sexually active relationships though. Besides, I don’t think it’s clear that men with trans ‘girlfriends’ couldn’t find female partners, that seems spurious.

Dude was a medium autistic edgelord living in bumfuck nowhere Utah. I don't think he was prime steer in that heterosexual dating market.

He wasn't a school dropout, he wasn't (previously) in trouble, and he wasn't ugly. Guy who's doing an apprenticeship, is reasonably smart and averagely good-looking can find a girlfriend (I would say "particularly in bumfuck nowhere Utah") if he wanted a girlfriend. No, he's not going to get hot liberal college chick, but "conventional Mormon girl from lower middle-class background" is not out of his range.

If he was living with a boyfriend-turned-transitioning male to female, then he's gay or bi and not looking for a (cis) het girl.

The rural western US generally has a male slant in the population. Entirely possible he just wasn't going to be able to find a girlfriend- and the trades are not high status among mormons, who push college very strongly(in fairness, their college is free).

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I'm not sure "prime steer" and "heterosexual dating market" belong in the same sentence, considering a steer is definitionally castrated.

His partner was a man in a dress, though

Yeah. Most of that divergent stuff has come from people having too much access to weird porn and finding it hard to accomplish the proverbial 'get a girlfriend'. Whilst I'm sure there's some small % of the Queer population that'd lean that way regardless, but there's a pretty heavy social contagion that's only been exacerbated by systematic dysfunction in normal hetero relationship formation.

I think the opposite explanation is far more likely, until recently the pressure to be in a hetero relation was extremely strong and any “divergent” behaviour was kept tightly under wraps. The Kinsey reports from the 1940s found 37% of males had at least one homosexual experience, 11.6% were about equally bisexual and 10% were more-or-less exclusively homosexual.

I’ve known plenty of gay and bisexual men and none fit the profile of “watched too much porn, couldn’t get a girlfriend”. Gay men just have completely different innate sexual appetites, and lots of bi men are closeted and cheating on their girlfriends and wives. The closest thing to what you’re describing would be bisexual men choosing to hook up with men because it takes less effort to organise than ordering from DoorDash, or men dating trans women because they’re more “chill”, but I can’t believe being an incel for long enough will make you want to shove a penis into your mouth with as much enthusiasm as these guys had.

The Kinsey report is not credible. The methodology was very flawed

It’s flawed for sure, but there is substantial anecdotal evidence that the percentage of men willing to engage in homosexual activity, especially in substantially or entirely male communities (men at war, men in prison, all-male boarding schools, male-only religious institutions) is probably higher than the 3-5% estimates of gay men.

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I've had a few friends kinda dabble in furry/gay/whatever culture whilst effectively 'incels' during University which generally went away as soon as they managed to somehow find a girlfriend. I also think that the whole transfetishist movement is a tad bit different to homosexual inclinations on part of a decent chunk of society, or atleast there's a feedback loop that's emphasizing it at present.

I’m really struggling to understand how having a hard time finding a girlfriend can make someone want to dress up as an anthropomorphic animal and have sex with other men in similar costumes. I can understand having those urges, getting into a relationship and it being too embarrassing to share so you just suppress it (although I’m sure many still explore them in porn), or being single because you have non-standard sexual interests and can’t find someone that fulfils you.

I do get that the internet/porn amplifies underlying fetishes and makes you seek more extreme stimuli, but I don’t think it can make a straight man gay or vice-versa, or a vanilla person interested in furry fandom.

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I mean, it's family - children, specifically - that has historically been the fundamental anchor of the social unit. Relationships that can't or won't bear children are fundamentally different than those that will.


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