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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25293 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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In one of the more anticipated decisions of this term, the Supreme Court (6-3 on ideological lines) has struck down the second Louisiana majority-black district. They did not rule categorically that race may not be used as a factor in redistricting decisions, but they did rule that if a redistricting decision could be explained by a partisan gerrymander rather than a racial one, there was no case.

To satisfy the second and third preconditions—politically cohesive voting by the minority and racial-bloc voting by the majority—the plaintiffs must provide an analysis that controls for party affiliation, showing that voters engage in racial-bloc voting that cannot be explained by partisan affiliation.

In practice, if taken seriously by lower courts, this pretty much destroys nearly all Section 2 Voting Rights Act cases, because of the strong affiliation between blacks and the Democratic Party.

I am very fond of Alito's framing in the summary:

The key concept is “less opportunity than other members of the electorate,” which sets a baseline against which to as sess the opportunity of minority voters. That baseline—the oppor tunity that any given group of voters has to elect their candidate of choice—depends on the voting preferences of other voters in the dis trict. For example, in a district where most voters prefer Democratic candidates, a Republican voter in that district will have a low chance of securing the election of his or her preferred candidate. The roster of voters who end up in a given district depends, in turn, on the district ing criteria the State uses to draw a legislative map. Thus, the “oppor tunity” of these “members of the electorate” to contribute their votes to a winning cause is whatever opportunity results from the application of the State’s combination of permissible districting criteria. That is what a randomly selected individual voter and group of voters can ex pect regarding their opportunity to elect their preferred candidate. Under §2, a minority voter is entitled to nothing less and nothing more. Pp. 19–22.

I am a bit of two minds about this. The Voting Rights Act seems like a band-aid solution, and if this SCOTUS is fond of one thing, it is ripping off liberal band-aids.

But even a quokka (did I use that term right?) in an ivory tower like me who would prefer color-blind policies can see that there is a big narrative difference between 'a third of Louisiana voted for Democrats and not win a single Representative' and 'the Blacks of Louisiana overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, and yet did not get a single Representative who is Black or a Democrat'. Both are bad, but the Blacks are a much more coherent group than people who vote for Democrats. You don't know if your coworker voted for Democrats, but you can certainly make an educated guess about their racial identification.

Democracy works pretty well compared to other political systems by convincing people dissatisfied with the status quo that that they can change things within the system, but it requires a widespread belief that the playing field is at least somewhat level. If you tell a peasant in an absolute monarchy 'if you have policy suggestions, simply become a great knight, accomplish heroic deeds until the king offers you the hand of his daughter and you inherit the kingdom', he will object that this seems very unlikely to work outside fairy tales and decide to try to use pitchforks to campaign for policy changes instead.

As an intuition pump, consider states worth 300 EC votes using state legislatures to pool their electors and award them to the winner of the overall popular vote over these states, effectively forming a single superstate for the purpose of presidential elections. Suppose Louisiana is not part of that block. How would Louisianans feel about this arrangement? Would they go "How other states assign their EC votes does not affect Louisiana", or would they declare "With this setup, the votes of us will never affect the outcome of presidential elections, ergo whoever gets elected is not our president".

I think the root of the problem is that states are competing for national attention, and doing the sane thing and awarding EC votes or Representatives in proportion to the state-wide vote will guarantee that a state will not be worth fighting over. If Colorado decided to do that, national parties would just ignore it completely. "To win one measly EC vote through campaigning, I would need to convince another 10% of their population to vote for me instead of the other guy? Hard pass."

Instead, it is the interests of states to be battleground states. "Half of our voters prefer Democrats, and half Republicans. The tiniest margin will decide who gets all of our EC votes and Representatives. So you better try hard to send gifts our way to convince the marginal voter to prefer you."

If doing the sane and stable thing leads to you being ignored and borderline flip-flopping makes you the center of attention, then states will behave as if they had BPD.

It's zero-sum. If you maximize the representation of black voters, you minimize those of non-black voters. Maximizing the representation of black voters does not make the playing field level, it tilts it in their direction (and, in practice, towards the Democratic party). So you can't get a widespread belief that the playing field is level by doing that; instead, you get the (accurate) belief among the non-blacks that the playing field is skewed towards the blacks. In the recent past and in most analysis this sort of thing is discarded; only the feelings of the minorities count. But there's no good reason for that to be true.

It might be zero-sum, but with an obvious Schelling point. The Schelling point is proportional representation (PR), where you basically just round the vote to the reciprocal of the number of representatives. If your state has five representatives and with a vote of R: 63%, D: 37%, you would end up with three seats for the GOP and two for the Dems. Anyone who prefers another distribution (2-3, 4-1 and 5-0 could all be gerrymandered) will have a hell of a time arguing that their system is actually fairer.

This is similar to how 'one man (or adult citizen of whatever gender identity, these days), one vote' is an obvious Schelling point. Sure, you can argue that instead voting power should be weighted according to some characteristic, perhaps income tax or education attainment or score on a civics test or the voters ability to fight in a civil war or number of children not dependent on social security, but the chance of convincing most of the others that any of these is actually a fairer way to assign voting power is basically nil.

I would be surprised if the VRA had actually lead to red states being gerrymandered in a way which favored the Dems beyond PR, though it certainly led to limits on how much the state could be gerrymandered in favor of the GOP. The obvious move would be to say 'okay, the VRA says the Blacks get two majority districts, so we will make districts where the majority is Black and the rest is university towns full of pinko liberals'.

Personally, I see gerrymandering as an injustice, and there is no right to equality in injustice. If the VRA limits gerrymandering all of your ethnic minorities into a single district, the GOP could push for federal legislation prohibiting putting all of your religious minorities (e.g. Evangelicals) into a single district.

I would be surprised if the VRA had actually lead to red states being gerrymandered in a way which favored the Dems beyond PR, though it certainly led to limits on how much the state could be gerrymandered in favor of the GOP.

Even if this is true, this means blue states could be gerrymandered in a way which favored the Democrats (as with Massachusetts, 9 Democratic representatives to 0 GOP in a state that's about 30% Republican) while red states could not be gerrymandered in a way which favored the GOP.

Personally, I see gerrymandering as an injustice, and there is no right to equality in injustice.

Equality in injustice is better than inequality in injustice favoring one side... from the viewpoint of the other side.

Is Massachusetts gerrymandered? If the distribution of Rs is even enough, it's basically impossible to create a reasonably contiguous district with enough Rs. A cursory look at the map doesn't reveal any obvious ways to carve out an R district, and it seems that few state republicans complained about the last redistricting..

https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/09/02/massachusetts-trump-gerrymander-texas-california-democrats

Ultimately we should just get rid of single member districts.

It’s only zero-sum because everything else is gerrymandered now. Which ya gerrymandering probably is bad. You can’t be carving out black districts in Southern states from a fairness perspective if you’re not also forcing California to carve out districts for their farming communities (or basically anyone inland).

I guess it’s fine if Blacks never fully assimilate and the probably aren’t capable of it, but future immigration we really do not want more groups that can’t just blend in. City-rural differences are just going to happen.

But even a quokka (did I use that term right?) in an ivory tower like me who would prefer color-blind policies can see that there is a big narrative difference between 'a third of Louisiana voted for Democrats and not win a single Representative' and 'the Blacks of Louisiana overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, and yet did not get a single Representative who is Black or a Democrat'. Both are bad, but the Blacks are a much more coherent group than people who vote for Democrats. You don't know if your coworker voted for Democrats, but you can certainly make an educated guess about their racial identification.

I can understand this perspective somewhat, but I struggle to see how to decide which groups are considered important for this purpose doesn't either end up a complete clusterfuck or worse, vindicates the ethnonationalists' fears of the inevitability of multicultural spoils systems. There is also even plenty of examples where it works out the other way around - special interest minorities who care a lot about an issue and coordinate well reliably outcompete even much larger majorities if those don't care enough, through a combination of lawfare, lobbying and (local) special elections.

I think the root of the problem is that states are competing for national attention, and doing the sane thing and awarding EC votes or Representatives in proportion to the state-wide vote will guarantee that a state will not be worth fighting over. If Colorado decided to do that, national parties would just ignore it completely. "To win one measly EC vote through campaigning, I would need to convince another 10% of their population to vote for me instead of the other guy? Hard pass."

Instead, it is the interests of states to be battleground states. "Half of our voters prefer Democrats, and half Republicans. The tiniest margin will decide who gets all of our EC votes and Representatives. So you better try hard to send gifts our way to convince the marginal voter to prefer you."

If doing the sane and stable thing leads to you being ignored and borderline flip-flopping makes you the center of attention, then states will behave as if they had BPD.

I think a large problem is also the centralisation of power in most western countries. Politics is often better the more local it is since the problems of one place are rarely the problems of another. Europe is, as usual, even worse on this account, since a lot of power got shifted into the EU which is at best difficult to understand for the average citizen, and at worst employs committees and courts that are entirely out of the citizens reach. Not that central politics is entirely bad, it has an important place especially for large-scale international trading, warfare or diplomacy. But this is often piggybacked unto for much more general power, and nobody ever lets go once granted.

The entire idea of section 2 applied this way has always been rather silly, it takes the collectivist view around race that people are better represented as a class based off their skin color rather than their ability to choose based off their own individual beliefs and preferences. There's a lot to complain about with voting, partisan gerrymandering is still messed up both federally and state election wise, the structure of the Senate explicitly having a bunch of low population states over less high population ones, and the electoral college works in a similar way.

But those are problems by changing the very value of a person's representation, by making someone in California have like 10x less say than the same person in Mississippi in Congress and the presidency. It's not an issue because they fail to make the assumption that black people need some explicit maps drawn out for them "as a class".

by making someone in California have like 10x less say than the same person in Mississippi in Congress and the presidency

Yes, and that's a good thing.

Let's take a look at where that isn't true: Canada. This country has the politics you say you want, where the only relevant voters reside in one of 3 cities (legislature is de facto unicameral, though on paper it is something else). Naturally, they all vote as a bloc, and their policies are not only alien to the rest of the country, but increasingly oppressive in the sense that they prevent anywhere else from developing.

As a direct result, Canada has had active separation movements since roughly the late 1800s. These weren't as much of a problem between 1910 and 1950 for obvious reasons, but it's been a continual threat since 1970, and the referendum in QC in the mid-'90s had majority support except for the city on the QC/ON border (as in, the vote for QC to secede would have succeeded without Montreal). Even then, it was defeated on a razor thin margin. And the next Provincial election in QC is likely going to the separatists.

Serious attempts at Western separatism are newer. The province is a natural seat of government for a separated West due to where it is and what it sits on, and there's a bigger barrier with respect to the fact it needs to win referenda in 4 provinces to be a viable country- but Ottawa (and Vancouver) become more and more foreign, and grow more and more hostile, to the rest of the nation every single day. The rest of the country won't have the chance to get any political representation for 15 years, the sitting government exists completely contrary to the results of the election, and everyone knows it.

Most of the movement on the issue has been cooler than it would be in the US- Canada is a much poorer country thanks to difficult land and high latitude so there's a lot less to fight over and a lack of social cohesion is therefore costlier. Were this same situation true for the US (even in its original 13-colony form) it just straight up wouldn't have survived.

TL;DR Consent of the governed isn't equally geographically distributed, and the cities depend on the country for raw resources and soldiers- which are two things cities require for continual survival they cannot create on their own. (Not that it's a law of nature for a city to fail to field soldiers; that's a new incapacity revealed over the latter half of the 20th century, and specifically for Western cities.)

It is wise to limit the power of larger states to run roughshod over smaller states to ensure the larger states are limited to mining/colonizing the rest of the country in a sustainable manner, and not one that doesn't just end up with the country folks shooting up the power lines and oil pipelines (or seceding completely -> reserving the right to wage what is technically a civil war at some time in the future).

Yes, and that's a good thing.

If it wasn't, you'd get the problem Canada has where the only relevant voters are all in 3 cities.

That's not true, in a one vote power per person system, rural voters are relevant too. They're just only as relevant as their actual population size.

Naturally, they all vote the same way.

Not true, but even if they do so what? More citizens live in the cities therefore doing pro city stuff means benefiting more citizens than pro rural stuff then.

Since consent of the governed isn't equally geographically distributed, and the cities depend on the country for resources and soldiers,

And the rural country doesn't likewise depend on the cities? They benefit from all the wonderful intentions, financing, and other stuff that comes out of the cities. Farming and resources are valuable, but rural life has electricity, cars, far more stable crops from advances in science (bad harvests are so much less common), medical inventions, internet, smart phones, TV, cheap good looking clothes, and basically anything else that comes from urban workers.

Rural life benefits immensely from the economic and technological growth that the cities are responsible for.

country folks shooting up the power lines and oil pipelines (or seceding completely, then waging war at some time in the future).

Ah so giving them extra vote power is just a deal so they don't shoot up the democracy.

Ah so giving them extra vote power is just a deal so they don't shoot up the democracy.

This is essentially the core thesis of the The Federalist Papers.

You believe in gaining the consent of the governed don't you?

rural voters are relevant too. They're just only as relevant as their actual population size.

Which is just another way of saying "they're irrelevant".

Not true.

Trivially true; look at election maps of my [admittedly newly-added] example over the last 150 years and you'll see exactly what I mean. The cities always only ever vote for themselves with a brief exception perhaps once every 30 years.

More citizens live in the cities therefore doing pro city stuff

This doesn't actually preclude them from doing their city thing in that city. In fact, a significant chunk of power comes from the city people being able to do this- which is balanced against the below.

And the rural country doesn't likewise depend on the cities?

The country needs the city far less than the city needs the country. This is a significant strategic liability for the city, actually- the city needs water and food and raw materials (to convert into finished goods) far beyond subsistence levels by its nature of being a city. Thus the power the city derives from centralization is dependent on the rest of the country, not the other way around.

This is much like how a man's job is to bring home the food and the woman's job is to cook it.
If the woman doesn't do her job, they're unhappy. If the man doesn't do his, they're dead.
So it is for city and country, and why the country outranks the city.

Ah so giving them extra vote power is just a deal so they don't shoot up the democracy.

Yes.

Trivially true; look at election maps of my [admittedly newly-added] example over the last 150 years and you'll see exactly what I mean. The cities always only ever vote for themselves with a brief exception perhaps once every 30 years.

One party in the US two-party system was based on an (admittedly corrupt) alliance between the northern urban political machines and the rural south from about 1910 to about 1980, which is a third of America's history. For much of the other two thirds politics was sectional (New England and friends vs the South and friends) with cities and their hinterlands voting together. AFAIK the only period "urban vs rural" has been the best simple model of national politics in the US was the last twenty years, and it has been a 50-50 split with suburbs as swing territory. [I think you can make an argument for rural Jacksonians vs urban Whigs as a model for the 1820-1840 period, but it isn't the standard one]

In the rest of the democratic world, big-tent centre-right parties which consistently win the countryside and are competitive in the cities are dominant in most countries most of the time. In the UK specifically, the Tories are competitive in the big industrial cities until Thatcher, and in London until Brexit - in both cases until they stopped trying. (Labour's heartland was the coal-mining areas, not the cities) For example, the last time Manchester elected a Tory-majority council was 1967-1971, and 1982-1984 for Birmingham.

Running against urbanism and cities is a choice made by some right-wing parties for their own internal reasons. If right-wing parties choose to do that, they don't get to say that urbanites hating them back is an unfairness that needs to be remedied with malapportionment.

The country needs the city far less than the city needs the country. This is a significant strategic liability for the city, actually- the city needs water and food and raw materials (to convert into finished goods) far beyond subsistence levels by its nature of being a city. Thus the power the city derives from centralization is dependent on the rest of the country, not the other way around.

Coastal cities are built around ports, usually at river mouths (which gives you access to fresh water). Rich cities relying on food and raw materials imported by sea because they didn't control a large enough rural hinterland to feed themselves goes at least as far back as ancient Athens - Rome was fed from the Nile Delta. And higher value raw materials come from even further afield. The archaeology is ambiguous, but it is likely that Athenian hoplites were going into battle wearing bronze armour where the tin in the alloy came from Cornwall.

New York City doesn't need Idaho because they have Elizabeth, and Elizabeth plus cash gives them the world. If you look at the blue/red state map, every blue state has blue-or-Canadian-controlled access to the sea. (I agree that there are blue cities in red states which don't). Technically all red states have red-controlled access to the sea via the Gulf coast, but in practice using that access would overwhelm the capacity of the Gulf coast ports, and also require the use of railway junctions in blue states. So in the case of a peaceful-but-hostile split, the reds would run out of raw materials first.

There have been times and places where the economy of the city is based on a threat to shoot up the country - see Rome passim. (Urbanites make much better soldiers than yokels, it's just that they have sufficiently good alternative employment opportunities that they don't volunteer for peacetime garrison duty). The modern US is not one of them - rural America is subsidy-dependent, and the largest paypig in the system is Big Tech.

Which is just another way of saying "they're irrelevant".

No, they'd just as relevant as any other individual voter.

Trivially true; look at election maps of my [admittedly newly-added] example over the last 150 years and you'll see exactly what I mean. The cities always only ever vote for themselves with a brief exception perhaps once every 30 years.

Even in the most one sided cities, they still tend to be around 70/30 Dem vs GOP. Which is what I assume you actually mean rather than "vote for themselves".

This doesn't actually preclude them from doing their city thing in that city. In fact, a significant chunk of power comes from the city people being able to do this- which is balanced against the below.

Actually it can, look at North Carolina! The state legislature is extremely gerrymandered into a basically permanent veto proof GOP majority despite being a swing state that routinely votes Dem leaders and they constantly use this to try to limit and control Charlotte and Raleigh's ability to self govern. Like that famous "bathroom bill" a decade ago came out explicitly in response to Charlotte passing an inclusive ordinance within city borders. This is not uncommon.

Cities are in fact often precluded from doing what they want because of gerrymandering.

The country needs the city far less than the city needs the country. This is a significant strategic liability for the city, actually- the city needs water and food and raw materials (to convert into finished goods) far beyond subsistence levels by its nature of being a city.

Yes those are quite important, but cities are needed too. Try defending the country without the technology and logistics that urban wealth helps create and provide. Much of those are raw materials and natural resources are practically useless without the urbanites inventing things to do with them.

This is much like how a man's job is to bring home the food and the woman's job is to cook it. If the woman doesn't do her job, they're unhappy. If the man doesn't do his, they're dead.

So it is for city and country, and why the country outranks the city.

If the woman doesn't do her job in this scenario, they get sick and die from eating raw meat. Just like how the rurals would be squashed by our enemies without the wealth and intelligence of the city.

But it's also an ahistorical example, women did tons of work in the past. Most people were far too poor to be letting someone get away with not being productive! When famines are frequent and the Lord demands his pay, you don't get to sit on your ass. Even the young children had to go out and till the fields.

Only the nobles and chieftains could have such a fancy life of not needing everyone working hard. Women milked cattle, tilled fields, managed crops, kept chickens, cleaned (also known as sanitizing things), make clothing (especially necessary at the time where minor scratches and infections could kill and no A/C or heating), hauled water, picked fruits and vegetables and various other tasks.

Ah so giving them extra vote power is just a deal so they don't shoot up the democracy.

Yes.

So what you're saying is that the cities should just start threatening their supreme economic and technological superiority back. Sure cities might be without food for a short bit before they move to conquer the fields, but the rurals will be without life after a few AI guided drone strikes and missiles.

So what you're saying is that the cities should just start threatening their supreme economic and technological superiority back. Sure cities might be without food for a short bit before they move to conquer the fields, but the rurals will be without life after a few AI guided drone strikes and missiles.

But in your view, this would make the Urbanites the bad guys, would it not?

Sure cities might be without food for a short bit before they move to conquer the fields, but the rurals will be without life after a few AI guided drone strikes and missiles.

So, The Hunger Games?

A proportionate response to an explicit threat of "We will destroy democracy if we can't rig it" is not what happened in the hunger games. The hunger games government was a dictatorship police state, kinda like the Russia and North Korea that Trump so admires.

That framing seems to ignore that we're a republic, and the senate is the body representing the constituent members of our republic, the states.

Without the Great Compromise between proportional to population representation and equal representation per state (as it had been in the Articles of Confederation) there likely would have been no union.

The hunger games government was a dictatorship police state.

Dictatorship police state of the 'urban elite', the Great Compromise is the protection against this failure mode and ensures the states / districts are represented in Congress and the mode of electing the President.

Which is just another way of saying "they're irrelevant".

No, they'd just as relevant as any other individual voter.

Speaking generally, I don't know that I have a useful definition of being "relevant" or "irrelevant". I'm hearing very similar claims that, after Callais, gerrymandering can or will make many black voters "irrelevant". One could pithily retort that they are just as relevant as any other individual voter, but I don't think that would be satisfying to the person making the claim.

by making someone in California have like 10x less say than the same person in Mississippi in Congress and the presidency

The Senate does not represent people, it represents States. You may think that States do not deserve representation at all, but that's a different argument. California and Mississippi are equally represented in the Senate, as intended. The people of California and Mississippi are more-or-less equally represented in the House, mostly as intended except we need 3-10x as many seats as we do now. At least they're equally treated in their gargantuan districts.

The Senate does not represent people, it represents States. You may think that States do not deserve representation at all, but that's a different argument. California and Mississippi are equally represented in the Senate, as intended.

Yeah it's a rather silly system that hasn't scaled well. States are collectives of people but they aren't people, the people in states should be represented fairly and the current Senate system doesn't do that. It explicitly gives smaller less populated areas far more influence.

The founders believed states would have much more power and guard it jealously. The Gettysburg address was the tipping point between "The United States are..." and "The United States is". Then the depression and the war ensured federal dominance.

"These United States..." used to be a thing too.

The Gettysburg address may have been the tipping point, but the writing was on the wall with the railroad and telegraph.

Whether it's silly or not is a matter of opinion (I don't think it's silly at all), but it is factually incorrect to say that the Senate gives smaller states more influence than larger ones. It gives them the same influence.

States are collective entities made up of, wait for it.... people. The Senate gives smaller states disproportionate influence because states with less people have the same swing as states with more people.

When we say a state, past all the abstraction we really just mean "the people there in that region".

No, that's not true. You don't get to hand wave a state as being equivalent to the people within it and then claim that it's disproportionate influence on that basis. States are coherent entities by themselves, and are not the same thing as the people living within them. Your argument is like saying that if two families own a business together (split 50/50), the family with fewer children somehow has a disproportionate influence over the business. It is a poor argument.

States are collectives of people but they aren't people, the people in states should be represented fairly

Taking this consistently, we must conclude that Russia should get to conquer Ukraine, by a vote on the order of 130M to 30M.

Recall that originally state meant, well, "state", not "prefecture".

Far more influence over the country as a whole != far more influence in actual fact, especially on the local level.

The large city/states have more than enough ways to throw their weight around, including the mere fact they're city/states. They don't need the ability to pass the "Loot the Rest of the Country Forever Because Fuck You Act".

by making someone in California have like 10x less say than the same person in Mississippi in Congress and the presidency.

The Electoral College prevents a small number of influential and high population urban centers with views that may be broadly considered alien from running a country most of the size of a continent. It is likely responsible for quite a bit of US stability.

Look at the Hunger Games, where a large capital dictates unpopular policy to the other regions.

It's likely we would have significant ongoing issues with places like Texas trying to leave if California was in charge.

The EC allows the federal government to have teeth without a shit ton of civil wars.

The American founding fathers were some of the most brilliant and successful political theorists in the history of mankind. Don't throw out the political technologies they invented because it has been recently expedient.

The American founding fathers were some of the most brilliant and successful political theorists in the history of mankind. Don't throw out the political technologies they invented because it has been recently expedient.

We know what the founding fathers were trying to do with the Electoral College because they tell us in their writings, and it had nothing to do with any of the modern arguments for using the Electoral College to count a partisan election. The whole point of the Electoral College according to the people who set it up was to avoid a partisan election for the President. It failed, demonstrating that the genius of the founding fathers was finite and necessitating the 12th amendment as a bugfix.

Something like the modern partisan Electoral College makes sense in a world where states run their own elections, because it means a fully corrupt one-party state can't steal any more Presidential votes than it already has, but it isn't a technology invented by the framers except accidentally.

Can you extrapolate on why the EC wasn’t designed specifically for our current political climate?

This seems like a novel opinion and I doubt many people have any idea why you are referencing.

The Electoral College prevents a small number of influential and high population urban centers with views that may be broadly considered alien from running a country most of the size of a continent. It is likely responsible for quite a bit of US stability.

Plenty of other democracies have been stable without such a system, so I'm gonna have to doubt this claim. Maybe the size does make a difference, but there's not too much evidence for it that counteracts the examples in other nations.

Look at the Hunger Games, where a large capital dictates unpopular policy to the other regions.

Completely fictional story, you might as well point to hunger games as proof for why Marx was right as well.

It's likely we would have significant ongoing issues with places like Texas trying to leave if California was in charge.

Texas is the second largest state population wise! Texas is literally one of the victims of EC small state bias.

The EC allows the federal government to have teeth without a shit ton of civil wars.

Now maybe if we don't give rurals disproportionate influence and instead only power proportionate to the population they will turn violent, but that says a lot about the rural population IMO.

The American founding fathers were some of the most brilliant and successful political theorists in the history of mankind. Don't throw out the political technologies they invented because it has been recently expedient.

That's true, but they were not perfect and even knew this pretty well themselves and it's why they have processed like constitutional amendments to begin with. It's especially useful to understand the time period they were working in as well, the electoral college makes more sense in a world where organizing and communicating things took a lot more effort.

Voting for people to serve as your representatives that go to the big meeting and give your state's votes makes way more sense back then. Now we can easily collect everyone's votes and know who people actually want.

What the EC does currently is tell minority party voters in every state that they don't matter and shouldn't bother. Did you know California has the largest Republican party in the country? Doesn't matter, they don't get a vote in the presidential elections. They are disenfranchised because the EC says so, and that means California Republicans have to rely entirely on other state Republicans. This means any interests and beliefs that California Repiblicans might want that aren't supported by say, Mississippi Republicans goes nowhere. They have no say, no influence, no sway. They have no voice, no one to speak for any interests unique to California Republicans.

The same way how Mississippi Democrats just have to go along with whatever the California Democrats want. It pushes our country towards extremism on both sides because the more statistically likely to be moderate people, the reds in blue states and the blues in red states, literally don't get a say. Republicans are only the reddest of red and Democrats are only the bluest of blues because everyone else has no vote and no influence thanks to the EC. Imagine if a Democrat candidate had to bother to appeal to the more moderate Dems in Texas?

Plenty of other democracies have been stable without such a system

The average democracy is only about 60 years old at this point. The US has, incredibly, managed to make it to 248.

What the EC does currently is tell minority party voters in every state that they don't matter and shouldn't bother.

That's more a consequence of FPTP (and in Westminster systems, whipping votes) than anything else. Again, other countries have political parties that manage to pull this kind of voter suppression off just fine.

Separation and/or a more confederated system starts to make more sense here simply because it encourages political competition and innovation in the areas that break off. Otherwise you start to run into certain failure modes of democracy, like "intentionally fail to enforce immigration laws, let the illegals vote, then swing elections that way", or letting the cities merge together politically into one globally homogeneous patchwork rather than retaining solutions tailored to/coupled with that area's unique circumstances (perhaps as a reaction to not being able to get their reforms through).

The US has, incredibly, managed to make it to 248.

While this is a valuable myth for Americans, it is false. The Civil War is fairly obviously a total failure of the OG Constitution and the worst outbreak of political violence in the history of the English-speaking world. The Reconstruction amendments were passed by force, not by using the Article V amendment process in the way the framers intended. I think Redemption was also an important de facto amendment of the Constitution (namely de facto repeal of the 15th amendment) achieved by political violence.

It is conventional wisdom on the right (and, in my view, correct) that the New Deal and Civil Rights Era represent irregular changes to the small-c constitution, but they were achieved with broad democratic legitimacy and with very limited political violence, so I don't think they count as a break in continuity. So I would say the US has gone for about 140 years since the last violent regime change, which is still a good run, though no longer outstanding for English-speaking countries.

Plenty of other democracies have been stable without such a system

Can you think of another heterogeneous democracy that has operated for at least a hundred years and hasn't had a region or subset of its population declare independence? Sure, the South tried to leave, but you can't exactly point at France (new Republic every two generations!) or Britain (see Ireland, or India) either.

How heterogeneous to count? Finland has two official languages with a 5% population of Fennoswedes. The Sami also haven't seceded from any of the Nordics despite obnoxious activism.

Canada has not seen an irregular change to its constitution or boundaries or large-scale political violence since Confederation in 1867. That makes the current Canadian order about the same age as the (post-Civil War) American one, or significantly older if you consider any or all of Redemption, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights era as irregular and/or violent constitutional changes.

Australia likewise since Federation in 1901.

The UK has not seen an irregular change to the constitution since 1688, or a violent one since 1660. There has been political violence due to Irish secessionist movements, but Irish Home Rule would have been handled peacefully if WW1 hadn't happened at the wrong time.

As a separate issue, the main reason why the Anglosphere has so much democratic continuity compared to continental Europe is a lack of foreign invasions, not a lack of revolutions.

Why are France and Britain a problem? The transition from 4th to 5th Republic was not a violent revolution; discounting the period of foreign occupation during WW2, France has had a democratic government continuously since 1870. Britain's separatist rebellions came out of disenfranchised subject territories; as well say the US has a discontinuity because it no longer owns the Philippines.

France has had a democratic government continuously since 1870

Several declared-integral parts of France, most notably Algeria have felt otherwise about this statement. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland had to change its name because most, but not all, of Ireland felt otherwise. Even when it's done peacefully and democratically (see hypothetical Scotland referendum), a decision to change the definition of the polity seems anathema to the requested "stability" of a heterogeneous democratic government.

Admittedly the US has also divested several territories in that time (Cuba, the Philippines), but none of those examples have been self-declared as "integral" (states) except for that one time in 1861-1865 (and arguably Reconstruction effectively treating those as colonies for at least a while). There's certainly room to contest the relevance of integral-ness, but it seems important to my reading of "stability".

Can you think of another heterogeneous democracy that has operated for at least a hundred years and hasn't had a region or subset of its population declare independence?

This isn't even true of the US, so I don't know what you mean by "another".

Sure, the South tried to leave, but you can't exactly point at France (new Republic every two generations!) or Britain (see Ireland, or India) either.

Even you're aware that your ask isn't true of the US. But yes I can, Switzerland. In fact it's even more heterogenous, 40% of the population has a migrant background and there's two different main languages spoken in both German and French.

I think most blocs are cultural in at least some sense. It’s just like anything else. Rural Americans have been conservative for a long time now. Evangelicals in many churches would consider a vote for a democrat to be sinful. Is that a sober analysis of political positions? It’s part of the culture.

As to the ridiculous division of power in the country, honestly I think our current system is too flawed to work. It really seems to solidify the ideas of some blocks over others. Yes the individual voter in a large state is disempowered in the senate, but he’s also overpowered in the House and the presidential elections. California has 54 electoral votes. Pennsylvania has 20+. Those states have outsized influence over national politics. If you lose all of the big population states, you lose. Heck, if you lose the northwest corridor you have an uphill battle, especially if you’re a Republican who won’t have the 54 electoral votes CA brings.

Electorally I think it’s past time to allow each congressional and senatorial district to issue its own electors. State by state winner takes all overpowers the large states too much in national policy.

I do think electoral votes ought to go by district with the overall state popular vote winner getting the bonus 2 votes.

What does "overpowered" mean? Populous states explicitly punch below their weight relative to their actual proportion of the electorate in all federal elections. The US already has a number of countermajoritarian and outright minoritarian institutions, and the argument is that actually we need the federal government to be less representative?

Electorally I think it’s past time to allow each congressional and senatorial district to issue its own electors. State by state winner takes all overpowers the large states too much in national policy.

Why not just have a direct popular vote for President? Or abolish the Presidency and have Congress select the chief executive?

I’m mostly thinking of the House and the electoral college. In both cases, California gets 50 votes, and thus can have a large influence on how things will happen. If you live in a less populated state, say Idaho with a whopping 4 electoral votes and 2 members of the House, you, for most practical purposes do not matter. No one looks at a piece of legislation and worries about pissing off Idaho. If something would harm a large state like CA, NY, PA, FL, it’s going to be hard to get the party to agree to do it. Most of the cultural issues are issues because they play in the urban core and big coastal states. If it were backward, and trans issues were viewed negatively in California but positively in Idaho, no one would be forcing the issue of things like bathroom bills.

Why are Southern black voters so uniformly aligned with the Democratic Party? Did something happen? I was led to understand that race relations in the South were actually great and reports of interracial discord were Yankee propaganda.

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Race relations in the South are pretty good, they're about as good as they are anywhere in the country, which ranks with the best in the world.

Mainly, they do it because it works. Blacks exercise inordinate power in the Democratic party, and probably will into the immediate future even as their relative power is eroded by immigration. Republicans are mostly too scared to actually campaign for Blacks -- Trump's appearances at say the National Association of Black Journalists was so remarkable because it was so unusual. Moreover, the Democratic Party offers Black voters visible patronage and money and public works that Republicans mostly don't want to give. And if that isn't sufficient explanation, it probably is the case that urban city political machines harvest black voters to vote at rates and percentages higher than what they might otherwise naturally produce.

A part of me would love to see Republicans run a race- and gender-swapped version of the Harris campaign's "He'll never know who you voted for" ad targeting Black men.

Speaking of that campaign, it’s pretty crazy how abortion just completely dropped off the map as a hot topic immediately after the election was over.

Did it?

I mean, blacks shifted to overwhelmingly supporting the Democratic Party well before the Civil Rights movement and the supposed "party switch". 75% of blacks voted for FDR in 1936, for example. The charitable view is that blacks migrating to cities etc. supported the dems because they had greater support for unions and worker's rights etc. A less charitable view is that blacks supported dems because they saw it as a way to get handouts from the government.

Or, as Lyndon B. Johnson (allegedly) said about his welfare initiatives: "I'll have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years." (Even if Johnson didn't actually say that, he is confirmed to have used "nigger" on several occasions).

75% of blacks voted for FDR in 1936, for example.

Wiki claims "two-thirds of black voters", not much more than his 60.8% of voters as a whole. You have to cut down demographics more finely to get to "76 percent of Blacks in northern cities" specifically.

The charitable view is that blacks migrating to cities etc. supported the dems because they had greater support for unions and worker's rights etc. A less charitable view is that blacks supported dems because they saw it as a way to get handouts from the government.

Neither of these views is logically inconsistent with the corrected numbers, but Bayes would note that our relative credence in the view with "migrating to cities" in it should increase after we learn that the data shows an effect specifically focused on migrant-targeted cities. (you'd otherwise think "Northern" would push in the other direction; Southerners also went 76% for LBJ)

Whether he said it or not, the prediction contained within that someone made looks pretty true for the 60-year period anyway.

Is LBJ using the word particularly notable? He was born in 1908. My dad was born in the late 40s and the word was regularly used in school rhymes and whatnot in his youth, so the overton window was still well over that way throughout most of LBJ's life

Not necessarily, but it weighs a bit in favor of the alleged quote being real. Or rather it's points against people eho think the use of the word makes the quote more likely to be fake.

LBJ was notoriously foul-mouthed, and definitely would have used the n-word. But as with Trump, it's easy to make up a plausible "LBJ-sounding" quote.

75% of blacks voted for FDR in 1936, for example.

75% of blacks who could vote. In 1936 most blacks lived in the Jim Crow South and couldn't vote.

My rough model is that in the New Deal era Northeast and Midwest, the Republicans were the party of monied elites plus rural and small town voters and the Democrats were the party of the big city political machines. In that model Northern blacks vote Dem because they live in the cities and benefit from the political machines.

I don’t get why LBJ would say that but I am not a politician. Do you want power or do you want to improve America? Pulling in 85% of the black vote helps the Democrats. But you would still need to view your policies as good on their own or modestly bad but their votes will give you power to do other things you think are good.

And sure I probably answered my own question. He either likes being politically powerful or thought it was a good trade off.

But you would still need to view your policies as good

I've never met any politician who sincerely believed that their proposed policies has to be "good" in and of themselves. Not trying to be insulting to you personally, but believing that anything more than 1% of politicians (especially at the national level) care about doing good with their power is a quokka belief.

Trump of course is narcissistic and an egomaniac and has used government to enrich himself but I still believe he desires to work for me and wants to leave a legacy of America as a better place. So yes I believe more than 1% of politicians have good intentions.

Having good intentions and believing their policies are especially good are not necessarily the same thing. They may believe, for example, that they're doing good simply by holding a given office, taking up space that could have gone to that bastard who ran against them.

Are southern blacks more dem than blacks nationally? Everything I've seen is that they're about the same and this is machine politics all the way down.

I didn't say that they were. It is merely that the South is where efforts to disenfranchise black voters have been most vigorously pursued. And in case it's not clear, I think the suggestion that persistent efforts to disenfranchise black voters have transitioned seamlessly from white supremacist to merely partisan motives should be viewed as totally laughable with extreme skepticism.

My understanding is that it is more a Urban vs Rural issue than a race issue, with the current status quo being that the urban populations of cities like Atlanta and Charlotte are distributed across congressional districts in such a way that it allows the Democrats to be competitive across multiple seats. Where as in an alternate map where the urban core was one district and the surrounding suburbs to the east and west were two others, the Democrats would essentially gain a "safe" seat at the expense of no longer being competitive in the others.

See this proposed map that has been making the rounds on X.

https://x.com/NewsWire_US/status/1978495533229428823/photo/1

That doesn't answer the question of why Southern black voters are so strongly aligned with the Democratic Party. Or why Southern white voters are so strongly aligned with the Republican Party - e.g. in 2023 Brandon Presely got 22% of the white vote in MS, which was an exceptionally good performance (Biden got 17% in 2020 and Obama got even less in 2012).

(It must also be noted that the Deep South has a large rural black population - appealing to rural/urban splits doesn't resolve the problem)

That doesn't answer the question of why Southern black voters are so strongly aligned with the Democratic Party. Or why Southern white voters are so strongly aligned with the Republican Party

Both are explained by Democratic policy preferences being to favor blacks and disfavor whites.

Southern Whites vote strongly republican due to the moral majority- this is the moment when the Southern White vote actually became disproportionately republican. We don't see it because Reagan won everywhere but the south was still a dem stronghold into the late eighties.

I feel like you are starting from a conclusion and looking for supporting evidence, rather than sincerely seeking the answer to a question.

Yes there is an alignment, but I do not think it is as strong or as uniform as you seem to be treating it. Per the 2020 census there are 94 majority Black counties in the United States. Of those 94, Trump won 11 in the 2024 election, and was seems to have been competitive in maybe 20 others. That's not a lot, but it's not nothing either, and when you look at those majority black counties where Trump won or came close to winning, the common thread seems to be a lack of proximity to major urban centers.

My working theory is that rural and working class blacks largely mirror rural and working class whites in that they tend to be more socially conservative and anti-immigration than their urban counterparts. And that while the power of the various "political machines" that run cities like Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, Et Al may be famous, the power of those machines does not project into "the boondocks".

Sarcasm is unbecoming. Speak plainly.

This is something anyone can answer, but I'll ask a different question: why does no other ethnic group align at even remotely the same level?

Jews and Muslims are not that far off. The same way, which has been presenting a dilemma for the Democrats... which they seem to be resolving in favor of Muslims.

AFAIK a lot of Black voting organizational infrastructure tends to come through the churches, and being able to tap into a religious network when trying to get people out and voting is always going to make things a lot easier than doing it with other groups that don't have as strong a community gathering point.

Anti-black racism is sui generis in the United States, especially in the South. Racism, xenophobia, and other forms of bigotry generally push minorities left, but this is, for the most part, garden variety discrimination that you find everywhere to some degree. It wasn't that long ago that ~1/3rd of the US was run by explicit white supremacists and rendered black Americans explicitly second-class citizens (on top of a raft of informal but no less severe forms of discrimination). One of the consequences of prolonged, intensive discrimination was to forge African-Americans into a much more cohesive, organized identity group than pretty much anyone else.

By contrast, "White", "Hispanic", or "Asian" are much more weakly operational groups containing subsets that do not see themselves as having shared interests, e.g. you could probably justify dividing white voters regionally and Hispanic/Asian voters by country of ancestral origin.

generally push minorities left

For certain narrow, idiosyncratic definitions of "left," at least.

The average Black Southerner cares very little for many Democratic-aligned social endeavors, for example, but not to an extent that they'll vote against them, either.

are much more weakly operational groups containing subsets that do not see themselves as having shared interests

Given the organized project of generating Black (capitalization here intended to signify ADOS, not the NYT's bullshit) identity, there's also been the parallel and ongoing project demonizing any creation of white shared interests as such.

It'll be interesting to see if Asians group more or shift over the next several years as the parties realign somewhat. One could see they'd be more consistently Democratic as the "higher education" party, but inter-minority discrimination issues weaken that somewhat.

The average Black Southerner cares very little for many Democratic-aligned social endeavors, for example, but not to an extent that they'll vote against them, either.

What is your point? Not agreeing with all of the political goals of candidates they support is not a distinctive feature of black voters (e.g. not all Republican voters are anti-LGBT, but they still support anti-LGBT politicians).

A question of interest might be why the GOP is so incredibly bad at capturing these socially conservative black voters. They're certainly capable of getting votes from extremely poor, socially conservative white voters, often despite openly promising policies detrimental to their welfare. I put it to you that there a significant faction in American politics that is hostile to black civil rights, that post-CRM these people concentrated in the Republican Party, and that black voters are acutely aware of this. The result is that even though there are a lot of socially conservative black voters and even though poor social conservatives may prioritize their social beliefs over economic interests, the GOP does extraordinarily poorly with black voters.

there's also been the parallel and ongoing project demonizing any creation of white shared interests as such.

If you are talking purely about progressive spaces, I find it hard to deny this, but I also find it hard to escape the conclusion that this is because basically every attempt to construct a shared white interest group has been unsubtle white supremacism/white nationalism. Black identity, by contrast, is largely an outside imposition, and by and large black political organization has been organized around civil rights issue; there is no comparable set of issues for white voters.

If you are talking about the full American political spectrum, no. Virtually every conservative space is extremely skeptical of the idea that racism against minorities is a live issue (unless they can find a way to blame the liberals, who are the real racists) while being very receptive to the idea that white people (and particularly white men) are being systematically disadvantaged.

What is your point?

My point is that it's ridiculous to say they're pushed to the left in any meaningful way. They're not doctrinaire socialists, they're absolutely not social progressives, saying black people are pushed to the left is just an example of the oversimplified spectrum.

I put it to you that there a significant faction in American politics that is hostile to black civil rights

Reading a history book I'd find it hard to disagree, but I would find it hard to read modernity and decide that they're opposed to civil rights and not the way civil rights get gerrymandered.

Black identity, by contrast, is largely an outside imposition

I disagree; I think the bulk of evidence suggests that every racial group except white people have a considerable amount of in-group preference. Black identity might be strengthened by the outside effect, but it's absolutely not the sole cause, nor do I think the primary one.

being very receptive to the idea that white people (and particularly white men) are being systematically disadvantaged.

It's not like there's piles of evidence for that from every major university, major publishing company, written directly into the law in the non-US Anglosphere, etc.

Anti-black racism is an interpersonal issue, no longer a legibly systematic one. Here I wish for a word that distinguishes between "systematic as in black-letter regulation" and "systematic as in rooted in historical discrimination continuing to echo down the generations," but alas, I don't know of one.

Anti-black racism is sui generis in the United States, especially in the South. Racism, xenophobia, and other forms of bigotry generally push minorities left, but this is, for the most part, garden variety discrimination that you find everywhere to some degree.

Disagree. It appears that the only group capable of being robustly non-leftist over time, worldwide, is American whites. Everything else is just fluff. American whites, particularly married ones, are a super unique set of individuals that keep the country, and thereby the world from descending into leftist decline.

I'm not sure, blacks are more religious, more anti-LGBT, there is certainly a strong foundation in which they could be the core of the right. Anyway, what @Skibboleth was saying is to explain why black people moves more generally as a voting bloc instead of splintering.

My counterpoint would be that those cultural beliefs are window dressing. Without core beliefs for personal responsibility and skepticism about the long-term effects of the welfare state, it's worthless. Black voters choose the side that promises the most spoils and reparations-lite for them.

To be clear, this is probably true for all voters. I've run the data analysis to split voting blocs among racial and gender segments. Their support for student loan forgiveness had an R of .89 to the amount they typically owe:

Strongest Correlation: Groups that would benefit most financially show the highest support:
Black Women: $18,950 net benefit → 76% support
Black Men: $14,400 net benefit → 68% support
Hispanic Women: $11,400 net benefit → 72% support

Negative Net Benefit Groups show predictably lower support:

Asian Men: -$2,300 net cost → 30% support
White Men: -$250 net cost → 32% support

Likewise, my philosophy now is to always vote for lower taxes, regardless of the future implications to the national debt, since it's become unworkable to cut spending.

If nothing else, I would argue that the people who are racist against blacks are more likely to be found in the Republican Party and less likely to be actively criticized. In addition, if the Republican Party keeps discriminating against them as a group for the reason that they are usually Dem, it doesn't exactly endear them to the Republicans even if said discrimination would go away if they became solidly Republican.

HBD can completely explain this. If you have lower ability than your community then you will vote for more redistribution. The prior system could be 100% fair in a meritocratic way, but because you have less human capital you would prefer more free stuff from the government even if it means more taxes (which you largely don’t pay).

It’s mostly just because they are poor and compete poorly in a free market/meritocratic environment. You don’t need racism to explain this result.

If you have lower ability than your community then you will vote for more redistribution.

Support for socialism increases with education and SES, no?

Does it? After the last decade I'm very skeptical of "it's just a handful of loud college students" theories, but in the case of support for socialism it may actually be just a handful of loud college students?

Currently the demographic most likely to say US national spending on welfare is "too little" is people with "less than high school" education (vs high school graduates and college graduates), and this is the case far more often than not, although the correlation with education seems surprisingly weak in general - high school graduates' and college graduates' responses are pretty much neck-and-neck.

That's not an apples-to-apples question, I admit. Might there be people who think we should overthrow capitalism altogether and perfect the New Soviet Man or whatever but who also don't want any more money going to today's lumpenproles? It still seems like a good indicator.

Does it? After the last decade I'm very skeptical of "it's just a handful of loud college students" theories, but in the case of support for socialism it may actually be just a handful of loud college students?

Zohran Mandami argues otherwise.

Yeah, "handful" was grossly wrong. 30% for "more welfare", geographically non-uniform, means there's probably going to be somewhere you can get a plurality to vote for seizing the means of production ... grocery retail? really? ...

But my point is just that, if loud vocal support for more welfare seems to be coming disproportionally from college students, that's because of a disproportionality in "loud" and "vocal", not in "support".

No?

Have you ever seen anyone, of any race or class, say “I guess I’m low human capital, time to get on the dole”? Okay, maybe angsty channers. But it’s really not the normal mindset.

Also, this would predict that poor Appalachian whites should vote Dem, which does not appear to have been true for some time.

Have you ever seen anyone, of any race or class, say “I guess I’m low human capital, time to get on the dole”?

Of course they don't phrase it like that, in much the same way approximately no one considers themselves evil, but yeah I do think resentment about relative value does play a significant role in the expectation of welfare.

this would predict that poor Appalachian whites should vote Dem, which does not appear to have been true for some time.

But it was true for a long time before that, before Dem stances on gun control and other social issues, combined with weakening union influence, caused them to flip. And one could fairly argue there's a certain... hmm... something akin to hypocrisy in regards to what kinds of welfare should be allowed, and why, and who gets it. Consider attitudes on disability versus, perhaps, Section 8.

Other cultural factors presumably explain why blacks stayed Dem despite being overwhelmingly more conservative than the average white Dem.

Have you ever seen anyone, of any race or class, say “I guess I’m low human capital, time to get on the dole”? Okay, maybe angsty channers. But it’s really not the normal mindset.

No! The best part about black scam culture is they think they are geniuses and we are all the idiots for working regular jobs while they can lie and scheme and the only real consequences ever are a low credit score or a felony conviction here or there. And they don't even really internalize thinking about the felony, "oh that was uncle Thad, I'm smarter than him and wont get caught."

Are you trying to imply that this sort of attitude is somehow unique to the black underclass? In my experience it is endemic.

It is certainly not endemic, or at least was not until recently. I went to a majority white, mostly middle class, some high some low, high school with a sizeable Mexican minority population. The activities you describe would never have occurred in any of the classes amongst the white students. And since our school was intellectually segregated, it was also functionally racially segregated, so I don't know what the Mexicans were doing. I did experience some "cheating culture" as I got to engineering school and the racial makeup included more Asians. Cheating culture is bad, but is different from scam culture. None of the engineering students were ever shoplifting with abandon. Perhaps from time to time someone games the food court by bringing a laptop and working there from 9am to 10pm only swiping in once, thats like the biggest scam.

And going back to my hometown, if you were caught by a neighbor using EBT you'd be socially ostracized, the rare section 8 housing person would not be invited to block parties. There were no Learing centers. If you did that you'd be charged with felonies. Heck, the police spent like 6 months investigating a "meth ring" where their seizure was 5 grams hidden under a table at a bar. Where I currently live, 5 grams is barely considered chargeable unless the fellow was picked up doing something else WORSE and the meth charge is just a kicker to get a plea deal.

And the opposite is true in the full on scam culture. These people make facebook videos and tutorials on scamming. The Learing centers all follow a business model propagated from some grey market scam culture NGOs. People sell EBT cards for booze. Its all very different from the normal world of 2000, and scam culture (unlike cheating culture) isn't new. It goes way back to before I was borne. Welfare queens wasn't Reagan slander, it was real life.

Hell, I just was in court. As I was waiting for my order from the clerk the next case was called. Child support case. Male, 20, convicted felon, on pretrial release for domestic violence, somehow drives a Tesla despite no documented employment. On EBT and S8. Female, 19, mother of one (alleged father is the male), currently pregnant (allegedly also his). No documented employment. Lives in a neighborhood where average rents are 3k a month with just herself and the baby. Then I get to leave before things finish. But still. Scam culture is its whole own level.

And going back to my hometown, if you were caught by a neighbor using EBT you'd be socially ostracized, the rare section 8 housing person would not be invited to block parties.

Maybe I am dumb, so these people are on SNAP or something and they're poor so it's automatically assumed they are leeches on society and must be shun?

More that if you can't or won't support yourself, and your friends, family, and church are unwilling to help you, you're almost certainly some kind of fuckup likely to cause problems for others.

Maybe I am dumb, so these people are on SNAP or something and they're poor so it's automatically assumed they are leeches on society and must be shun?

Why wouldn't you come to that conclusion. Not only are they objectively leeches on society, their move when being poor was not to build a social network that would help support them, instead they went and got other people's money through forcible taxation so they can buy chips and soda.

Unique, no. Overrepresented, likely. PPP loan scams would be one of the notable, recent examples.

Though I think "don't be the chump" scam culture has increased in other social and racial classes, like with getting various diagnoses for extra time on college tests and assignments cuts across those lines.

And "why am I a fucking chump" perception of, say, net taxpayers continues to generate a lot of resentment as we burn the stored goodwill.

"Don't be the chump" is downstream of cheaters prospering.

If you have lower ability than your community then you will vote for more redistribution.

Not necessarily. As long as you believe there is a good chance for you to become rich, that is often enough to justify voting against it. Whether your odds are actually good is an entirely different matter. People who are poorly off don't necessarily run on cold logic, and even if they do, they may be unable to see how redistribution helps them more than it hurts.

As long as you believe there is a good chance for you to become rich, that is often enough to justify voting against it.

Why would you believe this when you see your group failing more in the market?

It occurs to me that smart people often can't even imagine what it's like to be dumb.

Once you see it, it's impossible to miss how much internet discourse is dominated by people who never interact with the bottom quintile/decile and have zero idea how those groups think or act.

Because hope is not rational, and it is easy to believe yourself better than your peers. Even if said belief is an illusion.

Yeah, that's a pretty hard sell given that manifestly it is considered a problem in the community and even rich blacks line up behind Democrats as a result.

They did not rule categorically that race may not be used as a factor in redistricting decisions, but they did rule that if a redistricting decision could be explained by a partisan gerrymander rather than a racial one, there was no case.

This is like saying that if I ban my employees from wearing turbans during work then I'm not discriminating against Sikh Men, even though Sikh Men are the ones who are going to be hit by the change almost exclusively. All I've done is laundered religious prejudice through an apparently neutral criteria. Shame on the 6 ideological justices.

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This is just disparate impact. I agree with Gail / Richard here that any possible standard you can think of has a disparate impact, and that its bad and dumb and makes no sense.

Politically I am fine with disparate impact when the country was 85/15 white/black. But it doesn’t work at all after the migration of last 40 years.

That being said VRA has always been unconstitutional allow with all racial discrimination.

IIRC a number of noisy affirmative-action opponents have said they would be willing to hold noses and support a compromise where affirmative action (and laws like disparate impact that de facto mandate it) was credibly restricted to ADOS blacks and tribally enrolled native Americans.

This isn't going to happen because

  • Machine politicians of other ethnicities are a key element of the Democratic coalition that could punish politicians for doing the deal.
  • White anti-black racists are a key element of the Republican coalition likewise
  • The vast majority of the problems caused by low-human-capital sub-populations in the US are caused by ADOS blacks anyway.

But affirmative action in favour of poorly assimilated immigrant-descended sub-populations is one of the most socially corrosive things you can do.

This seems like a deeper explanation of what I said works for me. Logically the two groups are different. Natives and blacks aren’t here by choice so finding a way to get them to have special representation that they couldn’t earn on their own makes some sense.

The reason you left out is the ratio we would have today with more groups claiming they need special accommodations. You can have functional institutions when 15% of the people have special status but the other 85% are assimilated whites who would still have comfortable governing majorities. It would be like 60-40 today. You lose the comfortable majority to govern today. The less the ratio is “meritocratic” and the more it is “special privilege” the worse the system becomes.

It would be like 60-40 today.

Worse than that because women are affirmative-action eligible.

Try to think of a way of hiring or promoting people that does not benefit one group at the expense of another.

Simple: give up on meritocracy and equal protection, and set a quota by race/sex/etc. If you can't tune it perfectly (e.g. 5/10 board members can be women, but other areas don't have strict categories or nice numbers), then be sure to err against non-protected groups.

It's not good, but it is almost as simple as figuring out what the criteria is and then following it.

In order to stop conspiracy theory disparate impact racism you're advocating for explicit racism.

The problem is that races are not equally politically united. It's not a given that any race (besides African-Americans) are going to be for a party to such a degree that a partisan gerrymander is synonymous with a racial one. So you risk essentially rewarding the most polarized groups (presumably the thing we eventually want less of) and/or disenfranchising less polarized people in order to give them representation.

It's not an easy problem. I'd say it's near unavoidable under the current system, like gerrymandering itself. What is the compromise solution here? Some room for partisan gerrymandering except where it causes a racial gerrymander which then, by your own argument, is a partisan gerrymander that necessitates a gerrymander in the other direction?

Would you say the black person who says, "I don't want to be assumed to vote Democrat just because I'm black" is more sympathetic to this SCOTUS decision than one who's fine with that assumption?

It's outdated by now, but exit polling of the 2016 election had Black voters favoring Clinton more than Republicans favored Trump. It was literally more true than "I don't want to be assumed to vote Republican just because I'm a Republican" in that case.

The solution here would be an arms length neutral body made up of experts from non-political backgrounds which deicdes on districts and isn't subject to the executive in who's on it. A bit like how the Judicial Appointments Comission decides on who to appoint as judges in the UK completely independent from whoever is in government at the time. All the gerrymandered angular districts would disappear in one fell swoop and things would look a lot more reasonable.

  • -13

Precisely. And of course the only acceptably neutral, arms-length body of experts from non-political backgrounds and isn't subject to the executive is the one that I personally select.

It's amazing how many things turn out to work this way.

That just a who’s watching the watchers game. A fight to gain political power within the selection committee.

But a bigger issue and a huge Chesterton Fence is it would be an attack on State’s Rights and their internal politics. I know the left generally hates States Rights because it limits their power more but we do have regional economies. You can only have a few SuperStar high margin based economies. Most do not work in those fields. Most people build a widget for $4 and sell it for $5. A lot of people have seen a huge QOL improvement being able to move out of California. Somewhat housing related but the tax regime Apple or Jane St can bear is not the same tax regime a small moat manufacturer can bear.

Perhaps you could just pass an Amendment limiting it to congressional districts but it would be a slippery slope.

Federal Election gerrymandering is bad but if everyone does it then it’s overall effect on federal politics is smaller.

That just a who’s watching the watchers game. A fight to gain political power within the selection committee.

It is a solved problem in every other democracy with single-member districts, despite the stakes being even higher in Parliamentary systems. I agree that the level of partisan rancour in the US right now is that it couldn't be done from scratch, with the possible exception where a non-partisan populist governor in a purple state like Jesse Ventura decided to make ending gerrymandering in the state part of his legacy. In the US context, proportional representation within states (or large multi-member districts in the largest states - NY could have separate lists for NYC+LI and upstate, for example) is the obviously correct approach.

But a bigger issue and a huge Chesterton Fence is it would be an attack on State’s Rights and their internal politics.

This is a good rhetorical point for conservatives to make to each other, but the moral logic of States' Rights doesn't include a state's right to organise its government in a sufficiently non-democratic way. There isn't a Chesterton's Fence here - the general principle is in the Constitution (the "republican form of government" clause) and there is a history of successful federal interventions against insufficiently internally democratic states during the civil rights era. (Under current SCOTUS doctrine there are no grounds for intervention, but "current SCOTUS doctrine" is not a moral argument, and in a world where "everyone knows" that SCOTUS is a partisan institution that doesn't really believe in the rule of law it isn't a legal argument either.)

There are some purple states (notably North Carolina and Wisconsin) where the state legislature is so gerrymandered (and has the power to continue to gerrymander itself in perpetuity) that state legislators are no longer meaningfully accountable to voters. In the current year there is no federal authority that could intervene as anything other than a blatant partisan flex, but if SCOTUS still had the credibility it did in 1964 then intervening would be very much within the tradition of American constitutionalism.

Federal Election gerrymandering is bad but if everyone does it then it’s overall effect on federal politics is smaller.

Federal election gerrymandering ultimately destroys state-level politics by making state elections proxy federal elections. This is a large part of why the OG Progressives supported the 17th amendment. (The other was that US senate elections in state legislatures were a bribe magnet). This is an old problem - the 1858 state legislative elections in Illinois are famous for a series of debates between US Senate candidates who were not on the ballot.

Perhaps nice compact districts like this.

Anyway, we lack angels in the form of neutral experts to redistrict us.

My 55% serious solution is to redistrict via random parameters every six years, without any human input.

My trolling solution is to randomly assign voters to districts: "look ma, no consideration at all of race, creed, or anything". Except that it's definitionally the worst possible gerrymander.

Honestly, I think geographic districting is a lost cause and proportional statewide representation would at least give easy answers to these problems.

I'm pretty sure this one of the Supreme Court partisan gerrymandering cases had this exact fact-pattern. They wrote a computer program to generate hundreds of possible maps that all comply with "traditional districting criteria", then picked the map that had the most Republican seats.

The key thing that makes the difference in the UK (and, AFIAK, other Commonwealth countries) is that there is a small amount of wiggle-room on equal electorates, allowing most districts to align with local government boundaries that change a lot less often than the redistricting cycle.

If the non-partisan merit criterion is "draw as many district boundaries on municipal boundaries as possible, conditional on all districts having equal electorates to within 5%" then there may even be a knowable optimum answer, and in any case there is less wiggle-room than "draw compact districts with exactly equal census populations" because you can't tweak boundaries at census tract level.

When the UK Boundary Commission consults on map changes, they get two types of response:

  • Responses organised by political parties for partisan purposes, where the actual arguments made are specious.
  • Responses saying that they should tolerate even more population inequality than we already do to better align district boundaries with natural boundaries (which are usually, but not always, municipal boundaries).

At least in the UK, real normie voters would rather be mildly under-represented than have an unnatural constituency drawn based on a size criterion. The textbook example is the Isle of Wight where the locals insisted on having a single constituency with 113k voters (vs a national target of 73k) rather than having 40k of them share an MP with part of the mainland. In my own mis-spent youth as a local politician when I was in grad school in Cambridge, Cambridge residents similarly felt that the City of Cambridge (c. 90k voters) should be a single constituency with an aligned boundary, although the Boundary Commission ignored them and drew right-size constituencies that put one ward into the adjacent rural seat. Uncontroversially, the whole county of Cambridgeshire got exactly 8 constituencies (with no constituency crossing the county line) despite an electorate that would justify about 8.2.

If the non-partisan merit criterion is "draw as many district boundaries on municipal boundaries as possible, conditional on all districts having equal electorates to within 5%" then there may even be a knowable optimum answer, and in any case there is less wiggle-room than "draw compact districts with exactly equal census populations" because you can't tweak boundaries at census tract level.

There can be a knowable optimum answer under those conditions, but in much of the US such a map would "pack" Democrats, giving Republicans a significant advantage -- that's why I posted the Florida map, which does pretty much that.

I think your example is more than simply disparate impact. If you decide that out of all headwear, turbans are verboten it seems likely that you are intentionally using this as a proxy.

A better comparison would be an accounting firm which only hires hot women. Then some Muslims complain that this is a discrimination against Muslims, because in traditional Muslim families, it is the husband who works outside the house and earns money. The employer does not give a damn about the religious affiliations of his employees, as long as there is enough cleavage for him to leer at. Is the employer guilty of religious discrimination?

Southern Republicans don't care about the skin color of the voters, they would happily win with the votes of the Blacks if the Blacks were voting for them. However, they care about the Republicans winning the maximum amount of seats, and Blacks tend to vote for Democrats, so they gerrymander to constrain the voting power of them, just like they try to constrain the voting power of urban communities or furries.

If Republicans were on record that they would rather lose than win with Black votes, things would be clear, it would be straightforward racial discrimination. This way, it seems much less clear, but I would argue that partisan gerrymandering is bad in itself.

Obviously FPTP is to blame, and the US should just adopt a better voting system. Or they should do recursive gerrymandering. (7% voted for candidate A, but due to communal gerrymandering, candidate A won 13% of the communities. Due to the gerrymandering of the communities, this won him 26% of the districts. Due to the distribution of states, this this won him 51% percent of the EC vote, so welcome your new president.)

If you decide that out of all headwear, turbans are verboten it seems likely that you are intentionally using this as a proxy.

Unironically, not so! If I’m running a machine shop, I don’t want turbans anywhere near my lathes. Other headwear doesn’t present nearly as much of a scalping risk.

I prefer to keep my head as far away from the spindle as possible when I'm operating a lathe, personally.

That is fair. If you ban shawls, turbans and neckties, (or even better, impose upper limits on the tensile strength of anything rope-y worn around above the belt line), I would call that very reasonable.

(Of course, for the SJ left, that is still disparate impact. And the fact that you are running a machine shop instead of an ad agency in the first place is just further evidence that you are in the enemy class.)

This runs into a very basic question: if a general rule has a disparate impact should you eliminate the general rule.

The historic proposition was that you can have the general rule but allow for reasonable accommodations (eg if you are fired for refusing to work the sabbath, then that isn’t quitting for unemployment purposes but if you claimed every day was the sabbath that would be quitting).

Here, there doesn’t seem to be an easy accommodation.

if a general rule has a disparate impact should you eliminate the general rule.

If you look closely enough (and I've never seen a specific proposed amount of "acceptable" impact here), all general rules have a disparate impact at some form. I think it'd be difficult to come up with an example of two statistical variables that are absolutely uncorrelated for any sample size in the wild.

ETA: For a rather concrete example, any tax regime almost certainly has some degree of disparate impact. If income is correlated with race [citation left to reader], the burden of income taxation is as well, presenting a disparate impact on high earners (especially for a progressive taxation regime).

ANZAC Day and Welcome to Country

Anzac Day is an Australian national holiday on 25th April each year, devised to honour the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought in WW1. Gallipoli is one of the great national myths of Australia, at the start of the the transition from colony to real country. There’s a myth of ‘lions led by donkeys’ in that the British were too slow to secure their beachhead, their officers were having tea on the beach and then we got stuck in trench warfare. This is confected but helped solidify Australia as a nation distinct from Britain.

There are Anzac values like bravery, mateship, camaraderie and ingenuity: William Scurry’s self-firing ‘drip rifle’ that was used to mask the retreat. If you went to school in Australia you’d have memories of a student mangling The Last Post on a bugle while in Assembly, everyone saying ‘lest we forget’ and speeches about sacrifice and duty and values.

More recently, there has been booing during a Welcome to Country ceremony conducted in the Melbourne Dawn Service for Anzac Day A transcript of the Welcome to Country, from Bunurong Elder and Senior Cultural Heritage Officer Mark Brown:

“I am uncle Mark Brown, elder and senior cultural heritage officer of the Bunurong people. And today I'm here to welcome everybody to my father's country. Beautiful Bunarong country.

But before we do that, as always, we take a moment, we pay our acknowledgements, and we pay our respects. We pay our respect to all of my ancestors. We pay our respect to all of my elders. And we pay our respect to all of my community members, past, present, and emerging, And we acknowledge the continuous and unbroken connection to country for the Bunurong people.

We also pay acknowledgements and respects to all traditional custodians of Australia, Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. And we pay acknowledgements and respects to all of my indigenous brothers and sisters from around the world who work, rest, live or play on Bunurong country. We acknowledge their continuous and unbroken connection to country for all of their people, and we thank each and every single one of them for being here with us.

But today, on the sacred lands of the Bunurong people, we all gather in the spirit of respect, unity, and reconciliation. And this welcome, this welcome is an opportunity. It is an opportunity for us to honour and respect the deep cultural heritage of the Bunurong people of the Kulin nation, whose elders and community members have generously looked after these lands for countless generations.

My people have a deep spiritual connection to these lands, encompassing all of our rivers, our mountains, our coastal areas, and all of our beautiful bushlands that surround us today. Our traditional territory spans from the Werribee River in the west and moves to Diggers Rest in the north. We follow it over to the Dandenong Ranges, the Yarra Valley, and down to Wilson's Prom. We encompass the top end of Tasmania, which we share with the beautiful Palawa people. French, Phillip, King and Flinders islands are also ours.

And these are the traditional lands and territories of the Bunurong people that I welcome everybody to today. And as we gather here today, we gather in the respect of all of my people, my family, the fighting Gunditj and the Bunurong.

So Wominjeka and welcome to beautiful Bunurong country, my father's country.

Thank you."

‘Welcome to Country’ is a new myth-building rite that’s conducted at just about all major and minor public occasions in Australia these days, where an Aboriginal comes and gives an address and affirms, in some more or less nebulous way, that his people are the real owners of the land. Maybe they're traditional custodians. Or perhaps 'sovereignty was never ceded'. Sometimes they're really small and quick, when it's just white people reading out a script in a monotone as a preamble to some trivial meeting, even zoom meetings sometimes.

One thing that I observe is this interchangeable use of the first person. He uses ‘my people’, ‘my indigenous brothers’ and also ‘our rivers’, ‘islands are ours’. Yet he also says how ‘we pay our respects to all of my elders’. He’s switching from being ‘I am here as part of all Australians present’ to ‘I am one of the true landowners, with a continuous and unbroken connection to my country’ as he sees fit. He’s paying respect as an Australian, on behalf of all others present, to himself as an indigenous elder and presenting it as an opportunity.

Maybe he adlibs too, trying to be more aggressive in the face of booing. It’s visible that he’s sad and upset about being booed.

War

Then there’s the reference to fighting Gunditijmara.

In essence, whites crushed Aboriginals wherever they came into conflict during colonization. Aboriginals largely lacked the martial culture and organization of Native Americans, who managed to inflict occasional defeats on white troops and massacre civilians with more success. The Comanche launched huge raids into Mexico and depopulated the north, did a lot of damage to Texas. None of that ever happened in Australia, it was one-sided in the extreme.

“It's believed that around 80 settlers died; while the Gunditjmara suffered the loss of 6,500 of their people, from a total of 7000.”

The SBS (state-run Australian ethnic media outlet) attribute the crushing defeat in this war of resistance partially to the Native Police, aboriginal troops with white officers. It seems that is one of the few kinds of multiculturalism that the SBS doesn’t favour:

“They wouldn’t have done what they did if they had been in a right mindset, and their tradition," said Ms Lovett.

"You reward them with shiny (things) and make them feel important. Because they hadn’t felt important for a long time. They were victims of what happened to all of us."

The whole article is full of cope really, glorifying sheep-stealing raids as an epic struggle of resistance, which brings me back to my main point.

The aboriginal tribes of Australia lost incredibly badly in warfare, it was possibly the most crushing and one-sided defeat in history, largely inflicted by adhoc militias and settlers rather than troops.

Peace

Then the aboriginals won a series of incredible political victories, despite being generally hopeless.

Today they get about $6 billion AUD a year in indigenous specific services, targeted exclusively at them, in addition to regular spending. Their tax input is minimal. Expenditure per person for aboriginals is roughly twice that for non-indigenous people (in large part due to how they live out in remote locations where it’s hard to provide goods and services) and also because they’re incredibly dysfunctional, requiring welfare and adult supervision.

They get partial native title over 70% of Australia's landmass, albeit mostly the desolate parts and block development.

Petrol in remote areas needs additives put in it to stop them sniffing it and suffering brain damage.

Indigenous youth make up 55% of those in youth detention despite being only 7% of the youth. Adults, despite being only 3% of the national population, represent 33% of the prison population. They are the most incarcerated people in the world because they commit enormous amounts of crime, mostly against eachother.

There are aboriginal towns in Australia 30x more violent than the US, even more violent than the nastier American cities.

They commit 30-80x more domestic violence against women than the Australian average.

Alice Springs at one point had the world’s highest stabbing rate, mostly aboriginal women being stabbed. It hasn't significantly improved.

There are occasional ‘interventions’ when white politicians get appalled by how violent and brutal their remote towns are and decide to ban alcohol and pornography. Australian politicians love banning things. But the situation was bad, there was and remains an epidemic of abuse and child rape in Aboriginal areas, children getting STDs:

90% of school age children in some places suffering abuse.

There’s a cycle where the situation gets really bad, then the government cracks down, left-wingers and NGOs decry it as racist and authoritarian and eventually the crackdown ends. There’s no positive long term change, only expenditure of money. The only thing that’s long-term is white people being blamed, somehow white colonization is said to have caused all this pedophilia and domestic violence, general incompetence. In truth they were already doing that when whites got here, they had ancient traditions of infanticide, ritual cannibalism, scarification and intertribal warfare. I don’t see how British colonization made the aboriginals horrifically violent and rapey to eachother but Ireland remains fine despite centuries of colonization and harsh treatment. Who loses their land and decides to become a pedophile or beat their wife to a pulp?

More realistically they were just inherently stupid to begin with, which is why they never got around to agriculture or more advanced social organization. How much time and effort needs to be expended trying to make these people meet the standards of others? Why expend effort trying to make them act like white people, while also encouraging and valorizing them for their indigeneity, for sitting on Australia for 60,000 years with little to show for it? Where is the value in this? Why even try? A billion dollars represents hundreds of lifetimes of labour, taken away by the state.

Some of my friends worked with the failed referendum to give Aboriginals a Voice to Parliament (a great tool for hectoring whites and asking for more money, more privileges). The ‘real’ black aboriginal elders, the ones who aren’t cherrypicked speakers, the ones they brought in from the bush to provide a more authentic perspective, they had no conceptual understanding of legislation or abstract concepts generally, consulting them was impossible. It was like they were drunk, my politically correct friends said. Maybe they were drunk. The elite aboriginal activists weren’t that much better, constantly trying to do crazy self-defeating things. This brings me to Lydia Thorpe.

A left-leaning Melbourne seat elected a partially aboriginal woman, Lydia Thorpe, to the Senate who made a complete embarrassment of herself and the Greens Party. She was in a relationship with an outlawed bikie gang ex-president while serving on the parliamentary law enforcement committee. She applauded an arson attack of the Old Parliament House as the colonial system burning down.

In a June 2022 interview, Thorpe said that the parliament has "no permission to be here [in Australia]" and that she’s a parliament member "only" so she can "infiltrate" the "colonial project." She added that the Australian flag had "no permission to be" in the land.

She heckled King Charles III at Parliament House and claimed she had sworn allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II’s ‘hairs’ rather than ‘heirs’. She then walked it back when it was pointed out that she’d signed a document for her oath and the document was spelled correctly.

She got into an altercation outside a Melbourne strip club, approaching white patrons and telling them they had small penises and had stolen her land. She’s since been permanently banned from that strip club.

In short, she’s a racist stereotype given flesh, a single mother at 17. An idiot who thinks she’s smarter than she is and still in the Senate.

Democracy is not a suicide pact, why would any normal people tolerate wreckers who are openly trying to undermine and destroy the country that they think is illegitimate, who clearly hold their oaths in total contempt? If this woman had any actual power, it is overwhelmingly clear that she'd use it solely for her co-ethnics and to extract from whites, which was my problem with the Voice to Parliament. Ironically, she opposed that, instead demanding a treaty where various aboriginal tribes would be considered like independent states.

As a group, Aboriginals make Sub-Saharan Africans look like paragons of civilization. Some did at least develop kingdoms, metalworking and agriculture. Aboriginals did not develop Australia in any way recognizable to civilized peoples. One can only take their word for it that they have a deep, invisible, spiritual connection to the land.

And yet despite all this dysfunction and incompetence, it’s fashionable and useful to have indigenous heritage. Sometimes universities boast on social media over their blue eyed, white-faced ‘indigenous’ medical graduates, who exploit the extra help given to nominally aboriginal students and their higher IQs, less dysfunctional family upbringings to get ahead. If they’re even aboriginal at all and not just lying.

Aboriginals get their customary law partially applied in some cases, they get more lenient treatment in the real courts, with judges and police incentivized informally to reduce their incarceration, find non-punitive ways of managing their dysfunction.

They get another $AUD billion a year in preferential govt contracting.

They can even be brought in to make Anzac Day speeches where about 85% of the content is them personally claiming the country that the fallen, overwhelmingly white, soldiers fought and died for. ANZACs were not mentioned at all in Brown’s speech, only affirmations to his people's claim to the country and these unsubtle implications that he's the authority who decides who other people pay respect to. Then they take a speaking fee for that. Meanwhile, war memorials are vandalized with graffiti such as ‘the colony will fall’…

It’s as if they won a war and are enjoying the spoils from the conquered people. Isn't this world-historically bizarre?

Yet there’s been booing from the audience, organized by younger and more radical rightwingers presumably. Naturally the booing was condemned by the state premiers and those who actually run the country as disrespectful to the war dead - though none of the soldiers who spoke about the war dead were booed. Some of the more rightwing senators are taking easier potshots like ‘it’s inappropriate to have a hat on while making a speech in a Dawn Service’ or denying that veterans need to be welcomed back to their country. They don't deny the central case generally, that whites need to pay respects and pay tribute to a conquered people. Just not on Anzac Day.

Here’s a twitter topic if you want to look at some other perspectives.

Why is there only booing about this? In 1870 Bismarck edited a single letter to make the tone a little curt, like Wilhelm had abruptly rebuffed the French ambassador and sent a low-ranked officer to convey the message. Bismarck had it leaked on Bastille day and that started a major war with France. Bismarck is considered the aggressor, people generally accepted at the time the French couldn’t accept an insult like that! Hundreds of thousands died over national honour.

The conquered are giving laws to the conquerors.

This is a microcosm of the key trend of the last 100 years, whites who forcibly conquered 90% of the world bending over backwards to be nice and get forgiveness from the peoples they conquered. The conquered peoples quickly organized to take maximum possible advantage of this bizarre blunder, organizing more or less adeptly to demand treaties, land rights, welfare payments, reparations and special ceremonies to further legitimize and expand this political superiority.

Despite the passivity, it is what war is all about: obtaining land and obtaining wealth or labour from others. Political and social status. Securing these things from challengers. That is what wars are fought for, only the means are non-kinetic.

There seems to be a concept that after enough of these political ceremonies, apologies, reparations (formal or just via progressive taxation), criminal justice reforms and affirmative action black people (or blak as they sometimes call themselves in Australia) are going to be happy and we’ll all dance together in harmony. Some day the Gap will be Closed, that's the ostensible plan that Australia pursues.

If you give people money and status because you conquered them, they’re going to use this and try to get more wealth from you. If you pay for something, you get more of it. It creates incentives for professional political workers like Elder Brown to show up and hone rabblerousing, rhetorical, guilt-tripping skills. It creates incentives to be more strident and demanding to prove ideological purity and righteousness. And there’s also a massive sunk cost fallacy amongst white people. Many officials, taxpayers and donors don’t want to believe that they’ve spent billions, hundreds of billions, trillions paying subsidies, apologising to and working for low-performers who aren’t going to get their act together anytime soon and certainly aren’t going to be grateful for it. It would be incredibly embarrassing to change course now. In fact, after paying all this lip service to colonial sins and a couple trillion in foreign aid to Africa, the Global Majority of black and brown people are multiplying and migrating over to Europe, America, Australia as ‘climate refugees’, looking for more money, welfare and special privileges. Ireland never colonized anyone, yet isn't escaping diversity.

The Israelis don’t make this mistake, there aren’t any Palestinian land acknowledgements in the West Bank. They make good use of language and ritual, as did the Australians of old. In the 19th century, Australian newspapers would report on how colonists would eagerly ‘disperse’ or ‘duly and efficiently pound’ aboriginals. The Native Police would ‘give them a dressing down’, a ‘thumping’ or ‘a shaking up’.

In Israel there’s all this talk about security zones, neutralizing, mowing the lawn, suspected militants, human shields, Dahiya doctrine. This is a kind of political warfare, on the other side there are words like Holocaust, Nazi and genocide, for Australia ‘Invasion Day’ rather than Australia Day.

We obsess far too much about physical weapons, hypersonic missiles, tanks and drones. They are important in conflicts where both sides are politically strong and united: traditional interstate wars. But political weapons are more important, they control that unity and self-conception. What good is it winning wars if you lose the peace?

Better not to fight at all, especially if hopelessly outgunned and outmatched. Better to just take wealth and land slowly through legal means, engineer new rites to legitimize authority and status and national self-concept. Even traditional warfare is a contest of willpower, the capacity to endure pain and fight on for a given reward, it’s a test of political strength.

AI

No post of mine would be complete without a digression on AI... Bunurong Elder Mark Brown has an AI-written website hawking his services:

He even made an AI-written statement decrying how he was booed on linkedin:

Along with some AI jeers at Charlie Kirk too:

Charlie Kirk deserved the fate he brought on himself. When you spend your life fueling division, spreading lies, and tearing down communities, it is only a matter of time before that same poison turns back on you. His downfall isn’t tragedy — it’s justice catching up with him. The irony is that the hate he spread became the weight that dragged him down.

My assumption is that a default ChatGPT wouldn’t quite outright say ‘Charlie Kirk deserved his fate’ even though it’s inclined in that direction. I think Brown just left the memory feature on by default and it acclimated itself to his views. I imagine it would refuse his rightwing equivalent. I haven’t tested this though and don’t use ChatGPT, I’m interested in any thoughts others have with that, or other things mentioned.

I observe also that the culture war is global and only getting more global with automated cheap translation and the primacy of US media, especially social media. And AI acts as a force multiplier. I doubt Brown would’ve bothered to make a statement on Kirk if he had to write it out himself.

One wonders whether Brown is a real person or just a mouth reading out AI speeches. After all, you can’t hear an em dash as easily as you can read it. Beneath all these high-minded words, there’s this perpetual search for cash: $770 AUD for a Welcome to Country, $4500 for a keynote speech, $90 for AI designed t-shirts and hoodies. Art created by AI (made by whites and Asians), printed on T-shirts (made in America from global parts, so whites and Asians), justified by a synthetic social status.

The indigenous are just the most recent intellectual cat's paw to be used by the actual native elites to keep the restive natives at bay by humiliating and shaming them for imagined crimes against more historical natives.

Whether it's the poor, the disabled, the gay, the communist, the catholics or the blacks or the jews or the palestinians or the ukrainians, it's just the cudgel of the day. It's how rich mostly-white people who went to the best colleges convince themselves they are chosen by god to lead their countries. The "revolutionary" stance of Ivy league grads and rich kids. It's just a hatred of their own working class, and fear of their electoral power. Only with constant state-funded propaganda, educational brainwashing and public religious ceremonies can the nation be cleansed of its (historical and minor by comparison) sins. And of course, a lot of public money flushed down the toilet of middle-class bureaucrats siphoning off all the cash being spent on the problems they claim to want to alleviate.

I’ve long suspected this, most especially because it explains the very large disconnection between what the liberal elite think about as important issues for minorities and other countries and cultures and what those people who are minorities think and want. It’s very obvious that in very few cases that anyone in the elite actually knows any minorities. Like, no working class minority has ever cared or ever will care about appropriation, or past oppression. They want access to education, they want to live in low crime neighborhoods, they want good jobs. Liberals don’t care about most of that. They have zero interest in fixing local majority minority schools. They don’t care about whether or not those majority minority neighborhoods are safe. They could give a shit less whether the median black man can get a decent job. Moving middle class and upper middle class blacks into slightly better jobs doesn’t fix anything that working class minorities care about.

By preaching race-hate, the elites paper over the class switch they're making in those elite positions. It's not poor black american kids getting DEI positions, at least not at the elite level. It's mostly rich, elite african and caribbean kids from extreme privilege who then pretend to be oppressed because they had to go to Brown instead of Yale. The elites are betting that black americans will be happy just to see people who share their skin color in elite positions. And so on with all the other minorities.

The issues that are pushed by the elites are intended to fail. They are not reasonable requests. The minority grievance will be channeled into the stupidest possible lane to ensure that nothing really changes, but everyone can claim it's because they weren't radical enough. Abolish police? Men in women's sports? Chemically castrating gay kids? No borders? Generation after generation of the scions of wealth and power posing in commie gear and talking about tearing down the system.

The whole revolutionary pose is nothing more than a threadbare blanket over the rankest conservatism. So fearful of change they must stymie every advance by making it stupidly radical.

Minority grievances are the point in my mind, and in fact fostering grievances is a big part of the project of liberal democracy. If I can convince you that you are being wronged by those guys over there, you’re mine for life. You won’t go anywhere else especially to those guys over there who you believe are oppressing you in some fashion. And fixing those things would mean the grievances go away.

This is true of some people. The churn of the Progressive Stack, the daily fashions and directional changes burn a lot of people out, and disenchant many over time. This is part of what makes people more conservative as they age. Lots of gay people my age figuring out that conservatives don't hate them the way they thought and libs don't love them the way they thought.

Of course, many are so brain-rotted or pot-committed that they are psychologically incapable of personal growth, but that's why religious movements like to push irrevocable changes. Once you've castrated your child for The Cause, your identity and sanity is bound up with that party now.

Liberals don’t care about most of that. They have zero interest in fixing local majority minority schools.

I think this is false. The amount of money shovelled, with the full support of liberal elites and the votes of liberal non-elites, into uplifting children from historically disadvantaged groups (very much including white oiks and chavs in the UK - I'm not sure if class counts in the US) through education and anciliary services is more than we have spent on almost any other social problem except for elder poverty (which we have managed to bankrupt the west over, but we did at least solve the problem).

It is true that this spending has been ineffective for "bad apples and bad bets" reasons, but that doesn't imply zero interest in fixing poor schools, just an inability to triage.

Do you genuinely believe that the money is being shoveled into "uplifting children from historically disadvantaged groups" and not just "into the hands of liberal social workers"?

Social workers are sufficiently badly paid that they wouldn't be doing the job if they didn't genuinely believe that they were helping. I think this is a case where Occam's Razor points to mistake theory and not conflict theory.

We obsess far too much about physical weapons, hypersonic missiles, tanks and drones. They are important in conflicts where both sides are politically strong and united: traditional interstate wars. But political weapons are more important, they control that unity and self-conception. What good is it winning wars if you lose the peace?

I'm tapping the sign again. This is, literally, unequivocally, without exaggeration, the work of Marxists and Marxist fellow travelers. It is the cumulative result of memetic weapons deployed by the Soviet Union and its precursor philosophers (Marx, Engels, Adler, Lenin et. al.) in an explicit attempt to undermine and destroy capitalist (read: Western) society and bring about the Glorious Revolution. I realize that typing that out makes me sound like a schizophrenic, and it sometimes makes me want to tear my hair out that as it turns out the people who were most right about Communism and Communists were McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. But McCarthy was, broadly speaking if not always in specific individual cases, completely and utterly correct.

Modern progressives are the heirs of Antonio Gramsci. Read this list of Soviet talking points and tell me that I'm crazy:

  • There is no truth, only competing agendas.
  • All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.
  • There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
  • The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
  • Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
  • The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
  • For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
  • When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

These ideas were drummed up in a Soviet think-tank or by communist fellow-travelers in a philosophy department in Vienna circa 1880 and eventually deliberately transmitted to Western intellectuals as tools of societal subversion designed to hollow out capitalism and replace it with a globalist regime which cannot defend itself because the very act of defense is seen as morally wrong. Once this was accomplished, there would be no need for T-62s to roll across the Fulda Gap and risk all-out nuclear war.

If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand, the ultimatum. And what then? When Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be, he has told them that we're retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he'd rather "live on his knees than die on his feet."

This is from a speech by Reagan, in 1964. Nineteen sixty-four. The most xenophobic right-wing frothing-at-the-mouth commentators from the 60s 70s and 80s were if anything underselling Soviet subversion because it sounds ridiculous. Ideas as weapons? Come on we're Americans, we engage in free debate as a pastime! Any idea the Soviets could create can't hurt us because their propaganda is clumsy and inelegant, it is designed for their fear-bound uneducated populace, not the Leaders of the Free World!

Modern progressives are the heirs of Antonio Gramsci. Read this list of Soviet talking points and tell me that I'm crazy:

Heirs of Gramsci and also Orwell.

There is no truth, only competing agendas... but also there is truth, truth-telling ceremonies, true histories that have been distorted and covered up by the West. 'History is a whitewash', to quote Capaldi's Doctor Who in a reimagined, more diverse Victorian setting.

There are no objective standards by which we can judge one culture better than another... but favoured cultures to be glorified as feminist, rape-free (at least before whites arrived), diverse, inclusive and their darker aspects are left tastefully obscured or just blamed on white people for corrupting them...

The poor and criminals are victims of society but hate criminals are just evil and hateful.

There are these subversions and inversions as needed, different paths in the same direction.

You asked me why I label your thinking as anti-western and then you post this?

From my perspective every statement you just made only reinforces @MonkeyWithAMachinegun's thesis.

every statement you just made only reinforces @MonkeyWithAMachinegun's thesis.

Um... yes? That's the point? If this seems like a reasonable response to you, you're deeply confused about what that post is doing.

Are you endorsing @RandomRanger's claim that "There is no truth, only competing agendas" and that "There are no objective standards by which we can judge one culture better than another"?

If so, are you trying to argue that the position of absolute moral relativism seemingly being advocated here is "pro" rather than "anti" western? and If you do believe that, do you believe that CS Lewis, Adam Smith, St Augustine, and Marcus Aurelius would all share your belief?

Are you endorsing @RandomRanger's claim that "There is no truth, only competing agendas" and that "There are no objective standards by which we can judge one culture better than another"?

No, I am telling you you're misreading that post very, very badly. That is not his claim, but his account (further elaborating on MWAM's) of what the postmodern-influenced keyboard activists in question believe in practise. (And also, between the lines but I may as well make it explicit now, that you need to calm down and take a few deep breaths...)

To be more clear, I'm saying that the claim that 'there's no truth, only competing agendas' is just a tactic, it's only rolled out in certain circumstances when the aim is to muddy the air. It's like how there's no such thing as race, just the human race and there's also no definition of race because of all this genetic variation... but also Black gets its capital letter and not white and any idiot can immediately see racial differences at first glance, which is how the whole system works. Try telling a Brazilian admission board that there is no race, just the human race and see how far you get with that. The definition of the words change to meet the needs at the time.

And that's why I said they were heirs of Orwell.

Are you posting under the influence, sir?

These ideas were drummed up in a Soviet think-tank or by communist fellow-travelers in a philosophy department in Vienna circa 1880

Were they? I mean, maybe, but I don't know if I can take ESR's word for it.

So I'm not a philosopher by training, and I'll welcome correction on this by someone from the motte who knows more, but my understanding is that yes. At the very least, two of those points:

All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

And

The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

Are straight up Soviet propaganda cliches.

The soviets were certainly partial to the first, but even Tolstoy was suggesting that lynching negros negates America's prosperity:

In a 1905 interview with The Century magazine, Leo Tolstoy criticised American culture, where despite "virtually no hindrances to individual development", yet "you lynch negroes, form trusts, and adopt imperialism."[20]

So I'm not convinced that this one was thought up by a Soviet think tank.

Similarly, the second critique goes back at least to Hobson:

When productive capacity grew faster than consumer demand, there was very soon an excess of this capacity (relative to consumer demand), and, hence, there were few profitable domestic investment outlets. Foreign investment was the only answer. But, insofar as the same problem existed in every industrialized capitalist country, such foreign investment was possible only if non-capitalist countries could be "civilized", "Christianized", and "uplifted"—that is, if their traditional institutions could be forcefully destroyed, and the people coercively brought under the domain of the "invisible hand" of market capitalism. So, imperialism was the only answer.[2]

While I agree these two sentiments were not necessarily thought up in a Soviet lab somewhere, that's why I mentioned that the other option was they were composed:

by communist fellow-travelers in a philosophy department in Vienna circa 1880

I should have been explicit in that I don't literally mean Vienna in the year 1880 and only Vienna in the year 1880, but rather that these ideas were the result of Marxist thought or proto-socialist thought which influenced Marx.

Tolstoy was suggesting that lynching negros negates America's prosperity... So I'm not convinced that this one was thought up by a Soviet think tank.

No, but he was an anarchist, which I believe fits the definition of "fellow-traveler", or as the Bolsheviks would have said a "poputchik." That is, a sympathizer who is not an actual communist or member of the communist party. I don't think it's particularly radical to say anarchists are fellow-travelers with communists, though if you disagree I'd be happy to explain my reasoning.

Similarly, the second critique goes back at least to Hobson

Who was also a communist fellow-traveler, if not simply a communist. His writings strongly influenced Lenin and Trotsky, and he was a member of the Independent Labour Party of England, which was an explicitly Marxist party.

Perhaps communist fellow-traveler is the wrong phrase, proto-socialist might fit better for those writers who predated Kapital, but at that point I think we're splitting hairs.

Sure, the communists liked people who agreed with them, and people who didn't like the western system around the turn of the 20th century generally liked to tear it down. This much we agree on.

There's more to the question though. Would the poputchiks consider themselves poputchiks? Tolstoy certainly didn't consider himself a Marxist or a socialist, though you're right that Hobson basically did.

Did the rest of these really come about from late 19th century counterculture? I don't know about that. Crime not being due to individual choice probably goes back at least to André-Michel Guerry in 1833 talking about crime and suicide rates being subject to rigid laws rather than individual choice. Cultural relativism was described by Herodotus. Etc.

As for this:

Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

I don't even know that Marxists believe this. Marx hated the lumpenproles. At best you can say that the Marxists believed that the poors are driven to theft by capitalism, but I don't know about entitlement or the virtue of submitting. Certainly none of them viewed theft as permissible in a socialist society like the USSR.

It just seems like you've collected a bunch of boo lights and credited Marxists and people kind of like Marxists with maybe originating or maybe just believing them. Doesn't seem to have a lot of explanatory power.

I realize that typing that out makes me sound like a schizophrenic, and it sometimes makes me want to tear my hair out that as it turns out the people who were most right about Communism and Communists were McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Don't leave out the John Birch Society. Going back and reading books from One Dozen Candles can be unnerving in their prescience.

McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee

Two different groups with different agendas. The HUAC was devoted to rooting out actual communists (most famously Alger Hiss), fellow-travellers (like Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles), and people protecting them (like Arthur Miller). McCarthy was putting on a show for the benefit of the "water fluoridation is communism" crowd and pioneered the art of making bad-faith allegations of communist sympathies against political opponents.

Lumping them together discredited the work of the HUAC, it didn't rehabilitate McCarthy. After the Army-McCarthy hearings McCarthy's reputation is rightfully unsalvageable.

Two different groups with different agendas.

I'm aware.

McCarthy was putting on a show for the benefit of the "water fluoridation is communism" crowd and pioneered the art of making bad-faith allegations of communist sympathies against political opponents.

McCarthy was, broadly speaking, utterly correct up until the Army hearings. Though frankly, the item at the Army hearings that imploded McCarthy's reputation was asking about an attorney in the office representing the Army's participation in the National Lawyer's Guild (NLG). That was what prompted the famous line "have you no decency?" The NLG was, according to a 1950 HUAC report, "the foremost legal bulwark of the Communist Party." While there are reasonable questions as to the control, or lack thereof, the Communist Party exerted on the NLG, the rebuttal to this report was delivered by NLG President of the Guild Professor Thomas Emerson, a self-described socialist. According to the NLG's own website the Communist Party "aided" in its formation, though the NLG maintains they preserved their independence. The NLG helped found the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), which was a communist front. The NLG represented the Rosenbergs, who were Soviet spies, and the Hollywood 10, who were communists. A few decades later, the NLG was the primary source of funding for the Weather Underground, a Marxist terrorist group.

McCarthy was wrong about individual cases, granted. But his overarching point, that there was communist infiltration in the State Department? Completely accurate.

It's funny how history goes. Nixon goes down for Watergate, but Obama wiretapped Trump's campaign and then used the intelligence agencies to launder Hillary's oppo research to blame Trump for being in league with the Russians that Clinton was paying to try to honeytrap the Trump campaign.

McCarthy goes down as the dumbest prosecutor in history for being right only 99.5% of the time.

I don't have too much to add to what you said, but I think it's interesting to note that Prince Philip's comments in 2002 about Australian aboriginals, specifically him asking if they still threw spears at each other, were vindicated entirely. Even though the Australian media generally still considers him racist over the question, "reality has a rightwing bias" it would seem. I present to you a gang fight in a rural Australian town between two aboriginal gangs, where they literally throw spears at each other (and at a cop car): https://old.reddit.com/r/ActualPublicFreakouts/comments/1gpmasx/brawl_breaks_out_in_remote_aboriginal_community/

Like, I really don't want to be uncharitable to aboriginals, but they have a dysfunction that seems to be on a whole different level than the dysfunction we see in other comparable subcultures. I've been to several Native American reservations throughout the US and gone to school and worked with several natives, I've been in ghetto black parts of cities like Oakland and LA and Baltimore, and I taught several Gypsy families as a missionary in Eastern Europe. All of these groups are doing immeasurably better than Australian aboriginals. Even if you believe that the issues these groups face are due to colonization/slavery/racism/whatever, I don't see how you can argue that Australian aboriginals got treated worse than black chattel slaves in the US. But even blacks the first generation after being freed from slavery seemed to have more civilized behavior than aboriginals centuries after being colonized.

The point I'm trying to make is that blaming colonization for the ills of aboriginals doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Similar to how people point to the Chinese Exclusion Act and the San Francisco Councils of Vigilance as proof that historical discrimination isn't keeping present day Asians from succeeding in America, with Australian aboriginals you can point to almost any other aboriginal or otherwise mistreated population across the world and they'll have better results despite often having been treated much worse. Whether that's the Ainu in Japan or the Kurds in the Middle East or the Navajo in America. I just don't see how continuing to lay all the blame on Europeans can continue to hold up to intellectual rigor (though I don't believe my opponents are actually trying to apply intellectual rigor here in the first place).

As a final bonus story about aboriginal dysfunction, because it's simply so absurd that it's hard to believe it's real. Truth really is stranger than fiction:

There was never much in Wadeye, a remote township 420 km south-west of Darwin. It only got its first coffee shop a few years ago. It still doesn't have a public toilet.

But after days of brutal clan warfare, there's even less there now.

About 500 people have fled the township of 4,000 to hide out in surrounding bush after the savage violence erupted and left them homeless.

Famous for its gangs named after heavy metal groups or performers - like the Slayer Mob, Judas Priest Boys, Metallica Mob and, for female locals, the Celine Dion gang, the Kylie Girls and the Madonna Mob - Wadeye has been riven by violence for decades.

But in the latest eruption, one man, 32, is dead, allegedly speared through the head, and another is seriously injured after being shot by a bow and arrow.

Frightening photographs from the township - which is the Northern Territory’s biggest Aboriginal community - have revealed the extent of the war between the tribal rivals.

Likened by some to 'the Wild West', Wadeye has seen pitched battles after dark between rival gang members wheeling around the streets and setting houses and vehicles alight.

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-10784597/Wadeye-Northern-Territory-burns-22-clans-war-brutal-tribal-rivalry-violence.html

Ironically, the use of archery is itself assimilating- the aborigines didn’t have it until introduced by Europeans.

.... Is this cultural appropriation

My mom did a few years teaching in rural Western Australia. Twice a year the indigenous half of the school would empty out for essentially a grand tribal council out in the bush that took a week or so. One of the main functions of this would be that members judged to have broken native law would be speared in the thighs as a punishment

I've been to several Native American reservations throughout the US and gone to school and worked with several natives, I've been in ghetto black parts of cities like Oakland and LA and Baltimore, and I taught several Gypsy families as a missionary in Eastern Europe

Your life sounds very interesting sir

Eh, not too interesting. There was a reservation 30 minutes from my hometown, they only had a K-8 school so several kids from the rez went to high school with me, and my summer job before my first year of college was doing construction on houses in the reservation. I've visited several others over the years while travelling, or as part of service projects, etc.

For the ghetto stuff, I went to USC for football games and other events several times, and despite USC being a ridiculously wealthy school it's smack in the middle of the hood. Also my brother lived in Koreatown for several years but that was more of a Hispanic ghetto than a black ghetto (the Koreans mostly left after 1992). For Oakland, most of my extended family lives in the SF bay area and I have a cousin who lives in Oakland proper for some incomprehensible reason (I'd assume cost of housing but he's also a weird leftist hippie type so I think it's related to that too lol). For Baltimore, I had issues with my visa when going on my (LDS/Mormon) mission to the Czech Republic so they stuck me in the Baltimore mission until my visa was approved. First lesson the other missionaries gave me when I arrived was "Don't trip and fall or you'll get AIDS" after which one of them proceeded to show me dozens of photos he had taken of random needles on the sidewalk etc. all around Baltimore.

For the Czech Republic that was just part of my missionary service as well. We taught a good amount of Gypsies, we had limited success with them though.

Oh also I walked through some bad parts of Seattle at 3 AM once because I missed the last connecting bus at Ranier Beach station on my way home from the airport. Fortunately I was wearing milsurp clothes and had a hobo beard so no one bothered me.

I mean, wouldn't you rather them throw spears at each other than fire Glocks? Surely there's a vastly reduced risk of innocent bystanders getting caught in the crossfire.

I mean, sure, but it doesn't make them hucking spears at each other any less primitive. At least Rwandans used machetes to murder each other which requires metal while a spear works fine with a stone or even wooden tip.

after enough of these political ceremonies, apologies, reparations (formal or just via progressive taxation), criminal justice reforms and affirmative action black people (or blak as they sometimes call themselves in Australia) are going to be happy and we’ll all dance together in harmony. Some day the Gap will be Closed

Sometimes I wonder if there's anyone left anywhere who actually believes this. Someone believed it fifty or sixty years ago, and every western country has been marching straight into the garbage can after it ever since.

Yes, I meet fairly intelligent people all the time who actually believe this. Trying to suggest to them that the truth is less hopeful has never gone well.

I think this is straightforwardly because everyone in Western society has been raised from birth to believe that some ideas are right, some ideas are wrong, and some ideas are evil. That last category can never even be seriously considered without becoming the absolute worst sort of person. No one wants to be the bad guy, so open-mindedness here is strongly contraindicated.

Sometimes I wonder if there's anyone left anywhere who actually believes this

Essentially nobody "actually" believes it in the sense that they would bet their life savings on it. But at the same time, many people believe it in the sense that they have sincerely fooled themselves into believing it; they will sincerely and eagerly support public policies based on these beliefs; etc.

The fact is that most people are pretty good at fooling themselves into believing ridiculous things; things that deep down they know aren't true.

I understand the logic that sits behind their way of thinking. The day you stop believing people can live together in harmony, peace and security is the day you lose it. If the attempts to keep that vision alive were always going to be doomed to fail and if America is the next USSR or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then I’m not really optimistic about the future.

It's worth noting that neither of those Empires looked like a powder keg ten years before they detonated.

The USSR didn't look like a powder keg from the outside because of propaganda and media control. It's hard to do that to Americans in America.

And I would disagree about Austria-Hungary. The first thing that comes to mind is the dual monarchy itself--they had to have a dual monarchy because Hungary was getting restless. The Croatians were getting restless too.

Sometimes I wonder if there's anyone left anywhere who actually believes this.

I don't know whether it is possible to achieve, but it would be a good outcome if it were, and I believe it is every person's duty to put their greatest effort towards it.

Those of us who try, even if we are not successful, will be able to stand before the Ultimate Judge and say that we did not fail to do our utmost.

Is that in the Bible?

Thou shalt pretend that all human subgroups evolved the exact same genetic potential for cognition, and maintain faith that this holy coincidence really is true, no matter how obviously wrong it becomes.

And anyway, that's not the same as trying to create a society where as many people as possible can live in safety, freedom, and peace. Nothing about such a society requires trying to dragoon a proportionately equal share of brain surgeons out of both Koreans and Somalians and then burning all your credibility down when you can't.

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise. -Galatians 3:28

I feel like pretty much the entire New Testament, is focused on judging people based on their character and faith rather then their race.

You can judge people for whatever you want, but you're not getting back any of the credibility you shed when policies based on your fantasy view of IQ equality all nosedive into the dirt for generation after generation.

It seems worth noting that conservative Christians are not the ones who've spent the last 50 years driving their communities and their TFR into the ground, so who exactly do you think is getting their credibility "shredded" here?

Everyone who whimpers when this subject comes up.

You're the one who brought up genetics.

The case for Closing the Gap is that Aboriginals, whatever else the case may be, are people and therefore should not be suffering avoidable harm. We should try to care for the worst off in our society.

This does not require blank-slatism. This does not require believing any woke nonsense about 'the oldest continuous culture on Earth', or submitting to any of the noble savage garbage that our enlightened academic superiors try to foist on us. This does not require any left-wing commitment.

Aboriginals are human beings and therefore, insofar as are reasonably able (and we are a very wealthy First World country), we should try to avoid them living in poverty, violence, and misery.

I promise I am not a bleeding heart leftie. I voted No to the Voice, and I believe that was right. I believe that my prior commentary on the issue establishes that I am not on the left, and if my views were known publicly, I suspect I would be denounced as a vicious racist. Nor am I supportive of the clearly hucksterish Aboriginal activist industry, which is full of people using Aboriginal suffering as a bad-faith explanation for why they should given more wealth and influence. I do not think that Aboriginals deserve any special or additional consideration relative to any other suffering group.

But Aboriginals are people. They are not orcs. If it is possible to 'close the gap', that is, to bring their life outcomes more-or-less into the range of the entire rest of the Australian population, that would be a good thing.

If you're happy paying them to exist and letting your two kids figure out how to support their three then have fun with that, but that's all you've been doing and all you'll be doing, and I don't consider the whole farce deserving of the respect you apparently feel it's entitled to.

This is a response to both you and @Southkraut below:

Well, a permanent class of parasites is what we have now. Part of the goal of Closing the Gap is to get Aboriginal people into the kind of economic system that would allow them to be like any other demographic in Australia.

I fully agree that it is a failure if all we do is bring Aboriginals up to the same standard of living as other Australians by throwing money into a sucking pit. The goal of all Closing the Gap schemes has to be getting the Aboriginal population to a point where they are sustainable participants in the Australian economy and even the Australian community.

The metrics by which the Gap is measured include educational and employment outcomes. The thing we are trying to do is get Aboriginal people to have jobs. I oppose just throwing charity or welfare at people forever. But if we can get most Aboriginal people to have tolerably decent jobs that are bringing them 60k AUD a year or whatever (which is well below average but enough to live on), then that is a good thing.

It seems to me that there are basically three paths before us.

Path one: Do absolutely nothing. Don't care, just let Aboriginal people starve or turn to crime or otherwise form a permanent underclass.

Path two: Provide enough welfare or charity to avoid one. Create a permanent welfare class.

Path three: Use a combination of welfare, education, and targeted social interventions to try to shift this group into sustainable participation in the Australian economy.

In the post you responded to I rejected path one. You now accuse me of path two. I agree that path two is bad. I therefore favour path three.

I can't think of any other path, save perhaps a 'path zero' which would be to just kill them all, or deport them all, or otherwise make Aboriginal people not exist in Australia any more. That's obviously not an acceptable path either. So what else is there?

What's your favoured path? What do you think should be done?

Option #3 is just option #2 with extra steps. You can't educate your way out of a serious IQ deficit, we've been watching the western world fail at exactly that for generations now. Targeted social intervention? Man the notion that as a group they're even capable of successfully navigating advanced civilization is, as far as I can tell, an unevidenced religious belief.

I don't have a different option for you. I'm just reminding you that all you really have are option #1, option #2, and a bunch of silly cope. Your society will maintain them at some level it's comfortable with, and where exactly on the dial between luxury welfare and Victorian poverty the needle lands isn't something I necessarily have a strong opinion on. At least not when it comes to other countries.

But if this is a place for serious discussion then I'm not taking this "closing the gaps" talk seriously. Be aware of what you're buying and don't delude yourself that the cost will ever go down. There is no real solution, this is just a permanent anchor around the neck.

I suppose I think the issue you're dodging, then, is that something must be done. Both option one and option two lead to undesirable outcomes - you only have to glance at Alice Springs to see that.

I don't think Aboriginals must be brought to some level of luxury, but even supposing for the sake of argument that Aboriginal people all have a median IQ of 80 or so, I think getting them into the same rough position of IQ 80 non-Aboriginal people would be a step up, both of them and for the rest of Australia. I won't dispute that the last fifty years of Aboriginal policy have failed, but I don't accept that "just live with a horrible problem forever" is a better approach.

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Since you tagged me - I don't really presume to favor one path over another. My personal preferences will hardly be those shared by a decisive plurality of Australians, and I'm very decidedly not even in Australia. About as far away as can be, really. I just hope whatever Australia does works out for the better, and whether or not that the results aren't ignored and that people world over can learn from it.

I'm just armchairing it, and I see the incentives for a growing class of parasites being established (if they haven't been before). Hence my question about Aboriginal birth rates.

The Aboriginal population is growing on paper, but I'm not sure about overall birthrate figures - the increase in people identifying as Aboriginal is partly driven by changing patterns of identification (and the increasing number of mostly-white people claiming indigenous identity) as well as increasing life expectancies. So even if the birthrate stayed completely flat I would expect the number of Aboriginal people on the census to increase.

As far as I can tell the Aboriginal birth rate is pretty flat overall, though higher than that of non-indigenous people. It is not so high that I expect an exploding Aboriginal population in the short to medium term, especiall since, though their birth rate is higher than non-indigenous people, large-scale migration means that the non-indigenous population is still growing much more quickly than the Aboriginal population. This paper is older but takes a longer look and seems to indicate that Aboriginal TFR has been falling, along with everybody else's.

If you would like policy to try to increase the non-indigenous birthrate in Australia, and to encourage family formation and children among Australians in general (perhaps specifically white Australians?), then I have no hesitation in supporting that. I think fertility decline is a serious problem across the entire Western world and I expect it to become one of the foremost global crises over the 21st century. So I am wholly behind pro-natalist policy.

I think my position overall, then, is that there is no particular threat of a rapidly expanding Aboriginal population making demands on the Australian welfare system that bankrupts us, but that I support pro-natalist policy regardless, for other reasons.

The best of intentions, leaving only the tiniest of backdoors for persistent abuse of public welfare, for the creation of a permanent class of parasites.

How are aboriginal birth rates?

Yes, it is in the bible. It is kind of the whole point of the parable of the Good Samaritan. The question of who is your "nieghbor" or your "brother", is not a matter of proximity or blood but of comportment.

It's amazing the way you guys seem to think the problem here is that I don't know that the bible says to love thy neighbor or whatever, totally eliding the possibility that maybe I do in fact know my ass from a hole in the ground and just don't think that being a noble loser on the HBD debate actually entitles someone to a pat on the back.

And why would God say that that's perfectly fine? He would expect humans to use their resources responsibly; putting your greatest effort towards something that you should know very well is not reasonably achievable is irresponsible.

I believe that that is addressed in the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel According to St Luke.

I'm more than happy to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with Somalians and aboriginals etc., and to help them achieve the most they can with their inherent abilities. I don't see how that means I need to spend disproportionate amounts of money and effort trying to give them a standard of living and civilization beyond their ability to maintain.

See the parable of the talents. We don't expect the servant given one talent to produce ten, we just expect him to not squander what he was given.

I'm more than happy to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with Somalians and aboriginals etc., and to help them achieve the most they can with their inherent abilities.

a standard of living and civilization beyond their ability to maintain.

The standard of living people can maintain themselves is orthogonal to the standard of living they deserve. Our ancestors did not deserve to bury half their children before their fifth birthdays, even if they could not maintain a low infant mortality rate themselves.

We (with the exception of Social Darwinists and others of that kidney) expect society to give many people within a racial group 'a standard of living beyond their ability to maintain', e. g., children, the elderly, and the disabled. I am simply advocating that this standard be applied to the 'Human' race.

The standard of living people can maintain themselves is orthogonal to the standard of living they deserve.

That would just mean that if we have limited resources, we can't give people what they deserve.

That would just mean that if we have limited resources, we can't give people what they deserve.

That would be an absurd conclusion if one accepts the premise that What Is Natural Is Necessarily Just.

I do not accept that premise.

If that outcome were to happen, it will only happen once we develop some CRISPR-like technology to basically uplift the entire population at once. Doing the work of 10000 years of selection in a single generation. Somehow I doubt that this will be to your liking.

some CRISPR-like technology to basically uplift the entire population at once. [...] Somehow I doubt that this will be to your liking.

Actually, I would consider that a good outcome. If they found a substance that increases a white person's IQ by 30 points and a black person's IQ by 45 points (or whatever the difference is), whoever discovered it would deserve two Nobel prizes, and monumental statues in his/her/their honour.

It is the sacred duty of humanity to remove all inequalities of opportunity that are in our power to ameliorate, including inequality caused by biological factors. When Nature decreed that city dwellers would be cut down by water-borne diseases, did we accept her will as not our place to question, or did we invent the sanitary sewer?

The same applies if Nature has in fact decreed that certain ethnic groups be less capable.

Not to take away from what are probably legitimate complaints about the modern day, but:

More realistically they were just inherently stupid to begin with, which is why they never got around to agriculture or more advanced social organization.

Historically this is pretty much straightforwardly false. Like almost as flagrantly false as you can get. A study of early human history is painfully clear that there is an immensely strong causal arrow from “excess food production” to advanced social organization and accelerated technological development.

Virtually every single modern scholar that I’m aware of seems to think that Australia is pretty much impossible for early human society to do any better. The soil quality is not good partially because of the geological history (no volcanoes or glaciers, bad phosphate content, etc), so you need artificial phosphate imports to boost food production (not a thing until like 1900ish). No domesticable beasts of burden, for plowing, or even for food. Native grains are shit. Rainfall patterns are laughably inconsistent.

Opinions can be debated about more broad topics but the quote in question is not an opinion, it is simply a false claim. There’s room for other HBD type arguments I suppose but even the anti-woke scholars will tell you that the Aborigines had hit pretty much a hard ceiling in civilizational development and it wasn’t their fault. You can correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure even the early settlers who brought all sorts of stuff with them had a shitty time at agriculture until they could mass import fertilizers and stuff of that nature.

Now, can culture be maladaptive still? Sure. Just because the Aborigines did all right optimizing for their shitty environment doesn’t mean that the society they formed was logical, just, or fair or anything like that. Cultural selection pressures are mostly survival-based.

This would be more convincing if the Maori weren't well ahead in civilizational terms, despite being even more remote from Eurasia. They had permanent dwellings and much more advanced politics, as did the Torres Strait Islanders. It's hard to see how the Torres Strait, tiny islands that are barely visible on the map, are more hospitable than all regions in an entire continent. Bananas are well suited to Queensland and could've been brought in from New Guinea... but only the Torres Strait Islanders did that. The most obvious difference is that they had Polynesian background.

Australian soil is not that bad either, not around the rivers at least. The colonists managed without fertilizer for a long time. Kangaroos are perfectly edible as a meat source too, albeit a bit tough.

This would be more convincing if the Maori weren't well ahead in civilizational terms, despite being even more remote from Eurasia.

You are aware that the Maori only arrived in New Zealand in the 13th century, right?

Taiwanese indigenous people had agriculture back in 3000 BCE and took it with them when they spread to Philippines and around Melanesia (and then in the 13th century to New Zealand). The distances in Melanesia much smaller, so a bunch of related cultures with centuries / millenia of seafaring had no problem exchanging ideas and technology between them. That situation is completely different to Australia.

No domesticable beasts of burden, for plowing, or even for food. Native grains are shit.

I'm completely unimpressed with that line of argumentation. There's no evidence that animals in other parts of the world were any more "domesticable" at the time we started domesticating them, or that the grains were better from the get-go.

Unless the argument is there are no native beasts of burden, period.

Unless the argument is there are no native beasts of burden, period.

There are no native beasts of burden in Australia.

There were megafauna when the Aboriginals got here. The Aboriginals killed them all.

(I will note that "not trainable" does have some legs as an idea; the Australian megafauna was marsupial, and hence less intelligent. I'm not aware of any prehistorically-domesticated marsupials, although only the South Americans would have had the chance to try and even then not for all that long given how late it was settled.)

Virtually every single modern scholar that I’m aware of seems to think that Australia is pretty much impossible for early human society to do any better. The soil quality is not good partially because of the geological history (no volcanoes or glaciers, bad phosphate content, etc), so you need artificial phosphate imports to boost food production (not a thing until like 1900ish). No domesticable beasts of burden, for plowing, or even for food. Native grains are shit. Rainfall patterns are laughably inconsistent.

There has been some scholarship on quasi-agricultural stuff like fish farming and harvesting moth spawns. However it's a bit muddy since a certain chunk of Indigenous scholarship doesn't like anything that might indicate that they may have had a sense of land-ownership or settlement since it's counterproductive for their narrative claims vis-a-vis White settlement. I do agree that extrapolating any of that to 'productive agrarian society' would have been broadly impossible, but they've discovered a lot more organization and quasi-agriculture than earlier writers expected.

Virtually every single modern scholar that I’m aware of seems to think that Australia is pretty much impossible for early human society to do any better. The soil quality is not good partially because of the geological history (no volcanoes or glaciers, bad phosphate content, etc), so you need artificial phosphate imports to boost food production (not a thing until like 1900ish). No domesticable beasts of burden, for plowing, or even for food. Native grains are shit. Rainfall patterns are laughably inconsistent.

I would call this the "Guns, Germs, & Steel" argument and I am very skeptical. Mainly because I read "Guns Germs & Steel" and the argument presented in that book does not stand up to scrutiny. The main flaw in the book is that the author compared apples and oranges. In the sense that he compared wild animals in Africa, such as the zebra, with animals in Eurasia which have been domesticated. For all anyone knows, the undomesticated version of the horse was just as unruly as the zebra and in fact it seems pretty likely. People tried to domesticate zebras and failed, but it's not the same because those people had the option of acquiring horses.

The soil quality is not good partially because of the geological history (no volcanoes or glaciers, bad phosphate content, etc), so you need artificial phosphate imports to boost food production

It's hard to believe that Australia is thoroughly and uniquely poor in this regard.

No domesticable beasts of burden, for plowing, or even for food.

I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure people eat kangaroos. How can you be so sure that kangaroos are not domesticable?

Native grains are shit.

I think it's pretty likely that the precursors to corn, wheat, etc. were "shit" as well, but of course I don't know what you mean by "shit."

Rainfall patterns are laughably inconsistent.

It's hard to believe that the entire continent of Australia is completely lacking in areas with adequate rainfall for agriculture.

It's hard to believe that Australia is thoroughly and uniquely poor in this regard.

It definitely isn't. The Arabian peninsula and Saharan Africa both have much worse soil for farming, but both still managed to spawn civilizations. Arabia in particular spawning one that conquered the entire Middle East and North Africa.

both have much worse soil for farming

This is more recent though. It wasn't called "the fertile crescent" for no reason.

Also I don't really think of nomadic Bedouins as a peak of civilization. Nomadic herder people's don't make it very far up the tech tree either, they're just lucky they had advanced agricultural neighbors to siphon off of

This is more recent though. It wasn't called "the fertile crescent" for no reason.

The fertile crescent very much doesn't include the Arabian peninsula. It's more Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel.

Also I don't really think of nomadic Bedouins as a peak of civilization.

I don't either, but in comparison to Australian aboriginals and their accomplishments, the Bedouins have them beat by a mile.

For all anyone knows, the undomesticated version of the horse was just as unruly as the zebra and in fact it seems pretty likely.

There's some weak evidence against it: we don't have pre-domestication true horses around, but the Przewalski's horse is a little closer related to the modern horse than to the zebra, and while they're even more assholish than zebras, they're supposedly more trainable. I'm not convinced that it's a big difference, but I'm not convinced that it's strong evidence against the Guns Germs Steel view.

I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure people eat kangaroos. How can you be so sure that kangaroos are not domesticable?

Kangaroos are farmed like deer, and take a similar environmental niche, but the males are also genetically primed to find the nearest biped and punch it in the face during mating season. That last bit's usually the argument why no one has domesticated them despite matching Diamond's six rules: yes, kangaroos have a dominance hierarchy, but it involves the lead male getting the shit clawed and kicked out of him, and humans aren't really built for that. They're also a little prone to panic, though that's kinda a hard metric to measure.

Conversely, the efforts to domesticate foxes, minks, and river otters are probably stronger arguments against Diamond: of his six proposed rules, these animals are bity, panicky, don't have as widespread a social structure, and are carnivorous. They still seem to get much more friendly pretty quickly; they just needed the right incentives and human leadership to domesticate or partially-domesticate.

the undomesticated version of the horse was just as unruly as the zebra and in fact it seems pretty likely.

They’re called tarpans and they survived into the 19th century, we actually have a pretty good idea of their behavior.

Australian soil is, as far as I know, the worst in the world on average, and farming there requires fertilization techniques that require preexisting agricultural traditions to bootstrap. No comment on the kangaroos argument, but even today there are two domesticated species from Australia- macadamia nuts and a single kind of fruit, both of which are expensive luxuries rather than something that could be a staple.

Australian soil is, as far as I know, the worst in the world on average, and farming there requires fertilization techniques that require preexisting agricultural traditions to bootstrap.

I'm kinda skeptical of this, mainly because Australia is a very large continent and also due to my reading of Guns Germs & Steel. (And also because of that "Primitive Technology" YouTube channel). Can you provide a cite for this?

but even today there are two domesticated species from Australia- macadamia nuts and a single kind of fruit, both of which are expensive luxuries rather than something that could be a staple.

These types of arguments, standing alone, don't hold much water for me. The reason is that there's much less incentive to domesticate a species if there are similar species, already domesticated and already available.

Australia is pretty much impossible for early human society to do any better. The soil quality is not good partially because etc. etc.

Nobody ever has to trot out this kind of geographical apologia on behalf any group that isn't packing drastically subnormal IQ. I've never heard of any people who sat around neglecting to invent the wheel for ten thousand years, then turned out to have normal intelligence once someone introduced them to fertilizer.

I've never heard of any people who sat around neglecting to invent the wheel for ten thousand years

Does this count specifically for carts and other transport (i.e. other vaguely wheel-like things don’t count)? Because the Incans never got around to wheels proper because of fairly obvious geographic limitations.

Why are the Torres Strait Islanders always mentioned and stapled together with the Aborigines in these events? They have a completely different culture and way of life, and live so far from any Australian towns of any size that I'd be willing to bet 90+ % of Australians have never seen one in person.

I did a year in Darwin and met a few. Way more organized people, prettymuch Polynesian level in development

They're ethnically distinct, more like Pacific Islanders... but belong in the same category of poor brown/black people for political purposes.

Same reason the acronym “BIPOC” came into being. It doesn’t really make sense, but in a certain context it’s politically useful (for organizing and for rallying white liberals to a singular cause).

Petrol in remote areas needs additives put in it to stop them sniffing it and suffering brain damage.

You sometimes see the internet racists post the "don't sleep on the road" PSA video, which aired in Australia's Northern Territories. It's one of those things that I really would have expected to be so absurd to be a racist fabrication, but sadly it seems to be real.

If it were any animal but humans, Aboriginal Australians would easily be categorized as a separate and long divergent species. Their exceptionally low intelligence, limited technological development, and prominent brow put them closer to our ancient fossilized cousins than any other “indigenous” (in the contemporary meaning of the term) people group.

That progressives use them as a status signal is not at all surprising - leftist women have driven social consciousness causes for all sorts of degenerates over time, from the clinically insane to the illegal immigrant child rapist to the Arab terrorist.

If it were any animal but humans

Is that really true? Dogs are all the same species and yet differ far more in intellect, brain size, color, appearance, size, lifespan etc than humans do.

The actual science of separating species is (as most biologists will say) almost completely arbitrary.

The genus Canis is such a taxonomic mess that almost everything about its classification is almost certainly wrong, though.

Politically correct taxonomy - it's not just for hominids.

(IIRC Jared Diamond wrote that if any other species did taxonomy, chimps and humans would be in the same genus).

The actual science of separating species is (as most biologists will say) almost completely arbitrary.

This is a false statement propagated by the same class of people who have difficulty answering the question "what is a woman?"

The word "species" has a clear and commonly understood definition. If two individuals are capable of interbreeding and the offspring produced are themselves reproductively viable then those two individuals are of the same species.

That is pretty clearly not the definition in practice. Your bitch-dog, if she's large enough not to get eaten afterwards, can have coyote puppies, which can themselves breed- and there are breeds of hunting dog with partial coyote ancestry. There's a breed of cat which is partially bobcat. Most bison have ancestry from domestic cattle.

If two individuals are capable of interbreeding and the offspring produced are themselves reproductively viable then those two individuals are of the same species

Yet we consider canis lupus, canis familiaris (sometimes), and canis latrans all different species.

(and forget about plants, those things are total degenerates)

Most taxonomists consider canis lupus lupus (Eurasian wolves), canis lupus dingo, canis lupus familiaris and the various subspecies of north American wolf to be the same species.

It isn't clear to me why canis latrans is a categorised as a different species given that fertile hybrids exist, although the wikipedia articles imply that c. latrans/c. lupus hybridisation is much less likely in the wild than hybridisation between c. lupus subspecies.

Combining the two topics, it appears that the debate about the origin of dingos has been stilted by concern about Aboriginal sensibilities - Occam's Razor points to the dingo being descended from feral domestic dogs brought over by the ancestors of the Aborigines, but lots of people want the story to be that dingos and humans came over separately and the Aborigines domesticated the dingo themselves in Australia.

There's also the red wolf, C. rufus/C. lupus rufus... which is still the subject of a debate as to whether or not they are a real species at all, or just a coyote/grey wolf hybrid. If the latter, than latrans and lupus hybridize plenty. And even if it is a real species, it commonly interbreeds with the coyote in the wild.

And also the rather silly C. lycaon (timber wolf), which is obviously just a grey wolf with a fan club.

The word "species" has a clear and commonly understood definition. If two individuals are capable of interbreeding and the offspring produced are themselves reproductively viable then those two individuals are of the same species

I'm pretty sure there are exceptions to that, biology is pretty wonky.

That definition is far too simplistic. Ring species defy it in one way. Multiple recognized species that can actually all interbreed defy it in the other direction.

That definition is far too simplistic.

I am also told that that the gender binary of "male" and "female" is "lacks nuance" and is "too simplistic".

But this definition is actually way too simplistic in a way unrelated to modern gender ideology. Ring species, etc.

OK, but how do you square your definition with ring species? Would two animals which can't interbreed be of one species if there existed an intermediate animal which they can both breed?

So you heard superficially similar arguments on two very different subjects? Neat.

Yet coyotes and dogs are considered different species.

Are they though?

While the American Kennel Club may disapprove, In my experience coydogs are treated as just another type of dog.

Do you consider Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens to be the same species?

Yes; Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and H. sapiens sapiens.

what is a woman?

For most purposes, a woman is someone who either (a.) is of the gender identity found more commonly in people born with vulvas, or (b.) has no gender identity and has a vulva.

For most purposes, a woman is someone who either (a.) is of the gender identity found more commonly in people born with vulvas

So effeminate men are women, actually? And trans women, who aren't adopting the female gender role well enough aren't actually women?

So effeminate men are women, actually?

Not unless they identify as such.

And trans women, who aren't adopting the female gender role well enough aren't actually women?

They still identify as women, they're women.

(Perhaps you're thinking of gender presentation?)

Not unless they identify as such.

What would they be identifyng with?

(Perhaps you're thinking of gender presentation?)

If it has nothing to do with presentation, does that mean a burly lumberjack type, with no desire for hormones, surgeries, or cross dressing, and male behavior and mannerisms, is a woman, as long as he says so?

I fear you already know how he's going to answer.

If she identifies as a woman, yes. (I doubt there are any transwomen fitting those specifications, though.)

If he is lying in order to pivot progressives to maintaining the black-and-white 1-bit oversimplification he was taught back when he was knee-high to a grasshopper, no.

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For most purposes

For ONE purpose: To alleviate the dissatisfaction a small number of people feel because they remain unable to change their sex.

For any purpose that is. if you aren't interacting with the trans individual's body, any of your beeswax.

(Also, some definitions of 'biological sex' can be changed.)

Sophistry and semantics can't turn a man into a woman.

I meant the 'hormones and secondary characteristics mediated by hormones' definition, and the 'what plumbing one currently has' definition.

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For most purposes, a woman is someone who either (a.) is of the gender identity found more commonly in people born with vulvas, or (b.) has no gender identity and has a vulva.

Christ, you'd do your cause more good by staying silent than by posting this kind of gobbledygook. The "what is a woman" thing really did one-shot that movement.

That movement is still alive and well. Criticism of it can be voiced more openly now, but it still holds key institutions and its supporters are as entrenched as always. Hardly a one-shot.

That movement is still alive and well. Criticism of it can be voiced more openly now, but it still holds key institutions and its supporters are as entrenched as always.

I hope that that doesn't change in either direction. I do not agree with what the 'gender critical' say, but I also do not trust anyone with the power to make them shut up.

the gender identity found more commonly in people born with vulvas

And what identity would that be?

'Woman'.

I don't think this holds.

Much like the sexes are "male" and "female", there are 2 genders: "Man" and "Political". (By the same logic, there are also only 2 races.)

A woman is a Political that only claims that one singular identity. If it claims anything else, that Political is not a woman, so we don't erroneously classify other Alphabet People, or ex-women who are not Men, to be women.

By contrast, a Man is the gender expression of the people who don't think their gender merits any special privilege. This is generally because, from a biological or environmental standpoint, they aren't granted any- if they disagree with this, they're (by definition) a Political. This ensures we don't preclude females from being Men if they waive the privilege being female inherently grants them, but so many of them won't that it's not worth building separate facilities for them. Of course, being Men, that wouldn't bother them.

Categorizing gender identities this way solves most problems. For instance, we can continue with the 2-protected-space (changing rooms/bathrooms) system for Men and Political, where Politicals aren't allowed in the Men's room and vice versa. Again, because the gender expression of a Political is complaining (about the other users, the lack of accommodations, or whatever), it's very easy to tell who's who- if a Political goes into the Men's room and bitches about how unsafe it was (or whatever), that act reveals them to have broken the rules.

This also permits Politicals to express their gender identity fully in that space- which I agree is very important- and includes things like "complaining that males in dresses are in there leering at little girls". If a Political doesn't like that, they might choose to identify as a Man in that moment and use the room for Man, but as you'll recall they express their gender identity by not complaining about a lack of sex-specific accommodation so if they do that they're barred from [identifying as a Political and] complaining about it.

Note that, because the sexes are male and female, Men will accept that dichotomy is accurate and (if they happen to be straddling the gap a bit) will accept that the categories don't necessarily cover them (if they are mad about that, they aren't a Man, which solves the question of what gender the intersex are). So Men's clothing stores will carry male and female clothing, while clothing stores for Politicals are free to express their gender identity and have all the alternate opinions about the fact Men divide the world into two sexes that they want.

Sure, Politicals might still demand access to Man-only spaces, but that approach is not compatible with the idea that one's gender identity is a free choice. A more corrupt version of this (where it's only a free choice when it advantages Politicals) would necessitate 3 gender identities: one for Political women, one for Political non-women, and one for everyone else; or "women", "men", and "cissies" for short.

Modern taxonomy is generally based on recent common ancestry. Despite their profound behavioral and morphological peculiarities, Australian Aborigines split more recently from other Eurasians than Eurasians as a whole split from Sub-Saharan Africans. So if Australian Aborigines are to be classified as a separate species, then so would groups like Khoisan, Pygmies, and black Africans. Which means... your_terms_are_acceptable.jpg, I suppose. If race is a social construct, then so is species.

Among modern humans, Oceanians (including Australia Aborigines) have the highest degree of archaic admixture from Denisovans and Neanderthals, perhaps around 4-6% Denisovan admixture, on top of the 1-4% of Neanderthal admixture shared by Eurasians. West Africans appear to have about 2-19% of archaic admixture from ghost populations (populations of which fossils have yet to be discovered, as the climate of Sub-Saharan Africa tends to be unkind toward fossils).

leftist women have driven social consciousness causes for all sorts of degenerates over time, from the clinically insane to the illegal immigrant child rapist to the Arab terrorist.

It reminds me of that viral tweet that I can't find at the moment, which reads something like "Leftist thought: Actually, productive, law-abiding citizens are the oppressors and the unproductive and the criminal are the oppressed."

If it were any animal but humans, Aboriginal Australians would easily be categorized as a separate and long divergent species.

FWIW I think there is some degree of truth in this. I remember a few years back a photo circulated which purported to compare the skull of an Aboriginal Australian with that of a European. The difference is so shocking that the normal reaction is to think that the photo can't be real; that it must be the work of a racist troll who mislabeled the skull of some non-human hominid. But I looked into it and concluded it was probably accurate.

I think what happened was that when Homo Sapiens spread around the world, they encountered other species, such as Neanderthals, who were close enough genetically that some degree of interbreeding was possible. Thus Europeans and Asians have some percentage of Neanderthal genes. I would guess that Aboriginal Australians have a high percentage of genes from whatever hominid species was in Australia when Homo Sapiens showed up.

I would guess that Aboriginal Australians have a high percentage of genes from whatever hominid species was in Australia when Homo Sapiens showed up.

That’s the thing, I am pretty sure (the ancestors of) the Aboriginals were the first hominids of any kind to populate Australia, around 50,000 or 60,000 years ago. I suppose it is a testament to the tenacity and creativity of their forebears that they were apparently able to navigate the seas millennia before agriculture, the earliest cave art, or the domestication of the dog. Sadly they seem to be the civilizational equivalent of the kid who peaked in high school.

were apparently able to navigate the seas millennia before agriculture

As I understand it, they wouldn’t have had to navigate very far, as at the time both the Sunda Shelf and Sahul were above water; these seafarers would have been able to travel between a series of close-together islands in between the two supercontinents.

True, but island-hopping 90-100km is still no mean feat for literal Paleolithic man! I suppose it may have taken place over multiple generations, though I don’t know if the interstitial archipelago was large and fertile enough to support such long pit stops.

We still don't have a tremendously convincing theory for how primitive primates managed to cross the Atlantic: their appearance in the fossil record is long after Africa and South America separated.

I would guess that Aboriginal Australians have a high percentage of genes from whatever hominid species was in Australia when Homo Sapiens showed up

Denisovans. IIRC the Denisovans were never actually in Australia, but Aboriginal Australians (along with Melanesians) picked up their genes in transit.

I don’t see how British colonization made the aboriginals horrifically violent and rapey to eachother but Ireland remains fine despite centuries of colonization and harsh treatment

Aboriginals being the most savage primitives in the world may well be true(although they have some competition). But as our resident ‘some cultures just suck’ enthusiast, this may not be entirely generic- do aborigines adopted by white families have similar incarceration rates?

There was a controversial activity a generation or two back called the stolen generation in which Aboriginal children were taken from remote locations and forcefully taken to the cities to be educated. This largely impacted children with European admixture.

Ironically this has produced a large group of Indigenous with far greater education, economic success and cultural salience (Nature v Nurture debate can be had) who have largely further diminished their blood quantum over the years. This group does the vast majority of lobbying on Aboriginal issues, whilst the remote community largely sits in whoop whoop and rots.

Aboriginal children were taken from remote locations and forcefully taken to the cities to be educated. This largely impacted children with European admixture.

It was specifically targetted at the "half-caste". I will note that characterising them as "Aboriginal children" (which, to be fair, essentially all Reliable Sources do because of course they do) is actually quite dubious - the kids were just as white as they were Aboriginal, and leaving them where they were (i.e. Aboriginal tribes) would also have severed them from their white cultural heritage.

The actual way it was done was pretty shitty, but the idea that hey, maybe raise the half-and-half kid in the half with an actual civilisation? Not really objectionable.

Similar or worse, though there's no clear controlled study for this.

There is a strong selection effect in that anyone entering the foster system is already headed in the wrong direction.

The Israelis don’t make this mistake, there aren’t any Palestinian land acknowledgements in the West Bank.

The reason is obvious: they have Jewish land acknowledgements instead, tracing every significant place to the Tanakh. The region itself is called Judea and Samaria in Israel. They are the decolonizers in their own story.

The reason is obvious: they have Jewish land acknowledgements instead, tracing every significant place to the Tanakh. The region itself is called Judea and Samaria in Israel. They are the decolonizers in their own story.

I think this may be a factor, but I doubt it's that big of a factor. For example, look at Sweden. Clearly ethnic Swedes are one of the indigenous peoples of Scandinavia. But that doesn't stop them from bringing in and valorizing destructive third-world people. Maybe they don't have land acknowledgments, but they have plenty of other Leftist nonsense.

It seems to me that Leftists can always find a way to twist things. The fact that Europeans are not indigenous to Australia is useful tool for them, but it doesn't stop them from playing their games in Europe or Judea.

I’m an ethnic Scandinavian by race; blue eyes, dark eyelashes; rosy cheeks; a lot of my father’s facial features; the standard Nordic template; and I really bemoan what leftism is doing over there. A lot of far-right publishers like Arktos come from there and produce a lot of literature that’s popular in the west and is continuing to gain traction year after year. It’s concerning to imagine where all this is headed because these people don’t integrate. They live in parallel societies.

The Israelis don’t make this mistake

Actually that's not totally true. Arab citizens of Israel enjoy some degree of affirmative action and Leftists in Israel are constantly pushing for the same sort of suicidal policies Leftists push for in every advanced nation.

The main differences are

(1) there are lots of Arabs in and around Israel that want to slaughter every last Jew and are aggressive, organized, and relentless about it; and

(2) the world is full of Jew-haters who inevitably blame all of this on the Israelis themselves; who twist everything in order to falsely accuse Israel of villainy; and who dismiss or ignore or defend the evil deeds of those who terrorize the Israeli people.

The ironic upshot of this persecution is that your typical Israeli is very conscious of the consequences of Leftist policies. So it's hard for the Left to get much purchase. Even so, Israel made the mistake of leaving Gaza -- with disasterous results.

Another factor is that Israel is the first advanced nation where a growing subpopulation of conservative religious types is starting to have real, general influence over internal politics. I would expect that the US is next in line to encounter such a phenomenon.

As a side note, it's worth pointing out that you yourself are one of the Jew-haters who, in effect, undermines the Left in Israel. For example, when a girl's school was blown up in Iran, I am pretty sure you were the person who was "confident" it was Israel that was responsible for the bombing. It's difficult to square this kind of arrogant and foolhardy rush to judgment with anything other than raw anti-Semitism. So probably conservatives in Israel owe you some degree of thanks.

Arab citizens of Israel enjoy some degree of affirmative action and Leftists in Israel are constantly pushing for the same sort of suicidal policies Leftists push for in every advanced nation.

How large is the left in Israel, nowadays? My understanding is since the 2010s the Overton Window has shifted such that Netanyahu is pretty close to the center, and the right is mostly religious conservatives who are inoculated against pathological xenophilia.

The right-wing in Israel is also quite split. If you think it’s “the left” that are Israel’s biggest source of internal instability, you should see just how strongly the right there opposes the state.

Do the ultra Orthodox trend left wing or right wing in Israeli politics? I feel like their beliefs are kind of spread out across the political axis

If you're ultra orthodox you're right-wing by definition but they get pretty rabid and extreme when it comes to their protests against the state.

I thought some were largely pacifist and driven by the allocation of gibs, though?

This is the Israeli equivalent of a rural interest party, is my understanding- they’ll coalition with anyone as long as they get their way, but that don’t make em left wing- even when that coalition is with labour. They’re also not pacifist, they just don’t want to personally fight.

you should see just how strongly the right there opposes the state.

I'm kind of skeptical about this. Can you give me 3 examples of right-wing members of the Knesset who strongly oppose the state?

I don’t know of any right-wing members of the Knesset that oppose the state, as most of the ultra orthodox that oppose the state don’t partake in the system in that way to begin with, which is kind of the point.

Yahadut Hatorah is an explicitly non-Zionist coalition of Haredi and Hasidic political parties that consistently gets 6-7 MKs. Back in the 1990s their MKs would refuse to sing the national anthem at the start of Knesset sessions. The anger at a party which was widely perceived as anti-Israel joining the government in 1996 drove the foundation of Shinui as a secular, Zionist, right-liberal party in opposition to Likud - the first pledge in Shinui's manifesto was "we will never join a coalition that includes MKs who don't sing the national anthem". The Haredi parties have improved their behaviour since then in order to become an acceptable coalition party for Netanyahu after 2009, but they still represent the tendency within Haredi communities to treat the State of Israel as a food animal.

The right-wing in Israel is also quite split. If you think it’s “the left” that are Israel’s biggest source of internal instability, you should see just how strongly the right there opposes the state.

I don’t know of any right-wing members of the Knesset that oppose the state, as most of the ultra orthodox that oppose the state don’t partake in the system in that way to begin with, which is kind of the point.

Well roughly how many of these ultra-orthodox are there who strongly oppose the state? And if they don't participate in the system, how do they contribute to internal instability on the right?

How large is the left in Israel, nowadays?

I don't know. But I do know that so far, they have not succeeded in getting the door open to immigration of outsiders. Which is kind of the holy grail for Leftists, for obvious reasons.

There is lots of immigration into Israël, and ‘who counts as Jewish’ is a thorny question that the left has taken W’s on in the past.

There is lots of immigration into Israël, and ‘who counts as Jewish’ is a thorny question that the left has taken W’s on in the past.

Right, and it's reasonably obvious that their goal is to open the floodgates via "quickie conversions."

??? No, the left's wins on Israeli immigration policy have tended to be recognizing as valid Jewish ethnic groups those with sketchier claims, conversions have pretty consistently been very difficult.

No, the left's wins on Israeli immigration policy have tended to be recognizing as valid Jewish ethnic groups those with sketchier claims, conversions have pretty consistently been very difficult.

I'm talking about what they would like to do -- not what they have accomplished.

Do you really believe that opposition to Israel is (always? in the case of OP specifically? most of the time?) motivated by opposition to Jews, or is it a rhetorical device because you like Israel and want to tar opposition to it? I'm particularly interested in the answer because I am situated in the category whose existence you appear to deny (no issue with Jews as an ethnicity or religion, large issue with the state of Israel in its current form - not even as a theoretical concept, as I've previously argued they should have just taken some land from the Germans and founded it on the Baltic coast back in 1945 instead).

"I'm particularly interested in the answer because I am situated in the category whose existence you appear to deny (no issue with Jews as an ethnicity or religion, large issue with the state of Israel in its current form - not even as a theoretical concept, as I've previously argued they should have just taken some land from the Germans and founded it on the Baltic coast back in 1945 instead)."

That pro-Israel classical liberals can't see this as the same nonsense that conflates the NAACP with all black people is beyond me. My theory: Jewish identity politics for some on the right is the one identity politics to rule them all. Meaning, its correctness is positively correlated with the incorrectness of all the other, admittedly more odious and societally detrimental kinds of identity politics.

"There can be no absence of identity politics, so choose the relatively best one, which also happens to nullify the other, worse ones! Yes, it means being hyperbolic and engaging in disingenuous rhetoric, but that's the price to pay, and it's worth it."

Do you really believe that opposition to Israel is (always? in the case of OP specifically? most of the time?) motivated by opposition to Jews

I'll go with "almost always."

I'm particularly interested in the answer because I am situated in the category whose existence you appear to deny

Well, here are a few questions:

When you criticize or condemn Israel for something, do you criticize or condemn other countries that behave similarly or worse?

Do you care about the treatment of the Palestinian Arabs? If so, how do you feel about the treatment of Palestinian Arabs by Arab countries such as Lebanon?

Are you aware that the UN condemns Israel far more than any other country by far? Do you think that this is because the UN is biased against Israel or do you believe that Israel genuinely is the worst country in the world in terms of activities which merit condemnation?

Are you upset about US military support of Israel? If so, how do you feel about US military support of South Korea; Japan; Norway; Turkey; or the UK?

When Israel does things such as attacking hospitals, do you understand and accept that this is because terrorist organizations such as Hamas operate out of hospitals?

In my experience, the vast majority of people who criticize or condemn Israel single the Israel out for special treatment. The vast majority of people who claim to care about Palestinian Arabs are not even aware, let alone care about, the way Palestinian Arabs are treated in places like Lebanon. The vast majority of people who criticize or condemn Israel are not able to bring themselves to admit that the UN is horrifically biased against Israel. The vast majority of people who complain about US military support of Israel are hardly aware and do not care about US military support for other countries. The vast majority of Israel's critics minimize or ignore things like Hamas' use of hospitals, which gives Israel no practical choice other than to attack hospitals. It's difficult to square these attitudes with anything other than anti-Semitism. The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that a lot of these people are simply NPC's repeating Leftist talking points -- they are a vehicle for other peoples' hatred of Jews, the equivalent of low level concentration camp guards.

It's difficult to square these attitudes with anything other than anti-Semitism. The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that a lot of these people are simply NPC's repeating Leftist talking points -- they are a vehicle for other peoples' hatred of Jews, the equivalent of low level concentration camp guards.

That doesn't have to be specifically anti-semitism; I think most of it is just garden variety anti-westernism. In general, the same leftists who condemn Israel for its military actions are the ones who condemn the US Military for similar actions. This attitude often extends to other domains, such as criminal justice.

That doesn't have to be specifically anti-semitism; I think most of it is just garden variety anti-westernism. In general, the same leftists who condemn Israel for its military actions are the ones who condemn the US Military for similar actions.

I agree that's probably a factor, but (1) given that Jews are one of world's most advanced peoples, in practice that sort of attitude is functionally indistinguishable from anti-Semitism; and (2) it doesn't look like it's the only factor, or even necessarily the main factor. Even before the current war, there were plenty of people in the US who were upset over US military aid to Israel. Those same people were apparently unaware that the US has full on military installations in South Korea and Germany. That the US is pledged to treat an attack on Norway as an attack on the United States.

Those same people were apparently unaware that the US has full on military installations in South Korea and Germany. That the US is pledged to treat an attack on Norway as an attack on the United States.

What treaties do we have with Israel that are in any way comparable to NATO? We pledge to defend Norway in case of an attack because they pledge the same thing back to us. Is it a lopsided relationship? Absolutely. But we don't even get those same guarantees back from Israel, lopsided as they would be. I'm not inherently opposed to entering a mutual defense treaty ala NATO with Israel, but there would have to be more to it than we just subsidize their military, forever.

The US security guarantee under NATO never extended to US support for punitive operations against countries which harboured terrorists. When Israel area-bombs civilian targets in southern Lebanon in order to root out Hezbollah, the US sends cash and ammo. If the UK had area-bombed civilian targets in County Monaghan and County Louth in order to root out the IRA, the US would have sent a Suez-style spanking.

We pledge to defend Norway in case of an attack because they pledge the same thing back to us.

So if Israel makes a pledge to defend the United States if it's ever attacked (and they honor that pledge to the same extent Norway has) do you think people who complain about US military aid to Israel will be mollified? Serious question.

Also, do you think those people care about US military aid to Egypt? My guess is that for the most part they don't even know about it.

So if Israel makes a pledge to defend the United States if it's ever attacked (and they honor that pledge to the same extent Norway has) do you think people who complain about US military aid to Israel will be mollified? Serious question.

Some of them (such as myself) would be (if we were also getting bases, unrestricted access to Israeli defense tech, etc. out of it). But I agree with you that there would be plenty who would not be because they hate Israel for other reasons. But I don't think it's necessarily because of anti-Semitism in all cases, some of the opposition to Israel seems to be because of deranged strains of Third-Worldism as well (and sometimes the two overlap as well).

Also, do you think those people care about US military aid to Egypt? My guess is that for the most part they don't even know about it.

I do, but I agree that the median American is retarded and ignorant about it. I will point out that the quantity of aid given to Israel is greater than that given to most other countries, so someone could be opposed to it on those grounds (though I admit they usually are not).

I'm personally opposed to almost all foreign aid, unless there is a clear benefit to the American people and taxpayers from that aid.

More comments

When you criticize or condemn Israel for something, do you criticize or condemn other countries that behave similarly or worse?

Do you care about the treatment of the Palestinian Arabs? If so, how do you feel about the treatment of Palestinian Arabs by Arab countries such as Lebanon?

These kinds of whataboutisms chalk up to antisemitism what is really about a lack of cognitive omnipotence. (Or the fact that Americans aren't allegedly joined morally at the hip with the Arab World, but they are with Israel, making criticisms more tempting.)

These kinds of whataboutisms chalk up to antisemitism what is really about a lack of cognitive omnipotence.

Well what happens when your typical Israel critic is informed about these things? Does it change the person's mind? Generally no.

allegedly joined morally at the hip

Can you explain what this means?

Yes, just assume that the critics already know these other things and that focusing on Israeli, er, malfeasance has sinister motives. That their not talking about violence and horribleness that afflicts Sub-Saharan Africans etc. must be due to a suspiciously strange obsession with Israel, which is just a random country like Bulgaria or Turkmenistan that is being unfairly singled out.

"Can you explain what this means?"

That they are a longstanding and obvious ally, an outpost of our Western way of life in the Middle East that is fundamentally on a higher moral plane (likewise, that even if you agree, you don't think Israel's problems should be our problems; nope, not good enough, it just MUST be Jew hatred.)

Yes, just assume that the critics already know these other things

There's no need to make that assumption. You just need to see whether they change their mind when presented with the facts. And the results are not flattering to such people.

That they are a longstanding and obvious ally, an outpost of our Western way of life in the Middle East that is fundamentally on a higher moral plane

Agreed. And if critics of Israel would regularly acknowledge this, I would be much less likely to conclude that they have "sinister motives" as you put it.

"Agreed. And if critics of Israel would regularly acknowledge this, I would be much less likely to conclude that they have "sinister motives" as you put it."

But when people call out Israel for not sharing our values (in being an ethno-religious state), that's also called Antisemitic. As it stands, I feel like I'm being asked to pick a side in the Shia vs. Sunni dispute. I say the line is being drawn arbitrarily. The whole intra-Middle East dispute spectrum, which includes the Israeli pov, is ALL awful.

More comments

When you criticize or condemn Israel for something, do you criticize or condemn other countries that behave similarly or worse?

I would, but unlike you I don't get the sense that there are currently other countries who are similar or worse. The country was founded less than 100 years ago on land violently stolen from the previous residents; more land continues to be stolen (settlers) on its periphery; the descendants of the same previous residents are stuck on its territory as an underclass with minimal sociopolitical rights and recently being slaughtered by the tens of thousands in a form of collective punishment for the violent resistance that formed among them. The most recent historical comparisons I can think of are South Africa and perhaps Korea/China under Japanese rule during/before WWII, and even in those cases I get the sense that the lot of the native population was actually better (both in terms of the sheer volume of violence they suffered relative to their total number, and in terms of how much of what was their ancestors' they were they denied the use of). Of course there is the objection that they are different in that the invaders had something like a homeland they could straightforwardly retreat to (this is more clear in the case of Japan than in the case of the white peoples of South Africa), but as someone who is not particularly convinced of a general right to an ethnostate I don't find this so compelling.

Do you care about the treatment of the Palestinian Arabs? If so, how do you feel about the treatment of Palestinian Arabs by Arab countries such as Lebanon?

I somewhat do, but to my best knowledge little of my taxes is spent on supporting whatever other Arab countries do to them, so it's easier to see it as an instance of misery that I have no moral responsibility to stop. Also, per the above angle on Israel, I'm not sure I agree that other Arab countries mistreat them as badly.

Are you aware that the UN condemns Israel far more than any other country by far? Do you think that this is because the UN is biased against Israel or do you believe that Israel genuinely is the worst country in the world in terms of activities which merit condemnation?

See above, I get the sense that it is among the worst. If pressed, I think North Korea might cause (in the counterfactual sense of causation: literally deleting the state of North Korea, including every member of leadership, official document and government building, would make things better) more total undeserved misery per capita, but for better or worse one may argue that the UN's magisterium is to regulate the relations between nations/peoples, so that North Koreans torturing their own is none of its business.

It's a harder question whether various colourful events in Africa (like the recent genocides in Sudan) were worse, and in general I would wish for more UN intervention in those; but to do so properly from my point of view requires a memetic rehabilitation of uplift colonialism, where we may accept that if some peoples keep murdering each other at some point we ought to go in, confiscate their children and put them through a few generations of forced schooling in a different cultural background. At the same time, the current memetic landscape unfortunately does not require this; and either way, in practice the UN has a lot more influence on rich first-world countries than places like Sudan, so it makes sense for it to direct its condemnation energy in a direction where it can actually affect outcomes.

Are you upset about US military support of Israel? If so, how do you feel about US military support of South Korea; Japan; Norway; Turkey; or the UK?

Neither of those is doing things as bad as what I said in my first paragraph! I should say that my citizenship is German, so my tax money is being spent on Israel to a significant extent but not so much on the others. But either way, the problem is not military support being intrinsically bad, but rather military support conveying upon the supporter some responsibility for what the military is then used for. Out of this list, if I were a US citizen, I would also prefer to defund Turkey.

When Israel does things such as attacking hospitals, do you understand and accept that this is because terrorist organizations such as Hamas operate out of hospitals?

I understand that this is a motivation, though I'm not convinced that it isn't simultaneously true that they are happy to have a pretext to flatten a hospital because it serves the longer-term goal of having fewer and less healthy Palestinians in the area.

I would, but unlike you I don't get the sense that there are currently other countries who are similar or worse. The country was founded less than 100 years ago on land violently stolen from the previous residents; more land continues to be stolen (settlers) on its periphery; the descendants of the same previous residents are stuck on its territory as an underclass with minimal sociopolitical rights and recently being slaughtered by the tens of thousands in a form of collective punishment for the violent resistance that formed among them. The most recent historical comparisons I can think of are South Africa and perhaps Korea/China under Japanese rule during/before WWII, and even in those cases I get the sense that the lot of the native population was actually better (both in terms of the sheer volume of violence they suffered relative to their total number, and in terms of how much of what was their ancestors' they were they denied the use of). Of course there is the objection that they are different in that the invaders had something like a homeland they could straightforwardly retreat to (this is more clear in the case of Japan than in the case of the white peoples of South Africa), but as someone who is not particularly convinced of a general right to an ethnostate I don't find this so compelling.

Let's see if I understand your argument correctly:

  1. In the 1940s, what is now Israel was collectively the property of the Arabs living in the area but NOT the property of the Jews living in the area.

  2. Thus, by declaring a Jewish state and winning the Israeli war of independence, Israel has a sort of original sin which taints everything it does.

  3. Therefore, if Israel blows up a hospital which is being used as a base by Hamas, it is illegitimate because Israel has no legitimate right of self defense.

  4. Thus, if some other country blows up a hospital or a school or whatever, and even if that hospital was not being used for military purposes, it's still not as bad as Israel because that other country does not have Israel's "original sin."

Do I understand your position correctly?

I somewhat do, but to my best knowledge little of my taxes is spent on supporting whatever other Arab countries do to them, so it's easier to see it as an instance of misery that I have no moral responsibility to stop.

Of course I have heard the "tax dollars" argument before. But if this were the reason for the ferocious and relentless criticism of Israel out there, one would expect Europeans to be far less anti-Israel than Americans. That's not the case at all. "Tax dollars" is an excuse, not the actual reason.

I understand that this is a motivation, though I'm not convinced that it isn't simultaneously true that they are happy to have a pretext to flatten a hospital because it serves the longer-term goal of having fewer and less healthy Palestinians in the area.

Are you similarly skeptical of the motives of other countries which are engaged in military conflicts?

No, not quite correctly.

  1. In the 1940s, the area was populated by a handful of Jews and many Arabs. They owned their respective property; Arabs were presumably in the majority, and in particular sufficiently densely distributed that there was no viable contiguous Jewish state that could be founded on Jewish property.

  2. Thereupon, Jewish colonists with Anglo-American backing started entering the area and killing and expelling the Arabs. Without these actions, the "war of independence" (which was really a unilateral war of aggression) could not have been won. This created a sort of "original sin" that is so recent that it has not met my statute of limitations.

  3. Israel continues doing the same thing (killing Arabs, expelling them from their land and settling it). Israel is a democracy (as its supporters are enthusiastic to point out). Therefore, sins analogous to the "original sin" are newly committed by the Israeli state with popular consent with regularity.

I'm not as hung up on hospitals as you seem to be, though I would like to point out that Russia is regularly condemned for attacking Ukrainian dual-use infrastructure (including hospitals) that is likewise used by the Ukrainian military and still manages to have produced a far lower number of civilian casualties in Ukraine than Israel has among its enemies. This seems like pretty strong evidence that Israel is unusually happy to cause civilian casualties.

Either way, nothing about this requires even talking about whether they are justified to blow up hospitals or anyone else is! Even ignoring the tens of thousands of skulls, 1-3 alone amounts to an obvious moral case for returning what was stolen. If Israel relinquishes all land that was not owned by Jews in 1940, we can talk about who and what they are allowed to destroy in defense of what's left.

The only relevance that the "original sin" has to evaluating Israel's other actions (including blowing up hospitals) is that Israel habitually defends its ongoing violence and theft against the Arabs with violence committed by Arabs against them. Commonly, notions of legitimate self-defense are understood to only cover unprovoked actions. You can't attack and rob someone, have them strike you in self-defense, and then justify further aggression against them as self-defense against the preceding act.

Of course I have heard the "tax dollars" argument before. But if this were the reason for the ferocious and relentless criticism of Israel out there, one would expect Europeans to be far less anti-Israel than Americans. That's not the case at all. "Tax dollars" is an excuse, not the actual reason.

This argument is nonsensical. There is no reason to assume that the total volume of possible outrage at atrocities committed elsewhere is the same in every country. If the amount of "tax dollars" has any relevance at all, at most you might argue that it determines the relative scale of our responsibility for Israel's actions, compared to other atrocities being committed with our monetary support - and there, I think there might be a good case that even though US support for Israel is in absolute terms much larger than ours, in relative terms there is comparatively more other immoral behaviour that American money pays for. It could be that 30% of all atrocities funded by EU military budget are Israeli and 10% of all atrocities funded by US military budget are, but the latter quantity is still much larger in monetary terms.

In the 1940s, the area was populated by a handful of Jews and many Arabs. They owned their respective property

I'm pretty sure that a lot of the land in the area, likely the majority, was not privately owned. Rather, it was previously Ottoman land, succeeded to by the British, at least as far as control goes. You could call it "public land." Are you saying that this public land land was the property of the Arabs as a group; the Jews as a group; both; neither; or something else?

Thereupon, Jewish colonists with Anglo-American backing started entering the area and killing and expelling the Arabs. Without these actions, the "war of independence" (which was really a unilateral war of aggression) could not have been won. This created a sort of "original sin" that is so recent that it has not met my statute of limitations.

Ok, so any group which, in the last 100 years, has acquired territory by means of ethnic cleansing, backed by violence, is tainted with "original sin." Do I understand you correctly?

Israel continues doing the same thing (killing Arabs, expelling them from their land and settling it)

Can you tell me the most recent significant incident in this process so that I know what you are talking about?

I'm not as hung up on hospitals as you seem to be, though I would like to point out that Russia is regularly condemned for attacking Ukrainian dual-use infrastructure (including hospitals) that is likewise used by the Ukrainian military and still manages to have produced a far lower number of civilian casualties in Ukraine than Israel has among its enemies. This seems like pretty strong evidence that Israel is unusually happy to cause civilian casualties.

Do you agree that Hamas regularly and aggressively uses human shields?

Arabs with violence committed by Arabs against them. Commonly, notions of legitimate self-defense are understood to only cover unprovoked actions.

Ok, so in your view, Israel has no legitimate right of self-defense when it comes to any and all Arab terrorism against it. Do I understand you correctly?

There is no reason to assume that the total volume of possible outrage at atrocities committed elsewhere is the same in every country.

I assume that by "atrocities," you are referring to the Israeli self-defense which you believe is per se illegitimate. What would you say are the primary reasons for variation, from country to country in opposition to Israel? And can we agree that at least on the surface, support of Israel with tax monies does not appear to be a significant factor? Also, I am a little confused by your post. Are you saying that there are European or other countries besides the US who are providing military support for Israel?

Last, I would appreciate an answer to my question from before: Are you similarly skeptical of the motives of other countries which are engaged in military conflicts?

I'm pretty sure that a lot of the land in the area, likely the majority, was not privately owned. Rather, it was previously Ottoman land, succeeded to by the British, at least as far as control goes. You could call it "public land." Are you saying that this public land land was the property of the Arabs as a group; the Jews as a group; both; neither; or something else?

I honestly don't know the details of how land titles in a British colony are divided up, but the details don't seem relevant. Per the table here we are talking about something like 75%+ Muslims. At the very least I would assume that their immediate residence, plus perhaps some tract of land around it, was owned by them. If the legal situation is such that you have small (by area) cities that are owned by individuals, and large tracts of non-residential land around them that are owned by the government/"public land" but essentially used by and for the small residential areas, then I'm quite happy to say that the "public land" is morally the collective property of those who own the small residential plots, in proportion to what percentage of the population they were. Manifestly, the colonists did expel the Arabs from their residences! Even if the situation was such that on paper 5% of the land was Arab and 95% was "public", it's rather disingenuous to treat the 5% "Arab land" that was stolen as a rounding error when clearly the colonists did not seem to think the Arabs could be allowed to keep it as a "rounding error" (because it turns out that the 5% private land was key to exploiting the 95% of public land).

Ok, so any group which, in the last 100 years, has acquired territory by means of ethnic cleansing, backed by violence, is tainted with "original sin." Do I understand you correctly?

Don't ignore context to generate overly ambitious strawman statements to refute. I'm happy with the following narrower version: any group which, in the last 100 years, has acquired territory by means of (...), where this ethnic cleansing and violence was not itself justified as retaliation against a previous act, is tainted with "original sin".

Can you tell me the most recent significant incident in this process so that I know what you are talking about?

Here's one from the top of a Google search for . The Golan Heights is getting settlement and that is literally territory they seized from another sovereign and internationally recognised at the time state in war.

Do you agree that Hamas regularly and aggressively uses human shields?

I don't know what exactly you mean by this, but I'm happy to accept a statement like "Hamas deliberately bases its operations in civilian areas for the purpose of concealment". Perhaps "aggressively uses human shields" is a Russell conjugation of this sort of thing, where in an allied country it's more of an innovative mom-and-pop shop startup story.

Ok, so in your view, Israel has no legitimate right of self-defense when it comes to any and all Arab terrorism against it. Do I understand you correctly?

Eh, not quite. My point is mostly that we (the country I'm a subject of, and also the country you are a subject of) have a moral obligation to not aid them in their defense. In terms of "legitimacy" (what do you mean by this?), I do lean towards saying something like every living being has some sort of natural right to fight for its own survival - I would not morally fault the murderer who is sought out by his victim's surviving relatives in retaliation for fighting them off, even as I may cheer on the relatives to prevail.

I assume that by "atrocities," you are referring to the Israeli self-defense which you believe is per se illegitimate.

I mean in particular self-defense that leaves cities looking like this, and for example everything that is mentioned in this article. I don't believe the argument that this is the only way they could defend themselves has been made, and in particular the Russia/Ukraine thing continues being a canonical test case - we are simultaneously hearing the assertion that Russia has worse training, less and inferior precision weaponry, is more brutal than Israel, and having no problem roundly condemning it and sanctioning it to hell, but somehow Russia manages to occupy Ukrainian cities without having to mow down people in bread lines and even the most thoroughly burned-over cities on the frontline there don't quite look that reduced to rubble.

Last, I would appreciate an answer to my question from before: Are you similarly skeptical of the motives of other countries which are engaged in military conflicts?

I think I've made an extensive case that nobody else seems to be currently engaged in military conflicts that are this one-sidedly immoral.

If you want to take this conversation further, please try to actually engage with the points I make, rather than doing this mixture of warping a few excerpts into strawmen and requesting that I undersign a battery of prepared statements. I don't think you are actually doing your case a service, because you are doing it so sloppily that you are just inviting more opportunities to make the Israeli case look bad.

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For example, when a girl's school was blown up in Iran, I am pretty sure you were the person who was "confident" it was Israel that was responsible for the bombing

OK, so it wasn't an Israeli bomb, it was an American bomb. But the American attack was justified as defence of Israel both informally by Rubio and formally in America's justification... in a war that Israel was very keen on and has been encouraging for decades. Netanyahu has been telling tales of Iran being weeks or months away from a nuclear bomb since the 90s. Israel has been working proficiently to bring the US into this war and keep America in the war. It serves their strategic goals if America wrecks Iran.

Blaming Israel for an American airstrike in an Israeli war, that's arrogant and foolhardy anti-semitism.

There's no phrase in common use that efficiently encapsulates the waging of a war on dubious pretences with impractical goals, wrecking the world energy system, dragging in other countries to do the serious fighting via cajoling, bribery and relentless nuclear fearmongering.

This is my point about language and political weapons, anti-semitism is up there in the top tier, albeit somewhat strained with the workload resting upon it these days.

OK, so it wasn't an Israeli bomb, it was an American bomb. But the American attack was justified as defence of Israel both informally by Rubio and formally in America's justification... in a war that Israel was very keen on and has been encouraging for decades. Netanyahu has been telling tales of Iran being weeks or months away from a nuclear bomb since the 90s. Israel has been working proficiently to bring the US into this war and keep America in the war. It serves their strategic goals if America wrecks Iran.

Blaming Israel for an American airstrike in an Israeli war, that's arrogant and foolhardy anti-semitism.

You are weaseling here. If you had said that possibly America had dropped the bomb but even if it was the US, Israel still has some degree of responsibility, that would have been one thing. But what you said was something else. Of course, everyone makes mistakes but this one was revealing of the thought processes in your head. And it's pretty obvious that you are consumed by hatred for Israel. And it's pretty obvious why.

But I'm sort of curious: Do you think Jewish people bear any blame or responsibility for Australia's policy towards Aboriginal Australians?

You are weaseling here

You were the one insinuating that it was the Iranians that blew up their own school, which I said was debunked and silly, then you asked for a source for it being debunked, I provided it, then you said something like 'oh well even though it makes little sense to blow up their own school, Iran is such an awful country they might well do that kind of thing anyway'... What does that say about your thought process, I wonder? You imagine that your enemies are so comically evil they'll blow up their own schools just to make Israel look bad...

The US and Israel are peas in a pod with regard to this war. The US has adopted the Israeli stance of zero enrichment, an unverifiable demand. All of this in a war for Israel, since the US (if we look at a map) is not threatened by a nuclear Iran. The US is nowhere near Iran.

An American bomb or an Israeli bomb, does it really matter, in context? To you, perhaps. To the point I was making, about how this war has greatly angered the Iranians and provided strong incentives for heightened militarization? It doesn't matter at all. Do you think the Iranians see much distinction between the US and Israel at this point?

https://www.australianjewishnews.com/exploring-the-relationship-between-jewish-and-first-nations-people/

https://nswjbd.org.au/indigenous-and-jewish-australians-working-together/

Mabo's QC was Jewish, Spiegelman on the Freedom Rides and much else besides... there's abundant evidence of Jewish involvement in the aboriginal cause, such that they boast about it freely.

You were the one insinuating that it was the Iranians that blew up their own school, which I said was debunked and silly, then you asked for a source for it being debunked, I provided it, then you said something like 'oh well even though it makes little sense to blow up their own school, Iran is such an awful country they might well do that kind of thing anyway'...

Unfortunately for you, it's not too hard to go back and check the actual exchange. Unsurprisingly, your account is completely false.

Here's what happened:

Me:

What I am trying to say is that the Iranian government's hatred of Israel and desire for nuclear weapons was pretty maximal before the latest attack, so I doubt that this will provoke the reaction you predict.

You:

Well they did blow up a bunch of kids

Me:

So you are confident it was Israel who did that?

You:

Yes, the 'actually Iranian rockets blew up their own school' storyline has been debunked.

Me:

I'm very skeptical that any member of the general public could already know -- with confidence -- who was behind this situation. I'm also suspicious of your use of the passive voice. Can you please link to a source? TIA.

You:

Occam's razor suggests that if a school is bombed in a country being bombed, it is overwhelmingly likely that the country bombing it that did the bombing. There needs to be evidence to the contrary to support any alternate hypothesis

Me:

I don't necessarily agree, particularly given the nature of the countries involved. However it looks to me like there is a threshold issue, which is that you claimed you were confident that it is Israel who was behind the bombing . . . Given that the US is also involved in the war, how exactly does Occam's razor work here?

You:

[no response]

+++++++++++++++++++

So I was open to all possibilities, including the possibility that this was an Iranian missile that fell short. I didn't "insinuate" that Iran was (directly) responsible because I didn't know. But if I had accused Iran, I would own it. I wouldn't say something like "Well, akshually Iran was responsible for the missile because they provoked this war."

Of course I didn't rush to judgment against Iran, because I didn't know either way. You, on the other hand, arrogantly rushed to judgment against Israel even though I reminded you that the US was also involved in the war. Rather than own it, you now try to weasel out of your words.

An American bomb or an Israeli bomb, does it really matter, in context?

In the grand scheme of things, perhaps not. But that's not the point. The point is that your heart is so full of hatred for Jewish people, it didn't even occur to you that it might have been an American missile. You really wanted it to be true that Jews are so evil and so bloodthirsty that they targeted a girl's school.

Mabo's QC was Jewish, Spiegelman on the Freedom Rides and much else besides... there's abundant evidence of Jewish involvement in the aboriginal cause, such that they boast about it freely.

So that means "yes," right? You genuinely believe that Jewish people -- as a group -- bear significant responsibility and blame for Australia's policy towards Aboriginal Australians. Right?

Your obsession with the identity of the missile is bizarre, I'm not going to go into this anymore. Your main argument was silly and wrong. Bombing countries does in fact inspire hatred towards those who do bombing.

Here's what I said before this pathetic outburst of nitpicking:

However, Khameini's death means his fatwa against nuclear weapons no longer holds. If the IRGC take control, as militaries have been known to do in wartime, then we may see a much more militarized, nuclearized and aggressive Iran. They absolutely can and likely will hate Israel more than they hate them now! There are only so many regime-change attempts they can take before turning a latent nuclear program into a real nuclear program.

And here's what you said:

What I am trying to say is that the Iranian government's hatred of Israel and desire for nuclear weapons was pretty maximal before the latest attack, so I doubt that this will provoke the reaction you predict. At this point, the main thing for Israel (and the US) to do, to paraphrase the Untouchables, is the Chicago Way.

You said Iran was already maximally hateful towards Israel, maximally committed to nuclear weapons. Quite clearly they were not, for they would've acquired nuclear weapons over the last 30 years of breathless Israeli fearmongering and nuked Israel with them. They haven't done this because they just aren't as vengeful and hateful as Israel. Iran doesn't have any religious anniversaries to slaughtering Jews, like Jews have in Purim. Iraq invaded their country, gassed them, fought viciously all within living memory... they didn't nuke Iraq. But you say they'd nuke Israel, they just mysteriously have all this hate in their hearts and so they need to be destroyed in escalatory strikes, the Chicago Way...

It is obvious that blowing up refineries in Tehran and making thick toxic smog is going to make Iranians upset with Israel. Along with assassinating leaders. Along with blowing up schools, whether it's Israel or America that does it. This is basic, kindergarten-tier psychology that seemingly escapes you since you classified them all as jew-haters against whom escalation has only gains, not costs. The same goes the other way around, for what it's worth. Israelis aren't going to be thrilled with Iran making them cower in bomb shelters, interrupting their sleep.

Constantly calling everyone else liars isn't going to work out forever, not when people can see the results of these wars over imaginary WMDs for themselves. Forget about me, think about all the tens, hundreds of millions who are going to be developing anti-semitism when they try to buy some petrol.

You genuinely believe that Jewish people -- as a group -- bear significant responsibility and blame for Australia's policy towards Aboriginal Australians. Right?

Duh, obviously they are. They boast about it. They did all kinds of agitating and lobbying and legal work, even write little children's books about Reconciliation, they write whole articles (these are just a few) talking about how their Jewish values led them in that direction, tikkun olam and all that. Are you saying I should disbelieve all these Jewish sources, call them liars? Or is the Mabo case a bit of a nothingburger, not very important? Who's the anti-semite here?

Your obsession with the identity of the missile is bizarre

You're the one who is obsessed with the identity of the missile. Or rather, you were obsessed until it turned out the situation couldn't be twisted into a blood libel against Israel. I wish I could say that your obsession is bizarre, but unfortunately Jew hatred is all too common.

Anyway, the fact is that you misrepresented our exchange. I NEVER "insinuated" that Iran was responsible for the school situation; rather, I kept an open mind. See, I'm not a big fan of Iran but I'm not so consumed by hate that I can't think rationally.

You said Iran was already maximally hateful towards Israel, maximally committed to nuclear weapons. Quite clearly they were not, for they would've acquired nuclear weapons over the last 30 years of breathless Israeli fearmongering and nuked Israel with them.

I don't think this claim will stand up to scrutiny. Here's what I asked you last go-round. I would appreciate answers:

Well do you agree that

(1) enriching Uranium requires large amounts of specialized equipment, such as centrifuges;

(2) the Iranians did actually construct a facility with such centrifuges;

(3) those centrifuge facilities have been sabotaged and/or bombed?

It is obvious that blowing up refineries in Tehran and making thick toxic smog is going to make Iranians upset with Israel.

Well what do you think Iran is going to do against Israel now that it wouldn't otherwise have done, given that now they are REALLY pissed off?

Duh, obviously they are. They boast about it. They did all kinds of agitating and lobbying and legal work, even write little children's books about Reconciliation, they write whole articles (these are just a few) talking about how their Jewish values led them in that direction, tikkun olam and all that. Are you saying I should disbelieve all these Jewish sources, call them liars? Or is the Mabo case a bit of a nothingburger, not very important? Who's the anti-semite here

Lol, you are. If any lurkers are still reading, it seems /u/randomranger has provided an excellent example of my point. Is it a coincidence that (1) he aggressively criticizes Israel to the point of rushing to judgment; (2) he believes Jewish people are collectively responsible (to a significant extent) for policies of the Australian government with which he disagrees; and (3) as far as I can tell, he doesn't seriously deny that he hates Jewish people?

The question on the table is whether (1) the accusation of anti-Semitism is just a rhetorical ploy to blunt criticism of Israel or if (2) it has actual merit. It seems pretty clear to me that, at least in this situation, it's the second possibility.

I don't have any Australian context, but today I learned there is apparently an "Aboriginal tent embassy" across the street from the Australian Parliament house. Now, it seems to me that a country cannot have an embassy of itself within itself, so this is a little awkward when combined with the idea of the land never having been ceded; however, that appears to be the point.

Williams suggested calling the tiny protest, at that point just a camp with a few placards, an embassy.[9] The term "embassy" was deliberately chosen to draw attention to the fact Aboriginal people had never ceded sovereignty, and that there had never been any kind of treaty process with the Crown; they were the only cultural group in Australia who did not have an embassy to represent them.[10] Dr Gary Foley later wrote in his 2014 book about the embassy that the term "tent embassy" was intended to serve as a reminder that Aboriginal people were living in substandard conditions, and treated "like aliens in their own land".[11]

Exactly, 'sovereignty never ceded' is something that they love to repeat despite sovereignty being taken without a treaty. William the Conqueror didn't need a treaty to achieve sovereignty over England. Treaties are secondary to conditions on the ground.

There was a fellow in Australia who LARPed as having his own country to get around paying taxes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Casley

He made visas and passports and his own currency, it was a bit of a tourist attraction... but that doesn't actually mean he had a real country, only that the government was tolerating him.

Yeah it's also produced a bunch of weird things in scholarship where anybody trying to argue for pre-existing Aboriginal organization or agricultural beyond a certain tier of development gets aggressively pilloried since it undermines a bunch of 'Aboriginals can't have lost a war since they didn't have an idea of a political body or losing a war so they can't have lost a war' circular arguments. Which has produced a bunch of hilarious culture war spots where conservatives are accused of giving the Indigenous too much credit for developing societies.

The Israelis don’t make this mistake, there aren’t any Palestinian land acknowledgements in the West Bank. They make good use of language and ritual, as did the Australians of old. In the 19th century, Australian newspapers would report on how colonists would eagerly ‘disperse’ or ‘duly and efficiently pound’ aboriginals. The Native Police would ‘give them a dressing down’, a ‘thumping’ or ‘a shaking up’.

huh, I would reverse that. Seems to me, 200 years from now, Israeli Jews are going to have to "[spend] billions, hundreds of billions, trillions paying subsidies, apologising to and working for low-performers who aren’t going to get their act together anytime soon and certainly aren’t going to be grateful for it."

PS: I was going to go a tangent about "all men are created equal" but then Australia is the only common law country with neither a constitutional nor federal legislative bill of rights to protect its citizens

Israeli Jews are already struggling with low-performing Haredis in Israel, even Israel hasn't mastered this social technology.

And what good is a bill of rights? Britain has one. Zimbabwe has one. The Soviet Union had one. Individual Australian states have them.

Laws are secondary to opinion and facts on the ground.

Laws are a reflection of opinion and facts on the ground. I've stood corrected anyways that Australia has a patchwork in which there is some form of "all men are created equal" and therefore if the "conquerors" don't continuously and incessantly make it clear they are to always stomp on the heads of the "conquered", and if violence is not the answer, then narratives and political power is what's left. I think it's one of, or combination of, the following for me:

  1. Whites are only martial conquerors. Once it's no longer about martial legitimacy (but other forms like traditional, ideological, charismatic, and rational-legal legitimacy), whites aren't better than others. (Like you said: "win the war, lose the peace").
  2. Whites have won the game momentarily, and that the only way to go is down and let the law of historical averages drag them back to baseline.
  3. Whites as a whole is in such a dominant position that "billions, hundreds of billions, trillions" is actually small and not much of a price at all if looking at the grand scheme of things.
  4. Whites stopped thinking of themselves as whites, and the competition became moot (I suppose for you this is a subset of 1 and is a losing condition, but in a different point of view that's a winning condition)

The Bill of Rights 1689 and Magna Carta are surely both also grandfathered into Australian law.

As to the Israelis, if the situation had been settled in the 80s they’d be doing so right now.

You are right. I stand corrected.

Indigenous youth make up 55% of those in youth detention despite being only 7% of the youth. Adults, despite being only 3% of the national population

That surprised me, I thought the population share was in the promille. Does that mean in a generation indigenous portion of youths will be in double digits?

The Indigenous population has approximately tripled in the last 25 years based on the census. However, that's generally seen as being largely a massive uptick in identification rather than the expansion of existing populations. Indigenous are also quite a bit more fertile than the population median afaik.


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