This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I recently had an experience with a regular at work that left me in a bit of a dilemma. It has some worthy CW meat to chew on, particularly in regard to some recent events, so I thought I'd share it here.
Let me tell you about Hassan.
Hassan is not his real name, though his real name is similarly classic Arabic. Hassan is an American black guy. Nothing he has said in the years I have known him implies Islamic faith, but the name suggests maybe his parents had interests in that direction. Hassan is tall, in quite good shape, and fairly handsome - a bit like a Temu Young Denzel. As I mentioned, he is a regular, and he seems to like me in particular, so I usually end up chatting with him for a while whenever he comes in. The last time I encountered Hassan he mentioned his desire to leave Jersey for the south (possibly the Carolinas), something he's mentioned on numerous prior occasions. He has issues with New Jersey that we'll get into later, and thinks the south would be a more welcoming environment. But this last time he added that if he were in the south, he could get a gun (he pantomimed a holstered pistol on his hip as he said this), so that he could "be a man" and "take care of business".
And the reason I found this concerning is that Hassan is a textbook paranoid schizophrenic.
The very first time I met Hassan he spent 15 minutes telling me that the government snuck into his apartment while he was out and planted listening devices in the walls. He frequently expresses concern that "they" are out to get him, a nebulous shadowy they who mess with his Social Security Disability payments, try to steal his money, try to lure him into doing bad things, sabotage his employment efforts, and try to take advantage of him sexually.
More on that last bit in a moment.
Talking to Hassan, all of this comes out in a non-stop stream of consciousness type exposition that has never even caught sight of a filter or a reality check. It's as though every thought that occurs to him is taken as literal Truth, and never subjected to any kind of, er, sanity checking.
That said, Hassan is actually quite functional. He lives by himself, handles his own bills and money, cooks for himself. These are accomplishments he is very proud of, that frequently come up during his expositions. He will start by telling me how the people at the Social Security office are stealing from him (AFAICT, that was either taxes or a garnishment of some sort), then veer into reciting all the vegetables he eats because he knows how to eat healthy, he cooks for himself, but these people they not eatin' right and it causes problems, mental problems in they head they be havin' mental problems because they don't eat right, not like him because he eats his green beans, real food that he cooks for himself because he knows how to eat right, act right because he learned it in school, third grade, food pyramid, he learned that here in Jersey in school, third grade, and these other people should have learned it but they not acting right, that’s just Jersey, lotta bad people in Jersey, obsessed with money, takin’ from you, takin’ your money.
Just imagine that sort of run-on sentence going on for 45 minutes.
"Acting rightly" is a very serious concern for Hassan. He is deeply worried about people plying him with drugs, or otherwise enticing him into criminal behavior. He recently managed to get a job at a bakery, but he noticed his boss was sniffling and rubbing at his nose, so Hassan flatly told the man to please not offer or force Hassan to do any coke.
He was fired shortly after for some reason. "They" struck again. Jersey, ammirite?
So, we have a man with an internal filter that is severely misfiring at best, with consistent delusions of enemies out to get him, telling me he wants to get a gun to "be a man" and "take care of business".
I consider myself to be a strong proponent of the Second Amendment, but that conversation made me consider the merits of having a chat with my local police department.
Awkwarrrrrrd.
As that thought occurred to me, it wasn't conceived as a hostile action. Five seconds before that moment I would have happily told you that Hassan was the very model of "Oh, yeah, he's crazy but he's harmless." As my brain first traced that hypothetical report, it was largely directed by concern for Hassan himself. He travels on foot throughout the county, often in bad neighborhoods, but that's always been the case. Has something changed? Is he being threatened? If I were to take that info to the police, it would be in the hopes that they would be forewarned, and able to help him.
And, contrary to popular belief, I honestly believe they'd try, because I've seen it before. Someone called the cops for a wellness check on Hassan, and they caught up to him when I was there. Three of them showed up, because this is a small, safe town with little for them to do, and they earnestly tried to just check and see if the man was alright.
Hassan responds poorly to wellness checks. On another occasion, Hassan was trekking around on a hot summer day, on foot and hauling his old lady luggage cart. A much more successful black man (judging by the car) paused to ask Hassan if he needed some water. Hassan yanked out his gallon jug of water from the luggage cart thing and shook it at the interloper, yelling "You need water?! You need water?! You need water?!" I had a young second-generation Hatian kid working for me at the time, and he thought it was the funniest fucking thing he'd ever seen. He was wandering around the place for weeks afterward, randomly muttering "You need water!" to himself and cracking up.
It was worse with the three cops. Hassan was yelling and agitated and scaring other customers, and I ended up sort of forcing myself into the situation and just aggressively treating him like a normal customer to keep him calm until the cops left (Hassan responds very well to being treated with normal, respectful courtesy. Imagine that.)
You might think it was so bad because of the obvious racial element of three white cops stopping an erratic black man and trying to grill him with questions, but it's actually because one of Hassan's persistent delusions is that The Police want to enter a homosexual relationship with him and he has no interest in doing so. It's not even like specific officers. Just "The Police" in general. All of them, I guess. Hell of a polycule. And it sounds funny, but it's probably actually very sad. Hassan has told me that his deceased father was a police officer, and the interest in a relationship from the cops came from when he was a young man. I suspect that the start of this was his dad's old buddies trying to watch out for the son, but their interest and attention being filtered through Hassan’s delusional paranoia.
Or maybe someone tried to molest him. I don't know, and I can't exactly take his interpretation at face value.
So the optimistic thought of the cops trying to help Hassan while being mindful that he may be armed lasted until the instant it occurred to me that they might try to frisk him, because that could well end in Gay Panic Tragedy.
But really, what right do I have to red flag the man? He has never done anything wrong that I've ever seen. Hassan would walk ten miles out of his way to avoid the appearance of having accidentally stolen a quarter. He might honestly be the most scrupulous person I've ever met - and if part of that is fueled by paranoid delusions, then his paranoia is remarkably pro-social and it might be that this world could do with more of it. By what right should a man that is pathologically righteous be stripped of the right to self-defense?
Well, because his IFF functionality is broken. Because his current modes of behavior may be "pro-social" because his only move when he encounters anything that strikes him as sketchy is to leave. But it's not like the man is powerless now. He's above average in height, and fit enough that I assume he's still doing Presidential Physical Fitness Testing daily, just like he was taught in third grade. If he was inclined to strike at perceived enemies, he could certainly do so by hand. A gun expands effectiveness, it won't add intent where none existed before.
Unless it puts the idea in his head. He's been paranoid and talking about moving to the south for years. Why the gun, why now? Was it a random conversation? Was it the violence on the news, in the air? Hassan strikes me as too focused on daily life for that. It takes nearly 100% of his mental bandwidth to get through his day to day. But I only see slices of his life. If a 3rd grade teacher told him that good citizens watch the news, how susceptible to social contagion would he be?
The final thing that dissuades me from taking a stroll to the station is the fact that we live in New Jersey. Hassan is never going to buy an illegal gun - in the tiny chance that some ne'er-do-well offers him a sale, he would assume he was being set up, freak out, and flee. And if the state that requires fingerprinting and a background check and two character references and a psych history and a sign-off by the local PD and assorted other rules so strict they won't let TheNybber buy a gun... well, if they give Hassan a Firearms Purchaser Card to buy a gun with his Permanent Disability For Psychological Issues money then we have much more general problems. And it's not like a warning like that would carry across state lines, even if the Free Carolinas would take a warning from the People's Republic of Jersey in the first place.
So I'm 99% sure it's a totally moot point. But it raises interesting questions. At what level of non-functionality should people lose rights? Should they, if they've never done anything wrong, in spite of the non-functionality? When I look at things like mass shooters, I will decry playing the partisan blame game when I think the person's thought process is sufficiently disordered - roughly at the level of "GPT2 playing madlibs". Is that a level that justifies preemptive action? If no, does such a level exist at all? If yes, where is the line?
The recent boat guy with the bullet in his brain who thought the "LGBTQ white supremacist pedophiles" were trying to kill him for narrowly avoiding their previous assassination attempts? That dude seems like he might just be broken hardware in a way where blaming any kind of software is just irrelevant. But before the attack he was just filing unhinged lawsuits and expressing wild conspiracy theories (unless there is an LGBTQ white supremacist pedophile cabal, in which case we again have much bigger problems). Is that something a man should have his rights stripped for? If so, is that meaningfully different from believing that, say, the police kill 10,000 unarmed black men per year? Or that Obama is a gay Kenyan married to Big Mike? Even broaching the topic feels wildly ripe for abuse.
Is this whole topic a can of worms best left unopened?
Certain rights are (imho) inherent and inalienable. For example, no matter if your IQ is 150 or 50, if you are age 1 or 120, you have (imho) a right not to be tortured.
Other rights are more conditional, some to the point where they might be considered privileges. Often these are rights which come with responsibilities. Driving a car on a public road would be a prime example: because cars are vastly more dangerous to the general public than bicycles, you generally need a license to drive them. It is still kind-of a right in that you typically have a right to try to get your license, and most governments can not deny it just because they dislike your skin color or something.
Nobody I am aware of argues that 2A describes an inherent, inalienable and unconditional right. Even the NRA will not arm toddlers. The absolute minimum to me seems to be that the gun owner will be generally found to be responsible for their own actions, which Hassan would fail. (Even if someone was generally of sound mind but had periodic episodes of diminished culpability, e.g. due to binge drinking, the decision to own a firearm would make me very unsympathetic towards a defendant who was accused of shooting someone under influence.)
Even if Hassan would never shoot anyone, it seems to me that he will get into situations where him being visibly armed would increase the stakes tremendously. A possibly deranged person mumbling to himself on the sidewalk is only a nuisance in many situations. Give him a gun belt, and that assessment changes completely. From my understanding, NJ does not allow any open carry, so this might be a practical issue. (Of course, NJ also requires a license for concealed carry, which he is unlikely to get. I am not sure how well "if you carry a gun bought in the Carolinas in NJ you are breaking the law" conversation would go, though.)
The cops which did the welfare check on him seem mostly chill from your description, but I would assume that they would be a lot less chill if they had a reasonable suspicion that he was packing.
Taking advantage of the gun show loophole requires considerable agency. You have to save up enough cash, find a show, find a way to travel there (presumably he is not driving a car?). Knowing how to ride a bus without conveying to the guy in the next seat that you are (1) mentally unsound and (2) on you way to buy a gun would be helpful as well.
Even sane people will sometimes voice aspirations which they will not follow through, from visiting far-away countries to quitting their jobs. "I am gonna go to NC to buy a gun there, for self-defense, youknow" could be just such a thing. Of course, if he is telling you he already found a gun show and transportation, that would seem a lot more concrete.
One flaw about modern bureaucracies is that sometimes there is nobody in the loop who has the authority (and balls) to pull the brakes and stop doing something counter-productive. If you tell the authorities that he has ideations about gun ownership, the default response would be him getting visited by cops who give him another talk. Given that this will be perceived as "gay cops are oogling me again", this will likely be counter-productive.
I guess you're not at all familiar with the topic then.
Here's Hobbes:
Here's Locke:
And it is of course explicitly because of this conception of a natural right of self defense, which was specifically popular in the early American Republic that the Anti-Federalists decided to include it in the Bill of Rights which they saw as necessary to secure against violation of natural rights that may come from the powers granted to the State through the Constitution.
To quote Hardy:
The second amendment was indeed understood to secure an inherent right to self defense. Much of it was implicit in the minds of its drafters due to the fact that English common law recognized it as a background principle, but it was actually talked about specifically in the constitutional ratification debates that preceded the bill of rights.
St. George Tucker writes in 1803 in the earliest published scholarly commentary on 2A:
The thing about people using violence to defend what they perceive to be their natural rights is that absent some consensus about what these other rights are and what the ground facts are, these claims will overlap.
For example, if what for me looks like innocent religious worship to which I am entitled through natural rights looks to you like depraved demon-calling which threatens the lives of your neighborhood, you would well be within your rights to use violence to stop me, and I would well be within my rights to use violence to oppose you.
Solve for equilibrium, and this is roughly equivalent to saying that there is only one right, which is to use violence to do whatever you want.
This is certainly a valid conception of natural rights, but also a rather trivial one: might makes right. It generally leads to long-lived feuds between clans and families which have wronged each other.
Hobbes speaks of "Judgement, and Reason", Locke of "to judge, whether they have just cause". This sounds to me like implicit prerequisites to the right to self-defense: if your judgement is obviously impaired, it seems unlikely that society will respect your right to self defense. (I still think they are overly optimistic if they believe that reasonable people will not make overlapping claims wrt their natural rights, but that is besides the point.)
Of course, we can argue if philosophically, a toddler or a psychotic has a right to defend themselves against what they perceive as violations of their natural rights, but pragmatically, all historical societies which I am aware of have avoided giving the means for effective self defense to these groups. The right not to get tortured or killed is a right which most civil societies bestow to any humans in their jurisdiction from the moment they are born. Other rights, e.g. the right to vote, or carry effective means for self defense, or consent to sex are granted conditionally. (Related potential scissor statement: "as the right to bear arms is a consequence of the natural right of self defense, illegal immigrants should be allowed to bear arms").
All societies consider trade-offs when it comes to enabling their people to practice self-defense. As @cjet79 has pointed out, guns are excellent tools for self-defense. But the kind of guns which are legal to own in the US are probably not what is always optimal for self-defense.
For example, consider tamper-resistant explosive vests as a weapon for deterring rapists. If a potential victim packing a firearm will deter 80% of the would-be rapists, wearing a well-known rape prevention vest which works by turning the wearer and anyone within five meters into bite-sized chunks whenever its sensors detect that a rape attempt is happening might deter 90% (all the ones who believe that they could startle their victim before she can draw). Yet despite offering marginal gains, wearing such a device in public would be illegal everywhere in the world, because societies will not consider the benefits in isolation but also the trade-offs. If the device blows up one subway car full of people by accident per three marginal rapes it prevents, that means that it has negative utility for broader society.
The difference between Texas, New York, and Germany is simply that the societies balance these trade-offs slightly differently.
You misunderstand. It is inarguable that they do in fact have such a right. Nature provides that they do. An insane person can decide to just revolt and kill anybody they perceive as a threat. The world is structured in a way that makes this impossible to totally prevent.
The question that you decide to shift this to here isn't whether this is a natural right, but whether such a natural right ought to be enforced by the government, inasmuch as it doesn't violate other rights.
The idea that this is not a natural right is incoherent with your line of reasoning unless you embrace the Roussean view that there is now essentially no such thing, and that all rights have become civil rights which are provided at will by the State which is now the font of all such things.
The problem you have is that the US was founded specifically in a rejection of this concept and an embrace of the idea that rights are ordained by God, not the State. Under the theory that good government is government that recognizes natural law and aligns itself with the liberties that God provided us as much as it practically can.
You may disagree with this policy, but unlike you are claiming, this is a difference of nature, not of degree. This is why Charlie Kirk said that some gun deaths may be worth it and why his opponents can't fathom how he could say such a thing, because this isn't about some consequential end of State policy, but about the deontological application of natural law.
More options
Context Copy link
Just to be surei understand you, do you believe in a right to self defense?
Like are we disagreeing that this is a fundamental right, or are we just quibbling about whether guns fall into an extension of that right?
This is absolutely not the equilibrium. If we are gonna use the terms of economics I'd say there are very high transaction costs for violence.
The equilibrium is more like: you can use violence or the threat of violence to protect a few things that you greatly care about. The things you can protect or enact with violence are heavily limited by what others are willing to protect with violence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
All rights are conditional and they are broken all the time. E.g. the torture right was famously broken in Guantanamo, many people consider things like prolonged solitary imprisonment as torture. Other people also argue that not having access to euthanasia constitutes a torture etc. In my opinion rights are neither inherent or inalienable. They are just strongly worded laws, they can be changed or added or removed - there literally is a process of amending US bill of rights or UN declaration of Human Rights etc.
Andrew Wilson also famously often points out the essence of rights - right is just entitlement absent duty. The problem is that the entitlement has to be enforced. In that sense any right depends on willingness of other people - either private persons or more often governments - to act. If they are unwilling or unable to do so, then poof - your right is gone.
Additionally in my experience the whole language around rights is just secular version of religious dogmas, a feeble attempt to ground the secular ideology in some wordplay. Saying a slogan X is a right seems as if it is something transcendental and grounded, not that it is just made up idea that has no basis other than as a tautology.
How does that distinguish rights from the concept of morality itself? Right and wrong as ideas are already not transcendental and grounded (at least in many worldviews). They are just language frames used to express commitments and to systematically boo/yay different types of behaviour. And we can't do without that.
My view on this is that the law is minimum of morals, while rights are just extra strongly worded form of laws. What I object is some wordplay - or equivocation - on the side of secularists, as if rights have some higher grounding and are to be implicitly followed. Let's use some example, most civilization have morality against murder encoded into their laws. Does then make any sense to say, that you have a right not to be murdered? I don't think so, murder is already prosecuted, stating it as a right does not add anything. And yet people talk about right to housing or free healthcare and other things as if they are stronger in this sense.
Exactly, that is my point. Rights is just a strong word aimed to provoke some emotional response, nothing more, nothing less. It is just strongly worded preference - you have right to abortion, you have right to body autonomy, you have right to free healthcare, you have right to freedom of movement etc. But there is no grounding for it other than that some people just feel strongly about this, and that they wish to impose it on society. Maybe Aztecs could have worded that everybody has right to be protected from wrath of Huītzilōpōchtli by sacrificing slaves.
Additionally even in in practice this is just a mirage - anybody who lived through COVID should already understand that this is all just fiction, the situation can change on a dime and former right is nullified just like that. There is no thunder from the sky striking somebody taking your supposed right away.
All this is to demonstrate, that there are no "inherent" or "inaliebable" rights especially from secularist perspective. The only way it would make sense is to describe some physical reality - e.g. you have an inherent "right" to fall when you jump. Otherwise it does not make any sense, there is no inherentness or inalienability for any actual rights as these are just some judicial constructs subject to change, indifference and all these kind of things.
I kind of agree that the language of rights is obfuscatory as to what is really going on, sometimes implying that a right is something metaphysical, though I suppose this is true of a pretty wide range of concepts. However, I think that rights talk does accomplish something real. I see rights as a legit expression of commitment to/hope that there are some core rules of human morality that transcend any particular legal system and that deserve to be incorporated into every legal system by one means or another. It is of course true that people then change their mind about torture being wrong, for example, and go ahead and do it. But at least rights provide a clear stake in the ground that countries, having signed up to a bill of rights, must renege on, proving that the values they once claimed are no longer/never were their true values. This should be at least embarrassing though perhaps we have entered an age where double standards and reversals of this kind no longer incur any shame.
I am not sure. Take my example with murder which is almost universally prosecuted across time and cultures. Do people think about murderers in terms of them acting against some inherent right? Does it add anything into the conversation above universally accepted moral stance of murder is bad? And even then there are some examples, where polity can actually define conditions around which killing us unlawful and thus constitutes a murder and which one is lawful and condoned - e.g. killing as part of death sentence or assassinating head of terrorist organization with a bomb etc. It is not as if we are talking about something inherent and inalienable, there are always conditions around it.
I think that what rights really represent culturally is a declaration of some secular or civic version of religious dogma. Politicians - either national or those sitting in UN - are akin to council of bishops or rabbis and theologians, who from time to time sit together and make some moral proclamation that abortions or something like that is now okay and in fact anybody stopping them is anathema to the church polity and will be punished. They have theological discussion about morality of current rights and how to do proper exegesis of the holy text of Constitution or Bill of Rights or even if to outright amend it. But the authority lies with them, the rights in this sense are given and not inherent and definitely not inalienable.
What I want to say is that I do not recognize this authority of rights as some universal morality, to me rights are just present set of laws or maybe as you said a present set of aspirations of lawmakers. I will for instance never in a million years morally recognize anything like right to abortion in this moral sense no matter how many wise men try to persuade me or how many people use it as a slogan on the street. Othere people let's say do not recognize right to bear arms or other rights.
Additionally I do not like the vocabulary of rights exactly because it is pure language of entitlement absent duty. Good society with good laws and even rights is result of hard work. If the society is bad then all you are entitledto is misery.
I kind of agree with you – yes, lawyers and politicians who decide on bills of rights are playing a role akin to religious councils. I would just say that there are those who do not interpret such a role as necessarily involving any metaphysical commitment. 'Ruling Passions' by Simon Blackburn is interesting on this, as an example of someone who is advocating for a quasi-realist position wrt morality (including rights), where we continue talking as if moral proclamations are 'out there' in the world, while also acknowledging that what is going on under the surface is fundamentally to do with our attitudes and sentiments rather than something we've discovered independent of us.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I would say that the right to self defense is an inherent, inalienable, and unconditional right. And I'm definitely not alone in that belief.
The second amendment is just an offshoot of that right, as guns are one of the best tools for self defense.
Just like freedom of speech is mostly useless if the government says "you can say whatever you want, just not in a newspaper or online or anywhere we can see it".
More options
Context Copy link
In practice, there is not a generally available 'gun show loophole'. It's possible that you, enterprising prohibited person, will find a vendor not covered by background check requirements at a gun show, but it's not very likely.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is the part of Uncomfortable HBD Facts that is very underdiscussed: Blacks More Likely to have paranoid schizophrenia.
There's a ton of results in this vein, and his Arabic name makes me suspect that his parents were into Nation of Islam stuff, Yakub doctrine and all that, which is of course schizophrenic throughout (very funny though), so it might be hereditary for him, on top of direct schizophrenia-promoting nurture.
But I don't think the beancounting method really explains the problem. Many, many, many more Blacks who don't get any diagnosis and generally function well buy into this zany conspiracist bullshit. In the limit, the whole narrative of Black existence under the yoke of Systemic Racism and mass slaughter of unarmed black men by the police in the US is a giant conspiracy theory with clear paranoid motives, and spotlight cases like Nick Cannon going off about melanin, people buying into Jussie Smollett hoax, Candace Owens spiraling into even crazier hypotheses about secret societies behind Macron's wife being a man, "black scholars" with mind-bogglingly idiotic and racist doctrines propped up as real intellectuals (I like Kobi Kazembe Kambon a.k.a. Joseph A. Baldwin, read it up), etc. etc. all add up to a general schizophrenic-paranoid tone in the Black community. Except – wasn't it Whites (and Jews, but in any case, the well-off, educated non-Black demographics) who championed the doctrine of systemic racism? Aren't Whites also buying into many of these hoaxes and libels today?
Unless you exaggerate greatly, Hassan sounds like he has quite a low IQ on top of his "schizophrenia". Mentally, he's close to an 8-10 year old White or Asian kid.
And I think this is the elephant in the room. There is simply not enough capacity to suppress delusions induced and exacerbated by the information environment. There is no clear separation between delusions and sincere confusions, Hassan won't have a mature enough epistemology to distinguish things that he pathologically overfixates on from things that just kinda legit sound right, even if you pump him full of antipsychotics. This is the ground zero of Black American Madness, along with smarter people than Hassan who also have a more profound illness and/or higher ego strength so they keep it together and spread their nonsense around. Then there are borderline cases who are relatively gullible and either propagate the message or simply do not push back, like that smart and non-insane Black guy once did for another celebrated Guggenheim scholar, Ibram X. Kendi:
Well, Clarence then probably got a normal job and never achieved prominence as a thought leader for his people. He wasn't exuberant enough to be made a champion.
…and then comes everyone else, who is simply overwhelmed by moral blackmail, the volume of second-hand "corroborating evidence" and plain emotional confidence. And here we are.
In short my thesis is that a small (large relatively, but still amounting to fractions of a percent of the total population) difference in the rates of paranoid schizophrenia, compounded by significantly lower IQ, creates a critical mass of self-propagating cultural madness in the Black community, which lowers general epistemic standard to rock bottom and then spills over to the broader society, warping the entire default narrative of what it is about. And now we're training large language models on this oeuvre, which seals the bubble of the consensus reality. I bet if I feed this exchange to any frontier LLM, it'll rebuke me harshly with the usual tut-tutting routine about how systemic racism is totally real and Scholars say so.
Regarding your actual question: I think paranoid schizophrenics, no matter how "functional" for the moment, certainly can't have guns. This isn't hard.
I'm not really sure what you were referring to here, so I took that insane excerpt from Ibram and pasted it into ChatGPT-5-thinking with no context, and it responded with:
Then I tried again in a new chat with the same text but added "is this true?" At the end and got:
I mean my entire post, of course. If you want to see how biased they are in less clear-cut cases, feed the wiki page of Kobi Kambon and ask if this is science.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I wonder about the extent to which all this is driving the 'black fatigue' phenomenon popularized on certain segments of US social media.
More options
Context Copy link
No, that's a fair and accurate recollection of his speech patterns. It's a bit odd to characterize him, unlike other mentally dysfunctional people I've met who did seem to be mentally aged 4 or 7. In mannerism, nothing about him codes as "childish", and that stream of free association comes quickly enough that it doesn't automatically flag him as stupid. But his thoughts seem constrained to a very narrow range that seems far more limited than even an 8 year old, like he's partially making up for an even more extreme limitation by sheer brute force of computational cycles, spending hours talking to himself about activities that most people here would cover in a few seconds.
And I've met plenty of other people like that (yes, disproportionately black), and they tend to be even more disordered than Hassan. People who will take ten pages of paperwork and spend 30 minutes going over it, sorting it, then confusing themselves, starting over, and repeating the cycle multiple times. Hassan at least usually has a clear sense of what he is doing and why, even if he's burning outrageous brain time on minor errands.
It’s interesting to me that this is exactly what certain reasoning LLMs will do. Not making any strong claims, just noting it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've been increasingly wondering at what point you have an IQ low enough, that you develop paranoid delusions in response to a society you can't possibly comprehend. If you've ever interacted with a particularly stupid person, many of them have this obnoxious personality trait of treating everything they don't understand like a personal attack.
I wonder at what point the IQ required to participate in society hits such a threshold that maladaptive mental illness in response to it increases.
I especially wonder at what point the various dark patterns of our society cause this to happen to me.
I read this off a comment talking about the Sherlock TV show done by the BBC - stupid people think that smart people are wizards. They literally can't understand them, and when they try it's like a smeared caricature of a psychic precognitive superhuman. When Sherlock enters a room, he intuits the correct sequence of events from an incredibly spurious and thin bit of evidence. From the stupid viewpoint, smart people are magic guessing all the time.
It is not, in fact, magic, but rather a systemic way of thinking that is orderly and (ideally) well reasoned. But a stupid person might go 'what makes your magic guess better than mine, huh?'
If you can't understand people's reasons, you sure as hell can't understand their motivations. It's easier to believe that your enemies are malevolent cackling pedophiles than to understand them as agent-actors with self-interest and multiple motivations. And when a smarter person disagrees with you publicly for reasons you can't understand, you lash back in narcissist ego-defense. People don't like being made to feel stupid even if they are and will lash out in comically disproportionate ways.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This was an excellent post, and I agree, this is textbook paranoid schizophrenia. Call the police man. Anonymously if possible, he is better off with you in his life imo. I would have and I am a paranoid schizophrenic. My reaction to reading he wants to get a gun to "be a man" and "take care of business" was "ohhhh shiiiiiiiit." Paranoid schizophrenics aren't dumb, we are good at connecting dots (too good), and if after a police visit he can't connect the dots that determine why him saying that to anyone is a bad idea, then he is too crazy to have a gun anyway.
I really appreciate the fact that you are thinking deeply about this, but the fact of the matter is that society just isn't equipped to individually assess every mentally ill person for the intricacies of their lunacy, and we know that schizophrenics have an elevated risk of substance abuse problems and as a result criminal behaviour. That doesn't mean we should be locked up, but it does mean society should limit our freedoms in some ways unfortunately. We can not be cops, we can not be judges, and we shouldn't have guns. I don't want to be treated like a toddler with a bomb, but I also don't expect society to commit suicide just to appease me. I might be fucking crazy, but I'm not a narcissist.
More options
Context Copy link
A big part of the problem with Western modernity is universal human rights, not in a “some people shouldn’t have rights hahahaha” shitposting way, but in the sense that some people struggle to function in modernity and must, for their benefit and the benefit of wider society, live with a lesser amount of both liberty and responsibility.
We understand this in some cases, people with down’s, late stage dementia, low-functioning autism. But those one or two cognitive steps above them have been granted, by the courts, almost absolute freedom. This was the second components of the emptying of the asylums.
Modernity is complex and confusing, I think Moldbug makes the point that plenty of people who would have been quite capable in historical situations struggle to function in their interactions with the modern state, modern employment market, modern social customs, subtext.
These people don’t deserve to be slaves. They have value as people, and in our materially abundant and prosperous society they should be supported in finding their happiness. But, in their interests and those of wider society, they shouldn’t be as free as us either.
There must be a stage between liberty and being a total ward of the state. A half-freedom.
Are you familiar with Chris Arnade's Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America? Very good book on how modern society increasingly demands a particular variety of cognitive ability (that of the "front row of the classroom" types), and how too often, our proposed solutions for the "back row" people come down to more "education" in the hopes of somehow imbuing them with these abilities and turning them into "front row" types, rather than figuring out how to give them a dignified, less impoverished existence compatible with their capacities and inclinations. I found it really rather relatable, both with my own experiences and those of family members.
More options
Context Copy link
I don’t think it would work unless you can seriously curtail the democracy and liberalism involved. The general conceit of democracy is that people can and should be making all of these decisions themselves. But it also means that those people will almost always vote for things that make them feel good rather than what is actually good for society. The People, it seems tend to think like teenagers when the votes are aggregated, and thus you really can’t say no to allowing stupid people to ruin their lives or no to allowing whatever dangerous, destructive, or socially harmful thing that the public has decided it really wants to do.
In the past, limitations of technology and communication prevented things from getting too out of control. In the past, you might not find out about an important bill until it had already passed. You thus couldn’t weigh in on it. If you did, you were limited to telephone calls (and you’d have to know the name of your congressman and how to find the switchboard number) or mail (which took longer and again required you to know who to address the letter to and to know the specific bill you want to pass or fail). Now you have instant access to the information and you have access to those government officials in your social media, and thus weighing in is easy.
In everyday life as well, I think limited options because of technology were a benefit. When you could only gamble in Vegas, in an actual casino, there were natural limits to how much gambling you could actually do. Unless you live there, you can only afford to go there a few times a year, for a week or two at a time, and then you had to leave. Now that the casino is in your pocket, blowing all of your money is easy. You don’t need pants, let alone to fly to another city. Anywhere you happen to be, if you have a phone with the app installed, that place is a casino. And it’s the same with other things like shopping. It’s much easier to overspend when everything on the planet is offered for sale in your pocket, any time and place you want to open Amazon.
I feel like really the biggest problem of modernity is the degree to which it allows people to engage in their Id with very few restraints and how good it is in removing both physical and social barriers that held those Id impulses in check. I think this is the thing most people have a hard time dealing with. Not that they cannot cognitively understand that some Vice is a bad idea. People know gambling, porn, overspending, overeating, and overuse of screens are bad. They just need a bit more of a natural limitation on getting access to those things. Personally I think even for high functioning people, having natural friction around doing those kinds of things is helpful. For lower functioning people, it’s a losing battle as they keep indulging in bad habits because it’s just so easy to do.
More options
Context Copy link
I think about this a lot lately. I've been religiously watching Caleb Hammer's Financial Audit this year. Apparently this year in particular older fans of the show have complained that it's devolved into Caleb Springer, and all the dysfunction of humanity is paraded in front of the camera with a thin veneer of "Lets look at you finances" after 60 minutes of discovering what a low functioning member of society they are across the board.
That said, the same themes keep coming up again and again. Employment has gone totally fucky, and you need to SEO your resume and tailor it to each job application, probably using AI to save time. Because everyone is getting spammed with thousands of AI generated resumes for even entry level positions, so git gud. I'm not sure this is a state of affairs we should accept for mid-wit level career opportunities.
The second is that feeding yourself is fucked. Generational knowledge of how to make thrifty healthy meals has been lost, and low functioning individuals constantly struggle with the impulse to door dash poison, and finance it to boot. That said, cheap staples like beans, rice, etc are still widely available. So it's not totally impossible, and it helps if you were raised right.
The third is that there are arrays of predatory credit vehicles that would blow your damned mind. I knew about how terrible it was to run a credit card balance, and I knew payday loans were predatory to a point of exciting legal scrutiny. I had no idea there was a whole world of credit apps build directly into shopping apps. Pay in four, Klarna, other crap I'm probably not spelling correctly because somehow I've never actually been exposed to it personally. And seemingly the prevailing wisdom is at 18 you get a credit card, max it out because it's "free money" and then pay the minimums your entire life. Sounds like a fair trade, a few months of zero impulse control, followed by paying only a few hundred a month forever. I'd say it's just the show, but then I think back to my 20's and all the people I knew, even educated professionals, who did exactly that and were digging their way back out from it. Nobody balances a checkbook anymore, and cash isn't physical so that when you are out you are out. It's all imaginary numbers and notices you can ignore.
And I mean, that's a complexity disease that has hit the three main areas of your life, employment, feeding yourself, and money. It makes me think a lot about how the bar has risen to meet some minimum standard to meaningfully navigate society.
Future shock is already here. The number of people who freak out at being asked to send an email is disturbingly high.
I have never read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but my closest friend once described it as being at least partially about the transition from pre-Modern society, where everything a man might encounter was basically comprehensible, to Modern society, where a stroll down the road would reveal behemoths of concrete and steel and chained lightning that the average man could not hope to understand well enough to effect repairs on.
This is incredibly stark with cell phones. How many of us here have ever repaired a cell phone? Have you ever tried to coax, say, an elderly Chinese man though a non-standard use of their phone, with all the text in Mandarin? It is sufficiently advanced technology, and it is indistinguishable from magic.
No, but I have used Google Translate as part of an effort to help an elderly Chinese man communicate with a somewhat belligerent and unpleasant customer in his shop, and I have rarely appreciated the magic more.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, to be clear, we have a kludge for credit(that’s what a credit score is). Information on how to feed yourself is widely available and you can usually tell when someone uses it. Employment I’ll grant you is harder, but still.
That you need a credit score to function in society as a whole should be illegal.
Yes, yes, I know, I know. I'm very well aware of how and why credit score functions. I get it.
I was still very well put out when I had to go purchase a new car unexpectedly, only to have the guy who went to check my finances come out and stare at me like I was some lost crytpid and blurt out 'You have no credit score.'
Yes, because I grew up around adults who abused credit cards and paid the consequences and who had no desire to go down that road, thank you very much. Only to find out late that, gee whillickers, if you want to function as an adult in society for some things, you actually need a credit score, and for that, you need a credit card.
Why, yes, I'm still salty about that. How could you tell?
(And before you ask, all my previous vehicles were old, used, family hand-me-downs.)
Boo hoo- credit scores show good breeding and conventionality. Of course people want to see them. Wouldn’t you?
I hate the antichrist.
More options
Context Copy link
I'd rather live in a society that I don't need to borrow to function, thanks.
Were you trying to purchase the car straight-up full cost and they still wouldn't sell it to you ? Or were you trying to get financing on it?
Financing.
As an aside, it's really flattering that you guys think I'm successful enough to just buy a car outright when needed. I wish.
In the end, I just had my father co-sign the note with me, which is something that's done when you either have no credit or bad credit. Not great, but not terrible.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I would want to see them, of course, as a matter of due diligence. But I think for me "no credit score" is the highest possible credit score. Then again most things about the US feel slightly dystopian to me.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Same, brother, same.
Well, except I didn't opt out of credit cards because I saw people in my life abuse them; I opted out because I didn't like the complexity and I have low executive function and I am sure I would forget to pay off the balance if I actually got one; I have gone months without checking my bank account when I was depressive. But I still have managed to amass almost six figures worth of savings in my checking account just by being frugal over the years, which makes my finances better than all those people who apparently cannot afford a sudden $1000 expense. But, nope, landlady still wants to see a fucking credit score. I had to show her my bank statement to convince her to rent to us. If I ever decide to buy a new car, I'll just get a cashier's check and pay up front.
Inflation is eating your lunch, you could at least have some of that in like Treasure notes so you're not losing money.
More options
Context Copy link
Interesting. Depressive but able to maintain a steady stream of income from a reliable job? I've only been very depressed when unemployed of massively underemployed. I envy the six figures, whew.
More options
Context Copy link
Why not do low cost ETFs or index funds? You don't need to look at those and you make lots of money.
Not op, but have a wife who suffers from a lot of anxiety and dysfunction around money.
There exists a huge swath of people that have their loss aversion with money cranked up to 11. They've had the same savings account since their parents signed them up for it as a child, and they aren't changing it. It took me 5 years to convince my wife to just change her savings account from a 0.02% interest account at a credit union she grew up with, to another FDIC insured high yield account that had 3%. She had tens of thousands of dollars in there, it was all the money she had ever saved in that one account rotting away to inflation. Getting the money moved over caused her so much anxiety it was a household event. She was terrified something would happen to it. What would happen? She didn't know, but the overwhelming undefined anxiety was real none the less.
5 years of carrot and stick badgering/showing off my brokerage account, she finally took some of that money and put it into some mutual funds I had selected for her, with a commitment to add more. Then the anxiety took hold again and the plan to move more stopped, because the stock market is scary. At least she left what she'd put in, in. What I convinced her to move over to stocks has now outgrown the balance she left in savings. That makes her happy. But she seems to have memory holed how much she dragged her feet, because she gives me shit for not having her do that sooner or with more money. But that's just marriage I guess.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
They wouldn't accept cash? I mean, literally piles of Benjamins?
No, most people will not accept grocery bags full of cash for tens of thousands of dollar purchases. That comes with reporting and the like.
Yes but there's a lot of paperwork when buying a car. Filing a form 8300 isn't intractable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Bold of you to think that I had the cash on hand at the time to just buy a car off-hand.
Mind, the only reason I was purchasing said vehicle was due to a truly amazing set of circumstance that wrecked the engine of my previous one.
I'm still salty about that, as well.
Pro-tip kids - always, always manage what maintenance you can yourself, and not rely on others.
I assumed it from the complaint. Usually when people complain about credit scores being required it's for something they think isn't relevant, like employment or rent (which is usually paid in advance, not arrears) or indeed buying something with cash. Needing a credit score to get a car loan seems pretty reasonable.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Credit cards are truly evil. I mean, I use them. I've used them for 20+ years and never had a single finance charge or fee ever, while accruing thousands of dollars in cash back rewards. They paid for my Switch 2 in fact.
But they're still evil. The yawning gaping pit they represent, which I have to balance on the edge of every time I run up their balance each month (within my budget) and then pay off in full is nightmarish. Because there is nothing stopping me, besides 20 years of inflexible habit and discipline, from just YOLOing with the nearly $40k of available credit they make available to me.
I watch some of these Financial Audits, and people's minimums on all their cards is over the amount I manage to save each month. I'll watch someone my same age, my same income, and they are looking at 5-10 years of aggressively budgeting and paying off debt to get back to zero. Meanwhile my assets appreciated more than my annual salary the last few years. But in another timeline, with only slightly different choices early on, I could have been them.
Half these people, when asked about a specific credit account, just go "I don't know, they just gave me that card when I bought X". X could be a car, a new roof, a large plumbing job, etc, etc. Like in my driveway story below, fucking everything is trying to get you to sign up for a new credit card now. People unthinkingly just take them. "Yeah, more free money" they think.
As I've gotten older, my arrogance at being part of the Credit Card Master Race has waned. Fuck them.
Credit cards do not fail us; it is we who fail credit cards.
It's been a while since I read the books; Captain Samuel Vimes does not, I presume, live in a world that extends easy credit to the working class. Because if he did, he'd just buy the $50 dollar boots with his (terrible) 30% APR credit card, keep his debt payments to the recommended 10% of his income ($3.80 a month) and have them paid off in 1 year and 5 months at a total cost of $61.39.
As a rule, money now is worth more than money later. It's not generally worth 30% more now than it will be in a year -- most of that is to cover the risk of nonpayment, a little overhead, plus some profit for the bank -- but if you're in a situation where it is -- not at all uncommon, especially for people who are struggling financially -- having the option of borrowing at that rate can be extremely helpful.
If you're treading water and your car breaks down and needs a $700 repair, going $700 in debt certainly isn't good, but it's a lot better than losing your job because you can't get to work. If your new job got things mixed up and sends your check to the wrong address, you're much better off if you can cover rent and groceries for the week or two that might take to get figured out -- if the timing's right, you might not pay any interest at all.
Much is made of how long and how much money it takes to pay off a credit card if you only pay the minimum. The bank could very easily solve this problem by raising the minimum payment such that the payoff time is at most two years (so, at most 170% of the principal)... but of course they'd rather you pay less each month for far, far longer. ... But you can counter this devious ploy by just deciding yourself to pay that much!
And if you're not in that situation? Well, you can just not borrow money! It's not impossible for you to be worse off for having another option available to you, but there's a reason that result is unintuitive: it's hardly ever the case in real life. And it certainly isn't here. All you have to do is not be an impulsive idiot!
... Which, of course, is the whole problem. Lots and lots of people are impulsive idiots. I haven't watched these audits, but I've got no doubt you're characterizing them accurately.
I hate the idea of denying responsible, thoughtful people every opportunity to better their circumstances in order to protect irresponsible fools, but I'm very doubtful that works from a Utilitarian perspective. I suppose limiting total credit to a more reasonable percentage of income might be a bearable compromise?
More options
Context Copy link
Realistically, I can't complain. Like you, I pay off my credit card every month, and in an emergency, I've built up a disturbingly large line of credit I could use to buy a great deal many things should a serious need arise.
Given that I get cash back on purchases, said company is basically paying me to use their card.
But, y'know... I wouldn't really cry if I had to give it up. Yeah. I could make that sacrifice. Easy.
More options
Context Copy link
Once in a while The Motte ditches culture war and sounds admirably left populist...
Horseshoe theory is ✨real✨
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, it largely comes down to just realizing that the "Doesn't completely fuck up your entire life" use case for credit cards is narrow, and the "Completely fucks up your entire life" use case for credit cards is unbounded. In theory a credit card could cover an income or a savings gap. You hear stories all the time of people having to put essential home repairs like a water heater or an HVAC system on a credit card because that's all they had. And yet, I have literally never heard that story end with "And then next month I scrounged up the money to pay it off". The story always goes "And that's why 5 years later I have high 5 low 6 figures in credit card debt". It's almost as if, much as it would have sucked, they'd have been better off without hot water or without central air until they scrounged, picked up hours, did gigs or begged until they had the money.
But who knows, maybe that's my emergency savings privilege talking.
That's because if we do, it's a nonissue and not something we talk about.
Last year, my car needed some repairs. As I tell the story, I paid for them - with some grumbles, but I paid it.
To tell it with some more detail... I didn't have a lot of money in my checking account at the time. But that was a nonissue: I just put the repairs on my credit card, and then a few weeks later I transferred enough money to my checking account to pay off the bill when it came due. So a credit card was rather handy then. Except I don't tell that part of the story, because it was rather a nonissue in my life.
More options
Context Copy link
But it's not. 82% of American adults use credit cards. More than half didn't even carry a balance.
There's no story if that happens.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As one of the ostensible leftists on here this just makes sense. Left wing populism is personally advantageous for everyone who does not have so much wealth they never need to work again. Wealth inequality is so high it is damaging almost every aspect of western societies and the conflict between the upper classes is at the heart of a vast number of culture war issues. The usual consensus here on a lot of issues, like whether we should import an infinite amount of indians to drive programming/IT wages as close to zero as possible, is actually isomorphic to the left populist position (i.e. infinity indians is not a good idea).
In the short term, sure.
Yes, it turns out that when you ban new development and innovation and bestow the wealthy a heckler's veto on any such thing society gets damaged. I blame the conservatives for that, but I also find said conservatives to be very invested in calling themselves leftists, so I couldn't tell you whether or not your model for what a left-wing populist is (and thus, who to blame) matches mine.
Actually I'd argue that the lack of conflict in the upper classes causes most of that (though we may also disagree who those upper classes are). When there is conflict, there is competition and space for reform. When there is capture, corruption and stagnation naturally follow; O'Brien only exists if the upper classes are in complete lockstep.
"Conservative" (or more accurately, "progressive-conservative") and "Reform" don't evenly break across "left" and "right", nor does either have a monopoly thereon. It's not an intuitive thing.
More options
Context Copy link
This is straightforwardly not true. State owned businesses perform poorly. Europe which has much more left populist crap is a decaying retirement home. Like most populism leftwing populism is very specifically selected for what scratches the grievance hindbrain of the most people listening to just so stories about how homelessness is really caused by the fact that Bezos has a really big yatch.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is all reasonable and I’m very sympathetic to it. But then again, I don’t feel that someone too stupid to understand compound interest and with a time preference too high to understand saving money and/or not maxxing out every loan facility they have should have the same power over the direction of our shared society as me.
And yet, like you, tens of millions of responsible middle class people go their entire lives without ever deciding to blow their credit card limit, get a second mortgage and put it on the roulette table, or put their retirement savings into extreme out of the money options recommended on /r/wallstreetbets.
Interesting point, and yeah I have to admit that dumber people often do screw up major societal decisions. The tricky part is deciding who gets to decide.
More options
Context Copy link
Hmmmmm, I wonder at that assumption. Not many people wear their net worth on their sleeve, and lots of people finance what on the surface looks like a stable middle class lifestyle. They might not take out a second mortgage on their house to bet it on black. But they do take out a variable rate HELOC to remodel the kitchen for a dubious increase in home value.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Watching just a few minutes of a recent episode, can you tell me what you like about it? Caleb seems extremely cruel in an obviously performative way, and frankly he comes off as almost evil to me.
I did watch one of the earlier ones where he seemed much more good-hearted and trying to help. These recent videos he just seems as if he's aiming to humiliate people.
Yeah this is an underrated terrible part of modern life. I personally think we need to massively reign in credit card companies given the fact that if someone carries a huge debt load for even half a year, it can set them back a decade in their financial life. It's frankly insane what we allow here.
I wanted to ask the same question, I found the clips I saw on tiktok initially funny and then rapidly they became boring and sad when it was the 10th iteration of "you spend all your money on an $800 bi weekly F150/hellcat and doordashed burritos YOU IDIOT" as some mildly confused mildly obese person from heartland America stared at him with a 95 IQ gaze.
Stupid people are stupid, and it's way more fun watching their antics on a fun reality show like Love Island versus a sad one like Caleb. At least the Love Island people are hot.
More options
Context Copy link
Everyone gets Flanderized even people who are ostensibly playing themselves.
Not everyone, but the vast majority it seems.
Even flanderising gets flanderised.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Hammer has “broken character” on the show before and revealed that the participants are told he’s going to play up meanness for the cameras but that it’s a bit. This was when one of the participants broke down crying at one of his wisecracks, and he tried to console saying he wasn’t trying to be hurtful, he’s sorry, this is the mean guy stuff they had agreed to.
So, it’s all consenting adults, and probably it’s meant to make viral clips to help promote the show, but I’m also uncomfortable with the meanness.
More options
Context Copy link
As is common, trying to alleviate the suffering of the wretched (in a paternalistic rather than charitable way in this case) results in more suffering for everyone else. Credit cards are great. You can buy things without carrying cash around, without being present, without having to apply for credit at every place you might buy things. You don't need to trust the merchants and they don't need to trust you. And you don't have to pay for this service if you don't want to. But as with many useful things, you can get hurt with it, and trying to make it "safer" will almost certainly increase cost and reduce utility.
Credit cards are moronic. Debit cards are great. If you have to put small ticket item on credit, it is good to have some friction in the system to think twice whether it is a good idea.
Debit cards violate the whole "need to trust the merchant" thing. Fraud on your credit card means the bank is out the money. Fraud on your debit card means YOU are out the money until the situation is resolved.
Fraud on your credit card is nearly impossible nowadays. At least here in EU you have to have secondary (sms or bank app) confirmation for every online transaction.
The EU may be a crime-free paradise, but there's still plenty of credit card fraud in the US. And not all of it from online transactions.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That just means you buy everything with cash and only trust a few big merchants like Amazon with your debit card information. I don't see why that's a big deal. Fuck credit cards.
You don't see why making it impossible to operate as a small business online is a big deal?
More options
Context Copy link
I buy stuff that isn't available on Amazon. Some of those merchants apparently haven't had the best security practices. With credit cards... that's between the issuer and the merchant, all I have to do is tell the issuer that I didn't make the charges.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There's a thing that can let you pay without carrying cash around, without being present and without having to apply for credit. It's called debit cards. You spend money you actually own, as opposed to some weird exercise of "paying back the money you spent during the month" that I once was surprised to learn most Americans apparently have to engage in. You can't be preyed upon with tricky overdraft fees because if you don't have the money, you simply can't spend it.
Oh if only that were true. I found out the hard way that my bank would happily let transactions through that my checking account couldn't cover, then charge me a $50 fee on top of having to bring the account positive. There are some very predatory banks in the US.
That aside credit cards do have other advantages. They aren't insurmountable but do exist.
So there are rational reasons to use a credit card. You don't have to, but they can be beneficial if you can avoid the trap of spending money you don't have.
Yeah, and if you use a credit card that won't happen. (Since 2009, they can't even charge you an over-the-limit fee unless you specifically opt-in).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Most banks will let you overdraw your account.
Mine doesn't do so by default.
Mine tricks people into signing up for "overdraft protection" (even the name is Orwellian!) with a story that it will save you from embarrassment at the grocery store if your card declines or something, and doesn't tell you anything about the $35 fees (and how they are completely silent so that you have no idea you are in the red until you actually remember to log in and check your balance, so it is very easy to overdraft several times and get nailed with a fee each time). I went online and turned it off once I figured it out, but that was years after I got my first bank account.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm perfectly fine with increasing cost and reducing utility in this situation. Yes credit cards are convenient, no I don't think the societal ills they unleash on the financial illiterate are worth the amount of convenience they provide. I like having them, and don't think we should get rid of the entire industry, but I'd be happy to make it significantly more inconvenient to use them if we could stop the predatory behavior.
Yes, of course you are. Because you value the wretched above all others, because that is the general rule everyone is taught. This is itself a problem with modernity, if modernity goes back to AD 1 anyway.
I do not value the wretched above all others. I value God. I think there are plenty of ways in which we should make life harder for the poor, in fact. Like restricting healthcare and social security and such. That being said, I still don't think that promoting ruinous usury is a good.
Unfortunately, as you probably guessed from my AD 1 reference, Christianity values the wretched above all others.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, he's a man after my own heart.
LOL this is a non-answer, but at least it's funny. I'll give you that. ;P
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The problem is that progressives (both in terms of race and class) spent decades promoting the message that “access to credit” was a key axis of intersectional inequality and the reason why various communities were locked out of “building wealth” that must be remedied as soon as possible. Of course lending to poor people, because of the inherent credit risk, can only be viable at very high rates to cover the many, many defaults involved.
Either you ban lending to the poor, and progressives whine about people locked out of credit and the opportunity to build wealth, or you allow them to borrow, and face the consequences. Blaming the lenders is ridiculous.
Progressives were never demanding that the poor get increased access to credit cards; banks have never had a problem marketing high-interest, low limit credit cards to the poor. The argument was that it was stupid for banks to deny mortgages to people with jobs who were currently paying more in rent than what the mortgage payment would be if they bought, on the grounds that they were too high a risk. It's also an argument that no one has made in the 20 years since banks went further than the progressives asked them to and started writing mortgages to people who couldn't pay them off if they lived to be a million, then repackaged them as AAA securities.
Not quite no-one. Kochtopus-funded economist Kevin Erdmann has been arguing for over a decade that a huge part of what is wrong with the post-Great Recession economy is that post-crisis regulations on mortgages have destroyed the bottom half of the owner-occupied housing market for no good reason. Erdmann and Scott Sumner have successfully convinced me that their contrarian theory of the 2008 crisis is probably correct:
Quote from the linked report:
I prefer the theory advanced by American Enterprise Institute economist Peter Wallison (free 90-page report (p. 441), Amazon book).
Quote from the linked report:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Can I blame the lenders and the progressives?
In general this argument that political pressure has forced businessmen to be immoral is not very convincing for me. I hope to live in a society where generally businessmen have lines they won't cross, like openly defrauding the poor.
They aren't "openly defrauding" the poor. We have all these disclosure laws about credit cards, which among other things tell people how much and how long they'll be paying if they only pay the minimum. The people who get into credit card trouble want to get stuff and pay only the minimum. They may want this because they are stupid and foolish, or they may want it because they figure if they get in deep enough someone will bail them out, but they want it.
Yeah I agree the openly defrauding was inaccurate. I'm angry about it. But you are right it's not fraud, though still immoral imo.
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, sure, technically you aren't wrong.
But even with everything spelled out for them, few people appreciate the reality distorting effects of 30% interest. They don't appreciate how quickly it is to get in trouble, or how slow it is to get out. They either never learned, or never really appreciated the rule of 72. They never had pointed out to them that their credit card debt doubles every 2-3 years, while a gold standard S&P500 index fund earning the historical average of 10% takes 7 years to double. They have no grasp of the fact that everything they put on a credit card that is accruing interest is eating up 2.5x more of their precious life than the equivalent amount saved in an S&P500 index fund gives them back. Closer to 10x more than a run of the mill savings account.
Math, and especially interest rates, aren't real to most people. Even explained to them, it doesn't translate into years of their life like it should. It was certainly never taught to me that way, nor I suspect to you. It was only in retrospect, in my 30's, looking at my nest egg thinking "This represents 10 years of my life" did these realizations hit.
Now imagine you never have a nest egg.
If we arrange the world to "protect" people like that, we make life worse for all the rest of us. A lot worse, because these people are so incapable. Just as a world without fast cars and sharp knives is worse than one with them, so is a world without (or with very limited) credit cards or any of the other things those people can hurt themselves with.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, there’s a meme on Anglo-reactionary Twitter, which I will do a post about at some point, that essentially says well you know popular democracy was designed for and works for 130 IQ Anglos. And the further you get away from that, you know, either the worse your democracy becomes or the less democracy you can have. Much of the American system over the last 150 years and before (thanks in some part to the wisdom of the founders) has been engineering things so that they still kind of work even when most voters aren’t 130 IQ Anglos, but there’s a limit to every system. Brazil is a democracy. India is a democracy. There are localized corruption issues but, generally speaking, these are countries in which the most popular party wins a majority in the legislature etc etc. They are still poor and dysfunctional.
I'm not sure my observations really correlate directly with "democracy only works with 130 IQ Anglos" and more, our entire society is developing pitfalls left and right in fundamental activities that everyone needs to navigate (getting a job, feeding yourself, managing your money) where the only winning move is to not engage in a whole swath of behavior.
I mean, to illustrate my point, maybe I'm getting old, or I am too paranoid about dark patterns, or what. But I got my driveway done. Dude who did it sends me an invoice. It's been generated in some off the shelf business solution, so I'm not mad at him about what comes next. But in the process of attempting to accept and pay for this invoice, it pitches me a credit card, with no obvious way to say "No I don't want a new credit card" without also shutting down the whole process. But after looking at the screen for a few minutes trying to find the hidden "I don't want a credit card, but I would like to pay this invoice button" and failing, I hit the "No Thank You" button and the whole process shut down, and it told the guy I had rejected his invoice.
I ended up paying him by check before he left.
Another example, I'm at a museum, and they have a CR Code you need to scan to take you to the page where you can reserve tickets for a particular exhibit. I have an old phone (because I refuse to upgrade perfectly good phones every 2-3 years just because), with a QR code reader that used to be reliable. I scan the code, and I now know but didn't at the time that after scanning the code, instead of displaying it's contents, it displayed an ad which looked like it's contents. I click the ad not knowing it's an ad, it takes me to a page asking for my credit card. I think this doesn't look right, so I show it to the attendant at the kiosk asking if this is the correct form to get tickets for the exhibit. They assure me it is. It wasn't. My credit card got stolen. I should have trusted my gut on that one. I didn't realize until after the fact that the QR Code reader I'd been using extremely sporadically over a decade had become enshittified with predatory ads. These days Brave on mobile has a QR Code reader built in, but I'm not sure that was the case at the time. Although I may just not have known. Regardless I'm irritated at the constant state of shifting sands under my feet revealing pit traps I'm expected to avoid.
Once upon a time, as a young teen on warez sites, there was always the game of virus roulette. You'd go to download a no-cd crack off GameCopyWorld.com, which still exists, and you were presented with 3-6 buttons that all said "Download" on them. All but one were predatory ads which caused you to install a virus. Only one was the actual download link to the no-cd crack.
The no-cd crack may also be a virus.
Now it feels like that's how everything works. Everything is an app, and every app has dark patterns trying to steal from you. I like to think I'm not a retard, but it's getting to the point where it tricks me from time to time. I can't imagine how normies fare. If Financial Audit is any indicator, not well.
Well yes. You didn't pay for a QR code reader or buy a phone where someone is paid to write it as a native/bundled app. So the only incentive structure remaining is for someone to write a free one with the hopes of monetizing it later.
Or you could have just paid $50 for the game. Steam doesn't distribute malware and their website is pristine.
No, everything is an app and every app needs a business model. Sometimes the business model is clear (you pay us $90/yr, we give you app). Sometimes it's less clear but still approximately benign (you use Reddit, they sell the ability to mass-train on their content to AI company). Sometimes it's clear it's ad supported (Facebook, Chrome) with varying degrees of scrupulosity on their origins. Some are indeed funded philanthropically like Brave or Signal. Some are fundamentally scammy.
More options
Context Copy link
Even though the QR code reader built into my phone camera works fine as far as I can tell, the phone in general is old, slow, and doesn't handle apps or webpages with ads well, so I pretend like it doesn't work. A few weeks ago I had to pull a Karen at a bar to get the bartender to give or tell me what the drinks were, since I was absolutely not going to scan their QR code on my phone, and sit there reading 30 drinks off my old, slow, sad phone/wallet. He produced a tablet for me. I was saddened but bought a foofy drink anyway.
A week ago, I tried calling AAA to have my car towed. Previously, it was 7 miles free. Now it's apparently 3 miles free, and after that you're supposed to pay the rest in cash (it was going to be $80 or so), or read a stranger your credit card over the phone. I didn't believe that could possibly be the protocol. I said that I couldn't possibly pay that way, that's not how anyone pays for official services, and demanded that he offload the car on the side of the road. He said he should probably return it to my house then. I said he could return it to the three mile mark. He said I would have to pay for the return trip. We finally settled on him dumping my car on the side of the road, and me reading my credit card number to a stranger over the phone, to be charged $30 for the misunderstanding. My husband brought all the kids, gave it a jump, and it made it to the mechanic. I guess I should have tried that first, but was worried it was the kind of thing that would get worse if I tried continuing to drive it while malfunctioning.
I attempted to cancel AAA, but apparently all I can do is remove the auto subscribe, and write myself a note to check whether they try to take money anyway some months from now (which Amazon Kids has done, and unsubscribing involved multiple text chats and phone calls). Not dealing with weird shady towing practices was literally why I've been paying for AAA all this time! That is literally their value proposition!
When I taught at a charter school, a WhatsApp chat group was the official means of group communication, and I had to use the Microsoft Authenticator app to log into Gradebook, which cause innumerable problems. I have seen a couple of restaurants that don't have physical menus, just a QR code that you are expected to scan to order. At my hotel, all the VIZIO TVs demand that you make an account or download the app before they let you watch so much as a single channel.
It's extremely annoying.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm kind of worried over what I'm supposed to do to support my parents in this stuff as they age. They've never been great with consumer tech, especially smart phones. I'd be perfectly willing to drive over and help them occasionally to fix something or install something, or just show it how it works. But it increasingly feels like a never-ending battle. The apps, like you said, just get more confusing and more malicious. My parents are not at all senile, but increasingly at that "i'm too old for this shit" phase where they really don't want to bother learning new tech. I don't want to bother, but I feel like I have no choice.
It used to be the case that you could always opt out by calling a place on the phone, or driving to their physical store, or paying someone in cash. Increasingly it feels like we just have to use the app, which will constantly change without warning. That feels really predatory and impractical, and I can't believe it's being allowed in our society where the average US senator is 65 years old and heavily weights the opinions of old people.
When I was doing my master's, one of my lecturers was telling us about how the quality control standards on the Apple App Store are much stricter on the Google Play Store. After one too many instances in which some child was paying some scummy pay-to-win game on his parents' iPad and racked up four figures' worth of "micro"transactions, Apple apparently established a blanket policy of banning games targeted at small children. (I may be misremembering this somewhat: obviously you can install games from the App Store meant for small children. I think the crackdown was targeting games which seem to be marketed towards children, but which contain microtransactions.)
All well and good, I thought: children's brains aren't fully developed, this is common sense. But what about people at the opposite end of the telescope? Elderly people being taken in by Indian call-centre scammers and Nigerian princes is already a known issue. Maybe eventually we'll get to the point where the App Store will simply prevent you from installing an app if you exceed some age threshold. Sure they'll be accused of ageism (that's literally what it is) or discrimination against people with dementia, but I'm sure they'd rather ride that wave of negative publicity than the much bigger wave of bad publicity associated with thousands of elderly people having their bank accounts drained because they mistakenly installed an app which looked like WhatsApp but was actually something else entirely.
What I don't understand is how absolutely swamped with shovelware and cheap scams every app marketplace seems to be.
Mobile app stores have been bad for a while -- any popular game will have tons of shitty knockoffs with similar names available for download almost immediately -- but in the last few years, even Nintendo of "Nintendo Seal of Quality" fame has their eshops flooded with low-effort sleaze like "Hentai Girls: Golf"
Clearly this is a solvable problem; Reddit and Facebook purchased armies of jannies to carry out "Anti-Evil Operations" against wrongthinkers. The depressing conclusion would be that there are enough slop enjoyers and straight-up cretins out there to make stricter app store curation a financially unwise decision even taking into account the reputational damage caused by this slop. But I'm hoping there's some other reason for it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Oh man, I should have included this story, but I forgot.
I had to sign up for a fucking app for my daughter's pediatrician! They literally handled all test results, scheduling, messaging etc exclusively through the Healow app, which was dog shit. I installed it, and attempted to get the account set up and synced with the doctors office properly, in their fucking lobby, and the piece of shit refused to work. Even just handing them my god damned phone and asking them to do it for me, they couldn't fucking do it. Eventually it just fucking worked for reasons that are opaque to everyone after trying enough times, but then eventually the app refused to update and wouldn't work anymore because my phone was too old. Because when you aren't wrestling with dark patterns and enshittification, there is always planned obsolescence.
We have a different pediatrician now. They have an ongoing problem where our Nurse Practitioner which we see is lazy about getting her files submitted, so our billing is always messed up. Nothing major, sometimes they tell us we owe a copay several weeks after we thought we were caught up. But at least there are actual people there we can speak to reliably, and they don't force us to go through a god damned enshittified app.
Enshittified doesn't mean "is shitty". It means "is shitty because now that you are locked in, they can exploit you". Just being shitty because they're cheapskates that can't spend the money on a good app doesn't count.
I see you are unfamiliar with the Healow app. Yes, it is shitty because they lock you in, and completely stop giving a fuck. It's more or less ubiquitous with Doctors offices, and if your Doctors office uses an app, it's probably Healow. I'm not even aware of another one. I think the Inova hospital system near me doesn't use it... yet. But virtually every other doctors office we had to use in Northern VA used it, although some were better about requiring it than others.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That sounds like a nightmare. I've had much better experiences with healthcare in 3rd world countries that don't use apps.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
At some point, I think at least 2-3 years ago, the default Android (and IIRC iOS) camera apps got the ability to scan QR codes. Honestly I try to have as few apps on my phone as I can get away with, though.
ETA: searching says it was 2017-2018 for Android.
Definitely before 2020 for Apple.
More options
Context Copy link
A cursory search says Brave didn't get this feature until Nov 2022. But it's an AI generated answer, so trust but verify. The event at the museum occurred probably summer 2021.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm sure the 130 IQ value is primarily for illustrative purposes, but there's no way in hell that when "popular"/modern democracy was established, the IQ of the average voter was in the 130s. I doubt you'd get there even if only considering land-owning freemen, let alone universal franchise for all "Anglos". It might be doable with a tight oligarchy, but that's not particularly democratic, is it?
To elaborate, 130 IQ is around 98th percentile. Early American democracy would probably have an average of 105-110, accounting for property requirements (implying some education and capabilities). The more universal it got, the closer it approached the population mean.
Since so many reactionaries and conservatives think that was America's heyday, by all right you only need 105 IQ "Anglos" to pull it off. That's not nearly as high a bar. Depending on which stats site you trust, that's only China, SK, Iran, Japan and Singapore. Well, minus being Anglos, but the Ancient Greeks weren't either and they did alright.
I can't speak for US and what bars one had to meet in order to be granted franchise there, but in 1900-01 Lower House elections in the Austrian part of Austria Hungary, 6% of adults had the right to vote. Assuming the population average IQ was 100 and enfranchisement being totally correlated with IQ, this correspends to the cut-off being 123.
But another way to think about it, is taking the meme to mean the average voter should have 130 IQ. Thus one has to find L, such that integrate(x*exp(-((x-mu)/15)^2/2)/sqrt(2pi)/15,x,L,infinity)/integrate(exp(-((x-mu)/15)^2/2)/sqrt(2pi)/15,x,L,infinity)=130. mu being population average IQ, and L the IQ bound for franchise, such that the average voter has 130 IQ. I don't have a CAS at hand to calculate L myself.
Apart from @EvanTh remark that the 6% of the voting class were not top 6% of the IQ, people 125 years ago had significantly lower IQ. This phenomenon is known as Flynn Effect and it has only recently started to plateau or even reverse.
More options
Context Copy link
What makes you think their voting requirements were closely associated with IQ?
More options
Context Copy link
Genuinely kind of surprised that our site doesn’t support native latex.
I mean, he could have used unicode and abbreviated the error function 𝒩 or φ, and the cumulant Φ which is perfectly usable notation. Would have saved like 80% of the chars and 90% of the parens. Not that I would object to having better math support here.
A cutoff of 123 does correspond to a (rounded) average value of 130 by my calculation (for a population mean 100). I didn't understand the need for a CAS though. Seems like something that any modern programing language can numerically solve for. Or just Newton's method if you're too lazy to open up the documentation for your favorite solver and can only remember one root finding algorithm like me.
Edit to add the calculation in case anyone doesn't trust my math (nullius in verba, etc):
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes of course, it’s a laughably high threshold. That said there are some (dubious) estimates that the average Anglo IQ in the Victorian era may have been as high as 108, so gentry landowners having a say 116 average really wouldn’t be out of the question.
Wild. Where can I find out more?
Example link
Basic argument: Victorians had faster reaction times than moderns. Reaction time (which is known to be about 20% correlated with IQ at an individual level) may be a better measure of true population-level g if the Flynn effect (rising population-average IQ test scores over time) is driven by education and not g. If you convert the average Victorian reaction time into an IQ based on the modern reaction time-IQ curve, you get 108. And a 8 IQ-point drop in genetic g is consistent with what you would predict based on dysgenic fertility over the intervening 150 years.
Counterpoint - why do we think that "ability to function in modern society" is better measured by reaction time than performance on IQ tests? All the work which validates the IQ-functionality correlation uses test scores and not reaction time.
How does that work? Under what population parameters?
More options
Context Copy link
There's an obvious potential confounder, and it seems to be present. I checked the first American study showing 208ms (Thompson, H. B. (1903). The mental traits of sex. An experimental investigation of the normal mind in men and women. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.) and the subjects it used were University of Chicago students.
I checked a later American study (Anger, W. K., Cassitto, M. G., Liang, Y. -X., Amador, R., Hooisma, J., Chrislip, D.W., et al. (1993). Comparison of performance from three continents on the WHO-recommended Neurobehavioral) showing 275.9ms. It used subjects living in working class and entry-level white collar housing. The University of Chicago is an elite university and in 1903, universities in general were considerably more elite than today (or 1993). These are different populations.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You can do that of course. The big worry has always been people taking advantage - involuntary sending off to an asylum is a staple threat in Victorian literature for a reason.
There are other options. Forms of internal exile, for example, which has a long history over the millennia. Multiplayer servers that pool cheaters together away from rule-abiding players are one example.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Great writeup, thanks for sharing. As I have asked in the past,
This is a very old problem. In Plato's Republic, he speaks occasionally of the lower castes in his ideal system, but the great bulk of the work is an obsessively detailed examination of the proper upbringing of the ruling class. Aristotle calls him out on this, suggesting that Plato's vision fails to adequately capture the breadth of human experience. Today, rather than frankly acknowledge the mental incapacity of the masses, we push free compulsory public education (substantially modeled on Plato's prescription!) as a way of supposedly "leveling the playing field," bringing everyone up to some minimum level of functioning (and insisting despite the evidence that everyone has basically the same potential to achieve and succeed).
Occasionally I meet people who are spending their retirement years caring for dependent adult children. Sometimes that responsibility falls to siblings instead, or even more distant relations. The ability and willingness to be a conservator for an adult of diminished capacity is not the stuff of romantic Hollywood aspiration (Love Actually notwithstanding!). Of course we talk about prisons and mental institutions and the government curtailing of important individual rights--because there's nothing any of us can do to fix the damage that liberal individualism has done to the institution of the family. There are all sorts of reasons why strong tribal ties might be undesirable, particularly in a Western liberal democracy, but as Thomas Sowell says--there are no solutions, only trade offs. The same forces that liberate some of us from the oppression of a tyrannical tribal chieftan also liberate the Hassans of the world from the moderating influence of tribal support.
More options
Context Copy link
It is a can worth opening, in no small part because Black people are 4x more likely to be schizophrenic. Schizophrenia in men leads to significantly higher rates of violent crime.
Thankfully, that psychosis does not translate to more mass shootings. Only about 10% of mass shootings are attributable to psychosis. It's possible that psychosis makes it harder to plan and execute a mass shooting. But that's my color commentary.
I'm not a fan of the 2nd amendment, and won't pretend to feel this conundrum as viscerally as you, or at all. But, 'crazy people shouldn't have guns' seems like an easy concession. I don't buy into slippery slope arguments. Afaik, 'First they came for the crazy people' isn't part of the original quote.
Guns aren't essential. They're somewhere between a hobby and a worst case backup if something crazy happens. For one, no one is entitled to a hobby. Second, if you've been institutionalized or are psychotic, then that 'something crazy' is YOU.
Psychosis does not equal schizophrenia. Men with schizophrenia are indeed more likely than the sane to commit violence - 4 to 7 times more likely depending on your source - but the absolute risk is actually very low - 1 in 4 schizophrenic men are likely to be involved in violent crime and schizophrenics make up about 0.3 percent of the population.
On top of that you have the fact that the vast majority of that 4 to 7 increase is by schizophrenics with substance abuse problems. Which makes sense when you understand the critical factors that separate schizophrenia from garden variety drug induced psychosis - the negative symptoms. It's actually really hard to summon the interest to violently assault someone when you spend most of your time in a state where you can barely summon the energy to give a shit about eating. When getting angry at a guy who cut you off in traffic feels like a lot of effort. When watching TV or doomscrolling feels like a chore.
That said, I agree with your overall argument, crazy people shouldn't have guns. But also, saying you don't buy into slippery slope arguments is like saying you don't go for this 'multiplication' the kids are doing, the world is shaped by patterns whether you buy into them or not.
More options
Context Copy link
It may not be part of the quote, but it sure was part of the process.
In 19th century America, being a slave who did not want to be enslaved was considered to be a mental disorder called drapetomania. In modern society, this would mean that a desire to be a human and not property would cost you your right to bear arms.
Fast forward to the Soviet era, where disagreement with communist politics would lead to being diagnosed with sluggish schizophrenia, because no sane person would object to the Glorious Dialectic. In modern society, having misgivings about liquidating the kulaks would cost you your right to bear arms.
As late as the 1960s, police arrested Clennon King for having the audacity to try and attend college while black and confined him to a mental institution. In modern society, this would have cost him his right to bear arms.
Where do you think the line is? Do you find any of those acceptable? If not, how do you prevent those abuses under the framework that you espouse above?
None of these people had the right to bear arms anyways. Mental illness being used as a tool against those society has already decided to repress doesn’t affect the rest of us much; there’d just be some other weapon used.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Your link is for 10% is broken.
Since there’s significant debate over the threshold for “mass shooting”, is it possible that statistic is using a pretty low minimum? I would expect the percentage involving psychosis to go up a lot with casualty count.
I also think there’s a categorical difference between spontaneous violence and ideological shootings.
I did find another paper by that org that says they were using a standard definition of 4 victims not including the shooter.
https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/nij-special-report-public-mass-shootings-research
Same paper: The 5-year running average for such events hovers around 5-6 incidents per year. And apparently the most common location is at workplaces, so more of a "going postal" situation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Do you think 10% of the population is psychotic?
No, but if all psychotic crazies magically disappeared, then then mass-shootings would only go down by 10%.
It implies that the primary reason for mass-shootings in the US is not schizophrenia. And therefore, black people's higher vulnerability towards Schizophrenia isn't significantly affecting mass-shootings in the US.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Tough situation. It's good that you noticed this* - people like this (in terms of mental health AND criminality) are all over the place all the time. This is both scary and should be heartening - in many environments it's national news if something goes wrong.
It may also be helpful to know that their isn't too much you can do here, guy is unlikely to want help and is unlikely to meet the criteria in the US for involuntary help. Family resources if well applied and other things like that can convince someone to be help seeking, but that ain't going to be your bag.
The gradual burning off of these resources is generally just a part of how this disease goes.
That said - some of the story is certainly concerning but the guy seems to not have caused problems (otherwise the police would be picking him up more often) and made it into middle age which is a good sign, and he is also seemingly not anti-social which is a huge source of violence.
Even people with broken brains tend to have a predisposition to not do violence, in a big city you'll see people running around screaming and attacking trash cans and saying threatening shit but they won't actually hurt other people most of the time.
Incidentally this is what concerns me about recent political violence, it is teaching people with poor judgment that said stuff is a good idea. Not wise.
This guy would likely struggle to get a gun anyway - if it's obvious to you its obvious to someone selling a gun who sniffs crazy every day.
*Our system in the U.S. is very rights focused. That can be good, that can be mad. People who are pro-2a need to experience these people in order to be taking an informed stance.
Most gun store owners are responsible, but if he tries enough of them…
I mean I'm even thinking street buys - by definition not responsible (more or less). Even those guys are going get the ick from someone decompensated like that.
Usually people like this have negative symptoms that an average person can clue onto even if they are not sure what it is and that's not counting anything directly weird the dude might say.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If you hold the lash, yes. If you are being lashed, no.
I saw North Carolina had a bail reform bill in response to Iryna's murder. The demographics of which representatives voted for it or against it are horribly depressing. You'd think such a display of the obvious failures of just instantly putting repeated violent offenders back on the streets has been made obvious to everyone, and yet the non-White legislators felt no impetus to change anything. Luckily they were outvoted, and so the pogrom hits a speed bump in NC.
In theory, I'm not against some sort of mental health red flag laws. But I also know my enemies consider my moral beliefs fundamentally insane. I know if they wanted to declare church attendance a risk factor to owning a gun, they could launder that premise through academia and friendly mid level bureaucrats in HHS or CDC, and suddenly I'm checking off a box on my back ground check asking me if I've ever attended church, under penalty of perjury if I lie about it.
Maybe the non-whites in North Carolina feel the same way about bail reform.
I don't expect the bodies to stop piling up as long as we're forced to live with each other.
More options
Context Copy link
I mean, yeah. Back when I worked in social housing, we had a client the same way (and same kind of delusions about the government spying on her). On her meds, she was perfectly functional. Off her meds, she gradually slid all the way down to 'can't hold down a job, is delusional, is talking a mile a minute in that stream of consciousness way'.
It's sad. Luckily she never got into any physical harm, but turn the delusions about the neighbours up a notch, add a gun into the mix... and the outcome probably wouldn't be great.
And it is exactly at that intersection of "should there be intervention or should this person be left alone?" Because intervention would probably mean - for Hassan as well - involuntary commitment and being made to take the meds. And Hassan does not sound like he'd take well to people trying to force him to take drugs. But without the meds he's dangerous - or is he?
That's the big, troubling question here. He's functional enough to be able to look after himself, and he hasn't gotten into trouble yet. The problem is the "yet". So long as talk about getting a gun is only talk, it's not at the point of "yeah he needs to be taken in". The problem is, how do you judge when he hits that point?
More options
Context Copy link
Although I'm IT, I happen to work in the mental health field, and we see a lot of Hassans on a semi-regular basis. I get the feeling that working with them would be extremely difficult, just because it'd be so fucking heartbreaking. I mean, I'd want to do everything I could for him, and I'd feel terrible that bare bones basics like medication management and linking him to help and encouraging him to use it would be the best that I could do for him, and that he probably wouldn't take advantage of any of the help because of the paranoia. It seems like bad choices all the way down when it comes to the question of when should these individuals lose their rights. I'm firmly on record as saying that the SC has erred on the side of turning the mental health problem into a law enforcement problem with the current doctrine of imminent danger of harm to self or others or chronic inability to care for self, but I also have no illusions that widespread institutionalization was worse. The reality of the law being a blunt instrument here really hits home with frequent flyer clients like the lady who is consistently hospitalized for abducting children off the streets which in her mind is for their own safety, treated with medication, then released, whereupon she promptly stops taking her meds, "because she doesn't need them," then goes back to her delusions and tries to protect another kid and starts the cycle all over again.
And the big kicker in all of this is that your example of Hassan is a great one in the sense that he seems to code to the classic, "would probably never even hurt a fly unless he is triggered in a highly specific fashion," sort of situation, which is, of course, the vast majority of schizophrenics. I know, I know, it's very trope-y to be busting out the, "less violent than normies," meme here but the other piece of this for me is that from what I've seen, the violent mentally ill throw many more red flags than just trying to protect themselves. Threats of violence and violent or even homicidal ideation are common and even then, the biggest single red flag is that they've been violent in the past, not that they threaten violence or fantasize about it. I'm sure this, in part, is why having a plan to harm someone or oneself is a prerequisite for involuntary commitment, lest we start locking folks up left and right for wanting to hurt or kill an antagonist or themselves.
Anyway, I really appreciate this post because it brings home the reality that absent a major breakthrough, schizophrenia in particular will remain a particularly poor fit for the lens of the culture wars. Even if we go with the metaphor of the spectrum for mental illness, there's a clear-cut difference between the Jared Loughners and the Lee Harvey Oswalds.
I know this is a big problem, but why does it happen? Is it that the meds don't really work, so patients are drugged and docile but still basically irrational? Is it that they work too well, so that patients think they're cured and therefore that they don't need the pills anymore? Or are the patients 'cured' but still basically too low-competency or erratic for their newfound sanity to make much difference?
I would have thought that after the first couple of rounds of 'didn't take my meds, got arrested', I would (being sober/sane because of the meds) spot the pattern and be very careful about taking the meds even when I'm feeling better.
To build on @Muninn's great explanation: Schizophrenia is in a way pattern matching in overdrive. What anti-psychotics do is dial the frequency in closer to the station that we call reality, but there is always still some fuzz. So a lot of people go on anti-psychotics for a while and because the fuzz is still there they don't really feel very different - or worse, they feel like they have traded the frankly fucking magical world they lived in for the grey lifeless slog all the zombies live in, because it has no effect on the symptoms like anhedonia.
And on top of that they also get to enjoy fun side effects like feeling dog tired all the time, constant headaches, weight gain despite constant vomiting, and the always delightful sensation of your muscles seizing of their own accord so you look like you have cerebral palsy because your jaw desperately wants to rest on your shoulder and your hands are doing their level best to retract into your elbows. On top of that, there is the widespread belief in the community that if you find yourself gurning you have been on anti-psychotics for too long and you are rolling the dice on involuntarily gurning for life.
Okay, I get this. So the fundamental delusions (the police want to hurt me / nobody's protecting these children / the CIA is watching everyone) are still there, just toned down and without the madder edges. They don't think, 'I was crazy before and now I'm sane', they think, 'I was basically right before, probably I was overreacting a bit but I'm better now'.
Pretty much. Sometimes it's easy to recognise when you have been crazy, but most of the time yeah it is 'oh I overreacted but I was basically right.' The confounder in all of this is the intelligence of the person being discussed of course.
I thought it might be. You need to be able to step back, look at yourself, and say, 'Even though I feel like I was obviously right, I got arrested, plus I know there is this disease called schizophrenia which everybody tells me I have and which does seem to make other people act this way. Maybe I should consider that my decision-making faculties aren't the best'. Not easy.
Makes me feel more impressed by deBoer than usual, although it's a shame he can't turn that self-awareness towards his Marxism.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Combination of "I feel perfectly fine, I don't need this" plus the side-effects can range from not great to terrible, plus there may be a dash of "I'm not crazy, why are they giving me pills for being crazy?" denial in the mix.
Same general area as "why do people stop taking antibiotics half way through the course?" Because the immediate symptoms are gone, they feel way better, so why would they need medicine when they're not sick anymore?
More options
Context Copy link
Sticking strictly to the antipsychotics, it's more that the meds help, but can only ease the symptoms and not actually rid most folks entirely of schizophrenia when they take them. If you've watched Reservation Dogs, the character of Maximus is a good example there. He knows he needs his medication when he's on it, and he tries to take it regularly, but he forgets sometimes and starts to spiral until his behavior catches up with him or he recognizes that he needs help. Either way, he gets treatment and can hold down his life again.
When it comes to not even believing that medication is needed, and with the caveat that I'm not a psychiatrist, etc. etc., my impression based on what I've seen is that for the most part is that there's a host of different justifications for that thinking, but the practicalities tend to boil down to a either a lack of insight or awareness that their behavior is even problematic in the first place, and/or an attachment to their particular flavor of schizophrenic ideation. On top of that, the side effects of antipsychotics tend to suck, too. More generally, kinda like how Hassan has the rigid belief that police officers want to have (homosexual) sex with him, in his world the police wanting to have sex with him is the problem, medication's got nothing to do with it! Or in my example above, of course the unaccompanied kids are in danger, there's no adult present to look after them! If the police were doing their jobs, they'd be either looking after the kids themselves, or going after the parents of the kids for not looking after their own!
More options
Context Copy link
Psychiatric medication having side effects was mentioned below and is true, although less of an impact for patients like this who may not be "with it" enough to notice the problems.
"Anosognosia" can also be a core symptom of some disease - if you realize you are delusional....well you aren't really delusional, now?
Additionally many regular people struggle to take their medication for seemingly "benign" things (like high blood pressure or diabetes) and up to really bad stuff like "my anti-rejection medications for my transplant."
More options
Context Copy link
Most people with schizophrenia eventually show some degree of cognitive deficits. The meds don't help with those, even if they reduce the risk of psychosis and some behavioral issues. (That is not the same as being sedated into compliance, if I could get away with that, my life would be much easier)
The best way to manage such situations is to provide long-acting depot injections. That way, when the patient is more or less in their right mind, they have fewer opportunities to just decide that they they can skip taking pills for a few days, triggering a relapse.
As hydro correctly states below, psych drugs are often unpleasant, and that's doubly true for antipsychotics. Nasty things, just better than untreated schizophrenia.
More options
Context Copy link
Psych drugs are very unpleasant, for one thing. And having good days and bad days isn’t unusual for a crazy person.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Exactly. To treat them, you have to drag them in against their will, medicate them against their will, and keep them locked up until they start responding to the medication. That's a horrible thing to do, but you might have to do it.
Then you let them out, and hope to God they maintain the medication regime instead of dropping it the second they're released and ending up back in the same rinse and repeat cycle.
We can ensure that TB patients take their meds. The cost is a fraction of the cost of allowing a well-controlled mental patient to relapse, waiting for them to start acting out, arresting them, re-institutionalising them, and re-stabilising them in an in-patient environment. Long-acting injectable mental health drugs make it even easier.
Why can't we do the same with mental patients? This is a serious question and I don't know if the answer is medical, practical or legal.
To be cynical, and invoking Freddie deBoer here, because there haven't been movies and TV shows and books all about how TB is ackshully a really wunnerful thing, not an illness, it's quirky! creative! unconventional! cool! people thing and it's only Big Pharma Medical Complex trying to force people to stop having TB. Nobody's made "One Flew Over The Magic Mountain" about wicked nurses torturing TB patients with mountain air and health regimes:
More options
Context Copy link
Well, no, we can't. In the US, directly observed treatment would be cost prohibitive. $10 total for 6-9 months of observations? In the US it would be several orders of magnitude higher. Furthermore, even if we could, it doesn't transfer to mental health. One, people with mental illness tend to be more resistant to observation. Two, there's no "Short Course"; the meds are for life or at least for decades if burnout occurs.
NYC does TB DOTS, including by video call where appropriate. A quick google finds this paper giving costs of $5-10 per day per patient at 2015 prices (as far as I can see, NYS DoH eats the cost because most of the benefit is public). While expensive, that is a lot cheaper than a seriously mentally ill person going off meds twice a year.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I made a post on this not too long ago about gun rights being civilization rights. If we don't trust Hassan to have a gun we don't really trust him to exist and live in our civilization.
I suspect this equivalence is true for most people:
(Number of people you trust to own a gun around you) < (Number of people you trust to live in society around you) < (Number of people actually in society around you)
The gaps in those numbers pose very thorny problems, and I think most people would prefer to sweep those problems under the rug.
I think someone like Hassan should be imprisoned and removed from society. We currently keep a bunch of criminals in prisons, and thus prisons are very terrible places to be. I would not want to condemn Hassan to such a place. Mental institutions used to be the kind of prison that would house people like Hassan. I don't think they were pleasant enough either. Either the nicest prison possible, or he remains a ward of his parents/the state.
I mean, you’re talking about a conservatorship. Thats thé most humane option. But Hassan is not going to react well, and the law gives a high bar because we are an individualist society that really values autonomy and freedom.
More options
Context Copy link
This doesn't compute for me. It's true that I trust fewer people to own guns around me than live in society around me. That means that gun rights are not the same as civilization rights. Many crazies are harmless when they do not own tools that can kill at a twitch of a finger and steeped in the culture of using them against perceived threats.
And on a larger scale, do you trust the state to determine whether or not you're crazy enough to take your rights away more or less than you trust the presumably small portion of crazies in society to not kill you?
Apart from the vast wilderness of North America with natural predators (not super relevant because in such places in Europe you can also often own hunting rifles), I have always assumed that this simply has to do entirely with the number of black people around in the US metro areas and the general distrust of large segments of the population towards the government that it will actually protect them from these black people.
Can Americans sanity check me?
No.
The directional distribution of crime stats is widely known in America, but the specific stats are not- and most Americans do not feel threatened by high black crime, because 'not going into the hood'(the ghetto is not where most people want to hang out anyways) is a perfectly viable method of avoiding it. And political support for gun rights is mostly correlated with living outside of the inner city anyways. Distrust of the government is a real factor, but the driving factor for concealed carry is fear of mass shootings, or drug fueled 'random' crime. Not fear of gang related crime among the black population, which yes most Americans are aware is a problem but also is seen as something that is geographically limited to places you don't really want to be in anyways. The sentiment is more 'the police can't be everywhere at once' and less 'the police favor black gangbangers'- the latter sentiment would be seen as farcical among the vast majority of Americans, including the last pockets of red tribe racism.
More options
Context Copy link
Uh, not really.
Political support for gun ownership is inversely proportional to distance from an urban center. It’s more a rural/redneck/rugged-individualist signal.
More options
Context Copy link
There was a video on twitter recently of a PoV of someone having to shoot a charging boar utilizing a bolt-action rifle.
I couldn't help but stare at the set of circumstance and think to myself, 'In that situation, I really, REALLY would prefer a PTR-91. Or AR-10.'
Which are semi-auto magazine rifles chambered in 308. Which is a typical hunting round.
And boars have become an endemic invasive species in America as of late.
That aside... I know enough to say that gun culture overall in the US has undergone a quiet, seismic shift who's origins can date all the way back to the initial attempt at a gun ban in the 1920s, threading through the Firearms Owners Protection Act in 1986, Clinton's Assault Weapons' Ban in the 90s, up until today, where you've had a steady increase in constitutional concealed carry.
It's around this point I could probably fish around for how holders of CCWs having less crime rates than police officer, the twisted and uncertain number of defensive gun uses and so on and so forth... but there's still a very American cultural thread that basically boils down to, when the Government gets a bee in thier bonnet and tells thier citizens 'No', there's an instinctive reaction of 'Fuck you, now I want it MORE'.
1911's have become a default sidearm among hog hunters for a reason.
I'm surprised they haven't taken a page out of Alaskan bush hunters and use 357 revolvers or whatever Glock is chambered for 10mm.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You have a link to that? One of my coworkers will definitely get a kick out of it.
Shit, I’d prefer an AR15 to my bolt-actions in that case.
Here you go.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If it was actually possible to stamp down the number of handguns circulating in the US metro areas (and not just taking them from the law-abiding citizens), I'd expect a general reduction of crime for the following reasons:
In addition, while I'll let Americans correct me my impression was that the large segments of the population who are wary of black people and the segments of non-black population who live in the US metro areas were two circles that do not overlap much. Cities vote blue, rurals vote red, do they not?
Eh maybe. To start with, the black-hispanic... strong mutual dislike... dwarfs any other racial tensions in the US by the numbers, even if BLM shenanigans are more common in the media, and this is a mostly urban phenomenon. You're certainly correct that the blue tribe is less wary around black people but nice urban liberals are well aware that big crowds of blacks/majority black areas are not good news from a safety perspective. They won't say it out loud of course but they are aware of the general correlates of race and crime, even if they think 13/52 is exaggerated, blame racism rather than criminals, etc.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah Gun rights are a peculiar American psychosis where, if guns were to come into existence today, the current status quo would just have a 0% chance of being the way they entered 2025 American Society. Which isn't necessarily unique, looking at alcohol and a bunch of other 'oh we've kinda grandfathered them in with civilization' stuff.
I'm personally from a country with essentially no guns (Police are armed but I genuinely do not think I've ever seen one unholstered) and I just find it unfathomable why I'd want to change that fact. I'm sure shooting guns is fun, I've done it once on vacation and it was cool but I have no particular urgency for my next experience and I'd consider 'the rest of society is far more likely to be armed' would impinge upon my personal freedoms and vibes far more than the status quo.
Like whenever I'm in the USA and I feel an interaction is getting weird or somebody's notably antisocial-looking I've got something in the back of my head saying 'that guy could be packing'. Whilst illegal firearms exist in Australia, probabilistically the chances are so much lower and guys like Hassan just aren't gonna have the contacts to get them and then randomly overly escalate some shit.
I don't think you can separate the things that were grandfathered in from the current good state we find ourselves in. Alcohol is useful for proving trustworthiness within a group. We might never have gotten out of small-scale tribalism without its influence. Guns were a necessary tool for breaking the old social order of kings and nobility. The countries where guns are rare have at least a vibe that no one could ever upset the established order. In America there are times when states, and even smaller groups, defy the federal government using force. The threat of such defiance limits the extent to which the establishment boot can stomp on human faces before it is stopped by force.
I do agree they've helped with establishing the status quo, but they're also something where if they were a fresh addition to the status quo they would clearly not be given their current status.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This isn't true, and we know it's not true because we've had a chance to test it: the modern equivalent of guns (in terms of a destructive individual technology) is the small drone, and you can buy them from Walmart (or whatever your Australian equivalent is) with no background check of any sort the last time I checked and only very minimal and nominal regulations on their use.
Drones aren't quite like guns since they require conversion and some significant level of skill to weaponize. Petrol-bombs are a thing but we don't worry so much about petrol like guns. Fertilizer -> explosives is a thing but fertilizer doesn't require special licenses to buy, though there is monitoring.
You can do vast amounts of damage with a laptop and internet connection but they're not too regulated.
Whereas guns, rockets, knives, high explosives are easy to weaponize if you have them.
More options
Context Copy link
It is definitely a case where technology (batteries and motors) has outstripped politics, but drones don’t really compete with firearms against undefended targets. Other than aircraft, I guess, which is where we see the leading edge of regulation.
Handguns are useful for personal violence in a way that drones can’t ever be.
More options
Context Copy link
Drones as sold aren’t destructive, surely? They need a gun or explosive to be attached to them, both of which are banned for being destructive.
During the Palisades fires some months back, a guy (one of the founders of Treyarch, the game development company) accidentally flew his civilian drone into a firefighting airplane and disabled it.
Now I imagine firefighting planes fly uncharacteristically low due to their mission, but the speed and mass of a drone is probably enough to cause severe injury in a direct collision, or to damage low flying planes (say, near an airport) or other vehicles, putting the lives of the people in them at risk. Imagine a drone going straight at your windshield while driving.
I might be mistaken, but I think most countries don't require a license to purchase a drone, only to fly it. Which, for someone planning mischief with their drone, is not a concern.
And this is without considering the additional homemade modifications one could make to make a drone more dangerous. Homemade explosives, yes, but that's hardly the only way to make it deadly. You could have them carry liquids (bleach, paint, lye, acid?) in a container that's meant to burst on impact, you could duck-tape spikes or knives to it... I'm barely even trying to be imaginative here.
More options
Context Copy link
Correct, but on balance I'd say it's much easier to manufacture an explosive device (a bottle filled with gasoline, for example, at the simplest) than it is to manufacture a drone. Imagine if you could just walk into a department store and buy a fully-functional guided anti-tank missile with everything but the warhead. That's what a drone is.
Certainly, but either of those raise the bar significantly from ‘here is your human-killing device, here is the stuff to put in it, press this button to make it go’. To my mind, this is beyond most psychotic murderers. Our Hassan treats daily life as a Herculean task, he’s not going to build improvised explosives.
I think I agree that a firearm has a lower entry point. However the drone might pose a greater threat at relatively similar skill levels, although it's possible that counter-drone tech advances and popularizes quickly enough to once again raise the skill level necessary to use a drone competently.
The truth is that a low-functioning psychotic with a gun (or a drone) does not pose a threat to society even if he poses a threat to individuals in society. It's intelligent and organized individuals that pose the threat to social stability, and guns and drones are a force-multiplier to that effort. Drones are to modern society what firearms were in an earlier: an extremely powerful tool – or weapon – that allows relatively under-equipped groups to reach parity with professional soldiers. The drone is to the tank what the musket was to the knight.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If it's equivalent why don't I hear of drone gang wars, or drone robberies, or drone school shootings?
You do if you know where to look.
Things will get worse on this front as the technology and expertise necessary to operate it (which is low, but there is an entry barrier) percolates through society.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Keep in mind that the U.S. is not just LA, DC, and NYC - it is also Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho.
I'm pretty much most countries like the US have gun rights.
How much? Okay that can be a problem, but when social services are three hours away and wild animals are an actual threat....you have to.
Europe is not the US
Canada is the closest analogue and has much stricter gun laws than the U.S., although laxer than most of Europe. Russia also has very strict gun control, although I don’t know how enforced that is in Siberia. India, dangerous wild animals living alongside humans- super strict gun control, and villagers are too poor to buy guns anyways.
South Africa has a large rural population and still has dangerous wild animals. I’m aware that there is an Afrikaans speaking gun culture but I don’t believe that the actual laws on the books are notably loose, and anyways crime rates are so high there that self defense is just mathematically dominated by common criminals.
Where else? I suppose Australia technically has dangerous wild animals in great variety, but guns are tightly controlled there.
While this is strictly speaking true it is slightly (and inadvertently) misleading. Australia's most dangerous animals are not ones that you can stop with a gun - an assault rifle will do nothing to stop you from being bitten by a funnel web spider that had moved into your shoe, a perfectly camouflaged snake that you stepped on or a small, transparent jellyfish floating 30 metres away from you. People in rural areas still use them and don't have much difficulty getting them.
Carrying a gun for snakes isn’t totally unknown.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Vast majority of Australian wild animals are only really going to cause you issues if you step on them or you're pretty far off the beaten track.
Dingos and saltwater crocs are technically dangerous to people, are they not? No bears, snakes and monitor lizards avoid people, no big cats. I suppose guns are pretty useless against saltwater crocodiles in general but still.
You’re not going to get attacked by a grizzly in a suburb either, you’d have to be way off the beaten track.
Grizzlies no, black bears maybe.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I know somebody who just got back from safari in South Africa. Apparently suppressors are near-universal there; it’s considered rude not to use one. But accessing guns was extremely lenient.
Argentina is another lax one. Big history of ranching.
Argentina has no dangerous wildlife(to humans) to speak of- argentine pumas are known for not even being willing to defend themselves against human assailants, jaguars have only a marginal presence, and the South American canid species are too small and tame to threaten people. I suppose theres bushmasters and rattlesnakes but guns are less helpful against snakes than macro predators.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not really, not to the same extent or of the same kind. Europe broadly doesn’t allow handguns or concealed carry, and makes getting a rifle difficult. The same is broadly true for Asia, Russia and a bit less so for India. Africa is unable to enforce this kind of thing.
The map of worldwide gun ownership per capita (which was made by the Swiss) is teal and blue globally, with a black blobs for America, Alaska and Yemen.
America doesn’t have handguns, ARs etc. because of its size and wild animals, it has them because it is (ironically) a very conservative country based on armed revolution.
Plus of course because you need them to protect yourself from all the people with guns. I’ve never seen posters here advocate for gun ownership to protect from wild animals, it’s always as a Schelling Point against government overreach or for self-defence.
It’s worth noting that self defense from wild animals is written into the gun laws of Canada and Norway, I believe. Now gun politics in those countries are not a big topic of discussion, but it does seem to be a recognized use case.
In the US nobody really cares about Wyomingites and Alaskans having handguns, so this topic doesn’t come up as often.
More options
Context Copy link
Worth noting that this is a very common use-case IRL, although the self-defense question is of course much more interesting and gets more "air time." I've personally used an AR-pattern rifle to shoot predators in defense of livestock.
Defending oneself against predators is very rare but it's enough of a problem in bear territory in North America that ammunition sellers will advertise ammunition as being relevant against bears. Mountain lions (and maybe wolves) are also a potential threat that might warrant a handgun in some places, but don't pose the same challenges that killing a bear does.
I might just be falling for toxoplasma, true.
Very cool, care to tell more? The closest I’ve got is a friend using a BB rifle to fend off monkeys, which can get very vicious.
Not much to tell! Shot and killed a coyote off of the back porch with an AR (chambered in .223) while growing up. Probably at 75 yards? It had come up to steal a chicken. This was a not-infrequent occurrence back on the farm, and we've killed a variety of predators though a variety of means, but the AR-15 was our typical go-to because it's reliable, relatively light, didn't require cycling a bolt for a follow-up shot, and of course it's easy to put whatever sight or other attachments (such as a flashlight) on there that you want. Plus, of course, if you had to you could grab the same gun for a defense against a (human) home invader.
I'm not going to pretend I couldn't have done that with another weapon, but a semi-automatic "sporting" rifle in a small caliber like .223 is ideal for dealing with predators like coyotes and foxes.
Hunting rifles are overkill – they are often heavy, use a larger and more expensive round with more recoil, and you typically mount optics on them that might be more suited to longer ranges and actually hinder target acquisition at closer ranges (this depends entirely of course on your property layout – on a ranch you might prefer a scoped weapon.) Also, I think I prefer the pistol grip on the AR rifle if I am shooting standing. But a less powerful round like a .22 is not generally considered powerful enough to reliably kill a predator, particularly at longer ranges.
An AR is cheap, reliable, and lets you get the first and second shot on quickly. It's also very modular, meaning you can easily adapt the same gun for different situations (so for example I used the same lower but a different upper receiver chambered with a larger round to kill a deer while hunting). This can save you a few bucks, and also it's cool.
Obviously it's not the only option, but for that specific threat (predator, relatively close, say expected at 200 yards or within) I would want a rifle with the same characteristics: small and fast rifle round with a flat trajectory, iron or red dot sight, semi-automatic. And that's a very similar problem to the one the military is trying to solve (especially for dismounted urban combat) so the design convergence is natural.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Most countries allow for hunting rifles and such, no?
For a very specific value of "allow", maybe.
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, certainly. But I don’t think that ‘some farmers have a rifle in the barn’ is what we’re talking about here. A Hassan wouldn’t be able to get a hunting rifle, and certainly wouldn’t be allowed to carry it into town or anything. There is essentially no probability that someone you meet is ‘packing’.
I made a post way back saying that lots of countries and England in particular are fine with sporting/hunting guns to some degree, but are absolutely rock-solid on forbidding personal weapons (with some unavoidable fuzziness in between).
My understanding of American gun rights supporters is that it’s the opposite: they feel it’s existentially important for their civilisation to allow people access to personal weapons specifically.
Yes "gun culture" is more American, but my point is that the access to guns is there in most countries should you wish. Most gun control advocates don't realize this though.
I'm aware that isn't you but might have been OP.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ah, a topic made for me. I needed a break after going through study material that uses vorbeireden to illustrate vorbeireden. I suppose this example helps me shore up my understanding of the differences between delusional perception, delusional memory, and delusional misinterpretation. It seems to be the last one in this case, the patient has a pre-existing delusion which causes him to interpret "neutral" stimuli in a negative context. I think. I am not sure if being accosted by three cops is strictly neutral, even for the neurotypical.
Let us stick to facts and base rates for a moment.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2787197
The authors note that this seemed relatively stable between countries, so it is fair to assume it holds in the States. This means that, statistically speaking, a man with schizophrenia is about 4.5 times more likely to perpetrate violence than a man without it. This is a significant number. It is not 450 times, but it is also not zero.
The same study notes that the relative risk also depends on the presence or absence of substance abuse:
Taking your testimony to Hassan's clean living standards at face value, he should be at the lower end. We can assume he is probably around 350% more dangerous than the average person, with wide error bars. The conclusion that he is, in fact, more dangerous than average seems almost certain from a statistical perspective.
(The more cynical would invoke FBI crime stats at this point)
But this is the classic base rate problem. We are not just interested in the average person with schizophrenia, we are also interested in Hassan. So I'll go ahead build a quick and dirty risk profile based on your account:
What works in his favor:
What works against him:
Human men have a wide variance in their propensity towards violence. I would personally class Hassan as moderate risk, but take my opinion with a massive dose of salt since I have never met the guy, I'm hearing the story secondhand, and I clearly lack the opportunity to run reasonably validated scoring systems across the gentleman. It's far from ideal. Good thing that nobody listens to me.
In the UK, where social services and the cops have more power in such matters, Hassan would likely have regular welfare checks from a social worker. If he demonstrated severe self-neglect, they'd have the right to bring him in for treatment, which would be given if he was deemed to lack capacity. Whether or not he meets that bar is unclear to me. I presume he'd react better to an unarmed social worker, but that's a luxury in the States, where gun violence is much more of a risk. Here, they'd probably try and shank you first, or hit you with a beer bottle. The matter would be expedited if he resorted to violence or criminality, but he's not there yet.
You mention the man who attacked the FBI office believing in an "LGBTQ white supremacist pedophile" cabal. His thought process seems totally divorced from reality. We can comfortably call that "broken hardware." But where is the line? As you note, is believing the police kill 10,000 unarmed black men a year (the actual number is closer to a dozen) a delusion, or just a political perspective fed by bad information? Is believing Obama is a gay Kenyan married to a man a delusion, or just a conspiracy theory?
(If I was in an OSCE setting, this is where I'd mutter something about the distinction between over-valued thoughts and delusions, and also the fact that delusions need to be carefully interpreted in terms of their commonality in the patient's socio-cultural milieu. If we could commit Evangelicals who spoke in tongues or spoke to Jesus, we'd be filling a lot of psych wards very quickly. The erroneous beliefs mentioned above have millions of adherents, so from a pragmatic point of view we can't treat them all)
I suppose after all that hedging, I should say something mildly actionable. If I were you, I'd refrain from asking for another wellness check unless you note clear and obvious deterioration on his condition. If you could gently nudge him towards a checkup, well, that might help. He seems to trust you, as he should, since you're clearly looking out for him.
At the end of the day, the US's approach to psychiatric services for the insane (who need it the most, I'd say) is rather suboptimal. This is probably the best way of avoiding suicide by cop or homelessness, while also balancing violating his rights. If only there was a way to bring him in for a few weeks to an impatient clinic and starting him on some antipsychotics. That would probably be best, but it's not on the cards at the moment. @Throwaway05 correct me if I'm wrong here.
I mean it depends on the where. Usually you can get someone to a psych ED through a wellness check, the police, etc (at least in a blue state). But then if it's a city this guy is absolutely going to get cut loose. So you need non-urban (save for the real acuity) or non-rural (not enough resources) for their to be any chance of really catching this guy and sending him to inpatient - which is what you'd have to do since he won't meet the criteria for involuntary outpatient and doesn't likely want treatment himself. Inpatient is not really appropriate either.
This is the system we have unfortunately (or fortunately - it's very rights forward which can be a good thing, but is pretty American).
Thanks. I wasn't aware that there was a Community Treatment Order equivalent in the States, which would likely be a better for this gentleman.
I mean I'm aware it exists but I've never actually seen it which says something unfortunate.
Some places have "ACT/PACT/Whatever" teams that follow people in the community so they don't need to go to appointments but that requires sufficient patient engagement.
Usually that means lots of commitments and you get them with "you wanna stay out of the hospital bro?"
But we let a lot of people wander who dont want treatment and stay out of trouble.
Usually drugs is what gets people involved because it makes them erratic enough for the police to get involved.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What can be done here?
The best option would be to bring him in and commence him on antipsychotics, at least for a few weeks. In an ideal world, that would reduce his symptoms enough for him to make an informed decision around continuing treatment, and he could be followed up in the community and even treated with long-lasting depot injections to reduce the compliance burden.
This would be relatively easy in the UK (it's still a major pain in the ass), much harder to achieve in the States, at least as I understand it. It might be easier if his condition worsened, severe self-neglect or violent tendencies would allow for expedited care. He's in an awkward state where he's too high-functioning to really justify institutionalization or imposed treatment, while clearly not being in his right mind.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
He's in his late 30's, if that changes things. The "young Denzel" line might have given a different impression, but there's a high degree of "black don't crack" going on. He has excellent skin condition.
I don't have any clues from things he's told me, but as we've covered his is pretty functional. Is it possible he's already on medication? I don't have a good sense of what modern anti-psychotics do. Would you expect a notable improvement on the delusions?
It's also worth noting that there's a small chance that he was previously on medication, but desisted. The drugs don't always work, and an unfortunate number of patients quit them either due to a lack of efficacy or the side effects becoming unbearable.
More options
Context Copy link
That's good context to have, but his situation will still likely decline with time.
Antipsychotics are modestly effective in schizophrenia. They're not... pleasant drugs to be on, but they do meet the bar of being better for you than going untreated. The most significant benefit they provide is a roughly 50% reduction in mortality rate, which is a pretty big deal. Even so, they're very unlikely to restore normalcy, but they have decent odds of at least helping improve his QOL. It's complicated, and I find it hard to translate things like improvements in PANSS scores to actual tangible benefits.
I would strongly bet against him being on meds. The profile just doesn't fit, he lacks insight into his condition, and he hasn't complained about medical professionals messing with him, which is the usual presentation for people who are coaxed or coerced into treatment. The US medical system is awful about such things.
Of course, you could just ask him next time you see him. If he doesn't know he has a diagnosis or doesn't remember taking pills or getting shots, then he's almost certainly not on medication.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Where do you work that employs someone like Hassan?
At what level of functionality should people be given rights in the first place?
At what level of functionality should something be registered as people?
Registering anything born by people as people, and then giving it adult rights as soon as it's been around for exactly 18 years is a bit of an oversimplification in the first place. Asking for a scrupulously well-designed threshold at which to remove rights seems like an isolated demand for rigor.
Which is to say - I shrug. There's no clean answer.
I guess I was being a little vague, but Hassan is a regular customer, not an employee.
Ah, thanks, makes sense. My bad, that was just me being non-anglo.
So where do you work where you can get away with talking to Hassan for 45 minutes?
Really not trying to be that specific on my spicy political opinions pseudonym. Let's just say that workloads are spikey, and I have never figured out a graceful way to disengage from conversation with Hassan. He will just natter away at me without pause until I am working with someone else, and even then it takes a minute or so for him to realize I am otherwise occupied and make his farewells. 45 minutes is a length I know from experience he is capable of, when he catches me during a slump, but the average is more like 10.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link