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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18681 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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To be fair, everyone is in some sort of bubble, and as such you ignore the bubble at your own risk. Most people are getting their view of the world through some sort of media, and unfortunately social media, so you can’t just throw your hands up and say “it’s just a social media propaganda bubble.” The bubble has caused three assassination attempts. It swings elections.

If I wanted to steel-man the administration's choices, it seems that the very public ICE actions are intended to broadcast a message of unwelcomeness to would-be illegal immigrants. Uncontrolled traffic at the border is down, I think, in a large part due to changing perceptions here, and while many of the individual actions seem cruel, it's demonstrably effective at piercing perceptual bubbles ("Uncle Joe will let us in") more than having the VP say "do not come."

I don't have the time to write this up at length right now, but I feel like this aligns with a much deeper pattern. Basically, I think there's an older kind of wisdom that says it can be socially optimal for authority to make credible, even hard, threats that different groups take seriously, because if people take those threats seriously, they'll often behave in socially desired ways and then the threats don't even have to be exercised for the most part. BUT doing that does require authority figures to look, publicly, like mean assholes, and it might require implementing nasty punishments a couple of times in especially public ways. You could say this goes all the back, at the level of theory, to at least Machiavelli, with his observation that, if a ruler has to choose between being feared or loved, it's generally more stable to be feared.

Internalizing this requires understanding second order effects on some deep level, and understanding that authority might need to be dickish in the correct ways for the greater good. And it absolutely seems like an understanding of the world that is apparently abhorrent to a lot of well-educated progressives I know. Interestingly, those same progressives seem to have exactly the same difficultly when it comes to parenting and holding the line on their own kids, a difficulty that often produces nasty consequences, so I don't think this is about hypocrisy. I think it's just an actual deep moral revulsion at "being mean", even if it's trivially necessary and for the greater good.

When I hear of "migrants dying on rickety boats trying to cross to Europe" I keep wondering if the tally would be positive or negative and by how much if Europeans countries had been sinking the unidentified vessels with unlawful intentions approaching their coasts right from the start. Sometimes, real mercy is harshly disincentivizing bad and dangerous behavior.

It's trivially true, even obvious. Sink a couple of boats and far fewer people die in the long run, nevermind the preventing other problems.

I think Australia has been successful without actively sinking boats, and the US' former "wet foot dry foot" policy seemed a IMO decent way to balance the incentives.

I don't know about that. A lot of the boats already sink just because they're floating pieces of trash. "There's a chance we'll sink and drown" is something immigrants are already pricing in when they take that leap of faith. Obviously there's some number of deliberate sinkings that would move the needle, but I don't think it's "a couple".

The actual consequences of killing a boatload of migrants in cold blood are far broader than just the deterrent factor though, so the utilitarian calculus is not obvious. E.g. It might lead to diplomatic isolation for the country responsible, protests and counterattacks, legal cases against the killers, etc.

Plausibly true, but not trivially.

Depends on how many potential migrants actually learn about the policy, evaluate their odds correctly, and decide they aren’t that desperate.

They would learn about it before the end of the day, they would not want to drown, and France is really not that terrible (despite all the French people).

Yeah, I'd agree it's plausible but far from trivially true. Which I why I wonder about it. How many boats would they have needed to sink? And you can look to Palestine to see how long some people can insist on taking basically suicidal actions even against a grimly determined superior force.

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