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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8575 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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The question of Northern vs Southern Italy is back with this new graphic. I'm going to dox myself slightly and say I have some perspective on this because both of my parents are Sicilian from Sicily, although I grew up in America. Though I will add it just to interject my general bemusement and provide some Med charm. My background isn't needed to reach this conclusion (though I'm surprised to see so few people arguing it... so maybe!)

Anyway, I presume HBD enjoyers love this North vs South divide because it comes across like that satellite photo of North vs South Korea where the dependent variable is "Communism", except in the case of Italy it's "African ancestry". That's fun to think about, and it certainly has a lot of pop culture roots (that hard scene in True Romance where the Sicilian mob boss is infuriated by being accused of being descended from the Moors), but this link is weak and it mostly ignores the elephant in the room: colonialism.

Yeah yeah we're all sick of hearing about colonialism, but hear me out. I don't mean the kind of colonialism where the natives resist being dragged kicking and screaming into an empire with reading, roads, global trade and capital. I mean the kind of colonialism where your island is considered a useful military outpost and changes hands constantly in wars of dominance.

Quick incomplete list of who ran Sicily over the last thousand years: Byzantines, then Arabs (reasonably good rulers, all things considered), then the Normans rolled in around 1060, then the Hohenstaufens, then the French Angevins, who got kicked out in 1282 in the Sicilian Vespers. A real popular uprising, my people murdering 3000+ Frenchmen over Easter weekend. Much proud. But short-lived! Then the Sicilians, having won, immediately had to invite the Aragonese in to rule them, because a chunk of land in the middle of the Mediterranean does not get to just be independent. The (definitely not gay) hypermasculine types who love the Vesper story seem to not really read to the next chapter where you have to bend the knee to a different imperial lord. Curious!

Anyway then there's the Spanish Habsburgs, who figured out how to maximally extract Naples and Sicily to fund their wars in Flanders. Then the Bourbons. Then briefly Napoleon. Then the Bourbons again. Then finally Garibaldi shows up in 1860 and the place gets annexed into the new Italian state. Run from afar, by people who didn't speak the language and considered the south basically Africa. BTW you knew these regions spoke different languages, right?

Sure, history is sad everywhere. But my point is you can't build anything durable on top of that. Every time a new overlord shows up, the previous administrative class either gets purged or has to switch sides. Whatever institutional knowledge existed gets fragmented. The legal system is whatever the new guy says it is. Tax collection is whatever can be extracted before the next regime change. Land tenure is locked in whatever extractive configuration was useful to the latest set of foreigners, which in Sicily's case meant gigantic estates owned by absentee landlords who lived in Naples or Madrid and never set foot on the property. Nobody is investing in the long term because there is no long term. The mafia isn't a quirk of North African ancestry but rather a survival instinct when you have a long, long standing tradition and belief that the state is illegitimate.

Again, whatever, story of the world. But now we're trying to compare this outpost (these outposts, not just Sicily here) to the seat of the fucking Renaissance up north! Genoa, Venice, Florence, Milan. City-states running their own banks, their own foreign policies, colonial empires of their own. Bit players in bootstrapping the enlightenment! Nobody could conquer the whole north cheaply because the Po Valley was fragmented and the cities played the Holy Roman Empire and France against each other for centuries.

The South had very little of this. It's not so much Guns, Germs and Steel as it is one is a series of defensible mini-Switzerlands and the other are islands easily starved.

The "one peoples, different outcomes, let's Notice" framing seems so off to me because it's clearly more more like smooshing two different countries together and asking why they're still so different. Cultural antibodies hardened over a millenium that rejects the state, trusting strangers, higher IQ institutions doesn't really change in decades.

You can conclude the South is poorer because of African ancestry. Or you can notice that the South spent a thousand years as a strategic chokepoint that every Mediterranean power needed to control, while the North was a fractured set of city-states that nobody could grab easily. One of these explanations predicts the data and the other is constructing vibes based on a satellite photo.

On the colonialism point, before even the Byzantines arguably that the Greeks and Romans, too.

Why doesn't this effect hit Alsace-Lorraine/Rhineland then or the Benelux region? How many empires have run Flanders? That was a chokepoint that the great powers sought to control or invade and yet also a great centre of wealth and industry even before coal was ever discovered there. The Spanish were spending all the silver from the New World buying German cannons and German mercs to fight in Flanders.

If we were going post-colonial, we could easily create a narrative that Belgium's been very hard done by - centuries of imperial rule, getting tossed around and partitioned between the French, Spanish and Dutch, constant warfare, along with the bloodiest fighting of WW1 and getting wrecked in WW2.

In antiquity, Egypt, Greece, Southern Italy, North Africa and Turkey were all well-developed regions despite no shortage of armies passing through and conquering them. Now they're largely a backwater. I find it highly suspicious that all these areas were overrun by the forces of Islam to some extent. Meanwhile, all the areas overrun by Franks, Saxons and men from the North turned out advanced and highly developed.

Ireland had absentee landlords, plenty of them. I have no doubt that absentee landlords are harmful to development. But Ireland popped right back up after centuries of fairly tough colonial rule. Same with Poland for that matter.

I think at this point S Italy has been brain drained too much to recover like W Virginia and it’s primarily not a HBD situation for why it didn’t develop. Colonialism probably stunted the region until it was W Virginia’d.

Most Americans are Southern or Central and did highly assimilate. There is some residual higher criminality. And the Mafia was not a low IQ business. Bigger than US Steel had a great degree of complexity. It was basically an international trading firm in illegal goods, gambling (requires math), and extortion (this kind of low IQ). Mafia did require a great deal of complexity.

My gut says the explanation for why S. Italy failed is primarily colonialism while at the same time Italians were allowed to mass migrate.

W Virginia scores poorly on demographically adjusted school performance. My gut says this does not mean West Virginia has bad public schools. I would probably prefer to send my children to a WV public school than a Chicago public school. But like 90% of the top 50% of WV population has emigrated elsewhere. This is think is also true comparing Florida Hispanic performance to California Hispanic performance. Florida is filled with upper class white people who came legally. Cali is filled with Aztec Hispanics who came illegally.

Aren't Italian Americans generally quite successful outside of organized crime?

Also quite successful inside of organized crime.

And the Mafia was not a low IQ business.

Eh, the Mafia is like Wal-Mart. A few pretty bright guys on top, a whole bunch of morons doing most of the work.

Having spent time in southern Italy I don't buy the historic narratives. Singapore was a swamp long after the historic issues impacted Southern Italy. China was wrecked in the 1900s but they are really putting in effort into building their country.

The issues in Southern Italy are related to an inability to organize. Buses crawl through cities in Sicily because there are parked cars everywhere. Building will be in disrepair and nobody bothers to paint them. They are not too poor to buy paint. The ticket machine at the train stations are constantly broken. There is garbage on the street despite high unemployment. Why are they not cleaning if they have nothing to do? There are basic issues with petty crime, people not being able to queue properly, loud behaviour and other anti social issues that make life hard there.

What struck me most about southern Italy is the lack of any large scale organization. Even when walking through large cities like Naples there are few businesses or organizations that seem to have a turnover of more than one million Euros. There are plenty of small restaurants, cafés, tiny hotels etc. Southern Italians seem perfectly capable of managing their own small scale operation. But they seem to fail specularly at scale. There seem to be few instances of larger groups of people coming together to achieve anything. Southern Italians are the inverse of Chinese and Japanese people.

There is simply no way a semiconductor manufacturer or any high tech firm can function when people can't cooperate. Southern Italy is a bit like India. There is plenty of talent and individually the people can be amazing. However, as a collective there is widespread dysfunction.

As for HBD narrative I found southern Italians to be much more European and lighter in complexion than expected.

Having spent time in southern Italy I don't buy the historic narratives. Singapore was a swamp long after the historic issues impacted Southern Italy.

Wasn't Singapore already a full-blown British colony (the better kind) with a large ethnically Chinese population with deep mercantile tradition to draw on?

Singapore/Malayan Chinese were incredibly rich by Chinese standards prior to WW2. Part of the reason the Japanese were so vicious during occupation was since money from SEA Chinese funded a lot of the mainland resistance.

On the other hand the jump between where Singapore was on the eve of independence and where it has since gone is huge and it was far from a given

Could you appreciate the brain drain argument? Going by my own family, something like 17 out of 20 of my parents' generation left Sicily for America to start a new life away from the rest of the europoors.

This should tell you a lot about the psychology of those who chose to remain (though I love some of them). If you have enough ambition to paint your 700 square foot "house" with no windows that was a carriage repair shop in the 1940s, you might also have enough ambition to say fuck this lets leave for America.

The issue is that other European nations had similar levels of migration without long term disastrous effects on the economy and IQ.

It seems more likely to me that there might have been some initial difference and that most of the brain drain was internal in Italy due to very long running differences is economic development between the north and the south. Perhaps similar things happen in other places but it's less of a regional divide and more that the talented people went to the local city so if you measure the entire region it looks unchanged, while in Italy it doesn't.

It seems like late-19th/early-20th century migration to America might have been roughly a quarter of the population of Sicily, which (assuming they were non-random, which seems obvious) could certainly be expected to have an effect. On the other hand, Sicily was poor before and poor after, so who knows?

The counterfactual is, of course, Ireland, which saw much higher and longer migration and now has the same wages as the historic colonial overlord.

Isn't Ireland benefiting from being vastly smaller and benefiting from being a low tax location for foreign corporations?

Some significant clarifications:

  • Sicily has between 3-7% North African admixture, in some cases up to 12% reportedly, not insignificant but also not dominant and not really stratified across Southern Italy. That North African admixture is almost entirely isolated in Sicily and is 0 - (low) throughout the rest of Southern Italy.
  • The Southern European phenotype is not derived from North African admixture, it's derived from the Early European Farmers. The Sardinians are a unique people in that they retain basically an entirely EEF admixture, and their phenotype was not inherited from Africa or Arabs. It's the closest you can get to seeing what a Early European Farmer looked like from thousands of years ago.
  • What you do see more significantly stratified across North Italy to South Italy is not Arab/African admixture but Indo-European admixture.

So the story there is more dominantly "Early European Farmers - Indo-European" spectrum from South to North and not really "African/Arab - European". Sicily is somewhat the exception given it does have non-negligible North African ancestry and that shows up in the Genetic analysis as well. You propose somewhat of a false dilemma:

You can conclude the South is poorer because of African ancestry. Or you can notice that the South spent a thousand years as a strategic chokepoint that every Mediterranean power needed to control, while the North was a fractured set of city-states that nobody could grab easily. One of these explanations predicts the data and the other is constructing vibes based on a satellite photo.

Not because of African ancestry but Indo-European ancestry. Yes, the Indo European colonizers conquered the Italian peninsula in different waves and different times, first it was the Romans, then the Barbarians and so on. But the HBD interpretation would be that the percolation of various empires and city states in the areas with greater Indo-European admixture is not a coincidence, i.e. the establishment of the Roman Empire with the arrival of the Latin tribes to Italy. That would be the Noticer explanation for why Northern Italy had this high degree of civilizational development that lacked in Southern Italy, not because of African ancestry.

So the Noticing is not a black mark against North African ancestry as much as it stresses that the Indo Europeans really were a colonize and impose civilization everywhere type of people.

The Southern European phenotype is not derived from North African admixture, it's derived from the Early European Farmers. The Sardinians are a unique people in that they retain basically an entirely EEF admixture, and their phenotype was not inherited from Africa or Arabs. It's the closest you can get to seeing what a Early European Farmer looked like from thousands of years ago.

Maybe it's a bad picture, but I could find dozens of guys like him in any MMA club in Dagestan.

The Neolithic Farmers spread into the both Caucasus and Europe, the G2a Early European Farmer haplogroup is concentrated in both Sardinia and the Caucasus region.

Some of the ethnic groups of the Caucasus tend to look quite different physically from Europeans or even from Iranians, and many of the languages of the Caucasus are not Indo-European despite the Caucasus being located very near to the likely origin point of the Indo-European languages and despite the Caucasus having spent thousands of years having strong Indo-European-speaking powers on its borders, so I suppose it's possible that they too retain strong pre-Indo-European genetic traits, although I have no idea whether there is any connection to Early European Farmers.

There's a separate ancestral group, Caucasian Hunter-gatherers, but they seem to be close to EEF according to this chart: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Admixture_graph_of_deep_Eurasian_lineages.png

WSH (Yamnaya culture) are considered a 50/50 mix of CHG and EHG, so ㄟ( ▔, ▔ )ㄏ

Mamma mia, get a load of this guy with the No True HBDer argument. Fuggadaboutit.

Isn't the South originally Indo-European descended? Greeks, Romans, Normans, the Aragonese?

Isn't the South originally Indo-European descended? Greeks, Romans, Normans, the Aragonese?

All of Europe was originally (for purposes of this discussion) inhabited by Early European Farmers who migrated into Europe like 10,000 years ago. And then starting about 5,000 years ago, during the transition between the Neolithic age and early Bronze Age, Indo European tribes invaded Europe.

All Europeans have significant admixture from both groups, but that's the main story in the North/South divide in Italian admixture, not African admixture (really with the exception of Sicily itself).

Isn't the main non-Indo-European zone in Italy in historic times Etruria, today one of the wealthier regions?

To my recollection, the Romans and Etruscans had similar levels of IE vs EEF genes, but the Romans had an Indo-European language and the Etruscans did not. This may reflect a broader difference between the cultures, but of course their influence on one another was so enormous as to kind of muddle any early differences.

Quick edit: Ah, looks like SS's citation covers that.

I'm not aware of Etruria being a non-Indo-European zone, are you referring to the Etruscans? The Etruscans were assimilated by the Romans, but it turns out they were also actually an IE tribe although they didn't speak an IE language. The Sabines and the Samnites were also IE tribes.

According to almost 2,000 years worth of genomic data, collected from 12 sites across Italy, these enigmatic people did not emigrate from Anatolia (a region that's now part of Turkey), but shared genetic heritage with people who lived nearby in ancient Rome.

All were descended from pastoralists who moved into the region from the steppes during the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age. Given that the steppes are thought to be where Indo-European languages originated, the finding underscores another Etruscan mystery – that of their (now extinct) non-Indo-European language, which managed to persist for centuries.

But the indo-Europeans were not a civilized people, they were steppe barbarians, and indo-European-ness doesn’t elsewhere correlate with wealth within Europe- Finland and the Basque Country are both wealthier regions.

The Steppe nomads, Yamnaya culture, were barbarians but then they migrated to Europe and evolved into the Corded Ware culture which became ancestral to Celtic, Latin, Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic cultures. The Haplogroups R1b and R1a are linked to the Indo-European steppe migrations and those haplogroups dominate European Royalty: R1b dominates Western European, British, and French royalty while R1a dominates Eastern European and Slavic royal lines.

Of course Haplogroup R1a is also prominently found in India at high frequencies (40-70%) among Indian Brahmin communities particularly in North India, and that haplogroup was brought to India by IE migrations into India. So that tells the same story as Europe.

The Finns have high levels of IE admixture, much higher than southern Italy.

Just browsing that map of Europe I linked does provide a strong correlation with wealth and development. Looking at that map also suggests there's no coincidence the Industrial Revolution was started in the North Sea area.

Edit: This is not to say I disagree that they were barbarians. But as Nietzsche said "The noble caste was in the beginning always the barbarian caste." The Latin barbarians (dominated by R1b haplogroup) did rampage through Italy and killed a lot of people, and then they built Rome and became the Nobles.

You can conclude the South is poorer because of African ancestry. Or you can notice that the South spent a thousand years as a strategic chokepoint that every Mediterranean power needed to control, while the North was a fractured set of city-states that, etc.

Well I don't need to conclude anything, but I can certainly lean toward the explanation that seems to correlate to poverty basically 100% of the time across contexts, rather than the latest bespoke localized novelty theory of the sort that a non-HBD person seemingly has to memorize hundreds of to rationalize the world around them.

lean toward the explanation that seems to correlate to poverty basically 100% of the time across contexts

I don't think you're trying very hard. North/South Korea, East/West Germany, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Same genes, different institutions, very different outcomes.

The Haiti/DR case is especially clean: same island, similar populations, 6-7x GDP gap, and Haiti spent 122 years paying France for having freed itself. Hold genes constant, vary institutions, get massive divergence. The "100%" claim doesn't survive contact with five minutes of thought.

I'm not memorizing hundreds of rationales, I just actually looked for counterexamples that ruined a seductive hobby horse.

Haiti being a basket case is relatively recent, because they were ruled by an insane witch who turned the country into a failed state because he didn't trust his own government, and the Dominican Republic's dictatorship was a normal standard average egomaniac strongman.

Haiti and the Dominican Republic

Not the same genes. Haiti is ~90% sub-Saharan African, the DR closer to 40%.

I expect there's some genetic variance east to west across Germany as well, though Communism was obviously the larger influence.

Never ask Puerto Ricans what they think of Dominicans, Dominicans what they think of Haitians—much less why.

As @SecureSignals distinguishes but @dr_analog appears to have elided—there’s a major genetic difference between North African ancestry and Sub-Saharan African ancestry.

Not the same genes. Haiti is ~90% sub-Saharan African, the DR closer to 40%.

I'll give that to you, though if we're going to contend a drop of African blood can turn South Italy into a wasteland imagine what 40% should be doing to the DR.

Sicily is very poor for Europe and the DR is doing quite well for Latin America, but Sicily is still much richer than the DR.

According to the results of a search right now, there has been no discussion here of the Pragmata controversy so far.

Wikipedia talk page

(There is no Wikipedia article on it, at least not yet.)

Summary on Know Your Meme

Shoeonhead's video

Forbes review

Slant Magazine review

I’d put forth the following arguments:

It seems the Blue Tribe generally views Gamergate as a propaganda defeat because they see it as a long-term contributor to the MAGA/alt-right phenomenon but at the same time I don’t think they concluded that they themselves are even partially to blame. Therefore they are looking for opportunities to fight back, and are now including the pedophilia accusation in their attacks on evil gamers. As far as I can say, this was generally not yet the case back in 2014.

I’m also noticing something that eluded me so far, namely that the probable reason why both the original Gamergate (the Zoe Quinn controversy) and the current controversy proved to be effective ragebait to the Blue Tribe is that they are fueling two of their grievances at once.

One: they generally believe that toxic loser men are aiming to police women's sex lives out of resentment and hatred. I don’t think they have anything specific in mind. (I once asked here what this stuff is even supposed to be. I only received one answer: ‘compelling or aggressively encouraging women to not be floozies.’) It’s just a general vibe that makes them feel the ick. It’s why they think Quinn was unjustly attacked.

Regarding Pragmata I think their train of thought is the following: this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut. And it’s not like these dudebros are making any effort to be the supportive, emotionally intelligent, suave etc. male ally that is worthy of a relationship, instead they want to realize their fantasies by curbing women’s freedoms. It’s just terribly gross.

Their other usual grievance, of course, is that toxic males want to appropriate hobbies and cordon them off for women, turning them into their own toxic ghettoized playgrounds.

Regarding Pragmata I think their train of thought is the following: this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut. And it’s not like these dudebros are making any effort to be the supportive, emotionally intelligent, suave etc. male ally that is worthy of a relationship, instead they want to realize their fantasies by curbing women’s freedoms. It’s just terribly gross.

Their other usual grievance, of course, is that toxic males want to appropriate hobbies and cordon them off for women, turning them into their own toxic ghettoized playgrounds.

I'm beginning to think the specific argument isn't the thing and this is the ultimate point. You have a bunch of neurotic ideologues (and, to be fair, people who outright earn a living from adulterating everything with politics) and their victory is forcing you to be as neurotic as they are about it. I'm sure they'd say it was consciousness raising or something but that's what it seems like to me.

In theory you could have just played a game about a child and thought nothing else about it. Instead, you've been forced to do woke philosophy to figure out what the hell drives this stuff.

Unreasonable demands actually work better here. There's always something. The more ridiculous it is the more sensitive you become about everything because everything can be "problematized" and the little woke-model living rent-free in your brain knows that more anodyne things yield more points when problematized.

This struck me during the Snape debacle: people, antiwoke people, were pre-outraged on essentially woke grounds (are we gonna watch some white jocks beat up a black kid??). What better victory than to loom so large in your opponent's mind that they can't escape your ideology and are in a permanent defensive crouch?

There's no winning this once it starts.

The ShoeOnHead video is actually funny. These people in the comment screenshots are insane.

"I want to like it, but can't, knowing men like it" sums these bigoted losers up pretty well.

This is probably evidence of Twitter optimizing outrage, but I've seen very little in the way of leftists criticizing Pragmata for it's portrayal of Diana (besides people suggesting that it's just a retread of the appeal of God of War/ The Last Of Us) but several people getting mad that Diana's voice actress is black (e.g. this x post)

I think the controversy of Saros is also pretty ripe culture war, but I should probably get off my ass and write up a full post myself.

This is disingenuous. The reason that people are point out Diana's VA is due to earlier crash outs in the VA community that basically boiled down to 'only VAs of the same ethnicity can reprise characters of color.'

And before you say, 'It's just twitter', this did have real-world repercussions, from the Simpsons getting rid of Apu's VA and the newest Avatar movie going out of their way to find a blind VA to play Toph as opposed to getting their old VAs.

They're pointing out the hypocrisy, but people having the attention span of gold fish, it just whooshes over thier head.

Please do, I am trying to get confirmation about whether it sucks before I buy. I am interested in the premise as an occasional King in Yellow enjoyer.

Oh to be clear I'm

A. A lefty who thinks the discourse is stupid outrage farming and

B. Someone who platinumed Returnal.

I was probably always going to buy Saros regardless of reviews as long as the gameplay looked similar, and I'm loving it even though I've only had ~10 hours to put in.

Malcom Collins actually agrees that the depiction of the child is a bit off, giving the pedo accusers something to latch on to. Strangely adult features on what is supposed to be a child (in which case, robbing it of what is supposed to be attractive to a pedo, come to think of it, defeating the point?).

robbing it of what is supposed to be attractive to a pedo, come to think of it, defeating the point?

Yes, trivially.

However, adult features (and behaviors) on children are what the average person thinks pedos like (re: Cuties, etc.), so they get set off on child beauty pageantry, etc.

Of course, how would said average person ever encounter someone who would point that out, given the room temperature around the topic is so hysterical it [approves of] calling the cops on men out with their daughters?

I honestly don't see how any of the three points you cite, and gamergate writ large, are in any way relevant here. Pragmata's Diana is a 1) robot 2) child that has no possible sex life to police, the "typical male fantasy" bit swiftly evokes the meme but otherwise AFAIK there's no wife to speak of so the entire point is moot (in fact I'd posit that feeling threatened by a rather ordinary fatherly-protector dynamic, or projecting any "wifely" duties onto the robot child, are both rather embarrassing self-owns), curbing a child's freedom to an extent is pretty much the definition of parenting, and A Plague Tale exists so child-deficient women are welcome to enjoy the medium at their leisure.

As for the cause of screeching, I think it's pretty obvious:

  • unashamedly cute and funny young female
  • bulky coat but entirely bare legs/feet is fertile ground for fetish projection (as a non-footfag I don't get it but I agree it stands out)
  • canonically an android so maps heh, MAPs very neatly onto the evergreen "ackchyually she's a 500 year old dragon" trope
  • cheeky promotional badge on Twitch as irresistible self-reporting bait to gooners (please god let that bit be intentional because it would be so fucking funny)

It feels weird saying this as an admitted degenerate, but the entire """controversy""" feels like a complete nothingburger to me - unfortunately in the age of the gooner no petite/underage character is safe from uoh-posting and pedo projections allegations, judging by the badge brouhaha even normies seem to have caught on the :crying_emoji: dogwhistle. I agree with @PutAHelmetOn that, since racism doesn't hit the same way anymore, pedophilia is very likely next up for a ride on the outgroup insult treadmill; as any sort of public-facing figure you will, or already do, have to be performatively disgusted by anything remotely "loli-coded" or be branded a closet pedo. As a gachatard I'm vividly reminded of the recent ""drama"" about Tiphera, a CZN character that had the temerity to be petite and almost-flat (while explicitly not a child) among a sea of titcows well-endowed characters, and accordingly has been the subject of much handwringing from the moment she was showcased, immortalized by a memetic Reddit mod melty and subsequent closing of ranks (why is it always Reddit mods?). To be entirely fair, unlike Diana that one also flashes you every time you choose her cards in battle, but she's also not a child, and that's really the norm by gacha fanservice standards.

I'm actually surprised that this is the direction the internet decided to take with Pragmata, instead of what I assumed to be a more obvious and less explicit angle of relentlessly Shinzo-Abe-posting about blatant, egregious Japanese birth rate propaganda and emotional exploitation (seriously, you can't tell me that as a man you can look at things like this and don't feel a faint warmth in your chest). Alive internet theory continues to lose ground. I grant that some design choices stand out, as described above, but I feel like this is mostly done to give the robot child a distinctive/memorable outline and a certain degree of uncanny valley, at which IMO it succeeds.

(seriously, you can't tell me that as a man you can look at things like this and don't feel a faint warmth in your chest)

Ironically, I think Pragmata and what I've seen of the discourse may have once again confirmed to me that I'm not well-suited to being a parent. Looking at Diana, I feel nothing at all, other than slight annoyance at some of her antics. I'm not some deranged child-free lunatic raving about "crotch goblins" every other hour of the day, nor am I an anti-pedo crusader looking for nonces under my bed, but I honestly don't think I've ever seen a child below the age of like 10, fictional or otherwise, behaving like a child would, whom I didn't find mildly unpleasant and annoying.

(seriously, you can't tell me that as a man you can look at things like this and don't feel a faint warmth in your chest)

Oddly enough, I feel that I'm protected from this game's superstimulus by interacting all day every day with a hyperstimulus in the shape of my own baby daughter. But I do admit it does look pretty cute.

Having heard nothing about this controversy before this thread other than that it had something to do with a video game, I simply could not believe the cover art was real. I still kinda don’t.

You buried the lede. They made the little girl look like an age 9 version of the hottest chick in the college sorority, complete with makeup, bedroom eyes, and long flowing hair.

Spec Ops: The Line was controversial for intentionally making the player feel like a war criminal. Is part of the artistic vision of Pragmata to make the player feel like a pedophile?

I appreciate the resistance to ideological uglification in games, but that doesn’t mean we need to make preteen girls look like Kate Upton.

hey made the little girl look like an age 9 version of the hottest chick in the college sorority, complete with makeup, bedroom eyes, and long flowing hair.

Oh for feck's sake. I had heard nothing about this whole kerfuffle until I saw Shoe's video, but come on. Newsflash: little girls have long flowing hair. When I was that age I had long flowing hair and it was nothing to do with "hottest chick in the college sorority".

Makeup? Haven't seen enough of the images to notice, but from what I can see, that's not makeup. Again, little girls (and boys!) have clear, unblemished, youthful skin with strong colouring - when I was a girl in my early to mid teens, I was at school with girls with Dresden doll complexions and no makeup was involved at all. Now, she does seem to be wearing lip gloss, but on the other hand it's hard to tell if that's meant to be makeup or if it's her artificial skin under the lighting (she also has a shiny nose in this, and there isn't (yet) the notion that one's nose should be shiny so here's highlighter to make that happen). And besides, there are makeup sets for tweens so we're long past any pearl-clutching over marketing adult shit to kids too young for it. (That TikTok is one where I'd happily join in a torch-bearing mob protesting against it).

Bedroom eyes? I'll have to take your word for that.

Going off looks, Diana is around eight to nine years old. So she won't have the uwu features of the sexualised anime little girls (like the current case of Mimi Yanagi, another storm in an online teacup case and one where the 'artist' damn well is making a 'sexualised four to six year old but it's all chibi art and a totally fake fictional character so what is all the fuss about?') that maybe you are referencing as an internal model of "this is what a child in video games should look like".

Agreed. The character looks like a prepubescent girl. A pretty girl to be sure, and somewhat stylized. She is a bit doll like, which is fitting given that she is supposed to be an android.

I hope we are not reaching a point where anything feminine, cute, or pretty is immediately seen as sexy. But it seems like an unfortunate side effect of internet memes that anything that can be sexualised will be, leading to weird situations like this one.

I hope we are not reaching a point where anything feminine, cute, or pretty is immediately seen as sexy.

No, you're only seeing the connection drawn here because:

a.) angry women on the Internet want to Problematize it and equate "men getting to interact with the cute/feminine" = "pedophilia [as the most effective proxy for 'offensive to Female Privilege']"

b.) angry men on the Internet actually did see it as sexy and are crimestop-ing, or are just simping/pretending to for the benefit of the aformentioned angry women

But it seems like an unfortunate side effect of internet memes that anything that can be sexualised will be

Well, it sure beats only one gender having the privilege to determine what is sexual and what is not. That way lies your "don't worry we won't tell your folks; when you're at school, you're a girl"s.

Yeah the character in question looks nothing like an adult.

If anything, the Pragmata "controversy" is an example of seeing the fake and gay culture war strings getting yanked in real time, or whatever metaphor you want, something something outrage farming, something something grifting. People say intentionally-outrageous things to get clicks, regardless of if it furthers their own stated ideological goals or even their reputation, because clicks are the sole aim.

This controversy has two elements to it: the pedo thing and the pro-family thing.

The pedo thing is just a cost of making anything with children in it, sorta like how anything anthro unfortunately attracts furries. Yes, they made the little girl very pretty. The bare legs/feet makes for a distinctive silhouette, but that also draws attention to her physicality. (Apparently pedos are really into feet, legs, and specifically the backs of knees, but that's precisely because those are parts of children's bodies that are typically exposed to view). Getting up in arms about accusing it of being a pedo game is someone actively trying to create generic moral panic outrage when there isn't any. If I run into someone in real life who goes off on an unprompted rant about how gamers are pedos and Pragmata is Incel Pedo Gamergate Misogyny Racism, I'll update my opinion and be disappointed.

The other element is a Hassan Piker line about how gamers (a lot of his audience and periphery audience, the guy is on Twitch) are pathetic losers something something. It's just outrage bait from an outrage baiter, what's annoying is that this naked-outrage-baiter hyperconsumerist grifting socialist gay-baiting himbo nepo-e-celeb gets fawned over and glazed by the NYT.

Socialists/Marxists shitting on the concept of the nuclear family isnt a good look for them, it annoys normies and sane people. Reminding normies that abolishing the family is technically on the Marxist platform is bad tactics when socialism is supposed to just mean "the government does nice things."

I am more inclined to agree with the idea that the paedo thing is "how dare men like the idea of being fathers and protectors!" so in the same spirit in which "oh, you're against gay rights? hmm you must be a closet poofter yourself then!" the accusation is being levelled that "the only reason you like this blonde, blue-eyed, white Aryan little girl is because you're a nonce, you Nazi white supremacist kiddy-diddler".

Well, the pedos did factually come out of the woodwork for this game.

One would generally expect that people who are attracted to little girls will flock to a game centered around a little girl. That does not mean the game was designed to appeal to pedophiles though, just like a game with dogs is not designed to appeal to zoophiles.

Hot take: anyone who morally criticizes art is wrong.

(Of course excluding "military secrets but art", "private personal information but art", etc.)

Even if it was depicting pedophillia: pedophilia is morally wrong, murder and genocide are morally wrong, yet most people have no issues with depicted gruesome murder and genocide. And most (including me) feel it's gross, but I feel lots of art is gross; it should definitely be behind a filter, like NSFW and "trigger warning" media, but otherwise, nobody should really care about what doesn't really affect them.

The reason for allowing subjective toxic waste, besides having others tolerate your disgusting (to them) fetish, is boundary ambiguity. People are too worried about persecution to publish safe art, unless they see works they know are far edgier avoid persecution (anxiety isn't logical). Furthermore, moral policing oversteps reasonable limits when it tries to target borderline examples (like this one). They shift the rules (spoken and unspoken); they either erode, making the moral policing ineffective to its supporters, or grow, leaving us with worse and worse "sensitive" art.

I have no strong argument against morally policing obvious pedophilia (or porn, or gore, or anything that most people don't like). But I still oppose it, because I'm not convinced it's worth the utilitarian/altruistic loss and potential to stray from "obvious".

As for this game: Dunkey recommends it, the Slade reviewer complements the father-daughter relationship (and the Forbes reviewer criticizes it not for pedophilia, but "zero friction"), the worst I've directly witnessed online is "over-reactive people are over-reacting".

Of course excluding "military secrets but art", "private personal information but art", etc.

I'm old enough to remember the first few bytes of the leaked AACS master key (09 f9 11 ...) because people made so much art, some of it decent, out of it. Controversy over that was a big part of the downfall of Digg, but you're not wrong that I'd probably feel differently if it was nuclear launch codes and not content protection keys.

Hot take: anyone who morally criticizes art is wrong.

(Of course excluding "military secrets but art", "private personal information but art", etc.)

This seems kind of contradictory to me. You seem to implicitly acknowledge that there are some kinds of fiction that can have real world negative consequences that are not above moral critique (leaking military secrets or private personal information), but also implicitly take the line that in the entire universe of things art can be about, none of them will have real world consequences that could match those of military secrets or private personal information.

Now, I'm personally fairly pro-icky art, and I think the simple, obvious reality is that icky art doesn't usually cause us to do icky things. Murder mysteries don't make you commit murder, dramas about rape and trauma don't make you go out and traumatize people, etc.

However, I at least find it plausible that there could be subcategories of icky stories, like those touching on suicide in a particular way, that could actually have negative effects on society and result in real world harm, perhaps in the ballpark of leaking military secrets or personal information. I think it has to be much more piecemeal than to simply say that "anyone who morally criticizes art is wrong."

Those exceptions are non-fiction.

I agree there can be some limits to acceptable expression, but they must be specific and have very good reason. I can't find a good reason against anything fictional, even fictional pedophilia. Generally when somebody morally criticizes "art", they're criticizing the fiction.

I at least find it plausible that there could be subcategories of icky stories, like those touching on suicide in a particular way, that could actually have negative effects on society and result in real world harm, perhaps in the ballpark of leaking military secrets or personal information.

In theory yes, but I think it would be too hard for anyone to form an argument against them that couldn't be broadly applied to harmless art, without hindsight.

More importantly, such infohazardous art would probably not be describable, or the reason for its ban would probably not be arguable, without leaking the infohazard. Meaning it would have to be secretly policed. Now, perfectly secretly policing art is indistinguishable from it not existing, and secret policing can be ethical (e.g. by downranking the art so the creator simply thinks noone likes it), so I don't object to it in theory. But secret police in today's first-world countries would require unimaginable competence, and historically secret police have a bad record, so I object in practice.

I agree there can be some limits to acceptable expression, but they must be specific and have very good reason. I can't find a good reason against anything fictional, even fictional pedophilia.

In fact, don't people who are anti-pornography say that it harms society because men use it as a low-effort substitute for going out and finding a real woman? In the case of pedo porn, this is exactly what we want to happen.

In the case of pedo porn, this is exactly what we want to happen.

No, that's exactly what people say they want to happen. More realistically, people usually just want to use pedophiles as punching bags for status signalling purposes.

Those exceptions are non-fiction.

I guess I assumed you were talking about something like the War Thunder forum, which always seems to have military leaks and is a fictional MMO.

That's the point: War Thunder is mostly fiction, but the leaked military vehicle specs were real.

I'm sure at least a few folks have had to sit through a threat brief involving not falling for a loose rewording of Cunningham's Law.

It's explicitly in the FBI anti-elicitation guidance, yes.

The controversy is a pitiful one, on par with "the symbol of white power", 👌, or Pizzagate in daftness.

Yes, the prepubescent robot girl probably attracts literal pedos to the game: she's wearing her long hair down, there's this weird contrast between her massive coat and bare legs and feet. But I sincerely doubt that Capcom would intentionally design her to attract pedophiles or that its SMM would leave dog-whistle emoji for them.

there's this weird contrast between her massive coat and bare legs and feet

To me, and this is only on first glance, that's meant to underline the fact that she's not a real human child but an android, the contrast between heavy coat and bare legs is jarring and for a flesh-and-blood person, having bare legs and feet like that would be unprotected and dangerous. But if she's a robot, then she isn't in the same danger of injury.

Or it, together with her hair, makes her look like she's wearing a nightgown, which is probably a better angle of attack than insisting that the developers are aware of an obscure meme.

an obscure meme

At this point, I feel doubtful that 4chan's /v/ board counts as obscure. It's my understanding that the meme also is fairly popular on Twitter.

she's wearing her long hair down, there's this weird contrast between her massive coat and bare legs and feet

Ah yes, she has bare ankles and a coat that's too big for her. How scandalous.

This is just angry women complaining that a young female character doesn't hate the male protagonist, and toxic females wanting to appropriate hobbies and cordon them off for men (everything these types complain about is projection). That's all.

I would have expected more hysteria over the DLC costumes; there's one that's quite a bit more form-fitting (and her hair is tied up and shortened) and as such maps closer to what pedophilia is in the mind of the typical normie.

As for the uoh-posting... the SMM is doing their job well. It's not like that isn't a target audience for the game, and "give people a slightly-edgy meme/emoji to spam in chat and thus annoy streamers on Twitch" is advertising as valuable as any other (perhaps moreso).

But the game isn't really trying to push "you should be sexually attracted to this character", far as I can tell. Of course, I've been busy catching up with my other backlog of games so I haven't had time to sit down and evaluate how cute and/or funny the android actually is yet.

Ah yes, she has bare ankles and a coat that's too big for her. How scandalous.

Truly Miyazaki tapped innto something with Dark Souls.

I mean there is that boss fight in Elden Ring with the crippled girls in graduation gowns trying to bite your ankles. Made my wife and I instantly say "the writer's thinly veiled fetish" when we got to it.

I sincerely doubt that Capcom would intentionally design her to attract pedophiles

It has been suggested that Capcom has done this before, with the Mega Man character Roll.

Roll? Seriously? Maybe I have no idea what pedophiles are attracted to, but I would definitely never suggest Roll as pedobait.

Capcom did authorize the sale of a statue of her bending over with a short dress and a coquettish wink.

Isn't that generally the way with collectible figures when it's female characters, though? It's not so much paedo-bait as "crying out loud, she's too young for the standard pout'n'wink lean forward show off boobs and butt female pose".

I remember the controversy when this piece of high art was released, back in the day.

Coquettish? It's like that Rorschach test joke that goes, "You have a whole album of gay furry porn in your office and I'm the pervert?"

I don't see the connection between this and Gamergate. At best, you could say "this game causes gamers to be attacked as pedophiles" which fits with the Gamergate narrative ("gamers attacked").

My only exposure to controversy about the game was people calling it sexualized, creepy, and pedophilic. The people who call this game perverted are themselves gooners. They are kind of like woke people who call DnD racist for having low-intelligence orcs. It is a kind of self-report. "Strong man protects little child" is completely normal and wholesome in media. It does not therefore become un-wholesome because the child is loli-coded.

Pedophile is becoming more common attack de jour among the Extremely Online. I expect it will follow a similar path of the word "racist." Concretely, I expect within the next decade, a new round of MeToo/cancel culture to include cancelling men for being "pedophiles" but this will not involve any legal proceedings. The "pedophilia" in question will just be age gap relationships (not harassment!).

If this prediction is true, then it would be unsurprising to see the newest term of derision applied early to an easy target like gamers.

In short, I think the controversy is caused by:

  1. perverts sexualizing the game (even though it is not sexual)
  2. getting mad at it (because straight male sexuality is taboo)

I'll probably regret asking, but how is the robot daughter in the game 'loli-coded'?

Only in the relative sense, like compared to Baby Yoda.

The admin of Kiwi Farms claims that she looks too good, with lip gloss, makeup, and a ridiculously fancy hair style, which implies intentional sexualization.

a ridiculously fancy hair style

I haven't seen all the images so maybe there's one where she does have her hair done, but God damn, if "long hair not tied back or up" is considered ridiculously fancy, I better not show anyone that photo of me when I was nine and hadn't even brushed my glossy, long, tresses when the photo was taken!

Here's the full quote of his opinion.

By the way, someone posted this [image of Sarah Miller from The Last of Us] at me on Xitter and I think they thought it was an epic slam dunk.

But, uh, it kind of immediately proves me point. It's an even better point of reference than Ellie [also from The Last of Us]. If you compare that girl to Diana it is even more starkly obvious than Ellie why Diana is so fucking creepy.

Sarah Miller:

  • Flat, short hair (juvenile haircut).

  • Knobbly nose.

  • Close together facial features (neotenic feature)

  • Far-apart eyes.

  • Natural complex and lips.

  • Thin, fuzzy eyebrows.

This looks like a real child.

Diana:

  • Waist-length hair that is featured like a pageant girl.

  • Extreme blush.

  • Lipgloss.

  • Plucked eyebrows.

  • Dark, painted eyelashes despite being blonde.

  • Facial features are further apart like an adult woman's.

  • Facial features are both hyper-realistic and also completely blown out like she has foundation on.

  • Facial features are completely symmetrical like a Sims character.

Like come the fuck on JUST LOOK AT HOW SHE IS MADE UP.

How can you sit there and lie to my face? How can you say that these are the same designs that serve the same innocent purpose?

If you think this is the same thing you have autism. You should not have paternal instincts activated because you have autism and your paternal instincts are broken.

The website's users seem to be more or less evenly split on whether they agree with him.

Or, to paraphrase:

Sarah Miller: I wasn't attracted to this, and she is kind of homely. I'm not attracted to butch haircuts or neotenous features, so that means nobody else would ever be either. By the way, I did not get along with the girls when I was in elementary school.

Diana: I was attracted to this, and that made me uncomfortable. This means other people will be attracted to this temptress too, and that's a thoughtcrime and bad. This is especially funny because of where I'm posting this opinion. Anyway, I think pedophiles would choose this one, 100%, even though I just got done explaining about how this looks nothing like an actual kid.

(This is mainly because I don't actually think "pedophilia" has anything to do with actual kids, and is more about policing men around young women, which my mind tells me this is; obviously this here is an attempt to get around that.)

This isn't really that difficult to understand.

I'll take "telling on myself" for 500, Alex.

GamerGate was a failure for the Right because it did not promote any of their aims and norms in the video game industry, but only further cemented the progressive stranglehold on video game culture. Look at modern WoW. The Progressive side successfully narrated the event within the industry and increased the number of LGBT / women / trans and their influence by some percent afterward. It’s an interesting event in any case as it shows the way that Progressive power functionally works — in a gender inclusive space filled with autistic men, attractive women wield enormous social power and can essentially act as petty tyrants, and this is amplified by advocacy networks and sympathetic media which side with them above all. It’s also interesting in that it showed the influence of anonymous organization online a la 4chan, which would later throw their weight behind Trump.

Gamergate did not involve "the right". There might have been a minority of gamers with right-of-center political views, but this was always an inter-left fight, with some of the defeated later drifting right having found some safe harbor there/having grown a decade older.

with some of the defeated later drifting right having found some safe harbor there

This is known as "having been thrown into the pit".

GamerGate was a failure for the Right because it did not promote any of their aims and norms in the video game industry, but only further cemented the progressive stranglehold on video game culture. Look at modern WoW.

That stranglehold seems to have strangled the industry to death. I'm sure the husk of Blizzard that was left after the sexual harassment catastrophe has filled its eternal legacy MMO with all kinds of woke shit, but out there in the world the industry is seeing devastating layoffs as unwanted games full of snowflake characters metaphorically pile up in trash bins. Like say Dragon Age. They successfully murdered a series, but they sure didn't get anyone to like it.

Yeah, I'm inclined to believe that the progressive victory was going to happen anyway because it did everywhere else. If anything Gamergate is just sort of the backlash from people who sense something is moving but can't really stop it.

"Go woke, go broke" is probably overrated but gaming seems to be one of the places where it regularly happens, for the same reasons it happens at the top end of the film industry.

Progressive stranglehold on video game culture or video games themselves?

I should say the culture expressed in video games.

this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut. And it’s not like these dudebros are making any effort to be the supportive, emotionally intelligent, suave etc. male ally that is worthy of a relationship, instead they want to realize their fantasies by curbing women’s freedoms. It’s just terribly gross.

If that is indeed the thinking, then that's Anita Sarkeesian levels of not having played the game and missed the point entirely. There's no nuclear family, it's "single dad" coded. There's no wife. Hugh is the most supportive idealized single dad. It's not even "disgusting instinct of spreading his genes"; Hugh is more like an adoptive father. He himself has been adopted, and talks multiple times of how much he loved and was loved by his adoptive family, and how they're his real family. The game is adoption propaganda. If anything the right should be complaining that it's encouraging men to raise kids that aren't their own.

If we're going to mindread the people who screech at the game, I don't think we need to go any further than: anything that reminds men and women that there are genuinely fulfilling experiences in building a family is unpleasant because they are not currently feeling fulfilled by the life they chose for themselves of eschewing traditional family roles.

I didn’t recognize the name, so I looked it up. Ah, it’s the robot daughter one. I’ve seen a couple people playing it.

I didn’t know there was controversy, either. Google doesn’t make it obvious; none of the search results include your links, nor do the related searches suggest any drama. The Forbes review is mildly critical but not controversial. Slant’s is unambiguously positive. How confident are you that this extends beyond the Extremely Online?

It’s definitely not at the level of GamerGate, which in turn was less important than the average games journalist suggests. I prescribe less time on Twitter.

I didn’t know there was controversy, either.

No more did I until literally the other day. But someone will always find a reason to be offended by something.

It’s definitely not at the level of GamerGate, which in turn was less important than the average games journalist suggests.

GamerGate was a huge battle in the culture wars. An entire generation of nerds was redpilled by the realization that:

  1. Game journalists were coordinating with each other as a class to put out a unified media narrative.
  2. Those same game journalists absolutely hated gamers.

And, of course, this lesson was readily generalizable to other fields, such as cinema, or politics.

There is a reason that Scott Alexander had to censor the term, reducing us to talking about reproductively viable worker ants.

To this date, the Wikipedia article on GamerGate starts with "Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture." Anybody who reads that sentence and remembers being there knows that Wikipedia is not to be trusted on political matters.

How confident are you that this extends beyond the Extremely Online?

Not at all. Then again, Gamergate wasn't that different in that regard, was it? I view this as a small and delayed aftershock of Gamergate.

and are now including the pedophilia accusation in their attacks on evil gamers.

Simpler answer: Many of the people lobbing this are just ahistorically narcissistic freaks who fail to grasp a fundamental part of human nature. If you're wierd enough to genuinely not know what a "man" is, then art depicting the Protector role will just come off as alien and disturbing. And if you're a gooner, then obviously it just gets parsed through a sexual lens.

Similar to the women who mainline romance slop calling Sam and Frodo gay because they've never had a real friendship.

And this one became high octane culture war fuel because of all the videos of women streamers having their ovaries take the wheel on stream while playing the game. Of course deep blue types will feel attacked; reds would act the same way if there was a game that had the chuds openly feeling gay-curious. I'll go ahead and note that the latter won't actually happen because it's an apparently inborn trait for a small, sticky slice of the population whereas the former is arguably the literal purpose of cellular life.

And this one became high octane culture war fuel because of all the videos of women streamers having their ovaries take the wheel on stream while playing the game.

If you're going to put it like this, now I want you to elaborate.

I'm not going to say 'just fucking google it', but it's enough of a minor trend for compilation videos to get thrown together.

I recall someone saying on twitter that the easiest way to solve the birthrate issue is to just have women legally obligated to hold a baby for thirty minutes once every month. They might be on to something...

I recall someone saying on twitter that the easiest way to solve the birthrate issue is to just have women legally obligated to hold a baby for thirty minutes once every month. They might be on to something...

"57 (86%) of 66 eligible schools were enrolled into the trial and randomly assigned 1:1 to the intervention (28 schools) or the control group (29 schools). Then, between Feb 1, 2003, and May 31, 2006, 1267 girls in the intervention schools received the Virtual Infant Parenting programme while 1567 girls in the control schools received the standard health education curriculum. Compared with girls in the control group, a higher proportion of girls in the intervention group recorded at least one birth (97 [8%] of 1267 in the intervention group vs 67 [4%] of 1567 in the control group) or at least one abortion as the first pregnancy event (113 [9%] vs 101 [6%]). After adjustment for potential confounders, the intervention group had a higher overall pregnancy risk than the control group (relative risk 1·36 [95% CI 1·10–1·67], p=0·003). Similar results were obtained with the use of proportional hazard models (hazard ratio 1·35 [95% CI 1·10–1·67], p=0·016)."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0140673616303841.com

How much can we trust that these vtubers are actual women?

The videos I saw were regular (hot women) streamers, though I don't actually watch any of them, and didn't note names well enough to mention.

  1. Most of them have been doxxed and are, indeed, biological women.
  2. "Female vtubers are secretly 400lbs neckbeards with a voice changer" is a dumb normie meme that has pretty much never turned out to be true. Voice changers are obvious pretty immediately, as are most MtF voices.

So it would be pretty reasonable to trust that they are women.

I don't think men who are better than women at what vtubers do exist in sufficient numbers to make it economically viable instead of just hiring women.

I'll go ahead and note that the latter won't actually happen because it's an apparently inborn trait for a small, sticky slice of the population whereas the former is arguably the literal purpose of cellular life.

Well, there is a body of thought behind the notion that although obligate homosexuality is an inborn minority, a much greater slice of the population can develop an interest in bisexuality depending on prevailing cultural norms, as per the Ancient Greeks.

Bioshock, dishonored, last of us all have "badass male MC protects little girl" and they're some of the most praised games ever. This one was created by a Japanese dev and appeals, intentionally or not, to the vtuber-lolicon crowd. Mainstream reviews will shy away from this because it's off-putting, to say the least, but this is probably why the game is getting pushback.

This trope feels very gendered: I can't think of any comparable examples where the player ends up playing dad to a boy. I'm uncertain if that's a fundamental type difference (sons grow up and become protectors themselves, daughters narratively always need protectors -- not agreeing with the position, just observing the trope), or a difference in magnitude that protecting daughters has a stronger emotional valence and makes a better story.

God Of War 4/Dad of Boy

Death Stranding.........

The baby you carry in the game is actually a girl.

But the baby Madds is talking to in the 3-hour-cutscenes is his son, you, the Norman Reedus.

IIRC, the Death Stranding baby has its gender unspecified for most of the game, and at the end of the game is revealed to be female.

The multi award winning God of War (the newer one, not the original games) and its sequel Ragnarok are just that.

I haven't played that one, thanks for the example. I have played BioShock (and Infinite) and Dishonored, though. Maybe I just missed that one: I'm not a PS gamer, and missed the PC release and don't really play that many single player games anymore.

God of War 2018???

this sleazy game feeds into the typical male fantasy of being the protector and patriarch of a nuclear family where he is supposedly owed sex, affection, food, services etc. His subjugated wife is the idealized woman who is virtuous and yet hot, basically a personal slut.

I don't follow. What is the nuclear family here? Who is the wife? Is this not a game where you play as a human with an "android" sidekick that looks like a child?

Who is the wife?

In this case, nobody. I didn't claim that the game wholly represents the typical male fantasy in the eyes of Blue Tribers, only that it feeds into it. In other words, it goes into the same mental bucket.

Seems like you kind of made that up out of whole cloth. Do you have any support for this claim? How does a game about (approximately) a single father relate to the nuclear family?

It seems much more likely that this game really is popular among pedos. This is not to say that this was intentional on capcom's part, or that you can't play this game as a normal person, of course.

And acts like a child. There was a viral video of a lady streamer melting down because the android drawed you a pictur.

Side thing: Why does the robot act like a little girl? Is it a cynical programming to make her an appealing product? No, I don't think cyberwarfare barefooted child robots are a consumer product.

My understanding is the game's story isn't really that deep or philosophical, so I'll do its own work for it. The android actually is a little girl; this is how you properly align an AGI, base it on human neural architecture and make it live life as a human. After X amount of time in an infant chassis, swap it to a cute little girl chassis, eventually give it an adult body. Then you've got a "Digital Native" artificial mind that can intuitively manipulate and hack technology while also identifying with and liking humans.

Kinda like in that shitty film The Creator.

There is a plot justification for the android being a little girl: it's specifically designed to be a guinea pig for testing medical treatments intended for the creator's daughter. As for why they made the medical testing doll not just agentic, but also in a human girl-like manner, your guess is as good as mine. But of course, the real reason is probably that there wouldn't be a plot without that.

Why would you do medical testing on a robot that doesn't have blood or organs? And why would it be a super-hacker?

The plot of the game revolves around lunafilament, a pretty much magical material with the potential to replicate anything. He was trying to make a robot to test artificial body parts so she was by design incredibly lifelike. Making a robot let him test that the artificial organs worked like organs, but as you say she was not a good test subject because lunafilament is toxic if inside humans and she cannot model that. I don't remember if it explained why can hack things.

But in all honestly, the plot of the game is super thin. Just enjoy your robot kid that does all the enjoyable things kids do with none of the parts that make you want to punch something.

Loay Alnaji Will Not Be Going To Prison

He might go to jail. VCStar reports:

Paul Kessler, a 69-year-old Thousand Oaks resident and pro-Israel protester, died less than a day after he was injured in a Nov. 5, 2023 confrontation with Loay Alnaji, a 54-year-old Moorpark resident.

On May 5, however, Ventura County Superior Court Judge Derek Malan offered the defendant probation if he changed his plea. Alnaji now faces a maximum sentence of one year in jail followed by three years on probation. Defense attorney Ron Bamieh said the offer came after several meetings with Malan and recalled that the judge determined “two old guys had a dispute and and [sic] an accident happened.”

This isn't quite the standard plea deal, because the prosecutor's office doesn't want it, either. It's an indicated sentence or judicial plea bargain, depending on how cynical you are, but don't take that court case saying 'judicial incentives for plea are unlawful' to mean judicial incentives for a plea actually get the judge in any hot water, or likely result in the plea bargainer getting screwed. There is, as far as I can tell, nearly zero information on how prevalent indicated sentences are, in California, nor how typical this case is, nor what the normal outcome would be in a comparable case, or even if indicated sentences have been used ever in a comparable case. There's even less information on how fucked up one has to be to actually get sent back for another try, and spoiler alert: this ain't it.

So it's probably weird, you can't prove how weird, and gfl for caring about it.

The reporting says up to a year in jail, but that's phantasmal. There's only a moderate chance Alnaji will receive the maximum end of that probation offer, only slightly better chance he'll end up toward the top of that scale, and if I'm understanding the (admittedly convoluted) good conduct credit rules he's very likely to only serve half of whatever sentence he does get. Alternate custody arrangements are on the table for this class of sentence, such as work release or partial home confinement, though I've got no idea what the chances of it getting granted here are. Do the math, and there's nontrivial chance he'll spend less time in jail than Kyle Rittenhouse did.

So on one hand, Alnaji is pleaing guilty to everything in the case; on the other, he's getting a massive discount, quite plausibly a ten-fold reduction in custodial sentencing (again, dependent on me understanding California's fucked up good behavior credit system, but I think the plea keeps his charge as a 50:50 good credit where a prison sentence would be 85:15).

It's also worth spelling something out :

Defense attorney Ron Bamieh said the offer came after several meetings with Malan and recalled that the judge determined “two old guys had a dispute and and [sic] an accident happened.”

That's a defense attorney, and not the judge, saying that, to be crystal clear. And he's talking to a reporter, so there's a minimum of two professional liars involved. Even if it's not made up wholesale, there's a lot of ways this could have been taken out of context, or misrepresented, or had some other reasonable explanation.

I would be very fascinated to know if the judge pushes back against a defense attorney, if that defense attorney is aggressively mischaracterizing the judge's on-the-stands statements about the merits of an existing case to the public. Because if not, there's a very fascinating problem here.

There are two theories of the case. The prosecutor theory is that Kessler stood near Alnaji, Alnaji hit Kessler in the head, and Kessler died. There is pretty strong evidence, here: Alnaji's megaphone has blood matching Kessler's on it, and injuries to the front of the face inconsistent with the fall. The defense's theory, and I quote the reporting: "Bamieh [defense lawyer] said that during the protest, Kessler aggressively put his cell phone in Alnaji’s face and when Alnaji swatted the phone away, he unintentionally hit Kessler’s face with a megaphone. Bamieh said Kessler had a brain tumor, which exacerbated the injuries when he fell." Alnaji's lawyer also claims that Kessler fell down eight feet away from where Alnaji unintentionally hit Kessler's face, or perhaps the tumor caused the fall. The gymnastics involved I will leave as an exercise for the reader.

Unfortunately, there is no video of the strike or fall itself. It's not even clear, from public information, if Kessler approached Alnaji or Alnaji approached Kessler, first.

Note, however, that there is also no theory of the case where Alnaji did not commit every necessary component to the charges. As a matter of law, in California, if someone runs into your personal space waving a camera, you can't lawfully smack it out of their hands. If you try, and in doing so you wave a heavy rigid object near their head, hit them unintentionally, you are committing an unlawful and negligent act. If you do so, and they turn out to have a skull made of eggshells, you have committed manslaughter. There is no theory of the case where Kessler committed to mutual combat, or put hands on Alnaji; there's no exception for oopsies. Had this case gone to trial, the defense would have rested on nothing deeper than playing to the jury's sympathies and confusions.

"[A]n accident happened" is, in this framework, a very specific unusual claim for a judge to be making, if a judge made it. It's simultaneously disavowing specific responsibility and minimizing any conduct. I mean, yes, there's also a justice matter about whether judges can or should be accepting pleas where there's signs that the plea is insincere, but that's not going to matter in a case where the judge is presenting the not-a-plea-deal.

Sentencing is at the end of June, assuming it doesn't get delayed. I'll leave spelling out the various comparisons to other high-profile cases for then, but this is a pre-registration that the comparison does matter, whether my predictions are correct or wrong. Even had this case gone to trial and he received a maximum sentence, Alnaji would never face a sentence as long as Adamiak, or Dexter Taylor will have spent in prison before they got their fair day in court. I'd be willing to bet cash at very steep odds that Alnaji will not spend as long in jail as the Hammond's did in federal prison before they got a pardon, at steep odds that Alnaji's sentence will not be as long as the year-and-a-day that Steven Hammond's original pre-bonus sentence, before Alnaji doesn't have to serve all of it.

And none of them killed anybody!

There's a morbid post, here, but it's all the more morbid where the original advice was "For Reds specifically". Kessler was not a Red. As I said two years ago, "It's not about X as a principle goes to this."

A few things. First, the Eggshell Skull Doctrine, strictly speaking, does not apply here, as it's a tort law doctrine that prohibits the defendant from limiting damages to what was foreseeable. In the first example, A punches B and causes a black eye, which is the foreseeable consequence of his action. In the second example, a punches B, but B has a medical condition that A doesn't know about that causes severe medical consequence. In both examples A is liable for battery, but in the second he can't argue that his damages should be limited to those for a black eye because he didn't know about B's medical condition. The criminal law regarding manslaughter seems analogous, but that the defendant cause the victim's death is an element of the offense, and the law doesn't require that such a death be foreseeable.

With that out of the way, it's clear he's guilty of involuntary manslaughter. There may be a chance that a jury views the whole situation as an accident, but it's a small chance. The problem for the prosecutor is that once you strip away all the culture war bullshit, there isn't a compelling case for pursuing this as aggressively as the prosecutor seems to be. The underlying battery was trying to knock the phone out of the guy's hand, which is about as minor as it can get. The blow that proved fatal was the result of inadvertent contact, the defendant had no criminal history, and he apparently cooperated with the police afterward. If I were the judge in this case I'd seriously consider excluding any evidence regarding the subject matter of the confrontation because I wouldn't want jurors deciding the outcome based on where they stand on the Israel-Palestine issue.

When it comes to sentencing, judges in California appear to have more discretion than in most places. I'm neither a criminal lawyer nor barred in California, but from reading the relevant statutes it looks like confinement to state prison was never on the table. I'm not going to list them here, but defendants convicted of involuntary manslaughter only go to state prison if certain factors are in play, none of which appear to be. Beyond that, the term of imprisonment is a maximum of either 2, 3, or 4 years. If certain other mitigating factors that don't apply here are in play, 2 is the max, and if certain aggravating factors that do apply here are in play, the max is 4. However, while the case for involuntary manslaughter is airtight, the case for the aggravating factors the prosecutor alleged wasn't. Taking them individually:

  • Personally inflicted great bodily injury True, but this is an element of the involuntary manslaughter charge; in any event, it's hard to imagine a case of involuntary manslaughter that wouldn't involve severe bodily injury. This would therefore only be applicable to the battery charge.

  • Defendant armed with and used a weapon Possible, but would require the jury to find that the defendant used the megaphone as a weapon, i.e. he intentionally struck Kessler with it.

  • Victim was particularly vulnerable Also possible, but would require that the jury find that Kessler was unusually susceptible to the attack in a manner which made the defendant's conduct distinctly worse than an ordinary example of the crime. I'm not sure what evidence the prosecution planned to present that would suggest Kessler was unusually vulnerable.

None of this ultimately matters because of the guilty plea, but I point it out here because there's a pretty good chance that the judge had more leeway with sentencing than he would have if the case had gone to verdict. If the jury hadn't found that any of the aggravating factors applied, then 3 years would be the default maximum sentence. But those are only maximum sentences. California doesn't offer any real guidelines, but when searching for the statutory text I came across a California defense attorney's website that says a conviction can mean:

Probation possible — up to 1 year county jail — common in lower-end cases where the court finds incarceration unnecessary

I can't vouch for the guy, but I'm assuming he didn't just put this up today to trick people into thinking the Alnaji decision was justified, so I'm going to assume that this is more or less accurate. I also took a look at PA's guidelines, to see how they compare. Here, Involuntary Manslaughter is a First Degree Misdemeanor with a theoretical maximum sentence of 5 years. For someone without a record, the recommended sentence is 5–8 months in county. In fact, statutory maximum aside, the maximum under the guidelines is 22 months. California isn't Pennsylvania, but the point is that a sentence of one year (6 months) plus three years of probation doesn't seem excessively lenient for the crime he was convicted of. You'd struggle to find a state where it's typical for someone with no priors to get four years in the state pen for involuntary manslaughter.

As to the disposition of the case, that's definitely strange. Whether this is an illegal judicial plea offer or not, I don't know. What I will say is that in the case you cited the judge knocked out enhancing factors before making the offer while in the present case the defendant pleaded guilty to all the counts in the indictment, but there could be other deficiencies I'm not aware of. But the procedural posture of this case is strange in general. The current judge was just assigned in March, after the original judge died. Yesterday's hearing only appeared on the calendar at the last minute. The case had already been listed for trial several times, but each time was continued at the last minute. And each trial date had requests for media presence and cameras. Judicial involvement in settlement negotiations is common in civil litigation but most states prohibit it in criminal matters. California, though, is one of the exceptions, though I don't know to what extent the practice is encouraged. The article says there were several meetings with the judge, and assuming these were similar to civil mediations, here's my theory on what transpired:

The judge knew that the matter was likely to become a media circus, and wanted the parties to settle. The prosecutor might not have been willing to make a deal, or wasn't willing to offer a deal that was acceptable to the defense. Over the course of the meetings it became clear that the judge's view of the case was that while a conviction was likely, the evidence the prosecution was giving him didn't support the sentence they were asking for. The prosecutor doesn't determine the sentence, and if a defendant thinks that he can get a better deal than what the prosecutor is offering by just pleading guilty and throwing himself at the mercy of the judge, there's nothing the prosecutor can do to stop him. In other words, the "offer" the judge made was the same as the sentence he would have given had the defendant been convicted at trial. The benefit to the defendant is not having to endure a two-week media circus with him as the star that is likely to yield the same result. They're scheduled to be in court in less than two weeks, but the media will be there, so they schedule an immediate hearing with little notice so that they can resolve the matter as quietly as possible. They still have to go back for formal sentencing in July, but unless something unusual happens that will be a formality that nobody cares about. Some people will still complain, but a lot fewer people are following the case now than would be if it goes to trial, and advocates for the prosecution have to deal with the elation of the guilty verdict followed by the disappointment of the sentence. The prosecutor, meanwhile, doesn't have to own anything. Everything is wrapped up in a nice little package.

The underlying battery was trying to knock the phone out of the guy's hand, which is about as minor as it can get. The blow that proved fatal was the result of inadvertent contact, the defendant had no criminal history, and he apparently cooperated with the police afterward.

With a hand holding a megaphone, aka a heavy rigid object. Beyond that, you seems to be taking the defendant's theory of the case entirely at face value. That's maybe relevant as an understanding of what the defense might want, but it's not the only plausible or even likely read on the story.

... unless, to spell it out, the judge has taken the defense's theory of the case at face value, before the trial has begun.

I'm neither a criminal lawyer nor barred in California, but from reading the relevant statutes it looks like confinement to state prison was never on the table.

If I'm reading it correctly, California Penal Code Section 1170(h)(3) says that a "has a prior or current felony conviction for a serious felony described in subdivision (c) of Section 1192.7" shall be served in prison. 1192.7(c)(8) specifically includes "any felony in which the defendant personally inflicts great bodily injury on any person, other than an accomplice," -- that's the specific enhancement on the case page twice.

If I were the judge in this case I'd seriously consider excluding any evidence regarding the subject matter of the confrontation because I wouldn't want jurors deciding the outcome based on where they stand on the Israel-Palestine issue.

Yes, the propensity for progressive groups to successfully argue that any politically-charged actions involving a Blue Tribe are just confusing the matter or an outright alleviating factor, while any politically-charged actions involving a Red Tribe matter are evidence of clear ill intent, is well-perceived, thank you for spelling it out.

Personally inflicted great bodily injury True, but this is an element of the involuntary manslaughter charge; in any event, it's hard to imagine a case of involuntary manslaughter that wouldn't involve severe bodily injury.

Personally inflicts great bodily injury is the enhancement. It's specifically to separate where the accused did the thing themselves, rather than caused it to happen through an intermediary. (this gets goofy for duty-of-care or group-assault scenarios, but neither are relevant here.) For an example, there's a ripped from the headlines case that clearly couldn't have involved the defendant.

Defendant armed with and used a weapon Possible, but would require the jury to find that the defendant used the megaphone as a weapon, i.e. he intentionally struck Kessler with it.

The enhancement is armed with or used a weapon, but more critically, Alnaji already admitted to the very requirements. The defense's theory of the case is that "Alnaji accidentally struck Kessler when he swatted away Kessler’s phone". But that "accident" in the defense's claim is only trying to separate the injury to Kessler's face; swatting at Kessler's phone does not make the megaphone phase through Kessler's hands.

That is the most reaching enhancement, but it's still not very weak.

Victim was particularly vulnerable I'm not sure what evidence the prosecution planned to present that would suggest Kessler was unusually vulnerable.

Kessler was an elderly and fairly frail man. Age alone can't support that enhancement if it's an element of the crime, but it's not, and Kessler is in the 65+ range where it's a common enhancement and readily supported.

California doesn't offer any real guidelines, but when searching for the statutory text I came across a California defense attorney's website that says a conviction can mean: Probation possible — up to 1 year county jail — common in lower-end cases where the court finds incarceration unnecessary... You'd struggle to find a state where it's typical for someone with no priors to get four years in the state pen for involuntary manslaughter.

Yes, lower-end cases end up at the lower end of the sentencing range. That's kinda begging the question. Involuntary manslaughter's lower-end includes some pretty far-reaching stuff! In this case, it's "hit a guy, didn't expect to kill him". That's not exactly some unpredictable consequence, even if it's an uncommon one, nor is it a low-culpability situation. And while it's not the definition of enhancement to be non-typical, it's pretty standard for a case involving several enhancements to be nontypical.

And, of course, this just ropes back to the broader point about inconsistency of the law, where you can just go and crack a man's head open, it result in his death, say oops, and then get a shorter sentence than if you had done something really evil, like attach a shoulder stock to an antique gun or buy an unlicensed barrel.

Whether this is an illegal judicial plea offer or not, I don't know. What I will say is that in the case you cited the judge knocked out enhancing factors before making the offer while in the present case the defendant pleaded guilty to all the counts in the indictment, but there could be other deficiencies I'm not aware of.

In this case, the problem I'm motioning toward is more "... whether the sentence proposed by the trial court reflected what it believed was the appropriate punishment for this defendant and these offenses, regardless of whether defendant was convicted by plea or following trial, or instead reflected what it believed was necessary to induce defendant to enter a plea."

The article says there were several meetings with the judge, and assuming these were similar to civil mediations, here's my theory on what transpired...

That seems like a really detailed description to say 'the judge didn't want to sentence the guy hard, and wanted less publicity when doing it'.

Is this something the DOJ could consider federal charges for? I'm pretty sure "state law enforcement or judiciary deciding to look the other way at hate crimes" is something we've written laws about in the past, but no clue if even the current DOJ would be interested in this case specifically.

In theory, yes. There is no constitutional protection against being tried and even punished for the same crime in both state and federal courts.

In practice, no. The relevant district attorney (kinda) is a Red partisan, but he couldn’t get indictments in several other cases and his position is in weird near-limbo. The feds have a presumption against retrial in this sort of case called the Petite Policy, and while it can be overridden, this isn’t the same category as anti-abortion protesters trespassing. Ventura Count is Blue, if not as Blue as California gets. And the federal nexus would be genuinely weak.

It seems like everyone (except the victim) basically got what they wanted here. The defendant got a very lenient deal, the prosecutors are making a show of protesting but still get to count this as a successful conviction for their stats, and the state of California can use a limited prison spot on a criminal who poses an actual danger to the public. It's not like this guy is going to make a habit of murder by megaphone. It's hard to muster up much outrage when this was a one in a million unlucky outcome from a typical scuffle at a protest.

How is this case any different than the guy who got life in the United the Right accident. People protesting, chaos, scuffle followed by a dead guy.

The one who plays for the right team gets a month in prison. The one who plays for the wrong team gets life.

  • maybe they are truly different but it’s clear in that case his car was struck before he accelerated -

I don't know what video you're looking at that shows his car was struck before he accelerated, but in any case I don't see how that's relevant. There's no universe where you have a legal justification for starting a block away before driving into a crowd at 30 miles an hour.

  1. I guarantee there is a universe where you say they allowed to accelerate. One in which a mob of people attack your car and it’s either blast thru or die.
  2. Video does so someone hitting his back bumper with like a pipe before he accelerated

This is one of those things from the great awakening that people just never knew.

Perhaps he should be guilty. Maybe it wasn’t enough of an attack to justify plowing. The case though wasn’t as clean cut as white supremacists plows thru crowd for no reason.

Personally I don’t see how they got reasonable doubt. No way to know what he thought was happening and sounded to me like he acted innocent after the incident.

the guy who got life in the United the Right accident

While it is effectively LWOP, he officially got a sentence more than twice as long as the guys that did the 1993 WTC bombings, which killed 6 and injured over a thousand. Absolutely absurd, radicalizing sentencing.

Some of them have even had sentence reductions and could die as free men if they make it to 100, assuming they don't get more reductions over the next couple decades.

To be clear, they weren't given sentence reductions because the judge felt sorry for them, but to comply with an esoteric Supreme Court ruling regarding what evidence is required for robbery under the Hobbs Act to qualify for mandatory minimum sentences.

It's not like this guy is going to make a habit of murder by megaphone.

No but if the state government says "You can attack people at protests and get away with it as long as we like you and it's plausibly ambiguous," the mob can make a habit of it.

Plus the whole 'if this happens with political spectrum reversed the dead guy is a national martyr and there's riots if there's no meaningful charges filed' aspect

Well done on following this up. A lot of these culture war flare ups don't get continuing coverage. I worry about losing track of a lot of these court cases as they take years to move through the system.

I don't think @FCfromSSC was wrong. I still think we're in a place where Blue tribe gets different treatment within the justice system for similar 'crimes'. The defendant here codes more Blue, while the deceased Paul Kessler codes more Red.

I looked at @FCfromSSC's post and the list "on the other side" looked rather weak as evidence for Red disadvantage. CHAZ - unless I am misremembering it, didn't they shoot some unarmed black kids joyriding in the area? (Between them and a quite possibly middle-class anarchist LARPer, who is higher on the progressive stack?) Reinoehl - he got killed by federal law enforcement; Dolloff - "punching and pepper-spraying" seems like it would rise to the standard of lethal self-defense in a lot of places, since it suggests both severe physical violence and an intention to incapacitate that would make it hard to decide to defend yourself later if the threat were escalated to obviously murderous.

Yeah. I wish he was wrong, but I think the most the coda can say is ‘insufficiently pessimistic’

A massive electoral fraud scandal in Puerto Rico has been revealed in Propublica today.

The TL;DR is that a gang was sneaking drugs into a prison, and exchanging those drugs with addicts in return for votes for the governor (Puerto Rico being one of the few places that lets current jailed felons vote). Federal investigators were planning an indictment against the gang, prison guards involved, and the prisoners who took the deal before orders from above in the upper echelons of government shut it down.

But there's a twist you might not expect, the votes were for the Republican governor and the higher ups who shut it down was the Trump admin. This might be the biggest this you style story yet. Trump is constantly claiming about stolen elections and voter fraud, and yet little evidence has ever shown up. We finally found a massive scheme, and it was a MAGA related plan. There is no direct connection with this plot to Trump or the governor, but the gang leaders did have some personal connections to the governor.

One of the imprisoned gang leaders had bragged on Facebook about his connection to González-Colón, posting a picture of him talking with her on WhatsApp while the primary campaign for governor was underway, two sources said.

The scheme probably wasn't enough to secure the election (at least not with the inmates alone) as the numbers aren't, but it was closer than you might guess. Thus even with a relatively massive scandal, it probably didn't have a direct impact then but it's interesting how the investigation was spiked.

She won the primary by fewer than 30,000 votes, according to the State Elections Commission. Local news reports said that an estimated 5,000 prisoners voted territorywide

Erick Erickson (conservative radio host/podcaster) posted something interesting earlier that seems applicable here.

Remember kids, though the GOP won in 2024 with Trump getting the popular vote, the grifters will tell you the losses this year are because the SAVE Act didn’t pass. Why actually assess the problems when we mythologize our way to victimhood for the profit of a few.

Perhaps Trump's focus on electoral fraud is not motivated by being against fraud, but instead just because he lost in 2020 and can't accept that hit to his ego, the shattering mythology of his victimhood, and that's why they won't push this Puerto Rico case further?

Puerto Rico is corrupt, news at 11. That's why nobody cares about this story. Not because of the partisan valences, because 'Bribes paid in Puerto Rico' is a page five story, and this one didn't even manage to actually swing the election.

Trump is constantly claiming about stolen elections and voter fraud, and yet little evidence has ever shown up.

Mostly because the only evidence leftists will ever accept is these bizarre reverse style "gotcha!" stories where they can be safe horny for election integrity. As soon as I read the words "there's a twist you might not expect" I can predict it's Republicans who will be doing the fraud, because that's the only context in which it is ever permissible to admit that election fraud ever happens. As long as we simultaneously arrive at the correct conclusion that, well, it can't have mattered anyways.

It's interesting, right? Criminal conspiracy to buy votes that, apparently, can only ever have maxed out at 5,000 votes in an election where the margin is way above that. You know it's futile, I know it's futile, but apparently the gangs organizing it didn't know it was futile? Weird that everyone involved thought this was worth doing when some back of the napkin math "proves" it can never have been worth doing. Why did they do it then? Well, they must have been irrational somehow, thankfully we don't have to examine our priors about whether election fraud is real or not.

Remember kids, though the GOP won in 2024 with Trump getting the popular vote, the grifters will tell you the losses this year are because the SAVE Act didn’t pass.

Note that this isn't even an argument against the SAVE act, this is just an argument that Erick Erickson is wise and his enemies are silly, while he sits in the corner watching. It might not even be true: this Wapo op-ed argues that the SAVE Act would turn Nevada and New Mexico into solid red states just by changing the voter pool. It doesn't even require us to believe in election fraud; The GOP simply chooses to play by rules that cause them to lose when they have a popular mandate and the power to change the rules. That's at least the decision Erick Erickson would make, as he looks down on me from his superior moral pedestal while pressing the "Keep Losing" button over and over again.

I can predict it's Republicans who will be doing the fraud, because that's the only context in which it is ever permissible to admit that election fraud ever happens

The lesbian ex-mayor of Hamtramck, MI was willing to say it was Muslim Democrats committing voter fraud locally, until it got reported by Project Veritas and she complained about being quoted by a bad source.

But that's a pretty limited example.

because that's the only context in which it is ever permissible to admit that election fraud ever happens.

Conservatives and conservative aligned people control the biggest media in the country! If there's a major story of Dem favored election fraud, even if the left wanted to cover it up it'd be on Fox News and CBS, very mainstream outlets. It wouldn't be censored on X.

If you have the largest and most viewed messaging apparatus and you can't get them to communicate a story then either you're idiots who fail at using the tools provided or it's so false that even your own partisans won't put their name to it.

You know it's futile, I know it's futile, but apparently the gangs organizing it didn't know it was futile?

The point is just to tip the scales in their favor. The gang leaders have connections to the governor and stood to benefit from her winning, thus they used the power they had to tilt things more in her favor.

Note that this isn't even an argument against the SAVE act, this is just an argument that Erick Erickson is wise and his enemies are silly, while he sits in the corner watching.

Yes, Erickson is generally much smarter than the grifters. He is a more principled conservative with strong Christian values, instead of appealing to populist victimhood fantasies.

The GOP simply chooses to play by rules that cause them to lose when they have a popular mandate and the power to change the rules.

Clearly and visibly not true, given that the GOP can not get the congressional votes to make it happen. If they had the mandate they would have done it. They don't have the votes.

And given how the midterms are looking, doesn't seem like "popular" applies as well anymore. Maybe if the Trump admin bothered to appeal to what the American people wanted instead of starting a war, driving up prices, harassing legal immigrant workers, and stalling business investment with tariffs, they could have kept the good faith that voters had going into 2025. No, instead they did all that, made independent and swing voters upset to the point some even admit regret and decided it must be because they, the most powerful people in the world, are just poor victims instead.

Maybe when voters say they want a good economy with low prices, you should do that instead of making everything more expensive and scarce. And maybe when they turn on you for it, it's your fault for not listening. That is how we went from the Senate being basically unwinnable for Dems to now being favored towards them.

CBS

The company that just produced a 60 Minutes special about how eeeevil white supremacists helped rebuild and brought food and supplies to the area after Hurricane Helene, and that's terrible? That CBS?

I get Bari Weiss is theoretically in charge over there now but evidence is pretty thin on the ground that it has changed their reporting or the insane bias.

We are ten years into the Trump era now, which was inaugurated in 2015 with a primary waged on dissatisfaction with the GOP establishment. That the base has been dissatisfied with Republican leadership is one of the central facts of American politics. It's why we have Trump. It's why half a dozen Indiana state senators got primaried yesterday after they refused to redistrict. It's why Erick Erickson got pushed out of mainstream Republican politics. It's why the Republican Party was happy to dump Trump throughout the 2020 election crisis. It's also a very simple explanation for why the Republican party is unable to pass Voter ID even though a supermajority of the American public consistently polls in favor of it. I don't know what else to add here. I think you are misunderstanding one of the basic facts of American politics and are now trying to invent alternate explanations for things trivially understood in my worldview.

Yes, Erickson is generally much smarter than the grifters.

Erick Erickson is an extremely stupid man filling out the D Tier of conservative talking head punditry whose big claim to fame is saying stupid things on the radio while having a funny name. One day he calls Trump a fascist and says he'll never vote for him, the next day he's endorsing him for President, one day he's calling Supreme Court Justices "goat fuckers" and debating whether Michelle will cut off Barack's penis, the next day he's policing Trump's tone. No consistent principles. Erick Erickson is not smarter than the grifters, he is a grifter. Please, please spare me this delusional fat imbecile's self-serving fantasies about his high-minded Christian principles. (It must be nice to be principled when you can make a lot of money advertising how principled you are. I'm pretty sure Jesus says not to do this somewhere. Maybe Erick Erickson can spend some time contemplating the Christian principle of fasting and lose some weight?)

I consider this argument won because instead of confronting head-on anything I said you have pivoted to a non-sequitur about Republicans' prospects in the midterms. Although I don't see why Republicans would lose the midterms when we apparently have the power to commit election fraud without being punished. Seems simple. Republicans nationalize the Puerto Rico model and Democrats can't do anything about it because they don't know how to commit election fraud.

Maybe I'm getting too snarky. But I don't really understand why I'm being treated as the stupid one when your position seems to be that Republicans are too moral for politics.

It's also a very simple explanation for why the Republican party is unable to pass Voter ID even though a supermajority of the American public consistently polls in favor of it.

Perhaps part of it is that married women who changed their name want to vote too.

I think you are misunderstanding one of the basic facts of American politics and are now trying to invent alternate explanations for things trivially understood in my worldview.

One of the actual basic facts of American politics is that voters views will change. Trump had a moment of popularity, absolutely. He lost it by destroying everyone's wallets and starting wars. That there is a base who will always suck him off is irrelevant if you can't get the moderates and swing voters to stay on board.

This is the exact same mistake that Biden did. He won 2020 and they took it as a mandate to do everything they wanted, instead of trying to aim for the moderate centrist voters who decide elections.

I consider this argument won because instead of confronting head-on anything I said you have pivoted to a non-sequitur about Republicans' prospects in the midterms.

Win the argument in your mind if you want, you clearly aren't winning the swing voters and moderates right now so you'll need something to claim as victory.

Although I don't see why Republicans would lose the midterms when we apparently have the power to commit election fraud without being punished.

Holy strawman batman. A small time election fraud with inmates (massive relative to the basically nonexistent amounts of election fraud that otherwise occurs) is not something they can widen.

This is the exact same mistake that Biden did. He won 2020 and they took it as a mandate to do everything they wanted, instead of trying to aim for the moderate centrist voters who decide elections

Biden did not do this. His admin was full of radicals who believed in arc of history triumphalist nonsense thought themselves to have a mandate to do whatever current progressive doctrine wanted, sure, but they believed this regardless of election results and also this wasn't sleepy Joe himself, it was staffers.

Perhaps part of it is that married women who changed their name want to vote too.

As someone whose wife came from a foreign location where women don't tend to change their names, and can thus attest to a significantly higher-than-normal level of grief over the wife changing her name, getting US documentation that would be sufficient for voting is probably the easiest part of a married woman changing her name.

Perhaps Trump's focus on electoral fraud is not motivated by being against fraud, but instead just because he lost in 2020 and can't accept that hit to his ego, the shattering mythology of his victimhood, and that's why they won't push this Puerto Rico case further?

Sounds like there's plenty of election fraud to go around, the fact that both parties have not colluded yet to make ID mandatory for voting and outlawed mail-in-ballots tells you everything you need to know.

Also there exist unfalsifiable yet anonymous algorithms for digital vote counting where you could be sure your vote was part of the count via a hash, but your own vote preference can't be revealed. The fact these "democratic" systems are still relying on pen and paper and corruptible people counting ballots by hand tells you everything you need to know about "democracy", it's a scam.

I will note that although the parties nationally can't get their shit together well enough to pass voter ID laws, states with strict voter ID and no mail in ballots are all red.

There exist unfalsifiable yet anonymous algorithms for digital vote counting where you could be sure your vote was part of the count via a hash, but your own vote preference can't be revealed

Unfalsifiable in theory, but with the tech illiterate masses, incompetent state officials, and messy reality, my understanding is that in-person voting, paper ballots, and manual counting with lots of redundancy is still the most reliable method. Oops. Cryptographers cancel election results after losing decryption key.

If mail-in ballots are outlawed, there should be an alternative for sick citizens, and citizens abroad like soldiers.

I see no issues with free and easy-to-get mandatory ID. I believe it's common in Europe and almost nobody complains.

Sometimes I wonder if we would be able to use the mathematics to make it easily verifiable without a computer somehow. Even if it takes you a day of filling up some puzzle paperwork.

Also there exist unfalsifiable yet anonymous algorithms for digital vote counting where you could be sure your vote was part of the count via a hash...

I don't think any of these systems have solved the last-mile "assigning digital IDs to people" in a practical way. We've had enough trouble getting RealID drivers licenses for things like flying that I doubt we could enforce smart cards for voting any time soon, and I bet both sides would oppose it today for different reasons.

ETA: and that's all before you get the fun chance to explain the cryptography to the median voter.

My cynical take on this is (1) in agreement that I don't believe anything in the popular press until solid facts are produced (2) but I was assured, firmly and frequently assured, that voter fraud never happened in any election ever and that it was depriving felons of their natural human rights to strip them of the right to vote while incarcerated!

If there is any truth in this story, it's probably somewhere between (a) yeah, drugs get smuggled into prison, this is a problem everywhere (except maybe Singapore, I couldn't tell you about that) (b) gosh, gangs on the outside have contact with their members inside? you startle me gravely with this information! (c) corruption in Puerto Rican politics? again, I don't know anything so I can't comment there.

It will be funny to watch all the "no corruption nowhere, safest ever elections" set scrambling to prove that this is indeed a case of electoral fraud and the "stolen elections" set claiming it's a nothingburger.

it was depriving felons of their natural human rights to strip them of the right to vote while incarcerated!

This isn't really the principal argument why felons should have the vote. It's a pragmatic one about perverse incentive. If the government can deprive people of the vote by convicting them of a particular crime, oopsie, you've created an incentive for the government to drum up those exact kinds of charges against political opponents.

I think the far more important part of imprisoning political opponents would be removing them from the political battlefield rather than get rid of their 1 vote among millions. In order to get an appreciable effect on the vote counts, you'd have to imprison so many opposition members there's no one left to vote for anyway.

As I said in another prong of this thread, I do agree that this is mostly symbolic in either direction - but I care about the government going the extra mile to avoid the appearance of impropriety w. regards to the franchise. In any case I didn't necessarily mean to die on the hill of this particular argument, merely to point out that in my experience that is the principal argument in favor of letting felons have the vote, as opposed to concern about their inalienable human rights yada yada.

I think if we're getting into taking out political opponents, drumming up charges is already well established. Think of all the TRUMP IS A FELON! 39 FELONIES! stuff and tell me at least some of those weren't politically motivated? And I'm sure there are cases for Democrats getting stalked as well.

Gosh, we're going to let the prisoners vote, we're sure a bunch of druggies, thieves, and gangsters will respect the electoral process and nobody will be motivated to intervene, bribe, buy or sell votes, etc. Yeah, unless you let them all out of jail for the day to visit the polling booths, I don't see how you can guarantee the integrity of the voting process. And letting a bunch of convicts out on day release to vote is likely to end up with "scarpered" rather than "placed my ballot in the box".

Sure but there is also the pragmatic argument of “criminals have proven themselves to be asocial and thus shouldn’t vote.”

We have very little evidence the government is trying to put people in jail for your concern. We have a lot of evidence the vast majority of criminals are in fact asocial scum. So this is a slope I’m not particularly worried about being slippery.

Yeah, I almost added a parenthetical about how it obviously wasn't a live concern in today's America, particularly. But I think it's one of those things where the government ought to avoid the appearance of a perverse incentive, as one of the many nested redundancies keeping us from a slide into tyranny. Caesar's wife must be above approach, etc. etc. (Indeed, this is especially persuasive to me on this issue because convicted felons represent a largely symbolic percentage of the vote in any case, so it can't do much harm to go the extra mile to prove the government's commitment to democracy.)

revealed in Propublica

ProPublica has zero credibility, and I will bang this drum every time someone cites them favorably. They damaged my faith in journalism more than anything else has or will. Also a perfect example of what we discussed last week: They are members in good standing of the Journalism Club, which tells me what their standards are and how they deal with deceptive and manipulative content. It's even "notable reporting".

1, 2, 3 are my posts I could find easily, but there are more out there.

With that out of the way, let's look at the article.

Leaders of the prison gang known as Los Tiburones, or the Sharks, were selling drugs to inmates not only for money, but for their votes...Investigators had gathered solid evidence of election fraud implicating both inmates and staff,

Alright, cool.

But as federal prosecutors prepared an indictment against the inmates and staff in November 2024 — just days after Trump won the election and González-Colón clinched the governorship — they received a surprising directive. Their bosses in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico instructed them to exclude the voting-related counts against the inmates and all charges against the prison staff, an investigation by ProPublica found.

"Just days after Trump won the election" is well before any real actions were taken to transition power from the Biden administration to Trump. Why did W. Stephen Muldrow (appointed under Trump I, dropped and immediately reappointed under Biden, and maintained in Trump II) do that? It's possible that Biden appointed someone disloyal, but it's also possible that it's completely mundane.

charging 34 inmates and associates

That's it?? I know that the election fraud offenders don't have to be a subset of the drug offenders, but it certainly suggests that it's a smalltime operation.

In court documents tied to a different case, in October 2025, a magistrate judge mentioned “an unrelated white-collar investigation involving the Governor of Puerto Rico.” Muldrow’s office responded in a filing, stating, “There is no white-collar investigation (or any other investigation) of Puerto Rico Governor Jenniffer González-Colón.”

"Involving" and "Of" are two different words.

González-Colón has not been charged with a crime.

Wow. Such news.

Raquel Rutledge (the author) has not been charged in the disappearance of Jack and Lilly Sullivan. This is 100% factual and you can check the public records if you doubt me.

the Office of the Director of National Intelligence seized the voting machines

How is that even tangentially connected to this scheme? All a voting machine can do is properly and accurately (or improperly and inaccurately) record what is entered into it. The machines don't have mind-reading equipment that can distinguish a coerced vote from a free one.

Over time, federal prosecutors say, several of these [nonprofit advocacy] groups operating in the prisons evolved into violent criminal organizations such as Los Tiburones and Ñetas,

I couldn't find any evidence that Los Tiburones "evolved", as it appears to have always been a criminal group. The Netas started as a legit advocacy group, and still use it as propaganda.

the party won 83% of the inmate vote, according to a ProPublica tally of voter returns on the State Elections Commission’s website.

Inmate votes were especially key in the 2024 gubernatorial primary as González-Colón, a longtime New Progressive Party member, was challenging the incumbent governor of the same party.

She won the primary by fewer than 30,000 votes, according to the State Elections Commission. Local news reports said that an estimated 5,000 prisoners voted territorywide.

No evidence of what the within-party split was in the primary: Extrapolating to 6000 prisoners total, 5000 support the Progressives, and of those 5000 an unknown number supported Colon with the remainder supporting her opponent(s) within the party primary.

(Fake edit: Later in the article has "...being pressured to vote in the primary — some for González-Colón and others for her opponent, Pedro Pierluisi.". Why wasn't that in the Primary section of the article? Oh wait, they moved from "Colon is benefiting" to "Prisoners are compelled" and expected that you couldn't cast this point back in time to where it would undermine their argument.)

Political analysts said rumors have swirled over the decades about coercive tactics being used to mobilize the prison vote, raising significant questions about the extent to which that support comes in exchange for favors from the ruling party.

This time was different, sources said. They had evidence.

...of something else, not what was mentioned in the previous paragraph. They're just "deep into investigating a potential..." for that part of it.

A relative of one of the prisoners told ProPublica that inmates had to show their ballots to gang leaders when they voted to avoid punishment.

God fucking damn it. There's a second breach of election security happening? Fix that, and vote buying becomes a pure game of trust. Given how trustworthy I find the prison population, I'd guess it would immediately kneecap any election influence operation.

it's possible that Biden appointed someone disloyal, but it's also possible that it's completely mundane.

Or both admins just appointed a careerist, like most US lawyers tend to be. Finding people who are competent and willing to give their careers so they can rock the boat is really hard. It got dropped because the careerist lawyers (rightfully!) predicted that the Trump admin upon assuming power would have no interest in further investigation here, and they being careerists don't want to bite the hands that feed them.

They aren't about loyalty either way. We know that, because the admin can't get the US attorneys to sign onto most of their blatant political prosecutions either.

That's it?? I know that the election fraud offenders don't have to be a subset of the drug offenders, but it certainly suggests that it's a smalltime operation.

Correct but also wrong! Relatively it's huge, electoral fraud schemes are incredibly rare and way smaller than this. Election fraud of course is just so much not an issue that even the big cases look smalltime.

Raquel Rutledge (the author) has not been charged in the disappearance of Jack and Lilly Sullivan. This is 100% factual and you can check the public records if you doubt me.

Well yes, you don't typically charge people who haven't done anything. It seems to have been done in favor of the governor by gang leaders with connections to her, but it doesn't seem to have been orchestrated by her. Presumably the gang leaders just wanted her to win for their own personal gain.

How is that even tangentially connected to this scheme?

If you're finding foul play, it is reasonable to suspect other forms might be taking place too and you would double check everything.

massive

MASSIVE. You know what else is massive?

four people with knowledge of the case told ProPublica. They requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the case.

Oh, look, it's the red flag for bullshit reporting.

But as federal prosecutors prepared an indictment against the inmates and staff in November 2024 — just days after Trump won the election and González-Colón clinched the governorship — they received a surprising directive. Their bosses in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico instructed them to exclude the voting-related counts against the inmates and all charges against the prison staff, an investigation by ProPublica found.

Trump getting up to shenanigans with his time machine again.

Inmate votes were especially key in the 2024 gubernatorial primary as González-Colón, a longtime New Progressive Party member, was challenging the incumbent governor of the same party.

She won the primary by fewer than 30,000 votes, according to the State Elections Commission. Local news reports said that an estimated 5,000 prisoners voted territorywide.

Seems worth mentioning that the election being referenced was a primary. She went on to win the general by 130k votes, with a 10% lead in the popular.

Inmates have been aligned with the party ever since, political analysts said. Political parties in Puerto Rico differ dramatically from those on the mainland. They don’t adhere to a straight divide among Democrats and Republicans. Instead, the two main parties center much of their focus on whether Puerto Rico should become a state and so have Republicans and Democrats within each.

It’s not unheard of for politicians of all parties to court the inmate vote, but the New Progressive Party has made it a “stronghold,” said Fernando Tormos-Aponte, a political scientist with expertise on Puerto Rico and an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.

“It’s been a huge advantage for them particularly as elections in Puerto Rico have been decided by small margins,” Tormos-Aponte said of the New Progressive Party. In the 2024 general election for governor, the party won 83% of the inmate vote, according to a ProPublica tally of voter returns on the State Elections Commission’s website.

And they were being bribed to vote for the same party that always wins the prisoner vote?

Wow, that is a lot of effort to daisy-chain tie this to Trump, in spite of not having any evidence.

Fun fact: the walking stereotype author of this piece was a Pulitzer Prize winner for investigating child care scams in Wisconsin, but all of the wiki citations about it go to dead pages.

So this author is an even worse person than I first imagined. Vapes are banned in a lot of places because of a morally panic on popcorn lung. Twitter is telling me they are banned in 60 countries. Let’s just say she contributed a part to causing a ton of lung cancer deaths.

Also a lot of people generally still believe vaping is bad for lung health. It might be worse than no smoker but it’s almost certainly less than 10% as bad as cigarettes.

I would also be curious what gets journalist to write things like these articles. You can read the article and by her own language realize she is writing in a specific style that she knows she doesn’t have the goods. But still rights the article anyway. Is it just needing a paycheck?

So this author is an even worse person than I first imagined. Vapes are banned in a lot of places because of a morally panic on popcorn lung. Twitter is telling me they are banned in 60 countries. Let’s just say she contributed a part to causing a ton of lung cancer deaths.

I don't accept this reasoning. It implies that every imperfect politician with any authority beyond a city, and certainly every politician with policies you don't like, is the equivalent of a mass murderer.

Normally, doing things which lead to unnecessary loss of life is bad because that's only possible through malice or negligence. If you're dealing with millions of people, though, that's no longer true and everything you do contributes to deaths. Our intuitions don't scale up to situations where ordinary decisions cause loss of life.

She wrote an article that vaping is poison. If she wrote the article with the same journalistic integrity as this article then I believe it’s fair some of the deaths fall on her.

If you shit on the commons then when the commons are bad you have some responsibility for the commons being bad. Her culpability though would depend in my view significantly on her intent. Did she write the article wanting click-baity outrage porn that was poorly sourced or did she write the article believing she was informing the public.

I would put writing an article that has direct correlation to people smoking more cigarettes as a very shitty thing to do if the article on vaping was poorly sourced. It would have a very logical path to people die more of lung cancer.

Writing an anti-vaping article only leads to lots of people dying because the article is seen by lots of people and the small chance of each one dying adds up. Adding this sort of thing up is exactly the problem--it turns a minor issue into a major one simply because it is being done on a large scale. And if we allow that into our morals, it becomes impossible for any human to do things on a large scale because everything has a tiny chance of death that can add up.

(Also, I am skeptical that she's causing many deaths anyway. People would decide to stop vaping not by reading one article, but by a cumulative set of experiences of which the article is a tiny part, and her contribution to those deaths has to be divided by the total number of anti-vaping things the person saw, weighted by their influence.)

In this case Vaping is illegal in a lot of places. Chicago they are fairly hard to buy and when I’ve bought one I believe it was illegally.

I have no problem with people doing things in good faith but being wrong. That will happen. Judging by the article shared today I do not believe she is a good faith writer.

Small things definitely need to count for morality. The commons depend on a lot of people doing small things morally. Like not littering. Not stealing $5 items at Whole Foods. Small theft adds up to a percentage of shrinkage which then makes everyone else pay more.

Small things definitely need to count for morality.

The issue is small things that have huge effects because a lot of people are involved. A $5 theft is small. A $1000 theft is a lot bigger. A "$1000 theft" which causes 100000 people to lose 1 cent worth of their time each should not be counted the same as stealing $1000 in a lump sum.

I would also be curious what gets journalist to write things like these articles. You can read the article and by her own language realize she is writing in a specific style that she knows she doesn’t have the goods. But still rights the article anyway. Is it just needing a paycheck?

My take is that they get the idea for an article, research it, then write out their idea (regardless of their findings). That's very different from finding an interesting topic, researching it, then writing out their findings (regardless of their initial idea).

For example, Machine Bias could've come about like:

  1. There's a new recidivism predictor. Tech is bad and courts are racist, therefore this will make racist decisions in the courts.
  2. It shows some predictive power, and is well-calibrated (recidivism rate is approximately (20 + 5 * risk score)%, with almost-entirely-overlapping error bars between races). Maybe there's something about what it's replacing as well.
  3. Here are some outliers, some stories about racism, and a few charts and tables showing a complex measure nobody has ever cared about before or since. Voila, point 1 stands.

I am more referencing how do they sleep at night. To write an article that misinforms to this extent (unless she really does have quality off-record research).

  1. I need food. I am writer. So I write the (badly sourced) article
  2. Trump is bad so even writing false thing is a good
  3. Somehow true believer.

This article on Puerto Rico seemed written by a lawyer to say bad things about Trump without crossing a line that would be defamation

No bad tactics, only bad targets, maybe? That's pretty much #2

Oh, look, it's the red flag for bullshit reporting.

Personally I don't take the stance that we can only trust the official word of the state, tons of important stories come out precisely because people are willing to leak things but don't want to immediately destroy their careers.

Trump getting up to shenanigans with his time machine again.

Careerists not wanting to upset their upcoming boss spike indictments that they worry would upset him. And accordingly they were right, when the Trump admin took place they did exactly that and forced the story down.

Soon after Trump took office, the lead prosecutor, Jorge Matos, was told by a supervisor to take the investigation no further, according to four people familiar with the case.

The average government worker cares for their job first and foremost obviously. It's the same way that the Trump admin can't get many of the careerist lawyers to sign onto political prosecutions, because they care about their future careers. They're perfectly happy to sit back and do nothing.

And they were being bribed to vote for the same party that always wins the prisoner vote?

Taking a group that votes you and bribing even more people in the group to.vote for you is actually still bad.

Wow, that is a lot of effort to daisy-chain tie this to Trump, in spite of not having any evidence.

Considering the careerist lawyers rightfully predicted the investigation would be stalled and decided to drop the case early to prevent further backlash, it doesn't seem like Trump is excited to latch onto this example of election fraud.

Fun fact: the walking stereotype author of this piece was a Pulitzer Prize winner for investigating child care scams in Wisconsin, but all of the wiki citations about it go to dead pages.

Damn she's got a really experienced career exposing all sorts of corruption and issues! Lead battery factories in Africa, tabocca industry influence in South America, benefit fraud, fuck ups during undercover law stings, a wet wipe company in Wisconsin selling tainted products, tainted alcohol products in Mexico.

Quite an impressive resume.

Personally I don't take the stance that we can only trust the official word of the state, tons of important stories come out precisely because people are willing to leak things but don't want to immediately destroy their careers.

On the other hand, such things are literally impossible for anyone other than the author of the piece to interrogate. Even if they, personally are telling the truth, there’s the issue of how many people actually agree with that statement, whether or not the information is first hand or just rumor, whether or not the person was knowledgeable about the phenomenon to really understand what they saw or thought they saw. All of that is acting upon the rather charitable assumption that these people are just concerned about the truth, when it could be all kids of things: not liking their job or boss, seeking notoriety, Believing that the wrong political party gained from this, etc. We literally cannot check; we have no answers to any of those questions.

By contrast, even though the official statements of the government are biased, we at least have some idea of what they know, where it comes from, what they are like, and what biases they have. The AG of Puerto Rico is known, he has a party affiliation that we know about, ambitions we know about, a past history we know about. It’s not something we have to guess at, he or she is a public figure whose name and history we have in front of us.

After the mysterious death of a Wisconsin college student in a resort swimming pool, Rutledge uncovered widespread problems with tainted alcohol, derelict law enforcement, price gouging from hospitals — and warnings to others muzzled by TripAdvisor.

Granted, it's a Wikipedia article so probably needs a hell of a lot more depth to the bare statement, but the Mexican alcohol one made me laugh. Good God, young adult goes on sun holiday and overdoes it on the boozing and happy fun times, leading to tragic death? I mean, it is sad, but it happens all the time (even without tainted alcohol). We'll be coming up to summer sun foreign holidays time soon over here and in a few more months post-exam time (in Ireland), and I guarantee you there will be stories in the media about 18-20s year olds dying or getting into serious accidents in mass-market holiday resorts abroad, often involving drink (over-consumption of). Sadly, there is little or nothing "mysterious" about that death.

If there is a need to write a story about "clubs trying to entice you in with 'drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence' promotions can afford this because they sell paint stripper as alcohol" then it's a public service, but it's hardly Watergate-level investigative journalism.

It’s possible all the “anonymous” sources are being done in good faith……..but it’s also how we spent 10 years in the Iraq War. It was the exact strategy he would do go on the MSM selling the WMD for war. It’s still essentially toilet paper because liers user this tactic too.

Personally I don't take the stance that we can only trust the official word of the state, tons of important stories come out precisely because people are willing to leak things but don't want to immediately destroy their careers.

No, that's the story journalists tell about themselves. More commonly, it's the method used to launder libel so as to protect the journalist from lawsuits.

Careerists not wanting to upset their upcoming boss spike indictments that they worry would upset him.

This is pure speculation.

Soon after Trump took office, the lead prosecutor, Jorge Matos, was told by a supervisor to take the investigation no further, according to four people familiar with the case.

This is the sort of weasel-wording you have to learn to parse when reading the news. Was told by "a supervisor" (Why not name the supervisor?). "To take the case no further". Further than what? The vote fraud stuff had already been dropped. A normal phrasing there would have been to "not go back to the old stuff" or something. And why? There's no discussion of the actual evidence that the vote buying even happened. Choosing to prioritize resources on easily provable drug offenses is very common. That's the case for most people in federal prison for "drug" charges.

Also worth noting, because it's much more pertinent, but this was soon after González-Colón took office, and she has much more direct relevant and influence over an unimportant province like PR. But "territorial governor possibly implicated in vote buying scheme" wouldn't have this article doing rounds like tying it to Trump does.

The average government worker cares for their job first and foremost obviously.

This is unbearably naive, and just embarrassing to say about PR.

Taking a group that votes you and bribing even more people in the group to.vote for you is actually still bad.

Sure. But right off the bat, it seems more probable that it would have been an inducement to vote in the first place, again, if indeed this even happened.

Considering the careerist lawyers rightfully predicted the investigation would be stalled and decided to drop the case early to prevent further backlash, it doesn't seem like Trump is excited to latch onto this example of election fraud.

Again, this is pure speculation. Do you honestly believe that Donald Trump is particularly invested in the local primary politics of a territory? I know the guy gets autistically fixated on random shit, but I can't recall him ever caring much about PR. And while the governor loves him, the article itself mentions it's a very one-sided obsession.

There are much simpler explanations for this, again, assuming it even happened. I suppose we'll see if he says anything about it. I give high odds that if he does, it's something bombastic and vague in support of the governor just because she says nice things about him.

I know the guy gets autistically fixated on random shit, but I can't recall him ever caring much about PR.

There was that entire arc involving a branded garbage truck, but I'm not sure that is indicative of deep political ties to the local leadership, or just riffing on the news cycle.

This is unbearably naive, and just embarrassing to say about PR.

Ok this alone makes me think you're disconnected from the world. The average government worker, like the average worker, doesn't give a shit about "the mission". They want to go in, do their job, get paid, go home. They aren't there for pleasure and passion, they're there to make money. Some people may find joy in their job, but it is a job at the end of the day

Most people will not rock the boat in order to "do what is right".

Again, this is pure speculation. Do you honestly believe that Donald Trump is particularly invested in the local primary politics of a territory?

Trump seems to care a lot about election integrity! He's constantly talking about fraud, and yes while it is Puerto Rico this would be one of the largest cases of election fraud in the US in modern times. This would be a great way for him to push for his SAVE act and try to limit mail in voting.

Well like yeah, let's be honest. Everyone knows, even many of his strongest conservative supporters like EW Erickson, that Trump is just salty over losing. He doesn't care about election fraud, he probably doesn't even truly believe it that much. He would use this case as a tool if it benefited him, but acknowledging that election fraud is being used for Republicans doesn't.

Everyone knows, even many of his strongest conservative supporters like EW Erickson, that Trump is just salty over losing. He doesn't care about election fraud, he probably doesn't even truly believe it that much.

I'd broadly agree, but I would also say it applies to the post-2024 Democrat voters who couldn't believe Harris lost and spun up their own stolen election conspiracy theories, complete with "voting machines hacked" (after years post-2020 declaring the machines were super-secure and couldn't be hacked) and the same general run of complaints Trump had used. So Trump saying 2020 was stolen because (A, B, C) was all lies, but 2024 being stolen because (A, B, C) was the solid truth. These and these aren't even the true nutjobs holding that view.

Everyone is salty about losing. Even the 'official' explanation that Hillary and Kamala lost because Sexism Misogyny Racism White Supremacy Christian Nationalism is being salty that "no, your candidate there wasn't good enough" is the real explanation.

Ok this alone makes me think you're disconnected from the world. The average government worker, like the average worker, doesn't give a shit about "the mission". They want to go in, do their job, get paid, go home. They aren't there for pleasure and passion, they're there to make money. Some people may find joy in their job, but it is a job at the end of the day

Most people will not rock the boat in order to "do what is right".

I think I may have completely misinterpreted you there as "care first and foremost about the ostensible purpose of their jobs". My bad.

Trump honestly believing in clean elections and that he won in 2020, and being willing to enforce it even against his own party also fits your facts. I don't think Puerto Rico is a central example of "MAGA", and if it is, that's a whole separate interesting thing.

What’s the case here? I don’t see any source in the entire article. And “massive”? I’m seeing 5k prison votes total which apparently the margin was 30k votes?

The drugs are probably just an easier case.

a gang was sneaking drugs into a prison, and exchanging those drugs with addicts in return for votes for the governor

One benefit of an anonymous ballot is that the gang can never be sure that the voters are holding up their end of the bargain.

Admittedly, mail-in ballots do complicate this; perhaps it would be wise to consider alternate methods of accommodation for those citizens unable to attend polling places in their area of residence.

Trump is constantly claiming about stolen elections and voter fraud, and yet little evidence has ever shown up

That's a pretty bold claim. The evidence is common enough that it has its own Wikipedia page, organized by decade.

Ok fair, bad phrasing. I meant it that little has shown up for his specific claims about 2020 and 2024.

Do communist governments and institutions have a unique tendency to suppress dissent? I definitely get that feeling based on my observations of the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, combined with my observations of Leftist organizations. So I am tempted to ask what, if anything, is inherent in communism which results in this type of behavior. (Ok, I admit that this is just a little boo-outgroup. I hate Leftists with a passion and I like the idea that there is something inherent in their thinking which leads to repression.)

That being said, it occurs to me that there is a threshold question. Perhaps all governments and institutions have a tendency to suppress dissent and there are a few exceptions, e,g, the United States, which combine (relatively) free markets with (relatively) free speech.

I'm spitballing a bit here, but my guess is that to some extent it's a matter of valuing individualism versus valuing collectivism. Perhaps people, institutions, and governments who value collectivism are more comfortable with the idea of suppressing dissent just as they are more comfortable with the idea of forcibly transferring wealth for some perceived greater good.

"Democratic"-style countries typically operate as "political markets" -- if you can assemble enough people who believe in X Policy to vote for you, you can make X Policy a reality. Of course, there are limiters, like Constitutions -- but even those can be changed if enough voters/representatives buy into such changes. It is a bottom-up model, theoretically.

Communist ideology anti-market. How a country is run is not at the whim of the citizens, but is, instead, top-down: The benevolent leaders determine what is best for the people, and the people comply, because they know that their wise leaders have figured out that the optimal way for everyone to receive equal everything is for Boris to dig ditches (even though Boris is skilled at architcture) and for Ivan to design buildings (even though Ivan is the useless son of a bureaucrat) with as little friction as possible.

What happens if Boris looks at Ivan's bullshit architectural models and petitions that he can do better? He might be correct, and a government that cares might agree and switch the two occupations. However, the government also knows that if Andrei sees Boris dissent from the system and succeed, that maybe Andrei will also dissent from his assigned role so he can be as personally fulfilled as Boris will be. This kind of thing is contagious. And so is the perception that the government of unelected elites who designed this perfect mechanism is flawed and makes mistakes, which undermines the entire theory that this system is really optimized for anything.

It seems there were two separate things going on. One: these regimes generated more internal dissent than non-communist dictatorships. Two: they reacted to existing dissent in more extreme ways than non-communist dictatorships normally did to the same sorts of dissent.

It’s not unique. We absolutely do it here. We actively suppress alternative theories of societal governance, we punish dissent (in western liberal societies, this is run through informal institutions. The government creates a theory called “hostile environment”, and then says you can be sued if you allow that to exist. This results in people not saying certain things in public lest we be unjobbed or kicked out of public spaces for crimethink) just as completely as any communist country ever did. We propagandize very effectively through mass media and through weakening institutions that compete with the government. This is why private schools are often forced to teach similar curricula to public schools and why homeschooling is treated with extreme suspicion. Those are potential seeds of dissent against the state’s views on social and economic issues especially. You can’t have that sort of thing if the state wants control.

All entities with a capacity for action will attempt to modify their environment to be more favorable to them. Communist states. Other states. People. Liberal democracies usually market themselves with free speech as a selling point, but observe them in action and you will notice that over time, they do their best to qualify and restrict that nominally free speech, to penalize undesirable utilizations of speech under some pretense, or to raise up institutions that exercise nominally non-state pressure to suppress certain types of speech.

This isn't unique to communism. Communism just tends to skip a lot of the foreplay, since totalitarian and authoritarian societies either don't run on public approval or never pretended to place value on free speech.

Communism just tends to skip a lot of the foreplay, since totalitarian and authoritarian societies either don't run on public approval

I'd say it's a little worse in communism, ironically because communist societies are supposed to earn public approval.

In a strongman dictatorship "I'm strong enough to crush all who oppose me" is something you brag about. In a theocracy you can say "we speak for God; better to crush blasphemy ourselves now than leave it for God to do later". Even in right-wing societies that are nominally run for all their members' benefit, there's no dogma that all their members opinions have value. A good muscle cell helps pick up the heavy thing it was told to and doesn't whine to the brain cells about the weight or about whether it should be picking up something else instead. If the people dissenting aren't actually respected then their dissent isn't as much of a threat, and you don't have to squelch it unless it seriously risks infecting your relatively small selectorate. (In practice right-wing authoritarians do squelch more than they have to, perhaps out of a cautious estimation of the risks here, perhaps because authoritarians are all dicks.)

But communism? That was supposed to be a utopia of equality! Sure, maybe we have to go through a "socialist" stage where we still have a state with leaders, and those leaders are super-empowered so they can design and implement the plans that improve our economy and our people and get us all ready for the final communist end stage and the withering away of the state, but even life under socialism is supposed to just be getting better and better, accruing public approval on top of the approval levels that were necessary to begin the communist project in the first place.

So what do you do when "One by one, these plans are attempted, fail, and are discarded"? (Communism also jumps in as a serious contributing factor to your problems at this point, via poor understanding of economics and mechanism design.) In @FCfromSSC's fascinating theory this "policy starvation" pushes even liberals to extremism; what must it do to people who began as communists? In a democracy the process initially just risks incumbent leaders losing elections. In a state with super-empowered leadership it risks incumbent leaders losing their lives! The peasants complaining might not really be part of your selectorate, but the ideology that you used as a Schelling point to organize and justify your state says that they matter, and so it's vitally important to you that their complaints don't cast enough blame on your part of the ruling coalition to make you one of the scapegoats for your collective failures. Letting them say what they want is, once your economy exhibits enough problems to make them persuasive, an existential threat to you! You almost have to declaim them as "wreckers" and punish them accordingly.

It's not unique to communism so much as a natural outcome of both the left's and the dissident right's embrace of collectivism. If you shift the focus of judgment from individual responsibility to the collective, the only practicable solution to the free-rider problem will be totalitarianism.

I think no, right-wing authoritarian governments have a similar level of tendency to suppress dissent.

Suharto killed over 500,000 civilians in the 1960s as part of a supposed anti-communist battle.

As for the Soviet Union, it was great at suppressing dissent back during Stalin's time. After it softened, the tendency to suppress dissent reduced to such an extent that by the time the system fell apart, it barely used its massive security forces and military to try to hold itself together by force.

So I think talking about "communism" is kind of a bad way of thinking about it. It allows people to go back to the loose ideas Marx had and try to pretend the dispute is about economic ideas.

In practice Communists are trying to implement Leninism as practiced.

The best way to understand it is Moldbug's Brahmin trying to remake society by force. There's no room in that for a loyal opposition or principled dissent.

The Brahmin particularly don't like being called out for their mistakes by their lessers and will always crack down harshly when they can get away with it.

Not unique, just cruder methods. The chinese, once they got rich enough with capitalism to be able to afford state of the art censorship, no longer have to use concentration camps very much. Neither does Russia, for the same reasons.

The US can afford the very best, an entire ecosystem of disinformation funded by dead rich people's estates being directed by the current fashionable elites from the best schools. CIA cutouts, partisan outlets, VOA penetration. And because it is so sophisticated and decentralized, there is no need for camps, or even to do much int eh way of directing things. The system does its own targeting, see the SPLC.

Do communist governments and institutions have a unique tendency to suppress dissent?

Russia and China had below-average tolerance for dissent before the Communists took power; thus 'persecute anyone who Notices that the sun doesn't shine out of our you-know-where' was seen as a more legitimate tool than it would be in the birthplaces of the Enlightenment.

I wouldn’t be certain about the former. The state response to Bolshevik terrorism and agitation in the late years of Czarism was, when compared to similar policies of Western nations, actually mild on average. The sheer difference between that regime and the Bolsheviks in terms of the number of people who were sentenced to forced labor or internal exile is also rather telling.

I was more referring to the tolerance for peaceful dissent.

You always have to consider the contingent historical circumstances that these nations develop under because revolutions never begin as a clean slate. It happens within a context.

If you take China as a popular example, almost nobody talks into account the fact that China has always had an authoritarian / autocratic streak since its inception. When you combine its unique history with the conditions under Mao Zedong, it doesn’t require a unique ideological causal factor to explain. This is why phrases like “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” is so well know in area studies of the region. It’s a syncretism between the two and you can’t divorce one from the other. Just like Zen Buddhism with Capitalism in Japan or Confucianism with Korea.

In the west we suppress dissenting voices as well. The spectrum of acceptable opinion within the MSM for instance is extraordinarily narrow. It isn’t narrow because someone throws you in a concentration camp. It’s narrow for other reasons. We don’t call it censorship, we call it “content moderation.” In the same way the term “propaganda” fell out of favor after the Second World War and has since been referred to as the “public relations industry.”

Bruce Schneier has also done an interesting analysis that turns politics into an analysis of information systems and in particular the structure of information flows, which are what’s important to these systems. One thing he notes is that democracies take the form of what he calls “common political knowledge,” and it details the power that transparency of information has. Authoritarian societies take common political knowledge and turn it into “contested political knowledge,” such that institutional divisions become less well understood and rules are often very fuzzy. This has several security benefits that you often see applied in IR studies, that explains why regimes will almost always favor security over prosperity whenever there is a conflict between the two.

Revolutionary utopian ideologies see dissent as delaying the arrival of the utopia and as a sign of dangerous disloyalty that threatens the strength of the movement. Comrades are supposed to be building towards a singular goal. Arguing about the goal or the methods is a waste of time at best and the start of a fracture that might doom the movement at worst. I don't think Communism is unique in this, it's just the highest profile recent example. See the French Revolution or the Anabaptist German cities for older examples.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

CS Lewis had a point there, I think.

I can't help but notice the irony of a prominent Christian writer deriding "omnipotent moral busybodies", emphasis on the omnipotent.

I can't help but notice the irony of a prominent Christian writer deriding "omnipotent moral busybodies", emphasis on the omnipotent.

To be charitable to Ol' Staples, he probably didn't think of God as "busybodies", given that he's triune at most and doesn't really care about your moral behavior until you die.

There's a brass tacks, Anglo-libertarian bias to a lot of these responses, which I also share. But to hear Catholic Integralists e.g. speak of vigilance in their statecraft as soul craft agenda, I can see them being as dedicated to policing people's hearts and minds in a way on par with communists.

Many understand that all totalitarianisms are the same ultimately. But few understand that all politics are ultimately totalitarian.

The commies just get there faster because their ideology is uniquely prone to the strife that accelerates the logic of power.

Non-communist authoritarian countries usually have shared factors that make them less oppressive. The military junta that rules the Republic of Banana just wants to keep the shipments to the Dole company going. They will be ferociously repressive in certain limited circumstances, but they aren’t interested in regulating everyone’s fence-post heights to the millimeter in search of a better world.

Communist governments usually want to make major changes to the economy and society in a way that requires them to exercise a lot more direct state control.

Everyone wants to stay in power. This includes even democracies. The more dissent against the system there is, the more repressive said system will need to be. Communism just doesn't work very well, causing more dissent and thus needing more repression.

China is a good example. Maoism was totalitarian. Today's China is much less repressive, not because the Communist Party has embraced individual rights in any way, but because they simply don't need it as much.

Since they let go of the strict communism, they went from being as poor as Zimbabwe to being the closest thing the US has to a peer competitor. As a result, people don't generally feel like they'd be better off by overthrowing the system. And ambitious people can throw themselves into making money, rather than the only outlet for ambition being scheming either within or against the Party. There is less need for repression, and therefore there is less repression.

Capitalist-ish dictatorships generally have better economies and more outlets for personal ambition than do traditional communist dictatorships, therefore the latter are going to need more repression just to keep going.

Regimes that use military force for legitimacy could, in theory, let people think and believe what they want, but they would never ever ever let people have access to arms, since that would threaten the legitimacy.

Regimes that use consent of the governed for legitimacy would never ever ever let people think for themselves, since the people may turn against the regime. If communist countries' legitimacy comes from a (perceived) consent of the governed then the regime must control the information and minds to ensure the people continue to perceive the government as legitimate.

That being said, it occurs to me that there is a threshold question. Perhaps all governments and institutions have a tendency to suppress dissent and there are a few exceptions, e,g, the United States, which combine (relatively) free markets with (relatively) free speech.

It's this. More to the point, it is a human tendency to think that if someone's wrong and insists on being wrong, it's OK to solve this problem by violence. Individuals are just as prone as collective institutions to think that 'error has no rights'. The normal way to handle heresy used to be violence, the normal way to handle differences between ruling class (ie. factions fighting for kingship etc.) was violence, it was normal for the masses to use violence when they wanted to overthrow the elites and for the elites to repress the masses with violence to keep their power. In practice, premodern societies had to allow a certain leeway simply because they lacked state capacity to handle everything; modern societies have that state capacity.

It actually takes a lot of societal and governmental indoctrination to get societies to the point where people are able to live with their political and religious differences, United States certainly having the capacity to enact such indoctrination. Even then I suspect a lot of it is simple apathy, a tendency to believe that politics has been solved and society stabilized to the degree that there's no real reason to care about anything and we can allow all sorts of weird freaks to have their say. This seems to explain the congruence of the late-90s end-of-history thinking with the post-political-correctness relative cultural tolerance.

Communists, fascists, religious extremists etc., then, are more willing to continue to shut their opponents down, either through state or through individual violence, because they're the ones who actually believe that their cause is just, important, and worth it to restore the use of violence as a general principle of handling differences.

Communists are more repressive because they actually think people can change.

Rightists and Leftists broadly define the outgroup as a minority. It might be defined as an economic class (‘capitalists’, ‘bourgeoisie’) or a social class (out of touch ‘elites’), or it might be defined nationally, religiously or ethnically, but the outgroup is generally a minority of the population.

What do you do when the majority - or at least seemingly a large mass of people - disagrees with you? The right has a built in explanation for this, which is expressed in different language at different places or times, sometimes more or less democratically, but which is essentially ‘some people are stronger, smarter, and more noble than others, we can lead, the rest will follow’ and this is broadly congruent. This leads to repression in far-right regimes being localized. It includes those groups marked out as the ‘true’ unassimilable enemy (see above), and a very small number of others who cause a nuisance, but there is no inherent need for the masses to be brought along provided they don’t threaten the running of the state. If you are not obstructing the running of government and do not belong to a primary outgroup, the reactionary regime generally leaves you alone.

The left lacks this explanation and dichotomy. Certainly, there have been attempts. The rural peasantry are inherently reactionary. The labor aristocracy are happy being kapos. But this all rings a little hollow compared to the fundamental ideological message - after all, unlike the right which is more willing to write off some people as outside the scope of the project, isn’t the core leftist idea that everyone (even sometimes former aristocrats and capitalists) can be reformed? Can become a servant of the revolution? Eventually, you reach a stage where the day-to-day political and social views of the masses need to be monitored, adjusted, and reported on. They are simply more relevant to communism as a political project. Communism cares about what people believe in their hearts in a way that reactionary traditionalist and right wing movements don’t - in part because communists think human nature is malleable in a way the right doesn’t.

This also makes for far more repressive forms of authoritarianism. In the end, Franco’s Spain ended because Spain became a liberal Western European country in front of him and he didn’t care to stop it, and it became clear to everyone even before he died that the ideology upon which it was built had evaporated among the masses, the working class and the lower middle and the bourgeois alike. Rightist regimes don’t make people go to Church. They might change the curriculum for kids, but they make no effect to convert adults ideologically, they assume they’re either in the small enemy group or already on their side. Communist countries have this problem less (not never, but less).

Going to(thé correct)church is strongly recommended and sometimes mandatory in rightist regimes with a religious component- Vatican II happened to blow up a load bearing pillar of Franco’s regime(and South Vietnam’s, but that’s another, longer, less straightforwards, story), but that didn’t mean public irreligion was acceptable.

The impression I have of fascist vs communist regimes is that unless you're a Jew or equivalent designated enemy category, the fascists will be satisfied with your lack of dissent, mostly you just don't get promoted over Party Members. Communist regimes extort ideological compliance out of the populace and expect you to, well, Signal your Virtue.

I'm sure there are all manner of counter-examoles from both directions, of course. "Regime" isn't a word with positive connotations.

Irreligion, no, but nowhere near the level of devotion required by the masses in a communist society. Weekly attendance at church was at maybe 40% at the height of Franco’s rule. A lot of that was residual, even then, the product of long habits.

Fascist Germany and Italy made more serious efforts at societal rituals, mass events, regular rallies but you were still far, far less ‘immersed’ in the ideology of Nazism as a random building inspector in a large town in German in 1937 as you were immersed in the ideology of Stalinism as a building inspector in a large town in Russia was in 1949 (assuming you weren’t a member of either party, which describes most people).

In the end, Franco’s Spain ended because Spain became a liberal Western European country in front of him and he didn’t care to stop it, and it became clear to everyone even before he died that the ideology upon which it was built had evaporated among the masses, the working class and the lower middle and the bourgeois alike.

Couldn't you describe the end of the Soviet Union roughly the same way, with some adjustments ("it became a market economy through black market in front of Gorbachev and he didn't care to stop it" etc., though also ideological liberalization in the form of glasnost of course), though?

The Soviet Union effectively repressed almost all private enterprise from the early 1930s to the mid 1980s. There were some smugglers and black marketers in 1975 but far fewer than there had been fifty years earlier. It was mostly effective. North Korea has a larger black market but it’s largely tolerated by the state due to extreme poverty as a supplementary income source.

Yes, and the Francoist regime also repressed the liberal forces, until eventually it didn't. (Also, my understanding is that the black market was already quite considerable a force in the Soviet economy in the early 80s.)

No. Because the fall of the Soviet Union threw probably half a billion people into massive poverty. To which almost 40 years later we still haven't totally climbed of.

Half a billion seems to be a massive overstatement. Otherwise I mostly agree.

The population of USSR and Warsaw pact was roughly 500 million that got their living standards fall 3 times overnight. During the 90s we had even food insecurity and hunger.

The population of USSR and Warsaw pact was roughly 500 million

I checked Google and it seems I was indeed mistaken. I’d add, however, that 2rafa’s argument is still basically correct: the collapse of the ‘90s did not affect all former Soviet satellite states to an equal degree, and the same applies to former Soviet republics.

People in much of Eastern Europe including Poland, Czechia and large parts of East Germany had higher quality of life by the mid-late 1990s than they did under communism. The Baltics saw the same effect with a large collapse in 1991-1993 and then recovery starting by 94-95, with ‘full’ recovery arguably by 1999-2001. Russia had the big crash in 98 and yet even there there was near enough ‘full’ recovery arguably by 2003 latest. And this ignores that in some ways capitalism brought improved product quality and some improvements to life even at the nadir of the economic collapse.

So at worst, after 50-80 years of communism, you’re looking at 7-10 years for a full recovery, which is extremely reasonable.

That is totally not true. The recovery in Balkans was at best 2006-2007. And then the global financial crisis hit. The standard of living took almost 20 years to recover. And arguably for people that are retired it never did.

I meant the Baltics but am extremely dumb and mistyped.

As for the Balkans…

  1. Since Yugoslavia was not in the USSR or Warsaw Pact and probably had at least half the population of the communist Balkans, I didn’t include it.

  2. There was a huge series of nationalist wars that delayed economic recovery by a decade, destroyed much infrastructure and dislocated a lot of people, all of which is bad for business.

That isn’t an inherent issue with shock therapy or capitalism. What happened in the Balkans was the final outcome of the Ottoman Collapse, which led to the first Balkan wars in the 1910s and which was frozen in stasis by the grand events of the 20th century until the collapse of communism caused them to resume in the 1990s.

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Threw? Or were these people already the opposite of American "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", having enough rubles on their sberkassa accounts, but no goods to spend this money on?

Yes threw the 90s were apocalyptic in Russia and the poorer republics are still below where they were. The Soviet Union wasn't exactly prosperous but it wasn't exactly poverty either and the entire system was set up for their state run economy so much random stuff just stopped working in the 90s in the former USSR.

It did genuinely cause a massive measurable decrease in life expectancy.

There were also related changes of the same nature. A massive drop in fertility, the rise of suicide rates, a massive rise in alcoholism and drug addiction rates, the reappearance of contagious diseases that were considered to be already eliminated etc. The latter was the result of the utter collapse of an already shoddy and underfunded healthcare system, as was the decrease that you mentioned.

You're right, I shouldn't write comments when half-asleep.

Governments and institutions have a general tendency to suppress dissent.

A state fundamentally sells security. You get courts and a capable army; they get your taxes. Supply, demand, solve for the equilibrium. Don’t push too hard, though, because failing to come to an agreement is a lose-lose proposition. Suppressing dissent lets states push that much harder before the revolts start.

It was true for the panem et circenses and for medieval fiefdoms. It’s true for us, too. We Westerners have the advantage of liberalism to take the edge off, but that’s all; we are not immune. When the going gets tough, you’ve seen Americans line up to sacrifice those principles. Just this once. Just for the really bad actors, right?

So I am tempted to ask what, if anything, is inherent in communism which results in this type of behavior.

It's not that there's something inherent in Marxism*. Rather, it's that Marxism was built by, and continues to attract, the types of people who already have a preexisting psychological disposition to suppress ideological dissent and view it as threatening. You see the same dynamics (that is, the dynamics of ideological suppression and the fear of wrongthink) play out everywhere from indie video game circles to "serious" leftist political organizations, it's plainly one and the same underlying phenomenon at work.

(* The notion of "communism" in general predates Marxism specifically, but, the Marxist and Marxist-inspired ideological strands are the ones that have been the most evolutionarily successful.)

Don't totalitarian rightist governments have a dim record on free speech too? Yes, but, it's different; it's subtle but different. Flipping things around for a moment, consider how Heidegger in his "Introduction to Metaphysics" lectures, delivered in 1935 (two years after the NSDAP came to power), argued that The Human Being As Such is ontologically grounded in "violence" and "struggle". I view this as an authentic expression of "the rightist mind" (or at least, a particular subtype or strand of it), and I view this as a legitimate difference between leftists and rightists. A committed Marxist simply wouldn't think or say that; even though they have engaged in a great amount of violence themselves in good conscience, and even though they have a certain degree of libidinal investment in the continuation of certain struggles that they claim to want to bring to an end. For all that, they are still not invested in the abstract concept of struggle itself; it doesn't structure their imagination in the same way. And this is part of what makes them leftists in the first place, and ultimately structures all the really-subtle-but-still-clearly-there differences in the ways that leftists and rightists think, talk, organize themselves, etc.

Analogously, rightists will suppress dissent for all sorts of reasons; because it's tactically the best move, because they legitimately believe that the target views will cause great harm if left to proliferate unchecked, because they simply take pleasure in the fear of their enemies; but they won't do it because they love suppressing dissent as such. The mind that loves struggle needs, first and foremost, enemies to struggle against. The mind that loves peace would rather see their enemies simply disappear into the mists of time. Or the mod queue.

I don't think there's much of a connection between the dissent-suppression of communist regimes and the dissent-suppression of leftist wokescolding. The latter has more in common with busybody church folk, and bitchy high-schoolers of whatever gender. That they both use Marxist gobbledygook is...a coincidence? A historical artifact? Orthogonal? One of those.

It's a direct and specific traditional inheritance which can be specifically identified and is so. So much so I would argue there is no actual meaningful difference. Wokescolding is a communism.

I thought wokescolding was invented during the protestant reformation.

If you read the captive mind, it talks about how the Soviets used exactly the kind of wokescolding behaviors we are all so familiar with to bring the Polish literary establishment to heel. The government wokescolds were called “dialectitions” and they would lead discussion assuming the role of a facilitator in exactly the same pose anyone who has done a DEI training would instantly recognize only with slightly more iron behind the velvet glove.

Why is it surprising that people who believe they are better and smarter than the market and deserve to control the economy also tend to believe they should command power elsewhere? Socialism without authoritarianism is in theory possible, but the same thought pattern leads to both.

The same way that would be authoritarians inevitably go down the path of socialism and try to boss around the economy. If you think you're smarter and should be in control of everything, why shouldn't that include telling big businesses what they can and can't do, implementing price controls, stealing from them with illegal taxations, and using government to seize stake in private corporations? Socialism and big government is a means to boss around people who would otherwise tell you to fuck off. It should say something that even the right wing dictators (and wannabe dictators) seem to never end up being economically libertarian.

The economy is one of the biggest ways that people make personal choices in their life. What do you trade for, who do you trade it with, what sort of job do you work, how long do you work it, how much can you trade? What sorts of things can you use in your day to day life and who can provide it? It's control over the food you eat and the homes you can live in. You can not have power if you do not exert control over the economy.

Do communist governments and institutions have a unique tendency to suppress dissent?

No.

Not unless you engage in significant somersaults to exclude right wing regimes that engaged in significant censorship of dissent and say that they are therefore left-wing.

Power has a non-unique tendency to suppress dissent, regardless of its style or origin.

Sample size is a bit of an issue here especially since a few of the examples have cultural/historical reasons. Russia has been authoritarian for centuries in large part due to institutional memory of invasions. China has always been somewhat collective because I think the theory indicates necessities of what worked for rice farmers. It could be why they chose communism and communism not being the cause. Russia though I would list as just authoritarian due to history. N Korea would have some of the issues with China but obviously they are even more extreme for Asians. Japan obviously has some of the “harmony” attributes.

I think it's just that dictatorships have a tendency to suppress dissent and communism for a series of reasons has a tendency to become a dictatorship.

Also add the fact that communism has a tendency to cause dissent due to its poor material outcomes. Many authoritarian capitalist governments don't have to suppress very much dissent because the people make money and are at least happy enough not to rebel (ie modern Russia).

communism for a series of reasons has a tendency to become a dictatorship.

Ok, and what do you think those reasons are.

Communism- by which we mean intentional socialism or Marxist-Leninism- is too unworkable to exist without an authoritarian edifice, and so it only exists where dissent is suppressed.


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