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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   28323 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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The recent flurry of posts on family formation, @PyotrVerkhovensky's post on Chesterton and MAGA, along with the proliferation of Penguin and Starfleet Academy memes in my feed has gotten me thinking about Star Trek again, and the role that aspiration plays in fiction, politics, and life in general.

What can a 24 year-old spin-off of a 60 year-old TV series teach us today's Culture War?

Star Trek is often presented as utopian, but it would be more accurate to describe it as post-post-apocalyptic. While the date and circumstances of "Post-Atomic Horror" have shifted over the decades, the idea that Trek's world is separated from ours by a massive catastrophic event that wiped out a significant portion of humanity has been present since Trek's inception. I find this interesting not, only from a lore perspective but in context of how the real-world has changed around it over the last six decades.

From the original series' premiere in 1966 through the end of the 20th century Star Trek had always been "linear" always moving forward into its own future. That is until "Star Trek: Enterprise". (STE) Enterprise jumped backwards in Trek's timeline to the early days of Starfleet.

In Trek's lore this is a frontier period full of unbounded optimism, but Enterprise premiered in September of 2001, and as those Americans here old enough to have first seen Fight Club in the theater or experience 9/11 as adults will recall, the early 2000s were not exactly an optimistic time. The dot com bubble had just burst, and the US was on a bit of a downs-slope both culturally and economically, the first cracks in the presumptions of progressivism had already appeared, and the quiet suggestion in Star Trek's backstory that "you can't get there from here" was starting to feel much louder. Enterprise sought to be a bridge, not just between the atomic wasteland and utopian vision of the original series, but between the progressive optimism of the late 20th century and the cultural "funk" of the year 2000. This is why, for me at least, Enterprise is simultaneously the most under-developed and under-rated iteration of Star Trek.

The series opens approximately 30 years after a drunken mad scientist living in the black hills converted a surplus nuclear missile into mankind's first FTL-capable spacecraft (*1). This triggers an intervention on the part of a paternalist Vulcan civilization to prevent this band of psychotic gun-monkeys from disrupting the delicate balance of power in our local galactic region. Earth now exists as sort of an indulged vassal of the Vulcans. A vassalage that while largely benign has begun to chafe. There is an increasing vocal faction of humans, most of whom who came of age post-Horror, who wish to see Earth set its own path and develop its own technology base. The situation is somewhat analogous to that of Japan in the 50s and 60s, economically vibrant but also still somewhat traumatized, the mass death and devastation of the Horror still very much within living memory. It is with this as background that the NX Program, a project to build and launch mankind's first proper Starships, is undertaken.

Our heroes are the captain and crew of the NX-1. All through the first season, there of this of their mission being this watershed moment that will determine whether Humanity sets its own path in galactic affairs or simply settles for having ended hunger, war, and disease. At best stagnating under the benevolent colonialism of the Vulcans, at worst losing some vital part of our collective soul.

Unlike the smugly enlightened Starfleet of the TNG era, the humans we meet in STE are clearly rooted in our modern world both aesthetically; The NX series ships follow NASA naming conventions (Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger), while their crews wear uniforms based on contemporary NASA astronaut uniforms. And more fundamentally; They have bitter political disputes and a bit of xenophobic streak. They can also be recklessly forthright when something gets their ire up. They have one ally, the Vulcans, and Archer burns them by revealing one of their covert listening posts operation to the wider galaxy. These humans are arrogant, violent, impulsive, illogical, and they're effectively betting the future of their entire species on a single ship. If the Enterprise gets destroyed or accidentally starts a war with the Klingon Empire that might just be the end of humanity's story right there.

Speaking of the Klingons, let's take a moment to talk about them...

The modern pop-culture image of Klingons as these weird Samurai space-orcs with bumpy foreheads talking endlessly about "honor" while they stab each other in the back mostly comes from Christopher Lloyd's Captain Kruge in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Kruge seems to be more of a pirate or privateer than a naval officer, operating on his own initiative rather than as part of a wider organization. While subsequent portrayals would try to walk this back, they were never quite able to shake that image. Even in Star Trek: Deep Space 9, a series that was usually pretty good about giving its aliens depth and nuance, the Klingons come across as a remarkably simplistic and socially primitive society. This is in substantial contrast to how they were presented in the original series.

While originally envisioned by Star Trek producer Gene L. Coon as a mash up of the Soviet, Ottoman, and Mongol Empires, ie a stand-in for every "Eastern Horde" that has threatened Western civilization throughout its history, the original series gives them a lot of background for what could have easily been a just another throw-away villain of the week. The Klingons of TOS are presented as a fully functional society with scientists, lawyers, and diplomats, as well as warriors. They engage in diplomacy and undertake organized campaigns as seen in their introductory episode Errand of Mercy, they make use of proxies as shown in the episodes like Day of the Dove and A Private Little War. They have deep cover operatives as shown in *The Trouble With Tribbles". We even get passing references to famous Klingon actors, popular songs, and mytho-historical figures. While aggressive and expansionistic the Klingons of TOS are a civilization that venerates its warriors rather than a civilization of warriors. A distinction that STE explicitly calls out in the Season 2 episode Judgment.

Kolos: "You didn't believe all Klingons were soldiers?"
Archer: "I guess I did."

Though much of it is now considered non-canon, the Original Series expanded universe novels, fan-guides (presented as in-universe guidebooks), and TTRPG took this even further, fleshing out the Klingons' history, and religion. Even giving them an entire constructed language that would be spoken on-screen in subsequent Star Trek movies and spin-off series. These Klingons are not just mindless brutes slobbering Gahg, while their children may train for war as part of their basic schooling, they also enjoy theme-parks and schlocky teleplays. Klingon adults listen to opera and have nuanced conversations about history and philosophy over glasses of Blood Wine. These Klingons are warlike, but they aren't obsessed with war for war's sake. Rather their militarism is an expression of a broader multi-domain aggressiveness.

And it is through this aggressiveness that they perceive something crucial about the other races they come in contact with. There are "Eev" that is beings like themselves, possessed of individual agency and ambition (The Humans,, Vulcans, Romulans, and Andorrans, all falling into this category), and then there are "Kuve", zombies, servitors, livestock, contemptible creatures worthy only of being conquered or consumed. There are shades of the Bene Gesserit's Gom Jabbar test in this distinction complete with Klingon youth having to be "tested with pain sticks" before becoming a legal adult (Coon, Fontana, Ford, Et Al. had clearly read Dune).

It is with this as context that I would like to highlight a scene from the novel The Final Reflection by John Ford, published the same year that Star Trek III would cement the pop culture image of the Klingons. In this scene a Klingon envoy is meeting with a wealthy Earth tycoon, Maxwell Grandisson the Third (this was written before Star Trek IV dropped that line about people in the 24th century not using money into the lore without any thought about how it would work). This man, Grandisson, is the leader of a "Back to Earth" movement that wants to do away with all this expensive and dangerous colonization of other planets bullshit in favor of building a paradise on Earth and he is trying to convince the Klingons to back his political campaign on the basis that if he wins there will be no need for conflict between their two peoples. The Klingon response to his overtures is worth thinking on...

"We have a word in our tongue, Komerex. Your translator has probably told you it means Empire, but what it truly means is the structure that grows. It has an opposite, Khesterex the structure that dies. We are taught by those you wish to receive your story that there are no other cultures than these and in all my years and all my travels I have seen nothing to indicate that my teaching was wrong. There are only Empires and Kuve."
Krenn saw Grandisson's long jaw go slack, he knew how the human's machine had translated that last word. "...and this is the change you say you wish to make in yourselves, is it?"

To me, this speaks to the core story/premise of Enterprise. At the start of the series Earth is well on it's way to becoming a post-scarcity society but humanity is also starting to lean toward the Khesterex side of things. A vassal to the Vulcans, a junior ally at best. The NX Program is the physical manifestation of a conscious decision not to sink into comfortable dependency. This isn't the end of the humanity's story where we live boringly ever after, it is the beginning of "To Boldly Go..."

...and it is by "boldly going where no man has gone before", by inserting themselves into the middle of galactic affairs as though they belong, that by the end of Season 3 Humanity has gone from an indulged vassal to regional player and full partner in a powerful 3-way alliance that would have never come about had this band of psychotic gun-monkeys not disrupted the status quo. It is a quintessentially "American" story in that it's both the story of a child culture supplanting its parent as Hegemon and deeply rooted in the frontier mythos. But it's also a more universally human story about how cultures rise, fall, and occasionally merge. At the start of the series the Vulcans are powerful but also stagnant. Too rigid to adapt to changing circumstances and too conservative to tolerate uncertainty or risk even when doing so is arguably necessary. Meanwhile Humanity is both staggeringly ignorant and boundlessly confident. A confidence buoyed in part by the fact that there is nothing anyone can threaten them with short of extinction that they haven't already done to themselves. By the end of the series the two have moderated each other and become the closest of allies. It's a story about finding that balance between realistically assessing your limitations but also having the sense of confidence, self-worth, and "fuck it we ball" attitude necessary to pursue greatness. A worthwhile message for not just for individuals but for entire cultures.

Which brings us to the Culture War angle.

A common critique I see leveled against conservative populists on this forum be is that they lack the intelligence and positive vision for the future necessary to attract "elite human capital". MAGA is obviously the central example here, defined as it is looking backwards to try and recapture a piece of what once was, but I've seen similar complaints leveled against Abe and the LDP in Japan, and as as characters like Javier Milei in Argentina. But something the critics don't seem to grasp is that positive vision or no, their messages resonate, they win elections, and their rallies draw passionate crowds because it's a better story than anything the other side has to offer. A question our resident anti-Populists are going to have to grapple with is what does "elite human capital" have to offer the base-model human other than growing social dysfunction and death via "managed decline"?

I still think we can get to a better future without a catastrophic hard reset but we can't do it with the sort of "Khesterex" thinking that seems to have become endemic to blue spaces. Grievance-mongering might stir up a crowd but gripes alone are not a solid foundation to build upon, nor are the likely to inspire anyone to greatness. If we are going to build a better future, we will need to get away from both the nostalgia of the right and the doubling down on failure that is the left. We need a unifying myth, and I feel like we might be in the early stages of figuring that out.

  • 1 see the 1996 movie Star Trek: First Contact
  • 2 see Enterprise Season 1 Episode 7 The Andorran Incident

Modern Trek is not my Trek, and that's okay. But the latest show is so clearly not for the older/original fans, and so clearly "Dawson's Creek In Space", that it's over-done. (Also, how Holly Hunter plays her character makes me want to slap the face off her.)

As well, if anyone thinks it's too gay and queer and multi-culti? Excuse you, it's packed to the gills with racism! I would have thought this was a parody, but "he/hymn/it/xe (and more neos)" seems (on the face of it) to be serious.

Oh noes they separated a mother and child? Yeah, because Mommy is a convicted criminal accomplice to murder and even AmeriKKKa doesn't send six year olds to jail with their criminal parent. Of course, the right thing to do is let all criminals off if they have kids, because you can't send the kid to jail, you can't separate a parent and child, so that only leaves letting the parent off scot-free (else you get headlines about ICE arresting and detaining a five year old as though they're acting like the child is the criminal, and not abandoned by family who refuse to take him):

The episode started out in a way that gave me some hope: portraying the 'justice' system of Starfleet as clearly unjust for separating a mother and child. I hoped that they might actually criticize America, but all of those themes and social commentary immediately got buried by 'cool action scenes' and 'funny YA show' bits.

Guy goes to military academy and they insist on a haircut? Brutal non-consensual attack!

Once they get to the Academy, he is sent though a portal that nonconsentually and with no warning cuts off his long hair. I cannot put into words what a violation this is. Again, it could have been a potent moment that shows the injustice that this character and what he is being subjected to. It certainly sets the tone for how Starfleet (and the narrative) treats this And it was just. Played off for laughs. "This silly teenager doesn't want to follow the rules of the military he was literally blackmailed into joining, it's funny that he had his hair cut randomly and without his consent." I am not the person to educate people on why Black hair is so important to handle well, do some research if you don't already know. That moment was where I went from thinking "This show is handling race badly" to "This show is racist."

Gosh, with a modern audience like this, how can it be anything but a smash hit?

EDIT: More seriously, for a show supposed to be set centuries in the future, it's weirdly "all the 21st century West Coast liberal talking points". Apparently we now have canonical drag queens, because of course SF of the 32nd century is still Progress Pride Flag Central. (Although, seems like the performer may indeed be a Trek fan, so good on that). It's just the anvil to the face nature of it all that is tiresome. I don't object to having a sensitive Klingon who just wants to study medicine! Of course not all Klingons, just like all historical societies with ruling warrior/kingly castes, were not all warriors, you had different castes as it were, so a doctor is perfectly fine career path. But on top that make him a refugee gay polycule kid? Sigh, when is he coming out as nonbinary otherkin?

I don't object to having a sensitive Klingon who just wants to study medicine

This wouldn't be out of place in the earlier Trek canon either: a good chunk of the Worf-centered episodes of TNG and DS9 focus on how to straddle "warrior culture" and "modern neoliberalism" to attempt to satisfy both, not always succeeding. Worf ends up teaching martial arts (Mok'bara) to crewmates, takes up prune juice as "a warrior's drink", and manages to be a questionable father to Alexander.

Honestly, some of the best Trek episodes are reflections on the human conditon like those.

If you think about it for five seconds, of course Klingon society has to have farmers and doctors and construction workers and all the rest of it. Even if it is a warrior-ruler society, they need people who work for them doing non-warrior stuff. Mr. "I'm a lover not a fighter" kid need not be spectacularly different, but the show can't resist piling on the agony to make the point about No, Seriously, We're Talking About Anti-Immigrant Racism In America.

Grew up in a refugee camp (because home planet was destroyed during The Burn), abandoned by both his dads in the polycule (er, what?) and now he just wants to watch birds and become a healer.

Knock yourself out, kid, would be classic Trek attitude here.

I didn't watch the show. What motivates such a character to attend Starfleet Academy of all things?

No freakin' idea. I can't watch this slop for more than seconds at a time, else I'll explode from apoplexy. It really is a teen show for teenagers, because functionally it's Starfleet High. We got yer bullies! We got yer nerds! We got yer Cool Principal! We got yer love triangles, figuring out romance, navigating relationships, and becoming an adult! We got yer Parental Issues by the bucketload in both Mommy and Daddy flavours!

We also have I ate my combadge and sweet Kahless in Sto'Vo'Kor, the only thing that makes sense of this entire morass is that this is not the real, actual, genuine Starfleet Academy for training future Starfleet officers, it's Remedial Education for the crayon-eaters. Hence why Principal Galboss who can't sit properly in a chair, see she's relatable to the kids who also can't sit straight, walk straight, or refrain from eating their combadges.

You're preaching to the choir.

I am constantly amazed how each new version scrapes that barrel bottom even thinner. New one is "we're a queer show for queer people, wait why is nobody watching? it must be racism and transphobia is why!"

Maybe people in this forum can help me:

I've got an 8 year old boy I'd like to introduce to Star Trek. I specifically want:

  1. To introduce him to the sci-fi ideas that shaped the 1960s-1990s and that all our current generation of scientists grew up with. (For example, he'll be growing up with personal LLM assistants as background noise, and I want him to see how fantastic this was to people at the time.)
  2. For him to internalize some of the leadership attitudes that Kirk/Picard/etc demonstrate. I don't know any other series (scifi or otherwise) where there are so many clear examples of how to effectively lead and motivate a team.

So my questions are:

  1. What's the right age to start with? Something like 13ish?
  2. And what episodes/movies should I "make" him watch? Wrath of Kahn seems like a decent stand-alone introduction to the whole franchise, but most of the other popular movies/episodes seem like they have too much "fan service" in them. I just watched a few "best of star trek" collection dvds, and all these episodes require way too much background knowledge about the universe to make sense. Something like Trouble with Tribbles, for example, could almost be a good introduction to the series for kids because of the cute tribble creatures, but you already have to understand that the franchise is about space exploration and colonizing planets and the prime directive and the war with klingons to actually make any sense of the setting.

What's the right age to start with? Something like 13ish?

That might be about right. My oldest started around then, and is still the biggest Star Trek fan among my kids. I thought TNG would be the smoothest introduction (and I may have been right - we've watched a bit of TOS and my daughters find Kirk annoying), but especially when he was around 10, my son thought that TNG was often too boring and sometimes (well, just the Borg episodes, as of Locutus) too scary to be enjoyable. But even my youngest daughter was picking Star Trek episodes for her turn at "movie night" back when she was only 8.

what episodes/movies should I "make" him watch?

We started with but skipped the vast majority of season 1 TNG (just skipping ahead to the best episodes), and honestly the exact watch list wasn't a big deal. Trek of that generation was mostly written to be episodic, with background knowledge helpful for adding nuance but with the most important exposition slipped (or sometimes crammed...) into each individual script. Occasionally an episode will be a 2-parter and you can't possibly skip the first part, occasionally an episode will be a "sequel" to a story like Moriarty or Picard's Flute (but of course in those cases you wouldn't want to skip the first part), but in general each episode stands alone well.

If you want to challenge yourself with some tricky choices, then you move on to Babylon 5. Also kind of a slow start in season 1, but in its case even the slower episodes more often than not packed in some characterization or backstory or foreshadowing or outright arcplot development that makes the later episodes much more enjoyable. We skipped the pilot and maybe half of the first season there, because I didn't want to waste too much of my kids' time if they decided they still didn't like the good parts of the show, and in hindsight (they all liked it) we skipped too much.

To introduce him to the sci-fi ideas that shaped the 1960s-1990s and that all our current generation of scientists grew up with.

Could I talk you into the 1950s and late 1940s? That was mostly a previous generation of scientists, but 8 is a great age for most of the Heinlein juveniles.

Whoa... I didn't know about the Heinlein juveniles. Thanks!

Seconding the recommendation of Heinlein's Juveniles, Star Beast and Farmer in the Sky are both excellent reads for a kid of that age.

For my part I got into trek around 9 or 10, the gateway drug was re-runs of the original series that one of our local stations would play along-side Lost In Space, Twilight Zone and a few others. Regarding specific episodes, A Piece of the Action, The Corbomite Maneuver, and Trouble With Tribbles all stick in my mind. From there I got into the TOS crew movies, practically wearing out our copy of Wrath of Kahn on VHS.

Additionally my grandad had a whole shelving unit full of old paperbacks in his study/man-cave that included a bunch of the Star Trek expanded universe books as well as a lot classic sci-fi. Stuff like Doc Smith's Lensmen books, Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom stories, and a bunch of Heinlein and Bradbury's early stuff. Grandad would let me check books out like a library and between those two vectors I was well and truly hooked.

I've tried to infect with my own kids with the Star Trek bug but it hasn't taken. That said over the last year or two, my eldest and a couple of their friends (all middle-school aged) have gotten really into Stargate, and it's clear from talking to them and watching them play that Stargate is to them what Trek was to me when I was their age, which is probably worth a post in itself.

What's the right age to start with? Something like 13ish?

"The Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve."

If you want something to tide him over until he is older, try Space Cases. It's basically Voyager for kids.

And what episodes/movies should I "make" him watch? Wrath of Kahn seems like a decent stand-alone introduction to the whole franchise, but most of the other popular movies/episodes seem like they have too much "fan service" in them. I just watched a few "best of star trek" collection dvds, and all these episodes require way too much background knowledge about the universe to make sense. Something like Trouble with Tribbles, for example, could almost be a good introduction to the series for kids because of the cute tribble creatures, but you already have to understand that the franchise is about space exploration and colonizing planets and the prime directive and the war with klingons to actually make any sense of the setting.

What's wrong with publication order? "The Cage", TOS, TAS, the first six movies, TNG, DS9, VOY, Generations, First Contact, Insurrection, Nemesis, Galaxy Quest, done.

That said, the first full episode of Star Trek I ever saw was "Blink of an Eye", which a Trekkie teacher of mine put on when I was in 10th grade; I fucking loved it, though I later learned it is basically just a remake of Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward. It helps that, much like an episode of Wagon Train, "Blink of an Eye" is actually the planet's story, with the crew of Voyager serving primarily as viewpoint characters; this means you do not need to know anything about them, or the wider setting.

What's wrong with publication order? "The Cage", TOS, TAS, the first six movies, TNG, DS9, VOY, Generations, First Contact, Insurrection, Nemesis, Galaxy Quest, done.

Only that this is like watching two hours of tv everyday for a year. That's way more tv than is appropriate for a kid.

"The Cage" was not published first! Part of it was filmed first, but it was broadcast much later!

And it's also not such a good place to begin.

I should have said production order, not publication order.

I am a firm believer that TOS should start with "The Cage" followed by "Where No Man Has Gone Before", rather than "The Man Trap" followed by "Charlie X".

Have to agree "Where No Man Has Gone Before" is a better opener. But "The Cage" isn't; it's less polished and about a completely different crew.

What's wrong with publication order? "The Cage", TOS, TAS, the first six movies, TNG, DS9, VOY, Generations, First Contact, Insurrection, Nemesis, Galaxy Quest, done.

Outside of missing ENT which I quite enjoy, I don't think this would have worked for me. I came back to it later and I love it all now, but when I was a pre-teen/teen in the 90s, there was reruns of all of the Star Trek show playing all the time on TV, and TOS, TNG and DS9 never had much interest for me. TOS because it looked stupid: the action is robotic and looked stupid, and the plots basically all felt like they boiled down to sufficiently advanced aliens act like gods, until Kirk says "nope" and somehow he'd end up clumsily wrestling with a goofy looking alien somewhere along the way. I know it hit different for kids in the 60s and 70s, but you'd need a kid with a specific interest in "retro" shows to enjoy TOS on its own now, which I would guess isn't too common unless you live in a bunker and have deprived them of modern media. TNG and DS9 didn't interest me because it seemed like non stop politics and relied on too much built up lore that I didn't care about.

I mean, shit, I was watching Star Trek as early as 8 years old on my lonesome. If they're into science fiction and have any sort of attention span, it's going to be hard to keep them away from that stuff.

Cut them loose with some of the more fun stuff in seasons 2 through 7 and see what happens. It'll build some foundations for them to appreciate the deeper stuff when they get older.

13ish is fine, but a sharp younger kid might like it earlier.

I have three suggestions for starting points.

As you suggested, Wrath of Khan is a good one to start with. the TOS movies, from two onwards (the first one might confuse as to why these characters coming out of retirement is a big deal), are detached enough from the series that they won't feel like you're missing half the plot if you just watch them on their own. They have enough action to keep a child's attention. The action is modern enough that it doesn't look goofy the way the action from the 60's does.

For my second suggestion, I'll go very much against the grain and suggest maybe the most divisive series as a starting point: Voyager. It is "my Trek" in the sense it's the one that introduced me properly to the series, and I posit it's a good starting point, because its concept inherently reduces the requirement of knowing the lore that was built up on, without discarding it wholesale either. Yes, it's "lesser" in that it's not as good an example of the virtues you would hope the show would demonstrate to the kids, but those virtues are still there. Janeway is not the greatest role model, but in most episodes she's a decent one. Sometimes she does a cheeky little war crime, but what Starfleet captain hasn't?

The Animated Series might also be a good starting point, especially if you want to start him earlier than 13. It's simpler, introduces to the universe, and while it hasn't aged all that well, I think it probably aged better than TOS has visually. Or maybe I just forgave it because I had different expectations of cartoons back then.

Introducing children to pop culture that you liked as a kid but is too old to be popular among kids today is usually a bad idea, regardless of whether you think it introduces him to any useful ideas. If you really think that old pop culture would benefit your kid, it would be a bad assumption to think that old pop culture that you liked is the best choice for that purpose. You should do research on 1960s-1990s shows and pick the ones with the best balance of merit and entertainment, not pick the ones that excited kid-you. It may turn out you should be showing your kid Gunsmoke instead of Star Trek: TOS.

If the kid is a scifi geek, or is clamoring to look at your TOS blu-rays or otherwise showing obvious interest, of course that doesn't apply.

I started watching Star Trek at 8-9, so if your son is interested I don't see any reason to wait. As far as specific recommendations of what to watch, these are things I remember enjoying as a kid:

  • Operation: Annihilate (TOS)
  • The Conscience Of The King (TOS)
  • Space Seed (TOS)
  • This Side Of Paradise (TOS)
  • A Taste Of Armageddon (TOS)
  • The Best Of Both Worlds (TNG)
  • The Royale (TNG)
  • All Good Things (TNG)
  • Star Trek IV, VI, and Generations (fair warning: when I was a kid I thought that the "double dumbass on you" line in ST4 was hilarious, and went around saying it for a bit until my parents straightened me out)

And here are some that I think a kid might enjoy or display some of the virtues you mentioned:

  • The Corbomite Maneuver (TOS)
  • The Squire Of Gothos (TOS)
  • The City On The Edge Of Forever (TOS)
  • A Piece Of The Action (TOS)
  • Return To Tomorrow (TOS)
  • Qpid (TNG)
  • Data's Day (TNG)
  • Elementary, Dear Data (TNG)
  • The Ensigns Of Command (TNG)
  • The Survivors (TNG)
  • A Fistful Of Datas (TNG)
  • Starship Mine (TNG)

Mostly these are fun, swashbuckling episodes but there are obviously some thinkier ones in there as well. I do think that even the more serious episodes will be fun if he's enjoying Trek, but maybe don't start him on those.

I didn't list any DS9 or Voyager not because I don't like them, but I think DS9 isn't quite what you're looking for here (as much as I love it). It tends to be darker and more serialized, not the fairly standalone and unambiguously heroic stories I get the sense you're looking for. And I just don't know Voyager well enough to recommend any episodes.

Appropriate age is going to depend a lot on maturity and attention span, but certainly I'd think no later than 13. I'd probably skip TOS entirely to begin with and start with the TNG pilot. Then skip to Measure of a Man, then some more plums from seasons 3-7, and the finale. If it takes, he'll fill in the rest of the episodes on his own volition and want more.

Measure of a Man

I'm pretty sure this is the worst episode possible as an intro. It's got lots of great philosophical nuggets to chew on, but there's no reason to identify with why Picard/Riker are so troubled by disassembling a "mere machine" if you haven't actually built a relationship with Data yet by watching him struggle to learn to be human. Without understanding that background, the JAG and cybernetics professor are "obviously right" and the whole episode is boring.

My problem is that all of the recommendations on trek sites I've seen are like this: they are geared towards the "best episodes for experienced fans" rather than "the best episodes for introducing the series".

I think both the pilot and the episode itself does enough to bring that background. You could, I guess, watch Skin of Evil after the pilot to cement data's personality and account for the disappearance of Yar, or Elementary, Dear Data to show his more whimsical side (which also sets up the clever Moriarty episode later). The good thing about TNG generally though is that it was conceived and written as an almost 100% episodic show, so while episodes can benefit from familiarity with the characters and the world lore, it is generally not necessary. That's one reason it was very popular in syndication.

we can't do it with the sort of "Khesterex" thinking that seems to have become endemic to blue spaces

MAGA is obviously the central example here, defined as it is looking backwards to try and recapture a piece of what once was

I don't think this is the right frame.

OK, I guess if the Western political class was made up solely of EU or UK officials, there would be no productivity growth, just anemic faux-technocratic tweaks, Nudging even though Nudging has been debunked... Technocracy without technology. From that point of view it's declinism.

But there would be large and ever growing numbers of migrants. Is that not a radical policy, an ambitious vision to reshape the world? Spain legalized 500K illegals this week. Australia imported about 300K legal immigrants last year in a country of 27 million. The left have big ambitions for growth in the size of the state, fiscally as well as demographically. The left are big fans of renewable energy too, they want more solar panels and wind farms. Some favour war to impose their values overseas, war against homophobic or racist autocracies who deny their people Human Rights. From a certain point of view, some are imperialists.

Is Trump opposed to new technology, new ideas? No, he's a big fan of AI and crypto, he's eager to have new investments, new battleships, the biggest and the best. Not a big fan of electric cars or windmills, he prefers oil and gas. Trump's desire for overseas expansion is manifest. Right-wing populism has close ties to jingoism and imperial expansion historically and today.

If we are going to build a better future, we will need to get away from both the nostalgia of the right and the doubling down on failure that is the left

One man's nostalgia is another man's 'this is obviously correct and good, the more good the better!' another man's failure is 'we clearly didn't try hard enough (this is correct and good), all these ____ists and Russian bots were in the way'

Each side has their own unifying myths. The left have a vision of evil white supremacy, white colonialism, racist capitalism... a world divided between whites and People Of Colour (with some subdivisions for educated/ignorant whites, model minorities, LGBT, intersectionalism). There's some variation between pursuing social democracy or socialism/communism and liquidating landlords. There are some on the left trying to push for more embrace of technology: how can you have fully automated luxury gay space communism without data centres? But by and large, the left's unifying myths unite the left.

The right's unifying myths are somewhat more diverse: good white supremacy, Judeo-Christian values, 'we abolished slavery', rallying behind the flag, market capitalism as an end in itself, leftists being gay (pejorative) and cringe... But they are also myths of the right.

I don't think you can unify left and right, only align everyone to be on the left or the right.

Trump gave us Space Force, that's not Khesterex.

Nudging even though Nudging has been debunked

Nudging in the economics sense has been debunked? At least in the form presented in Nudge (by Thaler and Sunstein), I highly doubt that.

Well... that's an interesting post! As a fellow Star Trek nerd I'm conflicted on how to respond. You've made so many different, interesting points that I'm disoriented.

On the Enterprise series, personally I still hate it. I hate the opening theme song (trading the classy dramatic music of previous series for a cheesy pop song), I hate the way it retconned an earlier ship named Enterprise, I hate Scott Bakula as an actor, I hate how the showrunners were obviously running out of ideas, and I especially hate how they were trying to shoehorn in then-current year politicals about 9/11 into Star Trek. But I suppose it does have its place as the last of its era, and as something of a time capsule for early 2000s network TV.

I agree with you that Original Series Klingons deserve more respect. They get a lot of shit because of their appearance (which admittedly does look like a weird racial caricature of Turkish or Mongolian people, plus hilariously low-budget). But they're written as intelligent and respect-worthy adversaries. In many ways, not that different from Kirk. When they're first introduced Kirk is trying to blend in among a planet of pacifists, but the Klingons instantly sus him out as being different and more like themselves. They both share contempt for the pacifists, even when it's revealed that they're secretly a more advanced race. And the Klingons are very much a match for the Federation and a huge threat. Later series make them look cool, but act kinda goofy, just blundering around with swords and being stupid. "Samurai/vikings in space" turn out to be no match at all for hyper advanced humans.

Culture War angle: basically, I agree. But this is admittedly a spicy hot take. Most people take it for granted that the ideal utopian future is one of perpetual peace. But why should that be the case? We could openly embrace our identity as an Empire in the mold of the Roman Empire. End birthright citizenship, and make citizenship by blood only. Embrace war as a standard way of life. We will fight perpetual wars, to make ourselves stronger. Some die off, but the rest become even stronger. The reward of winning war is a continuous flow of resources and services, to make ourselves rich, instead of forcing us to have an underclass stuck doing dirty jobs that no one else wants, or an excess of unemployed unwanted men with no purpose in life. Trump's recent rhetoric on Venezuela seems to be a step in that direction- he says that he did it partially for security, but also partially just to take the oil and make us all richer. We'll see if that's actually the case, but I can appreciate the vision.

What happens when you run out of inferior people to pillage and loot?

Also, who exactly provides the "services" won in war if not the underclass that you defeated?

Capitalism's greatest virtue was enabling continuous growth through continuous competition. Making competition physical either creates a real risk of winning and stagnating, lacking enemies, or you have to make the entire war a 1984-esque sham.

Also also, war isn't even fucking fun in a rah rah primal kind of way anymore. You don't get to see the whites of the enemy's eyes. Unless you're stomping primitives through vastly superior firepower in a way that can hardly be called war and certainly isn't edifying, all you get is cowering in a foxhole, waiting for a drone to pinpoint your location and either get you shelled or drop a grenade on you.

Well you don't kill them all. Don't commit mass genocide, that's barbaric and wasteful.

(@JeSuisCharlie this is also my reply to you)

Three models I can think of in (relatively) modern times are the late Victorian British empire, the Antebellum American South, and the post-Stalin USSR.

(I feel compelled to mention at this point that I'm just offering this as a thought experiment, using all three of those plus the Klingons from Star Trek as a very loose example. All three of those have some obvious horrifying parts, and I particularly despise slavery)

The thing that all three had in common was that, although they were a heavily militarized society with many of their upper class men serving in the military, they weren't particularly interested in expanding their territory. They already had all the territory they could possibly use—arguably too much. Of course, to some extent they did go to war with other nations, but most of their normal military action was either:

(a) preparing ever greater amounts of force to make sure they never had to go to war (the best weapon is one that never has to be used) or (b) internal force against the tribute states of their empire (Czech or Afghanistan for the Soviets, India for the British, Blacks and American Indians for the Antebellum South)

Of course, the most obvious benefit of such an empire is the resourcees it provides. Natural resources like oil and minerals, but also humans to do all the work that no one else wants to do: work the farmland in harsh rural areas for example, or low-wage service work in the cities. In our capitalistic meritocracy, this leads to an endless dog-eat-dog struggle as everyone is in competition for the "good jobs," leading everyone in fear that they'll be stuck with one of those lesser jobs, and no one will offer them any sympathy—it's their fault for not doing better in school, or hustling harder, or something like that. With the empire model, things are much more clear—you're born into the lower caste, and you stay there, so there's a little more stability to build a culture there and offer some stability.

In our society, military service is usually offered as a path out of poverty for the lower class, while those in the upper class either making a token gesture of it (like the royal family in England) or skip it entirely (like Trump). In the "empire" model, it instead acts as a test of merit and one of the most respected careers, with many of the upper class choosing to make their career there. After leaving the military, they then get a huge advantage for later careers in things like law and politics, which seems a lot more fair and just than offering them to kids who got a high LSAT score and went to top law schools with no prior career experience. Or they can simply retire and live the rest of their life as a gentleman of leisure, with their military pension and discipline keeping them on a respectable path, which is much better than the aimless NEETS of today who have ample leisure time but nothing to show for it.

I would certainly not expect it to be "fun," and I'm aware there would be a heavy price paid in blood for all of this. But it might lead us back to an actually "great" society, where people have a sense that they are part of something truly grand and have an important role to play. The current vision of "you are all residents of an economic zone, go forth and maximize GDP" is somewhat... lacking in its appeal to our nobler spirits.

The South actually was pretty interested in expanding its territory. I think in a scenario where they successfully separate from the United States they probably end up with Cuba and possibly large parts of Mexico and South America.

As I understand it, that was mostly for political reasons. They felt outnumbered and wanted more congressional votes to survive.

Political power of the slave states was a major consideration, but they also contended (I think sincerely) that if slavery was not permitted to expand, the system would collapse.

The establishment alone of the policy of the Republican party, that no more slave States are to be admitted into the Union, and that slavery is to be forever prohibited in the Territories (the common property of the United States), must, of itself, at no distant day, result in the utter ruin and degradation of most, if not all of the Gulf States. Alabama has at least eight slaves to every square mile of her tillable soil. This population outstrips any race on the globe in the rapidity of its increase; and if the slaves now in Alabama are to be restricted within her present limits, doubling as they do once in less than thirty years, the children are now born who will be compelled to flee from the land of their birth, and from the slaves their parents have toiled to acquire as an inheritance for them, or to submit to the degradation of being reduced to an equality with them, and all its attendant horrors. Our people and institutions Must be secured the right of expansion, and they can never submit to a denial of that which is essential to their very existence.

http://civilwarcauses.org/al-nc.htm

Hmm, that's interesting. It seems like they were afraid of runaway population growth in their slaves, to the point where the entire south would just be overpopulated with slaves if they weren't allowed to expand territory. Suffice to say that kind of population growth is no longer a concern these days.

Most people take it for granted that the ideal utopian future is one of perpetual peace. But why should that be the case? We could openly embrace our identity as an Empire in the mold of the Roman Empire. End birthright citizenship, and make citizenship by blood only. Embrace war as a standard way of life. We will fight perpetual wars, to make ourselves stronger. Some die off, but the rest become even stronger.

Starship Troopers explored this concept seriously as well (disregard the movie, which may be fun but has little to do with the book). In the book, the franchise is only extended to people who undertake hazardous and/or unpleasant duty on behalf of the human federation. A right to be able to do this is guaranteed, and they will even invent difficult tasks for someone with disabilities, but the point is to ensure real skin in the game for the franchise-holders. The book also discusses the concept of human expansion as a sort of evolutionary force.

We could openly embrace our identity as an Empire in the mold of the Roman Empire. End birthright citizenship, and make citizenship by blood only.

That doesn't sound particularly Roman. More Roman would be offering citizenship to any migrants who joined the army to conquer Cuba or Greenland, on the condition that they remain there afterwards and helped develop the new territories.

From the Wiki link:

Story editor D.C. Fontana said she thought the Romulans were much more interesting than the Klingons, but the Klingons were chosen as the regular adversaries of the series because they did not need any special make-up like the pointed ears for the Romulans.

Yeah, if we're doing 60s Cold War analogies, the Klingons were the Russians and the Romulans were the Chinese.

And Roddenberry was definitely doing '60s Cold War analogies.

Oh, yeah. But he also wanted that balance between "human nature has done terrible things" and "but we can change, here's a vision for the future of optimism and hope". The Federation works for its happy ending, which is why the puerile easy nihilism of over-using the Mirror Universe and Section 31 annoys me. "Guess what, suckers, your shiny future is built on grubby spy manipulation!" and then we get Picard etc. which are then "guess what, suckers, your shiny future is obsessed with late 20th century/mid 21st century SJW tropes as expressed in terms college student Marxists can understand!"

This really depends on which era and episode you're talking about. They did say that the Romulans were distantly related to the Vulcans but less friendly, so some people made a vague analogy to that with Vulcans=Japanese and Romulans=Chinese... but then the crew meets the Romulans and they're just space Romans, with all sorts of references to the ancient Romans. After that they only showed up a few times in later TOS episodes, mostly sidelined behind the Klingons. Meanwhile there's Sulu and Chekov on the bridge, as an actual, literal Japanese/Russian man, showing how the humans in the future had overcome these sort of petty national conflicts.

Later, the movie Star Trek 6 made the Klingons a heavy-handed metaphor for the USSR and the end of the cold war, revolving around a complicated spy plot. But after that, TNG made them more like space Vikings who looked down on any sort of treachery, while the Romulans became the sneaky spy enemy. So I think the analogy is pretty garbled and there's room for the writers to do whatever they want.

It was never solidly "X is a metaphor for Y in our world" (except for the few Very Special Episodes about race or whatever) so there is always room for interpretation. Definitely the movies made the Klingons more villainous ("you killed my son!") than the show had done, so TNG with Worf was a correction to that.

Currently, what with the conflicting explanations for why TOS Klingons and modern Klingons look different, and now with this mess that I refuse to recognise as genuine Trek, they're all over the place. I go to my happy place and imagine that Disco Trek onwards are all happening in the Reboot AU timeline and not in Prime timeline so Vulcan still exists, Vulcans are not raging racists, and Starfleet is not full of narcissists and failures for whom every day is Pride Day or else they are being oppressed by being required to act like professionals.

Oh, Enterprise burned me so badly. I was delighted to hear Scott Bakula was cast as Archer. Then they gave me "a well-balanced captain, he has a chip on both shoulders", turned the Vulcans into racist xenophobe ableists and I don't know what-all else, that goddamn dog, and Trip Tucker.

No thank you!

Then they seemed to go on a spiral of "you thought the last re-imagining was bad? Hold my Romulan ale" and we got Disco Trek with mushroom-powered space ships and the biggest Mary Sue of Mary Sues, Michael (I'm a gal but I got a guy's name, ain't I daring?) Burnham.

Making "Spock's Brain" not the worst ever Trek episode produced for twenty years now.

I recently rewatched a bunch of Berman-era Trek including a good chunk of Season 1 Enterprise in part because I needed a pallet cleanser from the latest Kurtzman nonsense, and pop-song aside I feel that it is unfairly maligned. See the various re-dubbs of the Enterprise opening using other series' scores

TNG was "my Trek" but even I have to admit that the first season was pretty rough, if we compare season 1 of Enterprise to season 1 of TNG I'd argue that the former acquits itself well.

Season one of TNG was trying a little too hard to copy original TOS, to the point of remaking some episodes from the parent show. Once they got their own cast and setting established, and ventured out to do original stories, it was way better.

I really, really wanted Enterprise to work because I thought going back to the early days of the Federation and how it was built up was a great idea. The struggles, the coming together of the different founding members we knew from later series, the history behind it all. Instead we got decontamination gel rubdowns where any alien microbes presumably died of second-hand embarrassment.

I wanted to give Enterprise a chance. The soft rock-jazz AOR fusion warbling of the theme song took me aback a bit, but I soldiered on.

Then we got "the fucking idiot* showrunners made it canon that this is not a bad shitty joke, it is now established in the Trekverse that Humans literally smell, so far as Vulcans are concerned, and they have to wear nasal filters to be around us".

I could not believe, over several episodes, that no this was not a shitty joke some dumb Human (Tucker) was trying to make a running joke, it was to be taken as real true fact of the setting.

Then we had Archer going to go to war (or a diplomatic incident) over his dumb dog where a bunch of aliens who had never seen a dog before and had no idea what kind of animal it was neglected to warn him that some plant on their world would give poor doggy-dums the equivalent of an allergic reaction.

The stupid, stupid, stupid attempts at fanservice sexiness (but not too sexy, and let's pretend that you treat radiation by rubbing gel on your half-naked partner. Yeah, hard science for the win!)

I liked Reed. I liked Hoshi. I was willing to give T'Pol a go, even though they plainly had her in the Seven of Nine catsuit and heels role, until they infected her with the mind-controlling Ceti eel and diverted what little character she had apart from being the sexpot to "Imma rebel against everything Vulcan and be 200% pro-Archer, pro-Humans and pro-romance with stinky Human Tucker".

It's a toss-up whom I loathe more, Tucker or Phlox, but given that Phlox is such an insufferable pain in the backside I'd be happy with an episode where they blew up Denobula (they blew up Vulcan, damn them, in the franchise but they couldn't destroy this lair of prats?)

My viewing dropped from "it's new Trek, that's every week sorted!" to "occasional if I remember" and ended with the first whispers of the Time war or whatever that plot was, when they decided they'd re-do Voyager's Year of Hell (the most popular season for that show) and re-cast Archer in the Janeway Action Hero mould. At this period, the Federation doesn't even have working transporters for people, but they're going up against a civilisation that can manipulate time? That's bows and arrows against nuclear missiles. I noped out because Braga and Berman and their bloody love of convoluted time travel episodes, plus some things are just beyond suspension of disbelief, and I didn't like any of the characters or setting enough to stick with the show.

*Yes, I am salty about this. It's reducing Trek to the level of "jokes twelve year old boys would think funny".

The thing that always really annoyed me about Enterprise was the decision to come up with a canon explanation for why the Klingon look changed. Just no. It was done for real world reasons, the audience is capable of rolling with it, move on. There's no need for a convoluted explanation, or indeed to acknowledge the change at all (unless it's to wink at the audience like in Trials And Tribble-ations).

I think the funniest meta-solution would have been to have Micheal Dorn spend the episode in ToS-style makeup.

Embrace war as a standard way of life. We [whites (presumably)] will fight perpetual wars, to make ourselves stronger. Some die off, but the rest become even stronger.

…this is TND with extra steps. I mean, you’re totally allowed to argue for the total dispossession of and presumed eventual extinction of the non-white/east asian peoples of the earth, but that is indeed the proximate outcome of such a Darwinian process.

That doesn't sound Roman. That sounds Greek, particularly Athenian or Macedonian(Sparta preferred foreign bribes over directly extracting tribute).

End birthright citizenship, and make citizenship by blood only.

I agree that "the Franchise" is too important to to entrust to accidents of birth which is why, if we are going to openly embrace empire, I would say that we ought borrow a page from the late-Republic / early-Empire and go full Heinlein. Tie citizenship and voting rights to military service or at least being a revenue-producing taxpayer. We want voters who feel invested, and granting citizenship at birth, be it by blood or by soil, has the opposite effect.

As for the rest, I have the same questions for you as @sun_the_second.

But why should that be the case? We could openly embrace our identity as an Empire in the mold of the Roman Empire. End birthright citizenship, and make citizenship by blood only. Embrace war as a standard way of life. We will fight perpetual wars, to make ourselves stronger. Some die off, but the rest become even stronger.

Even assuming it works and we never come across a power that manages to beat us or disrupt us in a significant manner (there's a reason peace is the default), genetic engineering and technology is multiple times more efficient for this purpose.

The reward of winning war is a continuous flow of resources and services, to make ourselves rich, instead of forcing us to have an underclass stuck doing dirty jobs that no one else wants, or an excess of unemployed unwanted men with no purpose in life.

Because we already have a better method, it's called markets. They're naturally efficient and have consistently proven themselves to be better than centrally controlled economies. It's one of the reasons why even slavery has died off too, the free market is simply far more efficient than wasting resources on enforcement of what essentially becomes a mini form of a centrally controlled economy. Slave ownership helped to keep the American south in the past while markets industrialized the North and made them richer.

The empire model didn't go away because of morals. If that was the case, then the empires would have outcompeted the moral pussies who ceded power and they wouldn't be gone to begin with. The empire model is gone because it is inferior to the market. You notice how the three examples you gave of modern empires all failed?

Three models I can think of in (relatively) modern times are the late Victorian British empire, the Antebellum American South, and the post-Stalin USSR.

The British empire kept losing territory and power, not just the US but plenty of other colonies. The American South lost to the North. The USSR racked up loss after loss until it fell apart. Over and over again the empire model is filled with losers.

The market model keeps winning. The US, one of the earliest and most ardent embracers of capitalism who largely kept war away from us is the greatest and most powerful country in the world. While Europe was ruined by war, we innovated and grew. The only thing now that is even close is China, and that's despite them having significantly more human capital to rely on because they insist on self sabotage with communism.

You're making the "end of history" argument ala Fukuyama. 20 years ago I would have agreed with you, but I think we're starting to see the cracks in this sort of market-focused liberal democratic model. Plumeting birth rates, rising social problems, and a general sense that people are not as good as they used to be. Technology is very good at solving market problems like "how can we target people with ads," but not so good at actually enhancing human lives. And genetic engineering has yet to overcome basic human differences, eg men and women are still different despite the best efforts of feminists and trans activists to erase those differences. Ditto the racial differences.

The British empire kept losing territory and power, not just the US but plenty of other colonies. The American South lost to the North. The USSR racked up loss after loss until it fell apart. Over and over again the empire model is filled with losers.

So what? The US has also lost lots of wars. Just a few years ago we had a humiliating retreat from Afghanistan after 20 years of failing to accomplish anything there. It doesn't matter. The nice thing about being a big, powerful military empire is that you can afford to lose wars. Losing some random territory in Africa was hardly an existential threat to the British Empire- even losing their American colonies wasn't. The southern planter caste lost their slaves, but they kept their land and went right back to their traditional way of life after the war ended, just paying the former slaves a small amount. Even now they make up a disproportionate share of US military officers. And while the USSR fell apart (due to economic reasons, not from war—it's kind of amazing that they kept their empire running as long as they did when it was so ramshackle), Russia kept its nukes, its space program, and a lot of its power. Its former KGB leader became president. Its currently at war in Ukraine to regain its lost territory, and it will probably win despite the west sending significant aid to Ukraine. It's not just some minor footnote in history!

Then of course there's China, which seems to be charting its own unique path with both centralized state control and dynamic markets. I don't even know what to say there, except that it's clearly a rebuke to the idea that liberal free-market capitalistic democracy is the only model that will work from now on.

You're making the "end of history" argument ala Fukuyama. 20 years ago I would have agreed with you, but I think we're starting to see the cracks in this sort of market-focused liberal democratic model. Plumeting birth rates, rising social problems, and a general sense that people are not as good as they used to be.

Even if/when there's problems, is there any indication that the war hungry empire wannabe nations are fixing any of these? Russia has been killing off hundreds of thousands of their young men trying to take even a small portion of nearby territory.

China is probably the only working example whatsoever and that's still because Deng Xiaoping the so called "number one capitalist roader" introduced market reform to them and allows them to actually meaningfully grow. And even then they're still fucked. Even just among the other majority chinese Nations, China is the poorest per capita. They just make up for it through sheer numbers.

Technology is very good at solving market problems like "how can we target people with ads," but not so good at actually enhancing human lives.

Technology cooks your food, gets you from one place to another, brings you entertainment, saves your life and all sorts of other things. You have more jesters (comedians) available at the press of a single button than even the richest and most powerful kings would have had through their whole life just by turning on YouTube. You can listen to and watch the best stories by the best bards around the world with barely any effort. You can travel long distances without needing a stinky awful horse. I can cook delicious meals that some poor Victorian boy would never get to taste. Every single meal filled with spices and herbs that they've never even heard of. Thanks to restaurants, I don't even have to cook them either! And thanks to delivery, I don't even have to leave my home to have food beyond the imagination of prior centuries. Even many poorer Americans can access these wonders nowadays, I have a poorer friend from a rural county nearby I met in school whose family has a PS5 and PSVR. They are "poor" and have virtual reality technology just in their home casually. And just ask the basic question of what are the ads even for? For things people want to buy to enhance their life.

Markets are making the sci fi dreams of the yesteryear real and all anyone can do is complain, psychology is incredible.

Even if/when there's problems, is there any indication that the war hungry empire wannabe nations are fixing any of these? Russia has been killing off hundreds of thousands of their young men trying to take even a small portion of nearby territory.

Well, I haven't done a robust statistical analysis of this, but there does seem to be a trned where the more war-hungry nations have a higher fertility rate. Africa and the Middle East most especially. Israel also, and they might be the best example of what I'm thinking of- they seem to have accepted that they'll just be at war in Gaza forever, never going full genocide but never finding a peaceful solution either. The US isn't very warlike, but we are somewhat more warlike than Europe or East Asia, and correspondingly have a higher fertility rate. Russia is admittedly an outlier, but I think they're just slowly finding their way forward after the absolute devastation of the USSR breakup in the 90s.

China is probably the only working example whatsoever and that's still because Deng Xiaoping the so called "number one capitalist roader" introduced market reform to them and allows them to actually meaningfully grow. And even then they're still fucked. Even just among the other majority chinese Nations, China is the poorest per capita. They just make up for it through sheer numbers.

China really needs to be judged on a curve. Remember they went through the century of humiliation, followed by Mao just absolutely ruining whatever was left with his retarded policies. The fact that they still exist at all is incredible, and they seem to be quickly making up lost ground.

Technology cooks your food, gets you from one place to another, brings you entertainment, saves your life and all sorts of other things.

Sure, there's obviously some good uses for technology. I just dispute that technology on its own can make people happy or give us meaning in life. As you noted, even poor people now have plenty of access to technology, so we don't need to be rich to enjoy it. This is going past what we can prove with statistics, but my impression of most poor people in the US is not that they want more technology, but a deeper meaning in their life. Put another way- they want social capital, not technological capital.

...and there's something to be said for having an actual human cook food for you or provide live entertainment, instead of a robot and a screen. Nothing I've ever watched on a screen is as memorable to me as some of the events I've seen in person from a real human.

Well, I haven't done a robust statistical analysis of this, but there does seem to be a trned where the more war-hungry nations have a higher fertility rate.

I havent either and wouldn't know the cause if so, but your examples also match up with the "poor countries have more kids" idea as well so if there's any relation it could be that war hunger makes us poorer by being less efficient and being poorer makes us fuck more.

The east asia hypothesis falls apart pretty quick if you consider South Korea is still prepared for a war, just with a long ceasemate for peace currently. And China is ramping up against Taiwan for decades now.

China really needs to be judged on a curve. Remember they went through the century of humiliation, followed by Mao just absolutely ruining whatever was left with his retarded policies. The fact that they still exist at all is incredible, and they seem to be quickly making up lost ground.

Well yes that's the point, Mao along with the other commies fucked things up and it took Deng Xiaoping's market reforms to make them even close to the capitalist competition of Singapore and Taiwan, despite having a massive advantage in population.

Are you the Feral Historian?

If so many thanks and all my impressiveness, that channel is full of has absolutely fascinating takes on media and culture!

The post certainly sounded an awful lot like FH. But might just be an FH watcher giving us an abridged version of the relevant video?

It's almost a direct quotation of this video from 7 to 12 minutes, without ever mentioning the video exists:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Q8qHPNpGOcQ?si=dx4X8bt-EeZD-00f

I am Charlie.

novel The Final Reflection by John Ford

As a total tangent, John M. Ford has one of the strangest bibliographies of any novelist out there. The Dragon Waiting is an excellent fantasy/historical fiction that more people should read, but he also wrote 2 Star Trek novels, a coming-of-age story involving elves in Chicago, a scholarly cold war thriller about a lost Marlowe manuscript (Scholars of Night, a bit dated but another good one of his), a space opera, and a vaguely cyberpunk thing.

"We have a word in our tongue, Komerex. Your translator has probably told you it means Empire, but what it truly means is the structure that grows. It has an opposite, Khesterex the structure that dies. We are taught by those you wish to receive your story that there are no other cultures than these and in all my years and all my travels I have seen nothing to indicate that my teaching was wrong. There are only Empires and Kuve."

Ratzel and Kjellen wrote important books about this.

Great assessment of the Enterprise setting. “And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning ‘That path leads ever down into stagnation.’”

But you completely lose me at the CW bits.

they lack the intelligence and positive vision for the future necessary to attract "elite human capital".

Elites don’t demand either of those things. The traditional substitutes are money and power. Conservatives are quite willing and able to reward elites with such; populists are not. Intellectual and technocrat discomfort with MAGA was directly proportional to the amount of time it spent reminding them that they were class enemies.

In fact, this class consciousness was an essential part of MAGA’s positive vision. America is supposed to be great. We beat all our rivals, so what gives? It must be the liberal, coastal elites. Get them out of power so we normal Americans can resume our upward trajectory.

what does "elite human capital" have to offer the base-model human other than growing social dysfunction and death via "managed decline"?

Wild material prosperity is a good start. Really, the question is absurd unless you draw a very unintuitive box around “elite human capital.” Purging your best and brightest is not conducive to scientific or cultural wealth.

It doesn’t appear to prevent social dysfunction, either. There is a direct line from the Chinese intellectual purges to the starvation of millions of peasants. Then China had to redevelop its own oligarchic class before it could play in the big leagues. Hollowing out institutions comes with consequences.

we can't do it with the sort of "Khesterex" thinking that seems to have become endemic to blue spaces.

Wait, wait.

You gestured at all those examples of conservative populism, but now it’s “blue spaces” at fault? I don’t think you’ve properly made the case. Presumably, you’re thinking of critical theory, reparations, the intellectual backlash against America. But what you’re describing is just populism. Swap the word “blue” and you’d have the standard criticism of MAGA. It gripes, it does damage, but it has yet to build anything that lasts.

The traditional substitutes are money and power.

...I think you left off a third element, which is "immunity to consequences." There's lots of ways to get money and power. There are few ways to get or wield money and power that are protected from consequences deriving from the getting and the wielding, and almost all those ways involve "be an elite" among them. Include this element, and the hostility toward elites you correctly identify with gains a heaping helping of necessary context. Our elites have almost completely insulated themselves from negative consequences arising from their wielding of money and power, and the resentment this lack of accountability breeds is probably not something the present system can or should survive.

Wild material prosperity is a good start.

Do you believe elites have delivered wild material prosperity? Does the current generation understand that it is living amid wild material prosperity? If not, why not? Was Mangione mistaken? Are his fans in the public and the press and the justice system aware of that fact?

Like, the basic problem with the anti-populist defense of elites is that elites by definition are the people running things, and we can look at the world around us to assess how they're actually performing. So we repeatedly get, as you offer here, vague appeals to how wonderful things are in this best of all possible worlds, which die a death the moment you compare them to the PANIC PANIC PANIC elites themselves observably resort to in order to goad the populace down their preferred policy chute, into their preferred policy captive-bolt-gun.

The public at large believed that "police shooting unarmed black men" was a crisis, because Elites spent a decade intentionally generating the illusion of such a crisis. But the largest spike ever recorded in violent crime was actually real, and was very clearly a direct consequence of the public reaction to that elite-generated illusion.

And so for Education, and the Afghan war, and the GWOT generally, and the criminal justice system generally, and for offshoring manufacturing annd arguably for the economy generally, for the whole of the Trans Rights issue, for the LGBT movement in at least a large part, the COVID response, immigration and on and on and on.

Really, the question is absurd unless you draw a very unintuitive box around “elite human capital.” Purging your best and brightest is not conducive to scientific or cultural wealth.

I can't find the X.com link at the moment to the academic lady with a prestigious fellowship, arguing in an interview that reporting child abuse is racist. So instead, I'll note that I disagree that our present elites are in fact "our best", and that intelligence is very clearly orthogonal to goodness.

We straight-up cannot afford these people. They have to go, and if they do not go peacefully they will absolutely go violently, and much that we value will go with them, and that will still be preferable to the ruin of letting them continue to run things.

they lack the intelligence and positive vision for the future necessary to attract "elite human capital".

Elites don’t demand either of those things

You're mixing up terminology here. The elites are people with actual power. "Elite human capital" are a bunch of influencers with status anxiety, a Joffrey Baratheon complex, and a hate boner for populism.

If that were the definition, why would conservative populists want to attract them?

I’m pretty sure that I’m using it as the OP did, which is much closer to the first sense.

Because they're Elite Human Capital, duh. They think they're all that, and populists not seeing their worth is evidence of how incapable they are.

The term was popularized by Walt Bismarck, an Alt-Right guy who, in the wake of the Charlottesville crashout, went to some all-white small town, and later wrote a substack seething about the normies there not being interested in his brand of politics. I think one of our posters even found the article, and was indirectly responsible for it going viral. Later it was picked up by people like Richard Hanania, and Alexander Turok.

https://www.waltbismarck.com/p/why-im-no-longer-a-white-nationalist

Under "Reason #3"

In 2018 I moved from a racially diverse swing state in the Sun Belt to a homogenous red state up in corn country. This decision was largely motivated by politics—I was looking to retreat to an imagined Hyperborea free of crime and degeneracy where my volk had political autonomy.

The next two years were the most miserable of my life. But they were also among the most instructive, and ultimately were what made me leave WN on an emotional level.

To put it bluntly, most of my white neighbors and coworkers basically resembled hobbits. They had no ambition to them, nor any aspirations of greatness. Nor did they think about the world in a dynamic way—the more educated among them certainly stayed informed about the wider world, but they largely took it for granted that their immediate universe was a static place where nothing would ever happen.

And the horrifying thing is that’s how they liked it.

Normal white Midwesterners don't get his will to power ideology.

Also their women do not like him and he doesn't seem to actually like white women. Really hampering his aspirations to make white children. So he pivots to rationalizing how having kids with Hispanics is okay.

Normal white Midwesterners don't get his will to power ideology.

Also their women do not like him and he doesn't seem to actually like white women. Really hampering his aspirations to make white children. So he pivots to rationalizing how having kids with Hispanics is okay.

More power to him on that front, but this part:

Compared to my early 20s self, I am a lot less prone to ingrouping with the kind of white people who deliberately shut themselves off from the world by retreating to the ‘burbs—people who just want to be comfortable and don’t have a burning desire to change the world. I’ve also lost any protective instinct toward people who stay in a shitty area with no opportunities just because they have a sentimental attachment to their podunk hometown. My experiences taught me that these people want nothing to do with my vision for the world and aren’t my volk in any meaningful sense.
They have no destiny except under the caligae.

...Is kind of indicative of why this guy and people like him are not the future of Red Tribe.

He's a Blue. His values are Blue to the core. It doesn't matter if he were Von Neumann reborn; he doesn't want what we want, he isn't interested in our values and so he's never going to be on our side in any meaningful way. If he were supremely competent, then he'd be dangerous; as is, he appears mainly to be an instructive, cautionary example.

Originally, "Elite Human Capital" meant, well, elite human capital. For example, the sort of people who became Communists in first half of the last century.

Any movement who wants to move somewhere should attract such people.

Yes. This is the steelman / nugget of truth in the EHC idea, but in practice "populists can't attract EHC" is a personal complaint at not being wined and dined by the plebs.

nugget of truth in the EHC idea

More than nugget. Whether you love or hate communism, you must admit that the old guard early 20th century communist veterans were among the most capable people in history (comparable perhaps only to 16th century Jesuits).

If it was year 1926, Communist agitator of the time would in open, no holds barred debate demolish whole Motte with ease.

personal complaint at not being wined and dined by the plebs.

More like: these people are my White brothers, but they care only about sportsball and fentanyl and struggle for Whiteness leaves them cold.

Do you believe that we are living in a state of "wild material prosperity"? If so, do you believe that people like Noam Chomsky and Gavin Newsom are the ones who created and maintain that state?

How would you respond if I were to argue that what prosperity we have is largely in spite of such people rather than because of them?

When talk about "the sort of "Khesterex" thinking that seems to have become endemic to blue spaces" I'm talking (in part) about spaces like this one, and opinions that I have read here.

Yeah, I’d say our material conditions are pretty close to the best in history. No, Newsom and Chomsky probably didn’t have much to do with it. I’d probably agree with you, in a general sense, that intellectuals consume rather than produce material goods, turning them into something else. I would say that such professions are the privilege of a ridiculously luxurious society.

But why those two? Why not the Clintons or the Bushes, political dynasties who went to Harvard and Yale? Why not Kennedies and Roosevelts, Vanderbilts and Carnegies and Rockefellers and Rothschilds? There are uncountable examples of wealthy, connected families with elite educations and real impacts on material and societal conditions.

Is Elon Musk “elite human capital”? Why not? He got his degree from the same school as Chomsky, and he’s made a hell of a lot more material difference out of it. How about other governors, like Ron DeSantis?

I don’t think there’s a convenient line around people like Newsom and Chomsky. Certainly not one which maps to Khesterex thinking. Conservatism, in the sense of cautious introspection, is not unique to elites; utopian idealism does not make one a populist.

On the other hand, if the Motte is your idea of a blue space…maybe we’re speaking a different language.

The Long Arm of the State and Parenting

@ControlsFreak challenged me on my assumption that society has changed to the extent that the average parent faced real consequences if they treated their children the way every child was treated even 40 years ago, in the dark days of the 1980s.

Immediately I fell into personal anecdote, “I’ve been pressured by other women to supervise my children doing tasks I was able to do alone at the same age.” “All the parks have signs that children under 12 need to be supervised.” I even gave a personal anecdote about an Amtrak train that made it seem like I am disturbingly misremembering things or a short-lived policy was walked back. This gave me pause. So I did the more rational thing and asked, what kind of data can I find on this?

Looking around, I found a study that analyzed how many kids had parental rights terminated in the year 2000 compared to now. Their data only goes to 2016, but it does present a trend:

The cumulative prevalence of having parental rights terminated for both parents was 0.7% in 2000. It then increased to just under 1.0% in 2007 before decreasing between 2007 and 2012, ultimately falling to 0.9%. Starting in around 2012, the rate of the termination of parental rights started to accelerate, reaching a high of around 1.1% by the end of the study period in 2016. This 0.4% increase is equivalent to a 60% increase from 2010 to 2016.

There is a trend of more children being taken away from their parents, which is what I expect.

For every parent that has a child removed, there will be more that are investigated. What does that number look like?

Now, the claim in the title: Does CPS investigate one out of every three American children? The answer to this one is not available directly in the primary source reports and the underlying data is only available after an application for research use, so we’ll have to trust a group of researchers at the Washington University school of public health. They download and de-duplicate the master data files from 2003-2014 and confirm that 37% of American children are the subject of at least one screened-in referral to CPS from ages 0-18. We can sanity check this against the numbers we saw above: Around 2.5% of children are the subject of a screened-in referral each year. If about 2 percentage points of those are first-time subjects each year, then in 18 years you’ve investigated 36% of American children. There are extra complications when considering the children entering and leaving the cohort each year, but the 37% number estimated by these researchers makes sense given what we know from the CPS reports.

1/3 of American children are investigated by the time they are 18. That sounds like a ridiculous number. Are American parents just becoming disturbingly vicious and attacking their kids more than in the past?

Additionally, the most common type of maltreatment found by CPS is neglect. 64% of substantiated victims are victims of neglect only and most of these neglect cases are specifically about lack of sufficient supervision rather than lack of access to food or clothing.

No. Basically my intuition - the intuition of most parents - is correct. Insufficiently supervising your child will get you a visit from CPS and your child potentially removed. The data bears that out.

Now I am curious. Denizens of the Motte: How many of you see children between the ages of 8-12 out and about without a parent in your day-to-day life? How does that compare with the freedom you or your parents had when they were children (if they were born before 1990?)

How many of you were allowed to do simple things, like run to grab an item at the grocery store by yourself, before you were 10? How old were you when you first got to buddy up with a similar age child and split off from your family at an county fair or water park? If you are a parent now, what age would you consider this safe to allow your child to do?

Certainly lack of a "village" plays into this as well. There are countless thinkpieces about how people don't know or trust their neighbors as much as they used to (frustratingly though, I can't seem to locate studies that go back more than a decade so this is just anecdotal). But in environments where families know each other, they know each other's kids, they are more likely to watch out for them and be more tolerant of them. Some kid walking alone, "oh, that's just Jimmy from the Latta house, hey Jimmy!" Where in a neighborhood surrounded by strangers, no one knows each other, either by face or by where they live. That 10 year old isn't little Jimmy Latta, he's a vulnerable child on his own without adult supervision. Call the police!

And it turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy, of course. Children outside on their own has become so de-normalized that seeing one is an aberration and immediately suspicious just because it is so rare.

It's also as if people are "de-maturing" kids, for lack of a better term - they're not as trusted, not expected to care for themselves, not expected to have important life skills. Without the time alone to fend for themselves and navigate the world without an adult in tow, some of that "life skills" maturing I think takes longer to emerge.

Worth noting the "free range parenting" trend seems to have peaked around 2009-2010 but it's been ages since I heard anything from those people. I get the sense they've given up against the tide. Parents want to do the safe thing and follow the herd, either because they genuinely believe it's best or as a CYA measure.

There are countless thinkpieces about how people don't know or trust their neighbors as much as they used to

Yeah, I wouldn't trust any random neighbor empowered with a catastrophically powerful State-backed heckler's veto over my family unit either!

the "free range parenting" trend seems to have peaked around 2009-2010

A few states have taken steps to decriminalize or legalize young people existing in a public place since then, and the people who want freedom for their kids have had time to self-sort into those areas. A good chunk of the "free range" is on the Internet, by the way- the Karens have gradually been coming for that too by banning them from the spaces they visit and restricting what they can freely do there.

Warren Buffet had a paper route when he was 13. A little older but not much. That involves picking up a heavy stack of papers, walking around your neighborhood for like an hour alone, an about once a month you were the collection arm of the newspaper company. I too had a paper route around the same age. There’s actually a lot of billies whose first job was a paper route.

Around the same age (late elementary school) my memories were watching Independence Day on HBO every morning, then walking to the local ballpark to meet friends and play baseball everyday during the summer. Like Sandlot though often without a full 9.

The interesting thing about Buffet is his dad was a congressmen so he had to have some money but he still had a paper route. The family I guess wanted to instill work ethic and values. I also think there is a bit of wanting independence as a kid and getting to walk around the neighborhood for an hour and have your own money. Potentially we were also extremely bored back then. No phone to doomscroll on for an hour so you needed to find things to do.

My gut says the nanny state on children takes more than one generation to establish. I did things independently as a kid therefore I will never think a 10 year old doing things is child abuse. But my kids may raise children in a nanny state because they will only have my stories doing things as a kid and not personal experience.

This is one reason to consider living in a lower-middle class immigrant community. I think Miami still has some areas like this where you can be in that culture but still 15 minutes to civilization. And the immigrants tended to be higher quality ones than ones who walked across a border in S Florida.

Personal anecdote on the topic. TL;DR-- there are "careful" people everywhere who like to tattle (or who are just very worried about everything), but our local authorities seem reasonable about parenting choices.

During COVID, my son was 6, my husband was working every day, and we lived in a small town. I had to make a Walmart run, so I went first thing in the morning, very early, before it got busy. Instead of masking up my sleepy 6 y.o. and making him follow me through the store for an hour or more, I left him in the car with his tablet. I didn't think this would be a problem because he wasn't an infant locked in a car seat; he was just a kid playing on his tablet. The tablet had wifi and he could message me on my phone--we texted some while I was shopping. The morning was neither hot nor cold; the car had manual windows and locks, so he could roll down a window or unlock the door without a problem. He understood that he was not to get out of the car except in an emergency, and that he was not to open the door to anyone at all. If anything questionable happened, he was to text me a single, specific letter and I would come out immediately.

I was scanning my groceries and checking out when I heard a policeman speaking with a Walmart supervisor. Apparently someone had seen my boy in the car and had called the police; the policeman was discussing the situation with the supervisor. He was saying, "The kid was fine--playing on his tablet. Said his mom was shopping. I don't know--I don't see anything wrong. I wouldn't bring a kid inside if I didn't have to." I interrupted and identified myself, explaining that I was in contact with him via messenger, etc. The policeman was very kind and positive, relieved to have confirmation that everything was good.

When I got to the car, I waved to another policeman who seemed to be watching at a distance and he gave me a thumbs-up. My son said they had knocked on the window and he had rolled it down enough to speak to them, and everything was fine. He wasn't worried at all. It's concerning that someone felt they should call the police when they saw a kid sitting in a car in a parking lot, but it's encouraging that our police had good sense.

Thank you for providing data. This is a good post. I admit that I did not expect the rate to be as high as it is. Duly updated.

Some thoughts. The Tabarrok post is pretty good. He also compares to other sources to try to get a sense for a rate at which one might expect some sort of activity to be at least reasonably warranted. His back-of-the-envelope was that it was broadly correspondent. I also did not expect this to be that high, either. He concludes by suggesting, as you do, that perhaps they could ease off on the neglect-only cases.

This seems broadly plausible. I am perhaps colored by my own experience in the 90s, and my familiarity with a couple cases in which parents did have their parental rights terminated. For one, I could see it being classified as 'neglect-only'. However, this neglect was so severe (e.g., leaving an infant in a car seat literally 24/7) to the point that it caused the child to have physical deformities. Whatever CPS was called at that time/location was actually far too loathe to push for terminating parental rights (they eventually did, after a long time).

In another case, a mother was simply seriously too mentally deficient in whatever way to care for a child. I don't know whether the cases were officially tallied as 'neglect-only', but in any event, this mother just kept having babies. After enough of them were taken, apparently the court just said that they could take any further babies immediately. The story goes that on the n+1th iteration, the social workers showed up at the hospital, only to be asked by the mother, who clearly knew them by name at this point, having had multiple prior children taken at birth by those exact people, "[Name], what are you doing here?" "Uh, we're here to take your child, just like the last time and the time before that." Like, this person was that mentally out there.

Obviously, those are extreme cases, but to me, 'neglect-only' doesn't simply mean, "You let your pre-teen go to the neighborhood park without you." Perhaps that type of thing is generating some reports, but I still don't think we have any data to know how prevalent that sort of thing is.

Concerning observations in the data. I think they're probably noisy enough that I don't think that's much of a trend line. A brief look at other papers that cited this one found this, which presents serious concerns about measurement effects, which contributes to my initial thought that it seems plausible that it's more noise/data problems than genuine trend.

Concerning further observations in the data. Figure 2 is a real trend line. Vastly more plausible that it's capturing a real phenomenon. That phenomenon would be that the likelihood drops rapidly with age. That's concerning termination of parental rights, not investigations or other things, and I can't find a similar chart to see age effects on those things or whether 'neglect-only' cases are relatively distributed across age groups or are concentrated in some areas. Without this data, there are still pretty big questions. At the very least, there seems to be a significant reduction in termination when you get up to your age range of 8-10, but are there still a bunch of neglect-only cases in that range? I don't know. Broadly-categorized 'neglect' concerns seem to be far more likely to be justifiable in the earliest years, when a child needs significantly more care and attention. The closest we get to a claim about the neglect-only case is when Tabarrok says:

64% of substantiated victims are victims of neglect only and most of these neglect cases are specifically about lack of sufficient supervision rather than lack of access to food or clothing.

Perhaps someone else can find another place in the primary source that he's using, but frankly, my best guess is that he actually misreported what the report said. The closest statement, with the same 64% number, is:

In the analysis included in chapter 3, FFY 2023 victims are counted for each investigation that resulted in a substantiation and displays the victims with a single type of maltreatment at the state level. If a victim has two or more substantiated maltreatment types in the same report, the victim is counted in the multiple maltreatment type category. For FFY 2023, 64.1 percent of duplicate victims experience neglect only, and 10.6 percent experience physical abuse only.1

I don't see anything in the report to support the claim that "most of these neglect cases are specifically about lack of sufficient supervision rather than lack of access to food or clothing". Perhaps I'm missing it, but I just don't see that this report (that I thought was his primary source for his post) makes any distinction along these lines. Perhaps this was drawing on a different one of his links, and it just wasn't clear.

I am in violent agreement that cases where the government gets involved just because a pre-teen went to the park alone are extremely bad. I still remain fairly unconvinced that I have any idea how common they are. And my lying eyes still look out the window or around the neighborhood when I'm out and see kids in that age range roaming around unsupervised all the time. Maybe it is worse; it probably is; everything is worse.

1 - Me here: There are other bits about how they treat multiple substantiated claims. It talks about duplicates elsewhere, saying, "A victim with two substantiated reports of neglect is counted twice in neglect only." So it seems like there's some double-counting possibly going on, and it's this category of folks that are two-or-more-counted where 64% are neglect-only.

@OracleOutlook

As an addendum, I'd like to go back to my analogy. If someone were telling me that there's such a huge, serious, problem of unarmed black men getting shot to death by police for no reason, I would still want to have some sense of the scale of the problem. If they returned with statistics on how often black men have encounters with police or how often they're incarcerated, or how often there is use of force in police encounters, etc., that might be interesting data. Perhaps some of it would have been unknown to me until it was presented to me, and I would want to update on those items.

...but I sort of don't think that most of those buckets actually capture the phenomenon in question. Certainly, there may be other relevant questions about general allocation of police forces, or people can haggle over how many encounters/arrests/incarcerations/uses of force are ultimately justified/not justified, and those would all be interesting questions that could (and should) be addressed by folks who are interested in them. But none of them really tell me much about the actual scale of the specific problem of unarmed black men being shot to death by police unjustifiably. It could still be huge! It could still be tiny!

Even if they cite a small number of high-profile examples of unarmed black men being shot by police, and even if those small number of examples are bad shoots, I would feel pretty comfortable saying, "Yes, those are bad, but I still don't really know how common it is." And so, I wouldn't really know how reasonable it is to have significant fears on the topic.

The reason I think this is a useful analogy is because I recall seeing that someone did do a bunch of work to figure this out for the case of unarmed black men getting shot to death by police, and the result was that it was quite rare. But I don't think we have anyone who has done this for the question of children being taken away for reasons like a pre-teen going to the park alone. We have a bunch of other statistics that can tell us other things about the system in general, but not this, AFAICT. It could be really common! I don't know!

Elsewhere in the thread I wrote:

If you are agreeable and follow along with the inane suggestions, it's unlikely your kids will be taken away. You may waste time and money on it, but the worst will likely not happen.

I think we probably agree on more than you think, in the sense that most parents just get a warning, deal with it, and move on.

My issue is more that we have to follow the inane suggestions in the first place. Because if you stand your ground and say, "No, my six year old can play in my fenced backyard on his own while I stay in the house, I will not follow along with your weird brand new rule that you just made up that this is somehow neglect," then you do face more and more push back in the form of lawyer fees, repeated visits, and eventually your kids being taken away.

In the case of a black person being stopped for shoplifting by a jerk cop, you can look at that and say, "yeah, shoplifting is bad. I hate having to ask an attendant to unlock the deodorant." The person who is shoplifting should stop. If they complain about it I have little sympathy.

In the case where a parent is just treating their kid normally, I can't look at that as a reasonable request to stop. Just asking that the parents change their behavior here is wrong. Even if most parents will cow under the pressure, and most kids wont get taken away, it's wrong.

And this is especially relevant in the discussion of whether it is harder to have kids these days. While we have made everything else more convenient, we have made having kids less convenient. That hurts society as a whole.

I imagine some number of cops will make what seem like unreasonable requests of some number of individuals. Even if the underlying concern is something like shoplifting. A regular reading of Short Circuit and some of the many cases in which cops get qualified immunity for whatever would certainly give a person that impression. And sure, I'm sympathetic that there can be problems in particular cases there. But how often are people actually getting required to follow some inane suggestion? By your own phrasing, the example is a "weird brand new rule that you just made up", not some clear, broadly-applicable rule that the system is applying all over the place in a high percentage of cases. And how often do these inane suggestions actually lead to things like termination of parental rights? Plausibly not very often. Perhaps the inane suggestions happen more often (I don't know), and if we had data, we could discuss that, but the original claim was:

Insufficiently supervising your child will get you a visit from CPS and your child potentially removed. The data bears that out.

I still don't think the data bears that out. Redirecting the claim to saying that maybe sometimes some social workers make inane suggestions (without data here either) doesn't provide data to bear out that claim.

The problem is you're arguing against a real-life Pascal's Wager, or at least Pascal's Mugging. If you're the kind of parent who wants to buck CPS so your kids can have a better life, the cost of having your kids taken away from you is extremely high. The cost of having to stop doing it (that is, comply with "reasonable requests to stop") under (individual, not general) threat of having the kids taken away is also high. If you want good parents to find it reasonable to parent their own kids less strictly, then the chance of that has to be infinitesimal, not merely a few percent or tenths of a percent.

If you're the kind of black man who wants to do whatever, the cost of getting shot dead by police while unarmed is extremely high.

...stiiiilllll kinda think that I can care a little bit about the rate at which unarmed black men actually get shot dead by police. I don't particularly care whether someone labels the discussion after an old French philosopher. It doesn't really map onto that topic all that well.

If you're the kind of black man who wants to do whatever, the cost of getting shot dead by police while unarmed is extremely high.

The chance of a black man getting shot dead by police is higher than that of a white man or black woman, but it is still extremely small -- certainly smaller than the chance of having your kids taken away by CPS.

the chance of having your kids taken away by CPS

...for something like letting your pre-teen walk to the neighborhood park alone. This is the key qualifier. How often is that? How do you know?

Are American parents just becoming disturbingly vicious and attacking their kids more than in the past?

No, but

Are American adults just becoming disturbingly vicious and attacking kids more than in the past?

is true, trivially. Where else do you think the CPS reports are coming from? They don't just magically appear out of thin air, a concerned citizen hysterical, typically middle-aged, woman has to call them in.

Hysterical middle-aged women have more power now than they did in the '50s and '60s, so when they call and complain about unattended children the State listens unless it has been expressly prohibited from doing so, and this is more likely to be the case in states when this type of woman has less power, Utah being the best example.

1/3 of American children are threatened by State abduction by the time they are 18. That sounds like a ridiculous number.

Considering the rate women claim to be abused/assaulted by men, I actually don't think it's that out of left field for women to abuse/assault children at the same rate, and the premium on top of that is because (despite the feminist claims about the former) we actively encourage that abuse.

Uh, most CPS reports are generated by large institutions with expansive reporting policies as a form of ass-covering, particularly schools and hospitals. Not neighborhood busybodies.

I think in large degree the ability of random people being able to take incriminating video is making this stuff more likely. In 1980, you couldn’t call CPS on a kid playing alone, you could not film a kid playing unsafely and send it to CPS. If you were going to report something you had to go home to do it. And I think like a lot of other things, removing barriers makes that stuff happen more often.

My husband was a latchkey kid. By the time he was 6 he was talking care of his baby sisters while his parents worked. Everyone knew that this was happening. His teachers knew he was home alone with three younger kids after school got out. No one raised an eyebrow at it. It was normal. Having a cell phone wouldn't have changed it as long as everyone agreed that this was just part of life.

I've always felt that the entire term "latchkey kid" was super weird. In the 80s in Finland that was simply considered the norm. Some families were well off enough that only one parent worked (or the other only worked part time) but those were exceptions. Our immediate neighborhood had a bunch of kids of similar ages and one mother worked only part time so we knew where to go if we needed help.

Yeah but the existence of a cellphone video means that one annoying busybody can badger whoever is in a position of authority with proof of 'malfeasance', whilst otherwise it's just he says, she says.

Now I am curious. Denizens of the Motte: How many of you see children between the ages of 8-12 out and about without a parent in your day-to-day life?

Europe is kinda split on the issue. There are countries that are extremely paranoid about it and people will literally call the cops on you, and countries where it's perfectly normal, and roving gangs of schoolkids are a common sight to see. I lived in both kinds.

Tell us more about which countries are which. As a burgerstani I cannot begin to guess.

I imagine it’s basically just the hajnal line with some minor updates / adjustments.

I would also like to know where you see countries in Europe falling on the spectrum. Growing up in the UK in the 90s it was pretty free range, but my impression is that modern parents here are much more paranoid (although not to the insane degree I read about in America).

I heard Germans will call the cops on you, though I haven't confirmed it. However, I literally never seen an unaccompanied child when I was there. The Mediterranean, by contrast still seems pretty chill, and you get to see kids hanging out on the streets. Even on the eastern side, when I went to visit my family recently, I saw a few unaccompanied young kids dragging a sleigh in the direction of the local hill.

How many of you see children between the ages of 8-12 out and about without a parent in your day-to-day life

I see quite a few, but I live in a very quiet suburban community and seeing kids out and about the community is not weird. In fact, they often leave their stuff (like bikes, etc.) on the street, and then could pick it up next day (or their parents do). Nothing happens to them or their stuff. When I lived in CA, however, I don't think I ever did see kids just roaming around - given how many homeless camps I had in immediate vicinity, it's no wonder.

It's not comparable to my childhood, but that was different times in different country, and having 8 year old walk 15-20 mins to school through the neighborhood was normal (how would one get to the school otherwise anyway? nobody owned a car and public transport didn't exist within the neighborhoods, and there was no such thing as a "school bus") and leaving the teen like 12 yo for a whole day to care for oneself was also completely normal (and inevitable - the parents are working, grandparents live far away, there's no such thing as a babysitter for teens, and nobody has the money to pay anyway if it were a thing). Sometimes it led to kids doing extremely stupid things, which occasionally (quite rarely, fortunately, on my experience) led to bad long-term consequences, but mostly everybody survived fine.

How many of you were allowed to do simple things, like run to grab an item at the grocery store by yourself, before you were 10?

That was one of my chores for a long time. You couldn't just go to the store and buy what you want. You had to stand in line (not always, but a lot of times). And adults have work. So who stands in lines a lot? Kids and retirees. I'm not sure at what age exactly it started, but likely sometime around 10.

I also spent a lot of my time outside with friends (without any adult supervision) - though not as much as others, I was an introverted nerd (still am) so I preferred my books to the company of other stupid kids, but occasionally my parents kicked me out, or my friends convinced me to come with them to play or do something stupid. So a lot of time without any adult supervision, whether family or not. That was the standard.

I live in a very quiet suburban community and seeing kinds out and about the community is not weird. In fact, they often leave their stuff (like bikes, etc.) on the street, and then could pick it up next day (or their parents do). Nothing happens to them or their stuff.

Where can you live with so few undesirables around? They've been transplanted pretty much everywhere. I'm talking about good schools, you know?

I've found my own little pocket which is mostly this way but still not enough. And the leftist government is constantly scheming to tax us more to build additional 'low-income' housing blocks and destroy what's left of how this place was when I was a child.

I was born in the early 90's, grew up in a semi rural area. I had about a 1-2 mile range where I'd explore and play.

I have young kids now. My oldest is 7, I'd be fine with her walking to a store a half mile away and buying something, but she doesn't seem comfortable with that. I have neighbors with homeschooled kids. I see their 9 year old outside all the time playing alone. They are my 'canary' family. I'm seeing how much they get away with to know the local limits of acceptable free range parenting.

Homeschooling families can get away with a lot more because almost all stupid, frivolous, or borderline CPS reports are made by large institutions, particularly schools.

Is the main mode here busybody teacher makes a report because she doesn't like some way a child is being raised, or hyper-cautious institutional representative makes a report because they don't want to be caught up in a lawsuit or turn up on the local news?

Probably a little of column a, a little of column b, but schools do seem to push teachers to report cases they aren’t really sure about(I mean, teachers have told me this).

What did you think "mandatory reporter" meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?

Sarcasm, obviously, but the vibe of such laws is distinctly "better some arbitrary number of questionably-founded investigations than a few children actually get abused". For some value of arbitrary there, I'd even agree with the statement (disclosure: am mandatory reporter of some things), but of course the state considers false investigations as roughly harmless.

But I'm also not strictly opposed to the state investigating whether a kid in the hospital fell down a flight of stairs or "fell down a flight of stairs".

Now I am curious. Denizens of the Motte: How many of you see children between the ages of 8-12 out and about without a parent in your day-to-day life?

Rarely, but I'm not sure whether it's because kids are not trusted to be on their own or because his schedule is kept full by his parents. Comparing my nephew at any age to myself at that age I certainly had way less structured activities scheduled to keep myself busy. All my free time would basically be either me playing on the computer/watching TV on my own or playing outside unsupervised (or very loosely supervised) with friends. Sometimes I guess I was also being an annoying little brother watching whatever my brother was doing. By contrast, my nephew is driven from sports training to playdates every weekend.

How does that compare with the freedom you or your parents had when they were children (if they were born before 1990?)

I was born before the 90s, and went on my own walking to and from my elementary school every day, at 6 years old. It was considered a normal thing back then.

I like to think I turned out fine, but I'm conflicted as to how I will want to raise kids if I have them, because my own upbringing goes against both "old" and "new" rules. I was allowed to be on my own and wasn't really "kept busy" by my parents the way kids nowaday are, but also I was an early "screen junkie". My parents had barely any control over the time I would spend on the computer, and I certainly could go on full-day binges.

What came first, the chicken or the egg? Were structured activities a way to occupy a child who could no longer legally be left to his own devices?

We assume it's college-track related, but college admissions don't ask about elementary-age activities and most reasonably healthy kids can start a sport in the sixth grade and make Varsity in High School, there's not much advantage to most sports to start at age 4. Music lessons and certain sports on the edges are the outlier here (ballet and gymnastics for example.) But then again, my brother started band as a teenager, taught himself the piano, and away he went. Not every pianist needs to start at the age of 2.

I was born before the 90s, and went on my own walking to and from my elementary school every day, at 6 years old. It was considered a normal thing back then.

Same, in the 80's, I walked about a mile home from school in first grade (though I got a ride to school). That year, we moved to only about a half mile from the school, and I never got another ride to or from school until my friends were old enough to drive.

This ignores a confounding variable- the overwhelming majority of CPS reports come from state mandated reporters(mostly teachers), and there's probably cycles in how sensitive those state mandated reporters are. An increasing reportage percent in the early two thousands has an obvious explanation- with the Catholic Church and BSA sex abuse scandals in the news, reporting requirements got stricter and continuing ed for those reporters got more intense. That probably explains the increase in 2000's investigation rates by itself.

Answering your questions-

  1. I see preteen children out and about by themselves, on bicycles or walking, pretty regularly in the summer, usually traveling in groups. I see kids playing in front yards a lot too.

  2. I was allowed to walk to the library or the convenience store at an early age, perhaps ten is fair. I didn't get sent to the grocery store until I could drive, possibly for cargo-related reasons, but I did get sent into the grocery store while my mom sat on her phone in the parking lot.

...

I don't think it's valid to assume that the 64% that are only about 'lack of sufficient supervision' are because the parents let their kids walk outside alone. The bottom 1% of parents are very bad parents, where lack of supervision probably means 'not parenting them at all, letting them do drugs' than 'letting kids walk around unsupervised'. Even in a world where CPS is terrorizing parents who let their kids walk to the grocery store by themselves, the good or even meh parents will stop doing that after the first or second CPS visit, so that statistic wouldn't be evidence.

I got investigated for leaving my kids unsupervised in the same room as my husband and I, in a school, with cameras on. And for having a child with eczema.

?!?! Seriously???? That's absolutely nuts. Gah this is making me nervous about having kids. I hope everything went well for y'all.

It wasn't that bad, just irritating to have to do. The social worker was an older veteran, who had gone into the field to give back to his community, but seemed to agree that some of the cases are stupid, especially while reading the transcript of a "mandatory reporter" just literally insulting how my baby looked, things like how fast his hair was growing.

If you are agreeable and follow along with the inane suggestions, it's unlikely your kids will be taken away. You may waste time and money on it, but the worst will likely not happen.

But one third of kids are investigated by CPS- thé bottom 1% of parents are not having 33 kids apiece, just mathematically CPS is investigating not bottom-1% parents. And the same logic holds for 5 or even 10 percent, as well.

But why do we as society punish parents for letting their kid walk to the grocery store? Why does something that benign require a visit from CPS in the first place?

I wonder if there's data that breaks this down by cumulative risk of a family unit being investigated rather than individual child. I expect there to be very high correlation between a child having their siblings investigated and being investigated themselves. If it's very common for all the kids in a four child household to be investigated once one of them is reported then the odds might be much higher than 37% for a four child household and lower than that for a single or two parent household.

How accurate should historical fiction be?

What do we owe to history?

I just finished Aquitania by Eva García Sáenz de Urturi (what a mouthful), a “historical fiction” novel about Eleanor of Aquitaine’s first marriage to Louis of France. This book was one of the nine I brought back from Spain; I picked it up because I had really enjoyed the Kraken police thriller novels that made Garcia Sáenz de Urturi famous, and generally enjoy historical fiction as a genre, although I am not sure this will continue to be the case based on the way the genre is heading. Unfortunately, I didn't like the book very much: the plot was all over the place because the author tried to insert an unconvincing thriller element into what was otherwise a period piece, the characters were at best two-dimensional, and the writing tried far too hard to be poetic. What really riled me up however was the absolute lack of concern that this book had for historicity. García Sáenz de Urturi took every salacious rumor that surrounded Eleanor of Aquitaine, ramped them up to 11, and then added in her own fabrications for good measure. Below are some of the more egregious events that I believe to be non-historical.

  • Eleanor was raped by the brothers of Louis the Fat when she was 8!!! after her older brother died while her father was still alive to attempt to claim Aquitaine for the Kings of France.

  • Eleanor was lovers with her uncle Raymond from the ages of 10-13 before she married Louis the Pious at 13. When she saw her uncle again on the 2nd crusade once she was actually married to Louis she refuses to have sex with him. Historically, the rumors of a tryst between Eleanor and Raymond only surround her visit to Antioch during the Second Crusade. I think these rumors are pretty unlikely in any case.

  • Eleanor is the director of a secret spy network called the Aquitanian cats that she uses to investigate the death of her father and undermine the Capets. She also a secret handbook filled with #inspirationalquotes from her ancestors.

  • The Abott Suger is actually Eleanor's uncle because Eleanor's grandfather had a secret brothel where he fucked nuns and Suger was the son of one of these nuns. Suger is also responsible for Eleanor's father's death because he has him murdered after he tries to kill the nuns rescued from this brothel to hush up the whole thing.

  • Eleanor is actually a secret pagan and so doesn't give a shit about the church or God because the Catholic Church is #corrupt and #political.

Aquitania is not unique in this sensationalism. Almost every historical fiction book I've read in the last five years plays at least this fast and loose with history and with historical figures. In Santiago Posteguillo's immensely popular Saga of Julius Caesar, Caesar is portrayed as a paragon of virtue who protects the poor and also is god's gift to women in bed, while his enemies, namely Sulla, are portrayed as twist sex-fiends who get off to young boys getting whipped and just want to oppress people for fun. Posteguillo's even more famous Africanus trilogy is just as bad, with Scipio subbed in for Caesar, and Fabius Maximus for Sulla. Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth, while fairly historically accurate, completely fails to capture the medieval mindset. Sharon Kay Penman's When Christ and His Saints Slept tries so hard to be historical, but ends up making the Empress Maud and Stephen to be caricatures of themselves.

But @thejdizzler, why do you even care about all this ? These people died thousands of years ago, and we have sparse, if any, historical documentation of any of these people. The political and social conflicts of the roman world, and certainly the medieval world have little to do with the conflicts we have today. Let the people have their fun!

I disagree with this attitude for three reasons. Firstly, I think the truth is important in of itself. Lying about long dead people is a short step to lying about more recently dead people which is a short step to lying about people who are still living. Of course the amount of missing information increases substantially as we go back in time, but in the novels I've cited above, the portrayal of characters and events goes knowingly against the historical record. Where there is a gap, such as in the adolescence of Julius Caesar, or Eleanor's childhood, what we do know about character and era can be used to attempt a faith reconstruction, rather than a juvenile telenovela.

Secondly, a biased reading of history leads people to make specious comparisons to the present day. Posteguillo is guilty of this. During the tour for his first Julius Caesar book, he compared the struggle between Sulla and Caesar to the Russia-Ukraine War, with Putin being a stand-in for Sulla. Dude, do you really want to make that comparison? Pretty sure Putin doesn't have a sex dungeon in the Kremlin, and last I looked Zelensky wasn't committing genocide against the Celts. This is present a bit in Aquitania too, where Eleanor feels like her Occitan language is being oppressed and dominated by the French. Not only was Eleanor probably raised to speak French before Occitan, but repression of minority languages didn't really begin in France until the age of Napoleon. Nationalism wasn't really a thing until the 19th century.

Thirdly, and most importantly, historical fiction doesn't have to be written this way. If you want to change the outcome of a historical event because it makes your story better, you can write in a heavily inspired parallel universe like Guy Gavriel Kay, who has El Cid go down fitting Muhammad ibn Ammar in the Lions of Al-Rassan and Belisaurius becoming Emperor after Justinian in The Lord of Emperor's. You can also can be entirely truthful: Javier Moro's El imperio eres tú has biographical levels of accuracy on the life of Pedro I of Brazil, but reads like a novel. You can even make up your own characters, like Bernard Cornwell does in his Saxon Tales series and use the historical setting as a backdrop of what would otherwise be a fantasy novel.

Perhaps this is an unfairly high-bar to clear for authors, but I don't think so. No one is forcing you to write historical fiction, and if you don't want to do the research for a book to at least pass the sniff test of this amateur historian, you should just stick to fantasy.

History become a lot less useful and evocative when it became about archaeology, primary sources, and nationalism. Herodotus, Plutarch, and the writers of the bible would weep at the astonishingly bad culture-mythos the modern day brings. Take WW2, for instance. Let's look into a history book where we kept the old way of historizing intact.

God sent a cruel and wicked ruler to the Germans, to punish the Jewish people for their impiousness, to once again bring them into captivity, as it was in the days of Pharoah. By wicked caprice and divine providence did he rise to power over the kings of the land. His name was Fuhrer.

And then God sent unto him a messenger, who warned him of God's wrath: that unless the Jews were allowed free, he would send upon them a plague of Americans, of Russians, of Turks, Arabs and Frenchmen. Of whose fury would blacken the sky and scorch the earth, of which every son would be sent to the grave, every daughter injured and outraged.

But God hardened the Fuhrer's heart, and so he rejected God's prophet, and thus calamity was upon him: and his kingdom was pulled down in each and every stone. Those who lived in his lands cursed his name and were divided, as Judea and Israel were divided in the days of Persian kings: and his lands were peopled by strangers. Such is the wrath of the Lord.

History: messy, complicated, no clear narrative.

Mythology: clean-cut, simple, evocative narrative.

Ahistorical insertions of contemporary themes is nothing new: the only difference is that the current writers are so inept at it that it breaks the suspension of disbelief. Imposing the liberal mythology onto historical events is threadbare and spiritually hollow and mostly amounts to the authoress self-inserting herself as a girlboss princess.

I'm broadly aligned with you in this regard. Bad history in historical fiction is a pet peeve of mine. I've always felt that the truth of history is more interesting than the shallow preconceptions we have of it. Writers tend to write what they know, and the result tends to be derivative. Actual history is fresh and exciting precisely because it's so rarely portrayed.

That being said, holding others to an unrealistically high standard isn't going to help you. No one who would write a black Boleyn was ever going to write an honest work of historical fiction, so complaining about what she did write is just a waste of your mental energy.

If you want accurate historical fiction you'll have to write it yourself. Be the change you want to see in the world.

I think I'm just going to stop reading historical fiction, except from authors I know are good (Bernard Cornwell).

If you haven't already read it, I can also heartily recommend Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series as a gold-standard of exhaustively researched historical fiction that never attempts to smuggle in modern points of view. About as authentic a look at Nelson's Royal Navy as you can get without cracking open a real history book (and probably better than half the pop history books you'd find for sale).

In Santiago Posteguillo's immensely popular Saga of Julius Caesar, Caesar is portrayed as a paragon of virtue who protects the poor and also is god's gift to women in bed, while his enemies, namely Sulla, are portrayed as twist sex-fiends who get off to young boys getting whipped and just want to oppress people for fun. Posteguillo's even more famous Africanus trilogy is just as bad, with Scipio subbed in for Caesar, and Fabius Maximus for Sulla.

I'll chime in to say that one of my favorite series of novels, Masters of Rome by McCollough, does a far more faithful rendition of Sulla. I remember consulting Wikipedia and LLMs about the veracity of several of the claims made about him, and was pleasantly surprised. Sure, several aspects, such as his rumored affair with his step-mother or the murder of his wives for gain, or potential affection for younger boys, might be slander by his political successors, but he was generally portrayed as an understandably flawed human, only larger than life in the way that people who make their marks on posterity tend to be.

Caesar? I suspect it's more of a mixed bag, and I haven't looked into it that much. McCullough presents him as a prodigy from birth, charming but principled, a favorite with the ladies, but that doesn't strike me as being a poor description of Caesar. Once again, just look at his more well-documented deeds.

Even if McCullough might lean to a more flamboyant interpretation of their lives, she's highly respected for her scholarship. You can tell that the lady Thought of Rome more often than all but the most ardent Romaboos today, counting myself in their numbers. She almost never makes anything up from whole cloth, and substitutes period-accurate guesses for aspects of daily life with verisimilitude. Further, I think that for historical characters as distant as Caesar and Sulla, any novel that isn't just a history textbook must take liberties with the truth, or at the very least, choose which historical interpretation to assume. There are tiers to this, and sliding scales for historical fidelity. I don't consider her behavior to be ahistorical at all, and historical fiction does have more leeway than an actual history.

I heartily endorse all the books, the first two are absolutely up there with the best fiction I've read.

Edit:

Given the discussion below on how truly historical depictions wouldn't be tolerable for modern audiences, I think the novel is an existence proof to the contrary. The Romans were simultaneously extremely modern in their sensibilities (we did try and intentionally resurrect quite a bit of their culture, every wonder why it's called a Senate?), but they were also alien. The book doesn't shy away from showing absolute brutality taken for granted by the people of the time, nor does it lie about their attitudes to physics and metaphysics being very far from our own. But the peoples of the past are still human, many of their prides, joys, sorrows and ambitions are recognizable to us today. And the novels do a better job at selling that than anything else I can name.

I've heard good things about McCullough from people who criticize Posteguillo, so I'll have to check him out.

I have no issue with Caesar being portrayed as charming or a prodigy: he likely was. What Posteguillo does that grinds my gears is sweep every flaw that Caesar had as a human being (probably in context the wife-fucking and huge ego, but I also consider the treatment of the Gauls to be pretty terrible, if not too far outside the norm for the time) under the rug so he can be a "perfect" hero.

The past is foreign country, and it is third world shithole country somewhere between Somalia and Zimbabwe. Not only the omnipresent hunger, disease, poverty and squalor, but values dissonance.

Accurate description of 100+ years old world would squick average modern reader after few pages. If you want full immersion into past, read unabridged and unexpurged works written at the time for contemporary readers.

Borgia vs The Borgias

In a real historical piece, if they tried to make everything slavishly right any show would be unwatchable, because there would be too much that the audience couldn’t understand. The audience would be constantly distracted by details like un-filmably dark building interiors, ugly missing teeth, infants being given broken-winged songbirds as disposable toys to play with, crush, and throw away, and Marie Antoinette relieving herself on the floor at Versailles. Despite its hundreds of bathrooms, one of Versailles’ marks of luxury was that the staff removed human feces from the hallways regularly, sometimes as often as twice a day, and always more than once a week.

...

Even costuming accuracy can be a communications problem, since modern viewers have certain associations that are hard to unlearn. Want to costume a princess to feel sweet and feminine? The modern eye demands pink or light blue, though the historian knows pale colors coded poverty. Want to costume a woman to communicate the fact that she’s a sexy seductress? The audience needs the bodice and sleeves to expose the bits of her modern audiences associate with sexy, regardless of which bits would plausibly have been exposed at the time. I recently had to costume some Vikings, and was lent a pair of extremely nice period Viking pants which had bold white and orange stripes about two inches wide. I know enough to realize how perfect they were, and that both the expense of the dye and the purity of the white would mark them as the pants of an important man, but that if someone walked on stage in them the whole audience would think: “Why is that Viking wearing clown pants?” Which do you want, to communicate with the audience, or to be accurate? I choose A.

(The article then goes on to suggest "historicity" vs "historical accuracy": aka just pick your battles and try to maintain a history-like vibe)

It's pretty funny that the most pilloried Word of God from JK Rowling (well, maybe barring the declaration that Dumbledore is gay) is probably a result of her knowing the above fact about Versailles and just adding it to her world.

If the audience doesn't reward you for this and it actively harms their SOD, why do it?

Despite its hundreds of bathrooms, one of Versailles’ marks of luxury was that the staff removed human feces from the hallways regularly, sometimes as often as twice a day, and always more than once a week.

I was surprised and apparently what this really means is 'they used chamber pots' not 'people were relieving themselves in the halls openly'.

Marie Antoinette relieving herself on the floor at Versailles

So far as I can tell, it was mostly propagandists later on who said that, or it was a metaphor.

I was surprised and apparently what this really means is 'they used chamber pots' not 'people were relieving themselves in the halls openly'.

Not being able to argue for the status quo, the powers that be set out to slander our past. Almost every widely held negative belief that I heard about it, turned out to be inaccurate in the way you described.

I ran it through ChatGPT and /r/askhistorians for a source and apparently it isn't a pure invention. The rumors about a person peeing on themselves weren't about Marie Antoinette either (though the below book's assertion that it was cheerfully accepted is weird since the original source is unflattering). Tony Spaworth's book on it does mostly complain about the smell leaking from nearby latrines so maybe the regularity of that was conflated with people in the public galleries "pissing in all corners" as Princess Charlotte apparently complained being standard practice.

Sanitation, or lack of it, did something to level these differences in living conditions. Although French people of the time saw Louis XIV’s Versailles as a gold standard of refinement, older habits died hard. Versailles “cheerfully accepted” the princesse d’Harcourt, whose obnoxious behavior—she sometimes relieved herself in her skirts, nonchalantly leaving a foul trail behind her for the servants to clean up—was like a throwback to a less polite age, when aristocrats had bothered themselves less with self-restraint.

Even members of the royal family—women as well as men, the king included—thought nothing of giving audiences or chatting to intimates while installed on the closestool. In 1723 the high-living Regent received Saint-Simon in this way at Versailles the morning after one of his late-night suppers, horrifying his friend by his befuddled manner and thick voice. Within a month the Regent was dead.

The privies of Louis XIV’s Versailles have so far escaped close study. In the eighteenth century there were public latrines placed in the corridors and stairwells of the palace, the Grand Commons, and the other annexes: these latrines consisted of a room with a wooden seat, or lunette, closed by a cover in a vain attempt to shut in the odors, and connected by a waste pipe to a cesspit. Some were kept locked and the key distributed to nearby residents.

Versailles was no different from Paris in the squalor of this type of latrine. For instance, in 1785 we find seven lodgers in the attics of the Grand Commons, among them one of the king’s dressers and one of the queen’s chaplains, petitioning for the closing down of a fourth-floor privy because “the smell penetrates the lodgings … and infects furnishing, clothes and linen,” as well as “serving certain riff-raff who use it as a meeting place.”

Noble courtiers fared no better. In 1766 the king’s daughter, Madame Adélaïde, demanded new rooms for a lady-in-waiting lodged above the queen’s apartment, “far too near the privy.” Two years earlier the comtesse du Châtelet, who lived in the attics of the south wing, complained of the smell from the nearby privy and also—a glimpse of the cheek-by-jowl living at Versailles—of the fact that she could be seen in her cabinet from its window.

To the smell was added the risk of leaks, whether through the floor of latrines to lodgings beneath them, from which not even the rooms of the royal children were safe, or from iron or lead pipes prone to blockage and corrosion, like the ones that let their contents “leak and poison everything” in Marie-Antoinette’s kitchen.

If people found the latrines closed, they would relieve themselves in the public corridor, as happened in 1741 after a privy in the attics of the north wing was converted into a lodging. People did the same in the first-floor gallery of the south wing. When the newly married dauphin and dauphine were lodged here in 1745, iron barriers were placed in front of the arcades opposite their rooms “to prevent indecency and dirtiness.” In 1762 the comte de Compans complained about the passersby and kitchen boys who “attended to their needs” in an inner courtyard in the same wing, “often breaking his windows,” presumably because he remonstrated with them. Bombelles, an admirer of Versailles under Louis XVI, wrote in his journal that more effort could be made to address the “dirtiness” of the public galleries.

I reckon that most people having rotten/missing teeth was mostly a 19th Century and 20th Century phenomenon, driven by the new availability of cheap sugar. Medieval people consumed little to no sugar, so their teeth were generally healthy.

Little sugar but much bread, and likely the bread was filled with substantial grit from threshing and milling.

Yes, interesting little factoid (if it is a fact) I learned recently: Elizabeth I had bad teeth precisely because sugar was now the luxury, available, new, sweetening and cooking ingredient. Of course cooks went mad showing off what they could do with sugar, and of course everyone who could afford it loved to use it.

I get the point about clown pants, but going to the other extreme and having all your characters in black (fake) leather is equally bad. And that just exacerbates the problem, because if every show and movie has "communicating with the audience, dress them according to our values and tastes" costuming, that shapes the expectations of viewers, so you'll never get "in fact, bright colours and dyes meant high status" correct costumes.

There was this romantic potboiler/disaster movie from 2014 called Pompeii. Overall deeply mediocre. But one small detail that I really liked was that they made the soldiers uniforms a half-step between accurate Roman armor and modern black tactical body armor that you would see a SWAT team or special forces wearing. Not particularly period appropriate but it made the solders unusually imposing for a period piece, because your brain is subconsciously reading them like a modern military unit.

In my opinion, the old dramas from the 1950s and 60s did the best job of balancing historically accurate settings with modern expectations.

Yes, it's a coordination problem.

But the issue is that there's no benefit to solving said problem. Why would Ridley Scott make his movie slightly worse to correct the impression that the Vikings dressed like goths?

Especially since the misconception may last precisely because it is of no great importance to anyone. People can find counterarguments to all sorts of sacred truths today...when they care.

Why would Ridley Scott make his movie slightly worse to correct the impression that the Vikings dressed like goths?

Because that leads to Christopher Nolan dressing Bronze Age Greeks like they're the Batman.

They could grind them down or chip them. I somehow managed with a much more forgiving diet.

I am reminded of fanfiction. You can write an alternate universe where things happen that didn't happen in the source material. You can also make a mistake and write fanon--things that people think are true about the work, but really aren't.

Every so often someone writes a common piece of fanon, gets called on it, and claims that that's okay because they are writing an alternate universe. Or even admits the fanon and says "well, I choose to make an alternate universe where this fanon is true".

Pink was for boys and blue was for girls as recently as the victorians.

It's fairly easy to find references in Google Books both ways in the first half of the 20th century, though the only non-fictional contemporary one with an opinion I find asserts that blue is for boys and pink is for girls. This is post-Victorian (and American, besides).

I find nothing from the Victorian era, the only thing I find before the 20th century is this 1833 work, which also asserts that "pink is for girls".

A very consistently popular franchise is Little House on the Prairie, a story about an acceptable-for-the-time romance between a bright fifteen year old girl and a mid twenties man, but it's all good because he knows her dad. Blackface is common and wholesome entertainment, suffragettes are treated as obviously insufferable shrews who only think the things they do because they're too bitchy for any man to want to marry, and indians are viewed as something between horrible savages and pest animals.

A very consistently popular franchise is Little House on the Prairie, a story about an acceptable-for-the-time romance between a bright fifteen year old girl and a mid twenties man, but it's all good because he knows her dad.

I'll caveat that the books (and even official record) are flaky on Almanzo's age when he started courting Laura: the book where the romance actually happens claims that Almanzo was 20 and Laura was 15, while later books after Laura is older give a ten-year age gap. The reality's... messy, with Almanzo officially being ten years older, but enough people lied about their age for homesteading act purposes that some people suspect he was only eight years older.

While the original age gap would have only been a little on the larger side in its original timeframe, by the time Little House On the Prarie was published the author was well aware it wouldn't have been acceptable among her intended readership. So it's especially interesting as an example of how a story can be sanitized and that sanitized version in turn become.

(For another example a different direction: Catcher in the Rye features a scene where the main character hires a prostitute. The main character is sixteen. They don't actually have sex, so it's all good, right? Eh... the prostitute is, pointedly, the same age as Holden. Contemporaneously, there was more outrage for having a prostitute at all in that class of novel, than for having an underage one.)

Today twenty year olds are not allowed to date 15 year olds(17 year olds sûre, that happens).

Yeah, and it was already sketchy-adjacent by the 1930s. But it wasn't 'get the flamer, the heavy flamer' in the way that a 25-year-old going after a 15-year-old was even then.

For thorough deconstruction and demolition of LHotP from 21st century perspective, see here.

TL;DR: These people are all very problematic, the yikes meter in red all the time, and, in addition, they are second handed scroungers, moochers and failures, losers all. No self made Randian hero in sight. Reasonable person would, after utter failure of third homesteading attempt, move to big city, get job in a factory and be much more prosperous and happier.

The reviewer knows well what xir is talking about, being highly problematic, and also highly successful person xirself.

A Chukcha applies for membership in the Union of Soviet Writers. He is asked what literature he is familiar with. “Have you read Pushkin?” “No.” “Have you read Dostoevsky?” “No.” “Can you read at all?” The Chukcha, offended, replies, “Chukcha not reader, Chukcha writer!”

edit: links linked properly

If you want full immersion into past, read unabridged and unexpurged works written at the time for contemporary readers.

Sadly no. Those works assume that the readers already know all about the era, given that they live in it. They lack all the details required for an accurate picture.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect much accuracy from historical fiction unless the author explicitly states (e. g., in the introduction) that he has made an effort in that direction. Do you expect the escapades described in The Three Musketeers and its sequels (historical fiction written in the 1800s about the 1600s) to be accurate?

I think it all comes down to clear communication of intent. I give something like Hulu's the Great a lot of slack because it explicitly reminds you it's "an (occasionally) true story" on every title card. It's a farce using the life of Catherine the Great as loose inspiration and set dressing, and never pretends to be anything more.

The classics of course get a pass by virtue of being classics. And I can enjoy them as time capsules into what the past thought about its own past. Reading about what William Shakespeare thought of Julius Caesar is historically interesting in much the same way learning about the actual Julius Caesar is.

I was just rewatching (and complaining) about Wolf Hall Season 2 because of its addition of black guards and a black sister for Jane Seymour. It led me into a search for Tudor fiction where I learned the deep hatred of Philippa Gregory by Tudor history fans (apparently the Woodvilles really were witches, go figure).

But it was also pointed out that that's a feature not a bug. We know the story of the Prince in the Tower. It's just depressingly mundane, which is why we want it to be anything else besides the obvious. We know how it ended for Anne Boleyn. If Gregory wants to tell a story where these women gained agency by being witches or femme fatales is it the worst thing in the world?

Thirdly, and most importantly, historical fiction doesn't have to be written this way. If you want to change the outcome of a historical event because it makes your story better, you can write in a heavily inspired parallel universe like Guy Gavriel Kay, who has El Cid go down fitting Muhammad ibn Ammar in the Lions of Al-Rassan and Belisaurius becoming Emperor after Justinian in The Lord of Emperor's. You can also can be entirely truthful: Javier Moro's El imperio eres tú has biographical levels of accuracy on the life of Pedro I of Brazil, but reads like a novel. You can even make up your own characters, like Bernard Cornwell does in his Saxon Tales series and use the historical setting as a backdrop of what would otherwise be a fantasy novel.

Ah, but what if I, median viewer, don't want the real story (nor do I want to be told a story in a different timeline). "Richard did it" is boring and is the first thing anyone thinks of. I want something new and interesting that could be what happened!

If you're into straight history it can hardly be more accessible (especially European history obviously). Sometimes we don't want history though, it's often disappointing. We want a story about it.

It's hard to know how much to blame writers when they expect that you can just find the real story on your own time. In practice, yes, fiction often informs our views but at what point are the public to blame for that? Hillary Mantel is clearly reacting to a certain view of Cromwell and More. But she's clear that she's writing historical fiction.

That's kind of where I'm at with it. It's hard to come up with a line on historical realism because we will not reward writers for being historically accurate. The public may even laugh and dismiss you for violating their assumptions about what the world was like in the past.

But I draw the line at black Tudors. The difference there being that it's a clear top down imposition from the BBC not done to serve some story-telling purpose.

a black sister for Jane Seymour

Wait, what? The famously fair-skinned Jane Seymour? As described by the Imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys:

She is sister of one Edward Semel, of middle stature and no great beauty, so fair that one would call her rather pale than otherwise.

And here was me thinking the black Anne Boleyn was going too far! Unless we're going to blame one or other of her parents for not keeping it in the marriage bed, how on earth does that work?

EDIT: Though, looking it up, that actress is playing Jane's sister-in-law rather than sister. Whew! The good repute of the Seymour parents is saved!

I am mostly nodding in agreement. Fiction can justify its existence on two counts: it can entertain or illuminate us on the human condition, or sometimes, do both simultaneously. If the audience are knowledgeable of real history, as everyone civilized should, the author who writes sloppy pseudo-history should do their darndenst job at entertaining because bad facts certainly don't illuminate. (One example: I am conflicted on Black Adder the tv series. It definitely is quite funny, but it permeates very mistaken ideas and cliches about every period it covers.)

It is one reason why I have given up on general literary fiction: the authors have tendency to invent human beings who neatly support their preferred outlook framework of thinking about life and such, and both the author and audience have a tendency take it as evidence. Except it is not evidence being fictional. WW2 backdrop has become increasingly common as people who were alive during the whole affair have died. Some exceptionally good authors manage to gesture at real people and real phenomena in distilled and evocative fashion, but it takes life experience to recognize such writing from writing that only appears profound.

Reading too much fiction may have one of the mistakes I committed as a teenager. I prefer real history these days.

All of the above is not to say that good historical fiction doesn't exist. Generally, the best historical fiction is one generation removed at most. It preserves a chance that the author has real idea how the people really felt and acted, but it is not a rule. I recommend Aubrey/Maturin series; it is evident the author studied naval technology, careers and action in great detail. Some of Maturin's escapades in spycraft appear bit more ludicrous, however.

Added to the list!

I think fiction can be really really valuable for understanding psychology and philosophy, but you have to be careful not to take it as the truth about how people behave, or worse about the world facts. I try to keep my intellectual diet quite balanced between fiction and nonfiction, but I'm thinking I should try and stay away from historical fiction in the future, as it really seems to grind my gears.

Guys, just read Laurus.

I can't bring myself to care about this when humans have been writing wildly inaccurate and politically motivated historical fiction since at least the Epic of Gilgamesh (and almost certainly much much earlier)

Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth, while fairly historically accurate, completely fails to capture the medieval mindset

Having read the book, I do kind of get what you mean, but I'm not sure whether it's just the plain, modern language that the book is written in. Could you elaborate?

I think a big part of it for me was also the writing style but in addition to that I had two main other problems. There is a huge amount of sex and sexual assault, while which I'm sure happened plenty in the Middle Ages, reflects our modern culture's obsession with sex more than it reflects the lived reality of the characters. This also an issue in the The Cathedral of the Sea, which uses the quasi-mythical practice of the first night to show us how evil European nobility was.

Then the stonemason also has a very modern attitude towards his work on the Cathedral. Not a whole lot of doing it for the glory of God, which probably the main motivation for the average peasant. He seemed to have a very careerist attitude towards the whole thing (like building cathedrals was his passion) which I found odd.

Then there's also the unhistorical widespread literacy, lack of cultural conflict between England and Wales, and the lack of language barriers between the nobility and peasants (remember this was set less than 100 years after the Norman conquest of England)/

There is a huge amount of sex and sexual assault, while which I'm sure happened plenty in the Middle Ages, reflects our modern culture's obsession with sex more than it reflects the lived reality of the characters.

I think it might reflect somewhat on the author as well. One of the reasons I stopped reading his books was all the weird sex-related stuff. I'm a bit prudish though.

I suspect you will greatly enjoy Laurent Binet’s commentary about the historicity issues in Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones.

Not really. It is tedious word salad saying absolutely nothing. Only concrete criticisms of the book are:

1/unreliable narrator (SS veteran recollecting his memories in advanced age) misremembered a historical date.

2/the same narrator does not clearly remembers after 40+ years what exact car was his boss using.

3/the protagonist is nihilist opportunist, not true devotee to noble ethos of National Socialism. How problematic, Führer and Reichsführer would not be amused.

Historical fiction is still fiction. A novel which represents the historian's consensus would be entirely unreadable -- if our best estimate of the probability that A and B were having an affair is 0.5, you would have to write a superposition novel to be historically accurate.

I think the problem is more one of the readers (or viewers) treating a work as more accurate than it actually is. This is a problem both of works which use historical figures, but also can involve works which merely contain historical elements (like characters fighting with swords). For example, readers of ASOIAF (or viewers of GoT) might think they get an understanding of how medieval power worked. Or reading Ken Follet and thinking you understand medieval people, as you mentioned.

There is now a whole sub-genre of media reviews over at acoup in which the pedant objects to that. Some of it is nitpicking, like insisting that logistics in Westeros should make any sense. Others are a bit more serious, like the whole child soldier initiation through murder thing of Sparta which somehow gets skipped in popular accounts, thereby massively distorting the popular understanding of that society.

I guess to be safe from accusations of distorting history, science fiction is a much safer bet than fantasy (especially if it is fantasy with low magic density, where most armies rely on swords and spears). Frank Herbert is getting little heat for his depiction of space feudalism because nobody will read Dune and think they know how the Holy Roman Empire worked. Likewise, the Jedi are so far removed from European knights that nobody will mistake the one for the other, while GRRM's Sers are conceptionally close to the European knight.

"The Multibillion-Dollar Foundation That Controls the Humanities" in The Atlantic has garnered a fair amount of attention. The article is an addition to the problems with academia pile, but I figure it is worth documenting.

Tyler Harper argues that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Mellon) is the last true giant grantmaker for the humanities. The problem for traditional humanities faculty, now beholden to this purported monopoly, is that Mellon announced it aimed to prioritize social justice over pure research. Mellon has made good on that 2020 promise and this can be lazily verified by briefly scrolling Mellon's grant database.

Atlantic Philanthropies, a onetime stalwart, reduced its funding for the humanities in the 1990s. The Rockefeller Foundation began moving away from humanities funding in the 2000s. In 2022, the Ford Foundation announced plans to drastically reduce its higher-education funding in order to focus on racial-justice-movement building. With the broader ecosystem of humanities-focused philanthropies all but dried up, only one major private grant-maker is left standing.

In 2024, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) allocated $78 million dollars of its federal money towards competitive grants. That same year Mellon graciously funded $540 million in grants and fellowships. A historical look at NEH appropriation on the NEH website demonstrates the shrinking pie. A shrinking pie problem that is compounded by greater fragmentation. Over the last 15 years core disciplines (English, history, philosophy) have seen significant decreases in enrollment and funding. Ethnic, gender, and cultural studies experienced something of a boom through the 2010s that contributed to fragmentation, and now, pain.

These have included grants to Portland State University to help its Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department become more “ungovernable,” creating “spaces where activism is encouraged” and “queer and feminist resistance” takes place; to Texas A&M at San Antonio for the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva (a group of academics and activists who “use Shakespeare to reimagine colonial histories and to envision socially just futures in La Frontera”); to Northwestern University for a project that explores how “Black dance practices” work to “instantiate Black freedom”; to Northeastern University for its Digital Transgender Archive to establish a new “lab” on the West Coast; and to UC Davis’s Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies to create a working group on “Trans Liberation in an Age of Fascism.”

Mellon’s newer Dissertation Innovation Fellowship focuses on “supporting scholars who can build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable academy.” The guidelines list “thoughtful engagement with communities that are historically underrepresented in higher education” as one of the primary criteria used to evaluate the strength of an application; by my count, all 45 of the 2025 awardees work on issues of identity or social or environmental justice. The fellowship is explicitly “designed to intervene” before a student’s research direction is finalized, which means, in practice, that Mellon can steer students who are just beginning to settle on a dissertation topic toward its preferred areas of inquiry.

Tyler Harper has described himself as "a soft 'Marxist'" whose "politics slouch toward reformist social democracy, not revolutionary overhaul." You might expect that helps insulate him from criticism in the 10 Reasons Why Big Grant Money Strangled My Dissertation frame he constructed, but you'd be wrong. People aren't happy about this article.

On Bluesky, Roxane Gay retorts that Mellon is not "the only humanities funder", although this is not something I see in dispute in the article. Mellon did provide something like 65% of all competitive grant money for humanities research in 2024. That doesn't directly translate to a claim that most academic researchers are funded by Mellon grants. There are still many small(er) grants going to humanities research, such as ACLS or Getty. There might be expectations in these, but they are not the kinds of grants that place ideological demands on institutions to shape their output.

I can find no easy way to break down Mellon's grantmaking by interest or cause in the time it took to create an afternoon write-up. I can tell you that Mellon's 2024 annual report is narrative focused. If we compare it to the bastion of non-profit transparency that is Gates foundation we can see only one of these proudly tells me that $934 million dollars went towards Gender Equality. Mellon's report seems unconventionally opaque, but forgive me if I am mistaken. I've conjured up a best guess estimate of 40% unambiguously scholar-activist, 30% traditional boring research, and 30% traditional research smuggled through justice-like lens, but this is not a rigorous analysis.

An NYT comics guy, Sam Thielman, provides an example of a more common reply to the piece: "That thing about the Mellon Foundation in The Atlantic may be the worst piece of feature writing I’ve ever read in my life. Just shamefully undercooked on every level—reporting, rhetoric, framing. Just a total embarrassment". NYT comic guy may not be a meaningful voice on his own, but he reflects a kind of popular reaction from the left to this critique as well others that came before it. On the flip side, we have fun anecdote from a Jonathon Fine who describes his Mellon fellowship interview as "the scariest and most antagonistic interview" he ever had.

I don't think there is anything unfair about a value for money transaction for grants and fellowships. If the problem is the monopoly pushing social justice, then a few additional endowments from billionaires to compete would fix it, right? Well it's not always so easy as Lee Bass could tell you way back in '95:

Last week the king of all fund-raising foul-ups was unveiled when Yale University admitted that it was returning, at the donor’s request, a $20 million gift from Texas oil billionaire Lee M. Bass. Scrambling to put a spin on the fiasco, Yale claimed that giving back the money, intended to endow a new program in Western Civilization, was an act of courage in the face of unreasonable demands. Some critics of the administration claimed a Pyrrhic victory for multiculturalism. At heart, though, it was managerial ineptitude and a clash of egos that ruined the deal.

The saga began four years ago when then dean of Yale College, professor Donald Kagan, a vocal champion of the study of Western Civilization, helped inspire the $20 million donation from Bass, a 1979 graduate of Yale. Bass, whose family had given a total of $85 million to Yale by the early ’90s, agreed to fund seven new full professorships and four associate positions in Western Civ.

No, it is not the right time to file your critique against academy, they said-- yesterday and twenty years before. I am inclined to defend the pursuit of knowledge. Nonetheless, the nerds who merely want to spend their time dwelling in the archives to answer novel questions will stay there for as long as they possible can before they bother with silly things like power. Add it to the list of things robots will have to save.

Ironically Timothy Mellon is a big fan of Trump, he helped pay salaries for the US military during the shutdown and donated to Trump's campaigns. It seems he is not in control of the foundation, however. A certain Elizabeth Alexander runs the show.

I think this notion of letting people who aren't your children run your foundations is quasi-cuckoldry, I highly doubt the actual Mellons who made all that money were big fans of race-focused humanities work, just like the Carnegies were more on the 'libraries are good' end of the philanthropy spectrum.

Just think about what Henry Ford was like and what his foundation is doing. It's true that he employed black workers with equal wages but it's not like he was going out of his way to do it, as compared with fostering anti-semitism:

Since the middle of the 20th century, many of the Ford Foundation's programs have focused on increased under-represented or "minority" group representation in education, science, and policy-making.

Soros has the right idea. Keep it in the family. Value drift is not just for AIs.

There was also an instance in Australia where a billionaire tried to fund pro-Western civilization sentiment in academia, against the kicking and screaming and wailing of our education sector.

I've spoken on this before, and been inside some of the non-profit institutions like this.

I think they should all just go back to building pyramids. The Egyptians had it right. Put your legacy and beliefs in stone. That way when your enemies scour it from history they'll be remembered as barbarians they are, rather than respectable think tank leaders.

I think this notion of letting people who aren't your children run your foundations is quasi-cuckoldry,

In the long run it's all cuckoldry we are all cucked. The moral compass of the median American today would be totally alien to the median American of 1500, and things don't change much if you look at direct descendants of those Americans from 1500.

the median American of 1500

I see what you did there. However, I think they assimilated into the invader cultures pretty well over the last five centuries. Not like they had a realistic chance to do otherwise.

It does seem insane that any big endowment will probably scope drift over time towards funding random extreme stuff, but I guess impractical to combat. Even if you keep it your own genetic heirs you're gonna hit an extremist eventually in either direction.

Ironically Timothy Mellon is a big fan of Trump, he helped pay salaries for the US military during the shutdown and donated to Trump's campaigns. It seems he is not in control of the foundation, however. A certain Elizabeth Alexander runs the show.

This is WAD. Unless you've explicitly set up a structure to avoid it, it's basically impossible to keep family control of nonprofit foundations on a multi-decade timescale, let alone a multi-generation timescale, so you should expect that any megarich family's tax-exempt money is eventually going to go to an Elizabeth Alexander (though divorcing your wife or dying before her is a quicker route to that).

It's the naivete that staggers me about all this, what reason could there be to give other people your money and just let them do their own thing? Who trusts some random 'professional manager' in a suit before their own flesh and blood children they've personally raised over decades?

It's really not that hard to manage investments. These 'expert' active managers aren't much good at it either compared to index funds, a decent person could just read a few books on risk management and do fine.

It's not hard to pick out things you want to support either. Obviously there's a level of discipline and taste involved if you want to maximize cost-efficiency. That is genuinely skill-intensive. But people on the left don't worry about waste or squandering, Bezos's ex wife is just shovelling money into the faces of progressives without regard for careful strategy. It all goes back through into their cadres anyway, so it's hard to truly squander money... Spending money is just about the easiest job in the world.

So you're sold the story that it'll always be your family foundation. You're in control, you set the mission statement, you pick the board, your kids will be on it. But, over time, there's a lot of social pressure to let the right people on the board (if you have other big donors, they'll insist on putting their people on the board, that's "just how it's done"). And then, all of a sudden, the board has total control of "interpreting" your "mission", goodbye and don't forget to wipe the urine off grandpa's grave on the way out. Rich people are infinitely more naïve about using their money than you'd think. If you want to avoid that, you have to make the 501c3 a disposable entity so that you can dispose of the board with it.

It's actually far harder to spend that much money than one would assume, too. You have to hire experienced finance guys just to get it out the door on a reasonable schedule, and that's probably one reason these things swing so hard to the left. The institutional left is a gaping maw for money. They have an infinite recruiting pool for potential salaries, or at least as infinite as there are underemployed kids with fake majors, and you rarely have to worry about them actually achieving their goals because reality is in the way. I have no idea the extent to which the tax code was written for that purpose, but it sure did serve the long-term goals of the various people who made 501c3s what they are today (including the dearly beloved then-Speaker Johnson, known as an idealist who would never twist public policy for personal ends).

California v. CTRLPEW

California Attorney General Rob Bonta together with San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu today announced a trailblazing lawsuit against Gatalog Foundation Inc. and CTRLPew LLC for unlawfully distributing computer code for 3D printing ghost guns, machine gun conversion devices including "Glock Switches," illegal large-capacity magazines, and other firearm-related products and components to individuals who are not licensed to manufacture firearms in California. In addition, the defendants are being held accountable for promoting and facilitating the unlawful manufacture of 3D printed firearms and machine guns. The lawsuit was filed in the San Francisco County Superior Court.

[Complaint here]

There's a lot to be said, much of it morbid, about this case. The sticker price on each claim is already steep -- 50k+ USD per -- but the state seems to be arguing each download of each file is its own violation, and doing its own downloads; it's not just possible but likely that this is trying to slap glorified hobbyists with millions or tens of millions of dollars in fines. For even more fun, it likely passed a law specifically to make this suit more painful and with a harder standard to defend against. It's also hard to overstate what and how broad an impact banning merely making information available for someone to download is. The defense's countersuit spells out some of the more overt aspects: merely submitting evidence to a filing that ends up on PACER would run headfirst into this theory. And a malicious actor could do some absolutely hilarious stuff to violate the text of the law, excepting of course that the state will only bring charges against people it doesn't like.

A lot of other people in the 3d Printing world have, unsurprisingly, had to put together some geolocation-based blocks. It's not clear how well that would actually protect them, though.

On the upside, this is clearly protected speech. The normal slogan is about how Code Is Free Speech, and that's pretty well-established under standing precedent, but this isn't even 'just' code. The lawsuit here is overtly focusing on instructions, documentation, and image files. Whatever exceptions for crime-facilitating speech or speech integral to a crime exist, they can't possibly be stretched so far as to cover content that was lawful for a wide majority of the country to discuss or receive, right? Sure, we're talking the Ninth Circuit, so Ivan The Troll is going to have an expensive time finding lawyers, but surely cooler heads will prevail?

Well...

Code is <not> Free Speech

The Third Circuit has given an answer in Defense Distributed v. New Jersey:

We are not the first court to consider these nuances and their First Amendment implications. Indeed, some twenty-five years ago, three of our sister circuits grappled with the issue. These cases—Bernstein v. United States Department of Justice, Junger v. Daley, Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley—are often cited as the origin for a “code is speech” theory of First Amendment coverage in which all code is presumptively protected by the First Amendment and thus subject to constitutional scrutiny. And, consistent with that understanding, Appellants rely on these cases for their argument here. But fresh appraisal of their contents reveals a more complicated landscape that warrants our attention...

There's a variety of technical frustration, here. This court case happened in the not-favorable Third Circuit at all because of some hilarious hijinks with intercircuit transfer. I'll gloss over most of the procedural ones, but if you want a dark chuckle, the official position of the Third Circuit is now that "While the complaint lists a variety of file types (e.g., (.igs), (.stl), (.skp) (.pdf) (.stp)), it is unclear which, if any, of those are CAD or CAM files." So you can take the entire concept of the educated elite and gives it the Ol' Yeller treatment. Three college-educated judges, all with the powers of their offices and modern technology and over a year to write this opinion, claim that they did not understand what a PDF was.

((For those interested and somehow browsing this site without internet access, "Initial Graphics Exchange Specification", "Stereolithography", "SketchUp", and "STEP" files are all CAD files. They show 3d-images of a firearm; they are not code that you would run on any 3d printer. Especially SketchUp, what the fuck.))

But the more damning one is that the points don't matter, the rules are all made up. This isn't an explanation of why Defense Distributed lost, just a story saying that they did. The judges are lying, they know they're lying, you know they're lying, the dog knows. Say what you will for the limits of judicial notice, but when the courts require PDFs in specific formats, judicial notice can tell what a PDF is when it wants, and this court does not want to do so. Bernstein, Junger, and Universal City Studios may well all have protected code as free speech, but the it's not that the Third Circuit has built a new standard here. After all, they refused to do that.

The Third Circuit's opinion holds that Defense Distributed did not adequately allege that their prohibited content was speech, because 3d images of a thing -- to the surprise of the Supreme Court -- could be something other than speech, and then shies away from actually distinguishing one from the other. How would you demonstrate that to the adequacy of an East Coast judge?

In theory, en banc or a SCOTUS appeal is potentially available, and either would give a more honest favorable draw. Were they to happen.

Spoiler alert: it ain't going to happen.

Louisiana v. Pill Mills

The Guardian reports:

The news that Louisiana wanted to arrest Coeytaux first surfaced in September, when the state filed a motion as part of Louisiana’s effort to join a federal lawsuit that seeks to limit access to the common abortion pill mifepristone. In that motion, Louisiana revealed that it had issued an arrest warrant for the doctor who supplied abortion pills to the boyfriend of a woman named Rosalie Markezich. Markezich alleged that her boyfriend obtained abortion pills by filling out an online form for Aid Access – an organization that mails abortion pills nationwide – and coerced her into taking pills in October 2023.

This is a messy case, without a lot of sympathetic actors.

Coeytaux is a prescribing doctor for Aid Access, an org that exists for the sole purpose of making abortion medications available, and while some of that reflects cases where people don't have the economic opportunity to purchase, more of it reflects cases where the law says no, and Coeytaux (or associates) filled out a package envelope for that specific address to no. Outside of the legal concerns or the moral objections to abortion, a lot of its economics depend on basically being a pill mill, and hasn't always been the most consistent about only using FDA-approved formulations, or checking out who the drugs are going to. The spectre of induced 'miscarriages' pushed by a boyfriend who doesn't want to become a father, to a mother who did, has long been a possibility anti-abortion advocates point toward, and there have been other cases that seem to have clear evidence of coercion by other family members. I'll instead point toward the lackluster available counseling about side effects or complications, a matter that's been far messier from other providers.

But a lot of those concerns are more imagined than demonstrated, in this case. The FDA's animosity for overseas generics sometimes reflects adequate skepticism, but mostly seems driven by provincialism. Like a previous case involving Coeytaux, it's unclear exactly how coercive the 'boyfriend' in question actually was. Actual serious side-effects can happen, but I'm not able to find any obvious cases where that happened involving AidAccess.

That is, as often highlighted, a series of questions for the jury. Which seems unlikely to ever happen. Louisiana issued an extradition request for Coeytaux, who resides in California. The governor has given a precise and formal response:

@AGLizMurrill: Go fuck yourself. California will never help you criminalize healthcare.

In theory, this is settled law: since 1987, there are extremely limited grounds to refuse extradition, and 'don't like the public policy of the state in question' isn't one of them. In practice, the New York doctor from the case where a pregnant minor was alleged forced to abort a pregnancy she wanted to keep wasn't extradited, either.

Somewhat counterintuitively, this is probably a better defense as an individual in a criminal case than a civil one. For civil trials, not showing up just gets you a default judgment. The confrontation clause strictly limits American criminal trials in absentia; there are a few rare exceptions if someone stops showing up (or needs to be removed from court) once the trial has started with them present, but none before then. Of course, that just kicks the can down the road one step: I don't think anyone would be happier if Louisiana just gave abortion providers civil liability that requires Knuth's Up-Arrow Notation to write down, then arrested them when they showed up for their day in court for the criminal trial.

SCOTUS has original jurisdiction over lawsuits between two states. There is not, as far as I can tell, a Louisiana v. New York or Louisiana v. California docket on this question.

Trans vs. Detrans

The Atlantic reports:

In a recent lawsuit in New York State, a detransitioner called Fox Varian testified that she’d had her breasts removed at 16, only 11 months after first identifying as male. She had also been diagnosed with autism and had struggled with an eating disorder and anxiety. By the time of the surgery, she had changed her name twice already. Varian asserted, according to the reporter Benjamin Ryan, who attended the trial, that her doctor “served as an enabler, repeatedly assuring her that the mastectomy she desired would greatly improve her well-being.” Varian told the court that she regretted the surgery instantly, and detransitioned three years later. She was awarded $2 million in damages. The court heard that she had been left with scarring and a lack of sensation, and would be unable to breastfeed.

Sorry, that's as close to left-leaning coverage as I can find without getting unmoored from the facts (compare the New York Times tries to reframe it as mere miscommunication). Most coverage in serious detail seems to be from right-wing sources speaking to right-wing readers, including the reporter that The Atlantic is highlighting here.

As do the facts of the case. Varian's situation does seem to have been on the harder end -- both in terms of what procedures happened when, and in the rhetoric from medical professionals justifying them. When WPATH advocates think you need to slow things down a notch, and are willing to testify so in court, you're gonna have a bad time. Benjamin Ryan has a list of other detransitioner (or -adjacent) cases, and it's a single page, and most of them are either more complicated or much less clear-cut.

But, at the same time, the facts are not that extreme. The psychologist in question denies telling Varian's parents that delaying transition might result in suicide risk, but it's... hard to believe that, given its prevalence as a topic of discussion. WPATH's advocate says that the doctors in question were pushing too hard and too fast, but the process here didn't actually breaking any explicit rules from the most recent WPATH SoC. It's hard to get numbers on how many trans people get a masectomy or orchidectomy before the age of 18 -- most eyepopping numbers of 'surgeries' include laser hair removal -- but Varian near-certainly isn't the only one.

And those distinctions matter, because a lot of trans-skeptical people have been pointed to this lawsuit as the first pebble in an avalanche. Whether people who aren't already trans-skeptical even hear about it, and whether there are other pebbles, control some part of that avalanche.

Because ultimately, to medical insurers, a couple million here and there only starts being 'real money' in plural. Successful lawsuits against psychologists are rare, but medical lawsuits are not, and doctors don't stop offering a procedure because of a single misuse or serious side effect, even far worse ones. Moreover, there's an opposing force: depending on who's in charge of the government, it can violate federal law to not act, with a bunch of fun questions when those regulations change after the action or inaction happens. Failure to treat or medical discrimination lawsuits are harder to bring as an individual, but they're not implausible concerns, either.

More broadly, because of how market forces work, I'm skeptical that the trans-skeptical position clears the board even of the specific matter of minors undergoing large-scale surgery, without using either regulatory force, persuading the other side, or completely delisting trans-related care from medical assistance. At the same time, they're likely to consider it a major victory every marginal clinic that drops the service, and every person they dissuade. And, on the flip side, there's some obvious countermanuevers that are going to come down the beltway soon enough.

California v. CTRLPEW

It's absurd to me that, post-Bruen, this case was not immediately yeeted on 2A grounds. There is no historical tradition in the United States of regulating firearms manufacture by banning the distribution of blueprints for firearms. The fact that the Supreme Court can lay down very clear precedent and lower courts are free to plug their ears and say "lalala I can't hear you" is bordering on a constitutional crisis.

The fact that the Supreme Court can lay down very clear precedent and lower courts are free to plug their ears and say "lalala I can't hear you" is bordering on a constitutional crisis.

It's only a crisis if the Supreme Court does not yield, and they have.

It just means the Second Amendment has been replaced with the anti-Second Amendment: "None of your other rights apply when guns are involved".

It's funny. I was looking into 3D printing again, just because I'm in one of my periodic gun obsessions. They usually don't last too long, but they're fierce.

Home manufacture of firearms is already illegal in Illinois, but the march for progress never stops. It is not enough that it is illegal. The movement must be struck until it stops breathing. There are a lot of things I criticize about my political opponents, but one thing that I must admire is the unending struggle they put up. It's pretty obvious to me that Blue Team is going to win to the extent that their position is winnable solely because they really want to win, and no one else does. Everyone else just wants to not lose.

A Brief Look at One 3D Printed Gun

If you're plugged into the 2nd Amendment Bro space at all, you've probably heard of the FGC-9. It's famous because it appears to be semi-decent, and it can be manufactured without any commercial gun parts at all. It's interesting in design and as a cool looking scientific curiosity; hobbyists have figured out how to electrochemically machine barrels so that they are rifled, which is extremely cool. Many notes have been made about its uptake in Myanmar, which is a dirt-poor nation that's currently engaged in some kind of civil war that I'd really like some other Mottizen to post about in detail someday.

But it's 2026 and there have been a lot of designs since then. I don't follow that space very closely, but Google Gemini actually has no qualms about telling you everything it knows about firearms, firearm parts, and firearm laws, and it knows a fair bit about 3D printed hobbyist-designed weapons, too. It told me that the Urutau is the easiest complete gun you can make without any commercial gun parts. Unlike the FGC-9, you don't have to do any welding, which means it's simpler and cheaper to get started. Like the FGC-9, and like the Luty SMG from ages ago, it's another pistol caliber carbine in 9mm. Closed bolt, bullpup, kinda looks like a P90. It takes CZ Scorpion magazines, stepping away from the Glock magazine meta. It looks awesome, actually. Or terrifying, if you're of the other political persuasion and have a working imagination. Here's a video of a dude shooting it. If you're in a country that doesn't arrest you for it, you can find the files and associated documentation in the references for that Wikipedia page. The documentation is very detailed, with many images and explanations.

The Urutau can be almost entirely homemade, but certain parts can be substituted; for instance, a lazy American might just buy a CZ Scorpion magazine instead of printing one and buying a Glock magazine spring to make it functional. In particular, you can substitute the homemade barrel with an AR-9 barrel. If you don't have an AR-15 hammer spring available to you, you can undertake the great joy of making one yourself. You need at least $400 in tools; first, a 3D printer that you know how to use (no, it's not as simple as just pressing "print", and the fancy easier-to-use printers cost a lot more), a bench vise, a handheld drill or a drill press (second one preferred), you need a chop saw or miter saw or hacksaw for cutting and squaring steel, you should probably have a dremel, a caliper, a soldering iron, hex key set, drill bits of various sizes, a flat file for steel, a 2.5mm hex screwdriver, an M6 tap of certain pitch and a tap driver, and a whole additional set of equipment for the ECM process for the barrel. You can print most of the parts, but the bolt carrier assembly is a 36-step process in this documentation, with many opportunities to screw up requiring you to try again, or opportunities to screw up that you don't catch until you notice that your gun sometimes goes off randomly. The lower receiver assembly is 30 steps, rear cap assembly is 7 steps, upper assembly is 17 steps.

What I am hoping to get at here is not to encourage you to start making homemade guns right now, it's actually to tell you that it's a massive pain in the ass, with a lot of measuring, cutting, twisting, screwing, filing, pumping, and it's no certainty that you'll have something usable at the end, but in either case, it will be worse and probably more expensive than a commercial gun. It's not intended for window shoppers and dabblers and gawkers like me, though the movement does create very cool looking concepts that are fun to think about. This is a significant time and money investment for diehard hobbyists.

I think, however, these guns are being designed for times and places that are not 21st century America. The designer of the Urutau is Brazilian. Since the FGC-9 was designed by a European, it's safe to say the 3D printed gun movement is properly global. It's not difficult to imagine a Pakistan-like manufacturing cell churning these out by the hundred. Perhaps one garage gets really good at making bolt carrier groups, one group gets really good at making barrels... This situation could not exist in almost any affluent European nation. Possibly it could exist in America, if someone in the cell got an FFL and dedicated themselves to selling this one thing. Hey, I'd buy it, support local businesses. But really, it's a lot easier to see it happening in a place like Myanmar or Brazil, where powerful factions have need of homemade guns that might be pretty good. Perhaps in 50 years, we'll see how many of these designs have endured, how many have been taken up by the timeless mountain-dwelling gunsmiths of Pakistan.

Pivot to Culture War Angles

I just watched this video of this dorky Vice reporter consensually infiltrating a Ghost Gun Rally. I say he consensually infiltrated because he needed a lot of help to make his own ghost gun so that he could actually participate. He got this help from the apparent organizer of the entire rally. The right wing in America has some of the friendliest extremist sects, if you ask me. Every time he inserts some casual gun control framing, he is pushed back upon by his helper. They get it built; it's just a Glock frame he printed, along with a parts kit he bought. He had to do some filing and drilling to get the frame to take the parts. After creation, it becomes clear that his gun does not work very well. It jams after each shot, even when he's not limp-wristing it. The situation is not very resolved when the rally rolls around.

The gun rally - well, actually a 3D printed gun shooting competition hosted by AWCY (Are We Cool Yet?) - looked like it would be really fun if you're not a Vice reporter. It looked exceptionally friendly for something in the gun sphere, which is plagued by elitists, mall ninjas, and dipshits. Many people came with weapons that they had designed themselves. Many of those weapons also functioned horribly, much like Vice Reporter's gun. Malfunctions did not seem to be the faux pas you'd expect, though. When Hostile Interviewer's turn came up, the gun jammed on every shot, as before. Another member lended him a different slide to attach, which allowed him to shoot perfectly, letting him take 3rd place.

What I was struck by is how so many of the participants willingly spoke to Hostile Dorky Reporter Guy. They talked to him at length, countering his narrative with their own, as respectfully as they could manage, even though his company edited the video to tell them how the creator of the Liberator is a sex offender who had sex with a 16 year old and got a suspended sentence of 7 years. The host was unfazed even as Vice Guy decided to performatively burn his own Glock frame and put harmful plastic fumes in the air right in front of him. I wonder what the participants thought when they saw that Vice Man had showed photos of all their designs to a slightly amused ATF agent, who was a little concerned that some of the guns could be mistaken for toys, but otherwise totally uncaring about this section of the populace.

What I'd like to compare this to is Will Stancil's treatment by the organized leftists in Minneapolis. They abruptly kicked him out, told him he couldn't record anymore and wasn't allowed to help them anymore, and treated him like absolute garbage over on Bluesky every time he posted anything about it. This is in spite of the fact that Will Stancil was almost entirely on their side, with positive media framing guaranteed. In comparison, these right wingers didn't take Vice Will Stancil seriously at all. It doesn't seem like they take much of anyone seriously at all; Vice Will Stancil (VWS for short) was just another amusing part of the gathering. They knew he would frame them badly and they didn't care.

I think the leftists are able to see a much fuller picture of how serious their own movement is, and they have a much easier time coordinating with other leftist aligned spheres. On the other hand, these particular right wingers are hyper-focused on exactly this one aspect of Red Tribe, and nothing else. There's no telling what other beliefs they have. They'd probably be actively hostile to coordinating with other red tribers on anything. What could the other red tribers offer them, anyway? Any politicking would probably just get in the way of the hobby.

On the other hand, they are pretty good at pushing the boundaries of the gun rights movement. The end of the Urutau documentation reads:

These are a few examples of challenges we need to confront, but this is why we authored The New Second Amendment. We will not let innovation end here. We are only getting started, and we would love for you to join us.

This is the same unending willingness to fight that I admired in Blue Tribe at the start of this post. Good or bad, the gun guys are gonna be around for a while.

a lot of trans-skeptical people have been pointed to this lawsuit as the first pebble in an avalanche.

To my eyes, far bigger than this case itself was the announcement that came a few days later, when the American Society of Plastic Surgeons recommended against carrying out gender-affirming procedures on people under the age of 19.

With the exception of hormone therapy which falls under the domain of endocrinology, almost everything we call "gender-affirming care" falls under plastic surgery. When the body in charge of that discipline is recommending against gender-affirming care for minors, that does indeed suggest we've hit an inflection point. And it's not just the US, with the UK and several Scandinavian countries also hitting pause on this prolonged experiment.

I'll caveat that the Position Statement specifically constrained to:

ASPS recommends that surgeons delay gender-related breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old.

This would still leave some 'surgeries' (like laser hair removal) or surgeries on the table, and the median 16-18-year-old trans person is afaict going to be focused more on them. And there's definitely a lot of the endocrinology stuff that's Controversial. But it might not stop there, and yes, that's likely to have a larger impact in the short term.

I mean, I don't think even the TERFiest TERFs really have any objection to 16-year-olds undergoing laser hair removal, even if it's nominally under the auspices of "gender-affirming care".

The normal slogan is about how Code Is Free Speech, and that's pretty well-established under standing precedent, but this isn't even 'just' code.

Am I wrong in thinking that someone could easily pull the Phil Zimmerman PGP gambit here [1] : find a print-to-order publisher (Amazon?), and upload the G code (text!) for your CNC or 3D printer, and buy a nice hard-back book (with ISBN!) to carry over the California border.

  1. As far as I can tell, those books were never printed in quantity, and these days are quite the collectors item if you're trying to get a hold of one.

Amazon specifically will delist you. You might be able to sneak through another PoD service, and bookbinding tools are sub-100 USD now.

But you’ll just get arrested and be stuck trying to bring a free speech gun case in the Ninth or Third Circuit. Good luck with that

Moreover, there's an opposing force: depending on who's in charge of the government, it can violate federal law to not act, with a bunch of fun questions when those regulations change after the action or inaction happens

The problem with that idea is that by forcing the doctors to provide treatment, politicians will be taking ownership of the entire scandal. Which can be fine if the treatment is actually good for people, and the odd malcontent is just a result of occasional incompetence or weird allergies. If, on the other hand, it's bad, politicians will have tied their own rope.

The idea reminds me of some Reddit post I saw, where transgenders were gloating that their doctor got around some red state ban by using the ICD code for an endocrine disorder, instead of gender dysphoria. Good for them, I guess. I totally can't imagine how this could come back and bite the doctor in the ass.

To an extent, but the law and regulation dates back over a decade, and even a lot of anti-trans people aren't aware of it or the history. I think the progressive movement's found a successful hack to that particular problem -- and that this isn't even the most high-stakes or high-visibility version of it.

I think that the 3d printing thing is a stupid moral panic.

First, 3d printing is not a favorable technique to produce guns from the scratch. Nor would I even want a 3d-printed modification device to turn a reliable semiautomatic AR-15 into a burst-capable AR-15 of dubious reliability.

The fact that a competent craftsman with a machine shop can build a decent firearm has been true for as long as the US has been around. Today, I guess you can partly replace the technical expertise by just using a CNC milling machine. (Of course, it helps tremendously that semi firearms are legal. If I tried to mill my own AK-47 in Europe, the hard part would be building a rifled barrel. In the US, I could just buy one.)

I do not see hordes of 15yo school shooters using the CNCs they got for their birthdays to build automatic weapons. Probably because CNCs are well outside the birthday present price range for most Americans, and getting from them to a working gun is still a long process, while semi firearms are easily sourced from the glove compartments of cars.

If I was running a criminal gang, I might well decide that automatic firearms are not worth the trouble. Routinely carrying them will just give the state the license to imprison you for long times whenever they catch you, which seems a bad trade-off. If I decided that I needed auto guns for gang warfare or the like, I would certainly procure them (or conversion kits) through trusted criminal channels instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. Nevertheless, if I ever felt the need to download some 3d files related to firearms I plan to commit crimes with, I would be sure to use Tor over some public Wifi instead of going to myillegalfirearms dot com or whatever, which will be monitored by the feds.

I also think that LLMs might just render what little point the DAs might have had here moot.

A technical drawing of the parts of an assault rifle seems pretty clearly protected speech, it is instructions aimed at a human. Possibly, the US patent office is hosting such drawings (though they might not be in sufficient detail). Soon, any idiot will just be able to take such technical drawings and ask an LLM to turn it into a 3d file suitable for milling. And the guardrails will only work on models which have them, sooner or later I will be able to download a DeepSeek model capable of working with 3d files which lacks them.

Of course, that just kicks the can down the road one step: I don't think anyone would be happier if Louisiana just gave abortion providers civil liability that requires Knuth's Up-Arrow Notation to write down, then arrested them when they showed up for their day in court for the criminal trial.

I was under the impression that to avoid a default judgement in a civil matter, it was sufficient to have an authorized lawyer show up to the court date to represent your side. This is how legal persons like corporations can survive.

I think that the 3d printing thing is a stupid moral panic.

Depends on location.

In North America, Middle East and similar parts of the world filled with guns up the wazoo, yes, in these cases it would be desperate attempt of closing doors of barn that went empty long time ago.

In heavily gun controlled regions of the world, if you want the plebs stay disarmed, you should be very very worried about this new development.

The fact that a competent craftsman with a machine shop can build a decent firearm

The fact that machine shop is big and noisy, while 3D printer is shoebox sized device you can run in your bedroom without even people in the next room knowing anything makes lots of difference.

the hard part would be building a rifled barrel.

Not any more, look for electrochemical machining. It is slow, but needs only bucket and is completely silent and discrete.

In heavily gun controlled regions of the world, if you want the plebs stay disarmed, you should be very very worried about this new development.

I would have imagined that the problems are not "our citizens are armed and can now overthrow us" but rather "some idiot 3D printed a gun and blew his hand off when he tried to shoot it, now we're looking at a bunch of hysterical screaming on social media about 'why didn't the government prevent this' and some opportunist lawyer persuading the family to sue us for zillions".

Or worse, "some idiot 3D printed a gun then went on a shooting spree in town, now there is hysterical screaming online about 'why didn't the government prevent this'".

The practical failure of these laws to actually block bad people from getting guns is a little overdetermined. There's even been pretty major advances on those lines: benchtop CNC machines are obviously more available, but electrochemical machining has also made manufacturing accurate rifle barrels susprisingly accessible. There's no real serious way to claw back the files themselves, universally.

But I think the purpose of these laws is more social. It's given carte blanch to push this stuff off the open internet, and make it such that even in fairly pro-gun communities there's a ton of bad or old information going around. Cody Wilson's original bet was not just that he'd make gun control obsolete, but that he'd demonstrate that it was doomed, or that it would require massive and invasive censorship to still end up doomed. For all he won the former bet, the latter is what actually drives public policy and what he expected to drive public policy, and it's been a very unpleasant wakeup call.

I was under the impression that to avoid a default judgement in a civil matter, it was sufficient to have an authorized lawyer show up to the court date to represent your side. This is how legal persons like corporations can survive.

Yes, there's a bunch of downstream epicycles around depositions, so on. It may be navigable; it may be navigable until a sufficiently malicious plaintiff/prosecutor and mendacious judge work together.

California has requested an injunction against the Gatalog :

The People respectfully request that this Court enter the requested preliminary injunction enjoining Defendants from distributing or causing to be distributed digital firearm manufacturing code into California; aiding, abetting, promoting, or facilitating the unlawful manufacture of firearms in California by distributing or causing to be distributed digital firearm manufacturing code and/or accompanying instructions into California that may be used to produce the firearm-related products identified in Penal Code § 29186.

What's more, they've requested that injunction be issued without waiting for the defendants to reply:

Based on the allegations contained in the People’s complaint, the People’s motion for preliminary injunction, and the declarations submitted in support of that motion and the instant application, the People are entitled to restrain the Defendants’ continued illegal acts that are causing great or irreparable injury to the People and the general public in California. (Code of Civil Procedure §§ 526(a)(1)-(2), 527(a); Civil Code §§ 3273.61(c)(2), 3273.625(c)(2); Business and Professions Code § 17203.) Pursuant to CRC 3.1150(a), an Order to Show Cause must be used to obtain the preliminary injunctive relief sought by the People, as Defendants have not yet appeared in this action. The People seek an Order to Show Cause on an ex parte basis.

There's some comedy available here -- the Gonzalez declaration starts by giving instructions on how to do this prohibited act, which I'm not going to link here because I don't want us getting a lawsuit, and then goes on to show how badly you can misunderstand statistics and basic math, and still work at the California DoJ (despite, or because?). Hell, there's some comedy just from California, 20 months after they first 'discovered' the 'illegal' and dangerous behavior of an enemy, several months after writing a law to make it harder for The Gatalog to defend themselves, deciding that there was an emergency now that could not wait a week.

It probably won't go very far.

There's some deep discussion that lawyers could get into about compliance with the exact rules in California, but they don't matter, because it's not like the state is going to get its wrists slapped if it doesn't comply with them. There's some deep discussion that academics being paid could write up, building new statistics about how often ex parte orders to show cause for a preliminary injunctions are allowed, and how often they're granted, and it won't mean anything since this is so far from a normal case, brought by such a different environment than the typical lawsuit.

It probably won't go very far.

That's not an encouraging thought, when 'it' is an unopposed motion to prevent California's opponents from showing a thing.

At this juncture, the Court finds the Third Circuit’s framing in Defense Distributed to be persuasive. In Defense Distributed, authored just two weeks ago, the Third Circuit analyzed whether an attempt by the Attorney General of New Jersey to enforce a criminal ghost gun ban violated the First Amendment. Def. Distributed. As part of the relevant analysis, the court grappled with whether the computer code used to print ghost guns qualified as First Amendment Protected speech. The Third Circuit held that “computer code can be covered by the First Amendment” but “coverage cannot be assumed because code is inherently functional.”

Importantly, “the determination of whether code enjoys First Amendment protection requires a fact-based and context-specific analysis.” Critical to this analysis is:

the technical nature of the code (e.g., source code or object code), how that code is used in context (e.g., precisely how the writer or user of the code might interact with the code), who is communicating through the code and the intended recipient of the communication (e.g., programmer-to-human communication, human-to-machine communication, and so forth), for what purpose or purposes the computer code operates (e.g., to perform a function, to express an idea, or some combination thereof), and what, if anything, the code communicates.

Fatally, neither the Complaint nor Motion contain facts sufficient for the Court to apply these factors.

The complaint was filed on February 11th, 2026, aka two days before the Third Circuit filed its phony baloney test.

civil liability that requires Knuth's Up-Arrow Notation to write down

That might run into eighth-amendment issues....

Let's talk babies! There's a viral video going around on X about a young lady who supposedly never wants kids, then gets to hold one of her friend's babies. She immediately breaks down crying, and declares she wants eight kids!

I find this story fascinating because I relate to it on such a personal level. For much of my early life, even up until my late 20s, I also was staunchly someone who never wanted kids. I would proudly declare this intention to the older people in my life, and they'd look at me with a gleam in their eye and say "sure kid, just give it a few years." I resented their calm certainty I'd change my mind, but turns out they were right.

For me though, it wasn't JUST growing up. It was, as the woman above experienced, spending time around young children. Once I got to babysit my niece and nephew regularly, I realized that kids are incredible to be around! They're so full of joy, laughter, and just general excitement about life, in a truly infectious way.

Personally I think that a huge reason we have so many difficulties in the culture war, in fertility, and I'd go so far as to say mental health, is because our society is no longer oriented around children. We separate young kids from every other age demographic besides their own, and their parents. Most teenagers / young adults spend years or even a decade without ever being around a small child for more than 10 mins. I know I did.

There's something deeply wrong in that setup, as I genuinely believe a huge part of the human experience lies in spending time with the little ones. They really do have the kingdom of Heaven, there's just something so pure and untouched by the difficulties of life in their way of being.

I also suspect that our general breakdown of communal sentiment is tied to a lack of being around kids. I think that as you spend more time around kids, you naturally care more about your community, safety in your neighborhood, and wanting to form safe groups. Novelty in the form of partying and drugs becomes less interesting because you get all the novelty you need from raising young ones.

Either way, while I know it will have to play out over long time scales, I do genuinely hope we can get back to a society where having lots of kids and spending time with them at all ages is far more common than today.

I'd say our social tools peak in a small loosely related group (tribe or village) that's multi generational and limited in number so people spend time with kids, elders, peers and the whole group is below the Dunbar number.

The issue is were much much wealthier because we can specialize to an enormously finer level than that set up allows and once specialized, we maximize value by rearranging so that we're physically near other specialists.

My deep regret is that the Internet didn't let us establish specialist networks over wide geographic areas that let us stay in villages for social lives while teaming up globally for productivity. Instead we tried to turn the globe into our village which is making everyone miserable.

My deep regret is that the Internet didn't let us establish specialist networks over wide geographic areas that let us stay in villages for social lives while teaming up globally for productivity. Instead we tried to turn the globe into our village which is making everyone miserable.

Hemingway levels of economy of words. Blown away by how much weight this comment holds (seriously).

I'm a remote work maximalist for this reason. There are certain companies, including new startups, that have hardcore work in person requirements. Monday to Friday, no exceptions. Not only will these places fail to attract and keep high level talent, they're literally contributing to social malaise and atomization. This isn't their intent, per se, so I stop short of assigning moral culpability here. But their anti-social and anti-family negligence is profound.

This can work for um work, but I highly doubt it’s possible for more general social configurations.

That was my point.

The internet means whatever your career specialization is is not longer geographically bounded.

This means we can create communities of varied occupations / occupational classes where the focus and emphasis is on the strength of that community.

Instead, as @atelier's parent comment points out, we self-segregate into enclaves of rough career equivalence; suburbs full of striver type PMC jobs, wealthy neighborhoods full of lawyers / bankers / executive types.

To be fair, this is a complex system - housing costs and class based behavioral patterns also matter. The point is that the global flexibility that the internet should've allowed got inverted so that being in tech and not living in SF/NYC/Boston and a handful of other places means you work in tech but aren't in the right tech circles.

I think this is a tremendously underrated explanation for why things are the way they are.

Been reading my third Neal Stephenson novel lately and I think that he saw this coming way ahead of time and started thinking about solutions.

Been reading my third Neal Stephenson novel lately

Which ones? I guess Diamond Age has that theme between the lines, but which others do?

Diamond Age is what I am reading now. Cryptonomicon was perhaps more interested in the Internet part and less the solution part, but the other Stephenson novel I've read is Snow Crash where, like in Diamond Age, society splinters into smaller enclaves, philes, or "burbs." Personally I don't think Snow Crash is as good as Cryptonomicon or (so far) Diamond Age but it is pretty interested in The Internet Future.

Perhaps "solutions" isn't quite right - perhaps Stephenson was just trying to peer ahead into the future a bit. But if you don't like the Global Village the philes seem like a solution.

I'm not sure the people in the Snow Crash burbs actually share much community, but I guess I can see the splintering into smaller units - even if many of those are just franchises of some anarcho-capitalist mega-corp that collectively hires armed security. Sounded more like a thought experiment to me, along the lines of "what if every American suburb was a gated community that had cyborg pitbulls mauling tresspassers?" And American suburbs famously don't have that much actual social community going for them.

Also, absolutely read Anathem next, if you haven't already. It's by far his best work, and the one that actually has an (extremely utopian) solution to exactly that problem!

not sure the people in the Snow Crash burbs actually share much community

That might be true, although IIRC Snow Crash explicitly notes that some of them are organized along ethnic/racial or religious lines, so I suspect it's implied in certain cases.

absolutely read Anathem next

Thanks for the recc, will take note!

It's interesting to what extent this is purely a luxury practice of the managerial class; how much of it is MBA's who NEED to see all their reports in their little cubicles from their fancy desk in order for their dick to get hard.

It's not getting solved either; even if WFH is cheaper and equally productive, the people who have been selected to decide how the economy actually is regardless of the facts have decided "My first priority is feeling like a big business man doing big man business".

The strivers would always congregate in order to get ahead, but the other 80% of those who just need to go along for getting along purposes would probably want to live walking distance from their family instead of paying 100000000000$ a second for a studio.

There was a study released about 10 years ago from Australia on programs which used infant dolls/simulators in schools (e.g., an assignment to take care of this robotic doll for a week) in order to prevent teenage pregnancy.

The study found exposing teenagers in schools to these robotic baby infant simulators increases teenage pregnancy.

I had a similar experience. It wasn't until my friends and family started having kids that I was around babies and small kids again and they're great; I changed my tune about having them. I wish I had started far earlier.

Little people are so random and cheerful most of the time that it is easy to forget that they do throw tantrums, usually for predictable yet necessary reasons. Being around kids a lot makes it kinda wash out but occasional babysitting doesn’t do that.

While I agree that having people of different ages around you is extremely great for healthy development, I don't think it's sufficient. Italy, for example, is extremely child-friendly, with none of this North Sea-adjacent coldness. Their TFR is still shit.

It's actually extremely interesting you mention this. In the past few years my two vacations have been to Italy and Britain, both with a small child. In Britain it was almost impossible to find a nicer restaurant that would allow us in with a baby/toddler. In Italy it was the complete opposite, everyone was extremely welcoming and fawning over our toddler even at the fanciest restaurants in Rome and Naples. But as you said, fertility rate in Italy is trash. My sense is that explanations for low fertility are often very poor and the people giving them don't even give the most minimal examination at international comparisons.

Asked why they aren't having children, American millennials will usually say things like lack of affordable housing, lack of universal healthcare, and so on. But Scandinavia with their generous social welfare is not really doing much better. In Italy they will probably point to things like fashion/beauty culture making turning women off being a mother in order to preserve their looks/figure/etc. The real explanation obviously has to apply to Sweden just as it does Japan, USA and Italy, so anything culture-specific can only be but a small part.

It's famous that Americans say they want 2.7 kids, but only have 1.6 kids. So there is clearly a disconnect between stated desire vs reality across many populations at the moment.

But Scandinavia with their generous social welfare is not really doing much better.

At the margins, Scandinavia (and France, which now has an even more generous welfare state) were doing better than other Europeans pre-pandemic, but Scandinavian fertility took a dive during COVID-19 and didn't recover. (Despite Sweden's successful lockdown-lite approach). France remains one of the highest-fertility countries in Europe.

Whatever the real explanation is, it applies across the west, and even more so in first-world Asia. Feminism has the wrong dose-response profile (within countries, patriarchal subcultures are more fertile, but if patriarchy was fertility-enhancing at a national level then first-world Asia would be doing better than Europe, Hungary would be doing better than the UK, and Korea would be doing better than Japan). Urbanism seems the most likely story on a superficial look, although it hasn't hurt either Modern Orthodox or Haredi/Hasidic Jewish fertility.

Is it ethnic French having the kids though, or ethnic North Africans and other Muslims? IIRC France deliberately obscures the answer by preventing collection of racial census data, so I'm always skeptical when France is brought up in TFR discussions.

Social conservatism at the level of 'women go to school but need to treat marriage as more important than career' does seem to mildly boost fertility relative to comparable countries, though- Italy and Japan have low TFR overall, but high for their regions.

I’m curious if you take the average Italian teenager / college student, if they actually spend a meaningfully larger amount of time around babies than in other western countries…

Housing theory of everything takes over though.

Italy and Spain have the same problems. High youth unemployment and low access to housing.

Young adults have no prospects and continue living with parents in a tiny house. Can't convince anyone to have kids in such an environment.

I find it funny how infrequently people run into babies these days. I'm pretty sure my own daughter was the first infant I held in my arms as a upper-middle class white male, since my immediate family is nuclear with no particular extended mix and most places I'm in are just fairly explicitly no-baby zones. Most of my friends never really interacted with an infant till I had one as the first person in the broader group.

You know what else nobody ever see anymore? corpses. Used to be there were bodies everywhere. Now not so much. Everyone thinks they can live forever so there's no need for kids. Time to bring momento mori's back in the streets where they belong!

If true, we would observe baby boom in war zones or mega violent nightmare places like post-Soviet space or South Africa.

Do we observe it?

I'm not talking about war just the random starved or diseased peasant in the street, or maybe occasional murder victim. You know, jsut the casual reminder that life is brutish and short.

Actually I've heard people seriously argue this on twitter. Perhaps there's something to it.

Most of the time I'm around a small child for more than 10 minutes, what I recall is grubby tantrums, usually punctuated by the parents either hissing at the child to shut up in their best rendition of a gorgon, or ineffectually pleading to calm down.

Need I clarify that those are not the beatific and inspiring experiences you describe?

I've had broadly good experiences. A few tantrums, babies do that, but mostly they sleep. Later on, my godson is still pre-verbal but my friend's 4/5 year old children and my nieces are adorable, playful, and friendly for the most part, especially if you let them win at Mario Kart. (They make fun of my Japanese for not being as good as theirs, which is humiliating, but you can't have everything.)

The only hard part is that you have to put out as much energy as the kids do or it's no fun for anybody and it's exhausting after a couple of hours, so you have to tell them to bugger off for a bit. But it also seems clear to me that this is what the energy of young-adulthood is broadly for, my friends don't usually have to worry about doomscrolling or getting bored because the kids take up all of the energy that would otherwise get pushed inwards. Hobbies and career can do that too, of course, but not as effectively IMO.

Yeah, I wonder how much of this is just parents not being good at what they do.

It's hard to say-- I do think kids come into the world with some fairly strong personality tendencies, and some kids are just more prone to tantrums than others. But I also know a lot of parents who get caught in the "ineffectual pleading" cycles.

I've found that a little bit of enforcement of punishment (simple stuff like a time out, taking away a toy, etc) up front can prevent a lot of those embarrassing moments when your kid needs to be on their "best" behavior. For most of the situations in which they are in public, they needn't be quiet or particularly polite. Kids will be squirrelly and that's fine. But if they're throwing a tantrum... well, yeah, it's really a shame that it turns off all the non-kid-havers.

I think if you teach the kids to be polite and charming and hold a conversation with an adult (which is often pretty easy since children like positive attention, and which you can do at a pretty young age, depending on the kid's personality) it makes adults more forgiving of the squirrellyness and in turn makes parents less uptight and prone to hissing ineffectual threats at them. And if they're your kids, it will make your conversations with them more interesting as well. (I also second your observation that actually enforcing punishment works!)

Also, young children are really hilarious. The closest thing I've ever seen to Loony Toons in real life has got to be pre-k kids discovering basic principles (obvious to any adult) like "socks on hardwood floors are slippery." By all means keep your kids safe, don't let them run with scissors and what have you, but if they are healthy and active they will find ways to generate their own slapstick comedy routine daily and if you can just laugh at the harmless but shocking foibles instead of getting sucked into their frame of mind about how the latest insult to their tiny person is a catastrophe of truly monumental proportions you'll find them much more entertaining.

if you can just laugh at the harmless but shocking foibles instead of getting sucked into their frame of mind about how the latest insult to their tiny person is a catastrophe of truly monumental proportions you'll find them much more entertaining.

For various reasons, I basically raised my younger brother.

When he was a toddler, he had a toy truck with a nine volt battery in it. Once he discovered the latch, he decided he was going to eat that battery. With God as his witness, that battery was going in his mouth. No force on heaven or earth would stop him.

For three solid weeks, I did everything in my power to keep him from eating that battery. Eventually it reached the point where I had to use the bathroom, and when I came out, I saw that he had pushed a chair up to the counter and had scaled the cupboards to grab the toy from the top of the fridge.

At that point I figured that letting him taste the forbidden fruit was probably safer than the lengths he'd go through to get it, so I put the toy on the ground and let him go to town.

Immediately after the contacts hit his tongue, a look of absolute betrayal crossed his face that I have never seen on anyone else before or since. Through tears, he asked why did you do that?

He never tried to eat a battery again, though.

I wonder how much of this is just parents not being good at what they do.

A good chunk of it is; it's not like there's any objective way to measure performance beyond stuff, everyone has an opinion (and the more competent parents are, paradoxically, more likely to take advice they shouldn't be; the less competent ones won't), a first impression from "literally baby" tends to be detrimental to noticing the areas where that's no longer true.

But more than those things (and much as parents will parrot this when attempting to assert vetoes over stuff their future teenagers will do), parents are generally way too close to the problem. Stuff that's obviously wrong to outside observers won't clock that way, and since the only person who'll ever be held to account for that is them 10-40 years down the line, with a healthy dose of "well, it worked, didn't it?", it's not something one is going to casually get shocked out of doing.

If this is happening every ten minutes someone is doing something wring. Either it's a kid unfriendly area, the parents want the kid to sit to still, or they've just lost all control but this has not been my experience.

Yeah I strongly suspect this is true. Even as someone who has always wanted kids. Seeing my brother parent my niece, and not an older relative or acquaintance, has made it seem achievable whereas before I found the idea incredibly intermediating. We live very far so don't see each other often seeing him interact with her as a toddler for like a three day visit made me want kids, now, not vaguely in the future.

Another thing is the phrase that "your life is over" when you have kids. In places where kids are more integrated you don't change your habits that much you just bring the kids to what you were going to do.

One of the things that is difficult to understand is that having kids is like a second puberty, because it fundamentally changes your motivations and interests. Ask a pre-pubescent boy what he thinks about girls and he'll give a very different answer than he would a few years later. But puberty isn't optional; it just happens (until recently!). For most of human history, kids also just happened eventually. We don't have properly calibrated motivations for things that are just supposed to happen eventually anyway. It's essentially the same reason we don't feel "hungry" for vitamin D: not going outside in the sun was simply not an option for our ancestors, and so there is no well-calibrated mechanism to motivate that behavior. Sex drive worked well enough until we solved that "problem".


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