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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25292 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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An elegant solution to all the male crisises, embryonic sex selection. https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/the-y-chromosome-is-dysgenic

Men commit far more crime than women, they are more prone to diseases and they live shorter lives.

There may be more variation in men's IQ scores and they are more common in STEM, so we would certainly need some men for new discoveries and the like but what is the need for 1:1 sex ratio?

Most people don't work on intellectual tasks in civilization which need constant innovation and incredible time spent on them with a singular focus. Most jobs are mundane and of maintaince variety. We can just have few men which work on hard research type jobs where vast majority of population is women. Maybe with lack of men female researchers would lead. Besides if super intelligence arrives we may not need men working at these jobs at all.

This would solve the incel problem since men are rarer, this would solve the problem of dangerous men preying on women.

Note I am not serious here, but talking about this hypothetical seems like fun. It does seem obviously wrong but I can't pinpoint any specific moral principle it might violate.

Surely there is something wrong with this argument but what is it? It seems fine from an purely utalitarian perspective.

Edit: i am again restating that I am not seriously considering this. It's starting prompt for philosophy and a fun writing excercise. No serious person would start their message with "An elegant solution".

Wolbachia, a parasite/symbiont does shift gender ratio for many of its insect hosts.

The idea that the sort of eugenics nerds who want to calculate the optimal male:female ratio in the blind hopes that will get them into the top 75% of males in terms of reproductive sex are going to win a fertility contest with the people who......don't do those things is what's wrong with it.

Well it certainly isn't practically feasible. I am not arguing on that. It's more of an argument against eugenics, most people who consider themselves eugenicists would say there is something wrong with this but not normal eugenics. (Ignoring for the moment the obviously evil state repression which would be required for actually implementing eugenics)

I am thinking what is morally wrong with this plan or is it even wrong? Provided you can somehow convince everyone to follow it, should you? One poster pointed out that this can lead to demonization of men which can be a super small minority. That is one moral problem.

I also posted this because this seemed like the type of policy which would be supported by the most radical of feminists and incels both. Which I find pretty comedic.

Society runs on the energy we harvest from young men during the competition to find who reproduces. We run that cohort at any problem we have, and we can afford to lose most of them in any given generation. If you invert that pyramid, so that there need be no competition for reproduction, you don't have a military. Which means your carefully constructed eugenics program now belongs to anyone who didn't do that shit. None of those men reproduce, and the hypothetical feminists who you think might support it would be the Handmaids of whichever outside power retained a slush fund of young men.

An elegant solution to all the male crisises, embryonic sex selection. https://mistakesweremade.substack.com/p/the-y-chromosome-is-dysgenic

Men commit far more crime than women, they are more prone to diseases and they live shorter lives.

There may be more variation in men's IQ scores and they are more common in STEM, so we would certainly need some men for new discoveries and the like but what is the need for 1:1 sex ratio?

Most people don't work on intellectual tasks in civilization which need constant innovation and incredible time spent on them with a singular focus. Most jobs are mundane and of maintaince variety. We can just have few men which work on hard research type jobs where vast majority of population is women. Maybe with lack of men female researchers would lead. Besides if super intelligence arrives we may not need men working at these jobs at all.

This would solve the incel problem since men are rarer, this would solve the problem of dangerous men preying on women.

Note I am not serious here, but talking about this hypothetical seems like fun. It does seem obviously wrong but I can't pinpoint any specific moral principle it might violate.

Surely there is something wrong with this argument but what is it? It seems fine from an purely utalitarian perspective.

I agree life would be a lot better for men in a world where the sex ratio was 2 or 3 women for every man. Possibly worse for women, though. Somewhere out there there is a ratio which maximizes everyone's welfare and happiness. Given that mankind is a tournament species, I wouldn't be surprised if that ratio was something north of 1 woman for every 1 man.

Anyway, how would an embryonic sex selection policy be enforced? In a world where there are 3 women for every 1 man, lots of people would prefer to have sons.

It seems fairly obvious to me that a ratio that resulted in the total normalization of multiple women sharing one man would result in even more winner-takes-all type outcomes in the sexual market, not some kind of utopia where every man gets two concubines.

(Legally enforced monogamy is a social technology that makes life better for males because it papers over the worst outcomes of unmanaged natural sexual competition. This much should be obvious given the last hundred years of western civilization. In the present day we're still operating on the fumes left over from those norms, and clearly there wouldn't be anything like them left in 3:1 world.)

It seems fairly obvious to me that a ratio that resulted in the total normalization of multiple women sharing one man would result in even more winner-takes-all type outcomes in the sexual market, not some kind of utopia where every man gets two concubines.

FWIW I attended one of those gifted scholar programs and for whatever reason the sex ratio was 2 girls for each guy. As far as I know, nobody had a harem but most of the guys had a girlfriend if they wanted one. Even including a lot of guys who wouldn't stand much of a chance in a typical university or high school setting. I don't know if this would translate in the situation of a society wide lopsided sex ratio, but I am pretty sure a lot would depend on social norms.

I recall reading that in the 1930s, there was a huge man shortage in Germany (owing to World War I) and the Nazis encouraged single women, in effect, to become concubines in an effort to raise birth rates.

Girls mature faster, so I suspect age cutoffs make a big difference in why so many of those programs are majority female.

It does seem obviously wrong but I can't pinpoint any specific moral principle it might violate.

Chesterton's Fence is the obvious one: the sex ratio, and the genes that cause it, affect so many things that its impossible to predict the effects. Doing such a big change without being able to predict the effects is imprudent.

Even so, I don't really think Inceldom is a problem big enough to justify 'removing' men. If Incels lives really were so bad, they are fully capable of killing themselves. Given that most haven't killed themselves, I think it shows that even for them the issue of being an Incel isn't a life-or-death one. There are counterarguments, such as suicide != never existing, but at that point we are going into Schopenhauer anti-natalist territory and that is a bigger question.

It seems fine from an purely utalitarian perspective.

Two very common issues with utilitarianism as practiced is the issue of calculating utilions, it's very non-trivial and I'd argue practically impossible at scale, and the fact that the world is so complex that calculating n-th order effects quickly becomes practically impossible for tons of activities, especially the more granular you get. I think those two issues are often why utilitarianism, where is a very good heuristic to use when pair with others, often morphs into horror and/or 'I wanted to do this anyway and I can fabricate a post-hoc justification for it using utilitarianism" when it's the sole "guide" or morality or action.

But weren't the genes selected for in an era when mortality was a lot higher? Especially for males? A 50/50 sex ratio at birth might be quite different after a couple of decades of low intensity war and hunting at maturity.

I doubt the 50/50 ratio comes from "male mortality being higher than female mortality." It comes from the fact that the most successful males are just so damn successful that from an expected value calculation, gambling on being a male (from behind the veil of ignorance) is worth it.

This. Every individual in the next generation will have half of their genes from a male and half from a female, so [i]ndividual selection favors equal parental investments in male and female offspring. Obligatory link to the sequences.

Chesterton's Fence is the obvious one: the sex ratio, and the genes that cause it, affect so many things that its impossible to predict the effects. Doing such a big change without being able to predict the effects is imprudent.

Chesterton's Fence doesn't apply here because we know why the 1:1 sex ratio exists - evolutionary equilibrium requires an equal chance of having grandchildren between boyparents and girlparents - and the reason serves no human purpose. At a more basic level Chesterton's Fence only applies to man-made fences, not facts of nature.

This may be my understanding of biology being limited, but while the biological tendency for the 1:1 sex ratio is well understood my understanding is that there are a lot of genes involved in actually causing the human roughly 50/50 sex ratio. My concern is more that messing with the genes could cause unintended side effects due to their, and their interactions, complexity.

Who suggested to mess with genes? Selective abortion is already long here with us.

I mean, Chesterton's Fence in its original form refers to something that was put up with a purpose but whose purpose has been forgotten. Technically, that doesn't apply to things without telos, but the basic conservative principle underlying it does. The lack of greater-than-OMG-available-energy particle collisions on Earth doesn't seem to be purposeful, but I'd still recommend against ending it until one knows what will happen (doing it in space would appear safer).

The conservative principle here actually is satisfied in the case of "substantial excess of women"; male mortality from combat has reached very high levels in the past, such that there have been large female excesses without apparent issues. This is why the objection I made was a purely "it looks like the political consequences of this could be dystopian" one, because doing this with women's suffrage would translate to full political matriarchy, where values that are mostly only held by men are totally shut out of policy, and AFAIK that is unprecedented with perhaps some hunter-gatherer exceptions. I suppose the social justice movement does try its best to centre women's values, so it's kind of a prototype, but it's not a full society, and it's not exactly reassuring.

(I hate staring into this abyss.)

Given that most haven't killed themselves, I think it shows that even for them the issue of being an Incel isn't a life-or-death one.

Being involuntarily celibate is a current state, not necessarily a permanent one. I imagine a non-negligible chunk of them would kill themselves if they somehow knew that they would never have sex/kids (I'd strongly consider it), but that's not actually a thing you can know for sure.

And of course, there's a simple low-cost way to do this... fight more wars. That was the traditional way society's removed their excess males, and it would be a huge strategic asset for America or any other 1st-world country if we could treat soldiers as expendable rather than a huge national tragedy every time a single grunt dies.

So arrange for combat by tournament to resolve international disputes. Use large hoplite armies recruited for one time cash payments, fighting on glorified football fields.

Idiots aren't useful as soldiers in modern warefare. Has been so since at least WWI, but probably even going back to 1776 you mostly could not have low-intelligence soldiers. The risk of them being near firearms or explosives simply outweighs any physical benefit of them carrying stuff around for you.

In case anyone reading doesn't know. In the 1960s they rounded up low IQ people and sent them to Vietnam. So they could benefit from military service.

Turns out low IQ people are terrible at modern combat. Whatever quickness or coordination it takes, they don't got it.

There are plenty of accounts of Russia using, uh, troops of questionable ability in the ongoing Ukraine War, which seems "modern" enough for me. I can't make claims on the efficacy of the approach, though, nor do I think accounts I end up hearing are unbiased.

You probably need a lot of men to produce just a few geniuses, so if you want to keep the discovery rate as is, you may not be able to reduce the male population all that much. Also, you might also upset some of the women who wouldn't like the lack of men, so some negative hedons there.

In terms of the moral principle violated, however, I think the small matter of forcing your vision of reproduction on billions of non-consenting people would be the main one!

If you can get everyone to agree to it though, have at it – I'll even sign your petition.

You probably need a lot of men to produce just a few geniuses, so if you want to keep the discovery rate as is, you may not be able to reduce the male population all that much.

Oh, ASI will do all that for us, right? Also solves the "but who will do the heavy lifting manual labour jobs?" since robots will then be advanced enough to do the drudge work.

If we have ASI, all the motivations for this are moot. Crime is impossible, disease doesn't exist, everyone lives forever. Or everyone is dead, women and men alike.

Everyone being dead would solve the Sex Wars, right enough.

I've never read it, but I think Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold covers the idea of a single-sex world, this time where it's all men-only.

The problem with this is that males become a kind of elite celebrity class, where the average male will have higher social status than the average female. Women would probably get jealous at this state of affairs. Many women would think, "why couldn't I have been born a man?" It wouldn't look like a feminist utopia.

I legitimately think that female envy (which is what drove Western Feminism) requires something of a low-status male slave class to rule over. Similarly, humans only think themselves rich when they have poorer neighbors to compare themselves with.

From this perspective, the humane solution to female emancipation is something like male p-zombies. Of course, that would require a Big Lie, so is it really humane?

Similarly, humans only think themselves rich when they have poorer neighbors to compare themselves with.

But do people really desire this? I would say the evidence points to people in general wanting to live around and interact with people in their own economic class, not live as a king among the poors.

I think women looking for men are mostly similar to this, they might want the best mate they can get but are perfectly fine with having a mate roughly as good as their peers.

But do people really desire this? I would say the evidence points to people in general wanting to live around and interact with people in their own economic class, not live as a king among the poors.

America is unusual among societies with relatively high inequality in that the "rich" class arranges things to make it easier to avoid poors 100% of the time, not to make it easier to hire servants with the tradeoff of only being able to avoid the other poors 90% of the time. I don't know if this is because America has a cultural norm of fake egalitarianism which makes people want servants less, or if it is because America is worse at policing such that people are willing to make more tradeoffs to avoid poors.

It's not "fake egalitarianism", it's a genuine egalitarianism that a lot of our "elites" and "elite aspirants" think is fake and this discontinuity is a major driver of tensions in the culture war.

When affluent liberals talk about how we need illegal immigrants because they do the jobs Americans wont. What they are saying in effect is that they don't think that people who pack meat or clean toilets should earn American level wages. To put it another way, they don't think they should have to pay "the help". They are saying that what they want is not employees but rather an underclass who they can exploit. And because there is a genuine norm of egalitarianism in the US this desire for an underclass is interpreted by many as a deliberate act of disrespect towards not just the class of people who pack meat and clean toilets, but towards the entire American experiment.

Illegal aliens do not make less than native citizens working the same jobs, but are more willing to work those crappy jobs to begin with.

The law of one price is strong, but the question is whether those crappy jobs would pay more (to attract US citizens) if illegal immigrants were not available.

Some of them, perhaps, but others hire mostly those legally required to work(criminals), which will not push for much wage increase.

In my experience the companies that will hire illegals tend to be less than scrupulous when it comes to things like counting hours and I have yet to receive a satisfactory explanation for why the law of supply and demand supposedly does not apply when it comes to the supply of labor.

This is because of measures designed by real egalitarians ostensibly to help the poor, such as minimum wage and nanny taxes. Of course, if you can't hire poors to work for you (unless you're Elon Musk rich and not just two-doctor household rich), you're best off avoiding them entirely.

Two doctor couples in the UK routinely hire a full-time nanny and a part-time housekeeper, and we have less inequality and higher taxes than you do, so there is something other than taxes or wage compression preventing Americans hiring servants.

Two doctor households in Texas- or one doctor households- regularly hire nannies and housekeepers. Of course, we have very high inequality by US standards. But a cleaning lady once or even twice a week merely requires one to be middle class if it's a priority, or upper middle if it isn't.

Hiring a cleaning lady once or twice a week is hiring a contractor, either under the table (cheap, illegal, but negligible chance of punishment) or through some agency which handles the formalities (expensive and legal). That's different than having a servant or servants who only work for you.

We are kind of talking past each other. It is true that the rich do not desire to interact with the poor. But it is also true that a person prefers to be rich than to be poor. When you think about it, that's a little crazy! You'd think a persons preference would be something like "I want a washing machine" but actually, people prefer to be rich than to be poor.

I think it means we do desire to know ourselves to be Kings. We just don't want to be the only King -- how lonely!

Women would probably get jealous at this state of affairs. Many women would think, "why couldn't I have been born a man?" It wouldn't look like a feminist utopia.

They already say all that. Why should we actually give them the low-status male slave class? Go, 1/10 gender ratio fanfiction made reality!

Why should we actually give them the low-status male slave class?

Who is "we" here? If you're posting this then you can just not give women what they want.

The rest of society will just give them what they want though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher%27s_principle - In a sexually reproducing species, the ratio tends towards 1:1.

https://malmesbury.substack.com/p/the-talk-a-brief-explainer-of-sexual - "sexual reproduction is virtually necessary to evolve into a complex fully-fledged multicellular organism."

So we're stuck with this, unless you think (a) we can institute a totalitarian surveillance regime to control the number of male and female babies people have, and (b) we can transcend biology and attain the purity of the blessed machine. Me, I'm not so sure.

Also you are completely correct about fisher. In a free society if a such a cultural movement arose women who are not selecting against male embryos would gain an enormous evolutionary advantage. The genes which make people not want to abort male babies would propagate and this society would go back to normal.

It's probably trivial to write a simulation to prove this.

Maybe it would take baby vats or something like that to keep the society going.

How hard can it be to switch human reproduction to parthenogenesis? Then there would be no need for fertile male humans at all. You could keep some breeding stock of Mark I humans in third-world countries, just in case. You could take some of their sons, sterilize them and raise them for male-specific tasks, the way people have been doing with cattle for millennia.

It sounds like a recipe for severe inbreeding.

You can't have inbreeding if children have only one parent (they are a clone of). If you mean that women with heritable diseases will inevitably pass them to their daughters, then yes. But if you have the technology to force egg cells to form with a complete set of chromosomes, you are probably advanced enough to engineer the diseases out of the mother's embryo.

Unlike the harem world, men probably wouldn't vote for that one.

What makes you say that? Men vote for the faction that seeks to trans their kids all the time.

And why do you think that is?

Any future where goverment is this powerful and uses it for such pointless bullshit is a complete dystopia. This assumes a scenario where very different cultural movements have won out and people are choosing to do this.

Black people commit more crime than white people, but you will not make similar suggestions about them.

It'd be a bit tricky to do that via gamete selection.

Also, I seem to recall we've had a few people here make such suggestions; whence your confidence?

What about an inversion of the idea?

Men are physically stronger and better for tough industrial jobs like oil production or construction. Men also contribute more high variance geniuses, entrepreneurs, innovators (and criminals too but also a good number of police and protectors).

So maybe there should be more men than women? AI can handle the busy bee jobs.

Women would concentrate on their key comparative advantage, what they can do but men can't, having children. There'd be some kind of polygamous system where men who do better get to have more wives, while low performers don't get even a single wife. Women would have many husbands, 3 or 4 on average maybe? More?

I think this is a bad idea, since having many more men than women would probably cause instability. Presumably the men wouldn't be too happy about sharing wives with other men, even if each could be sure of paternity via modern testing tools. Women would be jealous, upset. The most capable men would probably try and hoard the women... Such massive biological engineering schemes seem sure to have unintended consequences. Social engineering can be quickly undone, whereas biological mistakes are sticky!

Related, Arctotherium on marriage patterns in existing human cultures: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/human-reproduction-as-prisoners-dilemma

There is actually a very fundamental reason why the sex ratio is 50:50!

Yes, and that is based on individual natural selection.

The thing is, we are no longer aligned to the imperatives of natural selection. We use contraceptives. We build corrective glasses and synthesize thyroxine for the likes of me rather than letting natural selection deal with them. We have escaped from the yoke of our blind idiot god. Why should we keep this tenet when we have broken so many others?

Let's give it a few years lol

The rumours of the death of God may have been greatly exaggerated.

I can't tell if this is an exceptionally well crafted troll effort or yet another exhibit of just how broken and toxically effeminate the culture of the liberal striver class has become. The warnings in CS Lewis' Abolition of Man reframed as imperatives. Forget making "men without chests" what we really need to do is make no men at all!

It'd be funny if there wasn't a vocal population who seem to genuinely think like this.

Surely there is something wrong with this argument but what is it? It seems fine from an purely utalitarian perspective.

This where the absence of luminaries like DavidFriedman, BarnabyCajones, Ame_Damnee, Et Al are most sorely felt. As one of their rants on different moral systems, reframing of sin as virtue, or the pernicious evils of utilitarian thinking is what this thread really needs.

From a purely utilitarian perspective Nazi medical experimentation on live prisoners was an unalloyed good as they greatly expanded our understanding of phenomena like Shock and Hypothermia. This understanding has, without doubt, saved many more lives than those experiments consumed. Now you can take this one of too ways, as an argument in favor Nazi style death camps. or as an argument against Utilitarianism. I take it as the latter. To me, utilitarianism looks like a philosophy that was specifically designed for the purpose of allowing high-functioning sociopaths to justify and excuse horrible behavior.

From a purely utilitarian perspective Nazi medical experimentation on live prisoners was an unalloyed good as they greatly expanded our understanding of phenomena like Shock and Hypothermia. This understanding has, without doubt, saved many more lives than those experiments consumed.

The hypothermia research was the rare exception of Nazi medical research in that it had actual value. Basically, it allows you to estimate how long a human can survive depending on the water temperature, which is useful because rescue crews thus know when they can stop searching. Obviously not all the people who was rescued in cold water after consultation of that chart owe their lives to it, people have rescued shipwrecked sailors long before the Nazis. I would say the marginal effect is that (1) you avoid rescuers losing their own lives due to a futile rescue and (2) you avoid opportunity costs of futile rescues -- if you know that all the people from ship A are dead, you can instead focus on rescuing people from ship B, even if it had a smaller crew. Rascher's freezing experiments have killed some 300 people. I think similar data could have been collected through ethical means, but obviously it would have taken longer.

Most of the Nazi medical research was much more dubious. Mengele would be a rather typical example, a murderous SS fuck who spend his spare time on torturing prisoners for his 'experiments'.

I can't tell if this is an exceptionally well crafted troll effort

It does read like something written by Dr. Strangelove.

I recall the Chinese did infant sex selection, and that it didn't require Nazi camps, merely incentives aligning the right way. Their efforts resulted in demographic horrors because they selected against female children, and women are the bottleneck for reproduction. I'd like to hear the actual arguments against OP's proposal without devolving into "that's Nazi shit", or else I would like to see actual Nazi shit such as proposals to expel Jews/blacks treated the same way.

I don't like this tendency to insinuate that posters with outrageous theses must be trolling/dishonest. If this is not the place to discuss outrageous proposals at face value, what is? Moreover, to begin with, if it generates interesting discussion and the original proposer follows conversational decorum, does it even matter whether it's trolling? Your interlocutor might be honest; he might also internally laugh at you; he might also be a p-zombie and have no internal experience at all. If on the other hand the proposal is so offensive to you that you can't engage normally, that's on you.

does it even matter whether it's trolling?

I would argue that yes, it does matter. and that the failure to police bad actors is often one of the most visible manifestations of "toxic femininity". See Theodore Dalrymple's the rush from Judgment.

I did say in the post itself that I wasn't serious.

Note I am not serious here

I mostly wrote it to hear intresting moral arguments against it or for it.

I am not posting it to convince anyone to do it but because it's a good starting prompt for philosophy and a fun writing excercise.

From a purely utilitarian perspective Nazi medical experimentation on live prisoners was an unalloyed good as they greatly expanded our understanding of phenomena like Shock and Hypothermia. This understanding has, without doubt, saved many more lives than those experiments consumed.

I realize I'm going off topic here but the idea the Nazi medical experiments provided some amazing medical advances is a myth based on the just world fallacy. You're right about them helping us understand shock and hypothermia. However, most of their experiments were closer to macabre torture porn then proper science. The vast majority of their experiments weren't rigorous or documented enough to be of any use.

I can't tell if this is an exceptionally well crafted troll effort or yet another exhibit of just how broken and toxically effeminate the culture of the liberal striver class has become. The warnings in CS Lewis' Abolition of Man reframed as imperatives. Forget making "men without chests" what we really need to do is make no men at all!

Incels often float the idea of getting rid of women once there are artificial wombs. I propose a competition: one country gets rid of their men, and the other their women. Which country wins?

Obviously it is an argument in favor of Nazi style death camps, minus the whole "killing 6 million Jews" bit. Your argument relies on conflating these things.

With regards to the OP, I have (only a little tongue-in-cheekly) argued in favor of various feminist "solutions" to low-fertility: gender ratio control like this poster suggests, and also taxation-based polygyny (see recent paper making the rounds on Rightwing Twitter). When I promote these, the purpose is to show that the solutions require horrendous measures.

You might call this "accelerationism but for the future incel uprising"

No it does not rely on conflation of those things.

It relies on the supposition that evil things are always evil, and that good things are always good. But like others here, you are so steeped in left-wing anti-western propaganda that you do not even see it.

Furthermore removing and replacing an approximate third of the US (never mind the world) population would quickly make "the whole killing 6 million Jews bit" look like rookie numbers.

minus the whole "killing 6 million Jews" bit

Minus? There are 16.5 million Jews in the world, getting rid of most men among them would hit that number pretty reliably.

It's an argument against Utilitarianism only if you ignore 2nd-order effects. (This happens a lot with arguments against Utilitarianism.)

Take the extreme variant of the trolley problem, where a doctor has 5 sick patients who each need a different organ transplant. In the doctor's waiting room, there's a healthy patient. Should the doctor kill the healthy patient and use their organs to save the 5 sick people? After all, it'll be saving 5 lives at the cost of one; Utilitarianism demands that you kill the healthy person, right? It's exactly the same as pulling a lever on the train track to save 5 people, right?

... except no, because no one wants to live in a society where at any moment you can be righteously murdered for your organs. That's an insane way for a society to function. Everyone would be terrified all the time. No one would set foot in a hospital. There'd be constant revenge killings against doctors. Everyone who could afford bodyguards would hire them. Everyone would carry whatever weapons they could get their hands on. Society would collapse in about two days. The outcome is: you get no organ transplants, because you've destroyed the mechanisms that allowed for organ transplants in the first place.

Same thing with Nazi experimentation on live prisoners. The Utilitarian argument against it isn't just "the prisoners suffering is bad", it's that plus "if your society has a policy of experimenting on live prisoners, that generates a bunch of horrific problems", such as:

  • Significantly increased terror among the population
  • Dehumanisation of prisoners and any social group they're drawn from
  • Slippery slope to even less humane treatment of people
  • Slippery slope to expanding the number of valid targets
  • General breaking of bright lines around things like bodily autonomy, torture, etc

... so it's very much not an "unalloyed good", even leaving the suffering of the prisoners aside. (For that matter, even if we ignore 2nd-order effects, I'm not sure that the medical advances necessarily do outweigh the suffering of the prisoners! Then there's also the fact that there's no single unambiguous way to add up "greatest utility for the greatest number". You can absolutely have a version of Utilitarianism that prioritises additional utils for people at the bottom. And then, on top of that, there's no single way to convert pain/pleasure/satisfaction/whatever into utility; pain might have a much stronger contribution than pleasure. The weakness of Utilitarianism IMO is that it's inherently flexible and ambiguous like this.)

It might well be possible to construct a situation where Utilitarianism does give an unacceptable answer. But I don't think this is it. And typically, when these arguments go "Utilitarian says we should do X, which we can all agree has bad consequences" -- that's almost intrinsically self-defeating, because Utiliarianism is all about weighing up the consequences and minimising the badness!

Then there's also the fact that there's no single unambiguous way to add up "greatest utility for the greatest number". You can absolutely have a version of Utilitarianism that prioritises additional utils for people at the bottom. And then, on top of that, there's no single way to convert pain/pleasure/satisfaction/whatever into utility; pain might have a much stronger contribution than pleasure. The weakness of Utilitarianism IMO is that it's inherently flexible and ambiguous like this.

This is more than a weakness! It's simply impossible to meaningfully compare utility across individuals. It's a category error, like trying to convert the rupees you earn in the Legend of Zelda to USD: despite appearances, they're just not the same sort of thing. Utility is only meaningful in the context of a single agent (or, rather, in the context of each agent separately).

The generally accepted model is von Neumann-Morgenstern utility, which, notably, is invariant under positive affine transformations. For example, any given VNM utility function is equivalent to the same function multiplied by any positive value. A scenario that provides Alice 1000 utilons and Bob 100 is no different from one that provides Alice 100 and Bob 1000, as the scale is arbitrary and independent for each agent.

But even before that model was developed, economists have understood utility can't be meaningfully compared since 1932 at the latest. The 'serious' thinkers in the philosophy department are just engaging in long-debunked pseudo-science, as is their wont. But at least it's not the Labor Theory of Value?

And again, I feel like this is where absence of those luminaries is most sorely felt, because they were smarter and more articulate than I am, and would have a more clever and artful way of making this argument.

It's not about second order effects, or even third, or fourth order effects. It's about Nth order effects. And there is no realistic way for anyone to calculate Nth order effects unless they choose to go down the David Benatar route.

I can't tell if this is an exceptionally well crafted troll effort

It's dated April 2, 2025, but it's possible that's a time zone issue and it is indeed a year-old April Fools post.

The dystopian take: We are moving dangerously close to the most radical feminist fantasies with this. Keep in mind that feminism seemingly needs to treat men as the outgroup to function, and that most women still identify as feminist. We live in a democracy. Reducing the ratio of men to women means increasing the political power of feminists. That scares me, because there seems to be no end to the slippery slope that ideology is currently on. If something is wrong in society, they blame men. If that doesn't solve it, then they blame men more. Increase their power and reduce the ability of men to organize against it, and we could see some truly dystopian shit.

Why not bar men from high-paying positions entirely? Birth just enough of them so there are people to do the hard and risky jobs, and let everything else be done by women. One man can impregnate hundreds of women after all, so even gradually reducing the male:female ratio to less than 2:10 should be more than sufficient to keep up the population. Any male politician speaking out against this trend can be efficiently cancelled by hordes of women and watch himself slowly lose influence.

You also mention that men are more common than women in STEM. But for several fields this is not true. Women outnumber men quite heavily in medicine and biology for instance, and if you look at science fields overall, women actually outnumber men overall. Also note that the link I have here is 6 years old. As far as I know, women have only moved further ahead of men in the past years. In spite of this, there is still a broad push to get even more women into higher education. I fail to see how a version of the current landscape actually dominated by women would not just result in women dominating academia completely. I can already see the argument: Men is only X% of the global population, so there should at most be X% men in any given degree. Of course if the male percentage is lower than X (or 0) this just goes to show that women are better.

Finally, I think you are misdiagnosing the incel and broader dating problems of modern societies. The culture promotes hedonism, women are taught to fear men, people spend less time in-person socializing than ever, and the way that men are encouraged to act is unattractive to women. Nothing about reducing the ratio of men to women actually fixes any of this. The addictive and convenient nature of social media and gaming means they will continue to be picked over social interaction. Men will still be brought up anxious and scared of approaching. Demonizing men will only be easier as you meet them less. Maybe women will lower their standards purely due to a lack of options, but I honestly wouldn't count on it. That seems more like a male thing to do.

Just in general, screwing with the ratio of men to women seems like a Chesterton's fence of monumental proportions. No one predicted that the one child policy of China and the resulting increase in the proportion of men would turn out as disastrously as it did, even though it seems obvious now. Your experiment would probably result in some very interesting insights into the human mind, whilst similarly blowing up society in spectacular and unexpected fashion.

Fun to think about though.

Reducing the ratio of men to women means increasing the political power of feminists.

No, it doesn't. In fact, it's the reverse.

Remember, men provide, women select.

If less providers, selectors are now competing with each other and don't get to be as picky, (and each individual provider becomes more important), so the political power of selectors in aggregate decreases (a "seller's market"). If more providers, selectors get to be pickier (and providers are competing with each other more) so the political power of selectors increases (a "buyer's market").
This is socio-economics 101.

Right now, even with a rough 50/50 split, men are in surplus due to automation that uniquely affects that gender, and have been for the last 100 years- hence they have no power -> feminism. Communism is the same way, for that matter; too many (male) Russians and too little economic opportunity to sustain a democracy. Implications for China are obvious.

If we were able to automate women out of their jobs just as hard as we did men at the opening of the 20th century, or experienced a massive war where 20% of Western men were wiped out, politics would shift for a generation. As they had from 1945 to about 1990, which is also the reason you don't notice that 2020 is, socioeconomically, closer to 1900 than 1960 because the socioeconomic problems were merely hidden for that generation, and now that the surplus (in power for providers/sellers/men) is all gone they've come back with a vengeance.

Maybe women will lower their standards purely due to a lack of options, but I honestly wouldn't count on it.

It doesn't matter if they do or not. By increasing the number of women, and by lowering their political power without being able to partner up, you've increased the number that will settle to match the number of men. And that, empirically, is good enough.

By increasing the number of women, and by lowering their political power without being able to partner up, you've increased the number that will settle to match the number of men.

if you want someone you know despises you and only settled for you because the alternative was poverty, sure. You're still going to have adultery and affairs and all kinds of shenanigans, because you might be able to make Miss Susan marry Mr Thomas, but if Mr James is hotter or even just nicer to her, things will happen. Marriages where one party is lording it over the other that "I could have had my pick of anyone, I could have done better than you!" tend not to be the happiest. Maybe she'll just let it be water off a duck's back and put all her efforts into the kids while ignoring you. Maybe the Golden Age of British Murder will get a resurgence and there will be a lot of "suddenly, widows".

I don't see how a critical mass of women can't just force the men to do the essential job that require muscles. Guns are the great equalizer, so if you just don't give guns to the men (or let gunmen be the only high-status job available), you can force the new underclass to do hard labor through regulation. It wouldn't have to be total slavery either. Just make it so that producing goods is the only viable path forwards.

I guess I will have to concede that very specific jobs cannot be relegated to an underclass though. Your military and emergency services would probably still require men, and those men would likely have a lot of bargaining power.

Women that are both psychologically and physically fit for a job involving subjugating men through overwhelming violence appear to be very rare, even with guns as the equalizer. I suspect the number of men such a society could control would be too low to do all the hard labor, or else it would be the men in the military who would be the actual slavedrivers.

Remember, men provide, women select.

If less providers, selectors don't get to be as picky, (and each individual provider becomes more important), so the political power of selectors in aggregate decreases (a seller's market). If more providers, selectors get to be pickier, so the political power of selectors increases (a buyer's market). This is socio-economics 101.

@Bombadil is concerned, AIUI, about the possibility of a majority-feminist democracy removing a bunch of legal rights from men. You're using economic theorems that are founded on the assumption that both the buyer and seller are free citizens - that they have the option of walking away status quo ante. A slave can't walk away; his master (or, I suppose, mistress) can unilaterally torture him if he does not accept the deal, which tends to make his bargaining position pretty awful (and let's not get into the abuse of psychiatric drugs to remove his ability to refuse).

I personally, upon reading @Testing's OP, had more immediate/prosaic concerns, although still based on the "one person, one vote" point; the sex disparity in attitudes to liberty is huge (note that it mostly persists even for Red-coded oppression; this isn't just an artifact of the majority of women being Blue Tribe), and I'd worry about all the usual failure modes of hewing the legs from under liberty as a societal principle (including economic stagnation, for starters).

A slave can't walk away

Sure they can. But they don't, partially because there's no better deal to be found elsewhere. (Related: why don't women leave abusive husbands in 1860?)

The thing about one's group being in deficit is that it increases the benefits to defectors. Usually this means "pays a [higher/lower] wage if one is a [buyer/seller]", but it can be other things too, in particular political power.

For the last 100ish years, men have been the defectors, paying women higher and higher socioeconomic wages. They couch this in moral terms, but fundamentally it's just business, just like anti-slavery efforts (and democracy more generally) were back in their day.

Make the economic situation dire enough and people will literally fight to make themselves slaves. Communist countries are a pretty good object lesson in how that works.

We can debate the point that men are completely unnecessary in modern society (which is, in fact, a reasonable question to ask- as automation mostly replaces men, including suicide drone swarms); if they are, this won't work for exactly the reasons you stated. But if they are vital, then my point holds; I'll point to Western gynocracies' obsession with mass male immigration as a suggestion that they are.

and I'd worry about all the usual failure modes of hewing the legs from under liberty as a societal principle (including economic stagnation, for starters).

Yes, I'm fully aware of the track record of Western governance over the last 30 years.

Birth just enough of them so there are people to do the hard and risky jobs, and let everything else be done by women. One man can impregnate hundreds of women after all, so even gradually reducing the male:female ratio to less than 2:10 should be more than sufficient to keep up the population.

That's more than twice as generous as Sally Miller Gearhart's proposal to maintain the proportion of men at 10% of the human race.

It's actually only 60% more generous.

What? If men become scarce, then women will become desperate for men. That would increase mens' power, not decrease it.

The actual problem with the proposal is that this kind of society wouldn't actually be a feminist utopia. For one, women's hypergamous instinct is based on positional status, so making all the men tall or handsome doesn't do anything. There's nothing inherently short or ugly about Western men today. If they don't see the low-status men around, then the rest of men won't actually look high status! There's nothing to compare them to!

Indeed, even if the men are all the same (zero variance whatsoever), it seems unlikely this would make women happy. The purpose of hypergamy is to have a higher status partner than all your friends. If all the men are the same it might as well be a society without any men at all!

So the only thing that would happen is women will become desperate because men have more options. So the women will feel even worse than they do now! In addition to getting pumped and dumped, they will be getting dumped by actual losers! This will not feel like a feminist utopia at all!

It would seem women desire a male slave class.

A fun shower thought I had:

In competitive videogames, "smurfing" is a pejorative for a more-skilled player fooling skill-based matchmaking systems to play (and win) against a less-skilled player. This is seen as a kind of stolen valor: you only look impressive because of unfair comparisons!

I think its interesting that we do not respond emotionally similarly to hypergamous norms: Chad is basically smurfing the ranked queue, no?

If I caught myself describing romance like this I’d go ahead and remove myself from the gene pool.

Actually, incels are the real high-status and valorous winners because only they have the moral fortitude to survive being losers.

I think when encountering Chad "smurfing" in person, i.e. someone from a high-status environment coming to a lower-status one to fish for girls (or even just coming there without the overt intent to steal mates), men did react with hostility historically. The city boy among the country boys; the student from an elite school among the kids from a merely "decent" one, etc.

That's interesting. Do you have any examples? Also, if those men react with hostility, isn't that just simple male competitiveness? What I was talking about was more "society and social norms as a whole" e.g. including other high-status men who think that behavior is unfair.

Furthermore: historically, the purpose of monogamy was to marginalize hypergamous norms. In strong monogamous societies, "smurfing" is not possible, because the society is trying hard to equalize mens' status.

Rather, I mean: it should seem that society that acknowledges and strengthens hypergamous norms (e.g. by legalizing harems, codifying a virgin male underclass, etc.) is self-defeating: wouldn't they realize Chad is just smurfing? That it's all just positional?

So it would seem something primal about status is immune to this fairness instinct. Alternatively, hypergamous societies like this tend to never happen because people actually do feel it is unfair. I do not know.

E: Skill-based matchmaking is interesting because its an admission that high-skilled players are not entitled to high win rates in gameplay. I suppose that is fundamental difference.

Aren't there very few women promiscuous which have sex with chads? Most women have relatively few dating partners. The promiscuous women are selecting for superficial features since they are in for sex and pleasure. Normal women are just not having that much sex and are not available on dating apps since they are taken.

So it gives an appearance that all women are very shallow since only the very shallow women are available for dating.

Number of Partners Men (%) Women (%)
0 to 1 partner 29.8% 25.1%
2 to 4 partners 29.5% 34.6%
5 to 9 partners 19.3% 23.3%
10 or more partners 12.5% 9.5%

How would an incel uprising work in this context? Normal men and women are pairing up. Promiscuous women are choosing to have sex for pleasure instead of dating the bottom 20% since they don't have any societal pressure to do so.

If we lived in a gender reversed world lots of incels would indeed be having sex with female equivalent of chads who are readily available instead of getting in permanent relationship with ugly women.

In this gender reversed world, there would be few hot women who are satisfying lot of medicore men and there would be lot of fat women which are never picked.

This is not even a new thing by the way, even in 1800s there were still an lowerclass of men who never reproduced.

In places like Britain, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and the early United States, the rate of adults who lived to old age without having children was shockingly high—between 15% and 20%

Even then women were not dating poor men and preferred living alone than that.

The behaviour simply makes sense from game theory and evolutionary perspective.

I might be using "hypergamous norms" differently than usual. I don't mean in the sense that women are actually being promiscuous, only that they try to date out of their league. Also I didn't mention incel rebellions anywhere in this reply chain. Did you respond to the wrong comment?

The uprising thing was in another comment by you

You might call this "accelerationism but for the future incel uprising"

I assumed that by hypergamy you meant something close to the meme where there are ten women who are trying to date one man while rest of nine men are ignored.

Some women preferring to date men richer and more successful than them is a much weaker assertion.

That comment is about accelerationism, i.e. pushing for a different future. The idea is that pro-feminist solutions to fertility collapse are necessarily oppressive to men. Done correctly with the right technology though, the rebellion can be probably be prevented.

I mean, even if the top players think smurfing is lame (they are motivated by their competitiveness and do not desire weak opponents), there are still smurfs who are skilled enough to stomp on weak players and driven enough by the desire to simply win, no matter against whom, to do so.

I don't think the metaphor applies to men striving to get women anyway, because most men don't appear to be competitive with other men on this. They want a partner above some baseline level of beauty, and would take several if they can get away with it, but competing with other men is not a motivation. "Trophy wives" only appear to be a male status symbol among the very top elites, who appear to be pathologically driven to competition in as may small ways as possible.

Yes, I think that is another way to see it. "high-skill players are not entitled to high win rates" is a competitive attitude. Since mating is not competitive in this sense, Chad is in fact entitled to a harem.

In gaming it's more like "high-skill players are not entitled to infinite noobs to stomp". Noobs don't like getting stomped, and it doesn't seem to be good for long-term playerbase vitality. High-skill players can always have as high a winrate as they want against bots.

I think I recall variants of that meme in literature, although the initial examples that come to mind (The Great Gatsby, The Outsiders) are upper class boys gatekeeping the lower-class heartthrob from upper class girls.

Although I think it's also possible to see it as Chad smurfing the women: they go in assuming it's a fair matchmaking game, but he's hiding that he's got a separate account with lots of experience elsewhere, but is tired of losing all the time (the tyranny of PvP games: the average player loses half the time, and good matchmaking looks like everyone losing half the time). The classic story (I'm sure there are literary examples, but none come to mind) would tell you that he wasn't after true love, just using her for a cheap thrill.

That's closer to how I'd model it.

A hot, high status guy looking to get his rocks off can find a naive but physically attractive woman with self-esteem issues, and use his talents honed on much more selective girls to gas her up enough to bang him with relative ease. But the sheer truth of it is that being seen with her would detract from his status (and hurt his odds with the more selective girls) so its a bare, unvarnished fact of the universe that he will absolutely NEVER advance a relationship with her.

In a world where physical altercation isn't allowed, the girl's male family, and her other potential suitors, cannot actually slap the shit out of an interloper to discourage this. So males that can flex pure status and high verbal IQ have no real risk here, they don't have to fight their competition like deers locking antlers.

So I'd say the male-male competition aspect is narrowed by the fact that the only two factors you're allowed to compete on are pure attractiveness + status. The real challenge for getting laid is overcome the lady's defenses.

My comments about 'smurfing' are in the context of a female gaze, wherein girls choose according to the result of the ranked queue -- male competition.

"Chad is smurfing" is just a way to phrase the realization that hypergamous norms are positional. That is, any solution that attempts to do away with the suffering of loser men (through abortion, embryo selection, or just plain mass murder) is self-defeating. Chad is not impressive objectively (because "impressive objectively" is a contradiction). Chad is just smurfing the ranked queue.

That our moral intuitions are different about these two things shows us that my clever comments are just: cope.

I think this would be a huge improvement if it was done moderately and selectively. That is, take the people at the very bottom socioeconomic classes (mostly young unwed mothers), and offer them a financial incentive to choose daughters over sons. Then we end up with, say, 51% of babies being born female, compared to the present situation of 51% male. And that 2% would come from the demographics most likely to commit crime and get into trouble, so changing them to female would massively reduce those risk factors.

Unfortunately I think the people most likely to voluntarily choose this would be upper class liberal women, and that would just be a disaster. Even more girl boss feminist women!

You could also speculate about some fascist government forcing it on everyone, to the point where we end up like 75% female or even more. As a guy I'll admit it sounds like a fun sex fantasy, but... I suspect this would cause some horrible consequences down the line (the women would end up fighting with each other and not cooperate at all in running society).

I think this will would improve things for a generation or so, but likely increasing the fraction of women in classes which reproduce unplanned will increase their fertility.

One juvenile delinquent can easily impregnate a dozen 16yo's, if there are no competitors, after all.

While everything seems to work better with slightly more females than males, I strongly expect that would break down long before reaching a supermajority.

Knowledge workers constitute more of a privilege in modern society than they would have thousands of years ago. Yeah you still had “philosophers” back then, but subsistence labor was still much more prescient and important for the days ahead and was harder to come by. Even today, “all societies are only 3 meals away from anarchy.”

The research-type jobs are certainly a problem. The blue collar jobs are a bigger problem. Even Houston, Houston, Do You Read had them done by women given exogenous testosterone, which is going to bring back the violence. The creation of a superintelligence as with Banks's Culture solves this, but only by making humanity pets.

And of course if we're taking something as silly as gender eugenics seriously, we have to take race eugenics (which is a lot more practical) more seriously. You know who is about as violent as white men? Black women. Though if men were to disappear I would also suspect they would be the best replacements for those blue-collar jobs.

You also need to consider the female disadvantages, some of which are simply the flip side of male disadvantages (such as a higher risk tolerance).

You know who is about as violent as white men? Black women.

I suspect that this is probably not true, at least when it comes to the more dangerous forms of violence that cause severe injuries and deaths. The male vs female difference when it comes to this stuff is so large that it makes racial differences seem small in comparison.

But correct me if I'm wrong.

I have seen women in the trades, and black women are not overrepresented as successful compared to women writ large. You know who is? White lesbians. There are tons of black women in stuff like dispatching, purchasing, parts houses, etc, but they’re not actually trades- they’re staff hired from the existing pool of functional but lower skilled labor.

Seems reasonable at first pass but I think you end up with a coordination problem. How do you decide who gets to have the male child and thus have their genes highly represented in the next generation?

If you normalise sex-selective IVF for white normies, families wanting two children will have one of each and most of the families wanting one child will choose a girl. I suspect the same is true of black babymamas and well-assimilated Asians.

The problem is that you preferentially need to remove the bottom 20% of males to get the benefits of @Testing's idea, whereas this policy would preferentially remove above average males.

Make life socially a lot tougher for male children. This will result in 45th trimester self-abortions, concentrated among the bottom quintile of men.

Making life socially tougher only removes the bottom quintile if you define it tautologically. You'll remove those who are least socially adept within every stratum, not the least adept overall.

You could do welfare/tax incentives for girl children only.

most of the families wanting one child will choose a girl

What led you to this conclusion?

Media coverage makes three arguments for a mild daughter preference in the modern rich world:

  • When US IVF clinics offer sex selection at no or trivial extra cost, most patients choose girls. (Patients who explicitly seek out sex selection and are willing to pay a premium for it are mostly non-whites with a cultural preference for boys).
  • Adoption agencies say boys are harder to place than girls, and are able to extract more money from adoptive parents who get a healthy girl than they do from parents who get a healthy boy.
  • Last children skew female, suggesting that couples who have a girl are satisfied but couples who have a boy are more likely to try for a girl.

In the west it is an issue where people lie on surveys because "no preference" is definitely the politically correct answer (except for families with one child preferring the opposite sex for the second - "one of each" remains an acceptable, and common, preference for two-child families), but see for example this Korean poll showing a dramatic, recent shift in Korean preferences, with people now openly preferring daughters in surveys.

There is a lot of discussion about mechanism, but my suspicion is the dominant one is that most parents in cisHajnal societies have an own-sex preference, coupled with the feminist norm that having children is something women should make the decisions about.

but see for example this Korean poll showing a dramatic, recent shift in Korean preferences, with people now openly preferring daughters in surveys.

I guess that it's childfree people are saying this in a poll, instead of actually producing daughters.

The benefits of his idea have nothing to do with gene quality. It has only to do with positional status. The idea is just to make men rare so women are more desperate. You don't need to ensure the men are "high quality" -- what could that even mean? As long as the policy isn't making men worse each generation in a noticeable way, it should be fine.

This would be a society where girls are the desired sex and boys are the undesirable one. If we look at that in the real world, what you get is:

(a) Sex-selective abortion. In gender-flipped world, this means if you get pregnant with a boy, you abort it and keep trying for that girl. (b) Skewed sex ratios, which is the point of the experiment. Parents want girl children, boys are a mistake. We see places where that plays out. See China in the one child policy era, where the preference for boys meant that there were not enough women to go round when these boys grew up. (c) Scarcity will not mean the scarcer sex now becomes high-status and desirable. The preference for sons meant that even where daughters were scarce, women were not given high-status due to that scarcity:

The male-skew in India's sex ratio has increased since the early 20th century. In 1901 there were 3.2 million fewer women than men in India, but by the 2001 Census the disparity had increased by more than a factor of 10, to 35 million. This increase has been variously attributed to female infanticide, selective abortions (aided by increasing access to prenatal sex discernment procedures), and female child neglect. It has been suggested that the motivation for this selection against female children is due to the lower status and perceived usefulness of women in India's patriarchal society.

Your "one man for every ten women" world would not be "now even the most ugly, loser incel can have his pick of women", it would be "oh dear, you're having a boy? sorry to hear that" for every pregnancy.

We are talking past each other. What are you even talking about? Your "oh dear sorry to hear that" is just an emotive distraction. Using 'status' to refer to 'children as status trophies' is completely alien to the conversation. It might as well be off-topic. In your hypothetical world, you think men are so low status that no woman would ever want to have sex with one, and the mens' sperm would just be siphoned for IVF?

Status and quality here refer to 'husbands as status trophies' and with scarcer men of course their status would go up. This specific thread is about whether it is even necessary for the male minority to have 'desirable genes.' I argue that merely making men scarce would be enough to offset the hypergamous instinct.

'husbands as status trophies' and with scarcer men of course their status would go up

Unless we start breeding men like thoroughbred horses, and who knows what might be the rule in the hypothetical society, scarce trash is still trash. Let me ask the people complaining about the lack of ability for men to get wives: would you hold your nose and marry a meth addict obese trailer trash woman to have kids with, on the grounds that "this is all I can get", or would you hold out for something better?

Easy, its a lottery.

Then you'd breed unusually lucky people, I guess that could work.

I don't mean this as an attack on you: "Breeding lucky people" sounds like the kind of phrase LessWrong.com would call "a confusion"

The Pierson's Puppeteers tried that, hoping the luck would rub off on them. Didn't work out as they intended.

It's a reference to the scifi Ringworld series.

Larry Niven's gonna have to sue somebody.

Personally you just convince the existing feminists/misandrists to not have male children. Taking it one step further, you could offer to-be-single-mothers incentives for aborting sons, which is morally equivalent anyways. I'm the same vein, you can institute a policy of doctors spending relatively more time caring for female infants in neonatal care, and pushing harder for male children to participate in extreme sports and dangerous behavrior. Heading into pubescence, advertising and subsidizing potentially-lethal behaviors to boys would also work.

[Obviously this is all highly immoral, but I think this is a problem soluble to engineering solutions.]

I'm laughing because guys, this is already happening in parts of the world for women. So if you want to know what the world of skewed sex ratios would be like, you can just look around!

Son preference causes parents to utilize sex-selective abortion to ensure they have their preferred number of sons. The availability of abortion allows parents to abort female fetuses until they get pregnant with a male fetus, leading to a disproportionate amount of female feticide. Although female infanticide, the intentional killing of already-born girls, also occurs in India, research indicates abortion has become exceedingly more prevalent to determine the gender of children. In India, upwards of 1 million fetuses are sex-selectively aborted each year in India out of an estimated total of 16 million abortions in 2015. Additional research shows that the selective abortion of girls increased from the 1980s to the 2000s. Although sex-selective abortion is widely practiced in India, as evidenced by the abnormal SRB of 110, it is illegal to have an abortion based solely on the gender of the fetus. Abnormal sex ratios cause various problems for a country due to a shortage of women, as there will not be enough women for men to marry. One study projected a female deficiency of 6.8 million in India by 2030.

After birth, son preference results in health inequities for women and girls because parents prioritize the well-being of their sons over their daughters. Son preference causes unusually high mortality in female infants and girls.110 Parents are more likely to seek out and provide medical care for sick sons rather than sick daughters.

...In addition to mortality, girls in India experience health disorders and conditions at much higher rates than boys because of a lack of care. For instance, 54% of girls aged 15–19 were anemic, compared to 29% of boys in the same age range. Researchers have also found that son preference also increased the rate of stunting among girls. These outcomes occur because Indian girls often receive fewer calories and less nutritious food than boys. One study on nutrition in India found that, among breast-feeding children below the age of 2, girls were 15% less likely to receive supplemental milk-based solid foods, and 21% less likely to receive valuable meat, fish, or eggs. Girls were also 7% more likely to be malnourished than boys, demonstrating the nutrition disparity among children stemming from gender discrimination.

Ah, gentlemen. 'Gosh wow, what would this unprecedented thought experiment look like in reality? We can only speculate!'

Yes, we all know about son preference in india and china-- and that's why we're discussing installing an artificial daughter-preference in the western world. Tilting the gender ratio away from women has the unintended but in-retrospect obvious effect of increased the demand for and therefore power of the remaining women in the daughter-preference countries, so now male mottizens are considering how to encourage the opposite preference in their own societies to eliminate male competitors and increase their own social power. Obviously that would be terrible and unethical because infanticide, including abortion, is bad, but speaking from a purely self-interested perspective it makes perfect sense.

the demand for and therefore power of the remaining women in the daughter-preference countries

Buddy, when people are still burning women for bride-prices, I don't think we can say "women there are scarce and so have power".

It's really amusing to read all you guys claiming you are being so terribly repressed and oppressed by the new women-first social paradigm, where your major complaint is "I can't get a date" and not "my in-laws will murder me for not handing over more money".

The woman who were burned obviously got a bad deal, but the women remaining had more power than they otherwise would have thanks to their scarcity. That doesn't mean they were powerful in an absolute sense, but it's not necessary to prove that they were to still believe culling younger generations of males to increase the relative power of the older generation of males.

It's really amusing to read all you guys claiming you are being so terribly repressed and oppressed by the new women-first social paradigm, where your major complaint is "I can't get a date" and not "my in-laws will murder me for not handing over more money".

You are clearly engaging with my argument in bad faith if you think anything you said in the paragraph is at all relevant to this discussion. I can tell you very badly want to rehash the "are men or women more oppressed" argument but even if you could prove your side of that argument to everyone's satisfaction, it wouldn't counter anything the other posters have to say about the effects of enforcing artificial scarcity.

We've also done all of those.

The first one is a gimme. Of course, they don't have female children either.

The second one is already law in Blue areas (some nations take it a bit further and only make it illegal if the child is female- it's sold as an anti-Muslim thing, but the incentives align).

The third one is likely already the case for Women are Wonderful reasons.

The fourth one is war-as-population-control (re: white feathers of WW1).

I don't understand your comment. Yes, we've implemented policies similar to the policies I propose for obtaining a lower male/female ratio. That's my point. Your comment has the tone of a counterargument but doesn't actually oppose anything I said.

I don't think I'd want to implement this sort of move unless we had our robot factories up and running.

Maintenance of advanced civilization requires a lot of back-breaking work, constantly, day in and day out.

Fixing roads, disposing of waste, farming, butchering, building construction, fixing cars and heavy machinery, fighting fires, and running and maintaining electrical wires (lowkey, the most important one is that last one).

These needs spike in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster. Natural disasters are not a solved problem.

There's going to be some baseline need for physically strong laborers just to maintain what we have, let alone push us forward.

Here's interesting stats I didn't know existed before:

"Physical strength required for jobs in different occupations."

It looks like "Medium Strength" occupations and above are the ones that really need male capabilities. So we're sitting at around 40% of jobs that will need males to fill them, on the physical side. Then some overage of that for the mentally demanding stuff too.

Not a lot of headroom to start reducing the male ratio below 50%.

"Oh but we can outsource a lot of our industry/labor intensive work."

That just shifts the problems elsewhere, not eliminates them. We already do that in the U.S., and there's still 35+% of jobs that need upper body strength to perform effectively. China did its one child policy and now has an excessive number of males... which we get a benefit from by buying their labor at a discount.

That can't last.

Historically, I think the actual solution was always to create 'tiers' of males. In short, expendables and non-expendables.

So you have one class that is basically or literally enslaved, and was expected to die early after a hard, miserable life. That would reproduce only at the will of their betters to ensure a consistent supply of such labor to maintain the lifestyles of the rest.

Then the upper class, where the male-female ratio WAS much more favorable to those males.

That 'solves' your problem of needing males to do the work that upholds society, whilst also keeping the 'problem' males on a short leash, and giving the upper-class males a favorable gender ratio.

I'm very skeptical that women couldn't do any of those jobs, indeed there are some who do most of them now. Raw physical strength isn't that needed in modern society what with all the tools and hydraulics we have. And even so wouldn't that just let young uneducated men command a premium? Even at a ratio of 75% women to 25% men I'd still expect there to be plenty men to do all those. You'd have less young men working at Fast food or retail but it'd work out fine because they'd have more gainful employment. 25% men is easily enough to fill those jobs because very few jobs these days really require raw strength.

very few jobs these days really require raw strength.

This seems obscenely optimistic.

Even driving an Amazon truck will require some amount of raw strength on occasion.

Moving furniture around the house, let alone between houses.

Trimming trees, installing windows, changing tires, just dozens of systems where physical strength is a massive bonus when interacting with them.

Just because most humans aren't working on farms these days doesn't mean there are a ton of jobs which demand the physical strength, which we all pretty much rely on.

But that's kind of my point? 25% of men are plenty to do the jobs that need doing and most of those jobs women can do as well. There's really only a handful of jobs that require enough strength women actually can't do. Plenty of women can drive Amazon trucks and change tires.

I don't think they are.

Everything is interconnected and degradation in one part of the system will propagate.

You can get that 25% of men to do the core, indispensable jobs but there's still so much infrastructure built on top of that which needs maintenance.

Something is likely to give.

Is it your opinion that women can't do maintenance work? If there was such a shortage of men I think the free market would raise wages enough to find enough people.

It is my opinion that any maintenance work that requires much spatial reasoning and physical/brute force to complete is just far more efficiently done by a male than a female of 'equal' training.

I have watched women try to change a tire. While I don't doubt many could be trained up to complete the work 'quickly' with the proper tools... the steps required to jack the car up, force over-tightened nuts, remove the old tire and position the new one, and then physically tighten the nuts sufficiently, in the proper order, are easily done twice as fast by a dude with median male physical capabilities.

There's that famous examination of grip strength where only the very strongest females are actually able to compete with the overall weakest males.

The average guy in his 70's is stronger than most women in their 20's. The gap is absurd.

Its not hard to extrapolate from there that most women won't be suited for most physical tasks that the average dude completes.

"Physical strength required for jobs in different occupations."

According to this link, carrying 1lbs of weight at all times qualifies for "medium work"... my clothing weighs more than that...

Scroll to the actual list of occupations under that category.

It includes, non-exhaustively:

  • Automotive service technicians and mechanics
  • Construction laborers
  • Water and wastewater treatment plant and system operators
  • Landscaping and groundskeeping workers
  • Refuse and recyclable material collectors
  • Industrial machinery mechanics

The categorization is due to the fact that those jobs would "occasionally" require lifting of "26–50 pounds".

Whereas in order to classify as 'light' work, it never requires lifting that much.

I suspect that much of that can be handled. Workloads adapting for lifting smaller weights at a time where before the weights were as large as men could afford to regularly lift; using more teamwork; employing the stronger women who can actually lift 50 pounds.

So we're taking an efficiency/productivity hit since now entire industries has to be designed around standards based on what slightly above-average women/teams of women can do.

And we can expect a much higher injury rate which means more downtime, and higher medical costs to boot.

Women are just not outfitted for heavy, repetitive labor.

Although this also means exceptionally strong laborers will command quite a premium.

This appears to me to be like the thing with "economically viable oil fields". If we run out of economically viable oil fields, we don't run out of oil. We just move on to the next most viable oil fields. Similarly, many jobs appear to employ primarily men at the moment because a) women are less efficient and currently not economically viable; b) many of those jobs are shitty and men complain less about them. That doesn't show that women are physically unable to perform those jobs.

There would be some productivity hit, but I struggle to see how the market that can afford to pay so many people to do so many vastly less fundamental bullshit jobs couldn't absorb that hit without total society collapse.

I mean, we could probably take a look at the economic productivity of given nations who lost some significant portion of their male population in a short period of time.

Like, say, after a war.

We usually do indeed see the female population shift in to cover some of the shortfall.

Somehow I doubt that shift actually covered all the missing labor, and more likely certain less critical services were left to languish in the meantime.

More likely, I'd expect the aforementioned wage premium for strong laborers to encourage men to do more work so as to make up some of the difference.

As I said, I suspect there's a baseline hard laborer requirement needed to maintain the workings of civilizations, and as long as a society is barely above that line it can keep advancing.

I do not know where that baseline would be. I honestly do not want to find out.

Look, there's constant attempts to get women into the trades. I see it all the time.

Women do start. Single moms, married women, lesbians. Only the dykes make it(and this is what the ones who make it call themselves). Not necessarily she-hulks.

Powered exoskeletons (sorry, physical assistance devices) are advancing quite rapidly already. A lack of cheap strong labourers might encourage that further, and even decrease injuries long term.

Until we have robots that can build other robots, this is all still founded on the need for some core of strong physical laborers who can boostrap the rest.

And the powered exoskeletons we do have (forklifts, earth movers, cranes, etc.) are still overwhelmingly operated by males.

And finally, in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, when electricity and fuel are hard to come by, humans with physical strength are an absolutely critical resource to kickstarting rescue and recovery efforts.

So best I can tell security at the recent dinner was somehow even worse than at the campaign event that nearly cost Trump his life. This sounds incredibly stupid but mainstream media reports of the security indicate it is so. And this is in a...storied location no less.

This is also not a situation where things have been calm for a while, we are at war and several attempts have been made, and people have died (ex: Kirk).

Some of this is probably due to security theater elements - security was never good, so it remains not good. You'd think we could make a bit of a change though?

Are all of our institutions really so rotten?

And perhaps more importantly - how many times can we get lucky and how will our civic norms survive when that luck runs out?

It was intentionally weak so that Trump could justify building a Baalroom

The convergence of memes is too strong for this not to be true.

a Baalroom

But who's going to supply sacrificial children without Epstein?

P.Diddy ... time to bring DEI into child abuse.

This is also not a situation where things have been calm for a while, we are at war and several attempts have been made, and people have died (ex: Kirk).

Yes, you are technically at war, and yes, Kirk was killed, but the way you phrase it implies that these things are connected. Kirk was a victim of violence inspired by the culture war, but the culture war has not killed very many people for all the mind space it claims.

And yes, you are fighting a war against Iran, and Iran would probably jump at the chance to assassinate a US president, but this seems to be a problem of your own making.

Are all of our institutions really so rotten?

You can still rely on the US military. They are world class at killing elderly theocratic leaders, kidnapping foreign rulers, fighting naval battles against suspected drug smugglers, and neutralizing girl schools.

Seriously, in the grand scheme of things, the Secret Service is pretty far down on the list of relevant government institutions. Even if they failed to stop a president getting killed once per dozen years, this would not result in a lack of qualified people willing to do the job.

More broadly, Trump is synonymous with dismantling or perverting institutions or replacing them with his own cheap temu knockoffs:

  • Research: His administration plans to cut the NSF budget in half.
  • Higher Education: Trump has (correctly) identified universities as hotbeds of social justice progressivism. But rather than just pushing back against affirmative action, he is trying to dismantle them. For example, not allowing international student visas for Harvard will result in the best and the brightest of the world (whose influx has been a major advantage of the US in R&D) avoiding the US.
  • Public Health: RFK as a secretary for health is like making Gargamel the minister for Smurf welfare.
  • Multinational and international institutions: Since WW2, the US had used soft power to great effect. US foreign relations towards other West-aligned countries were based on the idea that there are deals where both sides win. NATO was such a case -- both Europe and North America had an interest in Europe not falling to the Soviets. The UN and the Security Council was another case, nobody was very keen on starting WW3. Free trade and the international rule based order were based on something similar. Trump did away with all of that. For him, deals seem to be zero sum, if the US is not fucking over some other country, that means they are getting fucked over. He snubs the SC by sending his wife of all people to represent the US and pushes his fictitious 'Board of Peace' instead.
  • DoD: Not faced by budget cuts, but its mission to defend US interests is seriously undermined by Trump not having a broader strategic vision. When GWB started his wars, he at least had allies at his side and it took a few years until the magnitude of the strategic failure became apparent. Half of Trump's tweets about the war he fights on behalf of Israel have a sell-by date less than 24h in the future. Macho warrior culture focusing on the physical fitness of senior officers and Kid Rock will not make the US military better at doing its job.
  • DoJ: To be fair, Trump did not start the lawfare, but boy did he double down on it. And bullshit charges which will never convince any trial jury are just half of his MO. The feds are still investigating legitimate criminals, sure, but the deeper purpose is not justice but a shakedown. Get convicted, donate to Trump, get your presidential pardon. Biden pardoned his son (likely because he felt that Trump would spend half the DoJ personnel hours to go after his enemies -- not that he was inaccurate there, sadly), which did immense damage to the perception of the rule of law, but again Trump doubled down by just pardoning crooks who did not hurt him personally and are willing to buy indulgence.
  • SCOTUS: Now, Trump is not the first president to criticize the SCOTUS when it decides against him (which happens rarely enough). Biden called Dobbs -- the biggest loss the liberals faced in court in a generation -- a tragic error. By contrast, when the SCOTUS decided that Trump's dubious theories why he could impose tariffs did not convince them, he went into full-on attack mode, calling conservative justices who had voted against him "disloyal". It is clear that he expects the relationship between a president and a justice he appointed one of vassalage -- he gets them a cushy job, they vote for his interests. Past presidents have understood that different candidates may lean different ways, and picked one who cared about the same things as their side, but ultimately they did not expect loyalty from them.
  • Democracy: Trump is utterly unable to gracefully accept defeat. His instinct when he has lost is to flip the table and set the board game on fire. This makes him different from any pre-MAGA politician. Sure, people have demanded recounts in front of the SCOTUS before, but that is still part of the rules of the game. Once the SCOTUS has spoken, you accept what they have said, and don't tell your followers to 'stop the steal'.

So in conclusion, Trump is the one who you would vote for if you found that US institutions are beyond saving (probably because they are woke) and should be dismantled. Sadly, his replacements are what you would expect from some banana republic. For all of Harvard's many faults, Trump University is not an adequate substitute. The Peace Nobel has not been without troubles, but does anyone seriously expect that the FIFA peace price will earn a similar prestige? Likewise the Security Council -- mostly a club of big countries with nukes who will only vote for resolutions which do not touch the interests of any of their client states, but who on occasion have aided in conflict resolution. Trump's pay-to-play Board of Peace will die with him.

Quite frankly, the only reason why I do not want Trump to replace the Secret Service with the TRUMP ELITE PRAETORIAN PRESIDENTIAL GUARD is because it would enable them to further his cause by getting shot by some dumb liberal, which would be his most effective move now. But I cling to some faint hope that he decides to take health advice from RFK Jr and croaks of measles or brain worms or whatever retro diseases are en vogue among anti-vaxxers.

But tell us how you really feel.

It's funny, I actually agree with you on a handful of these things and I voted for the guy.

But your aesthetic revulsion to Trumpism (kid rock, "macho" military, RFK Jr=Gargamel, "disrespecting our allies") marks you as a class enemy. The way you talk about those things just drips with disdain, you sound like you think half of our country should probably be disenfranchised.

Your indignation that our hallowed and immaculate institutions are being profaned (Harvard, SCOTUS, NATO, UN security council, justice system) is also rich. I'm sure you'd be glad if we went back to 2010, when Harvard was unassailable, our activist judicial system was too sacrosanct to criticize, and NATO was supported by the right as an expression of America's military might. Back when the rubes didn't even know what was being done to them. Things were easier then, eh?

Your attitude is a large part of why Trump is able to retain power despite being an arrogant, distateful, reactive bully with no strategy. I would rather have what we have now than go back to 2010 because I don't want people like you, people who have contempt for me and who gaslight me when I point out the ideological project that pervades our institutions (see Neutral vs Conservative), to have power over me anymore.

we are at war

We are not at anything. You should not consensus build here...

Politics has increased in heat level with each side increasing the verbal hostility level because hate sells. Unfortunately that has societal ramifications. As the populace is increasingly unmoored from any sort of shared foundational narrative, inevitably tribal conflicts will re-arrise. Accelerationists got what they wanted. Hopefully they enjoy the next 20-50 years of bloody sectarian conflict pitting brother against brother.

We are at literally kinetic war with an adversary that spends a lot of time and money on assassinations and terrorism..........

I mean far be it for me to put words in your mouth, but that is really not how any of this comes across.

  • No where in the original manifesto does it mention Iran, or the war on Iran
  • Charlie Kirk was not killed in association to any war in the middle east
  • Nobody in the thread discussing it last week ever brought up Iran
  • Nobody in mainstream or alt-stream media has brought up Iran
  • I haven't even heard a conspiracy theory that Iran (or Israel) did this
  • Has Iran recently (or even in the past 2 decades) coordinated an assassination or terrorist attack on domestic soil?

we are at war and several attempts have been made, and people have died (ex: Kirk)

  • None of those attempt have been made by a foreign power.
  • All of them have been made by domestic crazies, two with clear leftist ideologies (this one and kirk)

I guess bravo for maintaining the plausible deniability required, but this clearly contextually reads as about the left vs right divide, not the US vs Iran divide.

I don't think it is a significant leap to mention the importance of keeping our head of state safe while we are in a shooting war with a nation whose head of state we killed and that has espoused direct desire to kill our head of state.

I assumed he meant with Iran.

idk why, nothing in his comment is about Iran, its about another lefty taking a shot at the Big Don, and then a reference to Kirk in the same sentence. The clear delineation is a left vs right, that we(the right) are at war and the left is attacking us.

I agree with the unpresented perspective that this is another lefty taking a shot at the President because he's been immersed in a stew of leftist propaganda, but I did not read the OP as saying that, at all. The "we" seems obviously to be that state of the United States is at war since the broadly construed political right is plainly not on any sort of war footing.

We are at war special military operation. Doesn't have a ring to it.

It doesn’t seem like the security was bad but I did see reporting done that the security level for the event was not proportionate to the number of high level leaders there (President and VP and a number of Cabinet members) and so the claim that security wasn’t of the appropriate quality is almost certainly true (and admittedly so, according to the government’s own rules and policies for this sort of thing). So it’s hard to judge the execution itself other than to say that there’s clearly a planning weakness that we can clearly see across all three assassination attempts.

My question becomes: how would a random teacher in California know that this specific event would have unusually-lax security?

How can you say unusually lax? It seems like the random teacher underestimated the amount of security there, considering the actual result.

Were they supposed to search every hotel guest? Can you imagine the kinds of accusations that would've come out of security searching a random teacher from California?

What's your point? Why ask a vague question?

Were they supposed to search every hotel guest?

Yes. They search every passenger in every airport, after all. You don't even need to go all the way and force the guests to take off their belt and shoes. "Please place your bag onto the belt, empty your pockets into the tray and walk through the metal detector." You can even have the bellhop take their bags away and scan them discreetly to show some class.

Our civic norms under a diadochic presidency... will the mos maiorum actually deteriorate? The 60's were bad, but, I mean, we, you know, survived.

mos maiorum

That is a good point, actually. Trump has always not given a fuck about how things are customarily done in DC, from Birtherism over election denial to tariffs based on little more than the hope that they would be too bothersome to revert. There was corruption in DC before, but it had an etiquette, like people going to the bathroom to relieve themselves. With Trump, it is all blatant, the equivalent of just taking a dump in the middle of Time Square.

So yes, getting shot as a sitting president in a world where that just does not happen any more would seem perfectly in character for him.

OK. I guess someone will have to go there. I’ll ask the question. Does this also have plausibly something to do with the presence of women and other DEI hires in the Secret Service?

Much as I'd love to blame it on that I don't think so. This wasn't individual agents being unfit or stupid, this was top down problems.

I don't doubt that DEI contributes, but the most egregious thing I noticed (after looking into it after the Butler assassination attempt) is that the Secret Service budget for protection duties is $1.2 billion, which is an obscene amount of money for how little they do. They only provide full-time protection for roughly 40 people (I assume Trump and Vance and their families, Barack and Michelle Obama, George and Laura Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and some small number of others). Not sure how many people they provide temporary protection to outside of presidential election years but I doubt it's many.

Compare that $1.2 billion to the entire military budget of several countries: https://www.globalfirepower.com/defense-spending-budget.php

The Secret Service has a bigger budget than roughly 1/3 of the world's militaries, to provide protection to just 40 people. That they seem only moderately competent in the best cases (like this most recent attempt) and wildly incompetent in the worst (Butler etc.) and that they misused such a massive budget means thet the rot has been in the Secret Service for a very long time.

My suspicion is that the costs Presidential security imposes on third parties (road closures, airspace restrictions etc.) are significantly more than the Secret Service budget.

Presidents have been assassinated several times before and it has been fine; but Trump is singular (derogatory).

It's hard to know what his , lets call them fans would do, or what they could do; but at least some of his haters have been listening to what he was saying and interpreting it literally, so who knows what THEY would do.

In brief: Yo maybe those were load bearing norms, maybe we shouldn't have started removing struts to save weight, maybe the civility and political correctness and all those cancelations on tumblr I'm told were happening to prevent some real ass Sullian cancelations in the street, type of thing.

If Trump is assassinated nothing will happen. Rather, his successor — so JD in this timeline — gets extraordinary political capital to do all sorts of things. Crackdown on antifa, economic free hand, maybe an immigration bill. It all depends on the mix of JD’s temperament (stronger than most suppose) and the GOP’s temperament (weaker than you’re thinking).

But most of what a Trump successor could do is priced in. There would be an extraordinary moment followed by a return to politics as usual. That’s all.

Trump is not politics as usual. Trump is unusual. When he’s dead that tendency will go away. Whatever state he leaves us in is the trajectory we’re likely to follow for some time. An assassination would just give JD Vance a last gasp put some finishing touches on the hot iron shape before it cools into place.

There won’t be civil war. If there are riots they will fizzle out. If MAGA rises to the occasion it will be within the political process. If libs rise up they will playact as revolutionaries and then fizzle out into the political process. That’s all

I've never agreed with you more!

Ah yes, the load bearing norms, the same ones Obama used in operation Chokepoint, the same ones the SPLC and the JDL have been using to strangle the discourse. You know if Elon didn't buy Twitter we would still be back in the age where rabid groups of feminists and dangerhair unperson people and get them fired for not eating the communion wafer with enough gusto.

Agree on all counts, But it takes two to tango, speak up if you think the right has been perfectly christ-like and has not escalated to destroyed any of their own load bearing norms.

Presidents have been assassinated several times before and it has been fine

I feel like with all four of those we kind of “got lucky” that nothing particularly important was happening at the time. Even with Lincoln, the Civil War was basically over when he died. We aren’t guaranteed that it will always be like that. If equally obscure President Rutherford Hayes had been shot instead of Garfield, we may very well have had a second civil war.

Despite the heat of 1876 Hayes was ultimately accepted because the memory of the Civil War was too near for everybody to go to war. I guess it’s an open question. But I would take the other side of that bet

Yeah. Because clearly tumblr was a long standing fence in the middle of nowhere that reformers wanted to tear down without understanding why tumblr cancellations were there in the first place.

You joke but that is a true fact. People confused getting yelled at with actually getting prescribed out of existence; they seem to think that nobody should be allowed to make them feel bad and the power of the state should be deployed to that effect.

[Progressives] confused getting yelled at with actually getting prescribed out of existence; they seem to think that nobody should be allowed to make them feel bad and the power of the state should be deployed to that effect.

Yes, I think this is a perfectly valid characterization of their actions.

It's the other way around. Cancel culture was about a lot more than private citizens / liberals "making people feel bad". Among other incidents:

  • Chicago citizens were fired from their jobs for making the OK hand signal, because progressives hallucinated that this was a White Supremacist hand signal because of 4chan

  • Mass censorship campaigns on social media platforms which included government officials emailing i.e. twitter and asking for accounts to be throttled / banned. (In the case of the pandemic specifically, many of the things that would get one censored turned out to be true.)

  • Academics and university speakers protested for having opinions unacceptable to liberals: this created a really perverse political culture on universities which culminated in e.g. corporations imposing mass DEI policies in the wake of George Floyd because nobody could say out loud that it's illegal to not hire white people because of their race.

  • Google broke a wonderful search engine that materially contributed to the benefit of all humanity because sometimes when you search the news you can find things that liberals think aren't true.

  • The host of The Bachelor was fired because he posted comments in defense of a contestant who attended an event at a plantation. The Dr. Seuss company stopped printing several of his books because they contain language progressives now consider unacceptable. James Watson was canceled and dishonored to the point that he had to sell his Nobel because he believes that race and IQ are real.

Cancel culture was real and progressives would have prescribed people out of existence if they had the power to. They clearly tried to many times. Instead of letting them we created a parallel society where they can't do that, which is now mainstream. You are choosing to participate in a forum that abides by these norms, and not by the cancel culture norms progressives tried to ensconce.

To make a little joke, None of those things happened, and if they did happen they didn't happen like that, and if they did happen like that then it was good.

  1. You are gonna need to source me the first claim, it doesn't seem to have happened according to google.

  2. Mass censorship is when fact checked, got it. Crazy that I was actually there during that time and I would have paid money to get away from those types; it's the "I was Canceled!" from the front shelf in the bookstore meme in real life.

  3. Got it, free speech is when you can say whatever you want and if people get mad about it they should restrict their tone and only complain in the free speech zone on designated protest days. The knife cuts both ways, if you get to say what you want as a public figure, the public gets to call you a fascist/marxist depending on which direction the yelling is coming from.

4 and 5: so, the government should step in and force corporations to do things that the public at the time didn't like? Is that your solution? What do you actually want to do about this? When the republicans get washed this year and then again in 2028, should the Dem congress get to kick down the door to twitter and install sensitivity cops on every corner?

Cancel culture was fake, it was conservatives getting a taste of their own bullshit for the first time after 600 years of being on top and instead of realizing "Hey, free speech is great actually" doubling down on "No, only we should be allowed to cancel, now lets gut every US anything that has trans in the title. Transgenic? Transnational? Transorbital? Sounds woke to me."

Mass censorship is when fact checked, got it.

Fact checking is fine. However, like many other terms, this term got subverted to mean something that does not follow from its naive meaning. What "fact checking" is now is an industry that delivers plausible deniability to governmental and quasi-governmental bodies to exercise censorship by producing third-party "objective" opinions (always aligning with the Party's needs, miraculously) which are used to censor disfavored opinions for being "misinformation". This has very little to do with facts or checking them, about as much as Democratic People's Republic of Korea has to do with democracy. It's a censorship laundering. And the perpetrators did not hide and do not hide right now that the goal is to deny their political opponents the "platform" - i.e. the ability to express and publicize their political speech. The goal is not having better facts, it's having less opposition.

The knife cuts both ways, if you get to say what you want as a public figure, the public gets to call you a fascist/marxist depending on which direction the yelling is coming from.

Sure thing. The public figure does not get to use the government suppression apparatus to get me to stop saying those things though. And the public figures in the US did a lot of that recently. In fact, they had massive governmental and taxpayer-paid programs to get people to stop saying things that the government does not approve of saying.

The public figure also does not get to apply the laws differently depending on whether or not you say what the public figure wants. That's also what public figures had been doing a lot - like, saying "X is bad" and then some unknown people dressed in black show up and beat up X and destroy their business or set fire to a place where he was supposed to speak, and the public figure just shrugs and says "unfortunately, we do not know who those people are and have no way to find out, but if X says those things again, they have only themselves to blame for what happens".

so, the government should step in and force corporations to do things that the public at the time didn't like?

It should not, but it had been doing it a lot lately. The corporations had been pressed, either overtly - by government contracting rules, EEOC regulations and such, or more covertly - like prioritizing corporations that actively play in ESG and DEI, into doing what the government likes.

then again in 2028, should the Dem congress get to kick down the door to twitter and install sensitivity cops on every corner?

They shouldn't, but they would like to, very much. In fact, in Europe they are openly demanding exactly this. In the US, some pesky and little known legal loopholes, like 1st Amendment, make this harder, thus they need to resort to indirect ways like ones described above. Not that they are too proud to strong-arm too - see all the angry letters the government sent to social media companies under Biden, and the following censorship fast-lanes that were implemented as a result of that. If they take power in 2028, there is absolutely no doubt they would try to do it again.

Cancel culture was fake

That is a lie. Cancel culture was real, and is still real in many places.

it was conservatives getting a taste of their own bullshit

So was it fake, or was it righteous revenge? You can't claim both in the same sentence without having a red nose and a rainbow wig on.

And yes, the conservatives did a lot of censoring and cancelling themselves, when they were in power. That's bad. A lot of people said that it was bad at the time, and they were right. Now the left is doing it. It's still bad. Shame on the people that changed their opinion on freedom when it became their team that is in power and suppressing freedom. Shame on fair-weather freedom lovers.

You can get arrested in Britain for "hate speech" and hundreds of people do every year and the position of mainstream liberals was that we should have laws just like that. Look, just admit you're in favor of cancel culture, that's a much more consistent position to hold. Just admit that you're fine with the government monitoring twitter so they can throttle accounts they don't like. You can't actually coherently claim that "mass censorship is when fact checked" so it's no big deal and then also claim to somehow be against it.

should the Dem congress get to kick down the door to twitter and install sensitivity cops on every corner?

This is what actually happened. Dems on the Hill held hearings excoriating tech CEOs for not censoring more. Officials in the State Department had working relationships with social media companies to censor content they didn't like. The files were all released by Elon when he bought twitter. The case went up to SCOTUS and John Roberts ruled that it isn't illegal because the State Department has a 1st Amendment right to tell twitter to ban things.

You can be for it or against it. It's real and it happened.

Cancel culture was fake, it was conservatives getting a taste of their own bullshit for the first time after 600 years

See, you're not even against cancel culture, you're essentially arguing in favor of it. I don't actually need to provide a citation for every instance of cancel culture in the world: You are arguing on a forum that was created because reddit would no longer allow us to have these conversations on their platform. You are literally participating on a platform that exists as a consequence of the forces you deny exist. Your position is inherently ridiculous.

Yo maybe those were load bearing norms, maybe we shouldn't have started removing struts to save weight,

Be specific. What norms, dismantled by who and when?

The norms that politics was as usual, the system can be reformed, and we all play act like we are doin' shit while the technocrats get on with getting on, and that your messaging needed to be connected to reality to be effective.

As to who to blame: Newt Gingrich, IMO. He's the dude that realized that movement was more important than improvement; that he could make more hay out of breaking shit than maintaining shit; and that you could create the problem then sell the solution. With one hand you can sign NAFTA, with the other you can rail against mexicans taking your jerbs. With one hand you can wave china into the WTO while the other is in fist configuration, shaking away at those dirty chinks. It's been wildly effective since Reagan, and the democrats are too limp dicked and liberal to do anything about it.

What norms

Most of them

dismantled by who

The rich and powerful

when?

The last ~50 years

Edit: I wrote slightly more coherent version here

Then I got baited and wrote an even longer response here

  • -13

So no specifics. Thanks.

I'm not that guy, just exercising my god given right to butt into random conversations with my thoughts

I did write a slightly more coherent response here

EDIT: I got baited and wrote an even long response here

Man, that might be even more vague than the original framing.

In some ways yes, in others I actually find it quite accurate.

I've seen enough of the

"Republicans destroyed the norms"

"Erm actually, it was Democrats who started destroying the norms with X"

"Erm actually, the Dems who did X were simply responding to the Republican norm destroyal of Y"

And so on and so on. Lost in all the finger pointing litigation is the core truth that the norms have been fucking obliterated and our society is worse off overall.

Thus, I'd like step back and acknowledge that

  1. the leadership/elite of the Republican and Democratic have way more in common with each other than they do with us

  2. their en bloc interests very very clearly do not align with ours

  3. the rich and powerful people of Western civilization have been absolutely strip mining this civilization in their relentless pursuit of accruing more power and money to themselves, regardless of the detrimental effects to the society that created that wealth in the first place.

I don't think this is a good explanation. On really any level.

Have norms really eroded in the last 50 years? 50 years ago it was the 70s, this was a huge period of political and social unrest. Political violence was at least an order of magnitude more then. Very widespread protests on the Vietnam war. There were daily bombings by an entire mish mash of groups - the Weathermen, Puerto Ricans, black power type groups. What do you mean the norms have eroded in the last 50 years, they're way better than in the 70s! Especially on political violence!

And your 3 points are lazy. They don't really explain much.

Like on 1 - of course the leadership/elite of the parties have more in common with each other than with us. They work the same job! They talk to each other a lot! They live part time in the same city! Of course you have more in common with the people you work with than with 330 million people you have never met! How could it be any other way?

Your point 2 is also very vague, it is not clear at all. What en bloc interests are unaligned? How has that unalignment increased in the last 50 years? What are some examples? Like they have an interest to stay elected? And raise money? That's always been the case. What changed? What eroded?

Your point 3 - there have always been unscrupulous rich people. They have always been willing to obtain money and power at the expense of others. They've always been there, so how could a supposed erosion of norms be due to them? What has actually changed? There are much better and much more interesting explanations out there. Like if anything changed I would say it is the technology, particularly the internet, that is driving changes. The internet is what allowed the rise of social media, and online echo chambers, and doom scrolling algos, and mean nasty people having a voice. DJT is the twitter president. Technological changes allowed his rise, he could bypass the traditional media gatekeepers. Zuck can't build facebook in 1970 when there are no smartphones and no internet.

Sorry but its just a lazy explanation when there are much more interesting ones to chew on. "Rich people bad. Politicians bad." Ok but there are a lot of people, there are a lot of rich people, a lot of them will do bad things. This has always been the case. A lot of them did bad things in 1976. So what changed? You offer platitudes that aren't even true and don't make any sense.

I ass-pulled 50 years, I could have said 75 and I don't think it changes my point. 50 years = "directionally over the last century post WW2"

Have norms really eroded in the last 50 years?

Clearly the answer to this is yes. Many norms across society have changed in 50 years. Some of these changes are good, some bad. The norms around political violence have clearly gotten better, so that is nice.

What I’m talking about is, on net, norms of: institutional restraint, civic obligation, elite shame, truthfulness, long-term stewardship, and basic seriousness about governing. Some norms have improved. Others, like these, have decayed badly.

It mattered when politicians felt they had to at least pretend to respect institutional boundaries. It mattered when business leaders felt they had to at least pretend they owed something back to the society that made them rich. It mattered when public lying carried more shame. It mattered when leaders were expected to speak like adults, not like engagement-optimized influencers.

Trump is the obvious example, although clearly not the whole argument. A president(al candidate) being caught on tape saying "grab em by the pussy" or lying constantly and blatantly, or saying any number of things that would have been politically fatal in an earlier media environment, and large parts of the country just shrugging, is obviously a norm shift.

Similarly, on a procedural side: I don't really want to get into a debate about American constitutionalism and procedural philosophy, but it is very clear the Trump2 admin is doing many things outside the bounds of previously thought to be accepted norms and processes. Maybe it's good they're bending/breaking these processes because they were shit, maybe it's bad, maybe the Dems did it first in some way, I don't really care here. The point is that it's happening, and the boundaries are constantly being pushed and tested.

Also fun stuff like Citizens United.

Like on 1 - of course the leadership/elite of the parties have more in common with each other than with us

This is obvious to you, as it is obvious to me. However, I have seen enough partisan back-and-forth on this forum to know that many members either do not find this obvious, or choose to ignore it while trying to dunk on their opponents.

The perpetual "the Republicans ruined it" "no the Dems ruined it" is a stupid argument in my opinion. I don't care who ruined it, I want my government to work again. Us all fighting each other about who's fault it is serves the Democratic/Republican elite, who get to continue ruining everything as we fight over the Titanic's deck chair arrangement.

Red vs Blue arguments trap us inside a frame that benefits them and not us.

Your point 2 is also very vague, it is not clear at all. What en bloc interests are unaligned? How has that unalignment increased in the last 50 years? What are some examples? Like they have an interest to stay elected? And raise money? That's always been the case. What changed? What eroded?

The incentives of the political, economic, and media elite are growing increasingly detached from the long-term health of the society they govern.

Sure, politicians always wanted to be elected, businesses have always wanted to make money/secure power to ensure they can continue to make money, media has always wanted eyeballs. None of those incentives are new. What changed is the strength of the counterweights.

There used to be more pressure: social, institutional, geopolitical, and reputational. The elites had more pressure to justify their status by maintaining buy-in. Call it noblesse oblige, fear of communism, postwar civic nationalism, stronger unions, higher institutional trust, whatever. That system wasn't 100% fair or wonderful either. But there was at least pressure on elites to build public goods, maintain legitimacy, and make ordinary people feel like they had a stake in the system.

That pressure seems much weaker these days, does it even exist?

Now we get to enjoy things like: financialization, regulatory capture, monopolistic/oligopolistic concentration everywhere, cartoonish short-termism, asset inflation, institutional decay, and attention-economy slop. The pie is not being expanded in the way it could be. A lot of elite behavior now looks more like fighting over pie slices on a stagnating pie. We seem to be Moloch-maxxing a lot more these days.

Your point 3 - there have always been unscrupulous rich people.

Yes. Greed was not invented in 1976. My point is that the restraints around elite self-interest have borderline evaporated.

There have always been selfish rich people/corrupt politicians/those willing to trade the public good for personal advantage. But societies differ in how much they constrain that behavior, how much shame attaches to it, how much counter-power exists, and how much elites feel obligated to reinvest in the system that enabled their wealth.

Previously, the rich often felt some need to build public goods with their names on them. Libraries, universities, museums, civic institutions, hospitals, parks, whatever. Obviously there was ego and such involved, but the output was still often a durable public good.

Plus, I think they used to fear "the masses" a hell of a lot more than they do now. A big reason homeownership was pushed in the 1930s-??? (definitely not these days lol) was as a way to support/entrench/create buy-in to "the system" by making millions of households materially invested in private property, consumer credit, and rising asset values. To be clear, I think that this is a good thing. I want my government to be worried about my opinion towards the system, and to take action to make me like the system by having the system work for me. Do Americans feel like the system is working for them right now?

Now the dominant model feels blatantly extractive. Regulatory capture, monopoly/oligopoly power, tax avoidance, asset hoarding, platform rent-seeking, union avoidance, and political influence operations. The goal increasingly seems to be to take as much as possible out of the system while giving as little back as possible. All of this was happening in 1975 or 1950 too, but it seems a lot more successful and a lot more aggressive now.

Technology matters enormously. I agree. But I don’t think "the internet did it" is a full explanation either. The internet amplified incentives and trends that were already there.

TL;DR: Over the last ~X decades, the "elite" / "the institutions" have become increasingly optimized for extraction, self-preservation, and short-term advantage rather than long-term civilizational health. The informal norms that once partially restrained that behavior have weakened. We are worse off as a result. Parisian "no you're team is the one truly at fault" is useless at best, and actively against our own interests as citizens at worst.

It mattered when business leaders felt they had to at least pretend they owed something back to the society that made them rich.

This isn't a social norm, it's a political norm based on leftist assumptions. And not a common one in the past; it's most associated with Andrew Carnegie, though he based it on different assumptions. Further, Carnegie's beliefs did not cash out to "I should pay shitloads of taxes" (though he supported a high estate tax), but to "I, and other wealthy people, should use our wealth to directly help society".

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I agree with your general framing but would expand point 1. to the managerial/laptop class more generally, and suggest that much of derangement and consternation surrounding the Aesthetics of Trump and MAGA is driven by status anxiety stemming from the appearance of the working class pushing their own interests.

  1. to the managerial/laptop class more generally,

To borrow a word from this forum's favorite (as measured by number of times I see his name) political philosopher, I think we can happily call them the "petit bourgeois". Although the laptop-class is a larger group than the original concept of the petit bourgeois so I am personally partial to the term "Professional Managerial Class" and even that is almost too narrow.

But the occupy a similar niche for sure.

suggest that much of derangement and consternation surrounding the Aesthetics of Trump and MAGA is driven by status anxiety

100% agree but I'd go even further and say that much of the appeal of MAGA itself is also status anxiety. Its status anxiety all the way down! It's almost like people are really worried that things are being enshittified in every direction by a bunch of elites who no longer feel any obligation to their society...

The petit bourgeois (as defined by Marx) in modern society consists mostly of self-employed tradesmen and microbusiness owners. These are the most right-wing occupational group and largely define themselves in opposition to the PMC, which by stereotype consists of employees of large (public and private sector) organisations with large salaries.

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One example: social media has dismantled social norms.

Even when phones and TV existed, people used to communicate face-to-face more often, especially to strangers. Privacy used to be expected. News used to be centralized.

How does this affect politics? Perhaps since people have less random face-to-face interactions, they have tighter echo chambers and less respect for those outside. Perhaps since we have dirt on everyone (no privacy), especially dirty politicians are seen no differently. Perhaps since social media promotes strong emotions (especially negative ones; weaker centralized moderation), emotive (especially negative) politicians benefit.

Unfortunately in practice, we can’t ban social media and revert to the past (although that doesn’t stop politicians from trying). I think we need more local groups, in-person events with encouragement to attend, trusted curators who present “unbiased” news (specifically biased towards positivity and important details such that the people receiving the news benefit from hearing it). Most of all, we need to explicitly teach people how to behave socially, how to spot those who deserve sympathy vs. who’d exploit you, how to think critically; and this teaching should be through experience (trial and error, positive and negative reinforcement…). Because I believe those lessons used to be taught implicitly by face-to-face interactions which (para)social media has replaced.

Another thought: if the Secret Service failed, it was a failure of the Trump administration. The Secret Service is very much under control of the executive. If Trump wanted to be guarded exclusively by members of MAGA militias, he could certainly arrange for them to be hired. He made much bigger personnel changes happen in the USG, in fact.

I concede that this mostly rebuts the "they are incompetent" claim. If your claim is that they are highly and visibly competent, but also conspiring to get the president they are sworn to protect killed on their watch, it would not be reasonable to blame the administration for their failure to anticipate this treason.

How exactly was it worse? Did the moron ever have a chance of getting line of sight on the President?

Are all our institutions so rotten?

I don’t understand what institutions you think are analogous to the Secret Service.

From what I can tell the Hotel was essentially allowed to go about its business and the security cordon was in the building close to the event. You could get very close to the event itself with a generic hotel keyboard. Minimal access control. Someone could easily have preplanted a surprise or walked close with one and rendered the primary security buffer irrelevant, and then had others follow.

People who have been to similar events before said that the security was rather lacking in comparison to other events.

I certainly have been to places that have been more aggressive in searching my bag or person multiple times further out.

I gotta say I've been hassled more at job sites for municipalities than this; and I've done more hassling as impromptu "Don't bring a fucking gun into the reception, you dingus" doorman than the dude got.

It's so bad I really, really want to believe in false flag theory because if it's real it's dumb enough to make me sad.

Are all of our institutions really so rotten?

Yes.

Who is John Galt?

(Context: the question is the focus of the first chapter of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. It's meant to be asked with world-weary cynicism, with the undertone of "Why would you expect anything nowadays to not be rotten, falling apart, or incompetently handled?" Nobody in the setting even knows who John Galt is, and they still ask it.)

I guess it does prove the need for a White House event room, because there is no way for the President to hold events in a public space to the level of security you are expecting. You couldn't have preveted the JFK assassaination with more security. The only robust solution is to not drive around Downtown Dallas in a convertable.

I got stuck behind the presidential motorcade in traffic once. The security presense was immense. They blocked-off every freeway entrance on the route for what felt like 15 minutes before the bulk of the motorcade passed by. I had about a half-second of direct line of sight at 60-80 feet on Cadillac One, and that was by pure chance with no advance planning at all.

Every rooftop and every window is a sightline. Every organization that has people in the hot zone is a potential infiltration route.

This guy was a caltech grad and he couldn't come up with a better plan than "run past a security checkpoint and hope there aren't more guards"? He didn't even get onto the floor of the ballroom itself. What happened to good old fashioned ANFO?

What happened to good old fashioned ANFO?

Timothy McVeigh happened. The feds have been tracking fertilizer purchases nationwide since the Oklahoma City bombings for suspicious purchases, and I believe there are also trace amounts of other chemicals added to the fertilizers now so they can more easily track it to the source of purchase etc.

The New Orleans shooter managed to cook up some homemade RDX, though he forgot that it requires a detonator. Bizarre display of semicompetence from an Army vet.

Thankfully the people interested in doing this kind of stuff are generally idiots but that doesn't save us from sufficiently motivated state actors should that become relevant.

I've clocked at least one smart person engaged in domestic terrorism in the U.S. in an intelligent way, and I suspect there are more they just don't get noticed, caught, or publicly emphasized. I'm sure the TLAs are aware, however.

Thankfully the people interested in doing this kind of stuff are generally idiots but that doesn't save us from sufficiently motivated state actors should that become relevant.

After 9/11 airport security was significantly tightened, train security was not. 13 year old me was utterly confused why we weren't facing dozens of train derailments a day because it seemed so easy, destructive, and effective.

Turned out the terrorists aren't interested in those things, they just want flashy. Trains arent flashy so apparently they are safe. Old: Security through obscurity. New: Security through boring.

Used to happen in British Palestine (Israel) I believe. The Stern Gang loved that sort of thing.

Trains arent flashy

You wot mate?

Old: Security through obscurity. New: Security through boring.

No, there just aren't that many competent people who want to commit terrorism against the US or other western nations. You could do a straight rerun of 9/11 even today, if you got together a bunch of reasonably competent people.

security was never good, so it remains not good. You'd think we could make a bit of a change though?

Are all of our institutions really so rotten?

I think it’s more than security is hard. The President interfaces with a lot of people at a lot of events at a lot of locations. He and others have extensive staff and support. These events all have many service industry workers.

As you is increase security the inconvenience eventually becomes unacceptable. This is one of the many reasons that not murdering the president or calling for his murder is an important norm.

I have seen the conspiracy theory on leftwing subreddits that this was staged to bolster Trump's popularity. If looked at through the lens of it being performative, lax security kind of makes sense. They needed the "assassin" to get close enough that it felt dangerous to viewers.

It is also an argument for the ballroom. If private venues cannot be trusted with security, then you naturally have to make your own. Only for the sake of safety for your guests of course.

More seriously, the fact that the perpetrator was stopped arguably shows that security measures were perfectly adequate.

There's a "steelman"/less implausible version of the theory that keeps being invoked around terrorism events/public security incidents, which suggests that law enforcement knew in advance and made a deliberate choice to not apprehend/stop the attacker(s) as early as they could. This could serve to reap the PR boons from being targeted (greater support for authoritarian measures and some forms of collective reprisals against groups the attacker is associated with) while ideally still limiting the actual effects of the attack by stopping the attacker in the nick of time. Here, the theories seem to rest on some remark to the effect of "let's wait and see what happens" that Trump supposedly made when first being notified about the presence of a shooter.

Political brainrot notwithstanding, I've never been so convinced that the general pattern being suggested is altogether so implausible that it can't possibly have been true for any of the cases where it's commonly cited (1970s Italy's strategy of tension? 9/11? Oct 7th?). If it works out, the benefits to the goverment targeted are clearly great. One of the main objections is the potential costs if the whole scheme is revealed, but between the Snowden revelations and the realities of the tribalised information space I think the entire "shady conspiracies can't actually exist because someone would just leak it" argument complex is pretty discredited. Of course, there's another objection in that sometimes the "stop the attacker in the nick of time" plan would fail and/or the attack itself is more impactful than the conspirators bargained for. This one is harder to get a grasp of, because it would require an accurate model of how reckless or conversely loss-averse conspiratorial authorities can be, but to build that model we would need to ascertain the truth of alleged past situations which we can't because of our tribalised information space.

There's a "steelman"/less implausible version of the theory that keeps being invoked around terrorism events/public security incidents, which suggests that law enforcement knew in advance and made a deliberate choice to not apprehend/stop the attacker(s) as early as they could. This could serve to reap the PR boons from being targeted (greater support for authoritarian measures and some forms of collective reprisals against groups the attacker is associated with) while ideally still limiting the actual effects of the attack by stopping the attacker in the nick of time.

Another angle is that it simply makes prosecution and conviction much easier. If you arrest a guy with a shotgun on his way to DC, you'll have a hard time proving he was going there to shoot the president. If you let him post his manifesto and rush into the venue, brandishing the same shotgun and screaming, "Die, Trump, die", it's an open-and-shut case.

It's an open-and-shut case, until a DC jury pool declines to convict, but we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.

More seriously, the fact that the perpetrator was stopped arguably shows that security measures were perfectly adequate.

In a certain trivial way you're obviously right, but I increasingly fear that the primary reason it works that way is that this has more to do with the low quality of people trying, as opposed to saying anything about the security.

Yeah, it depends on how accurately one can predict the skill and risk of assassinations. If you are confident you are not at risk of some professional or organized effort to kill you, then you can afford to spend less on security.

I might be totally wrong here, but I imagine that a lot of security lies in gathering intel beforehand, and adapting your efforts to the information you have.

Very much agreed. When was the last time someone sane enough to have comprehensible political motives that make sense tried to assassinate a US President? I think it was the turn-of-the-century anarchists.

Vladimir Arutyunian? The motive seems comprehensible, even if GWB appears to have been a secondary target and there's nothing to indicate that he was insane, as such.

I would also consider Lee Oswald to go to this category, if we go by the formal story. He was not completely sane, but there was enough there to allow for Oswald to attempt to assassinate an US president as an expression of his communist ideology.

Arutyunian counts by the criteria I gave, even if GWB wasn't the actual target. His motives for trying to kill Saakashvili make perfect sense.

I think Oswald is marginal. He seems more of a nihilist who picked up communism as an expression his nihilism while living in the US, and then abandoned it as an expression of his nihilism while living in the USSR. And of course "was Oswald a communist or a nihilist" is something I can't find accurate information about with ordinary effort because it touches on Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.

While my primary source here is Case Closed, my understanding is that Oswald never abandoned communism. He was disappointed with the Soviet system in practice, but it just made him flirt with Trotskyism (though without full commitment) after moving back to US.

Idk, I hear all these people claiming all sorts of things about security and I don’t see whether it means anything. This influencer says security is blah blah blah, this influencer says that it’s actually yadda yadda, they know what exactly? Somebody I’ve never heard of before says something I have no ability to evaluate. Oh he’s an insider. Or pretending to be one. Must be serious.

I’m not sure what good security is supposed to look like. The guy with the gun got caught N layers before reaching the president. But actually it should have been N + 1 layers. Sure I guess. I can believe that. This says something important about society.

The number of people who really know what they’re talking about is probably at least three orders of magnitude smaller than what social media gives me access to.

I’m sure that some of those people are in the White House right now. And they’re making decisions. Maybe they’ll decide security was too lax and needs to be tightened. Maybe they’ll decide it was fine but we need some more theater. Maybe they’ll decide it doesn’t matter and we can take the headlines and build our ballroom and go. I don’t know. I guess I trust whatever Trump wants to do. He knows better than I do.

And it’s always possible that they keep security the same and something happens in the future, but not because anything is wrong with security but because it’s impossible to prevent everything. And it’s always possible we increase useless security theater and nothing happens because of sheer dumb luck and we say, wow, the security theater really worked. I admit I couldn’t tell the difference. I’m not sure most of these Washington “Insiders” can either.

I mean you have credible people making comments. Mark Halperin (who is usually very calm and measured) complaining is why I made this post.

Usually people with knowledge don't publicly comment because you don't want to create -ideas- but this time a lot of people were close by and in the splash zone and are pissed.

I'm willing to treat Mark Halperin as serious for the sake of argument and your reaction to him as same. But it's also possible he's wrong. There are hundreds of influencers with different takes. How am I supposed to know who actually has a piece of the truth? It's not like I actually know much about the difference between real security and security theater.

I mean that's not unfair. Mark is a serious person who has been to many, many of these types of events. On the other hand he's a journalist not a security expert, and security experts usually decline to aggressively comment on these types of events.

I'd say on the face of it it doesn't seem well secured, especially with some of the semi-public details (security started inside the building, movement was restricted to the presence of a generic hotel key sleeve, etc.).

The perpetrator wrote a PS in his manifesto that he thought security was bad. So that's something I guess. I'm not sure if he's supposed to know what he's talking about either given that, you know, he failed almost instantly. But here it is.

PS: Ok now that all the sappy stuff is done, what the hell is the Secret Service doing? Sorry, gonna rant a bit here and drop the formal tone.

Like, I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo.

What I got (who knows, maybe they’re pranking me!) is nothing.

No damn security.

Not in transport.

Not in the hotel.

Not in the event.

Like, the one thing that I immediately noticed walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance.

I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat.

The security at the event is all outside, focused on protestors and current arrivals, because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before.

Like, this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it’s corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again.

Seems like the competency crisis is hitting everyone hard.

It is difficult to get past your internalized misogyny when the Secret Service is incorporating what looks like an elementary school teacher.

But on the flipside I've internalized so much progressive propaganda I can practically feel the Netflix script they will write about the lone stalwart woman warrior that fought the incompetence of her superiors and coworkers and singlehandedly kept Trump alive through an unprecedented amount of half baked attempts against his life.

Honestly, if they made her full Karen it might even be worth it. As her insistence that everyone follow the rules exactly keeps foiling the ploys of the motley crew of would be assassins that seemingly can't do anything right.

For context, Allen made his reservation after the President announced he'd attend. Guy checks into the hotel before the event with his weapons, is surprised he's never once searched, and not obviously surveilled.

I get that. But were they supposed to? Is it normal to search every guest staying at a hotel if the president shows up the next day to give a speech?

No joke, this is the kind of thing that would make me say that Presidents should just stay at the White House and basically never leave. If the policy was that the President will be there sometime in the upcoming week so everyone is subject to a search, I would regard this as an obvious 4th Amendment violation, but also just a generalized case for the President staying home rather than annoying thousands of people that are just trying to go about their lives.

It's Camp David where the secret service would prefer the President stayed. The White House is a small parcel surrounded by city; Camp David is 125 acres of government property.

There are ways to solve the security problem, but yes in terms of risk management the question is 'at what cost?'

Are people willing to shut the hotel down for 24 hours to deny guest access to the lobby? Who is paying for that? Are you willing to put multiple people on every single ground floor entrance to the hotel and at every portal on the ground floor before, during and after the event? Who is paying for that?

Are you willing to inconvenience the rich and powerful with tools like turnstiles, metal detectors, x-rays, pat downs and biometric recording the week before to be checked on the night? Who is paying for that (and not just in currency)?

How about shutting down the entire city block, snipers on every rooftop and swapping the chefs and service staff out for Seal Team 6 for the night? Who... well no one would.

The short version is that Security is a game of Risk Management utilizing limited resources deployed against a thinking adversary. Its most basic philosophy is of Defense in Depth, or a series of layered interlocking defenses with the presumption that some of them maybe vulnerable to being breached by certain attack methods while others aren't.

Here the system worked. If you want guarantees that it will work perfectly and that any event will always proceed undisturbed even though attackers are willing to throw away their own lives in the attempt, then you need to pay a significant price for that. Including a lot of inconveniences to the legitimate attendees.

Most of the complaints about how far the attacker got are complete cope (including by the attacker). They have nothing else to clutch onto at yet another failed assassination.

The short version is that Security is a game of Risk Management utilizing limited resources deployed against a thinking adversary. Its most basic philosophy is of Defense in Depth, or a series of layered interlocking defenses with the presumption that some of them maybe vulnerable to being breached by certain attack methods while others aren't.

Here the system worked

Yeah, I haven't studied the situation carefully but it looks like the system worked exactly as planned and intended. The attempt in Pennsylvania was far more concerning. Admittedly, Trump was not president at that time, but even so it seems Trump was saved by blind luck.

There's a reason that Congress keeps passing bills like the Patriot Act. Identifying bad actors using mass surveillance is so much more effective than physical security, which can almost always be bypassed with sufficient effort. The effort involved in studying that security is generally enough of a signature to get you caught. And then you don't have the danger and chaos of an actual confrontation, you just quietly roll up the perpetrators the day before.

The reason this guy got close is apparently because he didn't do any planning, just walked in with some weapons. That's also the reason his attempt failed. But if he had done prep work, i.e. scoping out the location, he would almost certainly have been identified.

That's my take at least, I'm not an expert on the topic.

My understanding is a) the Secret Service rot far predates Trump's first term, and b) the shooter was already inside the hotel, as a guest, and that was a bit of a blind spot. Obvious in hindsight, but still.

Obvious in hindsight, but still.

Making sure the guests at a 1000 person hotel aren't armed or smuggling in materials is obvious in foresight, not hindsight.

...at least I hope so.

I am approximately a security denier. I think almost all security is pretty much just theater when it comes to ability to preempt planned attacks. I was at the Boston Marathon last week and the security around it is so obviously just exactly and specifically targeted at the horrible bombing that happened; perhaps that exact, specific thing would be prevented with the new security, but it would obviously do almost nothing to prevent the other angles of attack that a determined individual would present. The obsession with clear bags and a finish-line adjacent perimeter is very silly when considering the whole host of threats that could exist. Really, all you can do for any of these things is have some armed and trained guys hanging around to handle observed threats in the moment, to react to what they're seeing in front of them. Everything else is just hardening against previously observed attacks to make people feel like they're safe now.

The good news is that this actually most works anyway because there just aren't very many determined attackers. The bad news is that it sometimes fails because there isn't a great way to stop the President from getting shot or a big public event from turning into a mass casualty event. How do our civic norms survive? If things go well, the same way they always have, which is to say that about one out of ten Presidents is assassinated and another chunk get shot, and things just keep ticking.

The thing is assassination almost never accomplishes anything, because the problems people care about are systemic and not caused by any one person. Part of the reason the supervillain archetype is such a prominent theme in fiction is because it gives you a world where you just need to kill the bad guy and everything magically gets fixed.

Here in the real world, you shoot the UHC CEO and nothing changes, because it turns out UHC CEO is a role, not a person.

It's a similar thing that happens with the war on drugs over time. You can lock up or kill a few drug traffickers and lower supply, but demand stays the same so the price increases and pulls in more drug traffickers looking for bigger payouts. You can interrupt this process over and over and over again, but you will never win as long as people want drugs. Now interrupting can be a way to get some demand lower. Forcing people off their addictions will lead to at least a few kicking their habits and driving it underground can help prevent addictions from starting.

It's not useless and there's a reason why drug legalization doesn't solve the issue either, and if anything makes it worse. But that's important, either. The war on drugs method also fails, just not as extreme because ultimately the only thing that will truly stop drugs is for people to not want drugs.

I think that if Trump had been assassinated in Butler it would have been "successful" insofar as it would have influenced the upcoming election. the GOP convention was scheduled to begin the following week, and while it probably would have gone forward as an opportunity to eulogize Trump, it wouldn't have actually selected a nominee. While there was some controversy over Biden's passing the baton to Harris, it was nothing compared to the all-out war that would have happened in the Republican Party if their nominee had been killed on the eve of the convention. J.D. Vance, Nikki Haley, and Ron DeSantis all had claims to the nomination that were equal parts credible and ludicrous. Haley had won the second most primary votes, but those all came from people specifically voting against Trump. DeSantis probably would have been the nominee if Trump hadn't run, but he got even fewer votes in the primary than Haley, had a frosty relationship with Trump, and there's no way of proving what would have happened besides taking the word of Ron and other people who want him to be the nominee. J.D. Vance was the named heir apparent, but that wasn't public at the time, and anyone claiming that he was Trump's pick would just be accused of being self-serving, similar to people fighting over a will based on "what dad really wanted". And that leaves out opportunists who would throw their hat into the ring as "compromise candidates", and people who would throw their hat into the ring as full on Trump stans who would claim that none of the candidates represent the true MAGA spirit.

I guess, but I think the aesthetic difference is disproportionate to how this would have played out in practice.

In terms of policy, how is Trump any different than Bush 2.0, proceeding along the expected trajectory? You get more wars, a bunch of hot air about immigration but nothing actually happens, a bunch of pork, and... this is exactly what you'd get no matter which Republican won. The only difference with Trump is you get this chaotic, hog-in-the-China-shop, WWE Smackdown aesthetic, rather than the typical Bain Capital, business-suit psychopath aesthetic. But the policy is the same.

"If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it." -Mark Twain

In terms of policy, how is Trump any different than Bush 2.0

Bush didn't go out of his way to alienate every other US ally than Israel. That's a pretty major policy difference.

Ask USAID. Ask the Ayatollah Khameni (either one). Immigration changes actually did happen. So did tariffs. So did a rooting out of DEI in government; it wasn't complete but it happened.

Ask USAID.

Heritage Foundation, not Trump. Any Republican would have done this.

Ayatollah Khameni

That would be more wars in the Middle East for the donors, which Trump explicitly ran against. At least the typical Republican would have done the Captain America PR campaign correctly and made the war popular for 1-2 years instead of making it unpopular from the outset (Pew shows 44% strongly disapprove vs only 18% strongly approve, and the economic consequences haven't even hit yet)

tariffs

Ruled unconstitutional (by 2 of his own 3 justices lol). Lutnick made bank off of the confusion, though. Hard to imagine that wasn't the plan.

Heritage Foundation, not Trump. Any Republican would have done this.

No, not a chance.

Ruled unconstitutional (by 2 of his own 3 justices lol).

He just did them another way.

The UHC CEO is a role, but Donald Trump is not. Most presidents probably aren't, and Donald Trump definitely isn't.

The good news is that this actually most works anyway because there just aren't very many determined attackers.

Any motivated and competent attacker can find holes, heck even just little children can spot them often like how a would be plane bomber could just blow up the TSA lines instead. But almost all crime is either a way to make money somehow, or personal issues. Even school shootings have that element, you pretty much always see that the perp went to that school they shot up. They're not selecting schools at random or because of some idealogy, they're holding a violent grudge against their life.

People who kill outside of those two reasons are rare, and also typically incompetent in some meaningful way. Selection effect, you gotta have your brain broken in some way after all to think killing a person, even someone like Trump, is going to solve your problems.

Even the "smarter" would be assassins are morons, like Luigi or Tyler Robinson who get caught because of video and pictures of them. Guess what would have let them get off free then? A decent disguise! You don't even have to dress up too complex, just a little bit of shapewear to alter how your body looks, a wig and like idk a fake scar with a darker foundation for changing skin tone slightly. Color contacts, imagine in court when your lawyer is arguing that you literally have a different eye color than the perp on camera. Women draw on eyebrows so maybe you can even have different looking facial hair if it's that good. Put on a face mask, especially a few years ago but still I see people like that from time to time and think nothing of them I just assume they're a little sick. All you need is for your friends and family to not immediately recognize you when pictures get released, and plausible deniability that it is you in courts. You might be able to force the cops to drop the case just because they can't make parallel construction work without revealing all the illegal methods you can't plan for as well. The feds have dropped charges against terrorists before for that reason. Make it hard to match up video to reality. But they're all stupid and barely even try.

They're incompetent, so dumb that most get stopped before they even make an attempt because their stupid plans get discovered by them bragging to their friends about it or posting online, or in one case literally live streaming himself as he scoped out Obama's home.

Its amazing and frightening how long serial criminals can get away with crimes by:

  1. Not having a prior personal connection with their victims
  2. Not trying to make money

On the tamer side, graffiti artists can literally sign their names while defacing property and expect to get away with it.

AIUI graffiti artists are mostly doing graffiti in places where it is intentionally tolerated, and tend to get arrested quite fast if they do this stuff in nice exurbs.

How do our civic norms survive?

I'd agree that a decent chunk of security is theater, but probably not all of it. That theater (at least potentially) can make its watchers take better precautions: air travel is, in part, safer not due to "air marshalls" (have we been paying them to just, like, fly around for decades now?) but because passengers know that active resistance to hijackings is the right behavior. Having to take off your shoes (they ended that, finally) is at least partly a reminder of that.

The theater also allows for fairly straightforward laundering of parallel construction, although most of the issues seem to be lone wolves and I haven't heard as many accounts of foiled plots as I might expect.

None of this is to imply that these measures are efficient in doing so (not the biggest fan of the TSA or anything), but I do think it'd be remiss to ignore the theater aspect of security theater as theater, not as direct security.

I think Israel is an interesting example. They have had a constant stream of terrorism and attackers for a while now. The systems that can be hardened to prevent attackers have been hardened, but holes remain. It does seem like specific targets and locations can be secured. But that the general public and general public areas cannot be protected (or at least not at a tolerable cost of money and hassle).

The hardest thing about good security is just maintaining the defensive mindset, because good security is often a hassle to those it is meant to protect.

Israel's response to Palestinian terrorism was mostly to harden the outer perimeter by ending the use of Palestinian day-labour.

The good news is that this actually most works anyway because there just aren't very many determined attackers.

Absolutely. The same person who has the competency, drive, and intelligence to think through new angles of attack and succeed are also successful at finding better uses for their life.

I feel like a marathon is generally the most impractical thing to protect possible. '40KM stretch of open road that's otherwise open to the public the rest of the year and has a plethora of reasons for randoms to be clustering around doing random things'

Yep. As tragic as the events of 2013 were, I think the correct security reaction would have basically been, "yeah, well, what are ya gonna do". Among major marathons, Boston also has the additional complications of starting in a small, rural town with narrow roadways that bunch everything up further. You can take the symbolic action of being fastidious about finish line security, but Patriots' Day is just not really amenable to creating a genuinely secure event.

What really annoys me is that every other race decided that these are just actually good security protocols in general, so you can't drop your backpack at the finish line without it being treated as a security hazard. Guys, no one is trying to attack our 5K fun run and if they were this bag drop rule would not move the needle. But once something is standard practice, you're done for.

And to make matters worse, since the runners end up quite spread out, it’s not like you can just move security with the leaders. You need to secure miles of area at once.

We really are lucky that “mass murder” isn’t on more people’s bucket list, and should do what we can to keep it that.


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