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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   24231 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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I’m ‘stolen valoring’ a post from the Sunday thread and reposting it here for higher exposure (ht @odd_primes):

This post on "izzat" an Indian cultural honor system, went viral recently. I know we have at least a few Indian users here - how accurate is this characterization? Of course it's probably hard to generalize too much given the fragmented nature of India along cultural, linguistic, religious, and ethnic lines.

Here is the text in a non-image format from /r/askindia - the wide range of responses is interesting.

Recently there was a viral explosion on Kiwifarms > Twitter about a nebulous low trust Indian cultural behavioural trait. This honor culture trait isn’t something that is unique to India. There has however been a huge influx of Indians into the West both through immigration and through internet presence that has left cultural ripples. The memetic word is called ‘Izzat’ even though this is an Urdu word that only vaguely venn diagrams against the concept.

I’m beating around the bush, but I’m pretty much talking about scam culture, being the winner, getting one up on the people that are outsiders to ‘my group’, and getting status points for exploiting my outgroup.

I’d like to reiterate that this isn’t an Indian only issue, but it’s a culture clash between high and low trust cultures and is worthy of discussion.

Edit: Don't drunkpost. This is a culture war issue that should have been given better care in an OP.

2nd edit: Actually quoted the post.

3rd edit: Added a link to the 'patient zero' tweet.

This very strongly goes against the cultural relativism arguments, which a lot of left ideology is built on, imo.

I've worked with probably a dozen or so Indian coworkers over the years and this does not describe any interaction I've ever had with them. I am also deeply skeptical that a kiwi farms post from a thread entitled "The India Menace - Street shitting, unsanitary practices, scams, Hindu extremism & other things" which cites no evidence is going to contain accurate generalizations about Indians.

From the Indians I have worked with I'd say India follows a particularly brutal version of the 80/20 rule, call it then 98/2 rule. There are a few who are really, really good. The rest are so bad I don't know how they got through their interview (though I have heard having your friend do the remote parts of the interview for you is common amongst that community).

I have worked with hundreds of Indians and I can count on one hand those who I could trust to do what they said without double checking every single thing.

My guess is you were working with the creme of the crop and not your average bodyshop contractor.

The very obvious rebuttal to this is India's murder rate. If the subcontinent is truly a hellish honour culture where maintaining face is prioritized above everything and pursued with fatal resolve, it's odd that its murder rate slots it in between Kazakhstan and Turkey. Obviously one could maintain that there's some massaging going on, but it's fundamentally tough to hide bodies and I can't believe that the official rate is that far off the actual rate.

I might be inclined to accept that there is a nugget of truth the post has been built around, this kind of petty zero-sum honour culture is not exactly uncommon in developing nations. But it seems greatly exaggerated.

But a conventional honor culture(like in America’s black ghettos or parts of the Balkans or the rural south) is not exactly what’s being described- the idea is that Indians find scamming and lying admirable as long as you aren’t hurting your buddies. The really rough parts of New Orleans or rural Albania don’t work that way, going back on your word is worse than murder.

The reason I'm willing to believe that post is hitting on truth is simply interacting with the Indians in my local community over the course of years now.

And the tendency to try and 'get one over' on others, even when it is detrimental to the relationship is nigh-universal. Sometimes this is benign. But I'd be reluctant to put anything meaningful at risk in a deal that might go sour because of this factor.

I had a potential client with a 2.5 million dollar net worth (if I assume he was honest on this point) balk at paying me $1200 to fix a problem for him. This was already steeply discounted! I also noticed that its about 50-50 that any given Indian-American potential client I actually work with will follow through on actually finalizing their work, since, I suspect, that would mean handing money over. And I get the sense that the act of handing over money is seen as somewhat of a 'defeat' unless the amount you hand over is much less than the amount that was agreed to.

I'll still work with them, of course, but it has colored my expectations across the board. I would NOT take one on as a business partner unless I had a pre-existing extensive relationship with them.

And these are all otherwise decently smart, well-presenting, well-off individuals.

My conclusion is basically one of two things.

#1 Either the Indians who actually make it over here are 'the best of the best' to some degree, and in theory the best-suited to adapt to Western Cultural norms, and even they are acting on this 'defection-based' cultural baseline... which indicates such culture is endemic in their home country...

OR

#2 The Indians who make it over here achieved that by cheating the hardest and fooling the gullible Westerners intentionally... which indicates that this culture is so endemic in their home country that it is the ONLY way for them to get ahead.

(The third option is that those are the same thing: the 'most talented' Indians are also the ones best at playing that game, and that's maybe the scariest possibility of all, we're inviting the 'superpredators' of their society here.)

I have also had some perfectly delightful, non-scammy/defection interactions in various contexts, and in most cases they're pleasant to interact with when money isn't on the table. And I have a few Indian dishes that I really do enjoy, I would never say their culture is without its pros.

But as I've stated before, I have little problem, zero discomfort looking at the broader, population level stats and drawing the obvious conclusions from those. One of the big ones that still sort of puzzles me... how does a nation with 1.5 billion people produce so few Olympic-Caliber athletes? They've won 41 medals... TOTAL. That's one-third of what fucking KENYA has, and Kenya started competing in 1956, compared to India starting in 1900. Granted Kenya is a bit specialized in which events they win.

And my 'theory' is that that whole area of the world assumes that defection/low trust is 'normal' and act accordingly, and when introduced to a high-trust population, they're more inclined to view these folks as potential suckers (in the P.T. Barnum sense) than they are to realize they can achieve much greater things via cooperation here.

So that reading pretty readily confirms my priors... which makes me suspicious enough to want some independent verification.

If you know how I feel about high-trust societies... you probably get why I find this concept disgusting and mildly terrifying if true.

And the tendency to try and 'get one over' on others, even when it is detrimental to the relationship is nigh-universal. Sometimes this is benign. But I'd be reluctant to put anything meaningful at risk in a deal that might go sour because of this factor.

Consider for example the way the current President of the United States treated employees, contractors, lenders, wives etc. in his pre-political life, paying no meaningful price for it. "Hustle" (used upthread as a term for what high-trust societies don't do) is an American English word for behaviour that is as American as school shootings and trillion-dollar software companies (American old wives in my social circle blame PT Barnum). There was an American culture which told white boys from good families that hustling was beneath them. Now you can get >$10 billion in VC money for a company with the motto "Always be hustlin" (Ebonic spelling in the original).

Northern Europe (partially including the UK) was high-trust by default in a way which makes us quokkas when dealing with untrustworthy immigrants. America was high-trust by choice and effort (a British snarker would ask "why do you think they need so many lawyers?"), and it feels like you stopped trying starting at some time during the Clinton administration*. I don't know enough to know if the book about how it was done or how and when it stopped being done has been written, but I suspect Tanner Greer of Scholar's Stage has a better idea than most.

* High trust is of course still the default in some closed or semi-closed social circles like individual small towns or the Silicon Valley elite. That doesn't mean society as a whole is high trust, but I suppose it is a big improvement on real low-trust families where only kin can form that kind of local trust network.

I think much of the decline is explained by the cost and time of travel being reduced. Disparate populations are still easy to reach, but before we had mass communications, information about unsavory individuals might propagate slowly.

Snake Oil Salesmen are a well known trope in Westerns, where it was possible to arrive in an isolated town, scam the relatively trusting townspeople, leave before they realized the scam, and arrive in another such town before word actually spread.

Even today, it can be hard to punish a scammer if they stay mobile. Or simply operate outside the jurisdiction of the people they're scamming (oh look, India again).

Dunbar's number is probably pretty closely correlated to the largest community you can operate the runs solely on trust, rather than introducing contracts, mediators, and other dispute resolution systems.

Still, there is something 'magical' about being able to leave your garage door open, your car unlocked, and expect to find your Amazon packages left unmolested on your doorstep, and likewise be pretty certain that if someone DID try to take your packages or steal your car the neighbors would either intervene or call the police, who would in fact take it seriously enough to try to catch the miscreant.

One thing that has really stuck in my craw in the modern era are TSA agents stealing items from luggage. It was (is?) an epidemic, and I really can't see how you maintain trust in a system when the people tasked with enforcing the rules are the ones violating them flagrantly. And, oh dear, I have to note that A Majority of the Security Screeners are nonwhite.

One thing that has really stuck in my craw in the modern era are TSA agents stealing items from luggage.

In 1987, 40 Heathrow baggage handlers were arrested in a single week for stealing from checked bags. There were also major problems in France and Italy through the 70s and 80s with this, back when their handlers would have been mostly indigenous.

But change is important in an interesting way. Technological advancement papers over the cracks in a failing society. So gang violence and drug crime increase, but huge advancements in emergency medicine mean that the homicide rate still falls. Ubiquitous CCTV, plate detection and cellphone tracking slightly reduce residential burglaries, even though the neighborhood as a whole seems shadier and less welcoming. The numbers on paper look good, but everything feels worse.

Yep.

Technology fixes social problems which, I would argue, allows social 'rot' to spread underneath since now certain traits that were selected against on the population level are now still present but less noticed since we just use the tech solution (apply this logic to AI if you wish, lol).

When I first moved to my current area, 10 years ago, I was in the cheapest apartment I could find that still allowed pets. This was my first apartment after living in a College Town.

After years of no problems with Amazon deliveries, I started getting about half of my packages swiped off my stoop. I wondered for a bit if it was Amazon Delivery drivers being incompetent, but nope. I did the classic approach of filling a cardboard box with trash and leaving it out, and that, too got taken.

But a few months later, Amazon introduced An Amazon Locker at my local mall. So I could ship items there and pick them up at my leisure.

Problem solved! Except now it was a 15 minute round trip to pick up stuff, so I would have to schedule it around my other errands. The whole POINT of Amazon delivery is to NOT have to leave the house!!

And of course, I had to live with the knowledge that some of my neighbors were wanton thieves, which was the real issue. Can't leave my door or my car unlocked ever, knowing that. I did own a large dog at the time so I was relatively certain they'd not try to break into my unit.

(They've since added a locker at the convenience store w/in walking distance from that apartment. I have to assume they track package theft and use that as a basis for where they put the lockers).

Yes, I'm GLAD that technology solved a social problem... but it didn't actually solve the problem. Just routed around the symptom. I VASTLY prefer my current neighborhood, where not only can I leave Amazon packages sitting out for days, the Neighborhood facebook group will actively coordinate to find misdelivered packages and, if packages are going missing, immediately use the doorbell cameras to figure out if there's a thief about.

And we do that without using that classic bit of technology known as a gated community, so I can feel reasonably good that my neighbors are actually being neighborly.

One way to determine if a piece of tech is an 'unalloyed' good or if its just a hack borne of 'necessity' is whether people still choose to use it/pay for it when they genuinely don't have to do so. I never use Amazon lockers these days since the technology of bringing items to my doorstep in two days is the one I actually want.

One thing that has really stuck in my craw in the modern era are TSA agents stealing items from luggage. It was (is?) an epidemic, and I really can't see how you maintain trust in a system when the people tasked with enforcing the rules are the ones violating them flagrantly. And, oh dear, I have to note that A Majority of the Security Screeners are nonwhite.

Under Australian Common Law 'Stealing as a Servant' or 'Larceny as a Clerk' are their own particular crimes with harsher punishments, explicitly to combat the exploitation of a vulnerable situation. If people believe that cops, workers or other roles with access and authority are corrupt, then the entire system will grind to a halt.

As well it should.

Feels like there are numerous critical societal functions leaning on the reliable assumption "if I turn my property over to an agent of the state, I should expect that I will get it back later, if I have not broken any laws."

Alas.

Lack of izzat is a massive problem among westerners if you ask me. The level of disrespect they show towards not only other people but also other things means a lot of the time I'm interacting with (especially lower class) people I'm subconsiously thinking "didn't your parents teach you any better?". Same with how westerners send their own flesh and blood parents off to a care home when they start becoming too much of a burden on them. The lack of respect here is galling: your parents took care of you when you were nothing more than a little shit machine and this is how you repay them???

The kiwifarms post is a half truth (well actually more like a quarter truth), which makes it worse than a total lie. Some elements of it are correct, but others (like how you can rape and murder with impunity if you have enough izzat) are totally 100% false (rape and murder are the number 1 way you an destroy your whole extended family's izzat in a very short space of time for generations).

  • -16

The level of disrespect they show towards not only other people but also other things means a lot of the time I'm interacting with (especially lower class) people

As in their lack of immediate obsequious submission for the better person (for he has money for he gets to armwrestle in the zero-sum Finance fields, unlike those peasants)? I wouldn't consider Indian culture especially defined by inter-class respect, at least going downwards, but if the Western culture didn't have a peculiar glitch in which lower classes were afforded a minimum of respect and voice and given an opportunity it'd be hard to imagine modern immigration existing as it does.

I do agree with the parenting thing, but I'd argue a confluence of factors (Small family sizes, Westerners tend to be more mobile both for work and for Florida in their dotage, housing is brutally expensive, modern medicine allows for stupefyingly long armwrestles against mortality by people with massive care requirements) means that the equation's a bit different than in a more-settled setting where labor is absurdly cheap and families are large.

Lack of izzat is a massive problem among westerners if you ask me. The level of disrespect they show towards not only other people but also other things means a lot of the time I'm interacting with (especially lower class) people I'm subconsiously thinking "didn't your parents teach you any better?".

God in Heaven, the discourse is actually "oh rly? yur low class shitbags are scummy too, my low class shitbags aren't even that bad, lol".

I don't mean to pick on you BurdensomeCount. Many other posts in this thread are as bad or worse from the other direction. I'm not Indian (dot or feather), this thread is the first I've heard of this izzat concept. The gist I get is that it is an extremely broad and nebulous concept akin to prowess / craft / vigor / doing the needful. Indians being asked to comment on izzat as though their opinion means anything would be like me trying to provide an accurate, non-controversial definition of rizz.

To answer your rhetorical inner voice: no, of course their parents didn't teach them better, they are low class shitbags. Often their parents were also not taught better. Many such examples in every culture through every period of every time on every corner of this earth. Encountering a low class shitbag should produce zero units of Surprise. Low class shitbag is the human default, you should only be amazed that there exists anything better.

If I may now be part of the Problem, this entire line of inquiry is based around the lived experience of the individuals sharing their opinions. If I'm not mistaken, you are an Indian immigrant to the UK? It's possible that you are treated extra poorly across the spectrum, but especially by the low class shitbags, because many people in the UK sincerely believe that you - personally - are part of a serious problem straining their society. (If you began thinking of reasons they are wrong, please stop. You are only sabotaging yourself This is not a factual question. The actions of a human being are rooted in their beliefs, not something as abstract and fake as a "fact".)

I can only answer for my own experience and cultural milieu. Coming from a conservative part of the Southern United States, though born in the mid 80s and therefore only getting a watered down version by that time, I can tell you the expected response my culture would have for an individual encountering you in the context of your presence being part of a phenomenon widely believed to be harming my community's culture / prospects / lives / etc: to treat you poorly. That is what would be expected of someone raised correctly and making their parents proud.

Perhaps some of what you're encountering is good behavior within a society / context / culture / folkway of which you are not a member.

Edit: To clarify, I've heard my grandfather ask aloud your "but where were their parents?" question about people in his community who are kind and welcoming towards Yankees. The same behavior can be a signifier of low class, high class, or even completely class neutral contextually.

If I'm not mistaken, you are an Indian immigrant to the UK

Thats the greatest insult you could have given him, he's Pakistani

My apologies. That is a significant difference; unspeakable pains have been inflicted, huge numbers of human lives have been cut short based around those identities. It is a legitimate horror that such things occur.

The great news is that for the mindset I'm describing those differences are washed away. These people, assuming they were raised right, will not piss on the Pakistani or Indian immigrant alike to put them out if they were on fire and they'd make absolutely sure the immigrant in question knew it. There is no Us without a Them and the details of whatever makes one of them Them are only meaningful to better craft insults. To do otherwise is trashy.

The level of disrespect they show towards not only other people but also other things means a lot of the time I'm interacting with (especially lower class) people I'm subconsiously thinking "didn't your parents teach you any better?"

Can you give examples? What does lower classes disrespect so much?

Breaking ahead of me in queues, generally acting rude when asked simple clarification questions, asking me if I speak English (this has happened multiple times, I kid you not, from people whose command of the English language is worse than the level I had at age 9), taking my money (via taxes) and then acting like they're the generous ones for letting people like me live in the country (without a shred of self awareness) etc. etc.

Now I must say this doesn't happen all the time or even most of the time or even with much regularity in my interactions with the lower class. It happens in fewer than 5% of such encounters I'd say (and in reality probably fewer than 2%), but when you have to live around and amongst such people the total number of interactions gets very high very quickly so you get exposed to a fair amount of such low human capital behaviours.

  • -11

taking my money (via taxes) and then acting like they're the generous ones for letting people like me live in the country (without a shred of self awareness) etc. etc.

This may be the single most ironic sentence I've ever seen. Nearly every single member of this forum pays taxes, whether they are a native or foreign member of their country. You paying taxes is not a favour - it's table stakes.

I'm not paying teeny tiny taxes like most of these people, I'm paying (nearly) mid six figures in taxes every year. At the very least that should get me a medal or some sort of other thing that distinguishes me as above those who pay £3,000 in tax a year and consume £30,000 worth of public services.

You're getting that thing. It's called your salary, and since you're still there it's clearly enough.

Last time I checked your job was moving money from people who are bad with it to people who are good with it. Why ever would the former respect you or believe they owe you anything?

then acting like they're the generous ones for letting people like me live in the country (without a shred of self awareness)

It very much is a mark of charity and the culture that allows these lessers to address you as such without being summarily defenestrated that allows you to rise above due to the charity of your socioeconomic betters.

I'm reminded of one of Bryan Caplan's multi chapter reviews of the Malcolm X autobiography.

Malcolm never distinguishes between victimless crime (drugs, bootlegging, prostitution, gambling) and regular crime (burglary, robbery). For him, it’s all “hustling” – one person preying on another. Indeed, Malcolm appears to regard all for-profit business as “hustling.” While he’s clearly aware that mutually beneficial trade exists, the fact that trade is mutually beneficial isn’t morally significant for Malcolm. Purely charitable motives are the only ones he sees as admirable.

Basically this "hustle" culture seems equivalent to "Izzat". Caplan also goes on to point out how Malcolm has a lot of self destructive behaviors:

Still, Malcolm is well-aware of the importance of self-destructive behavior among the poor. Indeed, he’s a perfect example of the syndrome:

[A]ll the thousands of dollars I’d handled and I had nothing. Just satisfying my cocaine habit alone cost me about twenty dollars a day. I guess another five dollars a day could have been added for reefers and plain tobacco cigarettes…

Once he starts experimenting with Islam, Malcolm becomes puritanical – and predictably turns his life around. But he somehow manages to avoid the lesson that he was a major – if not the main – source of his own problems.

Imagine if Malcolm had stayed sober, stuck to victimless crime, and conservatively invested his money. He would quickly have surpassed the typical standard of living for contemporary whites. Yet the devil’s to blame for everything wrong in his life – and the devil is the white man

I think the idea of a sober Malcolm X sticking to victimless crime and conservatively investing his money is nonsensical. You are what you do. And Malcolm did petty crime so he also did all the petty criminal things. If you want to not do petty criminal things you need to not be a petty criminal. Malcolm instead became a religious leader and started doing all the religious leader things, which included a lot of righteousness and puritanical beliefs.

He sort of invented the role of black muslim religious leader. There was a great deal of flexibility in what he could have chosen for that role to become in society. It seems he made it more of an "anti-peti-criminal" role than anything else. Instead of no morals about anything, he had all the morals about everything. Instead of a life of debauchery and drugs, he chose a life of puritanism and sobriety.

Anyways, I think this "Izzat" culture is likely screwing itself over as well. Being a scammer would be a shitty life. Everything and everyone would feel fake all the time. You'd probably end up viewing all the victims of yours scams as pieces of crap that deserved it, and it would make you absolutely paranoid about being scammed yourself (so that you are not also a piece of crap that deserved to be scammed). You'll view many things that could be mutually beneficial exchanges as instead just scams waiting to happen.

If "Izzat" culture at all looks appealing its because they are running a scam on scammers. Probably recruiting for some sort of pyramid scheme. Think of it like a recruiting message for a company where the top salesman shows off his cool company car and brags about his company vacation. Meanwhile at that company most of the sales people joining are just doing cold calls and feeding that salesperson at the top promising leads, and then earning close to nothing on the commissions.

This happens a lot, where something that is basically a hyped up recruiting message gets translated by outside people as "this is how things really are". I remember a while back Stephen Colbert did some kind of expose on trailer park landlords and found this video about a guy bragging about how you could ruthlessly exploit trailer park renters. He claimed you could rent it out, immediately jack up the prices and they'd be screwed and have to pay cuz they'd have no where to move. The obvious thing that Colbert missed is that the guy saying this was selling trailers to trailer parks. The advertisement was trying to scam the scammers. Every point the guy made in the advertisement clashed with reality. The writers of the Colbert show didn't care though, they found this perfect little snippet of a guy being the most scumbag landlord you could imagine.

So yeah we need a category of things for "Advertisements between scammers getting mistaken for reality", and then we can hopefully avoid making this mistake again and again.

If "Izzat" culture at all looks appealing its because they are running a scam on scammers. Probably recruiting for some sort of pyramid scheme. Think of it like a recruiting message for a company where the top salesman shows off his cool company car and brags about his company vacation. Meanwhile at that company most of the sales people joining are just doing cold calls and feeding that salesperson at the top promising leads, and then earning close to nothing on the commissions.

Reminds me of multi-level marketing. In another (quokkaest) life I joined Amway and wasted a lot of time helping someone else make money.

I've had a similar idea to this post floating around in my head for a few months now - just observing bits of the phenomenon without having a word for it. I think China has a pretty similar version, or at least, that's what shows up in their translated fiction.

Perhaps the common cause is a long standing, fully settled culture. If there's no "frontier", if there's no concept of "making money" in a Randian sense of creating wealth by the alchemy of effort and ingenuity, then wouldn't a fiercely zero-sum culture make perfect sense? If the only way to benefit is for someone else to lose, then wouldn't that explain a culture of scammers? The way visiting vtubers talk about sliding into a hatefully defensive mindset in a week because every cabbie and street vendor "accidentally" adds an extra digit to the charge? Or the prank videos where someone records "finding" a bill on the floor of an Indian-owned shop, and the counter-minder immediately goes all on on a bluff check, insisting that they money was theirs and they dropped it and "If you are a good person, you'll give it to me."

What would happen after a hundred generations of that?

And getting caught up on the murder rate thing is an error. China doesn't have a high murder rate for the sake of face... but when it came to it, the CCP let millions of people starve so they could pretend to the world that everything was going great. Doesn't India have a history of mass famines? How many of them were made worse by aristocrats refusing to acknowledge the problem because it would lose them points in intra-elite status games?

What would happen after a hundred generations of that?

One of the things I see people talk about regarding India is this superposition of hateful gloating blended with crying supplication, like code switching back and forth to whichever seems most advantageous.

Ironically, I see the same thing in black thug culture. A guy will act like the toughest motherfucker in the world... until he gets pinched. Then he flips a switch and turns into a crybaby bitch, begging for a mercy he never showed anyone else. Seems kinda dishonorable for an "honor culture", but maybe that's just an optimization for a matriarchal/matrilinear subculture. If there's no name to pass down to your sons, why not trade that honor/face for a shot at an undeserved mercy? Or at least a police brutality payout?

That's another culture that openly celebrates "hustlers". Have you ever been hustled? I have, in my quokka days. It took more than a half dozen times, feeling like a fool for offering help and charity, before I internalized the rule "If a black guy asks you for help that even touches on the concept of money, he is a piece of shit scammer. Fuck him, fuck his "sick" mother and fuck his whole sick culture."

I think China has a pretty similar version, or at least, that's what shows up in their translated fiction.

As a Chinese, I think this isn't true at all. China has toyed with the idea of meritocacy since ancient times, and despite the fact that communism was a stain on its history, it was reversed quickly. To the extent that blood feuds exist, which isn't that much, they must be repaid in blood and aren't some silly status game about humiliation.

Chinese will certainly lie, cheat, and steal, but not more than people from any other western country. Meanwhile Indian scam farms celebrate and party every time they ruin someone's life, and they love it.

What about Chinese scam farms (1 2)?

Every society has some evil people, but it's telling that nigeria is synonymous with advance fee scams, india is synonymous with tech support scams, and china is synonymous with ... abducting people to work at the scam center because nobody wants to do it.

Meanwhile millions or even billions of indians would jump at the opportunity to work on a scam center.

I have fewer interactions with China outside of, as I said, the fiction, which likely plays up certain elements for drama. But the zero sum thinking comes up often, in a way that makes it feel like I'm listening to a fish talk about life, and just inferring the presence of water. In my impression, the Chinese are less "scumbag war of all against all" compared to India, but there's a consistent notion that your gain is someone else's loss - and your loss, someone else's gain. I've seen a few different sources suggest that wisdom is accepting that during your life, you'll be on both sides of the situation and that wickedness is going too far in the war of all against all.

Doesn't India have a history of mass famines?

Not since the end of the Raj.

In significant part because the end of the Raj split off famine-prone Bangladesh (the main site of the Bengal famine in 1943) into a separate country.

Bangladesh continued to have serious famines long after independence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_famine_of_1974

The postwar advent of intensive agriculture and chemical fertiliser presumably also helped.

but when it came to it, the CCP let millions of people starve so they could pretend to the world that everything was going great.

...I would like to think that I am not inclined to take a rosy view of the crimes of communist regimes, but I generally adhered to the narrative that the CCP "let millions of people starve" until a recent conversation here resulted in another commenter quoting details. Paraphrasing: "Mr So-and-so and his wife were accused of hoarding. Their fellow villagers beat them to death. Their children were turned out and denied food and shelter by the rest of the community until they starvced to death", repeated over and over again, leaving the distinct impression that this fate was routine for unfortunates in the period in question. In my view, that's pretty clearly murder.

One of the things I see people talk about regarding India is this superposition of hateful gloating blended with crying supplication, like code switching back and forth to whichever seems most advantageous.

There's an assumption that those that are bullied, being the weaker party, are somehow better or more honourable people. This is not necessarily the case. There are those that as soon as you take the boot off of their necks out of pity will betray you as soon as they are able (think Gollum from Lord of the Rings).

I've seen this concept in many other circumstances. Palestine for instance (at least from my perspective). China after the Opium Wars and gunboat diplomacy seems to be another where they act like a bullied child that has finally grown up and joined the cops to exploit authority over others.

There are those that are unfairly bullied. I know what that feels like. There are some that are fairly bullied (as individuals). You can't collective guilt an entire culture, but there are certainly those among them that deserve to be called out for bad behaviour. The real problem is sorting the wheat from the chaff.

I continually wonder how anywhere developed a high trust society in the first place. All I see, everywhere around me, is low trust behavior destroying all the traditions and institutions that made high trust Europe great. I can scarcely imagine how the opposite process could have ever occurred. I'm not aware of anywhere else in the world it even exists. I'm not aware of any other historical cultures one would describe as "high trust". Which is not to say there aren't any, I am just literally professing my ignorance. The existence of high trust societies has become something of a mystery to me, in light of everything I see around me.

It's increasingly difficult for me to even lay out in objective terms what I would define as a "high trust" society. Maybe a measure of how much state capacity bleeds off to corruption? Maybe the likelihood that any good or service you try to procure isn't fraudulent? The chance that any given person you meet isn't lying about who they are and what their capabilities are? An understanding of natural rights that are pro-social? Like respect for private or public property, or other people's time and effort.

But maybe that's a result of having grown up in a post-Demoralized society. You read about the billions of dollars of welfare fraud the Somali community has been doing in plain sight, and Tim Walz's administrations utter spinelessness and/or complicitness in it, and it's hard to see anything other than a civilization that has decided stopping crime is too mean. That taking any measures, no matter how one inarguably just, to secure it's continued existence, is just too cruel.

I continually wonder how anywhere developed a high trust society in the first place.

Perhaps by centuries of punishing even the most minor offenses by death?

I'm not aware of anywhere else in the world it even exists.

Japan comes to mind, but I'm no expert.

You know, I probably should have thought of Japan. Especially with how much right wing twitter is idolizing them these days.

According to that article, relatively few people were actually sentenced to death under the Bloody Code.

They were instead sentenced to a fate worse than death. To whit, Australia.

It seems the Bloody Code was only the tail end of it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13rojx5/henry_viii_executed_nearly_70k_people_maybe_more/

perhaps 0.02% of the English population suffered death by execution in the average year of Henry [VIII]'s reign

Compare with modern-day Oklahoma, which tops the US rankings with 3.101 executions / 100,000 / 48 years, roughly 1/300 of Henry VIII's score.

I don't know how this compares to other parts of the world around the same time, but the other aspect of this is that executions will only bring about an improvement in social trust if they're administered in a somewhat "orderly" fashion, as punishments for crimes of which the accused is more-likely-than-not to be guilty. (A comparable death rate brought about by indiscriminate mass killing will not have the same effect.) In England I'd guess the legal execution regime prevailed at least 600-700 years, starting from the time of Henry II if not earlier.

Oh, sorry, I agree with your broader point. You see the same with the very stern rule of the samurai in Japan. I just wanted to make a joke about poor old Australia.

I've often speculated that the frontier served a similar purpose for the US, actually, functioning as a place where you could send those who struggled to fit in or behave, or where they would remove themselves. A sort of capital punishment where nobody has to lose their capita if you will.

But then on the flip side you have Russia, again, where the frontier was where they sent malefactors for centuries, and things got worse.

And, you know, the US’s cartoonishly high violent crime rates.

Remove a handful of dangerous cities and the US doesn't have high violent crime rates. Half our murders are in two counties.

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This seems likely to be the largest effect.

Social selection effects 'alone' seem insufficient. Gotta actually remove/filter the least cooperative/most dangerous defectors out of the gene pool for a few generations, allowing the cooperators to proliferate.

The other factor is probably there being even higher-trust subpopulations that were either allowed to live in isolation, or those subpopulations leave to a new land and form a society where everyone is extremely high trust (and defectors get burned to death or killed off by the elements). Then norms these cultures produce probably rubbed off on others they came into contact with.

Butttt if we're going with long-term evolutionary explanations, I'm a fan of the idea that long, harsh winters tend to produce human populations that are good at long term thinking and directly linked to that, cooperation in iterated games. "If we start fighting over food supply now, all it will achieve is everyone dies when winter arrives."

Then of course winter itself forcing people to live in close proximity and anyone who was intolerable to be around would likely be kicked out of the house and would more than likely die.

A good test for this would be to see if current Inuit cultures seem to have similar 'high trust' norms.

Japan

I recently was reminded of the series they have over there where literal toddlers are sent on errands that require them to operate very independently and overcome some basic obstacles, and navigate the risks of the local environment.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=z5GB-uiX4f4?si=7rg1ZGv38B4Ue86c

And nobody finds this odd, every single person does their best to assist without overly coddling the kid, and generally you get the sense the entire social structure of this community is designed for the safety of their children.

That's the dream, imho.

Butttt if we're going with long-term evolutionary explanations, I'm a fan of the idea that long, harsh winters tend to produce human populations that are good at long term thinking and directly linked to that, cooperation in iterated games. "If we start fighting over food supply now, all it will achieve is everyone dies when winter arrives."

But this theory has to contend with Russia, which has been low-trust (by European standards, anyway) for long before Communism.

I'm actually unfamiliar with the criminal justice practices of Tsarist Russia, was the death penalty meted out with regularity?

The thing to remember about Slavs is that they were (as the name would imply) slaves. They were in the borderland between the Mongols, the Muslims, the Germanics, and the Vikings, and constantly getting rolled and subjugated by all four. As you can see from other ethnic groups that were slaves for generations, it does not make you high trust. It makes you servile in the face of brutality, cruel when you have power, distrustful, melancholic, and constantly scheming for any advantage.

Was pre-Communist Russia particularly low trust? It was certainly highy authoritarian and absolutist, but I don't think that's the same thing as low-trust. Even the relative destitution of the Russian people isn't really indicative of low trust and I would say more to do with Russia's lack of industralisation and entrenched serfdom. But previously other European countries had entrenched serfdom and were high trust (e.g. medieval France)

My only cultural touchstone is Crime and Punishment, which does imply a certain level of high trust in Russian society at the time. Indeed, one of Dostoevsky's main points with his writing is that these new modernist (and ultimately proto-Communist) ideas becoming popular at the time destroys morality and society.

I think it was, at least compared to western europe or east asia. I lived in Russia in the early '90s, and it was extremely low trust as a society. Everything is accomplished through bribery, nepotism and blackmail, nothing through official venues. The people don't trust the government or each other, the government doesn't trust the people or itself.

There are various Russian theories about this, but the most popular I recall was that Russian society evolved under extremely harsh foreign domination, the Mongols, Golden Horde, Polish-Lithuanians etc. and their own homegrown psychopaths. Russian elite society is incredibly low-trust and untrustworthy, moreso than the rest, hence the regular purges that have marked all of Russian political history.

Recall the tale of the murder of Rasputin, and if it sounds crazy, realize that the Russian nobility did shit like that constantly.

A good test for this would be to see if current Inuit cultures seem to have similar 'high trust' norms.

Inuit cultures might not be a useful example, though they don't invalidate your guess either. They didn't grow crops, so the whole food supply thing didn't apply as much. Their survival is an amazing adaptation of opportunistic hunter-gatherer lifestyles to an extreme environment, but they could not sustain a large, growing civilization as we understand it that way. As for current, their population are still low, and any anthropoclimatologic (I'm proud I've actually legit used this word now) study of them, at least here in Quebec, is hopelessly tainted by their interaction with europeans and their descendants.

A good test for this would be to see if current Inuit cultures seem to have similar 'high trust' norms.

The Inuit have had some weird trust building exercises, but today, their culture is dominated by severe alcoholism, and there are probably as many living in slums in the cities of their ancestral lands receiving welfare as there are in the ancestral environment.

"We have agreed to abide by these terms. If you do not, I will kill you." "Excellent. We have agreed to abide by these terms. If you do not, I will kill you." "Good."

Carry this forward a number of centuries, where your word is your bond(or you die), and, well...

High trust is fairly natural when people live in the same place for many years or even multiple generations, and when the population density is low enough that people can keep track of one another and remember their actions. Also when you have concepts like "honor", and everyone has lots of children resulting in large families. If you think back to the past, it makes sense. Even if you could get rich by scamming those around you, the results wouldn't be good.

Things looks different now. We're still tearing down Chesterton's fences today and calling it "progress", while claiming that the remaining fences are what's causing all the problems we're seeing, and I'm afraid we'll keep doing this until we live in a dystopian world, and that the vast majority still won't be able to wrap their head around what went wrong.

I'd call high-trust "Good faith" or "Investing into ones local environment, rather than exploiting ones local environment", a sort of presumption of alignment. Psychology plays a role too, when people treat me as if I'm a kind person, that makes me want to be more kind. Which reminds me, everything is probably made worse by modern media

I’m beating around the bush, but I’m pretty much talking about scam culture, being the winner, getting one up on the people that are outsiders to ‘my group’, and getting status points for exploiting my outgroup.

I’d like to reiterate that this isn’t an Indian only issue, but it’s a culture clash between high and low trust cultures and is worthy of discussion.

I know that this is one of a half-Native Alaskan friend of mine's biggest complaints about his fully-Native cousins. He's a devout Christian who believes strongly in the Golden Rule, while they make no effort to hide the ways they exploit the system, based in solidly tribalist views of ethics.

The original Kiwi Farms poster has written a follow-up where he gives some of his sources. Few of these sources seem specific to India, however.

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/the-india-menace.174997/page-1310#post-23093622

https://archive.is/q56Hs

Last week's discussion of a $100k salary in 1959 versus 2025 got me thinking about an age-old question: Of the money we earn and purchases we make, how much is devoted to improving the way we relate to other people (e.g. to enhance our social status, to buy exclusive experiences, etc.)? Or to put the question another way, how much money do I spend on things which, if they were affordable to everyone, would be kinda pointless?

So for example, as a fairly wealthy person, I paid a lot for a house in a "nice neighborhood," which in practice means a neighborhood that is sufficiently expensive so as to exclude poor people.

I think that the prospect of an AI revolution makes this issue especially salient. If everyone has the time and money to visit some beautiful beach on a tropical island paradise, how pleasant will that beach end up being? If everyone can afford a Bugati Veron, what will the rich do to show off?

I see this as a culture war issue because my sense is that people on the Left tend to be dismissive of this problem. For example, they seem to think it would be a great idea if public policy opened the doors of "good schools" to the "disadvantaged." Or if everyone went to college.

Perhaps a better example is the numerous YouTube videos I have seen of the "urbanist" genre. Which basically slam car-oriented suburbs and push for policies promoting walkable neighborhoods. They seem to ignore the point that the inconvenience of suburban living is not a bug but rather a feature. That kinda the point is to keep out, well, riff-raff for lack of a better word.

In a hypothetical future age of abundance, how much better can things really be?

If everyone has the time and money to visit some beautiful beach on a tropical island paradise, how pleasant will that beach end up being?

A post-scarcity world will make life wildly better for those actually affected by scarcity. Yeah, it'll be harder for the currently wealthy to exclude people, but whether you consider that a worthwhile sacrifice so that almost no one has to die of hunger or exposure is up to you.

If everyone can afford a Bugati Veron, what will the rich do to show off?

If money and economic productivity becomes a non-factor, prestige can always shift to how we spend our last limited resource (time). We still find things instinctually impressive even when they aren't productive: running marathons, bench pressing big numbers, speaking 12 languages, just being a charming/interesting conversationalist, etc.

In America today it is already the case that basically no one has to die of hunger or scarcity. But there are still fent zombies, crazy people, and wildly anti-social cohorts which one might want to keep away from ones home.

A post-scarcity world will make life wildly better for those actually affected by scarcity. Yeah, it'll be harder for the currently wealthy to exclude people, but whether you consider that a worthwhile sacrifice so that almost no one has to die of hunger or exposure is up to you.

Isn't most of the West essentially there already? By the time you're dying of hunger or exposure in the vast majority of cases in the Affluent West it's probably down to your own choices and anti-sociability than because anybody is explicitly depriving you of food and shelter simply due to you existing.

I suppose I may have misused "scarcity" in this context, but we are at least resource-limited and someone has to work and pay to feed, clothe, and house people. For most, there's a decent activation barrier to taking money out of their own retirement funds to do so for others versus almost none for letting the AI-robot army take care of it all.

I mean, you don’t have to delve into the tribes being dismissive of the problem to understand the differences- measured by consumption, Mississippi is far richer than NYC. Measured any other way, lol no it isn’t.

This shapes a lot of attitudes on the question- from teacher pay to the rise of ‘socialism’(these people aren’t Marxists, they just want free shit- because they insist on lifestyles that are unaffordable if it isn’t free. Literally, NYC/San Fran apartments have a high percentage that are subsidized, but if it isn’t subsidized it’s a huge stretch even for the high incomes in these places) to ongoing tribal divergence(I wonder how much of the blue tribe hatred of red is just that we don’t care about how much their trendy apartments cost to rent- they should accept less desirable neighborhoods/avocado toast/international travel).

Suburbs are sometimes exclusivist, but theres also plenty of suburbs that are affordable to the lower working class- I live in one. They’re simply a practical solution to ‘everyone gets a single family home with a yard’ in a rich country where you have to be quite poor not to have a car. Most of my neighbors, if offered the choice, would not move to a walkable safe neighborhood, because they want a single family home with a yard.

Suburbs are sometimes exclusivist, but theres also plenty of suburbs that are affordable to the lower working class- I live in one. They’re simply a practical solution to ‘everyone gets a single family home with a yard’ in a rich country where you have to be quite poor not to have a car. Most of my neighbors, if offered the choice, would not move to a walkable safe neighborhood, because they want a single family home with a yard.

In blue states, though, you can't build new suburbs of single-family homes, because the anti-growth mindset has won. For instance, there's lots of space in Western Maryland to build such things, but the Maryland Master Plan says no, that's gotta be preserved. This has been a sore point for people living in those counties who DO want the growth for well over a decade. Blue Tribe has been causing the housing price increases itself.

In blue states, though, you can't build new suburbs of single-family homes

You can't build new urban places either - the City that Builds in 2025 is Austin, TX. The dynamic isn't urbanists vs suburbanites, it's builders vs blockers. And it is, unusually, Red State (builder) vs Blue State (blocker) political culture, not Red Tribe vs Blue Tribe. Republicans in Blue States are some of the worst blockers. As far as I can see, Blue Tribers in Austin are making sure the new building happens in a Blue way, not trying to block it.

Republicans in Blue States are some of the worst blockers.

This is because in Blue States, the choices are between pods and nothing. In particular, the state government wants to build multi-family low-income housing in Republican-leaning areas of blue states in order to turn those areas Democratic-leaning. No need to gerrymander if you can move the population.

In particular, the state government wants to build multi-family low-income housing in Republican-leaning areas of blue states in order to turn those areas Democratic-leaning. No need to gerrymander if you can move the population.

As someone in the business of financing the building of multi-family low income housing, when people try to build multi-family low income housing in places that happen to be red the goal is to make money, it is not to, in a 7 degree round about way, do gerrymandering. There are much much easier ways to go about gerrymandering than carefully leaning on the state HUD to favorably grant tax credits to developer proposals that might move a couple hundred residents into one district that may or may not vote blue. Keep in mind a lot of these low income housing units are earmarked preferentially for like veterans and LIHTC recipients are much less likely to vote than the average person. The hud doesn't really even control who gets housing directly even if it was behaving nakedly partisanly. Thinking these are vehicles for gerrymandering is like thinking stock traders spend a lot of their time and effort trading in such a way that left leaning companies fail irrespective of their earning's report.

In fact, far outpacing the gerrymandering interest is the Community Reinvestment Act requirements on banks, who are the largest funders of LIHTC. Banks are required to invest in the communities where they operate or face increased scrutiny. The Low income housing tax credit offers an attractive and stable way to satisfy this requirement. Plop down LIHTC projects in the red areas where you have branches and you've satisfied your obligations in a way that offers a generous and steady return.

The developers don't care about the balance of power; the politicians who set up the incentives so you can build (or make more money on) low-income multi family housing but can't build (or will make less money on) market-priced single family housing absolutely do. The developers just follow the incentives.

Your claim was that these developments were a plot to turn red areas more blue. This is simply not true. They are primarily built in blue areas and in red areas even if allowed they are subject to all the restrictions and in fact more restrictions than market rate housing. The red areas resist both. They resist density whole sale. Which is the original topic, red areas are NIMBY, they refuse to allow housing that land owners, developers and perspective tenants all agree on building. That's it, that's the whole story. You defending blocking, you defend people in red areas nosing into other people's property rights and telling them what they can and cannot build on their own land.

If everyone can afford a Bugati Veron, what will the rich do to show off?

The same thing they currently do to show off within the same income bracket - invent taste and have more of it than others.

In many ways, this is already the case with supercars. The truly wealthy mostly don't bother with them because they mostly kind of suck to drive outside of track conditions and are super tacky. To the extent they bother driving at all, they drive Mercedes S-Classes and Porche Cayennes and top-trim Toyotas just like the upper-middle class, because they're comfy and dignified. Bugattis are for rappers, saudis, and idiots chasing clout via debt. They're, if anything, an anti-indicator of wealth and status.

If everyone has the time and money to visit some beautiful beach on a tropical island paradise, how pleasant will that beach end up being? If everyone can afford a Bugati Veron, what will the rich do to show off?

I think there's two separate questions here. There's things rich people do because they're genuinely pleasant, but which overcrowding would ruin; and there's things rich people do purely as a status symbol because few people can afford them. I think the world genuinely gets better if no one is buying gratuitously expensive brands anymore, and people instead focus on buying clothes, accessories, etc. that they actually like for their own sake. Whereas it would genuinely be a shame if vacation spots became so popular that there was no way to enjoy mostly-empty nature anymore.

They seem to ignore the point that the inconvenience of suburban living is not a bug but rather a feature. That kinda the point is to keep out, well, riff-raff for lack of a better word.

Plenty of urban environments do this as well. To the extent American cities aren't doing this is a *choice*.

There are plenty of other reasons to prefer urban, suburban or rural living but keeping away the riffraff isn't an inherent issue for any of them. Just like many of the "urbanist" complaints about soulless suburbs aren't inherent problems with suburbs just things that are most notable in some American suburbs.

In a hypothetical future age of abundance, how much better can things really be?

I was just this weekend reflecting on the extent to which we already live in this future. Specifically, I was purchasing over-the-counter medicine for a family member's lingering cough, and thinking about the mass produced medicinal miracles of modern chemistry. With the cost of open-market health insurance premiums set to rise next year, there is a lot of public discourse on the state of modern medicine (and how it gets funded). But for the vast, overwhelming majority of health concerns we have today, we live in an age of remarkable abundance and shocking affordability. Furthermore, we live in an age where there is very little difference in the treatments and medicines available to the rich versus the poor.

Now, don't misunderstand--I am absolutely aware of the eye-watering costs of some treatments, particularly experimental or end-of-life treatments, and the relatively better care available to people with money. But the kind of care that costs serious "rich person" cash is also the kind of care very few people would benefit from receiving. The vast majority of medical maladies you will face in your life are treatable by a nurse practitioner with medicine you can buy for less than an hour's wages, and a billionaire in your place would receive the very same prescription at the very same price.

Furthermore, though not everyone benefits in the same way or at the same level, most Americans do have some kind of health insurance that genuinely protects them from bankruptcy while providing them with treatments they could otherwise not possibly afford. Countries with socialized health care are arguably more efficient in how they structure the financing of all this, but either way the risk pooling that modern industrialized nations do with health care costs seems to work pretty well to everyone's absolute benefit, despite the persistence of individual disparities in particular cases.

Your mention of "if everyone went to college" is particularly noteworthy given that anyone who genuinely wants to learn something, today, is far better situated to make that happen than they would have been even twenty years ago. The existence of online college and satellite internet means you never even have to leave your house to get an education, often of a quality much higher than you could get at a top tier university a century ago. We have more knowledge, we disseminate it more smoothly, the costs are minimal and almost always subsidized. I have more books stored in my cell phone than I could physically fit in my house and office--combined. Someone with a loose attitude toward copyright infringement could very easily download several PhD's worth of knowledge for actual pennies (or, at their local library, possibly gratis).

Of course, credentials are a different story, but that's evidence of a society with so much abundance that it actively works to rate limit expertise. America's physician shortage (which is much less than the physician shortage in many other places) is driven in substantial measure by the profession's reluctance to increase the availability of training. This has resulted in a proliferation of paraprofessionals (who often think they are professionals)--but I digress. The point is that we have so much abundance, actually, many of our current sociocultural systems are kind of choking on it.

I sometimes wonder if this is why we are seeing a rise in political movements that, on my view, promise to function by ending abundance. On my view, trade is the lifeblood of prosperity; interfering with trade reduces abundance. On my view, free discourse generates a bounty of ideas; restricting discourse reduces abundance. Asceticism is often a kind of allergic reaction to abundance. Probably someone reading this comment is thinking of Universe 25 and wondering how it relates! Yes: possibly we are poorly evolved to thrive in an environment of abundance.

But I feel like the alternative is strictly worse. Better to wrangle with (and perhaps evolve beyond) our pyschological hangups in an environment of peace and plenty, I think, than to RETVRN to 50% infant mortality rates on grounds that this better reflects the ancestral environment. To answer the question directly, I think things could still get better in a variety of cool ways (I would like to live much, much longer then 100 years, for example!) but I do think we already live in an age of remarkable abundance, for which many, maybe most people are shamefully ungrateful, because they insist on thinking about wealth comparatively rather than in absolute terms.

think that the prospect of an AI revolution makes this issue especially salient. If everyone has the time and money to visit some beautiful beach on a tropical island paradise, how pleasant will that beach end up being? If everyone can afford a Bugati Veron, what will the rich do to show off?

Outside of the other residents of the neighborhood, and barring large scale terraforming/geoengineering/landscaping, quality real estate remains scarce even with fully automated extraction and production of material goods. By that, I mean quality of the plot of land, beauty of the views from the plot of land, climate, likelihood of natural disasters, distance from other desirable land (beaches, forests, etc...).

By that, I mean quality of the plot of land, beauty of the views from the plot of land, climate, likelihood of natural disasters, distance from other desirable land (beaches, forests, etc...).

Yeah, similar thoughts had occurred to me. For what it may be worth, in my singularity investment portfolio I hold some real estate in areas that a currently thought of as desirable. Of course who knows if that will change.

In a hypothetical future age of abundance, how much better can things really be?

I can imagine claiming some largeish planetoid in the asteroid belt and converting it over to suitability for human habitation, and have a couple Aldrin Cyclers that can drop off and pick up visitors.

Fuck a house in a nice neighborhood, I want my nearest neighbor to be 400,000 km away.

That's what I'D do with an AI-induced boon.

Buying comfortable solitude might be the next frontier in that sense, There's only so many private islands out there, although we can certainly build more.

Fuck a house in a nice neighborhood, I want my nearest neighbor to be 400,000 km away.

Yeah, similar thoughts had occurred to me. The Solar System is a very big place; the Milky Way Galaxy is crazy big.

There have been plenty of times in human history/pre-history in which groups of people were so far apart that they might as well not exist relative to each other. It's a bit disturbing to think that people might set up independent societies which are a great deal worse than North Korea, but the possibility of central control is in many ways more disturbing.

It's a bit disturbing to think that people might set up independent societies which are a great deal worse than North Korea, but the possibility of central control is in many ways more disturbing.

Scott Alexander wrote something about this tension.... (TL;DR version: limited central government enforcing very robust exit rights.)

Scott Alexander wrote something about this tension.... (TL;DR version: limited central government enforcing very robust exit rights.)

Please, please link to the original version of "Archipelago", not to the (horrible) revised edition.

Can you spoonfeed us on in how far the revisions made it horrible?

It would almost be easier to list examples of the things Scott didn't change in "Archipelago":

Archipelago diff:

Oh holy shit. All sorts of changes.

  • Nuked sections I and II
  • Purging lots of "left"/"liberal" in section III->I, either removing the references entirely or changing to "modern"/"individualist"
  • Removed worldbuilding in V->III, removed or reworded all references to "World Government" with "united government / UniGov"
  • Section VI->IV, removed this section entirely:

This is pretty funny, because the idea I’m pushing is rather explicitly reactionary. Like, I think it would be fair to call this the single core idea of reaction. All that stuff about kings and gender roles and ethno-nationalism is to some degree idle speculation about what kind of Archipelagian community would end up most successful, in the same way transhumanists sometimes speculate about how things should be run after the Singularity.

Yet I think its liberal credentials are impeccable.

Yeah, a purge of the neoreactionary stuff.

He claims to have done it because the piece got popular and he was embarrassed that so many people were reading about his conworlding, but replacing the rich mythology of Micras and Pelagia with literally "a wizard did it" still robbed the piece of much of its pathos and gravitas, and deleting all mentions of Mencius Moldbug and Patchwork was an act of cowardice unbecoming of a scholar.

"Archipelago" diff check.

If everyone has the time and money to visit some beautiful beach on a tropical island paradise, how pleasant will that beach end up being?

The nice neighborhood isn’t just pleasant because the people there are rich, it’s pleasant because pleasant, low time preference, civilized people who have something to lose and adhere to social decorum are more likely to be rich. This is the “bail reform” debate, it turns out that no matter how unfair cash bail seems, people who can afford to raise $10,000 overnight are, broadly speaking, more likely not to commit crimes on bail than those who can’t.

Whenever I go to a restaurant where (rich, high earning, often at least moderately intelligent) clientele are dressed like disgusting slobs, which is almost all of them, the reason for their slovenliness is because of a decline in standards. It’s the same reason Elon Musk wore a t shirt to the Oval Office. These standards don’t depend on a high trust society, they depend on strict enforcement. The permissive society began before mass immigration. In America, 120 years ago, the predominantly white and black population dressed consistently in formal clothes when they went outside (outside of work hours, when they wore workwear, if blue collar) , they dressed up for church etc. You can see this in mundane street photography from the era.

You can actually enforce this stuff, too. You can make people dress well or have them harassed by the police. You can ruin people’s lives for leaving trash outside. You can have people whipped for chewing gum. You can take people’s children away from them if they’re bad at raising them (including bad at disciplining them). This is all possible and people have done it before.

Whenever I go to a restaurant where (rich, high earning, often at least moderately intelligent) clientele are dressed like disgusting slobs, which is almost all of them, the reason for their slovenliness is because of a decline in standards. It’s the same reason Elon Musk wore a t shirt to the Oval Office.

You ought to look up "countersignaling", which is what they are doing.

No, that’s a bien-pensant take, but there are plenty of ways to countersignal the middle classes (who dress just as badly today) without doing that. Sweatpants are just more comfortable, and a more broadly permissive society standards just declined, that’s why it just so happened to happen at the same time as more permissive divorce, the sexual revolution, declining religiosity etc.

Whenever I go to a restaurant where (rich, high earning, often at least moderately intelligent) clientele are dressed like disgusting slobs, which is almost all of them, the reason for their slovenliness is because of a decline in standards.

That may have been true a quarter or half century ago. Today, it's more of a counter-signaling thing. It's the exact same mechanism -- dressing like crap while sitting courtside is an impossible-to-forge signal of status.

OTOH, I do strongly agree we can go back in on broken windows for antisocial offenses. But hassling people for wearing sweats isn't coming back.

Dressing like a slob is universal though, there isn’t some mythic respectable well-dressed middle class these people are countersignalling the way there might still have been (to an extent) 50 years ago.

The nice neighborhood isn’t just pleasant because the people there are rich, it’s pleasant because pleasant, low time preference, civilized people who have something to lose and adhere to social decorum are more likely to be rich.

To an extent I agree, but I think it's more useful to think about it in terms of who is being excluded than who is present.

Whenever I go to a restaurant where (rich, high earning, often at least moderately intelligent) clientele are dressed like disgusting slobs, which is almost all of them, the reason for their slovenliness is because of a decline in standards. It’s the same reason Elon Musk wore a t shirt to the Oval Office.

I actually kind of disagree with this. For one thing, I think that in large part it's due to the decline of payment by check and the ubiquity of reliable credit reporting and credit cards. It used to be that when people went out to engage in some transaction, the merchant was often taking a real risk on them. I still remember the days when you would walk into a store and it would be common to see a series of bounced checks taped to the wall. Dressing respectably is a (imperfect) way of signalling that you are a respectable person. Nowadays, a valid credit card / good credit score is more effective.

Another factor is counter-signalling. Guys like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg wear t-shirts as a way of saying "I'm such a big deal that I don't have to wear a suit and tie to impress people."

If everyone has the time and money to visit some beautiful beach on a tropical island paradise, how pleasant will that beach end up being? If everyone can afford a Bugati Veron, what will the rich do to show off?

Those are different examples! The experience of a beautiful beach with lots of colorful fish isn't a status good. It's a good-in-itself-good.

And maybe if you love racing your supercar, it could likewise be. But if you're showing it off for clout, it's now a different class of good.

Those are different examples! The experience of a beautiful beach with lots of colorful fish isn't a status good. It's a good-in-itself-good.

To a large extent, I agree. But I think that they are the same (or similar) in the sense that if there is broad access, the good becomes worthless or close to it.

If everyone can afford a Bugati Veron, what will the rich do to show off?

They seem to be doing just fine with "new ways to be obnoxious", though I suppose the people here aren't rich, they're just well-heeled enough to afford the likes of this bragging:

Res Ipsa was founded by two Aspen-based lawyers who couldn’t find the kind of ties they wanted to wear to work and decided to make their own. They now sell all manner of clothing in locations from my local on Larchmont, in Los Angeles, to Bill Cohan’s Nantucket. And the absolute best thing they sell are the Kilim loafers, suit-and-jean-appropriate shoes made by hand at Res Ipsa’s Marrakesh atelier using vintage kilim rugs. No two pairs are the same, so consider your first pair a gateway drug. I already have two, and will be gifting Jon Kelly his very own pair this Christmas.

What are you doing, if you don't have your very own pair (at least) of lawyer-designed loafers hand-made in Morocco out of vintage native rugs? Things like this make me yearn for the sound of the tumbrils rattling over the cobblestones. (I have no idea how I'm subscribed to this magazine. I'm certainly not its target audience reader).

The very rich will always find some way to be snootier than thou.

I recently watched In the Mood for Love and was reminded of how influential Wong Kar-wai’s 2000 unrequited love story has been on the way we dress, decorate our interiors, etcetera.

'Fess up, Mottizens: how many of you have been taking your interior design cues from Wong Kar-wai, you cinéastes, you? 😁

And they're practically giving this away at only $375:

Forever nostalgic for the sophisticated style of yesteryear, I have decided to integrate the long-lost art of headwear into my wardrobe. At the top of my holiday wishlist, to help me fulfill this goal, is an Après Beanie. Mains de Vapeur uses traditional millinery techniques, handcrafting each hat in their New York City atelier.

Looking for a Christmas gift for that important man in your life who just desperately needs the right kind of briefcase? Look no further!

Designed by Melissa Morris, these briefs are incredibly practical and high-quality. My husband has been on a decades-long quest for a slim briefcase, and this might be the one to end his search.

$3,650 at Métier

I mean, if you have the money, spend it and good luck, but cut down on the tweeness please?

My comment from deep in the last thread is about just this:

In the novel Diamond Age nanotechnology allows for any consumer good to be created almost for free. Free for the end user if they accept integrated advertisements playing on their stuff. So the wealthy wear natural fiber clothes handmade by tailors and write on 19th century style paper hand pressed by an artisanal paper maker, etc. If sheets of pure diamond were almost free due to diamond's simple repeating atomic structure, then the wealthy would only have genuine glass unlike the poors.

If sheets of pure diamond were almost free due to diamond's simple repeating atomic structure, then the wealthy would only have genuine glass unlike the poors.

Yes, I think this is an excellent point. I think it's worth adding that (possibly) a lot of people would feel genuinely depressed at being deprived of genuine glass. If genuine glass were not distributed evenly among races, then (possibly) social justice warriors of the future would be genuinely outraged.

Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die

"There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die."

Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

I'm going to try to combine a culture war style post and an "interesting person" post. We've had a few of these "interesting person" posts, with this one being one of the most upvoted posts all time. Hat tip to @naraburns. The good news is that I'll be using a real, live very online person that we can all directly reference instead of an example from my own life.

And that person is Shagbark.

Shagbark is a twitter personality I stumbled across several years ago by accident. Sometimes, you gotta love the algo. In about the last year, he's developed a legitimate following. 52,000 followers as of this morning. I believe 50k is the "famous on twitter" threshold.

Shagbark is eclectic to say the least. I could try to spin a narrative, but I think it's more impactful to go with the bullets:

  • Early to mid 30s
  • Coast Guard Veteran
  • Homeless for, IIRC, 8 years - by choice.
  • Devout Catholic (is he a Trad though? This is a point of controversy)
  • More or less a self-confessed luddite or neo-luddite. Hates not only AI, smartphones, and the usual list of "bad" modern technology, but also airplanes, cars, and objectively good modern building advancements like air conditioning.
  • A New York State hypernationalist. Specifically, very far upstate New York around areas like Plattsburgh and Messina. See this tweet about upstate NY
  • (Related to the above) Has a penchant for desolation. Often writes poetically about the harsh beauty of derelict old steel towns (Utica) and little, out of the way villages no one has a reason to go to (Elko, Nevada).
  • Is married to a woman and, of late, has a child. The woman has her own twitter and is proudly undocumented. Note that she is not an immigrant, but, from what I can tell, part of a line of weird conservo-hippie-anarchists. Her parents never got her a social security card.

Part of Shagbark's rise was due to his wife. I searched for, briefly, but cannot find the tweet exchange where in an young(ish) Asian woman from San Francisco made fun of Shagbark's wife's appearance. Paraphrasing, she said something along the lines of "Good news if you're a weirdo NEET; you can still get married if you're okay with your wife looking like this." Shagbark demonstrated some knowledge of the game by not directly replying and letting his defenders go after the bug lady. Not only did it work, but some rather large accounts came out of the woodwork to do it. Shagbark's signal was boosted and he now, by his own account, makes most of his money off of twitter monetization. On this last point, I am a bit skeptical; as a USCG vet, he's entitled to a pretty hefty basket of goodies that can go a long ways to supporting his bohemian lifestyle.

In sum, Shagbark is a technology hating somewhat-trad Catholic who LARPs as a kind of beatnik nomad / homesteader / flaneur / dirtbag entrepreneur and ... makes most of his income writing on Twitter and Substack. Contradictions abound, yet I cannot help think he does have genuine intent. This is not some multi-levels of irony deep parody or satire account. This is a real human, with real emotions, and many of them are unsupervised.

The Culture War Angle

Recently, Shagbark has been going through a bit of a crisis. After having his child, he realized that he couldn't actually raise her in a dilapidated shack in the New York hinterlands. He's now considering a move elsewhere. The suburbs are a non-starter (cars and soullessness) but any major metro is too expensive both in terms of money and ideological selling-out. So, he's started to look at old busted up cities that could be cheap to live in. His list, from this tweet is:

Utica, Las Vegas, El Paso, STL, Montreal, St John's NL, Brownsville, Yuma, Barstow, Ojinaga, Fargo, Houma, Wheeling, Atlantic City.

Personally, I'm hoping he ends up in Wheeling, WV. I've lived close enough to it to know that parts of it are truly hellscapes. I'm looking forward to the plot arc where Shagbark becomes a bizzaro Catholic-Luddite Harvey Milk advocating for the return of coal burning fireplaces to Wheeling.

Stemming from this look at cities, Shagbark wrote this tweet. The primary point of it is covered well in the second paragraph:

There is nowhere for a Thinking Man to "land" anymore. Even the cities are largely voids of anything resembling satisfying discourse -- largely because in those cities, rents are so high people now have to WORK more than they READ. You simply cannot live as a "starving artist" in cities where the median rent is $2k-3k/mo.

Shagbark bemoans that a bunch of pseudo intellectuals cannot find a cheap neighborhood to be unemployed in yet still meet up for beer, cigarettes, and High Quality Discourse About Subjects of Great Import. Now, I've been in enough bars around the country in all kinds of different cities and towns to know , sadly, exactly what Shagbark is envisioning. A bunch of weirdos sit around, nursing beers and cheap cocktails, shooting off their malformed opinions about random topics and letting the alcohol smooth out the edges. When you first encounter this in your 20s, as a brainy nerd, you think it's the coolest thing ever. After you round the corner into your 30s, you realize that it's a lot of talking in circles and well disguised emotional commiseration. Real intellectual work is done via writing because it forces you to state what you mean and the build an argument and evidence around it. You discover your own weaknesses, assumptions, holes. You often end up writing a totally different thing that you set out to, which, just as often, is a good thing. You've dug through the dirt and mud and found gold.

Pontificating in a bar is not this. It feels like it the way that LLMs feel like you're chatting with a human. But even a momentary bout of self-awareness dispels the idea that you're really doing the thing. We get drunk and debate in bars to form and sustain relationships of various sorts. We're not there to write the next Tractatus.

Obviously, you can tell I'm thinking of The Motte now. Part of what sustains this site is a culture of effortposts and even effortful comments. I believe most of our AAQCs are responses to topline posts, not the original screeds themselves. If you want to spout off about something random, that's what the Sunday thread is for. Mostly, I think, it works. As the holder of both several AAQCs and multiple temporary bans, I can say that most of the time if there is a "break down" it's because of the personal irresponsibility of individual posters, not something systemic or cultural.

The question I am left with is, however, what if Shagbark got his wish and found a cheap, "beautifully depressed" minor city with a magical bar full of ... Mottizens! Would this actually work or would most of us, being Turbo Autists, shut down in public and let this drunken HippyCath dominate the space? Would there be verbal equivalents of AAQCs or would it all devolve into drunken shouting before anyone got to their second section heading?

Stated plainly; is verbal discussion about any topic actually a road to productive work on that topic, or is writing absolutely better? The obvious exception is when the subject is a specific interpersonal relationship. You talk to your wife/husband/*-friend about your relationship, you don't write markdown formatted posts about it.

Following on that, is Shagbark a greek hero; doomed to horrific failure specifically in the case that he wins. If Shagbark's Booze Lair opens in Houma or St. Louis or Utica, will he find out he's simply created a flophouse for bums instead of a watering hole for this generations Sartres and Hans Uns Von Balthasars?

Personally, I'm hoping he ends up in Wheeling, WV. I've lived close enough to it to know that parts of it are truly hellscapes. I'm looking forward to the plot arc where Shagbark becomes a bizzaro Catholic-Luddite Harvey Milk advocating for the return of coal burning fireplaces to Wheeling.

Which parts? It isn't that big, and the only parts of it that I would consider remotely bad are the parts of the island where it's all drug addicts. But he isn't likely to live on the island if he doesn't want to have a car. Parts of it are dumpy for sure, but most of it is completely safe, and it isn't really blighted. If he's looking for actual hellscapes that aren't inside big cities, parts of the Mon Valley are much worse.

Was 100% thinking of the island.

Also you might like this ArcGis story map about the Mon Valley @Rov_Scam

Mingo Junction is where my mind goes. It's not scary or anything, but it's so empty it's like the Cairo (IL) of the valley.

It’s entirely possible to rescue failing cities by boosting particular neighborhoods(there’s a word for it- gentrification). IIRC shagbark wanted to do this in rust belt New York.

Unfortunately, he wanted to combine this with Luddism(lol), trad-Catholicism(minus the guilt), and ideological commitment. Alas he found no takers; most people don’t want to live a third world poor lifestyle, they would rather have jobs.

I have met him and his wife a few times. I have bought a few properties in the rust belt area he lives in and we're both from the same area elsewhere. Very good guy.

Even the online world is a very, very small place.

Any interest in nudging him towards looking at The Motte? If nothing else, he's going to have an interesting perspective on, well, everything.

Shagbark bemoans that a bunch of pseudo intellectuals cannot find a cheap neighborhood to be unemployed in yet still meet up for beer, cigarettes, and High Quality Discourse About Subjects of Great Import. Now, I've been in enough bars around the country in all kinds of different cities and towns to know , sadly, exactly what Shagbark is envisioning.

This is true and false. It is true that pontificating over beers is not real work, and has real risk of being wankery.

However, to have a culture that is doing real artistic or intellectual work, it sure helps to have a lower cost of living so the writers or artists can spend many, many hours on the work in their homes and garages or workshops or converted lofts without having to work 50+ hours a week at a stressful job. And it helps to be around others, not because the work is done at the bar, but because you get credit for the work at the bars, you get feedback and ideas, you get inspiration and motivation.

Mottizens! Would this actually work or would most of us, being Turbo Autists, shut down in public and let this drunken HippyCath dominate the space? Would there be verbal equivalents of AAQCs or would it all devolve into drunken shouting before anyone got to their second section heading?

Having been to many events with intellectual friends I've met through writing online, it has been a great experience. It's not a time for inventing theories or fully working out theories, but it is great for cross-fertilization, getting inspiration, learning things people weren't able to put in their writing, brainstorming, etc. etc. However, it would be a big leap from meeting up once or twice a year, to actually living with them. Not sure how that would work out.

Well, thank you for putting some things together for me that didn't click, before.

By the way, the lady in question - RealDianeYap - who insulted his wife was the same one prattling on about wanting to be a sex-slave for a 9 or 10 rather than a housekeeper for a 5. People claim she's a troll, but fake retarded behavior online is still retarded behavior, regardless.

Shagbark's wife, by the way, is a lovely woman and he's atleast lucky in that respect, I feel.

As for Shagbark - I'm not sure what my opinion on the man himself can fall into. He received a heavy amount of flack on twitter about his admission that his priors had shifted post-birth of his daughter. Advice he had been constantly preaching on how he felt men should follow his example and do what he was doing - all of a sudden, that didn't fly now that he had a small child to take care of, and he was getting roundly called out for it.

It was about this point where he admitted his big hope wasn't a round-robin bar scene for trad men(or even a round-robin trad-men coffee shop), but instead he had hoped to inspire men to basically settle with him and build a unified community.

Which shows where the critical failure lies, and what his sin really is - the lack of leadership, of charisma, of inspiration, of a passive type of ideological cowardice where instead of boldy stating 'Come with me to build a good society' he instead wibble-wobbled about how men should just do the things he had been doing while making limp-wristed motions in his general direction.

...Okay, I'm probably being very unfair to the guy. I get how fatherhood can radically change one's priorities. But I find it hard to respect someone who's actions prove him to be more than willing to sacrifice his prior principles and ideals.

On the other hand, as a parent, you haven't got the luxury of principles.

Now, having said all of that, I feel you're atleast doing him a bit of disservice. There's nothing wrong with wanting to have the company of your peers to throw around and discuss ideas, even outside of alcohal. I mentioned coffee shops before, and I actually got to see this, where a bunch of old men would come in like clock-work to have idle discussion on various topics, from politics to business to just idle chatter. It was definately interesting to see that in the flesh, and if that's what he was going for, I applaud him for it.

I don't think that's what it was, mind. Conversely, if he had setup his overall ideal community, it's possible things like that would grow out of it organically. Again, something I feel overall would be a good thing.

But it's clear by this point that if this is what he wants to do, he needs to step up and be a Leader, a Patriarch, someone whom others find worthy enough to follow. And that's something he's failed to do up until this point. He might want to work on that.

...running back to your initial question, while writing can cultivate intellectual work, open and skilled communication and debate is a completely different skill. Ideally, one should cultivate both, and my opinion is that one isn't nessecarily superior to the other.

Which shows where the critical failure lies, and what his sin really is - the lack of leadership, of charisma, of inspiration, of a passive type of ideological cowardice where instead of boldy stating 'Come with me to build a good society' he instead wibble-wobbled about how men should just do the things he had been doing while making limp-wristed motions in his general direction.

The issue is this get's pretty culty and has trouble lasting long-term. I see it a lot in churches - particularly non-denominational - that get big, sucking in the remnants of the declining churches around them. They create quite the impressive "community". It's all based around the Charismatic pastor, they start a little Bible college, if they make it a decade or two the pastor tries to set up his son, and then they whither away.

Guy in my home town played football for the state team. The Tide, as we say. A bit before my time--I was still in elementary school then--but he played well enough that under Bear Bryant he made a name for himself locally. Never went to the NFL but had a respectable following. Graduated, disappeared for a several years then was suddenly back and opening a church, as one does. Charismatic protestant, people speaking in tongues, ran it out of a little part of what we called strip malls back in the day, now I think these outdoor malls are the norm, at least back home, and the old indoor malls are nearly dead. Bama paraphernalia shops, a Victoria's Secret where the customers do not resemble the models on the displays, Spencer's Gifts, Sbarro's with slices of pizza under heat lamps.

I do not recall the name of his church. I believe the word Light was part of it. Many people attended his services. I knew some of them. Twice on Sunday, then Wednesday nights to top you up during the week. Lots of singing and praising God, etc. The dude was a very charming sort, apparently, and athletic even into his older age--though I'm older now than he was then.

He had married at some point and had a daughter who was by then a fetching blonde teenager. You could see a younger version of her mom in her, or at least that was my guess. I heard many stories that they (dad and daughter) were very clingy, would dance together in ways that did not seem, let me say, normal for a father and daughter. One guy I knew claimed to have seen them kissing on a dance floor at the Old L&N Club.

I didn't follow what was going on and I knew even then that people like to run their mouths about other people without any basis, but it's true various sources were whispering the same thing. Whether it was this, or money, or some other scandal, the church went under, just suddenly wasn't there any more. Not that his followers abandoned him. The true believers always said he was a great guy--they all called him by his first name, let's say it was Garrett (it wasn't.) Garrett this, Garrett that, Garrett is a good man, etc. Maybe one or two would say Garrett's ideas about the Lord are wrong because of A B or C but nothing against Garrett.

He seemed to submerge again, then suddenly there was his face in the back of the phone book. Injured? Call Garrett Footballer, free consultation. So he had become am ambulance chaser. Apparently he had also begun (or continued) drinking. And then one night, alone in a suburb, he wrapped his car around a tree and went to be with the Lord. That last part was of course the popular coda at the time. I've never trusted preachers.

I actually love the Wheeling/Weirton/Steubenville area. I go up there at least once a year, and I always have a great time. It's pretty bombed out but there are actually fascinating, intelligent people trying to build in the ruins; you can spend your whole day just striking up conversations with people, and it feels like everyone is happy to tell you about the history, or some new thing that's being tried. I think something beautiful is going to come from there sooner or later.

For those that have been - Raven, the huge bookstore cat at BookMarx apparently passed last year; but they have at least one and possibly two new ones.

One argument in favor of speaking (even, or perhaps especially, lubricated with alcohol): you're much more likely to get people's true beliefs and gut reactions. With writing, as you say, you state what you mean and an argument and evidence. But it's not quite those things themselves, but public representations of those things. When people write, it's less immediate; there's time for revision; and there's a public record of what you say that can be held against you for all eternity. This introduces more opportunities for dishonesty and crafting an inauthentic argument, either intentionally or not.

There's also a quickness and flexibility with concepts that speaking teaches in a way that writing doesn't, which probably helps with thought more generally.

Both modes of communication have their pros and cons. I'd say something like 25% speaking/75% writing is near the ideal, though I don't have real evidence of that or know one way or another what evidence would even look like.

I have these in person drunk chats with the local neighborhood dads. Many of the better discussions are about interpersonal stuff. Turns out that random dads in a good neighborhood are likely only experts at not fucking up their own lives. Political discussions vary heavily in quality depending on the topic.

We don't get to it as often as we would all like, but that is part of our expert ability to keep families together: we don't try and get wasted more than once or twice a month.

Now, I've been in enough bars around the country in all kinds of different cities and towns to know , sadly, exactly what Shagbark is envisioning. A bunch of weirdos sit around, nursing beers and cheap cocktails, shooting off their malformed opinions about random topics and letting the alcohol smooth out the edges. When you first encounter this in your 20s, as a brainy nerd, you think it's the coolest thing ever. After you round the corner into your 30s, you realize that it's a lot of talking in circles and well disguised emotional commiseration. Real intellectual work is done via writing because it forces you to state what you mean and the build an argument and evidence around it.

Well, allow me to present the counter-factual. Yes, writing is essential. It is absolutely required to create a coherent system of belief. But before you put pen to paper, there is a natural human urge to bounce your ideas off another human. Maybe more than one. Possibly a small group, in some kind of social situation, where you can engage in vigorous discussion (dare I say debate?) where your ideas are winnowed down before you ever put them on a piece of paper. It might even be reasonable to give your group a name, something a little pretentious, because you are discussing Important Ideas, not merely commiserating over a beer coffee.

Something like the Society of Psychoanalysts, founded at Café Korb in 1908 by Sigmund Freud. Or there is the famous Café Central, patronized by Peter Altenberg, Theodor Herzl, Alfred Adler, Egon Friedell, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Anton Kuh, Adolf Loos, Leo Perutz, Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig, Alfred Polgar, Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, and Stalin. All of these men of course eventually put pen to paper. But they didn't keep coming to the same coffee house just because they really liked the barista's triple caf no fat skim milk four pump blended mochachino. They found value in arguing, debating, and discussing what would become some of the most influential theories in the world with other intelligent men.

Now I'm not saying that Shagbark's club would look like Café Central. It probably would look like a bunch of weirdos sitting around nursing beers and cheap cocktails while pontificating loudly on subjects they were not qualified to take a 201 class in. But that is no reason to write off this kind of circle-jerk entirely. A circle-jerk it may be, but a circle-jerk can still result in ideas that will cause the world to tremble.

Now I'm not saying that Shagbark's club would look like Café Central. It probably would look like a bunch of weirdos sitting around nursing beers and cheap cocktails while pontificating loudly on subjects they were not qualified to take a 201 class in.

The vast majority of people at the Cafe Central were weirdos sitting around nursing beers and cheap cocktails and we've never heard of them. For every Freud and Herzl and Stalin and Hitler, there were fifty losers whose manifestos wound up lining a parrot cage. One of the important things you realize when you read the biographies of revolutionaries, is that it's really hard to tell the serious ones from the unserious ones until suddenly it is very obvious. The Bolsheviks embodied every stereotype of the LARPing coffee shop revolutionary, the thugs who use Socialism as a cover for robbing banks, the burnouts who just hate their parents, the grifters trying to avoid getting a real job, etc. Then suddenly they took over Russia. And I don't think it's something you can predict in advance, some people rise to the occasion and others turn out to be failures. Sam Adams was far more important than John before the Revolution, afterward Sam was an afterthought until he became a beer. Jesus may not even have been the most important Messiah running around Judea in 33, he turned out to be the most important man to ever live.

These kinds of environments are important because they support a huge petri dish of ideas and thinkers, and most of them will be unimportant but some will be earth shattering.

The question I am left with is, however, what if Shagbark got his wish and found a cheap, "beautifully depressed" minor city with a magical bar full of ... Mottizens! Would this actually work or would most of us, being Turbo Autists, shut down in public and let this drunken HippyCath dominate the space? Would there be verbal equivalents of AAQCs or would it all devolve into drunken shouting before anyone got to their second section heading?

If we're doing this I have numerous suggestions in my neck of the woods. There's a lot of tiny cheap old towns where you can buy a home, have a car, and walk to a church and a bar.

The verbal equivalent of an AAQC is the bon mot, the line that everyone remembers and repeats back to each other for years afterward, until it becomes part of speech.

This sounds lovely. Make sure there's an Orthodox church there and sign me up.

My actual escape plan if I can't take it anymore, is to run away to Wilmington, Ohio; which is a completely unremarkable town except that it does have a (tiny) Lutheran church of my type. It is interesting how that is a real consideration I never thought of as a youth.

I wonder why Plattsburgh isn't on his list. There's nothing much there but SUNY Plattsburgh, but it is a real (if small) town and he apparently already thinks favorably of it. Certainly it's a better choice than Utica.

Unfortunately, I think Shagbark's threshold for "high rent" is quite extreme. It seems like anything over about $600 / month is out of the question.

Stated plainly; is verbal discussion about any topic actually a road to productive work on that topic, or is writing absolutely better? The obvious exception is when the subject is a specific interpersonal relationship. You talk to your wife/husband/*-friend about your relationship, you don't write markdown formatted posts about it.

If you want to pin down something crystal clear that is to stand the test of time, then of course it needs to be written down. If all you want is a lifestyle, then writing is actively hostile to it - the written word can catch up with you, can pin you down, can put you on the spot. The lifestyle is easier when it's not documented, and you can adapt at a moment's notice without needing to recant, revise and re-annotate your earlier works.

Following on that, is Shagbark a greek hero; doomed to horrific failure specifically in the case that he wins. If Shagbark's Booze Lair opens in Houma or St. Louis or Utica, will he find out he's simply created a flophouse for bums instead of a watering hole for this generations Sartres and Hans Uns Von Balthasars?

I'm sympathetic to the guy. Now I'm more of a techno-doomer than a luddite - technology is actively hostile to humans, a barely synergistic parasite, history's true protagonist who will outlive us all, but you're either with technology or you get ground up under the boots of those who are - but the whole "disregard society, make babies and contemplate the wasteland that is the world" thing is basically me when I don't force myself to be a good German and live to work. But it's certainly not heroic. It's a failure to adapt and perform, fallback option for those who can't hack it, a turning-inward in the face of outward and actual defeat. That he manages to turn it around into a living is impressive though.

Hey, I will not stand for this anti-Elko slander! I will have you know that the city of my birth has both a world renowned cowboy poetry festival and one of the largest gold mines in the country. And it's absolutely beautiful high desert country.

Shhhh, stop telling people about the few remaining unspoiled places...

There's a subset of Mottizens that if transported to a rural setting, working remotely in fairly lucrative jobs, would have a good time at the bar/coffee shop. A big heuristic is if you can already pull that off. An issue is that reaping the benefits of rural living requires quite a bit of less productive labor, and it's hard to resist the incentive of working your more productive skill sets harder.

I am very sympathetic, I’ve always dreamed about going off and living in the woods. Unlike many I’ve grown up rural adjacent. On the list of effort posts I’ll never make is how expensive it is to switch from urban/suburban to rural. Being well off and rural is a lot of fun, but maybe not that fun as Critical Access doctors are hard to come by, unless that’s just because lefty docs don’t want to live around righty plebs.

Over roughly 70 years annual growth of 3% will double that of 2% growth.

Subsistence living sucks, it sucks hard, as evidenced by all of history people moving into really (by our standards) crappy urban life because of just how much subsistence living sucks.

Incentives matter, there’s a reason rural life is in the decline, and if you’re not very cognizant of what the issues are you’re going to get bit hard.

I'd pay good American greenbacks for that effortpost! (Not really, but I still encourage you to write it)

In your mind, what are the things people miss when thinking specifically about the "full remote white collar work, live rural" fantasy. I've had a number of friends who've done this but only to the fringes of exurbs or small cities (10k - 50k population). I don't yet know someone who is literally living the rural J.D. Salinger life way off in remote West Virginia, Montana, West Texas.

The Economist doesn't seem to know economics.

I was presented this article by Reddit as an ad. Though the ad used the subtitle about Trump as the title. This article packs more "wrong" in a coherently-written article than I've seen in a long time. The actual title is "America’s huge mortgage market is slowly dying".

Right out of the gate, we're told mortgage debt has dropped over 30 points as a percentage of the GDP since the housing crisis, and now is at its lowest level since 1999, before the bubble. Wait a minute? Isn't that a good thing? We've finally returned to normalcy after the bubble? In fact, the graph appears to show just that. Mortgage debt is still higher as a percent of GDP than any time other than the bubble.

We're then told "mortgage debt has shrunk to just 27% of the value of American household property—a 65-year low". Uh, yes, but those of us who are paying attention realize that this isn't because mortgage debt has shrunk, it's because the value of American property has increased. Which doesn't have much to do with any dying of the mortgage market.

Then we get this howler:

The availability of mortgages, as measured by lenders’ appetite for risk, is at its lowest in decades.

Uh, how exactly is lenders' appetite for risk a measure of mortgage availability?

The article then goes on to call this a "collapse in credit", because in 2003 (peak bubble), 35% of American mortgages went to people with credit scores below 720, whereas now that number is 22%. But the attached chart shows total originations are fairly close to immediately pre-COVID numbers. There's no real drying up in credit since the end of the bubble, just extension of the same credit to more creditworthy borrowers. Note that more than half of Americans with a credit score have one over 720. American's credit scores have increased, and lending less to people who are higher risk just makes sense. The bubble lending DIDN'T make sense, that's how we got the bubble!

Did I call the previous one a howler? No, that wasn't a howler. THIS is a howler:

The drought is also stopping fresh supply from entering the market. If developers have no prospective buyers to sell properties to, they are much less likely to build at all.

Uh, bitch, prices are high. Time on market is low. There's LOTS of buyers. It's a seller's market. If developers aren't building (and indeed they aren't) it's not a lack of prospective buyers causing it.

This is heart of the problem with the article: if there is indeed a mortgage drought preventing people from buying houses, house prices should be falling, not rising. Basic Econ 101 stuff. The article completely ignores this right up until the very end, when it notes

Goldman Sachs, a bank, estimates that the 1.6m privately owned properties completed last year still leave the market short of 3m-4m homes. Unless that gap is plugged fast, any policies meant to make mortgages more widely available will only push house prices higher, nullifying their effect.

I don't know what G-S means by that, but "any policies meant to make mortgages more widely available will only push house prices higher" makes more sense than anything else in the article, and it contradicts the whole thesis of the article.

The housing market has plenty of problems. Unavailability of credit is definitely not one of them.

Reminds me of this viral Substack series: Part 1, Part 2..

If you own a painting and it goes from $1,000 to $1,000,000, you are now wealthy. You do not need the painting to survive. You can sell the painting, buy a house, and live off the proceeds.

But if the home you live in goes from $200,000 to $1,000,000, you are not wealthy, because the replacement home also costs $1M. You are trapped. You cannot sell the house and take the profit, because you still need a place to sleep, and the house across the street also costs $1,000,000.

You haven’t gained purchasing power. You have simply experienced a revaluation of your Cost of Living.

...

For the middle class, rising home prices are not “Wealth Accumulation.” They are Asset Price Inflation. We have confused the capitalized cost of future rent with an asset. When housing prices triple relative to wages, we haven’t made homeowners rich; we have made non-owners poor. We pulled up the ladder and called it “Net Worth.”

The median age of first time homebuying has gone up from 28 in the 1990s to 40. First-time buyers now comprise just 21% of all home purchases.

Nothing about this seems sustainable to me. At least the younger generation will inherit the houses? Well, no. Usually inheritance passes down to the next generation, which currently owns their own homes. And many elderly are forced to sell their houses to pay for eldercare, meaning that all that home value goes to the health care system instead of anyone else.

Ok, but then who are the elderly selling to? People in their 40s able and willing to get into tons of debt. OK, but who buys when you exhaust that group? Property investment firms who are able to rent the houses out. Can that go on forever? Well, if they're buying houses at a certain price, they're hoping the rent will be more than the mortgage over the length of the life of the home. This happens when rents increase over time. Will we always have more people looking for homes than there are available?

To put a finer point on it, it seems like the system requires that there be perpetually fewer homes than desired, but this is not really desirable as a society because we like when everyone has a home and punish people who do not have a residence. And, regardless of what's good or bad or anyone's wishes, eventually the population will decrease as the boomers die off.

Home prices have to fall, right? And I wouldn't even be mad about it, though I'd be one of those holding the bag. I'd like for my kids to afford a home. I'd put me in a precarious financial position until the bulk of the principle is payed off. But I will pay the monthly amount I agreed to pay because I'm an adult, and I'll be happy to see my kids in a better position than me because I'm a normal human being.

But anyone who was hoping to trade their $800,000 home for 8 months in hospice care might be in for a rude awakening.

But if the home you live in goes from $200,000 to $1,000,000, you are not wealthy, because the replacement home also costs $1M. You are trapped. You cannot sell the house and take the profit, because you still need a place to sleep, and the house across the street also costs $1,000,000.

You haven’t gained purchasing power. You have simply experienced a revaluation of your Cost of Living.

This is obviously false simply by glancing at the alternative.

Person A: No income but has a million dollar house

Person B: No income, and also no house.

Person A is a million dollars of value richer. If people B want a home too they have to give the people A a million (or build their own, which is becoming increasingly not allowed).

Nothing here is negated because A bought in early or because A wants their current situation of having a home instead of B's situation. They still have a million more dollars of value.

The value isn't increasing in the same way as other assets. He compares it to a painting:

If you own a painting and it goes from $1,000 to $1,000,000, you are now wealthy. You do not need the painting to survive. You can sell the painting, buy a house, and live off the proceeds.

Whereas, if you have a house increase in value, you can't sell it for that full value and pocket the proceeds. You need to live somewhere:

If you sell the house to “realize” your wealth, you are homeless. You must enter the market to buy a replacement machine. But because all the machines repriced in correlation, your $600,000 gain is immediately consumed by the purchase of the new, equally expensive house.

The only way to unlock that wealth is to:

Die.

Downsize (move to a cheaper region, sacrificing income/opportunity/quality of life).

Borrow against it (HELOC or reverse mortgage), which turns your equity back into debt.

All three represent either a loss of utility or a conversion back into debt.

The fact that a person who doesn't own a house is in an even worse position does not negate that home inflation shouldn't really be considered the same as other assets.

Don't compare it from No home to Has home. Compare between a world where homes inflated 10x to one where homes only inflated 2x. Which world has generated more "wealth?"

If a painting goes from $1,000 to $1,000,000 at the same time general inflation goes up by a factor of 1000, you have gained nothing. If shelter inflation goes up more than general inflation, then if you own a home which goes up only by the value of shelter inflation, you have in fact gained (though not by as much as if your home went up and general shelter did not). It is true that to realize these gains you need to actually spend something, but that's just a matter of not being able to have your cake and eat it too -- if you want to realize the gain from the painting you won't have it after you sell it either.

You don't need a painting but you need a shelter. You don't need an Apple stock and you can sell it without needing to buy another S&P stock to replace it. I don't think that home value increases are wealth in the sense a good stock and bond portfolio is, but they are often treated as such in economic calculations. Accessing that wealth requires lowering a standard of living in some way that isn't replicated with other assets.

If I sell an appreciated painting, I no longer have it; my standard of living is decreased by exactly as much as having that painting increased it. Further, I CAN extract some value from my home (by borrowing from it) without reducing my standard of living. That you have arbitrarily rejected this does not make it not so.

Being able to go into debt is not wealth or everyone attending college right now would be worth $100,000.

No, the house is the wealth. It's made liquid by borrowing against it.

If I sell an appreciated painting, I no longer have it; my standard of living is decreased by exactly as much as having that painting increased it.

This is trivially true, but it just means that having a painting doesn't increase your standard of living by as much as a similarly priced house does. This won't change any relevant conclusion.

Are you denying that homeowners who have there house values massively increase aren't richer?

Sure the fact that you need to live somewhere does make that wealth harder to access, but HELOCs, reverse mortages, downsizing, purchasing a new house with a mortgage (rather than outright), etc are all options that are now available to you and give immediate access to that huge source of wealth, with many options both for where to live and how to structure your debt/asset mix.

My own parents, who bought their houses decades ago, leveraged housing price increases as collateral to purchase multiple rental and vacation properties. Sure the world didn't generate more wealth from this, but the point is my parents got much much wealthier at the expense of those who still need to purchase/rent, as they are the ones driving housing prices.

Are you denying that homeowners who have there house values massively increase aren't richer?

No, I acknowledge that a homeowner who has had a large home where the value massively increased can downsize when the kids are out and add the difference to their retirement. But I disagree that reverse mortgages and HELOCs are "wealth." Yes, it is possible if someone is lucky to have been born at certain times to leverage home values and buy rentals and extract economic rent that way.

What I don't think, and what I think the article author is trying to get at, is that home value increases are wealth in the sense a good stock and bond portfolio is, but they are often treated as such in economic calculations. Accessing that wealth requires lowering a standard of living in some way.

It makes more sense if you switch from

No house == homeless

to

No house == renter

If your home goes up hugely in value, and you sell without buying another house, then yes in a manner of speaking you have only acquired the approximate equivalent of a few decades of rental value which you will now have to pay, making the transaction net zero.

But if you had been renting all that time, you would still have to pay the new inflated price but you would have no assets to set off against them.

EDIT: I apologise, I see some of this was in your original post.

But none of that changes the simple fact that at the end of the day if you compare 65 year old senior with a million dollar home and 25 year old kid from a renter family without any major assets, just the house alone puts the senior a million dollars richer in value.

The senior's total value here is Renter + 1 Million

The difficulty in liquidating their holdings is only because they are actively using the one million dollar house, a choice the latter does not have unless they spend a million.

Yes, the renter is worse off. The renter has such a huge barrier to buying a house it might as well be on the moon.

But 1 Million in the stock market would be better than a 1 Million house, can we agree on this much? If your net worth is 1 Million, that doesn't tell us a complete picture of financial health. I think that's all that I'm trying to say here.

Borrow against it (HELOC or reverse mortgage), which turns your equity back into debt.

These are super viable options. No, they're not as good as having cash, but they're way, way better than nothing. 80+% of the way from "nothing" to "cash".

I heard this on the Odd Lots podcast and the host essentially says: "Everyone wants the real estate market to be low and cheap when they can afford it, then never low and cheap again, always increasing in price until the end of their lives". I think there are plenty of people like that now, hoping for some 2008-style crash where they can "deploy dry powder". Most people have wishful thinking on how they will successfully time the market twice (first time is not getting in the market before the crash; second is getting in the market at or right after it hits bottom). If we talk to New Yorkers, many can certainly tells you some hindsight-stories about Williamsburg in the 00s, or just anywhere in the city in general in the 80s, but that's the point, regret is powerful fuel for memories. If the tides actually goes out, companies are doing layoffs, banks are failing, societal services shutting down, buying a home would not seem like a good idea. And real estate is special because of how local it is, in case of a collapse, maybe you get 80s New York, or maybe you get 50s Detroit. Not to mention, others who are more well versed have pointed out that structurally things can be even worse and that even more can still be squeezed out of all of us. Personally, I don't bank on house prices being low over the long term, and that's even before talking about the cost of home ownership. If I can maintain and not have to liquidate my little parcel of the pale blue dot, I think that's enough to be considered as an astounding financial success.

The median age of first time homebuying has gone up from 28 in the 1990s to 40. First-time buyers now comprise just 21% of all home purchases.

I think this statistic, plus this well-known one about Millennials being "behind" on homeownership, plus COVID, goes a long way to explaining the current run-up in real home prices. Compared to Boomers and Gen X, more Millennials preferred to remain renters. Then COVID hit, and that changed those attitudes, in a lasting way. So there's a fairly large group of older non-homeowners. Being older, they are wealthier than typical first-time homebuyers in years past, so they can outbid Gen Z (and younger Millennials) who are also in the market. That's the demand side. The supply side is also messed up, for various reasons including (but not limited to) the ideological success of anti-growth and anti-sprawl policies.

Nothing about this seems sustainable to me. At least the younger generation will inherit the houses? Well, no. Usually inheritance passes down to the next generation, which currently owns their own homes. And many elderly are forced to sell their houses to pay for eldercare, meaning that all that home value goes to the health care system instead of anyone else.

When the elders leave the houses (whether due to death, incapacity, or moving to a rental unit) they typically become available for another buyer, whether the money goes into healthcare or not. This will drive prices down. But it's going to be a while before the boomers start dying en masse; life expectancy for an 80-year-old (the oldest boomers as of 2026) is ~9 years, and for a 62 (youngest boomers) year old, 20 years. So yes, house prices will have to fall (barring a massive increase in immigration, which is definitely possible in that time frame if President AOC opens the floodgates)

The falling percentage of first-time buyers suggests that they’re outcompeted by people who’ve already owned a house, not just older first-timers.

More details in the report highlights, although I don’t see a chart of median age over time. But there’s nothing here suggesting the demand surge is concentrated in millenials.

The craziest stat on that page is that, since COVID, all-cash purchases have gotten much more common. It’s got to be an inflation thing, right?

The falling percentage of first-time buyers suggests that they’re outcompeted by people who’ve already owned a house, not just older first-timers.

Unless we're talking about people who went to an apartment and are moving back to a house, or people buying second homes, non-first-time buyers can't crowd out first time buyers because they vacate one house when they buy a new one.

More details in the report highlights, although I don’t see a chart of median age over time. But there’s nothing here suggesting the demand surge is concentrated in millenials.

I was able to find the current report and the 2022 report. In 2022, 10% of first-time buyers were 18-24, 36% 25-34, 26% 35-44, 13% 45-54, 8% 55-64, 6% 65-74. In 2025, 4% were 18-24, 32% 25-34, 25% 35-44, 16% 45-54, 14% 55-64, 8% 65-74. So Millennials, but Xers and Boomers too.

The craziest stat on that page is that, since COVID, all-cash purchases have gotten much more common. It’s got to be an inflation thing, right?

Redfin has different numbers up to 2021.

this viral Substack series

I don't see how he gets his numbers.

Green:

ExpenditureSize (k$/a)
Food14.7
Housing23.3
Childcare32.8
Transportation14.8
Healthcare10.6
Other essentials21.9
Subtotal118.0
Taxes (including Social Security tax)18.5
Total136.5

Bureau of Labor Statistics (size of consumer unit by income before taxes: consumer unit of four people with income < 15 k$/a):

ExpenditureSize (k$/a)
Food11.1
Housing, excluding personal services17.0
Personal services (including childcare)*0.3
Transportation7.5
Healthcare1.7
Apparel and services1.8
Personal care products and services1.1
Education0.6
Subtotal41.1
Federal and state income taxes**0.0
Social Security and Medicare taxes*3.4
Total44.5

*I have submitted a pull request to fix this nonsensical CSS.

**Tax credit of 2 k$/(child⋅a) × 2 children overwhelms all federal income tax for a couple with taxable income < 37.2 $/a, which implies total income < 66.4 k$/a. I don't care enough to figure out the refundable "additional child tax credit" on top of that, let alone state income tax.

(Totals may not sum due to rounding.)

A lot of people complained about that, and it's really his fault but Part I is actually kind of Part 1.5. He wrote an article earlier about affording a home in Essex County, NJ, and used the numbers from MIT's Living Wage analysis for Essex County, New Jersey in his calculation. He wasn't expecting the article to go beyond his readership so he didn't really explain that part well until Part II.

He used the numbers from MIT's Living Wage analysis for Essex County, New Jersey, in his calculation.

That rather blatantly contradicts his statement in part 1 that he was using "conservative, national-average data".

Nothing about this seems sustainable to me. At least the younger generation will inherit the houses? Well, no. Usually inheritance passes down to the next generation, which currently owns their own homes. And many elderly are forced to sell their houses to pay for eldercare, meaning that all that home value goes to the health care system instead of anyone else.

Don't forget about reverse mortgages! Basically, boomers sell their houses while continuing to live in them, use the money to go on cruises, then when they die the house goes to the bank and their kids get nothing. I see tons of ads for them whenever I watch OTA television.

They truly are the locust generation.

I mean, on the bright side, advertisements mean there is a significant oversupply- more people wanting to offer them than people wanting to take up those offers.

Could it be the other way around too? They are profitable so they can spend money on marketing. Same reason VPNs and gacha games once dominated YouTube sponsoring.

this viral Substack series

Convenient compilation of debunkings

The article seems to think that Greene is asking for the government to interfere by subsidizing families more. However, I have not seen anything of the sort in his articles or his X timeline. Instead, I suspect he's going to recommend building more homes and daycares to lower costs, based on how Part II ended. "We are a nation of builders." (bolded in the original.)

Boehm also says that Greene refuses to acknowledge tradeoffs, but Boehm hasn't provided the numbers for what tradeoffs exist for a couple in their 20s who are hoping to have replacement-rate level children by the time they're 40. Boehm seems to think that children are optional luxuries, ("First, all choices come with tradeoffs, and having kids is no exception.") On the individual level this may be true, but on the societal level this is not true.

Saying "you only need to pay the outrageous cost of childcare for the first 5-10 years of parenthood and then the cost becomes smaller" doesn't lower the barrier to entry at all.

In Part II, Greene added up the percentages of jobs that could support children in Lynchburg, VA, and it came up to 63.6%. This complements perfectly the 36% of people who responded to a Pew Research poll indicating they could not afford kids. This stood out to me as something significant but no one on either side of the debate has commented on it yet. (Edit, this is a mistake on my part, it's 36% of people who don't have kids already who said the reason was they could not afford them, not 36% of the total population of people age 25-45.)

Complaints about the articles I am sympathetic towards:

Greene completely messed up his calculation on Part I by picking the numbers in a county in NJ, instead of actual National Averages. In Part II, his correction to $100,000 seems more accurate.

Greene is really trying to calculate the "Middle Class" line and distinguishing it from the "Working Poor" line. He conflates "Working Poor" with "Impoverished."

The articles being flawed doesn't detract from them being viral and noteworthy. They struck a cord with people.

The availability of mortgages, as measured by lenders’ appetite for risk, is at its lowest in decades.

This particular sentence is reasonable. Appetite for risk is the factor driving demand for all financial assets (with the arguable exclusion of treasuries). If lenders have more appetite for risk, then it is easier to find a lender for your risky mortgage.

What the article is trying to say is that the availability of mortgages to prospective buyers is low, and is using as evidence for this the fact that the lion's share of mortgages go to people with good credit. I don't think that's reasonable.

Do you think the drop in the number of bad-credit homeowners is because bad-credit people suddenly stopped wanting houses? I think the more-likely explaination is that lenders realized that these people were outside of their risk-tolerance, and thus stopped offering them mortgages. You could say that lenders stopped making mortgages available to prospective buyers because of their lack of appetite for risk.

Do you think the drop in the number of bad-credit homeowners is because bad-credit people suddenly stopped wanting houses?

The first drop occurred because of a change in lending standards, but that happened when the GFC hit and (eyeballing their graph) finished around 2010. There's another post-COVID drop, and I think that is explained not by a change in lending standards but a change in the population of homebuyers. With wealthier homebuyers driving up prices, people with bad credit (who are generally poorer than those with good credit) are simply less able to buy a house, and thus don't get mortgages.

Outside of a crash, the one avenue I don't see discussed very often for how this can end is for contractors to start building smaller.

Where I live there are two main problems hindering this natural market development: Regulations and lot allocation. Smaller contractors can easily build small in theory. But due to lot allocation, high lot price and regulations, it's not economically viable. This leaves small contractors unable to meet market conditions since a lot of prospective home buyers are priced out of single family homes. Which places the ball in the hands of larger contractor operations that can deal with the situation more easily via multi story housing. So problem solved. Smaller contractors fade out of business.

The 'small' problem with this, and why I think this is the future, is that we are looking at a pretty obvious lowering of living standards. Your future is less idyllic and smaller in scale.

On a certain time scale there is nothing wrong with this. People should start small, build capital in their small home, sell it later and expand into something bigger that can more easily house a larger family. The real issue is more clear when you look at this in a modern context.

Most people don't have families until they are in their 30's. Of those that do, there will be many who had not entered the real estate market until their late 20's. Depending on income, your children will be raised in a small home for the majority of their lives. Any dreams of green grass, a white picket fence and children playing with a puppy will stay as dreams. You will not be giving your children the childhood your parents gave you.

This development, at least where I live in Scandinavia, is already underway. Being marketed as a conversation about how we should orient our lives and a challenge to critically confront our values. Forget about owning a car, a big dog or raising your children. You will see your family 4 hours a day in a mass produced concrete box, stacked on other concrete boxes. Everything will be shrinking. Everything is being outsourced. It may not be the future anyone wanted, but it's the future everyone has been voting for. The migrant who is delivering your half eaten UberEats order has to live somewhere, after all.

This development, at least where I live in Scandinavia, is already underway.

I'd be curious how this aligns with populations that are starting to decline: it seems at some point you'd have a housing surplus unless everyone takes up second homes. I'd look to Japan, but their housing market is weird by Western standards. I know in the US it's often a location issue: there are cheap ghost towns but no employment prospects near them.

The short answer is that housing markets have a failure mode where all the family homes have pensioner couples living in them, and all the two-bed flats have families with children living them.

We're then told "mortgage debt has shrunk to just 27% of the value of American household property—a 65-year low". Uh, yes, but those of us who are paying attention realize that this isn't because mortgage debt has shrunk, it's because the value of American property has increased.

Anecdotally, I think it's more than just valuation changes.

I know an awful lot of people who would like to move, but are sitting on 2% mortgages and are unwilling to give them up. Just by virtue of paying the monthly payment over a few years, that number is going to drop.

On the other side of the coin, I know quite a few people who would desperately like to buy a house, but can't afford the monthly payments anywhere near their jobs. Historically, those people might have found a fixer upper somewhere and taken on a lot of new debt that bumped up the average. These days though, they're not taking on that debt at all.

In January 2020 (to get a pre-COVID number), the National Case-Shiller index was at 215. In January of this year, it was 330. That's about a 53% increase in the value of property, which means all that older mortgage debt is now a considerably smaller percentage of the total. As for liquidity, housing sales have stalled (after increasing up until COVID, then a massive increase during it) but at a level similar to pre-bubble levels.

On the other side of the coin, I know quite a few people who would desperately like to buy a house, but can't afford the monthly payments anywhere near their jobs. Historically, those people might have found a fixer upper somewhere and taken on a lot of new debt that bumped up the average. These days though, they're not taking on that debt at all.

Someone's buying those fixer-uppers, but they're wealthier people who are paying a lot more for it.

Uh, bitch, prices are high. Time on market is low. There's LOTS of buyers. It's a seller's market. If developers aren't building (and indeed they aren't) it's not a lack of prospective buyers causing it.

This is heart of the problem with the article: if there is indeed a mortgage drought preventing people from buying houses, house prices should be falling, not rising. Basic Econ 101 stuff.

Not necessarily. If more people are buying with cash, you can have both rising prices and people unable to get mortgages. And many, many more people are buying with cash. Either because they are older and have assets in hand, or because they are using OPM to invest in housing, or because they are just wealthier. Cash offers have become very common around here, to the point where even people who are using a mortgage can't put a mortgage contingency in the offer if they want to get the house.

Mortgages are a tool to allow people to afford a home without saving for decades. If they aren't available at a competitive price point, then people can't afford a home unless they save for decades first. This is generally considered Not Good for the economy for a variety of reasons, and certainly precludes widespread homeownership for young people.

You seem to assume that only one thing can be wrong at a time, but this is America in 2025, everything can be wrong at the same time.

Not necessarily. If more people are buying with cash, you can have both rising prices and people unable to get mortgages.

You could, but that wouldn't stop developers from building. Unless cash buyers are somehow only interested in existing homes.

You seem to assume that only one thing can be wrong at a time, but this is America in 2025, everything can be wrong at the same time.

I don't think it's actually possible for unavailability of mortgages to dissuade developers AND for home prices to be rising precipitously.

It is theoretically possible for mortgages to be unavailable and for cash buyers to still drive up prices, though I think this article utterly fails to demonstrate that. But the price signal should work regardless of the source of the money. What's happened is the supply has become less elastic.

And many, many more people are buying with cash

Nope, share of purchases that are for cash has been largely the same for 20 years.

https://www.redfin.com/news/all-cash-home-purchases-2021/

That has a graph up to 2021, and in 2025 it continues to hover around 30%.

What you fail to understand, though forgivably, is that the Economist is not an economics paper for a regular person’s idea of the economy. It’s for a certain brand of finance person with international and political awareness interests.

To you and I, normally, mortgages are mostly about houses. It’s about the chance of default, about rates, and about the first degree effects. The Economist occasionally talks about this stuff. But usually, this is not actually the most interesting part about mortgages. The interesting bit about them in our modern financial system is that they are pools of presumably predictable risk, and since large scale finance is all about allocation and dynamics of risk, mortgages play a key role as a counterbalance, hedge, collateral, stress test statistic for banks, etc all rolled into one. That is, second order effects to be a little lazy about it. As just one example, all big banks have strict liquidity ratios that they are mandated to carry to pass the “stress tests”, and mortgages are a big part of that. I think you’re missing this context entirely. Mortgages backstop much of the risk pool of the lending activity of big banks.

The entire point of the article is that there is a such thing as too-safe mortgages, when taken in aggregate, in terms of their role as a risk sink in the broader financially engineered world of banks. This is a legitimate concern, systemically speaking. It’s also pointing out that traditional turnover rates on housing are way undershot due to a combination of hitherto unusual levels of inflation, excess bank loan skepticism, and this has acted as a subtle brake on home building. That last point is an arguable thesis, but it’s a commonly made one.

Homes aren’t purely about supply and demand even if that’s a huge part of it. There are hidden background regulatory pressures that have a stochastic effect on mortgage offers. The financial market historically “expects” a certain ratio of subprime applicants, and hasn’t been getting it, so it’s been throwing a few wrenches into the cogs.

One side effect of this state of affairs by the way is that the big banks instead of doing the riskier lending themselves now lend money to private equity which then does the riskier lending. Some people think this is bad. One solution is to undo Dodd-Frank, and indeed some people want to, but many others feel like that’s worse (the liquidity rules are there for a reason and a collapse of private equity funds is potentially less bad than a collapse of the main banks themselves).

I suppose this is better than the Rick and Morty copypasta. In any case, this article is definitely not operating on that level. If it were, it would at least have to get into mortgage-backed securities, FNMA, and Freddie Mac, none of which it mentions. No actual sophisticated financier is going to give this article two seconds of their time; it is, in fact, directed at the layman.

It’s totally possible and I’d posit even likely that the Economist, rather than “not knowing economics”, subscribes to a particular school of economics, and at the same time doesn’t care to explain economics. After all, the vibe the magazine cultivates is that everyone reading it is a metropolitan genius. Those are both good explanations of why the article is light on root-cause explanations (and Fannie and Freddie are indeed mentioned very specifically!)

If you thought US politics could not get more (figuratively) retarded ... you'd be wrong.

Apparently Trump called Tim Walz (among other things) a (figurative) retard. Walz is pretty dumb but is not (medically) a retard. But Michael Bohacek has a daughter with Down's and apparently he's it went over poorly enough to derail the GOP redistricting effort.

[ An interesting parochial aside here is that decades of abortion politics has made Down's a bit of a CW item. And Indiana was among the first to react to Dobbs writing a ban that not only doesn't except Down's (only lethal anomalies count) but in a (laudable) fashion, it specifically un-excepts it. ]

My (subjective) take is that Bohacek's stand seems noble in a wildly-out-of-time kind of way. Like we're back in the 80s/90s and mainstream conservatism was still broadly anti-transgressive while the left was about iconoclasm. But I suppose also that 'family over politics' is not a value that either party is willing to endorse -- certainly not the scolding types gloating about talking down to their transphobic uncle at thanksgiving.

It's too bad the Republicans have to lose seats over no-no words, but we've seen what happens when they yield to this kind of thing, and it's no different than losing.

The mechanism for offense seems pretty tenuous anyway.

It’s both very small and very large at the same time. Are talking about the man’s daughter.

Nobody was talking about the man's daughter. His daughter has Down's syndrome, Trump called Tim Walz a retard. There's the sometimes-joked-about mechanism of offense, which is that he was offended by the comparison of that loser Tim Walz to actual retards like his daughter. And there's the real mechanism, which is just that "retard" is considered a no-no word because it can be used derisively to refer to people with Down's and others with actual mental retardation.

When I was a schoolboy, the slur for Down's syndrome kids was "mong", not "retard". "Mong" was also used to describe kids of normal intelligence who did something unconsionably dumb in a moment of weakness.

That's British English, though, an American would not say that. An American might say 'retard' or just 'tard' or 'downie'(not always a slur). An older American might say 'moron' or 'idiot' as a slur but nowadays that wouldn't be used for an actually retarded person, it's used for other drivers.

Are talking about the man’s daughter.

No, we are not, and thinking Trump was is retarded.

Maybe. But this was a man whose vote was apparently needed. So retarded or not, his view on it matters.

It really would be nice if our leaders could decide not to shoot themselves in the foot. Just once.

"why are the people who perpetually go out of their way to shoot themselves in the foot, shooting themselves in the foot so much??? I voted for President 'i love shooting my foot to own the libs' so he could get shit done, not shoot off his own feet!"

Elect clowns, expect a circus

Or in this case, elect a reality TV star, expect amusing antics

the scolding types gloating about talking down to their transphobic uncle at thanksgiving.

I've heard that this woman was actually involved in Kamala's campaign. Can anyone confirm? What's her name?

Edit: apparently her name is Arielle Fodor and she joined a "white women for Kamala" Zoom call.

That would be hilariously tragic or tragically hilarious.

she joined a "white women for Kamala" Zoom call

Harris just had absolutely no luck, did she? Picked Walz for VP, and now this scandal in Minnesota pops up just in time for when she's pondering a run for governor of California, and the white women voters she got were this type of person who alienates her entire family (where they'd end up voting for anyone else just to spite her).

I can't find it in me to believe that this is anything but performative pearl-clutching on Bohacek's part used as a reason to do what he wanted to do anyway. I suspect his recent DUI conviction has probably made it look impossible to get re-elected and he's doing what he believes is right outside of party lines or he's just lashing out because the GOP was going to primary him because of the DUI or something like that. The alternative is that he's seriously retarded.

Anyway, here's Bohacek's response to questions on redistricting(?) that started all this:

Many of you have asked my position on redistricting. I have been an unapologetic advocate for people with intellectual disabilities since the birth of my second daughter. Those of you that don't know me or know my family might not know that my daughter has Down Syndrome. This is not the first time our president has used these insulting and derogatory references and his choices of words have consequences. I will be voting NO on redistricting, perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority.

No, I didn't skip anything there. I know dems are making hay about the "slur" but the fact that a politician of any kind is deflecting policy questions this blatantly is pretty embarrassing. Both from a standpoint that he could (and did) get away with it, but also how unbelievably lazy and obvious it was as a deflection.

has made Down's a bit of a CW item

Lately, I've noticed many disabled babies and children on Twitter. While I want them to be happy, I'm not sure to what extent they can have enriching and productive lives. I wish I could push a button and make them all better (and make the billions of abled people better too, and myself. We sinful creatures all fall short of our abilities and obligations.) It took me a while to realize this was anti-abortion advocacy.

Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee(, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations). - Jeremiah 1:5

Theology tells us we existed before birth. As a wretched modern, I wrestle with the temptation to overcome disabilities with technology. Ultimately, it seems the key's when the soul's coupled to a body - past that point its murder. But if we could get rid of bad bodies before hand, more souls would have a chance. Is that akin to Talmudic legalism trying to one up God and ignoring the spirit, that for whatever reason these souls/people are born with different potential and context than us? I know nothing. But I feel very uncomfortable.

productive lives

Small to zero.

enriching

Anywhere from colossal to infinite.

Actual true story: my first best friend in childhood had something like severe downs syndrome. It wasn't actually downs but something very specific and rare. Her verbal ability was close to zero but because of kid brain plasticity or whatever, I could figure her out better than anyone besides her parents. We didn't have conversations per se, but we emoted, we played, we had a friendship. Around the time I was 12 or so, she and her family moved away.

I kept in touch with her and her family for 20+ years until she died very tragically and unexpectedly. My entire life was made better by knowing her and being her friend.

This is a common story for all special needs / developmentally disabled / retarded kids' family and friends. While measuring life quality in net GDP contribution is, charitably, overly metric based, imho, many to all of these kind of people have outsized contribution in terms of joy, fellow felling, and the nurturing of higher virtue emotions in others.

"But, but, but!" some will say, "Raising special needs kids is actually so fucking hard on the parents! You got to go home every day and didn't have to deal with the screaming fits and toilet mishaps etc." The challenges are indeed unique (and, on a practical level, I believe in generous subsidies for families dealing with them), I believe that any family who puts in the effort will find the rewards substantial. And the families who decide to murder cancel the body and soul in utero will, maybe, have a somewhat materially more pleasant life at the expense of another human's entire existence.

at the expense of another human's entire existence.

I'm reasonably sure (at least as far as these things go) that one of our close friends didn't have a planned 3rd and 4th kid after the 2nd was profoundly disabled.

Anecdote isn't data of course.

Like a lot of these things the compassion made more sense before the development of an advanced medical apparatus that can give cases like this their personal Golden Throne for decades of low quality life and family sizes are a lot smaller than they used to be.

Plus the entire existence argument has to take into account that longterm disability is generally massively impacting either the family or causing massive intervention by the state

I’ve had similar anecdotal experiences. I don’t know that they really tip the scale.

Forget the material benefits, forget the disability at all. Either it’s murder or it’s not. The pleasantness is incidental.

Anywhere from colossal to infinite.

You don't believe that people who are already bad parents, and are only made more resentful when saddled with a child who will remain a toddler for decades, exist?

Not only is it "hard", it is fruitless. You're breaking your back tilling a field that will not bring forth the harvest. Some people enjoy physical labor without expectation of reward. Usually in small portions and as a diversion from monotony. Not as the monotony.

You're breaking your back tilling a field that will not bring forth the harvest.

You must understand that I am directly disagreeing with this. "The harvest" is that you will experience the joy of parenthood even in such trying circumstances. You will experience profound love. That's it. That's the point.

You don't believe that people who are already bad parents, and are only made more resentful when saddled with a child who will remain a toddler for decades, exist?

I do believe they exist. I also believe there are awful parents of amazing children who go on to do wonderful things for all of society. Why should parents being bad only come into play when talking about a disabled child? Bad parents are bad parents period and should be called out as such. Think about what you're saying here; "Oh, these parents are so bad that we should kill a child so that they don't have a tough time of it."

It took me a while to realize this was anti-abortion advocacy.

I'm not really sure it is. Or at least I think the pro-choice advocacy position here is that they too wish they could push a button to make them all better. I think you part ways only on what to do when we cannot do so -- when the kid is not going to be all better no matter our best efforts.

I'm not really sure it is.

Ehh... it's hard to avoid that conclusion, I think, given the options and statistics in other countries. Having a kid with Downs, and especially making it "a thing" on social media, is a statement.

Like, yeah, pro-choice people aren't going to Hitler-rant about final solutions or anything, but they might offer termination 15 times or make some... less than carefully worded comments about just how late you can abort a kid with deformities.

Or at least I think the pro-choice advocacy position here is that they too wish they could push a button to make them all better.

I'm not entirely sure they do, given certain progressive opinions regarding disability (the Deaf community and people being opposed to cures for autism come to mind), but that's a weird side effect of big-tent progressivism.

Alternatively, they do have a button they can push, but that's an Anakin/Padme meme.

Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee;

Theology tells us we existed before birth.

Before conception, or in early-to-mid-XX-Century terms, 'before you were a twinkle in your father's eye'.

We also have Luke 1:41, where unborn John the Baptist reacted to Mary and unborn Jesus:

"And it came to pass, that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost:"

Theology tells us we existed before birth.

Modern Christianity has painted itself into a corner. It would be better to abort the downs baby than let it live, at least that way they go to heaven immediately instead of suffering on this hell plane.

There are few beliefs with such strong bipartisan appeal that I find so contemptible as the idea that calling someone stupid as an insult constitutes cruelty to the disabled.

I'm quite sure Trump refers to things as stupid and idiotic on a weekly basis.

Some parts of the iconoclastic euphemism-treadmill-go-brrrr contingent wants to recast the word 'retarded' as a synonym for 'very stupid'. That doesn't make it so.

"Retard" comes from "mental retardation" which is now officially "intellectual disability". But "idiot" also used to mean "someone profoundly mentally retarded". The idea that mere use of any of these terms (as an insult to someone unafflicted, or otherwise) is somehow cruel to the "intellectually disabled" is idiocy. Or rather, it's a flex by some culture warriors since the n-word wasn't enough for them.

I understand how the euphemism treadmill works.

Using terms that are considered slurs today, regardless of whether it's a slur in decades since or hence, is a flex by the edgy -- an attempt t demonstrate that they don't recognize that social norm and can't be made to.

The social norm was created by their opponents (the culture warriors in question). Breaking it (and ultimately denormalizing it) is a positive good. The existence of the norm, however, does not make the use of the word into actual cruelty to the retarded.

terms that are considered slurs today

It was never a slur except in the minds of obnoxious progressives. Normal people don't give a shit and this kind of slur-hunting is way past expiration.

You should probably look at this guy’s entire life.

Whatever Bohacek is, “progressive” ain’t it. You’ve lost the plot.

Oh sorry, obnoxious progressives and this one GOP guy with a retarded child. Nonetheless, this was never a real slur.

And this is where we get to see how much the edgy millennials get to determine conservative discourse in opposition to the kind of old school Christian types

Retard is a perfectly acceptable insult from my youth, as is faggot. The loss of good insults due to PC creep is not an affirmative good in any way.

An insult to your buddy is very different from one broadcast to millions.

-- certainly not the scolding types gloating about talking down to their transphobic uncle at thanksgiving.

This made the rounds on my Xwitter feed. I was wondering if it was going to show up here as well.

This can't be earnest, right? Like, this is some sort of meta-trolling post-irony in-joke account. Pepe The Frog but for weirdo progressive women to chortle about while wearing Pussy hats, right?

If you spoke to another adult like this in a corporate setting, even the most blue-haired of HR reps would have a meeting invite waiting for you by the time you got back to your desk. In a social setting, this would be suicidal, unless, as I said, you're actually just trolling a person in your outgroup for the lulz.

Alright, I found her on the White Women for Kamala Zoom Call. Here, she comes across a lot more normal - though still grating - HR style corpo speak. Healthy doses of progressive self-flagellation but nothing beyond the pale. This makes me think her gentle parenting schtick is just that; schtick.

The joke is that she's speaking as she would to a toddler - hence 'gentle parenting.'

The real meta-meta joke is that she talks to children the way she would condescend to adults, instead of regarding them as unformed people that will one day bear profound moral and social responsibility.

This can't be earnest, right? Like, this is some sort of meta-trolling post-irony in-joke account. Pepe The Frog but for weirdo progressive women to chortle about while wearing Pussy hats, right?

Yes, it is obviously rage bait and not the first of it's type. It's a reliable way to earn thousands of dollars on X, the everything app.

Can you link the transphobic uncle at Thanksgiving thing from X? The Instagram page isn't working for me, and Instagram requires a login these days.

Edit: Nevermind, I found it. https://x.com/ms_frazzled/status/1993545667487449402

Major missed opportunity by Bohacek to become a legend by expanding on Vance’s in-roads with respect to leaning into millenial/internet humor. Bohacek could had said something like: “Trump’s ableist slur in calling Walz a ‘retard’ is highly offensive. As a father of a daughter with Down syndrome, I can attest that even a retard wouldn’t tolerate having a bunch of Somalians in his state.”

Instead, Bohacek’s “Notice me!” attempt only associates Republicans more with pearl-clutching and the party with retarded children. This also tees-up leftists/Democrats with jokes like “oh sure, now the fascists suddenly care about slurs toward the vulnerable when the slurs accurately describe their base.” Good excuse, though, for Bohacek to continue the Republican tradition of being on the right side of history in losing gracefully.

A staunch contingent behind the Democratic party may be a Coalition of the Fringes and they may talk a big game about ableism, body positivity, different ways of knowing. However—no bad tactics, only bad targets. See, for example, how quickly the gay, short, small-dick, etc. accusations come out at a moment’s notice.

Ultimately, retarded children give people the ick, including leftists and Democrats.

That being said, Trump flippantly calling Walz a retard strikes me as an unforced error, like his preoccupation with tariffs or antisemitism. For better or worse—to most people’s sensibilities, including those who vote Republican, an unironic deployment of “retard” makes them recoil like an ironic or unironic “nigger” or “faggot,” and Trump’s usage violates the Michael Scott rule of limiting “retard” to when a friend is acting retarded.

Well, at the risk of being the bearer of unwelcome news, I don't think the stout Indiana conservative-conservatives and the edgy alt-right conservatives are gonna ever seen eye to eye. Bohacek can no more respond with ironic detachment than Trump can issue an apology -- it's not in either man's nature. And that's the intra-right generational fissure, which now that the right is ascendant, is arriving exactly on cue.

Of course you're absolutely right that it's an unforced error to do something that exposes that rift in his own coalition.

Ultimately, retarded children give people the ick, including leftists and Democrats.

True, but I think it cuts the other way when the GOP wants to elevate to prominence people that wouldn't terminate over it. Recall the old "what's the different between Sarah Palin's mouth and her vagina" joke.

I'm not sure that it is an error. I think it might be battlespace prep.

Trump strikes me as the kind of guy who is very concerned with his legacy, and handing the GOP over to the Groypers who' rather vote for Zohran Mamdani than Andrew Cuomo or Curtis Sliwa does not strike me as the sort of legacy he wants. Furthermore, if the GOP wants to maintain the in-roads it has made amongst minorities and the working-class the Groypers will need to be either marginalized or crushed, ideally before the 2028 election season.

Aren’t the groypers disproportionately minorities? And maybe working class (?). I would be more worried about losing educated white voters.

We're at a point where you can be incredibly based without even being coarse. Such as: "My daughter has Down syndrome and yet I can attest that even her would not permit Somalis to settle in her state".

even she would not permit Somalis to settle in her state

It is not quite as bad as misspelling a spelling flame, but I think people alleging retardation in their political opponents have a special responsibility to double-check their grammar.

God damn. If I had a niece who went all Mathew Arnold* on me like that, she'd be wearing the turkey over her patronising face. Be glad I don't have nieces or celebrate Thanksgiving. "use your listening ears, transphobic uncle". Yeah, well, you try your listening ears with a face full of gravy, woman.

  • But Arnold kept a smile of heart-broken forbearance, as of the teacher in an idiot school, that was enormously insulting. One trick he often tried with success. If his opponent had said something foolish, like “the destiny of England is in the great heart of England,” Arnold would repeat the phrase again and again until it looked more foolish than it really was. Thus he recurs again and again to “the British College of Health in the New Road” till the reader wants to rush out and burn the place down. Arnold’s great error was that he sometimes thus wearied us of his own phrases, as well as of his enemies'. The Victorian Age in Literature, G.K. Chesterton

I thought it was brilliant.

Maybe if Uncle Mark didn't want his niece to talk to him like a toddler, he oughtn't have thrown his toys out of the pram when he was told to be polite to people with whom he disagrees.

(Yes, even if he thinks they're delusional. Family dinners are not the time or place to practise amateur psychiatry; if we invited Richard Dawkins, we would expect him to refrain from referring to Cousin Sarah's church as 'fairy-tale club'. Not dead-naming or mis-pronouning Cousin Alice, or bringing up the genitals with which she was born, is the same principle.)

I know it's a lazy question but how normal was it on average before Dobbs to abort fetuses with Down's in the US?

This seems to be a pretty good review paper on the topic, and the average is somewhere upwards of 2/3 of prenatal Down's diagnoses end in abortion, but the range varies by location and time.

One interesting tidbit is that the rate was going down pre-Dobbs:

This hospital-based study from the University of South Carolina found that termination rates decreased from 78.6% (22 of 28) in 1972–1996 to 33.3% (3 of 9) in 1997–2000. Many of the remaining studies had overlapping study periods and clinical and geographic heterogeneity that precluded evaluation of temporal trends. However, the three population-based California studies, which presented data on mutually exclusive populations from different time periods, demonstrated a statistically significant decrease in termination rates over time, from 88.3% (1989–1991) to 72.2% (1995–2000) to 61.4% (2005–2007) (χ2 test for trend = 37.196, df = 2, p < 0.0001).

I'm curious about the causality there and any complicating factors to the analysis.

Iceland's rate is famously close to 100%, and The Beeb suggests the British rate is around 90%.

Of course, Iceland, Britain, etc have much higher rates of prenatal testing.


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