site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23294 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Top New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

For those with knowledge/believers of HBD, what does it have to say about Indians (East Asia), Arabs, & Hispanics (IQ wise)? I've been living in my city and I've noticed Indians tend to live in the nicer neighborhoods. Perhaps just selection effects from immigration? Hispanics have similar problems as black people, what does HBD say about them? Arabs?

  • -10

Perhaps just selection effects from immigration?

That can be, and is an important part of why immigration, especially the highest skill immigration is so important to keeping the US rich and powerful.

Let's say that white people will have a polymath SuperGenius in one out of a million people. In the US, that leaves us with roughly 210 white polymath SuperGenius. (in this scenario, we are Bovino pilled and have no non whites left)

Meanwhile let's be really racist and say that the ethnic Chinese only have a SuperGenius with one in three million. China, even despite this handicap, has roughly 450 or so super geniuses.

China has more one in a million SuperGenius than the US despite a significant disadvantage we applied to them. Do the same with 1 in 500k or 1 in 100k or whatever and you get the same results. China has more.

If the US does not either grow numbers significantly or recruit more SuperGenius, subSuperGenius, Genius, etc from elsewhere in the world, we will lose the top of intelligence war. Maybe we can cope with that, maybe we have better healthier systems from our higher average intelligence or something. But we will lose it anyway, China will have more just by pure numbers. Now consider that China is probably not 3x dumber than us at making SuperGenius.

Now apply this to the whole world. The US is only about 4.3% of the world population. Way more geniuses and talent of all sorts is born outside the country than in it. The best thing you can do is be immigrant friendly, and bring in the geniuses who do things like make up almost a third of your country's nobel prizes and make you richer and stronger. The worst thing you can do is to expel your geniuses so they all work for the immigrant friendly country willing to accept them.

You need the elite human capital. And of course, the more willing you are to take in anyone who is above average, your chances of Geniuses grows.

Many will say it’s good to let in the world’s geniuses, but that we don’t need people who are simply slightly above average. Of course, there’s no reliable way for government to decide who the geniuses are beforehand. Under such a system, Elon Musk wouldn’t have gotten in, and neither would Jensen Huang’s parents. The point is that if you accept large amounts of people who are slightly above average, some percentage of them and their children will turn out to make absolutely massive contributions to society.

Personally I've always said that we should extend immediate citizenship invites to winners of the math Olympiad and other such contests.

I think an issue with the immigration discourse, much like the abortion discourse, is that it's dominated by philosophical extremes, partially because that's who puts the most effort into the issue, when most people tend to be somewhere in the mushy middle. Abortion is dominated by people who either think life begins at conception, or close to it, and everything after it is unjustifiable homicide or people who believe in basically absolute bodily autonomy for the woman and that the fetus has no interests we should take into account at any stage. Most people tend to thing there are some abortions that are morally permissible, life of the mother being the least controversial example, others that are morally gray or not really a public issue, like an early stage abortion for lifestyle, and some that are outright wrong, such as Kermit Gosnell's abortions.

I think immigration has a similar structure; you have people who are either outright for open borders, or are de facto pro open borders, on one side and philosophical nativists who view immigration as bad in itself, which the bad only sometimes being outweighed by the virtues of the individual immigrant in certain cases, on the other side. Most people instead balance a lot of different factors, such as cultural assimilation, economic benefits, economic detriments, crime, and other factors when debating if immigration is good or not. Compare Ukrainian refugees/immigrants vs. Syrians; the Ukrainians tend to be benefits to the host societies, while the Syrians tend to be detriments. You can see Europeans react to this fact by one being far more controversial than the other.

A lot of political behavior on both Abortion and Immigration, really the rest of the culture war too, is describable by individual issues often being a ratchet. Red states and blue states on issues like guns and abortion are able to add up individual decisions which on their own aren't necessarily too objectionable into de facto banning certain actions, or at least making them incredibly difficult. Immigration is often the same way; letting in immigrants our economy needs is generally popular when you phrase it like that, but once you start fiddling with the definition of 'what our economy needs' or 'genius' or the help they get when they are here things get contentious quite quickly.

If you only believe in short-term GDPmaxxing (which is a valid position I suppose), sure. View people as fungible, import the best according to some metrics.

The truth about the US immigration system is that most green cards are family-based and that cultures and people are not fungible. Even if Chinese people and Indians increase your GDP they also change your culture, make use of family reunification (which can often negate economic advantages), bring grievances from the old world with them and often promote ideologies that go against the host population (white people). Not to mention that things like IQ =/= social trust, "western" morality, etc.

People have pointed out that Asians are importing things like Childhood-destroying striverism (see the whole Vivek thing), Caste-like dynamics, etc.

I am not nearly as reactionary as a lot of posters here but I do not believe in the fungibility of people. I think the US was smart to consider demographics in immigration policy, not just due to economic reasons, but much more because of cultural cohesion. Just like places like Singapore or the UAE (to a lesser extent) do. That doesn’t mean "no Asians" but maybe being very discerning about to whom you grant permanent residency to is not a bad idea. And it's not like you could just move to India or China either.

you only believe in short-term GDPmaxxing (which is a valid position I suppose), sure. View people as fungible, import the best according to some metrics.

People are not fungible. Jensen Huang alone has created far more value than the extremely large majority of other Americans regardless of race. You can not replace what he has created (5.4 trillion dollar valuation of Nvidia!) with your average Joe, it is not possible. You take a random white guy off the street and compare their value, and you can't even see the stranger on the chart. That is how dwarfed he is by Huang.

The truth about the US immigration system is that most green cards are family-based and that cultures and people are not fungible.

Well yes, it would be hard to convince smart people to come if they can't bring their families.

Even if Chinese people and Indians increase your GDP they also change your culture,

Yes, and part of that cultural change is a culture that values being smarter and harder working than what we currently have. A culture of grinders and geniuses.

make use of family reunification (which can often negate economic advantages)

Again, Jensen Huang alone is so massively valuable that even hundreds of thousands (probably even millions) of net negative parasites would be cancelled out. Alone. And we are not even close to that number of immigrants who are purely net negative.

bring grievances from the old world with them and often promote ideologies that go against the host population (white people).

I think Hanania addressed this with an excellent point that realistically, the same people pushing nativism the hardest now have been sabotaging themselves with the things they claimed immigrants would do.

I’m old enough to remember when nativists complained that immigration would make the country more socialist, yet as the Republican Party has become more nativist and anti-market at the same time, they have shown themselves to be accommodating towards or even enthusiastic about economic statism as long as it’s the type preferred by Americans who share their distaste for foreigners.

Immigrants actually have a pretty pro western selection effect overall. Some of the proudest most patriotic free market loving freedom desiring American dream appreciating people I know are immigrants. Meanwhile go up in the Appalachians or something and you get a bunch of drug addict white trash statists who would rather bitch about how unfair things are.

Here's Ronald Reagan saying this same thing.

It is bold men and women, yearning for freedom and opportunity, who leave their homelands and come to a new country to start their lives over. They believe in the American dream. And over and over, they make it come true for themselves, for their children, and for others. They give more than they receive. They labor and succeed. And often they are entrepreneurs. But their greatest contribution is more than economic, because they understand in a special way how glorious it is to be an American. They renew our pride and gratitude in the United States of America, the greatest, freest nation in the world -- the last, best hope of man on Earth.

They are the people who embrace being American far more than some white chick reposting marx memes on her phone between college classes, or some white trash honey boo boo family, or the endless other complainers and whiners who when given the greatest and most opportunities filled country in the world, in history, for free with native citizenship, flounder like the losers they are and complain instead.

I mean I suppose it depends on the immigrants and the compatibility of the culture. Chinese secular people would generally fit within the framework of American secular culture just fine. But if you’re importing the supermen from less compatible culture groups, and allowing them to set up little ethnic bergs within your country you’ll eventually end up being a collection of incompatible cultures bound together by nothing more than a piece of cloth and a national anthem. Unless you want to jettison democracy to find a strongman to hold all of those ethnic groups and their competing interests together, you’re going to watch the thing fly apart at the speed that those groups learn to use the federal government to issue carve outs for them and no one else.

Also keep in mind that immigration is permanent and regression to the mean exists. You might import a super genius from Iran in 2026, but by 2050 his 4-5 kids won’t be much smarter than average. They’ll still be Iranian Shia Muslims, still have a lot of Iranian cultural baggage, and be much more interested in promoting the fortunes of Arab-Americans at the expense of everyone else’s ethnic groups.

Children born and raised in the country are extremely integrated into American culture. It's a common story trope even of like, the Chinese grandma who is upset her grandkids don't know any of the cultural traditions or speak the language.

Also keep in mind that immigration is permanent and regression to the mean exists. You might import a super genius from Iran in 2026, but by 2050 his 4-5 kids won’t be much smarter than average

It does exist, but genetics is still a thing and those kids will actually be in general much smarter than the norm.

They’ll still be Iranian Shia Muslims, still have a lot of Iranian cultural baggage, and be much more interested in promoting the fortunes of Arab-Americans at the expense of everyone else’s ethnic groups.

Absolutely not true, only 34% of Iranian Americans are Muslim and that's including the first generation immigrants. Iranian Americans are more irreligious seculars than they are Muslim. No wonder when the selection effect causing this is obvious, we're taking in smart people (less likely to be hyper religious anyway) who don't like the islamist regime and wanted to leave for a freer less religious nation.

Even more than the general population!

According to the survey findings, as a group, Iranian Americans are religiously diverse, and are far more secular than the general U.S. population. By a nearly two to one margin, those who were questioned stated that their religious identity was “not very strong” (65 percent) as opposed to “very strong” (35 percent). By comparison, in a survey of Americans as a whole released by the Pew Forum in November 2012, the overall picture was reversed. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said that religion was “very important” in their lives and another twenty-two percent said that it was “somewhat important.” Only eighteen percent said it was “not too important” or “not important at all.”

Iranian Americans are better than the general population at dismissing the sky daddy belief.

And it's not exclusive to Iranians. Not only do American Muslims integrate quite well into American culture, but 1 in 4 raised in Islam don't continue being Muslims in adulthood!.

Well yes, it would be hard to convince smart people to come if they can't bring their families.

Plenty of places manage this without meaningful abilities to tap into the social security net. Dubai, Singapore etcetera are welcoming but you're going to struggle immensely to ever get a passport for a lot of immigrants. I do also broadly agree that the 'O1'/'genius' level of immigration should be encouraged (albeit one must acknowledge you're absolutely fucking the developing world by taking their best and brightest), but the current playing field has gone far far far far beyond that where now the H1B layer is taking fairly interchangeable mid-level career jobs and being used as a bludgeon on the native stock to keep wages down.

Without even going down to the Deliveroo layer that's now plowing into Europe where '30 years ago when we were ultra-selective people from these countries used to excel now let's take anybody who can get on a plane' is absolutely botched policy.

First of all, having no or very controlled family reunification and discerning permanent residency and citizenship does not preclude getting geniuses. Singapore, which, if it weren't well run, would be a much worse place to migrate to than the US, manages to attract very good people just fine.

Secondly, while I admire what Jensen Huang built to an extent, it's not trivially true that in his absence there wouldn't be an equal or marginally worse Nvidia equivalent. Indeed, many GPU manufacturers exist and it does not follow that a more restrictionist US would not be at the technological frontier.

Thirdly, this is ultimately a values question. You seem to find having "Asian Grinders" as a good thing. Many White Americans pre mass-migration, if told that their kids would have to compete in school and participate in the habits and mores of "Asian grinders", would have recoiled in horror. Not that they got a say anyway, no western country in history ever voted for mass migration.

Also, take Australia. Australia gets far more Asian grinders than the US ever did, indeed, it has some of the most elite immigration in the world measured by your system. And yet, it has stagnated against the US in the last decade in GDP terms and is facing heavy anti-immigrant backlash.

Immigrants actually have a pretty pro western selection effect overall. Some of the proudest most patriotic free market loving freedom desiring American dream appreciating people I know are immigrants.

If you look at actual polling you'll see that Asians are extremely happy to jump on the whole anti-white anti-western culture bus and that they often bring things like speech norms from their places of origin.

Here's Ronald Reagan saying this same thing.

Immigration in his time was from very different places than it is now.

Ultimately it gets down to whether nations should be economic zones or actual coherent nations.

Thirdly, this is ultimately a values question. You seem to find having "Asian Grinders" as a good thing. Many White Americans pre mass-migration, if told that their kids would have to compete in school and participate in the habits and mores of "Asian grinders", would have recoiled in horror.

Well no shit, lazy losers don't like being told that they're lazy losers and they especially don't like being told they should work harder. That doesn't change it is an improvement to the country if we go to hard work and effort being valued instead. Nativism against high skill immigrants is also a problem of ego.

Not that they got a say anyway, no western country in history ever voted for mass migration

Yes they actually do, in fact we used to debate on how accommodating we would be for immigrants. Look back on Reagan for instance, he never once hid how pro immigration he was and he is one of the most popular and beloved presidents in history. Heck you

Also, take Australia. Australia gets far more Asian grinders than the US ever did, indeed, it has some of the most elite immigration in the world measured by your system. And yet, it has stagnated against the US in the last decade in GDP terms and is facing heavy anti-immigrant backlash.

Elite human capital is only one part of the equation, even the smartest people can not overcome bad systems. This is not Atlus Shrugged, the John Galts of the world are often stuck just working in suboptimal suppressive conditions instead of being able to break open the government.

If you look at actual polling you'll see that Asians are extremely happy to jump on the whole anti-white anti-western culture bus and that they often bring things like speech norms from their places of origin.

Hey another example of how despite the complaints of immigrants, it's actually something being done even more by the increasingly nativist Republican party instead. The same way that the nativist party has abandoned the idea of free markets and trade, we have the government now blatently engaging in suppression of free speech even further than any immigrants have managed. And no, whataboutism does not fix the issue.

It the nativists themselves turn into the communists and censors, then that can't possibly be the true issue they have with immigrants. The nativists embrace the anti American ideals, ones we've had since the founding. George Washington himself saying the USA is a country to take the virtuous and persecuted. It is Washington's view that lead us to winning the space race, creating the nukes, and plenty of other achievements off the backs of the scientists the Nazis cast out.

Immigration in his time was from very different places than it is now.

Ultimately it gets down to whether nations should be economic zones or actual coherent nations.

This is not a binary choice. The US as a "coherent nation" has always been one of immigrants. Even now, about half of the citizenship can trace back heritage to just Ellis Island alone for instance. And economic strength is one of the necessary components to being a coherent nation, the US is strong and powerful because we have the best of the world. Would you rather it be Germany or Japan who developed the nukes first?

It traces back so far that it even goes to the very founding. George Washington himself himself wanted the USA to be a country that takes in the virtuous and persecuted. It is Washington's view that lead us to winning the space race, creating the nukes, and plenty of other achievements off the backs of the scientists the Nazis and Maoists and whoever else cast out.

Not that they got a say anyway, no western country in history ever voted for mass migration.

Western countries didn't exactly vote against mass immigration either, until well into the 2010s. There is a very noisy anti-immigration movement going back to Enoch Powell in the UK and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, and it has real mass working class support, but it doesn't actually move votes.

Even now, anti-immigration populist parties seem to face a hard cap of 25-30% support and centre-right parties who go into coalitions with them are punished - in other words about 70% of the voters are opposed to anti-immigration populism. (Trump wins because the US system allows you to capture the Presidency with 26% of the vote by winning a close primary and then a close general - in a jungle primary he would get 25-30%).

The British far right and populist right are an electoral irrelevance until UKIP get 16% of the vote in a low-turnout European election in 2004, and the first time a party running to the right of the Tories gets a significant vote share in a general election is 2015 when UKIP get 12.6%. The Tories run an anti-immigration campaign in 2005 (with the slogan "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" and it goes down like a lead balloon. David Cameron includes a pledge to cut immigration to the tens of thousands in the 2010 and 2015 manifestos, but the voters (correctly) don't believe him, he wins anyway, and doesn't cut immigration. Boris gets a landslide in 2019 despite having published policies that imply he will do a Boriswave.

The lack of ballot-box support for an anti-immigration insurgent party is unlikely to be purely because FPTP suppresses it - other third parties get mass support during this period, with the SDP-Liberal Alliance peaking at 25.4% in 1983 and the Greens getting 15% in the 1989 European elections.

So the big picture in the UK is that the Tories don't need an anti-immigration message to win, which is good because they can't effectively use one. And there is no meaningful opposition to their right until Farage, and even Farage doesn't have enough votes to matter until 2024 - his impact on British politics between 2010 and 2024 is driven by the impact of Farage panic on the internal politics of the Conservative Party.

In France, you have a serious anti-immigration party opposing the Gaullists from the right going back to Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National in the 1980's, but it's stuck on about 15% of the vote (with very little chance of winning anything under the French electoral system, because the other 85% will hold their noses and vote for anyone-but-FN in the runoff) until Marine Le Pen's 2017 breakthrough.

In the US, socially conservative insurgents (who, among other things, oppose immigration) consistently get about 20% in Republican primaries until Trump. The GOP grassroots are obviously more anti-immigrant than this suggests, but when they get into the polling booth they pull the lever for a GOPe tax cutter.

What does all this mean - the simplest interpretation is that immigration is low salience for normies until well into the 2010s. Talking about the issue (in either direction) is a vote loser even among anti-immigration conservative voters because it implies you don't care enough about the bread-and-butter issues voters care about. The other point is that effective anti-immigration politics is very visibly tied to the failure of traditional centre-left and centre-right parties to offer a positive programme voters could vote for. The best example here is the French Presidential election in 2017, where the traditional two big parties came third and fifth, but you see the same thing happening in the UK (where Boris can only win in 2019 by running against his own party's record in government) and the US (where neither the GOPe nor the Democrats can manage run a replacement-level candidate against Trump).

So the interesting question is the direction of causation. Do centre-left and centre-right parties decline because the public finally means it when they say they are fed up with mass immigration, or does anti-immigration politics exploit a vacuum left by the decline of centre-left and centre-right parties for other reasons? Those other reasons are obvious - some combination of social media-driven negativity and very real policy failures including the 2008 financial crisis and Iraq, with the relative impact depending on how sympathetic you find the old-school politicians.

At least in Europe, mass migration on the scale that it's a noticeable and negative thing for most people is actually shockingly recent. And if you dig into when it hit various countries, there absolutely was backlash, pre-2010s included. German guest workers were promised to be temporary. Asian migration to Australia was promised to be modest. The US had such backlash that until 1965ish there was a law on the books to basically freeze their demographics.

I would also argue that the idea that restrictions = nazism and racism post 1945 was used in the west to push it heavily. Also, usually populist parties that actually stopped migration also bundled rather odious populist policies and/or nationalist stuff with the whole thing. Why that is can be discussed at another time.

Western countries didn't exactly vote against mass immigration either

And? If the idea is that our rulers get to do whatever they want, even if their constituents are against it because "neener neener, you didn't vote hard enough" (even when they clearly did - see the policies under the "fascist" governments of Italy, Poland, or the recent DIGNIDAD Act), then it's time to stop pretending "democracy" as a concept has any substance to it at all.

Also, take Australia. Australia gets far more Asian grinders than the US ever did, indeed, it has some of the most elite immigration in the world measured by your system. And yet, it has stagnated against the US in the last decade in GDP terms and is facing heavy anti-immigrant backlash.

I feel like there might be a breadcrumbs effect that is under-explored. Basically, every ultra-competent (in the sense of being simultaneously highly intelligent and highly conscientious and highly agentic, and so on) person in the world, if they are interested in leaving their country and going to the west, will try to get into the US first and foremost, since it's the powerhouse #1. And since they are ultra-competent, they will find a way in. Every single other western country - no matter how hard they're working to have selective immigration - will only get the breadcrumbs from this, only people who either aren't quite competent enough to get into the US or who want to go to another country for idiosyncratic reasons, like already having family present there. And worse, this effect is cascading down: If not the US, then it's north-western europe, which also isn't even terribly hard to get into for a reasonably motivated individual.

To be sure as long as you're not screwing up the selection you're still getting reasonably competent, unproblematic individuals. But I wouldn't be surprised if Australia in particular gets the chaff of the grinders: Those that needed to grind extra-hard just to barely make it.

America gets all the first and second round draft picks.

Yeah I'm not a particular Elon Musk fan and I think he's probably better example of somebody who's harder to replace in that he has the right combination of luck, willingness to keep diversifying into new speculative fields and raw tenacity to actually engender meaningful change as an individual. IMO somebody like Huang would have likely emerged regardless since it's not like he invented Unobtanium that completely unlocked the path of GPU development.

You can not replace what he has created (5.4 trillion dollar valuation of Nvidia!) with your average Joe, it is not possible.

Again, Jensen Huang alone is so massively valuable that even hundreds of thousands (probably even millions) of net negative parasites would be cancelled out.

Not really. It's true no amount of average Joe's can replace a Jensen Huang, but the truth is he depends on them as much as they depend on him. This is trivially observable by the fact that none of these people are able to "cancel out" impoverished populations of other countries, and have to go to the US for their success.

It's also telling you measure his contribution by the valuation of his company, which is an absurd thing to do. In the mind of a valuation appreciator, all you have to do is subtract government expenditures going to the net negative parasites from the company valuation, and as long as the bottom line is in the black,you're good! The reality is that just like no amount of average Joes can compensate for Jensen Huang, even if you get enough of them that their total contributions exceed $5.4 trillion, no amount of Jensen Huangs, and no amount of money transferred by the government, can compensate for the social erosion caused by mass immigration from incompatible cultures.

Yes, and part of that cultural change is a culture that values being smarter and harder working than what we currently have. A culture of grinders and geniuses.

That's not the cultural change that's happening anywhere in the west. We are constantly being pushed to erode our standards, and a significant justification for that is the push for greater "diversity" necessitated by mass migration.

Not really. It's true no amount of average Joe's can replace a Jensen Huang, but the truth is he depends on them as much as they depend on him. This is trivially observable by the fact that none of these people are able to "cancel out" impoverished populations of other countries, and have to go to the US for their success.

Just because no super genius on an abandoned island can build a plane by themselves doesn't erase their immense and overwhelming power when given opportunities. Society works by depending on each other, but there's a reason why it's those like Jensen Huang or Elon Musk and not some John Smith who works as a trash collector. Trash collection is an extremely valuable and necessary role, but he is easily replaceable with anyone else. Huang is not.

It's also telling you measure his contribution by the valuation of his company, which is an absurd thing to do. In the mind of a valuation appreciator, all you have to do is subtract government expenditures going to the net negative parasites from the company valuation, and as long as the bottom line is in the black,you're good!

It's obviously not actually that simple, but valuation is the easy quick way to determine a person's value to society. What Huang has created is worth trillions of dollars. Because you can earn a billion dollars if you do things that people really really want.

That's not the cultural change that's happening anywhere in the west. We are constantly being pushed to erode our standards, and a significant justification for that is the push for greater "diversity" necessitated by mass migration.

You're right, unfortunately despite the grinder culture selection effect of immigration, it's not enough to overcome the growing problem of victimhood natives who instead of embracing freedom and opportunity, turn to their phones to whine on Tiktok instead about how unfair it is that the smarter and harder working Indians and Asians are "taking their jobs".

I'm not sure why you perceive the rest of the world as Mordor where any burgeoning company is instantly snuffed by the inability of peons to execute tasks. Nvidia has always manufactured a significant chunk of their product in Taiwan due to expertise, talent and advantages that don't exist inside the USA. The USA's useful more for being the best place to raise cash than necessarily in terms of pure manufacturing or actually making things happen.

Which is where your argument starts to run into a wall where it's more that the USA is a PVP realm of adspend optimizers, Facebook button colourers, ligitation and financial magicians. None of this is a particularly good use of human capital, actual manufacturing has been fucked off to other countries since getting affordable, hard-working talent to do it in the West is increasingly difficult

Just because no super genius on an abandoned island can build a plane by themselves

They also can't build it in certain densely populated, resource-rich, parts of the world either.

doesn't erase their immense and overwhelming power when given opportunities. Society works by depending on each other

Yes, that's my argument. You'll note that at no point have I denied their contribution, literally said "no amount of Jensen Huangs, can compensate for the social erosion caused by mass immigration from incompatible cultures" , a point which you are deliberately avoiding now.

It's obviously not actually that simple,but valuation is the easy quick way to determine a person's value to society. What Huang has created is worth trillions of dollars. Because you can earn a billion dollars if you do things that people really really want.

You'll again note that at no point have I denied Huang's contribution to society. What I did deny was his ability to compensate for mass migration from incompatible cultures. The argument for him possessing that ability clearly rests on it being that simple.

You're right, unfortunately despite the grinder culture selection effect of immigration, it's not enough to overcome the growing problem of victimhood natives who instead of embracing freedom and opportunity.

- Doctor, I think I have a cold.
- Here, have some arsenic. Feel any better?
- No, I feel a lot worse...
- You're right, unfortunately despite the healing effect of arsenic, it's not enough to overcome the growing common cold infection in your body...

There's absolutely no reason to believe the "grinder culture" culture of (some) immigrants in any way positively contributes to hosts cultures. On the other hand, the part of the native culture that is the most into victimhood narratives is also the most fanatically pro-immigration.

Right. You need Jensen Huang, plus all the various competent people he hires and who make up his customers. Plus you need a paucity of competent ultraparasites who make Bernie Sanders look like an Ayn Rand fan -- that's a thing lacking almost everywhere. Note that California, at least, is crossing a line on that latter point.

I am not necessarily a "believer" in the strong sense, but I guess I believe in a weaker sense that genetic differences can cause some group differences in intelligence. The extent and magnitude of that is debatable. I guess I simply don't believe group differences can be ruled out a priori and I also don't see why they should be especially unlikely. They are definitely not the sole explanatory variable but they seem to be a pretty good one for some cases.

I think for Indians the party line among strong proponents is that India is genetically very diverse and most immigrants are from higher-functioning sub populations. Hispanics are a mix, between blacks and whites and Arabs I don’t know what the party line is.

HBD, what does it have to say about Indians (East Asia), Arabs, & Hispanics (IQ wise)?

My moderately knowledgeable internet racist's intuition says:

Indians range from slightly above average to well below it, largely depending on caste. Arabs were smart at some point and some still are, but as a whole they have significantly damaged themselves by inbreeding. Hispanic is all over the map as a category, but assuming you're using the common definition, then I imagine they come in somewhat below whites and Asians but well above the usual suspects who need elaborate white guilty apologetics about geography and shit to explain why they never did anything.

Someone fact check me!

Small quibble, but you probably meant Indians (South Asia). Never heard of anyone placing India in East Asia.

Neither Indians (caste system) nor Hispanics (white, black, Amerindian) fit into one group. Hispanic is like saying someone is American. It’s not an ethnicity.

Intresting, so what are the actually "races" genetically speaking? Is it just, black people, whites, than asians? How is it classified?

Races are made up tribes based on people who have more similar genetics and skin coloring. It somewhat works for quickly understanding a few broad groups of people but has trouble with categorizing various shades of brown and brown-adjacent people. Unless brown is a race?

In your question about Indians, Arabs, and Hispanics you reveal the problem with a white/black/asian lens of race - it can't categorize most of the world with just a few categories. If you wanna go into HBD you need to read the research.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatu_Vanhanen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn

2002, IQ and the Wealth of Nations - this can be your starting point. It's old, and there is much newer stuff but you can get to that later.

You can cluster populations into clearly distinct genetic groups using various unsupervised algorithms (i.e. without prior labels about who belongs to which group). If you did this in the United States, those clusters would be highly predictive of which race we label the individuals in that cluster. Mixed race individuals would typically fall between those clusters. You'd also find a kind of substructure inside them: the Indian cluster would contain subclusters, corresponding to different castes and geographies. It, however, would still be in a distinctly Indian cluster. Hispanics would be the messiest group: black Hispanics would fall nearest the USA black cluster, white Hispanics nearest USA whites, and pure Amerindians would be their own thing, closest to Asians but more distant cousins.

Historically, there were gentler genetic gradients between different populations, along lines of historical migration. If you lined up every human in history, you'd see no sharp breaks at all: everyone is predictably a mix of their parents, with a couple mutations. Many of those lineages have died out, though, as they're outcompeted by other lineages; this creates a sharper gradient between adjacent successful lineages.

The 19th century scientific racists worked this out, and it has been confirmed by modern DNA testing. There are three major surviving racial groups, separated by the Sahara, the Great Steppe and the Himalayas:

  • Caucasians, including North Africans, Turks etc. who are white, but also Indians, who are closer to whites than either is to East Asians
  • East Asians
  • Black Africans.

There are then the various groups that didn't develop agriculture and got mostly-genocided when they came into contact with people who did. The pygmies and Khoisan in Africa are genetically distinct races and would be on the list alongside the big three if there were enough of them left. Native Americans (whose ancestors crossed the Bering Strait relatively recently) and Polynesians are subgroups of East Asians. Australian Aborigines have been genetically isolated for long enough that they are de facto a separate race too.

From the point of view of HBD-driven policy, this is complicated by the fact that endogamous sub-populations can be subject to relatively rapid selection for IQ or other pro-social traits (definitely over a timescale of centuries, possibly faster), leading to a hierarchy of desirability that doesn't track the big-picture genetics.

From the point of view of normie ethno-nationalism, none of this is relevant because "white" as an identity group that one can be a nationalist of is a political category and not a genetic one. The ethnogenesis of "whites" happened in America (and South Africa with the need to unite Anglos and Afrikaaners) and largely didn't in other places, and the boundaries of who can assimilate to American political whiteness are roughly "culturally Christian with no visible sub-Saharan African ancestry". The nearest equivalent to political whiteness in the UK is "non-Muslim", with Jews and Hindu Indians being politically whiter-than-white. Vivek winning the Ohio gubernatorial primary suggests something similar could happen in the US, with anyone who is neither Black nor Muslim ending up tarred with political whiteness by the far left and welcome in the politically white coalition on the right.

What does politically white mean above? A first class citizen the law protects, but does not bind? Google is doing me no favors. I feel US blacks are politically white in some cases, depending how your define it.

Same for arabs (especially since I'd expect the OP using it as a shorthand for 'Middle Eastern' more so than 'explicitly arabic descent')

I don't think anyone even moderately interested in HBD would use "Arabs" as a shorthand which included Persians and Copts.

One thought experiment I’ve had is I think it would be very interesting if upper caste Indians found an island or maybe somewhere in S America and did like the Jews in creating Israel. HBD studies seem to show a large part of Indian population is very low IQ. I think it’s tough to manage a country like that. What could they create if like 20 million of the better caste Indians moved to Uruguay which has enough land and low population. What would they create in 50 years?

Kinda played out a bunch of times. Trinidad's largest group is Indian descent afaik plus they're economically dominant. I don't think any has been able to necessarily filter for 'top 10% intellectually' but there's a bunch of countries with strong Indian diaspora presences.

There still isn’t a Singapore or Taiwan of Indian descent. Despite Indians probably outplaying Han Chinese in SV. They have succeeded at getting high ranking UK and US politicians plus a fairly large SV mafia. SV mafia may be bigger than English group (Musks, Thiel). That either implies a very small elite or a structural issue.

Not sure if it’s Trinidad but one of the big Indian areas in S America I believe was more lower class.

Indians are better at plugging into working organisms as middle managers and managing to fight in the arts of buraucracy and self-advancement. They're less suited to actually building things or being productive at scale.

One thought experiment I’ve had is I think it would be very interesting if upper caste Indians found an island or maybe somewhere

The British Empire already ran this experiment to a lesser extent, recruiting Indians to work in other British colonies. It gave rise to groups like the Ugandan Asians. Indians are economically dominant minorities in all the African (Caribbean included) countries they inhabit.

Indians are MDMs in Africa just like Lebanese and Palestinians are MDMs in Central America (and parts of West Africa, too). But that doesn’t say much about overall performance, just about potential differences with majority populations in those lands. ‘In the land of the blind’…, as that line goes.

What's MDM stand for here? Middleman? Merchant dominant minority?

Market-Dominant Minority iirc. Basically locally economically successful despite being politically and literally a niche group.

This would probably be better as a Sunday Question thread post. Not a lot of meat on it for a top level culture war post. Its kind of barely acceptable, so you aren't in trouble for it, but I don't want to leave people with the impression that this a-ok.

For those new to the community or unaware of the effort post requirements, I generally suggest three elements for a sufficient top level post:

  1. Topic / story / incident etc. Something happened: describe it, or let a news article describe it. A topic interests you, explain the topic a little. This can use other sources, it does not have to be your own words.
  2. Context. This is where you describe your perception of the thing. This does need your words. Is the news article missing stuff? Is the topic something you see on X a lot? Are you horrified by this thing, are you curious and seeking some answers?
  3. Start the discussion. You don't need to have a fully fleshed out effort post. Just something that marks your opinion. Something people might push back on or respond to. If you truly have no opinion that is fine as well, say why you don't have the opinion.

Indians aren't really an ethnic group. The caste system means that, in spite of living together for thousands of years, the different ethnicities in India are vastly different, genetically and phenotypically. The high-performing Indians you know are mostly from the upper castes.

Arab countries have pretty low IQs, although they could probably do better if they stopped marrying their cousins. Incest causes mental retardation. Christian Arabs are higher-IQ due to hundreds of years of selective pressure (the jizya meant that low-IQ Christians converted to Islam).

'Hispanic' isn't a particularly useful term. It can range from people who are 100% Spanish genetically, to Amerindians with no European ancestry whatsoever, to full-blooded Africans. Probably you're thinking of Mexican mestizos, who have lower IQs than Europeans, but not that much lower.

Of course, the people you're interacting with are massively confounded by selective migration. (Legal) migration to the US is very hard, so it selects for high-IQ people.

For those with knowledge/believers of HBD, what does it have to say about Indians (East Asia), Arabs, & Hispanics (IQ wise)? I've been living in my city and I've noticed Indians tend to live in the nicer neighborhoods. Perhaps just selection effects from immigration?

There are high-performing (IQ-wise and economically) subgroups of all these populations e.g. Tamil Brahmins for Indians, Maronite Christians for Arabs, and the white elites of any Latin American country for Hispanics, so you'll have to be more specific. Typically, immigrants who do not have access to a land border to hop or refugee status to apply for are disproportionately from these sorts of high-performing groups and subject to additional selection effects as well. People disagree on the magnitude of each of these effects, but that they exist there should be no doubt.

Hispanics have similar problems as black people, what does HBD say about them?

If by similar problems you mean crime, then at least as far as Mexico is concerned it seems to me that interpersonal violence correlates with Spanish conquistador ancestry. Areas that remain majority indigenous, such as the Yucatan peninsula, have low homicide rates, and travelers tend to remark that the locals are quite docile compared to their mestizo neighbors. There is a confounding factor, in that the whiter states in the north are close to the American border, a major catalyst for crime, but seeing as the Spainards who came to the New World were from areas like Extremadura that were at the front lines of the Reconquista for centuries (cf. the Scotch-Irish, who came from the bloody no-man's land between England and Scotland) it makes sense to me.

HBD is not really my area of expertise - it's questionable if it's anyone's, given the extreme political distortion of the field for at least the past two centuries - but:

I'm very sceptical of claims of recent large evolutionary changes. There's one that has definitively met the high bar, which is the terrible disease resistance of Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals due to not having plagues until colonisation (of course, this wasn't a change in them; rather, Old Worlders were massively selected for better disease resistance than the prehistoric norm).

I'm more open to claims of difference based on long timescales - the divergence of Homo sapiens sapiens within Africa (note that everyone besides sub-Saharan-Africans basically descends from one lineage of Africans that crossed into Arabia), and the hybridisation with other human subspecies (all non-Africans have about 3% Neanderthal admixture; the Austronesians of Maritime South-East Asia and Oceania have very large Denisovan admixture, sometimes over 10%; there may be some admixture from another subspecies in sub-Saharan Africans).

So from where I sit, this basically leaves only two groups with major question marks over them due to long separation and/or different subspecies makeup from most of humanity - the sub-Saharan Africans (including differences among them), and the Austronesians including Aboriginal Australians. These areas have been notoriously-far behind for most of history, so my best guess is that both of these question marks are probably negative in terms of cognition. My wild guess, if I have to give a number, would be 3-5 IQ points on average; not enough to swamp individual variation, but noticeable on population scales. As noted, though, probably some variation within Africa, and of course there are massive effects from nutrition.

Indians aren't far from being white with dark skin; the gene flow through Persia was always pretty significant. East Asians are more different, but are still basically Eurasian (there's detectable Denisovan admixture, but it's orders of magnitude smaller in China/Korea/Japan). Arabs are white except to the degree they've had recent sub-Saharan African admixture, which is usually minimal AIUI. "Hispanics" are heterogeneous; usually they're some mixture of white, Native American and sub-Saharan African, although the proportions vary drastically and many are outright missing one or two of those components. Native Americans can be treated as North Asians with shitty immune systems and don't have the question mark. Those with substantial sub-Saharan African ancestry have some portion of it (proportionally; do note, of course, that one-drop classification is a pile of shit, as generally everybody has a tiny bit of everything - the human race has never been fully sundered, and the most recent common ancestor may have lived within the span of history).

Obligatory disclaimer: I don't think slight statistical differences in cognition merit massacre or explicit discrimination in everyday life. They're still human beings, and the bell curves have massive overlap! About the only policy choice where I think my opinions are significantly influenced by this is the native birth rate vs. immigration question in First-World countries, but I should note that there are other, non-racist, reasons to prefer native-borns (native-borns get put through a better education system, and there are also cultural-continuity issues with massive importation from Third-World countries that are not secular, liberal, stable democracies, particularly with salad-bowlers around sabotaging assimilation - and in the case of the PRC, there's an outright security risk from those who've been through its education system and/or have family in Mainland China as potential hostages).

(note that everyone besides sub-Saharan-Africans basically descends from one lineage of Africans that crossed into Arabia)

From what I understand there were two separate migrations out of sub-Saharan Africa, the earlier of which resulted in East Asian and Austronesian people and the latter of which resulted in European people. I don't have the time right now to do the sketchy google searches to back up my claims but if you google "multiple human migrations out of Africa" you'll see that there's evidence for this (or at least for more than one out of Africa migration.)

Re-reading your claim I suppose it's possible that the two migrations derived from the Arabian population you refer to rather than Africa, I don't know

There's definitely been more than one human migration out of Africa, the first one ("Out of Africa I") being the source population for the Neanderthals and Denisovans (that's why sub-Saharan Africans don't have significant Neanderthal blood and why non-Austronesians don't have significant Denisovan blood: the Neanderthal hybridisation events occurred in Europe and Asia, and the Denisovan hybridisation appears to have occurred on the islands of the West Pacific). I was referring to the non-Africans' Homo sapiens sapiens forebears ("Out of Africa II"), which do seem to be singular (to be clear, there are no full-blooded Neanderthals or Denisovans anymore; all non-Africans are hybrids between those two migration waves).

There's one that has definitively met the high bar, which is the terrible disease resistance of Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals due to not having plagues until colonisation

Alcoholism resistance is another obvious one. The rates are just ridiculously higher than for any society that didn't move directly from being hunter gatherers to modern life.

Do modern descendants of Mesoamericans have better alcoholism resistance than modern descendants of North American natives? The Mesoamericans, after all, were not hunter-gatherers, they had advanced civilizations that were perhaps roughly at the scientific/technological level of the Mediterranean civilizations of about 1000 BC.

I don't have any numbers but there's probably a reason you don't hear anything about similar utter devastation that's common in North American natives and Australian Aboriginals communities.

AFAIK more or less every human farming civilization has developed alcohol so most of the people in those who were at very high risk of alcohol dependency simply died off centuries or millenia ago and the rest developed physical and cultural resistance mechanisms.

Some Native American hunter-gatherers used alcohol too, but it's probably easier for farmers to make in large quantities I suppose.

There might also be a factor, though, of greater social disruption leading to the greater alcohol abuse by North American natives as opposed to Mesoamerican natives. That's if there actually is higher abuse, of course. The Mesoamericans went through very profound social disruption, but most of them went from being farmers working for native elites to being farmers working for Spanish elites. Many of the North American natives, on the other hand, were forced entirely off their lands, killed, or "just" had their original ways of life almost entirely ended.

The Maya certainly have less of a reputation for alcoholism than the Cherokee.

And lactose tolerance. Not to mention the dead obvious one -- skin color.

I would argue that neither qualify as a large evolutionary change.

If humans did not have the ability to digest milk and recently acquired it, that would be amazing. What happened instead is that all viable humans in the ancestral environment had the genes for the ability to digest milk, but it was advantageous not to waste any energy on producing the enzymes after you were weaned. I suppose that in lactose tolerant humans, the configuration to turn off lactase was broken. (WP confirms that is it simply two single-nucleotide polymorphism -- exactly the opposite of a large evolutionary change!)

Skin color is the same. Almost all humans in the ancestral environment were able to produce melanin. Obviously the trade-offs between getting less skin cancer and producing less vitamin D depend on the amount of sunlight you are exposed to.

More interesting recent changes (though arguably also not a large one) might be the Ashkenazi intelligence gains, or perhaps the acclimation of some peoples to great heights. Still not on a 'new proteins' level, but a bit broader than just the two SNP changes of lactose tolerance or a few dialing down the melanin.

Ashkenazi gains

Not sure if the rate of gut related genetic inheritable syndromes and prevalence of neuroticism is worth it tbh.

I hadn't known about that. Now I do, and it explains a lot. Guess it's not parenting or alcohol or coffee, no, my issues are down to genetic predisposition! Who'd have guessed.

You might not think it is but it do, seriously take a look at random genetic disorders and corelate if they have anything to do with the gastrointestinal tract and population. It's crazy. You have Crohn's, Gaucher,Tay-Sachs,Cystic fibrosis, BRCA1/BRCA2 mutations (autosomal dominant, cancer predisposition): Carrier rate ~ 1 in 40 (vs. 1 in 400 in general pop).

If 1-2SD changes in intelligence don't require a "large" evolutionary change, then HBD can be true without requiring "large" evolutionary changes, and @magic9mushroom's skepticism of those is irrelevant.

I'd agree with lactose tolerance and should probably have included it; skin colour isn't all that recent AIUI (I believe Native Americans are a lot more uniform with latitude than Old Worlders, for instance; I'm also not 100% sure whether Neanderthal admixture might have played a part in introducing the light-skin alleles, though certainly there's been selection before and since). @SkoomaDentist I'm not fully convinced on alcoholism resistance; there's a fair bit of evidence, enough to make me seriously consider the possibility (though I'd be mostly suspecting livers rather than brains, at least for this), but I haven't yet seen a smoking gun (have there been wide-ranging studies on Aboriginal liver function? I think you could trust universities to report that accurately).

I'm not a HBD absolutist (Culture matters.), but I'll bite. I spent a few years at a stem-oriented boarding school for allegedly smart kids, so I wound up spending a fair amount of time with the kids of educated immigrants. Note, outside of that my experience is limited by having spent all my time in a not especially diverse part of the South. Also note, the smartest and dumbest kids I met there were of domestic extraction. The usual white problem was having mistaken being weird/nerdy for being smart (Those kids usually couldn't put down the video games long enough to study and weren't smart enough to get away with that, so they failed out quickly.) and the usual black problem was that "smart by the standards of the school back home" didn't mean that smart (though there were a few who were that smart).

Indians are among the most heavily filtered demographics in America (See also: Africans), so yeah, by and large they're at least midwits. In my experience the Indian kids weren't shockingly brilliant, but they were at least above average and the studious ones are doing well in life. An unfortunate set I met were a professor's sons. I have no idea what happened to one of them (He was something of a druggie burnout in college.) and the other is one whose level of education badly exceeds his intelligence combined with a nasty case of arrogance (and obesity) to boot, basically an Indian neckbeard and one of the universally reviled people I've known. It's hard to describe, but we're talking about a guy who had an MS in economics but couldn't really hack delivering pizza because he sucked at reading a map and using it find things.

The Asians tended to be FOBs or close to it with lousy English skills (same at the SEC school I attended) and/or terminal cases of introversion, but excellent at math (and WoW at the boarding school). The more Americanized ones have fared very well. I can't comment further because they tended to stick to their own clique.

The most oddly overrepresented demographic at the school were Russians/Ukrainians whose parents came here after the fall of the USSR/the bad 90s, about half Jewish and half gentile (Hilariously, it never occurred to me as a teenager that my friend who is the weediest, most obviously Jewish Russian Jew to ever walk the Earth is Jewish. White Southerners don't have Jewdar by default. Sadly, he suffers from neuroticism to a life-crippling degree and I see plenty of posts on Facebook about his struggles with CPTSD due to a less than ideal childhood.). The Russian from St. Petersburg is one of the most intelligent and driven people I've met, also among the most intransigent and outspoken, for better or worse. His inability to hide his sympathies for the Z invasion in '22 led to an epic crashout and loss of (mixed Russian and Ukrainian) friend group. He's now relocated to China with a wife, kid, and a job as a university professor. The Ukrainian was kind of an asshole (We ran in different cliques.) but definitely smart and is doing well here as an engineer. Memorably, he came up to me after someone else got the history ribbon during senior awards for DEI reasons and told me that it was bullshit that I didn't get it, high praise from an enemy (The history teachers wound up concocting a different award to give me that amounted to "teacher's pet".).

Exiting the classroom, I can't say much about Arabs because the only ones I've interacted with run gas stations, vape shops, or restaurants. They're not common where I've lived.

Hispanics are a broad category. The white Spanish ones are, well, white people, and the castizos aren't far off. One of my dear friends falls into that category and when she gets too deep into ranting about her experiences as a brown woman I like to fuck with her by pointing out that she's whiter than I am (If I have anything like a decent tan going on.). The mestizo Mexicans (and, they're all Mexican, or at least were; todays illegals are from further south), once assimilated (The kids of the W. era illegals have grown up now.) strike me as not much different from working-class white people (Note: I said working class and not white trash. The Mexicans strike me as less trashy, for now at least.). Hispanics don't really have the same problems that black Americans do. Hell, they live longer than white Americans in spite of being fatter and more diabetic.

For fun, I'll pick on my own kind, as someone who also had a chain smoking Mamaw named Bonnie who got married at 13. JD Vance might've done better to pick up a copy of Understanding the Borderline Mother (It would not surprise me if Scots-Irish women were found to suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder at rates above the white American baseline.) than to try to find a political explanation for his family's dysfunction (and to be clear, one of the themes of the book wasn't frustration over being poor, because his family wasn't, but over being dragged down from an otherwise middle class life by bad behavior). Hillbilly Elegy was a mediocre political polemic (and is badly dated; it was written pre-Trump when Vance was still angling for the Romney-Ryan wing of Republican politics) but his story was a sufficiently compelling trip down memory lane that I really don't want to read it again and refuse to watch the movie.

To twist the knife a bit more, his telling of the story comes across as claiming the sort of unconditional victimhood that can only be the luxury of the younger sibling. That, and while I deeply sympathize with his reactionary streak there’s an air of self-righteousness that’s a touch off putting in someone I’d otherwise want to like. I describe my mother as something of a cartoon villain but it’s hard to square “honor culture”/”honor” as I grew up to understand it with “writing a book outing Mom as a dysfunctional fuckup/bad person for all the world to read”. It never occurred to me to play the “write about my crappy childhood in a college admissions essay” card, but my little sister sure did.

I feel like there's a certain element where people in Western 'salary-driven' economies don't really understand that people in more developing economies tend to have far larger reliance on entrepreneurship to get rich enough to be in the West and especially to be affluent in the West. Whilst it's likely valuable to have intelligence to succeed as an entrepreneur, the great sort of Western civilization means that if you're living in an UMC bastion the locals likely have parents who are your doctors, engineers etcetera (which correlate more strictly with raw intellectual horsepower) whilst foreigners are more likely to have made their money through business ownership.

This IMO makes trying to proxy raw intellect via income weaker than you'd expect. An entrepreneur is testing for luck, social skills, connections et al in ways that white collar professionals aren't experiencing the same way. This also factors strongly into some groups being able to swing way above their intellectual horsepower due to having cultural setups that are better at enabling them to run businesses and find their way into more-softskill driven sinecuresque parts of the established economy through their mastery of networking and the art of the job application. This can be a double-edged sword in that said groups can be good at entrepreneurial (yay, more small business) and sinecure obtainment (boo, those jobs really should either not exist or be earmarked for sons of the soil and you'd have to be monumentally stupid to give these to foreigners) whilst the difference doesn't show on a spreadsheet to politicos who simply say 'X minority has a higher gdp per capita'.

Talking about Jewish people? Didn't know they were overrepresented in entrepreneur areas.

Jews do pretty well entrepreneurially but they weren't the group I'd indicate.

Which group then? A hint?

More investment talk as the thread dies: I posted earlier about some short term funny money gambling I did on the US administration stepping on their own balls before falling into a ditch re. the Middle east because every Republican gets at least 1, I present to you another such case:

I keep a fairly large amount of money in foreign currency not as an investment but just to have available to use out country should I need it. My euros (tourist fun bucks) have been doing well as Trump weakens the US economy in relation to the world but not that well, more of a medium well. My other currency I keep a decent chunk of from the old country has been blowing the fuck up. I have made almost 100% gains on this bitch just for having it, I am up more than $70000 just on the currency, I don't even know how much the property has gone up.

Nowm the culture war angle, which I didn't understand when I was a brokie (Read: had a job the contributed to society positively in any way): I can see why people with huge amounts of liquid capital would want someone like trump, even if he was obviously going to shit up the economy he is in charge of.

If you are wrong and he doesn't shit it up, geat! You make money normal style! If he shits it up just a little, great! The proles get hungry and lose their bargaining power! If he fucks it up a TON, great! You can take advantage of the motion to get opportunities you would never receive in a well functioning system!

And on top of all that, he promises you spoils; you can just ignore anti trust if you bow a scrape, you can count on a reduced tax burden and a less well off population that is easier to exploit, you can count on him not actually fucking with the immigration that you REALLY need to keep the wheels turning.

All this is predicated on the Democrats being Republican lite Regans with little rainbow flag tie pins; that they aren't going to storm back into office like TR and bust the shit out of you, but that seems like a safe bet. The party machine is so outrageously cucked they can't even be properly anti-war or anti-elite, even though both those positions are wildly popular in both bases.

My investment strategy so far has been "Shit's Fucked". It's been doing very well, although I have been outperformed by strategies I have termed "AI bull forever" (Nvidia, RAM companies) and "Shit Better Not Be Fucked" (FAANG, Palantir, weapons manufacturers) so far.

I see it reversing very hard in near future, but I'm not in options so I don't have time gating on my thesis. I'm long oil, oil services, offshore oil, energy, gold, uranium, gold mining companies, shipping and tanker companies. Considering getting into fertilizer stocks and old people care stocks. As far as degenerate portfolios go, I like "Poor Fat and Stupid", which is fast food companies, pharma companies, plus Klarna. I hear some guy has also been running an Evil portfolio - investing on the most evil companies he could find on the NYSE, I think he was doing pretty well.

That was me! I'm the evil guy!

I did that as soon as I saw trump was probably gonna win, and It did pretty good until I got out of it.

Other people must have had that idea though, it was too obvious to make real money.

Most wealthy GOP donors didn’t want Trump. I think it had something to do with vulgarity but more to do with the fact that Trump was in an important business for a long time in a major market (commercial and to some extent residential real estate, casinos, hotels, TV, in and around NYC for 50+ years) and so encountered many rich people in many walks of life before becoming president. Many very rich people I know in NYC, which has by far the largest number of them in the country, had either met him or knew someone who had or had heard some kind of first/secondhand stories of him, and nobody liked doing business with him and he screwed over a lot of people.

Do markets love Trump? Traders love Trump because of volatility. Volatility is good for business because uncertainty widens spreads in every asset class. That is why trading floors on the sell side especially shrank so much after 2009 and have done so well since Covid, and especially over the last year and a half. As for other participants I don’t think Trump is responsible for the asset price boom of the last few years concentrated around tech and AI, which has been driven by a combination of earnings and hype but which also follows the general post-COVID boom that largely happened under Biden.

My guess is that if you look at actual Trump voting among rich people (in finance or generally), the demographics largely follow the overall pro-Trump vote in all classes.

I want to talk about Ressentiment, specifically the intro to a book I read of the same name by Max Schaler. I'm surprised the motte/rationalist circles haven't discussed it more, because it seems extremely relevant to the culture war. Here's the definition given in the book:

Ressentiment is an incurable, persistent feeling of hating and despising which occurs in certain individuals and groups. It takes its root in equally incurable impotencies or weaknesses that those subjects constantly suffer from. These impotencies generate either individual or collective, but always negative emotive attitudes. They can permeate a whole culture, era, and an entire moral system. The feeling of ressentiment leads to false moral judgments made on other people who are devoid of this feeling. Such judgments are not infrequently accompanied by rash, at times fanatical claims of truth generated by the impotency this feeling comes from.

The reason I bring it up is that I see this emotional pattern as the driving force behind modern politics. More on the populist right surely, but the left also has a weird sort of ressentiment in which they kind of hate their own culture, see whiteness / western civ as a stain that they can never get rid of.

Importantly though I think the right falls into the definition of being 'impotent' FAR more than the left, which as this quote explains is crucial to the whole process of ressentiment:

Ressentiment persists and perseveres, it was stated, because of an abiding impotency which blocks any possible realization of particular positive values. This, in turn, lets the venom of ressentiment permeate the person's whole inner life and experience, so that the order of values and the order of loving positive values is in a state of disarray. Reasoning about values can not stop the emotive disorder to occur and continue. It might at best recognize the disorder when, for instance, a ressentiment-subject says, "There is something wrong with me." But this is very rare among those subjects, and it neither nullifies the experience of the disorder felt among positive and negative values, nor does it help to rationally recognize the higher values to be attained, i.e., to let the grapes simply what they are, namely, sweet. A insight in emotional experiences is at a rational inventory of oneself. Rational logic is no cure in a flawed experience of values.

Ultimately I know a ton has been written about this topic, but curious what folks here think of the idea?

I think this has less explanatory power than a combined evolutionary and psychological model of politics. Both the Left and Right have always needed propaganda to recruit believers. Evolutionarily, humans hate the idea of someone having more than them if it seems excessive or unjustly begotten, and even primates form coalitions to overthrow the social order to more equitably distribute goods. Regarding this latter point, Abrahamic theism used to divert this instinct by extolling poverty, shaming the rich, and promising delayed treasure for the poor and delayed recompense against the rich (plus a plethora of other social technologies which prevented unrest — that God has established the social order and fighting it was a sin, that there were more awe-inspiring things to focus on, that you didn’t fight in wars if you were a peasant and had many paid feasts, etc). To me, this seems to perfectly explain the current political landscape and the trajectory of history. The Left hates the rich because it’s in their blood to hate them, not because they are Left or inferior mutants because they are humans and have an ingrained instinct to feel equality. The Right aims to sublimate this instinct through religion or through the Neoconic employing of economics as a quasi-religion. The populist right wants fascism to satisfy the former while turning the state quasi-religious. The Soviets went pure equality and totally ignored religion. So we can make a lot of sense with this model.

"In their blood to hate" sounds like a thought-terminating cliche. It seems to me just as correct to say the Left has an ingrained instinct to feel equality (=sameness). I think your model of the Right is right though.

What I mean is only that “I hate someone who has a more than me” seems to be a built-in instinct, which is exacerbated when there’s a question about the tactics used to acquire wealth, and which was historically answered by religious dogma in the West (preventing unrest) and is today answered by a mixture of religious and economic dogma (the latter being: if we take anything from him, everything will collapse). I don’t have the evidence I would like for this claim, but it does explain why the West became focused on wealth redistribution immediately after it became less religious, and why we see egalitarianism in a lot of primitive societies, and why the very wealthy and powerful in antiquity often justified their gains through divine descent. All humans would have this instinct but not all humans would answer it in the same fashion. But I find this more satisfying than “these people are inferior and lash out at their superiors”; this doesn’t explain why the pedigreed NYC liberal actually wants redistribution despite it hurting their own pocket.

“I hate someone who has a more than me” seems to be a built-in instinct

And reasonably so, right? Sustained (as opposed to intermittent, via new inventions) economic growth probably first dates only as far back as the invention of agriculture. Other stores of wealth existed, but quickly capped out at the amount a nomadic hunter-gatherer could personally carry from place to place. For the past ten thousand years or so, if someone wanted a ton of fruit, they've had the option to earn it by planting and maintaining an orchard, or by buying an orchard with wealth accumulated from any number of other productive activities. But for the prior million years or two, if you saw someone with a ton of fruit, it was because that jackass just picked more than his fair share of the wild fruit your tribe had discovered. Screw that guy!

Huh, interesting thought. My intuition is that the evolutionary basis for jealousy is that it's a lot easier to steal someone else's stuff than to make your own, and the richer they are, the better the risk-reward ratio. But yeah, if most wealth disparity in the ancestral environment came down to monopolization of scarce resources, that would do it too.

But I don't think that's the case. It's certainly true that wealth disparities were far more compressed for hunter-gatherers, but there still was such a thing as capital. Fruit isn't capital, but, for example, a quantity of well-made spears or baskets or arrowheads would be. And creating those things takes effort and skill and in no way diminishes your access to them. Would you be more jealous of the guy with a lot of fruit or the guy with the nicest tent and finest weapons and best tools? The latter, I would think. Nomads can't have a lot of stuff, but the stuff they do have is all the more important for that reason.

Is ressentiment a good model here? As I understand it, the basic idea of ressentiment is, essentially, moral cope. Being unable to live up to your society's virtues, you redefine virtue to reflect the traits you already have (or are at least reasonably capable of attaining). I'm not going to say it describes nobody, but I don't think it describes the prevailing splits in American politics. Those are, I think, mostly about substantive and long-running values disagreements, and those disagreements are not explained by ressentiment.

Right-wing populists aren't abandoning left-wing values they cannot attain; they are rejecting standards they never supported. There's definitely a powerful element of resentment - a feeling that they are denied the status and respect to which they are properly entitled - but that is not the same thing. Not dissimilarly, I think the upswing in left-wing populism is directly traceable to anger over perceived moral hypocrisy and systemic economic failures rather than some tension between their understanding of conventional virtues and what they themselves can achieve.

Relevant Prior post, which in turn links back to my first AAQC

My problem with ressentiment is that I so rarely run into someone talking about it as something they are suffering, rather than a double-reverse-uno in which they are obsessed with how someone else is suffering from ressentiment, and as such their politics should be dismissed as the politics of envy.

Historically this is the province of the left, but it is better understood as the virus of identity politics in general.

Yes, when I first learned about Slave Morality 10 years ago, I immediately thought "wait this is just social justice." However, the modern culture war isn't primarily focused on impotent weakness. It is more correct to say social justice is just Feminine Norms. This explains sympathy for the weak while also explaining why certain Ressentiments are not left-coded (e.g. Incels).

I'm not sure what "Ressentiment" adds to the discussion, or why it looks like a fake French version of resentment, which is similar and widely understood. If someone is resentful about their impotency, like some of the characters in JD Vance's book, how is it helpful to add "ressentiment" on top of that?

It lets you know that his came from the Ressentiment region of France, while you get by with mere sparkling resentment.

I first came across the idea of ressentiment in this 2009 blog post, which in hindsight feels quite prescient - the right-wing inferiority complex, Palin as proto-Trump, and so on. As it says, you can't provide a political solution to a psychological problem, though I would probably reframe that as you can't force a political solution to a cultural or social problem, much the same way that Donald Trump could ascend to the most powerful office in the world but he could not make New York elites stop feeling contempt for him.

The word doesn't appear in the Sanchez piece, or in your top level post, but I think one of the key issues here is envy. Ressentiment is hatred combined with envy - it is the despising of people for being in the place that you feel you ought to be, it is simultaneously craving their validation and seeking to destroy them. If you ask any right-winger, "Do you want New York Times readers to like you?", they'll answer "No, of course not!", and on the surface level that's probably correct, but in the big picture I think they want the sort of validation or felt authority or elite status that one associates with the New York Times.

If you've read Screwtape Proposes a Toast, I think there's something here of the "I'm as good as you" attitude. I sometimes run into works by culturally conservative writers that express, as Lewis puts it, "the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept".

This does not have anything to do with actual inferiority - just the perception thereof. It is entirely possible for people to feel this kind of hateful envy toward their own intellectual inferiors, if those inferiors have the professorships and go on the television and in general enjoy an entitlement to respect that the resentful person does not.

I've singled out the right here, but let's be fair - what about the left? Almost no pathology, in politics, is restricted to a single tribe.

I have perhaps less to say here, because there is already a great deal of writing about the left and envy that is obvious enough. The socialist left feel ressentiment and envy toward the mainstream left. Many on the socialist or extreme left manage the impressive feat of feeling simultaneously that they are the true rebels and radicals speaking truth to power and that they are entitled to good jobs and comfortable offices and big incomes. But even within the hallowed halls of media and academia, I think there is a kind of ressentiment that goes something like, "I'm smarter than them, I'm morally better than them, I'm more compassionate than them, I have better taste than them, so why do they have all the money?" It's hardly the most original observation in the world to say that plenty of lefty commentators have this kind of envy-hatred of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Just as the conservative ressentiment is feeling that cultural elites occupy a status or command a respect that they do not deserve, the progressive ressentiment is the same feeling about economic elites.

In both cases I notice, within the tribe, a kind of endless group therapy that consists of people reassuring each other, "Yes, you are better than them". Be it Fox News or Bluesky, affirmation or validation has become one of the core activities of politics.

Thus, from both the left and the right perspective, what you get is a kind of performative attempt to offend the other side, to prove how little you care about what they think. From the right, this is Palin and Trump and triggering the libs; from the left I think it's more to do with luxury beliefs. Drag queens doing blasphemous tableaux before the Olympics, to pick a recent example. From either direction, you publicly show how little you care for the sensibilities or the sacred values of the other side, even if, underneath, it's not hard to see the desire for validation.

According to Nietzsche's interpretation, ressentiment was derived from a "slave revolt" against Master Morality- flipping the concept of good/bad and making the weak "good" and the strong "evil." That's a cultural phenomenon that spans both ends of the political spectrum but is clearly more of a left-wing cultural phenomenon- the mentally disturbed transgender obese Reddit mod becomes the "good" against the White Frat Chad driving the cool car and getting all the chicks, who is "evil." The socially incompetent, weak, ugly nerd is the good and the charismatic, popular, attractive, strong Jock is the bad guy. That is the sort of moral inversion that strikes at the heart of ressentiment.

Ressentiment frames weakness, ugliness, slave morality as a moral superiority over noble values, strength, and beauty.

Ultimately ressentiment is not about being powerless it's about asserting that state of powerlessness as constituting moral superiority over those who have an exercise power. "I am morally superior because I am weak and oppressed" is the cornerstone of ressentiment and it's a phenomenon that spans both ends of the political spectrum but is clearly derived from left-wing cultural criticisms of traditional morality in the 20th century.

Does Max Schaler claim to personally suffer from "Ressentiment"? Speaking generally, does anyone using the term "Ressentiment" use it to describe their own thoughts and feelings, or is this a label generally understood to be used on the thoughts and feelings of others?

Are new words exclusively intended to describe why other people are bad useful? I would argue that they usually are not.

Ressentiment persists and perseveres, it was stated, because of an abiding impotency which blocks any possible realization of particular positive values.

impotency = lack of power, correct? So he's saying people want to realize their positive values, but can't, and so their chronic frustration curdles into "Ressentiment"?

You say the right is far more impotent than the left, but this seems straightforwardly wrong to me, because the question isn't how much power a person or group has, it's how much power they have relative to their valued end-state. If your values demand shrimp welfare or the abolition of poverty or a classless utopia giving rise to incorruptible humans who will not know greed or envy or malice, you are going to be living with "an abiding impotency which blocks any possible realization of particular positive values", no? And in fact, can we not see abundant examples of how such frustrated values lead to "rash, at times fanatical claims of truth generated by the impotency this feeling comes from."

But what does the special word and its attendant pseudo-medicalization add to the discussion?

Personally I resonate with the concept and feel it quite often. So does the friend who recommended the book to me.

I think it helps illuminate a specific pattern of emotion.

Is it what the main character in Notes from Underground is suffering from?

impotency = lack of power, correct? So he's saying people want to realize their positive values, but can't, and so their chronic frustration curdles into "Ressentiment"?

That was my read on this excerpt from Schaler too, but it just seems to be describing resentment. If you want to realize your positive values, but can't, that can lead to resentment but ressentiment is something different. Ressentiment is- you can't realize your positive values so you just define your positive values as being the opposite of the Masters.

You can't join that exclusive WASPy frat, play sports, get the chicks, so you frame all of those things as bad and being a weak, loner, nerd as being the good.

ressentiment is something different. Ressentiment is- you can't realize your positive values so you just define your positive values as being the opposite of the Masters.

Sounds like a difference with very little distinction. Is it any different to Nietzche's slave morality?

Resentment is bitterness towards someone or something, ressentiment is formulating your values to be the antithesis of your target of resentment.

No, because Nietzsche popularized it to describe the psychology of slave morality.

More on the populist right surely

The populist right? Which populist right?

Maybe if you mean the groypers and GOPe. I don't expect the Motte to like my answer here, but I only find these feelings of ressentiment among the Panicans. Trump himself is maybe the most agentic man in the world, even when he's complaining about unfair treatment on twitter. I don't see impotence fantasies from the people behind Iran and Venezuela, or Trump's Ballroom and Victory Arch, or the MAGA loyal faithful who think we could pull out a victory in the midterms. I see a lot of impotence fantasies from the anti-Israel crowd and the neo-Tucker / Kent / MTG / Candace Owens people who say MAGA was betrayed and everything was lost. I see a lot of impotence fantasies from Hill Staffers and Congressmen who all of them, to a man, no matter what they say in public, believe that the midterms are 100% a guaranteed Republican loss so anything Trump tries to do about it is actually cope and therefore illegitimate. (They not only believe that we deserve to lose the redistricting wars for this reason, but that Trump squandered his 2024 mandate because of stuff like ICE protests in Minneapolis, oh well, we tried nothing and ran out of ideas, we deserve to lose, maybe we can try again next time in 3028.)

I suspect I will be accused of gross partisanship or bias but when I scan the landscape it's the faction that believes we can Make America Great Again that is the most ruthlessly optimistic about the future of America. Who is more excited about the state of the future today? The tech people? The peptide biohackers? I don't see a wellspring of optimism about the future coming from many other places.

More than that though:

It takes its root in equally incurable impotencies or weaknesses that those subjects constantly suffer from. These impotencies generate either individual or collective, but always negative emotive attitudes.

Does this not actually describe, to a T, the modern leftist emotional bent? It's the left subsumed in infinite impotence fantasies about how invisible ineradicable all-powerful forces permeate society at every level. They believe, for example, that White Supremacy is woven into the fabric of American life, it explains everything bad that happens to a minority anywhere, you can't log off and ignore it, you can't hard work your way out of it, you can't argue with it. A black man who fails failed because of White Supremacy. A black man who succeeds succeeded despite White Supremacy. We have to have massive, world-spanning DEI infrastructure to even begin to address the imbalance, it's never enough, we need police reform, we need reparations for Haiti, we need gun control. We can't even begin to address everything wrong with the world until we address capitalism, and to do that we have to fight the billionaires.

Is it not a movement premised around an extremely negative emotional outlook?

Climate change is going to destroy the world and as individuals we're powerless to do anything about it.

Sexism and racism are vast systemic forces and as individuals we're powerless to address them.

Technology and capitalism are destroying the world and as individuals we're powerless to change things.

Leftists often believe in all these powerlessness fantasies even as they do exercise real power. Climate change is the perfect example, real environmental problems that could be solved are subsumed into the ultimate global problem. Instead of getting people to go into the forest and pick up trash out of the river, you get them to protest for regulations that could curb 1% of a country's Co2 emissions over a 15-year period so that 0.02% of the global climate problem can be alleviated. It's actually extremely consistent, a lot of leftism is a machine for transmuting its followers real problems into vast impersonal forces that we are all powerless to do anything about (until the final defeat of capitalism i.e. Alex Jones and Donald Trump).

It might at best recognize the disorder when, for instance, a ressentiment-subject says, "There is something wrong with me." But this is very rare among those subjects,

I mean, "personal responsibility" is an idea so obviously coded one way that it's at this point a bad cliche.

There is something very admirable about the seemingly boundless faith some grassroots MAGA supporters have for Trump. It's a pure loyalty exercise for them. To a point where reality itself is just a test to be overcome. But that's also a flaw. Ruthless optimism that parts the sea of information and fact to lead us all to the promise land of hope through loyalty is only good insofar as the promise land is actually there and the parted sea doesn't collapse back in on everyone on the way there. J6 does come to mind.

To springboard off your example on lefties and white supremacy. The sociology theories lefties come up with to explain the racial gaps are obviously insane and untrue. But at the same time it's not possible to falsify them without actually explaining why the big gaps exist.

Now how does one explain that as a race blind MAGA supporter in Trump's America? Do some similarly half baked sociology based on the Moynihan Report? Do we just advocate for the implementation of a genuine white supremacy to mend the black nuclear family back together through force? Or do we just not talk about it?

Not talking about things seems to be the preferred option for dealing with most things that are unpleasant to think about for the MAGA optimists. We instead trust our leaders and don't think too much about things. Just listen to cope merchants on Fox and friends tell us about how everything is under control. No need to deal with hard reality. And that's where things stop feeling admirable.

When people start recognizing that this loyalty exists and start to pander to it for their own gain, then you're left with a snake swallowing its own tail. With hucksters abusing this captive audience that has nowhere else to go. It's very sad to watch.

There is something very admirable about the seemingly boundless faith some grassroots MAGA supporters have for Trump. It's a pure loyalty exercise for them. To a point where reality itself is just a test to be overcome.

Well I don't know I feel pretty confident that it's my view that matches reality and everyone else is just too jaded to believe in anything because they're cynical and old and mad at God. It's as if you described Christianity in very clinical terms and said, "There's something pure about belief in Christ even though these Christians have to put fact aside." Well, no, Christians believe (I believe) that Christianity is based in fact, just like I believe my support for Trump is based in fact.

But I understand that my perspective is rare so I get what you're trying to say etc. etc.

Now how does one explain that as a race blind MAGA supporter in Trump's America? Do some similarly half baked sociology based on the Moynihan Report? Do we just advocate for the implementation of a genuine white supremacy to mend the black nuclear family back together through force? Or do we just not talk about it?

Sorry, it's not clear to me contextually what specifically is being hypothetically explained here, the existence of the racial gap as such? I think the mainstream conservative position is that blacks and whites behave differently, and then you fill that difference with some ratio of "culture" and "race" depending on how racist you are. And this more or less explains everything, without having to reach into every social institution and change every facet of society. I like the take of a friend of mine who described DC's local government as having "an abusive relationship" with respect to local voters.

Not talking about things seems to be the preferred option for dealing with most things that are unpleasant to think about for the MAGA optimists. We instead trust our leaders and don't think too much about things.

This is a fierce, omnipresent debate within MAGA and I really only ever hear this line from people who don't like my explanation for why I trust Trump. It can't be that I've thought things through and reached a different conclusion from them (from you), it's that I haven't thought it through.

I guess, to add some specificity here instead of just talking on the meta level: I trust Trump because he's smarter than me, has better information than I have, and has better instincts than I have. People look at me like I have two heads when I say this, but if you were learning physics and your teacher demonstrated obvious learning you wouldn't say, "I trust my teacher and don't think too much about things." No, he clearly knows more than me, in this situation it's correct to be a little humble and learn something. I mean that with zero sycophancy.

To take an even more specific example, let's take immigration. I trust that Trump wants to stop illegal immigration. After ten years of Trumpian politics, I trust that Trump wants to stop illegal immigration. Now, in the day-to-day, there are all sorts of stories, why isn't Trump deporting more people, is this a broken campaign promise, or why hasn't Trump tried this strategy instead of that strategy, or what's he doing in Minnesota, or maybe he should defy judges, or this or that. There's a lot we could sit and debate I guess. But ultimately what reason do I have for actually supposing that Trump is wrong? He's much more agentic than I am, he's much more successful than I am, he has much better political instincts than I do, he has much more information than I do, he has much better judgment than I do. So take Minnesota. Maybe he could have done what twitter is saying and doubled down and called it an insurrection and declared martial law and forced an even bigger crisis. I'm sure that was presented to him as an option. But he didn't take it. Why would I assume that my judgment is better than his? Because I scroll twitter?

Note that this logic is not a blank check for trusting all leaders blindly. When leadership of the Republican Party passes to Marco Rubio or JD Vance I don't suppose that they will replicate Trump's skill in every domain. (Although they probably deserve more deference than random posters on twitter.) Likewise Obama and Biden don't deserve this kind of deference just by virtue of being the president. (Actually if there was one Democratic leader I would defer to it would be Nancy Pelosi: if you were a Democrat it would be entirely reasonable to take cues from her about what is politically possible, you wouldn't be very credible if you claimed to know better than her. That's because she earned it after a very long career of very highly-demonstrated competence.) Anyways, Trump has obviously performed at the highest levels for a generation now and succeeded in situations everyone else thought impossible. That actually obviously, trivially merits a pretty high level of trust. Backseat driving every decision Trump makes is about as compelling to me as a fat washed-up beer-belly in a sports jersey complaining that he can tell every time Lebron James makes a mistake.

I'm trying to lay this out very neutrally although reading back I think this conversation is not quite the right jumping-off point and I'll have to try again in the future. But I'm bored at work and I have time at my desk and so why not. I get why this sounds so irrational and strange to people. I also believe that Donald Trump dodged a bullet in an obvious miracle and is clearly chosen by God and clearly represents the deep spirit of America, U-S-A, U-S-A, and we're all too cynical so we need a reason why we should listen when Mom tells us not to touch the hot stove. But putting that aside I think loyalty can be extremely rational, which is what I'm trying to enunciate.

Just listen to cope merchants on Fox and friends tell us about how everything is under control.

As an aside, Fox has always been relatively critical of Trump and is definitely not where you go to hear happy stories about how everything is fine. Fox is where you go to hear about how woke transgender dog clinics are ruining San Francisco with vegan homeless shelters. If I was woke I would watch Fox News because it would make me feel powerful.

Many MAGA optimists don't gauge things by what is happening around them. It's exactly like you say. Their barometer is what Trump does. If he does X, then X was the best thing to do because they trust Trump. Their gas prices going up or their jobs moving away or their farms going bankrupt is just not accounted for as a counterfactual.

HBD has no place in mainstream conservative politics. The functional reason for the existence of the dissident right is to be a right winger that can acknowledge HBD. The mainstream conservatives have no explanation or the gaps between the races beyond what I described before, if they even acknowledge them at all, which is rare. The conservative position is that maladaptive black behavior is driven by culture. Primarily the welfare state making them dependent and ghetto culture that glorifies violence. They never explain why blacks move towards this sort of thing, nor how they are going to fix it. It's an excuse that is just as loony and baseless as any lefty cultural excuse about historical oppression and omnipresent ethereal white supremacy.

Those in power being the most competent is only true insofar as they are competent in staying in power. I'm not sold on how that naturally translates to functional governance. From what I can tell the Trump we have now is so far removed from the 2016 Trump it's not comparable. If one wants to say that every decision that he has made that has removed him from his original brand has been the best course of action, then I'd ask, best course towards what? Draining the swamp, building a border wall and kicking all the foreigners out and give jobs to Americans? Or the best course of action for Trump to stay in power? If it's the latter, why is it good that he is staying in power if those same actions are removing him from the original promises?

I'm not a routine Fox viewer but as far as I can gleam from the Youtube clips, they are pretty much on the Trump train. Especially with regards to Iran. It's been a fair while since I saw any rhetoric comparable to the #NeverTrump of 2016, when Fox, outside of Tucker Carlson and similar, was anti-Trump.

Primarily the welfare state making them dependent and ghetto culture that glorifies violence. They never explain why blacks move towards this sort of thing

You answered your own question here!

The welfare state and ghetto culture are the mechanism. That doesn't explain why blacks are drawn to it more so than other races.

If race is skin deep and the sociological theory being presented is true then it should apply equally regardless of race. But instead we see very disparate results along racial lines. It's the same problem lefty sociological theories have. As soon as you treat them as serious theories and not convenient verbal political excuses that have no substance and only exist to help us turn our brain off, they fall apart.

That doesn't explain why blacks are drawn to it more so than other races.

The origin of the American federal welfare state traces its way back to the Freedman's Bureau, established during the Civil War. As you might guess from the name, blacks were "drawn to it" because the Bureau was specifically established for them.

A sociological theory that hangs it all on "IQ" and doesn't account for the facts of the historical case is less fixing the problems with lefty sociological theories and more embracing them, just swapping out "IQ" for "racism" as the Great Monocausal Foe.

I think some people assume that accomplishing this swap will lead to closing the welfare state tap off, perhaps unaware or forgetting that the tap was turned on at a time when (functionally) that very belief was widespread.

To take your narrative seriously one would have to imagine that a post-war government program that lasted 9 years in the 1860's which gave resources and education to a group of people was always going to lead to that people being welfare dependent. If that's not the argument, then we're just finding historical a-ha! moments that might feel satisfying to our brains but are of no real consequence or value beyond that.

Both the left and the conservatives assert that the gaps exist because of historical circumstance and/or oppression. They both assert historical just so stories without ever applying them seriously as sociological theories about the nature of man. Instead treating it like a verbal game, not a look at reality. They walk through the steps of history and pontificate on each as a cause for behavior, but not a consequence of it.

The 'monocausal' foe is the nature of human beings, the differences between them, the widely divergent population groups humanity is composed of and the wide variety of circumstance they find themselves in.

If history was causal in the way you describe and not consequential, one would see a vast difference between ancestrally similar population groups that had divergent historical paths. We have this case.

Iceland was the poorest country in Europe for centuries. Yet with the Marshall Aid program post-WW2, they went from being the poorest to being one of the most prosperous nations on the planet in the span of 50 years. The lesson is simple. Give high quality people technology and resources and they will prosper. Being colonized doesn't matter. Being poor doesn't matter.

Becoming a criminal or welfare dependent is not a consequence of history. It's the path of least resistance for a certain type of person. Most people find it easier to learn how to read than to have 5 children with 5 different men, collect child support, become obese and claim medical benefits on top of that. Most people find it easier to go to work rather than rob a liquor store and sell drugs. Most. But not all. The difference is the people.

The circumstance that make those anti-social actions possible are a consequence of the kind of people that would take advantage of those circumstances existing. On top of that, welfare programs existing doesn't cause, for example, Norwegians in Norway to abuse the programs at nearly the same rates as other groups do. In short, these history specific explanations fail to explain anything in a broader context. They're not applicable to the real world. These things happen in different context and the obvious determining factor is the humans, not their historical circumstance.

More comments

Many MAGA optimists don't gauge things by what is happening around them. It's exactly like you say. Their barometer is what Trump does. If he does X, then X was the best thing to do because they trust Trump. Their gas prices going up or their jobs moving away or their farms going bankrupt is just not accounted for as a counterfactual.

I'm not sure what you're intending. Most people don't reason in the sense you're describing. There is no mass reserve of people who "gauge things by what is happening around them". Most people get their opinions from life experience, and most life experience is consuming media. There's nothing novel about MAGA here except that we broadly trust Trump's judgment. So that, if gas prices go up, I assume this was judged relative to other options and found to be the best course of action. It's not even that mysterious. It's not hard for me to make a case for why Trump went to war with Iran or how this is potentially a good thing. I don't have to appeal to mysterious subrational forces.

HBD has no place in mainstream conservative politics. The functional reason for the existence of the dissident right is to be a right winger that can acknowledge HBD.

Respectfully, conservative politics has moved way far beyond whether conservatives can talk about race.

From what I can tell the Trump we have now is so far removed from the 2016 Trump it's not comparable. If one wants to say that every decision that he has made that has removed him from his original brand has been the best course of action, then I'd ask, best course towards what? Draining the swamp, building a border wall and kicking all the foreigners out and give jobs to Americans? Or the best course of action for Trump to stay in power?

Well we are building a border wall and this is the first administration in generations that has seen more foreigners leaving America than coming in. As for draining the swamp, Trump has politically defeated a lot of powerful people in his attempt to reform the American government. To me this reads like making the perfect the enemy of the good, and declaring that, since Trump hasn't accomplished everything he must have moderated. But I don't know anyone, not a single person, who has ever accomplished everything they intended.

You describe the exact process I'm talking about. We both agree that MAGA optimists judge things by whether or not Trump did the thing or not. We both agree that this is novel.

Where we seemingly don't agree is whether or not a relevant amount of people care about 'things', like gas or housing prices, or something similar. I think a lot of people see or feel something that personally affects them like that and therefor want to vote for those things in specific. Expecting a solution and positive change. Using those things as the barometer. I think you understand and agree with this dynamic insofar as you understand that it's important to maintain that Trump is keeping his promises, like you do below.

I guess my point comes down to the question of how you determine values. It feels like we are doing a lot of outsourcing to Trump. My perspective is that MAGA optimists are going the way of the Dodo. They are politically a minority, their children will be a racial minority. I feel like I'm watching the sky fall and then I see them happy as clams because Trump is in charge.

It's not even that mysterious. It's not hard for me to make a case for why Trump went to war with Iran or how this is potentially a good thing. I don't have to appeal to mysterious subrational forces.

But you are appealing to a very limited force. Mainly just yourself and your faith in Trump. You making a case and then asserting that the course of action being taken is the best because Trump took it isn't particularly rational. Apologies if this sounds too dismissive but I'm starting to feel like you're just constructing a rhetorical fun house of sorts, where you can make assumptions and assertions yourself but preclude others from doing so at any time if they disagree with Trump. Since Trump is smarter and has more information and such. Like, not to rehash things but what is the current state of the Iran war? At what point can we state that the war has been a failure and that Trump made a bad choice? Or is that even possible?

Respectfully, conservative politics has moved way far beyond whether conservatives can talk about race.

Not really. The small contingent that was bullied into white advocacy, like Charlie Kirk or Tucker Carlson, talked some about whites as a group. But they all defaulted back on individualism, culture and values when push came to shove. Which is the same song and dance they've been doing since they ostracized Peter Brimelow and similar voices from the mainstream.

To me this reads like making the perfect the enemy of the good, and declaring that, since Trump hasn't accomplished everything he must have moderated. But I don't know anyone, not a single person, who has ever accomplished everything they intended.

Yeah, that sounds more true than not. So what is perfect?

Trump himself is maybe the most agentic man in the world

If he's so agentic why doesn't he focus on getting rid of Somali scammers in Minnesota and passing the Save act? Why doesn't he focus on cost of living and securing institutions in the US to crush the left, rather than Middle East wars? Desert Storm was a smashing success and yet H. W. Bush still lost re-election... The track record of Middle East wars is terrible, as Trump himself pointed out.

Even focusing on self-preservation alone (nevermind national interest or ideology) it makes no sense to wage these wars, it's pure slavish devotion to the neocon/Israeli faction. Does he think that if the Dems win he'll escape prison again?

He's a mindbroken husk of Trump the candidate. He's very old and reduced to boomerposting long walls of text on social media while advisers and officials run rings around him.

It’s clear you and Donald Trump have different priorities. We shall have to fine some way of judging whose are more successful.

Why is it so hard to conclude that Trump has made a mistake?

Look at tariffs. Chaos, then backpeddling, the origin of the TACO idea (extremely damaging for any leader), then courts ruling them illegal and mandating refunds. The opposite of creating a stable business environment for US industry.

Yeah Trump makes mistakes too what does that have to do with whether he's agentic or not? In the sense of the discussion about ressentiment and whether the populist right is the political faction that casts itself as powerless and mad.

the origin of the TACO idea

When you're actually "in the arena" the amount of criticism you face is infinite and I don't consider the fact that it exists to prove much of anything. One tweak in the algorithm and the viral meme would be "Trump Always Overdoes It" or whatever.

Trump the Agent: crushes the left with mass deportations and voter ID to advance MAGA ideology and safeguard own personal position. Political capital is solely wielded for the sake of strengthening the Trump faction. Critically, fuel prices are kept low and promises are not broken unless absolutely unavoidable.

Trump the Puppet: trusts Lutnick on imposing a retarded tariff policy (while Lutnick's son makes hundreds of millions buying tariff refund options), trusts the wisdom of neocon bunglers and Israeli intelligence and starts a war with Iran (completely against promises of no Middle East wars) that was predictably going to fail and embarrass any Republican successors, who are critical for keeping Trump out of prison.

The former judiciously navigates competing interests and pursues own agenda without getting derailed, the latter eats up whatever slop Mark Levin's show serves up, like this deranged idea that Iran's oil production was all going to explode or something after a few days of (leaky) naval blockade.

You've again just defined "agentic" to mean "Trump does what I want". Maybe Trump has different priorities from you.

For instance, fuel prices. Trump decided to go to war with Iran, which is currently causing fuel prices to go up. Trump decided that the risk was worth it. Ok, you can argue with that risk assessment. Do you argue that it shows that Trump is agentic?

For instance, voter ID. Trump cannot pass voter ID unilaterally, because of Congress. So he writes executive orders on mail-in ballots and cuts backroom deals to try to get votes for the SAVE act. Maybe President RandomRanger would say screw that and send in the troops. Ok, you could argue with that risk assessment. Do you argue that this shows that Trump is not agentic?

The actions Trump has taken are so stupid and self-destructive to all realistic or reasonable Trump goals (contrary even to his own statements, ideology and promises), the most reasonable conclusion is that he's under the control of other parties. Object, not subject.

Someone persuaded him that mass deportations are unpopular and should be toned down but Middle East wars, wow, that's catnip for voters! He's left reality behind, some neocon idiot would've told him something like 'no worries about fuel, the Iranians will be dealt with in one swift stroke' and he'll have accepted that because he's a credulous 80 year old.

In what universe would a man dependent on future Republican administrations to escape more aggressive prosecutions invest his political capital in 'predictably disastrous Middle East War' over 'structural Republican electoral advantage'? No rational actor would do that, only a controlled/misinformed actor.

More comments

I think this description is pretty accurate. I don’t see the left thinking anything can or will be actually fixed, and when someone proposes doing the thing it’s not enough because nothing is ever enough. We could deal with climate change through a combination of energy efficiency and investment in nuclear power. We could attempt to fix the inequalities by addressing things like education and culture (psst: if you want to get rich, your best bet is to learn math, science and engineering) and work ethic (rich people tend to work consistently where most people who end up poor also have terrible work ethics). Of course any attempt to do such a thing is going to be called racist or something. Or there will be all kinds of “structural reasons” to believe that no poor kid should be expected to do his homework while suffering from poverty. And you just can’t expect poor people to just keep working even when they just want to stay home. So poverty continues because while we know the things that need to happen to make a person more likely to be rich, we can’t do that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I hesitated in including that communism is a liberalism which is a protestantism, but of course.

I suppose one could say further that these techniques are written in the human soul but even if cult behavior and purity spirals are just something we do, the specific modalities are inherited from somewhere.

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.

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 takes 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.

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.

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

Ok, and what do you think those reasons are.

  1. Revolutions tend to cluster around a charismatic leader, this leader then naturally becomes a dictator. This is true of non-communist revolutions as well, think Franco, Pinochet, Mussolini and Hitler, for example.
  2. Communism is a centralized system, there needs to be something that makes all the decisions that would be taken by the distributed system of price signals of capitalism. This something has a lot of power and naturally tends to become and stay a dictatorship.

As for repression, it's inevitable in a dictatorship. If you are unhappy with the work of the dictator the only way to express it is through rebellion and rebellions need to be dealt with with repression. That's just how it goes.

Typically the pattern that you see is that the first dictator is overall a high quality individual that does a decent job governing and sees the need for repression decline over his reign. But every subsequent successor is a lower quality individual that's only good at playing court games, does a worse job governing and needs to apply further repression. So my recommendation to dictators is to make sure it ends with them, but that's easier to do in a capitalistic system than in communism. Communism however still has the AI god emperor option, it just has never been tried.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

But communism? That was supposed to be a utopia of equality!

Well then we're just back at "Real communism has never been tried", and we can never judge 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.

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).

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?

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.

More comments

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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).

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.

The central examples of fascist regimes we have (Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy) both made ideological fealty mandatory and were extremely interested in regulating the lives of their subjects.

The distinction there is not fascist vs communism but totalitarian vs authoritarian. Authoritarian regimes are often satisfied with mere obedience, and may actively try to depoliticize the population at large. Authoritarian countries tend to have a weak, withered civil society. Totalitarian countries, by contrast, have a powerful civil society that has been annexed by the state.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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".

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

  • -10

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 have no problem with people doing things in good faith but being wrong.

On a normal scale, "I did something which cost a thousand lives, but it was a mistake made in good faith" is not considered to be a valid excuse (especially if you knew in advance that a mistake would be lethal, and especially if you've made such mistakes often). If you really think that causing a loss of a statistical thousand lives is like causing that loss directly, you can't justify adding an exception for good faith.

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

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.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats