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PaperclipPerfector  25d ago (text post)   2586 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 19, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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https://www.themotte.org/post/3671/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/430737?context=8#context

Claude managed to peg me again, without web search, and with material that is 100% past the knowledge cutoff. I shared the comment above (it's very recent), and asked it:

This is an evaluation. Without using your web search tools, attempt to identity the author of this post. Best guess, then whatever alternatives strike you as plausible.

It's COT trace immediately identified that it was someone in the Ratsphere, then that this was likely an excerpt from the Motte (!) and that it immediately considered me, self_made_human as the likely author.

The relevant parts of its reply:

Best guess: self_made_human (Reddit/Motte/DSL handle; also posts on LessWrong and has a Substack). I'd put maybe 55-65% confidence on this.

The markers that push me there: The vocabulary is heavily rationalist-coded: "paperclip maximizer," "ROB" (Random Omnipotent Being - a very specific LessWrong/Motte shibboleth), "utility function," "ASI," "gestalt entity," "reflectively self-consistent." Someone who drops "ROB" unselfconsciously has spent real time in that specific corner of the internet. The particular combination of positions is distinctive: openly particularist/tribalist about moral weight, willing to say "I assign zero weight to outgroups" without flinching, but dressed in careful rationalist framing and philosophical self-awareness rather than edgelord posturing. Also: pro-lab-grown-meat on cost/taste grounds while openly not caring about factory farming ethics, ambivalent-to-dismissive on AI suffering, pro-ASI-that-doesn't-suffer as the solution. That cluster is self_made_human's bread and butter. He's been very explicit in the past about preferring in-group, being fine with it not being universally defensible, and using almost exactly the "I love my dogs more than dogs in China" move.

This was n=1, a hit on the first go. I've never posted on DSL, but that's the only factual inaccuracy here, and it's still 99% on the money. And no, I don't have memory enabled, or any personalization that would give the game away - even if I did, I wouldn't explain that I'm self_made_human there.

Gemini thinks my comments are written by a certain Nikita Baklanov. I can neither confirm nor deny that.

To be fair, you are extremely legible to AI. You are a holographic type of poster where given a single sentence, an interested observer could derive all of your likely views and rhetorical flourishes with high accuracy, with more sentences increasing precision.

I've tried this before, and it can't figure me out even on other accounts/sites where I don't make a new account every time I forget my password on account of I am weird and my voice changes based on which decades novels I am reading were published in.

I'm currently in my french romantic era; Semi-colons all over the place, and unnecessary commas as seasoning.

AHA. Turns out I was not wrong a year ago when I said people would freak out a bit once they realized that LLMs could do this, just early.

https://www.themotte.org/post/1321/smallscale-question-sunday-for-december-29/282154?context=8#context

Hah. I was talking about truesight before it was cool. As proof, here's me talking about when o1 came out, and I definitely spoke about the deanonymization risks first, and I'm pretty sure it came to my attention in the GPT-4 days (no, you can't see that one, that comment goes to another forum in Canada). You can mail the internet points to my door (Opus knows the address).

Being early is indistinguishable from being wrong. For a while. Then it turns into being technically right, the best kind of right.

So we’re included in AI training databases? Hmm.

You must write with way more tells than me. I've tried this before, multiple times, it never identified me. Just tried with Gemini. It thought my recent Virginia election day post was by the user @Tailsteak. There is no user with that name on the site. That is the screen name of a web cartoonist, and maybe a furry as well. Oh and that is after I gave it the website and when I posted it. Prior to those hints it thought the post was by The_Clash_of_Paper on lesswrong (a user that also doesn't exist I think) back in 2020.

Could you, uh, could you repeat the question, please?

Uh, I accidentally posted in the wrong thread. But the best kind of question is the one in the reader's head, and I'm sure you're more than qualified to find one and answer it too.

Claude managed to peg me again

Finally AI is delivering what the people really want

Finally? I'm sure someone's been doing that for ages. It probably isn't that hard to vibe code something that works with those programmable dildos.

The Wikipedia article you want is probably “Teledildonics,” but I’m not looking it up at work.

Hah. I’m glad you did this, I was about to do the same thing.

Where can I find a (much more) left-wing community similar to The Motte? /r/slatestarcodex is close but obviously intentionally tries to avoid Culture War topics (spurring the creation of this place in the first place).

By left-wing, I solely mean on social issues ("progressive liberalism"), like immigration, race, sex, gender, gender identity, democracy, rule of law (which I guess is now a pro-left position in 2026 or something). On economics stuff a range of views would be fine. I'm a pro-free market pro-capitalist person, myself rather than a socialist. There's /leftypol/ but those are essentially all communists who are pro-authoritarianism and all of that and who are often even right-wing on social issues.

There are tons of Twitter clusters full of very smart center-left people who agree with me on everything but it's not quite what I'm looking for.

Every time I venture forth from themotte, I am immediately punched with the reality of just how terrible the norms are in other locations.

Yes, the motte lets people argue that <ethnic group> is inherently negative, or that the usa should just do away with elections. But every other place either has no users or worse norms.

Some of them even have both!

This is what I was trying to get at with @ArjinFerman. The modal Internet community is profoundly disinterested in things like “freedom of speech” or “reasoned debate.” It can be expected to make everything as comfortable as possible for its users. Or it loses out to a more filtered, more flattering space.

If that userbase is remotely young, affluent, and left-leaning, the filter will reinforce those traits.

In theory I don't mind the concept of a left themotte that prunes ethnostatists or dark hinters or whatever.

But of the few spaces that try, bar none, they're all colonized by left-coded therapyspeakists and similar brain-melting mindworms. Ethnostatism in those spaces that claim to ban it tend to have a backdoor if you act like a traumatized victim.

Before my Reddit account had been banned years ago I sometimes would drop in on occasion and debate in PPD and I swear, none of the mods knew what a “debate” actually was, as they intrinsically produce friction and stir up tense conflict between competing ideas.

One of them in particular was so nitpicky and selective as well as thin skinned, on one occasion I’d had enough and just choose to roast and antagonize the shit out of her and give her a taste of her own medicine. If you were too lighthearted and cavalier she’d say “Don’t troll,” and would accuse you of being insincere. If you were too pointed and logical she’d say “Be civil,” and would accuse you of being aggressive. And she’d do this to everybody she disagreed with. On this particular day she threw her hat into the ring and tried engaging my argument so I replied back to her “Don’t troll.” And then a bunch of us started attacking her as a shit moderator and we would up getting permabanned.

Turned out like 6 months later, there was so much protest from people she’d been removed as a mod and to my knowledge nobody had seen her since. I rarely spend that much time online though. Good riddance either way.

If I may address a statement you made rather than answer your question, you wrote:

rule of law (which I guess is now a pro-left position in 2026 or something)

This leapt out at me. Care to elaborate? If not, it's fine.

This leapt out at me. Care to elaborate? If not, it's fine.

I think the OP referred to the ICE raids in the northern cities. I have no idea about the veracity of these claims, but I've heard a lot of American left-wingers say that the ICE does not follow the expected police protocol: when the police arrest someone, they first have a reasonable suspicion that this specific person has committed a specific crime, they perform the arrest and read the suspect their rights. Instead, ICE raiders perform broad racial profiling ("look, a group of brown people not speaking English to each other and hanging around the Home Depot parking lot!"), indiscriminately detain anyone who matches this profile and then make them prove they are not illegal aliens.

Have you just tried https://www.astralcodexten.com/ comments on the blog? For example, there are frequent open threads.

Community-wise? No idea. I tried Lemmy once and initially they loved me because I argued effectively on their behalf on points we mutually agreed on. Once they found me on the opposite side of them on social issues, I was swiftly banned from that place.

Only on ‘very’ few issues would I be considered left-wing. Years ago I took the political compass test and it placed me on the “authoritarian left-wing,” spectrum. On some issues sure. It’s survey of my views I felt weren’t asking me the right questions though. A single [and slight] word difference would’ve placed me from a moderate to the far right end of the spectrum.

If you’re a lefty though, why object to socialism? The core of socialism is just workers control of production (i.e. industrial democracy). Authoritarianism was always a reluctant ideological instrument of the early communists, when faced with external pressure and mounting enemies against their revolutionary attempts. These regimes of course were authoritarian. They unfortunately had to be. Otherwise counter-revolutionaries come in and undo all the progress you’ve made. These systems weren’t regularly allowed to fail or succeed on their own merits but were always being fucked with by outside actors.

I find that the "authoritarian" axis in political alignment tests is basically meaningless. We have a contested environment where there are four, if not more, obvious potential power centers (government; "the rabble"; the financial elite (business); the social elite (academics/journalists), possibly further pillarised into tribes so you have the Alex Joneses/Charlie Kirks and the NYT journalists), each having framed bringing at least some of the others to heel as a precondition to their own ability to exercise their natural right to live freely.

In this setting, being "libertarian" just ends up meaning "wants more power for the power centers the labeller likes" and being "authoritarian" means "wants more power for the power centers the labeller dislikes". The "tankie left" wants power for the rabble, and a hypothetical government of them, over the others; "yellow lib-right" wants power for the financial elite; traditional auth right wants power for government; "liberals" want power for their social elite, and the Ivermectin circuit essentially forms a sort of shadow liberal set that is excited over Robert Kennedy and probably also vaguely pining for an era when microchurch pastors with weird idiosyncratic beliefs commanded respect in their communities. Each of these groups thinks that it is natural if their respective elites rule, and unjust oppression if they are prevented from doing so.

These systems weren’t regularly allowed to fail or succeed on their own merits but were always being fucked with by outside actors.

At some point you gotta stop blaming outside actors for internal failures, right? The Soviets were large enough to stand their own and engaged in international trade. Still ended up collapsing.

Even China had to adapt to capitalism in the end. Worker control of the means of production simply doesn't work if you get rid of the market signals that influence the means of production -- and if you're adopting a market economy then you're not doing classical socialism anymore anyways.

To add to this, everyone and everything is always being influenced by outside actors. That's part of living in the world, you are not alone. Being able to deal with the rest of the world is simply a requirement.

It's actually quite remarkable how much the Soviets and their satellite states found it necessary to close off their societies. In the modern day, only North Korea does it to that extent.

At some point you gotta stop blaming outside actors for internal failures, right? The Soviets were large enough to stand their own and engaged in international trade. Still ended up collapsing.

First of all I never said it wasn't a failure. It obviously was. Friction is the deciding factor in the success of ideologies because it's where the rubber meets the road. Russia's particular implementation of communism via Marxist-Leninism didn't work, but...

Even China had to adapt to capitalism in the end.

China is a socialist market economy with strong Leninist leanings. So what does that prove? It proves that there are good and bad ways of implementing the program.

Worker control of the means of production simply doesn't work if you get rid of the market signals that influence the means of production -- and if you're adopting a market economy then you're not doing classical socialism anymore anyways.

WSDE's don't "get rid of" market signals and expressing a preference.

China is a socialist market economy with strong Leninist leanings

What are the defining features of the Chinese economy that get you to call it "socialist"? Given the state of the Chinese labor market and the bargaining power that Chinese workers have, it does not strike me at all as "worker control over the means of production."

WSDE's don't "get rid of" market signals and expressing a preference.

Likewise, I don't see any actual real-life implementations of that that don't seem like they'd be better described by the term "capitalism."

To begin with, China defines themselves along the way I described. This isn't something I just made up. Literally entire textbooks have been written on it. To give it concisely I very much have to abbreviate and abridge the economic and political logic at play here but basically it's a bureaucratic authoritarian system. So some of what I'm going to be misleading for the sake of concision.

In China, once a firm starts making a certain amount of money, the CCP comes in and nationalizes the entire business and takes it over. "Taking it over" in this context means that the business owner becomes a de facto member of the CCP and works in tandem with other actors in a similar position he is in, and with direct CCP officials to "harmonize" business incentives across enterprises to achieve broad political objectives set by the Politburo Standing Committee.

... it does not strike me at all as "worker control over the means of production."

You have to see it the way socialists see it. "Workers control," can mean it's "controlled" by them in a number of different ways. It can be controlled directly by them. It can be controlled by a "dictatorship of the proletariat" (though we've seen how that goes), it can be controlled by the government, it depends on what thread of socialism you subscribe too. Most socialists today that I "know" of somewhat, reject state socialism outright. They see examples like Russia as a God that failed and China as an example of one that works. Plus all the worker co-op's scattered throughout the world.

Likewise, I don't see any actual real-life implementations of that that don't seem like they'd be better described by the term "capitalism."

Call it what you want. Just as there are different flavors and varieties of capitalism, there are different flavors and varieties of socialism.

To begin with, China defines themselves along the way I described.

Right, but is a country's self-definition the best way to understand it? North Korea defines itself as a democratic people's republic, when it's obviously neither democratic nor for the people.

They see examples like Russia as a God that failed and China as an example of one that works.

Interesting. The internet socialists I've been in contact with in the past were the type to bemoan that China had lost its socialist way.

Call it what you want. Just as there are different flavors and varieties of capitalism, there are different flavors and varieties of socialism.

Fair enough. How is one to differentiate between a capitalist versus socialist economy then, when there can apparently be many shared characteristics across both? As I've mentioned, I'd like something more objective than "They claim to uphold the ideals of their ruling ideology."

How do you want to define “best” in this discussion? If you think it’s easier and want to lead under your paradigm go ahead. I have no problem operating within their established framework. Labels have their uses but I’m not dogmatically attached to them. In fact, all the better as far as I’m concerned. If you want someone stubborn to accept the brilliance of your philosophy the best way isn’t to argue with them but to convince them it was their idea in the first place, and then roll your eyes once their head is turned around.

Interesting. The internet socialists I've been in contact with in the past were the type to bemoan that China had lost its socialist way.

Well. I don’t know who these “internet socialists” are. I don’t spend that much time living my life online and this is pretty much the only social media account I actively use on occasion. They clearly aren’t the ones I talk to that have actually read a book down that alley.

How is one to differentiate between a capitalist versus socialist economy then, when there can apparently be many shared characteristics across both? As I've mentioned, I'd like something more objective than "They claim to uphold the ideals of their ruling ideology."

You examine the characteristics of these systems, the same as you do for anything else. Capitalism is a system where the means of production are privately owned. Socialism is a system where the means of production are controlled by the workers. Now how both of these different systems go about trying to enact and carry out their aims is multifaceted.

How do you want to define “best” in this discussion?

Good question. I suppose that would be, what gives me the most accurate mental model to work with? Modeling NK as "democratic," for example, would not be very accurate at all for any reasonable common understanding of the word "democratic." You'd have to construct so many epicycles to make that model work that it's much easier to model NK as simply being a very undemocratic dictatorship.

Capitalism is a system where the means of production are privately owned. Socialism is a system where the means of production are controlled by the workers. Now how both of these different systems go about trying to enact and carry out their aims is multifaceted.

Right, and when "private ownership" and "worker control" start blending into each other, what use do the labels have anymore? To go back to the beginning of this thread,

If you’re a lefty though, why object to socialism?

Well that depends on what is meant by "socialism", no? If by "socialism" you mean a Chinese-style economy where you can have more billionaires than the US, but the billionaires are explicitly subordinate to the state, then yeah I'm sure that's more palatable to a lot of people. It sounds pretty similar to a fascist Nazi Germany or modern Russia where the state has overwhelming power to direct industrial titans to work towards the state's goals, and neither of those were/are communist states.

What? Maybe you

  • disagree with Marx
  • think that real communism has, in fact, been tried
  • got disillusioned after Glushkov et al. failed to optimize
  • value the right to property more than fixing the unfairness of capital allocation
  • are convinced that a coming era of post-scarcity will make it all moot
  • actually like having material goods

Take your pick. I’m sure there are plenty of other reasons why a reasonable leftist would think socialism isn’t actually a good thing.

Leftists are the ones who are most gung-ho about “the system,” which is why it’s a little confusing to me that he refers to himself as a leftist but isn’t against capitalism. That’s the whole crux of all the herp derp about “conservatives not knowing the difference between a liberal and a leftist.” Liberals want to reform capitalism. Leftists want to abolish it for another system.

Your fourth point is more about the harmony that social democracy’s try to achieve by having a mixed system that accomplishes both ends to some extent and mitigates the excesses of the other.

Marx himself is actually a real pain in the ass to read unless you’re familiar with the labor context of the international economy at the time he was writing. And his obtuse writing style makes it all the worse when you’re trying to adapt his observations to the system today. I’ve only read the Communist Manifesto, volume 1 of Capital and the Grundrisse of his directly. I’ve read much more exegesis on his work than him. Personally I’m Catholic so we’re obviously ideological enemies but that doesn’t mean everything he wrote was nonsense. He had many interesting and I’d say correct observations.

I’ve never bought into the post-scarcity argument. Unless you can outsource economic production into space and you’re talking about things on a cosmic scale.

/r/theschism gets a little closer, I guess. It started as a split from the Reddit Motte over how to moderate accelerationists and edgelords. Since that involved a lot of right-wingers calling for violence against protestors/progressives/the DNC, it ended up collecting some of the harried leftists and more compassionate conservatives. I think it has much less material, but what’s there is of high quality.

You’re probably going to get several responses about how (insert outgroup here) is unwilling or unable to have polite dialogues, which I think is patently untrue. I’d say that all such spaces are subject to evaporative cooling, and that by the time you or I hear about one, it’s probably already drifted one way or another.

I should add that the subreddit in question has quickly become a desert with very low traffic. Apparently all the leftist who were initially present did in the end lose interest in commenting on a board where everyone present agrees with everyone else already.

I can't even begin to remember all the leftists who walked away from this board (and its predecessors) while straightforwardly saying that they were doing so because they couldn't tolerate the icky opinions. Not the tone, not the poor quality of discourse, but the opinions. Some ended up on sneerclub where they complained again about the opinions and were warmed and comforted by others who assured them that some ideas are just not okay.

As I think that a lot of the ideas in question happen to be correct, I found this endlessly discouraging for several years, especially in cases where I'd genuinely liked the poster in question up until their minds snapped shut. Now I've just accepted that some people don't want to think about certain things, and that where actual uninhibited high-quality debate happens, leftists cannot persist.

I mean, I'm probably a leftist and I leave and come back later to see what's going on all time in a checking on the animals in the zoo kind of way.

I don't leave because of icky opinions, I generally leave when I see a top level post that looks interesting and all the responses are people circlejerking about how rational and debate pilled they are for having this contrarian opinion that everyone else posting has, followed by imagining how the leftists could never have such a conversation, followed by the JQ/IQ Taijitsu, perfect in it's eternal repetition.

If I can see a post and then use my massive brain to imagine the response, the response to the response, the response to the response to the response, and then the post I will make that will get me modded for being insufficiently deferential, what is the point of being here?

Like you said, all boards eventually degenerate into a bunch of people agreeing with eachother; only pre-musk twitter avoided that fate, and now that is mainly chuds rage-baiting and porn bots now.

I can think of multiple hypotheses for why this would be the case, and I'm not entirely sure how to disentangle which are true and how much each contributes to this.

1: Center-right ideas are objectively true/better and therefore intelligent reflective people who listen to both sides and carefully consider them end up becoming center-right. Everyone immersed in the free expression of ideas eventually becomes center-right (or previously was already center-right) unless they are too stubborn to change their minds, so the only leftists remaining after enough time are mentally flawed in some way and that's why they leave. It's just selection effects: the people who want intelligent reasoned discussion are the same people who come to the correct conclusions on most topics. The only reason I'm suspicious of this idea is because it flatters my ego so much that I would probably believe it if it weren't true. Nevertheless I think this is at least part of the cause.

2: Leftist ideas are correlated with intolerance of wrongthink/ickiness for reasons orthogonal to correctness. For instance, certain people feel empathy for unfortunate seeming people more more innately, strongly, and viscerally than others. When they see a homeless stranger they feel the same way on the inside that you would if you saw your sibling in the same situation. When someone says "we should put mentally ill people in asylums" they feel the same anger that you would feel if someone literally broke into your parents home and tried to take them away to lock up. These people are more likely to be pathologically kind and fall for emotional rhetoric (thus becoming leftists) and more likely to become unhappy and disturbed in a place filled with wrongthink. Some of these people might be quite intelligent on an intellectual level and be capable of grasping complex ideas, and thus be initially drawn to this space, but doing so on certain topics hurts them psychologically. You take an otherwise intelligence person and put them in an emotionally charged and deeply unpleasant setting and they will leverage their intelligence to prioritize fixing the problem that is hurting them rather than seeking truth. I definitely think part of this is true (which is also why you see more leftist women, who are more emotionally driven on average), but am not sure what the magnitude is.

3: Everyone is more comfortable with group-think. It's pleasant to agree with people and have other people echo your ideas and write long essays dunking on stupid people, and say things that you already believed but more eloquently and with a couple of additional clever analogies that you hadn't thought of before. And for someone on the right there basically aren't any good places like that. There are a very small number of right-wing spaces, most of them are filled with racists and misogynists with dumb ideas. I find it very annoying to have people saying the right thing for the wrong reason (I recently saw a Facebook post arguing that ICE was good and necessary because illegal immigrants commit 63% of murders in the U.S.). So this is where we can go. But for a leftist there are dozens and dozens of places filled with people who agree with them. Who wants to hang out in a place with 50-50 people who agree with you when you can go somewhere with 90% people who agree with you? It's more pleasant and fun and comforting. Or worse, if the Motte used to be 70-30 right-left then leftists here were outnumbered and getting argued against constantly. Now, someone committed to the ideas of logic and free discussion might overcome those odds and want to stay here anyway (and some do and I'm quite grateful for that), but it's an additional barrier to entry. Someone with 10/10 rational points is going to feel right at home here regardless of whether they're left or right. But the people with 6/10 rational points on the right are also going to want to stay here and have their egos flattered, while someone with 6/10 rational points on the left is going to be made uncomfortable and go try to find an intelligent-ish leftist space. Even with no underlying correlation between rationalism and left-right, the space leaning right could induce a correlation in the people who stay here.

It might be the case that all three of them are true and contributing. I'm fairly certain that 1 and 3 are both true. I'm not sure about 2 (there are a lot of emotional right-wing people who get really mad about political issues in a visceral way). Regardless, I'm not sure how important each one is to causing this, but the "solution", if any, is likely to differ heavily depending on that balance.

the people who want intelligent reasoned discussion are the same people who come to the correct conclusions on most topics.

This is kind of lazy "boo outgroup" content

This is like one baby step above the endless front page Reddit articles saying shit like "new studies show that Republican voters don't have object permanence and hate your dog"

Also I largely have center left positions on things and think they're more right than their center right counterparts, so checkmate

the people who want intelligent reasoned discussion are the same people who come to the correct conclusions on most topics.

"Most" is doing a lot of work here. The audience of theMotte is only human, and as such perfectly capable of dealing with cognitive dissonance in unproductive manners. From the top of my head, I remember several discussions on "leftist" topics like vegetarianism, anti-car ideas, electric cars, solar power, urbanism, ect. that not only didn't result in "correct conclusions" (whatever that means in any context), discussion (and voting) wasn't very "intelligent" or "reasoned".

I think you could discuss those matters objectively and rationally. I think on a topic of... I don't know, "the culture of meat consumption in the west, and the necessity of factory farming to sustain it" you could come to a objectively and rationally "correct conclusion" after considering the ethics, economics, health impacts and negative externalities.

But I also think you couldn't do that here.

A willingness to debate requires a degree of disagreeableness. The same brain chemicals that make a man more eager to get into an argument also tend to make him more right-wing.

There's a notion on the right that leftism is a biological phenomenon, and I do think there's abit of truth to that idea.

Engaging with very right wing ideas such as HBD is socially embarassing. The ick is a natural response to that.

If person X has many accounts and one of them happens to be on the motte then a subset of people would judge them. "What kind of person has a stormfront, 4chan, incels.is etc account." This is the main reason for lack of leftists.

Now the common argument is just don't tell your peers you have an account but unfortunately psychology doesn't work like that, people want to be liked for all they are and dislike keeping secrets.

So they must decide if they must bear the psychological burden of keeping a secret to keep browsing the motte.

This isn't really concious but I assume that is what practically happens.

This process bleeds leftist dry from a platform and without them the discourse becomes too one sided and of lower quality. So even more people leave till you end with a mostly center right website.

I thought a bit more about it. Calling it embarassing is inaccurate. There is another primary reason for it.

It's a matter of honor even though people would never word it that way. It is dishonorable to let insults against your friends/family/group stand. HBD etc is insulting to minorities. Christians generally used to dislike their god being insulted. This "honor" is something I find is natural but only emerges when it is encouraged in the society. This can be completely suppressed depending on who your friends are and what is your culture.

Well also people dislike not being echo chambers and being with people like you is far more pleasant. I can't discount that.

Honor doesn't exist for a utalitarian reason, it is a thing in itself.

The social embarassment is for people who don't feel that "honor" feeling intrinsically.

Do you tell people you know IRL that you comment on this site? I have alluded to discussions here IRL a few times, but always in general terms, never giving the site name, and certainly never giving my own username.

Well only close friends but my close friends are basically indifferent to what I do unless I am causing real harm to someone. We follow a very live and let live philosophy.

Though I generally don't share my username, I do share screenshots of the website.

If an empirical survey of actual communities and their evaporative cooling endpoints results in a particularly skewed distribution... how should we interpret that other than "unwilling or unable to have polite dialogues?"

Are you saying leftwing moderators are just bad at curating debating clubs?

Debate clubs are just harder to cultivate than the average Internet echo chamber. They offer a weird, specific sort of entertainment.

I think evaporative cooling happens faster for left-leaning users because so many of those other spaces are more friendly to them. This doesn’t mean they’re unwilling or unable to debate; it’s simply become less fun.

I’d say that all such spaces are subject to evaporative cooling

The schism literally started off with banning no-no opinions, no matter how civil the poster was, and I bet they'd do it again if they had an influx of right-wing posters.

You’re probably going to get several responses about how (insert outgroup here) is unwilling or unable to have polite dialogues, which I think is patently untrue.

Just the sheer difference in poasting volume between our two fora, despite us being offsite, and them being on reddit, should be an indication that there's more to the idea than you might think.

Correlation, causation. The Schism has a different political slant, new user funnel, expected level of effort, etc. Which of those really deserves credit for the volume difference?

I would say that the cost of flouncing back to mainstream social media is generally lower for a left-winger than a right-winger. This makes niche forums lean right even if the underlying appeal is the same for everybody. The Schism counterbalanced this by kicking out more right-wingers, so it just has a tiny userbase.

As an aside: do you remember what the no-no topics were? I remember it being race war stuff, but I could be completely off base.

The Schism has a different political slant, new user funnel, expected level of effort, etc. Which of those really deserves credit for the volume difference?

Well, their new user funnel is actually better than ours since we moved offsite (we even have people claiming we should come back there, because we don't have a funnel at all right now), and do people actually get banned for not meeting the higher level of effort? If not, this only leaves the political slant by elimination.

I would say that the cost of flouncing back to mainstream social media is generally lower for a left-winger than a right-winger.

You're treating this as some immutable law of nature, when Reddit itself was remarkably chud by today's standards, well into the second half of the 2010's. It isn't anymore because Reddit started banning right wing subs, or handing them over to left-wing moderators, which in turn started banning right-wing users. This in itself shows the core thesis about left wingers not wanting to debate is correct.

Most people do not want to debate. They want assurance, tacit or vocal, that their community will back them up when it comes to anything remotely threatening. They will usually sort themselves into groups which offer that comfort. This is the only thing I’d come close to calling “immutable.” You will not find a diverse, truth-seeking community on any sufficiently large site.

Reddit used to offer sortition via subreddits. The pivot left came after a broader erosion of subreddit independence. At the time, it was justified as “cleaning up for the IPO”. I suspect that downplays the consequences of everyone on Twitter knowing what /r/TheDonald was up to at all times.

As an aside: do you remember what the no-no topics were? I remember it being race war stuff, but I could be completely off base.

Basically anything that would scare people off. See my "hobby horse" for example.

Certain framings of racial politics well short of race war were at least temporarily banned.

Er, I thought "race war" was just a shorthand on controversial topics related to race. If it was supposed to be about tone, than yeah I have to take back my agreement from the other comment.

I remember it being race war stuff, but I could be completely off base.

That's what I recall as well. I think there was even a post here from one of the mods justifying that decision.

I've discovered that my son's friend group, a wide assortment of several dozen boys aged 13-15 across a few towns, have been liberally using the words chud, cuck, and kike. Importantly, and concerningly, none of them know what those words mean. When I overheard the lingo, I sat the boy down and explained cuck and kike, and particularly how he should never let a teacher or other authority figure hear him using kike, and avoid being recorded doing so if reasonably possible (not the end of the world, his mother is Jewish).

But I was at a bit of a loss to explain "chud" without tediously lecturing about the last decade of deep-in-the-weeds political fights on twitter. They call each other "big, stinky chud", which seems to roughly cash out as "sweaty lacrosse player". He relayed a story to me where one close friend's older brother was caught using the term by his mother, an educated woman in her own right who is married to a very successful lawyer. He told her it meant "cool guy", and now she's using it with that intended meaning.

Imagine Mrs. FiveHourMarathon calling all her nephews "chuds" because she thinks that it's a cute kid phrase like 6-7 or aura.

Any advice for how to concisely explain the concept?

In France French coullion means a vulgarity approximating ‘fellow-motorist’, but in Cajun it is an endearing term for a fool.

This process is extremely common in the world’s languages. See also ‘nigga’. Sounds like it’s well underway.

That would probably be ideal, and he does adhere to that standard regarding certain other common terms after I explained the socio-political dynamics. But those words do serve a role in ingroup-bonding-via-shared-transgression-of-social-norms, so if he was going to use one, it probably ought to be the one he can claim as "our word".

Why is my wife catching strays?

Isn't this just the natural process for any slang term?

Sorry! It just seemed like a succinct way to describe to the regular Mottizan the social class of the mom from the story. No stray or slight was intended, and it was only after someone reached out to ask if I was an alt of yours that I realized that might have been overly familiar - at which point it had already been quote replied.

Oh no offense taken, it was just very funny to me that I've mentioned Mrs. FiveHour enough that she's a recognizable side character.

I think "chud" and "chad" have started to merge in current usage to some extent, such that the term chud is now more like an endearing, jokey insult. It reminds me of how millennial boys would refer to ourselves and our friends as "assholes" in a positive way. Also reminds me of how the connotations of the word "dude" shifted in the past.

… Is there something I’m missing here? “Chud” is the name of the dude in the “Nothing Ever Happens” meme.

I know language evolves but it seems it’s gotten ahead of even me today. Couple years ago I had to explain to my uncle that “cornhole” does not mean what he thinks it means.

I can only imagine trying to explain things to his generation today.

'Chud' stands for 'Cannibal Humanoid Underground Dwellers' from a rather kitchy/horrible 80s horror movie that leftists took up as a slur/insult for right-leaning individuals.

The various right-leaning groups, not giving a fuck, gradually adopted it as a label and now wear it proudly.

So it started off as a shameless slur, and now it's basically a compliment in some circles.

Back when the Chapo Trap House subreddit still existed, they'd practically never shut up about "MAGA chuds" = overtly anti-feminist male commenters anywhere, basically.

have been liberally using the words chud, cuck, and kike. Importantly, and concerningly, none of them know what those words mean

A friend of mine recently asked me what "gabbagool" means, because he's apparently been saying it in public, along with other words he picked up from the Sopranos.

Fortunately he didn't say any slurs or anything too terrible (like moolie or fanook). Gabbagool is a thinly sliced cured pork sausage but, incredibly for dick shaped food it has no vulgar connotations in Italian. They just love eating it on the show.

A friend of mine recently asked me what "gabbagool" means, because he's apparently been saying it in public, along with other words he picked up from the Sopranos.

Reminds me of the GOAT.

lol. what a king.

Importantly, and concerningly, none of them know what those words mean.

How do I tell you.... I also told my mom that I was just repeating bad words I heard from my older cousin when her friend overheard me swearing like a sailor on the beach at 14 and then decided to call my mom and tell her about it.

But I was at a bit of a loss to explain "chud" without tediously lecturing about the last decade of deep-in-the-weeds political fights on twitter.

The rough meaning for "chud" these days is just someone who is a loser by whatever metric is used to make that conclusion... "Bro you're such a chud, all you do is play video games!"

I also somehow doubt they actually don't know what those words mean.

I believe my son knows that he can tell me, and that I'll focus on doing my best to help him navigate the full breadth of social elements, including both "bro talk on xbox" and also "not catching a video that will make you unemployable". So I believe that he himself did not know the meaning, and judging by the group calls I overhear, I'm pretty sure his friends don't either beyond "insulting bad word".

Take that for what it's worth, meaning "I say that I believe that I think that he doesn't understand."

Is it? When somebody says Chud I picture Big Lez and picture somebody who's like cartoonish boomer stereotype more than a loser perse.

Once the word entered the mainstream, its meaning got watered down to be digestible for normies. Even a year ago the meaning was a bit different, but now it's just a synonym for 'loser'

I think it’s more finely grained than simply a “loser”, like how “based” originally came from drug use but it’s now a pretty specific cluster of traits.

Socially isolated / passively anti-social / reactionary seems more like the real definition of Chud.

The origin is literal sewer-dwelling monsters, though the movie's not really appropriate for <15-year-olds (and worse, not even entertainingly bad). The modern meaning is just very bad ugly dumb right-winger, there's really nothing deep going on there.

"chud is an acronym. It stands for cannibalistic humanoid underground dweller, from the name of a group of such monsters in a really old horror movie. Calling someone a Chud is calling them a subhuman monster."

I'm sure most people here are aware of it, but in modern parlance it first gained popularity in response to that neo-Nazi Walmart mass shooter who was depicted as "chudjak". "Chud" wasn't used much before then.

/images/17767019302056828.webp

In right-wing circles. In left-wing circles I believe it had already taken off by then as an insult.

Imagine Mrs. FiveHourMarathon calling all her nephews "chuds" because she thinks that it's a cute kid phrase like 6-7 or aura

Unintentionally accurate to call a group of rambunctious and kinda dumb (in the way all boys are kinda dumb once you have a pack of them) boys chuds.

IMO, it can be treated as a rough synonym of "troglodyte"/"trog", but with added right-wing connotations.

So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Hankins and Guelzo's The Golden Thread, Volume 1, on the strength of this review. So far it is hitting the right notes.

Those Who Dwell in Darkness: The Assembly Book 1 by Steve McHugh. Well written and engaging thus far, though it also seems to be flirting with the, "does this remind you of anything," trope just enough to consistently ping my awareness while not actually veering into thinly disguised political commentary.

Two-thirds of the way through Excalibur, the last book in Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles. It's grim and a bit sad. It occurs to me that the entire series is told through the eyes of the protagonist as he writes what is essentially a memoir, and thus his stage of life colors events. The story is more exuberant, hopeful, and narrative-driven when he is young, but now in middle aged it is more reflective, world-weary, and burdened with the accumulated loss of friends and loved ones. Cornwell is an excellent writer, and I will certainly be reading more of his books. It's a shame he didn't finish his series set during the Civil War.

Embarrassed to admit how little progress I've made on A Canticle for Leibowitz since this time last week.

Keep at it, it's excellent.

Speak of the Devil. That was fairly recently added to my Amazon wishlist. Hopefully I'll get to it by the end of this year.

Finished Night of Power fairly recently. Right now reading Applied Elite Theory. Interesting perspective and analysis and politically right up my ideological aisle.

Still on Howling Dark, getting into the last 20%... Looks like Hadrian after a series of minor disappointments, is heading into a very major one, which is going to rock his world and turn him from hippie to the knight, which he tried to avoid so much. I wish the book had faster pace, the repetitions and circuitous musings are a bit too many, but those are minor complaints, so far I'm enjoying it.

Working my way through a collection of Harlem Detective novels by Chester Himes.

He does a superb job at capturing how the criminal class talks to each other and interacts with each other. The setting is black Harlem, but it could easily be my white and hispanic clients, too. Just endless jabbering that goes nowhere, trying to pull one over each other or the cops with "clever" blather, trying to hype themselves up, etc. Utterly transparent once you see the pattern and usually only works at fooling themselves or other criminals who are stupid/high.

Always interesting to read pre-70s crime fiction and see the guns mentioned (not that the authors are necessarily that accurate or know much about guns). Mostly revolvers like 38 specials or .32s, maybe the occasional .25 auto, but rarely a .45 or 9mm. Whereas now when my clients get caught with guns, 90% of the time it's a 9mm, with a .45 or .40 putting in an occasional appearance.

So far as the guns go, laws were enacted in the sixties and seventies known collectively as Saturday Night Special laws. These made much of the existing stock of cheap shitty self-defense guns for poor people illegal to sell. These were most often small pocket automatics in "mouse" calibers like .32 and .25 as well as snubbie revolvers in .32 and .38. Probably into the eighties, these would have been the most common sort of gun stolen or used by criminals.

The eighties and nineties saw law enforcement coalesce first around the .40, then in the early oughts to the 9mm. Bullet technology brought the 9mm on par with the more powerful, larger cartridges and "won" the handgun caliber wars for the current generation. Today you can buy a gun the size and weight of an old five-shot Saturday Night Special .32 which carries twelve rounds of 9mm.

The downside is that the most commonly stolen guns are now better, smaller, lighter, with higher capacity and more powerful rounds than they were forty years ago. But they are still the cheap, shitty guns mostly. For every real Glock used in a crime, there's probably three Tauruses and two Kel Tecs.

I read Cotton Comes to Harlem about a year ago, lmk what you thought.

Working on it now. It's a step up in writing quality from the first 3 in the anthology, but also an increase in the societal/race commentary.

Mostly revolvers like 38 specials or .32s, maybe the occasional .25 auto, but rarely a .45 or 9mm. Whereas now when my clients get caught with guns, 90% of the time it's a 9mm, with a .45 or .40 putting in an occasional appearance.

The crime wave in the 70s got the gun culture much more serious about self-defense, and that lead to a far more "scientific" approach to the question of acceptable handgun chamberings. The social consensus was that anything less than a 9mm was too little gun, and this had a marked impact on the self-defense market as a whole. Once the idea spread through the police force, I'd imagine criminals largely picked it up as well.

The thing that makes me curious is to why such calibers as 45 acp weren't more popular, specifically due to use by the military. Hell, it's not as if 45 or 9mm are new calibers, even by that point, so why the utilization of 38 specials and other arcane cartridges?

Unless there was the 'cool' factor due to use by the police. Then again, why didn't the 'cool' factor make civilians pick up the military-favoured caliber, nevermind all the veterans prevalent post ww1 and ww2?

All of this reminds me that I've had the urge to track down books/articles on firearm catridge development and the social context surrounding it for the longest time. Years, by this point. I should probably get on that...

I wasn't alive in the 1970s, but I think .45 ACP wasn't more popular because there weren't really smaller handguns made for it. You can carry a .38 revolver in a coat pocket in a way that you can't a 1911.

Additionally, the .38 was specifically in widespread use by police and military, so the 'cool' factor associated with the military/police was absolutely there, and if I am not mistaken plenty of law enforcement agencies were still packing .38s in the 1970s.

Also a 1911 has always been kind of an expensive gun -- if you just need to wave it in somebody's face so they won't make a fuss and hand over their wallet, a little .25 works just fine. (and fits in your pocket)

We're living in the post-Miami world, no doubt about it.

According to the ATF, in years 2022 and 2023:

Among the 770,000 traced pistols (part 3 table CGT-03):

CaliberProportion (%)
9 mm60
.4013
.3808
.457
.224
.251
7.62 mm1
10 mm1
.57 (typo for 5.7 mm?)1
5.56 mm0.8

Among the 25,000 pistols recovered in Mexico (part 7 table SWB-10):

CaliberProportion (%)
9 mm45
.2217
.38012
.457
.406
.254
.383
7.62 mm2
.322
5.7 mm0.4

Was that 7.62 a Tokarev or is there another 7.62 handgun cartridge?

I'd guess it's cut-down AK "pistols".

I've seen people one-hand an RPK-74 when shooting into the air, but 7.62x39 has 1.5 the energy of 5.45x39. I doubt anyone would want to shoot that from a pistol.

1.5x the energy

Recoil is based solely on momentum, not energy; energy is not conserved in explosions. m(bullet) * v(bullet) = m(rifle) * v(rifle).

Accounting for similar impulse (since the bullet spends about the same amount of time in the barrel for each of these), here's what we see:

7.62x39 out of a Draco is 124 grains * 1700 FPS, and a Draco weighs about 7 pounds (or 49000 grains), so if you let the rifle freely recoil it'd hit you at 4.3 FPS. Oh yeah, and that's after the action's done cycling; the peak impulse is only going to be about 6/7ths of that because there's about a pound of mass that takes a while to hit the back of the assembly.

Compare to-spec .357 Magnum out of a typical pistol, which is 158 grains * 1400 FPS, and the gun weighs about 3 pounds (or 21000 grains), so if you let the handgun freely recoil it'd hit you at 10.5 FPS.

This is why Dracos are manageable one-handed from a pistol; but the fact you're holding 7 pounds out in front of you makes them kind of unwieldly.

TIL, thanks

They exist. Tokarev is a niche handgun for collectors in the USA. Handguns chambered in rifle cartridges appeal to gun nuts for some reason, IDK why, but you can easily find both AK caliber and AR-15 caliber handguns.

There are 3 reasons why:

  • it's an end run around the 1989 Federal import ban of "non-sporting" rifles (pistols are not rifles), which in addition to AKs also tends to affect clones of HK products, particularly MP5s
  • it's an end run around SBR laws, especially after the advent of the "pistol brace" (it's a stock with a fig leaf over it); yes, the lack of tax and registration is part of it, but there are a bunch of other rules around SBRs that don't apply to pistols
  • because rifles that short are kind of stupid and impractical, and memes are a great reason to own guns (usually Dracos and TEC-9s, but also applies to AR-18s around St. Patrick's day, Carcanos around President's Day, FALs in certain paint jobs, etc.)

the "pistols" in question are essentially AKSU-style carbines with no stock installed. I'm given to understand they're fairly popular.

New "handguns" (PCCs? SMGs?) currently available for purchase on guns.com:

  • 7.62×39 Soviet: 130

  • 7.62×51 NATO: 6

  • 7.62×25 Tokarev: 2

The document doesn't specify. Table CGT-21 seems to imply that it's actually recorded as just "762" with no decimal point at all.

Rolling up with the siege mortar, I guess.

Do you drink alcohol? If so, how much and how often, and what's your age?

I'm mid 40s and I used to be a social drinker, but gave it up 2.5 years ago because the hangovers, even after 2 drinks, became atrocious. Even if I ate something, spread out the drinks, hydrated, etc. Of my greater social group, though, I'm the only one to give it up. I keep hearing about people drinking less, but no one I know among my age group has slowed down or given it up.

Every now and again, im in my late 20s now. With my friends especially. It helps me relax.

I finally quit for good 3 months ago after drinking heavily for 5 years. I'm in my late 30s. Best decision ever. Some folks were surprised because I was a champ at the bar, but luckily I'm old enough now that people are either indifferent or they're mildly impressed that I quit.

My sleep is still bad, but I heard that goes away in the 3-6 month window. Anhedonia substantially cleared up too, I think. First six weeks were pretty awful, though.

A couple times a week, amount varying from one drink to five. The latter is only if I’m at home with the wife and we’re hanging out for the evening, playing Minecraft or listening to music together, low-effort social interaction.

I do think that’s too much for me. Today I I went back to sleep after my alarm this morning and was late for work. I feel like an idiot, so I am going to make an effort to cut back.

The complication is that I’ve been getting into mixing cocktails, mostly for my extended family. It feels like a legitimate reason to buy more and better liquor. I…think that might be a bad thing. I’m very capable of overthinking this, so the best thing is probably just to cut back.

Late 30s - from time to time.

I’ll drink socially an every few weekends or so. From time to time I’ll buy a six pack and work on it 1-2 a night spread over the week. This is usually while unwinding after the kids go down or doing some late night work at the computer.

I’ll also go stretches without drinking at all, like Lent.

Mid-40s now, drank hard for a decade, then what civilians would call "hard" for another. These days I drink relatively little, maybe a case a week during the summer and fall, plus a few binges in there for vacation, fishing, deer camp etc. Substituted weed for the daily use, pain management etc. The friends I've kept have slowed down. Some of the ones that drifted off are still hitting it hard.

Every year at guy's weekend the drinks get gayer and gayer. Zero sugar fruity spritzers and vodka fizzes rather than SoCo and PBR. Every New Years involves finding out that the kids these days can't hang with an old cunt who barely drinks anymore. I'm stuck between that and the real motherfuckers who don't consider beer to be drinking and still take road fifths.

I am from Eastern Europe.

Used to drink a lot when I was young (basically no sober weekends and at least one or two drunk days for several years), but always socially. That was just the kinds of friends I made at school. I grew sick of the hedonism-maxxing culture, reduced drinking to the point of practically quitting in my 20s, and I switched to social circles built on studying/work and sports. I still enjoy beer and scotch, but almost never get around to drinking any due to persistent social isolation (and I still almost never drink alone, maybe one glass per year). It's nice when I'm at a beer garden in summer, after a long walk, with friends, but I have no issues with not drinking. Age 36 now.

For me it's been a function of industry/lifestage.

5 years ago when I was working in the Australian gambling industry there'd be atleast one heavy session a week, plus I was dating at the same time and a lot of incidental on that front. Now I'm self-employed and married with children I'd essentially only drink on special occasions.

I've never really had a 'casual solo drinking' interest though. Price of alcohol and health effects just always made it seem not worthwhile.

Australian gambling industry

That'd be an interesting effortpost if ever you have the time. What's the main gambling people do over there?

By handle or social visibility?

60% Pokies (Slot machines in bars), 15% casino, 15% racing and 10% sports generally the split. Plus the lottery/scratchies but they get administered differently.

Yes, slightly over 50, once or twice a month. I don't get hangovers, at least not since very young and stupid student years, but I learned if I drunk too much, I felt very bad (nausea, stomach aches, etc.) so I stopped doing that and now limit myself to 1-2 drinks, or whenever I start feeling it's not good for me anymore. In my 40s, I was drinking about weekly, usually 1-2 drinks socially, but now even less for various reasons. Sometimes it could be several months without a single drink, sometimes could be a couple of times a week but on average it's about 1-2 times a months, and usually 1-2 drinks. I do enjoy drinking socially, usually with family or friends, so I am unlikely to give it up completely, but probably would keep this pace at least until some turn in my health would change it.

Early 40's. My drinking is social/event and sporadic. The thing is, I like drinking, but only to get drunk. I rather dislike the feeling of having 1-3 drinks. I like the taste, but I feel like I get little of the upside effects while still feeling enervated for the rest of the night. My idea amount would be a pint of whiskey over the course of an evening, culminating in a tall glass of water and then passing out.

The problem is that doing this basically ruins me for the next day. It's just not worth it any more.

The big exception is concerts of a certain exuberant, energetic variety. I get drunk enough to lose the perfect amount of inhibitions, but a few hours later I feel fantastic. I have absolutely no scientific basis for the claim whatsoever, but I feel like I sweat the alcohol out, or maybe it's just getting buried and swept away by other happy brain chemicals.

Most of my friends have quit or severely cut back, some for the post-40 hangover reasons, some for more serious medical concerns that justified cutting all things bad for them, and some in preference for legal THC.

44, and basically never thanks to medication interactions (serious drowsiness) — not that I was much of a drinker before I went on the meds. (Though, now that I do the math, that was like 20 years ago.)

I do use some in cooking, though (deglazing with wine, beer batter, beer in chili, sake in teriyaki marinade, etc…).

40s and I drink pretty irregularly.

I have a bad relationship with alcohol. During my divorce ten years ago I essentially disintegrated as a person and was often away on business, so slipped into what would be 'functional' alcoholism for anyone else. Real Anthony Bourdain hours, solemnly staring into glasses of chemical oblivion at hotel bars. I was drinking generally about a 750 ml bottle of liquor per day, and often a bit more. It was better than being sober. And to be honest I'm not sure how I'd have survived that period otherwise. It is, as they say, a solution before it's a problem.

But after 2-3 months of that I started to lose my mind. It would be easiest to describe the experience as very early, very rapid-onset dementia. I'd miss every exit; forget to turn off my engine when pumping gas; as often as not couldn't remember why I'd walked into the room; couldn't read a paragraph of text and hold the ideas together in my head long enough to make sense of them. Trying to research what was happening to me while in that condition was a terrible experience. I can only think about it now without residual terror because it worked out okay.

Long story short I managed to find a doctor online who very quickly put his finger on the problem. I was astonished to learn about 'wet brain'. My whole life I'd been warned about how alcohol can damage the liver; never once had anyone mentioned that it can also damage the brain. "Stop drinking alcohol and eat lots of red meat," he told me.

By the grace of God I did, and it was no problem at all. I can be compulsive about other things but for whatever reason alcohol does not hook me beyond the next sunrise. I simply stopped drinking for several months, and ate lots of red meat, and recovered fully within about a year. Since then I've learned that I'm extremely lucky; that almost no one who drinks that much for that long is capable of maintaining control.

These days I don't drink often. Partly this is because alcohol is the only drug I've ever regretted doing, and mainly in terms of my behavior and the things I say when drunk. I've learned to associate it with regret. Also because I've learned that while I can have one drink without any problem, it does make me want a second. Turning down the second isn't hard for me, but if I have two I'll have ten.

Wine with dinner sometimes, if I know I'll be metering it out across a multi-hour conversation with lots of food in-between. A cold beer while grilling, of course, though I'm careful to not buy more than that at a time, so as to avoid compulsive additional beers. (By the way, a glass of ice-cold whole milk is much, much closer to capturing the satisfaction of a cold beer than you might believe, and is also better in its own ways.)

I will have a drink or two with friends sometimes, but always with an eye to whether the situation looks liable to spiral into more.

But overall I'm just happier without any. I don't like the way it makes my body feel, and while it granted immense euphoria in my youth I don't get any of that any more. It just makes me dumb and vulgar and pushes me deep into 'drunken racist uncle' territory at family gatherings. Better to say no thanks. Finally, in recent years it's become apparent to me that if I have a drink one day my general anxiety level tends to be higher for several days after.

At this point I'd be happy to cut myself off entirely, except that can be awkward socially and also it would just seem... sad, to me, to have to go that far, and miss out on what can be a lovely dimension of life. I love good wine, and good scotch, and sometimes a ridiculous neon blue cocktail on the beach.

And I can have those and get along. Most of the time.

Yes. I'm in my mid-40s now. I suppose I'd be called a social binge drinker, and I do have a fairly high tolerance, but I have cut down on how drunk I am willing to get in the last couple of years due to hangovers getting worse.

I basically never drink at home. If I'm staying home on a given night, I won't drink at all. I try not to drink more than 3 nights a week or so on average, with some variation depending on what events are going on. Usually I go out with friends or to some sort of event, and I may drink like 4 to 8 drinks, depending on how big and strong they are. That's mostly mid-strength beers, since I like the taste and find it easier to regulate myself with beer. I may drink wine, mixed drinks, or shots occasionally, depending on the type of place and who I'm with, but I try to limit that to 1, maybe 2 a night, since they go down too easy and tend to lead to getting excessively drunk. Most of my friends drink around the same amount most of the time.

One weird quirk that seems to have started hitting me more in the last few years is that I don't like to drink too little, because I find that drinking only 1 or 2 drinks tends to disrupt my sleep patterns, making me wake up too early and have trouble getting back to sleep. Drinking a moderate amount, per above, usually results in a pretty good night's sleep and minimal hangover effect the next day. If I drink too much, then I still sleep decently well, but get a much worse hangover that might take the better part of the next day to get over.

Another quirk - I started making this electrolyte drink in a big pitcher at home, and I'll try to drink a glass full anytime I get home after a session of drinking. I think it helps cut down on the hangovers, which I have come to think electrolyte deficiency probably plays a big part in. Notably, if this is true, it also means that the common advice of drinking lots of water when drinking alcohol may work against you, since it only contributes more to draining your electrolytes. It's the same mechanism by which you can die from drinking too much water.

Yes, usually two-three drinks per day. This is a large reduction over previous consumption.

I'll be 40 this year. I drink usually once a week; my friends have a weekly hangout on tuesday evenings at a neighborhood bar, a tradition we've kept up for almost 15 years. I drink usually between 2 and 4 pints, over three to four hours. If I go for 4 pints I feel it quite a bit at the end, 2 pints not really.

My alcohol tolerance has declined quite a bit over time. I used to drink over 5 pints without much of an effect but those days are over. In social gatherings, I'll have a couple of beers, or a couple of glasses of wine, but in general I don't drink on my own or with my wife, unless it's a pairing I really appreciate a lot (for instance, a nice bowl of restaurant ramen requires a beer).

I used to drink quite frequently and heavily in my 20s. Nowadays I have slowly tapered off, drink 1-3 times a month for celebrations, ideally with friends out of the house. My hangovers tend to be fine if I do that, if I'm drinking alone or just with the lady at the house then my hangovers are terrible.

I'm 41. I drink, but something like two drinks a year, which my exasperated doctor once told me counts as "not drinking" for medical purposes. I don't have a moral precept against it or anything, I just don't enjoy drinking very much so I don't do it. Just as well because, like @ToaKraka I don't need an alcohol addiction to go with my rather severe sugar addiction.

Yes, mid 30s, and I go out to the bar between 1-3 nights a week (usually closer to three, but it depends). How much? Too much, especially for my wallet (I, uh, spent over $6K on bar tabs last year...), and a doctor would likely be horrified if I made an actual count and told them, but hey, who needs to do that? This is actually an improvement, and I rarely drink alone these days, just keep some light beer in the fridge to finish off the night if I get bored and go home early. I've been working on the same 15 pack of Natty Light in my fridge for the last month.

I was a pretty ridiculous drink at home alcoholic in my early-mid 20s, such that I’m probably lucky to have survived and definitely lucky not to have wound up in jail. I didn’t do much day drinking but did peak at about a fifth of vodka a night worth of whatever cheap beer (Steel Reserve and Natty Ice were my go-tos.) I was going for that night. I don’t recommend it, even if it was an effective weight loss plan. There’s nothing attractive about self-pity, getting blacked out every night is an extremely inefficient method of working through your problems at best, and that therapist who fired me and wanted me to go to inpatient rehab had a point (even if I don’t think that rehab was the correct answer).

From there I spent the better part of a decade being an overpaid (SEC college town) service industry townie who hung out with other townie service industry/musician types. It was a much more fun way to spend one’s time, if not exactly more productive. I had a life pretty much perfectly catered to it: Work 11AM-10/11PM, hit the bars until they close at 2, rinse and repeat and before you know it you’re over 30 wondering where the time went. Covid, rent increases, and the delivery company I worked for dying ended that fun, though I tossed in a few years of playing the alcoholic bartender game for good measure before concluding that bartending was a dead end. There’s a difference between being passionate and knowledgeable about drinking and passionate and knowledgeable about drinks, and I was a mediocre bartender at best who’d aged out of liking most craft beer.

The last few years and especially the last year have put a major crimp in my barfly lifestyle, namely due to most of my friends from that era either moving out of town or aging out of that lifestyle, along with now working a job that requires showing up early in the morning and actually being productive. Losing that employee discount along with the old crew that was good for at least one or two drinks not rang in per night also hurts. With that, my favorite bar has transformed itself from a hangout for disgruntled adjuncts/professors and dilettantes into a nursing home that occasionally hosts children (aka. undergraduates), or maybe happy hour was always like that and I just never knew (Spoiler: It was always like that, which is why I hated working happy hour, though it remains my contention that our night shift is a shadow of what it used to be). I get bored and want to go to the bar and talk (I envy people who enjoy watching TV.), but then I show up to happy hour and am more often than not the only person aside from the bartender under the age of 55. I haven’t hit every happy hour in town but this seems to be the case in every one I’ve tried so far. Lately, I’ve found myself going out less and/or having two rounds and going home more often because the expected value of entertainment/conversation just isn’t there like it used to be.

Mid fifties, drink almost every day, two probably. Meaning three. Gins and tonic this time of year. Wine whenever we get a bottle. Beers but beer goes to the gut for me. My wife suggests I limit my consumption more but when I did a month sober last fall her refrain was Just have a drink! as she found my sober self at dinner rather boring. I usually do a day or two dry each week just to spell the liver.

Known to exceed these limits on occasion as I run with degenerates.

You got a favorite gin? I was a big fan of Sakurao, great value for money. And Ki no Bi is great too.

Back when I was drinking, Plymouth (regular or Navy Strength) was my go-to for a softer gin, and Junipero for a more forward one.

Plymouth was really cheap in Japan until recently so I also used to use it a lot for mixed gin flips and gin daisies. Really versatile.

Japanese I like Roku. Otherwise a London Dry, currently the daily is Beefeater or Bombay Sapphire. I had a g and t at a very nice hotel recently and it was earthmoving but I suspect because they must have squeezed an entire lime into it. The Wilkinson's tonic is key Canada Dry works and Suntory has a tonic, but Wilkinson's is superior. I should look into those you mentioned.

Sakurao is cheapest on Amazon, was about 2200 a bottle so low risk. Kinobi I've found is cheapest at Yamaya, Aeon Liquor, or similar chain liquor stores.

I drank somewhere between 5 and 25 drinks a week for approximately my entire late teens and twenties. This is pretty normal in Britain, although most people usually moderate as they get older. I'd mostly stopped what I'd consider binge drinking (5+ drinks in a sitting) by 25 (with the exception of perhaps a wedding or Christmas) but would still drink, just with more moderation. I was probably down to 5-10 drinks a week. That works out to be considerably more than recommended.

I did full sobriety for approximately 6 months as I had to get some other issues in my life under control and realised my drinking was a barrier to this. It was much easier than I expected, I was extremely productive, but still felt like I missed out on enjoying some things as much as I might have after the perfect 2 drink mark (mostly nice dinners). I gradually returned to drinking 1 or 2 drinks a week, sometimes not drinking for a couple of weeks, sometimes having a couple of drinks a day on a holiday. I feel extremely happy with this current level of drinking and have maintained it for about 2 years, and although I haven't been properly drunk in a very long time, I intend to break this boring streak at an upcoming bachelor party.

I love alcohol. I'm going to be 30 pretty soon. I have unique drinking habits so if anyone who knows me is reading there's no mistaking who I am.

Do you drink alcohol?

That's complicated. I can't keep it in the house. If I have beers in the fridge I'll simply binge them right up until the time at which I need to stop so I can sober up before bed. I once bought a 24-pack at Costco because I was shocked at the per-unit price, and I drank 5 that night, alone, browsing the internet. Then 3 the next night, and so on. I'm like this with everything; I'll do the same with Coke Zero. So, we only have water and coffee in the house most of the time.... I haven't had an alcoholic beverage in several weeks at this point, by chance.

If it's served, I'll gladly accept. My friends all drink too slowly, so I'll happily outpace them. Loosen up guys!

In restaurants I'll order two to start (beers, margaritas, whichever). This is actually a huge boost in convenience because I don't have to wait on the waiter to offer another one, and I'll have longer to sober up to drive home (because I finished #2 twenty minutes ahead of the counterfactual).

Yes. I'm early 30s and I drink socially so at least 1 to 2 drinks every week and more than that if I'm on a work trip and going to dinner with clients.

The plummeting alcohol consumption is pretty sad to be honest because alcohol in an important social lubricant which allows for easier social bonding between people. The falling alcohol consumption is a result of far less social interaction, especially among young people. Instead of drinking alcohol around friends in a group, more and more people use THC and turn into vegetables in front of screens.

I see no downside whatsoever and quite a bit of upside through the moderate consumption of alcohol in person around other people.

Wow you guys are some real (semi) teetotallers. I never drank every day but I’ve probably had two drinks every Friday/Thursday (pre/post covid happy hour) since I moved to England, a glass of wine half the time on the average weekday when I eat at home, and weekends vary, but more when we go out for dinner.

I love alcohol but have probably cut down by 50% over the last 5 years. Not necessarily intentionally but it’s empty calories. I didn’t drink in high school or at college except at parties or at dinner with my family. Growing up my parents had exactly one glass of wine each with dinner every single day (and still do with the exception of Tuesdays, which they’ve recently declared sober), yet I never saw either of them drunk except once in my early twenties at a family wedding.

While in Scotland? I'd frequent the pub about twice a week, and drink more than I know is good for me. On average, two pints of beer and a few double-strength shots of some kind of spirit. This was for about a period of 4-6 months, outside of which I barely drank more than once a month.

I realized this wasn't great for me, and cut down significantly. It was also out of character, before, and after, I'm mostly a social drinker. I'd drink hard maybe twice or thrice a month, but only with company. I usually make it a point not to keep liquor at home or drink by myself, while I'm usually solid about not giving in to temptation, it's not easy during a bout of depression. The fact that I was self-administering alcohol use screening tests and squinting at the results was enough to make me desist.

Then again, it's Scotland. I'd have my visa revoked if I didn't engage in the cultural highlight.

Mid 30s, and I drink rarely because even one pint makes me woozy for a few hours and that's not fun unless I'm with friends. Drank 3 pints one evening last week, had very restless sleep and was hungover and unable to work until about 3pm. That's a bit extreme for me but it's just not something I can do any more.

In general I think it has less to do with age and more to do with drinking frequency, which correlates with age for various reasons. My father is like @MaximumCuddles and has more every single day than I would in a month. He doesn't sleep well but otherwise shows no ill effects.

Yeah there’s a bunch of parameters that go into it; genetics, lifestyle stuff. I’m on the right end of basically all of those spectrums to max out tolerance.

Frequently drinking very small amounts is a pretty simple way to keep your tolerance high.

I will say that now that I’m around 40 or I have more than two drinks I do feel more sluggish the next day but there’s a billion little tweaks you can make to minimize that; good nutrition, hydration, sleep hygiene, frequent exercise, etc.

I exist as a mid tier Dionysus figure in my friend group. One of my other past times in mountain biking, and I frequently bring three liters of water and one liter of half beer, half lemonade. The first time I went out biking with my friends they thought it was hilarious but near the end of our like 50km journey in the hills I was still rocking and rolling and they were dying of exhaustion.

There's a reason why radler is named after biking.

That’s what I tried to tell them!

I’m near 40 and I have consumed alcohol basically every day of my life since I was 21 years old. It’s very unusual for me to go a full 24 hours without consuming alcohol.

I’m writing this with a glass of wine next to me.

I’m an extreme outlier in this regard partially because both my private life and career path are both absolutely steeped in the culture of food & wine and I have extensive culinary training.

It would be extremely unusual for someone like me to not consume alcohol at all. I consume 1-2 standard drinks a day, on party or festival days that can sometimes jump to 3 or 4.

I’m quite moderate in the sense I rarely overindulge, to me alcohol is more like a grocery than to the average person. It accompanies most of my meals except breakfast. Having a beer, a light cocktail or a glass of wine is about as remarkable to me as a cup of coffee or a pot of tea. My drinks are often quite spaced out, I basically never engage in what people consider binge drinking, I find that behavior to be repugnant at this point.

I experimented with full sobriety for six months once, found it to be of no benefit whatsoever, and never thought about it again.

I understand why alcohol consumption is trending the way it is but it fills me with sadness as there is a ton of genius locked into the production of beautiful alcoholic beverages.

I would only ever cut out alcohol consumption under a direct order from multiple physicians. Part of my motivation to be very strong and physically active is to counteract the calories and mild physical stress drinking puts on myself.

Like I said, I’m a rather extreme outlier.

If I have any amount of alcohol I can’t sleep, it gives me a stimulant effect for some reason. So I don’t drink except for the rarest extended family occasion.

After 30 the headaches and hangovers got exponentially worse, or alternatively my ability to deal with them.

I'm in my early 40s and have never liked the taste of alcohol.

Comrades, we found the fake Russian!

1-3 drinks, once a week, socially. 30s.

We're in a strange time for alcohol. A confluence of factors moved against it. The ones I've witnessed:

  • Work From Home killed the standing drinks-after-work outing at my office. Even when enough people happen to be in, no one expects enough people to be in, so don't make contingency plans that allow them to go out ("oh, I would do drinks but I drove", "I have to get back and feed my cat/dog/crippling-social-media-addiction")
  • The economy. Alcohol is expensive af. Other vices are cheap. I hear people say: "Why would I spend $10 on a pint, when I can fill my vape for" ..whatever it costs. I forget. I don't vape. People are getting laid off and are worried about their financial future. They are cutting back.
  • It's just not cool any more. This is vibes, and it might just be my circles, but it's seen as something like smoking cigarettes - unhealthy, dated, low class.

But I'm sure it'll be back eventually. Alcohol is Lindy.

Alcohol is expensive af

Minor note; Alcohol at bars and restraunts are expensive as fuck. Buying direct is actually stupidly cheap, as they've come out with a massive host of surprisingly good whiskey and the like that can be had for very good prices.

Well, if you've a taste for whiskey, atleast.

I've seen people wonder if the social arena, bars and the like, have taken a severe hit due to the leagal-but-not-really-but-kinda-yes grey area that marijuana now falls in, as people are now choosing to stay in and get baked as opposed to go out, throw down lots of money, and not get baked.

But that's just musings on their part.

Alcohol is Lindy.

Lindy...?

Has faced the judgement of ages and come out on top.

Lindy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

Since it has been around for so long, it'll probably be around for a long time still.

Recently, I significantly cut down to 1-2 drinks on a Friday or Saturday every other week or so. Never less than 3 hrs before bedtime. I still enjoy it and my tolerance is about the same (minimally buzzed, no hangovers), but I found that it drastically reduced the quality of my sleep and I'd have to make up the debt the next night.

Same age as you. I drank socially when I was single and a yuppy, like 7 drinks a week, but since having kids it's like one 1-3 drinks a month on average. Even one drink feels like a high cost.

I did discover that I react quite poorly to wine and other craft beverages which takes a lot of fun out of countryside tastings though. Even just a few sips puts me into headachesville.

It kind of makes me a bit judgemental of people that drink regularly in middle age. But maybe they're very used to it and don't really suffer.

Rarely, maybe once every couple months. Middle-aged.

I can handle it my alcohol acceptably with stronger liquor, and don't get particularly bad hangovers, but I've never developed the taste, and a lot of casual drinking options like red wine or hoppy beer I remain unsure how normal people drink them.

Most of my social group either tends to either drink multiple times a week, or have a medical reason or past alcoholism reasons to avoid alcohol entirely. There's probably a total reduction, but if so it's probably more an artifact of external pressures on new drinkers, rather than a change to existing ones.

I am in my early 30s and have always been a boring teetotaler. I see no reason to become addicted to alcohol on top of sugar.

I’m middle-aged, maybe 10 times a year, 1-3 drinks. Pretty much for celebrations or live chess games with other drinkers. I drank much more frequently during grad school to get through grading.

Mid 20s here, expect I'm probably on the younger end of the user base in this forum. I do drink, but only very occasionally (somewhere on the order of once every few months) since I am pint sized, am a massive lightweight and get knocked on my ass from barely any alcohol. Basically, whenever any social event in a professional setting calls for it, I'll drink so long as everyone else is doing so. Very uncommonly, I will do so for pleasure or if I want to loosen up a little bit.

I have never gotten blackout drunk and do not ever plan to. It becomes physically difficult to force myself to drink after a certain level of drunkenness.

I'm in my 40s. I haven't had a drink since I was 22, when I absolutely obliterated myself in a blackout bender after a bad break-up.

A lot of my peers have stopped or curtailed their intake significantly. Alcoholism was rampant in my social circles, and everybody seems to have cut back or died.

AI labor currently has a tax advantage over human labor. I ask an AI to spit out a tax proposal where AI tokens were taxed a similar rate to humans that make 100k in the US. It made AIs something like 18x-850x more expensive. Which would make AIs economically non viable.

I do still feel that the tax advantage for AI labor is still morally wrong, but I don't want to effectively ban them. Is that just me?

How would you try to structure taxes such that the advantage disappears, but the AIs remain viable?

Anything can be taxed out of existence (well, legal existence anyway) but I don't see any reason to adopt tortured metaphors - like equating human income to AI output - if anybody wanted to do that. Income taxes exist because it's easy to the government to raise money this way (most people have income, and need to have income to live, thus providing unending stream of taxes) and it appears "just" - after all, if you are getting some money, why not share it? Sharing is caring. But a lot of things had been taxed, so AI output could be taxed too, of course - I just not see how "moral" comes into it. On what theory there's even a moral question here?

How does moral not come into tax questions?

It's one of the main ways that the government slams it's weight around in the economy. How it does so can impact everyone's livelihoods.

How does moral not come into tax questions?

I don't think this is a proper answer.

It's one of the main ways that the government slams it's weight around in the economy. How it does so can impact everyone's livelihoods.

Yes, but this does not explain a claim like "taxing X is a moral imperative" or "taxing X is morally abhorrent". I mean, you could make - and maybe even prove, who knows - such claims, but none of that directly from the fact that taxation is important. Yes, taxation is important, but it doesn't make a phrase like "tax advantage for AI labor is still morally wrong" more meaningful. You, essentially, claim that taxing AI is a moral necessity, but you provided no argument for it so far but saying "government taxes a lot of things and it has large impact". True, but does not prove that the questions of taxing AI has a moral dimension at all, let alone prove that the positive answer is morally necessary.

It made AIs something like 18x-850x more expensive

How did that work? If you’re paying $10/Mtokens, slap a 50% tax, aren’t you just paying 0.5x more?

It was comparing token output of a knowledge worker making about 100k a year. Which it estimated at 15-20 million tokens of human output. And then taxes on that person being about 30k. So tokens being taxed at 30k per 20 million.

The approach is not necessarily good, it's just what I started with when I had this thought.

So you’d tax per token, based on how much money would be paid to a human to do the same job? Seems extremely difficult to calculate in practice.

And what about local/self-hosted models? A decent GPU can easily output 20M tokens in a matter of hours, you leave it to summarise some PDFs overnight and suddenly you have to pay 30k?

Again, I didn't say this was a good method

Fun framing, but I think it proves too much.

Almost every technology has this advantage. Is a Roomba tax-advantaged over cleaning staff? Is a tractor tax-advantaged over farmhands? Productivity gains are good. If you tax them, you will get less of them.

Fair enough, if AI is merely a productivity enhancement tool we have nothing to worry about.

You can’t easily tax labor saving innovation. You can regulate it, which is what governments trying to protect jobs ultimately rely on (ban New Jersey from pumping its own gas, ban Brits from driving cars without a red flag being waved in front of them, ban autonomous taxis in NYC etc).

The first part of the question is about the actual profitability of AI providers. Most AI applications, especially a lot of basic white and blue collar labor (via multimodal models operating robotics) will be foundation model agnostic. You don’t need a frontier model to do customer support, so margins will be ground down by competition. It may even be that local models get good enough to do much of this pretty quickly, at which point it’s just compute with very little margin on top. For some applications, like cybersecurity or maybe some high frequency trading, having the highest performing LLM as fast as possible might allow some of the largest labs to eke out small, temporary high-margin windows immediately after big breakthroughs. But these will be short lived.

The second question is about the profitability of industries that replace workers with AI. Companies with extremely complex supply chains, very specialized and long lead time machinery that itself has long supply chains, and deep industry knowledge are arguably in a better position to automate without facing price pressure, therefore attaining higher margins. Even there, though, manufacturing margins are currently being hugely compressed by what’s happening in China, AI or not, and that’s likely to increase further. In addition, now SaaS is no longer as attractive, hundreds of billions in VC money is flowing into applied AI, and it’s arguably much easier to replicate and compete with that skilled business that’s been in the market for 30 years with AI, too.

The problem with western economies isn’t necessarily directly AI, even though a big employment shock is coming. It’s that huge sections of the economy haven’t gotten more efficient. We should be living in an age of hugely increasing across the board living standards but we aren’t because prices have been preserved by colossal regulatory job creation programs, some intentional and some not, primarily in healthcare and education, for over 40 years.

You end up with a world where AI can do everything but the government directly or indirectly employs 175,000,000 ditch diggers.

Have people looked into how necessary slavery was in historical civilizations? While industrialization seems to have ended the necessity of chattel slavery, though not necessarily all coerced and semi-coerced labor, in a country it seems the past required more coercion. An example is that sugar farming is so horrific once Haiti/St Domingue ended slavery, it basically stopped since no one was willing to do it without being forced to. I'm curious how much more economically diversified empires like the Romans and Chinese required slavery.

Maybe a tangent, but I'm reading a novel set in post Roman Briton, and it got me thinking. Why was there slavery in tribal Europe, even after Christianization? They weren't capturing slaves to work on large plantations then. I think it was something like this:

  1. Your warband attacks and burns an enemy village. They kill all the fighting men and maybe capture a few who surrender.
  2. There are a bunch of women and children. You now have several options:
    • Let them go. This was probably not actually very humane, you have just burned everything and killed all the strong laborers and ruined their dwellings and food stores. At best they will starve, at worse they will be prey for animals and men.
    • Kill them all. But why? It's a bunch of extra work for nothing, killing them brings you no benefit, and it pisses off the enemy and invites retaliation. And it is considered kind of bad form even among non Christians AFAICT. You might do this if you are on a revenge mission or are just a sadist I guess.
    • Capture them and take them with you. You can maybe sell them. And also, you can inflict psychological damage on the enemy while still appearing to be an honorable, rational enemy.
  3. You've brought them back to your towns and villages. Now they need somewhere to stay. You're a semi-settled tribe, so you don't have a big facility to house and feed them. So instead you parcel them out to your soldiers and their extended families. Now they have somewhere to sleep. But they don't get to eat for free, so they have to work. And now you've invented de facto slavery.

Edit: @Capital_Room beat me to it

I remember once seeing a comparison of the "energy" used by a modern household vs. Classical household, and that it was pretty similar, the difference obviously being electricity vs. human slaves. No idea as to the accuracy/rigor of it, tho.

Have people looked into how necessary slavery was in historical civilizations?

I like walking people through the thought experiment/scenario "Okay, you're a moderately-sized village of stationary agriculturalists in the Neolithic, and young men from hunter-gatherer tribes keep wandering by to hunt your livestock and gather your crops, because they find your idea that a person can 'own' such things, and that plants and animals aren't just there for whoever can take them, laughable and absurd, and mock you for the labor you put into cultivating those things instead of relying on the bounty of nature like a real man." Then ask what, after you defeat any of these raiders in a battle to defend your stuff, do you do with your defeated foe? Point out the strategic reasons (as pointed out by the likes of Sun Tzu) why you can't just kill or cripple them all. But why you also cannot just let them go to keep trying again. And then pointing out that a Neolithic farming village lacks the surplus to feed and house an idle prisoner. Then ask who supervises the prisoner you've put to work? Why would the prisoner submit to this person? Wouldn't it make sense to have it be the same guy who defeated and captured him in the first place, then? But why would this person take such a job? What does he get out of it? Can you trade that role to someone else?… and so on, through careful Socratic dialogue.

I love the looks on their faces when they finally realize what solution they've "invented."

Edit: Plus, you might also find the writings of George Fitzhugh interesting. A socialist who was answering the "socialism is state-run slavery" argument with a "chad yes" long before libertarian-types were around to make it. Who condemned the racist character of Southern chattel slavery… on the grounds that white people should be enslaved too.

on the grounds that white people should be enslaved too.

They were. It was called "indentured servitude". Yes, I know it wasn't hereditary, but for the person in it there wasn't too much difference in that.

BTW, returning to your Neolithic example, the question now if this prisoner finds a nice girl who wants to marry him and produces children, why shouldn't those be free? The whole argument does not work there if you want to make it hereditary.

I know it wasn't hereditary, but for the person in it there wasn't too much difference in that.

From the owner's perspective, an African slave was a "buy it for life" tractor, while an indentured servant was a rented U-Haul. Indentured servant employers frequently tried to squeeze as much labor as they could before the servants' contracts were up, leading to a surprisingly high mortality rate.

Then ask what, after you defeat any of these raiders in a battle to defend your stuff, do you do with your defeated foe?

Investigate the root causes of their raiding.

More seriously, your hypothetical does give an interesting conclusion; if you wish to maintain a 'Jeffersonian' society and are unwilling to resort to slavery, you kind of just have to kill the invaders. That being said, the 13th amendment does exclude coerced labor as a consequence of legal punishment from the abolition and coercing prisoners to do labor is more or less common in even rich nations, so I'm not sure using the defeated raiders for coerced labor is de-facto condemned even now.

The problem becomes comparing different forms of slavery/sefdom/free labor which are incommensurate.

Reading the replies, that does seem to be the case. Every society contains some degree of coercion, taxes can't be optional after all, but the difference between a modern westerner vs. a gulag inmate or a St. Domingue field slave seems to be in the particulars of treatment rather than some sort of a priori philosophical divide.

Chattel slavery actually has a pretty clear bright line- the individual can be transferred from one owner to another like any other piece of property, it isn't bound to real property.

Nowadays bound to real property is pretty rare in the west- it comes up in mineral/water rights sometimes and game animals, but it isn't something average people have to care about. But various forms of unfree labour which were not transferable, they were bound to real property, were not slavery, and historically bounded property was very common in other contexts as well.

I don't think "transferred from owner to owner and not bound to real property" is actually a good map to "slavery" as a concept across multiple cultures, at least not in terms of "what are we talking about when we are talking about slavery." Other factors that seem relevant:

-- Are the children of slaves free or are they also enslaved?

-- Can the owner beat or otherwise corporally punish the slaves? How severely?

-- Does the owner have a legal right of sexual access to the slaves?

-- Do the slaves have the right to property or marriages that the owner must respect?

Classical Greece had a tradition of agricultural slavery, but functionally the slaves were simply peasant farmers who didn't have the right to move or leave their farms. There were no overseers, no whips, no chains. They had money, friends, marriages, families.

The legal regimes and the customary treatment given to slaves varies wildly. I constantly bring up the anecdote in Frederick Douglass' memoir of a young Freddy making white friends who taught him to read, something they were legally obligated to do at school, in exchange for bread, of which Freddy had an endless supply from his master's kitchen.

I don't think discussions of slavery are terribly valuable absent a discussion of the particulars.

Large parts of medieval Europe basically didn’t have actual chattel slavery for long periods of time- they had unfree labour, but serfs weren’t slaves.

For Russian serfs, I don't see any difference (except the racist aspect of course).

For significant portions of Russian history, serfs were also understood as of a different blood and breed to the point of being practically speaking a different race.

Yes, and of course the aristocracy everywhere considered itself "different breed", but with black slavery it's always more prominent. It's one thing when somebody is of the low birth and you can find it out by digging into the archives, and quite another when you literally see it in their skin color. If you take a Russian serf, feed him well, clean him up, dress him up and put him next to a typical Russian pomeshik, you'd see little difference. Not so with a black slave.

You think that, and I think that, and it might even be true. Aristocrats of the time, true believers, did not think that was true. Aristocrats truly believed that they looked, thought, acted, simply were different at a biological breed level than their lessers. No matter how much you dressed a peasant up, the true nobles would see right through him. He could not imitate the nobility that comes from generations of breeding.

Russian serfs didn't have to be afraid their wives or children would be sold off to a far away plantation at any time, for one.

They did. Selling serfs "without land" had been allowed in 1675, and while Peter I tried to limit family-splitting sales, it had been largely ignored. A Russian proverb says "the severity of Russian laws is mitigated by the optionality of following them" - this is one of the constants of Russian history, whatever is happening there otherwise. Other tsars tried to ban the practice too (yet another evidence that previous bans were ineffectual) but it was still widespread. Especially when dvornya (house serfs) were concerned, since there wasn't a concern about working the land there.

Here's an episode from the biography of famous Russian writer Turgenev: http://i-s-turgenev.ru/books/item/f00/s00/z0000007/st003.shtml who, being a young man, interfered with such a deal, planned by his mother. Since he was a noble and proclaimed he will shoot the police officer if he'd try to enforce the deal (Russia was much more wild back then) the deal was cancelled. The police officer opened an official investigation, but since he was a lowly village policeman, predictably investigation against a local noble went nowhere and had no consequences whatsoever.

Alright, I stand corrected. Still, sounds like it was a lot less frequent for agricultural labor (which probably always was the vast majority of slaves) than in other systems of cattle slavery.

Mining was also a pretty rough profession for a long time.

The word "necessary" might be doing a lot of the lifting either way. It definitely makes some industries more profitable for the owners, but how "necessary" is it for that industry to be more profitable?

For something like salt mines maybe it matters a lot since salt was used to preserve food, and food preservation was very important for armies and power projection.

But for something else like tobacco production in the Americas .. the industry wasn't necessary at all. It was a luxury good that caused long term medical problems. Sugar is probably similar as well.

Yeah, I was thinking about levels of necessity too. Coal mining was possible without slavery and people were distressed when this nightmare job was taken away. Orwell quote, just because the writing is good:

“…each man is shifting coal at a speed approaching two tons an hour. I have just enough experience of pick and shovel work to be able to grasp what this means. When I am digging trenches in my garden, if I shift two tons of earth during the afternoon, I feel that I have earned my tea. But earth is tractable stuff compared with coal, and I don’t have to work kneeling down, a thousand feet underground, in suffocating heat and swallowing coal dust with every breath I take; nor do I have to walk a mile bent double before I begin. The miner’s job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on a flying trapeze or to win the Grand National. I am not a manual laborer and please God I never shall be one, but there are some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to. At a pitch I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate farm hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few weeks.

--Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

Quote from By This Axe (a sourcebook for ACKS (the Adventurer Conqueror King System), whose author prides himself on thorough historical research):

Throughout Europe during classical and late antiquity, and well into the modern age in many places worldwide, most mines were worked by slaves. However, there is some archaeological evidence that some mines were worked by paid laborers. For instance: There are over a thousand ancient graves at the Hallstatt salt mines, and all of the bodies are interred with valuable grave goods that suggest care and respect for the dead. These might be the graves of miners, and if so that would suggest paid labor.

My cursory Internet searching did not find anything super-helpful, but here are some articles about slavery in Scotland.

Interesting links. It seems coercive labor, even if it's not "slavery" per se, crops up almost everywhere you have civilization.


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